Category Archives: History

December 6, 2013 · 3:52 pm

Witch-Healers and Bonesetters

Returning home with my foot in a plaster cast–yes, the time arrived for further surgery, the other foot dropped, so to speak, but now I’m an old pro–all I could think was what if I injured that limb a couple of hundred years ago? What if I didn’t have Dr. Voellmicke, the finest doctor in the land, to set my metatarsal bones with metal screws? What would happen to my life? Would I be consigned to a rocker by the fire–or, worse, a harsh straight-backed colonial chair– an endless ball of wool and a pair of wooden sticks in my lap? Lots of mittens, but a pretty limited life for a formerly active woman.

Instant crone-ness. Not too happy.

I took another look though at medicine back before men got hold of “physick” in the nineteenth century to see if I was correct.

Women were the healers, you know, for thousands of years. Back to the Middle Ages, witch-healers produced incantations and charms that were broadly sanctioned, like prayer, adding in remedies and painkillers, digestive aids and anti-inflammatories.

People relied on these women’s preparations. Sanctioned, yes, until they weren’t. The witches who were lay healers were hunted down in the thousands and roasted or otherwise tortured and killed. These were the doctors of their day!

In America by the eighteenth century, the period that interests me because I’m researching the Revolution for a novel, the situation for healers was a little more respectful. (Yes, I know, Salem, but that was aberrant.) Sometimes a couple would go into medical practice together, the husband handling the surgery and the wife, the gynecology and midwifery, eveything else shared. Hang out a shingle, man and woman laboring in the same field (much as they might in an actual field). That’s a familiar idea, and I can tell you from the vantage of a writer-writer household that it can be the bomb.

In the 1700s, sometimes a young woman would go into the healing business on her own after apprenticeship with a husband/wife team. A good idea for a character in a novel, don’t you think? One real person, Harriet Hunt, one of our country’s first female doctors, got her start caring for a sick sister, then worked for a husband-wife practice, then treated patients on her own.

These independent women favored herbal medications, dietary changes and a fantastic bedside manner. As opposed to the book-learned doctors who received their certification in London in the 1800s — they laid on “heroic” measures. Huge doses of laxatives, for example. Calomel, which caused patients to bleed from the gums, salivate uncontrollably, and evacuate without restraint. Opium. Massive bleeding–George Washington died in 1799 of a throat infection after his three physicians drained his body of nine pints of blood in twenty-four hours. Or the now forgotten “tractors,” a pair of metal instruments, one gold, one silver, that were supposed to draw off the electrical fluid at the root of suffering. These guys killed their patients.

But could a woman or a man in those times fix a fracture? Yale University’s Rebecca Tannenbaum published a book on the subject of women and medicine in early New England titled The Healer’s Calling. She describes a 1760 case in which one Ebenezer Parkman got caught under a load of falling firewood. According to the injured man’s diary, the neighbors sent for Mrs. Parker, the local “doctoress” who was known as a bonesetter. She arrived with her apparatus for putting bones back in place, her splints and bandages. Bedside manner, check: a week later she returned to the Parkman household to see the patient and change his leg bandages.

Parents in New England were no doubt inordinately proud not only of “my son the doctor” but “my daughter the doctoress.”

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December 5, 2013 · 2:58 pm

The Spirit of Sinterklass

The Orphanmaster offers a glimpse into Christmas on Manhattan,1660s-style. Or, since the preponderance of colonists hail from the Netherlands, a glimpse into Sinterklass, the Dutch festival of St. Nicholas, which arrives on December 6^th. Because we’re talking about The Orphanmaster, everything in this particular holiday season is not all sugar cookies.

Here is a passage from the novel:

Sinterklass—Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas—came to New Amsterdam in early December, arriving with a ship that sailed all the way from Patria laden with toys and other gifts. Children laid out their shoes on the hearth the night of December 5^th. The next morning, they would find them filled with nuts, sweets and, for a fortunate few, gold coins.

Sinterklass himself rode slowly down the Broad Way and along Pearl Street on a stolid white mare, fairly gleaming in his long, draping robe, pearly beard and tall red bishop’s hat and mitre, brandishing a golden crosier with a curled top. He had apples for everyone, hard candy, frosted nuts.

But these treats were only a precursor to the grand feast celebrated the following day, December sixth, when wealthier colonists served roast goose and potatoes and kool slaw drenched in vinegar and melted butter. Sinterklass was the patron saint of children, doling out gifts to the well-behaved, though everyone got their fair share regardless of how naughty they had been.

Each child knew the story of the three little orphans during a terrible famine, how a malicious butcher lured them into his house, slaughtered and carved them up, then placed their remains in a barrel to cure, planning to sell them off as ham. Saint Nicholas resurrected the three boys from the barrel by his prayers, bringing the orphans magically back alive through the power of faith.

The spirit of the season ruled New Amsterdam between the Feast of Sinterklass on the sixth and Kerstydt, Christmas, on the twenty-fifth. Director general Peter Stuyvesant, who made clear his disgust with any drunken carousing during the holidays, yet made his Great House ablaze with candles and invited colonists in to dance in the entry hall.

But the mood this year was on the whole muted. Murder dampens the spirit…

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December 4, 2013 · 7:05 pm

The Spirit of Electricity

I finally saw “The Spirit of Electricity,” the costume worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at an outrageous fancy dress party she gave with her railroad tycoon husband that was one of the highlights of the Gilded Age in New York City. Textiles perish, and you don’t often get to see the famous gowns of the past. Mrs. Vanderbilt was always going to be a static image on a photo card, fetching but more than a little cracked.

