December 2020

Favorites of the month (all four!): Keep Moving: Notes on Loss Creativity and Change, Such a Fun Age, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, and Lavinia

Poet Maggie Smith begins Keep Moving, her deeply moving meditation on resilience and renewal in the wake of her divorce, with a simple, hopeful, yet so often forgotten reminder: “The ending of one thing is also the beginning of another.” In each poem and essay that follows, she expands upon this elemental premise, using her own journey as proof of the resurrective power of grief and loss. She admits that while we cannot revise our past or erase our pain, we can revise the way we think about our pain, reframing it as “an opportunity to make a new and improved life.” At the outset, she writes, our losses – whether shared and validated or private and undefinable – can seem like an ending or a “dissolution,” enwrapped in sadness and shame. But if we dig deep enough, we can uncover a kernel of hope and, ultimately, a key to renewal – a renewal that perhaps could have never been found if the loss had not come first.

To chart this circuitous path toward healing, Smith draws upon her own experiences, grounding them in the rhythms and processes of the natural world. All around us, she writes, there are limitless examples of a beauty that stems from – and at time requires – pain and loss: Serotinous pinecones that need fire to open and release their seeds; diamonds that can materialize only after billions of years spent under extreme molten pressure; pearls that can form only with the aid of a parasitic irritant; caterpillars that emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies, becoming at once the selves they always were and yet something entirely different and entirely new.

All what we have to do is to just keep moving – to stay vigilant, to stay present, so as not to miss what Smith calls life’s “beauty emergencies.” “Imagine,” she writes, “what might await you on the other side of this dark forest. Imagine the clearing, the sunshine.” Certainly, one day, the tall, overpowering trees will fade into the distance and the darkness will feel like a distant memory; like something you’ve left behind as your plane makes its way up to the sky, rendering everything below suddenly “toy-sized, miniaturized.” 

But when, the reader may ask herself, will that day come? When will we be able not just to keep moving but to move forward? When will we be able to see the beauty in our pain; when will we be proud of our scars? I think through writing this book and sharing the pain of her divorce so publicly, Smith seems to be suggesting – and in a way proving – that the “when” will come when we accept that we need other people to get through and that other people need us, too. “Our struggles will transform us,” she writes,

“And they may transform other people, too, if we let the breaks show – only if we honor imperfection and impermanence, filling the cracks with gold, can we be mirrors for each other. What we say when we write about our brokenness is not Look at me but Look at us.”

Our deepest pain can be a bridge to our deepest selves, our deepest understanding, and our deepest connections, but only if we’re brave enough to let down our walls, lower the gate, and let others in.

In Keep Moving, Smith not only lowers the gate, but gives us a hug and throws a celebration in our honor. Her story is our story, and our story is hers. Together, we prove that while there is no boundary for pain, there is also no boundary for healing.

In her incisive and timely debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Kiley Read constructs a profoundly relatable universe, filled with characters so real and so well-developed that you feel like you actually know them. At the heart of Reid’s story is Emira, a twenty-five-year-old black woman who, within the book’s first few pages, finds herself being accused of kidnapping Briar, the white toddler whom she babysits for. While everyone around Emira wants her to release video of the incident or file a civil action suit, Emira only wants to preserve her peace and privacy. In rather unmillennial fashion, she is okay with remaining anonymous; she doesn’t have an Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, nor does she have any interest in fame or performative politics. She is just like any other recent college graduate, trying to unearth her purpose amid an environment of “passionless negative space” – to find something she loves and to “stick with it.” 

Emira’s boss and characteristic foil, Alix (or “Mrs. Chamberlain”), could not be more different from Emira. As the thirty-two-year-old mother to three-year-old Briar and infant Catherine, she is the archetypal “mommy influencer,” endowed with a singular knack “for taking high-quality photos of free merchandise” and posting said merchandise to her blog. As a product (and prime beneficiary) of the Lean In zeitgeist, she harnesses every opportunity to build her neo-feminist, women-can-have-it-all “brand,” all while curating the persona of a “sharp, smart, and sexy” modern woman. Underlying this instagrammable façade, however, lies a deeply insecure person who is eternally aggrieved by FOMO and obsessed with losing her pregnancy weight. Lodged in social media’s alternate reality, she is concerned more with being “seen” than actually existing.

In drawing out these differences between Emira and Alix, Reid presents an uncomfortably recognizable tension between life as it is and life as we hope it to be. While Emira acknowledges that her charge, Briar, is a “rich-people baby,” she loves her deeply, regarding her as “her favorite little human.” By contrast, Alix dismisses her daughter as “a tiny drooling person” whose vexatious “voice consume[s] everything in its path.” “I know I’m not a mom,” Emira says to Alix toward the end of the book, “but you gotta stop looking at [Briar] like you’re just waiting for her to change, ‘cause um…It is what it is, you know? You’re her mom.” As Alix wishes for her daughter to graduate from the “terrible” toddler phase, so too does she yearn for Emira to reach her potential. Because Emira doesn’t yet have a “real job,” Alix assumes that her life is somehow less-than and that “she doesn’t know who she is.” She tokenizes Emira as material for her “LetHer Speak” platform, finding in her purportedly “unfortunate” circumstances the potential for a rags to riches “success” story.

