An Emersonian Connection

Abstract

An Emersonian Connection Kara Mason (bio) Every Past Thing. Pamela Thompson. Unbridled Books. http://www.unbridledbooks.com. 336 pages; cloth, $24.95. If you are not familiar with Edwin Romanzo Elmer's family portrait "Mourning Picture" (1890), take a moment to study the cover of Every Past Thing, as the portrait—featured on the dust jacket—plays a large role in the debut novel by Pamela Thompson. The painting is the work for which Elmer is best known, and features the artist, his wife, and their young daughter Effie, depicted at the age in which she met her early death. Thompson's novel is a fictional filling in of the holes left open by history's scant record of the reclusive Massachusetts artist and his wife, Mary Elmer. Mary, the book's protagonist, is depicted in the painting under the shadow of a tree, dressed in mourning clothes, a severe look on her face, a sky blue ball of yarn on her lap, but her hands left idle. Every Past Thing is a meditative novel, and this haunting image with its many fine details is the central meditation that runs throughout. Thompson's storytelling is cyclical, and she achieves this meditative quality through her use of repetition, so that by the end of the novel, it is possible for the reader to recreate the painting in his or her mind without having to close the book and look again on the cover. The death of Edward and Mary's daughter Effie is the tragedy that opens the novel. "With the ones we love, we know from the start the Story's end," Mary writes in her green book, a volume of hand-bound papers she fills as the novel progresses. Thompson uses Mary's own writing as a framing device to relate the extensive backstory of the entire Elmer family while at the same time confining the actual setting of the novel to one week in New York City in 1899. Effie's death is Mary's central life tragedy, but it was not the first or last tragic event to befall her. The green book is filled mostly with her musings on the complex feelings she has for Edward's brother Samuel, who she fell in love with as a girl; the details of the illicit affair she had with Jimmy Roberts, a boy many years her junior; her loveless marriage; her exploration of transcendentalism and feminism; her father's death in the Civil War; and the dark secret of the Elmer family, housed in the body and mind of Edward and Samuel's disturbed Uncle Albert. The green book goes through many incarnations throughout the novel. It is at times Mary's simple account of her own life; it is at times a letter to Effie; it is at times an intended gift for Maud, Mary's only niece; and it is at times a sacrificial object, bound for the bottom of the East River. There is a cast of tertiary characters that appear and disappear throughout the course of the novel, as Mary takes the reader through her childhood and married life in Western Massachusetts. But 1899 Manhattan, the place and time in which the novel itself resides, is a character almost as central and ever-present as Effie's ghost, or as Mary herself. Mary and Elmer lived in lower Manhattan for the year of 1899 while Edward studied painting at The National Academy of Design. Mary's love affair with the city itself is as palpable as those with Jimmy Roberts and another young man (a student she meets in Justus Schwab's saloon at 51 First Avenue, the address from which Jimmy Robert's early love letters used to arrive to her from). Leaving behind rural Massachusetts, Mary throws herself into the rhythm of city life, spending her days walking "from east to west and back until she had lost track of logic amid the crooked streets." In the beginning, she is searching for Jimmy Roberts, but a moment comes early in the novel in which it is clear that what she finds in her search is more a sense of her own identity...