When my cousins from Ohio or my friends from west of the Mississippi land in New England they always ask for clam chowder, for lobster rolls, for fried clams.
Those who ever tasted them want them again, and those who never tasted them havehad their curiosity whet. What they don’t know is that we New Englanders argue among ourselves about which version of each is the real one.
Lobster rolls with butter or mayo? I hear that the former is preferred in Connecticut and the latter in Maine, which may be why this ever-so-diplomatic Massachusetts boy will order one without asking which it is. They never disappoint.
Clams with bellies or strips? Anything without the bellies will disappoint, although I can understand how that mystery mush makes some folks queasy. In that case, stay with the chowder.
Concerning chowders, this has nothing to do with the choice between Manhattan and New England. The former is tomato-based, the result of a drunken cook spilling a bloody Mary into a vat of chowder in Delmonico’s kitchen upon hearing news of the ill-fated Titanic. Being New Yorkers, the staff refused to admit a mistake. And, being New Yorkers, the customers noticed no difference and rather enjoyed the new color. Once in a great while you’ll see Manhattan clam chowder on a specials board in an N.E. restaurant, but that’s only when they have an excess of tomatoes they need to get rid of.
Here in New England, the debate is between thick or thin broth. As a fan of both, I’m always amazed by those who are adamant advocates of either one. What they need is a trip to Newick’s in Dover, New Hampshire, just off Exit 4 on the Spaulding Turnpike. Lucky for me that it is ideally suited for strategic lunch breaks when the Marrakesh Express returns from a run to Lake Winnipesaukee, as happened today.
As always I am shown to a table with a view over the Piscataqua River. As always I tell the waitress before I sit down that I’ll have a bowl of chowder and specify the broth. No need for a menu. Last time I had thick, so today it is thin, next time thick. I’ll bring visitors here with a couple of paper cups in my pocket and order both. With the extra cups, each of us has both. No one has ever complained.
Years ago, when I found this place, I told the waitress that they could sell the thin broth on its own, as a drink. She laughed back then, and she laughs today, but here I am once again with a cup filled with sliced clams and potatoes after having gone bottoms up with the broth. Still delicious, but if they sold broth as a drink, I’d have the chowder as intended.
The waitresses always laugh at me from the moment I walk in. After they ask how I am, I say “Hungry.” Why is that funny? It’s why I’m there. After I give the order, they ask if there’s anything else. I say, “I hope not.” Why is that funny? Isn’t one meal enough?
This isn’t to complain. Newick’s staff is very friendly and attentive. And considerate. Before getting in the van after leaving today, I realized that my shades were not in my pocket, and went back in. Looked at my table, then went to the waitress and asked. “No, sorry.” Checked the men’s room. Nothing on the counter, but the mirror showed them on my head. Makes me wonder if she didn’t notice, or if she pretended not to notice to avoid embarrassing me.
Another advantage Newick’s offers to anything calling itself an express is quick service. That makes up for the lack of public WiFi–as does the view out the window with or without heavy clouds brewing heavy weather lightly reflected on the surface of the water.
Once or twice a month I am dispatched way up into New Hampshire, past Lake Winnipesaukee, just enough distance to catch all of Gov. Chris Sununu’s State of the State Address on NHPR.
The long-winded spiel seemed right for the white-knuckled drive through the crosswinds of I-93, and my long look at Manchester-on-the-Merrimack–the launching pad for presidential bids in this “first-in-the-nation” primary state–reinforced the teasing prophecy sounding from the van’s dashboard.
For those who missed it, Sununu was the choice of Mitch McConnell and the Republican National Committee to run against incumbent US Senator Maggie Hassen this fall, the best chance they figured they had to flip a Democratic seat. Days after the November election, he gave them a polite no–as did Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan just last week–saying that he would rather run for a fourth term as governor of the Granite State.
His speech today suggests he has something else in mind.
As with all “State of” speeches, Sununu’s boasted of New Hampshire’s high economic rankings. In a state where the two largest cities combined equal that of Akron, Ohio’s fifth largest city, such non-urban numbers are bound to be higher. Moreover, a very high percentage of NH residents live within a daily commute to Massachusetts where they earn incomes that pump the economy that Sununu wants us to believe is unique to his state.
One item that he omits is minimum wage. In New Hampshire’s three neighbors, here’s what that is: Massachusetts, $14.25; Vermont, $12.55; Maine, $12.75. No wonder he didn’t want to admit to $7.25.
Nor did he ever mention reproductive rights. His bill is among the most extreme now on the national table. No exemptions for fetal diagnoses, rape, or incest. Fines of $100,000 and jail terms for medical providers with no regard for medical need.
But why let context get in the way of the Gospel according to Chris? We here in New England already know the context, so he can ignore us, and most of his own constituents are quite fond of his pep-talks, so he’s a shoo-in for yet another term. That’s why McConnell hoped he’d replace Hassen.
