Poetics and Ruminations

Shelf Life

 

SHELF LIFE

By Lewis Turco

From Portland Monthly, December 2015, p. 93

 http://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2015/11/december-2015/

 

          On occasion I’ve been asked how I came to be involved in bookselling, but I have actually been involved with books on various levels all of my life. My parents were a Baptist minister and a Methodist missionary. Though we had no money during the Depression, when I was born, our home was full of books of all sorts. My mother read to me from the cradle, and I soon learned to read for myself. Nor was writing a mysterious act, because every week for as long as I can remember I watched my father hunched over his typewriter hunting out and pecking at his weekly sermons.

          I began to collect books myself as soon as I could read, and I enjoyed reading so much that I very early decided that I wanted to be a writer, to my parents’ sorrow, for they wanted me to be a preacher.  I was soon myself bent over that old manual typewriter like my father, hunting and pecking out short stories. In junior high I wrote articles and poems for the school paper, and just before I entered high school, when I was fifteen in 1949, one of my short stories won a prize in a summertime high school fiction contest. It was published by the sponsor, a local newspaper in Meriden, Connecticut, where I grew up. I had been a paperboy since I was in the fifth grade, and in high school I was clippings librarian (called the “morgue clerk”) and cub reporter for The Morning Record.

           My 7^th-grade shop teacher of Lincoln Junior High School, John Houdlette, a native Mainer born, like his wife, in Dresden Mills, had a daughter named Jean whom I had noticed early on. Later, at Meriden High, we were classmates, and we were members of the same crowd. Some of the boys in that crowd started a science-fiction reading club called The Fantaseers which supported a one-bookcase library at my house — in 2004 I published a book titled Fantaseers, A Book of Memories; there is a photo of the Fantaseers’ library in it. By the time we graduated, of course, all those books were left behind and became part of my own collection. By the time Jean and I were married in 1956 after my Navy stint, I had books everywhere and no place to put them, so I brought a lot of them up to Jean’s family place in Dresden, Maine, adding them to the large collection that was already there. They were like snow: over the years they accumulated in drifts.

          In 1960 I began teaching English literature and creative writing at Fenn College, now Cleveland State University, and over the years since then I’ve written a great many book manuscripts, fifty-six of which have appeared in print. However, it was a late colleague of mine at the State University of New York College at Oswego, where I directed the Program in Writing Arts and taught for 31 years, who got me started as a bookseller. His name was David Winslow. He had a Ph.D. in folklore, but he had had several other careers as well, including selling antiques and books. He taught me what I know about books as a commodity when he and I, on weekends mostly, became what are known as “book scouts.” We would sell the books we found upstate to downstate New York book dealers. And, of course, I also sold some of the books I had been accumulating.

          One day David called me up to say that there was a big sale of stuff in Hannibal, not far from Oswego. He said that they’d advertised books, but when we got there all we found of books was a box of paperbacks under one table. Dave sneered and walked away to look at other things, but I went through the paperbacks and found one, a first edition paperback original titled My Hope for America by Lyndon Baines Johnson. I bought it for ten cents.

          When we got back to the car Dave saw that I’d bought something, asked to see it, and then began to rag me about it. All I’d paid for it was a dime, but he acted as though I’d thrown away a fortune. By the time we got back to my house I was furious and had decided that I would wreak my revenge.

          My mother had been good with handicrafts, and she had taught me how to bind a book. In college I had bound my paperback textbooks so that they’d last longer, and as an adult I had taken to binding paperbacks and restoring old books as a hobby, so I took the Johnson book, quarter-bound it in cloth and leather, put it in a package with an old leather-bound hymnal, and sent it with return postage to former President Lyndon Johnson. In an enclosed letter I asked him if he would be willing to sign my book in exchange for the hymnal, which I hoped he would accept as a gift.

          Not a great while after that I got the book back. President Johnson had signed a Presidential bookplate for me, and he included a letter on official stationery telling me that he was delighted with the hymnal, which he was going to place in the L. B. J. Presidential Library in Texas. I pasted the bookplate onto the inside-front cover of My Hope for America, and I tipped his letter into the volume. Then I called David and asked him to come over to the house so that I could show him a book I had picked up for ten cents at a lousy sale in Hannibal. Later on, I sold the book for a lot of money on one of our downstate book trips.

          On another of those trips Dave took me to a book dealer in Johnstown, New York, where I was shown an old book that had no cover page, and it was missing some other pages as well. At the time I was collecting books and doing research for a book manuscript I would soon write titled Satan’s Scourge: A History of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697. I thought I knew what the book was that the dealer had shown me, despite its lack of a title page, so I bought it for $25.00. When I got it home I looked it up and sure enough, it was a first edition copy of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, etc., edited, with a Preface, by Meric. Casaubon, and published in London in1659.

          Dr. Dee was Royal Mathematician to Queen Elizabeth I, but he was also interested in spiritual matters. The book I had found is one of the most famous occult books in the English language, a record of the conversations William Kelly, Dr. Dee’s con-man pal, had with Madimi and many other celestial beings, as he dictated them to the good Doctor who could see and hear nothing in the crystal Kelly used. Kelly came to a bad end. My wife and I saw Dr. Dee’s crystal ball — it was egg-shaped, really — in the British Museum while we were in England in 1993.

          I wrote to the Cornell University Library, which has a great occult collection, and asked them to send me photocopies of the missing pages of the book. I then restored it and hand-bound it in studded, leather-covered wooden boards in 1971. Many years later, after I had finished my own book, begun the Mathom Bookshop in Dresden, and gone on-line, I sold that book to someone in Australia for $1000.00.

          During our summers in Maine I would go out on book-finding trips, sometimes alone, sometimes with Jean, and sometimes her sister Nathalie would come along. One of the places we would go to find books was Frank McQuaid’s Book Barn in Edgecomb. He had been a World War II bomber pilot, and I had been a sailor during and after the Korean War. We held similar political views, so often he and I would sit around gabbing, and then he began to take me out on some of his book-buying rounds as well. Not all of them, of course, but when I went out on my own, especially to the Montsweag Flea Market, I would discover that, no matter how early I got up, Frank would always have gotten there ahead of me and scooped up all the good books. It became quite frustrating for me.

          One Saturday or Sunday morning during the summer I arrived at Montsweag to find that Frank was still there, but well ahead of me. So I dragged along in his wake, looking at the stuff he’d rejected. There’s an old saying in the book trade: Not everyone can be an expert in everything. His specialties didn’t include modern first editions in particular, and I was interested in those, of course. I stopped at a stall to look at a few books and discovered a first edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach that Frank had missed. It was in good condition with a dustjacket, so I bought it for a dollar or under and later sold it for a few hundred dollars. The best part of that deal, though, was knowing I had beaten Frank McQuaid at his own game that once, anyway.

          Another person who roped me into the bookselling business was Charlie Davis, still a legendary character in Oswego, New York, and in the worlds of folklore and jazz as well. He turned from music to business to poetry and fiction writing and editing.  He established his own publishing company, The Mathom Publishing Company, in 1977, two years before The Mathom Bookshop of Dresden, Maine, was founded.

          For many years Davis had been a partner in a local business firm, Brown-Davis Furniture, and when he decided to return to college in the mid-1970s he was half-retired.  Retirement for Charlie simply meant expanding his horizons — not that they had been previously very limited.  One might say he now had more time to devote to his vocations.  Two of these had always been music and verse composition.  He began by taking a course in poetry writing with Roger Dickinson-Brown, then a member of the staff of my Program in Writing Arts at SUNY Oswego.

          Davis had grown up in Indiana.  His father had been a close friend of a neighbor, James Whitcomb Riley, the "Hoosier Poet," and Charlie early came under Riley's benevolent influence.  Later on, Charlie graduated from Notre Dame University and, upon his graduation, organized a group of musicians during the hey-day of the Big Bands — he wrote about it in his book, published by Mathom, That Band from Indiana — and was very successful on the swing and hot jazz circuits.  Those of you who watched Ken Burns’ history of jazz on PBS may have noticed a marquee at the Brooklyn Theatre that read, “Charlie Davis and His Joy Gang,” which shared the billing with a young singer named Ethel Merman. Charlie’s band singer was another young person named Dick Powell. One of his compositions of the period was "Copenhagen," a jazz classic that has been performed by nearly all the famous swing and jazz artists since it was introduced.  The composer drew royalties from it twice a year until his death in his nineties.

          The first course Davis took at my college was titled "The Nature of Poetry."  It was a beginner's course, but stringent and technical.  In it the student must write verse exercises in every prosody, schema, and genre imaginable.

          Davis did well for Dickinson-Brown,* and he began to involve himself in the extensive literary scene on campus.  He gave readings with other students, and his work was always popular because it was..."quaint" is the only word to describe it.  The Riley influence was clear, at least to the faculty if not to the students, who had never heard of the Hoosier Poet.

          When Davis asked to take the second course in the sequence of three undergraduate poetry courses in the Program he was asked whether he had ever completed a B. A.  He replied that he had a Ph. B. in business administration from Notre Dame, and he was denied permission to take the course, but he was told that he could enroll in the graduate seminar titled "Conference Course in Writing Poetry," which he did.  I taught it. He was told that the project of the course involved writing a long poem, something he had never done, and he was (atypically for the class) given a proscription: he was not to write a single rhymed couplet.  Instead, he was going to do something difficult.  Difficult for him, that is.

          "But what?" he asked, baffled.

          "Well, have you ever heard of William Carlos Williams?"

          "No, should I have?"

"Yes, since he's a famous contemporary of yours.  Your first assignment is to read Williams' Paterson."

          Davis did so.  No sooner had he digested the book than he began to write...And So the Irish Built a Church, a story about Oswego written, like Paterson, in prose and verse, with diary entries, newspaper clippings, songs, and what-have-you (it is impossible for the reader to identify what Davis invented and what he researched), tossed together in a seemingly random, but for all that, nevertheless, highly wrought melange of lore and character and incident.  Davis got so carried away that he even composed a pseudo-nineteenth century musical piece and copied it out on aged paper suitably charred to look as though it had been saved from the conflagration that had consumed the original church.

          The other members of the class were no less busy than Charlie Davis, and as the semester developed it became obvious that this was a remarkable group of students doing fine things. The Davis piece was not the first work to be published from that class, but he was without doubt writing the longest work — it turned out to be 120 pages in length — and the most popular. Everyone was interested in reading the next installment though Charlie, doing something totally new and experimental for him (except where he managed to sneak in a rhymed song against orders), could not believe his classmates were not dissembling when they applauded him.

          Since its publication in book form, people who know W. C. Williams claim that ...And So the Irish... is more readable than its model.  Since Paterson is a modern classic, this opinion is heretical.  The main criticism of the Davis opus may be that it begins to a degree shakily.  Riley is recognizable in the sentiment, and Williams in the form: the two do not mix well early on.  But as the book progresses, Riley and Williams disappear and Davis rises above his sources to become one of the most engaging literary personalities of the late 20^th century, just as the man himself was larger than life.

         Well, when Charlie had finished, he told me he was too old to start sending his book around to publishers and wait for them to accept it. He thought he would do it himself. So he gave himself, with my kibitzing, a short course in book publishing. When The Irish appeared it soon sold out, and Charlie decided to start his final career as a publisher. He asked me for a name for the press. I suggested “Mathom.” He asked what that meant. I told him it was a word out of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that described the sort of things that filled the burrow homes of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins: things that one had no earthly use for, but that one simply couldn’t bear to throw away. Charlie thought that accurately described the sorts of things he and I would publish (without asking, he assigned me as Editor-in-Chief of Mathom).

         Two years later, in 1979, I established my summer project, the Mathom Bookshop of Dresden, Maine, which would be the major outlet for the books we published. In 1996 I retired from teaching and turned my attention full time (more or less) to the bookshop. Two of the last books Mathom published in Oswego were Charlie Davis’ The Lake Trout and Legend Society’s Cookbook, 1980, and the story of Charlie’s career as a musical director, That Band from Indiana, 1982. One of the two latest is my book of poetry The Green Maces of Autumn, Voices in an Old Maine House, which was issued in 2002. It is a series of monologues by the people who live in the 1754 house built by Sylvester Gardiner on the property where my wife’s family has lived for a century or two, and where the Mathom Bookshop was located in the barn.

