camera girl

 

        That little excerpt quoted here yesterday -- when I looked back at the part Miss Bouvier wrote -- "I just can't tell you what it is like to come down from the mountains of Grenoble..." -- I noticed how she used the word "blazing" twice.

        The experience of being there was powerful and energizing, to her:

        ...this flat, blazing plain...

        ...palm trees with blazing red flowers...

        "I just can't tell you what it is like to come down from the mountains of Grenoble to this flat,

blazing

plain where seven-eighths of all you see is hot blue sky--and there are rows of poplars at the edge of every field to protect the crops from the mistral and spiky short palm trees with 

blazing

red flowers growing...."

        And then the final two sentences:

"They are always happy as they live in the sun and love to laugh.  It was heartbreaking to only get such a short glimpse of it all--I want to go back and soak it all up."

She imagines, gazing upon the scenic beauty, that those people living there are "always happy."  It's a fantasy -- an idyll.  Someplace where people are "always happy."

        She writes that the people are always happy because they "live in the sun"...(surely they have houses)...but to her, they seem to be always happy, and always "in the sun."

And right after writing that the people there are always happy, she says "it was heartbreaking" to only see it for a short time.

And then the desire to "go back and soak it all up."

The wonderful, happy, beautiful time was too short.  It was so great, for her, but yet she is already heartbroken, because she didn't have more of it.

Such a riot of feeling -- of emotion.

("Blazing" emotions, perhaps?)

_____________________________

The book is Camera Girl, just published this year.  The author is Carl Sferrazza Anthony--he has written a bunch of books about American First Ladies, and also was a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan.

What an historian!

What a career!

Camera Girl is about Jacqueline Bouvier's young-adult years and experiences, going from college and early jobs to her wedding to John F. Kennedy on September 12, 1953.

For me, it's really interesting, because in recent years after reading relaxedly and pretty much uncritically through several books about "Jackie" I kind of started to realize that mostly these were somewhat hack-ish, they basically just repeated and re-worked about a dozen different anecdotes that were in every Jackie took, and in many of the JFK books too.

Some of the books would emphasize Jackie's clothes, some would try to make "drama".  And after a while, you just wonder what it is you're really reading.

I longed for a better book.

This one answers that desire.  A whole, full-length book that's about what she did and wrote and learned, in the space of four years.

87 pages at the end are

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Less B.S., more scholarship.

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