Born Alva Erskine Smith, Mrs. Vanderbilt orchestrated the ball in 1883 to christen the new lodgings erected for the couple at 1 West 57^th Street. Theirs was the largest house ever built in Manhattan. In staging one of the most elaborate balls of the time, Alva assured the Vanderbilt family a perpetual place on Mrs. Astor’s 400, the list of New York’s social elite.

The New York Times covered the party perhaps less objectively than it would today. “The Vanderbilt ball has agitated New-York society more than any social event that has occurred here in many years,” read the article that ran the day after, on March 27th. “Since the announcement that it would take place…scarcely anything else has been talked about. It has been on every tongue and a fixed idea in every head. It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks, and has even, perhaps, interfered to some extent with that rigid observance of Lenten devotions which the Church exacts.”

In advance of the evening, quadrilles were relentlessly practiced, costumes were tailored, quantities of hair powder were laid in. The party was a showstopper. The Times reporter exclaimed about the “garden in the forest” where guests took their supper, and the phalanx of cops that kept gawkers at bay outside the mansion as carriages began to arrive after 10:30 or so. We have no pictures of the hordes with their noses pressed up against the windows, but the fashionables inside had their images captured for posterity by society photographers.

Each guest’s getup was wilder than the next.

Jesters, Romams, Mary Antoinette, the Four Seasons – it was a motley group.

I thought that the souvenir photos were all that remained of the event.

Then I visited Gilded New York, an exhibit that is currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York. The show includes the decorative arts, some paintings and some fashion. Yes, the end of the nineteenth century is big in Manhattan at the moment, with this enterprise and Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America at the New-York Historical Society. If you are a fan of ostentation, now is the time to put aside workaday worries and immerse yourself in a level of excess that is hard to fathom today.

The items on display were those that would have figured big in ball culture. Images of the grand Fifth Avenue houses set the stage, most long torn down, commissioned for the new industrial elites. By 1892, 27% of the nation’s millionaires lived in New York City, more than 1,100 of them.

Many of their mansions, like the Vanderbilt house, had a castle-like, European flavor. The structure where the 1883 ball took place was a model for the immense confection inhabited by the Delegate family in Savage Girl.

With their newfound wealth, the millionaires bought jewelry at Tiffany, gold, enamel, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. But they also went to Tiffany for other accessories, like this card case made of frog leather in 1900.

They had a taste for the over the top, like a decanter and cup fabricated of Murano Glass.

Long kid gloves were a necessity for a ball-going lady.

When they were feeling rustic they might show off a different style of ware, say the one decorated with an alligator, snake and lizard – this one belonged to Montana copper baron William Clark, one of the Fifth Avenue denizens.

All, it seemed, was glossy, elegant, costly. You can read the plush lifestyle in the portraiture, like the depiction of Helen Virginia Sands at age 19, shortly before her marriage to a successful Wall Street trader.

What I found most affecting, though, was the golden silk gown, “The Spirit of Electricity,” here in front of me, for real. It had emerged from the black-and-white photo card. Heavily embroidered in beaten gilt, it had silver tinsel filaments that lifted like small wings above the shoulders. Imported, of course, from Worth in Paris.

That’s a Herter Company jewelry cabinet in the background, for you Herter furniture fans. The dress survived because it was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum by Mrs. Vanderbilt’s daughter Countess Laszlo Szechenyi (neé Gladys Vanderbilt).

More affecting, even, the yellow silk stockings and pumps that Alva wore with the fancy gown.

This opulence of the distant past was real, something I could almost touch.

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December 3, 2013 · 8:23 pm

Making Book

Frank Stella’s splashy, enormous constructions line the walls of the lobby where my book publisher has its offices. Three collages, to be precise, of mixed media on a base of etched magnesium. Standing in front of one, you have to crane your neck to see the top of the piece. Standing there, I try to imagine creating something so large as the exploding Stella’s, so imposing. My mind wanders – outside is a dumpling truck with the snazzy legend: “Who’s Your Edamame?” It’s a New York morning, and art and food and commerce jostle for attention.

Books, books, time to think about books. Or one book: my book. Stella’s work depicts the inside of my head as I take the elevator to the fourth floor. We’re going to talk about how to introduce Savage Girl to the world. How can I describe the feeling? Heart-pounding excitement. Trepidation. All shades in between.

Savage Girl comes out March 6^th. And all the people at our meeting, editor, publicist, social media pro, literary agent – all of them are invested in making sure that my novel reaches a wide reading public.

So we talk about strategies. Bound gallleys, called ARCs in the business (for Advance Reading Copies) – who has received them so far, who gets them next? Print is no long king when it comes to reviewers – we want people to blab online about the book, on Goodreads, “where bookworms congregate,” as someone at the meeting says, on blogs, everywhere. We want the twitter-sphere to sing its praises. We want the people who read this blog – yes, you! – to get ahold of a copy and make their friend read it too. We want it to be consumed and consumed some more. Come up for air! Someone will say. It’s time to do the dishes. To go to the dentist! But I can’t possibly, you say, I am too immersed in the adventures of Hugo and Bronwyn.

Booksellers who received their early copy are liking Savage Girl, it seems. (Some Hollywood producers are too – shush, don’t jinx it by talking about it.) Authors have weighed in with comments that will appear on the back of the dust jacket. I like this one from Da Chen, the lyrical novelist:

The best historical fiction brings the reader back to a bygone era and the depth of humanity then. Jean Zimmerman does all that and more in her elegantly written new novel. I simply could not put down this this tale of sweet and painful love, of a savage girl and her encounter with modernity.

