Eureka #2

The second lost book I found is The Story Book of Houses, written and illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham, published in 1933. I have another one in the series, Food, and Bill has one about transportation. I googled the Petershams, and discovered that their lithographs had illustrated some 60 books and they had even won the Caldecott award. On the inside cover my youngest son has put his stamp, and I on the title page I have written my name in what looks like my grade two handwriting.

I can remember closely examining each detail of each pictureof the book and imaging what it would be like to live in such a house: a cave, a Chinese junk, a tree house. When I am writing, I have to make a deliberate effort to describe nature, but I describe the interior of a house and food too effortlessly. One editor said that she was hungry after working on my novel. In my first nine years we lived in nine different houses, and then, oh happy day, we bought the house that my parents lived in until they died. The purchase and refurbishing of this house was the major project of their lives.

Poor Mad Peter over in The Pilgrim is re-reading Elizabeth Goudge’s Scent of Water. That inspired me to re-read it too. It is about a woman who in middle age goes to live in a country house she has inherited. The story is about the house and its chattels, its gardens, and its neighbors. I think that Goudge invented a new plot, the story of the creation of a home, or at least she advanced it. My favorite of her novels is the Damerosehay trilogy, with the same plot. She comes so close to sentimentality that she sometimes veers across the line, and if she were alive, she would probably agree to have her editor expunge one of her favorite words, “ejaculated”, as a synonym for “said.” She does use the more conventional plot lines: courtship and the resurrection of a benighted character.

For many people, the making of a home is their major creation. Nothing tears at my heart like the words “homeless” and “refugee.”

Eureka!

I have uncovered two of my favorite books, both missing for at least a year. One is a book I mentioned when I first started this blog in March, and another is one I was looking for when I did the writers workshop in February. The first is Houses, and it was among the books I brought home from my office. It is thin and easily hides itself. The second is A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I was so sure that I had loaned that book and that it was gone forever, that I looked on the internet to see if I could buy another copy. Going through the bookcases, culling out so that I could find room to put the books I brought home, Eureka!, I found it. I had been looking for a blue book, and it is white.

Price, at a crucial time in his life, decided to translate some of the Bible, knowing no Hebrew or Greek, working from an interlinear Bible. I have read over and over his beginning essay, “The Origins and Life of Narrative.” I have underlined and made notes and whited out one of those notes so that I could photocopy a portion for my class. Bill has a note or two in it, and I see that my friend Ted, he of the uncooperative Mac, has made several of his characteristic marks in it. I will put one of my favorite quotations from the book in the blog description. More anon.

A Surprise

Bringing books home from my office, I unearthed the one from which the above quotation was taken. The quote but not the title was on my bulletin board. Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove was published in 1971. It is obviously a used book because someone else’s handwriting is in it, a textbook by the look of the notes. The back cover says that the author was an associate professor, and I wondered what had become of him, so I googled him.

My goodness. He has metamorphosed from a professor of philosophy and religious studies into a research fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. I know about this organization because an old Air Force acquaintance of ours is a member. It’s a conservative think tank. Novak has become such a partisan Republican that he could write just before the recent election that Donald Rumsfeld was the best Secretary of Defense that the USA has ever had. Even most staunch Republicans don’t think that. He has his own very elaborate web site. I remember now getting another book by him from the library and not being interested in it, but I can’t remember which of his many books it was or why I found it uninteresting.

I have been looking for the quotation to make sure I have it right and to see the context, but I haven’t found it yet. If I had tried to trace his life forward, to predict it from this one book, would I have got to the AEI?

When I was trying to figure out a theme for a blog, I thought of writing a kind of autobiography in which I could get a grip on what my life has been as a whole. I figured that the quotation was right for the project. When I was trying to get a name, Blogspot kept telling me that this or that title was taken, and when I hit upon the one that it became, Blogspot suggested hyphens. This has proven to be a very awkward title, but it is too late to change it now. I decided to use the name Nancy Ruth because I googled the writer of the poems that gave me that name and got so much information about her. I was especially tickled to find out that she was the rival of the much ridiculed Edgar Guest. Edgar Guest and Michael Novak. How strange life is.

Bringing Home the Books

Yesterday afternoon Bill and I carried more books down from my office. In two more days they will all be home. A lot of steps. Bill kept saying, "I've never seen this book before." He was pleasantly surprised, even though we now have to find space for them.

