I love her for all these things. I love her too, perhaps most of all, for waking me to my own potential”
14. “Doctor Bloor, Clara will show me how to bring purpose to my own life.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 21 March1930, AnB.
15. “For heaven’s sake, Jonathan, don’t let her go to Boston.” Andrew Bloor to Jonathan Blashette, 4 April1930, JBP.
16. Clara came with baggage. In addition to her son Hunter and her niece Margreta whom she was raising following a burro collision in the Grand Canyon that permanently juggled the brains of her sister Ida, Clara brought with her four dogs, two cats, Clara’s Aunt Love, Clara’s Aunt Love’s iron lung, Clara’s Aunt Love’s nurse Miss Puntz, Nurse Puntz’s extensive collection of japonaiserie, a sheep named Orville (for the wool), a goat named Snickersnee (for the cheese), and the famed engineer and bridge designer Bascom Caruthers. Merry Mintz Figel. Research notes from unproduced stage production Clara! The Musical, c. 1965.
17. One of Bascom’s ears had been badly disfigured in a botched candling episode. Ibid.
18. Among the other habitués of Clara’s literary “salon” were Dorothy Musgrove and Carter Wendt. Carter was perhaps genetically predisposed to poetry and light prose as the grand-nephew of poet Damon Wendt who, befriended by Walt Whitman at a Camden dry goods store as the two men found themselves laying claim to the same flannel work shirt, was inspired to write in the style and spirit of the hoary celebrant of the common man. (With all correspondence between the two having been burned by Damon’s sister and Carter’s great aunt Edith Puggs, upon Damon’s death and her discovery that he had deliberately called her in order of frequency, “Pigg,” “Porker,” “Priggy Pig” and “Ham Hips”), we are left with only Damon’s clearly derivative poems as evidence that Carter’s great uncle not only shared Whitman’s “invert” nature, but sought to incorporate the predilection into his poetry in an even more overt manner than did his friend and fellow flannel-wearer. An example is the following, from his self-published collection, Blades with Stalks.
Paean to the Packing House
O men of meat!
With rippled sinew, with muscles spread thick and bared,
To push, to pull, to swell, sweat-moistened, to haul and heave and thrust — hips forward hips back, a rush of man-work,
This place of heft and husky, hirsute manhood.
This abattoir of dust and dank and blood.
Blood of beast, sweat of man.
O pageant of manhood!
I gaze upon the scene and within me a beast awakes, stretches, yawns, fisting his eyes and viewing carnage civilized by the muscular men of meat.
Hear the throaty cries of the barrelmen of beef and brawn who carry the weight of commerce upon their massive, undulating shoulders.
Throats that hunger for the taste of meat cut, meat uncut.
I sing my joy of the packing house.
I am singer in a place queer in its blood-lock, yet sustenance-sustaining,
Carnivorous, cacophonous cavern of the deep, the dark, the dangerous, the men of meat.
I brush the young one lightly, gently, my hand searching, tentative in its touch.
To touch the shoulder, the hocks, the lumber limbs of the one with the astral eyes.
He pushes me back, a look of warning, a look of one who becomes master even in his youth.
Hands unsuppled by the work of the trade.
His baritone cry, warm and felt-lined, deep in the timbre of youthful man-gruff: “Stop looking at me.
Stop touching me.
You’re standing in a blood pool, you old fool.”
Fool I am but fool I be.
I touch him again, softly, a gentle stroke across the sullied apron pulled taut against his, no-doubt, fur-tuft chest.
Another push in answer.
In furrowed scorn.
“I told you to stop touching me. Touch me again, and I’ll pop you with this calf carcass.”
I laugh.
I embrace the folly of my petulant spirit, and am again about the pursuit of this fine avatar of male youth who carves the meat with the sheer brawn of his musky man-paw.
My hand reaches out again…
And is met by the darkness of day-sleep, of sudden somnolent ensilencing.
The flame of consciousness doused.
Upon my back I enter the Packing House of Dreams.
Where men welcome my wandering touch.
These men of meat!
A side note about Dorothy Musgrove: the poet moved to Washington, D.C., in 1932 and soon became a permanent, albeit minor, fixture in the “den of power” as she liked to call the city. Trading Clara’s literary salon for a political one, she enjoyed frequent invitations to sup with D.C.’s “living monument” Alice Roosevelt Longworth and other capital celebrities. Her low profile generally kept her name out of the local press.
The one notable exception occurred in 1936 when Dorothy found herself the victim of Seattle Congressman Marion Zioncheck’s drunken joy ride through the streets (and sidewalks) of downtown Washington. Struck in the head by an airborne trash can lid, she declined medical attention and proceeded to the home of Mrs. Longworth where she was expected for an intimate dinner party. With her head bloodied from the accident, she launched into a send-up of Teddy Roosevelt’s legendary address following the nearly fatal attempt made upon his life during the 1912 Presidential campaign, parodying Teddy with precision: “I want you all to be very quiet. Perhaps you’re not aware that I have been hit in the head by the lid of a garbage can knocked skyward by a drunken Congressman.” According to Dorothy’s recollection of the evening, “fun-loving Alice was reduced to hysterics, dropping to the floor and pummeling the boards in a fit of apoplectic mirth.” (Dorothy Musgrove, Things I Remember, [Baltimore: Boysenberry Press, 1960], 137-40.)