Volume 2
Editor Jennifer Jopp
Assistant Professor of History
Willamette University
108 Smullin
900 State Street
Salem, Oregon 97301
(503) 375-5341
A Neighborhood Diary
Albert Furtwangler, Independent Scholar
About ten years ago, I fell heir to two little daybooks my mother kept in 1947 and 1948. I got them because she was moving to a retirement home at age 90, and she pushed two or three cartons of miscellaneous records into my hands when she cleaned out her linen closet. Besides these daybooks and an out-of-date address book, these boxes held a lot of old snapshots, obituaries, clippings, matchbooks, invitations, greeting cards, and reception programs. Mother had saved these things with the idea that someday she would make a family history. But someday never came. Now her eyesight had grown dim and her memory was fading.
I knew that in accepting her treasures I was accepting her commission to do something with them, but months passed before I found the time and worked up the nerve to sort through these old records. Eventually I organized some file boxes and duplicated pages of selected items, to fill out a brief family album I could send out to several cousins.
I left the two daybooks unread, however, because I saw (or thought I saw) that they did not pertain to family. They were practical records from years when my parents were the on-site managers of a little apartment building on Capitol Hill, near downtown Seattle. I leafed through them and set them aside. Maybe I was hesitant, too, about prying into my parents' lives when they were much younger than I had already become. I read just enough to take in that the names and some of the events tallied with some scenes I could remember from an early age (when I was about to begin school). We went aboard a warship as the guests of its captain; a child my age had a dying mother; we made an outing and flew kites with one of my uncles; we went to an older couple's cabin by the ocean and dug clams. There were such bits and pieces of family life here, but they were fragments in a record of routine chores, furnace repairs, workmen's hours, and tenants' payments and concerns. After fifty years, I also saw, no one could make much sense of these details. The other adults named in these pages had all died, and I was the only child from that time who could still fit the full range of names together with a gleam of recognition.
Within the past year, I came upon these books again, and this time I read them through, cover to cover. I found no family skeletons rattling inside them, but I could not help noticing how, day after day, the lines blurred between family and neighbors. Tenants who lived upstairs appeared at least as often as the aunts and uncles and cousins who came to visit every week. People from adjacent streets, who sold us paint or pastry goods, also joined us on weekend fishing trips; but so did friends from the past. These little books recorded an ample panorama of my parents' many circles of acquaintance. Indeed, those circles overlapped and intersected and expanded in surprising ways. Again I found myself feeling the pressure of my mother's will, to unfold this old panorama and bring it back to life.
I now face that task, however, with aims very different from hers. What I find embedded in these books are brief lines and scenes of neighborhood and neighborliness, in several dimensions. A young couple, crowded next to the furnace room in a two-story building, keeps making telling gestures towards neighbors in adjacent rooms and streets but also across a city, into other states, and even through links to distant continents. Who were my earliest neighbors, and how did my parents connect through them to a wider world? These little books provide a variety of answers and raise some provocative questions.
To read and make sense of them I have had to catch myself shifting focus from page to page, often from line to line. I am forced to see my parents, for example, not as Mother and Father but as Al and Lourice, a couple who had been creating a web of shared connections long before I was born. I also have to keep rebalancing a sense of past and present, intimacy and distance. Though these records were made at a time when I was very young, we stayed on in the same place for my first years of school, when I began to read and write and thus to hold memories of my own in fixed form. Later I came to see many of our first neighbors from a different angle, from a house in another neighborhood miles away. Now, decades later, I look back after years spent in many a neighborhood far away. Yet I sense that I am still my parents' son, conditioned by these early years to hold certain deep expectations of what a neighborhood can and should be.
&To explore the daybooks coherently, I must sketch a brief background about how they came to be. Al and Lourice Furtwangler were married in the spring of 1937, when they were about thirty years old. Al was the bookkeeper and front-office manager for a small company that sold pipe and plumbing supplies; Lourice worked for the telephone company. They were newlyweds in a one-bedroom apartment at the corner of Boylston Avenue and Aloha Street, a few blocks from the Broadway shopping district.
The Depression gave way to the war years, and the couple became parents-to a son (Joe) in 1942 and a daughter (Kathy) in 1944. After the first birth, Lourice quit work to stay at home.
