Desk Notes No.9

A Christmas Spectacular & how to turn 40 with Empress Elisabeth

Dec 18, 2022

Dear friends,

Merry Christmas to all those celebrating! The most chaotic time of year is upon us again. Presents to wrap, dinners to cook, beds to make. Hardly a moment to sit down and collect your thoughts. And yet, this is the time I start thinking about the gardening year ahead; about what worked and what didn’t; about what I need to change. Before the perennials retreat beneath the wintry soil, I slip in labels to remind myself where everything is. The raspberries have thrown out runners and are popping up in places they shouldn’t. I ought to have dug them out already, but it will have to wait until the new year now. I make notes of the big spaces I need to fill with annuals - sweet peas, poppies and phlox. I was too late sowing seeds this year. I pop a deadline in my diary for March.

Last autumn, I ordered ten cordon fruit trees - compact apple, plum and pear trees that you can grow as close together as 60cm. They arrived with bare roots in mid-December. I spent the weekend before Christmas digging huge muddy trenches, filling two tonne bags with garden soil, before mixing it with compost and settling the trees in comfortably. I rejoice that I don’t have to do it again this year.

Reflecting on how the trees have done, it was worth the effort. Tucked against an east-facing fence, the apples put on a lot of blossom. I read somewhere that you should pinch out the young fruits in their first year, so the plants send all their energy to the roots. I didn’t have the heart when I saw the fruits swelling, and we got a small handful from each. Perhaps I’ll pay for my eagerness next year. Meanwhile, in their very sunny and often dry spot on the opposite side of the garden, the plums and pears look less well pleased. I commit myself to a strict regimen of mulching and feeding next year, in the hope of a small bounty.

Screen - Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer, released in UK cinemas 30 December 2022

Print - Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

Sound - A Christmas Spectacular with Michael Crawford, 1988. (Yes, you did just read that correctly)

Screen

Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer, released in UK cinemas on 30 December 2022

“As her 40th birthday approaches, Empress Elisabeth of Austria is thrown into turmoil as she anticipates being considered an old woman.”

Not the lines you want to read when you’re about to turn forty yourself.

Leafing through the London Film Festival guide earlier this year, I singled out Corsage as a must see. Lead actress, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Bergman Island) had already taken home Best Performance in the Un Certain Regard selection at Cannes. The film was screening as part of London’s Official Competition category - a mark of quality - which it eventually won. Queuing for screenings at Picturehouse Central, I overheard Corsage described as, “an Austrian The Favourite.” It shares that film’s irreverence. The poster says it all - Empress Elizabeth, aka Sisi, is standing defiant, sticking her middle finger up to the viewer.

Like The Favourite, Corsage plays fast and loose with history. Purists might find this difficult, but the emphasis here is on Sisi’s lived experience: the suffocating reality of court life as a woman; of being required to be seen and not heard. (Incidentally, I wrote about why historical accuracy doesn’t always matter, here). Writer-director Marie Kreutzer wastes no time finding the parallels with modern celebrity. Sisi is reduced to a face, a body. She crams herself into tiny corsets. The press are obsessed with her weight. She is chronically misunderstood. Even Sisi’s husband, Franz Joseph I, thinks her rebelliousness is a midlife crisis; age now stealing the only things that were ever important to her - the clothes and the admiration. 40 is the average life expectancy of Sisi’s female subjects. The medical profession wants her to sit down and shut up.

For a birthday gift, Sisi provocatively demands a bengal tiger or an extension to the women’s hospital. She enjoys her visits to the incarcerated women, where many of them are physically restrained for seeking pleasure in adultery - “she seems harmless,” says a doctor, “but she’s a real hussy.” It’s clear Sisi doesn’t conform to the ideal image of wife and mother. Her daring retaliations - pretend fainting to get out of tedious engagements, or storming out of dinner parties while telling her husband to f**k off - are sharp, funny and galvanising. But they meet with increasing resistance from the patriarchy. In the film’s earliest moments, it’s clear this power struggle cannot end well. A marvel then, how Kreutzer pulls off an ending that is, at once, tragic and uplifting. The end credits sequence is a wonder to behold - empowerment to the tunes of French pop-star Camille.

“Her soul is like a chaotic museum,” and she’s proud of it.

Print

As the new year races towards us, its seems opportune to reflect on my reading year and begin thinking about the books I might like to tackle in 2023. There are those I planned to get to in 2022 and let slip through my fingers - Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure and Desperate Remedies. And those books I read and loved, sparking the urge to read more: completing Wilkie Collins’ Armadale saw me bump The New Magadalen up my list. There are others I’ve been afraid to tackle, like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. My avoidance of this doorstop - reputedly the longest novel in the English language - cannot continue. The late scholar of 18th century literature, Angus Ross, billed it as:

“Dramatic, full of (perhaps irresolvable) tension, and violent. Clarissa Harlowe is a beautiful young girl of high intelligence, scrupulous moral judgement, strong resolution and warm humanity. She becomes the victim of her greedy and implacable family. They seek to force her to marry Roger Solmes, whom she detests; but she becomes attracted to Robert Lovelace, handsome, intelligent, witty and debonair, whom she allows herself to think may be rescued from a life of wickedness.”

