Homeward Bound

This coming weekend I will be flying across the Atlantic to visit my family for a couple of weeks. This is the first time in many years that I will heading home at this time of year, and I am looking forward to it.

I always love spring in the Washington area. First, the magnolias start to bloom and then the cherry blossoms burst forth in their short-lived glory, after which there’s the wisteria and the azaleas to look forward to in April and May before the temperature starts to creep up into the unbearable range and the mosquitoes start biting. But I do miss the spring in Britain – the intense green of the rain-fed grass, the clusters of hardy snowdrops and delicate primroses, carpets of crocuses and of course the bright cheeriness of the daffodils – my favorite flower.

After suffering a spell of arctic winter weather in February, south-east England – where I’m bound – is forecast to experience more balmy temperatures at the beginning of March. So I’m looking forward to smelling the damp earth (because it’s bound to rain at least some of the time) and seeing Wordsworth’s golden trumpets “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” By the time lambing season arrives and the woods are full of bluebells, I’ll be gone but I’ll have still had a brief whiff of England as “blossom by blossom the spring begins.”

From Atalanta in Calydon (1865) by Algernon Charles Swinburne

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

The Republic of the Imagination

So what did Dickens make of America? To say he was disappointed would be an understatement. He had started out on his journey with a mental picture and when the reality did not meet his expectations he lashed out – first in his private letters home and then in print.

As he travelled down the eastern seaboard he was mobbed by fans wherever he went. At first Dickens was gratified by this, but it soon became oppressive. He had come to see the fabric of America and his own fame was getting in the way. But once he turned away from the main cities, the attention waned enough to allow him to be the observer he wished to be. He saw prisons, hospitals for the insane, reform schools, schools for blind and deaf children, factories, and industrial mills. By train, stagecoach, and steam boat, he ranged as far north as Niagara, as far south as Richmond, and as far west as St. Louis.

The tour was full of new and remarkable scenes - the pigs that roamed the streets of New York, the nation’s legislators spitting tobacco juice on the marble floors of Congress, the lonely, flat immensity of Looking Glass Prairie near Lebanon, Illinois, the wonders of Niagara Falls. But by the end of his journey, Dickens was profoundly disillusioned with the country he had wanted so much to know. He wrote home to his friend William Macready, "this is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination."

But for Dickens, the America of 1842 seemed a society completely in thrall to money and commerce, nowhere more evident than in the slave trade. On the train from Fredericksburg to Richmond, he saw a small human drama that encapsulated for him the horror of the legal traffic in humanity. “In the negro car...were a mother and her children who had just been purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old owner. The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness who had bought them rode in the same train; and every time we stopped got down to see that they were safe.”

Such scenes seemed to impregnate all Dickens’ impression of the young republic. On his return to London, he took only four months to write a book-length account of his trip, American Notes for General Circulation. In it he attacked the venality and dishonesty of the bulk of the American press and the coarseness of political life and expressed in vehement terms his abhorrence for the practice of slavery.

When American Notes was published, Dickens’ American fans felt betrayed by this unexpected onslaught of vitriol, and this was compounded by his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, in which he satirized the United States as full of conmen and described it as “so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers... that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with disgust.”

The national press railed against this attack on their national pride, and Dickens’ American sales slumped. But his subsequent novels – starting with A Christmas Carol in 1843 - were too compelling to be ignored, and his sales of the American editions (many of them pirated from copies originally published in Britain) were soon as high as ever.

It was a quarter of century before Dickens returned to the United States. In 1867, he embarked on a triumphant tour of the eastern states on which he read – or rather acted out – passages from his most famous books to sold out audiences night after night.

Two years had passed since the end of the Civil War, three since the Emancipation Proclamation. This was a much-changed America, and Dickens knew it. In a speech at a public dinner in New York gathering in April 1868, he spoke approvingly of “the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side ‒ changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.”

And he added a gracious admission that his first impressions may have been hasty and exaggerated. “Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first.” And he added this tribute to the American instinct for hospitality, “Wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect.”

At last, the hatchet was buried. The New York Tribune declared that “Dickens' second coming was needed to disperse every cloud and every doubt, and to place his name undimmed in the silver sunshine of American admiration.” The republic had been restored to its rightful place in the imagination of Charles Dickens.

Another Ocean in the Air



Charles Dickens by Boston artist Francis Alexander (1800-1880), Boston 1842



In honor of the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens today (February 7, 2012), I would like to share with you my favorite comic passage from his many published works. American Notes for General Circulation was his nonfiction account of his first tour of the United States in 1842. Dickens was 29 years old, already world famous for the serializations of his novels The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop. He was keen to visit America to observe first-hand the young republic in action only 50 years after its independence from Britain.

Accompanied by his wife Kate and her maid, he embarked on the steamship Britannia in the port of Liverpool on January 3, 1842. On the third morning, Dickens was woken by a shriek of alarm from his wife as the ship was flung violently around by very heavy seas whipped up a strong head wind.

“The water-jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head. …Imagine the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against her. Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air. Add to all this the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault; - and there is the head-wind of that January morning. I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast.”

