Saturday Snapshot July 30

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce @ AT Home With Books.

Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.



     Since reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, we have both been thinking about Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. For this week's Saturday Snapshot, we decided to share some photos from our visit to Harper Lee's hometown, the basis for the "tired old town" of Maycomb. We visited Monroeville, AL a few years ago and saw the courthouse that was replicated for the set of the film and several murals depicting characters from the book around the town.

- Frances & Rose

Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictoral Memoir by Daphne du Maurier

     If you've followed our blog, you may have gathered that I'm a huge fan of Daphne du Maurier - especially her novel Rebecca.  This book is a wonderful visual journey through the Cornish landscape that she so vividly paints in her novel.  But more than that, it is a chronicle of the part Cornwall has played in her life.  She says:

     I walked this land with a dreamer's freedom and with a waking man's perspective - places, houses whispered to me their secrets and shared with me their sorrows and their joys.  And in return I gave them something of myself, a few of my novels passing into the folk-lore of this ancient place.

     Written in her later years, the book looks back on her life from her childhood, to her early love of Cornwall, and the stories behind the novels she set there.  She uses passages from her many novels along with beautiful photographs of the areas that inspired each one.
     I enjoyed the stories of her childhood.  As the daughter of a British actor, she was raised on the world of make-believe and surrounded by her father's famous colleagues and friends.  She notes that after a visit from Basil Rathbone, there is a page in her diary on which she drew a heart pierced by an arrow and the words, "I love Basil."  Years later, he played the part of the wicked Lord Rockingham in the film version of her novel Frenchman's Creek.

   My favorite section of the book is when she writes about Menabilly, the house that inspired Rebecca.  The house was abandoned, the owner living elsewhere, and from the moment she set eyes upon it she was under its spell.  She began to write Rebecca in 1937 while her husband was stationed in Alexandria and she was homesick for Cornwall.

     This novel would not be a tale of smugglers and wreckers of the nineteenth century, like Jamaica Inn, but would be set in the present day, say the mid-twenties, and it would be about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations.  There were many such houses in Cornwall; my friend Foy Quiller-Couch, with whom I visited Jamaica Inn, had taken me to some of them.  Houses with extensive grounds, with woods, near to the sea, with family portraits on the walls...my Cornish house would be empty, neglected, its owners absent...very like Menabilly near Fowey...where I had so often trespassed.  And surely the Quiller-Couches had once told me that the owner had been married first to a very beautiful wife, whom he had divorced, and had married again a much younger woman?
     I wondered if she had been jealous of the first wife, as I would have been jealous if my Tommy had been married before he married me...
    Seeds began to drop.  A beautiful home...a first wife...jealousy...a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house...But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what...
     The couple would be living abroad, after some tragedy, there would be an epilogue - but on second thoughts that would have to come at the beginning...
     And thoughts turned to my first encounter with Menabilly, as I made my way down the old driveway from the east lodge, as it were in a dream.

     Thus, Rebecca was born.  Years later, after Rebecca was published, she actually leased Menabilly and lived there.

     Two of her other novels were set largely at Menabilly, The King's General and My Cousin Rachel.

     For fans of du Maurier, this memoir provides insight into the writer and the world of her novels.

     ~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #10

"If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs."
     ~ Anne Fadiman

"I even love the smell of books."
     ~ Adriana Trigiani

Waxing Poetic: A Fairly Sad Tale by Dorothy Parker

     Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was an American poet, short story writer, and satirist.  She is best known for her wit and wisecracks.  She had an unhappy childhood, went through two marriages (two to the same man), and survived several suicide attempts.  She grew increasingly dependent on alcohol.  Her wisecracks and caustic wit characterize her poetry.
     She was a founding member of The Algonquin Round Table, a group of journalists, editors, actors and press agents that met on a regular basis at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.  The group began lunching together in 1919 and continued for about eight years.  During this time, Dorothy wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Vogue.  She said of those early years:  "Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be.  Dammit, it was the twenties, and we had to be smarty."   In her later years, she came to denigrate the group:

These were no giants.  Think who was writing in these days - Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway.  Those were the real giants.  The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.  Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them...There was no truth in anything they said.  It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...