Of course, Reid writes, “Emira had met several ‘Mrs. Chamberlains’ before. They were all rich and overly nice and particularly lovely to the people who served them”; they were also all terrified of being seen as a “textbook white person.” Yet as opposed to actually doing the work of becoming a better person, Alix is only interested in projecting an air of self-manufactured and optically credible “wokeness.” She doesn’t want to be good as much she wants others to think that she is good. She wants Emira to be happy and successful, but only if she can get credit for it. In the end, it all comes back to her and her instagram page.

As difficult as Emira and Alix’s story is (and as gut-wrenching as some of Reid’s scenes can be), Such a Fun Age is often hilarious, making its title both apt and revelatory. Set in 2015, Reid’s “fun age” refers to not only Briar’s age (three) and Emira’s (twenty-five), but also the age in which we all used to live – our own comically self-indulgent, pre-Trumpian “age of innocence.” Such a Fun Age will make you laugh, but in a way that elicits profound discomfort. It is like an outfit you once thought was cool but wouldn’t be caught dead in today or a ludicrously out-of-touch remark that you are too scared to correct.

There was a part of me that found the end of Such a Fun Age to be somewhat unsatisfying, but I think this was Reid’s intention. Through it all, she remains committed to reality, even as her readers yearn for a glorious, cinematic finish. There is no gratifying soliloquy or conclusive resolution in Such a Fun Age. There is only life, continuing on with its frustrations and predictabilities amid its opportunities for beauty, joy, and connection, all hiding boundlessly in plain sight.

The title of Todd S. Purdum’s Something Wonderful is a tribute to the much-loved song, featured in The King and I, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1951 musical about Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut of Siam. “He will not always say,” sings Lady Thiang as she tries to persuade Anna to accept the King for his faults,

“What you would have him say,
But now and then he’ll do
Something
Wonderful.”

In his dual biography of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Purdum delivers something as wonderful as the legacy left behind by his subjects. As two of the most pioneering and influential producers of twentieth-century entertainment, Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized American theater, weaving together song, story, and dance as no one had before. With hits such as Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Cinderella, and The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein became the veritable Lin-Manuel Mirandas of their day, radically changing musical theater with their commitment to a “novelty, simplicity, and directness of expression that seemed so fresh as to be shocking.” In total, their musicals would amass thirty-four Tony awards, fifteen Academy Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Grammys, and two Emmys, setting the stage on which the careers of Shirley MacLaine, Julie Andrews, Celeste Holm, Sean Connery, and Marlon Brando would be launched.

In Something Wonderful, Purdum “lifts the curtain” to unveil the particular and peculiar genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s process and craft. Out of his Pennsylvania farmhouse, the disciplined Hammerstein would always begin his day at seven, lodging himself in a cozy room with a captain’s desk and comfy armchair. With a soft black pencil, yellow paper pad, typewriter, and complete multivolume set of the Oxford English Dictionary, he would write until five, ending his day with a game of tennis. By contrast, Rodgers preferred to work in the morning. From his Manhattan apartment or Connecticut country house, he would set up shop by his piano, demanding complete silence from his co-inhabitants (no whistling or humming allowed).

Though in many ways “remote” collaborators (very appropriate for 2020, I daresay!), Rodgers and Hammerstein managed to create songs as classic and recognizable as our own national anthem, excavating every narrative, conversational, and melodic possibility to ensure not just connection, but credibility. For the Maine-based Carousel, Purdum tells us, Hammerstein hired his daughter Alice to unearth any and all information about “Yankee customs, mores, and history,” from the local flora and fauna to regionally specific pronunciations (“blesh” for “blush”) and figures of speech (i.e., “Fixin’ to make a quick getaway”). As a composer, Rodgers was just as painstaking. For Oklahoma!, he composed “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” with a repetitious melody to replicate the sound of clopping horse hooves; in The Sound of Music, he wrote the famous choral arrangement – “Do-Mi-Mi/Mi-So-So/Re-Fa-Fa/La-Ti-Ti” – to mimic the ringing of Alpine bells; and in both South Pacific and The King and I, he jettisoned the traditional seven-part, heptatonic scale in favor of the pentatonic scale, incorporating intervals of open-fifths and open-fourths – without the intervening third tone of the scale – to produce an authentically Eastern-inspired sound.    

