My Living History Project

 

My daughter’s fourth-grade class is on a field trip today to the Eight Square School House in Ithaca where they’ll be experiencing a day of old-school school, having their knuckles rapped and wearing dunce caps and that kind of thing.  As soon as I received the memo about the suggested dress for the field trip – aprons and petticoats, sunbonnets and black ankle boots – I got a manic gleam in my eye.  Here was my chance to let my family values blossom into a concrete school project.  Here was a prime opportunity to start myself on the path to being the rabid historical-dress enthusiast I’ve always imagined I would ripen into in my old age.  Someday I will go the whole nine yards (or ten or twelve) and sew a Marietta Holley address, on an adult scale, complete with stays, shift, bustle and all.  But first – an 1892 child’s day dress, and not an authentic historical reproduction, but a kindly costume version from a modern pattern (Simplicity 2843) with accommodations made for ease and convenience.  Like a zipper.

I entered into the project with enthusiasm, and the joy I felt throughout the process was rather unlike the cursing and mumbling many of my sewing project devolve into.  I had an old tablecloth to repurpose, an eccentric floor-length table cover I had made to disguise my 90’s era (1990s, I mean) butcher-block table back in the days before we had a proper antique table in the dining room.  The butcher-block is now a kitchen island, and the tablecloth, a pale aqua cotton-linen blend, was ripe for reuse.

My other raw materials came from a Victorian sewing basket I bought at an estate sale in Mecklenburg two years ago.  The house it came from was a delicious time capsule of crumbling plaster and old wallpaper, with a very early brick hearth and warming ovens in the kitchen.  We found it packed to rafters with junk that had been new and useful more than a century ago, with a sprinkling of fifties Christmas decorations and few World War II-era letters on top.  The Chinese sewing basket was one of a matching set of three I found in an upstairs bedroom, sitting on top of an old cabinet sewing machine and across from a full bearskin rug.  They were encrusted with dust.

The basket proved to be full of old dress trimmings.  Some frugal lady, perhaps the mother of the person who had last occupied the house, had saved the valuable pieces of lace and ribbon from her dresses and petticoats and shifts when they wore out.  She had picked them off and rolled them up and pinned them neatly with tiny pins.  The lace on the shifts was too small and fussy to remove, so she just cut the yokes off the tops and saved them in a bundle for later.  Later never came, and she died before she could use the laces, and they came to me, still tightly wrapped up, as yellow-brown as parchment.

I washed the front and back yokes of one of the shifts, and I sat for a length of time that seemed inordinately long, at least the way we measure time nowadays, picking off the lace with a pair of embroidery scissors.  I needed my glasses, and even then the stitches holding the lace on were so small they were undetectable to the human eye.  When I got the first length unpicked, I pressed it and sewed it immediately onto the yoke of Poppy’s dress.  The piece of lace was exactly the right length to reach from one shoulder seam to the other without cutting or hemming.  How could this not be a sign from the beyond?  The soul of the frugal lady whose underwear lace I had in my hand was reaching out to bless me for using it at last.

This is a subject I plan to return to later, these stashes of fancy things passed on to me when the old ladies who saved them died before they could find a use for them.  I have countless doilies and napkins from my grandmother, a prodigious button collection from my stepmom’s great aunt, and a well-stocked bamboo sewing stand that came from another estate sale.  I could spend the rest of my lifetime finding good uses for all those precious bits and bobs, but I suspect I’m going to get more mileage out of writing about them instead.

The dress began to take shape.  When all the tiny lace was in place, and I was nearly blind from peering closely at it, I stepped back to get a better look.  Even with all that tiny trimming, the dress looked absolutely plain Jane, not like a Victorian confection but like a costume from a high-school production of The Music Man (trust me).

What was to be done?  Back into the basket for more lace.

The finishing touch was a long piece of crocheted lace that had obviously been on the hem of dress at one time, so that’s where I put it.  As I sat and sewed it on, I wallowed in living history lessons.  This is what a new dress meant for a nineteenth-century family of my class.  This is how much effort a nineteenth-century woman would expect to put in to get something worthwhile from her labors.  I guzzled these thoughts like fine wine.  Living history has a mixed reputation in the history world – Civil War reenactors have less intellectual clout than academic historians, say.  There was a good article by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker last November about Lucy Worsley, London’s Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces.  She has become famous for her historical reentactment shows on the BBC, during which she dresses up and tries out outmoded cooking methods and finds elements of Henry VIII’s diet in the grocery store.  Some people are critical of her living-history methods, fearing that she is in danger of turning history into a theme-park experience, leaving out the misery and the complexity.  I see the danger of this, and I take it to heart.  Truly old things are dirty and run-down and crazily foreign, not polished up to a Disney gloss.

Still, there is great, satisfying fun to be had in reenactment.  At first I thought my living-history imaginings were fuel for my historical novel-in-progress – what did a person wearing a dress like this think about, with the weight of that dress hanging on her shoulders (and the knowledge that if she blotted it with ink, she was in for another two weeks of lace picking and stitching)?  How did her dress inform her sense of self, and how did she express herself with the (very elaborate) possibilities of dress?

I have a new suspicion, however, that the other way around.  It’s my novel that’s serving my living history fascination.

Poppy is probably sitting on a hard bench as I write this, or maybe she’s snitching molasses cookies out of her lunch basket.  I can predict what some of her insights into Victorian life will be – long dresses are hot; petticoats are uncomfortable; you can’t run in ankle boots; hats are itchy.  I tried to give her as authentic an experience as I could.

Write like a kid

The crazy, word-hoarding pace of Nanowrimo does something to rewire the psychology of writing, and after churning out 50,000 words I didn’t really have time for because there wasn’t time to agonize over each one, I am getting a whiff of something I remember from a long time ago. I remember what it was like to write as a kid.

My first novel was a sprawling venture involving a parallel fairy universe/continent called “Toonvia.” A regular girl was falling asleep in her room (a small white bedroom with the cardboard rainbow from Spenser’s on the wall over the bookshelf) when a fairy came alive in a poster on the wall, and begged the girl to step through the poster into the other world. The fairy’s name, at least in early drafts, was a memorable hybrid I invented myself, and when I gave birth to my first child in 2002, my oldest friend was shocked to learn that her name was not Lilyamelody.

I wrote that novel like crazy, all the time. I carried a notebook around with me everywhere in fifth grade, and there was some kind of dire warning on the inside front cover written in all caps – something like “IF LOST, PLEASE RETURN TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS. IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.” My afore-mentioned friend told me then that this was a bit much, and for the first time I understood that being too earnest was not an asset. Even in elementary school.

Tragically, every single draft of that novel is now lost. I hope when I die I am offered a chance to view a movie of all the unremarked moments in life when things were lost – the exact moment when my mother accidentally put that notebook into the trash, or when I ripped out the pages and put them in a folder which was never seen again. There are plenty of moments like that to review – what happened to the pair of opals someone gave my dad and I used to keep in my jewelry box? Where did the burglar who stole my rings in graduate school put them? What was I doing when my necklace of jet beads fell off and was lost? And where is it now?

I have only the soft-focus memory of the pages in my first novel notebook to remember what was in it. I know there was a war going on in Toonvia between the good fairy folk and a host of witches and monsters who lived on the other side of the continent. The human girl (and what was her name? Probably Melanie.) was welcomed into fairyland with a full makeover and a feast, a la The Wizard of Oz. I remember that scene well because when I gave it to a girl to read at summer camp, she ended up only reading one side of each page in my double-sided manuscript. I figured out the mistake when she became very upset that there was a father pixie being served up at the welcome feast, but when I pointed out what she had done, she declined to go back and re-read the whole thing. Imagine!

I wrote and re-wrote that novel all the way through junior high. It evolved into a conventional fantasy adventure novel inspired by Anne McCaffrey (who has recently died, I was sad to learn). There was some kind of stone that had to be obtained. There were two kids sent on a quest. The boy could make things appear by magic when he played his flute. I wrote all summer in little coded notebooks and on my mother’s typewriter. I wrote while we were up in Pulaski, declining to go down to the river to swim so I could get some work in on my character sketches and chapter outlines. I made maps and kept lists of names. I also had separate sections in my notebook for other pursuits, like the “Philosophy” section in which I was building a taxonomy of every possible kind of conflict known to humanity. Don’t ask me! Those synapses have long since been pruned.

At some point the novel fizzled out, and what I remember was that I became more interested in physical descriptions of the winsome hero with dark curly hair than I was in plotting – he was a dreamboat, and (wouldn’t you know it) he exactly resembled the teenage TV star I was in love with at the time. So out went the era of literary intensity and in came that other era, the one in which Ophelia needs to be revived.

For fifteen years I wrote hardly any fiction. I signed up for poetry in college, thinking that I only had a prayer of finishing something if it was short. Poems are exquisitely short. I could write and rewrite them ten times in an afternoon and still have time for a two-foot high stack of Russian homework.

Academia is a pretty good party killer when it comes to unbridled creativity. My critical faculties increased to the point that I knew it was embarrassing to write. Still, I never quite made it to the other camp. During my last gasp of graduate school, at a conference on Russian women writers I organized, I gave a paper on the poet Karolina Pavlova. Afterward, a kind professor from another campus said, “You know, that was a writer’s paper, not an academic’s paper.” Secretly, I took it as a compliment.

It takes an exercise like Nanowrimo to force the imagination back into the mindset of writing like a kid – writing all the time, every minute, wool gathering, making leaps, forging ahead constantly. I didn’t waste time doing laundry and dishes when I was a kid, either. In January I can begin the process of agonizing over the fifty thousand new words, one at a time. Meanwhile I am going to devise a process of hypnotizing myself so that when I sit down to write, mentally, I’m ten.

Paranormal Investigations

Who are these winsome frontier lassies?

I did a lot of digging around in old things when I was in Pulaski at the end of the summer, and there are a number of unsolved mysteries I have yet to unravel. One particularly fertile place for excavations is in Great Great Uncle Richard's trunk, which serves most of the time as a tablecloth draping stand in the back room at the Brick House. It's full of all the special things he saved from his time out in Leadville, Colorado designing mining works and making friends.



I realized, as I was sneezing through the mildew and the dust and the remains of century-old weevils, that what I really wanted were not the facts. I want to get past the facts to the juicy stories, the ones that don't make it into family bibles and the letters home. Who, for instance, is this person, whose woolen long-john clad likeness shows up in the photo archive in the top tray of the trunk (just inches away, I might add, from all the photos of his dear old sis back home in Pulaski)?


Those fancy ladies out in Leadville, Colorado were a frisky lot, posing in their underwear -- but you have to admit, it is cold out there. A lady can't be too careful of her health.

I am also hot on the trail of this raven-haired beauty:

Her face shows up on several warped pieces of cardstock in the collection, and her signature appears on the bottom of a heartsick letter, written after a weekend rendez-vous that had to come to an end.

Is this the same person, in a later photo?

The interesting part of the story is the part that gets erased (as when Great Grandma Mahaffy burned the half-literate letters that went with the photos at the top of this post "Deer Hart, Wen yew gonna come and see mee?"), or the part that was never committed to writing in the first place. Communicating with the other side takes a little imagination.

Migraine Interlude

Good nighty night, ladies and jets -- I mean, gents. I am so good happy to speak to you this day on the change purse of the Headache People. In Washington. From the tingly part to the shame labyrinth -- I can make it a migraine for you. That is to say, I can help you get migraine too.