I was surprised too. There were books I had forgotten were there: Priestesses, by Norma Goodrich, a book I used in writing The Irrational Doorways. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, by Charles Taylor. Carlos Fuentes' essays, Myself With Others. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Poems by the Persian poet Firdausis. There were books I can't remember having read: The Parables of Jesus by Joachim Jeremias. Genoa: A Telling of Wonder by Paul Metcalf. There were my talisman books: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. My childhood favorite, Houses. The Pilgrim's Inn by Elizabeth Goudge (how I was led to the blog of ukbookworm.) There were two talisman books that came to me by serendipity: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi by Henry Corbin. My oldest son brought this back from a trip, twenty years ago, thinking I might like it, and I have pored over it every since. Bill bought me The Meaning of God in Human Experience by William Hocking at a UNB book sale. It is now held together with packing tape. There is my "religious" reference library. Fifteen years ago I found a mail order business that sold wonderful religious classics at bargain prices. There is my extensive Dead Sea Scroll library, from back when I was fascinated with the subject. Or rather, fascinated by why other people were fascinated.

My scheme of writing as soon as I get up, this morning at 5:45, is working so far. Knock on wood. I get the coffee ready to go the night before, so there is hardly anything to do but sit and write. I have been checking the e-mail while the coffee brews, but I think I will change that and not check until my writing stint is over. I am feeling happy about my decision to give up my office.

The Elephant Talks to God

The launch Friday night of our friend’s book, The Elephant Talks to God, was a success, with about 150 people attending, and some forty books sold. It was held at the new Charlotte St. Art Centre, created from an old school, using the example of the Aberdeen Art Centre in Moncton. The whole of the Goose Lane Editions fall offerings was launched, with an unusual number of New Brunswick books, six, in the fall catalogue. Flora, Write This Down was the first Goose Lane edition, 24 years ago.

The things of this world

One of my favorite quotations is by St. Augustine, “Love calls me to the things of this world.” Richard Wilbur uses it as the title of a wonderful poem. The idea that we are kept tied to this world, even in the midst of tragedy, by the things of the world is to me, one of the most profound of truths. When I see a child entranced by a bug – a white caterpillar with a black stripe down its back or a luna moth – I remember that I myself don’t spend enough time with what the world offers. There are moments of grace, however, where the world jumps up and slaps me: the time several years ago when Bill and I went on our first walk of the spring and came upon a patch of yellow flowers. Afterwards we found out its name, coltsfoot, and learned that it is the earliest wildflower of our region. Richard Wilbur wakes to the sound of the clothes line pulley and to the look of sheets hanging on the line. A moment of grace.

Structures

I have been re-reading Ernest Buckler’s Ox Bells and Fireflies. I have compared the book I am reviewing, When I Was Young & In My Prime, to Buckler’s book. Both books are structured in small chunks, bits and pieces, unified by running themes, with little narrative thrust or plot. Buckler says straight out that his is a memoir, but he also suggests that it is fictionalized. Munce’s book, although a novel, strongly suggests that a lot of it is memoir, that the details are remembered, not invented. Both use the anecdote, rather than the scene, as building blocks. Munce uses many forms, much like Viktor Shlovsky and Guy Davenport do: prose-poems, a government pamphlet, an auctioneer’s patter at a farm sale. Both are interested in memory. A unifying theme of both is birds.

Many blogs do proceed by anecdote and by their very nature are structured in bits and pieces. Litlove, over at Tales From the Reading Room, is ruminating about the form of the blog, the blog as genre. A blog’s inherent structural difficulty is that it is read backwards. The writer begins at the beginning, with his first post, but the reader is reading only the latest installment. Of course a reader could go back to the beginning and read straight through to the present, but probably not many do. As a blogger, how do you use this backward quality? If a blog was made into a book, would it start at the beginning, at the blogger’s first post, and continue to the last one? This would destroy the intention, wouldn’t it? In a journal made into a book, the reader reads from the starting point to the end. There is usually a structure – a year in the life of, the constructing of a home, a journey.

The writer of the blog isn’t going to conform to an overall structure and probably isn’t going to envision an end. Some blogs do have a unifying theme – cooking, or making dresses, or homeschooling for example, but most have various concerns and passions.

