This month is the anniversary of Margaret Schlauch’s birthday. She was the professor at New York University who influenced me to change my major from philosophy to medieval literature, and then my friend. I continue to think of her. Even up here in these unscholarly climes, I have met persons who remember her, who were her students or readers of her work when they did their graduate work. Hers is the kind of immortality I believe in, a continued existence in the creative world of scholarship and learning, a ghostly presence who returns every time The Gift of Tongues, her most readable history of the development of Indo-European languages, and her other books are opened and studied. The word for such a return after death, in whatever form, I have recently learned, is ‘revenant.’
Sitting on the deck this morning, waiting for Sybil to bring the mail from the post office, which might contain more reviews, I read the last chapters of the Book of Job. After many long descriptions, in forty-two chapters, of the terrible trials God submits him to, there is a happy ending in one sentence of the epilogue: ‘So the Lord restored Job’s fortunes and doubled all his possessions.’ And then, at the last (in the New English Bible, issued in 1970): ‘Thereafter Job lived another hundred and forty years, he saw his sons and his grandsons to four generations, and died at a very great age.’
In its many translations into English, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the Bible moves from poetry to matter-of-fact prose and rarely back to poetry again. But always it reflects the patriarchy of the society in which it is written. The poetry of my more familiar translation, ‘So Job died, being old and full of days,’ is gone from the new, ‘revised’ one, but there is still the interesting Hebraic insistence on the primacy of male offspring. Job had three most beautiful daughters who were left a share of the rich inheritance, but there is no mention of his living to see any granddaughters.
In reward for his fidelity to him, God doomed Job to live on and on (the verbiage here is mine). It is a lovely story, but nowhere is it said that Job suffered any of the usual infirmities of his gift of old age. If his possessions were doubled, perhaps also his age was, which would have made him 280 old. Arthritic? Deaf? Blind? Lame? Toothless? Senile? We do not know. Perhaps God, as an added gift to him, threw in immunity from all such indignities, in which case long time and extreme age would indeed be a gift. But if God did not think to do this, would it not be a further affliction for Job to be made to live on, so ‘full of days’?
Bill Henderson, the astute editor of the Pushcart Press who has built a summer cottage on Deer Isle with his own hands (‘How did you know how to go about it?’ I asked him. ‘I read a book,’ he said), writes this morning to tell me he likes the appearance of my new book. This pleases me. Ever since another publisher, David Godine, taught me that it is as expensive to produce an ugly book as a beautiful one, or perhaps it was that it is as cheap to make a beautiful book as an ugly one, I have been interested in the subject of book design.
Having no formal training in typography, papermaking, binding, or design, I am usually designated ‘the sensitive amateur’ when I am asked to judge the appearance of books for the American Association of University Presses, or ‘the literary critic’ when I write reviews of handmade books for Fine Print. But my untutored views are firm enough to make me insist on having a hand in the design of my own books.
The first editor to listen to my complaints about a jacket design was Henry Robbins. I protested that the proposed drawing on the front misrepresented the persons in the text of Chamber Music. He laughed, and said that was not an uncommon state of affairs for jacket and copy. ‘Some jacket designers do not know too much about what goes on inside,’ he said. ‘Their instructions are to make something that will sell the book.’ Nonetheless, he ordered a change to a nonrepresentational jacket, and so Chamber Music appeared in a simple, unglossy ‘matte finish,’ as it is called, almost puritanical in design.
Another editor, Bill Whitehead, allowed me to specify the type I liked and other small design elements of the body of the text. He listened patiently to my no doubt boring dissertation on how every element of a book—the body type, the design and type of the title page and half title, as well as spine and jacket—ought to be coordinated. If this was done, readers might have a better sense, although they might not be entirely aware of it, of the unity of the whole, the story suitably housed in its pages, jacket, covers.
