All the Time in the World Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House LLC,

  Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Four lines from “Howl” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1955 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Six lines of song from A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat.

  Reprinted by permission of John Wiley and Sons.

  Illustrations by Minka Sicklinger

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Frontispiece illustration courtesy of the Smithsonian

  Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Jenkins, Jessica Kerwin

  All the time in the world : a book of hours / Jessica Kerwin Jenkins. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Manners and customs—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  GT90.J46 2013

  390—dc23 2013000795

  ISBN 978-0-385-53541-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53542-7

  v3.1

  For Nico, who makes every second count

  The honey of heaven may or may not come,

  But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  Great effort has gone into ensuring that the information found in this book is factual and accurate, as well as amusing. Notification of any errors is greatly appreciated: [email protected].

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  January - Skaters Glide on Ice

  February - Keats Loves and Loses

  March - Pilgrims Embark

  April - Cherry Blossoms Fall

  May - Desert Roses Bloom

  June - Blondin Crosses Niagara Falls

  July - Fruit Makes Jam

  August - Ruth St. Denis Heads East

  September - Moon Gazers Convene

  October - Instantanéisme is Born

  November - Europe Develops a Taste for Pineapple

  December - The Lord of Misrule Reigns

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  WHEN I WAS JUST STARTING OUT IN NEW YORK, working in a dull, gray office building, whenever the morning felt particularly bleak or tantalizingly sunny, I’d intentionally overshoot the front door, strolling eastward on Thirty-fourth Street, as if I were going somewhere else entirely. I’m embarrassed to remember how exhilarating it felt, and how thrilling it was to imagine one of my coworkers spotting me making my escape. I’d see a fantastic day spreading out before me, the matinees, the cafés, an afternoon wandering through Central Park. Then, at the corner of Fifth Avenue, I’d pause, like a trapeze artist at the end of her tether. And I’d turn on my heel and go back to work.

  I should have gone to the Cloisters instead. Up above 190th Street at the Cloisters Museum, I’d have found a small leather-bound book, like a diary, made for a medieval queen of France. A classic book of hours, The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux is composed of short texts that guided the queen through her day—from morning prayers through vespers and the verses for compline, said just before bed—and through her year. The full effect is enchanting. In contrast to the book’s pious theme, delicate images of monkeys, rabbits, dogs, and dancing revelers crowd the margins, little animations scholars call drôleries. Knights joust on one page; on another courtiers play “frog in the middle,” something like blindman’s buff meets tag. Holidays are noted in a striking red, some of the first “red-letter days.”

  My book is an homage to the books of hours treasured by women (and some men) of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These antiquated volumes were status symbols, fashion accessories, and talismans, often embellished with gold latches and gilt-edged pages, and done with illustrations in lapis or saffron. They opened a door to devotion, but also one to distraction.

  Lately, my husband has been obsessed with GTD—Getting Things Done—a culty businessman’s motto that glorifies the traditional to-do list. “GTD!” he crows, having Super Glued the broken handle of the teapot back together. Meanwhile, our individual Google calendars sync with our laptops, which, in turn, download data to devices that bleep in the middle of the night whenever it’s time to pay a bill. In response to these twittering interruptions, a phrase I’ve been muttering lately is, “WWBD?” That is, What Would Baudelaire Do?

  In the same way that my first book, Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, took inspiration from the earliest encyclopedias while offering an antidote to Wikipedia, All the Time in the World celebrates the traditional book of hours with the hope of countering the hyperscheduled cult of Getting Things Done. Wistful poets, frilly ladies, passionate dandies, voluntary tramps, rainbow hunters, bold artists, and iconoclasts with a passion for good living lead the way as the pages move through the hours of the day offering a string of historical anecdotes to demonstrate the unusual, fantastic, and beautiful ways people have spent time across centuries and continents. It’s an agenda turned upside down in favor of the impractical and the ephemeral: drinking hot cocoa, taking a nap, waltzing until dawn.

  I hope that in some subtle way this book, like the giddy characters flitting through the margins of a medieval book of hours, provokes a happily warped awareness of how we pass the time, while suggesting some bold and wonderful ways to spend whatever we’ve got left.

  In the early dawn, a riverboat calliope’s thin song wafted down the banks of the Mississippi River where five sleepy-eyed boys stood barefoot on the cold sand, peering into the distance. It was 1869 and the circus was coming to McGregor, Iowa. When the twinkling ship reached the dock, a muscle-bound, cursing crew clambered off and, wagon by wagon, unloaded the entire show, including an elephant whose weight bowed the gangplank. Meanwhile, the boys, sons of a German farmer called Ruengeling, stood mesmerized. “What would you say if we had a show like that?” the eldest, seventeen-year-old Albert, asked his brothers.

