The Politics of Irish Literature
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
His blackest thoughts grew from the refusal of the Young Ireland leaders to try to rescue him from jail. It will be remembered that this issue was excitedly argued at the time, with the clubmen in favor and Gavan Duffy opposed. Citing the impersonal logic of strategy, Mitchel had urged, as I have already told, that his rescue should signal an insurrection "then and there." The alternative, the decision actually taken, had led to Ballingarry, whereas his own plan must surely have succeeded, he thought. When he asked himself why he who was so right was not listened to by his comrades, who were so wrong, he never failed to make generous allowance for their nobility of intent. And yet he had to confess to himself that they had been guided by a certain stupidity, too, and even cowardice, with perhaps a touch of personal malice; for he could not wholly avoid looking at the council's decision from a personal viewpoint, he being the goat. All these pusillanimous Girondist vices he charged up against one convenient source, the "dastard," Mr. "Give-in" Duffy, whom he thenceforth insulted incessantly, thus opening up one of those symptomatic feuds that always accompanied an Irish political downswing. This vendetta was so prolonged that forty years later Yeats was able to dip into it for a quick tactical gain. When the police delivered Mitchel aboard the armed steamer Shearwater at the North Wall, his chains were taken off and he was escorted to an officer's private cabin aft. He took his last look at Dublin Bay, and finding pen and paper, he wrote:
So soon had Timon risen up to guide the despairing patriot. His genteel dastards need no further gloss here, but the bellowing slaves were a harshness not expected. For six months past he had placed his hopes increasingly in the spontaneous militance of the Dublin clubs. Rank and filers had prepared the scheme for his jail rescue, then the council had forbidden them to act. But even against orders they were ready to proceed on their own. "Let no foul tongue spit its sarcasm upon the people," said Meagher in recalling the incident. "They were ready for the sacrifice, and had the word been given the stars would burn tonight above a thousand crimsoned graves." When the Confederate council came to his cell with a letter already prepared in his name and instructing the clubs not to attempt a rescue, Mitchel had refused to sign it. Just so. But still they had not risen. He waited and they never came, except to the North Wall to see him removed in fetters. Honor forbade that he should press his suspicion of betrayal in his own name, but he found a quotation from Isaiah that he felt to be worth quoting "I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with me; for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments and I will stain all my raiment. For the day of vengeance is in my heart." He could also transfer his hurt to the parallel case of Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and MacManus, under death sentence two months later, awaiting rescue themselves in Tipperary:
We catch here the harsh strains of a familiar Irish air. This theme, if Mitchel had chosen to embellish it, could have swelled to the familiar refrain of a later time: "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow." But at this point he abruptly turned back. So, Christ had not died for the Irish; then his next word was "yet" and his next sentence began: "Yet whosoever had studied even the imperfect sketch which I have given of the potent and minutely elaborate system of oppression ... and so on, his forgiveness outpacing his anger. What checked him here is uncertain. Perhaps it was some instinct of pride that forbade him to dishonor the perfection of his curtain speech in Green Street Courthouse, when he arose in the dock to tell the sentencing judge: "I have done my part also." He possessed, too, a strain of humility hidden by his public ferocity. After all, he was one who had seen a famine winter in Galway. He had caught pained glimpses, also, of Young Ireland's own shortcomings, which he had shared in part-its "rose colored puff -clouds," its "deleterious flatulent pabulum." The teakwood timbers of a prison ship were formidable stuff, he said, elements in a real world where "nobody seems to be sensible of the merits and fame of those fine young literary men, who, from their little coterie, breathed a new soul into Ireland." In the same chastened mood he reconsidered his past harshness toward O'Connell's memory and softened it somewhat, recognizing now an imperfect earthy strength not seen before. Whatever it was that held his latent animosity toward Ireland suspended, it was not benevolence. He had dropped that into the bay at the North Wall and had reverted to his earliest mentors, Jeremiah and Calvin, the prophets of his boyhood Presbyterianism, and especially to Carlyle, "the only man in these latter days who produces what can properly be termed books." A newer guide he found in Joseph de Maistre, the eulogist of hangmen. Henceforth he saw mankind as one vast festering mass of depravity, Irishmen excepted. III Jail Journal is a sustained nausea. Mitchel could loathe as enthusiastically as "noster Thomas" himself. He hated capitalists and he hated socialists, those creatures "somewhat worse than wild beasts." He hated the English, as everybody knows, but he hated the Yankees no less. "I despise the civilization of the nineteenth century," he said, "and its two highest expressions and grandest hopes most especially." He hated the strong, also the weak. He was against many things: "comfort" and "happiness," Teufelsdroeckh's favorite abominations; "snivelling jackasses"; commerce; steam engines; "pudding and praise and profit"; Jews; the "stratified debris" of popular literature; Bacon, Macaulay, and also Mazzini; the naturalist von Humboldt, who had blasphemously constructed a "cyanometer" to measure the blueness of the very empyrean; thin-skinned penology, which "so richly rewards" criminals; sentimentalists who opposed strangulation. Oddly, he was against flogging, now that he had actually seen men flogged in the British penal colonies. But he soon corrected for this drift toward decadence: there would be no scourging in the army of the future Irish republic, he said; instead, all second offenders would be shot. Above all, he was against "cant," Carlyle's verbal tic for the extermination of the irksome. And what was he not against? He discovered that he had a fondness for Negro slavery. When his prison ship dropped anchor at Pernambuco, he looked about him to locate the picturesque, like any tourist in Kerry. His eye fell upon the Brazilian slaves who had rowed out to the warship in small boats. He would not himself like to own slaves, yet they did have their charm, "fat and merry, obviously not overworked or underfed," and it pleased him to watch the "lazy rogues, lolling in their boats, sucking a piece of green sugar cane." On reaching the United States in 1853 after having escaped from Van Diemen's Land, he found slavery still more attractive. His first American quarrel was with the antislavery faction in the KnowNothing party, who combined abolition with a raucous no-popery agitation that sounded for his taste too much like the Orangemen back home in Newry. He extended his antipathy to abolitionists in general, whom he seems to have considered a subbranch of the Know-Nothing party. To make his opinion heard, he started a proslavery newspaper in New York, the Citizen. Through the spring and summer of 1854 the Citizen moved in a whirlwind of projects and excitements. There was a lengthy public feud with Gavan Duffy. There was a fight with Archbishop Hughes of New York, running in installments through many months, over the ethics of armed force in Irish nationalism. Riding high, Mitchel wrote to the archbishop "The Constitution of America (which may God long preserve!) happily fixes a bit between the teeth of you all; and clips your claws and draws your fangs. . . . Although your Grace should wear a Hat as red as fire, you will hardly in our times preside at an auto da fe in the Park." There was the war in the Crimea, where England would have been in mortal danger had it not been for the mix-up that placed France, Ireland's ally, on England's side. There was excited talk about a "Young America" to which Mitchel could not but be spiritually in tune. Young America ca,me forward with a plan to occupy Cuba and Japan "ahead of the English," and Mitchel wanted to be there. There was a weekly crisis over the congressional fortunes of the Nebraska bill, which Mitchel followed as a southern partisan, for his interest had now fixed itself upon the defense of slavery. There lived in Dublin at the time an elderly philanthropist named James Haughton, a wealthy merchant who had supported Repeal and Young Ireland, and beyond that, most of the humanitarian causes of the time, including abolition. When the escaped Irish felons reached America, he wrote them urging that they join him in abolition as he had joined them in Repeal. Mitchel replied in an insolent open letter, published in the Citizen, accusing Haughton, "an amiable monomaniac," of feeling indifferent to the famine but being seized "with a paroxysm of violent sympathy with the fat negroes of America."" He concluded: "We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion; we only wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama." Henry Ward Beecher entered the dispute, crying "Fallen! Uprooted!" and pointing to Mitchel's inconsistency. In Ireland he was for freedom, but in America he was against it. Mitchel's reply to Beecher reminded that "most learned clerk" that Socrates, Christ, and Thomas Jefferson, not to mention Leonidas and Themistocles, had approved of slavery, or at least had not disapproved, and that Beecher's attitude could best be described by one word-cant. No newspaper could long survive this manic pace, and before the year was out Mitchel was forced to sell the Citizen and move on. "The `Alabama Plantation' swept off ten thousand readers at one blow," he said in farewell. "Archbishop