"Pride goeth before a fall" is a contraction of the biblical proverb "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." Last Thursday, after years of professing that automobile dependency is the root of all evil in this country and that walking is the cure for all the ills of man and mankind, I walked right into a utility panel buried in a manmade hillside in Riverfront Park. So the proverb has been on my mind.
I was on my way to meet with some friends from Lubavitch of Arkansas. Lubavitchers, easily identified around here as "the guys in the black hats," are a sect of the Chassidic movement, which originated in Poland in the 18th century among Jews who cleaved to the teachings of a charismatic rabbi; the name of the particular Chassidic sect (Lubavitcher or Bialystoker, for example) comes from the name of the founding rabbi's village. It's as if followers of Jesus of Nazareth were all called Nazarenes.
What I like about the Lubavitchers is that they show up. And speak Yiddish. During the long infirmity of my husband, whose first language was the Yiddish of his immigrant parents, the junior Lubavitcher rabbi would call and ask to come over. Granted permission to visit, he always brought two or three children, who would play with the vintage toys that my husband's first wife had the foresight to preserve.
Certain mass-produced toys have the power to stir delight and draw out nostalgia from people of a certain age across diverse backgrounds; Fisher-Price Little People, I have learned, not only penetrated the world of Brooklyn Chassidim; they were affectionately called "menschies."
My Lubavitcher friends saw to it that I got home last Thursday with my busted ankle. My longtime housekeeper came Friday and fixed up the place. On Saturday, another friend brought me a brace and retrieved my phone and laptop chargers from my office, where I keep them in order to minimize screen time at home.
On Sunday, some good neighbors delivered my produce order--radishes, turnips, sprouts. I pulled a brisket out of the freezer. It came from McCrae. I didn't smoke it. Horror of horrors, I boiled it, with minimal seasoning (garlic and salt). I was going to call this preparation "Yankee barbecue" until I looked it up and discovered that until recently it was the preferred method of cooking brisket in New Orleans. It yields a rich, fatty broth, and my hope is that the broth is full of nutrients from the cow's connective tissue that will go to repair my own.
It's been a clarifying injury. I spent six years alongside someone with limited mobility, but this is my first time to experience it firsthand. A kind of Zen comes from the necessity, in the first few days of pain, of plotting out every motion, every trip across the room. And in the enforced rest, I finished reading the "Life is a Song: An Autobiography of John Gould Fletcher."
It took Fletcher weeks to get from Switzerland back to England, along with many other Britons stranded on the continent after the outbreak of World War I. To Fletcher's credit, he considered joining the British forces to fight the enemy. Still an American citizen, he did not feel that he could remain in England and remain neutral. Daisy Arbuthnot, still technically his mistress, begged him not to join the fight, and he wound up returning to America, alone, in November 1914, his first trip back since going abroad in 1908.
I lost track of the number of times Fletcher crossed the Atlantic over the next two decades. He married Arbuthnot in 1916. Fletcher had a long friendship and working relationship with poet Amy Lowell, and while he gives us a wonderful sense of her character (strong, lively, persistent) and that of her companion Ada Russell (intelligent, devoted), we get very little sense, by contrast, of the character of Daisy Arbuthnot.
I don't think a single conversation is reproduced after the initial affair, only her nagging wish to remain in England while Fletcher was drawn back to America. (That and her requirement of financial support, which he met, with difficulty, until their final separation in 1933, and possibly until their actual divorce, just before he and Charlie May Simon married in 1936.)
For those who like to believe we live in a small world, the most interesting part of Fletcher's story is who he knew. In the early years in London, it was Ezra Pound (quite funny before mental illness took hold) and his crew of modernist poets, and Amy Lowell, who supplied a great many connections in London and after her permanent return to Boston.
In Chicago, while consulting with Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine, Fletcher got to take a look at an unpublished draft, submitted by T.S. Eliot, of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which he advised Monroe to publish.
Later comes his association with the Fugitive poets/Southern Agrarians (unsurprising for someone with severe reservations about "the noiseless and complete revolution in all American habits which had been so successfully engineered by Henry Ford"), and finally, after his return to Arkansas, come his most interesting associations of all: with folklorist Vance Randolph, painter Adrian Brewer, writers Eleanor Risley, Charles Davis, and Charles J. Finger, archaeologist Sam Dellinger, and Charlie May Simon herself.