Laccabawn to New York

The letter transcribed and reproduced here is part of a small cache of correspondence exchanged between Margaret Nagle or Neagle, a young Irish immigrant in New York City, and her parents, of whom we know only the name of her father, John. The letters cover the period from August 1866 to March 1870.

Margaret, who periodically sent money home, apparently worked as a domestic servant, and reported -- truthfully or not -- that she had no difficulty finding employment. In the other letters there are indications that neither she nor her parents were able to read or write (Margaret does once mention that she is attempting to learn), so the entire correspondence would have been conducted by means of proxies. Although at one point she gives an address on West 20th Street, she generally requested that letters be sent to her care of the general post office in New York City.

At least two of Margaret's siblings remained at home in Ireland: a brother, also named John, and her younger sister Mary. Her father appears to have been a tenant farmer or laborer. There are several places in Ireland called Laccabawn or Lackabane, but this one appears to have been in the parish of Donoughmore in County Cork.

In the transcription below I have divided the text into paragraphs for easier reading, added periods and capitalization, and excised one repeated word. The embossed stationery, clear penmanship, and absence of spelling and grammar errors in this letter suggest that the person who actually wrote it down was reasonably well-educated. Brackets indicate a word that can't be read with complete certainty.

Laccabawn Sept 17th 1867

My Dear Daughter

We received your most welcome letter on the 4th of this month which gave us the greatest pleasure to hear that you were enjoying good health as we are ourselves at present thanks be to god. We do feel very thankful to you for the present you have sent to us which was £2 and was very much wanted. Last winter was so very severe that there was neither hire or wages for man or woman provisions of every description went up to famine prices which robbed the people especially the labouring class.

I do kindly thank you for the nice ribbon you sent me which will bring you to my memory every time I shall look at it during my life time. Your brother Johnny kissed it several times when he saw it. Johnny is in service with his fathers consent at low wages. Our potatoes are blighted this year again. You did well not to trouble yourself by enquiring about friends. Your uncle and family are well but does not care about any one else nor never asked about you since you left home. They consider their own business plenty and no more.

I would send you some presents of [flannel] or stockings if I got any sure person to take them to you. I would like that you would give us your address more correct than usual. Johnny is a fine big boy of his age and Mary feels angry as you did not say anything about herself in your letter. I do feel very proud to hear that you are sensible and attentive as usual. Mind yourself as you always did and you will have your father and mothers blessing. Mary says she hopes to see you yet. She says she is as big as you now. Your aunts two daughters are gone to America. Their passage was paid by their brother.

Write to us at any rate very soon. No more at present from your parents brother and sister.

Direct as usual.




Later letters discuss plans to have Margaret's brother John join her in New York. There are indications that her parents might have been considering emigrating as well.

Cortázar: Los relatos

I revisit many of the stories in these three volumes quite regularly, particularly the first, but lately I've been realizing that I haven't read some of the individual tales in maybe, well, thirty years or so, so I've decided to start with the first volume and read through the whole set, although given my unpredictable reading habits it may be months or even years before I actually complete the project.


Alianza Editorial in Madrid first published these paperbacks in the series "El libro de bolsillo" in 1976. The contents, representing more or less all of Cortázar's published short fiction up to that time (not counting the special case of Cronopios and Famas), were arranged not in chronological order but on the basis of affinities detected by the author, who sorted the stories into categories denominated "rites, games, and passages." The disadvantage of this arrangement, of course, is that it obscured the temporal sequence of their publication and their arrangement as they had originally appeared in volumes like Bestiario, Las armas secretas, and Final del juego, but the author's wishes in this sort of thing ought not to be lightly dismissed. A fourth volume containing later stories and subtitled Ahí y ahora ("There and Now") was published several years after these three, perhaps posthumously, but I've never owned a copy.


The first volume, which I've just finished re-reading in its entirety, has always been my sentimental favorite, in part because I bought it several years before the others (which it why the cover is a bit different), and in part simply because the stories it gathers are so extraordinary. It contains several pieces that have long been well known to English-language readers of Cortázar, including "La noche boca arriba ("The Night Face Up"), "Bestiario" ("Bestiary"), "Carta a una señorita in París" ("Letter to a Young Lady in Paris"), "El ídolo de las Cícladas" ("The Idol of the Cyclades"), and "Final del juego" ("End of the Game"), a few that have appeared in volumes of translations that have since gone out-of-print, and at least a handful of important stories that as far as I can tell have never been translated into English, including "Omnibus," "Los venenos" ("The Poisons"), and "Relato con un fondo de agua" ("Story with a Background of Water"). Reading them together, one detects common themes: childhood, family, illness and death, the mysterious interchangeability of individual identities, the ways in which we offer ourselves and others explanations that seem plausible on their face but mask deeper passions we can't afford to reveal. With the sole exception of the forgettable "El viaje" ("The Trip"), the level of artistry is high but at the same time apparently effortless, whether in the hilarious "Cartas de una señorita en París," the poignant but venomous "Los venenos," the droll social comedy of "Los buenos servicios" ("At Your Service"), or the nouveau roman in miniature of "Manuscrito hallado en un bolsillo" ("Manuscript Found in a Pocket").

My copy of the first volume is approaching the end of its run. The pages have darkened a bit but more ominously the binding, which I've already reinforced once with tape, is starting to go. There were always a distressing number of typos in any case (whether these were carried over from earlier collections I don't know). Not surprisingly, Cortázar's stories have been collected and re-collected several times; there's an old one-volume hardcover edition comprising his early stories that I have my eye out for, and a more recent multi-volume Cuentos completos from Punto de lectura. Still, I imagine I'll be picking this one up now and then for years to come, spending a few moments with a favorite story from the hand of the master.

An Open Letter to Gustavo Ribeiro

Dear Gustavo,

You’ve asked for a few thoughts on how Cortázar is seen in the US. I’m not an academic and I haven’t made any systematic effort to keep up with the latest scholarship in English, so what follows will be largely based on my personal perspective as a reader and as a bookseller (in one form or another) for the last thirty-five years.

I first encountered Cortázar in translation, in anthologies of Latin American literature, of which there were several good ones on the market in the 1970s. I don’t remember for sure, but the first story I read may have been “Axolotl” or “Carta a una señorita en París,” either of which would have been sufficient to hook me for life. I probably then picked up a second-hand copy of the paperback edition of Blow-Up and Other Stories, Paul Blackburn’s compilation assembled from portions of Final del juego, Bestiario, and Las armas secretas, before moving on to the novels. As my Spanish improved I was able to revisit the works in their original form and also familiarize myself with books that were as yet untranslated.


The first published book-length edition of Cortázar into English was Elaine Kerrigan’s translation of Los premios, (The Winners in English) in 1965, a translation which I don’t think the author liked particularly. Since that time he has been generally fortunate in his English-language translators; he worked closely with both Blackburn and Gregory Rabassa, and was very pleased with the results. Until the publication of Blow-Up (originally as The End of the Game and Other Stories) in 1967, Cortázar was known in the English-speaking world only as a novelist, which of course is a reversal of how his career had actually developed.

By and large, US publishers kept up with the output of Cortázar’s major works during the latter stages of his life. His books were issued in hardcover by large but prestigious houses, and several appeared in “mass-market” editions in paperback, notably in Avon’s Bard imprint. Since his death, however, the situation has been mixed. Hopscotch (Rayuela) and Blow-Up have been more or less continually available, no doubt in part due to course adoptions in universities, but Libro de Manuel (translated here as A Manual for Manual) and several other important works have been allowed to go out of print. More importantly, editions of previously untranslated or posthumous works have been slow to come. The large commercial publishers, even such respected houses as Knopf and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, seem to have no interest in Cortázar, but fortunately the slack has been taken up to some extent by smaller independent publishers like New Directions, City Lights, and Archipelago Books.


Perhaps the greatest omission in the publication of Cortázar’s work here is in the short fiction. Paul Blackburn’s selection was made in conjunction with his wife, Sara, then an editor at Pantheon, and with Cortázar himself, and presumably represented an effort at a “best selected stories” drawn from what had been published in Spanish up to that time. The selection was a good one, but ironically it has led to a situation in which many of Cortázar’s best stories from the first twenty years or so of his publishing career, ones that were not initially selected for Blow-Up, have never been translated at all and so are entirely unknown to readers who can not read him in the original. Later collections of Cortázar stories in English (for instance, All Fires the Fire) were generally organized so as to match the contents of the corresponding volumes in Spanish; whatever their merit, early stories like “Cartas de Mamá,” “Después del almuerzo,” and “Los venenos” were left to fall by the wayside. This has, I think, somewhat skewed our understanding of Cortázar’s canon, giving more emphasis to work set in Europe than to work set in Buenos Aires, and therefore giving us an image of Cortázar the writer that is less “Latin American” than it might be otherwise.

The US marketplace has long been notoriously unfriendly to translations, and in some ways we are the most provincial of countries as far as our choice of reading matter. The so-called “boom” in the Latin American novel was matched by a corresponding expansion in translations for the US market during the 1970s and early 1980s, but that era is now long past. While there are exceptions, (García Márquez, whose settings perhaps offer more of the “exoticism” that our readers expect from a Latin American writer, and Vargas Llosa, with his Nobel Prize and long relationship with a single US publisher), the overall picture remains fairly bleak. There are important book-length critical studies on Cortázar (some of them by now quite dated) and as I mentioned a trickle of new editions appear from small but valiant publishers, but no major concerted effort is being made to keep Cortázar’s works in print, in comprehensive editions, and to promote his work to a broad readership.

Having said that, it nevertheless can’t be said that Cortázar lacks a following in the US. His books are taught with regularity in university courses and are the subject of frequent scholarly articles, dissertations, and blog posts. Moreover, we have a growing Spanish-speaking population of readers who are not dependent on translations; there is even a Penguin paperback, La autopista del sur y otros cuentos, aimed at Spanish-speaking audiences. His novels and stories are well known to fellow writers, to Latin American specialists, to critics and college students of literature, and many others. Nevertheless, Cortázar, as erudite a man as he was, did not write for the benefit of academics and specialists alone, and the full disruptive effect of a book like Rayuela deserves to be felt, as I think it has been in Latin America and to some extent in Europe, by a broader audience. A comprehensive edition of the stories is overdue, as is a biography, though in the case of the latter it is probably better for the Spanish-speaking world to take the lead.

The best news, however, is that the work remains. Even those editions that have gone out of print are obtainable second-hand or in libraries for those who are willing to take the time to seek them out. The translations they will find are generally high-quality, and although there are gaps enough of Cortázar’s work remains available to demonstrate his importance and provide delight and stimulus for the reader, which I think was the author’s intent.

All the best,

Chris

Postscript: for a Portuguese-language translation of this article see Blog Morellianas.

Ilion

For most of this summer I've been devoting this space to looking at images and inscriptions from some century-old postcards, trying to understand something of what such humble artifacts might have to say about the people who made and sent them and the world in which they lived. This faded "real photo postcard" and its dapper subject will finish the theme for now, not because it's exhausted but because I want to sail other waters as well.

The man, perhaps a prosperous farmer, is wearing a straw boater, light-colored pants and vest, a white shirt, and a dark tie with some sort of clasp or pin; beneath his folded sleeves you can also make out part of the chain of a pocket watch. The elaborate decorated border -- perhaps a common stock device, although I haven't come across another example so far -- echoes the vegetation behind the figure, which appears to be pea vines. Above the photo there's a space that was obviously intended for an inscription, but it's been left blank. There are some faint oval blisters in the paper that are apparently the result of flaws in the developing process.

