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.

Urbanism Kolkata Style

I recently spent a week at a workshop in Kolkata organised by the British Library and the National Library of India, designed to lay the foundations for a project to digitise early Bengali Books (1778-1914).  In many respects it was a wonderful experience, and the project is incredibly worthwhile (though it will be difficult to implement).  But this was also my first visit to India, and my first visit to what might be called a 'mega-city', and the experience has forced me to revisit some aspects of how I have been conceptualising urban living, and in particular the nature of eighteenth and nineteenth century London.

A couple of years ago I visited Marrakesh and was struck by the essentially orderly character of what is a relatively poor and very crowded urban environment.  By contrast, what struck me in Kolkata was the extent to which urban growth seemed to have outstripped the city's ability to discipline behaviour.  At around seven million people at midday, and four million at midnight, Kolkata is both one of the worlds most recently created cities, and a city occupied by a rapidly burgeoning population drawn primarily from its own rural hinterland.  The city lived up to many stereotypes - crowded streets, fearsome pollution, and traffic that worked like fairground dodgems.   And while there were fewer beggars (either children or the disabled) than I had expected, and while I saw little evidence of malnutrition,  there were ragged shanties and street people around every corner.

But what surprised me was the nature of the rubbish.  It seemed to pile up along every roadside, untended and ignored.  And it seemed to be made up overwhelmingly of small bits of plastic, mixed with dust.  There was little evidence of large amounts of organic matter - no rotting fruit, or vegetables, fly specked bones or industrial by-products.  At one level it seemed the least varied or interesting rubbish I had ever seen - and it seemed to sit entirely unregarded, unmoved and unchanging.

My only explanation for this phenomenon is that, first, everything that could be recycled, re-used, turned to any account whatsoever, had been sifted from the pile and moved on.  And second, that there was no working system in place to remove the last, uneconomic residuum. 

As a historian of the urban environment this seems to me to re-enforce the profound inter-relationship between the economics of city life (its wealth), and the need for cultural controls on the behaviour of each individual urban dweller in order to make a city work.  In essence, what it confirmed for me is the extent to which living in a city requires the kind of detailed social and cultural system that could remove the rubbish; and that such cultural and bureaucratic systems can only be sustained in the face of measured growth - and that they can easily breakdown in the face of rapid migration.

When cities grow quickly as Kolkata certianly has; when behaviours and systems of bodily maintenance fitted for small holdings and low-density living, are practised in a high-density urban environment, the result in this instance seemed to approach the unliveable; or at least a form of urban dystopia.

In relation to the history of London, this observation seems to me to both emphasise the extent to which the city in the eighteenth century was able to maintain a culturally disciplined series of behaviours that both ensured that the rubbish was coralled to the correct place on the street; and that it was not allowed to stay there - poor neighbourhoods seldom tipped irredeemably into chaos.  It also suggests that the evolution of the nineteenth-century rookery formed an outpost of disfunctional urbanism that can be mapped against rural in-migration.  But, most importantly, this experience has re-enforced a belief that 'urban living' can be conceptualised as a distinct cultural phenomenon that takes similar forms across the globe - that being a city dweller is first and foremost about sharing a cultural system built on specifically urban forms of behaviour.



 

A Review: The Diary of Edmund Harrold

This is a pre-print of a review commissioned for publication in the Economic History Review ©2009, Economic History Society.

Craig Horner, ed, The diary of Edmund Harrold, wigmaker of Manchester 1712-15 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xxxvii + 178. 3 figs. 1 map. ISBN 9780754661726. Hbk. £55)

Reading a diary always feels slightly transgressive; as if you are looking through the front window of a private home on to a domestic scene beyond. Historians have used the intimate nature of these sources to construct a broad narrative of a changing interiority, of the evolution of a modern ‘self’; and to chart the texture and quality of interpersonal relations. And yet, as any dedicated voyeur knows, most domestic scenes observed through a distant window make for very dull viewing. In a similar way diaries are frequently repetitious and frustrating. The events of most lives are made up of petty conflicts, self-serving worries, and banal jealousies. The diary of Edmund Harrold is no exception. A somewhat maudlin and self-pitying drunk, Edmund Harrold made a poor living as a wig maker in early eighteenth-century Manchester – a manufacturer of perhaps the most useless item imaginable, in a world newly committed to making useful things. This particular diary is not very illuminating about the nature of early industrialization, or the economics of innovation. It tells us remarkably little about the social life of Harrold’s all important contemporary generation of Mancunians, and while it does provide a comprehensive account of pretty much everything Harrold read, even this seems to consist almost entirely of the most conventional of religious writings. Nevertheless, this is an important diary, and this edition, scrupulously transcribed, footnoted, and introduced, is a welcome addition to our modern public understanding of the long dead and very private interior world of one early eighteenth-century Mancunian.

The detail many readers will assume sets this diary apart and gives it heightened scholarly interest is Harrold’s record of his sexual relations with both his second and third wives. And it is true that sexual activity is rarely recorded in even the most revealing of diaries, but it is also remarkably unhelpful. Harrold regularly records that he ‘did wife’ or ‘did wife new fashion’. Since he was also father to nine children, however, these bald statements simply repeat the obvious. Of much greater historical significance is Harrold’s record of his courtship of his third wife Ann Horrocks. The inclusion of a record of night visiting, when combined with the birth of his eighth child, John, six months after the wedding, provides new and individualized evidence that this particular style of courtship was accompanied by penetrative sexual activity. But, even more important are the small details of Edmund Harrold’s emotional engagement with his second wife, Sarah. His account of her decline over a period of some three weeks following the birth of their daughter, and her eventual death in Edmund’s arms is both evocative and moving. In combination with the details he gives of his arrangements for his newly orphaned infant child, also named Sarah, and his active and to modern sensibilities, hasty, search for a new wife, the diary makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the pressures felt by a middle aged, down-at-heel member of the middling sort. These separate elements of the diary help to reveal how emotional engagement, affect and hard calculation might co-exist in a single early modern breast.

The diary also helps to give texture to our story of the evolution of ‘self writing’. It seems to partake equally of the seventeenth century tradition of religious self-examination, and a more ‘modern’ secular concern with personal emotional response. Admixt between these covers are endless self-flagellating explorations of Harrold’s religious laxity; a compelling, unself-conscious story of his relations with two wives; and a detailed and essentially secular narrative of the crash and dodgems journey of a chronic alcoholic.

As an edited edition of an eighteenth-century manuscript, this volume is also exemplary. The introduction is clear and informative, and the academic apparatus is extensive (if occasionally slightly too extensive). Four appendixes are also included. The first reproduces a lecture based on the diary given by J.E. Bailey in 1884; the second, a series of copied abstracts from Charles Povey’s Meditation of a divine soul (1703); the third, a comprehensive and very useful list of all works mentioned by Harrold; and the fourth, a hand list of comparable published diaries. The volume concludes with a good, but not exhaustive index. It is perhaps unfortunate that this work has been published as a hard copy edition, rather than online, and in a form where the occasional glancing reference could be more easily located, but Craig Horner should nevertheless be congratulated for an excellent piece of scholarship.

For the inveterate voyeur, dedicated to wandering the shelves in search of an uncurtained window revealing a meaningful scene beyond, this volume provides a few excellent vantage points. It is perhaps not particularly revealing about the changing nature of economic behavior in the early industrial revolution, but it does reveal a single man, caught in a web of culture, of friends and wives, and alcohol.

TIM HITCHCOCK