An antidote to Christmas humbug

A great many of my friends and family are confirmed Christmas nay-sayers, citing primarily its commercial aspect, its religious dimension (or the lack of it), its hyped-up artificiality . . .   Etc.  I tend to agree with their criticisms and complaints, but reach my own conclusions, and my own solutions.  

Shunning the glitzy aspect of Christmas as completely as possible, I try to avoid commercial radio, television, and shopping malls during the month of December, and seek refuge in the still recesses of the house: curled up on the couch under a blanket, beside fireplace and illuminated tree, fortifying myself against the contemporary world with egg nog, rum and a stack of worthy old books. 

Moreover, as Marian & I count Christmas as the true first day (with eleven to come) of the Christmas season, rather than the last, we mostly have our Christmas when, by the rest of the world, it has already been forgotten. 

We take daily walks with our Scotty, have the occasional quiet meal out, dine in the houses of our friends and, all in all, keep a subdued Christmas, with major emphasis on food, drink, English traditions and, of course, books, books and more books.  (We have approximately 10,000 mostly hardcover books in our home, from basement to attic, filling floor-to-ceiling bookcases in every room, and not a Kindle or Nook among them).

First and foremost, of course, is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  I would like to say that we own an 1843 Chapman & Hall edition, illustrated by John Leech and designed by Dickens himself– for that would be the preferred way to read it– where not only the language but the physical presence of the book itself, right down to the faint whiff of old dust and the smattering of foxing on the fine old linen paper, are redolent of the time and place where the story originated, the long-ago and long-since-vanished world of early Victorian London.

A library should be full of such volumes, books as old as their authors, and ours has its share– including a two-volume 1852 edition of David Copperfield in half-leather– but The Christmas Carol is a special case, and if we actually owned one we would doubtless have to keep it under lock & key.  So we make do with later (much later) editions.

A excellent choice is a volume from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens series, which is small enough to fit the hand easily, and thus nicely adapted to reading in bed.  It comes together with Dickens’ other Christmas tales, and is entitled simply Christmas Books.  It has the original illustrations by John Leech (with the other stories illustrated by their respective original artists), and a new introduction by Eleanor Farjeon.

The perfect companion volume to A Christmas Carol is The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’ s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.  Described by its author, Les Standiford, as “a fireside pleasure of the Fezziwigian type, and not a formal work of scholarship”, I found the style sufficiently light and enlivened to read through the whole book in a sitting, though I suspect that, as a work of scholarship, it will bear scrutiny.  It is not only a history of Dickens and his book, and the reception it received, and a consideration of its considerable influence, but a deeply thoughtful meditation on the nature of Christmas as well.

Behind all of Dickens, and close to essential meaning of Christmas, is the squalid reality of London poverty in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution.  I have several books which I return to off and on throughout the year, but which I dwell upon especially during the Christmas season. 

Top of the list are the several chronicles of the London poor published by the journalist Henry Mayhew in the 1850s and ’60s: London Labour & the London Poor; The Criminal Prisons of London and London’s Underworld.  Mayhew had a gift for winning the confidence of the desperate and destitute, and of persuading them to speak freely of their lives and circumstances, and the personal accounts that he put into his books were a shock and a revelation to his readers at the time, and to this day.

His books are now considered classics and, as such, merit presentation in expensive editions such as that put forth by the Folio Society: London Characters and Crooks, which is a selection from several Mayhew titles, and is illustrated by the superb Woodburytype plates of John Thompson, from his Street Life in London, published in 1877-8.

A recent study of the 19th century London dark side is Kellow Chesney’s Pickpockets, Beggars & Ratcatchers, Life in the Victorian Underworld, which not only examines Henry Mayhew’s works in depth, but casts a wide net over contemporary first-hand accounts and early sociological and criminology studies dating back to the 1830s, to dredge up detailed portraits of navvies, costermongers, tinkers, gypsies, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, forgers, footpads, burglars, housebreakers, cracksmen, confidence men, bookies, gonophs, beggars, and many others.  A most helpful glossary of colloquial and cant words is provided.

For a visual tour of the back streets of 19th century London there is no finer guide than Gustave Dore who published his London portfolio of 180 drawings in the early 1870s.   I recommend the inexpensive Dover edition: Dore’s London: All 180 Illustrations from London, A Pilgrimage.  Roughly half the drawings are of the upper crust and what strikes one most about these is how more or less identical everyone looks, all dressed in much the same way and comporting themselves according to the tightly defined  strictures of their class.  Of greater interest are the far more individualistic styles of the street people, captured in all their idiosyncratic variety and detail by Dore’s uncanny eye.

For an in-depth study of poverty in England during the dawn of the Industrial Age, the finest study is undoubtedly Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Idea of Poverty in the Early Industrial Age.  It examines the idea of poverty in the writings of Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Malthus, Carlyle, Cobbett, Engels, Mayhew and others, as well as how the idea of poverty is presented in the literary works of Dickens, Ainsworth, Thackery, and Reynolds.

Himmelfarb suggests no clear villians or heroes, and offers no clear answers about the causes or cures of poverty.  The more  poverty is examined, the more complex and contradictory it becomes.  Yet for answering the question of how or whether the Industrial Revolution exacerbated the problem of poverty in England, or even created an entire new class of the poor, Himmelfarb’s study is indispensable.  I have returned to it numerous times over the years, and study it especially at Christmas.

Finally, I came across an apropos title online a few days ago which I immediately ordered: Dickens & the Street Children of London by Andrea Warren.  I expect to read it straight through once it arrives, which should be any day now.

For the past several Christmases I have developed an idea of a cycle of sonnets, each portraying a particular London street person from the 1840s.  This Christmas I completed the first of what I hope will be many, entitled “A Widow in Rosemary Lane“.

In these days leading up to Christmas . . .

a night of cold comfort on the cobblestones

In these days leading up to Christmas, I continue— in working simultaneously as an historical interpreter at Pricketts Fort & as a theatre & arts reviewer at Fairmont State— to straddle a chronological divide of some two & a half centuries. Making that journey almost daily, from the trans-Allegheny frontier of the 1770s to the twilight realm of contemporary art and theatre, has left me with a severe case of chronic disorientation— particularly when immersed in yet one more historical period or another while researching & reviewing a play.

This past semester it was Victorian London for The Elephant Man, followed by Weimar Berlin for Cabaret. Some of my days run from 5 a.m. to midnight, from a smoke-filled 18th century log cabin to the gas-lit smog of a 19th century London alleyway.

After such a marathon stretch of corn-hoeing, wood-splitting, & theatre-attending,  the dream-sequence I am likely to endure that night will be one for the books: hoisting a hefty pint of Tetley’s ale in a darkened London pub with Fess Parker wearing a coonskin cap, a monocle & smoking a Meerschaum pipe, as we engage in a lively  tête-à-tête over the relative merits of Browning’s dramatic monologues vs. Tennyson’s meditative lyrics, the increasing scarcity of prime beaver pelts in the lower Ohio valley, the deplorable living conditions among the labouring classes in London’s East End & the likelihood that the Shawnee will take to the warpath in the coming Spring. I’m never sure if I’m leading a colorful life or just entering the opening phases of dementia.

Be that as it may, Marian & I are settling in for a long, quiet interlude: decking the halls, dressing the bird, and wishing you all a very Merry Christmas indeed.

Virginia de Courcey, relics: literary, political, philosophical writings, 1966-1986

For those of you who remember my second wife, Virginia de Courcey, who died in 1986, I am in the process of makng her writings available online.  It is labor-intensive, but a labor of love.  There are many hundreds of pages to be typed out by hand, as they are on typescript of quality too poor to be rendered into digital form by OCR technology.

Her writings will be available here:

Anyone with copies of Virginia’s writings not listed on this site, please contact me at skipper@labyrinth.net.

Thank you,
BJ Omanson

After three suicide attempts & a stint in the asylum, the poet Cowper retires to his Garden & the company of his rabbit

So here it is, August nearly gone, and this is almost the first time this year I have had a moment to sit quietly in the garden and write.  What has gone wrong in my life?  At my age, life should be slowing down . . .

The poet Cowper, for instance, managed it nicely.  Recovering from three suicide attempts and a harrowing stint in the asylum, he retired undisturbed to his garden where he labored endlessly on  meditative poems in blank verse, interspersed with idyllic days of doing nothing but puttering among the shrubbery in the company of his rabbit.

If Cowper could so neatly arrange his life, why can’t I?

the poet Cowper, puttering among the shrubbery in the company of his rabbit

But if I have lacked time for reading & reflection in my garden, I have at least had the solace of working in it on my infrequent days off and, by such tending, maintaining it as a proper haven for that hypothetical interlude of blessed inaction which never seems to come.  And if it is true that I have scarcely employed it for this purpose myself,  our particular genius loci–  the good Mr. Chumbles–  is always there with his sure instinct for locating the perfect meditative niche.

Along with the usual quotidian garden chores, I began painting the house this summer. Not that I got very far . . .

I began with the front porch which looks out over Oak Grove Cemetery, affords a glimpse of the Monongahela, and of the wooded hills rising on its opposite bank. The porch is almost a garden in itself, clad in English ivy and painted in Mediterranean hues. At Marian’s insistence, I even gave the old wicker furniture a new coat of color.

