A Trip To the Land of the Great Serendip

As Thomas Cristensen puts it in his introduction to Horace Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, the British art historian and man of letters was “about as odd as you would expect”, an exemplar of what Christensen calls a long-lived and somewhat peculiar strain of British tradition distinguished by “absurdity, ridicule, wordplay, wit, wickedness and plain madness”. Walpole’s most well-known work, The Castle of Otranto, is considered the first gothic novel, though at the time of its publication it was passed off by Walpole himself as a translation from the Italian.

Clearly, Walpole had plenty of energy and a taste for imaginative high-jinks.  When he wasn’t busy shepherding tourists through Strawberry Hill, his home outside London, he wrote  letters – volumes of letters, of all sorts.   One of the most famous was written in 1765, when Walpole faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,who had fled persecution in Geneva and taken up residence in France.  Supposedly written by King Frederick of Prussia, the letter offered Rousseau refuge-with-a-twist. “I will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take pride in being persecuted,” it said.  Rousseau first attributed the letter to Voltaire. Later, in England, as his paranoia increased, he suspected even his friend David Hume, and the letter played a role in a spectacular falling out between Hume and Rousseau.

Evangeline Memories

For weeks I’ve watched my blogging friend Proserpina entice her readers into accepting a simple concept - color-based blogs - and encourage them to help create a rich and expressive tapestry of personal preference. “Here is a color,” she says. “Here are its qualities. Here are some references to it in history and the arts. Does it remind you of something? How do you feel about it? How has it decorated your life?”  

Such simple questions, and yet the answers she receives build one upon another to form patterns of exquisite complexity. Readers contribute images of famous paintings, or their grandchild’s refrigerator art. They bring limericks and literature, poetry, personal photographs of beloved objects, memories from days of long-past travel and dreamscapes from journeys yet to come.

With each new color, discoveries are made. When Proserpina designated “Blue” as her first color, I was a bit disappointed. I’ve always considered blue to be my least favorite color and yet as images, videos and snippets of literature were posted, I realized ”blue” is too general a term. While I dislike the primary blue of the color wheel, powder blue baby blankets, navy blue and electric blue, I wear denim and covet turquoise jewelry. I’ve reveled in the azure, aqua and cerulean of Carribbean waters and will sit for hours watching the smokey indigo of disappearing sunsets. Clearly, there are distinctions to be made.

Victor Hugo Kindles Some Thoughts

Prejudice can be terrible to behold and worse to experience. In its most virulent forms - such as sexism, nationalism, ageism and racism – it can destroy communities and erode relationships. Sometimes its Medusa-like coils seem determined to wrap around every aspect of our lives. Prejudice helps lay the foundation for religious intolerance and class envy. Prejudice colors discussions of politics and sometimes renders problematic the most well-intentioned attempts at problem-solving. Even minor irritants like social snobbery and cliquish behavior have a soupçon of  prejudice stirred into their mix. All of us are prejudiced, it seems, but in a wonderful bit of irony, none of us wishes to appear so. It’s simply who we are. 

The Banned and the Beautiful

“Flophouse” made me giggle.  I’d never heard such a word, and when I pulled the slim yellow volume from my parents’ bookshelves, admiring the bold red print along the spine and the rough, burlap texture of  its cover, I wasn’t certain at first I’d read it correctly.  But there it was: “flophouse”.

Paging through the book I found it once, twice, and twice again.  I giggled every time I read it, and went running down the stairs to the Big People’s party.

“What’s a flophouse?” I asked my Dad.  “What are you reading now?” he asked in turn, not even bothering to look up from his cards.

What I was reading was John Steinbeck’s  Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents’ household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who’d pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it. Their assumption was that I’d be interested, or not, and if a grown-up book piqued my interest there was plenty of time to look up unfamiliar words or talk about life in a flophouse.

The View from Uncle Henry’s

 

Uncle Henry’s at Moon Lake is a fine place to mark a literary anniversary.  Tucked between Yazoo Pass and the Mississippi River just north of Clarksdale, Moon Lake itself is an oxbow, good for fishing if not for navigation and commerce.  Across the road from the lake, Uncle Henry’s awaits its guests with a spacious gallery, a west-facing view perfect for sunset-watching and no scheduled activities.  On the other hand, there’s all the time in the world for sitting and thinking, two activities particularly dear to writers.  While robins stitch their song through dogwood and azaleas and morning blooms more yellow than the iris, I’ve been sitting with all my might, and doing some thinking, too - about the nature of persistence, and how quickly a year can flee down the corridors of time.

Uncle Henry isn’t my uncle, of course, but the fellow whose name was given to a traditional Mississippi establishment.   Uncle Henry’s started life as an Elks’ Lodge in 1926.   Sold in 1933 to William Wilkerson, it became known as the Moon Lake Club, a Prohibition landmark known for good food, high living and assorted illegalities.  It lost and then re-gained respectability when the locals cut its connections to the Chicago mob.  Finally, in 1946 it was purchased by Henry Trevino, the foster father of Sarah Wright.  Sarah and her son George now run Uncle Henry’s, an Inn and Restaurant by its sign, a Bed & Breakfast in the tourist guides.  It’s a little shabby, quite a bit quirky, imbued with fading elegance and filled with piles of indiscriminate memories.  You don’t have to have been raised in the South to recognize that Uncle Henry’s actually is a “she” -  the prototypical genteel Southern Lady who’s just a little down on her luck. 

On the other hand, Uncle Henry’s is a treasured part of local lore and legend - not to mention local life.  On Friday and Saturday nights, there are “regulars” in the restaurant, the kind of folks waitresses ask, “Will you be having the usual?” even while knowing the answer to their own question.  When I mentioned Moon Lake to some fishermen eating breakfast in the Cleveland, Mississippi Huddle House, their first question was, “Did you stop by Uncle Henry’s?”  When I said I’d been staying there, one of the men said, “Well, it’s not the Holiday Inn, that’s for sure. But that’s the good news – it’s not the Holiday Inn.” 

It certainly isn’t the Holiday Inn. George himself told me that when I made my sight-unseen reservation.  A late and impulsive decision to attend Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Festival had left me scrambling for a room.  Motels were booked, and had been for weeks.  When I called the Shack Up Inn (perfectly respectable lodging, by the way), they were full, too. But with the solicitous kindness I’d already come to associate with Mississippians, the proprietor said, “You better call up at Uncle Henry’s. I do believe I heard they had a cancellation and they might be able to put you up.  Of course, they might not, but you call George. He’ll tell you how things are.”