As I heard it, his speech had another audience. A national audience. An audience that will be voting in presidential primaries just two years from now.
Though no one beyond the range of New Hampshire Public Radio will hear this speech or any speech he gives this year or next, voters from coast to coast will begin hearing of him. “One of the few Republicans standing up to Trump and Trumpism” will be the line used over and again to describe Chris Sununu.
That’s why he ended it with a thumping condemnation of “extremism on both sides.” No mention of Jan. 6, of claims of a rigged election, of swastikas and Confederate flags at right-wing rallies. Just “both sides,” though he leaves out the “very fine people.”
Today’s speech will be honed from here to 2024 with independent voters foremost in mind. That’s why he never used the words “Republican” or “Democratic,” instead using the name “Washington” as if there are no distinct parties but just a single obstacle to all things good.
Another convenient punching bag was the neighboring state where budgets are “out of control” because Massachusetts “says yes to everything.” No mention of our surplus, and even less of our far larger population and economy from which so many of his own constituents draw incomes.
Just as he will cash in on Massachusetts’ reputation as the “bluest state,” he will cash in on Republicans’ exhaustion with what McConnell just this week condemned as “goofballs” (i.e. Qanon) in his own party.
Sununu is positioning himself for a presidential bid. As a governor, he can claim the always attractive label of outsider. Two years from now, at the age of 49, he will look and sound like a breath of fresh air. Think Jimmy Carter in 1976, put aside all ideology, and you can’t miss the logic.
Or think John Kasich in 2016. Sununu’s hope is that, in 2024, enough Republicans will be done with Trump, done with “goofballs,” done with extremism, and be ready for someone who at least appears reasonable, good-natured, and calm.
In the lobby of the Newburyport Public Library, I always look at the display of “New Releases.”
Would never look for a title such as Deliberate Evil, but a red cover will catch anyone’s eye, and a photo of a home you’ve walked past a few hundred times will keep it.
Add to that the subtitle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, and the 1830 Murder of a Salem Slave Trader, and I skimmed the 207-page account of America’s first nationally-sensational murder trial.
Stopping to look at the dozen or so photos taken in 1900, my jaw dropped for one of a house in which I once lived. And so I took the book to where I now live.
Never heard of the murder or trial during my extended time at the state college (now university) back in the Nixon-Ford years or during the 25 years I busked the Essex Street Mall, but Salem scandalized the states in 1830 as thoroughly as it did the colonies in 1692.
Indeed, the city, already beginning its decline as the largest port in the New World, took great pains to bury its witch trials in the past. But there was something more immediate that Salem wanted out of sight and mind.
Salem’s prominence on the world stage peaked in 1800. Its wealth was spectacular, as anyone who walks around the Salem Common or down Lafayette, Chestnut, and Federal streets today can deduce. And what made all that money?
Thanks to America’s sanitized history as taught in schools, we tend to think that slavery was entirely in the South. Lately we are reminded in the nightly news how unwelcome the truth is, North or South. Enslaved people were in the North, and in some states their freedom waited for Lincoln’s proclamation. In Massachusetts it happened sooner thanks to the Abolitionist movement, which was a sore point in Salem.
For two decades after the slave trade stopped in 1808, Salem had an easy time keeping the lid on the source of its wealth. Its richest trader, Capt. Joseph White, had already retired from the high seas, turning his business interests to inland forests and factories. In 1830, he was well into his 80s.
His murderers had only White’s will in mind, but while leaving a treasure chest under the bed intact, they sure ripped open Salem’s deep closet. What made Nathaniel Hawthorne’s head spin was that the victim was more of an embarrassment to the city than the perpetrators of the crime.
Author Edward J. Renehan Jr. suggests that this was what prompted White’s son to hire Daniel Webster, already a giant in the US Senate, to lead the prosecution. Some historians claim that Mark Twain was America’s first celebrity creating a buzz and drawing crowds as he toured the country for scheduled readings. However, at the age of 48, over three decades before Twain hit the scene:
…rock star Daniel Webster had his groupies. During a time when women were not regular attendees of criminal trials, especially gruesome murder trials, the Knapp-Crowninshield affair became an exception to the rule, for the great Webster drew crowds of all stripes and all sexes.
He also drew newspapers from Boston and New York, one of which reported that the courtroom was:
…thronged by the fair auditors; they were crowded in solid masses in various parts of the hall as well as in the gallery–and some were perched upon the mantlepieces, the windows seats, etc.
Renehan notes that more women gathered in the streets, under the courthouse windows:
…eager to catch “even now and then a sentence, which the commanding voice and distinct pronunciation [would enable] them to do.”
The trial made an impression on Hawthorne that would be evident twenty years later in his novels, The House of Seven Gables and TheScarlet Letter. For the latter, Webster’s summation speeches–both of which appear in Deliberate Evil–“greatly influenced Hawthorne’s sculpting of… Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, the secret lover of the shunned outcast Hester Prynne.”
