Emily Bronte a short post

I’ve been reading a short book on the Brontes by Margaret Lane.  It is not an in- depth study, but covers talks given to the Bronte Society by Lane who was an author in her own right. I want to write a longer piece about Emily someday but the book threw up a few ideas for me.

It is called the “Drug like Bronte Dream” and Lane’s thesis is that all of the Brontes had a capacity for ignoring ordinary life and living in an imagined world, which gave them scope for their writing.

In real life they were the children of an Irishman (Patrick Brunty), from a very poor background who had raised himself to becoming clergyman of the Church of England and a modest success as Curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. He changed the spelling of his name to Bronte and married an English girl, by whom he had 6 children.  But while he had raised himself admirably by his own efforts, they were still poor by middle class standards.  Patrick lost his wife – she died of cancer when the children were very young.  Then he lost 2 of his children when he sent them to a school which he hoped would give them a good education.  The school was horrifically harsh.  The children were unkindly treated and poorly fed and looked after.  The two older girls - Maria and Elizabeth -were taken ill and died.  He removed the other two girls, Charlotte and Emily and took them back home to educate them himself.

Patricks’ stipend was small but enough to keep him and his children frugally. He knew thought that when he died there would be nothing for them, so he wanted to help them towards earning a living when he was gone.  He had particularly high hopes that his only son Branwell would do very well and would get a good job and be able to help his sisters.  Branwell was clever and more outgoing than the girls, and it seemed likely, with his talents at writing and painting that he would be the one to make a success of his life and be able to provide for his sisters. However, Patrick expected that his daughters might have to go out as governesses, this being almost the only form of employment allowable for genteel girls.  So he was anxious to have them well educated also.

The children socialised a little, with the local gentry and other clergy families but they were very shy and awkward and were happiest in their own family circle.  Because it was there that they were able to foster their imagination by writing.  They created entire fantasy worlds, Gondal and Angria, and from an early age wrote stories about their characters. What was unusual about this, Lane points out, is not the creation of a world or writing and acting out stories – this has been done by other children and even other families of children who were creative - but the way they did it.
Form childhood, they “wrote” books in such a way as to make them look like small print books. They wrote in tiny print because paper was expensive, but they wanted the “books” to look like real published books, right from the earliest age.
The four children spilt up into two pairs, Emily and Anne creating and writing about Gondar and Branwell and Charlotte writing about Angria.  They read the papers and used characters from the news of the day, such as the Duke of Wellington, as material for their stories.
Charlotte was able to “switch off” from normal life and hypnotise herself into the world of her characters, to literally “see” them, while she was busy with other routine things.  Emily too, was happy when helping with housework and cooking, and it is likely that she also could go into her private world of imagination while doing the household tasks and work out her plots and “see” the people she was writing about.
Charlotte was very shy and socially awkward, but she did her best at times to mix with people. However Emily seemed to reject completely “normal real life” and to choose to live entirely in the imaginary life she had created for herself.
She never worked as a governess, unlike Charlotte or Anne.  She went to a school for a time after the disastrous school where her sisters had died, but she was unhappy away from the moors.  She then spent a period as a teacher in a private school and later as a pupil teacher in a respected Brussels school, with Charlotte. She never made any friends outside the family, and lived for her writing and her rambling on the moors.

THE RIDE (SONG)

The Ride is a country song recorded by David Allen Coe, an “outlaw” country singer... It was on his album Castles in the Sand in 1983.

Written by Gary Gentry and J.B. Detterline Jr, it is about an encounter between a drifting singer hitchhiking towards Nashville, who gets a ride with a country singer who looks ghostly –half drunk and hollow eyed.  They listen to the radio and as he looks at the driver, he realises that this is no ordinary ride...

 The driver asks him if he can “make folks feel what you feel inside”.  As he lets the man out of his car so that he can drive back to Alabama, the hitch hiker thanks him and he replies “You don’t have to call me Mister, Mister; the whole world calls me Hank”.

And he realizes it was the dead Hank Williams….

 The song has a chilling quality, helped by Coe’s delivery.

I like it particularly because it hits so clearly at the appeal of country music. People who think that it is commercialized schmaltz don’t understand the deep meaning that it has traditionally had for poor “country” people. Most of the older singers, now beginning sadly to leave us, came from impoverished hard–scrabble backgrounds, sharecropping families in the southern states.  It appeals in most countries where there is a rural base and where people have had to work hard to make a living… It has always been popular in Ireland and Scotland and the North of England.  Also in Scandinavia and in parts of Eastern Europe. It’s usually sneered at by the well off and the sophisticated.

For people of that time, music was one of the few entertainments that they had.  They were too poor to go to the movies often; there were no theatres, not many books, and no TV, but most houses had some kind of musical instrument and someone who could play it... and they could listen to the Grand Old Opry on the radio.

