May Memories: First Encounters with Jane Austen and why we still read her: Part III

In this series of guest post, a meta-diary of sorts, Austen readers recount what brought them to Austen in the first place and why they keep returning. The following is by Elaine Pigeon.

Although I’d certainly heard of Jane Austen, I didn’t read her when I was growing up. I was turned-off by the prim and proper female novels my British grandmother tried to get me to read, which is what I thought Austen was about. I preferred the adventures of Nancy Drew. Later, when I was in my twenties, I read the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin for insight and inspiration. Having attended art school sporadically in my late teens, I was enthralled by the Bloomsbury group.

My attitude toward Austen changed when her novels started showing up as costume dramas on Masterpiece Theatre in the mid-1990s. I remember nearly falling off my seat while watching Pride and Prejudice. As Elizabeth Bennet drives by the Pemberley estate, her eyes suddenly light up and her attitude toward Darcy undergoes an instant transformation. I thought this must have been the filmmaker’s interpretation, but low and behold, I soon learned that Austen does this in the novel. My interest was piqued, but not enough to start reading her; I opted for the films.

Pemberley

As a graduate student, I had lots of other books to read. In fact, I don’t recall seeing Austen listed on any grad courses! Hopefully, that has changed. In any case, I began studying Henry James and spent about two years reading his writings and then wrote my dissertation on a few of his major novels. Eventually, I came to see how much he drew on Austen. In The Portrait of a Lady, when Isabel Archer arrives at Gardencourt, she declares, “It’s just like a book!” This is an allusion to Northanger Abbey, echoing Catherine Morland’s words when Henry Tilney describes the Abbey to her: “Oh! Mr Tilney, how frightful! – This is just like a book!” Following Austen’s example, James illustrates how his idealistic Isabel must come to terms with reality.

Northanger Abbey has become one of my favourite Austen novels, possibly because it’s the one I know best. I have had the pleasure of teaching it in a course on eighteenth and nineteenth century writing by women a number of times, and it never disappoints: every time I read it I find more and more to admire. On my syllabus, it follows after our reading of Francis Burney’s epistolary novel Evelina and the first few chapters of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Northanger Abbey makes a wonderful contrast to Evelina; Austen’s prose is so clear and concise -- in a word, so modern. I also have the students consider Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe and her pursuit of Captain Tilney as an illustration of the analogy Wollstonecraft makes between fashionable young women and men in the military. Both are excessively vain and superficial in their values. I also present the novel as an example of metafiction, in that Austen incorporates a critique of the novel, especially Gothic novels, into her text. Finally, I make sure to draw attention to that fact that Catherine was not entirely wrong in her impression of Henry’s father, General Tilney. He does prove to be a villain when he discovers that Catherine is not rich and orders her to leave the Abbey. In terms of the actual text, I prefer the Broadview edition of the novel, edited by Claire Grogan. She provides an excellent introduction and very informative footnotes.

Of course, James learned other things from Austen besides her realism. I am now convinced that reading Austen provided him with much insight into the efficacy of irony and ambiguity, and how craftily they can be deployed. As a queer male, James could not write about his sexual preference directly. Just think of what they did to Oscar Wilde! Instead, James learned how to create a very subtle queer subtext, not necessarily perceptible to all readers. Moreover, one could not actually prove that the subtext was there, that would have been too risky. As a reader, one could, however, draw it out through the allusions and thereby produce an alternate text.

I've since read Mansfield Park and Emma, but much preferred the former. While I identified intensely with the much maligned Fanny Price, I still dislike the haughty and narrow-minded Emma, especially as incarnated by Gwyneth Paltrow. As I live in Montreal, I was fortunate in that I was able to attend the Austen AGM conference here in 2014 and listen to some excellent presentations on Mansfield Park in relation to the slave trade, which informs the background of the novel. Patricia Rozema drew on this for her excellent 1999 film adaptation.

