You Can’t Go Home Again: Aunt Janey and Other Stories February 14, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Qua campis cervos agitabat sacra juventus/ Incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior./ Nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundus, amamus?
(‘Here the holy young man who chased deer in the fields, now, stands a broken old man with a stick/ O what wretches! Why, world we love, do you flee from us?’) Alcuin O Mea Cella
Beach’s daughters received yesterday a present from their venerable grandfather (Beach Pater), a series of exercise books where the five year old Beach learnt to write. There was something painful about watching the supercilious little and tiny miss Beaches turning the pages and laughing at the bad drawings: ‘Is that an elephant, Dad?!’ Very rarely we are confronted with our younger selves, shown a glimpse of what we really were rather than what we remember ourselves to be. Here, on this theme, are two passages from the biographies of great men that Beach has always found affecting because they do precisely this. In the first the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world (arguably the most powerful at this date) has come to say goodbye to his mother in her last illness. She had been a tough mother, but she had done her best to protect her darling boy from the hands of a drunken husband. The last conversation was recorded for posterity: he had only seen her three times in as many decades.
‘Why did you beat me so hard?’
‘That’s why you turned out so well! Joseph, what exactly are you now?’
‘Well, remember the Tsar. I’m something like a Tsar.’
‘You’d have done better to have become a priest’ (162)
Joseph Stalin is here confronted with perhaps the only person in the world who could make him quail: he had the good sense to laugh at the line about the priest (and God knows she was right). There is a wonderful Italian poem (Salvatore Quasimodo) of a son writing to his dying mother and begging death not to touch the clock on the wall that had ticked out the poet’s infancy (non toccare l’orologio in cucina che batte sopra il muro tutta la mia infanzia è passata sullo smalto del suo quadrante, su quei fiori dipinti). Like Hitler asking for directions as to how shoot himself, Stalin in the presence of his fading mother reminds us that even monsters can excite, in the intimate padded corners of their lairs, pity.
The second passage is a far more pleasant, joky affair with a far better man: a man who has grown on Beach over the years from the classic naive idealist to principled doer. But it is, in its way, just as affecting. Our hero has returned to the town of his birth, where there is one living relation, aunt Janie.
‘Well, Tommy, what are you doing now?’
‘I’ve been elected President, Aunt Janie’ [shouted into ear trumpet]
‘President of what?’
This was Woodrow Wilson in Staunton, Virginia. Aunt Janie who had not seen her nephew for decades still used his original name, Wilson had begun to use his middle name, ‘Woodrow’ in his twenties. When he and Janie had last met, there were still slaves in Staunton and the Confederacy beckoned. As a student at Princeton, Wilson had defended the memory of the Confederacy but in his twenties he claimed that the defeat of the Confederacy was positive for the south: Beach has sometimes wondered what the fourteen points would have done for the lost cause, or was it the lost cause that created the fourteen points? After that Wilson had slowly dragged his roots north with his beautiful southern wife. On his visit to Staunton, however, there were strong moments of nostalgia. The town not only celebrated the President’s birthday but had Wilson sleep in the bedroom where he had slept as a small child. Wilson apparently loved every minute of his trip back down memory lane. Beach suspects that Janie quickly forgot Tommy’s visit: she had her memories that by then, as is the way with the very old, were more real than intrusions from the real.
‘Vague memories, nothing but memories.’
Other can’t-go-home dialogues: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
15 Feb 2015: Nathaniel writes, ‘After Abraham Lincoln’s death, his law partner William Herndon set out to gather information for what he planned to be Lincoln’s definitive biography. The linked letter is one of many that Herndon received in response to his questions. The entire archive is a treasure trove of 19th century writing. Don’t be misled by the great variations in literacy; sometimes the seemingly least literate writers are the most vivid. Letter from Dennis F. Hanks, cousin of Lincoln’s mother: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.6533:1.lincoln Link to the entire archive: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/herndon.html Thanks Nathan! Dennis’ letter is well worth reading…
