The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  Another time, another “project,” off to Greece and Turkey “in the footsteps of Saint Paul,” as I wrote in the proposal for a travel grant. Went there to find the narrative for a book. But I decided, after all, to leave Paul to the scholars, and wrote nothing, asking the guide as we drove on and on in the little top-heavy van, from Tarsus to Antioch, along the eastern Mediterranean from Iconium to Perga, on to Ephesus, “Did Paul walk all this?” Yes, all this, 100 percent for sure. Hours later, still in the van, the dun-colored dust coating the glass rectangle I looked out, the crunch of stone when the tires veered to the edge: “And this whole way too?” Yes, I tell you, all this, on foot, all this, 100 percent for sure. I closed my eyes, curled up in my seat, flummoxed by such zeal, glad of the AC.

  The Galilee? Made that trip too, against the advice of the fretful (Isn’t that near the Golan Heights? Do you think you should . . . ?). Believe it or not, Jesus was there, Lake Kinneret smooth as a rink that June afternoon, easily walkable. A boat set off in the distance, slap, slap, the distant sound of fisherfolk, as if a figment of Minnesota’s wild rice waterways had followed me to that arid place. Always at home near a fishing lake.

  He had not been in Jerusalem amid the smoky votive lights of the Armenian watchdogs of the sepulcher. But I should not have been surprised to find him on the pristine shores near Capernaum. Nor was this a Christian theme park. It seemed untouched. Timeless. His.

  Oh no, said the Catholic priest who was showing me around. Oh no, the Israelis would never let anyone junk this up—it provides a big percentage of the drinking water for the country.

  Sacred water because secular water. An even better miracle these days than water into wine—water into water. Liked that. But for some reason I never wrote up that agreeable irony, except in my notebook, the slag heap of the annotated life tossed along paths abandoned or never taken. Honestly wasted moments, as so many details deserve to be, even when they are given their humble habitation on the private page. Let them get lost in their unnumbered diary pages.

  There is, as well, an even longer list of saints I sought—a bus from Paris to Lisieux to find the tubercular Carmelite, Thérèse, author of the first autobiography of my girlhood, sending showers of roses from heaven after her death at twenty-four. I took hers for my confirmation name—Patricia Mary Thérèse, mainly for the Frenchy accents. I fostered a taste for youthful death, and dreamed of going to Lima to see the bed of broken bricks Saint Rose slept on in a hut behind her family’s grand mansion, a life of ardent denial. All the jewels—rubies, sapphires—she refused to wear. Her furious father. That trip never happened, my Lives of the Saints period petered out before I achieved Latin America.

  But I made it to Assisi for Francis, the best saint of them all—he got a whole book from me. The following year, off to England to Norwich for Saint Julian, the anchoress confined to her little cell, a carbuncle stuck on the side of the Church of Saint Julian (hence her name—no one really knows who she was, she with her mystic visions). Julian and her sole companion, a little cat who is always at her feet in pictures and statuary, the tail neatly rounding his upright body. The “showings” came to her in fits, and then, convalescing, she wrote them down. T. S. Eliot quotes her at the end of Four Quartets, as if her fourteenth-century assurance that all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well could assuage the savage wounds of the twentieth.

  Then, naturally enough, on to Anne Frank—up early, ahead of everyone that cold spring morning in Amsterdam, I was the first to lumber up the narrow staircase, getting the room to myself for five minutes before the world crowded in behind me, mostly schoolchildren on a field trip.

  I hardly realized all these trips were pilgrimages, sometimes spiritual, more often secular, hajjes to the homes or haunts of figures I knew—or felt I knew, people who flared alive in my mind from reading. They seemed to invite me from the page to call on them, as if they were there, a trace at least. A literary bloodhound on the prowl not for ghosts, but for leftover life. Evidence. Of what? History? Evidence of the combustible urgency of the soul?

