Happy Anniversary, mom and dad.

It was 1977, the year before Watergate, a laughable offence compared to what is going on now in Washington.  The cold war was in full swing. My grandmother was dying from an ovarian cancer metastasis.  She and my grandfather had come up to the island where my parents had their summer house on Vinalhaven.  My mother told me that on their last walk together round Lanes' Island, my grandmother had said, "well Patty, I suppose you'll always be spending time in a place like this."  She was trying to imagine what she would not live to see.  It was the year in which I was conceived.  But of this, she knew nothing at the time.  It was not long after my parents' marriage, eleven months, to be exact, that the great event took place. When my grandmother learned of the pregnancy in the fall, she told my mother, why don't you abort it. My father also expressed an interest in my mother's terminating the pregnancy.  But this she would not do.  She was going to have me no matter what.

Today is my parents' anniversary. They married in '77 on May 1st. I was conceived on the island of Vinalhaven, fifteen miles off the coast of Maine. They were playing tennis with Willard Baldwin, and his dad, in his parents' country house, near Stonington, Dear Isle, when my mother realised that she was pregnant.  It was a hot summer's day.  But the game had gone well. Willard Baldwin, who had gone to Milton Academy where my dad was teaching the year I was born, had a daughter who later married the poet, Mark Strand.  It had been a wonderful weekend. But they never saw Baldwin again. At the end of it, they waved goodbye to Willard Baldwin's mother, a charming woman, who died the following week, and his dad some time later that year... Soon after, Willard gave up his life in Baltimore and went off sailing in the Bahamas.  And my parents sadly never saw Willard again. At the end of that summer, when the family was again at home on Lake Avenue in Newton, by Christal Lake, my parents informed the children of their first marriages, Eric and Jessica Goodheart whose father was Eugene Goodheart, a professor of English and Comparative literature at BU and later at Brandeis, and Davie Van Vactor, whose mother, Anita Bullard,  later married Frank Kermode of University College London and Cambridge University, England, were informed of the pregnancy, they were not the only ones who were shocked, that, old as they were, thirty-seven and thirty-eight respectively, they were soon to become my parents. And yet, my grandmother's happiest moments, my mother told me, were when she could hold me in her arms. She realised then that she had been wrong in suggesting that my mother end the pregnancy. My father loved me no less.  And rejoiced in my birth though he had questioned the sense of it. I was nine months old when my grandmother died.  A first novel by my mother, Pat Goodheart, was published a year later. It was completed on the dining room table while my father picked up the slack, cooking, doing laundry, helping to look after me. And during my infancy, when my mother was looking after her mother, I was always with her.  Such were my beginnings. 

Read a long review in the 5/24/2012 London Review of Books by Jackson Learse about the biography of George Kennan called George Kennan by a Yale professor named George Lewis Gaddis. It's informative. Covers a whole period of diplomacy with regard to Russia during the Stalin regime and the nuclear arms race. It's critical of Gaddis. Lears feels that Gaddis does not fully represent Kennan's regret about his position of how to contain Russia, which was characterized as "appeasement" by the Right Wing.

A spy novel by William Boyd. Called RESTLESS. It's about someone's mother who was conscripted into MI6 and trained in espionage, this is before the second World War. It's a little slow in places but very well written in the beginning.

The book is called Cider With Rosie, by Lauri Lee read and reviewed by N.H.V.V.

Lauri Lee is a poet and writer from England. It's about being a child in a poor family during WWI. The family was abandoned by the father. Eight children and their mother living in a big house in the country. It's all about his brothers and sisters going to school. Getting meals together and the sleeping arrangements. Very detailed and poetic.  It's light reading.

Lee was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War but not as a fighter, just as an observer, surviving by playing his violin on the streets for handouts. There are two books about this period he wrote which are brilliant.

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Spender; read and reviewed by N.H.V.V.

