Golden Folds of Ease

Gerard Manley Hopkins by Rowan Gillespie

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was one of the greatest religious poets in the English language. Though born an Anglican, in his 20s he began to be drawn to the rituals and beliefs of Catholicism after reading the work of John Henry Newman. Newman was an evangelical academic who had caused a virtual schism in the Church of England in the 1840s when he started the Oxford Movement for those who wished the Church of England to return to many Catholic beliefs and traditional forms of worship from before the Reformation. (There are echoes of this mid-Victorian schism in the Church of England in many novels of the time, including Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles.) In 1845, Newman became a Roman Catholic, eventually rising to the rank of Cardinal. Twenty years later, responding to attacks on him in the press, he published Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A Defense of His Life), and after reading this book, Hopkins decided to follow Newman’s example and convert.

Hopkins entered the Jesuit Novitiate in 1868 and resolved to write no more poetry, but in time he came to see that poetry could be written in service of his beliefs. He wrote in an unusual complex style, using archaic and even made-up words, but their effect is powerful. When studying theology in North Wales, he learned Welsh, and he adapted the rhythms of this melodic language to his verse. He called his technique “sprung rhythm” and described it as “scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.”

In later years as a parish priest and then as a teacher of Latin and Greek in Lancashire and Dublin, he wrestled with his faith, fearing that God was no longer listening to his prayers. He was deeply melancholy and often in ill health, though he pushed on with the exhausting regimen of his chosen life, teaching, grading mountains of papers, preaching, and visiting the sick. He was often close to both mental and physical breakdown and expressed his depression in his verse.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerald Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever, aged only 44, in 1889, unknown and unheralded, though he had little time for acclaim. In a letter to a friend, he wrote these memorable words which I believe should be taped to the desk of every writer:

“Fame is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.”

Nevertheless, thirty years after Hopkins’ death, his poems were eventually published as a result of the efforts of his friend, Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate. In 1918, Oxford University Press brought out an edition of 750 of Hopkins’ poems, which at last brought the melancholy Jesuit poet to the attention of the “random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust” world.

Hopkins wrote several poems about Easter – this is the most well-known and widely anthologized.

Easter Communion

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,

God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Remembrance of Things Past

Rebecca Hall as Sylvia Tietjens in "Parade's End"

I recently had the pleasure of watching the enthralling period drama “Parade’s End” produced by the BBC and HBO. (See the trailer here.) Written by Tom Stoppard from the novels by Ford Maddox Ford, it had excellent credentials from the get-go, and these were enhanced by the marvellous nuanced performances by the actors involved. Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) was a perfect Edward Tietjens, the moral, upright Englishman who let the world think the worst of him rather than allow the reputation of his volatile and sensuous wife Sylvia to be besmirched. And the magnificent Rebecca Hall as Sylvia, a sharp-witted beauty who kicks over the traces out of sheer boredom, desperate for her husband’s love and attention but too perverse to allow herself to accept it.  

This is yet another example of our culture’s enduring fascination of the Edwardian era – the time between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the end of the First World War. In less than two decades, Britain went through a dizzying period of changes, many of which were also happening around the world.

Then, as now, there was a dramatic acceleration of technology in daily life, particularly the widening use of the telephone and the automobiles. And social changes were happening in every area of life - women demanding the vote, the rise of the trade union movement, and the introduction of social welfare legislation by the reforming Liberal government of 1906, including the first national old age pension, free school meals, the National Health Insurance scheme, and unemployment  benefits. And all this was before the great disaster epic of the First World War had even begun.

So it’s no wonder that the period has been mined so extensively not only in literature but also in TV (The Forsythe Saga, the original Upstairs Downstairs, and of course Downton Abbey) and films (Howard’s End, The Shooting Party, The Wings of a Dove with Helena Bonham-Carter, and Joseph Losey’s glorious The Go Between). The over-exposure of this era means that it can be hard to avoid clichés – there are those who are tired of seeing or reading about yet another stately home, suffragette march, or muddy trench. Which raises the question of whether there is anything left to say about this period in British history.  

Clearly, given that I am writing a novel set between 1911 and 1923, I’m hoping the answer is yes. After all, it’s not as if we put a limit on the number of novels that can be written about the present day. There are always new stories to be told of individuals caught up in the same events and against the same backdrop.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether the reader is interested in my characters and what becomes of them. So it’s up to me to make sure that the people in Albion’s Millennium are absorbing and true to life whether they’re wearing jeans and a teeshirt or the enchantingly feminine clothes of the Edwardian age.

 

Light after Darkness

Pictures taken at Brookside Gardens, Wheaton MD, February 28, 2013

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring‒

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Gluck

 

 

 

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.