Poet of the Month 052: CARSON McCULLERS

CARSON McCULLERS 
 c 1952

 

 

 

WHEN WE ARE LOST

 

When we are lost what image tells?
Nothing resembles nothing.  Yet nothing
Is not blank.  It is configured Hell:
Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,
Demanding furniture.  All unrelated
And with air between.

 

The terror.  Is it of Space, of Time?
Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?
To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized.  While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

 

 

December 1952

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lula Carson Smith was born on 19 February 1917 in the town of Columbus in western Georgia, the eldest child of Lamar Smith, a local jeweler, and his wife Vera Marguerite 'Bebe' Smith (née Waters).  Her brother Lamar Smith Jr followed her into the world in 1919 and was himself followed, in 1922, by her sister Margarita Gachet Smith.

 

McCullers, who dropped the 'Lula' from her name when she was thirteen, originally dreamed of becoming a concert pianist.  This ambition changed, however, when she contracted rheumatic fever in 1932 –– an event which persuaded her, along with the voracious reading she had done since early childhood, that she ought to become a writer. 

 

In September 1934 she left Georgia for New York City where she enrolled in writing courses at Columbia University, supporting herself by working odd jobs after losing the money she was given by her family in what would remain, until the end of her life, unexplained circumstances.  She returned to Columbia in 1935 to continue her studies and was followed there by a young soldier named Reeves McCullers Jr whom she had met in Georgia through a mutual friend the previous summer.  It was Reeves, now out of the army and studying at Columbia himself, who took her home to her family when she once again became seriously ill in November 1935.  Forced to spend weeks in bed recuperating, she began the story, at that time titled The Mute, that would eventually become her first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  

 

McCullers married Reeves in September 1937 and moved with him to North Carolina shortly after the ceremony where she continued to work on The Mute, eventually submitting an outline of the novel to a fiction contest run by Boston-based publishers Houghton Mifflin.  Her outline won her the contest's second prize of $500 and automatic acceptance of the book upon completion.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published on 4 June 1940, making the twenty-three year old McCullers an overnight critical and commercial success, as popular with the notoriously hard to impress New York critics as she was (and continues to be) with readers all around the world.  By this time, however, she was separated from her husband, with whom she would continue to have a difficult on-again, off-again relationship until his death, by suicide, on 18 November 1953 in a Paris hotel room.  (They had divorced in 1941, only to remarry in 1945 in what proved to be a disastrous move for both of them.)

 

Although McCuller's second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), a story about obsessional love set on a military base, did not repeat the runaway success of her first novel her reputation was assured with the 1943 publication of the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in the widely read fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar.  The story was reprinted in Best American Short Stories of 1944, a boost for her confidence which encouraged her to complete The Member of the Wedding, the novel many critics now believe to be her masterpiece. This book was published, again by Houghton Mifflin, to largely favorable reviews on 19 March 1946 and McCullers went on to successfully adapt it for the stage, with the dramatized version, starring Julie Harris, black jazz singer Ethel Waters and newly discovered child actor Brandon de Wilde, opening on Broadway on 5 January 1950 and running for 501 performances.  The cast repeated their roles in the 1952 film version directed by Fred Zinnemann, with the 27 year old Julie Harris earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her moving and convincing portrayal of the story's 12 year old protagonist Frankie Addams.

 

McCullers published what would be her final novel, Clock Without Hands, in 1960.  It was preceded by another play titled The Square Root of Wonderful, based in large part on her doomed marriage to Reeves, which premiered on 30 October 1957 and closed, to her great disappointment, after only 45 performances.  The fact that she was able to complete these works was nothing short of a miracle, given the atrocious state of her health which had been in gradual decline since the late 1930s and saw her suffer a stroke in 1947 that affected her ability to read and left her with a paralyzed left arm.  Now considered to be one of North America's greatest and most compassionate writers, she died on 29 September 1967 in Nyack, New York after suffering another brain hemorrhage that left her comatose for 47 days. 

 

Unlike many novelists, who often begin their careers as poets, McCullers did not start writing poetry until she was well into her thirties.  Nor was much of her work in this medium ever published during her lifetime.  As her sister Margarita explained in her notes for The Mortgaged Heart, a posthumous collection of her uncollected work that appeared in 1972, much of her poetry was left unfinished in 'handwritten manuscripts that are unclear.'  She did, however, give a few public readings of her poems over the years and also managed to record some of them for MGM Records prior to her death.  'I remember best one evening,' her sister wrote, 'at a university lecture.  After she had recited "Stone Is Not Stone" in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence.  Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, "Mrs McCullers, I love you".'