 

 

Of course, once the front porch had been resurrected, Mr Chumbles was quick to insist that similar efforts be applied to the back porch, which is his preferred haunt. I never did get around to painting it, but did clear away several summers’ accumulation of rubbish and junk and imposed a modicum of order on the place. Chumbles settled right in and has added one more title to his growing list of grand appelations: namely the ‘Back Porch Pasha’.

back porch pasha

~~~~~
Yet in Eden, all is not well . . .

From yon far country, an air that kills . . . . to paraphrase Housman.  Although in this instance the air that kills is not from a far country at all, but rather from a recently clear-cut hillside just a half-mile upriver–  while the source of the lethal air– which promises to cast a debilitating pall over our garden and home–  is a pair of sinister Marcellus gas wells, within sight of our neighborhood.  The figure of Death sitting in a garden chair.  Et in Arcadia ego.

For the whole of the past summer and spring these wells, and thousands of other gas wells across much of rural West Virginia and Pennsylvania, have kept me preoccupied.   I have joined with others in the community to fight their appearance directly across the Monongahela river from the intake pipe from which all of Morgantown gets its drinking water.  Our efforts to stop this well, and to resist Marcellus drilling generally throughout the Monongahela watershed, are chronicled in a new blog which I established this past spring, entitled Gas wells on the Monongahela: hydrofracking in the Monongahela watershed, a grassroots view. 

These wells, situated on the river, will be spewing unregulated clouds of highly-toxic pollutants directly upwind from our neighborhood, and as the air currents are contained and funneled by the river bluffs, the entire airborne discharge will wash right over us.  Two wells are drilled already, with more slated for the near future.

But that dire development still lies several weeks into the future, when the hydrofracking is slated to commence.

 For now the Red Queen and her faery consort still watch over the pool in the ivy.  The catbirds and mockingbirds still harrass Mr Chumbles at every opportunity– an annoyance he scarcely deigns to notice– and our backyard Arcadia remains a haven of arborous tranquility fit for the Goddess Flora.  How long it will remain so is a matter for the Fates and the Marcellus gas industry.

hard times

The way a single frail crocus struggles up through black matted leaves in our garden looks much like the world struggling to throw off this obdurate global recession.  The accumulated crust and weight of old death seems impossible to penetrate.

I slog on.  Fittingly, all my work of late has concerned war or hard times. A few days ago I sent off a manuscript, the memoir of a First World War soldier with my commentary and annotations, to McFarland Publishing, wrote a review of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Seztuan, about a poor prostitute struggling through poverty, added new titles to two of my American history bookstores, the Hard Times Bookstore and the American Labor History Bookstore, where all the news these days has been nothing but hard times.

Also, not too long ago, I wrote the following poem, which will be part of my collection, Stark County Poems: War & the Depression come to Spoon River:

~ ~ ~ ~

Nowhere to Nowhere

When they sold off the farm she took the child
and caught a bus out of town– as for him,
with everyone gone and everything grim,
he opened a pint of bourbon, piled

pictures, letters and clothes in the yard,
doused them in kerosene, struck a match
and watched as they burnt to ashes, watched
and worked on his whiskey, working hard.

The next morning he caught an outbound freight
heading god-knows-where and he didn’t care–
he was down to nothing, a gypsy’s fare–
down to a rusty tin cup and a plate,

dice and a bible, a bedroll and fate,
down to a bone-jarring ride on a train
through country dying and desperate for rain,
running nowhere to nowhere and running late.

trans-siberian train of thought

These past days stretching into weeks of ice and snow have put me much in mind of that old “easeful” friend that Keats wrote of— .  From about midnight until 3 or 4 each night I have been reading from Boris Pasternak— poetry, bolsheviks, siberia, beautiful women, war— the ideal antidote to days of mundane drudgery.

Every winter I read Dickens through the Christmas season, then something Russian until the spring.  I suspect a good many male poets of a certain age received an impulse into poetry on some primal level, in their teens, from watching the David Lean production of Dr. Zhivago over and over again on a wide screen in some old theatre house.  Yuri Zhivago in that otherworldly ice-enshrouded empty house, with his mistress Laura asleep in the other room, and he sitting alone at a table with a pen, a sheet of paper and a solitary candle, courting his half-frozen muse in the depths of the Siberian night.  The archetypal poet. 

Winter hangs on here.  The backyard angels are ensconced in ice, sheltering among the spruces.  The robins, who arrived some time ago, are lying low.  In the frozen ground the bulbs are torpid, awaiting rumors of worms and rebirth. In the early twilight I place a candle in the window and watch as it warms a halo in the frost.