Steinbeck’s final moments of his short novel, Of Mice and Men are both tragic and yet hopeful. The reader recognises that Steinbeck is offering a glimpse of an equal, potential friendship between the two most respected  characters in the novel, George and Slim. This glimpse of hope prevents the close of the novel being utterly bleak and even despairing. 

For the  tragedy of the text emanates from George’s ironically ‘kind’ execution of his best friend Lenny who is being relentlessly pursued for the his ignorant killing of Curley’s wife. George has to shoot Lenny before the posse led by Curley, reaches Lenny and inflicts a bloody form of ‘justice’ upon him. George chooses to stand by his promise to take of care of his friend, even though this promise has inflicted  a terrible responsibility for Lenny’s welfare upon him. This responsibility culminates in this act of compassionate murder that will haunt George no doubt,  for the remainder of his life. 

 In this short essay, I will examine the ways in which Steinbeck suggests that George may still have something to live for at the close of Of Mice and Men, even though the context in which he has to live on without his friend Lenny,  seems peopled by insensitive human beings only interested in their own selfish, immediate concerns.  

The rest of this essay will be available shortly as a Tusi Note. In the meantime, a Tusi Note is already available on Carol Ann Duffy’s exceptional poem, Before you were Mine.

I find the poem fascinating because Carol Ann Duffy has re-imagined monstrosity as pathos. The malign solitude of Medusa, excluded from connection and intimacy through her ‘look’, becomes near enough to our own vulnerable experiencing of love and being lovable, to terrify! We are all Medusa-like at times! Duffy makes us all look in a mirror in this poem. Are we Medusa or Perseus or are we implicated in both? How uncomfortably proximate the poem seems!

So this is my February 20/2/2012 reaction to Medusa!

For another Tusi Note see Carol Ann Duffy’s Before You were Mine.

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.

Rejection turns to rage as the emotional juggernaut of the presumed ‘events’ of Medusa’s intimate relationship take their toll on her equilibrium. Beautiful, intelligent and evidently passionate as Medusa was,  the absent beloved’s perceived ‘neglect’ or ‘betrayal’ ,  transform her mentally and physically into a profoundly grotesque  figure.  Her feelings of rage are literally animated upon her scalp. She will literally petrify all who come to gaze upon her or even to greet her in any way at all. The curse of Athena excludes Medusa permanently from love and her only release is death. In this revsion, it is Medusa’s terrifying jealousy that makes her repulsive to others. She is the externalised embodiment of our own otherness. Of course Freud saw Medusa as the castrating mother figure too. Her writhing serpent laden  head, an externalisation of castration fears.

Carol Ann Duffy  carefully gives careful expression to the escalation of Medusa’s feelings of disquiet, an escalation perfectly captured through the simple use of the list. Each word is a sign of a different emotional state and temporal location. Each word/sign relates to another disappointment in Medusa’s relationship, a relationship corroded by distrust and cruelty, culminating in the hideous manifestation of her feelings becoming like poisonous snakes upon her head. This significant revision of the original myth, creates a new dialogue with the original tale. We have to reconsider Medusa as a figure more sinned against perhaps than sinning? And the writhing snakes upon her head are now as dangerous to Medusa herself perhaps as to others, though not in the same way. For Medusa’s suffering is the suffering of  tormented, repetitive thoughts. The terrible revisitations of the night that hold our peace of mind to ransom.

For when  we become fixated upon another’s movements and behaviours, the energies directed take over our  mental space and feed unhealthy thoughts and attitudes. Here Duffy deliberately draws attention to the figurative aspect of Medusa’s imaginings: ‘as though my thoughts/hisssed and spat upon my scalp.’

Emotional discomfort is experienced as serpentine venom: a brilliant representation of the Janus faced union between hurt and hatred.  The head is the source of self awareness here: a heated place of acute anxiety and ‘dis-ease’ . You can hear the hatred in this poem as well as  the despairing loneliness of the abject figure of Medusa. Sounds do create feelings and the sounds of this poem escalate into self destruction.