All I have to do between now and March is a hundred things. Suffice it to say I’ll be writing more here and elsewhere about the Gilded Age, sharing what I learned in the process of researching Savage Girl. Debutante rituals, fashion, feasting, feral children, nineteenth century medical practices, mansions that are architectural marvels… I hope that people who don’t know much about the period will find out something new, and that I’ll satisfy Gilded Age aficionados’ yearning for more on the subject.

Say you enter your favorite independent bookstore, where the management has carefully curated its collection. You inspect the table when you come in the door and find scads of titles that tantalize you, that beg to be picked up and perused. It may seem that they found their way there by some kind of magic. Not so. Behind every glossy jacket is a team of geniuses who have pondered and sleuthed and brainstormed a way to bring that wonderful volume to you. Like an explosion, like the mixed-media Stella on the wall, the planning all comes together to unveil a bound book.

Riding the subway uptown, I notice a man standing next to me with headphones. Dancing, and not so demurely, either. He is rocking and rolling. He is happy. So am I. I remember a couplet by one of my favorite poets, another Frank, Frank O’Hara, who made New York City the star of many of his poems in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

How funny you are today New York

like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime

Sometimes, when you’re in Manhattan, everything can seem so right. I get off the train at my stop and look from one side to the other, not sure which direction to head on the platform. A woman in black-framed glasses and long black hair touches me on the arm. I don’t even have to ask. She points with her finger and softly, kindly says, This way. This way.

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December 2, 2013 · 5:48 pm

Victorians Striking a Maternal Pose

The photos published in The Guardian today haunt me.

A series of Victorian babies, each one posed against a fabric-draped… mother. They’re from a new book called The Hidden Mother by Linda Fregni Nagler, which archives 1,002 photographs, daguerreotypes and tintypes, cartes de visite and cabinet cards.

As a reporter describes it, the requirements of primitive photography mandated extra care in posing children: “A 19th-century parent would have to dress the baby in a starchy gown, transport it and perhaps its siblings to the nearest photographer’s studio as early in the morning as possible, climb several flights of stairs to the skylit attic, arrange the family group against the studio backdrop, get everyone to remain completely still for 30 seconds or so, part with a large chunk of money, and then wait several days for the copies to be finished, before sending them round to family and friends as calling cards, or pasting them into albums.”

Sound difficult? With long exposure times, the only way to get the baby to hold still was for the mother to grip it in her hands.

Apparently photography was becoming an acceptable profession for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pictures captured by female photographers were no cheerier than those taken by men. Laughing messed with the shutter speed. A dose of opium often did the trick in keeping the subject still if dulled.

You have to wonder about the woman concealed beneath the textile. Was the mother shushing her baby, cooing to it, singing lullabyes? It must have been stuffy in her confinement, and she had no idea what the outcome would be. But she was fierce in her dedication to getting an image of her infant, a keepsake, the face and form of her beloved. Miraculously two dimensional. And always quiet and still.

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November 26, 2013 · 8:01 pm

Thank You for Reading

I am thankful.

This is a post about this blog.

At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken part in this ritual, I’ve sometimes had to squelch the urge to say something slightly comical or snarky. I don’t know why, perhaps because the whole thing seemed so self serious. Real thanks seem quieter, more internal, perhaps.

Now, with a few days before us until we’ll be stuffed with stuffing, with a clear head, I want to be serious.

I am grateful, deeply grateful, to those of you who read this blog.

When people ask what my site is all about, I say different things. It’s called Blog Cabin, and it’s about living in a circa 1800 home in a thoroughly modern world, and the time travel that allows for. Sometimes I call it a personal magazine. A diary. A cultural commentary. It’s about the past as a living, breathing entity. All about history and art and nature and literature… An author blog, as I have one novel about to come out and one just in the rearview.

What it really is, is playtime. Writing books, of course, is hard work. (If you’re doing it right.) Writing this blog has given me a chance to dabble in the things that absorb me in my book writing life, but on a more finite scale, with pleasure at the foremost – yes, history and art and nature and literature and… a pogo stick championship?

It was hot July and the contestants soared. You could taste the adrenaline.

Writing for you has given me a reason to go on adventures that you might not take, even if you had the chance. Or perhaps you would, like my search for an infant saguaro cactus at a botanical garden in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a beaming guide, but you couldn’t get there that day.

I’ve taken myself to a Victorian waltz class and tea.

To a Broadway disco-play, and to a euphoria-inducing Brahms recital. And to a dramatic dance performance en plein air, at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

I’ve plumbed the depths of the 20-something psyche, because I have a young adult close to my heart. Instagramming is their life.

They’re fascinating animals, as are husbands, and mine hitchhikes along with me from time to time.

As are dogs. Mine is inscrutable, but adds flavor to the mix.

And writers. I’ve loved writing about Gertrude Stein.

I’ve shared many favorite recipes, like the one for Marcella Hazan’s braised pork in milk.

Observed motorcycle pirates on the loose in NYC. With some history about pirates intertwined, of course.

A rowdy pig festival in upstate New York.

Explored a local farm on an enchanted evening, just as dusk fell.

Learned about the power of graffiti at the late, great 5Pointz. Got my leg cast tagged there, too.

And witnessed the unlikely beauties of slime mold in a pristine nature preserve.

It’s been my pleasure to gather these treasures and offer them to you, and your great generosity has been receiving them from me. So thank you. I’m looking forward to many more adventures.

