Maurice R. "Monty" Montgomery, 1938- 2017: RIP

My friend Monty was always a slightly elusive presence, even in his autobiographical sketch in Amazon, written by himself:

"M. R. Montgomery, known to the various government record keepers as Maurice R. Montgomery Jr., and to all his acquaintances as Monty, was born in eastern Montana in 1938, raised partly in California, and now lives near Boston for reasons that he cannot quite explain. Over the past twenty-five years he has written for the Boston Globe on every subject except politics, a clean record he hopes to maintain until retirement. Other than fishing and a little bit of gunning, he has no obsessive hobbies, although he has been known to plant the occasional tomato and a manageable number of antique rose varieties, these for the pleasure of his wife, Florence."

He was sort of the unknown best writer I knew. ALL of his books were good, but two in particular, Many Rivers to Cross, about native trout, and Saying Goodbye, about eastern Montana and fathers and sons, are absolute classics. Saying Goodbye is the best book on eastern Montana I know.

Monty could write about anything. Though I didn’t get to know him until the 90s, I first wrote to him for advice on bird dogs in 1970s -- he replied with a column called “Find a Gentleman With a Bird Dog”. He also wrote columns I remember on rutabagas and November.

In the end I couldn't even find his obit in the Globe. Monty was erudite, kind, and generous as well as an undervalued writer. He will be missed.

Here is a fine tribute by Corb Lund about their mutual country.

Hemingway's Guns-- new edition

Silvio Calabi and Co. hav come out with a new ed of the already- good Hemingways's Guns that adds the Cuban guns from the Finca Vigia (a uniformly ruined unshootable lot BTW) to the already good scholarship of the first volume. Two things are  particularly notable. First, most American rich folks back then shot good versions of the same guns as their less well- off contemporaries, not aristocrats' or Best guns. Hem shot a Model 12, some 21's, a Springfield, many Winchesters, and a humpback Browning; so did my father, and I have owned them all. The only real "Best" he ever owned was the Westley .577, and he disliked shooting it.

And though Patrick H debunked it long ago as a myth propagated by "Miss Mary" (I believe): Hemingway not only didn't shoot himself with a Boss; he never owned a London Best shotgun! Calabi has done real detective work here, finding the remnants of the W & C Scott lock from the fatal gun.

For all fans of Hem and guns, (except perhaps those put off by the NYRB article that called the book "sick fetishism"-- !)

And on another gun matter, congratulations to reader Phil Yearout, who just got published in Shooting Sportsman!

PS : Pauline shot a Darne 28!

"Great Unknown"?

John Muller's fine piece on me in  NM magazine is out, graced by the photos of Hans Wachs, and soon to be online.  It is called "The Great Unknown"--  meaning me!-- and uses this photo as a lead, which will have to do until I have a link.
UPDATE: Here
is the link, thanks to David Zincavage and others.

William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, 1941- 2017

Chris Waddington, my old editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and now a happier man in his belovcd New Orleans (even though Katrina flooded his house) emailed to tell me that our mutual friend Gatz Hjortsberg died at his home in Livingston after a "short illness" i.e. pancreatic cancer (it's a bad one; it's the one that took down Bob Jones after he survived prostate cancer.)

As I said to Chris, our friendship was cordial, but not particularly close. Still, we were part of the same Montana scene and went to the same parties, where Michael Katakis would groan "Oh God, Gatz and Bodio are both here -- nobody else will be able to get  in a word." Probably true, and I think they're all the better for it.  He was always known as "Gatz", never Bill or William, apparently because of a youthful infatuation with the work of Scott Fitzgerald, especially The Great Gatsby. Besides, he wore all those cool hats.

He was utterly intrepid.He was one of Pat's boys" at Sports Illustrated, and his first assignment was to ride a BULL.He did it, too.

Gatz was undervalued as a writer of books, perhaps because he was a writer of genre books in a  literary field. He followed his friend Tom McGuane to Livingston from grad school, because McGuane was the only writer he knew who fished. Among the schools he attended was Stanford, where like McGuane, he was a Stegner  Fellow; that is, someone whom Wallace Stegner abused. This was good company to be in; among the other people Stegner called bums, hippies, beatniks, and worthless were Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, and the lesser known but fascinating David Shetzline, who wrote one of the only two good novels I know of about  forest fires. Among Gatz's books were the dark fantasy Alp and the darker sci- fi Gray Matters in the early years, and the Mexican thriller Manana recently. But his best knows was Falling Angel , which was made into a movie starring Mickey Rourke. He also wrote Nevermore where he wrote the following wonderful inscription in my copy:

He also wrote a puzzling biography of "Poor Old Richard" Brautigan, which took him about 14 years and was rejected by its first publisher. In the end it ran to 862 pages, any 100 of which were brilliant. I can't help but think that Richard's own words might apply: " In this world, where there is only a little time to spend, I think I've spent enougth time on this butterfly." *

No matter. Gatz Hjortsberg was a gentleman and a writer, and he will be missed.

*The quote about the butterfly is a close paraphrase. I'm not going to look it up at this hour!

Tom's tour- and Book

A friend in Alberta snapped this photo of Tom Russell and Ian Tyson in fine form at a concert up there.

My informant said that he told a story of bringing his Swiss Father-in-law over the Continental Divide at night to visit us and our hounds and hawks. It could have been a fraught scene -- "Poppi" says that his only English was "Fuck you, cowboy", which as Tom said "went over real big with a bunch of drunk cowboys demanding encores of "Tonight We Ride", but our French wine, our posole, and our animals disarmed him, not to mention my ability to speak French, and he now sends us German articles on falconry.

This story and many others are in Tom's wonderful new collection of essays Ceremonies of the Horsemen. There are portraits of Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins, of Hemingway and Ian Tyson, Charles Portis and John Graves, and a piece on J P S Brown, a hard old man we both know who may be the best unknown cowboy novelist around. There is also that story about me and falconry, one about Gallo del Cielo (the "damn chicken song") and the only English cockfight corrida I know, which will teach you all you need to know about cockfighting (and I don't mean that sarcastically). It is a tragedy with laughs around the edges, although Tom has been known to claim that he wrote a version with a happy ending in which the rooster buys the Golden Spur Bar.
In the weirdest of these stories Tom ends up in the Swiss castle of Balthus' widow, discussing their mutual admiration for Tex Ritter's "Blood on the Saddle". Buy this book! Nobody but Tom could ever have written it.

Recovering

Libby is doing well, although the broken rib really hurts when she she coughs, and she is going to a dentist today to plan tooth repair.

To certain complainers: I did not publish unattractive pics of Lib without her permission; I did ask, before I took the photos, and she gave it gladly, in the interest of the story. She is the least vain, most un- self- conscious person there is. I am the one who dreads most new pics, feeling like half of them make me look like I were on chemo (I will publish a couple today, as it is only fair). What makes anyone think i would EVER hurt Libby's feelings, or that in a four- room house that she would be ignorant of it for more than five minutes?

The Cooper's material was necessary to keep the new woman from sending the Feds or the warden after us. We're perfectly legal, but an "invalid" with a book contract and deadlines, as well as the walking wounded, don't need the extra hassle of official visit and explanations. I thought I would put all the facts, biological and legal, up front as a preemptive strike...

The justified (and funny) critic was Jonathan, who wrote in part that the post "...non-sequiturs into a thousand-word exegesis on urban raptors, then - oh yeah - completes the story about Libby!" I have always digressed, or as I say defensively, been "non- linear", and I am getting worse. I'm just glad that someone who is currently in Tel Aviv, heading to Lebanon with his bicycle, is reading the blog.

Why I may NEVER be rich...

What's that? Oh, a Jack Unruh illo, for a piece I had published, that I sent in un- asked for, "over the transom". In SI. In 1980. When Pat was still editor. And I didn't follow up.

Because I didn't know how. Thank God Gray's was only a subway stop away....

