Book Review: To the Far Blue Mountains

Title: To the Far Blue Mountains

Author: Louis L’Amour

Date: 1976

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0-553-02757-3

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “It is a far land to which I’ll go. There be savages there, and forests such as you’ve never seen.”

So says Barnabas Sackett, planning his move to the wild frontier of Virginia. Sackett is the progenitor and prototype of other L’Amour heroes—always brave, usually right—though, unlike most of L’Amour’s novels, his story is a complete biography rather than a tragedy or comedy. A comedy usually ends with a wedding or some sort of small success; a tragedy usually ends with the tragic hero’s ruin, defeat, or untimely death; a fictional biography ends with a summary of what the protagonist left to his or her heirs, usually at the end of a long and admirable life.

So you have some idea how this book ends but, it being Louis L’Amour and any of his fictional Sackett clan, you know there’ll be plenty of adventures along the way. Enjoy.

My enjoyment was marred only slightly by the perennial problem of writing seventeenth-century English for twentieth-century readers. Most authors don’t even try, and most make it a little easier on themselves by telling the stories of seventeenth-century characters in the third person. L’Amour tries to pretend that what he has Barnabas Sackett saying is seventeenth-century English. It’s not, of course. L’Amour might have been able to write seventeenth-century English but, if he’d done it, his audience would have rejected his book. This book is written in twentieth-century English with an occasional seventeenth-century phrase thrown in. (I open the book at random: on page 101, in the first paragraph Sackett says “Show up here looking the way an officer on the poop deck should look, and you’ll keep the job,” and in the third paragraph he says “Aye, but I’ve no wish to displace you.” That low grinding noise I hear is cognitive dissonance. I’m not sure what John Smith or William Bradford would have said, in that context, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been that.) Since the nineteenth century, where most L’Amour novels are set, the English language hasn’t changed much; people spoke differently than they speak now, but mostly in the sense that they had different things to talk about. Since the seventeenth century the basic grammar and vocabulary of English have changed significantly; we can still read Milton, Spenser, or Swift, but we’re constantly aware of how much our common language has changed, and have to wonder whether we’d be able to converse with them. We could converse with Barnabas Sackett—which raises the question whether any of his contemporaries in the real world could have conversed with him.

Louis L’Amour saw himself as a serious historian who read about many places and periods, then wrote the kind of adventure stories his audience bought. In this novel, he was celebrating the United States’ Bicentennial, a very successful marketing theme that some believe helped reunite a nation torn by economic trouble following an inexcusable war. It is possible that visions of TV mini-series, which were starting to call for strong heroines and multiethnic casts, danced in his head as he created Abigail the perfect bride, big tough Lila (recognizably based on some of America’s legendary lovable eccentrics), Thorvald the noble Norseman, Potaka the friendly native American (from a lost tribe), Sakim the Muslim scholar, Kane the loyal Irishman, and the rest of the many likable characters in this book. Yet the prospects for TV mini-series don’t affect the real history. At this period the better organized settlements of European immigrants in North America were tight-knit, gossipy little villages that could fairly call themselves things like “New London” or “New Amsterdam,” where most if not all the Europeans had come from the same place and lived in extended-family intimacy on the long journey across the sea. Most of the history was written in such places. Yet at the same time smaller groups of adventurers were forming, breaking up, and re-forming as people’s adventures had led them; nobody was ordering these people to send regular reports to anybody, and while carrying everything they owned through the forests few of them bothered to carry pens and paper; such groups were often multiethnic, and made up of heroically quirky individuals, not necessarily less heroic than Barnabas Sackett and his little band of friends. If your American genealogy goes back nine or ten generations, or more, your ancestors probably included a few characters like these.

Book Review: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Title: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Author: Eleanor Farjeon

Date: 1921

Publisher: Lippincott

ISBN: none

Length: 305 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Richard Kennedy in 1961 reprint; 1921 edition had none

Quote: “‘I have loved,’ he vowed, ‘as many times as I have tuned lute-strings.’ ‘Then...you have never loved in vain.’ ‘Always, thank God!’ said Martin fervently.”

This novel purports to explain a song and game children used to play in Sussex. It’s a tale of merry old pastoral England. Martin the minstrel takes pity on a spineless fellow nicknamed Robin Rue, who, along with his sweetheart Gillian, has been banished from Gillian’s father’s house. Gillian has been banished to the shed, chaperoned by six of the milkmaids who work on her father's farm, “sworn virgins and man-haters all.” (Martin happens to know that all six have quarrelled with their boyfriends.) Martin sets himself the challenge of telling these girls “new love stories” that will move them to be reconciled with their suitors and let Gillian leave the shed--if that's what she wants to do.

This being a fantasy, seven couples will live happily ever after. In a sequel, Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field, Martin will tell stories to their seven children.

