Literature | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Falling in Love with Falling in Love with a Place

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 17 asks, “Take a look at your bookcase. If you had enough free time, which book would be the first one you’d like to reread? Why?”
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On re-visiting Cape Cod this weekend, I remembered a favorite book, Henry Beston‘s “The Outermost House,” and decided to re-read it. I have not looked in its pages for 20 years and no longer own a copy. This sad situation was remedied with the money in my wallet being accepted at Yellow Umbrella Books. Since I was on vacation on Cape Cod, finding enough free time to re-read was not an issue.

Beston himself wrote perhaps the best physical description of Cape Cod in the book’s opening lines: “East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, and disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold.” He depicts a heroic shoreline, a land that declares its own terms of surrender against a hostile, battering sea. Given that Cape Cod resembles a single raised fist jutting in the air, a heroic, Byronesque, cliff face is only appropriate.

The house itself was a 20 x 16-foot cabin that Beston ordered built on the dunes near Eastham, Massachustts, along the Cape’s forearm, in 1925. It faced the ocean, and its many windows offered him a view of the water that made him feel like he was on a ship. Thus he called the house the “Fo’castle,” but it became known as the “outermost house” for an obvious reason: it sat at what seemed like the end of the earth. Beston never lived full-time in his shanty, but he spent enough time there to write his book which is subtitled, “A Year of Life on The Great Beach of Cape Cod.” Picking epic-seeming events from each of the seasons he experienced gives his “year” an intensity of action and feeling. The book was published in 1928 by Doubleday.

As a young man, I knew that I loved Cape Cod, for reasons of family and fun, but it was not until I devoured this short, 218-page, book, that I found the deeper reasons. It would be beautiful if every place on our planet could have a writer fall so utterly in love with it, as Cape Cod had Henry Beston. Beston’s brief meditation on the slow, usually imperceptible rhythms of nature—imperceptible because few bother to perceive them and communicate them—is written in a muscular language that makes the surf appear to have desires and dreams, the wind have language, the birds individual personalities.

It is not easy to take memorable landscape photos; the camera may capture every detail of a very detailed outdoors scene, but a photographer’s eye and hand is needed to direct our eyes to what he or she finds worth looking at. Otherwise, every beach snapshot is every other beach snapshot; they are alike in their uniqueness of sky and sand. The nature writer has even more difficulties: he could either be yelping on the page, “It was such a stupendous night sky full of stars! You should have seen it,” boring us with banal generalities, or, lurching in the other direction, boring us to tears with specifics. Beston finds the poetry in using the correctly applied terminology of whatever phenomena he describes. This was a revelation to my twenty-year-old self.

Cape Cod, winter 2010. Photo by The Gad About Town

Winter from atop the dunes is neither “frigid” nor “bitter,” two words that may frequent one’s letters home; rather it is “crystalline” and the snow is dancing and driving:

The snow skirred along the beach, the wind suffering it no rest; I saw little whirlpools of it driving down the sand into the onrush of the breakers, it gathered in the footprints of the coast guard patrols, building up on their leeward side and patterning them in white on an empty beach. The very snow in the air had a character of its own, for it was the snow of the outer Cape and the North Atlantic, snow icy and crystalline, and sweeping across the dunes and moors rather than down upon them.

When the National Park Service was evaluating the arguments for establishing the Cape Cod National Seashore, Beston’s book was cited frequently in the report’s pages. Beston died in 1968, and a sentence from “The Outermost House” is an epitaph: “Creation is still going on, the creative forces are as great and active today as they have ever been, and tomorrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world.” The cabin itself was swept away by the Blizzard of 1978, a nor’easter of heroic strength with historic effects; in other words, a storm that Henry Beston would have appreciated. The spot on the beach where the cabin stood, once atop the dunes, is now under the Atlantic Ocean, a portion of the Cape that the sea has claimed for itself.

No single development at any one location on the beach would have phased this wondering, passionate naturalist and writer, though:

And what of Nature itself, you say—that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much an engine as you think. As for “red in tooth and fang,” whenever I hear that phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life—all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain.

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A documentary about Henry Beston and Outermost House is in production:

Henry Beston Documentary Trailer : Cape Cod from Mooncusser Films LLC on Vimeo.

Literature, Poetry

Philip Larkin, August 9, 1922–December 2, 1985

Image | Posted on August 9, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

Auden’s Decency

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

In the documentary, “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” W.H. Auden’s friend Thekla Clark recounts the story of one of Auden’s lovers complaining to him that he thought Auden would be more “romantic,” being a poet, after all. “But you aren’t romantic,” Clark quotes the lover telling the poet. “You aren’t romantic at all.”

“If you want romance,” Clark quotes Auden replying, “screw a journalist.” (Except she does not say “screw.”)

Auden was not one for ruining a good line—or a good night—by spending it explaining the difference between romance and sentimentality.

Auden’s poetry, often about love, derived from an almost clinical study of his own personal history and emotions. A professional poetic detachment yielded a poetry that was undisturbed by sentimentality. Yet Auden is also the least cynical and one of the most humane of the great poets.

One can not declare oneself humble. Humility and decency do not allow for advertising. The moment one discusses one’s virtues, one yields them. In the same documentary, “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” Auden tells the talk-show host Michael Parkinson that “a writer is a maker, not a man of action” so everything he writes is an autobiography, is his history of his experience transformed in his senses, and that, no, he would not be writing his memoirs. The autobiography of a man of action—a politician or general or activist—may be necessary to understand them.

(The clip starts around minute three. The documentary, which first aired on the BBC in 2000, is full of interviews with Auden and his circle. Once upon a time, talk shows featured literary figures; Michael Parkinson was the Johnny Carson or Dick Cavett of Britain, minus the jokes. Actually, Dick Cavett was the Parkinson of America.)

Auden learned the difference between a man of action and a maker early on, and he learned how tempting it could be to confuse the two. In the 1930s, while a young writer, he was made into a hero of the British left, and moved to America to reacquire his privacy. Edward Mendelson quotes Auden in “The Secret Auden,” in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring … . It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.”

By the 1960s, both his politics (left) and his religion (he returned to the Anglican Church of his youth in 1940) were publicly known, but he was no longer a speech maker and never was a proselytizer. From Mendelson’s article:

When he felt obliged to stand on principle on some literary or moral issue, he did so without calling attention to himself, and he was impatient with writers like Robert Lowell whose political protests seemed to him more egocentric than effective. When he won the National Medal for Literature in 1967, he was unwilling either to accept it in Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian, where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics and propaganda.”—The Secret Auden,”

To accept an award from one’s adopted country and relocate the ceremony from the heart of power to the nation’s museum, and then to turn the ceremony into a lecture about corruption is, when available, a different sort of bravery than an attempt to make one’s absence into a loud presence.

Edward Mendelson is Auden’s literary executor, and in the New York Review article, he reveals that he is still learning of some of Auden’s acts of decency, 40 years after the poet’s death. Charities he quietly funded, a manuscript donated for a sale to pay for a friend’s surgery, a prisoner who wrote him once and began a lifelong correspondence course in literature. Even the story of a woman from his congregation in Manhattan who “was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.”

There is even this story, revealed last year in a letter to the Times of London:

Sixty years ago my English teacher brought me to London from my provincial grammar school for a literary conference. Understandably, she abandoned me for her friends when we arrived, and I was left to flounder. I was gauche and inept and had no idea what to do with myself. Auden must have sensed this because he approached me and said, “Everyone here is just as nervous as you are, but they are bluffing, and you must learn to bluff too.”

Auden knew, Mendelson writes, that good and evil exist, but that human beings fall on a spectrum between the two. Most are not evil people attempting to be saintly but good people striving to become better. There “are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.” When one’s nation declares itself a force for good in the world, maybe one should make sure the passport is up-to-date. Auden once wrote, “Many a sore bottom finds/A sorer one to kick.”

We do not practice what we thoroughly possess. We say we “practice” kindness because we do not possess it, not to the degree that makes us kind. We practice love because we are not loving but can always be more so. The humble acts of decency and kindness may not change the universe, but they may change an individual’s universe. In the often misquoted line from his amused and amusing 1957 poem, “The More Loving One,” Auden says, “If equal affection cannot be,/Let the more loving one be me.”

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Mendelson mentions Thekla Clark in his New York Review article, in one more anecdote about Auden’s quiet defense of doing the right thing, and adds that he learned of this “in a documentary film, ‘Wystan: The Life, Love and Death of a Poet,’ by Michael Buergermeister, which had its premiere in Oxford last year.” It is the only mention I have found of this documentary. On Buergermeister’s own website, only this trailer for the film appears: