Tag: 260409

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 171 pages)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of poetry knows of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet who composed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” (the latter said to have been written under the influence of opium).

Far fewer know of his firstborn son, David Hartley Coleridge, frequently referred to by friends and family as “Poor Hartley.” Essayist Anne Fadiman plucks the lesser Coleridge out of popular obscurity in Frog (And Other Essays), a collection that offers an eclectic assortment of subjects, from the titular frog, a family pet that wound up in the freezer, to the men on a doomed polar expedition who produced a newspaper/literary magazine to help them endure the long and depressing Antarctic winters.

All are, in a word, a delight.

“Frog” is the first of seven. It chronicles the life and death of Bunky, who entered the Fadiman household as a tadpole shipped in a Styrofoam container. The brand was called “Grow-a-Frog” and it wasn’t until later that Fadiman learned of Bucky’s heritage: He was an African clawed frog who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press.” Bunky lived, more or less happily, with the family for about 17 years, although Fadiman notes that she would sometimes “hear him softly calling for a mate he would never meet” when she got up for a middle-of-the-night snack.

Bunky’s story meanders. Fadiman leads us through short discussions of various family pets and varied anecdotes of Bunky’s limited life, some of which, she admits, now cause her regret. When he died, “I mourned for all frogs in too small-aquariums. All the fish brought home from fairs in plastic bags. All the turtles bought on impulse, vegetating in plastic lagoons. All the baby alligators flushed down toilets.” Her attempt to honor him in death, however, doesn’t go as intended, and he winds up spending an extended time in the refrigerator, because “It’s easy to forget you have a frog in your freezer when he’s behind the frozen tamales.”

“The Oakling and the Oak” is the surprisingly riveting tale of “Poor Hartley,” which shows that the travails of a child growing up in the shadow of a larger-than-life parent is a story that has existed since Adam and Cain.

Hartley didn’t kill anyone, but he was a disappointment to his father, even though he was not without talent himself, and his father was enamoured of him when he was a child. (“By the time he was seven, it is no exaggeration to say he had inspired some of the greatest poems ever written in English,” Fadiman writes.

In fact, it was that early outpouring of love that could have been a problem: “A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head” and the poems his father wrote about him described the boy “as more spirit than mortal, a child who did not walk so much as levitate.” But STC turned out to be an absentee father, and Hartley turned out to be something of an irresponsible young adult; despite a strong intellect, he lost a coveted fellowship, in part because, as the college dean wrote, “he was often guilty of intemperance and came home in a state in which it was not safe to trust him with a candle.” It wasn’t long before father and son were not on speaking terms. He never married, and Fadiman describes a poignant deathbed scene where Poor Hartley, who loved babies but never had children, asked to hold a neighbor’s infant as he was dying. As is her wont, Fadiman leaves us wanting to learn even more about the various subjects she writes about.

In “South Polar Times” she offers evidence that “the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation.” Case in point: the newspaper/literary magazine produced by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team. “There was only one copy of each of its twelve issues, to be shared (depending on the year) by between thirteen and forty-seven readers.” Because the sun in Antarctica set in April and rose in August, depression was as much a problem as the cold. A publication featuring the work of the crew, all submitted anonymously, was one of Scott’s antidotes to misery (along with brandy and theatrical shows); contributors deposited their poems, essays and other articles into a mahogany box for consideration.

The originals still exist; Fadiman, having long held interest in arctic expeditions, once reviewed a compilation of them, marveling at the illustrations done by Dr. Edward Wilson, the Discovery’s assistant surgeon, who also happened to be a zoologist and artist. (Wilson was among the men who perished alongside Scott after discovering that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the South Pole.)

Again, more books will have to be read, for having read Frog.

Not all of Fadiman’s topics are so poignant. In “My Old Printer,” she rues her unwillingness to part with old printers. (“Why couldn’t I treat my printer the same way I’d treat an elderly relative who, if spared the indignity of intubation, would succumb to a painless bout of pneumonia? Why couldn’t I just let nature take its course? It’s because I and most other people my age are cumbersome ourselves. We are hard to upgrade. We are not adaptable. Our memories are short on disk space. … We are all HP LaserJet II printers.”)

In “All My Pronouns,” she takes us through a brief history of pronoun controversies, from her Yale students adapting they/them to the Quakers who insisted on addressing everyone as “thou” even though the usage demoted in social standing some of the people who were addressed.

(In 16th-century Europe, she writes, “there were few more efficient ways to dishonor a man than to ‘thou’ him.”)

In “Screen Share,” she tells her pandemic story, which while interesting is no more or less interesting than yours — pretty much everyone over the age of 15 has an interesting pandemic story to tell these days.

She finishes with “Yes to Everything,” a tribute to one of her students (“Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy.”) who had been told by a visiting novelist “that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible.” It will punch you in the gut, is all I’ll say. Read with tissues. And don’t buy your kids frogs. A

Featured Photo: Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman