A brief appreciation of Jean Merrill

Ten years ago, in the summer of 2002, I went to a wedding with Alex. The groom was one of his work colleagues, and he'd waffled about whether we should go or not. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have, or, at least we should have skipped the reception (more about that later). But the one fabulous thing that came out of that August afternoon is that I got to meet Jean Merrill, the author of one of my favorite childhood books, The Pushcart War.

The ceremony was held in Skinner State Park, at the Summit House on top of Mount Holyoke, and we obediently followed instructions and parked our car part way up the auto road to wait for the shuttle. As cars kept passing us on their way to the top, though, we realized that not many of the other guests had followed the instructions except for one older couple whom we met while we were waiting for the shuttle. Their names were Jean and Ronni, and we chatted with them pleasantly as we waited at the side of the road. They looked to be in their late 70s and had clearly been a couple for many years. Ronni had long white hair and was lovely. Jean's hair was short and her manner matter of fact. When I asked her what she did, she told me she was a writer, that she mostly wrote children's books. I asked what she'd written. She paused and then said, "Well, the most well known one is probably The Pushcart War." I gasped. I gushed. I gaped. "The Pushcart War was one of my favorite books when I was a kid," I told her. And so it had been. I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to meet, by happenstance and not in a more formal setting--a reading, a book signing, a lecture--a person whose book I'd loved as a child. But here I was, and here she was, and I was delighted.

I learned little bits about her over those few hours--how she had gone to summer camp in Vermont with the groom's mother; how she and Ronni had 2 houses in Vermont not very far from each other, their summer house and their winter house; how Ronni was an artist and had illustrated many of Jean's books; how The Pushcart War had never been out of print; and how Tony Kushner, a friend, had attempted to write a movie adaptation of it and failed. (According to the New York Times, "The quirkiness and dense originality of the book — qualities that made Ms. Merrill’s epic tale so compelling — ultimately made adapting it as a film impossible, Mr. Kushner said.") I learned that she too had had a Fulbright Fellowship to India--hers, in 1952 to study folklore in Madras (now Chennai). My Fulbright happened nearly 40 years later, but both had been life changing.

Meeting Jean and Ronni was the best thing that happened that day. I was delighted and, really, genuinely thrilled at the happenstance of it all. And as soon as the library opened a few days later, I went straight to the children's section and took out The Pushcart War, which I hadn't read in probably 25 years. It didn't disappoint. Published in 1964, it's written as a history (in 1986) looking back at the famous Pushcart War of 1976, in which the pushcart vendors of the lower east side of Manhattan strike back against the truckers who are trying, through bullying, malice and dirty tricks, to get them off the streets. The pushcart vendors decide to fight back, first by embarking on the Pea Shooter Campaign, in which they blow tacks into truck tires via peashooters, causing the flat-tired trucks to block the roads, inconveniencing everyone, thus swaying the public to their side. The books is clever, quirky and funny, even if you're not analyzing it for broader social commentary (a la Waggish). It appears, sadly, not to be in print anymore, but I hope that will change.

As for the wedding, well, I'm not proud of what we did next. After the ceremony on the top of Mount Holyoke, we drove to the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst for the reception. The photos of the wedding party were taken, seemingly for hours. The not very expansive hors d'ouevres table was ravaged. We mingled as best we could, growing hungrier by the minute. We found our table and discovered that we were seated--not with Jean and Ronni, not with the bride's cool friends from the Peace Corps, not even with the groom's other friends--but with the minister, the bride's estranged father and a few other random people. We ate the sad salad and made strained conversation with our tablemates. We fidgeted with hunger and boredom.

And, now, I must say it. We had some whispered conversation between us. I left the decision entirely up to Alex, given that the groom was his colleague. He decided. I agreed. And so, dear readers, we left. We each excused ourselves to go to the rest room after the salad course, and we exited via the back door of the Inn. It was possibly the most deliberately rude thing I've ever done, but in the moment, it felt extraordinarily liberating. We ran happily down the street towards the car, breathing in the fresh August air, and then we went out for Chinese food.

That was the end of Alex's friendship with the groom, of course, but he doesn't seem to mind. When I think back to that day, I feel a twinge of remorse--yes, we probably should have been good citizens and at least stuck it out through the rest of dinner before making our escape--but I mostly remember my delight in meeting Jean and Ronni and grateful for the opportunity to have told her how much I'd loved her books. (I was also fond of her book The Toothpaste Millionaire, which I also read multiple times.)

Jean Merrill died, at the age of 89, earlier this month, according to her obituary in the New York Times. Ronni, her partner of more than 50 years, survives her. And in a strange twist, when I was googling Ronni's name, I found a photo of her taken by Jessamyn West, who was in David Foster Wallace's class at Amherst with me and whose remembrance of him I linked in this post. Jessamyn, apparently, was a tenant of Jean and Ronni in one of their Vermont houses. Small world, indeed. You can see some of Ronni's environmental art pieces here.

