Literature

Marianne Faithfull: the singer with an inimitable voice was a Romantic poet at heart

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Faithfull related to the poems of the Romantics and often used them to articulate her own feelings.

By Gemma Ware

Marianne Faithfull, the London-born singer with an inimitable voice, has passed away at the age of 78. She was known for many things: she was a pop star, an actress and a muse. But she was probably best known for her voice.

When she first entered the world of pop in 1964, her high-pitched tones rang with mellifluous vibrato. As she grew older and lived an increasingly excessive lifestyle, she developed a rasp – a quality borne of her unique experiences.

Faithfull’s final musical releases were works that incorporated Romantic poetry in different ways. She Walks in Beauty (2021) is a spoken-word album of canonical Romantic poetry by the likes of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats. Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995 (2022) is a chronological retrospective of her career which uses the name of William Blake’s poetry collection (1789) as its title.

As a PhD student focused on the legacy of Romanticism in 1960s and 1970s popular music, I’ve closely examined Faithfull’s engagement with Romantic literature throughout her career. These final two albums represent a beautiful culmination of her artistic journey, and are a testament to her unique voice and strong poetic influences

Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995, like Blake’s poetry collection, is broken up into the sections Innocence and Experience.

The Innocence portion of the album covers Faithfull’s youth, featuring early hits such as This Little Bird. Her early sound incorporated baroque pop instrumentation, including harps, harpsichord and horn arrangements (Come and Stay with Me), as well as folk styles with the acoustic guitar at the centre of the sound (Cockleshells).

Faithfull’s voice in this section portrays her as an “innocent” girl in pop stardom, as its high pitch and pure tone embody a sense of naivete that is also reflected in her lyrics about young love, such as in Come and Stay With Me:

We’ll live a life no one has ever known
But I know you’re thinking that I’m hardly grown
But oh thank God, at last and finally
I can see you’re gonna stay with me

There is a noticeable shift in the Innocence section of the album with the song Sister Morphine. As the song was made in collaboration with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger, it features a noticeably more rock sound in contrast to her previous pop productions. You can also hear subtle changes in Faithfull’s voice: it cracks and sounds strained in places.

The song’s lyrics (“Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams”) reflect the darker side of the mythologised “swinging sixties” lifestyle and its drug culture, which Faithfull has come to symbolise.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence features a piper as the presiding narrator over the poems. In contrast, Songs of Experience is meant to be heard through the voice of an ancient bard, as established in Introduction to the Songs of Experience:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

The Experience section of Faithfull’s album features music from Broken English (1979) and her re-recording of As Tears Go By, from Strange Weather (1987). The songs in this portion of the album exhibit her completely transformed voice: from piper to bard, it is deeper, raw and more weathered as a result of her struggles with addiction and bouts of illness. This brought a distinct edge to her music, marking a new phase in her career.

Beyond the qualities of her voice, Faithfull’s song selection reflects Blake’s notions of Experience. Strange Weather (“Will you take me across the Channel / London Bridge is falling down”) aligns with Blake’s London geographically and thematically, as both explore entrapment and decay. Faithfull’s depiction of societal monotony, as in “Strangers talk only about the weather / All over the world / It’s the same …” echo Blake’s “charter’d street(s)” and “mind-forg’d manacles”.

Faithfull’s connection to Romantic poetry is most overt in She Walks in Beauty, which she made with Warren Ellis (Australian composer and member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). In this album, she recites Romantic poetry set to Ellis’s music.

The poems she selected to recite are all by male poets and many feature voiceless female subjects, such as Byron’s She Walks in Beauty or Thomas Hood’s The Bridge of Sighs. On the album’s liner notes, Faithfull described how she related with these women, particularly Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

The Lady of Shalott is a woman cursed to live alone in a tower near Camelot – unable to look directly at the world, forced to weave what she sees in the mirror. Faithfull uses the Lady to reflect on the pressure she felt to conform to the expectations imposed on her by the press and music industry. There is a parallel between the Lady’s forced isolation and her struggles with being controlled and defined by external forces, as she explained:

Do I identify with the Lady? Oh yeah, always. I’m nothing like the Lady of Shalott, but I guess I wanted to be … When Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for As Tears Go By, he knew this poem. There’s a bit he always said he used from here, the thing about ‘it was the closing of the day’.

In the liner notes, Faithfull also mentioned that her love of poetry was thanks to her English teacher at St Joseph’s Convent in Reading, Mrs Simpson, and to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of English poetry, which she had bought as a teenager.

Faithfull’s lifelong interest in literature came to fruition in her two final projects. They exemplify how she was a pop star, muse and chanteuse – and also a Romantic.

Source: Marianne Faithfull: the singer with an inimitable voice was a Romantic poet at heart

Tuzzy-muzzy! Does it matter if Mary Shelley was bisexual? 

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By Dr Fern Riddell

Mary Shelley is a queen. Daughter of modern feminism’s founder, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the radical thinker William Godwin, this rebellious woman wrote one of the earliest and most influential gothic horror novels: Frankenstein. Published in 1818, when Shelley was just 20 years old, it remains a work of genius that can still horrify readers with the depths of man’s depravity and pursuit of knowledge at all costs. It is also a novel that places love, and the desire for love in its absence, at the heart of life. For this, and many other reasons, Shelley has become an idol for those whose souls search for belonging in dark times.

