I’d mentioned a few
posts back that I was reading C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia to my younger
daughter. The first book, “ The
Magician’s Nephew” is a great set up for the more popular “The Lion, The Witch
and The Wardrobe.” My girls had seen the
movie umpteen times a while back and so its familiar and things move
swiftly. Meanwhile, with my older daughter,
we’re reading Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” which by comparison, is
unfamiliar and plodding.
Whereas with some authors we’ve read like Tolstoy or Achebe
were people or stories I loved, this is something I’ve never read but feel we ought to know about. The first novel written by a woman to win the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction back in 1921.
Set in a Manhattan that my grandparents’ grandparents knew or wondered
about, it is widely lauded as an apogee of American literature. I confess I have a hard time imagining or
being particularly interested in this version of New York but still, its early
days as we’re only to page 44.
Importantly the Penguin addition we’re reading has a lady in a frilly
white dress, with a purple sash and matching hat band, pulling a bow and arrow
evoking “The Hunger Games” so it got my daughter’s attention. The back cover tells me the cover painting is
the right decade but set in England, the wrong continent: William Powell Frith, “The Fair
Toxophilites”, 1872.
But man, this is a rickety, stuffy old world. We spent a page or more last night on which
old New York families could really claim to be truly distinguished. It’s interesting so see an America, or a
segment of it, so concerned with mimicking the Old World. I explained to my
daughter that this was the conservative hidebound world of English and (in New
York, at least) Dutch aristocracy that allowed few if any other ethnicities legitimacy. It was a world that in my reading of
American history is one that is gradually, painfully and wonderfully dismantled
by essentially everyone else, including my own Irish ancestors, who eventually
gain a seat at the table.
Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had
been Louisa Dagonet and her mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac
of an old Channel Island family who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled
in Maryland after the war with his bride the Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth
daughter of the Earl St. Austrey. The
tie between the Dagonets and the du Lacs of Maryland and their aristocratic
Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas had always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had more than
once paid long visits to the present house of Trevanna, the Duke of St. Austrey
at his country seat in Cornwall and St. Austrey in Gloucestershire and his
Grace had frequently announced his intention of some day returning their visit
(without the Duchess who feared the Atlantic.)
Right. Well. Reading this out loud, before my daughter
heads to bed, it certainly has a sleep-inducing effect. Who cares?
Obviously they all did. And Edith
is no doubt setting this all up to illustrate their hopeless insularity. But so far, wringing hands with Newland
Archer as he wonders if May Welland is Ms. right, its slow going. Despite the fact that 门当户对[1] trouble is brewing.
Last summer I took my girls and my nephew for a quick visit
to the Morgan Library in Manhattan.
Somehow that is the vision that comes to my mind when I read about the
Archer’s and the Mingott’s and the van der Luyden’s. I suppose at that time, when Morgan was
building his library, he would have been seen as a flashy new-money man. Indeed there is a magazine illustration in
the Morgan Library from that time that depicts the financier with an evil grin,
out with a magnet in Europe drawing in all the treasures of the continent, with
his great wealth.
The library room itself is a remarkable storehouse of
knowledge and stuffy refinement and at the time, it must have been not only
priceless but comparatively utile collection of knowledge to have there in one
place. And of course, now the two or was
it three stories of books with ladders and all the information therein could
all be held on a 1TB hard drive and slipped in my breast pocket. The illuminated manuscripts, the smell of
the old hard covers and the visual impact of book upon book is still evocative
and irresistible. But like so much of
the refinements that people once took so seriously, they are now relevant only
as a museum collection.
Born two years after Edith won her Pulitzer, right there in
New York City, Elmo Hope is skipping and thumping along, in my ears from the
1953 recording of “It’s a Lovely Day Today.”
Somehow he keeps riding the base note in a way that feels like a subway
riding beneath all the pedestrian traffic overhead. Like so many jazz greats; Sonny Rollins,
and Mal Waldren and Herbie Nichols, Elmo’s parents were West Indian and moved
to New York.
Perhaps a bit more fair, a bit more colorful. A bit more room at the top, than the New York
of Newland Archer’s day. But not for
most ethnicities. At the age of
seventeen Elmo Hope was mistakenly shot by a New York City policeman when he
tried to run away from a disturbance.
The case was dismissed as a frame-up.
The bullet had narrowly missed his spine. Digging his elegant, “spidery”
style, where he “places a note almost anywhere, except on the beat” we can
pause thankful that the cop, whatever his ethnicity, was a bad shot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmo_Hope
[1]
méndānghùduì: the families are
well-matched in terms of social status (idiom) / (of a prospective marriage
partner) an appropriate match
No comments:
Post a Comment