 Hank Williams wrote songs that appealed to the people he came from, whom he played for.  People who were poor, struggling to live, who had stormy lives, trying to bring up children on too little pay, where a love betrayal was a tragedy... Many of his songs came from his love hate relationship with his wife Audrey and his own despairing addiction to pills and drink…

And he could make people feel the pain that he suffered; make them believe that he felt their pains… -and that’s what makes a great country singer…

. 

Cash In Concert 1997

It will be obvious to anyone reading this blog (and I know some people do) that I love country music.  And mostly I love the singers that came to prominence in the 50s and 60s. But the one I love most is Johnny Cash. 
I  got to see him singing live once, in 1997. 
He was touring in Europe and played one night in England at the Royal Albert Hall. I ended up with 4 tickets because of being keen to get the best seats that I could.  But I managed to sell the other 2.

On the night, Jewel was his support act but I’m afraid that my friend and I didn’t go to see her.  We just wanted to see Johnny and if possible to see him arrive. We went for a drink at the Albert Hall’s bar and then went to wait outside to see if we might actually see him coming in.

It was April and at the hour of evening when it is starting to get dark... and it wasn’t too warm, but I was shaking with excitement over the prospect of seeing my childhood hero.  And hoping that he would still be in good singing voice. He was then in his mid-60s and I knew his health wasn’t too good.  But when he arrived, I wasn’t quite prepared for how frail he looked.  He was a tall man but now a bit stooped and his hair was thinning and greying.  He moved very slowly, and didn’t speak but signed a few autographs before going into the Hall.

My friend and I went in and took our seats and both of us were excited and apprehensive.  My friend said that he hoped very much for my sake that Johnny’s voice was still good, because it meant so much to me and he too loved the man and wanted to hear him singing well.  But we both knew that time can take its toll. And we could see that he wasn’t the big strong looking man that he had once been.

But when he came on stage, he bounded on like a 20 year old and said “Hello I’m Johnny Cash” and I realised that he could save his energy for the performance and that he was going to be all right.

I can’t remember now what song he stated with, but I think it was Folsom Prison Blues.  His son John Carter Cash was performing with him and his wife, June…

And his voice was as good as it ever had been.  Strong, resonant, powerful and tuneful. 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard such a wonderful concert. I can remember many of the songs, Lefty Frizzel’s’ Long Black Veil, Big River, Ghost Riders in the Sky, Jackson (with June)….

June was charming and funny and sang and played beautifully, and the love between her and John showed very clearly in their duets. It almost moved me to tears when Johnny and June sang together.  When it was all over, we knew that he wasn’t up to doing an encore, but had played and sung for about an hour and a half, and had sung his heart out.  As we left, we saw him and June leaving.

Not too long after that concert, Johnny’s health got much worse and he had to give up touring abroad and gradually had to cut on tours In the US.  But he kept on singing and recording as long as he could.  All of his life.

And a while ago, reading a biography of Johnny, I found that his sight had been failing at that stage and I realised that that was why he had walked so slowly… He probably could hardly see in the poor light and the unfamiliar location.  But it didn’t stop him from working and singing.  In biographies of him, I’ve Read of friends and family saying that they were worried, around that time, when they realised he could hardly see in a poor light or if he came indoors from outside, but that when he got ready to sing, he would be fine.  And that sums him up.

I only saw him live once, and we were lucky because that was the last chance we would have had... So I am deeply grateful for the wonderful experience.

Rough Music a new Musican's love story

A couple of years ago, I was recovering from an operation, and found that I was rather bored with the genre I used to write in.  So while I was convalescing, I started to listen to music that I’d loved in my youth, in the late 70s and 1980s.  I got back into country music again.  So I started to write some stories based in the world of music.  I didn’t want these to be just soft edged, happy ending stories.  Musicians aren’t usually choir boys and especially back in the days of long tours, there was a lot of wild stuff, drinking, sex and drug taking.   My first story was a gay one about a song writer and a young guy who wants to be a singer, who falls in love.   (Lovers of the Road).  My next story is more of a story of a marriage, between a young couple who live together, but who aren’t exactly Loves Young Dream.  He has a small band, and plays in the Nashville bars.  She is a young mother and they don’t have much in common apart from their baby.  But they find a way of living together.

The latest story, “Rough Music”, does not have the traditional happy ending.  It is about a band who play country and rock and who are just breaking into the big time. The lead singer finds that his marriage is falling apart, because of his long months away touring and his own infidelities and drinking.  He remarries, but is the second marriage going to be more successful.

I now that many people won’t like these type of stories, but I just feel that writing all the time about “happy endings” and “rakes tamed by the love of a good woman” is unrealistic.  I like to write about people who are real, who do stupid things and good things, who aren’t “sorted out by the end of the novel”.   

Merle Haggard, country legend

Merle Haggard was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1937, and died on his 79^th birthday…his family were “Okies”, farming people who had moved from Oklahoma, to California, during the Depression when the “dust bowl” destroyed farms in their home state, and reduced them to a desperate condition, with no option but to pack up and leave.  They made the trip west in their cars, hoping for a new life.  John Steinbeck’s novel, Grapes of Wrath, is about this terrible time in US history.
They were poor, and Merle’s music reflected that.  Like most country singers of his generation, he had experienced the poverty and social problems that he wrote about in his songs… They were born in rural poverty, and isolation.  Family was often all the wealth that they had, and  even then, their families were not immune to the many issues that affected most people in the 20^th century, such as desertion or divorce, children “going off the rails”, harsh parenting.  Country music was the white working class blues; it was about the real life experiences of the singers who wrote the songs, which were often sneered at by the more fortunate or educated.

As a boy, Merle loved music and played the guitar, but he was often in trouble with the law.  His father’s death left him lost and he got into more and more trouble.  in his teens he ran away from home, and then got into trouble with the law, and spent time in various juvenile detention centres, from which he escaped.   At the age of 20, he was serving time in prison, San Quentin, when Johnny Cash played a concert there.  Merle resolved to straighten himself out. He was traumatised by the more appalling aspects of prison life, and wanted to get out.

Cash understood brushes with the law, and had made helping prisoners one of his causes. Merle got out of prison, and eventually he won a full pardon for his crime.  He got a job and gradually began to sing, and to start a successful career in country music.

Many of his songs were drawn from childhood experiences.  “Mama Tried” was about his family and how his mother had hoped to keep him from crime… “Sing me back home” also has a prison background.

One of his most famous songs was “Okie From Muskogee”- a semi humorous song about the clash of the values of Middle America and the hippies of the 1960s, who “smoke marijuana” and “make a party out of loving”.  He was ambivalent about the song... it was taken up by the conservatives as supporting the values of the “silent Majority”, but Merle saw it as praise for the old style ways and beliefs of his parents and grandparents, without being overly right wing. One of his other songs was Irma Jackson, about an inter-racial romance and in later life, he wrote songs against the Iraq War.   Although he performed for Nixon at the White House in the 70’s he was always willing to listen to protestors against the Vietnam War….
Merle’s love life was stormy.  He was married 5 times, and during the 1980s he developed a coke habit, which damaged his health to a degree.  But his musical career was fruitful and he loved his work.  He loved life, and worked hard, still performing even when he had had cancer.  Sadly I never saw him perform live, but I have loved his songs and his singing... Ever since as a child, I saw him in a small role in the Waltons.

Pallisers and stories of married life

I’ve been watching “The Pallisers” on TV lately and remembering how much I loved the novels when I was a kid...

I like Antony Trollope, because while he is in many ways a quintessential Victorian, in his attitudes, he is also much more tolerant and more a “man of the world” than many Victorian writers.  
Trollope realises that people are flawed and foolish, and make mistakes, that marriage isn’t always a happy bed of roses and that love doesn’t always solve problems. He was lucky into that he was writing at a time where a novel could be about a marriage rather than the run up to it.  He described marriages of various kinds, and his favourite female character was the flawed but charming Glencora Palliser, a young woman who is forced into a marriage with a serious and dull young man whom she does not love.. She is in love with a “bad lot”, the gambler, Burgo Fitzgerald, and in the early years of her marriage, she wants to leave her husband and run off as Fitzgerald’s mistress.   Her husband persuades her to stay and give their marriage a chance, because he loves her, although she is different from him.  She is flighty, and often vulgar and wilful, and he is cool and unemotional and finds it hard to relate to people, even his wife and children.  She is very human and at times, he is “something more than human,” very virtuous and serious.

I have hoped to write some fiction about married life, rather than the courtship stage, and show marriages that are in trouble, marriages that are not too good and not too bad, and to try and show people as they really are. I don’t claim to be as good a writer as Trollope, (though like him I am a part timer!), but I hope that some may like my newer fictions about married life... So far, I have two stories, “Beds and Blue Jeans” and “Rough Music”.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1451048583&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=nadina+sutton

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458478281&sr=8-1&keywords=Rough+music+nadine

Beds and Blue Jeans Romance

Beds and Blue Jeans is a sort of “anti-Romance” story about a couple – Sam and Pattie, who wind up living together almost by accident.  They have a baby and Sam tries to be a good father, but he is bored with his girlfriend and she seems to just about tolerate him.  So he keeps on with his work of playing in a band and finds that a lot of women throw themselves at him because he is a musician.   He half enjoys the thrill of secret flings, and dodging being found out by his bad tempered girlfriend.  But as times goes by, the flings are less satisfying because he wants something more from a woman, but he thinks that Pattie is too immature to provide him with any real companionship.

http://www.amazon.com/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443265304&sr=8-2&keywords=nadine+sutton