White Life Research Articles

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness by Patricia Moran

Reviewed by: Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness by Patricia Moran Lizzie Hutton (bio) Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness Patricia Moran Edinburgh UP, 2018, 289 pp. ISBN 9781474418218, $105.00 hardcover. The undeniably autobiographical fiction of British author Antonia White—a quartet of novels and a slender, fiery short story collection—makes a linked set of female Künstlerromans that are grievously underappreciated. Singular for their stylistic control and psychological incision, they delineate a young woman's faltering search for grace in a rigidly conventional middle-class world—or should I say, a devastatingly conventional middle-class world. White's work takes place in London and its outskirts in the 1910s and 20s, in which its heroine's labor of forging a genuine sense of self is continuously confounded by forces beyond her control. Yet this is not art of explicit protest or critique. Like the work of her contemporary Elizabeth Bowen, who was an admirer, White's novels are political without naming their politics as such, so thoroughly does their heroine seem to have internalized the power structures and social expectations against which she struggles. White's is literature tense with the exertions of working to articulate one's own truth in a world that cannot quite accommodate or recognize that truth as such. In contrast to her carefully crafted works of fiction, White left behind rafts of often fervid correspondences and journals, which were posthumously published in 1992, as edited by White's daughter Susan Chitty. It should be noted that in 1985 Chitty also published a memoir of life with her mother, a book whose tell-all glee—for this reader at least—casts some doubt on its usefulness as a reliable guide to White's life and work. Many critics have found the temptations of this biographical material too great to resist. Faced with this archive's abundance of suggestive detail—intimations of incest and rape, accounts of mental breakdowns and forced institutionalizations, records of her many failed marriages, incessant writer's block, and years of psychoanalytic treatment—scholars have come to focus much of their [End Page 504] analytical energies on the intricacies of White's messy life, instead of on the fictionalized life story White still managed to wrest from the apparent turmoil of her day-to-day. In many ways, this has done more to cement White's reputation as a train wreck of a struggling female writer than it has to illuminate her specific contributions as an author. From the title alone, Patricia Moran's new study of Antonia White appears to follow this critical pattern exactly. Moran persuasively takes issue with White's real-life diagnosis as a schizophrenic, only to retrospectively replace it with another diagnosis—bipolar disorder—a disease through which, Moran argues, White's life and thus her work might more accurately and fruitfully be read. In this, Moran hews to the well-established habits of biographical-psychoanalytic criticism, for which White's life, to be sure, offers an especially graphic case study. Moran uses both White's earlier misdiagnosis and this new diagnosis as a crib sheet for explaining the author's personal struggles, especially her difficulties coming into her own as an author. She compares White's disordered life to the (purportedly) more stable careers of Virginia Woolf and H. D., those fellow female modernists who suffered too from severe psychiatric disorders—but who, by Moran's telling at least, were fortunate to have a better understanding of and relative control over their own diseases. Through this lens of pathology, Moran also explicates some of the knottier nuances of White's fiction—reading, for example, White's religiosity (she was a Catholic convert twice over), as well as her emotional entanglements with her domineering father, as symptoms of her struggles with mental illness. From her diaries and letters, White appears to have been debilitatingly insecure, paralyzed in her artistic ambitions by near-constant waves of guilt and shame. She burned through affairs and marriages and bungled her maternal duties, and she chastised herself endlessly for these perceived failures. For Moran, manic depression offers an explanation for these erratic emotions and behaviors also described in her...

