Georgiana and Summer 1993
“Georgiana learned to treat life as if it were a series of rooms and as she entered and left each she closed doors behind her ..."
Oh hello
Everyone is saying that I need to get out more, that they’ve been trying to see me for months, and how awful is the __, and could I pass the mayonnaise, god it is good, have I been to that old French restaurant in west London, they do the best mayonnaise, and that the problem is clearly structural, and what about me though how is my writing, and my new perfume is gorgeous, reminds them of their Latvian holiday in 2007, or this one boy from Estonia who didn’t speak much but communication remember isn’t only verbal, and that they’ve been trying to see me for months, and here look do I know Carter, he is making footwear now designed on the aerodynamic and aesthetic principles of the Concorde.
I didn’t want you to think that I spent all this time alone. This was from last night’s dinner at my friend Cara’s. She loves to organise dinners in an aspirational salon kind of way. Politically, she tells her guests that she is opposed to the beautification of meals, the oh so 90s return of drizzles and powders and ingredients that add empty mystique. She considers that taste should always be the focus of our judgments on food, such that her meals are delicious, sloppy and totally disgusting looking. She has a semi viral Instagram account called vomit_princess_cooks. This time she made stew with potatoes. For dessert, we had apple crumble that wallowed in custard.
Dinner was lovely, it was, and I will go again, keep going more often. I’ve been playing the violin more and Cara would like me to play a composition at her next dinner. I’d rather just play Bach but it could be good for me to put myself out there, not that violin composition is something that I need to be putting myself out there with. Willow, at the dinner, between fourth and fifth portions of crumble—a fixation on the deliciousness of the crumble that I found horrifying and ultimately sad because it was, well, just crumble and custard—Willow told me that there’s something radical about loneliness, revolutionary in that it claws at and speaks to the broken synapse like connections of the contemporary city. They said that ultimately all we have is ourselves. That it shouldn’t be that way but it is that way so it is good that I’m enjoying the violin.
This week, I’m writing about two portraits on childhood and adolescence. The first is Georgiana by Maude Hutchins. Hutchins grew up in New York and, after becoming an orphan at a young age, lived with her grandmother in Long Island. She lived a well to do high society married life until 1948 when she left her husband—who became the president of the University of Chicago—and moved to Connecticut with her three kids. She didn’t remarry and got an amateur pilot license which she would use for cross country trips. All her novels—which are known for adopting the nouveau roman style in English—were published after her divorce. As well as Georgiana, this email is about Summer 1993 by Carla Simón, the first feature film by the Catalan filmmaker whose film Alcarràs won the golden bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In the summer of 1993, Simón moved to live with her uncle and aunt in north Catalonia after her parents both died of AIDS. That experience is the basis for this film.
Georgiana (1948) by Maude Hutchins
Georgiana is about losing sight of life by focussing stubbornly, know-it-all-y, on the world as metaphor; as images that repeat but rarely change. Georgiana follows a girl growing up: first from the perspective of a very involved narrator, then in a “long quote” from Georgiana herself, before returning again to the narrator. The story begins at her grandparents where, as an orphan, she lives, before moving to boarding school. Hutchins says that “[t]he story of a woman must of necessity and by definition be a love story”, adding, “at least the woman of whom I speak”.
Georgiana races along with a deft and steadfast commitment to the comma as the saviour of sense, offering pause, reflection, the addition of a description, at times a flourish like: “Valentina’s short speeches always had an untranslatable but definite appeal, physical”. Metaphors cascade and open up betraying the purity of the comparison, as if to echo the world of fracturing allusions that Georgiana lives in. The narrator says: “The difficulty in describing Georgiana however is that the feeling of loss when Georgiana went away, left you, said goodnight, was more like having your leg cut off, your glasses taken away, or a dream lobster changed into rose-quartz …” The writing feels like a kid playing with an infinite paper fortune teller at school, where questions and answers and new directions and futures unfold forever under each crease.
Like that game, Georgiana’s pace creates a blinding self awareness in which she continues to see people in her present as mere copies of others from her past. The arc of Georgiana centres I think on her coming to terms with this not being accurate. Initially, life is all symbols. The narrator nods that: “these little men will trouble her in the future differently incarnated but recognizable; frightening”. Georgiana “learned that every essential action was the same, really, with only a change of costume, and that gesture and thought, itself, was repeated ad infinitum in everything, everywhere, always; there are only a few stories; the difference descriptive”. Georgiana’s personal dissatisfaction stems in part, I think, from seeing life in this way: as a mimicry of some original story of her life. “My own eyes say nothing to me. “What is the matter,” I say out loud. “What is the matter,” I add impatiently.””
But in part 3, we see a shift, which, if not absolute, at least reflects a principled change in Georgiana. It is mistaken, Georgiana learns, to be like the artist “who thinks a face is a memory of face, that it is two eyes, a mouth, and a nose”. Instead, she begins to treat her life “as if it were a series of rooms and as she entered and left each she closed doors behind her, … gently, gratefully, sometimes absent-mindedly, already anticipating the next chamber”. While Hutchins’ novel does not attempt to present a clean coming of age story, Georgiana’s development is an awareness of the uniqueness of the present of her life. She positions herself as someone who isn’t simply repeating her life day after day but is instead encountering it newly with inevitably some knowledge of what has come before. In a particularly beautiful passage, the image of the face reappears. Having sex with Michael, a lover: “his eyes and mouth seemed to change places … The line between his closed lips seemed to be duplicated in pain across her chest”. Georgiana, in her desire for Michael, loses her understanding of his detail, his specificity, becoming “all wish, all verb, all being … like interwinding fraternal columns of a monastery”.
Returning, briefly and again to speed, I think I’m excited by Georgiana's pace because of what it demands of the reader (focus), because of the movement that it evokes, the sense of bluster and ephemeral impatience, like trying to get a word in quickly, while waiting in line, how it bottles something of the contemporary swirl and noise, and because it is in its commitment to spewing and pace, it maintains lightness and vividness. Now, to summer.
Summer 1993 (2017) by Carla Simón
Where Georgiana races, Summer 1993 slows down and focusses on one summer in the hazy catalan sun. Frida is in the countryside staying with her aunt, Marga, her uncle, Esteve, and their child, Anna. Frida’s parents have both passed away but the film focusses on the more recent death of her mother. She knows her mum has died (she keeps a shrine for her in which she leaves, e.g., cigarettes), but she doesn’t know how she died. There is a forest close to the house, and water to swim in, and a vege patch.
Frida struggles to fit herself into this new family. She becomes the problem child in which her moments of joy seem only at the expense of another family member’s health. One day she is swimming happily and Anna, younger and with a broken arm, attempts to follow. She falls in and has to be saved by her dad. The moment switches from tender to tragic as she is blamed by her new dad for trying to kill Anna.
Where Georgiana is too aware of the structure of her life, Frida seems lost in hers. She is unable to make sense of how she has ended up here in the dusty countryside with a new family that, albeit loving, is upset by and struggles with her intervention into their life. We can see, as viewers, the tell tale impacts of Frida’s loss: vying for her new family’s attention, pretending that she can’t tie her shoe laces in order to be parented, wetting the bed, competing with Anna. But for Frida, life is mysterious and treacherous and simply full of death. While doing homework, with Anna playing around her, she asks Marga about how her mum died. She asks: “How did my previous mum die?” With a beautiful stillness, she asks: “Why was I not there if I’m her daughter?” She asks: “She didn’t say anything about me?” She asks Marga whether she is also going to die of a virus. And then, the conversation is over, at least for now. She asks: “Can I decorate this?”
Love
Anne