Lifespans

The former Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski died on February 20th at the age of eighty-nine. Mazeroski, who retired as a player in 1972, was only a middling hitter, but he was a standout defensive player who still holds the all-time record for turning the most career double plays at his position. The moment he will always be most remembered for, though, came at the plate: with the underdog Pirates batting against the New York Yankees in the bottom of the ninth inning in the decisive seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he belted a home run over the left-field fence, breaking a 9-9 tie and giving his team the game and the series. It's considered one of the greatest games in baseball history.

As famous as that moment was, I wouldn't bother to mention it except that it forms one of my earliest imaginary memories, certainly the first related to baseball or, for that matter, to anything outside of home and family. I say "imaginary" because I suspect that, given my age at the time (four), I would have been at best only vaguely aware of what was happening, and I only think I recall it because it was reinforced by repeated retellings after the fact. My parents weren't big sports fans, but since the Yankees were involved I'm sure they had the game on, and it's likely that I was in the room. The first baseball games I have definite memories of watching came four years later, in the 1964 series in which the ascendant St. Louis Cardinals put an end to the Yankee dynasty, at least for the next decade or so.

Mazeroski's death came just eight days after the death of his longtime teammate, the brilliant relief pitcher Roy Face, who was ninety-seven. I have no statistics to back this up, but longevity seemed to favor that 1960 Bucs team; as I write starting pitcher Vernon Law is alive, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday, as is outfielder Bob Skinner, who is ninety-four. Bill Virdon, another outfielder, made it to ninety, and pitcher Bob Friend to eighty-eight. Who knows how old the great Roberto Clemente might have lived to be, if he hadn't died in a plane crash in 1972? (The champion of that series in this regard, though, was in the opposing bullpen: Yankee relief pitcher Bobby Shantz, alive as of this writing at the age of one hundred. He would play for the Pirates in 1961.)

Remember that Mazeroski's home run came during what was still the Eisenhower administration; JFK's triumph over Nixon that November, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dealey Plaza, all of that still lay ahead. They say that life is short, and sometimes it really is (and tragically so), but at the same time it's astonishing to contemplate all that can happen in the span of a single life.

Patriarch

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers concocted a plan for a volume in which each participant would undertake a literary treatment of one of the larger-than-life political figures — dictator, caudillo, or what have you — from the annals of his or her respective native country. Despite a good deal of initial enthusiasm, the volume never came off, but García Márquez (Colombia) had already decided who he wanted to write about, and described his choice in a letter to Carlos Fuentes:

My candidate is General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, aristocrat, former officer under Bolívar, who assumed the presidency four times. To be sure, he had much in common with your Santa Anna. Don Tomás was completely crazy, and nevertheless he was a great man: the first liberal to intercede against the dictatorial fever of the Liberator, and, of course, he ended up a dictator in his turn. He had his entire jaw reconstructed from silver, he dressed, in his second period, like the kings of France, and he was cruel, arbitrary, truly progressive, and a very fine writer. He expelled the Jesuits from the country, headed by his own brother, who was archbishop primate of Bogotá. In his full decadence, crazy and alcoholic, he walked around with his old cutlass chasing the boys who made fun of him through the streets. He complained to the president, and as the latter paid no attention to him, he kicked him out of the palace and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief for the third time. In short, he belongs to the great line of the fathers of the country.

García Márquez, who was living in Mexico City at the time, may have misremembered some of the details. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera did have a brother, Manuel José Mosquera, who was an archbishop, but the latter was already dead when Tomás expelled the Jesuits (in 1863 or 1864), and had left the country in 1852, under pressure, in an earlier wave of anticlericalism. But whether true or not, the image of the old soldier with his prosthetic jaw brandishing his sword to chase away impertinent boys, and taking the government into his hands when he couldn't get satisfaction, must have been too garciamarquesco to pass up.

Image: Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, looking a little jaundiced, portrait from the Museo Nacional de Colombia. The text of the letter from García Márquez to Carlos Fuentes is from Las cartas del Boom (translation mine).

