Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  * * *

  * The quote was a flourish by the building’s architect, William Mitchell Kendall, who read Greek for pleasure. He found it in Herodotus’s book of the Persian Wars, describing the Persians’ loyal mounted postal couriers. Little did Kendall know Americans would make it the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service.

  NINE

  WRITERS ON THE STORM

  Steven Patrick Morrissey remembers his 1960s boyhood in Manchester, England, as sodden with rain and troubles. In his working-class neighborhood, the Victorian cobblestones never seemed to dry, rain sent black streaks down feeble windows, and mothers lined front parlors with buckets to catch the endless leaks. His primary school was a “bleak mausoleum” where “children tumble in soaked by rain, and thus they remain for the rest of the day—wet shoes and wet clothes moisten the air, for this is the way.” It was fitting scenery for Morrissey’s childhood isolation and sadness, which soon turned into clinical depression.

  Manchester lies in the northwest of England, and its rainy renown, like Seattle’s, is based more in cultural psyche than actual rainfall. Along with geography and grim skies, the two metros share similar creative contributions. It is perhaps no accident that the rain-famed cities of the United States and the U.K. birthed angst-filled independent rock genres: in Seattle, grunge; in Manchester, the moody indie pop of Morrissey’s band the Smiths, along with Joy Division, New Order, and others.

  In winter, drizzly Manchester gets an average half hour of sunlight a day. Its grit is born of history as the world’s first industrial city, and that, too, had to do with the rain. The first steam-powered textile mill opened on Miller Street in 1781. Industry journals buzzed with the importance of high humidity for cotton manufacture; then and now, moist air meant fewer snapped threads. By the mid-nineteenth century, more than a hundred cotton factories—along with the one cranking out Mr. Macintosh’s Waterproof Double Textures—huffed black smoke into Manchester’s already ashen ceiling. Alexis de Tocqueville described their proud rise from the city’s hilltops: “Huge enclosures give notice from afar of the centralisation of industry!” A young visitor named Friedrich Engels was more struck by the human enclosures. In horrified dispatches from worker neighborhoods, he described rain-rotting, filthy cottages built back to back along steep banks of the river Irk, which flowed black with raw sewage and the waste of the mills.

  A century later, Manchester was bleeding population in a postindustrial economic collapse, pollution had all but killed the Irk, and working-class Mancunians were still living in the back-to-backs. One of them, a young guitar player named Johnny Marr, had grown up in the same sort of grim factory neighborhood as Morrissey. The two shared a taste and talent for dark lyrics, wit, and chords. Each kept hearing about the other, but Morrissey was too reclusive to seek out compatriots. It was Marr who came and banged on his door one day in the summer of 1982, wanting to write songs together.

  The pair formed a band and called it the Smiths. Morrissey and Marr co-wrote songs that appealed to the sort of sensitive, alienated teens they’d been, in the words of one music journalist, “a vast company that loves misery.” Marr said that the band’s “usual default setting was Manchester in the rain.” Their 1984 hit “William, It Was Really Nothing” (number 431 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time) began with the repeating phrase: “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town / This town has dragged you down.”

  The more famous he became, the more Morrissey bemoaned his youth in “Victorian, knife-plunging Manchester.” But creatively, this town did anything but drag him down. “Teenage depression was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he once told an interviewer, for it sent songs “sloshing around in my head.” Their melancholy lyrics helped make him the most iconic British pop artist of his time, and even birthed a genre, mockingly dubbed “miserablism,” beneath Manchester’s leaden skies.

  From the indie pop bands of the knife-plunging city to the grunge musicians of Seattle or Charles Dickens writing in the stormiest years of London history, some writers and composers, poets and painters are famously inspired by despair. It might come from outside—la grisaille, as Parisians call their stylishly overcast sky. Or it may churn from within, temporary blues or serious depression. Often, it seems to be a combination—rain, sending gray streaks down windows and gloomy thoughts through the mind.

  History’s best-known musical rains patter in Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude op. 28, no. 15, known as the “Raindrop Prelude.” Chopin is believed to have written the piece, his longest prelude, during his stay at a Majorca monastery in 1838. The French novelist Amandine Dupin (better known by her pen name, George Sand), Chopin’s mistress, who accompanied him to Majorca, recounted the night she returned to the monastery in a catastrophic storm, to find Chopin weeping as he played one of his new preludes. He was hallucinating, Sand wrote in her Histoire de Ma Vie. He saw himself drowned in a lake. “His composition that evening was full of raindrops that resounded on the roof tiles,” Sand wrote, “but were translated in his imagination and in his chant into tears falling on his heart from the sky.”

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  From the northern Atlantic Ocean, prevailing winds called the westerlies carry warm, moist clouds over the west coast of the British Isles. (To clarify a confusing argot of scientists and mariners: When they speak of wind, they refer to the direction from which it blows. Of an ocean current, they cite the direction toward which it flows.) As the clouds rise over the craggy landscape, they release the heaviest rains over Ireland and western Scotland, England, and Wales. This weather pattern makes small rural villages along the west coast the rainiest inhabited places in the United Kingdom. The wettest of all, soaked with 140 inches a year, is a charming fell-walking hamlet, Seathwaite, about two hours’ drive northwest of Manchester.

  Like the Cascades to Seattle, England’s green and gentle Pennines stretch to the north and east of Manchester, holding perpetual light rain clouds overhead. Also like Seattle, Manchester is England’s notorious city of rain despite not breaking the top ten rainiest places in the nation. People just seem to want a rain capital, and they want their rain capital to drip, not pour.

  In their short and cult-worshipped history, the Smiths put out four albums, all of which reached the U.K. top five. The music is known for capturing British character and British weather. The Manchester-born music journalist Sarah Champion, in her book And God Created Manchester, wrote that Marr’s psychedelic Bo Diddley riff in the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” evokes the wet streets of Manchester “as powerfully as Ry Cooder’s blues twang does the desert terrain of Paris, Texas.”

  Once Champion pointed it out, I could hear the rain in Marr’s guitar. I thought of other bands and classic rock songs like the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” and the Seattle native Jimi Hendrix’s “Rainy Day, Dream Away,” and wondered how the musicians so well captured rain in mood and sound. Champion’s suggestion of a rain riff and Bo Diddley, the American R&B legend who helped blaze the road from blues to rock, sent me to the phone to call my friend Karl Meyer, a blues bass player and producer in Chicago who is a big fan of Bo’s music. Alternately talking and singing to me over the phone, he explained Diddley’s signature beat, an Afro-Cuban rhythm with a three-two clave: BUM-BUM-BUM…BUM-BUM. In “How Soon Is Now,” Marr plays the Diddley beat, but it’s only the backdrop for the rain to come. For that, he tweaks the clave with the reverb on his guitar, creating an echo that, just like a storm, conjures a big sound rather than single drops. In the more overt rain rock songs, Karl tells me, a rainstorm can be as easy as turning up the reverb and hitting a Fender amp with a fist. The Doors used those sorts of sound effects for the storm in “Riders.” But the song’s well-known rain solo comes from Ray Manzarek’s long downward run on a Fender Rhodes electric piano.

  —

  Grunge has its own set of atmospherics. To find their origins, you have to drive two hours beyond Seattle, west to Kurt Cobain’s birthplace, the logging burg of Ab
erdeen, Washington. Singer-guitarist Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic famously formed the breakout band Nirvana in their hometown in 1987. There was definitely something in the air. Aberdeen makes Seattle look sun-drenched. With upward of 130 inches of rain a year—more than three times Seattle’s annual catch—it is one of the wettest inhabited cities in the continental United States.

