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Volume 26, Issue 2/3

Introduction: New England Decorum

New England is the only place in America where decorum has entered the vernacular. It has done so through architecture. New England is first of all a settled countryside, houses of medieval simplicity clustered along a road, among them a town hall and a church of the same style and scale as the houses them selves, with the addition of columns and steeple. The houses are white, built parallel to one another at generous intervals, with scarcely a post or a stone between them to hint at boundaries. Barns and out buildings trail away behind them. Their only adorn ment might be a carved lintel, a fan-light window, or a beaded frontlet above the door. Their primary grace is an elegance of proportion, enforced on one's notice by continuous repetition, emphasized by a notable absence of the passion to individualize which has long raged in the neighborhoods of our Republic.

In fact, so powerful is the spirit of decorum maintained among these towns that all the diverse populations that pass through them defer to it more or less. These old houses inspire something one sees nowhere else in this country, a self-effacement in certain of their owners so complete as to forbid any trace of their own presence—the curtains at the windows, the pumpkin on the step, the flag by the door, all a scrupulous, anonymous observing of convention. The severest absence of ornament is itself an ornament, an ostentation. That is the principle of the conservation of New England as a landscape, as a style of life.

We think of the vanished tribes who built these houses as dour and ethereal, forgetting that their epic fecundity inspired Malthus to extrapolate, and Adam Smith to suggest, that if we and Britain should remain one country, convenience would finally shift the capital here. Our most prodigious birth occurred in these plain houses, their sides flushed and windows dazzled by plain old maples, gone unworldly red.

New England is prodigious in a small way, like a Dickinson poem or a Shaker chair. Its light on a clear day is a miniaturist's light, that makes it a piece of fine work, precisian, exacting, and naive. It is not possible, surely, to see every brick in a wall, every leaf on a tree. This must be a provincial error, to be mended in Paris. New England presents itself as if through a lens that makes much of little and more of less. Its very thrift is a form of profligacy, as in the care given to pumpkin culture, and in the eager traffic in knobby squash of uncertain use that must be carried in two arms and stowed in the trunk of the car, and in the persistent encampment of locals on their shadowy lawns among the detritus of their drawers and attics, which the mere affixing of a sign to a tree has trans formed into goods one might possibly desire.

It is no irony that a landscape that denied itself even so small a thing as a cross on a steeple top should become an iconography. That is transcendentalism, after all. These ancients have gone and left us such a patrimony as poor men leave, plain barns, stony pas tures, trees that bear good apples, a taste for homely food, an admiration for tight houses and sound boots. To figure the interest on our Yankee fortune, think by what measure these things are more than themselves.

Marilynne Robinson
—Northampton, Massachusetts, 1985


Entries

poetry

My Elusive Guests; New England Gardener Gets Personal

BY Maxine Kumin

non fiction

The Sorcery of Rhetoric in French and American Letters

BY Jefferson Humphries

non fiction

New England as Region and Idea: Looking Over the Tafferel of Our Craft

BY Donald Junkins

fiction

Before He Went Out West

BY Castle Freeman

art

Untitled, 10 Photographs of Henry James in Northampton

BY Elisabeth McClellan

non fiction

The View from Prospect House

BY Dean Flower

non fiction

Precocious Incest: First Novels by Louisa May Alcott and Henry James

BY Alfred Habegger

poetry

The Ash Grove in October

BY John Engles

poetry

Robert Frost—Two Unpublsihed Plays: In an Art Factory; The Guardeen

BY Robert Frost

non fiction

Robert Frost and Susan Hayes Ward

BY Lesley Lee Francis

non fiction

Whiteness in Robert Frost's Poetry

BY Arnold Bartini

poetry

Second Nesting; The Farm Animal's Desertion

BY Peter Davison

poetry

The Red Roof on Tuckerman Avenue

BY Ruth Whitman

non fiction

Was Mr. Dudley Dear?: Emily Dickinson & John Langdon Dudley

BY Polly Longsworth

poetry

Xmas on Bay State Road, Boston, By B.U. 1978

BY Michael Benedikt

non fiction

Boggy Ways: Notes on Irish-American Culture

BY Shaun O'Connell

poetry

The Whaling Wife Awaits the Captian's Return Home; Whale Watch

BY Madeline DeFrees

non fiction

Black, Quadroon, Gypsy: Women in the Art of George Fuller, with fourteen reproductions

BY Sarah Burns

non fiction

Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in Florence, Massachusetts

BY Terry Esther

poetry

Whatever Crept Away

BY Ann Neelon

poetry

Lizzie Borden Through Art and Literature

BY Caroline Knox

art

The Colonizing of Indian New England

BY Neal Salisbury

non fiction

Self-Made Men: The Development of Middling-Class Consciousness in New England

BY Gary J. Kornblith

poetry

Black Ice; Stonington Harbor,

BY Willian Doreski

Table of Contents

New England Decorum,
Non-Fiction by Marilyn Robinson

My Elusive Guests; New England
Gardener Gets Personal,
Poetry by Maxine Kumin

The Sorcery of Rhetoric in French and American
Letters, Non-Fiction by Jefferson Humphries

New England as Region and Idea: Looking Over
the Tafferel of Our Craft, Non-Fiction by Donald Junkins

Before He Went Out West, Fiction by
CastleFreeman

untitled, Art by Elisabeth McClellan,
10 photographs of Henry James in Northampton
(with the essay "The View from Prospect House"
by Dean Flower)

The View from Prospect House, Non-Fiction by Dean
Flower, with 10 photographs of Henry James in
Northampton by Elisabeth McClellan

Precocious Incest: First Novels by Louisa May
Alcott and Henry James, Non-Fiction by Alfred Habegger

The Ash Grove in October, Poetry by John Engles

Robert Frost--Two Unpublsihed Plays:
In an Art Factory; The Guardeen, Poetry by Robert Frost

Robert Frost and Susan Hayes Ward,
Non-Fiction by Lesley Lee Francis

Whiteness in Robert Frost's Poetry,
Non-Fiction by Arnold Bartini

Second Nesting; The Farm Animal's Desertion,
Poetry by Peter Davison

The Red Roof on Tuckerman Avenue,
Poetry by Ruth Whitman

Was Mr. Dudley Dear?: Emily Dickinson & John
Langdon Dudley, Non-Fiction by Polly Longsworth

Xmas on Bay State Road, Boston, By B.U. 1978,
Poetry by Michael Benedikt

Boggy Ways: Notes on Irish-American Culture,
Non-Fiction by Shaun O'Connell

The Whaling Wife Awaits the Captian's Return Home;
Whale Watch, Poetry by Madeline DeFrees

Black, Quadroon, Gypsy: Women in the Art of George
Fuller, with fourteen reproductions,
Non-Fiction by Sarah Burns
14 Reproductions, Art by George Fuller

Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in Florence,
Massachusetts, Non-Fiction by Terry Esther

Whatever Crept Away, Poetry by Ann Neelon

Lizzie Borden Through Art and Literature,
Poetry by Caroline Knox

The Colonizing of Indian New England,
Art by Neal Salisbury

Self-Made Men: The Development of Middling-Class
Consciousness in New England,
Non-Fiction by Gary J. Kornblith

Black Ice; Stonington Harbor,
Poetry by William Doreski

Basket, Emily Dickinson's Window; Tombstone,
Marblehead, MA, Cover Art by Jerome Liebling

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