tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91019598945798021362024-02-18T19:16:57.764-08:00Janette Griffiths Literary LocationsJanette Griffiths is an award-winning travel writer, novelist, broadcaster, and scriptwriter. She divides her time between Vancouver, London and Paris and is currently adapting her novel, The Singing House, to the screen.Here she takes you on a trip to some of her favourite literary locations - From Hemingway in Italy, Stephen King in Maine to Steinbeck in California. Click on the arrow next to the month for a full listJanette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-19622379998090151082008-04-22T15:14:00.000-07:002008-04-22T15:35:29.093-07:00The Brownings and FlorenceAt the age of 43 year old Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave birth to her first and only child, her son Pen, in the bedroom of the Casa Guidi in Florence. The most celebrated woman poet of her time had found new reserves of stamina since her departure from the life of a quasi-invalid in the stuffy bedroom at Wimpole St. And she had, at the age of 40, found love. Husband Robert whose devotion seems never to have wavered called her “A soul of fire in a shell of pearl.” <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0517187213&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0015MMXXE&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />A visitor who rents the Brownings’ Italian home from the Landmark Trust can sleep in that bedroom (where Elizabeth was to die 12 years later) though not in the original bed. The furnishings were all sold at auction at Sothebys in 1912. Only the efforts of the Browning Society of New York saved the apartment itself from being converted to offices in the 1970s.<br /><br />When I was spending a winter in Florence in the early 90s, I attended a rather forlorn cocktail party at the Casa Guidi just opposite the Palazzo Pitti. The rooms were almost empty except for portraits of the poets. The American hosts from the Browning Institute served us sherry and spoke in that valiant American way of their plans to retrieve or replace all the furniture so that the place would look the way it had in the Browning’s day. I didn’t think they had much hope of success. The restoration plan did prove difficult but help came in 1993 when ownership was transferred to Eton College. The Landmark Trust was brought into act as agents and in July 1995, the restored Casa Guidi was reopened for rent to up to six people.<br /><br />Anybody who has looked for a flat in London will find comfort in reading of how Robert Browning traipsed around Florence “returning in despair,” in Elizabeth’s words, when he was looking for a cool summer place for them to rent. He finally found the Casa Guidi and for that first summer they replaced a Russian prince and lived among his luxurious furnishings. When they returned the following year they bought their own furnishings and drapes. Although a lot of the original furniture has been lost, one of their favourite pieces an exuberant rococo mirror with very plump cherubs clutching candlesticks, still hangs on the drawing room wall. Elizabeth’s mother-of- pearl tea caddy is displayed on a table. The portrait of her father, who never forgave her for marrying, still hangs in the bedroom.<br /><br />In our driven workaholic age, I found it refreshing to read that in their early years at Casa Guidi, these two great poets didn’t bother writing much poetry. Robert sculpted and painted. He confessed to a friend that he could “with an unutterably easy heart, never write another line.” He went out a lot in the evenings and was very popular with women although he seems to have remained devoted to his wife. Elizabeth wrote to a friend that “being too happy doesn’t agree with literary activity.” More reclusive than her husband she was content to lie around on one of her eight sofas reading “wicked” French novels. Most of all and hard to believe in our cynical times, they seemed happy just to be together, walking on the narrow terrace in the evenings, going to Doney’s café for an ice cream or sitting on the Ponte Vecchio. When they did venture out, for example to hear “Signor Verdi’s very passionate and dramatic new opera “Il Trovatore” at the Pergola theatre, the low cost of living in Florence meant that they could do it in style and rent a box and order champagne. When they stayed home they ordered in from the trattoria across the road. <br /><br />A lot of what the Brownings did in Florence is not that different from what a contemporary visitor would do today. Doney’s café only disappeared a few years ago. Nowadays the Pergola theatre tends to concentrate on prose with the Teatro Communale providing the operas. A visit to the Casa Guidi is a good opportunity to discover the “Oltrarno” district of Florence. Traditionally the poorest district of Florence, it is earthier, less fashionable, more of a neighborhood than the other side of the river. Conscious of the traffic problems in the cramped, narrow streets, the city has introduced electrical “Bussini ecologici “- little ecological buses. Line D will take you round the Oltrarno district with frequencies every eight minutes. On the second Sunday of each month a flea market is held just a block from Casa Guidi on Piazza Santo Spirito.<br /><br />Elizabeth Browning is buried in the Protestant Cemetery, situated these days in the middle of the Viale, the ring road that circles central Florence. I tried to cross and pay her a return visit but the traffic was too frenetic. I retreated gratefully to the peace of my 21st century hotel.<br /><br />For further information:http://www.landmarktrust.org.ukJanette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-33543690613403566112008-04-19T05:35:00.000-07:002008-04-19T06:13:46.373-07:00HG Wells, The War of the Worlds and WokingStephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise in Woking? It was never going to happen. Woking is a very ordinary town, an hour's train ride south of London. It lacks the drama that Americans have the ability to confer on their dullest destinations. So Tom Cruise flees those spindly monster tripods as he travels from Athens, New York to his inlaws' house in Boston.<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00005JNTI&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />But walk out of Woking station, turn right and head along the diagonal street towards the precinct. And there he is at the end of the street. Wells' weird and wonderful Martian on his tripod watching over the Saturday shoppers in the precinct. Wells himself lived in Woking and would wander the nearby heathlands with his brother Frank discussing the great questions of life. They, like us, were living at the birth of a technological revolution: telegrams, electricity and fast news were new arrivals on their scene. "Suppose" Frank once asked "some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly" and thus the 1898 novel was born. <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0375759239&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />The Martian cylinders land in familiar suburban locations: Horsell Common, Addlestone Golf Links, Pyrford. The narrator's journey takes him not through Cruise and Spielberg's contemporary New York and New Jersey but along the hedgerows of southern England to a devastated London. The book is a fast, exciting read, worth revisiting and making the Spielberg film look clunky and sentimental in comparison.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-74968038663048733892008-04-14T02:54:00.000-07:002008-04-14T13:37:39.249-07:00Byron and VeniceThe end, in Missolonghi, Greece was sad - Byron was bled to death by doctors who knew no better. The beginning, born in Aberdeen and attended Cambridge, was often uproarious but the man lived most of his thirty six years in exile. Some of his finest moments were spent in Venice.<br /><br />The poet would swim home from evening engagements along the Grand Canal. His valet would accompany him in a gondola, holding his clothes. As Byron scholars will tell you, his complex about his club foot had contributed to his skill as a swimmer. In the water he gained grace - even in the waters of the Grand Canal.<br /><br />He first came to Venice in 1816 at the age of 28. Byron described Venice as, next to the East, "the greenest island of my imagination". His first sojourn was fairly discreet by Byronic standards. He taught himself Armenian, attended performances at La Fenice opera - 'the finest I have ever seen.' By the time of his second visit in 1818, he was a celebrity- a superstar poet. <br /><br />His friend, Hoppner, the British Consul describes British tourists in Venice, "eyeing him as they would a statue in a museum." Byron had at one point boasted of having a different woman on 200 consecutive evenings during his Venice stay which probably accounts for a lot of the fascination. But the man found time to work. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV with its famous opening line:<br />"I stood in Venice on the "Bridge of Sighs",<br />A Palace and prison on each hand,"<br />was composed during this time. Ever the exile, Byron did not stand in Venice for long. By 1819 he was gone.<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0140424504&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-66410086225171386202008-04-13T01:43:00.000-07:002008-04-17T00:08:34.517-07:00Virginia Woolf, Mills and Boon and LondonI hated the film "The Hours". Julianne Moore's period housewife was okay but oh Nicole and that putty nose. Perhaps I had a slight over-reaction because this is the one literary location that deals with the place where I grew up. The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has been, variously, home to Mick Jagger, Richard Attenborough, Queen Elizabeth the First (a small part of her palace remains by the Thames) even Alan Bennett's 'Mad' King George had his palace within the borough just down this wide and pastoral stretch of the river at Kew. <br /><br />Virginia Woolf lived in Richmond for a while and it is here that she and husband, Leonard Woolf, set up the Hogarth Press which would go on to launch the literary careers of Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, C. Day Lewis, Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, John Maynard Keynes. And the Woolf's quite literally "set up" the