Herne the Hunter dawdles home

It's happened. After residing here for a little over three months, my feet have automatically taken me home.

I'd had an idea of dropping in on Demeter, but found myself striding up Chester Avenue, where I spotted a small boy straddled a small bike with training wheels, pushing himself up the hill.

This wouldn't have been remarkable, except for his bike helmet, which had various branches seeming to sprout from the helmet-holes. (Chester Avenue is, as usual, strewn with branches from the ancient plane trees after the latest windstorm.) He looked rather like Herne the Hunter.

I came abreast of him, and inquired: "Camouflage?"
"He's dawdling," answered his father, bringing up the rear. "He's so slow, things are growing out of him."

Another wrinkle

Yesterday morning I woke early, after a late night, unwilling to get up and dress just yet, but not wanting to wake my husband.  I padded down to the living room to retrieve my laptop, because I've been deliberately keeping it downstairs to discourage myself from going online before the day has properly begun.

However,  I had gone to sleep with the briefly glimpsed corner of a mystery on my mind.  It seems that the Disney corporation will be attempting to bring A Wrinkle in Time to the big screen.  There have been attempts before, including an adaptation to the small screen, an unsatisfactory televised version.  I'm wondering if a satisfactory version is possible, but I have a daughter living on the autistic spectrum, and thus have acquired an appreciation for movies, television specials, and graphic novels based on classics, so I tried to find out a little bit more.

In doing so, I noticed a sentence fragment in a Google search just before I went to bed, something about her son's death in 1999.  Madeleine L'Engle herself died in 2007, but I do not ever recall her writing about Bion Franklin's death; she devoted nearly a whole book to the final year of her husband Hugh. It was late, and I was working on something else, so I set my puzzlement aside for the morning.

With the covers over my head to block the dimmed light from the screen from the sleeping Resident Fan Boy,  I went back to the link --- and learned that Bion Franklin had died in his forties from the effects of alcoholism.  Bion?  The little boy who was the model for Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin?  I entered a few more search terms and stumbled on a 2004 New Yorker article, which said, among many other things, that Bion and his adopted sister Maria loathed the cycle of books about the Austin family, and that L'Engle's children and grandchildren alike detest L'Engle's Crosswick Journals series, especially Two-Part Invention which was L'Engle's memoir about her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin. Hugh Franklin drank quite a bit and had at least two extra-marital affairs.

Their eldest child Josephine read it and apparently thought: Who the hell is she talking about?

The New Yorker article, which has become quite notorious amongst L'Engle fans and which somehow I'd managed to miss, is not a hatchet-job.  It also reflects the love L'Engle's family had for her along with the exasperation.  But I, huddled under the covers with my glowing laptop, was fighting back my shock and a sense of loss.  I've read everything L'Engle wrote, with the possible exception of her poetry.  I grew up with the four books that begin with A Wrinkle in Time, and of course, I loved the Austin books which were about the sort of family I'd never had.  It turns out that L'Engle may not have have had that sort of family either.  The Crosswick Journals were the sort of books to which I'd turn again and again for comfort, wisdom and perspective.

As the shock wore off, an odd sense of relief took over.  I felt consoled by all this dysfunction somehow, and besides, I recognized something about her children's feelings -- anger, bewilderment, and the sense of having no say in the story.  It was the same feeling I had when I read the biographical essay featured in my father's order of service.  I wonder if they too had the cold sweat when they read the matriarch's version of their family?  Coincidentally, Alan Jones, L'Engle's ex-son-in-law, was the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when my dad's service was held there.  Possibly he still is.  Speaking of L'Engle, he refers to the "confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative" which could also be a charitable way of describing the legend my father built up to support his life in California.

I don't know what I'll find now when I revisit L'Engle's books, particularly the Crosswick Journals, but I've been rereading many of my favourite books this past year (no L'Engle ones, as it happens), and I'm rediscovering that no book will ever be the same, anyway. That's probably true of most things.

Merry Titanicalia?