 

 

 

Use the link below read more about the life and work of North American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet CARSON McCULLERS:

 

 

 

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/carson-mccullers-1917-1967

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use these links to watch a 1956 interview with CARSON McCULLERS and view a news story about Lover Beloved: An Evening with Carson McCullers, a musical play based on her life and work conceived and performed by singer/songwriter SUZANNE VEGA.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDY_NPbkRs

 


 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfdFQ5qVimc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 040: HELENE MULLINS

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 035: EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 025: JOSEPHINE MILES

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 19 March 2021

 

The Women in Black (1993) by MADELEINE ST JOHN [Re-Post]

The Text Publishing Company, 2012

 

 

 

'I don't suppose you mean to make a career in the retail trade?' said Miss Cartright.

    'Oh, no!' cried Lisa.
    Miss Cartright laughed. 
  'It's quite all right, Lisa.  It doesn't suit everybody.  But as long as you are working here, you will be expected to work hard, and as if it were your permanent job.  Do you understand that?'
  'Oh, of course,' said Lisa, desperately.  'Of course; I do understand.  I'll work very hard.'
   And Miss Cartright, thinking it might be rather quaint to see the girl in such a context, decided to put her in Ladies' Cocktail, where she could give a hand to Magda in Model Gowns now and then because, although she looked so childish, she was evidently bright as well as willing, and might be quite useful, all things considered.

 

 

The Novel:  Shy, seventeen year old Lesley Miles has just finished her Leaving Certificate (the 1960s equivalent to today's SAT exam, Baccalauréat, GSCE A-Level or HSC, depending which part of the world you happen to call home).  Needing a job to keep her busy over the Christmas holidays and earn her a little extra cash while she awaits her exam results, she applies for a position as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Sydney's famous FG Goode Department Store ('Serving the People of Sydney since 1895').  Although she is unaware of it when she arrives for her interview –– where she daringly decides to write her name as 'Lisa' on the application form, replacing the long detested 'Lesley' she was christened by her mother –– the relatively short amount of time she will spend working behind the counter at Goode's will prove to be transformative for her and for her fellow 'women in black' in many pleasantly surprising but as yet unsuspected ways. 

 

She is sent, by the indomitable Miss Cartright, to work in the Ladies Cocktail department on the store's second floor, where she ably assists Miss Fay Baines, Mrs Patty Williams and Miss Jacobs –– its alterations specialist who has worked at Goode's 'since before the War' –– in their efforts to fit and clothe the bustling female hordes who descend upon them each sale time like swarms of bargain-hunting locusts.  Thanks to the whimsicality of Miss Cartright, Lisa is also called upon to occasionally assist the exotic and formidable Magda –– a newly-arrived immigrant with an unpronounceable Slovenian surname who also speaks fluent French –– otherwise known as the 'guardian of the rose pink cave of Model Gowns.'  Only the city's richest, most fashion-conscious (and silliest) women can afford to shop in Model Gowns, where they are sold one-off haute couture creations –– suitable for any cocktail party or similarly well-to-do social occasion –– by this enigmatic, ever-tactful and perpetually unflappable 'Continental' salesperson.    

 

Magda is unlike anybody the quiet and bookish Lisa has ever encountered before.  She speaks differently (because she is 'a New Australian'), dresses differently –– she is permitted to wear her own clothes to work, as long as they are black, rather than being forced to wear the unflattering black frock the store provides –– and discusses novels like Anna Karenina and French clothing designers with her as though she considers the newcomer her social, cultural and intellectual equal.  Magda more or less adopts Lisa during her time at Goode's, encouraging her in her ambition to become a poet (or an actress, Lisa has not yet quite decided which it will be) and inviting her to boisterous, fun-filled parties held at her tiny Cremorne flat.  In addition to sampling her first glass of wine and first slice of salami at one of these parties, Lisa is also introduced to Magda's husband Stefan and their livewire friend Rudi, newly arrived from Hungary via Melbourne, and to a clever boy her own age named Michael.  

 

But Magda does not confine herself to broadening the horizons of this yet-to-blossom school leaver.  She also invites Fay Baines –– twenty-nine years old, unmarried, a former would-be showgirl who has an unfortunate habit of falling in love with the wrong sort of men –– to her New Year's Eve party, introducing her to Rudi as per his request that Magda should find him 'a nice healthy Australian girl to marry.'  Even the unhappy home life of Patty Williams, childless and married to the taciturn and uninspired Frank, takes a turn for the better after Frank leaves her, only to return a fortnight later to discover that he no longer calls the shots in their new, sexually exciting marriage.  Only Miss Jacobs –– stolid, uncomplaining, solitary –– fails to be drawn into the spell that Magda's refreshing forthrightness appears to have cast over the lives of her delighted but somewhat flummoxed co-workers.  

