Best years, given or given up

I was browsing a biography of Teresa Wright in the library, looking first at the pages about Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). And my confidence in the writer began to drop. Here is his discussion of the title of Wyler’s film:

“The best years” cannot refer to the time of the war, nor to what preceded it — that would be too cynical and would reduce the significance of the heroic exploits of these men. Nor can the title refer to what is in the future — that would be hypothetical and, from a narrative standpoint, a cheat. Nor can the best years indicate what we see in the present, which is obviously a time of disillusionment and disappointment.

The title makes sense only if we understand it not literally but ironically. That is certainly the impact of the only moment in the picture when the phrase is spoken: when the character played by Virginia Mayo complains loudly to her husband (Dana Andrews), “I’ve given you the best years of my life!" In fact, she’s given him nothing of the kind: she married him less than three weeks before he went off to war, and he has returned to find her frivolous, avaricious and adulterous.

Donald Spoto, A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

But that’s not what “the character played by Virginia Mayo,” otherwise known as Marie Derry, says to husband Fred. What she does say:

“I’ve given you every chance to make something of yourself. I gave up my own job when you asked me. I gave up the best years of my life! And what have you done? You've flopped.”

Selfish Marie doesn’t claim to have given Fred anything — except chances. But she has given up , given up what belonged to her — the time that has been lost to war, time that can never be regained. In an earlier scene, when Marie speaks of being “right back where [we] started,” “just as if nothing had ever happened,” Fred tells her, “We can never be back there. We never want to be back there.”

I suspect that the title of Wyler’s film lurks behind a passage in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of the Odyssey . In book 23, Penelope speaks to Odysseus of their twenty years apart:

                                                      “Think
what difficulty the gods gave: they denied
    us
life together in our prime and flowering
    years,
kept us from crossing into age together.”

“Our prime and flowering years” — or the best years of our lives.

[Fitzgerald served in the U.S. Navy in the Second War. He writes about that in the postscript to his translation of the Aeneid .]

What made Billy Wilder cry

Billy Wilder, speaking of The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946):

“I cried through the whole picture, and I am not a pushover — I laugh at Hamlet .”

From Directed by William Wyler (dir. Aviva Slesin, 1986). Quoted in Donald Spoto’s A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

Somewhat related posts
Harold Russell : Teresa Wright, Teresa Wright

“The Right Way to Resist Trump”

Luigi Zingales, an observer of Italian politics, writing in The New York Times about “The Right Way to Resist Trump”: “The news that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for office is the worst possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a monarchy, how can it fight the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?”

[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]

“The Rot of Fake News”

“Doc, you’re gargling with Coke. And it’s bad for you”: “The Rot of Fake News,” an essay by Todd Zwillich (WNYC).

A related post
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year: post-truth

“Oh yes, of course, art simplifies”

Willa Cather, from a letter to Ida Kleber Todd, December 28, 1934:

People are always writing me (people I don’t know) that I have “influenced” their lives. I wonder if you know that you have influenced mine? Once, long ago, in some discussion, you said, half under your breath, “Oh yes, of course, art simplifies.” I had never thought of that before; I have been trying to live that remark ever since. It was the way you spoke, carelessly and yet as if there could be no doubt about the matter; and because I felt a kind of authority in you — didn’t try to explain it, just felt it.

I have read thousands of pages that did not say as much to me as that sentence rather lightly dropped by a living voice — a very individual voice with a tempo and timbre distinctly its own. The sentence went home like an arrow — because of something in you and something in me. As I said, I’ve been trying to live it ever since.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

Ida Kleber Todd (1858–1946) was the daughter of Henry Kleber (1816–1897), who was a major figure in Pittsburgh musical life. The Selected Letters has no information about Todd, and the information in the preceding sentence is all that I have been able to find. From 1896 to 1906, Cather lived in Pittsburgh, working as a journalist, editor, and teacher.

Cather, in a 1921 interview: “I’m trying to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part.” And in her essay “The Novel Démeublé” (1922): “The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished.” Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) begins with a man walking through the empty rooms of a “dismantled house.”

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[The novel démeublé: the novel stripped of its furniture, the novel with its furniture removed.]

Zippy Cleaners

[Zippy , November 17, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

The obscure reference? Not “three rocks.” Martinizing.

This Zippy Cleaners is was located in Manhattan at 149 Elizabeth Street. Look at what Bill Griffith did with the fire escape.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts, Nancy and Zippy posts, Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Todd VanDerWerff on progressive politics and rural America

Todd VanDerWerff, writing about a communication gap between progressive urbanites and conservative ruralites:

I say “racism” and mean “a system, built up over centuries of American history, that privileges white people over everybody else.” Many rural whites hear “racism” and think it means, “You’re a bad person who hates black people,” when they believe they’re not actively discriminating against anyone because of race.

That single sentence jumped out: it’s the perfect characterization of a mindset that prevails in my immediate environs. “I treat everyone the same,” &c.

VanDerWeff is not apologizing for or excusing oppression or bigotry. But he is suggesting that people need to do a better job listening and speaking to one another across a political and cultural divide.

[In today’s local paper, a letter calls “liberals” “fat, lazy, slobs” who will now have to “get their fat little butts off the couch and get a job.”]

A Word of the Year

For Oxford Dictionaries, it’s post-truth :

After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth — an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

notebin.cc

A reader recommends notebin.cc, an online text editor, and successor to the defunct notepad.cc.

Three good sentences

At the OUPblog, Edwin Battistella writes about how to write a good sentence, with three sample sentences. The sample sentences are from Oxford University Press books. Total cost: $238.95. But you can ponder the sentences for free.

Somewhat related
A review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence