Fifteen years had passed since last we visited Fernandina Beach. The Florida town anchors Amelia Island, the last barrier island as you descend the Atlantic Coast. It's also the extreme northwestern corner of Florida, above Jacksonville. And as our Amelia River Cruises guide put it, while we crossed the water into Georgia to view the wind-bent coastal oaks of Cumberland Island and the Rockefeller ruins of Dungeness Mansion, "It's the same size as Manhattan with about a million-and-a-half fewer people."
On Amelia Island, there's neither Broadway nor Madison Avenue nor a Statue of Liberty standing watch over the harbor. Yet there is a constancy of nature and civilization. Enough town amenities that we found a viewing of the documentary Chappaquiddick in a local theater, and nearby an Island Falls Adventure Golf to satisfy my mandatory quench for miniature golf on vacations, especially those residing near a beach. Amelia Island isn't unspoiled, but it's nicely preserved. Construction clamored on the causeway to the island, but Fernandina Beach was much as we remembered it when we stayed in the Amelia Island Williams House, a Victorian B&B, on the first trip.
Both trips we enjoyed an anniversary dinner at the delightful French bistro, Le Clos, and on both occasions we were regaled by the Isle of Eight Flags Shrimp Festival parade rolling right past our table — pirates, walking shrimp, doubloons and Mardi Gras beads, oh my! The wonderful Williams House is but blocks away from the town center and harbor, but we'd had to bicycle a couple of miles to reach the beach on the first trip. We're older and more settled now, and the allure of walking off the deck, past the languid sea oats, onto the white hot sands and greeting the emerald sea in a heartbeat — that's what we yearned for this time.
A beach is what we wanted, and books. Bunches of them. I count it a successful vacation if, in addition to relaxation, I find inspiration from reading two books. This trip was the twice the fun. We alighted at Elizabeth Pointe Lodge, a Cape Cod-style inn, where the Breezes suite in an adjoining Ocean House gave us the reading deck we were looking for, and a boardwalk over a sea oat-studded dune to the Atlantic Ocean shore. Here's a bird's-eye view of four good reads from the beach.
NEAR HAVEN— Matthew Stephen Sirois
A debut novel, Near Haven delves into the dystopian past of what might have been in the waning years of the Reagan Administration — what might have been had a government-sanctioned scientist identified a hitherto unknown comet on a collision course with Earth. Protagonist Tom Beaumont watches the cosmic drama unfold at first with Abel Stearns, his mentor and the proprietor of Stearns Fiberglass. Orders for their boat-building business on the Maine coast dry up. Abel Stearns dies long before the date with cataclysm and bequeaths what's left of the business to Beaumont. Mere months from impact, Beaumont lives in the boat shop, scrounges for food and fuel, and watches in horror as the town of Near Haven collapses. The electric grid fails; unpumped sewage backs up; roving militias from the highway loot businesses and desecrate homes. Tom Beaumont wrestles with his own doubts about the comet's existence — "shomee" is the label attached to those like Beaumont who sniff a government conspiracy run amok — but he can't deny the very real demons who are savaging his world in anticipation of the worst.
"This shomee attitude a yours might make ya feel smart," says sea salt Neville Bradford, Tom's older stalwart in the disintegrating community. "But if ya get shot for a couple gallons gas, it won't make ya any less dead."
Bradford is a blessing in the book. He's initially not much help to Beaumont's boat-building obsession — Tom plans to set to sea as the comet hysteria climaxes — and Bradford's a randy, hard-drinking denizen of the harbor. But he provides cover and counsel to Tom as they navigate the minefields on shore. He's a ready source of comic relief, but he's something more than a Falstaffian figure: He's a lifeline to a past that once was normal and a future that might be again. The epoch and tone of Sirois' novel is far removed from a much earlier Maine work by Kenneth Roberts, Arundel, but when Nev Bradford and Tom Beaumont muster an offensive against a marauding band in Near Haven, Bradford's role brings to mind the Roberts character Cap Huff, accompanying Stephen Nason and Benedict Arnold in their campaign to Quebec.
Readers may find themselves longing for more concrete details and a richer narrative about the comet cosmology itself. The threat is ever-present in the novel, but following an opening televised debate, there's little exposition from the airwaves or from any other source afar. That device is by design. TV signals are failing with the same frequency that's rending every other fabric of society. As one reviewer has noted, what makes Near Haven successful is its hyperlocal focus. Fear feeds on the increasingly tenuous ties to established society, and Tom Beaumont's journey is not unlike that of Will Barrett in Walker Percy's The Second Coming or Dick Pierce in John Casey's Spartina. Here, however, there's no real romantic relationship to buoy Beaumont (though a flame flickers in from the past). His is a more purely existential journey to the sea in search of sanity and safety — just a man and his boat and his cat for first mate. Near Haven is an arresting debut. It's a book that found me by dint of the plucky independent Louisiana publisher, Belle Lutte Press. Near Haven is the third title published by Belle Lutte, and each novel is well-worth pursuing. Sirois indicates his next novel will not be a sequel to Near Haven, but something in a new direction. We'll wait with bated breath, and with good reason. Sirois, a metal fabricator by day, is the rarest of writers — someone who can render mechanical subjects with the precision and reverence of Tim Gautreaux, and someone whose eloquent handling of a hunting scene in Near Haven is worthy of Donna Tartt. This is a riveting writing career in the making.
