Fanny Brandeis is a new woman, whose career comes first, and when Clarence Heyl, an unacknowledged suitor, asks her to picnic, she says that she’s so busy working that she has forgotten how. But the next morning, Fanny is sitting in a train heading out from...
Smallwood’s picnic episode is not in Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias. According to Smallwood’s cinematic logic, however, romantic scenes set in a natural setting are sure to be audience winners. The screen legend tells the obvious, “Love is...
Their marriage disintegrating, Leopold and Molly Bloom remember when they were in love and picnicked on Howth Head. They vividly remember Molly feeding Bloom a seedcake. (Joyce considered this sensual, but the visual image is of a bird feeding its young.) Bloom and...
It’s a momentous picnic for a young couple to understand they are courting in Colette’s The Ripening Seed. With the summer half gone, Phil Adebert (sixteen and a half) and Vinca Ferret (fifteen and a half) pack their picnic baskets and walk down the rocky cliffs like...
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...
Bridge’s Peking Picnic is autofiction based on her life as the wife of the British Oriental Attaché in Peking. The romantic interlude suggests that Bridge’s real-life marriage to Owen O’Malley was no picnic. It’s the story of picnic romance...
LeRoy’s Random Harvest picnic is phony. (It’s also original to the screenplay.) Smithy and Paula sit on fake grass beside an artificial stream with real goldfish. It’s props like these Nathaniel West had pulverized in his Hollywood satire The Day of...
McCarthy and Wilson enjoyed sex and picnics in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They often picnicked at the freshwater ponds dotting the mid-Cape, but during the summer of 1942, their marriage was wobbly. Wilson was fond of remembering his sexual relations with McCarthy....
Slightly drunk, Sebastian Flyte looks up at the sky, remarking (mainly to himself), “Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” he says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I...
Frederick Ashton’s Picnic at Tintagel is inspired by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s popular Victorian novel Royal Mount, where sightseers picnic on Tintagel Castle’s ruins. (Discussion of Braddon’s Royal Mount is posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.com)...