What could possibly go wrong? Richardson’s first novel, Pamela sparked a media storm when it was released in 1740 and was satirically re-written by Henry Fielding (as Shamela) and Eliza Haywood (as The Anti-Pamela). Pamela was the conduct book dramatised, promoting female virtue, encouraging women to resist (often violent) sexual advances until marriage. There are many disturbing parallels with Me Too. Like Pamela, Clarissa is an epistolary novel - a series of letters between two female friends and their suitors - and explores similar themes.

In 2023, I plan to read the novel letter-by-letter on the same dates they were penned by their fictional authors. If you would like to join me in this year-long venture (the first letter is dated 10 January, the last 18 December) please get in touch in the comments. If there are any takers, I will turn on the ‘Chat’ function so we can share ideas and motivation in the Substack App (it’s been described as a private social network - social media without the noise - which could be exciting to try out).

I’m intimidated by Clarissa but I’m thrilled by the chance to finally read Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. I’ve been putting it off, but for entirely different reasons. In my teens, I fell in love with Jane Eyre. I poured away countless hours inside Thornfield Hall, lingering over my favourite passages to an obsessive degree. The tedium and anxiety of a bad day at school could be wiped away by a few moments with Jane, inhaling Rochester’s cigars through an open window. Between fevered re-readings, I squeezed in Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, held in thrall by its power dynamics.

When I turned thirty, I read Charlotte’s final novel, Villette. I was awe-struck. It was better than Jane. The timid and lonely Lucy Snowe seemed to speak to me directly, while I struggled with my own mental health and the limiting reality of being a shy, introverted grown-up. “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness,” she writes, “What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.” Villette felt honest and raw. Its undercurrent of sadness struck me as profoundly realistic. It moved me so acutely, I haven’t been able to re-read it.

That left Shirley. The final unread Charlotte Brontë novel. There would be no more after this one; no more surprises; no new characters; no new passages of gorgeous prose. So I waited, and I waited, and I waited.

When people started asking me what I wanted to do to celebrate my fortieth birthday, I struggled to come up with anything exciting. I wanted to do my favourite things: National Trusting, tea and cake, walking with family, spotting ancient oak trees. And I wanted to read Shirley. I really wanted to read Shirley. Forty years is long enough.

Sound

A Christmas Spectacular, various artists, 1988

“Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood.”

So wrote the king of Christmas, Charles Dickens, in December 1850. Earlier that evening, Dickens had seen a group of children, assembled around a Christmas tree, “brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects… in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, “There was everything, and more.”

Dickens knew that the magic of Christmas is rooted in childhood; in nostalgia for a time when Christmas lights sparkled with anticipation and puddings were bigger than our hands. When Aunties and Uncles came bearing gifts we had dreamed of. And quiet rooms were transformed by the sound of cutlery, conversation and laughter.

In 1988 when I was just six, stars of Broadway and the West End recorded a slew of Christmas tunes and released them for Save the Children as A Christmas Spectacular. There was an accompanying television programme introduced by Princess Anne, Save the Children with Michael Crawford, that opened with the cast of Les Miserables singing Ding Dong Merrily on High. (You can watch it on Youtube here, but be advised it features a charity appeal that hasn’t aged well). As a family, we played the album of Christmas songs and carols every year throughout the 1990s. It was the sound of our Christmas dinners, dominoes and Grandad’s old-fashioned card games. Today, even the distinctly un-seasonal numbers - Let’s Pretend and Save The Children - give me that tingly Christmassy feeling. The power of association.

The charity album was the vehicle for one of my favourite, but lesser known tunes, Christmas by David Essex. Objectively, it’s terrible. The peculiar vocals have always made Dad cringe - “we must save the bay-bies.” But there are few lines I sing with more relish. Perhaps I was always destined to be a David Essex fan. The December I was born, A Winters Tale was in the charts. Mum and her sister would sing it as they rocked me to sleep. I watched the music video recently, and I finally understood their girlish crush. Essex is the model of Heathcliff - wandering a lonely moor in a gothic coat, dark locks blowing in the breeze. How Phil Collins kept Winters Tale from number one with his cover of You Can’t Hurry Love, I’ll never know.

It isn’t Christmas without David Essex, Michael Crawford and their Christmas Spectacular, no matter how bad some of these songs might be. Long departed family are always near when I listen. It strikes me that people always have an elaborate answer to the dinner party question - “who would sit at the table of your ideal dinner party?” The real answer is simple: both sets of Grandparents, Aunties, Uncles, Mum and Dad. Bring on the bickering, the moaning and the ritual incineration of a frozen apple strudel.

Merry Christmas everyone! Wishing you a happy new year. If you would like to join me in a slow read-along of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, please let me know in the comments. Or if you have any other thoughts on this month’s Desk Notes, or would like to share your Christmas traditions, please get in touch.

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