Famous Homes

by Sheila Connolly

New England is blessed with the surviving homes of many writers whose names we all recognize, and I've visited my share of them.  But sometimes I wonder, what do people do that?  What do visitors hope to find when they contemplate the desk where Louisa May Alcott penned Little Women in Orchard House in Concord, or the view from Emily Dickinson's window in Amherst?

I suppose one could argue that we learn something about social class for each of the writers, which in turn must inform their writing.  We know from other sources that Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, was, to put it kindly, an idealist but hardly a practical man, which left it to the rest of the family to make ends meet.  His wife turned to taking in laundry; his daughter to writing.  Dad must have recognized and taken pride in his daughter's literary achievements, if the Orchard House docent is to be believed:  he constructed an interesting built-in writing desk in Louisa May's room.  What's more, the writer based the house in Little Women on that house.

Visiting the house shows clearly how close to the other great minds of Concord the Alcotts lived—Ralph Waldo Emerson had a grand house just up the street, with Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond not far away, and both Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne occupied the Manse near the famous bridge for a time, a mile or two in the opposite direction. The website for the Manse bills it as "the center of Concord’s political, literary, and social revolutions." Do you think some of the heady discussions that took place there soaked into the walls?

As a final note, the Alcotts, Hawthornes, Emersons and Thoreaus are all buried in close proximity to each other in nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. People visit the graves and leave little gifts on the tombstones. Do you think the late literati commune from grave to grave?

The house Emily Dickinson occupied much of her life is clearly more upscale, and she had a pretty, pleasant bedroom with multiple windows upstairs facing the street.  However, the back of the house faces the cemetery where she was ultimately buried.

I will confess that my daughter and I made an odd pilgrimage to visit the houses where Sylvia Plath attempted suicide (the first time, unsuccessfully) and went on to write about it in The Bell Jar. It is only a few miles from the house where Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton accomplished what Sylvia had failed to do.  Both are rather nondescript and forgettable modern homes.

I must say that visiting Mark Twain's house in Hartford, Connecticut, was eye-opening.  Twain married a woman with money, and the house they built in Hartford took every advantage of that (they hired Louis Comfort Tiffany's firm to decorate it).  If you're ever in the area, it is well worth seeing.  It is the most magnificent example of high Victorian interior decoration I have ever encountered—and they won't even let you take pictures.  I am still obsessing over one upholstered chair…

But what is most interesting is that Twain chose to write on the third floor, at the top of the house.  It's a large and comfortable space, but it is far less ornate than the rest of the house.  I would guess it was also more peaceful. That's where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and perhaps his most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

My own work environment is small and chaotic, between desperate spurts of sorting and filing the piles of paper I accumulate.  But I do find I like visual reminders of what I'm working on—pictures, maps and talismans that I hang on a corkboard in front of me. 

If you're a writer, what works best for you?

Durable Literature: The Great American Novel

Elizabeth Zelvin


When I was a kid, boys (not girls, in those prehistoric times) dreamed of being the first man on the moon. Once Neil Armstrong took that one small step in 1969, the dream became superfluous. Boys, again, used to talk about growing up to be President of the United States. That’s a dream that’s still available but has surely lost a great deal of its luster. With the paradigm shift in the book industry and the proliferation of electronic words, I doubt that young writers are dreaming about writing the Great American Novel. Besides, it’s already been written—more than once.


According to Wikipedia, “the phrase [Great American Novel] derives from the title of an essay by American Civil War novelist John William DeForest, published in The Nation on January 9, 1868.” As an old English major, I know that much of American literature, even in the early 20th century, looked to English literature for its role models and heroes. Henry James is probably the best example of an American novelist inspired by Europe. His settings, his vision of society, and his leisurely, tortuous sentences evoked the Old World, not the vigorous frontier.


The Great American Novel had to be set in America as seen by Americans, not through the filter of British or European attitudes. Its American characters had to demonstrate American values: individualism, social and economic mobility, a robust egalitarianism. They had to tell stories that could only happen in America in some version of the American language.