Hawthorne, 26 at the time, was acquainted with the families on both sides of the trial and followed the proceedings with skepticism that would turn to cynicism when the verdict came in: “Sin is but a name,” was his dissent.
Families involved were all of the upper crust, and their names are all over the city and nearby towns to this day: Derby, Story, Crowninshield, Knapp, Manning, Phillips, Treadwell, Prescott, Proctor, and more. After one hung jury, Salem’s Committee of Vigilance realized that a second jury should be free of Salem connections, giving Deliberate Evil a list of names from all over Essex County from Beverly to Haverhill and Newburyport: Rantoul, Choate, Chase, Caldwell, Appleton, Abbott, Ladd, and still more.
The cast includes numerous US Representatives and Senators, cabinet secretaries, justices, at least one governor, and the founder of Vanity Fair. With all the intermarriages, especially in a chapter titled “Ghosts” which serves as a sequel, Deliberate Evil is as much a goldmine for genealogists as for historians of 19th Century America.
And for students of American literature. When Renehan describes House of Seven Gables‘ “broad themes of ancestral malfeasance, inherited guilt, and the timelessness of sin,” he could have been describing his own book.
If you think that recent attacks on public education have only to do with the teaching of history, think again.
If you are surprised by the intensity of attacks, including death threats against school board members across the USA, you have either forgotten history or your classes ended at World War Two.
If you are shocked that the Republican Party has allied itself with the movement and made it a priority in elections both local and statewide, you stopped paying attention when Newt Gingrich contrived his “Contract for America” in 1994.
And, yes, “Contract on America” would be the honest title for a fire hose aimed at privatizing all that is public.
True, this backlash–or whitelash as it would be more accurately termed–was triggered by the 1619 Project published by the New York Times to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the American colonies. The idea was to set the record straight.
Whitelash was inevitable from those who don’t want it set straight. No amount of research or documentation mattered. Nor was the report read by those who want to cling to the myth that slavery was, for the most part, a benevolent arrangement. Instead, it was scanned for buzzwords that would act like a naked flame to the gasoline of ingrained prejudice:
“Critical race theory.” Bingo!
The word “critical” sounds menacing all by itself, and how dare anyone suggest that America to any degree is or ever was a racist country. “Theory”? Can’t get any more elitist than that. Works like an angry charm. Groups with names like “Concerned Citizens for Responsible Education” have convinced parents in every state that any attempt to address racism in schools is the educational equivalent of cancer. As such, it was the only issue for their successful candidate for governor in Virginia last year.
Get ready to hear Republicans harp on it as they campaign in every state this year.
But don’t be fooled. The parents disrupting school board meetings may think its all about curricula and text books, but for Republican officials and candidates the subject of history is a Trojan Horse. Their real intent is getting people to take kids out of public schools and enroll them in private schools.
Republicans have wanted to defund and eventually erase public schools for years. This is why they promote charter schools every chance they get–and why a billionaire whose wealth is drawn from exorbitant interest rates from student loans served herself and her cronies playing the role of Trump’s Secretary of Education. Reducing enrollments at public schools will justify slashing public budgets even further than the bare bones level most have been operating on for years.
This dynamic played out in the 1950s. When whites saw blacks at the newly integrated public swimming pools, the manufacturers of home pools saw business skyrocket. Public pools then went without maintenance and most of them disappeared. This unintended consequence of integration would form an opening chapter of a book published just months after Trump’s election titled Fortress America: How America Embraced FearandAbandoned Democracy.
From pools to schools, it’s in the Republican playbook.
Unfortunately, many of those who support public education play right into their hands. Consider this meme making the rounds on social media:
Not sure where this “parents-should-control-what-is-taught-in-schools-because-they-are-our-kids” is originating, but they do have the option to send their kids to a hand-selected private school at their own expense.
Yes, that’s what Republican politicos want their voters to do. As enrollments sink, so will budgets. If the private schools put gag orders on history and literature teachers and restrict their curricula and libraries to white-washed texts, that’s just vanilla frosting on the angel cake.
The meme’s picture is of the carved-in-granite inscription above the entrance to a public school:
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS THE BEST DEFENSE OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION
As far as I can tell, this is an adaptation of a line from Thomas Jefferson’s rationale for the First Amendment:
The best defense of a democracy is an informed electorate.
While contradicting the misguided first line of the meme, it also serves as rationale for the second and final line:
The purpose of public education is not to teach kids only what their parents want them to be taught, but to teach what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.
Do we want them to be schools or nursing homes? Those who believe that education should never make their children “uncomfortable” are unavoidably at odds with schools whose purpose is to educate them as citizens.
Dive below the surface, and put your goggles on. This is not so much about history as it is about privatization.
