Imprinted Life discussion

Pegge and William's marriage and relationship is the backdrop to larger events.

Chapter 20.

Pegge and William's family life at their country estate, Clewer, is removed to an extent from the pollution and politics of London. The household seems potentially intrusive upon Pegge's former freedom.

Having a birthday picnic by a marsh, Pegge and the several children decide to rescue the Deanery's vessel, in which spotted-dog pudding is jelling, from floating toward a league of crows.

The children like repeating Donne's phrase from a letter,

"We had not one another at so cheap a rate that we should ever be weary of one another."

William enters the scene with sleepy Isabel and with news of Cromwell's soldiers. Though King Charles was beheaded, William had been his Groom of the Wardrobe and Donne had written sympathetically of the king's cause.

"Is that the vessel from the Deanery? ...It is dangerous to keep such a thing. The soldiers have already sacked my study once, looking for your father's writings sympathetic to the King.
...
"They wanted to search your chamber as well, but I told them--You have not kept any of your father's books, have you, Pegge?"

Besides Pegge's relationship to her children and William, the chapter also shows her character (and oppression) in the formal Bowles' household. She keeps a secret of her reading and writing and passes through the house without being seen by servants.

Chapter 21.

Continues the domestic setting of chapter 20. This time, Meg's sixteenth birthday comes around. Instead of just the nuclear family, Pegge's widowed, domineering sister Constance is staying with the Bowles. Her influential manner over the affairs of the household diminishes Pegge's individuality and authority(?). Con oversees the Bowles children's education in painting and needlework and manages everyone else other than Pegge and William, but takes William's side in his and Pegge's frequent disagreements.

Con and Pegge's inharmonious kinship also pertains to Izaac Walton, both sisters adamantly opposing each other's view of the angler and biographer.

Con's intrusion is further felt by Pegge during an outing when the group gets separated. Pegge nonetheless overhears Con and William's close conversation.

Chapter 22.

In the Prologue at the start of the book, Pegge rescues Donne's marble effigy from St. Paul's during the Great London Fire of 1666. Dragging and carting it, she encounters Izaac Walton there. They continue carrying it from the church down to the wharf, where William awaits in a barge. The barge moves on the Thames, to stop at the Bowles' Clewer estate.

Since Walton's London home burnt to the ground in the fire, he continued to stay with the Bowles for two weeks so far, hoping perhaps to wed Constance. He and Pegge renew their former friendship of thirty years earlier. At first aloof, he warms to her attentions after her handmade "miniature flies" fool his eye. They later use them and more of them for fly fishing.

One night, Walton discovers a passionate woman is sharing his bed. It's raven-haired Constance whose name he calls out. On one hand, Pegge criticizes his saintly biography of Donne's life; on the other hand, she waxes approvingly for an expanded edition of his anglers' tales.

Hair and hair-like strands are frequently parts of scenes. Besides the value of stray hairs, kept in an "enamelled hair-tidy", for making fishing flies of a feather and other small things entwined with dyed hair strands, Pegge also cleans and tints Walton's hair, brushing and curling it for a long time. There's the horsehair fishing line, in the scenes which "dap and dibble" the fly across the water's surface to bring in a grayling or a pike.

Chapter 23.

The chapter continues the aftermath of London's fire. Ashes of books, etc, are blown over the countryside while, in reverse, the visitors Walton and Constance, and eventually William, leave the estate, going back to somewhere else.

William and Pegge's thirty-years marriage seems an imaginative stretch in most of this chapter. Disagreeable, easily persuaded by Constance's interference in domestic affairs, persnickety in his narrow view of Pegge's activities, he is quite unlikeable.

Strong-minded Pegge, however, sweetly remains true to herself, refreshing his memory,

"I told you that I was John Donne's daughter, that I was Ann More's child, that I could never stop being what I was, but you took me all the same."

