A Letter worthy of Thanksgiving

The attached text is from the comments section, but I wanted to highlight here.  It came this morning, quite by surprise.  Like the comments by other distinguished authors including Christopher Priest and James Sallis, it reminded me why I slog along this path of the honoring of George R. Stewart and his great novel, Earth Abides.

My original intention was to edit the message.  But it is so integrated that it shall stand as sent.  The only change  is to add links to Terence Green and his work.

Just finished your biography of George R. Stewart. Enjoyed it immensely — a very fine book. Like all good biographies, it gives a sense of the times and the place as well as the individual — especially the UC Berkeley milieu of that era. (In short, I learned a lot.)

I’m a Canadian writer and teacher, born in 1947, currently in my 12th year of teaching creative writing at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada (this London is a city of some 300,000, 2 hours south-west of Toronto). Before that, I spent 30 years teaching high school English, primarily in Toronto. I’m also the author of 8 books [That’s a review of one] (7 novels and a collection of short stories).

I bought and read the Ace paperback of EARTH ABIDES back in the early 60s (62? 63?) as a high-school teenager, and was duly impressed… So impressed, I might add, that I still have that particular 50-cent edition (more than 50 years now) on a bookshelf here in my office — an old favorite, and probably a collector’s item of sorts. I rank it with A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ — also never out of print — as transcending any genre, moving people, and opening eyes — touching the mind and the heart, as the best literature does.

When I spotted the trade paperback edition published by Del Rey about a decade ago, I bought it and re-read it. I was impressed once again. It more than held up. And just recently, I read it for the 3rd time, still moved and impressed — enough to search the internet for more information on Stewart. This is how I found and ordered your book.

I just wanted you to hear yet another story of how far-reaching his work has been, and by extension, how far-reaching your own appreciation has been.

Many thanks for the scholarship (and work) involved in spreading the word. I like to think there’s a potential, significant, continuous groundswell for the book, and that it will indeed abide long into the future, like Ish’s hammer. And you’ve helped.

Thanks to Terence Green, and to all those who understand the greatness of George R. Stewart and Earth Abides; and who take the trouble to let others in the “Fellowship of the Hammer” know their feelings.

George R. Stewart Finds Treasure Island

When I was a boy, the folks bought a record player and a recorded version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  Dad said I wore the record out, especially the beginning with its stirring lines:  “If ever a boy loved adventure, Jim Hawkins was his name.”

When George R. Stewart was a boy, wandering through the treasures in the family attic in Indiana, Pennsylvania, he found a copy of the book, Treasure Island.  He took it downstairs, opened it and began to read. It changed his life.

He became fascinated with maps and mapping, inspired by the map to pirate’s treasure.  Years later, he may have learned that Stevenson was similarly in love with maps; and he often mapped a story out first and then let the tale unfold as the map directed. Like Stevenson, Stewart would become an author of place, of geography, and of maps.

Stevenson’s book stayed with Stewart.  When he was at UC Berkeley, working on his Master’s Degree, two fine professors helped him discover his style of writing and his subject – the geography and history of the west.  He decided to write a Master’s Thesis which would combine the two.  Treasure Island came to mind.

There was some evidence that “Treasure Island” was, in fact, located in the landscapes and history of the greater Bay Area.  (One giveaway was the presence of rattlesnakes among Coast Live Oaks in the novel.)  Stewart decided to use the internal evidence from the novel, research into Stevenson’s writings, and field research to see if he could discover where the Island was located.

Stewart found Treasure Island.  The wave-swept beaches were the shores of Monterey Bay.  The Coast Live Oak forests backed the Bay.   The flat-topped mountain, Spyglass Hill, was Mount St. Helena, where Stevenson and his bride Fanny spent their honeymoon.

And the abandoned mine where the Stevensons spent their honeymoon gave Robert Louis Stevenson the name for one of his characters – one of the great characters of English literature.