She’s also someone who I thought couldn’t really become any cooler. After all, this is the woman said to have married her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, after losing her virginity to him at the graveside of her mother. And then, after he drowned in a storm in 1822, carried his calcified heart – the only thing to survive his cremation – with her, wrapped in a silk shroud, until her death in 1851. (It was found in her desk, wrapped in the pages of one of his last poems.) But this week, Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley, taught me something new: Shelley was bisexual.

Writing to her close friend Edward Trelawny in 1835, Shelley recalled the years of loneliness and longing that followed Percy’s death, saying: “I was so ready to give myself away – and being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women.” Reading this as a historian of sexual culture, I recognised this as sexual slang – but did this allude to masturbation, or actual relationships?

When I tweeted the quote above, revelations flooded in thick and fast. Jonathon Green, one of our most important historical lexicographers, was able to tell me that “tuzzy-muzzy” as slang for the vagina dates back to 1642. There are also stories of Shelley having a love affair with Jane Williams not long after Percy’s death. She was also instrumental in procuring fake passports for two friends, Isabel Robinson and Mary Diana Dods, to flee to Paris and live there disguised as man and wife.

It wasn’t unusual for women to live or travel together at this time, so they didn’t need to disguise themselves. Rather, there may have been more at play here in terms of sexual and gender identities than you might expect to find in 19th-century history. Which is why it matters that we recognise that Shelley, by her own admission, was bisexual.

As soon as I sent out my tweet, amongst the celebration and excitement that others shared came a consistent push back. Some people saw the acknowledgement of Shelley’s bisexual life as crude and unnecessary, something that detracts from her achievements as a writer.

We know that a socially conditioned, deep and destructive self-loathing is still often suffered by those who grow up knowing that to be gay, queer, trans, bisexual, or anything other than heterosexual, has historically been seen as evil and wrong. What I have found time and again in the archives, is incredible evidence of queer lives being lived throughout the centuries. In the 1880s, science and medicine perfected pathologising sexuality and defined anything outside heterosexuality as a mental disease. But before this, sex, love and identity were very much individual choices. Shelley’s admission that she turned to women for sexual gratification shows us that to her, and many like her, sexuality did not fit the binary boundaries we have projected on to those in the past – and ourselves today. Acknowledging Shelley’s sexuality is very important for bi-visibility, something we still struggle with. But bi-history is everywhere, and now it has a new icon. Long may she reign.

• Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Source: Does it matter if Mary Shelley was bisexual? | Books | The Guardian

When Beatniks Begat Hippies Begat Punks

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Ed Sanders of The Fugs bridges the gap between 3 very influential, uniquely American subcultures – Beats, hippies and punks

By Alan Bisbort

For the past four years, I have taught a course at the University of Connecticut-Waterbury called “Beatniks vs. Hippies? No Contest!” One of the pleasures of teaching it is finding new ways to examine these two uniquely American subcultures and to find the links between them. Because they do exist. The links, that is.

And, of course, some of those same links can keep right on going into the future, hooking up with the punks and then beyond, possibly even to those enigmatic hipsters currently running up the rents in Brooklyn.

And then there are the people who had their feet in several camps, people I call “floaters.” Allen Ginsberg was one of those. After the Beat Generation ran its course, he could be seen working with Bob Dylan. And, after that, he recorded with The Clash, among many other punk-era artists.

Ed Sanders is another one of these people. He was, in fact, partly the inspiration for my college course in the first place. For those who weren’t around when Maynard G. Krebs morphed into Wavy Gravy and then into Johnny Rotten, it’s nice to talk with someone who was. Ed Sanders was there.

A poet, journalist, musician, publisher and raconteur who bridged the Beats and the hippies (and the punks; his band, The Fugs, pointed the way to punk), still continues to create innovative and challenging work today. He has, in fact, written a great deal about the “hippies” (in The Family, his bestselling book about Charles Manson) and beats (in his poetry and memoirs like Tales of Beatnik Glory and the hugely entertaining Fug You). But he never could see that it mattered what you called people on the literary and artistic fringe in those days. He told me about a time when Allen Ginsberg came to his apartment in New York.

Here’s a partial exchange from our conversation:

AB: People tend to think the Beat generation sort of petered out and was replaced, or subsumed, by the hippie generation. Which really wasn’t true, especially in New York. It seemed all the same people walked forward into the hippie scene, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, etc. The Beat sensibility brought an active rather than passive sensibility, or infusion, to the hippies.

ES: They brought some good writing, too. Hippies could be pretty vaporous in their literature. You know, I figure it must have been around February 1967 that we began to see the changeover. Instead of someone sneering at you and calling you “a dirty Beatnik,” they were now calling you “a dirty hippie.” I remember when Allen Ginsberg came over to our house on Avenue A around this time and said, “Now I guess we’re going to have to be hippies.” Miriam wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. It was a mysterious switch over. It went from tire-soled sandals to Merlin curved-toe shoes and gowns, and men wearing necklaces, which was a big deal for a man. Suddenly you have to wear a necklace, toe ring or go barefoot in the street, and burn incense. It was pretty strange. But the Beats ultimately prevailed. There are still conferences on the Beat Generation where young people come dressed all in black.

One way to get a bead on Ed Sanders is to watch this legendary episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line on which a drunken Jack Kerouac, clearly headed to an early grave, admits the hippies were better than the Beats. Ed Sanders was invited on the show as the token “hippie,” though he cut his teeth as a Beat (see above). The entire episode of this show is grimly amusing, especially if you fast forward whenever the insufferable Buckley is speaking.

The rest of my Ed Sanders interview appeared, in part, in Ugly Things magazine and, in whole, at Literary Kicks, the website devoted to all things Beat and pacifist.

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