Six for Snow-Struck Boston!

Boston in the epic winter of 2015-16

The sun was shining yesterday in Boston, which was so strange after the last 90 days that I looked at the city, seeing it with the fresh realization that Boston has managed to survive a genuine battering of storms and cold and storms and cold. It wasn’t an easy survival, of course, and it was deeply embarrassing on top of everything else, since vital parts of the city’s superstructure collapsed virtually overnight when the storm-onslaught started and then limped and whined along day after day, week after week while the actual working people of Boston did what they always do: dug out, kept on, made mordant jokes. Walking around the city in the sunlight, I saw the now-familiar mountainous snowbanks and single-file switchback foot-paths where sidewalks used to be, but for the first time in over a month, it felt like a siege had been lifted. So naturally, when I got back home to my books, I pulled together a little pile of Boston titles, six gems I want to recommend about this place I love so much:

Boston Observed – I automatically started with this profusely-illustrated (and slightly oversized) 1971 volume by Carl Seaburg, a first-rate archive-sifter and a gentle divine of that most pleasantly baffling of all denominations, the Unitarian Universalists (as far as I’ve ever been able to determine, they worship the Sacred Cod of the State House, which is fine by me), who kicks off his lively tour of Boston’s history in true Bostonian fashion, by complaining about the weather. Once he’s run through rain, heat, humidity, and yes, snow, he gets all churchy in order to make some observations about the vanity of human works, or some such:

So here we stand, secure we think, on our asphalt-paved Boston, surrounded by our brick or concrete or glass and steel walls, breathing our air-conditioned air in our fluorescent-lighted buildings. We look at our captive trees and flower in their permitted parks – ah Nature! Yet under our feet, about our proud artificial town, above our heads in the polluted skies, the natural process continues. We can only record it. It doesn’t stop because we have hidden ourselves from it. The changes of the natural order proceed on their courses. The winds tear the land. The waves eat the shore. Silt eddies, sinks, settles, stratifies. Rocks weather; the eternal hills flow. Rains beat down; the ice cometh. Deep beneath our feet, rocks boil, strata shift, secret springs infiltrate, chemicals act out their lawful obligations upon each other.

Hidden Gardens of Beacon Hill – if we move from the what of worship to the where, we can’t do better than this little 1972 pamphlet (since much enlarged, of course) put out by the Beacon Hill Garden Club and rather paradoxically seeking to celebrate something most people in the Club would simultaneously prefer to conceal: that Beacon Hill is warrened with gorgeous hidden nooks and crannies of well-tended green. I’ve sat in many of the gardens featured in these pages (and I’ve spent a good deal of time in two extremely gorgeous little spaces whose owners blanched white at the very idea of being mentioned in such a public thing), so whenever I flip through this book I smile at the combination of cloistered and boasting that fills its pages right from the beginning:

The gardens in this book cannot, in general, be glimpsed from the street or even guessed at, tucked away as they are behind the weathered brick facades of Beacon Hill. These little city gardens have as their main feature the immensely personal quality of a garden that is really an outdoor extension of the house. Like the tiny inner patio gardens of the Mediterranean countries, they are created not for public show but for the retreat and refreshment of the family.

Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston – Naturally, thinking about these last 90 days brought tangentially to mind other hardships Boston’s faced in its long history, and the books about those hardships. One of the best of those books is this slim 1974 volume by the wonderful Ola Elizabeth Winslow, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Jonathan Edwards and here writes about the horrific 1721 smallpox epidemic that swept through the city and transformed it, however temporarily, into a plague zone straight out of the Middle Ages:

Boston’s doctors had no rest day or night. With hundreds sick there were always calls that could not be answered. Selectmen were as busy as the doctors, week by week making themselves available day or night. The General Court was prorogued three times during this period. Their alternate meetingplace in early summer had been Cambridge, which was now also under siege. Selectmen’s orders give hints of problems that arose. In late July complaints against the continual ringing of funeral bells had led to an order that one bell might be tolled at a time and that only at designated hours. A forty-shilling fine was imposed for disobedience to this order, but very soon it had to be rescinded. Boston’s accustomed funeral pattern made obedience too painful to endure, and the bells rang again.

The Illustrated Handbook of the Museum of Fine Arts – If I needed a smile after the excellent but grim tidings of Winslow’s book, I could always turn to this 1976 volume produced by the MFA, in which some design mavin gave free rein to drollery by covering a handbook – front and back – with all the hands on display in the museum’s permanent collections. This was one of the last museum, um, handbooks that was made in black-and-white, but it’s so full of sharp prose and fine photography that it’s always a pleasure to take it in hand.

The Bostonians – Every bit as pleasant, I’m often surprised to realize, is this great 1886 novel Henry James, especially in this 2003 Modern Library paperback with its shrewd Introduction by A. S. Byatt, who understands the charms of the book perfectly and sums up a key difference in its conception just brilliantly:

The writing of The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James. It also has a layered subtlety that might be lost on modern readers. If we compare it with The Princess Casamassima, written immediately after it, about anarchism and the class structure in London and Europe, we can see that the fact that James knew neither the English working class nor socialist and anarchist theory in Europe led him to write something like a pastiche of Dickensian melodrama (and the French melodrama of Sue and Dumas pere, also). He works up his Londoners from literary and external sources. His improbable New Englanders are real.

Boston in the Age of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – And speaking of improbable, real New Englanders: in any short list like this one, I always feel disposed to give pride of place to this luminous little 1966 volume by Walter Muir Whitehill, then the legendary director of the Boston Athenaeum and here putting Boston squarely in the middle of the “Centers of Civilization” series. True to form, Walter spends virtually no time in his book on its nominal subject, Boston in the “age” of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a singularly unedifying and slightly tinny time for the city and one our author dispenses with in fairly short order so that he can spend the bulk of his book talking about much older history and civic folklore. Unlike the other volumes in this wonderful, forgotten series, Boston in the Age of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is a strongly personal work; even when Walter is delving into the history of some part of this city he loved so much – like, say, the Gardner Museum he adored – he can’t extricate himself from his subject and doesn’t really even try:

After Mrs. Gardner’s death on July 27, 1924, Fenway Court was opened, as her will directed, “as a Museum for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” The provision that forbade rearrangement, substitutions, additions, or changes in the collection seemed at the time unduly restrictive, but after forty years I am glad that she made it. Every other museum that I know has changed beyond recognition, in these four decades, some of them for the worse. The finest pictures in Fenway Court would be worth seeing even if hung at eye level, flanked by aspidistras, on characterless walls lighted by fluorescent tubes screened by egg crates, with purple, green, and yellow chairs of eccentric shape for the convenience of visitors. But I like them better as they are, and because their arrangement remains unchanged, Fenway Court is not only a remarkable collection of pictures but an equally remarkable document in the history of taste at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And because Mrs. Gardner left ample endowments for its maintenance, there is an abundance of music and flowers.

It was a pleasure to revisit these Boston volumes, especially while allowing myself to dream of Spring at last. And that one weather forecasting model predicting mid-March snowstorms for New England? I’m trying not to think about that.