I was standing in the room Sarah Orne Jewett lived in near the end of her life, looking at the initials she’d carved into the glass pane of her window. It had the wavery old glass of a Revolutionary War-era house, like the shimmer of heat frozen in place. Of the rooms in the house, this was the one that was kept most closely to the way it was when Sarah died, per the wishes of her sister. It retains some of the feeling of being there while she is away, an uncanny sense that she’s stepped out after cleaning her room, and might be back at any moment, arms full of cut flowers.
The room was a rich dark green. An antique doll sat with its back to the pillows, spread across the bed, and had the eerie quality of a placeholder for the room’s former resident. A tiny ceramic thimble-sized pen holster was mounted to the wall by the bed. I imagined her reaching for it. It conjured the strongest sense of her life, of all the objects here, of which there were many. I glimpsed from it the pattern of her life, of how tall she’d been, and the drive to write mixed with the amount of time she took to bed. I saw her take the dry pen to the glass and press down, until her initials appeared. That being the other, most vivid impression of her.
Sarah Orne Jewett House, South Berwick, Maine. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
I did not come here to imagine I could somehow understand her work better. I did not come here in place of reading her. I did not come here because it is a fetish of some kind, or any of those other reasons quoted in recent attacks on the custom of writers houses and those who visit them. If I wanted a fetish, it was of the kind for the conjuring of magic, and in that case, that is perhaps what I left with. I came in order to express the affection I feel for a woman who was a trailblazer, who in her own way made room for the writer I am now: Jewett was a Mainer, queer, stylish, of fierce opinions and with a great love of this land. A love that allowed, sadly, some to condemn her work as “regional,” as if being indifferent to place was a quality of some more universal, “better” writer. She spent her life as an unmarried woman of letters, she had no one to show her how to be the person she became–she simply became herself, and in doing so, was able to be a mentor to the young Willa Cather. And a role model in a sense to those of us who claim her now as a hero, after her death. To those who mock writers house visits, I can only say, how nice for you, to live a life where you don’t need heroes. How nice that what you wanted to be always came with some sort of imprimatur of approval from somewhere above you so that you could seek it uncomplicatedly, and not feel like a class traitor, or a gender traitor, or a sexual one. Hurrah for you. After all, there’s just so many ways writers are honored in America after their deaths, it really does get hard to choose. It’s not like the French, who really love literature appropriately, went and made Victor Hugo’s house into a museum or anything.
Anyway.
The Herb Garden. Photo Credit: Alexander Chee
My visit to the Sarah Orne Jewett House was in some ways inauspicious. As I bought my ticket, I discovered I’d missed a talk by the house’s excellent gardener the night before, she the author of finely planted gardens I’d been admiring outside the house, along the entrance walkway and in back. These were all plants mentioned in Jewett’s books, and the guide to them had lovely concise quotes to place each of them for the reader. You would never not know what feverfew looked like after this visit. The library next door, which turned out to be also a place Jewett spent much of her childhood—at a young age, her family moved next door and later moved back—was closed, and so I could not also see that. The famous white rose (famous to those who love Jewett’s work, I’ll add) had no blooms left after the brutal July heat wave, and instead looked a little like someone had lined it up along the wall to be shot, though to be fair, I think all of us felt that way that day.
Garden Guide. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
And so there were moments when I imagined a visit by someone who was like me but better than me, who knew to check ahead for the talk, who came when roses bloom earlier in the summer, or who lived in a country like this one but with expanded library hours.
Photo credit: Alexander Chee
The visit was spontaneous. On a visit to the Maine Historical Society earlier in the week for research my family has been doing into our family history, I found a footnote in the history of my mother’s family saying Jewett had mentioned a distant relation of ours in her autobiographical essay “The Old Town of Berwick.”
