If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!
― Shel Silverstein 

The Gormenghast Trilogy is a series of novels authored by Mervyn Peake between 1946 and the early 50s. I’ve recommended them here before. In 2000 the first two novels were made into a four-part miniseries by the BBC.

The books achieved near cult status in the 70s—borderline Tolkein—but faded from popularity, except for a few hardcore enthusiasts. I suppose many were disappointed with the small-screen adaptation of Peake’s epic: How could the sweep of his tale be crabbed into four short hours? The casting, however, was skillful, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing the role of Steerpike long before the actor’s fame as Henry VIII in “The Tudors”.  If you’d like to borrow the “Gormenghast” DVD, just ask. But when you view it, please be sure to watch the supplementary material taking us behind the scenes. Curiously, one of the Gormenghast cast was Stephen Fry, who speaks of author Mervyn Peake (whom he never knew) and the important difference between fantasy and imagination.

I think tonight of several threads in the story: Stephen Fry, for example, has been a prominent spokesperson for atheism (perhaps more interesting to me than those who read this). Curiously, however, C. S. Lewis, the Narnia author and Christian apologist, had good things to say about Peake [“[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”], and Lewis was himself a close friend of Tolkein, and both of them were in turn, especially in their religiosity, creatures of G. K. Chesterton. I’ve always been skeptical of that unctuous trinity of authors—Chesterton, Tolkein and Lewis—for that reason alone: their cloying religiosity. So, for C. S. Lewis and Stephen Fry to say good things about Mervyn Peake is, for me, notable.

Also, to an ashen academic such as I am, Professor Bellgrove, Fry’s character in the BBC production, is another thread, this time linked with me and my ilk, we quaint and curious keepers of forgotten lore. Each day as Professor Bellgrove and his fellow faculty begin their academic day, they recite a poem, a virtual pledge of their purpose as teachers. One of their students, their academic charges, is none other than Titus Groan, heir to the Earldom of Gormenghast, a place more hidebound by tradition that the British monarchy.

Hold fast / To the law / Of the last / Cold tome, / Where the earth / Of the truth / Lies thick / On the page, / And the loam / Of faith / In the ink / Long fled / From the drone / Of the nib / Flows on / Through the breath / Of the bone / Reborn / In a dawn / Of doom / Where blooms / The Rose / For the winds / The child / For the tomb / The thrush / For the hush / Of song, / The corn / For the scythe / And the thorn / In wait / For the heart / Till the last / Of the first / Depart, / And the least / Of the past / Is dust / And the dust / Is lost / Hold fast!

Hold fast indeed. Which brings me back to the question du jour: the difference between fantasy and imagination, for the chasm between them is greater than between either one and fact.

Several years ago, Molly Yergens invited me down to Shattuck–St Mary’s, the Hogwarts of southeastern Minnesota, where she teaches art. Molly had asked me to tell her students (eight or ten of them, aged 12 or 13) about Agincourt, my own Gormanghast wannabe, I suppose. [Is it pretentious to link these two imaginary places?] Toward the end of the hour, I noted the furrowed brow of one young man and asked what troubled him. “Well, it seems to me, some people might actually think that Agincourt exists.” “You’ve caught right on,” I enthused, “That’s precisely what we hope!” Molly then asked them to imagine their own realms, and got a lot of Lollypop Lakes and Big Rock Candy mountains in the bargain. She got fantasy, rather than imagination. I suddenly understood myself much better.

*The Gormenghast image above was created by Ian Miller and is available for purchase in limited edition giclée format.

Given how many of my interests have their roots in religion— a) the Episcopal church buildings of Dakota Territory, b) the Akron-Auditorium phenomenon among Methodists and other Protestant denominations, c) William Halsey Wood, half of whose product was ecclesiastical, d) the Social Gospel, about which much has been written but virtually none of it is architectural; I could go on—it seems only fair to go on record about my own religious perspective. I have, after all, designed four church buildings in Agincourt and helped with a couple others.

My mother was a Congo, by which I mean that Marge had roots in the New England tradition of Congregationalism, white-painted spires and all that. I have vague recollection of attending church with her at the Argo Congregational (still there at 7438 West 62nd Place). But she departed with a suitcase of lingerie and loose cash one spring night in 1953, and my father was unlikely to continue any pattern of regular religious indoctrination. He was not only unchurched but unbaptized. Roy’s parents were Roy and Clara, one a confirmed atheist alcoholic wife-beater, but I loved him, and the other an old school Polish Catholic who had married outside her church and been marginalized by her family. So my framework for faith was anything but rigorous.

Neighbors, the Millers and their daughter Andrea, then took my spiritual welfare in hand and dutifully dragged me with them to that same Congregational (now UCC) church in Argo, where I did the usual Bible study in its basement/Sunday School room, paging rapidly through my Bible (yes I did own one) in an invariably failed attempt to be the first to parrot the verse attached to Premonitions 2:14 or 33:8 in Song of Sixpence or whatever citation had been called out to us. Do you sense my heart just wasn’t in it?

Then something creepy happened about the time that the Congregational denomination merged with several others and formed the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. UCC): little old ladies of the Mamie Eisenhower type—white gloves, pillbox hats with short veils and a disinclination to disrupt the service—began quite unexpectedly to punctuate sermons with “Praise the Lord” and “Amen” and other such blurtations that, even as a thirteen-year-old, I felt unwillingly transported to a smokey courtroom in Tennessee during the Scopes “Monkey Trail”! This was, frankly, too much. With luck, the Millers moved to LaGrange (1030 Sherwood Drive; FLeetwood 2–6762) and I was spared any further mandatory church attendance.

Grandfather, the alcoholic, died when I was six. And even after that, my grandmother, the woman who raised me, never attended Mass at Saint Blaise (the patron saint of those afflicted with diseases of the throat) in nearby Summit. She was, however, the most spiritual person of my experience—then or since. I was shown right behavior by word and deed, and wrong was pointed out to me; I was offered a value system and code of personal responsibility that has served me well, despite any inability or unwillingness to toe the line. In short, I was allowed to form my own spiritual framework and not adapt myself to one imposed by others.

In addition to Clara’s gentle guidance, in my case it also “took a village”, the Village of Bedford Park specifically, where I could at one time name everyone who lived on both sides of the three-block-long West 65th Place. I can still  name many now long-dead neighbors who stepped in when my parents’ divorce took the unusual path of granting custody to my father; that just didn’t happen in the 1950s. So parents other than my own and their children, my contemporaries, served as stand-ins for the siblings I lacked.

It was an imperfect childhood, as many of you who know me can attest. I still bear its stars and its scars. But I would also not exchange it for another.

I not only identify with these people, I can long for their experience and the character it must have built. And I can feel their terror, when on August 29th, 1930 they were forcibly removed by their government and relocated.

The morning of the evacuation promised a perfect day. The sun rose out of a calm and sparkling sea and warmed the impassive cliffs of Oiseval. The sky was hopelessly blue and the sight of Hirta, green and pleasant as the island of so many careless dreams, made parting all the more difficult. Observing tradition the islanders left an open Bible and a small pile of oats in each house, locked all the doors and at 7 am boarded the Harebell. Although exhausted by the strain and hard work of the last few days, they were reported to have stayed cheerful throughout the operation. But as the long antler of Dun fell back onto the horizon and the familiar outline of the island grew faint, the severing of an ancient tie became a reality and the St Kildans gave way to tears.

Do you think there were any locked doors in this village when it was occupied?

Oh, by the way, this was posting #400.

Americans have perfected the ability to be alone together.

Sherry Turkle has a new book about the phenomenon of our time: the dependence upon social media for our relationships at the expense of maintaining actual personal relationships. Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other is on my list of “next books to read,” not because the social networks are abuzz with it, but because I see it enacted every day here in the twenty-something realm of higher education. Now, compound that observation with my own particular brand of anomie and the consequences are mind numbing.

At the party last weekend (thanks, by the way, to Cindy and Mark for hosting it, and to Steve, AnneMarie, Paul and Kay for all their contributions) there were both extremes in evidence: A) people in the midst of a relative crowd, who were texting and tweeting and googling and checking bids on eBay and god knows what else on their smart phones, while B) there were genuine conversations under way between and among friends, but also with absolute strangers who had nothing more in common than knowing me or Peter. Despite the two manhattans crafted for me by Mark (or, perhaps, because of them), I had a few genuinely insightful exchanges with some of my favorite people. One of them with a friend who said he had a letter half-written and would complete it when he got home, and the other from a friend who said he wanted to start a correspondence in slow time to savor each word sent, each phrase received, each thought shared, each idea explored.

When’s the last time you wrote a letter?

I thought about this earlier today when I stumbled on a posting titled “9 Abandoned Islands where Time has Stopped” and lusted for a few moments of genuine isolation to center myself with the World. Soon enough time will indeed stop for me, but while I wait, there are days I’d wish to teleport to the island of Hirta or some other place with only un-mown turf, abandoned houses that had once been loved and might be again.

Do you suppose the Scots would let me camp there for a week? I promise to come back a different person.

“So, Uncle Anson, when did you decide to become an architect?”

Simple questions can require complicated, even convoluted reply. This deceptively innocent question opened a welcome conversation with my great uncle Anson Curtiss Tennant, the man who died twice. I was nineteen years old and he was seventy-five. Funny thing: our discussion straddled the divide between my intense curiosity about the past and his passion for what lay ahead of us all. Let me tell you what I learned.

Some teenager — probably a lot like me at that age; I can’t recall — is storied to have written Frank Lloyd Wright for his definition of “architect”; Wright responded by parsing the word. “Arch” he said was chief, principal or encompassing person. “Techne”, coming from the Greek, was craftsmanship, craft or art. So, taken together, an architect was the Master of the Know-how. From my earliest memories, that was uncle Anson: the go-to guy when things went wrong, awry; off course, despite my best efforts. I knew that he’d been an architect before World War I but then had gone a different way. I wondered: Was he still an architect in deed, if not by title?

You probably need to know a little about the Tennant family, my family, which begins with a bastard: Gaudeamus Tennant, illegitimate child of Marie-Hélène Cachemaille and a family that bought her silence and their reputation. Living in the Channel Islands and speaking a patois of Medieval French and English, Gaudeamus — “we are grateful” in Latin — learned the island ways of smuggling and tax evasion. Then, about the time of the American Revolution, mother and son emigrated to New Jersey and a better life. Later two of his sons helped found a town in northwestern Iowa — the Agincourt that’s been home to five Tennant generations. We tend to stay put. “Grow where you’re planted,” says my old friend Marilla.

“Architect. It was like I knew the word from birth,” he told me.

Anson was the second child and only son of James and Martha Tennant. Summers on grandpa Curtiss’s farm taught him carpentry (we’ve got birdhouses galore to prove it) and in the fall of 1905 he built a dollhouse for his little sister Claire. Hardly the start of an illustrious career?

Claire had contracted diphtheria and wasn’t expected to live, so the ’05 Christmas had to be special. He recalled a rainy weekend in the attic, cross-legged among piles of magazines, where he found a house he liked in The Scientific American Architects & Builders Edition. It served as model. But what sense does a sixteen-year-old make of perspectives and technical drawings? Illusions and abstractions? Claire lived, by the way, so the better question is: Does architecture have the capacity to heal? Like those who’ve nominated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí for sainthood, Claire’s children and grandchildren (my cousins) believe it can — and did.

The next summer, to make room for the girls turning into young women, Anson moved to the carriage house loft, his treehouse/studio for a few years, and the summer after high school Jim Tennant asked him to remodel and enlarge the house itself. It’s a bed-and-breakfast now, owned by another family, so you can stay there and see what he designed — his first official commission, I suppose, if you don’t count the dollhouse.

“Dad had confidence in me,” as my own did in me.

Practical experience is one way to become an architect; book learnin’ is another. Anson’s father sought the advice of his friend Lyman Silsbee, an old school, hard-knocks architect who recommended the program at the Art Institute of Chicago. So, in the Fall of 1910, young Anson ventured from the quiet cove of small-town Iowa into the fullness of Metropolis.