Echoes of the Boom

Two recent publishing events revisit the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary "Boom" of the 1960s, in particular highlighting the four novelists — Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru) — who are widely regarded as the movement's seminal figures. Las cartas del Boom (Alfaguara, 2023) collects the correspondence exchanged between the the fab four, as the editors call them, during the years of literary ferment when they were reinventing the modern novel. Regarding the importance of the volume, in the words of the editors:

To find an example parallel to Las cartas del Boom, and exaggerating only a bit (there are more languages involved), one would have to imagine Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner engaging in an intense correspondence in the decade of the 1920s concerning literature and politics, including the sometimes instantaneous reactions to the works of each one.

The vagaries of preservation affected what could be included. Cortázar wrote countless letters but preserved few of the many that he must have received, García Márquez periodically destroyed letters (as well as his own working notes and manuscripts), and only Fuentes kept copies of most of his outgoing correspondence. The letters begin, haltingly, in the late 1950s and dwindle to a trickle in the 1970s, in part because two of the writers (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa) were by then no longer on speaking terms, but also no doubt because greater reliance on the telephone had made written correspondence less essential. Many of the letters from Cortázar to Fuentes printed here were not included in the monumental five-volume edition of the former's letters because of restrictions from the Fuentes estate that have now been lifted.

Las cartas del Boom has been translated into several languages but not, thus far, into English. The good news on that front involves a related event: Archipelago Books — which seems to be able to undertake translation projects that few other publishers are interested in handling — will be releasing the first installment of a generous two-volume selection of Cortázar's correspondence, Letters from Julio, in September 2026. The translators are Anne McLean and Sarah Moses.

The University of Oregon hosts a blog with more information on the Boom correspondence.

In addition, New Directions — another indispensable publisher — has published a revised translation of José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night, incorporating portions of the novel that were excised from the original US version. The New York Review of Books has a review. While he isn't included in Las cartas del Boom (his correspondence with Fuentes has been published separately) Donoso was another key figure in the movement and The Obscene Bird of Night is regarded as his major work. I've had a copy of the old Knopf edition on my shelves for close to fifty years; one of these days I'll have to get around to reading it.

Monochrome

The city is behind me. In daylight, with no lights visible, the wind and the breakers cutting off all sound, one might think it uninhabited, but it isn't, it's just temporarily of no importance. The tall spires on its summit, rigid and precise, seem sketched by a draftsman's pencil with no concern for anything but the laws of geometry. Along the seawall a few sheets of newspaper take wing among scattered indifferent gulls, then fall, dispirited, huddling against unlit streetlamps and refuse cans.

Even where I stand, separated from the water's edge by a plateau of impenetrable rock a hundred yards across, I feel the cold mist against my face. The sun wanders out from cloud cover briefly, illuminating patches of wet stone scattered with fragmentary strands of seaweed, then loses heart and disappears. As the tide crests its bore surges into the mouth of the great river, annihilating its flow in a deafening battle of waters. Its accumulating force is terrible to contemplate.

There are no ships visible in the offing; if any there are, steaming their way miles out, they are hidden by waves and low clouds. The grand beacon, sunk into an exposed shelf of rock just up the coast, blinks metronomically, untended, unseen. I shudder and hoist up my overcoat, then turn my back on the sea and go home.

Good kids

Scenes from a student-led anti-ICE demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, February 3, 2026. The demonstration began with a scheduled walk-out from classes.

A local news article quoted one of the leaders, high school senior Lyla Caldwell:

“I’ve seen that ICE is going into schools and waiting outside of schools to take teenagers,” Caldwell said. “If they’re going to make it the place, we’re going to make it the place. It’s wrong.”

Judging by the number of passing drivers who honked and waved, community support seemed to be strong. I overheard one woman say, I think approvingly, "They seem to be having a good time." And they were — for a good cause.

Tales Told Twice

In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that appeared, among other places, in the newspaper El País in Spain. His biographer, Gerald Martin, says that these pieces amounted to "a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary." Some of the material in those columns was, in fact, later reworked into the pages of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.

In one of these columns ("Ghosts of the Road," August 19th, 1981) he relates an incident that was said to have happened some fifteen years before. García Márquez and his family were traveling from Barcelona to southern France, when an unexplained sudden intuition made him slow down in advance of a curve. Several cars whizzed by him, and he remembers in particular one "healthy-looking Dutch woman" driving a van.

After passing us in perfect order, the three cars disappeared around the curve, but we found them again an instant later one on top of another, in a pile of smoking wreckage, embedded in an out-of-control truck in an oncoming lane. The only survivor was the Dutch couple's six-month-old baby.