Fanny Price (Francis O’Connor)

Next month, I will finally be reading Persuasion with a small group. There is also a new Austen film that has just come out, Love and Friendship, based on her early work, so I can now start at the beginning and work my way through her novels one more time. Austen is a writer who clearly merits rereading. I also think there is still much than can be said about Austen’s influence on James. Now that would be another interesting project!

Elaine Pigeon has a BFA in Film Studies and for her MA focused on the construction of gender in 18th-century literature. She received her Ph.D. in English Studies from the Université de Montréal. Her dissertation, Queer Impressions: Henry James’s Art of Fiction, was published by Routledge in 2005; the paperback edition in 2011. She currently teaches courses on 18th & 19th Century Writing by Women, Modern Fiction, and the American Novel as well as Children’s Literature in the English Department of Concordia University. Her interests include women’s writing, the gothic, modernism, cultural studies and film. She also blogs at pigeonfiles.wordpress.com.

May Memories: First Encounters with Jane Austen and why we still read her: Part II

In this series of guest posts, a meta diary of sorts,  Austen readers recount what brought them to Austen in the first place and reflect on why they keep returning. The following is by Ellen Moody. 

On first encountering Jane Austen and reading her again and again even now

The 1926 edition of Sense and Sensibility edited by Chapman, bought for me by my husband on my first birthday after we were married

      I first encountered Jane Austen as two books in one of my father's sets of “classic English” novels when I was around 12 to 13. These were books published (he told me) by organizations like The Left Book Club, meant to make available to ordinary readers great books at an affordable price. They had light-weight hard-back covers, these two in a set of beige and dark brown books, announcing thereby how serious they were. In other words, not packaged as romance, or a girls' book, but including the more available or well-known respected books as well as (often times) more unusual choices: this set had Dickens's David Copperfield but also (so sex was part of this world to some extent), Richardson's Pamela.  Another set in black with silver letters contained R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone.

Of course, they were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, still the best known and most widely read, the most frequently adapted. I read first and loved Pride and Prejudice. I saw it as exquisitely witty, very funny. I recognized the parents as versions of mine: it was validating to see this incompatible couple. I sided intensely with Mr. Bennet as I had with my father. It was a revelation and comfort to see truths about marriage out there. It was only years later I admitted to myself how softened the portrait was, how overt little punishment meted out.

Then I read Sense and Sensibility. I have, in a sense, never stopped reading it. Elinor Dashwood became interwoven with my being as I endured the abrasions and contradictory demands of teenagehood.  It wasn't that I could imitate her literally, but I kept in mind how she prudently guarded herself, how safety and self-respect lay in not letting the world see. Self-control. Again it took years for me to see that it was the Marianne in me she was teaching me to protect. Steady I would now say. Not just from men but the policing of outward cant and unexamined norms. We are ever offending every moment of our lives, cries Marianne, in protest, to which  Elinor replies that she has not told her to adopt these others' views or even act as they do when it comes to what counts. It was Elinor I reminded myself of in moments of distress. I figured out what to do.

Fast forward two years and I was in an old-fashioned drug store in NYC, the kind that used to sell classics in paperback for 40 cents. On a turning contraption I found Mansfield Park, a soft white book with Restoration comedy type caricature figures, where the blurb promised “a rollicking comedy.” In my naivete, I assumed the editor misunderstood what she had read. There too was Jane Eyre, a drawing of a Victorian looking young women dressed in a dark color against a dark green background. I don't know which I read first. Jane Eyre I read so many times I could envisage favorite scenes on the page, like Helen dying in Jane's arms. “Reader, I married him,” yes, for me, a third relationship at age 23. But it was Fanny who stayed with me. I identified utterly with her, with her real strength and also her sense of herself as utterly undervalued. I knew what she felt on the other side of the door, hesitating, dreading to walk in. When I got to the end of the book and read of life as a struggle, as endurance, I felt I had read something so strengthening, I turned back to the first page, and reread immediately.  I've reread it so many times, I do think it has ever left my mind since.

