Occupy Boston, Dewey Square Tent City, Massachusetts

Before we left Boston, Massachusetts, late October, this was the scene in Dewey Square. $45,000 in donations had been received, a library full of books given, and a giant Gandhi statue had been loaned to the group. There was a large quantity of free food, and the atmosphere was very positive and very friendly. I'll let the images speak for themselves.

Goodbye once more Boston.

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Occupy London in Finsbury Square.

E. B. White: The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)

The rear inside cover tells us that E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan 'was named an ALA Notable Children's Book'. The book has illustrations, a kind of Disney-style anthropomorphism certainly, but the vocabulary isn't particularly simplified, and I suspect many adults (young or otherwise) would really enjoy this tale of an outsider.

The story is about a swan named Louis (as in Armstrong) who is a swan who's mute, which is pretty serious when you're a trumpeter swan. (And there's some technical information about trumpeter swans, so this book is Educational, children, OK?) But Louis has a helper in the form of the human Sam Beaver, an eleven-year-old with a serious interest in wildlife. As you might imagine, Louis is a very smart swan, as smart — if not more — than humans, so eventually he decides that if he can communicate by learning English, it'll be a great advantage for him. We now have a fully literate swan flying back to his parents with a writing slate, but when he falls in love with the swan Serena, he still can't communicate with her.

So his father decides that to make a sound the only thing is to get Louis a trumpet, which he does by flying through the window of a music shop. But by the time Louis is learning to acquire an artificial voice, Serena has flown off. The other problem is Louis's guilt: he must raise money to pay for the stolen trumpet and the broken window. Eventually, having mastered the trumpet, he flies off to a summer camp where he saves a boy's life and is given a medal for it, then he flies to the Boston swan boats in the Public Garden where he makes a lot of money performing for the crowd. And so we have Louis, flying around with a trumpet, a medal, and a purse tied round his neck. Soon, he receives a highly lucrative offer to play a regular spot in a nightclub in Philadephia, and his bulging purse will soon make him a rich swan.

Yes, of course there's eventually a happy ending, and it actually reads much better than I can explain here, so I recommend it. On the back cover, John Updike is quoted as writing in The New York Times 'We are lucky to have this book.' I think so too.

Edgar Allan Poe in Boston, Massachusetts

'EDGAR ALLAN POE

POET   STORYWRITER   CRITIC

BORN ON CARVER STREET JANUARY 19, 1809,

TO DAVID AND ELIZABETH (ELIZA) POE,

ACTORS AT THE BOSTON THEATRE.

IN 1827 PUBLISHED HIS FIRST BOOK,

TAMBERLAINE AND OTHER POEMS,

AT A SHOP ON THE CORNER OF WASHINGTON

AND STATE STREETS AND ENLISTED IN THE

U.S. ARMY AT FORT INDEPENDENCE,

BOSTON HARBOR. LECTURED IN BOSTON

OCTOBER 16, 1845, PUBLISHED "LANDOR'S COTTAGE,"

HIS LAST TALE, IN BOSTON'S

FLAG OF OUR UNION, JUNE 9, 1849.

DIED AT BALTIMORE OCTOBER 7, 1849.'

Wendell Phillips in Boston, Massachusetts

Wendell Phillips (1811-84) was a lawyer who ceased practising law after seeing abolitionist George Thompson almost being lynched for his views, and listening to William Lloyd Garrison: he became a committed abolitionist, joined and gave speeches for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and wrote newpaper articles for the cause. He consumed no products produced by the work of slaves.

Following the Civil War, he turned his attention to such social issues as women's rights, universal suffrage, and equal rights for Native Americans.

This statue was erected in the Public Garden in 1913.

Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

Beacon Hill is a neighborhood in Boston north of the Public Garden and Boston Common, with the boundaries Storrow Drive to the west, Cambridge Street to the north, Beacon Street to the south, and Somerset Street to the east. Many notable literary figures have lived here, but unfortunately the dense foliage and the parked vehicles make it very difficult to take a decent photo. However, I managed a few.

This quotation on a mural in Charles Street, Beacon Hill, is from Robert Lowell's 'The Ruins of Time', which consists of two sonnets, and the tercet here is from the end of the second sonnet:

'O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze
and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once
was fugitive maintains its permanence.'

