One mans meat, p.30
One Man's Meat, page 30
Our trading center, where the bank is, is quite a distance from home, and nowadays, with the tire situation what it is, the trip is quite an event. We used to go about once a week to this embryonic metropolis; now we go about once a month—to meet a train, or anaesthetize a dog, or pay off a mortgage. Once upon a time this little city looked small to me; now it seems a boiling metropolis, vast and inscrutable and pleasantly corrupt. In it you see people in that curious larval stage, between country worm and city butterfly—the town beginning to get in its licks. Clothes are a curious compromise of farm and office, of barn and salon. The ladies have studied the fashions and have gone about the matter with a will; but their efforts don’t quite come off. Men are city from the waist down, country from the waist up. Or sometimes the other way round. You see a man dressed four-fifths for business, one-fifth for chores—apportioning his apparel as he apportions his time. He may have on the trousers, shirt, vest, tie, shoes, and socks of a Brummel, but for his jacket he has substituted an old zipper sweater in a two-tone design. Or he may be turned out in the mode, complete except for his feet, which are encased sensibly in hunting boots. In general, the people in small cities of this sort seem to lack the homespun and genuinely comfortable appearance of the countryman, without having achieved the well-groomed appearance of the city dweller. It has to be a compromise. One minute a clerk will be tending his counter, half an hour later he will be tending his hens.
There are unmistakable signs that always betray embryonic cities and show that they have the makings of concentration. The presence of pigeons and of English sparrows, those unfailing followers of the smart metropolitan whirl, is a sign. An English sparrow wouldn’t be found dead in the country, and it seems to me pigeons feel about the same way; but the minute you get into Main Street there they are, enjoying the hot pavements and the excitement and the congenial vices of congestion and trade. The faces you see on the streets have a slightly different look, too. They are not the faces you left back in the country. You see a fellow and he has a look in his eye, or perhaps it is the way he holds a toothpick in his mouth, as though he knew a secret. And as you pass along in front of the shops you hear the muffled sound of distant bowling balls, the tell-tale thunder of civilization.
[ June 1942 ]
AUNT POO
In our living room, in a great old-fashioned frame, there hangs a painting of a lady and a dog. This picture rather dominates the room, and I have become quite fond of the lady. It is not a great painting but it is a pleasing one. You can look at it again and again and not tire of it. The lady is of Victorian mold. She is young. She sits with one elbow cocked on the table next her chair, gazing down quizzically at her little dog. The artist responsible for this unsung work of art is my wife’s aunt, a lady of eighty-five years, whose career as a painter was somewhat broken into in middle life when she laid aside her brushes and married a Japanese.
I have never met this fabulous aunt. She went to Tokyo and, except for a couple of brief visits, never came back. But she seems vivid enough—one of those semi-fictional characters you acquire by marriage and through much hearsay, just as you acquire, by slow degrees, the whole childhood history of the person you marry and at length feel that you know the child. I feel that I know Puss quite well, or Aunt Poo as she is invariably called by her three nieces, who cling with New England grit to the whimsical name by which she was known in the nursery. Although eighty-five, she is still beset by the enormous vigor that has filled her lifetime. At any rate she recently completed, in time to get it to America before all communication with Japan ceased, a volume of her memoirs, including a family history covering the years 1680 to 1908. I have just been reading it. Only three copies exist (one for each niece); for in fact it is not a printed book at all but is a typed book—typed by her, single-spaced, on heavy drawing paper, and beautifully bound in an old brocade handed down from her husband’s ancestors. Since in her scheme of bookmaking there had to be three copies of this monumental work, Aunt Poo had to run it through her typewriter three times, an appalling task. You see, if she had merely made an original and two carbons she would have been left with an unthinkable problem in discrimination: the problem of deciding which of her three nieces was to get the original, which the first carbon, which the second. Rather than face this distasteful dilemma, and because any book of hers, even a bound typescript, must meet certain standards of craftsmanship, she laboriously executed it three times, punching away night after night in the settlement house over which she presides in the slum district of Tokyo, minding her margins and neatly pasting in photographs by way of illustration.
To have so close a link with the enemy as Aunt Poo is both sobering and salutary. In war one tends to dehumanize the foe and to take pleasure in the thought of the dropped bomb. The presence in Tokyo of a member of the family, while it in no way lessens our determination to win, somewhat tempers our blood lust; we drop our bombs rather gingerly, trusting that our old aunt is dodging with the same skill and courage with which, at the age of four in Minnesota, she was dodging musket fire in the Indian uprising while her father rode two hundred miles on horseback to the rescue of a besieged garrison of whites in Fort Abercrombie. I feel that these new bombs will not prove an impossible burden at the end of so spectacular a career, but they will tear at her heart, since they bring into conflict the two great loves of her life, her ancestral New England and her adopted Nippon.
The story of her marriage to the Japanese and of the founding of the settlement house called Yurin-En is one that I hesitate to tell, since it is just family stuff; yet it is unique and timely and perhaps worth a try.
There was always something about Aunt Poo that was vaguely exciting, according to my wife’s account. Poo was the member of the family who had thrown off conventions and become an artist. She had been to Paris. She was Bohemia, in Suburbia. Strong-minded, sentimental, domineering, she had a flair for giving life (for little girls anyway) a certain extra quality. She was a great one to make an occasion of a day. Any sort of anniversary inflamed her. It would suddenly occur to her that today was Lincoln’s Birthday, or the Ides of March, or Decoration Day, and in no time at all the house would tremble with the violence of redecoration or cookery or charades. She had the gift of celebration. There was no day so drab but, under Poo’s fiery tutelage, could be whipped into a carnival.
She had been to Paris. She had had a studio in New York. In those days the very word studio was drenched with glamorous meaning. But despite her art and her wanderings, the great preoccupation of the first half of her life was her family, to belong to which seemed a career in itself. Her father, her mother, her sister, and her brother—to these she gave much of her energy and most of her thoughts. Within a relatively short space of time all four died, leaving her alone, and it was then that she bought a house in Woodstock, Connecticut, where the second phase of her life began.
Woodstock itself meant nothing in particular—her people had been rooted in the colder soil of Maine, in the little towns of Fryeburg, Naples, Bridgton, in Saco, and in the metropolises of Portland and Boston. Her infancy had been spent in the frontier town of St. Cloud, Minnesota, her childhood on a farm in Naples. But Woodstock contained a cousin, and to Woodstock she went to settle down for the long agreeable grind of spinsterhood. She applied herself rather briskly to fixing up the place, which she named Apple End, and rather desultorily to painting. She had come into a little money and could afford a cook. She could afford one but she couldn’t seem to find one. In desperation she turned to the Springfield Y.M.C.A. Training School, among whose students were a few Orientals learning to be athletic directors in the American manner. It was summertime, and classes were over for the year.
As a result of her inquiry there arrived at Apple End one Hyozo Omori, a young Japanese of distinguished lineage, frail, aesthetic, and anxious to earn a little money. He had a slight beard which, with his delicate features and sensitiveness, gave him a Christlike appearance. He was shown the kitchen and given a rough idea of his duties: he was to cook the meals and serve them and tidy up. He seemed polite but worried.
It became apparent almost immediately that Mr. Omori and a kitchen were strangers of long standing. Aristocracy stuck out all over him. Although his efforts at cooking were preposterous, his conversation was charming. Aunt Poo saw in him a man who had been waited on all his life and who was clearly unsuited for any sudden reversal. So she set to and prepared Mr. Omori’s meals for him, and as soon as possible engaged a large colored woman to carry some of the rapidly mounting household burden.
Mr. Omori, it must be said, offered to leave, but she urged him to stay on and assume duties of a more wispy sort—poking about the flower garden and exchanging views on poetry. He consented. For a while the domestic situation at Apple End was confused; the Japanese student was unwilling to sit at table with the colored woman, and the mistress of the house was disinclined to sit at table with the Japanese student. Everybody was eating off trays, in aseptic splendor.
In this way [writes Aunt Poo in her memorial volume] began my acquaintance with Hyozo Omori, a gentleman of ancient lineage and culture who, like most of the Japanese students of that day, regarded all Americans as quite inferior in culture but were quite ready, given a respect for all honest work, to earn money from us in a perfectly impersonal way, making a contact with unpleasant things for a moment for convenience, without feeling oneself degraded.
I take it what slight momentary degradation Mr. Omori had been subjected to during his first few days at Woodstock was forgotten in the ensuing weeks. Aunt Poo and he liked the same books. Together they walked in the garden and talked of Japanese art—which Mr. Omori knew a great deal about—and he told her of his two ambitions in life: to found a settlement house in Tokyo, and to increase the stature of the Japanese race. In the fall he returned to Springfield, she to Boston. They corresponded. He visited her several times, and finally asked her to marry him. She decided after a while to accept.
The news exploded like a time bomb in the house in a Boston suburb where my wife was then living as a young girl. Since Poo’s immediate family were all dead, the conventional and decent thing of course would be to have her married under her brother-in-law’s roof. But to a Japanese!
“What will the papers do with this?” groaned Papa, who had troubles enough of an Occidental nature without an involvement with the Rising Sun.
The Boston American, already banned from the house on general principles, broke the story with a mild flourish. Family councils were held behind closed doors. The girls, bursting with direct questions, were put off with evasive answers. It was a time of incredible consternation and embarrassment. But my wife’s father was no quitter. He announced to the children that the wedding, if indeed their aunt was determined to go through with it, would be “under our roof.” This took courage of a high order.
Meantime Mr. Omori was introduced to the household and made something of a hit with his nieces-to-be. He showed them how to make tea in the Japanese fashion, green tea served in cups without handles. Gracefully, politely, they would sip it and nibble on the little rice cakes, which were slightly sweet. Mr. Omori seemed genuinely attached to his New England fiancée, and regarded her with amazement and humorous delight. His cultivated mind and his gentle manner were disarming to a considerable degree, and his appearance was celestial. He lacked only a halo. Aunt Poo, by contrast, appeared more earthly than ever, with her plump and friendly frame.
They were married in the parlor. The girls were delighted to have a wedding in their house and to have the mantelpiece transformed into an altar by the addition of some Mrs. Humphry Ward roses. The couple left immediately for Tokyo on their wedding trip. It was the first of October, 1907.
