Amália Rodrigues: The voice of Fado.

Amália da Piedade Rodrigues (July 1, 1920 – October 6, 1999)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E’ ou nãò é

 

Gaivota

Se uma gaivota viesse                               
Trazer-me o céu de Lisboa
No desenho que fizesse
Nesse céu onde o olhar
É uma asa que não voa
Esmorece e cai no mar

Que perfeito coração
No meu peito bateria
Meu amor na tua mão
Nessa mão onde cabia
Perfeito o meu coração

Se um português marinheiro
Dos sete mares andarilho
Fosse quem sabe o primeiro
A contar-me o que inventasse
Se um olhar de novo brilho
Ao meu olhar se enlaçasse

Que perfeito coração                
No meu peito bateria
Meu amor na tua mão
Nessa mão onde cabia
Perfeito o meu coração

Se ao dizer adeus à vida
As aves todas do céu
Me dessem na despedida
O teu olhar derradeiro
Esse olhar que era só teu
Amor que foste o primeiro

Que perfeito coração
Morreria no meu peito
Meu amor na tua mão
Nessa mão onde perfeito
Bateu o meu coração

Meu amor
Na tua mão
Nessa mão onde perfeito
Bateu o meu coração

Seagull

A seagull came close                           
To bring me the sky of Lisbon.
In that image made
In this sky, where the look
Is a flightless wing which
Falters and falls to the sea.

What a perfect heart
Would beat in my breast
My love, were it your hand
That hand which would fit
My heart perfectly

If a Portuguese sailor
Drifting on the seven seas
Was the first to know,
And tell me even if he invented it,
A look of a new brilliance
Would entwine with my gaze again.

What a perfect heart
Would beat in my chest
My love, in your hand
That hand where it would fit
My heart perfectly

If when saying farewell to life                  
All birds in the sky
Would give me when I part
The fire of your last look
That look that was yours alone
You who were my first love.

What a perfect heart
Would die in my chest
My love, in your hand
That hand were perfectly
My heart used to beat

My love
In your hand
That hand were perfectly
My heart used to beat

Nem os paredes confesso

Não queiras gostar de mim                            
Sem que eu te peça
Nem me dês nada que ao fim
Eu não mereça
Vê se me deitas depois
Culpas no rosto
Isto é sincero
Por que não quero dar-te um desgosto

De quem eu gosto
Nem às paredes confesso
E até aposto
Que não gosto de ninguém
Podes sorrir, podes mentir, podes chorar também
De quem eu gosto
Nem às paredes confesso

Quem sabe se te esqueci
Ou se te quero
Quem sabe até se é por ti
Por quem eu espero
Se gosto ou não afinal
Isso é comigo
Mesmo que penses que me convences
Nada te digo

Not even to the walls will I confess

Don’t wish to love me                                             
Without me asking you to
Don’t even give me anything which in the end
I don’t deserve

Then see if you can find
Blame or regret on my face
I mean this sincerely
Because I do not want
To give you reason to be hurt

The one I love
Not even to the walls will I confess
And I even bet
That I love nobody.

You can smile
You can lie
You can even cry, that
Of the one that I love;
Not even to the walls will I confess              

Who knows if I have forgotten you
Or whether I want you
Who knows even if it’s you
That I am waiting for?

Whether I love or not, (in the end)
Is my business
Even if you think
That you can convince me
I (shall) tell you nothing

(the name of) the one I love
Not even to the walls (will I) confess
And I even bet
That I love nobody

Maldição

Que destino, ou maldição                
Manda em nós, meu coração?
Um do outro assim perdido
Somos dois gritos calados
Dois fados desencontrados
Dois amantes desunidos

Somos dois gritos calados
Dois fados desencontrados
Dois amantes desunidos

Por ti sofro e vou morrendo
Não te encontro, nem te entendo
Amo e odeio sem razão
Coração quando te cansas
Das nossas mortas esperanças
Quando paras, coração?

Coração quando te cansas
Das nossas mortas esperanças
Quando paras, coração?

Nesta luta, esta agonia                    
Canto e choro de alegria
Sou feliz e desgraçada
Que sina a tua, meu peito
Que nunca estás satisfeito
Que dás tudo e não tens nada

Que sina a tua, meu peito
Que nunca estás satisfeito
Que dás tudo e não tens nada

Na gelada solidão
Que tu me dás coração
Não há vida nem há morte
É lucidez, desatino
De ler no próprio
Sem poder mudar-lhe a sorte

É lucidez, desatino
De ler no próprio destino
Sem poder mudar-lhe a sorte

Curse

What destiny or curse                                        
do you command in us, my heart?
One so lost from the other
We are two silenced screams
Two unencountered fates
Two separated lovers.

We are two shut-up screams
Two unencountered fates
Two separated lovers.

I suffer for you and go dying
I do not find you nor do I understand you
I love and hate without reason
Heart, when will you tire
of our dead hopes
When will you stop, heart?

Heart, when will you tire                                      
of our dead hopes
When will you stop, heart?

In this fight, this agony
I sing and cry for joy
I am happy and miserable
What destiny you have, my heart
that you are never satisfied
that you give everything and have nothing

What destiny you have, my heart
that you are never satisfied
that you give everything and have nothing

In the frozen solitude
that you gave me, heart
There is no life nor is there death
It is lucidity and folly
to read one’s own destiny
without the power to change its path

Primavera

Todo o amor que nos prendera      
Como se fora de cera
Se quebrava e desfazia
Ai funesta primavera
Quem me dera, quem nos dera
Ter morrido nesse dia.

E condenaram-me a tanto
Viver comigo meu pranto
Viver, viver e sem ti
Vivendo sem no entanto
Eu me esquecer desse encanto
Que nesse dia perdi.

Pão duro da solidão
É somente o que nos dão
O que nos dão a comer
Que importa que o coração
Diga que sim ou que não
Se continua a viver.

Todo o amor que nos prendera           
Se quebrara e desfizera
Em pavor se convertia
Ninguém fale em primavera
Quem me dera, quem nos dera
Ter morrido nesse dia.

Spring

All the love that had restrained us
As though it were of wax
Was breaking and undoing itself
Oh dismal spring
If only I, If only we
Had died on that day

And they condemned me so
To live with me my weeping
To live and live without you
Living without nevertheless
Forgetting that spell
That I lost on that day

Bread hard from solitude                   
Is all that they give us
That they give us to eat
What matters is that the heart
Say yes or no
Whether it continues to live

All the love that had restrained us
Had broken and undone itself
In dread it changed
Nobody speaks in spring
If only I, if only we
Had died on that day.

 

Uma Casa Portuguesa

Numa casa portuguesa fica bem,               
pão e vinho sobre a mesa.
e se à porta humildemente bate alguém,
senta-se à mesa co’a gente.
Fica bem esta franqueza, fica bem,
que o povo nunca desmente.
A alegria da pobreza
está nesta grande riqueza
de dar, e ficar contente.

Quatro paredes caiadas,
um cheirinho à alecrim,
um cacho de uvas doiradas,
duas rosas num jardim,
um São José de azulejo,
mais o sol da primavera…
uma promessa de beijos…
dois braços à minha espera…
É uma casa portuguesa, com certeza!
É, com certeza, uma casa portuguesa!

No conforto pobrezinho do meu lar,         
há fartura de carinho.
e a cortina da janela é o luar,
mais o sol que bate nela…
Basta pouco, poucochinho p’ra alegrar
uma existência singela…
É só amor, pão e vinho
e um caldo verde, verdinho
a fumegar na tigela.

Quatro paredes caiadas,
um cheirinho á alecrim,
um cacho de uvas doiradas,
duas rosas num jardim,
São José de azulejo
mais um sol de primavera…
uma promessa de beijos…
dois braços à minha espera…
É uma casa portuguesa, com certeza!
É, com certeza, uma casa portuguesa!

É uma casa portuguesa, com certeza!
É, com certeza, uma casa portuguesa!

A Portuguese Home

In a Portuguese home, it is so good                
to have bread and wine on the table.
and if someone humbly knocks at the door,
we invite them to sit at the table with us
This sincerity is good, so good ,
the sincerity which people never deny
the joy of poverty
is this great richness
of being generous and feeling happy
Four whitewashed walls,
a sweet smell of rosemary,
a bunch of golden grapes
two roses in a garden,
a ceramic statue of St. Joseph
and the sun of the spring in addition …                 
a promise of finding kisses
two open arms waiting for me.
This is a Portuguese home, certainly!
This is, surely, a Portuguese home!
In the humble comfort of my home,
there is the plenty of affection.
and the curtain of the window is the moonlight,
and also the sun, that shines on it …
Just a little is enough to cheer
such a simple existence
It’s simply love, bread and wine
and the green kale soup,
steaming from the bowl.

Cansaço

Por trás do espelho quem está   
De olhos fixados nos meus;
Alguém que passou por cá
E seguiu ao Deus dará
Deixando os olhos nos meus

Quem dorme na minha cama
E tenta sonhar meus sonhos
Alguém morreu nesta cama
E lá de longe me chama

Tudo o que faço ou não faço
Outros fizeram assim;
Daí este meu cansaço
De sentir que quanto faço
Não é feito só por mim.

Weariness

Behind this mirror, who is that                              
With her gaze fixed on mine?
Someone who had been here among the living
And now is gone somewhere
Under the Lord’s providence
Leaving her gaze confined in my eyes

Who is that, sleeping in my bed,
Trying to dream my dreams?
Someone has died right here
In this bed and now is calling for me
In the distance, blended in my dreams

Whatever it is I do, or not do,
Many others did the very same
And here’s the source of my weariness :
To feel that whatever it is I try to do,
Many others have tried the very same

Com Que Voz

Com que voz chorarei meu triste fado,    
que em tão dura paixão me sepultou.
Que mor não seja a dor que me deixou
o tempo, de meu bem desenganado.
Mas chorar não se estima neste estado
aonde suspirar nunca aproveitou.
Triste quero viver, pois se mudou
em tisteza a alegria do passado.
De tanto mal, a causa é amor puro,
devido a quem de mim tenho ausente,
por quem a vida e bens dela aventuro.

(Lyrics adapted by Alain Oulman from the original sonnet of Luís Vaz de Camões)

 

With What Voice

With what voice will I cry my sad fate?                  
That in such hard passion entombed me
That more may not be the pain that time left me
from my disabused love?

But to cry does not esteem itself in this state
Whence sighing never proves useful
Sad I want to live, for the joy of the past
Changes in sadness

In this way I pass life discontent
To the sound in this prison of the hard shackle
That pains the foot that suffers and feels it
Of such evil the cause is pure love
From whom, and owed to me is absent
For whom life and goods I hazard.

Sabe-se lá

Lá porque ando embaixo agora     
Não me neguem vossa estima
Que os alcatruzes da nora
Quando chora
Não andam sempre por cima
Rir da gente ninguém pode
Se o azar nos amofina
Pois se Deus não nos acode
Não há roda que mais rode
Do que a roda da má sina.

Sabe-se lá
Quando a sorte é boa ou má
Sabe-se lá
Na anhã o que virá
Breve desfaz – se
Uma vida honrada e boa
Ninguém sabe, quando nasce
Pró que nasce uma pessoa.

Lord only knows

Lord only knows why I’m going under now.
Don’t refuse your esteem for me
Because every bucket in the noria,
When the wheel goes around,
Will always be turned and overturned.
No one has a right to laugh at us
when the bad fortune strikes us.
And if God doesn’t watch over us,
No other wheel can be wilder
Than the wheel of misfortune

Lord only knows,
When one’s fortune is good or bad.
Lord only knows,
What tomorrow will bring us.
In the blink of an eye,
A honest and honored life is undone.
No one will never know when begins
What a person is meant to live

Confesso

Confesso que te amei, confesso       
Não coro de o dizer, não coro
Pareço outra mulher, pareço
Mas lá chorar por ti, não choro
Fugir do amor tem seu preço
E a noite em claro atravesso
Longe do meu travesseiro
Começo a ver que não esqueço
Mas lá perdão não te peço
Sem que me peças primeiro

De rastos a teus pés
Perdida te adorei
Até que me encontrei, perdida
Agora já não és
Na vida o meu senhor
Mas foste o meu amor, na vida

Não penses mais em mim, não penses 
Não estou nem p’ra te ouvir por carta
Convences as mulheres, convences
Estou farta de o saber, estou farta
Não escrevas mais nem me incenses
Quero que tu me diferences
Dessas que a vida te deu
A mim já não me pertences
Mas lá vencer-me não vences
Porque vencida estou eu

De rastos a teus pés
Perdida te adorei
Até que me encontrei, perdida
Agora já não és
Na vida o meu senhor
Mas foste o meu amor, na vida.

I confess

I confess that I loved you, yes, I do                    
I will not blush with saying that, sure, I won’t
I feel like a different woman now , yes, I do
But cry for you, I will not do
Escaping from love has a price
For that, I have been through nights of vigil
Unable to lay my head on the pillow
I start to see that it is not easy to forget
But ask pardon, I will not do
Not before you do it first

Crawling at your feet,
I used to adore you insanely
Until the day I found myself, fully lost
From now on, you are not
my lord anymore, the lord in my life
But sure you were my love for the lifetime

Don’t think about me anymore, please don’t       
I don’t want to hear from you, even by letters
You lure another women, yes, you do
I am exhausted of being told about, yes, I am
Don’t write me, don’t cajole me, either
I want you to know the difference between me
And these women that life has given to you
You don’t belong to me anymore
But you will not defeat my pride, no, you won’t
Because I have been defeated since long ago

Crawling at your feet,
I used to adore you insanely
Until the day I found myself, fully lost
From now on, you are not
my lord anymore, the lord in my life
But you were the love for the lifetime

Barco Negro

De manhã, que medo que me achasses feia,          
acordei tremendo deitada na areia.
Mas logo os teus olhos disseram que não!
E o sol penetrou no meu coração.

Vi depois numa rocha uma cruz
e o teu barco negro dançava na luz…
Vi teu braço acenando entre as velas já soltas…
Dizem as velhas da praia que não voltas.

São loucas… são loucas!

Eu sei, meu amor, que nem chegaste a partir,
pois tudo em meu redor me diz que estás sempre comigo.

No vento que lança areia nos vidros,
na água que canta no fogo mortiço,
no calor do leito dos bancos vazios,
dentro do meu peito estás sempre comigo.

Eu sei, meu amor, que nem chegaste a partir,

Black Boat

I feared the morning would find me in a bad way          
Shaking I awoke lying in the sand
But right away your eyes told me “no”!
And the sun penetrated my heart.

Then I saw a crucifix on a rock
And your black boat dancing in the light…
I saw your arm waving among the open sails…
The old women of the beach say you will not return.

They’re mad… they’re mad!

I know, my love, you haven’t left me
For everything around tells me you are always with me.

In the wind that blows sand on the windows
In the water that sings on the dying fire
In the warmth of the empty bed

In my heart you are always with me

I know, my love, you haven’t left.

Estranha Forma de Vida

Foi por vontade de Deus             
que eu vivo nesta ansiedade.
Que todos os ais são meus,
Que é toda a minha saudade.
Foi por vontade de Deus.

Que estranha forma de vida
tem este meu coração:
vive de forma perdida;
Quem lhe daria o condão?
Que estranha forma de vida.

Coração independente,
coração que não comando:
vive perdido entre a gente,
teimosamente sangrando,
coração independente.

Eu não te acompanho mais:
para, deixa de bater.
Se não sabes aonde vais,
porque teimas em correr,
eu não te acompanho mais.

Strange Manner of Being

It was the will of God                      
That I live in this anxiety.
Where all sighs are mine alone,
Where all longing belongs to me.

Such a strange manner of being
Does my heart possess;
It exists in a lost form;
Who gave it this magic?
Such a strange manner of being.

Independent heart,
A heart I do not control:
It finds itself lost among us,
Stubbornly bleeding,
Oh, independent heart.

I will accompany you no more:
Stop, cease your beating.
If you know not your destination,
Why must you insist on running?
I will accompany you no longer.

Fado Português

O Fado nasceu um dia,                        
quando o vento mal bulia
e o céu o mar prolongava,
na amurada dum veleiro,
no peito dum marinheiro
que, estando triste, cantava,
que, estando triste, cantava.

Ai, que lindeza tamanha,
meu chão , meu monte, meu vale,
de folhas, flores, frutas de oiro,
vê se vês terras de Espanha,
areias de Portugal,
olhar ceguinho de choro.

Na boca dum marinheiro
do frágil barco veleiro,
morrendo a canção magoada,
diz o pungir dos desejos
do lábio a queimar de beijos
que beija o ar, e mais nada,
que beija o ar, e mais nada.