          However, I opened my shop in the tractor garage of the farm on Blinn Hill Road and began to sell some of the books I’d accumulated. I started out with one short shelf of books, and I put a handmade sign out on the road. Pretty soon I added a shelf, and then another and another, and then I was building permanent bookshelves. One day the Maine State D.O.T. stopped by to tell me I needed to register my business with the sales tax office, and my signs had to conform to rules and regulations. Things were beginning to get expensive.

          While I was in the garage I sold my books cheaply. Customers would stop by, and when they’d bought what they wanted they’d tell my wife that I was charging too little for my collection. In 1995 I decided to salvage the barn. I put a new floor into the northwest corner where it had collapsed, then built a room on it with shelves, lighting, a phone and other amenities. The next thing I had to do was move my books from the garage into the new bookshop, and while I was doing that, I decided to clean out my junk books and re-price everything.

          One of the books I ran across while I was doing this was a beat-up loose-leaf black cloth notebook bound in half red leather and holding a set of printed pamphlets, 390 pp. in all, constituting a course in Business Law taught at M.I.T. during the school year 1895-96. The pamphlets were in very good shape, but the binder was well worn and the spine was crumbling. It belonged to “C. B. Paine,” who apparently took the course during his “2nd year,” according to an ink notation on the rear pastedown. In the garage I’d had a sticker price on this item of ten cents.

          There were two semesters’ worth of printed pamphlets in the binder, held in upside down by short cords. The name of the teacher was on none of the first semester pamphlets, but on those of the second semester I found the name of the instructor: Louis D. Brandeis, later to become Justice of the United States Supreme Court. His specialty was business law, and, indeed, he was teaching at M.I.T. in the pertinent years.

          Obviously, I was no longer going to sell the binder and its contentsfor ten cents! But what price was I going to put on it? 1995 was the year when the Mathom Bookshop went on line, so I warmed up the computer, looked in Bookfinder.com and everywhere else I could think of, but could find no trace of another copy anywhere in the world. All I could do was shrug my shoulders and put an arbitrary price on the Brandeis item. I thought $800.00 sounded pretty good. As soon as Business Law appeared on line a Washington attorney snapped it up. I suspect I could have gotten a bit more than $800.00 for it, but at least my second price was better than my first!

           It was never hard to find books to sell. In fact, they found me. People were always calling me up to ask if I bought books, and of course I bought many more books than I sold, so my stock increased exponentially. One day, after I’d moved from the garage into the renovated barn, I arrived there to discover one of my neighbors had left piles of boxes filled with her collection of cookbooks in front of the barn door. I was fortunate that it hadn’t rained. She didn’t want payment, she just wanted to get rid of her books.

          Another day during the winter I received a phone call from a young man in Richmond who said he had a Jeep full of books to sell. I went over to look at them. It was a pretty ordinary lot. I said I’d buy them for two hundred dollars if he’d deliver them to the bookshop. He agreed.

          It took me weeks to go through the books, decide which ones I’d donate to the Dresden Library book sale, as I did every year, and which ones I’d keep and catalog. One of the first books I looked at, a large tabletop production, annoyed me greatly. The author was someone named Slim Aarons, and it was titled A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life, published in 1974. It was all about how great it was to be rich in those times. The volume was in very good shape with a dust jacket, but it so offended me that I threw it up on top of an old appliance standing there in the barn and left it for last.

          Finally, when I had finished dealing with all the other books, I looked up the Aarons book on the web to see if it was listed and what it was worth. I found that, indeed, it was listed, and that I had by far the best copy of it in the world. My copy was perfect with a perfect dust jacket; all others had some flaw or imperfection. And each of the available copies, of which there were few, was worth hundreds of dollars. I was amazed. Why would anybody want to buy such an idiotic book? However, no sooner had I put it into my on-line catalogue than a rare books dealer in New York City bought it for what was apparently my favorite price to charge, $800.00. If a dealer was willing to pay that much for it, imagine what he was going to sell it for, because dealers usually buy a book for between a quarter and a third of its retail value, unless they can get it for less.

          By the way, I have recently finished reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Umberto Eco. Titled The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, it is about an Italian rare books dealer who has had a stroke and, when he comes out of it, he remembers nothing of his actual life, only the books he has read over the years since he was a child. I recommend it to anyone at all interested in books: comic books, dime novels, collecting books, World War II … in fact, I simply recommend it to anyone who loves reading a good book.

          All my life I have enjoyed collecting and reading books, and selling them, too, but I was making no real profit from my retirement business despite the occasional windfall. In fact, my rising overhead was getting to the point where I could hardly break even anymore, so the Mathom Bookshop closed its doors officially on the last day of December, 2006. I began selling off some of my stock, mostly duplicates, in small auctions, but the first auction of some of my really good remaining books took place at the Thomaston Place Auction Galleries of Thomaston, Maine, and on-line on Saturday, June 30^th, 2007.

          It was a beautiful early summer day. The sun was bright, Route One was beginning to fill up with traffic, but when we pulled into the parking lot of the auction house we saw very few cars. “I was afraid of this,” I told Jean. “Who’s going to attend an auction on a day like this one?”

          Inside I thought I’d see some fellow members of the Maine Antiquarian Booksellers Association, but I recognized no one. That was alarming. Then I saw in the catalogue that most of the books in the auction were books on architecture, and those were the ones the people present were after. Sure enough, some of my best books went for pennies on the dollar while others weren’t bid on at all. “Not a very literary crowd, I guess, eh?” I said to one of the auctioneers on my way out to join Jean in the car where she had earlier retreated to avoid the depressing sale.

          The books sat in the barn until a raccoon got in and tore the place up. Then I discovered that a bookdealer from Waterville had been knocking on the door quite often, looking for me, but we had moved up the road to another dwelling on our property. He found me one day, and I sold all the books to him before the local wildlife had another chance to do damage. Since then, I’ve had nothing much to do with books but read them, write them, and sell them. My epic, The Hero Enkidu came out this year, 2015.

_____________________

*The day before a version of this essay was published in Portland Monthly one of Roger Dickinson-Brown's former students at SUNY Oswego sent me this email message:

"Dear Lew -

"Roger's youngest daughter Elizabeth recently moved to NYC so this morning I had breakfast with her. She told me the details of what she knew about Roger's death. She said that he disappeared one day in April. The previous weekend the entire family all had a fine family dinner drinking, laughing, having fun together. Roger was not found for 3 days. He had checked into a hotel, taken a lethal dose of morphine & died. The police found him & his car with the keys in the car.

"I am writing this to you in case you had never heard this. This was the first I heard of this. Elizabeth told me it was fine to tell other people, they are not hiding the truth. She said that it was a bit of a scandal in the small village they lived in but not for very long.

"We both cried throughout the entire breakfast.

"Pamela"

 

Hortatory Terzanelle

 

The American TERZANELLE is a villanelle written in terza rima.  Like the latter, it is nineteen lines in length: five interlocking triplets plus a concluding quatrain in which the first and third lines of triplet one reappear as refrains.  The center line of each triplet is a repeton reappearing as the last line of the succeeding triplet with the exception of the center line of the penultimate stanza which reappears in the quatrain. This is the rhyme and refrain scheme for the triplets: A¹BA² bCB cDC dED eFE.  The poem may end in one of two ways: fA¹FA² or fFA¹A².  Every line is the same metrical length.

 

HORTATORY TERZANELLE

By Lewis Turco

 

We do not have the time to waste,

And yet we waste it all the time.

Time wasted leaves a bitter taste

 

Like orangeade turned tart as lime

Or sweet remembrance gone to seed,

But still we waste it all the time.

 

We take one sip more than we need

And soon our glasses are half full,

Like sweet remembrance gone to seed.

 

Time’s seepage is implacable:

Swallow or it evaporates

And soon our glass is but half full,

 

The freshest morning dissipates,

Becomes the driest afternoon.

Swallow or life evaporates —

 

The sun will soon become the moon —

We do not have this time to waste!

Here in the driest afternoon

Time wasted leaves a bitter taste.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

Verse Vs. Prose, Rhythm Vs. Metre

 

 

 

STONE COAST SEMINAR

 Lewis Putnam Turco

University of Southern Maine

Stone House Conference Center

642 Wolf's Neck Road

Freeport, Maine,

1:30 p. m.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

 

        In this seminar we will look at the differences between “measured language,” that is to say, “verse,” and “unmeasured language,” or “prose,” and we will ask ourselves, where does “free verse” come into the picture? Given the definitions of verse and prose, how does one define free verse? What is the difference between “prose and poetry,” or between “poetry and verse”?

Required Reading:

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, 3^rd edition, pp. 9-54. “The Sonic Level” and p. 189, “Free Verse.”

Recommended Reading:

"Verse vs. Prose / Prosody vs. Meter" in Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, ed. David Baker, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1997, pp. 249-263.

 

POEM EXAMPLES TO READ IN THE BOOK OF FORMS,

Third Edition

 

1. “Dirge” by Kenneth Fearing, pp. 10-12 (includes analysis).

2, “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman, pp. 13-14.

3. “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, beginning and ending, on p. 14 (students may look up the rest of the poem in many anthologies).

4. “l(a” by E. E. Cummings, pp. 16-17.

5. “She” by Russell Salamon, pp. 17-19 (includes analysis).

6. “Re” by Vito Hannibal Acconci, pp. 19-20 (includes analysis).

7. “On Gay Wallpaper” by William Carlos Williams, pp. 31-32 (includes analysis).

8. “Marriage,” by William Carlos Williams, pp. 188-189 (includes analysis).

9. “Cool Tombs” by Carl Sandburg, including description of “polyphonic prose,” pp. 225-226.

10. The beginning of “Kindly Unhitch that Star, Buddy,” by Ogden Nash, including definition of “wrenched rhyme,” pp. 88-89.

11. “The Death of the Astronaut,” by Lewis Turco, pp. 292-296.

        The oldest “poem” in the Western world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is also our oldest “novel.” An “epic” is a long narrative that tells of the fabulous exploits of a person who is often of superhuman stature and nature like the Chaldean “protagonist” of Gilgamesh whose semi-divine hero was the sovereign of the city of Erech in ancient Babylonia. It was written in Mesopotamia perhaps six thousand years ago, and it was written in prose, like the poetry of the later Bible, such as the “Song of Songs” and the Psalms of David. Here we have two terms that need to be explained right off the bat: “poetry” and “prose.” What is poetry? It is a genre, or type, of literature like other genres such as fiction, drama, and nonfiction.

        What, then, is prose? It is one of the two modes of writing, the other of which is verse. How are they different? Prose is unmeasured language, whereas verse is measured language. People didn’t get around to measuring language until much more recently in history than when Gilgamesh or the Bible were written. How does one measure language? Depending on the language, one counts elements of it, such as syllables in English and other Western languages like Italian, or French, or German.

        What is the difference between prose and poetry? Given these definitions, there can be only one answer: prose is a mode of writing, and poetry is a genre of writing. All right, then we need to define “poetry” and distinguish it from the other genres like “fiction,” which is the art of storytelling, and “drama,” which is the art of acting out a story, and “nonfiction,” which is the art of exposition, of explaining something. That leaves “poetry” to be defined. What is it?

