Isn't it time (you don't have to wait)...it must be time

I've known about the third collection of Henry Mitchell's gardening columns (Henry Mitchell On Gardening) for some time now, but have held myself back from acquiring (and devouring) it. This book was put together after his death, and edited by no-slouch-he Allen Lacy, who also contributed the introduction. I can't wait to read this, but I have made myself wait. Why? Because this, Henry Mitchell's third garden book, is his last garden book.

~ ~ ~

When I was a teenage bookworm, my reading tastes heavily favored fantasy, sci-fi and horror. One of my favorites was an anthology published by Scholastic books, titled 11 Great Horror Stories, selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. It has survived three decades of culling and triage, and moves from Okinawa, to Lake Bluff, Illinois, through three dorm rooms, an apartment, and a condominium in Chicago's Hyde Park, to San Francisco, California, and now rests comfortably on a built-in basement bookshelf in Madison, Wisconsin. Don't know quite how this happened, but it's now the book in my library that I've owned the longest (to put it more starkly: when I first cracked its spine, Spiro Agnew was not only still alive, he was the sitting vice-president of the United States). It includes stories by the greats (H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker), but the story in this volume that I have remembered most vividly and often re-read over the years has been "The Love Letter" by Jack Finney. It's a time-travel story, written before Finney's "cult classic" time-travel novel Time and Again. (Finney also wrote the novel "The Body Snatchers", from which the two great and creepy "Invasion of..." movies were made.) The story in a nutshell: bachelor in mid-20th century NYC--who still hasn't found what he's looking for in the bright lights of the big city--finds a portal to the 19th century and a brief ("yet eternal") courtship of a woman who lived and died long before he was born. This is a lovely story that takes only a few pages to move the reader from ennui to sentimentality. I heard that a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV movie adaptation of the story came out a few years back, but I haven't sought it out...although the thought of seeing the actors who played Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker in another film, as the protagonists in this movie, is bizarrely intriguing.

The thing is, the hero of the story "receives" three, and only three, letters from his bygone beloved, and, knowing that the third letter will be the last, makes himself wait before allowing himself to open it:

It was a long week. I worked, I kept busy daytimes, but at night I thought of hardly anything but the third secret drawer in my desk. I was terribly tempted to open it earlier, telling myself that whatever might lie in it had been put there decades before and must be there now but I wasn't sure, and I waited.

Then, late at night [...] I pulled out the third drawer, reached in and brought out the last little secret drawer which lay behind it. My hand was actually shaking, and for a moment I couldn't bear to look directly--something lay in the drawer--and I turned my head away. Then I looked.

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So I've held off, but now I think it's time, with the winter solstice behind us and the New Year straight ahead, to open Henry Mitchell's third letter.

Henry Mitchell On Gardening. Henry Mitchell, Allen Lacy (introduction). Mariner Books, 1999. ISBN 0395957672.

11 Great Horror Stores Including The Oblong Box and The Dunwich Horror. Selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. Scholastic Book Services, 1969. No ISBN and out of print, but used book copies appear to be available from a number of online sources.

A "fun with Google" postscript: I came across this thread in one of the forums at Garden Web, on the subject "Who is your favorite garden writer, and why?" No surprise that Henry Mitchell figures prominently, and passionately, in the responses.

Comments

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