Here’s my list of the novels I think deserve the title:


1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The least debatable and still delightfully readable Great American Novel. Set in the heartland, with the Mississippi River as its central metaphor, it’s a great example of the always popular coming of age novel. It tackles the core American issues of freedom vs slavery and independence vs conformity. Furthermore, Mark Twain made brilliant use of the American language—more than most modern readers realize—by rendering the subtleties of local dialect at each point along the river as Huck’s raft floated down it. I read the book aloud to my son when he was 8, and it held up marvelously as a masterpiece of storytelling with suspense, compassion, and humor.


2. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. The unreadable Great American Novel. It’s the mighty story of man against whale, in a ponderous poetry that some people might still tackle for pleasure, but tough going for most modern readers. I had to laugh when someone on DorothyL complained about mysteries that bore us by telling more than we want to know about fishing. Melville devoted hundreds of pages to how to catch, cut up, and cook the whale. He also gave us the ultimate vision of the New England whaler.


3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The 20th century Great American Novel. It’s about secrets and justice and childhood (a girl’s, this time, though a sturdy tomboy of a girl) and race relations and small town life—American as apple pie.


4. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The unsung Great American Novel, my personal pick and the only one on my list that Wikipedia doesn’t mention in its article on the topic. I believe it’s disregarded because it’s for and about and read by girls and women. Yet the language is as fresh and everyday today as it was in 1868. It’s probably never been out of print, it’s been adapted many times for stage and screen, and I’m one of many thousands, perhaps millions, of women who know this beloved book practically by heart, who return to it time and again for another visit with the March girls, who still cry when Beth dies, and whom Jo inspired to become writers.


It’s probably a shame that there will be no more Great American Novels. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help would be a grand contender, but who can tell if people will still be reading it even half a century from now? And what about graphic novels? Are they meant to be cherished and reread or scrolled through and deleted? Would the first Superman comic book or the first Spiderman be a candidate for Great American Graphic Novel?


True confession: I was crying over one of Louisa May Alcott’s books on my Kindle in the subway the other day. (Okay, I’ll tell you which one: Rose in Bloom, the sequel to Eight Cousins. When I was a kid, we used to call it “the Jewish Alcott book.” Rosenblum—get it?) When I reached my stop, I sat down on one of the benches in the station to finish the chapter (which I’d read umpteen times before) before I went out into the sunshine and had to put away the Kindle. I bet some women readers can guess which chapter, too. Now, that’s what I call durable literature!

Succumbing to Kindle

Elizabeth Zelvin

I hope I won’t regret admitting publicly that I got a Kindle for Christmas. Or was it Chanukah? As a reader, I look forward to traveling without pounds of books in my backpack or luggage and never running out of reading matter. As a writer, I feel more ambivalent. Amazon’s world-changing e-reader has permanently debased the price of books (and therefore author earnings) and cut radically into the business of the independent booksellers and librarians who are the best friends of midlist writers like me. On the other hand, it provides opportunities that didn’t exist before to share my work with readers, and affordably, at that. I don’t want to add to the millions of words on the subject of the changing publishing industry that are already floating around the Internet. Instead, let’s talk about me as a reader with my first electronic reading device.


Can the reader be separated from the writer who inhabits the same brain and body? Maybe not. My very first download was my own story, “Navidad,” currently enjoying new life as an e-story on Untreed Reads, after originally appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As I write this, it occurs to me that if I actually read the thing, I’ll have a better idea of how this e-publisher presents its material. I’ve only thought of this because I noticed flaws in the formatting of the first e-book I did read: Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the very first Hercule Poirot mystery.


I know that HarperCollins plans to publish new editions of all 80 of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. Now, there would be a grand project for a Kindle reader, if it’s not prohibitively expensive. (I can’t imagine going out and buying 80 new print novels that I’ve already read, not to mention giving them shelf space. Can you?) But what’s available now for free or close to it consists of two novels, the first Poirot and the first Tommy and Tuppence, The Secret Adversary, which I also downloaded.


