Our very own Kaye Seamer (who spans Joyce and Proust gracefully) has also sung for twelve years with the Royal Choral Society, which is staging a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 June to mark its 150th Anniversary. The concert will be particularly special because the RCS gave the premier British performance of the work at the Royal Albert Hall in 1875, conducted by Verdi himself.
It is truly one of life’s great experiences to be in a beautiful place, with a group of adventurous and stretchy readers, immersed for a week in a complex book (Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady) that drives us to consider closely our own identity, relationship to history, cultural context, social relationships, familial inheritance . . .
Our insights into the challenges facing Isabel Archer, her enclosure in tradition and the interior maps she must negotiate to claim agency in a claustrophobic space, reflected back upon us all and inspired each of us. Some responded with creative writing, some with nuggets shared in discussion. For others the illuminations are held within, to carry back home and keep turning over.
Jackie Seigler and I worked to find the right balance of yoga and study sessions while leaving time for reflection, walking and adventuring in the golden landscapes of Umbria. There were food adventures to be had, wine-tastings, underground caves to crawl through and lakes to discover and dip into. Back in London, I feel my body strengthened with the careful attention of the yoga and my mind calmed with the wonderful focus of the discussions around the complex art of Henry James. I learned from every member of the group – Salonistas from Paris, London, Bristol, New York City, Upstate New York, some who have been with the Salon since its early days, a few experiencing the Salon for the first time. Thank you all for making this adventure so inspiring!
Some feedback from participants:
Location: ‘Really beautiful and welcoming. Just the right balance of comfort and simplicity.’
Food: ‘Very good! Appreciated the many varieties of greens. A bit more pasta perhaps . . .’
Schedule: ‘Nicely paced. I could not routinely find my way to yoga twice a day but was really happy that the possibility was there when I did. Really enjoyed the afternoons at leisure too.’
Cost: ‘Good value for money.’
Yoga: ‘Really enjoyed the restorative and gentle yoga classes. Jackie, your warmth, joy and expertise is in my cells after this retreat.’
‘I found everything about the yoga just right. I felt really held and taken care of in the sessions. I particularly liked the restorative yoga and yoga nidra.’
Salon: ‘Toby, difficult to put into words the depth of the experience. I appreciated so much the slow read of a well-chosen classic and how it gave meaning to my own life in new ways. So good to read closely and in the process become closer to such thoughtful people.’
Overall: ‘Thank you both for all you did and are. I am renewed, recharged and changed after these seven very special days. See you in September.’
‘You both held the group beautifully . . . just the right balance. You were both really kind, sensitive, attentive and inclusive. It made for a great group experience . . . Only suggestion is to get people to read the book completely!’
‘This was a rich and revivifying experience – physically because of the wonderful yoga, and spiritually and intellectually through our collective reading of one of the great 19th century novels. The opportunity to drop into a book, deep below the surface, with a group of open-minded, intelligent, sensitive readers – and to stay there for a week, under expert and self-effacing leadership – is a great privilege. That privilege was enhanced by first-class yoga teaching which kept us grounded, and physically well-tuned.’
And finally, a poetic reflection from our creative writing facilitator Alison Cable:
On reading Portrait of a Lady with LitSalon in Umbria
Where am I positioned as reader
Of words, characters, people?
I am invited to slow down--
I experience others.
Words, characters, people,
When our systems crack, what are we left with?
I experience others--
Half-closed eyelids, a full moon.
When our systems crack, what are we left with?
It was an act of devotion to conceal her misery.
Half-closed eyelids, full moon--
Epiphany, expansion.
It was an act of devotion to conceal her misery.
Where am I positioned?
Epiphany, expansion—
I experience others.
Alison Cable, April 2022
In a recent newsflash I shared some resources in response to the Ukrainian crisis. Thanks to all who followed up, and for the thoughts and actions you have taken. As you know, the news of unrelenting attacks on the Ukrainian people is horrific, as are Putin’s twists of logic in attempting to justify invasion.
Since writing that, I have had feedback from some people in the Salon community that has helped me to expand my understanding and grasp the complexity of the situation, as well as the potential for blind spots and accidental omissions in describing such terrible events.
First, one Salonista who is from Russia and has relatives in Ukraine called me to account:
“Please, please do not say Russian invasion and Russian aggression, it is not! It is the Putin’s regime aggression and his and his clique’s invasion. Russia and the Russian people have never agreed to that. It is not done in my name and not in the name of other millions of Russians.”
