The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  Rustication was not simply chic. It presented itself as a saving grace against the dark satanic mills (Blake) and the getting-and-spending (Wordsworth) of the new world economic order. The world managed by academicians and technicians (business and markets, in a word) that we live in today is a souped-up version of the one the Ladies and their admirers saw with alarm rolling toward them and, they feared, soon rolling over them.

  The Ladies lived to see France, whose language they knew and whose elegant humanist culture they revered, decimated by the Revolution and its bloody aftermath. They lived beyond that to see the further ruination of their orderly (well, feudal) values trashed by the usurper Napoleon. They did what they could to keep ordered grace going in their corner of Wales, chatelaines of serenity.

  Yet theirs cannot be understood as a life of hedonism or even precisely of aestheticism. They had a daily regimen, as monastic orders always do, a strict rule of life. Their leisure, like a monastery’s, was ruled by the clock. This domestic order may have been part of their “enchantment,” why poets and nobles made the trek to their cottage door. They called their organized day our System. They were fearful of veering from it, as if the life of retirement relied, fundamentally and paradoxically, on discipline and strict observance, not indulgence. The System was the reason they never—almost never—left home. They had to obey the internalized bells of their ordered day, ringing its changes as it sent them about the business of their enclosure. Their devotions were not a prayer schedule, but acts of self-improvement, a vow of betterment for themselves and their patch of the world.

  Each day was exactingly scheduled, hours given to study (languages especially: Italian, Spanish), transcription of admired texts, drawing and sketching, long walks, correspondence, reading, reading, reading in several languages—both silently and, at night, aloud to one another amid the glow of candles, an alarming expense of nine pounds per annum, but a requirement of the romantic reading life. Sarah ruined a map she was drawing one winter day and had to report in her diary that “a mistake in the Tropics has left me nothing to show for the last six weeks of my life.”

  * * *

  —

  I go up to the second floor, look at the vitrines displaying some of their possessions, the flowery tea set, the impossibly small embroidered satin pump (labeled as Eleanor’s), the teeny-tiny “porcelain watering can the Ladies used to perfume their carpets.” Droplets of musk sprinkled from the perforated spout.

  Then down a couple dark steps to the woody box of the dressing room where all the late-night reading amid the candlelight went on. So still. So silent.

  So claustrophobic. I know I should spend longer in the house, take more notes, pause, conjure up the past. Conjure them. But I’m out the door, away from the dark Gothick fug of the place, past the boy listening to music (I can hear the ground beat) on his iPod.

  I retrieve the big orange umbrella behind him, but keep it furled (the rain has stopped) and use it as a walking stick, poking the gravel as I make my way past the topiaries. No, I decide after all, Eleanor would send the workmen with their spades and mattocks to make the bombastic leafy beasts go away. Her Gothick was of the interior. Nature was meant to be wild—even if you had to train it to look wild.

  I feel slightly elderly—or possibly I feel stately, moving forward with my walking stick, a woman of means surveying my domain. I’m headed toward the nature walk the Ladies loved, the “Home Circuit,” what still exists of it, running along the Cuffleyman that rushes and burbles over the stones Eleanor often described in her journal as she did on a fine day in April 1788. The Ladies have taken their books into the garden, rising at six to an “enchanting morning.” Their morning reading is Sterne. Wonderful to think of them reading Tristram Shandy, a novel that is a meandering bunch of narrative snippets and essays. Another writer belonging, if more narratively, to Montaigne’s tribe.

  Walking the Home Circuit, as they called this ramble from the house, past the pasture and gardens (no topiaries then), into the rough down by the Cuffleyman stream and its outcroppings, and back again, along the planted greenery they called their Shrubbery, to which they were ever adding and replanting.

  “How splendid, how heavenly,” Eleanor exults in her journal that day.

  Then back inside “for a few Minutes to Write.” For of course the retired life is the described life, the life relived in rolling sentences. Then out again with the letters of Madame de Sevigné to read in the rustic hut overlooking the Cuffleyman.

  I have just arrived at the hut myself—the wood-roofed stone eyrie above the river that now has a sign directing visitors, in Welsh and English, with an arrow pointing the way through greenery and blossoming bushes—“Lady Eleanor’s Bower.” I have passed a bench or two, sequestered along the way, another little outbuilding across the Cuffleyman (several dainty bridges cross from one side to the other). But this is the place—wrought-iron gate, Gothick iron decorative medallions at the “windows” on the side opening to the Cuffleyman below. This was where they came on that perfect day in April 1788 to absorb (and radiate later in the journal) the sublime sensation of being alive.

  “Such a day!” Eleanor reported. Then on to dinner at three: “roast breast of Mutton boil’d Veal Bacon and Greens Toasted Cheese.”

  All this was followed by “such a heavenly evening—blue Sky with patches of Cloud Scattered over it. So picturesque, like little Islands studding it.” Back to the Shrubbery for another walk. Then on to the Bower where another sign, quite faded, reports what Eleanor records for the day in her journal: “Spent the Evening there. Brought our Books, planted out our hundred Carnations in different parts of the Borders. Heavenly evening. Reading. Writing.”

  Then, night falling, back inside within the glow of the candles they indulged so profligately. “Nine to One in the dressing room. Reading. A day of such Exquisite Such enjoyed retirement. So still. So silent.”

  So tightly controlled.

  They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limitation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tourniquet of the System was a saving ligature.

  No wonder I was impatient with Colette’s wink-wink at what they were really up to, what couldn’t be said in their age but could be named in her day (and even more in ours). Theirs was then and remains even more today the stranger passion, the one little understood—or even comprehended as passion.

  Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day—sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too.

  For a moment, don’t dismiss it as trivial or creepy. For a moment, standing in the damp Bower (Spenser’s bower of bliss? It comes to mind) it is possible to feel the fact of being alive as it breathes in, breathes out. It’s a life. It’s the life. It’s the System. I suppose it’s even love. For surely they loved each other. A love that passeth even the understanding of Eros.

  * * *

  —

  All the people, the poets and princes, who preceded me to this distant place to visit—to pay homage, to claim connection to “the most Illustrious Virgins in Europe.” How was it that the Ladies’ strenuous “retirement” so quickly turned to society news? That their seclusion so soon translated into fame and fashion?

  Their celebrity may have changed coloration over the decades, but their way of life remained essentially unaltered for fifty years. By the end (which came with Lady Eleanor’s death, age ninety, in 1829, Sarah following her Beloved two years later in 1831), visitors to Llangollen did not always find the Ladies so enchanting, but simply very odd. The Scottish editor John Lockhart, visiting Plas Newydd in 1825 with his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, delighted in a malicious description of them wearing “enormous shoes, and men’s hats, with their petticoats so
tucked up, that at first glance of them fussing and tottering about . . . we took them for a couple of hazy or crazy old sailors.”

  Perhaps their earlier, more romantic celebrity, remarkable to us, was no great mystery in their own age. Their fame was a result or even the function of the deepest bond that first brought them together in the salons of their families ten years before their elopement to Wales, the bond that sustained their way of life for fifty years. Writing did it. Writing had inspired these two admirers of Rousseau, as had their taste for the novels and philosophy of the Enlightenment and refined French culture in the years preceding the Revolution.

  Writing was the silver thread stitching together relations in their class, relations of love and especially of female friendship—from one bluestocking to another, from provincial whist-playing mother to urban-dwelling socialite daughter—Lady Betty Fownes in Kilkenny to her married daughter Sarah Tighe in Dublin. From the very epistolary Mrs. Thrale (onetime companion of Dr. Johnson) to the Ladies. And the busybody Harriet Bowdler—sister of the Shakespeare-purifying bowdlerizing Thomas Bowdler, editor of The Family Shakespeare. She too was a confidante of the Ladies, another of their letter writers, visitors, confabulators.

