In Schubert, the major tonality is more tragic than the minor. It is the way he switches between them that rips at our innards. What is he doing? What is he saying? Recognition of darkness turns to acceptance of it, maybe. Or to seeing the beauty beyond it. Or to welcoming it. Or to extending compassion to everyone for it, with a wry smile through the tears. I believe that in the change from minor to major he is not only recognising the darkness and transforming it, but empathising with both sides of it, and with us all: in that switch, for Schubert, lies the essence of the human condition.

This is so accurate, I think. The major tonality has always been what moved me the most about Winterreise, exactly because it never signified to me something as banal as a glimpse of hope or optimisim or springtime. To me the switch to major tonality in the opening lied “Gute Nacht” has always been what solidified the sadness of it, and set the tone for the rest of the lied cycle which, I believe, is a cycle about an infitine, hopeless sadness. To me, the major tonality in this lied, and the rest of the lieder, signifies the recognition of the lost beauty, or love, or happiness without which the sadness would be bearable.

(from Ian Bostridge’s wonderful, staged Winterreise)

The change goes so well with the lyrics, too:

Will dich im Traum nicht stören,
Wär schad’ um deine Ruh’.
Sollst meinen Tritt nicht hören -
Sacht, sacht die Türe zu !
Schreib im Vorübergehen
Ans Tor dir: Gute Nacht,
Damit du mögest sehen,
An dich hab’ ich gedacht.

If there was nothing to the lied cycle but the bitter resolution expressed in the first three stanzas (“Was soll ich länger weilen…?”), surely there would be no lied cycle at all. The persona would have marched right out of the wintry little town with rapid steps, as indicated by the resolute walking pace of the lied (also noted by Duchen). Spring would have come. But the persona lingers because of course there is something other than the bitterness. There is a tenderness and a love that, tragically, seems to live on the frail constitution of the persona amid the frozen landscape, like the crow that is hoping to pick the persona’s bones after his death, and it creeps into every lied in the cycle, making the cycle the masterpiece that it is.

Am I reading too much into Schubert’s music, putting words in his mouth? Likely. But I feel like it’s more the other way around: Schubert puts notes into my mouth. Even in the pieces that are purely instrumental, I always feel like he is using music as a universal language and speaking to me directly and extremely eloquently through it. Like in the second movement of his piano trio in E flat, which Duchen also posts and which happens to be one of my favourite pieces of any classical music:

I feel like I understand exactly what Schubert is saying here, as plainly as if he had been speaking in my native tongue, except that his music makes him capable of expressing sentiments so complex and nuanced that words would never be able to cover it. There’s something in there about frustration, something about sorrow and longing, and something about an obstacle, but also something about determination. And something very basic about breathing, one’s chest rising and falling. But like I said, my words aren’t adequate. Sometimes words aren’t. To me, Schubert proved this better than any other composer.

The RAF heistated at first because of the risky nature of the planned attack: It called for extremely hazardous low-level flight, so they estimated, and since the headquarters were situated in central Copenhagen, many civilian lives might be lost. When they finally and carried out the attack, it became clear that their concern had been justified: During the attack, one of the RAF Mosquito aircrafts hit a lamp post , its wing was damaged and it’s crashed in a garage building right behind a school at Frederiksberg, Copenhagen – the Institut Jeanne d’Arc (commonly known as The French School). Seeing smoke and flames coming from the school, several of the aircrafts in the raid’s second and third wave mistook the school for the Shellhus target and proceeded to bomb the school. A private Catholic girls school, which nevertheless also admitted non-Catholic pupils, and boys were admitted in the schools kindergarten. In the bombing more than 100 civilians were killed, 86 of them children.

The French School after the bombardment. Photo: Scanpix

This was the only major loss of civilians during World War II in Denmark: We were lucky. We know this. Yet if a catastrophe had to happen, it could hardly have been more tragic: The accidental bombing of a school. At noon, on a week day, full of children and their beloved teachers, a staff of devout nuns attending their education. In this essay, I would like to discuss how the Danish nation as a culture has handled this traumatic incident.

If you had to answer the question very briefly it wouldn’t be completely out of line, I think, to say that it was handled badly. At least in the immediate aftermath. Since the 1970s the school children that survived the incident have spoken up about their experience and one thing that they – almost everyone of them – attest to is the experience that they were not allowed to talk about and process the experience of escaping the wrecked school, many of them trapped in rubble for hours before being rescued, many of them witnessing the violent deaths of school mates and teachers. Many of the survivors have reported experiencing flashbacks from the unprocessed trauma all through their lives.

There was one clear reason for this: The parents of surviving children have later revealed that the doctors and psychiatrists at the time all gave them the same advice: Don’t talk to your children about what has happened. Children forget if they’re not reminded. Change the subject if your child tries to discuss the incident. The parents, wishing only the best for their children, of course took this advice to heart in good faith.

But I also think that there might be another reason: I think everybody – not just those immediately affected – were eager to forget about this incident. Certainly, the date “March 21″ bears little consequence in Danish culture, compared to say “September 11″ which is instantly associated with traumatizing images. I think the utter meaninglessness of the incident can’t have helped.  The narrative of the bombing of the French School was so darned meaningless. It was a useless experience. If you disregard that one terrible catastrophe, the story of Denmark during WWII is almost bearable. We were occupied, but we were never one with the occupiers, and we had a resistance movement that the Allies have called the best resistance movement in all of Europe. We worked against Nazi Germany in our own small way. But the trouble is of course that aircrafts that bombed the French School weren’t German aircrafts. They were there to help us, to carry out a mission that our own resistance movement had asked them to undertake. Hearing the RAF’s reasons for accepting the mission doesn’t exactly make the narrative any more glorious either. As one of the RAF pilots involved in the attack has stated:

There was a strategic reason for the the wish for an attack at such a late stage of the war: To keep the approximately 200,000 German soldiers in Denmark and prevent many of them to be sent to the fronts. This was Denmark’s great achievement in the war of the allies, and Field Marshall Montgomery himself declared that the Danish resistance movement was the best in all of Europe.”