I looked to see if I could find the essay, which I didn’t know, there at the Historical Society. I was introduced to Jewett by Marilynne Robinson years ago in Iowa as a student, when Marilynne asked me if I knew her work and wanted to take part in a reading honoring the release of Jewett’s Library of America edition. I felt an affection, and even a nostalgia for when I had discovered her on seeing that footnote. When I looked up the essay, I found a copy donated to the society by her sister Mary from an edition reprinted after her death in 1909. I discovered her again that day, in the way you can sometimes with a writer who writes both fiction and essays. The essays reveal another person, the one behind the veil.
I have always believed that Martin Pring must have been the first English discoverer of my native town, when he came to the head of tide water in the Piscataqua River in 1603. Bartholomew Gosnold had sailed along the coast in 1602, and Pring’s pilot was one of Gosnold’s seamen. He brought his two little vessels, the “Speedwell” and the “Discoverer,” of fifty and twenty-six tons burden respectively, in search of adventure and of sassafras bark, which at that time in England was believed to be a sovereign remedy for human ails.
“I have always believed…” By the end of the sentence, I wanted a boat called the Speedwell.
The main branch of the Piscataqua (river of right angles or the great deer drive, as one may choose to interpret it) would lead him to Newichawannock Falls (my place of wigwams), and to Quampeagan (the great fishing place). No doubt there were those who could direct him to this point, for, being in June, it was the time of the salmon fishery at the Newichawannock Falls, to which place all the Indians came to catch and dry their fish for winter use. It was the great fishery for all that part of the country.
I have myself traced for some distance the deep-worn footpath which marks the first day’s trail northward and northeastward, as I have been told by a very old person who has preserved many of the earlier traditions of the town. I have heard that one might walk across on the salmon, which wedged themselves into solid masses in their efforts to leap the impossible high fall near the mouth of Chadbourne’s or the Great Works River…
I didn’t just want to go to the house. I wanted to go down, try to find that “deep-worn footpath,” discover where the salmon had once been thick enough to be a bridge. But instead there was the house, so I began there, with my mother and partner Dustin along for the adventure.
The Sarah Orne Jewett House is so exactly at the center of town, it would be easy to miss it. I do not know how far it is from that part of the river she spoke of, though I found myself wanting to wander out and find it as I waited for the tour. On arriving I almost passed the house, which has the white paint and black shutters of many New England homes. It looked entirely like a part of the town, and only a small sign telling you the tour starts at the side of this Georgian house told me it was time to park and get out.
I wandered the gardens, examined the rose with its empty arms, and then a friendly young woman opened the door, and wearing blue paper safety shoes we would also have to put on, worn in order to protect the carpet and the floors.
The library next door was her home after the age of nine, where she grew to maturity. The home I entered was was where she later returned and died, a place she lived in with her sister Mary, though her heart and much of her life was in Boston, with one Annie Fields, the widow of her editor at the Atlantic, and the woman referred to when people speak of Jewett’s “Boston Marriage.” She wrote long passionate letters to friends, sending sometimes 80 a day, according to the tour guide, and was known to send lilacs down to Boston on the train.
Photo credit: Alexander Chee
The home is a stunning 1774 house, with dramatic, confident architecture punctuated by William Morris carpets of the kind done to resemble needlepoint. My favorite was in fact a reproduction made from a scrap found in the barn. The foundation that runs the house is affectionate toward Jewett, as well as reverent–reverent but not too reverent. Jewett’s first novel, Deephaven, used the house as a setting, and throughout, quotes on small cards set in the rooms punctuate your sense of immersion in her life and the novel. The descriptions of the rooms included are still largely accurate. One amusing one is in her sister Mary’s bedroom, which contains one of the few remaining examples of flocked wallpaper from the 18th century, a process which had glue painted to the wall and red wool dust and mica spread across it, to create in this case flowers like cherry blossoms in relief. After the guide finished her explanation I looked down to the card, to see Jewett’s narrator’s humorous complaint:
The paper was captured in a French prize some time in the last century, and part of the figure was shaggy, and therein little spiders found habitation, and went visiting their acquaintances across the shiny places. The color was an unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave it the appearance of having moulded.