Instead of spurning or ignoring him, she patiently attends to him, solving his anxiety about a hovering bee, undoing his doublet buttons for fresh air, etc, until he yields to the new fish pool, the conservatory, the "maison rustique" and to her penchant of country living with her youngest son while he is doing business in London. When he reaffirms what attracted, and still attracts, him to Pegge, his earlier sharp needling has to be forgiven.

Chapter 24.

Returning from the countryside to the city at the behest of Charles II after the Great Fire of 1666, William Bowles learns that Charles's court and some London citizens blame Papists, most likely French, for the fire's origin. Those innocent, useful people include Hubert of Rouen, who made the awesome minute-hand on William's pocket-clock, and the Fleet Street shoemaker of the diarist Samuel Pepys.

Before his coming back to London, William went so far to steal Pegge's annotated copy of Donne's posthumous Sermons from her locked cabinet. When William meets Pepys in The Three Cranes tavern, he wants the renowned man's opinion about the incomprehensible scribbling in the book. Pepys easily recognizes the arrangement and meaning of the words. After William's comprehending Pepys's reading of the writing, he realizes that the words must have recently been written by the dead Ann More. William fears Ann More's ghost arising from the grave to write across the book's pages. Some Londoners similarly tended to interpret the miracle of Donne's unburnt mummy in St Paul's crypt. Their explanations possessed an inkling of irrational mysteries.

To William, Hubert's fine invention is more important than his being French Catholic. By contrast, xenophobia extended beyond matters of conscience to fashion and to imported goods. Thus, William must apply the king's preferences in his professional duties, anticipating the use of dye pigments from English beetroot and of cloth from English woolens.

Chapter 25.

Following up the end of the tavern scene, which had brought out Samuel Pepys's bawdiness
opposite William Bowles's fascination with the pocket-clock, Elizabeth Pepys's dog fetches Pepys home. A harmonious, "sympathy of souls" plays between Samuel and Elizabeth, muting the undertone of realities.

Chapter 26.

The prior evening, William consulted with Pepys about Pegge's illegible handwriting on a copy of Walton's "Life of Donne". Now, Pepys sends William a key to decipher her writing. The key was possibly that of Thomas Shelton, who wrote a book on tachygraphy (fast writing), which Pepys used in penning his diary and other papers.

In addition to William's working on reading Pegge's notations, he feels irritable after his last night's nightmare; jealous of Walton and Pegge's close friendship; warmer than some others in their stylish English fashions with ornamental buttons; overwhelmed by hawkers, who offer Donne-like poems, which make good fire tinder; and unsettled by Pegge's spectacle of reinstating Donne's effigy to Paul's through a crowd of spectators.

Chapter 27.

With William unheard from at Clewer and unseen by Pegge in London, in the previous chapter, he had nevertheless noticed and turned away from Pegge's mingling with a curious crowd during her returning Donne's effigy to Paul's.

This next chapter flashes back to Pegge, still in the countryside during William's absence. She receives Franny's news about a huckster's commercializing on Donne's unburnt mummy. She decides that it's time to upright and return Donne's effigy. On a horse-drawn wagon, she and Angus take it to London during windy, cold St. Lucy's eve, three months after she had saved it.

In London, she detaches bone by bone Donne's wired, mummy-like skeleton off the scaffolding, while futilely driving away dogs and crows, scavengers for fleshy remains on his dismembered bones.

She then climbs to the vantage point of Paul's choir, opened to the night sky and to London's environs, recalling the cathedral's "inferno", a hellish scenario from which she rescued the heavy effigy from under the breaking roof. Her memory is a vivid description of molten lead; buckling paving stones which reveal the "gaping crypt"; "roasting", smelly contents of coffins in which

"[a] great man's grave was as mute as a poor man's";

burning books, whose

"....charred bookpapers flew out of the crypt like rabid bats";

"fiery", "smoldering" beams under which she saw Izaac Walton transfixed.

Chapter 28.