My grandfather was in the resistance movement, and I’m proud of him and everything he and his friends did. But with the strategic reasoning behind the air raid on March 21 in mind, it’s hard for me not to think of the movement as playing the part of an annoying, yet harmless mosquito, momentarily distracting the Gestapo from fighting the real war. It’s not a reasonable way of looking at things, of course, but the sentiment is still there.

And then, just six weeks after the attack on the French School, the war ended. There was no resistance movement to protect any longer and celebrations ensued. Who could have wanted to remember the tragedy then?

The small objects
The lucid memories of the event attested by the survivors betray the fact that they felt this loss of meaningful narrative particularly badly. Artist and author Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, who survived the bombing at age five, has edited an anthology of testimonies by eye witnesses and survivors from the disaster (Tavshed blev min sang 2005 – “Silence Was My Song”) that gives a heartbreaking insight into the troubled mind of the surviving children, trying to make sense of a terrible experience. In the following quote from this book, Guldbrandsen talks about her experience (translated into English by myself):

The cellar light started to flicker, it grew weaker and weaker, and then the darkness was total. Immediately afterwards a devastating crash was heard, after which everything came tumbling down over me. I have no sense of time during the period that I lay buried under the rubble. The memories I do have must have been from a time when I regained some level of consciousness. The first thing I recall is a powerful, almost panicked will to move upwards. I can still feel the struggle against the heavy counterweight from all around me. My arms, shoulders, legs and feet thrust desperately against the pressure from outside, and I use all the power I have in me. In the middle of my exertion, I feel my shoes coming off, one fell of after the other. I remember how it pained me to lose the red shoes, but that it was necessary in order to achieve my goal.
(…)
Startled,  I hear the sound of something that falls into the darkness, catching the light from outside in one short glimpse. Immediately afterwards my eyes are further blinded by a bright cone of light, and I hear a man shout: ‘Here’s another one.’ Two strong arms pull me up, and it feels like my body is severed in the middle, but I slide out slowly and then I’m free.
(…)
A man dressed in black and wearing a shiny helmet and a gas mask wraps me gently in a grey blanket, lifts me up and tosses me through the flames, and I land in the arms of another person in uniform. (…) After a few moments I’m on a wagon along with others. There are loud voices and a deep silence. The voices are crying, screaming, moaning and praying, but it is the silent passangers that I remember the most. (…) As the wagon drives away, I think about the red shoes burning in there in the thundering fire.
(…)
[In the time following immediately after the catastrophe] I felt as if I was living in my own closed world where everyone around me seemed like figures, moving around silently. I don’t know for how long this condition continued, but a certain gesture has been saved in my memory. Very often I would sit on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, looking almost apathetically into a little closet where my red shoes used to be. But it was emtpy and left me with nothing but despair and a longing that I was unable to express.”

Equally, another survivor giving her testimony in the book, Lene, has a vivid memory of the songbook that she had on her when her 1. grade singing class was abruptly ended by the bombardment. She, too, was rescued by a firefighter and brought away on a wagon:

The wagon brought us to Frederiksberg Hospital. I had some bruises on my one arm and a lot of chalk on my scalp, but i must have bled a lot, too, bcause there was blood on “My First Songbook” which I was hugging tight during the entire incident. Today that book is my visual memory of the catastrophe.”

This focus on objects is a thing that is to be seen in the testimonies of many of the surviving girls. Another girl, Marianna, who was five years old, found it crucial that a cloth napkin be saved:

I will never forget the moment when my mother found me in the hospital, not because I embraced her in tears, no, I was deeply disappointed that she wasn’t pleased that I had remembered to save the cloth napkin which she had ordered me that same morning not to throw away. Mother only said, her eyes filled with tears: ‘Never mind about the napkin, you are more important.’ Strange how a child can react, but this shows that I did not understand the catastrophe by the time of the accident, the reaction came later on.”

Another survivor, Vibeke, who was four years old, remembers being told that she and her classmates were to leave the school quickly, and they were strictly informed not to tbring anything with them, and that they were not to walk along the panels, not even to get their coats. When she was in the hallway, she was tempted to get her coat because it was a cold day, so she walked over to the coat-hook, but even when standing right in front of it, she didn’t dare to take down her coat: She remembered the prohibition and was afraid that something terrible might happen if she took the coat. Another survivor, Jane, remember risking her life to go get her beautiful green lunchbox which had belonged to her great-grandmother. Yet another survivor, Elisa, who was six, still keeps a little children’s cup that belonged to her best friend Viggo who perished during the bombardment.

As Marianna writes, it’s strange the way a child reacts, but this childish focus on the various small objects – a pair of shoes, a songbook, a lunch box – also seems significant to me in the national processing of the bombardment. Children do not always fully comprehend the consequences of a traumatic experience, but they know enough to realise it when there is something that they don’t understand, and they can be helped to grasp the situation if they are talked to and if their questions are listened to. As we know, this was not the case in the aftermath of the bombardment of the Institut Jeanne d’Arc, and I have to wonder if this is not part of the reason why the entire incident still seems so obscure? Why the survivors’ stories are stories of an unfathomable misery related to seemingly insignificant, fragmentary little every-day objects. Nobody wanted to see the big picture of the catastrophe, but of course it was there, and of course the children sensed it, despite being coaxed into forgetting. Particularly striking is the contrast between the dramatic situation and the children’s focus on something insignificant like a small cup in the testimony of another survivor, Suzanne, who was three years old. She was a classmate of Elisa’s who happened to be living in the same building as Suzanne, and Suzanne remembers a sinister detail that Elisa has apparently forgotten. She and her mother were at home anxiously waiting to hear any news about Elisa:

“Finally the door bell rang and there [Elisa] was, wearing her father’s coat which reached all the way down to the door mat, her face all black and her hair burnt. With gazing eyes she simply said: ‘Viggo is dead, Viggo is dead; I held his hand and his head came off.’”

