Nava Atlas's Blog, page 40
May 18, 2021
That is the New Rhythm: Mina Loy and Marianne Moore
A reflection on the period in which Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, modernist poets (among other talents) crossed paths in the early 1920s. Excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
The poetry of Mina Loy was often compared and sometimes published next to that of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap put them together in the issue of Little Review that immediately followed their obscenity conviction for printing Ulysses, some time around 1920.
Man Ray took photographs of both of them specially; opposites in looks but potential sisters in their view of female sexuality. And the only issue of the magazine New York Dada had both an article mocking Loy’s relationship with Cravan and a portrait of the Baroness, this time wearing only her jewelry, as the “naked truth” of Dada.
A confluence of poets
Loy was also often compared to Ezra Pound; she wrote a paper called “Modern Poetry,” in which she talks about the relationship of poetry to music. In it she says that only one poet has really ever made “the logical transition from verse to music” — Pound.
To speak of the modern movement is to speak of him; the masterly impresario of modern poets, for without the discoveries he made with his poet’s instinct for poetry, this modern movement would still be rather a nebula than the constellation it has become.
Like William Carlos Williams, Loy believed that it was “inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English.” Loy is not interested in the past, only in the future, and one of the most futuristic poets for her is e.e. cummings; where “other poets have failed for being too modern he is more modern still, and altogether successful.”
She does admire some poets from what she calls the past though, including H.D. and Marianne Moore “whose writing so often amusingly suggests the soliloquies of a library clock.” This is not necessarily praise from such a freethinking and passionate woman – the words “library” and “clock” suggest the aloof austerity of which H.D. was in awe; Moore was in fact a librarian.
Even though she was at Bryn Mawr and knew them all, Marianne Moore was never close to Ezra, Bill, or Hilda throughout her life; she was never part of any movement or any set, and in both her life and her poetry she was quite reserved and austere. Moore lived in a tiny apartment with her mother, who was gay, sharing a bed until her mother’s death.
In awe of Marianne Moore
Both men and women were attracted to Moore but she seems to have had no real relationships with either sex. H.D. seems to have been rather in awe of Moore. As late as October 28, 1934, HD wrote to Bryher:
“I have had my first real fan letter from a woman – Marianne – of all people – write this in letter of gold – And I hope you will never doubt from such worms as myself the admiration which the shining face of your courage evokes! … I am positively limp!!!! I was terrified of M.M.”
William Carlos Williams was also slightly in awe of Moore.
“She had a head of the most glorious auburn hair and eyes – I don’t even know to this day whether they were blue or green – but these features were about her only claim to physical beauty. We all loved and not a little feared her not only because of her keen wit but for her skill as a writer of poems. She had a unique style of her own; none of us wanted to copy it but we admired it.”
In Moore’s only published reference to Loy she talks about Loy’s “sliced and cylindrical, complicated yet simple use of words.” Again, not exactly pure praise. Around 1920, many people were comparing Loy and Moore. Ezra Pound bracketed them together, calling their style logopoeia, the poetry of ideas. This wasn’t praise either; at the time he was promoting Imagism, the poetry of things, in the work of H.D. and Amy Lowell. Pound said that Loy and Moore didn’t use arresting images or noble sentiments, their work was just “a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas … A mind cry, more than a heart cry.”
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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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T.S. Eliot, in The Egoist, ranked Moore higher than Loy in his personal pantheon but Pound quickly replied saying that some of Mina’s lines were “perhaps better than anything I have found in Miss Moore.” In practice, Pound championed and supported them both.
In a very long letter of April 22, 1921 to Anderson and Heap, soon after they had been fined $50 each for publishing sections of Ulysses and barred from publishing any more, Pound lists his suggested contributors for the next issue; referring to Mina and Marianne only by their first names.
Cocteau ourselves illustrations of work by Picabia
W. c. Williams Brancusi etc. Cendrars
Marianne Picasso Cros
Mina Lewis Morand
Crossing paths
The two women first met in 1916 when Marianne saw Mina playing the wife opposite William Carlos Williams at the Provincetown Players. They met again in 1920, when McAlmon took Loy to the apartment at St Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village where Marianne the librarian lived with her mother, as if playing to her image as a timid spinster.
In McAlmon’s fictional version, Loy says that her life must be the result of “some suppression or cowardice.” But Marianne is very welcoming and tells Mina she has wanted to talk about her poetry, saying that her job keeps her from writing. Mina says to her: “you observe things too uniquely to let any paid job interfere, though I presume you believe in self-discipline and duty more than some of us.”
Williams knew both Moore and Loy, and recorded a dinner where both women were there so everyone could compare them – their physical appearance if not their poetry.
“Marianne Moore, like a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building, a caryatid, her red hair plaited and wound twice about the fine skull, though she was surely one of the main supports of the new order, was no luckier than the rest of us. One night (Mina Loy was there also) we all met at some Dutch-treat party in a cheap restaurant on West Fifteenth Street or thereabouts.
There must have been twenty of us. Marianne, with her sidelong laugh and shake of the head, quite childlike and overt, was in awed admiration of Mina’s long-legged charms. Such things were in our best tradition. Marianne was our saint – if we had one – in whom we all instinctively felt our purpose come together to form a stream. Everyone loved her.”
That is the new rhythm
In her article “Modern Poetry,” Loy singles out Williams for special praise as one of the few writers who embodies her idea of a bridge between the past and the future.
“Williams brings me to a distinction that it is necessary to make in speaking of modern poets. Those I have spoken of are poets according to the old as well as the new reckoning; there are others who are poets only according to the new reckoning. They are headed by Dr. Carlos Williams. Here is the poet whose expression derives from life. He is a doctor. He loves bare facts. He is also a poet, he must recreate everything to suit himself. How can he reconcile these two selves?
Williams will make a poem of a bare fact – just show you something you noticed. The doctor wishes you to know just how uncompromisingly itself that fact is. But the poet would like you to realisze all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes part of Williams’ own nature as well as the thing itself. That is the new rhythm.”
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You might also enjoy:
Mina Loy and “The Crowd”: Modernists in 1920s Paris
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post That is the New Rhythm: Mina Loy and Marianne Moore appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Mina Loy, Modernist Poet, Playwright, and Artist
Mina Loy (December 27, 1882 – September 25, 1966) was a brilliant English-born poet, playwright, and artist. Light years ahead of her time, she was lauded by her peers for her dense analyses of the female experience in early twentieth-century Western society.
She was associated with other great minds and literary innovators of her time, like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and others.
BackgroundLoy was born Mina Gertrude Löwy in London, England, the eldest daughter of Sigmund and Julia Bryan Löwy. Löwy’s father was a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant.
Mina was granted an unconventionally thorough education for a young lady of a wealthy middle-class family, traveling to Europe to study in the great art capitals of the Continent.
Unhappy marriages and a peripatetic life
At twenty-one, Loy married fellow artist Hugh “Stephen” Oscar William Haweis. They settled in Paris among the bustling modernist art salons, where they mingled with the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, and Picasso, as well as Leo and Gertrude Stein.
Loy and Haweis had three children. Their eldest, Oda Janet, died in infancy. The bereaved family relocated to Florence, Italy, where Loy gave birth to two more children, Joella and Giles. Loy began to suffer from frequent ailments and mental illness, but continued to pursue and exhibit her art in both Italy and her native England.
As a young child, Joella was unwell, leading to Loy’s pursuit of Christian Science. Her marriage to Haweis was never a happy one, and in 1913, he abandoned his family to travel to the South Seas. The couple finally divorced several years later. Loy spent these years as a recluse among the expatriate community in Florence, a sad and beautiful young woman — unprepared for motherhood, overwhelmed by her illnesses and Joella’s.
Despite her own afflictions, Loy worked as a nurse during World War I but soon abandoned the Continent for the United States. In October 1916, she left her children in the care of a nurse, intending to retrieve them soon, and sailed for New York City.
While in New York, Loy fell in love with early Dadaist and surrealist, Arthur Cravan. In January 1918, they married in Mexico City, then returned to Europe to reunite with Loy’s children and make a home in Paris. Loy went ahead, planning to reunite with Cravan in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but he never arrived.
Loy diverted her travels to London, where she gave birth to their daughter, Jemima Fabienne. Cravan’s disappearance devastated Loy, and she would continue to mourn him in her writings. In 1921, Loy’s ex-husband abducted their son Giles from Florence. The child died only two years later.
She settled again in Paris, this time with her daughters, and together they ran a business where she designed and sold lampshades.
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Becoming a poetThough Loy began her art career with painting, her creative fire propelled her expansion into other forms of artistic expression. Her introduction to Italian futurists, Carlo Carrà, F.T. Martinetti, and Giovanni Papini among them, was a primary inspiration to her poetry.
Although she espoused the futurists’ teachings on how to use one’s “vitality,” Loy remained skeptical of their machismo and quickly turned to satirize them in pamphlets, poems, and plays like “The Sacred Prostitute,” Psycho-Democracy, and “Lions’ Jaws.”