        Some people would define poetry as the art of song. Well, but Gilgamesh is a story, not a song, isn’t it? Yes, but before there was such a thing as written language, there was only spoken language, or in the case of stories and poems, sung language, and a story or a poem had to be remembered so that it could be passed on to later generations, so what does song do that the other genres don’t do? It relies heavily on particular language effects, such as chime, which would include rhyme and rhythm. We won’t go into rhyme and other mnemonic devices — that is, aids to remembrance, — like assonance, alliteration, consonance, dissonance, and so forth, but we need to discuss rhythm which is the flow of cadences in language. “Cadence” is the “modulation or inflection of the voice” such as that “implied by the structure and ordering of words and phrases” in speech or writing. For instance, if one writes a prose sentence such as, “I hear the cowboy singing as he rides his pony alone over the plain,” we can hear cadences, for certain words and syllables are emphasized more than others: “I hear the cowboy singing as he rides his pony alone over the plain,”

        The first element in this sentence that is stressed is the one-syllable verb “hear”; the second is “cow,” the first syllable of “cowboy” because that’s simply the way we pronounce the word, with the stress on the first syllable; ditto for “sing” in “singing”; “rides” is another one-syllable verb; the first syllable of “pony” is stressed, but it’s the second syllable of the adverb “alone” that takes the stress, then back to the first syllable of the two-syllable adverb “over,” and finally the one-syllable noun “plain.” Now, if we take this pattern and repeat it, we will hear the cadences repeated as well, the rhythms:

I hear the cowboy singing as he rides his pony alone over the plain,

I hear the mother singing as she rocks her baby in its cradle,

I hear the shoemaker singing as he pounds the shoe upon his last,

I hear the sailor singing as he climbs the mast of his scudding ship,

 

and so forth and so on, just as Walt Whitman did it in his poem titled “I hear America Singing”:

 

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter's song, the plowboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

 

(Question: What should Whitman have edited out of the last "line"? Can anyone sing with closed mouths?)

         This is a poem written in prose; it obviously has rhythm, but its language is not measured because Whitman was not counting the elements of the language, in this case, the syllables in his sentences; he was repeating a model sentence structure. But if we return to our original sentence, the first half of it at least, and we count the syllables, we’ll find that there are ten syllables in it:

 

I hear the cow boy sing ing as he rides = 10

 

Then, if we add the stresses, an odd thing happens to the word “as” —

 

I hear the cowboy singing as he rides — 

 

we hear it take a stress, not a very strong one, but a secondary stress, because we expect to hear one there now that we have isolated the first half of the sentence and notice that the cadence seems to call for a stress on every other syllable, which gives us what we call a series of iambs, five of them in this case. And if we carry on with this pattern, it becomes clear that what we are doing is measuring the lines, not just repeating prose sentence structures:

 

I hear the cowboy singing as he rides,

The mother singing as she rocks her child,

The sailor singing in the howling wind,

The leatherworker singing at his last.

 

Both examples are poetry; one is written in prose, the other is written in verse. There is no third mode called “free verse,” because language is either measured (we call it “metered”), or it is not. Dividing prose sentences into “lines” by cutting them into phrases, clauses, and so forth, does not turn them into verse, because we are not measuring the lines:

 

I hear the cowboy singing

as he rides his pony

alone over the plain,

I hear the mother singing

as she rocks her baby

in its cradle,

I hear the shoemaker singing

as he pounds the shoe

upon his last,

I hear the sailor singing

as he climbs the mast

of his scudding ship,

 

This is a prose poem, NOT a “free verse” poem.

        The point to be made here is that any of the genres of literature may be written in either of the modes, prose or verse. There may be prose poetry or verse poetry; prose drama or verse drama; prose essays or verse essays. Any of the genres may even be written in combinations of prose or verse, but the difference between prose and poetry is that prose is a mode and poetry is a genre. And the difference between poetry and verse is that poetry is a genre and verse is a mode.

        A lively discussion ensued for the rest of the period which ultimately boiled down to defining the elements of the term, "free verse." We all agreed that the definition of "verse" was "measured language," and we also agreed that the definition of "free" was "unrestricted." Most of us agreed that "unrestricted measured language" made no sense. Those of us who could not bring ourselves to agree that it made no sense left the session brooding. 

COMMENTARY

Annie Finch has written in the comments on this posting, “Thanks for coming to the Stonecoast MFA residency, Lew. It was a stimulating session that got people talking. And for the record, everyone there did NOT in fact agree with the definition of verse as measured language. Verse can be defined as "lined language," going back to the etymology of "verse" as simply a "turning." By this definition, a line of poetry can be a line without being metrical, measured, or counted. Such a line would be a nonmetrical line, and that is what is sometimes called "free." Thanks again for your visit!

 

Turco.  I know that you do not agree with the definition I proffered in the seminar, but you were absent part of the time, and you were not yourself a member of the seminar. I do not recall that you were present when I asked the class if my definition of verse as METERED LANGUAGE seemed reasonable to them. I don’t recall that anyone disagreed. However, my definition was not invented by me, as yours seems to have been invented by you. This is the definition of “Verse” from the Oxford English Dictionary: “A succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line; one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification.”

I invite you to look closely at this definition and to notice how the word “line” is used in it as “a complete METRICAL line, and I invite everyone to examine closely the OED definitions of “verse” and “line.” As to the etymology of verse:

Verse \verse\ (?), n. [oe. vers, as. fers, l. versus a line in writing, and, in poetry, a verse, from vertere, versum, to turn, to turn round; akin to e. worth to become: cf. f. vers. see worth to become, and cf. advertise, averse, controversy, convert, divers, invert, obverse, prose, suzerain, vortex.]

1. A line consisting of a certain number of metrical feet (see foot, n., 9) DIsposed according to metrical rules.

note: Verses are of various kinds, as hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter, etc., according to the number of feet in each. a verse of twelve syllables is called an alexandrine. two or more verses form a stanza or strophe.

2. Metrical arrangement and language; that which is composed in metrical form; versification; poetry. Such prompt eloquence flowed from their lips in prose or numerous verse. Virtue was taught in verse. Verse embalms virtue.

3. A short division of any composition; specifically: (a) a stanza; a stave; as, a hymn of four verses.

note: Although this use of verse is common, it is objectionable, because not always distinguishable from the stricter use in the sense of a line. (b) (script.) One of the short divisions of the chapters in the Old and New Testaments.

note: The author of the division of the [prose of the] Old Testament into verses is not ascertained. The New Testament was divided into verses by Robert Stephens [or Estienne], a french PRINTER. This arrangement appeared for the first time in an edition printed at Geneva, in 1551. (c) (mus.) A portion of an anthem to be performed by a single voice to each part.

4. A piece of poetry. "This verse be thine."

Please note dear Annie and other readers, NOWHERE IS THE WORD VERSE DEFINED AS "lined language," OR “as simply a ‘turning.’" Nor is there anywhere a reference stating that “a line of poetry [don't you mean a line of VERSE, Annie? -- as I pointed out in my seminar there is nothing wrong with prose poetry] can be a line without being metrical, measured, or counted. Such a line would be a nonmetrical line, and that is what is sometimes called ‘free.’"

No, Annie, NOWHERE IN THE OED IS THERE A REFERENCE TO VERSE AS SOMETHING NONMETRICAL, but of course THERE IS SUCH A THING AS POETRY, WHICH IS A GENRE, WRITTEN IN PROSE, WHICH IS A MODE, as I was at great pains to discuss in the seminar. Were you there when I did that? I was also at great pains to point out that FREE (unrestricted) VERSE (metrical language) is CLEARLY A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS.

Your whole argument seems to be based upon the fact that you hate the idea of writing prose poems, so you (along with many others) need to have the term “verse” attached to what you (and I and many others) do. I don’t need the term. Poets have been writing prose poetry since the Epic of Gilgamesh was composed 6000 years ago…which is where I began my seminar, if you will look at the lecture I gave yesterday, which I handed you at the end of the session, which I sent you on several occasions over the past year, and which I have posted above, here.

Now I am going to turn that last paragraph into “poetry” by “lineating” it. I’m certain that it will go down in the annals of literature as a masterpiece (of irony if not of literature):

 

Your whole argument

seems to be based

upon the fact

that you hate the idea

of writing prose poems,

so you (along with many others)

need to have the term “verse”

attached to what you (and I

and many others)

do.

 

I don’t need the term.

Poets have been writing prose poetry

since the Epic of Gilgamesh was composed

6000 years ago…

which is where I began my seminar,

if you will look at the lecture

I gave yesterday,

which I handed you

at the end of the session,

and which I have posted above,

here.

 

Wow! I see what you mean, Annie! By breaking up that last paragraph into discrete lines I have obviously improved its quality to the point where anyone may see at a glance that it has ceased being merely prose and is now free verse par excellence! And unlike the last line of Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing,” I don’t have to delete anything to make it work!

You know, I bet I could go on doing this until I had a book of last paragraphs turned into poems by “lineating” or, as I have called it in The Book of Forms, line-phrasing them. Let’s try it. Here we go again:

 

Wow!

I see what you mean,

Annie!

By breaking up

That last paragraph

(And maybe capitalizing the first letters

Of each line)

Into discrete lines…,

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

 

Finch. Lew, Definitions of individual words change in different times and contexts (and definitions in prosody are, notoriously, especially shifting and subjective!), so I prefer not to get into discussions pitting terms against each other. (For example, it looks like the OED definition of a "verse" as a metrical line appears to predate the widespread development of free verse, which makes it at least a century old. Not surprising; a dictionary is a big thing and it takes a while to get around to updating every entry, and of course poetry is a frequently neglected topic. Another example: I suspect that what you are calling the mode of "poetry" might be what Aristotle called the mode of "lyric" (as opposed to "dramatic" and "narrative.") I have no objection to your using the word "prose" to describe nonmetrical poems: that's fine with me; However, I'm curious that your use of the word doesn't seem to acknowledge any difference between a nonmetrical lyric poem written out in paragraph form, and nonmetrical lyric poem in which the words have been broken into lines. No matter what effect the lineation has on the quality of the poem, I think this difference is real and does affect the way i experience the text on the page (even if I can't hear the difference when the text is read aloud). Is it true that you prefer not to include in your system of poetics any word that acknowledges or could describe the difference between a passage of nonmetrical lyric language written in lines, and a passage of nonmetrical lyric language written in a paragraph?

 

Turco. Annie, you do not read well and you don’t pay attention. I have never called poetry a mode. I called poetry a genre. The mode is verse, the other mode is prose. I deeply deplore your inability to listen to my argument and then your willful distortion of it beyond all recognition.

As to the OED being “at least a century old,” so is the term “free verse” which became widespread in English after 1912 and the Modernist revolution. The French “vers libre,” which is where “free verse” comes from is more than a century old. I took my definition from the current edition of the OED, the very one that everyone in 2011 uses at this moment. Your personal definitions of terms do not supersede those that are agreed upon by most of the English-speaking world.

As to my calling the “lyric” a “mode”: anyone who has read The Book of Forms, which apparently you have not done, knows that I call “lyric poetry” a subgenre of the genre of literature called “poetry,” the other subgenres of poetry being “narrative poetry” and “dramatic poetry.” Besides “poetry,” the genres of literature are “fiction,” “drama,” and “nonfiction,” which I clearly explained in the lecture I gave in my seminar.

And I do not use “prose to describe nonmetrical poems,” I use prose to denote one of the two modes of writing, the other one being verse. One may choose to write a “poem” in either prose of verse. You ask, “Is it true that you prefer not to include in your system of poetics any word that acknowledges or could describe the difference between a passage of nonmetrical lyric language written in lines, and a passage of nonmetrical lyric language written in a paragraph?” No, Annie, it is not true. I was at some pains to describe in my lecture and discussion what Amy Lowell called “polyphonic prose.”

You don’t listen well, you don’t read attentively, you do not argue logically, and you put your own words into your opponent’s mouth. Arguing with someone who doesn’t know how to carry a discussion forward from point A to point B to point C is an extremely frustrating experience, and I don’t plan to do it any more. But thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain the difference between prose and verse to your students, most of whom seemed to understand what I was saying.

 

Finch. Wow, Lew, you really know how to keep your cool in an argument. Got to admire that, no matter how I feel about the ideas. Sincere apologies for mixing up your terms. I should have doublechecked them. The definition of verse I was using is one I've used for years in my own work; it can be found in the Online Etymological Dictionary: verse c.1050, "line or section of a psalm or canticle," later "line of poetry" (c.1369), from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. vers, from L. versus "verse, line of writing," from PIE base *wer- "to turn, bend" (see versus). The metaphor is of plowing, of "turning" from one line to another (vertere = "to turn") as a plowman does. O.E. had fers, an early W.Gmc. borrowing directly from Latin. Meaning "metrical composition" is recorded from c.1300; sense of "part of a modern pop song" (as distinguished from the chorus) is attested from 1927. The English N.T. first divided fully into verses in the Geneva version (1550s). Verse was invented as an aid to memory. Later it was preserved to increase pleasure by the spectacle of difficulty overcome. That it should still survive in dramatic art is a vestige of barbarism. [Stendhal, "De L'Amour," 1822] Meter (counting )is not essential to this definition. Polyphonic prose, as Amy Lowell used the term, is prose and is not divided into lines, so it still does not answer the simple question I was asking you (about six times now, both in person and here).