From the markings on the back, which was never addressed, it can be determined that the variety of Azo photographic paper on which the card was printed was manufactured between 1907 and 1918. The previous owner thought that the location of the photo might have been the small upstate New York town with the improbable Homeric name of Ilion, which will do for a working hypothesis. In any case the man's identity is probably unrecoverable, unless by chance another likeness survives somewhere in a photo album, labelled "Uncle Theo, 1912" or something like that. Somewhere, no doubt, his name, perhaps otherwise forgotten, can be found inscribed in the ink of census records or an old family Bible, but nothing now connects it to this fading chemical memory of a man who once posed in his garden on a summer afternoon, wearing his finest suit of clothes.

We live in a world that is saturated with pictures, moving and still, the vast majority of which are created to serve commercial or political purposes or just to provide an instant's ephemeral amusement. We've become so desensitized to the torrent that we forget the alchemy that lies behind every photographic image, as well as the utter strangeness of being able to view, in meticulous detail, the visible trace of where one man stood for a second a century ago, squinting a bit in the sunlight, no doubt little reflecting on the possibility that his monochrome ghost would linger long after him and reappear to the eyes of a distant stranger decades after his bones had been laid to rest.

New pastures

These photographic postcards, issued by the Rotograph Co., were sent as New Year's greetings. The sender is unidentified, but the inscriptions suggest he or she may have lived in West Warren, Massachusetts; the recipient, a J. Chester Forté, could be the person of that name, aged 27, who lived in nearby Worcester in 1910 and was employed as a salesman in a grocery store. Three are dated 1912; the fourth date of 1919 may be a mistake, since all four appear to be written with the same ink and the Rotograph Co. was long gone by 1919. They aren't postmarked, so if they were mailed they must have been enclosed in an envelope.


Unlike most commercial postcards of the era, these were not produced by lithography but are actual continuous-tone photographic prints, in this case on bromide paper. The so-called "real photo postcard" technology, marketed by Kodak's George Eastman, lent itself both to amateur production, in some cases of single unique prints, and to larger-scale manufacture (though probably not often on the scale of the mass-produced lithographic cards). Rotograph was a prolific company, producing tens of thousands of different images in the few years it was in operation, but these "O series" cards, printed in Britain, seem to be relatively uncommon and probably cost a bit more at the time. The designs have a three-part composition: an outer faux-wood frame, an intricately textured embossed "mat" (more cream-colored than these reddish scans indicate) and the high-gloss oval photograph itself.


There are several excellent collections of real photo postcards. The ones I've seen include Luc Sante's Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 and Rosamond B. Vaule's As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930, both of which have extended and thoughtful essays on the history and interpretation of the genre, as well as Letitia Wolff and Todd Alden's Real Photo Postcards: Unbelievable Images from the Collection of Harvey Tulcensky. For those with a strong stomach, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America will dispel any lingering notions about the innocence of the era.


And now for a bit of a digression (or more than one): below are two cards, not from the same sender, that were obviously made by the same maker at around the same time as the examples above, but instead of the Rotograph name they bear an emblem of a winged circle enclosing the letters "SL & Co.," the mark of Samuel Langdorf & Co. of New York City (though again, they were printed in England). Although it may be hard to make out in these scans, the images have been delicately -- and quite skillfully -- treated with washes of added color, and could easily be taken for true color photographs.



This particular pair, which are neither stamped nor postmarked, bear the handwritten names of Prof. Theodore Perkins and Mrs. Mary Perkins of Chalfont, Pennsylvania on the reverse. If my identification is correct, this Theodore E. Perkins was a noted composer of hymns, a co-founder of the music publishing company Brown & Perkins, and the author of such works as Physiological Voice Culture and its Application to the Singing and Speaking Voice. One of his collaborators -- they composed a cantata together -- was the blind poet, prolific composer, and urban missionary Fanny Crosby. Coincidentally, Crosby was a supporter of Jerry McAuley's Water Street Mission in Manhattan, about which I have written in the past. It seems you can't swing a stick in the field of 19th- and early 20th-century American culture without hitting an evangelist.

Mr. Greenawalt's world

This is a moderately interesting postcard view of the City Hall Park in lower Manhattan area looking with the East River and Brooklyn in the background; the long low building pointing across the river just left of center is, I'm told, the terminal for the cable cars of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Railway. Although it may not be immediately evident in the above scan, the card has been extensively decorated with glitter, which is easiest to spot on the horizontal lines of the tall building in the center of the frame. It was manufactured by the Rotograph Co. in Germany and bears the Sol Art Prints trademark. The stamp on the reverse has been cancelled but there's no date; 1906-1908 would be a good guess.


As interesting as the view itself, perhaps, is the brief message on the front and the person to whom it was addressed. The recipient was Mr. W. G. Greenawalt of 1428 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and the inscription ("These ought to sell well – With Phila views. J. R. M.") would have been of particular interest to him, for Greenawalt, a pharmacist, was the author of several articles on postcards written from the retailer's point-of-view, articles that appeared in now obscure -- but surprisingly lively -- trade journals. Here, for example, are the beginning paragraphs of an article on "Making Capital of the Post-card Craze," which appeared in May 1908 in the Bulletin of Pharmacy:

Having traveled abroad, and knowing the popularity of picture post-cards, as most foreigners call them, I watched with eager interest their advent into America. I felt that they would become just as popular here, if not more so.

When they were first coming into vogue, I was located up on Broadway in New York. I was one of the pioneers in the post-card business, making some of the first window displays to be seen on Broadway.

Knowing that human nature is much the same in all countries, and feeling sure that Americans would buy postal cards at home, just as the travelers and tourists did abroad, I displayed a few local views. Gradually I added others of a fancy nature — flowers, fruits, dogs, cats, and later scenes from the various cities of the East.

I soon realized that my theory was correct. Americans did buy them, and I was developing quite a nice trade in souvenir cards, when a real estate deal brought a change of location. I came to Philadelphia*, where I located on Chestnut Street.

Here again, with renewed energy and zeal, with my confidence in the souvenir postal cards unshaken, I gave them a conspicuous place in my store and began making window displays. Never shall I forget the comments, the criticisms and sneers which followed: "Picture postal cards, a whole window full, in a drug store on Chestnut Street!"

