Can't find my way home
Dissecting past lives and cadavers. Plus: Three design pioneers, for good or evil.
EXHIBITS
AVES, AN EXHIBIT of my bird photographs, opens at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center Gallery in the Flagship Building, 1001 Water Street, on Friday, March 14. The show will run through June 8. And please check out the new exhibits by my friends Linda Okazaki and Brian Goodman at the Grover Gallery, 236 Taylor Street in PT. I will interview Linda about her paintings there this Friday, March 7, at 6 pm.
TRAVELS
A presence in the past
ON A RECENT TRIP to the Bay Area, I drove by the house in Berkeley where Barbara and I lived for twenty-two years. Built in 1886 by a postal worker, the tall Victorian occupies a double lot, with an old carriage house in the back that was converted into a studio before we moved in. On the ground floor, basically a basement, we found newspapers from the early 1900s pasted to the ceiling, a rusted six-shooter, and a door frame with the dates and heights of growing children marked in pencil.
When we moved in, we inherited a photograph of the house from 1903. Over the next hundred years, one of the newly planted elm trees in the picture grew to the height of the house. The tree shaded our bedroom with dappled light until it caught a disease and was cut down by the city. The little girl in the photo, Evelyn, lived in the house until the late 1960s, when she died and it was sold for the first time. She and a handful of subsequent owners were listed on the back of the photograph, with dates, and we added ours as we were leaving the house and Berkeley ten years ago.
In Memories of Old Jack, Wendell Berry narrates his novel largely through the remembrances of its title character, Jack Beechum, on the last day of his life. The story is set in 1952, the year I was born. He is in his eighties. Just a few years earlier, Jack had finally moved to a hotel in town, run by a widow as a rooming house, from the farm where he had toiled his entire life. As he wanders from the hotel to the barbershop and then to a country lunch at his nephew’s home, the people and places of the present mostly serve to trigger memories—of his unhappy marriage to a wife he had worshipped, of the years spent paying off the farm debt and the triumph of turning in the final mortgage check, and of a woman who finally gave him happiness and then died suddenly in a fire. Most of all, he dwells upon the farm and the rhythms of work it required:
“The present is small and the future perhaps still smaller. And what his mind is apt to do is leap out of that confinement, like an old dog, still strong, that has been penned up and then let loose in the one countryside that it knows and that it knew for a long time. But it is like an old dog possessed by an old man’s intelligent ghost that remembers all it has seen and done and all the places it has known, and that goes back to haunt and lurk in those places.”
During our Berkeley visit, we stayed with friends whose home has barely changed in forty-five years. I know where the stoneware coffee mugs are hung and how to navigate the bathtub shower. The board games played by their son, who now has two boys of his own, still occupy the closet shelves in his old bedroom. I remember when the shelves were built. I hung shirts in the closet when I left my first wife.
Though our friends are now Jack’s age, they maintain a steady pace of activity—he paints and composes cheerful books aimed at their grandchildren and she writes learned essays on French literature. They are grounded by a set of habits settled upon years ago: A weekly meal plan, a day for food shopping, another for cleaning. Yet on this visit I detected an extra note of fretfulness, of attention to each other’s safety and needs, which was magnified when their cat suddenly contracted an illness that the extravagantly priced veterinarian could not confidently diagnose or treat.
That anxiety felt familiar to me, especially this past year when Barbara had her heart surgery. A leak widens until the dam breaks. A test result warrants further investigation. One friend we visited lost a husband to mental illness. One has decided to stay in a residential treatment home. Another, a month earlier, coded in the hospital and was revived.
Our former home has been tastefully repainted. The current owners, two biology professors with young children, are substantially expanding the house into the back yard, where we were married thirty years ago. A construction manager’s pickup sat in the driveway. What I could see of the renovation heightened the alien feeling of driving past a door that we had walked through thousands of times. How strange to imagine that a remodeled kitchen is one of the footprints you leave behind.
After paying off his mortgage, Old Jack turned his attention to long overdue improvements on his farm. But the age of the family farmer was passing. Jack’s daughter married a banker in a nearby city. At the hotel, the few family and friends that remained in town kept a loving eye on him. They remembered his years of backbreaking work, and the tragedies that he bore, as did he, running through every detail in his mind. When I read the novel as a young man, I recall thinking that it made perfect sense for Jack to live in the past. The past was where he had spent most of his life. Now I’m an old man. I know, as Faulkner wrote, that “the past is never dead” and also that the future is smaller. But still alive.
–Kerry Tremain
TALES OF MY MOTHER
Mother and the cadaver
WHEN MY MOTHER started medical school in 1942, there were three women in her class of a hundred. Three was considered a “huge” number at the time. But the United States had just entered WWII and the pool of eligible male students had been depleted. My mother—a straight-A premed student who’d been pining to be a doctor since age five—managed to slip past a misogynistic admissions committee. Even after she got in, there were doubters.
She did well in her studies, worked hard, and behaved herself. But when her class began gross anatomy, things went south. The male students expected the women to find the “gross” in gross anatomy too much to bear. Cutting up dead bodies isn’t for the squeamish. So her demeanor was closely watched. Would she flinch? Gag? Possibly even faint?
My mother had been brought up on a farm in south Alabama during the Depression. She butchered the chickens her mother raised and gutted the deer her brother shot, and she helped deliver the occasional calf. In reality, she had far less trouble than the boys in her class whose dinners had been prepared by the hired help.
