A Lesson from Eudora Welty

        “When do I stop doing research and start writing?” That question plagues writers of historical fiction. When you are working on a Ph.D. professors often answer that question this way, “When you pick up a book on your topic and you are familiar with most of the books listed in the bibliography, quit!” I use another rule, one I learned in a roundabout way from Eudora Welty.

        Ms. Welty (pronounced “Miz” in “Southern”) was one of the many graces of attending Millsaps College.

As Writer-in-Residence she attended a seminar I was taking in my junior year. I was awed, meeting a woman who earned a living as a writer and, I was as charmed as a young woman could be when visiting an eccentric maiden aunt.

        We had read Golden Apples in preparation for her attendance, so we discussed the book at length. As with most writers, the conversation eventually turned to the craft of writing. Ms. Welty said, (and you will have to imagine my paraphrased response in an elaborate, liquid, Southern drawl) “They ask me about my stories, ‘What happened next?’ Or they ask me ‘Why did she do that?’ And I tell them, ‘I don’t know. It’s as if I were a next door neighbor and I told you all I know.’”

        It is important to understand that a next-door neighbor in the South is a person who knows you extremely well. Unlike in many parts of this country where I have lived, your next-door neighbor walks into your house with a holler rather than a knock, is the first person to bring a casserole when you are in need, taught you how to cook collard greens, and told you where to get a bargain on those new pillows on your couch. So, using the Southern definition of neighbor, I think Eudora Welty would say that you stop doing research on a historical novel and start writing when you know as much as your heroine’s next-door neighbor would have known.

Fanny Mendelssohn, Another Talented Sister

     Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony plays in my office, and I can imagine the joyful violins heralding spring’s plum blossoms outside my window. As I have been researching Felix Mendelssohn I discovered that he—like Mozart—had an equally talented sister. (Once again writing program notes for the Lake Union Civic Orchestra has yielded material for my blog. See my January 26, 2013 blog for earlier insights.)

     Felix’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, was so skilled at counterpoint and composition that her teacher

Carl Zelter wrote to Goethe about her: “. . .[she] could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.” Fanny’s father recognized her talent, indeed believing she was more talented than her younger brother, and educated her along with Felix. She was probably also encouraged, or at least inspired, by her two great-aunts: Fanny von Arnstein, patroness of a well-known salon, and Sarah Levy, an accomplished keyboardist who owned a collection of Bach manuscripts. We can assume Fanny also had the support of her artist husband, as she continued to perform in the Sunday afternoon concerts at her family home and even gave her only known public performance (of one of her brother’s piano concertos) after her marriage.

     Her brother had a collaborative relationship with Fanny. She critiqued Felix’s music before publication and he published some of her pieces under his name. He once wrote, “From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled.” Since Fanny wrote over 460 pieces of music, I have to assume that Felix was wrong. While Fanny was dusting cobwebs and polishing silver, she must have been creating music in her head, perhaps humming to distract herself from tedious work?

     Felix added, “Publishing would only disturb her in these [her wifely pursuits], and I cannot say that I approve of it.” Was he jealous of her? That is hard to say, but he was attached to her. Fanny died of a stroke when she was forty-one and Felix died six months later.

     Just as Felix Mendelssohn revived Bach’s music, the record labels Hyperion and CPO are now reviving Fanny’s. Their release of her compositions in the past years, as well as scholarly research on her creativity, may liberate her from history’s indifference. 

Women's Hands in Meek's Cutoff

     Living in the West has peaked my interest in the women who came across our country in wagon trains, and my curiosity about their lives drew me to the movie Meek’s Cutoff. It is the story of a small group of westward-ho adventurers who wander, lost in the Oregon desert in 1845, searching for water. 

     The movie is more realistic than previous movies about wagon trains, partly because it is based on a historical incident. It also presents a woman’s viewpoint, that of Kelly Reichardt, the director. The scenes of nighttime are pitch black, the campfire punctuating conversation periodically with the glimpse of a cheek, a shirt shoulder, or a hat brim. The scenes of daytime are filled with drudgery, boredom, and dirt. Dust settles on the women’s skirt hems, facial wrinkles, even hair covered by bonnets.

(from Photl.com)

     Toward the end of the journey the women are so dirty that their hands have turned black. Those black hands represent to me all the hands of all the women through the ages who engaged in menial labor: the farmers’ wives who toiled in the fields beside their husbands (and still cooked and kept a clean house); the women who helped their husbands in tanneries, granaries, and fisheries; those who assisted their husbands in birthing animals, performing surgery and printing newspapers; those who existed on their own, growing and butchering food, curing meat, preserving vegetables, taking the horse-drawn wagon to town.

     Those black hands are the hands of women of every color and hue who labored. The hands that baked the bread also toiled wherever assistance was required—and many still do. Black hands. Women’s hands not afraid of dirt or hardship. Women who stand beside men. Women who stand alone. 

The Feminine Mystique

     When The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published in 1963 women who read it gave copies to their friends. Similarly, a friend loaned me A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz, a recent book about the influence of The Feminine Mystique. While the title of Coontz’ book refers to the “stirring” caused in women by Betty Friedan’s book, it was Coontz’ book that aroused the “stirring” that often burbles within me. I worry as conservative forces throughout the world cover up women, prevent their access to birth control, and re-define their roles as subservient to men. I fret that young women today do not realize how recently their rights were won in this country and how fragile they might be.