Tom McGuane on Raptors

Novelist Tom McGuane, while noted for his horses and pointing dogs, has always had a feel for birds of prey,  notices them, and on occasion writes lyrically about them. There is a vivid set piece in the novel Something to Be Desired, in which which the protagonist, LucienTaylor,  takes his young son, who does not live with him, to lure a Prairie falcon in to trap on a pigeon, using a falconry practice to band the bird to study. The child is frightened, startled  by the bird's falling from the sky like a hammer onto the  luckless bait bird, but Lucien is ecstatic, with the emotions of a true hawk trapper.
"There were feathers everywhere, and the hawk beat in a blur of cold fury, striking at Lucien with his downcurving knife of a beak and superimposing his own screech over the noise of James. "We've got him, James!" James, quiet now, looked ready to run. The hawk had stopped all motion but kept his beak marginally parted so that the small, hard black tongue could be seen advancing and retreating slightly within his mouth. 'It's a prairie falcon. It's the most beautiful bird in the world. I want to come back as a prairie falcon.' "

This is a man who has been there. Here is another lyrical piece, from the more recent Driving  On the Rim:

"With my new leisure following upon my indictment and my failure as a house painter, I had time to walk the woody creek bottoms where I observed the short-winged woodland hawks, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, speeding through the trees with uncanny nimbleness. I had several times watched prairie falcons diving into blackbirds when I walked around the uplands, and the chaos they made seemed to briefly fill the sky. These jaunts were hardly adventurous, as I never went more than a few minutes from town, but it was greatly reassuring to find wildlife so close to humanity. In fact, I could still make out the old water tower through the trees where I first came upon the goshawk, a northern goshawk, to be precise. Since I came upon her unawares and she was going about her goshawk business under my eye, it made a tremendous impression on me: almost blue-black on her back with a creamy and precisely barred breast. She was swiveling her head from side to side, broadcasting her oddly relentless screams. Over time, I would see her often, hunting, soaring, sleeping. And she saw me often enough that she no longer fled at my sight, moving me by her acceptance."
Tom once wrote to me "Cutting horses are my falcons". True enough, but he also has an eye for the real thing. Sometimes I'm almost jealous of his ability to paint a picture, even in this throwaway line in a handwritten 1992 letter: "There is a Peregrine living around my place this summer. Saw him come down the face of black thunderhead seamed with lightning and kill a pigeon on the County road.."

Good essay

Barry Lopez in Granta. The first quote is so often the writer's dilemma.

"As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place."

"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it."

(Courtesy of Carlos Martinez del Rio)

Beebe

Will Beebe, naturalist, writer, inventor, New York socialite, jungle and ocean explorer, is a man whose like it would be hard to have today. But without his example, I don't know if I would be the person I am. Tom McGuane also cites him as a childhood inspiration, not for writing (I think he slights him a bit here), but for adventure. He wrote his first book in 1905, a rather 19th century affair called Two Bird Lovers in Mexico, and wrote his last stuff for the Geographic in the early sixties. He was a friend to Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote the intro to (I believe) his second book, early, and to Father Anderson Bakewell much later, invented the Bathysphere and exploration of the abyss, shot flying fish with a 28 bore Parker, and married beautiful women...

I have intended to write on Beebe for a while, as I have a nice little collection of "Beeebeana", but I was prompted by my correspondent, Kirk, one of the serious polymaths himself-- geneticist, MD, gourmand, elk hunter, scholar of Icelandic history, sea trout fiend, student of esoteric lore (he is the only acquaintance of mine who has attended the Naropa Institute Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where he among other things read Conrad with William Burroughs!) Kirk, in a discussion of Kipling, asked me if I knew of the "Kiplingite" Beebe (who actually met Kipling when he was living in Vermont). When I replied that I did, and shared my modest collection, Kirk responded with the following:

"Since the first page I "self-identified" as a scientist.
A tiny sphere dangling deep in the dark with
a shaft of light on bizarre never-before-seen creatures.
My wife gave me Gould's biography (out of print) this summer after hearing
her interviewed on NPR, and probably tiring of me
rave about William Beebe for 40 years (almost
from the day we met) i.e., why I do what I do.
What a combination - absolute scientific rigor,
wild bravery, aplomb everywhere (back of beyond to Vanity Fair),
work hard, party hard, a true advocate for women in
science (one of the first), smashing technical and popular writer,
bon vivant with no care for possessions or
wealth other than that needed for more science, genial
mentor to so many of the best of the best."

