LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS, essential 19th-century reading tells us about the 21st century

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS and Other Stories
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS (Tillie Olsen, editor; Kim Kelly, Foreword)
The Feminist Press at CUNY
$15.95 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly, “Life in the Iron Mills” remains a classic of proletarian literature that paints a bleak and incisive portrait of nineteenth-century industrial America. Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the first writers to depict a working class that was exploited and exhausted as capitalism’s mills and factories destroyed both the natural environment and the human spirit.

Davis's work was first recovered in the 1970s by the Feminist Press and writer Tillie Olsen, and then expanded in the 1980s to be the most comprehensive collection of her work to date. This reissued edition includes an updated critical introduction, and shares a uniquely prescient capitalist critique with a new generation.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review:

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent throuhg all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

Choosing to bring her story to us via a first-person introductory passage was a stroke of genius by Author Harding Davis. At first, I felt very nervous because the idea of first-person present-tense narration for a whole novella's length isn't, um, too terribly appealing to me; but we get into the action when she has the narrator say that the people he's going to talk about lived there thirty years ago and....

Well! All is on track, then! Stand down, adrenal gland.

But mere lines later, my mind hit another conceptual pothole:

She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone.

Wow! That's not even a little bit judgey, is it. (And "nothing stronger than ale" must resound oddly in the modern Puritanical no-booze no-sex no-fun ear! The paeans to the clean air and the purity of this bygone world make me itch. The entire world drank some sort of beer or wine because drinking water could kill you via cholera and/or diphtheria and/or typhoid fever.) Kim Kelly (author of Top Ten Words Women Hate which is short and to the point besides having a great title), in her Foreword to this second Feminist Press edition, says of the author:

Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it's hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

I must decline to co-sign, Kim Kelly. To my elderly man-ears, this story sounds like the Abolition era's standard christian social-reform literature à la Uncle Tom's Cabin. Built into its very real sympathy is the distancing judgmental mind-set inescapable by a woman of Author Harding Davis's background. She isn't all about the judgments, it is true, because her point is to bring into sharp relief the inequitable, really iniquitous, world that has done this to Deb, the character described here. But baked into the clay is that vocabulary of blame and othering inescapable in 1861's world-view.

The capitalist mouthpiece character is a piece of work. He's called Kirby, but really could've been called Carnegie or Rockefeller. His anthem:

"I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible."

In that unlovely speech, addressed to one Mitchell, the dilettante character of no special moral fiber but a deep and abiding aesthetic sensibility, one hears echoes of "I don't see race" and its ilk, doesn't one. Mitchell is moved to say in riposte, "Money has spoken!"

Kirby and Mitchell are discussing the existence of one of the mill-hands, Hugh Wolfe. He is a true Other, a man out of place in his place of residence. He has had a modicum of schooling; he is aesthetically aware of the world around him; therefore he is the subject of the other mill-hands' bullying. He has created a statue of great aesthetic interest to Mitchell, a carved woman whose anatomy Mitchell criticizes for being not starved-looking when Hugh tells him the korl sculpture is meant to be hungry. In a passage that felt to me more than a little codedly homoerotic, Wolfe, Kirby, and Mitchell pass around the idea of bodies on display (half-naked men abounding in the smelthing-furnace heat, summer or winter) being essentially lower-class unless they are Art.

Mitchell ends his part of the conversation with a "cool, musical laugh." ::eyebrow:: Then Author Harding Davis delivers this about him:

Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.

The hairpins are dropping...nay, flying! And then she has him speak Scripture, "De profundis clamavi" no less!, at which juncture he is compared to the Devil. Now I do not know Author Harding Davis's other works, but these are Uranian markers in nineteenth-century gay parlance. Mitchell, and to a lesser degree Kirby, are assessing Hugh Wolfe as a sex object. And he's right there with 'em.

Think not? Thus Hugh of Mitchell, so recently departed and he fears and expects not to return:

Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at {Hugh's} pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men.

And the rest of the story might as well have been A Tragic Gay Romance. I'm fine with that, and don't feel the need to chisel away my impression of what Author Harding Davis did because it might not be what she intended (note use of conditional).

