The Paris Olympics Hot Air Balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 The Paris Olympics hot air balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 

Watching the hot air balloon that dominated the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, I immediately thought of the original Montgolfieres and their sensational use in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign in 1798. Nicolas Conte, the hero of my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter, was the Chief Engineer of the Balloonist Corps in Napoleon’s army in Egypt.

Napoleon tasked Nicolas Conte with flying a manned hot air balloon over French-occupied Cairo, as a display of superior French military engineering intended to awe the local population. Conte’s objected that he could not answer for the safety of such a demonstration with inadequate resources and limited time, and prevailed on Bonaparte to at least let him attempt an unmanned Montgolfiere. The Cairene crowds gathered to witness this miracle of French invention, a formidable flying airship capable of transporting soldiers great distances. The enormous hot air balloon rose in the cloudless sky until it burst into flame and came down ignominiously in flaming tatters. Far from being impressed, the crowd dispersed in disgust, convinced, according to the scathing Egyptian historian El Jabarti, that “this was no more than a very large kite of the sort knaves at street fairs fly to entertain children.”

 

Françoise Hardy and the Yé Yé Era

 Françoise Hardy and I 

Nothing has the power to bounce you back to your teenage years like the music of that decade, and nothing sobers you up like learning of the passing of one of your adolescent icons. If you grew up in the 1960’s listening to the French pop singers of the decade, as I did, you had your favorite, just as you had your favorite Beatle. Sylvie Vartan, Chantal Goya, France Gall, Sheila, and Françoise Hardy, were everywhere, especially on the cover of Salut les Copains.

Although they were not a girl group, they were invariably swept together in press and publicity, emblematic of a fresh, upbeat yé yé generation, light years away from the moody chanteuses like Juliette Greco and Mireille Mathieu.    

Each cultivated her own style. Sylvie Vartan, the cute bleached blonde in glamorous outfits, Johnny Halliday’s girlfriend. France Gall and Chantal Goya with their identical page boy bangs, one blonde, one dark, like negative images of each other. Sheila, with whom I empathized, because she seemed more awkward than the others, as if, secretly, she sometimes had to struggle with her hair or her weight.

Françoise Hardy, on the other hand, was the epitome of cool. She stood out from the others with her tall, lean, slightly androgynous figure and style, akin to her contemporary Jane Birkin. One suspected there were darker depths to Francoise Hardy. You could say she was the George Harrison of the group. She is also the one whose classic style and thoughtful lyrics have survived the test of time. How fitting today to listen to her “Mon Amie la Rose,” with its intimations of mortality, inviting the listener to contemplate the short, lovely life of the rose. The beauty of the garden today, withered and denuded the next. “On est bien peu de chose….” Or, as Shakespeare put it: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So true. RIP Françoise Hardy.

The Beauty and Menace of Spring in Carolina

 Today the roses are in glorious full bloom for the first time this Spring. But so is the kudzu, its malignant vines obliterating entire banks of trees seemingly overnight, as if a sorcerer had turned them into humpbacked monsters that would not be free of his spell till Fall. Beauty and menace, cultivation and wilderness, it is with Nature as with Life. Today on the trials the brand new crop of babies were jogged along in their prams by the yummy mummies, and elderly couples aimed their binoculars at the trees and turned to smile at each other as if to say, we made it, we’re here for one more Spring.  

Napoleon: the many wrongs and one right of the new biopic

 Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is baffling. From the get go, the miscasting of Joaquin Phoenix as the eponymous antihero is fatal. The actor looks every day of his fifty years, and yet he plays Napoleon from the age of 27, when he first made his mark on the bloody post-Revolution scene of a France in the throes of the Terror. Phoenix’s Napoleon mumbles unintelligibly throughout the film, and is as stripped of charisma as he is of energy, which flies in the face of the historical record of a dynamic leader who commanded the loyalty of his armies and the adulation of the masses of his countrymen. Scott’s Napoleon is a caricature, petulant, childish, boorish, besotted with Josephine and putty in her hands. 

