Armchair Travel
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
  Books I Can't Not Buy
I know I have a problem. I admit it. The last time I moved I had five truckloads worth of books, and that was 12 years ago. Now who knows.

I don't buy anything I can get at the library, and I don't buy anything because someone else might want it. But then there are these books I can't not buy.

This Sunday it was World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren and The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot.

Robert Penn Warren used to eat lunch at Silliman College when I was there. I always had this vague idea that I should go and sit with him, but I never did. Maybe I missed a life-changing moment, but I don't think so. Let the guy eat his lunch in peace is what I thought.

I read All the King's Men about Huey Long, and it could just be the Great American Novel, but no one will ever know whether it is or not, so let's just say it's a good book. And I had never heard of World Enough and Time. That usually means it didn't sell many copies, but that also means it's obscure, so I had to have it.

The title is from Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress."

"Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime..." Like many adolescent males, I memorized it just in case I might find it useful in some romantic situation. Never happened. Good poem, though.

"And your quaint honor turned to dust and into ashes all my lust." The argument, I think, is that the coy mistress should have sex with the poet because we're all going to die. Can't argue with that.

As for The Cocktail Party, by T.S. Eliot, it's a play. Why hasn't it been performed on Broadway? People devote their lives to a single poem by Eliot.

"The Wasteland," which he probably knocked off in an afternoon, has been the subject of 529,097,321 or so postgraduate theses in the World of Academia because he makes all these obscure references that academics have such tremendous fun tracking down.

In Academia, there is no distinction between obscurity and profundity; to an academic, they're exactly the same.

Isn't it odd that a few pages, scribbled in a few hours, should generate, literally, enough verbiage to fill twenty freight cars? I think it has to do with the ratio of creators to analyzers.

So why hasn't The Cocktail Party been produced on Broadway and made into a movie? I'll let you know.

I was in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral as a young nitwit -- I played the third priest -- and believe me, it was a corker!

"In the still, small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread your endless round of thought
To justify your actions to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe, which never is belief..."

I know why Murder in the Cathedral never made it to Broadway. No women!
 
Monday, July 21, 2008
  A Grave Illness, A Simple Remedy
"Paddy Corcoran's wife was for several years afflicted with a kind of complaint which nobody could properly understand," writes William Carleton in his story, aptly titled "Paddy Corcoran's Wife," in W.B. Yeats Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland.

"She was sick and she was not sick; she was well and she was not well; she was as ladies wish to be when they love their lords, and she was not as such ladies wish to be. [I have no idea what this means.] In fact nobody could tell what the matter with her was."

But clearly it's no joke. The poor woman is bedridden for seven years, and clearly it's no pleasure or comfort to her being sick and bedridden.

At last a "little weeshy (fairy) woman, dressed in a neat red cloak" comes in and sits down and says, "Well, Kitty Corcoran, you've had a long lair of it there on the broad o' yer back for seven years, and you're jist as far from bein' cured as ever."

"Do you think it's a comfort or a pleasure to me to be sick and bedridden?" Kitty asks in reply.

"No, I do not," says the weeshy woman, "but I'll tell you the truth: for the last seven years you have been annoying us. I am one o' the good people; an as I have a regard for you, I'm come to let you know the raison why you've been sick so long as you are.

"For all the time you've been ill, your childhre threwn out yer dirty wather after dusk an' before sunrise at the very time we're passin' yer door, which we pass twice a day. Now if you avoid this, if you throw it out in a different place, an' at a different time, the complaint you have will lave you an' you'll be as well as ever you wor.

"If you don't follow this advice, why, remain as you are, an' all the art o' man won't cure you." Then she disappears.

Kitty Corcoran and her kids take a little more care with the dishwater and she is restored to perfect health.
 
Friday, July 18, 2008
  Jimmy Breslin - Old Time Reporting
Just in time to be too late, I have a good question to ask at reunions, which are pretty much over for the year. Anyway, the question is -- instead of the stupid-sounding "What are you doing?" meaning, "Where do you get your money?" -- I suggest, "What are you reading?"

Ask me that question at any one time, and I'm likely to say Livy's History of Rome, Louise Dickinson Rich, We Took to the Woods (a best-seller in 1942), old copies of American Heritage, and, my current favorite The World According to Breslin.

While big-city daily reporters are transcribing police reports, Breslin is talking to the people who saw the guy get killed.

It's a weird old-timey thing you see in the old movies. They used to call it "reporting."

Breslin is one of the last practitioners of this ancient art.

Imagine going out in search of news when you can get the whole story over the phone or just publish press releases that get delivered right to your door!
 
