Fear no more the heat of the sun

Grant (October 22, 1919- April 14, 2012)

Here's what I need you to know about my grandfather. Pay close attention: it's a romantic story.

Chapter 1

Potent playgrounds

He was, to the great consternation of ninety years of passport control officials and dermatologists, an American born in Egypt, towheaded and blue-eyed and casually fluent in Arabic.  His father, Frank, was a part of the Presbyterian mission in Egypt (unsurprising given our Scottish family - one of the earliest pictures of my grandfather shows him being dandled, newborn, by a uniformed Scottish soldier who has crowned the baby with his tartan cap).  Frank, a former college track star, was a doctor at the mission hospital, and a man famous for his gregariousness and kindness.  You can see his warmth emanating from the photographs, in which he seriously examines patients, performs complex surgery in his early twentieth-century facilities in Assiut, or stands proudly next to a Hadja (a woman who has undertaken the Hadj) and her luxuriant sheep.

Grant's was a childhood of sun and sand and books.  It was an era in which children could clamor over ancient statuary like it was some patient, long-suffering family pet - a Great Dane with cosmic concerns and small, rambunctious friends. 

Helen, sowing the seeds of bibliophilia (or possibly bibliomania)

Grant's mother, Helen, had trained to be a teacher, and she was a voracious reader, one who carried a Bible and a volume of Shakespeare's Complete Works with her wherever she traveled and read devotionally from each every day.   You can see that I come by my bibliomania honestly.  There's a clear genealogy from this picture of Helen reading to her sons in Assiut to my library in Nova Scotia. At Farfara I have a tiny table and an Egyptian rug of undyed wools that Frank and Helen packed in the single steamer trunk they brought back from a lifetime of service in Assiut.  God, how I wish I had that gorgeous bookcase.  Years later, after Grant had had his own children, he was posted to the NATO Defense College, and had to leave my adolescent mother with friends in London to finish out the school year while the rest of the family moved to a luxurious apartment in Paris.  When he dropped her off, and before he said his goodbyes, Grant handed my mother a two-foot-tall stack of new Penguin paperbacks, in their distinctive orange covers, a bibliophile solace for the absence of family.  In this stack was I, Claudius, which was, he told her, one of his mother's favorite books.  It wasn't until I read it for the first time, opening that same orange-covered copy as a teenager, that I realized how bold a choice - filled with sex and murder and intrigue - it was for a missionary doctor's wife in the 30s.  I came to know my great-grandmother in all her complexity through the books she loved. 

Scowling against the sun

So, childhood was a bit of an idyll, despite the loss of a younger sister named Jennie when she was very young.  Grant's family rarely made it back to the States, but on vacations they sought out contrasts, making their way to chalets in snowy Switzerland.  

Outside the clinic in Assiut

One day in Egypt, a traveling peddler came by Helen and Frank's house.  He offered, among other things, a small satchel of ancient bronze coins.  Fascinated, Grant bought them with his pocket money.  It was the birth of a numismatist. (There are few enough opportunities in life to use that word; you've got to seize them when they come.)  He was entranced by ancient history, fascinated by the ruins and hieroglyphs that surrounded him.  He wanted to become an Egyptologist.

When Grant had just turned three, Howard Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon, stood together outside the newly opened tomb of the ancient pharaoh Tutankhamun and looked on burial treasures no one had seen in over 3000 years - treasures that certainly no one was meant to have seen ever again.  When Lord Carnarvon fell terribly ill in the months that followed, so the family story goes, doctors were called in from all over Egypt, among them my great-grandfather Frank.  

This is why, my grandfather often told me with a serious mouth and a glint in his eye, our family is doomed to death by the mummy's curse.  The wrath of Tutankhamun finds us all; sometimes it just takes nine decades to do it.

Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Washington, DC

Clarity or Fat Caliper?: A Battle of Wills

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Farfara

"I have another name I'd like to put to you for our future, as-of-yet-utterly-hypothetical children," I said to D one day by the fire, when he was still in town. Name-speculating is one of my favorite pastimes, but D normally greets my proposals with ill-concealed (well, unconcealed) scorn. I mean, what's wrong with "Clarity"? Or "Meta"?  Perfectly legitimate names.

I paused for drama, but D's way ahead of me this time. His own proposal tripped off his tongue: "Fat Caliper."

"What?" I did a double-take. "Are you proposing that we name our child 'Fat Caliper'?"

"Yes."

"Well," I said thoughtfully, after a long moment, "I was going to suggest 'Griffin,' but 'Fat Caliper' would pretty much destine him for a fruitfully painful career as a bluesman. And we could call him 'Cal.'"

Two can play at this game of chicken, D.* Satirize me at your own peril.






*In fact, it's not much of a game of chicken unless two are playing at it.

Sentimental Remains: Down on Downton

Friday, April 6, 2012

There's something that's been eating away at me about Downton Abbey, even before Salon thought to ask why liberals (particularly in America) love it so or I found out that Alan Cumming agrees with me (which is naturally a great bolstering of my ego).  What's making me mad is essentially this: Downton spends a great deal of money and effort to make us believe that an aristocracy (a system that pays people to behave as if they are better than their fellow citizens based on the arbitrary fact of their birth) is an inherently benevolent social institution, beneath the cheerful cattiness of its various members.  There might as well be a motto emblazoned over the opening credits: Downton Abbey: Noblesse Oblige. It's well-clad hegemony: it persuades those who are being screwed by the system that their screwing is not just a necessary process, but a beautiful and noble one.


I'm liable to get a bit ranty on the subject, particularly since I harbor a substantial fondness for historical fictions and costume dramas, and their ability to mine the complexities of historical difference to philosophically complex and often subversive ends. But today, in discussion with a friend, I reflected on what made this different from a more effective, less ideologically disturbing costume drama.  Here's what I said, with some moments of expansion:


I would like Downton Abbey so much better if it were more like Remains of the Day - a vividly and humanely drawn portrait of people so steeped in the ideology of a class system that they are 100% committed to their own oppression or privilege (or both), but a portrait that nonetheless managed to throw that oppression and privilege into stark relief rather than dipping it in treacly, unquestioning nostalgia. (Remains of the Day is about nostalgia, as the title indicates, and it persuades us of the power of that nostalgia, but that nostalgia is problematic.  The protagonist looks back longingly, and with varying degrees of self-knowledge, to a period that was glorious but morally complex; it is damningly tied up in, among other things, fascism.) There are times when Downton tended in that direction, mostly in the first series, where characters were allowed to be much more plausibly selfish. This compelling self-absorption not only made it a more plausible critique of aristocratic privilege, but also a more well-wrought drama. In series two, the characters were muddled by strange, implausible, and anachronistic acts of generosity that seem designed rather to win our modern sympathies than to make sense with their psychology or their social context. In their spontaneous desire to concern themselves with the benefit of those they in no way considered to be their social (or often intellectual) equals, the characters came to operate on the principle of patriotic parable (Pull together, all! That's what the class system is about!) rather than human psychology.  By series two, I felt that I was watching a propaganda film with extra kissing.

My wrath at the series finally peaked during the episode in which the Irish socialist attempts an act of dinner-table terrorism. It just made my skin crawl. What a demeaning, infantilizing representation of revolutionary ideology that was: all of his ideals fizzling into a melodrama-turned-farce.  I could only hope that this series would never, ever air in Ireland. And, unbelievably, because narrative necessity and an unrealistic sense of the chummy inter-class loyalty of these houses rules the plotting, the humiliated political miscreant continued to work at Downton after this bizarre incident.

I do love a good costume drama (love them like nobody's business), and I don't think this sort of ideology is inherent to them. I had high hopes for Downton Abbey, which is why it fills me with sadness that it appears to be part of an upswing of nostalgic art that goes hand in hand with conservative politics in Britain.