Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 5

Jane Eyre

When I first read Jane Eyre, perhaps at age twelve or thirteen, I was intolerable for months. Southern California was very short on wild moors, and I longed for them. A little breathlessly I imagined a great love for a difficult man worthy of my affections. So captivated was I that  I pined for the 19th century in general.

I have returned to Jane Eyre  many times, and certainly it is one of those books that in re-reading, one gauges one’s own progress through the world, the havoc or wisdom (or both) that experience wreaks upon the individual. For myself, as often as I have read it, my admiration for Jane’s bravery—her agency, to use the current phrase— remains undimmed.  I have the same undiminished admiration for Charlotte Bronte’s courage, her pluck (to use the 19th century word) her sheer, bull-headed insistence on seeing this novel and her other books into a world that would prefer that she and women like her fade into the wainscoting of homes they did not own.

I no longer pine for the moors. Visiting the Bronte parsonage on a summer day some years ago quickly disabused me of cheerful notions of 19th century life. The chillblains in the house were palpable, and I shudder to think of the drains and the water supply so close to that sad graveyard. I no longer see as quaint the 19th century where women like Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, Emily and Anne, if they did not marry,  could only aspire to the role of governesses, that is to say, live at the mercy of grim employers, thankless brats, poor pay, and if they grew old, to live impoverished and without resources.   Charlotte, Emily and Anne chafed at these assumptions, restrictions, expectations. They wrote their way out of them. In these novels, there is a strong, one might even say a savage undercurrent of dissatisfaction.

Contented Women Don’t Write Novels

“I may be poor and plain…..” Jane declares. Nonetheless she insists on her independence and her own self-worth. Once made aware of the existence of the madwoman, Bertha Rochester (and on her wedding day, no less!) Jane will not consent to be Rochester’s mistress though she loves him.  An unhallowed union like that is unthinkable to her. For very different reasons it is also unthinkable that she should marry the clergyman, St. John Rivers, though he saved her life. Even reading the book at age thirteen, I was glad that Jane did not succumb to his pious blandishments. For all his Christian principles, there is something truly creepy about Reverend Rivers.  When, as it turns out, Jane comes into money, her core self is unchanged by the windfall. And that too testifies to her sense of self-worth. In short, neither the brutal adversarial conditions of her aunt’s house, of Lowood School, of near-death upon the moors, nor a surfeit of good fortune could erode her essential integrity. That’s what makes her a heroine.

To see oneself as the heroine of one’s own life is an occupational hazard of bookish girls. At one point, in my twenties, my mother reminded me pointedly I was not, actually, a heroine in a novel. At one point in my thirties, she told me, I was a heroine and I should continue to insist on my own self-worth, no matter what.

I know now that one cannot be a heroine without facing challenges. That’s how heroism is created, or excavated, or however it unfolds in any particular life. The  heroine doesn’t have to go to the brutal Lowood School, or be mistreated by nasty relatives. For bookish girls Jane Eyre, the heroine provides a sort of guide through the thicket of experience, like loving a difficult man worthy of one’s affections.  I can still thrill to the lines, Reader, I married him, but that thrill is tempered with pity that Jane should have the lifelong care and feeding of a wreck of a man who, even with his sight partially restored would doubtless remain difficult and never mellow.

For bookish girls who grow up to be writers, Jane Eyre offers a more vivid beacon. As an aspiring writer, I took heart from Charlotte Bronte’s struggles. Each time her first novel, The Professor, was rejected, Charlotte Bronte, then calling herself Currer Bell, would simply ink out the name of the rejecting publisher and send it on to someone else without ever changing the parcel-paper.  Thus, each new prospective publisher could see the book had been turned down many times. I often thought of this when (back in the day) a manuscript would be returned to me with a coffee stain or a blot of mustard. Well, I thought, at least they read it. Or some of it.

For Charlotte, the editor at Smith and Elder declined  The Professor, but he returned the manuscript “so courteously, so considerately” that Currer Bell wrote a note thanking him, and saying that another novel was now almost finished and would he like to read that? That second novel—which in fact, he could not put down from the first time he held the manuscript in his hands—was Jane Eyre. I reminded myself of this anecdote many times in the seven years (and many drafts) between the publication of my first novel, and my second. And indeed, since then.

Famously Jean Rhys took heart (and took issue) with Jane Eyre both the book and the heroine, in her famous  Wide Sargasso Sea, an origin story for the mad Bertha Rochester. (Such an ugly name!). Bertha appears as the lovely, flawed Antoinette in her Caribbean island element before her marriage to Rochester.  I first picked up Wide Sargasso Sea in a used bookstore, enchanted by the title, no idea at all that it was linked to  Jane Eyre. As the hints accelerate (without the names for clues) the reader keeps feeling that she knows the story, but only at the end, did it come on me that Antoinette became Bertha. One of the most intense literary shocks of my whole random reading career!

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also took heart and took issue with Jane Eyre in their famous tome, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979 a work of feminist lit crit that lit up (not to say blazed through) the ranks of women readers and writers when it was first published—which also happened to be the era that I was starting out as a writer. Gilbert and Gubar seemed to say, “Let us slay The Angel in the House! Let’s wield our pens like swords! Perish that noble, self-abnegating paragon of domesticity that we’ve been culturally attuned to aspire to.”

About this same time Virago Press, unleashed a whole slew of books by lesser known, even unknown women writers, and the banging in the literary attic reached a kind of crescendo. We’re up here! We’ve always been up here! We were always making noise and making waves and no doubt making enemies! How could we not? How exciting it was to come upon all those 19th century women writers like Charlotte and Emily and Anne Bronte, like Elizabeth Gaskell, like Mary Braddon and Mrs. Oliphant and others whose careers were desperate, brave, tragic and anything but prim. Across the chasm of decades they shouted to us literary women:  You want to be a writer? You need to be brave. You want to be a woman writer? Get ready for a struggle. You want to be a writer and a mother? Strap on your armor along with your diaper bag. Be ready to be ruthless about your time. Be ready to make sacrifices and compromises you cannot even imagine. To make mistakes. To be fierce on behalf of your work, your aspirations, your kids. You will get tired. You will get discouraged. You will get pissed off.

All true. How right they were.

Charlotte Bronte married the curate in her father’s parish in 1854, and died with her unborn child in March 1855, at thirty-eight years old. Her husband did not die until 1906. She outlived all of her siblings. Her old father outlived her by years. In 1857 her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of her, an intimate biography by 19th century standards. The Life of Charlotte Bronte is a wonderful book, and a good introduction, but it can only barely suggest the ink-stained energy, the onslaught of words and ambition and exhortation and disappointment, and loss, the fears, the deaths and heartbreak that cascaded through the life of Charlotte Bronte.

The Professor, that first novel, she so furiously sent out time and again to an unheeding world? That was published posthumously.

Memoir in a Jar

I opened the back door and walked into a house that was cold, dark, empty, and worst of all, silent. I had just returned from taking my youngest son to university 1300 miles away where he joined his brother. The day your child leaves home  is every bit as momentous as the day he enters it—except that with a new baby, your energies are absorbed for the next eighteen years. Now, I had no such focus. No focus outside of my work. What to do with all that energy?

Other parents I knew, friends  confronted with empty nests, responded in various ways. Some got divorced. (Been there, done that.) Some started traveling. (Two sons in college, no chance of that.)  Kitchen remodel? (No way.) Get a dog?  (Not with my antique rugs.) I  heard anecdotes of Empty Nesters who bought sports cars, took up salsa dancing, yoga, Zumba, weaving, community theatre.  And then there are the inspiring tales of people who founded non-profits, tutored at-risk kids, volunteered at the Food Bank, boldly joined the Peace Corps in their fifties. Fine, laudable adventurous undertakings, but not for me. No, I started on what became an orgy of canning and pickling. While my peers were looking to the future,  I was looking to the past.

…it could be truly said that  I would pickle anything that couldn’t outrun me.

Was it some hereditary gene kicking in? Some DNA gift of my father’s Mormon ancestors, women who were famous for “putting things up,” or “putting by.” Or was it, more likely, the slow, unwelcome recognition, the fear that amid life’s dynamics, perhaps nothing can be preserved? The days of my sons’ childhood—days that had seemed endless, both timeless and seasonal—those were gone; they could be recalled but not replicated. I wanted nothing less than to preserve time.

Although I had never made anything more demanding than freezer jam, I rigged up the stock pot for processing Mason jars. At garage sales, with the competitive sisterhood of canning mavens, I rummaged through boxes seeking cheap Mason jars. I bought a recipe book, but  my  ambitions swiftly expanded, and for a time it could be truly said that  I would pickle anything that couldn’t outrun me. I was buying cider vinegar in two gallon jugs and going through boxes of pickling salt, packages of lids and jars at an alarming rate. No longer content with the old stock pot, I invested in a huge processing pan with a lift-out insert. I bought more books, about food preservation in medieval times, the 16th and 17th centuries, 19th century manuals. I propped them open so often that spines on these books cracked, and the pages got splashed, dog-eared, and filled with sticky-notes, scribbled dates and outcomes.

I made up a recipe, Summer in a Jar, fresh tomatoes, newly-cut mint, garlic and peppers.   Month after month, season after season, the jars lined up on the kitchen shelves, each with the contents noted and the date. Some I gave away, collecting applause from friends. Some I used myself. Many just stayed, collected on the cupboard shelves, little labeled  triumphs against time, against erosion, against the ebbing of memory. In all this furious activity, I had one goal: when that jar got opened I wanted to taste the sunshine, the season. I wanted to savor the dew still on the just-picked green beans, the spicy freshness of the tomato, the promise of ripe peaches.

In my passion for preservation I developed new respect, new insight into my Mormon ancestors, indeed for all those people in the past who endured cold winters with limited light and fuel. Failure  to preserve their harvests could cost them their lives. And the herculean effort needed! The 17th century recipe to “Paper Your Plums” read like epic poetry, Beowulf, maybe. I tried my best to follow it, imagining lovely little sugary confections, but my plums withered, wizened.  Enchanted with a medieval recipe to “lay down rose petals in salt,” I followed those procedures, but moisture clumped up the salt, and within days the petals had visibly dissolved.

Undaunted by these failures, I bought great lugs of tomatoes, made marinara sauce and canned it all.  At a summer party a friend gave me an armful of bright yellow plums; I left immediately, and raced home to preserve them as chutney while their juices still popped sticky on their skins.  I bought twenty pounds of peaches, put them up with allspice, cloves and cinnamon sticks, delighted with their bronzy glow. Autumns  I made corn relish and put up cranberry sauce and brandied apples.  I became the Ant in the story of  Grasshopper and the Ant,  the embodiment of industrious preservation (as opposed to the heedless revelry of the Grasshopper).  Oh, I was just full of industrious preservation, working against time to pickle, preserve, cap and process the present.

At the same time I  also put my energies into writing a long novel, American Cookery. This book used recipes as a central metaphor uniting women’s lives and experience over several generations, and across the immigrant experience.  By the time I recognized that the story was too big and unwieldy for one novel, I was contractually obliged, and personally committed. The final manuscript was turned in two years late and two hundred pages longer than the editor wanted. It was published with tiny print. Though my passion for preserving did not outlive the novel, the recipe for Summer in a Jar is on page 158.

REVEL VS. PRESERVE

Some years later, (both sons had graduated from college, and one had got married; the book had been published and paperbacked) in a moment of critical evaluation, I opened that cupboard. I stared at the jars all lined up.  One by one I opened them and nibbled on the contents.

To preserve  suggests fixity, but at the cost of exuberance.

