Mysteries and ambiguities
By Glenda Robinson January 30, 2009 San Miguel de Allende

PEN Lecture Series
The Joys of Joyce
Austin Briggs
Tues, Feb 3, 6pm
Auditorio Miguel Malo, Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75
Donation 50 pesos

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is widely regarded as the best coming-of-age novel in the English language. It is so much a part of the culture that it has spawned countless offspring, including A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog…an Old Man…a Middle-Aged Cleaning Woman…a Chair…and a Porn Retailer (the last is an episode of the racy internet talk show Keith & the Girl, in which the host and his sidekick discuss the vagaries of buying sex toys).

Austin Briggs talks about Portrait in Tuesday’s lecture, the third in his series, “The Joys of Joyce.” If you caught either of the first two sold-out evenings, you know that Briggs never fails to captivate with his wit, warmth and passion for his favorite author. Briggs is a recently retired professor of English literature at Hamilton College and an recognized authority on James Joyce.

I talked recently with Briggs in his (now) full-time San Miguel home. 

Glenda Robinson: Tell me a bit about how you see Portrait. 

Austin Briggs: It is an archetypal story of the adolescent experience, told through the semi-autobiographical character of Stephen Dedalus. But Joyce skillfully avoids first novel “baring the soul” clichés by building an ironic distance between himself and Stephen. 

GR: How is it autobiographical, and how is it not? 

AB: Joyce, like Stephen, did attend the very exclusive Jesuit school depicted in the book, Clongowes Woods College, and was the “prize boy” everyone hoped would become a priest. And like Stephen, he started going to brothels at a very early age—possibly at 14. Joyce’s father was a drunken raconteur who managed to squander his fortune, like Stephen’s father in Portrait. On the other hand, Stephen stands timidly on the sidelines watching others play sports, while Joyce was athletic, a strong runner and swimmer, and a physically tough Irish kid. 

GR: How many times have you read Portrait? 

AB: Probably 20 times, but just a few hours ago I stumbled upon an interesting passage—and I’ll be damned if I know what it means. One of the things I love about Joyce is that reading his work is much more fun than a book where the only mystery to be solved is who committed the murder. I continue to uncover mysteries in his writing, even after 50 years of teaching him. 

GR: Did Portrait add any new words to the English language, in the way that Ulysses gave us “quark”? 

AB: Not exactly, but his early draft for the novel offered a new meaning for the word “epiphany” that has become common parlance. Because of the way Joyce employed it, now you hear, “I had an epiphany that this guy Bernie I invested with was up to no good....” That sort of thing. 

GR: You did post-doc work in film theory and criticism. What did you think of the Portrait movie?

AB: Not a very good movie, except for an incredible cameo by Sir John Gielgud as a priest. But as Truffaut once observed, bad books make good movies. It’s hard to make a good movie out of good book. If you know and love the book, you often dislike the movie. 

GR: People debate why Joyce named Stephen after the mythical Daedelus. Is he meant to be Daedelus the father, the skilled inventor, or Icarus the son of Daedelus, the self-destructive rebel? 

AB: The novel ends just as he sets forth on his new career, so we don’t know. I treasure the ambiguity that is one of Joyce’s hallmarks. My wife Bunny and I are still asking ourselves what we are going to be when we grow up—Daedelus or Icarus? We could have bought a condo on a golf course somewhere, but here we are in Mexico. Are we flying too close to the sun? For me, living with ambiguity and a feeling of risk is healthy. I don’t believe in being “well adjusted”—as if you are a watch that just has to be tinkered with and brought in line with the norm. 

GR: The last time we talked, you hinted that you might start teaching in San Miguel. Any further thoughts? 

AB: First we have to finish the house we’re building and then I have to start learning Spanish. But after that, maybe I’ll start a Joyce reading group. 

GR: I suspect that would be wildly popular.

AB: Maybe. But I have to warn you, it would require a pretty big commitment. Kind of like when Jesus told his followers to leave behind their families and sell all their worldly goods. We Joyceans are fanatics! 

