1950 Dust Jacket from New Directions |
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Books: Physical Perfection
I'll never become a Kindle kind of reader, an electronic-books user, because I love to touch and look at books. Sometimes they can be perfect in every way, even in size, such as this 4-1/2 X 6-1/2" edition of an essay on Baudelaire by Sartre. And perfect graphically too ... pre-Elvis pink and black!
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Happy Birthday to George Harrison
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Edna St. Vincent Millay - Feb. 22, 1892 - Oct. 19, 1950
Historical marker along Route 9 |
Steepletop; Austerlitz, New York |
For me, she was a lucky start; I'm so glad the graphics of that paperback caught my eye -- Millay was the perfect poet with whom to set out on the road to an appreciation of the beauty of precisely arranged words. Eventually, in 1963, a friend named Richard English gave me a hardback copy; it's worn but loved:
At Steepletop the docent asked we four pilgrims -- which, besides myself, included my dear friend Ellen Miller, and another couple whom we did not know -- asked how each of us had first come upon Millay. I spoke about buying her in paperback in Germany, and added that I had not been a good student, but had learned punctuation and a good deal of grammar through my close reading and re-reading of Millay. "I can still remember some of her poems by heart," I said, and recited a sonnet. I was moved to realize myself standing in Millay's very home, a place I had imagined and longed to visit for over fifty years. I was moved to be saying the first of her poems I'd memorized, whose words have never fallen from my mind; and I was mindful, too, of the desolative nature of the poem's sentiment, so that, as I recited, my eyes welled with tears; I played to my tiny crowd; I managed to manage every enunciation and emphasis perfectly:
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
The docent, obviously charmed, turned to the other museum official, a woman who was (I believe) a curator, and said, "We'll have to have him back to recite at ...."
I forget at what -- some sort of special event at Steepletop. I'm sorry I don't recall the docent's name but am glad the picture I took of him (above) shows his warm and welcoming face which indicate his pleasant demeanor. And I wish I had his curly hair.
I forget at what -- some sort of special event at Steepletop. I'm sorry I don't recall the docent's name but am glad the picture I took of him (above) shows his warm and welcoming face which indicate his pleasant demeanor. And I wish I had his curly hair.
I don't remember the exact words -- it was in the sixties that I read Millay's Collected Letters, but when her husband Eugen died the postmistress sent her a note of sympathy. "I can't believe I'll never see him coming down the hill again to fetch the mail," she wrote. Millay responded: "Yes, and I can't believe he won't be coming up the hill either."
First Day Issue Millay stamps; postmarked Austerlitz and St. Vincent's Station, N.Y.; July 10, 1981 |
Below is her obituary from the New York Times:
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, EDNA ST. V. MILLAY FOUND DEAD AT 58 - Noted Poet Succumbs of Heart Attack in Upstate Home, Body Discovered 8 Hours Later - WON PULITZER PRIZE IN ‘22 - Also Scored Success With Book for Opera, "King’s Henchman," and "The Harp-Weaver" - Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES - AUSTERLITZ, N. Y., Oct. 19 - Edna St. Vincent Millay, the famous poet, was found dead at the foot of the stairs in her isolated home near here at 3:30 P.M. today. Her physician said she died of a heart attack after a coronary occlusion. She was 58 years old. She was dressed in a nightgown and slippers when her body was found by James Pinnie, a caretaker, who had arrived to fix a fire for the evening. The Columbia County coroner estimated that she had been dead for eight hours. Her nearest neighbor lived a mile away. Miss Millay had lived alone in the Berkshire hills near the Massachusetts border, ten miles southwest of Chatham, N. Y., since her husband died on Aug. 20, 1949. He was Eugen Jan Boissevain, a retired New York importer. Spokesman for Three Decades - Edna St. Vincent Millay was a terse and moving spokesman during the Twenties, the Thirties and the Forties. She was an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village when she wrote what critics termed a frivolous but widely known poem which ended: My candle burns at both ends, It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, It gives a lovely light! All critics agreed, however, that Greenwich Village and Vassar, plus a gypsy childhood on the rocky coast of Maine, produced one of the greatest American poets of her time. In 1940 she published in THE NEW YORK TIMES Magazine a plea against isolationism which said, “There are no islands any more,” and during the second World War she wrote of the Nazi massacre of the Czechoslovak city of Lidice: The whole world holds in its arms today The murdered village of Lidice, Like the murdered body of a little child, Innocent, happy, surprised at play. Before this, when Miss Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1922, her work. had become more profound and less personal as she grew out of the “flaming youth” era in the Village. The nation and the world had become her concern. Was Raised in Maine - Miss Millay was born In Rockland, Me., on Feb. 22, 1892, in an old house “between the mountains and the sea” where baskets of apples and drying herbs on the porch mingled their scents with those of the neighboring