This seems to be the year of John Keats: in July, his house was reopened to the public in Hampstead Heath, London, and this week, “Bright Star”, the new film about Keats’ brief love affair with Fanny Brawne, opens in theatres. Directed by Jane Campion, the movie got a lovely review in the New York Times and I hope that Campion will do for Keats what she did for Henry James in her wonderful adaptation of “The Portrait of a Lady”, one of my favorite books.
Intrigued by the recent Keats renaissance of sorts, I made a trip to the library in search of his poems – thus far, poor Mr. Keats had been rather overshadowed by Percy Shelley and Lord Byron in my modest study of 19th century poets. Reading Keats over the past few weeks, though, I’ve been struck by how beautifully fresh and almost modern his verse seems, unmarred by the dusty coverlet of nearly two centuries. His words have such a delightful elegance and I’m continually amazed just how much he matured in such a short life — his poems have a depth that’s remarkable when you consider that he was only 25 when he died.
As the Times stated, no movie can ever fully capture the exquisiteness of his poetry as it appears on the page, but I hope that “Bright Star” will at the very least encourage a new generation, like me, to pick up a volume of his work and appreciate the purity of his genius. I’m certainly inspired to read, in addition to his verse, the Keats biography written by Britain’s former poet laureate, Andrew Motion. And, as I have a weakness for both Romantic poets and romantic movies, “Bright Star” is definitely my must-see film for the fall (it comes to Stamford’s Avon Theater on Friday, Sept. 25).
Here’s a taste of the poem that, I assume, inspired the film’s title. Interestingly, a line from another of Keats’ poems, “Ode to a Nightingale”, provided the title for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night.”
BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Philip Hensher’s “The Northern Clemency” is very much about England, set in a city “made by fire out of water.” The primeval description refers to Sheffield, South Yorkshire, circa 1974, when the city was the steel center of England and heaps of coal fed the gaping furnaces of the factories and muddied the rolling, purplish landscape of the pensive moors.”The city made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal.” Over the course of the novel, Sheffield hovers like a persistent haze, lovingly and forbiddingly evoked by turns, almost a character in itself.
Hensher’s human characters, though, are entrenched in a claustrophobic suburbia, a world of dull cocktail parties fed by vol-au-vents and nosy neighbors obsessed with the Queen. The residents of Rayfield Avenue are, for the most part, bored and dissatisfied, but none quite so much as Katharine Glover, the proverbial desperate housewife with three sullen children and a lifeless marriage. Katharine’s spontaneous decision to try for a job in a newly-opened flower shop triggers a disastrous train of events – her husband Malcolm, assuming she’s having an affair with her charismatic young boss, walks out of the house without a word and Katharine erroneously releases her dismay on her youngest son, Tim. The deeply disturbing scene in which she violently stamps on the head of his illicitly purchased pet snake haunts both Tim and the rest of the book through the final pages.
Each of the characters evolve, over a span of almost twenty years, in the shadow of England’s changing politics. There are frequent references to the regime of Margaret Thatcher, evocations of the crippling recession that took hold in the ’80s, and a brief but powerful portrayal of the coal miner’s strike that gripped the north of England in 1984.
I enjoyed Hensher’ detailed descriptions, his unusual metaphors and the precision with which he evoked a certain era — the minutae of everyday life was meticulously catalogued and really gave the reader a sense of time and place, from the description of a public swimming pool to careful mention of iced biscuits and tea in a local, gossip-ridden cafe. The characters, however, were harder to respond to. With a few exceptions, like depressed housewife Katharine and her over-sexed but compassionate son Daniel, I found most of the characters to be depressingly unlikeable. A few of the overlapping storylines were intriguing — surprisingly, I found the side-plot of florist/reluctant drug runner Nick Reynolds and his diabolically sleazy dealer fascinating — but a good deal of the characters left me cold. The most irritating were Sandra Sellers, the emotionally indifferent and destructively promiscuous daughter of the Glovers’ neighbors, and Tim Glover, an eerie child who grows into an annoyingly fervent Marxist, obsessed with Sandra to the point of creepy delusion. Even some of the more appealing characters felt distant and suffused in chilliness— throughout the novel, I felt almost as if they were deliberately held at arms’ length. This might have just been my reaction — another reader might find it easier to get close to them — but I ultimately found the city itself to be more compelling than the people who lived in it, the city made by fire out of water, that seemed to breathe on its own.