In these years their building was managed by an upright, good-natured older woman named Jessie Shunk. She had both a son and a daughter in uniform, but when the war ended her daughter came home and found a nursing job on the Oregon coast. In 1946 Mrs. Shunk moved there as well. Rather, "Aunt Jane" moved away-for that is what Lourice had long called her. Lourice also named her daughter Katherine Jean after the nursing daughter, Katherine Jane. In short, by 1947 the bonds between these tenants had already developed a family feeling, and for several summers afterwards, a week of each summer vacation to visits with the Shunks at the Oregon coast.
The owner of the building, Mr. Weiss, lived across town. When the Shunks left he needed another manager, and he seems to have made an attractive offer. If Lourice would do routine cleaning of the halls and laundry room and look after the furnace, and Al would do minor maintenance and yard work, they would have a slightly larger ground-floor unit with a separate entrance and get some kind of stipend. I can find no exact record of payment beyond an entry about Lourice's signing a withholding certificate. Perhaps the rent was abated. (The other tenants paid $37 a month for their apartments, $40 with garage space.) In any case, here was a second income for a young family, for what seemed to be light efforts close to home.
On January 1, 1947, Lourice seems to have sat at the desk Mrs. Shunk once used and made her first entry in the books I now own. They are small daybooks, 4 x 7 inches, bound in dark leatherette with "A. E. Furtwangler" embossed on the front cover and New Year's greetings from a national collection agency printed on the endpapers. There is a blank page for each weekday and weekend, and Lourice's entries never run over that limit. She writes just brief lines of events without reflecting on them, to keep a practical record for Mr. Weiss.
But from the first, she also includes more personal touches. From line to line a page may mingle chores and duties with visitors, meals, the children's routines, and other matters. Here is a typical entry, for Friday, May 9, 1947:
Lit the furnace at 5:30-It was pouring rain-Stay'd up & washed out a few things-finished my ironing-wrote a card (Mother's Day) to Cleo-
Called Mr. Weiss in regards to having the wringer repaired-
Made breakfast for K & J. Cleaned up the apt-furnace room--& halls-
K. & J play'd out of doors in the sunshine for a while-
Mr. Paulson, Janet, & Holly had waffle lunch with us.
I put the children to bed for naps.
Called Kohler's CA 1008 to have wringer repaired.
I call this entry typical because the routines are broken by touches of neighborly interest. The furnace, the weather, the laundry, the halls, the children's naps-these are commonplace notes that recur with boring regularity. To keep track of a special point, Lourice herself marks the calls about the wringer in red pencil (shown here in italics). But woven into these practical lines are two personal touches, which deserve a bit of explanation. "Wrote a card to Cleo"-that is, paused to remember the older sister who took Lourice in when she first came to Seattle in her teens. "Mr. Paulson, Janet, and Holly had a waffle lunch with us"-that is, a tenant from upstairs felt welcome to stop in with his daughter and a friend, girls about to finish boarding school, and stay for a simple meal.
Such little events show up day after day, and as they do here, they reveal odd crisscrossings of one range of people with another. In the course of a week twenty relatives, friends, tenants, neighbors, and workmen might drop into this apartment and linger for an hour or more. In the course of a year the number grows much larger.
The best way I can think of to do justice to these entries is to describe and explain the circles of acquaintance that they name, beginning with the closest neighbors and working outward.
The closest neighbors, of course, were the other tenants in that two-story building. Most of them appear infrequently and under their formal names: Miss Battie (a high school teacher), Mr. and Mrs. Norden (a couple with a baby), two sisters named McIntosh (also teachers), Mrs. Kameron, and Mr. and Mrs. Lamb (who moved into the Shunks' old apartment). These formal names, however, do not imply coldness or distance. There was a situational intimacy in the way the building was laid out. Lourice often moved through the halls, running a vacuum cleaner and collecting trash from little closets near each door. At her approach, a door might open for a word about a leaking faucet or a rent payment. She had a passkey for repairs when tenants were away. And it was in her nature to offer extra touches, such as keeping a vase of fresh flowers at the main entrance and running others' laundry through the mangle if she found it hanging dry in the laundry room when she got up early to light the furnace.
The laundry room was downstairs next to our apartment, and the door was usually open between them. Each tenant had a scheduled time for using the wringer washer and clotheslines, and as the hours went by she might smell coffee brewing or waffles baking, or find a small child underfoot. One thing would lead to another and end either in a visit at Lourice's table or in a child's excursion upstairs.
Three of the tenants appear in these notes very often, though only one goes by her first name. By day Judy Johnson worked as a secretary in a large insurance agency downtown. At night she often stopped in on her way home. She might stay for dinner, go out with Al and Lourice to see a double feature, or babysit while they went out. Lourice often writes that "Judy came down & had coffee with me" or "I went up to Judy's for a little while." Judy also had a nephew named Walter who stayed in her apartment while he was waiting for his wife and young daughters to arrive in Seattle. There are entries through a period of two months when "Walt came down to iron some shirts & had coffee with us."Later, Al sometimes drove to pick up Walter, Vera, and the children on visits between their new home and Judy's apartment.
Over the course of a year, another tenant became "George" a few times rather than Mr. Paulson. This was a widowed salesman with a daughter in her late teens. She was at a convent boarding school through the week but came home on weekends. When her father was away on the road, he left $15 or $25 a month for Lourice to dole out for her expenses. Janet also needed help with the laundry equipment at times. In May, "Janet P. came down and asked me to put polish on her nails-I cleaned her jewelry for the Prom & helped her to get ready." In the fall, Janet came home from college at Thanksgiving and on Sunday "Mr. Paulson and Janet came down had dinner with us-Janet left on 11:30 train." Meanwhile, Janet's father relied on Lourice to forward his mail, and when he was in town he stopped in for coffee and sometimes a dinner. In August, "Al went to the ball game with George P. & I went to bed early."
The apartment directly overhead belonged to a woman in her seventies, Mrs. E. H. McClelland; her husband lived miles away in a veterans' home and her grown sons lived in California. In the course of the year she, too, grew close to Lourice. She needed help with drapes and curtains in March and May. In August she had an eye operation. Over the next two months her daughters-in-law came for visits, probably to give her needed support. Then came Halloween:
We had an early dinner-Al took Kathy & Joe around the apt. to Trick or Treat with the Lanterns that he made the night before-Clelland and Doris came down in the evening and we spent the evening-Al put on mask & acted the clown . . . Mr. Norden came down-all three borrowed masks for the party-We told stories-had apple pie & coffee-went to bed after mid night.
So the name became just "Clelland" or "Clellan"-the person I remember most vividly from that time. In the next two years, when I was beginning school, her apartment was my place to land if I came home and found no one at ours. Clellan's door was left unlocked at that hour so that I could slip in and tell her about my day. She usually sat in her living room with her back to the windows, a thin old lady with eyes enlarged by her glasses, laying out cards for solitaire, puffing at a Fatima cigarette and setting it back carefully in a brass ashtray, waiting for the radio broadcasts of political commentators on the Mutual network.
As her children were growing, Lourice had looked out for playmates and their parents along Boylston Avenue or in a similar apartment building on Aloha Street. The Dennen family was closest, in a large house next to our building. The father was a doctor with an office a few blocks away on Broadway. Mrs. Dennen often worked out exchanges, bringing her two girls over for the afternoon or bringing Lourice's children to her yard to play. Across the avenue were the Vinings, with two young sons. There was a boy my age in the next apartment building, and a girl my sister's age, in another family there; they get little mention in these books, probably because we became closer playmates later on.
Farther away there were families that seem to have been at extremes of the social scale. At one end of the avenue, a family with two small children was falling into chaos as the mother lay dying of liver cancer. Mrs. Dennen, Mrs. Vining, and others enlisted Lourice to help keep the children bathed and clothed until visiting nurses and distant relatives could step in. A block in the other direction was an old banker's mansion with ample grounds. From time to time, "Governess came by with the little girl in the afternoon & visited for a while," or "little girl and Governess came by in time to have a waffle."
The apartment also served as a handy place for relatives to come to, when they had any business downtown. Lourice had four sisters living in Seattle or nearby. Al had a sister, two brothers, and a cousin about his age. Lourice records casual, drop-in visits from all of them and from a couple of college-age nieces and nephews and their friends.
Her oldest sister, Cleo, had found work downtown in a jewelry store after her husband had a stroke and could no longer work as a civil engineer. Three or four times a month, her husband would catch a late-morning bus and come to the apartment, or meet his wife after work and come to the apartment for dinner, and Al would drive them back to their home on the other side of Lake Washington.
Another of Lourice's sisters had a husband away at sea as captain of a merchant ship. She came to town many evenings to take a Spanish course and dropped her son off at the apartment. She came by for help to catch a train or a plane to get to a far port. She stopped in on the way home from her son's music lessons. And so it went. As a neighbor went out one door, a relative might be stepping up to ring the bell at another.
Beyond the neighborhood, but not completely apart from it, Al and Lourice also kept up a circle of old friends whom they saw almost every week. Al made the rounds on Saturdays to see many of them at their places of business-and to talk over plans for getting away for some kind of camping or fishing trip. Mr. Adams sold us our meat at a downtown market; he and his wife also had us to their house for an evening of music in January and shared their cabin at Pacific Beach for a clam-digging weekend on the Fourth of July. (Is it an oddity of the writer or of her times, that after days of intimacy in a rough one-room cabin, they remain "Mr. and Mrs. Adams" in these entries?) The Hastings brothers pumped our gas and serviced our car. They also took Al fishing in April and to a stag party in May. Lyle Hartje ran a hardware store. Al and Lourice went to his wedding in June, and the two couples rented cabins for a fishing trip and crab feed the next January, the weekend of Lourice's birthday. Ralph Lyle had a downtown barbershop where Al always got his hair cut and swapped fishing stories. In April he and his wife Inga came to dinner at the apartment; in May and June, Al and Lourice went over to see their new baby. Harry Spencer did our dry cleaning at a plant on Olive Way. In the fall, he and Al went over the mountains to hunt pheasants.
Closer to home was Mr. Cuff, who lived a block away and sold Al and Mr. Weiss the paint they needed for a major redecoration project. He also went fishing with Al one Saturday morning in September, and they brought home three salmon. (Months later he was promoting a new paint that glowed in the dark on fishing lures. He demonstrated by suspending a salmon plug deep into a barrel. Then we all went to Orcas Island for a few days to try it out.) Right across Boylston lived Mr. and Mrs. Karvonen, who owned a small bakery. They also had a cabin cruiser on which the men went fishing, and a cocker spaniel that sometimes dashed in and out of our kitchen to sniff into our garbage can.
Lourice had her familiar rounds, too, in the shops along Broadway. Some days she also caught a bus for a brief ride down to the department stores downtown, where she could stop in to see Cleo or visit with a salty, round-faced old friend at the cosmetics counter in The Bon Marché. "Took Joe to school. Kathy and I went to town. To Fredericks-bought a form fit garment & 3 aprons-shopped around-went to the Bon. saw Margaret took her to lunch-bought some creams etc."
Long after we left the apartment building Al and Lourice were still getting meat, bread, haircuts, hardware, and cosmetics from these friends, and still sharing weekends with them. It may seem odd now that what Germans call Lebensmittel-provisions, but literally "means of life"-came to us for so many years from people we had camped with and partied with, from hands we had seen wielding fishing poles and clam shovels. But so it was.
Such closeness to neighbors, family, and friends may suggest a very encapsulated life, far removed from both the riches and the horrors of the modern world.
Far from it. For one thing, our apartment was just steps away from two remarkable cultural institutions; for another, these books record a time soon after World War II, when its echoes were still in the air.
Just down Boylston, on the same block, was the Cornish School building, where music and art were taught so intensively that classical piano notes seemed to spill down from the open windows whenever we walked past it. A few blocks away was the Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park. In those days every small child was taken to pose on the Asian animal statues that guarded the front doors. Al and Mrs. Dennen also took turns driving their children to special museum programs on Saturday mornings through the winter. Between these two institutions, this mid-city neighborhood touched wider horizons of European music and Asian art.
It was also linked to scenes of global warfare. Many people close to us had been on edge while their relatives served overseas. Aunt Jane's son was a career Coast Guard officer, and so was one of my uncles. Another uncle had gone into the Navy from the Merchant Marine. Cleo's son had enlisted in the Marine Corps right after high school and was now beginning college five years later. Clellan's older son was an Annapolis graduate who (I learned years later) had won one of the first naval battles of the war by ramming a small Japanese submarine in Pearl Harbor with the destroyer he commanded. One Saturday morning in October his wife issued an invitation to come aboard his current ship, a heavy cruiser. "Doris came down and invited us four to have lunch on the U. S. S. Helena with them-we left about 11:30-Drove out to the ship-looked over the ship while the Capt'n signed papers and dressed for dinner-had a nice lunch & visit the service was lovely."
In late January 1948 another side of the war reached our apartment. "Had the children dressed & dinner ready when Al came home-we drove out to see Sue and Mrs. Haury-had a pleasant evening-Mrs Haury read a letter from Germany to Al & she wrote an answer for him." This letter had been sent to my grandfather from his sister and her daughter. He had died in 1945, but his mail was forwarded to Capitol Hill. Now Al was taking us back to his old neighborhood, to consult a neighbor who could read and write German.
I still have a file of this correspondence, written and typed in German and English from 1948 to 1950. These distant relatives survived the war, they wrote, but they were destitute afterwards, living in the French occupation zone. They begged for help. My father and his sister gathered clothes and food and ordered CARE packages. In return the women reported that Freiburg had been firebombed so badly that they were now barely subsisting in a remote village. "What we lack is practically everything." In March, Al wrote again:
I have shown your letter to several people, all of different nationalities, and always get the same response, We will do what we can to help you. It will take a little time, but I am sure that in the future you will understand that the American people as a whole are a peace loving people and will go a long way to keep peace. I have several offers of clothing and will collect them and forward them to you. I am sending money to New York, for a food package to be sent to you immediately. . . . In the immediate future, my family and I will make up a package among ourselves and will send what we think will do you the most good.
So kin reached out to never-met kin in a neighborly touch across thousands of miles and barriers of more than language.
By making this intensive review of the many figures in their lives, I have come to see how entangled my parents were and how precarious the situation was becoming in their little apartment. Time was ticking and their children were growing. Lourice records each day by itself and very rarely looks forward or back, but over the course of fourteen months her writing habits change. A full week of pages is blank in September, when the family was on a vacation trip to Oregon. But another blank interval, unexplained, appears in October; then several blank pages in November and December. The 1948 book begins with full entries in January, becomes spotty in mid-February, and is blank after February 26.
I strongly suspect that this change stems from an entry for August 29: "Got up early-got breakfast-dressed Joe & Kay & took Joe over to the Lowell school to register him for Kindergarten-We went down town & did some shopping for school-etc." When school began, so did a new daily routine. Each weekday there was the walk up to Broadway and Mercer at noon to meet the crossing guards who led squads of children to the school; later in the day another walk when school let out, again with a smaller child in tow.
Lourice still had to keep records that fall. The furnace needed an overhaul, and painters came to work long hours in all the apartments. But she also notes sending seventy-five pounds of paper to a Lowell School paper drive in September, baking a pie for the school open house in November, and going over with Mrs. Vining and Mrs. Dennen to a PTA meeting in January. Step by step she was being drawn into a new set of connections. In early February she was involved for a week with another paper drive. The book goes blank but then resumes on September 11: "Mrs. Rowe-P.T.A. President called and asked if I would be paper drive chairman this year." Then pages fill with names of school staff, PTA officers and volunteers, and dealings with paper recyclers through mid-October. Lourice's days were now full on a new front. I sense that she now kept simpler apartment records elsewhere and simply gave up taking notes on personal events.
The beginning of school might well have signaled that it was time for this family to move. The children were now too big for a one-bedroom apartment. But for understandable reasons, Al and Lourice could not budge from this neighborhood. Capitol Hill was district of either modest apartments or houses beyond their means. This building had been their only home as a couple, and they moved freely and comfortably through most of its spaces. The children could be sent to play in the laundry room or storage areas, or could go upstairs to be watched for an hour by Clellan or Judy. Just as telling, Al and Lourice were not long-range planners. The daybooks, as we have seen, note routines over and over and catch just one day at a time. These parents had been surprised to have children, beginning five years after they married. They did not foresee what devouring monsters they were nurturing in their midst but went on tucking small bodies into the back of their coupe to go off camping or to see a late movie. Finally, there was a simple economic bind. Any house would demand a major investment and be an ongoing expense. The apartment provided a second income.
In the end, it took a jolt to dislodge us from that building. One morning in March 1949, my sister chased a dog into the street just as a car came downhill and made a sharp turn. She spent a long time in traction in the hospital, then came home to fill a daybed in the living room, with heavy plaster casts on a leg and an arm. Within two months we were moving to a bungalow in West Seattle.
It would be pleasant to say that we all settled into that new neighborhood and lived happily ever after. But that would be true only in part. Al and Lourice found new neighbors close at hand with whom they went on chatting, playing cards, sharing leftovers, and swapping garden flowers for many years. But their children grew and ranged abroad to make different connections, and they did, too. In time we became four people creating very separate lives from under the same roof.
Mine was a world of school and libraries, and I began to move about with friends from blocks away who also did well in class and looked ahead to college. My sister disliked following in my shadow and had a different kind of teenage life. She still lives in West Seattle; her own children grew up there, she and her husband now run a store on the main street, and they travel with buddies they have known since high school. Around the time I reached eighth grade, Lourice went back to work and put on a headset every morning at a downtown telephone answering service. Her talent for making brief jottings flourished again, as she time-stamped a little scratch pad and tucked messages into pigeonholes above her switchboard. Al went on buying fishing tackle and camping gear, but many of his old partners fell away. He found new ones and a new schedule of outings with the West Seattle Sportsmen's Club; he was elected to many terms as the club treasurer.
These family changes brought about a completely different sense of neighborhood. Capitol Hill had been a place where neighbors grew closer after coming together by chance; in West Seattle, we each moved into new circles by choosing and being chosen. The tenants in the apartment building had simply needed living space at about the same rate of rent, and they went on to share necessities in a decade of economic strain and wartime tension. The 1950s eased those conditions. We moved out to find more congenial, separate spaces, but in houses set apart by lawns and fences and in rooms with doors that were often closed.
Lourice's records provide plenty of details to illustrate many points about what neighborhood and neighborliness can mean. I will refrain from closing off these possibilities by suggesting any precise definitions and distinctions. But as I mentioned at the start of this essay, reading these records has forced me to consider my own deepest habits in relating to neighbors.
It's an old story that Americans have been perpetually on the move-from the first explorers and immigrants to westward-moving settlers to seekers of new opportunities and sheer road-trip thrills. The past century has whirled millions of us out of our first homes and set us down again and again in new settings. Military service, higher education, career shifts, and family disasters have carried us far from our parents' settings and scattered our children and grandchildren, too, to remote states and countries. Holding on to a lasting sense of neighborhood may simply be impossible now.
My own rambles illustrate this point: four years of college in Massachusetts, four in graduate school at Cornell, three in Chicago, then twenty-five in eastern Canada, interrupted by one-year leaves in New Haven and Princeton. Move after move has entailed cutting off past connections, often very painfully, and finding ways into new streets and corridors among indifferent strangers. Even standing still has had its perplexities. My wife and I have now lived in Salem just twelve years, and in that time every one of the six houses around ours has changed hands.
Yet when I look back through these many changes, I quickly recall dear faces in every scene. Not only of classmates, colleagues, support staff, and former students, but also of people who just happened to live nearby, in the apartments upstairs in Chicago and Princeton, or the houses next door and around the corner in Sackville and New Haven, and of people behind the counters at local shops, cafés, banks, and offices. Sound familiar? Like my father before me, I have had to know the purveyors of our weekly Lebensmittel-though not to the point of hunting and fishing with them. Like my mother, I have liked having open doors that others find inviting-though not to the point of maintaining a common laundry room. Like both parents, I have shared with a spouse a readiness to look at people's snapshots, hear their most recent doings, and offer a drive to the store, an odd tool, support with a chore, or a few hours of child care. In place after place, it seems, I have been repeating what I had modeled for me from infancy-- developing circles of personal acquaintances around our rooms, so that in every day's walk there could be happy collisions, brief encounters, ongoing reinforcements of mutual recognition.