pine woods. She was the eldest of three sisters, brought up by their mother, the former Cora Buzelle [sic]. Of the younger sisters, Norma became an actress and Kathleen a writer, whose first novel, published in 1927, was succeeded by fairy stories, short stories, plays and verse. Floyd Dell, novelist and unofficial historian of the Village in the early Twenties, has written how the mother worked to bring up her daughters in “gay and courageous poverty.” Edna, the tomboy of the family, was usually called “Vincent” by her mother and sisters. Her talent was recognized and encouraged and poetry was read and reread in the household. At 14 she won the St. Nicholas Gold Badge for poetry, the first of many honors. In the poem that gave its name to her volume, “The Harp-Weaver,” some have discovered the inspiration of her poor youth and her mother's devotion. Edna entered Vassar late. She was then 21 years old, but when she was 18 she had finished the first part of her first long poem. “Renascence” and at 20 had ended it. It was published in a prize contest, which incidentally, it did not win. Sonnets and lyrics followed while she still was in college. She was graduated In 1917 and came to live in the Village, remaining for years, something of a tradition in her college. Miss Millay, says Floyd Dell, was in those days “a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine,” young, red-haired and unquestionably pretty. But the Village was the wartime Village, and Miss Millay took the radical stand. John Reed, Communist and war correspondent, was among her friends. Inez Milholland, feminist leader, to whom the sonnet "The Pioneer” is a tribute, was one of her admirers. In a play, “Aria da Capo,” written in 1921, she expressed her hatred of war, and it has been recorded that she haunted court rooms with her pacifist friends, reciting to them her poetry to comfort them while juries decided on their cases. With Provincetown Players - At first poetry in Greenwich Village did not pay, and Miss Millay turned to the theatre, briefly. She acted without pay with the Provincetown Players in their converted stable on Macdougal Street and got a part in a Theatre Guild production. For some time she did hack writing for magazines under a pseudonym. It was her second volume of verses, “A Few Figs From Thistles,” that turned national attention to the nine-foot-wide house on Bedford Street where she lived. There followed “Second April” in 1921 and “The Lamp and the Bell” and a morality play, “Two Slatterns and a King,” in the same year, and in 1922, with the Pulitzer Prize, her position as a poet was established. “The Harp-Weaver” was published In 1923, and then the Metropolitan Opera House commissioned Miss Millay to write a book for the score of an opera composed by Deems Taylor. For her plot she went to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Eadgar, King of Wessex, a story not unlike that of Tristan and Isolde, and the result was “The King’s Henchman,” called by one writer the most effectively and artistically wrought American opera ever to reach the stage. It was produced at the Metropolitan Opera as the most important production of the 1927 season, with Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Johnson and Florence Easton, and later was taken on an extensive tour. Within twenty days of the publication of the poem in book form four editions were exhausted, and it was calculated that Miss Millay’s royalties from her publishers ran to $100 a day. In the summer of 1927 the time drew near for the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzettti, Boston Italians whose trial and conviction of murder became one of the most celebrated labor causes of the United States. Only recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, Miss Millay flung herself into the fight for their lives. (New York Times, Oct. 20, 1950).
Her grave is on the grounds of Steepletop, which comprise some 200 acres. Although it was June when Ellen and I were there it was a cold and rainy day, and the grave is placed a good distance through a woods. We lost our way a couple times but -- owing Edna St. Vincent Millay a huge amount of homage -- there was no giving up.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
RIP: Tura Satana - July 11, 1935 - Feb 4, 2011
Tura Satana, on right. |
Of her performance in Russ Meyer's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" Tura Satana said it was convincing because she was essentially playing herself. "I was getting rid of a lot of anger," she said. "A lot of things when I was growing up and as a young girl -- that anger I kept inside of me all those years -- I think I finally let it loose."
I saw the movie at a great birthday party in the late seventies.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Valentines Forever
Sisters Pat (in top photo) and Dorothy (w/me in bottom photo), wonderful friends when I lived in Michigan and wonderful friends still. They are part of a large extended family of Lebanese descent; if you were lucky enough to get invited to one of their family gatherings there would be thirty or forty or fifty people there, and it would probably be a backyard picnic, and the sun would be shining, and the food would be southern Mediterranean, and though you might be pretty much a stranger to most of Pat & Dorothy's relatives, each and every single one of them possessed extraordinary warmth and made you feel welcome and made you feel special. It was enough to make you want to move to Beirut (which in bygone days was thought of as the Paris of the Mideast) or at least to have Lebanese blood flowing through your veins.