  Like 1960s Manchester, it is not the rain that makes Aberdeen gloomy. It is the rain mixing with the yellowish smoke of a pulp mill, rusting through an abandoned railroad track, and spattering up from the tires of a log truck rumbling by on Highway 101. Aberdeen was the only rainy place I traveled where the color seemed to be draining away rather than brightening, a result of industrialization and its collapse. (Today’s Manchester, with handsome converted warehouses, glass skyscrapers, and a thriving Gay Village, has largely overcome its grim past.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Aberdeen was a busy sawmilling town. By the turn of the twenty-first, some of its last big mills were being shuttered. The area consistently suffers the highest unemployment rates in Washington.

  The day I visited, Aberdeen’s horizon was indistinguishable between the gray sky and the gray harbor, appropriately named Grays Harbor. (For the one-eyed sea captain Robert Gray. He discovered the harbor in 1792 during a fur-trading expedition, but apparently did not bother to disembark.) The gunmetal monochrome extended to the aging industrial plants along the harbor, the rusting ships at berth there, and the fog that clouded it all. The small downtown was desolate, with the exception of one treasure trove, the Sucher and Sons Star Wars Shop—every inch crammed with intergalactic toys and collectibles, with Cobain memorabilia thrown in among the Chewbaccas and Clone Troopers.

  Some ascribe the rise of Cobain and the flannel-swathed, booted army of young grunge musicians to the rain, or the slump in the logging industry, or the jilting of a generation—the first in American history to hear that they would never have it as good as their parents. The stormy electric sound also emerged in Seattle’s isolation from New York and Los Angeles. Grunge’s trademark rain and flannel are antihero symbols, real and authentic: no L.A. sunshine here.

  Cobain always said how much he hated his gloomy hometown. But it also inspired some of his richest songs, like the gentle “Something in the Way,” which captures his misery in drips from the ceiling of Aberdeen’s Young Street Bridge, which he said he slept under as a teenager. Today, the bridge’s concrete underbelly is full of tributes spray-painted to Cobain since he committed suicide at age twenty-seven.

  As I read them, it seemed to me that giving rain credit for grunge, or Cobain’s sadness or his songwriting, would be just the sort of misunderstanding that so tortured him in his short life. In the context of a storm, rain is just one stage direction in an atmospheric tempest. Maybe it’s the same with the creative mind. Rain may not be the sole cause of the anguish or the art. But no doubt, it can create a mood and inspire a melody.

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  In her Kenya memoir Out of Africa, the Danish author Isak Dinesen described a diversion she created one evening while harvesting maize with young Swahili laborers. As a way of amusing herself and them, she put together Swahili words in rhyming verse. The boys formed a ring around her and waited eagerly for the rhymes, laughing each time she came up with one. “I tried to make them…find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: Speak again. Speak like rain.”

  Perhaps more than in music or any other genre, rain, so fit for meter and metaphor, speaks in the language of poetry. Anthologies seem to have no end of poems titled “Rain,” or those devoted to April rain, May rain, August rain, September rain, summer rain, noon rain, night rain, and London rain—and all of that not even counting showers.

  Conrad Aiken’s beautiful “Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise the Rain” is emblematic of poetry that reveres rain in spirit and deed. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet called raindrops “the syllables of water.” Few worked the syllables as well as rain-loving Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In his “Rain in Summer,” written in 1845, streets and lanes relish the rain after a hot day. Rain relieves a sick man. It brings joy to boys who “down the wet streets / Sail their mimic fleets.” In the country, rain is welcomed by the thirsting grain, the “toilsome and patient oxen,” and the grateful farmer. But only the poet can see rain in its full cycle, following raindrops to rainbows and graves alike. “From birth to death, from death to birth / From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth.”

  Longfellow also wrote what is arguably rain’s most famous refrain, the closing lines of “The Rainy Day”:

  Into each life some rain must fall

  Some days must be dark and dreary.

  The popular use of the lines has left “The Rainy Day” known for the bleakest of messages, rather than the hope Longfellow intended when he wrote, “Be still, sad heart, and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.”

  Emily Dickinson wallowed in the inevitability of Longfellow’s closing stanza, judging by the number of times she quoted one line or the other in her correspondence. “It’s a sorrowful morning Susie,” she wrote her dear friend and future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, in 1852. “The wind blows and it rains; ‘into each life some rain must fall,’ and I hardly know which falls fastest, the rain without, or within.”

