by Peter Cates

The Native Poets of Maine

S. Herbert Lancey, editor.
Published in Bangor, Maine, by David Bugbee and Company in 1854. 324 pages.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The above anthology from so long ago is a sizable representation of poets born in our Pine Tree State and some of their works; the most well-known is Portland’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), but Albion’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-1837), even though not that famous as a poet, did the ultimate sacrifice in Alton, Illinois, at the hands of an angry mob because of his fearless stand against slavery.

Seba Smith

The other names, now mere footnotes in history, include Biddeford’s Grenville Mellen, North Yarmouth’s William Cutler, Exeter’s David Barker, Strong’s Florence Percy, Belfast’s William G. Crosby and Sidney’s Harriet Atwell and so forth and their poems do evoke something of Maine, even if just a couple of lines — the four seasons, joys, sorrows, daily routines.

Most of them in quality are between commonplace and slightly higher. Despite these lackings , this book is fascinating historical documentation of what some people in my native state were thinking and feeling 170 years ago.

I offer one exceptionally vivid poem from Buckfield’s Seba Smith:

The Snow Storm

The cold winds swept the mountain’s height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And mid the cheerless hours of night
A mother wandered with her child :
As through the drifting snow she press’d,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.

And colder still the winds did blow,
And darker hours of night came on,
And deeper grew the drifting snow :
Her limbs were chill’d, her strength was gone;
‘O God!’ she cried, in accents wild,
‘If I must perish, save my child !’

She stripp’d her mantle from her breast,
And bared her bosom to the storm,
And round the child she wrapp’d the vest
And smil’d to think her babe was warm.
With one cold kiss, one tear she shed,
And sunk upon her snowy bed.

At dawn a traveller pass’d by,
And saw her ‘neath a snowy veil;
The frost of death was in her eye,
Her cheek was cold, and hard, and pale;
He moved the robe from off the child,
The babe look’d up and sweetly smiled.

There are 13 copies of this book on Book Finder, priced from $26.74 to $116.52.

by Peter Cates

Lush Life

John Coltrane, tenor sax
Heritage, 513289L, CD, 1987 reissue of sessions from 1957-58.

John Coltrane

One of the greatest saxophone players in the history of jazz, John Coltrane (1926-1967) left a huge recorded legacy, each listing imbued with consistently high quality. Lush Life gathers five previously available selections from the late ‘50s – Like Someone in Love, Cole Porter’s I Love You, Trane’s Slow Blues, I Hear a Rhapsody and the title composition by Billy Strayhorn.

He assembled several distinguished musicians including Donald Byrd on trumpet, pianist Red Garland, Earl May and Paul Chambers playing bass and drummers Art Taylor, Louis Hayes and Al Heath.

The entire CD is very good but my absolute favorite is Lush Life with very beautiful playing by Coltrane, Garland, Chambers, Byrd and Hayes. It evokes loneliness with haunting eloquence. Strayhorn wrote the piece during the 1930s while many singers and instrumentalists have also recorded it.

Jazz critic Joe Goldberg’s insightful liner notes are included with the CD.

***

Don Rickles

From the late, great cheap shot jokester/comedy star, Don Rickles, 1926-2017. – “I don’t drink much anymore, but when I traveled with Frank Sinatra, God rest his soul, I used to drink like I could do it. He made it a test. In Vegas, the Rat Pack, which I was a little part of, drank all night and slept most of the day. Then, about 5 o’clock, we’d meet in the hotel steam room, lock the door, and steam our brains out.”

E. B.White

by Peter Cates

When I wrote about E.B. White’s Elements of Style for my February 14, 2019, column, I expressed my intent to devote another column or more in coming weeks, not only because of his phenomenal quality and quantity of writing, but also of the many years he and his wife lived in Maine.

I didn’t realize how soon until I received a phone call from Mrs. Janet Dow, with respect to my Valentine’s Day column. She told me of some paragraphs from White’s book, One Man’s Meat, in the form of a diary entry, devoted to the January 1941 night when the writer, his wife and their son slept at a China Village, Maine, inn owned by Mrs. Dow’s mother, Letha Wilson. Since China Village is located in my neck of the woods, this week’s column will consist of E.B. White’s paragraphs about that night:

Sunday. All three of us to the faraway doctor yesterday through snow and bad temper, the temper being mine; but it comes from my nose not my heart. The doctor took X-ray pictures of our son’s antra and wants to bore some holes in his head, which made me sick and discouraged all day and worried. We started driving back home just before dark, but I was doubtful that we could make it, as the snow had begun to drift across the highway and it was still snowing hard. Couldn’t see the road very well, so when we drew into the village of China I decided we had had enough of storm and bone cavities for one day, enough of doubts and slippery surfaces, so we drove into the garage of R.E. Coombs and he told us we might find lodging at an inn across the way.

No lights showed, but we waded up to the door and were welcomed by Mrs. Wilson, the proprietress, who was surprised to find guests in winter but took us in anyway and gave us some Saturday-night baked beans and brown bread with a dessert of preserved strawberries; and we moved the davenport from the living room into a big chamber across the hall to make the third bed. After supper we had a talk with our hostess about education, a subject on which she turned out to be an authority, because in winter-time, when innkeeping is slow, she occupies herself by teaching a district school and has nine schools under her.

She thought consolidation of schools in her town would probably be a good thing, but that there was strong opposition to it. And she told us that, although the disadvantages of the one-room school were very great, there were some compensating things too, principally that the pupils in such a school gained of necessity a certain independence at an early age, realizing that they had to progress in scholarship almost unassisted if they were to progress at all. She had taught also in Augusta, where she had only one grade to instruct, and she said it was noticeable how much more reliant on the teacher were the pupils there than in the country school.

I believe that, too, and my guess is that the Little Red School of yesterday produced a lower average of intelligence but produced occasional individuals who had the very best education there is, namely the knack and the will to seek and gain knowledge independently, without having it spooned out.

by Peter Cates

E.B. White

The Elements of Style
(with William Strunk, Jr.), 4th edition – Longman Publishers; 1935, 1959, 1979, 1999; 95 pages.

Although Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985), better known as E.B. White, was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the family vacations during his childhood in Maine’s Belgrade Lakes, the routines of farm life and the workings of nature, enriched his own writings. In addition, he spent many years of his adulthood living on, and working, his farm in Brooklin, Maine, near Deer Isle and Stonington. These years, with the many New Yorker contributions, added much.

I hope to devote another column or more in the weeks ahead to White. This week I am focusing on The Elements of Style, a 1935 book on writing by his English professor at Cornell, William Strunk Jr. (1869-1946). White edited and revised extensively, in 1959 and 1979, editions before his own death in 1985. Some extras were tacked on the above 1999 fourth edition by his stepson, Roger Angell, himself a noted writer on baseball and still living in his 99th year.

The 95 pages of content mirror Strunk and White’s commitment to saving teacher and student hard labor yet keeping the book concise and most helpful to anyone who writes lots of words in a week. I offer choice quotations from both men:

“‘Omit needless words’ cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself – a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had out-distanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, ‘Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’ ”

Actually, I have found this book in one or two earlier copies, very edifying for more than 40 years.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

by Peter Cates

Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

William Stenberg conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Capitol P 8305, LP, recorded 1955.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

William Steinberg had a style of conducting in which the most often recorded works (and I still persist in my fascination with duplicates of favorite pieces of music) sounded freshly minted; his LP of Scheher­azade kept me listening from beginning to end and is available on Internet sites.

Other classical recordings recently heard and worthy of attention:

Pietro Mascagni

Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana – Domenico Savino conducting the Rome Symphony Orchestra, Kapp LP, KCL-9003, recorded between late 1950s to early ’60s. Kapp released mostly popular artists such as pianist Roger Williams, arranger/conductor Marty Gold and singer Jack Jones but it did have a few classical titles including the series, Opera Without Words, featuring Domenico Savino and his Rome instrumentalists. Along with Puccini’s Turandot, Verdi’s La Forza del Destino and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Savino did an orchestral synthesis of the ever-inspired Cavalleria Rusticana of Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945). The singing is missed but the orchestral passages still shine; I played the record twice within a week recently.

Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi: Four Seasons – Iona Brown as soloist and conducting the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Philips 9500717 LP, 1979. The late Iona Brown (1941-2004) delivered a more understated performance of Vivaldi’s Seasons than is usually the case but her own vibrant musicianship enlivened this recording, one holding its own among many good renditions.

Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings; Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Sir Georg Solti conducting the Israel Philharmonic, London CS 6066, LP, recorded 1963. Sir Georg Solti (1912-1997) delivered a surging, intense performance of Tchai­kov­sky’s Serenade, one that stands with the Eugene Ormandy Philadelphia Orchestra Sony CD as exceptional; the Mozart is good but not as distinguished as those of other conductors. But Solti’s legacy of recordings is a great one. I recommend watching a 60 minute YouTube video of him rehearsing the Vienna Philharmonic playing Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture, from 1966. It is fascinating in how he goes over details of the score and relates to the orchestra.

Quote from the late humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) – “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”