Last September, we had an orgy of 9/11 retrospectives, rather like a bleak sort of holiday celebrating the vaporization of three thousand people. We have now reached the end of a week-long festival of Titanic remembrances, a loving itemization of the freezing/crushing/drowning/imploding of 1500 people in 1912. There was a parade in Halifax (where many of the recovered bodies were buried); the newspapers have had series of articles on the disaster, and of course, as with 9/11, we've been treated to a week of Titanic documentaries and movies. The Turner Classic Movie Channel showed The Unsinkable Molly Brown and A Night to Remember (which features one of my indirect links to the Titanic). The fellow responsible for Downton Abbey has come up with his take on the sinking, four episodes shown repeatedly. (I've only managed to watch bits before wanting to hurl stuff at the TV.) The History Channel and The National Geographic Channel have had a field-week.

Predictably, those that aren't interested were crying "Enough!" within a couple of days, but I've been, while not exactly a "Titaniac", a follower of things to do with the big ship since I was ten, so I've been having rather a lovely time. Or does that sound morbid and inappropriate?

One intriguing aspect of having so many television presentations on one topic is the opportunity to compare. We have the really high-end specials involving mind-boggling computer graphics. They have remarkably similar titles: Titanic: Case Closed; Titanic: The Final Word and Titanic 100: Mystery Solved. While all three are engaging documentaries, brimming with well-known experts and high production values, as a family researcher, I'm leery of titles indicating completeness. History is never finished.

A bit farther down the scale are those news specials and TV series suffering from limited time and funds. Real Stories: The Real Titanic, for example, has its heart in the right place, stating (quite rightly) that what really happened was many times more dramatic and tragic than in films made about the disaster. Unfortunately, Real Stories's budget did not allow the hiring of real actors --- nor the purchase of nail polish remover. We're treated to a long shots of "re-enactors" chatting on deck (looking remarkably unmoved), or in impossibly small row-boats (most of the Titanic lifeboats had a seating capacity of between 40 to 60 people). Most distracting and improbable is a scene where a First Class passenger with pearls, a shoulder-length hair-do and blood-red nails pretends to rub invisible cream into her face.

 Aside from the more expensive, less-hastily-made shows, few have been able to resist the basic Titanic myths:
 1) She was out to break a speed record. No, Cunard was after the speed records; White Star was going for the comfort angle. She was going too fast for seas laced with ice-bergs, but that was due more than the crew being unaware of the true danger.
 2) She had been marketed as "unsinkable". The "u" word only appeared in an engineering article which described her as "practically unsinkable". Any public perception of the Titanic being indestructible came from word-of-mouth, not from advertising.
 3) The ship's band went down playing "Nearer My God to Thee".  Oh for Pete's sake. Take a look, if you will, at very similar scenes from the two most famous movies about the Titanic: 1997's Titanic and 1958's A Night to Remember.

 Go ahead, I'll wait: Notice something? There are two completely different tunes. "Bethany" is the setting most familiar to North Americans, while the usual Church of England setting, familiar to most Brits, is "Horbury". Furthermore, Wallace Hartley the band leader, was a Methodist and was said to prefer another setting called "Propier Deo". Walter Lord, the author of the book A Night to Remember, wrote a follow-up in 1986 entitled The Night Lives On (because history is never finished). If you want to read the full argument, someone has thoughtfully posted the chapter and some bonus illustrations online. (Incidentally, the article mentions "Mrs A.A. Dick of Calgary" who happened to be an acquaintance of my late mother-in-law, so there's another of my admittedly very indirect connections to the Titanic.)

 I listened online to BBC Four's The Titanic Minute by Minute which depended heavily on Lord's original book for research and claimed to be an accurate timeline of the sinking. It was a tribute to the Titanic's noble and dutiful musicians, and also featured nifty numbers from the likes of Billy Bragg and Kate Rusbury. I quite enjoyed it until BBC Four, as so many others, could not resist the pull of the legend. They played "Nearer My God to Thee", in the Bethany setting, yet! I actually screamed abuse at the computer, much frightening the dog.

 Maybe I am a Titaniac, after all.