Summer in a Jar did not taste like summer, though the tomatoes remained plump. The pickled roasted peppers retained their bright color and texture, but only the taste of vinegar remained. Ditto the cranberry relish, and the color was a sad mauve. The green beans were rubbery, and their color dull. The marinara had lost its piquancy. Of the jars of peaches, only the stick cinnamon, the clove and the hard nub of allspice remained; the essence of peach had fled, the fruit gone mushy.  The strawberry chutney, always an experiment, had turned to a sickly ooze.  In some of the chutneys only the raisins retained their shape and presence in what was otherwise sludge. The yellow plum chutney (for which I had fled the summer party) had turned to a molasses-black color and the fruit dissolved, though  the hot peppers still bit back. Which brings me back to the Grasshopper and the Ant, the heedless reveler and the industrious preserver. To preserve  suggests fixity, but at the cost of exuberance. Into the trash, one after the other went the contents of these jars.

Though nothing I preserved had outright rotted, all had assuredly changed. Elements that had once been co-equal and co-operative (the fruit, the spices, the vinegar) had altered their relationships. Which is exactly what happens to the past over time. I should have regarded those jars as chapters in a memoir. Like writing memoir, I had attempted, in a self-conscious process, to preserve, to render into remembrance what was finite, fleeting.  In any life, in any family, even the most memorable days slide under the waters and are washed out to a vast sea in which they are undifferentiated, difficult, impossible to recall individually. Some incidents get shaped into anecdotes, a preserving process which in itself fashions, edits, tidies the contents, brings order to the past before capping it into a story to be told later.

Using my surplus energies to try to put Summer in a Jar was a fine, but futile undertaking. Can one balance the cyclic and repeatable in one’s life, with the linear and finite? Summer will always come again, but any particular summer?  That summer has fled, and in trying to preserve, I failed to revel, and that was my loss.

Summer in a Jar

Toss your tomatoes briefly in boiling water, fetch them out with a slotted spoon in a few minutes when the skin starts to split. Place in a bowl to catch juices. ( You can make a nice salad of these peeled tomatoes too while you’re at it. When they’re cool, slip them out of their skins and into a salad bowl. Dress with bit of oil, vinegar and some freshly cut mint and parsley. Set aside till suppertime.)

To pickle your tomatoes, use small jars, ½ pint. Into each sterilized jar, place one clove of peeled garlic, some pepper corns, one or two red dried chili peppers. Then put in your tomatoes, pressing down.

Heat equal parts red wine vinegar, and water, l tsp pickling salt and a bit of sugar. Bring to a boil so that sugar and salt are dissolved. Pour over tomatoes, leaving about a quarter inch headroom. In each jar, slide a sprig rosemary or thyme. Important to use herbs that have some stems and rigor to them. Otherwise they wilt and don’t’ look good in the jars.

Cap with hot two piece caps and process ten minutes in boiling water, as per canning instructions. Remove carefully from hot water bath. Place the jars on a towel and leave until completely cool. Test the center of the lid. If there is no “give,” your seal is fine and you can unscrew the ring. Keep in a cool dark place for at least three weeks before using. Best opened in January when the savor of summer can be yours all over again. Preserved thus, they will keep for years.

We Need to Gather: November 9th, 2016

The phone kept pinging in the night, text after text, for the most part, as I glanced at them, numbers without names. I tried to sleep through them. I tried to sleep at all. I didn’t want to wake up to a world where Donald Trump would be the President of the United States.

When I recognized the primary text coming from a dear friend: We need to gather, she wrote as shock and horror rippled through our collective cohort of writers, artists, teachers, therapists, booksellers and assorted others. My house, I texted back to everyone whether I knew them or not. Come to my house.

Getting ready for everyone to arrive that morning, looking out the kitchen window, I was astonished to see children going to the nearby elementary school, as if this were just another Wednesday. How could they? The world had clearly changed in some hideous way. I kept trying to imagine Hillary and Bill and Chelsea sitting across from one another this morning, stupefied as the rest of us, more so. We had been anticipating this moment, the first woman president, since Barack Obama was elected to a second term. Now! Now! Now would be our moment! Now we would have a woman president…..Now….Hilary Clinton, a Secretary of State had lost to a dumpster? (No notion then that she had lost to a lot of Russian bots, Vladimir lickspittles and assorted slimeballs.)

People straggled into my kitchen starting around ten. Everyone brought something to eat, brought wine. I made a pot of soup and cornbread. We began drinking early. What else was there to do? We moaned and bemoaned. Tears were useless. So were questions, but we asked questions nonetheless. We wrung our hands and raised our voices, bewailing the many disgusting dumpster moments. (Access Hollywood tapes? “Russia, if you’re listening…” Hovering behind Hilary like Grim Death on the debate stage, nasty women, rallying, hate, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-NATO…) Sometimes we didn’t talk, we just regarded one another like zombies from The Walking Dead. Some stayed for hours. Some came late. All day long my local friends drifted in and out of my kitchen, well past the early dusk.

That very night I joined the ACLU and the NAACP. I bought the online subscription to the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Had previously only read the free stuff). I hoped, even if I didn’t altogether believe that surely this was a terrible error, and even if it wasn’t, then surely the dumpster was so ostentatiously corrupt that we could be rid of him in a year or so. Right?

And yet. Here we are, three years out from that day that we needed to gather, and the dumpster is still in power, still throttling the American public and the world with one ghastly shock after another, and only now, at last, three years into this nightmare, is he facing impeachment. Public hearings start Wednesday. Good. I long to see him, as the old Nixonian phrase has it, “twist in the wind.”

However, We Need to Gather, that simple text my friend sent out, became a rallying cry not just for the group of us here, but everywhere! January, 2017, the Women’s March! The outcry against the Muslim ban, the coalition broadly known as Indivisibles, the onslaught of people who protested in the capitol when they threatened to strip Obamacare from millions. We need to gather! This terrible emergency brought us together.

