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It startles me to recognize that there is a strain of hemispheric consciousness in New England's literary life. Unlike California, or Florida, here this interest isn't driven by the presence of a large population of Hispanics (although there are pockets of Azoreans, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Haitians, Jamaicans and diverse Latin Americans throughout the region). Or at least it hasn't in the past. It would seem strange that there is anyone with a compelling fascination let alone a number of such artists and writers. But perhaps this is the nature of a literary tradition, or a general valuing of the mind urging one to look beyond borders.
I have already made note of Susan Meiselas' ties with New England. Jennifer Harbury lives in Etna, NH. Russell Banks has set several of his books in the Caribbean. For a New Englander one of the great pleasures in reading Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is to discover his occasional comparisons with scenes in Amherst or marvel, as he does, that his journey began on a commuter train in Boston's South Station. But this small group of the Latin American minded could be coincidental?
If it is it's a coincidence that has repeated itself many times and extends back to the founding of this nation. In the 19th century it was the whaling industry that generated much of this interest in the rest of the hemisphere and accounted for Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket just as surely as it did Charles Barnard's narrative or Herman Melville's "The Encantatas."
You can follow this same Latin American thread among artists. In the 19th century Frederick Edwin Church painted dark, brooding, mystical images of Jamaica's Blue Mountain as well as brilliant landscapes of the Peruvian Andes. Have you ever seen Winslow Homer's Bahamian watercolors? Or those green mountains of Tierra del Fuego painted by Rockwell Kent? Who but Kent could have seen that frozen lime luminescence?
This southern gaze goes deeper than mere setting or an awed appreciation of the landscape. What could explain that abiding interest in the Latin American writers evidenced by the reviews of William Kennedy? But this too is not new. In the burst of attention that was focused on Latin American literature during the 1960's and 1970'si one of the earliest anthologies was assembled by the Vermont poet, Barbara Howes (1915-1996). The Eye of the Heart: Short Stories From Latin America (1973) brought together work from the whole pantheon of the Boom writers. Nor had she overlooked the Caribbean authors. She had already brought together the anthology, From the Green Antilles: Writings of the Caribbean (1966).
At long last I have found a copy of this latter work and am glad of it. I expected to find the selections discerning (and I did). What I didn't anticipate was an account of the under girding of her research for this volume. There's no corresponding explanation in The Eye of the Heart. But here in her introduction to From the Green Antilles she lays out many of the same matters that I have. You can read that essay as a more controlled forerunner of this project you are now reading.
In the opening paragraph she goes right to the heart of a broad poetic overview of the Caribbean mind, its island psychology shaped by life in close communities; bounded, shared, and known; and alternately confined and restrictive. The economic history of the plantation system, the microcosm of European political history, and slavery, also figure in her thoughts about the writing of this region. She too sees World War II as the turning point in the history of West Indian literature, the origins of a literary explosion. Although Howes is presenting a contemporary sample of Caribbean writers, she is simultaneously outlining a sociological understanding of the literary outlets that fostered these authors. In 1966 she can write that there were no publishing houses save in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Yet there were small literary journals that had sprung up like weeds. The most important of these was Bim, published in Barbados. For many of these Caribbean authors she can point out a pattern of migration back to the mother country, whether it is Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam or London. If this isn't physically true for an individual writer, it certainly is when tracking his or her publications.
There were 39 contemporary authors represented in this anthology. For most of them it was the first time they had been published in the United States. For those writing in languages other than English, many of these stories are their first translations. Her selections are divided into four parts, determined by the languages in which these writers were working. (Other than a tiny group of translations printed in The Caribbean Writer, the five Dutch-American authors that Howes has included here represent the only such work I have seen.) Before each section she has written a brief commentary, each one as perceptive as the introduction. Of the English-speaking Caribbean expatriates in London she writes that the founding of the BBC's 'West Indian Hour' in 1942 was a milestone in the creation of their audience. Of the writers of the Hispanic islands she ruminates upon the political and social effects of U.S. consumer products. When describing the areas colonized by the Dutch she is ultimately thrown back upon the resources of their languages. These are penetrating insights into the relationships between writers, their thinking, and their audiences, ideas that just seem to blossom in Howes.
It was a breathtaking pair of anthologies that she put together. I don't think there's been anything as original, as forward looking, or as suggestive since.ii
New England's academic institutions have been a powerful international draw for at least a century. Many of the Caribbean and Latin American writers have been educated here. Brown University's writing program graduated both Edwidge Danticat and Patricia Powell. Vanessa Spence--to my mind the most gifted of this youngest generation--graduated from Yale. The number of Latin American writers and artists that have found jobs teaching in New England is significant. Ilan Stavans at Amherst and Julia Alvarez at Middleburyiiiare but two contemporary examples. Many more have come for short periods as visiting authors or artists in residence, as was true for both Carlos Fuentes and José Clemente Orozco at Dartmouth. Or is now true of Earl Lovelace.
In the academic outlets (like Ediciones del Norte in Hanover or The Massachusetts Review) and the small independent houses (like Steerforth, Common Courage, or Curbstone) New England has published a small but steady stream of work by or about the Americas.
For at least one Caribbean author, Jamaica Kincaid, New England holds no strings other than a better life.
Who would think of New England as a crossroads of the Americas? But in the artistic and the literary record there is a more than an occasional truth to this proposition. So maybe it isn't altogether unexpected that I should have found a Maine writer probing the aftermath of the coup against Chile's President Allende.
I believe that Luisa Domic (1985) was the last book of George Dennison's published during his lifetime. At a glance his would seem to have been an odd career. His most popular work, The Lives of Children, was a nonfiction study of alternative schooling. The rest of his work included a short-story collection, Oilers and Sweepers, a short novel, Shawno, and this novel. Since his death in 1987 there has been a posthumous publication, Temple.
In this century much of Maine writing has been the work of refugees from New York or other urban areas of the east coast, people who moved to take up the good life in a still uncontaminated world. Native Maine writers are the exception rather than the rule. Dennison joined a long, long list of metropolitan malcontents. As a year-round resident I think he ran into many of the setbacks you might expect: highly educated, he missed the cultured conversations he had enjoyed in New York. Unable to make easy friendships among wary natives, he idolized and disdained them in equal measures. The woods, the change of the seasons, all of nature became the great compensation.
Out of this psychological space Dennison fashioned what appears to be a partially autobiographical story. It takes place over the course of two or three days and highlights the arrival of some guests at the author's home. One of these acquaintances is a homosexual composer who has given up his concert career to provide innovative programs of music therapy to retarded children. Another old friend, a political activist, drops in while traveling north to Canada. He is accompanying a woman (Luisa Domic) who has just fled the Chilean coup. This conjunction of friends, art, and politics moves in infinitely minute steps, keeping time with the slow pace of the fall weather, sharing the innocence of the author's three children. But innocence proves to be as complex as guilt.
-November 27, 1998
Endnotes
i Here I am making reference to "the Boom" in Latin American literature, a label that was widely circulated at the time. Ever since then the title has been frequently amended as "the so-called Boom," particularly by people who are associated with this literature. The qualified version is, I think, meant to carry a derisive connotation, as if to say Latin American literature still hasn't received its due.
ii See her obituary for a brief biography and some further comments from Jorge Luis Borges about The Eye of the Heart: Eric Pace, "Barbara Howes, Poet and Editor, Dies at 81," New York Times, February 25, 1996.
iii Julia Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic. She just published a collection of essays titled Something to Declare. Many of the selections offer a highly readable description of her odyssey through American academia, as well as the uneasy process of settling into rural Vermont life.
