A Certain Slant of Light

I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.

The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.

But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.

In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.

I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Judith Flanders’ The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London, which I’ve been dipping in and out of for months. It’s the sort of book that rewards that kind of reading; there’s not really a storyline as such, so you’re not going to lose the thread if you go slowly, and there are fascinating tidbits of information on every page. An amazing resource if you want to learn more about life in Victorian London. (Some of the information is clearly London-specific, but Flanders’ overarching thesis - that the city streets in the nineteenth century were a much livelier social space than they are today - jibes with descriptions I’ve read of other nineteenth century cities, in America as well as England.)

Conveniently, another history book that I read this week provides an echo of this fact: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair is a solid but not spectacular history of the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, which buttresses Flanders’ assertion that large crowds would turn out to watch just about anything with its description of the crowds that came to watch the Milburn House, where President McKinley convalesced after being shot. They couldn’t even get near the house - the police cordoned off the whole block so McKinley could have quiet to rest - but people still turned out, even though there was nothing to see but the policemen patrolling the block and maybe a far-distant view of the roof.

The Buffalo fair was called the Rainbow Fair because, in contrast to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (called the White City for its dazzling white buildings), it painted its Spanish Mission-inspired buildings in many colors. It also, in a bold but perhaps misguided move, decided to focus solely on the Western Hemisphere: it only had pavilions from North and South America, not Europe. Unfortunately, Americans then (much like American now) were much more interested in Paris than, for instance, Buenos Aires, which perhaps partially accounted for the low attendance numbers: the fair didn’t make back its initial investment. (Although of course, President McKinley’s assassination may have slowed business, too.)

Onward in the Newbery Honor project: I read Patricia Reilly Giff’s Pictures of Hollis Woods, which perhaps suffered because it reminded me of a book I really didn’t like, Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers. Both books center around a girl in foster care; both are told in alternating chapters, half the chapters set Now and the other half set Sometime Before Now, when our heroine tragically messed up the only foster placement that made her feel like she really had a home, a fact to which she keeps alluding but does not explain for most of the book.

Because of this association, I kept expecting Hollis Woods to reveal that she, like the heroine in Language of Flowers, is really kind of a psychopath, but that’s entirely on me and not the book at all; if Hollis has any problems as a character, it’s the fact that the book keeps telling us she’s trouble but never actually shows her… being troublesome. Even the part where she sort of kidnaps her foster mother is really an altruistic act: her foster mother clearly has dementia or something of that nature, and Hollis is afraid that the foster care system will separate them and perhaps put her foster mother in some sort of institution.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST (I read a lot of books this week), I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax on Safari, a solid entrant in the Mrs. Pollifax series, a soothing balm of exotic espionage during these troubled times. I was a little sorry that it seems Mrs. Pollifax is going to marry not!Farrell, but I daresay her paramour will grow on me eventually, even though their emotional connection didn’t grow like a tender vine while they spend ten days trapped together in a prison cell in Albania.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Orne Jewett knows what I like, and what I like is HERMITS. Earlier this week, the narrator visited her landlady’s mother, an older woman in her eighties who lives on an idyllic island off the coast of Maine - with her son, though, and they always welcome visitors, so they are really only semi-hermits.

Then Jewett followed this up with the tale of Joanna, who was Crossed in Love (jilted, in fact, right before her wedding day) and thereafter resettled on small, storm-tossed Shellheap Island, on which boats can only land if the tide and the winds happen to align. Now that shows true commitment to hermithood.

What I Plan to Read Next

A friend of mine is sending me a book care package from Caveat Emptor, so I shall have many mystery books, both in the sense that I don’t know what they’ll be, and in the sense that some of them should be mystery novels.

Caveat Emptor is a Bloomington institution, which was looking down the barrel of defaulting on its May rent because of the pandemic; I was going to include a link to the book care packages, but the Bloomington book community responded with such fervor to the threat of the bookstore's death that they now have too many orders to fill! So they've temporarily shut down that deal while they catch up. A story with a happy ending!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances M. Wood’s When Molly Was a Harvey Girl, which is cute but not as excellent as Becoming Rosemary. I’m starting to think Wood, like Patrice Kindl, might be a one hit wonder for me: they both have one book I adored, and all their other books are underwhelming.

What I’m Reading Now

Still The Cracks in the Kingdom. I haven’t been reading very much because I’ve been so busy writing.

I’ve also been listening to Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, which I expected to love because it’s about a young woman becoming a doctor in the late 19th century. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect book for me? But I can’t get into it, and I’ve figured out why: it’s all narration, or almost all of it, almost all telling and very little showing.

I actually enjoy that sort of thing in moderation - I love the beginnings of Jane Austen’s books, say, where she spends a chapter introducing the cast of characters and telling you what they’re like. But the key words here are “in moderation.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs on my to-read shelf. I’m also planning to read the next Benjamin January book.