The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  * * *

  —

  Up early, but Plas Newydd doesn’t open for several hours. It’s still raining, the sky heavy, sodden. This isn’t going to blow over.

  Then back along the street to the café overlooking the falls that are rushing, thanks to the rain. Lashings of milky Assam in a clattery cup and saucer. My notebook open, paging around to see what’s there before I describe the weather, always my starter in the morning. Here’s Pavarotti copied from an interview somewhere: One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. A leisure man.

  I take the hint and order a big stunner of a breakfast, then head back to the Falls and the cratering bed and sink into something deeper than a nap. I awaken an hour later, feverish, hungover from a bacon and eggs bender.

  Still too early to walk to Plas Newydd. I’ve finished Elizabeth Mavor’s biography of the Ladies, so I turn back to Montaigne, as if he were—well, he is—the real destination, held in reserve, but always there, shadowing me, beckoning deeper into whatever the idea of “retirement” has to offer. I tap on the iPhone to the Audible version of The Complete Essays, earbuds plugged in. The British voice reads to me, the voice my midwestern ear can’t help hearing as . . . snooty. It is not at all how I hear the Essais when I read them myself, marking the margins.

  Not that Montaigne’s voice in my reading ear is modern or breezy or that I would want that kind of louche contemporary voice reading to me. Impossible to imagine Montaigne confining himself to 140 strokes of a dip pen. His formality is part of his age, a world that accepted the primacy of the complex clause, the sprung coil of thought releasing itself in a long periodic sentence. The page is an open prairie he rides across (he claimed to like riding even more than writing).

  If there is an agenda in the Essais, it is his determination to be nobody but himself. Whoever that is. That’s the point—to write in order to be a self to himself. In particular, he is wary of sounding—or being—scholarly, especially of sounding literary. Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moy-mesmes la matière de mon livre. So, reader, I am myself the material—the stuff—of my book.

  He can’t help making this pledge not to himself, but to “the reader.” The reader, of course, is another version of the writer self. Montaigne speaks—all essayists do—with a personal voice but into an unknown, anonymous ear. Yet that other self—the reader—is also personal, intimate, individual, and has to be imagined out of oneself, not from someone else.

  Though it occurs to me with one of those stabs of recognition I’m getting used to, I did have a reader. Across the yellow kitchen table all those years together. I handed over my drafts, and down he descended into himself, a concentration beyond me, past domestic life, even beyond our erotic life, into a pure and independent reader self, while I paced around, walked the dog, pretended not to be waiting for The Word. Pitch perfect, that ear of his. On page 4, I wonder if you really mean . . .

  Montaigne says in “On Cannibals” (an essai I keep going back to) that he would strip naked before you (the reader) if doing so would get his meaning across more exactly. Across the centuries you can feel this is not a metaphor. Nakedness is truth.

  It was for us, him and me. Of course that’s how it started, naked and mad-happy—all those years ago. Back of the car at a rest stop—we did that all those years ago. Crazy to think of that—“all those years ago” as distant and yet immediate as “back of the car at a rest stop.” A phrase that keeps drumming in my head—all those years, as if the accumulation of time should assure endurance, even immortality. Crazy how the mind works, chews really, on the one certainty—nakedness of body, of mind, of heart. Nakedness may be truth, but it’s not immortality. As I keep thinking with a kind of awe—his beautiful hand, dust now. I seem to have fastened on his hand. As if thinking about it, seeing it with the narrow gold ring that meant he belonged to me, could conjure him entire.

  Montaigne longed for naked utterance. He wanted, somehow, to let impulse dart around, then pin the butterfly of thought on the page. Not a tale or story, not an argument. A thought. Then another, another. Amounting to a collection. Or something even more gossamer than “a thought.” He wanted to snare the act of thinking, consciousness shearing into articulation, a loose-moving cloud passing over the mind. I don’t portray being, I portray passing. That movement might, after all, be the elusive self, the moy-mesmes he said was the stuff of his book.

