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?