Mãe, adeus. Adeus, Maria.           
Guarda bem no teu sentido
que aqui te faço uma jura:
que ou te levo à sacristia,
ou foi Deus que foi servido
dar-me no mar sepultura.

Ora eis que embora outro dia,
quando o vento nem bulia
e o céu o mar prolongava,
à proa de outro veleiro
velava outro marinheiro

que, estando triste, cantava,
que, estando triste, cantava.

Portuguese Fado

Fado was born on a day,                   
When the wind barely stirred,
And the seas elongated the skies.
On the main rail of a sailing ship,
In the chest of a seaman
While sorrowful he sang.
While sorrowful he sang.

Oh, what imense beauty,
My land, my hill, my valley
Of golden leaves, flowers and fruits
Do you see lands of Spain,
Sands of Portugal,
Vision blinded by tears.

In the mouth of a seaman
In the fragile sailing ship
The hurtful song fading
With the piercing of desires
From the lips burning with kisses
That kiss the air and nothing more,
That kiss the air and nothing more.

Farewell mother, farewell Maria,           
Keep this well in mind,
That I make this vow:
Either I will take you to the altar,
Or it was God who was served instead
Give me my rest at sea

Now, on another given day
When the wind barely stirred
And the seas elongated the skies
At the bow of another sailing ship
Another seaman sailed

While sorrowful he sang
While sorrowful he sang.

Que Deus Me Perdõe

Se a minha alma fechada          
Se pudesse mostrar,
E o que eu sofro calada
Se pudesse contar,
Toda a gente veria
Quanto sou desgraçada
Quanto finjo alegria
Quanto choro a cantar…

Que Deus me perdoe
Se é crime ou pecado
Mas eu sou assim
E fugindo ao fado,
Fugia de mim.
Cantando dou brado
E nada me dói
Se é pois um pecado
Ter amor ao fado
Que Deus me perdoe.

Quanto canto não penso
No que a vida é de má,
Nem sequer me pertenço,
Nem o mal se me dá.
Chego a querer a verdade
E a sonhar – sonho imenso –
Que tudo é felicidade
E tristeza não há.

May God Forgive Me

If only my hidden soul                         
Could reveal itself
And what I suffer in silence
Could be divulged
Everyone would see
Just what a wretch am I
How I fein happiness
How I cry as I sing

May God forgive me
If it is a crime or sin
But I am this way
And by running away from the fado
I would run from myself.
I clamour as I sing
And I feel no pain
If it is then a sin
To love fado
May God forgive me

When I sing I do not ponder
About how difficult life is
I am not even myself
Nor does pain affect me
I realize I want the truth
And by dreaming – an imense dream-
That all is happiness
And sadness does not exist.

Foi Deus

Nao sei, nao sabe ninguem       
Porque canto o fado neste tom magoado de dor e de pranto
E neste tormento, todo o sofrimento
Eu sinto que alma ca dentro se acalma nos versos que canto

Foi Deus que deu voz ao vento,
Luz ao firmamento e deu o azul as ondas do mar
Foi Deus que me pos no peito
Um rosario de penas que vou desfiando e choro a cantar

Fez poeta o rouxinol, pos no campo o alecrim
Deu as flores a primavera
Ai, e deu-me esta voz a mim

Se canto, nao sei o que canto
Misto de ventura, saudade, ternura e talvez amor
Mas sei que cantando, sinto mesmo quando
Se tem um desgosto e o pranto no rosto nos deixa melhor

Foi Deus, que deu luz aos olhos, deu o ouro ao sol e a prata ao luar
Foi deu que me pos no peito um rosario de penas que vou
Desfiando e choro a cantar.

It was God

I know not, no one knows 
Why I sing the fado in this hurtful tone of pain and mourning
And in this torment, all this suffering
I feel my soul is consoled by the verses I sing

It was God who gave voice to the wind,
Light to the heavens and made the waves of the sea blue
It was God who placed on my chest
A rosary of pain that I unravel as I cry and sing

He made a poet of the nightingale, he put rosemary in the fields
He gave flowers to the spring
Oh, he gave me this voice

If I sing, I know not what I sing
A mix of chance, longing, fondness and perhaps love
However I know that when singing, I feel that
When one has heartbreak and mourning on our face we are consoled

It was God who gave light to the eyes, gave gold to the sun and silver to moonlight
It was God who placed on my chest
A rosary of pain which
I unravel as I cry and sing

Tudo isso é fado

Perguntaste-me outro dia      
Se eu sabia o que era o fado
Disse-te que não sabia
Tu ficaste admirado
Sem saber o que dizia
Eu menti naquela hora
Disse-te que não sabia
Mas vou-te dizer agora

Almas vencidas
Noites perdidas
Sombras bizarras
Na Mouraria
Canta um rufia
Choram guitarras
Amor ciúme
Cinzas e lume
Dor e pecado
Tudo isto existe
Tudo isto é triste
Tudo isto é fado

Se queres ser o meu senhor
E teres-me sempre a teu lado
Nao me fales só de amor
Fala-me também do fado
E o fado é o meu castigo
Só nasceu pr’a me perder
O fado é tudo o que digo
Mais o que eu não sei dizer.

All of it is Fado

You asked me the other day                  
If I knew what fado was
I told you I did not know
You became surprised
Without knowing what I was saying
I lied at that time
I told you I did not know
But I will now tell you

Vanquished souls
Lost nights
Bizarre shadows
In the Mouraria*
A pimp sings
Guitars cry
Jealous love
Ashes and fire
Pain and sin
All of this exists
All of this is sorrowful
All of this is fado

If you wish to be my man
And always have me by your side
Speak to me not only of love
Speak to me of fado as well
And fado is my punishment
It was born solely to make me lost
Fado is everything I say
Plus the things I cannot explain.

* “Mouraria” refers to the moorish quarter in Lisbon. It was here that the Moors were said to have their ghetto.

 

Basta de Mala

One of my earliest childhood memories was listening to Amalia’s songs “Coimbra” – better known by its English title “April in Portugal” and “Basta de Mala.” This second song struck terror in me because of the sounds of  breaking and incipient violence that preceded the melody. I would put my hands over my ears and run for cover out of earshot until I knew the traumatic introduction was past, and then come out of my hiding place to listen to the rest of the song. Beyond the title (“Enough of the Bad”) I have no idea of  what the lyrics mean, and have had no success finding them on the web, but Amalia’s voice –  that voice – with all its clearly audible layers of timbre – had tremendous resonance for me, and it captured my heart, and the dry tinder of my childish imagination caught fire from this ravishing voice which scorched my soul forever.

Amalia’s Genre, Fado, is unique to Portugal, and the word ‘fado’  – meaning fate – is finely apposite. Its tone and lyricism is drenched in fatalism and unassuageable longing.  This is something that bleeds through even in the most mangled of translations, as are some I have been compelled to include in this post for lack of better alternatives. Not knowing Portuguese, I was able to make some corrections based on extrapolations of my limited knowledge of Spanish, but there were many faults I was unable to amend.

Fate is a force beyond the control of human beings, and the lyrics of Fado speak of how fate has determined the course of ordinary lives, helpless to resist it in every important respect. The dividends resulting from the investment Portugal made in colonial expansion of centuries past did not continue paying out for very long, and certainly most poor people did not benefit either in the past or in the present. The circumstances of their lives and livelihoods were not constructed to withstand hardship unscathed, or the vicissitudes of daily life and loss. The song “A casa da Mariquinhas”  is about the home of a young girl which has now become a pawn shop. It is a sequel to the song of the same name, by Alfredo Marceneiro of Mariquinhas house in happier times, and in a real sense, it is the story of fado – how a happy time can be so easily be transformed to sadness.

Fado is a blend of complex emotions. It is about loss and love and helplessness against the hardships of life and the implacability of fate, but sometimes it carries a defiant note – and even occasionally some consolation – as the “ginjinhas” in this last song “A casa da Mariquinhas,” but perhaps the greatest antidote to the trials and difficulties of life is Fado itself.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fado

Fado (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈfaðu], “destiny, fate”) is a music genre which can be traced to the 1820s in Portugal, but probably with much earlier origins. Fado historian and scholar, Rui Vieira Nery, states that “the only reliable information on the history of Fado was orally transmitted and goes back to the 1820s and 1830s at best. But even that information was frequently modified within the generational transmission process that made it reach us today.” In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a characteristic sentiment of resignation, fatefulness and melancholia (loosely captured by the word “saudade”, or longing). However, in reality fado is simply a form of song which can be about anything, but must follow a certain structure. The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade which symbolizes the feeling of loss (a permanent, irreparable loss and its consequent life lasting damage). Amália Rodrigues, Carlos do Carmo, Mariza, Mafalda Arnauth, and Cristina Branco are amongst the most famous individuals associated with the genre.

The Portuguese past was deeply interwoven in the Ceylon of my childhood. Sinhalese (the dominant language in Sri Lanka, as modern day Ceylon is known) is thickly sprinkled with Portuguese words – pintura, viduruwa, janela, sapattu, camisa, kalisama, bothama, lensuwa, bastame, panawa, mesa, pena, tinta, baila, cansadhu, pan, vinakiri, temperadhu, and a thousand others,  and these words still retain their practical currency in the Sinhalese language today. Many Sinhalese have Portuguese names – de Silva, Perera, Fernando, Gonsales, Rodrigo, Soysa etc, and  many still continue to follow the Catholic religion of their Portuguese ancestors.  Sinhalese men of a few generations ago, whose custom it was to wear their long hair in a knot, followed the Portuguese style of wearing curved tortoise-shell combs in their hair, and women wore gathered ‘frill’ over their blouses called a ‘manthe‘ – no doubt derived from the word ‘mantila.’

When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese as colonial rulers, many Dutch servants of the Dutch East India Company, some of my own ancestors included, intermarried with people of Portuguese descent, and Portuguese became their common language rather than Dutch. I remember my paternal grandmother speaking Portuguese with my grand-aunt, something she reverted to when they wished to speak in secret within my hearing. This grand-aunt told me that her uncle (of Scottish descent) whom the nieces and nephews referred to by his last name, Brodie, spoke Portuguese, as no doubt did his sister Rosalind Maude Brodie, my great-grandmother, born November 8, 1874.

The sermons in the Dutch Reformed Church in Wolvendaal on the outskirts of Colombo, in Ceylon, used to be preached in Portuguese. Dias, de Sielwe (Dutch spelling of de Silva) d’ Orta,and Pereira are all names from my family genealogy. Many of these ancestors were probably Jewish, and their names (of the pear tree, of the forest, of the orchard)  suggest they were fabricated, but there is no doubt at all of their Portuguese origins.

I like to think that Amalia’s music struck me so powerfully not just on its own unimpugnable merits, but also because of a echo from my  genetic past, and the residue of the historical past which lingered like a fine mist around my childhood. Her voice still thrills me and causes my skin to prickle, and the hairs on the back of my neck to bristle. It is an ecstatic voice, rich with feeling and intensity. It is instantly recognisable, and there is no other like it in all the world. There is no way to listen to it without being carried away to a deep interior world, where pain and elation combine to form an intoxicating magic.

A casa da Mariquinhas

Foi no Domingo passado que passei    
À casa onde vivia a Mariquinhas
Mas está tudo tão mudado
Que não vi em nenhum lado
As tais janelas que tinham tabuinhas

Do rés-do-chão ao telhado
Não vi nada, nada, nada
Que pudesse recordar-me a Mariquinhas
E há um vidro pegado e azulado
Onde via as tabuinhas

Entrei e onde era a sala agora está
a secretária e um sujeito que é lingrinhas
Mas não vi colchas com barra
Nem viola nem guitarra
Nem espreitadelas furtivas das vizinhas

O tempo cravou a garra                                 
Na alma daquela casa
Onde às vezes petiscávamos sardinhas
Quando em noites de guitarra e de farra
Estava alegre a Mariquinhas

As janelas tão garridas que ficavam
Com cortinados de chita às pintinhas
Perderam de todo a graça porque é hoje uma vidraça
Com cercaduras de lata às voltinhas

E lá pra dentro quem passa
Hoje é pra ir aos penhores
Entregar o usurário, umas coisinhas
Pois chega a esta desgraça toda a graça
Da casa da Mariquinhas

Pra terem feito da casa o que fizeram                      
Melhor fora que a mandassem prás alminhas
Pois ser casa de penhor
O que foi viveiro de amor
É ideia que não cabe cá nas minhas

Recordações de calor
E das saudades o gosto eu vou procurar esquecer
Numas ginjinhas

Pois dar de beber à dor é o melhor
Já dizia a Mariquinhas
Pois dar de beber à dor é o melhor
Já dizia a Mariquinhas

 

Mariquinha’s house

It was last Sunday I passed                               
the house Mariquinhas lived
but everything is so changed
Nowhere did I see
Those windows with their blinds.

From the floor to the ceiling
I saw nothing, nothing, nothing
that could remind me Mariquinhas,
and there is a blue pane, stuck in the place
where the blinds used to be.

I went in and where the room was, now
there is a skinny guy sitting at the desk,
but I did not see bedspreads
with embroidered borders anymore,
nor viola, nor guitar
neither the furtive nosy glances
from the women in the neighborhood.

Time spiked its claws                                            
into the soul of that house,
where we many times snacked sardines,
when in nights of celebration with a guitar
Mariquinhas used to feel so joyful

The windows looked so bright and coloured
With curtains of a bobble patterned fabric
They lost all the grace
because they are just a pane today
with bent iron frames.

And anyone who enters there today,
they come in only to get to the pawn shop,
to deliver to the loan shark a couple of things.
This is the misery that the grace of
Mariquinhas’s house has come to

Having done what they did to the house           
Better if they had blown it up,
because, turning into a pawn shop
what was a nest of love
is an idea that does not sit well with me.

Memories of warmth
and the taste of nostalgia
I will try to forget these things
by relishing some ginjinhas,*
because “feeding the thirst
of my pain is the best thing to do”
as Mariquinhas used to say.
Because “feeding the thirst
of my pain is the best thing to do”
as Mariquinhas used to say

*Ginjinhas is a drink made by infusing  alcohol with sour cherries and prune plums.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Casa da Mariquinhas

É numa rua bizarra                        

A casa da Mariquinhas
Tem na sala uma guitarra
E janelas com tabuinhas

Vive com muitas amigas
Aquela de quem vos falo
E não há maior regalo
Que a vida de raparigas
É doida pelas cantigas
Como no campo a cigarra
Canta o fado à guitarra
De comovida até chora
A casa alegre onde mora
É numa rua bizarra

Para se tornar notada
Usa coisas esquesitas
Muitas rendas, muitas fitas     
Lenços de cor variada.
Pretendida, desejada
Altiva como as rainhas
Ri das muitas, coitadinhas
Que a censuram rudemente
Por verem cheia de gente
A casa da Mariquinhas

É de aparência singela
Mas muito mal mobilada
E no fundo não vale nada
O tudo da casa dela
No vão de cada janela
Sobre coluna, uma jarra
Colchas de chita com barra
Quadros de gosto magano
Em vez de ter um piano
Tem na sala uma guitarra                

P’ra guardar o parco espólio
Um cofre forte comprou
E como o gaz acabou
Ilumina-se a petróleo.
Limpa as mobílias com óleo
De amêndoa doce e mesquinhas
Passam defronte as vizinhas
P’ra ver o que lá se passa
Mas ela tem por pirraça
Janelas com tabuinhas

 The House of Mariquinhas             

On a quaint little street
is the house of Mariquinhas.
It has a guitar in the parlour
and little shutters on the windows.She lives there with many friends
over there, she of whom I speak;
there are no great luxuries there,
but the lives of the young girls
who are crazy about songs
seem like field of cicadas.
They sing fado accompanied by a guitar
so that one is moved to tears,
where she lives, in that happy house       
on a quaint little street.

One can notice there
many exquisite things,
embroideries and ribbons
and linens of many colours.
They wish to play make-believe
putting on airs like queens
and they laugh at the poor women
who try to scold them
for having a house full of people.

It had a simple appearance,
and very shabby furniture
which in fact was quite worthless.
One could also find in her house,
placed in each window
a jar placed on a little stand.
There were bedspreads of printed cotton
in stripes and checks, all in very poor taste,
and instead of a piano
in the parlour there was a guitar.

To keep safe an old pair of ankle boots,
she bought a sturdy trunk,
and as the gas was all used up
the light came from a kerosine lamp,
the furniture there was polished with oil
and the almirah little and cute.
The neighbourhood women passing by in front
try to catch a glimpse inside,
but they find to their great annoyance,
that the shutters are always closed.

