Contrary

Mary, Mary, quite contrary 

How does your garden grow? 

With silver bells, and cockle shells, 

And pretty maids all in a row. 

This nursery rhyme was one of my childhood favorites. I loved three things about it especially. First, the image of Mary standing in her among garden pale flowers (silver bells and pretty maids) and a bed of seashells (cockle shells). I didn’t know about the rhyme’s possible references—still an issue of contention—to a royal Mary, either Mary Queen of Scots or Bloody Mary. Nor was I aware of the alternative last lines, with their references to rows of cuckolds (probably meaning cuckoos) and marigolds. Second, the rhythms of the rhyme—the triplet “how does your” of line two and the sixteenths-eighth of “pretty maids” in line four. Third, and most importantly, the word contrary. As someone with a slip-slidey mind, contrary was a position in which I often found myself, often to my chagrin. I pictured Mary, confidently contrary, happy in the place she’d made. 

Therefore when I went looking for contrarian poems about spring, I was delighted to find a sonnet by a Mary, in this case Mary Lock(e). The e is parenthetical because consistency of spelling wasn’t all that important in the eighteenth century. It could have been an attempt to claim a kinship, correctly or otherwise, with the philosopher John Locke, or just a whim.

The poem was originally published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, a publication that ran from 1731 to 1922 and was the first periodical to call itself a magazine. Locke published about 20 poems in the magazine in the 1790s. According to Roger Lonsdale, who edited an anthology of women poets of the eighteenth century, Mary’s verses  “often took …subjectivity and melancholy to alarming extremes.” Here is Mary’s take on spring: 

I hate the Spring in parti-coloured vest, 

What time she breathes upon the opening rose, 

When every vale in cheerfulness is dressed, 

And man with grateful admiration glows. 

Still may he glow, and love the sprightly scene, 

Who ne’er has felt the iron hand of Care; 

But what avails to me a sky serene, 

Whose mind is torn with Anguish and Despair? 

Give me the Winter’s desolating reign, 

The gloomy sky in which no star is found; 

Howl, ye wild winds, across the desert plain; 

Ye waters roar, ye falling woods resound! 

Congenial horrors, hail! I love to see 

All Nature mourn, and share my misery.

This doesn’t seem a particularly alarming extreme, amiright? In 2024 I’m finding it pretty relatable. Here in the jeanSpace household there have been more disasters and crises than usual. Personally I’ve had to actively search for the bump I get from the sunshine, milder temperatures, the little green buds, etc. And that lift has been more forced—and short-lived—than most years. “Congenial horrors, hail!” is right up my alley.  

Mary was born in 1766 (1768, by some accounts, but her 4x-great-granddaughter says it’s 1766, and that’s the date I’m using). Her father died when she was four. Her mother soon remarried, dying when Mary was 20. Mary’s childhood seems to have been unhappy, without much attention to education. After her mother’s death, Mary was taken in by a relative, Edward Taylor. Taylor was a man of letters, comfortably off, and Mary thrived in her new home. It was during this time that she published her poems. Taylor died in 1797, leaving Mary a substantial settlement that allowed her, at the age of 30, to marry William Mister, a physician and apothecary. The couple had three children, two of whom survived to adulthood. 

After about twelve years off, Mary resumed her writing career, now under the name of Mary Mister. It’s not clear why she was silent for so long. It’s possible that her creative side was fully occupied by the challenges of being a wife and mother. (That has happened to me, and to other writers I know.) There’s a bitchy quote from Christopher Hitchens about everyone having a book inside them, but in most cases that book should stay inside. I hold that everybody has at least one book, which should be written or not, as the spirit moves—though for some people, one book is it. Nevertheless I’m fascinated by people who take a significant amount of time away from their art, then go back to it. Rachmaninoff was so dismayed by the reception of his first symphony that he didn’t write anything for about three years. Harper Lee infamously took 55 years off between novels. 

Mary Mister had more than one work inside her.  In 1810, she published the first of five children’s books, with the final book in 1817. Her inspiration, she noted, was the bedtime stories she told her own children. The works were a far cry from her edgy poems. Maybe it’s an unfair comparison, given the different forms and audiences, but I found Mary’s prose thick textured, sometimes fussy, and slow paced. However, there are interesting and unusual perspectives. “Mungo, The Little Traveller” is a grand tour through Europe from the point of view of a dog. “The Adventures of a Doll” is narrated by a doll as she’s passed from owner to owner. “Tales from the Mountains” is a collection of short stories—morality tales, some with a gruesome edge. In one of the stories a gluttonous child is forced to watch someone of his own age being hanged in order to be cured of his vice. I remember devouring similar literature as a child, with relish and without the slightest wish to reform. I wonder what her unvarnished narrative voice was like—oh, to have been a fly on the wall as she told the stories to her children! 

It seems that Mary last book was finished in 1817. By then her children were grown, or close to it. I have a theory that many creative people find an audience, even if it’s an audience of one, to be a spur to composition. (Or maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so.) Maybe Mary’s first audience was Edward Taylor, and her second audience was her kids. 

She passed away in 1829. Her third audience may have been posterity. Her tombstone reads “Sacred to the Memory of Mary Mister, wife of William Mister Esqr of Glantowey, Caermarthenshire, who died 18 July 1829 aged 58 years.” Just as I love three things about the nursery rhyme I love three things about this sentence. First, that some of the language on the tombstone comes from Mary’s will (which was signed in Paris, ooh la la)—so I speculate that she had a bit of creative input here. Second, the evocation of the exotic locale of Caermarthenshire. And third, the fact that Mary–or someone–shaved her age by three to five years. 

I’d like to visit Mary Locke Mister’s garden, not a rose or a silver bell to be found, but with a windswept, gloomy beauty. 

Santa’s baby?

Thomas Nast, Father of the American Cartoon, worked for Harper’s Weekly (tagline: “A Journal of Civilization”), which was the most widely read magazine in the US during the mid 1800s. Mystery aficionados might be interested to know that it was the first American magazine to publish a Sherlock Holmes story, 1893’s “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.” Nast’s Harper’s drawings were popular and immensely influential; they helped bring down New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall regime and also built support for the Union side of the Civil War. President Lincoln called Nast “our best recruiting sergeant.”

Nast also produced pictures about less controversial topics, such as Christmas. His Christmas drawings ran in Harper’s from 1863 to 1886. Some of them were political. For example, in 1863, Nast’s Santa is shown dressed in a star-spangled coat and striped pants, distributing presents to Union Army soldiers. Some drawings weren’t political but were notable for other reasons, such as the December 29, 1866, double-page spread entitled “Santa Claus and His Works.” This is a collage of many drawings, one of which is captioned Santaclaussville, N.P. (North Pole). Setting the location of Santa’s home was one of Nast’s most notable contributions to the Claus canon.

A lot of Santa lore was developed during the 1800s. The historical Saint Nicholas was a Greek bishop who lived in what is now Turkey during the fourth century. He was noted for his charity and his red robes. He had nothing to do with chimneys and little to do with children, although he did give gifts. Nicholas became a saint officially in 1466, along with a feast day on December 6 that commemorated his death in A.D. 343. The Dutch eventually developed a tradition of celebrating Sinterklaas on the eve of December 6 with games and presents, which practice they continued in their settlements in North America. December 6 was close enough to Christmas for various writers, including Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and whoever composed “The Night Before Christmas,” to transmogrify Saint Nicholas into Santa Claus. Santa kept Saint Nick’s signature color, but he gained pounds, toy-making and surveillance abilities, a sleigh, and flying reindeer. Also Santa switched species from human to elf.

Nast’s images of Santa reflect these developments. Jolly, plump, not too tall, rosy-cheeked, white-bearded. A photograph of the cartoonist himself reveals an impressive mustache and beard combination that he could’ve used as inspiration but didn’t (which I think is a pity). Nast’s choice of the North Pole as Santa’s home was probably related to the reindeer, which are Arctic animals, and the association of Christmas with winter’s snow and cold. Yet another factor was that the North Pole was a mysterious and sought-after place. No human was known to have set flag or foot on it, though many had tried.

For centuries people had sailed as far north as the ice would allow, for various reasons. However, by the 1800s polar expeditions had become a sport at the national level. Nast, immersed in news and politics, would have known about England’s Sir John Franklin, who had embarked on his third Arctic expedition in 1845, never to return. Franklin’s ships, the HMS Erebus and the Terror, had succumbed to the ice 20 years before Nast’s drawing, but Franklin’s widow Jane was still sponsoring search parties. One of those expeditions, led by Charles Francis Hall, had left in 1864 and was still looking. Another attempt, headed by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, had returned in 1859 with the news that Sir John had perished in 1847. The wrecked ships themselves would not be found until the 2010s. 

The Santa canon has continued to add lore, of course, even after humans reached the North Pole and some of the mystery faded. One relatively recent bit of Santa embroidery is a throwback to the 1800s polar exploration craze and involves…wait for it…Frankenstein’s creature. At the end of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein himself has expired and the Creature is heading north. If ever there was a being who needed a little Christmas, as the song has it, Frankenstein’s creature would be it. In the stories, though, things don’t always work out well for Creature or Santa. Sometimes Santa beats the Creature up. Sometimes the Creature mugs Santa for his costume and toys. But sometimes things go better: Santa befriends and reforms the Creature.

What if Santa felt old age coming on when he found the Creature? Strong, tall, smart, chastened by experience, and capable of surviving in a place with no land, just ice and storm. What if Santa made the Creature his heir?

I wish Nast had had a chance to draw that. Ho ho hmmmm…

Kind strangers

Audio version here!

Some mornings when I’m writing in my journal I run out of thoughts but not energy. When this happens I open 3000 Questions about ME or some other book—but mostly it’s 3000 Questions—for a prompt. This morning I pondered Question 2158: Do you think a person can always depend on the kindness of strangers?

Any time the word always is in a question my literalist brain responds with an automatic no, but removing the adverb makes things more interesting. The kindness of a stranger, even if it’s something as minor as pointing out that a nickel fell out of your pocket at the checkout line, certainly delivers an extra zing.

Besides, eliminating the word always would be false to the reference. Blanche DuBois’s iconic line, in full, is “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The quote comes from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, who was one of the Big Three mid-twentieth century American playwrights (the other two being Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller). Williams’ given name was Thomas—but oh, does Tennessee have a better ring. He lived from 1911 to 1983, so he was around for a lot of volatile world history. His personal history was also turbulent, with an abusive, alcoholic father, an unhappy mother, a long childhood illness, a sister with mental issues, and a puritanical upbringing that made romantic connections difficult for Williams, who was gay. Streetcar, which starred virtual unknowns Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, debuted on Broadway in 1947 and was made into a movie in 1951. In the movie Vivien Leigh took over Tandy’s role. Streetcar was Williams’ second big success, following 1944’s The Glass Menagerie

 I read this play yonks ago, in my 20s. Back then I lived near a bunch of great bookstores and was shoveling capital-L Literature into my brain at warp speed. I’ve never seen the movie, the play, the opera, or even the musical that the Simpsons made of it, though all of these are now on my my to-be-watched list. As you might imagine, racing through Great Works while also being a busy person who hadn’t accumulated a lot of life experience washed most of the specifics of Streetcar from my mind. Tragic, southern, family drama: that’s what I remembered.

The play has four leads, but Blanche (Tandy/Leigh) is the star. She’s lost most things: her gay husband, who killed himself; her ancestral Mississippi estate; her money…even her ability to make a living with her body is fading. Blanche comes to live with her younger sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and Stella’s husband Stanley (Brando), in New Orleans. Here she hopes to make a new life. She attracts a man with whom she might start over—until her relatives tell the guy about her past. Then Blanche’s brother-in-law rapes her, and her sister refuses to believe that fact. She has a nervous breakdown and is sent, in the play’s final scene, to the loony bin. The line about kindness and strangers is delivered to the doctor who is escorting Blanche—gently but inexorably—from Stella’s home. 

I suppose an implication of the quote is that the biggest cruelties in the play are perpetrated by relatives. Another might be that one shouldn’t depend on other people for everything, despite Donne’s assertion that no man is an island. However, the world is a better place for the possibility that a stranger will be kind.

I was at the grocery store on the day before Thanksgiving. Not too many people, not too panicked, but it was pretty early in the day. I was searching for vanilla in the Friendly’s ice cream bay. Other flavors abounded, but vanilla was as scarce as a physical Friendly’s restaurant (the chain has shrunk from 850 locations at its peak to 119 today, with only 29  left in Massachusetts, none of them near me). Anyhow, a guy standing at the Breyers’ bay must have been struck by my Resting Confused Face.

“There’s more ice cream up at the front,” the man said. He stuck a couple of Breyers cartons in his shopping basket.

“Thanks,” I replied. “I hope there’s some vanilla left.”

It took my hero just a couple of seconds. “There it is,” he said, pointing downward and to my left.

I thanked him again, and we wished one another a Happy Thanksgiving and went on our merry ways. Why does a small cruelty from a stranger feel muted, generating a brief roll of my eyes, while a kindness feels so elevated? I’m hoping a second read—a slow read—of Streetcar will give me a clue. If nothing else, I’ll get to swim in the bottomless ocean of reading, a kindness from the universe.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

April 21 is Big Word Day, so here’s a tribute to the 27-letter, 13-syllable  “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” which means honorableness. For your eyes and my typing fingers’ sake, I’ll shorten it to the H-word. For a time this was the longest word in English language dictionaries. I suspect it’s survived for hundreds of years because Shakespeare used it in Love’s Labour’s Lost; it was by far the longest word in any of his plays. There are longer words around these days, many of them technical or medical terms. My favorites are words that are in on the joke, like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (a long word, no meaning attached, that can make a person sound smart) and floccinaucinihilipilification, (the habit of estimating something as worthless). Even with the big words I like, my brain don’t process them well. Just looking at them makes my eyes hurt. 

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy about King Ferdinand of Navarre and a trio of his courtiers who want (as the productivity bros of 2023 might put it) to 10x their knowledge. Therefore they swear to study and fast for three years. To avoid distractions, they foreswear the company of women.  Ferdinand hires a tutor and imposes a no-girls zone around the castle. Antics ensue, and by play’s end everyone is in love and at least one of the female characters has gotten pregnant. Interestingly, as well as the longest word the play has a couple of other extravagances: Shakespeare’s longest scene and his longest speech.

Big Word enthusiasts hold that learning and using big words can provide numerous benefits, one of which is impressing other people. I dunno. In my experience big words can annoy as much as impress. Not that that’s a reason to forego the big word, if it’s the right one for the job.  Especially if it has a manageable number of syllables and is a fun word to say. Like montmorillonite (first known use in 1854), which is a kind of clay and which I’ll try to work into a conversation, someday.

Ferdinand and his gang impress one another mightily with their syllables and wordplay and what even I can recognize as shaky Latin. The rest of the characters—the servants, the women, and Costard, the play’s truth-telling rustic—are annoyed. The H-word itself comes in a mocking aside between Costard and Ferdinand’s servant Moth, after Moth notes that his master and friends “have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”  “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words,” Costard replies. “I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as [H-word]; thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.”

In reading that passage, my eye leaps over the H-word and heads straight to “flap-dragon.” A flap-dragon is a burning raisin or other small bit of fruit. Evidently it was a fun Elizabethan game of the same name to put fruit in brandy, set the thing on fire, and then fish the fruit out and swallow it whole (swallowing whole being yet another meaning for flap-dragon). 

Other benefits of learning big words include exercising our brains and improving our ability to express ourselves. Fair enough. I found the astonishing claim on the site of nationaltoday.com that words “give us personality.” I don’t think this is true, but if I accept the axiom, a possible conclusion could be the bigger the word, the bigger the personality. I don’t think I could manage an H-word-sized personality.

Before the H-word intimidated me and the word flap-dragon grabbed my attention, I was thinking about little words. About catfight, in fact, whose first known use, like montmorillonite, was in 1854. This morning, walking on Gold Street, I saw a catfight. There was a tuxedo cat standing very still at the back of a driveway, staring intently at a silver cat, equally still, at the driveway’s edge. As I drew closer both felines looked at me, and the silver took the opportunity to leg it, pursued vigorously but at a safe distance by the tuxedo cat until the silver disappeared into the next yard. The battle was short and silent, and not at all like my mental picture of a catfight.

