Volume 26, Issues 2 & 3
FRONT COVER: Jerome Liebling
Basket, Emily Dickinson’s Window, Amherst 1982
PHOTOGRAPH
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 adornment 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 pastures, 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
Table of Contents
New England Decorum, Introduction by Marilynne Robinson
My Elusive Guest; A 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 Castle Freeman, Jr.
The View from Prospect House, by Dean Flower, with 10 photographs of Henry James 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 Unpublished Plays: In an Art Factory; The Guardeen, by Robert Frost, with an introduction by Roger D. Sell
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 Animals’ Desertion, Poetry by Peter Davison
The Red Roof on Tuckerman Avenue, Poetry by Ruth Whitman
“Was Mr. Dudley Dear?”: Emily Dickinson and 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 Captain’s Return Home; Whale Watch, Poetry by Madeline DeFrees
Black, Quadroon, Gypsy: Women in the Art of George Fuller, Non-Fiction by Sarah Burns, with fourteen Reproductions
Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in Florence, Massachusetts, Non-Fiction by Esther Terry
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
Contributors
ARNOLD BARTINI is at work on a book, Frost in the Eighties.
MICHAEL BENEDIKTE fifth and most recent book of poems is The Badminton at Great Barrington; he is currently writing poetry about life in Boston.
SARAH BURNS is Professor of Art History at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.
A Senior Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, PETER DAVISON‘s ninth and most recent book is Praying Wrong: New and Selected Poems, 1957-1984.
MADELINE DEFREES has retired to write full-time in Seattle; her poems have most recently appeared in Indiana Review and American Poetry Review.
Half of the Map is WILLIAM DORESKI‘s latest book of poetry.
JOHN ENGELS, an NEA Fellow in 1984, has a new collection of poems underway entitled Cardinals in the Ice Age.
DEAN FLOWER teaches at Smith College, and is the author of Henry James in Northampton: Visions and Revisions.
The granddaughter of Robert Frost, LESLEY LEE FRANCIS holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Duke University; she is presently Associate Secretary of the American Association of University Professors.
CASTLE FREEMAN, JR.‘s previous fiction, which appeared in MR, was nominated for a Pushcart award; he lives in Newfane, Vermont.
ALFRED HABEGGER‘s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker; his book, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature appeared in 1982.
JEFFERSON HUMPHRIES taught English and French at Yale before going to Louisiana State University.
Author of The Graves of Scotland Parish, DONALD JUNKINS teaches poetry in the MFA writing program at the University of Massachusetts.
GARY J. KORNBLITH teaches history at Oberlin College and is writing a book on Master Mechanics and the Industrialization of New England.
CAROLINE KNOX‘s book of poems was published in 1984.
Pulitzer Prize winner MAXINE KUMIN‘s eighth book of poems, The Long Approach was published by Viking; she raises horses on a Vermont farm.
JEROME LIEBLING, Professor of Photography at Hampshire College, has been awarded a Massachusetts Arts Council grant to do a series of New England photographs.
POLLY LONGSWORTH is the author of Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.
ANN NEELON‘s poems and translations appear frequently; she teaches English at Boston College High School.
SHAUN O’CONNELL is a book reviewer for the Boston Globe, and writes frequently on modern American and Irish literature.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON is the author of the novel, Housekeeping.
NEAL SALISBURY, Professor of History at Smith College, is a specialist in New England Indian history.
ROGER D. SELL, author of numerous studies of the work of Robert Frost, has edited a recent edition of Stories For Lesley, a collection of children’s stories by Frost.
Professor of Afro-American Studies, ESTHER TERRY is also Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
RUTH WHITMAN has just spent a year as Senior Fulbright Writer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is working on a new collection of poems called The Promise.