The Christies were not the first. My first visit to the Kindle store (which was not involved in the acquisition of my own short story) took me to two longtime favorite authors of whom I’ve read most but not quite everything in my lifetime: in order of acquisition, Louisa May Alcott and Jane Austen. My hardcover copies of Little Women (“special contents of this edition,” presumably the foreword and full-color illustrations, copyright 1946) and Jo’s Boys (Goldsmith Publishing Company, Chicago, no copyright information whatever) are falling apart. The spine of Little Women flaps precariously; the brittle brown pages of Jo’s Boys flake off as I turn them, trying to find a date. I still re-read them, and yes, I still cry every single time Beth dies. Um, is crying on a Kindle as bad as spilling coffee on a computer keyboard? If so, I might be in trouble.


I know I have my Pride and Prejudice somewhere, though I haven’t opened it in a while. It’s a trade paperback I got for an English lit class in college, which means it’s close to fifty years old. I don’t really need to re-read it to remember more than enough to enjoy P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley. Yep, I treated myself to a $12.99 current read I might otherwise have reserved at the library. P.D. James is not one of the hundreds of mystery authors I know personally, so I won’t pretend I would have bought the hardcover. But I certainly wouldn’t have failed to read it, no matter what. Anyhow, as Amazon assiduously tells readers, “This price was set by the publishers.” And there I go down the primrose path, buying books again.




























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NICE NEIGHBORS

by Sheila Connolly

I've been playing catch-up this week, since I've just finished the draft of one book, due to my publisher at the end of the month, and I'm waiting for editorial comments on another book, due next week.  So while I wait, I've been clearing off my desk and finalizing some things that have been pending for a while.

One of which is my cemetery plot.  No, I don't have a terminal illness, nor does anyone in my family.  But I have an unusual history with cemeteries: they are my inheritance.  I can prove ownership of at least four plots, all of which have space in them.  In some cases there hasn't been a burial in the plot for decades.

Since the world has a way of surprising you, I thought it made sense to verify what my rights are, in the event something unexpected happens.  After all, your loved ones usually aren't in any condition to make major decisions at difficult times, and they may live far away, which complicates matters.  So if I can make one small part of the process simpler, I'll feel better.

The thing of it is, I'm not talking about any old cemetery; I'm talking about Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.  All right, most people won't know anything about it, or will confuse it with Washington Irving's story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (that's in a different state).  "My" Sleepy Hollow is famous for other reasons:  it's where all those authors are buried.

My family has a long history with the place.  The plot where I (or whatever is left of me) want to spend eternity was bought when my great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Durant Pratt died in 1893.  She didn't even live in Concord at that time, but that's where she met and married her husband.  She was probably a millworker, and he was a carpenter, later contractor.  They did have one son who lived in Concord in the 1890s (he had his own plot in the same cemetery).

So the family bought the plot for Sarah, and she and later her husband and a couple of her daughters were buried there.  It's a nice plot, right on one of the internal roads, on level ground--easy to get to. Lots of passers-by. But the biggest appeal is that it's right down the hill from Author's Ridge.

There was a cemetery on the site in the eighteenth century, but the better-known section was designed in 1855 by a pair of landscape architects.  Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the consecration.  It was one of the earlier "garden cemeteries" (Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, founded in 1831, was the first, followed closely by Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia).  Such cemeteries were intended as something like recreational sites, where middle-class citizens could pack a picnic lunch and visit to commune with the dead and enjoy the glories of nature.  They were provided with benches and strolling paths, punctuated by burbling fountains.  Maybe now it seems a bit odd to think of cemeteries as places for pleasure, but I've enjoyed more than my fair share.

To return to Sleepy Hollow's Author's Ridge...think back to the heady days of the nineteenth century, when the historic town of Concord was a hotbed of Transcendentalism, led by Emerson (whose house is not far distant from the cemetery).  Picture the marvelous dinners that gathered Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and others around Emerson's table.  It shouldn't surprise you that they chose to continue their discourse even after death:  they're all buried together in the cemetery.  The Thoreau family, the Alcott family, the Emerson family, as well of Nathaniel Hawthorne, all cheek by jowl at the top of the hill--overlooking "my" plot, passed down to me through generations.

Louisa May Alcott

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I first visited the cemetery when I was a teenager, with my mother and grandmother.  My grandmother had presided over the last interment there, in 1935, representing the dwindling family (she had married Sarah's great-grandson).  I have always remembered the visit, most notably Emerson's pink quartz stone.




Fast forward to 2003.  I was housesitting for a college friend in a town near Concord, while my daughter finished high school so we could move to Massachusetts where my husband had a job waiting.  I was unexpectedly unemployed, so I wrote a book.  It was not a wonderful book, but it was good enough to land me my first agent.  In the spring of 2003, before heading back to Pennsylvania to pack up for the move, I stopped by the cemetery to talk to the authors.  I had planned to ask them to help me sell the book.  Instead, what came out of my mouth unexpectedly was, "help me make it good."

I guess it worked.  That book didn't sell, and I fired that first agent, but eight years later I have nine books on the shelves and more coming.  Thank you, Louisa, David, Nathaniel and Ralph.  (BTW, my grandmother was a BIG fan of Emerson.)

All of these writers and thinkers were already installed on top of the ridge when my family bought the cemetery plot.  Did it affect their selection?  I don't know.  But I would be honored to take my place among the Concord titans--which is why I'm paying the back fees this week.


P.S.  If you want one more literary note, Louisa May Alcott wrote a short mystery story in 1867:  "The Mysterious Key and What It Opened." It's widely available as a free download online.

The Bewildering Experience of Getting Reviewed

Elizabeth Zelvin

About two months before publication, the debut author undergoes an experience that is fraught with anticipation and terror: the moment when the advance reviews come out. Booksellers and especially librarians base their buying decisions on the opinions of the Big Four: Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, and Kirkus. To make it worse, these arbiters of literary taste read, not the finished book with every comma in its most perfect place, but uncorrected proofs with all the errors that the writer and a bevy of editors didn’t catch till galleys.

I went through a rollercoaster ride through ecstasy and despair during this process. Only when all the early opinions were in could I see that every negative was balanced or, even better, overruled by one or more positives. One reviewer said I had “outstanding storytelling ability,” another commented snarkily that I “know more about dependence and codependence than about storytelling.” One praised my “good surprise ending,” another, who obviously guessed whodunit, found the solution disappointing.

On the good side, my prose was “deft” and “smooth,” my characters “well-developed.” Library Journal called it “a remarkable and strongly recommended first novel,” and another early reviewer, Crimespree, said I was “an author to keep your eye on.” That helped relieve my doubts about myself as a writer. And then I got two terrific accolades: a private compliment, a very enthusiastic one, from a revered hardboiled writer, and, at the other end of the crime fiction spectrum, an Agatha nomination for my short story, "Death Will Clean Your Closet." After that, I felt a lot better.

I recently heard an eminent editor say, “Enjoy the good reviews, ignore the bad ones.” I like that. It also helps to realize that authors have been having the same experience for more than a hundred years. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the heroine, Jo, is a writer, and I assume Jo’s experiences are based on Alcott’s own. The following passage, first published in 1870, shows how little has changed from her time to ours.

Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired….Well, it was printed, and she got three hundred dollars for it; likewise plenty of praise and blame, both so much greater than she expected that she was thrown into a state of bewilderment, from which it took her some time to recover.

“You said, mother, that criticism would help me; but how can it, when it’s so contradictory that I don’t know whether I’ve written a promising book or broken all the ten commandments?” cried poor Jo, turning over a heap of notices, the perusal of which filled her with pride and joy one minute, wrath and dire dismay the next. “This man says, ‘An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness,’” …continued the perplexed authoress. “The next, ‘…full of morbid fancies…and unnatural characters.’….Another says, ‘It’s one of the best American novels which has appeared for years’ (I know better than that); and the next asserts that ‘though it is original, and written with great force and feeling, it is a dangerous book.”…Some make fun of it, some over-praise, and nearly all insist that I had a deep theory to expound, when I only wrote it for the pleasure and the money.”

…it was a hard time for sensitive, high-spirited Jo, who meant so well, and had apparently done so ill….

“Not being a genius, like Keats, it won’t kill me,” she said stoutly; “and I’ve got the joke on my side…for all the parts that were taken straight out of real life are denounced as impossible and absurd, and the scenes I made up out of my own silly head are pronounced ‘charmingly natural, tender, and true.’ So I’ll comfort myself with that; and when I’m ready, I’ll up again and take another.”