Internet Radio Daze

I’ll be on an internet radio program, Tuesday morning at 7 Eastern time, talking about books! More here!

Update: Did the interview, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, and it’s archived here.

Another Post at History Undressed

I have a guest post up at History Undressed … Civil War in the Hill Country, a shorter version of the talk that I gave to the Civil War Roundtable last week. (Which went over pretty well, I think – although I was fighting against a lot of noise from the main dining room at the venue.)

All Things Doggish

It has happened to us again; we came home from morning walkies on Thursday with an extra dog, to the bafflement and apparent disgust of the Lesser Weevil and Connor … who seem to be getting over it, even as I write. The current canine find is small, attractive, and relatively well-behaved and seems to be agreeable to cats. Which a dog in our house had damn-well better be … the cats outnumber the dogs, and are Superior Beings – at least, as the cats see it, and woe betide the canine which doesn’t acknowledge this superiority immediately.

We have done this quite often – arrived home with another dog. Usually we can locate an owner almost at once – either the original owner or someone who will step up to the plate and take said dog on. Now and again we have had to turn them over to the county animal shelter; a concern which is trying their damndest to re-house the amiable and healthy animals which are turned into their facility. This time we do have some hopes of locating the owner who is missing him. How many people in a short range of our neighborhood have managed to misplace what appears to the expert eye (of a breeder just a short way away) to be a young pure-bred male Pomeranian, of an appealing reddish coloring, an amiable personality, and agreeable to other cats and dogs. He (an unmistakably un-neutered he) was running around on one of the main streets through our neighborhood. It took a bit of effort to catch him, as they are fast-moving little b****rds. Two of our neighbors stopped and told us – as we were carrying him home – that they had tried to catch him, as he was merrily skipping about in the traffic along that main feeder avenue. We were the first to be successful, probably because he was curious about Weevil and Connor, so that after about three blocks of pursuit, feints and dodges, my daughter  managed to scoop him up in her arms and carry him homewards – all eight pounds and some. Of which I think a pound or so is in the weight of his fur and about half a pound in the weight of his balls … un-neutered male, as I said.

He was gloriously filthy, having had a good couple of days of unsupervised freedom – enough to ravel the fur on his nether quarters into unspeakably filthy knots, bedecked with a huge quantity of foxtails, stickers and other matter best left undescribed. We stopped and talked to a handful of neighbors – some of whom said they had seen him at large and from a distance, as a fast-moving ball of fluff – for about a week, which seems about right, although where he was getting food and water from is anyone’s guess. He was quite cooperative about being bathed and groomed – which is a huge necessity for the breed, and was enthusiastic about accepting a harness and leash and going for the usual walkies this morning. One curious note – he prefers women; doesn’t care for men at all, and now and again growls at me when I come into the house wearing the gimme baseball cap that I wear when working in the garden. So, I deduce a female owner, with other cats and dogs in the household. Dismayingly, though – there are no posters out for him, and nothing like him listed on any of the local lost-pet websites, and he can’t possibly have come very far. We’ve been told by people who know that that there are pets being abandoned right and left, even here in San Antonio, where things are pretty much OK. It does say something, though – that the abandoned dogs that we have found lately aren’t the overgrown, untrained young mutts that someone apparently picked up as a cute puppy and ditched when they turned out to be too much of a handful. Connor is a Maltese-poodle of some years, well-trained, amiable and socialized, previously well-taken care of, and the lost Pomeranian looks to be the same sort.

Oh, and if we don’t find his owner – which is starting to shape up that way – we’re going to keep him. Lord knows – he won’t eat much.

Story-Telling and History

I am almost sure that telling a historical story through a movie is fraught with as many perils for the story-teller as doing so through the medium of historical fiction – it’s just that the movie-maker’s pratfalls are so much more … public, I guess is the word that I’m fishing for. There are big-name, serious historical fiction writers who abuse history almost beyond recognition in their attempt to weave a tale of the past – Philippa Gregory, anyone? – but to my mind, the really, really egregious mainstream offenses are committed in the service of movie-making. I was reminded of this again, in reading yet another 100-year-anniversary-of-the-Titanic sinking, and how James Cameron had to apologize to the descendants of First Officer William Murdoch for the manner in which Murdoch’s character was maligned and his fate dramatized in Titanic … all in the service of punching up the drama a couple of degrees. Which was really not necessary, since – like most dramatic historical episodes – a strict accounting of the facts usually provides all the drama required. But Cameron isn’t the only movie-maker guilty of over-egging the pudding and re-making the characters of participants in events to suit the need for higher drama. The movie Zulu – also based on a supremely dramatic incident – felt obliged to portray one of the participants in the battle of Rorke’s Drift as an insubordinate drunkard and a malingerer. The man was actually a teetotaler and a model professional soldier, and his then still-living daughters were outraged, to the point of walking out of the premiere. The mega-flopperoo Heaven’s Gate did the same with Nate Champion, Jim Averill, and Frank Canton – real participants in the historical Johnson County war, but not quite as how they were drawn. I suppose the funniest take on the clash between historical accuracy and the needs of cinematic spectacle must be the old Alan Alda movie, Sweet Liberty.

Anyway – it’s a problem, using the names of real people, and it just seems to be worse with movies. Curiously, the worst offenders that I can think of make a great big deal about their fidelity to historical accuracy, but usually that means they will try very, very, very hard to nail down small details; the general appearance of things, but trip and fall over plot points as well as character development. I’m still shaking my head over Mel Gibson’s The Patriot – heck, they even scored a cover story about their fidelity to historical accuracy in The Smithsonian Magazine. At least, though – they had the decency to change all the names of the characters. The Patriot was only inspired by the adventures of certain historical characters in the American Revolution; mercifully, they didn’t even try to do an accurate rendering of the adventures of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox.

And that is the honest and ethical thing to do when re-telling a historical story in a novel or a movie; if it would have been impossible for a historical figure to have done, or said, or behaved in way that advances the plot, then one is perfectly free to make up a character to carry out those functions. Just be absolutely straight with the real people. Always. The thing about it is – just telling the story absolutely straight is often more dramatic, improbable and fantastic than anything you might have made up.

 

The Little House Books, and What They Meant to Me

Some time ago, as I was putting together the short story, Atalanta and the Erlking I was reminded yet again again of my own grade-school devotion to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books. My heroine is a thirteen-year-old girl, in the Texas Hill country during the Civil War, taking the first few steps toward being a responsible adult, in caring for her younger sister and friends, and bearing a warning to other households in the tiny settlement where she lives about the depredations of the ‘hanging band’, a pro-Confederate lynch mob. Much of the background activities in the story – cutting wood, making soap over an open fire – are all drawn from my memories of reading the Little House books. I have all of them, of course, from the hard-bound uniform editions that were published in the 1960ies, with Garth Williams’ illustrations. All of mine are sadly battered, and minus the dust jackets, but with flyleaf inscriptions in Mom’s handwriting; a present to me on my 8th birthday, a Christmas present in 1964, or 1965. Over five or six years, I acquired them one and two at a time, and read them avidly, often in one sitting. Little Town on the Prairie was the first, and is the most completely tattered. I think I got The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years next, at one fell swoop for my birthday, and then Mom and Dad filled out the collection with Farmer Boy and the others.

Mom had also been a fan. The books were originally published when she was in grade school, and her class had written a group fan letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was still then living, and she had sent them a very cordial reply, befitting a very proper Victorian school teacher. Later on, Mom tried emulating Ma, in being always calm and serene no matter what the situation, with mixed success as that degree of passive Victorian “Angel in the House” serenity was very much against her nature to begin with.

I read them out of sequence, as I received them as presents, and afterwards over and over and over again. I still hold the books (but not the TV series, which was marred by the constraints imposed by a weekly need for drama and irredeemable presentism) in considerable affection. Looking back now, though, one does wonder a little bit about Pa. Even allowing for Mrs. Wilder’s nostalgic affections, how on earth could a man make a bust of farming in Minnesota, for pete’s sake? And rushing out to stake a claim in a territory not yet open for settlement, and which turned out not to be, after all? It is not even certain that the books were entirely of her own writing, either. The Little House books are so different, much more immediate in the telling, and deft in the descriptions and characterization than those writings known absolutely to be by Mrs. Wilder. That was plain to me as soon as I had a chance to compare and contrast- say, by high school. As soon as the theory was raised by her biographer, I thought it quite likely that Rose Wilder Lane, a professional writer of long experience, had polished, added to and edited her mother’s memoir.

The books spoke to us, to Mom and I both. After all, when they were first published, the details of lives on the frontier in the 1870ies were in the living memory of grandparents, and even parents; Granny Jessie had been raised on a farm, where horses provided the main power, when pigs were slaughtered in the fall, for meat to last the winter, and it was expected that a housewife would make her own clothes and her own jam, and for the family to make their own music and entertainment of an evening. Wood burning stoves, kerosene lanterns and outhouses were, and are still a part of life in many parts of the country. My own Dad fixed things, and built things, just like Pa. Mom read to us, and made our clothes, and we sang long folksongs together – just like the Ingalls family did.

And even though they had lived in what was always seen as the Old West (and everything I ever knew about blizzards and the dangerous attraction of pump handles in mid-winter, I learned from the books) this was an Old West that was not the wild and wooly frontier of so much popular culture: although there were brief encounters with elements that are supposed to be typical (cattle drives, Indians, lawlessness and violence) most of the narrative is concerned with the prosaic business of making a life for a family, in the face of dangers more natural than man-made; blizzards, prairie fires, tornadoes, drought and plagues of grasshoppers, malaria and scarlet fever. Oh, and the problem of being snubbed at school by the girls with nicer clothes, and trying to keep a surprise Christmas present a secret, in a small house.

The Little House books still speak to us, because in that American way, they are profoundly optimistic. The common message running through all the books is that of being able to cope with whatever was set in your way, no matter how large or small: You yourself, your family, with your friends, and the community could do what needed to be done to resolve the problem, no matter if it was a bad-tempered teacher picking on your little sister, or the entire town snowed in and near starvation. There was a solution, sometimes a hard, and risky solution, requiring courage and daring –  but there was a solution, and it could be accomplished. This is a very empowering message, which I think explains the enduring appeal.

Not Prepping … Just Prepared

It would seem that once there is a TV reality show about something than you can assume that it’s gone mainstream enough that the denizens of the mainstream media world are interested. So it seems to have happened with ‘prepping’ – that is, being prepared for the zombie apocalypse with a garage or a bunker full of shelf-stable and dried foods, a water purification system and a couple of cases of munitions. Meh … a lot of people went nutso over this just before New Years’ Day 2000, and there always has been a lunatic fringe … but then ensuring that you have a plentiful supply of food, drink and supplies on hand used to be pretty mainstream, actually. It was called ‘getting ready for winter’ in the 19^th century, especially if you lived on a homestead half a day’s journey from the nearest general store. It certainly has been a requirement for LDS church members, as I discovered when I lived in Utah. It seemed pretty sensible for me, actually – having an emergency stash of food. I remember my mother telling me of a friend of hers, whose husband was laid off from the Lockheed assembly line. They bought a hundred-pound sack of dried beans, which formed the largest part of their daily meals until he was employed again. We never were forced to that extreme, Dad being regularly employed, but on occasion my mother finished out the last day or two before his paychecks arrived with barely a handful of dollars and change to buy groceries with. The grandparents remembered not just the Depression, but hard times before that. They always – especially Granny Jessie who was raised on a farm – had a stash of foodstuffs on hand. So, it always seemed quite natural to read in the Little House Books, of how Pa and Ma Ingalls planted a garden, harvested from it, stored away potatoes and squash in a root cellar, butchered a pig and smoked the hams and made sausage, made apple butter and wild-berry jam. I don’t remember if Ma made cheese from fresh cow’s milk; but I do remember descriptions of churning butter from it.

Mind you, my own parents weren’t that hard-core about do-it-yourself food, but they had the can-do-it-yourself attitude about a lot of things, including landscaping and shade-tree auto repair. I came away from the assignment in Utah with a full-size freezer, a dehydrator with a lot of extra trays, and a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer with a lot of extra attachments … like a sausage stuffer, for instance. It just seemed quite natural to get interested in home brewing, and home cheese-making as well, as the results have been so delicious … and doing this had the added benefit of me being able to write fairly knowledgeably about a 19^th century homemaker doing all this. Although – I am not hard-core enough t do it over a wood-burning iron stove. There is something very satisfactory about eating a slice of home-made baguette with a slice of home-made cheese on it, to eating fresh salad greens from your own garden, tomatoes and beans and squash that you picked just that afternoon.

We’ve just started doing jams and pickles and relishes of our own, in addition to all the other things. How much better than the purchased food will they taste? I’m beginning to think the next thing will be keeping hens for eggs, and I just don’t know how the neighbors will feel about that. Keeping a small cow for milk, though – that is definitely out. The yard is just not large enough.

Granny Clarke

Granny Clarke was the mother of my mothers’ dearest friend from the time that JP, my next-youngest brother and I were small children,  before my sister Pippy was born, and my parents were living in a tiny rented cottage in the hills part of Beverly Hills – a house on a dirt road, with the surrounding area abundant in nothing much else but chaparral, eucalypts and rattlesnakes. Mom and her friend, who was eventually of such closeness that we called her “Auntie Mary” met when Mom began to attend services at a Lutheran congregation in West Hollywood, rather than endure the long drive to Pasadena and the ancestral congregation at Trinity Lutheran in Pasadena.

 Auntie Mary Hammond was a little older than Mom, with four sons, each more strapping than the other, in spite of Auntie Mary’s wistful hopes for one of them to have been a girl. The oldest were teenagers, the youngest slightly younger than JP  . . .  although Paulie was as large and boisterous as his older brothers and appeared to be more my contemporary. They lived all together with Auntie Mary Hammonds’ mother, Granny Clarke, in a townhouse in West Hollywood, an intriguing house built on a steeply sloping street, up a flight of stairs from the concrete sidewalk, with only a tiny garden at one side, and the constant background noise and bustle of the city all around, not the quiet wilderness of the hills, which JP and I were more used to.  But there was one thing we had in common with Paulie and his brothers— an immigrant grandparent with a curious accent and a long career in domestic service inSouthern California.

It is a little known curiosity, outside Southern California (and maybe a surprise to even those inside it, in this modern day) that there was once a thriving and very cohesive British ex-pat community there; one that revolved around the twin suns of the old and established wealthy families, and the slightly newer movie business – united in their desire for employment as high-class and supremely competent domestic service, or just residence in a place offering considerably nicer weather. They all met on Sundays at Victor McLaughlin Park, where there were British-rules football games, and even cricket matches, all during the 20ies and 30ies. (My maternal and paternal grandfathers may even have met there, twenty years before their son and daughter resolved to marry their respective fortunes together).

All unknowing, my own Grandpa Jim and Auntie Mary’s mother, Granny Clarke, represented the poles of that lonely expat community. Grandpa Jim worked for nearly three decades for a wealthy, well-established Pasadena family of irreproachable respectability  . . .  and Granny Clark, for reasons that may be forever unknown,  took it into her head to work for “those Hollywood people.” According to my mother, who took a great interest in Granny Clarke and held her in considerable reverence, this was an irrevocable career move. In the world of domestic service in Southern California back then, once a domestic had “Hollywood” people on the professional resume, they were pretty well sunk as far as the other respectable employers were concerned. It is all rather amusing at this 21st century date to discover that the Old Money Pasadena/Montebello  People looked down on the New Money Los Angeles People, who all  in turn and in unison looked down on the very new Hollywood People  . . .  who had, as legend has it, arrived on a train, looking for nice weather and a place to film those newfangled moving picture thingies without being bothered by an assortment of … well, people that did not have their best economic interests at hand, back on the Other Coast.