This second sonnet is a version of 'A Roma sepultada en ruinas' by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645), of which the second tercet is:

'¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
lo fugitivo permanece y dura.'

And this in turn is a Spanish translation of the fourth sonnet  of the 'Les Antiquités de Rome' sequence (1556) by Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522-60), of which the second tercet is:

'Reste de Rome. Ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.'

'From 1865 to 1893

THE HOME OF

FRANCIS PARKMAN

American Historian' 

As I've already mentioned Parkman in the Mount Auburn Cemetery post, I shall say nothing here. Except that it was impossible to photograph the house because the foliage rendered it almost invisible.

Henry David Thoreau once lived in an apartment at 4 Pinckney Street.

Irish-American Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) was a poet and essayist born in Roxbury, MA, and was a friend of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Her most noted publications are A Roadside Harp (1893) and Patrins (1897). She died in Chipping Camden, England.

'20 Pinckney Street

As a litle girl Louisa May Alcott lived in rented rooms at 20 Pinckney Street. The Alcott home was part of the Boston literary scene during the decades before the Civil War.  Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was an innovative educator whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison.

In the 1880s, her reputation and fortune secure, Miss Alcott returned to Beacon Hill. She lived at 10 Louisberg Square until her death.'

'ROBERT LEE FROST

1874-1963

AMERICA'S "POET LAUREATE

AND FOUR-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

LIVED AT 88 MT. VERNON STREET

FROM 1938-1941

WHILE TEACHING POETRY

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES,

IT BEGINS IN DELIGHT AND ENDS IN WISDOM."'

The Parker House, The Last Hurrah, and Edwin O'Connor, Boston, Massachusetts

 'The Parker House

'One of Boston's luxury hotels, opened by innovative hostellier Harvey Parker, the Parker House has been operating on this site since 1856. Parker introduced the European plan, started the practice of serving meals continuously, and coined the word scrod, the fresh white fish catch of the day. The famous Parker Roll and the Boston Cream Pie originated here.

'Among the illustrious patrons of the Parker House were Charles Dickens, Ulysses S. Grant and John F. Kennedy. The members of The Saturday Club, a group of leading 19th century authors including Emerson, Lowell and Longfellow, gathered here.'

The original Parker House has gone, but the bar of the present one is called 'The Last Hurrah' after a 1956 novel by Edwin O'Connor (1918-68), who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for The Edge of Sadness.

Diagonally opposite the bar, on School Street, is the Old City Hall, which plays a prominent part in The Last Hurrah. O'Connor's protagonist is the mayor, Frank Skeffington Jr., who was obviously modeled on the highly disreputable mayor James Michael Curley.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the King's Chapel Burying Ground, Boston, Massachusetts

King's Chapel Burying Ground is on Tremont Street, downtown Boston, the city's oldest cemetery. Nathaniel Hawthorne used to enjoy walking around cemetries, and this is was one of them. Legend has it that the above gravestone, of Elizabeth Pain, who died in 1704, inspired Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, because of the (tenuous) resemblance of the symbol at the top left to the letter 'A'.

Certainly, the closing paragraph of the novel seems to suggest something of this, even if the colors are incorrect:

'So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the
scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb-stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate - as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport - there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:
"ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"'

The Old Corner Bookstore, Boston, Massachusetts

The Old Bookstore is on the corner of School and Washington streets in Downtown Boston.

'The Old Corner Bookstore

'Thomas Crease built this structure as his apothecary and residence shortly after the great fire of 1711 destroyed Anne Hutchinson's house on this site. Timothy Carter opened the Old Corner Bookstore here in 1829. Between 1845 and 1865, the booksellers Ticknor and Fields established the building's lasting literary significance as the publishers of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Stowe, Emerson, Thoreau and other prominent American and British authors, who often gathered here.

'In 1960, civic leaders raised the money and established Historic Boston Incorporated to acquire and preserve this site.'

Kahlil Gibran in Boston, Massachusetts

'KAHLIL GIBRAN, A NATIVE OF BESHARRI, LEBANON, FOUND LITERARY AND ARTISTIC SUSTENANCE IN THE DENISON SETTLEMENT HOUSE, THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY. A GRATEFUL CITY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GREATER HARMONY AMONG MEN AND STRENGTHENED UNIVERSALITY OF SPIRIT GIVEN BY KAHLIL GIBRAN TO THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD IN RETURN.'

