Now, Voyager and Bette Davis

 

With April 5th the birthday of my favorite actress, it seems the perfect time to share the book that my favorite Bette Davis movie is taken from. 

Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty was published in 1941 and just a year later Warner Bros. released the movie. While not Davis's best critical success by any means, it is the movie I must stop and watch every time TCM plays it. 

 

 It's no surprise that while the movie is fabulous, the book is even better. The movie screenwriter was wise enough to include much of the actual dialogue from the book, including the Walt Whitman lines Prouty used on the title page:

The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

If ever someone needed to seek their untold want, it was Charlotte Vale, far away from her domineering mother. While I cannot imagine a better actress to have played the part of Charlotte than Bette Davis, I was fascinated by Prouty's own word picture of her that she opened the book with:

She looked as if she might have recently been ill. She had little natural color, and no artificial color whatsoever. There was something that suggested old ivory about the cast and quality of her skin. Her cheek-bones were high and accentuated by hollows in her cheeks. her brows were black, well-defined, and extraordinarily far apart. Her hair was black--what could be seen of it. It was cut very short. Her eyes were the somber blue of late-blooming monk's-hood. She was dressed in the conservative good taste that is expensive. A navy blue costume, very plain and very perfect, with a small snug navy-blue hat on her close-cropped head. Over her shoulders hung the pelts of several little animals, probably Russian sable. She caused much comment among the other passengers because of the incongruity between her distinguished appearance and her wary manner.

For those familiar with the movie, you'll notice that the book opens with the transformation of Charlotte Vale after her stay in an expensive sanitarium following her nervous breakdown, while that part comes much later in the movie.

Olive Higgins Prouty wrote honestly about mental illness because she was a sufferer of it herself and I read online that she wrote very accurately about psychotherapy, something that few authors of the time did. 

And here in the rough draft that I wrote Sunday morning while watching CBS Sunday Morning is where my notes end because I went on to watch Face the Nation and Margaret Brennan's video call interview with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, including current news and pictures. 

I've often turned to books these last horrifying weeks to distract me from the news I cannot turn off. But even a book I loved like Now, Voyager cannot help when faced with such atrocities being committed against innocent people. I had to get up, go to my kitchen and bang pots and pans angrily together and when that didn't help, go outside in the cold but sunny day with BreeBree and James Mason and cry helplessly.

And life goes on here in America.

Last week I went to our local library for the first time in years. After organizing my bookshelves this winter I realized I should stop buying more books (most of the time) and start finding them at the library, one fabulous thing that is still free. 

I picked out three novels and a new Susan Loomis cookbook, which I later ended up ordering because there were too many good recipes to copy. Ha, so much for my good intentions! One new idea at the library was a rack of Lucky Day books, new popular releases that you could only choose one of, with no renewal.

I chose a new Anne Tyler book called French Braid.

 

My apology to Anne Tyler fans but I finally laid this book aside after three nights' reading, hoping it would get better (happier). It didn't.

Next I opened Sarah Addison Allen's First Frost, chosen because I think I remember liking her Garden Spells. Even it took awhile for me to warm up to but I ended up enjoying it, the ending especially. 

I need happy endings. 

 

I'm grateful to be starting a library routine again. So many of the new books I've bought the last few years have not been put on my own bookshelves but rather passed on or donated. Very few new authors join the books on my eight bookshelves to be read again and again. 

There's no hope for me. I like old music, old books, old movies. I won't say "old" actors but rather say "actors from the past."

Happy Birthday, Bette Davis!

From Ladies' Home Journal, June 1951, the original Bette Davis eyes.

The Grits Is Cold and The Little Foxes

I am a grits-aholic, to the bone.

We who love grits disagree about grits, what kind to buy and how long to cook them, what to put in them.

One thing is a given. Instant grits or quick cook grits are not the real thing, not really.

One argument you don't hear much of these days is whether grits is singular or plural.

We just don't say anymore,

"The grits is good."

We say, "The grits are good."

And that's a darn shame because grits is singular and properly we should say:

"The grits is good this morning, Mama!"

My authority on the matter is Bette Davis playing Regina Hubbard Gidden in 1941's The Little Foxes.

Davis's Regina was one superbly bitchy woman.

Regina is married in the film to a favorite actor of mine, Herbert Marshall--remember him and his beautiful voice in The Enchanted Cottage as the blind pianist?

