About Boston!

Our book today is David McCord’s charming 1948 volume About Boston, a warmly affectionate look at Boston written by a Harvard graduate and long-time professional Harvard booster (and fundraiser! Good Grief, the man could get a donation-check out of a potted geranium) McCord, who was most famous in his own day as a charming poet, although he’s entirely forgotten nowadays. I’ve read all the man’s works many times, but it’s About Boston that calls me back most reliably, so I was extra-pleased recently to find a nice hardcover (at the Brattle Bookshop, of course) that will hold up better to re-readings than the old green paperback that’s been slowly decomposing in my collection for many, many years.

It’s almost inevitable but nonetheless sad to say that the Boston painted in McCord’s book has in large part vanished. Entire enormous construction projects have been planned, undertaken, finished, hated, superseded, and demolished in the interval, and dozens of century-old traditions have gone by the wayside. So what McCord intended as a kind of quasi-guidebook (and which sold very well in that role from bookstores all over Boston) has now become a historical curiosity on it own – and he must have sensed the possibility, because often in his pages he harkens to eternal things … like, for example, the weather:

As we look at Boston and Bostonians, we should at this point look at Boston weather. It is impossible to overlook it. In the Aleutians weather is a menace, in Los Angeles a monotony, in England a mistake; but in Boston it is simply a problem. Old Bostonians never mention it; but not so the stranger. He speaks of it in comparative terms. It is wetter than Kansas, drier than Washington, colder than Virginia, hotter than Minnesota, clearer than the Labrador, foggier than New Mexico, and stranger than all get out.

But McCord slips most naturally into his own memories and taste for anecdotes, and that usually ends him up talking about long-vanished things and people, like his wonderful pen-portrait of Henry Taylor Parker, the long-time theater critic for the dear old Boston Transcript, who lived in book-filled rooms in the Hotel Vendome and pronounced so regularly and infallibly on every show coming through town that many thousands of Bostonians agreed with the old pundit who said (of a different theater critic) that reading him was infinitely preferable to taking in the show in question. McCord gives us a wonderful look at Parker in his prime:

He was assumed in London to be a Frenchman, in Paris a German, and in Berlin an Englishman. But people crossed the street to him, as a native, for directions and advice. He used to say that once at Cambridge, England, he was mistaken for an Oxford don. He was, perhaps, the most colorful figure in the ample history of Boston arts and letters. And how vigorously did he live up to his creed: “I’d much rather write than talk.”

But McCord always tries to return to eternal things in order to ground his book – or things he, being a good Bostonian, believes must be eternal:

Crossing Boston Common in the new warmth of an April day, the world seems suddenly as innocent as the blue-gray flocks of pigeons in our path, and as gentle as the light breeze ruffling the newspaper of that old man asleep on a bench. Innocent, gentle, and warm: and the mind gone hunting on the breeze.

The new warmth of April days has fled for the time being in Boston; just very recently, in fact, a weak and temporary approximation of chilly autumn weather has visited the city, and walkers across the Common first thing tomorrow might need to turn up their collars. This, too, will change: the city’s eternal warmth will return mid-week, and reading About Boston couldn’t help but make me wonder what McCord would have thought about shirt-sleeve weather in November – who knows how much more of his book will seem outdated, in another fifty years.