#47 A Writer not in Retreat

The Hermit on the Hill: Not!

      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. 

A set of Bancroft's Works with basket
www.californiabaskets.com

          Fortunately, the reception for his book has been very positive, with many friends, family, and strangers finding out what I also discovered about Bancroft’s “history of my history,” as he called it: It’s a good read!

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

"Matilda Bancroft" (in back) and Jenny Ricard (HHB descendant in blue sweater)  with journalism students at Bancroft Middle School in Long Beach

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?”

"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.

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."

My friends Leif and Asher after gathering strawberries from my garden