 

But the spell, like all such spells, is quickly broken.  Lisa receives her Leaving results, which are excellent and promise a bright future for her at Sydney University if only she and her mother can persuade her stick-in-the-mud father to let her attend this hotbed of libertine sinfulness.  Happily they do, meaning, less happily, that Lisa must give up her job at Goode's.  Meanwhile, Fay becomes engaged to Rudi ('the nicest man I've ever met' is how she describes him to a disbelieving friend) and Patty, childless and miserable about it for so long, learns that she is finally pregnant.  Only Magda is left, biding her time in Model Gowns until she and the ever-charming Stefan can save enough money to allow her to open a shop of her own in swanky Double Bay.  

 

 

André Deutsch Ltd UK, 1993

 

 

The Women in Black is a slim little gem of a novel, a charming modern update of the Cinderella story that manages to be witty and positive while never losing its ironic edge or becoming crassly sentimental.  It captures the time and place in which it is set –– a quieter, far less pretentious Sydney doing its best to survive the Christmas/New Year 'retail rush' of 1960 and 1961 –– in a way that is wistful, engaging and at the same time elegantly satirical.  For anybody who grew up in Sydney in the 1960s (or even the 1970s or the 1980s) it will bring back fond memories of a time when the city's department stores seemed like treasure-laden palaces and the act of shopping itself was a perplexing, wearying but generally far more pleasurable experience than it often is today.  The world of FG Goode's Department Store –– based on the still-existing David Jones' Department Store that has been a beloved city institution since 1838 –– is a vanished world but no less appealing or intriguing for having been relegated so irretrievably to the past.  The Women in Black recreates a time when life was not necessarily better or easier but was certainly a lot simpler and, it might be ventured, a bit more fun for a variety of reasons. 

 

MADELEINE ST JOHN, c 1993

 

 

 

The Writer:  Madeleine St John was born in Sydney on 12 November 1941 but spent most of her adult life in London, the city in which three of her four published novels are set.  'I was brought up,' she once told a friend, 'on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged.  Australia was a deviation of one's essence.'  England, she added, '…was everything one had hoped for and continues to be so.'

 

St John (which she pronounced 'sin-jin' all her life in the supposedly 'true' English style) grew up in the genteel northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.  Her father Edward St John was a Queen's Councillor and a well-known Liberal politician who was considered something of a renegade by his party for speaking out against apartheid and in favour of other radical ideas like nuclear disarmament.  (He also gained attention for exposing the somewhat convoluted sex life of John Gorton, Australia's nineteenth Prime Minister).  Her mother Sylvette, born in Paris, was of Romanian-Jewish descent and unfortunately took her own life when Madeleine, who adored her, was twelve.  This event, she later confessed, 'obviously changed everything.'  Her father remarried and St John would live in what her half brother would call 'self-imposed exile' from him and his 'new' family for the remainder of her life.  She rarely discussed her family and only then, according to friends like Bruce Beresford, to draw attention to their alleged (but never conclusively proven) ill treatment of her.

 

After becoming a boarder at St Catherine's School in Waverley with her younger sister Collette –– an experience she likened to attending Lowood, the grim educational institution featured in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre –– she went on to obtain a Master's Degree in English at Sydney University, where her friends and fellow students included Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford (who has just directed what was, for more than twenty years, his unproduced screen adaptation of The Women in Black retitled Ladies in Black) and the future maestro of Australian Shakespearean actors, the great John Bell.  She graduated in 1963 and almost immediately married a fellow student named Chris Tillam, moving first to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco with him so they could be together while he studied filmmaking.

 

In 1968 St John relocated to London, fully expecting that her husband would join her there once his studies were complete.  Tillam chose not to do this, so she lived a semi-bohemian existence in flats shared with a succession of her fellow Australian emigrés before finding a permanent home in what was, at that time, the seedy and somewhat down-at-heel suburb of Notting Hill.  During this period, while supporting herself as a bookseller, a clerk and sometimes as a secretary, she became a follower of an Indian mystic named Swami Jr, wore Indian clothes and, for a time, called herself by an Indian name.  But this flirtation with Eastern mysticism proved, in the end, to be a passing fad.  A devoted churchgoer all her life, St John soon began attending services again each Sunday as she had done, very unfashionably, throughout her university days. 

