Yet now that I consider it, I can see that the appeal of Freya, Balder, Loki, and Company was, precisely, to my Catholic nature. The Prince of Darkness, despite his large handicap, was a power for us, a kind of god even if we avoided the Manichean heresy of picturing him as dividing the world in equal shares with God the Father. The only surprise is that the Norse cosmogony should have felt so congenial to me given the prejudice against real Norsemen—the “Scandihoovians” of Minnesota—that Irish Catholics learned at their mother’s knee. Evidently I made no connection between the great battle of Ragnarok that was to end the world and the local Olsens and Hansens. In the same way, my grandmother, old Lizzie McCarthy, who was “not over-fond” of Jews, never appeared to notice that Jesus was one, at least on His mother’s side.
The sense of being at home among the Aesir, “speaking their language,” was all the more natural to a Catholic child in that the Northern myths (though I did not guess it then) show clear traces of Christian impaste overlaying very primitive material. Balder, in particular, their pure-as-snow sun god, is a lot closer to Jesus on Mount Tabor than to Phoebus Apollo in his sky-chariot. The gods and Nature weep tears for him, treacherously slain by an arrow of mistletoe, as he descends like Christ crucified to the lower world, but there is a promise of a Second Coming, when all will live in harmony.
So it “fits,” I suppose, that when I left the house in Minneapolis and, before very long, the faith, the gods of Asgard lost their hold on me. I have scarcely thought of them since. Looking them up now, to reaffirm my memory, I am amazed to learn that Balder has a wife (Nanna); I had imagined him as a bachelor like Our Lord or Sir Percival. Otherwise that Northern pantheon has remained surprisingly fresh in my mind, as though deep-frozen in a snow-slide, untouched by any process of wear or tear. I do not think they figure in my writings even metaphorically, unlike King Arthur and his knights, who turn up in the story of Peter Levi (Birds of America). My passion for them was a crush, which I got over so completely that the cure has left me with a perfect immunity to Wagner. Though The Ring has been “in” twice during my life, I have never had any interest in it.
But I am digressing in the middle of a digression, piling Ossa on Pelion, we Latinists would say. I was talking about books or, rather, about the scarcity of them that I had to endure between my seventh and my twelfth year. Yet losing the thread (or seeming to) has given me time to wonder about the truth of what I was saying. On reflection I see that I have been exaggerating. I cannot have waited more than a decade to read “Thumbelina” and “Puss in Boots,” or “Snow White” or “Rapunzel” or “Rumpelstiltskin.” If they were already old friends when I read them aloud to Reuel, it means that in Minneapolis we must have had the usual Grimm and Perrault fairy tales and that secretly or openly I read them.
Aladdin and his lamp, too—I have a distinct memory of a genie, somewhat pear-shaped, emerging from a cloud of smoke—Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor, in one of whose adventures I first learned of the roc and pictured to myself fearfully its huge white fabulous eggs. Then there are books I feel I have read that I cannot remember in the Minneapolis house or “place” in the years just following: Tanglewood Tales and a Pilgrim’s Progress illustrated with dark, Doré-like lithographs. But a Catholic home would not have had Bunyan; still less would the Sisters of St. Joseph have given it to us in school—almost better Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. And yet I feel sure that I was a child—not a girl—when I saw the words “Apollyon” and “Slough of Despond” and essayed to pronounce them to myself. The volume with its gloomy illustrations “belongs” in the Minneapolis framework, more specifically in the glass-fronted bookcase in the parlor, and I can only suppose that, like the Dante and Don Quixote, it had belonged to our father, more catholic in his tastes than the rest of his family, and that our guardians were too ignorant to confiscate it.
It was not till I left Minneapolis, I think, that a book disappointed me. I could not finish Washington Irving’s The Alhambra. That was in the convent, in Seattle. I doubt that such a thing could have happened in the Minneapolis time, for then I could read just about anything—I had an iron stomach for printed matter, like a goat’s. To this day, I have a good digestion in this respect, which I must owe, like my generally good digestion and appetite, to the Blaisdell Avenue regime. The ability to read almost anything was the corollary, obviously, of deprivation, for, exaggerate or not, it is still true that we had very few books.
