Category: writing

No writer works alone in Boston. The city’s literary heritage nests on windowsills, hovers above keyboards, and is breathed in with the sturdy New England air. And its effect on its writers can be felt in every aspect of their work.

There is the physical setting. “I’ve been walking through the city since 1956,” Davison says, “writing in notebooks wherever I went. There is a sense of Boston being all around you.” In his “Poem in the Park,” you recognize the walk “through the bricky streets” to the Public Garden, and “… the sky of the public park,/its gates ajar, its paths cast wide in welcome…” In another, a diner at the Ritz contemplates the swordless statue of George Washington. His ever-shifting walk to his North End office inspired, “Walking Through the Big Dig.”

And the layer of tradition. Davison can point out where the city’s publishing houses were once grouped around the Common. He can tell the stories of how Julia Ward Howe had her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” first published in The Atlantic in 1862–they paid her about eight dollars–and that Samuel Eliot Morison always turned in his stories a little ahead of deadline.

But the city’s most profou “nd influence on writers is undoubtedly its rich history as home to legendary writers and the lessons they handed down. The city’s size made it more likely that young writers who wanted to learn those lessons could. Davison, for example, recalls walking down a Beacon Hill street and having a lively argument with the poet Robert Lowell about Macbeth.

“Lowell was such an extraordinary figure,” says Davison, “and his “For the Union Dead” is one of the great city poems.”

Lowell was also an influential teacher and creator of a poetry community that drew writers and held them here. Lloyd Schwartz, the author of three books of poetry including Cairo Traffic, and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning music critic, became part of that community.

Schwartz expected to return to to his native New York when he finished his graduate work at Harvard in the late 1960s. That didn’t happen. What did were things he feels could never have happened anywhere else.

Schwartz’s “Cambridge was the Cambridge of the poets,” as Peter Davison wrote, about a different poet in a different Cambridge. It was a time when Lowell held his famous “office hours,” where anyone could drop in to talk about poetry. Those who did included soon-to-be-major poets like Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Gail Mazur, Jonathan Galassi, and Richard Tillinghast. Jean Valentine Íor Elizabeth Bishop might stop by if they were in town.

“There was an attitude toward poetry that was really thrilling,” says Schwartz. “It had to do with everything I loved about poetry–with intellectual and emotional ambition. It was not just spinning words and inventing images, as beautiful as that can be. There was a sense that poetry was an important thing to be taken seriously. There were possibilities and we were helping each other realize them.”

Schwartz remembers when his first poem was accepted for publication. “It was a dramatic monologue, probably not the type of poem I would have written in New York.” But what also would not have happened in New York was that, when Schwartz excitedly called Frank Bidart to tell him, Lowell was at Bidart’s apartment.

In the Henry James story, The Jolly Corner, a man visits a house haunted by the ghost of the person he might have been. Schwartz finds that the story’s echoes are with him whenever he thinks of the New York job he didn’t take after graduate school. Whether it was his involvement in the theater, his becoming a music critic, his teaching career, or his work as a poet, everything he has done has been shaped by the fact that he has done it here.

“Everything good that ever happened to me,” he says, “happened because I stayed in Boston.” Robert Lowell and the others would, no doubt, be pleased to hear it.

”I remember taking my daughter out in her stroller, and someone called out the window, `Put a hat on that child!”’ says Dooley.

Some say it takes a village to raise a child. Cambridge-based children’s book authors Norah Dooley and Glenna Lang would say what it takes is a neighborhood. Dooley’s neighborhood is Washington Street, a block-long slice of Cambridge’s Area 4. Its colorful multifamily houses and rainbow of residents inspired her books ”Everybody Cooks Rice,” ”Everybody Serves Soup,” ”Everybody Bakes Bread,” and ”Everybody Brings Noodles.” The stories follow a young girl as she goes from house to house on her street and finds those basic foods made in many variations, all gladly shared.

”Everyone says hello. It’s a place where the kids feel safe,” says Dooley. ”They feel looked after, protected. They see their place in the world. They know they can knock on someone’s door if they are locked out or need help with their homework or with a Halloween costume.”

Washington Street’s summer block parties have been famous for an exotic mix of shared foods, music, water balloons, and talent shows that have included one memorable performance piece by a dreadlocks-adorned neighbor dressed entirely in seaweed.

The picture Dooley paints of her neighborhood in her books is partly as it is and partly as she dreams it to be. She says the end of rent control in Cambridge in 1995 ”decimated the landscape of my books.” Some of the people whose bread and noodles figure in the books can no longer afford to live on Washington Street.

Pointing out houses where apartments now command gentrified rents, she asks, ”When the car won’t start or you need a cup of sugar, who are you going to call – a bank?” But the storybook neighborhood as it was before the late 1990s is what Dooley would wish for all city children.

