History in Flight

When I first came to Washington D.C. many years ago, I was a political junkie and was thrilled by my physical proximity to the men and women whose faces were on television and the front pages of the newspapers every day. (This was in the dark ages before the Internet.) I lived just eight blocks from the Capitol and would routinely see famous faces on my walks down to the Mall - Senator Ted Kennedy surrounded by staffers, Bob Schieffer of CBS News who gave me the loveliest of avuncular smiles one day as our paths crossed on the Senate grounds.   

In those days you could wander around Congress with minimal security. I was able to take my dad to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting to see J.K. Galbraith, the renowned economist, testifying, and remember seeing Senator John Kerry’s long face open into a tremendous yawn. When I worked downtown, I would often encounter traffic being held up for motorcades for such luminaries as Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, or Yitzhak Rabin, though tinted windows hid them from view. But one day as I walked down 17^th Street, Bill Clinton’s motorcade went speeding by, and I got a clear view of POTUS in solitary state in the back of his limo, his glasses on, head bent over some papers.

These days I live less than an hour outside the city, but I hardly ever go downtown. I work from my little house in a pleasant Maryland suburb, and have access to great restaurants, live theater, movie theaters, and great friends our here in the ’burbs. Over the years, political Washington has become as foreign to me as when I first arrived in this country.

But every year at the end of March or the beginning of April, I reacquaint myself with the Nation’s Capital when I make my annual cherry blossom walk around the Tidal Basin. Washington’s blooming cherry blossom trees are one of the wonders of the world, and I have been privileged to enjoy their glory every year but one since 1988. The Japanese cherry trees (Yoshino and Kanzan) were a gift to the city of Washington in 1912 from the Mayor of Tokyo City to enhance the growing friendship between Japan and the U.S. - back in those innocent days 30 years before Pearl Harbor. 

The blossoms were late this year, and so was I. I had so much work to do I couldn’t get downtown until after the period of “peak bloom” when the blossoms are at their most spectacular. On the day I was there, rain had knocked many of the petals off the delicate blooms, but there was still much beauty to be seen – showers of drifting petals falling from the trees, pink swirls in the water of the Tidal Basin, carpets of petals that looked like the real snow that had covered the same ground only three weeks before.  

As I was sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial amid a swarm of other blossom watchers, the President’s helicopter, Marine One, flew in over the Tidal Basin from the east. Its two identical flanking helicopters peeled away, and Marine One headed into the distance and descended out of sight onto the South Lawn of The White House. Seeing that helicopter made me think of Jack Kennedy’s children running to greet him as he descended the helicopter’s steps, little John Kennedy Junior thrilled to be allowed to sit at the controls, Ronald Reagan coming down the steps in his Western gear from the California White House, and – most indelibly – Richard Nixon leaving The White House after his resignation, his hands thrust out in defiant V signs.  

After about ten minutes, I saw Marine One rise again from the South Lawn. It curved over the Tidal Basin as if saluting the blossoms, its faithful wingmen once again on either side. As I shaded my eyes to look up, it passed almost directly above me, carrying a man whose face is known around the globe, whose decisions affect millions of people, who is probably the most powerful person in the world. And suddenly, after many years, I felt the thrill of my proximity to history all over again. 

(My satirical short story on the subject of a young woman's encounter with a famous face was published last year in an anthology of writing about Washington D.C.)

Spring Fever of the Mind

I’ve recently joined a new writing group in my area after a long layoff during which I was working alone. Writing groups have always been tremendously helpful to me, providing me with valuable feedback while giving me deadlines to work towards. The deadlines give me the excuse I need to push writing higher up my to-do list and to justify pushing other things further down. Yes, I need to sew on some buttons and do my long-neglected filing, but the writing group is waiting to hear from me and it meets Monday next. 

Without my first group, I never would have finished The Province of the Imagination, and my second nurtured the early phases of Albion’s Millennium. The members of that second group also saved my bacon when our house was broken into and my laptop and back-up thumb drive were both stolen complete with the only copies of all my novel chapters. I was utterly distraught, but much to my relief my colleagues had saved the drafts I’d shared with the group, thus averting a nightmarish disaster and earning my endless gratitude.

The only problem with writing groups is that, in return for all the help you receive, you must also put back in an equal amount of effort to help others with their projects. When I say it’s a problem, I just mean in terms of time since I genuinely love reading the fruits of other people’s imaginations. Reading drafts in advance and making careful notes can be quite time-consuming if you do it with the right amount of commitment. But this new group I’ve joined – on the kind invitation of my talented neighbor, the poet and short story writer Sibbie O’Sullivan – takes a different approach. It meets every two weeks (mostly), and we each bring along whatever we’ve been working on between meetings and read it aloud to each other.

I was a little skeptical at first, wondering if the immediacy of the format would be capable of eliciting considered feedback, but I have been very pleasantly surprised. So far it’s proved to be an extremely useful and time-efficient way to get feedback and encouragement on my work and for me to make my own small contribution to the work of others.

And this new development has unleashed a tidal wave of inspiration in me. I’ve been turning out a couple of short stories a week and jotting down a constant influx of ideas and first lines. I even take a pad and pen into the bathroom with me so I can jot down the ideas that come to me in the shower before I forget them. I've been going wherever my imagination decides to take me. There’s a wife confronting her husband’s mistress after his violent death, a woman seeing her dead baby in Sainsbury’s, a bitter man facing a divorce and failing to understand how he’s alienated his wife throughout their marriage. I hadn’t written short stories for years and had pretty much decided I didn’t know how, but since starting with this group I’ve already had two stories accepted for publication. My personal spring has sprung!