I want their sweet and beautiful niece Julie to be my Valentine also, but I have no photo of her.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Alan Bennett on Denton Welch
This is a 'thank you!' to Joan who in a comment on my Nabokov post gave me a link to Alan Bennett's 2004 review in the Manchester Guardian of a biography of Denton Welch, by one James Metheun-Campbell. I'm crazy about both Bennett and Welch, and in Bennett's review I loved: "The nearest [Welch] had come to active service was in the battle against beige, so it was fitting that in June 1945 he should have had a picture in the Victory number of Vogue, 'a rendering of a room in his cottage in Kent, where color plays an important part.' He says: 'Do not think that brilliant colour is difficult to live with. It is always stimulating and refreshing; and change to a neutral-toned, colourless room would be exhausting, lowering, and depressing.'"
In the 70's and 80's I hung with a crowd that included a guy named Seymour Avigdor; I think he was a fabric designer; he lived in a fabulous loft in Manhattan. He had an amazing talent at decorating -- and though this has nothing to do with Welch, and nothing to do with Bennett, I like to add a picture or two with each of my posts so, below, I'll put up a picture I took of my friend Channing Wilroy at Seymour's; the background indicates Seymour's boldness and astuteness with color and design. I like to think that if Denton Welch could have walked into Seymour's loft he would have marveled and approved. And, on the left, a photo I took of Seymour and his dog Endust in Seymour's galley kitchen.
Seymour Avigdor |
Channing Wilroy |
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Vladimir Nabokov - Apr. 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977
I love this Nabokov guy! And I loved all 1400-or-so pages of Brian Boyd’s excellent two-volume biography, pictured below, of him. I’ve culled all anecdotes and quotes in this post from Boyd’s work.
I wish fate had arranged that Nabokov would have been my friend. He was brilliant. He loved languages, was fluent in at least four, and his vocabularies and precisely correct grammar in all four languages was probably superior to that of 99% of those for whom English, German, French, or Russian was his/her native tongue.
There were major upheavals in his life. He was born in St. Petersburg, where his father, an amazingly progressive member of the Russian judiciary, was a political figure. They were driven from their homeland by the Bolsheviks; like thousands of other Russian refugees from Communism the Nabokovs settled in Berlin. Here Nabokov’s father was killed at a political event … not for his own views … but while trying to prevent the assassination of someone whose views he was not particularly in sympathy with.
It was in Berlin that Vladimir Nabokov met Vera, a Jewish woman whom he would adore for the rest of his life. Vladimir and Vera produced a son, Dimitri. And too, in Berlin, Nabokov wrote several novels in Russian; inasmuch as there was a large community of Russian exiles in Berlin, he made a precarious but usually decent living from his writings, which included poetry and journalism. Then, as the Nazis rose to power, Nabokov fled to Paris with his family. Eventually, when the German forces were advancing on Paris in WWII, the Nabokovs were forced to flee again -- initially to the south of France, and, from there, to the United States.
Here he began lecturing, teaching (at Wellesley and then at Cornell), and writing novels in English. After a couple of decades, thanks to Lolita, he became rich and famous, and he and Vera moved to Switzerland, where they resided in a hotel. “He knew clearly why he had never chosen to own a house, even in America: ‘The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my memories correctly – so why trouble with hopeless approximations?’ And, he added, he did not much care ‘for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things – perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth.’ Living in a hotel, he pointed out, ‘eliminates the nuisance of private ownership.’ Apart from memories, he hoarded nothing, not even good books. A hotel life, he said, ‘confirms me in my favorite habit – the habit of freedom.’”
(My friend Abby and I have dreamed of residing in hotels/motels for much the same reasons.)
(My friend Abby and I have dreamed of residing in hotels/motels for much the same reasons.)
“He never had the least interest in the window-shopping the grand-Rue [outside their Swiss hotel] offered: he might notice pedestrians or sound out the shopkeepers he had to deal with, but he had no curiosity about the goods on display. He preferred to stroll along the quay observing the birds, the trees, the water, the light, and perhaps a lady with her little dog. After the one occasion when he makes the mistake of entering a shop on impulse and buying some pearls, he turned his blunder into another standing joke: ‘I am going out. Can I bring you back something? Some bread? Milk? Pearls?’”
***
Nabokov was a marvelous punster. At the time of the Vietnam War protests, he asked a professor friend if the latter’s classes at Northwestern University had been disrupted by the student unrest. The professor told him that his classroom problems were not political. “I told him about a nun who sat in the back row of one of my lecture classes, and who one day complained after class that a couple near her were always spooning. ‘Sister,’ I had said, ‘in these troubled times we should be grateful if that’s all they were doing.’ “‘Ohhh,’ moaned Nabokov, mourning [the professor’s] lost opportunity, clapping his hand to his head in mock anguish. ‘You should have said, “Sister, be grateful that they were not forking.”
One of his closest friends in the United States was the eminent critic Edmund Wilson. When, early in their friendship, they were “out on a stroll together, Wilson asked Nabokov whether he believed in God. ‘Do you?’ countered Nabokov. ‘What a strange question!’ muttered Wilson, and fell silent.”
