Wednesday Night Suppers

I spent several hot hours this afternoon in a state that seemed simultaneously a part of waking, a part of sleeping, definitely involved in sweating, highly aware of felines, and disgusted by the telephone and its attendant messages.

Having hoofed it to the bathroom upon shaking off all of the above, that was where I screamed a tender "Bye-ay-ay!  Have-ah-ah gooo-oo-d thai-aye-aye-am!" to Fred, who was off to consort with the Militant Lesbian Existential Feminists at their regular Wednesday Night Supper. (I always wonder what Fred actually hears me screaming, since my phrases are sucked up by Marlinspike Hall's intramural echo effects -- It's all those Garderobe Chutes, remember?)

Oh, drat, I didn't quite get that right, did I?  I meant to say: the Militant Lesbian Existential Feminists and The Mousse, she of the indeterminate persuasions.  The Mousse was tagged as The Mousse due to her fondness for the chocolate version of this dessert, the only food [besides a garlic pizza] to ever strike me low with food poisoning.
As it would happen, The Mousse participated in the previously mentioned "several hot hours," horning in on my rest by leaving a long, idiotic, breathless message for Fred, complete with ingratiating references to my various past contributions to these weekly culinary adventures.  In fact, I was planning to get up and cook something fascinating for My Clueless Darling to take... but something, something, something seemed to push me back into my steamy lethargy, lolling about the bed, smushing one incubating hairy feline after another. 

[And when I use "loll," I mean lax, lazy, AND indolent.  Take that, you verbmeisters.]

In an effort to eat cake and ice cream at every possible opportunity, The Mousse strives to celebrate any birthday, inoculation, anniversary, voter registration, first or last drunk, momentous sexual indiscretion, substantial retail discount, and whatever.  It turns out that tonight is Elaine's birthday and Llewellyn-Femme's Fifth Anniversary of Her First Swim With Sharks.  Tiger shark diving season is getting ready to kick off down in the Bahamas, so The Wednesday Supper Gang is also going to lay hands on Llewellyn-Femme -- in a non-Christian (yet inclusive) kind of pseudo-ecumenical militant lesbian existentialist feminist way -- in order to bless and protect her from sharp white teeth and iron jaws during her stints in the cage.

Anyway, so The Mousse opines during her extended whine on my voice mail service that Fred should probably help out by bringing ice cream, which would go nicely with her shark-themed birthday gateau.
I know that everything she says is in code, and when I break it down, I toss and turn and incorporate her ball-breaking bullcrap into a fresh, restless dream.

I was hoping to sort of pull myself back together while Fred is partying down at E-Cong, a vast repast before him on the long folding table, surrounded by women who don't share his spiritual beliefs, and one who wants to jump his bones.

He's not the only guy.  The Church Secretary is a guy.  And sometimes our old friend Sven shows up. 

I am hoping, though, that Sven didn't decide to attend this evening's supper -- because Fred recently decided to take Sven's inventory -- a very rare thing for even-keeled, sweet-hearted Fred.  With a little time, he'll remember that Sven's a friend, even if we've all been pretty weak in the Friend Maintenance category.

It has to do more with Sven's wife, Hazelnut.  She's an honest-to-goodness Minister, having trained in Existentialism at the knobby knees of Rev. R. Lanier Clance, Founder and Minister Emeritus of the First Existentialist Congregation.  Somehow, she learned very little, and over time, has forgotten that.

Anyway, this is not a critique of her sermonizing... but of her vast talent for taking hostages. 

Oh, okay, it's all about her every-sixth Sunday delivery of the same message:  How Christianity Hurted Me (pout::pout::pout).  Her father, damn the man, was a missionary who inflicted the habit of prayer on his children while tending to a lost flock of Native Americans who had the gall to claim pre-existent spirit-oriented lives. 

At some point in her childhood, Hazelnut suffered a severe injury, lost a leg -- She lives in pain.

I think that she has pain as her core.  I think pain is what is going on. 

So Fred is hot under the collar, almost continually, about the feminist inroads being made at E-Cong.  He's at the point where he responds to any challenge by demanding that you ("you" standing in for one Militant Lesbian Existential Feminist) "define your terms." Unfortunately, some internet genius cobbled together a list of 74 different "types" of feminism, a list which Fred declared authoritative and inviolate, and which he promptly committed to memory.

Should you defy authority and, undaunted, offer up a 75th version, Fred will stomp his feet, sputter, and craftily reply: "Yeah?  Well, spell it!"

Sven is blind. 

I am not trying to elicit any particular response by informing you that Sven is blind.  I am simply trying to advance what may appear to be a stalled narrative.  I wish the story could be told without mentioning either Hazelnut's missing leg or Sven's missing eyesight. 

I'd much rather do a commercial for their jazz music -- Sven tickles the ivories, Hazelnut croons;  They're wonderfully good.  Neither is disabled, both are achievers, maybe even overachievers.  That Hazelnut manages to be a full time teacher, pursue her musical ambitions, and serve as a Minister, is downright inspirational.  Sven is equally busy, also holding down a challenging job while serving as the driving force in their jazz career.
I mention their achievements to the Fredster, adding the raising of two fine sons to the list.  I'm hoping that he'll remember that Hazelnut has a right to her opinions, that he really does like and appreciate her, and that Sven is quite capable of critical thought and is no one's captive minion.  

"Yeah?  Well, spell it!"

Fred is so angry at Hazelnut he could just spit.  He tells me that she trashes Christianity, and with glee.  He tells me she is rewriting the history of E-Cong (a large part of which is his own history) and inserting feminism into a perfectly fine stand-alone existential foundation.  The beginnings of this Existential Fellowship were solidly grounded in philosophy and psychology, in personal responsibility, and in caring for one another -- never a simple task.  "No one used the F-word back then!"

I never thought that I would be a sounding board for attacks on feminism, and in my own home, too.  Okay, so, technically, we are just caretakers here, squatters in this vast manor until such time as Captain Haddock and Company resume their  occupancy -- but it feels like home.  I don't think I've ever been so close to an Indentured Domestic Staff before coming to Marlinspike Hall. 

Just the other day, hands on his hips, standing in the middle of the Fragonard Hobby Room, lost in its thinly veiled erotic frills, Fred had something of a hissy fit, and dared to define fair feminism as stuff women do.  So very frustrated with E-Cong and its revisionist historians, he now mistakes gender as the driving force behind feminist thought... an easy mistake to make, but tiresome, too.  The pink tits and ass of Fragonard did not help matters any.  [I'm just sayin'.] 

Yes, yes.  We have waltzed around "what's-wrong-with-calling-it-humanism?" and there's been fervent fomentation of Søren Kierkegaard and philosophical approaches to Christian theologies.  Unfortunately, Hazelnut could be heard, in the background, improvising melody and turning "phallocentrism" and "don't-it-just-beg-the-question-baby?" into pure rhythmic scat.

As a result of  these highminded debates and other equally muddled communications, Fred resigned from the E-Cong Board of Directors, and Sven promptly signed on.  Fred thinks that Hazelnut forced Sven to put himself up for nomination and that his presence signals the beginning of Militant Lesbian Existential Feminism's heyday.

"Yeah, well..."

My patient and compassionate Fred recently decided that Sven would be an Excellent Guy were he just free of Hazelnut.  His reasoning is that Sven doesn't know or have the capacity to navigate this world (being blind from birth and all) and has come to so depend on his wife that he is "clearly" suffering from... Stockholm Syndrome.  That's right, Sven has been held hostage and has come to sympathize with his tormentor, his wife, his partner in song -- Hazelnut the Haggling Hun.

I don't mind listening to most anything Fred has on his mind.  Like everyone, he works things out sometimes by talking things out.  He's very procedural.  He's an incredible writer, very clear, his words pristine in concert with his thought.  His humor will surprise you.  His elegant persuasions sway, his logic is rarely fallacious.

But he isn't budging on this one.  The Fredster fails to progress, his labor stalled. Which would also be fine, even kind of fun to debate, to examine -- but for one unanticipated twist:  Sven needs to be enlightened. That's right, Fred plans to inform his friend that he is being manipulated and hijacked in the worst way.  He plans to soften the blow by reminding Sven that he certainly doesn't deserve this fate, and shouldn't be judged for having subverted his good judgment to Hazelnut's ill-conceived opinions and attitudes.  What with Sven being so handicapped 'n all, no one will judge him harshly for his singular lack of backbone and his inability to agree with Fred over Hazelnut.

