Seasoned Timber

This bittersweet, vivid book recounts a high school headmaster's falling in love at age 44 (the titular "seasoned timber"). The object of his admiration, a teacher 20 years his junior, does not know of the gentleman's feelings, and settles instead on another, alas.

I want to compliment the author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (she of the eponymous children's book award), on the ice skating image. Our hero (I'm sorry, I don't have the character's name noted) teaches the students to ice skate in this New England town. This consists in large part of convincing them to let their caution go and speed up - the greater the speed the greater the ease, and the surer the balance. This is in a nutshell what our protaganist must learn about love; these show more lessons, however, are late coming, and mostly ineffective.

Also worth noting are the lovely poetic flights our hero's imagination takes - these are the most effective and affecting "deep in love" passages in memory. They occur and recur throughout the book, and they are one of the chief delights.

"Seasoned Timber" flies generally under the radar, and that's a shame. If you want to take a flight among the human heart's desires, poetically and compassionately drawn, pick up this book. I think the author deserves not to be so obscure.

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I love and respect Dorothy Canfield Fisher. I know her well because she was a friend (and then not-friend and then friend again) of Willa Cather, one of my research interests. Dorothy was a dynamo. I don't know how she found time to accomplish all the work that she was able to do. Having said that, I find her fiction unreadable, with the single exception of the children's book, Understood Betsy. I even took one of her books (it may have been this one) with me when I traveled by train from New York to Vermont, where Dorothy lived, hoping I would feel inspired by the spirit of place. It didn't work.

However, having now flamed her adult fiction, I want to add that her letters are wonderful, and Dorothy is fortunate that a Cather scholar show more has created an excellent edition of the letters: Keeping Fires Night and Day, edited by Mark Madigan (1993)--and note that this Harscrabble edition was also edited by Madigan. I so love that title, taken from a line in one of Dorothy's letters--something like, Oh, we're doing just fine here, keeping fires night and day. Madigan's biographical notes throughout the volume of letters are better than either of the biographies written about DCF. Sadly, her biographies are not worthy of her, and I hope someday someone will write a biography that captures the spirit of this lively, lovely, hardworking Vermonter. show less