The uncompassionate poet and mother

Another extract from Margaret Forster's biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Wilson was her personal maid for many years, from just before she was married. She took on the arduous task of maintaining the household in Florence, but also in other places on their travels, taught herself Italian from a book, and spent a great deal of time babysitting the Brownings' only son (known as 'Pen.') In spite of this, when she finally asked for a rise in her meagre pay after many years, the Brownings (who were not badly off) rejected her request. In this extract, some years later, she had fallen in love with the household cook, whose sleeping accommodation was even smaller than Wilson's - and Wilson's private room was smaller than Robert Browning's dressing room. Forster's irritation with the selfishness of the Brownings often shows through in the book, not only in this passage.

Wilson and the cook, Ferdinando, had had intercourse sometime prior to the events described here, resulting in Wilson becoming pregnant. By this time the two servants were married (a crisis in itself for the Brownings) and all four were in London for a few months.

Wilson, unable by the end of August to hide her condition any longer, told Elizabeth she was expecting a baby in a few weeks' time. Elizabeth was appalled. She wrote to Henrietta [her married sister] on September 6th that she was not only 'shocked' but 'pained.' Clearly, the baby had been conceived in the Casa Guidi [the Brownings' longstanding rented accommodation in Florence] by the unmarried couple. She does not appear, for all her acknowledged recognition of the power of sexual attraction, to have thought back to the living accommodation in Casa Guidi, to that room of Wilson's next to the even smaller one where Ferdinando slept. The proximity for two people in love was irresistible.
As usual, it was not only the immorality which shocked Elizabeth, that admirer of George Sand [infamously known for her many lovers], but the deceit. She hated to think Wilson had not confided in her. She had never given Wilson the least cause to be sure of her sympathy and tolerance in such a situation but she was angry that she had not been naturally trusted. But at least her affection for, and gratitude to, Wilson was sufficient to make her try hard in this crisis to 'think chiefly of her many excellent qualities and of what she has done for me...' as she put it to Henrietta.
Quite what she was prepared to do for Wilson in this hour of her need was not at first clear. Obviously, Wilson would have to go somewhere to have her baby: she certainly could not give birth in her employers' lodgings. It was arranged that she would go to her sister's who lived in East Retford (her mother had died two years before). Equally obviously, Elizabeth would need a new maid: managing on her own during Wilson's annual two week holiday was one thing, managing for six months another.
But these were trivial decisions compared to the underlying major one: would Wilson come back after the birth of her baby? Could she come back? Could she bring her baby with her? The Brownings' answer to that last question dictated all else: No, Wilson could not take her baby back to Casa Guidi. The apartment was too small, they could not afford another mouth to feed and Wilson would be unable to perform her duties properly. So they gave Wilson a choice: either she remained in their service, leaving her baby with her sister, or she left their service and kept her child. Where her husband Ferdinando fitted into this choice was for Wilson to work out. If she stayed in England, she lost him, unless he could miraculously find employment and support her and her child; and if she went back to Italy, she kept him but lost her child. She left for East Retford with no illusions, still undecided.
Nobody had offered her the only truly compassionate alternative: to keep both husband and baby, return with them to Italy, board the baby out nearby and continue working. Victorian employers though such magnanimity absurd. Elizabeth was a creature of her time in sharing what they saw as an entirely justifiable viewpoint: her peers would not have expected her to behave in any other way. But the author of Aurora Leigh [i.e., Elizabeth], so concerned with the plight of poor working women, so close to a servant who had proved her loyalty over and over again at considerable personal risk, cannot be judged by conventional standards. Elizabeth failed Wilson as Wilson had never failed her. To take Wilson and her baby back to Italy would have been impractical, inconvenient, unreasonably charitable - but it would have not been impossible for people as resourceful and courageous as the Brownings.  [pages 302/3]

The saga continues some pages later. Another maid went back to Italy with them for an interim period, until they returned to London again. 

