Desk Notes No.2
Annie Ernaux, Old Joy and Carlo Crivelli
Dear friends,
They say that time passes more quickly as we age - each year representing a smaller portion of life’s whole. Perhaps this is why I always feel time is getting away from me. Last year I put together a small Victorian greenhouse with good intentions to sow plenty of vegetables in early spring. Life intervened and I’ve spent this month playing catch up. As I write, tiny sweetcorn, courgettes and winter squash are finally reaching upwards. Too late to germinate any chillies, I bought a few plants, and begged some tomatoes from friends and family. From the window I can see the occasional tulip perilously clutching its bloom. The borders bob with the alliums’ little mauve cotton balls and deep red peonies are bursting from swollen buds - a sure sign of rain which never fails to cut short their bold flourish. I am - if anything - a pessimistic gardener.
This month I’ve been reading diaries (Annie Ernaux, William Gladstone), thinking about forests and discovering the art of Carlo Crivelli.
Print
‘Simple Passion’ by Annie Ernaux
‘Diary, 1988’ by Annie Ernaux, published in the Paris Review, Spring 2022
‘The Gladstone Diaries’ by William Ewart Gladstone
Last week I took part in Summer Brennan’s essay camp, carving out time to draft five short essays in five days. It was a moment of serendipity - I’d been reading Brian Dillon’s fabulous meditation on the form, Essayism, and had just splurged on eight essay titles in the Fitzcarraldo sale. The first I dived into was Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion - a brief but intense book about the emotional impact of a love affair. Written in the wake of her relationship with a married man in the late 1980s, and first published in 1991, Simple Passion exists in parallel with Ernaux’s own diary of that time - now printed in the latest issue of the Paris Review.
In both texts Ernaux writes without shame or false modesty. To make this possible, she clings to the idea that the writing is still, “something private… like the declarations of love and the obscene expressions I used to write in the back of my exercise books in class… when there is no risk of it being read.” This is different from exhibitionism on account of, “the time which separates the moment from when they are written - when only I can see them - from the time they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then,” she writes, “I could have had an accident or died, a war or revolution could have broken out.” Time (and distance) are pivotal, not only in Ernaux’s decision to publish the original diaries, but to release them without alterations:
“For me, words that are set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of any given moment are as irreversible as time — are time itself.”
This speaks to my inner historian. But a recent foray into the diaries of nineteenth century Prime Minister, William Gladstone, has left me wondering about the ethics of reading historical diaries and whether, in death, we really do relinquish our desire for privacy. When Gladstone’s diaries were published in the 1960s, he was immediately thrown into scandal. His efforts to assist London’s impoverished sex-workers - meeting them on the street and offering them money and rehabilitation - saw him rewritten as a, “tortured man in sexual crisis.” Biographers asked whether his night walks were motivated by desire or fascination, or even the wish to test his own morality by courting temptation.
Reading his diaries today feels like an act of voyeurism. Encounters with ‘fallen women’ are often closely followed by small whip symbols, which many historians have interpreted as a record of punishment by self-flagellation. Reading Gladstone’s secret confessions about the temptation and shame of impure thoughts, I wondered if he ever seriously considered their later publication. Charles Dickens and Henry James famously burned their own private papers, while friends and family destroyed the work of Lord Byron, Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy in order to preserve their reputations.
“Reviewing the recent past with the sin of impurity I have much cause for pain and shame: I do not say that it has come in with the force of last year but I think it has lingered more… I know that two of the rocks on which I may fear to split are 1. The allowing and entertaining of positive desire: in regard to which our Lord has left us so clear and conspicuous law. 2. That which is well called delectatio morose [thinking of evil without intending to act on it]. I am aware that either of these is adultery of the heart.”
William Gladstone, 2 April 1849
As recently as the 1950s, Gladstone’s family asserted they were private documents. And, in his review of the published diaries in 1982, historian Derek Beales argues that Gladstone:
“Was extremely self-conscious about his own motives, about the records of his own life and about the problems faced by historians in establishing the truth about the individual’s intentions. He carefully preserved an enormous proportion of this correspondence, but imposed tortuous and crippling stipulations on its publication during his lifetime… At least once he was ready to use his diary as a historical source, to assist the preparation of an article vindicating his and his colleagues’ conduct towards Russia in 1853. His own view of the reliability of diaries ought to be taken into consideration. He told Manning’s Biographer: ‘I don’t agree with you that diaries afford the most trustworthy evidence. In them there is always, I feel, an interlocutor - namely myself, the worst of all interlocutors.’”
