Alice Walker - The color Purple, March 24,2022

The Color Purple, first edition cover, 1962.

The Color Purple takes place in rural Georgia, where the lives and tribulations of the life of African-American women in the 1930's is laid bare. It starts in a very despairing manner exposing wide-scale family abuse and rape of women at home as a result of male domination. 

Celie is the central character, abused by her husband Albert who treats her as his chattel and discards her after sex. Celie was raped by her stepfather and bore two children who subsequently disappeared. Nettie is her sister who escapes the dismal situation by going to London and joining a missionary group. She has a decent husband and lives a joyous life in Africa.

Albert takes on a mistress named Shug who is at first contemptuous of Celie, but later grows fond of her and establishes a bond. It all starts with Celie nursing Shug back to health when she falls sick. It grows into a lesbian affair and a few pages of this are the cause for demands that the book be banned in school libraries in USA.

Celie has no one to sympathise with her and confesses her troubles in letters addressed to God. This is how the first half of the story is told. She writes letters to Nettie but never gets a reply until she later discovers with Shug’s help that Nettie’s replies to her had been hidden, stashed away by her cruel husband in a trunk. From those letters, we learn of Nettie's voyage to Africa and her spiritual conversion, after finding that the white missionaries did not really care for the Olinka people or respect their traditions. In the end, the message is one of hope.

The Color Purple was turned into a musical in 2005 and played to sell-out audiences on Broadway during 2005 to 2008, earning eleven Tony Award nominations. 

                          

Scene from the musical The Color Purple – Fantasia Barrino, playing Celie, was wailing through her climactic solo, ‘I’m Here.’

The passage by Saras has the line from which the title of the novel is taken:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Joe’s passage has another comforting quote from a letter of Nettie:

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Poetry Session – Feb 25, 2022

T.S. Eliot at age  10 in 1898 – he was never young according to Robert Crawford, his biographer

This was the year to celebrate two literary centenaries, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Appropriately a section of Eliot’s poem was read at the February session. But since Joyce’s poetic works are not as celebrated as his other works, here below we wish to remember the light touch Joyce had with lyric poems when he started out:

STRINGS in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
 
There's music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.
 
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument. 
(From Chamber Music, 1907)

Since February is Black History month in America, KumKum chose to read a young contemporary poet, Amanda Gorman, who has been named the first Youth Poet Laureate of America. Another black poet, Alice Walker also figured, whose parting advice is:
… expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

She stands in contrast to those who wrote poetry in their youth in the sixties, the beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Thomo chose Ginsberg and read from his poem Howl.  

Though it is not the ‘cruellest month,’ the change of season that comes about in northern climes in February inspires many poets – some with prosaic thoughts about a ‘small pink bumhole’ (Margaret Atwood), and Boris Pasternak with more care-worn lines about
… the melting snow, instilling
Dry sadness into eyes that weep.

The variety among the poems is attested by there being a woman Dogri poet, Padma Sachdev, in English translation represented, as well as Milton from the opposite end of the spectrum, describing the Biblical strongman Samson, given the epithet Agonistes, i.e. one engaged in struggle.

A souvenir mug for KRG readers was designed by Joe. One side shows the mug shots of the current 12 readers:

The obverse depicts the favicon of KRG's blog – the design for which is a stylised form of the coat of arms purchased by William Shakespeare for his father, John Shakespeare:

Kiran Desai – Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard Jan 28, 2022

  Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - first edition cover

The Sermon in the Guava Tree by Kiran Desai appeared as a short story on page 90 in the June 23, 1997 issue of The New Yorker. The novel appeared a year later.

The Sermon in the Guava Tree by Kiran Desai appeared as a short story in the June 23, 1997 issue of The New Yorker

The short story begins with Sampath moving into the Guava tree and the police being unable to trace him. Later he is found in the orchard. “We must formulate a plan. Only monkeys climb up trees,” says his father and a doctor is called in to examine him, but concludes, “Nobody except for God can do anything about him.”
A holy man is consulted, and he says all Sampath needs is a mate, for whom there is a standard roster of requisite qualifications. This was the subject of the passage Saras read from the novel. A talcum-powdered girl is found and she is hoisted up the tree to Sampath.

Sampath notices people he knew in the audience below, whose letters he had secretly read in the post office after steaming them open. He proceeds to divulge snippets and after a few such episodes of seeming clairvoyance, he is confirmed as a Baba, a god-man.

