Green Market Press Blog

SNOW COMING, WOOD TO BE STACKED
(Song for two voices)

Ron hauls the wood from a lot somewhere
in a red pickup, and dumps
a ragged heap in the yard.

I think you know that your welfare and happiness

He never knows what’s coming.
Today it is quartered ash,
two seasons old, with worm tunnels
under the bark, and grain so straight
he could write music on it,
or sonnets,

are close to my heart,

and red oak, close-hearted, tough,
and hackberry, his favorite,
whose straw-colored tangles
burn like nothing else.

and that there is nothing possessive

He wants to get all of it
off the ground before snow
overruns his position. A few flakes
are falling already, like waves
of paratroops hitting the ditches.

or, I hope, intrusive

He stacks it true, favoring the ache
of an old wound: the oak,
which needs to dry, on the far rick,
hackberry near the door,
ash where it fits,

in this. Please send more

a more logical forest,
rationalized finally into something
ready for burning

news about him. I am burning to hear

in the long draft of night
as snow drifts
over the windows

the joy in your voice.

‘THE CIVILIZED EDITOR’

When the blog calls, I sometimes open an old notebook and write about whatever’s on that page—it has to be a random selection.

Today it was a clipping, from the Washington Post of Dec. 9, 1992, reflecting on the life of William Shawn, former editor of the New Yorker. The tribute was by Elizabeth Drew, whose work I’ve followed for years in the New York Review of Books. It was a surprise, a happy one, to find her again in the notebook.

Her piece is pure delight, and I wish I had time to copy it out in full. Her lead will have to do.

“The most important thing about William Shawn was what he did for writers. This humane, exacting genius of a man, who died yesterday at 85, knew how to get better work out of writers than they had ever thought they could do. He did this by giving them confidence—the one thing that writers are constantly, and often desperately, in need of.”

And then she quotes a New York Times editorial written after Shawn’s ouster from the magazine in 1987: “For several generations of [writers], winning the chance to work with William Shawn was like being asked to dance by Fred Astaire.”

When I feel like pontificating about editing, I usually do it on my Editorland blog, which at last count was read occasionally by one other person. So I’m pretty safe there.

But today I feel moved to muse about a curious condition of editing, or more particularly proofreading. This will not be a pontification, because I have no answer to the problem posed.

The condition has to do with (1) the desire and need of copyeditors and proofreaders to have “bright lines”—definitive answers—in order to do their jobs, and (2) the fact that the rest of the world, including writers and readers, seldom gives a damn.

Here’s an example. I work with writers who produce material that has many lists. These are usually prefaced with an introductory sentence along the lines of “There are five conditions, as follows:” or “The following steps complete the operation:”

Note the colon. The Chicago Manual of Style and I agree that it should be there in each of these cases.

But what about this example? “The following six steps are always necessary, and the operation will fail if you neglect any of them.”

This looks like a simple statement to me—one that should end with a period, even though the next thing up is a list. So I’ve performed a colonectomy.

But I know I’m not going to get by with this when the copy reaches the proofreaders. They want a bright line, either all periods or all colons, after all sentences containing the word “following.” So did I when I was on the copy desk. I didn’t have time to stop and reason about whether a colon or a period was required in a particular instance. I just wanted to zip through the copy and go home.

Now that I’m a writer (and an editor supervising writers), I can live happily with ambiguity. I trust the colon/no colon decision to my ear, knowing 999 of 1,000 readers won’t even notice (and the remaining one is locked up in an institution).

But the proofreaders are waiting, waiting. I can hear them muttering. And that creaking sound. It’s the tumbril, isn’t it?

By WILLIAM BRIDGES
United Press International

BERLIN. Oct. 1, 1960 — The United States today rejected a Communist claim to a tiny piece of West Berlin cut off from the rest of the city.

“We don’t intend to give it up,” a spokesman of the U.S. Berlin Mission said.

