That whole thing about getting to be a hermit on the hill
writing and editing books? Watch out for what you wish for: you might get it! If a book is successful, down the hill and on the road you go.
I last mentioned that I had edited Literary
Industries, the 1890 memoir of my great-great-grandfather, H.H. Bancroft, a
California historian, book collector, and founder of the Bancroft Library at
U.C. Berkeley.
Bancroft came to California in 1852 at age 19. The growth of his
early bookselling and publishing enterprise coincided with the explosive growth
of the West following the Gold Rush, a story chronicled in Literary Industries. The Berkeley press Heyday and the Bancroft Library conjointly insured that a beautiful, illustrated version of the book
came out at a mere 250 pages, compared to the challenging 800-pages of the
original tome.
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| A set of Bancroft's Works with basket www.californiabaskets.com |
HHB has poignant and insightful
descriptions about his childhood and family life. He also has a sense of humor about
his foibles. And in sometimes modest terms, Bancroft reveals his visionary
efforts to collect every archive possible relating to the history of the
Pacific West. His book can even read like an adventure story as he figures out
how to save the memories of early settlers and the documents that would be lost
were they not safeguarded in a library. He provides instructive lessons about
right living and thought provoking analysis of how history has unfolded.
For
example, he shares this little gem regarding his task in collecting 60,000
items for his library and histories about the West from the Gold Rush on:
"What
was this task? …to save to the world a mass of valuable human experiences,
which otherwise, in the hurry and scramble attending the securing of wealth,
power or place in this new field of enterprise, would have dropped out of
existence.”
In my own effort to share with the world the contemporary record of this man’s vast literary
experience, I have been on quite a book talk tour
throughout the Bay Area and even to southern California. Because Bancroft’s
work covered so many topics, I’ve been able to adjust my book talks to a
variety of audiences and settings.
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| Michael Short's photo, SF Chronicle |
Have Book, Will Travel....
At the Bancroft Library, I naturally addressed how he founded the Library, and what a glorious setting it was for that talk, in the wood paneled Morrison Reading Room at the Doe Library next door. A full article about the Bancroft Library and this book just came out in the San Francisco Chronicle, in fact, and well written by Tim Holt.
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| Ruth Bancroft in her garden |
In Walnut Creek, I spoke at the
Ygnacio Valley Library, and there met a gathering of aficionados of the Ruth Bancroft Garden.
Ruth is H.H. Bancroft’s daughter-in-law, one generation removed, being the wife
of Bancroft’s grandson, Philip Bancroft, Jr. Ruth’s husband had inherited the
Walnut Creek property that H.H. owned, and with a few remaining acres that had
not been sold off to provide residences to the expanding suburb, Ruth created a
world- renowned succulent garden. At this site, a talk about the role of
family and enterprise in H.H.’s life was appropriate, and happily, various members
of the Philip Bancroft descendants attended that talk, as well.
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| HH Bancroft's Helix Farm 1880s, Spring Valley, outside San Diego |
That talk also served for a
presentation at the small but intrepid Spring Valley Historical Society, outside of San Diego, at
the Bancroft Ranch House Museum, where H.H. Bancroft and family also owned a
farm.
For an Author’s Brown Bag in
Albany, I could pull from Bancroft’s memoir his many passages about the process
of writing.
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| Alison Glasey, the Museum Director; Victoria Patterson, scholar; and me |
In my hometown Willits in conjunction with Earth Day, the Mendocino County Museum hosted a talk. There I shared Bancroft’s
thoughts about nature and Native Americans, a presentation that also featured Victoria Patterson, a local and esteemed scholar on Native
Pomo culture in this area.
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| "Matilda Bancroft" (in back) and Jenny Ricard (HHB descendant in blue sweater) with journalism students at Bancroft Middle School in Long Beach |
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| Jenny Ricard and I outside the Bancroft Middle School |
A delightful way I’ve been able to
present the book has been dressed up as my great-great-grandmother Matilda
Bancroft to tell the story of her husband in the California schools named after
H.H. Bancroft, including this one in Long Beach, where another descendant of HH
Bancroft lives. I had a delicious time addressing students’ questions and
trying to bring history alive, dressed in my Victorian gown. One of the best
questions ever came from a fourth-grade student at the Bancroft Elementary
School in Sacramento who asked, “What was the most surprising thing you learned
about your great-great-grandfather?”
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| "Matilda Griffing Bancroft" at the Mechanics Institute |
I had to think about it for a
moment. Then I replied, “How he could think about the future in a way that made
him want to hold onto the past. Think about stuff you have
today or the way you live now that might be gone in fifty years. That’s hard to
figure out, isn’t it?”
Their teacher jumped in, saying,“Remember when I told you that we were going to watch a movie on a
VCR, and you asked what a VCR was?” The kids laughed as we talked about
other things that had already changed in their young life times.
I finished up my whirlwind tour
with a marvelous opportunity to present Matilda to adults at the lovely
Mechanics Institute Library, arranged by their events director Laura Sheppard,
herself an “impersonator.” She has done a show as Harriet Lane Levy, a friend of Gertrude Stein.
In this presentation as
Matilda, I focused on H.H. Bancroft’s relationship with women, culling from his
autobiography the ways he shows tremendous respect for the women in his
life—his mother, sister, and a first wife who died in childbirth, not to
mention his second wife, Matilda. And yet, as in so many aspects of H.H.
Bancroft, he was a man of contradictions, finding women too "frail and tender" to
be writers in his workshop, even as he depended on his wife Matilda for help
with editing his work, and as one woman, Frances Fuller Victor, wrote several
volumes of Bancroft's Works.
One of my most consistent messages
throughout all these talks was learning to understand the complexity in the
contradictions of a Victorian-era scholar such as H.H. Bancroft.
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| Kim & Sata on the road |
But learning to wrestle with contradictions is something many of us deal with in facing our complex society,
our complex selves.
As an innate introvert, I've sought more quietude on the mountain than I could practice in my life as a
teacher.After a
year quietly working on several books while Literary Industries was in production, I suddenly found myself traipsing about the countryside in enthusiastic
recountings of what H.H. Bancroft contributed to history—including his own
traipsing up and down the country, as far as Vancouver to the north and Mexico
to the south and to Europe, in his efforts to collect books and other archives,
as well as “dictations,” or oral histories. And he had to go by steamer, rail,
wagon, and stagecoach, so I shouldn't complain since my dog and I could traverse hundreds miles a day in the comfort of my car.
With that journey over, I return to caring for my garden, woods, and valley, and to nurturing other books. As Voltaire said in Candide, in the end "we must cultivate our garden."
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| My friends Leif and Asher after gathering strawberries from my garden |
