Wood and Memory

 The post that follows is personal.  It is in the tradition of memoir-like and self-revealing blogging; and I am posting it here because this blog started off as a hybrid that was intended to encompass both my professional and private personae.  In the last eighteen months or so it has rather evolved in to a more professional beast, with digital history and policy overwhelming more personal topics.  But this transition was not intended.  In other words, if you are looking for a nice post on 'Big Data', or the politics of Open Access, please look away now.



Wood and Memory

I did not know my uncle very well.  Richard Pozzini ('Dicky') was my mother's much younger brother, and I only knew him for a couple of years when I was ten and eleven, and he was in his late twenties.  At the age of 28, in the late 1960s  he killed himself.   As a child, my brother and sisters and I were protected from the full impact of his death, and it was seldom spoken of.  A couple of years later, Virgil and Gina, Dicky's mother and father, my grandparents, moved into a small apartment above a garage attached to my parent's house in San Francisco, and for the next eight or nine years, I lived in and out of their home.  I never heard my grandfather, Virgil (Nonno), mention Dicky in all those years, nor did Dicky's mother, Gina (Nonni), then, or in the thirty years to her death in 2001, ever voluntarily discuss him without being prompted.  Nor has my mother, Dicky's older sister, talked much about him - few fond memories of a shared childhood.  He was always present, in carved objects and panels, in the models he made as a child, but mainly in the silence he left behind.  

Gina, Florence, Virgil and Richard 'Dicky' Pozzini. c.1949.

But I remember Dicky, and I want to record my memories of him, and just take some time to think about him, and to do something to memorialise a wonderful and creative life that nevertheless ended in despair.

Dicky did many things - he was a farmer, and a cyclist, a photographer, a student of Italian literature, a member of the Peace Corp in Brazil and an artist; but my memories of him are as a student of nature and a maker of things.

A series of a bird sculptures made around 1968 or 69.

He grew up on the smallholding his parents Virgil and Gina bought in the early 1930s, as immigrants trying to recapture the rural lifestyle they had left behind in Northern Italy: fourteen acres of grapes and walnut trees in El Campo, Woodbridge, just outside Lodi in the Central Valley of California.  The area is now famous for its wine, but then it felt like the dry, hot factory floor of California agriculture.  Dicky's parents made a hard scrabble living combining wine making and market gardening with whatever work came to their very skillful hands.  In my memory they seemed to be experimenting with a new crop, a new strategy to make money every year.  Virgil made all their furniture, and Gina made all their clothes.  Dinner was as likely to feature song birds or hare, as meat from a butcher. And while there was always food on the table, it never felt like there was a lot of money in the bank. 

The 'Ranch' was really just a classic California subdivision, with a small bungalow, a tank house, a windmill (which had been replaced by an electric pump by the 1960s), a well and a few out-buildings.  And it was never big enough to support them as an exclusively agricultural concern.  Gina went to work in the fruit (processing peaches and cherries through the hot nights of summer) and Virgil made furniture and fitted kitchens for his better-off neighbours in the workshop.

Dicky grew up driving tractors, and working in the shop, helping with the wine; fishing and hunting the river trout and small birds of the neighbourhood; and just getting on with all the gathering and processing that a small holding required.  It was a life of making and repairing, processing and planning for the next season; and it required huge imagination as well as simple hard work.  One of my earliest memories of Dicky is helping him make sausages in the tank house kitchen (reserved for processing large batches of food).  While I was allowed to turn the handle, he stood over the meat grinder expertly tying off each link as the meat filled the casing.  But it was not all work.  He also took us on adventures to the river, and taught us how to make whistles from a a bit of reed.  He was the first person I ever saw use a cast-net for river fishing. 

But more than anything, from an early age he was a wonderful craftsman.  My brother still has the perfect miniature model cars Dicky made as a child (reflecting designs from the 1910s and 1920s), and my parents have the carvings of birds, and of a bunch of grapes and a rooster that he made.  The panels always hung on the wall in my grandparents' living room.

El Campo was anything but an easy life.  Virgil was a disappointed man who had spent twenty years living in all-male quarters in mining towns, and lodging houses - a victim of that largely male diaspora suffered by the Irish, Italians and Poles in the first decades of the last century.  He was given to alcohol  and socialising; and drank a fair portion of the wine he made.  He always hankered after a return to Italy, but following his marriage in 1929, he never went back.  He could be violent to his wife and children, and has always been held up by my mother as the canker at the heart of that particular knotty world.  She herself was largely protected from him by her own mother, but as a boy Dicky was expected to tough it out.  But, Dicky also had good friends, and a varied life at the heart of a small community.  His childhood certainly did not leave him fearful, or unambitious, frightened of the world, or unable to make friends.

