REVIEW POTPOURRI: Elisabeth Ogilvie

Elisabeth Ogilvie

by Peter Cates

Elisabeth Ogilvie

The consistently intriguing Maine Speaks anthology contains a short story, Scobie, by Elisabeth Ogilvie (1917-2006), which was first published in the August, 1951, issue of Woman’s Day magazine.

The story is set in a fishing village along the Maine coast and is recounted from the point of view of a first person unnamed narrator who is living presently in the early 1950s and, in visiting with a childhood friend, Rhoda, is recalling memories of those 1920s or ’30s yesteryears when the village only had “a general store, a filling station, a sardine factory, a fish-and-lobster buyer, and a fifteen-room hotel that catered for three summer months to artists and elderly people….” and in particular of an eccentric named Scobie who lived for a year on the very edge of the village in a “pinkie” or discarded boat with his well-trained pet baby pig, Barnaby.

The story has a very commendably achieved sense of time and place in its details of local color but the main plot in its depiction of the girls interactions with Scobie when they visited him a few times (and without their parents’ permission) was unfortunately a bit wooden and desultory.

Still, one paragraph stood out in its vividness, when the narrator is describing her father’s job as a warden of the village “fisheries”:

“At the far curve of the harbor, away from the sardine factory and the big wharves, there was a regular settlement of lobstermen, who preferred to live in sight of the harbor and the moorings rather than in the town. Their houses, with neat white clapboards or silvery shingles, were sheltered by the spruce woods behind; the grassy ground sloped down to the shore, where their boats were hauled up for painting; and their traps were stacked against wildrose bushes and blackberry vines. My father spent a lot of time over there.”

The potential for further reader interest in the lives of these inhabitants in a separate universe from the other villagers may have been a lost opportunity.

Ogilvie was a Massachusetts native but, in 1944, she moved into a 33-acre farm, on Gay’s Island, in Cushing, where she died from a stroke in 2006. She published more than 40 novels, mostly based on life in the islands along the Maine coast; along with an autobiography.

Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff

April 1 was the 150th birthday anniversary of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). YouTube contains a highly recommended recording of his ever justly popular 2nd Piano Concerto, which he composed in 1901, after recovering from a deep depression through the help of hypnosis from a Doctor Dahl. The performance is a 1960 Columbia Masterworks collaboration between pianist Philippe Entremont and the late Leonard Bernstein, with the New York Philharmonic.

It was the first LP I ever owned of the work and its power and poetry had a uniquely gripping eloquence of its own. The second movement was slowly paced and milked for maximum sentiment while the concluding 3rd movement was paced with lightning speed until the magnificent concluding three minutes when, with slower tempos, the music exploded with beauty.