A Mysterious Conjunction Overrides a Promised Blog

Forget Henry James and Isabel Archer. I’ve been waylaid this Sunday afternoon by a favorite poet from my salad days at USC. Yet here’s a curious fact. This poet lived on the same street in Cambridge (Mass.) as Henry’s older brother, William.  And ee, the poet who eschewed capitals, only exists because Professor William James introduced a fellow Harvard professor to the woman he would marry; and she gave birth to Edward Estlin Cummings.

So just now, from my library, I pulled out a thick 866 page Complete Poems (1913-1962), a gift years ago from daughter Bonnie.

Two articles ‘filed’ in the book of poetry were from 2014, when Susan Cheever wrote a biography about Cummings. One review “Capital Case,” by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker, included two of my favorite ee poems: “Buffalo Bill’s defunct” and “she being Brand.”  I had my daughters in their early years memorize the first poem, with its delightful “watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefour pigeons-justlikethat.” And for years as a high school English teacher in the Napa Valley, I used the second poem with recalcitrant male students who thought poetry was for sissies. The poem purports to be about driving a new car with a stiff clutch but is about sexual intercourse. “Is this a poem?” I would be asked, getting looks that suggested the male students knew what the poem was about and could not believe I’d given it to them.

Here’s what I call a mysterious conjunction. My friend Dorie recently bought a children’s book in New York City for Noa, her granddaughter: Enormous Smallness by Mathew Burgess about ee cummings. I read it and realized I’d not read any prose by the poet. His first book, The Enormous Room, was an autobiographical work about his time in Paris in 1917. An ambulance driver, Cummings ended up imprisoned for writing satirical letters that censors deemed traitorous.

My point is that Dorie’s book made me want to buy both Enormous Smallness and The Enormous Room. Then on July 5th, my daughter Bonnie wanted to visit the Lancaster Library’s book sale. While she was selecting cookbooks for chefs she knows in D.C., I looked at “classics” on a nearby table. What did I find?  A 1934 Modern Library copy of The Enormous Room. 

Seriously, what were the chances of that?  What does ee say in the first line of his Introduction, written in New York City in 1932.  DON’T BE AFRAID. He repeats this again on page four at the end.  To be continued…

Why Read The Master by Colm Tóibín?

July 1st… I’ve returned to my blog on literature. Today’s page is about an Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, who wrote a novel about Henry James.

Colm Tóibín

Henry James

Oh, no, you might think. That “old-school” writer, born in 1843 and dead by 1916, who largely spent his life in England?  Yes, and if you could see the folder I have of recent articles on Henry and his famous brother, the pragmatist-philosopher William, you would realize both men are relevant today.

In The Master, a reader enters a time frame of January 1895 to October 1899. You learn nothing about Henry’s last seventeen years but read a lot about his life before 1895. Yet the backstory is clearly and artfully woven in… because Tóibín is a master of fiction like Henry. (Colm’s latest novel is Long Island, a sequel to the earlier Brooklyn.)

If you enjoy travel, you get to visit many places in The Master: Newport, R.I., Boston, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Ireland, and Rye, England. That’s where Henry lived from 1887 until his death.  What was the love of Henry’s life?  Writing. And Tóibín’s rendering of those “closeted” times is artful about sexual longings for one’s own sex. The novel begins with Henry attending a performance of an Oscar Wilde play. What happened to Oscar? He went to prison for his flagrant love of another man. What Henry possessed instead of someone to love, other than family and friends, was a keen intelligence for understanding both men and women.

In The Master, a reader meets memorable females. Those in his family (mother, aunt, sister, cousin) and a famous woman & writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson. And his cousin Minny is the prototype for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. 

A literary confession! I’ve no words for how much I abhorred this novel in college. Why? I tried to read Portrait in a weekend and write a paper on it, due on Monday. And no exceptions with this professor for late papers. Yet after re-reading The Master, I am returning to Isabel for a patient and wiser read than in my 1960 “salad days, when I was green in judgment.”

Next week: John Banville’s 2017 novel, Mrs. Osmond, about Henry’s character Isabel Archer Osmond. The brilliant Banville takes off where Henry ended. I call this Irish chutzpah!  

What Would Wallace Stegner Say About Donald’s Felonies?

Today I take leave of a writer I love. I am on the porch of the cottage where I read, write, and study. Before me is a verdant garden, tall trees in every direction, and a riot of chattering birds. I sit here in a wood rocker from Poso Park, a century-old cabin on the boundary of Sequoia National Forest. Nearby is another rocker from Poso, both older than my 81 years. I mention this cabin in California because of Wallace Stegner’s last book, a non-fiction work from 1992, and one worth reading about living and writing in the West.

Stegner loved wilderness and national parks and fought the good fight on their behalf.  He died 23 years before Donald Trump’s first reign and his gutting of the EPA, as if the agency were a rotting fish. Given Wallace’s moral code, he would not have been able to stomach anything about the rich boy who inherited Big Rock Candy Mountain. This was the mythical place that Stegner’s father George sought throughout life. And the wreckage from his father’s false dream was strewn everywhere he went, while dragging a fine wife and two sons with him. Stegner describes his father as “a boomer from the age of fourteen…always on the lookout for the big chance, the ground floor, the inside track… And if you believe the world owes you a bonanza, then restrictions and laws are only an irritation and a challenge.” How familiar this sounds.

Wallace Stegner, the famous writer and environmental activist, never reconciled with his father in life or death. Which is to say the violent did not bear it away. His father shot his mistress and then himself on June 15, 1939. News of the murder-suicide “splashed across the front and inside pages of Salt Lake’s three daily newspapers for two days.” (Fradkin bio, p.94) Stegner wrote that his father “did more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime.” George’s story is one for tawdry rag-sheets like The National Inquirer. But the past week did bring this welcome headline to newspapers throughout the world and in our country. 

Ironically, George Stegner did not die with a felony, since there could be no trial. But his grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery alongside son Cecil and wife Hilda is unmarked.  In Recapitulation, a brilliant novel about memory and time, Ambassador Bruce Mason does order a gravestone for Bo Mason. Yet in real life, he never took this action, unable to forgive his father for what he had done to both family and to those whose lives he crossed in a relentless search for the ‘deal’ and the summit of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In early July I return to Literature I Love with Colm Toibin (Column Toe Bean ) as the Irish say!