The Outermost House – Henry Beston

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)/ it’s always ourselves we find in the sea- e e cummings

I went to the woods because I wished…wait, that’s not right for this, is it? Thoreau may have traipsed deliberately into the underbrush to live, but he, like Henry Beston, was surely drawn to the sea. Perhaps we all are, summoned by the weight of ancient codes and polypeptides shifting within our cells, leaning us waterward, demanding our periodic attendance to that primordial spot, the place where it all began, so as to never entirely lose our inner ooze. Elemental, yes?

Henry Beston went to the ocean in 1925 after building himself a sturdy two room home on the easternmost point of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, known as Eastham Beach. Beston intended to remain for two weeks at the home he named Fo’castle (pronounced fohk-suhl), only to find

the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

The Outermost House is Beston’s lively commentary upon this extraordinary year, a time in which he lived alone but was never lonely, given to the solitary and singularly glorious task of observing the oceanfront environment and recording his ample ideas upon its changes within the course of that annum. Beston considered himself foremost a writer, then a naturalist. His little book affords such literary immersion in a world bordered only by water and sky and sand, inhabited by thousands of birds and very few people. Beston places the naturalist’s patina upon his images of the mundane yet haunting essences of water, wildlife, and vegetation, those ephemera which are always moving and brimming with life stories, none of them human.

Beston’s path to Fo’castle sprang from his days of World War I service. Any reader will be forced to imagine the healing course upon him of hours and days spent on the shore, the certain rhythms and the tediums of  observance filling in and smoothing grooves where before there almost certainly was horror and pain. Truly, the reader is given only to imagine this, for Beston very scarcely brings himself into the account. His personal references are almost non-existent; his philosophical musings are breezy, while containing great insight into Beston’s love of nature and his most cherished beliefs.

Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time.

Beston gives us the world of the shore in all its wide, sensuous span. He devotes a chapter each to the full exploration of his beachfront existence through  sensory measures, by day and by night, with such descriptions of aural, visual and olfactory register that any reader acquainted with the ocean will recognize and appreciate the simple, evocative power of the words.

Listen to it a while, and it will seem but one remote and formidable sound; listen still longer and you will discern in it a symphony of breaker thunderings, an endless, distant, elemental cannonade. There is beauty in it, and ancient terror.

Beston also details the lives of the native and transitory birds who inhabit the Cape. He is a bird lover of high measure, going so far as to capture a large bird caught in an oil spill for an overnight’s safekeeping and an attempt at feather cleaning in the little house. He counts nests and eggs, checks on flocks after storms, and takes great pains to portray the inherent grace of even the modest sparrow and tern without sentimentality or pretense.

Henry David Thoreau did walk through Eastham in 1849, “warding off a drenching autumnal rain with his Concord umbrella,” and Beston summons something of Thoreau’s spirit, if not his wordiness, for The Outermost House. It’s the same spirit which possessed me earlier this year, a knowledge that I must get to the beach for a body-to-sand embrace, for some reflection, for some inexorable reason, pulled more than driven to that spot where the veil is partially lifted and we can glimpse another world.

There is no harshness here in the landscape line, no hard Northern brightness or brusque revelation; there is always reserve and mystery, always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature, honouring, conceals.

The Debut by Anita Brookner

Who would pick her up? Such a dull background, such a drabbled and muddy cover that I was unable to find a single online image to share. Treating it simply as an object, I stared at the book for a while in the library before deciding to check out The Debut. This 1981 Linden Press edition of Anita Brookner’s first novel, known in the United Kingdom as A Start in Life, did not fill me with anything close to anticipation. I toyed more than once with the notion of throwing it back into the curbside return box, a speedy, shallow drive-by rejection of all that the cover implies.

Here she is, a dowdy woman ill served by muted wallpaper background and an equally dated hairstyle and countenance, deserving no attention from the world, to say nothing of a self-respecting reader. There has to be some chemistry, right? Some pizazz, a faint frisson, must come into play during such important choices, should it not? I could not be blamed for passing her by. Doubtless I probably would, had I not read John Self’s review of the new Brookner novel, Strangers.

This brown paper bag edition of The Debut disguises a novel which left me deeply impressed and eager to rummage through all of Brookner’s catalog, looking for the sort of treasures often hidden in subtlety, riches and jewels that are only for the reader, the ultimate discoverer. The Debut is the story of Ruth Weiss,  a woman who takes a mid-life retrospective to find “that her life had been ruined by literature.”

