Garlic and Sapphires in the Mud: Remembering Paul Priest, 1931-2015

He was my first cousin once-removed, which didn’t really count as family, something I was acutely aware of when the young doctor at Wheatfields appeared in the visitors room, looking grim and wanting to discuss Paul’s condition. After asking whether I was Hannah and finding that I was not, was instead this distant American relation, he disappeared down the hall. It would not be until evening that Hannah would explain the problem: Paul was getting better, or at least not getting worse, “stabilized,” as the doctor had called it. The average stay at Wheatfields was a week—Paul had been there for a fortnight--and the National Health Service wanted something to be done: a transfer back to his flat in Quaker House or into a nursing home.  

“I’m being punished for living,” Paul had wailed when Hannah told him the news. He was listing to the right in the bed he had not left since he arrived, the retractable tray across his food-stained, tee-shirted belly filled with yogurt cups, dried apricots, Sippy cups of fennel tea as well as envelopes, cards, and poetry books (a pocket Emily Dickinson, a chapbook by one of his poetry group members), far more lively than his fellow-traveler across the hall, a woman who lay open-mouthed and still as a sarcophagus, gone by week’s end.

         The password for Wheatfields’ Wi-Fi was DOTHERIGHTTHING, all in caps, a detail I noted in the black-bound journal I carried with me everywhere. I had flown over from Boston the day before, having received Paul’s e-mail explaining that a fall at home had precipitated his move into hospice: “The cancer is up and down my spine, bedecked, and I cannot get out of bed. But nurses are lovely, the food excellent, my life expectancy a matter of weeks,” he had written. I called him the next morning, a Sunday afternoon at Wheatfields, when he was surrounded by his children and his elder son Oliver handed him his cell phone and he was able to talk: He had loads of visitors. And he loved being the center of attention. His voice was faint and scratchy, but he did not sound like a man who was dying.

“Death is a joke,” he had said, but there was no bitterness, only a kind of brazen giddiness.

         Just a year ago, I had flown to the UK to attend a wedding in Wales and stopped to see Paul for what I thought would be the last time. I wasn’t much of a transatlantic traveler and had never been to Leeds: Paul and I had always met in Canada where our families had summer places on Georgian Bay or in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Paul lived with his second wife Helen and my mother, his first cousin, all of them sharing in the nursing care of his mother, the artist Hartwell Priest, who died at home at 103.

Although Paul and I were not of the same generation, we shared many things: a love for writing and all things literary (like him, I was an English professor); a need to parse our pathologic relations (there was craziness in our maternal line, and I needed Paul to assure me, as he always did, that it had bypassed me); and the fact that we both had suffered, in different ways, from the divorces in our families. Once, when I had whined on a walk along Eau de Claire beach in Georgian Bay that I felt my existence was marginal, because I was the product of an unhappy union that should never have been, Paul explained that he didn’t believe anything in this life—certainly not with regards to love—was an accident.

During those three days with Paul in August of 2014, we packed in a lifetime of memories. I rented a car at Heathrow and picked him up at Oliver and Lizzie’s house in Norwich and we drove halfway across the United Kingdom stopping to tour Sandringham (he was of the opinion that if you’ve seen one royal pile, you’ve seen them all, but agreed to indulge my infatuation with all things royal). We went out to dinner at Akmal’s Tandoori Bistro with Una, his good friend from Quaker House and discussed her recent trip to Prague to attend a co-counseling conference. The next day, he put me on a bus to Ilkley so that I might hike the Ilkley Moor, something he was not up to. When I returned, he made dinner of jacket potatoes and pork chops which we ate at his small, cluttered dining table. We were invited to dinner with his colleagues Joyce and Colin at Joyce’s home in Guiseley, where we talked of everything from the lost art of memorizing poetry to the history of Oxfam.

On the last day, we drove to Haworth and toured the Bronte Museum, discussing the triumph of Emily and the tragedy of Bramwell, both of us moved by Bramwell’s last words: “I have done nothing great or good,” then amused by Paul’s observation that the real tragedy of the Brontes was: “not a scrap of humor anywhere!” After the museum closed, Paul urged me to explore the paths beyond the car park to the ruined cottage said to be Wuthering Heights while he rested on a bench outside the gift shop. “Seize the day,” he had said, and so I had, taking dozens of photos on my phone of heather and sheep and stonewalls and skies tumbling with clouds. 

When we had said goodbye the next morning in the car park of Quaker House, Paul smiling Gandalf-like in the midday August sunlight near the vegetable garden, Una giving me a hug and a tea-towel which said, Force May Subdue but Love Gains, I had thought: This is it. The last goodbye. And yet, nearly a year later, when had I read his elegiac e-mail from Wheatfields, “So Hail and Farewell, bright, bright spot in my life,” I had cried. I wasn’t ready to let go.