Philo-Veritas [Hughes] with his pastoral crozier drew away a few thousand more. The Reverend Mr. Beecher rushed upon me with his tomahawk at one side: some Catholic priests cursed me from their altars at the other." But he had won good friends elsewhere. He was invited to visit Virginia, and there he saw the "luckiest, jolliest, and freest negroes on the face of the earth," and learned that "the cause of negro slavery is the cause of true philanthropy." From New Orleans he wrote: "How deeply and urgently this nation needs a good rattling war-a war with some nation that is fairly its match, to occupy its mind and give a career to its craving and impassioned youth. I tell you it is like Carleton's tailor, `blue moulded for want of a baytin'; it will blow up, like any other high-pressure steam-boiler; and it is not insured." He enjoyed such gracious southern hospitality that he flounced out of New York, clipped his Mosaic beard back to a goatee, and set up as editor of a proslavery paper, the Southern Citizen, in Knoxville. When the Civil War began, he moved to Richmond as editor of the Enquirer and later the Examiner. Even after Grant opened his coup de grace campaign around Petersburg in 1864, he still believed the South's prospects excellent, arguing that the North, like old England, was financially bankrupt if the truth were known-"the greenbacks support the war and the war supports the greenbacks." He sent his three sons into the Confederate army. Captain James survived three years with Lee; but Private Willy enlisted in Pickett's division and died at Gettysburg, and Captain John died of wounds at Fort Sumter at the close of the war. Immediately after Appomattox, Mitchel hastened north again. While all the northern newspapers were still in shock from Lincoln's assassination, he turned up in New York, witty and unreconstructed, to begin work as editor of the copperhead newspaper, the Daily News. "I never devoured my enemies, roast or boiled," he said. "I ask leave of nobody to come to this city." His plan, so the Times thought, was evidently to publish "another Richmond Enquirer adapted to a northern latitude." He wrote his mother that "New York is the most Southern city in America," confidence that proved oversanguine. The Union army at that time held only two prisoners on general charges of war crimes, both confined at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Best known was Jefferson Davis; the other was Senator Clay of Alabama. Then one day there was a third prisoner taking his exercise in the fortress yard: John Mitchel. He had been arrested at the Daily News office and taken aboard a Virginia-bound naval vessel before his friends could appear with a writ of habeas corpus. Those friends who were powerless to save Mitchel from imprisonment were Irish-American patriots. Four months later, their pressure on Secretary of War Stanton secured his release on condition that he leave the United States. He went then to Paris, where he received a letter from his son, Captain James, asking him to sit down and compose a vindication of the defeated South. Mitchel had suddenly had enough of that lost cause: "I must admit that I grudge it what it cost us . . . the lives of our two sons in defence of a country which, after all, was not their own." He wrote his wife to stop James from making "a martyr of himself" - "it is quite a bad trade. . . . I had rather be a farmer." Guided by this practical advice James underwent transfiguration, emerging as a successful New York politician. He rose to the rank of fire marshal and begot a son who, thanks to the warm memories of his grandfather's name on Third Avenue, was in the fullness of time elected an anti-Tammany mayor of New York City. Mitchel's proslavery exploits delighted the English press, which spread the scandal around the world as proof of the general insanity of Irish nationalism. He had alienated many other good friends of the Irish besides Beecher and Haughton. To salvage an important Irish reputation needed a vigorous justification. Mitchel himself offered several apologies. We have already heard him say that every man is half mad, an invitation to value him for his worth and charitably to forget the rest. He also hinted that he was a Promethean man, born to defy all authority, James Joyce ahead of his time. The hint was eagerly followed up by his biographer, William Dillon, who observed of the Fortress Monroe episode: "It is to be remembered that there were others before John Mitchel who found it as hard as he did to get along peaceably with the powers that be, and whom, nevertheless, the judgment of succeeding ages has not condemned-notably Socrates, and a greater than Socrates." IV Mitchel's proslavery persuasion was an especially crude expression of Irish particularism, the same subbranch of xenophobia that had led O'Connell to expel infidel Chartists and frenchified Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association. Irish apologists commonly defend Mitchel on the same grounds -when an Irish patriot went overseas and quarreled with the citizens there, necessarily