Ruth is an academic, at work on a never-ending study entitled Women in Balzac’s Novels. “Dr. Weiss, who preferred men, was an authority on women.” Brookner introduces us to her at the tender age of forty, then  scampers through the highlights of Ruth’s life, both the one she has lived and the one she has correlated as fiction. Dr. Weiss’ story is  common. The daughter of petty, selfish individuals who grab and take what they need with no thought to the needs of others, Ruth learns early that “moral fortitude…was quite irrelevant in the conduct of one’s life: it was better, or in any event, easier, to be engaging. And attractive.” The teenage Ruth knows her score and finds safety within the pages of fiction.

In her room Ruth read of cottages blasted by northern winds, of country mansions with spacious lawns, of Parisian lodging houses teeming with intrigue and activity, of miners’ back-to-backs vibrating with the heat of banked-up coal fire, of home farms and rectories, of villas and castles, of gardens and pièces d’eau, of journeys and sojourns abroad. Was real life always so untenanted? Or was real life a distillation from ordinary mundane disappointment?

A young Ruth studies hard and fills the role of obedient only child, a strategy which brings her academic success and, for a long while, personal loneliness. She struggles ineptly through an infatuation, then suddenly seizes upon an invitation to move to Paris and study Balzac at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Ruth blossoms in her new setting, and she begins “to think of the world in terms of Balzacian opportunism”.

There was no doubt that her looks improved. She put on weight and brushed her hair and learned the difficult Parisian art of being immaculately turned out…Her heels clipped along the corridor with authority these days, and she was no longer afraid of having time on her hands.

Ruth begins to aspire to a life of her own, far and free from the tug of her aging parents and their bottomless need. She begins to breathe her own oxygen, even while immersing herself in the cautions of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

What she tended to ignore these days (and her work suffered as a result of it) was Balzac’s strange sense of the unfinished, the sudden unforeseen deaths, the endless and unexpected remorse, the mutation of one grand lady into someone else’s grander wife, the ruthless pursuit of ambition…What she did understand, and this is not difficult, is Balzac’s sense of cosmic energy, in which all the characters are submerged until thrown up again, like atoms, to dance on the surface of one particular story, to disappear, to reappear in another guise, in another novel.

What impressed me so deeply about Brookner’s first novel is the ease with which such difficult truths as Ruth discovers floated through Brookner’s prose and settled into this reader. In her hands there is a sensitive portrayal of one person’s attempt to beat a desperation which, for anyone, might be only one illness, one failed relationship, one enormous loss away. And it is this delicate reinforcement- not of any harsh ending- but of the noble attempt, which unloads oomph aplenty in Brookner’s writing, maybe more than I can take most days. I’ll be reading more of Anita Brookner’s novels, but never disguised in brown paper.

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

Imagine with me for a moment a greatly leveling experience, aside from that which is our shared first and last. Find an airport for the departure of your reverie, any old major metropolitan will do. Hop a mind’s flight to London,  from there jump the train up to Cambridge. Then mosey your way, in a crowd if you must (but better if you can go it alone or with just a few imaginary others), into the nave of the King’s College Chapel. Stand for a while under the fan vaulting and let the weight of 500 years wash over you. That should begin to do it. Are you feeling a smidgen of insignificance?

Now, take it just a bit further. Close your eyes, standing still where you are, or perhaps closer into the chancel with its woodwork and candles, and imagine that you are an English commoner of those 500 years past,  someone with neither rank nor lineage to boost your way in this world. You work hard, have your family and your likes and dislikes. You have a trade that sustains your living and you’re doing well as can be expected. Keep those eyes closed tightly. Now, take a deep breath and let yourself feel the main event, a faintest brush of the largest, finest velvet sleeve imaginable, come up against your bare hand and, contained within that sleeve, the magnificence known as His Majesty, Henry VIII. Tell me you don’t feel a little shiver.

This feeble exercise in pretense can’t fully encompass the deep sense of inadequacy which I felt two weeks ago upon opening Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s Booker shortlisted novel. Invited to such a romping, sprawling imaginative event as that which is the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell, what could I possibly bring to the party as a common reader? I almost gave up. One hundred pages in, I was nervously trying to sort the novel’s sundry  references to the titled life when I hit upon this:

Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin. Turn the king inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid, serpentine flesh.

Mantel’s style thus unleashes the reader and leaves the wannabe Tudor historian behind. Wolf Hall is historical fiction at its finest and gives the reader permission to slip off whatever limitations might be carried into the opening pages. This is a novel in which to sink your teeth.

The story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power is ultimately one  familiar to us all. It is the story of a friendship, born under unlikely circumstance and driven for varying reasons to unique  consequence. Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son who leaves home at the age of fifteen to find his rough-and- tumble way, inhabits Mantel’s novel as a middle aged man who relishes the comforts and fellowship of family life, a man whose success as a brilliant lawyer affords him ample opportunity to share his wealth amongst his kindred and other common folk. He is also a man who wears his hard scrabble raising beneath his clothing, not unlike the hair shirt worn by the Catholic apologist Thomas More, Cromwell’s formidable adversary.

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Incorporated into the life of this “person from Putney” is advancement, power,  privilege, and friendship, all in the form of Henricus Rex. Henry strolls through the pages of Wolf Hall with his legendary larger than life appetites intact, while at the same time seeming thoughtful and somehow vulnerable. Cromwell eases into the court life by virtue of his intelligence and willingness to work for his King and country. The friendship is remarkably vivid in Mantel’s flawless dialogue, full of humor and a sense of realism.

He (Cromwell) looks up. ‘May I speak?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Henry cries. ‘I wish someone would.’

He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war…, there’s not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe…

‘If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice…and May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?…What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention…I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’

Henry appears to look straight through him, to the wall behind. He waits. Henry says, ‘Dogholes, then?’

He smiles.

Of course the intent which initially drives the friendship between Cromwell and Henry VIII  is that of obtaining a divorce for Henry from his wife Katherine so that he can marry Anne Boleyn.

Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife. Both these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion, the one to the interest of the other.

Henry and Cromwell are bound forever within the famous campaign to shape  the future of their beloved island.

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater: her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

Wolf Hall is populated with many peripheral characters, some written fully, such as Anne Boleyn, and many others brilliantly focused and placed within the novel to give the life of Thomas Cromwell shape and meaning. Cromwell’s characterization is immensely satisfying and identifiable in its wide range. In Mantel’s vision, he is as much a “man for all seasons” as his contemporary More.

He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted. Here at the close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.

Four Letters of Love

In the list of topics for which my understanding is grossly inadequate, religious faith and love have to be right up at the top. These are twin mysteries, belonging to the lives of others.

With all self-protective instinct, I believed Niall Williams’ 1997 novel, Four Letters of Love to be a typically safe story when I pulled it from the shelf recently. The snippets I’d seen hinted at a gloriously written romance, but there was nothing to indicate that Williams’ prose would at times lure this reader into an almost trance-like state where I was allowed to close the pages believing that somehow I’d been graced with the experience of both great love and unshakable faith in a bit over two hundred and fifty pages.

And that would be putting it mildly. It would be unseemly and might spoil any fun were I to go on about how this novel works on an emotional and spiritual level. So I’ll just tell you a bit about the story.

Four Letters of Love is the story of parallel lives, those of Nicholas Coughlan and Isabel Gore, to be exact. Nicholas is the son of a Dublin man who one day announces to his family that he is leaving a comfortable position in civil service for life as a painter and, in order to practice his art,  must leave home for an indefinite while.

We come to know Nicholas as he matures, from a twelve year old boy caught in the maelstrom of seeking to please both of his parents while one seeks to please God and the other seeks refuge from reality, to a young man, confident in his own right to love and be loved. His is a story of change, of trial by fire and sorrow which carries in its longing both the foundation of solid familial love and an otherworldly awareness of love’s wide, inexplicable reach.

(It) seemed to me, God came to live in our house. He was not often spoken of, and was never addressed. And yet we knew He was there. Not exactly holy, not exactly prayerful, but a kind of presence. Like central heating, my mother said. When my father was gone, He stayed.

At the same time, we meet Isabel, daughter of the local schoolmaster and his devoted wife who live “on an island in the west.” Isabel is a wild girl, prone to walking in storms and appropriating self-punishments as her requisite due for being part of an incident that gravely incapacitates her brother.

When Isabel danced on the rock’s edge she felt the wind dance with her; she felt it touch her legs and run the danger through her. Her cheeks burned, her eyes fixed on the far sea and her hands down by her sides.

Isabel chafes at the restrictions her education requires, and veers into a passionate physical relationship with Peader, a man with a “worm in his winter rose. For nothing was as deeply set in the heart and mind of Peader O’Luing than the nagging suspicion that underneath all he was worthless.” Isabel’s story is also one of transformation, though her spiral is downward and takes her into the realm of self-loathing even as Nicholas’ journey does the opposite,  bringing him to a level of awareness which includes a decidedly supernatural element.

Angels, my father once said, must pass us in the street every day. They must be ordinary as birds, he said, and recognizable only in the brief moment of their connection to our lives. There was, according to this reasoning, a moment when you knew you were met by an angel and that whatever aid it gave you, however subtle and difficult to trace, your life was changed.

All of this loving and angelfire, in the wrong hands, could have been rendered  sentimental mush that would be as forgettable as it is unlikely. The Irish writer Niall Williams’ first novel is, for this reader, a little bit of a miracle. Though some of the narrative contains far flung imagery and flights of magical thinking, there is an earthy coherence to the story which had me thinking about the manner in which love in all its shapes and sizes operates ceaselessly within and around each life, as both the tangible and invisible expressions of its power continue to surprise and bind us together.