The historical Josephine was a few years older and more worldly than the young Bonaparte, whereas Vanessa Kirby, who plays her, is decades younger than Phoenix, which changes the whole dynamic of the onscreen relationship. Kirby does not seem to have a grip on her role, playing Josephine as mindlessly promiscuous, unfaithful, and alternately Napoleon’s muse and his victim. The sex scenes between them are so joyless and off putting that it is hard to believe in a grand passion. 

I was particularly attentive to the brief scenes set during Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, having studied it extensively for my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter. There is no record of Bonaparte firing a cannon at the top of the Cheops Pyramid. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he left his army stranded in Egypt and escaped back to France because he heard that Josephine had taken a lover, rather than because, supremely ambitious as he was, he realized that his mission in Egypt had failed and history would pass him by while the real action was taking place on European soil. 

Rupert Everett’s cameo as Napoleon’s nemesis the Duke of Wellington is equally one-note, a permanent curled lip of aristocratic disdain and an apocryphal sense of English fair play, a portrayal that reminds the viewer that Ridley Scott is an Englishman. 

So, to sum up, why should a prospective viewer watch this two and a half hour film, but only on the widest possible screen in a theatre ? Because of the gorgeously reproduced landscapes of the battle scenes, familiar paintings come to life, history unfolding, Austerlitz, the march on Moscow. That is Ridley Scott’s forte. That is where we get a glimpse of the military genius behind the historic victories and the ultimately arrogant overreach of the Corsican who came from nothing and conquered Europe before he lost everything. 

The closing credits enumerate the hundreds of thousands who died in battle in the Napoleonic wars. But if Scott’s intention is to condemn wars of ambition, why then are the battle scenes rendered so glamorously? Baffling.

Playing Barbie in Nasser’s Egypt

 Playing Barbie in Sixties Egypt

 

In the early Sixties, in Nasser’s “socialist” Egypt, you could not come by anything imported, and I absolutely longed for a Barbie doll. When an uncle went to the States, he brought back one for me. The stereotypical Barbie, of course, there was no other at the time, and she came with just the swimsuit she stood up in. Ordering additional outfits or accessories was out of the question, but that was not a problem. 

I was on the older side to be playing with dolls, anyway, and the pleasure, for me, was designing, cutting and sewing dresses for my Barbie. There were always plenty of fabric scraps left over from the summer frocks and nightgowns the “little dressmaker” ran up for me on a freestanding, iron Singer sewing machine that occupied most of a small room in our house. My mother could not sew to save her life, but it was common in those days to have a dressmaker come to one’s house to do the sewing, and I can still conjure the sound of that foot pedal running “drrrrrrrrr” from the sewing room, off and on for hours at the beginning of every season. 

For proper dresses the dressmaker often copied patterns from Burda, a German magazine, painstakingly expanding them to scale and size on butcher paper, and then cutting the fabric along the lines. Then came the lengthy process of fittings, which I hated, having to stand on a stool while having the dress carefully slipped over my head, first with the fabric held together with prickly pins, then very loosely stitched at the seams, then finally sewn up properly on the Singer sewing machine, the hems and linings finished by hand.

So I always had plenty of fabric scraps for my Barbie’s dresses: cotton lawn, silk chiffon, even upholstery velvet. I started with boat neck shifts, as they were the easiest style to cut, and stitched them up with a handheld sewing tool like a large stapler. It came in handy, since I was the despair of my governess, who had tried in vain to teach me the simplest of stem stitches. She herself truly had what she called in French “fairy hands,” but I was my mother’s daughter when faced with needle and thread.

Now that I look at my grandaughter’s generation, surrounded by multiple Barbies with closets full of ready-made Barbie clothes and accessories, their gigantic doll houses and Barbie cars and swimming pools, none of which seem to hold children’s attention for more than a couple of hours, it makes me wonder. I know I had endless hours of entertainment with the creative process of dressing up my mannequin doll.  It makes me wonder. Was I really so deprived in comparison, with my one Barbie and her homemade clothes in Sixties Egypt? 

