Saturday, October 30, 2010

A Piece of Me Has Been Living in the Bottom of a Filing Cabinet in England



Shortly after life had made of me a nineteen-year-old soldier in Germany, and an accounting clerk (as the Army termed it, though it was simple bookkeeping) in a hospital on a small base next to the town of Muenchweiler, I was befriended by my boss, Warrant Officer Philip Alden; later, more importantly, his wife, Ella, a beyond wonderful Jewish woman born in Britain, who had taken one look at me and decided I was "baby faced" and way too young to be away from home, became like a second mother to me.  I have never loved anymore more than I came to love Ella Alden.  My fellow soldier and closest buddy, Eddie Franklin, were added as honorary members of the Alden family, which included Phil and Ella's two pre-teenaged sons, Pip and Adrian.  I could write chapters about the good experiences we had, but today's mini-essay has a different point.

Ella would occasionally write an author whose book she'd enjoyed, often hearing back from them; she also sometimes wrote letters to newspapers, usually to The Manchester Guardian (she'd been born in Manchester).  These letters generally were just funny little anecdotes such as (the one I remember) about a rude bus driver she'd encountered on a visit to London.

In emulation of Ella, I wrote a letter to The Guardian myself.  I said (as best I can recall) that I was a U.S. soldier in Germany, loved getting letters, and had just read and loved T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and if any of my readers had any poems about cats I'd love it if they sent them to me.  Well, I got maybe fifty letters from a wide variety of people ... a few with a poem ... several from a man or a woman who just wanted to express appreciation to an American for the help Britain had received from us in World War II ... some from folks who just wanted to perhaps allay what they perceived as the loneliness or homesickness of a young man thousands of miles from his home.

I answered every letter.  Some wrote back; some became correspondents for various periods of time but all eventually -- some on my part, some on their part -- petered out.  The longest correspondence though was with a young girl from Manchester named Margaret.  Her letters were always welcomed; we wrote back and forth into the mid-sixties; I don't recall in detail exactly how this correspondence ended, but I have a vivid memory of writing her what I think was my last letter from a rooming house in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where I had a temporary assignment at that town's Western Union Telegraph Company office.  (Oddly, so many memories for me are accompanied by a memory of what book I was reading at the time, and I wrote Margaret (who had by then come to America to work as a nanny in Westchester County) that I'd just finished Flush by Virginia Woolf.  (A delightful book, by the way, a' biography' of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's cocker spaniel; rare light fare from Virginia's pen.)

This morning I received a message on Facebook:  "Hello, I don't suppose you are the George Fitzgerald that used to write to me in England.  If you are that George you would have been stationed in Germany doing national service.  Sorry to trouble you if you are not the right person.  Kind regards.  Margaret Blake."

I responded that I remembered writing to a Margaret Glasier; would that perhaps have been her maiden name?  Meanwhile, seeing on Margaret Blake's Facebook page that she was a novelist, I learned that she was from Manchester and seventy years old. It was beginning to come together.

I drove to Orleans, got my haircut, had a bagel, grocery-shopped.  Back home there was another message on Facebook:  "Hi George, This is amazing!  Yes it's me, Margaret Glaiser.  I live ... on the Lancashire coast now, and yes I did go to live in New Rochelle, near Scarsdale.  I was looking through some old papers and came across a stack of letters from you in the bottom of my filing cabinet.  I thought I would Facebook you and believe me you were the first person I contacted.  I remembered you originated from Indiana and it all sort of fitted in.  Yes, at last I am a writer.  Remember we used to talk about writing all the time.  You used to write the most beautiful letters.  I often wondered what happened to you.  Goodness, have so much to tell you and you must have loads to tell me.  I recently lost my husband of 38 years so have been so nostalgic about many things.  Goodness, this is so exciting."

Exciting?

So much so that I've had to take a valium.
---
Update Oct. 31:  We're on email now; we're new old friends.  I'm still agog but instead of a valium I'll drive someplace nice for a walk.







Friday, October 29, 2010

Old Diaries - Part II

Menton, France - Google Image

November 8, 1977 - Board train in Florence at 12:15AM.  Change at Pisa.  Ride along beautifully lit Italian-French coastline -- Rapallo, Cannes, Monaco, Nice, and even Menton, which my home town of Mentone, Indiana, is supposedly named after.  In compartment with me are three Greek seamen.  Talk a good part of the night away with the chief of them, the one who speaks English.  All handsome and charming and cheerful.  They are headed for Nice where they have a job of taking someone's yacht to Greece; the chief says I can come with them.  I think of taking up his invitation except that they won't ship out of Nice for three or four days.  [I've regretted not taking that chance of adventure ever since, but I couldn't imagine keeping myself occupied in Nice for that long.]

Reach Barcelona mid-morning.  I'm starved and eat three sweet rolls and drink two coffees in station snack bar.  Since I have a few hours wait before catching the train that will take me to Sitges I decide to leave the station and walk around aimlessly.  The streets are quiet and empty except for an occasional policeman, as if all of Barcelona sleeps in on a Sunday morning.  Or maybe it's that everyone but me and a few policemen are at Mass.

As I'm walking down one quiet street I see that I'm approaching from behind a policeman in front of some official-looking building.  His uniform is gaudy like opera costumery.  He's just ambling slowly.  Suddenly, surprised, he hears my footsteps behind him and swings around and simultaneously hoists a machine gun so that it is aimed at me.  Judging me harmless, I guess, he lifts an arm as if to dismiss his carelessness and laughs and presents the sidewalk to me with a sweep of his arm.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Old Diaries - Vienna & Trieste

Schonbrunn Palace, Vienna (Google Image)

11/2/1977 - Reach Vienna.  On the train from Munich the old lady sitting across from me in the first-class (thanks to Eurailpass) compartment munches all the way, as if her schnitzel bag is bottomless.  I've found a nice room for $12.  Hotel with broad curving stairs, double-doored rooms, and other touches of slightly faded elegance.  Want to see all I can of Vienna in just the rest of today and tomorrow.

Take a guided city tour ... Hapsburg caskets in musty church cellar ... Marie Terese and her husband, a love story, buried sitting up and looking at each other so that on Resurrection Day the first each will see will be the other.

Walk through Schonbrunn Palace, fabulous views of formal gardens, stunning rooms.

Small group of us in the large bus:  A young Israeli man; two Jewish women from upstate New York; an elderly and elegant Jewish violinist, born in Berlin, then twenty years in Tel Aviv, then New York City; and a thirty-ish German couple.  The elderly cane-using violinist is so sweet and I keep by his side, giving him my arm at times.  He insists on the Israeli speaking to him in English rather than Yiddish so that I will not feel left out.  It's easy to respond to his warmth and friendliness; he seems the epitome of culture.

I want to invite him to have dinner tonight but the ladies beat me to it and I definitely don't want to eat with them ... not that I was invited.

In a crowded restaurant where I'm having a lonely weiner schnitzel  the maitre 'd  comes to my table to say he has a lady to join me as no other seats are free.  That sounds okay but then she turns out to be an amazingly boring young lawyer from Indianapolis.  She turns me off, seeming impossibly hickish, saying rude things about the places she's seen in Europe.  Toward the end of our meals she says she has heard of Cape Cod and she is thinking of planning a vacation there next summer.

I give her a false name -- George Weitz -- and I can rest assured anyhow that she'll never locate me because she thinks Cape Cod is the name of a town.  I leave the restaurant sort of sad to think that I ended up across the table with such a bore, and had been beaten out of dinner with that wonderful intelligent Berlin-born violinist by the upstate ladies just because I didn't pop my invitation before they popped theirs.  

In bed I come across a funny anecdote in an article in Time magazine:  Upon learning of Darwin's theory in 1860, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester exclaimed, "Descended from apes!  Let us hope it's not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known!"

Trieste, Italy (Google Image)

11/4/77 - Trieste.  Early morning arrival by overnight train from Vienna.  I have an address for a pensione.  "Dove via Tivernella?" I ask the elaborately uniformed and handsome guardi in the Square outside Central Station.  He non comprende.  I speak it slowly. "Do-vay vee-a Tivernella?" It seems nothing could be more simple to speak but again he non comprende.  I pull out my notebook and write the name of the street.

"Aaaaah!" he goes very expressively, as if he's received a revelation, "Aaaaah!  Via Tee-ver-naaaaa-la!"   ... drawing out the words as if they comprise a musical phrase, understanding me now, but ... yes ... having no idea where via Tivernella is.

He stops a passerby.  The passerby points and says it is right off the left side of the piazzo we're standing on, not a hundred meters from us!

The guardi finds this uproariously funny and he puts his hand on my shoulder, laughs, blows kisses into the air that I guess are aimed at the street sign attached to a building at the beginning of via Tivernella, and says, "Buono!  Buono!"


After settling in my room I inquire at the station about a train to Zadar in Yugoslavia for tomorrow.  I'm told I would have to go via Belgrade, that it would be very expensive, so I must  take a bus.  I go to the bus station to buy a ticket but absolute amazing pandemonium prevails there.  I don't know what is going on but there are hundreds of gypsy-looking women and hundreds of Muslim-garbed women in black, only their eyes showing, sitting on the floor next to a dishevelment of boxes, bags, baskets, and trunks; or wandering around.  Odd:  not a man besides myself to be seen.  At the ticket-windows nobody lines up; everyone just crowds around pushing and shoving and shouting for position, waving their arms -- a hundred or more at each of the three windows.  It's totally crazy.  Chaos.  I just can't figure it out, can't imagine ever getting close to a ticket seller.  There's no one who seems anything like me to ask what is going on.  Any glance which meets mine seems menacing.  I can only imagine that any bus I might get on would be crammed to the gills with these people and me, just as this station is.  I can't do it.  I even picture myself getting smothered on the bus.  I had imagined that seeing Zadar would be a high point of my traveling but now I discard the idea of Zadar with barely a regretful thought.   I leave the bus station and decide I'll go to Florence tomorrow.  On a train.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Sylvia Plath - Born on Oct. 27th in 1932

Beautiful and smiling on a Cape Cod beach; August 1952.



Sylvia Plath to be inducted into Cathedral of St. John the Divine American’s Poets’ Corner: The Most Influential American Poet of the Last 50 Years*


New York, NY: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is pleased to present an evening of poetry and insight in honor of the induction of Sylvia Plath into the Cathedral’s Poets’ Corner. On Thursday, November 4th at 7:30pm, poets and Plath scholars will take part in the celebration. Participants include Poet in Residence Marilyn Nelson; poet Paul Muldoon; Karen Kukil, Associate Curator, Special Collections & Archivist, Plath Papers, Smith College, speaking on her extensive work with Plath manuscripts, both as archivist and editor of the unabridged journals; poet/scholar Annie Finch speaking on the meter and music of Plath’s poetry; playwright/screenwriter/actress Tristine Skyler; and louderArts Project poets Corrina Bain, Elana Bell, Sean Patrick Conlon, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, and Lynne Procope reading Plath poems.

The formal induction ceremony will take place at the Sunday Evensong Service on November 7th, at 4:00pm. The Very Reverend James Kowalski will preside over the unveiling of the stone, inscribed with the line: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary,” from "The Moon and the Yew Tree." Poets Carol Muske-Dukes, Rosanna Warren, Kelly Cherry, and Major Jackson will read Plath poems. As well as music by the Cathedral Choir, there will be performances – on both evenings - of Ariel: 5 Poems of Sylvia Plath for Soprano, Clarinet and Piano, composed by Ned Rorem in 1974.

****

The Cathedral American Poets’ Corner, founded in 1984, inducts one new writer each year. The first inductees were Walt Whitman, Washington Irving and Emily Dickinson. More recent inductees include Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Hayden and Tennessee Williams.

The Poets’ Corner is modeled on the Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, and in fact we have two poets in common: T. S. Eliot, an American who became a British citizen and W. H. Auden, an Englishman who took American citizenship. No writers are entombed within the Cathedral, as is sometimes the case at Westminster Abbey; rather, stone tablets are carved with names, dates, and a line from each writer’s work.

The Cathedral is proud to be rooted in our local genius. In historic terms—if not in current influence—American literature is still very young. To celebrate American poets and writers fulfills the Cathedral’s mission, and reminds us of the early and continuing verbal ingenuity, insight and dazzle of our countrymen. What constitutes good or great poetry will always be contentious, and rightly so. But we believe there is great poetry being written today, and that great poetry will be written tomorrow. Whenever the energy seems to falter, when our own era seems wan and diminished, new poets come along with something new to say. Walt Whitman wrote, “Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?” This is at the heart of the American experience, and at the heart of the Cathedral’s philosophy. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*And I'll be there.  And a hat tip to Peter Steinberg from whose website http://www.sylviaplath.info/ I copied the St. John's press release.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Lillian Hellman & Scoundrel Time


I ran out of new books to read, having reached the library in Orleans five minutes late Saturday, so dug out this oldie.  It was a great re-read, an account of her disheartening experiences during the McCarthy-era in the early fifties; she was one of those called to testify: was she a Communist? ... did she know anyone who was or had been a Communist?  The only response, in order not to rat out one's friends or colleagues, was to take the Fifth Amendment.  Lillian Hellman hated having to do this, wishing to speak only for herself, but if you opened your mouth even about yourself you became obliged to answer other questions.  She is famous for having said in a letter (before her appearance before it) to the House on Un-American Activities Committee, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

I did keep in mind that, since reading this book the first time, Mary McCarthy had (on The Dick Cavett Show) said of Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Whom to trust?  As much as I admire McCarthy -- a great essayist and a mediocre novelist -- I think I'll trust Hellman for truth before trusting McCarthy. 

Saturday, October 23, 2010

The Homecoming Queen by Julie Brown

It's Homecoming Weekend so I need to post the lyrics and the YouTube video of one of my favorite chilly autumn weekend songs:



The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun

Hooooo - It was homecoming night at my high school
Hooooo - Everyone was there, it was totally cool
Hooooo - I was real excited, I almost wet my jeans
Hooooo - 'Cause my best friend Debbie was homecoming queen

She looked so pretty in pink chiffon, chiffon
Riding the float with her tiara on, tiara on
Holding this humongous bouquet in her hand, bouquet
She looked straight out of Disneyland

You know, like the Cinderella ride, I mean definitely an E ticket, E ticket
The crowd was cheering, everyone was stoked, was stoked
I mean it was like the whole school was totally coked or something
The band was playing Evergreen
And all of a sudden somebody screamed

Look out!  The homecoming queen's got a gun!

{Refrain}
Everybody run, the homecoming queen's got a gun
Everybody run, the homecoming queen has got a gun

Debbie's smiling and waving her gun
Picking off cheerleaders one by one
Oh Buffie's pompom just blew to bits
Oh no, Mitzie's head just did the splits
God, my best friend's on a shooting spree
Stop it, Debbie, you're embarrassing me
How could you do what you just did
Are you having a really bad period

{Refrain}

Stop Debbie, you're making a mess
Powder burns all over your dress

An hour later the cops arrived
By then the entire glee club had died, no big loss
You wouldn't believe what they brought to stop her
Tear gas, machine guns, even a chopper
"Throw down your gun and tiara and come out of the float"
Debbie didn't listen to what the cop said
She aimed and fired and now the math teacher's dead
Oh it's really sad but kind of a relief
I mean, we had this big test coming up next week

{Refrain}

Debbie's really having a blast
She's wasting half of the class

The cops fired a warning shot that blew her off the float
I tried to scream "duck" but it stuck in my throat
She hit the ground and did a flip, it was real acrobatic
But I was crying so hard I couldn't work my Instamatic
I ran down to Debbie, I had to find out
What made her do it, why'd she freak out
I saw the bullet had got her right in the ear
I knew then the end was near

So I ran down and I said, in her good ear, "Debbie, why'd you do it?" She raised her head, smiled, and said "I - I did it for Johnny." Johnny? Well like who's Johnny? Answer me, Debbie, who's Johnny? Does anybody here know Johnny? Are you Johnny? There was one guy named Johnny but he was a total geek, he always had food in his braces. Answer me, Debbie, who's Johnny? Oh God this is like that movie Citizen Kane you know where you later find out Rosebud was a sled? But we'll never know who Johnny was because like she's dead.

(Refrain)

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Who's Your Daddy?

When the phrase "Who's Your Daddy?" was used as a taunt between the Red Sox and the Yankees a few years back I couldn't really imagine what it really meant.  I played with it and, being from Indiana, changed it and referred to myself as "Hoosier Daddy" at work even though I'm not a father.  I thought I was totally cool but then Wikipedia says that "Who's Your Daddy?" became, in Indiana, "Hoosier Daddy" -- referring to Bobby Knight -- long before the Red Sox and Yankees began using it and long before I transformed "Who's Your" to "Hoosier".  Wikipedia traces it back to the song "Time of the Season" by the Zombies, and says it indicates dominance by those shouting it even if there's nothing in the song that bespeaks dominance

Anyhow, not a daddy, I still liked it when, in my late thirties, some of my young friends who were in their late teens called me Dad or Daddy or Poppy.

(It occurs to me that I can come up with some really lame non sequiturs in composing a few words to accompany an illustration that I want to post -- lame self-indulgence.  Oh, well.) 

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Great Alan Bennett


Alan Bennett, who was a member of the sixties comedy group called Beyond the Fringe, is one of my favorite contemporary writers, so when I learned some time ago that he had a new memoir coming out, I was probably the first to put myself on the list for it at the Cape Libraries (I order books online and they're waiting for me at the desk when I go to the Snow Library in Orleans).

Though in other books he's been laugh-out-loud funny, A Life Like Other People's is somber; it contains perfectly and fetchingly drawn portraits of, for the most part, his family -- his parents, grandparents, two aunts -- all with their quirks, all sympathetically presented; the book also contains Bennett's accounts of their various illnesses and deaths, including his mother's fall into dementia and decades of living in a what we call a nursing home; sadnesses and frustrations live on every page, but all is revealed in perfect pitch; Bennett's compositional skills are marvelous.

Still, although I've quoted it in an earlier post about Bennett, I'm going to quote a paragraph from one of his earlier memoirs; it struck me as so hilarious when I first read it that I had to immediately telephone one of my brothers, whom I knew would also find it hilarious, and read it to him.  Bennett's writing about the funeral of an aunt:

The funeral is at a featureless crematorium in Lytham St. Annes. Afterwards we go for a lunch to a roadhouse on the outskirts. I sit next to my grandmother's niece, Cousin Florence, who keeps a boarding house in Blackpool. A down-to-earth woman, she eats a large meal of lukewarm lasagna, then puts down her fork and says, "Well, that's the first time I've dined off brown plates." Grief is not much in evidence, though with Cousin Florence it is hardly to be expected. Her husband's name was Frank, and six months before we had had a two-page letter filling us in on all her news. Halfway down the second page came the sentence: "Frank died last week, haven't we been having some weather?" Seldom can a comma have borne such a burden."


My brother and I have since paraphrased similarly gigantically burdened commas at any opportunity, and get to roar with laughter all over again. 

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Some Company I Kept; Muenchweiler, Germany; 1960

It's hard to believe that I was ever the sort who'd get an invitation into the home of nuns, but I was, for an Easter season lunch.  My Army buddy, Eddie Franklin, and my boss's wife, Ella Alden, who was like a mother to me while I was overseas, had been befriended by the local nuns.  The following is typed on the back of this photograph:  "The nun on my right is 'my sister' (my favorite one), Sister Monfrieda.  The one on the left of me is the organist, and the one down in front of Sister Monfrieda is the kindergarten teacher.  She is very pretty although this picture does not show it well.  She looks very young but has been a nun for around twenty-five years.  This was taken the Sunday after Easter at the side door of their home, Muenchweiler, Germany, 1960."

Sister Monfrieda had relatives in Indiana and thought that since I was from Indiana I must know them.  Her relatives were from Decatur, not exactly near Mentone, where I grew up.  She pronounced Decatur: Day-ka-tour.

Our friendship didn't last all that long.  Once they suggested that we could perhaps come up with some amount of money for something or other that we didn't exactly think was charitable.  End of friendship.


Monday, October 18, 2010

Scrapbook Cruising: The Oberammergau Passion Play

In an August 1, 1959, letter to my mother, mailed from the Muenchweiler Army Post in Germany, I wrote: "Did you ever hear of the Passion Play that is put on every ten years?  It is on next year and I plan to see it.  It is supposed to be the greatest play on earth.  It is about the latter years of Christ's life.  In history when the Black Plague was terrifying Europe, the people of this small town of Oberammergau in Bavaria promised God they would put on this play every ten years if they would be spared from the disease.  They were spared and have put on the play every ten years since 1634 [actually the play was not performed in 1770, when it was banned by Rome, nor in 1940 because of the war]!  The town is all Catholic and the rules are very strict as to who can play a part; they must be citizens of the town.*  Mr. Alden [my boss; I was a clerk in the Mess Hall of a hospital] saw it ten years ago and said it was the best thing he ever saw or ever hoped to see."

And so, the next summer, in Mr. Alden's gigantic 1956 Oldsmobile, I went  to Oberammergau with him, and his two young sons, 12 and 10, and my buddy, Bob Flanagan, who was from Jersey City.  It was a spectacle; the play lasted seven hours, with a couple hours break for lunch.  I still have the booklet produced for American soldiers:


We stayed in a gasthaus called Alpenblick.  It was astoundingly charming.  I wanted to just stay there for the rest of my life.


I bought a postcard of the character who played Jesus:


And I bought a postcard of the young woman who played Mary:


The play ended at about seven in the evening.  I then stopped in a shop to buy some film and there, working the cash register, was the mother of Jesus, just off the huge outdoor stage!  I asked her to autograph my postcard of her picture:


In another letter to my mother, this one dated May 15, 1960, I wrote: "I guess I never have told you about the Passion Play, but I hate to start it on paper now [I didn't have a lot of spare time; in addition to my Army job I also worked as a waiter in the small base club from five to midnight five nights a week].  One thing about the trip: we also visited the WWII Memorial Prison Camp at Dachau, Germany.  It was one of the camps where many Jews and Allied soldiers were tortured and killed.  Thousands, maybe even millions, were killed there.  It is kept just as it was during the war, except graves are marked with inscriptions such as TOMB OF THOUSANDS UNKNOWN DEAD.  The main way of killing was gas chambers and they are still the same.  The Germans are ashamed of this Memorial, especially the villagers of Dachau.  They wanted to destroy the place but the Catholic priest of the village said, 'No, let it always be a reminder of the horrors of war.'"  

Well, I wasn't much of a writer in those days, but my experiences were rich.  I saw, per my letter, what was "supposed to be the greatest play on earth."  Later, in Paris, I saw Josephine Baker perform at The Moulin Rouge, and "Madame Butterfly" at the sumptuous l'Opera; in Milano, at La Scala, I saw Tchaikovski's "The Queen of Spades"; in Venice I saw "La Boheme".  I saw the Good Pope John at close range at TheVatican.  For a rube from the cornfields of Indiana my eyes were opening.

To say nothing of smaller pleasures, such as back at the small club on the Muenchweiler Post they would often have touring British or German bands performing on a Saturday night (this was about the time The Beatles were performing in Hamburg!) so at a Christmas party one year I got to hear a female German vocalist singing "I'm dweaming of a vite Crease-moose" as well as "Wenus in Bluejeans."

*This from a website about the cast of The Passion Play:  'The entire cast consists of villagers who have lived in Oberammergau for at least 20 years. They must also be amateurs and people of high moral and ethical principles. Villagers also make the outstanding costumes. As no wigs are used, participants must grow their hair and beards for several months prior to the performances, beginning on Ash Wednesday 2009 according to the "Hair Decree."'

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Frances Sargent Osgood - 1811-1850

Mount Auburn Cemetery
A lyre plus a laurel wreath tops the gravestone of this poetess.  Someone at last Monday's Dead Poets Society gathering said that the lyre originally had five strings but that with each death in the family one string was removed.  I don't know ... five strings ... the poet and her husband had but two daughters ... whose death called for the removal of the fifth? ... and presuming one member had already died before the  marker was created ... well ... there's no telling ... I don't know ... perhaps I misunderstood or misheard.

Some in her circle believed that during a time of estrangement from her husband she struck up an affair with Edgar Allan Poe.  Rob Velella, whom I mentioned in Monday's post, who is most knowledgeable about Poe, thinks there was not an affair, but, rather, something like a doting friendship.  In Poe's poem "A Valentine" Frances Sargent Osgood's name is secreted; find it by taking letter one from line one, letter two from line two ... et etera.

A Valentine


For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines!- they hold a treasure
Divine- a talisman- an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure-
The words- the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets- as the name is a poet's, too,
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto- Mendez Ferdinando-
Still form a synonym for Truth- Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.


Frances Sargent Osgood

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Gruesome. Horrible Thought. Shocking.


EUTHANIZED DOG COMES BACK TO LIFE
As any pet owner can attest to, it was no easy task for Matt Olivarez to end the life of his 10-year-old family dog, Mia. But with spinal problems that left her barely able to walk, the veterinarian told Olivarez that there were no better options to ease her pain.
Olivarez watched as Mia was given two shots and declared deceased. He wrapped her in a blanket and took her home so the family could give her a burial. But the next day, Olivarez found Mia sitting in front of her food bowl, wide awake and obviously alive.
In a video on CNN, Olivarez expresses his frustration with the baffling situation: "What if I would have buried my dog alive? What if I had her cremated? She would've got burnt alive."
Now he is faced with the tough choice of if he should try to have her put down again, and witness the death of his beloved companion once more. "How do I explain to my kids I have to kill Mia twice?"



Friday, October 15, 2010

Eleven Words - One Poem

                              I let him sleep in my bed --
                              he stole my dreams.
                                    
                                       -- Ellen Miller


(My dear friend Ellen, living on St. Mark's Place (in the same block where Auden lived), wrote this poem.  I love it, and I love all the blank whiteness I can see surrounding it on a page; the empty space indicating all that needs not be said because these eleven words say enough.)

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Diana Athill and "Stet"


After reading a review of this book when it came out in 2000 I wanted to read it.  Then it slipped out of my mind.  And then I would remember it when I came across references to book editing but now could no longer remember the title of the book or the author's name.  (It must have been along in there somewhere that I began extensive keeping-of-notes as reminders, only to find myself with so many notes -- disordered, scattered, and often, when found, indecipherable -- that going through them to find something was arduous, and often futile.)  Then, not long ago, Diana Athill brought out another memoir and ... lo!

It is a delight.  Breezy, beautifully written, charming.  You can't help thinking that it would be great to have had Diana Athill as a friend (not that's she's dead yet, but ... her most recent memoir is titled Somewhere Towards the End -- note the italicized the!)  Here's a sample anecdote from Stet:


The director of Andre Deutsch Publishing, a firm of which Athill held a small share of ownership, was, of course, Andre Deutsch.  Athill writes of "the desperately boring ordeal" of hearing from him about his several love affairs, which seemed always to end in a heart broken, and of her frequent lending, over a period of years and years, of a sympathetic ear.  And then:

"At about the time he was going through his paroxysms of jealousy ... I fell in love with a man who had the courage, when he realized what had happened, to tell me that he was unable to fall in love with me. Even then I was grateful for his honesty because experience had already taught me a good deal about broken-heartedness, and I knew that the quickest cure is lack of hope.  If mistaken kindness allows you the least glimmer of hope you snatch at it and your misery is prolonged: but this man (this dear man whom I continued to like very much after I was cured) made it impossible for me to fool myself, so I was able to set about getting better without delay and in the end was left without a scar.  But although the process was steady it was not quick, and for about a year I had nothing to take my mind off sadness but my work, so that my evenings were often desolate ... Think[ing] of all the listening [to Andre about] his love troubles ... surely after all that I could bring myself to confess that I was going through a bad time and that an occasional evening at the cinema with him and the others would be very welcome.


"So I did -- probably, after all the screwing up to it which had gone on, in a tiresomely self-conscious voice.  And what he said, very crossly, was: 'Oh for God's sake!  Don't be so sorry for yourself.'"
***
Somewhere Athill mentions the English poet Stevie Smith, whom I, after a couple of attempts, have found to be unreadable, but the mention of Smith served to remind me that one of her poems has one of my favorite titles, which one could easily think had been thought up by Dorothy Parker:  Not Waving But Drowning.  (Though it's not exactly clear, despite its being the end-phrase of a few lines of slight disparagement about certain poets, it seems Athill agrees with me at least somewhat, writing that she "considered that 'Not Waving But Drowning' was the best known of Stevie Smith's poems because it was the best of them." 
***
For me, though, the most fascinating part of Stet is a chapter devoted to V.S. Naipaul, whose books she edited (but whom she found to be so fastidious in his work that he needed only slight editing).  I have read a great amount of material about V.S. Naipaul, am fascinated by the history of his rising from the dusty unworldly streets of Trinidad to a Nobel laureateship.  Generally, by all who are acquainted with him and who have written about him, Naipaul is apparently a first-class ---hole ... arrogant, rude, mean ...  unlikable.  (I find it uncomfortable to think of the dislike of the man who wrote The Enigma of Arrival, as perfect a "novel" as I've read, an all-time favorite ... and I put the word novel in quotes because the book strikes me as so authentic as to surely be not fiction but rather a chunk of exact memoir; repeated reading of it -- three times -- does not dissipate my pleasure; perfection does not cease to give pleasure.)

In 2001, the also-excellent writer Paul Theroux, after decades of close friendship with Naipaul, published Sir Vidia's Shadow, a devastatingly cruel portrait of Naipaul.  The treachery was stunning, shocking; while reading the book I often needed to pause and wait for my brain's blood circulation to slow.  Naipaul must have thought to regard Theroux as the Quentin Crisp character in The Naked Civil Servant regarded the gang of tough teddy-boys who'd viciously beaten him up in a London street: "I seem somehow to have offended you gentlemen!"

To stack cruelty atop viciousness, Theroux's book seemed timed to come out just as Naipaul's name began to be regularly bandied about as a potential recipient of literature's top prize. 

Diana Athill's thoroughly believable account of Vidia Naipaul's character -- published a year before Theroux's  -- is more succinct by far but hardly less devastating, and, while Athill is far superior in presenting a cogent understanding of the reasons behind the development of Naipaul's character -- as opposed to Theroux's simple depiction of it -- Athill's account lends credence to Theroux's just as Theroux's lends credence to hers.

After a few paragraphs about Naipaul's long-suffering wife, Athill writes: "... whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings, I used to tell myself 'At least I'm not married to Vidia'."  

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Story Chapel; Mount Auburn Cemetery; Cambridge



At yesterday's Mount Auburn Cemetery event, refreshments were served in this chapel.  Beautiful place to pew-sit sipping cranberry juice!

Monday, October 11, 2010

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Mount Auburn Cemetery


Sometimes I'm really nice to myself.  Today I drove to Cambridge for the above event.  The day was gorgeous ... sun-warmed autumn air, blue sky, and the spectacularly interesting Mount Auburn Cemetery.  About forty of us, poetry aficionados all, headed up by Walter Skold, the founder of The Dead Poets Society (http://deadpoets.typepad.com/dpsablog/), were treated to a guided walk to the graves of twenty-two poets; at each site one of the poet's poems was recited.  My favorites:  Walter Skold's reading of John Ciardi's "An Apology for Not Invoking the Muse" and a recitation of Maria White Lowell's "The Grave of Keats" ... Maria White Lowell, dead at thirty-two, was the wife of James Russell Lowell; another member of the famous Lowell family, the poetess Amy, said of Maria's poetry, "It is better than anything her husband ever wrote ... he always said that she was a better poet than he!"

The entire event was special but by far far far the most delightful aspect was the presence of "The Proper Ladies" -- Anabel Graetz & Deborah Goss, pictured below -- who have heavenly voices, and are adorable, and are cute, and are delightful.  At Julia Ward Howe's grave they sang her lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" ... at John Pierpont Senior's grave they sang his son James' "Jingle Bells" which, in the original, has a slightly different melody than what we're accustomed to.  And it was Anabel Graetz (on right in picture) who recited the Maria White Lowell poem.