   

 

The Text Publishing Company, 2009

 

 

Firmly settled in London, St John spent eight years attempting to write a biography of Madame Blavatsky, the Russian-born co-founder of the spiritual system known as 'Theosophy,' before permanently abandoning the project some time in the early 1990s.  She wrote her first novel, The Women in Black, in six months –– she claimed that none of it was autobiographical, modestly explaining that she lacked the ability to 'pull off' such a feat –– and it was published by the UK firm of André Deutsch in 1993.  Three more novels –– A Pure Clear Light (1996), The Essence of The Thing (1997) and Stairway to Paradise (1999) –– followed, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, making her the first Australian female author to be nominated for the award and a bugbear for certain members of the British literary establishment who took offence at her honest outsider's depiction of English mores and manners.  Her own reaction to the nomination was anything but self-aggrandizing.  'There are squillions of books out there,' she told a reporter.  'Who knows what the best six are?  It's not about me being brilliant.  It's about me being lucky… We won't know for a hundred years the truth about whether it's any good.  It's one of the things about literature; you just can't tell until you're dead.'

 

A heavy smoker all her life –– her tin of Virginia Gold tobacco remained within arm's reach on her night table right until the end –– Madeleine St John died of emphysema, in her beloved London, on 18 June 2006.  In addition to four well-regarded novels, she also left behind her Notting Hill flat, a few dozen assorted paperbacks, one hundred handwritten pages of an uncompleted manuscript and a will stipulating that none of her work should ever be translated into any foreign language.  She remained a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure even to her closest friends, a writer who seemed to value her privacy to the point of making a recluse of herself in order to protect it.    

 

 

 

Print and digital copies of The Women in Black and other novels by MADELEINE ST JOHN can be ordered directly from the Text Publishing website.

 

 

 

 

Another review of The Women in Black can be read on the blog The Resident Judge of Port Phillip. 

 

 

The long awaited BRUCE BERESFORD film adaptation of The Women in Black, retitled Ladies in Black, premiered in Sydney on 20 September 2018 and is currently on general release in Australia and many other parts of the world.  It stars ANGOURIE RICE as Lisa, JULIA ORMOND as Magda, RACHAEL TAYLOR as Fay Baines, NONI HAZELHURST as Miss Cartright, VINCENT PEREZ as Stefan, RYAN CORR as Rudi and ALISON McGIRR as Patty Williams.

 

   

 

 

 

 

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The Watch Tower (1966) by ELIZABETH HARROWER

 

 

 

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Originally posted 3 October 2013 

 

 

 
Last updated 16 March 2021 

 

 

The Write Advice 115: EL DOCTOROW

It’s not calculated at all.  It never has been.  One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing.  To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing… The inventions of the book come as discoveries.  At a certain point, of course, you figure out what your premises are and what you’re doing.  But certainly, with the beginnings of the work, you really don’t know what’s going to happen…  
  It’s not a terribly rational way to work.  It’s hard to explain.  I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people.  I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The Art of Fiction #94 [The Paris Review #101, Winter 1986]


 

Use the link below to read a 2015 article about North American novelist EL DOCTOROW (1931–2015):

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/23/el-doctorow-great-american-novelist

 

 

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Think About It 042: CG JUNG

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible… If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely… A creative person has little power over his own life.  He is not free.  He is captive and driven by his daimon.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)


 

Use the link below to visit The Jung Page, '…a place to encounter innovative writers and to enter into a rich, ongoing conversation about psychology and culture' created by Jungian psychoanalyst DON WILLIAMS in 1995:

 

http://cgjungpage.org/

 

 

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Jean de Florette (1962) by MARCEL PAGNOL

Fortunio/Editions de Fallois, 2004

<< Je sais à quoi tu penses.  Ça te met mal à l'aise l'idée que tu pourrais le sauver.  Eh bien, moi, je dis le contraire. Je dis que c'est pour son bien.  Et toi-même, un jour, tu me l'as dit : s'il fait une réussite cette année, même petite, il va continuer, et l'année prochaine, ça recommencera, et ce sera un malheureux tout sa vie, jusqu'à ce qu'il crève au travail ; tandis que si toutes les plantes sèchent sur pied, il comprendra, et avec l'argent que je suis tout bienveillant à lui donner pour lui acheter sa ferme, il peut retourner s'installer en ville, et ça sera beaucoup mieux pour lui.  Même s'il n'y avait pas la question des oeillets, moi je ne lui prêterais pas le mulet, parce que si on ne l'aide pas, on lui rend service.  Tiens, voilà cinquante francs.  Va dormir, et demain matin file à la gare d'Aubagne, et sans regarder derrière toi ! >>