In New York City, Loy was recognized as the epitome of the avant-garde woman. She was a forerunner of the movement to modernize poetry inspired by futurism, cubism, and surrealism. Immediately after her arrival in the States, Loy acted in Kreymborg’s play, Lima Beans.
Loy was too radical for the more mainstream poetry journals of her day but found a home for her work in journals such as Others, Camera Work, and Rogue. After Marcel Duchamp’s definitive Dadaist sculpture was rejected by the New York Independents Exhibit, Duchamp, Loy, and others collaborated on a journal of their own, called Blind Man.
Feminist Manifesto
Feminist Manifesto, which is now considered Loy’s greatest work, wasn’t published until decades after her death. In this 1914 piece, Loy struggles modernism, the artistic philosophy of her day, and its central aesthetic of impersonality.
Loy believed women needed to assert their own special brand of selfhood because they had so long been relegated to “impersonality” by subsuming their own personalities in those of men.
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Mina Loy was central to a group of creatives known as “The Crowd”
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Loy was as much noted for her visual art as for her writing. She was promoted by the noted art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, who wrote,
“Mina Loy, who was not only a poetess and a painter, was always inventing something new by which she hoped to make a fortune. She had just created a new, or old, form of papier collé – flower cut-outs which she framed in beautiful old Louis Philippe frames she bought in the flea market. She asked me to take these to New York for her and sell them.”
Peggy exhibited Loy’s work in her Madison Avenue gallery, with great success. Later, back in Paris, Mina and Peggy went into business together, opening a lampshade shop.
Controversy and legacy
Mina Loy’s shockingly open handling of sexuality scandalized more conservative readers and her cerebral, abstract style alienated and confused many, but her supporters praised her “dance of the intelligence among words and ideas” and her innate artistry, saying, “Yes, poetry is in this lady whether she writes or not.”
Loy sought to combine feminism and futurism, often to unsettling ends, as when she asserted that intelligent women ought to produce children as part of her “race-responsibility.” She railed against the ideal of virginity and how it constrained women to narrowly defined roles set for them by men.
Her unabashed honesty and demands that her readers face their own truth, never shrinking to hide in delusion, capture the terrible beauty of life’s constant change. Her short lines and not-quite-free verse style reflected the deep emotion and deep thought saturating her poetry. Her bounding from imagery to calculated analysis irked some of her fellow artists but was an intentional artistic reflection of the chaos of the physical world and our own inner processes.
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Mina Loy page on Amazon*
More about Mina LoyOn this site
Mina Loy and “The Crowd” — Modernists in 1920s Paris That is the New Rhythm: Mina Loy and Marianne MoorePoetry
Lunar Baedeker (1923)Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958)The Last Lunar Baedeker, Roger Conover, ed. (1982)The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Roger Conover, ed. (1997)Prose
Insel, Elizabeth Arnold ed. (1991)Stories and Essays, Sara Crangle, ed. (2011)More information
Modern American Poetry Poetry Foundation Modernism Lab at Yale University WikipediaRead online
Mina Loy at Electronic Poetry Center Works by or about Mina Loy at HathiTrustWorks by or about Mina Loy at Internet Archive. . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Mina Loy, Modernist Poet, Playwright, and Artist appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
May 14, 2021
The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson: An Analysis
This analysis of The Road Through the Wall focuses on its young heroine, Harriet Merriam and is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
The Road Through the Wall was Shirley Jackson’s first novel, published in 1948. That was also the year when her short story, “The Lottery,” was published, making her instantly famous (as well as infamous).
Jackson claimed that the novel was loosely based on her childhood growing up in a well-to-do neighborhood in California. Admitting that this book was somewhat of a revenge novel, she asserted that a first novel’s purpose, after all, was to get back one’s parents.
Two original reviews
Saturday Review, February 28, 1948 wrote that “the story is a good one, set down with neither hope nor despair. It is the story of Sidestreet, USA, where the children reflect the life of their parents with its bickering futility and its moral bankruptcy.”
The Montreal Gazette (May 28, 1948) wrote: “Miss Jackson is no Sinclair Lewis; she is only 28. But she does in her most recent work show a remarkable talent for putting on paper the everyday happenings which at times make life a pleasure and sometimes make it pretty grim.”
Introducing Harriet Merriam
As in several of Jackson’s stories and novels, we do indeed see the world – and in this case Pepper Street is its own world – largely through children and their mothers; Jackson didn’t – possibly couldn’t – ever write a sympathetic male character.
Fourteen-year-old Harriet lives in a middle-class suburb in California – not completely unlike the one where Jackson herself was born – where everyone knows everyone else’s business. This a chamber piece where many characters have an equal part and Harriet is simply one of the actors in the drama. Nevertheless, she is drawn in great detail and the novel does show her awkwardly coming of age, at least in one sense.
Like many fictional teen heroines, Harriet wants to be a writer. She considers herself dumpy, unattractive and awkward; Jackson herself was consistently overweight – at the age of forty she weighed over 200 pounds – and by no means conventionally beautiful or glamorous even in her publicity photos; she creates Harriet with obvious love and a great deal of empathy.
“Harriet was a big girl, large-boned and stout, and Mrs. Merriam braided Harriet’s hair every morning and dressed her in bright colors. For the last year or so, from twelve to almost fourteen, Harriet had begun to speak awkwardly when she was uneasy, missing her words sometimes, and stammering.”
Trouble with Mother
Her mother confides to a friend that she worries about Harriet, “about her being so heavy, I mean. It’s very hard on a girl.” Harriet does not join in with the other children playing “baseball or tag or hide-and-seek, actually because she was fat and the other children made fun of her, ostensibly because her mother had forbidden her to play.’ She tells her friends that she has ‘a sort of weak heart… My mother thinks and the doctor thinks I shouldn’t do much running around like the other kids.” Jackson herself died of a heart attack in her forties.
Harriet’s trouble with her mother starts when, following other girls in her class, she writes a letter to a boy which only the most prudish of mothers, even in the 1940s, would consider risqué. Unfortunately for Harriet, her mother is one of those mothers. Harriet has chosen to write to George “because he was dull and unpopular and she felt vaguely that she had no right to aim any higher than the one boy no one else would have.”
Harriet had not sent the letter, nor even finished it. It begins, “Dearest George,” and continues, “Let’s run away and get married. I love you and I want to – “ The letter ends here because “Harriet had not been able to think of what she wanted to do with George.” Her friend Helen’s letter had ended “kiss you a thousand times’ but Harriet ‘could not bring herself to write such a thing, at least partly because the thought of kissing George Martin’s doll face horrified her.”
Harriet sees that her mother has been looking through her desk drawers, a private world which contains her notebooks labelled, respectively, Poems, Moods, Me and Daydreams. The mothers of the various girls are appalled to various degrees at this wanton, lustful collective display on the part of their daughters. Harriet’s mother is distraught.
“I try to make my daughter into a good decent girl in spite of –“ Mrs Merriam sobbed, “– in spite of everything, and I work all day and I worry about money and try to make a good decent home for my husband and now my only daughter turns out to be –“
“Josephine,” Mr Merriam said strongly. “Harriet, go upstairs again.”
Harriet went upstairs away from her mother’s sorry voice. Her desk was unlocked; instead of eating dinner, she and her mother had stood religiously by the furnace and put Harriet’s diaries and letters and notebooks into the fire one by one, while solid Harry Merriam sat eating lamb chops and boiled potatoes upstairs alone.
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Harriet’s mother soon comes down and “Harriet felt at last like crying. She loved her mother again, as one should love a mother, tenderly and affectionately. She put her arm around her mother and kissed her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.”
Her mother says to Harriet: “We’ll spend more time together from now on. Reading, and sewing. Would you like to learn to cook, really cook?” She even offers to help Harriet write her poetry. “I used to write poetry, Harriet, not very well, of course, but that’s probably where you get it.”
Her father insists that she shows her mother everything she writes; Harriet, earnestly, says she will. Unusually for the characters in Girls in Bloom, Harriet’s father is not at all close to his daughter and has no idea what is going on in her life. Unlike Natalie Waite’s father in Jackson’s Hangsaman, he has no interest in literature or his daughter’s interest in it.
Real-life and literary friends
Harriet’s friend Virginia very nearly leads her into serious trouble when she takes Harriet with her to the apartment of a Chinese man she has met on the street. Harriet has been nervous of doing anything her mother would not approve of and wants to go the long way home so they will not run into him but Virginia tells her, “if you’re going to be scared all the time and always be wanting to go around the other way and afraid of your mother and everything I’ll just go on down to the store by myself and not talk to you anymore.”
Harriet doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t want to go into the apartment but “she couldn’t let Virginia go alone, and never be friends again afterward, but once inside they were no longer right where they could call for help.” She tries to stop Virginia. “We can’t go in, Ginnie. My mother.” The girls do go inside but nothing bad happens, except that they discover the Chinese man is simply a servant in the apartment and the owners are away.
Afterwards she is nervous that Virginia will let slip something to her mother and is hoping that the family moving into the vacant house on the street may provide a new friend for her to replace the risky Virginia. Harriet quite naturally sees the world in terms of Little Women, though unusually, she does not want to be Jo.
