Park Street Papers!

Our book today is Park-Street Papers, a charming 1908 volume made by Bliss Perry, the sweetest-natured man ever to run the venerable Atlantic Monthly (with all  due apologies to the shade of the almost equally venerable Edward Weeks, who ran a wonderful shop for a long time but who would have readily admitted that he could have fuzzy days just like plain folks). Perry helmed the magazine from 1899 to 1909 and was its genial “Toastmaster,” writing signed and unsigned commentary and patter for every issue, dealing with the endless stream of authors who visited Number 4 Park Street, trying to keep the budget from flying apart at the seams, and maintaining throughout it all the disposition of a saint, often stealing quiet moments to sit and look out The Atlantic’s big bow windows at the city beyond:

They look down upon the mild activities of Park Street, to the left upon the black lines of people streaming in and out of the Subway, in front toward the Common with its fountain that never flows and its Frog Pond gleaming through the elms, and to the right toward the monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Is all this fairly typical of American life – its work and play, its resourcefulness and its carelessness, its tolerant respect for the past, its posthumous honors gladly paid to leaders of forlorn hopes? Or is it merely a view of Boston, something local, provincial; and our outlook from Park Street windows, instead of summarizing and symbolizing the American, the human spectacle, is it only “Frogpondinium” – as scoffers have dubbed it – after all?

He himself was never in any real doubt as to the answer to that question, and the excerpt – from early on in Park-Street Papers, shows both how friendly his prose always was and how easy it was. He was fond  – over-fond, perhaps – of those big, simple writing conceits that smarter authors tend to avoid: organizing a piece around the things he can see from his desk, organizing a piece around the view out his windows, organizing a piece as though it were a banquet – that sort of thing came ready-made to his hand.

Most of the pieces collected in Park-Street Papers began life as “Atlantic Prologues” in the magazine itself. There are grinning tributes to the magazine, as well as several examples of Perry’s strongest suit as a writer: long, loving profiles of authors. He writes with insight and affection about such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and he’s at his best – in fact it’s the best thing in this book – when writing about Francis Underwood, “The Editor Who Was Never An Editor,” a quiet, unassuming man who was present at the legendary 1857 dinner party at which The Atlantic was created (these things seem always to happen over food) and who remained something of a presiding spirit there for many years.

Perry was just such a presiding spirit himself, and although he only served for a decade, he did more than anybody else to set The Atlantic’s attitude, that curious mixture of serenity and agitation that has always characterized it at its best. His secret? Avoid the pointlessness of slavish imitation in search of a larger audience:

The Atlantic has many competitors. The more the better. Each of them fulfills some public service peculiar to itself – even if it be only to serve as an “awful example.” Each of them reaches many persons whom the Atlantic cannot reach without changing its character and aim. The colored illustrations of one, the unimpeachable innocuousness of another, the agility of a third in jumping to the majority side of every question, do not arouse the Atlantic’s envy.

Park-Street Papers brims with just that kind of quiet confidence, in the faith that good writing will always find good readers. Ironically, that faith isn’t borne out by Perry’s own writing (who reads Whittier anymore? Or Aldrich? Or Perry himself, for all that?), but it doesn’t matter: the faith itself is the important thing. And if you’re lucky enough to come across this merry, optimistic volume on the bargain carts of my beloved Brattle Bookshop (or, you know, the electronic equivalents), don’t hesitate to spend the $3 – it’s a glimpse into a publishing, writing, and editing world that no longer exists and whose like may not come again. Here lives again a list of authors whose names were once on the lips of every conscientious reader, and here also lives again a Boston of a cruder, gentler, slower time – also now gone, except for some of that remaining exquisitely reserved Yankee architecture.