press - starting with a small handpress that they operated out of their dining room at 34 Paradise Road in Richmond. <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0156787334&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />But when I taught creative writing, very briefly, in the borough's continuing ed programme, it was a publisher at a 18-24 Paradise Road who seemed to excite my students' imagination: Mills and Boon, (motto - 'pure reading pleasure') the UK equivalent of Harlequin Romance occupies offices just yards from the Woolf's old home. And students would pass through my classes reciting the same old mantra: "well, we wouldn't read one but we've heard that they are easy to write and that the money is good." I never knew what to say to that. I sensed that you probably had to believe in that kind of romance to write that kind of romance. It would have been interesting to hear what Virginia Woolf would have thought of the neighbours. <br /><br />The Hogarth Press house and the Mills and Boon offices are on either side of a busy T-junction. The Woolf's old home is not open to visitors. You have to head down to Rodmell in East Sussex and visit Monks' House. We'll save that for another post. <br /><br />Richmond is worth a visit anyway. In one scene in 'The Hours', Kidman is filmed at the top of Richmond Hill with the Thames, winding through meadows and round woodsy islands towards the horizon. It is still one of the loveliest views in London but these days you are more likely to glimpse Mick Jagger out for a stroll.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-13860887484019281462008-04-12T10:11:00.001-07:002008-12-08T16:36:13.071-08:00Douglas Coupland's Vancouver<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvMAswPjvi137U_KCSnnqzSrIQu4EGwT3c7NmH42Ie6Dhql20kkGNqrEuSuYb-di-xPf25FB8dRcOBwgoCZ6yRWe588i1oeEmWXC0F_Q1OluhTECVUN0Xf9Tw7Sc5dge3oicZmSNcIwNU/s1600-h/P8300296.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvMAswPjvi137U_KCSnnqzSrIQu4EGwT3c7NmH42Ie6Dhql20kkGNqrEuSuYb-di-xPf25FB8dRcOBwgoCZ6yRWe588i1oeEmWXC0F_Q1OluhTECVUN0Xf9Tw7Sc5dge3oicZmSNcIwNU/s200/P8300296.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5188646051881745954" /></a><br />Sailing past Canada House in Trafalgar Square, on the top of a double decker bus, I saw the banner draped across the building - <span style="font-style:italic;">Douglas Coupland</span>. I knew that Coupland was a novelist but had no knowledge of his artistic activities. So I assumed that the Canadians had decided to fly Coupland in from his native Vancouver and just, well, have him hang out inside their splendid old colonial building. I debated going in and hanging out with him but the bus had sailed past, on its way to Piccadilly. And really, Coupland belongs in Vancouver.<br /><br />Coupland belongs in West Vancouver to be precise. His seminal, "Generation X" may have taken place in the US but Coupland, who confesses these days to caring little for travel, is rooted in that bright, almost Californian, land of upmarket strip malls and luxury mansions on hills with stunning views that lies beyond the Lions Gate bridge - gazing sleepily across at downtown Vancouver. <br /><br />Coupland's "jPod" had a recent outing as a series on Canadian tv. That story revolves around a group of video game programmers whose last names all begin with 'J'. They work in a 'pod' developing a game called 'BoardX'(and later 'Sprite Quest'). Coupland has been quoted as saying that the company they work for resembles but in no way is Electronic Arts - a video game company located in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.<br /><br />But my favourite Coupland novel is "Eleanor Rigby". This one is a bit of a departure from his admittedly brilliant observations on our Google run planet. No other writer has understood and described our strange new cyber world better than Coupland. And with such rapidity. The man does not need to stand back and ponder a development. It happens and Coupland has it processed and ready to go. <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1582346437&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />"Eleanor Rigby" is the story of a very lonely woman,Liz Dunn, living in a dull little condo in, where else, West Van. Her life turns around when her deeply disturbed and terminally ill, illegitimate son who she had given up for adoption, returns to her life. For all his irony and detachment, Coupland has an almost naive sweetness in dealing with his character's emotional lives. Without saying too much, he gives his heroine a happy ending but not before leading his reader through one of the finest studies of modern loneliness that I've come across in a long time.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-81131065889219278572008-04-12T05:07:00.000-07:002008-04-12T05:28:07.572-07:00Stephen King's MaineThe American day begins in Maine –mossy, moosey Maine – that rugged, empty,most northeastern state. Maine is first with the dawn but it is a writer of our darkest nights who is one of Maine’s most famous sons. Stephen King, the world’s bestselling novelist and recent recipient of the National Book Foundation Medalwas born in Portland Maine and has spent most of his adult life in Bangor, Maine.