Perhaps one of the new girls who would live in the house – they would be like in Little Women, and Harriet’s friend would be Jo (or just possibly Beth, and they could die together, patiently) – would love and esteem Harriet, and some day their friendship would be a literary legend, and their letters –
“‘Listen, she said in an honest voice, ‘I wanted to talk to you for a long time.’
‘What about?’ Harriet said.
Marilyn put her chin on her hands and stared straight ahead. ‘Just about everything,’ she said. ‘You like to read, don’t you?’ When Harriet moved her head solemnly Marilyn said, ‘so do I,’ and then stopped to think.
‘Do you get library books? she asked.
‘No,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve never been to the library yet.’
‘Me neither,’ Marilyn said. ‘We could get library cards you know.’
‘Have you read Little Women?’ Harriet asked.
Marilyn shook her head and asked, ‘have you read Vanity Fair?’
‘I haven’t read that yet,’ Harriet said. ‘I liked Little Women, though.’”
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The Road Through the Wall on Bookshop.org*
The Road Through the Wall on Amazon*
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Harriet’s mother would presumably be apoplectic if Harriet were to read Vanity Fair. Marilyn tells Harriet about the girls she does not like, including Virginia. “She’s not much,” says Harriet and in “a final recognition of her bond with Marilyn,” she says, “I know something about her.”
Marilyn is from the only Jewish family in the neighborhood. Harriet’s parents are not at first especially anti-Semitic, and the subject only arises in relation to readings of Shakespeare that are being organized; someone mentions that it might be insensitive to read The Merchant of Venice with Marilyn present. Eventually, Harriet’s parents tell her she must not see Marilyn again but before that Harriet and Marilyn have become close, especially in their literary tastes.
One time, Marilyn is talking about reincarnation; she tells Harriet that she might have been Becky Sharp before she was Harriet Merriam, even though Harriet is far closer to Emmy Sedley than to Becky Sharp, who is more like Virginia. ‘“Or Jo March,” Harriet replied, fascinated;’ clearly her friendship with Marilyn has given her the confidence to move up the ladder of the March sisters. Marilyn suggests that they should both write down where they think they will be in ten years’ time, bury the notes and never look at each other’s for the next ten years.
“Rest here, all my hopes and dreams,” says Marilyn as they bury the paper. “The curse be on whoever touches these papers,” adds Harriet. “Now you’re my closest and dearest friend, Harriet.”
After Harriet’s parents have forbidden her to see Marilyn again, Harriet meekly agrees but handles the breakup very badly. Marilyn calls her a fat slob and Harriet now sees Marilyn as being ugly. They never do see each other’s ten-year plans, but we do: a neighborhood boy finds them and Jackson shows them to us. As we have already seen, Jackson knows a thing or two about what teenage girls want. Cunningly, she does not tells which note is which but we can probably work it out.
“In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.
I will be a famous actress or maybe a painter and everyone will be afraid of me and do what I say.”
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You may also like:
An Analysis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples..
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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson: An Analysis appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
May 13, 2021
Deep Thinking: 45 Quotes by Susan Sontag
From the time of her classic essay, “Notes on Camp” (1963), Susan Sontag was launched into the position of one of America’s premier public intellectuals. Nearly every line she wrote or spoke was quotable, so it’s a great challenge to choose a selection of quotes by Susan Sontag for a post that’s reasonable in length; here, we’ve attempted such a feat.
Achieving fame (and sometimes notoriety) in multiple forms of media — essays, fiction, film, and more — Sontag seemed to embrace her role as provocateur. Susan Sontag pastel portrait at right by Juan Bastos.
In her biography of Susan Sontag on this site, Nancy Snyder writes that she “achieved what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of interpretation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag easily made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star.”
Learn more about Susan Sontag
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Notes on Camp (1964)“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
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“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”
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“Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.”
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“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”
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“Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.”
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“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
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On Photography (1977)“The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
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“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”
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“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
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“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”
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“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”
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“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”
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“Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour.”
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“Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.”
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“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”
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“The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.”
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Illness as Metaphor (1978)“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
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“There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the ‘reality’ of a disease. That reality has to be explained.
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For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
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“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ‘spirit’ over matter.”
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AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)“The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”
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“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”
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“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”
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“Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) everyone’s disease.”
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Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)“From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”
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“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating.”
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“None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practices.”
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“What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.”
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“Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded.”
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Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.”
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“The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”
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“Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.”
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“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art … To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”
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“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.”
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“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
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Miscellaneous writings and essays“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.” (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003)
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“Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”
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“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.” (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963)
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“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.” (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963)
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“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.” (The Benefactor, 1963)
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“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” (Partisan Review, Winter 1967)
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“I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.” (“Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August 2, 1992)
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“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.” (“Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August 2, 1992)
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“One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling … which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.” (from “Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview” with Jonathan Cott, October 1979)
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“The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion … the powerless saying: I’m here, too.” (“The Pleasure of the Image,” from Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern, 1988)
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“I guess I think I’m writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I’ll be doing something that’s worth their time. I’d be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.” (From “The Risk Taker,” profile by Gary Younge, The Guardian, January 19, 2002)
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Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. … Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises. (“One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Styles of Radical Will, 1966)
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Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Deep Thinking: 45 Quotes by Susan Sontag appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
May 12, 2021
Rachel Field, Author of All This and Heaven Too
This brief biography of Rachel Field (September 19, 1894 – March 15, 1942), a noted yet often neglected American author, will highlight her extensive body of work in the areas of adult fiction, poetry, and children’s fiction. She’s perhaps best remembered for All This and Heaven Too (1938), which was adapted into a film starring Bette Davis, and Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929), an award-winning children’s book.
Several of her other books were adapted into films starring prominent Hollywood stars of the time, and upon her untimely death in 1942, newspaper editor Laura Benet remembered her as a calming and reassuring presence to all of those who knew her.
Background and first worksRachel Lyman Field was the last of five siblings born to Dr. Matthew Field and Lucy Atwater Field. She entered the world on September 19, 1894, and spent her earliest years in Western Massachusetts where her father’s family originated.
Field was the great-niece of Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field and international lawyer David Dudley Field. She recalled that she was somewhat of an awkward child who did not learn to read well until she was ten years old. Once she mastered this skill, however, she developed an interest in writing poetry. Her first published piece was an essay, “A Winter Walk,” which was published in St. Nicholas Magazine when she was 16 years old.
Her strong writing ability earned her special admittance to Radcliffe College after winning a high school essay contest, and once there she became part of a renowned playwriting workshop. Her first major recognition came for her play, Rise Up, Jennie Smith. It garnered a Drama League of America award and was later published in 1918.
After completing college, Field moved to New York and wrote book and play summaries for a film company. During her free time, she worked on personal writing projects and continued to hone her craft.
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[image error]
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Hitty, Her First Hundred YearsAmong the works Field created for children, the most celebrated and enduring is Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, published in 1929. Written in the voice of a 100-year-old doll telling her life story, it gave her the distinction of being the first woman to win a Newberry Medal (1930). It also received the acclaimed Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Hitty enjoyed a long life in print. The 1959 MacMillan Company edition, with illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop, describes the book as follows:
“Hitty is a doll of great charm and real character. It is a privilege to be able to publish her memoirs which, besides being full of the most thrilling adventures on land and sea, also reveal a personality which is delightful and forceful.
One glance at her portrait will show that she is no ordinary doll. Hitty, or Mehitable, as she was really named, was carved from a piece of white ash by a peddler who was spending the winter in Maine. Phoebe Preble, for whom Hitty was made, was very proud of her doll and took her everywhere, even on a long sailing trip in a whaler.
In this way Hitty’s horizon was broadened and she acquired ample material to make her memoirs exciting and instructive. Hitty is a real doll, over one hundred years old, and now belongs to both Miss Field and Miss Lathrop. Recently she has done more traveling all over America in special exhibits to get acquainted with the young readers who love her story.”
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Rachel Field and her dog, Spriggen
(photo: Portland Library, Maine)
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In addition to children’s novels and picture books, field also created several poetry collections for children including Taxis and Toadstools, An Alphabet for Boys and Girls, and A Circus Garland: Poems.
In 1931, she followed up with titled Calico Bush, which was set in the year 1743 and told from the perspective of a young French girl who was an indentured servant in Maine. Several of her books were set in Maine, a place she became quite enamored with after first visiting there as a teenager. Field was very conscious of word choice with young readers because she felt that authors often used language that was too simple when writing for them.
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Rachel Field with Bette Davis,
star of All This and Heaven Too (1940 film)
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In 1935, Field turned to writing for an adult audience with Time Out of Mind, which was given the designation of ‘Most Distinguished Novel of 1935’ at the first National Book Awards. That same year, she married her husband, Arthur Pederson. They moved to California, and in 1937 they wrote a book together called To See Ourselves. This book highlighted ordinary, everyday people living in close proximity to the glamorous life in Hollywood.
Field’s best-known and most celebrated novel, All This and Heaven Too, came shortly after in 1938. It was a fictionalized story about her real-life great-aunt through marriage, Mademoiselle Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, who had been falsely accused of being involved with the murder of Duchess of Choiseul-Praslin.
