PEARL K. BELL
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nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation's
got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every
remark you make, an' it wears a person out."
Sarah Jewett published over twenty books, the first,
Deephaven,
when she was twenty-eight, and most of the volumes, even those she
chose to call novels, are gatherings of sketches and stories that had
appeared in the
Atlantic
and, occasionally, elsewhere. She lacked
whatever talent it takes to sustain the lengthy complications of a
novel, and when she compelled herself to make the effort, she
blundered. Her gift was for place and character, not plot, for the
brief glimpse, the small incident that illuminates everything about a
person, a family , a house, through the kind of detail and image that
become acts of revelation. In "The Guests of Mrs. Timms," a fussy,
pretentious woman is described as "a straight, flat little person, as if,
when not in use, she kept herself, silk dress and all, between the
leaves of a book ." She could summon up the poignancy of a way of
life, at once nourished and imperilled by the sea,with a few spare
strokes in the opening of "By the Morning Boat":
On the coast of Maine, where many green islands and salt in–
lets fringe the deep-cut shore line; where balsam firs and
bayberry bushes send their fragrance far seaward . .. and the
tide runs plashing in and out among the weedy ledges . . . . On
the lonely coast of Maine stood a small gray house facing the
morning light. All the weather-beaten houses of that region face
the sea apprehensively, like the women who live in them.
In Miss Jewett's great triumph as a writer,
The Country of the
Pointed Firs,
published when she was in her late forties , one feels only
the faintest premonitory rustlings of the world beyond the village of
Dunnet Landing. The life elsewhere, away from this small com–
munity facing the sea, seems at first to be entirely absent from the
stories which compose this "novel," as though these humble old men
and women, whose days turn in rhythm with the seasons and the
light, are anemones fossilized in amber. But it is soon clear that even
though their life seems to be going on in the present, it is the past
that Miss Jewett is embracing in an eloquent gesture of farewell.
This is never said, of course, since such literalness would violate the
art of her elegy . But she succeeded, as we finally realize, in recaptur–
ing the past without a trace of false sentiment.
