Singers of family tales

...Eliot, "East Coker" DURINGMYFIRSTyear of graduate study at the University Iof Virginia, I was assigned two roommates, one but a brief acquaintance who transferred at semester's end...

...Item: Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (Shambala, 1975) and Gary Zukav's immensely popular The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Morrow, 1979...

...As we grow older The worm becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living.T.S...

...PD 59 is not a step in the direction of safety or peace...

...This same uncle must be one of the few persons alive who, searching his memory for my father, could write: "I saw the full impact of war...

...with a statement of affectionfor her two sisters...

...Psychology's theologicalquantumjump DAVID TOOLAN BBB~HERE WILLbe a revival of Christianity," Owen l-Barfield has written, "when it becomes impossible to write a popular manual of science without referring to the incarnation of the Word...

...Probably...

...Born six months after Pearl Harbor, I do not know a world without war bonds, hot and flushable running water, and the democratic entitlement to a college education...

...No libraries...

...Pointing nuclear weapons at military targets, and thereby emphasizing their nature as weapons, marks the beginning of a sea-change in the psychology of RussianAmerican confrontation, a gradual acceptance of the possibility of war...

...Having largely created Western common sense, and the dispiriting logic of cog-psyches caught in the cosmic machine, physicists are now busy undermining that entire edifice...

...and closes with Deo gratias...

...They were especially wrong when trying to answer any question beginning with when...

...What I relate here is an experiment in recording more of a family than can ever be caught in the winter branches of a genealogy...

...They carried with them: "an upright piano complete with brass candle-sticks pivoted in front, the bench, a bicycle, crockery, glassware in crates and baskets, a game of wooden skittles with wooden balls, brother Jim's 'nudger' and his precious violin in its case with bows and resin, family albums, clothes, chamber pots, tea pots," and miscellaneous sundries...

...In both these interim reports of conversations between "far out" psychologists and physicists, recent developments in quantum mechanics are construed as showing more affinity with Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies and psychologies than with the Western idiom of Wisdom becoming incarnate...

...In her book on Families, Jane Howard remarks that one of the strongest ties that binds a family are its "myths," those private legends of lunatics or lyricists that are the true points of honor in a family escutcheon...

...No one need be wholly unclear who is wholly honest...

...I, myself, have trouble remembering Wordsworth's best lines, often read, but my father's heart leaps up when he beholds his recollected "golden daffodils," and he could recite, for the wondrous edification of his children, letter-perfect poems learned sixty years earlier...

...Upwind he soars, and it scarcely seems 25,000 words later that he touches down briefly for refueling...

...He had a short, alliterative name, and after he had seen his first snow, he finished his M.B.A...

...Military and civilian leaders will of course go on saying their purpose is to prevent war, but there is a vast difference between saying that war is inherently too terrible to happen, and that we are too strong and alert t~ be challenged successfully...

...when the attic stairway folds up into the ceiling, there is precious little room left for antiquity...

...I do not know for sure...

...I have nothing but a book...

...some first-generation memorabilia of our immediate family's school years...

...Hot Cross buns and Pancake Tuesday are not a part of my religion, no more than black strap molasses mixed with sulphur is for me a rite of spring...

...True, the capital letters are finely illuminated, as in amedieval psaltery, but initially there is somewhat more story than plot as William begets Francis begets....Gradually, however, myths gather between the lines...

...It takes long study just to gain familiarity with the words, and after that it requires a sustained effort of the moral imagination to keep hold of what the words mean...

...We shall deploy .different kinds of weapons in different kinds of ways...

...And when he talked of Great-aunt Cassandra or of Cousin Ruby, twice removed, you could taste the stock in his soup...

...in L.A...

...To this day, my father's brother, now in his mid-eighties, practices his violin alone each morning, playing "Tra6merei" or the Intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana from memory...

...and the passing down of a christening gown once worn by Aunt Minnie's Loretta, dead at sixteen, is another...

...Iconoclastic modern physics is in the process of discrediting this viewpoint, and replacing it with an uncommon sense that, for the first time in three hundred years, renders Barfieid's Commonweal: 562...

...They composed a simple memory of family...

...And certain New Britain's knitting mills and her lovely winter's skating...

...crowd my mother's pages...

...the other, an enduring friend...

...Certain also that my maternal grandmother was proudly married in the self-same year as Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman she greatly admired, and that after ftrst seeing George M. Cohan in "Four Cohans," she never again missed seeing him play...

...In the past it was assumed such a war would be terrible but soon over...

...and sure it is that Uncle Patsy always brought bouquets on festive occasions...