Alas, I cannot recall when I first read Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Between ages 17 and 19 I cannot remember my life very well. There are blanks. I know I read them by the time I was 21 because it was that year Emma was assigned in a college course on the eighteenth-century novel I was in.  I knew it was the only one I had not read. (I was in my thirties when I read Elizabeth Jenkins, the first biography I read and realized there were other serious novels! Not just the hilarious Love and Friendship whose wild mockery I couldn't get over when I encountered it either in graduate school or a second-hand bookshop (yes it was Chesterton's edition) because here I was 200 years later and these jokes hit home. At fifty-five surely we may give over worry about “the persecutions” of males. ) Northanger Abbey had gotten into me by that time; the professor suggested we reread it with a sliver of Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho.  I was fond of it, and it seemed to me I had reached one of the important goals of my existence when I got to Bath, enacted some long-standing dream, looking down from Beechen Cliff, at the ready to reject all I saw. I didn't. But a high moment.

Persuasion was my favorite by that time. I knew it was. That nadir of shattered nervousness when Wentworth comes into the room after eight years of absence. When I had a bad miscarriage at Keswick Hospital in the Lake District, Jim brought it to my bed to read the next day. My daughter, Isobel, took is with her to college to function similarly. Years later I've understood it is truncated, parts crude, a third volume planned and never executed, but those parts finished to perfection, especially that revised ending.

I conclude I must've read them in a blue paperback reprint of Chapman's texts because I had them when it came time to go to England (when I was 22). They were then to me sister-novels, packaged together, not misrepresented, but not particularly attractive. I must've hunted them out in a better bookstore.

But I didn't like Emma. I didn't understand that while my conscious mind recognized her malice, unjustified self-conceit, how she was hurting the foolish Harriet and plangent heroine, Jane, I had also identified enough. I used to say the scene where Emma insults Miss Bates was so painful, it was worse than the final moments in Lear because after all they were after all that had gone before a final “after-loss” after life had meted out its worst. What I didn't understand was it was not that moment I couldn't bear but this afterward when Mr. Knightley reproaches her so brutally. I now think it one of Austen's two supremely virtuoso works of art (the other Mansfield Park) but its text is too rebarbatively defensive despite its texts' strongly harmonizing rhythms  and continual turns to reasoned perspectives outside all the stories, which enable me sitting there to feel the diastole and systole of a heart-beating calm. A blue Houghton-Mifflin paperback, the kind assigned to students in those days.

It was post-1995 when I first read her three unfinished fragments, Catherine,or The Bower; The Watsons, Sanditon, and Lady Susan. It was due to being on Austen-l, and I read Austen's letters for the first time then too. I grieve she never wrote the second and third volume of The Watsons in any state. Here she was unguarded. So too in a kind of reverse mirror, Lady Susan. (I will write a post-script blog to this one on my own Under the Sign of Austen, Two.) Like E.M. Forster, the letters shocked me as utterly disjunctive from the abiding presence of the implied author of the novels. It took a long time and re-readings for me to realize, yes here is the strain, the inculcated antipathetic self-policing, the regaling us as a form of anesthetizing to keep what we have to at bay.

It's increasingly a problem to keep in contact with these texts. So much gets in the way, distorting contexts, the insistent complacency of fans and scholars too. I see why Henry James cried out against the careerist “in” use of “everyone's Jane” back in the 1890s. It doesn't do to find fault in Jane either.   To see the actual distance from what we might wish her to have written and what in her circumstances and given her background, what she did write.  I am one of those who can find in close readings and through some of the films enough of Austen coming through to extend the texts a little.  I am grateful for the enlargement of her small oeuvre through some of those which turn a kaleidoscope to offer another perspective. Rare, but a few of the sequels: Jo Baker's Longbourn, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club; Juliette Towhidi's mini-series film adaption, Death Comes to Pemberley, with its depiction of a later strained Elizabeth (Anna Maxwell Martin deepened for me Elizabeth's ability to be "excessively diverted" when others might cry). To other of the actors, actresses, script-writers who have realized the books adequately now and again. I enjoy reading her close contemporaries as in dialogue with her.  Whenever I do return to one of her texts, as I did two weeks ago Lady Susan, what she writes, the very words, her stance, what she does see exhilarates and consoles me. That she has seen it too. Even in Emma, she never fails me..