Of course, almost every one of my moves has also been a further step out of my parents' ways of knowing the world and into a more remote, not to say aloof stage of academic life. I turn over these little books from the 1940s knowing that I can't help handling them as the very bookish professor I have become. But in their own way, they chide me in return, and challenge the books that now line my walls. By working my way through them, I have come to value the ways they talk back to many weightier volumes on my shelves. They are antidotes, in a way, to a couple of misleading notions we sometimes pick up from literature.
The first of these literary ideas is a feeling of nostalgia for village life, drawn from many writers' memories of their childhood. A long tradition of such glowing memories can be traced in just a handful of passages I have taught over the years.
Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village" is a good starting point, for the poet recalls his birthplace as a scene of "humble happiness" in a long summer of harmonious interchanges between toil and sport, youth and age:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene;
How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made.
But as the poet remembers this rural Eden, he firmly sets it in the past, for this is a Deserted Village, after all:
These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,
With sweet succession, taught even toil to please;
These round thy bowers their chearful influence shed,
These were thy charms-But all these charms are fled.
(lines 5-14, 31-34)
Like many other poets, William Wordsworth felt Goldsmith's influence and even followed his example by making a literal return to scenes of his childhood. He grew up in the Lake District and chose to return there and spend his life in the embrace of its beautiful natural scenery. In Book Eight of The Prelude he, too, focuses on a tiny, sheltered scene of summer happiness among "pitiably dear" and innocent rustic folk:
Immense
Is the Recess, the circumambient World
Magnificent, by which they are embraced.
They move about upon the soft green field:
How little They, they and their doings seem,
Their herds and flocks about them, they themselves,
And all that they can further or obstruct!
Through utter weakness pitiably dear
As tender Infants are; and yet how great!
For all things serve them; them the Morning light
Loves as it glistens on the silent rocks,
And them the silent Rocks, which now from high
Look down upon them.
(1805 version, VIII.46-58)
But again, Wordsworth has placed this passage at the opening of one book in this long poem, to make a wholesome contrast with a preceding scene, the "anarchy and din/Barbarian and infernal" of modern London (VII.659-60). And in many other places Wordsworth decries changes that have come over England, replacing the nurturing scenes of his youth with tawdry, soul-killing, urban distractions. The ideal scene of his youth is vanishing if not irrecoverable. Hence his tender handling of the vulnerable villagers he describes.
It may seem odd that to Goldsmith, the possibility of village life was being extinguished in 1770, the very year Wordsworth was born, and yet the later poet could still find a village refuge long afterwards. But other writers could recall similar scenes, while repeating the lament for their disappearance, up to the middle of the twentieth century.
Many of George Eliot's novels grow out of her village childhood in the Midlands in the 1820s-and also reflect her enthusiasm for Wordsworth. Silas Marner (first published in 1861) is an outstanding example, for it extols the virtues of bygone village people. "The clue to the basis of their lives," an acute critic writes, "is in a word we keep meeting: ‘neighborly'"--and she goes on to explain:
The village way of life is shown to foster some virtues that the city does nothing to promote. . . The villagers don't steal money or goods if only because these couldn't be used without discovery, and cheating of any sort is despised. . . . Morality is also ensured because there is no privacy, and wisdom because everyone through gossip has the communal assessment of everyone's character, even the gentry's, to draw on. Above all, mutual helpfulness is as necessarily practiced in the village as competition in the city.
Yet to a modern reader, she adds, "first-hand knowledge of that culture has gone for ever, and its very existence is denied by intellectuals of our phase of civilization" (Leavis 1967, 16, 17-18).
If George Eliot thus seems distant from us, and caught up in her own nostalgia, what are we to think of George Orwell, writing in 1940 about the bucolic poems of A. E. Housman? These poems stirred up images of a vanishing rural, neighborly world, he insists, but one still within reach of living memories. "Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of Shropshire Lad by heart"(Orwell 1940, 226).
So the neighborly village scene keeps vanishing in each generation, only to spring up again in later writers' memories of their youth. From Goldsmith to Wordsworth to Eliot to Housman to Orwell, vivid, cozy images from childhood keep re-emerging as a refuge and source of renewal in the face of various threats from the Industrial Revolution, including large-scale agriculture, urban crowding, factory labor, mass communications, and mechanized warfare.