The Momument
What of the location of the incident then – the Ground Zero of the bombardment? As with the World Trade Centre in New York, this was the object of many debates after the bombardment. In Henrik Ahlmann’s thoroughly researched book about the catastrophe he references public debates between representatives of the families of the victims as well as the city administration. What, if anything, should be erected on the grounds where the now burnt-out, shaddered school lay? The city administration wanted to erect new apartment complexes on the grounds, and they got their way despite the parents’ expressed wishes to have a memorial garden on the grounds. It was agreed that a monument commemorating the tragedy should be raised, but this, too, was the cause of a heated debate. The city administration held a competition among artists, and the winning submission was offensively macabre to the parents: A three-metres tall momument showing a crashed, burning airplane in the background, and a mother with a small child in the foreground. The parents’ instead ordered a monument by another artist who had not been part of the competition, Max Andersen, whose monument was erected, amid many protests from the official partitioners in the competition. Andersen’s monument had a more peaceful, dignified imagery: A nun calmly shields a boy of about four and a slightly older girl. The nun’s gaze is directed towards the children, while the children look towards the sky. According to Ahlmann’s book, the two children were modelled after two siblings, kindergartener Dennis and schoolgirl Ayoe, of whom only Dennis survived the bombardment. In the tiles surrounding the monument, the names and ages of the deceased are engraved.

The monument at Frederiksberg Allé, Copenhagen

I think the monument is a moving and quite tasteful way of commemorating the victims. I like that the monument depicts a surviving child, as well as a child who was killed, and that a special tribute is paid to the nuns: Several reports by both surviving school children and firefighters show that the nuns were infinitely unselfish and brave in their attempt to save the children, many of them perishing while shielding a child from falling rubble.

The monument is not, however, immediately noticable and, perhaps because of its calm, dignified expression, it blends in almost too well on the picturesque boulevard, Frederiksberg Allé, where it stands erected. Indeed, in 1993 journalist Albert Müller wrote an opinion piece in national newspaper B.T. in which he complained that the monument seemed forgotten and unnoticed by the public. Was the monument not grand enough a gesture? It’s hard to say of course. I can see how an entire memorial garden dedicated to the French School might have been too much. Not because I don’t think the victims deserved to be remembered, but because it would have been like a burial ground, a constant reminder of this specific, horrible incident, and the concrete, lost little bodies. What I do think could perhas have been an appropriate way of commemorating the loss was to build a memorial garden on the ground of the French School, dedicated not just to the victims of the French School bombardment, but to every Danish victim of World War II. To move towards ridding the incident finally of its atmosphere of the fragmentary and meaningless. To include all those seemingly insignificant objects in a context. To let the incident speak of the unavoidably cruelty of a war that might otherwise be remembered as something our nation got through unharmed.

Of course I’m writing this with the luxury of being neither part of the necessarily pragmatic city administration, nor a grieving relative of a victim, and my perspective is naturally limited. But I’m writing it in my capacity as a person who thinks it is crucial that we remember.

(This essay has been difficult for me to write as I am keenly aware of the sensitive subject matter. Many of the survivors are still alive today, as well as others whose lives are immediately affected by the catastrophe. I have strived to be respectful of the victims and towards getting all the facts concerning the bombing straight. If I have in any way failed to do so, please let me know and I will take steps to correct it.)

I hope you guys are having a much more festive evening and that you will have a wonderful new year. I want to thank you for reading along and commenting in the year that has passed. Blog-wise, 2011 was the year that I got quite a lot more readers and commenters (I have an average of about 100 more readers now than I did by the end of 2010), and I find this truly humbling. According to my stats surprisingly large number of you were readers stopping by to read my post about 1990s sitcom Blossom, but a lot of you also hung around and left me inspiring and insightful comments, especially on my posts from 2007 and 2010 about the tableau vivant in literature and about the character of Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Some of you I still owe an answer to your comments. I apologise for this – I will get to it ASAP, and I hope you know that your comments are deeply appreciated. You guys make it worth the effort to sit down in front of the keyboard after a long day of hard work.

As a token of my gratitude and a New Year’s present, I thought of sharing with you the insanely adorable video from Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt – “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve“, but I’m sure you’ve already seen that on a gazillion other blogs, no? Plus, the lyrics

“Who’s gonna be the one to hold you tight/when it’s exactly 12 o’clock at night?”

are making me a little verklempt in my bedridden, lonely state. So instead I’d like to end the year 2011 with the melancholy Farewell Waltz from Waterloo Bridge - “For Auld Lang Syne”. With the risk of tooting my own horn, I have to say that my post about this 1940 movie was a favourite of mine on the blog this year, and seeing the movie was one of my best film experiences of 2011, so it seems appropriate.

Lantana is directed by Ray Lawrence, and I knew absolutely nothing about it before I sat down to watch the dvd. The film did, however, affect me deeply, and I was sucked into the movie right from the first phrames of the film which showed the body of a woman lying in a lantana bush. It’s the classic way to open a crime story, but Lantana isn’t that, or not just that, it’s more of a love story about the things that unfold when evidence takes the place of testimony.

Still from "Lantana"

The film, most of which is composed as a flashback showing us the events leading up to the body being found in the bush, introduces a handful of characters that are all more or less directly linked to the woman’s body. Anthony LaPaglia plays police officer, Leon, whose marriage is crumbling. Leon is having an affair with Jane, a recently separated woman (played by Rachael Blake) while Leon’s wife Sonja is secretly consulting a therapist about her worries that she is losing Leon. The therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), is having problems of her own: The book she has just written about the loss of her 11-year-old daughter Eleanor has failed to give her the release she desperately needs, and the grief is tearing Valerie and her husband John (Geoffrey Rush) apart. Troubled by the thought that John may be leaving her, Valerie finds herself threatened by the cynical persepectives of a client, Patrick, who is having an affair with a married man and blames his lover’s wife for her denial. In the middle of all this is Jane’s next-door neighbour unemployed Nik and his wife Paula, parents of three young children and struggling to pay the bills, but happily married. One night, Jane sees Nik toss a woman’s shoe into a bush…

Something gets broken
Is there really any way a man could throw a woman’s shoe into some bushes late at night without it being a sign of some awful crime having been comitted? Suspicion versus redeeming trust is at the core of the movie, and mistrust is an essential problem in almost all of the relationships in the movie. Valerie says as much in her speech at her book launching:

We don’t know what’s right or right or wrong anymore. (…) We ask, what can we believe in, what should be we believe in? Our politicians? Hardly. Our priests? You’d be amazed at how many of my clients come to see me because they once believed in priests. It’s not supposed to be that way, but it is. What then, our parents? Our home is our sanctuary. For a privileged few. For most it’s a battle ground. It’s not supposed to be that way, but it is.”

