Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs in the Bay Area

Dear all,

I did not know what to expect when I picked up this book to read; I did not know, I suppose, that I would fall in love—the way the mysterious narrator says in the opening paragraph, “The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.” Falling in love with a single person—final, swift, fateful—yes, but the truth is, I did not fall in love with Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs with swiftness. I wandered in, mildly curious and confused, lulled by the quaint New England rituals and solitudes, until the stories and the daytrips and the dooryard visits began to revolve within me and stir deep pangs of longing.

Part of this, I believe, must have something to do with the narrator herself—a writer of some sort on her summer retreat at Dunnet Landing, well-traveled but having chosen to seclude herself in this tiny fishing village on the coast of Maine, who finds herself tempted so much by the gossip and chatter and characters at her lodgings with Mrs. Todd’s that she rents an abandoned schoolroom on a hill to work during the daytime. These are, of course, details gleaned over the course of reading the novella—of herself, her history and particulars, the narrator is inconspicuously silent as we join her in marveling at these beautiful, enduring people of Dunnet Landing. It isn’t until the third page into the novella that we’re graced with the first “I”—until then, a third-person omniscient voice seems ready to carry the entire narrative.

This strangely distant, yet acknowledged and appealed to narrator of Pointed Firs brings together both remoteness and warmth; Mrs. Blackett smiles at her and squeezes her hand, Elijah Tilley invites her to his house for dinner, countless people turn to her as the medium of their lives—yet we know nothing about her own loves and dreams, except that she writes and fishes, and would sooner surrender herself to self-forgetfulness than to solitary work: “…as we turned away, I saw a flutter of white go past the window as I left the schoolhouse and my morning’s work to their neglected fate.” How much I, too, am easily lured away from my writing!

Besides the narration, something else held me back sometimes, and that is its quaintness—so quaint and picturesque and off-key. The picture book view of the folk of Dunnet Landing reminded me very much of Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which is filled quaint, little cottages and tombstones, and is narrated by a similarly romantic writer. In Pointed Firs, however, there is something pitifully pathetic in the stories recounted, like shriveled blackberries on the stem that had too little sun and too many harsh sea gusts to let them ripen. There is something ludicrous in the Queen’s Twin who is convinced that she and the Queen of England lead parallel lives, who cuts out magazine photographs of the royal family and makes gauzy, fanciful frames for each relative; something petty in the way Mrs. Todd, as generous and spritely as she is, dismisses others for being dull or stingy. Yet we are asked to love these earnest and simple people because, as Mrs. Todd says, “Don’t it show that for folks that have any fancy in ‘em, such beautiful dreams is the real part o’ life? But to most folks the common things that happens outside ‘em is all in all.”

I am aware that my own idealism, which makes me cling to these quaint little stories, is quite laughable, that my naïveté might be discounted as the strange fruit of ivory towers and pastoral commons. Yesterday, sitting outside “Brainwash café” in its own bubble in SOMA, I was told just as much by someone who is far more realistic, and being a lawyer, far more concerned about clauses and provisions for off-chances and eventualities, far more shrewd about diction and loopholes for profits and tax breaks. Yet even he cannot live without his dreams, for what is an iPhone and a MacBook but sleek modern versions of magazine cutouts? What is this mania for information at your fingertips but another kind of distraction? Mrs. Todd says discerningly of the Queen’s Twin, “I expect all this business about the Queen has buoyed her over many a shoal place in her life. Yes, you might say that Abby’d been a slave, but there ain’t any slave but has some freedom.” I have always thought that self-proclaimed idealists are the true pessimists because we believe so resolutely in misery that we’ll see every silver lining in the gloom and doom while the realists simply read the day’s weather report and plan accordingly.

I refuse to plan accordingly, I’d rather be accused of the albeit artificial and self-imposed ignorance and vanity that allows a sense of surprise in a world where there is nothing new under the sun. Surprise. This is my mantra against knowledge and complacency, prejudice and practicalities. Though we may all of us be prisoners or slaves of this hard, unsympathetic world we live in, I think our mantras and manias save us and give us sustenance and society in our loneliest hour. At the very least we recognize another’s loneliness by the forlorn or listless look that mirrors our own, and there is some fellowship of solitary dreamers that leads us to leave small offerings of kinship, sympathy, or tribute to each other. Each letter I write is in some way an offering of that sort.

Here is the line in Pointed Firs that captured for me that cold, austere New England air “of some ethereal northern sort, with a cool freshness as if it came over new-fallen snow”: “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellow of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

Here in the Bay Area, we haven’t the hundreds of secluded islands that splinter off the coast of Maine. We have, instead, blustery winds that sweep through the marsh grasses and carry in a sea layer of fog that hugs our coastlines and overshadows our peninsulas; dry yellow hills that roll gently into the marshes or into our suburbs and into the bay; grey mudflats and grey industrial walls and debris. We have a loneliness of length that stretches in one long unbroken path upon a levy from inland canyon into the flat sheen of the salt ponds; a loneliness of sprawl that builds tract houses from hillside to the last stretch of infill; and a loneliness of highways that cuts through our cities and replaces distance with endless longing or euphoric independence. People come to the very edges of the golden state to reach the ends of this long loneliness, and there, I trust, they often find that they can go no farther and make their home upon its shores.

I, for one, am still longing for more and have sent out this length of words into the winds. (Play here Mary Poppins' "Let's go fly a kite!") :-)

Much love,
Jules