Archive for the ‘Washington Square’ Category

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, February 26th, 2010

February 26, 2010
Washington, DC

WashingtonSquarecrowdWeb

Stereograph of the north side of Washington Square, New York City, October 1909 from Library of Congress collection

In 1948, fresh from her Oscar-nominated role in The Snake Pit, Olivia de Havilland was encouraged to attend a Broadway production of The Heiress, a stage adaptation of Henry James’s novel Washington Square. As she recalled in an interview with the NEA, “At the end of the second act I knew I wanted to play Catherine Sloper. I wanted with all my heart to play that lovely character.” Her portrayal of Catherine Sloper earned de Havilland the 1950 Academy Award for Best Acress in a Leading Role. (The Heiress ultimately received eight nominations and four wins, including nominations for Best Picture and Best Director for William Wyler.) In the excerpt below, de Havilland recounts what drew her to James’s heroine and why James is in some ways  an actor’s novelist.

 I loved the character.  Here she was, such a good person, so modest, so good, so loving, so eager to please, so trusting. Then, of course, she discovers that the two men who mean the most to her in all her life, her father and the young man who courts her, Morris Townsend, she discovers that neither of them love her. And worse than that, they do not respect her.  They do not even like her. I cannot imagine in a woman’s life greater tragedies than those or a greater tragedy than that, to discover that the persons you love the most have no regard for you. And that was her discovery.  Now the marvelous thing about this, this simple, loving creature, through this experience, she becomes strong and intelligent.  That’s the marvelous thing about her character development.

I have just read Henry James’s Washington Square yet again, and . . .what a good read it is. It’s marvelously constructed—the short chapters with intense exchanges between the characters. He has a great feeling for dialogue; an awful lot of authors don’t. They like a lot of prose and description and then use very sparse dialogue. That’s not true with James, and you can understand why he toyed with the idea of becoming a playwright because he does see the novel in intense separate scenes, and they’re wonderfully done. It was a thrilling experience to re-read Washington Square.  Absolutely marvelous. I may even read it again. It could be addictive.

Don’t forget to visit The Big Read calendar to find out how you can get involved with a Big Read near you. And visit the NEA website to hear more from Olivia de Havilland who received the National Medal of Arts—the nation’s highest award in the arts–in 2008. 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Washington Square | No Comments »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

August 20, 2009
Washington, DC

washingtonsquarenorthweb
“Washington Square North, nos. 121-125, Manhattan.”
Abbott, Berenice — Photographer. 1935-1938, printed 1935-ca. 1990
from The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
 

Most people have heard about the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James. But it turns out that Cynthia Ozick has also spent a great deal of time keeping company with our resident expat bachelor. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Ms. Ozick on “the marvels” of Washington Square.

[T]here’s not surprise in this novel, and that’s one of the surprises in this novel, that there’s no surprise.  That [Morris Townsend] comes on to begin with as somebody who has his eye on a dull but very rich girl, and it ends that way.  And nothing has changed in between the beginning and the end of the book, except the transformation of Catherine who, to begin with, has been transformed from dullness into a sense of her own worth, her own actual beauty, herself, really, as a work of art. . . . And later, she becomes transformed from a humble, obedient girl, into a hard, sarcastic, unkind simulacru and echo of her father.

So, although nothing changes, everything has changed, because if Catherine is the focal point of the novel, and the change takes place in her, then this novel, which is seemingly about no change, is about enormous change, but in one person only.  And that is one of the marvels of [Washington Square]. 

There [is also] the dialogue, which you can reread and reread and study and study, and see that every sentence in a passage is crucial to the next sentence.  Each sentence creates the succeeding sentence, and it’s always with extreme wit, extreme insight, and moving the story another notch forward. 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Washington Square | No Comments »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Friday, May 15th, 2009

May 15, 2009
Washington, DC

Yesterday, the Arts Endowment announced 11 new NEA National Heritage Fellows , the best of the best of the nation’s artists working in the folk and traditional arts. Tradition is at the heart of many of the Big Read titles, from the rigid etiquette of “Old New York” in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s Washington Square to the immigrant traditions that permeate Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. In the following literary moment, 2006 NEA National Heritage Fellow Charles M. Carrillo, a New Mexican anthropologist and santero (a carver and painter of images of saints), discusses one of the many traditional beliefs at the heart of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Posted in Bless Me, Ultima, My Antonia, The Age of Innocence, The Joy Luck Club, Washington Square | Comments Off

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

 April 15, 2009
Washington, DC

Happy Birthday Henry James! To celebrate here’s fellow Big Read author Cynthia Ozick’s take on Washington Square (from the Reader’s Guide to Washington Square).

“Washington Square is about people who pretend to be what they are not. This is a book about lies, people who lie about themselves and about other people. It’s also a novel about the abuse of imagination, the abuse of trust, the abuse of propriety and form; about, above all, the absence of pity.”

Posted in Washington Square | Comments Off

The Big Read’s Teenage Reading Survey, Part II

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

July 23, 2007
Washington, DC

While tabulating responses to our survey of teenagers’ favorite books, I’ve been thinking what I’d do if I ever found myself in front of a teenage English class for a semester — besides panic, that is. This is where my trusty know-it-all megalomania comes in handy. Here, drawing on all the classroom expertise that seven years as newspaperman and two as an arts administrator have afforded me, is my notion:

On the first day of class, I’d challenge each student to name a book he likes. No fudging, no sucking up, just any book. Gatsby, Danielle Steele, X-Men — I don’t care. Each kid’s first assignment would just be to tell the class why they ought to read it too, thereby helping develop those powers of argumentation. Then the class votes, and whichever book polls highest becomes the first assignment on an otherwise blank syllabus. (So it’s an alternative school, OK? Work with me.)

Say the class picks some Robert Ludlum thriller. Onto the syllabus it goes. The class reads it, I read it, the kid who championed it re-reads it. Over a week we talk about whether Ludlum creates suspense effectively or not, whether his characters sound real or don’t, whether he nails the ending or doesn’t, quite.

We now return the class to its regularly scheduled taskmaster, i.e., me. For Lesson 2, I suggest a slightly older, slightly better thriller. Some Frederick Forsyth, maybe, or Michael Crichton’s Binary, written under the pen name John Lange.

Lesson 3: Something short, but with a little more meat on its bones. Maybe John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

Lesson 4: A vintage American mystery, like the Big Read’s own Maltese Falcon.

Lesson 5: A classic proto-thriller, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Lesson 6: The original and still best geopolitical mistaken-identity thriller of all time: A Tale of Two Cities.

This way, we’ve taken them from Robert Ludlum, via Dashiell Hammett, all the way to Dickens in just one semester. Similarly, if the class picks Danielle Steele, maybe regress them through Gone With the Wind to Little Women to Henry James’s Washington Square, which is joining the Big Read in fall 2008. If they pick an X-Men comic, take them back through H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Jules Verne. If they pick Harry Potter, walk them down the years past the Big Read’s A Wizard of Earthsea to The Hobbit.

The point is, let them pick the first book on the syllabus, then follow it back through the genealogy of literature wherever it leads. This way they’ll have a stake in the assigned reading, since they indirectly picked it. Start them cold with Dickens or Alcott, and they might not stick around for Ludlum or Steele.

Believe me, I know how impractical this all is. Feel free to file it under “unsolicited advice, passed along just to vent.” But if somebody had put me on to Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al when I was 8 when Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was my favorite book, I would have discovered classic American literature a whole lot sooner…

Posted in A Wizard of Earthsea, General, The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon, Washington Square | Comments Off