Read Full Post »

Saturday Evening in the Village: Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi
(June 29 1798 – June 14 1837)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading by Maddalena Balsamo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Il Sabato del villaggio      

La donzelletta vien dalla campagna
in sul calar del sole,
col suo fascio dell’erba; e reca in mano
un mazzolin di rose e viole,
onde, siccome suole, ornare ella si appresta
dimani, al dí di festa, il petto e il crine.
Siede con le vicine
su la scala a filar la vecchierella,
incontro là dove si perde il giorno;
e novellando vien del suo buon tempo,
quando ai dí della festa ella si ornava,
ed ancor sana e snella
solea danzar la sera intra di quei
ch’ebbe compagni nell’età piú bella.

 
Già tutta l’aria imbruna,
torna azzurro il sereno, e tornan l’ombre  
giú da’ colli e da’ tetti,
al biancheggiar della recente luna.
Or la squilla dà segno
della festa che viene;
ed a quel suon diresti
che il cor si riconforta.
I fanciulli gridando
su la piazzuola in frotta,
e qua e là saltando,
fanno un lieto romore;
e intanto riede alla sua parca mensa,
fischiando, il zappatore,
e seco pensa al dí del suo riposo.

 

Poi quando intorno è spenta ogni altra face,
e tutto l’altro tace,
odi il martel picchiare, odi la sega
del legnaiuol, che veglia
nella chiusa bottega alla lucerna,
e s’affretta, e s’adopra
di fornir l’opra anzi al chiarir dell’alba.

Questo di sette è il più gradito giorno,
pien di speme e di gioia:
diman tristezza e noia
recheran l’ore, ed al travaglio usato
ciascuno in suo pensier farà ritorno.

 

 

Garzoncello scherzoso,
cotesta età fiorita
è come un giorno d’allegrezza pieno,
giorno chiaro, sereno,
che precorre alla festa di tua vita.          
Godi, fanciullo mio; stato soave,
stagion lieta è cotesta.
Altro dirti non vo’; ma la tua festa
ch’anco tardi a venir non ti sia grave.

 

 

 

 

 

 Settembre 28,1829.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday Evening in the Village.                       

             

The young girl comes from the fields
about the set of sun,
bearing her swath of grass, and in her hand
a bunch of roses and violets,
as is her custom, for,
tomorrow’s holiday
to make more beautiful her breast and hair.

 
And the old woman sits
upon the steps among her neighbours, spinning 
turning herself to where the day goes down,
and telling tales how she,in better times,
decked herself out for the holiday,
and graceful still,and fresh,
would dance the evening through among the rest,
who were companions of her lovely prime.
Now the air and sky grow dark,
take on a deeper blue,and shadows fall
cast by the roofs and hills
beneath the whiteness of the rising moon.

 
And now the bell proclaims                                     
The holy day’s approach,
and at the sound,it seems,
each heart is cheered once more.
The small boys shouting in troops
about the village square
go leaping hither and thither
and make a cheerful noise;
meanwhile  the labourer goes whistling home,
back to his frugal meal,
and thinks about the coming day of rest.
When every other light around is out,
all other sound is mute,
hark to the hammer knocking,and the saw –
the carpenter is up,
working by lamplight in his shuttered shop,             
and labours on, in haste
to get all finished before the morning comes.

This is the best-loved day of all the week,
most full of hope and joy;
the morrow will be back
sadness and tedium, and each within his thought
returns once more to find his usual labour.

You little playful boy,
even this your flowering time
is like a day filled up with grace and joy –
a clear, calm day that comes
as a precursor to life’s festival.
Be happy little lad;
a joyful time  is this.
More I’d not tell you; but if your holiday
seems somewhat tardy yet, let not that grieve you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 28, 1829.

Translation John Heath Stubbs.

 

 

 

Perhaps a long evening spent standing on his balcony, watching the steady rhythms of village life unfold, gave rise to this dreamy inward looking poem, written by Giacomo Leopardi when he was thirty years old. As always, a deep sadness underlies his observations and musings. In the course of an evening the succession of images passing before him, of ordinary people going about their lives, inspires within him a  feeling of participation. He seems to catch the sense of their thoughts and motivations, their hopes, their musings and anticipations, the memories of their pasts, and their dreams. The flowers the young girl is taking home will be placed in cool water to be kept fresh for the morning, when they will be braided into her hair and adorn her dress. The old woman, for whom youth is now only a memory, recalls the joys of her her girlhood, when she was nimble and rejoiced in the gaiety of dance. The labourer returning to his rustic home leaves behind him a week of hard work, and looks forward to the satisfaction of sitting down to a simple meal. All these tender speculations add an extension to the present moment, and at the same time  permit an innocent intrusion into other lives – lives which are invested with clear and uncomplicated purpose.  One feels Leopardi reaching out in an effort to connect himself with a sense of the authentically lived human life which he himself seems to lack.

But nothing about Leopardi is as simple as it seems. The roses and violets the young girl takes home are the stuff of his imagination. Roses may bloom in September – but I can firmly attest to the fact that violets are flowers of spring, for I see them blooming now in my late March garden. Even if he could hear the receding whistle of the labourer, the old lady at her spinning wheel cannot be within earshot – a courtyard and a village square separates her from Leopardi.

I cannot escape the feeling that this poem of Leopardi’s echos the images of at least two others. The workman returning home late after a days work or at the end of the work week has a special significance for Leopardi. He is the relic of a childhood memory: it is the song of a workman Leopardi hears as a boy as he lies sleepless in his bed; and a workman appears again in “The Evening of the Holiday” (La sera del dì di festa), whistling on his way home from a hard day’s work. Spinning and weaving – those quintessentially feminine tasks, heavy with the fateful significance of which Leopardi must have been aware, and his covert observations of “Silvia” have her toiling over her loom, even as the old lady in this poem reminisces over her spinning.  All this suggests to me a persistence of memory and imagery which insists on surfacing through the depths of his imagination when he is in in a relaxed and receptive state –which is to say, when a poem begins to take shape in his mind.

Poems for Leopardi are litanies of loss. Youth and beauty with their terrible burden of ephemeralness, and incipient pain are full of sweetness and longing. One can never, it seems, be experienced without the other. And yet one feels Leopardi’s passionate longing to try to hold on to them – and to cry out in pain as they slip through his grasp. He feels as if his own youth has passed him by, even though (even at a time when life-spans were not as long as they are now) thirty could not be said to be any great age. What Leopardi cannot bring himself to say is that it is not his youth per se which has deserted him, but his soundness of body, for in early adolescence the signs of the disability which was to disfigure and distort his body had made their baneful appearance.

Leopardi went to his grave believing he became a hunchback as a result of his strenuous studies, but we now know it was not studying which left him frail, bent-over and stunted at a height of about four feet six inches  (1.41 metres) tall, but tuberculosis of the bones. He had hoped his brilliant mind would compensate for these disfigurements, and that once the world recognised the extent of his intellect he would win both fame and fortune, but sadly this was not to be. Instead he found that he was barely noticed except by a few, and instead of becoming a man of independent means, he was to remain for the rest of his live humiliatingly dependent on his father for his finances.

The finality of these several disappointments would have been crushing for a much more stalwart soul (and body) but to Leopardi they were almost unbearable. Life seems to have become for him something he could experience only vicariously, hence the longing with which he reaches out to it through the authenticity of other people’s experience, knowing all the while it could never be claimed by him directly. This is the well-spring of Leopardi’s awesome power as a writer, a thinker and a poet, and at the same time the source of his tragic weakness – that he could feel so well what he could never possess.

Leopardi spent his early years longing to escape the odious provinciality and restrictiveness of his home town Recanati, situated as it was in the papal Marches, and under the intractable influence of the church. When he finally escaped to Rome, and later to Bologna, he found them not to his liking either: it was to the scenes of his  childhood that his poetic mind repeatedly returned.  His mind oscillated between love and hate, deploring and romanticising in turn the very place he found both unbearable and inescapable.

The ending of this poem in a sense encapsulates this contradiction. His poem “Le ricordanze” (“Memories”)  is in equal parts tender and scathing in its recollections. The playful boy to whom he addresses his final remark, in “Il Sabato del villaggio” must have reminded him of the boys who pelted rocks at him and knocked off his hat, screaming ” hunchback” at him all the while. Now as he remembers how he watched the boys at play on a late Saturday evening, he cannot restrain himself from uttering a veiled malediction. He cannot say it outright, but he knows, as they do not, that their joys will soon pass, as did his own.

Read Full Post »

Sarah Orne Jewett: The Lost Lover

Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3 1849 – June 24 1909)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a great many years it had been understood in Longfield that Miss Horatia Dane once had a lover,and that he had been lost at sea. By little and little, in one way and another, her acquaintances found out or made up the whole story; and Miss Dane stood in the position, not of an unmarried woman exactly, but rather of having spent most of her life in a long and lonely widowhood. She looked like a person with a history, strangers often said (as if we each did not have a history); and her own unbroken reserve about this romance of hers gave everybody the more respect for it.

The Longfield people paid willing deference to Miss Dane: her family had always been one that could be liked and respected and she was the last that was left in the old home of which she was so fond. This was a high, square house, with a row of pointed windows in its roof, a peaked porch in front, with some lilac-bushes near it; and down by the road was a long, orderly procession of poplars, like a row of sentinels standing guard. She had lived here alone since her father’s death, twenty years before. She was a kind, just woman whose pleasures were of a stately and sober sort; and she seemed not unhappy in her loneliness, though she sometimes said gravely that she was the last of her family, as if the fact had a great sadness for her.

She had some middle-aged and elderly cousins who lived at a distance, and they came occasionally to see her; but there had      been no young people staying in her house for many years until this summer, when the daughter of her youngest cousin had written to ask if she might come to make a visit. She was a motherless girl of twenty, both older and younger than her years. Her father and brother, who were civil engineers, had taken some work upon the line of a railway in the far Western country. Nelly had made many long journeys with them before and since she had left school, and she had meant to follow them now, after spending a fortnight with the old cousin whom she had not seen since her childhood. Her father had laughed at this visit as a freak, and warned her of the dullness and primness of Longfield; but the result was that the girl found herself very happy in the comfortable home. She was still her own free, unfettered, lucky, and sunshiny self; and the old house was so much pleasanter for the girlish face and life, that Miss Horatia had, at first timidly and then most heartily, begged her to stay for the whole summer, or even the autumn, until her father was ready to come East. The name of Dane was very dear to Miss Horatia, and she grew fonder of her guest. When the village people saw her glance at the girl affectionately, as they sat together in the family pew of a Sunday, or saw them walking together after tea, they said it was a good thing for Miss Horatia; how bright she looked! and no doubt she would leave all her money to Nelly Dane, if she played her cards well.

But we will do Nelly justice, and say that she was not mercenary; she would have scorned such a thought. She had grown to have a great love for her cousin Horatia, and really liked to please her. She idealized her, I have no doubt; and her repression, her grave courtesy and rare words of approval, had a great fascination for a girl who had just been used to people who chattered, and were upon most intimate terms with you directly, and could forget you with equal ease. And Nelly liked having so admiring and easily pleased an audience as Miss Dane and her old servant Melissa. She liked to be queen of her company: she had so many gay, bright stories of what had happened to herself and her friends. Beside, she was clever with her needle, and had all those practical gifts which elderly women approve so heartily in girls. They liked her pretty clothes; she was sensible, and economical, and busy; they praised her to each other and to the world, and even stubborn old Andrew, the man servant to whom Miss Horatia herself spoke with deference, would do anything she asked. Nelly would by no means choose so dull a life as this for the rest of her days; but she enjoyed it immensely for the time being. She instinctively avoided all that would shock the grave dignity and old-school ideas of Miss Dane; and somehow she never had felt happier or better satisfied with life. Perhaps it was because she was her best and most lady-like self. It was not long before she knew the village people almost as well as Miss Dane did, and she became a very great favorite, as a girl so easily can who is good-natured and pretty, and well versed in city fashions; who has that tact and cleverness that come to such a nature from going about the world and knowing many people.

She had not been in Longfield many weeks before she heard something of Miss Dane’s love-story; for one of her new friends asked, in a confidential moment, “Does your cousin ever speak to you about the young man to whom she was engaged to be married?” and Nelly answered, “No,” with great wonder, and not without regret at her own ignorance. After this she kept eyes and ears open for whatever news of this lover’s existence might be found.

At last it happened one morning that she had a good chance for a friendly talk with Melissa; for who should know the family affairs better than she? Miss Horatia had taken her second-best parasol, with a deep fringe, and had gone majestically down the street to do some household errands which she could trust to no one. Melissa was shelling peas at the shady kitchen doorstep, and Nelly came strolling round from the garden, along the clean-swept flag-stones, and sat down to help her. Melissa moved along, with a grim smile, to make room for her. “You needn’t bother yourself,” said she, “I’ve nothing else to do. You’ll green your fingers all over.” But she was evidently pleased to have company.

“My fingers will wash,” said Nelly, “and I’ve nothing else to do either. Please push the basket this way a little, or I shall scatter the pods, and then you will scold.” She went to work busily, while she tried to think of the best way to find out the story she wished to hear.

“There!” said Melissa, “I never told Miss H’ratia to get some citron, and I settled yesterday to make some pound-cake this forenoon after I got dinner along a piece. She’s most out o’ mustard too; she’s set about having mustard to eat with her beef, just as the old colonel was before her. I never saw any other folks eat mustard with their roast beef; but every family has their own tricks. I tied a thread round my left-hand little finger purpose to remember that citron before she came down this morning. I hope I ain’t losing my fac’lties.” It was seldom that Melissa was so talkative as this at first. She was clearly in a talkative mood.

“Melissa,” asked Nelly, with great bravery, after a minute or two of silence, “who was it that my cousin Horatia was going to marry? It’s odd that I shouldn’t know; but I don’t remember father’s ever speaking of it, and I shouldn’t think of asking her.”

“I s’pose it’ll seem strange to you,” said Melissa, beginning to shell the peas a great deal faster, “but as many years as I have lived in this house with her, – her mother, the old lady, fetched me up, – I never knew Miss H’ratia to say a word about him. But there! she knows I know, and we’ve got an understanding on many things we never talk over as some folks would. I’ve heard about it from other folks. She was visiting her great-aunt in Salem when she met with him. His name was Carrick, and it was presumed they was going to be married when he came home from the voyage he was lost on. He had the promise of going out master of a new ship. They didn’t keep company long; it was made up of a sudden, and folks here didn’t get hold of the story till some time after. I’ve heard some that ought to know say it was only talk, and they never was engaged to be married no more than I am.”

“You say he was lost at sea?” asked Nelly.

“The ship never was heard from. They supposed she was run down in the night out in the South Seas somewhere. It was a good while before they gave up expecting news; but none ever come. I think she set everything by him, and took it very hard losing of him. But there! she’d never say a word. You’re the freest-spoken Dane I ever saw; but you may take it from your mother’s folks. I expect he gave her that whale’s tooth with the ship drawn on it that’s on the mantelpiece in her room. She may have a sight of other keepsakes, for all I know; but it ain’t likely.” And here there was a pause, in which Nelly grew sorrowful as she thought of the long waiting for tidings of the missing ship, and of her cousin’s solitary life. It was very odd to think of prim Miss Horatia’s being in love with a sailor. There was a young lieutenant in the navy whom Nelly herself liked dearly, and he had gone away on a long voyage. “Perhaps she’s been just as well off,” said Melissa. “She’s dreadful set, y’r cousin H’ratia is, and sailors is high-tempered men. I’ve heard it hinted that he was a fast fellow; and if a woman’s got a good home like this, and’s able to do for herself, she’d better stay there. I ain’t going to give up a certainty for an uncertainty, – that’s what I always tell ’em,” added Melissa, with great decision, as if she were besieged by lovers; but Nelly smiled inwardly as she thought of the courage it would take to support any one who wished to offer her companion his heart and hand. It would need desperate energy to scale the walls of that garrison.