Some laughed, while others took the matter much more seriously. But many who stopped to scoff remained to admire and came in to buy. Notwithstanding adverse criticisms, I continued to show postals, making occasional window displays. Finally, it became quite the proper thing, for others followed as soon as they saw what was being done.

Incidentally, the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record of June 13, 1904 records the druggist's move from New York to Philadelphia, in a somewhat mocking tone that suggests there may have been a whiff of disapproval in the industry over the way he ran his business:

William G. Greenawalt, of Chambersburg, Pa., who opened a pharmacy on Broadway, near Twenty-eighth street, Manhattan, about 18 months ago, has either found the pace too swift for him, or the New Yorkers unappreciative of certain innovations to which he tried to accustom them, for he has shut up shop and removed to Philadelphia, most of his stock and fixtures being transferred to his new location in the Y.M.C.A. Building at 1428 Chestnut street, Philadelphia.

The Alumni Report of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy Alumni Association for August 1904 put a more positive spin on the move, declaring that the New York store was "both a sensation and a success," and that its owner "was induced by a handsome offer (owing to the great rise in real estate values) to sell his unexpired lease." The reference to "innovations" in the one account, and "sensation" in the second, makes one wonder whether Greenawalt's display windows of postcards might not have been raising a ruckus.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the coming of the postcard craze, particularly since "naughty" or "vulgar" comic cards quickly gained a foothold in the market. Greenawalt was reassuring, however. The March issue of the Bulletin of Pharmacy records the druggist's views on the controversial topic of "The Propriety of Selling Souvenir Post-cards":

In a paper read before the Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Association, W. G. Greenawalt dwelt incidentally on his attitude toward the fitness of carrying postal cards. Mr. Greenawalt said, in part: "As a business bringer the post-card is one of the best we have ever had, and it bids fair to continue. There are post-cards and post-cards. There are those of a high class, which have an educating and refining influence, and their sale adds to the tone and dignity of any establishment in which they are found. There are others much less so, yet still attractive and interesting, and also the cheaper common ones, which are crude, coarse, and often vulgar. These naturally prove a disadvantage, but it is good to know that few pharmacists have taken them up. Generally he prefers better cards, and so long as he does so he will most surely derive profit and pleasure, even though his ethical sensibilities are shocked. However, he has as his defense that he must live, and if the sale of souvenirs and post-cards is creditable, and makes him more comfortable than some other side-lines, it should console him for any injury to his feelings in the matter."

In his own article he declared, perhaps prematurely, that

The sale of the comic postal has fallen off, as most persons have no longer any interest in them. That was a passing fad.

Greenawalt's original base of operations was apparently Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, which may also have been his birthplace, around 1865; it appears that he or his family ran a drugstore there for at least twenty years. In the 1900 federal census a "G. William Greenwalt," age 33, was listed as living in that city with his mother and two siblings; both he and his brother David were pharmacists. The 1910 census shows a druggist with the same name, age 45, boarding on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn, perhaps while traveling on business, and in 1912 the brothers purchased a drugstore in Frederick, Maryland. In 1917, William contributed another article to the Bulletin of Pharmacy, this one recording his experiences with "An Unusual Caller" to his store. Census records for 1920 have him again living with his siblings on Queen Street in Chambersburg. David was still the proprietor of a pharmacy, but William's occupation was now given as "none." David was still living at the same address in 1930 (occupation "none") but there is no further mention of William. It appears neither brother ever married.

Though the postcard would remain popular throughout the 20th century, the great boom itself lasted only a few years. By 1912 the Rotograph Co., one of the most prolific producers and arguably one of the most aesthetically successful, had ceased operations.

Buildings and inscriptions

These four postcards were each sent to unmarried women members of the Bergin family at their address on Canonbury Road in Jamaica, Queens. One is addressed to "Miss Mamie Bergin," the only record I have of a person bearing that name (or nickname). Paying visits, church activities, and the health of various family members were recurrent topics. The words in brackets aren't clearly legible.


"Birthplace of Ex-President Grover Cleveland, Caldwell, N. J."

Dear Teresa,

Will not get a chance to visit you until later on. Pleased to know you are well. We are doing nicely. We are going to have a fair in our church. don't you want to make a small donation and help us in this poor little country town? Love to all –

Sincerely,

Lillie
Box 14
[Dated August 5, 1907]

The Grover Cleveland Birthplace was opened to the public in 1913 and remains in operation as a museum.


"New York Hippodrome. Largest and most famous playhouse in the world"

[Postmarked January 4, 1906]

Dear Mamie,

Will not be over tomorrow as father is not well. He has been home from business since Sat.

Margaret

Once advertised as the largest theatre in the world (it could reportedly accommodate 1,000 performers), the Hippodrome, located on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, became a financial white elephant and was razed in 1939.


"Portland, Me., St. Dominic's Church"

Hotel Eastman
N. Conway N. H.
July 17– [1909]

This is the church we attended in Portland [Me.] L. is doing her duty you see. I have improved physically & spiritually. We are enjoying this place immensely. The [Healys?] are here. We walk and talk & read & eat and dance a little. Nothing exciting. Hope you and your sister are well. What are you doing? Won't you send me a line? [words unclear] to get letters. Mary [Routh?]

Constructed in the 1880s, St. Dominic's Roman Catholic Church was acquired by the city of Portland in 2000 and subsequently sold to the non-profit Maine Irish Heritage Center, which has continued to refurbish it.


"Main Road in Fort Totten, N. Y."

Nov 15 1909

Dear Sister,

The men went to work again so I will have to wait for another day. Joe is not very well he has a bad cold. The Doctor thinks it is the gripe so he will be home from school for a day or two. We us [sic] are all well. Love from all to all.

A. H.

[A week earlier, the same correspondent had written, intriguingly: "The men were laid off. Their man was elected. If they do not go to work this week I will be over on Saturday for the day..." Was this a municipal election or a union election, and were the men punished for the outcome?]