  But then, what is travel but a search for what has preceded us—a personage, a habitation. Whitman was wrong about that—the open road isn’t open. At least it isn’t vacant. Even a hike or canoe trip into wilderness that seems to be outside history, repudiating human narrative, even such travel is a search for before—the trace of an ancient tree, Precambrian rock, rare ladyslipper orchid in a reclusive swamp. The pristine location sought by the naturalist is a figment of time immemorial. Virgin history before we made up History. But history, nonetheless.

  The first time I went to England, after graduate school, I had to remind myself: There will be cars, skyscrapers, fast food. My England was a set design by Jane Austen, George Eliot, and my great favorite, Thackeray. Literature had been my Elsewhere long before I left St. Paul. In London that first trip, I choked on a nut sandwich in a vegetarian teashop built into William Blake’s house, and had time to think, before someone smacked me on the back and I was saved—Jeez, I’m dying where Blake wrote his poems.

  In time, writers overtook the saints, and became a different canon—Katherine Mansfield in Bandol, Hemingway at his standing desk in Key West, all those cats catting around. Then Hampstead again, this time for Keats, also Guy’s Hospital for him, and finally, as he did, off to Rome, the little room overlooking the Spanish Steps where he died, tourists in shorts and cartoonish running shoes lined up on the steps eating ice cream, an American undergrad laughing to his buddy, leaping past the window of the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time, yelling fuck, no! fuck, man!

  Later to Amherst for Emily Dickinson’s house and the gravesite—Called Home. Along the Promenade in Brooklyn for Whitman, reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” And a blistering hot July afternoon in the cool library of Indiana University for Sylvia Plath’s baby book—her mother’s itty-bitty control-freak handwriting telling you all you needed to know about where her frightful ambition was hatched.

  I almost never travel for a vacation—I take off for commemorative or even funerary experience, as if all the world were a vast and not cheerless cemetery, the ghosts still murmuring if you can get close enough. Well, most of them, even the saints, were writers, so the words are audible as you move from room to room of their houses or through the gardens—Rye House garden for Henry James. I sweet-talked my way in there on a day when it was closed, taking the train from London. James was my hero of the notebook, not of the novel: If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene, he said in his wonderfully overstuffed way, it could but be because notes had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy . . . to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember. I sought out Rye House, pledging my allegiance to the note, the shard, the fragment, the bit that glints in the dirt and makes the book possible. I knew even then I didn’t believe in the narrative arc, that fiction of fiction.

  I’ve even contrived to live in a shrine myself—though I didn’t plan it or realize it when I moved in years ago: Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul, his grandmother’s slice of a witchy old row house in the old Cathedral Hill neighborhood, my home these last thirty-six years. It was a sad-sack crumbling place when I arrived, a heartbreak hotel without children or pets, housing an array of fixed-income tenants—a defrocked priest, the physician who’d lost his license but not his thirst for Canada rye, an array of maiden/divorced/widowed ladies (hard to tell the category of loneliness), one a woman who wondered if I would be interested in seeing a letter from Willa Cather she had received as a girl. Maybe it was worth something? Did I know? Not that she would ever part with it, absolutely not—as if I had asked to buy it. Astrology magazines came regularly for several of them, their only apparent mail.

  I was surprised to find next door the retired “lay teacher” from my old high school. She taught Spanish, not my language: I belonged to F
rance and Sister Peronne Marie, the cloistered nun who taught us how to use the Paris Métro from a grid she mimeoed and gave to each of us: Girls, how do we get from Invalides to Marché aux Puces at Porte de Clignancourt? What are the transfer points?

  The old Spanish teacher greeted me warily, with shy hope as I lugged my boxes of books and not much else up to the second floor: Do you like scotch, dear?

  Before long, the museum curators and the psychotherapists began buying up the old heaps—this is the neighborhood, in fact the very block, where Jonathan Franzen opens his novel Freedom, earnest young couples acquiring abandoned mansions for a song, ruining their marriages with too much infidelity and paint-stripping.

