The Headstone Carvers of Barre, Vermont
Also: Revisiting Pamela Bright’s 1955 novel “Life in Our Hands,” Emily Dickinson’s subjunctives, Kevin Hart’s riveting memoir, and more.
Harper’s has been firing on all cylinders recently. A few weeks ago, I noted Alan Jacob’s essay on the humanism of Northrop Frye, and just last week I linked to Rosanna Warren’s memoir of a summer in northern France with her father, Robert Penn Warren, and her mother, Eleanor Clark. (If you haven’t read Warren’s piece yet, let me encourage you again to give it a try. It’s a perfect essay for the summer.)
Now, let me draw your attention to Ellyn Gaydos’s piece on the granite mines—and the headstone carvers—of Barre, Vermont:
At first, granite was evident in Barre in small scrapes where receding glaciers had exposed rock formations in the mountains. Early residents pried it out with wedges to make millstones. Following the arrival of the railroad and steam drills after 1875, the population of the small agricultural community more than tripled in ten years, the city teeming with an influx of men arriving from quarrying towns in Scotland, Italy, Canada, and later Spain to remove veins of granite that stretch miles deep. By the early twentieth century, Barre was Vermont’s most diverse city, 90 percent of its workforce was unionized, and anarchists attempted to assassinate the police chief. The work was dangerous, hard, and seasonal. Before the required installation of suction devices in 1936, the dusty granite sheds often sent their workers to early graves. Gradually, the city became known as the granite capital of the world.
The annual solstice party seemed somehow sacrilegious in light of Millstone Hill’s history as a worksite, where men had scrambled up and down ladders, their bodies sometimes maimed and made smaller under the weight of falling rock. “It was like burying yourself in a stone grave,” one quarryman’s widow recounted to a Works Progress Administration interviewer, “and hardly knowing there was a world and sun around you.” The cemeteries in Barre are full of headstones memorializing the workers who harvested them, complete with a mixture of religious iconography and more worldly carvings: pietàs and race cars, lovers appearing in clouds of cigarette smoke, cats and motorcycles, even stones that show their own sculptor at work, chisel held up to the staid surface of his grave. Now there are only about a dozen carvers left in the city who fashion monuments like these.
As the bagpipe escorts fell away from the path, other musicians appeared farther down—a flutist, a harpist. Deeper in the woods, a DJ spun beats with wildlife sounds next to a grout pile two stories high. I watched a couple dance after just meeting, then walk to the ledge above the quarry, its tall rocky sides reflected in the water below, looking as though they were about to kiss. Some people on the walk seemed drunk, others transfixed by the glowing lights and white-barked birch trees. The candlelit path dead-ended at an inscribed bust of Hephaestus that read god of blacksmiths, metalworkers, masonry, sculptors, volcanos and fire. Moths flitted with desperate abandon from the luminaries surrounding the gray god to the lit batons belonging to a pair of fire jugglers. As the procession exited the quarry, a woman became sick in the grass.
To get to Heather Milne Ritchie’s studio, I drove past a stretch of aged sheds, pulling over just before the road crept up toward the quarries. In Barre—pronounced “berry,” as in its nickname, “Scary Barre”—an entire industry remains preserved.
Do read the whole thing.
In other news, Brad Bigelow revisits Pamela Bright’s 1955 novel Life in Our Hands in Slightly Foxed:
‘Where am I?’ a soldier asks Pamela Bright in the first line of Life in Our Hands (1955). ‘In a field hospital,’ she replies, and moves on down the line of beds to the next patient. And that is all we know for the first ten pages of this book. It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’, and her ward is filled with wounded men. Some can be saved. Some, like Tom Malone, his liver ripped in two, cannot. He mumbles the Lord’s Prayer, cries out for his mother. Bright administers morphine, holds his hand, feels shame at the futility of her care.
Opening a story in media res like this is an unusual approach for a war memoir, but then Life in Our Hands is an unusual book. Although critically acclaimed when it was first published, it was soon forgotten and I only learned of it through a passing reference in The Inner Circle, her sister Joan Bright Astley’s entertaining recollections of her time as a personal assistant to Churchill’s War Cabinet. Joan Astley writes that she had shown Peter Fleming a novel Pamela had written. Fleming dismissed it as ‘not good enough’, but Joan adds that ‘after the war she wrote, and had published, four good books based on her nursing experiences’. To an inveterate stalker of neglected books, this was enough to set me on the chase that led to Life in Our Hands.
John Wilson reviews Kevin Hart’s memoir Dark-Land: “Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I’ve ever read — literary or otherwise — Dark-Land is among the very best. The currency of praise is debased these days. I loathe the endless hype that has taken over so much writing about books, as if that were the only way to get readers’ attention. But not to acknowledge a genuinely astonishing achievement, out of a fastidious fear of being mistaken for one of the shameless boosters, would be a crime . . . Hart was born in 1954, the second child of an ill-matched couple who nevertheless stuck together and did their best. His only sibling — a sister, Pauline — was nearly 10 years older. Like you, I suspect, I have read a fair number of accounts of everyday life in working-class London during this period of grimy austerity. Hart’s is the least cliched I have ever encountered, at once appalling and funny, rich in visceral detail; the same can be said of his memories of family life and (grotesque) early schooling. But what makes the book most unusual is Hart’s account of his inner life.”
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