John McGahern / A family touched with madness

John McGahern

A family touched with madness

He's been denounced from the pulpit and seen his work banned as pornographic, says Sean O'Hagan. Now Ireland's greatest fiction writer, John McGahern, has published a moving memoir

The 100 best novels / No 97 / Amongst Women by John McGahern (1990)

John McGahern / A brief survey of the short story

Sean O'Hagan

Sunday 28 August 2005 11.33 BST

John Donne did not write 'Let us make one little room, and everywhere', as stated below. He wrote: 'For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere.'

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'One thing you find out while writing a memoir,' says John McGahern, 'is what an uncertain place the mind is.' I am sitting in the half-dark of a Soho bar listening to Ireland's greatest living writer of fiction describe some of the unexpected difficulties he underwent while writing his first factual book. His soft voice and carefully wrought sentences echo the cadences and craft of his prose so much so that it is as easy to be mesmerised by his spoken words as his written ones.

Feet / Elizabeth Debicki

Feet
ELIZABETH DEBICKI

Dorothy B. Hugues, 1923

Queen of noir: The mysteries of Dorothy B. Hughes

Molly Boyle

Sep 9, 2016

Fiesta. The time of celebration, of release from gloom, from the specter of evil. But under celebration was evil; the feast was rooted in blood, in the Spanish conquering of the Indian. It was a memory of death and destruction. ... A memory of peace, but before peace, death and destruction. Indian, Spaniard, Gringo; the outsider, the paler face. One in Fiesta.”

— Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse

Mystery writer and Santa Fe resident Dorothy B. Hughes, whose 1946 novel Ride the Pink Horse is among a handful of books she set here, seems to have harbored complicated feelings about the city. Ride the Pink Horse, which is rife with details about Santa Fe’s complex history, centers on a Chicago hoodlum named Sailor who tracks a vacationing Illinois senator to the Plaza during Fiesta. Sailor initially sneers at the small town (which he repeatedly calls a “dump”), its diverse citizenry, and especially its strange rituals — the burning of Zozobra, Fiesta’s garish carnival ambience — even as he enlists the guidance of a Hispano-Indian carousel operator and an enigmatic San Ildefonso Pueblo teenager. Through the course of the novel, as the capital city’s traditions make an impression on Sailor’s callous modernity, Santa Fe itself becomes a kind of phantom character. One wonders what, exactly, the book’s author may have felt about the annual celebration of Fiesta — or even about the town as a whole.

Dorothy B. Hughes / When he kissed me

WHEN HE KISSED ME
by Dorothy B. Hughs

Queen of noir / The mysteries of Dorothy B. Hughes

I was born when he kissed me, I died when he left me, I lived a few weeks while he loved me.

Dorothy B. Hughes
In a Lonely Place

Elizabeth Debicki / The Night Manager

Elizabeth Debicki

The Night Manager

Elizabeth Debicki, Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert / The Maids by Jean Genet
Elizabeth Debicki / ‘We fought about how sexy I should be ’
We we love / Elizabeth Debicki

Zofia Wichłacz / A Polish Actress

Zofia Wichłacz 

A POLISH ACTRESS

Zofia Wichłacz (Polish pronunciation: [ˈzɔfja ˈvixwat͡ʂ]; born 5 April 1995) is a Polish actress. She has appeared in films such as Afterimage and Warsaw 44 and television programmes such as Medics, Głęboka woda and The Romanoffs.

Her father Zbigniew Wichłacz is a camera operator and her mother Anna Seitz-Wichłacz is a scenographer.

She first appeared in a war film about the Warsaw Uprising in 2012. She played in a television play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska in 2013 and in a one episode of Głęboka woda the same year and Medics in 2014. She became recognisable after playing the main role in Warsaw 44 and won two prestigious Polish awards - the Golden Lion for the best female role during 39th Gdynia Film Festival and the Eagle for the revelation of the year in the 17th Polish Film Awards. Andrzej Wajda had seen Zofia in a play and had decided to cast her in Afterimage which later turned out to be the director's last production.

WIKIPEDIA

Zofia Wichłacz plays Kasia Tomaszeski in World On Fire

Zofia Wichłacz

Zofia Wichłacz plays Kasia Tomaszeski

 in World On Fire

World On Fire

BBC One’s epic new drama from multi-award winning writer Peter Bowker

Date: 24.09.2019
Last updated: 24.09.2019 at 22.57

Who is Kasia and how do we first meet her?

We meet Kasia in episode one, just before the war starts, and she’s at this perfect moment in her life. She has a loving family, a loving boyfriend, Harry, who she’s madly in love with. She’s just young, independent and happy. Then the war starts and everything falls apart. During auditions I only had a few scenes to read and Adam said something about her journey and that she’s going to have to change and that intrigued me. I wanted to know more.