Remember that book about the guy who was really really smart, so smart he could see the cells in the flowers? And then he got really dumb again, so dumb he forgot his name was Algernon? No wait -- Charles. Algie was the mouse, right? Anyway, it's like that.

Or like have you ever tried to sleep over at your cousin's or aunt's or roommate's place on one of those blow-up thingies down low on the ground close to a big spiderweb, and then in the morning you are on the hardness in a sinking sinkhole with covers choking you? That's it too.

Maybe you are going up in a log ride and your tummy is already boiling from the cotton candy you shouldn't have eaten for breakfast, but up you go, chunkity chunk chunk -- and you know you aren't going to die, but it seems like you might, only the chunkers under you chunk out and you slide down the back side of the flume, not going the right way, so maybe you do die. That's what happens to your thinking parts. Not just your thinking parts, but the whole bowling ball up there, and your jugular vessel is the chunking machine.

Does that make sense? I had some powderpoint slides but I can't get this thing to work, so you'll have to follow me through the frabjous part.

Good! Now is the question asking time. Hello there! Hmm. Mmm hmmm. I'm nodding. Yow, that smarts. Excuse me -- see that long green thingy over there, off stage, the one with the pillows and the hard bits on the end? Is that clean enough to lie down on or what?

By Request

Comments have been streaming in (Can't see them? Make sure you have your preferences set to "View Invisible Comments.") about how William Blake's picture of Cronos eating his children is not a very nice "summer vacation" picture for the blog. Cronos seemed like a good idea at the time, and it isn't always the crazed daddy I identify with. But onto other seasons! This season I've been digging up new material. Cemeteries in the North Country, it turns out, are treasure troves of Victorian names, and some of them are real howlers.


Apparently some families had a real poetic gift for choosing evocative names, and I'm sure they knew very well the provenance of the names they chose, internet or no internet. Even in temperance-friendly northern New York, you just have to let your kids be their own people.

Modern-day children with funky names are a great help in spotting the real treasures.


But some of the stones in these tiny rural cemeteries are so old, the names have long been obscured by lichens and mosses, as if the dead are so fashionably ensconced in the afterlife they no longer need the living to care for them.


Whoops! On closer inspection, this gravestone belongs to my Grandma Guthrie, who is alive and well and always did believe in planning ahead. You wouldn't want your children messing around with your final resting place. In their grief, they might get uppity ideas.

The Muse?

Literary inspiration does exist, only it isn't the divine gift you read about. The muse isn't a comely nymph with classical features, nor even an immortal roller skating babe (before the Classics, there was Xanadu).

Here are some of the things I did yesterday to work myself into a literary state of mind: sort a stack of mail two feet high, pay bills, write a letter about property taxes, pick up groceries, organize tools, throw away garden seeds "Packed for 2005", wash dishes, help with a report on "America the Beautiful" and change three filthy HEPA prefilters. Sound inspiring? Once the kids were in bed I did some light stretching while dipping into an excellent book about health by Andrew Weil.

And then, KABOOM, the clouds parted and I had a genuine Literary Thought. It was a thought in the shape of a poem, something to do with what Andrew Weil was saying about Venus and Saturn, about the balance between the generative, feminine Aphrodite and the destructive, masculine Cronos (devourer of his own children).
I couldn't remember the last time I'd been able to see an idea for a poem, but there was no time to stop, as I was galloping ahead. My novel was on the horizon -- the chapter I've been working on in fits and starts, the scene that still needs some strong glue to hold it together, and the deadline looming next month. I had two good ideas about things to add -- no, make that three ideas! -- and in a moment I had blasted right past making notes and was writing actual dialog. Not just dialog, but funny dialog! I could not be stopped.

It was in the middle of the hilarious, scene-clinching conversation that I realized the left side of my head was cracking open like a volcanic fissure and that I mildly wanted to throw up. I leaped off the page where I was writing and started scribbling down observations on the back of another sheet. Migraine was dawning. How did it happen? Did I think so hard I tweaked my brain? Did the neural pathways required for literary thought happen to be the same ones prone to swelling? Did writing increase circulation in the grey matter so rapidly it caused a short circuit?

I dragged myself to the medicine cabinet and then got back into bed with my notebook. Before I collapsed on the pillow I had finished the dialog, outlined the next book review I have to do, and made two pages of notes on important plot questions for the second half of my novel -- which surprisingly had a lot to do with the book for the review. What an amazing coincidence.

My husband turned out to be the only person thinking clearly. When he came in to bed, he listened patiently to my chatter for ten minutes before observing, in his calm way, that literary thoughts are not the cause of the migraine, they are one of the symptoms. "It's just part of the manic lead-up," he said, before turning off the light.

My delusions of grandeur went hissing off into the darkness like a leaky balloon. This was not inspiration -- this was prodrome. The lack of blood to the brain was producing literary thoughts, not the reverse. Were they real ideas? Would they still be there, on the page, when I recovered from the migraine (and the side effects of the medication)?

Eric put in his two cents. "You have to take what you can get," he said, and was asleep in thirty seconds.

Marietta Holley: The Song

Do you know the low feeling, about a third of the way through a big project (a novel, say -- or a wallpapering job, or a knitted sweater), when the pile of glittering good intentions with which you began your effort seems to be sifting down into nothing and your stamina is at a low ebb? I've been trying to unstick myself from such a moment. I've been reading Marietta Holley's own words, and getting up my enthusiasm to know more about the suffrage movement and what exactly Susan B. Anthony said and when. Today, in my noodling, I found "The Ballad of Marietta Holley", courtesy of the students at South Jefferson Central High, in Adams:

"Oh Marietta, I need to know you.
Oh Marietta, why don't I know you?
I would have thought they would have told me of you in school.
Oh Marietta, I need to find you."

