23. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

The writing matters.

Last summer I was in 2nd and Charles, the used bookstore associated with Books-a-Million Corporation, browsing the remaindered paperbacks.   These are new books, sold for insultingly low prices, an insult I’m willing to inflict to benefit my reading habit.   It’s always surprising to see who turns up there.

Never mind it’s December 23rd and I still need another gift for my son’s Almost-Fiancee.  She’s a reader, an English teacher, so I madly start reading first pages in the pile of yet-to-be-read books beside my bed.  Aha!  A book by Edna O’Brien–a name I remember repeated by a much-loved writing teacher long ago.  The Almost-Fiancee is Irish with a grandmother whose lilt sounds like she just stepped off the boat.

The Light of Evening.  A resonant title.

I open the book.  Ohhhh.  The prose is so gorgeous, I can hardly breathe.  I dare to quote from the Prologue:

There is a photograph of my mother as a young woman in a white dress, standing by her mother who is seated out-of-doors on a kitchen chair, in front of a plantation of evergreen trees.  Her mother is staring with a grave expression, her gnarled fingers clasped in prayer.  Despite the virgin marvel of the white dress and the obligingness of her stance, my mother has heard the mating calls of the world byond and has seen a picture of a white ship far out at sea.  Her eyes are shockingly soft and beautiful.

The photograph would have been taken of a Sunday and for a special reason, perhaps on account of the daughter’s looming departure.  A stillness reigns.  One can feel the sultriness, the sun beating down on the tops of the drowsing trees and over the nondescript fields, on and on to the bluish swath of mountain.  Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature’s fault that makes us first full, then empty.

Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers, on and on until the last day, the bluish tinge, the pismires, the gloaming, and dying dust.

I’ve never seen a corncrake, (had, in fact, never heard of one), but I will never forget the sound.  It’s internalized now.  She did that, the miracle of words on the page.

Listen to the words, the repetition.  Look at the images that repeat and therefore linger.  Feel the fullness, the emptiness, the groaning of those mothers, in the moment of birth, in the moment of separation.

I stand amazed.  Yes.  That’s how it is.  I am so grateful to the one who said it.

Posted in Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening, sound, image, prose, reading | No Comments »

10. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m just finishing up a debut novel by Debra Dean called The Madonnas of Leningrad, a must-read for art lovers and anyone who wants to know what it was like to survive the terrible winter of the Nazi seige of Leningrad.  The protagonist is a docent in Leningrad’s enormous museum called The Hermitage, but as the Nazis descend, she is called upon to help pack up the art works to be shipped to a safe location, then to spy out fires set by Nazi bombs, then to maintain a water-soaked building.

Juxtaposed against this story in intermittent chapters is the story of her marriage and descent into Alzheimers in old age.

The dramatic fracture the juxtaposition causes is not disorienting, though I am continually evaluating which story most intrigues me.  The stories each inform the other, so for example, the Leningrad material gradually reveals how the marriage actually came about, and the Alzheimer’s story (interesting in itself) is delivering material that might be delivered in an epilogue in a linear novel.

In addition to the time being fractured, so is place.  The historical Leningrad setting is radically different from the contemporary American locale of the Alzheimer’s story, where we meet the protagonists eventual family as they meet for a wedding and struggle to deal with the problem of how to secure their elderly parents’ increasingly endangered lives.

(Being an art lover myself, an additional intrigue is all the named paintings.  Many of the paintings I’ve seen in person–living in a city with a wonderful art museum as well as traveling to many I’m wanting to reread the book with a computer so I can  examine all the details.)

The madonna motif is presented in many paintings, then completed by the mysterious pregnancy of the protagonist, this in utero character appearing as an adult in the contemporary story.

I really love this novel.  Though the protagonist is not a famous person as in my fictional biographies, the structure serves as a paradigm for a way to set up a life where the time frame is not limited to 17 months as in my Darwin novel.

