Mansfield was in Bandol, a sea resort in the south of France, where she hoped to regain health and stability. However, her time there was unhappy, exemplified by “Pic-Nic,” a poem hinting that her state of mind was no picnic. Perhaps because it was too dark, she...
Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure called Charlie’s Picnic is an excursion in San Pedro harbor. It’s not a picnic, and Chaplin preferred A Day’s Pleasure as an ironic title because the story is a series of ironic misfortunes: seasickness, fistfights, and a return home that...
The humor of Smith’s picnic fiasco “Slicing the Wasps” is obvious. The legend reads: “Suitable for both sexes, young and old. Fascinating, amusing, skillful exciting, and with that element of danger.” It’s also an allusion to John...
“The Ideal” is Logan Pearsall Smith’s satiric dream of the impossibility of an ideal English picnic. Smith conjectures that though he might be promised a perfect day for a picnic and feasting in the shade of splendid trees, “when, in the rainy...
Mansfield wrote to a friend that motor picnicking was a pleasure that momentarily took her mind from her rampaging tuberculosis. The episode has the dreamy quality of an advertisement, such as one used by Jowett Motors (discussed elsewhere). “The weather here...
“How lovely it is to be free,” said Ursula, running swiftly here and there between the tree trunks, quite naked, her hair blowing loose. The grove was of beech trees, big and splendid, a steel-grey scaffolding of trunks and boughs, with level sprays of...
Villa America, Sara, and Gerald Murphy’s home in Antibes looked down on La Garoupe, where they spread oriental carpets on the sand and drank wine and cold Veuve Cliquot. They were prodigious drinkers, but what they ate was a mystery. During the 1920s, their home was a...
Bell often picnicked for entertainment and worked as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad) and spy. Often, the two were indistinguishable. Once using the picnic as a deception, she and her companions took an official (not identified) to a lonely...
Situated on the bluff near St. Tropez overlooking the brilliant blue ocean, Bonnard’s picnic is one delightfully cheerful mood. Everything is gold, yellow, brown, and green around the woman, a man, a child, and a recumbent dog. It’s a palette suggesting happiness and...
Smallwood’s picnic episode is not in Dumas, fils’s La Dame aux Camélias. According to Smallwood’s cinematic logic, however, romantic scenes in a natural setting are sure audience winners. The screen legend tells the obvious, “Love is the...
