A young married couple starts a bookstore and starts a family. They name the bookstore Goldengrove, after the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. They name their first daughter Margaret, also after the Hopkins poem. They name their second daughter Nico, after the pop icon. Margaret, who has a heart defect, dies suddenly at 17. When Nico later happens upon the poem that begins “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving,” she is incensed at her parents.

For some reason, it infuriated me. I held the book open before me like a cross to ward off a vampire, like the surprise piece of evidence at my parents’ trial for…what? What sadist would name a baby after such a depressing poem? Maybe they’d accidentally caused her death by naming her Margaret. Nancy or Suzie or Heather might still be alive and well. I slammed the book shut as if it were the poem’s fault, though I knew that if I’d read the poem when Margaret was alive, it wouldn’t have meant anything beyond some dead guy’s weak attempt to sound gloomy and important.

In January I read Francine Prose’s new novel Goldengrove, about this 13-year-old girl whose much-loved older sister has died. My interest was caught a bit by the title–I love that Hopkins poem–but mostly by a review by D. G. Myers at his blog A Commonplace Blog. I’d been aware of Prose since college when a friend wrote her BA thesis on her, but had never been tempted to read her. Myers’s blog review changed that:

Goldengrove is a literary dimension, a world made of books, where it is not the trees whose “unleaving” is the occasion for grief. Prose successfully dissembles what she is up to by making her narrator a thirteen-year-old girl who has never heard of Hopkins, has never watched Vertigo, and is more absorbed with global warming than art. When she was a kid, her favorite reading was C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, because she “longed to enter another dimension through a wardrobe or a snow globe.” After her sister’s death, she pretty much gets her wish. Nico’s emotions are thoroughly mediated by art–songs, films, her mother’s piano pieces, Giovanni di Paolo’s Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Shipwreck, which she finds in a “volume on Sienese painting so large that I had to spread it across the counter.” And of course she becomes her sister’s boyfriend’s Galatea. The name of Mirror Lake in which Margaret drowns, and to which Nico returns every time she returns home, is appropriate. Human experience mirrors books, which mirror other books, which mirror other books, which mirror other books. . . . There is no original experience “out there”–not adolescent grief, not first love, not being Judy-ed–which the novel sets out to capture with perfect fidelity. There is only the illusion, the images, of experience and fidelity.

Before I ever picked up the novel, Myers’s reading of it gave me a jolt and a lift. “One of us,” it seemed to say. His point is about literature, but it has something to say about life too, at least the lives of readers. Prose’s book is filled with characters who comprehend their experience of the world through the lenses that art–high art, popular art, and everything in between–offers up. Even though Goldengrove tells a sad story, I found great comfort and pleasure in reading about these characters and their attachments to and imitations of art, and appreciated Myers’s identification of this kind of activity and attachment as a subject of the novel. “We learn what we were like as children from such books as The Mill on the Floss, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and Goldengrove,” he says. Our experience of art is as much a life experience as anything else.
In the book, much of the art that moves the main character Nico, and mediates and organizes her response to her sister’s death, has itself been mediated for her by her sister. In life, Margaret was an authoritative judge and critic of songs, movies, pictures, and an infectious sharer of her enthusiasms. One of the most bitter moments for Nico comes when she discovers that Margaret never shared with her two favorite movies, Casablanca and Ninotchka, that were touchstones in her relationship with her boyfriend. And, as Myers notes above, part of the charge of reading this novel is spending time with an impressionable character who is only just discovering something like Casablanca, who isn’t self-conscious about relaying her impressions, and who unabashedly–in fact, with a desperation–applies what she finds in art directly to life. On one hand her grief drives Nico to look for a key and a salve in everything at hand, and art speaks more urgently to her than most things. But in a sense she’s just experiencing a heightened version of what many of us do with it all the time.

Only for you, Terry:
1. Was named with Laura Petrie in mind.

2. Have never broken a bone, gotten stitches, or had surgery.

3. Was a girl scout, but not long enough to earn any badges.

4. Was the tallest girl in my grade until about age 12 and loved it. A doctor told my parents I would grow up to be 5’9″ but I never made it. I’m 5’7″ and still disappointed.

5. Favorite song at age 4: “Brand New Key” by Melanie.

6. Poems I know by heart: “Kubla Khan,” “To Autumn,” “The Tyger,” “Spring and Fall, to a Young Child,” “Full Fathom Five” from the Tempest.

7. Desperately miss sending and receiving mail through the post office.

8. Don’t have a musical bone in my body…

9. …but can bake a mean cake.

10. Never took a course in philosophy, economics, or psychology…

11. …but was a crack student in math, testing through the roof, and still wonder what might have been.

12. Flunked my first driving test while pulling out of the parking spot.

13. Wish to travel to Alaska, the Scottish Highlands, and the Canadian Rockies; think beaches are overrated.

14. Look something up in the dictionary most days–in the book, not the Web site.

15. Coffee snob.

16. In a high school writing workshop, submitted an epistolary roman à clef short story that was passed around the entire student population and made its shy author, for a short time, notorious.

