Year chases year, decay pursues decay … except for the detective heroine

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)

Dear friends and readers,

Half-way through January and I have some news. The good includes my two new chairs, which arrived this past Monday: the front room chair, a recliner, is deliciously comfortable. There is Ian trying it out. It’s miraculously engineered to hold up my back and head while I can still read and stretch my feet out. I love the upholstery too. The desk chair is not as obviously wonderful, but it is strong and also has a good back which I can lean into, no pillow needed. It was a bit high, but Izzy managed to bring it down sufficiently so I can type, write at my desk without over-hunching, and be seen by my zoom camera. Poor Ian has to jump higher, and I endure more scratches so we can be comfortable together on it too.

These are the first pieces of furniture I’ve bought since Jim died — barring three bookcases, 2 2/3s the way up and wide for the enclosed porch, and one small one for the part of the hall.

Not too soon, for I’ve had bad news about my back and walking. Two years ago I began to have sudden soaring pain from the back of my waist to my hip when I walked too long or fast; then about a year ago I couldn’t walk as long without my lower back starting to hurt, and I’d have these sudden stabs, and now they occur at random just walking about the house. I said that magic year number, 1946 (“what year were you born?”), and got an appointment quickly with Dr Wiltz and then a physical therapist. Arthritis, degenerating disks and osteoporosis are the terms. These translate into I am losing the cushions (all metaphors now) between my disks (bone or cartilage) around the right side of my lower back to the point that two of them rub together — there’s almost no cushion. He told me I ought not to take long walks, for that just inflames the area. While I no longer enjoy long walks, especially as almost all the time I do it alone, this morning as I went out to pick up my paper I felt a yearning for the fresh chilled air.

Driving to and from a gym is stressful, time-consuming; most of them are anonymous, no socializing I could see, decent ones not inexpensive. Great anonymous barns, soulless, worse than modern hotels if you can imagine that. (Years ago Jim took me to a luxurious one, very expensive, and then said we were too old, and would not fit in as it was for socializing.) A cold water pool is torture. So now at home twice a day I’ve started exercises designed to strengthen my “core.” I once tried yoga, which I found just ridiculous — not the stretching itself but all the inane talk, words, rituals around it, including the special music. But I have left-over a mat. My knees hurt when they hit the hard floor — and at other times too. It aches my shoulders to lay flat down and the upper part of my back while I lie on the floor. I do the stand-from-a-chair and stationary bike too. I listen on my ipad to Pandora channels for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nancy Griffins, Joan Baez. It all takes over 20 minutes. I am more careful about picking anything up — I could not pick up the tree to take it out of the house when Christmas (the tree) was taken out – Izzy did it.

Poor lonely Ian. Izzy and I have decided we will not go anywhere together for more than a few hours, no days on end until we find him a companion cat. He and I are becoming closer, and she tells me that when I am out for a couple of hours, he starts to prowl about looking for me, and then will go into the hall near my workroom and then howl. Like he is doing right now from the living area — I call it clamoring. I will not be able to cope with the websites Laura showed me: run by enterpreneurial foster mothers, I’ve no idea what to do (like the photo websites where I can’t figure out how to order framed photos of Clarycat), if she does not help me, by later spring I’ll go to the Alexandria animal shelter and get us a rescue cat … and/or maybe a dog. Dog walking would not be overlong, get me out and eventually provides companionship. I am very lonely for Clarycat. Ian does not sleep with me, he does not stay close all the time the way she did; he’s not there in the same way. I find myself crying when I try to talk of her.

Resolutely turning to good things: Laura did come over and all of my three blogs now have a modern appearance: they had hitherto been using a “retired” template and it was beginning to develop glitches with new aspects of wordpress software: if you step back and look at Under the Sign of Sylvia II or all around what you are reading, and you will see what a pretty set of blue hues, with my profile picture, Rose Williams as Charlotte Heywood off to work as a governess in the Andrew Davies & company free adaptation of Sanditon. Go to Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two, and you see shades of dark pink and maroon lettering; this time my profile picture is Olivia Williams as Jane Austen meditating the water sadly in Gwyneth Hughes’s Miss Austen Regrets (out of Austen’s letters, especially as interpreted by David Nokes); finally, go to Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two, and the space is soft greens and a sort of hazel-colored lettering, with the profile picture, a still from a movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw several years ago at the Folger, an actress playing Puck looking into the horizon — the blog is to be on the creative spirit in all the arts. Here are these two pictures in full:

Nothing without its flaw: Izzy and I have not managed to make my links visible as a blogroll any more. The “happiness engineers” will not help people out individually, and four different sets of instructional videos have gotten us nowhere. I have the links inside my software so they are not lost to me at least.

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From Gaudy Night — both people under strain

My courses have started at Politics and Prose, and OLLI at Mason begins next week, which includes me teaching Women’s Detective Fiction. More on the last tomorrow at Austen Reveries. For now I’ll say I am so enjoying the four Dorothy Sayers books I’ve read or am in the midst of over the past few weeks, the pleasure is akin to what I feel when I read Jane Austen. I’ve gone through at least 3 bouts of reading Sayers: once at age 18-20 when I read two of her books from Dante’s Commedia (Hell, Purgatory), which three yellowing aged books I still have: my first introduction to the poet in this Edmund Spenserian verse. I did understand the poem – there are more notes on a page than verse. I was in my first years of college, basically living alone. I can remember reading Five Red Herrings and Nine Tailors at the time (with my father disparaging Lord Peter as “not manly,” “not believable”), but find I own copies of Unnatural Death and Busman’s Holiday. Then in my later 30s and 40s, when PBS aired the Edward Petherbridge-Harriet Walter series of three Lord Peter-Harriet Vane stories when I read for the first time Strong Poison and Gaudy Night, and just loved them. My original pseudonym so long ago when I first came onto the Net was Miss Sylvia Drake! And now again. Kara Keeling’s course in Clouds of Witness, Unpleasantness at Bellona Club, and Murder Must Advertise is very enjoyable, intelligent, informative, pleasant. I am by the way enchanted by Ian Carmichael’s Lord Peter, and Sayers’ too.

So I’ve decided for Spring 2025 to do a course on Dorothy Sayers. It will spare me new work — all that I’m doing now will go into that. At moments I get so enthusiastic I begin to think of a book.

For Sayers there are three biographies at least, so many editions of all her books, but not much close reading and literary criticism. Her Lord Peter Wimsey is not truly taken seriously except by those writing about mystery-thrillers by women in the 1930s. Not a very wide category. For PD James whose books are equally but differently works of genius, there is much literary criticism, and hardly any biography beyond her own autobiography. The third woman I’m “covering for my course, Elizabeth Mackintosh aka Josephine Tey has a marvelous biographer, Jennifer Morag Henderson but essays about her are about her Scottishness and Richard III. She wrote far more plays than novels, had two pseudonyms (Gordon Daviat the other)’ her Richard of Bordeaux, a great hit, disagreeing (wrongly) with Shakespeare’s interpretation of the man as a troubled neurotic, made John Gielgud’s early fame. But I’m not compelled for she lacks the variety and brilliant literary facility and intriguing depths of Sayers.

77 people have registered for this course at OLLI at Mason — I don’t recognize a lot of the names and I’ve a hunch those showing up who’ve never had a class with me may not stay long if they think they are there to be frivolously engaging in superficial games. For me these authors and their books improve each time you read them, for each time you get far more out of their worlds. I’ve started Singing Sands by Tey (later book where her detective has had a nervous breakdown and returns to the Highlands to recuperate); I’ve now started, read and seen so many by P.D. James I must write a separate blog. I do think this is the first time in years I’ve come across a literary figure I’m drawn to about whom I would truly enjoy writing a book. FWIW, there’s been several in my life: Anne Finch, Winston Graham of Poldark fame; not Diana Gabaldon but her Outlander books (still her), Austen, Trollope, and now Dorothy Sayers.

A dream image of myself as Fanny Price (Sylvestre Le Tousel, one of the great actresses of our time) writing, here in the library of Mansfield Park to her beloved brother (Mansfield Park, 1983)

Out of my course in Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance with Michelle Simms-Burton, I’ve been watching the film adaptation of Nella Larson’s Passing. Done deliberately in black and white. It is a very faithful adaptation about the agonies of a black person who looks white in the US and has chosen to lead a life of a white — cutting herself off from family, original friends and ever living a lie. The characters are all black middle class is part of the movie’s originality — and book’s — not that there aren’t such books, but white people don’t know about them when they are not very angry or masterpieces (James Baldwin) or aesthetically revolutionary (Toni Morrison). For a white person you learn so much about what black people go through in the US society that you never thought of. Or I never did. Strongly recommended as well as Jessie Redmon Fausset’s Plum Bun, about which I also must write a blog of its own. As with Forster’s Maurice, I loved that Plum Bun had a happy ending. I’ve begun a supeb biography by George Hutchinson; as far-reaching in implications about such trauma, hardship and unhappiness as Isabel Wilkinson’s Caste. What does it mean to live a life based on a color line?

So I have been busy in the raison d’etre of my existence, literary (and nowadays) film study.
The pleasantest zoom of them all have been my poetry reading sessions with a group of serious readers of poetry. One poem by Louise Gluck I understood for the first time.

The Night Migraines:

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.

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I don’t want to go on for too long. So I’ll end on the theme of detective heroines I’ve been so engaged with for weeks, nay months, about which I put on face-book my time-line this review of TLS and a specific article on the republication of some older detective “classics” this morning:

A couple of years ago I was lamenting how TLS was now turning into a tasteless super-slim supplement which didn’t understand the previous audience and appeal to a mythical new audience (which apparently never appeared) was counter-productive. They were striving for the ugly offensive images so loved by Tina Browne when at the New Yorker.

No longer even if the articles are now mostly very short and when political the bias is sort of (disguised) conservative. There are often excellent reviewers who seem able to say a lot in a shortish space (and if they need more room are given it) on subjects of real interest which are also intellectually sound. They address concerns of right now. I wrote about the January 5th review of the Penguin reprinting of mystery stories where all but 4 are by men, and said that the reviewer condemned this — though she took time to get there (see comment).

