crooked house

Are You My Mother? Maud Interviews Alison Bechdel

Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir (is that a thing?) about her relationship with her mother. Maud Newton talks to her about it in this really intriguing interview.

AB: One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn't sensor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it's because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.

 

BNR: And when your OCD was making it really difficult to keep the diary, your mom would write down your entries. I remember that from Fun Home, too, and both times it gave me chills. The devotion implicit in it.

 

AB: Oh my God, that was another pivotal moment. She would sit there and write down everything I said. It was amazing. It also becomes weirdly this template for my relationship later with therapists, other women who would sit there and take down notes on what I was saying.

This Life is In Your Hands. And A Spoiler Alert.

 This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone is a memoir by Melissa Coleman that got a lot of attention last year when it first came out. Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue, were among the first back-to-the-landers of the late 60s and 70s. They moved to a plot of land in rural Maine that adjoined the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing, the couple who wrote Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which is the book credited with inspiring the movement. Eliot and Sue built their own home, grew their own food, and Sue gave birth to two little girls while they did it. It sounds Edenic, particularly for children, and partly, it was.  (This NYT review of the book does a good job of describing the basic events of This Life is In Your Hands and also the sort of see-sawing the book does between the poetry of the family's life, rooted as it was in nature, and an increasing sense of ominousness.)

It's easy for people who have never attempted to be self-sufficient through farming to romanticize the idea (witness the current resurgence of what Emily Matchar calls the New Domesticity, which admittedly doesn't seem as hard-core a movement) but the fact is that it makes for a very hard life. (I am guilty of romanticizing it myself -- in  high school I gave a speech on my version of "the good life" in which I would retreat with my little family to a cabin in the woods, where I would homeschool my children and we would all survive, I guess, on nuts and berries.) Coleman, who is now a nationally recognized expert on organic gardening, actually had a thyroid disorder, largely untreated, that spurred him on to ceaseless physical labour. And if I were going to try to accomplish what he did, I think I'd want one, too. From Melissa Coleman's descriptions of her mother, Sue, it seems to me that she  suffered terribly from post-partum depression and that this was horribly compounded by the relentless, back-breaking work that homesteading actually entailed, not to mention possible malnutrition.

Now here is where the spoiler comes in. Consider yourself warned. One day, busy preparing a feast for some visitors (as if she doesn't have enough to do), Sue shoos Melissa's little sister Heidi, who is around three at the time I think, out of the cabin, telling her to go float her toy boat on the pond. Heidi actually comes back once or twice, begging for attention, and Sue turns her away. You can guess what happened to Heidi down at the pond. She drowned.

Melissa Coleman doesn't blame her mother for this in the book, but she doesn't exactly absolve her, either. After reading it I was left feeling absolutely bereft for the poor woman, whom I was unable to track down via google, hoping to learn she has found some sort of peace. And I must admit I was also left feeling a bit pissed off about Eliot Coleman's (and the Nearings') subsequent success as  folk heroes.

Now of course children die. They die in car accidents in suburbia and of childhood cancers and all kinds of things. But all it takes is a short stroll through a pioneer-era graveyard to see how many children died when there was no choice for anyone but a  "lifestyle" of relentless physical labour in order to put food on the table. A lot of those deaths were from childhood diseases we can now vaccinate against (if we aren't against vaccinating) but many of them were from accidents that happened when parents didn't have the time and the energy to hover over their kids.

Not Entirely Lost

From Dana Spiotta's intriguing Stone Arabia,a novel partly about a very intense sibling relationship, this excerpt describes a memory of the narrator's father, who died when she was seven or eight years old:

I don't remember a single conversation I had with my father. I do remember, however, walking behind him on the street. He reached his hand back and opened it, then closed it and opened it without looking around for me. I ran up and pressed my palm into his palm. He closed his hand gently over mine, squeezed it. I remember how large his hand was, and how warm and heavy it felt.

...

Occasionally -- maybe three times it happened -- I get a sense of my father from other men. When I walk behind a certain kind of man in the street. It happened to me in New York City once. I was in a crowd and a man moved right in front of me. He brushed past me. He was wearing an overcoat. And because of his height, or maybe the way he carried himself, the way he walked, or the way his hair met the back of his collar. Or how his hand looked as he held his briefcase -- something brought back my father. A deep, intimate body memory came over me; I could see him -- somewhat -- but I could feel him, or recall feeling him, completely. I glimpsed this stranger through the crowd and I startled. A flood of recognition and longing. I hurried after him, even tried to catch up. And then he turned slightly and I saw his face. I felt, ridiculously, real disappointment when I realized he was not my father. He did not look at all like my father. The incident didn't make me feel sad, though, it made me remember my father in ways a picture never could. I felt the memory of my father on my body, the way you feel a breeze or the heat of the sun. He did not feel -- and so was not -- entirely lost to me.