Education for entry to the architectural profession was sketchy a hundred years ago; even the title “architect” had diverse meanings, especially in small-town and rural America, and becoming one could follow several different paths. So Anson enrolled in classes at the Art Institute and found part-time work in an office recommended by Silsbee, the family friend; I forgot to ask which one, because he soon volunteered at the office of Louis Sullivan, then working on two Iowa projects in Cedar Rapids. “Being in a room with him, you understood his constricted practice, yet saw no decline in his mental powers. I would have paid to work there — if I’d had the funds. In those few weeks, I learned one important lesson. ‘Safe solutions are tepid; they lack conviction,’ Sullivan said.”

And so it was after some twenty months of “formal” education, young Mr Tennant returned to Agincourt and began a professional life. He was twenty-three.

I’m still reconstructing Anson’s brief three-year practice. It included remodeling—which is to say “unmuddling”—the Wasserman Block, where he bartered an office as his fee. Then there was the public library competition, which must have consumed much his time and energy. We also know about the Crispin chapel, but that was built posthumously. He may also have been involved with St Ferreolus at the lakes. What other jobs did he take on? I should have asked when I had the chance.

“Then everything went blank for twenty-six years.”

The tragic story of his sailing on the “Lusitania” is too uncomfortable to repeat once again. But reminding us of the coïncidental passing of a Basque fishing boat has allowed the story to continue, for it brought him to a convent hospital outside Donostia (the Spanish San Sebastián) where his health returned but his memory did not.

Map of Donostia / San Sebastian from the time of Uncle Anson’s time

“I learned to trust my intuition.”

Graxi Urrutia worked for the nuns, cooking and keeping house, but took special interest in the thin man who’d come to port with the cod fleet, on her brother’s boat. Weeks of quiet care (just how many we aren’t sure) at the hospice in the hills south of Donostia restored Tennant to physical health. But the loss of memories, his very identity, was more debilitating than days clinging to debris had been, adrift in the North Atlantic; here there was little to cling to. “Graxi knew that busy hands would divert a heavy heart. As soon as I was able, she brought me to her father’s shop. Therapy that was far more than physical.”

“The long way home….” 

Twenty years in the Basque Country hadn’t made Anson a native, but his Basque (Euskara) was far better than his Spanish language skills. So when the Spanish Civil War erupted in July 1936, his sympathies were well set. Married into the family of Mattin Urrutia, unapologetic Basque Nationalist, and now the father of three small children, Anson in one respect had the advantage of being a man without a country. His amnesia, the lack of any papers, and a low profile gave him the liberty to pursue carpentry and contribute to his new extended family. Then came Guernica and nearly everything changed.

“Reunion”

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls may be the best telling in English of Spain’s Civil War. If Uncle Anson had met Hemingway, he never mentioned it. Though he is more likely to have made the brief acquaintance of Pablo Picasso, whose painting “Guernica” brought worldwide attention to the aerial bombing of the Basque market town of Gernika on 26 April 1937. It was about that time — though unrelated to the actual bombing, which took place many miles from Donostia — that Anson’s memory returned. “It was like coming back to the play, the second act, after a long and diverting Intermission and reminding myself where the plot had left off,” he described it for me. “So much unresolved; so many loose ends.”

Armed now with a name (albeit a slippery, hesitant recollection), Graxi telegraphed the British consul in Bordeaux, who, in turn, spoke with their American counterpart. Several cables back and forth to Washington confirmed that, yes, there had been an Anson Tennant aboard the “Lusitania” but he was listed as “missing.” There were questions, of course — How had he come ashore 2,000 kilometers from the sinking? Why now after twenty-one years? — and Graxi provided his compelling edge-of-your-seat narrative. At some point the family were contacted in Iowa. Anson’s father Augustus James had died in 1919 (the simple answer to four years’ grieving) but his mother and sisters received the news with utter disbelief. It was agreed that Molly and Claire would sail immediately for Bordeaux and wait.

But crossing the border at Irun-Hendaye would have been far too conspicuous for two adults and three children, especially one without papers, and leaving them behind for a later reunion was unthinkable. So Mattin arranged transport by the very means that had brought Anson to this haven: they would leave discretely by fishing trawler and make an excuse to put in for repairs at Biarritz; then a train to Bordeaux and the steamer for New York. He would leave as he had arrived, with his bother-in-law Eitor at the helm.

Anson and his family passed through the main train station in Bordeaux on their way “home” in late 1937

“Back from the dead”

What a shock to see Molly and “Mouse” (Anson’s pet name for his youngest sister) after twenty-two years. Local newspapers reported Anson’s Return from the Dead but many of his old acquaintances had passed or moved away. There was celebration nonetheless, making the rounds like a 30th high school reunion, where faces had changed, but voices remained the same. Getting back into architecture looked too painful, though, like trying to imagine nothing had happened. His carpentry skills, however, had sharpened considerably under Mattin Urrutia’s guidance, so here was a tangent path to follow.

“Old dog. New tricks.”

From the fall of 1937 until he died thirty years later, Uncle Anson became the craftsman he had tried to be in his teenage years. An artistic handyman who remodeled kitchens, built new porches and repaired old ones. He even reworked some of the old Public Library before it moved to new quarters in 1970. But the project he most enjoyed was a simple table and chairs for his old teacher Rose Kavana, now retired from her job as principal at Charles Darwin School. Anson “dated” these pieces with a two peseta coin he had accidentally brought back from Spain in his coat pocket.

Two peseta coin issued by the government of the Basque Country (Euskadi) in 1937

Miss Kavana had seen something in fifth-grade Anson; recognized a penchant for drawing and making. She may even have provided the introduction to William Morris (who got it from Chaucer who, in turn, got it from Hippocrates) and encouraged Claire’s dollhouse. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

I miss my Uncle Anson.

“The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne. 
Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge, 
The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne; 
Al this mene I by love.”  (Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules, I, 1-4)

Once Upon a Time

Michael William Six, an S.U. grad from a few years ago (please don’t say “back in the day”!), sent me a link to Blank Space. In its own words, Blank Space is “a new online platform for architecture founded … to uncover the true power of architecture by creating new opportunities for design to engage the public.” How could we not applaud.

There was a time in the 60s that many of us did sense that power and hoped to bring it to bear. What Michael specifically wanted me to see, however, was “Fairy Tales”, a competition announced by Blank Space, that Michael thought would interest some of us in Agincourt. My immediate enthusiasm has been only slightly tempered by a closer reading of the competition brief:

Once upon a time, Architecture was at the forefront of social innovation, addressing issues that the entire society felt were worth finding creative solutions for. A curse was then cast on Architecture: the Evil Witch of Banality tricked the architects into believing that their ideas were worthless, that society didn’t care about them, and that the only way to advance their projects was to produce vacuous glitzy renderings. Only those would lure developers into financing projects, and publications into publishing them. You are the hero that is being given the chance to battle the Evil Witch of Banality. Your magic power is Creativity. Your ace in the hole is Good Communication. Will you accept the call to this epic battle?

How can I say “no”?

Am I wrong to imagine that this applies directly to The Project? That our work during the last six years can somehow be pared and pruned and pollarded to fit five 11 by 17 sheets of graphics, two 8.5 by 11 pages of text and one page of participant bios? I registered in fewer than ninety seconds. And those few dollars are a good investment regardless of whether I/we actually enter. I wish the project success with or without my entry.

Agincourt has had many participants and gratefully holds on to a few loyal true believers. One of them is coming this weekend, so I asked him to collaborate (our potential success, I must admit, depends on his skills, not mine). Happily, he said yes.

If Agincourt has an underlying fairy tale, it’s the life of its architect-protagonist Anson Curtiss Tennant [1889-1915/1968], the man with two death dates. I’ve imagined his life in some detail and considerable context. And if pressed to give him physical appearance, I am happy to claim this pencil sketch as representing him (though it is actually an 1899 sketch of Edward Julius Detmold by his twin Charles Maurice Detmold). Would the story of a young person’s discovery of “the architect” as a life course be sufficient narrative to constitute this “fairy tale”? That discovery and that quest are the core of the Agincourt Project and have been since its beginning.

Suggestions are welcome.

Oh, by the way, the deadline for submission is January 17th—my 69th birthday. Coincidence? I think not.