Today I wend my way back from Washington to Halifax. So we moved off, as Homer said, sad in the vast offing, having our precious lives, but not our friends.

Before I leave, I've tried to do as much scanning of old photographs as I could, and I put this to you: some of my ancestors could be dashing heroes of historical romance.

Take my great-great-great-uncle Francis, for instance, a veteran of the Civil War:

I'm mean seriously: Byronic, right?  Those cheekbones....

Or there's my great-great-grandfather, Francis's older brother by three years (they were the babies and pranksters of the family - thirteenth and fifteenth of seventeen siblings). He may have had really alarming facial hair, but he's got the same stern, ferocious good looks as Francis, and I'm sure he looked just as swashbuckling in his Illinois Regulars uniform.  Also, check out his name, which I would have derided as improbably contrived in a spy thriller or romance novel, but which (it turns out) is a traditional family moniker.

I think he may be using some hair pins to fasten back those luxuriant locks.

Good looking boys they were in that family, and between them they had an unsurprising 17 children with names like Fern, Effa Eutoka, Zenas, and Enoch.  Actually, that's relatively restrained, given the determined fecundity of their own parents....


Monday, April 23, 2012
Washington, DC

A Most Lamentable Comedy 

Janet Mullany (2009) 

More than One Night 

Sarah Mayberry (2012) 

In for a Penny 

Rose Lerner (2010) 

Secrets of a Summer Night 

Lisa Kleypas (2004)

Crazy for You 

Jennifer Crusie (1999)

Tell Me Lies 

Jennifer Crusie (1998)

My grandfather and his bear: a parable of friendship and temptation, in his own words.

Early one evening shortly before Christmas Day [1925] Helen took him to a toy store in the area of shops up the street from the hospital. It was dark night in the street, but the shop was brilliantly lighted by many exposed filament light bulbs.  There was a low counter and shelves above it displaying dolls, Teddy bears, felt monkeys, and other toys.  Helen must have made a previous survey and wanted Grant to have a chance to approve his main gift.  Grant sensed that she was pushing him tactfully to select a particular Teddy bear, but at least initially his eye was taken by a felt monkey in a red jacket with bright brass buttons and a "bell-boy" cap.  Helen clearly didn't like the monkey, the bear did have a quiet, kindly charm, and the bear gave a throaty growl when you tipped him forward.  Grant saw he ought to vote for the bear, and so he did. Perhaps Helen believed it was a choice between a solid friend and a flashy acquaintance.  Probably she was right, but more than 50 years later Grant still had a trace of yearning for that red-jacketed monkey.  The toy is a symbol to him of all those touches of glamor which you give up a when you set your course for a steady, responsible life, as McC-----s in his time generally did.

More than fifty years later... (More than eighty years, in fact, when this picture was taken.)

The Teddy bear was a faithful companion of Grant's Assiut years.  His growl mechanism failed after a few years so that he only rattled inside when moved.  His feet and paws had to be patched with light khaki when the original cloth covering wore out.  Helen made him a suit of blue-gray material with a pocket in front and several red buttons below the neck.  After a year or two Grant once tried to shave Teddy with his father's straight-edge razor.  The cut was stitched together by Helen, and Grant was made to repent for his thoughtlessness by having Teddy put away in a drawer for many days.

So many things.  First, note that Grant wasn't reprimanded for playing with a straight razor at the age of five, but rather for thoughtlessness to Teddy, whose integrity as a faithful friend he had failed to honor. Secondly, and on a related note, I want to declare here and now that I am vindicated of personal responsibility for the oddity of my adult belief that stuffed animals have feelings, a belief that has, on occasion, led me to try to enlist D in massive stuffed-animal-liberation maneuvers in the gulags of FAO Schwartz.  Clearly, both the excess of anthropomorphizing empathy and the tendency towards allegorical melodrama are delightfully but inalterably genetic.


Thursday, 19 April 2012
Washington, DC

A Prelude to Chapter 1

My great-grandmother, the face that launched the Canopic

I've just come upon an account my grandfather, Grant, wrote in 1973 of the love story of his parents - the jovial Frank (a doctor) and gentle Helen (a schoolteacher).  I'm only part of the way through it right now, but already it's a tale filled with influenza epidemics, travel across war-torn oceans filled with torpedo boats, riotous Egyptian nationalism, and tremendous tenderness.  Every so often, Grant has left an open space in the typescript (no doubt prepared by my industrious, sometimes Bracknellian grandmother), which he has filled with hieroglyphs, phrases in Arabic, and tiny sketches of the difference between an Egyptian carriage and an American one.  It's enthralling.