  In order to be trustworthy, writing must have a chaotic charge, an unbidden quality. The ease of passion—remember? Montaigne’s kind of writing, anyway, had to have that:

  If it doesn’t go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going. We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp, because of a certain harshness and roughness that labor imprints on productions in which it has a large part. But besides this, the anxiety to do well, and the tension of straining too intently on one’s work, put the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent; as happens with water, which because of the very pressure of its violence and abundance cannot find a way out of an open bottle-neck.

  Like the Ladies, two centuries after him, Montaigne had “retreated.” It’s because of him I’m on the road, looking for those who believed, against the world’s insistence on the value of labor, that leisure is what really matters in this life. My favorite sin of the Seven Deadly—sloth.

  Except that isn’t the word for this elusive quality, this golden time. Leisure isn’t idleness, and it isn’t simply an exhausted pause before shouldering the next task. I’m not just hunting down heroes of leisure for an eccentric little collection. I’m trying to figure out what it is, this leisure people now claim they do not have.

  You’re the last person to be talking about leisure—how often he said that when I started these trips, filling my notebooks. You’re a workaholic. Always that amusement. And his encouragement—Go ahead, off you go. Always waiting for me when I came back. Tell me what you discovered. You and your nuns. You and your subjects.

  Montaigne wanted to get away from the smell of oil and the lamp. Away from the anxiety to do well.

  Know it well—the anxiety to do well. You’re the last person to talk about leisure. You’re a workaholic, darling.

  * * *

  —

  The Ladies don’t quote Montaigne. His name is not in Elizabeth Mavor’s meticulous index. I’d been hoping to find him there. If Montaigne is the patron saint of modern leisure, surely the Ladies are its Enlightenment votaries. If he’s the rock star of ease, I expected them at least to be latter-day roadies. He and the Ladies retreating during ages of political mayhem, ages of terrible certainty, accompanied by certainty’s henchman, ruthlessness. They saw, Montaigne and the Ladies, the act of leaving the world’s stage as the best way to attain balance, and beyond that to reach the self’s greatest achievement—integrity. This retreat from “the world” was the way to avoid the evil of certainty. The malignant cells of certainty that create the monster of demagoguery.

  Maybe the Ladies didn’t read Montaigne—they who read French as easily as English (and more often, all those French novels). They were great admirers of Rousseau, but then Rousseau was famously critical of (jealous of?) Montaigne. “I had always laughed at the false naïveté of Montaigne,” Rousseau says in claiming his own greater authenticity. To him, while “making a pretense of admitting his flaws,” Montaigne “takes great care to give himself only amiable ones.” Rousseau didn’t understand. Some people can’t help being charming. It’s not an act, it’s a form of native generosity, the first step toward empathy.

  * * *

  —

  The sky cleared long enough for me to get started, walking on the winding roadway from the tourist center of town to Plas Newydd. I turned up a narrow street to reach the main road to the property, and passed a building wedged between two others. A royal blue metal historical plaque w
as riveted to the gray wall, reporting that this was the original Old Post Office “from coaching days.” Here, the sign said, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby had stayed before leasing Plas Newydd. Farther along, I passed the churchyard where all three of them—the Ladies and Mary Carryll, their faithful domestic—are buried. I didn’t turn in there. Saving that for later.

  The walk up to Plas Newydd went along a road of brick houses built on the slant of the rise, back gardens overrun with early summer flowers wagging in the rain (it had started up again, stinging in a sharp wind), hedges and bushes that would benefit from pruning, a hairless dog looking glum behind a fence, a house needing paint, a general air of things having been let go. I saw no one, the only language I encountered a large hand-lettered sign, fixed to a dilapidated wooden fence: NO DOG FOULING.

  A neighborhood of plastic buckets left out for watering, Wellies on the back stoop, a vaguely tended weediness to the little plots, the sense that here people did things for themselves—or left them undone. On a sunny day all this would look cheery. Even today, the sky glooming above, it brought to mind the word modesty. Even decency. Not poor, not rich, just middling—and content with that ordinariness.

  The turn into the property of Plas Newydd left behind this haphazard middle-class modesty. The lawn, vast and severely manicured, suggested a daft Alice in Wonderland set design by Disney. A herd of elephantine topiaries crouched on the lawn, green bulbous potentates in possession of the expanse. This was the same view of the property in the print from the Ladies’ time reproduced in Elizabeth Mavor’s biography. Then it was a sweetly idealized pasture for sheep, hummocky and serene. No topiaries.

  I made for the teashop in what had once been the coach house. The weather was not encouraging, the woman who brought me my tea said with regret, as if it were her fault. She might have been the mother of the young waiter at the Corn Mill. Or sister to Carol at the Cornerstone with her tea and cake. She radiated the same fretful personal responsibility for my comfort.

  She loaned me a giant orange umbrella when I paid for my ticket to tour the house and grounds. I went out past the alarming topiaries, feeling outsize myself with my massive umbrella. The crushed gravel walkway led to the formidable house—hardly a cottage. The building was sheathed in wood painted white over the original (and now invisible) dove gray stone. The whole thing had been laced up in the nineteenth century with a black-painted geometric oak carapace in a vaguely Elizabethan style suggesting half-timbering.

  All this was the work of a series of owners after the Ladies’ time, after another century of extension and redecorating, after a fire destroyed the expansion, followed by years of neglect and dry rot, until the property came into the possession of the local council, which had seen to the renovation in the final years of the twentieth century. Just in time.

  Impossible to restore precisely the Ladies’ Cottage as it had been in their time, given the centuries of overlay. But the lantern over the Gothic (Gothick, as the Ladies put it) doorway was theirs, as were the intricate black oak carvings of the little entry roof and the doorway I entered, handing my ticket to a boy sitting on a folding chair sheltering under a black umbrella. He jumped when I came around the turn to the entry, pulling the white cord of his iPod out of his ear.

  How dark the place was. Yet once inside, there it was, the “Cottage” more or less reconstituted after all the expansions and extensions of wood had fallen victim to decay and neglect and fire. I stepped into the Gothick rooms they had known, their much-loved and fussed-over interior, the musk-scented stage for the life of retirement, their retreat from “every vexation.” There was no musk, of course, only the faint fragrance of damp, the long vacancy of so many house museums. The odor not of death but of emptiness, the scent of life having decamped. This smell of absence, paradoxically, was heavy with presence.

  I had the place to myself, turned to the right—main sitting room, dining room, surprisingly large kitchen. All of it shadowy, enclosed. Lady Eleanor saw to a well-provided table and a wine cellar of note. The Ladies were forever either in debt or in frenzied terror of ruin, waiting for Eleanor’s family in Ireland to “settle” something substantial on them, or urging the Crown to provide a pension (for what? for being themselves, apparently).

  They trembled with money worries, but kept on spending—on the gardens and the property, new shrubbery, the damming and redirection of the Cuffleyman, the “picturesque” stream that ran through the property. Nature often required an assist back to its ideal disorder. “Sat in the rustic seat,” Eleanor wrote in her journal (a seat over the Cuffleyman she had of course made rustic), “disliked the appearance of the Stones over which the Water falls, thought it appeared too formal. Sent our workmen to it with a spade and Mattock.”

  Over the years, the Ladies found much to alter in nature’s too great tidiness, much to decorate in the house interior, always discovering something that could be improved (or amplified or put in proper disarray). New doors for the library, a marble chimneypiece, carpets and curtains, upholstery. And a growing commitment to augmenting the grotesqueries of Gothick design, colored glass at the windows lending the place a cathedral air with images not of saints but suns and moons, stars, falcons, an antlered stag. The glass endures. I put my face to the white stag, looking out to the elephantine topiaries in the near distance. So much to ornament here in this paradise dedicated to the picaresque. Hard to say what the Ladies would make of the topiaries. Awfully formal. Then again, possibly Gothick at heart.

