Procrustes' Bed

Henry James, despite the complexities and complications and prolixity of his late style and his late fiction, greatly admired "strong brevity and lucidity," the "ideal of economy." What James says in the epigraph for this issue about the "concise anecdote" not only applies to fiction but to the essay in reminiscence and reflection. The stories presented in this issue all possess the virtues of the "compactness of anecdote" that James praises for its marvelous brevity "like the hard, shining sonnet," "one of the most indestructible forms of composition in general use." James goes on to explain in this preface that his procedure in developing "his little situation" is "to follow it as much as possible from its outer edge in, rather than from its centre outward." There it is in a nutshell, a strategy that yields not only the stories shaped by Ronald Frame, Nancy Packer, Ron Rash, Barry Targan, and Andrew Wright, but the essays forged by Merrill Joan Gerber, Eugene Goodheart, Robert Lacy, Mairi MacInnes, John McCormick, Ed Minus, Earl Rovit, and Wilfred Stone. I will not recite the virtues in economy and in other matters that are achieved by each author. I will instead generalize about the stories to the extent that all embody "that most difficult of all things for the novelist to render, the duration of time, the drag and friction of its passage," which James celebrates. And I will invoke the James of The American Scene to applaud the accomplishment of the various essayists in the "excursions into memory" through the agency of "the pursuing imagination" that renders "the finer texture of life."

The authors that I am fitting to Procrustes' bed in this issue—William Kloefkorn, Robert Klose, Noel Perrin, and Baron Wormser—have many virtues, one of which is that each of them is not only readable but rereadable. Being rereadable is a rare virtue that few authors achieve. The discerning reader, who does not have world enough and time, is always thinking of the great books that beckon, the books that may lie unread in the library at hand. How many of us own dozens of such books?

Noel Perrin, who wrote many books, was accommodating enough in his salad days to give me a brilliant piece on Joseph Mitchell that is one of the most durable essays to have been published on that durable author—"Paragon of Reporters" (SR, spring 1983). Among Perrin's many other literary interests was Henry James; and, in one of his wittiest and most engaging essays (in the Perrin Sampler), he recalls his plan (in a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis) to determine "whether James in his last years was an old master or an old impostor." Now Perrin's publisher, David Godine, has published Best Person Rural, Perrin's selected essays on rural life in Vermont (edited by Terry Osborne)—a gathering harvested from his four books written on the subject. And there are uncollected essays—"A House, A Horse, A Hill, and a Husband"; "Break and Enter"; "Life on Nothing a Week"; and "Farewell to Thetford Farm"—that are among the best in this superb collection. The last essay—and the book—ends with these words: "As I move into exile—and that is how I see leaving the farm, the maple trees, the cattle, the wild turkeys—I am very clear that assisted living comes at a price." The price, of course, was high and final as the author died of a debilitating affliction in 2004. Ned Perrin, we salute you as your essays pass in review.

Among Perrin's most amusing literary pieces is "Answers to...