One good warm day during Spring Quarter, and all my students want to have class “outdoors”. Sure, let’s sit in the wet grass uncomfortably without my security-blanket white board, and pretend we love nature, kids! Enjoy the two big ovals of wetness on your asses and enjoy your venerable teacher trying to stand up from a prone position, proving that he is not long for this earth. Et in Arcadio Ego, OMG I’m suddenly the “ego”. OMG I have become Henry James.
There are delicious stories of the less-than-genius trying to destroy those with genuine vision. We love the drama of “Amadeus”, Peter Shaffer’s ersatz history play about Antonio Salieri’s single-handed destruction of W.A. Mozart. The film “Prick Up Your Ears” depicts the rise and demise of British playwright Joe Orton, killed at the hands of his partner Kenneth Halliwell (“You do everything better than me! You even die better than me!”). But for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite action, and so much of history is quietly limned with stories of invisible helpers—enthusiasts who recognized genius before anybody else does, and do everything they could to bring further recognition to the most important thing.
Frances Anne Kemble was a famous actress in England, but when she toured the United States in the 1830’s, she fell in love with a Southern plantation heir and married him, settling in for a life on one of those slave islands off Atlantic coast for several years. Miserable in semi-retirement, she wrote mediocre poetry and kept a lively journal, witness to the mistreatment of slaves. She published a volume, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, hardly known in this country, but a bestseller on the level of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United Kingdom.
Arguably, historians have pointed out, with the Journal, she turned the opinion of Britain against the South, keeping them from joining in the American Civil War (had they intervened, they would have helped the Confederate States of America contributing to the textiles of the region), and turning the tide of history. I have been fascinated by Kemble for decades, and have a valuable lithograph of Kemble, and an even more valuable—and beloved—first edition of Journal of a Residence on a George Plantation.
Now, I’m cracking Henry James’ Washington Square, and discovering that HJ was very good friends with France Anne Kemble, which is like a plot twist you always knew twisted—of course he knew her—she was bicoastal, she was in the theater, she was literary, she had stories, she had lived “in nature” on that island down south, so he didn’t have to. Washington Square is based on Kemble’s brother, who fell in love “wrong”.
"A plot twist you always knew twisted" -- goddammit I love you, Brian B.
A very fine twist of fates, and OF COURSE Henry James knew her. Except for his stints living in a ghost house, he was a butterfly. Also, that feral beast looks more bored than feral. Although of course a real feral beast would do exactly that, so the prey would never suspect the upcoming danger. Assessment: 100% feral.