Frank and Helen first came together because their siblings - his brother Paul and her sister Grace (who would herself become a great historian of the family) - were married, and Helen later describes him as "the same sweet, unselfish, gentle Frank that we all loved so well in those days when we learned to know him after Paul's death." Nonetheless, Frank's interest seems to have come as something of a shock to Helen and her family. I'll let Grant tell it:

Shortly before Christmas Frank wrote from Harvard to Helen at her home in Waverly, Ohio, proposing marriage. [...] Frank's message was a surprise, and when Helen told the household, her mother, Cora Barch Smith, in agitation threw the envelope into the flames of the living room fireplace. [...] Helen cherished this letter and once showed it to Grant in Assiut when he was about 12 years old.  He remembers being told then the explanation for its lack of an envelope.  She destroyed the letter with many other papers in 1951 in Egypt.

Helen and her childhood friends, in the same fit of riotous hilarity that virtually any afternoon with my high school friends dissolved into...

Frank remained in Cambridge during the Christmas holidays.  To make good use of this period without classes and to keep himself from brooding too much about what Helen's response might be he asked Dr. Strong to suggest a line of study.

Strong recommended that he read works on tropical poisonous reptiles.  Frank took his advice and became intensely interested in cobras, vipers, scorpions and other venomous creatures.  This knowledge proved to be of direct use to him later in Egypt, particularly in Luxor.

Helen's reply to Frank's letter was that he should come to Waverly for a talk.  He did so, and they became engaged.  Helen's engagement ring was of a simple design, and the diamond, though modest in size, was of the finest purity with a pale blue fire.

The cherished letter, only destroyed when they finally left Egypt! The supplicant lover so much on tenterhooks about the response to his proposal that he can only soothe himself with the study of vipers and scorpions! (Family lesson: sometimes the venomous can be the best source of solace.)  This is gothic stuff, and I adore it.

But Grant has (oddly enough) left out the best part.


After a Christmas spent in the anxious study of poisonous creatures, Frank received a letter from Helen in the new year saying that he should come to Waverly to discuss the matter further with her.  When he arrived at her parents' house, she suggested a walk, and as they wandered amidst bleak wintry gardens, she accepted his proposal.  As she did so, she reached out and plucked a thorn several inches long from a bush close at hand, and they made their happy way back to break the news to her family.

Helen amidst the thorn trees in Waverly (I find something moving in the fact that in these pictures, the people are blurred out of focus - as if moving too quickly through a fleeting time - but the thorn trees are static and precise.)

It was 1915, and they didn't yet know that within the next year they would not only be married, but also finished with his post-graduate studies in tropical medicine and her teaching, assigned to a hospital in Egypt, and making their way towards the Mediterranean in the ghoulishly named Canopic, a British liner carrying a hold full of ammunition through the submarine-patrolled Atlantic waters.   In fact, all they knew for certain was that they'd be married soon. They had photographs taken to commemorate the happy day, and in our albums, above those pictures, a single thorn, the length of my smallest finger, pierces the album's thick, dark paper.

Frank and the family emblem

Wednesday, 18 April 2012
Washington, DC

Grant (October 22, 1919- April 14, 2012)

Here's what I need you to know about my grandfather. Pay close attention: it's a romantic story.

Chapter 1

Potent playgrounds

He was, to the great consternation of ninety years of passport control officials and dermatologists, an American born in Egypt, towheaded and blue-eyed and casually fluent in Arabic.  His father, Frank, was a part of the Presbyterian mission in Egypt (unsurprising given our Scottish family - one of the earliest pictures of my grandfather shows him being dandled, newborn, by a uniformed Scottish soldier who has crowned the baby with his tartan cap).  Frank, a former college track star, was a doctor at the mission hospital, and a man famous for his gregariousness and kindness.  You can see his warmth emanating from the photographs, in which he seriously examines patients, performs complex surgery in his early twentieth-century facilities in Assiut, or stands proudly next to a Hadja (a woman who has undertaken the Hadj) and her luxuriant sheep.