'IT WAS IN MY HEART TO HELP A LITTLE BECAUSE I WAS HELPED MUCH.'

Opposite Boston Public Library in Copley Square is this monument to Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), a Lebanese immigrant who wrote most of The Prophet (1923) in Chinatown, Boston. His godson, also called Kahlil Gibran, sculpted this piece.

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, and Poets, Boston, Massachusetts

The magnificent Robert Gould Shaw memorial (described below) stands north-east of Boston Common opposite the Massachusetts State House on the corner of Beacon and Park streets.

A number of important poems have been written about Robert Gould Shaw, among them James Russell Lowell's 'Memoriae Positum R. G. S.' (1864), William Vaughn Moody's 'An Ode in Time of Hesitation' (1900), John Berryman's 'Boston Common' (1948), and Robert Lowell's 'Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th', which was reprinted as 'For the Union Dead' (1959 and 1960).

'THE MONUMENT

THE SHAW-54TH REGIMENT MEMORIAL HONORS COLONEL ROBERT SHAW AND MEMBERS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS 54TH REGIMENT WHO DIED IN THE ASSAULT ON FORT WAGNER, SOUTH CAROLINA, JULY 18, 1863. THE 54TH WAS THE FIRST REGIMENT OF BLACK VOLUNTEERS FROM THE NORTH TO FIGHT IN THE CIVIL WAR. ON THE BACK OF THE MONUMENT ARE INSCRIBED THE NAMES OF THE MEMBERS OF THE 54TH WHO DIED WITH COLONEL SHAW IN THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM AND UNION. THE MONUMENT WAS ERECTEDD THROUGH PRIVATE DONATIONS AND GIVEN TO THE CITY OF BOSTON IN 1897. IT BECAME PART OF BOSTON AFRICAN-AMERICAN NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE IN 1980. FUNDS CONTRIBUTED FROM ACROSS THE UNITED STATES MADE POSSIBLE ITS RESTORATION IN 1983-1984.'

'THE SCULPTOR

THE SHAW-54TH REGIMENT MEMORIAL, THE OUTSTANDING

TRIBUTE TO SOLDIERS OF THE CIVIL WAR, WAS CREATED

BY ONE OF AMERICA'S FOREMOST SCULPTORS, AUGUSTUS

SAINT GAUDENS (1848-1907). BORN IN DUBLIN, OF A

FRENCH FATHER AND AN IRISH MOTHER, HE GREW UP IN

NEW YORK, WAS APPRENTICED TO A CAMEO CUTTER AT 13,

AND STUDIED AT THE ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS IN PARIS.

HE BEST KNOWN WORKS INCLUDE THE ADAMS MEMORIAL

IN WASHINGTON, D.C., GENERAL SHERMAN IN NEW YORK AND

PRESIDENT LINCOLN IN CHICAGO. HIS HOME IN CORNISH,

NEW HAMPSHIRE IS A NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE. THE SETTING

FOR THE MEMORIAL WAS DESIGNED BY THE DISTINGUISHED

ARCHITECT, CHARLES F. MCKIM.'

Edward Everett Hale in Boston, Massachusetts

The statue of Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) stands close to the duckling sculpture near the Charles Street entrance to the Public Garden in Boston. Hale was a writer, historian and Unitarian clergyman who was born in Boston. A child prodigy, at the age of 13 he entered Harvard College, where he graduated four years later: he was thought of as the class poet.

Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins, a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe's, and like Stowe was a staunch abolitionist. He preached in the South Congregational Church in Boston, and is now perhaps best known for his patriotic work The Man without a Country, which was published in The Atlantic in 1853, and can be read here.

 

Bela Lyon Pratt (1867-1917) sculpted this, and also sculpted the Nathaniel Hawthorne statue in Salem, Massaachusetts.

Elizabeth Bishop in Boston, Massachusetts

A pedal-powered swan boat on the lake in the Public Garden, Boston, pulls into dock at the end of a tour. It was of an event during one such ride, a number of years ago, that a future major American poet later spoke.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother was institutionalized in 1916, when Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia. Bishop never forgot the occasion when she was about three when she went for a ride on a swan boat with her mentally ill mother still wearing her widow's weeds, and her mother feeding peanuts to a swan which bit her and drew blood through her black glove. She later tried to write a poem about it but never managed to complete it.

