REVIEW POTPOURRI: Maine Speaks anthology

by Peter Cates

Maine Speaks anthology

Lawrence S. Hall

The 1987 Maine Speaks anthology contains what has elsewhere been often considered the most famous 20th century short story from our Pine Tree State – The Ledge, by Lawrence Sargent Hall (1915-1993).

However, before today (February 2, 2025), I was totally unfamiliar with the story, and the writer, let alone the resulting popularity after it was first published in 1959; I simply started reading it out of curiosity and became sucked into its skillfully drawn atmosphere of suspense and dread.

The plot depicts a fisherman taking his 13 year-old-son and 15-year-old nephew out early one Christmas morning to a rock ledge off the Maine coast to shoot ducks. His boat is moored at an outlying island where the three take a skiff roughly 300 yards further to the ledge.

They are bagging birds by the dozens, highly anticipating the delicious eating; in the excitement of the moment, they don’t notice that the skiff has loosened and floated dangerously far away until only visible in the distance and they are now stuck on the ledge with no means of getting off before high tides.

Meanwhile, the freezing cold waves are rising around the ledge. I am not going to reveal the ending.

But I will provide a couple of passages conveying the situation, atmosphere and attitude, sometimes simultaneously, as in the first example:

“They had it figured exactly right for today. The ledge would not be going under until after the gunning was over, and they would be home for supper in good season. With a little luck the boys would have a skiff-load of birds to show for their first time outside. Well beyond the legal limit, which was no matter. You took what you could get in this life, or the next man made out and you didn’t. ”

As can be seen, with situation, the preceding quote conveys the seemingly careful planning of every detail in this venture, leaving little to chance – “They had it figured exactly right”; with atmosphere, the imminent danger – “the ledge would not be going under”; and with attitude, the rationalizing dishonesty of the fisherman in taking “what you could get in this life. ”

The second quote hints at the possibility of a lurking bombshell in one otherwise perfectly nice day:

“This could be one of those days where all the right conditions masked an incalculable flaw.”

One of Hall’s beliefs was that he considered great fiction more true to life and fact to be mere fact because great fiction seeks out the truth behind mere facts. “Fiction….reveals beyond what perhaps happened what could, or would, or should happen.”

Elsewhere, he stated that he wrote “out of fascination with the experience of humankind living on this planet.”

Hall got his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, in 1936 and a Ph.D from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1943, doing his thesis on another Bowdoin alumnus, Nathaniel Hawthorne, which he later published.

During World War II, Hall worked for the Office of Strategic Services, better known as the OSS, an earlier incarnation of the CIA where he ran a censorship unit.

From 1946 to 1986, he was an English professor at Bowdoin and resided on Orr’s Island, near Harpswell, where for a few years he also ran a boat yard.

In 1999, novelist John Updike included The Ledge when he edited The Best American Short Stories of the Century, praising it as “timeless – a naturalistic anecdote terrible in its tidal simplicity and inexorability fatally weighted in every detail.”