Let it be known — one does not have to be a musician to enjoy Something Wonderful. Purdum packs his biography with loads of fun and heart. We learn from Purdum so many fun facts about Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows – like how “Getting to Know You” was added last-minute or how the Von Trapp children almost sang “So long, farewell, Auf wiedersehen, aloha.” Thanks to Purdum, we also get to know the men behind the music. Ostensibly, Rodgers and Hammerstein seemed almost predestined for collaboration: They were both born in upper-middle-class Harlem; they were both members of Columbia’s musical comedy troupe, the Varsity Show; and they were both married to women named Dorothy (who were both interior designers). Yet while the prolific Rodgers had “a reputation as a speed demon,” Hammerstein could take days, sometimes weeks, to write a single lyric. And while Hammerstein was passionate and sentimental, prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Rodgers was much more guarded and “emotionally opaque.” Toward the very end, the two men maintained that they did not know whether the other actually liked them. “I was very fond of him – very fond of him – and I never did find out whether he liked me or not. To this day I don’t know,” Rodgers confessed to Hammerstein’s biographer in 1977, more than fifteen years after Hammerstein’s death.

Despite these differences and tensions, Purdum tells us that the two men would always sign their correspondence to each other with the word “love,” signaling a clear sense of mutual respect and, perhaps, a fidelity to something that was more important than their egos. The art that they created, the worlds that they imagined, and the songs they gave us were indeed transcendent. They symbolized the best of what America is and the best of what America could be. They were, in the words of their star Julie Andrews, “both timely and timeless – the epitome of classic.”

In Lavinia, Ursula Le Guin produces an inspired reimaging of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem about Aeneas, the Trojan warrior and father of Rome. Commissioned by Emperor Augustus in 29 B.C., the poem made Aeneas, a secondary character in Homer’s the Iliad, its protagonist while crucially establishing both a narrative and genealogical link between Mount Olympus and the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome. Beginning with the Trojan War, it describes how Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and a cousin of King Priam, escapes Troy after the arrival of the infamous Trojan horse. After seven years spent at sea, fruitlessly seeking settlement in places like Sicily and Carthage, Aeneas finally lands in Latium, where he wins the hand and heart of King Latinus’s daughter, Lavinia.

In her book, Le Guin retells the tale of Aeneas from the perspective of Lavinia, a character Virgil regrettably treats as a “dull” vessel and “colorless” utility – as a mere “single daughter, now ripe for a man, now of full marriageable age.” Throughout the entirety of the Aeneid, Lavinia’s most memorable “action” is a blush that befalls her virginal face: “Tears flowed over Lavinia’s fevered cheeks as she listened,” Virgil writes,

“Noting her mother’s appeal. An intense blush crimsoned her features,
Spreading its radiant warmth through her face with suffusions of fire.
As when the blood of the sea-mollusk violates Indian ivory’s
Pureness, as lilies when set among roses erupt with a rubied
Tinge to their whiteness, so the girl’s face gleamed changes of color.”

Much like how Virgil gave life to a minor Homerian character, Le Guin infuses Lavinia’s overshadowed story with substance and spirit. “You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody,” the ghost of Virgil tells Le Guin’s Lavinia when she is a girl. “He didn’t let me say a word,” she laments, resolving “to take the word from him” and tell her own story. As Le Guin’s Lavinia grows up, she becomes strong, spunky, and assiduously perceptive; she rejects the ideal of the “silent modest maiden” and yearns to “fly, to take my wings across the air, across the years to come,” fulfilling Virgil’s “hope of Rome.” In subtle yet powerful ways, Le Guin frames Lavinia as the forebear to Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome who were nurtured by a she-wolf after being abandoned on the river Tiber to die. “I was ravenously hungry, a wolf,” she reveals. “If a wolf comes here,” she says after being exiled to the woods, “I will call him brother.”  

In imagining Lavinia’s untold perspective, Le Guin lends fresh and nuanced depth to what distinguished the Aeneid from the Odyssey and the Iliad, underscoring what she describes as the “loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Virgil’s idea of a hero.” As the personification of Roman virtue, Aeneas was not recklessly brave, nor did he indulge in “impatient rage” against the tedium of peace. “At the moment of choice,” Le Guin’s Lavinia reflects,

“Aeneas might hesitate, confused, looking to the outcome, torn between conflicting claims and possibilities: in a torment of indecision he groped for his purpose, his fate, till he found it. Then his choice was made and he acted on it.”

In illuminating the wisdom of Aeneas’s heroics, Le Guin asks the reader to contemplate what actually makes the hero a hero. Is it victory in battle? Or perhaps a quieter, more patient type of resolve? “Without war there are no heroes,” Aeneas says to Lavinia as he tries to educate her on the “ways of men.” “What harm would that be?” she replies. “Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.”

And what about the heroes whose stories have never been written? What about the characters who are only known for their beauty or the color of their cheeks? As Le Guin’s Lavinia knows all too well, “we are all contingent.” We are all subject to the preconceptions and caprices of those who have the agency – and the hindsight – to either memorialize, demonize, or bury our stories.

Here’s to the writers who choose to exhume the tales of the forgotten, misunderstood, and ignored – to the writers who rescue the Aeneas’s and Lavinia’s of the world from the obscurity of “contingency,” unearthing the voices of those who have so long yearned to be heard.