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November 25, 2013 · 4:04 pm

Starring Gertrude Stein

“If you enjoy my work you understand it… if you don’t enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?

These were Gertrude Stein’s slightly sharp-elbowed words pronounced sixty-nine years ago to an interviewer at at New York’s Algonquin Hotel upon her arrival in America to record The Making of Americans and some of her other works. The lecture tour had bestseller wind beneath its sails, as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had been published to raves in 1933. The opera she created with Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts, was opening on Broadway. Suddenly Stein had become rich, a condition she’d never before known.

On October 24, 1934, Stein and Toklas arrived in New York aboard the S.S. Champlain. The crowds and the press went wild. One newspaper headline read: Gerty Gerty Stein is Back Home Home Back. Tickertape lights flashed across The New York Times building announced her arrival.

Stein had not been in the United States in nearly thirty years. Now, for seven months, with Toklas at her side, she crisscrossed America, speaking to campuses, arts groups and museum audiences about her writing and love of modern painting.

Early in 1935 she published Lectures in America, with a patriotic picture tucked inside the front cover.

Seventy appearances later, her celebrityhood held strong. An observer described the two travelers: “a large lady firmly dressed in a shirt-waist and skirt and jacket, and a smaller lady in something dark with a gray astrakhan toque…slightly suggestive of a battleship and a cruiser.” A headline in the New York Sun read: Miss Stein a Wow; Her Lectures a Sellout She’s Such a Hit.

Francis Picabia did her in oils in 1933. Stein was a star!

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November 23, 2013 · 4:19 pm

Portrait of a Lady Descending a Staircase

Visiting the exhibit of Gilded Age Portraits at the New-York Historical Society, I simply had to let myself go into a cloud of chiffon, of gleaming satins, of deep-pile velvet. And, on the masculine side, really good wool. I fortified myself beforehand, consuming a dish of pappardelle with duck ragu and chocolate shavings, the kind of meal they serve in museum restaurants in New York City. I felt that eating something rich and rare would prepare me for a glimpse into the lives of people whose dinners were usually revealed by servants lifting silver tops off of Sevres dinnerware.

At the entrance, outside the gallery itself, there happened to hang a portrait from quite a different time — a star of the Society’s collection, depicting Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, appointed governor of the province of New York and New Jersey by Queen Anne in 1702. In some ways this painting was a perfect New York introduction, as so many of these Gilded Age models were New Yorkers. Though in this case there is definitely a hint of the weird, since Lord Cornbury was known for strolling up Broadway wearing women’s clothes.

No, the people portrayed in the exhibit, people who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were aristocrats whose likenesses were proper, proud and a little mysterious. The little boy with the big name, Cortlandt Field Bishop, was painted by Bouguereau in 1873. A sky blue sash and a trumpet – did he choose the trumpet prop, I wonder – and his baby-fine hair make him seem the perfect lace-swaddled little lord fauntleroy. But he was descended from mighty Van Cortlandts and DePeysters.

The exhibit is based on portrait shows sponsored by the elites of that era, and so we find Martha Washington on the wall, although she seems almost out of place here as Lord Cornbury, with her country mouse, Revolutionary-era bonnet.

But Rembrandt Peale’s 1853 portrait was displayed at a famous 1895 portrait exhibition, presumably because “Lady Washington” had by then earned the status of domestic goddess.

When elite families wanted their Portrait of a Lady (the novel published first by James in 1880, and then extensively revised for a 1908 reprint) they demanded the tried and true. They wanted a painter to reliably render the jewels and flounces and creamed skin of a well-to-do woman.

The woman shown here in 1906 is Saint Louis socialite Nellie McCormick Flagg, painted by her husband James Montgomery Flagg. He described his conception of female beauty.

She should be tall, with wide shoulders; a face as symmetrical as a Greek vase; thick, wavy hair… long lashes; straight nose tipped up a bit at the end; her eyes so full of feminine allure that your heart skips a beat when you gaze into them.

Looks like he got her.

On display was an image of the infamous Ward McAllister. I’d always wondered what he looked like. He played God when he deemed himself the arbiter of social acceptability in Gilded Age Manhattan, creating the concept of the Four Hundred – the number of fashionables who could fit in Mrs. Caroline Astor’s ballroom. He was the master of exclusivity.

But despite his power, he was only a man with a drooping mustache who depended on his wife’s wealth for his social standing.

I think my favorite piece in the show was the picture of James Hazen Hyde, rendered in 1901 by Frenchman Theobald Chartran.

Soon after Hyde’s likeness was painted he removed himself from New York to Paris. Why? He was accused of mismanagement of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, a company his papa left to him. He looks like a guy who’s getting ready to drink your milkshake (as turn-of-the-century oil tycoon Daniel Plainview puts it in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood).

And meanwhile… not decades away, the traditional art of beautifully modelled heirs and heiresses was about to explode. I walked up a flight from the portraiture show at the Historical Society to an exhibit of works from the 1913 Armory show, which scandalized New Yorkers.

There were chunky Matisse nudes, symbolic Redons, shockingly sauvage Gauguins – on another planet from the Gilded Age canvases. The world was changing. Thomas Edison was shooting movies of men building Manhattan skyscrapers. The lobby for “woman suffrage” had racheted up and would soon make a revolution. There was no rigid dividing line between the Gilded Age sensibility and the modern; a collector might hang examples of both in his drawing room. John Singer Sargent, the sultan of sumptuousness, had caught Edith Minturn and I.N. Phelps Stokes in a thoroughly modern moment in 1893.