Writing A Review

I am nearly finished writing a book review. Every time I agree to write one, I say to myself, Never again. Fortunately, I liked the book, When I Was Young & In My Prime. I understood and appreciated what she was trying to do. Next I have to write a review of a book I didn’t like. I never agree to write reviews of books I don’t like – what’s the point, I think – but somehow I got myself into this. What is more, it is about a subject I knew very little about and so have had to do a lot of reading to bone up. That part is good. Once I was in a writing group that was open to anyone, and as a consequence there was a lot of awfully bad writing. One of our group, an accomplished poet, editor, teacher, could always find something good to say about any poem. What he would say would be true, too, and helpful. I have tried to do the same, but it is difficult to do, requiring much concentration.

Mrs. Todd

A long time ago I read Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. I loved it from the first sentence, and I love it still. I wondered what the herbs looked like that Mrs. Todd, the herb lady, grew or collected in the wild, so I started an herb garden and grew those herbs: pennyroyal, elecampane, thoroughwort (also known as boneset), borage, wormwood, southernwood, thyme, balm, sweet mary, mint. Most of them definitely weren’t herbs you could use in cooking. I bought herb books and read up on the lore.

Over a period of twenty five years the garden had to be uprooted four times, and after the fourth, I decided I didn’t have the physical energy to begin again. Many of the herbs, however, were hardy and continue to thrive beside the fence, along the house, or in the top soil pile where they can’t be mowed down.

I used the lore of the herbs in Flora, Write This Down. I became interested in other medicinal herbs as well: tansy, angelica, comfrey, ladies mantle, and I learned to identify many others in the wild, St. Johnswort and yarrow for example.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is by far the best of Jewett’s books. It seems as if it must have been inspired by a higher power.

The Ethnic Groups of China

A friend has given me a most wonderful book containing descriptions of the various peoples of China, perhaps 450 different ethnic groups. Bob gave it to me because he had just re-read my The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, and was reminded of my fascination for little-known tribes, especially those of Russia, the Middle East, and China.

One of the groups discussed in this book is the Diao, 2000 people, one of the minorities of the province of Guizshou. It is said of these Guizhou minorities that “the making of her traditional dress continues to play an important part in a woman’s life. Each tribe’s dress has its own background story which reflects that group’s customs, history and beliefs. Cultural identity is therefore maintained by the making and wearing of the garments.”

My father’s mother died in 1913 and so lived all her life wearing a long dress. Long dresses have occasionally become fashionable in my lifetime although they have never become mandatory. When I wear one, I have to be extra careful not to trip, especially on stairs. I wonder if women tripped and fell more before 1918 when wearing long dresses went out of fashion. I am exceptionally clumsy so perhaps I don’t represent the norm, but wearing a long dress to do chores must have been awkward. My mother’s mother lived to 1985, and thus she wore short dresses most of her life. She did always wear dresses, though, never slacks. Both of my grandmothers were professional seamstresses, that is, they sewed for other people for money.

If I were to sew my own dress to tell the story of my customs, history, and beliefs, what could I make? What could my grandmothers have made? The cloth I would use would have been woven in another country – Thailand perhaps. At the moment I am wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Is there any seamstress in the western world who makes her own jeans? I’ve never seen a pair of homemade jeans.

Have we women lost something, being so far removed from the creation of what we wear? And from what we cook? We surely have gained time. Part of my fascination for little-known ethnic people is trying to figure out how they maintain their distinctiveness. How do they keep their language, for example? Most of the peoples in this book do speak mandarin Chinese in addition to their own language. I still have my Massachusetts accent, but I notice when I go back to visit my hometown, that most of the young people speak "American."

Silas Marner

I have just finished re-reading Silas Marner. My husband remembered that Silas had been a member of the Plymouth Brethren. There was no mention of it in the book, only that he had been a Dissenter. A scholar perhaps has determined that the brand of Dissenter was Plymouth Brethren, but I can’t find any reference to that.

I had forgotten so much about the book. I had forgotten the wonderful character, Dolly Winthrop, forgotten that it was so short, forgotten how masterful the plotting is. One of my writer friends in an e-mail today said that a strong plot was now considered old-fashioned. Is that true? Gilead is a wonderful novel, widely praised, and it doesn’t have much traditional plot.

Challenge Met

Here I am posting to my blog in the library. I have only 30 minutes, so I won't be as long winded as I usually am. I have read The Red Tent, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, House Thinking, and a Carolyn Roe mystery, A Draught for a Deadman. The No. 1 Ladies is quite different from what I imagined -- I can see why my friend likes the series so well. The central character is indeed a lovable creature. The Roe mystery is like the Brother Cadfael series, in that you are treated to historical settings as well as to interesting characters and of course a mystery to be solved. The House Thinking is like some of this kind of book -- there is a premise which after a while seems to be labored. One of its most interesting themes is the desirability of having both refuge and prospect in a home -- vistas and coziness -- and that men like a ratio of more prospect than refuge and women vice-versa. The Red Tent is quite a tour de force -- very convincing.