 

Turco. Yes, Annie, I HAVE answered your question, you just don’t want to hear it. Here it is again, and it’s the last time I’m going to say it:

THERE ARE TWO MODES OF WRITING IN ENGLISH, AND ONLY TWO: PROSE, WHICH IS UNMETERED LANGUAGE, AND VERSE, WHICH IS METERED LANGUAGE. ONE MAY WRITE ANYTHING AT ALL IN EITHER OF THESE MODES. THERE IS NO THIRD MODE CALLED “FREE VERSE” THAT IS A BLENDING OF THE TWO MODES, although people have been using the term and making up definitions for it since Emerson attempted to invent a third mode, failed, and had to herald a prose poet named Walt Whitman. Either mode may range from “flat” language to “heightened” language. Most “poems” are written in what Wordsworth and others called “heightened language,” which is what Amy Lowell was talking about when she used the term “polyphonic prose.” There are older terms applied to heightened prose that are similar, including “euphuism” and “gongorism.”

As to your source, the Online Etymological Dictionary, I looked it up, and it is administered by one person, Douglas Harper, a Ph. D. who earned his degree in history from Brandeis and teaches at Duquesne. He is not a linguist, but he makes all the decisions as to the etymologies that appear on his web page. On the other hand, the Oxford English Dictionary is and has always been a collaborative work by many learned people in many fields. Harper’s page isn’t a lot better than Wikipedia, for which anybody can write, degree, education, or not.

No more arguing on this topic, Annie, you will believe what you wish to believe, which is the case with most people, including me.

 

Lewis,

I wish I could have attended the session. There was clearly much food for thought. I appreciate the logical steps of your argument, Lewis, and learned a great deal in terms of the roots and nature of poetry. Where would be without the OED?

Caroline Gill

Wales, UK

 

Lew,

Here's an email I had in my draft box from a couple days ago.  I don't know that I would have written it today, but nonetheless, the invitation stands:

Everyone has had fun talking about your class.  There were some suggestions to invite you back next year (maybe January 2012) for a discussion/debate of these issues between you and a "free verse poet" (perhaps Ira Sadoff).  Are you interested?

 

Annie,

I would enjoy doing another session for you, but not with Ira Sadoff…, and not on this same topic.

Lew

 

New England Book Festival Wild-Card Winner, 2009

Lewis Putnam Turco. Satan’s Scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft, a book review by Joe Danciger

Satan’s Scourge by Lewis Turco refers in its title to smallpox and also to the punishments applied to those believed to be involved with witchcraft or allied practices, such as alchemy or divination.  This book develops a story spanning the years from 1580-1697, chronicling the sweep from a more superstitious age to the age of science and reason. This book is a must read for anyone interested in early American history or witchcraft and magic.

Satan’s Scourge is rich in detail, and many scenes have a sense of immediacy that makes history exciting. The brilliant and graphic account of the Salem witch trials may be the best and most detailed ever written. By the time the trials begin, we have walked the cow paths of New England with these people and have seen the terrible hardships of colonial existence. These details make the trials all the more poignant. Turco is a descendant of the Putnam family, who were very involved in the Salem witch trials, and on whom the book is centered. One might say without exaggeration that this story is in Lewis Turco's blood.

At the time of "Satan’s Scourge,” in Europe Galileo was publishing and considered to be heretical, while in Salem, Massachusetts, farmers were planting and harvesting crops of corn and wheat. Turco describes the historical and philosophical beliefs of the times so thoroughly that the narration can be wholly readable without resorting to further references. In addition the bibliography and index contain favorites of those who are fond of books on demonology and magic, such as Sir Reginald Scot’s “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” This anchors the story and lends its own pleasures. On both continents, riches could be gained by feigning or attempting diverse magical practices—and by hunting those who did so.  

The narrative of Satan's Scourge is not without humor: an occasional fool blows up a boat by accident, and some players are reliably unreliable. The legendary Mother Goose appears in her actual person and uses her herbal knowledge on some very bee-stung boys. The people portrayed in the book are documented by Turco’s scholarship.

The detailed and well-researched writing makes reading this book a pleasure: e.g., in a typical passage, “Early in the spring of 1679 John Stebbins of Northampton was working in a sawmill when he began to have trouble with the logs and boards with which he was working. They began to act up in strange ways- falling down by themselves, writhing out of his hands.” Stebbins later dies, covered with spots, and a neighbor is charged with witchcraft.

Written in such an engaging way that it is hard to stop reading, the narrative of Satan’s Scourge tells about a family and a time of superstition that was replaced by science. This book has depth, and goes far beyond retelling witchy stunts and acts of cruelty by stern patriarchs.

From Per Contra, Spring 2010, at http://www.percontra.net/18danciger.htm  

 
Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 by Lewis Putnam Turco was the winner of the Wild Card category of the New England Book Festival 2009. The award ceremony was held at the Omni Parker House in Boston, Massachusetts, on Saturday, January 16, 2010, from 7:00-9:30 p.m. with the author and the publisher, Dr. Steven E. Swerdfeger of Star Cloud Press, Scottsdale, Arizona, both present.

 

Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1694, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2009, ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages. ORDER FROM BARNES & NOBLE / ORDER FROM AMAZON  

WICKED

An interview by Deirdre Fleming, Staff Writer, The Maine Sunday Telegram, Sunday, March 15, 2009,

 

Dresden Mills writer Lewis Putnam Turco is out with a book, Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, on the deadly and scurrilous witch hunts that plagued Britain and America in the 16th and 17th centuries. After 35 years Dr. Turco has finally had his 800-page historical work on the Salem witch trials published. The 74-year-old award-winning poet was determined not to cut it.

Fleming. Why not?

Turco. I was quite happy with what I had done  — I had researched all that stuff, found out so much information about my mother's family, the Putnams of Salem Village, Massachusetts, which is now Danvers. I really didn't care whether it was published or not.

Fleming. But published it was, and you will discuss this newest book on March 29 at the Augusta City Hall learning gallery at 16 Cony St. What will be the focus of your talk?

Turco. The talk will be on the only trial of a Maine witch that occurred during that period — the trial of Casco minister George Burroughs in 1692. Burroughs was convicted and hanged.

Fleming. When did you actually write this book?

Turco. In 1974 I researched and wrote about the history of the Putnams, as well as all of the witch trails that occurred in New England at the height of the age of "sympathetic magic." The book is told not only chronologically, but also from the point of view of the crystal gazers, alchemists and alleged witches as well as their accusers, other witnesses and clerics. Read in its entirety, the book fully explains the period of time when science was coming into being and those who believed in magic were sometimes hunted down and killed.

Fleming. How did you become interested in this subject?

Turco. I have known about my mother’s ancestors and been interested in the subject since high school, or even before — I had been reading about it for years.

Fleming. Yet for more than three decades, your work and writing were focused on poetry. You taught poetry at the college level since 1960, first at what is now Cleveland State University and then at the State University of New York at Oswego, from which you retired in 1996. Your book on literary criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award in 1986, one of many awards your work on poetry has received. Why did this book sit around and not get published?

Turco. I tried to publish it. I wrote around, and publishers said it was too long. I wasn't willing to cut it, so I let it sit for 35 years. I didn't even try to peddle it for most of that time. Then, in 2006, I bought a new computer and decided to type it in. I had actually written the typescript in a spring and a summer, so I took another summer and rewrote it as I went along. — It didn't change much. I tightened it up a bit, but it is largely unchanged. When I mentioned it to my current publisher he asked to see it, so I sent it along.

Fleming. Why make it so long?

Turco. It is the only book that I know of that covers that entire history of witchcraft in England and New England during the period I specify, the year 1580, which is the birthday of my mother’s Putnam ancestor who founded the Putnam dynasty in America, to 1697 when the witch-hunts finally died out for good. That was the age when the system in America and in the world, really, was shifting from what we consider sympathetic magic to science, as for instance the shift from astrology to astronomy. It's a fascinating period. This changeover from magic to science is what the Salem witch-hunt was all about. It was the last big clash between science and sympathetic magic.

Fleming. What can we learn from that period?

Turco. There are lots of things we can learn — for instance, the way that witches could be saved in New England in the 17th century was if they confessed to being witches. If you read the whole book, all the accused witches who weren’t hanged in Salem confessed to being witches, and of course, they weren't witches. But some refused to confess, and they weren't witches either. They were hanged. That should tell us something about the ethics of torture. You also learn something about belief and the difference between belief and reality.

Fleming. Are those things relevant today?

Turco. We had a big witch hunt while I was in the Navy in the 1950s — it was called McCarthyism. That was a witch hunt. It is the same thing, exactly. You can learn a lot about human nature. We do repeat history. We're doomed to repeat. We never seem to learn. And there are so many mysterious things that no human being is ever probably going to get to the bottom of, such as “black holes” and “the big bang.” Well, if people have open minds, perhaps they can get their minds around such things, and then believe them.

But believing them is just taking them on faith. Some people take it on faith that there was an initial explosion that created the universe. Other people say God created it, but how do they know that? They take it on faith. The big question is, if God created the universe, who created God? And if there was an initial “big bang,” what came before the big bang? One of these two things is based on science, and the other is based on religion, but both of them are totally mysterious, and people believe in both.

Fleming. Do the same sorts of wrestling matches over ideas continue throughout history?

Turco. Right now there is a witch-hunt going on. We are looking for terrorists. And to a lot of people, anybody with a Muslim background is one. That is not a lot different.

Fleming. Are there others?

Turco. There is a small witch hunt getting started — it is the witch-hunt over the woman who had octuplets. The grandmother is getting threats, and the young “octomom” is getting threats. What is the most rational thing to do? To say, “forget all that, and take care of the babies.” The babies are there. Stop trying to blame the mother. So she's crazy — that's past. That's a good example of a modern witch-hunt.

Fleming. Do you think you'll write more on witchcraft?

Turco.  I doubt it. I'll be seventy-five years old in May. I'm not young, and can't really take on a huge project at my age. So I doubt I will. I will keep writing, though, and I'm giving that talk at Augusta City Hall that you mentioned. I went through my book and got all the information on the minister there in Casco who was hanged in Salem, and put it together as a lecture for this event. And in the summer I’ll be giving another such lecture in Connecticut on the Wallingford witch-hunt that took place about the same time as the Salem event. So I’m still fiddling with the subject to a degree. 

 

Witchcraft in Maine

THE TRIAL OF THE REVEREND GEORGE BURROUGHS OF CASCO AND WELLS, a talk derived from his book, Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, delivered by Lewis Putnam Turco during the Old Fort Western Lecture Series in Augusta, Maine, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 29, 2009, in the Learning Gallery, room 146, Old Fort Western Museum, 1 City Center Plaza, Augusta ME 04330.

Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1694, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2009, ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages. ORDER FROM BARNES & NOBLE / ORDER FROM AMAZON   

When Harvard College graduated its class of 1670 in June, among the new holders of the baccalaureate degree was a young man who had distinguished himself, while at the school, as an athlete and gymnast. George Burroughs was a small man in stature, but solidly built. More than that, he liked to astonish people with his feats of strength, and he had a teasing streak in him as well. When folk marveled at his abilities in anything he was wont to be mysterious about how he did what he did. Yet, all in all, he was an affable young man who was likely to do well as the parson of a village — one of the lesser ones, probably. It came to pass that he chose Casco, Maine, as the place in which he wished to do his religious work. He was held in awe by many of the inhabitants, not only because he was an educated man of God, but because he could do things with his muscle that few ordinary men could do.

Casco was an outpost of New England civilization — a backward, insignificant settlement surrounded on three sides by dense forest filled with hostile Indians, and on the fourth by the chill ocean. In 1676 a band of Indians fell upon the community and destroyed it. Thirty-two people were killed or captured; others managed to escape into the forest. Rev. Mr. Burroughs was able to get to an island in Casco Bay from which he was eventually rescued by a party from the mainland. He was asked to write a report of the raid for the authorities in Boston, which he was glad to do.