There was one farewell Elizabeth was thankful not to have to make: Wilson was coming with them. She had at last made her 'choice'.  A year alone with a baby in East Retford had most effectively decided her. (In fact, she had made her decision within two months of the Brownings' departure for Paris the year before and had told them so but they had said they considered they were bound to her replacement, Harriet, until they returned to London.)
After the return from the Isle of Wight and Somerset, Wilson had her baby Oreste brought down from East Retford for a final leave-taking before committing him to her sister's care. Elizabeth described him as 'a pretty, interesting baby...with great black Italian eyes.' His parents proposed sending part of their wages back to East Retford each month to support him until they could be reunited. When that would be, or how it would come about, nobody was optimistic enough to speculate.
Nowhere in Elizabeth's correspondence at the time did she express any compassion for Wilson's agony. The mother who adored her own child and had been overwhelmed by the violence of maternal feeling, and the poet who was about to publish a poem full of the tenderness of women for children, and a defence of the exploited working-class girl [Aurora Leigh], both seemed untouched by her own maid's anguish. This was a severely practical matter. Nobody had exploited Wilson, nobody had forced her into marriage or motherhood. She was a servant, she had married, she had had a baby: the rules of the game were laid down and Elizabeth abided by them.
But it is not, strictly speaking, true that she was obliged to do so. It was not even true that no Victorian family could take in a servant's baby. Josephine Butler, soon to be famous for the campaign she led against the Contagious Diseases Acts, wife of an Oxford don, had already done so: she took in an unmarried girl who had been seduced by a Balliol man and had borne his child. There are enough isolated examples of that kind of courage, that sort of deliberate flouting of social convention, to suggest that Elizabeth could have taken Wilson's baby home with them if she had really wanted to, if her compassion had been large enough. [pages 315/6]

There is something of a 'happy ending'. After leaving the Brownings' service, Wilson eventually set up a boarding house in Florence, where she looked after the painter, Walter Savage Landor, among others. He had stayed with the Brownings in Florence some time before, after his wife left him. Wilson's son, Oreste, joined her at the boarding house when he was seven. (He had a younger brother by then, as well.) Later, she abruptly left Italy and returned to England, setting up another boarding house there, but this venture failed. She returned to Italy, destitute except for ten pounds a year Robert Browning had allowed her for old times' sake. When the Browning's son, 'Pen', brought the Plazzo Rezzonico, he remembered the old servant and took her in. She lived with him there, then went to Asolo with him, where she died in 1902. Her husband Ferdinando seems to have parted company with her in the late 1870s, but turned up later and was also taken in by Pen. Plainly the son had more compassion than either of his parents. 

Cards, Grimhilda!, Children of Men

Once upon a time I used to send out Christmas cards...quite a lot of them.   I haven't done this for years.  Instead I write a Christmas 'update' which brings the recipients up to date on what's been happening in the Crowl household - and email it.   It's always a bit of a challenge at the end of the year, but at least keeping a journal throughout the twelve months prior to that helps to remind me of what's happened.

In the last few years I've even added in photos of the various family members - which has only served to make the letter longer for those willing to endure reading it right through.   This is actually a bit of a step forward for me, since we never sent those custom photo holiday cards in the past that some people are wont (or were wont to do).  So we've actually gone from sending boring Christmas cards with barely an individual note on each one, to a major letter and photos.

Anyway, apropos of that in no way at all, Grimhilda! enters her final week of rehearsals tomorrow.   Sunday's rehearsal, in fact, will be the last time I actually play for the rehearsals.  After that, it'll be the orchestra.  I might not only be out of a job, but bereft!  Time will tell.

Last night I caught up with the version of Children of Men that I recorded some weeks back.  I'd once seen - on its own and out of context - the extraordinary long take that occurs towards the end of the movie, when Clive Owen stumbles and crashes and trips and climbs and eventually rescues the woman with the baby in the midst of a full-scale battle going on around him.  The set-up for this must have taken days, with an exhausted cast trying to deal with all the bombs going off and bullets flying and people dropping dead.  (Owen, in one of his best roles, looks exhausted through most of the movie.)  It's intriguing that directors seem to like doing long takes when it comes to battle scenes.  There's a famous one in the Russian version of War and Peace that travels across line after line of soldiers in various formations, but the most famous recent one (at least that I've seen) occurs in Atonement.  James McAvoy walks through hundreds of extras (as soldiers) doing all manner of things to while away their time before their rescued from wherever it is they are, and there are horses racing past, and things going on in the distance and in the foreground and stuff happening everywhere.  It's brilliant.  I'm not sure what it adds to the movie, but it's wonderful.

The long take in Children of Men has more point perhaps because it heightens the danger that Owen is in; we're with him all the way as he ducks and dives, briefly encounters the nasty character (Owen claimed earlier that he has bad breath) who seems to delight in shooting anyone and everyone, whatever side they're on, and finally finds the mother with the new-born baby.  But following that scene is the counterpoint: not another long take (although the camera still moves with the actors a great deal) but a marvellous quiet section in contrast to all the noise that's been going on: under Owen's protecting arm, the mother takes her crying baby out through the dozens of foreign refugees caught up in the battle and the soldiers who are struggling to keep the uprising at bay, and every one of them is reaching out to the child, quietly wanting to touch it, praising God for the miracle (the baby is the first in eighteen years in the known world).  The soldiers, whose faces all have that grittiness that comes with being battle-weary, are suddenly charmed into humanity by this tiny creature: men reflecting their potential fatherhood.  The women are like a thousand aunts all wanting to croon and chuckle over the infant.

I don't know whether I missed the point of some of the scenes in this film, but I never quite figured out how the clearance of foreigners from British soil connected with the loss of fertility amongst women worldwide. The two intersected a great deal, but in hindsight don't seem to have a connection.   Still it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking: wonderful performances, extraordinary sense of place (rubbish everywhere and detritus and a general air of things breaking down), a huge suspense in terms of how it's all going to work out, some extreme but believable action scenes, brilliant photography.   Stephanie Zacharek calls it the 'bleakest movie you'll ever want to see twice' and that's exactly right: it is bleak, but it's so superbly done from beginning to end that seeing it twice is virtually a must, if only to catch up on all the hundreds of details that aren't shoved into our faces but are there if we're quick enough to see them.

And apart from the wonderful moment when the child is paraded through the battling crowd, there's the delightful way in which the animals react in this movie, in particular to Owen: it's as if they trust him, see him as the one honest character amongst the rest.  Noisy farm dogs nestle towards him; a kitten climbs up his trouser leg.

Blankets

There's a great poem by Barbara Hamby called Ode to American English, in which she does a scatter-shot approach to the marvellous way in which English is expressed in the States.   It's very hard to quote from it because it has no stopping point, but here's a sample:

I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
       rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
       boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
       to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering...

You can see the whole poem on Hamby's site.

This post is about blankets, specifically personalized baby blankets like those on the left, but let's also celebrate whatever we can find out of my digital cuttings that relates to the subject. One of the writers I catch up with occasionally is Kim Fabricius, a somewhat anarchistic Christian pastor with a wicked sense of humour (and I mean 'wicked' in its current sense of outstanding, but also in the sense of very cheeky). He wrote a Good Friday sermon in 2008 which was posted on the Faith and Theology site this year.   (Fabricius doesn't seem to have a site of his own; most of his material that I've come across has appeared on F&T)

Fabricius is as hard as Hamby to quote briefly, so here's a decent chunk near the beginning of the sermon (in which our theme 'blanket' briefly appears):

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

Phew!  Imagine hearing that piece of fire coming at you from a pulpit...!

Here's another radical person: Tamie Fields Harkin, an Episcopalian minister from Alaska.   She presented a list of things to do if your really wanted to attract young people to your church - and they don't include any of the usual bumpf that's regarded as youth ministry.   Her 19th point is:
19.  Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7.  Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.
Sounds like she was anticipating the Occupy movement, and the way in which some churches are suggesting they open their doors to those who'd be sleeping in tents on very cold nights.  

Okay, I know this post is very loose in terms of how it's using it thematic material, but just go with the flow and enjoy the contrasts.  

Here's an extract from an email one of the Presbyterian ministers wrote shortly after the devastating February earthquake in Christchurch, NZ: 

I walked home from what remained of Knox [his church] yesterday afternoon surrounded by scenes of devastation far worse than on 4 September.  Whilst visiting a parishioner I spoke with one of his neighbours, whose husband was at that time unaccounted for in the Pyne Gould Guinness building in town. I walked for a while with a barefoot young woman whose workplace in the city had collapsed, and who told me of seeing a woman giving birth on the footpath. Later I passed others heading on foot with blankets and little else for Hagley Park, and wondered how they fared when the rain began to fall a couple of hours after that. Dinner was sausages cooked on the outdoor barbeque;  I've drained the leaking hot water cylinder upstairs into several large water containers so can probably manage with that, whatever food there is in the fridge and a bucket toilet for several days. 