White and Friend

White and Friend Ron Pretty (bio) I am writing in the front room of Murrays Cottage, where Donald Friend made his home for two years, until he left for Europe in March 1949. He visited again from time to time in later years. His friend Donald Murray remained in the cottage until his death in 1988, for Russell Drysdale and Friend had combined to purchase the cottage for him. Friend's stays in Hill End, and the extended stays by artist friends such as Russell Drysdale and Margaret Olley, transformed the almost deserted exgoldmining town into the artists' colony it remains to this day. According to the local shopkeeper, the population of the town today is 117. In 1872, at the height of the gold rush, the population was anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000, depending on whom you believe. Not much is left today of the extensive gardens that Friend and Murray planted and tended; the kangaroos and wallabies have seen to that. Even a wild pig has been rooting around in the backyard. The white goods and fittings have been modernized, but otherwise the cottage is very much as Friend left it: a modified nineteenth-century wattle and daub cottage. I am here to look for parallels between Patrick White's theories of art and Donald Friend's ideas and practice, as well as to write some ekphrastic poetry based on Friend's work. Years ago, I got so involved in White's semiautobiographical novel The Vivisector that I determined to write my MA thesis on it, despite my supervisor Leonie Kramer's opposition to the idea. She, of course, was of A. D. Hope's persuasion about White's "pretentious verbal sludge," but she didn't try to stop me. White's theory of art was one of the things that interested me. Was it a purely writerly concern, I wondered, or would a painter who had (at least superficially) some similarities, be likely to subscribe to similar theories? There are some interesting parallels between the painter and the writer: They lived at almost exactly the same time: White was born in 1912, Friend in 1915. Both died in 1989. Both escaped wealthy grazier backgrounds. White became increasingly estranged from his mother, Friend from his father (he idealized his mother as a child but became estranged from her later). Neither had any ambition to follow the grazier's life, though in both cases the properties continued to give them financial backing for their art. In spite of such assistance, both became increasingly irritated by the demands of their families. They were both romantics, both in their art and, especially in Friend's case, in their lives. [End Page 137] Both were gay, though Friend was more promiscuous, at one stage admitting to more than 1,000 lovers. White also had a number of lovers (though fewer than Friend) before Manoly Lascaris. Both found love, and relief from Australian mores, in exotic locations: Torres Strait, Sri Lanka, and Bali for Friend; Greece for White. Friend left Australia regularly to escape whenever he tired of his life. He was steeped in admiration for exotic cultures, though eventually they started to pall. Once White returned after the war, he stayed in Australia, but fulminated against Australian culture from the inside. "In Australia," he wrote, "the mind is the least of values."1 For twenty years, White was very close to Sidney Nolan, though the friendship soured after Cynthia Nolan's suicide and Sydney's rapid remarriage. That was paralleled by Friend's close friendship with Russell Drysdale, which also cooled somewhat after 1965, when, after the suicide of his first wife Bon, Drysdale married Maisie Newbold, whom Friend did not much like. But while they lasted, those friendships, White with Nolan, Friend with Drysdale, had a considerable impact on both their lives and their approaches to their art. Overall, though, Friend's relationships are much more important in his art than are White's. Lascaris is the steady center of White's life, but he is not central to his art the way Friend's lover/subjects are. We could perhaps also add that, for both of them, there...

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

The O'Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater

PHA 2014 Conference Poster Session

PHA 2014 Conference Poster Session

Exporting perilous Pauline: Pearl White and serial film craze

Exceptionally popular during their time, the spectacular American action film serials of the 1910s featured exciting stunts, film tricks, and effects set against the background of modern technology, often starring resourceful female heroines who displayed traditionally male qualities such as endurance, strength, and authority. The most renowned of these queens was Pearl White, whose career as the adventurous character Pauline developed during a transitional phase in the medium's evolving production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. In this volume, an international group of scholars explores how American serials starring Pearl White and other female stars affected the emerging cinemas in the United States and abroad. Contributors investigate the serial genre and its narrative patterns, marketing, cultural reception, and historiographic importance, with essays on Pearl White's life on and off the screen as well as the queen genre in Western and Eastern Europe, India, and China.Contributors are Weihong Bao, Rudmer Canjels, Marina Dahlquist, Monica Dall'Asta, Kevin B. Johnson, Christina Petersen, and Rosie Thomas.

The Story of Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic (review)

