The Brilliant evasiveness of the English. Or of Richard.
Several of Richard’s loving ex-wives have been checking in this holiday season. His first ex-wife asked in an email how he was planning to celebrate Christmas.
I really like this ex-wife. I like them all. I have met only one, number 2. We met in Leeds and got on immediately. I'm sure I would feel the same about the other two ex-wives, were we to meet.
Ex-wife number one was in the throes of extensive holiday planning. This is where the thing I mentioned above about Richard comes in. Instead of saying in a friendly way he wasn't going to be celebrating Christmas with decorations or seasonal baking, he said, "The last two women I have been with are Jewish."
He played the Jew card. I said, "So you made it seem like Jews killed Christmas as well as Christ, himself." Richard said, "No." What else could he say?
Recently, I coached him on pronouncing the word, "Jewish." He has a tendency to say it in one syllable . . . so it comes out JOOSH. I said, "It's JEW ISH, two syllables, like something is kind of a Jew." He practiced and got it right. He's excellent at it, now.
The thing is, I think he is missing Christmas in the old way he used to feel part of a family that held him in its bosom. He still has a family of people who love him greatly, but they are in England, planning seasonal gatherings of the Toon clan without him. He is present as the one who is missing.
He kind of acknowledges this is true. Christmas Day, I think, is a tender occasion for him. How could it not be, if it radiates love and companionship for a person? And here he is, marooned with another Jew in god knows whereville.
I think I may be happier than I've ever been.
I know you have other ways to spend your money, especially now . . . .
The next ZOOM conversation will gather on SATURDAY JANUARY 20 from 3 to 4pm EST.
Possible topics.
How to keep a writer's notebook as opposed to writing in a diary or a journal? How to write autobiography as a museum of things, people, places, and events you love? What is layering in narrative? How do you make a piece (in any genre) that you worked on over a long period of time and in different chunks come together as if you wrote it yesterday in one burst?
Please RSVP to be added to the list for a ZOOM link here: lauriestone@substack.com. The ZOOMs are for monthly and annual paid subscribers, and there is a special holiday offer now for new subscribers and gift subscriptions.
"Entre Nous" (streaming on Kanopy)
The other night, we watched “Entre Nous” (1983), a film by Diane Kurys. It felt like I had never seen it before, and maybe I had not. I remember being interested in the films of Kurys at a time when I was watching films as a way of life. I was seeing as much work by women as I could. Seeing films was a way of life for me long before I began to write for publication in my twenties. Seeing and reading the work of women artists has, more of less, become my life.
Kurys made films about her life. “Entre Nous” is about her parents and a woman her mother met in Lyon in the early 1950s. The women are called Lena (the mother), played by Isabelle Huppert, and Madeleine (the friend), played by Miou-Miou. “Coup de foudre” is an alternate title of the film and means “love at first sight.” Here’s the thing I want to tell you about this movie: it’s great. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. It’s a story of doubles, two women and the two men they are married to, men who look so alike, you’re at first confused by whom you’re seeing when the actions skips ahead 10 years.
The women meet at a school event their kids are part of and instantly feel a spark. As soon as they begin to speak, the rest of the world falls away from them because they have found in the other a self they didn’t know existed. This is the discovery we all made as part of the women’s movement. This is the love affair we all had with selves we didn’t know were possible.
At a point in the movie, Lena’s husband, Michel, screams at her she’s a “dyke.” The women aren’t yet lovers. They simply need each other to breathe. But the point Kurys is making is that, in the way women discover a self in their romances with other women, we are all dykes. We are all dykes whether or not our erotic fantasy lives and our lived sexual lives include other women.
It’s funny, when I was writing for the Voice, I so often promoted the work of gay artists that people who didn’t know me assumed I was gay. Certain kinds of romances are confusing, and our erotic natures are a jumble of impulses. Lena meets Michel in 1942 in a refugee camp, where Jews have been taken during the Vichy regime. Michel is a guard, although he is also a Jew, and Lena marries him as a way out of the camp—from there Jews are being shipped to concentration camps. Together, the couple escape to Italy through a snowy passage in the Alps, and by the time Lena meets Madeleine, she has adopted the style of a bourgeois housewife, complete with a fur coat and hats with veils.
In time, the women will come to resemble each other. Lena will begin to dress in the chic and carefree gear Madeleine wears. Madeleine is an artist, although she is stalled in her own version of a dead-end marriage. The women plan to open a dress shop in Lyon, but it’s soon made clear that Lyon isn’t possible for them, and they move with their kids to Paris. In a postscript, Kurys tells the viewer her parents never saw each other again.
This morning, as I was writing this piece, Richard wrote about the times in his life he took off from life A to make a run for life B. The way he wrote about these actions, he was looking at his sharkish drive to swim to the next location and also at the pain he left behind him. I told him about a man I’ll call John, whom I’d had hopes for in my fifties and who dumped me in a way I found so painful I can still feel it. I said that being dumped this way was the best thing John gave me because he showed me the pain I had caused other people and for the rest of my life I would not forget this.
The Crown (streaming on Netflix)
I didn't want to watch The Crown. It was 2:30 in the morning, a time when you say, “Really? What could possibly put me to sleep? Elizabeth Debicki plays the Diane who will die in the car with Dodi Fayed, and I find now, days later, I can still hear her awkward delivery that starts with a burst of anxious gaiety and ends with a hush. Every sentence she speaks is musically the story of her life.
The bowed head. The lips held together lest they say the wrong thing. A desire not to wound anything, not even her ex-husband Charles, now played by Dominic West with all the resemblance to Charles in his bearing and speech as a large Italian cheese has to Charles—not that there's anything wrong with Dominic or cheese. Just, you know, there's no Charles in this performance.