Constructed during the Civil War to help protect New York Harbor, Fort Totten is now owned by the City of New York and much of the property is now a public park and museum.

(The moiré patterns in the first and last of the above images are an artifact of the scanning of the original halftone prints.)

"The juiciest lemon I ever struck"

All eight of the postcards shown here (see previous post) were published by companies in Sullivan County, New York but have markings indicating that they were printed in Germany. Six of the eight are so identical in typography and in the layout of the address side of the card that it seems likely that they were printed by a single firm. Those six bear the imprints of J. Fahrenholz in Liberty, NY, of Foyette Souvenir Store, also in Liberty, or of H. M. Stoddard & Son in the nearby hamlet of Stevensville (since renamed Swan Lake). The remaining two cards, which were published by Milspaugh & Co.*, a drugstore in Liberty, appear to be the work of a different printer.

It's possible that sales reps from the major post card printers made regular circuits through the region, soliciting orders for custom postcards from local drugstores and the like, and perhaps even themselves taking the original photographs at the same time, but the stores may also have submitted their orders by mail. The American Druggist & Pharmaceutical Record for 1909 includes both advertisements from companies offering to make custom postcards from negatives and a "Business Opportunities" ad from the Souvenir Post Card Co. on Mercer Street in New York City seeking a salesman for "the best view and fancy post-card proposition ever offered."

The images below are in chronological order by postmark date, except for the last one, which has an unreadable year. I've added some punctuation for clarity. Ferndale and White Lake are other communities in the general vicinity of Liberty.


"Where the trout abound, Stevensville, N. Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty, N. Y. Postmarked June 9, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Love from Nan(?) and Margaret."


"Peace and queitude (sic) at Ferndale, N.Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty N. Y. Postmarked July 30, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Also at the farm. Annie L."


"K 2472 Post Office and North Shore, White Lake, N. Y." Published by Milspaugh & Co. Postmarked August 10, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Enjoy life while you may. Be an athletic girl. These are my mottos now. The same for yours. Margaret."


"K 2480 Old Stone House, WHITE LAKE, N. Y." Published by Milspaugh & Co. Postmarked August 30, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin. Inscribed (on front) "Erected in 1807. Compare with [P.S.?] '72.'" (on back) Am thinking of remaining here forever. Will you join me? The school buildings here appeal to me. Sincerely, Margaret."


"Bridge at Old Mill Pond, Stevensville, N. Y." Published by H. M. Stoddard & Son, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked June 24, 1908. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "How did you enjoy your trip Declaration Day? Aunt and I are taking life easy. The weather is very hot. Love to Mary and Yourself. Nan."


"In the woods, Ferndale, N. Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty, N. Y. Postmarked August 15, 1908. Addressed to Teresa Bergin; no inscription.


"Panorama of Swan Lake looking south, Stevensville, N.Y." Published by H. M. Stoddard & Son, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked August 15, 1908. Addressed to Miss Mary Bergin, inscribed "Dear Mary, Aunt is home and will be over to see you soon. Love to all, Margaret."


"View showing Swan Lake and Walnut Mt., Stevensville, N. Y." Published by Foyette Souvenir Store, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked August 25, 190?. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin; inscribed (possibly in reference to Stamford, NY, in Delaware County) "Stamford was about the juiciest lemon I ever struck, and that ain't no lie. Molly."

* In census records for 1910 a Marie Milspaugh is listed as a retail merchant of drugs in Liberty, NY. She was a widow with two young children; her mother-in-law lived with the family.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (9)

On the care of books:

When in 1773 the Society of Jesus was ordered dissolved, the books stored in the Society's house in Brussels were taken to the Royal Library of Belgium, where it was found that there was no place to house them. As a result, they were brought to an old church that was infested with mice. The librarians came up with a plan to protect the most valuable books, which they placed at the center of the nave, arranged on bookshelves. The dispensable volumes were then piled on the floor in concentric circles, so that the mice could gnaw away at them, thus preserving the ones in the interior intact.

I don't know if it worked.

From Jesús Marchamalo, Tocar los libros.

[Aurora Bernárdez and Julio Cortázar] traveled through Italy in the mid-1950s, moving by train from one city to another. In order not to have to carry unnecessary weight with them they decided to buy books in the kiosks in the stations. They chose inexpensive editions, on cheap paper and badly bound, which they would read together during their trips. Julio would almost always begin. As he turned each page he would rip it from the book and pass it to Aurora, who would read it and then toss it out the window.

That flying library, secret and invisible, has always seemed to me a metaphor of Cortázar: the leaves carried off by the wind.

And I'm tempted by the idea of retracing that journey through Italy, starting from the South, following the rail lines that were splashed with pages from that reader, Cortázar, who sent them marching out the open window while his gaze was lost in the landscape, at times, from the interior of the train.

From Jesús Marchamalo, Cortázar y los libros.

(These are very loose translations.)

Cortázar and books

Nine years after Julio Cortázar died in Paris in 1984, his library of some 4,000 volumes was acquired, with the co-operation of his literary executor (and first wife), Aurora Bernárdez, by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. Cortázar y los libros, a slender but genial book published by Fórcola Ediciones and generously illustrated (in black and white), represents a personal tour through Cortázar's library by a Spanish writer and journalist, Jesús Marchamalo.

Cortázar was widely read in at least three languages, and his library thus includes a broad range of titles published in French and English as well as in Spanish. He was a heavy annotator — what Anne Fadiman refers to as a "carnal" rather than a "courtly" book lover — who felt no compunction about marking up his volumes with marginal notes, underlinings, objections and agreements, and various doodles and scribbles whose meaning, if any, is unknown. Many of the volumes bear personal dedications from fellow writers such as Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Elena Poniatowska, José Lezama Lima, Rafael Alberti (whose dedication is woven into a full-page drawing), and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik (a good friend whose progressive mental decline is painfully evident in her inscriptions). A few of the books were apparently borrowed from other writers and never returned, including a volume of Luis Cernuda's poetry with Mario Vargas Llosa's name written inside it and an anthology of Catalan poetry personally inscribed to Gabriel García Márquez and his wife Mercedes. There are some impossible, fictional dedications, including one by Thomas de Quincey, who salutes Cortázar from beyond the grave as "a friend of Mr. Keats, I think?" And there are some mysteries, such as who — Cortázar himself, a wife or lover, or a previous owner? — left a number of pressed flowers in a copy of Baudelaire's Fleurs de mal.