García Márquez connects the incident with another that supposedly happened "on May 20 on the Paris-Montpellier freeway": three young people pick up a woman who hails them from the roadside. After they drive for several miles, the woman, in terror, warns them of a dangerous curve ahead — and then simply vanishes. No accident occurs, but the young people report the mysterous disappearance to the police. The case is never resolved. García Márquez speculates that, after the accident he witnessed, the spirit of the Dutch woman might linger on the highway to warn future travellers of the danger ahead.

The tale of the "vanishing hitchhiker," is, of course, a well-known and well-travelled one, with many documented variants; it provided the title for Jan Brunvand's 1981 study of urban legends.

García Márquez briefly revisited the purported Paris-Montpellier incident in a column the following year entitled "Tales of the Road." In that piece he also touches on reports of a similarly eerie kind of occurence: a silent figure is seen sitting inside a car, apparently smoking a cigarette; the figure is later revealed to have been a corpse, posed to look like a living passenger to avoid the paperwork and fees associated with transporting a dead body from one jurisdiction to another. In one variant that García Márquez mentions a grandmother who dies during a beach vacation is wrapped up in a carpet and stowed on the roof rack of a car, which is then stolen when the family takes a brief break.

I recognized the gist of the corpse passenger story immediately: Cortázar had outlined a very similar tale in A Cetain Lucas a few years earlier (see my related post). It's possible that García Márquez had read Cortázar's version, or heard something like it directly from him (they were friends), but it seems more likely that both writers drew on urban legends that had been circulating for years and may well still be circulating to this day.

A selection of García Márquez's syndicated columns can be found in the posthumous collection The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings.

The Drowned Circus

Maritime disasters have long served as inspiration for popular songs and ballads, especially when the drama of the incident is multiplied by the presence among the victims of those whom we identify as "innocents," as opposed to professional or military sailors who are presumed, perhaps, to accept the risks as a condition of their service. Among others, there's Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James" (about a warship), Toumani Diabaté's instrumental "Lampedusa" (memorializing the deaths of some 360 migrants off the shores of the island of that name), and several songs about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, including Blind Willie Johnson's haunting "God Moves on the Water" and the ditty variously known as "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" or "The Titanic," the lyrics of which prompted the parody containing these immortal lines, indelibly engraved in my childhood years:

Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants,
It was great when the sad ship went down.

Outside the English-speaking world I can think of Zachary Richard's "Le ballade du Irving Whale," about the sinking of an oil barge in which no human lives were lost (as far as I know) but great environmental damage was done. The example below, a bolero written by the Cuban musicians Julio Gutierrez and Bobby Collazo (here performed by the Trio La Rosa) relates an incident of unusual pathos that has a surprising connection with an apprentice journalist who went on to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

The Euskera or Euzkera was a cargo ship that had been first commissioned as a private yacht in 1891, then recommissioned as the USS Hawk during the Spanish-American War. The ship remained on reserve duty until 1940, when, according to Wikipedia, it was sold for scrap. Several years later, however, it was plying the waters of the Caribbean, and on September 1, 1948, en route from Havana to Cartagena in Colombia, it capsized and sank. Only a handful of the passengers survived (sources conflict as to whether there were six or twelve), and among the victims were most of the members of the renowned Razzore family of circus performers along with 59 circus animals. (Wrecksite has the most information, as well as a contemporary newspaper account.)

One member of the circus troupe who was not on board was its director and paterfamilias, Emilio Razzore, who had already arrived in Colombia to serve as advance man. Before the news of the sinking came through, he had appeared in the offices of the newspaper El Universal, where he peeled off his shirt to display the impressive scars he had received from the animals in his lion-taming act. There he met a twenty-one year old cub reporter named Gabriel García Márquez, who, according to the latter's memoirs, shared a meal with Razzore in a local restaurant and asked him, probably not too seriously, whether he could join the circus. Not long after that, the fate of the Euskera (the spelling García Márquez uses) became known, and the young writer remained with the devastated lion-tamer for several days, eventually accompanying him to Baranquilla, from where Razzore flew to Miami to try to rebuild his life. In Edith Grossman's translation García Márquez ends the account by saying "I never heard from him again," although the original is the more impersonal "Nada más se supo de él" (Nothing more was known of him).

The sinking was newsworthy enough that the New Yorker published a poem by an American writer, Walker Gibson, entitled "To the Memory of the Circus Ship Euzkera, Lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948" (available behind paywall).

I haven't been able to find a transcription of the lyrics of "La tragedía del circo," only parts of which I can make out.

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.

Ivan Klíma (1931-2025)

The Czech writer Ivan Klíma has died; the New York Times has a full obit.

Klíma has long been a favorite writer of mine, and I revisited at least one of his books earlier in the year. Of the ones that have been translated and that I've read, My First Loves, My Golden Trades, and My Merry Mornings are all worth reading, as is the weightier (and occasionally ponderous) Judge on Trial; the English-language edition of his novel Love and Garbage, however, is marred by a stilted translation. His memoir My Crazy Century covers the same ground as some of his fiction, and includes some philosophical musings that could easily have been skipped. My earlier posts can be found by clicking the tag at the bottom of this post.

I find it somewhat irritating that at least one obit pigeon-holes Klíma as an "author and anti-communist dissident." The latter designation isn't literally wrong, but it's a cliché (and arbitrary at that — he was also "a concentration camp survivor"), and I doubt that it's how he would have wanted to be remembered. Klíma wasn't an ideologue, he was a novelist.

Update: The Guardian also has an obit.

London sublime

A few weeks back Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a passage from Henry Mayhew's The Great World of London in which Mayhew described looking down at London from the basket of a hot-air balloon, and did so in a style that struck me as surprisingly lyrical and "literary" from an author who is usually associated with the meticulous (though not colorless) oral histories collected in London Labour and the London Poor.

As it turns out, though, the passage wasn't without precedent. I came across a similar bird's-eye view description in a 1971 volume entitled The Unknown Mayhew, which was edited by Eileen Yeo and E. P. Thompson, and which presented selections from rarely reprinted newspaper articles that Mayhew contributed to the Morning Chronicle in 1849-50. The whole extraordinary passage, a kind of overture to Mayhew's journalistic project, is too long to quote here, but it begins with a climb inside the dome of St. Paul's for a survey of the city and continues with a visit to the Custom House for a perspective of the docks and ships along the Thames. Then Mayhew considers the city at night, in a long paragraph that could have been plucked out of Our Mutual Friend or Bleak House.

Those who have only seen London in the day-time, with its flood of life pouring through its arteries to its restless heart, know it not in its grandest aspect. It is not in the noise and roar of the cataract of commerce pouring through its streets, nor in its forest of ships, nor in its vast docks and warehouses, that its true solemity is to be seen. To behold it in its greatest sublimity, it must be contemplated by night, afar off, from an eminence. The noblest prospect in the world, it has been well said, is London viewed from the suburbs on a clear winter's evening. The stars are shining in the heavens, but there is another firmament spread out below, with its millions of bright lights glittering at our feet. Line after line sparkles, like the trails left by meteors, cutting and crossing one another till they are lost in the haze of the distance. Over the whole there hangs a lurid cloud, bright as if the monster city were in flames, and looking afar off like the sea by night, made phosphorescent by the million creatures dwelling within it.

Mayhew was clearly a gifted writer, in addition to his accomplishments as a "social investigator" (a term Yeo and Thompson employ), but lest we think that he was guilty of merely aestheticizing the panorama of London with no regard for the conditions of the inhabitants of the great metropolis, here is the very human continuation of the passage quoted above:

At night it is that the strange anomalies of London are best seen. Then, as the hum of life ceases and the shops darken, and the gaudy gin palaces thrust out their ragged and squalid crowds, to pace the streets, London puts on its most solemn look of all. On the benches of the parks, in the nitches of the bridges, and in the litter of the markets, are huddled together the homeless and the destitute. The only living things that haunt the streets are the poor wretches who stand shivering in their finery, waiting to catch the drunkard as he goes shouting homewards. Here on a doorstep crouches some shoeless child, whose day's begging has not brought it enough to purchase it even the twopenny bed that its young companions in beggary have gone to. There, where the stones are taken up and piled high in the road, and the gas streams from a tall pipe in the centre of the street in a flag of flame –– there, round the red glowing coke fire, are grouped a ragged crowd smoking or dozing through the night beside it. Then, as the streets grow blue with the coming light, and the church spires and chimney tops stand out against the sky with a sharpness of outline that is seen only in London before its million fires cover the town with their pall of smoke –– then come sauntering forth the unwashed poor, some with greasy wallets on their back, to hunt over each dirt heap, and eke out life by seeking refuse bones or stray rags and pieces of old iron. Others, on their way to their work, gathered at the corner of the street round the breakfast stall, and blowing saucers of steaming coffee drawn from tall tin cans, with the fire shining crimson through the holes beneath; whilst already the little slattern girl, with her basket slung before her, screams watercresses through the sleeping streets.

The publication history of the Morning Chronicle articles and of London Labour and the London Poor (which grew from them) is convoluted, but Janice Schroeder has a useful summary at Branch. One interesting point that she makes is that a scholarly bias in favor of versions of texts that have been bound in book form has obscured the importance of Mayhew's original periodical work, which some critics argue is his best.

Update: Information on Christopher Anderson's fine recent biography of Mayhew is available here.

Logbook: Porcupines (2)

When I was out walking yesterday morning in one of my regular haunts, keeping an eye out for the deer and rabbits I often see if I arrive first before someone else has spooked them, I heard a rustling just off the trail and spotted a large porcupine with a beautiful dark coat. I was having camera trouble, and while I was fumbling with the zoom lens, trying to get it to co-operate, I figured the creature would note my presence and get itself out of sight. But porcupines have their own agendas, and also aren't very perceptive — they don't really need to be — and soon this one ambled out of the brush directly in front of me and went for a stroll down the middle of the trail for several hundred feet while I followed a few yards back. It only quickened its pace when it came under some hickory trees where some squirrels were chewing up husks and raining the remnants onto anyone or anything passing by.

Eventually it diverged from the trail but stopped for a moment, perhaps to register my presence before resuming its travels.

Little impalpable worlds

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

One afternoon, he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had been a favorite one with her brother, when they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad, from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, or the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and, perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them, by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walking-sticks, to touch, withal; and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never been.

The House of Seven Gables

Image: Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set (1949-1950), one of a number of works the artist devoted to the theme.

Islander

Amy Liptrot:

I never saw myself as, and resist becoming, the wholesome ‘outdoors’ type. But the things I experience keep dragging me in. There are moments that thrill and glow: the few seconds a silver male hen harrier flies beside my car one afternoon; the porpoise surfacing around our small boat; the wonderful sight of a herd of cattle let out on grass after a winter indoors, skipping and jumping, tails straight up to the sky with joy.

I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I've given up drugs, don't believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.

I came upon Amy Liptrot's memoir "by accident," by way of the film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan. But what constitutes an accident? Most of The Outrun takes place in Orkney, a place that has long interested me because of its geography and long history of human occupation, and if it had been set elsewhere I might never have been aware of it.

Liptrot was raised in Orkney (of English parents) but as a teenager couldn't wait to get away from it. She spent a decade in London going to clubs, finding and losing jobs, and — most of all — drinking. She tried and failed to get off the bottle various times, but finally succeeded, with the help of a treatment program, when it became clear that she was facing a choice of either life or booze. She retreated to Orkney, got a summer job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds counting elusive corncrakes, then rented a cottage on the tiny, treeless island of Papay (population less than one hundred).

The memoir and the film adaptation both have merits, but they're different merits. The movie is darker and more intense (and occasionally frustratingly non-linear); it focuses more on Liptrot's hellish and frenetic London years; the book is retrospective and meditative, following Liptrot as she retunes herself to the rhythms of the islands. Overall the film is faithful, and Ronan's high-energy performance is wonderful.

There is, of course, a movie tie-in edition with Saoirse Ronan on the cover, but I opted for this earlier Canongate paperback edition with cover art by an artist who works under the name Kai and Sunny.

John Martin

The founder and former publisher of Black Sparrow Press, John Martin, has died. The Times has a nice obit by Adam Nossiter, who can be forgiven for a throwaway reference to the press's authors as "offbeat literary rebels." The online version even includes the cover art for my favorite Black Sparrow book, Paul Bowles's Things Gone and Things Still Here. Martin is survived by his wife, Barbara, who was responsible for the elegant design of the Black Sparrow volumes.