It’s important to know before reading “The Healing of America” that the author, T.R. Reid, takes as a given that the health care system in America is broken. This seems pretty uncontroversial to me at this point. Nearly everyone agrees on the diagnosis; it was a big campaign issue for both Democrats and Republicans in 2008. What’s less clear is the treatment.
Atul Gawande argued pretty persuasively in January that health care systems in other countries work best when they build on what already existed: The British fashioned the National Health Service after World War II when, bombed and bedraggled, it had a huge soldier and civilian population to care for. Other countries took different approaches because what existed before was different.
President Barack Obama argued something similar in his speech to a special joint session of Congress last Wednesday night when he said “Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.” And Reid takes the same approach. His book is meant to look at the bits that work well in other countries, the problems other countries face and how those things compare to the polyglot American system, the last in the developed world that doesn’t guarantee basic health care to its populace.
Reid’s medical problem is a perfect one for this investigation. An old shoulder surgery makes him ache and interferes with his golf swing, but doesn’t impede greatly on his quality of life. Treatment can range from physical therapy to radical and expensive shoulder replacement surgery (which is what his American doctor recommended.) How treatment is tackled for such a non-emergency, life-enhancing and potentially expensive problem says a lot about how a country decides to meet everyone’s needs on limited resources.
I’m currently deeply immersed in Gay Talese’s book, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” which chronicles the sexual revolution and cultural shift of the 60s and 70s as well as its origins. Like many journalism students, I hold Talese as one of my heroes. Occasionally, when I’m stuck on a story, I often take a break to reread one of his essays or stories. I’m always struck by the stylistic purity of his prose. It’s never showy or overwrought, and seems to convey exactly the right facts with astonishing detail, leaving the reader wondering, “How the hell did he know that?”
Emulating Talese is a tough task that I imagine will take time and practice. But when I came across an interview of him on Charlie Rose recently, I decided that I might be able to adopt as least one of his reporting axioms.
“You should dress for the story!” he said with verve. As always, Talese was nattily dressed in a three-piece suit.
The son of an Italian tailor, Talese has in the past written about his devotion to style and well-made suits as both a show of support for a dying industry and a symbol of his heritage. Above is a segment produced on Conde Nast’s Style Web site that says it all.
Unlike Talese, I’m a harried dresser. Though I did make an effort on my grooming this week, I wound up with my shirttails sticking out of my pants by the end of a long day in the newsroom yesterday.
But I’m committed in spirit if not execution. Watch out, Zoning Board members! I just may dust off that tiara next week.
While the health care debate looms as a major issue when Washington gets back from vacation, we’re planning to read a journalist’s look at health care systems in other countries after we get back from vacation. Start reading T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America with us after Labor Day.
Reading Rainbow, a favorite from my childhood, is to end its 26-year run, NPR reports. I’m so sad. How will kids know what to read without LeVar Burton?
For November, I'll be reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year. We'll update our book club selection for December and January shortly.
Marilyn Ramos is a partner at the Stamford litigation law firm of Silver Golub & Teitell. She is a member of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association and the Connecticut Bar Association. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Fairfield County Bar Association and the Fairfield County Bar Foundation. She received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1989 and is a member of the Connecticut and New York bars. Prior to her career in law, she was a teacher with the Greenwich Public Schools and worked for the Stamford Human Rights Commission. Her views expressed on this blog are completely her own and do not represent those of Silver Golub & Teitell.
Roy J. Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. He grew up in Stamford and his father was a firefighter on the West Side. He received his bachelor's degree from Southern Connecticut State University and went on to receive a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami. He has traveled around the world, visiting 35 countries, but said, "I can’t credit on the road with getting me on the road."
