HvS | WW2 1945 to ERM Jul-Aug, ICAO

1945 Other years 1943 . 1944 . 1946

HvS > ERM 1945-7-12

Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton Street NW

Washington D.C. 15

July 12, 1945

[From April to June, a conference in San Francisco created the United Nations. ERM was there, having left the O.S.S. and now representing the U.S. Budget Bureau. He served as the Secretary of the Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization in Chicago. He is being asked to join the newly created ICAO at their new headquarters in Montreal  as an officer. On July 10 the Louvre reopened in Paris; on July 11 the Soviet Union handed over control of Western Berlin to U.S. and U.K. forces.]

Dearest Husband -

So glad to get your letter with your views on world affairs. You misunderstood my remark about the vicar of Christ, I only meant that Miffy [Mr. Smith, WW2 roomer from London], not willing to concede to the right of one person who decides spiritual matters in Christ's place, is of course equally unwilling to see someone assume that power in worldly matters. I would never recommend the Pope as arbiter of worldly affairs – not even in an ideal society (which, according to my views, would be a society spiritually united under the Pope). Only it should be guided by the laws of justice indicated by the church. 

As for the atonement – I only meant that it had been a mystery to me for so long why Christ only could pay the debt of sin in the world. They had only been empty words to me which I accepted on the authority of the church, but which I never visualized, having even a faint distaste for the whole thing as utterly unjust. And it is my feelings about the criminals in Europe that makes me approach the meaning – just a faint inkling of what it might mean. It isn't that I recommend that the criminals be let off – it is only that one feels that their state is already so miserable (though they don't know it) that whatever fate befalls them makes hardly any difference and certainly does not constitute a payment for what has been done. You might as well punish flames for devouring a house. 

Only the sufferings of good people seem to have any spiritual value – Which reminds one of the fact that animals brought to the altar always had to be without blemish. And for that reason of course, only the sufferings of Christ, being without sin, would be perfect. 

Another way to approach it would be to say that to exact retribution from the Germans we would have to act like the Germans and be like the Germans. Which would make everything worse all around. And from a loving God we might imagine that the alternative to Christ would have been to give us over to the Devil, only He didn't do it because He is a loving God – just as we don't want to imitate the Germans because we are still civilized. These are only approaches, mind you, but it helps a lot, all the same. 

Meanwhile I agree about the loss of valuable lives, from a worldly point of view. But so you might have said: "A pity that Christ had to die so young." Which is manifestly absurd. The worldly point of view is usually a travesty of the truth and God. Who could raise men from dead bones can raise gifted men from fools, if necessary.

I was interested in your account of the unfortunate little boy. You have the same feelings about him I had about the Peters boy. I felt it was sinful to have wished Elisabeth to be a boy when she is so strong and normal. But I think I would prefer a brilliant boy with an abnormal body than the other way around, though his suffering is much greater. I believe a great saint was just like that – I remember reading about him. He was useless anywhere, so he was stuck in a monastery and he became one of the wisest writers and saints of the Medieval Church. 

Are his parents Catholic? I believe the Church has great consolations for children like that.

As for going to Montreal [with ICAO, which the family did do], I would think it a delightful adventure if it weren't for my "healthy stream," I really quail at a a new household without help. I know that comfort is often opposed to happiness – but somehow the confusion of six children without help seems to me a happiness I can do without. All the same I leave the decision to you. Jane Gorman is heartbroken at the idea of my leaving.  She was telling me a funny thing – her daughter Susan said to her:

"Mother, if Mrs. Marlin gets to Heaven before you, do you think she'll help you in?"

Shows you the hero worship going on in that family!

Randal would love you to visit his camp for a week-end. Mother didn't tell him about Montreal because she is afraid he'd be too upset. Richard and Gilroy are the world to him at present!

Love, 

Wife

HvS > ERM 1945-7-25

From: Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton Street NW

Washington D.C. 15

July 25, 1945

Dearest Husband.

We are the last ten days in The Toils of Birdie's Vacation, so I'm just as glad you didn't come. It makes me less than eager to start existence without a servant. 

I have those two interesting communions and I manage to keep on working, did two and a half drawings the first Birdieless week, but of course the even monotony of the days suffer and the house runs down. 

The children quarrel in the rain, Mother is in bed with rheumatism and my only vice is cherries. I buy too many for the budget and I excuse myself that it's about all I eat (no meat since you left) that I don't spend money on myself in any other way and have no other relaxation. 

Still, I am myself down to one pound a day and then I went to Mrs. Gorman and brought her the pound I had "saved." She was so pathetically glad – she had looked at them all summer, she said, but couldn't afford them. I felt like a filthy Croesus and wished I'd brought her two pounds. I am really being a help to her – she has difficulties with her husband and I help her straighten herself out but I might use my own advice sometimes, I think. Only I do think it's hard for a woman never to have any money of her own and I know I am terribly lucky to be earning and to have a husband who allows me free use of my own money. 

I think there is something essentially unjust in an arrangement by which a woman works as [hard], or harder, than a man (she does all the washing and cleaning with only some help for the ironing) and always has to feel she has to account for every penny she spends without any money ever for her own. 

Now her husband accuses her of wastefulness and is taking the management of the money himself, only allowing her money for food. And food prices have gone up so she can't manage and she is at her wit's end. I told her some economies she could make, but she says she has done that already, and she doesn't want her children's health to suffer. 

Of course, they haven't managed things as well as we. She isn't a member of a coop and hence she hasn't got the saving in milk and spends ten dollars more a month. She isn't a member of Group Health, and though she has a garden she didn't fertilize it so she hasn't got a crop. Those things are a matter of foresight and knowledge and in these things they are a little hobbledehoy. 

Then she has a passion for reading and buys a book occasionally to her husband's disgust. I think he ought to be pleased to have a wife with only that extravagance, but of course I don't tell her that. I tell her that I can see his point of view, that he wants to save for emergencies and that if he got a cut in salary she'd have to manage too. I tell her simply to buy less of the expensive food; but as she says, you can't always get it. 

Corn costs a dollar for a dozen ears now! I have ceased to buy it, cherries are cheaper. Even without meat and vegetables (I have my own now, plenty of beans, carrots, squash, cucumber, onions, parsley and spinach) I spent almost three dollars a day just on bread, butter, melons, oranges, cherries, peaches and, occasionally, ice cream. And not extravagantly either. Fruit for one meal at a moderate quantity, comes to almost a dollar. Prices are terrific. I am glad I don't have to buy meat. I was able to give the Gormans almost eighty red points [ration coupons]. They were so glad. But, you see, they do spend it on meat and so they can't buy the fruit. 

The garden is a lifesaver, for vegetables are almost as expensive as fruit this summer and I couldn't have melons or cherries if I hadn't labored over my beans. [The victory garden is featured in The Mitchells, which is about WW2 Washington, D.C.]

The weeds are terrific on account of the rain. And the squash is up to my head almost with a profusion of blooms. I had to spend three dollars on insecticide too, but it will last me the rest of the summer.

I told Miffy about Jane's problems and he said: "But they have a good salary and they ought to be able to manage. Some people have to live on two thousand seven hundred dollars a year." I agreed, it is what has been worrying me all along, but I don't think it is possible in Washington. That's why all these women are working and children are neglected. Unless you put up your own food from a large garden, keep your own chickens and bees and own your own home you can't do it, certainly not with six children. 

That's why people won't have children any more and it's all wrong. But it's no good saying: "It must be possible," because it isn't. Though they don't have a maid more than once a week they have a car and a house to pay for and clothes and doctor's bills and a tonsil operation, etc. He took his vacation camping out with his two boys, to do it cheap, but that didn't benefit her, did it?

Meanwhile this increase you were going to get boils down to four dollars less a payday, and I suppose the same goes for them. A queer increase!

Meanwhile I did a little article for Literary Guild and got the choice of eight books for it. So I thought of your birthday and got two for you – a six-dollar book in two volumes by [Alexis Charles] Henri de Tocqueville called "Democracy in America" which is supposed to be excellent and probably the sort of book you'd want to own and "The Mechanics (or something) of Peace," by somebody else, also supposed to be very good. 

I'll send them as soon as I get them, or perhaps I'll just send the peace and keep democracy in the bookcase for you, for that's more a thing to dip in than to read, I imagine. I hope you're glad – they were the only titles worthy to be kept I thought, the other things on world affairs seemed sort of temporary, like books on how to deal with three hundred photographs on New England and a book on contemporary American painters. 

For mother I got a new biography of Tolstoy and a light novel by Elisabeth Corbeth whom we both enjoy. For the children I got "All the Mowgli Stories" by Kipling and "The little book about God" by Lauren Ford. I think, considering the amount of ephemeral tripe there was, that those are not bad choices. And they amount to about twenty-five dollars. Of course I could have gone to town on picture books for the children but they have enough already and will get more from Viking. I felt they should only have their fair share, and classics are most hard to get at present. Most of them are out of print.

Father Gorman saw the picture I did of the sacred heart after being infuriated with the one I had to hang in my room. (I then dropped it "accidentally" behind the bookcase and had to retrieve it for father Gorman to compare it with my own. Luckily I could then make him a present of the old one and have it off my conscience.) He is going to write to the promoter of the sacred heart about it.

Love to you -

Wife

HvS > ERM 1945-8-3

Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton Street NW

Washington D.C. 15

August 3 (?, n.d.), 1945

Dear husband.

Enclosed is Olga's last letter and a comb case which she made for you with your initials on it. She looks stunning. 

Both girls look well and brown but Brigid [7] is all teeth and hair still. But Olga [10] has a radiance that takes your breath away. She has brushed her teeth regularly and they are sparkling white, her hair is long now and bleached golden. She is much thinner, her legs are beautiful and she is almost as tall as I am and has gained in "poise." She and Sister Petra got on famously this time.

Pop Polak came to see me yesterday, though her husband is in London. She was left behind.

Love,

Hilda

HvS > ERM 1945-8-27

Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton Street NW

Washington D.C. 15

August 27, 1945

Dear Husband.

Just got your notes. Please realize that whatever you decide will be all right with me. Your wistful wish to see the pictures has made me hang on to them until you see them. Though I don't know whether you'll like them if you do. The only thing I can say is that they're not like other people’s Bible pictures. I saw some in Woodward & Lothrop's bookstore and it is just as if people were scared to draw natural when they are doing it for the Bible. 

They, the promoters of the sacred heart, sent back my sacred heart picture with a nice letter saying they didn't like the face and I agree with that. I realize you need a model and there is someone I can use beautifully, Father Blaise of our parish, a young Franciscan monk with a beard. I'm trying to get Father Gorman to persuade him to sit for me. Mrs. O'Sullivan who lives down the street has a plant which was used for the crown of thorns so I can get that straight too.

I have got into a fight with Mr. Dougherty about LendLease but he is fair and granted me some points. The funny part is that the American grievance is so illogical.

a) England should have known and she can get credit. 

b) England won't take credit which is terrible because she never pays her war debts.

It sounds absurd, but that is the way they reason over here. Also:

a) England is finished and she may as well realize it and all this protest is insincere because 

b) We all know she is much richer and more powerful than she pretends to be and she only pretends because she won't face the fact that she is finished.

You won't believe it, but that's the way they argue. 

Randal will be at your mother's on the twenty-ninth and you can pick him up there. I'm afraid your mother and Ruth would want to come with him. Otherwise and at present I have no place and I am curiously tired – I don't want any more fuss than is necessary.

Love, 

Wife

HvS | WW2 1943 to ERM, OSS

HvS and Children, about 1949
Clockwise from HvS: John, Brigid,
Randal, Sheila, Lis, Olga

[2017-9-3 Thanks to Jay for typing!]

HvS>ERM 1943-1-11

From: Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton St., NW

Washington 15, DC

To: Mr. E.R. Marlin

O.S.S. Detachment

APO 887

Postmaster New York City

Jan 11, 1943

Dearest, 

I lost your letter asking me for underwear, please write me another, it is ready to be sent but they won't take it unless there is a request. I have three union suits, park wool $4.00 each, long, size 42 (they said that would be better since they shrink). 

So please write to ask me for them. I also have a pair of leather gloves, wool-lined (from your Mother and Ruth) and a beautiful little pipe of imported briar ($5.00). Very prettily curved, soft and light. A present from me.  If you like some candy or tobacco I can send that too but you must ask for it. 

You ought to read “The Screwtape Letters” by a Mr. [C.S.] Lewis (Anglican), very good. 

The children liked the ballet all right but preferred "Cinderella". One little girl, when the two sisters were leaving Cinderella in the kitchen, cried aloud: "Why don't they hug her?" 

It is always noisy with comment – most of the spectators are very small children. On Randy's birthday there is going to be a magician at the same place - good coincidence, eh?

Love

Hilda

HvS>ERM 1943-1-30

From: 3728 Northampton Street NW
Washington 15 D.C.

Letter No. 23
January 30, 1943

Dear Husband,

Today we are living in Irish fashion with a temperature of fifty [degrees F] in an oilless house but with two wood fires burning. We were able to get wood at last, for twenty dollars a cord. They say they may come with oil tomorrow. They are three days behind in delivering on account of thick snow. 

Snow is jamming all the roads and clinging thick to the trees, yet it goes on snowing. One has to wade through lakes of yellow mud to cross a street and the bus goes bubble-bubble and as slow as a snail. I asked the bus man if it was hard driving and he said very. I asked him how the woman drivers were doing and he gave a crooked smile and told me they had only two and they left.

Birdie [one of two domestic help in Washington; the other was called Weeshee] feels exceedingly injured because it's hard to get to work in the mornings. She has to see empty bus after empty bus pass, and then she has to mount one that can hardly hold people. It is hard to convince her that racial prejudice is not involved. 

I am writing this by the radio and through a concert program I suddenly hear a message of someone who has had an accident on Pennsylvania Avenue and is told to wait until the traffic cop gets there. Interesting. I suppose it's all on account of the weather. The meat counter (oh, they are telling the cops to halt a hit and run driver, it's just like a detective story!) is very empty. I only could get two hamhocks and a slab of veal today. The rest was all just bones and chickens. The one too low and the other too high. 

I have good news for you. Miss Bertha Gunterman [Editor at Longman's Green] likes my drawing very much and wants me to continue the woodcut style for the book and May [Massee, Viking Press], who hadn't told me she had accepted "Gerrit and the Organ" suddenly sent me a page of manuscript to ask whether I liked that type for it, so apparently she has taken it. I told her I wanted to know what she thought of it.

Randal is a funny little fellow and he seems to have an enormous attraction for some people. I had paid him for sitting for me and he lost two dimes in the snow. He told me about it while I was shopping in the Safeway, and I was hardhearted enough to say I wouldn't replace them, that it was his loss. The silent tears trickled down his cheeks and so one of the shop attendants gave him two dimes. 

I love my children, they're very sweet. Randal, Brigid, Sheila and I went out this afternoon and we met Mrs. Sullivan and stopped to chat. In the course of conversation the topic became germs and I told her how the children pick chewing gum off the street to eat it. She wanted to impress on the children how dirty that was and said: "A great big colored man might have had it in his mouth," as if a colored man's mouth was necessarily more dirty than a white man, a completely unnecessary addition to the moral and one that made me squirm. The children looked at her with limpid eyes.

Afterwards Brigid asked me "What did she mean, colored man?" 

Randal had understood her to say "Car man."

"Oh," he said carelessly. "She meant someone who has a car."

I could have kissed them both on the spot, but I didn't.

I am starting a class or club for Olga. Every Tuesday afternoon Olga is going to have four friends who are going to sew with her. I felt she needed nice friends and she seems unable to attract them herself so I believe this is the answer. Randal won't have any trouble that way. You should see the girls who go to his class when they meet him accidentally on the street. They're quite ready to elope with him. By the way, he is getting an expert at arithmetic by counting his pennies and doing all sorts of sums with them.

Sheila has Christened John Anthony "Johnnyboy". Did I tell you that Baroness van Boetselaar [relative in Occupied Holland] has a son, a Caeserian birth? She lost one at four years with a weak heart and had several miscarriages but this one is said to be sound. So nice for her after two daughters. She seems to be doing well and to have been very brave. I suppose you heard about Margriet Francisca, I'm sure the Consul has elaborated on it. Congratulate him for me!

I have got you a letter from someone whom I can't place. It looks like Blissaine Dell or Dull and she lives in Ingleside Terrace and has lost her mother. I'll have to condole her without having the faintest notion who she is and whether she is married or not. I shall have to feign illegible handwriting. She has apparently been to our house, but I'm sure I never saw her name spelt and anyway, I always felt as if you were a kind of file I could consult in these matters. It's very awkward having one's file walk off on one. But I'll have to do the best I can.

Oh goodness, that reminds me I have to thank Edna Gorman for the presents she sent the children at Christmas so goodbye for the nonce. I may have to write you less frequently in the future with two books to illustrate. Please pray for me and I'll pray for you.

Love,
Hilda

CONTEST! | Quibble and Win a Prize! (Updated Aug. 30, 2017)

Hilda van Stockum Marlin, with her six children, c. 1950.
Clockwise: Hilda, John, Brigid, Randal, Sheila, Lis, Olga.

The fact that our dog Hachikō just won Second Prize in the Springs Agricultural Fair led me to thinking: We should have a contest. 

So here it is.

Don Rittner of the Albany Times-Union wrote an excellent article on Hilda van Stockum, "Not an Ordinary Woman," at the time of her birthday earlier this year. This has inspired me to announce a contest relating to the article.

The article is thoughtful and far-reaching, and much welcomed. Here it is.

http://blog.timesunion.com/rittner/hilda-van-stockum-was-not-an-ordinary-woman/5852/

Contest Announcement
I found a couple of minor errors in the article. It's hard to get it all right. As someone who is working on a couple of biographies, I know how hard it is to get everything right. So test your knowledge of Hilda van Stockum and see how many incorrect details you can sleuth out (ignore any mistakes in the associated advertising), number the errors, and send them to me.

Prize: Any book of your choice by Hilda van Stockum that is in print as of the end of September, 2017, delivered to your door. 

Contest Rules
1. Send your entry by email to john@boissevainbooks.com by 11:55 p.m., September 30, 2017. Entries received after that day cannot be considered for a prize.
2. Include your email address (required) and photo (optional) with your submission. We will not sell, exchange or give away your email address to anyone else.
3. Entries become the property of this blog, for us to report and comment on.
4. Entries will be judged on the number of errors correctly identified and the correct replacement noted. 
5. The final judge of the number of errors correctly identified will  be John Tepper Marlin. Neither he nor his spouse is eligible to enter. He will not discuss the contest in person until after September 30.

HvS | Blog passes 70,000 page views.

L to R: Hilda, Olga, Willem,
Bram van Stockum.

The HvS Blog has passed 70,000 page views. 

Thank you for reading.

Here are the top ten posts by number of page views, since the blog began:

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HvS | WW2 1944 to ERM, OSS Jan-Nov

HvS>ERM 1944-1-4

From: Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton St.

Washington, DC

To: Mr. E.R. Marlin

O.S.S. Detachment

APO 887

Postmaster New York City

Jan. 4, 1944

Dear Husband, 

Your letters came on New Year’s Day and were much appreciated by all the children. It was a lovely surprise. 

I agree with you about the photographer but he could only spoil me so it didn't matter. I had to take one nearby since I couldn't go far with that crowd in our overfilled busses.

It doesn't sound as if you are very enthusiastic about "Gerrit" [Gerrit and the Organ]. Anyway, I feel rather tired of writing books and need to have a year off, even if it has disastrous financial consequences. 

Mr. Melcher has given me another [painting] commission and I have another commission for a painting. Mrs. [Kate] Coblentz wants me to illustrate her new book [Bells of Leiden?]. It seems that all reviews have highly praised my pictures (one saying it was more than half the worth of the book!!).

Daniel Melcher told me that he had criticism from the P.T.A. about the anti safety elements of the poster. He seems to think it only funny but I can't help seeing a dangerous lack of proportion in American social welfare tendencies. If they're going to pull Santa Claus off the roof, what's going to become of the world? Might as well object to Hansel and Gretel because children might take to shoving objectionable adults in the fire, or the princess on the pea because it might give them notions. 

Let's hope that American children aren't quite as humorless and stupid as all that! 

However it has given me a feeling that these same people will […next page missing]

HvS>ERM 1944-3-21

From: Hilda Marlin
3728 Northampton Street NW
Washington 15 D.C.

To: Mr. E.R. Marlin
c/o Commanding General European Theatre No. 1
APO 887
Postmaster New York City

March 21, 1944

Dearest Husband.

I am having frightful trouble with my back, can hardly sit up and have to go to bed ever so often. I'm going to Dr. Schwartzman tomorrow. We had no oil for two days during the blizzard. It was rather unpleasant. 

Gordon and Rita expect their first baby in October, Gordon is all flustered over it. 

Sheila told me "Not to put up that stick" and it turned out she meant my frown. 

Randal did a message for Mother and came back saying he was "dead, simply dead."

"You must understand," he explained carefully, giving her back too little change. "That when I do a thing like that after working all day it is very tiring. So I went to the drugstore and took an ice cream." 

The neighbor children were scandalized because he made an airplane out of his honor certificate. He gets very many of them and I fear he does not value them as he should. 

Johnny is getting more charming every day, his eyes are getting brown but his hair is very blond still. 

Sheila is beautiful. She has the real Irish eyes. 

One of Uncle Charles' [Boissevain] grandsons is in Germany on labor [young men in Holland were taken away to Germany for factory and other work] and they haven't heard from him for a year.

Love,

Hilda

HvS > ERM in London, 1944-11-8 [Typed by Jay]

USA Votes in FDR for
4th Term

Hilda Marlin

3728 Northampton Street, NW

Washington D.C. 15

November 8, 1944

Dearest Husband,

Thanks for your last interesting letter. You may imagine that we're happy Roosevelt is elected [his unprecedented 4th term]. That is because an electoral landslide is due, I think, to the evenly divided percentage of intelligence in America. Don't you think so?

I hope you heard Dorothy Thompson when she repeated her speech. Randal and I were the first in the family to know who won. I had gone to sleep at the usual time but Johnny woke me at one-thirty and then Randal cried because he had a stomach ache so I put him in your bed with a hot water bottle and we heard the Republican foreman's speech with the comments afterwards of a roundtable of reporters, and finally [Thomas E.] Dewey’s farewell speech, a handsome one, I must say. I don't think it hurt him as much as [Wendell] Willkie [who was the GOP candidate against FDR in 1940]. He might have liked the honor but he had no real vision and plans; Willkie had.

I forgot to tell you that on Hallows Eve [Halloween] Mother ate with Mr. Smith and his clergyman at Barnhards. I sat at home with a bag of sweets, opening the door all the time to give handouts. Mother and Mr. Smith and the Clergyman dressed themselves up with paper bags and gave the fright of my life, pushing into the house after I had given the clergyman his hand out. (He was the same one you met the first day you came.)

Rita expects her baby any day now. I bought a new hat. I need clothes, Montgomery Ward was sold out on Maternity wear so I bought a nice pattern of a jumper and am going to make my own [Liz is on her way.]. Jumpers always look nice with fresh blouses under them and I'll buy a pretty smock to wear over it when I get too big. Nothing elso really hides you.

Randal is in bed with his stomach. He had to have an enema and may not eat. It's colic or something. I have changed Sheila's hours at school. She goes in the afternoon now. The morning class is too big, Sister Tarcinius couldn't give her enough attention and complications developed with Eddie. Rivalry or something. Sheila refused to go to school. Now she is happy.

I have aired your clothes in the sunshine and when I have time I'll clean out the closet, but I've been very busy. Shopping for Olga's birthday takes a lot of time. She is getting a buffet supper with chicken soup (a whole chicken in it), frankfurters (five pounds of them) with rolls, sandwiches, potato salad, cider and cake. I hope it is a success. Olga is very excited. Mr. Smith will be there too, it s on Sunday.

I haven't heard from May [Massee] yet, which is disappointing. If she doesn't want it now I'm going to send it to another publisher. Enough is enough.

Perhaps it is mean of me, but I suddenly wonder whether May's decision about my Santa Claus story [Kersti and St Nicholas, for which the illustrations meant to be landscape were in portrait position] was influenced at all by having two other Christmas Story books on her list? I think perhaps we writers underrate those factors. That's why it is really much better not to be tied too much to one publisher. Not that the Saint Nicholas story was perfect.

One evening after you were gone Sheila cried: "I want Daddy, why isn't Daddy home?" She sobbed. I explained that you would come back. She loves you very much. I am not going to hunt moths. If it spoils your evenings, what would my life be if I had them cheating me all the time with last year's insects or something?

Love, Hilda

P.S. You are giving Olga a female canary. It only cost three dollars and fifty cents as against fifteen dollars for a male, but she doesn't know that. She'll give you credit for a huge present. I got a nest too and the pet shop has promised to buy the babies when they're nine months. The female took possession of the cage briskly. Our Pete's heart thumped visibly and interest in life went up one hundred percent. But he is already henpecked. Mrs. shoves him into a corner and orders him around with shrewish pecks. Yet he adores her. Aren't men fools!

Hilda

REVOLUTION | July 14 – Bastille Day

Storming of the Bastille (Artist unknown.)

This day in 1789 the French Revolution began in Paris with the storming by an angry crowd of the Bastille prison, a 14th century medieval fortress long used as a prison, especially for the royal family's opponents.

One theory is that the Parisian mob wanted to get at the ammunition believed to be in the Bastille.

The origin of France's problems was the financial stress from supporting the American colonies' war of independence (a fact that Americans sometimes forget when they remember American help to France during the two World Wars).

Higher taxes provoked questions from French citizens about their government and its finances. Rebellions occurred in different parts of France. Louis XVI relied on Jacques Necker, finance minister and effectively prime minister, for answers. Necker tried to negotiate his way to some solutions, organizing the return of the Estates-General, an assembly consisting of clergy, aristocrats, and commoners (the "Third Estate"), for the first time since 1614.

The Estates-General came to no agreement. Necker either did not fully appreciate that political reforms were required or decided that the King wouldn't agree to them. On July 11, Louis dismissed Necker, unleashing mob violence.

The fighting at the Bastille, three days later, lasted several hours, with nearly a hundred attackers killed and one guard. The mob broke in only to find just just seven prisoners to liberate. They killed the governor of the Bastille and paraded around the city with his head on a pike.

When the King returned that evening from a day of hunting, a duke told him the story of the day's events at the Bastille. Louis asked, "So this is a revolt?" The duke replied: "No, Sire, this is a revolution!"

King Louis was executed in January 1793. Shortly afterwards, The Third Estate was  reborn as the National Assembly.

While the day is celebrated as the birth of the French Republic, not all French people celebrate the day. They may remember ancestors who had their heads removed by a guillotine during the years following the taking of the Bastille, or they may have left France. The defeat of the French Navy at Trafalgar is attributed by some to the lack of experienced naval officers, who before the revolution had to be "four quarters" nobility (all four grandparents).

HvS | WW2 1944 to Horn Book, February 15

3728 Northampton Street, NW
Washington 15, D.C.

To: Mrs. Bertha Mahoney Miller
Editor
The Horn Book
Boston, Mass.

Feb. 15, 1944

Dear Mrs. Miller.

It was lovely to get your letter. I am so glad you like my article! I don't mind when I'm paid for it, really, any time that is convenient for you. I am so sorry you are having so many troubles. A sick husband certainly is a tribulation. Mine always wants to have me hovering around in great anxiety about him and at the same time he wants to do exactly as he pleases, get up and go to the phone, and work in bed, and go back to work again much too early. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, for oh me, oh my! If I don't show concern and am as casual about him as he is about himself, or dare to treat lightly his “symptoms"!!!

The Irish, Like the Arabs, Are Spiritual

I think you are right about the Irish having inferiority feelings. I think the reason is that they have a special gift which is not easily appreciated in this pragmatic century. They are dreamers, poets, storytellers and mystics. With that goes a shrinking from daily monotonous toil. They can become furiously active to serve an idea, they are grand soldiers and missionaries and agitators, but to spend most of your time on merely living seems useless to them. You will not find a good Irish cook— they do not serve the stomach well, it is not an interesting organ to them. Now this quality does not make for "success" in the modern sense, though it makes beautiful personalities. 

I met an Arab at a supper party recently, a real Arab, a believing Muslim. (He looked like a fat, contented Dutchman.) I was most interested to hear him describe the Arab country and people. They reminded me so much of the Irish. I asked him how he liked [Wendell] Willkie's book [he had a book out in 1943, One World, including a visit with Stalin-JTM], and he said it was quite intelligent for such a short journey, and the intensely individualistic Arab would enjoy meeting a "great personage" who is as simple as Willkie, which sounded like the Irish to me. He also told of the hospitality in Arab villages, and how one "cottager" killed his cow, his sole possession, to do him honor. 

He said he didn't like Washington (I don't blame him for that) and that when he left Iraq people said: "Oh, you are going to the United States, how lucky for you, you must never come back if you have any sense," but he says he would rather live in Iraq with hardly any money than in the U.S.A. with wads of it, and I understand how he feels. He says everybody you meet there is a person, alive and full of the tradition and wisdom of centuries.

"You have no steam-heat conversations!" I said, and he was a little puzzled until I explained that it was my name for the conversation one gets in steam-heated arguments. There is something about sitting grouped around a fire which unlocks men's souls and when you sit facing each other in a small modern sitting-room with your back against a radiator, you only feel self-conscious and ridiculous and your soul shrivels inside you.

He admitted right away that it was so. They have only fires in Arabic countries, but they have very thick walls to their houses. The climate is much hotter in summer than Washington, but not so humid; it feels worse here. The winters are about the same. While he talked I caught a glimpse of a lovely, magic land, full of stories and poetry, and I couldn't help contrasting it with the terse sentences in Willkie's book about their not having any bathtub. According to their religion they have to wash five times a day, so they can't be as dirty as some people think, and their wisdom must be immense. It seems that also the harems are exaggerated. This Arab says it is impolite to speak of a man's wife, it is too intimate a term, so you speak of a man's harem to spare his feelings. According to the Koran a man may marry more than one wife, but only if he can give them economical equality and keep the peace between them. Men nowadays seldom risk it, according to this Arab.

The Koran also says it is the duty of a man and woman to beautify themselves, but only for intimates. Their face may be seen, the veil was an imported addition which has been largely abandoned. The word Fez apparently means "The Vienna," because it came from Vienna via Greece [actually seems to have originated in Cyprus, came to Arabs from Greece via Vienna, which developed a monopoly-JTM] to the Arab world. There is no difference between Muslims of various nationality; they are all equal because they are Muslims. (The Christian Church could learn something from that.) Of course their religion is largely laws, and reminds one of the Commandments of Moses. They consider Christians and Jews as belonging to the Muslim Church because they believe in One God. However, the idea of a sacrament is a closed book to them, if I'm to judge by this Arab. He thought his marriage much more "sensible" than the Christian, because it was just a contract. He simply disbelieves there can be anything more than a belief in God, and a lot of sensible rules. It was very interesting to me.

Of course this lack of a mystic quality differentiates the Arab greatly from the Irish, but I imagine they can be as much of a political pain in the neck, they are naturally fanatic and individualistic. What was most absorbing to me, though, was that when he was speaking you could see how sensible and enlightened he thought his own religion and culture and how inferior and fanatic he thought ours. Since we are apt to think vice versa it makes one see how patronizing everybody always is about others. It reminds me of the way unbelievers like to make first a ridiculous image of faith only to knock it down again, like Bernard Shaw who, in a recent interview, said, that of course he didn't believe in a God who had a beard and looked like himself! I could have told him "Well, who does?"

Perhaps what makes Arabic countries and Ireland so attractive is the unity of their faith. Of course I think it wrong to force religion on anyone, but if people more or less could agree naturally it would be so much easier to make laws and to write articles. As Chesterton says, it is impossible even to solve a small argument if there is no principle on which you can agree. The cleavage in Christianity is, I think, the main tragedy of the modern world which led to all other evils. Holland was very like America in many ways, especially in the admiration for science and the feeling that Christianity has had its day. I only began to be interested in religion when I arrived in Ireland.

Yet, for all its charm, Ireland too has its drawbacks. My husband heaved a sigh of relief when he was transferred from Ireland to London. There is an insularity about Ireland, and a self-centeredness which sometimes makes one want to tear out one's hair. And though the people seem to be more alive and eager, I think in reality they are even less interested in others than are the Dutch or the Americans. The nicest Irish people are not the intellectuals or the politicians, but the farmers, leaning over their half-doors and stone walls, with a smattering of astrology and mythology, and a view on everything under the sun, including the uselessness of weeding, "because everything grows again."

They are not unlike the Vermont farmers, except that they are less reserved. They are eager to speak and air their souls. And, of course, Ireland's great charm is the general acceptance of the supernatural. It is remarkable how easily one breathes in a country where God is as real as an apple. Also, in Ireland you are close to nature. You deal with stones and sand and sea, with hearths and fire, with wells and udders and surf-holes. Everything you use is dug up or squeezed out of something. One is near the heart of the world.

New York City

Now New York is quite different, it stunned me. I remember hanging desperately on to my personality like a dog with a bone, and being very much on the defensive to the disappoinment of my husband, who thought I would be overwhelmed with enthusiastic admiration for his native city. When I arrived there for the first time exactly the ninth of February ten years ago, he proudly presented me with a box of strawberries. His face shone with the miracle of it, this product of American ingenuity, symbolic, to him, of his fabulously wealthy and productive country. 

I hadn't even taken off my hat and coat, but I sat right down and burst into tears. The idea of eating strawberries when it was sixteen below zero was enough to finish me off. Then I remember my frustration and rage when I found out that I couldn't get out of our apartment without bothering the elevator boy, and the red-letter day when I discovered the stairs, and the amazement of my husband when I insisted on using them. I remember my horror when I couldn't regulate the temperature of my room, it all happening mysteriously downstairs, and twenty degrees above my liking.

Then I remember the open-mouthed amazement of a fellow apartment dweller when she found I had my windows wide open, and how she summoned all the inhabitants of that particular floor to come and look. And then, when Olga was coming, my determination to get out of that "hole" into some human place, and how we at last found an old house on thirtieth street, squashed between high buildings, where we had a whole floor, and it had a chimney which could be "opened" which my husband promptly did, with the help of a mason or plumber or something, who was very interested in my "condition," and kept telling me to sit down and rest, and also enlarged on the fact that he had nine sons and that his wife would soon have another, and that she still hoped it would be a girl, notwithstanding her nine disappointments.

I would so much have liked to hear whether the girl materialized, but we never did. The apartment was supposed to be heated by "hot air," but the air was decidedly cool, and so we lugged bags of coal up and had a fireplace in the living room and a potbellied stove in the bedroom, was I happy! 

Praying for the Mice

We also had a lot of mice and my husband insisted on exterminating them. He explained lengthily about the unsanitary aspects of having them around as pets, and on account of the baby I at last capitulated. We thereupon went to a place where they sell the means by which one gets rid of those animals, and the man, looking only at my husband, went with gusto into the mechanics of their horrible death.

When he saw me tugging frantically at my husband's sleeve, however, he slowed down and explained how absolutely and utterly painless it all was, but I, having seen the cruel gleam in his eyes at first, would not believe him. My husband was like granite, however and so my only refuge was prayer. So at night after having duly pleaded for the safety of the mice, I fell into a lovely sleep, to be wakened the next morning by the furious cries of my husband, who was dancing around with the trays in his hands, saying that the mice had eaten the cheese and got away. I chuckled. That's all I did, chuckle. But my husband spun around on his heels and glared at me. 

"You didn't...You didn't..." his voice trembled with indignation — "You didn't pray for them?!"

"Only one Hail Mary," I confessed timidly.

"Well of all the mean...!" my husband was speechless. Then he made me promise never to pray for them again, and hopefully set out the trap once more. But one prayer can be very powerful. The only mouse he ever caught was one that accidentally fell into a pot of paint. Now my husband never lets me know when he sets out traps and he and Randal [her third child and first son] dispose of them secretly, with masculine hardihood.

Of course you must not jump to the conclusion that I do not like America, I feel it is the hope of the world and I should be very proud of it, if it weren't so proud of itself. My husband says the very nicest people he has ever met are Americans, but then, he is American himself of course. I always say, "Well I married you, didn't I, when I could have had a Dutchman or an Irishman (at least, I pretend to him that I could have). On the other hand, you took a Dutch-Irish girl." We compromise by saying that American men are nicest but that Dutch-Irish girls are nicest, and since there are precious few of the latter I ought to be satisfied.

I think Americans have made their life too full of gadgetry. They call it a high standard of living and I call it clutteritis. But I admit some things are handy. Only when they start making houses that you can carry around with you and divide in two halves when you get divorced, as they are threatening to do, I don't know what I'll do. Buy a castle for two dollars and fifty cents or something. And put a moat around it. And get me a couple of bows and arrows. And say: "No houses parked here," etc., etc.

I hope you do not feel that we can't correspond any more now I've written my article. Your letters are no end of enjoyment to me. When I write my husband I practically get no answer, for it takes so long to get there that by the time he writes back I've forgotten what I've written. And, though I write May [Massee, her editor] sometimes, she is much too busy to answer, so I always end up thinking she probably disagrees with everything I say, which is rather disappointing. So your letters have been a real find of happiness for me.

Though I think I have an enviably full life, it is not overly social. I meet few people. I have some friends but I do not see them often. I am not in touch with anybody who paints and with very few who write. This is all very good for developing independently of current fashions but it leaves one rather hungry for exchange of thought. You're so tremendously alive and appreciative and interested in others, one can't help wanting to exchange views with you. So I hope you don't mind if we carry on.

Mr. Royanovsky may still have my letter… But I'm not sure it's fit for publication. On the other hand, what about his next book? I should love to write about it if it is as good as his last.

Cordially yours,

Hilda Marlin

Handwritten letter. Transcribed by JJTM, edited-annotated-posted by JTM.