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood.

Ellen Moody, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature, is an independent literary scholar who has taught in colleges for more than 30 years. She has published in various areas (Renaissance through nineteenth-century, the gothic, French and other eighteenth-century novels, translation, film studies). Her edition of Charlotte Smith's Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake is due out late this summer.  She maintains a website with much often-consulted material on Jane Austen's novels as well as e-text editions of later eighteenth-century French novelists, translations from Italian Renaissance poetry – and Anthony Trollope.

http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/emcalendars.html

http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/misc.html

May Memories: First Encounters with Austen and why we still read her:

In this series of guest posts, a meta diary of sorts,  Austen readers recount what brought them to Austen in the first place and reflect on why they keep returning. The first is by me. Hat tip to Sarah Emsley for giving me the idea of inviting guest bloggers.

The Mysterious Miss Austen

 Mystery didn't bring me to Austen, but mystery keeps me coming back. I first read Austen as a teenager, so I missed the cosy, wide-eyed, heart-pounding immediacy that a child brings to a text. How, then, might I have identified with young Catherine Morland, who, just like me at age 10

"loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house."

I too disliked piano lessons

 My first Austen novel, unsurprisingly, was Pride and Prejudice. I read it because it was famous. Then I read Emma  because I heard it was Austen's masterpiece. I moved on and very much enjoyed the autumnal Persuasion, then Sense and Sensibility, at which point I was in love. Mansfield Park came later, and though it is now a favorite, I can't say I enjoyed it at first. Most likely, I was too old for the first encounter. I thought Fanny a prig and longed for Mary and Edmund to marry. 

The scene where Fanny cuts roses in the sun ... similar to the strawberry picking in Emma. I no longer wish for Mary and Edmund to make a match. 

 In graduate school, I turned most often to Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I loved Pride and Prejudice for being so light, bright and sparkling, to me at that time as delightful and sprightly as Mozart.  Sense and Sensibility appealed for exploring situations I often found myself in. I identified deeply Elinor: I had the Mariannes and Lucy Steeles in my own life. 

I loved Austen too for doing what I found so rare in literature: acknowledging and laying out financial realities. This was congruent with my own life, where money mattered, and “shillings” were not laid out lightly, especially in graduate school. And I would have loved Austen for Charlotte Lucas alone. Charlotte married with her head, not her heart, yet remained a decent human being and attained a decent life. (I naturally, however, would marry for love.)

Charlotte marries with her head and it all works out.

So from early on I was an Austen fan. It was only later I developed a fascination.

That happened as I began to recognize what Kenneth Johnston in has called the white spaces in Austen’s work:

the sense that there is something 'missing' in Austen's stories often gives rise to, or provokes, parodies or critiques of her novels in which the 'blank' spaces in her novels are filled up ... (Unusual Suspects)

Long before Johnston, I'd started to intuit a mystery bubbling below the bright surface of these texts, as I did in Henry James. What was it about Fanny Price? What really was going in Mansfield Park? And Emma? Timelines and back stories began to fascinate me as indications of how completely Austen had planned her novels--and of how much was submerged, waiting for an astute reader to uncover. Allusions started to pull me deeper. Seemingly offhand details began to catch my eye.

Some have called Emma the first mystery novel, with its authorial misdirection about Frank and Jane Fairfax and the possible murder of Mrs. Churchill. What constitutes a mystery is a matter of debate, but Austen directs us perhaps to the mysteries lurking beneath her own surface texts, even as she seems to satirize the very quest for mystery.