The green peas were all shelled presently, and Melissa said gravely that she should have to be lazy now until it was time to put in the meat. She wasn’t used to being helped, unless there was extra work, and she calculated to have one piece of work join on to another. However, it was no account, and she was obliged for the company; and Nelly laughed merrily as she stood washing her hands in the shining old copper basin at the sink. The sun would not be round that side of the house for a long time yet, and the pink and blue morning-glories were still in their full bloom and freshness. They grew over the window, twined on strings exactly the same distance apart. There was a box crowded full of green houseleeks down at the side of the door; they were straying over the edge, and Melissa stooped stiffly down with an air of disapproval at their untidiness. “They straggle all over everything,” said she, “and they’re no kind of use, only Miss’s mother, she set everything by ’em. She fetched ’em from home with her when she was married, her mother kep’ a box, and they came from England. Folks used to say they was good for bee stings.” Then she went into the inner kitchen, and Nelly went slowly away along the flag-stones to the garden from whence she had come. The garden-gate opened with a tired creak, and shut with a clack; and she noticed how smooth and shiny the wood was where the touch of so many hands had worn it. There was a great pleasure to this girl in finding herself among such old and well-worn things. She had been for a long time in cities or at the West; and among the old fashions and ancient possessions of Longfield it seemed to her that everything had its story, and she liked the quietness and unchangeableness with which life seemed to go on from year to year. She had seen many a dainty or gorgeous garden, but never one that she had liked so well as this, with its herb-bed and its broken rows of currant-bushes, its tall stalks of white lilies, and its wandering rose-bushes and honeysuckles, that had bloomed beside the straight paths for so many more summers than she herself had lived. She picked a little bouquet of late red roses, and carried it into the house to put on the parlor table. The wide hall-door was standing open, with its green outer blinds closed, and the old hall was dim and cool. Miss Horatia did not like a glare of sunlight, and she abhorred flies with her whole heart. Nelly could hardly see her way through the rooms, it had been so bright out of doors; but she brought the tall champagne-glass of water from the dining-room and put the flowers in their place. Then she looked at two silhouettes which stood on the mantel in carved ebony frames. They were portraits of an uncle of Miss Dane and his wife. Miss Dane had thought Nelly looked like this uncle the evening before. She could not see the likeness herself; but the pictures suggested something else, and she turned suddenly, and went hurrying up the stairs to Miss Horatia’s own room, where she remembered to have seen a group of silhouettes fastened to the wall. There were seven or eight, and she looked at the young men among them most carefully; but they were all marked with the name of Dane: they were Miss Horatia’s uncles and brothers, and our friend hung them on their little brass hooks again with a feeling of disappointment. Perhaps her cousin had a quaint miniature of the lover, painted on ivory, and shut in a worn red morocco case; she hoped she should get a sight of it some day. This story of the lost sailor had a wonderful charm for the girl. Miss Horatia had never been so interesting to her before. How she must have mourned for the lover, and missed him, and hoped there would yet be news from the ship! Nelly thought she would tell her own little love-story some day, though there was not much to tell yet, in spite of there being so much to think about. She built a little castle in Spain as she sat in the front window-seat of the upper hall, and dreamed pleasant stories for herself until the sharp noise of the front gate-latch waked her; and she looked out through the blind to see her cousin coming up the walk.

Miss Horatia looked hot and tired, and her thoughts were not of any fashion of romance. “It is going to be very warm,” said she. “I have been worrying ever since I have been gone, because I forgot to ask Andrew to pick those white currants for the minister’s wife. I promised that she should have them early this morning. Would you go out to the kitchen and ask Melissa to step in for a moment, my dear?”

Melissa was picking over red currants to make a pie, and rose from her chair with a little unwillingness. “I guess they could wait until afternoon,” said she, as she came back. “Miss H’ratia’s in a fret because she forgot about sending some white currants to the minister’s. I told her that Andrew had gone to have the horses shod, and wouldn’t be back till near noon. I don’t see why part of the folks in the world should kill themselves trying to suit the rest. As long as I haven’t got any citron for the cake, I suppose I might go out and pick ’em,” added Melissa ungraciously. “I’ll get some to set away for tea anyhow.”

Miss Dane had a letter to write after she had rested from her walk; and Nelly soon left her in the dark parlor, and went back to the sunshiny garden to help Melissa, who seemed to be taking life with more than her usual disapproval. She was sheltered by an enormous gingham sunbonnet.

“I set out to free my mind to your cousin H’ratia this morning,” said she, as Nelly crouched down at the opposite side of the bush where she was picking; “but we can’t agree on that p’int, and it’s no use. I don’t say nothing. You might ‘s well ask the moon to face about and travel the other way as to try to change Miss H’ratia’s mind. I ain’t going to argue it with her, it ain’t my place; I know that as well as anybody. She’d run her feet off for the minister’s folks any day; and though I do say he’s a fair preacher, they haven’t got a speck o’ consideration nor fac’lty; they think the world was made for them, but I think likely they’ll find out it wasn’t; most folks do. When he first was settled here, I had a fit o’ sickness, and he come to see me when I was getting over the worst of it. He did the best he could, I always took it very kind of him; but he made a prayer and he kep’ sayin’ `this aged handmaid,’ I should think a dozen times. Aged handmaid!” said Melissa scornfully; “I don’t call myself aged yet, and that was more than ten years ago. I never made pretensions to being            younger than I am; but you’d ‘a’ thought I was a topplin’ old creatur’ going on a hundred.”

Nelly laughed. Melissa looked cross, and moved on to the next currant-bush. “So that’s why you don’t like the minister?” But the question did not seem to please.

“I hope I never should be set against a preacher by such as that.” And Nelly hastened to change the subject; but there was to be a last word: “I like to see a minister that’s solid minister right straight through, not one of these veneered folks. But old Parson Croden spoilt me for setting under any other preaching.”

“I wonder,” said Nelly after a little, “If Cousin Horatia has any picture of that Captain Carrick.”

“He wasn’t captain,” said Melissa. “I never heard that it was any more than they talked of giving him a ship next voyage.”

“And you never saw him? He never came here to see her?”

“Bless you, no! She met with him at Salem, where she was spending the winter, and he went right away to sea. I’ve heard a good deal more about it of late years than I ever did at the time. I suppose the Salem folks talked about it enough. All I know is, there was other good matches that offered to her since, and couldn’t get her; and I suppose it was on account of her heart’s being buried in the deep with him.” And this unexpected bit of sentiment, spoken in Melissa’s grum tone, seemed so funny to her young companion, that she bent very low to pick from a currant-twig close to the ground, and could not ask any more questions for some time.

“I have seen her a sight o’ times when I knew she was thinking about him,” Melissa went on presently, this time with a tenderness in her voice that touched Nelly’s heart. “She’s been dreadful lonesome. She and the old colonel, her father, wasn’t much company to each other, and she always kep’ everything to herself. The only time she ever said a word to me was one night six or seven years ago this Christmas. They got up a Christmas-tree in the vestry, and she went, and I did too; I guess everybody in the whole church and parish that could crawl turned out to go. The children they made a dreadful racket. I’d ha’ got my ears took off if I had been so forth-putting when I was little. I was looking round for Miss H’ratia ‘long at the last of the evening, and somebody said they’d seen her go home. I hurried, and I couldn’t see any light in the house, and I was afraid she was sick or something. She come and let me in, and I see she had been a-cryin’. I says, `Have you heard any bad news?’ But she says, `No,’ and began to cry again, real pitiful. `I never felt so lonesome in my life,’ says she, `as I did down there. It’s a dreadful thing to be left all alone in the world.’ I did feel for her; but I couldn’t seem to say a word. I put some pine chips I had handy for morning on the kitchen fire, and I made her up a cup o’ good hot tea quick ‘s I could, and took it to her; and I guess she felt better. She never went to bed till three o’clock that night. I couldn’t shut my eyes till I heard her come upstairs. There! I set everything by Miss H’ratia. I haven’t got no folks either. I was left an orphan over to Deerfield, where Miss’s mother come from, and she took me out o’ the town-farm to bring up. I remember when I come here, I was so small I had a box to stand up on when I helped wash the dishes. There’s nothing I ain’t had to make me comfortable, and I do just as I’m a mind to, and call in extra help every day of the week if I give the word; but I’ve had my lonesome times, and I guess Miss H’ratia knew.”

Nelly was very much touched by this bit of a story, it was a new idea to her that Melissa should have so much affection and be so sympathetic. People never will get over being surprised that chestnut-burrs are not as rough inside as they are outside, and the girl’s heart warmed toward the old woman who had spoken with such unlooked-for sentiment and pathos. Melissa went to the house with her basket, and Nelly also went in, but only to put on another hat, and see if it were straight in a minute spent before the old mirror, before she hurried down the long elm-shaded street to buy a pound of citron for the cake. She left it on the kitchen table when she came back, and nobody ever said anything about it; only there were two delicious pound-cakes –  a heart and a round – on a little blue china plate beside Nelly’s plate at tea.

After tea, Nelly and Miss Dane sat in the front doorway, – the elder woman in a high-backed chair, and the younger on the door-step. The tree-toads and crickets were tuning up heartily, the stars showed a little through the trees, and the elms looked heavy and black against the sky. The fragrance of the white lilies in the garden blew through the hall. Miss Horatia was tapping the ends of her fingers together. Probably she was not thinking of anything in particular. She had had a very peaceful day, with the exception of the currants; and they had, after all, gone to the parsonage some time before noon. Beside this, the minister had sent word that the delay        made no distress; for his wife had unexpectedly gone to Downton to pass the day and night. Miss Horatia had received the business letter for which she had been looking for several days; so there was nothing to regret deeply for that day, and there seemed to be nothing for one to dread on the morrow.

“Cousin Horatia,” asked Nelly, “are you sure you like having me here? Are you sure I don’t trouble you?”

“Of course not,” said Miss Dane, without a bit of sentiment in her tone; “I find it very pleasant having young company, though I am used to being alone; and I don’t mind it as I suppose you would.”

“I should mind it very much,” said the girl softly.

“You would get used to it, as I have,” said Miss Dane. “Yes, dear, I like having you here better and better. I hate to think of your going away.” And she smoothed Nelly’s hair as if she thought she might have spoken coldly at first, and wished to make up for it. This rare caress was not without its effect.

“I don’t miss father and Dick so very much,” owned Nelly frankly, “because I have grown used to their coming and going; but sometimes I miss people – Cousin Horatia, did I ever say anything to you about George Forest?”

“I think I remember the name,” answered Miss Dane.

“He is in the navy, and he has gone a long voyage, and – I think everything of him. I missed him awfully; but it is almost time to get a letter.”

“Does your father approve of him?” asked Miss Dane, with great propriety. “You are very young yet, and you must not think of such a thing carelessly. I should be so much grieved if you threw away your happiness.”

“Oh! we are not really engaged,” said Nelly, who felt a little chilled. “I suppose we are, too; only nobody knows yet. Yes, father knows him as well as I do, and he is very fond of him. Of course I should not keep it from father; but he guessed it himself. Only it’s such a long cruise, Cousin Horatia, – three years, I suppose, – away off in China and Japan.”

“I have known longer voyages than that,” said Miss Dane, with a quiver in her voice; and she rose suddenly, and walked away, this grave, reserved woman, who seemed so contented and so comfortable. But when she came back, she asked Nelly a great deal about her lover, and learned more of the girl’s life than she ever had before. And they talked together in the pleasantest way about this pleasant subject, which was so close to Nelly’s heart, until Melissa brought the candles at ten o’clock, that being the hour of Miss Dane’s bedtime.

But that night Miss Dane did not go to bed at ten; she sat by the window in her room, thinking. The moon rose late; and after a little while she blew out her candles, which were burning low. I suppose that the years which had come and gone since the young sailor went away on that last voyage of his had each added to her affection for him. She was a person who clung the more fondly to youth as she left it the farther behind.

This is such a natural thing; the great sorrows of our youth sometimes become the amusements of our later years; we can only remember them with a smile. We find that our lives look fairer to us, and we forget what used to trouble us so much, when we look back. Miss Dane certainly had come nearer to truly loving the sailor than she had any one else; and the more she thought of it, the more it became the romance of her life. She no longer asked herself, as she often had done in middle life, whether, if he had lived and had come home, she would have loved and married him. She had minded less and less, year by year, knowing that her friends and neighbors thought her faithful to the love of her youth. Poor, gay, handsome Joe Carrick! how fond he had been of her, and how he had looked at her that day he sailed away out of Salem Harbor on the brig Chevalier! If she had only known that she never should see him again, poor fellow!

But, as usual, her thoughts changed their current a little at the end of her reverie. Perhaps, after all, loneliness was not so hard to bear as other sorrows. She had had a pleasant life, God had been very good to her, and had spared her many trials, and granted her many blessings. “I am an old woman now,” she said to herself. “Things are better as they are; I can get on by myself better than most women can, and I never should have liked to be interfered with.”

Then she shut out the moonlight, and lighted her candles again, with an almost guilty feeling. What should I say if Nelly sat up till nearly midnight looking out at the moon?” she thought. “It is very silly; but this is such a beautiful night. I should like to have her see the moon shining through the tops of the trees.” But Nelly was sleeping the sleep of the just and sensible in her own room.

Next morning at breakfast, Nelly was a little conscious of there having been uncommon confidences the night before; but Miss Dane was her usual calm and somewhat formal self, and proposed their making a few calls after dinner, if the weather were not too hot. Nelly at once wondered what she had better wear. There was a certain black grenadine which Miss Horatia had noticed with approval, and she remembered that the lower ruffle needed hemming, and made up her mind that she would devote most of the time before dinner to that and to some other repairs. So, after breakfast was over, she brought the dress downstairs, with her work-box, and settled herself in the dining-room. Miss Dane usually sat there in the morning; it was a pleasant room, and she could keep an unsuspected watch over the kitchen and Melissa, who did not need watching in the least. I dare say it was for the sake of being within the sound of a voice.

Miss Dane marched in and out that morning; she went upstairs, and came down again, and was mysteriously busy for a while in the parlor. Nelly was sewing steadily by a window, where one of the blinds was a little way open, and tethered in its place by a string. She hummed a tune to herself over and over:-

“What will you do, love, when I am going,
With white sails flowing, the seas beyond ?”

And old Melissa, going to and fro at her work in the kitchen, grumbled out bits of an ancient psalm-tune at intervals. There seemed to be some connection between these fragments in her mind; it was like a ledge of rock in a pasture, that sometimes runs under the ground, and then crops out again. Perhaps it was the tune of  Windham.

Nelly found that there was a good deal to be done to the grenadine dress when she looked it over critically, and became very diligent. It was quiet in and about the house for a long time, until suddenly she heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming in from the road. The side-door was in a little entry between the room where Nelly sat and the kitchen, and the new-comer knocked loudly. “A tramp,” said Nelly to herself; while Melissa came to open the door, wiping her hands hurriedly on her apron.

“I wonder if you couldn’t give me something to eat,” said the man.

“I suppose I could,” answered Melissa. “Will you step in?” Beggars were very few in Longfield, and Miss Dane never wished anybody to go away hungry from her house. It was off the grand highway of tramps; but they were by no means unknown.

Melissa searched among her stores, and Nelly heard her putting one plate after another on the kitchen table, and thought that the breakfast promised to be a good one, if it were late.

“Don’t put yourself out,” said the man, as he moved his chair nearer. “I lodged in an old barn three or four miles above here last night, and there didn’t seem to be very good board there.”

“Going far?” inquired Melissa concisely.

“Boston,” said the man. “I’m a little too old to travel afoot. Now if I could go by water, it would seem nearer. I’m more used to the water. This is a royal good piece o’ beef. I suppose you couldn’t put your hand on a mug of cider?” This was said humbly; but the tone failed to touch Melissa’s heart.

“No, I couldn’t,” said she decisively; so there was an end of that, and the conversation flagged for a time.

Presently Melissa came to speak to Miss Dane, who had just come downstairs. “Could you stay in the kitchen a few minutes?” she whispered. “There’s an old creatur’ there that looks foreign. He came to the door for something to eat, and I gave it to him; but he’s miser’ble looking, and I don’t like to leave him alone. I’m just in the midst o’ dressing the chickens. He’ll be through pretty quick, according to the way he’s eating now.”

Miss Dane followed her without a word; and the man half rose, and said, “Good-morning, madam!” with unusual courtesy. And, when Melissa was out of hearing, he spoke again: “I suppose you haven’t any cider?” to which his hostess answered, “I couldn’t give you any this morning,” in a tone that left no room for argument. He looked as if he had had a great deal too much to drink already.

“How far do you call it from here to Boston?” he asked, and was told that it was eighty miles.

“I’m a slow traveler,” said he; “sailors don’t take much to walking.” Miss Dane asked him if he had been a sailor. “Nothing else,” replied the man, who seemed much inclined to talk. He had been eating like a hungry dog, as if he were half-starved, – a slouching, red-faced, untidy-looking old man, with some traces of former good looks still to be discovered in his face. “Nothing else. I ran away to sea when I was a boy, and I followed it until I got so old they wouldn’t ship me even for cook.” There was something in his feeling, for once, so comfortable, – perhaps it was being with a lady like Miss Dane, who pitied him, – that lifted his thoughts a little from their usual low level. “It’s drink that’s been the ruin of me,” said he. “I ought to have been somebody. I was nobody’s fool when I was young. I got to be mate of a firstrate ship, and there was some talk o’ my being captain before long. She was lost that voyage, and three of us were all that was saved; we got picked up by a Chinese junk. She had the plague aboard of her, and my mates died of it, and I was down myself. It was a hell of a place to be in. When I got ashore I shipped on an old bark that pretended to be coming round the Cape, and she turned out to be a pirate. I just went to the dogs, and I’ve gone from bad to worse ever since.”