The territory, called Steinstücken, is only a few acres in size and is separated from the rest of the city by a strip of East Germany the width of three city blocks. About 130 Germans live there.

The Communists recently issued new passes to visitors, describing it as part of East Germany.

“It’s part of West Berlin, and we maintain the right to go there,” the U.S. spokesman said.

“We are considering measures to be taken in light of the action by Pankow,” he said.

He said American officials have not visited Steinstücken for a long time.
American military police patrols stopped going there years ago, it was learned.

Communist border police have long barred West Berlin policemen from entering Steinstücken. West Berlin maintains a policeman with binoculars and a telephone on the city border to watch for any entrance by Communist police into the exclave.

The West Berlin city government protested the new Communist passes to Maj. Gen. Ralph M. Osborne, American commandant in Berlin.
Steinstücken is administered—as far as it can be—by the West Berlin district of Zehlendorf, which is in the American sector.

The East Germans made an attempt to take over Steinstücken in 1951, but withdrew their police after a stiff letter by Maj. Gen. Lemuel Mathewson, then U.S. Berlin commander.

This time, the Communists quietly changed the type of pass issued to tradesmen entering the village.

The new pass is the same as that issued for travel to East German cities, and describes Steinstücken as part of the Potsdam administrative district.

West Berlin newspapers played the story prominently this morning, calling it an attempt to “annex” part of West Berlin.

The U.S. sector has one other small exclave near Steinstücken, but it is uninhabited. The British and French once had similar exclaves, but traded them to East Germany for contiguous territory.

The exclaves belonged to pre-war Berlin, and were incorporated in the occupation zones.

Through the years, a string of incidents—funny and sad—have occurred in the village.

A Communist policeman once tried to flee to the West by crossing into it, but was dragged back by his comrades.

A Berlin oldtimer recalled yesterday that the Communists once arrested another man on the elevated railway tracks crossing Steinstücken. They said the village might be part of the West, but the tracks were Communist.

Villagers have always had difficulties with such matters as funerals and weddings because undertakers and ministers have to come in from the outside.

[Update: Google, of course, has a lot on Steinstücken. The “crisis” reported above passed, but after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, about a dozen border guards tried to escape through the village. So East Germany built a separate wall around Steinstücken. The village continued to figure in East-West negotiations, and finally acquired its own narrow corridor to West Berlin. Today it is just a peaceful village again, part of Berlin, part of Germany.]

‘WOMAN IN WHITE’
(Alice Dieudonné Chase)

Chase painted her in 1910. The time
is unimportant, it’s the hat
that matters, creamy blooms,
and the grave eyes
and something in the dress
that undoes time.
Her father painted her. The time
is unimportant,
Alice Gift-of-God is here.

“His work is beautiful. I do not ask
that it involve my feelings.”
Beauty does, but still
you see the point. This cool assault
on time is passionless
and does not live
in memory or recede.
The dead at first do not seem far from us,
but later on a sepia tone sets in.

The dress imagines blue. Chase brushed
a freshness in that seems
new-fangled. That explosion in the hat
still tosses blossoms with a lovely
throw weight along a long trajectory
that intersects at all points with our own.
Here at the prow of time the time
is now, is 1910, the eyes
are any time you choose.

©2009 William Bridges

Daily Journal, Franklin, Aug. 12, 1989

He was a dashing showman who sometimes wore a wing collar and a carnation while he painted. His students included some of the best American artists of the 20th century, and one of his own pastels sold not long ago for $980,000.

But behind William Merritt Chase was Will Chase, a Johnson County boy who once painted a “portrait” of a calf with house paint while his brother struggled to hold the animal still.

County residents now have their best chance in years to see Chase’s work. Five of his paintings are on display through Aug. 20 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in an exhibit of American art called “More Than the Red, White, and Blue.”

Art historians regard Chase “with great reverence,” the museum’s curator of paintings and sculpture, said recently. His paintings, especially his “sunstruck” Long Island landscapes, bring high prices.