She is right, and I apologise. Although the circumstances were somewhat different, as an American I was aghast at the destruction that was wreaked when the USA invaded Iraq; I demonstrated against this invasion and sought to disassociate myself from the military action of the US government. The bravery of the Russian people who are now speaking out against Putin is astonishing and thanks to MG for helping me shift my language.
I also had this feedback from another Salonista:
“. . . I feel terribly upset seeing the suffering of the ordinary people of Ukraine and up to yesterday I supported Ukraine against Russia.
Sadly, reports are coming out about shocking racist practices being used by Ukrainian authorities against Black people, mainly students, and Indians trying to flee Ukraine. It is not widely reported but there are testimonials in the Independent, ITV, Twitter (#AfricansinUkraine) and the Black press . . .
I have written to the BBC to ask why reporters are not questioning Ukrainian spokespeople about these allegations.
I have donated to crowdfunding for African students trying to flee . . .”
Since SA pointed this out to me, I have found various articles that have exposed these racist practices and there has been increased reporting. I want to express outrage and compassion for the Ukrainian people under attack, as well as the African nationals and Black refugees who are being discriminated against in their struggle to escape the war. This opinion piece by Daniel Howden also considers the varying responses to refugees and offers hope that the current crisis will result in an expanded empathic response to refugees from all conflict zones.
In a recent discussion in a Proust study, we were examining the crash of the Union Générale in 1882 and how this shifted financial power in France before being used to support antisemitic myths about the power of Jewish bankers. As these myths repeat themselves even today (to the extent that one current French politician has proposed reconsidering the exoneration of Dreyfus, more than a century after his unjust and tortured incarceration), I found the research undertaken by study members to help understand how the Jewish bankers were scapegoated in the rising fury of antisemitism enlightening. In the process, I also learned that the form ‘anti-Semitism’ is no longer favoured and have updated my usage accordingly.
I appreciate how both in the studies and beyond, we have worked together to become more thoughtful about how language – a powerful and subtle tool – is used.
And finally, we have been asked to raise awareness of Packed with Hope, an initiative providing age-appropriate storybooks and a variety of comforting items (from hot water bottles to colouring pencils and notepads) to the many children caught up in the terror of being uprooted from their homes, family and friends in Ukraine. Please take a look and donate if you can.
Some years ago, we were told about the great work Kate Slotover and Laura Potter were doing in opening up literature to readers everywhere. Laura and Kate founded The Book Club Review Podcast – an energetic discussion about what to read and how different readers may respond. In their words:
“We founded The Book Club Review Podcast to turn the solitary act of reading into a shared experience.
Loved the book? Loathed it? So much the better. We’re all about big opinions. We live for the great debate, the heated discussion, the ‘I see what you’re saying, but here’s why you’re wrong’ rant. With good humour. With respect. But with commitment too. Because the world has forgotten that disagreement is good for us. That it’s the friction of debate that sparks off new ideas, new perspectives – just like a good book. Bring the two together and there’s really nothing better.”
We are great admirers of their work which, as you can see, dovetails beautifully with the energy of exploration we generate in the Salon, so I was happy to spend a delicious February evening discussing doorstoppers – and WHY read them – with Laura, Kate and Phil Chaffee in the latest episode of the podcast.
The result is recommended listening for anyone who is either enjoying or feeling daunted by the ‘big’ books featured in Salon studies. If you like what you hear, take a look at previous episodes (including their 2019 interview with me about what the London Literary Salon does) and subscribe to the podcast newsletter to be alerted to new ones.
As 2021 draws to a close, we’re looking forward to welcoming Salonistas old and new to studies in 2022, and excited to be beginning our new venture, the LitSalon Challenge. In the meantime, we wish you all a happy and healthy New Year filled with great reading adventures.
This has been such a strange year . . . but, thanks to so many of you, it has been a year of discovery and development for the Salon community. I hope others have found – as I have – the studies to provide some ballast in this unstable time.
There is the frenetic energy of the moments in the Salon when we build upon each other’s ideas, questions, struggles, to come (unexpectedly, with a whoosh of pleasure) to textured reading that resonates with each of us, and with the text. In those moments, the loud world hums around us, briefly, with rhythm instead of dissonance. And, in spite of the divided Zoom frame, I feel connected to a global gathering of hungry minds.