 

 

'I know what you're thinking.  The idea that you could save him makes you uneasy.  All right, I say the opposite.  I say it's for his own good.  And you yourself said to me one day: if he makes a success of it this year, even a little one, he'll keep going, and the next year, it'll all start again, and it'll be a misfortune to him all his life, until he dies from overwork; while if all his plants wither under his feet, he'll understand, and with the money I'm so kindly going to give him to buy his farm, he can go back to the city, and that'll be a lot better for him.  Even if it wasn't a question of the carnations, I still wouldn't take my mule to him, because if we don't help him we'll be doing him a favor.  Here's fifty francs.  Go to sleep, and tomorrow morning hurry off to the station at Aubagne, and do it without looking behind you!'

 

 

Excerpts translated by

  

BR

 

 

 

The Novel:  The Provençal village of Bastides is a small farming community, deeply rooted in tradition, which steadfastly resists the modernity that is beginning to make its presence felt in most other regions of rural 1920s France.  Its inhabitants go about their business as they have for centuries, their lives governed by the seasons, the size of their goat herds, their annual harvests of olives, chickpeas, wheat and grapes and the amount of game they can trap or shoot to help boost their incomes and supplement their meager diets.  The village is not a place where change is encouraged or strangers are welcomed, particularly not if they hail from the neighboring town of Crespin –– a community Les Bastidiens hold a longstanding ancestral grudge against, one which sparked a drunken argument at a wedding which saw the male and female populations of both villages fight a pitched battle in its streets, leaving several people, including the town priest, injured and bleeding.

 

The most important family in Bastides is the Soubeyran clan which, after several generations of inter-marriage, has been reduced to just two surviving members –– the nearly sixty year old bachelor César Soubeyran, locally known as 'Le Papet' [literally 'grandfather,' but in his case more like 'the patriarch'] and his unmarried nephew Ugolin.  Both men are farmers, obsessed with money and the need to protect the precious 'sources,' or springs, which provide the water required to successfully grow crops in such dry and rocky soil.  Theirs is a hard but profitable life, its physical and agricultural challenges matched only by their stinginess and their unrelenting desire to obtain more land so they might increase their zealously guarded wealth.  Apart from their weekly visits to town, where they drink Pernod at the local café and play a game or two of boules with the mayor, Papet and Ugolin mind their own business and expect their friends and neighbors to do the same.

 

 

Farrar Straus Giroux UK edition, 1998

 

 

 

It is the redheaded Ugolin –– thin as a goat but large in the shoulders and impressively strong for his size, who also suffers from a nervous tic which causes him to blink repeatedly whenever he's nervous or upset –– who stumbles upon the unprecedented idea of growing oeillets [carnations] on their land.  These flowers, so popular during the season of religious festivals and also for funerals, have begun to sell for impressive prices in the nearby town of Aubagne, leading Ugolin to experiment with growing a small number of them on his farm without his uncle's knowledge.  His experiment pays off, however, when he sells his first crop to an Aubagne florist for the respectable sum of forty francs, proving to Papet that they would be wise to take the risk of growing the flowers on a commercial scale.  

 

The problems –– as they have always been in and around Bastides –– are obtaining enough land and water to make this new flower growing enterprise a viable proposition.  Carnations are thirsty plants, requiring daily saturation to survive the harsh Provençal summers.  A lot of land is also required to grow them in profitable quantities, leading Papet to offer to buy 'Romarins,' a neighboring farm, from its irascible owner Marius Camoins, better known to the villagers as the acquitted (but later self-confessed) murderer of a trespassing braconnier [poacher].  Papet only wants the extra land and access to the long forgotten spring he knows is on it, but Camoins stubbornly refuses to sell, climbing down from the olive tree he's pruning to threaten him and Ugolin when they refuse to leave his property.  Compelled, as they see it, to defend their family honor, the Soubeyrans trip the old man, who falls flat on his face and dies right in front of them.  After dragging his body back to the olive tree to make his death appear an accident, uncle and nephew depart, secure in the knowledge that the land they covet will soon be theirs because whoever is due to inherit it is unlikely to have any interest in working such an arid and unprofitable property.  All they have to do is wait, Papet assures the anxious Ugolin, and they will be able to snap up the land at a bargain price, having secretly returned in the meantime to block its re-discovered spring with cement.

