In the Bleak Midwinter

This morning in Seattle the sky is paper white. Coming in to the bookstore, Brooklyn Ave., as I cross it, disappears at either end in a fog as dense as pipe-smoke. At this hour of the morning -- early for a Saturday -- University Way is empty but for baggy-kneed runners and a very small lady walking a very small dog. The occasional crow with a bagel too large to be lifted from the gutter semaphores threats to rival diners real or imagined. The air burns just a little with each breath taken.

Now this is Winter in Seattle, as I've come to enjoy it. Not that mess of snow and ice we had in December. This, this is what winter weather is meant to look and feel, and even smell like in the greatest city in the Northwest.

Someone, and I think we all know who I mean, still has a great deal of explaining to do. Cliff Mass (his very name suggesting geologic time and the grand mutability of nature,) will be here at the bookstore today at 1PM to sign his book, Weather of the Northwest. Cliff Mass, our local weather Magus and hero of the booksellers' Christmas. Drop in to get a signed copy and tell him about the sand in the streets and the rain in the Scablands.

"Stayers-at-Home" or Further Snowbound Reading

And so we are forced to be again today -- "stayers-at-home."  The snow outside our door and up our walk and stairs took a grown man the better part of three hours to clear, including the sidewalk above, as we aren't the kind of neighbors to leave off a thing where our own convenience ends and the more general welfare starts.  Now if that makes us sound better than we are, consider that the grown man doing the shoveling was neither of us: the homeowners.  As my grandmother would have said, "we had a man in."  I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I am awfully glad it was Gary the handyman and not me out there this afternoon.  (If you live in West Seattle, and aren't feeling up to the task of digging out, I'll be happy to pass Gary's number on to you.  He's a good fellow and as handy, as it turns out, with a snow-shovel as he is with a rake.  Bless 'im.)

The phrase "stayers-at-home" I take from Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of Pointed Firs, specifically the story "A Winter Courtship" therein.  the story is a slight one, told between two elderly parties on a wagon ride between  North Kilby and Sanscrit Pond, Maine, one frozen December morning.  I've just reread the story, which is charming.

Sarah Orne Jewett is a reliable pleasure to read and reread, and strangely still unknown to many contemporary readers who might otherwise know the classics of American literature well.  Her novels and stories, and even her poems as it turns out, are just the sort of tartly sentimental reading, it seems to me, called for at this Holiday Season; deceptively simple stories of good people, in a granite hard place, salted with humor and solid American optimism, told in a spare and reliably satisfying prose.  Not every story ends as happily as "A Winter Courtship," but they're all satisfying, each in it's way, hard cider or soft.

Her books are perfect reading for just such days as we're having now.

And Yet More Snowbound Reading

The lovely poem"The Snowman" by Wallace Stevens contributed by KW below, I'm inspired to suggest two more poems appropriate, in their very different ways, to our current weather conditions. (Both are a little long for this blog, so I've linked them to the full text off site.)

"A Country Boy in Winter" is by Sarah Orne Jewett, the author of The Country of Pointed Firs and other classic tales of rough, 19th Century rural New England.



"A City Winter" by Frank O'Hara offers a very different, very 20th Century take on the present season. The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara were published in a handsome new edition back in February of this year.

More Snowbound Reading

Having ventured out at last to fetch home a loaf of bread & other eatables, I'm now in for good.  So with my ham sandwich and hot coco, I'm going to settle down and reread a bit of Josephine Tey.  She is my favorite mystery writer, and she might be yours too if you give her a try.

Her real name was  Elizabeth Macintosh, though she adopted more than one nom de plume.  She was of perhaps the last generation of professional women writers who found it simpler at first to be published under a masculine name.  She had, for example, great success as a playwright under the name Gordon Daviot when she wrote Richard of Bordeaux, which was a smash hit for John Gielgud in 1932.  Macintosh took to mystery writing, a more established genre for women, as Josephine Tey, publishing her first novel under that name in 1929.  Not being a particular fan of the genre, she wrote her mysteries entirely to suit herself, famously not even doing anyone in in one of my favorites, Miss Pym Disposes, until the book was nearly two thirds through!

She did invent a superb hero in Detective Inspector Grant, featuring him in five novels, including The Daughter of Time, wherein, laid up "in hospital," he enlists various associates to help him solve the historical mystery of the murder of the Princes in the Tower.

                                                                                                                                           Today I think I'll go again to The Singing Sands, set in Scotland, and again featuring Grant, this time recovering from what we might now call a nervous breakdown.

Josephine Tey may not have been specially concerned with the puzzle-making that usually constitutes the chief virtue of the whodunit, so purists may not find in her a favorite, but for any reader willing to spend a cold afternoon or two in her company, the pleasures of this witty and inventive writer will be richly rewarded.

Coco and murder sounds just right for today in Seattle.

Snowbound Reading

Getting to the bookstore today may prove impossible.  Getting out of the house at all might not be such a good idea just now.  So this would seem to be the perfect occasion for some wintry reading before the fireplace, next to the space-heater, or just huddled in bed with extra blankets and a stocking-cap.

By way of suggestion, you might try reading some of the delightful stories of Saki.  If you don't know him, Hector Hugh Munro was an Englishman and one of the true masters of the short story.  His stories are invariably funny, and occasionally chilling.

Three stories come immediately to mind when looking out the picture window today at all the evil white nothingness:  The She Wolf -- about the dangers of being glib in matters supernatural, The Wolves of Cernogratz -- which concerns making the best of servant problems, and finally, and particularly, The Interlopers,  of which I am reminded every time I forced to take a walk in the woods.

All three are of course included in The Complete Stories of Saki, from Penguin, available at the bookstore and to be ordered online.

Saki is best read in such weather as we're having now.  With a nice cup of tea, with lemon, not milk, and certainly without sugar, though a drop of whiskey wouldn't do a bit of harm on a day like this.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

By Thomas Campion

Now winters nights enlarge

The Number of their hours,

And clouds their storm discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze,

And cups o'erflow with wine;

Let well-tuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense

With lovers' long discourse;

Much speech hath some defense,

Though beauty no remorse.

All do not all things well;

Some measures comely tread,

Some knotted riddles tell,

Some poems smoothly read.

The summer hath his joys

And winter his delights;

Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,

They shorten tedious nights.

'Twas the Night Before Dickens

The world of Charles Dickens, in the popular imagination of our day, is little more than a Victorian Christmas card; plump ladies in funny caps, fat gentlemen in side-whiskers, all gathered 'round the Christmas table, chubby tykes gamboling about, and a toast in punch about to be drunk to the joys of the Season, perhaps to be followed by another to the dear little Queen. And then, what? Carols perhaps? How jolly. But look again at the card reproduced above. It is the very first commercially produced Christmas card, from 1843. There's more to it, isn't there?

Nowadays, there are whole collections for sale on EBay of just such happy scenes in miniature; whole happy villages reproduced in neat plastic, snow white plastic on tidy plastic streets full of clean little plastic Victorians and everybody, again, seems to be forever on the verge of singing. And this cheery vulgarity, for whom is it named? Why, Charles Dickens, of course.

It is entirely understandable that some might find this vision of the sanitized,

sentimentalized past more than a little noisome. Dickens would.

And there's worse. In Kent, England there's now an amusement park, brazenly called "Dickens' World," where costumed characters parade around the tidy reproduction of London, including, if you can believe it, the quaint slums, and drop off the little ones for daycare in "Fagin's Den."

Because what's missing in the miniatures and the amusement park -- other than taste -- and present, at least peripherally, in the actual Victorian scene on the card, are the poor. The model Victoriana is all about nostalgia, a phenomenon Charles Dickens found ridiculous and distasteful, if not infuriating, because nostalgia precludes even the possibility of progress. If they were in fact, such "good old times," then what was all that fuss about the Poor Laws, about child labor, about exploitation, and poverty, "ignorance and want?"

Dickens was no killjoy. Don't think that. As the title of Les Standiford's new book points out, Dickens is, after all, The Man Who Invented Christmas. But Christmas, as Dickens understood it, was as much or more about what we do to one another the rest of the year, as it is about what we do for one another, or at least intend to do, come December 25th.

So, enjoy the Festive Season, as those jolly folks in the middle of the first Christmas card seem to be doing. Dickens would heartily approve. He'd join in the fun, if he still could. (And maybe he does, depending on one's point of view.) But note what's just to either side of the good time. And remember, as Charles Dickens, in his "generous anger," wrote, and spoke, and read aloud and fought to remind us: that the spirit of Christmas need not come but once a year.