How did you want to portray Kasia?

My idea at the beginning was to show Kasia as this very independent, happy, strong young woman. She is still a girl at the beginning but then she has to very quickly grow up and be strong. Even from the beginning I felt that she was strong but she just didn’t know it. You see her in love, but as the story develops we see her grow in resilience and strength and face all sorts of horrors.

Why are Kasia and Harry drawn to each other?

During rehearsals we had some time to really talk about the relationship with our director Adam Smith, and Jonah, who plays Harry. We talked about how Kasia and Harry met and why they fell in love.

It’s been so great because in the episode, you only see small snapshots but then you have to think about all the things that are left unsaid. How do they spend their time and where do they go on their dates? We had these ideas for how they met - because the café that Kasia works in is on the way to the embassy where Harry works, so he probably stopped in for a coffee. Then perhaps they had the same sense of humour and they started joking and maybe he started learning some Polish. Jonah is just amazing and he gives so much of himself to his part, which is so important.

What was it like shooting the dancing scenes with Jonah?

Scenes like that are easy for me, because it’s about having fun and working on the chemistry with your partner on set. I loved the dancing so much. We went for a lesson the day before and learned swing and blues. Days like that on set are just fun, when you know you have scenes which are sad and difficult coming up, you want to enjoy these as much as you can.

I wanted to create a world for Kasia. I read a lot about Warsaw at that time before war and how vivid the city was. I wanted to know the places where she could have taken Harry on a date, what music she would have listened to, and I listened to it a lot myself. 

Zofia Wichłacz

What was it about the costume and production design that helped you get into character?

I loved my costumes so much. The costume should be your second skin and the moment you get the costumes on you inhabit your character. You have to feel comfortable. Then when I stepped on set and saw a whole square they had built, with so many different buildings, cafes, it was so amazing and immediately gave me the vibe I needed. The art department did such an incredible job and it really helped us out when it came to finding our characters.

How does this series mix the light and dark?

There is a huge explosion just before Harry proposes to Kasia and it’s full of humour. It’s the humour, you know, that’s makes the show amazing. It’s very important to find a sense of humour, especially when the film or the series is sad and dark. We were trying to find humour in the scenes where you maybe wouldn’t see the place for humour.

What do you think it is about this story that will resonate with the audience?

I love the work of our DP Susie Lavelle. She shot this with a lot of close-ups because it is so important to be close to the characters. We want to feel their emotions and Susie has been magical at that. It helps people relate to their characters and you feel you are with them in every moment.

Tell us about the part of the story where Warsaw gets bombed.

When filming such scenes it is of course just a set, and the bombs aren’t real, but it stills gives you a certain feeling. For Kasia it’s an important part of her journey and she witnesses the bombing of Warsaw. She runs through the barricades and there is fire everywhere. It’s at that point of the story that her world falls apart and she has a real struggle to take control of it again. It hardens Kasia. I like to think of her as a fighter.

How was it filming those emotional scenes with Jonah and Eryk?

That was a very emotional scene to shoot when Kasia says goodbye to Harry. He doesn’t know that she is going to send her little brother on the train to England instead of her. It was a really emotional day. She has to try to save her little brother and she knows that this is more important than her happiness with Harry. She stays in Warsaw to fight and to stay with her mother. I guess that tells you a lot about her strength of character.

Did you do any other research for the role or was it all in the script for you?

When I got the part, I did some research. I wanted to create a world for Kasia including things she liked, the books she would read and what she might be interested in and why. She’s independent, earning her own money and I was so inspired by things that I found in my research. I read a lot about Warsaw at that time before war and how vivid the city was. I wanted to know the places where she could have taken Harry on a date. What music she would have listened to, and I listened to it a lot myself. That was really important for me to get the essence of her character.

How would you sum up the show?

World On Fire tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people. It is universal. It’s about love, about freedom, about wanting to be free when you can’t. It’s about young people who are full of life yet they’re in this difficult time and very dark place. It’s a very emotional story.

BBC

Kasia Tomaszeski

Played by Zofia Wichłacz

Kasia starts the war as a waitress in one of Warsaw’s many bars and cafés, already in a passionate love affair with the young English translator Harry Chase, unaware that he already has a girl at home.

Her father Stefan and brother Grzegorz depart for Danzig to defend against the imminent German invasion, leaving Kasia with mother Maria and younger brother Jan at home in the city. Within days of the war beginning, Kasia’s family has each faced the cruel reality of this brutal conflict, and Kasia is faced with terrible choices between protecting her family and her own safety and freedom.

