botanizing

Hold Still

“. . . to whatever extent photographs can reveal the dark mysteries of a haunted landscape, I set out to make them.” - Sally Mann from Hold Still

Last weekend I read photographer Sally Mann’s new memoir Hold Still, in which she unpacks the boxes of her ancestors’ photographs, letters, journals, and relicts and turns them into stories, into her story, borne from and braided with their lives and their places.  Place is central to Mann, who lives on a farm along the Maury River in Virginia, and writes about the importance of life on the river, on her isolated farm, and in the conflicted contemporary South, and each of those is a subject of her photographs.  If place is one locus for Mann, then memory, in both her photographs and memoir, is the second locus, but one without a frame, for every memory recalled, she tells us, is a memory altered and altered again at its next recall.  “[T]he exercise of our memory,” Mann writes, “does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.”  And photographs lie in their hold of memory.

I had a wonderful time with the book.

Part Wild in the Conner Museum

Writer Ceiridwen Terrill, author of the books Part Wild: One Woman's Journey with a Creature Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs and Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species, visited campus yesterday.  At dinner, Ceiridwen spoke about voice and the plans for her next book on the radioactive Hanford site in central Washington and the lives that all of us lead with nuclear radiation.  All of the authors around the dinner table talked about favorite writers and others.  Later Ceiridwen read from Part Wild to an audience of about fifty at an event co-sponsored by the Conner Museum of Natural History and the Visiting Writers Series.  Afterward, we went to a reception in the Conner Museum, where Ceiridwen chatted with everyone and signed copies of her books.

A Year

A year.  A friend told me in an email that it had been a year since I had posted at Botanizing.  It has been a year of talking and cooking rather than writing.  Stories seemed never as easily at hand as a frying pan.

A year ago, we had just returned from a collecting trip in Arizona and Utah.  The monsoon rains had chased us from Arizona, and we spent our last few days of the trip looking for rock art in canyons of southern Utah.  From there we had a long drive home—through mountains, over passes, up intermountain valleys, through rain, and we stopped at Mollie’s in Snowville for breakfast.  Then we bolted across the plains, crossing and recrossing the Snake River, and then climbing into the mountains of Idaho, which we exited to meet the hills of the Palouse.  At home, young hawks were screaming in the nest behind the house.

Soon after returning from the desert we were in the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho, where a blocked road prevented us from reaching a trailhead we wanted to use for a backpack.  We retreated down the mountains to the

Selway River and to its tributary, Meadow Creek, where we camped.  We walked up Meadow Creek, where the dew wet leaves of grasses slapped against my shins.   The winged stems of Lathyrus hung like the weighted beams of balances over the trail.  The slope above us was an old burn, where snags of cedars stood.  The burnt cedars had trunks of black charcoal that shone bluish in the sun from the burnishing of wind and weather.  Adrian harvested thimbleberries and serviceberries as we walked. 

At the beginning of October, we made a backpack up the Selway River.  There was a wildfire—by then under control—in the river valley, where a scrim of white smoke covered the hills, and we stopped only a short distance beyond Race Creek.  Smoke was our gauge.    We camped on a sand shelf above a point bar, and in the evening, when breezes began to move upriver, the scent of smoke cleared.

It was also in October that I was asked to help lead the development of a new arts and sciences college at our university.  It had been decided a few weeks earlier that our then colleges of sciences and liberal arts would be merged to form a single college.  My next eight months were focused on merger planning and formulating recommendations for the structures and procedures of the new college.  This was an incredible opportunity—how often does one get to create a new college?

The first frost of the season came on 25 October to place briefly a light white coat on the roof of the house behind us.  I was reading V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which began:  “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”  The arrogance was shocking.

We saw Carmen at Seattle Opera.  This was thoroughly enjoyable.

 

In early November, I went to an informal session on ‘Ecopoetics on the Palouse.’  One of the participants said that a “poem is an ecosystem.”  I wondered about this. It was unclear to me what the speaker may have meant:  was it meant as a simile or as a description of a poem’s complexity and function?   Most poems, especially any short of long, narrative verses, are too simple to stand in comparison to ecosystems.  What is the simile for a poem in the ecology of place?  A bunch grass, perhaps?  Maybe a lyrical poem is just a blade of grass?

I delighted in reading Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.  The book had a lovely shadowy tone, a slight tinge of melancholy.  The story looked back to a journey to ask what had there been before and what was there after that event—“this voyage would be a great education,” one of characters told the young protagonist.

November was a brown season.  The hills of the Palouse showed dark soil or lighter crop stubble.   In the conifer forest where we walked on the north side of a tall butte, the woods were nearly a cave of brown tree trunks, and the trail was coated by a thick thatch of golden brown needles.  A brown Varied Thrush sat quietly on the shadowed branch of a Douglas Fir.  I looked to find the greens of the season:  dark canopy, stringy networks of lichens, and mosses.

In late December and early January, we traveled to Costa Rica for several days on the Osa Peninsula and then in Monteverde.  On the Osa Peninsula, our cabin overlooking the ocean was surrounded by forest.  Blackhooded Antshrikes pecked about the shrubby shadows while Riverside Wrens built a nest in the shrubs.  Amid their vital activities, I read on the deck.  We botanized and birded and spent a few minutes on the beach.  At Monteverde, we walked in the clouds while continuing to bird and botanize.  At the end of the trip, we visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose.  The old building occupied by the Museum was wonderful—it was barn-like in its first gallery and had rough, unfinished walls in a gallery of photographs.

Mid January:  Atop a red buoy, numbered 44, anchored in the middle of the former Snake River, now the Lower Granite Lake, which backs behind Lower Granite Dam, there stood a Great Blue Heron.  It seemed like a poem.

The dammed Snake, once

a river that slithered

among stone scaled hills,

lies in flat water

navigated by grain barges.

Red buoys mark channel.

A hunter watches,

still in evening shadows—

a Great Blue Heron

atop buoy 44—

awaits any movement—

a fish, a river.

At Seattle Opera, we see Verdi’s Attila, which I do not enjoy.  There was lovely choral singing, and there were a few beautiful arias, but the story and its violent themes were unappealing.  In contrast to the opera, we saw a fabulous performance only a few days earlier by the Ying Quartet at the University of Idaho.  They played two contemporary pieces and then Beethoven’s final string quartet.  The concert was absolutely energizing, and I spent days afterward looking around the web to hear other pieces related to the music that was performed.

“Ha . . . Ha . . .”  A Great Horned Owl called sharply as I approached home in the dark of a cold evening.   From another tall conifer its companion answered, “Hoo Hoo Hoo.”  The conversation warmed me.

We saw Glück’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Seattle Opera in late February.  It was lovely—the music, the singing, the ballet, and Amour portrayed as a woman on a bicycle.  We also went to the exhibit Gauguin and Polynesia at Seattle Art Museum.  This was a great chance to see not only many paintings by Gauguin from his time in Polynesia but also to see his carvings and material collections.

In March, we traveled to Indianapolis, where I had much of a day in the art museum.  One of the first paintings I saw was Gauguin’s “Landscape near Arles,” which was one of the first paintings he made after joining Van Gogh in the ‘studio in the south.’  The painting is a tight composition of a haystack framed by a building on the left, a house in the back, and by trees.  The haystack is colorful—in yellow and oranges done in narrow, short brush strokes—Van Gogh’s colors and Van Gogh’s brush strokes.  Whistler’s “Harmony in Pink and Gray:  Lady Meux” was exceptional.  I especially enjoyed the collection of work by Indiana painters and American impressionists from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries—many of these were artists that had gone to Paris for training and came home with lighter colors and bolder brush strokes.  There were wonderful pieces by the American modernists Sloan, Hartley, and O’Keeffe, and among these I discovered an artist unknown to be before:  Victor Higgins.  Higgins was originally from Indiana, but he had gone to Europe for training, and later moved to Taos, where he painted mostly landscapes.  His painting of barren hills in New Mexico made me want to take brushes and tubes of paint to the Southwest.

In April, the tributaries of the Selway River were in flood so we stopped our hike at Packer Creek and clambered to the top of a large boulder a few feet out in the river’s channel.  We watched dippers.  One jumped repeatedly in and out of the breaking white water from a steep stone in the river’s splash zone.  Fast and regular like the ratchet action of a machine, the bird was in and out, in and out, and in and out of the river.  After feeding, the dipper flew up the cliff face to land on a steep slab of stone just below a clump of dried moss.  It stood there—but did not stand still for a dipper is seldom still—it did kneebends and pecked at soil in the cracks of the cliff until it slipped into a hole at the base of the moss clump.  Soon anther dipper flew across the river to the same moss clump.  It, too, stood for a few moments and then slipped beneath the moss.

I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in early May.  Before this trip I had read Patricia Vigderman’s The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which was marvelously quirky, much like the museum itself.  The book’s short chapters each had a title taken from a work of art in the museum, but they were less about art in the galleries than the art of making a life.  Vigderman does not tell a straight-forward biographical story about Gardner; instead, she writes around the life of Gardner, who had burned all of her personal letters, attempted to maintain the privacy of her life, even to remain elusive, and the book becomes a circumscription—bounding Gardner by stories about her home, her collections, and the painters, writers and friends that were close to her.  I enjoyed the museum as well, especially as the collection of one individual, which we rarely have the chance to see.

We see Madame Butterfly at Seattle Opera.  It’s too shallow despite some good music.

In late May, I left the northwest for several weeks of fieldwork on the Colorado Plateau.  We are exploring how the complex topography of the Colorado Plateau has shaped plant migration patterns, provided glacial refugia, and influenced the evolution of new species using Cronquist’s blazing star (Mentzelia cronquistii) and a few of its closest relatives.  I looked for populations to sample and spent days driving rough roads, walking hills, and clambering up cliffs—my favorite kind of travel.  Mostly I found dead individuals in populations that should have been thriving—possibly an adverse effect of the persistent drought in this region and certainly a detriment to our research.  After a week in Utah, I moved on to the Grand Canyon, which is the southernmost and lowest elevation reach of Cronquist’s blazing star, making this area a likely candidate as a glacial refuge that could have played a role in the repopulation of the Colorado Plateau following the Pleistocene glaciation.  With friends and others involved in the project, I backpacked through the canyon for a week.  Once we emerged from the Grand Canyon, I returned to Utah for another week of collecting.

In early July, I attended the annual professional conference for botanists, which was held this year in Columbus, Ohio, where recent high temperatures and violent storms had impacted the city’s environment.  During the three days I was at the conference, I went outside only once to have dinner a few blocks from my hotel; otherwise, I ate and spend my days in talks and meetings in the hotel and convention center complex.  My schedule and environment were entirely contained for days.  On my flight to Ohio, I read Frank Waters’s Pumpkin Seed Point and on my return flight read Gary Nabhan’s The Desert Smells Like Rain—two books centered on Native American life in Arizona.  While my body was contained in aircraft and hotels, my mind wandered the western landscape.

In the middle of July we were still having rain.  It had been a cool, wet spring and summer.  Snow and cold persisted through much of the spring and then rain and cool days through June.  Usually, by the beginning of July our days in the inland Northwest have turned dry—arid provides a better sense of those days—in which there can be a sharp heat and intense dryness.  This year, in contrast, we have been having regular thunderstorms, which in the past were exceptionally rare in this region.

We backpacked among the headwaters of Gedney Creek, which drains to the Selway River, in the Bitterroot Mountains.  The huckleberries were ripe, and Adrian ate as she walked.  We crossed Canteen Creek on stones.  Its shallow water, rippled by flow over the stones, projected shadows on the bedding stones that made the creek appear to be coated in yellow scales like the back of a showy, dryland lizard.  On the backpack, I read Maureen McLane's new book My Poets and was fascinated by its collage style that melded criticism, poetry and personal narrative.  It was quite beautiful.  I especially enjoyed the chapter on Elizabeth Bishop (Gertrude Stein) that was written in the style of Stein.

 

In the basement of the campus library, where seldom read books are kept (mostly untended and often in disarray) in compactors—one of my favorite places to gather reading material—I picked-up Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos.  It’s an odd book about Dodge Luhan’s interactions with D. H. Lawrence during the time he was in Taos.  Dodge Luhan addresses the book to the poet Robinson Jeffers, which she begins by saying:  “You know Jeffers, after I met you, I felt that you and Lawrence ought to know each other, that you would have liked and understood each other . . .”  I wondered if I should be in on this conversation, which seemed a personal triangulation that didn’t really involve me—after all, I have never really liked or understood Lawrence.  One wanted to ask Dodge Luhan why the distraction of Robinson Jeffers was introduced—while reading about Lawrence and Taos, I kept thinking about Jeffers in his Tor on the coast of California.  Yet, the trope of a private conversation—making the reader an eavesdropper—has its uniqueness and interest.  There was in the book (on page 4) this lovely description of the way Taos infiltrated one’s life:   “The mountain and the fields were not separate from one’s life.  One did not go out to things, one was part of them.  The mountain, if anything, came to one, came into the house; one ate it with the cake.”

I have been buying a piece of cake with the groceries each week.  We have our cake, our music, our art, and our mountains.

Photographs

1. Selway River; 2. Bisbee Antiques in Bisbee, Arizona; 3. Mollie’s Café in Snowville, Utah; 4. Cayuse Lake, Clearwater Mountains; 5. Meadow Creek, a tributary of the Selway; 6. Selway River; 7. Cloud above ridge along the Selway River; 8. Selway River; 9. Deleted; 10. Lower Ribbon Falls, Grand Canyon; 11. Petroglyphs in Buckhorn Wash, Utah; 12. View from our cabin on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica; 13. “Elvis 3D” by Juliana Barquero in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose, Costa Rica; 14. Capuchin monkey, Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica; 15. Indianapolis Museum of Art; 16. Rock clematis (Clematis columbiana); 17. Selway River; 18. Selway River; 19. The Green River in Utah on a moonlit night with lightning; 20. Grand Canyon; 21. Backpacking in Grand Canyon; 22. In the vicinity of Last Chance Wash, San Rafael Swell, Utah; 23. Hotel room, Columbus, Ohio; 24. Stones in Canteen Creek, Bitterroot Mountains; 25. Leaning teacup in our campsite at Gedney Creek in Nez Perce National Forest; 26. Deleted; 27. Colorado River in Grand Canyon.

Reading Sebald

Debbie, Peter, and I read recently W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and met this week for dinner to discuss the book.  I had first read the book, along with Sebald’s Austerlitz and The Natural History of Destruction, about four years ago as I explored relationships between stories and photographs.  The Rings of Saturn interested me as I thought about ways to write about travel, especially the way that stories could emerge from walking.

The Rings of Saturn has a setting—a walking trip taken by the author through the English countryside in Suffolk—but it does not have a theme.  The book has been compared to a collage—it is an assembly of stories that on the whole create an impression, but collectively the stories provide no narrative arc.  The walk, which could provide the basis of a narrative, provides only as disjointed locales of reference that serve as points of departure for the stories.  Sebald’s landscape is minimally described, but the independent stories that have tenuous roots in or wildly twining tendrils that grasp for the places Sebald visits are vividly told.

Near the beginning of The Rings of Saturn, where he writes of the author Thomas Browne, Sebald suggests (p. 18) that the earlier author saw the world as “no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond.”  This serves also as an excellent description of The Rings of Saturn in which the villages and landscape of Suffolk are little more than umbral shadows cast for stories caught from the past.

* * *

Photo by DL

Up the river with Ray

After we rise in the morning, I fix tea water and a breakfast of eggs and sausage for everyone.  We clean-up the campsite, and disperse to prepare our packs for a walk up the Selway River.  Ray, as he walks down the hill from the campground’s pit toilet, announces, “I read a poem by W. S. Merwin while on the privy.”  Debbie laughs.  “Ray,” I say, “that sounds like the first lines of a poem.”   

Soon, Ray shoulders his pack, grabs his pole, and walks to the trailhead.  A few minutes later, Debbie and Peter depart.  Adrian and I continue to pack and, then, we also shoulder our backpacks to walk up the river.  We walk for nearly three hours and go a little more than three miles.  

Debbie, Peter, and Ray lie on a point bar, where they bask in the hot afternoon sun after a swim in the chilly Selway, when Adrian and I arrive.  We chat through the remainder of the afternoon about the poems of William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, and Inger Christensen.  

Ray says, “Ouzels sound to me like change jangling in your pocket.”  Soon, as he sits with his back to the river, we hear the jangling call of a bird as it flies upriver.  Ray swiftly tilts his head to catch the call.  “Hear that?” he says, “It’s an ouzel.”  We always enjoy the ouzels on the Selway.  We’ve watched them dive from boulders to water at some campsites.  At other sites, we have waited pensively for those dives when the ouzels were contented simply to do knee-bends on riverside stones.  I wait, too, for Ray to write a jangling poem about the behaviors of ouzels as he has done for salmon and wolverines.  

As the afternoon becomes evening, we gather firewood, and Ray starts a fire on the point bar that will be our campsite.  We reconnoiter spots around the fire—expecting the wind to go either up river or down—and put our sleeping pads on the sand around the fire where we hope that smoke will not go.  

In the darkness, Ray reads aloud from the collected poems of Theodore Roethke.  He asks the rest of us to each read a stanza of Roethke’s poem “The Rose” and, by the light of our headlamps, we read.  Debbie begins:  “There are those to whom place is unimportant, / But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, / Is important . . .”  

This place, the Selway River, is important.  By walking this river over the years we have built of steps our history in this place.  Point bars have become the places of stories.  The river’s flow, its sinuous channel, and its rippled reflections of light have become poems.  

When we finish reading Roethke’s “The Rose,” accompanied by the rush of the river and the chirruping of tree frogs, we leave the fire to head to our tents for the night.  I think about this line from Roethke’s poem: “It is here that the poet claims to find his true self.”  I am not a poet, and I am uncertain about true selves, but many claims reside here for me.  I find on the Selway River solace, calm, and beauty as well as good friends, Ray’s stories, and nights of poetry.

* * *

The photograph of the group around the fire was taken by Adrian.

Reading R. S. Thomas

As I walked home from work on Friday, I flipped open the Collected Poems of R. S. Thomas to find “A Welshman at St. James’ Park.”  The London park of the poem is much like our manicured campus, where I walked in the shade of trees and read the poem’s opening:  “I am invited to enter these gardens / As one of the public . . .”

The cantankerous poet is at once at odds with the park’s regulations to keep the mass of urban humanity in check, including “To keep off the grass and sample flowers / Without touching them; to admire birds / That have been seduced from wildness by / bread they are pelted with.” The long trip to London from his Welsh countryside helps Thomas see how counter he is to conforming not just to the park’s rules:

                             I am not one

Of the public; I have come a long way

To realise it.  Under the sun’s

Feathers are the sinews of stone,

The curved claws.  

His sense runs counter to the public and even to humanity; the poet sees himself more of nature than of humanity and sees, under the park’s feathery light, his sinewy muscles are earthy stone, and his hands are animal-like claws.  His urge is for a place more primal than a park:  “I think of a Welsh hill / That is without fencing . . .”  I smile at the power of Thomas’s unease in the poem.  

Thomas goes further in his poem “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man.”  We find him not merely revealing his earthy and animal sides but knowing the thoughts of animals and speaking for them, which he does through blackbirds.  

“Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man” is the poem that sent me today to the library.  I wanted to know more about the man who had written this poem and to read more of his writing.  I checked-out of the library with not only his Collected Poems but also a volume of later poems, his selected prose, and a book of criticism.  My urges are scholarly.  

I was drawn to Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds” by an another, earlier and better known, poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens.   The Stevens poem is one of my favorites.  It is a poetic replica of what a Japanese artist, like Hokusai or Hirosige, might have designed for a series of woodblock prints.  Replete with senuous imagery, “Thirteen Ways” leans stylistically toward traditional Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku and tanka, which consist of few lines and equate a single strong image with a mood or sense.  I was curious how Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds” might respond to Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways.”  

That response by Thomas is largely homage, held in the echo of his title and his poem’s structure of 13 brief stanzas.  What Thomas has taken from Stevens is the imagery of blackbirds.  In Stevens’s poem those blackbirds had a role that was all-encompassing and almost god-like, but in Thomas’s poem the blackbirds are more like the citizens.    

In Stevens’s  “Thirteen Ways,” we find perceptions of unity and continuity in the world; in Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds,” we find that disruption, even evil, has entered the ecologically unified world because man is part of nature but acts willfully apart from nature.  Where Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways” was stylistically delicate and elliptical, Thomas’s poem is hard and direct, reflecting, perhaps, our better understanding, than we had early in the twentieth century when Stevens’s poem was written, that many ecological dilemmas are human created and spiraling out of human control.  

“Thirteen Blackbirds” expresses wariness of the human-centered world and sees man as evil in nature.  The poem sets us first in an Edenic world where good and evil are unknown, but they are foreshadowed by the presence of man.  A shadow becomes real in stanza 3 when devilish—“forked”—man, emblematic of evil, creates “darkness / stretching from horizon / to horizon” when he stands out-sized in natural environments, here exemplified by a moor, where nothing native is higher than a low bush.   

The problem of man, the blackbirds state clearly in stanza 5, where “the garden is disturbed,” is that he expects “everything to come to him.”  That all of nature should be available to man to till and mine creates imbalances distasteful to Thomas’s blackbirds.  In stanza 6, the blackbirds “wipe our beaks / on the branches / wasting the dawn’s / jewellery to get rid / of the taste of a man.”  Man infiltrates all and the blackbirds in stanza 12 have so tired of hearing him by day that at night “we stop our ears / lest we should hear tell / of the man in the moon.”   

The life of fair seasons, like the time of plentiful resources on Earth, ends in stanza 13, with the departure of migrants, and the poem ends with a question:  “When they return / in the spring to the garden,  / will there be a man among them?”  The question is at once wishful—the blackbirds seeking a time without the disruptions of humans—and uncertain—what should the blackbirds expect of humans who pillage resources and abandon the spoils.  

Where Wallace Stevens framed his “Thirteen Ways” using first and last stanzas beset by snow, in which the liveliness of the blackbird’s eye is posed against pastoral snowy mountains at the beginning and the calmness of the blackbird stands against active and inevitable weather in the last stanza, Thomas has framed his with scenes in a garden.  That garden, with its Edenic reverberences of good and evil at the beginning of the poem, raises the importance of Thomas’s life as a curate in the Anglican Church and the persistence of God and religious themes in his poetry; those are themes beyond both my ken and desire.  

While his god is called and questioned frequently in Thomas’s poems, his beliefs for me recall those of Robinson Jeffers.  In the preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), Jeffers called for a philosophy of “inhumanism,” which he described as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man.”  The emphasis of Thomas’s  “Thirteen Blackbirds” remains man (and, perhaps, the evil “taste of a man”), but we might say that the perspective of this poem and others by Thomas are “not-man.”

Light reading

I read recently in the mornings when the early light came down my driveway, in the eastern-most of my southern windows, and slipped over my shoulder onto the page.  The illuminated text was a pleasure.  I read long for a few days and lived in the pages of A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, while I subsisted on tea, toast, and delicious paragraphs.

Woolf: A Gift in the Library

I stopped by the archives of the library to read in preparation for an upcoming trip.  The receptionist took my book request and stepped into the back to have someone retrieve the book.   A moment later I heard the voice of Trevor Bond, the head of the archive, call my name.

“There is something I want to show you,” Trevor said.

I followed him behind the reception area to a corridor where offices are located and then into a large room where books are stored.  This is one of the rooms where the library keeps some of its most valuable and oldest collections. 

Trevor spread his hand toward a wall of books.  “We’ve begun to reorganize the Woolf collection,” he said.

One of the important collections in our university archive is the personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, which includes over 9000 volumes.  The archive is in the process of reorganizing the volumes of the Woolf library to maintain them as an integrated group of books to enhance use by scholars.  Trevor knows that I have a fondness for Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle, and he wanted to show me the progress that was being made on the reorganization of the Woolf library.

The Woolf library is being placed on shelves that stand over six feet high and extend for nearly 50 feet along a wall through two rooms.  About 15 linear feet of wall are now covered by the Woolfs’ books.  “I expect they will ultimately extend all the way through the next room and around the corner,” Trevor said about the Woolf library.  I made a quick estimation that it would be about 300 square feet of books.  [And I also made a quick calculation of the square feet of books in my personal library . . . about 165 square feet, although my collection of paperbacks is hardly as interesting as the books in the Woolf library.]

As Trevor and I talked, I noticed a small volume on St. Kilda and thought about Leslie Stephen’s fondness for travel, especially in the mountains.  Many of the books that Virginia and Leonard had in the their personal library came from her father, Leslie Stephen. 

A copy of Frazier’s Golden Bough also caught my attention.  The Golden Bough was influential in the first half of the 20th century, and it played a role in my reading last weekend about the archeologist Arthur Evans and his investment of myth in the reports about excavations at Knossos.  I wondered whether Virginia Woolf had read Frazier’s Golden Bough and what she thought of it.

Trevor took the Golden Bough from the shelf and examined the opening pages to look for a name or notes.  On the end pages of the volume, there were handwritten notes in pencil.  “Leonard Woolf,” Trevor said, “made notes like that.  Organizing themes on the blank end pages.” 

Trevor then waved his hand with excitement and said, “Andrew just found this.”  Andrew is one of the graduate students from the English Department who is working this summer to reorganize the Woolf library.  Trevor reached for a heavy blue volume.  Its title was Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland.   Trevor opened the volume to an inscription written in a flowing hand.  The volume was a gift “presented to Mrs. Virginia Woolf by her devoted & obedient servant.”  It was signed “T. S. Eliot on the occasion of Christmas 1937.”  And at hand, I had a book handled by both T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.  It was a fine gift for an afternoon in June.

[The scan of the T.S. Eliot inscription in Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland was downloaded from the website of the Washington State University Libraries at http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/rssapp/rssviewer.aspx?Story=1127]

Books

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times had a review of Larry McMurtry’s new book, Books:  A Memoir.  The review was not especially strong, explaining that McMurtry’s narrative was disjointed and his stories were too often dropped before they were developed.  I immediately ordered the book despite the caveats raised by the Times.

Books:  A Memoir arrived quickly, and I read it yesterday.  The Times review as accurate; and as I read I wished that McMurtry had better developed his stories; yet, Books:  A Memoir was wonderful.

When I first opened Books I was amazed and a little intimidated by the list of books that McMurtry has published.  My response was the kind had by someone who can’t write books when faced with another who seems to have written so many with such ease and success.  But surely I read too much into a simple list.  Near the end of Books, Murtry talks about himself as a writer, describing writing as “neither a keen pleasure nor a hated chore.”  He calls it “simply my vocation.”   

I have read only two of McMurtry’s earlier books—All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers and The Last Picture Show.  The film of the latter is among my favorites, and I watch it every couple of years.  A copy of McMurtry’s Roads sits on my library shelves, and I look forward to reading it because my own interest in travelling American roads is only a little less strong than my interest in reading.  I have read regularly the reviews that McMurtry has published in the New York Review of Books, which are strikingly well informed, giving the impression of a writer who has exceptional facility with a broad body of knowledge.

Books is not about the vocation of writing books or the writing life, it is about what McMurtry calls “a powerful competitor” to writing:  book buying. Books is about having books—searching for, handling, accumulating, and then selling books.  It is about book collections and the book trade.

McMurtry says the “antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture.”  Books fits that culture as a succession of anecdotes.  His chapters are fragments of memories, barely shaped into stories.  Still, it holds the shape and stuff of a life about which McMurtry has cared—it has the joy of experience and the pleasure of various characters.  That experience and those characters provide a sociology of America and show our social structuring. 

Books reminded me of a used bookstore.  Its short chapters, one after another, were like the piles of books that crowd aisles.  It had valuable finds amid dross.  It was all a pleasure—one enjoys looking through the piles and scanning the books on the shelves, pulling out the interesting ones to see how they feel.

From its beginning, Books made my imagination hum.  I could read only a few sentences before my memories would overwhelm my concentration, and the words on the page would fuzz before the vivid images in my reveries.  McMurtry begins Books by telling us that his parents had not read him stories as a child, and he tells us where he discovers stories in the first books that he acquires.  And I was thinking about being read to as a child and thinking about my first books.  I was thinking about the consuming desire for books and the pleasure of reading.  I would read few paragraphs then put Books aside to reach for my pen.

*  *  *

Larry McMurtry, 2008. Books:  A Memoir.  Simon & Schuster, New York.

Dickinson’s Windows

South light of winters would have lain on Emily Dickinson’s small sleigh bed.  Her bed offered itself to both low south and late west light.  There were windows on each of those walls of her corner bedroom. Her small writing table stood angled between those two windows.  I have not thought about Dickinson and light.  They do not seem affiliated.  I have wondered about the values of her windows.  They were portals to spy on arrivals, allowing her moments to decide whether to remain hidden or to descend to conversation. Dickinson could ‘play’ from the windows, dropping sweets and surreptitious notes.

When I think about her windows, it is her mirror that comes to mind. A small mirror hung above her dresser, and I wonder whether she was too tightly framed by it.  I doubt a tiny mirror could have held Emily Dickinson’s ecstatic vision.  Seated at her writing table, however, she could have looked to the windows, eyes flitting to give a quick glance to south and west, to catch her own face in quarter profile in each window.  In her windows, Dickinson could have seen herself reflected against the outside world. She could see herself in the world without entering it, her face poised against leaves and the town, providing a cautiously distant perspective, a sense of self kept at reflective remove from wearying conflicts.

Below her mirror, Dickinson had hung pictures of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  She could capture her face in the mirror, then look down to her mentors, and up again, holding the shapes of their strongly outlined faces against her own in the mirror.  Her hands could be on the chest below the mirror.  She could reach down to the bottom drawer, where she had collected her own poetry, miscellaneous sheets as well as sheaves bound by string.

There was a large mirror over the fireplace in the Dickinson front parlour.  On my tour of the house there were several other people, including teenage girls who seemed to know Dickinson quite well.  When we were in the parlour, a lovely young woman, who was perhaps 16, asked the tour guide whether Dickinson had cared about her looks and how other people saw her. The guide could have told us about Dickinson’s tiny mirror, her reflective windows, and how she gazed at the pictures of Browning and Eliot, but these were not part of her answer for the young woman. After the guide’s answer, the young woman turned toward the parlour mirror.  She looked intently at her own face.  Here she was.  Her gaze was self-reflective, but the strong look connected to Emily, to questions of self and place in the world, and to wariness at the questions of the world’s gaze.  The young woman looked in the mirror as if looking through Emily’s windows to find the poet.

*   *   *
For RT, who shared her observations and put Emily Dickinson on our itinerary.