With thanks to all the very talented women with whom I’ve shared bread, wine, and our mutual passion for telling stories. 

The Reality of Winter

Brandywine River, November 2014

The day after Thanksgiving last year I had reason to meet some friends up in Wilmington, Delaware, and I decided to drive up a bit early so I would have time to see the paintings of Andrew Wyeth at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Wyeth has marked the various stages of my life in America. I saw my first Wyeth in 1979, though only in reproduction. I’d just graduated from the University of Edinburgh, and was traveling around the US in an attempt to understand the country where I had spent the first six years of my life. In the bookstore of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, a picture on the front of a book caught my eye was – a simple window of a clapboard house with a glimpse of red geraniums on the far windowsill. I loved the framing of the window within a window and the mere suggestion of red in the darkness and clutter within. I bought the book as a present for my mother, an artist herself.

Geraniums by Andrew Wyeth

When I first moved to Washington in 1987, the National Gallery of Art was exhibiting Wyeth’s controversial Helga paintings, over 240 paintings and drawings of a single model, Wyeth’s Chadd’s Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf. It was said that Wyeth had kept these modelling sessions secret from his wife for 15 years, and the frankly erotic charge given off by the many nudes fueled rumors that Helga was more than just his model. But as I wandered around the exhibit, I was as taken by the settings of the paintings as by Helga’s powerful female form – the splintered paint on the weathered houses, the silvered bark of the naked trees, and the glossy transparency of the river water. 

Cape Coat Helga by Andrew Wyeth

Last November as I drove up Route 52 through the Brandywine Valley towards Chadds Ford, there were lines of snow in the folds of the stark empty fields, and I realized I was looking at a quintessential Wyeth landscape - spare, uncompromising, without illusions. Wyeth once said: “I love Pennsylvania in the winter. It’s not pretty...The Brandywine’s sort of ugly, looking like what George Washington must have felt when he camped at Valley Forge. Tough living.” 

John Updike also loved the country of south-eastern Pennsylvania. He grew up on a farm in Shillington near Reading, and as a writer he was “full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say.” The result was, among others, the wonderful Olinger stories and the four Rabbit books, two of which won Pulitzer prizes. He and Wyeth were linked by a sensibility as well as a landscape.

Winter was Wyeth’s favorite season. “I love the bleakness of winter and snow and get a thrill out of the chill... My winter scenes differ from those of other artists in that they’re not romantic. No! They capture that marvelous, lonely bleakness – the quiet, the chill reality of winter.”

It was in that season that he died - in his own bed in Chadds Ford on January 16, 2009. In the novel, The Centaur, Updike seems to have prefigured the painter’s last view from his bedroom window: 

“A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field across the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in their twigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January...”

Remarkably, John Updike died a mere 11 days after Wyeth, on January 27. Coincidence? I think not. 

Kuerners Farm House, Chadds Ford by Andrew Wyeth

Life and Death in Mrs Dalloway

 “But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence...”

In this passage from her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf casts ahead (she was only 42) to a time when the share of life would have dwindled to a narrow slice. Rereading it in my own middle age, I see much more clearly than I did in my youth that Mrs Dalloway is a book about the purpose of our lives and the encroachment of death.

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

I remember very clearly the moment when I knew I wouldn’t live forever. Lying on the couch reading, as much at peace as I ever was during my turbulent first marriage, it suddenly hit me I was already on the downslide to being 40 years old. My youth had gone – not in terms of my looks, which at that moment didn’t matter at all, but in terms of the number of years I had left to live. These moments are now an eddying stream of moments, as they are for Mrs Dalloway on the day she ventures out to buy the flowers for her party.

“Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.” 

For those of us in middle age, time passes inexorably, however we may lean back against it, marked by the tolling of bells. “Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First, a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

Acknowledging, as we must, the fleeting nature of our existence, we tend to want our lives to have a purpose – whether to lead multitudes, right wrongs, or create a masterpiece – something significant to mark our passing between the cradle and the grave, to leave a handprint on the earth. Clarissa Dalloway frets about her own lack of purpose, fearing that her life has been frivolous, spent only in throwing parties and bringing people together for brief moments of pleasure. But then it occurs to her maybe that was precisely her gift, what she had been born to do.

“It was an offering; to combine; to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled the Armenians and the Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

So Mrs Dalloway gives her party. Doors are taken off their hinges, and Chinese lanterns are hung in the fragrant June garden. Rumpelmayer’s men bring the confiseries, while Mrs Walker, the cook, labors in the kitchen among “the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins.” Lucy the maid runs into the drawing room to smooth a cover and straighten a chair. Gentlemen wait in the hall while ladies take their cloaks off in the room along the passage where Mrs Barnett (“old Ellen Barnet who had been with the family for forty years”) pins up their hair and helps Lady Lovejoy who is having “some trouble with her underbodice.” Bending and straightening himself at the drawing room door, Mr. Wilkins (“hired for parties”) announces the guests as they arrive, and Clarissa, in "ear-rings and a silver-green mermaid's dress" greets them all with the same effusive phrases, even the Prime Minister, “this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society” who withdraws into a little room with old Lady Bruton. The rooms are packed and the noise is tremendous, and yet Clarissa has been feeling in her bones that her party is going to be a failure, the parts not cohering into a natural flow. And then a yellow curtain covered with birds of Paradise billows at the open window and it seems "as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, and then sucked back.” As it bellies out again, Clarissa sees a guest beat it back with his hand and go right on talking, and she knows all will be well. “So it wasn’t a failure after all! It was going to be all right now – her party. It had begun. It had started.”