Geoffrey Rush’s character John confirms as much in a pivotal scene in which he and Leon discuss their respective marriages:

“Have you ever cheated on your wife? (…) Well, you’re a better man than I am. (…) There was someone once. A woman. Once that’s happened you’re never entirely believed again. Something gets broken, permanently – trust, I suppose. When that’s happened anything’s possible it woud seem.”

Collisions
But what I like the best about the movie is that John is actually – subtly – proven wrong. In Lantana it’s not the mistrust itself that seems to be the most damaging, it’s the failure to communicate that lack of trust, and the scenes that deal with these breaches of communication are what really makes the movie stand out to me. Ray Lawrence has something truly original at heart here, I think. One amazing scene has a frantic Valerie standing at the side of a road, talking into a payphone to her husband’s answering machine. She’s asking John to come pick her up and telling him that she needs him, but the message gets muddled by a not-quite-articulated suspicion:

“I’m on the back road, and… I just wanted to get home. (…) I called road service, they said there were going to be a 90-minute wait. Where are you? You didn’t say you were going to be late. I can’t stand this! Please… Please, I need you. (…) John? There’s a man… Patrick. He’s a client and he’s… he’s gay. I don’t understand this, I don’t understand us… anymore. I don’t want this to be happening to us.”

The message goes unanswered by her husband – with disastrous results. And this is far from the only scene in the movie where communication goes horribly wrong. Sonja wisely makes the point during a therapy session that Leon cheating wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but him cheating and not telling her would be, and after being deeply upset by her client Patrick and not voicing her anger to him, Valerie has a miserable non-conversation with a random stranger (Pete – Jane’s husband) whom she happens to pass in the street:

Pete silently passes Valerie in the street
Valerie: What did you say?
Pete: What?
Valerie: You said something to me.
Pete: No, I didn’t.
Valerie: Yes, you did!
Pete: I didn’t.
Valerie (to a bystander): You heard him, didn’t you?! He said something!
Pete: This is bullshit…
Valerie: Bullshit? I want your name.
Pete starts walking away
Valerie: Give me your name! Your name!

And this scene mirrors another scene which, to me was the most powerful scene of the entire movie, and to which I wouldn’t do justice by quoting it here as it doesn’t actually have much dialogue: Jogging in his neighbourhood, Leon bumps into a stranger in the sidewalking while turning a corner without looking. The collision causes him to accidentally headbutt the stranger. This leaves Leon with a massive blow to the head and it seemingly breaks the stranger’s nose. Blood everywhere, Leon starts shouting abuse at the stranger, blaming him for the accident. The stranger cowers and starts stuttering away. Leon then sees the stranger’s groceries lying on the street, he picks them up and follows him, trying to make amends. The stranger breaks down sobbing in a startled Leon’s arms.

It’s really one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in a long time in any movie, and it actually had my crying. Not so much because of the blood and the implied physical injury (although this was certainly graphic enough! So much blood.), but because of the implied psychological impact: The shock, the misdirected aggression, the hurt, the emotional response – and the short glimpse of compassion between two people. If misunderstandings and mistrust are inevitable between people, then it’s at least possible for us to make amends by genuinely communication with each other, so the movie seems to say.

Ray Lawrence and the “Short Cuts” premise
The actors’ performances are excellent all around, and the art direction is brilliant as well. The opening shot of the film – zooming in through the pretty surface of a beautiful, blooming lantana bush, uncovering a bloody corpse lying between the tangled, dark branches while insects are buzzing – is iconic and reminded me somewhat of some of the nature morte-ish shots from Peter Weir’s excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock. It sets the movie’s tone of merciless scrutiny which is balanced by the aforementioned subtle sense of hope in the interacting between the characters.

I’ll admit that I was a bit worried when I first realized that the various’ character stories were all going to be intertwined somehow. I loved that premise in Short Cuts, but so many directors have tried to pull it off since and failed (most notably the clumsy and pretentious Playing by Heart). However, Lantana does this really well, especially because Lawrence actually manages to use it in quite a clever way: Several times I was fooled by this premise into suspecting that there was going to be a connection between two stories that turned out not to have a connection at all. An ingenious way to demonstrate the theme of suspicion and misunderstanding even in the narrative level of the movie.

And All Suns are Darkened did a review of the movie in his Top 5 of Australian movies himself – read it here.

I think Astrid Lindgren must have loved Christmas. There are Christmas descriptions in almost all of her book series; Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Maple Hills, Madicken of June Hill, the Six Bullerby Children, and Lotta on Troublemaker Street all celebrate the holiday in her books and their Christmas preparations and celebrations are always carefully described. In this December 24th post I will discuss the Christmas descriptions found in Madicken of June Hill and Emil of Maple Hills, two Christmas descriptions that I’ve always loved dearly.

From the book "Look, Madicken, it's snowing!"

(NOTE: as I do not have access to English translations of Astrid Lindgren’s books, the English translations of the Swedish books below are all my own)

Portrait of the Writer as a Little Girl – Christmas in June Hill
Madicken of June Hill books have always been my favourites among Astrid Lingren’s works. The books are said to be inspired by Lindgren’s own childhood, and I think that this authobiographical trait is very much visible in the series: I think that it’s possible to read the Madicken books as the story of the cultivation of a young writer’s voice.

Madicken is an upper-middle-class girl, living in Småland in a house called June Hill during the time of World War I with her father, editor-in-chief at a local newspaper, her mother, her younger sister Elisabeth, and their maid Alva. And Madicken definitely has the makings of a writer: She’s emotional, she has a vivid imagination, she’s passionate about books and stories, and one of the first things we learn about her is that she “gets her ideas quicker than a pig can blink”. The main conflict of the Madicken books is, however, that Madicken has not yet learned how to manage her creative abilities and her flair for storytelling, and Madicken often gets herself into trouble. A recurring theme in Madicken is the fact that things rarely turn out in reality the way one imagines them, or the way they play out in fiction. One famous example is her jumping from a wood shed with an umbrella, inspired by stories she has read about WWI soldiers jumping with parachutes – with the result of her getting rather a concussion.