Deephaven is the story of an adventure between two young women, Helen and Kate, best friends who go off to live for the summer in Maine, in the house of a great-aunt of Kate’s who has recently died. It is a kind of mirror to the life Sarah had here. In the hall at the top of the stairs, near her very grand desk, is a table with two curio cabinets composed by her sister Mary, side by side: a spoon decorated by a turqouise, a pen knife of extraordinary tininess, a needle-case, tiny silver buttons, a card with what looked to be two slim brooches pinned to it, and written in a very small hand. Two facing silhouettes of the sisters flank the display.
Jewett had a sea-captain grandfather, and the house has the eclectic style of a traveler, a curio cabinet all on its own with many rooms. Sarah was the tomboy, Mary the proper one; Mary eventually came to reign as South Berwick’s grand dame. Caroline was the one sister who married of the three, to an Edwin Eastman, and she lived next door in the building that became the library. Her son, Teddy, was much beloved by Sarah and Mary, and we were even shown a room said to be his room. He died just a year after Mary did. Still, the house retains Sarah’s imprimatur. Sarah was a stylish woman and very precise. Her books were all designed by the artist Sarah Wyman Whitman, in an Arts and Crafts style, mostly green covers with gilt, and to see them in the house as you do, you feel the books are of a piece with the place and her sensibility.
From the downstairs library, where Jewett’s books have been returned on permanent loan from Harvard, to the conch shells that sit next to the fireplaces, to the landing study on the upstairs, with its maple desk topped by brass phoenix finials and black horsehair couches, I felt I left each room too quickly. I wanted to linger at the letter to a friend, framed, on the occasion of the publication of one of my favorite stories of hers, “The Queen’s Twin.” I imagined laying down on Mary’s Civil War field bed, with its fantastic canopy, or find some occasion to use the pin cushion made from scallop shells.
But each of the objects also set me dreaming, which was a bit distracting, as the tour is excellent, and the tour guide is friendly and knowledgeable. I almost heard what she said about the dining room, for example, while I stood there hypnotized by Captain Jewett’s captain’s shipboard liquor cabinet, a wood case full of beautiful gilt-streaked bottles with handwritten labels that said “bourbon,” “gin,” “rum,” “Jamaican rum,” “St. Cruz rum,” and crowned with a set of glasses that seemed ready to use. And when I entered her room itself, which her sister had shut after her death, saying she wanted it always to be as it was, the spell was at its strongest.
I glanced at her weathered leatherbound copy of Montaigne’s essays, with her French dictionary beside it on a side table. A retractable electric lamp, an early example of electricity, was to light her desk, but looked as if it might extend as far as the bed on its collapsible arm. The initials were cut not only into the wavering ancient glass of her window, but also her desk, and her chalkboards. The guide told us of how she loved her initials. On the desk rested a tiny cartoon she drew as a young woman of them, the S and J as serpents, chasing what looked to be the O in the form of a bonneted girl who was almost outrunning them, her mouth wide in mock horror.
Parsnip Cake. Photo credit: Alexander Chee
Afterward, at a cafe across the street, our waitress insisted we try the parsnip cake. As we’d never heard of it, we did, consuming it quickly. It had a deep yellow color, and a mellow, earthy sweetness. I asked about it and the manager or owner on duty explained that in replacing a beloved carrot cake from their menu, lost to them when the partner left with his recipe, they invented it, only to find the caterer near them making what appeared to be the same cake. When confronted, the caterer denied copying them. “I have been making that cake for years,” she told them. “The society order it. It’s Sarah Orne Jewett’s favorite dessert.”
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. He currently teaches a seminar on the Graphic Novel at Columbia’s MFA in Writing and lives in New York. For more about him, check him out at Koreanish.
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Tags: Alexander Chee, Deephaven, Harvard, Maine Historical Society, Marilynne Robinson, Montaigne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah Wyman Whitman, South Berwick, The Queen's Twin, Victor Hugo
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