I heard a peculiarly soft voice issuing from my gaping maw, and thought:  Uh-oh.  My superior tone was dripping with condescension, equally at ease when among the people as when mingling with my equals.

I was enunciating, in the manner elicited back in my school days by a demonic French prof who would mark cadence by fierce taps on my curly head with a wooden ruler.  Always a bad sign, this patient, sneering enunciation.

Fred promptly made me define my terms.  Feeling kind of antithetical (also nauseated), I proceeded to draw a distinction between being correct and being right.  As in, he may be correct, but I am clearly right.  Miss Marmy Fluffy Butt, my Debate Coach, nodded her approbation.

And so I cling to my rightness.  He has no business saying anything of the sort to Sven.  "Sven, my friend, your whole life is but a regurgitation of your wife's bullshit... It's called the Stockholm Syndrome... It's a psychological paradox and I just thought you oughta know that you haven't had an idea to call your own in over 20 years... But I wanna reiterate that you couldn't help it, you're blind as a freaking bat!"

I don't think Fred heard any of my reasons to shut-the-hell-up-about-the-silly-stockholm-syndrome but I think I saw a flicker of something in his eyes when I said:  "Well, at least promise me that if you say this awful thing to him, that you will stand by him as a friend after it is said.  You have a responsibility to do so..."  It was probably a trick of lighting.

Who would have thought that these Wednesday night "church" suppers had so much at stake?  Jealousies of all sorts, machinations worthy of Machiavelli, insincerity as an art form, suffering bodies, suffering minds, troubled souls. 

I guess I can decide not to give a crap about The Mousse.  Given the Sven, Fred, and Hazelnut Triad, she just doesn't measure up as a worry or concern.  She's a simple annoyance. Just try and jump his bones, you dessert-driven nagging harpy, I don't care.  Whose Manor does he come home to, hmmm?

I'm up in the Computer Turret at the moment (obviously, huh?!) and it looks like Ruby the Honda CRV is coming down the road, throwing up dust and scaring our herd of Square Island Buffalo. Yep, that's her, weaving and dodging those giant hooves.  Unfortunately, La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore pulled up the drawbridge when she came home from rehersals earlier --  he's gonna have to leave Ruby to crank it back down...

What the... ?

Even from here, it's clear that Fred has the mother of all black eyes and two (maybe three) fingers in a splint.  And I am not sure, but I think he is GURGLING.

Bless his heart.

I think I'll just sleep up here tonight.

BEATRICE RAVENEL: The Confused Subjectivity of Modernism OR How I Came To Write Her Poem

If you don't already, after reading this post, you will think me daft.

The mind that used to be like the famous "steel trap" has become a notorious sieve, still stainless steel but with gaping, wide mesh.

Many years ago, someone steered me to the poetry of Beatrice Ravenel. It's one of those names, isn't it? A delight to say. Say it with me now: Beatrice. Ravenel. Beatrice Ravenel! In-to-na-tion as-cen-dante! I can practically feel the sharp taps on the head from my French linguistics professor (who was, sadly, obsessed with phonetics -- and corporal punishment with rulers).

Furthermore, like Seinfeld, I also enjoy the word salsa. From the episode about "The Pitch," where George and Jerry establish "nothing" as being the show's key concept:

GEORGE: So, what's happening with the TV show? You come up with anything?

JERRY: No, nothing.

GEORGE: Why don't they have salsa on the table?

JERRY: What do you need salsa for?

GEORGE: Salsa is now the number one condiment in America.

JERRY: You know why? Because people like to say "salsa." "Excuse me, do
you have salsa?" "We need more salsa." "Where is the salsa? No salsa?"

GEORGE: You know it must be impossible for a Spanish person to order
seltzer and not get salsa. (Angry) "I wanted seltzer, not salsa."

JERRY: "Don't you know the difference between seltzer and salsa?? You
have the seltzer after the salsa!"