All This and Heaven Too was quite well received. It was soon made into a film featuring screen legend Bette Davis, released in 1940. Two of her other novels that were made into movies were And Now Tomorrow, starring Loretta Young, and Time Out of Mind, with Phyllis Calvert.
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The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood on Bookshop.org*
The Field House on Amazon*
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In 2021, Rachel Field finally earns her due in a compelling, full-scale biography by Robin Clifford Wood, titled The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine. As the publisher describes the book as “recounting the remarkable life of writer Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) from the perspective of a woman who lived in Field’s old, neglected island home in Maine, sparking a unique sisterhood across time.”
Robin Clifford Wood seeks to find the answers to the questions of “Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—which was widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today?” Wood writes of her biographical process,
“It becomes clear in the book that I fall in love with my biographical subject. Rachel Field, first and foremost, was a poet, with a poet’s sensibilities. She was transported by beauty, haunted by it at times, but always, always deeply moved by beauty – in a seagull’s wing underlit by the setting sun, in a turn of phrase, in the face of a dear friend.
Rachel despaired of her own physical appearance – a weighty, overlarge frame and heavy masculine features. However, in her writing and her spirit, she shimmered with a beautiful, enchanting spirit. That is what I try to evoke by bringing her light back to life in this book. If we could all be infused with Rachel’s essence, the world would be a more beautiful place.”
Read the full Q & A with Robin Clifford Wood about how this biography, which is fascinatingly intertwined with memoir, came about.
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Rachel Field page on Amazon*
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Despite becoming a popular and well-known public figure, Field preferred living a simple and quiet life. She and her husband adopted a daughter named Hannah, and she enjoyed working in her garden and taking care of her family. Throughout her career, she wrote dozens of works, including novels, plays, children’s books, and poetry collections. She also composed a version of English lyrics for the song Ave Maria which was included in the 1940 Walt Disney classic, Fantasia.
Tragically, Rachel Field passed away prematurely at the age of forty-seven on March 15, 1942, after developing pneumonia following an operation. A poem that she had written for her daughter, Prayer for a Child, was published posthumously in 1944. This was her second piece to win the prestigious Lewis Caroll Shelf Award.
Her papers are housed in the Radcliffe College Archives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Rachel Field collections can be found at both Smith College and Yale University.
More about Rachel FieldMajor Works
Novels (adult)
1932 – Hepatica Hawks1933 – Just Across The Street1934 – Susanna B And William C1935 – Time Out Of Mind , fiction1937 – To See Ourselves written with husband Arthur Pederson)1938 – All This and Heaven Too1942 – And Now TomorrowPlays
1924 – Cinderella Married, A Comedy in One Act1924 – Six Plays1927 – The Cross-Stitch Heart And Other One-Act Plays1931 – The Bad Penny: A Drama in One Act1936 – First Class Matter: A Comedy in One Act1938 – The Londonderry Air, produced as a film of the same nameChildren’s books
1926 – Eliza and the Elves1927 – The Magic Pawnshop1928 – Little Dog Toby1929 – Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (winner of the 1930 Newbery Medal)1931- Calico Bush (also a Newbery winner)1944 – Prayer for a Child (winner of the 1945 Caldecott Medal)Poetry (for children and adults)1924 – The Pointed People1926 – Taxis and Toadstools1926 – An Alphabet for Boys and Girls1930 – A Circus Garland: Poems1934 – Branches Green1936 – Fear Is the ThornMore information
Poetry Foundation Wikipedia Reader discussion of Fields’ works on Goodreads. . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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May 11, 2021
Susan Sontag, American Iconoclast
In the course of American letters, there have been very few writers who are able to approach the iconoclastic status and cultural significance that Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) gained in her sixty-year career as an essayist, documentarian, political activist and novelist.
Beginning with her classic essay, “Notes on Camp“ (1963), Sontag embraced her role as one of the country’s premier public intellectuals; and, with her signature style of always dressing in black — combined with her long black hair with one distinctive white streak framing her face — Sontag became instantly recognizable in pop culture and in the more refined circles of literary discourse.
Sontag achieved what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of interpretation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag easily made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star.
Effective in multiple forms of media
At times, Sontag’s carefully constructed public image as America’s “Dark Lady” of literature who dominated the New York literary scene, was just that: an image. Considering the brilliance of Sontag’s legacy, such a thought carries no weight.
Her best-known critical works include the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Where the Stress Falls (2001). Sontag’s fiction includes The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999).
Sontag was also a filmmaker, documentarian, playwright, political activist, and from 1987 – 1989, Sontag served as the President of PEN, the international organization committed to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature.
Background and early life
Before she became Susan Sontag, she was born in New York City on January 16, 1933 to Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Jack Rosenblatt was a successful fur trader who died of tuberculosis when Susan was five. After Jack’s death, Mildred Rosenblatt moved her two young daughters, Susan and Judith, first to Long Island, New York, then to Tucson, Arizona.
They finally settled in North Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles when Susan was twelve. Along the way, Mildred met Army captain Nathan Sontag. Although Sontag mostly ignored her stepfather, she kept his last name. “I wanted a new name,” she later wrote in a diary, “the name I had was ugly and foreign.”
Sontag’s remembers her childhood as unhappy, with a mother who was unapproachable, distant and “always away.” There was also the question of Mildred’s alcohol abuse and the effect on her daughters — leading some biographers to conclude that Sontag’s often fraught relationships with other women stemmed from Mildred’s withholding of affection.
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Susan Sontag in 1966
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Sontag graduated from North Hollywood High School and spent one semester at the University of California Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago.
For Sontag, the University of Chicago was her dream school — there were no sports teams and the students were eager to debate Plato. At the University of Chicago Sontag was presented with a set of intrinsic values — the belief in the superiority of the great books and high culture coupled with a disdain of commercial culture and philistinism would shape Sontag’s creative life.
At the University of Chicago, Sontag met Mike Nichols, a lifelong friend who would later become one of the country’s most respected film directors, and, her future husband, Philip Rieff. Rieff was Sontag’s sociology professor, twenty-eight years old Sontag’s seventeen when they met and married after one week of meeting one another.
Sontag was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society when graduated from the University of Chicago at eighteen. Rieff and Sontag moved to Cambridge to pursue academic careers. Sontag was enrolled in a Harvard doctoral program and began studying literature, then added the studies of metaphysics, ethics, Greek and Continental philosophy and theology.
What’s notable about this time in Cambridge, besides having the esteemed professor Herbert Marcuse (who became the mentor for the young professor Angela Davis a decade later), living with Rieff and Sontag while he wrote his masterpiece Eros and Civilization, was the writing partnership between husband Philip Rieff and wife Susan Sontag.
When Philip Rieff published Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Sontag asserted that she was the actual writer of Rieff’s book. Sontag later stated that she wrote “every single word” of the acclaimed study of Freud. However, at the end of their eight-year marriage (which produced a son, David Rieff), a divorce wholly acrimonious and painful, Sontag gave up her rights to the book as one term of their divorce settlement.
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Susan Sontag pastel portrait by Juan Bastos
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A headline-grabbing divorce
Sontag’s 1957 divorce from Philip Rieff made headlines in the New York Daily News. Rieff held their son David as a form of hostage: Sontag had fallen in love with the Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes which, in Rieff’s perspective, made her an unfit mother.
Sontag was supporting herself as a writer at Commentary magazine and teaching religion part-time at Columbia University and refused alimony from Rieff. At that time, homosexuality was scandalous and grounds for denying custody of children in a divorce.
Sontag did eventually regain custody of David, but the terrifying experience of having her sexuality“outed” during the divorce proceedings would shape her decision never to formally “come out” during her lifetime. Nevertheless, she was romantically involved with a number of prominent men and women. Sontag’s last relationship was with noted photographer Annie Leibovitz, which lasted from the late 1980s until her death.
A provocative writer and thinker
For the next forty-five years, Sontag remained in New York, where, she stated, was the only place possible for her to live. “I don’t like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it’s full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through,” was Sontag’s perception of life outside of Manhattan.
Sontag kept writing and kept making uncomfortable statements: another Sontag legacy of speaking truth to power that made other critics and writers either very angry or just the opposite. Here are some of her best known and/or controversial stances:
Sontag zealously opposed the Vietnam War with the statement, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Sontag consistently backed up her statements with action, and so she famously, or infamously, visited Hanoi in 1968 in the midst of a heavy bombing siege, to demonstrate solidarity with the North Vietnamese.
Five years later, Sontag bore witness against the ravages of war from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Sontag made the film, Promised Lands, a work that examined the Palestinian situation in Israel.
When writer Salman Rushdie was under fundamentalist Islamic fatwah, Sontag was a major supporter for him.
In the 1990s, Sontag made several humanitarian trips to Sarajevo, famously staging a production of the play Waiting for Godot during a bombing siege.
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Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
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In the last years of her life, while enduring immense pain from her third onset of cancer (Sontag had previously survived breast cancer and a mastectomy) Sontag wrote Regarding The Pain of Others. Sontag’s final written work scrutinizes the human response as they witness images of war and torture.
The book was the culmination of Sontag’s attempt to have her readers comprehend the political and social events of their times through a moral compass. “I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says ‘be serious, be passionate, wake up.’”