Glenna Lang also uses Cambridge as a backdrop for her children’s books. As an illustrator, Lang created four books in which her drawings were paired with classic poems, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ”The Children’s Hour,” set in the Longfellow House on Brattle Street. She both wrote and illustrated her most recent book, ”Looking Out for Sarah,” which tells the story of a blind woman and her guide dog, using many city backgrounds.

”In Looking Out for Sarah,” says Lang, ”I used a park along the Charles where there are wonderful little concrete animal structures that are brightly colored and have letters on their sides. I think the mundane is appealing to children: very simple things – an old-fashioned grocery store, a post office; city scenes with native animals – squirrels, pigeons. When you’re little, everything is exciting.”

‘Lang’s first impressions on moving to Boston were of the architecture and the neighborhoods. Jamaica Plain’s triple-deckers and the early-’70s North End were among the areas that give her books a sense of place. Her illustrations could be glimpses of Cambridge or Charlestown or Roslindale. They reflect her vision of the wonder of the everyday, made smaller and simpler for her young audience.

”Cities are exciting and vibrant,” Lang says. ”And Boston in particular is so bite-sized. It has a vernacular architecture of colored, simple forms and small scale. It’s a cozy place for children.”

‘Other children’s books set in the Boston area include: ”Zachary’s Ball,” by Matt Tavares; ”The Gilded Cat” by Catherine Dexter; ”Bernelly and Harriet,” by Elizabeth Dahlie; ”Jonathan and His Mommy,” by Irene Smalls.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

It wasn’t the heightened security she objected to. In fact, she agreed to open the snap herself. Instead, it was the routine assumption that anything – anything – she might be asked to do in the name of that security was justified. ”We need to have a sense of ourselves as individuals with rights safeguarded by the Constitution. If we say yes without thinking to everything we’re asked, we give up our rights.”

Flags and patriotic slogans wave at us from billboards and SUVs. But being ”a good American” today feels more complex than it might have in 1776 or 1941. Hershman and another Boston-area writer, Askia Toure, recently talked about what patriotism means to them in 2002.

In Hershman’s novel ”Tales of the Master Race,” unquestioning compliance chips away at individual conscience. A hausfrau worries that the Jewish members of her ladies’ auxiliary won’t allow themselves to be ejected from the group without protest. A civil servant is ordered to examine and measure his fellow townspeople slated for execution. A printer appropriates the firm’s master copies after his Jewish employer has been taken away. These are clearly not people who have said no.

”When someone asks us to do something we think is wrong, we can say no,” says Hershman. Not only can, but should.

”My understanding of America is that the intent is not to create an obedient citizenry. What are we being patriotic to? A government that changes every four years? Patriotism and security might not be the same thing. Patriotism and acquiescence might not be the same thing. Patriotism and civic responsibility might not be the same thing.

”We need to think of what we are as a culture, not just militarily,” she says, pointing to the motto e pluribus unum – out of many, one. We may emphasize the ”one” in times of national crisis, but the ”many” reminds us that we are a country built on diversity.

For Askia Toure, patriotism is a word with long and painful roots.

Toure’s book ”From the Pyramids to the Projects” won the American Book Award in 1989. He was honored for lifetime achievement at the recent Cambridge Poetry Awards.

”African Americans have been the most patriotic people in this country,” Toure says. ”We were patriotic even before we were Americans. We fought in every war, even when we were considered three-fifths of a human being. We were the force that helped Lincoln and the Union defeat the Confederacy, by calling a general strike on the plantations. We worked in this country for [hundreds of years] without receiving pay. What about America’s patriotism toward us?”

While Toure expresses sadness over the devastation of Sept. 11, he has questions about the ensuing flag-waving.

”In the US before 9/11 there was not an excessive amount of love and brotherhood among the various ethnic groups. People may say it’s a new day for this country, but is it? That would be wonderful, but I have my doubts.

”In Roxbury and Dorchester and Mattapan and Harlem – in the chocolate cities of this country – we’re seeing billions of dollars going overseas while there is devastation of the inner cities, destruction of the public schools, drugs everywhere, massive unemployment within the world’s most powerful nation.”

True patriotism, according to Toure, would see reparations paid to the descendants of former slaves that would lift them ”out of third-world conditions and onto a par with white America. That would confirm for us that they believe in patriotism applied to the poor and oppressed in this country.”

For Hershman, patriotism not only allows but requires us to look critically at our country. ”Maybe it’s unpatriotic to be blindly obedient. We need to use our minds and our hearts in the spirit of the country.”

This story ran on page 6 of the Boston Globe’s City Weekly section on 5/12/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.