The historical architect of St. Paul's rebuilding, Christopher Wren surveys its burnt-down exterior and advises Pegge on the safest way to bring her wagon's load, a "colossus", down the steep slope. St Paul's Cathedral: Sir Christopher Wren and On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Sir Christopher Wren are two books in Wikipedia's bibliography of "Christopher Wren". The reader sees Pegge through the eyes and mind of William Bowles, whose artistic soul yearns for the pleasures of color shades and of relaxed country life.

"If pinks and oranges could be colours, why not chocolate and coffee? Why not lemon? He would feed her lemon cakes and coffee--an intriguing milky brown--and take her back to the country, staying with her as long as the King would let him. If he is correct, King Charles would be in no hurry to have him back."

He relishes not being the king's tailor at court but the tentmaker in the countryside with a strange wife.

"He knew without asking, by the look on Christopher Wren's face when she had jumped down from her horse, that she had introduced herself as Ann More, a woman dead for fifty years."

Chapter 29.

Setting: the country estate of Clewer in summer and over the next few months.

Point of View: William's.

Basically William's monologue in which he opines on daily life at Clewer. Under his scrutiny, are Pegge, his married daughter Franny, Franny's toddler, his son Duodecimus, and even Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. He's concerned with his family's safety during England's century of political-religious instability, keeping the contents of Pegge's letters about Donne's elegies from going by post. About women writing, he is a bit conservative, considering it "a very inconvenient business", especially by the "eccentric" Duchess of Newcastle. Overall, the chapter is given over, on the one hand, to William's sedateness and contentment and, on the other hand, to his sensuality.

"...Pegge...would...slice potatoes...layering them in a pie-dish with scalded milk and raisins. She would pull butter out of the well and roll cubes in cinnamon to scatter over the top. When it was cool, she would cut the sloppy pie with such wild movements of her blade that he would choke back a fear that she would stab herself. She would laugh at his cowardly face, pick up a runny slice, and feed it to him on her palm. It would taste of apples burnt by a Persian sun."

Chapter 30 and "The London Evening Post"

Narrator: Pegge's monologue to Bowles then Donne then Bowles.

Pegge brings the topic to the beginning when she's young, without fleurs, and with longing. Now, she also is without fleurs in late life.

"Tonight memory washes over me like a benediction, a sudden jasmine on the night air. My fleurs did not come this month and I am fierce with longing",

referring to her late menarche and menopause and physical desire. A motif in this book, the fleurs are a major event of Pegge's life, signifying marriage and motherhood.

Connected to those life events is death, her mother's dying in childbirth when Pegge is a child, and her father's death in decrepit old age when she nursed him at seventeen. The codicil of his will and the onset of her fleurs lead to her own marriage to William Bowles.

Her mother and father's unconventional marriage for its time was based on personal attraction and love rather than on paternal choice. Then, there was its death by Donne's religious beliefs and by Ann's physical death.

The supernatural aura of this novel contrasts well with the earthly details of the flora, the Great London Fire, the fishing flies, the medical treatments, the kitchen preparations, and the clothing details. In separate chapters, Ann in the tomb and Donne on the deathbed spiritually quarrel about a shared grave in death, Ann's living spirit demanding that Donne keep his wedding vow to do so. His unconvincing cajoling that death is divorce, that the resurrection will rejoin them as youths, does not win her over to his point of view. Ann doesn't want to wait that long and doesn't get her wish. Donne's position as the Dean came with new observances about love in life and in death.

Will Pegge's desire, unlike her mother's wish, be fulfilled? Will William not be overawed by Donne's amorous reputation in the marriage-and-death bed in which Pegge sleeps?

"Come, William, I see Venus rising like a pink nipple on the plump horizon. Shall we make that clock of your run faster? Let us bed down together in this new dawn and weave a silken tent of arms. Such feats are not reserved for extraordinary lovers, and my love for you has grown over the years to marvellous proportions. Let us die together in the act of love, so death cannot divorce us. When our grave is broken open, our souls shall take flight together, assuming limbs of flesh, and lips, ears, loins, and brows. But first let us speed darkening time and savour this long night of love."