The books document Cortázar's reading interests through various phases of his life from the 1930s onward, but there are unexpected gaps in the shelves, and the absence of certain titles in the library of an author who traveled widely and lived in various places shouldn't be taken as evidence that he never read or owned them. There is no Camus, no de Beauvoir, no Duras, no Tolstoy or Turgenev, and surprisingly little by Vargas Llosa (a good friend, despite their political differences) or by García Márquez (no Cien años de soledad, notably).

Marchamalo's book — as yet untranslated — makes no pretense of being a scientific survey (hopefully other hands will take up the task) and raises as many questions about Cortázar's reading as it answers. But for anyone interested in Cortázar's work and character, or in the ways in which readers and writers shape — and respond to — their own personal libraries, it will be a unalloyed delight.

Update (2014): For Tororo's French translation of this post, visit A Nice Slice of Tororu Shiru.

The Bergin postcards: an introduction

These cards, postmarked between 1905 and 1908, were mailed, with one exception, to two women who resided at Canonbury Road (now 90th Avenue) in Eastwood in Jamaica (Queens), Long Island; the two recipients, who were probably sisters, were addressed as Miss Teresa Bergin and Miss Mary Bergin. The sole exception is the earliest dated card, shown above, which was sent, if I'm reading the initials correctly, to a Miss T. T. Bergin at 264 W. 115th St., N.Y.C.


The senders, where they can be identified, were several different women, though because of the vagaries of nicknaming some may actually have been the same people. They were probably in their teens or early twenties; one sender refers to the aunt who accompanies her. Based on the evidence of their names and one card that depicts a church they may have been Roman Catholics.


All of the cards shown here were postmarked in the vicinity of the town of Liberty, which is located in Sullivan County in the Catskills. Even then it was already a resort area, and the cards were mailed between June and early September, so it's quite likely the women were summering away from home, either as vacationers or conceivably as resort workers, though there's nothing on the cards to suggest the latter. Together the images depict a kind of idyllic, marginal zone, thinly populated, not quite wilderness but close enough to it that the women could smell the fresh air and be safely away from the crush of the urban crowd (and apparently, from any need to work from a living). There are few traces, either in the messages or in the postcard views, of the presence of the male sex.


We don't see, naturally, what these images and inscriptions choose not to show us, and we should be careful not to assume that it isn't there. All of the color you see, by the way, is artificial, having been layered by various techniques onto what began as black-and-white photographs.


The postcard craze of the early years of the 20th century began in Europe, and the leading printers were in Germany, where all of these cards were printed. Some of them were distributed by Rotograph, a large company that published tens of thousands of different cards, while others were printed for long-forgotten small-town souvenir shops and drugstores in the Catskills. In some cases identical typography is used by different issuers, implying that they shared the same German printer and perhaps placed their orders through the firm's traveling salesmen. The existence of such a sophisticated international network, one capable of bringing imported custom printing to even rural communities, is a reminder of just how far globalization had already advanced a century ago.



As is more often than not the case with any new means of communication, the rise of the postcard was greeted with a fair degree of hand-wringing. Like the paperback novel later on, it was tainted by association with the minority of examples that were risqué or regarded as vulgar. The ones pictured here are inoffensive enough, of course, but there were deeper issues. Many observers felt that scrawling a few banalities on the back of a card was a poor substitute for the composition of a well-written letter, an art which would inevitably suffer as a consequence. (Little did they know what else the future would bring). Moreover, since the postcard was mailed without an envelope, some thought it indiscreet to expose anything other than a pro forma salutation to the prying eyes of the postman.




In future posts I'll look more closely at some of these images and their inscriptions, as well as some other cards sent to the same recipients. I may, possibly, try to pursue the trails of the Misses Bergin and their correspondents through census records and the like, in order to get a better idea of who they were and how they lived, although something could be said for letting them stay as they are, hovering like phantoms on the margins of sight, as befits the delicate irreality of these images. Of course, if we do become better acquainted there's always the risk that I may find them slipping away from the narratives I attempt to weave around them. For their part, they might not have been thrilled to discover that I've been rifling through their mail.

(I'm indebted to Daniel Gifford's unpublished doctoral dissertation, To You and Your Kin: Holiday Images from America’s Postcard Phenomenon, 1907-1910 (PDF), for much of the contextual information included above.)

Postscript: According to federal census records, in 1900 the two sisters were living at 264 W. 115th Street, along with two brothers, Michael, a mail carrier, and Thomas, whose occupation is listed as "collector - clothing." Theresa (spelled thus) was already 27, Mary 34; their parents' country of birth is given as Ireland. They must have lived at that address at least into the summer of 1905 before moving out to Queens.

The List of Enrolled Voters, Fourth Assembly District, Borough of Queens (NY) issued December 31, 1919 records Teresa Bergin, Mary C. Bergin, and Thomas H. Bergin as registered Democrats residing at 51 Canonbury Road. There is no mention of Michael. In the 1930 census, the three siblings still resided, unmarried, on what was now called 90th Avenue. Theresa, a public school teacher listed as the "head of household," was the youngest at 55; Thomas, an order clerk in an office, was 60, and Mary, whose occupation is listed as "housekeeper," was 63.

Another card, not shown here, suggests that there was at least one other Bergin sister who married and may have had at least one child. Her initials under her married name were A. H.