As for this new book that Bill Henderson writes to me about: the publisher, designer, and editor conspired with me to make, to my mind, just such a satisfying volume. I wanted the right-hand margins to be unjustified, that is, unevenly set to resemble the jaggedness of handwriting in a journal. I like Bembo type for such casual writing. For the jacket I submitted the photograph of a sturdy little Model T Ford taken by a friend in a field not too far from where I live. I hoped the type around it, and the heads and subheads inside, might be in italic rather than roman, to approximate the slant of penmanship.
Then came a surprising, added bonus of goodwill and good bookmaking. Reading the galleys of End Zone, the publisher, Donald Lamm, discovered my distaste for the ugly design and tacky production of most contemporary trade books. So he authorized that the book be bound entirely in cloth instead of the usual two-thirds-paper-over-board.
I suppose I would be strung up and eviscerated by the Association of American Publishers if I asserted that writers ought to have a hand in the design of their books. It might be more prudent to suggest that writers spend some time studying the principles of book design, as well as the economics that govern such amenities, and then practice a vast amount of tact in offering suggestions about the kind of domicile they would like to see for their manuscript.
Looking through my good set of what we used to call ‘spyglasses,’ from my study window, I spot the Cove’s many birds. But the view the glasses provide is not always what I want to see. From a distance, and without the glasses, they appear to be a great patch of undifferentiated ducks, the brown female eider melded with the startling black-and-white males. Somehow the view makes me think of fiction, of how Henry James used almost no proper names for objects and places and yet, with the force exerted by his great tissue of words, he created particulars perhaps with the reader’s unaware contributions. His unbounded generalities settle in the mind as graphic, detailed singularities.
On a drive toward Route 1 I pass the newly moved Episcopal church, now seated firmly on a hill, still gaunt-looking because the landscaping has not been done or the building painted, but impressive in its architectural aspiration. I think of its six-mile journey, cut into two pieces. Then the parts were put together, the chandeliers and windows and spire restored, and a historic place of worship was once again made whole.… Coming back toward Blue Hill, I slow down to see the empty field where the church, then serving a Methodist congregation, stood for so many years. The site is overgrown, with no sign remaining that it was a place where hardy Maine Protestants once made their arduous Sunday journey to worship.
Everywhere in this central coastal area of Maine FOR SALE signs appear along the roads, some of them the same signs that were here last year. Real estate, we are told, is being offered at low prices but very little of it is being purchased. Some older Mainers who wish to leave the winter cold for the year-round warmth of Florida are finding it hard to rid themselves of their (in many cases) ancestral property. Others, who tried to ride the recent crest of high prices, find that they have missed their chance for profit, and are held on their land and in their houses by the very real recession up here.
It is almost unbelievable. This morning on the radio President Bush claimed that the “so-called” recession is only a matter of “pessimistic attitudes” on the part of an uncooperative citizenry. I suppose it is possible to think this if one lives in a majestic house surrounded by acres of lawn, uniformed guards holding guard dogs, and a tall iron fence to keep out the disturbing presence of the homeless and the hungry who camp across the street in Lafayette Park. Cheerfulness and
optimism are rather easy to maintain under such opulent conditions, but much harder up here where heating oil and wood for stoves are expensive, where snow and ice cover the frozen ground for almost half the year, where there is only seasonal employment or no jobs at all, and too many people live below the poverty level. In winter, darkness descends before four o’clock in the afternoon and remains inexorably until after seven in the morning. All of this provides a natural culture for pessimistic attitudes and despair about the economy.
One house, on Route 15, opposite the brave little sign a neighbor Annie Tobin has had put up at her own expense (WELCOME TO SARGENTVILLE), boasts a fine view of the sunset. It has been for sale or for rent for as long as we have lived here. Recently the sign came down, and now lights appear in the evening in the living room. A car is parked in front of a closed barn. I wonder if there are new tenants, or if the old ones have given up their attempts to leave and have settled back into residence in sight of the red-gold glory of the evening sky.