<br /><br />“King fans come to Bangor from as far away as Moscow,” says Stu Tinker who presides over Betts Books in a small parade of shops on Hammond Street. The bookstore is a virtual King museum; it carries copies of all his works,first editions, foreign language editions, t-shirts and other memorabilia. Tinker even has an address in Beijing on his mailing list. How could someone in Beijing relate to King’s Bangor or those Maine woods? How much of King’s tenebrous world can we even hope to find in Maine? Surely the journey we need to make is inside the man’s teeming brain? Since that is not an option, I rent a car and head for Bangor on a grey autumn day. Bangor looks to this English writer’s eyes, a lot like a northern English industrial town – oppressive dark red brick buildings –a chimney stack or two. For Europeans whose fantasy New England is one of white clapboard villages, the industrial red brick is always a surprise.<br /><br />King’s birthplace of Portland is, these days, a politely bustling port town of art galleries, coffee shops, fine restaurants and elegant brownstone houses on cobbled streets. But he has chosen to live in Bangor – a bleaker, more northern place a quintessentially America small town whose heart has evidently been ripped out and transplanted to the local strip mall where it now beats weakly if at all.But of course King is bound to be more redbrick than white clapboard, more Bangor than Portland. And Bangor looms over his work.<br /><br />King’s fictional town of Derry is Bangor,the setting for “It” the 1981 novel that some feel is King’s finest work.Stu Tinker is happy to provide a map that allows King pilgrims to make their way to many Bangor literary locations that feature in “It” and other novels and films. The gateway to “It’s” lair was through a sewer pipe in a swampy woodland by the Kenduskeag stream on the edge of town. Just a few minutes away is the Thomas Hill standpipe, an immense, white fortress-like structure that contained the dead children’s souls in “IT” and, when the evil erupted out of the earth, toppled and flooded Derry. The standpipe is still functioning– there is an enormous cistern inside. At night it takes on an eerie beauty when it is crowned with lights. The canal where “It’s” unfortunate gay victim is thrown to his death still runs just behind City Hall.“Graveyard Shift” was filmed at the waterworks. The narrator’s beloved wife in “Bag of Bones” dies just outside the pharmacy a few blocks up from Betts Books on Hammond. A lot of “Insomnia” is set around that same humble block of shops on Hammond. King often hides his monsters right there in the utilities - in those mundane, ignored places that hold our lives together – and often it seems the connection is water – the canal, the standpipe and, of course, the sewer.<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0451169514&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />Like so many masters of horror, he knows that the ordinary become extraordinary is the most horrifying of all.But, of course, he also takes us to the cemetery. Pet Sematary was inspired by a mispelt sign on a real pet cemetery out near Orrington where the Kings once lived. The film used Bangor’s lovely Mount Hope cemetery as a location and King himself in a cameo as a preacher..<br /><br />King’s Bangor home is easy to distinguish even though it is not marked on any of the maps. The neo-gothic structure stands behind a wrought-iron fence on one of the city’s most elegant boulevards where the lumber barons once built their mansions.Spider’s webs are woven into the wrought-iron fence, bat wings adorn the rim – a three-headed griffon rises out of one corner.<br /><br />King has also used the celebrated Maine coast as a setting – most recently in the tv screenplay “Storm of the Century” where tiny Southwest Harbor became the blizzard-bound and blighted Little Tall Island of the Story. I spend a sunny day in pursuit of King locations at Southwest and neighbouring Bar Harbor. I find instead lovely late summer villages with not a hint of evil. But the woods are all around – those Maine woods so celebrated of Thoreau and transformed into the primeval forest in Pet Sematary. I stop the car on the road and wonder if I should find a trail and walk in.But dusk will fall soon. And anyway King’s universe is elsewhere – in the world of every child who still fears the bogeyman, the child that everyone of us on the planet once was, who knows that the thing that made the twig snap in the woods is real. And is looking for us. And those primeval woods are the same for all of us because they come not from external geography but from some mysterious cellular memory that we all carry whether, in our daily existence, we look upon Red Square, the Forbidden City or Hammond Street in Bangor, Maine.<br /><br />Further information on Maine at: www.visitmaine.com – toll free: 1 888-95-Maine.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-68399542669064223512008-04-10T23:32:00.000-07:002008-04-11T00:13:59.228-07:00DH Lawrence and Taos, New MexicoWhen DH Lawrence first saw the Taos Valley in 1922 he said, “Something stood still in my soul and I started to attend.” He described New Mexico in general as “the greatest experience from the outside world that I ever had.