Saturday was a dreary day. A good example, I think, of what Wyman Richardson was talking about in the chapter of The House on Nauset Marsh titled “The March Doldrums.” We were at the Inn at the Oaks in Eastham to hear readings from Richardson’s book.
Wyman Richardson was a distinguished physician and professor at Harvard Medical School, but The House on Nauset Marsh is about the place he loved more than any other — the old farmhouse on the marsh in Eastham that was his family’s refuge and retreat. The memoir, published in 1947, began as a series of essays in the Atlantic Monthly — his closely observed reflections on the ocean, the landscape, the weather, and the wildlife of the Outer Cape in the 1940s.
What’s notable about these chapters is that not much happens in them. We follow the good doctor out to the beach or into the woods and then back to the house for a drink and dinner, with his amiable commentary on everything from fog to the language of birds to the best way to cook a striped bass.
Mark Vonnegut, who grew up on the Cape and is himself a Harvard-educated physician, read us the book’s opening chapter, “The Farm House,” and then Robert Finch’s elegant introduction to the 50th anniversary edition. Finch clearly appreciated the recording of these “undramatic and commonplace,” events. “The style is deceptively casual, as if we were listening to stories told by a favorite relative,” Finch wrote. “In a sense it is the book’s very ‘artlessness’ that sets it apart from other classics of Cape Cod literature.”
Taking us further into just being here, Leah Dower, the youth services librarian at the Eastham library, read the chapter titled “The Do-Nothing Day,” the main activity of which was making dinner: broiled striped bass and creamed potatoes. “We have very definite ideas about food and how it should be prepared,” wrote Richardson. “We like it simple but properly cooked. We do not go in for rare spices, unusual combinations, difficult sauces, and such things.”
Then, Bob Seay read “The March Doldrums,” the word evoking a sense of defeat and despondency. I was certainly not the only one in the room thinking about the parallels between the 1940s and our own time.
Afterwards, our writer friend Cathy Corman asked, “What was it like to have come through the war and to have had Eastham as a retreat from a world that had come unmoored?” Listening to Richardson had her thinking, “How will the seasonal rhythms and beauty of the Outer Cape offer comfort in the coming years, which I imagine will be very difficult?”
Mark Vonnegut interrupted our collective reverie to say that Wyman Richardson’s nephew, Elliot Richardson, had also spent time in Eastham. He was the one who resigned as U.S. Attorney General in 1973 rather than obey President Richard Nixon’s order that he fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Someone in the audience said, “It can be done.” The room burst into applause.