“[Nabokov’s] skepticism is ruthless,” writes Boyd, “his indifference to any religion complete. He refuses to rely on tradition, he shucks off the intellectually untenable and the emotionally indulgent, and he offers answers not as firm conclusions but as philosophical possibilities that force us to reopen doors we thought we had reason to shut.”
Wilson, famously curmudgeonly, “seemed to expect [his friends] to be charmed by his behavior, by the special Wilsonian tartness of judgment and independence of imagination. Even at an early state of their relationship, Nabokov detected this irrationality in his friend. Nevertheless he was deeply fond of Wilson, and almost from the start wrote to him with a warmth that Wilson seldom matched. To their common friend Roman Grynberg, Nabokov confided that with Wilson the ‘lyrical plaint’ that adorns Russian friendship seemed to be lacking – as it generally was, he felt, among Anglo-Saxons: ‘I love a violin in personal relationships, but in [Wilson’s case] there is no way one can let out a heartfelt sigh or casually unburden a soft fresh bit of oneself. Still, there’s a good deal else to make up for it.’”
Wilson and Nabokov, after years and years of friendship, fell out when Wilson, who had learned Russian so that he could read the great poet Pushkin in the original, had the audacity to criticize Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin.
***
When on a lecture tour early in his United States residency Nabokov found himself spending a few days at Spelman College, a liberal black women’s college in Atlanta. The President of the college was Florence Reed, “a vibrant, astute older woman who surrounded [Nabokov] with every attention and would become a long-term friend of the Nabokov family. He breakfasted with her every day, discussing everything from the Negro problem to telepathy. She told him he would have to go to chapel at 9:00 a.m., but he protested he was a heretic and hated music and singing. ‘You’ll love ours,’ she insisted, and led him off.”
***
Nabokov was intolerant of prejudice in any of its various versions. When he took his family for a vacation in New Hampshire, “Everything about the holiday was disappointing: a highway right beside the lodge; bungalows all cramped in one part of the grounds, and full of townies ‘out on the country’; shopkeepers; signs stipulating only ‘gentile clientele.’ In a restaurant where Nabokov noticed that phrase on the menu he called the waitress over and asked her if she would serve a couple who tethered their donkey outside and came in with their baby boy. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘I’m talking about Christ!’ he replied, and led his family out.”
On another trip, when headed for the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming, “one afternoon, quite exhausted, Nabokov asked Vera if they could stop in the next settlement. There they found a dirty little hut with two lockless doors at opposite ends, but no door inside for the toilet. ‘Where are you folks from?’ asked the landlord. ‘Upstate New York.’ ‘Good enough so long as you are not from the Big City. All sorts of folks come from there trying to Jew you.’ ‘What is wrong with Jews?’ asked Vera. ‘Oh, they always try to knife you, get the better of you.’‘Well, I am Jewish,’ she replied, ‘and I have no intention of swindling you.’ His smiles and apologies were too late, the local cafes too grimy, and the Nabokovs drove on to Sheridan, forfeiting the night’s rent to their righteous host.”
***
In his early years in America, Nabokov was eager for the novels he’d written in Russian to be translated into English and published. In a letter to the publisher James Laughlin he wrote, revealing a touch of chauvinism, that he wanted “a man who knows English better than Russian – and a man, not a woman. I am frankly homosexual on the subject of translators.”
When a certain man was suggested by Laughlin, Nabokov wrote: “I know it is difficult to find a man who has enough Russian to understand my writings and at the same time can turn his English inside out and slice, chop, twist, volley, smash, kill, drive, half-volley, lob and place perfectly every word.” But, Nabokov went on, the translator named by Laughlin, “will gently pat the ball into the net – or send it sailing into the neighbor’s garden.”
***
When he was teaching at Wellesley College, the school’s newspaper ran a profile on him: “Pushkin, Shakespeare and himself constitute his favorite writers. Mann, Faulkner, and Andre Gide receive the doubtful honor of being the three writers he most detests.”
Nabokov, reports Boyd, called the best-seller "'perhaps the worst form of propaganda, the propaganda of current ideas, easily digested brain food, fashionable worries.' He objected to any form of leveling or simplification. 'Brains must work the hard way or lose their calling and rank.'"
A friend asked Nabokov if he liked Proust. “Not just like; I simply adore him,” Nabokov replied. “I’ve read all twelve volumes [obviously the French edition] through twice.”
“He thought poorly of Robert Lowell as a translator,” writes Boyd. “In an exchange with Lowell in Encounter … on the subject of [Lowell’s translation of Pushkin’s] Onegin, Nabokov asked Lowell to ‘stop mutilating defenceless dead poets – Mandelstam, Rimbaud and others’ and later in the year he wrote to [a friend] expressing the hope that somebody would attack Lowell ‘for his illiterate and cretinic reworkings of poor, marvelous Mandelstam.’”