JOE DIMAGGIO: THE LONG VIGIL — Jerome Charyn
The late mystery novelist Robert B. Parker once said, "Equal parts baseball and mystery are the perfect proportion." To which we might add the corollary, "Equal parts baseball and beach reading compose the sublime symphony." Okay, my take is a bit grandiose, but nonetheless true. The prolific author Jerome Charyn ranks among the top tier of late 20th century and early 21st century literary figures. Before happening upon his DiMaggio treatment, my familiarity with him lay chiefly in his classic baseball novel, The Seventh Babe. Here, in his synthesis of the man, mythos and celebrity of Joe DiMaggio, Charyn clouts a home run.
The Jolter, as Charyn frequently calls him (in deference to a Grantland Rice coinage), represents at once the greatest, most graceful presence ever to glide over the baseball grass and the clumsiest celebrity ever to rub elbows with the Manhattan crowd at Toots Shor Restaurant. Charyn doesn't delve deeply into DiMaggio's San Franciso Bay Area upbringing, and he doesn't overanalyze the Yankee Clipper's actual baseball career. He does establish the arc of a national covenant between baseball fans and the pinstriped Yankees who would become American's grandest, dynastic sports heroes. Yankee Stadium became a three-ring circus, but a regal one bedecked in patriotic bunting. Between the tent poles of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio raised the center pole with his mythic 56-game hitting streak, so ascendant in the national consciousness that baseball's last .400 hitter — Ted Williams, whose OPS of 1.287 that year towered over DiMaggio's 1.083 — played second fiddle when the Most Valuable Player Award went to DiMaggio in 1941. While Williams' aloofness came across as arrogance to baseball media of the day, DiMaggio's aloofness came across as reserve, a sort of royal shyness one could forgive a demigod of the diamond.
And more so, off the diamond. On the field, DiMaggio's fielding talent and base running ability soared above the hitting-obsessed Williams. If Joe faltered off the field, he could be forgiven. He ingratiated himself further by proving, in street clothes, that Superman could be Clark Kent. A god could be a regular guy. And that duality set DiMaggio up for his second act as America's hero. A scant few years beyond an early retirement, his heel spurs and legs failing him, the Jolter came under the spell of Marilyn Monroe, about whom it could be said that marriage to Joe DiMaggio read like a career-building act in one of her movies. But not an act devoid of passion or feeling.
Here, America saw the Jolter-as-regular-guy sweeping the screen star off her feet for a marriage made in tabloid heaven that lasted, alas, a mere nine months. The beginning of the end came when Joe, incensed by seeing Marilyn's infamous dress scene during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, roughed her up at home and remained in Monroe's doghouse for the duration of the marriage. For her part, Marilyn had already let slip to a confidante her scheme to marry playwright Arthur Miller.
In Act 3, DiMaggio would devolve into his starring role as "Mr. Coffee" and a series of corporate endorsements while making millions in the baseball memorabilia market through the counsel of his late-career attorney, Morris Engelberg. But always, there was Marilyn. America smiled wanly, tearfully, as Joe delivered roses to her grave for decades after her conspiracy-stoked death. Perceiving Frank Sinatra's treatment of Marilyn at the singer's Palm Springs compound as criminal, DiMaggio never spoke to Sinatra again. He similarly loathed the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby, and when a distraught DiMaggio turned up at Toots Shor's restaurant in Marilyn's final year, his renewed marriage proposal spurned, Joe lamented, "What can you do with a girl like that?" Shor's rejoinder — "Aw, whaddya do with any whore ..." — sent DiMaggio steaming out the door, never to speak to Toots again.
Engelberg, DiMaggio's fawning adviser, would say years later that DiMaggio might go into a trance at a memorabilia show or on a fishing trip, "and I knew he wasn't even aware he was on a boat with me. His thoughts were with Marilyn." Yet the nation, when given the chance, still turned its lonely eyes on Joe. In the 1970s, DiMaggio bumped into Paul Simon at an Italian restaurant in New York, grumbled about not being paid for the use of his name in Mrs. Robinson, and planted a burning commentary on the singer's plate, "What I don't understand is why you ask me where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial. I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank, and I haven't gone anywhere."