  These women picked up a pen the way we tap on a cell phone, passing the latest to each other in reams of sinuous, dependent-clause-heavy prose, transcribing whole volleys of dialogue from dinners and tea parties, unfurling descriptions of spring blossoming and autumnal murk from long walks in all weathers. In a sense, they were all writing essays, meandering in their minds, and sometimes taking on questions of the day—slaveholding, environmental depredations (those satanic mills), the recent alarming rumors from France.

  They were amateur Montaignes. But then, being an amateur was central to Montaigne’s project, not its result but its core impulse. His Essais, his whatevers. The offhandedness and the intimacy of letters could also convey stray thoughts, arpeggios of feeling, formless forms. All this the Ladies and their correspondents adopted as essential to life.

  But the analogy to the cell phone is wrong: the Ladies and their friends weren’t yakking, they were writing, sentences and paragraphs lending their expression, like Montaigne’s, formality and the chance of longer shelf life through copying and quotation. And curiously, more revealing of self than conversation (because uninterrupted by social awareness).

  Theirs was a writing world, a small sphere by the standards of our mass culture, moving not over media outlets but across the well-oiled tracks of correspondence, warmed and boiled over by heated gossip and rumor. In this closed but wordy culture of correspondence, “reputations could be made,” according to Elizabeth Mavor, “without so much as publishing a book.”

  Letters were copied and shared, quoted, read aloud to visitors. And of course everyone was keeping a journal, annotating encounters with the eye not of an historian but a proto-novelist, keeping track, keeping score, assessing and attesting—and then quoting themselves from their journals back into their letters, a kind of self-publishing editorial project that kept these supposedly idle women very busy.

  Writing—or passionate reading (which comes to the same thing in ardent bookish youth)—was the first attachment between Sarah and Eleanor when they met in their families’ salons, Sarah a child of thirteen, Lady Eleanor, sharp-tongued, going nowhere in the marriage market, but suddenly on the way to becoming the soul mate to the shy, dependent orphan.

  It was at first and for years before their elopement an epistolary friendship, words on the page allowing the two friends an intimacy that conversation could not equal, deepening attachment, confirming intimacy, heart to heart, mind to mind. The letters flew between Woodstock and Butler Castle, great sheaves of shared feeling folded within the confines of envelopes ripped open and immediately responded to. Passionate paragraphs, the subject-verb-object of ardor. As Lady Betty said of Sarah after the elopement, expressing herself in her distracted but acute way, “Poor Soul if she had not been so fond of her pen so much would not have happened.”

  Nor are we entirely divorced from this writing romance. A priest told me recently that 40 percent of the weddings he performs now are, as he put it, Match.com marriages. These romances may start with a posted photograph, but no one gets beyond the picture without having to write a portrait to the other, for it turns out real self-disclosure still comes not from pictures but through words. And words on the page (or screen) are paradoxically more, not less, revealing than that first meet-for-coffee date. Even our way of describing it proves the point. We don’t say, “Show me yourself.” I want you in words, the narrative reveal: Tell me about yourself. Tell me.

  Remember how strangely embarrassed he was, admitting he didn’t like Skype when it first became possible on these research trips to call home for free—to see each other, to talk? I miss the letters, he said, almost sheepishly. Meaning the long email screeds I wrote every night and he replied to in the morning. It’s more intimate, he said. Brings you nearer. Nearer even than the sight of the face, though of course we each kissed the screen, and laughed, touching the cold flat rectangle with our lips. Write me, write me, he said. Meaning, come nearer.

  * * *

  —

  I return the orange umbrella to the woman at the teashop, who hopes I have enjoyed myself. We fall into conversation (another cup of tea), and she tells me with a shyness veering on quiet desperation (Thoreau comes to mind—another seeker after the perfect life system) that she used to work in nursing, but now that’s over. There has been a sadness, a loss—she’d rather not say—but her life has . . . changed. I don’t mention that my life has changed too. She is running the cash register at the teashop now. She has become devoted to the Ladies. She lives alone. Now. A loss. She repeats this word. Such friends they were—Eleanor and Sarah.

  It must have been hard, she says, for Sarah after Eleanor . . . went. Well, she only stayed on another two years. Said thoughtfully, as if two years were doable.

  This soft-edged woman probably my age, running the cash register—she’s the one I’ve come all this way to meet, it occurs to me. Someone who understands them. Meditates on loss, weighs its heft. In considering the nature of the Ladies’ attachment, their biographer calls theirs a “romantic friendship,” saying this bond was “a once flourishing but now lost relationship.” Romantic friendship may be extinct, but it does not go unmourned by the teashop cashier.

  You’ll put them in a book? she asks, wonder in her voice.

  That’s the plan, I say.

  She nods—They’ll be hard to get.

  I walk back down the way I came, past the NO DOG FOULING sign and the back gardens, down the steep hill into the little town. I won’t be here much longer. Suddenly I realize—surely because of the sad woman in the teashop—that what I will remember most from this effort (it has been an effort to get here, even to be here, trying so strenuously to conjure a lost relationship) is the people who were supposed to not matter, not really, the extras of contemporary life.

  The stars I have sought always exist in the past. But now—not so much. A shift of focus. The young waiter at the Corn Mill (You’re a nice lady, and you got here first, didn’t you?), Carol at the Cornerstone (Glad to take in a stray, come anytime), the grieving madonna at the tearoom cash register. I have taken more notes (the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy) on them, the supposed bit players, than on Plas Newydd, this place I went to such trouble to get myself to.

  I stop at a flower shop—it’s late, the store closing. I buy a handful of lilies, rather limp, all that’s left in the metal bucket outside the door. The woman closing the shop takes the time to furl them in a sheet of paper printed with pale roses. With this wand of flowers I head to the churchyard where the three of them—Eleanor, Sarah, Mary Carryll—are buried.

  The church is gray, stern and stony at the end of the long, grassy property, and of course not a Catholic church. Their System may have
had a monastic tinge to it, but Sarah was ardently anti-Catholic. Part of the argument about “living and dying with Miss Butler” she made so passionately to her guardians concerned the Butler plan to dispatch troublesome Eleanor to a convent in France (what a fate that would have been on the eve of the Revolution). “I would do anything,” she wrote to a friend in the midst of the upheaval before they were allowed to leave Ireland together, “to save Miss Butler from Popery and a Convent.”

  I have the churchyard to myself, and don’t have to hunt around for the monument—for there it is, a triangular freestanding pediment of gray stone, each side devoted to one of them. Mary Carryll was the first to go, November 22, 1809. Her death was occasion for the monument’s erection, to which the other two plaques would be added in due course.

  A heavily end-rhymed poem (surely by Eleanor), honors the Ladies’ faithful servant whose

  Virtues dignified her humble birth

  And raised her mind above this sordid earth. . . .

  Reared by Two Friends who will her loss bemoan,

  Till with Her Ashes . . . Here shall rest, Their own.

  They were as good as their word. The plaque on the second side is “Sacred to the Memory of the Right Honorable Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler,” deceased June 2, 1829, aged ninety years, with every title and relationship to a title toted up (“Daughter of the Sixteenth, Sister of the Seventeenth Earls of Ormonde and Ossory, Aunt to the Late and to the Present Marquess of Ormonde”). Never mind that her Irish relatives would have nothing to do with her.

  The list of her attributes, surely written by Sarah, include “Brilliant Vivacity of Mind,” “Delight,” “Excellence of Heart and . . . Manners worthy of Her Illustrious Birth,” “amiable Condescension and Benevolence,” and “various Perfections.” All these virtues, the plaque assures the reader, are, together with their possessor, now “enjoying their Eternal Reward, and by Her of whom for more than Fifty Years they constituted that Happiness Which . . . She trusts will be renewed When THIS TOMB Shall have closed Over Its Latest Tenant.” A tongue-twisting form of bereavement from the grieving Sarah, a longing for death. That is, for reunion. Amazing—what would it be like to believe that? To see him again.