Sontag died in New York City on December 18, 2004. At the suggestion of her son, David, Sontag is buried in Paris, a city that Sontag passionately loved to visit. For the millions of readers attracted to Sontag as a writer and thinker, her tremendous legacy of work will offer years of introspection, debate, and contemplation.
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Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
More about Susan SontagEssay collections
Other essays by Sontag not compiled into books appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Partisan Review, London Review of Books, and others.
Against Interpretation (1966, includes Notes on “Camp”) Styles of Radical Will (1969)Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) Where the Stress Falls (2001)Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches (2007)Fiction (novels & short stories)
The Benefactor (novel, 1963)Death Kit (novel, 1967) I, etcetera (short stories, 1977) The Volcano Lover (novel, 1992) In America (novel, 1999)Plays
The Way We Live Now (1990)A Parsifal (1991)Alice in Bed (1993)Lady from the Sea (1998)Films
Duett för kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals, 1969) Broder Carl (Brother Carl, (1971) Promised Lands (1974) Unguided Tour AKA Letter from Venice (1983)Selected biographies and criticism
Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist by Sohnya Sayres (1990)Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000)Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff (2008)Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate (2009)Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber (2014)Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez (2014)Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (2019)More information
Official website “Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143” – The Paris Review, Winter 1995 Wikipedia Obituary in The Guardian (December 29, 2004)“How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think” (A.O. Scott, NY Times, 2019) “Misunderstanding Susan Sontag” (Merve Emre, The Atlantic, 2019) Reader discussion of Sontag’s works on Goodreads. . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Susan Sontag, American Iconoclast appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
Susan Sontag
In the course of American letters, there have been very few writers who are able to approach the iconoclastic status and cultural significance that Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) gained in her sixty-year career as an essayist, documentarian, political activist and novelist.
Beginning with her classic essay, “Notes on Camp“ (1963), Sontag embraced her role as one of the country’s premier public intellectuals; and, with her signature style of always dressing in black — combined with her long black hair with one distinctive white streak framing her face — Sontag became instantly recognizable in pop culture and in the more refined circles of literary discourse.
Sontag achieved what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of interpretation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag easily made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star.
Effective in multiple forms of media
At times, Sontag’s carefully constructed public image as America’s “Dark Lady” of literature who dominated the New York literary scene, was just that: an image. Considering the brilliance of Sontag’s legacy, such a thought carries no weight.
Her best-known critical works include the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and Where the Stress Falls (2001). Sontag’s fiction includes The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999).
Sontag was also a filmmaker, documentarian, playwright, political activist, and from 1987 – 1989, Sontag served as the President of PEN, the international organization committed to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature.
Background and early life
Before she became Susan Sontag, she was born in New York City on January 16, 1933 to Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Jack Rosenblatt was a successful fur trader who died of tuberculosis when Susan was five. After Jack’s death, Mildred Rosenblatt moved her two young daughters, Susan and Judith, first to Long Island, New York, then to Tucson, Arizona.
They finally settled in North Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles when Susan was twelve. Along the way, Mildred met Army captain Nathan Sontag. Although Sontag mostly ignored her stepfather, she kept his last name. “I wanted a new name,” she later wrote in a diary, “the name I had was ugly and foreign.”
Sontag’s remembers her childhood as unhappy, with a mother who was unapproachable, distant and “always away.” There was also the question of Mildred’s alcohol abuse and the effect on her daughters — leading some biographers to conclude that Sontag’s often fraught relationships with other women stemmed from Mildred’s withholding of affection.
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Susan Sontag in 1966
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Sontag graduated from North Hollywood High School and spent one semester at the University of California Berkeley before transferring to the University of Chicago.
For Sontag, the University of Chicago was her dream school — there were no sports teams and the students were eager to debate Plato. At the University of Chicago Sontag was presented with a set of intrinsic values — the belief in the superiority of the great books and high culture coupled with a disdain of commercial culture and philistinism would shape Sontag’s creative life.
At the University of Chicago, Sontag met Mike Nichols, a lifelong friend who would later become one of the country’s most respected film directors, and, her future husband, Philip Rieff. Rieff was Sontag’s sociology professor, twenty-eight years old Sontag’s seventeen when they met and married after one week of meeting one another.
Sontag was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society when graduated from the University of Chicago at eighteen. Rieff and Sontag moved to Cambridge to pursue academic careers. Sontag was enrolled in a Harvard doctoral program and began studying literature, then added the studies of metaphysics, ethics, Greek and Continental philosophy and theology.
What’s notable about this time in Cambridge, besides having the esteemed professor Herbert Marcuse (who became the mentor for the young professor Angela Davis a decade later), living with Rieff and Sontag while he wrote his masterpiece Eros and Civilization, was the writing partnership between husband Philip Rieff and wife Susan Sontag.
When Philip Rieff published Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Sontag asserted that she was the actual writer of Rieff’s book. Sontag later stated that she wrote “every single word” of the acclaimed study of Freud. However, at the end of their eight-year marriage (which produced a son, David Rieff), a divorce wholly acrimonious and painful, Sontag gave up her rights to the book as one term of their divorce settlement.
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Susan Sontag pastel portrait by Juan Bastos
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A headline-grabbing divorce
Sontag’s 1957 divorce from Philip Rieff made headlines in the New York Daily News. Rieff held their son David as a form of hostage: Sontag had fallen in love with the Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes which, in Rieff’s perspective, made her an unfit mother.
Sontag was supporting herself as a writer at Commentary magazine and teaching religion part-time at Columbia University and refused alimony from Rieff. At that time, homosexuality was scandalous and grounds for denying custody of children in a divorce.
Sontag did eventually regain custody of David, but the terrifying experience of having her sexuality“outed” during the divorce proceedings would shape her decision never to formally “come out” during her lifetime. Nevertheless, she was romantically involved with a number of prominent men and women. Sontag’s last relationship was with noted photographer Annie Leibovitz, which lasted from the late 1980s until her death.
A provocative writer and thinker
For the next forty-five years, Sontag remained in New York, where, she stated, was the only place possible for her to live. “I don’t like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it’s full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through,” was Sontag’s perception of life outside of Manhattan.
Sontag kept writing and kept making uncomfortable statements: another Sontag legacy of speaking truth to power that made other critics and writers either very angry or just the opposite. Here are some of her best known and/or controversial stances:
Sontag zealously opposed the Vietnam War with the statement, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Sontag consistently backed up her statements with action, and so she famously, or infamously, visited Hanoi in 1968 in the midst of a heavy bombing siege, to demonstrate solidarity with the North Vietnamese.
Five years later, Sontag bore witness against the ravages of war from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Sontag made the film, Promised Lands, a work that examined the Palestinian situation in Israel.
When writer Salman Rushdie was under fundamentalist Islamic fatwah, Sontag was a major supporter for him.
In the 1990s, Sontag made several humanitarian trips to Sarajevo, famously staging a production of the play Waiting for Godot during a bombing siege.
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Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
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In the last years of her life, while enduring immense pain from her third onset of cancer (Sontag had previously survived breast cancer and a mastectomy) Sontag wrote Regarding The Pain of Others. Sontag’s final written work scrutinizes the human response as they witness images of war and torture.
The book was the culmination of Sontag’s attempt to have her readers comprehend the political and social events of their times through a moral compass. “I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says ‘be serious, be passionate, wake up.’”
Sontag died in New York City on December 18, 2004. At the suggestion of her son, David, Sontag is buried in Paris, a city that Sontag passionately loved to visit. For the millions of readers attracted to Sontag as a writer and thinker, her tremendous legacy of work will offer years of introspection, debate, and contemplation.
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Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
More about Susan SontagEssay collections
Other essays by Sontag not compiled into books appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Partisan Review, London Review of Books, and others.
Against Interpretation (1966, includes Notes on “Camp”) Styles of Radical Will (1969)Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) Where the Stress Falls (2001)Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches (2007)Fiction (novels & short stories)
The Benefactor (novel, 1963)Death Kit (novel, 1967) I, etcetera (short stories, 1977) The Volcano Lover (novel, 1992) In America (novel, 1999)Plays
The Way We Live Now (1990)A Parsifal (1991)Alice in Bed (1993)Lady from the Sea (1998)Films
Duett för kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals, 1969) Broder Carl (Brother Carl, (1971) Promised Lands (1974) Unguided Tour AKA Letter from Venice (1983)Selected biographies and criticism
Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist by Sohnya Sayres (1990)Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000)Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff (2008)Notes on Sontag by Phillip Lopate (2009)Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber (2014)Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez (2014)Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (2019)More information
Official website “Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143” – The Paris Review, Winter 1995 Wikipedia Obituary in The Guardian (December 29, 2004)“How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think” (A.O. Scott, NY Times, 2019) “Misunderstanding Susan Sontag” (Merve Emre, The Atlantic, 2019) Reader discussion of Sontag’s works on Goodreads. . . . . . . . .
*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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May 7, 2021
10 Classic Indian Women Poets, from Akka Mahadevi to Meena Alexander
India is a rich mosaic when it comes to languages, cultures and states. This diverse selection keeps in mind the feminist angle as it journeys from the 12th century through the 21st. These classic Indian women poets are presented here in order of birth, from Akka Mahadevi (1130-1160) through Meena Alexander (1951-2018).