Reviewed by: The Story of Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic Miriam Janechek (bio) The Story of Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic. By Michael Sims. New York: Walker, 2011. Michael Sims's The Story of Charlotte's Web offers an intimate account of the life of one of the most revered American writers. He artfully navigates the creative waters between factual account and inviting story, and skillfully accomplishes both. Sims traces the life of Elwyn Brooks White (Andy, as he was known as an adult) from his childhood in the quiet town of Mount Vernon, New York, through his college years at Cornell University, to finding his way as a writer in New York City. The book is a satisfying read, in large part because Sims never loses the rhetorical thread established in his subtitle, E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic. From the opening pages to the end of Andy's life, Sims uses biographical evidence to demonstrate the author's lifelong love of animals, particularly spiders; the evidence builds an artfully told story of how E. B. White's Charlotte is the result of a life spent watching and documenting the animals of his world. It is clear in every chapter, and therefore in every moment of White's life, that the quiet and reserved man loved both nature and writing, combining the two passions in his canonical children's stories, of which Charlotte's Web stands at the forefront. Part one of Sims's project concentrates on White's childhood adventures in New York, and his yearly family trips to the serene landscape of Maine. And as E. B.'s biography unfolds, so do the beginnings of his children's story. The opening paragraph of Sims's book is reminiscent of a well-known Charlotte's Web scene: "The coachman said the eggs would never hatch. They were infertile, he insisted, as he tossed them onto the manure pile outside the stable" (1). Just as Fern watches Templeton scurry away with the goose's rotten egg, so Elwyn's story begins with him watching the animal world around him; and, when the manure-pile eggs do hatch, Sims channels the excitement [End Page 505] the young child felt watching the impossible. Young White's life included far more than animals and nature, and Sims takes his readers through that childhood full of family, travel, and writing. White, who was an unusually reserved child, exhibited his writing skills at an early age with a poem inspired by an animal friend, published in a lady's magazine. Sims takes great care to establish Andy not just as a nature enthusiast turned writer, but also as a participant in the American literary world, starting from his youth. He describes White's rich reading history, which included nature books and literary magazines. Sims's description of E. B.'s formative reading habits works well for his overarching narrative because it connects directly to White's adult life, and in part two it is clear how invested his career was in American magazines. Andy's tenure at The New Yorker begins almost as early as the magazine itself, as does his relationship with his wife, New Yorker editor Katharine Angell. Sims never strays far from the topic of nature, because White never did; he consistently included animals in his writing, even though (or particularly because) he was surrounded by the city. Sims juxtaposes the writer's eye trained on the sparrows, flowers, and parks with the bustling metropolis, and the contrast makes clear Andy's longing for a life surrounded by nature. Part three begins with White happily married and situated on a farm in upstate New York. Sims's description of the farm in Allen Cove evokes feelings of quiet and charm. It accommodated White's longing for animals, barns, and physical work. It was here, surrounded by piles of books to be edited and articles to be written, that Andy found enjoyment in his cows, lambs, chickens...

“Fixin’ to Die Blues”: The Last Months of Bukka White With an afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A faint odor of bedpan greeted me as I entered room in rehabilitation unit of Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts. In bed lay stocky figure of Booker T. Washington White, clad in a white hospital smock. The upper half of hospital bed had been raised so that Bukka (as Vocalion record label had dubbed him in 1937) could sit. His wide torso looked even wider in smock--not wiry sort of blues icon I had in mind when I called his doctor's office to ask if he was well enough to have a visitor. White had suffered a stroke a month before while on a flight from Memphis to Boston, where he was scheduled to play a week-long engagement at a small concert club thirty miles north of city. After spending eight days in intensive care unit, he had been transferred to rehabilitation unit on Sunday, July 4. By time I visited him on Thursday afternoon, July 29--the day before he was to leave hospital and fly home to Memphis--I was told that he had regained enough strength in his right hand to be able to play some guitar while sitting up in bed. In July 1976 I knew almost nothing about Bukka White other than that he was an old-time blues musician. I was lifestyle editor of a local paper who had been writing about music, mostly rock, for seven years. I owed what little I knew of Mississippi Delta blues to Robert Johnson album owned by college friends, and I had heard Skip James in person. I thought White must be like them. As I introduced myself, I could tell almost immediately that he was not interested in talking to me that day. In hindsight, this was more than understandable: I was not only a complete stranger, but a reporter seeking an interview--and most emphatically not a medical professional in a position to help him leave hospital, which was his overriding goal. As hospital publicist had told me, wants simply to go home. White had compelling personal reasons to return to Memphis. He had traveled to Boston with a tragic loss on his mind: only ten days before, daughter of his longtime domestic partner had been murdered almost outside his door. Presilla was one of three children of Leola Morris, woman with whom White had lived for years in Memphis, and the night she died she was walking in alley almost to [White]'s house when her boyfriend shot and killed her. [white] and Leola heard shots and ran out to discover her already dead. (1) Although I had spoken with his doctor's office, I cannot recall if White had received advance notice of my visit. In those days my journalistic curiosity was greater than my sensitivity. I thought of White as a newsworthy musician whose performance I had planned to cover had he not suffered stroke. As a journalist, I had a reporter's urge to document his presence north of Boston in a story for my newspaper. On a personal level, I did not want to miss such an opportunity to learn first-hand about nature and history of blues. For several minutes we negotiated about whether he would allow me to interview him without being paid. He hinted that he was accustomed to receiving money for an interview. In 1976, during an era when reporters were full of ethical self-awareness following Watergate scandal, I avoided responding directly to his suggestion. Instead, I gave reasons why my newspaper--a 30,000-circulation daily--was unable to pay him. My persistence prevailed. He at last agreed to interview, and I set up my small tape recorder on table by his bed. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over next forty-five minutes White shared a remarkable account of actual life of a blues musician--not romantic conception of that life that many in music, film, and print media have portrayed before and since. The first twenty-five minutes of tape consist of an interview about White's life and music; next twenty minutes capture a personal discussion between musician and a medical social worker about medical care (or lack of it) that would be available to him when he returned to Memphis. …