  As for other expenses—a person had to eat, set a proper table, not to mention the occasional guests. When it was “Scowling and Black” outside in January, the Ladies were at table with roast goose and hog’s puddings, though Eleanor’s journal tut-tuts that they will “eat no more of the latter, too savoury, too rich for our abstemious Stomachs.” Meals were a point of pride, or at least part of the rapturous daily accounting of the daily round of exquisite retirement. Lady Eleanor, always stocky, became quite stout. Even the wandlike Sarah filled out over the years. Clearly Pavarotti people, agreeing that one of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

  They wore riding habits of black and men’s top hats. They powdered their hair, a style long out of fashion. Much unkind merriment about their getups was made by visitors who saw them in their old age and found the riding habits and top hats absurd. But the local people thought them sensible, wearing outdoor clothes for a farm and garden life. They had their uniform, and were free to ignore fashion, anticipating Gertrude Stein by over a century: “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” Hemingway quotes Stein as saying. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both.” Substitute “buy shrubbery” for “buy pictures” and you have the essential value at work here. Eleanor, vain about her journal and letter writing, was happy to describe to a correspondent their excellent larder, tended by Mary Carryll:

  new laid Eggs from our Jersey Hens Who are in the Most beautiful Second Mourning you ever beheld . . . Dinner Shall be boil’d chickens from our own Coop. Asparagus out of our garden. Ham of our own Saving and Mutton from our own Village. . . . Supper Shall consist of Goosberry Fool, Cranberry Tarts roast Fowel and Sallad. Don’t this Tempt you.

  * * *

  —

  The Ladies’ impulse for retreat, coupled with their compulsive tending of the Plas Newydd property, made them irresistible outliers for an age just revving the engines of the Industrial Revolution, whose speeded mass fabrication was beginning to be mistrusted as a false new god laying waste the pacific slowness of ages past. Among the genteel classes a moist regret hovered over this pastoral ideal. This nostalgia, like much nostalgia, was not for something actually experienced and lost, but for a notion held in the fond focus of the imagination. “Retirement” was in the spirit of the times among cultivated classes.

  The Ladies were not alone in
their pursuit of retreat, even if Dr. Johnson, cultural arbiter of the age, decried such fashionable rustication as “Civil suicide.” He replied, famously and tartly, to James Boswell’s question on the topic, “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” I had seen the tired-of-London/tired-of-life remark on tea mugs in souvenir shops near Big Ben.

  This was the period when Marie Antoinette and her set were dressing up in faux farm frocks while she played shepherdess at her hameau at Petit Trianon, never imagining that barely a decade later she would be delivered to her beheading in a tumbrel, a farm cart whose usual purpose was for unloading manure in the fields.

  There was a political echo of Montaigne’s age in the Ladies’ life as well—his age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, wars and burned flesh, heads on pikes, and their age of the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror, another harvest of heads and body parts. Fevered certainties padding the way to unquestioned cruelties.

  The French Revolution made the Ladies shudder—perhaps especially Catholic Eleanor, who had been educated by French nuns (you and your nuns!) at a convent boarding school in Cambrai, founded by a descendant of the martyred Sir Thomas More, a typical education for a Catholic aristo in Anglo-Ireland. Eleanor certainly would have heard of the murders (the martyrdoms) of Blessed Madeleine Fontaine and her small band of Sisters of Charity in June 1794 in Arras, barely thirty miles from Cambrai. The nuns went to the guillotine singing the Ave Maris Stella.

  But before the déluge of the Revolution, the Ladies shared with Marie Antoinette a taste for rural life—what they imagined and arranged for it to be. They took their cue from Rousseau. Lady Eleanor seems not to have carried her Catholicism from Ireland to Wales. But she harbored a Francophile soul of the ancien régime sort, including this passion for pastoral life.