And in honor of Jean, I'd recommend a trip to the local library, where you should still be able to find The Pushcart War on the shelf. In Jean's honor and her memory, take it out and read about Frank the Flower, General Anna, Morris the Florist and the Pushcart King himself, Maxie Hammerman. You won't regret it.

Winter Holiday

It's been a very snowy winter many places on the East coast. For better or for worse, my part of Western Mass. is not one of those places. (Every big storm that’s hit further south or east (or west) has mostly managed to miss us.) The most time I’ve spent in the snow has been when I’ve been shoveling it off my driveway. My new snowshoes are still in their bag, and I’ve only used my x-country skis once, and for that, I had to drive halfway to the Berkshires to find (almost) enough snow to ski on. (Admittedly, that was a few weeks ago, and now I wouldn’t have to go so far, after the cumulative effect of this week’s storms.) Still, I felt the need to read about a real winter, of sudden blizzards and frozen lakes with homey houseboats conveniently frozen into them, of skates and sleds and semaphore. In other words, I had to dig out Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransome, fourth in the Swallows and Amazons series and the only one of his novels set in winter.

I have to add that I was not alone in this impulse. A few days later, I went to look at my friend Mo's blog, Loving the Tasmanian Devil, and saw that she'd written a long and thoughtful post called a Happy Confluence of Winter Books about two of her favorite winter books, one of which is Carol Ryrie Brink's Winter Cottage. I had never heard of Winter Cottage and had to put it on my library list immediately.

But back to Arthur Ransome. I didn't grow up reading the Swallows and Amazons books. For those not in the know, they're a beloved series of British children's books, written mostly in the 1930s and 40s, set mostly in the Lake District of England and featuring several families of intrepid adventurers who sail and camp and have adventures. The first I heard of them was in college, when I discovered my friend and next door neighbor, Ann, reading Swallows and Amazons, the first in the series, which she did, I learned, whenever she was stressed out. Some years later, looking at her bookshelves, I found one of the later books of the series, with the inscription, “For Ann on her 23rd birthday,” which made me laugh.

Perhaps incongruously, I read my first Swallows and Amazons book in Delhi in 1994. I belonged to many libraries during that long stay, one of which was the American Embassy library, where there was a 15 rupee sale shelf. More often than I'd imagined, decent books turned up on the 15 rupee shelf, and I snatched them up. One summer day, a battered copy of Swallows and Amazons was there, and I bought it. I did not read it right then, however. I remembered Ann's use of Swallows and Amazons as comfort reading, and I saved it for when I might need it. (I knew the time would come, and it did.) In the years since then, I've read a number of the others, and along with Swallows and Amazons, my favorite is Winter Holiday.

The book involves 3 groups of siblings: the Walkers (aka the Swallows), the Blacketts (the Amazons) and the Callums (the D's) who all end up, mostly parentless (except for Mrs. Blackett), in the Lake District during their winter holiday. It is one of the coldest winters on record, and as more and more of the long lake begins to freeze, the children hope to be able to mount an expedition to the north pole (aka the end of the lake). Due to a fortunately timed case of the mumps and subsequent quarantine that keeps them at the lake for an additional month, their wish is granted.

One thing that’s appealing about the book is how well the kids take advantage of winter. They skate daily on a frozen pond and on the lake itself, they take wild sled rides down the hill onto the lake, they spend time in an igloo they’ve constructed and even manage to rescue a sheep stranded on a cliff. Eventually, they take possession of the Blackett sisters’ Uncle Jim’s houseboat that’s been frozen into the lake, renaming it the Fram, after the boat in Nansen’s arctic expedition in the 1890s, systematically eating their way through all of his stores and readying themselves for their own version of polar exploration, a trip to their own north pole, which turns out to be more than they bargained for and also the adventure that they desperately wanted.

By the end of the book, it is abundantly clear that Nancy Blackett’s pronouncement about winter that serves as the book's epigraph—“Dark at tea-time and sleeping indoors: nothing ever happens in the winter holidays.”—is absolutely false. And for those of us who may never build an igloo, enjoy a frozen houseboat or mount an expedition to any pole at all, it’s a true pleasure to go along with them.

I can’t write about Arthur Ransome without noting that he was recently the subject of a major biography—The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome—in which it turns out that he was a spy for Britain and also so close to the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution that he was nearly prosecuted for treason. I read two fascinating reviews of the book in the Guardian and in the Times of London, but I have to admit that I can't decide how much I actually want to know about his real life. Sometimes, at least, it's best to stick with the fiction.

Hooray, Hooray for Betsy Ray

There are times when only comfort reading will do, and comfort reading of the most extensive sort--a much loved childhood series. One such time was this summer when I was sick, and I re-read the first four Betsy-Tacy books, ostensibly to see how they would work for my nieces, now both reading up a storm. (Just fine--not that there was any question of that.)