While Fortress America focuses on public swimming pools in America in the 1950s and puts them in a larger context, this book is all about swimming wherever it was and is done, reaches back in time and bringing it right to 2009 when it was published. https://uncpress.org/book/9780807871270/contested-waters/
Tempting to say that the new documentary film, Who We Are, is must-see for anyone who cares who Americans now are. Or, as we lately express it, anyone alarmed by what America has become.
Surrounded by friends or relatives who will insist that this is not a racist country, we get nowhere with political views and theories. We give up.
In this context, Who We Are serves as an instructional manual for those who, for whatever reason, can’t give up.
Co-founder and CEO of the Who We Are Project, Jeffery Robinson casts his presentation not as argument, but as questions that he answers with quotes. And while we hear from George Orwell–Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past–and at length from Martin Luther King, most quotes are from the Constitution, landmark Supreme Court decisions, declarations of succession from southern states that contradict all modern claims that the Civil War “was not about slavery.”
In other words, words of American law and lawmakers. Words woven into America’s fabric. Systemic words whether we are ever aware of them or not–whether we want to admit them or not.
In the Constitution, we see how the word “slavery” was avoided by the use of “property” and “such persons.” In a Tennessee newspaper, we see Andrew Jackson’s offer of a bounty for a runaway–with extra payment if the runaway is whipped before return. Even Francis Scott Key, a virulent anti-abolitionist who believed that slavery was a benevolent institution, has his say with the third–but never heard–stanza of his anthem. Here’s a few lyrics with references to Hessian mercenaries (“hirelings”) and enslaved people who might fight for their own freedom:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The film let’s us hear that sung by a gospel group, making us wonder if it’s bitter satire. It’s one of many insertions that co-directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler (yes, daughters of…) place into Robinson’s presentation, along with interviews and archival footage, that make the film as ear-opening as the celebration of African-American culture they run with the end-credits.
Most eye-opening are the irrefutable answers Robinson offers for the complaints often made under the banner of “cancel culture.”
If your uncle complains that taking down the statues of Confederate officers will lead to the loss of memorials of Washington and Jefferson, remind him that the Confederates’ only claim to fame was killing American soldiers for the right to own people. Washington and Jefferson are not memorialized for owning enslaved people, but “for, oh, I don’t know, founding the country?”
Tell your aunt that these memorials went up long after the Civil War was over as a reinforcement for Jim Crow laws challenged when African-American soldiers returned from European wars.
Tell your neighbor that Reconstruction was not abandoned because it was a failure, but because it worked. Thousands of freedmen gained the right to vote in the south. Many owned property, businesses, farms. In a backroom deal with southern pols, President Hayes withdrew the northern troops in 1877, and the KKK ran roughshod.
Tell your friend that an African-American section of Tulsa was not destroyed because of any sinful or illegal activity, but because it was thriving. So successful were its businesses that it was known as “Black Wall Street.” Not something that white people in Oklahoma wanted to see.
Today, judging from the protests and threats aimed at school boards, white people from coast to coast don’t even want to hear about it. They certainly don’t want their children hearing about it.
Expense? Tell your representative that reparations were already made: To white people. Soon after Emancipation, the federal government reimbursed plantation owners millions of dollars–billions in today’s money–for their lost “property.”
Yes, it’s American history too long withheld. The backlash to the 1619 Project and the out-of-context distortion of “critical race theory” are screaming attempts to keep it that way.
Who We Are offers the questions that must be asked no matter how uncomfortable it makes anyone feel, no matter it makes us feel when we pose them, if there’s to be any truth to America’s flag-waving, anthem-standing claim:
Not until after I saw Drive My Car did I learn that it is the first Japanese film to ever gain an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
Following three hours of surprise, I won’t be surprised if it wins.
All reviews I’ve seen praise the film. All use phrases such as “meditation on grief and loss” and “a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace.” Some add the words “betrayal” and “reconciliation.” Also “a haunting road movie,” though the road is mostly a commute in and out of Hiroshima, a city that resonates as a setting for characters who refer to each other as “survivors.”
One calls its length “baggy,” an objection that seems to satisfy some self-imposed obligation to find some small fault to offset the otherwise profuse praise. To be fair, length is mentioned in most reviews to introduce the presentation of the film’s opening credits–40 minutes after Drive My Car begins.
But length goes unnoticed in a story paced by twists and turns that you’d expect from, say, Pedro Almodovar. Revelations made by several characters drip-by-drip throughout the film would clinch an Oscar for Most Ah-Ha Moments if such an award existed. And it will convince you of the improbable, such as an actress in a stage play speaking in sign with subtitles projected above her.*
“Chekhov is terrifying,” her director insists, “when you say his lines, it drags out the real you.”
Everything about the film is unusual. Not an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, but an Oriental scramble of it. Yes, it recalls Louis Malle’s 1994 Vanya on 42nd Street, but the concept is closer to The French Lieutenant’s Woman which launched the careers of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in 1981. For those whose memories go way back, think Orson Welles’ 1955 Moby-Dick Rehearsed.