Some of her lab partners enjoyed teasing her nonetheless. She was assigned the body of an older woman, and some of the guys thought they could irk my mother by insulting the poor woman’s appearance.
Now this was a bit risky. The entire class had received a strict lecture about the bodies, which had been generously donated to the school. They were told to revere these people, be thankful for their unselfishness, and treat them with the utmost respect. Denigrating the appearance of the dead was hardly in keeping with those instructions.
“Claire, your lady is really frightful! She’s the ugliest woman this side of the Mississippi,” said one.
“Her liver is more attractive than your liver,” she shot back.
“If you’re not careful, Claire, you might end up with a complexion as green as hers.”
“You’re the one who’s green - with envy. I aced the midterm and you can’t tell a patella from a petunia.”
The teasing and her ripostes went on and on, though sotto voce, so the professor wouldn’t hear. It was good-natured teasing, but teasing nonetheless, and my mother, one of five children from an argumentative and competitive family, hated to be bested.
One evening after the anatomy lab closed, my mother managed to sneak in and paint her cadaver’s nails bright red. She would show those boys how beautiful her cadaver was!
The next day unfolded as usual. Lectures in the morning, anatomy lab in the afternoon. She went over to her cadaver at the appointed time and began the day’s dissection. Soon the teasing started up again.
“That woman is hideous, Claire. How can you stand to get so close to her?”
“She is not hideous. She takes a lot of care with her appearance. Just look at these well-manicured hands.” A few heads turned in the direction of her cadaver. Somebody laughed. A few of the guys closest to her table came over to see and more laughter ensued.
Abruptly, the professor materialized at the head of the slab. “What does everyone find so amusing?” he demanded. All the guys looked at their feet or took a hasty interest in the ceiling. But the professor knew whose cadaver they were gathered around.
“Miss Conerly, would you care to explain what it is that everyone seems to find so funny?”
“Well, you see, they were…I mean, because everyone kept…I didn’t mean any disrespect, but I really had…to…”
She suddenly realized she’d messed up. Her clever comeback was revealed as a silly gesture. She reached for the cadaver’s hand and held it up.
“I painted her nails, sir.”
He looked over and forced down a smile. “Remove your lab coat and report to the dean’s office. Tell him what you’ve done.”
The dean was not so amused. He said that this was the kind of offense that the school took extremely seriously. Expulsion was mentioned, threatened, and then withdrawn. Doctors were in short supply and she was a good student. She promised to do better in the future and was allowed back in the anatomy lab the next day.
But the teasing ceased. Her ploy had worked after all, just not quite the way she’d envisioned.
—By Barbara Ramsey
ON DESIGN
Three fates
DESIGN HISTORIAN Steven Heller called them the Three Plakateers, a play on Plakatstil, the name given to a style of design that emerged first in Germany in the early 1900s. Though their personal approaches varied, Lucien Bernhard, Ludwig Hohlwien, and Julius Klinger are credited by Bernhard’s biographer as “the tiny handful of figures who invented modern graphic design.” A 2018 documentary film by Adolfo Conti, Plakat: The Birth of Modern Advertising, explores their influence.
Against the ornate designs characteristic of Jugenstile and Art Nouveau—organic flowing forms, highly stylized typography and decoration, and mythological themes—these designers’ work spoke directly to the viewer in simple, clean lines. Their posters often showed the central subject or product—Bernhard’s poster for Priester Matches was a seminal example—conveyed with bold colors and typography. Prefiguring Constructivism and the Bauhaus, their designs were well matched to the massive industrial brands and political movements that gained prominence in the mid-century.
Their personal fates also echo the historical upheavals in the first half of the 20th century. Bernhard immigrated to New York in 1927, where he had a long and successful career in advertising. Hohlwien was a staunch German nationalist who designed Nazi propaganda for Joseph Goebbels, including posters for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Julius Klinger and his Jewish family were removed from Vienna in 1942 by the Nazis and likely perished in the Maly Trostenets extermination camp near Minsk in Belarus.
More on Lucien Bernhard, his typefaces, and famous daughter, in a future issue. –KT
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
ONE OF MY FAVORITE contemporary music groups is called Kings Return, an acappella singing quartet from Houston. Ever since the Beatles, one of my musical pastimes has been deciding on which member of every four-man group I like the most. These guys simply won’t cooperate—every one is the best.
The singers met while in college and originally sang gospel, but they’ve diversified since then. One of their signature moves is to create medleys that link songs in surprising ways. Their super-seamless arrangements can catch you unawares, even when their material is the best-known songs in the R&B universe. Have a taste! –BR
I enjoyed every part of this week's Wild Things. My imagining your living in the spacious 1886 home could easily be a very similar one in the Port Townsend historic district. No wonder this town felt familiar. The nostalgic memories reveal important parts of your past that are just beginnings of longer intriguing conversations.
The tradition of adding the inhabitants' names and dates to the photo of the original house intrigues me. I wonder if people now and in the future would respect that? I hope the family who lives in "your" house will continue it.
It seems that moxie runs in your family Barbara! Keep telling us about strong women.
And another great musical recommendation. What fabulous voices and arrangements. Between you and Krugman, I get my nearly all my new music sources. Thanks!