As Pascal once said. ‘Man’s greatness resides in his knowing himself to be wretched.’  Medusa certainly has the self awareness to acknowledge her own wretchedness. It is as if this poem represents some terrible suicide note; arch, self loathing and dangerously ironic.

The second Stanza tomorrow.

My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?

Idealisation gives way to the reality of deception. The very ‘breath’ of Medusa becomes tainted by the poison of the beloved’ s deceit, so that the most elemental apparatus of life, the lungs, become cumbersome ‘bags’ corrupted by the air once shared, now infiltrated by bitter truth, where the breath is more spite than respite! Medusa’s beauty has become transmutated into the Gorgon version of the ‘femme fatale’. She is fatal to others, specifically men, her hair a writhing testimony to the abjection caused by rejection. 

 This is alienates her from her own kind and remember women do not suffer the fate of men with the glare of Medusa. They are not implicated in the hatred of the betrayal, even in Duffy’s reworking, though women are far from idealised in some of Duffy’s work, particularly when she is involved with them. Who we wonder is being specifically addressed by the use of the second person? Is is Perseus, the perfect God, come to slay her and reclaim male authority, reducing an angry woman to headlessness? Freud’s essay on Medusa talks of castration. Decapitation being a trope for castration and a warning to men about the dangers of female sexuality. In Duffy, we feel the pathos surrounding medusa’s death, as we have entered her consciousness  and found a profoundly hurt human being, whose monstruousness is a convenient label attached to her by those double talking  beings, who have betrayed her trust and love.  Little wonder Medusa converts so whole heartedly to savagery, snakes and bullets!

Tomorrow stanza Three!

Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better by for me if you were stone.

Medusa’s hurt is pathologised, and the snakes writhing on her head, serve to represent the emotional wreckage of her mind. So the beginning of stanza three opens with a command: ‘Be terrified.’ It is immediately endstopped giving forbidding weight to the imperative. And we do ‘wait’ for the next declaration, this time only paused by a comma, adding pathos to the uneasy juxtaposition of terror and love. Love as terror; a volcanic release of venom!

We are in dangerous emotional territory indeed. Glenn Close’s infamous portrayal as the deranged ex-lover in the film Fatal Attraction has certain correspondences here. For rejection unsettles the lover in that film and she is condemned as the ‘bunny boiler’, the lunatic female, without even a hint of blame attached to the Michael Douglas,male lover figure, suffering violent repercussions,  from the sanctity of his marital home.  

However in Duffy’s poem, the poet is moving the reader always towards sympathy. We feel the process of Medusa’s thinking. Reason is emotion and vice versa. Her intelligence takes her to all tenses of possibility. She explores the ‘perfect man’ in past, present and future tenses. All tenses lead to hurt and therefore no healing escape is offered, no trust foreseen  and she is left with only the cold isolation of stone. Listen to the near rhymes of ‘stone’ home’ and ‘own’. A terrible trinity of romantic despair, where intimacy and sexual ownership are supplanted by the secure comfort of the tomb-’stone’. Better to be a pariah, than a victim?

The terrible irony is of course  that the ‘perfect man’ is Perseus, the ‘Greek God’ come to destroy Medusa and return the world to ‘stability’. Of course this stability is purchased through the murder of Medusa herself, so that the ‘female gone wrong’ can be punished for her stridency and unfeminine power and sexuality. By this point of the poem however we are not on the side of history.If history is made up of as   ’his-story’ , we may feel that Medusa’s tale has been revised by Carol Ann Duffy as an appeal against misogynist history

Stanza Four tomorrow.

I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebbly fell
to the ground.
I glanced at a singing bird,
a handful of dusty gravel
spattered down

I looked at a ginger cat,
a housebrick
shattered a bowl of milk.
I looked at a snuffling pig,
a boulder rolled
in a heap of shit.