Can you believe it? They read my mind. Click here to see the affecting video, complete with photographs from the Watertown Historical Society. You may not need your hankie, but I sure did.

Relics, Archives, Memorabilia & Souvenirs

BEFORE

When the clutter is knee deep on the ground, when the books are in laundry baskets because there is no room for them in the bookcase, when the file drawers are so jammed with relics from the pre-digital age they bend and warp and can't be closed, it's time for a purge.

At first glance it would seem that a mess is a problem related to space, but upon closer inspection it turns out that the real issue is time. The books are straightforward -- even books read in the past are timeless -- but scratch the surface and there are time bombs and worm holes of every description lurking in the piles. The high-school yearbooks are expected, and the photo albums, and the baby books (Poppy's, Effie's, and mine). The college papers have been filed neatly away, at least, and the decades of journals line up in an aesthetically pleasing manner, but what about the rest of the stuff -- the old letters, the notebooks full of miscellany, the postcards from every museum in Europe? Then it gets tough -- what about the unfinished poems, the dead novels, the aborted dissertation in its own accordion file, the fan I slept with every night as a child, the carousel of slides from my mother's teenage years, the Victorian coin purse my great-grandmother gave me, her note still inside? The only proof that my past really happened is here in this house. Without the memorabilia, even I might forget I was ever a roller-skating preteen in Austin, Texas, or a California hippie graduate student. My eyes might glaze over and I might begin to believe I have never been anything but a mother of two in a big house, watching the clock and wondering where the little one's ballet clothes are.

WHERE ARE THE PURPLE SOCKS?

When the past begins to infiltrate the present, though, it's dangerous-- there is more past than present, and more every minute. Tidbits from the past filter to the surface and impede the flow of time in a forward direction. Today when I wanted to put on earrings I first had to tug a filmy piece of purple rayon off the pair I wanted, and I had to waste time thinking, "This is a purple sock belonging to the toy incarnation of Donny Osmond, circa 1976. Yes, I remember watching 'The Donny and Marie Show' and doing somersaults around the living room with my brother, and those were good times, and I'm sort of glad I saved the Donny and Marie playset, and I'm sort of glad I let the kids play with it, although I wish I could use this brain power to reflect on the Elizabeth Gaskell biography I'm reading -- not to mention to get myself dressed on time -- instead of worrying that I'm forgetting the past or failing to find the interesting kernel in it by not making hay out of the whole Donny and Marie thing."

What kind of archive would set the mind at rest? Wouldn't it be great to have a closet full of industrial-strength storage boxes, stacked and labeled in bland, unemotional codes like the materials in a library vault? Reminiscing would require white cotton gloves and a blank table, and could only go on until dinner time, when the box would be have to be repacked and returned to a high shelf.

My own TV and Russian literature-inflected past -- indeed, my whole family's past (the distant daguerreotype past, and the recent baby-photo past) -- is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is history to be reckoned with. There is an infinite wealth of times past I don't even know about yet -- my memory can't be jogged, but must be stocked. If I'm not tripping over my old toe shoes on the stairs, I can be watching time pass on a bigger scale, welcoming past time into the memory banks, which are airy and full of room.

Did I mention that I'm writing a historical novel?

AFTER

Grandpa Watson

Here is a daguerreotype image of the Reverend William Watson, young and roguish, with his cheeks faintly colorized by the photographer's brush. He is my great-great-great grandfather, father of the Samantha look-alike (Mary Watson Mahaffy) pictured below, born in Northiam England in November of 1823, died in Ilion, New York in 1898. I've always considered the horde of loot he left his descendants to be my prime material -- he left scores of sermons, diaries, letters, pictures, books, and personal effects to the family. We have his false teeth. We have his flute, his worthless mining stock certificates, his speech on abolition, his diary from the voyage to America in 1851. We have his wooden crate full of serious works of history and Bible scholarship -- it has sat in the Brick House relatively undisturbed for more than a hundred years. It makes a good nightstand in the tiny bedroom my grandpa dubbed "The Watson Wing."

My parents made some serious headway into the material when my dad had the cockamamie idea of trying to earn an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas in the mid-seventies. He started a thesis on Grandpa Watson. He discovered many of the Watson papers in the attic of the Brick House, where my great-grandmother was using Grandpa Watson's trunk as a step up into the crawl space. He and my mom visited Grandpa Watson's grave in Ilion, and found his old parish across the pond in Northiam, which had been converted to a kitchen boutique. My mom worked on sorting the papers and typing up some of the diaries in an early word processor (not compatible with modern data, unfortunately). Life intervened -- it was too much to finish an M.A. when there were two kids to raise. There was no time to keep up with Grandpa Watson, although Dad did make use of his sermons from time to time. One Sunday he dressed up as Grandpa Watson and delivered a hearty dose of Victorian Methodist fire-and-brimstone from the pulpit. (Dad is an Episcopalian, by the way -- a big departure, as Anglicanism was one of the things Grandpa Watson railed against. One letter he kept in his papers is a reprimand from another clergyman, chastising Grandpa Watson for using an invitation to give a funeral prayer at another church as a platform to criticize that church's lack of grounding in the Bible. I assume the offended clergyman was an Episcopalian.)

I am safeguarding most of the papers in my study now, where mice are less likely to get at them then at the Brick House. Suddenly they are very relevant to all the things I am thinking and writing about. Temperance, that quixotic political movement that seemed so important then, is one topic Grandpa Watson can help me sort out. After the Civil War, when the country no longer needed him to speak out about the evils of slavery, Grandpa Watson turned his attention to the scourge of drink. He felt it his moral duty to get involved with temperance, and he struggled in his conscience with the references to wine in the Bible. He entered into correspondence with an old mentor in England on the subject of Biblical drinking, and his mentor dipped back into Biblical Greek and Hebrew to show that, in fact, when Jesus says wine, he probably does mean fermented grape juice.