After high school, Dicky went to Italy cycling through the North - to visit relatives, and I suspect, just to get out of rural America.  By all accounts the trip was a hard one - with little money and less support -  but it must have been enough to spark a desire to study Italian literature, which he did for a couple of years at San Francisco State.   I don't know how long this lasted, though he never finished the degree.  And soon enough, he was off to Brazil with the Peace Corp, and a couple of years later, following a short stay back at the Ranch, returned to Brazil to help set up an agricultural co-operative in the rain forest.

The co-operative eventually failed, and Dicky found himself back in San Francisco in his late twenties, and in need of a living.  With three or four false starts behind him, I suspect returning the US was very hard.  In that particular world, there was not much sympathy for failure. 

I remember driving up to Lodi with him in what must have been one of his first visits to see his parents after returning for good from South America.  We drove the eighty miles or so in the most dilapidated pick-up you can imagine - there was no key, and Dicky had to hot wire it every time we stopped.  Virgil and Gina had given up the Ranch the year before and had moved in to a small house in Lodi; and the afternoon was punctuated with Virgil and Dicky arguing, while Gina and I listened from the kitchen.   I will always remember Virgil saying, 'If I thought you were going to return, we would never have sold the Ranch'.

Dicky and me (aged 10) around 1967 or 68.

                    

I doubt Dicky could ever have gone back to El Campo, but it seemed a powerful accusation to me at the age of nine or ten, still shocked by the loss of a much loved childhood haunt.

Dicky did not talk to me about the argument, and we drove back to San Francisco pretty much in silence (I was a kid).  And in the next month or so, Dicky went about setting up a wood working shop on Valencia Street, and tried to figure out how to make a living.

For the next year or so he was a frequent visitor to my parents house, and a regular presence in our lives.  I remember visiting Muir Woods with him once, and being allowed to use his Rolex camera for a few close ups of plants and insects.  At weekends there were the craft fairs where he sold the small pieces he was making by then.  It was San Francisco in 1968 and 1969, so all the work was psychedelic, loud and colourful.  As kids we were encouraged to make 'God's Eyes' and scented candles. 

I don't remember how long this lasted - probably not more than eighteen months.  My parents heard of Dicky's suicide late on a Sunday night, on our return from a long weekend trip to somewhere I don't remember. He had shot himself.

From here my memories are about how not to deal with a death like Dicky's.  The silence, the mismanaged attempts to protect children from hard adult emotions.  The awkward attempts to explain the truth; and to work through the guilt that wracked my parents' and grandparents' lives for years. 

But that tragedy and experience is not the point of this blog.  Instead, I just wanted to remember a person, Dicky Pozzini.  He was a craftsman and an artist, a socialist, and a generous soul.  Lives are made of people and experience, and Dicky is one of the people who has shaped my life, and whom I  simply want to remember.

These days I am doing as much woodworking as time allows; making stuff, because making stuff is important.  And every time I cut in to a piece of black walnut, with its evocative smell so familiar from my childhood, or let my gouge reveal the curve of bowl on the lathe, I think of Dicky.

Two fish sculptures made by my son, Nick and I in 2011.  The walnut was laid down to cure by Dicky Pozzini in 1968.

Towards a popular conception of the world in 1780.

The text of a contribution to a panel on popular conceptions of the world, for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Oxford, January 2009.

Imagine for a moment living on Long Lane in London, just north of Smithfields Market, in the Spring of 1780, in a furnished, rented room. This is the kind of accommodation shared by the vast majority of working Londoners and recently described by Peter Guillery. [The Small House in Eighteenth-century London (Yale University Press, 2004).] The house you live in is a hundred years old, and made of oak and brick. The windows are small casements and the fire place is rudimentary, creating a barrier to more complex forms of domestic cooking, and forcing you to participate in a local round of public eating. Your room is in a vernacular building, and the dominant colours are the browns of distemper, the off-whites of lime wash, and the darkening hews of unpainted wood. There is the occasional flash of brass, but most of your everyday objects are dull pewter and tin, wood and earthenware. The only strong colours you are likely to live with are found in your clothes – in the flash of a printed bit of cotton, in the red of a neckerchief, in the grey-white of your worn linen. The house you live in is probably like that rented by Francis Place ten years later:

...very dark and dirty... built with timber, lath and plaster; ... filled with rats, mice and bugs.[Mary Thale, ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), (CUP, 1972), p.107.]

Your working life is similarly old fashioned, built around a small scale process of production and exchange; probably tied to a local hinterland of supply. In other words, for the vast majority of Londoners in 1780 life was embedded within a familiar frame, within a cultural and material economics that must have seemed simply ‘natural’.

But, if in that Spring of 1780 you walked just a few yards from that room, out the door and past the lowing pens of Smithfield, towards Newgate Street, where the new prison was just finishing, you would have been confronted by something else. And the point is simply that while most eighteenth-century Londoners lived in a vernacular city of dull browns and natural hues, and worked in a hand-made world of complex, but decentralised craft, authority was being new built around them in forms of white neo-classicism. What had been a medieval gate – Newgate – of warn shapes and familiar statues, a symbol of community, that marked the boundary between a safe city collective, and a more frightening external world, had been rebuilt over the preceding decade into a massive, white stone edifice, its portals and doors picked out with a ubiquitous black cast iron. The building was three hundred yards long, and walking past this, the longest single street-frontage in London, a newly distant and powerful state authority must have welled up in your heart. In buildings like this – but most especially in Newgate Prison itself – was created a new urban landscape of authority that every pedestrian Londoner needed to interpret and navigate in a new way.

But if authority and power were demonstrated through the use of a neo-classical architectural palate, and an ever growing weight of cast iron, its meanings must have seemed to stretch in every direction.

In the cold baroque of Wren and Hawksmoor’s churches, once again, authority was built in a different colour – in Portland stone and cast iron. The decision in 1714 to spend £11,600 to encircle St Paul’s within a black cast iron paling, topped with spear heads – privatising and monopolising the traditional medieval church yard, the civic centre of London - was simply the first brutal act in the process of creating a new landscape of power. [E. Graeme Robertson and Joan Robertson, Cast Iron Decoration: A World Survey, (Thames and Hudson, 1977; 1994 edn), p.16.]

And what is most significant about this rebuilding of authority is that it seamlessly spread from actual government and religious buildings, to the houses of the simply rich. To walk through a stuccoed London square, with its bright white, mock stone exteriors, its sunken areas encased, not just in cast iron, but by mid-century onwards, by cast iron in the form of spears and daggers; was to be confronted by a ruling class newly comfortable with its own authority, willing to use the signs of state power, to claim a more personal variety.

In other words, a changing world view that necessarily accommodated to new forms of authority was created as late eighteenth Londoners wandered through their city. Class and state authority were re-made of bricks and stone and iron. So when we think of that subtle process of class formation, and its changing conceptions of the world, we need to think about it not just as an intellectual process, but as a physical one as well.

And of course, this new-built environment of class division extended to the smallest of items. In the late 1770s, as black refugees from American slavery flooded into London, with the scars of a brutal system cut in to their very flesh; each product of slavery, each mahogany chest and the contents of each inlaid snuff-box, must have gradually taken on an ever more powerful meaning that claimed for its owners authority over an Atlantic-wide empire.

Peter Linebaugh has written about the symbolism of keys and locks for working Londoners, but it seems to me that the world of meaning and symbol extends to almost every object.[The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, (2nd edn, Verso, 2006), pp.366-8.] A mahogany picture frame was redolent of a system of colonialism that extended across four continents – and was just then, in 1780, in wild and military dispute on all of them. Cotton spoke of an exotic empire and brutal heathens; tobacco and coffee, of the brutalities of slavery, and cast iron and stone, of a new found system of industrial production.

All I am really trying to suggest is that the evolution of a popular conception of the world was, particularly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, embedded within a physical framing whose signs could be held in your hand, and whose visage fronted every street.

And that therefore, when we try to understand the contents of popular politics, of events such as the Gordon Riots in June 1780, we need to see them not simply as expressions of a stated ideology but as physical engagements with a world full of meaning.

That Newgate Prison formed an early object of assault and destruction is just the most obvious fragment of a process that spread to every level of activity. To ‘pull down’ a house – as the Gordon Rioters did with Lord Manfield’s – was to tear out its sash windows (a symbol of modernity and power that even Jane Austen recognised a few years later in Northanger Abbey); was to burn the mahogany furniture (and smell its distinctive smoke – so different from that of oak and ash and elm); was to make a bonfire of identifiable symbols of authority. To pull down Lord Mansfield's house, was not just to comment upon his role Chief Justice, but to manipulate a coherent series of symbols of state and Imperial authority, made flesh in the objects themselves. A political bonfire of the sort lit by the Gordon Rioters, smelt and sounded, not like a bonfire of celebration (made of oak and broad leafed woods), but instead crackled with the sick sound of burning lacquer, and smelt of mahogany built authority.

In other words conceptions of the world are found as much in the palm of your hand and the memory of smoke in your nostrils, as in the expressed content of your library.