As Henry Tilney says to Catherine:

Unable to … repress your curiosity, you will instantly arise … and proceed to examine this mystery. After a short search, you will discover a division in the tapestry so artfully constructed as to defy the minutest inspection, and on opening it, a door will immediately appear …  your eyes will be attracted towards an old fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold … you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer—but for some time without discovering anything of importance –perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of papers appears—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber … when you lamp suddenly expires in the socket …

Maybe there really is a mystery lurking in Northanger Abbey?

Wicked Jane stops us there: she knows we love a mystery. Henry's mocking Catherine: but is there a real mystery he doesn't want her to see?

Austen will properly chide us for looking for mysteries, using Mr. Knightley as her proxy:

Mystery; Finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?

But can we trust Mr. Knightley? For there is a mystery dancing all around Emma, only she simply can't see it.

For me, the pull towards Austen continues to be in the mysteries, the dropped hints, the double entendres, the possible puns, the dual readings that lie just below the surface. What VirginiaWoolf, in a different context, calls Austen’s laughter, draws me in, Austen laughing at us as we topple in the face of her repeated misdirection. As long as I keep finding news clues, I will keep coming back, looking for another a "secret scroll" in her texts and knowing the whole time she may be playing us all for fools. If so, I will laugh yet again: Austen has not disappointed me yet.  

Serendipities

Today I participated in a poetry reading at Ohio University Eastern.

I had been wondering what poem to read. My brother just died in December, and I had been finding solace in Wordsworth's  "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" but felt I shouldn't use it. 

Daffodils

What then can I recite, I wondered? I had chosen a stanza from a poem called "The Java of Pussycats" that I found on Ellen's blog, but I needed more. Several hours before the reading a poem called "What is Death?" showed up in my mailbox, sent out by Friend Susannah Rose. 

Not only was the timing of the poem's arrival and its theme perfect, the poem was written by Henry Scott Holland, the same name as a mentor who encouraged me strongly on my Bonhoeffer book.

 I read the poem, which I reprint below. 

Hat tip to Camille for the images

Not only was it perfect for the occasion, but our emeritus English professor, Tom Flynn, read "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Tom not only read it but said almost exactly what I would have said about it. 

I tend to be suspicious of "connect the dots" serendipities, but yet I wonder. Is this all coincidence? The uncanny timing of the poem's arrival, the poem itself, the author, Tom reading Wordsworth? 

Perhaps I construct all this. And yet. Is a construction, like a poem, real? I suppose the most important takeaway is that we never know who we will touch when we send a poem or a word out into the world. Susan Rose could not have suspected that I needed just that poem for a poetry reading just that day. As I worry about this post, I am trying to trust that maybe it too will speak. 

What is Death?   

Henry Scott Holland

1847-1918

Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

I am I and you are you.

Whatever we were to each other, 

  that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak to me in the easy way

  which you always used.

Put no difference in your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed 

  at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word

  that it always was.

Let it be spoken without affect,

  without the trace of a shadow on it. 

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was.

There is absolutely unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind

  because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you,

 for an interval, 

    somewhere very near,

      just around the corner.

All is well.

__._,_.___

Daffodils, without irony

Daffodils picked near my house in a Spode vase sent from England by Jane

Every spring, in the woods near my house, sunlight comes in because the trees have no leaves yet. Daffodils blooms in those sunny patches. It's hilly in the woods, and at the bottom of the hills a stream meanders through. Every year, I pick daffodils there. This year, the daffodils, like Easter, appeared early, perhaps, in the case of the daffodils, because we had a milder winter than usual. 

I had to slow down to work my way carefully through thorns that seemed, to my fancy, to have been deliberately put on guard at the periphery of the woods to get we human creatures to adopt a far more thoughtful and deliberate pace as we enter the forest. 

On the note of slowing down, this year, I have been especially enjoying reading some of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and particularly an old favorite, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."  I find this poem a balm to my soul in what has been a relentlessly busy season. I simply delight in his image of the joyful daffodils:

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

And as I get older, I more and more resonate with:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude 

There's nothing like a store of happy memories:

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

I imagine Wordsworth, or perhaps Dorothy, on a sofa on a cold day, thinking about those daffodils with no photograph or painting,  just the memory, and then, feeling happy recalling them.

Daffodils in the lake District.

 Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about these same daffodils in her journal:

 I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway.

To me, this passage is as lovely as the poem. It's so direct, so immediate. I remember reading Dorothy's journals many years ago on a long flight somewhere, and being much taken with them.

The Danish Girl and Spotlight

This weekend I saw two fine films at the old-fashioned movie house in Athens, Ohio. The first, The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander, imaginatively retells the story of Einar and Gerda Wegener, Copenhagen painters from the 1920s. Einar adopts the persona of a woman he calls Lili Elbe and gradually comes to realize that he is, in fact, a woman trapped inside a man's body. He becomes one of the first transgendered people after undergoing sex-change surgery in the early 1930s.

Gerda sketching.

Though based on a real story, the movie displays as a fantasia. Every scene is gorgeous, often filmed with the faint haze of an Impressionist painting or backlit by a golden glow. Copenhagen, with its fishing boats and tiled roofs, is unutteraby lovely, as is marbled and chanderliered Paris. The people in the movie look beautiful and appear in opulent clothes as they float through parties and art openings dressed in velvets, sequins and silk scarves with beautiful prints. Breathtaking art nouveau designs fill the rooms, along with exquisite white tulle ballet gowns and half finished canvases. Downton Abbey looks pedestrian in contrast (of of course has a "downstairs" of servants and at least superficial bit of toil).

 If the filming is lush, the film's characters are also drawn unabashedly bigger-than-life, reminding me of Peter Jackson's daring in depicting heroism in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a love story, The Danish Girl reminded me too of lyrical 1940s Hollywood dramas.

Stills don't entirely capture the cumulative effect of the lush, beautiful filming.  Gerda remains bigger-than-life in her  loyalty to her transgendered husband. 

Einar poses for Gerda, perhaps clutching the ballet gown with too much longing.

Like Jackson's trilogy--and Downton Abbey for that matter--this movie works, because its animating vision is clear, consistent and sustained throughout the film, and the acting quite good. I found myself caring about the bigger-than-life characters and despite myself, was moved, though it occurred to me at times that while Einar might have shed his male identity, he never, ever shed his overwhelming sense of male entitlement. Nevertheless, I craved a costume drama and this entirely satisfied that urge. I appreciated the movie for being so unabashedly the gorgeous fantasia it was. I found it not entirely escapist either, as it raised hard and intelligent questions about identity and gender, as well as the condundrums posed by art, identity and pain: in the movie, Gerda achieves depth as artist only when she begins painting Lili, whose emergence is the catalyst for the destruction of her domestic idyll, while as a woman, the talented painter Einar/Lili abandons his art and becomes a shop girl in a department store, apparently happily.

The real Lili beside the filmed version, played by Eddie Redmayne.

After The Danish Girl, we watched Spotlight, a film aiming to realistically recreate how the Boston Globe broke the story of Roman Catholic Church's systemic 40-year cover-up of  priests who sexually abused minors. Although we know how it all turned out, the blow-by-blow depiction of the story's unfolding was riveting. The movie also compellingly illustrated the damage the cover-up did, as priests the church knew to be pedophiles were allowed to continue to victimize the innocent. I would say the movie is only somewhat realistic, however, because as a former reporter I realized that the film, to combat tedium, made the reporters' tasks (drudgery) seem much easier than they would have been.

The Spotlight team--the investigative reporting unit of the Globe--meet to discuss the unfolding sex abuse story. It could be jarring to see faces familiar from tv, such as  John Slattery from Mad Men and Rachel McAdams from True Detective. 

The film pointedly questions the news media, making it clear that the Globe had the story in its hands--that is to say, pluckable--for at least decade and never bothered to put the pieces together. It was all there, hidden in plain sight, but, the film strongly implies, nobody wanted to see it. Given the extent to which corporate profit taking since 2001-02 (the time frame of the movie) has decimated, if not destroyed, many newsrooms, one can only long for the kind of funding and patience that in the end made breaking this story possible--and wonder what rampant corruption might be going on undetected today.

The story hiding in plain sight also reminded me of my Bonhoeffer research, which likewise uncovered a story hiding in plain sight. I imagine this happens more often than we think: I see it in Jane Austen studies too. As Nietzsche pointed out, we often see only what we have already decided is there; we fit our facts to our frame, not our frame to our facts.

Both these movies impressed me for their willingness to develop characters, raise difficult questions and work from an ethical framework.

Richard Menustik: Artist and people lover: 1963-2015

In late September,  my brother John called with the news: Richard, our younger brother, had been diagnosed terminal lung cancer. After the initial chemo went badly, and knowing the prognosis was dire, Richard opted out of treatment. The disease ravaged him, and he passed away on December 17, 2015.

This issue of Richard's comic book, clean dirt, merged his love of comic with his love of dinosaurs.

From an early age, Richard loved dinosaurs, comic books, and drawing. Our mother saw his artistic talent and made sure that as a child he had art lessons at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Our father would take him most weekends to Geppi's, a local, hole-in-the wall comic book seller: the real deal. I like to think this support and affirmation laid a foundation that helped formed the person Richard became.

Richard's dinosaurs and sense of humor.

In 1972, our family moved to Ellicott City, Maryland, to Grosvenor Drive in the brand new neighborhood of Somerset, and there Richard, called Ritchie at the time, made many lifelong friends. His friend David Cooke remembered that on first moving near us (our house faced his block) in 1974, Richard and John came to meet him. Among the first words out of Richard's mouth were: Do you have any comic books?

Richard is the little boy third from the left in the back row of this fourth-grade photo from Northfield Elementary School. 

In the late 1970s, as both John and Richard began attending Centennial High School, a group formed in the "Menustik basement." My parents gladly allowed all comers into the hangout, thinking how nice it was that kids enjoyed getting together to play games (Dungeons and Dragons) and talk. They had no idea that a party scene flourished in the paneled basement with the brown tiled floor. Life carried on one side of the basement door, in a harvest gold kitchen with classic 1970s dark wood cabinets and a shag-carpeted family room, and life down below, never the twain to meet.

Richard worked on his zombie dinosaurs all of his adult life.

Friend Jenny Wall remembered the basement as a place where teenagers found acceptance, friendships and a space to explore who they were becoming.  For David Cooke, the basement became a haven, the spot that made a transition to a new neighborhood OK, and probably the reason he stayed in Howard County for the rest of his life. It was a magical and transformative time for the people in the group, young, alive, full of energy, searching for identity, seeking and finding friendships that would last a lifetime.

During this era, John and Richard, who were exceptionally close, and others became avid Frank Zappa fans, attending many, many concerts together. They also began to embrace science fiction, especially Balticon. They loved metal and the then-vibrant Baltimore punk scene. All through this, Richard kept drawing.

John and Richard on August 1, 2009 at Merriwether Post Pavilion.

In the early 1980s, Richard attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for one year, where at least one of his comic strips was published in the school paper. Then, wanting a more robust art program and art scene, and being told by his friend Curt Kronlage that Virginia Commonwealth University was a happening place, he transferred there, completing a bachelor's degree in fine arts. He moved to Baltimore for a few years after graduating, and then back to Richmond, working for M-2 Marketing.

One of Richard's comics appeared in the Retriever, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County newspaper, in the early 1980s. 

