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Oddities and Curiosities: Helen Kirby's FILLY

It's not difficult to convince me to buy almost any book for a dollar. I plucked *Filly* from a dollar table in haste after a second's glance at the cover--the shop was about to close. *Filly* must be one of the oddest books it has ever been my questionable pleasure to own and finger at leisure. Helen Kirby wrote and illustrated this little biography in verse of Filly, her family, and her misadventures in romance. They are horse-headed humans--yes, reverse centaurs, as it were; their story is a rather faint satire on contemporary mores, while the dozens of illustrations are rather disturbing parodies of the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Singer Sargent (see the cover for Kirby's Rossetti riff). *Filly* is evidently a sequel--yes, there's *another* in this vein!--to *Martingale, the Tale of a Foalish (sic) Virgin*; Martingale is Filly's aunt.
There is something singularly disturbing about Kirby's conception--but why? We have become accustomed to Anubis' doggy *kopf*, Thoth's ibis-in-a-wig look, not to mention centaurs, sirens, nagas, and the whole array of waist-down hybrids. Yet there's a distinct frisson to be had in looking at Kirby's elegant torsos with hooves (yes!) and long equine snouts, in her free and at times "brushy" pencil work. The whole effect is Peter Arno Meets, say, Gelett Burgess.
I have not as yet been able to discover anything further about Mrs. Kirby (except for that "Mrs.," as per worldcat.org), but now, of course, I'll have to hunt down *Martingale*.

Weaving

I have read--heard, via CD--George Eliot's Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe-and what a curious limping book it is, revisited after many years. Her texture is determinedly, almost patronizingly, fustian: the cloth of the humble. Her novel is absolutely the counterpart of the approved paintings of her day: so *competent*, so *careful*; scenes of local color fussily laid out, with suitable "realism" and "touches of humor," with "typical" flat characters in the middle distance, to fill out the landscape around the wronged weaver and his little charge. Only one character can be said to develop--Marner himself. Eppie's place, as the sign of human values supplanting merely commercial interest--her golden locks, in infancy, seen by near-sighted Marner as golden coins--is spelled out so insistently that she hardly rises to the level of symbol. Eliot's fondness for melodrama, and the shrinking from certain realities that accompanies it, generates the embarrassing crisis at the heart of the novel--Cass' opium-addled first wife, Molly, dying in the snow, leaving her child to wander to Silas' cottage. Eliot, despite the unconventionality of her own life, had to damn Molly with opium, yet could not bring herself to make darling Eppie a bastard. Yet, Eliot's real gift, her wise and observing mind, peeks out in the parenthetical observations about truth, memory, faith, and the action of time, like a child peering out from around a curtain.

A Dream

I have often remarked that I dream in architecture.
Two nights ago, doubtless partly enchanted by Dayquil, I dreamed that I was in a city, as familiar to me as Boston, but New York in its essentials. I missed a bus, but knew that the next bus, although a different number and route, would serve me just as well. After we had traveled for some blocks, the bus lifted directly into the air, like a kitten seized by a hawk. We were all a little fearful, but we came to know without quite being told, as is true in dreams, that it was possible to charter some buses, for enough money, for special purposes--weddings, funerals, receptions--and that our bus, at great expense, was being transported, by a machine we could not see, and at whose ingenuity and scale we could only guess, to the top of a highrise building--like a funicular, but straight up into the sky. Just before we came to our destination, the bus transformed itself into a mattress, and the population of the bus shrank to a handful. We disembarked, and the mattress slid into the garage-like aperture in the side of the building, like a sheet of paper into a drawer.
I found myself not on a tall building, but again on the ground. Just behind the grimy whitewashed structures that faced me was a silent grass-grown park: side by side, facing the east, were the ruins of two buildings. Their facades were like those of Classical temples, but I understood them at once as rival churches. Little remained but these faces, and the beginnings of the side walls; so long had they been abandoned that the moss and grass had covered them over entire and made them more green than stone; surrounding them, at a little distance, were overgrown and toppled tombstones. I came to know--as one does--that these churches and the little precinct that surrounded them--had been quarantined and left behind during a yellow fever epidemic in the early nineteenth century, and somehow rested, secret and undisturbed, in the very midst of a modern and crowded city.
Part Boston--part "New England" (the rival churches)--part New York--and a good deal of Rome, where so many ruins with strange antique stories lie beside modern steel and paving.

