16 April 1999: Rambling

Dearest Wench-toad [a letter to my beloved sister],

This is so strange. I am finally nearing the end of my stack of recycled paper. I always shove the most recent stuff on top, so to approach the bottom couple of inches means that soon your letters will be printed on books we did over a year ago. I have to find someone who's fucking up lots of drafts of something long to replenish my stock. It would be really nifty if we had a dedicated recycled printer for drafts, but we don't. So I have my little one and feel smug.

Anyway I am reading The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers and on page 100, Henry VII is finally dead (900 pages to go). Henry VIII is now finding out about all the silly titles, like the poulterer who acquired lamb but the acatary who procured meat, including mutton. So I asked a reading coworker if she had any idea what "acatary" meant and she didn't, but she does share my interest in Tudor gossip. She is going to the Scottish isles this June (the two weeks spanning Solstice, so she'll have no sleep) and recently read something proclaiming Mary Queen of Scots' as a stronger claim to the throne than Elizabeth I's.

That claim must rely on believing Elizabeth I to be illegitimate and on being Scottish, which her guidebook was. Mary Queen of Scots was the six-greats granddaughter of Edward III through her father and seven-greats through her mother while EI was sixth-greats through her father alone and of dubious legitimacy. I like Tudor gossip and I think you like Windsor gossip, but here, have all the family trees. Don't you wish you had internet access? I drool over them. Anne Frank liked them too; apparently among her papers were quite complex family trees of the European royalty.

Speaking of Anne Frank, did you know her sister, whatever her sister's name was, kept a diary too? Aha, two minutes later, Margot. I love the web. Don't you wish you had internet access? The diary was destroyed, but Otto remembered her keeping one or something.

Okay, so the web isn't so great: I still can't find a definition of "acatary."

So there's a series of movies on A&E about Horatio Hornblower, hero of C.S. Forester's books. Someone named Ioan Gruffun stars and people left and right (mostly women) are drooling over him. I dunno; that name is a real turn-off. But I haven't watched any of the series (I cannot break the distateful association of Horatio Hornblower to Horatio Alger) and maybe he's more appealing in action than in appellation.

I am reading about Henry VIII, which I have typed three times now as Henvy because you know, that works for me, instead of Gore Vidal or Julian Barnes. Also yesterday I reread Caddie Woodlawn for the first time since a fourth-or-so grade book report. I remember disliking it and now I realize why: she seemed a pale imitation of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Also from Wisconsin, about ten years older, her story told by her granddaughter instead of herself. However, Brink published in 1935 (and won the Newbery Medal in 1936) and LIW won only Newbery Honors for hers, but for all the last five, On the Banks of Plum Creek (1938) through These Happy Golden Years (1944). (Can you imagine publishing a book with that kind of title today?). Which means Brink pro'ly didn't plagiarize.

So when are we going to do that tour of her houses?

Anyway, I bought Caddie from the library yesterday for 99¢ along with a book of Shel Silverstein's poetry, Falling Up. What the hell is the library doing discarding a Newbery Medalist? Except this is clearly a Later edition with the Wrong illustrations. There is no way these illustrations came with the original edition. Y'know how The Wind in the Willows looks Wrong without the Shephard decorations, and Alice in Wonderland isn't Alice without Tenniel? Did you ever see the first editions of the Little House books? Center School's library had a couple and I hated them. They looked Wrong without Garth Williams's furry illustrations. So I reassure myself that the library's priorities are not so low that they're discarding Newberys but so high that they're booting Wrongly illustrated books.

Speaking of Garth Williams, he also illustrated The Cricket in Times Square, which was also a Newbery Honor book (1961). However, George Selden was a pseudonym. D'you know what that means? It means the author lied, the way Laura Ingalls Wilder lied. Did you know, did I tell you, that another family lived with them during The Long Winter, a young couple and their baby? D'you remember that in The First Four Years, the Boasts (their friends since By the Shores of Silver Lake) offered them their stable's finest horse in exchange for Rose? I have wondered, since finding out that Laura Ingalls Wilder lied in The Long Winter, if that other couple were the Boasts and the baby eventually died (remember that Carrie was weak from then on, the way she nearly fainted in Little Town on the Prairie writing her spelling on the board under the cruel eye of Miss Wilder) and Mrs. Boast, also weakened, was never able to conceive another.

I have been somewhat successful in assuring myself that since Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote fiction, the omission of lots of stuff, like the baby Charles between Caroline and Grace (that I had long known of) and the omission of the other people during The Long Winter is not lying but fiction. Not wholly successful though.

Anyway, so I just idly searched for The Cricket in Times Square at Amazon and got "George Selden, Garth Williams (Illustrator), Robin Longshaw (Translator)." Translator? You mean it wasn't some female writing under a man's name or initials like Ellis Bell for Emily Bronte or J.E. Austen for my buddy Janey-Jane but some ignorant fool who didn't have the good grace to speak Godfearing American?

Did I tell you that once upon a time I was driving through Westport with NCS and we passed a sign reading Hedley's Meadow? I screamed for him to stop the car and of course he being an illiterate ignoramus had no idea why I was so excited. So we stopped and I explored and explained and he listened in a humoring kind of way grrr and then we went to the Westport library and I took out the whole series and reread them then and there. Hedley's Meadow really exists.

[end]

I only began this letter to CLH so that she wouldn't open an anonymous envelope of family trees and fear for a mail stalker, as if there exist two people who would send her such. From Henry VIII my train of thought--a deliberately bad metaphor, since my thought process is anything but linear--brought me to Hedley's Meadow. All roads lead to Rome.