  Later that summer, the boys charged neighborhood kids ten straight pins’ admission to their backyard circus. Eventually they added a billy goat, then a horse, and upped their fee. By 1884 they’d changed their name to Ringling, and soon enough, after hooking up with Barnum & Bailey, their circus was known as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

  At the turn of the century, nearly a hundred small circuses crisscrossed the United States, traveling the rivers, roads, and rails, as enthusiasts gathered in the predawn hours to greet them at every stop. “When the circus came to town we managed to shake out of sleep at four o’clock in the morning,” poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) remembered of his boyhood in Galesburg, Illinois. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he’d grab a slice of bread and butter and sprint off to the yards.

  Farm families traveled from miles around on Circus Day. School was canceled. Shops closed. Attendants could sell eight thousand tickets in forty minutes for a big-top show that promised clowns by the dozen, lion tamers, and high-wire acrobats, who, in those days, were perfecting the midair triple somersault. For country folk, the circus provided “ou
r brief season of imaginative life,” the novelist Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) wrote. “In one day—in a part of one day—we gained a thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature.” In with the circus came the latest songs and jokes. It gave everyone something to talk about. “Next day as we resumed work in the field,” Garland wrote, “the memory of its splendours went with us like a golden cloud.”

  Just like that, the cloud drifted on. Roaming the deep countryside, circus wagoners lost their way “with perverse frequency,” one performer remembered. “You have slept four hours out of sixteen and are crawling along in the face of a drenching, blinding rainstorm—soaked, hungry and dazed.” Yet, traveling by wagon, one also felt the “wild, free, clean abandon of the life,” clown Jules Turnour (d. 1931) wrote. Turnover rates were high among circus workers, but there were always romantic souls desperate to run away from home and replace those who had returned.

  To join the circus was to enter a different world. Circus people had their own slang: an elephant was a “punk,” acrobats were “kinkers,” a joking clown was “cracking a wheeze.” The cry “Hey, Rube!” was their call to arms, raised when an outsider violated circus code, and bringing anyone nearby to jump into the fray.

  Sometimes they stayed in town for one night only. While the audience watched the show unaware, a circus train crew disassembled the tented city, packing up the menagerie, sideshow tents, and candy shops, then pressed on to the next destination, with the last cars pulling out after midnight. During the 1890s, the Barnum & Bailey Circus rolled along with a thousand employees, 407 horses, 12 elephants, 2 mules, and 4 camels, all in 102 wagons. The crew could transform an empty lot into a tented city in two hours flat, while in the just-constructed kitchen the cooks prepared two thousand cups of coffee, several thousand eggs, and five hundred pounds of meat. At 6:00 a.m., they rang the bell for breakfast.

  “I never saw a lover rejoicing because he liked the dawn,” sang the thirteenth-century Provençal troubadour Cadenet. For centuries the aching, reluctant farewells of lovers parting at sunrise generated poetic fodder in the form of the aubade, or dawn song, as when the ancient Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) scolded Aurora, goddess of the rising sun, for tearing him from his lover’s bed:

  How often have I longed that night should not give place to thee, that the stars should not be moved to fly before thy face! How often have I longed that either the wind should break thine axle, or thy steed be tripped by dense cloud, and fall!

  But, alas, his love-struck pleas would go unheeded. As he reported, “the day did not arise any later than usual.”

  Poets writing in Provençal, Kurdish, Chinese, Japanese, and Quechua all bemoaned the sad state of affairs, taking up the theme and describing the sorrow of a lover cooing his goodbyes from under a window or the pillow talk between two lovers just waking and forced to part. A medieval maiden might try to persuade her knight to stay, despite the danger of discovery. One poet wrote, in Hindi, “There is a wager between Dawn and my heart, which will first break.” The more intense the lovers’ joy, the more terrible their separation. They did what they could to stop time, but in the end it always turned out the same.

  The thirteenth-century German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach regarded their eternal predicament with a sensualist’s eye:

  Their bright skin, that smooth skin,

  came closer as the day appeared.

  Weeping eyes—a sweet woman’s kiss!

  So were they all entwined,

  mouth, breast, arms, and shining legs.

  To make the early-morning curtain, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kabuki aficionados, on foot and riding in palanquins, made their way through the dark. In the streets of Osaka, Kyoto, and old Tokyo, ticket barkers shouted, whistled, or impersonated the theater’s stars, giving a preview of what might be seen inside. Thundering drums announced the start of the show as teahouse attendants who worked in establishments attached to the theaters helped distinguished guests change into slippers, and then guided them toward an early preshow breakfast. Eating was as important as watching the show.

  Inside the theater, runners delivered snacks to the box seats one after the next. First came tea and sweets, then appetizers and saki, then lunch, and then, in the afternoon, an assortment of sushi. Near dark, when the show was over, fancier guests retired to the teahouse for a banquet, hoping to meet the stars of the day.

  But kabuki wasn’t only for the rich. The theaters were crammed with all sorts—ladies, samurai, and geisha in the plush box seats, but also shopkeepers and monks, who sat on tatami mats on the floor. “The people came in pushing and jostling, and eight persons sat knee over knee on a mat,” an observer wrote in 1703. “It is very pleasant to see them pressed together like human sushi.”

  The plays centered on local scandal—vendettas, murders, swindles, and love affairs. The theme of lovers’ suicide was banned, so as not to encourage the lovelorn. But displays of enthusiasm were encouraged. At crucial moments during a performance, a player would pause to strike a stylized pose, prompting the wild crowd to shout his name, or, if the performance lived up to the standard of his theatrical lineage, the name of his revered father. Fan club members devoted to a star performer arrived at the theater all dressed alike and clapped in rhythm during the show, leaving behind bales of rice and barrels of saki as gifts.

  The first kabuki dance was performed by a Shinto priestess named Okuni on a dry riverbed in Kyoto in 1596. She later gave a repeat performance at the imperial palace. Following in her footsteps, women, mostly prostitutes, formed kabuki troupes, performing bawdy skits and slinky dances and inflaming the passions of young samurai, which raised a public alarm. “Recently there has been a tendency for even high-ranking people to use the argot of actors and prostitutes,” pronounced an adviser to a seventeenth-century shogun. “Such a tendency will result in the collapse of the social order.” The regent dictated harsh regulations designed to loosen kabuki’s hold, including a decree that theaters could be only partially roofed—over the stage and box seats—thereby limiting theater owners to operating on mild, sunny days. (This also meant that the show’s opening drums served as a local weather report.) Theaters were restricted to the red-light districts outside city walls, as were the performers themselves, who could not legally venture beyond the kabuki zone’s borders. Women were banned from the stage altogether in 1629, and when the long-haired boys who replaced them proved too attractive, the boys were forced to shave their heads so that they could no longer wear elaborate ladylike hairdos. To fake long, lustrous locks, the boys tied kerchiefs around their heads and used purple silk patches. “The appearance of their faces was smooth and like cats with their ears cut off, and they were a sorry sight,” wrote a theatergoer.

  And yet the devoted audience wouldn’t abandon kabuki. In the eighteenth century, samurais entered the theater incognito, wearing baskets over their heads. Ladies-in-waiting, who, for propriety’s sake, shouldn’t have been at the theater at all, faked visits to their parents so they could flock to the latest shows. Even the most distinguished matrons, those who wouldn’t dare go inside, stopped their palanquins in front of the theaters and had the curtain pulled back so they could take a peek. (The government soon passed a law against that.)

  The only thing that could stop kabuki cold was closing the theaters altogether, and this finally happened in 1713, after a lady-in-waiting to the emperor’s mother fell in love with a leading man. The lovers were banished to separate islands and all the theaters in Tokyo were closed. It was temporary, of course. Once the theaters reopened, things carried on as before, with the playwrights taking inspiration from the illicit love story for years to come.

  The true kabuki fan’s dawn-to-dusk life consisted of “living only for the moment,” author Asai Ryoi (1612–1691) wrote of the era’s decadents, “savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking saki, and diverting oneself just in floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent p
overty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current.”

  A PACK OF CHILDREN SKITTERED across the iced-over Moorfields on the outskirts of London in 1180, back when venturing onto the frozen water was something strange and noteworthy. Some, wearing sharpened bones strapped to their shoes like rudimentary ice skates, pushed themselves along with sticks “as swiftly as a bird flyeth in the air or an arrow out of a cross-bow,” an awed observer noted. And occasionally they moved “swiftly on so slippery a plain, they all fall down headlong.”

  The scene was more dignified in 1662, when King Charles II (1630–1685), gracefully glided onto the frozen Thames—a habit he’d picked up while exiled in Holland. Somewhat nervously, diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) tagged along to St. James Park to watch. The ice “was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his skates, which I do not like,” Pepys wrote, admitting that the king “slides very well.” Some twenty years later, Pepys would make his own icy debut during a winter fair, dancing across the frozen river with the king’s mistress, Nell Gwyn.

  The Thames didn’t freeze often, but when it did, it was an occasion. In 1813, hundreds assembled on London Bridge to see the first daredevils walk across the frozen river. Eager fairgoers soon followed, lured onto the ice by bookstalls, drinking tents, and a wheel of fortune, installed during a frost fair that lasted for months. Dancers whirled across the ice as a fiddler played a reel, and, from time to time, ice islets broke away from the mass, carrying unfortunate riders downriver. “As they passed under Westminster Bridge they cried out most piteously for help,” a fairgoer reported, after watching two men drift away, never to be seen again. And yet, as risky as clambering out onto the ice was, when the thaw came, thousands of disappointed Londoners thronged the banks, “and many a ’prentice boy and servant maid sighed unutterable things at the sudden and unlooked-for destruction of the Frost Fair,” a reporter noted.