Any of them might be called “a play within a play,” as if the reflection of art in life merely equals that of life in art, but the art is greater than the living sum of its parts. And then there are the auditions and rehearsals when you wonder if they are acting at all. In the end, there is a road trip in the sense of the term as we know it. The destination is Chekov: “My hardships might even be greater than yours, but I don’t give in to despair.”
To borrow Yusuke Kafuku’s gratitude for Misaki Watari, his assigned driver, Drive My Car is so smooth, you’ll feel weightless and forget you’re in a car.
* Fans of Chekov will want to know that the muted character is Sonya, Vanya’s niece and the only character who refers to him as “uncle,” an item which, in a previous life, caused me to write an essay for a graduate seminar claiming that it is Sonya, not Vanya, who is the play’s real protagonist. That impressed my faculty advisor so well that I followed it up with a case for Horatio being, for Shakespeare’s intent, the main character in Hamlet. That one seemed to lose all the points I had just gained. When I tried to atone for it with an essay claiming that Herman Melville’s Benito Cerino has three characters with equal claim to top billing, she mumbled something about needing a bottle of Excedrin III.
Been over two years since I last stopped here, but the routine is the same:
“I’ll have the greatest BLT in the history of the planet!”
Invariably, the young women behind the counter smile and make the notation. The woman before me today is new, or at least new to me, so she asks: “Your name?”
I tell her, then add, “like in the trunk of your car.”
She laughs and shakes her head before disappearing behind the door with the order.
“That’s so you’ll remember it!” I call after her.
It worked for the several years that I made pit stops here about once a month on the Marrakesh Express into Connecticut. They’d greet me by name when I walked through the door, and they’d jot down the order for the kitchen before I spoke. But I always spoke:
“I’ll have the mother of all BLTs!”
Another time: “I’ll have the finest BLT since the invention of upper-case letters!”
One day I felt daring: “I’ll have your kick-ass BLT!”
Whimsical: “To BLT, or not to B without LT!”
Patriotic: “Give me BLT, or give me tofu!” (That’s the Japanese word for “nothing,” in case you ever wondered.)
There was also: “Make it the BLT that should win a Noble Prize!”
And: “I’ll have the straight-A, magna cum laude BLT!”
And on and on with variations on Sturbridge Coffeehouse’s own theme. As they put on their menu board behind the counter: “World’s Best BLT.”
With toasted rye bread, I agreed on first bite, and the women there have suffered my dad jokes ever since. But they laugh politely, and have as good taste in music to dine by as they do in what to dine on. Never have I heard any screaming, pounding, shrill angst as what makes so many otherwise comfortable restaurants and coffeeshops unsittable.
Today I sit down to the voice of James Taylor singing about the road I just hopped off and will soon hop back on:
Now the first of December was covered with snow So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go
Halfway between the two ends of the Mass Pike that he names, I wonder if he stopped here. I’ll bet anything that the guy who wrote “Fire and Rain,” “Carolina on my Mind,” and “Mexico” would love the house blend served here.
By the time I finish my own, Carly Simon, a dear friend of Sweet Baby James back in the day if memory serves, is singing the song I’ve always thought was about me. Well, it was 43 years ago this month I saw a total eclipse of the sun. No, not in Nova Scotia, but in North Dakota. Close enough.
On my way out, one of the staff is bussing tables. I can’t resist a bit more culinary harassment. Call it dessert:
“Say, the BLT was delicious, as always, but my curiosity demands that I ask you a question.”
“Now what?” her expression says. “Sure,” her voice manages.
“Does anyone ever object to your ‘world’s best’ claim?”
She laughed as one does when presented with something both welcome and unexpected. And then, “No. A lot of regulars say it themselves.”
“Glad to hear it!”
Then it’s her turn: “But you’re the only one who exaggerates it.”
There it is on the in-house chalk-board behind the counter, bottom of the middle column. If you go to the “menu” page on their site, it’s listed simply as “BLT,” but the description suggests that, well, maybe it is since, after all, customers tell them it is.
The Massachusetts Turnpike. Sturbridge is the halfway point, right where you see I-84 veer south quickly into Connecticut on a diagonal through Hartford aimed right at NYC. Stockbridge is about where the Pike crosses US-7 near the New York State border. And, for the record, I live (and the Marrakesh Express begins) on Plum Island, the barrier beach in the northeast corner of this map. The indent of water at the northern end of PI is the Mouth of the Merrimack River.
Two years ago this month, before the plague shut us down, we at the Newburyport Screening Room were eagerly anticipating the arrival of Emma, a new adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s classic novels.
Jane Austen fans are as prominent as any in our demographic.
By middle March, the owner was almost comatose at the thought of how Emma would have filled the house for three weeks, only to sputter for a week as our aging demographic, which is most of it by far, quarantined in advance. Turned out to be Andrew Mungo’s last show.