Debicki's Diana wants to move through her sadness as a butter knife, smoothing life along. She strains so hard not to say “no,” absolutely “No, I want to go home and not to be dragged on yet another jaunt with you to Paris.” She strains so hard not to say “no,” although, finally, she does tell Dodi she doesn't love him and they won't be married. She says it in a way to build him up and not to shatter him, but she strains so hard not to say the simple true things she feels, she goes and gets herself killed.
The Commuter (2018, streaming on Netflix)
Last week, we watched The Commuter (2018), a movie starring Liam Neeson. He looks tired. The picture is filmed in a Metro North train. Liam gets beaten up with sharp objects so often, he doesn’t look as much like hamburger as you’d expect. The plot is spectacularly nonsensical and also not boring. Mike from Breaking Bad gets killed, and that is sad. If the movie were a sandwich, it would be fried egg on a buttered kaiser roll.
I remembered Liam Neeson in Love, Actually, where his performance as a sad-sack widower dad, with one of those lovely, boy-genius sons, is touching and sharp. In real life, Liam would, 6 years after that film, become a widower himself when his wife, Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, died freakishly of a head trauma from a fall on skis. Her head hadn’t bothered her that much and she’d waited to seek medical attention.
I want to find an application for this death, not so Natasha will not have died in vain. We all die in vain, as we live in vain, if you pull back and look at the big picture, I mean include the cosmos in the shot. I want to honor Natasha, who was talented and beautiful, with the tiny wish that someone else might be spared dying young and beautiful. So, no matter what you may think about a blow to your head, especially caused by a fall on skis, hurry to an ER, even if it turns out nothing is wrong. Better safe than dead is not a bad maxim to sew into your clothes, the way your mother sewed name tags on the clothes that were sent to camp.
I am only now, for the first time in my life, thinking about this task and the fact that it was thrust on my mother for no reason other than she had been cast in the part of “the mother.” It was a part she did not try out for, and although she loved my sister, she did not ever warm to the soul-erasing term “the mother.” I love her for this reason, and I see in her inward and almost secret rebellion a version of me. How did my mother sew in the labels? Think about it. She would have had to gather up all the required camp gear, sent to parents on a list, all the underpants and undershirts and shorts and socks and sweaters, and god knows what else was required to serve me for two months each summer. She would have sewn in the labels with my name on them before packing them all, including bed linens and towels, into a trunk that would be shipped off. My sister also went to this camp. Where were the trunks stored during the winter months? This is another thing I am only now wondering about.
Was my mother talented with a needle? Not really, although I have a tender memory of her in later years, altering her own clothes. Why? I have no idea. She would hem something. That’s not unusual, but she would also cut off the bottoms of shirts she thought was too long. She would cut and resew all kinds of things with tiny, not really that regular stitches she was very proud of. I find this touching because it has a crafty quality to it. Something artistic and designy about it. She once took a class in making tie-dyed things. They were quite beautiful in the way that anything scrunched together and dunked into dye and then opened up looks exactly the same as every other tie-dyed item. My mother was trying to be an artist in her way, and I have a sense she sewed in the name tags with something of this muted, needle-worker’s flair.
As I watched the movie with Liam Neeson, doing the things he does as a weirdo, Irish-accented, slack-haired, aging action figure, who is always on the side of doing the right thing, as I watched him perform this role, I could see why people enjoyed him, although Mike from Breaking Bad, in his brief performance, acted circles around Liam. Liam was conserving his energy for the 15 protracted fight scenes in the train, and this is fair.
By the end of the train’s journey, there wasn’t a window left unbroken by some body part of Liam’s crashing through it or the head of an assailant he was sending to a death as road kill. How did Liam have the stamina and skill to outlast all the younger men? He was an ex-cop is how. Being an ex-cop is a celebrated station in life. You say it proudly, “I’m an ex-cop,” a title my mother would have enjoyed far more than “the mother.” Many times as I was growing up, she told anyone in hearing distance she had wanted to be a WAC during the war. She would say, “I would have looked good in the uniforms.”
I want to recommend Masha Gessen’s masterful piece, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust, How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today," The New Yorker, December 9, 2023.
I will quickly summarize to say this is the most astonishingly brilliant piece of reporting, combined with memoir, combined with social and political analysis, combined with scholarship, combined with the sorrows and consolations of philosophy, combined with irony and ambiguity that I can remember having read. It is a must-read and so beautifully constructed, so musical in its way, you will gasp, and it is everything you need to come close to knowing what to understand and feel about Gaza, antiSemitism, the bending of the Holocaust in time and politics, and just plain ordinary craziness.
Gessen has skin in every game—including Russia, Ukraine, and family deaths in the Holocaust—and they never tell you what to do or how to think. The restraint and almost mischievous, Jewish head shake of this voice—as it sorts through the various shady claims of governments to represent themselves as Nazi-fighters—is part of its mysterious power.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust?_sp=590fe3d9-0c94-46f1-a6e2-58022c410acb.1703030533018&fbclid=IwAR3BcnrGl8haw6dHR2TGnri7D2I_YpAKK4TGk6_BxNjQNtLKt2oaSMIaEPg
Thank you for the Masha Gessen recommendation! What a powerhouse she is. I feel as though I just attended a grad school seminar.
I generally love your newsletters but this one was especially great, even for you. Your writing about your mother resisting the role of "the mother" was so resonant, and this part made me laugh: "How did Liam have the stamina and skill to outlast all the younger men? He was an ex-cop is how. Being an ex-cop is a celebrated station in life. You say it proudly, 'I’m an ex-cop,' a title my mother would have enjoyed far more than 'the mother.'"