Still, it’s no wonder that the people who loved statuesque Nellie McCormick Flagg flung insults at Duchamp’s brazen Nude Descending a Staircase.

It was painted in 1912, a thousand years after Nellie’s 1906 portrait.

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November 19, 2013 · 8:24 pm

Another Fine Dress You’ve Got Me Into

I always wondered by what means people got up their getups for fancy dress balls during the Gilded Age. A fancy dress ball didn’t mean, as it sounds, elegant gowns for the ladies and stiff black tails for the gents. They were actually masquerades, opportunities for the well-heeled to escape their own trials and tribulations – there were, in fact, economic downturns and “reversals” throughout the last decades of the 1800s – with a lot of very pricey role-playing. And to prove just how boss they were.

Balls were splendid on their own. Edith Wharton described a typical scene.

Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.

For Savage Girl I looked into debutante balls, when 18-year-olds got their first taste of all the splendour that money could buy.

I first got interested in fancy-dress shenanigans, though, when I wrote about I.N. Phelps Stokes as a young man studying architecture in Paris in 1894.

Most of the people he knew attended the spectacular Bal des Quat’z’Arts, where artists and architects partied hearty in the name of everything aesthetic and bohemian. Revelers could expect gold and silver paint slapped on bare flesh along with displays like the last days of Babylon, complete with “blackamoors,” camels and nearly naked women. Excess reigned every year.

Stokes, I learned from his generally no-nonsense memoir, wrote home to his mother demanding she ship over the black velvet dress he’d worn for a costume ball at his home the previous winter.

What, I wondered, trying to imagine Stokes be-gowned in velvet, was this slightly stiff, shy young gentleman doing cross-dressing at a balls-out ball?

It was the thing to do, though. Fancy dress celebrations were prevalent in Victorian England and Canada as welll as Paris and New York. One Canadian scholar who has studied archival material puts it this way:

The sheer number of archival photographs of people in fancy dress, as it was known, attests to the popularity of this phenomenon, as well as its importance to those who took part. These portraits reveal a great deal about Victorian morals, values, taboos and tastes regarding clothing, bodies and social behaviour. While the basic appeal of fancy dress lay in its semblance of permissiveness and escapism, this sort of amusement was controlled by a complex set of moral restrictions.

Few costumes survive, but these people were photo-obsessed and made sure to document the fancy ball madness.

On the website of Montreal’s McCord Museum you can find startling images of partygoers dressed to the nines, such as Herbert Molson and his sister Naomi as “Vikings,” costumed in 1898 for the Chateau de Ramezay Ball in Montreal.

And Miss Bethune as “An Incroyable,” in Montreal, in 1881.

There was also the “Girl of the Period,” shot in 1870. The Victorians could really break loose on ice skates with a swinging braid and a cigarillo.

The image was spookily familiar, and I realized it was the embodiment of a Currier and Ives print I have hanging on my wall.

You can see some of these photos as a video.

At the end of the century,New York City could always put on the biggest fancy show. One of the most famous costume extravaganzas was the Bradley-Martin Ball, which took place at the Waldorf in February 1897. Cornelia Bradley-Martin vowed that it would be “the greatest party in the history of the city”.

She and her husband spent nearly nine-million dollars in current money hosting eight hundred of the city’s leading lights, Astors, Schermerhorns, Morgans and Posts included. Cornelia doesn’t look like a party animal, but the fact that she is smiling slightly suggests something to me. Most people still did not smile when posing for a portrait.

The ballroom was a replica of Versailles, wigmakers stood at the ready, and guests arrived as Mary, Queen of Scots, a Spanish toreador, Henry the IV. The hostess appeared with a gold, pearl and precious stone embroidered gown.

She might have managed to best the Vanderbilts’ legendary ball of 1883, thrown by Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alva to christen their new Fifth Avenue chateau. Alva sure looked good in doves.

The Museum of the City of New York has a extensive collection of photos of people posed with all seriousness at the ball. Including Mrs. Henry T. Sloane as, I think, a witch. Probably a good witch.

If you’d like to get up a Gilded Age costume there are resources at your disposal.

But, what are we to wear? asks a manual from 1896, accessible on line in its entirety. This is the first exclamation on receipt of an invitation to a Fancy Ball, and it is to assist in answering such questions that this volume has been compiled.

Several hundred costumes are described with every incidental novelty introduced of late, including Autumn, Bee, Gipsies, Carmen, Dominos, Esmerelda, Fire, etc.

Henry James wrote:

The rooms were filling up and the spectacle had become brilliant. The ball borrowed its splendor chiefly from the shining shoulders and profuse jewels of the women, and from the voluminous elegance of their dresses.

You’ll have to invite 1,000 or so people to really get the fancy ball experience. And make sure to call your wigmaker. Everything will be rosy.

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November 17, 2013 · 7:31 pm

The Things We Carry

What heirloom would you bring?

I’m reading about refugees and the things that they carry (remembering the Tim O’Brien tale The Things They Carried, about the impedimenta Vietnam soldiers take with them into battle.) BBC News Magazine profiles refugees during the Nazi menace of the 1940s, asking that question.

Isabelle Rozenbaumas’s mother escaped Nazi-overrun Lithuania, barely, with her carriage-driver father, and snuck out three class photographs from that time.

Julian Glowinski’s grandmother was deported from Poland to Siberia in 1940. Amazingly, she packed a sewing machine onto a cattle truck, and converted gowns into wedding dresses in her concentration camp in exchange for food.