Though all have passed on, their voices and influence echo through the ages. Pictured at right, Kamala Das as a young woman.
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Akka Mahadevi (1130-1160)
One of the earliest known women poets in Kannada literature, Akka Mahadevi is known for her 430 extant Vachanas (spontaneous mystical poetry) and enjoys saintly status in the Lingayat community, which rose as a reformist movement to Hinduism in Karnataka.
Welding
The arrow that is shot should penetrate so deeply
that even the feathers do not show.
Hug the body of the Lord so tightly
that the bones must be crushed to crumble.
Weld to the divine until the very welding disappears.
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Lal Ded (1320-1392)
Despite being born in 14th century Kashmir, Lal Ded is considered one of the region’s most revered mystic poets, even 700 years later. Her work, known as Vak meaning words, has come down through the folk tradition and is considered as a foundation for Kashmiri literature. Her work holds value for both Hindus and Muslims.
I have seen an educated man starve,
a leaf blown off by bitter wind.
Once I saw a thoughtless fool
beat his cook.
Lalla has been waiting for the allure of the world
to fall away.
I might scatter the southern clouds,
drain the sea, or cure someone
hopelessly ill.
But to change the mind of a fool
is beyond me.
(from Bhaki poems)
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Muddupalani (1730-1790)
A courtesan in the court of King Pratap Singh, the Maratha King of Tanjore, Muddupalani is most renowned for her erotic poem, “Rādhikā-sāntvanam” (Appeasing Radha). Here is a portion of it:
… A face that glows like the full moon.
Skills of conversation, matching the countenance.
Eyes filled with compassion,
matching the speech.
A great spirit of generosity,
matching the glance.
These are the ornaments
that adorn Palani,
When she is praised by kings.
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Savitribai Phule (1831-1897)
Besides being an engaged poet, Savitribai Phule took on the forces of caste and patriarchy forcefully during her time, and was a social reformer and educationist. She used the medium of poetry to spread awareness and the compilations are available as Kavya Phule and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar.
Learn English
Make self-reliance your occupation,
Exert yourself to gather the wealth of knowledge,
Without knowledge animals remained dumb,
Don’t rest! Strive to educate yourself.
The opportunity is here,
For the Shudras and Ati Shudras,
To learn English
To dispel all woes.
Throw away the authority
Of the Brahmin and his teachings,
Break the shackles of caste,
By learning English.
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Toru Dutt (1856-1877)
Referred to as the Keats of India, Toru Dutt was the first Indian poet to write in both English and French. Her best work, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields stands testimony to the lyricism and talent, which was cut short by her untimely death at the age of 21.
… Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay
Unto thy honor, Tree, beloved of those
Who now in blessed sleep for aye repose,—
Dearer than life to me, alas, were they!
Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done
With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale,
Under whose awful branches lingered pale
Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton,
And Time the shadow; and though weak the verse
That would thy beauty fain, oh, fain rehearse,
May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse.
(a portion of “Our Casuarina Tree”)
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Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)
Poet, feminist and politician, Sarojini Naidu was also known as the Nightingale of India. Sarojini spoke several Indian languages whilst she composed her poetry in English. Her three collections of poems include The Golden Threshold.
… What are the sins of my race, Beloved,
what are my people to thee?
And what are thy shrines, and kine and kindred,
what are thy gods to me?
Love recks not of feuds and bitter follies,
of stranger, comrade or kin,
Alike in his ear sound the temple bells
and the cry of the muezzin.
For Love shall cancel the ancient wrong
and conquer the ancient rage,
Redeem with his tears the memoried sorrow
that sullied a bygone age.
(A portion of “An Indian Love Song”)
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Mahadevi Varma (1907-1987)
Mahadevi Varma is considered one of the four pillars of the Chhaayavadi (shadowism) movement of Hindi poetry and interestingly the only woman to figure there. Her four poetic works are published under the title, Yama and encompass feminist concerns.
Why an introduction dear
Why an introduction dear, you are within me,
reflections on starry nights, memories of a life,
creations of life in short spells, eyes notice
creations of life in short spells, eyes notice
gentle footsteps!
I don’t much to treasure anymore,
you are the treasure I have in me.
Your dazzling, radiant smile like sunrise
Is the reflection of fragrant sorrow,
it is consciousness, and dreamy slumber,
Let me tire and sleep incessantly, for
Would I understand the creation, big-bang!!
You are drawn, I am just an outline,
you are the sweet melody, I am just a string of notes,
you are limitless, I am but an illusion of limits,
In the secrecy of real image-reflection,
why enact to be lovers!!!
Why an introduction, since you are within me.
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Amrita Pritam (1919-2005)
Considered a maverick writer and poet, Amrita Pritam wrote in both Punjabi and Hindi. She moved from romantic to social commentary and was deeply affected by the Partition of India. In her most famous poem, “Aj Akhaan Waris Shah Nu” (“Today, I invoke Waris Shah”), she challenges the tropes used in the entire literary canon of romantic poetry, to question the status of a woman as a beloved.
Me—a book in the attic.
Maybe some covenant or hymnal.
Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra,
or a spell for intimate afflictions.
But then it seems I am none of these.
(If I were, someone would have read me.
Apparently at an assembly of revolutionaries
they passed a resolution,
and I am a longhand copy of it.
It has the police’s stamp on it
and was never successfully enforced.
It is preserved only for the sake of procedure.
(a portion of “A Letter”)
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Kamala Das (1934-2009)
The prolific author and poet Kamala Das, who wrote under the pen name of Madhavi Kutty, also came to be known as Kamala Sorayya, as she converted to Islam towards the last few years of her life. She brought in the concept of Confessional Poetry, very rare among women poets and has many volumes of poetry to her credit.
I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
(A portion of “An Introduction” — read this poem in full and several others in 10 Poems by Kamala Das, Confessional Poet of India)
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Meena Alexander (1951-2018)
The only non-resident late Indian poet to make this list, Meena Alexander has many volumes of poems to her credit. Some have also been set to music, including Acqua Alta by the Swedish composer, Jan Sandstrom. Her poetic influences are Indo-American and include Kamala Das and Adrienne Rich.
Cadenza
I watch your hands at the keyboard
Making music, one hand with a tiny jot,
A birthmark I think where finger bone
Joins palm, mark of the fish,
Living thing in search of a watering
Hole set in a walled garden,
Or in a field with all the fences torn:
Where I hear your father cry into the wind
That beats against stones in a small town
Where you were born; its cornfields
Skyward pointing, never sown, never
To be reaped, flagrant, immortal.
Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.
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See also: 10 Classic Indian Women Authors
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May 6, 2021
An Analysis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
This analysis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Shirley Jackson’s last novel, has a special emphasis on Mary Katherine (Merricat), the younger of the Blackwood sisters central to the story. Excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid 20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
In Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial and The Haunting of Hill House, she used an old house as a brooding, malign presence in the novel, almost a character in its own right. She did the same, though in a completely different way, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, her last completed novel.
Shirley Jackson is a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the séance-fiction writers. By day, amiably disguised as an embattled mother, she devotes her artful talents to the real-life confusions of the four small children (Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons) in her Vermont household. But when shadows fall and the little ones are safely tucked in, Author Jackson pulls down the deadly nightshade and is off. With exquisite subtlety she then explores a dark world (“The Lottery,” Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House) in which the usual brooding old houses, fetishes, poisons, poltergeists and psychotic females take on new dimensions of chill and dementia under her black-magical writing skill and infra-red feminine sensibility. (Time Magazine, 1962)
A literary cousin of Natalie Waite and Cassandra Mortmain
We Have Always Lived in the Castle was well received at the time of its publication – the reception of Jackson’s books got warmer with each new one she published – and has been well-regarded ever since, generally being considered her best work.
But it is strange that little attention has been paid to the similarity in title and content to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle; both are narrated by odd, isolated adolescent women living in fortress-like solitude, though Smith’s Cassandra Mortmain is perhaps more like Jackson’s Natalie Waite of Hangsaman than Merricat Blackwood.
Shirley Jackson’s previous adolescent heroines, including Natalie, have all been a little bit unhinged, but of this novel she said that the heroine was “really crazy.” Jackson’s older daughter Jannie told her mother’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer that the character of Merricat was based on her younger sister Sally and the character of the older sister Constance was based on herself.
Introducing Merricat BlackwoodJackson understood teenage girls and saw how really crazy they could be. In this case, the crazy girl is the narrator so that we see the story, indeed the whole world through her rather myopic, out of focus eyes. The opening paragraph is often quoted, and rightly so, as one of the best opening paragraphs in modern fiction; it is worth quoting again.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. The rest of my family is dead.
Actually this is not completely true: her uncle Julian is not dead and still lives with them, though he is in a wheelchair and has advanced dementia – he never speaks to Merricat and seems to think she is dead, along with the rest of the family who used to live in the house. It becomes apparent that the rest of the family have been poisoned and that Constance – ten years older than Merricat – was tried for their murder but not convicted.
