On a Shining Hill

 

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

For Valentine’s Day, here is a lovely poem that my step-daughter chose and read for us at the blessing ceremony for my husband and me in a 13th century church in England in 2001. It was written by Sara Teasdale, a poet of the Chicago Renaissance who won the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918.

Sara Teasdale received public admiration for her well-crafted lyrical poetry which centered on a woman's changing perspectives on beauty, love, and death. Many of Teasdale's poems chart developments in her own life, from her experiences as a sheltered young woman in St. Louis, to those as a successful yet increasingly uneasy writer in New York City, to a depressed and disillusioned person who would commit suicide in 1933. Although many later critics would not consider Teasdale a major poet, she was popular in her lifetime with both the public and critics. She won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

 

The Tree of Song

I sang my songs for the rest,
For you I am still;
The tree of my song is bare
On its shining hill.

For you came like a lordly wind,
And the leaves were whirled
Far as forgotten things
Past the rim of the world.

The tree of my song stands bare
Against the blue --
I gave my songs to the rest,
Myself to you.

Sarah Teasdale

 

To Look for America

"Jo in Wyoming, Painting" Edward Hopper, 1946



 In 1981, I had just moved to London from Scotland to take up my first job after graduating from university. One February day, I went to an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank and I found myself standing in front of the picture above. The image was like an electric shock to my hippocampus – suddenly I was once again looking through the eyes of my six-year-old self. For the first years of my life, I’d seen the world from the cave-like interior of a big old American-made car just like the one in Hopper’s painting. That steering wheel planted like a tree in that mahogany dashboard, the window cranks, the couch-like seatback separating me from my parents in front – it was all as familiar as if it were playing on a monitor in my brain instead on a canvas on a wall.

Of course this was before a great big ship, its hull rising sheer from the dockside as we boarded in New York harbor, took me away from everything I’d known. As the Queen Elizabeth I sailed slowly across the vast blank of the Atlantic, it could not have been clearer to me that my old life was gone for good. If the ocean was five whole days wide, how would I ever be able to find my own way home?

So it was not surprising that I took some time to adjust to my new country. The words “uprooted” and “transplanted” were exactly how it felt to be pulled up from the comfortable soil and exposed to a new earth and a new light, with no guarantee I would thrive. Never a particularly nervous child before, I became clingy and wouldn’t let my mother out of my sight. I started sleep-walking and, worst of all I had a recurring dream from which I’d wake screaming in terror.

In the dream, I was in the back seat of that car, my father at the wheel and my mother beside him, when suddenly with no warning at all, they both evaporated, leaving me utterly alone in the car as it continued on its relentless way through time and space.    

But the nightmares faded, and life in rural Scotland became the new reality. Glimpses of America on TV or in photographs would stir something primordial in me – a yellow school bus, a fire hydrant, a billboard along a highway. And then there was music. Simon and Garfunkel singing, “‘Kathy, I'm lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping, ‘I'm empty and aching and I don't know why,’ Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, They've all gone to look for America.” And Joni Mitchell, the eternal traveller, singing, “I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel, To shower off the dust, And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust, I dreamed of 747s, Over geometric farms, Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms.”

And when I read John Updike’s story collection, Pigeon Feathers, yet more inchoate images surfaced like some deep water fish –

“The windshield wipers beat, and the wonderland lights of the Newark refineries were swollen and broken like bubbles by the raindrops on the side windows. For a dozen seconds a solemn cross of colored stars was suspended stiffly in the upper part of the windshield; an airplane above me was coming in to land.”

Even as I read the passage, I already knew how it felt to be inside that Hopper-like car with the wipers creaking as the rain lashed down on the New Jersey turnpike. I'd already been there.  

And then came the day when I stood in front of that Hopper painting and saw again with the eyes of my American childhood. By that time, I was in my early 20s, and the country had taken on the quality of a myth, rooted in early 1960s Technicolor. A Camelot of the brain, a conglomeration of other people’s visions and stories. I had been back to the US once – a month-long odyssey into my past in New Jersey and Pittsburgh and then onto pastures new in San Francisco – but an idea had seeded within me that I needed to go back for longer.

A few years later, I made it happen. I only planned to stay for a year, but as of last August 2, I have been here for a quarter of a century. Once more, my world was cut in half, and there are times when I think that my bifurcated life has left me permanently wounded, neither here nor there nor anywhere in between. Though I feel at home in both my countries, wherever I am, I’m always homesick for something or someone.

But then another memory surfaces, a very early one, of being with my parents in the parking lot of a roadside diner somewhere in America on a fresh sunny morning. I remember looking up at the diner’s roof and seeing the Stars and Stripes snapping against a blue, blue sky and knew beyond a doubt that there was nothing better in the world than that sense of possibility before you set off on a journey, even when you have no idea of what is ahead of you or when, if ever, you’ll arrive.  

Undiscovered Countries

"Woman Lying on a Bench"  Carl Larsson



Having been felled by a nasty bronchial cough for the last week or so, I have been thinking about the no-man’s-land that separates the sick from the well. I am fortunate because I have every expectation and hope of being healthy again in a few more days, but others with more serious conditions face the prospect of never crossing back over to that chasm to the land of the heedless well. Conscious of this and of my own good fortune, I try not to mind the symptoms that sap my energy and cause me to lose valuable time. I try to see it as an experience that is as legitimate and valuable a state of being as any other and, as such, just as worthy a subject to be written about.