It is true, too, that at that time children by and large had a far greater power of absorption of the printed word than children do today, and there also scarcity was a factor—children’s books were a comparative rarity, so that children “made do” with books written for adults. The change came between my generation and the next: a book like The Water-Babies, which I “ate up” as a child, no doubt like my father before me, was utterly resistant to being gulped down or even tasted by my son. And he rebelled against Cooper’s The Prairie, even though it was being read aloud to him—a kind of spoon-feeding. You could blame that on the Hardy Boys, were it not for Henty and H. Rider Haggard, whom he read straight through and begged for more of.
On the whole, children’s taste in books seems to change more slowly than adults’. Heidi and Robin Hood are still classics, and I have read the Howard Pyle King Arthur books not only to Reuel but to my husband’s children, more than fifteen years his junior. But other old books have become inaccessible to young readers, as though placed out of their reach by the modern child’s shrunken vocabulary. Stylistic mannerisms are another barrier. They can cause books to date alarmingly, like affected fashions in dress, and this applies equally to old and young. We cannot return to the favorites of our youth. It is as much as I can do to read Meredith now, though I devoured him as a girl, to the point where until recently I supposed that my sentences must sound like him. But when a couple of summers ago I reread Richard Feverel, I could not see the shadow of a resemblance; the problem was to get through it at all.
Charles Kingsley, a “muscular Christian,” was a contemporary of Meredith’s. There is an old copy of The Water-Babies (first published in 1863, four years after Richard Feverel) in the room where I am writing, inscribed “Harry from Uncle Louis, Christmas 1904.” The two names are in my family, “Harry” on both sides of it, but the book is no relation; it came with the house in Maine when we bought it. Nevertheless the bookshelves that face me as I write are confronting me, eerily, with the classics of my childhood: The Water-Babies, Andrew Lang’s edition of The Arabian Nights (same illustrations), Black Beauty, Heidi, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, even Manly’s English Poetry, where I found “Sister Helen” a few years later on a Tacoma boarding-school shelf. It is as if these ghostly volumes that had formed my persona had been haunting the house on the Maine seacoast that my husband was to buy in 1967.
But to return to the point at hand: The Water-Babies, which was written as a children’s story on a theme of child labor, is extremely arch and fanciful, as much so as anything Meredith ever penned. On opening it yesterday, I felt sympathy with the reluctant Reuel of forty years ago; the only plain sentence in the whole narrative is the first one: “Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep and his name was Tom.” In the same way a new look at the first chapter of Vanity Fair, borrowed from the Bangor Public Library, makes me wonder how this could have figured in the sixth-grade reader of St. Stephen’s parochial school. Even if ruthlessly cut and preceded by a vocabulary, the need of which is emphasized by the markings in red ink of a previous borrower underlining the difficult words: “equipage,” “bandy,” “Semiramis,” “incident to,” “orthography,” “sensibility.” …
Well! Necessity is the mother of invention: the shortage of books in the Minneapolis house was compensated for by other kinds of reading-matter. We had the funny papers every afternoon and a whole section of them in color on Sunday. There was also the Sunday magazine section, which we were allowed to look at (I can’t guess why), spread out
on the den rug after church. I remember best the high-society scandals, constituent elements (come to think of it) of Henry James’s “international theme”—Anna Gould, Count Boni de Castellane, the much-married Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudray—King Tut, the Kohinoor diamond, the curse of the Carnarvons, and some medical curiosities. Then there were religious periodicals: Grandma McCarthy’s blue-and-white Ave Maria, which I read in her upstairs sunroom, and old Aunt Mary’s more lowbrow Extension, sepia-toned, which I would “borrow” and keep hidden under my mattress; both of these carried short stories. In Our Sunday Visitor, sold after church every Sunday, you could read about the scary burning of crosses by the Ku Klux Klan on Catholic lawns, and there was a gripping Question-and-Answer column that advised you, if you were a doctor, which to save, the mother or the child, in a perilous childbirth—readers seemed to write in the same questions week after week, maybe in the hope of getting a different answer. In church after Sunday Mass there were also free distributions of tracts on foreign missions—that was probably where I learned of Father Damien and the lepers on Molokai—Catholics had a great appetite for reading about gruesome diseases, especially those involving the rotting or falling off of parts of the body. But in general the various tracts, flyers, illustrated brochures on missionary work extended our horizons almost like The National Geographic of Protestant homes.
That was all there was to the “media” then; the very word was unknown. There was no equivalent of The Reader’s Digest; rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers were yet to come; radio was in the crystal-set stage—in our house Uncle Myers’ envied toy. We were allowed to watch him listen with the earphones on his head. There was a unique occasion, however, when we were brought to my grandmother’s house to listen to a radio “event” on a big set for which you did not need earphones; that was the Dempsey-Firpo fight (September 14, 1923). Unfortunately the knock-out took place early in the second round, almost before the fight had started, and there was nothing to do but tag home to bed, sadly (at least in my case) because Luis Angel Firpo had lost.
My passion for the Bull of the Pampas was a great laugh to the family. They did not understand that I had fallen in love with his name. Names were often the reason for my preferences—what else did I have to go by? And they are not such bad indicators: a man does not choose his name, but he can change it—witness Voltaire and Muhammad Ali. That a little girl should have a passionate crush on a prize fighter may seem odd, but here again the economics of scarcity were at work. It would have been more normal to be “crazy about” a star of the silver screen, but I had never seen one, unless maybe an episode of Pearl White in the days of Mama and Daddy. During the five years in Minneapolis, the only full-length movie I saw was The Seal of the Confessional, shown in the church basement. It was about a handsome priest who heard a murderer’s confession and so had to keep silent, rather tiresomely, while an innocent man was going to the chair, but there was an exciting sub-plot about an atheist who was struck down by lightning when he defied God to demonstrate His existence. On Saturday mornings our neighborhood movie house let children in free to see the trailer for the coming Western, but those “tastes,” while whetting the appetite, were of course not a substitute for the real William S. Hart. By the time I left Minneapolis and could go to the movies, the great days of silent film had passed.
Stage stars we never laid eyes on, nor vaudevillians. The only music we got to hear was a few records, e.g., “Over There,” “Listen to the Mocking-bird,” occasional band concerts in parks, the church organ, and military brasses in parades; our grandmother’s “music room” contained a player piano, with rolls you inserted, but we were forbidden to work it. We knew John McCormack and Harry Lauder from their photos, Caruso, probably, too, and our great-aunts cherished a faded tintype of a figure called Chauncey Olcott, who, Webster’s tells me, was “Chancellor John Olcott, 1860-1932, American actor and tenor,” surely of Irish descent. In my grandmother’s “music room,” I eyed a big photograph of Mme. Schumann-Heink and was shocked by the monstrous bellows of her bosom.
No public figures entered our ken, except for Marshal Foch, whom we saw in person—a trim little white-haired figure—being welcomed by the city in front of the Art Institute, across from Fairoaks Park. During the Harding-Cox campaign (1920), I pedaled our little wooden wagon up and down our driveway shouting “Hurrah for Cox!” but the only basis for my support was that he was a Democrat and I thought my father had been one. I was impressed by President Harding’s death because Seattle had a part in it. Returning from Alaska, he fell sick (surely from the seafood?) in Seattle and died in San Francisco. It was exciting to see our birthplace “make” the headlines. From the McCarthy aunts, uncles, and cousins we had already heard more than once about the IWW mayor, Ole Hansen, Seattle had elected. The initials, they said, stood for “I Won’t Work,” but I was less interested by that than by his horrible first name, which I probably identified with Ole Luk Oie, the bogey in the storybook. My happy memories of boulevards and grassy terraces and continual picnics in the backyard got muddied by the McCarthy family’s Republican politics and dislike of their in-laws till I came to think of Seattle as a disreputable place that had a dangerous district called Coon Hollow (I remembered that from my father) and an “I Won’t Work” Ole for a mayor.