I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
Fire spewed
from the mouth of a mountain.

And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?

Look at me now.

The face in the wall heard voices through the old plaster. Hoarse voices whose breathing came slowly and hard as if time was short. Houses like these carried memories deep in the walls, in the floors in the very stones that held up the strong, lonely building that some ambitious merchant had called Paradise House. A paradise it was not. George felt this too. He was walking towards the face with a small, red plasticine figure held between his left thumb and forefinger. He had done it again. The perfect gift to changeover the present one into the changed-one. There were many changed-ones now because of George. Some had been more challenging and had struggled to resist the changeover. But George had the faith. His Aunt had given him the faith before she went away from him. Only the faithful could create the changeover because they knew what had to be changed. They had seen and listened and that was  enough.

But George was the best. The Face in the wall told him so and George had no doubts about the truth of the face. The first time he had felt the whisper of plaster dust on his neck and then seen the dust settling in his hair, on his hands, even on his lips so he could taste the dust, he knew he had been found by something far larger than anything he had ever met before. His deep lostness, his helpless panic that she was gone, became hidden amongst the dust. It covered pain, it covered his certainty that no one would ever love him and his mystery ever again.

The red figure was a girl. She had a large head and brown eyes that sat on her face like scratches. George had made her small black boots and she was carrying a stick. Her hair had been difficult. The Face knew that and knew who George was bringing him today. Red hair was suggested with the tiniest of grooves all over her head. Even without any change there was light. This figure shone all by herself. She was herself, she was Demeter and her life was about to changeover.

Just the ideas you need to be different!

”This tender and elemental love poem to our first and most enduring love, that of the mother and child, is to all intents and purposes, a means for Carol Ann Duffy to reconstruct, even to re-invent a past beyond the first person, ‘I’ narrator. The poet conceives the poem as a response to looking back affectionately at another spirited ’self’, by imaginatively animating a snapshot of her ‘carefree’ teenage mother pictured with her friends. The poem transports the reader  ’back’ to this  re-conceived past, where the mother-daughter relationship and special time together, opens up also to the possibilities of friendship and to the potential for the very creation of the poet herself….”

Tusi Notes

Carol Ann Duffy’s Before You Were Mine: An Analysis by Moira Eribenne M.Ed.

Purchase this 2,014 word essay on Carol Ann Duffy’s Before you were Mine.

Price: £2.99

Whitney Houston could bring down the rafters of  her listener’s soul. I loved the sheer exuberance and innocent energy of her early singles; gospel had come to MTV and a miraculous voice was heard all over the world! Even the ghastly, wooden Kevin Costner seemed almost human  with the gorgeous Whitney in his vicinity.

Unlike Mariah Carey who sometimes  parades her vocal range ostentatiously, Houston had taste. Her voice was magnificent and she delivered emotion for real. We felt just what she was singing to us.

I was playing her only the other week for my kids because I wanted them to know how important her voice was in the history of female music.  I played her again today in the car and was spellbound by her hypnotic remix of ‘And I will always love you.’  Made all my skin tingle and even my cynical son pulled out his ipod  and listened.

My  favourite Whitney Houston song must be : ‘How will I know.’ Pulsates with wondrous energy and laughter behind the words..she is delighting herself with her sounds and that magical communion is shared…

Of course we know!

Strikingly beautiful and amazingly talented, why did she put up with the mediocrity of Bobbi Brown? I am sure that like Amy Winehouse and many others, talented women attract posseessive, jealous partners whose own lack of abilityand banality,  makes them want to destroy those who have it. Apparently Houston was curious about the confrontational nature of Brown and mistook it for a fiery challenge and termed their relationship a magnetic- ‘irresistible’ attraction.

A crying shame.  

Actions as my grandmother would always say to me, reveal the person. Love has no conditions or it is not love.

Here’s her saddest song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_4PlM85NJo&feature=related

WONDERFUL!

Many students I have  tutored find that their love of reading suffers a reality check when faced by the often drawn out process of literary studies.