So I rode the bus to Wheatfields in Headingly most days for the last two weeks of Paul’s life, carrying my black journal everywhere and recording everything: from the chalkboard in front of the cake shop on Woodhouse Lane, which read: “The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe. Eat cake.” To Paul’s commentary on the art in his room—the watercolor painted by his grandmother of the fierce-mouthed, head-scarfed Cuban woman and the reproduction by Leonardo of the heart-shaped face of the Young Woman with an Ermine: “See! The old woman is talking to the young one, and she is saying, ‘As I am, So shall you be.’”  

I recorded the Symposium-like discussions that seemed to take place most afternoons in Room 5 with Paul’s many visitors grabbing extra chairs and crowding around his bed to discuss whether Christianity was an instrument of Judeo-Greco-Roman imperialism or whether old age really was a second childhood. I noted the singular family tableaux that gathered one evening around the deathbed: Paul’s English ex-wife, Diane, whom I had never met; Martin, the affable English cleric whom Diane had left Paul for; Hannah, Diane’s daughter from her first marriage, whom Paul had raised from the age of 2 and loved as his own child; and Una, Paul’s faithful friend from Quaker House, who brought him ices in freezer packs every night. And everyone was getting along! Diane was telling me about Hannah’s father, who left her for another woman, and Paul was telling Martin about his ancestor, Diggery Priest who came over on the Mayflower and went directly back to England, unable to stand the climate.

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree,” Paul was saying, his voice softer and weaker so that I had to lean in close to hear him.

I had been in the UK for twelve days and Paul was still at Wheatfields, the issue of whether he would stay or go still unresolved, though Hannah, Oliver, and Joel were secretly touring a nursing home in Headingly, despite Paul’s opposition: “I feel called to heaven,” he quipped, “but not to a nursing home.”

In the meantime, I was reading aloud to him from “The Four Quartets.” I had taken a side trip to Cambridgeshire to visit a friend in Great Gidding, and she and I had walked to the tiny, medieval chapel of Little Gidding, which Eliot had visited in 1936 and after which he had titled the last section of his poem. I had shown Paul photos of the church on my cell phone and he had been thrilled because he had never been there.

Paul and I were playing a game where I would read him one line and he would see whether he could fill in the next.  When I started with the opening of Burnt Norton, Paul said, “April is the Cruelest Month,” which was from “The Wasteland” “and I worried that the exercise would prove too frustrating. Then, a few minutes later and surprising both of us, he had sung out the lines about garlic and sapphires.

“Well done!” I said, clapping my hands.

“Keep going,” he whispered.

And so I did, and while he could not recite any more intact couplets, he nevertheless corrected my pronunciation of the German “Erhebung,” my Italian pronunciation of  “Figilia del tuo figlio,” and my English pronunciation of haruspicate. When I came to the line, “Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,” and stopped to say, “Jesus, what a racist!” Paul did not miss a beat and said: “What did you expect? He was from St. Louis!”    

“Well, Becky, this has really taken our friendship up a notch,” Paul said, taking small, steady spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. It was early afternoon on a Monday in the second week of September, and the doctors would take Paul off the discharge list that evening. A group of ten friends from The Struggling Christians had just left Room 5, having finished their repertory of Gregorian chants, Paul trying to sing along, though apologizing that he was “a bit off key.”

“I don’t have words for how amazing it’s been,” I said.

“The next time we see one another, I will have the entire Four Quartets memorized.”

 “Fantastic!” I said, patting his glistening forehead and thinking, magically, that maybe this was not the last time. I put on my rain jacket, squeezed his free hand hard, and attempted to give him a hug; it was absurd to say goodbye to Paul while he was eating his lunch, and yet if I didn’t go now, I would miss my train to London.

Thirty-three hours later, Paul passed away.

“PAUL IS LIBERATED!” Hannah had e-mailed, all in caps in the subject heading.

I would like to think that somewhere Paul is singing: “And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well.”   

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The Blue Zones of Hartwell Priest

The moonstone-blue walls of the Unitarian church in Charlottesville, Virginia, were filled with her art work: watercolors of Venice and Florence created during her Wanderjahr in Europe in the nineteen twenties; lithographs of seagulls at her island in Georgian Bay, Canada, where she and her family summered for sixty years; the Jackson Pollock-like viscosities she did in old age when she dripped paint onto metal plates and then ran them through her lithograph press. This was the body of work that her 103-year-old body—thin-stalked and bent earthward like a November sunflower—had left behind. And if we mourners, fanning ourselves with programs, our faces raspberried with the late afternoon sun burning through long windows, if our eyes misted with only the occasional tear, it was because Hartwell Wyse Priest had lived long and well, and we had come to celebrate her.

She was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada on January 1, 1901, the youngest of four children and nicknamed New Year or Newie, a name that nearly everyone in the family called her, including my mother, her niece, and me, her great-niece. Newie’s husband, a corporate lawyer who taught at the University of Virginia and to whom she was married for fifty years, was one of the few people who called her Hartwell, the maiden name of her Maine-born grandmother. At her hundredth birthday party, I heard several of her younger artist friends also call her Hartwell. But she remained forever Newie to me, a tiny, bright-eyed figure of merriment, who studied, with my six-year-old son, the pictorial guides for the birthday chocolates that her friends had brought her, ceremoniously selected a cherry-filled mound, took a humming bird-like nibble from it, then returned it slyly to the box. When the party was over, my son noticed, with a kindergartener’s sense of justice, that there were six other partially eaten chocolates. But I laughed and said that when you got to 100, you were allowed to bend the rules.

So how did Hartwell Priest live to 103, I’ve often wondered. By bending the rules? Or breaking them? In BLUE ZONES psychologist Dan Buettner studied centenarians around the globe, hoping to discover why they lived so long. In Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California, and the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica, unaccountably large numbers of elderly men and women were walking several miles a day, tending their gardens, enjoying meals at home with their families. Buettner observed that these residents of blue zones--so named because one of Buettner’s colleagues had circled the areas on maps with blue pens--were alike in several significant ways: they put family first; they did not smoke; they ate a sparse, mostly plant-based diet; they lived in small communities where they enjoyed an active social network; they were engaged in constant moderate physical exercise; they were tough-minded, although they loved to laugh.

Hartwell Wyse Priest never lived in a geographical blue zone, but she inhabited a psychic blue zone, which inoculated her against many physical and emotional ills. After she graduated from Smith College in 1924, she set off for Paris to study art with Andre L’Hote, one of the leading pioneers of abstract expressionism. (Dora Maar, Picasso’s longtime mistress and muse, was also a student at L’Hote’s Montparnasse Institute.) Paris was, as Ernest Hemingway poetically described it, a “moveable feast” in those days, but there were many privileged American women who became dizzy with all the smoking, drinking, and jazz-dancing, flappers like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre, who couldn’t decide whether to have fun or make art, and ending up doing neither.

But Hartwell Wyse was not one of these lost souls. For one thing, she was accompanied everywhere on the Left Bank by her sixty-two-year-old mother, Rachel Thayer Wyse, an amateur painter who, having raised four children, was keen to pursue her own artistic goals. Mother and daughter were inseparable, sketching Notre Dame Cathedral from the Pont Neuf, studying the masters in the Louvre, attending Sunday services at the Christian Science Church on the Boulevard St. Germain. Rachel was not the type to hang around Les Deux Magots drinking absinthe and smoking Gauloises Bleues, and would never have permitted her pretty daughter such Continental liberties. Did Newie chafe under such maternal restrictions? I never asked her, but I suspect that she would say she was too busy mastering her craft—learning, for example, about dynamic symmetry, upon which she would later become an authority--to worry about whether she was missing out on more quotidian sensual pleasures.

I didn’t really get to know my great aunt until she was in her early nineties and I was in my middle thirties. I was doing graduate work in English at George Mason University, and I often drove down for the weekend to Charlottesville, staying on a pullout couch in her late husband's study (A.J. had passed away in 1978). My mother, stopping for several weeks on her annual migration from Florida to Canada, was in one of the small rooms upstairs. Newie’s house, an Italianate stone mansion set on fifteen acres not far from Jefferson’s Monticello, was big enough to accommodate everyone, including the law school student, Pat, who got room and board in exchange for helping with the shopping and cooking. From time to time, Newie’s trust officer, a protégé of her late husband’s, would lecture her about moving into an assisted living facility, but Newie grumbled that she could never find a place big enough to accommodate her two studios, the basement work area which held her lithograph press, and the upstairs studio adjacent to A.J.’s, where she sketched and painted.

