“Unflavored dulness”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

I can understand why Truman Capote told Willa Cather that Sarah Orne Jewett wrote “one good book,” The Country of the Pointed Firs. But Deephaven is a remarkable book: a picture of female friendship — partnership, really — in a faded fishing village.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts

[Cather thought that The Country of the Pointed Firs was one of three American works of literature likely to have a long life. The other two: The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.]

“The padlock knocks”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

This image of an empty house being done in by the weather makes me wonder if “Time Passes,” the middle section of To the Lighthouse, owes something to this novel. And Deephaven has a lighthouse. But I see no evidence that Deephaven ever came to Virginia Woolf’s awareness.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts

“When one really knows a village”

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

That’s the opening paragraph. You can find a copy of the 1896 edition at archive.org. Later editions have additional stories. I read this novel in a 1991 David R. Godine paperback and ended up ordering the Library of America volume of Jewett’s work. The Country of the Pointed Firs is that good.

Thanks to Pete Lit, whose post about the novel mentioned Willa Cather’s high praise of it. In a preface to a 1925 edition of Jewett’s fiction, Cather named The Scarlet Letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs as “three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life”:

I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say, “A masterpiece!”

Yes, a masterpiece.

Word of the day: trig

As found in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877):

Kate had evidently written to me in an excited state of mind, for her note was not so trig-looking as usual.

I think this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary explains this instance of trig: “Trim or tight in person, shape, or appearance; of a place, Neat, tidy, in good order. Chiefly Scottish and dialect.” Or perhaps this one: “Prim, precise, exact.”

I can hear a hundred compliments: “Your handwriting ... it’s so trig.”

“A place remote and islanded”

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

I can imagine Willa Cather reading this passage and thinking, Yes, exactly.

Also from this book
“When one really knows a village” : “It wears a person out”

“It wears a person out”

Mrs. Fosdick offers an addition to the philosopher H.P. Grice’s principles of conversation:


Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Also from this book
“When one really knows a village”

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fourth year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our fourth year we read twenty-three books (same as last year). In non-chronological order:

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, Clark Gifford’s Body

Clifford Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code

Yoel Hoffman. ed. The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Toni Morrison, Jazz, Song of Solomon

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Arthur Schnitzler, Desire and Despair: Three Novellas, Late Fame, “Night Games” and Other Stories and Novellas

Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and England, Tristram Shandy

Johannes Urzidil, The Last Bell

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: David Burnett, Adrienne Foulke, Michael Hoffman, Yoel Hoffman, Michael Hulse, Kathleen Raine, Margret Schaefer, and Alexander Starritt. Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, and 2018.