Hilda of Whitby

Hilda of Whitby lived from 614-680 A.D. She was said to have ruled the abbeys and farms she controlled in the north of England so well that population increased. This intrigues me, and I find I am not the only one!

Most of what we know about Hilda of Whitby was written in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede. When her father was poisoned, her mother took Hild and her sister Hereswith to live under the protection of King Edwin, who was then Anglo-Saxon over-King of Northumbria. Edwin was baptized by the Italian bishop Paulinus, along with all of his household when Hild was 13. The baptism took place in a building on the site of what is now York Minster. Edwin was killed in battle, however, in an uprising of the Britons from the west a few years later, in 633.

His queen, along with Hild and her mother fled south to Kent, where Hild’s sister Hereswith lived with her family. Roman Christianity was more firmly entrenched in Kent, but we lose sight of Hild until she was 33, when she went back to Northumbria as a nun in a Celtic monastery, under Bishop Aidan from Lindisfarne. Ten years later she founded Whitby Abbey. In the Celtic tradition, both men and women lived there separately, holding everything in common and worshipping together.

Hild was a skilled administrator and teacher. According to Bede, “all who knew her called her mother because of her outstanding devotion and grace.” In 664 a convention gathered at Whitby to address some of the differences which had arisen between Roman and Celtic Christianity. In regard to the day on which Easter should be celebrated and questions about tonsure, Roman traditions won out and some of the monks returned to Iona and Lindisfarne. 

Hild remained at Whitby until her death at 66, a very old age in those times. She was canonized as a saint with her feast day celebrated on November 17. As the patron saint of learning and culture, many schools and colleges bear her name.

The story of Hild is told in a masterful way by Nicola Griffith, who grew up in northern England. Her book is entitled simply Hild. Griffith has done a great deal of research into the history of the royal houses of the Seventh century, which came from British or Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Pict and other assorted backgrounds. It was a brutal time, in which rulers moved among their subjects, collecting tribute and fighting with each other. Though Edwin and his court were baptized, there is little evidence that Christianity changed anything at the time. The rulers who came after Edwin reverted to their previous gods. 

Since nothing is known of Hild for many years, Griffith sets her in the context of an ambitious mother who seeks to protect her child by making her into a “seer” for the king. The child Hild is extremely observant of the birds, the weather and knows the strengths and weaknesses of the people around her. She grows up strong, knows many of the languages used in a polyglot culture and learns how to read from a priest who tutors her. She is also beloved of her half-brother, her gemaccae (a girlfriend and weaving partner) and the household she creates around her at a young age. Griffith’s harrowing and beautiful story ends before the death of Edwin the king. Griffith expects to complete two more volumes on Hild’s life.

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag, 1968

It is possible you have never heard of Susan Sontag, but for someone of my generation, that would be unlikely. During most of her life [1933-2004], Susan was a powerful force, writing and publishing articles and books which generated cultural conversations, dominating the literary landscape.

Born in New York to a father who died when she was five, and a mother who remarried, Susan lived in many places, finding her strength in books. She got her first degree from the University of Chicago’s great books program at 18. She married Philip Rieff and had a son, David, at age 17. She went on to get an M.A. in Philosophy at Harvard and made her living teaching until she received a fellowship to Oxford, where she escaped to spend time alone, there and in Paris.

Returning to New York in 1959, Susan established herself as a writer. She first became widely known for “Notes on Camp,” which discussed high and low culture and its relative seriousness. In Against Interpretation, she described how the critique of art by intellectuals had taken over the enjoyment of it. She went to Hanoi in 1968 and wrote about her trip positively.

In 1975, Susan was diagnosed with cancer and went through aggressive treatment for it. She never stopped working, however, publishing On Photography in 1977. In this essay, which became a book, she describes the consumerist result of the proliferation of images and how it levels all experiences. In Illness as Metaphor, she describes how victims were blamed for their illness, in the case of cancer or tuberculosis, adding to their suffering. These books had big impacts on the way photography and cancer were discussed.

Susan was also writing fiction and making films at the time, though these works were not as widely known. She was a powerful, “fierce,” figure among New York intellectuals, becoming president of the PEN American Center. When a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, Susan supported him, rallying writers to his cause. She was also a great friend of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian dissident who ended up in New York. Brodsky had an uncompromising value for literature similar to Susan’s. Literature tamed people. It sensitized and humanized them. Susan felt Brodsky was one of the few people with standards as high as her own.

Susan had many relationships with both men and women. In 1989 she met the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was almost as famous as she. Susan would not admit to their relationship, as she did not want to be labeled, but according to Annie, they helped each other through their lives until Susan’s death in 2004.

In 1992, Sarajevo was beseiged for four years. Susan lived for long periods of time in the city during the siege, and mounted Waiting for Godot while there. “No one cared about us,” said the residents, “except Susan. Her presence was very helpful.” It was Susan’s way of saying, “culture is something worth dying for.”

The relation of language to reality was Susan’s theme, suggests Benjamin Moser, whose biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, came out in 2019. Neither is stable and over the course of her life there was much change. “Literature is the passport to a larger life,” Susan said, when she was given the German Peace Prize in 2004. “Literature is freedom, especially in a time when reading and inwardness are challenged.”

In 2004, in response to a cancer of the blood, Susan again fought aggressively. She tried to put mind over matter, had a bone marrow transplant, but it did not succeed. She was buried in Paris.

I mostly experienced Susan’s work as it appeared in The New York Review of Books, following her story at a distance. But she did inspire me, particularly in the value for seriousness and literature, which I too regard as foundational.

Kathryn Kontent Hollingsworth

"Portrait of a Young Woman Reading," 1938 by G.B. Barlow

Katya Kontent, whose story is told in The Rules of Civility [2011] by Amor Towles, grows up in Brooklyn with a Russian immigrant father. Her mother abandons them and at 19, Katya’s father dies, leaving her almost without family. By this time, however, she has a job doing typing and stenography for an attorney in New York and lives in a boardinghouse with her roommate Eve.

At 24, Katey and Eve are ready to take the town by storm. It is 1938 and the Depression is waning. They go out for a drink in a jazz club and meet an attractive man, Tinker Grey, who leaves them with his address and a gold lighter. At lunch one day, in the hole in the wall diner Katey enjoys, Tinker turns up and they talk. Katey falls in love with him. But an accident, in which the car the three of them were sharing is hit by a milk truck and Eve is badly injured, makes Tinker, who was driving, take responsibility for her. Eve recuperates at his apartment, and soon they are off to Palm Beach and then Europe. Katey is left to her books (often Dickens) and games of contract bridge, which she plays with herself in her apartment on the lower East Side.

During a bleak winter, Katey runs into Tinker’s brother, a painter. “Place no trust in appearances,” she is told. She also meets Ann Grandyn, Tinker’s “godmother.” By June, she is given a promotion, becoming the top secretary at her firm. On June 21, her birthday, she buys a new dress, shoes and clutch and goes out to dinner by herself at La Belle Epoch. Unlike her father, who thought restaurants an “ungodly waste,” Katey feels they are the height of civilization. “A fine dinner could revive the spirits.”

Katey quits her job and talks herself into a job at Pembroke Press. Here, the workers don’t need their jobs, don’t care what they are paid, as they have family money. Very quickly she is snapped up by the editor of a new magazine. Gotham is a Conde Nast publication of cultural demolition, clearing the way for something new. In a week, Katey’s life in New York has “come about.”

Katey’s new friends are very well off. Wallace, who is kind, steady and sincere, takes her shooting. He is planning to leave to fight in the Spanish Civil War, however. Katey and he shop for his Christmas gifts to his family in August, wrapping them and squirreling them away. Katey hears that Tinker and Eve will become engaged. She secures an invitation to the Hollingsworth Labor Day picnic on Long Island. When she finds that Tinker and Eve are there, she leaves for the train, but her host sends her home in a car with his son, Valentine. The radio is playing “Autumn in New York.”

Eve, it turns out, has refused Tinker and run away. She keeps running, all the way to California. Katey notices that Tinker is relieved. He invites Katey to come see him at Wallace's hunting camp, where he is building fires and reading Thoreau. They spend the night together, and Tinker invites her to meet him at a club on Monday night. Katey joyously prepares, but at lunch she runs into Tinker and Ann Grandyn, who is clearly much more than a “godmother.” Katey slaps him and ends up telling her friend the whole story.

Tinker tries to apologize; he was actually bidding Ann and the many things she provided him with goodbye. But Katey has been badly hurt. She goes out with others and runs again into Tinker’s brother. “My old man lost everything,” he tells her. “Tinker was sent to school, learned five languages. What he’s got can’t be taught in schools.” Katey knows this. Tinker is vibrant, fearless, naïve. Katey admits that she loves him.

Katey finds Tinker in the flophouse where his brother lived near the docks. His brother has enlisted. Tinker is not downcast or unraveled. Katey apologizes and they have lovely times together until Tinker sets off to find his way to unfettered openness. “I’m going to try the present on for size.” Katey keeps her eyes open, but she does not run into him again.

Katey continues to work for Gotham, the Depression ending as 1940 arrives. Wallace dies in Spain and bequeaths Katey $800 a year, enough so that she can continue to live with integrity and no regrets. In 1947 she is introduced to Val Hollingsworth, who remembers their drive, listening to “Autumn in New York.” She becomes editor of Gotham in 1955. In 1966, she and Val go to an exhibit of Walker Evans’ photographs of people on the subway, taken in 1938. Katey spots Tinker, twice. Once in his cashmere coat, looking rich, and later looking scruffy and happy.

Amor Towles' wonderful book is a love poem to New York, replete with all kinds of characters. “Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out?” But it is also the story of a young working class woman who maintains her dignity. On her way up, she does not do anything against her true feelings, does not demean herself. Dignity is under-rated, in my estimation. Katey’s father has left her with this advice: “One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition, and all manner of glamorous enticements.” She does not tell her husband about what happened between her and Tinker, keeping the memory of her 24^th year to herself. She has no regrets, though she does note that “the right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.” As physical creatures, we can only live one life.

Jia Tanchun

Wenying Dongfang, 1987 television series

The Story of the Stone, also called The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xuequin [first printed 1791] is well-known as the story of a young man, Bao-yu, living in a large Confucian household torn between the love of a gifted, difficult poet, Lin Dai-yu, and his fated marriage to a more measured, beautiful woman, Xue Bao-chai. Hundreds of characters with many complex stories fill the pages of this classical Chinese novel, which we most likely read in the David Hawkes translation. The novel has spawned its own study, “redology,” and endless debates are held about which of the two beauties is the better match for Bao-yu. Interesting as all this is, for me, the woman with her feet most on the ground, and a way into the story, is Bao-yu’s half-sister Tanchun.

Tanchun is one of the “twelve beauties” Bao-yu dreams of early in the book. One of the three “springs,” her name means “seeking spring.” Like Lin Dai-yu, she is a wonderful poet, but also she has managerial ability and can restore balance to a situation. Her mother, Auntie Zhao, is a concubine, and an unlikeable character, which dims Tanchun’s prospects. But Tanchun makes the most of her life and is one of the most successful beauties in the end.

As the story opens, Bao-yu, his cousins and relatives are quite young. The two branches of the Jia family live in adjoining mansions, each housing perhaps 300 people. One of their number has become consort to the emperor, so the families create a garden between the mansions, suitable as a residence for her when she comes to visit. The garden is pronounced lovely, but Jia Xuanchun says that the garden should not be left empty. Bao-yu and his young cousins, siblings and servants all move into it.

Bao-yu is supposed to be studying the Confucian classics, as directed by his father. But he refuses, spending his time idly, getting mixed up in intrigues and writing poetry. Bao-yu is the mouthpiece of the writer, Cao Xuequin, himself the scion of a great house about which he wrote with nostalgia as it went into decline. The book is a critique of society, castigating the Confucian scholar ruling class of the time with hypocrisy and lack of feeling. Those who study only to move up in the world are “career worms,” in Bao-yu’s eyes. Confucians felt passion was bad and must be quelled, but Bao-yu is interested in authenticity, finding the genuine feelings in one’s nature. Without passion, one is hardly a man. Thus his feelings for the romantic Dai-yu.

While living in the garden, Tanchun proposes a poetry club. When someone walks by with a pot of crabflowers, this name is attached to the club. Tanchun lives in the Autumn studio, where she paints and writes poetry. Under the benevolent eye of Grandmother Jia, the young people play games, go boating on the lake, watch plays and participate in ceremonies and festivals. When Wang Xi-feng, the spirited woman who manages the house, becomes ill, Tanchun learns to fill her shoes. Partly through the machinations of Wang Xi-feng, and certainly due to some of the wrongdoing of the greedy, lascivious and lazy members of the household, the Jia family falls into decline. When dealing with the quarrels, petty rivalries and outright fights, Tanchun says more than once that she wishes she lived with fewer people!

The climax of the book in reached with Bao-yu’s marriage. Everyone in the Jia household becomes involved in the deception. About this time, Zhou Qiong, a military man from the Haimen Coastal Region, asks for Tanchun’s hand. Tanchun must travel far to the south. A year or so later, at a tumultuous time, when Bao-yu cannot be found after his examinations and the only daughter of Wang Xi-feng is also missing, Tanchun and her husband return for a visit. “She had always been gifted with a knack of finding the right thing to say, and her natural equanimity restored a degree of calm to the gatherng.”

When visiting Hong Kong, I made a friend of a young girl whom I met in the street with a thick red book under her arm. Sure enough, it was a copy of Dream of the Red Chamber. I asked her about it! We met several times so she could practice her English. The book is a realistic depiction of the life of its time, but is also full of overtones of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. An opera made of the work opened in San Francisco in 2016. I have found whole courses in English on “redology,” such as these by Anthony E. Clark of Whitworth University. Clark expounds on the language, the story, the philosophy and history of the book. I wish you the joy of reading it yourself and finding your own favorite character. I could tell that Professor Clark loved best Wang Xi-feng, the “fox fairy.”

Helen Knothe Nearing

Helen Knothe was born into a theosophist family in New Jersey in 1904. She did not want a traditional American education, but went to Europe to study the violin. While there she had a relationship and traveled with the young Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Upon her return to the United States, still uncertain what she wanted to do with her life, she met Scott Nearing. Scott, 20 years older, was at the nadir of his life, having been asked to leave two universities for his radical economic and pacifist views, and tried for espionage for “obstructing the enlistment” of men into the Army in 1918. Scott was a prolific writer and speaker and Helen became his secretary and companion. They lived in New York until Scott bought property in 1934 in Vermont which he and Helen called “Forest Farm.”

Helen was a life-long vegetarian and Scott had become one. They wanted to live simply and self-reliantly, as much as possible. They began gardening and harvesting maple sugar which they sold as a cash crop. Each day was divided into three parts, one part for what they called “bread labor (gardening, chopping wood, building in stone),” one part for community work (writing and publishing) and one part for self improvement (educating themselves). In the winter, Scott continued to travel and speak and Helen wrote and published books, the first being The Maple Sugar Book, which described their sugaring techniques.

Helen’s biographer Ellen La Conte says she was an excellent salesman and publicist, with a considerable amount of “hustle.” In addition to writing books, they built nine stone buildings on the farm. Helen had never done physical work but she took to it, gardening, composting, working with wood. She loved building with stone, and became the person who did the pointing, laying in lime or cement mortar between stones.

When their home became part of a holiday ski area, the Nearings moved to Maine, to Cape Rosier, where their cash crop was raising blueberries. Living the Good Life was published in 1954 and it drew countless people to the farm to study the Nearings’ lifestyle. The Nearings were generous, feeding their visitors and getting them to help build roads, buildings and gardens. They lived a very public life, setting high standards for themselves and others, and publishing many more books. Their homesteads had no electricity, used composting outhouses and were heated with wood. Communication was by mail.

When Scott was in his 90’s and Helen in her 70’s, they built their last stone home, publishing Our Home Made of Stone in 1983. By this time Helen was making most of the decisions. She had help with carpentry, but she designed the place and did all the pointing. This last home, also called Forest Farm, has become the Good Life Center, an institute for education. Scott died in 1983 at 100 years of age, and Helen followed in 1995.

I love many things about the way the Nearings lived, and especially Our Home Made of Stone, which is mostly photographs. I have always hoped to one day build a stone house! Biographical materials on Helen are plentiful. She appears in many Youtube videos, including this one. Her own writing on “the good life” is straightforward and practical.

Tereza

Juliette Binoche as Tereza

Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984] portrays Tereza as the weight which comes to his protagonist Tomas as an ‘It must be.’ Tomas prefers lightness, but “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

Tereza meets Tomas when he comes to the bar where she is working. He sits alone with a book and asks for a cognac. Beethoven is playing on the radio. Tereza, who went to work at 15 to help her family, sees in Tomas a representative of what she has always longed for: a higher culture. “Lives are composed like music, guided by musical motifs,” Kundera tells us. “Without realizing it, an individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Tereza goes to Prague and knocks at Tomas’ door. He lets her in, feeling that she is a baby in a bullrush basket, sent down the river to meet him.

This meeting takes place in the mid-1960’s. Tereza moves in with Tomas. His friend Sabine finds Tereza a job on a magazine. Seeing promise in her, Sabine shows her photographs, what is important about each. Tereza takes up the camera and becomes a staff photographer. When the Russians move tanks in to Prague in 1968, repressing Czechoslovakia, Tereza roams the streets, photographing what is happening and handing her film to foreigners to take out of the country.

Sabine moves to Switzerland, and Tomas and Tereza soon follow. Tomas is a surgeon in a hospital. He is happy and feels free and much lighter. But being in a foreign country is like walking a tightrope. Tereza cannot handle the vertigo. She goes back to Prague, feeling weak. Tomas follows her, giving up his passport. Neither of them can leave Czechoslovakia again.

In Prague, both Tomas and Tereza feel the crushing weight of living under communist ideology. Tereza works as a waitress because she cannot be forgiven for giving her film to foreigners. Tomas is asked to retract an article he once wrote, but he will not. He is discharged from his job as a surgeon and takes up window washing. This job feels like a vacation, and he gives in to his adulterous delight in the bodies of women he meets. It makes Tereza miserable. She too has an adventure which seems to be a set up to get her to inform on her customers. Tereza and Tomas hardly see each other except in sleep.

Two years after leaving the hospital, Tomas is physically tired. “Prague has grown so ugly lately,” he tells Tereza. They talk of moving and find work on a communal farm in the country. Tereza minds the heifers, which are turned out each day to pasture, with the help of her dog Karenin. Tomas drives the pickup which takes workers out to the fields. The police stop pestering them, but they are unusual. Other communal farm workers find it is just a job and wish to move to the city. Instead of going dancing, at night they watch television in their homes. Tereza takes comfort among the animals, however. Animals love voluntarily.

When Karenin dies, Tomas and Tereza bury him between the crooked apple trees. Left to her thoughts, Tereza feels responsible for Tomas. It is her fault he moved back from Switzerland. She has used her weakness against him. She is afraid he is bored with her. But, one day she puts on a pretty dress and they go to the next town to dance. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m happy here?” Tomas asks her. Their death in an automobile accident is reported to Sabine by Tomas’ estranged son.

Kundera’s philosophical novel gives him a chance to present his thoughts on many subjects, including a diatribe against kitsch. Kitsch fills Sabine with horror. But Kundera feels it may be inescapable. “The novel is not the author’s confession. It is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

Though I loved the movie made of this novel by Philip Kaufman in 1988, Kundera repudiated it. I suspect that the movie did not portray the heaviness of the Russian occupation to the extent we see it in the novel. Tereza remains a finely wrought icon and the contrast Kundera sets up between her character and that of Sabine an interesting question.

Charmian Ross (Charlie)

Florence Pugh, The Little Drummer Girl 2018

Charmian Ross is The Little Drummer Girl in John le Carre novel of 1983. Recruited from a group of itinerant English actors, she has been involved in leftist politics. But these activities are chaotic and superficial compared to the disciplined Israelis who tell her they have a more important part for her in “the theater of the real.” “It will save innocent lives,” Kurtz, their leader, tells her. “Your talents are being wasted.” They do not tell her much else.

Joseph, to whom she is attracted, confuses her by acting romantic and then never following through. He takes her to elegant dinners and then to the Acropolis. He begins to explain the elaborate fiction in which Charlie, as she is called, is wooed by a young man named Michel, the brother of Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist who has been planting bombs all over Europe. Joseph impersonates this brother, using silk shirts, a red jacket and Mercedes. Letters, hotel and restaurant receipts, clothes for Charlie and a beautiful bracelet all contribute to a fake love affair they build up between them. Joseph tells her she can leave if she wants to, but Charlie is falling in love with Joseph, who is a legendary Israeli fighter, a hero of the battle for the Golan Heights. He asks her if she can drive the Mercedes up through Yugoslavia into Austria. It is full of explosives.

Charlie does this. In Munich, she is taken to see the brother Michel who is captive and drugged. She then goes back to England, to acting. She is contacted by the Palestinians, however, and is able to convincingly act her unhappiness at the death of Michel, who has been blown up in the red Mercedes. She is sent to Beirut where the Palestinians have their headquarters. She meets Michel’s sister Fatmeh. They want to know more about Michel, which Charlie tells them. She loves the “restless, dangerous urgency” of Beirut, weapons everywhere, boys with machine guns, nights in the desert. She finds the Palestinians “easy to love,” as Joseph told her she would. She is treated with great courtesy. The muezzin sounds every morning. “In the unreason around her, in this unlooked for truce for meditation, she found at last a cradle for her own irrationality and since no paradox was too great to bear amidst such chaos, she found a place in it for Joseph too, for her love for him.”

In a Palestinian camp, she makes friends with the children and joins a demonstration. She is also sent to a training camp, where she learns to use weapons. She hates it, but what begins as “an effort of will, became a habit of mind and body.” She is disciplined, becoming a leader. She is asked to deliver a bomb at a lecture in Freiburg, Germany. She flies under a fake passport, a dowdy student with her hair chopped off.

As Charlie gets in deeper, Israeli operatives monitor her progress, keeping in contact with bits of heather, cigarette packs. Some of them think she has gone over to the Palestinians. “What does it matter who she works for,” says Kurtz, “as long as she shows us the way.” Joseph is nervous, but all of them have to wait.

Charlie is taken to Khalil, who makes a bomb with his one good hand. Charlie delivers it. The Israelis, with the help of the German police, detonate the bomb, pretending the professor has been killed. Charlie goes back to Khalil, who prepares a dinner for her in a lovely house in the woods. They make love, but in the morning, Khalil does not hear cows, as he usually does. “Who do you work for, Charlie?” he asks. The Israelis storm the house and Khalil is shot. Charlie has a breakdown and is taken to a hospital in Tel Aviv.

Months later, the Israelis return Charlie to England. She acts in plays, but serious parts are too much for her, too irrelevant. Scenes of the Palestinians come before her eyes. Joseph has gone back to his life too, but he scares Kurtz: “What are we to become?” Joseph (the one-time freedom fighter known as Gadi Becker) asks. “A Jewish homeland or an ugly Spartan state?” One night Joseph comes to see a play in which Charlie is clearly losing it. Afterwards she tells him, “I’m dead, Joseph.” But it seems he wants her, dead or alive.

John le Carre modeled the “little drummer girl” on his left-leaning sister. As he writes in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel [2016], the young, idealistic character Charlie was right there with him as he traveled in Israel and Lebanon in the early 1980’s. He portrays both sides with great sympathy, his writing transcending the spy/thriller genre. In 2018, the BBC did an acclaimed six-part mini-series based on the book directed by Park Chan-wook.

Ramona Phail Assis Moreno

Kayla Contreras plays Ramona, 2016

The story of Ramona is told in a novel of the same name first serially published in 1884 by Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson hoped that her story would dramatize the plight of Native Americans whose lands were being taken from them by Americans. Instead, the success of the novel, which paralleled the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in southern California, sparked a tourist boom and an interest in the “wholly generous and wholly free” Mexican ranchero life about which she wrote. Several films were made of the novel and a “Ramona pageant” has run every year in Hemet, California, since 1923.

Ramona was born to a Scottish father and an Indian mother. When her foster mother dies, she grows up on the Moreno ranch, the ward of a woman who does not like her and disdains her mixed parentage. Senora Moreno’s son Filipe, however, loves Ramona like a sister.  The story begins when Ramona is 19 and a band of Native American sheep shearers comes from Temecula, headed by Alessandro. Felipe is not well during the shearing and Alessandro sings and plays his violin, which soothes Felipe. Alessandro is asked to stay on when the shearing is finished, which makes him happy as he has fallen in love with Ramona. Alessandro brings Felipe out into the air, where he begins to recover.

Ramona and Alessandro meet and confess their love for each other, but Senora Moreno finds them. She is outraged and locks Ramona in her room. Felipe tells Alessandro to leave until her anger blows over. When Senora Moreno tells Ramona she will not permit her to marry an Indian, Ramona says, “The whole world cannot keep me from marrying Alessandro.” At last Senora Moreno tells Ramona about her birth mother and shows her the jewels which were given to Ramona. Ramona keeps the scarf in which the pearls are wrapped, but assumes the rest will be given to the church.

Alessandro does not come when he is expected, but after many days Ramona senses he is near. She goes to meet him. He is a wasted shadow of himself. The people of his village have been driven out, his father has died and his flocks and cattle taken. Ramona begs him to take her with him anyway. They steal away in the night, planning to get married and then go to San Pasquale where a cousin of Alessandro lives. There Alessandro finds that his father had sent some of their animals, so he is still well off. He worries whether Ramona can live in an Indian village. Ramona is happy, making their home in a small adobe with a verandah. She has a baby girl with blue eyes. She is saddened to hear that her friend Father Salvierderra has died. She had hoped to have his blessing.

Once again, however, they find that San Pasquale has become the property of the U.S. government. The lands can be filed on and homesteaded. When a man arrives with lumber to build a house, Alessandro sells everything. “Where will we go?” asks Ramona. “I know not,” says Alessandro. “Somewhere the Americans do not want.” They set off toward the San Jacinto mountains.

Back on the Moreno ranch, everyone misses Ramona. Felipe searches, but an Indian who knew them misdirects him. When he returns he finds his mother is dying. Before she does, she directs Felipe toward the hiding place of the jewels and the letter written about them. Felipe is ashamed. He vows to find Ramona if she is still alive.

Alessandro and Ramona suffer privations and finally settle in another small village, making another home. But Ramona does not feel safe and the baby sickens. They try to take it to San Bernardino, but the baby dies on the way. They go into the mountains, far from people. Alessandro builds another house. They are happy for a while, Ramona becomes pregnant again, but Alessandro broods, repressing his feelings to the point he begins to go mad. At times he has delusions. Ramona hopes the priests can help him, but one day he rides in on an unknown horse. Soon a gunman follows. Insisting that Alessandro has stolen the horse, he shoots him. Ramona sets off with the baby on a day’s journey to the next village.

Meanwhile, Felipe has been searching all over California. He finds the horses, which had been given to a young man from Tennessee who helped them. Then comes the news of Alessandro’s death. Felipe and Aunt Ree find Ramona lying ill in the village, but Aunt Ree knows herbs which will save her. When she grows better, Felipe takes Ramona and her baby, also called Ramona, home to the Moreno ranch.

Ramona wrestles with her bereavement, remembering her duty to be joyful, as taught by Father Salvierderra. Felipe finds American life intolerable and begins to dream of moving to Mexico. He and Ramona plan a new life in this new world. Felipe finally declares he loves Ramona, who tells him, “Part of me is dead, but I will be your wife, if you think it is right.” The Moreno name is remembered in Mexico City and upon their marriage, Felipe and Ramona have sons and daughters. When Ramona hears doves singing, however, she looks up and remembers Alessandro.

Ramona’s faithfulness to her love and courage in taking up a nomadic existence with its privations is moving. Though written by a white woman, and incurably romantic, the story reflects something of the history of the time when “the Franciscans were dying out” and Hispanics were beginning to cede their lands to Americans as well. Its pervasive effect on the region surprised me, a story I did not know until I moved to southern California myself.

Mary Mann Hamilton

In her autobiography, published under the title Trials of the Earth in 2016, Mary Mann Hamilton tells in vivid prose of her life on the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century. She lived from 1866 to 1936, but the part that interests her most is the time of her marriage to Frank Hamilton, thirty years from the time she was 18 until his death in 1914.

Frank got to know Mary’s family after her father died and was instrumental in sending her to Illinois to school. When she found out how far behind she was, however, she quit and studied dressmaking. Frank wrote to her every week. When her mother died, she promised to marry Frank, who had asked for her hand. He was 14 years older, a mysterious Englishman who had been in the army in Bengal, India, was well-educated and knew many languages. Mary could not believe he loved her, but he told her, “You have more common sense than most.” She admired him more than anyone, but felt she didn’t love him.

Mary was never happier than when cooking, and started out working at an 80-person boarding house. She quickly found that Frank had what he called rheumatism, as well as malaria, and drank to deal with it. Mary cared for him and wondered about his mysterious past. He said that he came from a good old family in England, but that he had been betrayed by someone close to him and that they were dead to him.

Frank worked hard managing lumber camps, but couldn’t seem to hold on to money. At the time, lumber was needed for railroad ties. Mary worked so hard that she lost her first baby, and her second. Frank was often gone. They moved to Arkansas and then to Missouri. Mary took time to rest, and writes of the fruitful land around her brother’s house. She wanted nothing more than a little home herself. Ozzie was born, and then Nina and Leslie, two little girls. Mary and Frank delighted in their children, but at six Ozzie was poisoned by a doctor prescribing strychnine by mistake.  The family was devastated.

Frank found that his health was better in the Mississippi Delta, on Concordia Island. A doctor had told him that if he found a climate that agreed with him, he should stay there. The family lived in a large cloth tent and Frank’s crew made barrel staves. Mary was thrilled to see Frank in good health and she also loved the country. She cooked for a smaller crew. By this time another son, Frankie, was born. In an epic storm, Frank saved his family by hollowing out a stump and making a little boat. That winter was a “fat” time, with presents, candy and good food at Christmas.

Mary decided to make every place they lived in a home for them all, as they kept moving from camp to camp. A great storyteller, Mary describes many of these places in detail, as well as what the children said and did. There was much laughter as well as tears, and she reproduces many of the things Frank tells her. Though she didn’t badger him about his past, she did learn some things. When Nina, who had hair and a face like his mother’s, died, Frank went to pieces.

Finally, Frank purchased some land and built a house on the Sunflower River. Mary laid out a big garden and they cleared the rich Delta land for crops. Mary taught her children to help with the work, that the home was theirs as much as their parents. They all loved it. Idris and Bruce were born, and finally a tiny premature baby, John Robert. “I always looked for neighbors,” said Mary. “If you have neighbors you’re never poor. I didn’t look for trouble. It came and found us anyway."

They lost that house, as an overbearing neighbor wanted their piece of land. To get the children in school they moved back to Arkansas. Frank and Mary felt the children were most important, in any case. “My children were my flower garden,” she says. “Each was a new kind, needing different care and cultivation.” They had many happy evenings in front of the fire, Frank reading and telling stories.

One winter when things were going well, Frank thought he might go to England in the spring and try to clear up his family problems. He told Mary of the church where his family had been members for 600 years, their names in the register. But an accident, and another bad decision by a doctor, rendered Frank an invalid. “How I loved him,” said Mary. “Even better than my children.” But she was losing him. Before he died he told Mary that it wouldn’t help anyone to learn who his family was and he preferred not to tell.

After his death, Mary lived with one or the other of her five living children, who were growing up. She was so proud of them. “They weren’t rich or brilliant, but, as Frank taught them, they were straight and honest. They had been fitted by their father’s proud blood, his ideals and the training he gave them to a life far different from the one that poverty and helplessness made the only way after he was gone.”

Mary’s life of trouble and pain, hard work, laughter, love and courage is a riveting story. Her love for her mysterious husband and her children form the backdrop of the book. I can only point to the pleasure of reading it. Indeed, she does have more common sense than most, and she shares it freely.