“It’s never too late to mend,” said Melissa, who came into the kitchen just then for a string to tie the chickens.

“Lord help us, yes, it is!” said the sailor. “It’s easy for you to say that. I’m too old. I ain’t been master of this craft for a good while.” And he laughed at his melancholy joke.

“Don’t say that,” said Miss Dane.

“Well, now, what could an old wrack like me do to earn a living? and who ‘d want me if I could? You wouldn’t. I don’t know when I’ve been treated so decent as this before. I’m all broke down.” But his tone was no longer sincere; he had fallen back on his profession of beggar.

“Couldn’t you get into some asylum or – there’s the Sailors’ Snug Harbor, isn’t that for men like you? It seems such a pity for a man of your years to be homeless and a wanderer. Haven’t you any friends at all?” And here, suddenly, Miss Dane’s face altered, and she grew very white; something startled her. She looked as one might who saw a fearful ghost.

“No,” said the man; “but my folks used to be some of the best in Salem. I haven’t shown my head there this good while. I was an orphan. My grandmother brought me up. You see, I didn’t come back to the States for thirty or forty years. Along at the first of it I used to see men in port that I used to know; but I always dodged ’em, and I was way off in outlandish places. I’ve got an awful sight to answer for. I used to have a good wife when I was in Australia. I don’t know where I haven’t been, first and last. I was always a gay fellow. I’ve spent as much as a couple o’ fortunes, and here I am a-begging. Devil take it!”

Nelly was still sewing in the dining-room; but, soon after Miss Dane had gone out to the kitchen, one of the doors between had slowly closed itself with a plaintive whine. The round stone which Melissa used to keep it open had been pushed away. Nelly was a little annoyed; she liked to hear what was going on; but she was just then holding her work with great care in a place that was hard to sew, so she did not move. She heard the murmur of voices, and thought, after a while, that the old vagabond ought to go away by this time. What could be making her cousin Horatia talk so long with him? It was not like her at all. He would beg for money, of course, and she hoped Miss Horatia would not give him a single cent.

It was some time before the kitchen-door opened, and the man came out with clumsy, stumbling steps. “I’m much obliged to you,” he said, “and I don’t know but it is the last time I’ll get treated as if I was a gentleman. Is there anything I could do for you round the place?” he asked hesitatingly and as if he hoped that his offer would not be accepted.

“No,” answered Miss Dane. “No, thank you. Good-by!” and he went away.

The old beggar had been lifted a little above his low life; he fell back again directly before he was out of the gate. “I’m blessed if she didn’t give me a ten-dollar bill!” said he. “She must have thought it was one. I’ll get out o’ call as quick as I can; hope she won’t find it out, and send anybody after me.” Visions of unlimited drinks, and other things in which it was possible to find pleasure, flitted through his stupid mind. “How the old lady stared at me once!” he thought. “Wonder if she was anybody I used to know? `Downton?’ I don’t know as I ever heard of the place.” And he scuffed along the dusty road; and that night he was very drunk, and the next day he went wandering on, God only knows where.

But Nelly and Melissa both heard a strange noise in the kitchen, as if some one had fallen, and they found that Miss Horatia had fainted dead away. It was partly the heat, she said, when she saw their anxious faces as she came to herself; she had had a little headache all the morning; it was very hot and close in the kitchen, and the faintness had come upon her suddenly. They helped her to walk into the cool parlor presently, and Melissa brought her a glass of wine, and Nelly sat beside her on a footstool as she lay on the sofa, and fanned her. Once she held her cheek against Miss Horatia’s hand for a minute, and she will never know as long as she lives, what a comfort she was that day.

Every one but Miss Dane forgot the old sailor tramp in this excitement that followed his visit. Do you guess already who he was? But the certainty could not come to you with the chill and horror it did to Miss Dane. There had been something familiar in his look and voice from the first, and then she had suddenly known him, her lost lover. It was an awful change that the years had made in him. He had truly called himself a wreck; he was like some dreary wreck in its decay and utter ruin, its miserable ugliness and worthlessness, falling to pieces in the slow tides of a lifeless southern sea.

And he had once been her lover, Miss Dane thought bitterly, many times in the days that followed. Not that there was ever anything asked or promised between them, but they had liked each other dearly, and had parted with deep sorrow. She had thought of him all these years so tenderly; she had believed always that his love had been even greater than her own, and never once had doubted that the missing brig Chevalier had carried with it down into the sea a heart that was true to her.

By little and little this all grew familiar, and she accustomed herself to the knowledge of her new secret. She shuddered at the thought of the misery of a life with him, and she thanked God for sparing her such shame and despair. The distance between them seemed immense. She had always been a person of so much consequence among her friends, and so dutiful and irreproachable a woman. She had not begun to understand what dishonor is in the world; her life had been shut in by safe and orderly surroundings. It was a strange chance that had brought this wanderer to her door. She remembered his wretched untidiness. She had not liked even to stand near him. She had never imagined him grown old: he had always been young to her. It was a great mercy he had not known her; it would have been a most miserable position for them both; and yet she thought, with sad surprise, that she had not known she had changed so entirely. She thought of the different ways their roads in life had gone; she pitied him; she cried about him more than once; and she wished that she could know he was dead. He might have been such a brave, good man with his strong will and resolute        courage. God forgive him for the wickedness which his strength had been made to serve! “God forgive him!” said Miss Horatia to herself sadly over and over again. She wondered if she ought to have let him go away, and so have lost sight of him; but she could not do anything else. She suffered terribly on his account; she had a pity, such as God’s pity must be, for even his willful sins.

So her romance was all over with; yet the townspeople still whispered it to strangers, and even Melissa and Nelly never knew how she had really lost her lover in so strange and sad a way in her latest years. Nobody noticed much change; but Melissa saw that the whale’s tooth disappeared from its place in Miss Horatia’s room, and her old friends said to each other that she began to show her age a great deal. She seemed really like an old woman now; she was not the woman she had been a year ago.

This is all of the story; but we so often wish, when a story comes to an end, that we knew what became of the people afterward. Shall we believe that Miss Horatia clings more and more fondly to her young cousin Nelly; and that Nelly will stay with her a great deal before she marries, and sometimes afterward, when the lieutenant goes away to sea? Shall we say that Miss Dane seems as well satisfied and comfortable as ever, though she acknowledges she is not so young as she used to be, and secretly misses something out of her life? It is the contentment of winter rather than that of summer: the flowers are out of bloom for her now, and under the snow. And Melissa, will not she always be the same, with a quaintness and freshness and toughness like a cedar-tree, to the end of her days? Let us hope they will live on together and be untroubled this long time yet, the two good women; and let us wish Nelly much pleasure, and a sweet soberness and fearlessness as she grows older and finds life a harder thing to understand, and a graver thing to know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
“The Lost Lover,” this lovely story by Sarah Orne Jewett, placed as it is in the tranquil setting of  the New England of a century and a half ago, might just as well be called “The Narrow Escape.”

The love of Aunt Horatia’s life, formerly a dashing sailor, but now at the end of his own life of high adventure and down on his luck, comes begging for food – and a mug of cider (unequivocally denied) at her kitchen door. He is now a scruffy indigent at the bottom of the social scale, the worse for drink, and humiliatingly divested of the species of morality which would persuade one not similarly afflicted to inform the giver of a $10.00 bill that she may have mistaken it for a dollar. “She must have thought it was one. I’ll get out o’ call as quick as I can; hope she won’t find it out, and send anybody after me.” The sailor is now a beggar and a tramp, a decrepit old souse with no good prospects, except what he might find, if he was lucky, at the end of his 80 mile trek to Boston, if indeed he makes it to his intended destination.

Aunt Horatia, on the other hand, has lived a proper and upright – if lonely –  life. She is a woman of means, and of good standing in her community, and if love and marriage have passed her by, she has had the consolation of a faded romance which might still on occasion be summoned to recall, with all its attendant rosy glow of the ‘might have been.’ She had set her heart on one man, and spurned all other more promising marital prospects, and when the inevitability of a spinster’s life assumed its immovable position in place of more tender hopes, she resigned herself to her fate with the courage and fortitude typical of New England women of her class and station. She had thought her lover (and here we must divest this word of its contemporary connotation of carnality) to have loved her nobly, and she trusted the misfortune of his loss to have been occasioned by nothing short of death. That he had gone down with his ship with his love for her still burning in his heart and perhaps with her name on his lips, might have been a small recompense for the chaste life she was compelled to live in default one better preferred.
Melissa, and Horatia Dane have lived together all their lives. They provide each other with security and stability, and their well-ordered domestic life, if not exactly happy, cannot be said to be unhappy either. When young Nelly comes to join them, she fits neatly into place, and interjects a note of harmony into the settled quotidianity of plain New England tune. Until Nelly’s arrival at Longfield, Horatia had supposed herself to be the last in her line, and therefore the last inhabitant of her family home. But Nelly, who takes great pleasure in finding herself among such “old and well-worn things” as the garden gate, has all the sovereign hallmarks of a future New England spinster herself. She takes a quiet but decided pleasure that

“… everything had its story, and she liked the quietness and unchangeableness with which life seemed to go on from year to year. She had seen many a dainty or gorgeous garden, but never one that she had liked so well as this, with its herb-bed and its broken rows of currant-bushes, its tall stalks of white lilies, and its wandering rose-bushes and honeysuckles, that had bloomed beside the straight paths for so many more summers than she herself had lived.”

As for Horatia, who begins to decline in spirits after the unfortunate visit of  the benighted Joe Carrick, she mourns the loss of her dream. She was better off supposing her ‘lost lover’ dead than knowing the sordid reality of his life. Could Melissa  have mentioned even in passing, the wife abandoned in Australia?  because if she had, this would have been an additional affront to her sense of rigid propriety, that all the while she had supposed herself to be Carrick’s ‘one true love’, as he had been hers, that she had been supplanted, and that now both she and the woman who had assumed her vaunted position were the casualties of a decrepit sot and his crumbling recollections of the faded past.

The term “Boston marriage” has its origin in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians, and refers to the relationship between Verena Tennant and     Olive Chancellor. James denies the women a happy ending when Verena leaves Olive for Basil Ransom, a young lawyer, but he ends his story with dark hints of a tearful future for Verena.  It has been suggested that James based his model for the Olive/Verena relationship on that of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields – one that did not end in loss and desertion. In 1881,  and at age 31, Jewett began living with Fields after the death of Field’s husband  James Thomas Fields, the publisher of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’. Jewett and Fields remained together until Jewett’s death 28 years later in 1909 . There was a fifteen year difference in their ages (Fields was the older), as there might have been between Horatia and Nelly.  One is reminded here of another lesbian aunt and niece literary pairing (and one which endured for 40 years) between Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, who wrote and published jointly under the pseudonym ‘Michael Field.’

In “The Lost Lover” Jewett has firmly established Horatia’s heterosexual credentials, and perhaps Nelly’s as well, but Jewett herself wrote to Fields “I shall be with you tomorrow, your dear birthday. . . .I am tired of writing things. I want now to paint things, and drive things, and kiss things.”  That Henry James was himself subject to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ as was his sister Alice James, did not prevent him taking a jaundiced view of lesbians and feminists such as Jewett and Fields. The feminist  philosophy of Olive Chancellor James so snidely scoffs at in The Bostonians, today is taken quite seriously and firmly established in contemporary society and Western values, and it is James’s unfortunate prejudices and sexist views which have fallen into obsolescence and disrepute.

Here I am reminded of my first encounter in Ceylon with what was probably (but I could never be certain) a home-grown version of a ‘Boston marriage.’ My maternal grandmother’s unmarried siblings lived together in the house called Sunnyside Gardens, built many decades ago by their father Edward Jansz who was the postmaster general of Kandy, the city in which the family lived. My grand-aunt Nellie occupied the front room next to that of her friend, (known to us all as Aunty Illo) Wallbeoff. Nellie and Illo (both Eleanors) had met as schoolteachers, and occupied adjoining rooms for the rest of their lives. My memory has them sitting on the front verandah; I am watching Aunt Nellie peeling an apple while I sat on the front step, crushing a fragrant juniper sprig from the nearby bush. I remember the scents of apple and juniper combined, and eating the apple peels while listening to their conversation.

When I consider Jewett’s sympathetic summing up of Horatia Dane’s state of mind after her unfortunate discovery, I find it quite probable that she urged Nelly against the entertainment of any ill-advised illusions about George Forest, since

“By little and little this all grew familiar, and she accustomed herself to the knowledge of her new secret. She shuddered at the thought of the misery of a life with him, and she thanked God for sparing her such shame and despair. The distance between them seemed immense. She had always been a person of so much consequence among her friends, and so dutiful and irreproachable a woman. She had not begun to understand what dishonor is in the world; her life had been shut in by safe and orderly surroundings. It was a strange chance that had brought this wanderer to her door. She remembered his wretched untidiness. She had not liked even to stand near him. She had never imagined him grown old: he had always been young to her. It was a great mercy he had not known her; it would have been a most miserable position for them both; and yet she thought, with sad surprise, that she had not known she had changed so entirely. She thought of the different ways their roads in life had gone; she pitied him; she cried about him more than once; and she wished that she could know he was dead. He might have been such a brave, good man with his strong will and resolute courage. God forgive him for the wickedness which his strength had been made to serve! “God forgive him!” said Miss Horatia to herself sadly over and over again. She wondered if she ought to have let him go away, and so have lost sight of him; but she    could not do anything else. She suffered terribly on his account; she had a pity, such as God’s pity must be, for even his willful sins.”

We must hope such counsel, duly spoken by the voice of experience, was well-received. Perhaps the unnamed minister – the one who prayed so unctuously over Melissa in her “fit o’sickness” –  was possessed of a suitably prepossessing daughter. Perhaps  Nelly was introduced to her – perhaps we might call her Charlotte after my Grandmother, great-grand mother, and great -great-great grandmother. Perhaps in the uncommon felicity of Charlotte’s company Nelly will gradually dismiss the now ephemeral memory of the George Forest, and avert the whopping disgrace that might accrue to him were he likely to have followed in the unsteady footsteps of Joe Carrick. Charlotte and Nelly can  take their sweet and unruffled place in that sober New England community, and the question implicit in the poignant song,

“What will you do, love, When I am going,

With white sails flowing, in the seas beyond?”

will be joyfully, satisfactorily and conclusively settled.

 

 

 

A Quote from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Orne_Jewett
Jewett never married; but she established a close friendship with writer Annie fields  1834–1915) and her husband, publisher  James Thomas Fields , editor of the Atlantic Monthly . After the sudden death of James Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett’s life in what was then termed a ” Boston Marriage.” Some modern scholars have speculated that the two were lovers. In any case, “the two women found friendship, humor, and literary encouragement” in one another’s company, traveling to Europe together and hosting “American and European literati.”
 

 

 

 

 

 

And another from the following GLBTQ  site                                                                                                                                                                           

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/jewett_so.html

Annie Adams Fields was a primary feature in Jewett’s personal experience of that world since the two women maintained a “Boston marriage” from early in the 1880s until Jewett’s death. The widow of Boston publisher James T. Fields, the gracious, vivacious Annie provided Jewett with companionship and emotional support and introduced her to a galaxy of literary and cultural stars that included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Christina Rossetti.

An indefatigable traveler and dazzling hostess, Annie was also fifteen years older than Jewett and likely served as the model for the older women who so frequently guide younger women in Jewett’s fiction.

Read Full Post »

Ella Fitzgerald: A Favourite Selection

Ella Fitzgerald (April 25 1917 – June 15 1996)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Its Alright With Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take Love Easy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Very Thought of You

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Long Has This Been Going On

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Wished on The Moon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speak Low

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Too Darn Hot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Time We say Goodbye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These Foolish Things

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My One And Only Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’re the Top

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Misty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Body and Soul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Melancholy Baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Be that Way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All Or Nothing At All

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mean to Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Begin the Beguine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take the ‘A’ Train

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Want to Talk About You

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do I Love You

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My memories of Ella Fitzgerald go back into the the distant mists of my childhood and and from there they continue to pervade the rest of my life. I remember my father sitting at the old piano in my grandfather’s house playing “These Foolish Things” – his long fingers moving deftly on the old ivory keys and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth curling its wayward smoke around us, and even now I can summon the sense of cloudy magic which suffused my imagination in those moments.