Mr. Chawla, has the racketeer’s epiphany: Sampath might make his family's fortune. They could be rich! “How many men of unfathomable wisdom possessed unfathomable bank accounts?” At this point begins the pampering of Sampath who is provided every comfort for his chosen arboreal existence:
“He made a lovely picture seated there amid the greenery, reclining on his cot at a slight angle to the world; propped against numerous cushions, tucked up, during chilly evenings, in a glamorous satin quilt covered with leopard-skin spots. On his head he sported a tea-cozy-like red woollen hat that had been knitted by his grandmother.”

Thus ensconced in his orchard bower, Sampath gave what came to be known as The Sermon in the Guava Tree. Sampath uses his secret knowledge from steamed (and steamy) letters to amaze the audience. Then he issues a series of wisdom sayings, which Kiran Desai attributes in the novel’s acknowledgement, to Bhargava’s Standard Illustrated Dictionary of the Hindi Language, compiled by R. C. Pathak, BA, LT.
– Many a pickle makes a mickle . . .
– When the buffaloes fight, the crops suffer.
– It is a hard winter when dogs eat dogs.
– Every cock fights best on his own dunghill.
Etc.

The short story ends with Sampath making the news:
POST-OFFICE CLERK CLIMBS TREE
“Fleeing tedious duties at the Shahkot Post Office, a clerk has been reported to have settled in a large guava tree. According to popular speculation, he is one of an unusual spiritual nature, his child-like ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.”

But the novel has a more mysterious ending in which a metamorphosis of Sampath takes place into a Buddha-like Guava with his own birthmark. The langurs then spirit him off, thus transformed, to a distant forest in the mountains.

Humorous Poems – Dec 3, 2021

 

Eliot originally wrote these poems for sharing with his godchildren, later collecting them in a book that used his nickname given by Ezra Pound.

The Covid19 virus continues to keep people apart but the readers were determined to use digital methods to meet over the Internet the entire year using the Zoom app. While we might have enjoyed each other's company more if we were physically close, the distance has not been an insuperable obstacle, as this session of humorous poems showed.

We dressed in fancy ways to illustrate the whimsical poems we were reading. We extracted all the humour that rhyme and nonsense encourage. How is it one may ask that a serious poet not given to rhyme, one whose fame arrived with The Waste Land expressing the sombre fears and brokenness of four years of the first world war, could write with freedom and comic verve on the threshold of yet another war? But that's exactly what T.S. Eliot did in one of the poems recited (The Naming of Cats)

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
     It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
     When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

...

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

Lear's original 1846 Book of Nonsense was composed of limericks. Later other poems like the famous Owl and the Pussy Cat were added.

There is no doubt that humour and nonsense bring out the best in poetry. How memorable these poems are; fortunate those who are introduced to them as children for they leave in their wake the unending joy of remembering and reciting them !

Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend, Nov 19, 2021

 

My Brilliant Friend – first edition of the English translation, 2012, by Europa Editions

“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of,” said The Economist in a review one year after Europa Editions brought out the English translation of L‘amica geniale as My Brilliant Friend.  In the years following 2012 three other novels were published that follow the two friends as they grow up – The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). The four novels constitute the Neapolitan Novels quartet by Elena Ferrante. The first two books in the series have been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.

The HBO Series starring Gaia Girace as Lila and Margarita Mazzuco as Lenù

Elena Ferrante, the author, has maintained a studied anonymity, although she is willing to answer questions by e-mail, via her publisher. Her translator into English, Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, did not have access to her directly; the film directors who transferred her novels to the screen had only the most fleeting help from her. Her attitude is summed up in a comment she made: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”

A collection of essays, letters and interviews by Elena Ferrante

In a collection of essays, letters and interviews called Frantumaglia (meaning ‘fragments’) the author answers questions her readers have asked her. She speaks of the joys, the hardships, and the anxieties of those who tell a story. We learn about the cities in which she has lived. Childhood, she says, is a warehouse for a thousand suggestions and fantasies. She also deals with motherhood and feminism. 

Elisa Del Genio (Lenù) and Ludovica Nasti (Lila) in the HBO series Season 1

It was James Wood in a review in The New Yorker in 2013 who brought to the attention of the English-speaking world the writing of Elena Ferrante. He reviewed the four novels available in English at the time, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and My Brilliant Friend. Wood noted that the “the material that the early novels visit and revisit is intimate and often shockingly candid: child abuse, divorce, motherhood, wanting and not wanting children, the tedium of sex, the repulsions of the body, the narrator’s desperate struggle to retain a cohesive identity within a traditional marriage and amid the burdens of child rearing.” 