Sing it, Kirk! Here are some things...

His first book:

A favorite, Pheasant Jungles -- a signed copy. It was a VERY different time-- read the caption (double click to enlarge)...

Books then were decorative- here are the endpapers of  Jungle Days  and The Arcturus Adventure. Both were published by Putnam, nature and adventure being mainstream in those days...

One of his most wonderful books is Pheasants, Their Lives and Homes - two volumes covering every species, in its natural home! Beebe, just after WWl and working for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was given the kind of assignment that usually doesn't exist even in fiction-- to travel to Asia and collect and observe every species, paid for by the wealthy patron Colonel Kuser. The resulting volumes also used the great nature artists of the time-- Knight, George Lodge, Fuertes. There is nothing else like them.

 

 This is only the beginning, early, land based. His dives in the Bathysphere, his ocean stuff comes later. His bio, by Carol Grant Gould, and the bathysphere book, Descent, by Brad Matsen, are absolutely  worth reading. His social life was amusing too- he knew father B,  who collected snakes for the Museum, and who used to keep a copy of the Social Register beside his Alpine Journal and his cocked and locked Colt Commander ("What good is an unloaded gun?" he would always say), in front of a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe in his Santa Fe casita. I have joked that the American Museum , the Social Register, and the Explorers Club used to draw on the same crowd in the Thirties, and it is more true than not. To be continued...

Ahh, one more, from Beebe's own Bathysphere book, Half Mile Down...

Oliver Sacks-- 1933 - 2015; RIP

Tom McIntyre just let me know that Oliver Sacks has died at 82, from a recurrence of his melanoma. I wrote back, instantly:

"A great man; a Martian, as he characterized his friend Temple Grandin, but a GREAT Martian, and great writer- scientist. I have read nearly all his books, picking up the autobiography when he announced his impending death in the NYRB, and his reaction:" I must write another book!”*

"In it, I learned that he was a power lifter who could jerk 375 pounds (something i know a bit about personally); a biker, when that culture merged into gay culture in pre-  AIDS California; gay, but celibate 30 or more years,  for private reasons; and a sometime speed freak. He handled all this with grace and a gentle sense of amusement. Could he have had a touch of Asperger’s? He was “face blind”, but loved music. He swam like a  porpoise...

"Given friends like Jonathan Miller and Tom Stoppard, I expect he was edge of conservative in TODAY’s politics— old Establishment Jewish liberal was probably what he would prefer. As you said, not an ideologue…

"I have found many other fans lately— my neurologist AND her Bronx- bred resident for instance; Tom Quinn’s wfe Jeri, and more remarkably Tom, who tends to disapprove of gay people. The Bronx gal now thinks I am civilized again- I had lost points when Sarah (neuro) told her my implant had to go in my LEFT shoulder because “... he shoots so much!”

"It’s not particularly apropos but I have taken to using this quote whenever someone I consider grand and irreplaceable dies; Kipling, in the person of Mowgli, from "Red Dog": “Howl, dogs! A WOLF has died tonight!"

"Them’s my thoughts..."

* ANOTHER great book by a dying person: Clive James’ last views on everything, an unlikely celebration: Latest Readings

Quote

Via Jim Spencer: ""Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?" (James Joyce)

Cover

Book is more than half done but not done; cover is. Vadim of course.

James Salter, RIP

James Salter, novelist, is dead at ninety. The BBC report, which Reid sent, said that he "never converted critical acclaim into commercial success."