While he was living in Paris, a couple, Noel and Lucie Leon, invited the Nabokovs to dinner with ... James Joyce and Eugene and Maria Jolas. Lucie Leon in a later memoir wondered whether Nabokov might have been intimidated in the presence of Joyce. “Reading her memoir thirty years later Nabokov was amused to be accused for once of bashfulness rather than arrogance:
'...but is her impression correct? She
pictures me as a timid young artist; actually
I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid aware-
ness of what I had already done for Russian
letters preventing me from feeling awed in the
presence of any living writer. Had Mrs. Leon
and I met more often at parties, she might have
realized that I am always a disappointing guest,
neither inclined nor able to shine socially.'
'...but is her impression correct? She
pictures me as a timid young artist; actually
I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid aware-
ness of what I had already done for Russian
letters preventing me from feeling awed in the
presence of any living writer. Had Mrs. Leon
and I met more often at parties, she might have
realized that I am always a disappointing guest,
neither inclined nor able to shine socially.'
***
Critics’ appraisals of Nabokov’s work were usually rapturous. Typical was the rave in The New York Times Book Review of Ada: “A supremely original work of the imagination … further evidence that Nabokov is a peer of Kafka, Proust and Joyce … a love story, an erotic masterpiece, a philosophical investigation into the nature of time.”
Boyd, in the biography, presents synopses of all of Nabokov’s major works, including many short stories; he proclaims Invitation to a Beheading; The Defense; The Gift; Speak, Memory; Lolita; Pale Fire, and Ada to be masterpieces of the English language.
***
Nabokov credited his mother with inspiring him to be inspired. "[Nabokov] had wanted to call his memoirs [Speak, Memory] Speak, Mnemosyne, in honor of the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, and more specifically in honor of his own mother, who would lead her little son through the estate [in Russia] and instruct him, in conspiratorial terms, 'Vot zapomni [now remember],' as she drew his attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra [the estate's name]. She was the mother of his imagination: her instructions to him to hoard the present until it turned into the priceless past shaped his very being. She allowed him to daydream, she let him have all the time he wanted to pursue his butterflies [Nabokov was to become an avid lepidopterist] -- and in proposing the title Speak, Mnemosyne, Nabokov had also wanted to commemorate his love of lepidoptera by way of mnemosyne, a butterfly species he had chased at Vyra."
***
An early biographer of Proust, George Painter (and his work, like Boyd's of Nabokov, was a two-volumed effort), said his subject was "... intoxicated by his own facility." The same could be said of Nabokov.
Vastly different though they were in almost every other imaginable way as human beings, there are fascinating parallels between Nabokov's and Proust's writing philosophies; I lack the time and the intellectual vigor and, frankly, the intellect, required to compose a thesis on this subject, and so will leave it to someone seeking a Master's or a Doctorate -- but there are hints of it in some of Boyd's comments on Nabokov's writing:
"For Nabokov, the bounty of life is ultimately the bounty of the past; what we perceive is a 'form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.'"
"Life teems with the stuff of happiness, Nabokov felt confident, if only we can learn not to take our world for granted. That primary disposition ... shapes all his work, its curiosity, its openness, and above all its sense of grateful wonder. In an early story he tells us that an incidental character 'was a pessimist and, like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man.'* In an early poem the apostles feel revulsion at the worms crawling out of a dog's bloated corpse, but Christ alone marvels at the whiteness of the dead dog's teeth .... [F]or Nabokov art was the spirit that can see beauty in a butcher's carcasses, a spirit of detachment from the world's bustle, not to abjure the world but to look at it afresh,, to savor the priceless inutility and generosity of life."
"... [Nabokov] saw consciousness as incredibly complex, mobile, multichanneled, capable of an aside of thought or a stray conviction even at a moment of supreme stress, and always ready to be aware of being aware of himself. His style is psychology at its finest .... [H]e knew that it was impossible to transcribe the mind into a sequence of words when consciousness operates in 'the no-time of human thought,' varies in its levels of verbality, flicks from channel to ill-defined channel, or broadcasts simultaneously from several stations as signals well up and fade."
Early in The Eye [a short story] the narrator kills himself -- already this could only be one of Nabokov's worlds -- but apparently persists in his Berlin life by the momentum of thought, and becomes obsessed by an elusive new face in the old crowd, one Smurov, who turns out to be himself."
***
Nabokov is, in short, a literary feast; I have been gluttonous.
Cimetiere de Clarens, Vaud, Switzerland |
----
*I'm reminded of a line in Jim Harrison's novel Sundog: "If you think about it long enough, you'll find that the most exhausting part about human behavior is lack of curiosity."