There's a sense of just getting on with things, of having to; but the quiet desperation is apparent.  How do you start to deal with the enormity of the problem.  Christchurch is still dealing with it, and has another major earthquake since this date.  

Finally, an example of those church bulletin bloopers that appear in emails every so often:

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

8 posts to go....

...before I reach the magic 1000th post. Well, I've given myself till the 31st to achieve this, so here's one more step on the way.
The piano arrived this morning, rather later than expected because when the guys went to collect it they found they'd left some vital tools behind. I heard this from the former owner, when I finally rang her to see if they'd actually left her house yet.
I'd been told that these guys - or rather this company - had experience at shifting grand pianos, and maybe they have, but I'm not sure that the entire team that arrived had all had the experience claimed. Well, they got it to my house in several pieces (that's the way grand pianos travel) and put it back together without too much difficulty, so there must have been some experience there.
I gave them the option of taking it in the front door or in the back, and they decided on the back even though there are four steps up into the house at that point. (There are two at the front, but there's also very little turning room, as we've often found when we've taken something large into the house.) Getting the main part of the piano up the fours steps was a bit of an issue: one guy was doing all the hoisting up, it seemed, (puffing and blowing) while the other three did....something else. They were on hand, but you got the impression that they weren't always putting full muscle into it.
Suffice to say, they hoisted it into the house, swung it round through the kitchen, along the hall and with ease into the lounge. And, as I said, put it together.
And I played it. It's very bright sounding, which will take a bit of getting used to, and it needs a bit more effort from my fingers to move at speed on certain passages. It's not sluggish, just a bit tighter than my other piano.
We're going to have to reconsider where we put it. The current spot isn't quite roomy enough for me and the piano, and at the moment I'm the one who's getting the short end of the space. My wife and I will do some rethinking tonight, and see how we get on. I'm most concerned not to have it against an outside wall, as I've been told more than once that this isn't good for pianos.
Neither is sticking them up against a heater, or a heating vent, as Teachers' College, where we hold our church services, used to do to the very nice baby grand they had. I played it a lot, but gave up in the end when the other musicians could never get in tune with it. Now it's stuck out in a kind of sunroom area where the temperatures are alternatively very hot or very cold. Someone needs to have their head read - it's likely the piano will become irrepairable - or irreparable, depending on how you want to spell it.

A new baby

For some time now my old piano has been running not at 100%. We spent quite a bit of money on it a couple of years ago to little avail. Even after the last tuning, a couple of notes almost immediately went back to their untuned sound, which means probably that more actual repair work is needed.
So my wife and I have been considering getting a new piano for a while, and I went to a music shop recently to suss out the prices: uprights were coming in at a minimum of $12,000NZ, and were fairly unsubstantial creatures even at that. Plus they seem to place the keyboard too low these days. I have a friend who has a relatively new piano that gives me a back ache because I’m having to lean down towards it all the time.
One of the patients at the health centre where my wife works is a now retired piano tuner. He happened to mention that someone we knew was selling her baby grand – he’d been asked to price it for her, but isn’t really into pricing pianos. My wife expressed interest, and last night we went and visited the aforementioned baby.
A nice Broadwood, good and solid, a bit bright in the upper register (particularly one key – might have been the E two above middle C), and a little heavier in the action than my current piano. Of course, my current piano has been worked at until it plays without thinking (including the two or three dud sounding notes). The Broadwood would require me to work a little harder, but that’s no great problem. The bass has a nice clean sound to it, whereas my piano’s overtones seem to run into each other. And the soft pedal actually produces a softness.
I played through a couple of my recent compositions on it, since I knew well how they feel on the home piano. And then we asked the price. $6,500. Wow. A steal, even allowing for transporting it to my place.
So I will soon own a baby grand. It’s not the first grand to live at our house. Years ago, when we attended the AOG church, they let us look after their baby grand while a new church was being built. I think it was a bigger beast, as I recall it taking up quite a bit of room. (This baby has been on a bit of a diet pill regime by contrast!)
My current piano is a bit of a monster too, even though it’s an upright. It was formerly a player-piano, but before I got it, the player action was removed. Consequently, it stands solid on the ground.
Roll on Tuesday, when we welcome the new baby into the family.

