Читать книгу American Romances - Rebecca Brown - Страница 8

1 John Winthrop, who sailed to the Massachusetts Bay area in 1630 with a group of Puritans, wrote this about their mission to set up a home in the New World: “For wee must Consider that we shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us.” Also, that God would make of them “a story and a by-word through the world.” In other words, “wee” came here already rarin’ to go with the assignment of being storytellers hired by God to perform, for the clueless primitives in the rest of the backward world, how to behave. Winthrop is quoted (p. 11) by the great writer on Puritanism, Perry Miller, in his great book about Puritans, Errand into the Wilderness (Harper Torchbooks, 1964), the first footnote of which (p. vii) is: “American scholarship is prone to idealize the footnote.”

2 When Anne Hutchinson first began holding meetings at her home for other female Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the guys didn’t mind. But when she and her lady friends began to disagree with the male leaders on matters such as warfare (Men: Let’s kill the Indians; Women: Let’s not), original sin (Men: Eve did it; Women: No, she didn’t), and their own intelligence (Men: Women shouldn’t talk in church; Women: Yes, we should), her Puritan elders (all male) brought her to trial for dissension, witchcraft and lustfulness. She was found guilty and banished. Now there is a statue of her in front of the Massachusetts State House. She’s looking heavenward. See Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson, by Selma R. Williams (Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1981).

3 On Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans, edited by Harry Levin (Houghton Mifflin/Riverside Edition, 1961), and A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Larry J. Reynolds, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2001), in particular the essay by Brenda Wineapple. I also consulted Wineapple’s full-length biography, Hawthorne: A Life (Knopf, 2003), which is tremendous.

4 My copy of The Scarlet Letter Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans, with the great intro by Harry Levin, has a lot of fab, creepy stuff about the Puritans. It’s also where I got many of Hawthorne’s quotations about Romances, etc., that appear in this book.

5 My main sources for the Brian Wilson/Beach Boys material were: Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, by Peter Ames Carlin (Rodale, 2006) and Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, by Brian Wilson and Todd Gold (HarperCollins, 1991), a signed copy of which I found on the bookshelf in the brown house where Chris and Donna and Dave and George and Aldo and I stayed when we went to Hawaii to celebrate the end of Donna’s chemo. It was like an endless summer. We sat on a patio Brian Wilson had sat on. We cooked in a kitchen Brian Wilson ate food from. We had pillow fights in a bed Brian Wilson slept in. We swam from a rock Brian Wilson swam from. I’m glad we did and can remember, because now Donna is dead.

6 Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, David Galloway, ed. (Penguin, 1986).

Bonus Trivia Fun Fact Question: What do Puritan john (or was it William?) Hathorne, rockabilly hero jerry Lee Lewis and Edgar Allan Poe all have in common?

Answer: They each married their 14-year-old cousins! (Maybe it was 13. But you get my drift.)

7 Brian wrote most of the Beach Boys music and someone else wrote most of the lyrics. The liner notes to the Capitol Records reissues detail who did what where, including lyricists such as Gary Usher, Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day!), the icky Mike Love, and for a while, early in his solo career, the highly disturbing Eugene Landy.

David Leaf, the Beach Boys’ and Brian Wilson’s chief biographer (see The Beach Boys and the California Myth [Grosset & Dunlap, 1978]) wrote many of those liner notes.

The great Beach Boys lyrics, though, are/were mostly courtesy of the glorious Van Dyke Parks, particularly on Smile, 1967 and 2004. Parks also does his own terrific stuff (music and lyrics), such as Orange Crate Art and Song Cycle, and reappears on Brian Wilson’s 2008 That Lucky Old Sun. Thank you, Van Dyke Parks. You, sir, are a great American.

8 In addition to writing generally about the homeland of his forefathers, Hawthorne also wrote about specific homes in which he lived. Mosses from an Old Manse, his collection of tales from 1846, was named after and mostly written in the “Old Manse” Hawthorne and his wife Sophia rented in Concord. The house in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) was modeled closely on the house young Nathaniel had to move to with his mother and sister after his father died. Both of these books contain stories of houses that are haunted by history and secrecy and memory and ghosts and ancient books.

9 Midnight Ride (1966) was Paul Revere and the Raider’s second album, after their 1965 debut, Just Like Me. On the cover of Midnight Ride Paul Revere, Mark Lindsay, et al. are sitting inside a dark stone house holding candles (“One if by Land, Two if by Sea”) and looking apprehensive about the British invasion(s, both the first guns-and-shooting one and the second twist-and-shouting one).

10 I live out west, though not in California where I was born, but I get back east from time to time to work and visit friends and to wallow around in history, such as when I go to see my writer friend Dawn Paul and we go to see Hawthorne stuff. We went to the Old Manse, where Hawthorne lived with pictures of a bunch of old guys on the walls upstairs, and to the House of the Seven Gables where I bought the refrigerator magnet, the Christmas ornament, the coloring books, the postcards and the eraser, and walked to the gravesides and cemeteries of old Salem and on the beach, as Nathaniel Hawthorne also did.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a beach boy too.