About the stories that have such power to set everything right, I’ll say this. Farjeon was a world-class storyteller. I discovered Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard when I was twelve or thirteen. For some girls that may be a sentimental age; I remember schoolmates crying real tears at the thought of graduating from elementary school. For me it was an antiromantic age. I didn’t like novels that ended with marriages. But I liked Martin Pippin, although I maintain that his best story ever was “Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep,” a romance-free children’s story told in the Daisy Field.

Martin makes up these stories out of what he knows about their intended audience. The first story most obviously addresses Gillian’s situation, in which a couple who really are meant for each other splash through a pond like the one that’s separating Robin from Gillian, but goes on to address the quarrel between the milkmaid Joan and her future husband. Each of the other stories touches on the subject of another quarrel.

The six couples are meant to be comic parodies, and they are. The silliness of their quarrels can be painful. After listening to a story about a couple who are separated for twenty years, Jennifer confesses tearfully that she thinks she’s too old for love: “I will be nineteen in November.” The language they use is deliberately archaic; among other things they all mutually address one another as "Master" and "Mistress," as working-class Renaissance English people apparently did. The whole tradition of pastoral stories is that they're meant to be quaint, idealistic, dreamlike. Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard tells one story in which the human hero identifies with one of his ancestors "who was a king and a god and a smith"; in the Daisy Field some of the stories feature fairies. If Martin and friends, themselves, are a little more realistic than the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the characters in the stories Martin tells aren't.

The whole thing is charming to the point of being twee...I don't mind a wee bit of twee. If you don't, either, you need to know that this is another classic children's book whose Amazon selling prices are being pushed up into collectors' range, although the book sold well and isn't rare, in order for a publisher to make a profit on a reprint edition. Send $10 per book, plus $5 per package and $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address (from the bottom of the screen). Both Martin Pippin books, plus any two of The Little Bookroom, The Glass Slipper, and The Silver Curlew, will fit into one $5 package. Farjeon's other books (she wrote more than a hundred, but several were short picture books) came in a variety of shapes and sizes; how many of them you could substitute for any of those five standard-sized books, in one $5 package, I can't say.

Book Review: The Governor's Daughter

Title: The Governor’s Daughter

Author: Denton Whitson

Date: 1953

Publisher: Bobbs-Mierrill

ISBN: none

Length: 322 pages

Quote: “Not one inch of our blessed free soil must we abandon to French tyranny. This vast new country of ours can prosper only under the Magna Charta—under British laws.”

Before the American Revolution, American “colonials” had fought the French and Indian War, in which they learned the advantages of guerrilla-style fighting. This is the historical background of The Governor’s Daughter, a nice, family-friendly romance about Clytie, a colonial governor’s daughter, and Adam, a young officer in George II’s colonial army.

For a wartime romance it’s a remarkably wholesome story. Clytie, an adventurous young lady, is so resolutely nice that she can defy all her elders’ advice and ramble all through the Atlantic coastal colonies, with Adam and a hired man and nothing remotely resembling a chaperone, without any kind of reprisals. Even when Clytie and Adam are offered one bed for the night, they’re so virtuous they roll up in separate blankets and sleep back to back. Likewise Clytie is just too wholesome to be kidnapped, and Adam is just too wholesome to be killed, in situations in which people were kidnapped or killed in real life. And even when we’re told that soldiers are using foul language in scenes of battle, murder, and sudden death, we see only a couple of words misappropriated from the Bible.

Clytie and Adam know several people who became famous in real life. We get information about the early lives of Benjamin Franklin (Clytie, whose father he advises, is a fan of his) and George Washington (Adam is a fan of his). Not only does Whitson imagine Franklin and Washington in several fictional scenes; he also shows us William Franklin (a less heroic character than his father), and General Edward Braddock as he may well have been—at this time in history: an old man who refuses to learn anything new.

Clytie and Adam are young adults not teenagers, but their story is one to which teenagers can relate. It might interest some readers in the history of the American Colonies.

Whitson leaves me with some further questions about the dialogue. We don’t know how people actually talked in the eighteenth century, except that it probably wasn’t quite the same way they wrote. Variations of accent and dialect were wide. Even rich people didn’t necessarily learn to read; neither spelling nor grammar had been “standardized” by those who did. Whitson doesn’t try to reconstruct a real eighteenth century dialect, but goes beyond the twentieth century rule of letting everyone speak the author’s dialect and throwing in a few archaic words for flavor. His method is a compromise between these two. Some of his archaisms are well documented in historical sources, some are not. Whether fictional eighteenth century characters identify with their period by saying “’tis,” “that be,” “aye,” “ye,” or “lad/lass” need not interfere with a story. Whitson  picks up on occasional tidbits of linguistic history. Eighteenth century English speakers loved titles; “Mistress” was the usual title for any middle-class female, and the late eighteenth century was when the children’s and foreign servants’ forms, “Miss” and “Missis,” began to be used with separate meanings; Whitson lets Benjamin Franklin call attention to this new fad in conversation. I think that’s based on something Franklin wrote, and wish I had his complete collected works to check.