  For all my gallivanting, I’ve never left. I’ll get to that too. It’s part of the love story, the beautiful hand that held mine. He had the apartment on the first floor as I trudged up to the second with my boxes of books. My girlfriend, helping me move, said excitedly, There’s the most interesting-looking man in the first-floor apartment—his door was open. Maybe you’ll meet him . . . The quotation is exact—strange that it imprinted itself, though I said, Are you kidding? I was just breaking up with a boyfriend. I wasn’t looking for Mr. Right. I didn’t believe there was such a person.

  But there you are—the downstairs neighbor introducing yourself the next morning. Bright October, crisp and fresh. The City of St. Paul was planting a tree—a laurel tree—below my window just then. I have a graduate degree in lyric poetry, I thought. I know a symbol when I see one: putting down roots. I was holding a teacup, smiling, when there was the knock on the door. You. Would I like to be shown where the garbage bins were? The location was a little tricky, you said. I followed you into the alley, behind a rickety arbor fence, listened intently as you said the landlord required everything to be tied up in plastic bags. I was trying to think of something else I could ask you to tell me about.

  So we began. The first cup of coffee. The new life within twenty-four hours of the old. The life now ended, the hand now dust. Dust, but it must be said, gold dust. Memory glints. The laurel tree is huge now, should be pruned, the bark cracked. But still alive.

  Now high school students come to the building on assignment, snapping Instagrams to prove to their teachers that they’ve made the assigned circuit of the Fitzgerald locations. The “birth house” is three blocks up the street. It seems the English teachers insist on these pilgrimages, apparently more essential than reading the books. I often find a teenager on our staircase. More pilgrims, believers in the unreal estate of history-touched locations. I see I’m not alone in this.

  So I’ll make the rounds, take my notes (the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy) on a tour of the heroes of leisure, confined till now in my stack of notebooks, but out there, part of the great world. I’m ready to roll: carry-on bag, Montaigne (all of him) on the iPhone. Off I go. Looking for ease—if not my own ease. That’s gone, along with you. Reason enough to head out.

  * * *

  On the night of Monday, March 30, 1778, an Anglo-Irish lady named Sarah Ponsonby, age twenty-three, the unmarried dependent of well-placed relatives (her parents long dead), slipped out of her guardians’ Georgian mansion in Woodstock, Kilkenny, the rest of the house asleep. She was dressed in men’s clothing, had a pistol on her, and carried her little dog, Frisk.

  She made her way to the estate’s barn where Lady Eleanor Butler, a spinster sixteen years her senior, a member of one of the beleaguered old Catholic dynasties of Ireland (the Dukes—later the Earls—of Ormonde), was awaiting her, having decamped from stony Butler Castle twelve miles distant on a borrowed horse. She too was wearing men’s breeches and a topcoat.

  Their plan, long schemed, was to ride through the night, the moon a bare sliver, to Waterford, twenty-three miles away on the coast, and from there to embark for England to live together somewhere (they had no exact destination) in “delicious seclusion.” Their goal was “Retirement,” a life of “Sentiment” and “Tenderness.”

  Their alarmed relatives followed in panicked pursuit, intercepting them in a barn where they had sheltered overnight when they missed the packet boat. It is thought they were given away by the frantic yapping of Frisk. They were hauled back to their respective homes, where Sarah, having caught a cold in the barn, advanced the plot of their gothic tale by falling seriously ill with fever.

  Her life hung in the balance, but not her determination. The sweet-tempered, seemingly tractable Sarah told her guardians that were she denied her desire to “live and die with Miss Butler,” such a refusal would, according to a correspondent of her distressed guardian Lady Betty Fownes, “provoke her to an act that would give her friends more trouble than anything she had yet done.” A wiry will was coiled under her mild demeanor, betraying a capacity to perform acts more bold than the purse crocheting she was known for in the Fownes’s salon.

  As Sarah recovered over the next month, she and Lady Eleanor wore down their dismayed relatives. Everyone was comforted that at least “there was no man concerned with either of them,” as Lady Betty put it with some relief, if deeper perplexity.