Rocking the Cradle

Gorgeous rocker cradle by fine woodworker Scott Morrison.

The copy I borrowed of  Babies: An Unsentimental Anthology, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is long overdue at the library. A computer somewhere is totting up my fine as I type. And that is a shame, as I've been meaning to post number of excerpts from this delicious collection of amusing, unflattering, and often realistic snippets from literature about babies. Here is one of my favourites:

If you rock an empty cradle, you will rock a new baby into it. This is a superstition in viridi observantia, and it is quite curious to see the face of alarm with which a poor woman, with her tenth baby in her arms, will dash across the room to prevent the 'baby-but-one' from engaging in such a dangerous amusement as rocking the empty cradle.

                      The Book of Days, Robert Chambers, 1864, II, 9 July

I've been collecting lots of  photos of beautiful rocker cradles and rocking chairs on pinterest.

Babies in Literature: Pat Barker's The Ghost Road

I've recently been riveted by Pat Barker's highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy about the first world war, which I somehow missed when the books were first published in the 90s -- I'd majored in History at university, mostly of the world wars and, having moved on to teaching small children, I suppose I was all warred out. (You don't know conflict until you have tried to get twenty five-year-olds to sit down and be quiet all at the same time.) I imagine these texts, which are a blend of fiction and non-fiction, are used widely in college history classes today. If they aren't, they should be. They center on William Rivers, a real person -- a noted anthropologist and psychiatrist who treated soldiers, including poet Siegfried Sassoon, for shell-shock. Many of them suffered from fascinating hysterical illnesses such as muteness and paralysis, brought on by prolonged terror.

There aren't many babies in Regeneration and The Ghost Road, the first and last in the series and the two books I've read so far -- they focus mainly on the experiences of men. Interestingly, Barker wrote many books about working class women before turning to this topic and it was only then that she began to receive accolades. I'm planning to search out these earlier books immediately as I'm guessing they may be just as good, if not as appealing to the usual male book critic.

The following description is taken from one of Rivers's memories of his time before the war studying headhunters in Melanesia:

A thread-like wail from the baby Njiru held in his hands, one palm cradling the head, the other the buttocks, a morself of black-eyed misery squirming in between.

Her name was Kwini and her mother was dead. Worse than that, she'd died in childbirth, which made her an evil spirit, likely to attempt to reclaim her child. The body had been dumped at sea, a bundle of rags strapped between the breasts to fool the mother into thinking she had her baby with her but still ... Kwini's failure to thrive was attributed to her mother's attempts to get her back.

She certainly wasn't thriving: skin hung in loose folds from her thighs. Rivers looked round the circle at her grandmother's wrinkled dugs, the flat chest of her nine-year-old sister, the highly developed pectoral muscles of her father. He asked what she was being fed on. Mashed up yams softened by spit was the answer. The tiny hands clawed the air as if she would wring life out of it.

Njiru passed the leaves he was holding several times between his legs and then, stretching to his full height, attached them to the rafters at the gable end, where the scare ghost shivered in the draught. "Come down and depart, you ghost, her mother; do not haunt this child and let her live."

"Will she live?" Rivers asked.

He had his own opinion, but wanted to know what Njiru would say. Njiru spread his hands.

On their way back to Narovo, Rivers questioned him about the ghosts of women who died in childbirth. This was not a rare form of death, since the custom was for women to give birth alone, and there was no tradition of midwifery. Such ghosts could not be named, he already knew that. In the genealogy they were referred to as evil spirits. It had startled him at first to be told quite casually that such and such a man had married "an evil spirit."

They were called tomate pa na savo --the ghosts of the confining house -- Njiru explained, and they were dreaded, since their chief aim was to ensure that as many other women as possible should die in that same way.

 

Babies in Literature: Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks

Just discovered Jane Gardam, via something Kerry Clare said on facebook, and am really enjoying her. Particularly this hilarious, unsentimental description, from her novel God on the Rocks of a new baby and his eight-year-old sister's reaction to him:

Mrs Marsh, dazed about times of day, detached herself from the baby, drawing herself back and mopping about with a cloth. She lifted the baby up on her shoulder where a huge towelling nappy lay, hanging a little way down her back for the baby to be sick on. She massaged its back which was like the back of a duck, oven-ready. The baby's unsteady head and swivelling eyes rolled on her shoulder, its round mouth slightly open, wet and red. It seemed, filmily, to be trying to take in Margaret who was fiddling with things on the mantelpiece behind her mother. She looked down at it with a realistic glare. The baby under the massage let air come out of its mouth in a long explosion and pale milk ran out and over its chin.

"Filthy," said Margaret.

"There's my little lovekin," said Mrs Marsh. She lifted the baby into the air before her, both hands under the armpits, and let it hang like dough about to drop. "What did you say, dear? It's your treat-day with Lydia, isn't it?"

"This afternoon," said Margaret, dropping the baby's bottle of gripe water and smashing it to bits on the mottled cream tiles of the fireplace. Glass flew everywhere in splinters and the baby after jerking as if it had received an electric shock began to cry like a new lamb. "Lair, lair, lair," it went, scarlet in the face and flushing quickly to purple all over its bald head, its eyes in two directions.

Mrs Marsh was not upset, though she had jumped as violently as her son. Margaret saw her take the decision to be understanding rather than annoyed. "There now," she said. Placing the lamenting child over her other, nappiless, shoulder she drew Margaret to her to lean upon the other one. "Never mind , dear. Just an accident."

Margaret -- her mother smelled of milk and baby powder -- pulled away and made a face. "It's like a pig," she said.

Mrs Marsh looked yet more understanding. "Darling, you do know we love you, don't you? He's your baby, too, you know, just as much as ours. Look -- you hold him. You're such a big girl. He's going to love you so much."

"What's so marvellous?"

"Marvellous?"

"About that? Why do I have to be pleased that he's going to love me? I don't need him."

"He will need you."

"No he won't. If I wasn't here he wouldn't know anything about me."

"But you are here."

"I'm not here for him. I managed without me. Nobody was here for me when I was born and I was all right."

Mrs Marsh, trying very slowly to digest this empirical point, wrapped the child very tight in a cloth with its arms crossed over its chest tight beneath it, then put it on its face in the flounced organdy of the crib.

It did not look up to its surroundings. More like a trussed duck than ever.

"It can't be good for it, bound up like that," said Margaret, and Mrs Marsh brightened at a sign of possible concern. "Oh yes it is, dear. It says so in Truby King. They like to feel safe."

"I don't see why you feel safe if you're tied up."

[...]

[Mrs Marsh] looked at the trussed baby, face down, its red head like a tilted orange rearing up and down on the undersheet as if desperately trying to escape. Giving up, it let its head drop into suffocation position and there was another explosion followed by a long, liquid spluttering from further down the cot: and a smell. "Oh dear," said Mrs Marsh contented, "now I'll have to start all over again with a new nappy. Could you hand me the bucket, darling?"

"His own image," said Margaret, watching the horrible unwrapping. "If God looks like us... What's the point?"

 

Babies in Literature: Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales

This is  a painting of Kakuarshuk, an Inuit woman who is digging for babies -- that's where they come from, didn't you know? It's by the artist Rima Staines who talks about the folktale that inspired her, which was collected in Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales, over here at her blog, The Hermitage. The painting is for sale.

Babies in Literature: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography

According to Alexandra Popoff, author of Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, Leo Tolstoy's wife has been maligned by history. Popoff, who had access to a great deal of previously inaccessible archival materials, explains that it all stems from Tolstoy's final years, when he experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his marriage, his family, and his property (or try to). However much Tolstoy may have believed in his principles of poverty and chastity, this renunciation put his wife in a completely untenable position. Sophia was left to look after the couple's eight surviving children pretty much on her own. Clearly Tolstoy felt some responsibility to his family, because he kept waffling on property and money matters. Admittedly, Sophia kept fighting him on these -- who wouldn't, when she had eight children to feed, clothe, and educate? He also kept waffling on the matter of sex -- he kept sleeping with Sophia and then blaming the matronly woman for being a seductress. Tolstoy's most famous follower, Vladimir Chertkoff, managed to insinuate himself between the couple in Tolstoy's final years and ended up controlling his literary works after his death. Popoff argues that it is he who is most responsible for discrediting Sophia Tolstoy's character. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Tolstoy, and really, anyone who is interested in the concept of marriage and women's historical role within it.

Tolstoy was a literary genius, to be sure, but he also must have been infuriating to be married to. Sophia was not only Tolstoy's muse, she was a  tireless worker who devoted all her efforts to creating the proper environment for her husband to write in. She was Tolstoy's copyist and later his publisher. She managed his home and often his estate and related business matters. She made most of the childrearing and educational decisions on her own. (At one point, when she asked about appropriate education for one of their teenage sons, her husband brushed her off with a comment that he should become a street sweeper or the like because of his own religious beliefs against taking part in a money-based economy.) Sophia gave birth to thirteen children, although she wanted to stop after seven or so -- but Tolstoy wouldn't allow birth control. She breastfed all these babies herself at Tolstoy's insistence even though it never became easy for her (she often developed mastitis) and most women of her position employed wet nurses. And she watched six of her children die. Exhausted and completely emotionally and physically spent, at times Sophia wanted to end these pregnancies:

By now, she was certain of her [twelfth] pregnancy. As she wrote her sister, she felt like "screaming of despair and rage."

Told the news, Tolstoy wrote he was glad they would have a child; Sophia's unhappiness came from her revolté. It would be easier for her and people around her if she assumed a more accepting attitude: "Why can't you surrender?" Sophia thought his position was morally superior and felt crushed. "If I were bad before, now I am loathsome! And if you were good, you have become so much better!" Her pregnancy explained her abnormal state, Tolstoy replied: "I know, I've heard, that it's terribly oppressive for the soul."

Meanwhile, Sophia attempted to induce a miscarriage: she took scalding baths and jumped from a dresser. To a nanny who tried to talk her out of it, she said that Tolstoy considered leaving her and their children. When her attempts failed, she approached a midwife in Tula, asking for an abortion. The midwife, afraid of exposure, refused: she would perform an abortion for someone else, but not for Countess Tolstoy.

At times, Sophia Tolstoy wanted to end her own life.

You can read a brief excerpt from the biography here.

Babies in Literature: Audrey Thomas's Tattycoram

I have no idea if the actual Charles Dickens ever had an exchange like the following one that his fictional version has with his maid in Audrey Thomas's novel Tattycoram:

One afternoon [Mr. Dickens] said to me... "Hattie, how do you feel about children?"

"How do I feel about them, sir?"

"Yes. Do you like them?"

"I like them well enough. I'm particularly fond of the babies."

"I, too. I'm particularly fond of the babies. What a pity they can't be shot and stuffed before the age of five."

 I'm not familiar enough with Dickens's work to know if he ever really said anything like that or, perhaps, put those words into the mouth of one of his nastier characters. All a quick google would reveal about his thoughts on infants is that he said, "Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last." That seems more in keeping with his reputation for sentiment. (Interestingly, from that same quick google I learned that Queen Victoria was supposed to have said, "An ugly baby is a very nasty object - and the prettiest is frightful." She had nine of her own. It's hard to tell from pictures whether they were ugly or pretty. They were certainly snugly buttoned into a lot of clothing. And surely she could have handed them off to a myriad of nursemaids before they'd started to seem too unattractive.)

Tattycoram is a beautifully written, deceptively light novel, almost a piece of Victoriana, centered on one of Dickens's characters, a maid in Little Dorrit. Thomas's version of the maid, Harriet Coram, was abandoned at the Foundling Hospital as a baby and later hired by the fictional Dickens to look after his growing family and then to teach in the home for fallen women he helped set up. After Harriet's marriage, she is dismayed to learn that Dickens has made her a character in his novel -- and an unpleasant one at that. This twist gives Thomas's novel a nice postmodern edge and leaves me wondering how much of her fictional Dickens is based on historical fact. Thanks to Sara O'Leary for suggesting the book in the comments to my post about the foundling tokens.

Crazed Elf Inside A Fairy Ring

Can you see the wide ring of orange mushrooms around him? When we discovered it in our yard the other night I promptly tossed both my kids into it for the photo op. Turns out that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

They got out without any trouble, though. In fact, Sylvie wouldn't stay inside. Even magic is powerless against her. I was like the woodcutter in Hansel and Gretel, repeatedly pushing my child, albeit unknowingly, into the path of danger to no avail.