The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains

Introduction

Introduction Julia Spicher Kasdorf Fred Lewis Pattee had never traveled west of New York City when he set out to interview for his first college teaching job in the spring of 1894. As the train snaked along a single track through the isolated valleys and rocky mountainsides of Central Pennsylvania, he glimpsed “a new world, arousing all that was romantic” in him, as he would recall many years later when writing his memoirs. The landscape that inspired the thirty-year-old New Englander on that first visit to the region became the“indescribably lonely and wild” setting of the novel you now hold in your hand. Today scholars remember Pattee for his early and important contributions to the study of American literature as advocate, historian, and critic. But in light of recent enthusiasms for“the local,”The House of the Black Ring, long out of print, deserves a fresh look.What personal and literary concerns led the transplanted Penn State professor to write it? How was it received when it first appeared more than one hundred years ago? And perhaps most important, why read the book now? The House of the Black Ring What Pattee called “romantic” in that view outside his train window has a particular literary meaning that may be useful in understanding this book.“Novels” in Pattee’s day were commonly understood to be imaginative stories set in the real world, but“romances” were more fantastic works of fiction set in remote or exotic places with characters engaged in heroic dramas, passionate loves, or supernatural encounters —or, as in the case of this book, all of the above! Whereas The House of the Black Ring follows many of the plot conventions of a mid-nineteenth-century romance, its setting and characterization belong to a later genre: local color. Those works were not usually driven by dramatic plots; instead they sought to depict realistically the place and everyday life, humor, and language of remote introduction { viii } areas where people still lived close to the land. Nostalgia for simpler times sometimes inflected local color writing. The books were largely judged in terms of authenticity and for their ability to represent distinct identities and places accurately. The best examples of the genre celebrated the nation’s multicultural and geographical diversity; the worst exploited their rustic subjects and exposed them to ridicule. In one of his literary histories, Pattee identified the decades between 1880 and 1920 with regional writing. The House of the Black Ring, published in 1905, is one such work. Among local color authors, Pattee especially admired Sarah Orne Jewett, who is remembered for her vivid sketches of life along the border between New Hampshire and Maine. Pattee mentions Jewett in his memoir, relating her concern for the “invasion” of summer boarders from the cities to his own childhood memories of encounters with urban vacationers in the White Mountains. He quotes her on her motivation for writing her first novel, Deephaven: “I determined to teach the world that country people are not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wanted the world to know their grand simple lives; and so far as I had a mission, when I first began to write, I think that was it.” One of the“country people” himself, Fred Lewis Pattee was a writer and scholar whose career was shaped by his rural roots and modest means. He was born on March 22, 1863, the son of Lewis Franklin Pattee and Mary Philbrick Ingalls, on a small farm on Pattee Hill, adjacent to his grandfather’s property, in Alexandria, New Hampshire. He attended public schools in Bristol and South Alexandria. At sixteen , he went to work as a laborer on a nearby lawyer’s estate and there discovered the squire’s library. Like many American authors before him—Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman—Pattee’s literary interests led him to work as an apprentice in a print shop. He dreamed of gaining more education and becoming a journalist, a vocation more broadly concerned with literary pursuits in those days than now. Toward that end, he enrolled in preparatory courses in classical languages and literature and worked as a printer and waiter at resorts on the coast to raise funds for his college education. In 1888 Pattee graduated from Dartmouth College with some debt. One year later, he married Anna Lura Plumer, a neighbor and childhood friend who had studied art in Boston and then worked as a schoolteacher. Financial constraints...