The usual terms apply: to buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment; four books of this size would fit into one $5 package.

Book Review: Lutheran Makers of America

Title: Lutheran Makers of America

Author: Ira Oliver Nothstein

Date: 1930

Publisher: United Lutheran Publication House

ISBN: none

Length: 223 pages plus index and illustrations

Illustrations: many sepia-tone plates on glossy paper

Quote: “It has been an inspiration and a delight to the writer to gather...[Brief Sketches of 68 Notable Early Americans]...and these sketches are sent forth in the hope that they may bring equal inspiration and delight to many others.”

Although the copy I received owes its good condition to having been one of those “dry old reference books” that spend long tranquil lives in church libraries, as a fifty-year-old history buff I did find it a source of inspiration and delight. (It's not about Lutheran beliefs; it's about early immigrants to the United States who happened to belong to Lutheran churches, some of whom are remembered mainly as churchmen, some of whom are not.)

It's meant to be accurate rather than exciting, inclusive rather than detailed. In many cases, what's known about even the most “notable” immigrants into a prehistoric country is raw data. In some cases, even the raw data is confusing. All a biographer can do is gather the data into one place and write, in plain prose, what can be learned from lots of crumbling lists of names and dates and an occasional letter from a mission church back to its parent denomination overseas.

Nevertheless, Nothstein's material is about as inspiring as data can be. Sixty-eight church members went to certain places, did jobs with reasonable success, and became leaders of their communities because others failed not only to do similar jobs but to survive. They got along with their neighbors (in the absence of common languages, or even languages closely related enough to allow accurate translation). They farmed (using hand tools, many of which were hand-made) or practiced medicine (ditto). They taught elementary school or Sunday School classes (with or without even one actual book for the class to share). They were pioneers.

In the mid-twentieth century when I was born, a vigorous marketing campaign was underway to help the U.K. recover from the war and, at the same time, help every child in the U.S. identify with (and buy things imported from) “Mother England.” We spoke English. Many of us had English-sounding names. We read books by British authors, listened to records of British musicians, had boots and overcoats and bicycles and sewing kits made in England if able to afford them; I know Americans for whom the fashion for all things British never passed, who still drive British cars. Because all this was meant to help rebuild bombed-out London, it was, in fairness, much less deplorable than it came to seem to those who had no English ancestors and felt left out.

But even if we had English ancestors...I did. I had more Irish ones, and even if Scotland and England can fairly be lumped together as one United Kingdom, I had other kinds of American and Western European ancestors too. My real-world family name is one of those that have been used by several unrelated families in different European countries; one of the English families that used it was rather affluent, and some of the cousins were disappointed when the actual line of descent was traced back to Germany not England. Later on a relative went to Germany and located our distant cousins there; some of them, also, have black hair and tan easily. (Those basic-human-color genes that Hitler so resented are found all over the world because they tend to be healthy genes; our ancestors had apparently been practicing intertribal marriage, while continuing to breed to type, for several hundred years.) Although one of them was Dad's direct male-line ancestor, there were only three Germans in his pedigree, along with three Cherokees, two Frenchmen, a Scot, and several Irish people; since both of my grandmothers had Irish names the majority of my known ancestors were Irish. So, I grew up amidst celebrations of everything British, lived through periods when it was fashionable to be Irish or Cherokee, and by way of relatives I've been able to participate in celebrations of several other types of ancestry...but Americans tend to associate the word “German” with either the word “Nazi” or the word “beer.” Many people, including many of those who try, cannot celebrate beer.

And yet...thousands of North Americans had German ancestors. Recent waves of interest in the Amish may be an effort to reconnect with this submerged German-ness. In Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania, Germans were a majority. There was serious debate whether, if the American Colonies became a nation, that nation's official language would be English or German.

So what Nothstein offers in this little book is a group portrait of the “mainstream,” non-Amish, non-Mennonite Germans. Nothstein also explains why many of them, as the Amish say, went englisch even to the extent of “translating” their family names. If the Lutheran pioneer families' names were still spelled the German, Swedish, Dutch, or Danish way in 1776, changing to English spelling in 1776 kept the men who used those names from being mistaken for Hessian mercenary deserters and shot. Names like Nichols and Martin needed no change, and names like Schmidt and Braun were likely to have been changed already; names like Smith, Brown, Miller, and Johnson are common in the U.K. but much more common in the U.S. because, in the U.S., they may also be of German origin.