A Southern Sublimation: Lynching Film and the Reconstruction of American Memory

A Southern Sublimation:Lynching Film and the Reconstruction of American Memory Robert Jackson (bio) History, Genre, Projection "As I am finishing this book," National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretary Walter White writes in How Far the Promised Land? (1955), "something seems to have been left out. It would have been impossible a quarter century ago, or, for that matter, a decade ago, to write a book on the status of the American Negro without devoting at least one voluminous chapter to lynching" (229). Seemingly ubiquitous in American culture during the early decades of the twentieth century, lynching was on the wane by the 1950s. This was cause for relief, of course, but it also gave White pause to remember the need to remember. Even though lynching practices, whether in spectacles that attracted thousands and generated carnival settings or in isolated night-riding episodes with only a few participants, had been an open secret in American life for decades, they were sparsely documented in official records and public discourse. The number of lynchings between 1880 and 1930, a period in which lynching became popular in the American South and overwhelmingly targeted black men, has never been known with accuracy. The local white press in places where lynchings occurred was notoriously vague and unreliable on the subject. [End Page 102] Criminal prosecution was nonexistent. Federal anti-lynching legislation, proposed regularly since 1919, was invariably filibustered to death. Amid this vacuum of leadership it had fallen to the much smaller black press and to civil rights organizations like the NAACP to attempt any sort of record-keeping, as White did in his earlier book-length treatment of the subject, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). "There have been lynched in the United States 4951 persons in the forty-six years between 1882 and extending through 1927," begins his sobering, statistics-laden appendix, a rare sort of document for its time (227). By 1955, though, at the end of Walter White's life and career, with the incendiary presence and imagery of lynching largely disappeared from the immediate experience of so many Americans, black and white alike, lynching had begun a new phase of contestation in the realm of memory. The death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi, powerfully initiated this phase. Helpless to prevent her son's death or the acquittal of his killers, Till's mother launched a campaign for the mass memorialization of her son's lynching. Her decisions to display his mutilated and swollen body (found several days after the killing in the Tallahatchie River) in an open casket, and to publish photographs of his body in Jet magazine, contributed to Till's becoming perhaps the most famous lynching victim in an American history more notable for the anonymity and invisibility of those victims. The episode as a whole came soon before the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and served as one of the key events in the nascent civil rights movement. Because the official record was so indifferent to lynching's presence and influence, mass culture became an increasingly important site where lynching was represented and contested, often in innovative and surprising ways. Consequently, much of the recent scholarship that has revisited lynching in an effort to understand its historical and psychological impact has benefited from the wide-ranging, if uneven, documentation of the phenomenon in mass cultural artifacts and representations.1 James Allen's haunting photography exhibit and book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), for example, is composed largely of lithographic and photographic postcards of the dead, whose photographers, in Allen's words, "compulsively composed silvery tableaux (natures mortes) positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds on the wing." Allen accounts not just for the motives of the makers of these images, but also for those of their disseminators and collectors. "Lust propelled the commercial reproduction and distribution of the images, [End Page 103] facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary" (204–205). Yet even as Allen impugns the crass and deadly impulses that created and kept such...