Here’s the Hermitage Museum website:

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/

Here’s an interesting interview with the author where she describes her process:

http://conversationsfamouswriters.blogspot.com/2006/03/debra-dean-madonnas-of-leningrad.html

Posted in The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean, Hermitage, Siege of Leningrad, methods for creativity, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, reading, Fictional biography, historical fiction, writing | No Comments »

1. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

In keeping with my resolve not to change the historical record where it exists, I still wrestle with how to handle the gaps.   The writing of fictional biography gives me some license, of course, but I mostly interpret that to mean that I am imagining the scenes that are suggested by the historical record and making up the dialogue.  I’m also inventing characteristics and histories for minor characters who are documented in the record, but about whom little is written.  Mrs. Grut is an example, in my Darwin book.  She was the children’s  governess at a critical time in the Darwin household and appears in the Darwin letters but in no other place.  I knew she tried to make a proper Victorian household out of Emma Darwin’s fun house full of children–to the chagrin and detriment of all.  I had to create a character who was motivated to put things in order and provoke consternation.  Okay.  I’m fine with that.

What I find more troubling  is a matter like Mileva Maric’s sister Zorka, who was known to have developed something like schizophrenia.  What I don’t know is when it developed.  I can read statistics on when young women typically develop symptoms and I can read letters, but it seems that as soon as I write her into a scene with symptoms at an age of onset consistent with statistics, I read that Milos Maric (Mileva’s father) sent all his children abroad to school.  Now, how likely is it that an 18-year-old would thrive abroad at school with symptoms of schizophrenia?  I’m certain that Zorka was suffering symptoms by age 24, but then, after that, she went to help Mileva with the children during periods of Mileva’s debilitation after Einstein left the family. It doesn’t make sense to me that someone with unmedicated schizophrenia would be able to run a household with young children.

Perhaps the diagnosis is wrong.  Zorka was in Serbia and would have been hidden in the attic like Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre to avoid sending her to some brutal asylum where, at that time, she would have been chained to a wall or confined in some torture device and possibly put on public display like at Bedlam Hospital in England.  Zorka would not have been seen by a professional until later, when she went to Zurich and was treated at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, where the Einstein’s son Eduard, also schizophrenic, was interred at times.   So, there was a serious dysfunction of a psychological nature, which eventually Zorka self-medicated with alcohol, but it seemed to relapse at times.  One relative/neighbor interviewed by Michele Zackheim for her book Einstein’s Daughter said that before Mileva came home to visit her in later life, Zorka stopped drinking and put the house in order.   There’s volition, devotion, and shame in that behavior.  She knew she didn’t want Mileva to see how she was living.  Is that kind of self-awareness typical of schizophrenia?

There are two other bits of data that make me put age of onset sooner rather than later.  One is that when Mileva, already pregnant with Lieserl and still unmarried, traveled from Serbia to Switzerland to visit Albert in secret, he sent her a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel who was then the director of the Burgholzli.  Why that book?  While it is true that Mileva took a psychology course at some point in her education, they were not known to have read and discussed anything but physics together, so it seems out of context unless Mileva had requested he send her anything he could find to help her help Zorka.  He was in Schaffhausen, tutoring a young Englishman, and living in a household with a family.  Perhaps it was the only remotely relevant book he could find in a Schaffhausen library.

Conjecture.

The other data bit that makes me wonder about early onset for Zorka is that after Mileva’s baby was born, Albert and Mileva considered putting her up for adoption.  Why would they not have asked the Maric family to keep the baby?  She had already caused them shame by the fact of her unwed pregnancy.  They were wealthy and had servants, though Marija Maric (Mileva’s mother) continued to help with all house and farm work.  That means she was healthy.  The little girl lived there for 18 months, which seems a long time if she was going to be given up.  Perhaps Mileva’s parents couldn’t handle another dependent in addition to Zorka?

It’s all puzzling.  Then there is the fate of Lieserl–another unknown–except that Mileva clearly knows what happened to her and she’s a point-of-view character, so how do I get around that one?  I’m leaning heavily on Michele Zackheim’s interviews with family members and friends in Einstein’s Daughter, though I’m not certain how to explain a few things there, either.  For example, if Lieserl was born with Downs Syndrome–as Albert seems to have reported to a colleague later in his life–why would Albert have at the time written “I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.  It’s so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.”  To me, this sounds as though scarlet fever caused a disability she didn’t have before.  If Lieserl had died of the scarlet fever (lasting effect, indeed!), he would not have written the sentences that follow:  “As what is the child registered?  We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”

What is the likelihood that Lieserl was a Downs baby?  95% of Downs children are born to older mothers with no hereditary component.  Mileva was 25 at the time of conception.  The percentage of Downs children born due to other factors is 2-3% and then, only 1 in 3 due to a hereditary defect in one parent.  The fact that their third child was schizophrenic then, hardly seems to be related.

