Vivian and me, July 14, 2015, taken by Izzy: Alexandria’s yearly birthday party, a large park area by the Potomac, a concert and fireworks for all for free; we had a picnic
Dear friends and readers,
We are near setting off on our journey to Milan, Italy — Laura, Izzy, and I — where among other things (a visit to a friend who lives near Zurick which will necessitate a train-ride through the Alps and beautiful lakes; a visit to a fellow biographer of Veronica Gambara, in Reggio Emilia) we plan to attend the World Figure-Skating Championships, and find and look into what fashion museums and exhibits there are in this famous world city.
The last time the three of us were in Italy was 1994, 5 weeks with Jim in an apartment in Rome, from the which we took 4 trips: to Pompei, to Naples, to the island of Ischia for 3 days (where there is a beautiful beach and Vittoria Colonna lived for a number of years it’s thought), to Marino (where Colonna was born). We all three have many memories of that time. Upon coming into the flat, Laura, then 15, declared Italy had not invented air conditioning yet. Izzy said to another child at the beach: “mi chiamo Isabella.” A high point for Jim and I was a fresco we saw in a fourteenth century church one morning. We all wandered in the heat over the forum, the Colosseum, saw an opera amid some ancient Roman stones.
And early yesterday evening my good friend, Vivian, died: she went quickly, three weeks after the cancer resumed. I wrote about my visit to her in a hospice place in my last blog. I have learned as she died she was quiet (perhaps sleeping?), appeared to be at peace, kept out of consciousness of pain by drugs. Did she go gentle into that good night? I was not there and in her two earlier phone calls she expressed anguish.
What is it Macbeth says upon being told: “She should have dy’de hereafter;/There would have been time for such a word.” I will not be here when the memorial service is held. I grieve for her and will miss her.
Every moment I’ve been able to I’ve been either reading, writing, thinking for the courses I’m teaching (The Later Virginia Woolf; Sexual & Marital Conflicts in Anthony Trollope: HKHWR), or taking (The Brontes, a book club whose first item is Atwood’s The Blind Assassin), or still at that paper (Woolf & Johnson, biographers), or online with friends, blogging, nurturing (so so speak) my 3 groups.io (the book, the extraordinary American Senator) — not to omit getting through all things needful for the trip. Some of them arduous, time-consuming, confusing — like airline reservations supposed to be on a website which are not there. Not to worry: Laura made a phone call in her firm determined voice and our tickets & we now exist again. “Able to” is the operative phrase: many a later afternoon or evening I give out and succumb to a movie that can keep me up; this weekend I reached the fifth episode of Alias Grace (another Atwood adapted).
I’m more awake tonight than I have been for several, enough to tell of how this past Wednesday I went to the last of the four lectures on Impressionism outside France: so to my last blog on Russia, the low countries and Italy, I add the UK, and I was not surprised it was the most interesting because he had the most paintings to show. Gariff went on for nearly 3 hours. This time I had heard of most of the painters, but had not realized that the work of many of the painters I had “placed” in separate schools when regarded as impressionist made a different kind of sense. Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912), who I’ve written about as an Edwardian woman painter in the Newlyn School, links to Laura Knight (1877-1970), who I wrote more briefly about as a Cornish artist. Victorian artists familiar to me as recording the abysmal poverty of the countryside and cities, i.e., George Clausen (1852-1944) belong here; and some I’d never heard of, Spencer Frederick Gore (1878-1914):
The Icknield Way (1912) — a road in Surrey since Roman times
Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and his fostering of post-impressionism, his pictures belong here too. A Scottish woman artist, Ethel Walker (1861-1951) now fits. She painted Vanessa Bell, the first image I’ve seen that enables me to begin to understand why Bell was so liked:
Vanessa 1937
Two American artists this time were very influential: Whistler and John Singer Sargent. I learned that the next time I go to London I should go the London Imperial War Museum. Its name (because of the militarist connotations) is misleading: it is a leading place for artist painting during WW1, which most of these people did. Sidney Starr (1857-1925) has such a poor wikipedia page, I have to link in a sales one (he was an important art critic):
Starr’s City Atlas (1889-90) was part of an exhibit or talk about how difficult to get to know London
Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942) ended up an important teacher (teachers matter), he was influenced by Monet and this is his most famous painting.
Children Paddling, Walberswick (1894)
But perhaps this curiosity, of an over-dressed woman with a cat called Hydrangeas is more characteristic
Vivian’s favorite painter was Monet, and during the visit her brother and sister took her on to Paris this summer they took her to Giverny. She also had a cat called Sammy (Samantha) for seven years.
Izzy and I almost didn’t go to a performance by Catherine Flye accompanied by Michael Tolaydo as narrator at the Metrostage of a revue of the life and songs of Joan Grenfell. We had tickets for Saturday, and were so preoccupied we forgot to go. The woman who basically runs the Metrostage single-handed phoned us 5 minutes before, and offered to let us come Sunday instead. This remarkable pair of actors presented a later afternoon of witty cheer with an undercurrent of desperate acceptance; there were some twee moments but also direct hits at frustrated longing hearts. My favorite was a piece called “The Telephone Call” (a woman spending her life caring for an aged parent). A couple very funny: one of a woman on her first airplane flight when people were still treated with respect and given comfort as human beings. The pianist played wonderful older melodies I recognized, one famous from WW2, The Warsaw Concert by Richard Addinsell (who wrote most of the music performed).
Michael Tolaydo and Catherine Flye, 2002 (Gardener McKay’s Sea Marks)
We had both wanted to go because we both remembered the moving play Sea Marks, with Tolaydo and Flye, which we saw with Jim in 2002 at this Metrostage. I’ve had that black-and-white newsprint picture on the wall of my study all this time
I return to Vivian. One of the class members of my Later Woolf came for the first class and for the rest I’ll keep him in the email list as I send comments and readings out, and lectures too. He can’t come regularly as he’s taking chemotherapy and radiation for cancer. Vivian was killed by lymphoma (as was Jenny Diski) combined with brain cancer. She was no reader: odd for a best friend for me, but there are other things that matter. She was a kind person, sensitive. Charitable and forbearing at others’ flaws. She shared my politics, my lack of religion. While she didn’t read books, she always seemed to know the latest US political development; she’d take the progressive side most of the time, and post about it on face-book. We went to Bernie Sanders rallies. We also took wandering walks in Old Town. We’d go to some movies together (we didn’t quite have the same tastes): I went twice to Kedi (the movie set in Isanbul about feral cats and their caretakers in that city) so she could see it, and she cried. She stayed up (she had problems sleeping so would often fall asleep at movies) for and was moved by Still Alice.
Here is one of the poems Flye recited, movingly:
If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell.
But life goes on …
That doesn’t mean one forgets however little one is given chance to mourn with any ceremony. I feel bad because Vivian had emailed the suggestion when she still thought she would live (some 5 weeks ago) that she and I go to the Grand Canyon this coming May. I had balked at the idea of the plane and asked if there was a way to go by train. No. It would take some absurd amount of time. A drive was ridiculous. I was adjusting to the idea of taking yet another plane (how I hate them all) and was beginning to propose we look into a package tour. I told her I imagined us on donkeys going up and down vast cliffs, which probably showed how little I know about modern tourism in the Grand Canyon. It was still in the realm of half-joke when she phoned to say the cancer had returned and she was in hospital. We had some good walks in Old Towne this summer: a ghost tour, one night along the water eating ice-cream listening to street musicians in the mild crowd.
We all come from the past … life is a braided cord of humanity stretching from time long gone … it cannot be defined by a single journey from diaper to shroud … (Russell Baker, Growing Up, an autobiography I read with freshman composition students decades ago, which I remembered tonight)
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Jacqueline: Sad about your friend, Ellen. This is the miserable aspect of getting older…. but, she was planning and looking forward till near the end, in plans that included you. You should do the trip for her, one day.
Me: I feel it was a blessing that in her last four months she believed the cancer diagnosis of metastasis into her brain was wrong. She had been told her lympoma was in remission 2 weeks before that. She made the decision not to take chemotherapy and radiation when she was told that with the chemo and radiation, the brain cancer would kill her in two years, but there was a chance of dementia. She had been just miserable from chemo for the months she took it to rid heself of the brain cancer (together with some dire stuff called Pnedisone?). So she went on her trip to Paris and for some nearly 7 months enjoyed life: her apartment was renovated by the brother and sister who took her to Paris, and as I say we were even making plans for a small trip. It seems so much better than destroying quality of life and enjoyment in the last months in order to make more of them.