My son loves reading and was not excited in the slightest by examining texts at length,  preferring to let the reading process go on its own way without the heavy handed interference of analysis.  Ironically, sometimes at GCSE it can be  the less keen readers who find the whole process acceptable. For these students, English Literature is just another subject to learn and therefore they do not have  their original affection to lose or to contaminate.

Yesterday I was talking to a student about this problem, a problem I have  to say that  is improved by Private English  tuition where strategies are far more easily available to regain a love of reading and thinking about reading.  I was wondering what sort of approach could bridge the problem between pleasure and textual analysis.

Obviously the teaching approach is always important, but perhaps there is also something innately reductive about the dissection of texts at GCSE, where the  long dissection reveals a definitely dead ‘corpse text’  without any residual signs  of life!

So this is the challenge, a challenge to BRIDGE the gap between the pleasure of reading and the necessary ‘knowledge’ for GCSE English Literature success.

My best tutor, Steve Newman,  always advocated staying with your initial reaction or impression. This should always be preserved he would say. Hang onto your original thoughts and do not let them get chased away or suffocated by the weight of others’ opinions, or horror of horrors the often grindingly dry certainties of the introduction and notes!

• So always read with your own note book handy. Or write in the book itself or on the poem. .For what you think and feel matter.
• Such reactions give shape to your whole reading. They give you an opinion and any analysis without an opinion is just a list of mechanical details. Shapeless and without style! OR a list of symptoms without any notion of  the original illness or diagnosis!
• And ask questions that matter, that make a book REAL to you and your experience.

For example on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men:

1) Would YOU have stayed friends with Lenny for so long? Why?

2) What would you feel if a teacher/friend NEVER called you by your name like  Curley’s  Wife? How would this affect you?

3) What would happen to Lenny in today’s society?

4) Is FATE a helpful notion or does it let us off the hook of taking responsibility?

5) Does Slim offer George a more equal friendship and does this provide hope at the end? Can friendships work if inequality exists?

6) Why is Curley’s mother missing from Of Mice and Men? How  would a maternal influence have changed the novel?

Making a text real and relevant is HUGELY effective in encouraging readers to THINK and to WRITE THOUGHTFULLY.

This is from someone who admits to falling asleep during several productions of King Lear and who finds King Lear himself profoundly noisy and irritating.

BUT these reactions help me KNOW LOTS about the play’s shape , its characters and of course my own tolerances!

As a child, I used to hide books in the toilet, avoiding washing up and always getting to the end despite any number of guests! I remember finishing Alastair Maclean’s Bear Island instead of using a tea towel after a family gathering and then pretending to be surprised that I had missed all the fun. But when it came to a choice between Artic Circle murders by a person unknown or washing up, there was never any contest.

I know I  was better at hiding books than my mother and Aunties were good at finding them. Occasionally I would get caught of course and would be marched off to the kitchen, the offending book held high and placed under guard until the chores were done. This secretive aspect to reading of course made me love reading even more. I still find reading a uniquely happy experience and find reading like writing mood changing and peaceful, no matter how dramatic or exciting the book.

Sharing books is important. Books gift of yourself, sometimes  in ways that are surprising to others. And there are certain books that I would never lend out. Their going away from me would be felt almost physically- so I would rather buy another and give that instead.

 What’s a holiday without a bag of books? I can mark holidays by the books I have read. They are better than photographs and the dates and sometimes the stains, even the handwriting style makes them witnesses to a particular time of my life.

One Inter-rail holiday was marked out by Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit being passed around, battered but never cowed( it was the first Women’s Press edition complete with iron logo!)  by the grubby depths of several rucksacks and the overpowering heat of Sicilly in August.

No one else can read like me or you. Reading confirms our uniqueness as well as suggesting that beyond our uniqueness lies the universal human condition, scrapping for attention and notice.

This series will look at Nine Booksthat changed my life  and will begin tomorrow with Winterson’s novel The Passion, a novel practically perfect in every way and one I never had to hide in the toilet cistern!