The Asiago Bunny

The following story engages the two central themes of Western Literature, which are, of course, the possibility (or impossibility) of true love and the tragic fate of the pre-industrial artisan in an economy of mass production. Asiago is a kind of cheese.

"The Asiago Bunny: An Edifying Tale for Children"

With apologies all around

Many years ago, in a small village, there lived a cheesemaker named Granola. His was a lonely life; while everyone else in the village was having a good time he spent his days stirring vats of fermenting milk with a garden rake and waiting for the balls of cheese he had hung from the rafters to age, and he longed for a companion with whom to share his misery.

One day he became so completely unhinged that he picked up his penknife and resolved to do himself an injury, until his glance happened to fall on a wedge of asiago that was attracting flies on a shelf. Something about the way the light shimmered on that hunk of lifeless cheese suggested to him the outline of a face, and in an instant the cheesemaker was furiously gouging out pieces of it with his knife, until, in a few moments' time, he had sculpted the perfect likeness of a bunny, complete with soft, stumpy tail and lovable bunny face.

He nestled his creation in his arms and whispered to it as he rocked it back and forth; then he cleared a place for it on his cheesemaking table and set it down softly, reassuring it with a gentle pat on its innocent soft head. Through the rest of that day, as he went about his cheesemaking chores with more than usual esprit, he conversed with the bunny and shared his sorrows and dreams and sang to it his songs of the cheesemaking life.

When the sun went down and his work was through he gathered up the bunny and retired to his dusty garret, making a cradle for it on his tiny table alongside his only other possessions, a single stumpy candle and a half-filled bottle of wine. Before he snuffed the candle out he gazed into the eyes of his companion and sighed and said “Oh, if only you were a real bunny!”

That night, as Granola lay asleep, the Cheese Fairy glided through his window, beheld the sleeping cheesemaker and his inert creation, and with one sweep of her wand changed the carved cheese into a real bunny, with long white teeth and soft fur but with a body that was still only made of cheese. The bunny opened its limpid eyes and looked around, then climbed onto the bed beside the cheesemaker and began to gently nuzzle his ear. The cheesemaker rolled his head about but did not awaken, and the bunny curled up at his side and went to sleep.

After a while, however, it woke up and began to explore the room; it found the bottle of wine and sniffed at it tentatively, then pushed it over and drank the contents. Within a few moments the bunny began to feel unwell and lay down, and soon after it became completely unconscious.

When the cheesemaker awoke the next morning he looked down at the empty bottle and the motionless bunny beside it, and could not remember anything that had happened the day before. He picked up the bunny in his large, calloused hands, sniffed its curious aroma of mingled wine, cheese, and small herbivorous mammal, and shrugged his shoulders. He carried it downstairs, put it in a pot, and cooked it over the fire for a while, then smeared the steaming, savory, melted mass onto the remains of a loaf of bread and ate it for breakfast.

Several readers have objected to the manner in which the bunny drains the wine, pointing out that a bottle resting on its side will retain a substantial quantity of liquid, and that it is unlikely that the bunny would have the strength to raise the bottle over its head in order to invert it and drain the balance. The objection is simply addressed: the bunny lowers himself slowly over the edge of the table, tilting the bottle after him until he finishes the contents, then allows the bottle to rock back into its resting position on the table.

(From 2004 or thereabouts, previously posted on my old site.)

Babel

According to historian Bruce Watson, when William Wood's massive textile mill on the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts was completed, in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, it was regarded, at least by the locals, as "the eighth wonder of the world":

The size of the building simply boggled the imagination. The mill had two parallel wings each 1,937 feet long, 500 feet longer than the Empire State Building if laid on its side. The mill's sprawling floors housed 1,470 power looms along sixteen miles of aisles... Enclosing thirty acres under one roof, employing a small city of six thousand workers, the Wood Mill was to textiles what Pittsburgh was to steel -- the very symbol of consolidation and power.

Its workforce, and the workforce of the city's other mills, included representatives from some 30 nationalities, among them Armenians, East European Jews, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Russians, Scots, Syrians, and Turks. Many of the groups had their own newspapers, businesses, and places of worship.

On January 11, 1912, angered by a pay cut, workers at one of the city's mills walked out. The strike quickly spread, and over the next several months the city witnessed one of the most intense struggles between labor and management in 20th-century America, drawing in everyone from "Big Bill" Haywood and the Wobblies of the IWW to Harvard students assigned to serve in the local militia. (Watson's Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream tells the story in full.)


This postcard of the Wood Mill was mailed six years after the strike and four days after the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War. There are many other contemporary postcard views of the Lawrence mills; this one, published by L. L. Lester, a firm in nearby Lowell, is not the most aesthetically pleasing and in terms of lithographic technique it's pretty crude, but it does convey the vast scale of the mill. It was addressed to a Mrs. J. Liverman at "Suit 25," 888 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The sender's name could be "Jos.," maybe her husband Joseph or Josef. He or she wasn't necessarily a mill worker, perhaps just a traveling salesman on business.


I have no idea even what language family this message belongs to (Slavic? Baltic?), but would love to hear from someone who does, and who could perhaps even transcribe and translate it. The only words I can pick out with reasonable certainty are "Malden Sq."

Update: I'm told that the language is Russian and that the message is something like:

Dear Shura,

I'm thankful to say I'm alive and well, and wish you the same. Go tomorrow to the station at Malden Sq. and wait for me, I'll be there half past six or a bit later. Be well. See you tomorrow[?]

Thanks to the good folks at WordReference.com for identifying and transcribing this.

Postscript: According to federal census records from 1920, the Joseph Liverman at 888 Massachusetts Avenue was a sign painter, aged 35, who lived with his wife, Anna. He was born in Russia and had immigrated to the US in 1910. By September 23, 1923, according to U.S. Naturalization Records indexes, he had moved to 30 Upham St. in Malden, Massachusetts; here his date and place of birth are listed as May 6th, 1885 in Odessa, and his occupation as "sign writer." According to the 1930 census he was still living in Malden and working as a house painter; his wife's name is given as Adelia but since her age matches Anna's she was probably the same woman. It's interesting that although the 1920 census lists the couple's native tongue as "Russian," the 1930 census instead indicates "Yiddish."