And, if Lieserl had been born a Downs baby, would Albert have been pleased when Mileva got pregnant a second time, after they were married? Even without a hereditary factor–likely not known at that time–wouldn’t the feelings be more complex at the thought of a second go-round?  But that same letter begins “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie [his nickname for Mileva] is hatching a new chick.  In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. . . .  Brood on it very carefully so that something good will come of it.”

So what can I conclude that will satisfy the parameters in this letter?  This is the primary source.

Posted in Michele Zackheim, Eduard Einstein, Zurich, Einstein's Daughter, Marija Maric, schizophrenia, Bulgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, Zorka Maric, Milos Maric, Auguste Forel, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Fictional biography, historical fiction, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, point of view, writing | 2 Comments »

29. October 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

In keeping with my last post where I notated such helpful creative habits as building on predecessors and keeping the company of like minds, I turned in the night–one of spotty sleep–to the short stories of Andrea Barrett, whose collection, Ship Fever, won the National Book Award.  It was one of those serendipitous choices, the side of my bed being lined with books to select depending on mood.  (I went to sleep initially reading Eric Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts which provoked nightmares based on a scene where a Gentile woman has her head shaved and is dragged through Nuremberg in a carnival-like atmosphere to be jeered at, poked, and prodded by the crowd for the offense of being engaged to a Jew.  A book I’ve already read feels safer under such circumstances.)  And what better mentor/predecessor, what more like mind than Andrea Barrett,  to answer some thorny questions I’ve been wrestling with in the Einstein manuscript?  Ship Fever is a collection of short stories about ground-breaking naturalists like Gregor Mendel, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, etc.

I’ve spent the last week rewriting a chapter I thought was in good shape when I noticed I’d written it in the past tense.  That’s how it came out, the way I heard the voice of the story in my mind.  I was about to tack it onto the 100 plus pages already written when I realized I had changed the ongoing front story into present tense, reserving past tense for flashbacks.  But now, realizing I wasn’t hearing the story in present tense, I began to ask myself why, when it’s possible, of course, to write the front story in past tense and cast the flashbacks in past perfect.  (Sorry if this is too technical for the grammarphobes.  I’m a grammar nerd.)

Mindful that I need to have a reason for my choices, and that the reason in some way needs to mirror the task of the novel, I continued to grapple with this tense issue.  Originally, I cast the front story into present tense because there were so many shifts in time in the opening passage of the novel, it seemed to help eliminate confusion for the reader. These time shifts I justified by labeling the opening section TIME, playing with Einstein’s revolutionary idea that time is not a constant.  (Subsequent sections will have other physics-related titles like SPACE, FORCE, LIGHT, depending on how the metaphor works for what’s happening in the text.)  But this still doesn’t demand I use present tense.

Enter Andrea Barrett’s story “Rare Bird.”  Voila.  Present tense.  Hmmm.  The story is about a disenfranchised, educated woman in 19th century England who challenges Linnaeus’ already-established notion that swallows hibernate underwater during the winter, a fact that, if true, supports Darwin’s evolutionary theory.  (Linnaeus was the naturalist who categorized plants and animals with genus and species designations, a fact the reader already knows if s/he’s read Barrett’s stories in order, for the story “The English Pupil” precedes “Rare Bird” and establishes this fact.)  It occurs to me in looking at Barrett’s story that she’s also juggling layers of time, of pastness.  If her task is to bring the past into the reader’s present, it makes sense to use the present tense.

It’s easier to see on someone else’s work.

