Sarah Orne Jewett

by Peter Cates

Sarah Orne Jewett

The October 1904, Atlantic Monthly, out of Boston, Massachusetts, had an article, The Art of Miss Jewett, on South Berwick Maine’s own Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 – 1909) , via which Charles Miner Thompson (1864-1941) stated the following:

“…I always think of her as of one who, hearing New England accused of being a bleak land without beauty, passes confidently over the snow, and by the gray rock, and past the dark fir tree, to a southern bank, and there, brushing away the decayed leaves, triumphantly shows to the faultfinder a spray of the trailing arbutus. And I should like, for my own part, to add this: that the fragrant, retiring, exquisite flower, which I think she would say is the symbol of New England virtue, is the symbol also of her own modest and delightful art.”

Thompson’s statement might be encrusted by a bit too much purple scrub brush prose but he did show a discerning appreciation of a writer for her gifts at endowing the “bleak land…gray rock…[and] decayed leaves ” of our Pine Tree State and conveying its own special beauties and truths in this at times very scary universe.

As with William Faulkner’s hot dusty roads in Mississippi and Willa Cather’s Nebraska wheat fields, Jewett’s Southern Maine was transformed into a microcosm that resonated with so many readers.

In her short story collection The Country of the Pointed Firs, one story in particular, The Flight of Betsey Lane, has an opening paragraph that conveys in its simple narrative just how much Miss Jewett absorbed into her “little piece of dirt” in Southern Maine (She lived in South Berwick most of her life and, as a child, traveled with her father on his rounds as a country doctor.); since it’s too long to quote in its entirety, I offer a few sentences that hopefully will convey the spirit of the author :

“One windy morning in May, three old women sat together near an open window in the shed chamber of Byfleet Poor-house. The wind was from the northwest, but their window faced the southeast, and they were only visited by an occasional waft of fresh air.

“There was a cheerful feeling of activity, and even an air of comfort, about the Byfleet Poor-house. Almost every one was possessed of a most interesting past, though there was less to be said about the future.

“There was a sharp-faced, hard-worked young widow with seven children, who was an exception to the general level of society, because she deplored the change in her fortunes. The older women regarded her with suspicion, and were apt to talk about her in moments like this, when they happened to sit together at their work.”

Faulkner wrote, “A writer needs three things – experience, observation and imagination, any one or two of which can supply the lack of the others.”

Willa Cather, who was a friend, wrote of Sarah Orne Jewett, “She early learned to love her country for what it was. What is quite as important, she saw it as it was. She happened to have the right nature, the right temperament, to see it so- and to understand by intuition the deeper meaning of all she saw.”

Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg

An RCA Victor cassette contains Edvard Grieg’s a minor Piano Con­certo and two of his solo Lyric Pieces; and the Con­certo of Robert Schumann, also in a minor, as performed by Artur Rubinstein, with Alfred Wallenstein conducting a studio pickup orchestra for the Grieg and Carlo Maria Giulini directing the Chicago Symphony in the Schumann.

Rubinstein played with his wondrously expressive musicianship that he brought to a wide range of composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and they can be heard via YouTube. He could at odd moments smother the music with his personalized individuality but in general he conveyed the spirit of each composer in his many recordings.

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by Peter Cates

A childhood memory

Among my many childhood memories were the innumerable Sunday drives, when gas was inexpensive, down to Pemaquid, Rockport, Port Clyde, Belfast, Owl’s Head, St. George.

One particular memory is of the humongous rock quarries in St. George and it was brought to mind when I was browsing in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (1995, University of Maine Press) and came across a paragraph on the beginnings of the quarry industry during the early 19th century:

“Maine’s granite quarries were first opened by local companies using local capital. These were usually small firms with fewer than twenty-five employees. The business was fiercely competitive, as was the construction industry generally, and wages and profits fluctuated widely. In the second half of the century, the industry was stabilized through two developments. During the 1870s, the federal government issued lucrative contracts for public buildings, known as “fifteen percent contracts” because they guaranteed that amount of profit to the builders and, by extension, to the suppliers. Several large quarry owners gained a monopoly over these contracts and profited heavily. ”

Needless to say, greed increased with the wealth and relations between management and labor deteriorated.

Dean Martin

Dean Martin

Dean Martin recorded two quietly wistful ballads – Dreamy Old New England Moon; and Three Wishes – on a ten-inch Capitol 78 that was released in April 1949. What particularly enhanced Dino’s decently professional singing was the exquisitely crafted arrangements of Paul Weston who directed a studio orchestra consisting of some of the best strings and woodwinds session players to be found on the west coast and a backup group of harmonizing women.

NCIS Hawai’i

Vanessa Lachey

Though not quite on the same level as the Mark Harmon original, NCIS Hawaii’s first seven episodes for season one have proven entertaining. Vanessa Lachey as Jane Tennant, the lead agent for the Pearl Harbor branch of the Navy Criminal Investi­gation Service, had conveyed commendable presence.

Madeline Zima

Episode 5, Gaijing, which deals with the murder of a visiting Japanese officer, has an unusual plot twist. A woman who was close to both the victim and his girlfriend who had been murdered the previous year is the prime suspect because of what seems to be a psychopathic personality disorder. It’s the surprising plot twist that gave this episode unusual merit.

Madeline Zima’s performance as the suspect was quite extraordinary in her development of this character.

Leopold Stokowski

Leopold Stokowski

A 12-inch acoustically recorded shellac of the concluding part three of the Overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhauser had Leopold Stokowski conducting the Phil­adel­phia Orchestra in one of the most exciting performances to be heard when the horn was used for recording instead of the microphone. Stokowski not only drew extraordinary playing from the orchestra but achieved the most vivid sound from the still crude horn technology.

Stokow­ski’s other discs from before 1924, when Victor developed the electric microphone system, were also quite vivid in sound. And he would live long enough to record with stereo and four channel microphone set ups before he passed away in 1977 at the age of 95, and with a recording contract until he reached 100.