I was struck that this season includes Marguerite Duras’ “The North China Lover,” Antoine Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” and Sara Gmitter’s “In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story.” The video above is a teaser triptych by the three directors. I’d love to see the productions.
But the subject of this post is that though this company is based on a group of Northwestern University students, post-Alvina Krause and in those terms “only” twenty-five years old as compared to my time there (1957-61). They wished to explore experimental and original works. Somehow they have come back to three subjects that I first learned about in the late Fifties, right there at NU in Evanston when repertory theatre was only a dream.
Duras
Duras
I came to Marguerite Duras’ work through “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” which is the same autobiographically based story that she returned to again and again. But that version was entwined with the atomic bomb and the whole issue of peace. I had never seen such a sexy movie -- the lovers shower together -- nor had I seen eros paired with death so explicitly. It has never left me. I watched it again not long ago and I’ve also re-watched “The Lover” several times, but I haven’t read much of her writing. Maybe I should settle down to a formal study of her work but it would be more fun and possibly more rewarding to rework the Browning Sixties as though they were Saigon, using the holocaust massacre theme. In my head in those years the images of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” were very much alive -- it was only a year or so after sitting amazed in the Evanston art house film theatre.
The Little Prince
Saint Exupery
“The Little Prince” is bittersweet to think about. I still have the book given to me by a dear classmate, not as a romantic gift, so much as a sign of sharing a world, a coded version of a friendship. That friendship endured a long time, but maybe we’re out of sync now. It's not ended, really. Again, much of it echoed a few years later in Browning -- like the fox who comes to discuss what it is to be “tamed.” Of course, Saint-Exupery himself was never tamed. I read his biography and the other books and saw that he was one of those men who needed women as a base port, not a co-pilot.
Charles Darwin
His wife and cousin.
The third story is also relevant since my basic biology education was at NU and my biology lab partner became a very close friend. He died young but not before major achievements as a law professor and as father of a treasured family. Still reflecting on bio issues, much of my thinking now is about the “omics”: genomics, proteomics, epigenomics, culturomics and so on. I still hear that lab partner’s voice. The Darwin story is about the dynamics of understanding that have gripped us a long time, but the evolution of the actual animals has been displaced by the evolution of the code that makes them -- and our interventions in the code, accidentally and on purpose.
Since I often drove the barrel of “our” microscope through the slide we were trying to look at (I’ve always had a problem with focusing) but Bill never did, and since I had the greater manual dexterity at that point (I drew praise from the professor for an angleworm dissection), we made a synergistic pair. We often sat together in the back of the auditorium at Annie May Swift to observe the acting classes of Alvina Krause. At that point he was thinking of becoming a psychiatrist, so we were preoccupied with issues of identity, human heroism, and cultures that challenge and resist exceptional individuals. He never shared my interest in religion.
From this vantage point in time, Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin seem to walk in light, but they were all three problematic characters who had to weather a lot of doubt, resistance, and affliction. None of them were saints and none were religious in any conventional institutional sense. They were people who took chances, met hardship, made love, and left legacies. I’d like to be like that.
I never shared thoughts about these three individuals with Bob Scriver or anyone else in Browning. Both my NU friends came to visit Browning with the high school sweethearts they married. They were both sons of doctors -- what does that mean? They didn’t know each other except to pass on campus. Bob knew them only as my former classmates and they were very curious but baffled by him. No discussions of the meaning of life.
Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how compartmented my life has been. I suppose it’s an artifact of moving, not just from one place to another, but from one total context to another -- all of them unpredicted and with nothing obvious in common, and yet the themes and skills I learned from Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin have come with me -- the stolons stretching across the continent, connecting rhizomes that were communities of experience.
Maybe it’s a demonstration of how the arts and humanities become like spider silk, trailing along behind one, weaving a pattern. Or to be more funky, one could speak of the slime trail left by a slug, a kind of excrement in the opinion of some. When you look it up, slug slime is pretty complicated, implicated in everything from the ability to climb vertical surfaces to assisting sex. It’s how you use it that counts.
But the “whole point” is the story, the live theatre of all this. Consider that Ivan Doig was from here, is my age and attended NU at the same time, but in a journalism and history context. I doubt that he attended that art house movie theatre or that it had any particular effect on him. His writing is read in Montana, mine is read in Seattle. His writing is conventional “books,” mine is blogging. Our audiences are probably about the same size, but the difference is he’s able to make a living writing and I am not. But then our lifestyles are also different. And our writing is nothing alike. Yet we're both Scots -- maybe I'm more Irish.
If there is someone around here who watches Duras movies, reads Saint-Exupery books, or even thinks about Darwin, I don’t know who they are. Mere proximity means very little these days. But if one is “different” and spends the day writing, there are always friends a keystroke away. There is a lot more to this story.
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