Notes and Fragments
by Sarah Orne Jewett
from the Annie Fields Diary and Commonplace Book,
1907 - 1912
Introduction
Annie Adams Fields kept a diary and commonplace book in which
she made occasional entries, beginning when Sarah Orne Jewett
suffered what would prove her fatal stroke on Sunday 31 January
1909. She died almost five months later on Thursday 24
June 1909.
After Jewett's death, sometime in the first 9 months of 1910,
Fields gathered what she says were scraps of a Jewett diary and
copied these into her own diary. She implies that these
were written after Jewett's 1902 carriage accident that brought
an end to her professional writing career. Thus, they
suggest that she did continue to think about writing fiction.
Fields explains that when she had copied what she thought she
could, she destroyed the originals. Should scholars find these
fragment useful, they will be frustrated by knowing that they
are copies and not originals. Fields clearly has revised
them, and it cannot be clear whether the changes she makes are
corrections of her own transcription errors or "improvements" on
what Jewett wrote. It is even possible, though not very
likely, that she recorded Jewett's own revisions in her notes.
{ } = editorial clarifications.
[ ] = editorial information and commentary.
Fragments from Miss Jewett's [
well-written ?
] diary ^written in [on scraps of paper
? ]^ [
deleted
words, perhaps published ] copied into no book --
"Even if we are not equipped with that love
for our housemates that makes things easy there are certain
civilities that when observed make life easier and more
respectable for everyone"
[
Fields inserts two short parallel dividing lines before
beginning several of the following entries]
------- "one of those persons ^we^ [
deleted word ]
can do anything for but
love.
-------
You can't push 3d rate people up by pulling
first rate people down --
Want of openness is such a fatal thing --- cowardly in people of
a decent upbringing.
------- a beautiful openness of nature --- no sense
of hidden places
-------
She was full of pretty fancies: she'd always rest herself with
something to read; but you couldn't make
[ A faded sentence appears to be
penciled into the top margin. It may read: Some
mistake here belongs to something else. ]
no talk with him; he had a mind like a chine of pork sort of
thick and satisfied and everything you said seemed to drop on
the ground all round him --
Economy was his watch word even if it did come out of
others
somebody else!
----- She was like a bright river running in the sun, but full
of deep still places and not to be bridged by most people's
thoughts: a river that shone and sparkled and [
unrecognized
word raised
? ] its gay voice but it was
always full of unsuspected power ....
She has passed too quickly {--} we can only
see a rough and stormy way where such beauty and brightness were
in our sight so long.
Two half truths never make a whole one -----
[ Page 3 ]
S.O.J. continued. --
Sometimes genius comes to the light of day as a living spring
starts out of a rocky hillside, self existent and self
dependent. Often it is like a broad stream fed by many
tributaries drawn to its single channel by {a} mysterious power
of life and determination.
Everything depends upon whether we are trying to [ range
or
gauge
? ] ourselves with the high ideals, or are
satisfied with the low ones. We must not drop to these for
the sake of complimenting those who are satisfied so because it
is easier; -- neither for their sakes nor our own.
S.O.J.
She quotes from Marmontel: C'est ce touchant
désir de plaire qui avoue le besoin d'être aimé --* and again of
writers: Greedy little writers about other people's work who
always seem to write with green ink ---
[ Page 4 ]
Sarah says of one of her characters; "She belonged to a sect so
strenuous about the value of its rites as almost to put God
under obligations and throw the debt on that side{.}"
[
Next in Fields's diary is the manuscript of an incomplete
sketch by Jewett, entitled "By the Trolley Car." This
manuscript is published by itself. After copying this
sketch, Fields continues with another fragment.]
[ Page 5 ]
The country about Dunnet Landing has a way of
waiting quietly all round you{,} surrounding you with superior
forces until you suddenly find that you have become only a piece
of it instead of a foreign substance flung into it by chance.
And if you
[ Page 6 ]
keep to one place to go to and sit in, this feeling comes
faster and little things keep happening without troubling you
that you can watch. This is the difference between [ outdoor or
outdoors ? ] and in a house! Something always
happens to amuse you: an ant with a crumb, a bird going up
& down at tree or a little bit of a tree that stands in
front of you until it seems like a quiet person.
Sit until you do see it!* (The
beauty{,} the presence of something)
[ Page 7 ]
O my darling! this is all I can find to save
and I am tearing up the bits of paper on which you used to write
things which
come ^came^ into your head while
you were resting
during
[ Page 8 ]
in those many sad and to you unfruitful years. They were not
unfruitful for we were all
loving ^learning^
to know and understand you better and better and now we can seem
to follow and love you better for the way in which you endured
those days and found them [ sweet
? ] for your friends'
sake often time.
Notes
aimé:
Wikipedia
says: Jean-François Marmontel (1723 -1799) "was a French
historian and writer, a member of the Encyclopédistes movement."
The quotation is from his address to the French Academy of 22
December 1763 in
Œuvres Complètes de Marmontel, Volume 7,
p. 23. English translation, with assistance of Jeannine
Hammond, Coe College: It is this touching desire to please
that avows the need to be loved.
do see it: "do" is underlined twice.
Annie Fields's "Diary and Commonplace Book" 1907-1912 is held by
the Massachusetts Historical Society: Annie Fields papers,
1847-1912, MS. N-1221. This transcription was made from a
microfilm copy, available courtesy of the University of Kansas
Libraries, Lawrence Kansas: Annie Adams Fields Papers 1852-1912.
Folio PS 1669.F5 Z462, 1986, Reel 2.