...Commonweal: 560 we think ourselves demons or demigods, sprung full-blown from the head of Chaos and capable of shaking the ancients from our skies, which we cannot...

...World War II has just ended, and below the last typed sentence he has neatly printed "To Be Coneluded...

...Such detail is typical of my father's account...

...Where shall I begin...

...To supplement income, Grandmother Howard operated a fish-and-chips shop, sending her golden, mealy fare forth wrapped in the Manchester Guardian...

...Homer's Nestor, who liked to ruminate a bit himself on his checkered youth, did not recall it in finer detail than does my father...

...young men have grown old and died since 1945, while the problem has grown steadily more complicated and intractable as technical progress has made the weapons more versatile...

...It would be helpful if we might read it in full...

...We shall probably begin a civil defense program (since that is the clearest evidence of willingness to fight a limited nuclear war, which Brown says is the point we are trying to get across...

...Before his dreamship came in, however, he died in England at the age of forty-five,leaving to his six children, aged seventeen to two, the recollection that he was "a good man, loving and loved...

...It is, furthermore, unnecessary to be a professional historian in order to record one's memories...

...What I have written here is the barest outline of the argument which led to PD 59, and of the consequences we may expect from it...

...and "My mother said she thought...

...My father's father worked in Lancashire's cotton mills, joined early by his two oldest daughters, aged ten or thereabouts, in order that the family of eight might eat...

...Theirs were the plain thoughts of"jus' folks...

...Discussions of the problem posed by nuclear weapons in the immediate postwar period all recognized the extreme danger, even the likelihood, we would do ourselves severe damage-they saw the future clearly enough for that, just as we can--but at the same time they were groping, inexact, and often wide of the mark when it came to details...

...and an old trunk, neatly packed with used clothes and extra blankets smelling sweetly of camphor...

...We shall see, I think...

...That memory was about all he left, however, and so in 1907 the family itself left, for Boston, in the steerage of the "Ivernia...

...The survivors' natural sorrow for wh~t has been lost will be all but overwhelmed by fear of its repetition...

...In March of 1975, however, a decade after I met my roommates, my mother read Andrew Greeley's That Most DistressfulNation and agreed with him that Irish immigrants of the late nineteenth century knew grievous little about family history and cared even less for passing the news along...

...But like the other large things in history, precisely where it's taking us will all be more apparent in retrospect...

...My parents' love letters were, I suspect, there too, but we were raised not to open envelopes which were not addressed to us...

...Parents who share such memories with their children share the spirit of an age, as well as of two lifetimes, and bequeath an inheritance to successive generations that will only grow more valuable with age...

...The courtship between the new physics and the egodissolving oceanic-bliss orientation of oriental religions is odd and fascinating...

...The letters were not from eminent writers, generals, or even carpetbaggers, but from a common culture of people who had more or less eaten their peck of dirt and died...

...And the New York Giants: he was, in his daughter's eye, "as rabid a Giant fan as ever visited the Polo Grounds...

...But how much richer than the facts are the broken shards of memory preserved by my mother, bits and pieces of family spirit that grow dearer the deeper they are buried...

...Such as every parent, perhaps, should tell...

...Delderfield, a novelist my father much enjoys (partly, no doubt, because it is their shared conviction that God is an Englishman...

...After five single-spaced pages, my mother's narrative pauses, in medias res...

...The old photographs, however, were more striking, particularly those of agate-eyed women, their hair lynched back in skin-tight buns or cascading wildly down their bodices like the snakes of Medusa...

...For the moment nothing seems changed...

...As a child, I knew one of my grandparents...

...There is even a section on Dentistry ("I had five or six teeth out as a boy...

...touches upon a mother's "pragmatic article of faith in the form of a long, resilient wide belt always hung prominently on a nail in the kitchen...

...We will be subject to heightened tension whenever the United States and Russia edge towards a serious crisis, as we do every two or three years...

...Like Hinduism and Buddhism (at least in popular versions), the new physics seems to dissolve the substantial world of solid, separate bodies, and in addition, the whole idea of nature as I FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN,S J., is assistanteditor of Commonweal.independent of the human mind...

...No stock...

...Or should not...

...Exactly when the inherent instability of such a situation will assert itself is impossible to say, but it ought to be clear that the better "prepared" we are, the more we have got to fight a war with, the worse it will be...

...he begins, with all the gusto of Vergil announcing "Arma virumque cano . . ." It is not only the shape of the ancestral tree which interests him, he states, but "who and what made the limbs bend and the leaves flutter...

...Next up was the meat and potatoes compartment...

...His family was by no means landed gentry, but he knew each corm on his Carolina roots like he knew turnip from kohlrabi...

...In my own attic, by contrast, were the Christmas tree ornaments...

