1910 IN CLARENCEVILLE, QUEBEC, A QUIET PARADISE

The grandparents of Doug Macfie on their wedding day.

"Nina and Robin"

Genealogy on the family scale can be framed in many different ways: a story of triumph, an explanation of tragedy, or occasionally the connections turn up a portrait of a specific time and place that isn’t so much a crisis as a portrait of paradise, a dream world we don’t want to give up.  Such an instance is a little town outside Montreal, Quebec, in 1910, where one summer my future mother-in-law, poised on the lip of adulthood, was visited by cousins from Missouri, one of whom kept a journal and wrote letters home.

Rufus Horatio Creller married Emily Bush.  They built the Clarenceville house that became known as the Macfie homestead and had five children.  In 1910 it was occupied by George Hawley Macfie who had married Josephine Orpah Creller.  These were the maternal grandparents of Bob Scriver.  Their children were Ellison Westgarth Macfie (b. 1887) and Robert Eugene Macfie (called “Robin”, b. 1885).  (Bob’s paternal grandparents, the James A. and Mary Scriver owned the adjacent dairy farm.)  Doug Macfie is Robin’s son.

Doug Macfie is the head of the Canada Clan Macfie and a cousin of Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties.  In the past few years he has left Quebec and moved to Calgary where he is consolidating family papers.  It is he who sent me transcripts from the daughter of Franklin Truman Creller who beame a wealthy industrialist and developer in Joplin, MI.  This was a time when America was booming, largely due to land development on various frontiers.

There were no airlines yet so cousin Alice and her companions, Gertrude and 3-year-old son Addison, are traveling by railroad and riverboat, which is lucky since their luggage is trunks — not carry-on.  There are complex management issues over tickets, reservations in hotels, temporary storage of trunks while taking side expeditions, and so on.  Sometimes there are long walks between venues.  Rests are necessary!  The records are about weather, food, and scenery, which is mostly picturesque.

The War of 1812, which settled the ownership of the area as part of the British Empire, created a dynamic society of Native American tribes, French, and Englishmen remaining, content not to look to America.  These Clarenceville families were Anglophone in a French context left from before the political shift.  It was a time of British Empire consolidation, with a feel rather like India, but it has not been explored in film as far as I know.  Hired help was likely to be French and I think for Wessie that translated to Blackfeet when she got to Browning as a newlywed.  It did fit with the Metis people seen as “Cree” who were seeded through the Blackfeet world.

Quebec has always been a volatile province, but the families of Wessie and Alice were prosperous middle-class people, Edwardians of confidence in a time when women had parlor skills and men took their cigars aside to make deals.  Think “Anne of Green Gables” meets “Downton Abbey” with hints of “Room with a View.”  (But no Roman history and passion.)  At 23, Wessie was flattered by the attention of Thaddeus Scriver, youngest son, who had gone to Browning in 1903 in order to make his fortune but who was rather expected to return for Wessie and would do that in 1911.  

Alice has no such expectations, but the cousins are confident and joyful.  Alice repeats over and over how much fun “Ellison” is.  (She was always known as Wessie to friends in Browning.)  She’s physically fit, loves to run and could beat anyone in a footrace,and plays tennis in the family’s own court.  But the girls most of all love music — naturally they can play the piano — and Alice has gathered up a lot of duets to bring along so they can play in the evening.  Ellison sings and plays well enough to be asked to perform at events and church.

Alice is a small person who was taken into the family as help when her parents died and developed into an indispensable mainstay.  During the stay of the cousins, she goes to visit faraway relatives, so the girls take over her duties of cooking and laundry.  This is seen as fun because Alice can try Missouri recipes that the family doesn’t know and because the Macfie’s have a mechanical washing machine that makes the job easier.  Still, it can take several days to wash everything if one includes the ironing.  There must be two set-ups as they iron alongside each other as they chatter and sing.  When everything is clean, they go for walks and on visits or picnics.  It’s a simple, energetic life and no one complains that there’s nothing to do.

Addison provides anecdotes.  Observing cows being milked, which he hasn’t seen before, he worries that the poor cows’ teats might be pulled off and then wonders where they will get more milk to store up inside.  

