PATCHWORK ON THE SILK ROAD 

Up-Cycling in the Ninth Century 

    In case we thought that making do and mending – currently more trendily known as ‘re-purposing’ or ‘up-cycling’ – was a relatively recent idea, some surviving ancient textiles prove  that it is a concept which has been around for many centuries, although the motivations for it have been, and are, many and various. A silk valance* dating from the C9th/C10th, an example of a Buddhist devotional object, is a case in point. It was found in 1907 by the Hungarian-British explorer and archaeologist, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, in a previously sealed cave, designated Cave 17, connected to the now famous complex known as the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang, Western China. The carving of Buddhist shrines out of solid rock began in India and was transmitted to China along the Silk Roads. Those at Dunhuang were carved from sandstone cliffs between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries and even by the C7th there were over a thousand caves, lavishly decorated with paintings and sculptures, and attracting thousands of devotees and other travellers. 

Stein found three valances in Cave 17, two of which are in New Delhi, but the most complete of the three is in the Collection of the British Museum (Object MAS.855), where I was able to examine it. There are many examples of textiles salvaged from sites along the trading routes which have come to be known collectively as The Silk Road, but this one has special relevance to the history of patchwork. It demonstrates that the technique of piecing together scraps of fabric is long-established and exemplifies one of the many motivations for the use of that technique – in this case devotional. Valances feature in many of the paintings in the caves, illustrating the ways in which they were used. The size of this one, 281.5cms long and 42cms deep, suggests that it could have had several uses, for example as a hanging in front of an altar or a Buddha statue. It could also have served as part of a canopy, which was a religious object often used to shelter a statue of Buddha or carried as a banner symbolising the victory of Buddha’s teachings.

The valance incorporates sixteen types of silk, three different embroideries and one type of printed silk. Stitches used include satin stitch, split stitch and running stitch. The upper section is a 6” wide border pieced from ten patches, with eight suspension loops either of plain weave or of samite, which is a rich silk fabric interwoven with gold and silver threads. The lower section comprises streamers of damask, twill damask, samite and both printed and embroidered silk of different shapes, all of which are sandwiched between triangular double-sided tabs attached to the lower edge of the border, with tassels attached to the bottom of each tab. 

Some of the streamers are looped and knotted, some are roughly patched together and some also have tassels hanging from them. Surprisingly, close examination reveals that some streamers which look like carefully patterned patchwork are in fact constructed by overlapping rectangles, also double-sided, with mitred ends, secured together with small running stitches down the middle. To twenty-first century eyes they look convincingly like mens’ striped ties. Although shabby and faded today, one can imagine how bright and colourful the valance must have looked when it was made, over 1200 years ago.

As well as the valances, the caves contained other examples of silk patchwork in various states of preservation. Patchwork has historically had an important role in Buddhist practice, stimulated by the Buddha’s precept against waste. As a result, to piece together patches of valuable silk was seen as an act of serious piety. Silk fabrics were given as votive offerings by affluent visitors to the shrines, some perhaps spontaneously torn from their own clothing.

The way in which this valance, and many other artefacts from Dunhuang, ended up in western museum collections is in itself a fascinating story.  Stein was but one of many western explorers and archaeologists who, from the end of the nineteenth century, heard rumours of manuscripts and artefacts being offered for sale in local markets in Western China and set out to acquire whatever treasures they could find. Their activities eventually led the Chinese authorities to clamp down on ‘foreign devils’ simply loading their finds onto camels and horses and transporting them back to the West. But that clamping down didn’t happen until the 1930s, by which time many thousands of items had been acquired by museums both in the UK and in many other countries. Of course, the collection and acquisition of historic artefacts has been the subject of controversy for many years, the Elgin Mables being the most famous example. But it can be argued that the acquisition of such artefacts, including those from Dunhuang, was justified since it ensured their survival and facilitated the scholarly attention they have since received. 

Aside from their significance to contemporary patchworkers, the silk patchworks found at Dunhuang are a valuable contribution to the broader research into the subject of textiles on The Silk Road.. They provide unique insight into the probable uses and religious significance of found objects, as well as proving that certain construction and needlework techniques have been used over many centuries. Study of the fabrics yields information about types of silk, their geographical origins and manufacturing techniques. 

