In the previous newsletter I quoted a snippet from a volume by A.R.Ammons called The Snow Poems (1977), which is 292 pages long, huge for a volume of poetry that is not a collected works. The reason is that Ammons occasionally experimented with trying to capture the quotidian—the random, inconsequential details of the everyday in what amounted to a versified diary. His earlier book-length poem Tape for the Turn of the Year was typed on a roll of adding machine tape to emphasize its ongoing quality, imitating that of ordinary life itself, a continuous flow of experience without shape or closure.
Why attempt this, especially in poetry, traditionally the most shaped and patterned of all genres of literature? Ammons’s chief poetic influence was probably Wallace Stevens, who said that the imagination always has to struggle with a reality that resists its urge to transform it, remains to some degree stubbornly other. Reality and imagination are never totally harmonized or reconciled: the struggle between the two is the very nature of the creative process. Imagination recreates reality in its own image, transforming it into the patterns of its archetypes, myths, and conventions, but always at the risk of losing some of the unruly vitality of raw, lived experience. Ammons’ move away from formalism reflects a trend in American poetry at that time. Adrienne Rich, who showed in her first book that she could write a perfectly well-wrought poem at the age of 21, moved in mid-life to volumes of free verse with titles like Leaflets. Robert Lowell published volumes titled Life Studies and Notebook, relinquishing verbal polish and control, attempting to capture some of the messier areas of human life.
But it was the Romantic poets who, much earlier, first dramatized the conflict of imagination and reality by creating two seemingly opposite kinds of work. On the one hand they created new myths and fairy tales whose theme was the quest of the imagination to transform reality. On the other hand, they invented new ways of reflecting and valuing ordinary experience: the “conversation poems” of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the familiar essays of Lamb and Hazlitt, the letters of Keats, which are as famous in their way as his poetry. And alongside the Romantics, the novel arose to chronicle the exploits, not of gods, heroes, or an aristocratic elite, but the middle class. Samuel Richardson invented the epistolary novel, constructed out of letters. In 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses affirmed the claims of imagination and reality simultaneously. Starting with its title, it is structured by a complex mythical and symbolic apparatus. Yet it dealt frankly and unashamedly with real life, including bodily functions, in a way that scandalized some of its early reviewers: Leopold Bloom in the watercloset and masturbating, Molly Bloom getting her period.
However, the people I mention above are a gifted creative elite, sophisticated artists even when trying to seem “artless.” I am also interested in the attempts of ordinary people to shape their own experience and sense of identity in diaries, journals, and letters. One of Wallace Stevens’s great poems is called “The Plain Sense of Things,” and in it he says,
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination.
The depiction is of what in another poem Stevens called “things as they are,” without the waving of the imagination’s magic wand:
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed…
But that is not the final word:
Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined…
And that imagining is “required, as a necessity requires.” Required, because otherwise the imagination risks evading—evading its own failure. It has to confront the truth that things decay, and people suffer, and nothing we do can ever wish that away. I have devoted a lifetime, not to mention a newsletter, to the task of creating hope that imagination is a power than can transform the world. But I never want that belief, that hope, to make me forget the heartbreaking truth that nevertheless things decay and people suffer, sometimes unspeakably.
That is why I am, in a sense, turning over this newsletter to a guest writer, Elinor Babcock, born Elinor Bonney (1885-1962), the great-aunt of my former wife Bonney Harnish. Elinor kept a diary off and on from 1912 through 1955, in other words from the age of 27 to the age of 70, though with large gaps, one of them of twenty years. Still, although a day’s entry was only a paragraph long, the full diary amounts to 3000 pages, and is in the process of being transcribed, annotated, and keyed to photographs on the website www.bonneybonney.com. All this work has been done singlehandedly by Bonney Harnish, with a dedication that is remarkable and yet to me understandable. I am no historian, but I think the diary has value as social history, as a record of working class Ohio life in the early 20th century. Yet I think it is at the same time a compelling human document, raising questions about human suffering, and about the impulse to give meaning to that suffering by putting it into words. Elinor Babcock worked from dawn to dusk just about every day of her life, although dogged with almost constant ill health. The fact that she wrote 3000 pages, despite exhaustion and illness, despite having no idea that anyone else would ever read any of it, shows that this verbal monument, this life’s work in every sense, was required, as a necessity requires. Her lack of much formal education, evident in her erratic spelling, was only another obstacle to be overcome.
Most of her life Elinor lived in a house built by her father on Hahn Road a few miles from Lake Erie, in the area of Vermilion, Ohio. She was married for 13 years to Frank Babcock, but otherwise lived with her brother Elbert Bonney, who worked on boats that traveled Lake Erie or sometimes in the shipyards, and who, like Elinor and Frank, suffered from chronic health problems. After Elinor and Elbert died, “the farm,” as it was always called, was bought by John Harnish, my father-in-law, who began slowly modernizing it in his spare time in the late 1960’s through the 1970’s. I had a hand in that modernization. Somewhere there is a photo of me and my brother-in-law looking like coal miners at the end of shift, which in a sense we were. In order to finish the dirt-floored basement and install an indoor toilet to replace the outhouse that Bonney hated so much when she was a girl, the coal remaining from the old coal-fired furnace had to be thrown by hand out a small basement window above our heads, piece by piece. There were railroad tracks only a few hundred feet from the house: when a train went by, china in the cupboards rattled.
The diary falls into two large sections, divided by a 20-year gap. The earlier part, running from 1912-1920, is especially timely today because it includes a harrowing first-hand account of the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. Elinor ended up caring for an entire household of people, all of them sick in varying degrees. On October 20, 1918, she writes, “Gertie is sick today, We most have a hospital here. gloomy day for all.” The following excerpts give some sense of what it was like:
Oct.21. Gertie worse fever 102 1/2 had Dr. McGoraney Elbert went to Dr. Easton but don’t seem any better, Pa & Audrey working yet Audrey && Frank, got ride home.
Oct.22. Elbert is better, he took treatment to-day, Gertie better fever 101 1/2 today Audrey Pa & Martha don’t seem any better, Nellie sick alnight, better tonight. I did lot of work & finished my wash. Fred is sick.
Oct.23. Gertie’s fever 102. she’s terrible weak. gave her medicine until 12 midnight then pa took care of her untill Audrey got up, then I got up at 8-30. and cared for her untill 3-30.am
Martha was taken worse yesterday fever 104, no beter today. Gertie’s fever 103 1/4 today she’s in bad shape. I set up until 3-30 am. & feel tired out.
Oct.25. Well I got up at 12 to such a day Martha is better but Gertie’s fever 104 1/2 & I’ve done every think I know how to I set up until 4-30.am. and then pa took car of her.Oct.26. got up 2-30 pm been on the jump most every minute. Gertie’s fever 104 3/4. Martha better.
No one actually died, and by November 1 Gertie’s temperature was down to 99, but for a time Elinor had to keep up with the relentless household chores while also, as she says, running a hospital full of sick relatives.
While the pandemic was an exceptional event, the combination of chronic illness punctuated by occasional major health crises with the ongoing, exhausting task of survival is hard to capture in brief excerpts, especially because the sheer amount of hardship over hundreds of pages has a cumulative power. It is like reading a version of the Book of Job expanded to the size of War and Peace. The following passage may convey some idea of what life was like in that time, although it is actually an atypical summary by Elinor of events that occurred in a gap between April 24 and July 19, 1919:
Nellie took cold in her left breast & I brought her home on the 10th day I worked hard day & night for a week with her, but she had to have her left breast lanced & I had the incubator to take care of, & oh such a time, after three weeks I was so tiered out I took cold, it settled on my lungs, I stayed in bed one day & thought I’d stay in bed the next, but the roof caught fire & I got up & helped put out the fire. Gertie tried to climb up the roof on the dry shingle & roll off & hurt her back & yelled like a lunatic & then She had to have the Dr. & laterr I took her to Dr Easton & she got able to work, she took cold & had guinsey & couldn’t do any thing for three weeks, Audrey’s heart is feeling bad again but she has been working steady, I have been working hard to picking peas & beans & canning washing up double blankets & comfor lovers. I caned 1 qt of pea’s & picked 3 pks. & picked 1 1/2 by string beans & canned 10 quts. & 1 pt.
In these earlier years of the dairy, Elinor is chief caretaker of the people around her, and the health crises are more dramatic than in later years:
Wel I have lost a few weeks but I went to A [Audrey] each day only missed three or four days while sshe was there I brought her home after she had been week & we took her back & Oh it was terrible the operation she had to go through with. Dr Wheatly took out on overy & both tuves & the apendicts, he said he did not have the least hopes for her, but he for my sake he would do all he could & there was a bit puss bag in her & that was terrible & for 8 weeks I only misssed the few day’s I have spoke of and I didn’t miss those until I knew she was much better, but the Dr. said it was my coming & looking after her regular that ever saved her , the nurses are good but oh so neglectful & I help care for her all day & the last thing at night before I came home at 8-30 or 9 pm. then I cam home so tired & ate a cold supper & canned fruit & sewed & washed & ironed & done the thing I had to do to make the rest as comfortable as possible, in the way of planning out the meals & so forth and at length when I brought Audrey home, I momeadatly took ill myself & could only do just what had to be done for several days, but soon took heart and got back to my job, I had to go each night for severl nights and take care of Nellie just when Audrey was the worst, she had a bag case of grimzy but now things are looking better again.
In 1920, at the age of 35, Elinor Bonney married Frank Babcock. The account of their marriage is not the stuff of bridal magazines, and there was no honeymoon:
Mon.May.17.1920 Frank W Babcock came to Cleveland on his boat James E. Davidson working second assistant engineer, & the Cheif told him to come to Lorain & see his girl & so he did & he took me to Elyria to the Court House & then to Rev. Winters where we were married about supper time, We ate Supper up town, Frank took me to Elyria in a big car & then we came back to Lorain & stayed to the Elm Hotel all night Frank left at 4-a.m. for Cleveland. May God Bless Him and make us both strong in body & Spirit. I couldn’t lace my own shoes, the rheumatism is so bad in my back & hips, Well I went home & found lots of work to do as usual & so changed my clothes & went to work, its ever so hard to work.
From the beginning it was a kind of long-distance, commuter marriage, with Frank out on Lake Erie working on the boats:
Well Franks up the Lakes & I wonder if he will be able to come home when he gets back I have a terrible sore hip. Frank came home from Fairport, I love to have him come & dread to see him go. Well I have neglected to write every day, but I have been feel worse every day, I went to Conneant to see Frank twice the last time, I had Elbert go with me, I was almost afraid I couldnt get home a gain my hip was so bad, I nerved up & got there & back but, had to stay in bed two weeks with syatic rheumatism, Frank poor man was some worried I know, but I was to ill for once to worry. Frank calls me up each time he gets in port & he write me often & those are things that count, much. Elbert is sick a good boy he hardly left me a minute day or night until Audrey came home then he took care of my days, and Audrey nights, I got up just a soon as I could, I surely was some weak & lost 25 lbs. was sure sick, but I want (fr crossed out) Frank & could-nt die, and I want to look after Martha & Audrey, Elbert will miss me to, but then maybe he will have life easier, in the future. Well, Frank’s boat came here to load (quite crossed out) a number of times, two or three, then I have got strong enough to go meet him again, had all most all my teeth out so its kept me weakened for I can only eat soft food. got my upper ones bridges in again.
Actually, it was Frank who died, of uncertain causes, in 1933, after 13 years of marriage, which makes the following passage from November 5, 1920 all the more affecting:
I do Pray all so that He will be with Frank and Bless him with strength health and keep him safe from harm & evil, and bring him back to me, a good strong, true man. Oh God (this crossed out) it would be like wandering in the wilderness, now, with out Frank, I do thank You for sending him to me, I feel as if I had more to live for, some one to love me & care for me.
Elinor is not an emotionally open person, to put it mildly, and such an admission of vulnerability is poignant because it is rare in the diaries. Mostly it was a combination of stoic resignation and, increasingly, religion that got her through.
The gap in the diary from 1921-1940 covers the years of her marriage and seven years afterward. The second part of the diary, beginning in 1940, is, as Bonney says, “solidly entrenched in the seasonal rhythm of the Hahn Road homestead” where she now lived with her brother Elbert. Indeed, the detailed accounts of the weather, even down to the shifting direction of the wind during a day, are curious for someone who, despite the property’s nickname, was not a farmer with vulnerable crops. But people are vulnerable to the weather as well. Elbert had to drive miles to work at the shipyard, on country roads in all weather. Elinor is often concerned with Elbert’s safety out on the road, and sympathetic to the plight of a manual laborer with serious chiropractic pain:
Fri.Dec.27.1940./ Elbert went to work, I finished the washing all but the socks & my stockings, carried water, its to much to carry the water then wash, done the chores & got the supper and done up supper dishes. I feel so terrible foged out, so tired seems as if I just can’t endure it. But I thank the Lord he took Elbert safe & brought him safe, both he & his car, and he bought the grocierys, I thank God for taking care of me & giving me enough strength to do the washing carry water & do all the odds and ends. It has been a dark day, fog was so thick all morning I traveled in mind & spirit all the way with Elbert to the ship yard, although the fog lifted after he got into Lorain, but it has been thick all day & so dark no sun today, rained hard tonight at 7-30-p-m. wind still N.East and more chilly today.
And again:
Mon. Jan.19.1942./ Elbert went to work & the fog was so thick I couldn’t see his car lights after he got on top the hill, it stayed thick all day couldnt see Snyders house just the out lines once in a while, wind freshened from the west a 4-p-m fog cleared a little Elbert came so tired he could hardly drag himself in. I did half the wash, carried some water & spilled some getting in can’t seem to carry water & do the wash, no strength any more. I got it dried in the house & half to do the rest if I can in the morning, I’ll only do what I can get dried up in the house before supper, if it’s as bad tomorrow out side as it was today.
And there is the fierceness of a northern Ohio winter:
Tue. Jan. 6.1942./ Elbert went to work & boys oh boys but it’s cold. I got up at 4-a-m. and shook the ashes down & started the fire up & warmed the house. he had to get up at 5.a.m. the wind is S.W. & blowing a gale & colder I believe than yesterday. I was so cold doing the chores this morning, 5 below zero wind blowing & so cold, but I got the chores done I feel all tired out. Moon light as day out side.
At this point one flinches to remember that toilet facilities consisted of an outhouse. And, as a couple of entries make clear, God help you if you got “the runs.”
In a poem I inadvertently left out of last newsletter’s fantasia on winter, “The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens says that one must “have been cold a long time / To behold the junipers shagged with ice…and not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind.” In the end, the listener, “nothing himself beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Stevens rejected the comforts of religion, but Stevens lived a comfortable life. Elinor Babcock stared directly at “the nothing that is” her entire life, a life that never got any easier over the decades. It is not surprising that, as she got older, she got more and more religious, and the form her Christianity took was apocalyptic. She knew that it was not just her own life that was intolerable but life itself as most of the people she knew lived it. More than once she records having helped out a “bum” asking for a handout:
I fed a bum today noon, he carried a heavy pack on his back was terrible dirty said he was going to his folks in Cleveland that he was so dirty no one wanted to feed him, he was tired hungry & cold I gave him hot coffee 2 big cups & a pt bottle full in his pocket, Elbert saw him in Vermilion tonight he was foot sore to had walked from Minasota. What a queer world High wind tonight seems as if it would lift us sometimes.
She became increasingly convinced that she was living in the end times, I think because it was unthinkable to her that such universal suffering could go on forever:
Fri. Dec.21.1945./ Shortest day of the yr. and by the word of God, Jesus will be come before very long, and the ter-rible part of that will be, so many, are not ready to meet God. Oh God turn my brothers & Sisters to Thee With All there heart, soul, mind & strenth in Jesus Name, Amen
The events of World War II are present in the diary only as signs that God in his mercy is ready to put an end to what otherwise would be a tale of sound and fury, signifying the “nothing” that Steven’s “snow man” beholds:
The Old World have been waring for some time & now it looks as if this side will soon be in it and the bible history will soon be fulfilled. I pray God will forgive me and help me to do His Will, and help all the people to thank Him each day & night for our many blessings it looks as if this is our last war and Jesus will Soon be coming, I pray He will give me strength faith & courage like that of Daniel.
She never questions God’s ways, for God’s ways are the only hope she had, the hope that God would turn this life into what the theologians call the “Fortunate Fall,” a concept startlingly dramatized for her by a story she heard:
Tonight, Rev. Ellery & a young man were in the radio station & they told us how God takes care of His own for the young man had fell from an air plane 1000 feet to earth & had pray God would help him to land with-out breaking him all up or doing him any harm & God answered His believing prayer, he wasn’t hurt in any way, he said he felt as if some one eased him gently to earth the last few yds. of his fall & he landed as he had believed h would on the balls of his feet & ran a little & then walked to where he could report, they didn’t tell as how he happened to fall. God Wonderful kind and mercyfull, Glory Hallalujah I Love thee Jesus.
This event actually happened, in September, 1949.
Outside of family gatherings, there is scarce talk of amusements in the many pages of the diary: an elaborate flower garden, a few pet parakeets, a bit of Christian devotional reading. A day is judged by how many endlessly repeated tasks get accomplished: constant baking of bread; washing clothes without even a wringer—Elbert will sometimes help with the physically demanding task of wringing clothes by hand—making and repairing clothes; housecleaning and changing of beds. A major addition to the family finances was raising chickens and selling the eggs. Diary entries in the 1940’s often begin with a tally of the number of eggs gathered that day from as many as 150 hens and pullets. During Elinor’s lifetime, Roosevelt’s New Deal began to mitigate the circumstances of people like Elinor and Elbert. Immediately as it did so, a backlash occurred in the form of “libertarianism,” a new name for Social Darwinism, which spoke of the poor and struggling as “parasites” and “takers,” people wanting a handout. They are of course still speaking that way. At least Elinor and Elbert were respectably white.
Why did Elinor keep her diary? There is an element of self-justification, of demonstrating to God that she had done her utmost. Yet there is something else going on, something paradoxical, for the diary memorializes, fixes into a lasting form, the life that her apocalyptic wish fantasies long to eliminate. Did she imagine that anyone else would ever read it? Writing seeks eternity. Implicit in fixing a life in writing is the hope that it will endure, in a form that somehow transmutes its pain. All sorts of people do it who have no high artistic ambitions, merely a feeling that moments—even, strangely enough, the worst of moments—deserve some kind of permanent existence. Both my parents did it. My father kept a diary during his time onboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific during World War II. And when she retired in 1990, my mother at the age of 60 wrote a personal and family history that included a vividly remembered account of growing up on a farm during the same period as Elinor and Elbert. My father’s Navy diary and my mother’s memoir are in fact both posted on the www.bonneybonney.com website.
It is unreasonable to hope that one’s diary, memoir, or letters will be preserved and be of interest to other people. But here is Elinor’s diary made public and long-lasting in a form she could never have imagined, as a website on something called the Internet. Nor could she have imagined that her sister’s grandchild, Bonney Harnish, would spend hundreds of hours transcribing and editing the jottings she made at the end of each long, exhausting day.
We assume that so many things are impossible. Most of them are, but a few of them happen anyway. My laptop rests on an oak table, my desk for many years, made by my Italian grandfather almost a century ago. He could never have expected that, yet here I sit, writing a newsletter that will fly in all directions like dandelion seeds, alighting who knows where, yet at the same time rest preserved in a kind of electronic amber to be discovered who knows when. Our motives for writing are so deeply buried and mysterious that I sometimes think we write in order to find out what they are.
I like Ammons's book "Garbage" (Norton, 1993), which won the National Book Award for Poetry that year, twenty years after his first such award. It has seventeen sections, which might be called cantos if his well-crafted couplets could be compared to Dante's tercets in the "Inferno." Only his garbage dumps do not descend from one to another, better to worse. They occupy the flat landscape of the East Coast, "roughage … above snow in / winter, pure design lifeless in a painted hold." Can't get much more real than garbage.