Only one small landscape, from an earlier period, is on display at the IMA, but there are three Chase portraits and a still-life of fish, one of his favorite subjects. Chase worked so quickly, Lee said, that supposedly he cound buy fish and finish a still-life before they spoiled.

He was also a master of brushwork, color, and design “who just understood how to handle paint with incredible facility,” Lee said.

Chase was born Nov. 1, 1849, at Williamsburg (now Nineveh), where his father ran a dry goods and grocery store. When he was 12, the family moved to Indianapolis, and Chase clerked for a time in his father’s new shoe store. After a short and unhappy naval career, he studied art for two years in New York and then left for the family’s new home in St. Louis. (The Indianapolis shoe store had failed, and the Chases lives briefly in Franklin.)

In 1872, a group of St. Louis patrons raised $2,100 to send Chase to the Bavarian Royal Academy in Munich. He returned to New York in 1878 and soon established himself as a leading artist and teacher.

Chase’s richly furnished studio reflected his love of beautiful things, and his imposing figure, adorned with a beard and eyeglasses on a black ribbon, was the image of an artist. A servant with a red fez promoted the Bohemian effect. But in private life Chase was a family man whose wife and eight children were among his favorite subjects.

He himself was the oldest of seven children. His father had qualms about his artistic ambitions, and it touched Chase years later when the older man walked downtown with him in St. Louis and introduced him to a friend as “my son, the artist.” When Chase opened his summer art school on Long Island, his first portrait was of his mother, a plain-featured Midwestern woman in a lace cap he bought for the sitting.

Chase once said, “My God, I’d rather go to Europe than to Heaven.” On one European trip he and James McNeill Whistler, the expatriate American artist, painted portraits of each other. But Chase’s portrait of a wickedly elegant Whistler in that artist’s own style enraged Whistler, who supposedly said, “If I had wanted a Whistler, I would have painted it myself.”

Chase’s students included such later famous artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Rockwell Kent, and Joseph Stella.

Chase died in 1916. Critical regard for him has remained high, despite occasional complaints that he lacked inventiveness or seemed to view art as “a fine manufacture.”

Lee said some may have felt that Chase painted too much too rapidly or that his art fails to stir the viewer’s emotions. But she likes Chase’s paintings, she said, “because they’re beautiful, not because they involve me emotionally.”

(Hornell, N.Y., Evening Tribune, 1965)

Most people have certain Christmas cards they await with more interest than others.

One we look forward to is from Miss Hazel King, a retired librarian whose home is in Vancouver, British Columbia. Perhaps “base of operations” would be a better term than “home,” for Miss King is no housebound senior citizen.

This year’s card shows why, for after a brief personal message she adds, “I’m off on another freighter trip. Japan, Hong Kong, China, the Persian Gulf (wars permitting). Back in May. With all good wishes for 1966.”

When I met Miss King for the first (and only) time, she was returning from another freighter excursion in the neighborhood of the Philippines, Siam, and the Celebes. We were passengers on the same ship across the Atlantic, and by the lottery of the ship’s dining room were placed at the same table for the eight days.

It was a congenial group that made you do your best to get to meals even on stormier days. There was an official of the World Council of Churches who had worked with the Danish underground in World War II, There was a bluff Canadian farmer in his sixties who was on his way home to Saskatchewan. There was a young man who divided his time between pleasant shipboard romances and caring for his wan and pretty sister, whom the slightest swells made seasick.

But Miss King was the spark of the table. I have no idea how old she was—perhaps in her mid-sixties, old enough to retire in any event. Life sparkled for her, whether she was telling about her trip aboard a tramp steamer or joking about our club of diehard diners.

Gracious, well read, good-humored, she was a small woman who looked as if carrying a heavy book to the stacks would have taxed her strength. Yet she was spending her later years touring the world, and not on deluxe, well-planned commercial tours.

All of us exchanged addresses, as usual, but I hardly expected to hear from these chance acquaintances again. Yet within a couple of months there was a card from Miss King. A note went back, and the next Christmas the first of a series of cards arrived.

They continue to come, bearing cheerful messages and invitations to “drop in” at King George Terrace in Vancouver.

The one thing we’re sad about is that our card this year will reach Vancouver while Miss King is someplace on the high seas or in “Japan, Hong Kong, or the Persian Gulf (wars permitting).”

I know really very little about Hazel King. In Vancouver she may be wealthy and well known, or she may be simply an obscure retired librarian pursuing a dream on slender savings. But I do know that around the world there is a society of people whose lives are bound lightly yet firmly by her care and kindness.

There is concern mixed with happiness in the thought that amid the wars and hatreds of Asia this Christmas season one frail woman is calmly and happily making her way, and making new friends as she goes.

11 Millett Road is a house filled with art, and also with books about art.

I spent some time during my recent visit leafing through a large volume with the work of Richard Tuttle. Dianne got it out for me because we’d been talking about her new wire-haired dachshund, Mr. Tuttle. Why a dog should be named for a painter was never quite made clear—perhaps it was because Tuttle the artist is a minimalist painter and Tuttle the dachshund is a minimalist dog.

I picked another book off Dianne’s shelves myself: Utopia Parkway, the Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, by Deborah Solomon. Cornell was another sort of minimalist—his little glass-fronted boxes are small worlds in themselves, furnished with found objects that seem ineffably “right” together. The boxes have intrigued me for a long time; a high point came several years ago when I found myself alone with about 20 of them in a softly lighted room at the Chicago Museum of Art.

Solomon’s biography told me a lot about Cornell that I hadn’t known, and perhaps a few things that I would have been happier not knowing. I learned that he was also an artist in silent film, producing short reels assembled from older footage or photographing young women wandering through parks and startling the pigeons. I learned that he was a devout Christian Scientist, which was of interest to me because I attended a C.S. Sunday school for several years as a child. (Solomon, like most writers, gives a superficial and not especially friendly glimpse of Science.)

I also learned that Cornell spent much of his life tending his younger brother, Robert, crippled by cerebral palsy. And I learned with a certain sadness about the frustrations of Cornell’s life—his extreme reticence, and his struggles with repressed sexuality and the resulting guilt.

Cornell led his life honorably, and was not one of those sublime artists whom Louise Bogan describes as “drug takers, perverts unnerved.” But I thought of her comment on would-be artists: “nice people, joiners true blue/get the hell out of the way of the laurel/it is deathless, and it isn’t for you.”

Cornell received the laurel—he is one of the pre-eminent American artists of the 20th century, even though he worked in obscurity in his basement on Utopia Parkway in suburban Queens, N.Y.

Solomon does an excellent job of documenting and creating interest in what was essentially a life without events. She does not do quite as good a job, I feel, in explaining just what it was that Cornell was doing.

For that, one can turn to a little volume by the poet Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: the Art of Joseph Cornell. In a few quick strokes, Simic describes Cornell’s art of assemblage probably as well as it’s possible to do:

“Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still unknown objects that belong together. Once together they’ll make a work of art.”

Or as another poet, William Bronk, wrote of those old assemblage artists, the Incas:

Who had to spend such easing care on stone
found grace inherent more as idea than in
the world, loved simple soundness in a just joint,
and the pieces together once though elsewhere apart.

NAMES

My aunt’s name had a ring
so her parents thought)
of one born to sing:
Alta Nilsson Vaught.

Alta for a child
they had heard one day,
singing in the wild
waste of Ioway.

Nilsson for Christine,
Sweden’s brilliant bird,
late of Drury Lane,
heard of though unheard.

They were part pioneers
by Bloomfield upcast,
turning eager ears
to travelers who passed

on the western road,
by faith or promise led
(or leaving what they owed),
the desert still ahead.

Under the cottonwood
by the firelight
where the wagons stood,
Alta charmed the night

and was gone by morn
but left her name behind
in a mother’s mind
for a child unborn.