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP

White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP AUTHOR: KENNETH ROBERT JANKEN NEW YORK: THE NEW PRESS, 2003 PRICE: $29.95 ISBN: 1-56584-3 The life and times of Walter White (1893-1955) is a very important study as it intersects directly with the history of segregation and racialized relations in the US. Fortunately, Kenneth Janken has captured much of White's background, racial ambivalence, and his involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This book is a timely and first biographical portrait of this controversial "race" man. Why should Walter White be a fascinating African American personality to cover in a biography? The answer to this question can be found in his phenotype. Walter White was in the average person's eyes: White. His blond hair and blue eyes only testified more to the assumption that he could never be of African heritage. However, within the context of the North American social order, Walter White was indeed a man of African heritage. He came out of a southern middle class, "mixed" heritage Atlanta, background that had ingrained the "one drop rule" and placed by law anyone with the smallest amount of African blood into the African American cultural group. Born just three years before the Plessey versus Ferguson Supreme Court decision that upheld social segregation between Blacks and Whites, as long as facilities were "equal" (which was hardly ever the case), Walter White's physical appearance was certainly ambiguous, but his mind and his heart remained unequivocally African American. Moreover, even though Walter White's parents and siblings may well have been able to "pass" into the dominant White society, Janken writes: "There is no suggestion that the White family tried to pass; indeed, the family was enmeshed in the city's principal African American institutions" (p. 15). The fact that White spent the majority of his adult years, nearly forty years (1918-1955), working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) indicates his staying power in the cause for racial social justice. Janken gives a good account of his work and suggests that he has not been given enough recognition in the contemporary history books relating to African Americans (pp. 368-369). It is difficult to disagree with the perspective that still too little is known about Walter White's contribution to the African American struggle, yet he is not alone. Many significant contributors in the fight for civil and human rights have not been given enough recognition. In terms of Walter White's peers, one could mention Ella Baker as a perfect example of a person who has not received significant acknowledgement for her work in the struggle for civil rights. In point of fact, Janken provides a rare photograph of Ella Baker in the center pages of his book, along with a collection of other key personalities connected to Walter White's life and legacy. Arguably, Walter White had his finest hour for the NAACP as an undercover investigator following the contours of lynching and race riots. …

Leslie A. White: evolution and revolution in anthropology

Few figures in modern American anthropology have been more controversial or influential than Leslie A. White (1900-1975). Between the early 1940s and mid-1960s, White's work was widely discussed, and he was among the most frequently cited American anthropologists in the world. After writing several respected ethnographic works about the Pueblo Indians, White broke ranks with anthropologists who favored such cultural histories and began to radically rethink American anthropology. As his political interest in socialism grew, he revitalized the concept of cultural evolution and reinvigorated comparative studies of culture. His strident political beliefs, radical interpretive vision, and often combative nature earned him enemies inside and outside the academy. His trip to the Soviet Union and participation in the Socialist Labor Party brought him to the attention of the FBI during the height of the Cold War, and near-legendary scholarly and political conflicts surrounded him at the University of Michigan. Placing White's life and work in historic context, William J. Peace documents the broad sociopolitical influences that affected his career, including many aspects of White's life that are largely unknown, such as the reasons he became antagonistic toward Boasian anthropology. In so doing, Peace sheds light on what made White such a colourful figure as well as his enduring contributions to modern anthropology. William J. Peace is an independent scholar and lives in Katonah, New York. He has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography

Before his death from leukemia at the age of 36, Allon White had become known as one of the most important literary and cultural critics of his generation. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing represents a summation of the work which, as Stuart Hall explains in an extended introduction, transformed cultural studies in the 1980s. Allon White's central concerns - with writing, carnival, the body, hysteria, and memory - recur with differing inflections in the pieces collected here. Wide-ranging in scope, the essays move with fluency from an analysis of the work of Julia Kristeva to a discussion of language and location in Dicken's Bleak House, and from a Thomas Pynchon short story to the 'seriousness' of academic language. Other pieces deal with Gilles Deleuze and Francis Bacon, and with Mikhail Bakhtin, a major influence on Allon White's thinking. Included too is the poignant autobiographical fragment, 'Too Close to the Bone'. An Afterword by Jacqueline Rose deals with the links between theory and autobiography and between the academic and personal writings in the book. A memorial to Allon White's life and work, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing will be essential reading for all working within literary and cultural studies.