‘Berkshire Reader’ fascinating anthology

THE BERKSHIRE READER, edited by Richard Nunley, Berkshire House Publishers, Stockbridge, Mass., 530 pages, $16.95, drawings by Michael McCurdy.

Of the making of anthologies there is no end. I know a couple of professional anthologists with whom I’ve worked who have now compiled several hundred different titles. I’ve helped edit two anthologies myself (“Maine Speaks” and “The Best Maine Stories”); and as an English teacher, I use a number of anthologies, new and old, with my classes.

Book companies are forever churning out newer and flashier volumes, many of them multiculturally and politically correct. We may be living in the golden age of the anthology, possibly because we live in a time when people like to check things off, thinking that by scanning the latest anthology on whatever subject, they now know all about it. It may also be the way of today’s marketplace of specialized interests. Thus we have everything from Christmas Stories and Favorite Dog Tales to Slave Narratives and Black Lesbian Poetry.

Anthologies are one of the best examples of the failed dream — the notion that one or two people can pick out literary selections that will please everyone. Such a notion is a delusion. From my own experience, I know there’s something missing from even the most definitive collections. Deals have to be made to secure the rights to various selections, so anthologists are forever being compromised. Certain authors don’t want to be anthologized, and often genre is given more consideration than the quality of the literature.

For the serious reader, the only valid use of any anthology is as a quick overview.

With all of the above in mind, I picked up a new anthology titled, “The Berkshire Reader,” and subtitled, “Writings from New England’s Secluded Paradise.” In his introduction, the editor writes, “It should be pointed out to geographical purists that `the Berkshires’ as a region extend beyond the political boundaries of Berkshire County, Massachusetts — eastward toward Northampton and Springfield, southward into the `Connecticut Berkshires,’ westward into the eastern edge of Columbia County, New York, and northward into the bottom of Vermont.”

The “Reader” is divided into four sections: (1) Wilderness to Settlement: 1676 to 1810, (2) The Secluded Paradise: 1810 to 1850, (3) Literature and Luxury: 1850 to 1914, and (4) The Accessible Paradise: 1914-1990.

Among the famous writers who wrote about the region are Jonathan Edwards and his “Sermon to the Stockbridge Indians,” William Cullen Bryant with some poems and letters, historian Francis Parkman and his essay, “Through the Berkshires by Train in 1842,” Oliver Wendell Holmes and his “Memories of Pittsfield,” W.E.B. DuBois and his “Growing up in Great Barrington,” and Edith Wharton, who described her Lenox summer home in “Life at The Mount.”

Intermingled with the famous literati are the works of many nonprofessional authors who provide interesting accounts of “the area’s textile industry, its medical life, its machine, electrical, and plastics manufacturing, or its commerce.” Charles Dickens visited the region in 1842 to meet with the Shakers and in his essay, “A Visit to Mount Lebanon,” he writes of his “hearty dislike of the old Shakers and a hearty pity for the young ones.”

Writers included who Maine can also claim are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow whose poem, “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” was inspired by his stays with his Appleton in-laws in Pittsfield; Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote about her relatives and early life in “How We Kept Thanksgiving at Oldtown”; Henry David Thoreau, who wrote about his travels in the area in his book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who named Tanglewood and who is referred to as “the best observer the Berkshires have ever had”; and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote about “Renovating Steepletop,” her house in Austerlitz, N.Y., near the Massachusetts line. There’s also Walter Prichard Eaton, who wrote such popular boys’ books as “The Boy Scouts in the Berkshires” as well as “The Boy Scouts on Katahdin.”

One of the great American literary friendships, that of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, flourished in the Berkshires. Melville lived at Pittsfield where he rewrote “Moby Dick,” dedicating it to Hawthorne.

Throughout this compendium of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, there are many memorable and arresting passages, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes’ tribute to the New England elm tree, the next extinction of which has changed radically the look of many towns and villages. As he writes, “Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and patient.”

Among current writers, readers may be surprised to see southern humorist Roy Blount Jr. included, but he lives in Mill River. However, poet Amy Clampitt, who summered in Maine, and who had a house in Lenox where she died last year, is not included.

For those people who have attended concerts at Tanglewood, gone to college at Williams and other western Massachusetts schools, who have hiked the trails of the Berkshires, and who remember Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” “The Berkshire Reader” should prove most entertaining and fascinating. I enjoyed my browsing and am adding my review copy to my reference shelf of anthologies.

Sanford Phippen is a writer who teaches English at Orono High School.