Kasia joins the Polish resistance and her war becomes one of subterfuge, excruciating danger and constant fear of betrayal.

BBC

Strangely endearing … Olla.

Olla review – mail-order bride ruffles feathers in French suburbia

Romanna Lobach is the magnetic protagonist in this half-hour short about a mum-and-son household rocked by a new arrival

Phil Hoad

Wed 27 May 2020

This half-hour short film by Ariane Labed is a sparkily absurdist declaration of female independence that bucks against male fantasy. Romanna Lobach, blood-orange tresses blazing through the mist as she walks across a field in the opening shot, is the Russian mail-order bride shipped in by Pierre (Grégoire Tachnakian), a French bachelor living in a time-warp suburban house with his infirm mother. Fawning over his bride across the kitchen table, he christens her Lola and sets her to work as nursemaid.

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Labed – who also acted in her husband Yorgos Lanthimos’s projects Alps, Attenberg and The Lobster – favours the medium shot, all the better for deadpan dispatch of character. Lola and Pierre shuffle around the living room in fabric shoe covers to walk and polish at the same time; she bonds with his mum by playing with the remote-control footrest on the pensioner’s La-Z-Boy recliner. The film builds up a nice head of quirk, underpinned by Lola’s outsider status. Even the many-headed hydra of estate ne’er-do-wells who greet her as one – “Dirty slut!” – as she trots past in ankle boots seems strangely endearing.

The fantasy turns sour after Lola gives a Nancy Reagan-style makeover to the old lady. Pierre’s displeased reaction pushes his bride to reclaim her real name and begin venting. Labed’s comic inflections degenerate into hysteria and violence – especially in the aftermath of one key dance scene – in a controlled manner that promises well for any full-length work she might have en route. The vermillion shade of Lola’s hair continues to bloom on the colour palette – in bathroom tiles, sunset glints on windows, her supermarket carrier bag – as if in solidarity.

• Olla is on Mubi from 1 June.

THE GUARDIAN

Masterpieces of painting / Vincent van Gogh / The Starry Night

The Starry Night, 1889
Vincent van Gogh

MASTERPIECES OF PAINTING

The Starry Night

by Vincent van Gogh

• Alicja Zelazko
• • June 17, 2019

The oil-on-canvas painting is dominated by a night sky roiling with chromatic blue swirls, a glowing yellow crescent moon, and stars rendered as radiating orbs. One or two cypress trees, often described as flame-like, tower over the foreground to the left, their dark branches curling and swaying to the movement of the sky that they partly obscure. Amid all this animation, a structured village sits in the distance on the lower right of the canvas. Straight controlled lines make up the small cottages and the slender steeple of a church, which rises as a beacon against rolling blue hills. The glowing yellow squares of the houses suggest the welcoming lights of peaceful homes, creating a calm corner amid the painting’s turbulence.

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night during his 12-month stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, several months after suffering a breakdown in which he severed a part of his own ear with a razor. While at the asylum, he painted during bursts of productivity that alternated with moods of despair. As an artist who preferred working from observation, van Gogh was limited to the subjects that surrounded him—his own likeness, views outside his studio window, and the surrounding countryside that he could visit with a chaperone.

Although van Gogh’s subjects were restricted, his style was not. He experimented with the depiction of various weather conditions and changing light, often painting the wheat fields nearby under a bright summer sun or dark storm clouds. Van Gogh was also particularly preoccupied by the challenges of painting a night landscape and wrote about it not only to his brother, Theo, but to a fellow painter, Émile Bernard, and to his sister, Willemien. In a letter addressed to the latter, he alleged that night was more colourful than day and that stars were more than simple white dots on black, instead appearing yellow, pink, or green. By the time van Gogh arrived at Saint-Rémy, he had already painted a few night scenes, including Starry Night (Rhône) (1888). In that work, stars appear in bursts of yellow against a blue-black sky and compete with both the glowing gas lamps below and their reflection in the Rhône River.


At the asylum, van Gogh observed the night sky from his barred bedroom window and wrote a letter to Theo describing a magnificent view of the morning star very early one morning in the summer of 1889. Because he was not allowed to paint in his bedroom, he painted the scene from memory or possibly drawings and used his imagination for the small village that did not actually exist. Employing the expressive style he had developed during his stay in Paris in 1886–88, he applied the paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, creating thick impasto and intense hues. Ambivalent about working from his imagination, van Gogh eventually regarded the finished Starry Night as a failure, and Theo frankly indicated that the painting favoured style over substance.