But the Salon has also given me the enduring gift of apt words, deeply witty aphorisms and lyrical phrasings shared between the Salonistas embedded in a particular work. The photo above is an example: all of those cards are Joyce-connected, the postcard from Gibraltar (combining Proust AND Joyce in an involuntary memory connecting fragrance and literary references), a seascape with a vision towards Sandymount, Dylan – grandson of two dedicated Joyceans – preparing for his life-long reading, a Yulysses greeting from a Wakian with this Joyce (Ithaca) quote:
“May this Yuletide bring to thee
Joy and peace and welcome glee”
The winter solstice is a time when I am reminded to stop fighting the dark and hard moments, and instead to make room. To find a space of quiet and reflection, to be mindful of the struggle of others in this hard, hard time, to be present even as the world swirls. And in the gift of poetry, I find words that help me hold the dark:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
And finally, some Joyce trivia: from a 2022 Ulyssian:
Q. What have Sir Richard Rogers (recently departed architect of the Pompidou Centre, Lloyds Building et al) have in common with Mr Joyce?
A. Mr Joyce taught English to Richard Roger’s mother, Dada, when he was in Trieste.
Who knew?
Have a peaceful, happy and healthy time and look forward to catching up in 2022.
P.S. If you haven’t already seen our new LitSalon Challenge it’s free to join and please pass it on to anyone who you think might be interested. You can hear me talking about it on Times Radio here (about 2 hours 25 minutes into the programme, although be warned that it can take quite a long time to load).
Every visit to Paris is an encounter with the inexhaustible ideal of style. Even though I once lived here, I find myself tipsy with the sights and smells and sheer beauty of it all, even before I sip the crisp Pouilly-Fumé that somehow tastes better in Paris.
Here, life is lived on the streets in the most swirling and satisfying ways. In this city I am always hungry: the smells of coffee and patisseries surround me as I run along the Canal Saint Martin; on rue Montorgueil we are torn between multiple bistros for dinner, our mouths watering with the possibilities of fresh fish and autumn’s mushroom bounty.
We visit the newly reopened le Musée Carnavalet — the city’s oldest museum, dedicated to celebrating the history of this illuminated city. The current retrospective exposition of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson reminds us how his work is so embedded in the history and vision of Paris that my friend, who thought she was not familiar with his work, kept murmuring, ‘I know this picture . . .’ With his images in my mind, I am thinking about how an artist can shape our idea of a place — Paris becomes the time-misted, complicated, fleeting glimpses that Cartier-Bresson captured: the days of liberation, the children on Paris streets whose poverty does not diminish their intense play, the women walking as though they aren’t being watched, knowing very well they are watched . . . All his images catch moments of motion and hold them frozen in time: I am aware of a tilting skirt, a leaping man, a glance across a room. None of these movements may be remarkable in themselves, but by being captured in the instant they become eternal. In this and many other ways, our visit to the Carnavalet has me thinking about Proust’s explorations. Finding on the rue de Sevigne the entrance to the building that was home to Mme Sevigne, the 17th century journalist beloved by Marcel’s grandmother, is only the start of the threads of connection to Proust.
Reflecting on the Belle Époque in the Musee Carnavalet
Travelling is different in these pandemic days. Each café requires proof of our vaccinated status; I find this is reassuring. I wonder if I am also newly alive to the allure of foreign spaces and unknown faces. The months of enclosure have made me hungry – and Paris feeds the senses voluptuously.
Having just wrapped an incredible study of The Years in St Ives, I am inspired. We encountered a new book (for me and for the Salon). We were a tentative group — some knew some, some knew none — and all were in the wild and constantly changing weather of St Ives.
Our meeting space was in the wonderful Porthmeor Studios, with windows of stained glass made from the sands of the sea below us. This special space was renovated to honour the rich history of artists and fishermen who have worked and created here for centuries. Now the walls also hold the words of Woolf and the thoughts she inspired in us.
To be together after months of isolation and multiple postponements, to be in the surging air and seas of Cornwall, to face and grapple with Woolf’s contemplation of fragmentation, of breakdown (social, political and domestic), of ‘obdurate language’, to find our way through to our own shared epiphanies in the face of her shards: this is what is so deeply satisfying about these retreats.
