Closing a good story
To the editors:
Brian Blomerth’s back page Sketchbook, “The Mushroom Painter” (January 23), deserves a happy ending. Although Jean-Henri Fabre was concerned, as Blomerth noted, about the future of his mushroom paintings, they are safe and well cared for at the Harmas de Fabre museum – Fabre’s old home in Sérignan-du-Comtat, France, which is now part of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and is operated as a museum, garden and study center. The paintings were also published in 1991 as a limited edition book as “Les Champignons de Jean-Henri Fabre.” Neither rats nor a great-nephew attacked these treasures, thanks to the work of his family and the museum.
Donald H. Pfister
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer is the Asa Gray research professor of systematic botany at Harvard University.
Crossed paths
To the editors:
Regarding Troy Jollimore’s review of “Jim Harrison: Complete Poems” (January 16): For many years, beginning 40 years ago, we stayed at a Lake Michigan resort on the Leelanau Peninsula owned by the Jolliffe family and called the Jolli- lodge . One day Mrs. Jolliffe showed me the main building, built for wealthy Chicago folks in the 1920s. When she opened the door to a bedroom, still furnished as the original owners had left it, I saw a huge bottle of Gallo wine on the rickety desk. Mrs. Jolliffe said, “Oh, that’s Jim Harrison’s. He comes here to write when he needs some peace and privacy.” I nearly knelt in the doorway, but held back. I knew Harrison lived on the peninsula, but this was the closest I’ve ever come to a sighting, despite many visits to the area. (We also have a poster made by the Leelanau Cellars with a bit of Harrison’s poetry in the guest bathroom.)
Judith K. Simonson
Grand Rapids, Mich.
An Inconvenient Admission
To the editors:
Your review of Kendra James’ “Admissions” (January 23) brought back a flood of memories, including tragic ones. I am white, but I too have experienced the paradox of being an outsider in the insular world of an elite boarding school. Fifty years ago, I was a scholarship student at Lawrenceville School, a prep school with classes of 12, teachers with Ivy League degrees, and amenities such as black men serving food to white boys whose last names revealed what businesses their families owned.
To get there, I dragged a suitcase that weighed as much as I did through New York’s Port Authority Terminal. I’ll never forget the intellectual excitement I felt when a Yale-trained teacher let me read and write about books like “A Clockwork Orange.” I will also never forget a school official’s failure to do simple, obvious things when I was struggling emotionally in my sophomore year. My working-class background made me an outsider. Both of my parents suffered from severe mental illness, which put me at even more risk than adolescent boys in an unsupervised environment.
Reading the review of Kendra James’ memoir was painful, even 50 years after my own experience. Dazzling donations create the conditions for excellent education. Efforts to create racial and class diversity are commendable. But when elite schools take outsiders into what can be a Lewis Carroll novel scale of cultural change, they have a duty to reach those students as the young, vulnerable people they are. That didn’t happen for me.
David A. Scott
Columbus, Ohio
To slow down
To the editors:
In her By the Book interview (Jan 16), Annie Leibovitz reports that Susan Sontag once told her that if she read as slowly as Leibovitz, she wouldn’t read anything. Some adults are quite capable of putting children to shame about their reading, but this is proof that anyone, regardless of age, can be subjected to these kinds of condescending comments. Perhaps Sontag has “breathed in books,” but I suspect it’s likely that instead of inhaling books, Leibovitz enjoys them, and ends up getting more out of her reading than people who keep an endless reading list and confuse book consumption rate with comprehension. .
David English
Acton, Mass.