A cove of her own Prospect Harbor writer offers insights into the history of seasonal visitors and locals

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Miriam Colwell couldn’t have been more delighted. In the chicken house behind her home in Prospect Harbor, she discovered a novel that held her rapt from beginning to end. The story, set in a seaside village, explored the relationships between natives who run the place and visitors who are enchanted by its rustic charms. Colwell, who is 89 and has lived in Maine for most of her life, felt at home with the characters, the landscape, the writing.

She read: The town lies along the sea, around the fingers of land to east and west, and up the sloping hill.

And: The sea begins to steal the spreading color from the sky, like a giant prankish chameleon.

Happy as she was, Colwell could hardly believe what she was reading. She didn’t remember writing a word of it. But write it she did – in the 1950s, after Random House published her 1945 debut book, “Wind Off the Water.” She had called this unpublished manuscript “Plus and Minus” and shopped it around among publishers.

“It wasn’t picked up. So I put it out in the file in the chicken house, and it has been sitting there quietly not causing any trouble for 50 years,” said Colwell, whose deep voice comes in a measured, Down East cadence. “When I rediscovered it, I liked it. I read it as though I hadn’t written it.”

About two years ago, she shared her discovery with Constance Hunting, a creative writing professor at the University of Maine and publisher at Puckerbrush Press in Orono. Hunting was amused by the story’s wry humor and asked to publish the book under the title “Contentment Cove.” Colwell, whose 1955 novel “Young” was reprinted by Puckerbrush in 1998, agreed.

While the manuscript was at the printers in April, Hunting died. Her colleague and close friend Nancy MacKnight, a retired professor of literature at UM, took on some of the final duties and has helped with promotion. Earlier this month, MacKnight launched the book at a party in Orono with friends, academics and literary types who showed up on one of the hottest days of summer to welcome “Contentment Cove” to the shelves of Maine literature.

“I think of this book as gentle satire,” said Colwell, while waiting for the celebration to begin. She was wearing her signature dark glasses. “Connie said she didn’t think it was satire. She said it was just funny. I was writing about characters who were very real to me, but they are not unique. In fact, I think I speak for what is happening on the coast.”

Indeed, if there is a recurring theme in Colwell’s book, it is the power of an idyllic fishing village in the imaginations of its pleasure-seeking visitors and hardworking residents. The dreams of both classes interact, intersect and sometimes clash.

“There’s a Maine myth that has been going on a long time, that Maine literature is all romantic,” said MacKnight. “Miriam is one of the authors who punctured that myth. It’s social commentary, cultural commentary. She writes about the people who come into the village and are entranced by it. It was not a loss of innocence, she says, but something more fatal.”

Colwell’s novels gently trace the development of summer culture in Maine – from her first book about a fishing village that is self-sustaining to a story of a girl whose mother bakes pies for summer people to the influx of affluent summer people in “Contentment Cove.”

While some say the characters read as stereotypes, the newly released book fits squarely into an American tradition.

“The themes recall ‘The Great Gatsby’ and the whole issue of class in America,” said Burton Hatlen, English professor and director of the National Poetry Foundation in Orono. “A major theme is that the very rich or the moderately rich are different from you and me, that wealth and money inspire a certain kind of carelessness. Miriam has a definite eye to class gradations within that community.”

Hatlen called the book: nasty, funny, witty, biting, perceptive. Colwell knows that part of the world, he said, and has a keen eye for the nuances of its social life.

As a child on the Schoodic Peninsula, Colwell knew the handful of summer residents. She played with their children who were simply part of the warm-weather lifestyle. But one summer visitor, Chenoweth Hall, changed her life. The two women met through mutual friends the summer after Colwell’s first year at college in Orono. Hall asked Colwell to go to New York City, and eventually Colwell did. She spent her days writing poetry and learning about city life. She loved it.

Several years later, when Colwell returned to Prospect Harbor permanently to step into her family’s legacy as postmaster of the village, she did so with regret. She did not want to leave New York. But there was a payoff: From her unique perch at the town’s center, she observed the many riches and rumblings in the lives around her. They would become the fictionalized settings, characters and issues in her work, including “Contentment Cove.” She stayed with the job more than 30 years – “It was the least stressful possible job you could have,” she said. “I never minded it” – taking breaks to travel with Chenny, as Hall was called, and to breathe the air of her beloved New York.

Hall, who was a violinist and artist, died in 1999 at the age of 90. Colwell is writing a remembrance of their life together. Technically, Colwell says, she stopped writing in the 1960s. But her winters now are taken up with crafting the story of her life with her companion from “away.”

When she is not writing, Colwell is busy with several reading groups, occasional classes on literature, luncheons with friends, symphony concerts. Not long ago, she gave up playing tennis, a game she took up in her 60s and quickly mastered with her long, lithe limbs. After her first novel came out in the 1940s, she went from being a local darling to being a local “writer” celebrity. She maintains that position to this day.

“She’s a very, very important part of the community,” said Ruth Sargent, a volunteer worker at the local Dorcas Library in Prospect Harbor. “Everyone knows her, and she knows everyone. She remembers people who lived here years and years ago. She has been a very sage observer of the times. You see in her books, though written about the 1950s, that many things are just as true today as back then.”

A drive with Colwell along the twisty roads of Prospect Harbor and nearby villages was like stepping back in time. She motioned toward a swampy pond on Schoodic Point and talked about skating there as a girl. She named birds, pointed out islands in the distance, and quietly witnessed the orange evening light on craggy cliffs. Passing houses, she talked about who in her family had owned which one, and who owns it now. At a horseshoe beach a few miles outside of town, she asked to pull over at a small cottage. She and Hall lived there before moving into her grandfather’s home, where she now lives with her two cats.

Back at her rambling farmhouse, with neatly manicured grounds and a ready croquet set on the lawn, Colwell spoke about her life – her mother’s early death from influenza, visits with her disabled father across town, a charmed childhood, grandparents who raised her, and endless stories about visitors she and Hall entertained through the years. Their home was a Northeastern salon filled with artists and writers and conversation. John Marin, Paul Strand, Ruth Moore, Berenice Abbott and Marsden Hartley were all friends. Colwell might have missed New York, but, to anyone else, it must have looked as if New York came to her.

And it keeps on coming in the environs of her ancestral village in the form of summer visitors.

“This has been a slowly evolving situation,” she said of the changes she has witnessed in nearly nine decades. “Of course, Chenny was one of the first outlanders to come here and be a part of the scene. For so many years, I had a foot in her side and at the same time, I was deeply rooted and part of my community. Going up and down the streets of this village, there are many more people living here from away who don’t come from roots like mine. These are people who are on the school board and are selectmen. It’s a completely different scene. In re-reading this book – which I don’t remember writing – I realized how this gradual infiltration had taken place. But I don’t feel any need for resentment. It’s just something that has occurred in a natural progression.”

And naturally, Colwell continues with fascination to watch the changes around her. She may even think, as she reflects upon her rediscovered book, that summer people and locals continue to find their way into, and in some cases out of, Contentment Cove.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.

Excerpt from “Contentment Cove” by Miriam Colwell

Fifteen minutes after Randall got to the Post Office with the mail, the letters would be sorted, everyone would be gone and it would be as quiet as a tomb. But beforehand, it was a small bedlam.

To add to the confusion, the Peterson twins came galloping in. They could always be counted on to find a nice mud hole to play in, even during a dry summer, and they were a sight.

Mrs. Van Buran Chubb Pearl was talking to Hilly, but when she saw the twins she stopped and clapped her hands. “The precious urchins! Did you ever see anything so picturesque, their darling, dirty faces!”

“She’s been on Life magazine, dear,” Mrs. Potter whispered to Hilly. “Isn’t that enthusiasm of hers contagious? Such eagerness, about everything!”

“God, her poor husband!” Hilly muttered.

It always sounded funny when she said things like that, so dead pan, but often I wished she wouldn’t, because when you thought it over sometimes it sounded more as though she was sort of jealous of people like Mrs. Potter and her friend who could be so outspoken and enthusiastic about things, which wasn’t in her nature.

“Mina, aren’t they priceless?” Mrs. Pearl called. Everyone was listening and smiling. “Have you ever, ever seen such absolutely blank, priceless little faces. Ravishing! And so gloriously filthy! How old are you, lambs? Tell the nice lady how old you are. Mina darling, they’re struck dumb! They don’t know what to make of the city lady, do they? Isn’t it priceless! You divine, divine little creatures. They’re not able to utter a single word.”

Usually they didn’t bother with uttering single words, they shouted at the top of their lungs, but now they just stood staring at Mrs. Van Buran Chubb Pearl. Bobby began to suck his thumb.

“Lover, come here and give them an ice cream cone. Buy those adorable urchins something. Look at them taking the city lady all in, they’re so devastating, utterly blank! Will you eat some ice cream, angels?”

-PUBLISHED COURTESY OF PUCKERBRUSH PRESS