DVD Review: Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill

This article was first published at Blogcritics


Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, the PBS miniseries first broadcast in 1975, is now available on a two disc DVD set. In seven episodes, the series takes the American born Jennie Jerome from her whirlwind courtship and marriage to the younger son of one of the great British aristocratic families to her death after a fall necessitated an amputation of one of her ankles. While the series includes capable performances by a number of notable English actors—Ronald Pickup as Lord Randolph, Warren Clark as Winston, Jeremy Brett as Count Kinsky, perhaps the love of her life, it is Lee Remick's bravura turn as the effervescent enchanting Jennie that is the life's blood of this production.

Remick takes the character from age nineteen in the first episode to her sixties at the time of her death, and is equally adept at playing the passion of youth and the industry of the middle years as she is the dwindling powers of age. She is no less able to charm in her later years than she was in her early days. One can readily believe that even as a mother of two she was well able to attract the attentions of two men as young as her sons. That younger men would be interested in marriage with a woman of her wit and vigor as embodied by Remick is entirely believable. If Jennie mesmerized those around her, Remick's performance no less mesmerizes the audience.

Lady Randoloph, as she says in one of the later episodes, was a woman who lived her life as she felt it should be lived and not as others thought she should live it. Americans abroad in the middle of the nineteenth century were more often than not seen as unsophisticated barbarians, ill equipped to deal with the cultivated Europeans. One only has to read Henry James and Edith Wharton to get some idea of the attitudes towards Americans in the period. They were naïve parvenus who, if they were good natured and had money, were easily taken advantage of, and if they only had money they could be treated as social climbers ready to trade wealth for position and ripe for the fleecing. Not Jennie, at least not as she is presented in this biodrama. Jennie Jerome had wit, beauty, ambition, and grace. She was nobody's fool. She had a captivating personality, and captivate she did, even though she didn't have the one thing that made most Americans attractive to the Europeans, especially second sons, money.

From the first she is presented as unique. The first view we have of her she is racing on horseback with her father (played by Dan O'Herlihy). She plays the piano, not like an amateur, but with the skill of a professional. She has a mind of her own. Lord Randolph sees her at a ball and it is love at first sight. This despite the fact that he dances poorly, doesn't care for small talk, and is not exactly a matinee idol. He attracts her because his ambition is to be a great man, and she can help him.

The series, written by Julian Mitchell, is episodic. They meet and marry in the first epsode. The next three episodes deal with their marriage and Lord Randolph's political career. In the fifth installment, after Randolph's death, Jennie meets George Cornwallis-West who is the same age as Winston and they marry, despite the objections of his family. The sixth episode deals with their marital problems and eventual divorce. In the final episode she marries again, but dies before a planned trip to join her new husband in Africa. Throughout, the focus on Jennie and her loves is complimented by a broader concern with British politics, social mores, military campaigns and moral behavior.

While the jacket notes that the quality of the picture and sound may be flawed at times because of the age of the programs, these flaws are minimal and are rarely intrusive. The second disc includes a written biography of Lee Remick and a history of Blenheim Palace (the 300 year old seat of the Marlboroughs ) which provides some of the location shots for the program. There are also filmographies of the cast. Over all there is nothing particularly exciting about the extra material. But with over 360 minutes of broadcast material, the DVD set more than likely supplies more than enough excitement for most viewers.

Production shot from Murder in the Cathederal, 2007, Poet's Corner.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fforde does his thing, parodying the real world with his heroine who can travel back and forth between the world of books and the world of the outlanders. He likes puns and word games, and the logic of illogic: M. C. Esher in prose.

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The Genius and the Goddess by Jeffrey Meyers


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Reviews the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in preparation for a discussion of their relationship and marriage. Does some ananlysis of Miller's work, especially the work written for Marilyn, The Misfits and the lesser known work after the marital breakup.

Marilyn's doctors, the men who used her and the hangers on like the Strassbergs are dealt with most harshly.

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wild violet | waking world - impersonating mandelbaum by jack goodstein

Here's a link to one of my previously published pieces of flash fiction.

wild violet waking world - impersonating mandelbaum by jack goodstein

Book Review: Fists by Pietro Grossi

This article was first published at Blogcritics

First published in Italian in 2006, Pietro Grossi's collection of three short stories, Fists, is now available in an English translation by Howard Curtis. And if these stories are any indication of Grossi's talent, the translation comes much too late. His prose has the deceptive simplicity of a Hemingway overlaid with the tantalizing ambiguity of a writer like Paul Auster. It is the kind of writing that sneaks up on the reader and leaves him with the sense that he has come into contact with something extraordinary. Grossi's subjects are the events that change lives, the kinds of charged experiences that James Joyce found led to epiphanies.

"Boxing," the first of the stories, describes the great match of two young fighter's lives. The narrator, a self identified nerdy momma's boy, who has built himself into an almost mythical fighter despite the fact that he has never actually fought a bout, is finally challenged by a deaf mute bull of a battler who has heard of his reputation. On the one hand, it is a fight that teaches both boxers something about life, something about what it means to be a man. On the other hand, it is a fight that demonstrates that myth need not be destroyed by stubborn reality.

The narrator is known as the Dancer. He is renowned for his finesse and prowess, but it is prowess that has never been tested. His opponent is the Goat. He plugs away at his craft with the dogged obstinacy of his namesake, but more importantly, he has been proven in the ring. For the spectators, the Dancer tells us, the match was a chance to see "the stuff of legends." "They had come there to see if it was really worth telling the stories and believing in them or if, once again, as usually happened, reality would destroy the myth. . . ." It was to be a "battle between dream and reality, between the world as it was and the way we would like it to be."

In "Horses," a father buys his two sons, boys who are at first characterized by stealing drinks from an old woman, each a horse and in doing so changes their lives. Although neither wanted the animals at first they both work at training them, and for one the training becomes a passion, while for the other, if is merely an inconsequential chore to be gotten through before going on to more exciting things. For one brother the city beckons: women, fighting, drugs perhaps. For the other, there is the country and more horses and a life with honor. The story plays an interesting contemporary variation on the city mouse, country mouse theme.

The last story, "The Monkey," is perhaps the least realistic of the three. It concerns a young man who, in the midst of his busy life, is told that an old friend of his has begun to act like a monkey, and is asked to come back to his home town to see if he can help him. The friend has been successful in business and life in general, but as the young man thinks back to their last encounter, he remembers that the man seemed dissatisfied, as if he had found his success empty. He returns to his home, to find that indeed his friend is behaving like a monkey. "He was naked, crouching beside the bed, playing with a little pile of shells, just like a monkey." The story works as a comment on the banality of modern life.

Fists is the kind of book that not only promises a bright future for a talented writer, it is a book that demonstrates that that future is now. These are the kinds of stories that will be favorably compared with Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, Joyce's Dubliners, and Salinger's Nine Stories. They are the kinds of stories readers will find filling the pages of the short fiction anthologies of the future.

Book Review: Just Kids, by Patti Smith

This article was first published at Blogcritics

After some cursory attention to her childhood, Patti Smith moves very quickly to the heart of her new memoir, Just Kids, with her arrival in New York City in the summer of 1967 in pursuit of the artist's life. She has no money. Friends she hoped would put her up are nowhere to be found. Some kind of job in the arts out of reach: she is reduced to living on the streets. And then she meets a young man, an artist almost as destitute as she is herself; there is an affinity right from the start. Their relationship seems to have been almost mystically fated. They pool their meager resources, and Smith begins her "vie boheme," with famed photographer, Robert Maplethorpe.

If you are looking for the story of Patti Smith's career as a rock star, Just Kids isn't where you're going to find it. While she does write something about her music, it only comes at the very end of the book, it is very sketchy at best. She tells more about Maplethorpe's photograph session for the "Horses" album cover than she does about the music itself. This memoir is focused on the period before she became famous. It talks about her poetry; it talks about her drawings, but most of all it talks about her love and friendship for the photographer.

They may have only had enough money to share a hot dog at Nathan's or grilled cheese sandwiches at a local diner, but what they did have was an intense faith in themselves as artists destined to produce work of greatness coupled with a firm belief that to produce art was perhaps man's noblest ambition. "It's the artist's responsibility," she tells us, " to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation." More often than not she talks about art and artists in religious terms. Jim Morrison is "like a West Coast Saint Sebastian." Birdland is "hallowed ground" that was "blessed by John Coltrane." Maplethorpe's "service was to art, not to church or country." She sets off for New York from her South Jersey home like a Joan of Arc in pursuit of her destined glory.

And she finds it. The late sixties in New York were filled with budding painters, musicians, poets, actors with the same kind of devotion, not to mention the bevy artistic wannabees and hangers on in pursuit of their own dreams. There were even those, poets like the Beats, artists like Andy Warhol, who had already found success. There was a ready-made community with similar values always looking for kindred souls, always willing to see greatness in the work of their friends.

Indeed, the most interesting parts of the book are the anecdotes about the great and the near great. Allen Ginsberg, thinking she's a pretty boy, buys Smith a cheese sandwich at the Automat when she is short of money. Gregory Corso, falls asleep in her arm chair while reading her poems, and burns a hole in the arm. She goes out to dinner with Sam Sheppard, not realizing he is a famous playwright. Maplethorpe takes her to meet his Catholic family and tells them they are married. She visits Jim Morrison's grave in Paris and is scolded by an old crone caretaker because Americans have no respect for their poets.

Her own prose is at times very poetic, at times somewhat pretentious. At her best she has a knack for just the right inventive image. The first man walking on the moon is putting "rubber treads on a pearl of the gods." Jim Carroll "shot stuff in his freckled hand, like the darker side of Huckleberry Finn." On the other hand she calls a Bob Dylan obsessed fan's analysis of one of his songs an "endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic." She says Maplethorpe "sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism." Often the high flown mystical language makes an ironic contrast to the sleaziness of the one small room they shared at the Chelsea Hotel and the second hand outfits she is constantly describing.

As memoirs go, the most impressive thing about Just Kids is its honesty. Smith's description of her life with Maplethorpe has the ring of truth. She doesn't seem to have tidied things up. Drugs, sex, poverty—they're all there. Nothing is made to look rosy: except that there were two young people and they had their art and they had each other, and for a time that was enough.