Robert and Fanny stayed at the “old Juan Silverado mine.”

In English, roughly translated, that’s “old John of the Silver.”

“Long John Silver.”

Stewart had discovered not only the landscapes; he’d found Long John Silver himself.

If you visit the Napa wine country of California, it’s a short but winding drive north from Calistoga to “Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.”  Hike the short Memorial Trail to find a plaque memorializing the Stevensons’ honeymoon – placed where the mine cabin, the Old Juan Silverado mine cabin, stood.

Or you can choose longer hikes which wind around and up and down Mount Saint Helena.

Afterward, visit one of those fine Napa Valley wineries and raise a glass of  the wine Stevenson described as “bottled poetry” to celebrate your discovery of Treasure Island, and your meeting with Long John Silver himself.

For more information about Stevenson’s time in California, visit the pages of the Robert Louis Stevenson Organization.

Before you visit the park, review this page from the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum.   And read The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson’s record of the California years.  If you read the version edited by James Hart, From Scotland to Silverado, you’ll find George R. Stewart honored in the “Introduction” for his re-discovery of Treasure Island .  As at Donner Lake, Stewart’s research and writing were the foundation for a California state park.

After Robert Louis Stevenson died, his widow, Fanny Stevenson, built a beautiful home on Hyde Street, near winding Lombard Street, on that long stretch of hill made famous by the Powell-Hyde Cable Car.  The house eventually went to Noel Sullivan, a member of the family of Mayor James D. Phelan.  Sullivan turned the place into a center of learning and the arts, holding frequent gatherings that included many members of what Ansel Adams once called “The Northern California Enlightenment” [or words to that effect].  Robert Louis Stevenson would have found that use most satisfying.

 

George R. Stewart’s Prophetic Whole Earth Vision, and a Canadian Coin

In a recent issue of the excellent CBC New website,  journalist Bob MacDonald describes a new Canadian coin that honors the 25th anniversary of the first spaceflight by a female Canadian Scientist-Astronaut, Dr. Roberta Bondar.  The coin, beautifully-designed, has two remarkable features. Concave on one side and convex on the other, it carries a sense of the roundness of Earth.  And its colorful rendering of the image-map of Canada from space glows in the dark to reveal patterns of man-made lights in that northern country.  (The Canadians were also kind enough to include a good part of their neighboring nation to the south on the coin.)

Since this is a silver coin, durably made, it will be a long-lasting — “a deep time” — reminder of North American geography as it appeared the early 21st century.

In his article, MacDonald emphasizes what he seems to consider a new idea – that space and conservation are two sides of the same coin.  The article is well-written, and will open up that idea for the first time to many readers.  But the idea is NOT new – NASA is tasked, to do ecological research.  And that, in part, is certainly because George R.Stewart, nearly a quarter of a century before the NASA organic act was written, and 33 years before the first Earth Day,  in Ordeal By Hunger and his ecological novels, presented the concept to a massive audience of literate, general readers.

Ordeal By Hunger, written in 1936,  opens with a view of Nevada from orbit so accurately described that when  International Space Station Astronaut Dr. Ed Lu  photographed Nevada from space his images matched Stewart’s words almost exactly.  Stewart’s history of the Donner Party then comes down to Earth, to focus on the role of the ecosystem in the fate of the emigrants.  Thus, he completes what has become known as The Whole Earth vision – understanding Earth from within its ecosystem, and  from without,  as one small, beautiful, place in the universe.

Stewart follows that same approach in his first ecological novel, Storm.  The novel begins with a view of Earth from Earth orbit; moves into the ecosystem to tell its story; then ends by  taking the reader to an imaginary platform on Venus, describing the tiny bright light called Earth from millions of miles away.

Once again George R. Stewart proved to be a prophet, and trailblazer for our time.  His books helped lay the foundation for the view of Earth found on the new Canadian coin, and for our sense of the Whole Earth.