Then, her text solved an even thornier problem.  I have two scenes juxtaposed in this first section where Mileva is pregnant in the first, but then I flash back to before she was pregnant.   This is illogical at best, but when I juggled the scenes into chronological order, I lose the dramatic effect.  Again, enter Barrett, dealing with a time problem.  Her narrator says outright to the reader, “It’s September now–not the September following their meeting but the one after that:  1764.”  Well, why not?  Use the narrator to situate the reader.

Thank you, Andrea. (May I call you Andrea?)  It’s hard to argue with your logic.

Posted in Time, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett, verb tense | No Comments »

15. October 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

This morning I came across this letter from Martha Graham  to Agnes DeMille, both dancers that left a long trail of amazing choreography, works which are not only still being performed, but which arguably form the backbone of  some dance companies’ repertoire.

A Letter to Agnes De Mille

There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.

It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.

Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…

There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes “us” MORE alive than the others.

Martha Graham
( - a letter to Agnes De Mille-)

On one level, Graham’s advice strikes me personally, defining my task as a writer.  Stop judging, stop seeing your work through the judgments of others.  Keep the channel open and respond to it, because whatever anyone else thinks of the work, including myself in any given mood, the task, if my unique personhood is to be expressed, is only to keep the channel open.  It’s the kind of advice that any artist must continually return to, other voices being so anxious to shout down the creative impulse. 

On another level, it challenges me to think about both Darwin and Einstein, subjects of my fictional biographies, to think about what they did to keep their channels open.  In Darwin’s case, I’m aware that despite excessive approval-orientation, he produced a work that brought down 150 years of controversy by identifying and connecting to his passion and following wherever it took him.  As a child, he preferred collecting beetles to memorizing Latin vocabulary.  As a young man he incurred the wrath of his father by dropping out of two academic programs–medicine and theology–to go aboard HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist, sending back barrels of specimens to be studied by men who were then England’s top naturalists.  He didn’t yet see himself in their company, but as his ideas morphed, he dared to follow where they led, understanding that he had immense problems to solve–such as how species crossed oceans and appeared on different continents.  He built on the work of his predecessors and communicated with his fellow scientists regularly, swapping ideas, and particularly with Joseph Hooker, the botanist that inherited the directorship of Kew Gardens from his father.  And he didn’t allow the fact that he was a less-than-competent writer–Did you ever wonder why you memorize bullet points but don’t read his work in school?–to prevent him pursuing his goal and publishing his work.

What of Einstein?  He began writing papers and publishing in the Annalen, Europe’s most prestigious journal of physics, during the frustrating nearly two-year period when he could not find a teaching job.  Rejected for one teaching post after another, he used his time to immerse himself in the content and arguments of his era’s current thinkers, particularly Boltzmann, Mach, Ostwald, and Lennard.  He kept his mind mulling the problems his contemporaries encountered.  He wrote and published, and though this wasn’t ultimately what opened the door to his job at the Patent Office–a friend’s father did that–he didn’t insist on a direct path.  All of his concentration culminated in an explosion of productivity–five papers in 1905, just two years after he took his job at the Patent Office.  Now granted, Einstein’s brain was different, and we all don’t have that advantage, but there are methods here.  

What have I learned?  

• Identify your passion and follow where it leads. 

• Pursue the passion despite the nay-sayers.

• Don’t allow the immensity of the problem overcome your pursuit.

• Build on your predecessors.

• Cultivate the company of like minds.

• Don’t allow your weaknesses to defeat you.

• Immerse yourself in your materials, even when your path is blocked.

• Don’t insist on one path to your goal.  Walk through open doors, pursuing alternatives.

• When you’ve done these things, wait patiently for the pay-off.

And incidentally, Agnes DeMille was not a very good dancer. 

Posted in Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, innovation, making art, reading, Einstein, Darwin, genius, writing | 2 Comments »

26. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Bern is a medieval city that has changed little structurally since 1410 when a law was passed, after a fire that burned all the wooden buildings, that decreed all buildings be made of stone.   Of course the old city now has contemporary shops and is connected by buses and trams to the new city, yet still, it retains its original character.  The four main thoroughfares of the old city are covered in cobblestones and because the available stone, limestone, is porous, the eaves extend out farther than usual.  Awnings that originally covered the carts of vendors have been assimilated into the architecture so that the walkways are now covered, forming arcades on either side of the streets.

As you can see, the city remains much as it was, including a series of eleven fountains, each centered around a painted statue, where women in 1901 without running water assembled to do washing.

Bern is where Albert wrote the five papers that established his reputation in the year 1905, his anus mirabilus, while he was working full-time at the Bern Patent Office, newly married (1903) to Mileva, and soon-to-be the father of Hans Albert.  In his memoir, he records that these were the happy years.  (Interesting that happiness is reported BEFORE the success for which he is famous.  Hemingway also claimed the years before his acknowledgment, when married to Hadley Richardson, were his happiest.)

The apartment where Albert and Mileva lived when they were first married has been preserved as a tiny museum in two floors, those being what we would call the second and third floors.

You first enter two rooms of their apartment, one with a tiny fireplace and Albert’s desk from the Patent Office added, the other with table, chairs, grandfather clock, and photographs.  All are wood and quite beautiful.  The desk is the kind with cubbies, each filled with Albert’s belongings.

Between the two rooms in a little foyer is a closet with what appears to be Mileva’s wedding clothes and Hans Albert’s bassinet.  While it might be possible to look at period furniture dispassionately, the fabric of the clothing and the bassinet connected me to the real family.

Up the original staircase is a room full of information about Einstein, all of which was familiar to me from reading biographies.  It was my husband’s first initiation into the various particulars, so worthwhile for his participation and interest.  (No, I don’t discuss my day’s work with him beyond whether it went well or haltingly.  Though peculiarities in the research might come out, he doesn’t get the full gestalt until a trip such as this one or when reading the published book.)

The real treasure trove of content is in the Historical Museum here in Bern, housed in a castle and devoting an entire floor to Einstein.  With video demonstrations, newsreel, photographs and artifacts, the museum recreates the context of his work, his life, his legacy.

The Theory of Special Relativity is explained in animations, step-by-step, on four screens, the viewer able to rewatch each one as many times as necessary to understand the concepts.  This is the theory that presents the speed of light as the constant, and not space or time, as was previously thought.  As a writer, I’m struck with how much of grasping the concept is the same as understanding point of view.

The artifacts that were of greatest interest to me were those that demonstrated the particulars of daily life.  Seeing the heavy iron Mileva would have used, the telephone on which Albert might have called his mother, the stove that heated the rooms and old films of the trolley cars made the reality of their lives more palpable.

There were several rooms set up–a bedroom like where each lived in Zurich while in school, a store where Mileva might have shopped in Bern.  Such exhibits prevent me from imagining/writing their lives in a 21st century, revisionist way.

Three facts I didn’t know emerged:  Einstein’s father’s company was commissioned to light Oktoberfest with electricity–suggesting that Albert might have attended, especially the year it was first completed.  I can imagine the  moment of flipping that switch and seeing the grounds lit for the first time would be quite a sight.

I also learned that despite being aware that he was not a good marriage partner, Albert fell in love again in old age, after Elsa’s death, after his platonic relationship with his secretary Helen Dukas.  His inamorata was a Princeton librarian, Johanna Fantova, aka Hannie, also a European refugee.  He wrote her love poems like those he wrote to Mileva and liked to take her sailing–a lifelong passion akin to playing his violin.  Fortunately for Hannie, they didn’t marry.  He bemoaned in his memoir that he failed miserably at marriage.  Twice.

Finally, I saw the will above.  Mileva and Elsa were both dead before he died, so he provided $20,000 for his secretary, Helen Dukas, $20,000 for his step-daughter Margot (Elsa’s daughter), $15,000 for his son Eduard who was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution in Zurich, and $10,000 for his son Hans Albert, a hydro-geologist in California.  Any remainder, including all proceeds from his literary estate, was left to Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I will leave those numbers alone.  They speak for themselves.

Posted in Margot Einstein, Elsa Einstein, Helen Dukas, Johanna Fantova, Ernest Hemingway, History Museum, Hadley Richardson, Eduard Einstein, Hans Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, Switzerland, Mileva Maric, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Oktoberfest, Anus Mirabilus, Bern, Einstein | No Comments »

24. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Einstein spent his childhood from age one to fifteen in Munich, though the Munich of today is a reconstruction of the city, thanks to Munich being the Nazi headquarters and therefore the target of Allied bombs in WWII. When it became apparent to Hitler that Munich would fall, he didn’t move the art work out of the cathedrals because he felt it would demoralize the population. Instead, he had everything photographed. From these Nazi photographs the old city was reconstructed so that in the Alstadt, much appears as it did before.

The two gates that remain from the medieval city are the Isator and the Sendlinger Tor. Both Einstein households—his parents moved farther out of town as the business prospered—were near the Sendlinger Tor, so I was particularly interested in what a child could actually see from there. In the opening scene of my novel, Einstein is a three-year-old, left by his mother in the city to find his way home—a practice she was committed to in building his independence. This is fact, but how he learned to find his way home is a matter of fiction. Originally, I imagined that he oriented himself by the towers of the Fraumunster Kirche, but standing at the Sendlinger Tor, I realized that these towers, high as they are, are not visible. As if to oblige me, there stood a child, a little girl of about three, and through her eyes it was apparent that I needed to revise the scene so that three-year-old Albert would orient himself by the Tor itself.

I also sought out the Luitpold Gymnasium, the high school that Einstein attended, hated, and from which he arranged to be dismissed at age fifteen when his parents moved to Milan and left him behind to finish school. (He had a dual purpose. Not only did he hate the militaristic German educational methods, but if he did not revoke his German citizenship before age seventeen, he would be obliged by law to serve in the German army.) The school itself looked too new to be over one hundred years old, which leads me to believe that it was rebuilt after the war, the school he attended possibly having been destroyed. This is a subject for further research.

It happens that Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest during our stay, though, unlike four million people annually, it was not the purpose of our coming. Oktoberfest is the annual celebration of the wedding feast of the long-dead King Ludwig I and has continued since 1810.  That means Albert might have attended as a child.  My husband and I took a stroll through the celebration, an immense fairgrounds full of the most hair-raising rides I’ve ever seen, plus booths selling wurst, very fishy-smelling fish on a stick, pretzels, and decorated, heart-shaped cookies worn on a string around the neck by both men and women, all dressed in traditional Bavarian costumes. The main attraction, however, seems to be the ubiquitous beer halls where hundreds pack in to get drunk, sway, and sing both American and German songs, loudly, to the music of an oompah band.

After a several mile circle of the grounds at 6:00 PM, having sampled nothing, we were driven home in a bicycle-powered, two-seat carriage—the vehicle of choice in the car-and-taxi clogged roadways. The driver told us that to get a seat in a beer hall, one had to go at 10:00 AM. Since Albert Einstein was an introverted child who preferred building houses of cards, watching chickens, and proving the Pythagorean theorem, I suspect he might have been as anxious to leave as I was. Furthermore, he didn’t drink—he claimed it made one stupid—and while not a teetotaler myself, after seeing Oktoberfest, I’ve no doubt he was right.

Posted in Sendlinger Tor, Luitpold Gymnasium, Oktoberfest, Nazi headquarters, Munich, Einstein, Research methods, writing | No Comments »

19. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

It poured rain on our first day in Zurich and was the Swiss equivalent of Thanksgiving Day, besides.  Of the main churches, the Grossmunster was closed for a vocal concert, the Wasserkirche for services, and St. Peter’s Church for a string ensemble.  We did see the Chagall windows in the Fraumunster, (stunning, but not there in 1901 as Chagall was only fourteen and executed the commission when he was 80) and hear an amazing soprano sing for coins in the portico of the Wasserkirche.

Apart from the rain soaking through my raincoat, Sunday was the perfect day to go searching out specific Einstein sites.  I wanted to see the house where Mileva lived with her Eastern European countrywomen at Plattenstrasse 50 and also the room Albert rented at Unionstrasse 4.  I had seen both on the internet courtesy of Google Earth, but seeing them live was a different matter, like the difference between watching an opera on television or in a theater.  The rain did not dampen my enthusiasm for looking up to the fourth floor of 50 Plattenstrasse to the three windows that mark the only room up there.  This was Mileva’s room after she and Albert got together–for privacy, no doubt, though it meant climbing more stairs with her congenitally displaced hip and possibly having to descend a floor to use the bathroom.  She didn’t mind, apparently, though her housemates complained that she was unavailable to them once Albert came on the scene.

The building is stucco, painited gray, quite plain, on a street of old trees, sidewalks, and other more distinguished-looking houses with shutters.  The paint and the age of the trees might be different, but those three windows on the fourth floor suggest a large room up in the tree tops, a pleasant, light-filled nest for the two of them.  Strangely, given Albert’s mother’s antagonism for Mileva and her fear that Mileva would get pregnant, she sent care packages for Albert to Mileva’s address.

It was more difficult to find Albert’s room.  Unionstrasse is a tiny cul-de-sac which requires pinpoint navigation among a maze of streets.  A cooperative Swiss citizen helped, directing me in a combination of gestures and broken English.  The Swiss speak very good English–much better than my German–but the word cul-de-sac is not parlance learned in school.  Nonetheless, she managed to direct me to a lovely tree-lined street, and there was number 4 on the corner, buff-colored stucco building.  A plaque on the wall confirms that Albert Einstein indeed lived there.  An architect now has an office in the building.  I hope s/he feels particularly inspired.

From there I climbed farther up Ramistrasse to the ETH, the Polytech, where both went to school as members of the same class of five students.  The ETH itself is a massive building with a huge plaza that overlooks the city from a promontory, meaning that when Albert and Mileva went to the Cafe Metropole on the Limmat River, they went down a steep grade and had to climb back up, later.  Their houses were each up the incline as well,  so they were both in decent physical condition.

Today, Monday, I visited a tiny museum tucked back in the winding streets of the Alstadt (Old City) that showed a model of Zurich in 1800, before the ETH was built.  Of more interest were photographs of a 1910 house the city had renovated, which happened to look quite like the house where Mileva lived, including a rooftop room.  Renovation plans showed elevations of the interior, and there was a photograph of the interior of a renovated room with windows like in Mileva’s room and also of the original kitchen and common rooms before renovation.  It gave me a better sense of what the house looked like, including the areas where she and her friends met to play the piano and sing.  Albert played his violin for them there, with Mileva accompanying him.

Posted in Plattenstrasse 50, Unionstrasse 4, ETH/Zurich Polytech, Marc Chagall, Fraumunster, Zurich, Grossmunster, Wasserkirche, Switzerland | 1 Comment »

18. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

We stayed in Tremezzo (tree-metzo) because it’s the location of the Villa Carlotta, an open-to-the-public villa with extensive gardens that Albert and Mileva visited on their ferry trip from Como to Colico.  It’s likely they stopped in other villages as well–so we visited Bellagio and Varenna, both charming and different–but the Villa Carlotta is the stop that Mileva mentioned in her glowing letter to her friend Helene Savic, then married and living in Belgrade.

Built in the 1600’s for a powerful Milanese family, the Villa was bought in 1801 by an art collector responsible for its extant collection of Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Heyez.

In 1843, it was bought for the Princess Carlotta by her mother, the Prussian Princess Marianna of Nassau on the occasion of Carlotta’s marriage to Georg II of Sax-Meiningen, (note names for the villa’s ultimate fate) who was a passionate botanist and responsible for the 70,000 square meters of gardens, including rhododendron and azaleas that must have been astonishing when Albert and Mileva visited in May, as well as a cactus garden and a rain forest.

In the center rotunda of the villa stands a large-as-life sculpture of Mars and Venus in polished white marble, the figure of Mars standing stalwart, nude except for his helmet, sandals and a strap holding the cape that has fallen from his muscled body.  He holds a drawn sword, notable for its being the only metal part of the piece.  Venus, also nude, but round and supple, is the supplicant in the piece, as if begging Mars to reconsider.

In the next room, Eros and Psyche are caught mid-embrace, two beautiful, polished marble faces about to kiss in the lee of Eros’ spread wings.

It would be hard to imagine a more perfect set-up for the night Mileva got pregnant.  Unless it was the next night, after their drive in a horse-drawn sledge over the snow-covered Splugen Pass.  (When we crossed the Alps into Switzerland, there was no snow on the alps, though it was much colder than in Lake Como.)