Ravenel, salsa, seltzer, Beatrice. Also, multicolore and vraisembablement -- a regular party in the mouth, those!

Anyway. Yes, that's it. It must have happened that way -- that someone, with great intent, led me right to Beatrice Ravenel. How else would I have found her in this world overrun with Norton Anthologies and Citations of Authority? The last clear authority I acknowledge is 99 years out of date! The centenial celebration of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is an exciting prospect. Er, to people like me, who excite over a word's mouth-feel and false etymologies.

Sal-sa. Multi-co-lore!

We are a small group, but likeable. Really. What is sad, and truly unfortunate, are those who think that these little performances emanate from reclusive virtuosos.

Do not!

Are not!

So, sieve steadily leaking, I searched the aforementioned beloved encyclopedia for any mention of Ravenel. What a moment of excitement when the search returned a hit from the article about Charleston, home of the poetess in question! At its tail, referential end, there is a brief allusion to a 1906 book on the city by one "Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel."

Forget your [dearth of] excitement and imagine mine! Then, as is usual, follow its rapid descent into disappointment. I turned to a Charleston County Public Library publication -- because librarians, constitutionally, cannot lie -- where I found this next to a picture of the "Ravenel House":

This house was also the home of his son, Dr. St. Julien Ravenel, the noted scientist who designed and built the Civil War semi-submersible torpedo boat, the Lucy, and was a leader in the development of the phosphate fertilizer after the Civil War. lt was also the home of Dr. Ravenel's wife Harriett Horry Rutledge, who, using the name Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, authored the book Charleston: The Place and the People, and other works on local history.


Amazing that this decorated, decorous family name was lost to me for almost ten years.

Imagine, too, having to deal with a name like Whory Harriett in your playground days. C'mon, you know it had to happen! En plus, imagine being married to the progenitor of lazy-assed terrorists and their fertilizer bombs.

What? Oh, please, you are in charge of what-came-first insistances, and order, in general, and all those things.

Okay, so phosphate fertilizer isn't used in those home-grown, cheapo-cheapo production explosive devices. Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel was so greatly relieved when notified that she announced, "It is 5 o'clock somewhere," and poured herself a stiff drink.

Despite my amnesia for sourcework, those shiny metallic threads in the Ravenel tapestry, I retained an uncanny ability this last decade to recall a good many lines from Beatrice Ravenel's creations (with the slight caveat that I did not attribute them to her).

There was one piece in particular that I very much admired. A poem. I called it "Fear," and, as luck would have it, so did she.

You may not remember jotting down the phrase "on or about December 1910" from a lecture on Modernism in one of your lit classes but I assure you that you did. Let's go further and re-place the droplet in the ocean; Let's honor the context. This is what Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1923 essay titled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown:

[I]t would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed.

I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.

August 24, 1870 - March 15, 1956: an interesting span, Ravenel's dates. The very time of planes and trains and automobiles. Oh, and Einstein.

The sixteen-year-old Beatrice experienced a major earthquake at 9:50 p.m. on August 31, 1886. Do you think that was formative? Transformative?

On January 23, 1890 -- the 24th being my birthday -- the Rev Father Duffee married Mr. W. H. Welcome, of St Louis, Missouri, and Miss Ginia Leyden, of Mobile, Alabama, in the Charleston of the young Miss Ravenel.

Did Beatrice take note of Virginia's response to Arnold Bennett, a portion of which is cited above, who had declared Jacob's Room a work of inaccessible characters -- who said something to the effect that she wrote stories incapable of surviving... (yes, I *could* look it up. bennett's assertions matter, obviously, and were provocative, but i am tired, this draft has been here over two weeks, and i fear that in the looking-up, my meaning will be altered. correct, but a stifling rectitude.)

You know that one string, the one that threads its way through everything? You know how it nags at you to touch it, grab it, pull it? It's the one that holds it all together, and tears it all asunder, disparate results of the same gesture.

About twenty-five minutes (and a week or so) ago, the internet produced another of its quiet, personal miracles by reuniting our author with her verse. Yes, I managed to find three of Ravenel's poems!

Thus it was that I was relieved of the bizarre and alarming belief that I was the author of one of them.

That's right.

I thought I wrote it.