There was a night when I was about four years old, when sometime in the small hours I was awakened to a rapping at the front door. I overheard a the low voices of my grandparents and the messenger from the house of my grandmother’s unmarried siblings, and soon the lights came on, and  my grandparents were dressed and leaving with him. The news, as I was to find out the next day, was that my grand-aunt Maud had died. I must have cried and asked to accompany my grandparents, but was told I could not. My young aunt Jean who must have been around 24 years old at the time, who must have felt pressed to do so, consoled me with a tumbler of ‘sugar-water’. Whether or not I am confusing two memories or not I cannot say, but as I now recall it, my aunt put a record on her turn-table with the dark madder-coloured rubber pad, and in her room, with the shadows cast by the street-light of the rose tree outside her window, she picked me up in her arms and danced with me.
I don’t remember the song – but I remember the voice – It was Ella Fitzgerald’s.

When I was in my early twenties and living in Trinco, one stiflingly hot afternoon, I remember the radio being tuned to The Voice of America. I had been waiting for lunch to be prepared so that I could pack it in a plastic bag and take it with me to the shallow bay by Fort Frederick; I used to ride there on an old Raleigh bicycle to hunt for sea-shells in the soothing water. Instead I sat at the dining table which had turned warm to the touch from the ambient heat, and postponed my escape to the bay, and listened to that magical voice.
When I came to the U.S in ’76, that very first summer I bought two records – one of Ella with Oscar Peterson, and the other with Joe Pass. I must have played them hundreds of times, because every note of every track is engraved indelibly in my mind, and amenable to immediate recall.

To describe the effect on me of Ella’s voice, without  using that trite word ‘magic,’ is impossible. It is transportive. What makes Ella’s singing so unforgettable? Could it be the perfect pitch – the impeccable timing – the ravishing tone, the  brilliant and seemingly effortless scats, the confiding and straight-to-the-heart delivery, the perfect glissandos, the silky smooth modulations, the unfaltering way in which a song is carried to its conclusion, and yes, even the sometimes charmingly messed-up lyrics? But none of these things in themselves can explain the overall effect. That will always be a mystery.

I remember that sad day in the Summer of ’96,  I heard on the radio that this remarkable being had left us. I listened, bereft, as the radio announcer played Ella’s exquisite version of “Do I love You” – and I heard my heart reply, as it always had in response to that imitable sound – “Yes” – and always “Yes.”

 

From the Wikipedia Article on Ella Fitzgerald, these two comments on her voice:

 

As Will Friedwald noted,

Unlike any other singer you could name, Fitzgerald has the most amazing asset in the very sound of her voice: it’s easily one of the most beautiful and sonically perfect sounds known to man. Even if she couldn’t do anything with it, the instrument that Fitzgerald starts with is dulcet and pure and breathtakingly beautiful. As Henry Pleasants has observed, she has a wider range than most opera singers, and many of the latter, including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, are among her biggest fans. And the intonation that goes with the voice is, to put it conservatively, God-like. Fitzgerald simply exists in tune, and she hits every note that there is without the slightest trace of effort. Other singers tend to sound like they’re trying to reach up to a note – Fitzgerald always sounds like she’s already there. If anything, she’s descending from her heavenly perch and swooping down to whatever pitch she wants.

Henry Pleasants, an American classical-music critic, wrote this about her:

She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive… it is not so much what she does, or even the way she does it, it’s what she does not do. What she does not do, putting it simply as possible, is anything wrong. There is simply nothing in performance to which one would take exception… Everything seems to be just right. One would not want it any other way. Nor can one, for a moment imagine it any other way. Fitzgerald had an extraordinary vocal range. A mezzo soprano(who sang much lower than most classical contraltos), she had a range of “2 octaves and a sixth from a low D or D flat to a high B flat and possibly higher”

Read Full Post »

Catullus: Fifteen Poems

Gaius Valerius Catullus: an imagined likeness. (bce. 84 – bce 54)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 2                                                                                

Sparrow, favorite of my girl,
with whom she is accustomed to play,
whom she is accustomed to hold in her lap,
for whom, seeking greedily,
she is accustomed to give her index finger
and to provoke sharp bites.
When it is pleasing for my shining desire
to make some kind of joke
and a relief of her grief.
I believe, so that her heavy passion may become quiet.
If only I were able to play with you yourself, and
to lighten the sad cares of your mind.
It is as pleasing to me as they say
The golden apple to have been to that swift girl,
Which untied that long-bound girdle.

 

 

 

 

poem 3                                                                           

Mourn, oh Cupids and Venuses,
and whatever there is of rather pleasing men:
the sparrow of my girlfriend has died,
the sparrow, delight of my girl,
whom she loved more than her own eyes.
For it was honey-sweet and it had known its
mistress as well as a girl knew her mother,
nor did it move itself from her lap,
but jumping around now here now there
he used to chirp continually to his mistress alone:
who now goes through that gloomy journey
from whence they denied anyone returns.
But may it go badly for you, bad darkness
of Orcus, you who devour all beautiful things:
and so beautiful a bird you have taken away from me
O bad deed! O miserable sparrow!
Now on account of your work my girl’s
slightly swollen little eyes are red from weeping.

 

 

 

 

poem 5                                                                                

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
The suns are able to fall and rise:
When that brief light has fallen for us,
we must sleep a never ending night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don’t know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out
how many kisses we have shared.

 

 

 

 

poem 7                                                                              

You ask, my Lesbia, how many of your kisses
are enough and more than enough for me.
As big a number as the Libyan grains of sand
that lie at silphium producing Cyrene
between the oracle of Sultry Jupiter
and the sacred tomb of old Battus;
Or as many stars that see the secret love affairs of men,
when the night is silent.
So many kisses are enough
and more than enough for mad Catullus to kiss you,
these kisses which neither the inquisitive are able to count
nor an evil tongue bewitch.

 

 

 

 

poem 8                                                                                    

Break off fallen Catullus, time to cut losses,
bright days shone once, you followed a girl here and there,
loved her as no other perhaps shall be loved.
That was a time of  such happy scenes,
your desire matching her will.
Bright days shone on both of you.
Now, she wants you no more.
Follow suit, weak as you are: no chasing of mirages,
no fallen love, but a clean break,
stand your ground against the past.
Not again Lesbia. No more. Catullus is clear.
He won’t miss you. He is done craving. It is cold.
But you will cry that you are ruined.
What will your life be? Who will visit your room?
Who will uncover that beauty? Whom will you love?
Whose girl will you be? Whom kiss? whose lips bite?
Enough! Break, Catullus, against the past.

 

 

 

poem 60                                                                                          

Surely a lioness from the African mountains
or barking Scylla didn’t beget you from the lowest part of her loins,
you of such pitiless, vile spirit that you hold in contempt
the voice of a supplicant in his last and final despair,
ah, you of too cruel heart?

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 70                                                                  

My woman says to me that there is none
With whom she’d rather spend her days than I,
Should even Jove himself ask her to wed.
So she says, but women often lie,
What a woman says to a desirous lover,
This he ought to write in the wind and rapid water.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 72                                                                                                       

You used to say that you knew only Catullus,
Lesbia, neither did you wish to know Jupiter instead of me.
At that time I loved you not as the common crowd of men love a girlfriend
but as a father loves his sons and sons in law.
Now I know you: wherefore even if I burn the worse,
you are cheaper and of less meaning to me.
You say how can this be? Because a hurt of such a kind
forces a lover to love more, but to wish her less well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 poem 75                                                                                 

A mind dragged down to this point by your fault Lesbia,
a mind destroyed by dint of  its own devotion:
though you may now come clothed in all your excellences –
I cannot think tenderly of you:
though you may sink to whatever acts you dare –
Nor could I ever cut this love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 poem 76                                                                             

If evocations of past kindness shed
ease in the mind of one of rectitude,
or broke bond inviolate witnessed by god,
or led men intentionally to harm,
such, as life lasts, must Catullus shed
effect of joy from disregarded love.
For what by man can of goodness in act or word
be done to others, it has by me been done
but having been entrusted to an unregarding heart,
all that has perished.
Why protract this pain? Why not resist
yourself in mind; from this point inclining
yourself back, breaking this fallen love
counter to what the gods desire of men?                            
Hard suddenly to lose love of long use,
hard precondition of your sanity
refained. Possible or not, this last
conquest is for you to make, Catullus.
May the pitying gods who bring
help to the needy at the point of death
look towards me and, if my life were clean,
remove this malign plague out from my body
where, a paralysis, it creeps from limb to limb
driving all former happiness from the heart.
I do not now expect – or want – my love returned,
nor cry for the impossible,  for Lesbia to be chaste:
only that the gods cure me of this disease
and, as I once was whole, make me now whole again.

 

 

poem 85                                                                                     

I hate and I love. Wherefore would I do this, perhaps you ask?
I do not know. But I feel that it happens and I am tormented.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 87                                                                                 

No woman can truthfully say she was so much loved,
as my Lesbia was loved by me.
No such big trust was ever kept in any commitment before
as, on my side, my love for you was kept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 92                                                              

Lesbia loads me night and day with her curses
‘Catullus’ always on her lips.
Yet I know that she loves me.
How? I equally spend myself night and day
in assiduous execration
knowing too well my hopeless love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

poem 107                                                                                                      

If anything happened to one who is desirous and hopeful, yet unexpecting,
this is especially pleasing to the soul.
Therefore, this is pleasing, and dearer than gold to me,
because you, Lesbia, have restored yourself to desirous me.
You restore yourself to desirous, unexpecting me, you return yourself
to me. O, light of a fairer mark!
Who lives more happily than I alone, or who will be able
to say that these things are to be hoped for more than this life?

 

 

 

 

poem 109                                                                              

You, my life, promise that this love
of ours between us shall be agreeable and last forever.
Great gods, arrange for her to speak the truth,
and to say this sincere and from the bottom of her heart,
so that it is granted us to continue all our life
this treaty of inviolable fidelity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaius Valerius Catullus was the Modernist of his day. A young aristocrat  who was probably born close the Italian city which is today’s Verona, his family owned a villa on lake Garda, and it has been claimed they upon occasion offered hospitality to Julius Cæsar.
Catullus’s poetry was personal and expressive, and fairly sparkled with life, possessing a sense of immediacy and momentariness in its nimble treatment of the here-and-now and of his actual situation at the time of writing. His wit was sharp and acid, and his emotions vigourous. These are some of the characteristics of a genuine poet. His innamorata Clodia Metelli (the Lesbia of his poems, and probably so named as a tribute to Sappho and to Greek poetry) was the perfect Muse, in that she was a beautiful, strong, aristocratic and irascible woman who did not submit to him, and whose love he could only rejoice in momentarily, due to the fact she was married, and also because Catullus was not her only lover.

Clodia was the wife (and maternal cousin) of Q. Metellus Celer, a Roman prætor, a governor of Cisalpine Gaul. She live on the ‘Nob Hill’ of Rome, in the Clivus Victoriæ on the Palatine, as did Cicero, and we can well  imagine that her noisy parties disturbed the peace of this stogy old republican. Despite her illustrious pedigree and high station in life, Clodia had a taste for the demi-monde – and liked to rub shoulders with a decidedly louche crowd. Her perfumed aura carried with it the sulphurous whiff of scandal, and besides the accusation leveled against her (by Catullus) of loitering at the street corners with her aristocratic suitors and cronies, she is also thought to have poisoned her husband, and had incestuous affaires with her brothers. None of these rumours has ever been verified, and today we recognise them as being of the sort one reads on the scandal sheets prominently displayed next to the supermarket checkout counter.  Then as now, when a woman is endowed with beauty, intelligence, wealth and power, she becomes an irresistible magnet for rancorous and salacious gossip.

Cicero must have relished his opportunity for revenge, when one of his pupils Marcus Caelius was accused by Clodia’s brother Publius Clodius of having been involved in a political conspiracy and also dishonouring Clodia’s reputation. Cicero was a senatorial supporter, and Clodia’s family were supporters of Cæsar, and this placed them in opposite camps. Cicero’s defense of Marcus Caelius in his speech pro Caelio, permitted this aging lover of servile men to further besmirch Clodia’s reputation, and he must have  savoured the delightful opportunity to indulge his priggishness in public moralising.

Peter Whigham in the introduction to his translation of Catullus’s poems states

“Whatever her real nature, this was the woman who had more effect on Catullus’s life than perhaps anyone else.  Nor is it necessary to admit to a conventionally ‘romantic’ relationship to recognise that he speaks to her in an altogether different and more disturbing tone from than in which he addresses the other women in his poems. …. it was precisely her forceful and sexually dominating character that attracted him. Which was exactly what repelled Cicero.’

Catullus wrote around 28 poems to, about, and referring to Clodia. That he was deeply in love with her is beyond any doubt, and that she in turn both raised him to the pinnacles of ecstasy and plunged him into the depths of torment is clearly evident in his poems. Catullus’s affair with Clodia  demonstrates to a nicety  Shakespeare’s observation that “The course of true love never did run smooth.”  That Clodia accepted and rejected in turn Catullus’s suit, kept him forever in a state of unease where no thought is permitted to settle and no emotion is allowed to seek its balance. Her capriciousness and unpredictability dictated that he is never permitted by her to fall into complaisancy, or to relax his vigilance. Rejection, jealousy, and usurpation of his cherished place in her affection by his perceived inferiors must have gnawed at his heart, as when the wound and its remedy both find their common source in a single object.                                                                                    

I imagine in his visits to that elegant mansion beside the tree-line Tiber, Catullus must have spent more than a few agonised evenings, being teased and ignored by this woman who spurned the role of a Roman matron in favour of one which more resembled Greek hetære. Clodia had no respect for the conventional Roman values which required  women of her class to heed the rules set for patrician wives, which were to run their households with efficiency, manage and discipline their household slaves, and bear the required complement of sons. We cannot know if Catullus’s early provincial upbringing prepared him for such a shocking encounter as he must have had when first introduced to life in Rome.

But Catullus does not seem, at least in relation to Clodia, to have assumed the prerogatives of the superior public role accorded to a high-ranking Roman male. In other words, his poetry bears no taint of any belief in the supposed inferiority of women. He loves and hates Clodia by turn: he showers her with adoration when she is kind to him, and with invective when she is not, but he only denounces her rejection of him, and never assumes a priggish stance in relation to her infidelities and fickleness. This alone reveals something remarkable about his character, and his ability to exercise discretion and discrimination in deciding when and where it was appropriate to be insulting.  Far from being incapable of  vituperation, he wrote several acidic poems freely apportioning biting disparagement where he thought it due. Deride Clodia he may, but he never insults her, and not only that, but he cherishes her public castigations of him as evidence of her inability to put him out of her mind. This is evidenced in poem 83.

Lesbia says the vilest things about me
in front of her husband
who is thereby moved to fatuous laughter –
The mule of a man grasps nothing
If she were to be silent and forget me she would be sane,
but since she snarls and cuts me off,
it means she remembers me
what’s still worse, she is furious
and she burns  even as she speaks.

This particular poem reminds me of one by Juana Inés  Asbaje (better known by her monastic name of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz)  addressed to her own noble Muse, Maria Luisa the Countess of Paredes, Vicereine of Mexico. The poem ends with these lines:

En fin, yo de adorarte
el delito confieso;
si quieres castigarme,
este mismo castigo será premio.

In sum, I must admit
to the crime of adoring you;
should you wish to punish me,
the very punishment will be reward.

When subjected to intense pressure, as in the process of falling or being in love, the human mind tends frequently to resort to magical thinking, taking on the role of a scryer, or a reader and interpreter of signs, particularly in relation to the beloved. Every detail, every act and every situation becomes a potent symbol encapsulating within itself larger implications and meanings, and so it is with Catullus, that with the strange alchemy of desperate exigency, invective is wondrously transformed into something which engenders a species of satisfaction. To be the object of invective then, becomes a reason to be reassured, and punishment is transformed into reward, because it is no longer taken at face-value, but as evidence of love.

Catullus’s love for Clodia was illicit, and hers for him adulterous  – if indeed she ever did love him rather than merely bestowing her favours on him or yielding to his importunities. He was reduced to being the perennial supplicant, and forced to survive on what little gratification she offered him. But this is the classic role of the poet – to accommodate himself to the two halves of the muse cycle – first to be loved and then sacrificed. Uxorious or marital love with all its hidden condescensions to woman delegated to the role of wife, has no place in poetry. The poet/Muse dyad predates patriarchal culture, and finds its beginnings in the time before the iron age. It is Orphic and Dionysian rather than Apollonian, and lunar rather than solar – or as we would say, originating in right-brain wisdom/intuition rather than left-brain knowledge/intellect.