Back to grits...early in the film, long before Regina decides not to go fetch her husband's medicine when he's in the middle of a heart attack, crawling up the stairs, she and her daughter are sitting at the breakfast table on the veranda.

Mother dear sends the grits back to the kitchen, telling her servant,

"The grits is cold."

Subject closed. I'm glad that's settled.

***

There's nothing easier to cook than a pot of grits. I use water for breakfast grits and chicken broth for supper grits.

One ingredient for grits is as necessary as the grits itself. 

Salt

You might as well not go to the trouble to fix and eat grits if you're on a salt-free diet. But then, I can't imagine eating a tomato without salt, or an egg, so who's to say.

Tamar Adler inspired me to try her variation on grits in her An Everlasting Meal -- reviewed here on my other blog.

Cut salami into slices on a long bias and brown each slice in a pan. [I used the small dry Italian salami the first time I made this.]

Add red wine vinegar to cover and a spoonful of tomato paste. Let the slices of salami simmer until they've begun to soften, then spoon three or four pieces per person over each bowl of grits. Top each with fresh parsley and grated Parmesan cheese.

I followed Adler's recipe exactly the first time I made this and it was very very good.

The second time I added chopped scallions and a chopped jalape͠no and it was so good I embarrassed myself with compliments.

The third time I used Genoa salami instead of dry Italian, and minced instead of slicing it.

And then I thought, "Why not add the whole small can of tomato paste instead of a spoonful?" 

Yes, I fell for my besetting culinary sin of "If a little is good, more is bound to be better."

And it is not, more is not better.

And then I compounded my goof by stirring it all into the grits, as an imp on my shoulder suggested, instead of serving a little on top of each serving of grits.

I don't know why it surprised me that it looked so disgusting that I didn't even take a picture of it. What I should have done next was throw it all in the trashcan but I thought if I made really good scrambled eggs and toast that it might taste better than it looked.

RH summed it up as we ate our first bite:

"Well, I can say this about the grits, it's different."

Different and utterly awful. I was very glad my scrambled eggs and toast helped take the taste out of my mouth.

But it's what came after this that I'm ashamed of.

I let the little foxes into a perfectly lovely vineyard of a Sunday morning and fell into one of those moods where I berate myself when something goes wrong.

Why didn't I just follow directions?

Why didn't I just think?

Why isn't my table set pretty?

Why didn't I fold that basket of laundry yesterday?

Why can't I ever get anything right?

And here's about what I looked like right then, on a perfectly lovely Sunday morning, if you add a lot of decades to the face:

Does this child look as if she's about to say this?

"Mama, the grits is good!"

I didn't think so.

Do you think I learned my lesson? For a while I did.

I've made a conscious effort over the years to nip that bad habit in the bud--I always think of Barney Fife when I say nip it in the bud, do you?

And I am much better about this than I used to be. But on this morning's perfectly lovely cold dark April morning with snow spitting outside, I once again fixed grits for breakfast.

Plain Jane Grits with just butter melting in it.

And I sliced one potato very thin and a few slices of onion and sautéed them in butter along with slivers of our excellent Easter ham. Then stirred three beaten eggs into it and there we had an excellent breakfast.

I asked RH to fix his plate and then to take a dozen or so pictures of my pretty table.

Then we ate.

But do you think I was happy? No, not me. 

I let a whole skulk of little foxes into the vineyard (a bunch of foxes is called a skulk. I just googled it.)

I sat at my own plate, over on the big dining table because I didn't want to crowd place settings for two on our pretty 1950s dinette set, and I proceeded to criticize my plate.

...my own eggs had set too long in the pan while RH was getting photos of his table for this blog. Naturally I had to oversee him doing it.

...my ham should have been minced smaller.

...I should have had biscuits instead of toast.

....it needed salsa....

And then I really blew it.

After breakfast I imported RH's photos from his camera to my laptop and as they appeared, one by one, I started saying, "Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no."

This brought RH to my writing room asking, "What? What's wrong?"

[I mean, maybe the world was ending or something.]

I said: "You put too much of the egg stuff on your plate. It's ugly. You should have taken a small artistic helping, there's not enough white showing around the rim of the plate."

Can you believe he didn't blow his stack? He just laughed, and not in a mean way, just in a way of complete wonder at his wife's foolishness.

At least I folded all my laundry yesterday.

Song of Solomon 2:15

Take us the foxes,

the little foxes that spoil the vineyards,

for our vineyards are in blossom.

Anyone else out there ever let the little foxes in?

Besides me and Bette Davis?