There's some wonderful descriptions of Picasso's Blue and Pink period in this book of poetry; paintings of the characters of Harliquin, and other jugglers. --These were written about the same time Rilke was in Paris writing The Notebooks of Laurids Brigge, one of the most brilliant surrealistic novels of that time, circa 1915, Kafkaesque, but better written and more amusing.-- In the first Elegy you get a sense of profound sorrow, because Rilke is trying to describe what it might feel like for someone to have died young, before they had even enjoyed some of the fulfillment of their youth, and hence were cut off from all human association. There is an apprehension of insubstantiality as a consequence of being removed from human consciousness and the privilege of being able to communicate with like minds. The spirit described has become truly set adrift. But this spirit seems to dream of angels and longs for the comfort of loving affection. There's a sense of wonder in his evocation of angels and their majesty. "Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence." To imagine how it feels to be a fragile, ephemeral spirit, without substance, strength, bone structure, is incredibly powerful in its sense of extreme vulnerability. "For Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us." Rilke is bringing together many elements simultaneously: The serenity of beauty, the angelic and terror. --The atmosphere at this time in history in Europe was full of alarming incidents of terror. The poem is written on the eve of WWI, the Spanish Civil War. All of which were a prelude to WWII. -- "Each single angel is terrible. And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there we can make use of?" The speaker makes a radical transition from 'I' to 'we' which is in the context of reaching out to every day experience of the familiar daily world that gives us a sense of security and belonging, "Not angels, not men; and already the knowing brutes are aware that we don't feel very securely at home within our interpreted world." Why don't we feel secure? Because death is always a lurking possibility. The reason that we don't feel secure is maybe that we are not in touch with others with whom we can communicate fully. Or, simply the fact there's always the threat of a too early death that cuts us off from the fulfillment of our full potential.  Rilke was alive when he wrote this prose poem called Duino Elegies. Therefor, what died in Rilke? His love affair with Lou Andreas Salome was over. Stripped of the protection of love and companionship, Rilke could have been made defenseless against horrifying destruction and loss in war that was about to be unleashed upon the world. Why doesn't the quotidian world offer a sense of security anymore? Rilke predates existentialism by quite a few years, which is a response to WWII. The period of the early 1900s was filled with innovation in the fine arts, and in technology. Industrialization, urbanization and all the familiar traditions in the arts, coming out of the Belle Epoque or the turn of the century, were being thrown out the window. In the works of composers like Stravinsky and artists like Picasso and writers such as Joyce and Virginia Wolf one no longer had the comforting familiarity of traditional forms of expression. Perhaps this is what Rilke is getting at in talking about the lack of security. All Rights Reserved Copyright by Nicholas H. Van Vactor 2011.

Two Short Stories by D.H. Lawrence: The Prussian Officer and The Fox; read and reviewed by N.H.V.V.

The officer in the story The Prussian Officer focuses on certain physical characteristics, such as the ruddiness of his servant's face, which mainly represents his youthfulness and physical vigor, which the officer feels he himself is losing in his life. His contempt for the young man reaches a frenzy, so that everything he does infuriates him and reaches a certain pitch, so that he cannot restrain himself from kicking the young soldier in the thigh. The same kind of obsession is felt by the character, Banford in The Fox for the physicality of the young man, Henry who has persuaded the woman, March, with whom she lives, to marry him, thus threatening to break up their relationship. Some of Henry's expressions literally make her sick. She so abhors him. When March ultimately refuses him, he decides to get rid of Banford, after returning to the farm, where the two women have been trying to chop down a tree, and ask him to help them, Henry manages to fell the tree in such a way that it falls on Banford, breaking her neck and killing her. Why do I believe acts of cruelty like this are possible? There's something in me that desires to see the act of cruelty executed. When I'm reading something, I feel I can't stop it happening and there's a certain pleasure in being complicit in an act I am not going to be judged for or punished for. But in Lawrence's stories there is no justice; they don't end in a way that is satisfying.  Copyright 2011 by Nicholas Van Vactor, All Rights Reserved.

People Of Note 1 Of 4 Copy Right By N.H.V.V.