Average Joe couldn't comprehend that the two muses who fueled his competitive fires into the national myth — baseball and Marilyn — were now but ghosts. Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil is a slender volume by design. Charyn culled the DiMaggio literature to produce what's essentially a scholarly work in the Yale University Press series, Icons of America. Yet he delivers his own voice here, too, clear and distinct as an ash bat cracking against the 216 raised red seams of a big league baseball. Charyn's boyhood memories of DiMaggio are studious and luminous, yet they're also haunted by the question that prefaces his book: "Why did he disappear inside himself, like a living ghost?" In a demonstration of fact being stronger than fiction, Charyn answers the question extraordinarily well.
PAFKO AT THE WALL — Don DeLillo
Among my favorite vacation phenomena is this one: You'll inevitably find some things on your trip that line up in unexpected eureka moments. In 1991, while on a baseball tour of the Eastern U.S., a B&B host in Allentown, Pennsylvania, quipped, "If you've come this far, you've got to go to Cooperstown." The next day I did, arriving in the New York hamlet and becoming so charmed by it they had to run me out of the National Baseball Hall of Fame at 9 that night. One restaurant on Main Street was still open that night. I can still taste the steak. Nineteen years later, my wife and I dined at the same place while the late Roy Halladay tossed a no-hitter in the playoffs. Mythic stuff. Turns out, the whole story about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in a Cooperstown cow pasture in 1839, where 100 years later, after a commission confirmed the creation through research, the Baseball Hall of Fame opened to great pomp and circumstance and the dulcet tones of Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, and games were played in Doubleday Field — that's all founded on a myth. Doubleday didn't do it. That discovery was deflating, but the town and the museum are near-perfect. So be it.
A few days later at Gettysburg, while looking for a Civil War monument my grandmother helped Louisiana Gov. John McKeithen erect, there stood a statue of Gen. Abner Doubleday, who really did lead Union troops into battle and who had wounds to the neck to prove it, four score and seven years to the day after the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain. Flash forward to 2017: I'm standing in the charming Beaufort, South Carolina, bookstore Nevermore and picking up a copy of novelist Don DeLillo's Pafko At The Wall, an excerpted novella from his masterwork, Underworld. Days later, in Charleston, we take the tour to Fort Sumter, recently reopened after Hurricane Irma, and I learn that Abner Doubleday was here, serving at the fort and firing the first gun at the Confederates in the battle that launched the Civil War. Talk about your shots heard round the world.
I took up DeLillo's shot heard round the world on the following year's vacation to Florida, and it's a remarkable, fact-based, fictional treatment of New York Giant Bobby Thomson's dramatic home run that towered over the lonely figure of Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Andy Pafko at the Polo Grounds wall. Overhead, in DeLillo's world, a 14-year-old Giants fan who skipped school and a 40-year-old Dodgers fan who skipped work at his construction firm scramble under the bleacher seats and claw at the ball's 216 raised red stitches. The chase ensues beyond the ballpark and out into the New York streets.
Back behind home plate, in Giants manager Leo Durocher's box seats, four titans take in Thomson's miraculous ninth-inning shot: Jackie Gleason, who's skipping rehearsals for a new skit, The Honeymooners; Frank Sinatra, who's slipping away from his personal secret service to be with the boys; Toots Shor, who's skipping work at his restaurant; and J. Edgar Hoover, who's receiving intelligence reports from an agent crouched in the stadium aisle about the Soviet Union conducting secret tests of atomic bombs at undisclosed locations. Talk about your shots heard round the world.
The repartee between Gleason, Sinatra, Shor and Hoover throughout the game is priceless; and the press box banter between Giants announcer Russ Hodges and his producer, Al Edelstein, builds in tension until the ninth-inning comeback that concludes with Hodges' classic call: "Branca throws. There's a long drive. It's gonna be ... I believe ... The Giants win the pennant! [Repeat four times, fortississimo.] Hodges' call plays out over seven breathless pages. So does the scramble for the ball. It's a controlled breathlessness, and by the closing pages Russ Hodges and Al Edelstein are headed back across the Polo Grounds battlefield to retrieve an umbrella from the radio booth. A raincoat drunk is running the bases, leaping headlong into second base, and in the flying leap, DeLillo chronicles every stimulus, sight and sound surrounding the broadcaster. No matter that the Giants would go down to defeat in the World Series, losing four games to two to the New York Yankees in Joe DiMaggio's final season. Oct. 3, 1951, is a Golden Day in a Golden Age, and DeLillo turns out to be quite the alchemist.
BENEDICTION — Kent Haruf No baseball here, no shots heard round the world, no dystopian crack in the firmament.