If you've paid me the slightest attention at all, you'll know that the anti-capitalist message of the story is so in tune with my own thoughts about a properly run world that this really needs no belaboring. I was absolutely sure I'd enjoy this story when I read this:

Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are there out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?

I don't know, Kim Kelly. But the short answer is "not soon enough."

THE PARIS MYSTERIES, three of Edgar Allen Poe's most delicious tales

THE PARIS MYSTERIES: Deluxe Edition
EDGAR ALLEN POE
Pushkin Vertigo
$16.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Three macabre and confounding mysteries for the first and greatest of detectives, Auguste Dupin!

An apartment on the rue Morgue turned into a charnel house; the corpse of a shopgirl dragged from the Seine; a high-stakes game of political blackmail - three mysteries that have enthralled the whole of Paris, and baffled the city’s police. The brilliant Chevalier Auguste Dupin investigates - can he find the solution where so many others before him have failed?

These three stories from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe are some of the most influential ever written, widely praised and credited with inventing the detective genre. This edition contains: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter."

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS TITLE FROM PUSHKIN VERTIGO, VIA EDELWEISS PLUS. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's absolutely no point in going over the plots of these three stories. You have a computer, or you wouldn't be reading this review. Google the plots if you're in any doubt about what these three tales have in store for you.

I'll tell you, instead of a book report, that I downloaded the Digital Review Copy of this book wondering what would make the edition "Deluxe." There's nothing like a critical essay included here; the DRC isn't really that exciting typographically speaking; the footnotes of then-commonly-understood Latin phrases are, I *think*, in the original texts. Many now-common terms like "tibia" and "acumen" are italicized (and still other words are italicized for emphasis, Poe makes the difference very obvious) after the fashion of the 1840s when they first appeared; as Poe was busily inventing the detective (a word not coined until after Poe's death)-centered mystery model, one is prepared to forgive the spelling of "clew."

It is a hardcover edition; it is, judging from the photo below

a truly lovely object to hold and behold. The only luxe touch that it lacks is the elegance of deckled edges on the book block.

The other worthy-of-mention luxury in this edition is learning from Chevalier Auguste Dupin the genesis of ratiocination as a basis for criminology. The idea of professional policing was *scarcely* a century old at this point; the Bow Street Runners in London forming the first ever paid professional police force under the Blind Beak, Sir John Fielding, under whose stern guidance the semi-thieving days of the watch were ended at last. Dupin, then, as a logical and observant man of Justice's retinue, would've been a rare bird indeed in a time when the Law caught whoever "everyone knew" had killed the deady and he was punished. Observation being the absolute key contribution of Dupin to detective fiction:

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation.

So, if you ever wondered where the inspiration for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation came from, it's here. The presence of mildew (italics in original), the hiding of a body in a place it wasn't murdered but is calculated to be discovered in a particular manner and/or at a particular time...all that in 1840s Paris, via the imagination of M. Edgar Poe! And his creation Dupin predates the formal coining of the word "detective" by almost a decade, this honor going to Chuckles the Dick in 1850. Much as I hate to give ol' Chuckles any positive credit, this is an incontrovertible, evidence-based citation. Ick. It hurts to praise someone for inventing an excellent word when that someone is responsible for some of the lowest moments of one's reading life.

Still...there it is. Facts are, dammit anyway, facts.

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS, a local-color author's portrait of changing times

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Dover Publications
$4 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In scene after memorable scene of Sarah Orne Jewett's fictional masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the Maine-born author recorded what she felt were the rapidly disappearing traditions, manners and dialect of Maine coast natives at the turn of the 20th century. In luminous evocations of their lives--a happy family reunion, an old seaman's ghostly vision, a disappointed lover's self-imposed exile and more--Jewett created startlingly real portraits of individual New Englanders and a warm, humorous and compassionate vision of the New England character.