Elke Duffy and her family fled East Prussia in January 1945. With her she took an amber necklace her mother had strung from amber she and her sister found on a Baltic beach.

Ian Carr-de Avelon’s wife’s grandfather was forced onto a train in Lwow (then Poland, now Ukraine) with his wife. Rather than cherished photos he took a camp stove. A camp stove? But of course ultimately it made perfect sense.

So what to take in a hurry, with the monsters breathing down your throat?

Photos. But today they mostly stay trapped in the computer. You can’t just lift them out of an album, with yellowed tape stains on their backs. So print some, fast.

Maybe I’d take this one, if I had to take one.

I’d have to take another. Mark it on the back with a Sharpie, April 1987. The engagement party.

If I could, I’d grab more. My parents. My extended family. Gil would take this burst of joy.

Or, he says, an oilcloth Santa he remembers making when he was six.

What object would I choose? Not a sewing machine. Not an iPhone. I looked around my house, and I thought about storage. At least three dusty cardboard boxes are marked Heirlooms, mostly from a family bow-windowed breakfront now residing in a home with more space. How do you choose among the loved objects of the past?

I might take my paternal grandmother’s copy of Ulysses, by James Joyce, its cover broken off, which she bravely purchased at a time when the novel was still censored in the U.S.

Or a scrap tatted by my ancestors, embroidered with carnations, the cloth handled by their fingers.

I could tuck that into my sock.

But if I was going to bring some bigger object – what?

How about a china plate. A cake plate, a foot across, strewn with pink roses and lilies of the family. Utilitarian as well as cherished.

Just a plate. But a plate belonging to my great-great-grandmother, a woman with the interesting name of Brown Coats. A deep souvenir of family, embodying the optimistic conviction that sometime in the future, there will be cake.

Will the plate make it through the mud, the rutted roads, the mountain passes? Despite its apparent fragility, I am certain it is strong.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, Culture, Fashion, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Photography, Publishing

November 16, 2013 · 10:09 pm

The Myths of Time

I love that building, said my friend John, a publisher with a reliably elegant sense of taste. It was designed by Louis Kahn. The Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, is housed in a sleek shell of matte steel on Chapel Street, the bustling main drag of the town. It was the architect’s last major commission, completed after his death in 1974. It’s an interestingly modern container for the almost exclusively older works of art within, lovely canvases of fetching ladies, bewigged lords, and big-eyed colonial children with their colonial pets. Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love, completed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1771, is a good example.

You’ll also find lots of animals, horses and dogs mainly. My old friend Betsy, who lives nearby, told me she has spent serious time sunk in an overstuffed leather chair in the high-ceilinged gallery admiring the zebra painting. A rather famous zebra painting, made by George Stubbs in 1763, when a zebra would have seemed about as exotic to Europeans as a unicorn.

We couldn’t help but be stopped just inside the glass doors as we were coming in by a much more modern work. What is that? I said to Wendy, puzzling it out. A minotaur? A centaur?

No, she corrected me, a centaur is a man on top, horse on the bottom. This was a horse on top. I liked it a lot, it was so rough and raw, like something you’d see in a dream.

Turned out that Foal, sculpted of painted bronze, was one of seven works by the British artist Nicola Hicks which had been installed as a special exhibit in the Yale Center. The mythic is central to her work. As part of the show Hicks selected pieces from the museum’s collection to serve as counterpoints to her own. The British tradition of animal imagery intertwined with the contemporary creatures in a dynamic, charged way.

The painting chosen for the display that I found most affecting was William Barraud’s A Couple of Foxhounds with a Terrier, the Property of Lord Henry Bentinck. Hicks has said she recognizes Baraud’s profound understanding of how the “social structure” unites the animals depicted. It’s about the independent dogness of dogs, despite the humans that may believe they own them lock stock and kibble.

One sculpture reflected on Aesop’s fable about a donkey found in the forest wearing a lion’s skin, which ultimately results in the donkey being exposed as a fool.

Nicks’ Who was I Kidding, created of plaster and straw, shows the poor donkey with the skin thrown across its back. It bears some resemblance to another Stubbs canvas in the museum, A Lion Attacking a Horse. The horse in that conception feels not shame but blind fury.

Later, over tea, I noticed that Wendy had bought a postcard at the gift shop. She had out her small, purse-size sketchbook and a pencil.

Wendy’s a musician, an actress, an astute psychotherapist. She was drawing the donkey, tracing the gentle lines of its hanging, shamed head. She had taken the experience with her, as we do all myths that have power.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Dogs, Fashion, History, Jean Zimmerman

November 11, 2013 · 4:42 pm

The Natural Loveliness of Brahms

“It’s relaxing but it’s also uplifting,” I heard a woman say to her companion after the music ended.

I’d just emerged from a chamber performance at the Brooklyn Public Library, that Art Deco masterpiece on Grand Army Plaza which dates back to 1941.

The sense I think I shared with the mass of humanity swirling around me in the lobby was that we felt a whole lot better coming out of the concert than we had going in. Music as magical curative.

Vista Lirica is a New York-based chamber ensemble with an environmental focus, which means they play fantastic compositions by nineteenth-century Romantic composers in which nature’s power and emotionality take center stage. Mankind is a small though crucial part of the spectacle of the whole natural universe.

I knew Beth Levin, the pianist, but this was the first time I’d seen her perform with her cohort in Vista Lirica – Frank Foerster (viola), Eric Grossman (violin/viola), Neil Rynston (clarinet) and Lawrence Zoernig (cello).