By 1680 the church members of Salem Village (known in the 20^th century as Danvers, Massachusetts, a suburb of Salem) for a number of years, since it broke away from Salem to form its own parish, had been fighting among themselves over their ministers. The latest, Rev. James Bailey, had left behind a dilapidated parsonage that would need extensive repair before the next minister could move in. That minister, it had been decided, would be the Rev. Mr. George Burroughs of Casco, Maine, whose acquaintance Jonathan Putnam had made on trips to the area. Mr. Burroughs was called to Salem Village in November by the Parish Committee, and when he arrived in town he and his wife moved in with the family of Lt.. John Putnam, Jr., until the parsonage could be repaired.

The new year began auspiciously for Sgt. Thomas Putnam, Jr, and his wife Ann Carr Putnam. Since their marriage in 1678 Ann, like her sister Mary, had experienced a miscarriage or two, but on February 9^th, 1681, she was delivered of a healthy son who was christened Thomas Putnam III. The next day the Salem Village Parish voted the Rev. Mr. George Burroughs, their new minister, his salary for the year. All was not harmony in the Village, however, for Mr. Burroughs, though he like Bailey before him was the majority choice, was nevertheless not the unanimous choice. He soon found that he had automatic enemies in Thomas Putnam, Sr., Bailey’s prime backer, and in Ann Carr Putnam, Mary Bailey’s sister. With both his father and his wife opposed to Burroughs, Sgt. Thomas Putnam, Jr., of course was entered in the opposing lists as well.

Furthermore, there was friction developing between Burroughs and Lt. John Putnam, Jr., in whose house Burroughs continued to live while the parish wrangled over the refurbishment of the parsonage. Neither John nor his wife, Rebecca, cared for the way Burroughs treated his wife who was something of a gossip. Burroughs had a strong sense of privacy, and he objected to his spouse’s telling Rebecca all the family grievances. He chastised her for her loose tongue on several occasions — and, naturally, Mrs. Burroughs relayed these lectures to Rebecca who passed them on to John. Their sympathies lay with the oppressed wife, not the secretive minister. In April the Salem Village parsonage was ready for habitation and the Burroughs family moved into it.

In September, however, Mrs. George Burroughs died, perhaps of Satan’s Scourge: smallpox, and the minister was in deep trouble. He was totally broke, for no one had collected the rates he had been voted earlier in the year, and he had not been paid his salary. He and his existed on the charity of Capt. John Putnam, Jr., as best he could; now, he had to bury his helpmeet. He was forced to go further into debt.

It was the end. He foresaw no possibility of his being able to stay on in Salem Village and appease the warring parishioners. When he had come he had been wise enough to realize this might be the case, so he had had an escape clause written into his contract with the Village: “All is to be understood so long as I have Gospel encouragement.” He had had no encouragement whatsoever. As soon as he could get his affairs in order he left Salem Village, without even calling a parish meeting to try to settle the wages owed him, and went back to Maine — but not before he had taken another wife, the sister of Thomas Rucke. Burroughs’ abrupt departure did nothing at all to sweeten the atmosphere of the parish, and the minister left in his wake a number of implacable enemies, including his new brother-in-law.

At Ipswich Session of the Essex County Court in April of 1683 the Salem Villagers petitioned for relief from their lack of ministry and asked the magistrates that “they be pleased to write to Mr. Burroughs, requiring him to attend an orderly hearing and clearing up the case” and to settle accounts with them in respect to his salary and debts. It was to be a balancing of the books prior to the Village’s calling another minister. The Court agreed, and it summoned Mr. Burroughs from Casco; however, the “orderly hearing” was anything but that.

On April 24^th Burroughs appeared for the accounting, a letter from the Court was read directing the participants to settle accounts, and Burroughs asked his former parishioners, “Do you take up with the advice of the court, given in the letter, or do you reject it?”

“Yes,” the Villagers answered him, “we take up with it,” and no man demurred. They worked out a proposed settlement, and “the second, third, and fourth days of the following week were agreed upon by Mr. Burroughs and the people to be the days for every man to come in and to reckon with the said Burroughs; and so they adjourned the meeting to the last of the aforesaid three days, in the afternoon, then to make up the whole account in public.”

So May 2^nd was the day of reckoning. As the Villagers were gathered to complete the accounting and payments, Henry Skerry, the county marshal, came in the door, walked up to Lt. John Putnam, and whispered something to him. Putnam said aloud, “You know what you have to do! Do your office.”

Reluctantly, the marshal went over to Burroughs and said to him, “Sir, I have a writing to read to you.” It was an attachment of the salary the Village owed Burroughs, sworn out by John Putnam for debts Burroughs purportedly owed him for the time the minister had lived with the Putnam family, and for money that had been borrowed to pay for the funeral of Mr. Burroughs’ first wife.

When Marshal Skerry had read the document, Burroughs turned to Lt. Putnam and asked, “What money is it that you attach me for?”

Putnam replied, “For five pounds and odd money at Shippen’s at Boston, and for thirteen shillings at my father-in-law Gedney’s, and for twenty-four shillings at Mrs. Darby’s.”

Burroughs turned again to the marshal and told him, “I have no goods to show, but I am now reckoning with the inhabitants, for we do not know yet who is in debt,” he paused for a breath and said, “but here is my body.” He spread his arms wide.

Nathaniel Ingersoll stood up and faced John Putnam. “Lieutenant,” he said, “I wonder that you attach Mr. Burroughs for the money at Darby’s and your father Gedney’s, when, to my knowledge, you and Mr. Burroughs have reckoned and balanced accounts two or three times since — as you say — it was due, and you never made any mention of it when you reckoned with Mr. Burroughs.”

It was true. Furthermore, Ingersoll and his wife, Hannah, had been present when Burroughs borrowed the money for Shippen as well. Ingersoll had heard Burroughs ask for a draft to be presented to Mr. Shippen, and Putnam had inquired, “How much will you take up at Shippen’s?”

Burroughs had answered, “It might be five pounds,” but when he had done some more figuring he had said, “It may be it might come to more, therefore I will have to give him a draft to the value of five or six pounds.”

Putnam had replied, “It is all one to me,” and he had written the draft, read it to Burroughs, and said, “This will go for a part of the 33 pounds, 6 shillings, eight-pence the Parish owes you.”

There was nothing John Putnam could reply to Ingersoll — they were both well aware that the parish owed Burroughs much more than Burroughs owed Putnam. The two men stood looking at one another for a moment, and Putnam finally said, “It is true, and I own it.” But John Putnam was not about to let a small matter of equity interfere with what he had made up his mind to do.

The incident had broken up the meeting with nothing settled, and people were getting up to leave, most of them in great embarrassment, when Mr. Burroughs said, “Well, what will you do with me?”

The marshal approached John Putnam uncertainly and asked, “What shall I do?”

Putnam replied, “You know your business.” He tossed his head in the direction of the minister, then went over to his brother Thomas, tugged at his coat, and they went outdoors to confer while the marshal arrested Burroughs. The Putnam brothers came back in a moment later, and John Putnam said, “Marshal, take your prisoner and have him up to the Ordinary” — Ingersoll’s Inn — “and secure him till the morning.”

The marshal took Burroughs out, shouldering through the knots of citizens who stood about and looked angrily or reproachfully upon the proceedings. Some of the Villagers decided to do something about it. They followed Burroughs and Marshal Skerry to Ingersoll’s where they drew up a bond:

“We whose names are underwritten do bind ourselves jointly and severally to Henry Skerry, Marshal of Salem, our heirs, executors, and administrators, in the sum of fourteen pounds money, that George Burroughs shall appear at the next court at Salem, to answer to Lieutenant John Putnam according to the summons of this attachment, and to abide the order of the court therein, and not to depart without license; as witness our hands this 2^nd of May, 1683.” The bond was signed by Burroughs, Ingersoll, John Buxton, Thomas Haynes, Samuel and William Sibley, and William Ireland, Jr The Casco minister was set at local liberty for the time being.

It was a measure of John ’s vindictiveness when, in June, in Essex County Court, he brought a suit against George Burroughs for a “debt for two gallons of Canary wine, and cloth, &c., bought of Mr. Gedney on John Putnam’s account, for the funeral of Mrs. Burroughs.”

On February 22^nd 1684 the Salem Village parish again voted to raise “fifteen pounds for Mr. Burroughs” so that he could continue to exist while he awaited trial. In the meantime the parish committee had received permission to call another minister to preach in the Village, and it had settled upon Deodat Lawson who was, however, reluctant to respond to the call, for the notoriety of the settlement as a place of pastoral contention was widespread. Lawson was importuned to accept, however, and at last, reluctantly, he did so. At the same meeting that voted Burroughs funds, a committee of parish members was formed to arrange to have Lawson’s worldly goods transported into town from Boston.

In April Mr. Burroughs, who wanted nothing more than to get out of town, proposed a solution to his own particular problem: He authorized Lt. Thomas Putnam to receive from the parish the money due him by “the inhabitants of Salem Farms.” Thus, Thomas could pay his brother John whatever the Court decided Burroughs owed him, if anything, and send the rest up to Casco. Burroughs was not fool enough, however, to think that he would receive much of anything by mail. If by chance he did, fine; if not, at least he would be free of the toils of Salem Village, or so he surmised.

In 1685 Samuel Webber was living in Casco, Maine, where George Burroughs was once again the minister. Webber had heard about the prodigious strength of the man of God, and during a visit Webber finally got to talk about it with him. Burroughs didn’t offer to demonstrate, but he did tell Webber that he had put his fingers into the bung of a barrel of molasses, lifted it up, carried it around, and set it down again. Webber was impressed with the story, and a preacher wouldn’t make up something like that, would he?

The Salem Village parishioners on November 15^th, 1688, appointed a committee whose members were Capt. John Putnam, Jr, Joshua Ray, Sr., and Francis Nurse. They were empowered to approach the Rev. Mr. Samuel Parris and ask him to become the fourth minister of Salem Village. Parris was, in the pecking order of the unofficial ecclesiastical hierarchy, the bottom of the barrel, lower even than George Burroughs who had at least graduated from Harvard, though he had afterwards become a backwoods preacher down East.

Parris had attended Harvard, but he had never graduated, and any community of New England — if it could not have an Englishman out of Oxford or Cambridge — at least expected to have a Harvardian. Worse still, Parris had not gone straight into the ministry; rather, he had become a businessman in Barbados. It was through this connection that the Putnams became acquainted with the man, for the late Thomas’ second wife, Mary Veren Putnam, had property and other interests in Barbados. It was not until he had failed in business that Parris had returned to New England and taken up his cross. Four years later, in 1692, it would be in Rev. Parris’ household that the great Salem Witch Hunt would begin.

In 1689, however, The Devil manifested himself to William Barker of Salem Village. He was a Black Man with a cloven foot, and he put this proposition to Barker: He would pay Barker’s debts and see to it that he lived comfortably; for his part, Barker was to cede his soul to the powers of darkness. It was the Devil’s plan to begin his own coup by taking over Salem Village and then spreading out into the countryside. Barker made his pact and was taken to a Sabbat that had been called by Bridget Bishop and the former minister of Salem Village, Rev. George Burroughs. One hundred and five young blades, some of them armed with rapiers, gathered together at the assembly and, at the sound of a trumpet, fell to drinking wine and eating bread at the site of the Sabbat, which was a field nearby the meetinghouse.

Simon Willard, thirty-nine, went to Falmouth, Maine, on Casco Bay, and he stayed in the home of Robert Lawrence. They got to speaking of various things, and Mr. Lawrence introduced the subject of the local parson, Rev. Mr. George Burroughs, who was also visiting and present in the room. He commended Mr. Burroughs’ strength to Willard; he said, “We could none of us do what he could do, for Mr. Burroughs can hold out his gun with one hand.” The company were astonished, but Burroughs affirmed that he could do it. He showed the folk present where he held the gun to perform the feat — behind the flintlock. It was a rifle with a seven-foot barrel. Burroughs, being a modest man, refused to perform, but Willard picked it up, held it where Burroughs had shown him, and couldn’t lift it with both hands. Later Willard, still skeptical, mentioned it to Capt. Wormall, but the Captain assured him that Burroughs could do what he said.

