A great review appeared in The Courier-Gazette (Rockland) on November 11, written by Marilis Hornidge:
I once lamented the fact that Ruth Moore’s short fiction had been lost-and-forgotten. No longer, and this wonderful book is treasure beyond treasure, as far as a lot of us Moore-ites are concerned. From the introduction (READ IT, Don’t argue: read it) straight through to Mayo’s even-longer-forgotten gems, it’s a delight. This is the way short stories about a place oughta be wrote, guys… never mind the minimalist eye-to-the-keyhole stuff, this is the real thing. It is very fashionable to sneer at ‘old-fashioned-magazine-ficiton’ these days. Ruth Moore didn’t give much of a rolling d..arn about fashion–she was her own person with her own voice in her own place. And one helluva storyteller to boot. If there’s a Maine Publishers’ GoldStar Award For Fiction, Blackberry deserves it.
The Bangor Daily News reviewed Foley Craddock on Oct 25 in a well-written joint review with the reissue of Fire Balloon…
Clickie clickie for complete review
Back in 1986, Blackberry Books began a campaign to bring Ruth Moore’s novels back into print. The Gotts Island-born novelist and poet, then in her early 80s, was considered one of the country’s finest writers, yet most of her books could be found only in secondhand bookstores or libraries. Blackberry has now reprinted six novels, as well as a book of poems, Moore’s letters and a collection of short stories.
Moore wrote short stories early in her career, but as she stated in a letter to Sandy Phippen in 1985, “I got tired of rejection slips early on and chucked everything into an old chest where they came in handy for material in novels, now and again.” Indeed, two stories - the title one and “Pennies in the Water” - found in “When Foley Craddock Tore Off My Grandfather’s Thumb” served as the basis for scenes in “The Fire Balloon.”
The social interactions of “natives” and summer folk are the foundation for several stories in the collection, including the memorable “The Ladies from Philadelphia” (which first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1945) and “The Lonely of Heart.” Akin to some of the short fiction of Ted Holmes, “The Soldier Shows His Medal” (originally published in The New Yorker in 1945) is a study in Yankee modesty. A son of Maine returning to his village hides his medal for fear of the islanders’ rebuke: “Guess he thinks he’s something, going round trimmed up like a Christmas tree.”
Ruth Moore met Eleanor Mayo in 1940. They eventually bought land in the Mount Desert town of Tremont, on the road to the Bass Harbor Light, built a house and lived together till Mayo died in 1981. The latter’s literary career echoed her companion’s: she published a number of novels, several of which drew critical favor, then later went out of print.
Mayo doesn’t enjoy the reputation Moore does, yet her contributions to Maine literature merit a reappraisal. In what one hopes is a first step in this direction, six of her short works are printed here. The best of the batch, “Summertime,” is a sympathetic portrait of a young girl who is punished for her imagination until the day the truth of one of her fears comes to light. The short stories of J.D. Salinger came to mind while reading it.
A nonfiction piece, “The Owner of the Apples,” features the kind of commentary on modern life found in the essays of the late John Gould. Complaining about modern machinery, including the chain saw, Mayo writes, “there’s a lot of thinking that doesn’t get done now because the man who could think through the world’s simpler problems while his buck saw quietly snored its gradual way down through the good solid meat of a maple cordwood stick, no longer dares to.”
Kudos to Blackberry Books for the revival it continues to fuel.