Penelope

John William Waterhouse, Penelope and the Suitors

Penelope was a central character in the Homeric epic The Odyssey, among the orally transmitted poems finally written down in the late 8^th and early 7^th centuries BC. These poems may have had some historical background in the sieges and wars between the Greek city states which occurred four to five centuries earlier. They are stuffed with gods and goddesses who interact with humans, causing much trouble and saving whom they will.

Penelope is the daughter of Icarius, a Spartan prince famed as a champion runner. He proclaims that the man who wants to win his daughter must beat him at a race. Odysseus does this. When he is about to take Penelope home to his island of Ithaca, her father gives her the choice whether to go with Odysseus or stay home. Penelope simply puts her veil modestly in front of her face, which her father interprets as a wish to go with Odysseus.

In The Illiad, which begins in the middle of the ten-year long Trojan War, we do not hear anything about Penelope. Odysseus is gone all that time, though he and Penelope have had a son, Telemachus. Odysseus’ attempts to get home after the war are thwarted by the gods and it takes him another ten years. During that time, Penelope spends most of her time weaving in an upper room in her home with her women around her. She longs for her husband, as he longs for her.

When it begins to appear that Odysseus will not come home, a pack of young men begin to hang around, intent on becoming Penelope’s second husband. Telemachus, her son, is too young to prevent them from feasting every day at the house, eating up the cattle, sheep and pigs that are his patrimony. Penelope, who is as cunning as her husband, tells the suitors that when she finishes the shroud she is making for her father-in-law Laertes, she will marry one of them. Every day she weaves, but at night she undoes what she has woven that day. For three years this ruse works, but one of her handmaids tells the suitors what Penelope is doing.

When the household poet sings of Odysseus’ exploits, Penelope says “Sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart out.” Telemachus rebukes her and then leaves, to try to find news of his father. Penelope is horrified to find he is gone. The suitors plan to kill him, but Athena sends her a message that all will be well.

At this point Odysseus is still constrained by Calypso to stay with her on her island. He longs for “his quiet Penelope” and home. Athena intervenes and Odysseus has more adventures, but is at last given gifts and a ship to take him to Ithaca. Arriving, he visits first his faithful swineherd, dressed as a beggar. Telemachus also comes back to the island and meets his father there. Together they make plans to kill the suitors and retake their home.

Telemachus goes home first, though Odysseus will not allow him to tell Penelope that he is on the island. “What shall I do?” she asks Telemachus. Inspirited, Telemachus tells her to remain with her women in the upper room. The suitors continue to eat, drink and plot. When Odysseus, dressed as a beggar, comes and sits in the door stoop, they make fun of him and throw things at him. Telemachus tells them not to ill-use his guest.

Athena sends Penelope down in her great beauty, “her shining veil across her cheek.” “Deep-minded queen,” says one of the suitors, “Beauty like yours no woman had before.” At last she brings Odysseus’ heavy bow into the room and says that whoever can string it and send an arrow through 12 axe handles will be her husband. None of the suitors is able to string the bow. Telemachus makes some effort, but then sends his mother upstairs. Odysseus easily strings the bow, then strikes Antinous, the chief suitor with an arrow to his neck. With the help of his son, the swineherd and another herdsman, not to mention Athena, Odysseus slays all of the forty or more suitors. The servants come up to embrace Odysseus and the mutinous maids are made to clean up the mess.

Telemachus tells Penelope that his father has come home, but Penelope is skeptical. She sits on one side of the room, observing her husband, who has bathed and dressed himself, on the other. Odysseus’ old nurse has identified him by a childhood scar. “Let your mother test me,” said Odysseus. “We have secret signs between us.”

Penelope tells a servant to go and take their marriage bed into the hall, making it up for Odysseus. At this Odysseus flares up. “Who dares to move my bed?” he asks. “I made that bed from the trunk of a living olive tree.” When she hears this, Penelope runs to Odysseus and throws her arms around him. At last they weep together, rejoicing. When they go to bed, arms around each other, Odysseus tells her stories. “She could not close her eyes until all the stories had been told.”

The next day, Odysseus goes to his old father Laertes, also wasted with longing for his son. Laertes is spading earth around his fruit trees. Odysseus worries about the fathers of the suitors, who might come for revenge. Athena goes to Zeus, asking how to end this violence. “Conclude it as you will,” says Zeus. Thus, Athena compels the islanders to drop their quarrel and Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus are allowed to live in peace.

The Odyssey has followed me around most of my life. When I finally read it in the Robert Fitzgerald translation recently, hardly any of the incidents were unfamiliar. Indeed, the story of the weaving and unweaving of the shroud is told three times! As the wife of a valiant husband who is gone at least a third of the time, I most identify with the homecoming. When Don comes home, it takes days sometimes before all the stories have been told.