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Albert Aldorado Luckenbill - Feb. 9, 1875 - Feb. 12, 1968
Grandpa Luckenbill, someone said, "was a small man but only in stature."* He was maybe 5'7". He wore suspenders to hold his pants up & sleeve holders to keep his cuffs from hanging down to his hands. His mustache was huge and bushy, seldom trimmed. No hair on his head in his old age but a white fringe behind his ears and on the back of his neck. He shaved with a straight razor that he sharpened on a leather strop. He trusted Grandma to shave the back of his neck with that same razor. She did it every Sunday morning. Grandpa claimed that he was bald from sitting in damp churches with his hat off, but his oldest grand-daughter never knew him to step foot in a church.
He loved the babies in the family, trotted them on his knee & sang this (now politically incorrect) song,though in his day no-one considered it improper. Grandpa would not have used skin-color to judge the character of anyone.
Buy a little wagon
Haul the baby out
Give him plenty cool fresh air.
Feed him on bananas
And he'll never get the gout.
Tie a yaller ribbon round his hair,
Bye-O-Baby, her's yo' daddy,
Up and down he goes.
Little black pickaninny
From way down in Virginny
And it's goodness how he grows!
The babies loved him back.
Grandpa gathered eggs on a chicken farm. No machines. He did it by hand. Cased them, also. He walked 4 miles there and 4 miles back, winter & summer. When a couple of his sons were grown and home from WWII they wanted to get him a bicycle. He couldn't ride a bicycle and didn't intend to learn, so told them it was hard enough to walk 8 miles a day and he wasn't about to push no damn bicycle. He made $18 a week. He did, at one time, get a $2 raise, so now was bringing home $20 a week. He could have all the cracked eggs he wanted. Grandma Luckenbill used to tell him to bring home a dozen cracked eggs if Homer (the owner of the farm) had any. Grandpa would grin and say, "If he ain't got 'em, I can crack 'em."
"He was one of the best euchre players around," my brother Gerald said. "None of us could ever beat him. It was like he knew every card in your hand. When he won he would get a great laugh out of it. One of the most gentle and caring people in the world."
--
*I didn't know Grandpa well and have relied on the memories of older siblings to describe him.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Iris Luckenbill Fitzgerald - 02/08/07 - 01/21/89
The little girl second from right in the front row would eventually become the best pie crust-maker in the world. She told me once that she wouldn't smile in this picture because she didn't like the boy to her right and didn't want to be sitting next to him.
In my late thirties, I stayed with her in Indiana from late October through Christmas and she made me a pie every single day; she'd have one piece, I the rest. I returned to Provincetown with about fifteen additional pounds. Someone, noticing the tight fit of my jeans, said, "I see your mother must have cooked you a lot of good food while you were home." "Pies ... just pies," I said.
Friday, February 4, 2011
A Reading Treasure
An aspect of the panic that set in when I realized that I would be spending a couple days off work because of my ice-slip was that I had just finished Brian Boyd's two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov, approximately 1400 pages (absolutely great) and had nothing new to read. Luckily there were a couple issues of The New Yorker (passed on to me by a friend at work) but they didn't last long. And I can always re-read some books from my shelves. Proust, for one -- I can open any one of the six volumes of In Search of Lost Time to any page and be immediately riveted and entertained. I can also always re-read something by Violette LeDuc, usually Mad in Pursuit. But the truth is that for over forty years my emergency-backup has most often been the book pictured above, which I bought new in 1968 for $6.95 -- a rare hardbook purchase; in those days $6.95 was a serious splurge, but what a great investment! There are several excellent essays in this collection but two in particular -- "Return to Tipasa"and "Between Yes and No" --I have read twenty times if I've read them once.
Camus is most famous for his novel "The Stranger". I suppose it's assigned reading in countless literature courses. Having been born in Algeria, he was the first person from the continent of Africa to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957), and one of the youngest. His blood, though, was European; a French father, a Spanish mother; so referring to him as the first African Nobelist is rather like presidential candidate John Kerry's wife, born in Madagascar, referring to herself as an African-American; the difference is that Teresa Kerry was born to wealth; Camus had a wretchedly poor upbringing, his father having been killed in World War I;and Camus was more Algerian than European in character and outlook.
I remember sitting in the Mess Hall in Germany reading in a front-page article of Stars and Stripes that Camus had been killed in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.
Laurmarin, Vaucluse, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, France |
Thursday, February 3, 2011
And then ...