Really? He was a "writer's writer",  and a maker of perfect sentences and some small perfect books, as well as a big one-- in that sense, and because of the slightly icy perfection of his best work, he was never going to be a pop success-- but maybe he never wanted to be. Having your last big novel published by Knopf and selling respectably is hardly  a case of failure.

Nor should my phrase about small perfect books be construed as anything precious. He was also compared to Hemingway and that would be right if it were the correct concept of Hemingway-- the artist who on some level wanted to paint like Matisse. The "Beeb" said that he "became known for exploring masculine themes like conflict - provoking comparisons to Ernest Hemingway." But though both believed in precision in art, courage, and "grace under pressure",  Hemingway did not become a career Air Force officer, which Salter did, showing a serious commitment to something in addition to writing.

Salter also wrote the first-- some would say only-- great climbing novel,  Solo Faces, making him a cult figure to male climbers of our generation. The rest of his works other than Solo Faces and The Hunters were about men and women and eros and marriage, and he might have written on these themes, at least narrowly, better than any other male of his generation, the generation that thought there actually was a Great American Novel. None of the obvious contenders ever move me much.

He was also something of a self- creation, though he was open about it. Born Salzmann (not sure of the spelling) he made a conscious decision to change his name before he went into the service. He never apologized but never changed his name back, either.

He will be remembered for his earlier work: Solo Faces, A Sport and a Pastime, and Light Years (the one with the perfect sentences and an almost Japanese sense of sweet melancholy), and for his last,  All That Is (now THAT is an ambitious title!), which is probably the best novel about the post WWII New York writing and publishing world-- not a small thing in those years. But all of his writing is worth reading...

Plans & Changes

I have signed a contract to do the so- called "Silk Road Dog Book", The Hounds of Heaven, by September, and have a verbal agreement to continue on immediately with the contrarian Passenger pigeon book, A Feathered Tempest, on September second-- see two articles online in Living Bird, "Superdoves" and "A Feathered Tempest"-- and maybe see them soon, because the days are numbered for Living Bird as we know it.

The last book review in LB comes out this fall. I may or may not have a regular column for Anglers magazine, but I certainly will be writing for them. I am on track for the "Direct Brain Stimulation" operation and hope it will be as soon as possible, ie in August, as doing things like typing, and sometimes walking, becomes ever harder (doing a lot of dictation on my laptop-- thanks, Beth, re Airbook!!) The success of the operation on another old fart (and desert rat immigrant from the northeast, writer, and longdog man) is encouraging, though the whole situation edges the surreal-- as P Burns said, "What are the odds of two running dog guys having Parkinson's?...  Both in New Mexico too.  Mathematically you two are what we call "red-headed Eskimos."

Ch ch changes-- in attitude if not at the moment in latitude. Enormous work load, with corresponding decrease in ability, slight if not I hope permanent decline in income, increase in HEAT-- I have no idea how it will affect the blog, though don't expect too many long essays! It WILL continue...

Dutch and yrs truly at Owl Bar: Parky outdoorsmen seeking medication and liquids...

McGuane at the Strand

As promised. These have generated a lot of email (personal, off blog, though I would encourage them here) enough that I might start looking for such interviews. I will put some thoughts in reaction below (above?),  probably tomorrow...


OK, in-stream commentary to friends edited only for a minimum of sense and coherence:

"Living in the west, natives, newcomers, "Stickers". He conspicuously left out New Mexico, often an exception to easy rules. Given the ancient ethnes here-- well, just OLD for Navajos and Apaches, who just beat the Spanish- the old populations here, which I think still are more than half of our population-- any newcomer/ Anglo (includes, specifically, Italian here in Magdalena) has a chance at acceptance if he is what Stegner called a "sticker". Oldest ranch here is the Italian one, Sis Olney's (Pound ranch), and her great grandfather Joe Gianera came from the Swiss border about 18 miles from my gparents in 1859! John Davila considers his Davila ancestors parvenus becauise they married "UP into the Guttierez family" in 1820! Whereas the Guttierezes "... came up the river with Onate and took the place BACK!" after the Pueblo revolt. Gotta love that back... but it also means our church (big parish, San Miguel, Socorro) has a not always friendly rivalry going with Santa Fe as to who has the oldest church. Ours has the oldest wall, but had to incorporate it into a new one after the rebellion, because the Indians burned the old one...

