Month: June 2011

Another Letter: Fran Hamerstrom

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Or in her Beacon Hill accent and at her insistence, “Frahn”.

She was a force of nature, a well- born Bostonian who defied convention and became Aldo Leopold’s only female student, a biologist, a hunter, a writer, and a falconer. She and her beloved husband Frederick lived for as many years as I have been alive in a Victorian farmhouse in Wisconsin with few modern comforts, studying prairie chickens. She shot birds with a proper Yankee gun, a 16 gauge Parker, and trained an eagle. She also modeled and traveled to Europe and hunted with the pygmies in Africa and cooked a feral pigeon on Letterman to promote her cookbook (“Stephen, any publicity is good publicity”). After a little initial animosity — is that Wilde?– she became my friend. She NEVER suffered fools.

I recently found this card in my copy of the bird book she translated from the German (see link above) and wondered if she could be referring to Matt’s well- known kestrels; click to enlarge:

I wrote to him:

“Note from Fran Hamerstrom on kestrels at the meet in 91.

“When she finally came in Feb 92 was when I was in Idaho meeting Lib for the 1st time, though I returned in time to drink with her at the Spur. She was 84 I think and on her way to Mexico. Re- tied my peregrine’s knots, edited the ms on my desk, turned my thermostat up to about 80, used her revolver to shoot a stray dog that had been run over by an 18 wheeler to the horrified fascination of my house- watcher Sharon’s kids, & told me I was “well off” because I had good boots & shotguns. I will not dispute.

“Drank Spanish brandy every night with the likes of the Dixon brothers (Wade called her “Miss Frahn”– a fast learner), booted foot on the rail, all 5 feet nothing of her– a long way from Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill where she was born or the mansion on Brush Hill Road in Milton, later my grammar school, where she grew up. But then so am I…”

Matt thought she had hunted with Jennifer Coulson and sent it on. He was right:

“Guilty as charged! Awh, that’s awesome. I actually recognize her handwriting.
After the meet she sent me an autographed, inscribed copy of “Is She Coming Too?”
Wish I still had that. I bought another copy after Katrina, but it’s no replacement.

“That was one of the kestrels that I bred, named Katie. She actually flew back into the car carrying one of the House Sparrows she caught.”

Everyone knows that books are time machines, but notes like this are among my most priceless possessions.

The Girls in Santa Fe

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Much more in a little, but just downloaded this pic of The Girls looking rather formal and on their best behavior while staying at the Peculiar’s last week midst the chaos.

They behaved well, were a great comfort, and went to the graveside, though Lashyn (left) remained rather nervous the entire time. (She has a bit of the personality and neuroses of Helper Dog, though she is smarter).

Bill Haast dead at 100…

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The legendary reptile man Bill Haast died in Florida last week at 100.

According to the NYT:

“Mr. Haast was bitten at least 173 times by poisonous snakes, about 20 times almost fatally. It was all in a day’s work for probably the best-known snake handler in the country, a scientist-cum-showman who made enough money from milking toxic goo from slithery serpents to buy a cherry-red Rolls-Royce convertible.

“A secret of his success was the immunity he had built up by injecting himself every day for more than 60 years with a mix of venoms from 32 snake species. He suspected the inoculations might have explained his extraordinarily good health, but he was reluctant to make that claim, he said, until he reached 100.”

Housman had his number– and possibly inspired him.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

Fishing for words

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I’m between book projects at the moment – something that only happens for a short time every few years. My next children’s book has been sent to the printer, and my next adult book is making its way through the review process of an academic press under the guidance of an acquisitions editor who is championing the project. Now it’s time for me to select what to work on next. The easy choice would be for me to go back to work on any number of partial manuscripts I’ve got sitting around, suffering from neglect. But I’m not doing that.