The winter enemies of the year-round population are the dark and the cold. A humorous story is told of an elderly Maine farmer who lived on the Maine—New Hampshire border. He is visited by a state engineer who wishes to survey the area. After he has finished, the engineer tells the farmer that, he is sorry to report, his farm is not in Maine but in New Hampshire.
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ the farmer replies. ‘These hard Maine winters were getting too much for me.’
Funny, but also sad. That is about as far as elderly inhabitants would be able to move, for the most part, to escape the cold.
Right after Labor Day, the Sargentville—Sedgwick—Blue Hill—Brooksville area begins to divest itself of visitors. The first sign is the closing of the roadside drive-in restaurant near us called Milton’s Dream, where very good fried fish of every kind, carbonated drinks, and ice cream are sold from windows in a long shack. Sybil has discovered that it also dispenses a small ‘kiddie cone,’ as it is called, for twenty cents. Much as I tend to rejoice at the departure of tourists and the restoration of the stores and roads to year-round residents, she mourns the closing of Milton’s Dream for the winter and the loss of her tasty bargain.
September 23: Lee Eitingon Thompson, a friend since we worked together at Architectural Forum in 1940, telephones to say they are selling their property in Mahopac. All summer she has been showing it to prospective buyers. She and her husband are both ‘getting older,’ as we say of the elderly when we wish to be kind. Ed is ill, the place is too much for them, they need to live in less demanding surroundings. A garden apartment will be easier for Ed to get in and out of, and less upkeep and responsibility for Lee.
When first the Thompsons came to New York State from Washington, D.C., where Ed had founded and then edited Smithsonian magazine after he had been managing editor of Life for many years, Lee raised peahens on the beautiful estate called Rock Ledge Farm. I always looked forward to stopping there, on my way up and down the coast, to swimming in their old-fashioned pool after a long, hot drive, to sitting beside the beautiful, acre-sized pond where transient ducks and geese rested on their way north or south, to watching their overpopulated bird feeder. Then we would have a superb dinner cooked by Lee in one of her two professional kitchens (she had been a food columnist for the Washington Star), and much good, reminiscent conversation.
Sadly, places pass out of one’s life the way people do. It is hard to think that my passage from Maine to Washington or New York and back again will not always be interrupted by a stopover with Lee and Ed. I don’t like to think about getting acquainted with their new and probably most elegant apartment, although I will of course always want to see them. But in the space until the next visit I prefer to imagine them in the long dusk sitting with their drinks beside the pond on Rock Ledge Farm, waiting to open the gate when our car arrives.
I pay a bill from Dr. Ramey, a specialist in glandular malfunction. I consulted him in late spring about possible parathyroidism (held in check at the moment). While I waited for him in his office, I read the diplomas on his wall and learned he attended Yale Medical School.
I ask him, ‘Do you know my friend Richard Selzer, once a surgeon at the hospital in New Haven and now a writer of fiction and nonfiction, usually on medical subjects?’
‘O yes, very well,’ he said, and then proceeded to tell me a rather scurrilous but funny story. It seems that Dr. Selzer was asked to perform a small surgical procedure, the removal of a carrot from the rectum of a homosexual man. Afterwards, he patted the young man on the shoulder and said: ‘Sir, learn to chew your food better.’
I am reading Rose Macaulay’s last book, Letters to a Friend, published in 1962. Her friend was an Anglican priest, Father Hamilton Johnson, and the letters are good, if somewhat strange, reading, full of the kind of fanatical, absolute devotion to a new faith that converts often have. Macaulay returned to the Anglican Church after a flirtation with Catholicism. She writes that she is reading widely in Anglican texts and yearning to celebrate every one of the liturgies available to her.
Now, at the end of her life, after extensive travel and writing about what she saw (I am especially fond of Pleasure of Ruins, perhaps because she shares my fascination with the mysteries of Mayan civilization) and writing excellent fiction, she is exploring anew the importance to her of her old faith. The tone of her letters reminds me of my editor at Doubleday many years ago, Naomi Burton, who talked of very little but ‘the’ Church after her conversion to Roman Catholicism.
I think about Naomi. This spring, after a long, almost twenty-year silence, I heard she was in Washington visiting her daughter-in-law, Nora Smith, once a student of mine at American University. Naomi was famed in publishing for bringing her friend Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain to Harcourt, and she edited my second novel at Doubleday, a far smaller (and entirely uncelebrated) accomplishment. My first two novels were ‘secretly’ published in the early sixties, as the critic John Leonard once said of his own fiction.
Naomi and I talked on the telephone. She told me she had celebrated her eightieth birthday recently, her husband, Melville Stone, had died, she had sold the fine English-style house they had built on the ocean at York, Maine, and was now living in a retirement apartment in the same village. We explored the possibility of meeting again, but, of course, as happens to such plans that are long delayed, it was not to come about. She went back to York, I saw May Sarton there on our way north, but there was no time to seek out Naomi.
One thing from the telephone conversation surprised me. When the subject of the Catholic Church came up (how, I cannot recall), she indicated that her enthusiasm for it was now much diminished, in fact that she (as I did) left the Church because of its inexcusable treatment of women and had returned to the Episcopal Church. I could hardly believe that her passion, which at the time I knew her pervaded every reference she made and every sentence she uttered, had not survived to the very end of her life.
The life history of religious fervor, in those persons whose lives are touched by it, often follows a predictable pattern, I’ve learned. In direct proportion to its initial ardor it diminishes and disappears, leaving behind a curious bitterness that it ever affected them. Sometimes the contrary conviction sets in hard—passionate atheism or agnosticism. I suppose this might be true of political zealots as well: I recall the number of ardent Communists in my youth who suffered violent revulsion against that philosophy and then became fervent conservatives.
I hear from two of my daughters, who live hundreds of miles apart and yet are suffering the same strange ailment. Kate, who is pregnant with Maya’s sister (Maya is a year and a half), has a continuing bad taste in her mouth, and Jane, who fifteen years ago had a benign brain tumor removed, has both the bad taste and a constant unpleasant smell in her nostrils. For them, only eating diminishes the sensation. Kate, a physician, suspects hers is connected to her pregnancy; Jane does not know the cause of hers—it may be the aftermath of a bad eye infection. But she is c
ertain it has nothing to do with the recurrence of the tumor (although she was told by her surgeon that, slow-growing as meningiomas are, they can recur). A small amount of Valium makes things better, she reports. But she agrees to make an appointment with a neurologist to be sure that her own diagnosis (‘It’s not a tumor. I know what a brain tumor feels like’) is correct.
We go to Ellsworth, a shopping town about twenty-two miles from our Cove, to get groceries and household supplies. We pass a roadside drive-in where ‘heroes’ are offered. I am startled by the term, but Sybil, more learned in fast-food terminology than I, explains that they are long sandwiches, made on pseudo-French bread and filled with salami, cheese, chopped-up lettuce and tomato, onions, and hot peppers, and soaked with garlic-oil-and-vinegar dressing.
Her description makes me feel slightly sick. But she assures me that these elongated products are quite delicious even though biting into one requires a heroic spread of the jaws. The names for such gustatory monuments are varied, depending on the part of the country in which they can be found. They are called ‘hoagies’ in Pennsylvania, so named either for the pork (hog) contained in them or for the person capable of eating them. In New England they are known as ‘grinders,’ the origin of which is not certain; my guess is that the term refers to the necessarily excessive use of the teeth. Another title is ‘sub,’ from ‘submarine,’ an obviously graphic designation. Add ‘torpedo’ (clearly for the shape, not the effect), ‘spuky’ (for what? I do not know), ‘wedge’ in Rhode Island, and ‘poor boy’ in New Orleans (called ‘po’ boy’ sometimes) because it contains such a variety of fillings that it resembles the many courses of a meal combined into one sandwich.
Extra Innings Page 2