Another such time was this past week, when I learned that not only do I have Lyme disease but that I tested positive several months ago, and the doctor's office accidentally misplaced the test results. Not only that, but my best case scenario for treatment is a month of oral antibiotics (thereby wiping out all the good stomach bacteria I've been building up for years, which I'm convinced has kept me relatively healthy when I'm in India). (The other treatment scenario involves IV antibiotics for several weeks, but I'm devoutly hoping it won't come to that.) (By the way, I feel fine.)

So, comfort reading, if only to avoid thinking about all the things I'd like to do to the doctor's office, not to mention the stupid deer tick that bit me god knows when and didn't have the courtesy to make me get a rash, so I would know what had happened.

I first read the ten Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace when I was a child and then again as a teenager. I read them during stressful times in grad school, and I read them in my thirties, at least the last six, the books that take Betsy Ray and her best friend Tacy Kelly through high school and then abroad and into adulthood and marriage. I've always known that mine was not a solitary obsession, but it turns out to be more widespread than I'd imagined. The new reissue of the last six books from Harper Perennial Modern Classics, in three volumes, has garnered mentions in both New York Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. It also spurred the first ever Maud Hart Lovelace Reading Challenge, not to mention the Betsy-Tacy Book Blog Tour.

The Betsy books are fictionalized versions of their author's life--Maud Hart Lovelace grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, at the turn of the century in a warm, loving family, wanting to be a writer. Lovelace told stories of her childhood to her only daughter, Merian Kirchner, and the Betsy-Tacy series was born. The first four books, which take Betsy and Tacy, and their friend Tib, from the ages of five through twelve, are delightful. Tacy is shy, Tib is tiny and Betsy makes up stories and hatches adventures for them all.

The last six books are different. Not that they're not equally delightful, but they're no longer children's books. Each high school book takes Betsy and her crowd through a year of high school. Betsy and the Great World skips ahead several years to 22-year-old Betsy on her own in Europe in the months before the outbreak of World War I. And Betsy's Wedding brings her home and sees her married to her sometime high school sweetheart and writing rival, Joe Willard. (I only just now learned that the Betsy-Joe high school relationship is entirely fictional, as Maud Hart Lovelace didn't meet her husband, journalist Delos Lovelace, until she was in her twenties.)

What keeps these books relevant and engaging is Betsy herself. She is incredibly alive in these pages--charming and flawed and constantly aiming to improve herself, or, at some points, change herself entirely. (She never succeeds.) What is lovely about Betsy is that she screws up, over and over again. She gets overly involved with her friends, she blows off her school work, she makes plans and doesn't keep them. She wants to be a writer but doesn't always make it her priority. She is, in short, entirely believable as a teenager and as a young woman.

It's probably been ten years since I last read the series, and it's interesting to me what details remained with me. For some reason, I remembered Betsy's sister Julia getting blackballed by her sorority but not Betsy and her friends forming their own sorority, Okto Delta, with less than wonderful results. In Betsy and the Great World, I remembered her visit to Oberammergau, where the Passion Play is performed every ten years, but I had no recollection of her near love affair with a young Italian man in Venice. What struck me on this re-read of Betsy and the Great World is how perfectly Lovelace portrays how it is to be on your own in another country for the first time. Betsy may have traveled with infinitely more luggage than I did, but some of the things Betsy thinks in her first few days in Munich are exactly the things that I thought during my early days in Delhi twenty years ago. When Betsy finally makes a friend, and everything changes, I knew exactly how she felt. It also amused me to see that I absolutely identified with Betsy's yearning to take a bath. In her case, the obstacle was the location of the bathroom with the tub (in the section of her hotel where army officers were quartered), whereas I was struggling with the paucity of bathtubs in India in general. But while my friend Becca and I were so desperate for a bath that we were on the brink of asking a woman we'd just met if we could use the bathtub in her hotel room (we lost our nerve, alas), Betsy persists, gets her bath and charms the officers all at the same time. Go Betsy!

What's odd is that I don't actually own any of the Betsy books. I always read library copies as a child, and when I got older and thought about buying them, I discovered that the older editions are rare and expensive, and most of the reprints are not very well done. (Really, there were some terrible choices for cover illustrations along the way. Several times I thought, "But Betsy and Tacy didn't look like that!") That may change, though. I'm delighted that there are handsome new editions out, with the original illustrations and new introductions and material about Maud Hart Lovelace and her life. It's heartening to know that Betsy and her family and friends will continue to charm and entertain readers today, a century after Maud Hart Lovelace graduated from high school in Mankato and moved first to Minneapolis and then out into the great world. And maybe if the books are on my shelf, I won't wait ten years to re-read them. I won't need the excuse of illness or anything else to curl up with Betsy, Tacy and Tib, with Carney and Cab and Winona, with handsome Joe Willard and Julia Ray's endless stream of beaus, and watch Betsy roll the Magic Waver curlers in her hair before bed and settle down at her Uncle Keith's trunk to write the stories that she hopes will some day make her famous.