Autres temps, autres moeurs

Or as L.P. Hartley wrote in his Eustice and Hilda trilogy, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."  My mind is going in that direction after watching Tom Stoppard's televised version of Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End.  Earlier we watched the second season on DVD of Downton Abby to which I have been indifferent from the start but endure to promote marital happiness--my husband, Richard, loves it--because I have refused to watch Homeland or Dexter, his two absolute favorites.  Two years ago we watched the whole of the original Upstairs/Downstairs which took us from January until June, an experience from which it was hard to extricate myself.  I well remember tending the roses in our garden at Hull, Massachusetts, and looking out dimly to see that we were no longer in the Bellamy home in London.  While we were watching we kept up a running commentary that came at the drama from two very different perspectives.  Richard grew up on Staten Island in a working class family; his parents had been born at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. I grew up in a small Iowa town as the son of a prominent surgeon; my parents were, or at least in their fantasy, American "gentry" from suburban Oak Park Illinois, and my mother who had come out in 1910 was an Edwardian belle.  The dynamics of upstairs and downstairs were very familiar to me. I remember criticizing the  crude set erected for the Bellamy family home since it had but one stair which seemed to be used by both servants and children as well as the adults of the family.  No child or servant in my family home ever went up or down the front stair,  a procedural rule that absolutely mystified Richard and made me realize that we really and truly approached life in different ways.  He could not believe the silences, evasions, innuendos, and muttered half-truths that I took for quite natural among the Bellamy family members.  As an adult after lots of therapy I had grown, or so I imagined, to be as carefree and expressive as he thought himself to be, and we both identified with the folks working in the kitchen.  Except of course that I knew in my heart that the workings of the world were pinned on a myriad notions of what one did not do, one did not say, perhaps one did not even think.  I remember early on Richard's asking me if I wanted some tea as he headed to the kitchen to make himself some to which I replied "Oh, don't bother," and when he returned with none for me, I was indignant that he did not understand the locution as meaning that I wanted some, and he has ever after been amused at that aggressive ambiguity.  The two principals in Parade's End endure years of personal misery because they are locked into behavioral patterns from which there is no escape, he to honor his marital vow, but avoid sexual relations with his adulterous wife, she to accept a sexless marriage, refrain from other men, but refuse divorce because she is Catholic.  Neither can speak clearly on this subject to their friends or to each other so that the years are a horror of repression, submission, and depression.  It is difficult to escape the notion that at some level Christopher Tietjens nurses a profound contempt for women, not to mention an English upper class school boy's complete unfamiliarity with them, and that Sylvia's extraordinary cruelty and bitchiness are the acting out against that contempt.  Horrible as they both are, I was drawn to watching the lies, the silences, the repression, the life lived within the gaze of a servant class, what my parents brought to me as a childhood experience.  It worked so well with my having to hide the fact of my gayness back in those long ago days. Still and all, they both seemed to be dreadful people--even if she had the most brilliant taste in clothes--and I was glad when the film ended.  A few days before that we had watched the final episode of the second season of Girls.  Now there's a different generation, for sure!