Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKSBetrayal, doomed lovers and art combine in Tulip Fever, a bestseller in Britain and a historical novel of great originality.
FILM
Judy Berlin, a loving look at the suburbs, deserved the prize
it won at the Sundance festival.
AND CONSIDER THIS
Joni Mitchell's new album, Both Sides Now, comprises soulful
standards and a surprise or two; Ordinary Words, a collection by
Vermont poet Ruth Stone, is extraordinary.
Flowering Deceit
Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
Random House; 281 pages; $21.95
Think of the New York, London and American stock exchanges, Nasdaq,
day-trading and casino gambling as one giant speculative phenomenon and
you'll get some idea of the mania that swept across Holland in the 17th
century. The craze wasn't for stocks or bonds, gold, silver or pork-belly
futures; strange though it may seem now, fortunes were squandered and entire
families were ruined all for the sake of tulip bulbs. Prices rose to staggering
heights, then dropped abruptly. The Dutch had, of course, one other
passion: paintings and painters. Artists, some of them great
and some merely pedestrian, churned out the portraits commissioned by the
well-to-do and produced the still-lifes and landscapes that filled respectable
homes in The Netherlands.
Upon this historical ground, Deborah Moggach has built a tale
of love and betrayal to marvel at. A bestseller in Britain,
Tulip
Fever has just been published in the U.S., and it's a beautiful, haunting
book. Sophie, young and beautiful, but poor, has been married off
to a rich, widowed merchant in Amsterdam, Cornelis Sandvoort. Cornelis
adores his lovely wife; he could never have imagined such a surge of happiness.
Perhaps, he hopes, they will have a child. Wanting to preserve for
eternity his wedded happiness by hiring a young up-and-coming artist named
Jan van Loos to paint their portrait. At the first sitting, there's
an instant erotic attraction between Jan and Sophie. As he works,
the painter frankly explores every curve of her body, the blush of her
skin, the delicate smile, and as he paints, she can almost feel her skin
being stroked by the brush in his hand. They begin an illicit affair, deceiving
Cornelis and enlisting the help of the Sandvoort's maid Maria. More
and more helplessly entwined in their betrayal, a child is born, and the
unlucky lovers devise a plan to leave Holland. Jan foolishly seizes
on the idea of purchasing the rarest of bulbs and re-selling it for an
outlandish profit.
Each chapter of the unfolding story is seen through the
eyes of the different characters, a not unfamiliar technique because it
keeps a yarn moving briskly along while revealing the interior life of
varied and vivid personalities. Moggach excels at this, letting the reader
see Sophie's exultation in love and her turmoil of guilt as she betrays
and then seeks to escape from her husband. Ultimately, Sophie will find
redemption through yet another choice. By a chance and tragically
absurd turn of the plot, Jan's dreams for a new life are doomed, but as
if awakening from a nightmare, he discovers a deeper meaning and intention
in his art. One of his still-lifes has a vase holding a single tulip: "White
petals blushed with pink, like the flushed cheek of a woman who has just
risen from her lover's bed. On a petal there is a dewdrop. The woman's
image is reflected there. You need a magnifying glass to see her; she appears
to be trembling...like a dewdrop, her time is short before she vanishes
forever.'' It is a gifted writer who can evoke a long past time of careless
rapture and feverish gambling and also look back at it from a distance
through the spyglass of our own time.
Dutch painters of the 1600s produced grand portraits of
the rich burghers of their day but they also represented the faces of ordinary
people: ruddy-cheeked servants, honest tradespeople and scheming low-lifes.
The author does the same thing by letting the reader see not only Cornelis,
Jan and Sophie, but the maid Maria, her fishmonger lover Willem and Gerrit,
Jan's loyal but slow-witted servant. Moggach works like a draftsman,
sketching each character with an exquisitely fine pen, adding the tiniest
telling detail and faintest shading to make the figure emerge fully and
lifelike upon the blank white paper.
Split-Level Lives
Judy Berlin Written and directed by Eric Mendelsohn
Question: Do the Academy Award voters really think American Beauty
pins down the true suburban existence? If the movie is right, suburbs are
communities of strivers rooted in coldness and isolation, bleakness and
frustration, not to mention living next door to creeped-out new-comers
with peeping-Tom cameras and guns. Judy Berlin, a modest movie
that won its first-time director Eric Mendelsohn a 1999 Sundance Film Festival
award has quite a different take on the 'burbs. It finds the odd humor,
real affection and quiet despair in the lives of people going about their
split-level lives in the town of Babylon, on Long Island a short train
ride from New York City. Where American Beauty's
people are
shallow and disconnected, Mendelsohn's are complicated, deeply human and
enmeshed with others in the town.
