tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post4628906791154018039..comments2024-03-27T13:13:25.164-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saundersjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-114392083521497172010-05-19T13:59:38.827-04:002010-05-19T13:59:38.827-04:00This is what Virginia Woolf described as the feeli...This is what Virginia Woolf described as the feeling of being “driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world,” where the “singing of the real world” becomes muted, distant, as the condition of pronounced withdrawal asserts itself. Such was Violet Gibson's experience. A studio photograph, taken some time before the war, shows her attired like a lay religious. Her pose- the distant gaze, an open book (presumably a spiritual text) resting in her hand- is studied, calculated to transmit the subdued aura of the contemplative life. According to a friend, she now “limited her acquaintance to her own sex except in the case of priests. At a time when the world was bursting open in carnival of adventure (Joyce's “extravagant excursions into forbidden territory”), Violet moved not towards it but in the opposite direction. And perhaps she was right to, for beneath the exuberance lurked the suggestion of madness.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-88035146993651508622010-05-19T13:59:13.300-04:002010-05-19T13:59:13.300-04:00After the roaring guns of war, the Roaring Twenti...After the roaring guns of war, the Roaring Twenties. And how they roared. What a lot of parties. “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties...parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked turkish ciragetttes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that sucession and repetition and massed humanity.” These were Evelyn Waugh's “vile bodies,” publicity seeking, fun loving, anarchic, eager to overthrow the gloomy influence of the stiff-collared men who had presided over the war. “Being new at any cost” was Arnold Bennett's dim view of it.<br /><br /> Antonia White whizzing across to Paris in her lover's airplane. “The dry glare and the intolerable noise of the “Boeuf sur le Toit” where one goes to look at the Jews and the Lesbians and the fairies.” At 20 Rue Jacob, Clifford Barney, the “Amazon of Paris-Lesos” honoring the Sapphic muse with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas with her mustache and little black har=ts, baking her famous hashish brownies, Romaine Brooks, Janet Flanner, Colette with her curly, kinky hair like a wild dog. Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes. Ezra Pound dressed in “pearl-buttoned velvet coats, fawn or pearl gray trousers, a loose-flowing dark cape” topped with a sombrero- “a pinwheel of affectation. Man Ray punching a man on the nose in the front row of the composer George Antheil's debut, the surrealists punching everybody until the police arrived. The follies a deux of Scott and Zelda, Virginia and Leonard, the shipwreck of Vaslav Nijinsky.<br /><br /> T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" and Joyce's Ulysses, anatomizing the body and glorifying in all its vilenesses- Bloom inhaling with satisfaction the odor of his own shit- literary modernism's extraordinary combination of spiritualism, political extremism, sexual passion. George Bernard Shaw rejected it as “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization”; Carl Jung hated it as a “delirious confusion of the subjective and the psychic with objective reality,” containing “nothing pleasing”, an analogy for “schizophrenia”.<br /><br />On the fringes of this raffish intellectual Paris-Lesbos scene was Eileen Gray, who, like Violet, had left Ireland in 1902. In Paris she shed her title and her beautiful ropes of hair, and this bobbed applied herself to the Japanese art of lacquer. By the 1920s she was working on the revolutionary new theories of design and the architecture of the modern movement. Intensely private, Gray only rarely broke with the self-imposed monasticism of her atelier existence. Even when present she managed to remain absent, locked in a life of extreme inwardness. “Of all the people I knew in the world, she gave the feeling of complete consecration,” an acquaintance recalled. “One must never look for happiness,” Gray once said. “It passes you on your way, but always look in the opposite direction. Sometimes I recognize it.”johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-78662555795353640442010-05-19T09:36:56.677-04:002010-05-19T09:36:56.677-04:00The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Francis Stonor Sau...The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Francis Stonor Saunders; Metropolitan Books, 2010johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com