he was right and they were wrong. Dillon assured us that Mitchel's satirical rejoinder to Beecher's "abolitionist cant" was, all in all, "equal to anything in Swift " A fierce patriot of a later day, Arthur Griffith, explained Mitchel's American career in this way: "At the conclusion of the American Civil War he was imprisoned by the Yankee Government, which, under the guise of philanthropy and liberty had violated the States rights of the South. Mitchel's argument for the South could not be countered by the Northern logicians, but it was punished with imprisonment and attempted indignity." As Yeats often warned us, Griffith was not a subtle adversary with whom one exchanged light rapier wit. A philosophical self-defense is preserved in Mitchel's correspondence with Father Kenyon. In the original Citizen, Father Kenyon was cited as an ethical authority. He had declared that "Mr. Mitchel's published opinions about Negro slavery" were of such sort "as the truest lover of liberty and of the Catholic religion may lawfully adopt"; and he had expanded on the thought with whimsical humor: "We are all slaves." When Mitchel started the Southern Citizen in Knoxville, he sent Father Kenyon a prospectus, expecting more genial wit. Instead he received a sharp rebuff, for constancy was not Father Kenyon's primary tincture: "Actively to promote the [slave] system for its own sake would be something monstrous." Not so, replied Mitchel; in Dublin he had "specially hated the British system" and had fought it with "less devotion to truth and justice than raging wrath against cant and insolence." In Knoxville he was really doing the same brave work, for the British system was not confined to the British Isles: "Now I meet that evil power here also; he is everywhere, and nowhere more active and mischievous than in these United States," which had succumbed like Lord John Russell and Nassau Senior to the greedy lust for commerce, "obscenist of spirits." Familiar words, reminiscent of Davis' attack on Englishism and Yankeeism in his defeatist phase and foretelling the poetical flood to come. To the alert, Mitchel's argument might have given warning that if beautiful, lofty words exalting spirit over matter could defend slavery, they could equally well justify any action whatsoever. The Southern slaveowners were in Mitchel's opinion hostile to commerce and immune from cupidity. For a man whose lifelong pride was his ability to smell out cant, this myth of a nation of anticommercial slaveowners was rather insensitive. Mitchel's American fugue must always weigh in the judgment of his place in history, even in Irish history, for it gave a glimpse of what problems his followers would quickly have found in his leadership had the Irish cards in 1848 been dealt in his favor. His failure was not unique, however, but mirrored the aberrations that beset the typical provincial agrarian in the crises of the times. Mitchel resembled Cobbett in his mixture of rare good sense with fatuity; and he resembled Carlyle himself, whose downward path from Chartism to the Latter Day Pamphlets after the shocks of 1848 was an exact parallel to Mitchel's course from the United Irishman to the Southern Citizen. Devin Reilly, Mitchel's closest disciple, had sensed the hazards of agrarianism pure and simple and had sent the master the oracular warning, unheeded, that Ireland was "the avant garde into Europe, or the Vendee." Mitchel attempted a violent fusion of both, creating the wild schizoid flair admired by Yeats as "personality." Except for literary purposes, personality at such a price hardly seemed worthwhile. V With the passing years, Mitchel's demoralization healed and the familiar patriot of the United Irishman came back to life. Assuming the role of a historian, he retraced all the steps leading to his 1848 downfall, reasserting and augmenting his original apologia. The fruit of this effort was a series of memoirs of the troubled times beginning with "An Apology for the British Government in Ireland," published serially in the Nation in 1858, recast in 1860 as The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), and further rewritten twice afterward. While Mitchel's shadow Ego was busy frisking in proslavery American politics in his extraordinary fashion, his stodgy friend Doppelganger was still brooding on the Irish issues of 1848. The world since then being manifestly too much for Mitchel to comprehend, he chose to go back and pick up the thread where he had lost it at the North Wall. He set about to dignify and monumentalize his thoughts and deeds at the pinnacle of his life, when his enemies were Irish landlords and English dragoons instead of Henry Ward Beecher and Abraham Lincoln. His affair of the heart with aristocratic Virginia planters had not tempered his low opinion of their Irish counterparts. Of Irish landlords he continued to believe as he had believed in the heat of the crisis, that the famine had proved them to be not only useless and "thick-headed" but cowards as well. His retrospective manner was confident and casual, sensing correctly that Irish opinion had settled the dispute in his favor with resounding finality. Everybody was now abusing the landlords. "They convicted us of guilt," said Yeats on behalf of the Sligo gentry. They did that, much thanks to John Mitchel. Mitchel still insisted that English administrators had "sent the Famine." As we have seen, he attacked the act of God theory of the famine and substituted for it a theory of mass murder masked as charity. Merely on the face of it, his charge certainly sounded incredible; for did Lord John Russell not speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake? Even to those intimate with the hunger, Mitchel's accusation was not always self-evident truth;* but neither was it hard to believe. Michael Davitt, a standard case, thought the famine the crowning unforgivable sin of English rule in Ireland, and he put his anger in the strongest language he knew: "Nothing more inhumanly selfish and base is found to the disgrace of any class in any crisis in the history of civilized society." VI After Carleton's time, the famine seldom penetrated the imagination of Irish writers. Neither the catastrophe nor the resulting anger impinged at all upon George Moore, a Catholic, or on Lady Gregory, an Anglican, though both were born into the Connaught gentry just as the hunger subsided; or on Sean O'Casey or James Stephens the poet, native Dubliners of the next generation. After all, the traditional apology, "words cannot describe," is unbecoming in a professional writer. Yet there exists a small genre of retrospective famine literature, and in it some sort of reaction to Mitchel's accusations is necessarily involved. Liam O'Flaherty is a principal contributor to the genre with his impressive naturalistic novel, Famine (1937). Its debt to Michhel is rather more to Jail Journal "bellowing slaves" than to the United Irishman's hundred thousand flashing pikes; for O'Flaherty envisioned the Irish peasantry as a "horde of ants" not unworthy to be candidates for extermination. The second chief exhibit is Yeats's Countess Cathleen. It too recalls Michhel when one of the characters discovers the act of God theory to be a very poor recommendation for the Irishman's traditional worship
But the speaker is a revolting character, a "materialist," so that Yeats's own attitude remains enigmatical. His attention to Irish grievances was always slight and sustained only with difficulty. As soon as convenient his play turned to a more congenial theme, decidedly anti-Mitchelite, the exaltation of the supernatural benevolence of the Irish aristocracy toward the deserving poor. Later he abandoned Mitchel's stance altogether, complaining that it was "rancorous and devil possessed." In Ulysses Mitchel's accusation is indignantly repelled. Born Anglophobe though he was, Joyce thought the charge of mass murder deranged, at least in the 1904 version he had heard repeated about Dublin, once too often, apparently. His satire on the gaseous patriotism of "the citizen" presents the famine legend as compounded cliche and imposture:
Many readers have found pleasure in Joyce's refusal to traffic with such xenophobia. But recent historical scholarship has disturbed the mellow comforts of their sapience and tends to confirm Mitchel's most lurid accusations. The Irish historians who contributed to the volume of essays called The Great Famine (1957) reconnoitered Mitchel's ground and corrected his report somewhat, mostly in the details. Thomas P. O'Neill questioned whether Ireland actually exported during the famine sufficient grain to feed the country, pointing to a large net surplus of imported cornmeal and wheat over exported grain in 1846-47. But he concluded that it was "anomalous" that there should have been any Irish grain exports at all during those months. E. R. R. Green, another contributor to the same volume, cited statistics to show this accounting to be incomplete, inasmuch as the Irish export of beef and mutton actually increased during the famine. Moreover, while the export of pork did fall off sharply in 1847 (since the pigs like the people lived on potatoes), half a million pigs were exported under the policy of business as usual during the crucial months just before and after the failure of the 1846 potato harvest. But the heart of Mitchel's indictment lay elsewhere: he claimed that a famine at the center of the world's richest empire was a contradiction so monstrous that one could only assume somebody in power must have had some kind of will that a famine should be. This accusation has led historians into an examination of the motives of Lord John Russell and his ministry. A search was launched to discover if some Dracula lurked hidden in Whitehall. Charles Trevelyan, the administrator of the government's relief program, has been particularly scrutinized, and his attitude toward the life and death of Irish peasants closely canvassed. Professor O'Neill cited his rather too excited greeting to the catastrophe in October 1846: "This [problem] being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual." Trevelyan's Jehovah was clearly a student of Malthus. Cecil