Another treat was the presence of one Rob Velella, pictured below, who describes himself as "an independent literary historian".  He spoke at the grave of Margaret Fuller, an early-feminist and progressive-reformist. Velella has a head full of fascinating trivia about historical literary Boston


(Disclosure:  I took the photo of Velella but not that of The Proper Ladies; I swiped it from the Internet.)

Sunday, October 10, 2010

D.H. Lawrence


This biography riveted me; with its 418 pages of small-font print I thought it would last me two weeks, but it didn't last a week; it was hard to set it aside.  I kept thinking how cool it would be to have been introduced to Sons and Lovers or Women in Love or Aaron's Rod in high school instead of the painfully boring Silas Marner, but, truth be told, I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to anything introduced by the small-town/small-school English teachers I had.  They were not cool; I would not have allowed them to reach me.  Well, then, maybe Lady Chatterly's Lover? ... surely that would have gotten my attention ... no, not even that, unless it had been introduced by one of the only two teachers I liked -- Tony Pavlick (agriculture) and George Wendell Bryant (business and typing).

Lawrence, son of a coal miner, labored for years and years, producing book after book, without making much of a living from his writing.  His wife, Freida, child of German aristocracy, once commented, "Ach, Lorenzo, for a genius you are a poor ting." (Germans natives cannot, as a rule, master the th of English; thus Freida's thing becomes ting.)

Most interesting in The Life of An Outsider is its presentation of Lawrence's developing philosophies, such as the rejection of love and sex depicted in Aaron's Rod.

          Lawrence would develop these ideas further in the second of his psychoanalyis books, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which he drafted in Germany immediately after Aaron's Rod: 'We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess and intimacy ... We think it's so awfully nice to be like that, in ourselves.'  The theory thus grew (as he liked to thin it did) out of the passional experience of writing and engaging in fiction, so that the theory was both a confirmation of the fiction and a development away from it.  But both the fiction and the theory expressed the conviction that this was the end of the road for 'the vice of love'.  When he revised Fantasia eight months later, Lawrence would go still further: love becomes 'a piece of indecent trickery of the spiritual will.  A man should smack his wife's face the moment he hears her say it.  The great emotions like love are unspoken.  Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will.'  And this from the man who in 1912 had proclaimed himself 'a priest of love', and who had imagined that his life's work would be 'sticking up for the love between man and woman'.  He now makes himself the priest of freedom: 'one fights one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self whole again, and at last free.'  If only.**

*And, one hopes, Lawrence would think too that a woman should smack her husband's face the moment she hears him say it, but, considering Lawrence's views re: women, I doubt that his thoughts went that far.

** That If only from the biographer is priceless.



Thursday, October 7, 2010

Soapboxer

When I was twelve I built a soapbox and entered the Kosciusko County Soapbox Derby.  The carapace was black oilcloth.  No trophy for me though, and no picture of me on the next day's Times-Union being cheek-kissed by that summer's Mermaid Festival Queen --  for I didn't win even my first heat.  Also I didn't quite build it myself -- although the rules stipulated that the entrants had to build the soapboxes themselves, I wasn't anywhere near done and it was the night before the race.  Two guys in their twenties named Mervin Wagner and Jerry Kralis helped me finish it at the Kralis Brothers Poultry Plant, which was about four miles north of town, and which was my sponsor.  Guess I threw rules-following away early.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Anne Sexton - 11/9/28 - 10/4/74

Forest Hills Cemetery; Jamaica Plains, Mass.

Thirty-six years ago today
Anne Sexton parked her automobile
in her garage.
She shut the garage's door.
She went into the house.
Nevermind that the day
was warm -- October-pretty,
foliage-filled,
sunny, mild, perfect --
she donned
an old fur coat.
It had belonged
to her mother.


She returned to the car.
The engine was running.
Her next ride
was in a hearse.
Left behind:
years of tears,
marvelous verse.


Ringing the Bells
             -- by Anne Sexton












And this is the way they ring
the bells in Bedlam
and this is the bell-lady
who comes each Tuesday morning
to give us a music lesson
and because the attendants make you go
and because we mind by instinct,
like bees caught in the wrong hive,
we are the circle of crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,
who points at my hand
that holds my bell, E flat,
and this is the gray dress next to me
who grumbles as if it were special
to be old, to be old,
and this is the small hunched squirrel girl
on the other side of me
who picks at the hairs over her lip,
who picks at the hairs over her lip all day,
and this is how the bells really sound,
as untroubled and clean
as a workable kitchen,
and this is always my bell responding
to my hand that responds to the lady
who points at me, E flat;
and although we are not better for it,
they tell you to go. And you do.