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Description edit
These are some of the collected essays and musings of the historians Gervase Wemyss and Markham Pyle. In this volume, they meditate on trout streams, toaster-ovens, battlefields, game birds, regional culture, regional cooking, the writing of history, and the craft of writing, dispensing wise... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
Essays on land, regionalism, fly-fishing, battlefields, combat, rivers, and the craft of writing, by two historians, one, British, and one, American.
People edit
- GMW Wemyss: Historian
- Markham Shaw Pyle: Historian
- Sam Houston: Statesman and soldier
- W. G. Grace: The Doctor of Cricket
- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington: Statesman and soldier
- Robert E. Lee: Soldier
- Herodotus: Historian
- Fragonard: Artist
- Winston S. Churchill: Statesman and soldier
- Piper Bill Millin: Commando piper
Quotes edit
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“But that’s the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind.”
Markham Shaw Pyle -
“Now, it is peculiarly the case that, in the country – and, I rather think, even in town – being winter-bound and weather-bound brings the verge, the borders, the frontier between the homely and the Wild, to one’s very door. Even, for some of us, all but withindoors: in such weather as this, I know, I am well-advised to stand away from windows and doorways, by a good few feet, as the old pile is rather by way of being a howling, draughty wilderness intermittently warmed in spots. (And this without bringing the Wild withindoors with one, for all my jests that, if this wintry weather keeps up, I shall have to accommodate the pigs in the long gallery: the Gloucester Old Spots, at any rate, feeling as I do that the Tamworths may have the Rose Room and welcome to it).”
GMW Wemyss -
“It is a curious thing that beekeeping, farming, angling, and country life have produced, since civilisation began, more great literature, and more happy literature, than any other pursuits: observe how this is so, from the Georgics to the brilliant miniatures in prose of Martin (and Anthea) Bell’s marvellous father, the most underrated English author of the past century (Adrian Bell: it is sad that I must specify).”
GMW Wemyss -
“As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (We’re not specially courageous, we’re just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.)”
Markham Shaw Pyle -
“Shall I abandon my rivers? Should God forget His people? Super flumina, let us even in sorrow sing; and let my rod-hand forget her cunning if I forget these, my earthly Sion. Rather, let us to the rivers as they are, and get wisdom. I do not expect much fishing this year; yet I expect a catch in abundance, multiplying like the loaves and fishes in the feeding of the multitudes. I expect to land the Salmon of Wisdom.”
GMW Wemyss -
“And through it all, Rockbridge has had and kept its special ethos: Ulster-in-America, its established church in all but law the Kirk, with a thin gratin of Whiskypalians to give it tone: a forcing ground for invention and learning. It is, all of it, a great, American and Confederate Westminster Abbey, where Jefferson owned land and Washington had interests, where Marshall and Patton learned the trade of arms, where Maury and Jackson and Lee live on. It is the Sinai of W&L men and VMI alumni, House Mountain upon the horizon; it is stream and field, foxhunts and apple butter.”
Markham Shaw Pyle -
“It is essential to learn the ways of the beasts of the field, and the dim, strange world of fish, and the rhythm of the poultry run. If I do not know – not sentimentally, not bookishly, not at second-hand, but know of my own knowledge – something at least of the life of a beef steer or a muley buck, I have no right to say when and how it should die and how it should be cut and cooked when it is dead. No right but that of superior force and of unthinking whim and desire, which is but the title claimed by tyrants.”
Markham Shaw Pyle -
“Here the river and the River Stour, meeting it, are filled with small sail, and the gin flows like the rivers, and Tory hails Tory from yacht’s bridge to yacht’s bridge, resplendent in blazer and flannels. And in the bay between the mudflats and the great Isle offshore, on the skirts of the Forest, the waters rise again to the skies, to become the rain that falls on the downland where three chalk counties meet, and seep through the chalk, and rise in springs at a small farm in a coombe, to flow as our river once more to this harbour, itself, like all that is between, the gift of the river, its creation and work, shaping the land and man’s life upon and in the land. History is now and England.”
GMW Wemyss -
“Sixty-five years ago, in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown.”
GMW Wemyss -
“This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.”
Markham Shaw Pyle -
“There is no muse. Therefore, you are not to wait upon it. ... Get off your bum, go out into the world, feed upon it – and stop lazing about waiting for some mythical Heliconian demigoddess dressed as a Greek tart to stop by and lead you by the hand.”
Mr. Wemyss
First Sentence edit
In this Year of Grace 2012, it is an odd coincidence that a geographic midpoint between the Texas Gulf Coast and wildest Wilts puts you (and us) at Forty North, Forty-Eight West, some two hundred kilometres south’ards and east’ards of the site where the RMS Titanic sank.
Table of Contents edit
Preface: Transatlantic Disputations: Where, Who, What, and Why – No ‘How’
Terrain and Terroir:
1.Bayou Babylon: Cottonclads & Chicken-Frieds
2.Pastoral, commercialisation, and vulgarity
3.A Buryin’ at Pleasant Hill: Journeys in Deep East Texas
4.A winter stillness
5.The Natural Occupation: The Arsenal of (Garden) Warfare
6.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
7.Black, Decker, and the Light Crust Doughboys
8.Bach, Handel, Luther, Hooker
9.Rockbridge and the Valley
10.An eclogue: the Great Chain of Being at Cheltenham
11.Sweet Virginia Breeze
12.By bread alone
13.Sursum Corda: Lift Up Your Hearts (February 2000)
14.Green, yellow, and the Countryside
15.And Truth the Quarry
16.That Were the Week, That Were
17.Sabor Autentico: What Is and Isn’t Tex-Mex
18.Settlement patterns in the UK countryside
19.... And Native to the Soil
20.The River
War and History:
1.Fields of Battle, I: Manassas, First and Second: ‘To Die Here and Conquer’
2.MCMXLIV: Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus: 6 June 2011
3.Days of Remembrance: History & Holidays
4.The Last Post
5.Fields of Battle, II: The Swampy Field of Glory: San Jacinto
6.The beaches of Normandy
7.Down the Lazy River: Herodotus’ History
8.Remembrance Sunday: Ninety Years On (8 August 2008)
9.Fields of Battle, III: Hallowed Ground: Fredericksburg / Spotsylvania NMP
10.Wha’s like yon? Damn’ few, an’ they’re a’ deid: August 2010
Aphorisms & Observations:
The Writer’s Life:
1.There is no muse, and other unsettling principles
2.Tracing How We Got Here – Wherever Here Is
3.Old Age and Treachery’ll Beat Youth and Skill Every Time: Observations on the writer’s craft
Index
Colophon
Themes & Symbolism edit
Authors & Contributors edit
- Markham Shaw Pyle (Author)
- GMW Wemyss (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Bapton Books
Country: United States
Publication Date: 2012
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: Add the page count.
Publisher: Bapton Books
Country: United States
Publication Date: 2012
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: Add the page count.
Subjects edit
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