November 9th, 2016, I, for one, believed, hoped that the press and the courts could save us. The dumpster quickly began the process of eviscerating the courts, placing far-right judges in lifetime positions (and thus endearing himself to all those good conservatives with their good conservative values…..). He has railed at the press, threatened them, called them liars and smeared them with epithets from his limited vocabulary. But the press has endured, and gone on to truth-tell. The courts may wobble for another generation, but right now judges are (so far) not collapsing in front of corruption even if the Justice Department itself has collapsed.

But after three years, who still has the heart or strength or emotional wherewithal anymore to gather? Some of my friends have just bowed out of the news. They can’t take it. I don’t blame them. I can’t take it, but somehow I sit in front of Rachel Maddow every night and hope against hope she’ll give me some little glimmer of….

Every morning I still hate to wake up in a universe where that dumpster is the President of the United States.

Every morning I remember the Reverend Al Green.

On a visit to Memphis visit some years ago my friends took me to the Reverend Al Green’s church. This was one of the great religious experiences of my life, right up there with the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, or Notre-Dame in Paris, though Reverend Al’s was a modest church, the building undistinguished. Inside, though, the solemnity and civility, cordiality among people—those who knew each, and those who didn’t, black and white—was spiced with a sense of anticipation. (Musicians traveling through Memphis were known to forswear their hangovers, crawl out of bed and show up to play at Al Green’s church. Sure enough, you could have come just to hear the sax man.) The service, like a rock concert, had a couple of warm-up acts, preachers who had some of the congregation in the aisles, and the plate got passed again and again and everyone, moved by the spirit, was parting with their money just as fast as they could.

But when the Reverend Al got up there, he let all that electricity die down, ebb. He started out slow. Telling stories that at first seemed unconnected, anecdotes really, of sadness, loss, misery and vexation of every sort, all of the stories punctuated at the end with the phrase, I’m still here, Lord! Yes, no matter the woe, the sufferer could stand up and say, I’m still here, Lord! And before long everyone in the church (which by now was filled to capacity) was ringing, their voices in concert with Al Green’s, I’m still here, Lord! To the point where I was weeping, and I was not alone.

I think of the Reverend Al and that church when the world around me has often felt so tattered and hopeless, so frigging grim and sunk in the depraved swamps of dumpster and his minions, that my spirit sinks. I remind myself, I’m still here. We’re still here. The ACLU is still here! And the NAACP is still here! The press is still here! We have all lived through these past three years, and we’re still here, and there’s an election just one more year away.

This time, in the words of a famous rock anthem, we won’t be fooled again.  We’re going to get it right, to do it right, and on November 4th, 2020 when we need to gather, this time it will be to rejoice. Or, god help us.

Centennial Memoir

I am here because of incidents a hundred years ago in Adana, a city in the far southeastern corner of Turkey.

Every family has a few cherished
stories about how they came  to be who
they are, anecdotes of some ancestor, someone 
clever or determined, someone lucky, or fated or foolhardy. Certainly
every Armenian family has a story about how they survived the 1915 genocide.  For Armenians, these stories always
apocryphal: after all, if someone hadn’t survived, the teller wouldn’t be here,
and their relatives would not be here, and their children and grandchildren
would not, and would never be here.  
Indeed, I am here because of incidents a hundred years ago in Adana, a
city in the far southeastern corner of Turkey. These circumstances,  including the intervention of a brave
American teacher, allowed Haroutune and Haigouhi Kalpakian to survive the
genocide. A few years later they emigrated to Los Angeles in 1923 with their
two little daughters, Angagh and Pakradouhi, as well as Haigouhi’s younger
brother.  They rode the train from New
York to  Los Angeles where they were met
by Haigouhi’s older brother and sister who had emigrated years before, and
sponsored them.

Pakradouhi Kalpakian was a toddler in October 1923. Now, nearly one hundred years later, Peggy Kalpakian (her name change is official on her citizenship papers)  has written A CENTENNIAL MEMOIR. Of all Peggy’s immediate family (parents, three sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins) she is the only one still alive. The solemn burden, the responsibility  of having outlived everyone impelled her to pick up the pen in 2017 when she was 95 years old. She set out to commit these stories to the page in honor of those who were gone, and to preserve their stories and photos for those who are yet to come. 

Her slender, 118 page book  honors her parents, their journey, their struggles in America,  their becoming proud American citizens in 1931.  It begins with “The Old Country,” briefly describing their lives as Armenians living in Turkey, and their marriage in October 1917. Chapter 2 recounts “The Journey,” and chapter 3, “The New Country” about their lives in Los Angeles. Peggy had thought her book would stop around 1941 when Harry and Helen Kalpakian bought the house at 8645 West Olympic Boulevard. (They would live the rest of their lives there, my grandfather dying in 1963.)  But, as often happens for a writer, new ideas came to her. New stories grew out of the old ones. She had new ambitions to broaden the book beyond her own immediate family to include the lives of her aunts and uncles. The memoir bloomed into some nine chapters, plus a glossary of Armenian terms, sections on Armenian names, on family recipes, farewells, Hojah stories (folk tales that my grandfather loved to tell).  The book also grew larger in scope and concept because while she was writing, we were able to reconnect with Kalpakians living in Europe.

All of the Kalpakians left Turkey after World War I, all of them into the diaspora, the US, Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Romania.  My grandfather never saw any of them again. His youngest brother, Nishan traveling on a French passport, went to Romania. There Nishan married and had two children, and made a life. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, because he was not a Romanian citizen, Nishan and his family, were ordered to leave.  They moved to France where they struggled during the Nazi Occupation when Nishan was conscripted. He died in 1970 in Marseilles.

Citizenship Papers!

Thanks to the internet (and  the genealogical enthusiasms of Jenk Stephenson, husband of my cousin Patty) we reconnected with Nishan’s daughter, 85 year old Arminé Kaloustian—my mother’s only remaining first cousin. Arminé lives near Lyon, France, and one of her daughters, Astrid,  has excellent English so we could email back and forth, exchanging stories and pictures.   Summer 2018  we actually reunited when Astrid, her husband and daughter visited Southern California. Nearly one hundred years after the brothers Haroutune and Nishan had been torn apart, their descendants met.  Though my mom could not be with us—she is too old to travel—this  story too went into her book.

CENTENNIAL MEMOIR is personal, heartfelt and heart-warming. Peggy tells the family’s apocryphal tales of harrowing escapes, unthinkably fortunate coincidences in the old country.  But she also tells of a charmed childhood in 1920’s Los Angeles, school days during the Depression,  her parents’ careful frugality and emphasis on education.  The Kalpakians assimilated swiftly, eagerly, shed their old country selves without hesitation, or a backward glance. These two photos  of my grandmother document that eagerness to be American. The one, 1924, the year after they came, the other 1926, a mere two years later.  Short hair, short skirt, silk stockings, high heels. I would never describe my grandmother as a flapper, but she is certainly stylish. They became American citizens, Harry and Helen Kalpakian in 1931.

Grandma 1924

Haroutune Kalpakian spoke Turkish, Armenian, a little Arabic and some French, but  no English when he arrived in Los Angeles. In just a few years he went from working in a kewpie doll factory to owning a series of small grocery stores; his wife worked by his side; the daughters stocked the shelves and looked after one another. Thus, it was  altogether fitting that Peggy launched CENTENNIAL MEMOIR with a party at a small middle-eastern grocery and café,  Mediterranean Specialties, a favorite place of ours because the scents remind us of my grandfather’s stores.

Grandma 1926

Entering Mediterranean  Specialties that afternoon, my mom shed tears of happiness.“I never thought I would live to see this day!” she cried, arms open wide, face alight with joy.   She signed books, drank wine, nibbled on middle-eastern delights, and accepted the applause and recognition her hard work deserved.

Peggy, with the galleys of her new book.

That day was one of the happiest of Peggy Kalpakian Johnson’s whole life, all 97 years. 

Peggy Kalpakian Johnson is at work on a new memoir about the postwar years. Stay tuned.

Kalpakains’ new car LA  1926:  three little girls in the rumble seat

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Robin stole from the rich,  despised the greedy plutocrats, and in acts of social justice, gave to the poor, the hungry. As a child in Southern California, I knew nothing of class struggle, but I was all on the side of Robin and his Merry Men.

In the early 1950’s my parents bought their first house.  They financed it with the GI Bill, and the mortgage was $55 a month. Our neighborhood was but one of many tracts that sprang up all over post war San Fernando Valley: six long blocks parallel to one another, lined with homes, two styles and three colors to choose from (green stucco, gray stucco, or a sickly peach stucco). Before each house, on the strip of dirt between the street and the sidewalk (referred to as the parkway) little elms were staked. No lawns or gardens, nothing but dirt when we moved in.  The tract was bracketed at one end by an alfalfa field, and at the other by a defunct pear orchard and the remains of a chicken ranch. Within a few years all that was gone too, and there were more tract houses. I have no recollection whatever of the bulldozers, the dust and racket all that construction must surely have raised. I remember only lovely, hot summers, reading and playing imaginary games in the backyard, roller skating, riding bikes and watching television.

Helen, 1953

We had a television before
1952 when my sister, Helen, was born.  A
squat box, it sat on four stumpy legs, and for a time had  little rabbit ears antenna. Three networks
and three local LA stations played across the screen. Up and down Beckford
Avenue on summer nights, laugh tracks in unison spilled from the open doors,
and families sat rapt, their faces bathed in flickering gray light.  

Bill Johnson & kids, 1953

My postwar generation was the
first to have television influence much of our lives. The radio might play in
the kitchen while you were doing something else, but people sat down purposely
to watch television. Television gave shape to our childhood days, from
preschool Sheriff John and the Lunch Brigade, to afternoon kiddie
cartoon shows with  Popeye and Betty Boop
and Felix the Cat from the 1920’s and ‘30’s (thus, unknowingly, introducing us
to our parents’ cultural diet ) the puppet shows, Beanie and Cecil, and Thunderbolt
the Wonder Colt. A little later came the Mickey Mouse Club and  American Bandstand (where, shock!
there were black teens as well as white!!)

The Adventures of Robin Hood

But among these kiddie shows,
my favorite by far was  The Adventures
of Robin Hood.  Made, financed, and
distributed by the British, the series ran for four seasons and the cast
included names that would become stellar in British film and theatre. Interiors
were filmed at Nettlefold Studios, exteriors at Foxwarren Park, an estate in
Surrey owned by the producer, Hannah Weinstein.

However, Hannah was an
American who had fled New York during the McCarthy era. She chose her writers
from a great pool of exiled American talent. Writers who had once commanded
glamourous salaries and lounged by Hollywood pools, had fled to England when
faced with the prospects of  prison, or
being unable to work at all.  Some of
these writers like Adrian Scott (Crossfire, 1943 and Mr. Lucky,
1940, one of the original Hollywood Ten) 
had already served time in prison before coming England. These left-wing
writers must have had a great time (if not great pay) writing  The Adventures of Robin Hood.  After all, Sir Robin is born to the manor, but
prefers the forest and the company of comrades. 
Robin stole from the rich, 
despised the greedy plutocrats, and in acts of social justice, gave to
the poor, the hungry. As a child in Southern California, I knew nothing class
struggle, but I was all on the side of Robin and his Merry Men.

 In  the
1991 film Guilty by Suspicion, Robert deNiro plays a blacklisted
director, a man once powerful, who flees to England when he is branded as a
Commie in the 1950’s. He ends up working on an unnamed kiddie TV program set in
the middle ages and filmed at a castle.

Far from the castles of England,  I reveled in this series. I never missed an episode. For my birthday my parents got me a toy bow-and-arrow set (arrows with suction cups on the end) and a target they pinned to the backyard fence my dad built.  I would practice archery, usually wearing green. But I had no idea that dialogue on the lips of Robin, Marian, Friar Tuck, Little John and others came from the pens of Adrian Scott, Waldo Salt (later, Midnight Cowboy, 1969 and Coming Home, Serpico) Ring Lardner Jr. (Woman of the Year, and later M*A*S*H* 1970) Howard Koch (Letter to an Unknown Woman, 1948 and contributed to Casablanca). Their lines appeared, but their names did not. Had these names been in the credits, The Adventures of Robin Hood would have never got US distribution. They used pseudonyms, or on some episodes, they just left off the writers’ credit altogether.

The Adventures of Robin
Hood is my only connection to writers
whose stories I used in creating The Great Pretenders, but the series
lives on my memory as stirring television. The theme song too remains
indelible:

“Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, With his band of men
Feared by the bad, Loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

He called the greatest archers to a tavern on the green
They vowed to help the people of the king
They handled all the trouble on the English country scene
And still found plenty of time to sing”

I, personally, can still sing
this theme song. I won’t, but I can.

Frontiers: Immigrants and Pioneers

[image error]

Contented people do not uproot, repudiate their pasts and move on. To leave one’s home or homeland requires energy, strength, determination, or maybe just desperation. Somewhere in the past of all American families, such restless people exist, people who crossed frontiers of every sort.  To cross the frontier in an American context suggests a confrontation with nature, venturing into unknowable dangers, unmapped places. My father’s people, the Johnsons, were Mormon pioneers.  To cross the frontier in a European context suggests a confrontation with history, with language and identity: one shows one’s papers, declares one’s origins, crosses into another country, becoming foreign. The Kalpakians were Armenian immigrants, leaving Turkey, coming to Los Angeles in 1923.

Whether immigrants or
pioneers, in their hearts and minds these people carry their memories and
music, their recipes, their religion, for some their old languages. In short,
they bear with them old identities that cannot be declared at Customs, nor
tossed out of overladen Conestogas rumbling west. Over time, for immigrants and
pioneers alike, their remembered identities and adventures are gradually
converted into narrative, family stories that refine difficult, even painful
experience into the well-made, oft-told tale. These narratives become anecdotal
inheritance passed down to the generations that follow. Collectively these
stories preserve family identity. Eventually (however diminished the nugget of
truth at the center) they evolve into truth.  They are believed.

[image error]Turkish Passport

The Johnsons, a huge,
garrulous tribe of mostly rural Latter-day Saints, have many stories
chronicling their trials and triumphs, especially triumphs: how they outsmarted
someone, or enjoyed some miraculous piece of good luck, how they (especially
the men) were brilliant. In their tales everyone is devout, there’s no
heartbreak, and certainly no divorce; death is preferable to divorce.

[image error]The Johnson kids

The urban and urbane Kalpakians
committed their past to silence. My Armenian grandparents sank their old country
lives—war, genocide, deportation, unthinkable loss—into a silence so profound
that the past was deprived of narrative oxygen. With three exceptions. From all
that was otherwise unspeakable, my Armenian grandmother fashioned three
charming stories, The Cup of Coffee Story! The Hot Water Tap Story! The
Dumb-bell Story! Each was a reiterated telling of smooth and shapely tales
purged of pain, and told in exactly the same way with an exclamation point and
an assuredly happy ending!

When I first began to write fiction seriously in 1973 I began with her three stories and replaced that exclamation point with a question mark, asking what lies beyond and surrounding the well-told tale. I published these stories in America and internationally. But in truth, I am still writing and revising these stories, still asking questions; the more I know of the past, the more questions I have. Beginning with These Latter Days, I explored the Johnson family past in fictions I created.  But I have never written a book-length memoir because I cannot reconcile the pioneers and the immigrants. The two stories simply would not entwine. Why? Well, think on this: both of my grandfathers were born in 1887, Haroutune Kalpakian in Mersin, a Turkish port city on the eastern Mediterrean, and William A Johnson junior in a dugout, a shelter propped up with beams and covered with a sod roof in Madison County, Idaho.

My father’s people were
Mormon converts all; the Johnsons came from Sweden in the 19th
century. A vast tribe (my grandfather was one of twelve children, eleven lived
to adulthood) they moved westward to Zion, and on to Idaho hauling their goods
and families in wagons or pushing handcarts, and later they moved up and down
the mountain West in rackety cars. They farmed and failed, remained restless,
often impoverished, and lived in rugged, ragged circumstances. No joke: my dad,
Bill Johnson, started high school living in a log cabin.  After high school in 1937 he went to Ricks
College in Rexburg, Idaho. (Only he and one other of the forty Johnson cousins
went to college.) He was about to enroll at University of Utah when Pearl
Harbor was bombed. Bill Johnson joined the Marines, transferring later to the
Navy where he saw action on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Stationed at
Long Beach, California, he met Peggy Kalpakian, a USC student, at a USO dance. Six
months later they married, and after the war they remained in Southern
California, close to her Armenian family. Ironically (long story) we kids were
raised in the Mormon church.

Summer vacations, my father
drove us all to Utah and Idaho to see his relatives.  Amid these bland, fair-haired Mormons with
their slack grammar and flat voices, I knew I was not like them.  When I went to Armenian picnics with Grandma,
and had my cheeks pinched by smiling old folks who spoke Armenian to her, I
knew I was not like them either. I was different from the Armenians because
they didn’t speak English. I was different from the Mormons because they did.
In short, I knew who I wasn’t. I grew up on a sort of ethnic frontier, an
undefined edge, constantly fraying. This is an uneasy place to live, but it is
fruitful ground for a fiction writer.

 Writers are always advised: write from what
you know. I have  more often written from
what I don’t know, what vexes or haunts or troubles me. Growing up in sunny Southern
California I was surrounded by Armenians who made light narratives of their
earthly pain. I was raised in the Mormon church that alternated milk-and-honey
estates in heaven with the grisly suffering of sinners in the afterlife. While
I never could reconcile the two, the combination has endowed me with more than
curiosity, with ungovernable empathy. I remain alert, always, to both stories
and silences, asking not simply what then? but what if?....

High Noon

While High Noon was in
production, no one associated with it would have dreamed that it would be
nominated for seven Oscars, that it would win four, that it would rank as one
of the best westerns of all time. The studio originally treated it as a
throwaway, a black-and-white oater.  Not
until it was completed, and all the pieces in place, direction, dialogue,
acting, cinematography, music, editing, and other myriad elements (film is a
collective enterprise) did its greatness slowly dawn on its creators and the
studio. That achievement still shimmers on the screen nearly seventy years
later.

The film was made in
1950,  released, 1951 at the height of
the blacklist era, and the story echoes its moment. The starring role, Sheriff
Will Kane was originally offered to John Wayne who, as a noisy supporter of the
blacklist, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for American Ideals, immediately
saw the parallels implicit in the story, and declined. (Ironically Wayne
accepted Gary Cooper’s Oscar for Best Actor on his behalf; Cooper was filming
in Europe.)

High Noon has the distinction of a movie told in real time. The
clock on the wall of Sheriff Kane’s office says 11:00. Sheriff Kane is getting
married in church. Frank Miller’s gang awaits the noon train at the station.
News that the train is bringing the vicious, vengeful Frank Miller, just
released from prison, terrifies Hadleyville. (The name is significant; remember
Mark Twain’s novella, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyville.)  Ninety minutes later, the film ends.

In the beginning the
townspeople vow to stand with the sheriff to fight Frank Miller. One by one
they slink away, sheep-like, blubbering support, but scurrying afar. They leave
Will Kane isolated and alone, facing Frank Miller and his whole brutal gang who
are determined to see him dead. The story finally coalesces around four central
characters: the madam, sultry Mexican actress, Katy Jurado, the wife, Grace
Kelly, the weasely deputy, Lloyd Bridges, the sheriff, Gary Cooper. The Miller
gang are mostly undifferentiated except for Lee Van Cleef (his first role) who manages
to terrify without a single line of dialogue.

Glen Frankel’s fine book, High
Noon: the Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic
(Bloomsbury, 2017) explores the entire blacklist era through the prism of this
one fine film. Not only was the film a parable of the blacklist, it was itself
a casualty.  In the midst of filming the
writer Carl Foreman was called before HUAC. He declined to name any of his
previous comrades in the Communist Party.  
Officially declared an uncooperative witness, and blacklisted, Foreman
had a tremendous falling out with the film’s producer Stanley Kramer. The
intricacies of their fight are still not altogether clear, but the two men,
once good friends and long- time business partners never spoke again.

 Before the film was finished, Carl Foreman had
to flee the US for England where he lived and worked for many years. Indeed,
one of the films he worked on there was David Lean’s 1957 Bridge on the
River Kwai which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The Oscar went
to Pierre Boulle, author of the novel, who did not even speak English.
Foreman’s name was nowhere in the credits. Not until 1984 was his credit
restored, as well as the credit of another blacklisted writer, Michael Wilson.
Wilson was already dead and Foreman died the following day.  Carl Foreman’s story of exile, broken
friendships, broken contracts, a busted marriage, belated recognition seems to
me emblematic of the ravages the blacklist wrought on talented men and women.

I found High Noon: the
Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic
unputdownable.  Frankel makes clear that
Gary Cooper, though a staunch conservative, conducted himself throughout this
bleak era with the kind of integrity that Will Kane demonstrates in High
Noon. Cooper had been in films since the 1920’s, and the lines that thirty
years had etched on his face are part of the power of Will Kane’s character.
(That graven face, however, makes me wonder why lovely, youthful Grace Kelly
would be marrying scarred Will Kane, but I digress.)

At the end High Noon
shows us that even though the crisis passes, nothing can ever be the same.
After ninety minutes Hadleyville knows itself to be a town of spineless
cowards. Sheriff and Mrs. Kane leave it behind. Hollywood’s punitive nightmare
lasted more than a decade, from 1947 to 1960. Nothing would ever be the same: careers
were crushed,  friendships wrecked, lives
ruined

I never tire of watching High
Noon. Unlike most films from the 1950’s, it seems to me clean, sleek. The
tensions are perfectly paced, the music (and the classic song Do Not
Forsake Me Oh My Darlin’) lope along until they too escalate with the
action. The intricate relationships of the characters play across the screen
with understated grace and intensity.

The MG

If there is some glorious afterlife where one relives moments of tremendous earthly happiness, then for me, one of those would be me driving a vintage MG convertible, zipping along on a narrow road, Pacific Ocean on one side, dry California hills on the other, music blaring. I am wearing sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat.

I endowed Roxanne Granville
with my passion for those sweet little British sports cars. “The Silver Bullet
is a difficult English car, but it has everything I love: speed, style, wire
rims, a smooth purr to the engine, and a grace on curves. On PCH I turned north
toward Malibu, where I pulled off to the side of the road, and unsnapped the
convertible top and pushed it back so I could really feel my freedom. Speeding
up PCH, to my left the sea was a dolphin-gray, and blue-gray waves broke in a
white, ruffled froth along the pale beaches.”

Other vintage sports cars,
like the Triumph and the Porsche are fine and attractive, but the MG gets under
your skin. And into your wallet. The electrical systems are iffy. MGs are prone
to overheat. They do not always start when you want them too. In truth you can
really only drive an MG if you can do your own mechanical work. I could not. My
love affair with the MG has cost me plenty, not just money, but anxiety. I was
so happy when I lived in Encinitas years ago, to see that a mere two blocks
away in my scruffy, comfy neighborhood, a guy named Charlie opened a foreign
car repair shop. Charlie himself would sometimes push my MG the two blocks to his
garage (which is still there).

In 1953 Roxanne drives an MGT. I have always lusted after one of these cars, but have never even been a passenger in one, much less driven one. The MGT with its classic boxy lines was manufactured from 1936 to 1955. It was discontinued in 1958 when they produced the MGA, very much smoother, more fluid lines, but just as fussy and unreliable.