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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The remaining three family members live in a large rambling house on the edge of the village (presumed to be based on the New England town of Bennington where the Jacksons lived; her husband taught at the local college, a prestigious school for girls at the time). The inhabitants of the fictional village resented the old and wealthy family, who have lived in the house for generations, for their pretensions, and even more so after Merricat’s late father had fenced off the shortcut through the estate that the villagers used to use.
“The people of the village have always hated us.” Merricat is the only one who leaves the grounds of the house and only then twice a week to do the shopping and go to the library; Constance, who is an excellent gardener and cook gives her a shopping list.
Merricat gets through the shopping and comes home as quickly as possible, though she always briefly stops for coffee just to show that she does not care what people think, even though she does; whenever any of the surly and suspicious villagers come in they always taunt her. Merricat hates them in return.
Sympathetic magic
Merricat seems to have a degree of what would now be called OCD; whenever she leaves the house she plays a superstitious kind of children’s game of gaining and losing points depending on which route she can take.
“The library was my start and the black rock was my goal. I had to move down one side of Main Street, cross, and then move up the other side until I reached the black rock, when I would win. I began well, with a good safe turn along the empty side of Main Street, and perhaps this would turn out to be one of the very good days; it was like that sometimes, but not often on spring mornings. If it was a very good day I would later make an offering of jewelry out of gratitude.”
Merricat is superstitious to the point of believing in sympathetic magic; she buries objects and uses coins and mirrors to bring luck. She lives in her own private world, on the moon, as she puts it, though she does not mean this literally: “I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.”
Like all young girls she has a private world to which she can retreat in her head – taking with her her cat Jonas, who acts as kind of a witch’s familiar; Jackson had written a non-fiction book the children about the Salem witch trials, where adults believed that young girls believed that they could harm people with sympathetic magic. But of course Merricat is not a young girl, she is eighteen, even if she is mentally not even the twelve years old she was at the time of the death of her family.
Merricat and Constance
“I liked my house on the moon, and I put a fireplace in it and a garden outside (what would flourish, growing on the moon? I must ask Constance).” Constance, who is more like a loving mother than an older sister, always indulges Merricat in her fantasies.
Merricat and Constance are extremely fond of each other, complementing each other perhaps to the extent of being two halves of the same character; we have seen this several times in Girls in Bloom: two sisters with opposing personalities who are both to sides of the same coin.
“When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess … Even at the worst times she was pink and white and golden, and nothing has ever happened to dim the brightness of her. She is the most precious person in my world, always.”
In return, Constance loves and looks after Merricat with great affection and solicitude, sometimes calling her ‘silly Merricat’, but never chiding her or getting cross with her. It emerges that, before the poisoning, Merricat had been considered wayward and disobedient and had often been sent to bed with no supper, as she was on the night of the poisoning.
The remaining family members are quite content with their strange life, which they have lived for the six years since the poisoning. Uncle Julian never leaves the house, Constance never leaves the grounds and only leaves the house to tend to her garden; practically no one ever comes to visit them.
“Don’t you ever want to leave here, Merricat?” asks Constance. “Where would we go?” she replies. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.”
The two sisters are even fond of uncle Julian, who is happy enough pottering around taking notes and claiming to be writing a book about the poisoning, though he gets confused and very often has to ask if the poisoning actually happened. The two sisters never talk about it and Merricat never reveals anything to us, but we are slowly coming to think that perhaps it was she who did the poisoning and not Constance.
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A 1962 review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle
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The finely balanced domestic harmony is shattered when the sisters’ cousin Charles comes to visit and seems intent on staying. Merricat had already foreseen something: “All the omens spoke of change.” Change of course being the last thing that Merricat wants; she never wants to come of age. “There’s a change coming,” she says to Constance. “It’s spring, silly,” she replies.
It is quickly apparent to us, if not to Merricat and Constance, that Charles is after their money: it seems that the father had had a large amount of money in his safe when the family all died. There are also many silver coins, which Merricat has buried for superstitious reasons.
“On Sunday mornings I examined my safeguards, the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pinewoods; so long as they were where I put them nothing could get in to harm us.” Charles, who seems to be broke, becomes almost hysterical at this disregard of money but of course the two sisters are not concerned about money as such, they only need enough to live on; uncle Julian has no idea where the money comes from to provide the food that Constance prepares for him three times a day.
Merricat tries various kinds of sympathetic magic to get Charles to leave, but he is intent on staying and Constance seems to become almost fond of him. “It was important to choose the exact device to drive Charles away. An imperfect magic, or one incorrectly used, might only bring more disaster upon our house.”
Merricat tries everything, including not only symbolic magic like smashing mirrors but also practical attacks on him like pouring a pitcher of water over his bed. She even says to Constance: “I was thinking that you might make a gingerbread man, and I could name him Charles and eat him.” This is a very similar idea of sympathetic magic to the “poppets” that the so-called Salem Witches used, as Jackson had said in her book on them and Arthur Miller showed in his play The Crucible of 1955.
There is even more explicit reference to this kind of magic when Merricat finds a stone the size of a head, draws a face on it, buries it in the ground and says, “Goodbye, Charles.” But Charles’ presence seems to be making Constance reconsider their life.
“I never realized until lately how wrong I was to let you and Uncle Julian hide here with me. We should have faced the world and tried to live normal lives; Uncle Julian should have been in a hospital all these years, with good care and nurses to watch him. We should have been living like other people. You should…” She stopped, and waved her hands helplessly. “You should have boyfriends,” she said finally, and then began to laugh because she sounded funny even to herself.
“I have Jonas,” I said, and we both laughed and Uncle Julian woke up suddenly and laughed a thin old cackle.
“You are the silliest person I ever saw,” I told Constance, and went off to look for Jonas.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2019 film)
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Merricat is appalled at the way Charles brings newspapers into the house; they have no phone, never open mail and have received no news since Constance was released from prison. Another of Charles’ annoying habits for Merricat is his pipe-smoking, which leaves smell and mess in the pristine house – ever since the poisoning the two sisters have “neatened” the house weekly, leaving everything undisturbed and as it was when the whole family was living there.
She finds a saucer with his burning pipe on it; “I brushed the saucer and the pipe of the table into the wastebasket and they fell softly onto the newspapers he had brought into the house.’ If it does occur to her that this will cause a fire, she does not tell us. But of course it does cause a fire.
The local fire brigade attend, though all the neighbors stand around watching and tell them to let it burn. The villagers then go in to the house and start smashing objects and breaking windows in a frenzy of hatred that again recalls the days of witch hunting; the burning of “witches” – the auto da fé or act of faith – was supposed to free their souls.
Uncle Julian dies in the fire and Charles leaves but the two sisters remain in what is left of the house, which is pretty much only the kitchen. “Our house was a castle, turreted, and open to the sky.” (This makes their house even more like Cassandra Mortmain’s castle.) They decide that they will continue their lives as before; the kitchen was the centre of their existence anyway. They have no clothes, as everything has been destroyed, but Constance says she will wear uncle Julian’s shirts, which have survived and Merricat will wear a tablecloth made into a dress.
There is preserved food in the cellar, and the garden, though covered in ash, will still produce fresh food for them. They board up the door so that no one can see in, now that the village children have started to play on the path that their father had blocked off. And then, after only a few days, villagers start to leave food outside the door with apology notes for their behavior; they will not starve and they have each other.
One of our mother’s Dresden figurines is broken, I thought, and I said aloud to Constance, “I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. “The way you did before?” she asked.
It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years.
“Yes,” I said after a minute, “the way I did before.”
This is the nearest Merricat comes to a coming of age moment: admitting guilt and taking responsibility for her actions, though she does not have any regret. “Although I did not perceive it then, time and the orderly pattern of our old days had ended.” The new Merricat accepts the changes; she stops believing in the power of magic and turns more practical things.
“My new magical safeguards were the lock on the front door, and the boards over the windows, and the barricades along the sides of the house … We were going to be very happy, I thought. There were a great many things to do, and a whole new pattern of days to arrange, but I thought we were going to be very happy.”
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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May 5, 2021
The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood — Rediscovering Rachel Field
A compelling blend of biography and memoir, The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine by Robin Clifford Wood (She Writes Press, May 4, 2021) recounts the remarkable life of writer Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) from the perspective of a woman who lived in Field’s old, neglected island home in Maine, sparking a unique sisterhood across time.
Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award-winning novelist, a Newbery Medal-winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.
Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—which was widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today?
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Rachel Field and her dog, Spriggen
(photo: Portland Library, Maine)
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Rachel Field is perhaps best known for the 1938 novel All This and Heaven Too, which was adapted to the 1940 film of the same name starring Bette Davis. She was also known for the children’s book Hitty — Her First Hundred Years, which won the 1930 Newbery Medal.
Kirkus Reviews calls The Field House “An eloquent, detailed tribute to a less well-known but inspiring author.” To celebrate the publication of this book, here’s an in-depth interview with its author, Robin Clifford Wood.
How did you first come to know Rachel Field? Have you always been a fan of her work?