  Finally, with the two families apparently played out by the intransigence they faced, the two friends were allowed to leave Ireland together on a lovely May morning in a fashion less romantic but more commodious than their attempted escape some weeks before—they were provided with a coach to the seaport and were accompanied by a Butler housemaid, Mary Carryll. It was reported they were laughing merrily as they stepped into the coach.

  The plot was yet richer. Sarah Ponsonby’s guardian, Sir William Fownes, had confessed his passion for her in the midst of the upheaval. He entreated her, down on his knee, to stay in Kilkenny. He had been rather counting on Lady Betty’s poor health to release him before long. Thinking himself something of a catch (he was just over fifty and allowed that he considered himself to have “a pretty face”), he still hoped to provide a male heir to the family baronetcy (poor Lady Betty having managed only a daughter, now grown and married with children of her own in Dublin). Sarah Ponsonby had come into the household thanks to Betty, her kindhearted elder cousin who had taken in the orphan girl, originally against the grumpy objections of the later smitten Sir William.

  Lady Betty seems to have been exhausted by the romantic upheaval of it all. Her response to her husband’s passion and Sarah’s horrified rebuff was to leap over all these unruly emotions and head straight for the comforts of the grave, writing her “dear Sir Wm” a letter without a note of outrage or betrayal, outlining her burial wishes with housewifely economy:

  I have always ment to be a good Wife and Mother and hope you think Me so. As to my Funeral I hope youl allow me to be Buried as I like, which is this: When the Women about me are sure I am dead, I would be Carried to the Church and kept out of Ground two days and nights, four Women to sitt up with me. . . . No body to be at My Funeral but my own poor, who I think will be sorry for me.

  Lady Betty proved to be prescient, though her order backwards: while the Ladies were touring Wales, looking for a place to retire in delicious seclusion, Sir William succumbed to a stroke, though not before he was “cup’d blistered and glistered” in the medical method of the day. As he feared, the family baronetcy was extinct with his death.

  Lady Betty, with her weak heart, soon followed. They were buried side by side in the little Church of Ireland graveyard near their Woodstock home. Lady Eleanor and Sarah Ponsonby, careering around the countryside near the river Dee, looking for their ideal retreat, were blissfully unaware of this sad Irish epilogue to their own happy Welsh ending. Or their beginning, as it proved to be.

  * * *

  —

  The “Ladies,” as they were known in Llangollen, and are known still (for of course I went there), settled themselves and proceeded to pass fifty years in their “Welsh vale,” living the hyperdomesticated “retirement” they had dreamed of in Ireland.

  They s
oon became celebrated. They were famous for wishing to be left alone.

  In pursuing the Ladies in Llangollen, I was not discovering them, though no one I mentioned them to had heard of them. I was picking up a trail first laid down by their intrigued contemporaries two centuries earlier. During the Ladies’ long years in their home, called Plas Newydd, it seems just about everyone beat a path to the heavily ornamented Gothic door of their remote “Cottage.” Wordsworth and Southey composed poems under its low roof; both Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and “stare,” apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron—and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott. Even the Duke of Wellington (a treasured friend) and De Quincey (“coldly received”)—on and on the personages of the age made pilgrimage to the isolated Welsh village on the river Dee. Josiah Wedgwood visited the Ladies to tour and opine about the rock formations of the surrounding “savage” landscape.

  “The two most celebrated virgins in Europe” became, with their pastoral life, both a model and a curiosity. The poet Anna Seward, known as “the Swan of Litchfield,” visited and corresponded with the Ladies. Various royals from the Continent also made the pilgrimage—the aunt of Louis XVI, Prince Esterházy from Budapest. Coming and going, the aristocrats paid wistful (or baffled) homage to a way of life rare in its independence and chosen affection.

  Some visitors spent the night at Plas Newydd, though this was not favored by the reclusive Ladies, who valued their quiet nights à deux, tucked up by the fire (made up by Mary Carryll), reading aloud to each other from French novels. They directed visitors to put up at the Hand, the Llangollen inn still open for business today in a wan sort of way, a big barny hotel where, a sign indicates, the Llangollen Rotary Club meets every Monday, 5 p.m., save for bank holidays.