Jodie and I step off the front step just after six a.m., as we do every work-morning, for what is, in the winter, just a clockwise walk around the block. There has fallen, overnight, some snow --hardly more than a good dusting. In the driveway, suddenly, I am on an ice rink .. one foot flies that-a-way, the other that-a-way, but, regaining my balance, I slide-step gingerly onto the dusty-snow-laden street. I test it .. it is safe .. no treachery of ice beneath the snowdust. And so our walk proceeds, turning right onto Schooner Drive, and then another right until we've reached the point where the undeveloped "park area" of the development begins, the place where I like to let Jodie off her leash so she can, in this mini-woods-like setting, run and sniff and p&p at her leisure. I walk on .. what am I thinking of? .. am I not paying attention, as I almost always do, to where my feet will be falling? ... I walk on around the curve. I can't remember what I was thinking of, can't remember having put my brain in idle, can't remember proceeding unthinkingly.
And then .. and the suddeness of it was astonishing .. I realized I was airborne .. straight-out, as it were, the toes of my boots pointing skyward .. and it had been on the ascent that I somehow noticed that, yes, the white I'd been walking on had, in a foot-wide swathe along the side of the road, given way to a narrow strip of the dusk-grey ice.
Whack! Flat on my back! And, secondly, but with the lesser force .. crack! .. the back of my head. The first sense of my situation is a fright that I have no breath .. the wind has been knocked out of me. This hasn't happened since I fell out of a walnut tree when I was about five
At last, flat out on the ice, a gasp naturally enacts itself and the depletion of oxygen begins a reversal. Then I realize I can't move. It hurts too much. It had certainly been, I realize, a hard fall. I try "feeling-out" which vertebrates are shattered, and then I realize that any sort of broken bone would be a greater pain than I was feeling, and I recognize that what I am feeling is not any sharp pain but huge and various sorenesses. I try again to move. I still can't and see that my immobility is in part because any leg or arm I try to use is just sliding on the ice. Finally, somehow, bending my knees (and thinking, ah, no broken bones in my legs or knees), I get myself turned onto my left side on the ice. The left side of my back is what is hurting the most. Still I can't rise. No way can I rise.
I am helpless. I am an ungainly sprawl along a corner of a road in the dark. How long will it be before I am discovered? And will the discovery of me be in the form of being run over? Bump .. bump .. a driver puzzling out 'what the hell was that?' (Incidentally, counting this morning, I've forgotten a flashlight only about twice all winter.) I can't see Jodie, she's god-knows-where in the half-block of faux-wilderness. I wonder if she will come and realize I am hurt and will she come up with a plaintive barking?
Then I imagine an ambulance. Humiliation. My face isn't washed. My hair's standing every which way.
Finally I somehow scoot myself on the ice until I can reach over to the eight-inch high ridge of hardened snow left along the road by the plow. Using this ridge as purchase I get myself slid right to the edge of it. I pull myself onto it and .. with lots of pain and very slowly .. get myself turned over onto my knees. Now Jodie has arrived to stare at me, and sniff, and wonder, I suppose, what the hell her co-pack leader is doing on his hands and knees in the crusty snow. Slowly, soreness by soreness,I get myself stood up. With a crooked back I begin gingerly-stepping toward home. I feel slightly dazed and confused and scared at how quickly life can change. Then when I reach the point where I'm directly across from our house I look at it and see that .. hey-zu friggin' kreesto .. my car has been stolen! Was it not there when, four or five or six minutes earlier, I'd stepped out of the house? Had I really not noticed? How can you not notice your car has been stolen when you park it in the same spot day after day after day?
I am looking at the wrong house. My car is in the driveway two doors up.
In the house finally I give Jodie her slice-of-bread reward, and I go to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. I realize there'll be no going to work today. I may have to go to the hospital. I'm not sure I've straightened out my hurts from my sores, not sure I've recognized each place that hurts. Like Etta James sings -- all I could do was cry. That's how forlorn I felt. I have been accident-free my entire adult life (haven't I?) .. and now a divide has been breached. A fine control has been lost; aline crossed. I'll never be the same. At six o'clock I had not felt old. Now, weeping, hurting, with Jodie looking on concerned, vigorously licking my hand as if she would transfer healing from her tongue through my skin, I feel old and, yes, frail. Yesterday I was laughing. Today I am crying. I am pitiful.
I had promised my buddy Jack a lift to work this morning. I'll wait until the last moment before waking Mark to ask him if he'll get up and keep my promise for me. The moments crawl by. I feel my sore muscles stiffening. At close to seven I try to stop crying and I wipe my eyes dry. It's a huge agonizingly slow effort to stand up. I walk to Mark's door. "Mark!" He responds sleepily. "Will you help me?" "Yes! What?" "I slipped on the ice and hurt my back and I owe Jack a ride to work ... would you give him a ride for me?"
He jumps out of bed. "Are you okay?"
I am helpless. I've had to ask for help. I'm not okay. And drying my eyes was a waste. I start crying again .. maybe because I can't say I am okay because I'm not okay.