Yet the Holt, Colorado, painted with Kent Haruf's fictional palette — his Yoknapatawpha — harbors its own compelling drama. It's summer in the high plains hamlet of Holt, and on the opening page Dad Lewis and his wife, Mary, learn that Dad — the only name anyone knows him by in his advanced age — will be dead by September. They drive back from seeing the doctor in Denver, and Dad says over a tray of crackers, cheese and sliced apples on the front porch of the century-old, white clapboard, two-story house with a red-shingled roof and a black wrought-iron fence, "Well, that's it. That's the deal. Isn't it." Mary struggles to disabuse him of the idea that death could be so close around the corner. Dad, having none of it, examines his bottle of beer and says, "I might get me some kind of better grade of beer before I go. A guy I was talking to said something about Belgian beer. Maybe I'll try some of that. If I can get it around here."
Straightforward, matter-of-fact and laconic come to mind when sizing up Haruf's writing style. Despite my punctuation above, he eschews quotation marks in the mold of Cormac McCarthy, and that's an affectation I've always struggled to get past. Somehow, Haruf's narrative style conquers my reservations. His writing is deceptively rich, his plots surprisingly profound. A new pastor comes to town, mysteriously reassigned from Denver, and hushed speculation haunts him. His world devolves in a crisis of faith while he ministers to Dad during the latter's dying days.
Dad and Mary's next-door neighbor, Berta May, and Alice, the 8-year-old granddaughter she's raising, began to worm their way affectionately into Dad's final days. But for all of his superficial acceptance of his death sentence, Dad can't quite let go of the downtown hardware store two of his junior associates are running. He can't quite put to rest the ghosts of a former employee he fired and the consequences suffered by the ex-employee's family. And while Dad's daughter Lorraine takes leave of her Denver job to help her parents deal with his decline, there's the subject of his son Frank, estranged since high school, missing in action in his middle age, but ever-present in Dad's dreams and hallucinations.
For a simple tale of a dying man's final days, there's extraordinary drama sweeping through the high plains. Who gets the store when Dad's gone? Will Frank return before the funeral? Will Pastor Rob Lyle survive the summer with his ministry and his dignity intact? Will Dad linger past August? And will the disappearance of 8-year-old Alice rend the community fabric of Holt beyond repair? What keeps Haruf's fiction carefully knit together is a masterful sense of ritual — home visits, dinners, picnics, church services, trips to town, and vividly recalled memories. Dad's haunted by them, but as his health declines, he begins to make peace with them through visits real and imagined in his living room and bedroom. Two of his stalwart visitors are family friends Willa Johnson, an elderly farm widow, and her spinster daughter, Alene. The Johnson women have endured hard times in Holt and, perhaps because of their struggles, they're the kind of neighbors anyone in Dad and Mary Lewis's plight would want. The Johnson homestead, though, is some miles outside town, and it's there at a summer picnic staged by four female characters — Lorraine Lewis, young Alice, Willa and Alene — that Haruf's sense of ritual reaches the sublime. After a meal on the grass and a nap in the sun, pink dinner napkins draped over their faces, the older women awake and begin rhapsodizing about the tap dance and music lessons of their youth, with Lorraine chiming in that she wished for a creek and the chance for a swim. They talk of driving away cattle from a huge water trough nearby. "We don't have any bathing suits," Willa says. "Oh, damn the bathing suits, Mother," Lorraine scolds, disrobing and dipping her toes, than half her naked body into the stock tank. What issues from her mouth is a riotous mix of profane and sacred language, mimicked by the other women as they slip out of cotton dresses and skinny-dip in the cattle trough, tadpoles flitting about their ankles and the breathlessly cold water sending a chorus of epithets and benedictions into the blue Colorado sky.
Against the specter of impending death, the scene is Edenic, even salvific, and watching Haruf play it out is like eavesdropping on Vermeer as he layers color and light on canvas in Delft. After hearing about Haruf for years, I didn't actually read him until his posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night, came with the highest of recommendations from Ursula Le Guin. After that book's publication, Robert Redford snapped up screen rights, produced a quiet classic as he did with A River Runs Through It, and starred in his fourth movie with Jane Fonda. They're different tales — Benediction and Our Souls at Night— but both are shot through with the hard-fought honesty of Holt lives and an everyday happiness that, as Le Guin points out, has practically vanished from fiction these days.
###
The beach reading is receding into the past, but I'm trying to carry the rhythmic sound of the ocean back into the workaday world. That's no easy task. It's nigh unto impossible some days. Yet in the bathroom near our office, where we keep a collection of Florida shells from Sanibel Island, there's also a copy of the Anne Morrow Lindbergh classic, Gift From the Sea. That book chronicles her stay in a primitive cabin on Captiva Island, Sanibel's neighbor, many decades ago. Leaving Captiva behind, Lindbergh recalls the shells she discovered as metaphors for life, the waves echoing words — patience, faith, openness, simplicity, solitude, intermittency — and she resolves to rediscover them in new chapters of her life. " ... There are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning."