For Ferrante’s heroines, life is a conundrum of attachment and detachment. Illustration by Annette Marnat in The New Yorker

Poetry Session – Oct 29, 2021

Shelley claimed poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their moral influence on politics is exemplified by the spoken words which struck the world’s conscience when a young Sudanese-American poet was invited to tell the gathered attendees of COP26 in Glasgow what was happening as a result of climate change to the voiceless people of the world.

Emtithal Mahmoud shooting her poem about the devastating impact of climate change – ‘Earth began to purge us too’

We are treated at every poetry session to a similar experience as our readers declaim their selections. The written and the spoken words inspire us and we return energised to our lives, grateful for a hour or two of the human spirit bursting forth in word and song (yes, we listened to Leonard Cohen, that twin of Bob Dylan).

Two of our readers are leaving the group for personal reasons. We shall keep in touch directly; and indirectly through this blog. On occasion we have had past members join us for particular sessions.

The next meeting will be to read Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, on Nov 19 via Zoom. For those who have purchased the 4-novel Kindle edition, MBF, the first novel, ends at Chapter 62 with the sentence: “It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”

Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca, Sep 21, 2021

Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca, first edition 1938

Many remembered reading this novel in their teens or early twenties while at college. Daphne du Maurier was a best-selling novelist and her novels, often dark and brooding, with  hints of romance, attracted a wide readership.  Today Rebecca would be classified as a Gothic novel or a psychological thriller.

Three women figure prominently in the novel. The narrator herself who remains unnamed, Maxim de Winter’s deceased first wife Rebecca who dominates the novel, and the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who arranges the affairs of the estate of Maxim de Winter, Manderley. The novel can be seen as the journey of the second Mrs. de Winter from a hesitant and insecure naïf, kept in thrall by the domineering presence of Mrs. Danvers, to the confident mistress who rescues Maxim de Winter from his pathetic guilt-ridden state. 

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” is the famous opening line. The word ‘dreamt’ makes the reader throb with expectation, just as ‘Manderley’ with its hint of Mandalay makes one think of a mysterious locale. The reader is drawn into the story from the very beginning although it is not very exciting to read about the narrator’s life at first as a young handmaid and companion to an older woman on her travels.

The rescue from that life is almost a non-starter; Maxim de Winter says: “Instead of being companion to Mrs Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly the same.” It does not exhilarate to be requisitioned as a wife into a role analogous to that of a travelling companion. Mrs Van Hopper's prediction of calamity is about to come true, although the narrator believes she is ‘dreadfully’ in love.

We learn how important it was to keep up appearances in the world in which Maxim de Winter moved. Maxim de Winter contributes nothing to making his new wife gain her rightful stature at Manderley, weighed down as he is with his own guilt. But it is the narrator’s ability to surmount that guilt and enable Maxim de Winter to survive, that gains her the freedom that she should have had from the beginning. The destruction of Manderley at the end is her final ascendancy. Women can rejoice now that Daphne du Maurier was a feminist, despite her reputation as a romance novelist. 

Romantic Poets Session – Aug 27, 2021

Ten Famous Poets of the Romantic Movement

The great age of Romantic Poetry was from the middle of  the eighteenth until the early nineteenth century. The big six who exemplified the age were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Blake. 

This was the period when the lofty poetic diction of the Augustan Age was largely replaced by straightforward language. A major influence was the program set forward in the Lyrical Ballads authored jointly by WilliamWordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We could summarise the great Romantic qualities as an enduring sense of wonder, a great love of beauty, marked melancholia, and a keen sensibility, with the rich splendour of Imagination enfolding poetic expression. The theme of themes was Nature.

Nature offered not only beauty, but solace in its contemplation and an invitation to the poet to find significance even it its trifling manifestations. Many poets discovered a religious meaning too in Nature.

Love of liberty and hatred of tyranny flows in the poetry of the Romantic poets. They cherished individual freedom as a condition of romanticism. Their voices  championed the cause of liberty domestically and in other lands.

Running through their themes is a philosophical notion that the poet should live plainly, associate with people, and constantly keep in mind the high moral purpose of their writings.

The expressions of human love are varied. In Keats, love is a sensuous, earthly passion and his expressions invoke an ardour missing in such poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge and Wordsworth are more for spiritual bliss.