They are more successfully feminist than the now defunct Women’s review of Books or the new Liber (which is not succeeding) which came to take its place. Probably this is a matter of money: TLS still has sources of income.

So four more pieces from January 5th:

Opens with an explanation of the Assange case and an excellent defense of him on the principles of a free press and what is press is for. Charles Glass sometimes writes for LRB. A good review of a Norwegian woman artist by Lucy Davies (yes the translator): Harriet Backer, about the interior worlds suggested by Backer’s art and use of light and architecture. An essay on the biography and new edition of Anthony Hecht reviewed by Andrew Neilson – A Wound that Will Not Close Janet Todd on Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic Last Man. A new edition, Mary Shelley’s attitudes towards the coming calamity and revolution about which Todd manages to suggest it’s not very readable — Death Marches on. A new non-fiction book by Philippa Gregory, trying to praise and show how “Normal Women” (the title is unfortunate as well as some of what is asserted — like suffragettes killed people when they didn’t kill anyone, not one, and were it not for these “elite” women no one would have paid attention) worked hard to survive and what the great cruel odds were.

The gothic heroine glides into the book …

In particular, given my interest in women’s detective fiction just now – for some time to come too:

I’d like to vindicate Muireann Maguire in her article for TLS, Cherchez la femme, on the new reprinting of a bunch of older (perhaps out of copyright) books, most of them apparently mysteries. I had the impression the author herself condoned or pretended not to notice that all but 4 of the books are by men, and that the 4 themselves anything but feminist. Not at all.

Maguire does describe this as the situation — after she gives a flowery introduction about the original Penguin publication of books like this and other subgenres. What colors they came in &c What she doesn’t say (I think) forcefully enough is that at the turn of the century there profit-making motive of publishers was less in evidence and they really did produce books where they of course meant to make money but also meant to serve the public decently. This makes me remember the original Everyman series, and the later Modern Library ones.

But then when she goes on to reveal how few women were originally published, how then they are presented in denigrating non-serious ways, she brings out forcefully that this attitude is still going on in this new and seriously distorting misogyny. If women were treated condescendingly and if all of the books, but especially those by men contained centrally misogynistic and sexy-violent (low grade porn) incidents, books by women were nonetheless printed in large numbers and were probably “the leaders” in the field. Now she says by not publishing them at all you lose their words, you lose the social context, you marginalize women’s contribution to our society.

I love how she ends on a kind of somber joke or pun — since she is talking about detective fiction, she says what’s happening is criminal. Well it is — the corollary of this is erasing women, depriving them of existence, and in the US right now if you get pregnant in some states if you have a miscarriage, you can be arrested, if your pregnancy goes badly and you are in danger of death you can be let to die. It’s a felony if you mishandle your miscarriage …

I’ve gone out with a few friends to museum shows and lunching, renewed an old friendship with Diana Birchall who I first met as Miss Schuster-Slatt from Gaudy Night. The odd thing I’ve discovered about so many friendships is that people don’t necessarily or at all have to like one another, but I do like Diana and hope she likes me. Still, suffice to say I remain bereft inwardly. Only with Adele do I laugh. I am ever learning that lesson from Anne Finch’s poem, “I on Myself Can Live,” which was the title of the literary biography I tried to write about her and put here on the Internet. Shall I try for a book on Dorothy Sayers, especially after teaching a whole course on her next spring (2025)?

Ellen

New Year’s Eve: Izzy’s song, Clarycat not gone from us altogether; the year’s memories

Here I am holding firmly to my sturdy fellow, Ian, Izzy taking the photo — greeting everyone on FB and twitter & bluesky & a literary mastodon

Dear friends and readers,

This has not been an easy year. As you know, we lost our beloved darling Clarycat. She is not gone from us because we remember her — not just the urn and the pawprints, but I’ve ordered four images to be blown up into framed prints (8 by 11) and I will have one in my workroom to sit behind me as she used to do, one in my bedroom near the one of Jim, and two more smaller ones (3 by 5) in the dining area and enclosed porch where I sit and read. I greeted friends and acquaintances on FB, twitter — and also BlueSky and a literary mastodon (which last place I don’t understand as a way to communicate with others at all, it being one of these Discords) with me holding onto Ian — quite a two-arms full.

I also as a match put onto FB and twitter a photo taken by Izzy and me holding poor Clarycat a month after she had her stroke. I had been told she probably had a brain tumor (because of the way she could not hold her head steady, stumbled to the left) but no hyperthyroidism. From her photo you can see she no longer had a natural expression on her face, nor is she holding her lower body up by herself any more. I am so worried. It matches the one just above

Izzy has commemorated the year with one of her music videos. I think Simon and Garfunkel’s “American” admirably suited to her low-throated soprano voice (with its mezzo contralto registers):

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So, 12/31/2023, 5:45 pm, we (Izzy and I) have just (45 minutes ago) returned from the Kennedy Center where we saw The Girl from North Country, book by Conor McPherson (the last couple of years the Booker Prize has gone to Irish writers’ books), music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. Upfront it has its problems: that often, especially the first half, the songs, music and lyric seem to have nothing to do with the lives of this group of people living in or renting for now in a boarding house _is a problem_. Audiences don’t invent parallel universes (see review). But the stories grow on you and it is such a relief to get away from the script of competitive success and boasting — the choice of 1934, a year deep in the depression as speaking to Americans today tells us a lot. Everyone trying to fail better. Many not succeeding. It reminded me of Our Town (the imagined backward thrust from later death), and Steinbeck at his best. I loved the truthfulness of the down-and-out despairing stories and characters as well as their occasional hopefulness

The doctor character as MC (Washington Post, Thomas Floyd)

By the second half I was deeply roused. Not a happy or triumphant way to bring in the New Year; something better than that — a remembering, a refusal to stop looking at what’s happening through the lens of historical fiction: two reviews from the New York Times: Ben Brantley; same writer‘ for The Guardian, much more critical, but recognizing something deeply from within American culture, Alexis Soloski; the Irish Times.

Ensemble moment

We remembered our last year at the Kennedy Center with Jim, which I find I described here on this blog in 2013: “Elvis has left the building.”

Home again — both taxi drivers were friendly to us! About two hours after we got in, we sat down to steak and spaghetti and I have drunk half of one of three bottles of champagne that have been sitting in a cupboard for 11 years — since Jim died. The bottle was not so hard to open up after all. Main force and a scissor completed the work.

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Cover illustration for the New Yorker for 2023 by Bianca Bangarelli — it’s how I bring in and out many days & nights of my life

In these New Year’s Eve blogs or postings/memories, one is expected to answer questions, like what was the best or your favorite book or movie or play. I just saw the question, What was my favorite moment of this year? I cannot answer such a question; it presupposes joy as some kind of regular recurrence. Joy is now twice gone from me: gone with Jim’s death, and now reinforced with Clarycat’s …
I do feel tired and admit this was the saddest Christmas and New Year’s I’ve had since the year Jim died. I have this feeling of wanting to do less, reach for less, but what I do do genuinely take real pleasure in. To slow down. I don’t want to stop traveling altogether but that the trips I take be genuinely meaningful. Now that I am so aware of Ian as a personality by my side, I am also very reluctant to leave him unless I feel for sure I’ll have a good time or need to go. He and I are getting closer.

But there is something else working its way through me — culminating this year in the loss of Clary. I want to think about why I do what I do. I want to get my priorities accurate. What shall I do about these blogs? I want to see some way to feel secure until my death. And, yes, recognize that my age will make me dependent on one or both of my daughters way down the line (I hope way down).

Thus to me this year was no transcendent book or movie or play, though I entered into (read, watched) some superlatively fine ones, which justified to me living on, experiences I felt on offer to live for and for trying to share them with others. I carried on trying to be a mother-friend to my younger daughter, Isobel. I am not going to make a listicle (as my older daughter ironically calls these, while she is paid very well for doing such). Going together (me and Izzy) to Somerville College, Oxford, and the experience there and some of what we knew in London was probably our highpoint; for me Clary’s death that which I cannot recover from, the year’s deep grief.

As to sheer enjoyment (sort of inexplicable except I do love literary allusive books to other books I’ve loved) I have been loving the Dorothy Sayers’ Wimsey/Harriet Vane books, and both TV series (Ian Carmichael and Edward Petheridge/Harriet Walter) — she is entertaining to me (literary deeply) and her life as told buy two biographies (I’m going to begin a third soon). I am so stimulated and feel so guilty that I did not begin to know and understand American literature, especially of the African-American type. I carry on my feminist literary studies, though I now realize my understanding of the word feminist is now not part of any public group …

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It’s nearly midnight just now. I fell asleep trying to watch another episode of the 6th season of The Crown but did finally manage, the 8th episode, The Ritz. This is the hour during which Margaret has three strokes; we trace her journey towards death while she remembers one night in 1945, the ending of World War Two, May 8th when she and Elizabeth went to the Ritz and Lilibet ended up in the basement doing some wild dancing with the people celebrating down there. The fireworks are starting and I hear the booming of the rockets. Another year gone, and a dangerous one to come.

My best friend, Ian, is on my lap pushing his body against mine, his head against my head

The Girl from the North ended on this song which I send along to you gentle reader, for all of us:

Ellen

“At 77, it is time to be in earnest …”

Me and Clarycat, spring 2013, photo taken by Jim

Dear Friends and Readers,

If I’m not mistaken, this was the hardest birthday I’ve had to get through since Jim died, 10 years ago — 2013, when I was 67. I could, of course, have sat all day and cried, and sometimes I was very near tears. For example, when I thanked Norma Reck for organizing the luncheon for the Theater Group at a splendid restaurant tucked away in an older beautiful house, one I’d taken Izzy to several times when she was part of an Adult Aspergers Club. I always drove her there and back; now I got to go for the first time, and it was a yummy meal. I could feel that Norma felt my intense emotion. Why didn’t I? For the same reason as I’ve never sat for hours weeping over Jim. It’s just so useless –besides which it’ll exhaust me.  And such acts won’t bring him back, and nor cannot bring Clarycat back either.  With her passing, though, another of the fundamental presences which I’ve felt for years loves me, and who has been my companion is gone.

Funny, I have less to do: there is less food to put out, the litter box is not as full; going through morning tidying up takes less time: no one to provide a snack for when I get to the enclosed porch. She would sit there waiting for it. When we’d done in the kitchen, she’d come with me to this study for the day’s activity — mostly mental — me sitting reading, writing, her looking out one of the windows mostly, or half-sleeping.  Morning was a thing we did together.

I had a bad night, bad dreams, and took a half a sleeping pill to get through.

I did it by having things to do or places to be with others around. So part of usual routine was posting to the lists, paying a bill (fraught because I have to do most of them online and thus have to have user name and password accepted &c), tidying up (as usual) and then the finding the place. I left way early.

A two hour luncheon where I listened to (and myself spoke sometimes to the people near me) all their plans (Norma’s) for the coming year. When I had left, Ian had stared at me going out — looking astonished and unhappy. I had told him “I won’t be gone long; I’ll be back before 3,” and so I was. He hopped out of the cat-bed with a wall around it, slightly too small for him, which he’s been preferring since Clary died. Meowing at me. It took a while to settle back, and then there was a zoom chat at 4-5 (again from OLLI at Mason), this one about stress.

What a topic. I thought it was supposed to be stress at holiday time, but it seemed it was to be about stress in general just as much. Perhaps I gave away a bit too much of myself, but probably not. The wonders of zoom include how structured it is, how it does distance people so though I told twice of Clary’s death, and at one point the conversation was about what we were to do when very old and if we were preparing for it, and I said, no, as I hadn’t the money for good assisted living, and had no one to turn to who understood me, so I hoped to pop off all at once so as to obviate any need for killing myself. I did say something like that. Others took us in other dire directions, even the slaughter of the Palestinians over the past 6 weeks, and fear (very real) of Trump winning as a Hitler. After all most of them don’t find holiday time especially stressful.

I had hoped that I had a third distraction: a young male friend said he would be singing in a choir, reachable by zoom at 7:30 pm. Izzy obligingly made supper a little earlier, and with cooking, talking, the dishes, I was busy until just then. I waited 7 minutes and then realized it was 9/5, not 11/29. I made this mistake this past Saturday when Izzy and I went half-way to the Folger before I realized our tickets were for 12/9, not 11/25. The Oxford trip I had us coming in a day too early, I had us not having the full 5 nights booked for the week in London that we needed. Last minute arrangements were managed though — at considerable expense. This time we just had to turn round and go home — Izzy took another train to the movies.

So I turned to the real source of quietude and ordered thought amusement that was taking me through the day: Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, which I am truly enjoying. I read it on and off. I’ve just finished the fourth episode of the Ian Carmichael serial, Five Red Herrings — the movie much better than the book, from re-arrangement, re-emphasis on the characters, and the alluring scenery of Scotland. In both forms her forms of wittiness are so engaging.

Closing moments of Five Red Herrings — Lord Peter fishing, Bunter painting (Glyn Houston rightly got second billing) — what fun they might have taken it to drive all around that part of Scotland in 1920s luxury cars

I then watched DemocracyNow. org and learned of another massacre of civilians (just going from house to house, killing all the men, raping women first) going on in Darfur: the open genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza has set a dreadful precedent. And I read a wonderful essay on Protest Literature in American — a volume called A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, online book — a real lucky find because since he was a true protester, he has been utterly sidelined in publishing and curricula assignments in schools throughout the US. I have to get myself to try Of Mice and Men; I suspect I won’t like the depiction of the disabled man; and I don’t like Steinbeck’s way of depicting women.

But it was Sayers who kept me cheered. Laura wrote more than once, sending me photos of her cats; maybe over 50 people wished me a happy birthday on FB and my listserv. Again it’s so easy from afar; when I told anyone in person today, they rushed past that information.

10 years and now I’ve lost my second beloved. Ian is a different sort of cat: he is attached but he shows it far more distantly. For example, he sleeps elsewhere in the house, not in the bed near me.

An old photo of Rosalind Carter — my guess is she knew what it was herself

I also learned (from Amy Goodman) of how Rosalind Carter worked hard and effectively to make real help for people with mental health problems. She was very concerned that the stigma associated with this should be wiped away. I doubt it has because people fear mental distress, depression, sadness, anxiety, panic (and yes stress too). But she has made it less acceptable to reject and ignore people needing mental help. A stubborn woman who lucked into a good marriage with a man who acquired a lot of power and respect and shared it with her. She could not know but perhaps suspected how many people have such problems who don’t begin to bear true witness to it.

I’ve always been in earnest in life — I do hope when it’s time to go, I go quickly. I see now that I did the kindness thing I could for Clarycat. I gave her as much precious life as she could enjoy and then endure.

The local vet practice sent me a card where the two vets, the one I saw twice for Clary, and the one who sat with me and kept me company and basically did the euthanasia, wrote a paragraph each. In long hand. Kind, assuring me I’d done the right thing, spared Clarycat much suffering. This is better more humane treatment than Kaiser ever provided.

Posy Simmons’ image of Mrs Scrooge and her cat on Christmas eve — I shall have to dream of Clary that night

Ellen

On wanting to be haunted ….

On mantelpiece Clarycat’s urn w/her ashes near Jim’s, on one side her favorite toy, on the other a stuffed sheep bought at Stonehenge (family holiday, in London, & then Somerset); behind these things, a square holder with an impression of Clary’s front paws; the a literal dish she ate from, & then her heart-shaped tag. I even have a certificate for her death.

Friends and readers,

I now think Clarycat’s death is only now beginning to sink in. That she is gone forever. She had a distinct personality; she accompanied me around the house each morning as I did morning chores (making my bed, tidying up, renewing water in water bowls, snacks in a plate Clary would eat from that Izzy made for her and Ian many years ago. I’d find her snuggled up against me in the night. I used to say she thought I was another cat as she’d lick me a lot. I don’t want to adopt/buy new kittens for a while as I think I would not respond to them now — it’s too soon.

Thursday late afternoon I brought home Clarycat’s urn, her ashes in it. An impression of her two front paws, a death certificate (it’s much prettier than Jim’s which is more in the vein of a scannable document).

I had nothing like these relics when Llyr died. They help assuage grief, which in my case is more visceral than it was for Jim — I cry far more freely. I remember Clary’s particular behaviors whose memory I now cherish. I loved her so, she never judged me or expected boasting (as so many people do). No subtexts, no mysteries about our social life together. She is not here any more.

Ian is behaving in ways that shows he is made anxious, upset by Clary’s vanishing. Yesterday when we went to that Thanksgiving dinner (gone 3 hours), he looked so worried, rocking back and forth. In September he acted out because Clary was no longer a companion, but at least she was there. Now he is sticking close and when in other rooms cries out for attention. He stayed at a distance the last weeks of her life. I didn’t see the analogy between her and Jim until that last day: both died of cancer, both painfully thin and unable to hold up their bodies anymore. In a way I was able to be kinder to her; we didn’t have to wait the last painful days/hours out.

A Trollope listserv friend has reminded me that Dorothy Sayers is one of those women who lived in Mecklenberg Square — the center of Francesca Wades very absorbing and intelligent Square Haunting. I’ve taken it down to read the section again. Haunting is an apt word I now realize. The place is haunted by those who once lived there. I’m now realizing why at this time of year people do turn to ghost stories — we are haunted by the memories of those who’ve gone — their absent presences. I am thinking about Margaret Oliphant too — her powerful ghost stories. She wanted to be haunted by those she loved who had died befoe her. I would like to be haunted by Clarycat.

**********************************

The Cat’s Song by Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Dancing Cats — by Susan Herbert

Ellen

Clarycat has died (2009-2023)

How she looked a few minutes after the anesthesia was injected — she is no longer alive but for a few minutes she is as alive, and retains her beauty; note the IV in her paw: it enabled her death to be peaceful, gentle

1 a.m, 11/21: My bed feels very empty. Half its intended occupants are gone. Ian sleeping on his cat tree nearby — temperamentally he keeps a little distance. There are 3 cat comforters on this bed. I sleep on the side where Jim spent his years of sleep. A haunted bed.

Dear friends,

This past Saturday night Clarycat’s condition worsened. She stopped eating and drinking, she seemed to be no longer able to stand steadily; her walking was a continual falling and tumbling over. Friday night on my lap I felt her trembling intensely. On Sunday I had her in her cat-bed by my side as I sat at my computer where I work (read, write, think). Next to her the electric radiator (with a towel on it so if I need to wipe her it will be a warm towel), to the side of the cat-bed, some food and water. She lays there very still but sometimes I can tell she is awake. Someone suggested to me she was trying to live on for my sake; she has been staying very close for the last few days. And it so worries me because it is such an effort for her to follow me. The baby-wrap doesn’t work, so I try to carry her in cat-beds, which I decided to rotate (as she wets them and is uncomfortable).  When she trembles so, I fear she is in pain. So Izzy finally agreed.

This morning at about 8:10 I called the local Vet (the Mobile vet was much less accommodating), and I had a “walk-in” appointment at 10:30 am, where I was assured I would be holding her as the euthanasia proceeded, and could have her ashes in an urn in a few days. She did cry out from her carrier as we were walking from the car to the building — some instinct? but beyond that she made no sound, maybe mild mews. They took me right into a room in the back so my crying state would not disturb the other patients (people and pets waiting to be seen). The young man took down data and then I paid with a credit card ($417). Then the super-kind Vet who took Clary away to the “treatment” room to have the IV (which they called catheterized); you can see it in her paw. She brought her back and placed her in my lap. She asked if she should go out and I could have a couple of minutes with Clary. I said no. Then what she did was twice inject into the tube anesthesia. She was so frail the first dose did it; I saw her jerk and knew then it was over. So as I felt Jim’s heart stop, so I witnessed her lose her life. I held her in my arms as I had held him.

The Vet then started talking of how she had joined Jim “somewhere.” I had told her of how she had been attached to him, how he had died of esophageal cancer and how that and the death of my dog had influenced the way I was trying to the right and best thing for Clary and me and Izzy. I then tried to stop this sort of sort of vaguely religious talk, and said I was an atheist, but she seemed not to be able to stop herself from coming back to her cloud. She said, Was it not comforting? or some such statement asking did I not need some thought to help me through. So I said, “I tell myself no one can harm or hurt her now, she is safe; like Jim free from pain, in her case from that confusion & longing I would see on her face.”

I was thinking of Shakespeare’s song in Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!

My heart began to hurt, chest pain as I began to cry. The Vet began to be fearful for me, but I said no, not to worry. The pain did subside. She suggested a cab; did I have a relative to go home to? — I said I had talked with Laura by texting and emailing and Izzy would be home tonight. I did make a mistake when I drove the car out of the lot — I did went over the curb, but I did it so slow and gentle it seems not to have damaged anything. She stepped out for a minute or two and I sat with Clary. I petted her, talked — perhaps I should have done that before but I hadn’t been thinking straight and now I think if I had gotten hysterical perhaps that would have communicated itself to her in her last minutes. So good I didn’t but waited until she was not there any more.

To memory:  when I first saw her. A kitten of some 4 months. She was born April 7, 2009, and we adopted her in June or July, along with Ian, her male sibling. I picked her out of a group of squirming kittens because she looked so intense and nervous, so eager. I bonded with her then. I bought him because we had decided to buy two together and the woman said they were siblings. They had the same face and his ginger and white color was so fresh and appealing. I noticed the woman selling them to me was particularly fond of her as a cat who had been in need of affection.

Laura had driven me to a pet fair in a large pet store deep in Fairfax.  I was buying/adopting the cats partly to bond with Laura whom I could see loved cats. I also hoped they would help bring Izzy out of her autistic shell. Recently, finally, that has been true of she and Ian, though early on I have a photo of them together, she rejoicing

Probably 2012

Clary was ever after not a cat to shy or hide away from people, which Ian did (rather like Snuffy in Sesame Street who thought early on if he could not see us, we could not see him). Clary was nervy after affection and interaction. She would come out to make friends. Bold, trustful.

As a tiny kitten sitting on the one volume doorstop Clarissa

I named her after one of my favorite heroines, Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (I did my dissertation on the novel) but very quickly it seemed an absurdly long or inappropriate name so I switched to the character’s nickname in the book, Clary, and it was not long before she was Clarycat. Here she is a kitten, around 2010, and in her mature adulthood, 2017:

She was very attached to Jim before she transferred to me and one of the ideas in my mind as I grieve is she was my living link to him. He would sit with her on his lap looking down at her. She grieved for him when he died, going up and down the hall, caw, caw, cawing, sitting on his chair for three weeks, waiting for him to return.

Her life was that of a cat in a given household. She loved to look out the windows; she was very possessive over her toys and would not share with Ian what she liked to hold in her mouth. She could be very fierce.

Here she is running across the bookshelves —

She was not that playful but she was very affectionate: I used to think she thought I was a cat by the way she’s lick me all over where she could reach.

She and Ian were constant companions, lying together in a cat-bed, sitting together at windows, taking turns, playing both rough and kindly — it hurt him when she would not play with him after she had her stroke. He would run away and cry.

Sitting in a sun-puddle in my enclosed porch together

It was a stroke in April of this year that began her precipitous decline. She knew she couldn’t play in the robust ways they had. She could no longer control the direction she wanted to go in. She kept moving to the left side. He would then cry and clamor because she would not let him near.

I love remembering how in the morning Jim and I would wake and find her lying inbetween us. For many years after he died, I’d find her lying close to me, snuggled into my side when I’d wake up.

Just leaving kittenhood, clutching onto the table — perhaps 3 years old

Shortly after Jim died: Izzy and I at a JASNA, Clary and Ian left for 6 days, once a day a kind sitter came to stay an hour or so, feed and play with them; the sitter photographed her, you see she is waiting for Jim who had been her perpetual companion at such times ….

I believe she had a happy cat life. In the early years when Jim was alive, he kept them out of my study because when kittens one of them (probably Ian) had eaten a wire to a computer and entangled the whole set up so it took hours to retrieve it. Jim also did not like them sleeping in the bed, but as kittens they were so persistent to come into the room, it was better to let them in than endure the noise of keeping them out. Still I was not able to bond with them until they grew older, calmer and I just said I wanted them to be allowed to come into my room as I spent so much time there. From then on they were hours and hours in this room.  There are two cat-beds here for them.  I also never minded either of them sleeping with me. I let my dog, Llyr, sleep next to me most of her life.

A photo of her while we were in vacation, bewildered where we were and who was this new person taking care of her

She is gone now. I miss what she was when she was well, and I miss what she was when she was struggling to function normally and couldn’t. After her stroke, she never was able to walk properly; her head went to the side (a sign of brain tumor), and one of the Vets who saw her said she had a cancer that metastasized to her “gut.” So she weighed 5 pounds the last time we weighed her. Her body was not strong enough to withstand the aging process. She was actually doing pretty well at first and across the early summer — eating 2 cans of wet food. But beginning this fall she started to lose strength. It was as Johnson said: Decay pursue[d] Decay,/Still drop[ped] some Joy from with’ring Life away.” I kept being hopeful, made plans for what I’d do to keep her comfortable. Warm the towels on the radiator I was using to wipe her dry. I rejoiced when she got up at night and made her way into the kitchen in the dark to ear and drink, used the litter box and then made her way back to her cat-bed near me.  Then two or three days ago another level of stillness set in. She could no longer sit by me and I lay her in the cat-bed taking it whereever I was where she could try to be comfortable. The last day and a half or so she was sleeping or hardly awake most of the time.

I loved her and will love to the end of my time alive. I do believe that in this case I did it right. For Llyr I didn’t behave adequately; for Jim I was stymied, but here I gave her every minute of precious life as long as she was up to it, and when I saw the agon was beginning spared her and me.

She will exist on the way Jim does — through my memory of her I will keep her with me and him as long as my (failing) memory holds out. I have found that tag and placed it where there is a kind of shrine to the right side of my mantelpiece, with an urn for Jim there, photographs and keepsakes (his glasses, the DVD), a toy sheep from Stonehenge. I will have an urn of her ashes and put it there too. Ian is with me now and I will be as faithful to him as I was to her. Here he is no more than a year old captured by Laura openly vulnerable seeking affection:

Clarycat was a very loving cat — from the moment I set eyes on her until the day she died.

Ellen

Clarycat — Interim Update — with a poem to Tazzi

Clarycat this past April 2023, shortly after she had her stroke

To all my and Clarycat and Izzy’s dear friends who have responded or read the last blog with concern:

Let me say that after all, I probably will not take Clarycat in for euthanasia today or tomorrow. She began to eat again Monday morning and while she staggers far more than she walks and she falls back a good deal, she is now trying to get about again. She is drinking, she is sitting on my lap when she can. She smiles at me.

Most of all Izzy is against it — In fact it is Isobel’s view which has prevailed. On Sunday night she said I was giving up too soon. She says Clary will have bad days and we have to live with these — when she gets up she is weakest. I did wrong over my dog I know. She is just now struggling to sit near the grate. I have not yet reconciled myself and Izzy has even less. This is hard time for Ian who is made very uncomfortable, stays at a distance except when he is on my lap or takes her cat-bed (quite deliberately I think).

Today again she took up a toy and had a hard time carrying it but she tried. She is getting about this morning, it’s a struggle — slow steps, leaning against walls — but she does it and is just now back to sitting near me.

Yes in three days she might let us know but with Izzy here Clarycat’s signal (not doing anything but lying, no eating, no drinking, little response but eye contact) will have to last a couple of days at least. Izzy also said let us see if she loses weight: she has not lost any weight since we brought her home this past time —
Let us recall about all death (and Yes I mean to refer to the slaughters in Gaza and West Bank and Ukraine too — every single one of those 8000+ people)

when we are dead, we are dead for a long time.

I have long been grateful that Izzy lives with me.

ClaryCat resting in my workroom this afternoon, 5 pm

I have added a photo of my good friend, Martin’s cat to whom he wrote a poem in her late age

Ellen

I am taking my beloved Clarycat in to a Vet for euthanasia tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday

My heart is breaking. To the local Vet for $471 for the euthanasia and a cremation where I receive her ashes and buy an urn.  She yesterday seem to be letting me know she has had enough of life.

Darling Clarycat — summer 2017

Yesterday at 10 am or so Clarycat lay down on her side in the enclosed porch; she could no longer sit up without falling back. She seemed unable to walk. She never ate any tuna in the early morning. About 11:30 I put her in a cat-bed and brought her into my study and she lay there near me all day. When I tried to pick her up for supper, she just collapsed on the floor. I tried to reach the Mobile Vet by phone and was not surprised to be told by a tape this was off hours and if it was an emergency call something like the ASPCA. I emailed them and got one of these studiedly indifferent notes I remember from Kaiser when Jim was dying. They said they had no appts early this week, didn’t come after 5 pm but maybe could make it Tuesday after 3:30 (the time I asked). Of course no price cited. So after a while I said I would contact the other vet and see what they offered.

But this morning I found her on the other side of my bed (I had taken the cat-bed into my bedroom) and she walked. I carried her into the kitchen and she ate about 3/4s of a can of tuna. She tried to walk again, did not manage but has not given up on life altogether. She is not immediately dying. Now I will phone the other local Vet and try to make an appt for check-up and/or euthanasia, ask the price and if they cremate and will sell me some form of urn. I will do that with the Mobile Vet. The Mobile Vet has now lost my trust. Dr Hood never herself responded. This reminds me of Kaiser where no doctor but Wiltz ever got on a phone for Jim no matter what — even when he began to bleed to death– I don’t know if I ever told you of that experience. Read it here:

The man from 911: “this happens all the time”

Oddly crazily a burden of guilt I have carried since my dog died (I was 31 or so) is now lifted. My dog was dying, lying on the bathroom tiles and I didn’t know what to do. I had no regular vet, no car — my father had been paying for cancer treatments but we had given these up. I somehow got the number of someone it was said who would come and take the dog, put her to sleep in front of me (not dead, just sleep) and take her away and euthanize her. My dog looked dead, all but dead. I let this happen. The man came, injected her so that she would be sleeping now and took her away. It was 2 in the morning. I have ever since been so guilty. Well last night the Mobile Vet told me of some service that does this. What do they do with these animals has troubled me all these years. I was hysterical and Jim no use. He kept saying it’s only a dog.. He did not appear to grieve. I could not bear the idea of her dying on me. I did not know what to do. Jim was not always of use; he was especially bad over ill health, either his own or someone else’s.

This morning for the first time I realized this is common. It happens all the time 🙂 who knew? I was so young. I think to myself this morning that I should have waited until morning and phoned my father; he’d have come over and found a vet for us. But who knows? not right away and he lived in Queens and I in the Bronx and who knows if he’d have said to phone that number.

Clary was attached to Jim; she would sit in his lap on the front chair he preferred for years. She sat by him for the months in bed. When he was close to death, the last few days, she began to make caw-caw-cawing sounds; she would trot back and forth in the hall between the front of the house and the bedroom — where she had been sitting by his side also when he tried to sleep. When he died she sat in that front chair for about three weeks. Then slowly she transferred her attachment to me.

Listen to Judi Dench recite: When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state:

After a lifetime of aloneness and exclusion, if I thought on Jim he was my lark, and my Clarycat is what I have left of him living with me.

I am not taking her in today because I have lecture notes for tomorrow to do, and an Every-Other-Week Trollope group to attend. I want to hear what’s said about Miss Mackenzie. (I am not yet through with life.)  Tomorrow I must teach.  If she dies before then, I shall not be able to work; I shall be crying.  But if Tuesday later in the day or Wednesday well before Thursday’s teaching, I hope to cope.  Today she is staggering about trying to stay near me or go to her food or sit in the sun. I am also putting it off.

Ellen

Adventures in Oxford and London; Meeting Friends

This is a photo of the Somerville College Library, Oxford, from a southeast angle

Dear friends and readers,

Apart from the wonders of the Women in Trollope conference at Somerville College, Oxford, what did Izzy and I get up to in Oxford and London? It sounds like a lot. And we did tire ourselves, but towards the end while in London when it had become hot, we did stay in more, did less.

Here is a whirlwind tour as I am assuming at least some of my readers may have visited the places or the kinds of places I’ll be mentioning. We left Alexandria around 3:40 EDT in the afternoon and got into our plane around 6:40 EDT; a long flight but not as uncomfortable as it sometimes has been. We did not have a row of seats in front of us: this is called Premium Economy by the way. Arrival at Heathrow on Thursday, August 30th, around 7 am British Summer Time. My friend, Rory had given me a map and instructions on how to get to the National Express bus coach to go to Oxford, but we soon (around 8 am) found ourselves standing in front of a kiosk which included just that bus route, with the next bus due to arrive in half an hour.

As we boarded we were asked what stop we wanted. I had not thought of that. I asked the driver, which was the stop nearest the Old Parsonage Hotel; he had never heard of it; when I asked about a specific college, he said he knew nothing about Oxford. Maybe. Not for the last time Izzy took out her phone and began to navigate using apple and/or google maps and when we get close and then into Oxford we followed the route until near a deep blue spot said to be the Old Parsonage Hotel. It was the penultimate stop in Oxford, and not all that close. So we had an arduous walk following our dark blue line by foot to our dark blue spot. And there was the Old Parsonage Hotel behind a wall. A very pretty older building with restaurant.

Old Parsonage Hotel, at night, from the outside

They did take us in even if we were 5 hours early: it was 10 am and the room would be ready at 3 pm. They said they would do what they could to make it ready a little earlier. We put our bags in their back storing area and went to the dining room where breakfast was still being served. This was the first of two well-made meals — Izzy ate my scrambled eggs; the next day I had porridge! Around 11 or so we felt up to walking about and walk about we did.

Our day included the insides of several colleges, an exhibit at the Weston Library (where they offer tour guides, these guided tours are ubiquitous) and we saw a very interesting exhibit called Alphabits. The town squares were often traffic free so we wandered from square to square, and stumbled into Blackwell’s — still a huge and worthy story with older rare books and the best books in many areas; the Old Bodleian Library (the next day Izzy took a guided tour of that), an ancient church which was a moving experience because a man was sermonizing, and underneath the church was a cafe with very modern very British kinds of lunches (heavy hot savoury food is still being eaten for lunch). We did grow tired and wandered back by 2:20 or so and our room was ready.

One of the three old friends I had hoped to meet, Martin N. then called. He said he would come at 5, we could have drinks and then go to a restaurant called Bella Italia. I had not seen Martin in person for years. I met him three times in Oxford, twice with Jim and once with our daughters when they were teenagers. He has aged, well so have I. What a gentle sweet man. We began to talk — I was the only one drinking but that was okay. Then we found the restaurant and ordered a meal. Unluckily it was a noisy place and the truth is I was not up to it physically (I will spare details) so I fear I didn’t do justice to the occasion and we went back early. But I was so glad to see him and felt that we had established an old congeniality once more. We said we’d keep in touch. We did communicate once by zoom early in the pandemic. He talked of the Ashmolean and the next morning that is just where Izzy and I went.

The Ashmolean is a marvelous museum. Much Pre-Raphaelite art. Impressionism. Other schools. It is just so rich in important and beautiful European pictures. Martin’s advice was to do one room at a time and then go home, but there was no way we could do that and we were not to know if we could come back. So we stayed for 3 hours. I might as well say we had a similar experience in two other museums in London. On Tuesday morning, the Courtlauld Institute in Somerset House in London had a selection reminiscent of the Ashmolean. We visited there on Tuesday in London, and although it was small, its curators and donors had left a group of exquisitely good choices. A museum need not be large to be transformative for the time you are there. On Monday our experience was grim but educational. Since watching Foyle’s War and being told by someone that the Imperial War museum is not only richly about wars, but has a large impressionist collection. If it has the latter, it was hidden Monday morning. It was a long hot walk, and five floors of grim truthful accounts of WW1 and 2, of the holocaust (the most graphic effective I’ve ever seen), the Irish troubles and military heroes too. I did buy a catalogue. I learned newly about these conflicts but we came away in need of refreshment and stressed. More on this just below.

I can refresh us here, change our mood here by saying what we did after we left the Ashmolean. We went back to the Old Parsonage Hotel and directly onto Somerville College, and were met by several very friendly participants who sat down with us and introduced themselves, as we did ourselves. I think all six of us (except Izzy) were people who had participated in the Every-Other-Week online Trollope reading group. I was so glad to meet them and so glad to be there. Some looked like I imagined, and others not so much. I was told (as I often am) that I am smaller than people imagine me. This was the mark of the conference: it turned out to be a celebration of this 3 year silver lining which is on-going still. Now here it is appropriate for me to say something I did not say there. For my talk, I wore a very pretty feminine blouse I had bought the week before, a new lovely purple suit (a woman’s suit, with a skirt), and flat black pumps. I felt I looked right.

Back to the rooms and then out again to a dining room for a brief reception and then supper with all the participants who had arrived. I knew Isobel would not want to go to a pub so felt I should not try to join another group and let her go back alone. Instead we walked about Somerville, went back to our rooms and set up our connectivity. It was a very pretty evening in the college. Calm and quieter than term time I’m sure. I was reading alternatively Barbara Reynold’s life of Dorothy Sayers, and her Nine Tailors, appropriate books for the occasion and place. It had been cool that day, light sweater-weather and the rooms were comfortable.

Saturday Izzy spent in Oxford and she told me when she and I met at Somerville around 5:30 that she had had a good day. She went on guided tours, she took buses around Oxford. Later on she said she thought she liked Oxford better than London. Well Saturday was the big long day of the conference, and I’ve described in papers in that previously-referred to blog. A very satisfying day for me. I got to talk to a lot of people, inbetween times, over lunch, during the sessions. I enjoyed the sessions — they are my favorite parts of a conference. There were people from English-speaking countries almost around the globe — 2 or 3 from Australia, a couple originally from New Zealand, now living in the UK, people from all over the US, California, to NYC and New England, from the south, all over England, 2 people from Ireland, people from Northern England (Leeds), and Scotland. The Trollope community readership — as represented also on the Every-other-Week Zoom reading group.

But it was the dinner that was spectacular. We were so afraid we might be dressed up too much. Foolish us. Though it was just “smart casual” it was a regular several course sit-down dinner with wines, elegant food, candles even. Dominic, the chair, wore a beautiful suit and tie. I noticed several men went back to put on their ties. Susan Cooper, who was responsible for much of the conference (worked so very hard) was in an elegant gown, with her hair beautifully coiffeured. So Izzy’s beautiful cocktail dress (not over fancy) was perfect, with her gold necklace. I could have worn my fancy dress but I was just as comfortable in a lovely new dress that would be considered “smart casual” for an office, something one might war to a conference! I wore the pink jeweled necklace Jim bought me so long ago.

Here is the dining hall during the day — you can see all around are paintings of “famous old girls”

Towards the end we did a really fun thing, It was. People read passages from Trollope. I was one; mine was perhaps a somber moment from Orley Farm just after Mary Lady Mason has been driven to tell Sir Peregrine Orme that she did the crime to stop him from insisting she marry him, and three sentences from a nearby scene. These are deeply moving instances of inner soliloquy and (my theme for the conference) women’s friendship, for they are with Mrs Penelope Orme. Happily the choices were various, some very comic, some prosaic, all showing Trollope at some moment that the reader found especially delightful. Dominic ended the evening by reciting by heart some passages from songs (I believe) from Gilbert and Sullivan (not sure of that) he has recited at the end of dinners at the Literary Alliance Society.

Sunday was much more relaxed in dress. We came down to breakfast a bit later and people were getting to know one another and sitting in different configurations. I’ve described the papers of that morning, and the panel. Lunch. Then it was time to say goodbye. Maybe it ended all too soon, but I usually remember how when an event feels it has ended too soon, that means it has been and will be good in memory. We had a little trouble getting a cab to the train station but it was wiser than dragging those 3 cases. The weather by that time was turning very warm.

London. Then we did begin to have a hard time. I wrote a response to the Travelodge query about what I thought of their Kings Cross Royal Scot Hotel: it was awful. The worst thing was the people at the front desk seem to have been trained to refuse to help you. Seriously. You had to go upstairs and do “it” on the internet online yourself, except the internet was only available for 30 minutes, only for 2 devices and then connectivity was poor. I had made another of my bad mistakes, the result of not being able to be poised and clear in my mind and accept that I am really traveling someplace so I had us staying only until Thursday morning. Although it seemed the last place I wanted to stay, I knew no where else. Luckily one of the helpful managers (there was only one) himself actually phoned and arranged for us to have the room another night. He also directed the people at the desk to help us set up our connectivity in our room, which suddenly they were fully capable of doing.

I admit what seemed intolerable, unendurable at first, after a night’s rest, became a place where I could see the hotel chain was offering the minimum that you need to be comfortable, just, but they did offer it. You must go to manager to get service but then you do. Neighborhood was nice. Kings Cross is well-located and we later discovered we could take a train all the way to Heathrow: since it was not clear until the afternoon before we could get a cab to come to the hotel for us, that was our “insurance” on getting home. Exquisitely good Italian food in nearby restaurant. Then sleep.

Monday was the day we did too much. I made Izzy nervous because I was nervous when I had an episode of immediate memory loss: I blanked out at what was our next step on the Tube. At first it bewildered and overwhelmed me, and I never truly got used to it literally. Theoretically yes. This was the day of Imperial War Museum, and then we had a stressful time getting back to Westminster, and difficulties finding out how to get on a tour boat.

I knew I was pushing her to buy the ticket but I thought it was the right one and if we didn’t, we would not have time to do it. The result was a 2 and 1/2 hour ride to and from Greenwich, with an amusing guide. Unfortunately it had become hot and we had no hats. Alas, we barely had time to get back to our room and out again for the marvel of Dr Semelweiss with Mark Rylance. (This play will form my third blog about this trip.) Izzy was very upset at no supper before, but after it was over, she was reconciled because of the moving brilliance of the piece, the beauty of the theater and having found a Shake Shack, where she bought a hot dog, fries and I got a cup of vanilla cream. Let me admit I don’t care whether I eat or not most of the time. The room when we got back was too hot — there was a strong fan and I used it throughout the 4 days and 5 nights.

From my POV luckily on Sunday night I had persuaded Izzy to buy two tickets to the Victoria and Albert hall to listen to a concert by Rufus Wainright, starting at 10:15 pm. She wasn’t keen on Sunday night. Tuesday morning she would have been adamantinely against this. Further now she would not agree to a play on Wednesday night, which I longed to do: I read rave reviews of Noel Coward’s Private Lives with Patricia Hodges and Nigel Havers; it was said having the older couple gave renewed life to the lines, made a new old play. You might say luckily it was sold out on Wednesday night! I was not that keen on the others I suggested, but I admit were I not worried about my problems with memory and finding places, I might have gone by myself to the Old Vic Wednesday night to see Pygmalion (with a good cast). It was the theaters I wanted to see too.

Tuesday was the day we toured the Courthauld Museum (again very good: unexpected Reynolds, some beautiful and famous impressionists). In Somerset House, and again at mid-day found ourselves stressed in an attempt to figure out how to get on the bus tours. We hopped on and off two until we found the right one stopping at the right place. I did enjoy the two tours because they went all around central places in London and for the first time in my life I saw what was connected to what and how. Who knew 10 Downing Street was not far from Trafalgar Square? I didn’t. We also took a tour ride back to Kings Cross so we covered tourist and not-so-tourist areas. We found an older area of London is now Middle Eastern. Izzy was not that out of it because she listened alertly to the audiotape. I didn’t. Then home again, a meal out — not so good as the first.

Then we had to wait until 9:30 to leave. I almost chickened out. It was so hot and dark. I’m glad I didn’t. Arduous walking from Tube, but when the building itself nove into view, all roundness, all so wonderfully special with its endless columns and overdecorations, and it was crowded, we were both glad we were there. Very hot in the place. But they had a good snack bar, we found out our seats at the back of the orchestrra, and Izzy said Wainright’s first song was spectacular. I didn’t care for him — he is not like his father-in-law, Leonard Cohen after all. But the orchestra played sublimely. People danced in the center.

Jim loved this place and we went once during the proms when it was also very hot

Back to room, hurrying hurrying as we saw not all Tube entrances were opened. We made it! Tumbled into bed.

Wednesday was the special day after the conference. I met face-to-face a long-time LISTSERV and internet friend, Rory O’Farrell. I regret to have to say I forgot to take photos. It is so out of my usual ways, it never entered my mind until after he was gone, and I thought of telling the other people on our listserv and here and maybe the Trollope FB page. He loves, reads Trollope and knows many of the novels well (the listserv in question is my Trollope and his Contemporaries @ groups.io list.) It was he who encouraged me to put in a proposal for this Trollope conference I just attended. We talked for 2 and 1/2 hours in the cafe of the Victoria and Albert museum. Izzy was with us. We rested until 11:30 and then made our way to South Kensington station and the Victoria and Albert cafe where we said we would meet at 12:30 noon.

He recognized me first — though he said he thought I had brown hair. It’s a mix of light blonde, white, grey (does not look dyed). Like many , he said I’m smaller and thinner than he imagined. He’s 78; I really had no picture of him in my mind, never having seen a close clear photo. But when I saw a thinnish white-haired older man sitting there alone in a 4 people table looking expectant I knew it was him. We shook hands. This will help push me to go to Ireland next summer at long last with Road Scholar (put off for 4 years). It’s the 9-10 days called Enchanted Ireland. I shall make a real effort to remember to take photos. He and I have been writing each other daily (me first thing in the morning ET) for more than 10 years. We started when Jim became sick, carried on through the pandemic, and are still doing it. Many days just a short note, many our plans for today or what happened yesterday, what we are writing, or reading, all sorts of topics. I look forward to going home so Saturday we can start again.

The Victoria and Albert Museum pool

Again the time was all too short. I kissed him goodbye and he hugged me. Izzy demurred. As with the Somerset House, we discovered the central area was turned into a perpetual fountain for children. There were families there cavorting and having picnics. I was just not in the mood to find anything in the museum but did bring home a lovely engagement calendar — tasteful art work. Wednesday night we did not go out. I concede the BBC is not bad for programming (what passes for news is ludicrous) and over the 4 nights I saw Mary Beard, David Attenborough for an hour each, a program on St Paul’s, and one good one on early Ireland. We did that night experience fine dining at an expensive restaurant in St Pancras station and saw very expensive rooms, bars, and upper class men in suits.

I was sorry not to go out to a play again I admit. I am like a child. I am having trouble with immediate memory, cannot navigate around, so literally could not do what we’ve been doing w/o Izzy and her google and Apple Maps on her cellphone. The blog where I write of Rylance and the Harold Pinter Theater I will tell of my memories of going to the Old Vic with Jim (once to see The Wind in the Willows as a play by Alan Bennet).

Last day, Thursday. One more longed-for thing to do. The hottest day in the UK thus far this year, 32.6C at its height. Carrying on with our idea to see things we can’t replicate anywhere in the US, we went to Westminster Abbey. We were way too late for the central tour, but this did not matter. We walked with audio mobiles where Jeremy Irons among others explained what we were seeing. I found the early Modern dead royals especially hypocritical, much too much gilt &c but of course it’s the building itself, the windows, ornate iron, sculptures on the church one comes for. In Poet’s Corner we found Trollope’s memorial slab, a carving from his beautiful peroration in Autobiography. And took our only photo of it. The queen in 2012 added a huge chapel way high, and there were sculptures of moral men cut off (MLK, Ghandi, Bonhoeffer). You see London from a great height through carved windows.

Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I did adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words I have written … From the last paragraph of Trollope’s posthumously published Autobiography

Nice cafe, beautiful gardens, and back to hotel for trying time. We cannot get past an absurd glitch in our information in the British Air website (they won’t accept our home address as our destination; Izzy herself on the phone could not get past “they’ll do it at the airport). So we’ll go off early to be able to check in the earliest we can this way. I ordered a cab, no thanks to hotel staff reluctant even to do that.

This might be the room we had tea in — there was a bar at one end: this photograph is made to look glamorous or grand by the coloration; it’s much plainer in experience

Do another building: the Reform Club at 104 Pall Mall. We worked to find the block with its palaces. And there we found Dominic waiting for us in what looked like a morning room (it might have been at the Oxford-Cambridge). We had been able to make this appt during breakfast on Sunday! We had high afternoon tea with Dominic–a chance to talk to one another, Izzy there and animated. Alas, neither Izzy or I are cake eaters, but we did our best.

Dominic took us around the magnificent building. The elegant front rooms for AGMs to meet, library, dining place, computer room tucked away, more comfortable, less pretentious rooms upstairs (behind a sort of curtain). Good conversation. Izzy remembered being there for my speech on Trollope’s storytelling art, partly told in letters. I told Dominic of how I’d been there for lunch with Letts, with the publisher at Hambledon Press and Jim so the dining room I knew. I saw the AGM room and surmise it was there I gave that talk. A copy of my book is now in its library. There are 5000 members supporting it. We bid adieu outside on the steps.

And so our journey and the adventures that mattered ended. We went back to hotel, packed as far as we can, ready to leave for airport early tomorrow. I’m with Fanny Price who in Cowper’s poetic lines yearned for home.

Having packed, eaten what we could of the breakfast downstairs we waited 15 tense minutes more in this hottish (already) room. I was shaking slightly: these kinds of moments in travel are the worse. So I’m writing away. Izzy writes in diaries frequently when we are away. Small notebooks bought for the purpose. Then the cab did come — Euston Station service, and took us to the airport for a reasonable price. At long last I got to spend some cash, English pounds. At the airport after staring suspiciously at our home address, she found it elsewhere (passport papers) and we were given a boarding pass and seats. There was a stressful search (full scale at Heathrow, because they made me nervous and I couldn’t answer their question, in which bag were my toiletries?). Izzy losing patience waiting for the gate announcement. But finally boarded in a familiar corner and the plane took off.

Home again home again, jiggedy-jig And now we are sick: we appear to both have the same horrendous respiratory infection: from crowds, from stress. She is perpetually coughing but her fever has gone down; we have been to the doctor; it’s not Covid. He says no sign of pneumonia for me but if I’m not better by next week (!) go in for an X-ray.

Re-transplanting back to our routines, activities, reorganizing for the coming fall for the last couple of days nbetween intermittent bouts of sick misery. Our cats did miss us: Ian pissed all over one floor, over another book; Clarycat just looked lonely and stayed in my bed where I sleep a good deal of the time.

So here we are — wish for us we get well soon. It was really our first time since the pandemic to be with a lot of people in crowds.  I hope it is not my fault we have gotten so sick from doing too much.

Ellen

Fraught mornings, or on Renewing our passports, and other people’s taxes; Clarycat struggling on; summer/winter plans

Tazzi — December 2014, probably around 19

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been three weeks since I last wrote, and very slowly, painfully, not clear if at all truly, Clarycat is improving somewhat. The main thing is she is still eating, drinking, using her litter box, cleaning herself, and she is lively within limits. She follows me about, comes to the door when I return from being out, visits me in my chair in my workroom. She is aware something is wrong but not sure what it is, so remains in a kind of stunned state.

Yes my beloved Clarycat is now an elderly disabled cat. From some photos my friend, Martin, sent me, it appears that the way Clary often looks is commmon among cats in this “stage of life.” You see his beloved Tazzi at her best just above this in the last year(s) of life. I have opted (I think without meaning to act this way just not doing more as yet) not to go for x-rays lest the anesthesia kill her, and because I probably would not go to the huge expense and painful procedures in the hope I could prolong her life. The question is for how long? could they prevent another stroke? I remember what excruciating pain and misery Jim knew — after that operation.  How no one helped him once the cancer metastasized into his liver.  We should have cut loose and had one last holiday in England. Could he have had a good time with the idea in his head that now he must certainly die soon?  He would not go to the fantastically expensive expert doctors.  He only said to me near the end, “don’t let them hurt me. I know I may end in hospital and you won’t be able to help this.” In the event he died at home in the bed we had bought for him after the operation.

I am keeping an eye on her a good deal and she stays close to me; that means I pick her up and put her on my lap when she comes by, put her down, I help her steady herself. I did find her in her old spot between the back of my computer and one of the two workroom windows — the old spirit back. But she could topple any moment and topple the computer and wires so I have to take her down. She is slowly retrieving what she can but will never walk right again and never be able to climb much or come down from low heights easily.. She stays close and a new reinforcement of my homebody habits is how she looks forlorn when I go out. I find her cuddled into my side when I wake in the morning. She struggles to walk on her own. My job is to keep her spirits up.

Here is a poem Martin sent me that he wrote about Tazzi when she began to decline:

Our cat is old, she feels the cold
She sleeps beside a heater
Her world is shrunk to just one room
A basket on the kitchen floor
A food bowl, water, litter tray
No need for cat flap any more
She does not pass the kitchen door

A scarecrow, gaunt and deaf, she croaks,
A silent purr between your palms,
Her skin is thin, her backbone
Pricks beneath the fur you stroke
She cannot jump onto a chair,
Enfeebled legs will not permit her,
Who was so graceful, strong and fast.
The table cloth stays clean at last.

Her pleasure used to be to sit
in the front window
and watch the passing street.
But you cannot leave a cat alone
However still she looks
Who cannot get outside in time,
And pees on books.

She came to us some six years old
A rescue cat, is now perhaps nineteen.
She put her paws up on my chest,
And she decided it was us.
Dismissing all the rest.

The former cat, blocked by a door
Would quietly dig the carpet up.
But she will stand at the door and squawk
Requiring service now now now
Unusual cat, to almost talk.

There has been a time when she would wait
While I made breakfast and had sat down
To sit upon my lap
A few minutes before wandering off.

Allowing of affection
You could not pet a person so
Unharmed by petting, unseduced
Indifferent going on her way
The action left the better.

Despite it all, the spark of life
Is still alight, she has a healthy
Appetite for what she likes,
An unexpected turn of speed
When chicken scraps appear.
O sweety puss, O kitty cat,
A dragging leg today,
Not a good sign I fear,
But you just carry on,
There’s no self-pity there.

That’s right: there is no self-pity in Clarycat.

On her blanket a couple of mornings ago

Clarycat is one of my living links with Jim. She grieved for his death, as he lay dying by running back and forth in the hall, caw-cawing. She sat in his chair for two weeks after his body was taken out — she was waiting for him to return. When he didn’t, she slowly became attached to me.

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But yesterday morning fraughtness reached a different kind of height. I finally faced the reality that our passports may be rejected when we try to travel. The UK site says the passport need only be valid for the time we are there, but I phoned at last — the British embassy and British Airways, went to two different post offices, phoned online another person: the answer was airports have no general rule, and British Airways itself might not let us aboard because our passports will expire before the end of six month afterwards. When I heard “you can never tell with security guards,” my heart sunk. These are silent petty tyrants (the worst type of authority figure) I’ve had to deal with three times now – they ignore all you say. You have no civil rights.

When I found the place on line where we were to print out the application, I discovered that Izzy had said nothing because she too was reluctant to mail the passport off — out of fear it would not return in time. I was in the position of having to pressure her to do what was painful for me to do. I needed her help to navigate the damn site. Together we managed it. I knew where to go to get the passport photos — still the local drugstores are doing it. Our ordeal began at 9:30 am when we got online to look; and it ended at 11:45 am when we were driving back home having handed in to our local post office two envelopes with all the appropriate materials in them. Cross your fingers for us. Hope very hard. I have lost nearly $2000 since Jim died in non-refunded airplane fees (twice on Expedia I was egregiously robbed; cancelling a flight because of the pandemic I got nothing back) so if we must buy our airplane tickets ahead and the passports don’t come by late August, what then?

I told (by the way) my congressman would help expedite the passport renewal. Neither of his phones takes messages and it is explicitly written on the website, he can do nothing about passport renewals as the state department will not answer queries. The post office no longer helps you (De Joy strikes again). Ordinary people who know no one like Izzy and I are powerless w/o laws and customs on our side. They used to be, a little bit. No longer.

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Ah, I see I’ve not told you — my friends reading this — why we are traveling. Well around middle to later March my proposal to give a paper at the upcoming Trollope Society conference at Somerville College, in Oxford, September 1-3, on the theme of Trollope and Women was accepted! We are in time to stay in the college too! Izzy will come (I could not do it without her), and we hope to spend three days in London afterwards.

Somerville College, Oxford, very early women’s college (recent photo)

Finally see the Imperial War Museum with its fabulous collections of art (not sure which schools, perhaps many?) and its legendary history exhibits. Go to a play. Walk in the London parks again.

Here is my proposal:

Anna Carteret at Lady Mabel Grex (1974 Pallisers, from The Duke’s Children) — she gazes out the window at Frank Treghear and Lady Mary Palliser

Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction

Using a gendered perspective, I will discuss women characters who act, think, and feel in unexpected ways, whom recent readers find hard to explain, and cause controversy. I’ll focus on lesser known as well as more familiar presences.
My first & central pair will be Clara Amedroz and Mrs. Askerton from The Belton Estate. Most essays have been about how Clara at first prefers the glamorous, guarded, demanding and upper-class Captain Aylmer to the open-hearted, farmer-like, affectionate Will Belton. I will dwell on Clara’s refusal to give up her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a woman who fled an abusive husband and lived with him before her husband died, thus enabling Mr. Askerton and her to marry. Mrs. Askerton is stunningly unexpected in her generosity of spirit and mix of conventional and unconventional views. The first half of my talk will move from Clara to other young about to, just married or not marriageable women whose lives take them in insightful directions, e.g., Lily Dale, Miss Viner (“Journey to Panama”), Lady Glencora, Emily Lopez.

The second half of my talk will move from Mrs. Askerston to sexually and socially experienced disillusioned women, e.g., Madame Max, Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Mabel Grex, Mrs. Peacocke (Dr Wortle’s School), as well as older mature women who are mothers, and whom Trollope takes seriously, e.g., Lady Lufton, Mrs. Crawley, Lady Mason.

Trollope dramatizes what might seem perversities of behavior these women resort to as contrivances to get round a lack of concrete power (used against them, sometimes by other women, e.g., Lady Aylmer) to try to achieve results they can be happy or live in peace with. The point of the talk is to show how Trollope probes and makes visible psychological and iconoclastic realities in his women characters’ lives.

While I’m about it, I might as well tell why I am reading — and just reveling in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. I realize now that I never read it with enough attention, never gave it the respect it deserves as a brilliant account of a woman’s college (it takes place at Somerville where Sayers went! — called Shrewsbury in the novel). I remember who did it so am collecting clues! It’s like reading Austen’s Emma for the second time. My proposal for an online 4 week winter course at OLLI at Mason was accepted too:

Women in and writing Detective-Mystery Stories

We will explore the genre of detective stories of the mystery-thriller type from the angle of the woman writer, detective, victim & murderer: our three books will be Josephine Tey’s (Elizabeth MacKintosh) The Daughter of Time (the story the mystery of Richard III); Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night; and P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. We’ll also see (outside class) and discuss two movies: Robert Altman and Jerome Fellowes’s Gosford Park and J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (as rewritten by Helen Edmunsen and directed by Aisling Walsh). It’s a feminist literary history course, an outgrowth in one direction of the course I taught this past winter: The [archetypal] Heroine’s Journey

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This may be labelled fraught days we have learned to avoid. I’m now following or receiving substack newsletters from Susan Bordo, whose books on feminism, the body, literature, I once admired and read in. She writes vigorously and in the middle of the month described her fraught ordeal making out her and her husband’s taxes. She does them, using Turbo Tax: Turbo Tax Hell.