Excited about my new podcast interview and reading “Post 9/11 in the Cul-de-sac.”

The September 15, 2022 episode of the new podcast “27 Views of Chapel Hill” features an interview with me and readings from my short story, Muslims in the Cul-de-sac, which originally was published in the collection Love is Like Water and was republished in the anthology 27 Views of Chapel Hill. 

On Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify and here: http://www.enopublishers.org/27-views

Remembering Michael Malone

 Remembering Michael Malone: in spite, or perhaps because, of his acclaimed success as a novelist and screenwriter, he was the easiest and least ego-invested of writers to edit, as I can testify as the editor for his essays in both Mothers and Strangers and the South Writ Large Anthology. As I quoted in the Acknowledgments to Mothers and Strangers, Michael called me a “horse whisperer for writers,” but that was just typical of his generosity; no one was less in need of a whisperer than Michael Malone. He shone equally as a reader. Here he is reading from his essay in the book, nearly a year ago, on September 20, 2021.

Our new issue of South Writ Large Magazine with Jill McCorkle

 I’m especially proud of our newest issue of South Writ Large Magazine, of which I am one of four editor/founders. It features, among other articles, one I curated: the synergy of an exceptional essay by Jill McCorkle and splendid photographs by Tom Rankin.

The Russian Soul, Then and Now

 With Russia and the Ukraine in the news, and renewed discussion around Russian identity, the Russian soul, and the history of the region, who better to turn to than Russian authors themselves from Turgenev to Makine? But first let me posit that my own relationship with Russian authors is a complex one. I was introduced to the classics by an uncle who gave me a few books form his library that he thought age appropriate—I must have been around ten. I remember especially a beautifully illustrated book of folklore called The Malachite Maid, and also Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. My uncle may have found a connection with Pushkin, also a member of a landowning family in a period of turmoil. 

When I was reading these classics, however, was in the sixties, the decade of Nasser’s pro-Soviet years, and I disassociated the Russians in the books from the real live Russians who roamed the streets of Cairo, representating as they did the “Socialist” system in the name of which my family had been stripped of its estates and possessions. But my own bias apart, in general they were not liked by Egyptians of all classes. I remember one afternoon coming upon our maid standing behind the window watching a young Russian across the street sitting on his balcony under the broiling summer sun, stripped to the waist, his skin strawberry-red and peeling, sweating and fanning himself with a newspaper.

“Doesn’t he have enough sense to get out of the sun at midday?” She shook her head. “Someone should warn him. He’s some mother’s son, after all, even if he’s Russian.” Then she sighed and drew the shutters closed. No one regretted the Russians when Sadat booted them unceremoniously out in the early seventies. 

Later I read Turgenev and Chekhov, but only dipped in and out of Tolstoy. I have yet to finish War and Peace.

Now though, rereading Turgenev, I am struck by turns of expression that did not arrest my thought before. For instance, a landowner’s estate was not expressed in terms of acreage, but by the number of “souls” he owned, that is serfs. One book I found invaluable in putting Russian literature of the 19th century in context is Amanda Brickell Bellows’s American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post Emancipation Imagination. She highlights the progressive landlords like Turgenev, but also the apologists for serfdom, as evidenced in the fictional and artistic representations of the period. As she pointed out to me—Amanda is a friend and fellow editor—when I mentioned the reference to “souls”, in the American context the word “souls” could not have been used for enslaved people as their possession of souls was controversial. Truly fascinating. 

 

Variety is the Spice of Reading

 Variety is the spice of reading: always keep several books going at once, depending on one’s mood. Two authored by friends: Maureen Quilligan’s history of Renaissance queens and Redge Hanes’s novel of human trafficking. Turgenev, because a classic is always worth revisiting. And a contemporary French novelist, Nelly Alard, because variety…