Full Text:

A Little Literary Gem Tells Of A Local Writer's Newtown Retreat

(with book cover & photo)

BY SUZANNA NYBERG

The last decade of the 19th century was a heady one for students of

literature.

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula and Sigmund Freud finally published The

Interpretation of Dreams. After a series of glittering triumphs, Oscar Wilde

went to jail, only to emerge a broken man. The first newsstand magazine in the

United States was released, and the first narrative reports of baseball games

were written. Rudyard Kipling wrote the now infamous White Man's Burden ;

Yeats' poetic career was launched; Thomas Hardy abandoned the novel after

being vilified for Jude the Obscure.

In Newtown, Julia Sherman Hallock wrote and published a tiny volume, Broken

Notes From a Gray Nunnery.

Today, there are only three extant copies of this work.

The work is charming. Its charm lies in the sense of seclusion, the feeling of

religious rest that suffuses the writing, the solitude that is necessary to

reflect on the goodness of nature and enjoy the peace of God. It is not poetry

and yet it reads like verse. It is as touching as anything the local color

writers of the era ever wrote and it is as perceptive as Henry David Thoreau's

observations from Walden Pond.

"I treasure it as much as anything I have in my library," said Carolyn Stokes,

curator of the Booth Library. Another owner of the work rereads it every year.

An unusually literary diary, Julia's volume chronicles her departure from a

city to the Gray Nunnery, her friend Phyllis's old gray house that can still

be seen from Route 34. There she achieves a remarkable fullness of being.

Julia herself acknowledges the shift in perspective: "I was lingering in the

city, amid uncongenial surroundings," she writes of the time Phyllis summoned

her to the country. "At that time the fetters seemed to drop from my soul."

Later she remembers what it was like to have been throttled in captivity and

says that, "In my heart I must always keep a great pity for prisoners."

The Gray Nunnery became Julia's center, her London or Paris, the hub of her

universe. Indeed the house and its environs afford as much for her to talk

about as any metropolis.

Every day Julia plunges into a world where she finds more than she would have

in a cyclone of people. She sees so little and yet sees so much: marsh

marigold, wild fennel, swamp azalea, wild columbine; alarmingly purple and red

skies strike her blind; the chickadees receive her with tender chirps; Mrs

Phoebe disappears tragically and her mate waits broken-hearted, just as

Whitman's mockingbird did. It's enough to give one vertigo. Nothing is a bore,

and Julia's not in love.

Each entry begins with a comment on the weather: whether or not the skies were

serene, which way the winds blew, how it stormed. January was dark, cold and

snowy, but Julia never seemed tired of it. February was like January and the

lanes leading to the Nunnery were impassable. So she sat before the fire, the

wet snow falling from the sky, having tea with Phyllis. March was crowded,

working to get ready for spring, and when April came, the Nunnery had a genial

and blooming air.

Then, the Nunnery in the summer! On June 10, Julia writes:

This morning I went out to meet the sure welcome of the fields. The

sun-steeped grasses were breathing incense after the showers of last night,

and all the leaves and stems were full of fragrance. Ferns leaned out from the

gray wall's shelter, in happy family groups, bowing and beckoning all together

... A butterfly, all lilac and silver, spread buoyant wings and hovered along

the way alluringly. Eye-bright blossoms in the friendly grass shone blue and

pure as the glances of little children; venerable dandelions, stiff and tall,

were shaking hoary heads at their gay young sisters as if they had forgotten

their own coquettish youth.

To the reader's regret, the last months of the year run rapidly off Julia's

pen. Her knowledge blends so smoothly with the journal that its teachings are

almost hidden.

Autumn was active, but the weather turned cold and the days short. Julia's

pity does not end with the vertebrates. Even the mites, whom she carelessly

handled, are God's creatures, not less than dogs or sparrows. When she found

something that looked like a "coarse fringe" near some stonework:

Instead of standing reverently before this miracle, my idle curiosity put out

a careless hand, and with one little brush sent the whole frail wonder to

destruction. Then I discovered that each strand was a kind of dry hanging

well, walled with grains of earth and holding countless pale, naked mites that

wriggled feebly as they tried to extricate themselves from the ruins. If I had

been a genuine tornado I couldn't have felt meaner... How were those grains of

earth persuaded to hold so lightly together in the face of wind and damp and

the law of gravitation?

These sentiments, of course, are heresy, and 500 years ago Julia would have

been burned.

Human affairs offer nothing to interest Julia. She meets few people, gets no

news, hears no gossip. "As for our neighbors, they are all too far off to even

show us the smoke from their chimneys," she writes. She does not dine at

restaurants or go to concerts. She walks, and when she is not walking, she is

stretched in a hammock.

"Plenty of exercise and fresh air the well-being of my soul demands always,"

she declares. She seems quiet and contented and grown-up, as though she

refuses ever to be agitated. As long as she has something to do, life is not a

task.

Still, things are not always what they seem. Julia's surface conceals depths;

at the same moment that she is soothing, she is also disquieting. She slowly

reveals a hidden side, disclosing unexpected qualities in passionate

outbreaks. Contradictions are necessary; all life is filled with them and

Julia should not be any different.

Thanks to the work of resident genealogist Harlan Jessup, we may know

something of Julia's life. Records indicate that a Julia Sherman was born in

1847 and that she died in 1930. She married Egbert A. Hallock of Washington in

1875 when she was 28 and he was 25. Both were residents of Newtown at the time

of the marriage.

There are blank spaces in Julia's life, such as how many years she lived in

Newtown. Filling in the blanks can be left to future scholars: they can find

out who Julia was; they can trace her movements; they can date the years of

her life; and in the meantime, we can reread The Broken Notes, which sits

waiting for us in the Booth Library's collection of local authors.

To the very young, I do not recommend it. The young like narratives and need

action; but those who have lived a bit longer and are a bit tired can come

here and open the book and find rest.