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."

The Bones Beneath

Hoar Frost, Andrew Wyeth

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show." Andrew Wyeth

This is how fiction should be – hinting at what lies beneath the story rather than making all of its glories visible to the naked eye. Let the reader use her imagination to see what else might be there. There will always be readers whose minds will jib at the first sign of uncertainty and say, “Wait, how old is this character? What year is this happening? Where exactly are we?” but that’s an occupational hazard. If they have confidence in the writer, they'll read on and trust that meaning will seep up slowly from the bare bones of the prose.

This means that it's also incumbent on the writer to trust her readers to reach that understanding all by themselves and thus refrain from over-explaining. It’s a fine line but a crucial one. Too much information can be deadly for art.  

The Sea Inside

"Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?”

Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)  

Mike and I spent the week before Thanksgiving with friends in the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina. The resort town of Emerald Isle is on a 30-mile-long pencil of low-lying land attached to the mainland only by a bridge at either end. The island has a sound on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, and the towns along the island are known as the Crystal Coast. There are no high-rises along the beach, just unbroken rows of vacation houses just feet from the dunes, almost all of them empty in November – except ours.

So we woke up in the mornings and fell asleep at night to the sounds of the sea through the open windows. Like many people, I’ve never been good at stilling my mind, but somehow it becomes much easier to do when sitting on a strand of wet sand just watching the waves. There can be no more soothing sensation in the world. Every muscle in my body relaxes from its habitual semi-clench. I’m sure it’s partly because wave sounds are what all humans remember from being inside our mothers’ bellies. But in my case, it’s also because the North Sea provided the everlasting soundtrack of my childhood so, wherever I am in the world – the Carolinas, the English Channel, Tahiti - the sea is always home.

Our first two days in Emerald Isle were so hot it was impossible to sit for long in the direct sun. We wore shorts and tee-shirts, and I even waded in the Atlantic. But then the weather turned grey and cold. Mike and I tried to play tennis on the town’s courts and had to battle the icy wind that whipped the ball around. Then on the last full day of our week, the wind died down and the sky cleared, and we walked on the beach in sweaters and jackets, feeling the warmth of the sun on our faces. From blazing sun to cloud-curdled skies to chilly brilliance all in the space of a week.  

I spent the days reading and writing, gazing out at the shrimp boats with their masts akimbo, balanced on the horizon like bathtub toys. Lines of pelicans – still an exotic wonder to my European eyes – flew low over the water in perfect formation. And several times a day we would spot a pod of dolphins cresting through the silver shimmer on the grey Atlantic water.

On my beach walks, I was fascinated by how the tiny sanderlings would skitter across the wet sand with the ebb and flow of waves, always just ahead of the foam. And on several days I saw huge congregations of sea birds holding a vigil on the flat wet sand, all tightly packed and facing the same way – herring gulls,  black-backed gulls, willets, terns, and every kind of sandpiper. They seemed impervious to the proximity of a human, but at the approach of a dog, however docile, they would rise en masse only to settle down again a few yards further down the beach. Once Mike and I came across a dead cormorant on its back in the wet sand, as black as an oil slick and perfect except for a slight pink perforation on its breast.

Now we’re back in wintry Washington, with the rush and hustle of the holiday season upon us, and I’m already losing that unclenched tranquil feeling I had as I sat at the water’s edge. The sea is no longer just outside my window, but I know I must learn to listen to the inner ocean that is always there in my memory and imagination.