OTOH, Jenny Diski (whose death I grieved over as I so entered into her books) chose the chemo and had the two years (of writing too) and then died of the treatment.
A third case: Clive James, the poet and essayist, was diagnosed with some fatal cancer that was supposed to kill him in 1 year. Here he is 6 years later; about 2 years ago a new drug came out which is now extending his life. From these late poems it seems he now lives with a daughter and grandchildren and sits a lot in a garden or bed. He has written great poems these last years, far better (to my mind) than the Alexander Pope-like bitter satires of his earlier years. He has a couple of poems half-embarrassed he is still here, but not minding this at all. No one should judge any of these decisions.
The joy of the trip would have been to be with Vivian. I enjoyed myself in her company, relaxed and relatively free.
Catherine: “I’m sorry about your friend. The older I get, the more I appreciate how much my friends mean to me. My mother is 90 now and she says the hardest part about aging is that you lose friends. A shared past is a treasure. C.”
Well put. Thank you. Vivian and I had four years. We didn’t see each other as much as we should have. Who does? Ellen
I’m sorry you have lost your dear friend Vivian, Ellen. I’m glad you are going on a big wonderful trip very soon & will take Vivian in your heart. She would want you to enjoy yourself & have good times. Life goes on. Sing, while you are able. Thank you for this post with paintings I had not seen before. And artists to look up & enjoy. Have a lovely time & bon voyage.
Thank you, Judith. If I seem not lucky over cancer and lost close people, perhaps it’s that I don’t know enough people. I hope you saw that I finally was able to put your illustration of The Simple Heart into the Trollope&Peers files: click on Adminstration, you get a drop down menue, then click on Photos, and then on the “Members Album.”
Diana Birchall:
“I was wondering, since you showed that picture of the Icknield Way, if you are familiar with the book of that title by the World War I poet Edward Thomas? Great stuff – and I have actually hiked the Icknield Way a bit! To bring a woman into the subject matter, some years ago I was extremely fascinated by the writing of his wife, Helen Thomas. I wrote about it at the time on the Dove list, but didn’t blog about it, so here’s one of the bloggers who did:
https://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/as-it-was-by-helen-thomas/
This marriage, of the poet and his rather ill-treated and neglected wife who turned out to write marvelously herself, is worth study. I’m sure you know all about this already, but just thought I’d mention it as it’s a subject you’d really like, if you haven’t happened to encounter it.
Some of the Doves engaged in a long study of this, and visited the spots where the couple lived, including his time in France.
http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2017/04/edward-thomas-9th-april-1917.html”
Thank you. No I didn’t know the title of the particular book but certainly with his poetry. It’s beautiful, meaningful. He is one of the great WW1 poets, deeply ethical man. The essay on his wife manages to make him sound like an undesirable husband, the writer forgets there are more criteria for a relationship and existence to thrive than conformity and socializing. He died in 1917, another murdered, thrown away by war.
This is a small modest one:
Gone Home
Often I had gone this way before:
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else;
‘Twas home; one nationality
We had, I and the birds that sang,
One memory.
They welcomed me. I had come back
That eve somehow from somewhere far:
The April mist, the chill, the calm,
Meant the same thing familiar
And pleasant to us, and strange too,
Yet with no bar.
The thrush on the oaktop in the lane
Sang his last song, or last but one;
And as he ended, on the elm
Another had but just begun
His last; they knew no more than I
The day was done.
Then past his dark white cottage front
A labourer went along, his tread
Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;
And, through the silence, from his shed
The sound of sawing rounded all
That silence said.
Deeply sorry to hear about your friend Vivian, Ellen. May I offer you my heartfelt sympathies? I hope your trip helps ease your loss.
I’m back from my trip now, Elaine. On the whole, it was a good trip and yes the long period away makes what happened less immediate. I’ll miss her. She was but 62, young to lose her life.
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