At the time Gladstone was writing his diary, attitudes to these texts were in flux - many were being made public for the entertainment of newly literate classes, others were used as evidence in court, offering proof of adultery or breach of promise to marry. In The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain, historian Katheryn Carter describes, “a kind of wilful denial about diary writing and its alleged privacy.” Indeed, she points to the diary as a, “semi-public document,” until the mid-nineteenth century, when it became increasingly attached to notions of privacy and authenticity. I’m drawn to the idea that Victorians were becoming increasingly concerned about the purity of the diary form - seeing privacy as essential if the diarist was to write confidently, with honesty and sincerity:
“One of the most compelling or horrifying aspects, for the mid-century audience, is the diarist’s lack of control over the text as a commodity, its slip out of symbolic privacy into public circulation, and the potential ramifications of this movement on authenticity and truthfulness. Clearly, the Victorians had a vested interest in believing that diaries could be or should be private because of what it told them about the naturalness of their social structures, their class and gender divisions, and about what it meant to be an authentic human being in the mid-nineteenth century.”
Screen
‘Old Joy’ directed by Kelly Reichardt (2006)
‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ directed by Thomas Vinterberg (2015)
I fell in love with Kelly Reichardt’s filmmaking when I saw Certain Women in 2016. I was immersed in its feeling of space, both in the storytelling and the frame itself. With many of Reichardt’s early films screening on MUBI, I had to make time for Old Joy. It follows Mark and Kurt, childhood friends looking down the barrel of middle-age. Mark has a baby on the way, Kurt is still pursuing a life of freedom and adventure - a life less sustainable with each passing year and one that puts him in danger of eviction and homelessness.
When they reconnect for a camping trip to Oregon’s cascade mountains, the landscape becomes an essential third character. The dialogue is sparse. Instead, Reichardt’s camera lingers on the view from the car window. First, we gaze at the grey, post-industrial city, then soiled urban-rural borderlands, before finally reaching the deep, obsidian green of the forest by night. Lost, both physically and metaphorically, the men pitch camp:
Mark: It’s good to get out of the city. I forget all this is out here sometimes.
Kurt: No shit. It’s not like there’s any big difference between the forest and the city though. You know what I mean? Its all one huge thing now - there’s trees in the city and garbage in the forest. What’s the big difference, you know?
Mark: I see what you mean.
Daylight reveals the cumulative detritus of careless travellers - beer cans, crates, an old sofa. Reichardt ekes out these shots for an astonishing two and a half minutes. At this pace, the images begin to speak to the men’s lives: the thriving prospect of youth contaminated by adult realities - capitalism, materialism and the responsibilities those things entrench. The forest - a place of growth and fecundity, primeval in its solitude - fosters a return to their former selves and an intimate friendship that teeters on the erotic.
Since watching Old Joy I’ve been thinking about the role forests have played in our storytelling tradition. John Yorke titled his insightful book about “how stories work and why we tell them,” Into the Woods - a reference to the archetypal journey of fairytale characters. Forests are places of mystery, pagan even, often triggering the impulses society keeps in check. My thoughts turn to Thomas Hardy whose novel, Far From the Madding Crowd encapsulates the sensuality of lush vegetation. The chapter in which Bathsheba shares her first kiss with Troy - a moment of sexual awakening - is provocatively suggestive of the female anatomy. Hardy titled it, ‘The hollow amid the ferns.’
In his 2015 adaptation of the book, Thomas Vinterberg contrasts this verdant landscape with the vivd red of Troy’s military uniform; marking him out as dangerous - a symbol of civilised society that threatens the rural way of life. When their relationship implodes, Hardy’s Bathsheba seeks refuge in the same landscape, the ferns now dying back for the beginning of winter:
“She could think of nothing better to do with her palpitating self than to go in here and hide; and entering she lighted on a spot sheltered from the damp fog by a reclining trunk, where she sank down upon a tangled couch of fronds and stems. She mechanically pulled some armfuls round her to keep off the breezes, and closed her eyes.”
It’s no coincidence that the scene of seduction in Hardy’s Tess also occurs in a wood, the mysterious environment feeding the ambiguity of the encounter:
“He pulled the overcoat around her shoulders and plunged into the webs of vapour which by this time formed veils between the trees. She could hear the rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining slope, till his movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird, and finally died away. With the setting of the moon the pale light lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the leaves where he had left her.”