I never crowed with pride, I never gave it recitation. I knew something was hinky about that memory!

Even back then, way back when... during my initial introduction to her work, she was all dressed up in Southern Camouflage, Refined. For some reason, I attached to the lilting syllables of be-a-trice-ra-ven-el images of moist gardens full of heavy air and heady perfumes, dripping insular ivy leaflets, climbing the careful red brick and piercing the mortar of staid, old Charleston homes. But we all know, if only thanks to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, that there are some very strange, wonderfully different people in...

Savannah.

God, I entertain myself.

Do you see / Do you see how my poor mind / Works?

Anyway, the little contemporaneous criticism that you will find about this poet usually will rapidly tell you that Mrs. Ravenel lives in a former plantation home and that Mrs. Ravenel writes "occasional" poetry -- meaning not that she finds her muse every now and then, but that she composes to honor the events of life.

There is not, to my knowledge (we know well, already, how flawed is my knowing), a notable "occasional poetry" tradition in the United States. Here in Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé (très décédé, d'ailleurs)? We keep seven full time Occasional Poets on staff, with a dozen or so more on retainer.

Our Verse Section rounds out with three Pastoral Poets (who sleep in the barn and like our hens, are not producing much these days), a half-dozen Odists (usually to be found scattered among the various Listening Rooms, as Our Odes are still proudly declaimed to music), Uncountable Monotonous Modernists (question:reinvent;question:reinvent;question:reinvent), and the Polysemous Intertextuals (Postmodernists, really, but they refuse the reference; Every time Marlinspike Human Resources takes a census, there's a different number of PIs and lots of subterranean giggling) .

Anyway, our Occasional Poets are kept pretty busy, and enjoy unprecedented job security, at least in relation to the other scribes. Given that, they must, of course, demonstrate competency in a wide variety of subject matter -- imagine commissioning a poetic work for, say, some local triumph in animal husbandry, and finding out, at the last clonal minute that the Versemeister you're dealing with doesn't know Mendel from Oliver Wendell, and cannot fathom how the gelded horse still dreams!

Apparently, though, in the Charleston of Mrs. Ravenel's time, occasions begging memorialization were as thin and flitting as pastel tissue paper in air. To gird her loins in preparation for the occasions of her life that would birth such vague and foundless poetry, our Beatrice practiced Noteworthy Accomplishment -- specifically, Harvard and Scribner's. It's all in her nice bio over at the UNC Libraries, where her papers are entombed.

She will forever and always be of the card catalog, filed under the confident listing of Women Poets, American--South Carolina.

I figure she must have felt considerable anger at the environment which stifled her; I know it was poetry that relieved her impotence. There is just something moist, dark, and feminine about the Low-Country - engulfing.

Indeed, she wrote of a coast and in her anger at having been given, then having cultivated, a boundless voice yet no power? (Too bad that she wasn't properly impressed with herself -- She was, for years, self-supporting through published columns, short stories, and poems. There is a power in that, in not owing anyone for one's daily bread.)

Ravenel, it is said, sometimes came to sputters because she felt that South Carolinians were more interested in questions of race than in what was, to her, more pressing: women's suffrage. Tradition, The Old World, both supported her and inflamed her, this weird woman who ended in the camouflage of local Indians, in citations of totems.

Here is what she most wanted to say in terms of a Poetics: To be modern is to be disoriented in one's subjectivity. Trust me, she'd have said just that, eventually.

I know her, and understand her, because, remember, I wrote her poem.



FEAR

I am only afraid
Of the cold dull lids of eyes,
And the cold dull grain of sand in the soul,
Indurate, insensate, not to be made incandescent
Even by God.
I am afraid of the stupid people.