"But despite (because of?), I surely am considered an old timer in this town, with pics, mostly hunting ones, on the bar wall, not because I am "famous" but because I live here and have hung out there for three incarnations of the bar and a couple of generations of humans. As I said to my (75 year old!) friend Lawrence Aragon last year when he lamented the dearth of old- timers: WE, los borrachos perdidos- the surviving ones anyway-- are the old timers!

"So, Stegner's "Stickers". A good concept- though are we ones entirely by choice, or does economics play a part? The Stickers are often poor enough they might not do as well in richer placers, though McGuane and some others are exceptions. I wonder that any distance he feels from his neighbors might be because he is wealthy rather than an incomer-- it puts up barriers. Certainly he has a good rep as a man who knows horses, all the way down  here.

(Jackson and Eli both were born in Santa Fe, and they can make a case for Eli being a 4th Gen Gringo SANTA FEAN, not just NMexican-- pretty rare and cool...)

"With my crappy typing these days this feels like a dissertation, but a few more thoughts. Stegner fellowships at Stanford: did he like ANYBODY? McGuane, Robert Stone, Kesey, Shetzline-- all were told they were lazy, beatniks, hippies, drug addicts- being selected seems to have meant success of sorts, but not from him. Back in MT it was as bad-- Bud Guthrie AFAIK disliked without exception every incomer, and once told someone I know that anyone who moved there and bought a horse or rodeo'd was a poseur and a phony and he didn't have to read them. Harsh, and ridiculous...

"McGuane's lament for a more playful and less minimalist fiction rang true to me- his old stuff had more sheer FUN in it, prosodically anyway. I blame the influence-- baneful influence, however he is regarded, of Raymond Carver. Luckily the South has somewhat escaped this-- read Barry Hannah, much mentioned, and Brad Watson , two good examples. (Both Tom and Brad have written affectionate memories of THAT wild man).  And then there are crazy Catholic memoirists and poets like Mary Karr..


"Tom gave a shout- out to not just Helen but Helen's friend Olivia Laing and her great book on drunkenness in writers, The Trip to Echo Spring. What can I say- that it is an ENJOYABLE book on drunkenness, celebrating the writers if not their excesses; that it is utterly free of cant or twelve step religion; that it is  a road book, by a naturalist, about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carver, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, and John Cheever, that got me reading at least one (Cheever) again? That I once got an email from her in New Hampshire with an attached photo of my Good Guns Again, Blogger " Doctor Hypercube's" Arrieta, and the remains of bacon and eggs on the table?  Read her!

"Last: I enjoy his short stories but if he is really working on a novel about his family I am excited, hope it is BIG, and also hope it will go back to the "Irish Riviera", South Shore of Boston all the way around to Providence, where his roots (always acknowledged) are. Of course he has told me to do the same, just from bits in my pigeon book...

"I wish he would write more about bird dogs and guns and horses, at least as much as fish. (did you see him call to Nick Lyons in the audience?)"

Tom McGuane on writing and reading

The always intelligent McGuane on what made him a writer. "I read like a son- of- a - bitch" was an early statement of his that helped confirm my vocation-- in my youth I wrote at best in spasms, but read everything. That includes books he mentions he read but alludes to as as "non- literary", like Beebe's Arcturus Adventure, but I respectfully disagree- everything was more... not literary but readerly;  literate, then, if only because there were fewer ways to transmit information...

I have another, newer interview to watch-- if it adds much I will put it here too, so check back...

Rueful truth

Reid attended Tom McGuane's signing for his new book of short stories, Crow Fair, at the Tattered Cover,  where they talked of Helen's meteoric rise, gun nuts, and the blog-- I was pleased to know he sometimes checks in. He was kind enough to send down an inscribed copy via Reid-- thanks to both.

