dual personalities

I finished The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner on MLK Day. I think I had tried to read this book several years ago, but had put it aside. Not in the mood. When I opened it up a few days ago, however, it immediately grabbed me and held my interest. Isn’t that funny how that works? I am that much older, I guess, and receptive, therefore, to this wonderful book about a retired literary agent who starts reading his journals from a trip he took with his wife to seek his roots in Denmark twenty years earlier. Although a spring chicken myself in my fifties, I have a lot of friends who are in their seventies and eighties, and what Stegner writes struck me as very true.

“What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll?”

Anyway, I liked it a lot and highly recommend it. Some of the things his hero gripes about back in 1973 seem like nothing to what we put up with now. They are the same things, of course. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1977. It always surprises me when a book I like actually receives an award.

Wallace Stegner, you will recall, was an American novelist, short story writer and environmentalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose in 1972. He was an Eagle Scout.

I also recently read Cider With Rosie by the English poet Laurie Lee published in 1959. I read about it in The Outermost Dream, a collection of essays by William Maxwell, the wonderful New Yorker editor who also wrote some good fiction and had impeccable taste. Laurie Lee was unknown to me, but my dual personality tells me that he is quite well known in Britain and that his aforementioned memoir is dearly loved there.

Well, who knew? Thanks to William Maxwell, I found out. Laurence Edward Alan “Laurie” Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. And, by the way, his memoir of a bygone way of life really is wonderful.

What are you reading?

P.S. The paperwhite bulbs my brother sent for Christmas are growing–not blooming yet–but soon!