Later, another wood provides Tess with an escape from male harassment on the road. But its seclusion continues to hide his violence. Throughout the night she hears peculiar noises, “Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it was a sort of gasp or gurgle.” By daylight, she discovers its violent reality; pheasants shot during a hunt, but not killed outright, had spent the night, “pulsating feebly, some contorted, some stretched out - all of them writhing in agony.” A horrifying metaphor for her emotional state and the future yet to come.
Pictures
Carlo Crivelli at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones, is something of a hero in his home town of Birmingham. So it seems fitting that an innovative exhibition celebrating the work of fifteenth century Venetian artist Carlo Crivelli - one of Burne-Jones’ creative influences - should be held at the city’s Ikon Gallery. After reading about Crivelli’s use of trompe-l’oeil (illusion tricks that tease our sense of reality) in the London Review of Books, I had to take a closer look.
Crivelli produced elaborate altarpieces, now mostly broken up. But his use of hard-setting egg tempera (pigments mixed with egg yolk) means that the individual portraits have survived in excellent condition - the rich reds and greens are especially vibrant. During the mid-nineteenth century, public interest in Crivelli was growing and the National Gallery (who collaborate on this exhibition) acquired several of his paintings. In her essay for the catalogue, Stacey Sell reveals the influence of Crivelli on the composition of Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, Love Among the Ruins and The Annunciation; she draws attention to the similarity in descriptions of their work as “metallic”; and the attention both artists pay to the depiction of craft objects, including fabrics.
As it turns out, one of the things I enjoyed most in Crivelli’s work was despised by Burne-Jones’ mentor John Ruskin: pastiglia. This technique involves the creation of raised elements using gesso, which are then gilded to give the work a three dimensional appearance. Sell identifies a, “disdainful reference,” to pastiglia in Ruskin’s writing:
“That embossed execution of Rembrandt’s is just as much ignorant work as the embossed projecting jewels of Carlo Crivelli: a real painter never loads.”
It seems pastiglia offended Victorian aesthetics and many continued to view Crivelli’s work as inferior. In the flesh, it gives his work a striking physicality. The catalogue explores how Crivelli uses pastiglia to, “harness the haptic dimension of the painting.” Three dimensional jewellery and crowns, “engender empathy and a sense of immediacy in the viewer by highlighting the cultic presence of the saints and objects surrounding them; and just as importantly, they reinforce the presence of the painter, who has arranged those objects with the utmost skill and precision.”
Crivelli’s use of the technique, along with trompe-l’oeil, plays havoc with our relationship to the visual image. A fly, painted in the viewer’s scale, settles on the surface of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. It bridges the world of the painting with our own; drawing attention to the art as fiction. It’s the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall in cinema, or meta-fiction in the novel. Jonathan Watkins, the gallery’s director, writes in his forward to the catalogue:
“I was convinced of [Crivelli’s] contemporary relevance, arguing that his preoccupation with the nature of artistic representation anticipated Magritte’s seminal C’eci n’est pas one pipe by almost five hundred years.”1
With his trompe-l’oeil flies, Anna Degler writes that:
“Crivelli capitalises on the fact that the pesky insects are unaware of human rules of piety and decorum, and behave in a way that makes them seem amoral, even diabolical creatures: a fly will squat indiscriminately on an altar or a dunghill, on ambrosial foodstuffs or a putrescent corpse. When depicted in the context of a religious work of art, and especially when painted as though it is sitting on the picture plane, an insect of this kind constitutes a “shock-motif,” which as the French philosopher Louis Marin has argued, projects its inner and essential excess onto the world.”
None of this sounds especially like Burne-Jones, with the exception of The Story of Troy. Sell describes it as, “a mysterious project that he never completed”; a work of “illusionism” depicting a framed altarpiece. It is owned by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, partially closed at the moment for renovation works. After seeing these impressive paintings by Crivelli, The Story of Troy will be first on my list when the gallery fully reopens in 2024.
Have you read or seen anything featured in this month’s Desk Notes? Let me know your thoughts in the Comments and share the books, films and exhibitions you’ve enjoyed this month.
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This month’s featured image is from ‘The maniac father: or, The victim of seduction. A romance of deep interest’ courtesy of the British Library.
Print, screen & post office banners are courtesy of the Internet Book Archive. Pictures banner courtesy of The British Library.
Another stimulating read, thank you. Contemplating on the Victorian desire for purity of the diary form and the focus on honesty and sincerity, it is interesting that a number of diaries, particularly those of military figures, were edited before publication to enhance reputations.