Should Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (CPF) be updated?
CPF is classic. Harry's house is classic, too, but updated.
No. A classic (with meaning for many over time) should stay as is for whoever finds it next. Sequels by others are often dreadful, e.g. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Alexandra Ripley’s sequel, Scarlett, but a new Foreword or Introduction or translation can be useful, and a series by the same author can extend the pleasure e.g. William Trollope’s Barchester novels or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Sometimes, though, something really good is best just remembered.
Roseledge Books did not sell a single copy of CPF last summer, even though some of its action MAY be tied to Tenants Harbor and fewer degrees of separation between book and place usually sells books. No sales probably reflects that too few newbies came by and returnees have pondered the TH ties and moved on, but to what? That’s another good question.
For those who want more of CPF’s pace and place, several other good follow-up reads come to mind. Ruth Moore’s Spoonhandle is an almost-classic that also captures pace and place AND adds summer money to the Maine mix. Her dialog is better, too. Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine is another, but if you read it and think nothing happens, you are probably not going to enjoy Maine. Jim Sterba’s Frankie’s Place, written by someone from away and still alive who married into the rusticators of Mt Desert, may be my favorite and a RB bestseller two of the past three summers. The world may not need an updated CPF, but a Jim Sterba-like effort set in our Midcoast area would be good.
Local history resides in decisions about building stone walls.
For those who want more Tenants Harbor ties, there is the currently unavailable (but ever lurking at the library), History of St. George by Albert Smalley which needs to be reprinted (and retyped or reentered for digitizing), preferably by a stranger. The last person who volunteered to reproduce it wanted to change what Albert Smalley had to say about her family which would then make it HER history which is not necessarily bad, just different. Anecdotal histories, like Smalley’s are often quirky, filled with vigor, humor, real people, impolitic reflections, and often telling tidbits. Richard Meryman’s Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is another good example and pertinent because so much of it takes place in or near St. George. The more studied local histories can be too much data, e.g. cemetery lists, census counts, meeting minutes, but historian and summer resident Samuel Eliot Morison’s Story of Mount Desert is a good crossover example and probably more telling for someone seeking acquaintance.
As always, I am getting carried away, but it is fun to think about these things and you are not here to keep me in check. Back to my current read, in this case Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which tracks the lost and found history of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. I love it. The book is like good conversation with underlining and marginal notes, always subject to change after further thought. John Adams read books this way, too, as we all try to figure out how the world works.