  Dickinson could write brilliantly of rain on her own, but that didn’t mean she loved it; quite the opposite. (The belle of Amherst could, after all, write brilliantly of anything, including the common fly, with its “blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz.”) Comparing raindrops with pearls in her poem “Summer Shower,” Dickinson imagined, “What necklaces could be!” But beyond the warm drizzles that quenched her garden in summer and tamped down the dust that swirled from the dirt roads of Amherst, Dickinson viewed storms, and especially thunder and lightning, with a deep sense of doom.

  “The Storm” gives a glimpse of her foreboding:

  There came a wind like a bugle

  It quivered through the grass

  And a green chill upon the heat

  So ominous did pass

  We barred the windows and the doors

  As from an emerald ghost

  The doom’s electric moccasin

  That very instant passed.

  Dickinson considered rain a stark reminder of loneliness, and a spoiler of fun. In June 1851, when she was twenty, she wrote to her brother, Austin, on a Sunday evening just after he’d left Amherst to teach in Boston. She sat beside the family hearth as a storm blew from the northeast and her mother complained of icy feet. “We are a rather crestfallen company,” Dickinson wrote, “…what with the sighing wind, the sobbing rain, and the whining of nature generally, we can hardly contain ourselves, and I only hope and trust that your this evening’s lot is cast in far more cheery places than the ones you leave behind.”

  In other letters, Dickinson describes her horror at surprise rainfall during a carriage ride “in drops—sheets—cataracts—what fancy conceive of drippings and of drenchings,” and, on another occasion, “shower after shower of chilly pelting rain” that kept her from leaving her family’s home for church.

  Later in life, she would not venture out on sunny days, either. Perhaps the rain was an early, convenient source of blame for her reclusive tendencies, which modern researchers have linked to panic disorder or agoraphobia. But gray, gloomy weather also appears to have served Dickinson as a creative force. She is the only writer for whom psychologists have evidence to bolster what is otherwise the conjecture of literary criticism.

  The researchers believe that as a young woman, before her mental state became more acute, Dickinson suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Known as SAD, the seasonal depression usually occurs in the gloom of winter, during months of scant sunlight. Studies have found that Dickinson cranked out many more poems in spring and summertime than in autumn and winter. But cognitive
psychologists Christopher Ramey and Robert Weisberg asked a more relevant question. They set out to measure the quality of Dickinson’s work in different seasons, rather than the quantity. Ramey and Weisberg calculated by season the portion of poems Dickinson wrote that were later collected in top literary digests and anthologies. During the years she was believed to have suffered from SAD, Ramey and Weisberg found that Dickinson wrote a considerably higher percentage of her best poems in autumn and winter, even though she wrote more poems in spring and summer. Dickinson’s dark days, they concluded, “provided her with material that she could use in her poetry.”

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  In fiction, rain gives a sense of desolation and decay in virtually all the works of Charles Dickens, falling through a broken roof or “slowly and doggedly down” on Pickwick, “as if it had not even the spirit to pour.” Rain is a sure mourner at a Dickens funeral. It is a protagonist in Bleak House and a constant warning in Hard Times, seeming to caution the unhappily married Louisa against adultery when James Harthouse asks where they are to meet. Louisa was sure “there was another listener among the trees. It was only rain, beginning to fall fast, in heavy drops.”

  Dickens’s imagination revved up in the dark, and he especially liked to conjure rain in the black of night. The late Dickens scholar Bernard Shilling wrote, “As the river in darkness is most heavily charged with suggestions of its mystery, its terrible implacability, its indifference and continuous energy, so does the rain achieve its meaning in the silence and loneliness of night.” In The Old Curiosity Shop, when Little Nell’s grandfather steals her savings, she rises from her bed in the dark night while “the rain beat fast and furiously without, and ran down in plashing streams from the thatched roof.”