January 10, 2019 The Big Picture Daddy Issues: Renoir Père and Fils By Cody Delistraty The filmmaker Jean Renoir made a career of dismantling the beliefs of his absentee father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Jean satirized the aristocracy and upended his father’s saccharine scenes of leisure. An exhibition now at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, looks at their relationship. Jean Renoir, still from La Chienne, 1931 © Les Films du Jeudi The Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir rarely spent time with his second son, Jean. Whenever Pierre-Auguste was around the house, he demanded to be called patron—“the boss”—rather than the more typical papa, and Jean grew to view him more as a boarding school headmaster than as a father. As for the actual parenting, that was mostly left to the family’s nanny, Gabrielle Renard. Renard, who was only sixteen when she moved into the Renoirs’ home in Paris, spent years with Jean—taking him to the movies and to puppet shows, playing with toys and strolling the winding streets of Montmartre and the seaside in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Pierre-Auguste moved the family. Ultimately, Renard became one of the central influences on Jean’s filmmaking career: where his father’s paintings often portrayed their French aristocratic class in an earnest, sentimental light, Jean’s films cut deeper, thanks to the influence of Renard’s critical sensitivity. “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” Jean wrote at the beginning of his 1974 memoir, My Life and My Films. “She taught me to detest the cliché.” The strained relationship between Renoir père and fils manifested itself in their art. Pierre-Auguste was most present when he was painting his son. His portrait of a one- or two-year-old Jean from 1895 depicts the boy in gauzy, halcyon strokes as he smiles and coos in Renard’s arms and plays with toy farm animals. Pierre-Auguste painted from behind his easel, watching his son at a remove, as though the childhood of the boy he was painting were already part of the past. Other times, he was strict with how his son acted and looked. He forbade Jean to get a haircut until he was sixteen, forcing him to grow out his reddish hair and dressing him up in the regalia of the bourgeoisie—a pair of equestrian trousers, a bright foulard—for the sake of his paintings. Read More
January 10, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Your Body Will Haunt Mine By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. Illustration © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My girlfriend broke up with me five months ago. She once said to me, “I’ll love you forever.” Even though I knew forever wasn’t likely, her absence still leaves me lonely. I’m looking for a poem that will wrap me in its arms. Thanks, Bed is Too Big for Just Me Read More
January 9, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Eleanor Dark By Emma Garman Eleanor Dark As 1936 turned into 1937, the Australian novelist Eleanor Dark found herself embroiled in an epistolary skirmish with her U.S. literary agents. At stake was the fate of Prelude to Christopher, Dark’s startling second book. The story of one man’s calamitous quest for a socially engineered paradise, Prelude melds a gothic plot with a modernist style. At the time, fascism was spreading through Europe. Yet judging by the reaction from Dark’s agents and publisher, America wasn’t interested in a woman’s bleak take on biological determinism and utopianism. Prelude opens with Nigel Hendon, a middle-age doctor in a small rural town in New South Wales, getting into a car accident which leaves him badly injured. Through a semiconscious haze, he anticipates death as a relief, a solution to the “vast inimical burden” of living. As his mind slides into the past (“disappointed, futile years”), his memories are interspersed with the stream-of-consciousness perspectives of other characters, including his mother, his wife, and the young hospital nurse who secretly loves him (and who has chosen their future son’s name: Christopher). We soon learn that, as a gifted medical graduate in the years before World War I, Nigel formed his own breakaway society. An island utopia, where only the carefully screened “mentally and physically fit” could live, was to be the culmination of his every ambition, the realization of his scientific potential, a shimmering dream whose original preciousness still beckons: Read More
January 3, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: This Is the Year By Sarah Kay In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dearest Poets, The women who raised me suffered so many missed opportunities, and I am seized with guilt about it. I construct vivid images from the stories I know. I imagine my grandmother as a married seventeen-year-old woman-child, patiently waiting for the local florist to pass by our house so she could catch a whiff of the fragrant champac flowers she had no money to buy. How long did it take for her to give up on this tiny desire, I wonder? I imagine my mother doodling soft hands offering lotus obeisance to who-knows-which-god, over and over in the margins of her book. She must have been giving away her tenderness, surely? I see my aunt posing shyly for a photo, which is now torn in half. In a year, I will defend my doctoral thesis. This should be a vindication. But it doesn’t feel that way. Is there a poem for the taste of ash in my mouth right now? Yours, Vanquished Read More
January 3, 2019 Happily Ghost People: On Pinocchio and Raising Boys By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and raising boys. My son’s first grade teacher pulls me aside to tell me she’s concerned about Noah and the Ghost People. “Ghost People?” “Yes,” she says. She is cheerful, though I suspect the main ingredient of her cheer is dread. Something she probably picked up from childhood. “Can you encourage Noah to stop bringing them to school?” She is whispering, and she is smiling. She is a close talker, and occasionally calls me “girl” which embarrasses me. “I don’t know these Ghost People.” “You do.” “I don’t think so.” “He makes them out of the woodchips he finds on the playground. They’re distracting him. He isn’t finishing his sentences.” “Okay,” I say. “Ghost People,” I say. She smiles wide. One of her front teeth looks more alive than it should be. Read More
January 2, 2019 One Word One Word: Salty By Myriam Gurba In our new column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read More