     She was often dismissive of her talents and her wild reputation, as the following quotes indicate:

                      I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone:  Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

      In the thirties, she moved to Hollywood and did screenwriting.  Throughout the rest of her life she was a vocal advocate of civil rights and was placed on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era.  When she died, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation.
     In the following poem she laments her disappointing life.

A Fairly Sad Tale

I think that I shall never know
Why I am thus, and I am so.
Around me, other girls inspire
In men the rush and roar of fire,
The sweet transparency of glass,
The tenderness of April grass,
The durability of granite;
But me- I don't know how to plan it.
The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock
Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock.
They broke my heart, they stilled my song,
And said they had to run along,
Explaining, so to sop my tears,
First came their parents or careers.
But ever does experience
Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense!
Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope.
A heart in half is chaste, archaic;
But mine resembles a mosaic-
The thing's become ridiculous!
Why am I so? Why am I thus?

   The film, Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle is a portrayal of her life and her time spent with The Algonquin Round Table.  Jennifer Jason Leigh does a wonderful Dorothy with all her wit, loneliness, and overwhelming sadness.

Last Lines That Linger

     Usually, the focus is on the best first lines in literature. We are guilty of this, too. After all, the first lines are what draw you into a book. These are the ones we remember best. Shouldn't the last lines leave you feeling that the journey was worthwhile? Here are some of our favorites:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
     ~ The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"
     ~ The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

"I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"
     ~ Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

"After all, tomorrow is another day."
     ~ Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

"'All that is very well,' answered Candide, 'but let us cultivate our garden.'"
     ~ Candide - Voltaire

"Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided."
     ~ The African Queen - C. S. Forester

"Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is."
     ~ Continental Drift - Russell Banks

"I am haunted by waters."
     ~ A River Runs Through It - Norman MacLean

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."
     ~ The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy

"To us - and snails, God bless them!"
     ~ The Book and the Brotherhood - Iris Murdoch

"And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea."
     ~ Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier


Funnily enough, Rebecca also made it on our list of best first lines!


- Frances & Rose

Saturday Snapshot July 23

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce @ AT Home With Books.

Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.


     This is our first Saturday Snapshot. We thought we would start by posting a little gem found on a stroll through an abandoned downtown area.

 

      This is the view through the window of an antique shop. Despite the front door bearing a sign claiming they were "open", this place had clearly not been open for business in quite a long time! We love the carved bust - it reminds us of Marie Antoinette. We also wonder exactly how long it takes for something to be considered antique. Does the baby blue Crayola marker truly qualify?

- Frances & Rose

Library Loot #4

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Marg and Claire that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
I'm continuing my journey through all of Hemingway's works.  This is his first collection of short stories.


True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway
A fictional memoir published posthumously and edited by his son, Patrick.  It was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953 and chronicles his last African safari.


The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway
In 1959, Hemingway returned to Spain both the revisit "the country he loved more than any other than his own" and to see a series of bullfights that promised spectacular performances by two famous rivals.  He was commissioned by Life magazine to write a short article about his trip but he became so absorbed that he wrote a book-length manuscript.  It was the last major literary undertaking of his life.



Time Was Soft There: a Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer
Jeremy Mercer, a crime reporter, fled Canada in 1999 and ended up broke in Paris.  He stumbles upon Shakespeare & Co., the current incarnation of Sylvia Beach's famous bookstore of the 1920's owned by George Whitman.  The book "winds in and around the streets of Paris, the staff fall in and out of love, straighten bookshelves, host tea parties, drink in the more down-at-the-heels cafes, sell a few books, and help George find a way to keep his endangered bookstore open."

The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett
 A thriller set during WWII which involves a code that is embedded in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca!

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
This was Capote's first novel.  From the jacket:  "...a novel of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South."

From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus
Set in Cagliari, Sardinia, the novel relates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected to her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman's life from what she herself recalls about her and from the family lore which has survived through the memories of the rest of the family.  She creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is "the principal thing in life."