Some things do not bear much telling. I think my father knew this. I think he knew how words can sometimes flatten the deepest emotions or pin them like wild butterflies stunned out of magnificent flight, flimsiest souvenirs of what moved and colored air like silk. Better to imagine it.

Even better to read it.

The Baron in The Trees

Psst, that’s right-  you, down there. Come on up. Give me your hand. Okay? There you go, watch that low branch. Have a seat, no — here, this is a better spot. Comfy? I know, I know, it’s different — but you’re here now.  I just have to tell you a story about the boy who lived in the trees…

Italo Calvino’s magical 1957 novel, The Baron in The Trees, is the story of young Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, an eighteenth century nobleman who leaves his family dinner table one night at the age of twelve and climbs into a tree behind his family home. It’s a rash move. He’s ill prepared and his family even less so, met with disbelief that their oldest son should take such drastic action in proving a point.

Cosimo said: ”I told you I don’t want any, and I don’t!” and pushed away his plateful of snails. Never had we seen such disobedience.

Yet move into the trees Cosimo does, and in so doing, he enters a world of wonder liltingly written by Calvino. The translation by Archibald Colquhoun skilfully reveals Calvino’s humor and supremely deft description. The words fly from their pages in a manner not unlike that of boys running through stacks of sun-dried leaves.

The Baron in The Trees is a quintessentially winsome tale, eliciting a childlike sense of anticipation as the reader encounters delight upon delight. Cosimo, unsteady boy at first, embarks upon his adventure in a state of mixed trepidation and raw bravado, beset by practical concerns as well as more serious ones. He must find a way to eat, sleep, and bathe while remaining vigilant against a local brigand and a cunning feral cat. Never fear, Calvino brilliantly lets the reader hop closely alongside as Cosimo craftily meets his physical dilemmas and soon branches into the loftier concerns of adulthood. In little over 200 pages, among other feats, Cosimo manages to: hunt, garden, sew, rehabilitate  a criminal (using literature no less!), read voluminously, correspond with the high and mighty, make war, travel, make love, publish a newspaper, and own a dog, all while maintaining close ties with his nameless younger brother who serves as narrator.

While down below our world lay flattened, and our bodies looked quite disproportionate and we certainly understood nothing of what he knew up there — he who spent his nights listening to the sap running through its cells; the circles marking the years inside the trunks; the patches of mold growing ever larger helped by the north wind; the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests, then resettling their heads in the softest down of their wings; and the caterpillar waking, and the chrysalis opening.

Love enters Cosimo’s world as well, and Calvino’s luxurious description of the match flits between playful sensuality and gentle poignancy.

On summer afternoons, when sleep took the two lovers side by side, a squirrel would enter, looking for something to nibble, and stroke their faces with its feathery tail or plunge its teeth into a big toe. Then they would pull the curtains to more carefully; but a family of tree mice began gnawing at the roof of the pavilion and fell down on their heads.

This was the time in which they were discovering each other, telling of their lives, questioning.

”And did you feel alone?”

”I hadn’t you.”

”But alone before the rest of the world?”

”No. Why? I always had contacts with other people; I picked fruit, pruned trees, studied philosophy with the Abbé, fought the pirates. Isn’t it like that for everyone?”

”You’re the only one like that, that’s why I love you.”

The world of everyday concern follows Cosimo into the trees as well, bringing family strife, heartbreak and even the intrusion of Napoleon into the ”land of vines.” In one splendid section, Cosimo regales his brother with his own version of how he shelters the Lieutenant-poet Agrippa Papillon of Rouen and volunteers of the Republican army.

With the French army I tried to have as little to do as possible, as we know what armies are, every time they move there’s some disaster. But I had taken rather a liking to that outpost of Lieutenant Papillon and was rather worried about what might happen to them. For the immobility of the front threatened to be fatal to the squadron under the poet’s command. Moss and lichen were growing on the troopers’ uniforms, and sometimes even heather and fern; the tops of the busbies were nested in by screech owls, or sprouted and flowered with lilies of the valley; their thigh boots clotted with soil into compact clogs. The whole platoon was about to take root. Lieutenant Agrippa Papillon’s yielding attitude toward nature was sinking that squad of brave men into a fusion of animal and vegetable.

Thus Cosimo comes to soldier on, through ingenious implements of the forest and the fancy of Calvino. The life and times of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò all too quickly pass under the reader’s eye with dapples of light and dark, some soaking rain, and great sprinklings of love and generosity from their author.  In finishing the novel, I knew that ”all was to change, and no Cosimo will ever walk the trees again.” But – wait here with me for just a few seconds- listen, listen close.