Woodham-Smith's widely read volume, The Great Hunger (1962), probed further into the motivation question. Fresh from her triumphant research into the murderous follies of English administrators during the Crimean War, she corroborated the work of her Irish colleagues, stripping away from Trevelyan and his superiors their pious mask of famine charity and compassion. She disagreed with Mitchel in accepting the overpopulation premise, but overall her work was his vindication. Mitchel's most outrageous charge had said of the Whig relief policy initiated in 1847: "Steadily, but surely, the Government people were working out their calculation; and the product anticipated by `political circles' was likely to come out about September in round numbers - two million Irish corpses." One of Mrs. Woodham-Smith's discoveries came very near to proving the incredible; for she found Nassau Senior, Russell's chief economic adviser, casting a cold eye on the same scene and complaining that he feared the famine toll would halt prematurely at a mere one million deaths, far short of the ideal objective demanded by the science of political economy. For all that, Trevelyan as the likeliest suspect did not appear to fit the specifications for the monster being sought by the historians. He was, after all, just another hard-working muscular Christian of the times, whose vanity was that he was so strong morally that he could make "courageous" decisions-at somebody else's cost. The search for motive therefore turned from the study of personality inside the Whig ministry to a second line of inquiry: an examination of the social philosophy behind the administration of famine relief. In the histories of the catastrophe, one senses a common tendency to rest when the chain of causation has been traced back to a kind of stupid ministerial infatuation with what is called the "sanctity of laissez faire." More scrupulously, Mitchel had pushed beyond that point (and at the same time disposed of the Dracula search) in asking himself what the motive would be for just that particular infatuation:
One modern historian has recast Mitchel's outrageous thought with the maximum possible tact: "If the British chose not to consider Ireland part of Britain, when such an emergency arose, they could hardly complain if the Irish did likewise." VII Mitchel conceded only one correction of the beliefs he had once held as editor of the United Irishman. Duffy having honored him by abandoning the combination of all the classes in favor of peasant agitation, Mitchel returned the courtesy by quietly allowing Duffy his own point: England, he now agreed, must be in mortal peril before the Irish could attack. The amended rule seemed to imply a confession that he had attempted to lead the Irish people into a pointless slaughter in 1848, since with England not in peril, his own insurrection scheme could have fared no better by the rule than that "poor extemporized abortion of a rising" at Ballingarry. In fact, however, he always held that the famine itself had made a unique exception to the rule. It had so cheapened human life that any number of battle casualties would have been inconsequential. Once more he brought out Jeremiah for his support: "They that be slain with the sword be better than they that be slain with hunger; for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field." The modern reader recognizes that in Mitchel's day the ninety-nine years of the pax Britannica between Waterloo and Ypres had two-thirds of its span still to run. In 1848, however, so extended a delay of Irish opportunity seemed inconceivable. Not comprehending that the Irish threat was in itself one prime cause for the lengthening years of peace, Mitchel confidently told himself each year that "bankrupt England" must surely come to disaster next year. This was the context of his outcry "Send war in our time, O Lord!" His wait did seem very long, and the seventy-year delay showed his rule to be potentially as quietistic as O'Connell's moral force and Duffy's Girondism. But only up to a point. Supposing that England should really be in peril, as in Flanders in 1916, what were Irish nationalists supposed to do by Mitchel's rule? Those who were caught off guard by Easter Week had not learned their Irish history very well. Mitchel's phrase is embedded in Yeats's valedictory poem:
Send war for what? Against whom? As it happened, Mitchel had a context, but Yeats gave us none. Still, we have to have a context. If one went about repeating the fine ringing line simply as concretizing an attractive inner state, he would be aping Mitchel, right enough, but it would be the other half, the crazy American who carried a derringer and prayed for "a good rattling war"-any war-"to occupy its mind and give a career to its craving and impassioned youth."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
© Copyright 1973 - 2010 by Bruce Brown
and BF Communications Inc.
Astonisher and Astonisher.com
are trademarks of BF Communications Inc.
BF Communications Inc.
P.O. Box 393
Sumas, WA 98295 USA
(360) 927-3234
Website by Running Dog 