Intense subjectivity and melancholy, are characteristics of romanticism, and no poet in the Romantic era escapes it. Though Wordsworth’s definition of poetry is often quoted (“emotion recollected in tranquility“), it hardly qualifies the poetry you find in much of Keats‘ love sonnets, for example, To Fanny:

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! 

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest 

Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine, 

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,

Love and death are closely associated in the minds of the Romantic poets.

Perhaps after Nature the chief source of inspiration for the Romantic poets was their belief in the creative powers of the Imagination. Some like Blake founded whole imaginative universes, peopled by personages of mythical names. Others like Coleridge could enter dream-like states of bliss and describe their fancies in such alluring language that readers would be mesmerised and suspend their own reality so as to partake in what the poet had on offer, which was far more brilliant. Keats‘ imagination was no less sumptuous and inspiring, as may be seen in such a lovely poem as Ode on a Grecian Urn. But even in a lesser poem, On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour you can hear the note:

Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,

And half-discover’d wings, and glances keen.

The while let music wander round my ears,

And as it reaches each delicious ending,

Let me write down a line of glorious tone,

Some poets of the same era writing in other countries are also gathered under the same umbrella, e.g. Edgar Allan Poe and Pushkin.  There are also a number of other poets in England and Scotland considered to be in this category, including women poets. For this wider collection one may read the Wiki entry on Romantic poetry. The British Library has an essay by Stephanie Forward on the key ideas and influences of The Romantics. There is a more varied collection of essays on Romanticism from the British Library.

Joyce Cary – The Horse's Mouth, July 30, 2021

 First Edition, 1944

We have a tradition of reading books filled with rollicking fun every so often. Joyce Cary, who started out to make a career in art before he switched to writing, has left this portrait of an artist as a blithe spirit making his way through London untroubled by the norms of art or society.

He is committed to his vision of art and pursues it relentlessly, often ending in absurd situations, dogged by ill-luck and the police. Reduced from the renown of a moderately well-known artist who was collected by the famous, he is now in penury, having to cadge a few shillings to buy paints. A fresh canvas is now a luxury and he has to resort to a palimpsest, effacing an old painting to cover it anew with his latest vision.

Yet his response to neglect is wit: 

Walls have been my salvation.... Walls and losing my teeth young, which prevented me from biting bus conductors and other idealists.

Joyce Cary once wrote about the character he created: “Jimson, as an original artist, is always going over the top ... and knows that he will probably get nothing for his pains and enterprise but a bee-swarm of bullets, death in frustration, and an unmarked grave. He makes a joke of life because he dare not take it seriously.”

For all his waywardness Gulley Jimson has his epiphanies. Quotes and comments on a dozen poems from William Blake, who was the visionary print-maker and poet of the Romantic Poets era, dot the text. Blake is a companion wanderer of Jimson through the novel.  There are lines from an early lyric, Infant Joy, and quotes from the late Prophetic Books, Milton and Jerusalem. Some are short like the phrase the “starry wheels”(from Jerusalem); there are more than thirty taken from Visions of the Daughters of Albion and forty-eight dispersed lines from Milton, and twenty-six stanzas of The Mental Traveller. (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780427 Joyce Cary's Blake: The intertextuality of The Horse's Mouth by Annette Shandler Levitt). Levitt maintains that  “One could describe  The Horse's Mouth as a mosaic of richly varied tesserae representing the interlocking worlds of Gulley Jimson and William Blake.”

It is never resolved whether Gulley Jimson was a great artist unappreciated in his time like a van Gogh, or a footnote in the history fo English art. It does not matter, for when we collide with the sheer force of will and creative frenzy of Jimson we are wholly swept up by the mad urgency of his impulses and imagine we are in the presence of the creative act. That is Joyce Cary's art. 

Jimson‘s mind is a restless cauldron of painterly images:

An evening by Randipole Billy. Green lily sky, orange flames over the West. Long flat clouds like copper angels with brass hair floating on the curls of the fire. River mint green and blood orange. Old man lying along the water with a green beard, one arm under head, face twisted up—vision of Thames among the pot-houses. I could use that, I thought—that blunt round shape like a copper St. Paul’s with a squeeze in the middle—like a teat with a long end.

... 

I had a good view … of the sky, through the top of the window, and the sky was like a cinema film gone mad. Great whirling heads and arms and noses, naked legs and trousered bottoms, guns, swords and top hats, rushing past all night. Sometimes you saw a lovely lady in a pose plastique, but before you could wink she had swelled out like a balloon, lost her leg or her head, and turned into an ammunition wagon galloping over the corpses. 