Most of the “noteworthy” individuals are men, although the data suggest that some of the women in their families must have been equally noteworthy. In the one chapter devoted to the courage of two children who preserved their German language and songs after years of “being Indians” (they, too, must have had dark complexions), Nothstein admits some question whether the parents belonged to a Lutheran church. Only one adult woman (Sarah Austin) gets a chapter to herself. (Austin or her sewing club may have been the first to complete a newly designed U.S. flag; Nothstein discusses the difficulty of determining whether Austin beat Betsy Ross's time.) Other women's achievements were documented, and are discussed, as notes on the records of their husbands and fathers.

But they were tough as nails, anyway, and their achievements can be celebrated without beer. Johan Campanius Holm (usually called Campanius) not only learned a Native American language but translated a book into it; a Lutheran Catechism is a book of respectable size. Peter Zenger upheld the ideal of freedom of the press. Jonas Bronck lent his family name to “The Bronx,” and the Muhlenburg family left their names to several places in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. The pleasure of reading about Christopher Ludwig or Ludwick, whom George Washington claimed as a friend, was new to me and I won't spoil it for other readers.

After one reading Lutheran Makers of America will be shelved or donated to a church as a reference work; it's a fine candidate for Project Gutenberg, but do give it that one reading. If you have any German ancestors, you'll feel their DNA inside you going “Ja, ja! Danke schoen!”. Modest though cultural influences made the Lutheran pioneers, they did give North America a traditional celebration (of flowers) for which beer is optional.

Lutheran Makers of America is still relatively affordable, as vintage books go. To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address (directly to P.O. Box 322, or to the Paypal address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi @ yahoo. At least four books of this size will fit comfortably into one package and you can probably squeeze in a few thin paperbacks for the same $5 shipping charge.

Book Review: English Porcelain and Bone China

Title: English Porcelain and Bone China 1743-1850

Author: Bernard and Therle Hughes

Date: 1955

Publisher: Lutterworth

ISBN: none

Length: 248 pages plus index

Illustrations: several black-and-white photographs and sketches

Quote: “Antique porcelain is one of England’s most fascinating but tantalizing treasures...a major delight is the limitless range of [t]his subject.”

Fresh data about old ceramic work is always turning up...and in this book, Therle and Bernard Hughes supply enough detailed data about antique British chinaware for the serious collector.

That’s what you will and won’t love about this book. It explains which of the myriad of brands of porcelain and china on the market have high collection value, and why...with descriptions of the colors each manufacturer used, the techniques, the favored decorative motifs, sometimes the names and biographies of the people who made up each manufacturing company. It's like a guidebook to consult while deciding what to bid on most competitively at an auction.

Since 1955 makers of replicas have had the chance to use this book to make more credible faux antiques, so the Hughes’ work may have become a less reliable guide to separating the replicas from the Real McCoy. (Speaking of which, of course...this book doesn’t discuss U.S. ceramics at all, and never mentions McCoy.) On the other hand, the complexity and expensiveness of antique porcelain production has tended to limit the profitability of fake antiques. Nine out of ten people who buy plates with landscape pictures on them are satisfied with either a friend’s efforts or a mass-produced, frankly plastic piece; for those who want the real thing, a few corners may be cut, but it’s not easy to fake eighteenth-century china without actually making something close to the equivalent of eighteenth-century china.

Current information about what’s selling at what price is, of course, available online. For historical information, still valid, about the antique British trademarks to look for, here’s more than anyone not in the antique business could possibly have asked for about Chelsea, Bow, Longton Hall, Derby, Bristol, Worcester, Caughley, Liverpool, Lowestoft, Nantgarw, Swansea, Madeley, Plymouth, New Hall, Spode, Coalport, Minton, Rockingham, Davenport, and Wedgwood.

You’ll learn why a porcelain owl or pheasant was once an exciting technological breakthrough, which colors could have been used on a china figurine in 1750 and which would only have been available in 1850, which manufacturers always stamped a nice clear label on the bottom of each piece and which ones didn’t, and the precise chemical reasons why some antique china had distinctive tones or textures that might not be found in other antiques from the same year.You’ll learn which brands often identify the work of women artists (sometimes husband-wife or brother-sister teams) and which brand was painted by men who threatened a strike when women artists were hired.

This is the kind of book that belongs under the counter for reference, and would also make ideal bathroom reading, in an antique shop.

Amazon shows limited availability of relatively cheap paperback copies and collectors' prices on hardcover copies...and what I have is a hardcover copy. What you'll get, if you send this web site $5 per book + $5 per package (you could fit four books of this size into a package) + $1 per online payment, will be a paperback copy. If you're opening an antique shop or selling a relative's collection, that could be a great investment.