Janet Lewison

 Here, the word for me is the word,‘Amazed’. It carries the wonder of resurrection, of a second chance at life and of ‘awe-fulness’ – the offer of magical healing in one of the most bleak places in history.

LAST POST

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, and drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Carol Ann Duffy was asked to create a poem to mark the final passing of two of the last World War One survivors Harry Allingham and Harry patch. Here in Last Post she movingly rewinds the mindless slaughter of that war, revealing the promise and expansiveness of futures which were sacrificed for just a few hellish yards of mud. The ‘width ‘of certain words deployed  in Duffy’s new poem yield up  vistas lost, intimacies missed, the sense of any  ‘dailiness’  destroyed. Duffy’s imaginative, compassionate dream of another version of the war is ironically juxtaposed to Wilfred Owen’s terrible, nightmarish indictment of the war, Dulce est Decorum est.

Duffy acknowledges her poetic debt to the terrible ‘dreams’ of Owen through the occasional, terse use of the clipped ’t’ sound in the poem. This staccato sound conveys the inhuman mechanisation of carrying out one’s ‘duty’, through the ordinary soldiers’ loyal obligation to follow often senseless orders. Duffy’s combination of both short and long sounds allows both the ‘old’ story of the war told by poets like Wilfred Owen, where the soldiers’  ‘last breath’ is almost always upon us, with the resurrecting time turning, possibilities of Duffy’s healing ‘what if’ in Last Post.   For the staccato, terse sound of Owen’s poetic testimony  is movingly assuaged by Carol Ann Duffy’s  cinematic rewinding of the serial fatalities of the war, so that the poem seems to resuscitate the long dead through the emerging generosity of the breath, a returning breath,  which reverses and imaginatively heals  the bleak certainties of history.

How powerfully  the word ‘amazed’ works to announce the awe of Duffy’s  soldier  at his second chance at life, his second chance of another day, just as Fitzgerald movingly uses the word ‘wonder’ at the end of The Great Gatsby to suggest a perceptual bewilderment which embraces the wide eyed freshness and expectation of hope. The repetition of ‘you walk away’ catches at a choice wholly unavailable to the serving soldier and thus we hear through the simplicity of such a choice, a Hardy-like note of yearning tenderness. The poet may do what time may not.

As I have said, Duffy’s Last Post is significantly framed by an extract from Wilfred Owen’s famous poem about the horrors of the First World War, Dulce est Decorum est. Owen was a direct witness to the abject horrors of the war and his feeling of nightmarish impotency before the hapless victims of mustard gas described in this poem, finds visceral expression through the very ‘breathlessness’ of the poem’s actual  rhythm. As we read Owen’s poem we feel short of breath, we feel as if we too are gasping for our ‘last breath’ like his forgotten soldier. The desperate activity of the verb ‘plunges’ in Owen is upheld and sustained by the repetition of the present participles and this conveys the hellish, frenetic panic of the First World War soldiers victimised by the German’s use of mustard gas. The recurrence of such a disturbing image in the poet’s ‘dreams’  adds to the grim intensity of the recollected moment and operates as a very resonant introduction to Duffy’s new  poem. It is as if we have to hear again Owen’s testimony to the hell of the war, before Carol Ann Duffy can offer up another way, through which and by which hell can finally be alleviated. As Duffy states in her editor’s introduction to the anthology Answering Back, significantly perhaps utilising a word central to the effect of her Last Post:

‘What amazed (my italics) me, once I sat down to choose some kind of order for the hundred poems submitted, was the sense of coherence and community between the living and dead poets. This sense was so strong, that the dead poets, even the long dead, seemed just as vividly present on the page as the living.’

Duffy’s Anthology Answering Back was published in 2007 and it is apparent that this time travelling communion between one poet and another, where ‘Poetry…is language as life..’ finds powerful expression in this ‘amazed’ strange  meeting between Owen and her poet  self.

Duffy also explores the connotations of a form of time travel in her Laureate poem Premonitions and this I have explored in another piece. For what if time could retreat, if we could recuperate lost, dead moments and all that had been taken away from us could regroup and grow again? It seems that grief does make time travellers of us all. Indeed the profound and tragic irony of Duffy’s poem Last Post is that the poem can go backwards and healing can take place, when all the orders inflicted upon the soldiers sent them forwards, relentlessly ‘over the top’ to their deaths. So much language around bereavement is about moving forward, moving on, yet our natural inclination when we lose someone, is to move backwards to find them again.

 The soldiers’ lost potential is named through Duffy’s careful delineation of missed life stages, and the pathos of the casual seeming ‘shaking dried mud from their hair’ is profoundly physical as well as visual. The iconic, seemingly inescapable images of the war’s dead soldiers immersed in mud are beautifully challenged by Duffy’s liberating image. A perfect, tender glimpse of a ‘what if.’

The final pathos of the poet no longer needing to give testimony to the horrors of war, to the grisly events of the past is palpable. One of Wilfred Owen’s most famous poems frames this poetic resurrection of lost lives and his voice haunts the entire text.  Compassionately, it is as if Owen himself escapes his terrible, week before Armistice Day sacrifice and can smile too, glad to be alive, to survive and thrive, no longer obliged to write at all.  

‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards

Then it would. ‘

Tuesday 7th February was Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. Bolton School, Girls’ Division,celebrated the UK’s most famous novelist’s birthday in style, as all the pupils and the staff, came to school, dressed as a Dickens’ character. The corridors were awash with Ghosts, Miss Havishams, and street urchins. I even had a glimpse of a Barnaby Rudge-not an everyday occcurrence I can tell you!

I was pleased to have the chance to say a few words about my favourite writer and remembered with great love and affection, my old tutor Steve Newman, whose understanding of Dickens was truly inspirational and for me, never bettered.

Great Expectations is a deeply sad book. Sad to the bones because although the first person narrative may relate events that are apparently finished, they are hardly finished with. It is a novel of recurrence  and repetition.

When we look back, Orpheus like or otherwise, we are taking a risk. For what or who are we reanimating and once we bring them back, what might they do to us?

The compelling intensity of Great Expectations grows out of this intensely realised relation to the past. Pip’s growth in the novel is ironic, for the novel begins in a place of death and even in the revised ending, seems to end there too.

What are we seeing replicated through the haunting and hallucinatory narrtive?  The return of the repressed? Hamlet’s father with just the same intent as that recurring figure of unease and horror?  

Even words haunt each other, as if they too, cannot escape the prison house of unfinished, unresolved remembrance.

 Looking back I realised that I had no memory whatsoever of ‘Mrs Mellor’ and this highlights the way I felt the small ‘me’ experienced life at that age. I was not aware of family consequences then  and even now I can’t find any face for the probably long suffering Mrs Mellor…but Mr Mellor?  Oh, he is still around!

He must have been thrilled to have such children as neighbours and as I type I am sure that I can hear the music from my Godparents’ lounge, probably the Carpenters or The Seekers, as my mum and dad chatted away  inside whilst outside in the garden, we hurled mud at the exhausted Mr Mellor’s window. 

His tired  white singlet made an enduring childhood impression. Stanley Kowalski without the famous lines and all that  Southern heat!

Wendy Mellor’s dad always slept during the day and was very, very angry when anything woke him up. We found this exciting, especially during the long school holidays, when our parents came for the day and stayed indoors with  Uncle Roger’s famous new record player.

Anthony and I used to dig up bits of his back garden for ammunition and then throw mud at Mr Mellor’s dark window downstairs, until he started to shout.

We laughed when his light bulb came  on and would throw mud again, just to make sure.

Then we would hide in our tunnel just under Aunty Kathleen’s hedge, until we could start all over again.

Lenny and Frankie