As Jack Stewart in his study of five authors, Colour, Space and Creativity, notes: “For Gulley Jimson, the creative process is a life-affirming ritual and if he does not have paints and brushes handy, he pursues it in words. Through the artist's reflections of the Thames Embankment, Joyce Cary dramatises painterly ways of seeing the world.”

Jimson has a unique response to the scrapes he gets into. A street vendor thumps him while Jimson is trying to sell a few cards. “Then he kicked me up and kicked me down; kicked me in the guts and kicked me on the jaw; kicked me into the road and danced on me three or four times. His feet moved so fast one couldn’t see them.” When Jimson totes up the damage it is extensive: “When they put me to bed they found I had a broken nose, a broken arm, a broken collar bone, four broken ribs, three broken fingers, three or  or four square yards of serious contusions and a double rupture.” But his reaction is summed up by this soliloquy:

I was so angry that I might have done myself a serious injury, if I hadn’t said to myself, Hold on, Gulley. Don’t lose your presence of imagination. Wash out that blackguard till you’re well again and get a new pair of boots. With nails in them. Forgive and forget. Till you have him set. Remember that he had a certain amount of excuse for his actions. Give him his due, but not till you are ready with a crowbar. Don’t get spiteful. Keep cool. It’s the only way to handle a snake like that.

Jimson is always beginning – “It's a new world with every heartbeat,” he remarks. It does not seem to matter that the city planners have decided to raze the building on whose walls he has thrown up a new masterpiece of a fresco (The Creation). His enthusiasm cannot be contained even as doom closes in, for he is sure something great will emerge on the next attempt. Even as the author is never defeated by a blank page, the artist who looks on a blank canvas will only see visions rising up.

Poetry Session – June 25, 2021

For this poetry session Joe initiated the Zoom session from Arlington, MA, proof that Zoom no distinction makes of geography, so long as the clients are connected to the Internet.

Devika remarked that KumKum looked very relaxed – it makes such a huge difference not having to run a household.

Joe & KumKum

J&K used to go to USA to visit the children and grandchildren every summer, but they were last there in 2019 – 2020 was entirely lost to Covid-19. Devika’s niece left Shanghai at that time and came to India because the disease was raging in China at the time.

Arun drinking tea from a rooster mug

The mug is from the Oxford Natural History Museum. Devika buys a mug from shops when she goes on foreign visits and showed a tea mug she got from Kenya:

Devika shows her mug from Kenya

 

She has one from a museum in Cape Town and one from thee museum of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. His work is very colourful, perhaps could be labeled gaudy …

Arundhaty's mug from Wales

We were expecting to hear from Thommo and Geetha who are singing two Dylan songs; Thommo sent in the songs recorded ahead of time so as as to avoid glitches on the Internet during the Zoom. Geetha is sporting a short haircut that Devika liked. Arundhaty said KumKum looks quite chilled out and younger. Lots of pampering goes on in Arlington at Rachel’s home – even washing clothes in the machine and folding is taken care of! The children who work from home require quiet. J&K who are accustomed to being noisy (Bongs are like that, said Arundhaty) have to compose themselves.

KumKum mentioned enjoying food from a Punjabi restaurant in Arlington and her mind wandered to the food from Fusion Bay restaurant in Fort Kochi. Regularly ordering from them helps to keep their workers employed  – it’s a good variety of Kerala food they serve. The young men are gradates from a food institute in Kerala and now they are all married but continue to make their tasty dishes which they sell at moderate prices.

The novel next month, Joyce Carey's The Horse's Mouth, will be read on July 30. Arundhaty has started reading it. She likes it quite a bit and Devika said Gulley Jimson, the artist, is a real bindaas character. The movie is there on YouTube – Alec Guinness stars in the role of Gulley Jimson. He is an actor who could take on any character, tragic or comic, and do the part as if he was made for it, said KumKum. The novel itself has a link from which you can download it free. Register for a free account on archive.org and go to

https://archive.org/details/horsesmouth00cary/page/n9/mode/2up

to read The Horse's Mouth online. . 

Hydrangeas in Rachel's garden

The hydrangeas in Rachel’s garden are in good condition – they do not seem to do as well in Kochi said Devika and Arundhaty agreed they need the cooler weather of our hill stations such as Kodaikanal and Coonoor. In Kochi the colours look a bit faded.