So, while Granny Clarke might have been originally advised that she was committing professional suicide by casting her fortunes with “those Hollywood People,” it turned out very well in the end for her, even though she appeared, personally, to have been the very last likely person to take to the waters of the Tinseltown domestic pool with any enthusiasm. She was a being of the old breed, a stern and unbending Calvinist, the sort of Scots Lowlander featured in all sorts of 19th century stories; rigidly honest and a lifelong teetotaler, fearlessly confident in the presence of those who might have assumed themselves to be her social and economic betters, honest to a fault  . . .  and thrifty to a degree that my mother (no slouch in that department herself) could only genuflect towards, in awe and wonder. One of the first things that I remember Mom telling me about Granny Clarke was that she would carefully melt and re-mold the half-consumed remnants of jelled salads, pouring the liquid into an even smaller mold, and presenting a neat appearance at a subsequent meal. Neither Mom nor her own mother, Granny Jessie, ever had felt obliged to dress up leftovers as anything else than what they were, but Granny Clarke was a consummate professional.

Her early employers, so Mom related to me, were so enormously and touchingly grateful not to be abused, cheated and skinned economically, (or betrayed to the tabloids and gossip columnists) that no matter how personally uncomfortably they might have felt in the presence of someone who was the embodiment of sternly Calvinistic disapproval of their personal peccadilloes, Granny Clarke was fully and generously employed by a long sequence of “Hollywood people” for the subsequent half-century. Granny Clarke managed to achieve, I think, a certain ideal, of being able to tolerate in the larger arena, while disapproving personally, and being respected and valued in spite of it all. She was painfully honest about household accounts, and ran the kitchen on a shoestring, buying the least expensive cuts  . . .  and with magical skill, conjuring the most wonderful and richly flavored meals out of them.

She was for a time, employed by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the legendary Pickfair mansion, before moving on to her longest stretch of employment, as housekeeper and cook for the dancer and star, Eleanor Powell. According to Mom, she only and regretfully left service with Ms. Powell after the formers’ marriage to Glenn Ford. The impetus was that Granny Clarke collected stamps and so did Mr. Ford, and after the marriage of Mr. Ford and Miss Powell, Granny Clarke no longer had an uncontested pick of the many exotic stamps that came in attached to Miss Powell’s fan mail. She went to work for James Mason, instead. Presumably, he didn’t grudge her the stamps from his fan mail.

In retirement, she lived with her daughter and son in law, and their four sons, which is when I knew her. We were all only aware in the vaguest way that she had been the housekeeper to the stars; that all paled besides the wonderful way she cooked, and the way she cosseted us smaller children. I wish I had thought to ask for more stories about Hollywood in her time, for she must have been a rich fund of them.  One hot summer day, when we were at their house for dinner, Mom was not feeling very well, and when she confessed this, Granny Clarke said, sympathetically, “Oh, then I’ll fix you some poached eggs in cheese sauce.”

It sounded quite revolting to Mom – I think she may have been pregnant with my younger sister Pippy – but when Granny Clarke set down a  beautifully composed dish of perfectly poached eggs, bathed in a delicately flavored cheese sauce, Mom was able to eat every bite, and keep it down, too. She had never tasted anything quite so delicious, and when she said so, Granny Clarke allowed as how her poached eggs in cheese sauce had been a favorite among certain guests at Pickfair. Those movie moguls and directors and that, she said, all had ulcers and stomach upsets, through being so stressed … but they were all, to a man, very fond of her poached eggs and cheese sauce.