This sermon, actually an address to the Methodist District Meeting at Fulton in 1871, does not show any doubt on the matter of temperance. It begins, "Drunkenness in the Scriptures is Classed with the grosser Crimes, and no one who is adicted to it can be fit for refined or elevated society -- or enjoy the favor of God in this Life -- or go to Heaven when they die."


Oh, the courage of conviction! I know I can use this.

Revelations

I taxed my brain and my circulation this morning by following a twisty trail of questions deep into the internet. I knew I wanted to write a scene about Marietta Holley thinking religious thoughts with her Victorian brain as she sits through a service at the Adams Baptist Church in October of 1882. What was the Baptist lectionary for that year? It took a great many handsprings to formulate that question in the right way, and a great many more to locate the lectionary and to decide that Baptists probably used the same cycle of Bible readings that other protestant churches did at that time, even though, theologically speaking, they didn’t have to. I looked into the tenets of the Baptist church; I peered under the hood of several nineteenth-century Baptist hymnals. I counted ahead from Easter Sunday in 1882 (April 9, in case you were wondering), through the long weeks of “ordinary time” that finish out the church year before it begins again with Advent. I looked at some bizarre readings from Daniel for one Sunday in October, and then I decided I would make it All Saints Sunday instead, the first Sunday of November. I looked up the appropriate reading for that day – “Wis. 3.” Okay, Wisdom. A quick look revealed that “Wisdom” was not in the Old Testament in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible I have on my desk, and, briefly, I panicked. I can only remember the first few books of the Bible from the song I memorized in junior high at my best friend’s Vacation Bible School at the Baptist church (“Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, something, something . . .”). Maybe “Wisdom” got a new name after the King James version? Google held my hand through the panic – imagine how long these conundrums took to resolve in the olden days – and soon was reminded that Wisdom is a book of the Apocrypha.

I found “Wisdom of Solomon” in the Table of Contents. I flipped. I opened the page to chapter 3, and there was a post-it note in my Dad’s handwriting sticking up from the top of the page – only one of two such flags in my agnostic Bible. Someone (possibly me – the note has “SLOW” written in big letters in my writing at the bottom) read this passage at a funeral. Probably it was my Grandpa Guthrie’s funeral. The text begins, “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”

Enter Marietta Holley, spiritualism, Victorian grief. I got the message from the beyond as loudly and clearly as if she had rapped on the bottom of my desk.

Photo: Adams Village Baptist Church, Adams, New York

Street View of Bonnie View

With love from Google -- a drive-by of Marietta Holley's estate just south of Adams.

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Memoir

A few memoirs have crossed my desk this year (which is a fancy way to say, they’ve gathered dust on my night table until I read them) – Mary Karr’s Lit, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. Oh, and the crown princess of the publishing world, Eat, Pray, Love. Memoir is such an alluring genre because it makes life seem rational, as though all the crazy things that happen to a person have a perfectly shaped narrative arc, if only you have eyes to see it. It makes me want to write a memoir to have the experience of stuffing my life into an outline like that. Of course I know enough about writing to be able to see behind the curtain – that polished surface is artificially applied. When you have to shape a story into chapters, paragraphs, and conventional sentences , the rough edges come away. Nothing is as civilizing as grammar.

Wouldn’t it be a treat to read a book of your life that explained what it was all about? The influence of your class and ancestry would be laid out as a clear jumping-off point, followed by a sensitive parsing of your earliest memories and your formative school experiences. Your early choices would all begin to make sense, and the later preoccupations emerge as deliberate, not random as they seemed at the time. When you were eighteen and you imagined that if your boyfriend and your cat were both tied to the railroad track and you could only save one, you’d save your cat – that daydream was actually a watershed epiphany.

I eat up the passages where memoirists explain away their parents as if they were characters in a novel. They see into their parents young-adult minds – they know exactly what Mom and Dad were thinking when they met, married, moved to that crazy place. This has to be the biggest fiction at work in memoir – can these writers really encapsulate so blithely these personalities that existed for them a priori? Do they really wake up as adults and get the whole story of the aether from which they were sprung? As much as I love the fantasy, and would love to bluster through my own version of it, it smells funny to me.

Why do people write these things? The probably want coherent spiel to present to the world – “This is my story and I’m sticking to it.” What a job well done, this dredging up everything you can remember and sealing it up in clean typeface between two covers. Spit-spot, that’s that – on to the next.

The most productive reason I can see for mining the past -- especially childhood, education, the family – is to sift through the debris looking for parenting tips. If you can figure out exactly what happened and where things went wrong (if they did), then you can avoid repeating history for your own kids. If you can remember what the world looked like through the lens of third grade, you can make the way easier for your daughter and give her everything she needs to succeed and be happy beyond her wildest dreams. Of course there is a catch – Mother Nature has made sure that our children are like us, but not exactly like us. They are different animals, and our cats and boyfriends may not have any relevance to their dilemmas at all.

The imp of the perverse makes me want to scramble those neat memoirs, to muddle their tidy conclusions and rain on their sunny, last-chapter parades. What if we told the crazy, chaotic stories, the ones that make no sense, and shone a light into the blind allies of experience instead of sticking to the main road? Not everything can be explained. There are loose ends and extraneous characters all over the narrative. There is no easy closure, even when the life is over, but a constant dialog. Maybe if you throw in all the rough stuff, and avoid smugness in your conclusions, your memoir will be more revealing and more useful. Maybe this is true of all writing. I am not smug as I come to this conclusion.