Funds raised by this lecture support PEN International and help provide scholarships for deserving local students. For more information or advance tickets, contact lucina.kathmann@gmail.com  or Pat Hirschl at 154-9478. 

Biographies modern and historic
By Kimberly Kinser

Authors’ Sala Reading
John Virtue & Mamie Spiegel
Fri, Feb 6, 5–7pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
50 pesos

The Special Series present two biographers with extraordinary stories. John Virtue has written several biographies of expatriate San Miguel residents, among them Canadian artist Fred Taylor. Mamie Spiegel will read to us from her biography in process on the life of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century poet and nun whose countenance is found on the 20-peso note.

Virtue is director of the International Media Center at Florida International University in Miami, as well as being an author of books dealing, in one way or another, with Mexico. Besides Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows, he has written the Model American Abroad, a biography of Stirling Dickinson; Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel; and South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball Toward Racial Integration, which won the 2008 Robert Peterson award. 

Fred Taylor

Brother in the Shadows is about artist Fred Taylor, who fled to San Miguel de Allende in 1958 to escape the ever-increasing shadow of his famous brother, Edward Plunkett Taylor. Known as E.P., he was Canada’s best-known businessman from the forties through the sixties. He was as famous then in Canada as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are now in the US.

The more than 100 companies he controlled eventually extended to Mexico, so Taylor wasn’t able to escape the shadow after all. When E.P. visited his Mexican holdings, he would invite Taylor along. Walking together in Mexico, Taylor was said to have kept a pace behind out of deference to his brother’s importance.

The relationship between the two brothers started in the cradle. After E.P.’s birth, his parents wanted the second child to be a girl. Instead, Taylor was born, the only sibling E.P. was to have. Taylor’s mother later told him that she and her husband were disappointed when he was born. This confirmed to Taylor that E.P. was the favored son.

Taylor graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a degree in architecture. His grades were outstanding enough to bring him a scholarship to study with the great French architect Le Corbusier. But Taylor’s interest had always been in art. He chose architecture because he knew architects had to draw. 

So he abandoned architecture for art, first as an etcher and then as a painter. His parents were disappointed again. His father had invited E.P. to join him in his security company when he was just 22, further proof to Taylor that he would forever be No. 2 son in his parents’ eyes.

Taylor became well known himself in Canada during World War II for a series of paintings he did of war plants. He had wanted to be an official Canadian war artist in one of the armed services, but a skiing injury kept him out of the military. He considered himself a war artist on the home front, a self-designation that Canada’s War Museum eventually accepted. The museum has more of his wartime works than it does of any of the artists who served overseas. During the war, he sent some of his works to Leningrad as a gift in recognition of the Soviet city’s siege against German troops.

Taylor was a member of Canada’s Communist Party for a decade before it became apparent to his parents and brother. He was a guest of honor at the May Day Parade in Moscow in 1951. He stood within sight of Soviet leader Josef Stalin as the military hardware to be used against the West in any war rolled by. Upon his return to Canada, Taylor started giving pro-Communist speeches, forcing a rupture in relations with his family.

Taylor hadn’t become a Communist on his own, but rather through his first wife, who was also a first cousin. Miriam Magee came from a family that was as prominent as the Taylor family. Like so many intellectuals, Fred and Miriam were drawn to Communism because of the Spanish Civil War. They were studying art in London when the war broke out. 

Once back in Canada, they became good friends of Paul Robeson when the black singer visited Montreal to raise funds for the Republican cause in the civil war. Robeson wanted to sit for a portrait by Taylor, but a convenient time was never arranged. Taylor named the youngest of his two sons after Robeson.

Taylor broke with the Communist Party in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s atrocities at the twentieth congress in Moscow. A US Central Intelligence Agency report on the speech estimated that 16 million Soviet citizens had been “physically annihilated” by Stalin. 

After a divorce from his first wife, Taylor married American artist Nova Hecht, daughter of leftist American painter Zoltan Hecht. The house he designed and had built in San Miguel contained his and her studios. Both exhibited in Mexico and in Canada. One admirer of Nova’s works was Marilyn Monroe, who purchased a painting. Taylor committed suicide in San Miguel in 1987. 