At another gathering Burroughs was present when some members of Capt. Edward Sergeant’s garrison were talking about the minister’s ability to lift a barrel of molasses out of a canoe by himself and carry it to shore. The short, stocky preacher told the men, and Simon Willard who was there as well, that he had carried one barrel that was like to have hurt him, but Willard took this to mean that the ground was rough and he might have strained a leg, not that the effort was too much for him. He shook his head in wonder.

In 1690 another Indian raid got underway, but the people had been told help was in the offing, and no one was inclined, yet, to take to the woods. Lt. Richard Honeywell, Thomas and John Greenslit, and Rev. George Burroughs were at the home of Capt. Joshua Scott of Blackpoint. At the Scott home the people gathered there witnessed at last some of the proverbial strength of the minister. When the demonstration was over Thomas Greenslit told people that he had seen Burroughs insert his forefinger into a rifle with a six-foot barrel and lift it, holding it out at arm’s length; further, he had seen Burroughs lift a barrel with only his two fingers stuck into the bung; he had carried it that way from the stage depot to the door of the stage without setting it down along the way. Those to whom he told the story were amazed beyond measure — or skeptical.

When the Indians had finally finished with Casco it was a ruin, but once again George Burroughs managed to be one of the survivors. This time, though, he took his family and migrated down the coast a way to Wells where he was granted 150 acres of land. 

Early in 1692 the Rev. Mr. Samuel Parris was engaged with a lawsuit against the Salem Village Church and with various political intrigues. He was paying little attention to his daughter and the girls who orbited Tituba, a member of the Parris household’s Barbados servant family that included her husband, John Indian, and their young son whom everyone called merely, “Boy.” This group grew and fluctuated. Besides the minister’s daughter Elizabeth Parris, nine, there were her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven; Mary Walcott, sixteen, a near neighbor; Annie Putnam, twelve, Mary’s step-cousin, and Mercy Lewis who often came with Annie Putnam inasmuch as she was a servant of Sgt. Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam. On occasion she also worked for Carolina John Putnam (parenthetically, my several times maternal great grandfather), and when Rev. George Burroughs had been the Salem Village minister, Mercy had lived in his family for a while, having no family of her own. Other neighbors of the Parrises were Susannah Sheldon, eighteen, and Elizabeth Booth, sixteen, both of whom had taken to dropping in and listening to Tituba’s stories of phantasms and witchery. They were joined frequently by Elizabeth Hubbard, seventeen, the niece of Mrs. William Griggs, who lived with Dr. William Griggs’ family as a servant; by another servant, Sarah Churchill, twenty, maid of George Jacobs, and Mary Warren, also twenty, maidservant of John and Elizabeth Proctor.

Tituba’s influence, by January of 1692, had gone beyond mere storytelling. She had introduced the girls to some of the divinatory arts and to sympathetic magic. Tituba was a good teacher, for she gave her girls a thorough education in folklore. This, added to the fire and brimstone theology to which they all had been born, and that Mr. Parris reinforced twice each week from the pulpit, together with all the rumors and news of occult manifestations that were currently taking place in New England — such as those that had been laid out on the printed page by Cotton and Increase Mather of recent years in books that were easily available — wrought heavily on the girls’ minds. When they secretly got together in twos and threes to experiment with scrying and fortunetelling, they had the exquisite knowledge that if their parents and employers knew what they were up to they would be horrified. On the other hand, the young people knew for a fact that there were many witches, both white and black, who had been practicing more or less openly in the community and the area for years, usually without having incurred any real reprobation.

Moreover, the girls knew that nearly everyone from time to time applied some sort of magic to situations where nothing else seemed to be of avail. Even the doctors used remedies that seemed not to be entirely medical when they came to treat a particularly difficult case, and when they were baffled they would as often as not shake their heads and excuse their lack of skill by saying, “There is an evil hand in it,” or something suchlike. There was not one of the girls who had not been indoctrinated at an early age into the mysteries of the birth process, an event ringed around with superstition and presided over by the midwife, who was held in no little awe by the girls and the men of the villages particularly. The midwife was, to all intents and purposes, half priestess when she was practicing her calling, and she herself knew it. There was not one midwife anywhere who was not to some degree an herb-doctor, and an herb-doctor was one remove from the witch, if that much.

But what the girls did not foresee in their experiments was that some of the younger members of the juvenile coven might take things too seriously. These were delicious games they were playing when, though they didn’t know the technical terms, they practiced onychomancy — scrying into their waxed or oiled fingernails; Bibliomancy, as Increase Mather himself, and even some of their parents did when they allowed the Bible to fall open of itself to prophetic passages; chiromancy — palmistry; or cosquinomancy, divining by means of a sieve balanced on a rod or pincers, or oomancy: breaking an egg into a bowl of water and watching to see what shape it assumed. Had they known these names, the sounds would only have added occult glamour to their practices.

The trouble was that Elizabeth Parris particularly was too impressionable, and when she saw the egg in her bowl assume the shape of a coffin, she became uncontrollably hysterical, thus providing a model of behavior for the other girls. She was the minister’s daughter, and she was much more aware than the others that what they were doing was truly sinful. She was filled with feelings of guilt and impending damnation, but she could say nothing to her father, for she would be ostracized by her friends. They would all get into terrible trouble, and Tituba the witch would take revenge upon her. When finally Rev. Parris discovered what was going on he was all too ready to take the pressure that his parishioners were putting upon him off himself and transfer it to the witches that soon were to be found everywhere. And the girls were acting out in ways to keep the onus for what was happening in the Parris and Putnam households, and soon in many households around the Colony, off of themselves.

Abigail Hobbs implicated a number of people in Topsfield, Ipswich, Salem Village, and Salem Town itself; Mercy Lewis cried out upon George Jacobs, and Annie Putnam saw the shape of the Rev. Mr. George Burroughs of Casco. She exclaimed, “Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful! What? Are ministers witches too? What is your name, for I will complain of you, though you be a minister, if you be a wizard.”

Burroughs’ specter tortured her — she was racked and choked. He tempted her to write in his book, but she refused with loud cries: “I will not write in your book though you tear me to pieces! It is a dreadful thing that you who are a minister that should teach children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. Oh! Dreadful! Tell me your name that I may know who you are!”

Instead of doing so, however, Burroughs tortured her again, once more requested that she put pen to book. When Annie refused, Burroughs’ apparition told her, obligingly, “My name is George Burroughs. I have had three wives. I bewitched the first two of them to death, and I killed Mrs. Lawson” — Rev. Deodat Lawson’s wife — “because I was so unwilling to leave Salem Village, and I killed Mr. Lawson’s child because he went to the Eastward” (meaning Maine) “with Sir Edmund [Andros], and I preached so to the soldiers, and I bewitched a great many soldiers to death at the Eastward when Sir Edmund was there, and I made Abigail Hobbs a witch and several witches more, and above a witch, I am a conjuror as well.”

Thomas Putnam, Annie’s father, wrote a letter to Judges John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin that read in part, hinting darkly, “We thought it our duty to inform your Honors of what we conceive you have not heard, which are high and dreadful — of a wheel within a wheel, at which our ears do tingle.” Thomas hoped God would prepare them that they “may be a terror to evil-doers and a praise to them that do well….”

Warrants were soon issued for the arrest of several people, and Elisha Hutchinson, a magistrate, issued a surreptitious warrant for the arrest of Rev. George Burroughs of Wells, Maine. One evening shortly afterward Rev. Burroughs was sitting in the hall eating his supper when Field Marshal John Partridge rode up, burst into the house, arrested him, and without an explanation bundled the minister off on the familiar road to Salem.

Judge Hathorne in his examination of Deliverance Hobbs toward the end of April 1692 elicited yet another accusation of witchcraft from her against Rev. Burroughs and others. The specter of Rebecca Nurse told Mary Walcott that she had had a hand in the deaths of Benjamin Houlton, John Harrod, Rebecca Shepard and others, and in the evening the Rev. Mr. George Burroughs appeared to Annie Putnam again, asked her to sign his book; when she refused he said, “My two first wives will appear to you presently and tell you a great many lies, but you should not believe them.” Immediately, two phantoms put in an appearance: They were women in winding sheets with kerchiefs about their heads. They turned to Burroughs looking “very red and angry” and said, “You have been a cruel man to us. Our blood does cry for vengeance against you. We shall be clothed with white robes in Heaven when you are cast into Hell.” Apparently Hell was not a place that intimidated Annie Putnam herself.

Burroughs vanished. The women turned to Annie Putnam: Their color had changed — now they “looked as pale as a white wall.” They told the tirl, “We were Mr. Burroughs’ two first wives. He hath murdered us.”

One said, “I was his first wife. He stabbed me under the left arm and put a piece of sealing wax on the wound.” She pulled aside her winding sheet and showed Annie Putnam. The phantom continued, “I was in the house where Mr. Parris now lives when it was done.”

The other moaned, “Mr. Burroughs and his present wife did kill me in the vessel as I was coming to see my friends, for he and that woman” — she meant Burroughs’ third wife — “would have one another.”

Both the ghosts charged Annie Putnam to tell the magistrates these things “before Mr. Burroughs’ face, and if he does not own to them, we do not know but we shall appear there in the court.” It was a hair-raising prospect to the Salem Villagers until they thought about it — and then they realized they would probably be able to see no more of these shades than they had of all the others which, apparently, only the girls could see.

Early in May Warrants were issued in Salem Village against George Jacobs and his granddaughter Margaret Jacobs, and the specter of George Burroughs came a-visiting Annie Putnam again. Burroughs in person appeared in Salem under arrest in custody of Field Marshal John Partridge who turned him over to the local authorities. The minister was not put in prison but given lodging at Thomas Beadle’s Inn.

Thursday, May 5^th, Eleazer Keysar, forty, was at Beadle’s in Salem socializing with Capt. Daniel King and others, and the inevitable topic of conversation was the upstairs guest. King said to Keysar, “Will you not go up and see Mr. Burroughs and discourse with him?”

“It does not belong to me,” Keysar replied, “and I am unwilling to make or meddle with it.”

King said, huffily, “Are you not a Christian? If you are a Christian, go and see him, and discourse with him.”

Keysar set his glass on the table and told King measuredly, “I do believe it does not belong to such as I am to discourse with him, he being a learned man.”

King began to grow angry. “I believe he is a child of God,” he said, “a choice child of God, and God will clear his innocency.”

But Keysar’s back was up too. He cleared his throat and looked at the Captain. “My opinion or fear is that he is the chief of all the persons accused for witchcraft, or the ringleader of them all,” Keysar said. “If he is such a one, his Master has told him by now what I have said of him.”

Captain King flew into a rage and began to rail at Keysar. A wary hush settled over the room, and Keysar forebore to speak further until the situation had been glossed over by the others present.

Nevertheless, that afternoon Keysar did in fact have occasion to be in Mr. Burroughs’ chamber, and it seemed to him that Burroughs “did steadfastly fix his eyes” upon him.

After his day at the tavern Keysar went home and, he wrote in a deposition given in later, “The same evening, being in my own house, in a room without any light, I did see very strange things appear in the chimney, I suppose a dozen of them, which seemed to me to be something like jelly that used to be in the water, and quivered with a strange motion, and then quickly disappeared. Soon after which, I did see a light up in the chimney, about the bigness of my hand, something above the bar, which quivered and shaked, and seemed to have a motion upward, upon which I called the maid, and she, looking up the chimney, saw the same; and my wife looking up could not see any thing. So I did and do conclude it was some diabolical operation!”

On Friday, May 6^th, Daniel Wilkins — while his father and uncle were still away at Boston — grew ill up on Will’s Hill in Salem Village. In the evening George Burroughs’ specter appeared to Mercy Lewis, tortured her, and tried to get her to sign his book, which she refused to do. Then he brought her “a new-fashion book which he did not use to bring.” He told her, “You might write in this book, for it is a book that was in my study when you lived with my family.”

Mercy replied, “I do not believe you, for I was often in your study, but I never saw that book there.”

Burroughs replied, “I had several books in my study which you never saw, and with them I could raise the Devil. I bewitched Mr. Shepard’s daughter.” Burroughs was referring to Rebecca Shepard, daughter of the late Rebecca Putnam Shepard — Mrs. John Shepard, alias Widow John Fuller.

“How can you go,” Mercy asked, “to bewitch her now you are kept at Salem?”

“The Devil is my servant,” Burroughs informed her. “I sent him in my shape to do it.” He tortured her again, threatened to kill her “For,” he said, “you shall not witness against me.”

Lydia Wilkins, who had been attending her brother Daniel in his illness, came down with the contagion, smallpox,” on May 8^th. Her father and uncle yet were away in Boston where Bray Wilkins was still feeling ill himself. And the young Wilkins people were not the only ones who were down with the spread of Satan’s scourge. Cases were being reported all over Salem Village. Carolina John Putnam — now Constable John — was recovered from his own affliction; he and his family had buried Sarah, who had succumbed to the pox, and none of that family doubted that the witches were responsible. The Constable threw himself into his work with a will and a vengeance.

The next day, Monday, William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall came down from Boston to join John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin on the bench, but the first examination of the day was held in private, only the magistrates and ministers present.

Burroughs was asked when he had last partaken of the Lord’s Supper, for he maintained that he was a full communicant of the congregation at Roxbury. “It has been so long since, I cannot tell,” Burroughs told the interrogators.

“Have you not been to church when the Lord’s Supper was served?”

“I was at meeting at Boston part of one day when it was served, and again at Charlestown part of a Sabbath, but I did not partake at either time.”

“Why did you not?”

“I do not recall.”

“Is it not true that your house at Casco is haunted?” Burroughs was a bit confused — he no longer lived at Casco, but at Wells. Nevertheless he answered, “It is not true.”

“Is it not? Doth it not have toads in it?”

“It hath toads, but it is not haunted.” It seemed a fine distinction to the judges.

“We have it by report that you made your wife to swear,” — swear, that is, not to tell his secrets to the Putnams when they lived together. “What do you say to it?”

“I deny it.”

“When she wished to write to her father, did you not forbid it without your consent?” This was all material that had been provided by Mrs. Ann Carr Putnam who had been Mrs. Burroughs’ gossip.

“I deny it.”

“Is it not true that, of your children, none but the eldest is baptized?”

“It is true.”

“How comes this to pass?”

Burroughs did not answer, and the judges decided that it might be better to adjourn to the public gallery. No sooner had they all walked in than the afflicted people went into paroxysms of agony — screams, thrashings-about, wails, ululations: virtual Pandemonium. It lasted a long time, but eventually William Stoughton and the others managed to get things a bit settled and to take testimony from the accusers. Susannah Sheldon said, “This is the man who murdered his two wives. They came to me in their winding sheets and told me so.”

Burroughs was asked to turn about to face Susie — he looked back over his shoulder and almost all the afflicted were knocked down; Susie and Annie Putnam gasped that he brought the Book for them to sign. Finally, the judges asked, “What do you think of these things?”

“It is an amazing and humbling Providence,” Burroughs admitted, “but I understand nothing of it.” He mused for a moment, then said, “Some of you may observe that, when they begin to name my name, they cannot name it.”

Annie Putnam and Susannah testified that he murdered his two wives and two of his children. Some of the bewitched had such terrible fits that they were ordered to be carried out of the courtroom. Sarah Bibber, an adult accuser, managed to rasp out, “This is the man that has hurt me in his shape, but I have not seen him in his presence” — that is, in the flesh — “before this.” Assumedly Burroughs had never seen her either, so why would he have tormented her? However, logic was lacking at that time, and Burroughs was too confused to think of it.

Mary Warren told the court that Burroughs, when he wished to call a Sabbat in Rev. Mr. Parris’ field, blew a trumpet “to summon the witches to their feasts” — it could be heard rolling against the hills of Lynn and Gallows Hill in Salem Town, its spectral notes echoing down the Merrimac to Cape Ann and west to Andover, but its blast was audible only to the members of the coven.

The depositions of Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs and Eleazer Keysar were read; Capt. Simon Willard, John Brown, and John Weldon testified to the reality of the myths regarding his strength: He held up a great gun with one hand, even with but one finger stuck in the barrel; Capt. John Putnam, Jr., affirmed the truth of the stories. Capt. William Wormall testified about the barrel of molasses, but he said that Burroughs held the gun in front of the lock and rested its butt on his chest. John Brown told a story about a barrel of cider, but denied that his family was frightened by a white calf in his house. Capt. Putnam deposed that Burroughs forced his wife to enter into a covenant with him, and Abigail Hobbs submitted evidence from prison that Burroughs made her sign the Devil’s Book.

A body search of the minister for a witch’s mark had revealed nothing. At great length, Burroughs was quizzed and finally sent back to confinement. The evidence was overwhelming — at least to Stoughton and Hathorne, if not to Sewall and Corwin; but Sewall, at least, was enormously impressed.

On the 12^th of May Abigail Hobbs was examined in Salem Prison. She was asked, “Did Mr. Burroughs bring you any of the poppits” — that is, witch dolls — “of his wives to stick pins into?”

“I do not remember that he did,” she replied.

“Did he bring any of his children, or of the Eastward soldiers?”

“No.”

“Have you known of any that have been killed by witchcraft?”

“No. Nobody.”

“How came you to speak of Mr. Burroughs’s wives yesterday?”

“I don’t know.” For a confessed witch, Abigail was being singularly uncooperative.

“Is that true about Davis’ son of Casco, and of those of the Village?”

“Yes, it is true.”

“What service did he put you upon? And who are they you afflicted?”

“I cannot tell who, neither do I know whether they died.”

“Were they strangers to you that Burroughs would have you afflict?”

“Yes.”

“And were they afflicted accordingly?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you name some of them?”

“No. I cannot remember them.”

“Where did they live?”

“At the Eastward.”

“Have any vessels been cast away by you?”

“I do not know.”

“Have you consented to the afflicting of any others besides those at the Village?”

“Yes.”

“Who were they?”

“I cannot tell, but it was of such who lived at the fort side of the river about half a mile from the fort toward Capt. Brackett’s.”

“What was the hurt you gave to them by consent?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there anything brought to you like them?”

“Yes.”

“What did you stick into them?”

“Thorns.”

“Did some of them die?”

“Yes. One of them was Mary Lawrence that died.”

“Where did you stick the thorns?”

“I do not know.”

“Was it about the middle of her body?”

“Yes, and I stuck it right in.”

“What provoked you? Had she displeased you?”

“Yes, by some words she spoke of me.”

“Who brought the image to you?”

“It was Mr. Burroughs.”

“How did he bring it to you?”

“In his own person, bodily.”

“Where did he bring it to you?”

“Abroad a little way off from our house.”

“And what did he say to you then?”

“He told me he was angry with that family.”

“How many years since was it?”

“Before this Indian war.”

“How did you know Mr. Burroughs was a witch?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long have you been a witch?”

“I made two covenants with the Devil, first for two years, and after that for four years. I have been a witch these six years.”

“Did the maid complain of pain about the place you stuck the thorn in?”

“Yes, but how long she lived, I don’t know.”

“How do you know Burroughs was angry with Lawrence’s family.”

“Because he told me so.”

“Where did any other live that you afflicted?”

“Just by the other toward James Andrews’, and they died also.”

“How many were they — more than one?”

“Yes.”

“And who brought those poppits to you?”

“Mr. Burroughs.”

“What did you stick into them?”

“Pins. And he gave them to me.”

“Did you keep those poppits?”

“No, he carried them away with him.”

“Was he there himself with you in bodily person?”

“Yes, and so he was when he appeared to tempt me to set my hand to the Book. He then appeared in person, and I felt his hand at the same time.”

“Were they men, women, or children you killed?”

They were both boys and girls.”

“Was you angry with them yourself?”

“Yes, though I don’t know why now.”

“Did you know Mr. Burroughs’ wife?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know of any poppits pricked to kill her?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Have you seen several witches at the Eastward?”

“Yes, but I don’t know who they were.”

Toward the middle of the month Ann Foster was questioned several times — she was a goldmine of occult information, but this time she began to repeat herself, though some details were new: She had agreed to serve the Devil two years, “upon which he promised me prosperity but never performed it.” Indeed, it was remarkable how little prosperity there was among most of the accused witches. As she and Martha Carrier were going to the Witches’ Sabbat in Salem Village “the stick broke as we were carried in the air above the tops of the trees, and we fell, but I did hang fast about the neck of Goody Carrier, and we were presently at the Village, but I was then much hurt of my leg.” Though there were only twenty-five present at the meeting she “heard some of the witches say that there was three hundred and five in the whole country, and that they would ruin that place, the Village.”

Besides Burroughs there were at the meeting two men, “and one of them had gray hair.” Ann, contrite, told the judges that she “formerly frequented the public meeting to Worship God, but the Devil had such power over me that I could not profit there, and that was my undoing.” She recalled another act of murder that had been committed: “About three or four years ago Martha Carrier told me she would bewitch James Hobbs’ child to death, and the child died in twenty-four hours.” It was Martha Carrier who had brought the infection of smallpox into Andover, and perhaps into Salem Village as well.

After the judges left, the Rev. John Hale asked Ann further questions. “Did you ride to the witches’ meetings on a stick?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do for victuals?”

“I carried bread and cheese in my pocket. I came before the meeting with the Andover folk to Salem Village, and we sat down together under a tree and eat our food, and I drank water out of a brook to quench my thirst.”

“Where was the meeting?”

“Upon a grassy place by a cart path, and there was sandy ground in the path with the marks of horses’ feet.” She said further, “I am in fear that Mr. Burroughs and Martha Carrier will kill me, for they appeared to me and brought a sharp-pointed iron like a spindle, but four-square, and threatened to stab me to death with it because I had confessed my witchcraft and told of them that they were with me at meeting. It was Martha Carrier that made me a witch.”

The third session of the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer was convened in Salem, the purpose of which was to try John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rev. George Burroughs, John Willard, George Jacobs, Sr., and Martha Carrier. By this time many witches had been hanged on Gallows Hill where there was no true gallows, only a ladder against a tall tree up which the condemned people were led and then “turned off,” that is, twisted off of the rung upon which they stood.

The trial of George Burroughs was held on both August 2^nd and 3^rd, there were so many witnesses against him. At first the bitch witches had such a great number of fits and were struck so dumb at Burroughs’ entry into the courtroom in Salem that no one could accuse him. But after a great while Justice Gedney asked the minister, “Who do you think hinders these witnesses from giving their testimonies?”

“The Devil, I suppose,” Burroughs answered.

“How comes the Devil so loath to have any testimony borne against you?”

Burroughs didn’t know how to answer. The girls complained, “He bites!” and they showed the tooth marks. The court ordered Burroughs to bite a stick; the judges compared the stick with the bite marks on the children’s arms, and sure enough — !

Mercy Lewis in her fit said, “George Burroughs carried me away to a very high mountain where all the kingdoms of the world lay below and said, ‘I will give all these to you if you will but write in my Book, and if you do not I will throw you down and break your neck,’ but I told him, ‘They are none of yours to give, and I will not write if you throwed me down on a hundred pitchforks.’ 

True to their word, Burroughs’ two murdered wives appeared to Annie Putnam right there in court. She told the judges, “They cry, ‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’” The other girls were asked if they saw the specters there, and of course they did.

Hathorne asked Burroughs, “Do not you see the apparitions of your dead wives?”

“I know nothing of it,” he replied, baffled.

“You are not a large man,” Hathorne noted, “yet it is said you have performed feats beyond the strength of a giant. What do you say to it?”

“It is not true.”

“Did not you hold out a gun seven foot in the barrel with one hand?”

“An Indian was there, and held it out at the same time.”

Annie Putnam broke in, “It was the Black Man, or the Devil, who looks like an Indian. It was Hobbamock,” she told the Court, “who was with him in the appearance of a man.”

“Did you not carry a barrel full of molasses or cider from a canoe to the shore without help?” a judge queried.

“It is no great thing,” he replied. “It was a cask, not a barrel.”

