The Velvet Bridge
by
Anita Stubbs
This true-to-life rags to riches tale, my first novel, is set during WWII and could have actually happened if not for one thing: Mattie Featherstone never existed, other than between the covers of this 381-page book. But the lifestyles, the culture of the time, and some of the places ring so true, you'll wonder. It's classic 1940's, Dallas, Texas, in and around Oak Cliff.
Too young to be
widowed and too pretty to be alone, Mattie Featherstone is both. Suddenly
impoverished, this confused, tormented woman abandons her children and seeks
refuge in an encampment for vagrants situated near the Trinity River on the
west side of Dallas during World War II.
When a twist-of-fate encounter eases Mattie out of destitution into the
genteel world of her paper doll dreams, she manages to conceal the truth
about her past from her benefactors. She even justifies - in her own mind -
the abandonment of her daughters.
However, everything changes when yet another unforeseen event turns her life
into sensational headline news, revealing more than even she could imagine.
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The Spirit of Poetry
E. M. Forster, whose work was one of my earliest inspirations, remains one of my favorite English authors. Forster’s creed of life was summed up in two words, "only connect", taken from the epigraph to his novel, Howard’s End.
What I Believe, an essay—and the first Edward Morris Forster work I read—touched me personally. It seemed as though I had met a new friend with whom I shared a "secret understanding" and felt reassured about my own beliefs.
But, The Celestial Omnibus, his short story published in 1911 with a collection of other stories in a book by the same name, stirred me emotionally more than any other had until that time. The most impressive statement in the story has to be "For poetry is a spirit, and they that worship it must worship in spirit and in truth."
The boy in the story easily sees the spirit of poetry, the essence of which is beauty and goodness. He is physically impacted by the imagery of its presence, as illustrated in the following excerpt:
Small birds twittered. . . musically down through the cutting—that wonderful cutting which has drawn itself the whole beauty of Surbiton, and clad itself, like any Alpine Valley, with the glory of the fir and the silver birch and the primrose. It was this cutting that first stirred desire within the boy—desires for something just a little different. . . desires that would return whenever things were sunlit. . . running up and down inside him. . . til he would feel quite unusual all over, and as likely as not would want to cry.
But it is a gift, the boy’s ability to be touched by the poetic. He knew the art before he knew the artist. The art was within him. All the great writers he came to know through their creations were kindred spirits who beckoned him to follow them—to indulge himself in the lyrical world of imagery until he was completely embraced by it.
The story is filled with biblical allusions, but I’m struck with one more: Many are called but few are chosen. Mr. Bons falls into that category. Although, in his snobbery, he knew the artists intellectually, all their names, all the titles, even the words, he could never be among the chosen who felt the spirit of the art. He used the great works to line his shelves, as decoration to impress society, and to feed his own ego. He could never enter the Kingdom, as the boy could. In fact, it was impossible for him to enter, and impossible for the boy not to.
In all his literacy, Mr. Bons simply missed the point. He is like the pious minister of the gospel who clothes himself in all the holiness, all the rhetoric, in as much condescending righteousness he can claim as a "doer of the word", while the Word itself, the primordial Thought, eludes him. Like that minister, Mr. Bons is so blinded by the glare of the Names who wrote the words (or spoke them), so concerned with being ‘cultured’, that he is unable to intercept the Light that penetrates the darkness. Mr. Bons found value in "displaying" the covers of the books: "I believe we have seven Shelleys," he boasted. Mr. Bons idolized London, for it symbolized the "center" of culture. He only wanted to see London. For this, he lost his life.
I do not believe, however, that it is possible for everyone to see the rainbow, to hear the tune, to stand upon the living rock as the boy does. These things are spiritual, and the spirit, because it is a gift, cannot be acquired. But this knowledge does not diminish the desire, as demonstrated by the boy, to have everyone board the "celestial omnibus".
Sadly, however, they must be left in their poverty, to
starve from the lack of the experience, without "eyes to see or hands to
feel, the experiment of earthly life" as Forster wrote in What I Believe.
However, everything changes when yet another unforeseen event turns her life
into sensational headline news, revealing more than even she could imagine.