Odd things happened on the way to hear this beautiful music. The Brooklyn Bridge, under repair for at last another year to the tune of five hundred million dollars, wore a diaper to protect motorists from tools and other falling debris. You’d think it was a baby, but it was born in 1883.

Then, as the concert started at the library, there was a commotion in the back of the house. “Tell them to stop playing!” someone shouted. No one knew what to do. It was midway through Mozart’s Trio in E flat major. Turned out later there was a group of developmentally disabled adults in the audience. The musicians continued playing. All was well.

And then there was the piano tuner. A man was seated just down the way from me in the front row, with a pink bush of a beard and gnarly bare feet.

One side of his baggy tee read “Quiet Please.” The reverse: “Piano Tuning in Process.” He looked as if he wasn’t unfamiliar with a cardboard box for a domicile. He caused some alarm at intermission by jumping up on stage, removing the top of the instrument to get at the action and attacking the job with a furious intensity, all the while muttering under his breath.

The concert spanned four centuries. There was the Mozart trio. A Bernstein sonata. “La Danza Implacable” by Jorge Lopez Marin. And lastly, what I found irresistable, Johannes Brahms’ Quartet in g-minor for piano, violin, viola and cello. Clara Schumann was the pianist for the very first performance of the piece, back in 1861.

Musicians play music with their faces. Beth played vigorously, rapturously, looking somewhat stricken for most of the Brahms. The violinist appeared to be grappling with the secrets of the universe. The cello player was soulful, the viola player looked as if he had finally accepted his fate.

I might have been overinterpreting, remembering my cello fail in middle school, when I mounted the stage to find I had absolutely no idea what notes to play.

Or maybe I myself felt stricken by the romanticism of the Brahms. Owing to the natural bent of Vista Lirica, I felt myself muse on environmental themes as they played. Storms. Falling snow. Green hillsides.

What was that movie about the chamber ensemble? My mind drifted. A Late Quartet. The one with Catherine Keenan, Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman. I am fascinated by the way musicians signal each other with a slight tip of the chin or significant glance when they are ready to go into the next bit. Movement? Perhaps that’s the word for it. Anyway, I wish I could communicate so deftly.

The Brahms Andante con moto in particular held me in its sway.

Shadows, spider webs, a rainbow.

Later, I asked Beth about the Andante, what makes it so special. “Well, the Andante is usually moving,” she said, “often minor key. The composer goes so deep. But in this one the middle section gets jubilant, like a dance.”

Still attired in the fuschia top she wore on stage, the perfect garment for a Romantic pianist, Beth was surprisingly shy-seeming after her thunderous stage presence. She’s somewhat reserved, she told me, both before and after she performs. Was it hard to go on playing after that noisy interruption today? “Once I played and hailstorms came down on the roof – it was Schumann! Keep playing, I always heard, so I did.” And what about that colorful piano tuner? “Oh, that’s Ben,” she said, adding that she’d been startled when she first met him and he tossed his sandals aside before getting down to business. “When Ben shows up at a concert,” she told me, “I know he’s going to want to tune my piano.”

A concert soloist when she is not with the chamber group, Beth spent two weeks recently in Germany – two recitals and sightseeing. She payed homage to Bach at his grave in Leipzig.

And the music that was mesmerizing me with its spider webs and rainbows, how did that happen, I wondered. Approaching the Brahms, she said, she and the other performers “talked about nature, not in rehearsals but afterward, when we were sitting around.” She smiled. “Brahms was probably walking through the forest half the time when he was writing.”

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Filed under Culture, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Nature

November 9, 2013 · 5:20 pm

Squeezing the Juice From the Season

There is nothing like a Saturday morning in November to make you stand up straight and take clear-eyed notice of the world. Of the crisp air and fresh colors, the sweetly rotten smell of leaves being pulverized underfoot.

Both Gil and I could easily stay home and work all day, bent over our books, leaning into our computer screens. But we were drawn out into the Saturday sunshine. drive, he sd, as poet Robert Creeley wrote.

We remarked as we spun along the little roads on every jolt of red.

Some unexpected graffiti on the side of a concrete shed oddly did the opposite of marring the rural scene. It underscored fall’s beauty with its blast of a message.

Down the road from the Cabin we passed an arch of shrubbery above a stone gate that opens into a mysterious vacant pasture. I never get tired of looking at it.

And I never get tired of visiting Thompson’s Cider Mill, where Geoff Thompson combines up to twenty varieties of fresh apples into a juice that is pure nectar. He makes his cider every weekend, and every weekend it is a different brew.

When you buy apples at Thompson’s, you get to see each one’s heritage marked above the bin. The history of apples is vast and rich, and here you can taste history–when you bite into an heirloom Newtown Pippin, say, first grown from a chance seedling in the mid-18th century.

Out of the wealth of choices we’ve taken most of all to the Jonathans, which are grown right in this orchard and are sweet and tart, firm and compact.

If you come on a Saturday morning you can watch the thoroughly up-to-date press do its business, mashing the fruit into not only a liquid but also a paste that will later be tossed to the pigs at a local organic farm. Keats talked in Ode to Autumn about how by a cider-press, with patient look,/Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. This is where those oozings happen. Geoff handed around small plastic cups to catch some of the new cider as it ran out of the press.

We sipped. “Perfect blend,” said Geoff. I agreed. “Wish I could figure out how to do that every time,” he said with pleasant self deprecation. This mill does make the best cider in the land, and that’s not opinion but fact. They also have on hand my namesake fruit.

