A Certain Slant of Light

Confession time: I couldn’t resist Surprised by Oxford because the premise promised lots and lots of beautiful shots of Oxford, and in this respect the movie absolutely did not disappoint. In the post-screening Q&A (attended by the director, two producers, the lead actress, and the woman who wrote the memoir on which the film is based), one of the producers commented, “It’s hard to get an ugly shot of Oxford,” and he was extremely right.

Otherwise… well, look, I am simultaneously the perfect audience and the worst possible audience for this film. I love Oxford, I love the Inklings, I love C. S. Lewis in particular, and yes, the title is 100% a reference to Lewis’s memoir Surprised by Joy, and yes there is a pivotal moment in this film where Caro’s love interest/intellectual antagonist Kent takes her to a bookstore to dramatically introduce her to that book.

But I’m also not a Christian, and while it’s clearly possible to write a conversion narrative that appeals to non-believers (see above my love for C. S. Lewis, who is continually writing conversion narratives), for me this movie doesn’t quite manage it. The love story and the conversion narrative are too intertwined. Is Caro converting because she loves God, or because she loves Kent? Unclear.

Or, conversely, perhaps the love story and the conversion narrative are not intertwined enough. If Caro and Kent spent less time clanging against Caro’s emotional unavailability and more time having meaty intellectual arguments about the existence of God, there would have been more substance to both their relationship and Caro’s conversion.

Having said all of this - I do admire the movie’s ambition. It’s trying to do so many things, and it might have worked better if it had pulled back and tried to do less, but there is something to be said for being an ambitious mess rather than a small, safe, forgettable success.

Due to the exigencies of traveling I have not had a chance to post this until now. I have been doing much reading! Mostly Angela Brazil.Last time I was in England, I read great works of literature. I feel that the switch from Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte to Angela Brazil may indicate a downward slide in my intellectual development.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, which is actually a reread, which I usually don’t count for this meme because I usually don’t reread books straight through - I flip through till I land on a likely page and then read for a bit, then flip about some more.

But I reread this one from beginning to end and very much enjoyed it. My favorite chapter remains the one where Carpenter recreates an Inklings meeting - sadly there are no minutes from the Inklings meetings (although perhaps it’s just as well; it would have altered the character of the Inklings awfully to be so formal about it), but Carpenter builds on the extant records and on the participants’ numerous writings to create a remarkably seamless whole. If someday someone decided to write an entire book of Inklings meetings - someone, I mean, as steeped in the voices of the participants of Carpenter - I would probably read it till my copy fell apart.

I also read Angela Brazil’s The Youngest Girl in the Fifth and The Jolliest Term on Record, which I quite enjoyed - particularly The Jolliest Term on Record, which is about a pair of artistic sisters (Gwethyn and Katrine, and I also love Brazil’s penchant for slightly oddball names) who go to boarding school because their parents are headed to Australia for a conference. Gwethyn eventually befriends a cranky goose girl named Githa (these names!), who has a secret and of course angst-filled past involving the vast decaying house out in the woods.

There is much painting! Also tennis! And nature descriptions! Also World War I is going on somewhere out there (the book was published in 1915), but although the girls are occasionally afflicted with bursts of patriotism, mostly it seems very distant.

Both books have blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of racism, but it could easily be excised - nothing like as pervasive or thematically important as in Gene Stratton Porter’s Her Father’s Daughter.

What I’m Reading Now

Angela Brazil’s The Madcap of the School, which I am enjoying markedly less than the first two Brazils. It opens with one of those unpleasant sequences where the heroine and her chums decide they need to break in the new girls, who they have decided are far too full of themselves. In this book, they humiliate one young lady in front of the entire school - which is especially awful because she was so grateful for their advice: “Thanks awfully!...I’d have done the same by you if you’d been a new girl at The Poplars,” the new girl gushes.

But does our heroine feel a prick of conscience at this appeal to her empathy? “The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school,” she seethes. Empathy shmempathy!

At this point I wanted nothing more than for heroine to get a kick in the pants, and sharpish, but of course the narrative is on her side.

This is a transatlantic fault. Jean Webster’s American novel Just Patty opens with a similar sequence, except it’s followed up by an extended sequence wherein the headmistress opines that Patty’s victim is terribly priggish, totally deserved to be picked on, and doubtless will be improved by having cocoa dumped on her bed. At this point steam boiled out of my ears, because YOU ARE THE HEADMISTRESS, YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO STAND FOR ORDER AND FAIRNESS, WHY ARE YOU SIDING WITH THE BULLIES?

(The Molly Brown college series, written about the same time, has a send-up of these scenes: Molly’s chums throw a mocking dinner party to discipline a new student who walks around wearing her high school medals and bragging about her high school achievements. The young lady, mercifully, doesn’t notice they’re mocking her and continues on her irritating way. But eventually, unhappy at her inability to make friends, the new girl asks Molly for advice and Molly kindly explains that perhaps she ought not to brag quite so much.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I think I should branch out from Angela Brazil. I’m thinking either Elizabeth von Armin’s The Enchanted April or Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Has anyone read either?

The highlight of the trip to Oxford: lunch at the Eagle and Child, the pub where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and the rest of the Inklings hung out in the forties and fifties. In the room where they met. I sat in the corner by the fireplace and drank mulled cider and tried to write. As I was in a state of nervous exultation it did not work too well, but I got this:

"Griffin, Griffin, where are your wings?" said the cat.
"Well I can't very well wear wings after Labor Day," Griffin said.

One hopes there's more to that.

Otherwise I did a lot of walking. Aside from the Steampunk exhibit (!!!!!!!!) at the Museum of the History of Science I couldn't settle down enough to go to any exhibits of anything. But I did walk across the Christ Church Meadow, where Lewis Carroll used to walk with Alice Liddell; it was early in the morning, and the frost had not yet quite burned off.



It was a nice trip, and I enjoyed myself; but Oxford is a cold city. The colleges are almost all closed to the public, and it makes the place feel hard and mean.

I did run across one that was open, though: Hertford College, which was having a cake sale, with the college choir singing Christmas carols to attract attention. They sang beautifully, and I stood a long time in the courtyard to listen.