I
discovered puberty and my parents discovered Martha's Vineyard
in the same year. That first summer they rented a house in Edgartown,
but the next year, the summer I was 14, they started renting
up-island and I started pretending to be 18. Because nearly
all of my growing up took place on the Vineyard and I live here
year-round now. I find in Peter Simon's On The Vineyard books
a treasury of the people, places and events that define who
I am.
The latest edition, On the Vineyard III, contains hundreds
of Peter Simon's photographs—most new, others from his archives
–and essays and poems by 40 Islanders; some year rounders,
some seasonal; some professional writers, some not.
In it, Vineyard novelist Phillip Craig writes (in The
Sun Tree, a tribute to his wife's enthusiasm) that everyone
has a private, personal Martha's Vineyard. While every reader
brings a different set of experiences to a book about the
Island, the variety of subjects and styles of writing here
is so wide that a great many readers will find their own private
Vineyards. I certainly found mine in this book, and many others
will find theirs too.
Mr. Simon's photographs, as everyone knows, are wonderful.
You won't love them all, but you'll find many that you do
love. Mr. Simon uses his considerable charm to get people
to react to him as he takes their pictures. (An old trick
of his is to tell everyone to jump into the air – and one
of the archival pictures shows subjects doing just that.)
Whatever the new tricks, a hallmark of the Simon style is
that his subjects look interested and interesting. The question
is, how does he manage to do the same thing with inanimate
subjects? His color photos of landscapes are stunning.
One problem with a book of pictures is that the viewer
can quickly overdose of the art. The On the Vineyard series
has solved that problem by giving the reader something to
do before turning the page to see the next picture. Because
of the variety of authors, many readers will find the writing
uneven, but the photographs are consistently fine.
In this Introduction, Mr. Simon tells us that one of
his motivations is to present "a loving but realistic picture
of Martha's Vineyard at the turn of the century." While this
is undoubtedly so, the main appeal for me in the collection
is the large number of stories of the Vineyard in earlier
times, of people and events form the 1950s and 1960s also
appreciate glimpses into still earlier years or into Vineyard
communities outside my own experience. Especially charming
are Pat Waring's history or the Black Dog, Virginia Poole's
reflections of Menemsha harbor and Cynthia Higg's history
of Cleaveland House (with a nice focus on a mysterious Rebecca).
Richard Skidmore's long essay, Tracking Island Music,
is worth the price of the book all by itself.
June Manning's Aquinnah and two essays about Oak Bluffs---by
Jib Ellis and Delia Brown Hardman –all provide glimpses of
history worth saving for posterity.
In a reflection of the grumbling heard often on the
Island, many of the writers bewail the loss of innocence and
rural character the Vineyard has undergone. This idea is typified
in Ralph Graves' Middle Road by the Numbers. In the essays
sharing this theme, the "picture of Martha's Vineyard at the
turn of the century" is not a happy one.
However, there are some other points of view. Dana
Anderson's homage to Bend in the Road beach and Richard Patterson's
to Dogfish Bar show the Vineyard at it's best. The same is
true of Stan Hart's amusing Hitching With Peter, written in
a self-deprecating narrative voice (Jack Kerouac meets J.
Alfred Prufrock?). Alan Dershowitz's Working the Beach is
an equally lighthearted look into the manners and mores of
Lucy Vincent Beach. Tom Dunlop's The End of Everything satirizes
the doom-and-gloomers.
More serious essays on the contemporary scene are Theophilus
Nix's excellent The Other Vineyard, which points out that
Dukes County is the second-poorest county in the state, and
Jason Gay's Ink Stain, on the damage media attention has caused.
The collection contains only two poems, both strong,
and wondered why Vineyard poets are not more widely represented.
John Maloney's Menemsha Bight, with which On the Vineyard
III ends, is a delight to the ear as well as the mind. It
begins:
To begin on the beat, at the bight, on the beat behind…
And plays variations of that rhythm with the sounds of Vineyard
places and things in the manner of a piece of music---which
of course it is.