(Yemassee Lands, 77)

*** ** *** ** ***
From The Charleston Library Society Fall, 2009 Newsletter:

Beatrice Witte Ravenel
Beatrice Witte Ravenel was the third of six daughters
born to Charles Otto Witte, a German-born businessman
as well as German and Norwegian Consul to Charleston, a
philanthropist, a rose gardener, and a music lover. In 1866
Witte married Charlotte Sophia Reeves, twenty years his
junior and desperately poor after the “Confederate War.”
She was only 20 when her first daughter was born, and
over the next ten years a girl was born every two years.
Beatrice is characterized as “gifted with the brains of the
family” in youngest sister Laura’s memoir The Way It Was
in Charleston. Laura contends that Beatrice inherited
a “colossal” memory from her father and “cared more
for books and for reading,” though she was interested
in drawing, painting, and writing plays. She was also a
marvelous storyteller to “spellbound children.”
Beatrice’s sister Carlotta “had the style of the family,”
according to Laura, who writes that Carlotta “…had
a great talent for making doll’s clothes and was most
unselfish in giving her time for such things.” Thus perhaps
a handmade paper doll equipped with several beautifully
fashioned costumes in the Library Society’s Beatrice
Ravenel collection may be the work of Carlotta—perhaps
created for Beatrice St. Julian (Kitty) Ravenel, daughter
of Beatrice Witte and her first husband, Frances Gualdo
(Frank) Ravenel.
Beatrice proves herself to be an artist of sophisticated style
and elegant hand in her collection of drawings to illustrate
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Thirty-one elegant
art nouveau drawings, numbered and titled, are preserved
in the Beatrice Ravenel collection. The images are seductive
and mysterious, befitting the text that inspired them, and
remind the viewer of the highly stylized work of Aubrey
Beardsley.
When Beatrice married for the second time after the death of
Frank Ravenel, she did not have to change her monogram,
for she married Samuel Prioleau Ravenel, widower of
Florence Leftwich Ravenel, in December of 1926. The couple
left on a honeymoon to the Middle East and Europe, taking
Kitty with them and not returning for three years. Beatrice’s
journal of those travels, which is held by the Library Society,
contains a few small sketches of birds at Lake Maggiore in
Italy. Though Beatrice Ravenel later wrote interesting and
exotic poems which draw on the Voodoo culture in the
Caribbean, her collection in the Charleston Library Society
contains no illustrations from that era.

Collection Title: Beatrice Witte Ravenel Papers, 1892-1948
University of North Carolina Libraries
The Wilson Library
Southern Historical Collection (SHC)

Beatrice Witte Ravenel (24 August 1870-15 March 1956), daughter of Charles Otto and Charlotte Sophia Reeves Witte, was born in Charleston, S.C. Her father was a German-born businessman and civic leader in Charleston. Beatrice was educated at the Charleston Female Seminary, and, in 1889, enrolled in the women's division of Harvard University. While in college, she played a prominent role in a group of literary young men and women, including William Vaughn Moody, Trumball Stickney, and Norman and Hutchins Hapgood. She wrote for the Harvard Monthly and the Advocate, and published poems in Scribner's Magazine, the Chap-Book Magazine, and the Literary Digest.

In 1900, she married Francis Gualdo Ravenel, whose mother, Harriot Horry Ravenel, was a well-known writer and biographer. In 1904, Beatrice and Francis had a daughter, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel. After the birth of her daughter, Beatrice Witte Ravenel lived on a plantation south of Charleston. This was the setting for several of her best poems, which primarily deal with the Yemassee Indian heritage of the Carolina low country. Francis Ravenel was no businessman, and, by the late 1910s, the sizable fortune left Beatrice by her father was gone. She helped support the family by writing fiction for Ainslee's, Harper's, and the Saturday Evening Post, and, after 1919, she wrote editorials for the Columbia (S.C.) State.

In the late 1910s, Beatrice began writing poetry again, and, in the early 1920s, came abrupt change in her verse. She ceased to write the sentimental abstractions of the waning genteel tradition and began producing free verse of notable economy of diction, precision of language, and vivid imagery. The formation of the South Carolina Poetry Society brought her into contact with other poets, including visitors such as Amy Lowell, with whom she formed a strong friendship.

In 1926, six years after Francis Ravenel's death, Beatrice married Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. After her second marriage, she no longer had to support herself and daughter through writing. The Ravenels traveled extensively. Though she wrote little poetry during her later years, one sequence based on the West Indies, unpublished in her lifetime, is among her most accomplished work. Beatrice Witte Ravenel died on 15 March 1956 at the age of 85. Her best known work is The Arrow of Lightening, a book of poetry published in 1926.