17. Worked at the publishing imprint that bought and then rejected Dreams From My Father.

18. First book review assignment ever: a life of River Phoenix.

19. As a child, was approached in a Toronto park to shoot a spot for a television ad promoting the Canadian kids’ show The Friendly Giant. Had to say “I like Geoffrey Giraffe” and received a Canadian dollar for my efforts, which my parents still have.

20. Paid $250 a month in rent when I last lived in New York in 1993. Actually, it wasn’t rent but lawyers’ fees–the tenants were suing the owners at the time.

21. Have read Pride and Prejudice more times than any other book.

22. Was president of student council in 9th grade, before switching to private school and becoming shy.

23. Have checked off every movie I’ve seen in my copy of Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies.

24. Wish I were a morning person; I love being up in the early morning, once I get over the pain, but rarely get up earlier than I have to.

25. Can never have too many socks. There’s no such thing.

If you know anything about Fanny Burney, you probably know that Samuel Johnson was a great admirer of her first novel, Evelina, and that his admiration was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between them. I’m rereading the book for the first time since college and finding it just as disarmingly funny and irrepressible as the first time. Edward A. Bloom, in the introduction to my Oxford World’s Classics edition, details the making of the Burney-Johnson friendship:

When eminent figures like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke joined the growing company of Evelina‘s admirers, Fanny was elated. But no one’s approbation meant more to her than that of Dr. Johnson: upon learning that he had read the book, she ran out on to the lawn at Chessington and danced around a mulberry tree. The elderly Johnson was indeed so intrigued by the characters–especially the vulgar ones–that he memorized their scenes and was convulsed with laughter.

The book will do that to you. The vulgar characters in Evelina’s circle, especially the perpetually battling Frenchwoman Madame Duval and English Captain Mirvan, are eager to point out each other’s vulgarity but, of course, blissfully unaware of their own: “he has no more manners than a bear,” Mme. Duval says of the captain; he just laughs at her–and never more than in Letter XVI, when she and her escort M. Du Bois not quite accidentally fall into a mud puddle.

All eyes were then turned to Monsieur Du Bois, whose clothes were in the same miserable plight with those of Madame Duval, and who, wet and shivering, and disconsolate, had crept to the fire.

The Captain laughed yet more heartily; while Mrs. Mirvan, ashamed of his rudeness, repeated her enquiries to Madame Duval; who answered, ‘Why, as we were a-coming along, all in the rain, Monsieur Du Bois was so obliging, though I’m sure it was an unlucky obligingness for me, as to lift me up in his arms, to carry me over a place that was ancle-deep in mud; but instead of my being ever the better for it, just as we were in the worst part,–I’m sure I wish we had been fifty miles off,–for, somehow or other, his foot slipt,–at least, I suppose so,–though I can’t think how it happened, for I’m no such great weight,–but, however that was, down we both came together, all in the mud; and the more we tried to get up, the more deeper we got covered with the nastiness,–and my new Lyon’s negligee, too, quite spoilt!–however, it’s well we got up at all, for we might have laid there till now, for aught you cared; for nobody never came near us.’

This recital put the Captain into an extacy; he went from the lady to the gentleman, and from the gentleman to the lady, to enjoy alternately the sight of their distress. He really shouted with pleasure; and, shaking Monsieur Du Bois strenuously by the hand, wished him joy of having touched English ground; and then he held a candle to Madame Duval, that he might have a more complete view of her disaster, declaring repeatedly, that he had never been better pleased in his life.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Keats and “To Autumn,” mentioning in passing the poet’s contemporary critics. A reader wrote with further reflections on Keats’s critical reception. He unfurls this more artfully than I possibly could, so here’s his message in its entirety:

Reading your comments on Keats today, and especially your mention of his critics,
moves me to share with you one of my very favorite passages. It is from a biography
of Keats that was published in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
After a single sentence giving the date and place of Keats’ birth, the author moves
directly into the critical history:

In his first book there was little foretaste of anything greatly or even genuinely
good; but between the marshy and sandy flats of sterile or futile verse there were
undoubtedly some few purple patches of floral promise. His third book raised him at
once to a foremost rank in the highest class of English poets. Never was any one of
them but Shelley so little of a marvelous boy and so suddenly revealed as a
marvelous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement
of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his
fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket
with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. The Ode to a
Nightingale, one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all
ages, is immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the most vulgar
and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the
sickly stage of whelphood.

If that strikes you as unusual prosody for an encyclopedia, you are right. It is
Swinburne. On a few occasions I have, with some success, read this paragraph aloud
to auditors.

Just marvelous. Thank you, Bob.

• Cinetrix finds awesome celeb memoir cover art. (And, as a commenter notes, the title’s not too shabby either.)
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• Something I looked at over Thanksgiving weekend. And looked and looked at. Idea for a future post: the difference between luxuritating in half a dozen Breugels in a single room and encountering a single Breugel in a sea of less-great art.
• An adolescent girl “is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs–to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others–are met precisely by the act of reading.” Enough to make me order the first two novels in the Twilight series.