Needless to say, on the visual side we were kept well below the poverty line, just as in politics, reading, entertainment. The house they had put us in was ugly, with an ugly yard and a few ugly bushes like Bridal Wreath. For a while we were allowed to use a stereopticon, with views of the pyramids, and in my room there was a “Baby Stuart” in a blue-and-white boy’s dress. In a group of schoolchildren, we could sometimes go to the museum, where, running away from home, I once hid behind the cast of the Laocoon. But our clothes, faded, continually pieced, let out, and let down, the repellent food we ate, my worn, dull black, second-hand rosary were cruelly punishing to a sense of beauty. Yet in this sphere our guardians were less effectual. They could keep books out of our hands, limit the repertory of the phonograph, restrict our intercourse with the neighbors’ children by penning us within a wire-net fence, but they could not stop us from using our eyes. The passionate pleasure I got from soap bubbles, rainbows—anything iridescent, including smears of oil on street puddles—from the funny “faces” of pansies, spurs of nasturtiums (which also concealed a nectar), freckles of foxglove, from holy pictures, spider webs, motes of dust riding on a sun ray, “Jack Frost flowers,” dew, the white vestments at Easter, Easter lilies around the altar, all that joy was beyond our guardians’ power of prevention. No more could they put a halt to it than they could keep us, fenced in our yard, from reading the sky-writing that spelled out “Lucky Strike” on the summer sky while we watched the words form.
Nature finds substitutes in the cultural realm, and how can I regret Orphans in the Storm, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Buster Keaton, early Harold Lloyd, the Little Pepper books, the “Patty” books, Jeritza, Mary Garden, when I had Balder and Freya, Thor and Sif, The Book of Knowledge, snowflakes, prismatic refractions, the seeds I planted one year on Good Friday that turned into frilly sweet peas?
The wryness I feel on looking back at Uncle Myers and the Sheridan sisters, on that jaundice-colored house with its attendant Golden Glow, Bridal Wreath, and gross rhubarb plant in the backyard, is almost wholly material. I don’t mind about the cultural sustenance that was withheld from us—rather, the contrary. They seem to have hit on a formula for child-rearing that virtually forced us to use our imaginations. What I mind is the horrible food we were made to eat, the carrots I dumped out the window, the gristle and fat, the chicken necks I sucked to draw out the little white cord, the prunes, farina, and Wheatena. Here there was no compensation, no sensibilizing of the palate to shadings of taste; the envy with which we watched Uncle Myers put bananas on his corn flakes led only to my devouring thirteen in one fevered session in my grandmother’s pantry in
Seattle—a sickening experience and my last encounter with the fruit.
The beatings with hairbrush and razor-strop I can still resent, but abstractly, as injustice. My body does not remember them as it remembers the carrots and parsnips, still refusing more than sixty-five years later the sweetish taste of the first unless camouflaged with mint, butter, caramelized sugar, and so on, and refusing the second absolutely. As to compensation for the physical abuse I received (and I count being made to stay outdoors in the snow for two hours at a stretch in sub-zero temperatures going down to twenty), I am not sure whether Nature has seen to that or not. Certainly those people, at least in this world, never had to pay for their crimes. Yet I do not think that I have tried to avenge myself on them in what I have written—they were dead long before I could use a typewriter. As far as I can tell, I do not feel vindictive toward them, have not for years, maybe not since I was seated on a train for Seattle with my other grandfather; my escape was my revenge. And if I triumph over them now, still again, recalling details of their regimen, it is because the tale of it makes me smile. Perhaps that is Nature’s repair-work: over the years I have found a means—laughter—of turning pain into pleasure. Uncle Myers and Aunt Margaret, my grandmother, too, in her own style, amuse me by their capacity for being awful. It is a sort of talent, really, that people do not have nowadays or not in the same way. And, to the extent that my memory has been able to do justice to that talent in them, they have been immortalized, which is to say that Uncle Myers and his pedometer have been condemned to eternal derision.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 25