Like a wild trout lurking in the dark shadow of a cold stream, I’m detecting a new book project about to rise. Afraid to scare the elusive creature off, I’m moving slowly, reading pointed materials on the subject matter to spawn interest, delving out leaders of inspirational literature and engaging in writing exercises to sharpen my skills. I’m casting the fly line back and forth, back and forth, wooing that lurking wildness into the light.

I know it’s working, this taking things slow and letting the story rise on its own time. At first I had just a vague idea of subject matter, but that’s evolved to a rough outline in my mind, akin to that first glimpse of the full silhouette of the trout as it moves through the water. The book project has become a living being, accompanying me throughout the day. Stirred from the dark pool of back of my mind, the book has moved front and center, always with me, sharing space with all other tasks and thoughts. I’ve even started to dream about it. Soon it will emerge.

Husband Jim watches this book-fishing process with fascination, knowing that all this quiet and calm effort will soon erupt in a fury, as I begin marathon writing bouts to get the words from my head to paper, as the trout breaks the surface after my dancing fly gliding over the sparkling water. The fly rod melts away, replaced by my pen.

Seattle turf war

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Jim and I had the pleasure of spending last weekend in Seattle, visiting our grandgirls and nephew. While exploring Pike’s Place Market, we heard a ruckus above. A crow and gull were having a horrendous dispute, and I enjoyed spending a few minutes watching the crow dive-bombing the stubborn gull.

Belated Answer

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Too busy! But re “digs him up again” in Mesabi below: the ref is from Ezra Pound in his pre- Modernist period; from “Sestina: Altaforte”, his sketch of the warrior troubador Bertrans de Born. He prefaces the poem:

“Dante Alghieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer up of strife.

“Eccovi!

“Judge ye!

“Have I dug him up again?”

It then begins:
“Damn it all! All this our south stinks peace…”

proceeds through “…In hot summer I have great rejoicing/ When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace…”

and “There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing…”

and ends with the bloody bard howling “Hell blot black for always the thought ‘Peace!’ “

NOT your regulation sensitive poet type…

PLF 2: Letters from Geoffrey Household

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Sadly, I never corresponded with Patrick Leigh Fermor, but I did for many years with the adventurous old “suspense” story writer Geoffrey Household (as so many perceptive critics wrote, he was so much more than that, including a naturalist, a regionalist, and a chronicler of the same old lost Europe that Leigh Fermor also celebrated). Some of his best works are still or at least recently in print, though they were written from the thirties into the eighties: Rogue Male, in which an English big game hunter with a secret stalks a Hitler figure until he becomes the prey; 1965’s Dance of the Dwarfs, a cryptozoological novel with several twists; and the one I read first, 1960’s Watcher in the Shadows, still another tale of being stalked. Household’s knowledge of nature and animals gave him an intuition and sympathy for prey that many writers of such novels lacked.*

I will write about Geoffrey’s own work, but that must wait. Suffice to say that in the winter of 86-87, having been recently widowed, I wrote to him asking if he had known PLF, whose Woods & Water I had just finished. I figured with his background– among other things, he had lived in Bucharest and Greece for many years before the war, and been in British Intelligence– he might have. I just wanted to do something new– walk across Europe, perhaps?

Geoffrey wrote back with enthusiasm; we had written to each other for some time, and I think he was worried for me. Of course, he HAD known “Paddy” during the war.

(I’ll follow each letter with a blown- up text of the relevant part, as the handwriting of an 87- year- old- man can be as bad as that of a 61- year old with Parkinson’s– click twice and they are more legible than the originals!)


He apparently thought the matter over, then, perhaps forgetting his previous note, wrote what may have been his last letter to me in the fall before his death the next year at 88. His handwriting had deteriorated, but he could still command a phrase.


Desperados indeed. As David Pryce- Jones said this morning: “Could there be men like that again? In these thin days I doubt it…”

*Geoffrey’s short story collections are not “suspense” and are much harder to find but worth the effort. Start with Sabres on the Sand or The Europe that Was.

