Richard Caddel asked to see this, so I'm posting it in hopes that other
Poundians might also find it of interest. Sylvester
>From Sunday's NY Times
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/obit-metcalf.html>
>
>
>
> Paul Metcalf, Who Wrote Experimental Tales, Dies at 81
>
>
> By DINITIA SMITH
>
> Paul Metcalf, who made his mark as an experimental
> writer of prose, poetry and plays, died on Jan. 21
> near Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81 and lived in Chester,
> Mass.
>
> His wife, Nancy, said Metcalf had a heart attack after
> buying apples at a farmers market not far from
> Arrowhead, the Berkshire home of Herman Melville, his
> great-grandfather.
>
> "Like a medieval chronicler with the eye of a poet and
> the heart of a taleteller, he fits together radiant
> fragments into a wholly new kind of construct," the
> author Guy Davenport once wrote of Metcalf. His more
> than 20 books were often collages of first-person
> historical narratives, science writing, newspaper clips
> and his own words, woven together in a single fabric.
> "It was like a symphony, with sources like old diaries
> and botanical descriptions as the different
> instruments," said his daughter Adrienne.
>
> Nonetheless, the words had a cumulative effect. In his
> 1976 book "Apalache," an epic about the settlement of
> the New World, he mixed native and settler chronicles
> with his own musings: "The fragrance drifts seaward/we
> smelled the land a hundred leagues, and farther when
> they burned the cedars/before we come in sight of it
> thirty leagues, we smell a sweet savour/we had now fair
> sunshine weather, and so pleasant a sweet as did much
> refresh us, and there came a smell off the shore like
> the smell of a garden."
>
> Metcalf came from a distinguished New England family.
> His mother was Eleanor Thomas Metcalf, a granddaughter
> of Herman Melville and his literary executor. His
> father, Henry Knight Metcalf, who worked for an
> insurance company, was a descendant of Roger Williams,
> the founder of Rhode Island.
>
> Metcalf was born in East Milton, Mass., and was educated
> at private schools. He attended Harvard but disliked it
> and left after only three months. In 1942 he married
> Nancy Harman Blackford of Charleston, S.C., and during
> the next 20 years the couple spent long periods in the
> South. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a
> brother, David, of Topsham, Me.; two daughters, Anne
> Westmoreland of Schuyler, Va., and Adrienne, of Becket,
> Mass., and two granddaughters.
>
> Early in his life, Metcalf thought little about his
> famous ancestor and his writings. His first book, "Will
> West," published in 1956, was a short novel about murder
> with a Cherokee as the protagonist.
>
> But in the early 60s Metcalf returned to the Berkshires,
> and in his 1965 book, "Genoa," acknowledged the
> relationship to Melville. "Genoa" was one of his
> best-known works, a blend of references to Melville,
> other sources and his own language.
>
> In the book, a man called Michael Mills muses about his
> own history, and his brother, Carl, who is a monster:
> "Herman would harangue his wife and two daughters (this
> was after the sons were gone) on matters that had no
> interest for them, and they would roll their eyes, and
> sigh, and wait, or there would be outbursts of temper,
> sarcasm."
>
> Metcalf told his hometown newspaper, The Berkshire
> Eagle, that the book "was a way of getting the Melville
> monkey off my back."
>
> William H. Gass, reviewing "Genoa" in The New York
> Times, said that the book "invites us to pass our minds
> down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both
> fact and fiction, and to discover something true about
> the geography of time."
>
> Metcalf was a tall man with a powerful physical
> presence. In recent years, with his hair nearly shoulder
> length and his pipe in his mouth, he was a colorful
> figure. His home in Becket became a center for artists
> and writers in the area. As a writer he remained a cult
> figure, although in 1987 he was honored by the American
> Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Beginning in
> 1996, the Coffee House Press of Minneapolis published a
> three-volume edition of his collected works.
>
> He also supported efforts to increase the collection of
> Melville's papers at Arrowhead and at the Berkshire
> Athenaeum in Pittsfield. In 1921, the manuscript of
> Melville's novel "Billy Budd" was discovered in a tin
> box in his family's home.
>
> Several months ago, as Metcalf was moving out of his
> Becket house, he found two more boxes of family papers
> and memorabilia that he had long forgotten. He donated
> the papers to the Melville Room of the Berkshire
> Athenaeum.
>
> Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
>:
>
>
>
>Herb Levy
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