My Review: There aren't all that many loud, public admirers of Sarah Orne Jewett's fiction. Willa Cather, she of Death Comes for the Archbishop fame, was an admirer, but that's most of a century ago. I think that's too bad. Jewett's lovely, lapidary prose is a treat. She's more than likely a gay lady, given her "Boston marriage" *snort* to Annie Adams Fields from 1881 until her death in 1909. That makes enjoying her work incumbent on me, I suppose, though I can honestly say that I've enjoyed her way with words and her sharply observed and economically told tales since I found out about her in high school forty years ago. This novella is, in my never-remotely-humble opinion, one of the nineteenth century's literary high points, right up there with Silas Marner and The Aspern Papers.

From the minute our narrator addresses us, the tone and the tenor are set:

When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

We are launched on a voyage of discovery in love. We have as our captain a lady of a certain vintage, not old and not young, who is hiding in Dunnet Landing, Maine, in order to meet her publishing deadline...which she has already blown past, as she tells us early on. Her landlady Mrs. Todd has presented her with to tempting a distraction as she tantalizes the narrator with reminiscences of her long-ago lost love and his subsequent marriage, her subsequent marriage....

And then, after the narrator moves her workspace to the local schoolhouse (it being summer, the building is unused) to reduce interruptions and avoid gossiping time-sinks, comes the fascinating old man, Captain Littlepage, to tell his own love story:

"It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure," said I, with redoubled interest.

"It was a dog's life," said the poor gentleman, quite reassured, "but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor though 'tis, who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of 'em. There is no occupation so fit for just that class o' men who never get beyond the fo'cas'le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper. In the old days, a good part o' the best men here knew a hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw the world for themselves, and like's not their wives and children saw it with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with 'em sight-seein', but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an' their laws, an' could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet; they got some sense o' proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and their houses were better within an' without. Shipping's a terrible loss to this part o' New England from a social point o' view, ma'am."

Shipping...anything that takes a person out of a narrow area of interest...is a terrible loss for the world's average people. We have the internet now, thus we have almost instantaneous access to information and news and opinions from every corner of the globe. But we don't have any particular reason to seek it out, since the fact is most Americans are un- or underemployed compared to generations gone by, and thus are unlikely to seek beyond the dark alleys of CNN and Fox "News" for news and views on world and national events. With the inevitable bad results.

Captain Littlepage continues:

"No, there's nothing to take the place of shipping in a place like ours. These bicycles offend me dreadfully; they don't afford no real opportunities of experience such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it. There's no large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule everything; we're all turned upside down and going back year by year."

"Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not," said I, trying to soothe his feelings.

There was silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late golden robin, with the most joyful and eager of voices, was singing close by in a thicket of wild roses.

Ladies and gentlemen, everything old is made new again. Captain Cassandra Littlepage sings a lament at the end of the nineteenth century that many of us have been reprising here in the twenty-first. Or, as the old Frenchman had it, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

After a lovely summer outing to Green Island, in the bay off Dunnet Landing, Mrs. Todd welcomes to her herb-gardeny home an old friend, a Mrs. Fosdick. The narrator and Mrs. Todd have now the extra-strength bonding compound of family approval. Green Island is home to Mrs. Todd's mother and younger brother, a wight of some sixty summers; both the Blacketts of Green Island love the narrator as soon as she steps ashore from the dory, and she them. Into this mutual admiration society steps Susan Fosdick, contemporary of Mrs. Todd, and plants herself for a long afternoon's gossip. When you've known someone all your life, the words come easy if they need to come at all:

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know. I see so many of these new folks 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.

Jewett's gift is to limn a lovely scene against a delicately scented and lit background. It is a great deal like that rooted-in-the-past conversation that is so relaxing and welcome, reading this...and her other...work. Direct and unfussy. Lovely and simple. A vase of daisies on a linen cloth, not a candelabra gleaming over a cornucopia of pineapples on fine lace...each beautiful, one way or the other.

I believe that the pleasures of reading a novella are as rich and gorgeously textured as any novel's are. The difference, for me at least, and in the instance of this novella, comes down to the writer's ability to evoke a place, a time, a season, a slant of light; at greater length, her strength could become a weakness, a surfeit, when piled on a larger plate. As it stands, though, this serving is a beautifully balanced, perfectly presented summer picnic on the cool, seaside meadow of a Maine island. Your eyes and ears and nose all attune you to a simple pleasure, a familiar scent, a welcome patch of emotional shade in a hot summer of life.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.