Out To Lunch

I should have created a vacation message to cover the summer months: "The blog you have dialed could not be reached. Please check the address and try again when fall has arrived and the author has a prayer of getting any time in her desk chair due to the resumption of child care, er, school . . ."

"Out to lunch" is more like it, though. I did load up on some good nourishment during the season of trips, reunions, and sibling rivalry. And I got a tantalizing taste of things to come. I got to visit Marietta Holley's portrait in the "Marietta Holley Room" at the Flower Memorial Library in Watertown. Unfortunately, none of the other things in the room had anything to do with Marietta Holley, but I have high hopes for what I will find in the basement at the historical society, across the street (Photographs! Letters! Articles of dress!) Here is the portrait, complete with boudoir lace getup:

Today I read the passage in Holley's autobiography where her friend Mrs. Newman sets the portrait appointment with one Theodore Pyne, an "eminent portrait painter" and church deacon. (His other clients were Mrs. Leland Stanford and the Pierreponts of Pierrepont Manor, but it doesn't appear, from his lack of a web presence, that his eminence has stood the test of time.) An artist friend told Marietta that Mr. Pyne had made her look too self-satisfied. "You might have known how it would be," he said. "The idea of having a Deacon paint a portrait. If you had made up your mind to have him paint it you should have at least sent him off on a spree before he commenced it."

That's it! I've been off on a spree.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reads the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

Poppy was paying attention at the Women's Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls after all. (Note the squirmy kids in the back.)

The Shape

Driving down route 14 to Elmira this morning, around the crack of dawn, I saw an elemental. It was a pocket of fog or low-hanging cloud suspended in the most sharply chiseled part of the valley, orphaned just above the grey roof of the old farmhouse wedged between the steep hills. I always think of that spot, somewhere between Montour Falls and Millport, as the Chemung Valley, although of course that name refers to a much greater region. I should think of it as the Bermuda Triangle for vintage tractors instead – there is always a lineup of these sturdy machines by the roadside, and there used to be an antique farm equipment field day in the pasture every summer. Maybe the tractors are still there, and maybe the field day still goes on – I was too fixated on the atmospherics to notice. Whoever put that house in that locale must have had an eye for the mystical, as that is a particularly damp, dusky valley. The sun shines only a few hours, lost as it is behind the east hill at sunrise and the west hill at sunset. Elementals must be a regular feature in the landscape, and they are too magnificent to be the souls of rusted-out tractors.

In case you are not familiar with the terminology I use here, I’ll quote from the definitive source on spine-tingling mist effects. Here is Cassandra Mortmain, speaking to Simon Cotton in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Cassandra is celebrating her childhood “Midsummer Rites” for the last time, putting on perfume and lighting a sacramental bonfire on the mound outside the ruins of a medieval castle:

The mist from the moat was rolling right up Belmotte; already the lower slopes were veiled.
I said: “It’s like the night when we saw the Shape.”

“The what?”

I told him about it as we carried the branches to the fire: “It happened the third year we held the rites, after a very hot, windless day like to-day. As the mist came towards us, it suddenly formed into a giant shape as high as – oh higher than – the tower. It hung there between us and the castle; it seemed to be falling forward over us – I never felt such terror in my life. And the queer thing was that neither of us tried to run away; we screamed and flung ourselves face downwards before it. It was an elemental, of course – I’d been saying a spell to raise one.”

He laughed and said it must have been some freak of the mist: “You poor kids! What happened then?”

“I prayed to God to take it away and He very obligingly did – Rose was brave enough to look up after a minute or two and it had vanished. I felt rather sorry for it afterwards; I daresay no one had summoned it since the Ancient Britons.”

Simon laughed again, then looked at me curiously: “You don’t, by any chance, still believe it was an elemental?”

Do I? I only know that just then I happened to look down towards the oncoming mist – its first rolling rush was over and it was creeping thinly – and suddenly the memory of that colossal shape came back so terrifyingly I very nearly screamed. I managed a feeble laugh instead and began to throw wood on the fire so that I could let the subject drop.

I didn’t feel terror at the sight of the Shape on route 14, but I came rather close a few minutes later when I was lying on a narrow plastic table with a blanket swaddling my middle and a massive x-ray device hovering centimeters away from my torso. It was a routine medical test, and the idea was to take a look inside my gallbladder. Perhaps the sight of medical technology is more scary than any mist cloud, or maybe it’s the hospital that does the trick, with all the departments and clinics and wards for all the various things that can go wrong in the body. Or perhaps it’s just being told to hold still that made me edgy, because of course at the bottom of it I’m just a wild animal like everyone else. Or at least an Ancient Briton.

I held still -- for an hour and ten minutes -- and closed my eyes and listened to literary interviews on my iPod. The theme of the interviews was: literature is hard. Giving your life to art is hard; finding an audience, getting your work into the world without being shaped by a market or a corporation or starvation – hard. Holding still under an x-ray machine is no big deal, in the scheme of things.

I Capture the Castle is my perfect book, the one that initiated me into the mysteries of literature. I don’t suppose it’s the only book that could have worked – the right book at the right time is what’s needed. Age 12, plus summer in a lush green place (Pulaski), plus English castles, struggling families, and the literary potential of romantic struggles (Hello, Stephen Colly!). Plus elementals – great humid shapes that materialize out of mist and air, ideas, or conceptions, that emerge against the backdrop of everyday life and tower over everything.

Twins Separated at Birth?

Here is a picture of Marietta Holley's fictional alter-ego, Samantha, aka "Josiah Allen's Wife", from the frontispiece of Samantha Among the Brethren (1890). Note the substance of her figure (she gives her weight as "two hundred and 4 pounds" -- citing the number so that Josiah will stop trying to call her "a little angel"). Observe the stalwart bosom, the small eyes boring through tiny round spectacles, the no-nonsense coiffure.

Now get a load of Mary Watson Mahaffy, my great-great grandmother, in a portrait taken about the same time:

According to family lore, Mary Mahaffy was a kind, gregarious sort of person, even if she didn't believe in smiling for photographs. Her son, Dick, was a rabid photography enthusiast, so maybe she was unimpressed by cameras.

The Brick House was her married home. She helped run her husband's woolen mill, kept dairy cows, raised four kids, took care of extended family, played the organ at the Methodist church, and took part in several ladies' clubs. She was born in Dewitt, New York in 1854, the first child of her family born in America. She died in Pulaski on January 22, 1920. Here is a letter she wrote to Dick in 1917. I found it in the same packet as the two letters from Yates, posted earlier, and I have liberally added punctuation, which I feel is my prerogative as a blood relation:

My Dear Boy

I tried all last week to write to you and thought sure I would get time today, but everyone been here all day so there has not been any chance. Perhaps I can get a chance to write tonight while I am waiting on milk customers. I have thought of you many times and am glad you have kept well. I was afraid you would sure get the Influenza. There is a lot of it here, yet everything closed up here. Quite a few deaths -- not so many as there are in some places. I will be glad when it is over with. We have kept well so far Nell and Orson and Fred has had it but quite light but hard enough. The last I heard from Yates he was back to work. He wrote last Tuesday. Thought sure I would hear from him today but did not – he has a new address. It is battery D. 4^th Regiment I.A.R.D. No one knows what I have been through for more than a month thinking of you two boys of course I worried more over Yates as I knew he was where he could not get home and it would take me as long to get to him after they knew he was sick. It is his first time he has been away from home. When he was home he would never say one word about feeling sick but keep right on working until he would almost drop in his tracks.

Uncle Will don’t get along at all. I guess they have about given up thinking he will get up. Of course he has some good days, then he gets down again, don’t sit up any only while his bed is being made. There they have to hurry. Aunt Helene keeps about so -- don’t get much better, gets up in the morning and sits by the stove all day. Does not do much of any thing. Uncle Will does nearly everything. Carrie Lane goes over nearly every day and helps, and Belle Mates and the girls, but the girls can’t do much with their babies. It makes Aunt Helen nervous having children around. Aunt Kate can’t get over very often -- her hands are full. I have been up once but if I walk up there and work and walk back I am all in. I can’t go up there until after dinner any way because of milk customers coming. They don’t want anyone to go there and stay so it is hard telling what to do there is nothing to do with where any one goes there.

Winter will soon be here and I dread it. I will have to stay in then. I don’t get away very much now but I can get out doors and we go up to Hell’s to dinner every Sunday now, and she says we must as long as I can get up there

I hope you will not have to get into the war any more than you are now. I do wish this war would come to an end soon as though it must. I will finish this letter now. I waited thinking perhaps I would get some word from Yates then I would write what he had to say but did not hear from him and will not now until tomorrow

I must try to write to Drusilla this week but I have been so nervous I could not settle down to write Want to write to Aunt Hattie. Must any way this week

Orson is working up in Watertown and getting good wages and thinks soon he will stay there all winter.

Your father is busy all the time carding every one wants yarn but can’t get it only by making it so when they have a little wool or can get some they have it carded and make their own yarn your father can’t get any anywhere would sell a lot of it if he could get it.

It is near dinner time and there is not much more news to write that would interest you so will quit at this time hoping you keep well and never have to go in the war only as you are now. I will say goodbye write when you can if only a card. I know you do not have time to write but a card is better than nothing.

With lots of love from all your loving

Mother

Birds and Bees

Now, to get this blog back on track, let's talk about something really sexy. Here is the sexiest topic around, sexier than, say, Rupert Friend as Chéri. Sexier than Mr. Darcy. Sexier than Jemaine Clement's lips.

Oh yeah, you KNOW what I'm talking about.

VICTORIAN GRAPHIC DESIGN.

Here are some high Victorian book spines to titillate (the 5 on the right are Marietta Holley titles). Oh, the typefaces. And the botanical gew gaws, and the gilding, and the curlicues, and the embossing. These are the elements that make you want to curl up with a book -- and not just curl up, but shack up on a velvet fainting couch with a paisley shawl about your shoulders and a cashmere turban in your hair. With fringe.

Modernist graphic design is sterile by comparison. There is no there there -- no flowers, no filigree, no engraving, no birds, and no bees.

Get a load of this tissue I found in one of the Holley novels. Technically, it is a "Japanese handkerchief", a durable piece of ephemera:

(Unfortunately it doesn't smell any more, except of old paper, but that's an appealing aroma too.)

Even these funeral cards have a joie de vivre to them, an exuberance of detail, a fineness of texture (the white designs are embossed):

(Note to hip urban families out there: a black border signifies mourning. Please do not attempt to send black-framed photos of your kids out this Christmas, or you may cause undue panic in the family.)

Stark modern design rejected ornamentation as a distraction. How short sighted. Is there any better way to go?

Melancholia Greatest Hits

Speaking of grief, there is something perversely funny about the low, sad moments in life. Windows are opened and looked out of, then closed when the shivers set in.

1. The Russian Soul

Getting over a hard breakup, I had the bright idea of cheering myself up with a summer abroad. Hello Russia, distiller of the finest misery in the world. It was my third visit, but I thought everything was different now that Russia was a democracy (!) and valiuta was out in the open.

I remember my first morning waking up in post-Soviet Moscow, staying with American acquaintances in an apartment in a subproletariat concrete apartment block, looking out over the scene of cracked cement, weeds, and cottonwood trees blowing fluff all around. It was a landscape from an anti-totalitarian fairy tale. There were dumpsters. There were long tubes in the entryway in which to pour the trash – musorprovody. Garbage conductors. Drunk men had marked the territory thoroughly, like feral cats. If there were any actual cats they were starving.