<br />A tubercular DH Lawrence came to Taos on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation in 1922. New Mexico’s dry climate was thought to be beneficial. Mabel, a wealthy American woman who had run literary salons in New York and Italy, knew upon arriving in this small town nestling between the mountains and the mesa, that here she could found her long dreamed of community of artists, writers and thinkers. With her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, an Indian from the Taos Pueblo, she created a three storey house full of light in stark contrast to the squat low adobes of local architecture. In addition to Lawrence, visitors included Georgia O’Keefe, Carl Jung and Willa Cather. Lawrence went on to do some more painting while here and his notorious “pornographic” pictures are now kept in a locked room behind the reception desk at the garish La Fonda hotel on that mournful plaza. They can be viewed on request. I requested and got to see what are probably the least accomplished works on display in the whole town.<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0140188061&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />His New Mexican stay inspired Lawrence's short story "The Woman who Rode Away." Lawrence himself would not, in the end, ride away from Taos. His ashes are enshrined here at Mabel's ranch a short drive outside town. The novelist who travelled restlessly around the world has returned to Taos forever.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-6754747485026778262008-04-06T11:37:00.000-07:002008-04-10T23:32:29.164-07:00Ian Fleming's Goldeneye and Quantum of SolaceWhat a strange title for the new James Bond film. "Quantum of Solace" was a short story by Ian Fleming that appeared in "Modern Woman" in 1959. James Bond plays a smaller role in the story. "Quantum of Solace" is a mathematical measurement of love- that calculates the comfort, humanity and fellow feeling required between two people for love to survive. All a long way, away from the exotic setting of the classic Bond stories. But set in the Caribbean so not far from Fleming's opulent home, Goldeneye, in Jamaica.<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1572970340&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br />Ian Fleming spent 20 winters at this clifftop villa at Orcabessa, a small port on Jamaica’s north coast. He wrote 14 of the James Bond books here. Visitors included Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor and Evelyn Waugh. Noel Coward lived nearby at his villa, Firefly in Galina, now a museum. Fleming’s three bedroom home on a bluff overlooking a secluded cove is now part of a larger resort with four other villas, ranging from one to three bedroom units and can be rented individually or as a whole. His writing desk made of Jamaican Blue Mahoe can be seen in the master bedroom. The small cinema on site has a full collection of James Bond videos.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-87449596105519282752008-04-04T01:45:00.000-07:002008-04-11T00:16:14.864-07:00Rudyard Kipling in Vermont“All things considered there are only two kinds of men in the world - those that stay at home and those that do not,” said Kipling. He, of course, did not. He came to live in Vermont near Brattleboro and his American wife, Caroline’s family. Kipling fell in love with this New England landscape and bought eleven acres of land on a hill looking over the Connecticut River Valley. There he supervised the building of Naulakha - the jewel beyond price.Their daughers were born here and in the study, which remains exactly as he knew it, Kipling wrote the stories that were to become The Jungle Book. Wonderful autumn colours around this house and log fires and sleigh rides in winter. Another Landmark Trust property: www.landmarktrust.co.uk<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0954510399&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-79807472724496587022008-04-04T00:53:00.000-07:002008-04-11T00:22:05.598-07:00Lawrence Durrell - White House, Kalami, Corfu“English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary,” said Lawrence Durrell. Born in India, Durrell had found life in England unendurable when he returned there to attend school at the age of eleven. He later persuaded his family to move to Corfu in 1939 where they rented the White House in Kalami . Durrell felt that Greece reconnected him to India. He wrote descriptions of the house on the bay of Kalami and its views of Albania in his book “Prospero’s Cell”. He wrote descriptions of the house on the bay of Kalami and its views of Albania in his book “Prospero’s Cell”. His writing desk and dining table still form part of the apartment’s furnishings<br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0571057586&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-82650685226881142462008-03-31T03:08:00.000-07:002008-04-11T00:25:56.241-07:00Ernest Hemingway's Stresa - A Farewell to ArmsThe manager of the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees in Stresa on Italy's Lake Maggiore hands me a photo of Ernest Hemingway. The Nobel laureate is sitting at the hotel bar. He is leaning slightly backwards, clutching his stomach, his eyes are closed. He looks as is if he is about to slide peacefully on to the Persian carpet. Has he just consumed yet another of the "cool and clean martinis" that Frederick Henry, the hero of his novel, "A FAREWELL TO ARMS," mentions twice in one page as he sits at the same bar? "Hemingway stayed here many times," says the manager. "He first came in 1918 and kept coming back right through to the fifties." He shows me the hotel's Golden Book of illustrious guests where, along with John Steinbeck, Clark Gable, assorted Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and various maharajahs and kings, (the hotel does have its own heliport) Hemingway has signed himself as "an old client." He always stayed in room 106 which was, in fact, a suite on the first floor, looking out on Lake Maggiore and the peacocks, statues, topiary and terraces of the dream-like "Isola Bella." "You cannot, alas, visit," says the manager. "It is occupied." I will later learn that the suite is booked for a long stay by an Arabian princess. Hemingway's protagonist, Frederick Henry and his lover, the English nurse, Catherine Barclay arrive at the Grand Hotel just before the book begins it final, tragic climax. The novel opens on the Austro-Italian frontier where American ambulance driver, Henry, is based with the Italian army. The Italy of Hemingway's novel is a grey land of the north and of war. Mud, mountains, mist and most of all, rain, fill the landscape of A Farewell to Arms. I first read this novel when I was twelve. The only Italian place name that I recognized in the novel was Milan where the love affair between Frederick Henry and Catherine Barclay is consummated in an empty American hospital after he undergoes major knee surgery. My twelve year old self was too innocent to wonder, as I did at a recent reading, about the logistics of lovemaking within days of such surgery. At twelve I knew nothing of war or Italy or passionate love and yet I devoured this book. If Milan marks the beginning of the lovers' happiness, Stresa marks the beginning of the end . I would glimpse Stresa four years later in 1970 from a train window. It was my first sight of Italy and I felt woozy from what seemed then to be the sultry, sensuous, radiant Mediterranean charm. There was a palm tree (the first I'd ever seen) on the station platform, there were rounded red tiles on the roofs and a royal blue lake dotted with mysterious islands as a back drop. Hemingway's hero also travels by train around this region but he is wounded and moving through the greys and browns of the war zone in winter. He tells how he vomits on the train floor but "it did not matter because the man on the other side had been very sick on the floor several times before."</p><p>As his disgust and disillusion with the war increase so does Frederick Henry's passionate love for Catherine Barclay. When he narrowly escapes a random execution during the chaotic Italian retreat from the front, he joins Catherine in Stresa. But by now he is wanted for desertion. Stresa's vibrant beauty is marred by the November rain that greets his arrival in the town, and by our awareness that the lovers' time in this lovely place is fated to be cut short. When the Italian army comes looking for Henry, he and Catherine are rescued by the hotel barman who warns them and helps them to slip out of the hotel and into his boat. He explains the route that they must row to escape to neutral Switzerland at the north end of the lake. <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0684801469&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>The hotel manager is handing me another photo of Hemingway in a small boat fishing in front of the hotel. No guests go fishing during my stay. The couples who pause for a cappuccino at La Verbanella café on the lake shore or buy an excellent sandwich from Rosaria at the Cambusa delicatessen and wine shop in town are more likely to hire a mountain bike or follow the percorso vita, an obstacle course of gymnastic equipment set at intervals along the lakefront. "Stresa is one of the few resorts that has grown quieter," says Rosaria in her excellent English. "There used to be orchestras in all the lake front cafes - now they are too expensive." The town does seem to be fading gently into its past. Majestic villas stand abandoned behind stern padlocks guarded only by headless statues or winged lions with rusty halos. Buddlea bushes grow out of the rooftops. Back at the Grand Hotel, music and the modern world reappear in the form of another American, singer Billy Joel who is sitting at the bar ordering tea for his daughter. The Arabian princess wanders by on her way to the gym.