I’m really obsessed with Keats’s “To Autumn”; I think it’s a perfect and magical piece of writing, with effects that resonate and evolve for a lifetime. I got familiar with the poem in my first year of graduate school, when I took a memorable course called “Keats and Critique.” The course explored the premise–popular among the Victorians who installed him belatedly as a great English poet–that Keats was done in, in part, by his bad reviews. And it’s true that when they were bad, they were vicious.
When I reread this poem–or, as lately, recite it and write it out as outlets for its hold upon my ear and brain–I fend off impulses to thrust it upon innocent passers-by, pointing out its most bewitching features. I don’t so much have a reading of it as a set of things I notice in it, a collection that grows slowly over the years. Here are just a few of these amateur observations, truly off the top of my head; consider yourself one of those unsuspecting bystanders.
The first stanza describes an ample, apparently endless autumn bounty.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.

Throughout the poem there’s a (deceptive) sense that time is suspended. In this stanza, that’s accomplished in large measure by the repeated use of infinitive verbs: “to load and bless”; “to bend”; “[to] fill”: “to swell”; “[to] plump”; “to set.” The last line, explaining how the bees are fooled, links this sense of time drawn out to the abundance described throughout the stanza. Tees bent under the weight of fruit, the filling, swelling, plumping, budding, overbrimming of nature–all of this burgeoning–is mimicked in the poem’s language, where phrases spill over the bounds of their lines and a gratuitous second instance of “more” in line nine performs the word’s own meaning. The stanza is literally fruitful: “fruit” appears three times in its 11 lines, including an instance as something that fills (vines) and one as something that is filled (with ripeness).
The next stanza switches gears, presenting autumn as an allegorical figure.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow, sound asleep,

Drows’d with the fume of poppies while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Again, time is on hold. The personified Autumn is an indolent creature, “sitting careless” in a workplace, “sound asleep” in the fields, watching the press rather than operating it. Even in the most industrious of the four attitudes described here, she is only like a gleaner. The work of her hook, in her previous guise, is to “spare”; it’s at rest. All of this is in contrast with the busy industry of the first stanza, though the sense of time stood still persists. Until that last line, that is, when a sense of ending finally sets in–in the “last oozings,” significant both for the adjective’s meaning and for the noun’s sound, and in the invocation of hours. There’s also the gently diminishing length of the four views of Autumn offered here: they fill three lines, three lines, two, and two. (Note, though, they stop short of approaching zero.)
The third and last stanza masterfully dissolves into sounds, capturing a last, momentary stasis before winter sets in.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft,

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

There are so many interesting things going on here. The use of “bloom” as a transitive verb; the singular, whistling red-breast set against the plural plains, gnats, sallows, lambs, crickets, swallows, and skies; the seemingly unnecessary designation of the gnats as “small.” Autumn’s music, it must be said, is a gentle, symphonic, glorious, consoling…dirge. “Soft-dying” describes not only the day but the season and the year as viewed through the prism of this poem, and by extension human life (it also provides a coda to the soft-lifting of stanza two). From its flirting with the notion of birth, through the use of the homophones “borne” and “bourn” (not to mention rhyming them with “mourn”), to the invocation of lambs on the threshold of adulthood and a wind that flits easily from death to life, it looks to the seasonal cycle for consolation for the life-cycle. It tries to touch mortality with rosy hue. It softens you up for the final blow, which takes place off the page–delivered, we imagine, softly.
P.S. By coincidence, Anecdotal Evidence also posts on Keats, death, and beauty today.

My paid workload is at something like an all-time height this week and into next, so consider this just poking my head in. I’ve been in this boat for a while, leading a narrowed life. But I did carve out some time last weekend for something special: a first-ever viewing of The Godfather on the big screen, and a gorgeous new print at that. In a recent story in Slate, Fred Kaplan walked readers through the heroically painstaking process through which Coppola’s masterpiece, and its even greater sequel, were restored to their original glory.
The quality of the picture and sound, and of course the liberation from living-room scale, made the film a new experience. We noticed details that were easy to lose in the background in previous viewings–a tear in Tom Hagen’s eye in one scene and numerous details of setting throughout. But Al Pacino’s performance is the element that most benefits from the restoration as far as I’m concerned. It’s a more subtle and powerful performance than I knew before. And it’s all in the eyes.
The transformation of Michael Corleone is tracked as much in his countenance and expression as in his speech, actions, and gestures. Pacino conveys all of this with terrific restraint, building his performance from the eyes out. After the incident outside the hospital, Michael becomes a strikingly more self-contained figure–composed, calculating, and almost shrunken–so that the eyes become his main conduit of expression. They’re darting and furtive in the earliest scenes following the blow to Michael’s face, the scenes in which the hits on Sollozzo and McCluskey are planned and carried out and Michael is still making rookie mistakes like betraying his surprise when the car gets on a bridge to Jersey. But the eyes themselves eventually come under discipline, too, growing steady and dead well before the final settling of accounts.
The new print is an electrifying experience, and one that really makes you lament what’s happened to Pacino. If you knew him only from such latter-day growling and bellowing as his performances in, say, Heat and Any Given Sunday, would you even recognize him here?
I can hardly wait to see Part II.

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earh, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand in one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping