One Fine Day - Part II

As promised (threatened), I want to reflect for a few minutes on how Stephen and Laura work through their feelings about England in Mollie Panter-Downes (pictured here) "One Fine Day," given that their lives in this post war world will be very different. The focal point seems to be Barrow Down, the high ground still in a natural state where one can look down on the surrounding countryside. Perhaps somewhat ironically Stephen thinks about it on his way home from work not knowing that Laura is up there at that very moment without his knowing it.

Almost symbolically either being there or thinking about it helps them to think about England and what is going on their lives. Stephen starts to find some real clarity when he realizes that before the war they and their class were really puppets with their lives run by the servants who pulled the strings and now that no one was pulling the strings nothing works the way it had in the past. Perhaps this is a first step in moving towards how to live in this new world, but what seems even more significant is that they realize how important England is to them, how important it is that England won the war. And again, it is seeing and thinking about the land that is a major part of this.

Interestingly as an American of a completely different generation I can share some of these feelings. I have commented frequently about our trip to England earlier this year which was our third trip to England. Our first in 1976 was the traditional tourist guided tour of London and surrounding areas with one day around Stratford. The purpose of our second trip, almost 25 years later, in 2000 was to climb my family tree. We stayed in Tewksbury while visiting Horsely in Gloucestershire and Astley/Worcester in Worcestershire. Then we met my third cousin who graciously hosted us for a week in Audley in Staffordshire.

This trip was off the typical tourist path so we had to plan it all by ourselves and for almost two weeks we did not see or talk to another American. We learned and saw a lot about my English ancestors and the plan was to go back once I had gotten better organized on my research. The trip we made this year was for an entirely different reason - to see Shakespeare's entire history cycle at Stratford. While it certainly wasn't spur of the moment, it was fairly spontaneous ruling out any possibility of doing family history research.

We did, however, go a few days early leaving open the possibility of visiting my cousin in Audley plus some other distant relatives who I had met over the Internet. The idea was that on our first full day there, we would take the train from Stratford to Birmingham and then Stoke. For a while it seemed like the meeting with my relatives might not happen and I remember saying to Carol that if we couldn't do that I didn't want to make the trip since the only other reason to go was to do research and there wasn't enough time for that.

Fortunately we did work out the visit with my relatives which was wonderful. However, what I didn't expect in any way was how moved I was to be back in Audley. We had time both before and after our lunch and my cousin drove us around in her car plus we walked into the village looking for the site on the home of one of my earliest ancestors. My roots in Audley go back into the 1500's and I was surprised by the strong feelings I had about visiting there again and am very grateful that we got there.

Carol and I are planning another trip to England sometime in 2010. At present there are two goals, family history and visiting places related to our favorite authors, we especially want to visit Dartmoor, the site of "The Hound of the Baskervilles." On the family history side I want to do research as it is definitely time to write all this down in a form it can be passed on to future generations. But equally important I want to spend a few days in Nympsfield and Horsely in Gloucestershire as well as Audley - walking in the village and through the surrounding countryside, renewing connections that are hundreds of years old.

All of this helped me both understand and appreciate how Stephen and Laura come to a deeper understanding of what England means to them. I am very grateful to Elaine of Random Jottings for introducing me to this author. And the good news is that this was just the first of the authors she recommended - so many books so little time!

The Sun Sets on the Season

Yesterday on a pristine October afternoon the Eureka Base Ball Club of Newark (21st Century version) concluded its 2008 season with a loss to the Mountain Athletic Club of Fleischmann's, New York. Carol and I made the 2 plus hour ride up to Fleischmann's in Delaware County, in addition to the game we got a chance to see some spectacular autumn foliage.

This game was played under 1890's rules which is very similar to today's game, the major exception being that foul balls are not strikes. After seeing a few games played by these rules I understand why reformers wanted to change this rule - it is a tremendous advantage to the batter. Of all the forms of 19th century rules I have to say that I like the 1890's version (the overhand game) the least. I think the closer that the rules are to the modern game, the more it favors teams made up of predominantly younger players which is definitely not this year's version of the Eureka. The other thing is that if we are going to recreate an early version of the game it seems to make sense to do so in a way that is distinctly different from today.

One encouraging development is that there is interest in forming two new teams next year which would give us five vintage base ball teams in New Jersey. That would allow for more games in the state with less travel. Being retired I don't mind the travel that much, but it is tough on younger guys especially those with young children. There is to be a meeting on the subject in the near future and I hope we can make this happen. It will also be interesting to work on this at the same time that I am involved in the planning for the 150th Civil War anniversary.

On a related note, I received an e-mail this week from Peter Morris of the pioneer project, indicating that my drafts of team histories for the Eureka, the Newark Club and the Olympic Club of Paterson were in fairly good order. It looks now like I will basically be writing the New Jersey chapter of this book. Besides finishing these first three, I have to go on and write about the Irvington club plus see what other teams are out there. Based on what I have seen so far, I will probably also include a history of the Centennial Club of Jersey City and something about the Resolute Club of Elizabeth.

A big question going forward is how I am going to proceed with researching the early history of base ball in New Jersey. Expanding this chapter into a book is a distinct possibility, but one that would require a lot more research and some careful planning about how to write it. One thing that is very appealing is that it does not appear that there has been a lot of work done in this area. On the other hand the narrow focus is a drawback in terms of getting it published. The question is one I will be wrestling with as I work to finish the current project by the April 1, 2009 deadline.

All of that is for another day, however, the key thing today is to honor the 2008 Eureka - a great bunch of guys. I have enjoyed every minute of it and am already looking forward to the 2009. So three cheers and a tiger for everyone who made this possible.

One Fine Day - Part I

As stated previously one of my goals in retirement is to do a lot of reading thereby making up a lot of lost time over the past few years. Since we got back from England in March, I have been doing just that - I have probably read more books in six months than in the past six years combined. A subset of the goal to read more was (and is) to work my way through the books I already have - at some point I will write about my issues with buying books, but for the moment suffice it to say that I own far books than I have read.

So the idea was to focus on reading what I already have as opposed to buying or borrowing other books, new or otherwise. While I have certainly made progress there too, it gets subverted frequently as I learn about authors and books that are new to me. Case in point is two posts by Elaine over at Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover (http://randomjottings.typepad.com/) about books set in English villages which contained the names of a number of authors who are new to me.

Of particular note was a book called "One Fine Day" by Mollie Panter-Downes, Elaine quoted a passage from the book that by itself made me want to read it. So while down at the Rutgers library last week doing baseball history research, I checked the stacks and was able to find a copy of this short novel (184 pages) about one day in an English village in 1946. Due to its short length I was able to finish it in just a few days. I think it is an extraordinary book, one that I am confident that I didn't fully understand and will both want and need to read again.


At the heart of the book is the Marshall family, Laura, Stephen and their daughter Victoria. They are presented as a middle class family that before the war enjoyed a life where most of the manual type labor was done by servants. Now in this new post war world, servants are no longer available and Laura and Stephen are having a hard time adjusting. They are now having to do work to maintain a home and household that they are not used to doing, haven't been trained to do - in some cases things that they were trained not to do or at least not to think about.


My initial reaction to their difficulties was fairly negative, sort of a reverse snobbism. Life without servants - get used to it, grow up - that kind of thing. But the more I think about it, that initial reaction feels like a kind of literary "presentism" - judging the past by the present - a more typical problem in history. I have written a lot about my sense that the Civil War generation in the U.S. doesn't get sufficient credit today for ending slavery because today the very idea is so unthinkable.

The life the Marshalls lived in before the war was the life they were prepared for, the life they inherited. It is unfair, therefore, to think that they should easily accept the end of that way of life. Especially after enduring the risks and deprivations of war for five to six years - it is hard not to understand their asking, "What was the purpose of these sacrifices,?" "What did we ultimately win by winning the war?" It reminds me in some ways of the famous American movie, "The Best Years of Our Lives," the story of the difficulties faced by three American servicemen adjusting to civilian life.


Looking at it this way, it seems to me that the bulk of the story is about how Stephen and Laura, especially Laura, work through these issues. What is tested then in large measure is their devotion to England now that it is a very different England that to paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle's words, "lies in the sunshine once the storm has past." How they see the enduring good in England is something I will try to address in my next post, addressed, of course, from an American point of view.

Civil War 150th Anniversary - New Jersey Style

The main reason there was no post yesterday was that I was out most of the day first doing research for the base ball pioneer project, but more importantly attending a meeting about the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War which will begin in 2011. Earlier this year I had reached out to a small group of the New Jersey Civil War community to see if there was interest in convening a group of interested parties to start discussing how New Jersey might observe this anniversary.

We had our first meeting yesterday and there was a high level of interest, commitment and belief that it is important that New Jersey observe this anniversary and do so in an appropriate way. Perhaps not surprisingly there was unanimity that the Civil War is one of the most important events in American history and that New Jersey's role is not adequately studied, taught and known. Given those in attendance none of this was a surprise, but we went on to have a good discussion about how to organize this effort with some discussion of the content. We are going to keep meeting and I am excited about being part of this effort.

As is obvious from my posts about books about Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Civil War. What has become clearer to me is how much of a turning point the Civil War was in our history. Clearly before the war the United States was a nation committed to high principles, but with a cancer eating at its core - the cancer of slavery. As I wrote the other day it seems hard to believe that there was any peaceable way to end slavery which, if true, means that in this case war was the only answer and who won that war was crucial to the nation's future.

Had the south prevailed there would have been two nations, one with an economic system based on slavery and buttressed by a philosophy of racism. There might not have been slaves in the north, but as time passed it seems likely that economic relations between the two nations would have been rebuilt so that much of the north's economy would have been tied into this same system. And with an adjoining nation built on the belief of the inferiority of blacks, it is very questionable how much real progress blacks would have seen in the north even if they weren't slaves. It is also worth nothing Major Henry Hitchcock's comment after taking part in both the March to the Sea and the Carolina campaign - "Talk about negro slavery! - if we haven't seen white slaves from Atlanta to Goldsboro, I don't know what the word means." Perhaps the whole nation needed - "a new birth of freedom."

This is what makes the war so important, makes it important it is studied and remembered, and makes it important New Jersey observe this anniversary and use it as an opportunity to do something about past failures to teach this important aspect of our history. The photo that accompanies this post is one of the battle flags of the 33rd New Jersey taken shortly after the war. It became tattered in a good cause, we need to make sure that its memory is not tattered because we forgot.

Emma

Last week I finished "Emma" so I have now read four of Jane Austen's full length novels with only "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" to go. The latter two appear to be quite short perhaps not much longer combined than "Emma" or "Mansfield Park" alone. In the introduction to "Emma" (which I always read after I have read the book) there was something about the importance of reading Austen's novels more than once since you look for other things once you are not focused on how the story will come out. This may be something I need to do, at least with "Mansfield Park" and "Emma."

One thing that stood out for me in "Emma" was a number of the subsidiary characters who are very well drawn. In writing about "Mansfield Park" I suggested that these two novels may represent Austen's moving to another level as a novelist - after the success of her first two books and before her declining health impaired her ability to work. Of special note to me in "Emma" are Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates, one a chronic hypochondriac and worse, the other a chronic talker. While these habits are not necessarily endearing, Austen's portrayal of them makes them both funny and to some degree endearing.

Perhaps the only unsympathetic character in "Emma" is the local vicar - Mr. Elton. This is interesting because it represents the second time (Mr. Collins in "Pride and Prejudice" being the first) where an Anglican minister is presented in something less than glowing terms. Interesting because, of course, Austen's father was an Anglican minister. One would guess that Austen probably knew Anglican clergy fairly well, raised by one, no doubt hearing stories of countless others and also probably meeting a number of them at different times. After working for almost 25 years in the Episcopal church, I am well aware of the many issues facing clergy children - enough to make me wonder about Austen's motivation for at least twice presenting pictures of unattractive behavior of men of the cloth.

My reading of two Austen novels this year has closely followed reading about five Trollope novels. Reading them in contrast like that made one thing about Austen's world especially clear - the difficulty of travel and how sheltered one's existence was away from major cities. In Trollope travel is almost always by railroad, neither simple nor easy, but it pales in comparison to Austen's world where horseback and stage were the only means of any kind of distance travel. Witness how in "Mansfield Park" Fanny is really stranded at Bristol until someone (ie. a protective male) can come and bring her back to Mansfield Park. George Eliot's novel, "Adam Bede" has been described as being about life in England before the railroad - Austen's novels are even more so.

One complaint about "Emma." As in "Mansfield Park," Austen sets up a two/one romantic situation creatring drama about who will be married and who will be left out. While in "Mansfield Park" the problem was resolved by someone giving into their bad side, in "Emma" it is resolved by one person falling in love with someone else. The latter relationship is present throughout the book, but no explanation is given for the one of the two giving up the one and marrying someone else. Indeed, the book ends without Emma herself understanding how this happens - it seems too easy a way out of someone being disappointed. But this complaint should not be seen as being anti-Jane. I am enjoying myself, looking forward to the last two and then on to "The Jane Austen Book Club."

Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union

This past week I finally finished Robert Remini's almost 800 page biography of Henry Clay, long time Senator from Kentucky, Secretary of State under JQ Adams, and three time unsuccessful presidential candidate. This makes the third of Remini's biographies of major American political leaders of the first half of the 19th century that I have read, the others being his three volume biography of Andrew Jackson and a one volume biography of Daniel Webster. Remini is a distinguished professor and scholar who I have seen many times on CSpan. At the same time I have to say that I always seem to find his biographies somewhat disappointing.

There is no question that they are exhaustively researched, comprehensive and then some, and the writing is certainly accessible. I think it is more that to me they tend to be long detailed accounts of the subject's live with only limited amounts of analysis and explanation. I may be mistaken in that, but it sure feels that way. The Clay biography is an example. One of the reasons I read it was that I wanted to get some understanding of Whig principles. After all the Whigs were one of the two major political parties in the 1830's and 40's and elected two presidents in that time frame.

Yet after all that reading I still don't have a real good sense of what was at the heart of the Whig party. As for Clay for most of the book all that I really took away was that he was charming and a mesmerizing speaker, but not much of a real sense of why he is an important person in American history. I finally got that sense at the end of the book when Remini discusses Clay's role as the driving force behind the Compromise of 1850. Clay had previously played similar roles in the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise tariff of 1833.