Photographs: Janet Minichiello
In The Years, Woolf tries to use fact to find truth in the expanse of fiction, but this is an uneven attempt from a writer who sings so beautifully the realm of interiority. She experiments — and finds a play between — the snapshots of nature at seasonal moments, the movement between light and shadows, between what we say and what we mean. Setting the work to span the twilight of the Victorian era to the ‘Present Moment’ (unspecified, but most agree 1932), we move with a London family through meals, parties, deaths, war and structural change. There are moments of pure lyric flight and moments interrupted — profound thoughts uncompleted, intense connections unrealised, desires frustrated. For the better part of a week, twelve of us lived with this work, the discussions not stopping after the sessions, but seeping into our dinners, walks and swims.
It was an incredible experience to be with a group of hungry minds in a beautiful place, as we dug deeply into the complexity and richness of Woolf’s vision. And then there were moments of hilarity: was that an orgasm on the train? Do we need to comment on the stain on the wall? And what’s the fuss about lavatory vs. bath? There were moments of discomfort as we worked to situate the antisemitism that Woolf portrays — is this her own, or her reflecting a difficult world, or the struggle for the artist against the press to speak politically?
Together, we came to some extraordinary understandings. And then there were rainbows, and Sheila sang . . .
For anyone who fancies joining our next trip to St Ives, we are beginning to plan for Spring 2022. In the meantime, a new study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway begins on 11 October and there are still places left!
As September slides in under summer’s fading shadow, I find returning to the depths of literature offers a delicious slowing down after the shifting and frantic days of this summer with its overwhelming world news. I look for a way to balance the fears and dread of global and local upheavals with a space for hope, inspiration and celebration of the human creative spirit.
One Salonista put it succinctly: “. . . I look forward to seeing you and reading the book which helps me to think deeply rather than be frightened by the daily news.”
Immersion in literature is not to escape, but to find a perspective that is wide enough to hold the chaos of living, to help give context – historical, global – to the individual subjective self that must absorb and flow through the experience of being awake in this world, at this moment.
This autumn’s Salon Studies offer a sumptuous feast to support, expand and sometimes soothe the troubled mind. We have expanded our offerings to give choices in length of courses and cost, approach, focus, genre and historical perspective. In our recent facilitators’ meeting, we discussed developing studies that connect and build on one another – studies which can stand alone but are also linked thematically, developing ideas and understanding of particular strands of literature.
The coming study of Ulysses (starting January 2022, as we approach the centenary of its first publication) offers an opportunity for this kind of interconnected study: this huge book that is both the peak of modernist literature and one of the great unread books, is interwoven with other great works. Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey – often humorously – as a reference point and scaffold upon which to weave his tale of a scruffy and sensitive modern hero who echoes Odysseus in unexpected ways. Ulysses also repeatedly echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet both thematically and in exploring the perennial question of the relationship between the artist and their vision. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be seen as the prequel to Ulysses – giving the reader background to Stephen Dedalus and his struggles, as well as introducing us to Joyce’s experiments in language and style.
We will be offering studies of The Odyssey, Hamlet (soliloquies) and Portrait this autumn. If you are joining the Centenary Study of Ulysses, any or all of these courses would be valuable but, of course, you don’t need to be preparing for Ulysses to enjoy these extraordinary works!
It is with great sadness that I share the news of the death of a Salonista, beloved Agi Katz. When I went back through the records to see what studies Agi had done, I was amazed by the breadth of her participation: she was one of the second tour of Proust, she completed studies on Magic Mountain, Paradise Lost, The Iliad, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and The Fury, Ulysses, Hamlet, Invisible Man . . . Those who were on these courses with her will remember her lively mind, her extensive knowledge of visual art, her strong opinions and her humour.
I first met Agi at the Kenwood Ladies Pond, where she became for me one of those ‘mother swimmers’ – those seasoned Ladies whose stewardship and advocacy have kept the Pond the unique haven we love. Agi also brought her incredible work in researching and advocating for lesser known European artists (she was the founder and director of The Boundary Gallery) to the Salon: for the Proust studies, she brought original sketches made during the trial of Dreyfus – bringing this pivotal moment in history to life for us.
You may also be interested to read the obituary from the Ben Uri Research Unit, where Agi was a curator for six years before opening her own art gallery, The Boundary Gallery, in 1986.