The picture is of a Broadwood similar to the one I'm getting. The image is from a site called The Rooms Above

Gone Baby Gone

Watched Gone Baby Gone on DVD the other night. I hadn’t heard of it until I came across it in the video store, which is a bit of a surprise now, having seen the movie. It’s top quality, and tells a difficult tale with great integrity. You certainly won’t agree with the actions of all the characters, especially that of the main character, but it’s a movie that makes you think about what the characters do.
It’s Mystic River territory, but without the three heavyweights who carried that movie. Here the main character, Patrick, is played by Casey Affleck (his taller and better-known brother, Ben directs the movie). This Affleck is someone I don’t remember having seen before, even though he appeared in all three of the Oceans movies. (Not that you remember anyone of the other eight Ocean team members in those movies, pretty much, since they’re so thinly written as characters). Casey is superb in the movie: he comes across as having strength, in spite of his relative youth; he has a moral compass that pretty much sticks on course even though all those around him disagree with his decisions (especially his final one); and he’s believable. His partner, Angie, played in a very soft fashion by Michelle Monaghan, seems almost miscast. Could such a person exist in the neighbourhood portrayed in the movie, where she’s supposed to be at home? She has intuition, sure, but she has little else as a character. She’s the only weak point in the movie, I think.
Patrick and Angie are lovers and partners in work: they’re private detectives, of a sort, and are very familiar with the extremely rough-and-ready territory they inhabit. So rough-and-ready you don’t want to open your mouth and say the wrong word at the wrong time: though Affleck’s character frequently does. The movie is littered with the f-word and even uses the c-word in one striking – and appropriate - moment. And the cast surrounding the main actors is full of actors and, I suspect, non-actors, who look so real you know you wouldn’t want to meet them in broad daylight - let alone at night.
The story concerns a missing child, a little girl, whose mother doesn’t give a damn about her, really, though she professes to. Her uncle and aunt are obviously the ones who care about her, and love her, and they employ the private detectives to bump up the lack of progress in the police case. In spite of this, the detectives get involved with a couple of ordinary police detectives (one of them played by Ed Harris, looking as though the hairdresser had a field day with his tonsure), and the story progresses from there with constant twists and turns. Morgan Freeman makes a few vital appearances, and Amy Ryan is scarily on target as the child's crass and careless mother.
It has a ‘happier’ ending than Mystic River – in one sense. But the choice that Affleck takes is tough, and there’s no knowing where it will lead him. The ending is wide open. (Apparently there’s an alternative ending on the DVD, but we didn’t have time to check it out.)

Little things

I read somewhere the other day – it was in one of those books about doing positive things in your life – that you should take every opportunity to hold a baby, a puppy or a kitten.
Now all you macho people out there can say what you like, but I think this is good advice. In fact one of the things I missed most while being overseas away from our family was not being able to hold any babies. Of course when we got back here, the two baby grandchildren that were available had both grown up by six months. The little girl – all nine months of her – was into climbing stairs, pushing her big brother’s bike around, investigating the DVD player, dancing to the music on the telly and so on. Not quite such a baby anymore.
The boy grandchild, who’d been cuddly when we left, was now beginning to walk, and being held wasn’t quite such an option any more. Although when I did hold him he took a firm grip of my glasses and refused to let me put them back on.
At least with puppies and kittens they don’t take your glasses off, or dance in front of the telly. But they don’t stay puppies and kittens very long either.
Which I think is the point of what the positive person was saying: seize the day/baby/puppy/kitten. They won’t be any of those things for long.

A footnote - or should that be an above note?

The picture in the previous post originally appeared on the Alberta Shaken Baby Syndrome Prevention site. Last weekend we had two of my grandchildren staying with us – and their mother. Boy, is she patient with them! The older of the two, who’s around 15 months, got diarrhoea while he was here, and cried loudly every time he was changed – which was often. And then his baby sister would join in. My wife and I can get small children to stop crying by a variety of (positive) methods – all of them learned through handling our own children over the years - but even we were struggling to keep them calm for long. Their mother, bless her heart, never got angry, never got mad, even though she was very tired. Good on yer, daughter!