Bad as this was, there was worse to come. On the evening of the tenth day out, the ship sailed into a gale-force wind that raged for twelve brutal hours. The passengers must have been afraid for their lives, knowing that many a transatlantic ship was lost at sea. Yet in the midst of this chaos, Dickens found himself “in a situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong a sense of its absurdity as I have now.”

His wife, her maid and a Scottish lady passenger “being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the moment, than a hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumblerful without delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa - a fixture extending entirely across the cabin - where they clung to each other in momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see them alll roll slowly down to the other end! And when I staggered to that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa for at least quarter of an hour without reaching them once; and, by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished by constant spilling to a tea-spoonful."  

No doubt Dickens was alone in seeing the comic side of the incident at the time. To everyone’s enormous relief, the storm abated the next morning, having torn away the covers of the steamer’s paddle-boxes, knotted the rigging, and smashed the life-boat “like a walnut shell.” The rest of the journey was uncomfortable but uneventful. The Britannia made landfall in Boston on January 22, 1842, giving Charles Dickens his first glimpse of the “republic of my  imagination.”  

To be continued.....



The Ebb Tide

I am on the tail end of my Robert Louis Stevenson reading jag, having made lots of detours along the way. I only have Treasure Island left to go, which somehow I managed not to read during my childhood. One of my favorites among all his stories has been the novella, The Ebb Tide, which he co-wrote with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne – a taut, gripping tale of three disparate men, two Brits and an American, who are down on their luck and stranded in Tahiti. Together they hijack a schooner and plot to kill a rich settler on an outer island and steal his priceless stock of pearls.  

At the beginning of the novella, there is a general description of the transplanted European in the tropics, a particular breed of seedy misfit who is familiar to us from the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and, more recently, Graham Greene:

“Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease. Others again must marry for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-colored dame supports them in sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps some relic (such a single eye-glass) of the officer and a gentleman, they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with memoirs of the music hall.” 

This is not too different from the catty description of Alexander Salmon (which I have quoted before here) by Herman Melville:

“This adventurer rose late, dressed theatrically in calico and trinkets, assumed a dictatorial tone in conversation, and was evidently on excellent terms with himself. We found him reclining on a mat, smoking a reed-pipe of tobacco, in the midst of an admiring circle of chiefs and ladies.”   

While Alexander Salmon was a displaced European who reinvented himself and his humble origins in Tahiti, he was certainly no slacker or parasite. While he acquired considerable amounts of land as a result of his marriage to Ariitaimai, it was as a result of his efforts that they came to yield as much value as they did. Because the war with the French had destroyed many of their crops and livestock, Alexander had to work extremely hard to rebuild his family’s livelihood. Luckily, it turned out he had an aptitude for farming and for business. By introducing the most modern methods of production, he vastly increased the yields of his wife’s coconut plantations and pig farms. He also began cultivating coffee and oranges, exporting his goods as far afield as Sydney and California.

Another way in which he was unlike the stereotype of the lazy European settler was his passionate commitment to his adopted home. With Ariitaimai, he helped to broker a peace deal in the Tahitians war with the French in 1846-7, after which he acted as Queen Pomare’s secretary and was closely involved in preparing the treaty that laid out the powers and responsibilities of the French Protectorate vis-à-vis the Tahitians and their Queen. And later he headed the Commerce Tribunal (or Chamber of Commerce) and served on the island’s Council of Administration. And in 1858, he travelled all the way to Paris in an attempt to bring to the attention of Emperor Napoleon III “actions [by the French authorities] which have led to wrongful treatment prejudicial to this ... blessed but unhappy isle.”  

So there was no sprawling on palm-leaf verandahs for Alexander Salmon. And when he died in 1866 – of dysentery at the age of only 46 – the whole island went into mourning. As reported in the official newspaper of the time, “in the various posts he had filled he had won the affection of many by the amenity of his character... that the entire population preceded by the Governor of the colony accompanied his mortal remains” to the cemetery.

There can be little doubt that Robert Louis Stevenson heard Alexander Salmon’s story from his son Tati while RLS was staying at the family home in Papara in 1888 (I have described here how RLS sat up in bed at Tati’s house scribbling the last section of The Master of Ballantrae). Perhaps it was too much of a success story to inspire the Scot – who preferred to write about his seedy colonial misfits wrestling with the good and evil within themselves in a far-off land.

The Last Flight

Velma's last day

Less than three months after we lost her sister, our brave sweet cat Velma has also left this mortal coil. A year of trying to find a solution to her rampant incontinence had worn us out, and when she started protest peeing around the house right in front of our very eyes, we began to understand she’d had enough.

Because her illness was the kind that wasn’t going to kill her by itself, the decision about whether her life should continue or end was entirely in our hands. I found myself overwhelmed by the responsibility. Who was I to play God - to decide the fate of another living creature, especially one whom I loved so much. I felt like a Roman emperor deciding the fate of a gladiator with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Above all, I didn’t want it to be about me and my convenience. Certainly a year of cleaning up after Velma’s accidents and taking her to various vets and getting up in the night to check on her had taken its toll on me in terms of anxiety, sleep, and dollars. But I wasn’t prepared to let her go as long as there were options to be tried, and as long as I felt like she was still enjoying life.

People would say “You’ll know when the time is right” and I thought that was just a kindly bromide. But it turned out that I did know. As recently as Thursday, she had a good day – full of joyous purring and sun-basking and giving the scratching-post a good seeing to. But it didn’t last. At 5am on Friday morning as I stroked Velma’s head after cleaning up after another series of leaks and pees, it became crystal clear to me that she deserved better and that neither I nor veterinary medicine could give that to her.

So yesterday morning, a gray day with an inch of snow and a coating of ice on the ground, Mike and I took Velma on her last journey. At the local vets’ office, the doctor gave her a sedative and handed her to me, calm and spacey and wrapped in a blanket like a newborn. We took our time saying our goodbyes as she looked up at both of us with her lovely yellow-green eyes, the pupils dark and dilated. When we were ready, the doctor came in and slipped the needle into the catheter, and peacefully and quietly Velma slipped away from her broken-down but still beautiful little body.

Now we can take the waterproof covers off our furniture and take away the litter boxes that were in almost every room. We can sleep through the night and we can plan the weekend trips we’ve wanted to take for a long time. And above all, I’m looking forward to having more time and psychic energy to get back to writing. But for now, all I can do stare out at the wintry sky and mourn.

Never More Will the Wind by H.D. (from Hymen)

Never more will the wind

Cherish you again

Never more will the rain. 

Never more

Shall we find you bright

In the snow and wind.

The snow is melted,

The snow is gone,

And you are flown;

Like a bird out of our hand,

Like a light out of our heart,

You are gone.

Some Strange Conflagration

Still from "The Eligible Bachelor" an episode of the Granada TV series Sherlock Holmes

I lived in London for almost eight years from 1980 to 1987 and had many memorable experiences, but I was about 20 years too late to experience a classic pea-souper fog. By my day, the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968 had cleared away the miasma of soot particulates and sulphur dioxide that used to envelope the city.

Those fogs – known as London Particulars – were lethal, especially to the elderly and people with respiratory conditions. The Great Smog of December 1952 is estimated to have killed as many as 12,000 people in just five days. Nevertheless, I would have liked just once to have been able to experience moving through a city swathed in that surreal, muffled darkness.

Robert Louis Stevenson includes a memorable description of a London fog in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde:

“A great chocolate pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually changing and routing these embattled vapors; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the black end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths... The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind.”

Fogs were very frequent in the early 1800s when Alexander Salmon was growing up over his father’s greengrocer shop on Piccadilly. They were often so thick that the horses pulling omnibuses and coaches had to be led by men carrying torches in order to warn of their approach. A particularly dense one occurred on December 5^th 1837, and perhaps the 17-year-old Alexander was a witness to the incident described in The Times of London the following day.  

“Not only was the darkness so great [in the morning] that the shops were all lighted up, but also every object in the streets, however near, was totally obscured from the view of the persons walking along. In Piccadilly the darkness was very great, and the confusion caused by the vehicles running against each other beyond description. About 9 o’clock the Hastings branch coach, which had just left the Old White Horse Cellar, while endeavouring to turn into St. James’s-street, ran into the shop window of Mr Hoby, the celebrated bootmaker, at the western corner, which it demolished with a fearful crash, breaking upwards of 40 squares of glass.”

Can any greater contrast to this dark, Satanic metropolis be imagined than the palms, cloudless skies, and black sand beaches of Tahiti?

In the Room They Left

When I was growing up and would lament some lost opportunity, my dad used to quote to me from his favorite poem:   

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

This is the famous Stanza 51 from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a long poem by an 11^th century Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet ‒ Ghiyathuddin Abulfath Omar bin Ibrahim Al-Khayyami. The manuscript of the poem was discovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford in the mid-19^th century by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), a friend of Thackeray and Tennyson. Fitzgerald, who had studied Persian at the University of Oxford, translated and adapted the obscure poem. It was published as a penny pamphlet that sold barely any copies until it was taken up and popularized by the Pre-Raphaelite poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne. Since then, it has appeared around the world in 650 editions in 70 different languages. It has been set to music by 100 composers and illustrated by 150 artists (including Edmund Dulac as in the lovely picture above).

The poem was very popular in the first half of the 20th century and was very well known to all schoolchildren of that era, including my father. The poem’s seize the day theme resonated with him.  This was how he lived his life. No regrets and no looking back.  He made plenty of mistakes as we all do, but he never dwelled on them but forged onto the next challenge. While this meant he sometimes didn’t take the time to learn from his mistakes, it also meant that he was a man singularly devoid of self-pity. It also meant that he managed to stay positive. Even in the face of a terminal diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, he lived every day to the fullest, right to the end. In that respect in particular, he remains an inspiration to me.  

He died on January 8th 2008 - four years ago tomorrow.

“And we, that now make merry in the Room

They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom,

Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

Descend – ourselves to make a Couch – for whom?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie

Sans wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and sans End!”

Rest in peace, Dad.