During these late summer months, Josephine — Wessie’s mother — is ill enough to be bed-ridden and weak.  She eats nothing but egg whites and loses twenty pounds.  It’s a worry, but the cousins fill the vacuum and formally “visit” her bedroom to keep her informed.  This is before refrigeration, so perhaps it’s a kind of food-poisoning.  As a mature woman Wessie was plagued with diverticulitis.  The women take their handwork up to the bedroom to do while talking over events and neighbors.

As a side comment, Thad Scriver’s mother was a frail, artistic woman, much loved, who brought two boys to term, but then lost several pregnancies too early to be viable.  Thad himself was premature and grew up to be a small but tough man.  I feel sure that he was thinking of a good healthy mother when he chose Ellison.  She had no trouble with pregnancy and birth.  The culture shift from the graceful life of Clarenceville to the dusty, windy, fragmented reservation was hard on her, but she coped.  She had a piano but I never heard her play it.

I’d better include a quote:

“After dinner we all took a nap, that was always Aunt Josie’s orders, so today we were all glad to listen to the suggestion.  Ellison and I would softly slip out and do something.  One afternoon she and I went across the road and through the gate and down the road by the barn and as we stood by the fence, Ellison began to whistle and here came two of the most beautiful bay colts I have ever seen.  They just looked like twins, each had a white mark on his forehead.  Their tails almost touched the ground and their manes were so thick and beautiful.  Ellison talked to them and gave each one a lump of sugar and they just frisked around and were so happy.  I never saw anything so sweet and when we left they both whinnied at us.  We waved and told them goodbye.  I think they get lonesome and are happy to see someone.  Ellison said they were going to put them to carriage the next year or so.

“After each one had their nap, we sat down to a card game.”  

Then she reports that the phone rang and they were invited to a dance.  The trip home was in mid-October so they had to acquire a few warmer clothes.  I don’t know whether the trip was ever repeated, but perhaps they attended Wessie’s wedding the next year.

Wessie’s son “Robert” or Bob, had a daughter named Margaret who had a daughter named Michelle who had a daughter named Whitney who reminds me very much of Wessie.  She is an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States.  I’ll send her this.

Doug reminds me that his father is Murray who is the son of Robin and Nina.  

MY REVOLUTION TRANQUILLE

All along I’ve been wrestling with the problem of finding and maintaining some balance between individual and group that is my own balance.  For the past sixteen years I’ve been a celibate hermit, more or less, deeply relieved to be working alone in my collapsing old house in a tiny village next to the Blackfeet reservation on the East Slope of the Rocky Mountains.

“Quiet Revolution” has two formal meanings.  One is a website: www.quietrev.com:  “Advice and stories for introverts and extroverts alike on how to appreciate our quiet sides.”  The tight relationship between quiet and solitude is not quite acknowledged or analyzed -- at least so far as I have read. The whole thing is derived from a book by Susan Cain, daughter of a rabbi and herself a corporate lawyer.

Susan Cain reminds me of Susan Lucci, the notorious Erika Cain.

The other reference is historical and political.  "The Quiet Revolution" (French: "Révolution Tranquille") was a period of intense socio-political and socio-cultural change in the Canadian province of Quebec, characterized by the effective secularization of society, the creation of a welfare state (état-providence), and realignment of politics.”  My in-laws were Quebequois, born in the 19th century,  Royalists, and life-long adult residents on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Their basic understanding of life was always Anglophone in an Other space than mainstream Quebec which in WWI French-related times was dominated by the Catholic church. Family and the family-owned mercantile business was the only real concern of the Scrivers.  Once the kids were raised, the family was not "churchy." So opposed to the welfare state was my father-in-law that he refused Social Security payments at first.  WWII forced both sons into quite a different world-view.

My mother-in-law saw the world with British class system eyes.  She felt there was no question she ranked high.  Yet they were not greedy or domineering, but lived -- nearly hidden -- quiet lives.  The Masonic Lodge became their "tribe" -- not ANTI-Indian, but UN-Indian -- they were UN-Catholic because that's where the Indians attended.  Sort of the reverse of my declared stance now: “I cheer for Browning!” is an irrelevant statement since I don’t attend sports events.  But it amusingly aggravates Valier people and makes a convenient boundary around me.

Vive les Quebequois!