I only had the vaguest awareness of Rachel Field before I started spending time on Sutton Island in 1979, but I’d heard of her poem that begins, “If once you have slept on an island, you’ll never be quite the same.”
That opening line proved to be true for Rachel and me both. She was still quite renowned in the Cranberry Isles region in the 1980s, so her name became increasingly familiar. When we first bought the Field House in 1994, tour boats still passed by out front announcing over their PA system: “Up there to your right you’ll see the home of the famous author Rachel Field.”
Keep in mind, too, that when people move out of these island homes, they leave most things behind. There are no roads, only footpaths for carting your supplies in wheelbarrows from the ferry dock. So I was living amongst Rachel’s things – the wicker furniture she sat on, her mail up in the attic, her books on shelves, the chipped china and tin coffee pot that were old even when she arrived, her initials hand-stitched into a linen dish towel, old galley-proofs in a drawer, a map of Paris from 1920 that she must have bought on a trip to Europe.
It wasn’t just the smell of spruce and sea-wind, the rhythm of tides and tolling of bell buoys, the expeditions to gather blueberries, cranberries and mushrooms, or the thick, moss-carpeted woods that we shared; I was also immersed in the same domestic space that Rachel inhabited.
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The Field House on Bookshop.org*
The Field House on Amazon*
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How did you come to live in Field’s house in the Cranberry Isles, and what was the experience like for you? Do you believe fate had a part to play?
I first set foot on Sutton Island as an 18-year-old, when my college boyfriend invited me to visit his family’s summer home. I fell in love with the island’s peace and simplicity, life boiled down to just being. It was years (fourteen!) before Jonathan and I heard that Rachel’s old abandoned house was up for sale. By then we were married with four children, and the island was rooted deeply in the soil of our lives.
As soon as I walked into the house, I got flutters in my belly. I felt something – excitement? anticipation? connection? I knew it was a writer’s house before I got there, but I felt that it was a writer’s house when I stood inside its walls.
As for fate – who knows? A part of me thinks Rachel Field reached out to me across time. There were so many strangely convenient coincidences that joined Rachel’s life and mine, or streamlined my path to writing about her life. But it took so long for me to get her message – another fourteen years before I started researching Rachel’s life, then ten more to finish the book. Maybe fate or Rachel’s spirit or some magic muse led me here, but whoever it was, they were extremely patient.
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Moon over the Field House, present day
Photo: Robin Clifford Wood
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Can you tell me more about those “strangely convenient coincidences?”
Well, it seemed that every time I got discouraged or lost momentum on the project, some new source would mysteriously crop up to draw me back in. An archivist I’d met called to tell me about someone who wanted to donate his private Rachel Field collection to their library – could she share my contact information?
That someone became an important mentor. Other times, whenever my life began drifting away from the project, I’d get an invitation to read Rachel’s poetry at a public event, or a question about copyrights, or an invitation to give a talk about Rachel, or a new batch of letters in the mail from a Rachel Field fan. Getting a publisher was similarly serendipitous. I’d shifted my focus to a different project, and here came the big news. Rachel was back at number one in my attentions.
Also, it was uncanny how every cache of Rachel Field material was housed somewhere that connected me to family, which streamlined my logistics. Two of my kids were at Yale when I went to study in the Yale archives. I had kids living in Washington D.C. and in Cambridge, Mass when I visited collections in those cities, so I got to combine my work with visits to my children.
My mother was a Vassar alumna, so she came with me to the Vassar archives to be my research assistant for the day. My daughter’s college softball team invited all their parents to their annual spring training. The year I was in the thick of my research, their spring training was in California. That’s when I did all my California research.
One of the longest running mysteries for me was Rachel’s love life. She married late, at age 40, but her poetry from earlier years reveals an intense, passionate love affair that ended in heartbreak. An unidentified name, “Lyle,” shows up in an old Wanamaker Diary on a shelf of the Field House, written by Rachel’s mother. “Rachel and Lyle all devotion,” it reads. Who could this Lyle person be?
Years into the research, I had some down time about two weeks before I’d be driving my youngest daughter from Maine to New Orleans, where she was starting as a transfer student at Tulane University. I pulled out my notes for the first time in months and happened upon the name “Lyle Saxon,” a writer from the 1920s. Could this be Rachel’s mysterious Lyle?
I tracked down Saxon’s biographer, who gasped when I told her my story. “I can’t believe you live in Rachel Field’s house,” she said. She knew all about Rachel and was sure she’d been in love with Lyle Saxon. There were thirty extraordinary letters from Rachel to Lyle, she told me, that almost convinced her to write about Rachel Field herself.
“Where are those letters?” I asked. “In the archives at Tulane University.” These are the things that started to convince me that something more than mere chance was at play.
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What was your research process like for this biography?
I absolutely loved the research. First, research is like a treasure hunt, with each stop offering tantalizing new clues to lead you on. Second, I was astounded by the enthusiasm and generosity of archivists, librarians and hobbyist historians all over the country. I owe so much to the memory-keepers who boosted me along.
I started locally for an article about Rachel that would appear in Port City Life Magazine. Great Cranberry Island Historical Society had a dedicated Rachel Field and “Hitty” corner (Hitty is the doll protagonist of her Newbery-winning book). That launching point led me to Hitty fans around the country who connected me to more archive sources.
By the time I finished the research for that short article, I had enough material for eight articles, so I thought I’d take another year and write the full biography. Ha! Lucky I was so naïve or I might have never begun.
I ended up exploring archive collections in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, California, and more. A mentor I met along the way gave me one of my most important pieces of advice. I asked him, years into the work, “How do I know when I’m done with the research?” He answered, “You’re never done. You just have to start writing.”
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Rachel and Spriggin on Sutton Island, 1929
Photo: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study, Harvard University
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The Field House blends biography and memoir creating a unique and more contemporary take on a traditional biography. Why did you choose this approach?
One unusual thing about this project is that I was invited to give presentations about Rachel Field years before the book came to be – not just around Maine, but in her hometown of Stockbridge, Massachusetts and at a literary conference in Tampa, Florida. At every speaking engagement, without fail, the thing that most captivated audiences was the interweaving of my life and Rachel’s, what we shared, even beyond an island house in Maine.
I was determined to make this book about Rachel, not about me, but I eventually became convinced that the best way to garner attention for Rachel’s story was to add an extra layer of storytelling. At the Iota Short Prose writer’s conference one summer, a writing prompt asked us to write a letter to someone who would never read it, so I wrote a letter to Rachel Field. That exercise blossomed into a revelation. Here was a way to dovetail my story into Rachel’s. I began composing letters to go with each chapter of the book.
You say that among other things, The Field House is a book about beauty. Will you explain this?
It becomes clear in the book that I fall in love with my biographical subject. Rachel Field, first and foremost, was a poet, with a poet’s sensibilities. She was transported by beauty, haunted by it at times, but always, always deeply moved by beauty – in a seagull’s wing underlit by the setting sun, in a turn of phrase, in the face of a dear friend.
Rachel despaired of her own physical appearance – a weighty, overlarge frame and heavy masculine features. However, in her writing and her spirit, she shimmered with a beautiful, enchanting spirit. That is what I try to evoke by bringing her light back to life in this book. If we could all be infused with Rachel’s essence, the world would be a more beautiful place.
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Rachel Field with Bette Davis
during the filming of All This and Heaven Too
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How has your life been affected by this project?
Where to begin? I suppose I can boil down the effect this project had on my life into two categories. First, Rachel inspired me to push my writing further, to reach a place where I could finally call myself a writer without blushing and kicking my toe against the ground. Maybe I would have found my way here without her, but after decades of slow progress my writing accelerated with Rachel’s arrival on the scene. She was the source of my first glossy magazine success.
The wish to finish her story was the impetus behind my application to an MFA program. I became an “expert” guest speaker thanks to her. My first commissioned piece – a ghost story produced by a professional theatre company – was based on her biography of Captain Samuel Hadlock, Jr. And of course, she is the source of my first published book.
Second, all the years I spent in Rachel’s company led me to a greater acceptance of my own life’s journey. Rachel and I were both drawn to writing and to motherhood. She immersed in the former and struggled to achieve the latter; I did the opposite. I sometimes felt I’d wasted my productive years not writing. Immersed in Rachel’s life, I recognized that my path, my choices, were valid ones, to be celebrated. Each of us realized our goals in our own time and fashion. In a way, our lives complement, uplift, and validate each other. She made me feel completed in a way I never had before.
ROBIN CLIFFORD WOOD has a BA from Yale University, an MA in English from the University of Rochester, and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. During twenty-five years as a full-time mom, she published local human-interest features in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts and spent seven years as a regular columnist, first in Massachusetts, then for Maine’s Bangor Daily News. She began teaching college writing in 2015.
Her articles have appeared in Port City Life magazine, Bangor Metro, and Solstice literary magazine, which published her powerful essay “How Do You Help Your Parents Die?” in its spring 2019 issue. Her award-winning poetry received national recognition from the 2020 Writer’s Digest Competition. Wood lives in central Maine with her husband and dogs. The Field House is her first book. For more information, visit robincliffordwood.com.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood — Rediscovering Rachel Field appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