 In 1994 the British Library established the International Dunhuang Project, a collaborative effort to conserve, catalogue and digitize manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from the caves at Dunhuang and various other archaeological sites from the eastern end of The Silk Road.

Further reading and information

Aurel Stein on the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield, The British Museum Press, London, 2004

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road  by Peter Hopkirk, John Murray, London, 1980

The International Dunhuang Project Online: http://idp.bl.uk

Thanks to Dr Luk Yu-ping, Basil Gray Curator: Chinese Paintings, Prints and Central Asian Collection at the British Museum, for facilitating access to Object MAS.855.

© CME 2020

Walking with Ghosts in Flimby Great Wood 2019

 Walking With Ghosts in Flimby Great Wood 

Read at the 2019 Celebration of the Lives and Friendship of Norman Nicholson and Percy Kelly, held at The Settlement, Maryport 

Though Norman Nicholson wrote about the Lake District as passionately as anyone since Wordsworth, and though Percy Kelly eventually left Cumbria entirely and moved to Norfolk, both produced their most significant work when they dealt with the very different landscape in which both had grown up: the landscape of the coastal strip, in and around Millom and Barrow in Nicholson’s case, in and around Workington and Maryport in Kelly’s. 
It was, and is, not only a very different landscape but one in which human beings lived very different lives from the sturdy pastoral world of Wordsworth’s Lake District farmers of two hundred years ago. These coastal folk of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived lives of hard physical labour – in mines, foundries and docks and out on the sea on fishing boats - for poor financial returns. And they lived them, mostly, not in scattered, atmospheric farmhouses but in cheek-by-jowl terraces of plain little houses which often seem to huddle into the landscape to escape the bitter winds and rain driving in from the Solway.  

When we moved to Maryport over thirty years ago, much of that industrial past had already gone: wiped away as though it had never existed – pits and foundries closed and demolished, rail-tracks ripped up, harbours become redundant and abandoned. But the evidence was still there – not only in Nicolson’s poems and Kelly’s paintings, but on the ground, where landscapes apparently of untouched rurality often hide clues to the hard lives lived there in the past. I should have realised and been ready to spot that, since we came here from Derbyshire’s Peak District, where ancient lead mining and later textile manufacture had left similar plentiful, if half-hidden signs, on the ground. But I didn’t. I only began to appreciate it when I met Mr Peacock and through him discovered Flimby Great Wood. 

Flimby Great Wood lies to the north of Flimby village. Setting out one morning from Maryport, quite randomly following a lonning leading off Ellenbrough Road, just walking out to see what I could see, I met another walker, an elderly man going in the same direction. We fell to chatting and he, finding that I was new to Maryport, began to tell me about what I’d see along this route. After a while, passing fields on either side, we came to a narrow grassy track which took us down to Risehow on the main road. Mr. Peacock showed me the disused red brick buildings, including the baths and offices, of the Risehow Mine where he had worked before retirement. (All of those buildings, by the way, were completely demolished only a couple of years ago.) 

Back up the track, we followed a path into fields until we came to woodland. But there were few broadleaf trees, just stumps and scrubby undergrowth, birch and alder saplings colonising the cleared land (to be followed later by serried ranks of newly planted conifers). Mr. Peacock told me that the then owner of the wood, the Lowther Estate, had carried out a major felling three years before, leaving that part of the wood as we saw it. (The wood has since been sold to a private owner, who has done more felling, this time of the conifers which were planted after that felling of broadleaves. Encouragingly, he has replaced the conifers with many thousands of native hardwoods. And the several public tracks through the wood remain open.) We followed another track, leading from farmland to an isolated cottage, which, as Mr. Peacock told me, had once been the woodman’s cottage. His friend, who now lived there, invited us in for tea and biscuits. 

We chatted amiably – but, decades too late, I think now of the questions I should have asked Mr Peacock and his friend. But don’t we all, as we grow older, regret the unasked questions? My own family history includes, for example, Cornish farmers and shopkeepers, Glaswegian trades union activists and German Jewish immigrants. Elderly representatives of all those strands were still alive when I was a girl and young woman. Did I ask them about what they remembered from when they were young? I did not. Impossible now, since all are long dead.) 