 

But things do not proceed according to plan for Papet and his nephew.  The heir to Romarins turns out to be the hunchbacked son of Camoins's long departed sister Florette whose wedding, so many years before, was the scene of the violent confrontation which drove the final wedge between the citizens of Bastides and those of neighboring Crespin.  Considered a great beauty in her day, Florette was also a former sweetheart of Papet's whose relationship with him ended unhappily on her side –– a fact not lost on the old man nor his anxious kinsman.  When news arrives that Florette is dead, Papet and Ugolin begin to breathe a little easier.  They soon learn that 'Le Bossu' [the hunchback] is a tax collector by occupation, someone who can surely be relied upon to sell them the Romarins property at the cheapest possible price.

 

But once again the Soubeyrans are mistaken.  Jean Cadoret intends to farm his dead uncle's land and arrives at Romarins shortly afterwards with his wife Aimée, a former opera singer, and his little girl Manon.  A man of culture, philosophy and science whose greatest pleasure is playing the harmonica, Jean plans to make a new start with them in what, after a lifetime spent in the city, he naïvely mistakes for a peaceful bucolic paradise.  Armed with a generous selection of 'How To' books and seemingly limitless supplies of energy and enthusiasm, he sets about transforming Romarins into a productive working farm, buying rabbits to breed and sell and planting a specially imported variety of Asian squash with which to feed them, certain in his heart that his land contains a spring he is bound to find before the fierce Mediterranean summer forces him to haul water from a well six miles away to keep his livestock, crops and family alive.

 

At first Jean succeeds, provoking even greater anxiety in the heart of his closest neighbor Ugolin who, on Papet's advice, makes a conscious effort to befriend him, eventually providing the tiles the newcomer needs to mend his leaking roof.  But this plan has unexpected consequences, finding the greedy but basically simpleminded Ugolin becoming genuinely fond of the hunchback, his wife and their pretty, perpetually suspicious little girl.  Forced again and again to bide his time, Ugolin finds himself drawn in to his neighbor's schemes to dig himself a well, half wanting his 'scientific' method of farming to succeed in spite of what it will cost him in terms of growing his carnations and the chance to add to his well hidden but frequently counted stash of gold coins.  

 

But no amount of science, it seems, can save Jean when summer arrives and the mistral –– the strong hot wind which blows north across the Mediterranean from the coast of Africa each year –– begins to kill off his crops and threaten the lives of his rabbits.  Soon this obliges him, Aimée, Manon and their Piedmontese housekeeper Baptistine to spend their days marching back and forth between the farm and the well located in the hills to keep its rapidly emptying cistern at least partially filled with water.

 

The hunchback barely survives this grueling daily task, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion and beyond only to have the rain –– long overdue according to his frequently consulted weather charts –– fail him right when he needs it most.  Determined not to give up despite being urged by his 'friend' Ugolin to do precisely that, Jean stakes everything he has on finding the spring he is positive is on his land, teaching himself the art of water-divining from a book to avoid paying a sourcier [professional water-diviner] to find it for him.  In time he begins to dig a well which, without realizing it, is only a few metres from the site of the farm's cement-blocked spring.  He keeps digging, stopping only when he encounters solid rock –– rock which must be blasted away with dynamite, he decides, to grant him access to the water he remains convinced must lie beneath it.

 

Ugolin is, by now, frantic with worry –– not only for his carnations, but also for the hunchback he has genuinely come to admire and does not wish to see injured, maimed or killed.  But Papet remains unmoved.  They must not help this outsider, this bossu who, like all his kind, has the power, or so the local superstition has it, to put the 'evil eye' on people.  Helping Jean and his family will only make matters worse, offering them false hope and prolonging the amount of time they must wait to acquire the land and water needed to grow their flowers on a commercial scale.  Only by refusing to help this couillon [damn idiot], Papet insists, will they gain what should have been theirs, as true Bastidiens, right from the beginning.

 

Their wait is not a long one.  Having taught himself, via one of his 'How To' books, how to blast through rock with dynamite, Jean runs towards the site of the explosion in the hope of seeing the precious water he needs come gushing out of the hole, unaware that much of the debris created by the explosion is yet to fall to earth.  A large shard of this still airborne rock strikes him on the head, knocking him unconscious and causing a hemorrhage that, in what proves to be a pitifully short time, robs him of his senses and ultimately of his life.  Although Ugolin and Papet are sad –– neither of them, they piously tell themselves, wanted things to end this way –– they are also relieved and secretly satisfied by this unexpected if not altogether unwelcome tragedy.  With Jean dead and the grief-stricken Aimée in no position to run the farm alone, Papet makes his move and offers to buy Romarins from her, 'generously' telling her that she and Manon can continue to live in its house for as long as they like.  But the thought of staying on the farm without their beloved husband and papa is too much for the heartbroken women to bear.  One morning, Papet sees them loading their possessions into a cart so they can be transported to their new home –– a converted cave in the hills they plan to share with the silent, unfailingly loyal Baptistine. 

