Vidor’s picnic in La Bohème narrates the critical moment when Mimi and Rodolpho fall in love. It’s absent from the screenplay’s sources: Puccini’s opera La Bohème and Henri Muger’s Scenes de la vie bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life). The legend tells that Her first...
Conrad Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (1925) is a moody picnic story. It’s an elegy on death seen through the eyes of an unnamed young boy, somewhere between nine and eleven years old, who is bewildering affected by the death of his dear friend...
When Christopher Robin organizes an “Expotition” to the North Pole, his friends are unsure what he means. “We are all going on an Expedition,” said Christopher Robin, as he got up and brushed himself. “Thank you, Pooh.” ”...
Nabokov’s “The University Poem” (1926) marks the decline of a love affair at a punting picnic on the River Cam in Cambridge. In what ought to be a happy scene of lovers on the Cam, a teem rivers full of punts bordered by tawny Gothic buildings and green lawns, and...
Except for the picnic on Monte Rosa in The Voyage Out, Woolf’s other picnic is in To the lighthouse. It’s a skimpy lunch shared by Mr. Ramsay, James, and Camas as they sail to the lighthouse. Just before reaching the island, Mr. Ramsay announces that...
Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed has two picnics, and I’ll treat each as a separate posting. Each picnic features the protagonist Vance Weston with different women, Halo (Héloïse) Spear on Thundertop Mountain at sunrise over the Hudson River, and Laura Lou...
The Thundertop picnic at sunrise over the Hudson River is the first of two picnics in Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed. The other is a honeymoon picnic on an ocean beach, which I’ve treated in a separate posting. Both picnics are extended metaphors for...
Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons takes its name from the Swallow and the Amazon, two fourteen-foot dinghies that the childre n of the Walker and Blackett families sail in Coniston Lake in the English Lake District, where they play pirates and picnic at their...
Simkhovitch’s The Picnic is a day of leisure for a group that seems mirthless. They sit on bare earth, and each is unsmiling and subdued. There is no picnic joy as a small picnic cloth is spread around which they all gather. A man in a bathing suit reclines, his back...
Bill Clary, a native of Valentines, Virginia, for whom Dinner on the Grounds was the first Sunday of August. But other regional churches held their revival meetings on the other Sundays so that there was no competition. Clary recollected that each family had its spot...