The painting was one of van Gogh’s late works, as he committed suicide the following year. His artistic career was brief, comprising only 10 years, but it was very productive. He left more than 800 paintings and 700 to 850 drawings to his brother. When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City purchased The Starry Night from a private collector in 1941, it was not well known, but it has since become one of van Gogh’s most famous, if not one of the most recognized, works in the art history canon.

ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

ENCICLOPAEDIA  BRITANNICA

Michael Rosen
Illustration by Quentin Blake

Author Michael Rosen out of intensive care after 47 days

Wife tweets first update in two weeks, saying his recovery on the ward will take time

Mattha Busby
Saturday 23 May 2020

 The poet, broadcaster and author Michael Rosen has left intensive care 47 days after he was admitted.

Rosen, 74, the author of children’s books including We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Little Rabbit Foo Foo, charted the initial stages of his illness on Twitter. He has not tweeted since late March but his wife, Emma-Louise Williams, updated wellwishers periodically while he was “very poorly”.

After more than a fortnight without updates about his health, Williams tweeted on her own account: “Today Michael has been in hospital for 8 weeks & I’m v happy to say he left ICU yesterday after a long & difficult 47 days. His recovery is continuing on the ward & will take time. He has done so well to get through this but please don’t expect him back here yet.”

She retweeted the post on his account and praised “the amazing efforts of the lovely kind staff” at Whittington hospital in north London, where Rosen has been receiving treatment.

Williams last tweeted on Rosen’s account on 7 May, saying: “Thanks very much for all your continuing love and support on here.” She has not confirmed whether Rosen contracted coronavirus.

On 20 April she wrote: “Thanks v much for all the love. I’m not updating regularly because when someone is very poorly things can change daily & details of Michael’s ongoing care from fantastic NHS staff are private. So please be patient, no news is good news.”

Rosen, a former children’s laureate, described his illness on 22 March. “Can’t stop my thermostat from crashing: icy hands, hot head. Freezing cold sweats. Under the covers for bed-breaking shakes. Image of war hero biting on a hankie, while best mate plunges live charcoal into the wound to cauterise it,” he wrote.

The next day he wondered whether he was suffering from a heavy flu rather than coronavirus. “Have had no chest pains. No persistent cough. So all along it could have been a heavy flu and not corona. Today the fevers are ebbing. In their place a deep muscle exhaustion. In every corner.”

He was admitted to hospital later that week and spend his first night in intensive care on 29 March, before being placed on a ward. He returned to the ICU in early April.

In 2008 Rosen wrote a poem, These Are the Hands, for the 60th anniversary of the NHS. “These are the hands / That touch us first / Feel your head / Find the pulse / And make your bed,” it opened

THE GUARDIAN

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation

Woody Allen
Photo by Jane Bown
Illustration by T.A.

BOOK OF THE DAY

AUTOBIOGRAPY AND MEMORY

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation

This controversial memoir displays the filmmaker’s self-deprecating wit, but his account of Mia Farrow and their family veers between sadness, fury and spite

Fiona Sturges

Tuesday 9 April 2020

In this memoir, Woody Allen is keen to clear up some misconceptions. He is not, as he has frequently been described, an intellectual. As a man who is practically “illiterate and uninterested in all things scholarly”, he dismisses the notion as being as “phony as the Loch Ness Monster”. He also explains that, contrary to appearances, he is no slouch on the sports field. In his youth he was a fast runner, “very fine” at baseball and a decent schoolyard basketball player who could also “catch a football and throw it a mile”.

Allen, 84, also wants it to be known that he is not a child molester, as claimed by his former partner, the actor Mia Farrow, and his alleged victim, their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, who is now 34. Throughout this complicated saga, which erupted in 1992, and was reignited in 2014 when Dylan wrote an open letter reasserting the alleged assault, many have had their say on the matter. Along with Dylan’s letter, there have been public missives from Allen’s son Ronan (who has stood firmly with his sister), Mia’s adopted son Moses (who has taken Allen’s side and whose letter is extensively quoted here), and Soon-Yi Previn (Mia and her ex-husband André Previn’s adopted daughter, who had an affair with Allen and later married him). Police investigators have twice found no legal case against Allen, a fact that is sometimes forgotten amid the public rush to judgment. While Allen quips that the main theme of Apropos of Nothing – which was controversially binned by its original publisher, Hachette, after staff staged a walkout – is “man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe”, the 90-odd pages devoted to the Farrow “to-do” would suggest that, after remaining mostly quiet on the subject for 30 years, he has deemed it time to offer his version of events.

Woody Allen  and Soon-Yi Previn

Of course, this is the story of a life, not just an accusation, and, as one might expect from a writer with his comic pedigree, Allen’s style is gossipy and spry when dealing with his childhood and rise to fame. It begins with a sprint through his early years in Brooklyn as the son of a cab driver father and bookkeeper mother. His parents “disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards”, but they doted on their two children. Cultural awakening arrived via his cousin Rita, who would take him to the movies on Saturday afternoons and encouraged him to listen to the radio where he discovered Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday. At 11, a trip to Manhattan with a childhood friend opened his eyes to vaudeville after they found the cinema closed. He was so taken with the comedy skits that he returned every Saturday, taking a pencil and paper to make notes.


Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (1984

While still at high school, he began sending jokes off to newspapers, many of which were printed. Eventually an agent got in touch and asked him to spend a few hours each day after school writing one-liners for their celebrity clients, for which they would take the credit. He went to NYU, majoring in film, but was kicked out after he failed to show up to classes. No matter, as he was already working in comedy writers’ rooms and making more money than his parents did. He decided to change his name (he was born Allan Konigsberg), something he never regretted aside from the time a saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s asked: “Will that be all, Mr Woodpecker?”

Self-deprecation is Allen’s default setting and his bleak humour can be winning. He recalls drunkenly daydreaming with his second wife, Louise, about their preferred method of suicide – “Her preference was to go by pistol shot, mine by placing my head in the dishwasher and pressing Full Cycle.” Looking back on the biggest flop of his film career, he says: “The filming of Shadows and Fog came off without a hitch except for the movie.” When the lights went up after the screening for the film’s financial backers “the four or five suits sat immobile as if they had all been paralysed by curare”.

 

Allen routinely plays down his talents, but wastes no opportunity to list the luminaries who have showered him in praise

Elsewhere, however, egotism tramples wit. He routinely plays down his talents, and wants us to know how little his films returned at the box office, but wastes no opportunity to list the luminaries who have showered him in praise. It’s also a familiar Allen routine to wonder why any woman would give him, a self-anointed schlemiel, the time of day romantically, but here they are rated ruthlessly on their looks. Even his mother doesn’t escape judgment – she was “loving and decent but not, let us say, physically prepossessing”, he writes, before observing her similarity to Groucho Marx.

You might think that a man dogged by dark accusations would take extra pains to avoid coming over like a creep around young women. Yet 17-year-old Stacey Nelkin, who appeared in Annie Hall, and who the 42-year-old Allen briefly dated, caused him and the screenwriter Marshall Brickman “to spin around each other like electrons”. Talking about Scarlett Johansson, he observes “when you meet her you have to fight your way through the pheromones. Not only was she gifted and beautiful, but sexually she was radioactive.” He carps that much has been made of his dating much younger girls when “it’s really not so”, offering as evidence his first wife, Harlene, who was just three years younger than him. Given he was 20 when they married, it would have been a grave matter had the age gap been any wider.

Woody Allen

Aged 56, apparently marooned in a chilly relationship with Farrow, he says he was “ripe for the plucking” when he began an affair with the 21-year-old Soon-Yi; his revelation that “we couldn’t keep our hands of each other” is, frankly, too much information when discussing a woman who was, to all intents and purposes, his stepdaughter. His account of the fall-out, and the subsequent accusations regarding Dylan, pinballs between sadness and fury. He is sympathetic towards Dylan, whom he claims was coached and “brainwashed” by her mother into believing that, one afternoon in the crawl-space in their Connecticut home, her father abused her while she lay playing with trains.

He is less forgiving towards his son, Ronan, from whom he has long been estranged and who has written extensively about his father’s alleged misdeeds. Another sub-plot in the eternal Farrow soap opera is the question mark over Ronan’s paternity, and Allen can’t resist making a dig about the child support he was legally obliged to pay: “If Mia was right about [Ronan] being the son of Frank Sinatra, then I was really being bilked.” But he saves most of his vitriol for Mia, whom he claims told him: “You took my daughter, now I’ll take yours.” He paints her as bitter, damaged and cruel, a woman who shopped for adopted children as if she were collecting ornaments, and then neglected and physically abused them. It makes for grim reading. While you can’t blame him for putting his point across forcefully, and for howling against perceived injustices, the spiteful tone helps no one.

But Allen isn’t in it to win friends, as evidenced by intermittent rants against the “Appropriate Police”, the “#MeToo zealots” and his former friends and colleagues in Hollywood who, after gauging the public mood, have publicly denounced him. He makes clear his understanding that the book is unlikely to influence those who have already made up their minds. Reflecting on his legacy, he says: “Rather than live in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment.”

• Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen is published by Arcade.

EL PAÍS