I have been writing about my grandfather, my mother's father, and I will put some of that on this blog the next time.

Thanks to poor mad peter for his advice.

A New Blog Challenge

I have a new blogging challenge to meet. We are going away to Maine. Will I be able to post, using the library computer? At first I thought I could write some paragraphs and have the man who will stay here post them for me, but I was afraid that would unduly complicate things for him.

I am taking these books:
An Alexander McCall Smith detective story, because a friend admires his work greatly and because she says it is fun to read
Anita Diamant, The Red Tent, because my daughter gave it to me after reading it herself and wants to know what I think of it
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees – someone gave it to me with a strong recommendation, but I can’t remember who

Four books by and about Elizabeth Bishop – because I have to write a review of God and Elizabeth Bishop

We will stop at Borders in Bangor, and I will look for Winifred Gallagher, House Thinking, and Philip Zaleski, Prayer, because I read reviews that made them sound as if I might like them.

I will get some Brother Cadfael mysteries from the local library. They seem to have a complete collection.

Complaining Boethius

Before I started on the previous blog, I hadn’t remembered how strongly influenced I had been by Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. I hadn’t re-read it for many years, so I got it out to read again. I wish I could find the journal I kept while I was reading it for the first time – it is there in the bowels of the house somewhere. What was I thinking then? How did I manage to slog through the wordiness of the allegory, with Philosophy as a woman holding a dialogue with poor complaining Boethius. I hadn’t remembered that Philosophy had banished the Muses of poetry who stood beside Boethius as he wrote his petulant poetry. Did I give up writing poetry because of this? I can’t remember, but maybe as I am re-reading it, I can recapture specifically what influenced me.

An Answer

I am reading Peter Short's new book, Outside Eden, so that I can write a short review of it for our church newsletter. Peter is on leave from our church because he was elected the moderator of the United Church of Canada. I read this on page 71, "We don't go to church because God is present there. We go to church because in most of our experience, most of the time, God is absent. Oh, there is the rare and stunning moment God's appearing in the landscape of the day, but it is a brief and passing moment. "

How Do You Fill a God Hole?

Both my brother and I inherited a God hole from my mother’s father. About 1960 my brother received the call to become a minister. He wrote about this call in a poem titled “Softly.” “Softly, almost unnoticed, the spirit of Christ/ Enters and becomes. No hysteric act displays itself/ His coming unto us/…Jesus enters softly.”

I thought that if my beloved Robin was going to devote his life to the church, I should support him if I could. A year or so later, the local Methodist minister came to visit – he was visiting all the people in our apartment complex – and found me reading John Wesley’s biography. Soon I too was involved with the church. I’ve been attending church since then, although there was a period from 1965 until about 1975 when my attendance was sporadic but still faithful.

I can’t say that the church has been much influence on my religious life. Only occasionally do I feel there as if I am in the presence of God. Just once has Communion constituted a religious experience for me, and that was when Robin led a Watch Night service in our village church. Why then do I attend? I don’t know.

I had an intense period of reading religious books, from about 1965 until about 1990. My religious experiences have come often when I am either reading or writing. I was profoundly moved and changed by reading Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. I have led my life under its guidance ever since. Reading W.E. Hockings’ The Meaning of God in Human Experience changed the way I think of the world, of God and especially of what happens after death. I studied the Bible, read Biblical scholarship, and read works by the Mystics. About 1990 one of our ministers, Rod Sykes, led a seminar on the Reign of God, and that became a huge part of my thinking.

All my novels use a religious a structure but not an obvious one. (No one, not even a reviewer, has mentioned such a structure.) Flora used the Book of Revelations for its structure as written about in Farrer’s The Rebirth of Images. Wise-Ears used the Book of Proverbs. The Opening Eye and Samara used the first part of the Book of Acts. The Irrational Doorways used the Book of Acts and others of Paul’s writings. The current, unpublished novel, Temple House, uses what I can grasp of the Reign of God.

More rumination about blogging

My husband, Bill, has just written a response to a listserv about the use of letters in 18th century periodicals. The discussion is whether some letters to these periodicals were written by the editors or others using a fictional persona. He suggested that he expects blogs will soon be written by people with such a fictional guise. I have noticed that many writers create and sustain a carefully crafted persona. A male poet is a hard-drinking womanizing cad. A novelist is completely self-taught. A female journalist is tough as nails. A female poet is completely a-moral. I seem to have gravitated to the blogs written by sensitive, Christian, home-schooling mothers. I have just read a book by Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister. He presents himself as an Augustinian reformed drunkard. Several of the blogs I have been on suggest that the minister writing the blog has a drinking problem. “I too am human; I reformed, so can you.” People have told me that they would know my writing even if it weren’t signed, but I don’t know how they would. Whatever persona I have is uncrafted, unself-conscious. In this blog I am trying to figure out who I am and how I got that way, become more self-conscious.

What's In A Blog?

I am trying to discover what elements of the blog as a literary genre make a successful one. The blog is not quite published raw diary, and yet not quite finely edited journal either. I have been looking at various blogs and can see that the personal should be there, to let a potential reader know he will be interested in what the blogger has to say, to let the reader hear the voice behind the posts. Some interesting information that a reader might find useful and the ability to connect what the blogger is saying about his personal life to the life of the reader can be there. I have written novels, short stories, and art journalism (profiles of artists and reviews of exhibits and books) – what elements do each of these have in common with a blog? Can a blog have narrative thrust, plot? I have sat in on several different writer’s groups where we read to each other what we have written the previous week, and this has lead to my ability to hear those writers’ voices behind what they have written. The newspaper stated last week that one blog is being constructed every second, so it stands to reason that there will be people out there whose interests I share. But how to find those blogs? May Sarton’s published journals read like a blog although you know they have been edited thoroughly. A blog has the advantage of being of the moment, unedited.

more doorways

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.
William James

I have just finished re-reading “The Land of the Wee-Uns,” one of the six stories in The Listen to Me Stories, and if I remember correctly, my favorite. I could almost recapture the feeling I had when I first read it: delight in that hidden world of tiny people living in a mountain under the sea. Why had the story so enthralled me? Was it because I was experiencing another world for the first time and thus could look at my own world with new eyes? The story is about a boy who sets out from the coast of Scotland and is marooned there. He was heartbroken to be separated from his mother and father, and yet he eventually became happy and content. James goes on to write about experiencing in arts the “vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.” One of the great joys I have in writing novels is constructing other worlds. The Wee-Uns are sweeter than we giants are. My constructed worlds are peopled with sweet characters, a flaw perhaps.

In my novel Wise-Ears, the main character writes stories. For one of these stories, to get the right voice and style, I read Granny’s Wonderful Chair out loud. Years ago, on one of his visits my father brought me a chair that looks like the one in the book’s illustration. The chair is of no earthly use, uncomfortable and awkward, but I love it nonetheless.

Irrational Doorways

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.
William James

My father brought us used books from a place in Boston called Morgan Memorial. I remember the name well since it was the source of treasures, but I didn’t know what it was until I looked it up on the internet. It is a place where “unwanted household goods” were made serviceable by people with disabilities. One of these books was my favorite: The Listen to Me Stories by Alicia Aspinwall. Another of my favorites was Granny’s Wonderful Chair by Frances Browne. The inscription in that book is “Nuzzo to Mr. L.” I think Nuzzo was one of my father’s charges in the school where he taught woodworking to boys who had got in trouble with the law, truancy mostly but also petty thefts. I don’t know why Nuzzo gave my father a book.

Alicia is not as well-known as Frances, partly I think, because Granny’s Wonderful Chair contained "The Christmas Cuckoo", widely-anthologized in Christmas story books. Perhaps she was a better storyteller, but she also had a more dramatic biography. She was blind, the result of smallpox in her childhood, and came from a family of 12 in Ireland. I think Alicia was an American, but I can’t find anything more about her. She wrote a moralizing story about the use of the word “please” also anthologized.

Until I started writing this, I hadn’t fully realized that these two books were products of the nineteenth century. The Listen to Me Stories was first published in 1897, but my copy is a 1910 reprint. Granny’s Wonderful Chair was published in 1856.

Both of these books, I also just realized, were told by a recognizable storyteller. In Granny’s Wonderful Chair, the chair tells the stories. “Chair of my grandmother, tell me a story.” That the title of The Listen to Me Stories implied a storyteller, I understood and I even imagined the storyteller.

I thought I could finish this exploration without having to reread the stories, but I realize I can’t. What did I find in these stories that so affected me?