The Sunday Table: The Well of Loneliness

You never know what the Sunday Table is going to turn up. This time, it's a surprising edition -- bound in leather & marbled paper binding -- of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. In Danish. (With a typo on the spine.)

Have I read The Well of Loneliness? I have not. I started trudging through it many years ago, but never got to the end. Will I ever read it in Danish? I would say no.

But it gives me an excuse to tell a story, maybe apocryphal, maybe not, of how Loneliness fared in Hollywood. The book was a hot property in 1928, when it was published. It was banned in Boston, so there was much scandal around it, and many headlines, and no publicity is bad publicity, as Oprah herself would admit. Thus Radclyffe Hall's painful story of a woman who loves a woman came to the attention of Samuel Goldwyn, who had been recently forced out of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and had hung out a shingle of his own. (A shingle that would later produce Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, and The Best Years of Our Lives.)

From what I understand, Goldwyn wanted to snap up the rights to Hall's book before any of his competitors could get to it.

"Mr. Goldwyn," says his factotum, "it's a real sad story."
"That's okay," says Goldwyn.
"Sir," says his flunky, "it was banned in Boston."
"I don't care," says Goldwyn.
"Sam," says his flack, "it's about a lesbian."
"So," says Goldwyn, "in the movie, we'll make her American."

If only he had made her a Dane!

Poetry Friday: Billy Collins

Here's a neat little commentary on one of the pillars of our literary canon by the inestimable Billy Collins. Reprinted, shamefacedly, without permission from his collection Ballistics, published by Random House last year.

That roast beef has stopped me more than once, too, though I imagine the middle piggy in front of a bloody joint (as the British say), not a deli sandwich. It surely can't be the only nursery rhyme that stops us in our tracks, can it? Who's looked at the Opie collections lately?

My favorite line here is the one about the smug self-satisfaction of Jack Horner. We want to be Little Jack and we want to smack him in the face at the same time. Or maybe that's just Billy and me.

This Little Piggy Went to Market


is the usual thing to say when you begin
pulling on the toes of a small child,
and I have never had a problem with that.
I could easily picture the piggy with his basket
and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.

What always stopped me in my tracks was
the middle toe -- this little piggy ate roast beef.
I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich
with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,
but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.

I am probably being too literal-minded here --
I am even wondering why it's called "horseradish."
I should just go along with the beautiful nonsense
of the nursery, float downstream on its waters.
After all, Little Jack Horner speaks to me deeply.

I don't want to be the one to ruin the children's party
by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots
or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.
By the way, I am completely down with going
"Wee wee wee" all the way home,
having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.


-- Billy Collins, 2008