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When we came back, we found news that Aunt Esther was dead. She had never recovered from a violent cold which she caught when lying for hours, in pouring rain, upon her husband’s grave.
[Image: Unknown photographer, Clasped hands of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, 1854-94]
The way it wasn't: from the files of James Laughlin consists of gossip, tall tales, & bragging. But he merits it.
That a twenty-year-old rich kid ditches Harvard to go Europe to make himself useful to (1st) Gertrude Stein in Belley and (2nd) Ezra Pound in Rappallo is perhaps not so unusual. But then he really did make himself useful, by becoming the most adventurous publisher in the USA.
It's a scrapbook of crazy adventures. Besides serious literature, Laughlin enjoyed tea at a Key West whorehouse with Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop, a Mets game with Marianne Moore, skiing, and girls, girls, girls.
Quotes:
His mother-in-law told him, “Never settle in a city where there aren’t any Jews: the food will be terrible and they’ll be no culture.”
Randall Jarrell referred to me as “Goody Two-Shoes.”
Wyndham Lewis: “Why don’t you stop New Directions, your books are crap.”
Ridley Hall
… when Cousin Susan engaged a new servant, he or she was always told that a dog would be especially annexed to them, and considered to belong to them. When the footman came in to put the coals, his dog came in with him; when you met the housemaid in the passage, she was accompanied by her dog. … Many of the dogs went to church too, … This was so completely considered a matter of course, that I never observed it as anything absurd …
Streatlam Castle
We are called at eight, and at ten march in to breakfast with the same procession as at dinner, only at this meal ‘Madame Bowes’ does not appear, for she is then reclining in a bath of coal-black acid, which ‘refreshes her system,’ but leaves her nails black. At twelve Madame appears, having painted the under-lids of her jet-black eyes with belladonna.
[Image: John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Orangery Margam Castle, 1852]
Even the pleasures of this home-Sunday, however, were marred in the summer, when my mother gave in to a suggestion of Aunt Esther that I should be locked into the vestry of the church between the services. Miserable indeed were the three hours which—provided with a sandwich for dinner—I had weekly to spend there; and though I did not expect to see ghosts, the utter isolation of Hurstmonceaux Church, far away from all haunts of men, gave my imprisonment an unusual eeriness.
Sometimes I used to clamber over the tomb of the Lords Dacre, which rises like a screen against one side of the vestry, and be stricken with vague terrors by the two grim white figures lying upon it in the silent desolation, in which the scamper of a rat across the floor seemed to make a noise like a whirlwind.
At that time two grinning skulls (of the founder and foundress of the church, it was believed) lay on the ledge of the tomb; but soon after this Uncle Julius and Aunt Esther made a weird excursion to the churchyard with a spade, and buried them in the dusk with their own hands.
[Hill & Adamson, The Artist and the Gravedigger, 1845]
For the last couple of months I have been reading the memoirs of 19th century travel-writer Augustus Hare. Stupefying is the only word for it.
The first volume, The Years with Mother, begins six months after he was born when his mother and father gave him away to a sister-in-law who asked for him. His subsequent encounters with his enormous family of completely mad relatives scream aloud to be illustrated by Edward Gorey. Through all the tortures and insanity, he never pauses to complain or wonder why.
The second volume, In My Solitary Life, records his adult life spent pretty much being a house guest all over Europe, where he encountered even more weird people. His books are archives of ghost stories and racy pre-Victorian gossip. It is all rigorously factual and circumstantial, but also completely bonkers.
Little AH arrives at school:
All infantine immoralities were highly popular, and—in such close quarters—it would have been difficult for the most pure and high-minded boy to escape from them. The first evening I was there, at nine years old, I was compelled to eat Eve’s apple quite up—indeed, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was tripped absolutely bare: there was no fruit left to gather.
[Image: detail from an untitled 19th c. photograph from Taormina by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden]
Stills from Shirikiana Aina's 1982 documentary about poor Black communities struggling to exist alongside official Washington D.C.
Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted
[Jean Arp, Head and leaf, head and vase, 1929]