It is a curious coincidence that down the street from Catullus’s house in Rome, was situated the temple devoted to the rites of the Greek Goddess Cybele. Her worship was brought to Rome around 204 b.c.e, in the wake of the Punic wars, and was practiced by its enthusiastic votaries with full panoply of its orgiastic rites, including voluntary castration.  Catullus must have found the sounds of music and  singing from the temple precincts to be within earshot. These rites, so different from the formulaic propitiations typical of state-sanctioned religion, particularly in Roman times, must have been startling and unnerving to those who witnessed, or even just overheard them. The worshippers of Cybele were not votaries of a civilised deity:  they were not vestal virgins or toga-clad priests, but the wild, untethered, uncontrollable, unrestrained, adherents of an ancient, orgiastic, pre-patriarchal religion, stubbornly unamenable to the restrained, formal stage-management typical of the rituals of state.  I tend to think that the blood-letting Shia rites of Moharram possess some of the flavour of Goddess worship, and they may indeed be a re-cycling of far more ancient traditions. I suppose too that convention-loving Romans looked down on these demonstrations of madness-tinged devotion with  much the same horror-struck disapproval that the puritanical Sunni view their uninhibited Shia brethren, or for that matter the way in which a good Methodist would view a Pentecostal service complete with glossolalia and snake-handling.

It is interesting to speculate about the role played by geographical location in the poetry of Catullus.  In the opposite direction from the temple of Cybele on Catullus’s street, was the temple of Castor and Pollux – the Dioscuri, where Clodia’s husband sometimes gave political speeches. This spot was also frequented by Clodia and her hangers-on, and it is the pillars of this temple  which are referred to in Catullus’s infamous poem 58.  Perhaps the location of his home between these two disparate poles, representing the pre-patriarchal orgiastic past and the state-dominated  politicised present may have inspired some interesting mental oscillations, and brought into a sharper focus the values that informed his thinking.

Catullus feared and respected the psychic spaces claimed by the Muse in both her benign and ferocious aspects. He was aware of the power of the poetic trance, and makes it evident in his translation of Sappho’s “Fragment 31” (Catullus poem 51) that he could divest himself of something resembling a social masculinity and subsume it beneath the configuration of female personality.  He had moments when he acutely feared  being driven mad by love, taking leave of his senses to become a social outcast condemned to exile and a savage life as was Atthis the most famous of Cybele’s votaries. These fearful sentiments are powerfully and pathetically expressed in poem 76.

Catullus was the most renowned of a group Cicero referred to as the Poetæ Novi – The New Poets. Catullus in particular brought a newly minted sincerity and immediacy to the art as he revealed himself, his circumstances and his heart-felt predicament in relation to the love of his life. Catullus was always direct, never pompous or given to bloated conceits. He was never guilty of distorting good sound sense, or resorting to nonsense, never incoherent, effete or epicene.  When he resorted to cheerful obscenity in his poetry it was only to deride the pretensions and dishonesties he perceived within his circle of acquaintances and associates. When one seeks to castigate bad or obscene behaviour, one must sometimes resort to a device which possesses the ability to cut through a deep layer of resistant unawareness. Mild reproof will not deter the man who steals napkins at banquets, or does not wash under his arms, or worse, is given to incest or bribery or writing bad poetry.  Catullus is clear that he himself remains unbesmirched by the questionable form of his denunciatory poems. He states in poem 16  “Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est….”  –  “A genuine poet must be chaste, though his verses need not be so.”  

In all the material I have (and by no means exhaustively) read about Catullus, I have failed to come across any serious appreciation of his erudition. He was a pupil of Appolonius of Rhodes, and more than just a passingly good student of Greek. His translations of Callimachus (poem 66) and Sappho (poem 51) bear testament to his scholarship, as well his deep familiarity of Greek myth, which found its way into his poems in an entirely personal context (poems 62, 64, 65, and 68) and as a shorthand to implication and layered meaning. He made elegant use of the Greek poetical metrics such as alexandrines, iambics and sapphics, unlike Virgil whose awkward misapplications of homeric metre marred and garbled his native Latin and imposed on the Aeneid an unfelicitous, procrustian fit.

I have often found myself wishing that Catullus had lived to see Virgil. He would have made celebrated mince-meat out of Virgil’s epic prolixity and his thousand other pompous and boring mannerisms. ‘Poets’ such as Virgil who cater to the vanity of heads of state and supply a spurious pedigree to bolster the pretensions of politicians or Emperors are not their own men, but the mouthpieces of others.  I would love to have seen his take on one of the most overrated pseudo poets ever –  whom he would have no doubt have relished demolishing. Catullus loathed and derided falsity whether it is found in the ordinary individual or in the powerful aristocrat, and a plump and swarthy boot-licker such as Virgil would have been spared not a single lash from Catullus’s mordant wit. His rebellious honesty, his tendency to pour out his spontaneously brilliant invective on the snobbery of the foolish and vainglorious men, would perhaps have served as a corrective to the depravity that overtook Rome in the next hundred years following his death.                                            
The trait of Catullus which strikes me above all else is his brilliant honesty. This is what makes his poems always sparkle with freshness and meaning. He sounds as modern today as he did two thousand years ago, and his  fierce and despairing love, his hopeless predicament, his thwarted passion, his extremes of joy and despair, his originality, his lack of silliness, his derisive attitude towards the things he found ugly, unworthy and hypocritical, are what make him appealing to many of us today.

In reading Catullus’s poetry we have no trouble in recognising a shared experience.  If he had been less honest, less forthcoming and less able to express the core of profound human emotion which still remains our common experience across centuries of time, he would be less relevant today. Instead, his vigour and vivacity would seem to shed sparks which burn and singe the page, and his poems contrast beautifully and unstuffily when compared to the vast majority of the poets who merely fill our brains with dreary dust.

 

Read Full Post »

Susan Glaspell: A Jury of Her Peers

Susan Glaspell (July 1 1876 – July 27 1948)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away–it was probably further from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.
She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too–adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scary and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

“Martha!” now came her husband’s impatient voice. “Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.”

She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife. She was small and thin and didn’t have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff’s wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff–a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale’s mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights’ now as a sheriff.

“The country’s not very pleasant this time of year,” Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.

Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

“I’m glad you came with me,” Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.                 

Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn’t cross it now was simply because she hadn’t crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, “I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster”–she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.

The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, “Come up to the fire, ladies.”

Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m not–cold,” she said.

And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.

The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. “Now, Mr. Hale,” he said in a sort of semi-official voice, “before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning.”

The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

“By the way,” he said, “has anything been moved?” He turned to the sheriff. “Are things just as you left them yesterday?”

Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.

“It’s just the same.”

“Somebody should have been left here yesterday,” said the county attorney.

“Oh–yesterday,” returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. “When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy–let me tell you. I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself–”

“Well, Mr. Hale,” said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, “tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.”

Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn’t begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer–as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.

“Yes, Mr. Hale?” the county attorney reminded.

“Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes,” Mrs. Hale’s husband began.

Harry was Mrs. Hale’s oldest boy. He wasn’t with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn’t been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale’s other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn’t dressed warm enough–they hadn’t any of them realized how that north wind did bite.

“We come along this road,” Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, “and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, ‘I’m goin’ to see if I can’t get John Wright to take a telephone.’ You see,” he explained to Henderson, “unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won’t come out this branch road except for a price I can’t pay. I’d spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet–guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing–well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say–though I said at the same time that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John–”

Now there he was!–saying things he didn’t need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband’s eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:

“Let’s talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that but, I’m anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here.”

When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:

“I didn’t see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up–it was past eight o’clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, ‘Come in.’ I wasn’t sure–I’m not sure yet. But I opened the door–this door,” jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood. “and there, in that rocker”–pointing to it–“sat Mrs. Wright.”

Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale’s mind that that rocker didn’t look in the least like Minnie Foster–the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side.

“How did she–look?” the county attorney was inquiring.

“Well,” said Hale, “she looked–queer.”

“How do you mean–queer?”

As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that note-book and make trouble.

Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.

“Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of–done up.”

“How did she seem to feel about your coming?”

“Why, I don’t think she minded–one way or other. She didn’t pay much attention. I said, ‘Ho’ do, Mrs. Wright? It’s cold, ain’t it?’ And she said. ‘Is it?’–and went on pleatin’ at her apron.

“Well, I was surprised. She didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin’ at me. And so I said: ‘I want to see John.’

“And then she–laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh.

“I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, ‘Can I see John?’ ‘No,’ says she–kind of dull like. ‘Ain’t he home?’ says I. Then she looked at me. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s home.’ ‘Then why can’t I see him?’ I asked her, out of patience with her now. ‘Cause he’s dead’ says she, just as quiet and dull–and fell to pleatin’ her apron. ‘Dead?’ says, I, like you do when you can’t take in what you’ve heard.

“She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth.

“‘Why–where is he?’ says I, not knowing what to say.

“She just pointed upstairs–like this”–pointing to the room above.

“I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I–didn’t know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: ‘Why, what did he die of?’

“‘He died of a rope around his neck,’ says she; and just went on pleatin’ at her apron.”

Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if every one were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.

“And what did you do then?” the county attorney at last broke the silence.

“I went out and called Harry. I thought I might–need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs.” His voice fell almost to a whisper. “There he was–lying over the–”

“I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs,” the county attorney interrupted, “where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.”

“Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked–”

He stopped, his face twitching.

“But Harry, he went up to him, and he said. ‘No, he’s dead all right, and we’d better not touch anything.’ So we went downstairs.

“She was still sitting that same way. ‘Has anybody been notified?’ I asked. ‘No, says she, unconcerned.

“‘Who did this, Mrs. Wright?’ said Harry. He said it businesslike, and she stopped pleatin’ at her apron. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t know?’ says Harry. ‘Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with him?’ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘but I was on the inside. ‘Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn’t wake up?’ says Harry. ‘I didn’t wake up,’ she said after him.

“We may have looked as if we didn’t see how that could be, for after a minute she said, ‘I sleep sound.’

“Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren’t our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road–the Rivers’ place, where there’s a telephone.”

“And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?” The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

“She moved from that chair to this one over here”–Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner–“and just sat there with her hands held together and lookin down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me–scared.”

At the sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

“I dunno–maybe it wasn’t scared,” he hastened: “I wouldn’t like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that’s all I know that you don’t.”

He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Everyone moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.

“I guess we’ll go upstairs first–then out to the barn and around there.”

He paused and looked around the kitchen.

“You’re convinced there was nothing important here?” he asked the sheriff. “Nothing that would–point to any motive?”

The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

“Nothing here but kitchen things,” he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

The county attorney was looking at the cupboard–a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.

“Here’s a nice mess,” he said resentfully.

The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff’s wife spoke.

“Oh–her fruit,” she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding.

She turned back to the county attorney and explained: “She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst.”

Mrs. Peters’ husband broke into a laugh.

“Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!”

The young attorney set his lips.

“I guess before we’re through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.”

“Oh, well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners–and think of his future.

“And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician. “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel–whirled it for a cleaner place.

“Dirty towelsl Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?”

He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.

“There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm,” said Mrs. Hale stiffly.

“To be sure. And yet”–with a little bow to her–‘I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels.” He gave it a pull to expose its full length again.

“Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.

“Ah, loyal to your sex, I see,” he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look, “But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.”

Martha Hale shook her head.

“I’ve seen little enough of her of late years. I’ve not been in this house–it’s more than a year.”

“And why was that? You didn’t like her?”

“I liked her well enough,” she replied with spirit. “Farmers’ wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then–” She looked around the kitchen.

“Yes?” he encouraged.

“It never seemed a very cheerful place,” said she, more to herself than to him.

“No,” he agreed; “I don’t think anyone would call it cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the home-making instinct.”

“Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either,” she muttered.

“You mean they didn’t get on very well?” he was quick to ask.

“No; I don’t mean anything,” she answered, with decision. As she turned a lit- tle away from him, she added: “But I don’t think a place would be any the cheerfuller for John Wright’s bein’ in it.”

“I’d like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale,” he said. “I’m anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now.”

He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.

“I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right?” the sheriff inquired. “She was to take in some clothes for her, you know–and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.”

The county attorney looked at the two women they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things.

“Yes–Mrs. Peters,” he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff’s wife. “Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us,” he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. “And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive–and that’s the thing we need.”

Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a showman getting ready for a pleasantry.

“But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.

The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.

Then, as if releasing herself from something strange. Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney’s disdainful push of the foot had deranged.

“I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen,” she said testily–“snoopin’ round and criticizin’.”

“Of course it’s no more than their duty,” said the sheriff’s wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.

“Duty’s all right,” replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; “but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on.” She gave the roller towel a pull. ‘Wish I’d thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry.”

She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not “slicked up.” Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag–half full.

Mrs. HaIe moved toward it.

“She was putting this in there,” she said to herself–slowly.

She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home–half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it,–unfinished things always bothered her,–and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her–and she didn’t want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then–for some reason–not finished.

“It’s a shame about her fruit,” she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: “I wonder if it’s all gone.”

It was a sorry enough looking sight, but “Here’s one that’s all right,” she said at last. She held it toward the light. “This is cherries, too.” She looked again. “I declare I believe that’s the only one.”

With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.

“She’Il feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.

She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened–stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there “pleatin’ at her apron.”

The thin voice of the sheriff’s wife broke in upon her: “I must be getting those things from the front-room closet.” She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. “You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?” she asked nervously. “You–you could help me get them.”

They were soon back–the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.

“My!” said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.

Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.                                                                 

“Wright was close!” she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. “I think maybe that’s why she kept so much to herself. I s’pose she felt she couldn’t do her part; and then, you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively–when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that–oh, that was twenty years ago.”

With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters, and there was something in the other woman’s look that irritated her.

“She don’t care,” she said to herself. “Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl.”

Then she looked again, and she wasn’t so sure; in fact, she hadn’t at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

“This all you was to take in?” asked Mrs. Hale.

“No,” said the sheriffs wife; “she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, ” she ventured in her nervous little way, “for there’s not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you’re used to wearing an apron–. She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes–here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door.”

She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it.

Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman, “Mrs. Peters!”

“Yes, Mrs. Hale?”

“Do you think she–did it?’

A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters’ eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a voice that seemed to shink away from the subject.

“Well, I don’t think she did,” affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. “Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin’ about her fruit.”

“Mr. Peters says–.” Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: “Mr. Peters says–it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he’s going to make fun of her saying she didn’t–wake up.”

For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, “Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake up–when they was slippin’ that rope under his neck,” she muttered.

“No, it’s strange,” breathed Mrs. Peters. “They think it was such a–funny way to kill a man.”

She began to laugh; at sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped.

“That’s just what Mr. Hale said,” said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. “There was a gun in the house. He says that’s what he can’t understand.”

“Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger–or sudden feeling.”

‘Well, I don’t see any signs of anger around here,” said Mrs. Hale, “I don’t–” She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun–and not finished.

After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself:

“Wonder how they’re finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up up there. You know,”–she paused, and feeling gathered,–“it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!”

“But, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife, “the law is the law.”

“I s’pose ’tis,” answered Mrs. Hale shortly.

She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively:

“The law is the law–and a bad stove is a bad stove. How’d you like to cook on this?”–pointing with the poker to the broken lining. She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven–and the thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster–.                                                                                                                                                

She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: “A person gets discouraged–and loses heart.”

The sheriff’s wife had looked from the stove to the sink–to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff’s wife now. When Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently:

“Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We’ll not feel them when we go out.”

Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, “Why, she was piecing a quilt,” and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces.

Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks on the table.

“It’s log-cabin pattern,” she said, putting several of them together, “Pretty, isn’t it?”

They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was saying:

“Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?”

The sheriff threw up his hands.

“They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!”

There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly:

“Well, let’s go right out to the barn and get that cleared up.”

“I don’t see as there’s anything so strange,” Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men–“our taking up our time with little things while we’re waiting for them to get the evidence. I don’t see as it’s anything to laugh about.”

“Of course they’ve got awful important things on their minds,” said the sheriff’s wife apologetically.

They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff’s wife say, in a queer tone:

“Why, look at this one.”

She turned to take the block held out to her.

“The sewing,” said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way, “All the rest of them have been so nice and even–but–this one. Why, it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about!”

Their eyes met–something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat there, her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads.

“Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?” asked the sheriff’s wife, startled.

“Just pulling out a stitch or two that’s not sewed very good,” said Mrs. Hale mildly.

“I don’t think we ought to touch things,” Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.

“I’ll just finish up this end,” answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion.

She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid voice, she heard:

“Mrs. Hale!”

“Yes, Mrs. Peters?”

‘What do you suppose she was so–nervous about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. “I don’t know as she was–nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I’m just tired.”

She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff’s wife seemed to have tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way:

‘Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper–and string.”

“In that cupboard, maybe,” suggested to Mrs. Hale, after a glance around.

One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peter’s back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her.

Mrs. Peters’ voice roused her.

“Here’s a bird-cage,” she said. “Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?”

