Short of sailing myself I take pleasure in watching the Davieses’ sloop go out to sea. The mainsail is raised. On my deck I can hear its rings clatter against the mast. The sailor is alone. With the mainsail up he starts for the Reach. As he tacks into the Petersons’ water I see the jib go up, and now he is truly off, leaving behind small white marks of wake on the water. He settles into the stern, takes the tiller, and heads out. I am with him as his boat becomes a chalked spot on the horizon. Almost.
A letter from a lady in Geneva, New York, who says she disliked the unjustified-type right-hand margins on the pages of End Zone. ‘Was this your idea?’ she asks, suggesting that if it wasn’t, my publisher has wronged me. I answer: Yes, it was my idea. I thought irregular margins looked more like a handwritten journal than the strict, regular ones, just as I liked italic rather than roman faces for headings because the slope of italic suggests handwriting. I apologize for displeasing her, but still, I think …
Seasons in this corner of Maine are a matter of the color of blueberry fields. In early April, every other year, they are black, having been burned off to increase the crop. In the summer, now, they are green and low to the ground. Then the first wave of migrant workers, bees, arrives. They are rented and brought to the fields to carry out the need for fertilization of the bushes. Three thousand colonies of them arrive from Florida. The report this year is that they have been performing well, ‘flying hard despite the weather.’
Why don’t they use local bees? Because, I read, they have had a high mortality rate this year, the result of tracheal mites. But a good winter in Florida contributed to the health of the hives there. Those bees are granted a health certificate (literally) and come north to do their salubrious work, pollenizing the blueberry barrens. In August the fields turn blue with the happy results of their activity.
And then in October, to accompany the glory of reddened and yellowed leaves, the denuded expanses will celebrate their victory over burning, tracheal mites, and picking by turning scarlet, a color so deep and pure that my breath is short in their presence.
A terrible day of resistance and rebellion: My computer has refused to obey my instructions. I press F6 to delete a line. Instead, two prints of the line I wish to take out appear. I want to move up a line. It refuses to obey. I press ^G to delete a letter. Two of that letter appear on the screen.
At first I believe that my little IBM clone is rebelling against what the manual calls my ‘commands.’ It seems afflicted by what the Germans say is Schadenfreude, satisfaction and pleasure the clone feels at my misfortune. It gloats at my frustration, adding unwillingness to its resistance. It will not move a block of type I have it in mind to put in another place in this memoir.
Suddenly, everything becomes clear. The clone is tired of being ordered around like a common servant. I have underrated its intelligence, its talent, and its judgment. It has stopped being my amanuensis, my gofer, and decided that, for six years, my instructions have been foolish, ineffective, poorly chosen, lacking precision and wit, indeed, dictatorial. It will now do what it thinks best. It has become a critic.
An old friend, Woodie Crohn, comes by from Buffalo. He is retired from medical practice. We talk about his famous father, for whom Crohn’s disease is named. I hear, for the first time, that Burrill B. Crohn was one of twelve children of an impoverished immigrant family. Then I remember Burrill telling me years ago that he had no carfare to get to City College of New York, so he would walk the hundred blocks early in the day and home again after dark. He earned his expenses for medical school. He became one of New York City’s most eminent internists, practicing still when he was in his nineties. After the celebration of his ninety-ninth birthday with his family and many friends, he was hospitalized for two months, and died.
I recall a funny (and terrible) story he once told me. He had treated a patient in her home on Park Avenue and taken away with him a urine specimen. He wrapped the bottle in a brown paper bag and placed it on the front seat of his car when he went on to the next patient. He was returning to his parked car from that call when he saw a hobo (what a homeless man was called in the thirties) reach into the car and grab the paper bag. Horrified at what he realized was the hobo’s intention, he shouted after him. The hobo heard him and ran. Burrill began to chase him, and only gave up when he realized he was outdistanced.
He said he spent some time imagining the man’s first mouthful. He wondered if it might not have been the beginning of the poor chap’s rehabilitation.
Burrill and I became friends when I was a college freshman. In the days of house calls, he came to treat me for infectious hepatitis. I stayed in bed for months, feeling so sick that dying seemed an attractive alternative. Dr. Crohn’s visits were the only virtue of that awful winter. After he examined me, he would stay to talk about books he had read recently, and often, when I showed some valetudinarian interest, would bring them on his next visit for me to read. I remember that in this way I became acquainted with George Santayana’s only novel, The Last Puritan, The Letters of William James, and the novels of his brother.
I often find it hard to believe in the death of someone at whose demise I was not present. The past, for me, is increasingly present. So Burrill is still over there on Park Avenue, packing his black bag full of syringes, brown urine-specimen bottles, and maybe a novel by Edith Wharton, whom he admired, on his way to our apartment on West End Avenue to medicate me, tell me a funny story, and ask what I thought about The Wings of the Dove.
Conversation overheard in the bookstore:
A grown daughter and her middle-aged mother are looking at books. The mother shows the daughter (or it may be the other way around) a volume by Eudora Welty.
‘She’s a good writer.’
The other replies: ‘I never heard of her.’
‘She’s won prizes—that Swedish prize, you know, what’s it called?’
‘The Pulitzer Prize?’
‘That’s it. She’s won that.’
They both inspect The Optimist’s Daughter, and then return it to the shelf.
Sedgwick, the town of which the village of Sargentville, population two hundred or so, is a part, held a town meeting last night. A plan has been drawn up by an appointed committee to control growth in the area. Based on responses from the citizenry, it provides for very little commercial growth, and very tightly controlled residential growth. ‘Development’ (that despised word) would seem to have been circumvented by the required size of acreage on which it is possible to build, and by the amount of waterfront required for a single dwelling.
But still, there is ground for dissension. The village has one lovely, elevated site, Caterpillar Hill, from which, on a clear day, it is possible to obtain a panoramic view of Walker Pond (actually a large lake), Penobscot Bay, the Reach, and far out, the sea. It is a wondrous sight, and many tourists, as well as residents, stop their cars there and climb out to take pictures or to enjoy the view. We often go up to watch the sun set over the Castine Hills.
The plan calls for the preservation of the outlook from that place at the top of the hill to guarantee that ‘our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy it.’ But protection of personal property is to be the theme of the rest of the meeting. A longtime resident, who owns almost one hundred acres of blueberry fields on the hill and whose property encompasses the view area, demands to know if someone is going to tell her what to do with her land.
‘Oh no, not at all,’ says the selectman. ‘We’re just suggesting what might be done to preserve …’
‘That’s what I mean,’ says the redoubtable lady.
So it goes, back and forth, nothing won or lost or settled, only the occasional Maine expression of fierce, outspoken opposition to any intrusion upon property rights, any hint of communal use or preservation for the future.
I read in yesterday’s Times that the newly refurbished Guggenheim Museum will open today in New York City. The new cafe area is not quite finished. So the hot dog wagon jus
t around the corner is doing a very good business, its owner says. But then, he and his father before him have sold hot dogs on this spot for many years. What is more, the frankfurter entrepreneur has contributed one thousand dollars to the renewal work on the building.
My two-year-old grandchild, Maya, and her newborn sister, Hannah, will not come here to visit this summer. Maya dislikes flying, because her ears plug up upon descent; this is very painful. But she may go to see her New York aunt because she can be taken there by train.
Telephone conversation between her and her Aunt Barbie, reported to me this morning:
‘Will you come to New York to see us? Sam and I will take you to the movies.’ (She is devoted to Beauty and the Beast.)
Maya: ‘Oh yes, I’ll come.’
Her aunt: ‘You can bring your mother and father.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Hannah can come too.’
Maya, very quickly: ‘Oh no, Hannah doesn’t like movies.’
After talking about the possibility for four years, we have finally plowed, fertilized, and dug a trench for an asparagus bed. What is more, after a few weeks, some wispy spears have appeared, so thin that Sybil says they have only one side.… Next year, Deo volente, they will be somewhat thicker, but still not edible. An asparagus bed is an act of faith in the future. With luck we will be able to eat the vegetable in 1994.
Last evening Harold Casey brought my new hard disk, transferring everything I need from the ailing, moribund one (now named for the eminent critic Edmund Wilson) to the Duracom Desksaver in about fifteen minutes, whole books, everything that took me years to enter into it. The new computer is two-thirds the size of the old one, but its capacity is the same. It works so fast that it embarrasses me, like the electric typewriter when first I took it up. That machine put me to shame with its impatient humming while I sat frozen and mute, unable to think of anything to write.
A new addition is an expensive gadget called a Tripplite, which will provide me with fifteen minutes of additional power in case of an outage or brownout, more than enough time to turn off all the gadgetry and save the doubtless immortal prose I have been endowing it with. In this part of Maine there are frequent failures of this kind; I am now protected against them. But not, I fear, against the failure of ideas or imagination.
This morning I put the new PC to work. I write, enter, print out, and then rewrite and correct. I change and rearrange. I take out and bring back. Insert and omit. The new draft (the third) bears very little resemblance to the first. Later, I talk by telephone to Helen Yglesias, who listens to my bragging about my technical skills. I ask her: ‘Do I do all this maneuvering out of love for the versatility of the program and the machinery, or because I believe it improves my prose?’
She reminds me that things are sometimes better before one rewrites them.
For the summer, at St. Francis-by-the-Sea Church (a name no longer pertinent, since the old Methodist church has been moved to a meadow in Blue Hill at least three miles from the water and rechristened Episcopal), there is a substitute priest who lives near here in the summer and is professor of music at Wheaton College during the academic year. Carlton Russell gives good sermons, full of learned references, and he is sensitive to questions of language. Last Sunday he bemoaned the fact that the new translation of the Bible had made ‘earthen vessel’ into ‘clay pot,’ a simplification William Strunk would have approved of, but which has singularly little poetry to it.
On the other hand, we listened to the news last evening, hearing about Republicans who ‘utilize’ dirty tricks in their political campaign. Sybil asked: ‘What happened to “use”?’ And then we witnessed the funeral of a policeman in Washington, D.C., whose ‘casket’ was borne by his fellow officers. And once again she wondered, whatever happened to ‘coffin’?
This year the winter lasted well into early June, so there was almost no spring. The cold went on until yesterday, Bastille Day. Today feels very much like fall. Sybil builds a fire in the bookstore’s woodstove, and I put on a wool sweater. There are two blankets on the bed. By the end of June we had not yet put our dinghy in the water, and I, the inveterate swimmer, have not tried the Cove.
Summer comes to central coastal Maine at noon about once a week in August. It is the view of some that summer here is a minority opinion, or a kindly judgment, or a tenet of faith, or a debatable figment of the local imagination.
Last evening we heard a weatherman describing the rain, fog, and cold we are to expect this week. He ended his report by saying:
‘There’s a lot of weather out there.’
Senator Everett Dirksen, quoted on the radio this morning: ‘A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon it adds up to real money.’ My grandmother and her pennies.…
Tourists seem not to be deterred by weather. They come to Maine in their season of summer. They come for strange reasons, I learned on the plane to Washington last week. I sat next to an attractive young woman, a college student from Texas, who told me she had been visiting her roommate’s parents in Boston. When she asked, I told her I was from Maine, words that come slowly to me because I am so recently a Maine resident.
‘Oh, my roommate and I went to Maine for a week,’ she said.
‘Where in Maine?’ I asked, expecting to hear of the camping places, Baxter State Park, Acadia, a whale-watching excursion off Northeast Harbor perhaps.
‘Kittery,’ she said. ‘Shopping in the discount stores in the mall.’
Abigail McCarthy came to lunch today. She is visiting her friends the Dudmans, and Helen drives her down from Cranberry Island, where they summer. I ask Abigail why we did not see Eugene on TV at the Democratic National Convention in New York. The new ‘young Turks’ of the party offered him two tickets to the affair in an obscure section of the hall, she said, and he thought there should have been five, as he was a candidate, no matter how unrecognized by the party. So he did not attend. The much-revered (in my time) Senator Edward Muskie was offered two tickets; he went instead to Moscow.
These are McCarthy’s spiritual children who are now in the spotlight. Bill Clinton did not wish to go to Vietnam; ‘Clean Gene’ was the leader of the objectors to that insane war. Now it is probably not politic to recognize him in his old age, in their flourishing youth.
After we have exhausted politics, Helen Dudman tells me she has a friend who hates Maine. She claims it is ‘east of the United States.’
Reluctantly, I go to Washington, D.C., for a committee meeting, an ad hoc offshoot of my senatorial duties in the Phi Beta Kappa Society. The weather there is terrible, the capital’s usual hot and humid summer days, known as humiture, the discomfort one feels in such conditions. (Did I wonder in Maine where summer was? Ah, it is here.)
The two days of meetings are worse. I cannot remember how I allowed myself to be put on this committee (PBK has so many committees that it maintains a Committee on Committees), or why I ever agreed to take this step back into the time-and-energy-consuming activities of the academic world by becoming a member of the Senate. Ego. I am paying for it now.
(Footnote on Committee on Committees: It reminds me of another foolishness that took place during a faculty meeting at the College of Saint Rose. After four fruitless hours of debate on some subject I can no longer remember, we took a vote on whether to take a vote. On that vote, one member of the faculty, famous for his timidity in the presence of the nuns, voted to abstain.)
All the things I most disliked about academic meetings in the old days were present at this one: the fraudulent surface of civility, the undercurrent of prearranged and determined agendas, the rude disregard of a woman chairman by male members of the executive committee accustomed to dominating every occasion of their privileged lives, their loud (or contrivedly too-soft) and always obtrusive voices carrying every question and insisting on every answer. My humiture was intense. I came away feeling sick, tired, discouraged, and angry at myself for spending four days of my diminishing supply of time in this absurd
way.
On the plane I decided to resign.
But there was one saving grace to the trip. I learned that Alice Walker would be at a midtown store signing books. I left the offices of PBK, heated almost to exploding, and calmed down, cooled down, when she and I had a short, warm reunion. She is an old acquaintance from MacDowell days. I have always admired her talent and her person. A long line of admirers buying her new book and waiting for her to sign it stretched out the door of Vertigo, a bookstore devoted in large part to black writers.
The queue was composed of black and white readers, a good sign that the best black writers have a mixed following, as it should be. Soon there will be no need for separate courses in black fiction. I noticed, last Sunday, that three black women are on the Times best-seller list: Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.
May Sarton comes for a short, overnight visit, with her friend Susan Sherman. Susan is young (by our standards), energetic, and devoted to May. May tells me she has been feeling better since the Westbrook College gathering to which more than three hundred persons came to read papers about her work and hear her read her own new poems written for her eightieth birthday.
But the days she was here she was not well. She was constantly in bad pain (she told me later in a letter), and yet her determined spirit made her hide it from us. She talked of her delight in the recognition (‘at last,’ she said) by the academic community, and of her new journal, which had to be spoken into a dictaphone because she was not up to long spells of writing by hand or typewriter. It is to be called Encore, and will appear for her eighty-first birthday, another achievement by a gallant writer whose job, she has always believed, is to write, quand même.
I thought of Henry James. In the midst of writing What Maisie Knew he developed a rheumatic right wrist. He abandoned writing his novels and letters by hand and began to dictate them to a typist. When he saw his typed letters he said they suffered from ‘a fierce legibility.’ He grew fond of the sound of the typewriter, and said his prose came to the page ‘through an embroidered veil of sound.’ The odd thing was, the longer he dictated the more complex grew his writing.
Extra Innings Page 23