     My own feminist “stirring” came not from The Feminine Mystique but from The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. There is a scene in the book where one woman helps another woman by writing a check for her—without asking her husband. It seems foolish now, but I wept uncontrollably when I read those last words.

     According to Coontz, it was only forty years ago that a woman in New York City was denied the right to rent an apartment unless her husband signed the lease—and he was in a mental institution. Forty years ago, a woman was not allowed to keep her maiden surname in Illinois because it would make it too difficult for motel owners to promote moral standards. It was only twenty years ago that North Carolina recognized that a woman could be raped by her husband.

     For those young women who believe their rights will remain, now that they have been won, I would recommend Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In her story, during one night—only one night—the credit cards and employment of every woman are terminated. (That book gave me many more nightmares than 1984 ever did.) Women live in enough fear, and I do not wish to burden them further, but we do need to be aware and to protect the rights we assume are sacred and secure.

Women in the Lives of Musicians

I am spending time with the lives of Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven and Dmitri Shostakovich as I prepare program notes for an upcoming concert by the Lake Union Civic Orchestra. The composers are from different eras: Beethoven is the paragon of the Romantic composers; Debussy was on the forefront of Impressionism; and Shostakovich was a modern Russian whose life exemplifies the revolution within his country. And yet the three have something in common that has provoked me to think about the relationship between love and art: all three had poor relationships with women.

Beethoven fell in love with many unattainable women and dedicated his compositions to them, but he never married. One he called his “immortal beloved,” but never his wife. Although Debussy was buried with his wife, he also “had” many other men’s wives as well. Shostakovich was married four times, two of those marriages to the same woman.

All three of these composers wrote music that exudes passion. Does their passion for women infuse their music? Or does passion for music overshadow all other passions, including those for other people, accounting for their inconstancy? Or does the passion that some musicians transfer so easily from one composition to the next become a pattern repeated in life, where passion for whatever is the current project extends to those the composer loves? 

Connecting with the World

     My laughter was spontaneous when Lynne Rossetto Kasper closed her recent “Splendid Table” program with a quote from Erma Bombeck: “No self-respecting mother would run out of intimidations on the eve of a major holiday.” It bubbled up from that self-recognition that prompts the deepest amusement—and a little embarrassment. As I thought further about the truism, my head filled with questions.

     Why do women behave this way? Could the frustration that results in intimidations arise from tension over the extra work that holidays entail? Why do we shop for special food? Why do we decorate the house, the windows, the table? Why do we plan, clean and cook? Is it expected of us? Or are we the ones who add extra chores to already full workloads?

Angel Askew

     Asking these questions led me back to an observation I made when decorating my tree this year. One of my favorite teddy-bear ornaments, among the one hundred and seven that adorn the tree, is an angel with a cock-eyed halo, flopped over one ear. For more than a decade I had assumed that her untidiness was indicative of her general disposition, a carelessness about her appearance. This year as I hung her on the branch I wondered if she was truly careless, or merely overworked. Perhaps she is so busy hanging stars that there is no time to attend to her own appearance. Another woman, burdened by the holiday.

     Then I heard Erma’s joke about women’s tactics to manage the holiday burden and wondered how far back traditions relied on women for implementation. Mental pictures from literature written in the 1800’s occupied my imagination:  Mrs. March maintaining the holiday hearth for her Little Women and Mrs. Cratchit, making the best of a meager situation for Tiny Tim’s family in The Christmas Carol. Before recorded history, fictional or factual, in the time of hunters and gatherers, women remained at the hearth while the men were away and were responsible for organizing the household. Perhaps the habit of preparations is now ingrained in our genes.

     The theme of this blog is how women are connected to one another, but my reflections on Erma Bombeck’s quote made me realize that it is women who also preserve the connections within families—perhaps the principal reason we are so concerned about maintaining the holidays. It is also women who safeguard connections within communities and within faith traditions. Women are the resin that binds the tree of life. Our connections extend beyond other women into the world—a world we envision at peace, for the sake of our children, even of we do sometimes employ intimidations to keep them in line!

DIFFERENT WOMEN ?

At first glance you notice our differences. Her dark, straight hair peeks out from her headscarf. My blond hair curls toward the sun. She wears a long-sleeved knit shirt and peasant skirt. I wear a shiny purple blouse and slacks. She is an innkeeper’s wife, I a woman on a research mission. I came across this picture recently and it drew me back into the moment it was taken in Cappadoccia, Turkey in 2010. For me it represents a moment when two dissimilar lives merged.

While I explored the fairy chimneys, hermit caves and churches hewn from rock, Biset swept and washed and cooked. When we went down to breakfast in the morning, she was standing over a wood-stoked stove, turning out eggs and meats to accompany plates of cheese and olives. The men served the tables and she stood silently in the background, orchestrating everything without speaking a word.

Biset was shy around the men and did not speak to them, neither those who ran the inn nor the guests, but when I went out to sit on the porch to read, she approached me timidly. With her halting English and my almost total absence of Turkish, we still managed to share the facts most important to women: the numbers of our children, their genders, their ages.

On the second day, I had my camera with me. She pointed to the camera and to herself, but when I pointed my camera toward her, she shook her head. Waving her arm toward me in an inclusive motion, she indicated that we should both be in the picture. I stepped into my room and secured the services of my husband to snap our photograph. When we two women stood side by side, with our arms around each other, I could have been embracing my sister.