 

 

Film tie-in edition 1986

 

 

 

In the meantime, Papet and Ugolin have 're-discovered' and removed the cement from the mouth of the blocked spring, meaning they now have unlimited access to the water they need to succeed as carnation growers.  Immediately following the departure of Aimée and Manon, Papet returns to the spring to find his nephew kneeling beside the new creek the water has begun to carve from the hillside, a crown of white flowers perched atop his head.  'Le Papet crut qu'il rendait grâces, et qu'il allait boire: mais il versa l'eau sur sa tête, et dit solennellement:  << Au nom de Père, du Fils, et du Saint-Esprit, je te baptise le Roi de Oeillets! >>'.  [Papet believed he was giving thanks, and that he was going to drink:  but he tipped the water on his head, and solemnly said:  'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you the King of the Carnations.']  It is left to their fellow villagers –– and Jean's still distrustful young daughter –– to judge if their discovery of this source was the lucky accident they claim it was or a calculated attempt to deprive the hunchback of the water which, had it been found in time, would have saved his farm and spared his life.

 

The story of Papet, Ugolin and Manon does not end here.  It continues in the 1963 sequel Manon des sources [Manon of the Springs] – a tale best summarized in the words of its cover blurb:  'Après la mort du Bossu, et la vente des Romarins, Manon et sa mère s'installent dans les grotte de Baptistine.  Quelques années plus tard, Manon trouve l'occasion de se venger...'.  [After the death of the hunchback, and the sale of Romarins, Manon and her mother install themselves in the cave of Baptistine.  Several years later, Manon finds the occasion to avenge herself… ']  Like Jean de Florette [Jean, son of Florette], Manon des sources examines the nature of evil and guilt and the terrible effect greed has upon those for whom the pursuit of wealth for its own sake matters more than any human relationship, no matter how intimate and loving it may be or, in time, may promise to become.  What makes these stories –– which are collectively known as L'eau des collines [The Water from the Hills] –– so haunting is their startling combination, in the figures of Papet and Ugolin, of buffoonery and immorality, of shameless greed and opportunities wasted that, once gone, can never be recovered.

 

 

MARCEL PAGNOL, c 1920

 

 

 

The Writer:  'When I recall the long string of characters I have played in my life,' Marcel Pagnol once wrote, 'I wonder who I am…'  It's not surprising that Pagnol suffered from an identity crisis, given that he first worked as a teacher before embarking on his later, remarkably successful parallel careers as playwright, novelist, memoirist and one of France's most beloved and respected filmmakers.  His most famous novels –– Jean de Florette (1962) and Manon des sources (1963) –– had their beginnings in the two part film he made of the latter in 1952 in which the tragic story of 'Le Bossu' [the hunchback] was dealt with only in a brief flashback scene.  It was this that inspired Pagnol, a full decade later, to re-tell the full story of Jean Cadoret and his tragic run-in with César and Ugolin Soubeyran in literary form.  Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to adapt his novels to the screen, leaving that task to Claude Berri whose two part adaption of L'Eau des collines, both released in 1986, were among the most widely acclaimed French films of all time, breaking box office records not just in France but in many other parts of the world as well.

 

Pagnol was born in Aubagne, a town in southern Provence not far from the bustling port city of Marseille, on 28 February 1895.  Although he grew up and attended school in Marseilles –– where his father, a teacher, was posted in 1904 –– it was the farm 'Bastide Neuve' ['New Country Farm'], rented by his father and uncle in the nearby village of La Treille, that was to become in many ways his true home.  It was in La Treille, where his family spent most of its weekends and vacationed every summer, that he heard the tale, told to him by a local paysan [farmer], of the hunchback from the city who had inherited a local property and killed himself in the fruitless quest to find the spring he was certain it contained.  It was these golden childhood summers that Pagnol would go on to immortalize so movingly in his memoirs La Gloire de mon père [My Father's Glory, 1957], Le Château de ma mère [My Mother's Castle, 1958], Le Temps des secrets [The Time of Secrets, 1960] and the posthumously published Le Temps des amours [The Time of Love, 1977].

 

After gaining a degree in English Literature from the University of Aix-en-Provence –– a period which saw him co-found the student literary magazine Fortunio which would later transform itself into the important revue Les Cahiers de Sud [Notes from the South] –– Pagnol joined the French army.  His war service was brief, however, with his weak physical condition seeing him discharged on medical grounds shortly after he enlisted.  Between 1915 and 1922 –– taking time out only to marry his first wife Simonne Colin in March 1916 –– he worked as a teacher in the cities of Tarrascon, Digne, Pamiers and Aix.  In 1920 he returned to Marseilles, where he would teach until 1923 when he was offered a new teaching post at the Lycée Concordet in Paris.

 

His arrival in Paris coincided with the composition of his first work for the theater, Les Marchands de gloire [The Merchants of Glory, 1924], written in collaboration with his friend Paul Nivoix.  This was followed by Jazz, a non-collaborative work for the stage which premiered in Monte Carlo on 9 December 1926 and also ran in the French capital for several weeks.  His next two plays, Topaze (1928) and Marius (1929), proved equally popular with Parisian audiences and resulted in an offer from British director Alexander Korda to adapt the latter to the screen.  The subsequent film appeared in 1931, with a screenplay written by its author, and was followed in 1932 by two more films adapted from Pagnol plays –– the aforementioned Topaze directed by Louis Gasnier and Fanny directed by Marc Allegret.

 

Pagnol's own career as a director began in 1933 with La Gendre de Monsieur Poirier [Mr Poirier's Son-in-Law], his adaptation of a play by Emile Augier.  Between 1933 and 1940 he directed nine more films, including a second version of his play Topaze and three adaptations of the work of his fellow Provençal novelist Jean Giono including Regain, Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger [The Baker's Wife].  (The star of the latter film was Raimu, with whom he formed a close friendship which ended only with the legendary French actor's death in 1946.)  The invasion and occupation of France by the Nazis meant that Pagnol was forced to abandon work on what would have been his thirteenth film, La prière aux étoiles [Prayer to the Stars], before he could complete it.  The war years saw him participate in the production of only one more film, a 1943 adaptation of the play Arlette et l'Amour [Love and Arlette] for which he was only permitted to provide 'additional dialogue' by the occupying Germans.  

 

His directing career resumed in 1948 with the release of La Belle Meunière [The Beautiful Miller's Daughter], a musical starring singer Tino Rossi in the role of Romantic composer Franz Schubert.  His next film as a director was a third version of his play Topaze (1950) but it was the project he began shortly after this –– a film so long its distributor insisted on releasing it in two parts –– that would set the seal on his reputation as a director.  Manon des sources (1952) and its sequel Ugolin (1952) met with instant approval from critics and audiences alike, with the captivating performance of Pagnol's second wife Jacqueline Bouvier, whom he had married in 1945, quickly establishing her as a major new star.

 

 

MARCEL PAGNOL, c 1970

 

 

 

In 1946 Pagnol became the first French director to be elected to the Académie Française –– an honor which saw him, during the next decade, turn his back on filmmaking and producing to focus on the writing of novels, essays and the memoirs collectively known as Les Souvenirs de mon enfance [Memories of My Childhood].  What proved to be his final film, Les Lettres de mon moulin [Letters From My Windmill] appeared in 1954, the same year his three year old daughter Estelle suddenly died of the blood disease acetonemia.  For the next two decades, until his own death in Paris on 18 April 1974, Pagnol would publish more than a dozen works of prose including collections of many of his screenplays, translations of the work of the Roman poet Virgil and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, and Le Masque de Fer [The Iron Mask] –– a history of the famous 'iron mask' mystery involving Eustache Dauger, the allegedly imprisoned brother of Louis XIV, which inspired Alexandre Dumas's frequently filmed 1847 novel The Man In The Iron Mask.   

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website (which offers a choice between French and English) of novelist, playwright, memoirist and internationally renowned filmmaker MARCEL PAGNOL:

 

 

 

http://en.marcel-pagnol.com/

 

 

 

The 1986 film versions of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, directed by CLAUDE BERRI and starring GÉRARD DEPARDIEU as Jean, YVES MONTAND as Papet, DANIEL AUTEUIL as Ugolin, and EMMANUELLE BÉART as Manon remain widely available in most regions of the world.

 

 

Film poster UK, 1986

 

 

A two part graphic novel adaptation of L'Eau des collines, featuring the full French texts of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources dramatized in bandes-dessinées [comic strip] form by artist JACQUES FERRANDEZ, was published by Casterman in 2011 and should be obtainable via your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer, as should the French and English versions of the original novels.

 

 

Éditions Casterman, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 

Le Baiser au lépreux [Kiss for the Lepers] (1922) by FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

 

 

 

Bonheur d'occasion [The Tin Flute] (1945) by GABRIELLE ROY

 

 

 

Collected Stories 1900–1944 (2007) by IVAN BUNIN 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 29 January 2021