Certainly thirty years ago I knew little about West Cumbria’s industrial history, and can’t claim to know a great deal more now. However, returning later to the woods alone, I found, among the conifer plantations which had replaced the felled broadleaf trees, evidence of the mining activity which had extended over large parts of the woods: the massive granite walls which had housed the mechanism for hauling the coal trucks up and down, the mine-heads and ventilation shafts fenced off by the Coal Authority, and other ruins, solid, stone-built structures lost in thickets of nettles and brambles. What function did those buildings serve? What had gone on in them? There is still so much I don’t know, so for me, even today, the woods remain a place of mysterious, only-half-understood echoes from the past.  

Some facts, at least, are easily unearthed from local archives and, especially, from the records housed in the Durham Mining Museum. The main pit actually inside Flimby Great Wood was called Robin Hood Pit, which closed over a century ago, in 1909. (And, no, I don’t know why it was called Robin Hood Pit. Perhaps simply because it was in a wood and Robin Hood’s home patch was Sherwood Forest?) However, the Risehow Pit, just south of the wood, on the outskirts of Flimby, operated until 1966 - so thirty years ago, as well as Mr. Peacock, others who had worked there would still have been alive. Indeed, probably some of Percy Kelly’s customers, when he was sub-postmaster at nearby Great Broughton between 1952 and 1958, would have worked there. Even today, local people have memories of their fathers' and grandfathers', lives in the collieries. 

But the history of mining here goes back at least to the eighteenth century. Edward Hughes’ book, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century,1700-1830, charts its development. The first efforts to establish a colliery near Ellenborough were made by Humphrey Senhouse of Netherhall in the early 1770s and his letters and other records reveal the difficulty and danger involved in creating the pits in the first place. They also provide evidence of the bitter reality of the lives of those who worked there: harsh working conditions for pitiful wages. 

In April, leaving the main tracks and footpaths, I make forays into wild places, nostalgically hunting for clumps of primroses to remind me of my Cornish childhood. Although the ground I walk on feels solid enough, the fenced-off pit-heads and ventilation shafts remind me that I’m walking over a dark labyrinth of abandoned underground roads, tunnels and tracks, where once men and boys, and ponies, laboured long and hard, lit only by lamplight. Today the reservoir which once fed the colliery is a wide and tranquil lake, known locally as Robin Pond, haunt of ducks and herons, carpeted with water lilies, edged with watermint, where fishermen spend long, slow hours sitting patiently on the banks. After rain, the woods are loud with the sound of water gushing along the gills. From Robin Pond, Furnace Gill cascades over a ruined weir and runs all the way down through the wood and then through Flimby village to the coast. It’s hard work to follow it, clambering over fallen branches, boots slipping on wet boulders. Along the banks, I find more crumbled walls and stumble on bricks lying in the stream. I’m looking for any evidence of the furnace which gives the Gill its name. There are other gills running through the woods: Penny Gill and Risehow Gill. Beside Risehow Gill there are more extensive ruins of stone buildings, whose history and use are still mysterious to me.  

On fine summer mornings I wonder if even those long-dead miners may have enjoyed their walk to work, if they took hidden paths edged with wild flowers and with a haze of bluebells under the trees, before coming within sound of the racket of men and machines which must have surrounded the mine workings. The woods are not much frequented nowadays and later, in Autumn and Winter, as the wind and rain blows straight in from the Solway and the paths I trudge turn to deep mud, I am usually the only one there. At least, the only one alive. It is easy, though, to feel the presence here still of those long-gone, hard-scrabble lives and the often dreadful deaths which ended them. Between 1833 and 1906 The Durham Mining Museum records 23 deaths in Robin Hood colliery. There appear to be no records of those injured. 

 Here are just a few of the ghosts I walk with in Flimby Great Wood – some of which ghosts haunt the paintings of Percy Kelly and the poems of Norman Nicolson: 

Mary Hines, aged 40, a greaser, who was crushed by tubs on a surface incline on 28th August 1869. A greaser was employed in greasing the axles of the coal wagons. 

Thomas Lanchester, age unknown, died on 25th April 1854, when a pickaxe fell on his head from the top of the shaft. He left a wife and four children. 

In February 1864, a large quantity of coal fell on Robert Milburn, age unknown. His foot was amputated, but he subsequently died. 

Thomas Armstrong, aged 14, was killed by a fall of coal on 16th December, 1870. He was employed as a driver. (A driver was a boy, usually aged 14 or 15, employed to manage the ponies on the main road underground.) 

John Cooper, aged 40, died on 26th August 1869 when he slipped from a rope to the bottom of the shaft he was inspecting. The report adds: ‘Death, of course, was instantaneous. The poor fellow has left a widow and eight children.’ 

Allan Cameron, aged 14, in 1906 slipped into the Robin Hood reservoir and was drowned while attempting to replace derailed coal tubs on the bridge crossing the water. The inquest report makes special mention of the fact that he was wearing clogs. 

Hard lives and hard deaths, some of them reflected in poems and paintings. Echoes of an almost vanished world. But a part of our history that we should never forget. 

A War Lord's Patchwork Coat

The Coat (Furisode) of Uesugi Kenshin (1530 -1578)

In Japan, as in some other cultures, patchwork garments were given as gifts. In those cases, the garment would be made of the most expensive fabrics the donor could afford, since the gift was a mark of respect. A patchwork coat from around 1560 and illustrated in Japanese Quilts by Jill Liddell and Yuko Watanabe, for instance, is constructed from seventeen different kinds of rare Chinese brocades. The coat dates from the Muromachi Period (1338-1573), a time when, due to the financial burden of civil wars, domestic textile production diminished. As a result, fabrics such as silks and brocades had to be imported from China so were scarce and highly valued, and would have been available for consumption only by the wealthy. This particular coat was presented as a gift to the famous war lord, Usuegi Kenshin (1530 – 1578), who had vowed to become a Zen-Buddhist and devoted to the Buddhist God of War, Bishamonten. Thus, ‘The use of patchwork would seem to be in accordance with the aesthetics of Buddhist monks  but the gorgeousness [would be] appropriate for his status as one for the most important warlords of the time.’ 

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A Study in Turkey Red

A Study in Turkey Red

What links this Turkey Red quilt with Charles Dickens, West Cumbrian history and the history of the dyeing industry in Scotland?

 In 2010, I acquired four quilts from Mrs. Oxtoby, of Wigton, West Cumbria. Mrs. Oxtoby and her family have lived in Wigton for many generations and the quilts had belonged to her mother, Mrs. Smith, née Sharp, who had died earlier that year. The quilts were found in a trunk in the attic when Mrs Oxtoby was clearing her mother’s house to put it on the market. (Reassuring to know that, even in the 21^st century, there are still attics which have not been ransacked for items to sell on Ebay!)

 Although the quilts are in various states of wear and condition, I was delighted to be able to add such excellent examples of quilts with local provenance, displaying all the characteristics of quilts made in this region of the UK, to my collection.

  All four quilts are pieced entirely in cotton and contain cotton wadding. The hand-quilting is competent without being outstanding, and appears to be uniform over the four quilts. There are no labels or identifying marks on any of the quilts, but they are typical of those produced in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

 Even if local provenance hadn't been available, I would have felt confident in saying that they had been made locally, for two reasons: the four quilts are quilted in the particular pattern traditionally associated with the quilts of West Cumbria and found also in geographically associated regions, which is to say South-West Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man; the pattern is known as ‘All over Wave pattern’ and takes the form of a series of chevrons covering the entire surface. The second clue is in the use of a particular red fabric, known as Turkey red, in one of the quilts. This fabric is ubiquitous in quilts of our region for reasons connected to the dyeing industry in Scotland.

Mrs. Oxtoby was able to tell me that other members of the family remembered the quilts and believed that they had been made by two sisters, Sara and Mary Eliza McMechan, whose family had a close friendship with Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother’s family, the Sharps. It is believed that the quilts were given to the Sharp family as a gift.

The two sisters, neither of whom married, were the daughters of Thomas McMechan, the founder of the Wigton Advertiser.  He had premises in King Street, where he also ran the printing works. He rose to become one of Wigton’s leading citizens and, among other civic roles, had the distinction of leading the deputation which welcomed Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins on their visit to Wigton during their walking tour of Cumberland in 1857.

 After Thomas’s death in 1914, the Wigton Advertiser was published by his two daughters and, on their retirement, by the Wilson brothers, two long-term employees. It ran until 1941, when the Second World War brought paper shortages and severe restrictions on publishing.

