Was Gertrude Stein a Fascist?

Alexandria Campus faculty came to grips with that question after reading Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Although author Janet Malcolm doesn't exhaustively explore Gertrude Stein's political life, she does inform us that Stein was an opponent of Roosevelt, deplored the New Deal, felt that people should take responsibility for their own economic well-being, and was a vocal supporter of Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

Right-wing politics were the way to go among the literary avant garde in mid-century. Stein's near contemporary TS Eliot once described himself as an "Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a monarchist in politics." Ezra Pound moved to Italy in the 1930s and was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Evelyn Waugh converted to the Catholicism and staunchly supported conservative social and political positions throughout his life (Waugh was convinced, for instance, that Picasso was a hoakster who was taking people in).

Was Stein a fascist? Despite being Jewish, and living in a straightforwardly lesbian relationship with Alice B Toklas, she managed to survive (and indeed prosper) in occupied France throughout WWII.

A Superior Form of Authenticity

The Alexandria Campus Book Club read Margaret Atwood's collection of short stories-cum-novella.

Several of the stories/ chapters might call to mind previous Book Club selections.

'My last Duchess', for instance, in which the teenage protagonist reads and critiques Browning's poem in light of her own experience, is reminscent of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

'Moral Disorder' , 'Monopoly' and 'White Horse' find the principal characters decamped to a bohemian rural paradise trying their amateur hands at farming, recalling the (again) fashionable back-to-nature organic movement at the heart of Omnivores Dilema.

Atwood says of her work that it is "not autobiography. If it was, people would say I was lying. It's the paradox of our times. If you put fiction on the front, they say, 'Ah, but we know it's really about you,' and if you put autobiography, they say, 'Well, of course she's trying to make herself look good and she has left this out and left that out.'" A tension between autobiography and fiction, the real and the contrived confronted previously in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

Family relationships pervade the stories. Relationships between parents (present and absent) and children bring to mind both A Hole In The Earth as well as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Those between siblings recall Atonement.

Harold Bloom once said all literature profited or suffered from an "anxiety of influence". he probably didn't think of his criticism in the conext of the Alex Book Club reading list, but it's true nevertheless.

Disordered, Morally Speaking

The Alexandria Campus Book Club turns to short stories for the second selection of the Fall Term, reading Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder.



AS Byatt reviewed the book in the Washington Post and said, in part:

"Moral Disorder is a perfect title -- apparently one from a novel abandoned by Atwood's husband, which fits. And the work, with its isolated tales, some in the first person, some in the third, is a perfect shape for contemplating life and death. It is like our memories: There are things that persist in refusing to be forgotten, are as clear as the day they happened, whereas all sorts of more apparently significant things vanish into dust or persist only in old newspapers and fashion magazines. A life, unlike a biography, does not unfold in a neat progression. Nor is it entirely incoherent. Each of these stories coheres round a defined patch of Nell's life, and each has its own cluster of brilliantly described and unforgettable things, which are as important as the people...

This tale, like all these tales, is both grim and delightful, because it is triumphantly understood and excellently written."

Check out a copy from the Library or visit your local book-shop.

More on Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengetsu, author of the Book Club's fall selection The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, is interviewed on NPR and also on the Penguin Book site. Learn more about the author and his inspiration for this story of African immigrants set in Logan Circle.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Get ready for fall & start reading the book club selection this summer.

Perfect for the beach. Buy it from Amazon today.

The novel takes place in Logan Circle -- perfect destination for a field trip!

Chimes At Midnight

Orson Welles's 1967 film The Chimes At Midnight, based on Shakespeare's character of Sir John Falstaff, is now available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. The film stars Welles as Flastaff, John Gielgud as Henry VI, as well as Anne Rutherford and Jeanne Moreau.


Thanks to Dianne Daily for discovering this!

Book Club goes local

The book club turns to a novel set in Washington DC to kick off the fall season. The Washington Post says of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears:

"One of the glories of the literature of exile is the sharp outlines a writer can bring to the contours of his adoptive society. For readers who were born in the writer's host country, such literature can uncover things that might otherwise be obscured by familiarity. Dinaw Mengestu's praiseworthy first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, draws upon this principle. Take, for example, this wide-eyed reflection by Sepha Stephanos, the Ethiopian émigré who narrates the story, on riding the Washington Metro: "The red-line train bound for the suburbs of Maryland is delayed. The trains of this city continue to marvel me, regardless of how long I live here. It's not just their size, but their order, the sense you get when riding them that a higher, regulatory power is in firm control, even if you yourself are not." Most native Metro users probably wouldn't greet a delay with such transcendental musings.
But Stephanos lacks an outlet -- aside from his friends -- to channel his thoughts. The novel underscores this element by contrasting his plight with that of the 19th-century writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who is a favorite author of a character in the novel. Unlike the blue-blooded Frenchman who returned to his homeland and was celebrated for his insights into American life, the struggling Stephanos seems unlikely to return to his native country or win admiration for his perspicacity.
As a teenager, Stephanos fled Ethiopia to escape fallout from the military coup that ousted Haile Selassie in 1974 and thrust the Dergue -- a junta that ruled the country until 1987 -- into power. Stephanos's father -- a prosperous lawyer in Ethiopia's capital -- attracted the ire of a government determined to snuff out all so-called counter- revolutionaries. After witnessing his father's brutal treatment at the hands of the Dergue's henchmen, Stephanos acceded to his mother's wishes and fled Ethiopia. Eventually, he made his way to Washington.
Mengestu's tightly written novel largely unfolds in alternating chapters of past and present. The story is structured around a period of unrest in Logan Circle when gentrification led to evictions. For Stephanos, the influx of moneyed white people into the predominantly black neighborhood where he resides and runs a grocery store is a welcome event. He hopes that his business might improve along with the neighborhood and that his loneliness might be alleviated by a white academic and her biracial child, whom he befriends.
Unfortunately, vandalism aimed at Logan Circle's new residents prompts the Tocqueville-loving scholar, with whom Stephanos is enamored, to leave the neighborhood. And so, while Stephanos mulls over the events that vaporized his hopes for a more fulfilling life, he finds himself in a self-reflective purgatory, searching for a new raison d'être. Indeed, the title of the novel comes from the last lines of Dante's Inferno, where the poet, emerging from hell, is granted a glimpse of heaven before he makes his way into purgatory.
Apart from its lean sentences, which very rarely overreach, Mengestu's novel benefits from his plausible depiction of characters caught on the seams between two worlds -- rich/poor, black/white, citizen/foreigner. This lends an urgency to their ruminations that believably cleanses their conversation of small talk. In other words, the big ideas of Stephanos and his two African friends about racial politics in America, the necessary accouterments for success, and why colonels make for better dictators than generals don't come off as stilted but as natural byproducts of their exiled condition.
With its well-observed characters and brisk narrative pacing, greatly benefited by the characters' tension-laced wit, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is an assured literary debut by a writer worth watching."