At 90, Hartwell Priest still followed what villagers in the Nicoyan peninsula of Costa Rica call a “plan de vida,” rising early to practice her craft. Sometimes I would join her in the kitchen when she was taking a break. She had always brewed a pot of fresh coffee and set another place at the table, laid out boxes of cold cereal and bananas. Newie’s kitchen was small, compared to the rest of the house, and contained all the original knotty-pine cabinets and beige linoleum floor, now stained and buckling, that had been installed in the fifties when she and A.J. had built the house. Newie wasn’t poor and could easily have remodeled her kitchen, but she was penurious, and hated spending money on frivolities. There was just enough room for the Formica-topped breakfast table and matching chairs, the padded red seats patched together with duct tape. It didn’t take me a Ph.D. to figure out that one of Newie’s secrets to long life was that she didn’t care that much about food. Like the Okinawan villagers who practiced Hara Hachi Bu, the Confucian-inspired practice of stopping eating when one is 80 percent full, Newie never ate to excess. Subsisting mainly on fruits and vegetables, enjoying an occasional glass of wine with dinner, she easily maintained the girlish figure she had cut decades ago in Paris.

After a morning in the studio, Newie liked to go for a long walk along the lanes and dirt roads near her home on Old Farm Road, her fat, old poodle, Alouette lumbering behind her. In the last years of her life, the walks became shorter. Newie’s son and daughter-in-law, who had moved in to the house to take care of her, set up rusted iron porch chairs at intervals along the quarter-mile driveway so that she could rest during her daily constitutionals. By then, the dog had been put down and Newie’s widow’s hump was so bad that she was bent at nearly ninety degrees over her walker. But she kept up the walks as long as she could, and when she no longer ventured outside, her son or daughter-in-law helped her locomote from her bedroom to the upstairs studio to her faded gray velvet armchair in the living room, the journey round the house the last one left for her.

Newie’s life was free of money worries, but not without its tragedies. In 1982, four years after A.J. had passed away, her younger daughter, Marianna, died of skin cancer at the age of 48. Before her illness, Marianna had divorced her Episcopal preacher husband, after discovering that he was having affairs with several women in his congregation. Marianna was a trusting, naïve soul--she and her husband had met as students at Harvard Divinity School, and she had been smitten with the tall, soft-spoken man descended from blue-blooded Boston divines. The break-up of the family was hard, especially since the couple’s children were young. The story my mother told—and, like all family stories, it may be equal parts myth and fact—was that on Marianna’s deathbed in the hospital, Marianna had said to her mother, “I wish you’d spent more time with me as a child. Your art always came first.”

Marianna’s last words, shrapnel to the brain that could never be surgically removed, must have hurt. But like the gnarled villagers in Okinawa, who had survived the “The Typhoon of Steel,” the American invasion of their island in World War II, Newie was a stoic. If she had regrets about her mothering, she kept them to herself. Instead, she sought solace in her summers at Georgian Bay, in the Prussian blue waters of Parry Sound, where she had scattered Marianna’s ashes and where her own ashes would one day fall. The glaciated rocks, the wind-beaten white pines, the gulls wheeling through the sky, the wild blueberries along the paths to her studio--all of it made her feel, in the words of the fourteenth-century mystic Dame Julian of Norwich, that "all shall well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Two weeks ago, I donated one of Hartwell Priest’s lithographs, “Autumn Harvest,” to a benefit for Whole Children, a nonprofit organization in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts that offers after-school programs for special needs children. I have a stack of Hartwell Priest lithographs and unframed oils in my closet, so it wasn’t a big sacrifice. I also selected a work I wasn’t attached to, one of her Jackson Pollock-like viscosities done in green with sparks of orange.

The benefit was set up so that everyone who paid their $15O walked away at the end of the evening with a painting, if not that of their first choice, then their second or third. I paid the walk-around-and-have-fun rate of $35, which meant I didn’t get an art work but that was fine with me, as I have more art than wall space. There were more art works than patrons, which meant that some works would end up like the proverbial wallflower at the dance, unwanted and unclaimed. For much of the evening, I fretted that I hadn’t donated something that I myself was loath to part with. I stood beside “Autumn Harvest,” prominently displayed on its easel in a corner of the Northampton Center for the Arts, chatting up Hartwell Priest and her vita—“She has an etching in the Library of Congress,” I boasted--like an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. One bow-tied gentleman inspected the matted, unframed lithograph with a magnifying glass, and wanted to know whether it was computer-generated. When I quipped that my great aunt wouldn’t have known a byte if it bit her in the behind, he slunk away in a huff.

“Autumn Harvest” was claimed by a friendly, dark-haired woman from Long Island, a professional realtor and mother of two grown children, who was delighted to support Whole Children (she has an autistic nephew) and delighted to have this lithograph, which had been her first choice and which she had just the place for on her living room wall. We talked for twenty minutes, and I shared some of the highlights of my great aunt’s long life, and when we hugged goodbye we exchanged e-mail addresses.

I walked back to my car, parked just down the hill from the ivy-covered entrance arch to Smith College, wheeling in my own blue zone of happiness like one of Hartwell Priest’s gulls.