 Evidence of the close friendship between the family of Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother, the Sharps, and the McMechans is in the Will of Mary Eliza McMechan, in which she bequeathed legacies to Mr. Henry Sharp and his two daughters, one of whom was Mrs. Oxtoby’s mother.

All over Wave quilting

 What, one might wonder, were Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins doing in Wigton? On 7th September 1857 they had embarked on a walking tour in the north of England. They left London for Carlisle by train, then travelled another 14 miles to the village of Hesketh Newmarket. Here they stayed at the Queen’s Head Inn, close to Carrock Fell. Despite the adverse weather, Dickens insisted on climbing the mountain; their compass broke and they became hopelessly lost in thick mist. Collins, a reluctant participant in this venture, badly sprained his ankle on the descent so they travelled to nearby Wigton, where he saw a doctor. We must assume that this was when they were met and greeted by the town dignitaries, including Thomas McMechan, the father of the quiltmaking daughters. Wilkie, presumably would have been limping badly!

 Their stay in Wigton was brief, because on 9^th September they travelled on to Allonby. Arriving there in time for lunch, they stopped for two nights at The Ship, described by Dickens as ‘a capital little homely inn looking out upon the sea – a clean, nice place in a rough wild country.’ The landlord was Benjamin Partridge whose ‘immensely fat’ wife was ‘very obliging and comfortable.’ The Ship Inn is still there and a wall-plaque commemorates the famous visit.

  So, there’s the Dickens link - tenuous, I admit! But what links this Turkey red and white quilt to the history of the dyeing industry in Scotland?

  Before the introduction of synthetic dyes, the colour red was mainly derived from the use of the dried roots of the madder plant: Rubia tinctorum. But until the C17th no method had been discovered in Europe whereby cotton fabrics could be dyed red which would be fast to light and water - in other words, they would not fade or bleed. So when vividly-coloured, painted and printed cotton textiles, which would withstand washing and sunlight, began to be imported by the East India Company, European producers were keen to learn the dyeing processes by which they were produced. The existing producers, mainly in parts of  the Turkish Empire like Greece and the Levant, hence the ‘Turkey red’ description, were understandably secretive about their processes, but in the 1740s determined efforts were made by Europeans to discover those secrets. Britain’s efforts to succeed in this C18th version of industrial espionage were a failure and it was a Frenchman who eventually found the method of creating the fabulous red dye. The method, it should be said, was complex and involved many stages, some of them noisome: soaking the fabric in ox blood and then in urine, for example!

  Pierre Jacques Papillon was first wooed by the Manchester textile producers but, for various reasons, he settled in Glasgow. Long before the advent of Turkey red there were major dyeing and bleaching works in and around Glasgow, many of which were moved out to the Vale of Leven because of its great resource of clean, unpolluted water. The industry grew to be the major source of employment and industrial output in that area, but the production of Turkey red fabric became the dominant industry, turning regional firms into multinationals, owners into millionaires and giving the Vale of Leven a world-wide reputation for production of superior Turkey red goods. Under the auspices of the United Turkey Red Co. Ltd. an alliance of three major companies formed during the 1890s, the production of Turkey red textiles continued there until the 1960s, when advances in dyeing technology and competition from Japan and India led to the decline and ultimate collapse of the textile industry in the Vale of Levens.

  So there’s the link: my Turkey red quilt reflects the fact that proximity to the centre of production of Turkey red fabric meant that it was easily available to fabric retailers in the North of England, hence the ubiquity of its use in quilts made in our region. Not, of course, that Turkey red quilts aren’t found in other parts of the country, but there are an awful lot of them up North!

 The history of Turkey red dyeing is long and complex and the above is a very brief, and far from scholarly, introduction to the subject. There's lots more information available on-line and it's the subject of several books and academic publications.

©CME 2017

THE POST OFFICE GIRL

On reading Stefan Zweig 

Stefan Zweig ( 1818-1942)

‘Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.’ (See (Wikipaedia)

 ‘It seems to me a duty to bear witness to our lifetime, which has been fraught with such dramatic events, for we have all .....witnessed these vast transformations – we have been forced to witness them.’ Foreword to his autobigraphy, The World of Yesterday. P.21

A prolific writer of biographies (e.g Marie Antoinette, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Dickens), novellas, short stories and plays, his only two actual novels are Beware of Pity, published in 1939 and The Post Office Girl, the manuscript of which was found among his papers after his suicide in 1942 but which was not published until forty years later, in 1982.