I have read several of these stories already, mostly in the New Yorker; some are funny, some very dark. I see a deep Irish thing there, transplanted to the Plains; I often find the same thing in North Dakota poet Tim Murphy: "Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death. / Horseman,  pass by...";  though I think both Tom and Tim are merrier characters than Yeats...

But for some reason I went to the back of the book to read the last line of the last story and laughed aloud, albeit not without that frisson of recognition of one's own mortality that accompanies such rueful truth- telling. It applies to me as well as it does to his narrator, and to Tom, who is eleven years older than I am. And  you'd better believe he did it consciously.

"Lately, I've been riding a carriage at the annual Bucking Horse Sale, waving to everyone like an old-timer, which I guess is what I'm getting to be." 

Quote

On our rockstar Helen, by Jonathan Katz, an uncommon observation.

"... the writer Wilfred Sheed wrote once in the New Yorker that "every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." Sheed wasn't being nasty, he was being honest. I loved Macdonald's talk and a I loved her book, but I died a little tonight.

"Even though I died a bit, looking at the crowd, reading those reviews, I also loved every second of it. Sheed is right,  I suppose, every writer winces a bit at a book as good as this one, but I loved being there much more than I didn't. When a book and a writer  deserves every bit of the praise, it softens the blow."

Also, as truthful if less painful:

"Macdonald talked about the need for animals in our lives, and  her worry that they are disappearing from the every day lives of people."

Helen's latest conquest is an excellent review by Caleb Crain in the New York Review of Books (no free link yet).

Caroline Gordon

The minor great (is that contradictory?) southern writers are always being revived, sometimes by friends of mine; their agrarian roots make them more appealing to me than old Yankees generally. A person descended from  Alpine peasants and mercenary Celtic soldiers can remember misty maritime coasts with nostalgia, but be impatient with the old cultural hegemony of Puritans; what Betsy Huntington, product of rural squires up the Connecticut River, called "that Boston commercial money."

So an article pops up in the Catholic mag First Things celebrating Alan Tate. Well, OK, he did some good stuff (he was alleged to be...difficult, too-- if I weren't sober I'd be tempted to say "a dick"), but, OK.

But does anybody outside of academia read Tate? Whereas his wife...

She is not all that popular in feminist circles--as a Southerner and a Catholic convert, she is already odd. But her classic work, Aleck Maury, Sportsman is the tale of a "worthless" Classics prof who wastes his entire life hunting and fishing, while knowing he is doing something as important as anyone engaged in a so- called useful profession. NOBODY in the academy but oddballs like my friend Gerry gets that.

Maury is good enough to have a place as one of the hundred books in my Book of Books, A Sportsman's Library. But even I can't say anything as wild as Tom McGuane did back in the interesting book Rediscoveries, more than a decade back (I don't own a copy, just a xerox of the essay-- Google it!) He said: "... there are sections of this book which seem to me to have been dictated by God."

Is it the best sporting novel ever? Naah-- only in the top ten. But the stand- alone story about Maury, "The last day in the field", available in Old Red and other Stories, may just be the best story- with- bird- shooting ever; its most likely runners- up are McGuane's "Flight", and any of, say, five of Turgenev's reminisces...

And I have a treat. Caroline Gordon was a great friend of Father Anderson Bakewell SJ, scientist, hunter, explorer, drinker and teller of tales, and my Explorers Club patron. I didn't get the .416 Rigby when he died, but i got all the Gordon books, and their correspondence. I had forgotten that he had a Mannlicher Schoenauer, my own favorite rifle, as it was overshadowed by his Rigby .416 "Rifle for heavy Game" and his two Italian over and under rifles, but you see it mentioned here.

Letter below, cut for relevance; inscription in Old Red;  and Andy with his last feral hog (maybe HIS Last Day in the Field), using a Zoli over and under 8 X 57 JRS and custom loads with Barnes X ("my X- rated") bullets.