Madicken is somewhat like Ian McEwan’s Briony Tallis in this way; she sees possibilities of fiction everywhere in her surroundings. This is what gets her into trouble - and sometimes into real danger – but it’s also what makes her an intriguing and amusing heroine.

This is apparent in the Christmas descriptions in the Madicken books. In December, Madicken is characteristically enthusiastic about having everything play out the way she’s imagined, and it’s important to her that the aesthetics of Christmas permeate her entire world. Accordingly, Madicken inspects the Christmas preparations in her home carefully:

“Yes, now Christmas may come to June Hill, everything is ready to receive it. Every nook is clean, there are white, newly starched curtains at every window, there are candles in every candlestick, in the kitchen the new patchwork quilts are brightening up everything, on the walls the copper pots and pans are shining with all their might, and the iron rod under the cooker hood has been decorated with curly crêpe paper of red and green, festive like Christmas itself.”

Another illustration from "Look, Madicken, It's Snowing!"

Madicken is satisfied with all this, and on the day of Christmas Eve she savours every little sensory impression of it, like the smell of the lacquer used to seal the wrapped Christmas gifts:

“She explains Elisabeth how nice it would be, if one could put a little bit of the lacquer scent into a tin along with all the other lovely Christmas scents. Then you would have a can to sniff all year, until it would finally be Christmas again.”

A can containing all the scents of Christmas is of course an impossible notion, but this is typical of Madicken and her lyrical disposition: She wants so much to capture the moment that it almost becomes too much for her. It’s the same urge that gave her her near-fatal concussion in an earlier chapter, and while she doesn’t bring herself into danger in the Christmas chapter, her pursuit of the true Christmas spirit does leave her very upset towards the end of Christmas Eve:

The day of Christmas Eve is long, but it ends after all. The candles burn out, everyone has had their presents, everyone has cracked nuts, everyone has eaten apples and Christmas sweets, and everyeone is too tired to dance around the Christmas tree again. Then Madicken suddenly hides her face in her hands and bursts into to tears: ‘Oh, now it’s over! To think that it’s over so soon!’”

Significantly, Madicken is also dismayed as she visits her neighbours, the teenage boy Anders and his poor parents the Nilssons, the day before Christmas:

“…[she finds] Anders lying on his knees, scrubbing the floor! He stops abruptly as Madicken enters. ‘I was just mopping up something’, he explains. But he has already scrubbed half of the floor. (…) Madicken takes a look around. Apart from that there isn’t much Christmas preparation visible. The curtains and the chrocheted shelf trimmings haven’t been cleaned, everything looks as it always does, and it shouldn’t on the night before Christmas Eve, Madicken thinks.
‘Haven’t you tidied up yet?’ she asks.
Anders looks confused.
‘Tidied up? How do you mean?’
Madicken doesn’t really know what to say.
‘Well, it’s… it’s Christmas tomorrow.’
‘Ah, yes, well, that’s all taken care of!’ says Anders, ‘Come and see!’
He leads the way into the small room next to the kitchen. Here is a paper cloth hung up on the wall, full of bearded Christmas gnomes.
‘How do you like that?’ he asks triumphantly. ‘Father and mother haven’t seen it yet, but they’ll be gaping when they see it – you can bet on that!’
(…)
Madicken thinks that the paper cloth with the bearded gnomes is nice, but it only spreads Christmas cheer in one little spot. Madicken wants for the Christmas cheer to spread everywhere.

As emphatic a character as she is, there is something let-them-eat-cake-ishly spoiled about upper-middle-class Madicken’s scrutiny of poor Anders’ home. Astrid Lindgren seems aware of this, and while she definitely celebrates Madicken’s artistic streak, she doesn’t let her protagonist get away with this privileged purely aesthetic approach to her surroundings. Madicken’s father is the editor of the local newspaper and is depicted as a highly socially conscious person who makes sure that Madicken understands that there is a big, harsh world outside her cherished June Hill – a world with which she needs to deal. “I think the children ought to know that there are many different kinds of people in this world,” he says at one time, as Madicken’s mother voices her concern that Madicken is spending so much time with Anders and his alcoholic father, “Then maybe they will learn that they’ll learn that they shouldn’t be to quick to bring out the heavy armour”. In another Christmas-related chapter we learn that Madicken’s father always takes Madicken for a walk around the poorer parts of the town on Christmas Eve:

“The church bells are chiming so that they can be heard all over the town as Daddy and Madicken walk out. They take the same route as always on Christmas Eve. Down crooked, narrow alleys past houses that are (…) so low that Madicken can scrape the snow off of the roof if she wants to make a snowball. The streets are dark, but almost all the houses are lit. The people who live there probably don’t have blinds, or maybe they don’t care that you can look right through their windows into their rooms.
‘And we are impertinent enough to be peeking through their windows,’ says daddy. ‘I’m sure you can tell that they don’t really have what we have at June Hill in there?’
No, they certainly do not! But it still looks kind of cosy, Madicken thinks. In some places anyway. Even if it is a bit cramped and poor and even though there isn’t much furniture and not much room for all the children, playing and romping about in there. They do seem to have tried to decorate the house for Christmas, you can tell. But in some places it looks too miserable.
‘I wouldn’t want to live in there.’ says Madicken.
‘I’m sure you would’t.’ says daddy.”

But it is possible to make a difference, so Madicken’s father’s message seems to be, by relating to the poverty around you and recognising it, and, possibly, bearing witness to it. And Madicken’s father’s dry response notwithstanding there’s no sense of reproof from Lindgren. Madicken may not master her own narrative voice quite yet, but her sense of lyrical beauty and her childish sensitivity to her surroundings makes her capable of recognising things that the adult world would overlook or dismiss as irrational. In a later chapter in the book revolving around Mrs Nilsson’s selling her body to science, Madicken is the only person to see how gravely Mrs Nilsson is troubled by this action. And in the Christmas chapters, too, Madicken manages to spread some joy – like when she gives Anders a Christmas present and is able to respect and delight in the modest Christmas celebrations of the Nilsson family:

The Nilssons are in the kitchen as usual, and Mr Nilsson is on the kitchen bench as usual. But the kitchen is unusually birghtly lit. The new lamp, but Anders’ eyes almost shine more brightly every time he looks at it. He ill not take his eyes off the lamp. He hardly even notices Madicken and Elisabeth. But Mr Nilsson nods at htem from the bench.
‘Here’s the little Madicken and the little Elisabeth of June Hill, and they have arrived at exactly the right moment!’
He points to the lamp.
‘How do you like that? How do you like this glorious item that my son has purchased? What light! What pleasance!’
‘Yes, it’s pretty.’ says Madicken.
‘Look into the little room! How do you like the funny littile Christmas gnomes with which my son has decorated the wall? And the Christmas tree that he has got just to make his old father happy, how do you like that? Anders, Anders, you are a good son!’
Mrs Nilsson is sitting as close to the lamp as she can, drinking coffee. Now she puts down the cop and pats Anders on his head.
‘As if he didn’t do it for his mother as well! Yes, you are surely a good boy, little Anders.’
Anders is embarrassed by all this praise and turns towards Madicken and Elisabeth.
‘What did you want by the way?’
Madicken produces the present that she has kept hidden behind her back.
‘I just wanted to give you a Christmas present, Anders.’
‘Me?’ says Anders. ‘A Christmas present? How come?’
Mrs Nilsson clasps her hands in horror. ‘A Christmas present for Anders! Oh, but we forgot about that!’
She looks reproachfully at Mr Nilsson on the bench. ‘Did you by any chance remember to buy a Christmas present for Anders?’
Mr Nilsson is silent and glares grumpily at Mrs Nilsson. Finally he says, with some annoyance:
‘I may have both a house and a farm, but I’m still a little short on cash at the moment. So I couldn’t get Anders a Christmas present this year. Are you sad about that, Anders?’
Anders doesn’t look sad in the least.
‘Never mind about that, we have the lamp!’
‘And Madicken’s Christmas present.’ Elisabeth reminds him.
‘Gee, yes, that’s right, I got a Christmas present from Madicken.’ says Anders.
He opens the present and finds the harmonica. Mr Nilsson is jubilant.
‘A harmonica, I must say! Now you can play something pretty for your old man, can’t you, Anders?’
It isn’t a fine or expensive harmonica, but Anders can still make it play a few melodies.
(…)
And Madicken and Elisabeth walk away happy and relieved.
“It was nice in there.” says Elisabeth.
‘Yes, it was.’ says Madikcen. ‘And what a nice lamp, I wish we had a lamp like that.’

The progress of a country boy
Moving on to another Lindgren character, Emil of Lönneberga, we find a very different description of Christmas. Emil is not the child of a newspaper editor, he’s the young son of a farmer, living with his parents, his little sister Ida, a maid and a farm hand on his father’s farm Katholt. Emil is infamous in the parson for his mischief which time and again enrages his father and sends him to the farm woodshed where he is to atone for his misdeeds. The thing is however, that Emil never means to misbehave. He always means well, but like Madicken he has a knack for getting into trouble.

Emil - one of Björn Berg's illustrations for the Emil books

The similarities between Madicken and Emil don’t go much further than this, though. Being a handy, practical farmer boy Emil is much more in tune with the elements and the conditions of nature than Madicken the editor’s daughter, and the imagery and plots of the Emil books tend to have a baser, more textural sense to them than the ones in the Madicken novels. In one book, Emil accidentally swallows a coin of his father’s and it is described that Emil dutifully paid back his debt after nature had taken its course with the coin in question. Another plot is kickstarted as Emil “has a stomach ache and had to go to the outhouse” one night. And the plot of one of the most dramatic stories focuses on the aggressive blood poisoning of the farmhand, Alfred. That’s the way it goes in the Emil stories. Bacteria invade people’s bloodstreams, and people have bowel movements. The third-person narrator of the Emil books is also notably unceremonious, recounting the stories in a language that is closer to that of an oral than of a written narrative tradition.

Emil as portrayed by young Jan Olsson in the Swedish series based on the books

Thus it is not surprising to find that the Emil Christmas chapter is devoid of Madicken’s preoccupation with a certain Christmas atmosphere. Emil isn’t overly excited as the holidays approach, and when Christmas Eve finally comes along, it is described in two simple sentences, without any superlatives:

“Emil and [his little sister] Ida went home, and then it was Christmas Eve. It was very nice at Katholt that evening as well as on Christmas Day.”

Similarly, as Emil rides a sleigh to church on Christmas morning, Emil is not lost in thoughts about the beauty of the snowy landscape the way Madicken probably would have:  He is merely satisfied that the Katholt horses prove to be faster than than the horses dragging the neighbouring sleighs. At a farm in Småland, Sweden, Christmas is mostly a time for taking stock. Through the year, the farms have strived to accumulate enough for the winter and now the result is contemplated with satisfaction. Not an aesthetic satisfaction with fancy garnish like white newly starched tablecloths and fragrant hyacinths, but of solid things, like heavy, filling traditional fare in the pantry:

“Now everyone at Katholt was busy, because at Katholt Christmas was celebrated with a vengeance. First there was the big clean-up. Lina and Lingon-berry Maja knelt on the icy bridge by the Katholt brook and did the laundry until Lina was crying and breathing on her freezing fingers. Then the Christmas hog was slaughtered, and once that was done there was almost no room left in the kitchen, said Lina, because of all those black puddings and Cumberland sausages and oatmeal sausages and minced sausage, and potato sausage and salamis taking up space along iwth hams and headcheeses, and pork roastes and I don’t know what all. Juniper ale was also a must for Christmas. Emil’s mother brewed it in the big wooden vessel in the scullery. And pastry and breads needed to be bake, enough to make a person’s head swim, rye bread and treacle bread and fine black bread and saffron bread and ordinary white bread and gingerbread and a special kind of small, delicious cakes in the shapes of pretzels and puff pastry cakes, yes, it is impossible to mention all of it. Candles were also required. Emil’s mother and Lina spent an entire night making candles, big candles and small candles and Thee Kings Candles, for now Christmas was almost there. Alfred and Emil harnessed Lukas [the horse] and drove into the woods to get a Christmas tree, and Emil’s father went to the barn to get two sheafs of oat that he had saved for the sparrows.
‘It’s sheer madness,’ he said, ‘but the sparrows should know that it’s Christmas, too.’”

Indeed they should. Emil and his family certainly aren’t materialists after all. If Christmas is the time of year to showcase what goods one has produced out of the earth’s soil, it is also the time of year to give thanks to remember the ones that nature has been less kind to in the year that has passed. The birds – but also the old, poor, and lonely paupers of the village who reside in a measly, crowded little workhouse run as a charitable institution by the parish counsil. Emil’s mother prepares a special basket full of food for these poor people.

Unfortunately, the paupers’ strict matron, a mean old woman called the Commander, sees fit to eat all the food by herself, and when Emil finds out about this, he decides to take matters into his own hands. While his parents are out away at a Christmas party in the village, Emil prepares and hosts an extravagant Christmas feast for the paupers all by himself. Significantly, the feast takes place on December the 26th, boxing day. Emil’s wellmannered little sister anxiously asks Emil if giving away their parents’ food won’t count as mischief, but Emil assures her that the feast is something “that God’s angels will clap their hands at, as much as they must have been crying at the wretched Christmas that the paupers had to endure.”

This is probably as poetic as it gets, and there seems to be a recognition that the paupers will have less use for this kind of pretty imagery than for good old fashioned, solid food. Emil certainly understands that getting some food into the paupers is more important than any idea of heavenly reward, as the loquacious narrator informally lets us know:

“…when [the paupers] entered the kitchen at Katholt, prepared for the holidays as it was, and lit by five big Three Kings Candles that Emil had lit, the shimmer of which were mirrored in the newly polished copper saucepans hanging on the walls, so that everything was bright and shiny, they were at first completely silent, and old Nitwit Jokum thought that he had gone to heaven. (…) But then Emil said: ‘Now we will have a Christmas feast!’ And a Christmas feast it was. Emil and Alfred and little Ida helped each other carrying in all they could manage from the pantry. And I feel you should know what was on the table in the Katholt kitchen on Boxing Day when everything had been brought in.
There was:
A dish of black pudding
A dish of Cumberland sausage
A dish of headcheese
A dish of paté
A dish of smoked sausage
A dish of meatballs
A dish of veal cutlets
A dish of pork roast
A dish of oatmeal sausage
A dish of potato sausage
A dish of salted meat
A dish of slightly salted ox tongue
A dish with the big Christmas ham
A dish with the big Christmas cheese
A bowl with herring salad
A tray with rye bread
A tray with treacle bread
A tray with fine black bread
A pitcher of juniper beer
A pitcher of milk
A roaster of rice pudding
A kind of cheese pudding
A bowl of prunes
A  bowl of whipped cream
A bowl of strawberry jam
A bowl of ginger pears and
A roasted whole hog, decorated with sugar icing.

That was all, I think. I can’t have forgotten more than three things, four at the most, oh, well, let’s say five just in case, but to be on the safe side, but then I’m sure I must have remembered everything.”

If the Madicken books are about an aspiring writer learning how to use her artistic streak constructively, the Emil books are about learning how to be a good person. But Astrid Lindgren never assumes a moralistic adult voice in her children’s books. She celebrates Madicken’s artistic streak, and I find it significant that in the Emil books it seems to be Emil’s surroundings who need to learn to understand Emil’s good deeds – and not Emil who needs to learn how to please his surroundings. As the Emil narrator discloses, Emil later grew up to be elected head of the parish counsil, so we know the rest of the world eventually caught on. Lindrgen had that rare talent for speaking on behalf of child protagonists in a manner that has nothing overbearing or patronising in it, and her Christmas descriptions are no exceptions. Christmas is often described as a the children’s holiday, and Lindgren takes the consequence of this in her children’s books and depicts Christmas as a time when children have a chance of showing adults the way.

Luckily I have just started my Christmas vacation today, and I will do my very best to get on top of things ASAP. Pun sort of intended! Leg-lock humour!

*)When I was telling one of my friends this, he said: “Ooo, sounds hot.” Trust me, it was not. It was very painful. Apparently, being locked in a professional wrestling hold by a head of state doesn’t really do it for me.

I can’t tell you how many program notes of this kind I have dealt with during my career in classical music.

"Uh, ma'am? Ma'am, your child has freakishly long arms for a newborn." says that donkey. From the murals of Fanefjord Church, Denmark.

The Tumblr blog Ugly Renaissance Babies, brought to my attention by Danish blogger Sofisten, makes such revelling easy, featuring the likeness of a new unattractive infant on an almost daily basis.

Enjoy!

Despite being, so I like to think, at least somewhat well-versed within the movie classics, I’d never even heard of this movie before, which really got me thinking about how arbitrary it is that some movies continue to be thought of as classics, while others sink into oblivion. Waterloo Bridge certainly deserves status as a classic as much as, say, Casablanca does, if you ask me. I expected an old-fashioned romantic movie, but I got a lot more than that.

Air-raid romance
Not that the romantic story of the movie isn’t fulfilling in and of itself – it is. It’s the story of Captain Roy Cronin (Robert Taylor) and ballerina Myra (Vivian Leigh), a young couple who have a chance encounter on Waterloo Bridge around the time of the on-set of World War I during an air-raid. After having spent some time together seeking shelter in the underground for the duration of the raid, the two are sad to part, and Roy goes to see Myra in her ballet company’s production of Swan Lake, taking her out afterwards. The two fall in love and Roy, destined to leave for France two days later, proposes the next day that they marry right away. Myra accepts, but before the two can be wed, Roy is given order to leave a day earlier than expected.

Courtship in wartime: Myra and Roy during the air raid

Taylor is dashing and Leigh displays a wonderfully sweet mien that will surprise anyone who associates her chiefly with the proud and capricious Scarlett O’Hara, and the two have great chemistry. Director Mervyn LeRoy has wisely chosen to let their quick attraction towards one another be shown through clever dialogue, which always seems more convincing and less forced to me than the lingering gazes movie directors sometimes resort to when depicting love at first sight. You really believe that these two people feel singularly comfortable with each other right away. The dialogue allows us to get to know the two main characters and the two characters to get to know each other:

Myra: What was it that you started to tell me in the restaurant that you didn’t understand about me?

Roy: No use getting into it now…

Myra: No, but tell me, please, I’d like to know.

