It’s easy to focus on Emily Dickinson’s history of lost connections (both friendly and romantic) and assume that her descent into seclusion was driven by despair, and that, if only one of her attachments had stayed with her, life might have been perfection for her. But every time I’m tempted to take that view I slide myself over to Macgregor Jenkins’s slim volume of reflections on his childhood, Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor. He and other neighborhood children often played about around the gardens of the Dickinson homestead and he left us his reflections of those days, when Dickinson was in her mid forties. As we leave her here for a while in the Pierce household, I’d like to quote a bit from that book as a way of beating back somewhat the gloom which people (including me) have tended to wrap Emily in. It breaks the unspoken internet rule of never quoting more than two lines at a time, but as it’s charming and lovely, I hope you’ll indulge me:
What a perfect playmate she was. Never actually in the game but always hovering near us, adding that touch of mystery and charm that children feel and love. We were pirates, storm-tossed, starving on some barren isle (starvation played an important part in all our games) some signal would be given, a soft tap on window glass or a fluttered handkerchief, and succor would come from an unexpected source. We had grown to half expect it, but its arrival always gave us the thrill of the unexpected and unusual. A window would be opened, silently and with the utmost caution. I never could decide whether her care and deliberation were part of the game or whether they were to avoid attracting Maggie’s (a housekeeper on the Dickinson estate) vigilant attention. But the window would be in Miss Emily’s room, and soon on the window ledge would appear a basket. It would be slowly lowered. I can see it now, jerking its way down from what seemed to us then an incredible height. We saw two delicate hands playing out a much knotted cord, and framed in the window above a slender figure in white and a pair of laughing eyes.
I shall never forget the contents of that basket. It was as like Miss Emily as it could possibly be, and by the same token unlike any one else. The basket always contained gingerbread, whether of her own making or Maggie’s I do not know. It was not like any gingerbread I had ever seen before or have encountered since. It was in the form of long, oval cakes, crisp and brown on the outside, but within a light brown or yellow and delicately sweet and gummy. The flat tops were hard and shiny and on these a bit of decoration was often added, in the way of a penny or other small flower.
Not abruptly and with wild whoops of delight did we approach this manna. It had come to us in the accepted and appropriate fashion and all must be done with nice attention to the proprieties. So we would approach the basket with due caution and indirection, creeping through the grass, taking every precaution lest we be surprised and overcome by unfriendly savages. At last the prize was in our hands, a crumpled daisy or clover put in the basket by way of tribute, and it would make its uncertain ascent to the cloistered window.
See you back here on Tuesday, as Geoff takes Frederick and company on a brand new adventure in a period of time as yet untouched by our redoubtable zeitsgeschlaegers! Just four days away!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
It’s a long proven fact of nature that rumbles between Vaudevillians and Silent Screen Actresses attract others of their kind to the scene, regardless of the distances involved. There’s a branch of astrophysical information theory devoted to it, I’m pretty sure. Gish is doing the “talking” here, but my favorite, Miriam Cooper, showed on up as well. While I have the chance, here’s the first bit from her 1973 autobiography Dark Lady of the Silents, which you should grab if you have the chance, and even if you can’t, I figure a flavor of it is a fine thing:
Most little old ladies I know who are pushing eighty sit in front of TV sets in nursing homes. Not me. At the age of seventy-eight I started having a ball. Somebody sent a limousine 125 miles for me to be on TV. I made my first trip by airplane to talk to university classes. All of a sudden my little house was full of young people chattering away. All because somebody discovered what I had known all along – I’m Miriam Cooper.
For a long time if I’d made a statement like that you’d have said, ‘Who the hell is Miriam Cooper?” I was completely forgotten and, to tell the truth, I didn’t give a damn. Then people began getting interested in early movies. They’re on TV every night. People even go to school and study them. And it came as a pleasant shock to me that all those people knew that I played leading roles in the two greatest pictures ever made, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.
Dozens of books have been written in the last few years about the silent films. People are always showing them to me. A funny thing is that the authors are usually young people who weren’t even born at the time they’re writing about. How can they do that? I know they look up things in books and magazines, but what makes them think what they read is the truth? When I was in pictures, back in the teens and twenties, the studio publicity people wrote more untrue stuff about me than you could imagine.
Well, just one more episode till Ye Scripting Baton gets passed back to Geoff for a storyline that stands to be the greatest Frederick tale yet! Stick around!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Marx and the French were often not on great terms (though that sentence loses some of its impact in that you can replace “French” with any group of more than 3 people sharing a common interest and it would probably be equally true). This had nothing to do with their pantslessness, however. In fact, a fair percentage of Marx’s correspondence with Engels consisted in scurrilous rumor swapping, and Marx’s attachment to his own pants was less than upright. That being said, Marx tended to bristle at the theoretical obsessions of the French socialists as opposed to what he considered his more practical view of the problem of the laboring classes. When acting as chair of any given communist or worker’s association, inevitably one of the first things he did was steer the rules in such a way as to exclude as much of the Frenchish/theoreticalish element as possible.
Oh, hey, just looked at the APE site on a whim. We are confirmed at table 422 and, low and behold, Kate Beaton is going to be in attendance too! A rare chance to hit for the cycle with 2007-Launched-Historical-Comics! Why a fellow could pick up a signed copy of Never Learn Anything From History and then walk across the aisle and get a doubly signed copy of Light Opera and Heavy Consequences. So come on out and see us October 1 and 2 in San Francisco!
– Count Dolby von Luckner