Daddy Fox

Last summer I chanced upon an interesting edition of the tale of Reynard the Fox in the free stuff shed in our local dump, and strangely enough this week I came across an account of one of his decendants in the same place. Bertha B. and Ernest Cobb's Allspice, originally published in 1925, was one of a series of books designed not just for children in general but specifically for classroom use, as what we might now call "easy readers." They were sturdily bound, printed in a large-size font, and made use of repetition and a somewhat limited vocabulary. The Cobbs were a husband-and-wife team who operated their own publishing firm (the Arlo Publishing Company) in the Boston suburb of Upper Newton Mills. The illustrations, which we'll get to, are by L. J. Bridgman.

When we first meet Daddy Fox, he has played a cruel trick on Roland Rabbit involving a hive full of hornets. Roland complains to the King (in this case a human, not a lion), who puts a bounty on the fox's head. A miller and his wife scheme to capture him and win the bounty, but with the help of a friend Daddy Fox escapes and miller and wife get their comeuppance. Daddy Fox isn't very honest or very nice, but of course we cheer him on. The title comes from a weak joke about putting salt — or spice — on an animal's tale to subdue it.

As childen's literature goes, Allspice is frankly pretty thin stuff; most kids would probably nod off if it was read aloud to them. The illustrations, however, are quite wonderful. I only wish their sharpness came through better in these scans.

Lewis Jesse Bridgman (1857-1931) was an accomplished artist based in Salem, Massachusetts; an article on the Streets of Salem blog has a brief bio and selections of his work. He's received less attention than some of his peers from the Golden Age of Illustration, but judging from his work for the Cobbs he's ripe for rediscovery. He managed to combine intricate naturalistic detail with a real feel for motion and expression; I particularly like the tenderness with which Ginger Bear rescues his friend from the box in which he is trapped, minus, alas, a bit of his tail. I didn't immediately notice that you can see the feet of the dozing miller and wife just beyond the base of the tree.

There was a time

Four stanzas from the medieval Irish legend Buile Suibne, variously translated as The Frenzy of Suibhne or Sweeney Astray:

There was a time when I preferred
to the low converse of humans
the accents of the turtle-dove
fluttering about a pool.

There was a time when I preferred
to the tinkle of neighbour bells
the voice of the blackbird from the crag
and the belling of a stag in a storm.

There was a time when I preferred
to the voice of a fine woman near me
the call of the mountain-grouse
heard at day.

There was a time when I preferred
the yapping of the wolves
to the voice of a cleric
melling and megling within.

The above is Flann O'Brien's rendition, as presented in At Swim-Two-Birds, where the story of Sweeny (as he spells it) forms just one element in the novel's set of narrative nesting dolls. Among other English-language versions, there is a notable (and more complete) one by Seamus Heaney, but I find Heaney's translation of the corresponding stanzas comparatively flat. O'Brien, a native Irish speaker and competent student of the medieval forms of the tongue, could be a bit cheeky in his treatment of the eccentricities of the literary style of the original — elsewhere he renders a line as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints" — but in the quatrains above he plays it straight. As far as I know he translated and arranged the material himself; the definitive English version at the time, by James G. O'Keefe, is quite different. The curious "melling and megling," based on a comparison with other versions, is meant to evoke the bleating of sheep.

The story of Sweeney, to the extent that one can summarize it briefly, is the tale of an Irish king who, finding his peace disturbed by church bells, seizes a bishop's psalter and flings it in a lake (whence it is retrieved, miraculously undamaged, by an otter) and commits other violent assaults on the bishop and his acolytes. The bishop puts a curse on him through which he became a kind of Bird-Man or Wild Man of the Trees, undergoing various torments and adventures and fleeing the society of men and women for the space of many years. In time, however, he seems to prefer his new existence — which is perhaps why he is said to be mad. Finally taken in by another bishop, he is mortally wounded by an irate herdsman due to a misunderstanding. He speaks the lines above, atones for his sins, and dies in honor.

Does Arthur Clennam know?

Has biographer Claire Tomalin slipped up in her account of Little Dorrit? In Charles Dickens: A Life, she writes

Arthur Clennam, the unheroic hero, has been brought up by a ferociously pious mother whose creed is 'Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them.' He discovers that his real mother, who died young, had been a poor singer training for the stage, and so dedicated to the world of art and imagination despised by his foster mother.

The problem is that although we as readers learn this information, via a dramatic revelation scene late in the book, it's not made explicitly clear that Arthur ever does. As the book approaches its climax, Clennam is confined in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, delirious from a fever, and being tended to by Amy Dorrit, the "child of the Marshalsea," who was born within its walls but who is now free. His ostensible mother, an invalid with whom he has long had a distant relationship, is being blackmailed by one Rigaud alias Blandois. In a breathless series of disclosures, we learn that Arthur is the product of an adulterous affair on the part of his father, that his real mother was treated with great cruelty, that Mrs. Clennam's sinister aged retainer Flintwinch has a previously unsuspected twin brother, and that Amy Dorrit is, by a string of improbable circumstances, the rightful heir to a legacy from the Clennam fortune. To force Mrs. Clennam to pay up, Rigaud has sent a letter with the details to Amy and Arthur, with instructions to open it if it is not retrieved by the time the prison bell rings that evening. When she learns of the letter, Mrs. Clennam somehow rouses herself from her chair and hurries across the Thames to the Marshalsea, where she instructs Amy to read the letter and implores her to keep its contents secret until she (Mrs. Clennam) dies. Arriving home, she witnesses the sudden collapse of the house where Rigaud is waiting for her return. Rigaud is crushed to death by the wreckage, Flintwinch vanishes, and Mrs. Clennam collapses in the street. She lives for another three years, unable to speak; we aren't told whether Arthur ever sees her again.

While Arthur slowly recovers, Amy receives a box of documents containing the original evidence behind the revelations. On their wedding day, she presents them to Arthur, but asks him to burn them unread, which he promptly does. Had he read them, he would have known, as he had always suspected, that his family had always been under some kind of obligation to Amy Dorrit, and that his inheritance — if it still amounted to anything — was in part rightly hers.

As far as I can tell, there's just one, almost cryptic, indication that Amy will eventually share part of the secret with Arthur. It comes at the exact moment when she receives the cache of documents:

Little Dorrit came in, and Mr Meagles with pride and joy produced the box, and her gentle face was lighted up with grateful happiness and joy. The secret was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should never know of her loss; in time to come he should know all that was of import to himself; but he should never know what concerned her only. That was all passed, all forgiven, all forgotten. [Emphasis added]

That is, though the scene won't be narrated in the pages of the book, Arthur will at some point at least be told the true story of his birth. Which may, in part, explain why he is never described as visiting Mrs. Clennam again in the few years that remain to her.

Scenes from the Life of a Planet

This may be the first time I've ever hunted down a book based entirely on a phrase that popped into my head. I'd been thinking about the state of the natural world, and how I'd like to be able to feel that it was not only surviving in the face of everything that human beings have done and are continuing to do to it but was actually teeming with life (a feeling that's of course increasingly hard to sustain). The words "nature abounding" came into my thoughts and I wondered if they had a history. As far as I can tell, this 1941 Faber & Faber anthology of nature writing edited by E. L. Grant Watson is the only book that has ever borne the phrase as its title.

Nature Abounding represents a kind of book that has largely gone out of fashion, an armchair or bedside reader of brief prose excerpts, aimed, I suspect, at a somewhat tweedy readership. The selections chosen range from Herodotus to the 1930s, and are accompanied by rather nice illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe, examples of which are shown on the front cover and spine of the dust jacket. The shortest pieces are only a paragraph, the longest run to ten pages or so. There's a brief Preface but no other commentary or biographical information on the writers.

No attempt at inclusiveness was made. The writers chosen — naturalists, travelers, and literary writers — are disproportionately British and almost exclusively European (Emerson and Melville are the most notable exceptions); more eyebrow-raising is that apparently no woman writers were thought worthy of excerpting, unless there are one or two hiding under their initials ( I think not).

In spite of those limitations, it's hard to dislike the book. Nature Abounding is organized thematically by the categories of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. A garish passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, describing Egdon Heath, opens the book and sets the overall tone, which tends to the purple. (A bit too purple at times; I found the passages by Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas almost unreadable.) Selections on related topics flow into each other, so that, for example, there are three consecutive excerpts devoted to the hunting habits of stoats and weasels, and we get back-to-back descriptions of marine phosphorescence by Melville and Charles Darwin. Some of the writers are careful professional observers, but colorful nineteenth-century eccentrics like Charles Waterton and Frank Buckland are represented as well.

The editor, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, was at one time a well-known cultural figure. He was born in England but spent much of his life wandering from continent to continent, writing novels, poems, books for children, and works of natural history (several of which were illustrated by Tunnicliffe). He was a bit of a heretic, mixing Darwinian ideas with Jungianism. Most or all of his books are long out of print.

Hawthorne in Salem

Van Wyck Brooks:

He had a painter's delight in tone. He liked to throw a ghostly glimmer over scenes that he chose because they were ghostly. It was a taste like Claude Lorrain's for varnish. He liked to study chimneys in the rain, choked with their own smoke, or a mountain with its base enveloped in fog while the summit floated aloft. He liked to see a yellow field of rye veiled in a morning mist. He liked to think of a woman in a silvery mantle, covering her face and figure. A man's face, with a patched eye, turning its profile towards him; an arm and hand extended from behind a screen; a smile that seemed to be only a part of a smile, seen through a covering hand; a sunbeam passing through a cobweb, or lying in the corner of a dusty floor. Dissolving and vanishing objects. Trees reflected in a river, reversed and strangely arrayed and as if transfigured. The effects wrought by moonlight on a wall. Moonlight in a familiar sitting-room, investing every object with an odd remoteness, — one's walking-stick or a child's shoe or doll, — so that, instead of seeing these objects, one seemed to remember them through a lapse of years. Hawthorne could never have said why it was that, after spending an evening in some pleasant room, lighted by a fire of coals, he liked to return and open the door again, and close it and re-open it, peeping back into the ruddy dimness that seemed so like a dream, as if he were enacting a conscious dream. For the rest, he was well aware why he had withdrawn to this little chamber, where there was nothing to measure time but the progress of the shadow across the floor. Somewhere, as it were beneath his feet, a hidden treasure lay, like Goldthwaite's chest, brimming over with jewels and charms, goblets and golden salvers. It was the treasure of his own genius, and it was to find this precious treasure that he had sat at his desk through summer and winter.

The Flowering of New England (1936)

Does anyone still read Van Wyck Brooks? Sometimes I think of inaugurating a series of posts with titles beginning Does Anyone Still Read...? or maybe Doesn't Anyone Still Read...? As far as I can tell, most or all of his books are long out of print. When I was first haunting bookstores and book sales, dog-eared copies of his work were as common as the old Scribner paperbacks of Fitzgerald and Hemingway (both edited, as it happens, by Brooks's childhood friend Max Perkins). But they must have been dated even then, and I can't say that I'm surprised that Brooks's blend of literary biography and cultural criticism has gone out of fashion. Learned as he was — and he seemed to have read and judiciously weighed not only every word of all the major writers and historians but reams of the work of justly forgotten figures as well — his concerns aren't really our concerns today, and his ex cathedra manner and assumption that his readers will already know much that a more modern biographer would feel obligated to explain, in the way of cultural and historical references, can be a bit irritating. The above passage is an example of both his cavalier attitude towards documentation (how does he know in such detail what Hawthorne saw and thought?) and his talent as a writer. There's no bibliography in the book, and the footnotes, which are fairly numerous, are generally devoted to digressions. But the brisk fluidity of his style, and the novelistic brilliance with which he imagines inner lives, should still earn him a few appreciative readers. If nothing else, there are the colorful capsule portraits of figures like the polyglot blacksmith Elihu Burritt, "who made a version of Longfellow in Sanskrit and mastered more than forty languages, toiling at the forge or in the evening" — and who recorded in his diary that he labored twelve hours at the smithy on a day when he felt "unwell." And there are glimpses of a lost cultural world in which women working in Lowell mills "all seemed to know Paradise Lost by heart and talked about Wordsworth, Coleridge and Macaulay in the intervals of changing bobbins on the looms."

Pencils

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

We found the Thoreau family plot first, and thought that maybe the offerings of writing implements on Henry's grave might be an allusion to his innovations in pencil manufacture, but as we walked on we saw that the same tribute was afforded to the other writers who are interred nearby.

Louisa May Alcott received by far the most pencils (and a few pens), as well as some corn dollies, flowers, and hand-written notes.

All of these graves (as well as Emerson's, not shown), along with those of many of their family members, lie within a few steps of each other on a little knoll.

Autumn

Three people I used to know fairly well at various times in my life have died this year. One was a childhood friend I hadn't seen since the Nixon adminstration (our lives diverged); the other two were midlife colleagues and friends from the book business I lost touch with when I retired. As far as I know, all three were active and healthy a year ago. Unsettlingly, all three were also more or less my age — but that's how it goes, you know. Once you reach a certain age, if your contemporaries aren't starting to predecease you it's only because you're the one to go first.

In the meantime, the political condition of the country is as bad as it's been in my lifetime, and there seems to be no prospect of improvement in the offing. The people holding the reins are not only corrupt and sociopathic but actually grotesque; that many of us are endorsing this or accommodating ourselves to it is the surest indication that the republic as a whole is politically and morally dead. We no longer seem able to discern right from wrong or true from false, but that's hardly surprising when our public and private lives are increasingly given over to fakery and superficiality. (End of screed.)

And suddenly the seasons have changed. In spite of some lovely mild October weather, I'm waking in the dark and in the cold now. Afternoons still linger a bit but that will change when we turn the clocks back. After a seemingly endless (and mostly rainless) summer it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it will be half a year before I can start planting things outdoors again.

The corn and peaches are gone from the local farmstands and weekend markets, but there are pumpkins and winter squashes and beautiful apples in abundance. I've broken out the first Dickens for winter reading and the jigsaw puzzles await patiently in their cardboard boxes.

The wild turkeys above are from a group of twelve that overnighted in a local graveyard. Just down the road at our favorite local farm there's a small flock of their white domestic cousins enjoying their last weeks of life before Thanksgiving. The world turns, and the harvest goes on.