In her 1926 essay, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf marveled that illness had not become a popular theme in literature.  

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light...it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; ... literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear."

But it is true that illness does produce “undiscovered countries” in our feverish dreams and in our long strange bedridden hours where the world goes on without us. Even as our body lies fallow and weak, our subconscious is a riot of fertility, a tangled rainforest of images and ideas for us to use when we finally get enough strength back to sit at our desks. It is a writer’s great consolation for these lost days marooned on the island of the ill.

More Precious than Rubies

Ian Malcolm Mackintosh, 1927-2008

It’s been 5 years today since my father died. Though he was born in the 1920s, a time so distant that it seems almost prehistoric, his childhood is as vivid to me as my own. This is because both he and his mother – my grandmother Alice – were born storytellers, and I was lucky enough to be regaled with those stories as long as they both lived.  

My paternal grandparents, Roy and Alice Mackintosh, married very young - he was 19 and she 18 (they look like mere children in their wedding picture below) – but it was seven years before their longed-for firstborn, my dad Ian, came along. He was born in a little terraced house in Nottingham but the family moved three times before he was 10, eventually settling in the suburb of Sherwood three years before the Second World War.

Roy and Alice's wedding day, October 16, 1920

Roy was a lively, affectionate man, but he was somewhat feckless and highly strung, and found it a struggle to keep the various jobs he had over the years. On the other hand, Alice, while a happy-go-lucky young woman, had a streak of toughness and self-preservation that served herself and her children well but also took no prisoners. The family lived very much what we would call paycheck to paycheck, and that paycheck wasn’t always forthcoming. Roy tried his hand at various business ventures, but in 1934 he had a nervous breakdown. So Alice began working - first as a demonstrator of vacuum cleaners and washing machines at The Nottingham Electricity Showrooms and later as a life insurance inspector - and never stopped (even when she had her second son Allan in 1936) till she retired three decades later. But by then, the war had broken Roy and Alice apart as it did to so many families as couples tasted unfamiliar freedoms. 

But over the years, I heard many stories of the time before that happened, stories that my grandmother and my father almost always told as comic tales, even when the underlying subject matter wasn’t so funny. That was how they both coped with their pains and sorrows – by turning them into anecdotes offered for the amusement of others.

And amuse they did. I never tired of hearing my grandmother tell of not being able to find toddler Ian after putting him to bed up in the attic of his Uncle Jack’s house and eventually discovering him fast asleep underneath the bed. Or running with her sons to the public shelter during an air raid wearing saucepans on their heads because they couldn’t find their tin helmets. And seeing a packet of biscuits being drawn up past the dining room window on a string as the boys tried to gather provisions for a sneaky midnight feast.

Then there were my dad’s own memories – of his father building him a model farm and hutches for his rabbits. And taking him all round the Midlands countryside on his motorbike with young Ian strapped on the back in a makeshift child’s chair. Of making paper boats with his Uncle Jack, flushing them down the toilet and then rushing out to the cesspit in the garden see the boats emerge. And, when polishing the buttons of his father’s RAF uniform, finding a letter in the pocket from another woman and deciding not to tell his mother.

All of this family lore is a huge gift to a writer. Some of these stories will end up in Albion’s Millennium because they are far too good – and real – to go to waste. The ability to craft and pace a story clearly runs in my family, and if I’ve been lucky enough to have inherited even a hint of it, it will have been a gift more precious than rubies.

Now and In England

Extract from Four Quartets (Quartet No. 4: Little Gidding) by T.S. Eliot

Last season's fruit is eaten
And the full-fed beast shall kick the empty pail.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice. ....

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

Hear the whole poem read by Eliot himself here.

Happy New Year and New Beginnings to all readers of Midatlantic!  

It snowed and it snowed

Illustration by Edward Ardizzone

 

"A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas is one of the most evocative accounts of the magic of a childhood Christmas. Here is one of my favorite passages:

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

 

But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."
"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

Here is Dylan Thomas reading the whole short book in his inimitably mellifluous - and surprisingly unWelsh - voice.

 

Wishing all the readers of Midatlantic a peaceful and joyous Christmas!

 

 

Versed in Sorrow



Prince Sigismund of Prussia (1864-1866)



Letter from Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia to her mother Queen Victoria on the death of her 18-month old son Sigismund from meningitis, June 19 1866

"Your suffering child turns to you in her grief, sure to find sympathy from so tender a heart - so versed in sorrow. The Hand of Providence is heavy upon me....

My little darling, graciously lent to me for a short time to be my pride, my joy, my hope is gone - gone where I can not recall him! Oh spare me the details - spare me telling you how -and when - and where my heart was rent and broken; let me only say that I do not murmur or repine. God's will be done.

What I suffer no one can know - few knew how I loved! It was my own happy secret-the long cry of agony which rises from the inmost depth of my soul reaches Heaven alone.

I wish you to know all - you are so kind, darling Mama - that you will wish to know all about the last terrible days - I cannot describe them.

I am calm now - for Fritz's sake [her husband] and my little ones' - but oh! How bitter is the cross.

I kiss your dear hands and wish I could be in your dear arms.

Your broken-hearted child, Victoria."