Frontispiece to Gone-Away Lake
                                                                                                      by Elilzabeth Enright
                                                                                                      New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1957
                                                                                                      Illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush

Cousins Portia and Julian go exploring and discover a once elegant but now forgotten summer resort from the turn of the last century on the banks of a swamp that used to be a lake. 

As you might imagine, people still ask why I am interested in 1904.  Sometimes I credit James Joyce, but really I think I should blame Elizabeth Enright.  A part of me still likes to pretend that I am twelve years old again and the past is a forgotten and attractively run-down place that I have discovered and get to explore all summer long. 

People tend not to want to argue about the past, which is what makes the past safe to talk about.  It is generally agreed that in the past you needed vast numbers of servants to keep things going, and since very few people aspire these days to be servants (or going back further, peasants or slaves), it follows that the past, though charming in some respects, did not in the end possess a very sustainable lifestyle, unlike our own modern present with its labor-saving devices and fast food.

In other words, the past with its corsets and unwieldy hats and too many buttons and elaborate rules of ettiquette, not to mention chamber pots and coal shuttles, is hard to defend.  Curious and picturesque perhaps but doomed, if you see my point.  

The remarkable thing about the past, however, is that lots of people at the time were wildly bent on defending it.  Committed to a rigid class structure, the suppression of women, in favor of child labor, poor houses and chain gangs.

There are people today, of course, who are just as fiercely out to defend the present system, fighting to preserve a way of life which favors a few and profits off the misery of the many.   There are in fact people spending enormous amounts of money to stir up the rabble and con the poor and scare the old people in order to retain their own power and control and profits.  People who think they are losing something can be dangerous, as you know; some of them will go to desperate lengths to hold on.