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Alumni/ae
1928-Edmund L. "Skip" Eveleth. A Documentary of Igor I. Sikorsky. (Walsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 2001)
1943-Caldwell Titcomb. [Forward to] Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. [As recorded by Lucien Price.] (David R. Godine, 2001) [Originally published in 1954 by Little, Brown]
Christopher A. Thurber. "Internal Leadership Development." In Camping Magazine.(November/
December 2001)
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Of Islands and Beaches
Snow Island (MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2002) is set on a remote island off the New England coast just as the United States is being drawn into World War II, but this subtle and assured novel actually got its start at Phillips Exeter during the year that author Katherine Towler spent as the Academy's Bennett Fellow. The novel may be Towler's first, but she writes with the poise and generous perspective of an experienced novelist, transporting the reader out to the "tiny, unprotected slip of land," deftly introducing its inhabitants and gradually revealing how their lives have been shaped, and scarred, by island living. Her protagonists are an unlikely pair, united by loss. George Tibbits survived combat during the First World War only to be crippled by a blow upon his return to Snow Island: the suicide, just days before, of the beloved aunt who had raised him there. Sixteen-year-old Alice Daggett has lost her father, a fisherman, to the sea-leaving her to run the island store and fend for herself, as well as her younger brother and feckless mother. Now a recluse in his early 40s, George has tried to flee his grief by leaving Snow Island, but finds himself unable to resist the island's "lonely pull." Every spring, he boards the ferry from the mainland to recreate his fateful homecoming from the war: "He wanted to duplicate that first homecoming as precisely as possible because it was only then that he could forget, for a moment, what had waited for him on the island that day. It was only then he could make himself believe it could have been different." Alice, unlike the other islanders, understands the need to repeat a past one is helpless to change: "There were some things a person had to do, over and over, for no reason but the doing of them. She had to go down to the dock and watch for her father sometimes, just to remind herself what her years with him had been like, to make them feel not so far away." The book does grant Alice a chance to change the past, after a fashion, when she helps rescue George from a fate similar to her father's-an act that sets both their lives on new courses. "What kind of fate was this," George wonders, "that damned and saved in equal measure, that did not care?" Alice, too, will find herself damned and saved over the course of the novel, by her first brushes with love and desire, and by a growing war that intrudes upon the island's separate peace. Towler, a contributing editor to the Bulletin, clearly knows her islands, both the real and figurative ones her characters inhabit. Snow Island is a place where everyone knows everyone else's business, but not necessarily their hearts; a place where close confinement brings people together and drives them apart. It is a place where the year-round islanders like Alice depend on the wealthy summer residents for their livelihood, but at the cost of feeling like second-class citizens on their own island. Alice is quick to notice "the incredulous, condescending expressions" on the summer people's faces when they ask how she can stand the island winters, and quick to hear what's left unsaid: only small people could be content with such a small world. But then they "never saw the island in the winter light, when the setting sun turned the brittle fronds of beach grass into golden fields. They never felt the stiff force of the wind on the west side, so steady off the water the icicles hung sideways from the eaves of the houses." Towler's prose is illuminated by this same clear light, this same bracing beauty. Snow Island is a novel in which fate strikes randomly and without warning, but its author cares deeply about her characters, and so will her readers.
GOING HOME AGAIN
Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond (Beacon Press; 2002), a wonderful collection of essays by Roland Merullo '71, contains a moving account of the immigrant experience. Actually, there are at least two such accounts: In "What a Father Leaves," Merullo's closely observed, deeply felt eulogy for his late father, he notes how his father, "like millions of first-generation European immigrants [growing up] in the first quarter of this century," found himself "caught between the strictures of the old world and the promises and possibilities of the new." But Merullo underwent his own immigrant experience when, as a 15-year-old, he left his hometown of Revere, MA-"a kind of working-class heaven" -to attend Phillip Exeter. Many Exonians have made similar journeys, and know what it is to be caught between worlds. But Merullo resists the ready assumptions that attend such journeys, "that Revere was a certain kind of place, that Phillips Exeter was a certain kind of place, that growing up in one and going to school in the other was the equivalent of changing blood type at age 15." Not that Merullo was unaware of "the differences between the laboring class and the inheritance class," or of the fact that some of his friends "went skiing in Switzerland on winter vacation, [while] my family made day trips into Boston to go to the Museum of Science, and had pizza afterward at Bill Ash's on the beach." But what really mattered, he writes, "was that my roommate was a good guy, that I could play hockey every winter day on a real ice rink, make the JV baseball team, walk alone in the woods. . . . It made me feel good that just about everyone took home books and studied hard for tests. . . . I had fled one paradise and stumbled into another." Paradise seldom comes cheap, and Merullo, in a marvelous image, describes how his mother and father "turned themselves into a sort of parental rocket engine, burning up their own lives so that I might be propelled into some other orbit we could barely imagine but which was supposed to be better." And for himself, Merullo acknowledges "that invisible weight, that small sorrow" that immigrants carry, even if they would not return from whence they came. But in all his essays, as in each succeeding chapter of his life, Merullo works to glimpse "a solid bottom beneath [life's] tidal sweeps of good and bad fortune."
— Beth Brosnan |
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