The internet has become for me something like a book, except I’m living and writing it.  One would think that the new website “Quiet Revolution” would be a natural home for me, but it is not, partly because of demographics: these people are all young, prosperous, educated, basically compliant but entitled.  The other part is related.  In the Fifties when we last had a wave of “group-think” it soon boomeranged into the Age of Aquarius -- defiant opposition to the mainstream.  The book that gave us terms for what was being revolted against was “The Lonely Crowd.”  I am decidedly NOT Other-Directed.  Well, maybe a little counter-culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8V8pGoVKdk  Harmonica, anyone?

From the anonymously authored Wikipedia: "The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. It is considered, along with White Collar: The American Middle Classes, written by Riesman's friend and colleague, C. Wright Mills, a landmark study of American character.   Riesman et al. identify and analyze three main cultural types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed.”  My mother-in-law was tradition-directed.

"Quiet Revolution," the website that is supposed to be about quiet solitude, is not talking about the same thing as being inner-directed.  The very fact of a group collaborating on a website clearly based on the popular performance of a charming corporate lawyer in a TED talk is NOT working alone.  It falls in the group described in the previous post as “Market Pricing.”

Solitariness in our culture is associated with either being problematic and excluded or else with privilege.  Being allowed to live alone in a hermitage near a monastery is a high honor.  I suggest that this "Quiet" website is about privilege.  In school terms the teacher might send a student to the library to isolate a troublemaker, but also if he or she has earned the privilege of working alone because of productivity that only needs resources since it is self-starting.  Some people combine revolution (trouble-making) with quiet solitary thought.  They become inexhaustible.  Inner-directed.

I still read in this chair.

In the late Forties when I was a child, I hated recess and would sneak indoors to stand against the radiator, pleasantly scorching my wet wool coat in the quiet dimness.  If a teacher discovered me, she would force me back outside. In the fourth grade I had a male teacher, a veteran, who saw that I was very near-sighted, which explained why I was so bad at “playground” which had a lot to do with throwing balls.  Also I got a “pass” from my extrovert mother because of her chagrin at not taking proper care of me.  No one ever mentioned that eye care was expensive and therefore ignored.  Being near-sighted also explained my marathon reading.  

Not that reading was necessarily enlightening.  In fact, I tended to read my father’s books, which nearly crowded us out of the house -- but usually they just presented more questions that no one wanted to answer.  The branch library a few blocks away became my adjunct home, far more than school was, until high school when dramatics provided a good balance of introvert/extrovert.  By now, at 76, I can dimple up and tell funny stories if the situation demands it, but I do not drink as others do to “loosen up.”  It’s not a virtue or asceticism but a way of letting my introversion guard my extraversion.  My introversion made it clear that I was not suited for the kind of ministry that is supplying camaraderie and security for people who are other-directed and feel qualified to be the Other who takes charge of your life.

Party Mary

Nor am I suited for today’s group-based writers’ lives.  We are strange about these “creative” things.  Something that can best be done alone at a keyboard now obligates a person who wants to be published to endlessly fraternize, read aloud in bookstores, tolerate rude interviewers who have not read one’s books, and otherwise prevent the opportunity to get back to the quiet keyboard. 

I cannot grasp the idea of allowing random others to critique one’s writing with the purpose of “improving it.” To me it feels degrading, invasive.  More optimistically, it is a way of writing as a group that fits a product meant for group consumption like movies/TV.  It is part of the “cloud” and “wiki” ideas.  "Heartbreak Butte" was written that way by a 7th grade class.

I suspect that “Game of Thrones” is sliding into violence and sex because it’s no longer written by one focused author, George R.R. Martin, who has a visionary grasp of the big picture, but instead by a group of unnamed people trying to capture as big a numerical audience as possible.  We’re back to “Market Pricing,” profit as a group enterprise, corporatized.  Such homogenization takes all the thought and surprise out of something that in Martin’s hands was unique.  Ironically, the pursuit of profit destroys the poor innocent golden goose, which is not Martin, but the integrity of the creation.  At least this entropy makes room for the next thing.

Returning to the starting point, http://www.quietrev.com/our-team-quiet-revolution/ is a display of “our team” that is revealing.  The usual lemmings, children of Baby Boom parents.  This is very much bait-and-switch.  I deleted it from my bookmarks.  Oh, well.  Here's a lovely music vid from Chris de Burgh called "Quiet Revolution."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdT9oq7VBDA  I'll try that next.  The internet is almost inexhaustible.