I lean against the jamb of Mark's bedroom's door to maybe change one hurt to a better hurt. Mark's asks me where I hurt and I assure him once and twice and thrice that, no, I don't think I need to go to the hospital because while it is sore it is not sharp pain and if there were a broken bone there would be sharp pain, and, no, I don't think my head hit hard enough that it is concussed ... etc., etc.
When he's left to pick up Jack I finally can get back into bed. Not easily. Not painlessly. But I get in first on my knees .. how I suddenly appreciate my creaky knees .. and let myself down; then it takes about five minutes as I millimeter-by-millimeter get myself turned onto my side. That hurts too much. Slowly to the other side. That hurts too much. Finally flat on my back. I never rest flat on my back. I know you're supposed to, and I try, but I just can't. Now I'm forced to practice the pose. And it quickly is evident that the longer I lay the stiffer my sore muscles are becoming.
Mark comes back and now is getting ready for work. He has brought me donuts and coffee. He sets an extra table by my bed and puts my laptop on it. The idea of reaching for that laptop is squelched when I try without success to reach for the coffee.
And do I want some extra-strength Tylenol?
No.
I who used to admire the idea of dumping chemicals into bodies am now afraid of things like Tylenol -- I trusted Stanley Owsley, the early (before it was even illegal) distributor of LSD, more than I trust the corporate-souled manufacturers of Tylenol. (My theory: A Tylenol would camouflage the pain and I'd be inspired to turn this or that way when I shouldn't, possibly resulting in damage.)
Do I want Mineral Ice? No. "I'll leave it here on the table in case you change your mind." The idea that I could reach any space of my back to apply Mineral Ice is laughable excepting that it would hurt terribly to laugh, but this doesn't take away from the sweetness of Mark's kindliness and care and concern.
So, abed, I lie, trying to to move various muscles. My mouth almost drops open when, thumbing through an unread New Yorker I come across an article by Joyce Carol Oates, "The Widow's Story". Whop! If anything can take my mind off my back it is something biographical from J.C.O.! I'm obsessed with her and her brilliance and her production of at least ten books a year (as it seems). The article is plenty long and it is poignant beyond poignant and it totally engrosses me and then I am deflated when I come to that little New Yorker symbol that indicates the end of a story, and in my deflation I realize that I've become so stiff that I can hardly turn in bed at all. Well .. I do manage .. wrenching and winching and scooting myself ever so slowly and hurtingly until, still on my back, my legs are dangled off the side. From this position I carefully and slowly raise my back upright and then cautiously get onto my feet. As I walk around I realize that this activity somewhat dissipates the stiffness. I shave. I take a shower. I put on fresh underwear .. making myself now, three hours after the accident, presentable to go to the hospital if needs be .. I put on baggy clothes .. and I walk back and forth from here to there and walk back and forth from there to here .. walking invalid-ly slow and not without some occasional teaching-moments of pain .. learning, for instance: do not reach for something .. careful, that dictionary (just how the hell is camouflage spelled?) is heavy .. do not sit in that lounge chair but in that one with the straight back.
And so here's how it stands now: I'm sitting at a desktop Apple. I'm sore but not in any great pain. It hurts to take a deep breath but I've learned to take them, if possible, in the style of that last segment of a lazy yawn .. is that clear? .. that quick inhalation that goes deep and, for today, results in only a quick second's worth of hurt. I suppose that deep-breath-hurt comes because of bruised or cracked rib(s).
My largest anxiety is that if I stay in one place or position too long I will get so stiff that I can't unstiffen myself. And if my whole-body-erection lasts for more than four hours ... well, as the ad on TV says, I'll have to call the doctor.
So - half an hour typing - stand, walk, try to stretch - then type some more.
So - half an hour typing - stand, walk, try to stretch - then type some more.
It's become about eleven. Having manned it up, I stopped crying hours ago.
--
Update #1: On the phone Abby .. "are you nuts?" .. urges me to get pain-killer pills. I call my doc and Mark picks up 30 50mg Diclofenac tablets on his way home from work. He's made a crockpot of great beef stew.
--
Update #2: Friday. I have a great sleep. Still sore. Abby brings donuts and laughs (ouch, ouch). I sit the afternoon away watching stupid TV, standing and stretching every half hour or so. When Jack shows up at 5 p.m. with some brownies, and to take Jodie for a walk, I amaze myself by being able to walk almost normally once I've gotten myself up.
--
Update #3: Saturday. All the great pain has diminished, it's all plenty tolerable. I drive to Orleans. I have a great sandwich at Jo Mama's. I go to the library and stay for about four hours, attending a couple different presentations in their auditorium (one on musical instruments; another on raptors). I'm beginning to think I'm really something! And then, back home, Jack brings chicken soup. I watch Indiana get beat by Iowa by one point. What's one more hurt?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)