interview with me in the Maine Times , and so borrowed End Zone on interlibrary loan. Clearly she did not wish to be saddled with it permanently if it turned out to resemble my aired remarks or The Ladies . Finally, she admits that, to her surprise, she enjoyed it and has even gone so far as to order a copy for a friend. Against all reason and anticipation, I gather.
A long letter from Frederick Manfred, with whom I used to correspond regularly in New Republic days. I remember him as a Siouxlander, a white-haired, unusually tall and handsome
Minnesotan whose novel The Manly-Hearted Woman I reviewed enthusiastically. He comments on my comments in End Zone about Brenda Ueland, a Minnesotan, and another correspondent from those days, whose long, active, loquacious life I admired. He knows much more about her than I do and offers the fascinating suggestion that Sinclair Lewis (another citizen of Minnesota) was the father of her born-out-of wedlock daughter.
I no longer own a copy of Mark Schorerâs life of Lewis, an enormous, detailed work as I recall, so I cannot look Ueland up in the index. It would be interesting to know if this is true. Ueland was a free spirit long before it was fashionable and socially correct to be one. She went to teas at Willa Catherâs apartment in Greenwich Village, wrote for New York magazines, and produced at least two books, one on writing that was reprinted recently, just before her death. She lived on a health-food diet most of her life and climbed mountains after she was eighty.
Manfred himself must now be âgetting on,â as they say, but he is still very active. He is reading galleys on a new book, and writing still another. I seem to recall a long list of novels in the front of one of his books. He writes: âItâs funny but I have the feeling that Iâm only now learning how to do it.â
Birth and death in a day: Wanting to see the last of the afternoon light yesterday (it begins to grow dark here before four), I went out on the deck and caught sight of a black, diaphanous mayfly, a very late comer to the fall lawn scene. I remember that the mayflyâs life span is a day. It was born this morning and now, in the growing afternoon darkness, is on its way to its death.
The sight sends me back to my study, where I search until I find a copy of Thomas Boremanâs Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron . First published in London in 1739, my copy was made by David Godine early (1970) in his notable career as publisher and designer of elegant letterpress books. It has delicate, colored etchings by Lance Hidy, is printed on fine Amalfi paper, hand-bound, and put up in a cloth-covered box made, I think by Arno Werner. I handle it with pleasure. In every sense it is an example of a book that suitably houses its contents.
The introductory paragraph reads this way:
The Ephemeron, or Mayfly, is a common freshwater insect. The nymph grows for two years before it surfaces, sheds its skin, and emerges as a delicate, transparent fly. It is unable to eat, and can only fly and mate during its day of life.â¦
Trout fishermen and philosophers have both written about the Mayfly.⦠Aristotle established the Mayfly as a symbol of the shortest-lived animal. Philosophers use it still as a reminder of our vanity and mortality.
I look through the study window to the deck that is now entirely obliterated by the dark. The mayfly I saw must now be dead, or moribund, as was the one Boreman contemplated in the eighteenth century, the âdying sageâ who speaks to her fellow flies of her youth in the morning:
What confidence did I repose in the fullness and spring of my joints and in the strength of my pinions! But I have lived enough to nature, and even to glory. Neither will any of you whom I leave behind have equal satisfaction in life in the dark, declining age which I see is already begun.
Tonight I am unaccountably sad. I feel as if I were
A long letter from Frederick Manfred, with whom I used to correspond regularly in New Republic days. I remember him as a Siouxlander, a white-haired, unusually tall and handsome
Minnesotan whose novel The Manly-Hearted Woman I reviewed enthusiastically. He comments on my comments in End Zone about Brenda Ueland, a Minnesotan, and another correspondent from those days, whose long, active, loquacious life I admired. He knows much more about her than I do and offers the fascinating suggestion that Sinclair Lewis (another citizen of Minnesota) was the father of her born-out-of wedlock daughter.
I no longer own a copy of Mark Schorerâs life of Lewis, an enormous, detailed work as I recall, so I cannot look Ueland up in the index. It would be interesting to know if this is true. Ueland was a free spirit long before it was fashionable and socially correct to be one. She went to teas at Willa Catherâs apartment in Greenwich Village, wrote for New York magazines, and produced at least two books, one on writing that was reprinted recently, just before her death. She lived on a health-food diet most of her life and climbed mountains after she was eighty.
Manfred himself must now be âgetting on,â as they say, but he is still very active. He is reading galleys on a new book, and writing still another. I seem to recall a long list of novels in the front of one of his books. He writes: âItâs funny but I have the feeling that Iâm only now learning how to do it.â
Birth and death in a day: Wanting to see the last of the afternoon light yesterday (it begins to grow dark here before four), I went out on the deck and caught sight of a black, diaphanous mayfly, a very late comer to the fall lawn scene. I remember that the mayflyâs life span is a day. It was born this morning and now, in the growing afternoon darkness, is on its way to its death.
The sight sends me back to my study, where I search until I find a copy of Thomas Boremanâs Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron . First published in London in 1739, my copy was made by David Godine early (1970) in his notable career as publisher and designer of elegant letterpress books. It has delicate, colored etchings by Lance Hidy, is printed on fine Amalfi paper, hand-bound, and put up in a cloth-covered box made, I think by Arno Werner. I handle it with pleasure. In every sense it is an example of a book that suitably houses its contents.
The introductory paragraph reads this way:
The Ephemeron, or Mayfly, is a common freshwater insect. The nymph grows for two years before it surfaces, sheds its skin, and emerges as a delicate, transparent fly. It is unable to eat, and can only fly and mate during its day of life.â¦
Trout fishermen and philosophers have both written about the Mayfly.⦠Aristotle established the Mayfly as a symbol of the shortest-lived animal. Philosophers use it still as a reminder of our vanity and mortality.
I look through the study window to the deck that is now entirely obliterated by the dark. The mayfly I saw must now be dead, or moribund, as was the one Boreman contemplated in the eighteenth century, the âdying sageâ who speaks to her fellow flies of her youth in the morning:
What confidence did I repose in the fullness and spring of my joints and in the strength of my pinions! But I have lived enough to nature, and even to glory. Neither will any of you whom I leave behind have equal satisfaction in life in the dark, declining age which I see is already begun.
Tonight I am unaccountably sad. I feel as if I were
Similar Books
