Publisher reviving Moore and Mayo

THE FIRE BALLOON, by Ruth Moore. Blackberry Books, Nobleboro, Maine; 347 pages, $15, softbound.

WHEN FOLEY CRADDOCK TORE OFF MY GRANDFATHER’S THUMB: THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RUTH MOORE & ELEANOR MAYO, edited by Sven Davisson, Blackberry Books, 247 pages, $14.59, softbound.

Among the treasures in the Maine Women Writers Collection housed at the University of New England is a bumper sticker that states “I Read Ruth Moore.”

Back in 1986, Blackberry Books began a campaign to bring Ruth Moore’s novels back into print. The Gotts Island-born novelist and poet, then in her early 80s, was considered one of the country’s finest writers, yet most of her books could be found only in secondhand bookstores or libraries. Blackberry has now reprinted six novels, as well as a book of poems, Moore’s letters and a collection of short stories.

The latest title to be resurrected is “The Fire Balloon,” Moore’s third novel, first published in 1948 by William Morrow & Co. Set in the fictional Maine coast village of Granite Hook, the book opens with a Fourth of July celebration hosted by summer people, the Beacons, to which locals, including the Sewell family, have been invited. The year is 1941; the fire balloon that Mr. Beacon releases at the end of his fireworks display might represent World War II, which is under way, but also comes to signify young Theoline Sewell’s ambitions to escape her lot in life.

The rest of the novel takes place in postwar years, following the diverse fortunes of the Sewell family and the people they come in contact with. Moore is especially skilled at limning the lives of fishermen. Her descriptions of lobstermen and weir tenders are expert and engaging. She also evokes the elements with a poet’s eye. The writer LaRue Spiker once praised a specific passage in “The Fire Balloon” that depicts “the first slow sigh of the onset of a storm.”

Moore’s language is rich in invention. Here’s the ever-critical Gram Sarah’s take on her son Morgan Sewell and his wife from away, Emily: “You take a man smart in everything else, and nine times out of ten he’d get mixed up with some slimpsy woman who never got her housework done – that Emly’d spudge around all day in a two-quart dish.” The spell check had a field day with “slimpsy” and “spudge.”

One of the most entertaining scenes in “The Fire Balloon” describes Emily Sewell’s encounter with Foley Craddock, a lobsterman who “looked like an old woodcock which somebody had shot years ago and tried, not too successfully, to stuff,” and his friend and rival, Uncle Wheat, a retired sea captain. Very pregnant and feeling sorry for herself, Emily flees the confines of her house to explore the ledgy shore where she meets up with the two codgers who manage to revive her spirits. Their interactions are written with the humor and timing of a scene in a Shakespeare comedy. In a letter written to a friend in 1953, E.B. White complimented Moore on this aspect of her writing: “I think one reason she’s so good is that she has such affection for the people she’s writing about.”

Moore wrote short stories early in her career, but as she stated in a letter to Sandy Phippen in 1985, “I got tired of rejection slips early on and chucked everything into an old chest where they came in handy for material in novels, now and again.” Indeed, two stories – the title one and “Pennies in the Water” – found in “When Foley Craddock Tore Off My Grandfather’s Thumb” served as the basis for scenes in “The Fire Balloon.”

The social interactions of “natives” and summer folk are the foundation for several stories in the collection, including the memorable “The Ladies from Philadelphia” (which first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1945) and “The Lonely of Heart.” Akin to some of the short fiction of Ted Holmes, “The Soldier Shows His Medal” (originally published in The New Yorker in 1945) is a study in Yankee modesty. A son of Maine returning to his village hides his medal for fear of the islanders’ rebuke: “Guess he thinks he’s something, going round trimmed up like a Christmas tree.”

Ruth Moore met Eleanor Mayo in 1940. They eventually bought land in the Mount Desert town of Tremont, on the road to the Bass Harbor Light, built a house and lived together till Mayo died in 1981. The latter’s literary career echoed her companion’s: she published a number of novels, several of which drew critical favor, then later went out of print.

Mayo doesn’t enjoy the reputation Moore does, yet her contributions to Maine literature merit a reappraisal. In what one hopes is a first step in this direction, six of her short works are printed here. The best of the batch, “Summertime,” is a sympathetic portrait of a young girl who is punished for her imagination until the day the truth of one of her fears comes to light. The short stories of J.D. Salinger came to mind while reading it.

A nonfiction piece, “The Owner of the Apples,” features the kind of commentary on modern life found in the essays of the late John Gould. Complaining about modern machinery, including the chain saw, Mayo writes, “there’s a lot of thinking that doesn’t get done now because the man who could think through the world’s simpler problems while his buck saw quietly snored its gradual way down through the good solid meat of a maple cordwood stick, no longer dares to.”

Kudos to Blackberry Books for the revival it continues to fuel.

Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.