Many friends came up from Richmond for the memorial service and remembered Richard as a mainstay of the Richmond music and arts scene. He sang for a punk rock fusion band called Spooge. His college roommate became part of the metal band Gwar and Richard had some connections with the group. One friend remembered that if friends said they would come out to hear a band perform, Richard was always the one you could count on to really show up--and cheer you along the whole time. Others recalled how important he was to their lives in connecting them with other people in the Richmond art scene--or with like minded people in general. He spent his life building bridges, helping people to find community in an increasingly atomized world.

Richard worked as an extra in Steven Spielberg's period drama, Lincoln, shot in Richmond, an experience he most enjoyed.

Richard also continued art projects he had begun in college: a comic book, meticulously hand drawn, called Clean Dirt, and dinosaur illustrations that included zombie dinosaurs and a series called Dinosaurs in Richmond that put dinosaurs in various familiar spots in the city. One friend remembered the day in 1988 Richard threw a copy of Clean Dirt on the Zappa stage during a concert, and Zappa, though not prone to audience interactions, picked it up and read the title aloud.

One of Richard's Dinosaurs in Richmond series. All his life, he meticulously hand drew his work.

In spring of 2012, M-2 Marketing closing, Richard moved to Ashton, Maryland, near Howard County, and lived in a rounded silver 1960s trailer on Curt's property. He helped Curt with his landscaping business, worked at Demspey's restaurant and continued with his art. He also made friends and connected with people, and at least one remembered the silver trailer as a second home. Curt and his partner Missy and their two children became a family for Richard.

Mr. Grindstone was familiar to family and friends, appearing on t-shirts as well as playbills. 

In March 2014, John and Richard visited the Smithsonian Museum's dinosaur collection, familiar to them since earliest childhood, before it closed for a renovation. John described it as a perfect day where the weather was good and every part of the trip went smoothly. As they were leaving, Richard asked when the dinosaur exhibit would reopen: John told him 2019. Richard, as if knowing something was not right, said that he wouldn't be alive to see it.

Richard  made a deep  impression on my three children, Sophie, Nick and Will. Will and Nick are now metalheads because Richard and John gave them metal CDs--and because of Richard's enthusiasm for all things metal. Will started a metal band at Earlham College called Abdominal Residue that he hopes to resurrect, after having been a semester away in India, as Bog. At the memorial, Sophie remembered staying at John's condo one Christmas season to work at Heavenly Ham, and having a long, solo discussion with Richard in which she felt total acceptance from a person she knew she could count on for support. It became one of those magical moments of connection that come so fleetingly into life. Another friend, Beth Gilbert, noted that she and Richard talked on the phone every week.

John and Richard in the last week of Richard's life, in hospice. Richard, on morphine, is a little out of it. 

Others, including me, remember a person who never got angry at other people, though he did get angry injustices and the political system. He was an upbeat person who saw the humor in most situations, and one who accepted his death with a courage that I have never before seen. He never once complained. He told people not to mourn his passing because he had lived a good, full life on his own terms. As one person at the memorial put it, he burned his candle brightly and fast. He cared about people more than material possessions. He cared about art more than money. He lived according to his own lights. In a world not overflowing with kindness and compassion, he was one of the rare good souls, never grasping for himself but instead pouring himself out for others.

Our cousin Susanne, on the left, pictured with her mother, our Aunt Betty, attended the funeral and spread word to our ancestral village of Vrboce in Slovakia about Richard's death. They will say prayers for him there. 

John remembered after the service Richard saying about 20 years ago that he wanted Zappa's "Watermelon in Easter Hay" played at his funeral, so here is hoping for a commemorative listen to his favorite song. A 1988 version can be found at Youtube:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B9DqykUsqRY.

Zappa performs "Watermelon in Easter Hay"

 I invite people to add their thoughts, their corrections, their additions. This is post is only the beginning, I hope, of remembering Richard's life.