Hold the sympathy. He was planning to retire anyway, already looking for new owners who would keep the place independent. Mission accomplished, but I’m still here–as if I came with the furniture, all 99 seats of it.
But I’m in the projection booth just one day and night per week as I devote most of my semi-retirement to the Newburyport Melville Society. This week’s task was to answer correspondence from Helena Basquette, Professor of Literature at D’arcy College and co-founder of the Goddard Austen Society which formed to share interests in the prolific, if short-lived, 19th Century British novelist following our NMS example. When she read my interpretation of Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee, as an indictment of colonialism, she wanted me to know that Dear Jane had nothing to do with those English ships.
Her co-founder, Helen Frye, archivist at D’arcy’s Fitzwilliam Memorial Library, added that Austen had no interest beyond England’s shores:
The word “America” appears only once in all her work, in Chapter 12 of Mansfield Park (1814), in what appears to be a female character’s attempt to get the attentions of a doctor, asking him to tell her what to think of the “strange business” in America.
“Strange business” is an odd way to refer to a war. Especially when your country is in it, though it was across the Atlantic. Born the year before American independence, Austen wrote Mansfield Park when hostilities between fledgling America and Mother England were renewed in what we call the War of 1812–or what John Adams called “The American Revolution, Act Two.”
Frye continued:
I also searched Austen for “colony,” “colonies,” and “revolution,” finding nothing pertinent to the USA. Also looked for signs of George III and IV, but found no obvious references. She seems to have avoided all politics beyond those of town, family, and marriages. It would be fun to interrogate her about all of this, if I knew a reliable medium.
If she wrote that last line on social media, she’d have a dozen applicants for the job before she logged out. But I interrupt:
There are 30 or so uses of “abroad” in Austen’s novels, a few in the context of military service, though the locations (America?) are unspecified. In the case of “abroad,” I came to that passage in Emma today, and wondered if that term might have been used by her as a euphemism for military action. But the vast majority of occurrences had no clear connection with military campaigns.
When I mentioned that the film Emma closed the Screening Room for 18 months, Frye’s response was immediate:
Loved Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film. Quick comparison must be made with Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice.
When they specify directors and dates, you know you’re dealing with film buffs:
A clear superiority goes to Wright’s camera operator(s), with those incredibly long shots, but de Wilde’s are beautiful too. The casts & ultimate effects are equally touching. De Wilde’s film benefits from soundtrack contributions from The Watersons, Maddie Pryor, & June Tabor which almost make up for some rather muddy dialog editing in many scenes. Not mixed for home stereo, I suppose; common flaw lately.
Fine, but I was more curious about her word-searches. Is there a “concordance” for Austen as there is for Shakespeare and the Bible?
Having enjoyed another Austen-based film, I spent $3 for a Kindle file which includes all the Jane Austen novels. All on my tablet. They are in one file ($3!) which I can read via the Kindle app. A term comes to mind, and I use the search tool. It is a plain old text search, like that in a word processor, not with Artificial Intelligence heuristics or algorithms like web search engines use. It sifts the file and presents fragments in which the term occurs. It also sifts any passages I have already highlighted, and lists those hits separately.
Does it have an index?
Indices in ebooks? I have seen very few that worked well. The search tool works better, though it is more of a fire hose than a well-curated index.
And then she changed the subject:
I have wondered if anyone has studied Austen’s influence on Dickens.
This piqued my interest. If Austen influenced Dickens, she influenced Melville. Basquette broke in to our back-and-forth with an unlabeled and somewhat redacted passage:
———- was an orphan, the only child of ——–’s youngest daughter. The marriage of Lieut. —– of the __ regiment of infantry, and ————-, had had its day of fame and pleasure, hope and interest; but nothing now remained of it, save the melancholy remembrance of him dying in action abroad — of his widow sinking under consumption and grief soon afterwards — and this girl.
This was a test. Not if I could identify the title, but the author. Sure is Dickensian in style and character. Before I could guess, Frye hastened to summarize the Dickensian plot:
Lieut—–‘s regimental friend, Col. —–, believed —– had saved his life, and felt indebted when he returned to England, offering to rescue 3-YO —- from her life of poverty with her grandmother & her mother’s talkative sister. He promised to give —– a good education, moving her to his family’s London home, etc.
Ah, wish I could be in Goddard enjoying almond croissants at the Mansfield Park Cafe to talk it over with Helen and Helena! Maybe attend a seminar at D’arcy College. But I’ll settle for my seat here in Newburyport’s Thirsty Whale with NMS, content to raise a toast to GAS.
-30-
A mere 19 years ago, Helen Highwater and I first met Helena Basquette and Helen Frye at the Woodhouse Writers Conference in Minneapolis where we happened to catch this staged adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Quite powerful with much laughter and an occasional hankie to the eye, aided by the playful and graceful musical accompaniment of the late, legendary composer, Helen Bach. Most memorable were the actresses who played Elizabeth Bennet’s younger sisters as if they were a pair of corgis: https://www.playbill.com/article/austen-power-guthries-pride-and-prejudice-begins-perfs-july-26-com-114473
Revelations of Herman Melville’s twelve-year-long affair with a woman as married as he sent shock waves through the Newburyport Melville Society.
All these years we’ve been led to believe that the author of Moby-Dick went well-inland to Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains and stayed there for the sake of seclusion. Moreover, gay rights groups have long claimed Melville as one of theirs on no better evidence than his all-male casts and the flowery, metaphorical dedication of his most adventurous book to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Do they think women hunted whales and he chose to ignore them? Do they not know that artists impregnate each other with ideas?
Rather than wasting time with those rhetorical questions, the Newburyport Melville Society is now exploring the premise of Melville in Love. No small task. The book claims that Melville, never a farmer, bought a farm adjacent to one owned by Sarah Morewood and her very rich and mostly absentee, all-about-business husband for the purpose of keeping company with her. It also claims that, based on newly surfaced letters written by Melville to his neighbor-with-benefits, Sarah Morewood inspired the conception and creation of Moby-Dick.
The recent biography also calls to attention Melville’s first book, Typee, written years before he met Mrs. Morewood, as a key to understanding Melville’s sexuality. For that, NMS–both of us–picked Typee for our next reading. Didn’t take long for me to realize what would open our next talk. It’s something that my fellow English majors and teachers of American literature need to address:
Typee is a Trojan Horse.
The coincidental commercial brand name notwithstanding, this has nothing to do with sex, although the book’s subtitle might suggest otherwise: A Peep at Polynesian Life. “Peep” as in “peep show”? Most of the book–novel? romance? adventure? travelogue? memoir?–is a close look the natives of a Marquesan isle and an account of Melville’s few weeks living with them before his escape.
Given his descriptions of young women in all stages of undress and the company he frequently keeps with “the beauteous Fayaway,” readers might wonder why he would want to escape. Let’s leave that question to the book, but let’s also note that Melville’s stand-in narrator, Tommo, gushes over Fayaway much like the author would years later in letters to Sara Morewood.
Accounts of exotic places were standard fare for American and English audiences in the 19th Century, but most all of them were written to advance one or more of three causes: scientific, military, and/or missionary. Typee does none of this. Instead, Melville offers a way of life, its pastimes, work, recreation, habits, meals, feasts, all free of any editorial call for change, control, or conversion.
At times he does probe military and missionary efforts for the sake of contrast. Most all of them describe the Sandwich Islands (i.e. Hawai’i), sometimes with mention of Tahiti. Structurally, these are reminiscent of the many tangents in Moby-Dick, but those are mostly about whales and the whaling industry, germane to the story being told. Moreover, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael, while he frequently challenges widely accepted beliefs, is content to poke fun rather than issue indictments. One such poke sells a t-shirt available in the gift shop of the New Bedford Whaling Museum:
I’d rather sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Compare that to Typee:
The enormities perpetrated in the South Seas upon some of the inoffensive islanders wellnigh pass belief. These things are seldom proclaimed at home; they happen at the very ends of the earth; they are done in a corner, and there are none to reveal them.
With this, Melville offers a passage that, if you change nouns and dates, describes more recent events wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross:
It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that in all the cases of outrages committed by Polynesians, Europeans have at some time or other been the aggressors, and that the cruel and bloodthirsty disposition of some of the islanders is mainly to be ascribed to the influence of such examples.
Europe’s lead aside, the most damning line has echoed throughout American history, all across the Great Plains and from “Remember the Maine” to “Gulf of Tonkin”:
We breathe nothing but vengeance…
How did Melville get away with it? Fayaway? The “river-nymphs” who “swim about me like a shoal of dolphins”? In the late 1840s, Typee was an instant success that made Melville the most popular writer in America and England. Many people, including his wife before they wed, called him “Typee.” Specifically, the exotic hints at sex made him a man that, as we sometimes say of a modern male celebrity, “every woman wanted and every man wanted to be.” The better question may be how he got away with that.
He damn near didn’t. The publishers soon heard complaints from others visitors to the South Pacific that Typee was pure fabrication. Given their experiences in Hawai’i and Tahiti, such a tribe as Melville portrayed could not possibly exist. Some howled that a common sailor was incapable of writing a book–a tactic we see frequently today: When you can’t answer questions, attack the people raising them.
Though those casting doubt were all connected with either the military or the missions, made brief visits, and kept a distance from tribal villages, they outnumbered Melville. Since one was an impossible number to sustain, the publishers started to cave. Until…
In Typee, another sailor goes AWOL with Tommo and lives with the natives for about a week before he disappears. This is about halfway into the book, after which Tommo is left wondering what became of Toby right to the narrative’s end. Typee‘s publication startled a newspaper editor in Buffalo, New York, named Richard Tobias Greene who was delighted to learn that his buddy was alive and well and living in America.
But Greene was soon distressed by the controversy as it played out in letters to various publications. He made himself known, went to NYC for a meeting with Melville, and the controversy vanished. He also told Melville the details of his own escape, which was written up and added as a sequel in Typee‘s next and all subsequent editions.
Powers that be can always beat one, but as soon as you get to two, they have a problem.
So it is that we have this early indictment of the colonial and imperial reach of America, England, and France, assisted by the Catholic and Protestant churches. Overshadowed by Moby-Dick, but just as available for students to check out of a library or for teachers to assign their classes. Easy it is for this former lit teacher to imagine assigning an idyllic “peep” at an exotic South Sea island as a way to steer college students into the brutal path that lead to America’s annexation of Hawai’i:
What has [the native islander] to desire at the hand of Civilization?… Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible.”
In a time when many prefer to avoid historical truth by limiting what students read and what teachers discuss, Typee–novel? romance? adventure? travelogue? memoir?–offers a deceptive choice. Trojan Horses always do.
Other than the foibles of another orange-haired bozo, news from the UK is that TheZealot Gene, a new album by Jethro Tull, is number four on the British charts in its first week of release.
Not bad for a band that formed 55 years ago–whose last top-ten album was 50 years ago.
Make that two albums. Thick as a Brick and a compilation album, Living in the Past, both reached number three in 1972. Tull’s commercial success then subsided, but the group retained a faithful following that bought enough albums and filled enough concert halls to keep them performing non-stop until 2012. Americans never noticed, but Tull became Europe’s Grateful Dead, playing as many concerts in a year as other bands play in a decade. America had Dead Heads; the European Union and the former Eastern Bloc still have Tull Skulls.
Though on this side of the Atlantic, I guess I’m one, having attended at least 30 from here to Minneapolis, although the last few have not been billed as “Jethro Tull.” In 2012, front man-flautist-vocalist Ian Anderson and lead guitarist Martin Barre went separate ways, both releasing solo albums and touring with separate bands. A few Tull Skulls have chosen sides, but most of us remain true to both.
Now the name is back. Barre and friends, including a few of the dozens who played for Tull at some point, are playing to rave reviews in the US in a tour billed as “the music of Jethro Tull.” Truth is that Barre adds plenty of his own fine songs and transforms Tull classics such as “Fat Man” into his own brand of hard-driving, how-the-hell-is-this-not-in-the-Rock-Hall-of-Fame rock-and-roll.
Setting out on a year-long tour of Europe and a few former Soviet Republics, Anderson has put the name on the group that has been with him for the recent solo albums, Thick as a Brick II and Homo Erraticus. That would make it easy to say that Zealot Gene is another solo show.
Well, it is musically related to the recent works, but the prominence of guitars, drums, keyboard, accordion–and the play between them as well as with Anderson’s flute and voice–harken back to sounds from This Was to Crest of the Knave. “The Betrayal of Joshua Kynde” is a five-way conversation that you would rather not end. And, as with Aqualung and most every album that followed, the lyrics range from whimsical:
Half of us are in the apple Half of us are in the pie All of us are in the pudding When the last bus has gone by Someone has to take the high road Someone has to make the bed No-one has the right to tell you To lie down when all is said
To charged:
The populist with dark appeal The pandering to hate Which xenophobic scaremongers Deliver on a plate To tame the pangs of hunger And satisfy the lust Slave to ideology Moderation bites the dust
And that’s just the title track. Somehow, Classic Rock described the music as, “light, bright, tight, and recognizably Tull.” No question about those last two. As for light and bright, the energetic opening track, “Mrs. Tibbetts,” and the charming “Where Did Saturday Go?” will delight fans of “Mother Goose” and “Nursie Dear.”
On the other hand, the menacing “Mine Is the Mountain” is quite recognizable as the descendant of “Heavy Horses” and “Farm on the Freeway.” “Sad City Sister” could be the daughter of “Beside Myself,” maybe the granddaughter of “Pibroch (Cap in Hand)” from Songs from the Wood, an album echoed throughout Zealot Gene. Musically, the final track, “The Fisherman of Ephesus,” will recall “Cold Dead Reckoning” from HomoErraticus, but its lyrics, as well as those of other tracks, echo the religious themes of Aqualung and Passion Play.
In keeping with past Tull and Anderson albums, the main theme is topical, summed up in a chorus:
Carrying the Zealot gene Right or left, no in between Beware, beware the Zealot gene Naked flame near gasoline
Prog magazine’s review included a line that fits the album as well as the surprising harmonica fits “Jacob’s Tale,” calling the album “ripe with fresh inspiration and resonant of past glories.”
For Tull-Skulls–at least for this American fan who first heard Tull play at the Hampton Beach Casino 52 years ago–The Zealot Gene serves as a spirited reminder for “being who you really want to be.”
Mouth of the River 