There was nothing to eat and no visible place to get anything. Up from the scrubby horizon poked the spires of the local neighborhood attraction, the BDHX (Vay Day Enn Kha) – formerly a permanent exhibition of Soviet agricultural prowess. (Look at this fine rich soil preserved in plexiglass! Look at this dried up corn!), now used mainly for car showrooms.

I remember drinking vodka to retreat from the horror (and thinking this was a new idea, although obviously, duh), and talking to a former prostitute who was very enthusiastic in the feminist direction. Da. Do svidania. Please go away.

2. Sawdust Soup and Bucket Latrine

Whose idea is it to make girls in their junior year of high school stock up on war narratives (in history class) and Holocaust survivor tales (in English)?

Dear impressionable fledgling person-let,

You already know that the world is a hostile place, that people are falling all over themselves to humiliate and ridicule you, to pull the wool over your eyes and hurt your delicate feelings, to tromp on your sensibilities and damage your hearing – but it gets much worse. Ha, ha. You are weak.

3. Knitting

The sad, unfortunate thing I am thinking of will go away if I just knit another 5 rows of this lumpy scarf. Okay, 10 rows. Acrylic yarn really isn’t so bad in this light, and at that price?

Another 25 rows would do it. 50? When my limbs are numb and my lips are tingling from lack of blood flow, and my wrists are thinking about carpal tunnel as I flick the needles, then I’m almost there. But wait, is the scarf as long as the person I am not thinking about is tall? No? Better keep going.

I see that the examples amuse me because they come from the Black Forest of youth. The melancholia of middle age is a different scale. Empty baby hats. Small children in the ER. Elders losing their marbles. Reading glasses. Not funny. Maybe when I’m older these categories of thought will be real knee slappers, but for now, no.

Good Grief

When I was booking up the 101 away from Grandma's funeral in San Luis Obispo, I thought, good, now I can lie down and cry for a week. There never was any good time to let it all out. I could have cried a lot more at the service, but even waterproof mascara has its limits, and besides I wanted to keep a hold of myself because I knew I had to get up and read three-quarters of the way through.

Crying doesn't satisfy, though. You end up with a nose so stuffy your body aborts the mission -- "Mayday, mayday! Abandon ship on the higher emotions because we aren't getting enough oxygen up here!" Then the bottled-up anguish collects around your brain as a crust of unsavory biochemicals, and, bam, one side of your cerebral cortex is a rotten melon oozing with maggots and the pain is so excruciating you'd like to get at a machete so you can hack it off. It might work to scrape away the worst bits, but the toxic mold has probably already spread its spores to the other side and they are going to go off in a minute.

So there are no rational and tidy ways to clean up after grief -- no easy 12-step program (Denial. Check.), no modern social customs to ease the burden (wailing mourners for hire). I was sure for three days during the week they stopped feeding Grandma that if I could just get my hands on some real Victorian mourning jewelry I would feel better. I bought some genuine jet beads and hand-knotted a necklace; I did web searches for terms like "cabochon" and "bog oak", but these were only distractions and Grandma died just the same.

Idealism gets tangled up in there, in all the tiny beads and the pocket packs of Kleenex. The imaginary Grandma who did not have Alzheimers and was secretly even more wise and analytical than the Grandma I knew probably had lots of coherent things to say which I will never get to hear. Only the Grandma in my head can say those things now, and it's possible she's the one who's been saying them all along.

The mind plays tricks. When a white-haired person stepped out of the hall and into the hubbub of the post-funeral supper, the corner of my mind thought, "Oh good, Grandma's here now. She shouldn't miss this." And I reflect that the human life span is shorter than our brain capacity would seem to require -- what, bow out now? Don't you want to see how everything turns out?

Crying still seems like the only option, although crying all alone seems too solipsistic and unproductive, and crying with other people seems like barking up the wrong tree. There is only one person who would really "get it" -- the affront of this loss and the nuances of what it all means. There's one person it would be great to talk it all over with and work through it and while we're at it, figure out the rest of the family. Oh, wait a minute.

Marietta Who?

Marietta Holley was a dyed-in-the-wool North Country local who made a name for herself in literature. It seemed farfetched, even in the mid-nineteenth century, that the daughter of religious rural folk from the area near Adams, New York would grow up to write, but she did it anyway. One crabby old woman in the family's social circle cackled at her and told her she wouldn't earn enough to pay for the postage on her letters. But either in spite of or because of the naysayers, she wrote, and her work sold like hotcakes in the 1870s and 80s. She made enough of a living to build a Queen Anne mansion for herself on the site of the old family homestead, and the friendly, supportive citizens of Adams took to calling it "Holley's Folly."

Holley was a feminist, and her shtick was to argue for reform in the voice of homely, hefty, folksy goodwife named Samantha Allen. Samantha tries to talk sense into people in the down-to-earth dialect of her native village. Certain of her locutions are uncannily familiar -- she talks just like my Grandma Guthrie. Unlike Grandma Guthrie, however, Samantha shakes her head at the overblown conservatism of her fellow citizens. She's a common-sense progressive, but not a radical -- she promises that giving her the vote won't make her shirk her duties where pies and laundry are concerned.

The Samantha novels were bestsellers, and Holley was put in the category of a "regional humorist" (like Mark Twain). She kept churning out Samantha novels long after literary fashion had moved on to other things.

I find it fascinating that she was able to create a literary life for herself against the odds, to set up her own independence, to define her own politics. I doubt it would have been possible for her to launch herself any higher than she did -- not without cutting ties to Adams and moving to the big city. In the end, she did not turn out to be a female Mark Twain, but she did pretty well. Are there any modern Marietta Holleys coming out of Adams today? If there are, how long do they stick around after graduation?