Since then I have lived thirty years and more in Japan, more than one-third of my life, and have never regretted that daring [writes Aunt Poo in the memoirs]. There is something in the Japanese character that can be understood by one of Puritan stock. They like simplicity, even a sort of severity of life. There is no pretense about them. In manners they are punctilious. At heart they are very kind. I do not say that I have never had homesick moments, but I truly loved my husband’s beautiful spirit. When he could no longer do for his country what he so much wished to do, I tried in my small way to supply his place, and perhaps Japan is now my home as New England could not be now; and that other life is now not to me unloved, nor dead, but separated as death does separate, in a way never to be put together again.
That was written in 1939. Mr. Omori died in 1912, five years after the marriage.
One of the things he had “so much wished to do” for his country was, as I have mentioned, to increase the stature of the Japanese race, whose diminutive size he found out of keeping with their large destiny. It seemed like a detail worth correcting. First, however, he and his wife set about realizing his major aim—the Tokyo settlement house, which soon became a reality and has for a quarter of a century been an institution of considerable importance, the Hull House of Tokyo.
The other goal was less easy, but Mr. Omori made a start. What he did was to organize the first Japanese team ever to enter the Olympic Games; he hoped that participation in sports would sooner or later result in bigger bodies for his little countrymen. Proudly he escorted his team to Stockholm, over the trans-Siberian railway, and took Aunt Poo along. The whole junket seems, at this date, curiously roundabout and tinged with musical-comedy intrigue. I haven’t any idea whether Uncle Hyozo was dreaming, even then, of Pearl Harbor and the straits before Singapore. My wife doubts that he was. In a way it doesn’t make any difference. The Japanese are still little fellows, for all the competition they met at the games.
The team returned by way of Siberia but Aunt Poo and Uncle Hyo continued west, turning up in the Boston suburb bearing some aquamarines from the Urals as gifts for the girls. It was plain, by that time, that Mr. Omori was a sick man. He was, in fact, in an advanced tubercular stage. The doctor ordered him to quit traveling, but Mr. Omori was not a man to be ordered about. He announced that he and his wife were returning immediately to Tokyo, and together they set out. The couple got as far as San Francisco, and there he died.
San Francisco must have been a sort of crossroads for Aunt Poo. One way pointed back to New England, to her beloved villages and the elms and the kinsfolk. It was the clearer way. The other pointed to the Orient. Aunt Poo apparently never hesitated. She turned west across the Pacific, escorting her husband’s body home, and there she remained to carry on the settlement house that was her husband’s dearest desire.
The flyleaf of the memoirs is inscribed: “To my dear niece Katharine Sergeant White, a tribute to our common past.” The story is one of the most revealing I have ever read. Page by page one learns what it was that nourished her through her busy and useful years in a foreign land. It was her extraordinary sense of the past, her deep sense of family. It was New England in Japan. As time went on she became thoroughly involved in life at 370 Kashiwagi, Yodobashi, Tokyo. She translated Lady Murasaki into English. In the earthquake of 1922 she performed heroic service and was decorated by the government. But through it all the sense of the past grew stronger rather than weaker. Her letters flowed in an endless stream, keeping the past alive. Now and again she would request that something be sent her—a root from a common field flower, a recipe for an ancestral pie. Her thoughts returned constantly to the Maine villages of her childhood, to the snowberries and blush roses under the windows of the house in Naples, to the syringa and the spiraea, to the living room with Hannah knitting and sister reading with the kitten in her lap.
I don’t know what the war is doing to her. Intellectually it is an impossible situation. She has always stood up for Japan and has felt that everything Japan did was right—even the “China incident” as she called it. For her nieces, who saw nothing “incidental” in the ravaging of China, correspondence with Aunt Poo was becoming increasingly difficult when it was shut off altogether.
At any rate I find it, as I say, salutary to read in the neat typing of this very old lady the findings of her thirty years’ ministering to the poor people of an alien race, her insistence on their good qualities. It is a valuable antidote to the campaign of hate that war breeds; for somehow I don’t believe that hate is the answer to our troubles. Hate is a mere beginner of wars. To end them, we shall have to marry our indignation with our faith.
Author’s note. Since the above was written, word has been received of Aunt Poo’s death. Details are lacking, but she is reported to have died of natural causes. Against the backdrop of war and Japanese brutality, the story of Mrs. Omori’s life seems unreal, and her long years of work in the slums of Tokyo take on the quality of a bitter jest. They were never this to her; but it is significant, perhaps, that in the last years before the war her thoughts turned away from the new currents around her in Japan and back to New England on the strong tide of emotion that took the form of her memoirs for her nieces.
[ July 1942 ]
BOOK LEARNING
Farmers are interested in science, in modern methods, and in theory, but they are not easily thrown off balance and they maintain a healthy suspicion of book learning and of the shenanigans of biologists, chemists, geneticists, and other late-rising students of farm practice and management. They are, I think, impressed by education, but they have seen too many examples of the helplessness and the impracticality of educated persons to be either envious or easily budged from their position.