Even the little words are proving themselves to be slippery, so I’ve decided to avoid big words for a few hours. Farewell to Big Word Day and hello to National Tea Day. I’m off to find some Earl Grey.

Queen of the Day

Mother Nature’s been changing up her look. Yesterday’s brilliant blues and browns have been replaced by cool neutrals. Today’s outfit is Park Avenue matron: whites, taupes, and grays. Even the gaudy crimson of the fire hydrant across the street has been muted to a brick brown. The tree branches bend and tremble under the snow’s weight.

I hope my friend from last night is happy today. She loves the snow and was sad that her town was only projected to get a couple of inches, but the weather people said the totals everywhere are going to be quite a bit bigger than predicted. The snow is heavy but there’s no wind. Maybe there’s a way to recapture my long-lost snow delight. The world is quiet except for when the plows drive by. Noisy mechanical things, breaking the mood. It’s Snow Queen weather.

By the time I first read Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the Snow Queen, at around age nine, I was already primed to see her as a villain. That’s what C.S. Lewis made of her in the Narnia stories, the White Witch who forced endless winter and no Christmas. On today’s reread I have a different opinion. My favorite part of the story is still the bit at the beginning. A wicked hobgoblin, who runs a school, invents a magnifying glass. Things viewed through the glass seem distorted and ugly, making the viewer sad. The hobgoblin has great success spreading despair and cynicism on Earth, but then he decides to fly the glass up to the heavens to have a look at the angels. The glass slips through his fingers, though, and falls back to earth, breaking into millions of fragments. It’s just chance, apparently, that as these fragments float around the atmosphere they sometimes make their way into people’s eyes or hearts. A bit in the heart is the more dangerous, often fatal.

Kay and Gerda are childhood friends who love roses, one another, and the stories told by Kay’s grandmother. One story is about the Snow Queen, who commands the snow bees. “She is the largest of them all, and never remains on earth, but flies up to the dark clouds,” Grandma tells the children. “Often at midnight she flies through the streets of the town, and looks in at the windows, then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful shapes, that look like flowers and castles.”

Through no fault of his own, Kay is hit by a double-dose (eye and heart) of the evil mirror fragments. Soon he can’t appreciate natural beauty and becomes absorbed instead in academic studies. Arithmetic and microscopy. He becomes spiteful towards Gerda. Eventually he  encounters the Snow Queen and is taken to her castle. Gerda sets out to rescue him and has many adventures doing so.

I don’t think that the Snow Queen is a villain. She’s more guardian than jailor. She helps Kay manage his condition by making him resistant to cold. She gives him puzzles so that he can play “the icy game of reason.” She tells him what he needs to do to solve his problem, which is to spell the word eternity. She even encourages him to try by reminding him that if he succeeds, he’ll be his own master. She promises him a set of skates as a reward. But she has other work to do, and he’ll have to manage his challenges on his own. “I will go and look into the black craters of the tops of the burning mountains, Etna and Vesuvius,” she says. “I shall make them look white, which will be good for them, and for the lemons and the grapes.”

Gerda shows up and rescues Kay. (She and providence do all the actual work.) Reason flees. Innocence is restored. The summer roses beat back the snow bees. “The cold empty grandeur of the Snow Queen’s palace vanished from their memories like a painful dream.”

It’s too bad that they forget, in my opinion. Summer beauties are fine, but the Snow Queen is also gorgeous. The first time Kay sees her, before his accident, she is “the figure of a woman, dressed in garments of white gauze, which looked like millions of starry snow-flakes linked together…she was alive and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, but there was neither peace nor rest in their glance.” She’s making the most of her situation. She’s protective as well as destructive, and she gets her work done even when she’s feeling a little stressed.

The snow outside continues steady, like a slow-motion waterfall. I listen for hoof clops and the squeak of sledge runners on the snow. If the Snow Queen in her gauze and furs stopped for me, would I go for a ride? Not knowing the risks or the destination? Yes. Yes, I would.