Bishop's friend Robert Lowell (1917-77), born in Boston, wrote a poem titled 'The Public Garden', in which he speaks of a 'jaded flock of swanboats', and 'the arched bridge' from which I took this photo.

(Another book which includes the Public Garden is the children's story The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) by E. B. White (1899-1985), which concerns the trumpeter swan Louis, who is mute, but on learning to play a real trumpet becomes a celebrity on the swan boats before moving to richer pickings.)

Toward the end of her life Bishop lived for a few years at 60 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, but preferred Boston (particularly the North End with its Italian butcher shops, and bakeries for macaroons), and at the beginning of July, 1974 she moved to 437 Lewis Wharf, off Atlantic Avenue, on the fourth floor, where she had a superb view of the Atlantic Ocean. A late interview by Elizabeth Spires made at Lewis Wharf and published in the Paris Review is here.

Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, Boston, Massachusetts

Boston's Public Garden is a rectangle bounded by Beacon, Charles, Boylston, and Arlington streets, and there's a fascinating sculpture on the north-east corner of it. On the face of it, this post seems to smack of that awful animal, you know, the t-word: tourism. How many tourists in Boston stop to sit their kids on the ducks and take photos? Isn't this post about the p-word too? Yes: popularity!

So what possible defense could I make for this post? Well, this attaction is free, it doesn't cost about $50 dollars like the Boston CityPASS which droves of tourists buy to see a number of things they probably don't really want to see. Plus it's literature: this delightful culpture is based on a Boston book, but unlike such Boston books as The Bostonians, or Looking Backward, or Infinite Jest, or Laura Warholic, or any other book set in Boston, this one's for children. Of all ages. Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey (1914—2003), was his second book and was published in 1941. It has sold over 2,000,000 copies, although I wonder how many of those were in the States alone. But it can certainly be called obscure in the UK: searching for the title in local libraries has proved fruitless, and Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard's two column inch entry on McCloskey in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1999, p. 327 ) expresses regret that very few of his books are available in the UK.

There is little text in the book, which an adult could easily read in a few minutes, but McCloskey's illustrations are bigger, and he studied ducklings to the point of keeping several of them in his studio in NYC.

The story is about a couple of mallards who fly around central Boston in search of a place to start a family. At first they're happy with the pond in the Public Garden, where people throw them peanuts from the swan boats, but a bicycle frightens Mrs Mallard so they find a nearby island on the Charles River. Mrs Mallard gives birth to eight ducklings: Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouac, Pack, and Quack. Policeman Michael feeds the family peanuts from the river bank.

Mr Mallard decides to investigate downstream while Mrs Mallard prepares the ducklings for the real world, and the couple agree that they should all meet at the Public Garden a week later.

When it comes to the time to leave, the ducks have a traffic problem, as they have to waddle across Embankment Road and down Mount Vernon and Charles streets to enter the park. Michael comes to the rescue by getting the police to stop the traffic as they make their way to the Public Garden where Mr Mallard is waiting, and where they decide to stay.

The ending is difficult to believe, as drakes are sexually promiscuous, and the idea of Mr Mallard being there after a week is of course an example of anthropomorphism. But it makes a good story, and one that has endured.

'THIS SCULPTURE HAS

BEEN PLACED HERE AS A TRIBUTE TO

ROBERT McCLOSKEY,

WHOSE STORY "MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS"

HAS MADE THE BOSTON PUBLIC GARDEN

FAMILIAR TO CHILDREN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

1987'

Oddly, there is no mention of the artist, but this bronze structure was made by Nancy Schön, who unsurprisingly chose to depict the troop of ducklings as they are waddling along the sidewalk, a piece of which is incorporated in the work itself. And, of course, there is no Mr Mallard. I had to wait a short time before all the kids clambered off the ducks, but an obliging couple of young women let me get on with the job without interfering.

Mrs Mallard with, as the book repeatedly choruses,

Jack,

Kack,

Lack,

Mack,

Nack,

Ouac,

Pack,

And Quack!

In 1991 the First Lady Barbara Bush gave a copy of the statue to the Soviet First Lady Raisa Gorbachev for the children of her country, and it was erected in Novodevichy Park in Moscow the same year.