As a rule compromisers are not usually people that I admire and that would especially be true of situations where the compromise helped the continuation of slavery which was the case in both 1820 and 1850. However, in Remini's portrayal of Clay's role, it is possible to see Clay as a positive force. Clay comes across as someone who was committed to the Union at a time when many on both sides were not. This made Clay's role important as he was articulating a value system that was certainly not the norm.

Remini repeats the oft made claim that the Compromise of 1850 was key to the ultimate Union victory in the Civil War as it gave the north ten more years to strengthen itself and to find Abraham Lincoln as its war leader. He also speculates that had Clay been elected president in 1844 that the Civil War might well have been avoided. Unlike Polk the ultimate winner, Clay was opposed to war with Mexico making it at least possible that the nation could have avoided war and the huge acquisition of territory that helped put the issue of slavery on the front burner. Given Clay's skills at compromise, the author also thinks it possible that he would have helped find a way to peaceful solution on the slavery issue.

Clay himself was an outspoken opponent of slavery while at the same time owning slaves. Although opposed to slavery, Clay clearly held racist views about the inferiority of blacks which would make a multi-racial society untenable. Like many of his time, Clay supported the colonization of freed slaves back to Africa. Also like many of his time, Clay had no solution except for the vague hope that the white population would increase to the point that it flood the country with such much free labor that there would be no economic basis for slavery,an idea that seems far fetched at best.

All of this reminds me of something I wrote last month about a form of presentism - evaluating the past by modern standards. To us today the very idea of slavery is so horrifying that a system based on it seems almost unimaginable. But the truth is that from before the nation's founding through its first 90 or so years, it not only existed, but it was built upon the pillars of racial prejudice and economic interest. No wonder that Clay opposed it, but had no solution - to come right down to it, no one had a peaceful solution. Only when we understand this, can we begin to understand the depth of the challenge taken on by those who not only opposed slavery, but tried to do something about it.

And only then can we properly appreciate the complexity, difficulty and indeed heroic nature of what they did whether they be John Quincy Adams, William Lloyd Garrison or most important of all, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln not only had to get himself into a position where he could do something about slavery, but then try to lead those who remained in the union - many of whom would ultimately have to overcome their economic self interest and/or their racial prejudices. I started out reading about Henry Clay to understand more about Whip principles, I came away with a greater understanding of the U. S. before the Civil War - not an attractive place to visit (even in the mind) if one believes in the values of the American Revolution

Mansfield Park

Since I last posted about Jane Austen I have finished both "Mansfield Park" and "Emma." What follows is written without doing any real research, just my reactions and observations. To me it seemed that Austen after enjoying some success with her first two books, was now moving or trying to move into the next level of her writing career. Both books are significantly longer than what came before and my sense is that she was trying for more fully developed plots and characters.

What held my attention about "Mansfield Park" was what I saw to be the drama in who Fanny would ultimately marry. Although the Edmund/Fanny possibilities are made clear throughout the book and certainly seem to be written to attract our sympathy, Austen also gradually starts to make Henry Crawford more sympathetic. I found this especially true when he visits Fanny and her family in Bristol, the last place where Fanny would want anyone from her life at Mansfield Park to visit. During those scenes Austen makes Crawford appear to be growing/improving so that if continued it seemed possible that a Crawford/Fanny marriage might be the outcome.

All of this breaks down, of course, when Crawford reverts to the bad Henry, running away with Maria the older of the two Bertram daughters. It felt to me that Austen used this much in the same way she used the Lydia/Wickham elopement in "Pride and Prejudice" as a sort of Deus Ex Machina to move the story to a final solution. The Crawford/Maria relationship had been very strongly suggested earlier in the book, but still the whole thing seemed a little contrived to me.

Austen had created a situation with two possible outcomes (marriages) for her heroine. Her decision to have the one give into the worst angels of his nature also seems too neat and clean. Those who sin are punished for their sins, those who don't are rewarded. This is also the case with the Mary Crawford/Edmund relationship, Henry's sins set the stage for Mary's inappropriate reactions leading Edmund to turn away from that possibility and ultimately turn to Fanny who is, of course, even more available before. An outcome where someone is disappointed even though they did nothing wrong would be more ambiguous, but to me, at least on first thought, more satisfying.

I enjoyed "Mansfield Park," as I said Austen's development of William Crawford to be an almost eligible (from Fanny's perspective) suitor created drama that more than held my attention. There seems to be a pattern in her endings, however, that I find to be disappointing. I will write more about this when I write about "Emma" which will come after I post something about the Henry Clay biography. I should also say that I am thinking a lot about Austen overall which I will probably write about once I have had more time to think about it.