The Country of the Pointed Firs
was written in 1895, and
it has no plot. I'm hard put to explain why this short book, which moves so
quietly to a quiet close, leaves the impression that it does. Sarah Orne
Jewett's novel is told by a woman writer who goes on what she expects to be a
tranquil retreat from crowded Boston to a tiny settlement on the eastern coast
of Maine. Jewett calls it Dunnet Landing. "One evening in June, a single
passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf." Strangers are a rarity, and the
local children follow her "with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the
salt-aired, white clapboarded little town."
And the place closes around me, seeming to shut me off from the larger
world, as the visitor settles in with her landlady, Mrs. Todd. This Mrs. Todd
is an ample, knowledgeable woman, who grows herbs for medicine in her tiny
garden. She has "a fine, unhindered voice, as if she were calling across a
field." "Unhindered" is exactly the right word, describing both the place and
the person.
The visitor rents the schoolhouse as a study. The first interruption,
apart from the bees and the swallows, is Captain Littlepage, a retired
shipmaster who "looked like an aged grasshopper of some strange human variety."
He, of course, reminisces, but, quite unexpectedly, tells a story of the
supernatural--of an unexplored region north of Hudson Bay ("a kind of
waiting-place between this world an' the next") where the half-seen inhabitants
are only "the shape of folks." His neighbors esteem Captain Littlepage, though
some of them think him a little cracked. Jewett, having added this new
dimension to Dunnet Landing, leaves me without explanation.
Really, her book consists of a loving description of plants, birds, fish,
sheep, weather, and tides, and--keeping pace with them as the summer passes--a
record of meetings, conversations, and confessions through which I get to know
these people, or at least learn how much there is to know. The truth comes out
in stray moments, as it does in life. Paying visits is an art, of course, so is
offering hospitality, but these are stories of an intense loneliness that is
beyond even looking for consolation.
Joanna, Mrs. Todd's cousin, whose young man threw her over, lived out the
rest of her life alone on tiny Shell-heap Island. "How everybody used to notice
whether there was smoke out of the chimney!" says Mrs. Todd. Was this a wasted
life, or was it heroism? Jewett doesn't offer direct moral judgments. "You must
write to the human heart," she told Willa Cather, "the great consciousness that
all humanity goes to make up."
Many things are left unsaid, by common consent, at Dunnet Landing. When
the time comes for the visitor to leave, Mrs. Todd only utters a few words "in
an unusually loud and business-like voice," but Jewett makes me very well aware
of how she will feel when she is left with the empty bedroom. "So we die before
our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end."
Meantime, "the small, unpunctual steamer" has struck out seaward--and when the
visitor looks back, Dunnet Landing and all its coasts are lost to sight.