‘Why, I don’t know whether she did or not.” She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peters was holding up. “I’ve not been here in so long.” She sighed. “There was a man round last year selling canaries cheap–but I don’t know as she took one. Maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself.”

Mrs. Peters looked around the kitchen.

“Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here.” She half laughed–an attempt to put up a barrier. “But she must have had one–or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it.”

“I suppose maybe the cat got it,” suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing.

“No; she didn’t have a cat. She’s got that feeling some people have about cats–being afraid of them. When they brought her to our house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out.”

“My sister Bessie was like that,” laughed Mrs. Hale.

The sheriff’s wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the bird-cage.

“Look at this door,” she said slowly. “It’s broke. One hinge has been pulled apart.”

Mrs. Hale came nearer.

“Looks as if someone must have been–rough with it.”

Again their eyes met–startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away, said brusquely:

“If they’re going to find any evidence, I wish they’d be about it. I don’t like this place.”

“But I’m awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale.” Mrs. Peters put the bird-cage on the table and sat down. “It would be lonesome for me–sitting here alone.”

“Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: “But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I wish–I had.”

“But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house–and your children.”

“I could’ve come,” retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. “I stayed away because it weren’t cheerful–and that’s why I ought to have come. I”–she looked around–“I’ve never liked this place. Maybe because it’s down in a hollow and you don’t see the road. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a lonesome place, and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now–” She did not put it into words.

“Well, you mustn’t reproach yourself,” counseled Mrs. Peters. “Somehow, we just don’t see how it is with other folks till–something comes up.”

“Not having children makes less work,” mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, “but it makes a quiet house–and Wright out to work all day–and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?”

“Not to know him. I’ve seen him in town. They say he was a good man.”

“Yes–good,” conceded John Wright’s neighbor grimly. “He didn’t drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him–.” She stopped, shivered a little. “Like a raw wind that gets to the bone.” Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: “I should think she would’ve wanted a bird!”

Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. “But what do you s’pose went wrong with it?”                                                              

“I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Peters; “unless it got sick and died.”

But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.

“You didn’t know–her?” Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.

“Not till they brought her yesterday,” said the sheriff’s wife.

“She–come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and–fluttery. How–she–did–change.”

That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things, she exclaimed:

“Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don’t you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.”

“Why, I think that’s a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale,” agreed the sheriff’s wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. “There couldn’t possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here–and her things?”

They turned to the sewing basket.

“Here’s some red,” said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. “Here, maybe her scissors are in here–and her things.” She held it up. “What a pretty box! I’ll warrant that was something she had a long time ago–when she was a girl.”

She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.

Instantly her hand went to her nose.

“Why–!”                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Mrs. Peters drew nearer–then turned away.

“There’s something wrapped up in this piece of silk,” faltered Mrs. Hale.

“This isn’t her scissors,” said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.

Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. “Oh, Mrs. Peters!” she cried. “It’s–”

Mrs. Peters bent closer.

“It’s the bird,” she whispered.

“But, Mrs. Peters!” cried Mrs. Hale. “Look at it! Its neck–look at its neck! It’s all–other side to.”

She held the box away from her.

The sheriff’s wife again bent closer.

“Somebody wrung its neck,” said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

And then again the eyes of the two women met–this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door. Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.

“Well, ladies,” said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, “have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?”

“We think,” began the sheriff’s wife in a flurried voice, “that she was going to–knot it.”

He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.

“Well, that’s very interesting, I’m sure,” he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the bird-cage.

“Has the bird flown?”

“We think the cat got it,” said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.

He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.                                                                                                                                           

“Is there a cat?” he asked absently.

Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff’s wife.

“Well, not now,” said Mrs. Peters. “They’re superstitious, you know; they leave.”

She sank into her chair.

The county attorney did not heed her. “No sign at all of anyone having come in from the outside,” he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. “Their own rope. Now let’s go upstairs again and go over it, picee by piece. It would have to have been someone who knew just the–”

The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.

“She liked the bird,” said Martha Hale, low and slowly. “She was going to bury it in that pretty box.”

When I was a girl,” said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, “my kitten–there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes–before I could get there–” She covered her face an instant. “If they hadn’t held me back I would have”–she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly–“hurt him.”

Then they sat without speaking or moving.

“I wonder how it would seem,” Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground–“never to have had any children around?” Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years “No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird,” she said after that–“a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too.” Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

“Of course we don’t know who killed the bird.”

“I knew John Wright,” was Mrs. Hale’s answer.                                                                                                                                                           

“It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife. “Killing a man while he slept–slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand went out to the bird cage.

“We don’t know who killed him,” whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. “We don’t know.”

Mrs. Hale had not moved. “If there had been years and years of–nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful–still–after the bird was still.”

It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

“I know what stillness is,” she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. “When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died–after he was two years old–and me with no other then–”

Mrs. Hale stirred.

“How soon do you suppose they’ll be through looking for the evidence?”

“I know what stillness is,” repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. “The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale,” she said in her tight little way.

“I wish you’d seen Minnie Foster,” was the answer, “when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang.”

The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear.

“Oh, I wish I’d come over here once in a while!” she cried. “That was a crime! Who’s going to punish that?”

“We mustn’t take on,” said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.

“I might ‘a’ known she needed help! I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things–it’s all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren’t–why do you and I understand? Why do we know–what we know this minute?”

She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table she reached for it and choked out:

“If I was you I wouldn’t tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain’t. Tell her it’s all right–all of it. Here–take this in to prove it to her! She–she may never know whether it was broke or not.”

She turned away.

Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it–as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.

“My!” she began, in a high, false voice, “it’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a–dead canary.” She hurried over that. “As if that could have anything to do with–with–My, wouldn’t they laugh?”

Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

“Maybe they would,” muttered Mrs. Hale–“maybe they wouldn’t.”

“No, Peters,” said the county attorney incisively; “it’s all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing–something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it.”

In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in.

“I’ve got the team round now,” he said. “Pretty cold out there.”                                                                                                                                      

“I’m going to stay here awhile by myself,” the county attorney suddenly announced. “You can send Frank out for me, can’t you?” he asked the sheriff. “I want to go over everything. I’m not satisfied we can’t do better.”

Again, for one brief moment, the two women’s eyes found one another.

The sheriff came up to the table.

“Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?”

The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.

“Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out.”

Mrs. Hale’s hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:

“No; Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?”

Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“Not–just that way,” she said.

“Married to the law!” chuckled Mrs. Peters’ husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

“I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.”

“Oh–windows,” said the county attorney scoffingly.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Hale,” said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.

Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again–for one final moment–the two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the         sheriff’s wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching. Then Martha Hale’s eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman–that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke–she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff’s wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.

“Well, Henry,” said the county attorney facetiously, “at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to–what is it you call it, ladies?”                    

Mrs. Hale’s hand was against the pocket of her coat.

“We call it–knot it, Mr. Henderson.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Susan Glaspell, besides being a writer of fiction, was also an accomplished dramatist. She wrote her play Trifles in 1916 over a ten day period,  in what must have been a burst of creativity. She then re-wrote the play as a the short story “A Jury of Her Peers”. After several decades of neglect, her work was rediscovered in the ’80s, by feminist scholars. Glaspell was in many respects, a woman ahead of her times, and therefore out of synch with them. She married twice, for the first time 1913 when she was 37 years old, and again in 1924, two years after after  the death of her first husband. She was friends with some of the most non-conformist women of her day – Edna Ferber, Djuna Barnes and Edna St.Vincent Millay, and she belonged to a feminist group called ‘Heterodoxy’.

Around 1908 she spent a year in Paris with her friend Lucy Huffaker (her friend for the next 50 years) where the two rubbed shoulders with the cream of lesbian literary society, including women such as Natalie Clifford Barney, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach.

Though Glaspell was not a lesbian, much of her work, including “Trifles” and ” A Jury of Her Peers” is suffused with a keen sensibility of the emotional bonds that exist between women. For this, and other reasons, some feminst scholars today claim Glaspell as ‘Queer’.

Here is an excerpt from a paper by Cheryl Black. I have provided the link to it at the bottom of the post at the bottom of the post.

“Susan Glaspell was queer in her geographic and ideological departure from her middle class, Midwestern roots. She was queer in her desire for education and a career as a writer, in her artistic ambitions, in her delay of marriage, in her sexual desire for a married man and later in life, for one nearly twenty years her junior. She was queer in her childlessness, in her critique of sexism, racism, and other forms of injustice within American social institutions, in her bold expression of “unwomanly” behavior: unruly sexuality, unbridled ambition, rage, and violence. She was queer in her use of irony and parodic humor, in her jarring juxtaposition of tone and mood that keeps her readers and spectators off-balance, in her unique displacement of traditional dramatic focus from onstage to offstage.
In her most politically and artistically radical works, these ideological and formal subversions may be read as queer dramaturgy, and Susan Glaspell, in her continual identification of subversive gender and sexual identity as well as subversive aesthetic creation as “queer,” functions as a queer theorist and may be regarded as a pioneer in queering feminism. These works emerged at the advent of the invention of compulsory heterosexuality as a political and economic institution in American life, and they resonate with new vitality in our current cultural climate’s attempt to reify the “sanctity” of heterosexual unions and to constitutionally prohibit any other kind.”
 

Strangulation is a long slow death – it requires strength and determination, and takes roughly four minutes to complete, and a man of  John Wright’s temperament would not have gone easy. To accomplish such a feat must have required a sufficiency of pent-up anger and grim determination, and that Minnie Foster possessed it in a measure commensurate to her task bespeaks a long history of degradation and abuse.

Minnie Foster’s tender girlhood has ended long ago. She is now trapped and isolated on a remote farm with a cruel and sadistic husband, John Wright. She has no future – nothing to ameliorate her condition or beguile her hours but a little singing bird – a bird whose neck John Wright–of whom it is “common knowledge that  he did not care to please his wife”– snaps in two.

It is a challenging task to attempt to imagine the full extent of  Minnie Foster’s tenebrous and despairing life. No central heat, no electricity, no telephone, no gramophone, no radio or t.v or computer – no friends, no books, no cat or dog – just a little canary to break the silence and relieve her desolation.

Add to this her taciturn and begrudging husband John Wright who keeps her shabbily dressed and ill-provided so that she has to do her cooking on a broken stove and do her sewing sitting on a broken rocker, and the dismal picture comes sharply into focus.

Glaspell’s  story is about reading the clues – the clues she lets us see through the eyes of the two women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, but particularly Mrs. Hale, Minnie Foster’s girlhood friend.  The women alone are capable of making the kinds of observations – and inferences–which go below the surface in order to re-construct and interpret a reality which is invisible to the men. The men look in all the wrong places – and through the lens of their unexamined assumptions about the triviality of womens’ natures.  Glaspell with the steady accumulations of unremarkable-seeming  facts revealed through dialogue, makes it clear to her readers that the investigating trio of kind and straightforward Mr. Hale, with his slight tendency towards garrulosity, the bluff and unsubtle sheriff  Mr. Peters, and the odious little prig of a county attorney Mr. Henderson, would never understand that the murder of John Wright was no crime, and that justice had already been done.

What else could a real ‘jury of her peers’  do but take the law into their own capable hands and dismiss the case?

What was it I wonder that caused Martha Hale to not set foot for 20 years in the house of her girlhood friend? Why did she remember her so tenderly? And why did she cover-up for her murder? Pity and guilt for omissions of care and sympathy may present themselves as possible reasons, but I cannot help feeling that these facts hint at a different mystery from the one this story solves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Article on Susan Glaspell

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/awia/gallery/glaspell.html

A thorough and beautiful analytical disquisition of Susan Glaspell’s life and work.

https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&q=susan+glaspell+lesbian

Wikipedia entry on Susan Glaspell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Glaspell

Read Full Post »

La Divina – Maria Callas: Five favourite arias.

Maria Callas December 2 1923 – September 16 1977

 

 

 

 

 

Regnava nel silenzio

Regnava nel silenzio

alta la notte e bruna…

colpia la fonte un pallido

raggio di tetra luna…

Quando un sommesso gemito

fra l’aure udir si fe’;

ed ecco a su quel margine

l’ ombra mostrarsi

Ah!  l’ombra mostrarsi a me.

 

 

Ah!

Quel di chi parla, muoversi

il labbro suo vedea,

e con la mano esanime

chiamarmi a sè parea.

Stette un momento immobile,

poi rato dileguò.

E l’onda, pria sì limpida,

di sangue rosseggiò.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence reigned                      

Silence reigned

in the night deep and dark,

the fountain gleamed

in the pale ray of a sullen moon,

when a subdued sigh

was made audible in the air,

and then at the fountain’s side

ah! a shadow appeared to me.

 

As if she were speaking

her lips seemed to move.

and with a lifeless hand

she seemed to beckon me.

She stood motionless for an instant

then she disappeared,

and the water which had been so limpid

became reddened with blood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quando rapito in estasi

Quando rapito in estasi

del più cocente ardore,

col favellar del core

mi gira eterna fe’,

gli affanni miei dimentico,

gioia diviene il pianto…..

Parmi che a lui d’accanto

si schiuda il ciel per me!

 

When I am enraptured in ecstasy

 

When I am enraptured in ecstasy

By this most burning love,

With the heart’s own speech

He swears eternal faith to me

I forget my anxiousness,

My tears transform to joy

And it would seem to me

That heaven opens up to me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caro Nome         

                     

Caro nome che il mio cor

festi primo palpitar,

le delizie dell’amor

mi dêi sempre rammentar!

Col pensiero il mio desir

a te ognora volerà,

e pur l’ ultimo sospir,

caro nome, tuo sarà.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Name                                       

 

Dear Name,  which made my heart

Throb for the first time,

You make me always to recall

The delights of of love.

In my thoughts, my desires

Fly to your at every hour

And to my final breath

Dear Name, I will be yours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porgi Amor      

                      

Porgi amor, qualche ristoro

al mio duolo, a’miei sospir!

O mi rendi il mio tesoro,

O mi lascia almen morir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Love, give me…       

                                 

O Love, give me something to restore me –

For my suffering, and my sighs!

Either give me my treasure

Or at least, let me die.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ernani involami                       

Surta è la notte,

e Silva non ritorna!

Ah, non tornasse ei più!

Questo odiato veglio,

che quale immondo spettro

ognor m’insegue,

col favellar

col favellar d’amore,

più sempre Ernani

mi configge in core.

Ernani!… Ernani, involami                       

all’abborrito amplesso.

Fuggiam… se teco vivere

mi fia d’amor concesso,

per antri e lande inospiti

ti seguirà il mio piè.

Un Eden di delizia

saran quegli antri a me.

 

Tutto sprezzo che d’Ernani

non favella a questo core,

non v’ha gemma che in amore      

possa l’odio tramutar.

Vola, o tempo,  e presto reca

di mia fuga il lieto istante!

Vola, o tempo, al core amante

è supplizio I’indugiar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ernani, Fly Away with Me                                               

 

Night has fallen,

And Silva has not yet returned…

Oh, may he never return.

The more this odious old man pursues me,

With talk of love,

The more Ernani is lodged in my heart.

Ernani, flee with me.

 

 

 

 

Away from this abhorred embrace

Let us flee,  and together with you

If love will be bestowed on me

Even a cave in an inhospitable land  will be for me

An Eden of delight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My feet will follow you                                  

And even a cave will be for me

An Eden of delight

I disdain everything that of Ernani

To my heart does not speak.

There is no gem which can transform

Hatred to love.

Fly O time, and soon bring back

To the loving heart

That joyful moment of my escape

Fly,  O time, for to the loving heart

Delay is a torment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translations Dia Tsung

 

Maria Callas needs no introduction. She transformed opera from a showcase for pretty voices into the what we expect of it today – a performance which demands a high degree of acting ability, a voice capable of expressing the drama, meaning and emotion in an aria, and the ability to command the stage. Callas had all these things and more.
A brilliant innovator and interpreter of dramatic roles, Callas made it impossible for opera to revert to its previous (pre-Callas) incarnation when acting was not a skill demanded of singers, and when audiences expected and accepted even the most renowned sopranos and tenors to deliver their dramatic arias with a few stiff and formulaic gestures.
Callas was completely dedicated to her art, and demanded a very high level of commitment from both herself and her colleagues, and much to their chagrin, she sang her rehearsals in full voice. She single-handedly revived the until then forgotten and neglected Bel-canto canon, and infused operatic performances with fresh, authentic and believable interpretations of the roles she played. Anyone who goes to an opera today benefits from Calla’s legacy. The art we now recognise as opera has been individually shaped and  indelibly stamped with Callas’s original brilliance.

 

 

 

For more information on Callas, one can find an extensive submission in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Callas

The Maria Callas official website

http://www.callas.it/english/home.asp

Read Full Post »