Sunday, May 26, 2013

Return to Peyton Place






Last Saturday I was in New Hampshire. I felt like doing some meandering so thought I'd return to Gilmanton, the small town where Grace Metalious lived when Peyton Place was published. I stopped at a Rest Area/Information Center along Interstate 89 to check a map. There was an attendant but he was off to a side arranging brochures. I got a map of New Hampshire and spread it out on the counter. The attendant came over and asked if he could help

"I want to go to Gilmanton but I'm not sure what's the best way from here."

We studied the map together and decided that one way was as good as another. "What would take you to Gilmanton, if you don't mind me asking? You'll be going by both tracks!" He was a man of maybe forty-five or fifty, black hair, swarthy skin, surely of French descent, as are so many up that way; and, as for tracks, he was referring to the famous NASCAR track at Loudon and then a dog track further up the road.

"Gilmanton's the town where the woman who wrote Peyton Place lived ... Grace Metalious."

"Really? She was from Gilmanton?"

"Well, she wasn't from there but that's where she lived when she wrote the book. Her husband was the school principal ... at least until the book came out. A lot of the locals didn't appreciate how she'd portrayed the town, and her husband got fired."

"No, they wouldn't like an outlier."

"Well, she wasn't exactly what I'd call an outlier. She was born and grew up just down the road in Manchester."

"Oh, up here we don't even consider that to be part of New Hampshire. Anything below Concord is just part of Massachusetts as far as we're concerned."

He was serious. "You're kidding me!"

"Most of them are from Massachusetts anyway. And they're just different! For instance, my nearest neighbor is two-and-a-half miles way, and I wouldn't want one any closer. But them people down below Concord don't care; they'll build a house almost right on top of you. They don't appreciate independence and privacy."

"Oh." Part of the live free or die mentality maybe.

"By the way another author lived not far from here," he said. "Robert Frost's farm is down in Derry."

"I've been there before. It's nothing much to see. Frost wasn't even a published poet when he lived there. He moved from Derry to England and that's where he became famous. After four years or so he came back to the states as a famous poet and bought a farm up north in Plymouth."

"Really? He went to England to become famous? That's like Jimi Hendrix! He went to England to become famous too."

"Well, I don't think that connection ever crossed my mind, but I guess you're right."

I was enjoying chatting with him but thought I needed to get going. Then when I got going and was 5 or 10 miles down the road I had a bunch more questions for him and wished I'd stayed longer. But Gilmanton beckoned. I didn't feel like turning back.

Gated entrance to Smith Meeting House (S.M.H.) Cemetery.


Grace's Grave, adorned with three pennies and a cheap pen.
Grave near Grace's of Charles B. Roberts, "England's Youngest
Boy Orator," 1892-1992. A Roberts family in Gilmanton is politically
prominent in the state, but this fellow clearly was an outlier. 

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

RIP: Emily Dickinson - Dec. 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886


I bought this book in 1959 at the little newsstand that stood against a wall just outside the Mess Hall at Camp Muenchweiler in Germany. At $1.25 it was high-end, but those Doubleday Anchor paperbacks were better built than the usual. I've read often from this particular one; I've marked it up; I was cruel to its spine; I glued poems written by a friend onto the blank pages at the end of it; I've carelessly tossed it on a table or dropped it on a floor. I stuffed it into box after box after box and moved it to a hundred cities. It has held up well.

I see that the cover was designed by Leonard Baskin, and the cover's typography by Edward Gorey. Neither of these names would have meant a thing to me in 1959. Later, around 1964, in Lansing, my friend Dennis Little, who must have been one of Gorey's earliest fans, turned me onto the fabulously twisted humor of Edward Gorey.  Dennis owned those early little Gorey books that Gorey was printing himself in editions of just a few hundred.

And Leonard Baskin, in the fifties, founded Gehenna Press, which published exquisite and limited editions, usually of his own woodcuts, and sometimes the writings of others with Baskin's woodcuts as illustrations. He eventually was teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College, where, in the late fifties, he met Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. He provided many illustrations for Hughes' books from the early sixties up to the time of their deaths -- that of Hughes in 1998 and Baskin's in 2000.

(Gorey probably designed way more Anchor covers than Baskin; this is the only one I've seen by Baskin whereas I've noticed thirty or forty designed by Gorey.)

But, setting aside Baskin and Gorey, this is Emily's deathday! And of the 1800-or-so poems she wrote, below is one of my favorites, one that I long ago committed to memory. It's amazing how comfortable she is with death, how charmingly and casually she speaks of him (is seduced by him, some have posited).

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.