Zweig‘s original title, Rausch der Verwandlung, roughly translated, means The Intoxication of Transformation. It was given its English title, The Post Office Girl, when it was translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg, and in 2009 was shortlisted for The Best Translated Book Award, an American literary award that recognizes the previous year's best original translation into English. The award takes into consideration not only the quality of the translation but the entire package: the work of the original writer, translator, editor, and publisher. The award is "an opportunity to honour and celebrate the translators, editors, publishers, and other literary supporters who help make literature from other cultures available to American readers.”

The question arises: wasThe Post Office Girl completed? In an Afterword to the English translation, William Deresiewitcz says that Zweig ‘nibbled’ at the book for years and suggests that he may never have hammered the book into a shape which satisfied him. But, when I read it for the first time I was unaware of its pre-publication history and accepted the indeterminate ending as the only possible one the author could have offered: Christine and Ferdinand’s fate seems as unknowable as our own and I was content to leave it there.

The significance and interest of this novel, for me, lies in the way in which the narrative of the individual’s life and fate is set in the context of historical events in a way that brings those historical events to life. Of course, in this Zweig is by no means using an original idea: think Tolstoy, for example, or, nearer to our own time, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. But in the analysis of Christine’s personality and experiences (and it must be remembered that Zweig was a friend and follower of Freud) we get an insight into the ways in which political and social situation in which she finds herself limit and determine the direction of her life.

Despite his remarkable popularity as a writer during the 30s and 40s, Zweig does have (and did have) his detractors. For example, in a review of Zweigs’ Autobiography,The World of Yesterday, published in 2010 in The London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann was unequivocally disparaging about Zweig’s entire oeuvre, as, it must be noted, were many of his (Zweig’s) contemporaries. On the other hand, readers’ online comments are almost unanimously admiring and appreciative.

One of Hofmann’s criticisms with which I will concur is that Zweig does have a tendency to overwrite: for example,Ferdinand’s long polemic rants toward the end are unnecessarily protracted, with too much repetition of the points he has already made quite clearly enough.

For all that, I value this book for its psychological truth, and, of course, because it’s a compelling read. On second reading, it still gripped me and also inspired me to look more closely into the history of Austria before and after the First World War.The World of Yesterday gives yet more insight into the experiences and fate of Jewish families, like that of Zweig, who lived through those times.

I first came to Zweig through his other novel, Beware of Pity, a psychological masterpiece, in my view. The Post office Girl is another such.

© CME 2016

The Custom of the Country

The Custom of the Country

By  Edith Wharton

One couldn’t really describe Undine Spragg as a ‘heroine’.  But she is certainly the main protagonist of this book. The spoilt only child of a successful businessman and a compliant mother, Undine has grown up to expect her every whim to be satisfied.  The novel follows her attempts to rise above her roots.

What gives Undine distinction is her exceptional beauty, which she believes will enable her to leave behind her modest beginnings in backwater Apex and achieve the heights of New York society by making a favourable marriage.  To this end, her parents remove themselves and Undine to New York for her to begin what she sees as her inevitable progress, through marriage, to the heights of the sophisticated world of mid-Nineteenth century New York

 Everything we need to know about Undine’s family background and attitudes is neatly summarised by Wharton when Ralph Marvell, whom Undine eventually marries, asks her mother to explain how she came to be called ‘Undine’ He says: ‘It’s a wonderful find – how could you tell it would be such a fit?’ Undine’s mother replies easily, ‘’Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born.’ Ralph remaining struck and silent, she goes on to explain: It’s from Undoolay’, you know, the French for crimping.’

Modern American marriage customs and divorce in the upper eschelons of American society are the two main themes of the novel. The phrase: ‘the custom of the country’ is used early on in the narrative by Charles Bowen, a character who serves as a social analyst, and who observes that ‘it is the custom of the country’ for a man to slave away to pay for his wife's extravagances without ever telling her anything about the work he does. The consequence is that there is little if any shared life in many American marriages. The centre of the man's life, the world of business, remains a mystery to his wife. The centre of her life, a social world of opulent display, becomes an expensive drain on his resources when business is not going well. Undine early on gives her view of the purpose of American marriages when she observes that her friend Mabel Lipscomb will probably soon be getting a divorce since her husband has ‘been a disappointment to her.’

However, to me, ‘the custom of the country’ must also refer to Undine’s chronic, and ultimately disastrous, inability to understand any social world but the one she grew up in. Despite her meteoric rise through the social strata, her values remain basically Apex values.  Her attempts to ‘learn’ ways of sounding well-informed and intelligent are doomed. Marrying, first, into a family who, as well as their aristocratic connections, are educated and embrace all aspects of cultural life, Undine is out of her depths; worse than that, Ralph Marvell turns out to be a man whose creative bent is the main focus of his life. Being forced to take on uncongenial work to support Undine in the manner to which she is accustomed, he bravely soldiers on. When  eventually, she divorces him, leaving young Paul with his father, Ralph focuses all his affection on his son. Later, after divorce and re-marriage,  Undine decides that having the son she had previously rejected to live with her will create the best impression in her new, aristocratic family, which is the final humiliation for Ralph and he shoots himself.

In her marrying into the aristocratic de Chelles  family and becoming a Marquise, Undine believes that has finally achieved her highest ambition and reached the pinnacle of  French society. But she very soon discovers that the customs of that particular country are completely alien to her. Instead of the dazzling social life in Paris she anticipated, she is forced to live in her husband’s decaying chateau in the depths of the country and to join the other women of his family in quiet pursuits like housekeeping and needlework.

Undine’s story reminds me of the story of the Little Old Woman who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle: a kind fairy hears her sighing that she wished she could get out of her vinegar bottle and live in a nice cottage. The wish is granted. But the little old lady is never satisfied; from the cottage she moves into a house, then into a mansion, then into a palace. Finally she asks for a castle. The next day she wakes up and she’s back in her vinegar bottle! So Undine  gets her richly-deserved come-uppance, although in a rather unexpected way and one which shows Wharton deploying her well-developed sense of irony at its best. The only way in which she can enjoy the level of wealth she deems necessary to achieve recognition in ‘the best society’ is to re-marry the man whom she’d first known, married, then rejected, in her far-off youth in Apex. He has now become fabulously wealthy – but the social life Undine aspires to eludes the reach of the couple who are very slightly scorned as ‘nouveau riche.’ Her marriage is a hollow sham and she’s left with a deep sense of somehow having failed in life.

Something's Wrong by Sam Smith

Something’s Wrong

By Sam Smith

‘Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.’

 R.D. Laing

This book is written from the wealth of its author’s own experience as a worker in the UK’s mental health care system, although in the end we’re left wondering if ‘care’ is the right word. There is a polemical underpinning to the work, which is expressed forcefully in an Afterword to the narrative, in which the shortcomings and anomalies of the mental health care system are laid bare and a plea made for urgent reform.

The narrative takes the form of a transcription of tape recordings made by Robert, aged around 50 when he begins them. What the tapes contain is, of course, always and entirely his narrative, his thoughts, his perspective. The reader is drawn so tightly into Robert’s thoughtscape that at times one could almost feel worn down by it, and yearn for relief from its sheer intensity.

            Since being diagnosed, at nineteen, as a paranoid schizophrenic, Robert has been through all the labyrinthine highways and byways of ‘The System’, including at times being Sectioned as being a danger to himself and others, at others being given limited freedom under so-called ‘supervision.’ He has experienced every known treatment and therapy, from drugs to electrotherapy. He is, indeed, a walking encyclopaedia on everything ‘The System’ has to offer those diagnosed mentally ill.

When the narrative begins, Robert is living in a care facility where he is permitted a degree of freedom. As the recorded tapes show, he observes and understands everything around him, especially his fellow inmates and the ‘carers’ who are employed to supervise them. It becomes painfully clear that ‘caring’, in any meaningful sense of that word, is not mostly what happens; the inadequacies of an extensive cast of ‘carers ‘ is detailed, from the down-right callous to the well-meaning, but ineffectual, social worker.

From the beginning, Robert is telling himself that something is wrong but is unable to quite put his finger on what that is. In making his tape recordings, he is determinendly, and ultimately successfully, thinking his way back to some form of normality. What we gradually learn is that what is wrong is the whole system to which he has been subjected  and within which he has been ensnared. The regime of drugs and other therapies, far from ‘curing’ him, have served only to confirm the first diagnosis of the professionals: that he is mentally ill, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. As the narrative proceeds we are invited to question and meditate on our own perceptions of ‘insanity’ and ‘normality.’