Central Viaduct, Cleveland Ohio

"A street car went through this viaduct several years ago killing all passengers."

Postcard, the Rotograph Co., probably printed before 1908.

The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History has an account of the disaster:

The Central Viaduct streetcar accident occurred on the dark, foggy night of 16 November 1895. Cleveland City Railway Co. streetcar No. 642, on the Cedar-Jennings route, plunged through the open draw of the Central Viaduct into the Cuyahoga River, over 100 feet below. The mishap resulted in 17 deaths, making it the worst traction accident in the United States at that time and the worst such disaster in Cleveland's history. It was the second trip that evening for motorman Augustus Rogers and conductor Edward Hoffman. There were 21 people aboard, many of them women and children who had boarded the car downtown. Visibility was poor as the car approached the derailer switch. Hoffman went ahead, threw the switch, and motioned the car forward, jumping aboard the rear platform as the car passed. Unknown to either man, the draw was open, permitting the passage of a tug towing two vessels, and the power cutoff had not operated for some time.

Peering through the mist, Rogers thought he saw that the draw was open over the tracks, but since there was still current, he dismissed the idea. As he increased the throttle, the mist cleared, revealing the open draw. Slamming the transmission into reverse, Rogers and three passengers leaped to safety. Crashing through the warning fence, the streetcar plunged downward, striking a support piling and rebounding into 18 feet of water. Only one passenger survived the plunge, Patrick Looney, and he spent the rest of his life as an invalid due to of (sic) the injuries he sustained.

Two more Bowery views

Belle époque Paris boasted its arcades and flâneurs; turn-of-the-century Manhattan had strolls under the El. This postcard, which was mailed in 1910, was issued by the firm of Theodor Eismann, which had branches in Leipzig and New York and published cards with the Theocrom brand. It's a lithograph based on a photographic original, with considerable added color, thus neither strictly a photograph nor an artistic "print." The obviously photographic ironwork in the lower righthand corner hardly seems to belong to the same image as the cartoonish buildings in the background in the upper right, yet the whole composition has a distinct liveliness and beauty.

The Bowery was once New York's theatre district, rowdy and open to all classes in a way that Broadway wouldn't come to be. The poster on the sidewalk appears to advertise the London Theatre, founded by the impresario and politician Henry Clay Miner, but the London itself was several blocks away at at 235 Bowery. I haven't been able to find out what the Saranac at 57 Bowery was, but there's a photographic view of the same sign here at Shorpy (you'll have to click through to the enlarged version there to see the sign in the lower righthand corner).


The card above, published by the Rotograph Co. some time in the first decade of the 20th century, looks down the Bowery from where it ends at Cooper Square. It appears to be a collotype rather than a lithograph, but once again the image has been extensively colored. Browning, King & Co., the large building on the right, was a clothing chain with stores in several cities.

Below, a few thoughts which are not meant to provide any kind of rigorous analysis of these hybrid pictures but rather an attempt to come to terms with why I find them particularly interesting.

An image that is entirely one thing or another -- a photograph or a print or a painting -- is an object that purports to be existentially intact and complete, a fulfillment, to the degree that it succeeds, of a single artist's intentions and abilities. (In saying that it only "purports to be" I am, of course, deliberately deferring to another time the issue of how reading the context of an art work affects our understanding of it.)

An image that has originated in one process but which has then been visibly altered by being subjected -- usually by someone else -- to techniques from another process, an image that continues to preserve visible evidence of having been "worked on," is an image that refuses to be complete, refuses to be "flat." When we examine such an picture we see a disjuncture, a clash between multiple processes and multiple creators, and that conflict re-opens the image -- in fact it refuses to allow the image to re-close. Instead of seeing an "artistic statement," we see an unresolved dialogue. An image that may have originally intended to be documentary, to represent what is as closely as possible, takes on a layer in which what will appear is shaped by an entirely different set of aesthetic or market considerations, but without entirely erasing the trace of the original or revoking its documentary claims. There is no way of deciding how much "weight" to give to the claims of one partner in its creation or another.

In some cases retouching may take over an image and conceal the original entirely. When that happens the underlying structure remains but by no longer being apparent on the surface it loses its destabilizing power. It has become fully contained.

Of course photography is never merely documentary; the way in which an image is framed and developed is necessarily guided by the photographer. But we don't see the photographer, at least at first sight; we only see the image. In a hybrid image, on the other hand, we see visible evidence of the ways in which one set of intentions and processes interferes with another.

There are some of them here yet

This postcard was mailed from Noboribetsu on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on May 12, 1914 and addressed to E. J. Thompkins in Albany, NY. The inscription on the back reads "These people inhabited Japan before the Japanese came here and there are some of them here yet." The name of the sender seems to have been Henry Russell. Was he in Japan on business, as a tourist, or for some other reason? (Intriguingly, a Henry Russell, who had a Japanese mother, was born in Yokohama in 1880, but that may be pure coincidence.)

The town of Noboribetsu (the name is derived from the Ainu language and is said to mean something like "dark river") is today known for its hot springs. It also boasts an Ainu museum village. Though the photograph doesn't necessarily represent Noboribetsu itself -- it could have been elsewhere in Hokkaido -- I wonder whether the scene depicted might not have been a tourist trap even then.

The card, which was undoubtedly part of a series, was probably published by the Tomboya company in Japan. It lacks the little dragonfly in the front right-hand corner that was Tomboya's emblem (tombo or tonbo means dragonfly in Japanese), but there is a dragonfly on the back next to a row of characters. The photographer could have been Takaji Hotta, whose work was often published by Tomboya. The caption below the photograph (its true color is blue-green) has been printed so firmly that an impression can be felt on the back.


The block on Hamilton Street in Albany where E. J. Thompkins lived apparently no longer exists.