My mother's daybooks may seem to come perilously close to extending this tradition, especially as I have presented them here, embellished with my own fond memories from preschool days. But if these books ring variations on this theme, they are strikingly odd variations. For my remembered scene is not a rural village, but a modern, urban apartment block. The unifying economic bond is not shared agricultural land but shared laundry facilities and central heating. The setting is not sequestered and sheltered by nature but manifestly connected to the wider world by autos, telephones, radio, and intercontinental ships and planes. Neighborly interdependence remains, but cut off from any aura of ancient farms and folkways. And it flourishes briefly, for just a decade or so, before these neighbors move apart to find their ways into different lives. This neighborhood disappears, that is, not because of some external change or threat but because of new opportunities to find better company in ampler surroundings.
This last point brings us to another misleading impression we may get from books, especially very modern ones-the impression that a few main characters and their individual life choices are the things that really matter. To be sure, stories have always had to highlight just a few characters and treat others as incidental figures in the background. The choices of the main characters commonly turn on intense one-on-one relations, too: courtship and marriage, deep friendship, shared acts of rare sacrifice, and on the other side of the coin the undoing of such bonds in partings, betrayals, and murders. It is hard to imagine how even a long play or novel could be constructed otherwise without becoming impossibly diffuse.
My mother's little books, however, challenge such representations of life, just because they are so diffuse. They hold no major dramas or heavily pondered choices, but rather trivial, everyday connections. Dozens of characters appear fleetingly in random occurrences through a week or a month. To keep track of them for this essay, I have had to dig into them in my scholarly way, by compiling and organizing a file box full of index slips. If there were intense one-on-one moments in 1947-48, they go unreported here. "Had a really good visit," in this context, most likely records a chummy chat about housework, a recent movie, somebody's home remedy, and problems with the children or the furnace. Weddings, funerals, and departures for far destinations occur as they occur, without foreshadowing or a weighing of their consequences.
And yet, as we have seen, woven through these miscellaneous notes run fine filaments of steady trust and mutual support. The effect is cumulative but forceful. As I read it, the faint plot in these books is that Al and Lourice were moving from old bonds they had grown into as a couple to new connections they had to take on as responsible parents. But that transition had to be gradual; to complete it would take years. Frequent contacts with family, neighbors, and old friends held them in a web too comfortable and reliable to be relinquished without a struggle or a crisis.
Moreover, Lourice's little touches about a variety of people add up to a remarkable limning of character. She wrote hastily, briefly, and artlessly each day. But when her pages are read through a year, it is possible to pick up a sense of the people surrounding her. She seems to have written at least a line or two about everyone she knows.
And these observations reflect back on her. The interchanges between my parents and their neighbors reveal them in a very good light, as practical, hard-working, generous caretakers of their building, while extending support to many others. Not the least of their gestures, of course, was Lourice's steady practice in keeping these journals. She takes note of those around her, holds them in her thoughts, and finally names them in ink as she reviews her day. With these light touches she builds up a self-portrait as someone engaged and intertwined with scores of people.
Of how many modern literary characters can that be said? Perhaps my reading of these little books has only reinforced a sense of social bonds I picked up as a child. But I sometimes catch myself grumbling as I read about isolated protagonists and brittle couples, or sit through their anguish in films and plays: Do these people have no sisters or cousins, no work mates, no one else to care about, no clerks they know by name at the grocery store or deli, no barbers, no workmen they depend on, no old acquaintances breaking into their lives with strange demands? Can they suppose that they are not being noticed and remembered by the people they pass every day? What kind of people are these, if the story most worth telling is theirs alone?
References
- Goldsmith, Oliver. 1955. The Vicar of Wakefield and Other Writings. Edited by Frederick W. Hilles. New York: The Modern Library.
- Leavis, Q. D. 1967. Introduction to Silas Marner. London: Penguin Books.
- Orwell, George. 1940. Inside the Whale. Reprinted in George Orwell: A Collection of Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1954.
- Wordsworth, William. 1960. The Prelude. Text of 1805. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Helen Darbishire. London: Oxford University Press.