Helen, sowing the seeds of bibliophilia (or possibly bibliomania)

Scowling against the sun

Outside the clinic in Assiut

Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

"I have another name I'd like to put to you for our future, as-of-yet-utterly-hypothetical children," I said to D one day by the fire, when he was still in town. Name-speculating is one of my favorite pastimes, but D normally greets my proposals with ill-concealed (well, unconcealed) scorn. I mean, what's wrong with "Clarity"? Or "Meta"?  Perfectly legitimate names.

I paused for drama, but D's way ahead of me this time. His own proposal tripped off his tongue: "Fat Caliper."

"What?" I did a double-take. "Are you proposing that we name our child 'Fat Caliper'?"

"Yes."

"Well," I said thoughtfully, after a long moment, "I was going to suggest 'Griffin,' but 'Fat Caliper' would pretty much destine him for a fruitfully painful career as a bluesman. And we could call him 'Cal.'"

Two can play at this game of chicken, D.* Satirize me at your own peril.






*In fact, it's not much of a game of chicken unless two are playing at it.

There's something that's been eating away at me about Downton Abbey, even before Salon thought to ask why liberals (particularly in America) love it so or I found out that Alan Cumming agrees with me (which is naturally a great bolstering of my ego).  What's making me mad is essentially this: Downton spends a great deal of money and effort to make us believe that an aristocracy (a system that pays people to behave as if they are better than their fellow citizens based on the arbitrary fact of their birth) is an inherently benevolent social institution, beneath the cheerful cattiness of its various members.  There might as well be a motto emblazoned over the opening credits: Downton Abbey: Noblesse Oblige. It's well-clad hegemony: it persuades those who are being screwed by the system that their screwing is not just a necessary process, but a beautiful and noble one.


I'm liable to get a bit ranty on the subject, particularly since I harbor a substantial fondness for historical fictions and costume dramas, and their ability to mine the complexities of historical difference to philosophically complex and often subversive ends. But today, in discussion with a friend, I reflected on what made this different from a more effective, less ideologically disturbing costume drama.  Here's what I said, with some moments of expansion:


I would like Downton Abbey so much better if it were more like Remains of the Day - a vividly and humanely drawn portrait of people so steeped in the ideology of a class system that they are 100% committed to their own oppression or privilege (or both), but a portrait that nonetheless managed to throw that oppression and privilege into stark relief rather than dipping it in treacly, unquestioning nostalgia. (Remains of the Day is about nostalgia, as the title indicates, and it persuades us of the power of that nostalgia, but that nostalgia is problematic.  The protagonist looks back longingly, and with varying degrees of self-knowledge, to a period that was glorious but morally complex; it is damningly tied up in, among other things, fascism.) There are times when Downton tended in that direction, mostly in the first series, where characters were allowed to be much more plausibly selfish. This compelling self-absorption not only made it a more plausible critique of aristocratic privilege, but also a more well-wrought drama. In series two, the characters were muddled by strange, implausible, and anachronistic acts of generosity that seem designed rather to win our modern sympathies than to make sense with their psychology or their social context. In their spontaneous desire to concern themselves with the benefit of those they in no way considered to be their social (or often intellectual) equals, the characters came to operate on the principle of patriotic parable (Pull together, all! That's what the class system is about!) rather than human psychology.  By series two, I felt that I was watching a propaganda film with extra kissing.

My wrath at the series finally peaked during the episode in which the Irish socialist attempts an act of dinner-table terrorism. It just made my skin crawl. What a demeaning, infantilizing representation of revolutionary ideology that was: all of his ideals fizzling into a melodrama-turned-farce.  I could only hope that this series would never, ever air in Ireland. And, unbelievably, because narrative necessity and an unrealistic sense of the chummy inter-class loyalty of these houses rules the plotting, the humiliated political miscreant continued to work at Downton after this bizarre incident.

I do love a good costume drama (love them like nobody's business), and I don't think this sort of ideology is inherent to them. I had high hopes for Downton Abbey, which is why it fills me with sadness that it appears to be part of an upswing of nostalgic art that goes hand in hand with conservative politics in Britain.