Writer’s workshops help teens soar
By Sara Fasy

Writer Dianna Hutts Aston had an epiphany. One day, riding high in a hot air balloon above San Miguel, watching the patchwork of land below and the sky above, her perspective shifted. As she puts it, “I realized two things in the air that day: There are no real borders in this world. And there are no limits on your dreams, not a single one.” 

When her next balloon trip landed in a rural schoolyard, the children scrambled to help. They were full of questions about how the balloon stayed afloat. They wondered what it was like to soar so high above the town. Then they asked if they, too, could float in the sky one day. Dianna says, “I began to realize that within each hidden village and within every orphanage are children with the intelligence and desire to become great teachers, scientists, doctors, artists, presidents. But it takes the acknowledgment and encouragement of people outside of their villages to help them follow the road of their dreams.”

Thus began The Oz Project, which later led to The San Miguel Teen Writers Workshops. Dianna, a successful children’s book author (An Egg Is Quiet, When You Were Born), founded the nonprofit organization to give disadvantaged children and young adults experiences to ignite the imagination and open up the wider world. In a felicitous collaboration with Jody Feagan, the founder and director of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and San Miguel Workshops, a wonderful opportunity to fire up that imagination was conceived. 

On February 23–24, San Miguel Workshops and The Oz Project will offer local teens aged 14–18 a free opportunity to learn ways to express their ideas through the written word. “Our mission,” says Jody, “is to create a program that introduces teens to the world of writing and to offer instruction on ways for them to better their writing skills. We believe that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success and that great leaps in learning can be made when students have those skills.” 

The workshops will allow 30 Mexican teenagers from San Miguel schools and casas hogares to attend and will be taught by talented published authors. Those involved in the project include Dianna Hutts Aston, Betsy James (an award-winning author of YA (young adult) books) and Sue McKinney de Ortega, who has written about her bicultural family life in San Miguel. All workshops will be taught in Spanish and all supplies for the teens will be free. 

Each teacher has designed a unique approach to tap into students’ skills and interest. Betsy James’s group will be working in the genre of the graphic novel. Betsy comments, “Since words and images can be combined in any proportion, it’s a marvelously flexible genre. It can bridge the gap for students who are less skilled at writing, or who are just beginning to gain competence in a language; in multilingual classrooms, the written component can be translated while the visual component serves as a prompt. A graphic novel can be text-heavy or image-heavy—and besides, it’s just plain fun!” Part of the fun will be looking at examples of graphic novels and composing a large-scale collaborative demo. “We’ll talk about concepts like setting and character, story arc, rough draft, revision. We’ll wonder about how cinema influences graphic artists. We’ll be looking for ways to push the graphic novel in new directions.”

Sue McKinney de Ortega will bring her experience as a writer and mother to the table. To encourage her bilingual daughters, ages 12 and 14, to improve their English spelling skills, she helped them start a blog about their pony club. She wants to help local teens create their own blogs as a means to approach writing creatively and individually. “Skateboarding. Movies. Videos they are making with their friends. Their soccer team. I’ll encourage them to choose a theme.” 

After all that hard work, the workshop will conclude with a party and a drawing will be held to award three participants with new laptop computers. And to encourage the budding writers to connect with their readers, all works will be published in the writing gallery, at www.sanmiguelworkshops.com  or Dianna’s www.theozproject.org. Dianna will also be offering free hot air balloon rides to the participants in the upcoming balloon festival sponsored by The Oz Project. 

This project will also be funded in part by the San Miguel Literary Society, which will donate a percentage of each new or renewing membership. Jody adds, “We are still seeking donations. People can sponsor a teen to attend the workshops for just US$100. Partial sponsorships are also available.” 

What better way to invest in the future of San Miguel at the start of a new year than to provide a local teen with a potentially life-changing opportunity? 

For more information, email: Jody Feagan at jody@sanmiguelworkshops.com  or Dianna Hutts Aston at www.theozproject.org. 

  




 


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