Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud

Magnified watercolor detail from "Pennsylvania Museum"

Arthur Rimbaud, de francais, is best candidate to be canonized for secular saint, although there are others since Sartre proposed Saint Genet. The thing these writers have in common is disdain for the mundane order and a heroism attributed for their exploration of the dark. To compare my Mennonite Aunt to these legends is as absurd as their lives, but there in the end, depravity beneath, are the rest of us. Rimbaud commits artistic suicide, but he is not so base as those who cannot stand to lose their fame. At age 19, willfully overthrowing all his poetic about debauch and actually living as a gun runner, slave trader and addict, Rimbaud chose to never write again. My Lady Philosophy replaces her art talent with retailing and care for her aged mother. By Sartre's light, however, whether I should value my nation over my family, join the Free French or stay home and care for the aged mother the choice is equally absurd. One may likewise define the dilemma opposing art and not art, but not without seeing that blood will  out and that Sartre's mother was the first cousin of Albert Schweitzer. This tells more about Sartre than any ethical dilemma.

I discovered these things when I stayed in her attic on visits as a child at four. The attic was unfinished, except for a floor. It had windows at both ends, the smell of rock wool insulation and wood. It was the place of exile  of her still life  oils, oranges and apples shadowed in a green bowl on a table. I used to starve for the canvases from my cot in the half light of morning, piled high and dark on the tops of old wardrobes. Then they disappeared.  As a boy I wanted to know, whose art is it? Why is it in the attic? Then later, where did it go?

Sixty years passed. She asked me to clean and inventory the contents of the attic. I found thirteen full sheets of watercolors, interiors architectured sometimes like a Rilke sonnet, colors fresh, rolled up, hidden in the attic all that time. A few had water stains from a leaking roof, but the best were immaculate when cleaned. I digitally enlarge here the details, shadows of chair rungs, Pennsylvania Dutch designs on wallpaper above and below tables. They triumph faith and desire against the terrible nature of destruction, called sacrifice, hold integrity even when faith is full of obstacle. At 70 I began to see my own life a watercolor sheet rolled and stored in an attic, the  heavy paper stretched on boards, perimeter glued  and the whole wet. When finally executed the paper was cut free.

Images of Furniture

She had affection for furniture in her work, a metaphor of life as an interior landscape, or in other words "the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber." I came to understand that her course of Interior Decoration at the Moore College of Art and Design was the essence of the inward point of view of the Pennsylvania German generations. The interior landscape becomes after a time all that we really see and think about, the interior showing and being shown. Metaphors of wear, color, time, age are supported and contained by the brown edges, an impression of green gold alchemy, in her case the visual metaphor of the large lengthwise cushion of "Sheraton Settee," reflecting sunlight.

The Settee seats at least six across. Long upholstered panels alternate vertical pale yellow stripes with light green. The Settee is a painting of a real settee. Four equidistant spindled legs outline the whole. The upholstery where the backs of people rested is worn, shown by shading yellows up and down the stripes, washing pale to a more constant yellow at the top and from the middle down, where the cushion is implied to be curved. [Proper images of these and others are found in her site, Folk Artist].

In another interior, "Pennsylvania Room - Philadelphia Museum," a pitcher, vase and old book held by metal clasps, much like the Wahren Christenthum in her attic inscribed with her great grandfather’s name, rest on a trestle table. Above the table in a painting of a woman in a bonnet. To the right a spindle-backed chair sits below a country cupboard, to the left another wooden chair. Pennsylvania Dutch folk designs are embroidered on the wall paper with baskets of flowers, borders, part of a barn, a rooster, a collage of folk images. The designs continue under the table and chairs, interwoven with shadows.
Her sketchbook shows how each elegant detail was prepared, measured, identified: front stretcher, its dimensions, side stretcher, its dimensions, the chair, positive and negative space identified, measured. Different versions of the wallpaper occur in the notebooks, but the one chosen, designed on hand drawn graph paper, magnifies each detail before finished execution. Much of these are displayed here and more will be.

"What drives that desire for the beautiful out of twilight into full sun? Why was her work hidden, not framed? Why was some thrown away? Where is the mature body of promised work?" In the last four years of her life when she lived alone in that same four story house that became myth she was sometimes so bored she would take up even speculations about lost causes. I asked why she didn't paint fraktur. "Too tired," she said, "from the long days." The image of the sun in the sky implicit in the settee's cushion, the watercolor of green and gold bursts in on the beasts of my mind. "Do you deny that I saw these paintings in my memory all these years from childhood?"  It is an argument I am bound to lose. My memory is as detailed as the paintings on the walls of  at Van Gogh's  house at the viewing where Emile Bernard says  his last paintings hung (Letter b3052). On the bier, in state, surrounded by riches, this long aged figure of Beatrice of paradise  pretends to hide the interior with indifference. The canvases stretched in negative space make positive the road not taken. I take it.

Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud

Hiding the interior, you cannot look at the sun, led to such conclusion in the moderns who reveal it by hiding.  She is a reverse Rimbaud. The work she never did, accepting that it was never done, makes her. He accomplished his by dissolution. She took hemlock by retailing. "Tired from long days" might be believed, but I don't trust the Mennonite distaste for glory she dares call "realism," a fearsome display of the tiger stripes of beauty and austerity. "Not good enough for fine art," she dares say when I ask the right question, denigrates herself with self-effacement, "not a genius." As we learn however, they are not what they say they are not. There are causes and counter causes.

I make a collection. George Herbert didn't think his work measured up so he commanded his brother to burn it down. Donne circulated only hand written copies. Emily Dickinson hid it in her room. Michaelangelo burned his drawings (Vasari). Who survives doing the work and burning it or burning it by not doing it? Realism and genius! We go any lengths to restore the beauty of memories, dig manuscripts from Rossetti's grave, save the one surviving colored copy of Jerusalem. There is no surviving work of her maturity, which makes a dichotomy of art and life beyond comprehension. That is, there is none except her maturity that I wrote down.

Blame the Mennonites?

Blame fortune, the death of her father.

Blame personality, ambition, that she was able to give it up at all.

Blame duty, sacrifice, she gave it up for her mother.

She sacrificed to work, provide a home, protect, did not become an artist in the Dutch manner or in any other. It's as if she lived on the farm, this last Dutchman who spurned the passion of her life. But though we push it down  it comes up there. She invented as many ways to doubt her work as she did to doubt her beauty: upbringing, religion, gender, poverty.

Beauty was well known among the Pennsylvania Germans even while they thought it vain, consumed as they were by Sister Truth. Pietists, Mennonists, sought truth for its own sake, not use. Where was beauty hid? The pitfall of acknowledging beauty was that it might be acknowledged pleasure. In the city they outwardly ruled by utility, formality and duty, but in the country it was worse. You didn't need the English prejudice against them, they were their own worst enemies.

Auto de Fe

But  in spite of austerity, self denial, duty, perfectionism, there was a work of her maturity. When the rolled sheaf of watercolors was recovered from the attic she mentioned there had been another collection, painted much later and to her own taste in plain style, "as watercolors should be done," without extras. Had I seen these in a large red portfolio in the attic?

No, no sign.

"I guess I threw them away."

This prank is laughable not only because she is not guessing and knows well what happened, bu because it is also pathetic.

She did not just throw them away. She ripped them up in her husband's face. The story comes out that in the midst of some discussion or other, and uncharacteristically wanting to reveal herself further, she had shown them to her husband, another fanatic Dutchman of the mere seventh generation. His  ideas about art were so fierce that he then and there declared they weren't art! So equally then and there, she destroyed them in front of his eyes, tore them up in a passionate fury. It's nice to compare this with the time the rejected criticized Blake, furiously gouged every word with a cisel from the copper plates of Jesrusalem that suggested his "love," or "friendship" for the reader, "all traces of personal intimacy and spiritual communion" (Blake,10-11).

Destroying the red portfolio, this auto de fe, is not solely a Dutch rage, though there is a tradition in the collection and burning of German devotional books by Peter Miller and Conrad Weiser in 1732. They immolated the Heidelberg Catechism just to prove they weren't Lutherans, but true Sabbatarians. And this was not the last immolation of that century according to the critic Julius Friedrich Sachse (I, 245). Sachse means at least that the Ephrata order burned all the work of Israel Eckerlin when he was deposed, who had said in the preface that "most mystical books were not worth more than to be burnt afterwards...all hymns and writings they had which were composed by him." Thoroughly purged, they "collected everything that originated with him and delivered it to a Brother to have it burnt" (Chronicon, 182). But it wasn't even the first such immolation of her own family. Before she ever graduated art school her brother had profoundly destroyed their errant grandfather’s estate papers. Later in life he said he just didn't pick them up, but the earlier gleeful report was of their burning and burning. Of course the hearer is not supposed to remember such things, just to let them twist unchallenged in the mind. With art or without, she admits to a temper. Is it Dutch? Her mother destroyed every letter she got after she had read it (but not the post cards!) from the belief that once read the letter was worthless. Why then did she save all the post cards? They were art! Cold flurries of reconciliation swirl about, which is why the antiquarian Jacob Mensch's saving of the 49 letters of Andrew Mack is so profound. She pulls the aplomb of decades around her, "you'll get over it," she says, as if she did, but I'm on my hands and knees piecing shards, clues of attic, basement, china cabinet, chests.

If this rejection of the body,  book, papers is a Pennsylvania Dutch paradigm, it's not art, letters, estate papers or devotional books that offend. This habit of expression was life long. When she had retired to her last stop in the hospital towers  of Riddle Memorial at $300 a day, a desk drawer with diaries of the 70's and 80's was found, meticulous dailies which  yielded no personal comments or observations of any kind. Asked what she wanted to do with them, she replied, "I'll get my lawyer to burn them." She declares she has old records of her trips to Greece, asks whether she should send them to me or "tear them up?" It is a manner of speaking. My wife's grandmother burned all the letters she got from her sisters in Sweden after moving to Texas in 1920, and there turned out to be a deeper reason for it, revealed in this latter day by his Excellency Sigurd Walldal of Gothenburg. We should not let appearances be too deceiving. Her recipe book was handed down though, except that her daughter glued recipes cut from magazines over the original ones handwritten in Swedish. I have this book, a Spiral Composition Book at least an inch thick, filled with Swedish cursives and spellings, some English, pen and pencil. My wife, her granddaughter scorns me when I ask to see it, "it's just sweet things!" But I can piece  together the life in the words, the realized hand with the mysteries, for this book was in the care of her daughter, named for her, who also wrote her name in the front!

Why Did You Go To Art School

 Do we get ever over the destiny generations find so hard to attain? Forces oppose the inevitable.

Considering all this she is asked, why did you go to art school?
"I didn't want to be a teacher."

Why did you go to art school?
"Well I wanted to be a doctor but that didn't go over at home."

That rings true.

Not good enough for fine art or medical school, the vessel despises entitlement. When she finished art school she painted murals for cash, floral scenes on walls for rich ladies such as Mrs. Sheldeker on Oak Lane who insisted on having her driven home by chauffeur. For this patronage she terminated the position. I fear  inheriting some of these tendencies.

What she lacked was hubris, a trait forbidden by the Mennonite. Talent, genius, entitlement, she was a reverse genius. She believed the opposite so strongly it didn't matter what others did, as if all the high flown questions of the Pennsylvania Dutch aardvarks about celestial chastity, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders and rebaptizers came down to just fulfilling a need to belong, being accepted when everything they did caused them to be excluded? Soft hearted Benjamin Rush accepted them. They had nice barns.

A Fragrant Husband

She disdained farmers and ignorance, but immensely favored the maternal families, even though farmers and Mennonites, but cast a cold eye on the paternal. The irony is that in the 18^th century these people weren't Mennonites or poor. They had farms, were educated professionals, founded, amid controversy the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania. As political and social leaders they were everything her mother Anna eight generations later wanted to be. Before Anna ever sought to escape the accent, farm and country ignorance, these paternal forebearers spoke multiple languages, including English and held public office. Anna must have sensed a deep fragrance of the life she wanted in her husband's background.

You can read of them, but  this first new world progenitor settled his family in Salford at least by 1717 (Strassburger, 414). He signed his name "with a firm hand" (Heckler) as witness to the Mennonite Trust agreement of 1725 that allocated land for a burial ground and school. Maybe he even put this agreement into English. The terms of his will show him wise and implicitly educated.

His son "was entrusted by the Colonial government as agent to collect partial payments on their lands in 1723, he must have been here some time before, well acquainted, and in the confidence of the leading men". (Dotterer quoted in Heckler, 31) This son was Philadelphia County assessor in 1741, deputy for the probate of wills for Philadelphia County, 1743 to 1748. Heckler in his Historical Sketches (1886) said he was "the most prominent man in the early history of Salford” and among the four most "reasonably well educated" men of the area who were classically trained, "a man of great force of character.

The next generation's oldest son, Jacob, was the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), voted for the Convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, was one of several founders of the Wentz Reformed Church which continued the Skippack Reformed Church, the first Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, begun by his father and grandfather. The second son, George (1740-1808), from whom she descended, became a Mennonite, married Elizabeth Hendricks, daughter of Leonard Hendricks, son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks, part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled Germantown in 1683 whose progenitor signed the anti-slavery tract in 1688.

George and Jacob's cousins, Daniel and Phillip, were officers in the Berks Co. Militia during the Revolution. Their wives were likewise educated, wrote and spoke English, were mentioned honorably in contemporary affairs. Many of these activities fall under Mennonite suspicion, but how many generations does it take to get assurance for the immigrant mind?

Compelled to answer the questions raised here just because the puzzle is in front of my eyes I do it because from the earliest age she was the image of beauty to my mind.

When she first declared herself terminal with cancer an early draft of the whole of this was rushed out for her to read, a thousand disorganized details.

"People are going to ask me whether you read it, but it's very chaotic, the Mennonites, for instance crop up everywhere. What do I tell them?"

"That's the way it is with me," she says, "the Mennonites are always following me around mentally. I'm still a Mennonite in some way or other."

Note: Her cousin Anthony Loudis:

Dean Robinson also hoped for a music department (there was usually but one teacher of music on the faculty, with provisions for private lessons on campus or in Wilmington) or, still better in her mind, a school of music. The first step in this direction took place in 1937, a year before her retirement, when Anthony Loudis a concert pianist who was a graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, joined the faculty and began the development of a department of music of which he was chairman for more than three decades.

Works Cited

William Blake. Jerusalem. Edited by Morton D. Paley. Princeton: William Blake Trust. 1998.

James Y. Heckler. The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1899. NY: AMS Press, 1971.

Sartre, J. P., 1975. "Existentialism is a Humanism," in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann, New York: Meridian-New American, 345-69.
Strassburger, Ralph Beaver. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Privately Printed: Gwynedd Valley, Pa. 1922, 414.J

ohn Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s, 1966.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.