I was moved to write as follows:

My husband always did the taxes; he had a Ph.d in Math and was good in arithmetic. I have yet to figure out how to do percentages and long division. And he was very impatient, a bad teacher. So he did the taxes until he died — some 10 years ago now. My adventures with Turbo Tax and my older daughter the first year after his death will go undiscussed. For 3 years I was gouged by experts who couldn’t be bothered to understand what was my predicament. I have a portfolio of invested money by Schwabb, a legacy from my parents). I have an autistic (my younger) daughter who lives at home but makes a good income. She comes with me with her forms. Finally through the OLLI at Mason where I teach and a course called How to do your Taxes I learned a little about what all the rectangles meant — I began to realize why my father each year would become enraged at how much he had to pay. But through them I discovered AARP does anyone’s taxes for free if there is an office nearby. The first year took them 4 hours. You might say luckily I have never made any money on my 2 books. The people put notes in explaining everything — We arrive at the library we go to where AARP can found as the door’s open and get out around noon — mine now takes 2 hours + — but we also spend time waiting in a line of chairs too. The whole thing makes me so nervous that this year for the first time I discovered I was writing down wrong information about when my husband died. No one ever caught it.

So there you have what happened to me, to us, to our family group (includes two cats) this month that matters most in practical ways and practical things matter.

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Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke hard at work on proposed new cottages which her uncle will never build (1994 Middlemarch, scripted by Andrew Davies)

We have begin Eliot’s Middlemarch on Trollope&Peers and the reading and discussion will take all summer; in a few nights (if not tonight) I shall turn my attention to Elizabeth Gaskell and her Wives and Daughters, as I’ll be reading and teaching it at OLLI at Mason from middle June to late July. Both books have exceptionally superb Andrew Davies film adaptations. The two Italian classes I’m teaching are going well. Would you believe I’m reviewing a book for an 18th century Intelligencer where I’m rereading Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers: I remember Anne Oldfield. I had no idea he derived some of his early wealth from enslaved people on plantations. I’ve two subscriptions with my friend Betty to see operas and go to plays next year; one with Izzy to go to the Folger once again to see Shakespeare. So I soothe myself.

I lost my one close and true friend of 44 years and all I do is an effort to replace him. I’m listening to Ross Poldark by Winston Graham being read aloud in my car and I realize I loved it so because the couple at the center are to me Jim and me. The attitude towards class and social life mine. I love to escape to these historical fictions and romances and to real historical narratives too — I’ve now added mystery-thrillers of the detective story type descending from Agatha Christie. I have decided Joan Hickman has it closest; it is with her we feel safer. Let’s hear it for spinsters and widows alone.

Miss Marple — I’ve enjoyed four serials thus far and am just mesmerized by PD James’s Dalgliesh (two thus far) on TV; her books have a quiet but persistent melancholic vein that makes them worth while …

So I’ve succumbed after all — how gentle, tender and touching are the Dorothy Sayers mysteries with Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter — I’m loving him in the book too. Escape from the present into an Arcadia where death still resides, from hard lives to dreams that create an analogous experience to those I imagined and was really in with Jim.

And on the other hand, the way I’m learning to read Elena Ferrante’s books from The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chihava, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards I find I can do in these women’s mysteries: in the interstices of these — Gaudy Night, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Jessie Childs’s The Siege of Loyalty House (harking me back to DuMaurier’s King’s General only this one so much realer and close to today’s fascism rising) even, is the discovery of myself and aspects of my journey in my mind and feeling I find across The Neapolitan Quartet. Really.

It is very hard to live on without Jim — I spend hours, days, weeks, months alone working here (reading, writing) and playing here (movies and friends’ chat) conflicted because I don’t force myself to go out — where I am sometimes rejuvenated but often come home so stressed and wonder why I went. I now know that what I am driven to do to my feet sometimes is a form of stimming. I keep learning at these autism sessions so much. Our (me, Nina, Bianca) first Women with Autism online zoom group seemed to go so well. Another thing for you to cross your fingers for me. I am so very frightened without him.

Ellen

Clarycat

Clarycat home from the Vet this past Monday morning

Dear friends and readers,

Last Friday, so six days ago Clarycat began to walk oddly: she was leaning against walls on her left side, her head held tilted to the right, yet stumbling on her left side, look like someone very uncomfortable, possibly in pain. She could no longer jump down from cat beds, only get on my lap after I helped her and with real struggle and effort upon onto our bed. Very worrying. She was eating, drinking, but much less; she looked thinner, her tail down. She looked sad.

I had to wait until Monday morning and brought her in about 10 minutes after the office opened. The vet declared she is 14, born 2008, so in her 80s (human equivalent), very old lady. She has small kidneys. If her blood pressure was high that meant she had had a major stroke, brain damage. We had blood work done, tests for organic disease. $695. The next day the Vet phoned and the news was moderately good: no disease could be found, her blood pressure is normal. So what is wrong. If we had a cat scan, the Vet could tell us more but since the Vet declared an operation out of the question (very expensive — $3000 and more), that Clary would be at risk of dying from anesthesia, we cannot know any more. The Vet had given her an injection of an antibiotic. It could have been the middle ear – an infection. But the Vet seemed inclined to think Clary suffered a minor stroke, a minor heart attack we could say.

During Monday, she looked so limp as she lay on her side, my heart failed. That was the way Llyr lay down in her last days.

She was named after Samuel Richardson’s heroine, Clarissa, but I felt silly calling such a sweet tiny kitten Clarissa, so she soon became Clary (my favorite nickname for Richardson’s character) and then Clarycat. One time I took a photo ofher sitting on Richardson’s book, but I can no longer find it. So here she is in a posture like the one she took when placed upon the book:

2011, Clarycat at 3

Here she and Ian are as kittens when they first arrived:

and here she is fully adult and in good health, watching me:

Mid-week she was getting better (I hoped) very slowly. I thought I saw tiny improvements. She is eating and drinking better. She stopped being hostile to Ian (spitting and hissing at him) — I think she was afraid of his wrestling her. She uses her litter. I saw signs of her climbing a bit here and there, but this morning she attempted the kitchen table and tumbled off. I felt so terrible for her. She scurried off and hid under the bed.  She seemed very upset.  She likes to climb: that’s how she gets into her cat beds by the windows and looks out.

She has not played with her toys for over a week. She often carries them about in her mouth or she puts them in spots where I have been. She will not share them.  She can get pretty fierce with poor Ian.  They now lie ignored in a cab bed.

When I leave the house, I can forget about it, but on my way home I remember and feel so sad.

I should say during this time Laura told me her male cat, Maxx, a sweet cream-colored darling had a urinary tract obstruction. Crystals formed in one of his tubes, something that can happened to a cat that has been neutered. It cost her $3200 to have him catheterized, a tube put in him to drain the urine until the crystals were dissolved. At one point she had an emergency return to the animal hospital. She sent me a photo of him in a crib with a tube coming out of him. She has told me not to get pet insurance as it is very difficult to get the insurers to pay and they charge a lot too!

Here he is one New Year’s Eve, say 2 years ago

Thursday — this morning Clarycat not getting worse; sometimes she also seemed to be better: she is holding her body carefully as she walks along; she carries on eating, drinking, using the litter and today I saw her vigorously cleaning herself and sitting in the sun.  She can climb onto my chair again, from the side, a sort of slithering leap.

She remains stunned. She knows something has happened to her. She can’t say I’ve had a neurological event but she feels it as weakening, strange.

She is the darling of my heart. On my lap as I type,

As I read she sleeps lying by my side. Now when I wake and read between 5 am and 7:15 when I get up, she lies across my chest. I carry her about, put her near the sun, I so want her to be enjoying life insofar as she can.

She loved Jim — was very attached to him. When he lay dying the last two days, she went back and forth in the hall making unhappy noises. After he was taken away, she sat in his chair for couple of weeks.

A few years ago now I translated a poem by Elsa Morante to her cat, Alvaro. Here it is again:

Morante and one of her cats

A song for Alvaro

You regard your nest as within my arms
At once still and tenacious, a genius loci shines out intently
and yet you are all play, vain, selfish, without goal,
beyond the moment, worse than useless creature.
The afternoon shades are your dwelling places:
like a soft dove, alert, you can turn into an owl;
seen in the depths of night, from tombs
your soft breath contains spirit.
When I extinguish the light, your pupils
a candelabrum staring into
my dozing half-sleep half awake eyes;
you crack whatever solemn respite, truce from life,
I know — for there you are again,
fiery light in your eyes, a burning transience;
as baby tigers chase their tails, so you
in my sweet deliriums.
Then you sleep, your show-y light gone,
you who in the morning I find proudly sitting
on the edge of the windowsill,
your beautiful eyes twin flowers
And I am your equal,
your equal, do remember —
aloof, sad, grave. Amid the somber
and dark leaves; we sparkle in a garden
together in the middle of uncivilized people,
a small paradise of two. I remember exile
that you in the room didn’t understand
as far as you were concerned
we were on the same patch of earth
passingly fleetingly, a playful pilgrim.
Oh, why do you condescend to
favor me, savage wild untamed thing.
When your peers, god-like creatures
savor their languid follies, turn to festive games
of fighting before dawn, occasional heartless hunting,
why are you here with me.
Continuously, you who are free, without lies
while I am thrice burdened with
prison, sin and death
Between the moons and the sun, within gleaming hawthornes,
magic herbs, chimeras, fawns immortal leap;
the young galants with the beautiful names: Curly
Atropos, Violent, Passion-flower, Palombra
and during that meticulous storm of naming,
the first day
where were you? did you love me from the start?
You don’t answer me. Jealous of your secrets,
you keep them to yourself, in the prison of self:
they include the sword of Damocles,
stories of gold, velvet zebras, hidden satyrs
who will not speak to women. Close eyes.
The sounds you make cajoling cajoling,
a humming flirting, purring whirr
my bee, thread your honey double up,
twist, bend, fold that string.
I remember ghosts O the cheer
of having you for a friend
is enough for my heart.
And for my stupidities and lies,
for my tearing myself, self-harm,
by your kisses and your sweet plaintiveness
you console me
oh my cat

Trans. Ellen Moody

From Alibi, bilingual edition (French and Italian)

For Italian and French, see my blog, Sylvia II at https://austenreveries.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/elsa-morantes-song-for-my-cat-alvaro/

Heart-breaking. This morning she is laying/sitting in a very lax kind of way that worries me. She would not survive 5 minutes out-of-doors.  She has not eaten this morning either, but then neither did Ian, also 14, a sibling from the same litter.

Ellen