Telling Tales
We usually come across Edward Holmes's short stories about Maine singly, one here, one there, in popular New England journals. Fortunately, Holmes also gets the urge from time to time to collect his scattered stories in one volume. When he does, the whole turns out to equal a great deal more than the sum of its parts. Short stories seem something like pearls: Each is a self-contained entity with its unique sheen and symmetry, but when many are strung together the luster of each combines to create the luminosity of the whole.
In this collection Holmes adds some new pearls. No fewer than 9 of the 17 stories in Mostly Maine are published here for the first time. The new pieces seem especially significant, moreover, because in them, freed from the popular magazine format, Holmes is able not only to experiment with several interesting new story-telling techniques but also to devote greater length to the development of a story than a magazine could tolerate (his final story is 78 pages long, almost a novella). Thus the new pieces in this collection seem more, mature, substantial works of fiction than the short-short, told-around-the-cracker-barrel vignettes that have previously appeared in Maine Life,Down East, or Yankee.
Perhaps more important, it is only when we see a sizable number of his stories cheek by jowl in a single volume that we begin to tumble to what Holmes has been up to all along. Read together, his stories cohere; they come to seem more chapters in a single novel than 17 separate stories. What Holmes has achieved, we finally see, is the creation of his own fully developed, imagined, fictive world.
His locus is of course "mostly Maine," but his is a Down East that never was on land or sea. He gives his fictive settings various plausible names: Rockhaven, Fishhawk Point, Medric Island, Oak Harbor. But search the map as you will from Jonesport to Cape Elizabeth you won't find these places. Places like them, of course, but not these. For they exist Only in the author's imagination; they are his own settings, integral backdrops for his own created world.
He peoples his Oak Harbor and its environs with numbers of fully imagined characters. Imagined, note, not imaginary; and characters, not people. For like his places, Holmes's characters are not to be found in the flesh either. Aaron Dexter, Joe Teak, Uncle Mark Hanscomb; Clara Holbrook, Doc Wheatley: The names are plausible; they ring true. Even the general lineaments may be familiar. If you know Maine, you know people like them: that penny-pinching skinflint who went broke keeping the country store up near Ellsworth a few summers back; the close-mouthed lobsterman from Boothbay who used to deliver your milk on his days ashore; the wise-cracking young fellow from Camden who made a pretty fair living summers fleecing the tourists at his roadside stand over on Route 1. "Characters" abound Down East (especially in tourist season); you can't miss them. But characters, the characters in Holmes's stories, are to be found only in his own imagined world.
What emerges from Holmes's fiction, then, is what emerges from any successful work of the imagination: not verisimilitude, but truth. Or reality, if you prefer. But always reality transmuted by the creative imagination of the writer. And it may surprise those readers who know Holmes only from his pieces in MaineLife or Yankee that his vision of truth embraces much that is dark, somber, as bleak as the Down East coast itself. An unrepentant mill worker murders a dog warden who had killed his dog; boys fall in love and are crudely disillusioned, their elders whore; boats are splintered on reefs, fishermen drown; men lust openly after other men's wives and vice versa. And outside Oak Harbor waits the sea, the implacable enemy of all.
MOSTLY MAINE:Short Stories and Other WritingsBy Edward M. Holmes '33University of Maine, 1977. 245 pp. $5.95