I wonder if Mileva would have been so entranced had she known that after the birth of many children, the Princess Carlotta died at age 23, and that fewer than twenty years later the villa itself, on the defeat of Germany in WWI, would be confiscated by the Italian government.  Sad fate.

Beware of your affections, Mileva!

Posted in Bellagio, Varenna, Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo, Lake Como, Mileva Maric, reading, Einstein | No Comments »

15. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

My husband and I arrived in Milan yesterday after the (for me) sleepless overnight flight that is penance for the luxury of European travel, meaning no taxi fare seemed too high if it meant we might settle in at our hotel sooner. And Tremezzo, the small village on the west shore of Lake Como, midlake, where I had booked our room, couldn’t have made it more worth it. What overwhelmed me more than the lake itself, is the geography of the basin it’s in. Carved out by a glacier, the foothills surround the lake are covered in lush foliage with darker vertical veins, which in the haze of humidity appear velvetine, like the iris petals in the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe.

On the lake shore, the Hotel Villa Marie, complete with its own cupola (on left, below), is the most picturesque in a row of tile-roofed and pastel-painted Italian villas.

This is not where Albert and Mileva stayed, though it’s one km from the Villa Carlotta where they disembarked from their ferry to tour the house and gardens. The ferry boats are still the most efficient means of transportation to various villages on the lake, so today Beloved and I boarded the “slow boat,” (Centro Lago in Italian), and took a gestalt tour of the mid-lake villages, including Bellagio, home to luxury shops, and Varenna, a charmingly-preserved fishing village with an 11^th century stone chapel and unrestored 14^th century frescoes. Tomorrow we will tour the Villa Carlotta. Today it was focused on what it feels like to be here. This morning, in addition to the lapping of water against the stone walls that separate the land from the lake, I heard the church bells ring two strokes with a non-melodious “clong.” I heard the rigging of the sailboats clinking against aluminun masts in the tiny harbor in front of the hotel, but masts were wood in 1901, so perhaps chattering would be a better word. Regrettably, the traffic noise is loud now on the road that wends around the lake. Albert, unlike Beloved, would not have needed to jerk Mileva from the path of drivers speeding around blind curves.

At our sidewalk cafe dinner last night we sat at a small table among many other couples at small tables, all speaking in whispers, until, as invariable happens with my friendly husband, we all began talking to one another. Beside us was a couple of honeymooners, obvious and perfect for imagining Albert and Mileva, though they were not yet married on their May, 1901 trip, but their heads likely inclined toward one another in the same way, though Albert didn’t drink so they wouldn’t have shared the same bottle of expensive wine, (red, of course.) Still, they might have lingered long, ordering each course and eating it before deciding on the next, sharing each as if unable yet to acknowledge different preferences, she serving out his helping first while he sat by helpless and helplessly in love.

Around these two sat three couples of oldlyweds, none of us jaded, I hope, but clearly in a different place as we lounged back in the wicker chairs, drinking from different liters of wine—his red, hers white, ordering not multiple courses—who can eat like that after 35?–but trying not to lick the plate of our measley one course apiece. One man called the rising, almost-full moon, the sun and told the groom to enjoy the next six months as if life would never be like that again. Perhaps not, but I didn’t sense regret from any table. The most senior were a couple from Wales and England, clearly enjoying their holiday together, though they were supposed to come six months earlier for a wedding and had to postpone for his illness. I was thinking how Mileva would have envied us all—the young lovers and the mature ones with our children grown and ably fending for themselves–she who was abandoned and left to care for a schizophrenic son.

Now my patient Beloved waits, out on the balcony of our room, overlooking the lake. The rocky tops of the Alps to the north—in fact in Switzerland—turn pink at sunset. His wife writes on, but it is dinner time and he is getting hungry. I suspect we will return to our same cafe, The Helvetia, because our Welsh and British friends—last night the end of their holiday here–confirm it has the freshest food in Tremezzo.  The veal in mushrooms and wine the newlyweds were eating looked stupendous.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, historical fiction, Tremezzo, Bellagio, Varenna, Italy, Lake Como, Einstein, Mileva Maric, Research methods, reading, writing | 1 Comment »