And the second need
an uncle, Roll, supplied
(fancier of the Swede)
and soon after died.

Singing child and man
with no thought of fame
threw a narrow span
forward all the same,

though they didn’t know.
My aunt couldn’t sing
any more than crow.
A name’s a funny thing.

©2009 William Bridges

One purpose of the trip east was to track down some church windows designed by my Uncle Stephen—windows that were proving strangely elusive.

In a 1979 Glass Digest article, they had been placed in the College of the Sacred Heart, at  Newton, Mass.; the author of the article, identified only as R.M., praised Stephen’s work and described the Newton windows as “quite different from his usual style.”

Finding them would be easy, I thought, but it wasn’t. No “Newton College of the Sacred Heart” came up on the Internet—the closest thing seemed to be a Newton Country Day School, which indeed had a chapel with stained-glass windows.  But the school’s business manager, Fred Levy, said these were Irish windows, installed in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, my son Karl had tracked down “R.M,” who turned out to be Richard Millard, a former colleague of Stephen’s, who had been trying to find the windows for years. He had thought once that they were in Wooster, Mass. He and his wife even made a trip to a church there—but no windows. Millard had a particular reason for wanting to find them—Stephen had engaged him in 1962 to paint the full-size “cartoons” for them.

At this point, Catha Rambusch (of Stephen’s old New York studio) came to the rescue by digging out the “completed jobs” file on the project. The windows had indeed been installed in the College of the Sacred Heart, at 885 Centre St., in Newton. She even had the bill of sale—$64,110, with the name of “Sr. Elizabeth Sweeney, Treasurer” as the contact. The Newton Country Day address was 785 Centre St., so its chapel had to be the place, didn’t it?

But how to account for Fred Levy’s conviction that the windows at his school were Irish ones from the 1920s? “People sometimes just don’t know,” Catha said.

So I called Levy back, without shaking his conviction. He did promise to check further, though. At this point my journalist’s instincts kicked in. What did I really know for sure, after all? Windows had been installed in 1962 at an address on Centre Street, but stained glass is strangely mobile. Some 19th Century windows at my alma mater, Franklin College, are now in their third location on campus. Perhaps the Newton windows had been at Country Day once, but had been taken down and moved. Or even destroyed.

Then Fred Levy called back. He had located some likely windows, at what was now Trinity Chapel on Boston College’s Newton campus, just down the street from Newton Country Day. The “College of the Sacred Heart” had closed and been sold to the college, he said.

So on Nov. 10, 2009, there was a gathering for lunch at Baker’s Best restaurant in Newton Highlands. I drove over from 11 Millett Road in Swampscott with David and Dianne Jenkins. Dick Millard and his wife Vicky drove down from Antrim, N.H. A stained-glass protégé of Millard’s, Matthew Fallon, bicycled over from his home nearby. Afterward we went to Country Day and picked up Fred Levy, who guided us to Trinity Chapel.

“Those are the windows,” Millard said when he saw them. He had expected only three or four, but there were 10 along the walls, with a spectacular “eye of God” in the ceiling. The windows were as unusual as “R.M.” had said—among them an astonishing “Creation” window, with sun, moon, stars, and a profusion of plants and animals. Another window featured an almost Cubist descent of angels in brilliant gold. They were indeed unlike any church windows—or any of Stephen’s windows—that I had seen before.

Photographs were taken, and then we went back to Country Day, where Millard inspected and praised the Irish windows—and also gave advice to Levy and Sister Barbara Rogers, the headmistress, about protecting themselves from ripoff restorationists.

And Levy told a good story about Sr. Elizabeth Sweeney, who had talked a bishop out of the money for Stephen’s windows. The bishop, however, had a reputation for giving out funds and then coming back years later and asking, “When are you going to repay my loan?” So Sister Elizabeth, Levy said, had made certain to get the word “gift” in writing.

On some days, everything goes right.