“Here is testimony that you caught up with your wife and her brother Richard preternaturally quick when you had been left far behind” — the judge waved a deposition at him — “and you chided her for speaking of you and told her you knew their thoughts” (a new charge: Burroughs was a telepath); “that Rucke was startled and said that the Devil himself did not know so far, and that you replied, ‘My God makes known your thought to me.’”

“Rucke and my wife left a man with me when they left me,” Burroughs said, implying that he had a witness. But Thomas Rucke, who was present in Court, stood forth and called, “That is false!”

Gedney asked Burroughs, “What was the man’s name?”

Burroughs did not answer.

“Why do you not reply? Is it because you only stepped aside to put on your invisibility so that you might listen to them in a fascinating mist?” It was a fascinating question.

Rather than answer, Burroughs submitted a paper to the Court that read, in part, “There neither are, nor ever were, witches that, having made a compact with the Devil, can send a Devil to torment other people at a distance.” The magistrates read it; then Gedney asked, “Did you write this?”

“Yes,” Burroughs replied. It was a stupid lie because the one thing no one should have doubted was that this court was widely and deeply read in the literature of witchcraft.

“You are a liar!” he was told. “This paper is transcribed from the book of Thomas Ady.” The eyes of judge and accused locked: They both knew they were talking about the 1655 skeptical treatise titled A Candle in the Dark. Now Burroughs was accused of two new charges — telepathy and plagiarism!

Caught in an untenable position, Burroughs, like his colleagues in Boston, chose to bluster it out. “I took none of it out of any book,” he maintained.

“How does it happen, then, that this sounds so much like the other?”

“A gentleman gave me the discourse in a manuscript,” Burroughs said, “from whence I transcribed it.” It was a mealy-mouthed reply that nevertheless meant he himself had not written the paper. The Court was disgusted, and the parade of witnesses and storm of depositions continued unabated, but they were no longer needed — they were but window dressing to justify the condemnation of an ordained minister.

The affidavit of Samuel Sheldon was read. He said that the day before the trial Burroughs appeared to him and asked if Sheldon “would go to the village tomorrow to witness against him.” When Sheldon answered he would, Burroughs’ specter told him that before that happened he would be killed. That hadn’t happened, obviously.

Later, at Ingersoll’s, the shade reappeared and told Sheldon, in direct contradiction of the details as they had been revealed to Annie Putnam, that he had smothered his first wife and choked the second, together with his two children. He had also killed three other children in Maine.

After his condemnation Burroughs said to the magistrates, “I am innocent, yet I justify you in your verdict, for there are many positive witnesses against me, but I die by false witnesses.” His justification of the Court gave some faint satisfaction to the ministers of Boston.

In addition to George Jacobs, John Proctor and Burroughs, John Willard and Martha Carrier were convicted by Friday, August fifth, 1692.

Friday, August 19^th, was a day of execution. As the cart bearing the condemned people — George Jacobs, Sr., John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, and the Rev. Mr. George Burroughs — proceeded slowly up Gallows Hill, at one point it got stuck. The bitch witches, who walked alongside, informed the crowd, as people put their shoulders to the wheels, “The Devil hinders it.”

At the gallows oak the crowd was ominously quiet; when George Proctor and John Willard died bravely and well, the silence began to grow into an angry murmur. Cotton Mather had come up from Boston to be present at this execution of a colleague; he sat upon a horse while the hangings took place. Samuel Sewall was in the crowd, as were several ministers — Rev. Messrs. Simms, John Hale, Nicholas Noyes, and Samuel Cheever among others.

Martha Carrier, like the others before her, died protesting her innocence. And when George Burroughs mounted the ladder he spoke to the gathering of Puritans, said he was innocent, delivered a short oration, and ended with a flawlessly executed recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

The display, as it was meant to do, amazed the crowd, for no witch was supposed to be able to manage such a feat, and he was quickly turned off the ladder before the assembly could assimilate his achievement. While the little dark minister was swinging and dying Cotton Mather on his horse shouted, “They all died by righteous sentence! Mr. Burroughs was not an ordained minister.” That was an incomprehensible remark. “That he could recite the Lord’s Prayer is no proof of his innocence, for the Devil often has been transformed into an angel of light” — another remarkable statement.

The corpses were cut down and hastily buried among the rocks in shallow graves. Burroughs was tumbled into a gash in the ground along with John Willard and Martha Carrier. When the soil was shoveled in, the gravediggers were in too great a hurry to get away, for they left the preacher’s hand and chin uncovered, as well as a foot of one of the others. There were many people who left Gallows Hill weeping that day.

 Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1694, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2009, ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages. ORDER FROM BARNES & NOBLE / ORDER FROM AMAZON  

Commencement Address

Commencement Address

University of Maine: Fort Kent

9 May 2009

In 1952, during my senior year at Meriden High School in Connecticut, as a member of the English Honors Class taught by Mark Bollman I was required to write an essay for the school’s Hicks Prize Essay Contest. The title of my entry was "A Row of Hedges," and it made an elaborate metaphor: The hedges outside the English Honors classroom represented the succession of our school years; the frame of the window closest to the front of the room cut off the view of the downhill end of the hedges, which represented the future, and so forth and so on. Quite corny, but decently written for a high school senior, apparently, because it was one of the finalists.

Fast forward nine years: At the beginning of my second year of teaching in 1961, at what is now the Cleveland State University, I was asked to address the incoming freshmen at the fall convocation. Reaching back into my not-so-distant past, I refurbished “A Row of Hedges” and turned it into an exemplary talk about the importance of writing in college. Afterward one of the freshmen approached me to say, “I hope you don’t expect us to write as well as that!” I didn’t, but I wished I could have done so.

In the Kennebec Journal for Tuesday, February 24^th of this year there was an article by Eleanor Chute the headline of which read, “In Internet Era, Writing Has Taken on a New Importance.” She began, “Bob Dandoy, who has taught high school and college composition…for more than 30 years, still remembers the community college student who, upon being told she would have to write a ten page research paper, got up, walked out and threw up.”

Ms. Chute continued her story; she wrote, “Not all students so vividly display their anxieties about writing, but teachers can find plenty of examples of students who say they can’t write, don’t write, or hate to write.

“Yet outside of school,” she continued, “students and others are writing e-mails, Facebook entries, text messages, blogs, job letters, resumes and more.

“Writing has become so ubiquitous that we are now living in the ‘Age of Composition,’ according to Kathleen Blake Yancey, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. ‘I think we’re conceiving of writing very differently than we did before. We’re understanding writing takes place in lots of different environments and for lots of different purposes,’ Yancey said.”

On the Larry King Live show this past January 18^th the actor Kal Penn said, “I’m an actor; I just read lines that people much smarter than I am write for me.” Writers aren’t necessarily smarter than actors or anybody else, but there is no doubt at all that they can think, because writing is thinking.

Performers get most of the awards, though, the Emmies and the Golden Globes and the Oscars and the Obies and so forth and so on ad infinitum it seems, but every once in a while we get someone who can both write and perform. Such a person is usually a winner of more than just an award.

Back in 2004 when I heard Barack Obama give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention I came to attention and listened intently. Here was a person who clearly was able to think, and who was able to deliver his thoughts so cogently that it was electrifying. Of course, no one yet had any idea that freshman senator Obama was going to become the next President of the United States, but it was clear to me that he was heading for something big. When he declared his candidacy I was immediately his partisan — I became one of those bloggers Governor Sarah Palin complains about — because what the country needed was someone who could get his or her ideas in order, and then put them into the public mind in such a way that they stuck, and subsequently see them through to a conclusion. So far, he has been able to do the first two things, and I’m sure he’ll do the third as well.

What am I saying to you here today — that it’s possible for any one of you members of the Class of 2009 to become President of the United States? That may, in fact, be possible. More important, though, I am saying that an ability to write, to handle the language in persuasive and cogent ways, is desirable for us all if we wish to be all that we can become, do all that we wish to do in our lives and our careers. There’s a performance component as well, of course, and it would be simply wonderful if we could not only put our thoughts together on paper, but deliver them publicly so that those words would persuade our audience, whoever they might be, to climb on board our train of thought. It would be wonderful if we could all be not only penmen and women but orators as well; at a minimum, though, wouldn’t we all like those ahead of us in the chain of command to be persuaded that we have ideas that need to be reckoned with? 

Time for another little story of my own. I was a professor of English for many years, and one of the necessities for academics is that they sit on various committees that quite often amount to very little, accomplish a bare minimum. I sat on such a committee at my college back in the seventies when things were changing in our world. This committee had been given the charge of coming up with rules for what was then called Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment.

The chair of our committee was a young woman assistant dean. We met with her about once a month for most of the fall semester, but as usual we fiddled and faddled and trod water. Our chair didn’t seem to have much of a handle on what we were supposed to be doing. I got fed up. As usual.

Before our next meeting I wrote an outline of what our goals should be. It was perhaps a page long. When next the committee met I passed around my outline. When our chair read it she fell into a bemused state. Her eyes stared into space. One could practically hear the wheels turning between her ears. Suddenly she simply adjourned the meeting, apparently without having heard a word any of us had said, and we didn’t meet again for several weeks. At our next gathering, though, our chair passed out a document that was several pages in length. What had she done? You guessed it: She had turned my outline into a paper that we read and eventually passed as our final report.

The rules that I had put into outline became the template for affirmative action at my school, and that young assistant dean went soaring off to become a full dean, a vice president and provost, and eventually a college president. Truly, she did. I went on to sit on many more committees before I retired and, of course, to write quite a few books on various subjects, many of them on the subject of writing. I got really tired of sitting on committees, but I never got tired of writing or of teaching people young and old how to write.

May I suggest that you all give a lot of thought, for the rest of your lives, to what it is that you are thinking? And that you spend a fair amount of time practicing getting your thoughts in order in a manner that can persuade the readers of whatever it is you’re thinking that you are someone who needs to be reckoned with? I promise you, if you do those things, you won’t be sorry. Just take a look at President Barack Obama and what he’s been able to do, and think of what he is still to do. Oh, and by the way, I suggest that you read his books. They are very well written.

Lewis Turco

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REMARKS

Thank you so much, Lew,

People up here are still talking about your address to the graduates and how well it connected with everything we have been talking about on campus....  One of our upcoming faculty development days will focus on writing across the curriculum.

Take care, and best wishes,

Geraldine Cannon Becker

 

Dear Geraldine,

Jean and I had a really good time in Fort Kent. Thank you and Joe for your nomination. We were really impressed that there wasn’t a single hitch in the proceedings! Dick Cost was clearly every inch the Navy destroyer captain, in total control and aware of everything at all times. most impressive. The first time I went through one of these trips and ceremonies I wound up having to buy a new van because mine had to be left behind at a repair shop on the way down (to Ashland, Ohio), and it gave up the ghost on the way back (near Buffalo). It was an exceedingly expensive honor. Tell Dick we were thoroughly delighted with the whole thing, including the trip, on which we both saw a marten and Jean saw an antlered moose.

I'm happy that you're happy. Give Joe my best, and tell him I forgive him for turning into an administrator. If anyone wants a copy of my talk, I've posted it on my blog.

Lew

 

Lew,

You've heard me spout on about the importance of good writing skills before. Here is an interesting idea.

Jennifer is interviewing people to be on her sales force at her new job (she will soon be the general manager of a hotel that is still being built). She has had to sift through many resumés and cover letters lately. More than a few have been rife with egregious errors that prove that even with a spell checker a person can be dangerous. ('miss communication' instead of  'miscommunication' or 'due able' instead of 'doable', for example, can slip past even some of the better grammar checkers, not to mention spell checkers). It irks her no end but provides some nightly entertainment. I watched her send a rejection to one or two people for such errors. Is that too harsh? Do you think she owes it to these people to explain that she is rejecting them for such stuff?

If she does interview a person, she is considering asking them to write a quick paragraph describing their apartment or house as if they were trying to sell it. She will evaluate them on spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style. Do you think this is unfair? Do you have another suggestion?

Paul

 

Hell, no, I don't think it's unfair! Illiteracy should never be tolerated. But read my commencement address at UMFK on my blog. It's all about what you're saying.

Lew