Next stop, the Hastings Farmer’s Market, overlooking the Hudson River. A produce stand at the end of the season has its own distinctive merits. No sweet, fuzzy peaches, perhaps, but turban squashes and sugar pumpkins and the dark leafy kale your doctor wants you to eat more of. The singer Milton was performing his song In the City when we arrived.

I like the song. It does capture the effervescence of New York. Though it seemed less relevant today with the trees aflame in the cool, cool, quiet air.

The woman who worked the booth for Cowberry Crossing was off on a coffee run, so Reese and I together worked out the numbers for a pair of pork chops and a bag of chicken feet. Inaccurately, it turned out when mom returned.

He was a great little salesman anyway. I am devoted to using chicken feet to make stock – you need a soup foul first, then throw in the feet in addition – and I used to have a chicken farm down the road where I could buy them in five-pound freezer bags. I’ve gotten a little squeamish about how the toes resemble an old lady monster’s, with manicure-worthy nails. But they make such a velvety broth, it’s worth the psychic discomfort.

Over at Do Re Me Farms, they still had some green beans, zucchini and cranberry beans.

It was wicked cold behind the cash register, and everyone was shivering.

Mushrooms, a variety, were my choice. To add to a risotto or simply.saute and devour.

There was less produce than usual, more maple syrup, cider, pickles. Here they make a big thing out of offering pickles on sticks to children, like sour lollipops.

Painted Goat Farm is an artisan cheese producer located upstate in Garrattsville (now that is a true New York name). They offer goat cheese both fresh and aged, along with goat meat and what they call goat confections. They were out of the aged and I didn’t care for any goat confections, so I took home the fresh with garlic and chives.

The farm’s herd now stands at 85 – the females are “drying up” at the moment, I was told, and will give birth in February, when the babies will drive the count up to over 100. I’d like to pay them a visit then. If I had any kind of farm it’d be a goat farm. I love goats, both how satanic their eyes look, and their pure and total determination.

Natasha and Pierre on Broadway

Well, yes, only in New York, sure. An electro-pop opera in a night club. In a tent. On a parking lot. In Times Square.

On line outside Kazino supper club, on a Wednesday night, we wait in the cold.

There are many sweet and stylish young couples.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 takes place two centuries before us. A young theatrical wizard named Dave Malloy concocted the musical production. Will there be relevance in the enterprise?

A handsome man in a Tolstoy tee shirt waits for admission.

The company’s names appear on sheet metal inside the entryway. You know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Inside, cocktail tables. Grey Goose available at $240 the bottle. Hot pierogies materialize, and short glasses of pink borscht that look like votive candles.

A big babe of a man called Royce strides around acting the hostess. Cossack hat, fur slouched over the shoulders, in a leopard skirt. Welcoming everyone.

There are voluptuous wine-colored curtains all around, hung with “vintage” paintings, including one of Napolean.

The actors prance onto the floor, belting it out. Suddenly, the show has begun.

There’s a leading lady straight out of Julliard, who really knows how to warble.

Tolstoy would say the actresses are “nude” because they have bare shoulders. They range the room along with the dashing young actors; the scene changes from the opera to a drawing room to a gypsy lair. Lovers Natasha and Andre are parted when he goes off to war, Natasha is seduced by Anatole, then finally forgiven by Pierre. A simple plot delivered with much gnashing of teeth, tears and sexy dancing. The audience is given egg-shaped shakers to accompany the musicians.

The finale has Pierre singing a haunting tune to the Great Comet of 1812, represented by one of the night club’s old-fashioned chandeliers. It’s goose-bump-making, breathtaking.

Did I mention the play’s based on War and Peace?

Only in New York. And Moscow.

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Filed under Culture, Dance, Fashion, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Writers

November 5, 2013 · 3:12 pm

Sullivan Street Curative

I woke with a touch of labyrinthitis.There are scientific explanations for this condition, all pertaining to the inner ear and “unilateral vestibular dysfunction.” But what it amounts to, what you feel, is dizziness. Vertigo in the extreme. I sat on my living room couch and watched the room whirl around me like a merry-go-round. Not fun.

When the show had subsided and after I conked out for a while, it was time for lunch. I steeled myself to go downstairs to the kitchen. An omelette. I gripped the counter. I was doing it. And the room stood relatively still.

There is not much in the way of medicine to treat labyrinthitis. You can take the pills more often prescribed for seasickness. I don’t have those in the house. I ate my food and watched the walls throb.

What I did have was bread from Sullivan Street Bakery. We go to the establishment on 47^th Street (not, improbably, Sullivan Street) in Hell’s Kitchen to stock up on baked goods whenever we’re in Manhattan. We often bring back what’s called a filone, which the bakery describes thus:

Large, tube-shaped loaf, baked dark to very dark, generously coated with wheat bran; open, irregular crumb structure and waxy-looking webbing. Mature fermentation; because of the unique baking method, flavor is nutty and sour with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The bakery is famous for founder Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, which you can attempt to make at home if you’re not near enough to do a drive-by like we do.

The bread is superior to any other – chewy, crusty, earthy, flavorful. I always think it’s the kind I’d want in my larder if the Barbarians were at the door. Why would we need bread at that time? For nourishment!

I buttered a slice of toasted filone and took bites in between spearing garlicky mushrooms. The room threatened to spin. But it hove to a stop when I swallowed.

Maybe I’ll sit very still and fill my mouth with bread all day.

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Filed under Cooking, Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Writers

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