The camera looks kindly on all the knickknacks of existence,
on kitchens and schoolrooms and empty train platforms, but reserves its
greatest warmth for people's faces. And such good faces they are. Madeline
Kahn is sweetly daffy as the stay-at-home wife of the distracted school
principal, trying to win a little attention from him and be a jolly pal
to her 30-year-old son David, an erstwhile move director who has inexplicably
returned home, morose and silent.
Director Mendelsohn shot his film in black and white,
which gives it a cinema verité feel, and assembled a first-rate
cast of veteran stage and film actors--Barbara Barrie, Novella Nelson,
Bob Dishy and Betty Henritze, among them. Henritze is touching as a retired
teacher who's gradually losing her memory, and at one point drives to the
local school and tries to resume duties in her former third-grade class.
Barrie is the teacher she barges in on, a woman with a undeniable gift
for understanding her young pupils, though not her own grown daughter.
Between Barrie and the married principal, an unresolved attraction hangs
like an unbroken thread. All of the performances are so truthful that you
feel you've been dropped down among people you've known for a long time.
The film takes place almost in ''real time,'' a
morning and afternoon during a solar eclipse. The strange and unnatural
darkness in the middle of the day is magical, and the characters wander
through their town as if in an enchanted forest. Kahn walks along shadowed
streets, smiling and playful, pretending she's strolling on the moon, holding
up her arms, and gently saying, "Whoooo - whoooo.'' The slightly spacey
character, unaware of her charm and her endearing confusions, was Kahn's
last role. It was perfect for her, and she's memorable in it.
Drifting aimlessly around Babylon, David runs into Judy Berlin,
a woman he had known back in high school. As performed by Edie Falco of
The Sopranos, Judy is still something of a gawky adolescent with
all the spontaneity, spunk and sunny optimism that the introspective David
lacks. An aspiring actress, she's leaving that day for California and is
determined to have a dazzling career in the movies. David knows what she's
up against, and recognizes the futility of her pursuit, but he's powerless
to resist Judy Berlin's hopefulness and essential good nature, and so,
in the end, are we.
(For a quick cyber-glance at the
movie and its mood, director and performers, have a look at the artfully
designed www.judyberlin.com.)
Music
Both Sides Now
(WEA/Warner Bros; $17.97)
A cigarette in a languid hand, smoke curling above her
blond hair and a glass of red wine in front of her, Joni Mitchell broods
on the front of her new CD. The painting catches the tone of the songs
inside, muted and lonely and looking back on failed romance. The dozen
songs--two of them by Mitchell--are familiar, and stand-bys like
Stormy
Weather, I Wish I Were In Love Again and At Last have
all had other interpretations, some better than others. Mitchell's husky
voice, smoky and smooth as whiskey, and her intelligence gives them a distinct
and sustained story line. There's a nice subtle jazz influence and an infectious
swing quality to some arrangements, but occasionally there's a touch too
much swelling strings and over-orchestration--remember those old music-to-love-by
Sinatra albums? The simplest are best. You've Changed is a heart-breaking
meditation on disappointment, ending with the last words of the title half-spoken,
half-sung. In her interpretation of Both Sides Now, she pitches
her voice low and the song is slow and somber, the words coming from her
lips as if she had newly discovered them this morning. It's sure to become
the standard by which all future versions will be compared.
Books
Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone
(Paris Press; 74 pages; $19.95)
Ruth Stone lives in Vermont, and this year turns 85. It's important
to know those two facts about her because a strong sense of place and the
arc of age are elements woven through the poems in her latest collection,
Ordinary
Words. It won Stone the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award earlier
this year, and it's a splendid way to be introduced to one of the country's
best poets. Stone is not choosy about her subject, writing deceptively
simple lines about mothers and daughters, McDonald's and doughnut shops,
and about country people: "After she smashed the furniture, Mabel tried/to
burn the house down. Years later when they let Mabel out of asylum, she
was so light/you could lift her with one hand./Buddy took her in and she
lay on the iron bed/under a pieced quilt. 'Quiet as a little bird,' he
said.''
There is little that escapes Stone's notice. Attuned to
the tiniest, least important creatures, Stone sees microcosms of our human
world in their life and death. There's a touching elegy to a small tomato
caterpillar carrying under its skin the wasp eggs that hatch and
devour it. Oh, world, says the caterpillar, you were so beautiful. Now
I am so tired. "...Nature/ smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are
a lovely link/in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be
born.'' In seeking to retrieve the past, Stone finds the illusions
of memory: "Returning to streets that had poured/heavy shopping malls/over
the hay-sweet grass/where he and I lay whispering/the most important nonsense/of
my desperate and embittered life.'' In Japan, Stone would have
long since been declared a national treasure.
