In 2012, a new landlord took over the pub, and, fairly or unfairly, a wave of negative publicity followed. There were newspaper stories about a police search for unlicensed hunting firearms at the Old Forge in 2014 (the guns were confiscated but no criminal charges were filed) and unpaid utility bills (the owner reportedly settled with the electricity company out of court). There was talk that the owner was excluding locals and muddy visitors. Those of us who watched from afar wondered if it was going to be the end of the legend.
Then, earlier this year, British papers reported that disgruntled regulars had constructed their own drinking spot directly across the road from the Old Forge in protest. Called the Table, it was said to have started as a plank of wood that evolved into a little shack and essentially served as a DIY pub, built, maintained, and patronized by the most remote community on mainland Britain.
The Art of War reminds us of the immense range of human experience and feeling, also that people are not Pavlovian creatures to be led easily by carrots and sticks, and we hold such contradictory views that our “considered” judgments are apt to turn on a dime. Eschewing abstractions, this classic returns us, time and time again, to the human scale and the extraordinary deeds that men (and women) find themselves capable of, given the right situation.
Reading Emerson’s essays did not feel like reading other books. Later, when I tried to describe the experience to a friend, I asked, “Have you ever read a book that made you feel, like, drunk?” Emerson’s aphorisms are forceful, his cadences dizzying, his appeal to individual will seductive. Normally I am an orderly, chapter-per-day kind of reader, using up a pack of Post-it flags and then typing up the important quotes later. But my copy of Emerson’s Essays has only one Post-it flag, in the introduction by Douglas Crase (an Emerson quote: “It seems the one lesson which this miraculous world has to teach us, to the sacred, to stand aloof, and suffer no man and no custom, no mode of thinking to intrude upon us and bereave us of our infinitude”). After that, I lost my bearings. I was always just somewhere in the book, underlining and circling, hunched over, my face too close to the page.
Right after he died, all I ever wanted to do was talk about how great my dad was. People never quite related to that urge properly, leaving me feeling frustrated and thwarted at every turn. I was so dialed into my grief that it was unimaginable to me how people could talk to me about anything else. I wanted other people to tell me funny stories that made my father sound as cool and charming as I’d always believed him to be, without my having to ask for it. That was the thing that my dad’s old coworker did for me. I shot the signals of my mourning into space for months, fully expecting them to die unreceived. And when I least expected it, someone sent signals back that said, “You are not the last living witness to the relationship you had with your father.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, could never quite understand why his detective stories excited such hoopla. While grateful for the pots of cash they brought in, he firmly believed that his name would live in literary history because of his two deeply researched historical novels, “The White Company” (1891) and “Sir Nigel” (1906). The first and more famous is available this month in an exemplary annotated edition by Doug Elliott and Roy Pilot, while the second is arguably an even better written, more thrilling swashbuckler.
In this way, “A Long Petal of the Sea,” a page-turning story rich with history and surprising subplots that keep the novel unpredictable to the end, serves as a counterpoint and companion to Allende’s first novel. This time, though, she focuses on the lives of the downtrodden but no less heroic figures of war.