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
  Where is the Knowing?
I can't tell you what a great time I'm having reading We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich about life on the shores of Lake Umbagog in northern Maine in 1942. Well I could, but it would take too long. Just to give you an idea, here's a bit about her stepdaughter Sally:

"The first twelve years of her life she lived in Southern Illinois and attended school regularly. Then she came with us for a while. Just as she was getting used to our peculiar mode of life, her mother sent for her to come to Lichtenstein -- a small country betweeen Switzerland and Austria, in case you didn't know -- and she spent two years there and in the West Indies.

"She didn't go to school at all, but she was being educated, nonetheless. She learned, among other things, not to giggle when a Count kissed her hand, no matter how much it tickled, how to get through the customs with the least trouble, how to wear clothes, and how to order a meal in German. Then came the war, and Sally came back to us."

[Sally boards with family friends, the Allens, and goes to school in Upton, Maine.]

"When she was fifteen, her birthday party was held in the bar of a hotel in Haiti, closed to the public for the occasion. When she was sixteen, her birthday party was held in the Allens' kitchen, open to the public for the occasion. Apparently everyone in town attended. As far as I can tell, she enjoyed both parties equally.

"She belongs to the 4H Club, and teaches a Sunday School class, and has a boyfriend. In fact she has a different one every time we see her, which makes it nice. If she stuck to one I'd probably think I had to worry about its being too serious..."

Louise takes very seriously her responsibilities toward Sally and Rufus, her son with Sally's dad, Ralph Rich. The first picture ever taken of Rufus shows him in the arms of Jonesy, the cook in the local logging camp.

"Most of them [the loggers] were homeless and familyless, and a baby was a treat," she writes.

I particularly love her advice on parenting: "All any parent can do is to stagger along as best he is able, and trust to luck."

Reminds me of Robert Coles, the esteemed child psychologist, who said, "I learn a lot from my neighbors."

And it reminds me of the time my daughter Sarah was three and we were watching Slim Goodbody on television and he was explaining the heart and the lungs and the liver and the brain, and she turned to me and asked, "Where is the knowing?"

"What?" I asked.

"The knowing. Where is the knowing?"

That's when I realized that I was gong to be holding on to my hat for this entire journey. "Some say it's in the head," I said, "and some say it's in the heart." But I was winging it, and I have been ever since.

I do have one tip, believe it or not, despite my predeliction against pontification of any kind. I have always focused on learning from my kid.

I figured if she wanted to know where the Atlantic Ocean was, she would ask, and I would tell her, but my main focus was on learning from her. Kids are closer to the other side, like old people. They know tons of stuff we don't know.

Did I learn a lot? You betcha. I didn't even know what a toe sock was! Now I can sing all the tunes from Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. I've seen My Girl and My Girl 2, and I cry at the opening credits of Anne of Green Gables. I'm a deeper, more nuanced person.

Did she learn a lot? Who cares? That's her look-out.
 
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
  Changelings
Here's W.B. Yeats' introduction to the section on changelings in his collection Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland:

"Sometimes the fairies fancy mortals and carry them away into their own country, leaving instead some sickly fairy child, or a log of wood so bewitched that it seems to be a mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried.

"Most commonly they steal children. If you 'look over' a child,' that is, look on it with envy, the fairies have it in their power."

[But how can you tell? I mean maybe my kid just kind of shriveled up 'cause he was sick. And babies look an awful lot alike.]

"Many things can be done to find out if a child's a changeling, but there is one infallible thing -- lay it on the fire with this formula, 'Burn, burn, burn -- if of the devil, burn; but if of God and the saints, be safe from harm.'"

[Don't forget that last part! I know what you're thinking. But we have to be more open-minded about faith-based medical procedures. And Yeats notes that this incantation is from Lady Wilde, who tended to be a lot gloomier than all the other Irish writers on the subject.]

Then Yeats tells a beautiful little story in just one paragraph, really a thing of beauty:

"It is on record that once, when a mother was leaning over a wizened changeling, the latch lifted and a fairy came in, carrying home the wholesome stolen baby. 'It was the others who stole him,' she said. As for her, she wanted her own child."
 
Sunday, July 13, 2008
  The Other Winston Churchill
At last I found it. There's a New Hampshire novelist named Winston Churchill who wrote in the 1800s and is always confused with the British prime minister of the same name.

You see his books often, bound in red with gold trimming, so they must have been popular in their day, but I have never in all my experience ever met anyone who has read a novel by the other Winston Churchill.

I never would have, except that I stumbled upon Mr Crewe's Career, which is about New Hampshire politics in the 1800s, and I happened to be a member of the Senate staff in New Hampshire for six years.

Though I have seen many copies of Mr. Crewe's Career -- I own three and have given one away -- it is the sequel to a book called Coniston, of which I have only found one copy in thirty years of collecting.

I found another copy yesterday for a buck. I would have paid fifty, but the seller wouldn't get more than a quarter from a used-book seller. No one buys or reads them.

I found it in a box of contemporary books, completely out of context. The young woman said she had not read it. I should have asked her where she got it, because now I'm really curious. Maybe her grandmother gve it to her and told her it was a really good book and she never got around to it.

Here's a thumbnail sketch of the plot: A young New Hampshire bumpkin adores a young woman who marries another man, a wastrel. She dies and the bumpkin travels to Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, and takes the young woman's daughter from the wastrel, who then dies as well.

So this old curmudgeon who becomes rich as a tanner and then as the immovable force in New Hampshire politics, who eats nothing but crackers and milk, has an adopted daughter, the child of his long-lost love.

Winston Churchill himself also makes a cameo appearance in this book.

Whenever I find someone who has read Coniston by the other Winston Churchill, I know I will have found a kindred spirit.
 
  The Shores of Lake Umbagog
I went down to the flea market in Hadley Sunday and picked up a book called We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich. It was in a bunch of books that once belonged to a religious person named Ethel Holmes, who bought it the year it came out, 1942.

It was the only secular book among them. It was so out of place I can only conclude that Ethel and Louise must have known one another.

I found a book about the prophecies of Daniel that looked good and then I saw Louise's. There was a map on the inside cover and I saw Lake Umbagog, where I once went canoeing as a callow youth. We used to call it Lake UMbagog, but I gather it's UmBAYgog. Whatever.

The booth was empty and I had to ask around to find the guy who was selling Ethel's books. The neighboring sellers pointed him out to me.

You don't grab a book you really want and then ask what it costs. You leave the books in the box and gesture vaguely toward them and ask, "How much for books?"

This guy sized me up and said, "A buck."

I hate it when people size you up. You wonder if somebody else might get a better price, but the guy has your number. Well, after all, I did ask around.

But for a buck, I've already gotten two or three good movies worth of enjoyment, and I've only read the first hundred pages.

What's it like living on the shores of Lake Umbagog in 1942? Well it takes a whole chapter to explain what Louise and her husband Ralph do for a living. They live on a five-mile stretch of road and own four cars. It's extemely interesting, if you're interested.

I'll be posting some samples of Louise Rich's writing. It's really superb, but you have to get a decent size sample to appreciate it.

Reading this book reminded me of the tag sale in Northfield that I almost didn't stop at where I got a signed copy of Mary Phylinda Dole's authobiography or the times I first stumbled on Dame Shirley and Isabella Bird and Harry Golden.

It may be that I'm the only person in the world who could possibly enjoy this book, but that just makes it all the more enjoyable.
 
  In Which I Actually Dicker
I saw a box of books at the flea market today and asked the lady, "How much for books?" She said, "They're all different prices. Some are marked."

I hate that. Books are a buck for hardbound, fifty for paperback.

I looked at the book I wanted, the only old one there (1921, poor condition), and it said five bucks. "That's a lot," I said, and put it back.

"Three," she said. I was ready to pay it. It was a book by E. Phillips Oppenheim.

"Two," I said, not because I'm cheap, but because this blog is about great reads for a quarter, or a buck, or maybe two, but not three, except of course for signed copies of Mary Phylinda Dole's autobiography.

The book, Nobody's Man, now that I've had a look at it, is worth ten bucks (to me), even in a banged-up edition. But to almost anyone else in the universe, it has no value whatsoever. To enjoy it you have to know all kinds of code belonging to the last century that no one knows today.

The main character, we can't really call him a hero yet, is quite clearly guilty of second degree murder and he's equally clearly trying to cover it up. He punched a guy who hit a rotten bit of railing and fell off a predipice. He has sent away his social-climbing wife and all the servants from his country estate and refuses to answer questions posed by Scotland Yard.

Usually we would read a few hundred pages and see him get his comeuppance. But this is different. This is 1921, three years after the end of WWI, and the guy is a war hero. Not only that, he has been driven out of Parliament because he refused to compromise his ideals.

For those of you unfamiliar with the code, this means he's not going to be convicted of murder. Not only that, he's probably going to become Prime Minister, but I'm hooked. I have to see how Oppenheim makes this happen.

I've read several other books by Oppenheim -- one was about a million dollar note that three people had pieces of -- and they're all really good if you're willing to get bored in drawing rooms, gentleman's clubs and country estates all over England. You do meet some rather droll characters.

But if you don't know the discourse of the last century, it's all pretty unintelligible. I guess it comes under the heading really interesting, if you're interested.
 
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
  Summer Stock Theater:The Hobbit Packs a Bag
The joke around the office is I help edit a travel website, but I hate to leave New England. It's true I did turn down trips to Paris and Madrid and drive ten hours to a B&B in Maine.

No disrespect to those ancient capitals, far from it. I suggested writers who could (and did!) do a much better job than I could -- Sony Stark and Chance St. John.

I have a theory, based, I admit, solely on my personal preferences, that you can have as much fun in Maine as you could have anywhere in the world. Just take a look at a map of Maine and you'll see what I mean, the way the land embraces the sea.

I think one of the silver linings in the air travel crisis is more and more people, expecially New Englanders, are going to discover the breathtaking beauty of Maine, which has for generations captivated the attentions of so many great painters.

If only there were a train from Boston. People wouldn't have to drive.

This month I am again bestirring myself, this time even less far, to New Hampshire, where I want to write an article about summer stock theater. I think that's something people don't usually think about when they plan their vacation, but it can be really memorable, especially for kids.

I've been talking about this lately with friends, and I've found so many people who fondly remember plays they saw when they were kids. I remember vividly seeing 'Toad of Toad Hall' at the Barnstormers Theater in Tamworth when I was six, half a century ago.

This play, based on The Wind in the Willows, is a swamp-based metaphor for America in the 21st century: the manor has been taken over by rats and weasels and the dimwitted owner, obsessed with motoring, is unable to restore decency and morality.

Summer stock allows children to enjoy theater without riding in subways and taxicabs or wearing uncomfortable clothes, and anything that awakens a kid's sense of wonder can't be all bad.

Summer stock theater also allows greenery-deprived actors from New York to take a breath of fresh air and get a little closer to nature, and I'll bet they enjoy that. But I don't know, so I'm going to ask them.

Then there are the members of the community, many of them kids, who work on the plays. Every stage hand winds up knowing the play by heart, and being a part of a dramatic production gives you a depth of understanding of drama and stagecraft that you never forget because it entwines your own imagination with the playwright's and everybody else's all at once -- the director, the actors, the musicians, the prop manager, the lighting guys, everybody.

Long after it's all over, you feel an attachment to everyone else in the production that it's hard to describe. It's like when Dorothy wakes up in Kansas and everything is black and white again and she says, "But you were there! and you! and you! and you!"

So if a few more parents decide to include a summer stock performance in their vacation planning, and a few more kids discover the power of imagination, that's alright with me.
 
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
  Jimmy Breslin versus France
I've been digressing from the main purpose of this blog lately to indulge my latest hobby, bringing peace to the Middle East. I apologize. Back to great reads for a quarter, and you can't miss if you buy a book by Jimmy Breslin.

I consider Table Money the best American novel I have ever read, just beating out All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren and Continental Drift by Russell Banks. And all Breslin's books are great reads. It's a point of honor with him. He will not waste your time.

So last Saturday I was on my way to tag sales in Montague and Leverett when I saw some tables of books set out with nobody there, just a jar. A bunch of beautiful picture books of the Kennedys. I should have bought them all. The price was right. But I have a few books as it is and I often have to make painful choices. I picked out four.

There was also a collection of Breslin's columns, The World According to Breslin, which I had to have, but I didn't have the right change. I tried to find somebody at the house, but no luck, just a couple of dogs inside barking ferociously. I had to drive a half a mile and get the right change and go back, but it was all worth it. Here's a sample:

Breslin is speaking up for the people in Howard Beach who don't want the Concorde to land at Kennedy Airport because it makes too much noise. The French say that it makes no more noise than an American-made plane, and these objections are a ruse to exclude European-made aircraft.

Breslin takes umbrage with a comment by the French president about the residents of Howard Beach and books passage on the QE2 to take up the matter in person. In Cherbourg he tells reporters that he is challenging President d'Estaing to a duel.

"How do you dare such a thing as to challenge our president?" an announcer shrieked.

"He insulted me. I shall avenge these insults."

"You would duel our president?"

"And win." I said.

President d'Estaing declines to meet with him or speak with him or duel with him, but Breslin goes to the National Assembly where there's a marble bar with a brass rail and six bartenders "to serve the the politicians who came off the Assemblee floor to wash the harangue from their throats."

Breslin is in his element, and one might expect more of him here. As it happens he engages in a puerile exchange with a French deputy, a guy who represents the district where the Concorde is manufactured. Still it's funny:

The interpreter said, "He says that a friendship binds France and the United States. It is of vital importance to both of us. It is not in the interest of the United States to tarnish the image of Franco-American cooperation."

I said to the interpreter, "Tell him that a study at Queens College shows that the noise of the Concorde makes people impotent."

M. Raymond's eyes widened as he listened to this. His voice barked. "He says he is most certainly not impotent," the interpreter said.

"Tell him to prove it," I said.

As the interpreter spoke to him again, M. Raymond's mouth opened. The interpreter said to me, "Not with you." Then M. Raymond calls out something and raises two fingers.

The interpreter said, "He said he will show you that he is not impotent from the Concorde going over his head, that you are to get him two Blue Bell Girls from the Lido and he will show you."
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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