UPDATE: In the introductory essay to the NYTBR ed of Rogue Male, linked above (click on “See Inside”), Virginia Nelson writes “…One can’t help but wondering if his path crossed that of the notable English picaro Patrick Leigh Fermor…”

UPDATE 2: The wonderful Patrick Leigh Fermor blog is now on our blogroll (right). More to come I’m sure…

Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915- 2011 RIP

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Too burnt on obit- writing to write a proper tribute to one of my (and Betsy Huntington’s; she left me all my early first editions; and Q’s) favorite writers and examples of a life well- lived. But readers and nomads everywhere should observe a silent moment: Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at 96 in England. He had recently returned from the island off Crete he had called home for many years, perhaps to be reunited at last with his late wife Joan. We must all hope that he finally completed his third book about his youthful walk, between the wars, from the Hook of Holland to “Constantinople”; the second volume,Between the Woods and the Water, may be my favorite travel book ever. I eagerly await Artemis Cooper’s biography next year…

Good obits in the Telegraph, at England’s Channel 4, and at The Guardian. More to come I’m sure…

Will attempt something later; for now here is an older post by me and here is one by Reid.

UPDATE: more good obits and memories: Max Hastings in the Daily mail; his biographer-to- be, Artemis Cooper, with a photo of his first love, Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene– be still my heart!

Let’s lift a glass to one who never hesitated– see Cooper’s opening tale– to do so himself.

And a last note from another Guardian article, for those who are holding their breath about the existence or fate of the “Third Volume”:

“Readers are still awaiting the promised third leg of Leigh Fermor’s trip, despite the author’s repeated promises to “pull my socks up and get on with it” and his 2007 declaration that he was learning to type so that he could complete it more quickly.

“Cooper, who visited him at his Greek home earlier this year, said that the writer had been working on corrections to a finished text. “A early draft of the third volume has existed for some time, and will be published in due course,” she said.’

Readings

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On a hot dusty day, we buried Patty Adam in Fairview Cemetery on Cerrillos road in Santa Fe, with a small crowd of friends in attendance. The cemetery, on the National Historic Register, is odd, small, old, and dry, with 19th century tombstones and a general air of benign neglect– think New Orleans with prairie dogs resident and dead grass instead of damp moss. Her neighbors, so to speak, include the fiery Polish-American writer Maia Wojciechowska (mother of our painter friend Oriana Rodman), and other local luminaries.

God knows what her friends we didn’t know thought of our choice in readings. Patty had asked for a psalm and we all agreed on a “dog poem”. I found a brilliant rather scary Ogden Nash that was more Housman than doggerel (sorry!), and we skipped over the more conventional sweetness of Psalm 23– green pastures, fear no evil and all that– for the tragic beauty of a selection from Psalm 103:

“For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth we are dust.

“As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

“For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

(I actually read from her childhood friend Virginia Huntington’s little leather- bound book of psalms; it is tempting to wonder whether another little girl might have seen it in China long ago).

Then, the Nash, particularly poignant when you have aging dogs too. One tends to think of Nash as silly but this one is not:

My little pup ten years ago
was arrogant and spry
Her backbone was a bended bow
for arrows in her eye
Her step was proud, her bark was loud,
her nose was in the sky,
But she was ten years older then,
And so by God, was I.

Small birds on stilts along the beach
rose up with piping cry.
And as they rose beyond her reach
I thought to see her fly.
If natural law refused her wings,
That law she would defy,
for she could do unheard of things
and so, at times, could I.

Ten years ago she split the air
to seize what she could spy;
now she bumps against a chair,
betrayed by milky eye!
She seems to pant,
time up, time up
My little dog must die,
And lie in dust with Hector’s pup
So, presently must I.

Last, Libby read a sweet verse by Tolkien sent by Lily’s breeder, Teddy Moritz in New Jersey:

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
With morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For there are still so many things
that I have never seen:
In every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
And people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the time I sit and think
of people long ago
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door.