In my youth I have driven a ‘58 MGA, a ‘59 MGA (the car battery on this one was held in place with a coat hanger for a time). I drove one MGA across country. In winter. The patron saint of travelers, St. Christopher himself vowed to disown me for such stupidity, but I did it. Driving in the desert late at night and very tired and thinking, idly dreaming somehow of marshmallows roasting on a fire, I passed beneath a overhead light. I saw that the little cab was filled with actual smoke, and that the floorboards were on fire. Yes, this MGA had wooden floors. Miles later I found a gas station, closed, but the water was still available and I put out the embers.

I had an Austin-Healy Sprite (which was wrecked, and I had to be pried out of the driver’s seat) and perhaps my favorite of all, a 1970 MGB, yellow which I also drove across country, and in the desert, the headlights failed.

I had to give up driving MGs once I became a mother. You simply cannot put a kid in one of these cars. My mother (whose children were all grown and gone) took over my MG. My sister had no kids, and she drove a red MGA for years until she started riding horses, and she could not afford both the horse, and the MGA. Although I have a picture of my eldest son, Bear, about three years old looking lovingly at the MGA parked in my parents’ yard, neither he nor his brother inherited my love of sports cars. Perhaps it’s not genetic, and certainly it’s just as well.

Bear and MG

In my current neighborhood
someone nearby owns a sweet little blue MG convertible. This time of year,
spring, I am stricken with envy and nostalgia to see him zipping along the city
streets, no doubt on his way to some imagined adventure.

Book club kit is HERE!

If you are interested in the BOOK CLUB KIT for THE GREAT PRETENDERS, it is finally here and here to stay! Feel free to try out the cocktail, meal and playlists for your immersive 50s experience. Share with your friends and book club as you enjoy reading TGP.

http://cmscontent.penguinrandomhouse....

Trumbo: The Blacklist portrayed in film

Join me, for a showing of Trumbo! May 2nd at 6 PM. I will introduce the film and talk about its connections to my novel, The Great Pretenders. Your ticket also entitles you to a glass of champagne in a nod to old Hollywood glamour. Hope to see you there.

Of the films that deal explicitly with the blacklist, Trumbo (2015) is the most successful. Dalton Trumbo, famous for his acerbic wit and fearlessness, was at his peak, the highest paid writer in Hollywood in 1947. He was certainly the most famous of the Hollywood Ten, writers and directors who were called to testify before Congress that year to answer if they were, or had they ever been Communists. They refused (often with witty repartee; they were writers, after all) basing their actions on the First Amendment, that is, on the belief that Congress had no right to inquire into their political lives, much less their comrades. They were held in contempt. For three years (and astronomical legal fees) they lost their appeals in higher courts. Finally, the Supreme Court refused to hear their case at all, thus all their convictions stood. In 1950 they went to federal prisons.

 

Bryan Cranston was deservedly nominated for Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe in the title role. His is a powerful, compelling performance. Helen Mirren’s performance as the asp-in-a-hat Hedda Hopper also garnered a lot of praise. John Goodman’s has terrific fun with his role as the sleazeball producer of a schlocky Poverty Row studio. And yet the 2015 film–which will play at the Pickford Film Center May 2nd at 6 pm–did not fare especially well critically or commercially. To my eye, the difficulty with the film is that TRUMBO shifts direction about half way through, steps away from the complexity inherent in the events, and becomes instead about the difficult adjustments obliged of the Trumbo family as they navigate his post-prison life. It becomes, in effect, a father/daughter story.

In making a historical film (or writing a historical novel) the audience has to know what’s at stake. Context must be created scenically and dramatically. In the case of the blacklist era as it reverberated through the entertainment industry, that challenge is daunting. Film as an art form is allied, even shackled to the sequential: this happens, that follows. Film loves chronology. Backstory is hard to portray. However, the roots of the blacklist, of McCarthyism in general, reached back twenty years to complicated events in the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and during the Second World War. Context for these complexities is not solved when, in TRUMBO, Dalton’s little daughter asks “Daddy, are you a Communist?” He replies with the metaphor something on the order of a peanut butter sandwich. Fine for a ten year old girl, but surely the audience deserves something more sophisticated.

In Arlen Hird (played by Louis C. K. ) the filmmakers created a composite individual whose pathos and fate are clearly meant to stand in for the lives of many. And yet, once this character is sadly dispatched, you wonder why he was in the film at all. His plight never quite ignites the meaning it is supposed to have. His fate does not resonate with sadness or with the other characters after he’s gone.

Post-prison, unable to work under his own name, Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976) took on all sorts of projects under other names, including the ignominy of writing for “Poverty Row,” small studios that churned out nonstop schlock, and throwing words into the ever-hungry maw of television. The relentless demands of this kind of work (ill-paid, heavily stressed) are vividly portrayed. We watch, cheering, when using a friend, Ian McLellan Hunter, as a front, Trumbo’s script for the (still lovely) Roman Holiday wins the Oscar for Best Writing in 1954. And then again, in 1957, another Oscar for The Brave One written under the pseudonym Robert Rich.

The film paints the actor Kirk Douglas in a heroic role in trying to get his famous picture Spartacus (1960) made, insisting that Dalton Trumbo write it, and put his name on it. The rapturous reception of Spartacus marks a convenient end to the Blacklist era, though not to the end of its destructions and the controversies which go on to this day. Thus, it was odd to me that the film ends with a public moment near the end of Trumbo’s life when he famously said there were no heroes or villains in the blacklist era, only victims. The family all stand and applaud, looking dewy and joyous. This assessment was wildly controversial in 1976. It’s an assertion that many would still dispute. Me among them.

I was writing The Great Pretenders in the fall of 2015 when Trumbo came out. I was mad to see it, but it had somehow fizzled even before release, and despite its all star cast, it did not show on any screens in Bellingham. The Pickford Film Center is going to rectify that. You can see it at the Pickford–one night only–May 2nd at 6 PM. I will introduce the film and talk about its connections to my novel. Your ticket also entitles you to a glass of champagne in a nod to old Hollywood glamour. Hope to see you there.

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