Roy: Well, it struck me as curious ever since I met you… that you’re so young and so lovely and so… defeatist, you know? You don’t seem to expect much from life.

Myra: Well, aren’t I right? For instance, I met you. I liked you. And now so soon we have to part – perhaps we’ll never see each other again.

Waterloo Bridge as a “womance”
Myra is late for a ballet performance as she has to rush to the station to say goodbye to her war-bound fiancé, and for this misdemeanor she is excluded from the company by the strict manager Madame Kirowa. Myra’s best friend Kitty (Virginia Field) steps into character here as she stands up to Madame Kirowa trying to explain the urgent nature of Myra’s errand that night – and is thrown out along with Myra. This marks the beginning of the second half of the movie which is what really makes the movie stand out to me.

Because apart from being a romantic drama about boy meets girl, the movie is actually also a bit of a womance – the story of loving friendship between women. Kitty and Myra seem to be depicted deliberately as opposites: Brunette Myra is demure and meek, while blonde Kitty has a fiesty, outspoken temperament. Yet the two remain close and loyal  friends to each other, and after Roy has left to fight in the war, they move in together in a humble flat trying to make a living as dancers. The war leaves very few job opportunities for two young women ballet dancers, and as Myra is led mistakingly by a note in the newspaper that Roy has been killed, she sinks into depression and illness, leaving Kitty to desperately trying to support the both of them.

Sisterhood: Kitty and Myra

Kitty lies and tells Myra that she has got a job in a dance theatre production, but Myra catches her in the deception and confronts her. This leads to the most tremendously moving scene of the film:

Myra: Where is the money coming from? Where are you getting it?

Kitty: Where do you think I’ve been getting it?! …I tried to keep it from you, but… Well, you know now.

Myra: (sits down shakily) You did it for me.

Kitty: No, I didn’t! I’d have done it anyhow! C’est la guerre: No jobs. No boys who want to marry you. Only men who want to kill a few hours because they know it may be their last…

Myra: Kitty, you did it for me, to buy me food and medicine. I’d sooner have died…

Kitty: No no, you wouldn’t. You think you would, but you wouldn’t! I thought of that. But I wasn’t brave enough. I wanted to go on living. Heaven knows why, but I did, and so would you. We’re young, and it’s good to live! Even the life *I*’m leading, though God knows, it’s… I’ve heard them call it ‘the easiest way’. I wonder whoever came up with that little phrase. I know one thing: It couldn’t have been a woman. I suppose you think I’m dirt…

Myra: Oh, Kitty. (embracing her)

My quoting the scene doesn’t really do justice to it. The direction is absolutely ingenious here. The dialogue balances just on the verge of becoming an argument, and you think it will, but then it doesn’t, and it ends in an embrace. The feeling of solidarity between women that you sense in this scene is all the more important because of the subject matter, and it is also echoed significantly in Myra’s interaction with her mother-in-law Lady Margaret (a superb Lucile Watson) as the two share a scene of great compassion towards the ending of the movie when Myra is in a desperate state.

“If I were only casting the white swan…”
And the movie goes even further with that solidarity. Rather than letting Kitty play the part of the whore opposite Myra’s virtuous Madonna (like Kim and Amanda in the 2008 flick Taken which I recently reviewed), Myra, too, descends into prostitution in the aftermath of this scene. Kitty is right: Myra really does want to live, and there’s only one way to do that in their situation and it’s not the Madonna way. Surely it’s significant that Roy sees Myra dancing Swan Lake of all ballets. More than half a century before Black Swan, this movie explores the interesting duality that lies implicitly in the title character of the Tchaikovsky ballet – the white and the black swan embodied by one dancer.

In this movie, produced during the trying times of World War II, the theme is not, as in the Aronofsky movie, the destructive fulfilment of true art, but the hardships of women left behind as their men go off to the trenches. The reference, though kept very subtle, is most apparent in the heartbreaking scene,  beautifully played by Leigh, when Roy returns as a war hero and is overjoyed to find an astonished Myra there to receive him at the train station. He remains oblivious to the tragically ironic fact that she was really there to pick up customers . Once a white-clad ballerina, Myra is now wearing dark dress and a pitch-black hat. “It is you, isn’t it? It’s really you” Roy says, embracing her – as the swan theme from the Tchaikovsky ballet is struck up mournfully by the  orchestra in the soundtrack.

Metamorphosis. Left: Myra at the beginning of the story clad in white tutu as a bashful ballerina. Right: Myra as a prostitute in dark dress on the train station as Roy returns

Roy’s question goes unanswered by Myra who simply bursts into tears. This puzzles Roy – “This is a happy ending!”, he insists. In Mervin LeRoy’s directing, the returning war hero is optimistic and triumphant. But for the ones who have been left behind there is little triumph, the movie seems to say, and they have good reason to be, well, defeatist. For Myra and Kitty the war has been a humiliating defeat to the black-feathered side to them that has had to take over in order for them to go on living, and the home-coming of Roy assigns to Myra the impossible task of having to be the lily-white maiden that her war hero expects to find waiting for him.

Oh, ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road
The ending of the movie is concerned with the question of whether Myra will tell Roy what’s happened to her and whether Roy will be willing to accept and love Myra for what she is now. This makes for a satisfying ending to the romantic storyline, but it isn’t an urgent question. We have already been led to accept Myra and love her. I really like that, and I’m impressed that a movie from this era of partriachy, and directed by a man at that, got such a message through. I’m sure that the movie was marketed in part as an exploitation film because of its scandalous subject matter, but the prostitution storyline hardly gets an exploitation-like vulgar feel to it at any point in the actual movie.

Finally, the film has a very good soundtrack. Apart from introducing a fetching original love theme and, as mentioned above, remnants of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the orchestral score includes fragments of Scottish sentimental ballads such as “For Auld Lang Syne“, and “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, thus emphasizing discretely and effectively the themes of Myra’s metamorphosis, scottish-born Roy’s somewhat nostalgic approach to the world, as well as the moving story of affection and loss between two lovers.

I love the concept of the blog, which is also open to submissions and often adds amusing and clarifying little descriptions to the posted videos, and I have added it to my Google Reader. You should do the same if you’re looking for a good opera pusher!