The Wonder of England

To while away the irksome drive to my second job and back--an hour and more in each direction--I listened to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, read by Irene Sutcliffe, after five or six years away from Austen, excepting perhaps Persuasion--and was dumbfounded by the brilliance, the majestic assurance, of this great novelist. Never did I feel that her characters had been "worked up" from other writers' characters, or the pages of a chronicle, as in Scott or Hawthorne; never did I feel that they had been wheezed into existence for an idea's sake, as in Radcliffe or Shelley (he or she). For pages--quarter-hours--at a time, I found myself delighted by her apt deployment of dialogue or situation, half-forgetting that Austen, more than animating Bennets and Darcys, had created the whole--scenes, settings, houses, and parks. How deftly, in her comic deflation of moral certainties, she created the space in which true moral development might be shown; how wittily, judiciously, sparingly, she interjected her own little moralia. I have often thought--and this fresh encounter did nothing to change my mind--that Austen's writing was the last harvest of the eighteenth century; that she was, just as I think she must have hoped, a spiritual daughter to Richardson and Johnson. But how much finer, to our taste; how much more laughter. Richardson's eye for situation, without his frenzied fascination with sexuality; Johnson's wisdom, without his sententious gloom. Generating interest from crime and sex, always the first resort of the writer, is comparatively easy--without apparent effort, Austen understood the gravity, the symbolic power, of those little actions that determine the happiness of men and women. How faint and half-hearted most novelists look beside her! How fortunate we are, in the English language, to catch her singular prose, her signature tunes, first-hand!

A-Roma

Every city has its signature smell--some strange potpourri of local earths and waters and human habits. All this past fortnight I could smell Rome again, wherever I was: an absolutely distinctive stew of honey, lemon, damp stone, a discreet backdrop of pine sap, and beneath it all, a benign note of decay, as though something had gone slightly wrong in the bottom of the refrigerator. It brings back the wide swing of the Via Veneto, the gravel walks around the Palazzo Borghese, the seagods splendid in mosaic at Ostia, the upraised arm of Christ and his mother's half-shielded face in Michelangelo's Last Judgment--and the faces of my friends there, my cousin Elisabeth, her husband Michael, and their little boys...
Why should I recall Rome so vividly now?

Shoes and the child's mind

This last week, my forbidden pleasure has been Noel Streatfeild's 1937 novel, Ballet Shoes. What a document of the Depression, a vanished era in the theatre, and the child's mind it is--not to mention charming almost beyond its author's merits. The story, as you will recall, concerns three orphans, improbably and separately rescued from disaster by a paleontologist, eccentric in a storybook manner. Before he leaves them with his hapless niece Sylvia, the children dub him "Gum" (Great Uncle Matthew); with equal whimsical improbability, he gives them the common surname Fossil. They call Sylvia--who is neither their mother nor their nurse--Garnie, a childish corruption of "Guardian," and as in the Mitfords and their "Hons" and "Bod," these childhood nicknames take on an almost sacred, immutable quality. The remainder of the novel gives itself to the story of the Fossil sisters' gradual rise in the theatre--the lively half-world of pantomimes and matinees that employed London children before the era of Annie or Cats. They are lucky, each of them, to have a distinctive talent, but much of the book is devoted to their work--the assiduous daily training they undergo at Madame Fidolia's Academy, hours of home tutoring from their spinster-schoolteacher boarders (likely a lesbian couple?)--and the achievement and even joy they derive from their efforts. It is a fantasy of real life in its florets of whimsy (of course the boarders supply their educational and emotional wants precisely! of course Gum re-emerges like a deus ex machina!) --but of genuine fantasy and magic, there is none; nor do we desire any. What is most striking is Streatfeild's uncanny recollection of what satisfies the child's mind, male or female. Conversation is rarely long or sentimental; her heroines are never little philosophers or psychologists, but genuine children, kind, selfish, and hard by turns. She lavishes her novelist's attention on their clothing--crucial dresses and outfits--and on food they enjoy and long for (and sometimes lack). She remembers, somehow, what we forget: the child's almost fetishistic love for real, tangible things (clothing, toys, food), around which wishes and fantasies can cluster. Her children's lives are semi-magical; but the children themselves are never false or sugary.