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-22220814217149984182008-03-31T03:06:00.000-07:002008-04-11T00:45:12.039-07:00The Maltese Falcon - Sam Spade's San Francisco"On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” So says a plaque on a building on the corner of Burritt Alley and Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. This is a pleasant residential block in a cul-de-sac - not quite the place for a murder but, of course, this murder only happened in the pages of Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon”. As I will discover as I make my way around Sam Spade’s neighbourhood, San Franciscans are happy to pretend that Sam, and that motley crew of Falcon hunters, the mysterious Miss Wonderly, oily little Joel Cairo and the chillingly genial Gutman all really travelled the city blocks around Union Square in their pursuit of the shiny black bird.<br />This pretence requires some effort for Dashiell Hammett was not given to elaborate scene setting.The most detailed description in The Maltese Falcon consists of one sentence: Spade has received the call telling of Miles’s murder; he phones a yellow cab company. The taxi drops him “where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown.” <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0679722645&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>Sam Spade’s San Francisco ignores everything that the postcards and travellers, including me, associate with the city. "Little cable cars don’t climb halfway to the stars” or anywhere else in Sam Spade’s world. There is hardly a sense of the hills that can turn even a walk up the block for breakfast into a calf-stretching hike. Bush Street’s “roofing” of Stockton just hints at the way this city scrambles up and down Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill - the three heights that separate Sam Spade from a blue ocean, an orange bridge and a beautiful bay that he never seems to see. As I walk around Sam Spade’s world I realize how small it is. This is dark, busy San Francisco, the part that turns its back on all the blue sea and sky and on all those pastel-painted, gabled Victorian houses that cling so optimistically to those cruel hills. As I ride the Hyde Street cable car from Nob to Russian Hill at that point when it turns to tumble down to the Pacific, San Francisco looks to me as though it has just emerged from the laundry all crisp and blue and white, hung out to dry in the morning sun. But Hammett’s characters don’t have time to look at such loveliness. They are, after all, in pursuit of a much more elusive beauty - “the stuff dreams are made of” as Bogart said in the film (but Hammett did not in the book): the black-enamelled, solid gold, jewel-encrusted falcon that will consume all their ambition and energy and ultimately escape them all. Hammett grants his characters a very occasional diversion. Joel Cairo attends a show. They are currently showing Moliere’s Misanthrope; A Christmas Carol is announced for the holidays. It is hard to imagine Joel Cairo attending either one. He wouldn’t have had far to walk from his Hotel Belvedere. In its true incarnation as the Bellevue it was just one block down at Geary and Taylor. These days it has been reborn as the Monaco, a chic boutique “fantasy” hotel where upturned Vuitton trunks serve as the front desk and hot air balloons on the trompe l’oeil ceilings race through fluffy clouds. There is an occasional mention of San Francisco’s night fog, “thin, clammy and penetrant,” but most of the time, the Falcon’s characters move through a world of interiors: Sam’s office, his apartment, Brigid’s apartment and various hotel suites. Dashiell Hammett worked for a while as a detective in San Francisco He moved around a lot but lived for a while at 891 Post Street and that is where he put Sam Spade’s apartment. When I ask a restaurant waiter if it’s a safe area to visit at night, he shrugs and says, ”It’s a bit of a gay ghetto after dark…..”<br />Hammett gave Spade an office in a splendid 1926 building at 111 Sutter Street. The marble hall and walls and the beamed, painted ceiling look more like the entrance to a Medici palace. The doorman, the maintenance man, anybody who happens to be around the hallway knows that this is where “Sam Spade had his office - on the fifth floor.”<br />In another of Hammett’s curt stage directions, he has Spade say: “Have him pick me up at John’s, Ellis Street.”And there, the detective asks the waiter to hurry his order of “chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes.” In 1997, John’s Grill was declared a National Literary Landmark. For an expensive $26 dollars, a visitor can still order those chops. If they do, they should try to eat them in the upstairs dining room where Hammett books and a replica Maltese Falcon are kept in a glass case in the entrance. But there is something missing. Sam Spade might recognize the look of the place but probably not the smell. There is no smoke. And the smokers who lurk outside his office building back up on Sutter, puffing furtively during a short American lunch break are a reminder that Sam and his mink-draped ladies have been left behind in another century.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9101959894579802136.post-26758116616876322292008-03-31T02:55:00.000-07:002008-04-11T01:06:13.258-07:00John Steinbeck - Cannery RowCannery Row, in Monterey, California lies between Castroville and Carmel.Castroville, the “artichoke capital of the world” once crowned a young Marilyn Monroe “the first California Artichoke Queen,” in 1947. Carmel once had Clint Eastwood as mayor. Back in the 1930s, where John Steinbeck set his novel of the same name, Cannery Row once had sardines - millions and millions of them swirling around just offshore waiting for the Chinese and the Sicilian and the Portuguese immigrants to fish them out of the Pacific. Eventually they would fish them out of existence and the “stink and the grating noise” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row would disappear. But before then, the 1962 Nobel Prize winner had a tale to tell. <br /><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=janetgrifflit-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=014200068X&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />“To open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves,” says John Steinbeck in the opening chapter of. He is telling the reader how he plans to set down his story of life on Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, California, the row of sardine canneries and fisheries that would eventually name itself after his book. He is comparing this subtle capture of a story with the capture of certain delicate ocean flatworms that will break if touched and must be allowed to “ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife.”<br />Subtlety and delicacy are not the first words that come to mind on today’s Cannery Row. But woven in among the shopping malls, the amusement arcades and the seafood restaurants are a handful of wooden buildings that contain the dramatic history of the short life and death of an industry. Better still they contain the story of the life and work of one man. “Doc,” the collector of all the lovely animals of the sea in his little wooden laboratory overlooking the Pacific. “For Ed Ricketts who knows why or should” says the enigmatic dedication at the front of this book. Ed Ricketts was Steinbeck’s friend and mentor and Ed Ricketts was “Doc.” “Half-Christ and half-goat” was how Steinbeck described the man who would write"Between Pacific Tides" and introduce to marine biology the, then revolutionary, concept of ecology -that you can’t understand an organism unless you understand where it lives and who lives with it. Ricketts’ Doc, is working quietly away at this major task in the background of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. In the foreground of this story is a compassionate loner “a fountain of philosophy and science and art,” who loved good beer and Bach, and “true things.” And who by being faithful to those “true things” automatically made the people around him each aspire to be a better person." Among the people around Doc in Cannery Row were the prostitutes in the two bordellos, the group of drifting young men who settled in the Palace Flophouse and Lee Chong the owner of the Chinese grocer’s across the street. Of the two bordellos, the Bear Flag Restaurant (in reality the Lone Star Café) was replaced by a concrete warehouse in 1942. But La Ida’s is still standing. This was where Eddie,one of the boys at the Flophouse, would drain the remaining drinks to take back to the others. There are no more trips upstairs but the café is still in business, run these days by Kalisa, an exuberant Latvian. The ceiling is still papered with the same Chinese newspapers that grew yellow from the smoke of Steinbeck and Rickett’s cigarettes.The fictional Lee Chong’s grocery was based on Wing Chong’s Market next to La Ida’s. Whether his store had the same extraordinary stock of the fictional “miracle of supply” in the novel, where “he never had a sale, never reduced a price and never remaindered,” we cannot know. Recently the owner of what is now a gift store opened up access to the old 1930’s ice box where Ed Ricketts and Steinbeck would have bought their beer.Running through these interweaving tales of all the teaming life along the Monterey shore, is the ongoing story of a surprise party to be held for Doc. The drifting boys at the Palace Flophouse are somewhat in awe of him and conceive confused and often boozy plans to “do something nice for Doc.” His old home and laboratory where the resulting disastrous party is held was later burned down by fire but rebuilt and purchased by the City of Monterey. The Palace Flophouse is long gone. A new life has come to Cannery Row. There is excellent jazz at Sly McFlys where the locals go. And those same locals dance the two step up at the Blue Fin café and stop for cigars at the Cool Cat cigar shop. Neighbour Clint Eastwood filmed the bar scenes in “Play Misty for Me” at the bar of The Sardine Factory Restaurant. The task that Doc performed with such dedication goes on now opposite La Ida’s old whorehouse at the magnificent Monterey Aquarium. But to go where Doc’s spirit still lingers, read Steinbeck’s loving and magical description of the Great Tide Pool at the opening of chapter six - I guarantee that after a few lines, the page will seem to undulate and shimmer like the mysterious underwater world it is describing. Then turn your back on the shopping malls and souvenir shops and walk through Steinbeck Plaza down to McAbee Beach and Ed Rickett’s beloved ocean beyond.Janette Griffithshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15836983801769722555noreply@blogger.com0