Through the transcription of the tapes we begin to get a picture of Robert’s early life and the reasons for his being diagnosed as mentally ill. We discover that he was the only child of his parents: father a sensible, responsible man who, as Robert eventually realizes, loved his son very much, albeit in an undemonstrative way. His mother, on the other hand, is revealed as over-doting, indulging him to the extent of tolerating, indeed encouraging, him in uninhibited horse-play. It becomes clear that she is, in part at least, the reason for Robert’s later behaviour and his failure to recognize limits. (The fact that she later hangs herself, unable to face up to Robert’s offence and its consequences, indicates that she was always unstable.) So when, at nineteen, he is involved in a fight outside a pub with another lad, he doesn’t know when to stop. As he puts it: how do you know when the other one isn’t going to get up and hit you again? As a result his opponent is badly injured, to the extent that he will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Retribution is inevitable, but Robert has a history of other incidents of abnormal behaviour – the most serious being the occasion when he tied his mother up to a chair and sat by her until his father came home to release her. As a result, instead of being sent to prison for inflicting grievous bodily harm (in which case, he bitterly reflects, he would by the time he is recording these tapes have served his sentence and been a free man) he is diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and sent to a secure unit. As the tapes proceed, we gain the impression that he really is manic in his obsessive attention to detail, and he also refers to episodes of past manic behaviour. The question, always, is to what extent the treatment he has been receiving is the cause of his behaviour rather than the other way round.

In his observations of his life and times Robert comes across as eminently sane; he observes and comments on many features of contemporary life which, looked at objectively, are pretty strange: the ways people dress, the ways they behave. As well as the mental health system, property developers, lawyers, the state of our towns and homelessness are all critically examine – and mostly found wanting. I particularly enjoyed his critique of The Saturday Guardian, which he describes as ‘heavy’, with all its supplements and sections, but in which: ‘Every week the same. Like an empty bowl that has to be filled, week after week, but with words. Like a nervous chatterbox filling time with nonsense talk. No, not nonsense; but chirping away about things of little importance. Saying for the sake of saying.’ Amen to that!

So, how does Robert’s story end? It is not an easy resolution. He finally understands that the only way to escape the clutches of the system is to become entirely invisible; to disappear; to live outside any possibility of discovery. Since his whole journey through the mental health care system has been a series of encounters with the mentally ill, the addicted, the rejected, through them he has learnt the lessons which enable him to slip out of sight and to live outside any conceivable system. In other words, he learns how to efface himself completely.

Anyone who lived, and read, through the 1960s will remember people like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, both of whom became gurus of alternative thinking about what was termed ‘mental illness.’ Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness" - his term. His rejection of the medicalisation of mental illness almost certainly went too far in denying the influence of  biological or chemical causes of what was termed ‘madness’; in any case, Laing was largely discredited in his life-time, both for his ideas and because of his alcoholism and his drug-taking. Never the less, his ideas do still have resonance and there are those who adhere to them. In 2004 The International R.D. Laing Institute was established in Switzerland as ‘a meeting place for all those interested in the psychotherapeutic approach of and its theoretical reflections by R.D.Laing.’ Laing defined insanity as ‘a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.’ Robert could be seen as a case in point, with his confusing childhood experiences, followed by a regime of treatment which not only didn’t ‘cure’ him, but arguably made him worse. Laing also claimed that ‘There is no such condition as “schizophrenia,” but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.’

When Thomas Szasz wrote: "If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic" he summed up what he saw as society’s ambivalent and illogical attitude to mental illness. Although he strongly opposed Laing’s ‘counter-cultural’ stand and the whole anti-psychiatry movement, he also rejected the ‘medicalisation’ of mental illness. No doubt many, if not most, contemporary mental health practitioners would take issue with the notion that mental illness is entirely a response to one’s environment, which seems too simplistic;  more recent research indicates that chemical and hormonal influences on the brain may have greater influence than people like Laing or Szasz would ever have considered.

Nonetheless, the question remains: was Robert mad or was he driven mad?

Sam Smith's books here: http://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/