...I might as well be reading Dickens or Fielding as my father's life, so alien to me are galvanized iron wash tubs, carbolic soap, and a "three-holer out back.., to be shared among two families...

...No reputation for making love or war...

...NON.EUCLIDEAN LINES BY WHICH GOD WRITES STRAIGHT...

...It is in passing impressions, implicit judgments, and moods of memory that one touches not only one's ancestors but also one's parents and, ultimately, one's own soul...

...Too little remains after generations of house-cleaning: some familial names...

...In the best scientific tradition, my father classifies and numbers his topics as his subject grows complex...

...She determined then to write down for her children what she knew of their ancestry, and, after a brief show of reticence, my father too seized a pen...

...To write history, it has been said, is so difficult that most historians must make concessions to the technique of legend...

...Most of the time, however, such myths are oral and can draw their last breath at any moment...

...in preparation for eternity, my own grandmother tore up most of her old family photos...

...I do not know what a Christmas pudding is but my father remembers precisely where, in his youth, they were hung...

...From such bare bones it is possible, if one wished, to piece together a genealogical chart, one that might even grace a den or rest upon a mantle...

...a directory of notable addresses...

...From the day of Hiroshima forward it has been apparent that nuclear weapons meant trouble for humanity...

...How is it possible for Western scientists to assimilate an oriental religious outlook with seeming ease when the absorption of the native religious tradition seems so difficult...

...History, therefore, remained a vicarious experience for me, and I marveled from a distance at a daguerreotype of someone else's mustachioed grandmother...

...Until lately, Eastern religions have scarcely been touched by the split between mind and heart engendered by the Western scientific revolution, much less touched by historical criticism and the subtle acrobatics of reinterpretation called for when a scientifically oriented Westerner sets out to appropriate the meanings of an ancient religious tradition...

...Certain, too, are the lives of the many children who died young...

...No short article can possibly do the subject justice...

...Yeats, "if...

...and it is emphatically clear that great-grandfather Molloy and his wife were, as my mother put it, "a prolific pair": the names of seven children remain, and that without benefit of total recall...

...our closeness, she writes, "would have pleased our parents as it pleases us...

...my wife, none of hers -- indeed, her own parents (one of them an immigrant herself from "that most distressful nation") did not live long enough to consider the possibility of doing more than inscribing a few names in the family Testament...

...No rummaging there for old buttons or bullets...

...It is the weapons, in fact, which have been leading the way, not we the weapons...

...The military approach borrows all the language of deterrence, while attempting to balance forces in the manner of the great European powers before 1914...

...He has written for the New York Times, National Review, America, Newsday and other publications...

...10 October 1980:559 It awed me, a child of New York City whose family emigrated to Long Island, that his family held letters addressed from graves on which the stones were long illegible, and I listened with curious wonder to the legends of skeletons hung row on row in the closet, each a lo(,ingly pruned limb from the family tree...

...My father's zenith as a musician came, he adds in anticlimactic conclusion of the more laudable report on his siblings, the day he played "The Blue Bells of Scotland" on his violin for his third-grade class...

...and topmost for the pie or cake...

...To write amemoir does not require a finished style, but memory -which often bears up better than one might expect under writing's cross-examination -- is essential...

...Neither of my parents is "a writer"--though my mother plainly prefers posting friends a letter to "giving them a buzz"--but together they composed.., not a bareboned genealogy nor, on the other hand, a full-blown history...

...The same is likely to be the case now...

...At her children's urging, she has promised to add recollections of our own early history, beginning in infancy and continuing through childhood...

...The first was from the California coast, and for him Virginia's red clay, pecan pie, and well-bred women spoke not of ante-bellum mint juleps on a white verandah but of Eastern senescence and the slow smokeless burning of decay...

...No self-help guides to climbing the family tree...

...For without some such history, IIIII PAULH.CONNOLLYis associate professor of English at Yeshiva University in New York...

...Those who are not shocked when they f'n'st come across quantum theory," said Niels Bohr at the dawn of nuclear physics, "cannot possibly have understood it...

...You must take a running leap at history, my father evidently believes, for he falls back to 1860 as his starting mark, and firms his feet there in his native English Midlands, home of his maternal grandparents, the Howards...

...Hers is a simple, straight story, such as anyone could tell...

...Leaving the distaff side of the family," my mother further recalls that her grandfather, Thomas J. O'Donoghue, was a sergeant-major in the 69th Regiment during the (Civil) War, and that he maintained close ties to his regiment for many years --as old soldiers often will do...

...Instead, her account begins basically as a list of Biblical begats...

...There are other "chapters" of a page or more devoted to Sports, the Red Schoolhouse, Transportation, the Newspapers...

...They also felt peace was to be found through strength, and that war would never begin so long as all sides knew what they were up against...

...In the process of understanding that, we may also see that part of the difficulty in appropriating the Western religious tradition may consist in the fact that the "scientifically oriented" Western student tacitly presumes a no longer valid Cartesian-Newtonian epistemology and world-view...

...But what stronger proof can there ever be of "your blood and mine...

...Iris a story about myth-making and the singers of family tales that may inspire other parents to share their roots with other children...

...Just a tale of character, a legacy that cannot be spent by heirs apparent...

...But within a very few years things will be quite different...

...few hard facts and still fewer gentle traditions -- the continuance, through four generations, of the name "Margaret" is one...

...Cotton was king," reports my father, later a Republican yet always a member of the idealist party, "and in its service the industrial working class was created, bondaged, pillaged, and plundered...

...This is not an essay on genealogy, nor on writing one's memoirs...

...At the turn of the century, my paternal grandfather, sailed twice to America, testing the milk and honey...

...Pardon, old fathers," asks the poet W.B...

...WHILEMYFATHERwas slower to begin his recollections, he quickly reached thirty pages before pausing to draw breath and announce: "I was then three...

...He still recalls the names of neighbors and classmates from his primary school years and the number of blocks he carried dinner pails to the number of sisters who had secured work in a number of Lonsdale textile mills: "In the bottom went the tea, all milked and sugared...

...later a letter carrier;, and some small pieces of his hand-made jewelry yet remain, as does a book he won for scholarship before starting work at the end of ninth grade...

...Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine...

...But certain it is for me now that Francis King, my maternal greatgrandfather, died of pneumonia contracted New Year's day on New York's docks...

...It might even be argued that no one has felt truly light-hearted since...

...No land...

...Her father was a silversmith for Reed and Barton...

...What do we know," he questions, "of the kingfishers and grubbers, the hawks and the doves, the cardinals and the vultures....9 Were there goldfinch and titmice, peacocks and sparrows, gooney birds and jailbirds roosting among.., our ancestral relatives...

...we are still prepared for Armageddon, both psychologically and militarily...

...Horses ripped open on barbed wire trying tojump it...

...Darden Asbury Pyron was the second roommate, and his three surnames were a honeyed syllabic porridge borne in sacred testimony/ to his southern birthright...

...At last reading, my father is still writing...

...TAICE A RVJNNING LEAP KT HISTORY, MY FATHER BELIEVES Singers of family tales PAUL H. CONNOLLY Home is where one starts from...

...I never had much confidence in the long-term efficacy of the first approach, but at least it encouraged a sober frame of mind...

...It begins with an altar boy's lntroibo ad altare Dei...

...But thirty-five years is a long time to keep something in mind...

...Recently, there have been theoretical developments in this direction, but more along the line of the incarnate word (Vishnu) in Hindu cosmology...

...We will protect our weapons in ways which precludearms agreements...

...Rare memories are, therefore, rich ones, like the exotic treasures borne from a IPharaoh's tomb...

...PD 59 ensures the agony will be prolonged...

...THESEIMPLICATIONSof PD 59 all make it a significant document...

...But it was this latter "reenergizer,'" my father recalls with flatulence, which "had the f'wepower of a French 75 and a noise factorjust a few decibles below TNT -- pure carbohydrate...

...But the fourth implication, already suggested, is the most important of all...

...If, as is often argued, music is I0 October 1980:561 congenital, it is worth addingthat my own musical notes ended the afternoon my three-year-old son glued middle-F to E and G while repairing some damage done the piano while playing it with a hammer...

...fillings were for the wealthy...

...His plot reads like the tales of R.F...

...And there is a more substantial report on The Spiritual Life...

...WHEN MY MOTHERbegan her family report, she did not make any of the familiar motions toward uncovering the honor in our heraldic crest...

...His style of writing is as rococo as my mother's is unadorned, as if, after a lifetime's experience with the schematics of mechanical engineering, his pen had drunk the ichor of Saul Steinberg's ink...

...These necessarily lie in the future, which we can see only dimly...

...No letters to "the other side...

...There is a section on the house in which he was reared, another on its food, and yet another on its music...

...It does not require professional charms to attract one's children, so the singers of family tales need not worry about "their style...

...Gradually, his story works its way toward 1885, the year his parents married in Ashton-under-Lyne, east of Manchester -- and a far cry from Eden...

...But what a lovely concession legend can be, for in the final analysis it matters less who begat whom than how happily they lived ever after...

...In my mother's memory, "he was a gentle man whose main excitement lay in politics and labor unions...