At Large and At Small (24 page)

B
Y
V
ILHJALMUR
S
TEFANSSON

Stefansson, Vilhjalmur.
Arctic Manual
. New York: Macmillan, 1944.

———.
Discovery: The Autobiography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

———.
The Friendly Arctic
. New York:
Macmillan, 1922.

———.
My Life with the Eskimo
. New York: Collier, 1962.

———.
The Northward Course of Empire
. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

———.
Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic
. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

———.
Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
, ed. Gísli Pálsson. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

———, ed.
Great Adventures and Explorations
. New York: Dial, 1947.

O
N
V
ILHJALMUR
S
TEFANSSON

Berry, Erick.
Mr. Arctic
. New York: David McKay, 1966.

Diubaldo, Richard.
Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic
. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.

Hunt, William R.
Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson
. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986.

LeBourdais, D. M.
Stefansson, Ambassador of the North
. Montreal: Harvest
House, 1963.

McKinlay, William Laird.
The Last Voyage of the
Karluk. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976.

Niven, Jennifer.
The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the
Karluk. New York: Hyperion, 2000.

O
N THE HISTORY OF ARCTIC EXPLORATION

Berton, Pierre.
The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909
. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Holland, Clive, ed.
Farthest
North
. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.

Imbert, Bertrand.
North Pole, South Pole
. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.

Mirsky, Jeannette.
To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present
. Intro. Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.

M
ISCELLANEOUS SOURCES

Fadiman, Clifton. “I Shook Hands with Shakespeare.” In
Any Number Can Play
. Cleveland:
World Publishing Company, 1957.

Hahn, J. G. von. “How the Dragon Was Tricked.” In
The Pink Fairy Book
, ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1967.

Wolfe, Tom.
The Right Stuff
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

C
OFFEE

The classic history is by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, who also happens to be an enormously enjoyable literary stylist. I drew much excellent material from Mark Pendergrast, Wolfgang
Schivelbusch, and Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer (to whom I owe the London–New York coffeehouse extrapolation). By far the most entertaining author on my coffee shelf is Stewart Lee Allen; he is best appreciated in a highly caffeinated state.

Much good writing has been done on (and in) coffeehouses. My favorite sources are Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous passage on coffeehouses
as a political institution in late-seventeenth-century London and Harold V. Routh’s seminal studies on the influence of coffeehouse conversation on English literature.

In case any readers have wondered how I could possibly remember what I ate for lunch more than three decades ago, my source for the menu of La Pyramide, Fernand Point’s legendary restaurant in Vienne, is a breathless six-page aerogramme
I sent my parents on July 21, 1969. I found it in their files after their deaths.

O
N COFFEE IN GENERAL

Allen, Stewart Lee.
The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History
. New York: Soho, 1999.

Barefoot, Kevin, ed.
Higher Grounds: The Little Book of Coffee Culture
. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1995.

Dicum, Gregory, and Nina Luttinger.
The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to
the Last Drop
. New York: New Press, 1999.

Jacob, Heinrich Eduard.
The Epic of a Commodity
, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul [1935]. Intro. Lynn Alley. Short Hills, N.J.: Burford, 1998.

Pendergrast, Mark.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
. New York: Basic, 1999.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang.
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
, trans. David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K. Bealer.
The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug
. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Yates, Jill.
Coffee Lover’s Bible
. Santa Fe: Clear Light, 1998.

O
N THE HISTORY OF COFFEEHOUSES

“The Character of a Coffee-House” (1673) and “Coffee-Houses Vindicated” (1675). In Charles W.
Colby, ed.
Selections from the Sources of English History, B.C. 55–A.D. 1832
. London: Longmans, Green, 1920.

Ellis, Markman. “An Introduction to the Coffee-House: A Discursive Model.” In Kahve-Society,
A Coffee-House Conversation on the International Art World and Its Exclusions
. E-book published in 2002 by Kahve-Society in collaboration with Autograph and the Institute of Digital Art Technology,
www.kahve-house.com/society/programme
.

Heise, Ulla.
Coffee and Coffee-Houses
, trans. Paul Roper. West Chester, Pa.: Schiffer, 1987.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “The State of England in 1685: The Coffee Houses.” In
The History of England from the Accession of James II
, vol. 1. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856.

Pelzer, John, and Linda Pelzer. “The Coffee Houses of Augustan London.”
History
Today
, October 1982.

Pepys, Samuel.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

Routh, Harold V. “The Advent of Modern Thought in Popular Literature: Coffee-houses.” In
Cambridge History of English and American Literature
, vol. 7. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.

———. “Steele and Addison,” “Influence of the Coffeehouses,” “Literature and Clubland,” and “Beginnings of
The Tatler
.” In
Cambridge History of English and American Literature
, vol. 9. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.

O
N
H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC AND COFFEE

Balzac, Honoré de.
Traité des excitants moderne
, trans. Robert Onopa. In Weinberg and Bealer,
The World of Caffeine.

Pritchett, V. S. “Honoré de Balzac: Poor Relations.” In
The Pritchett Century
. New York: Modern Library, 1999.

M
ISCELLANEOUS
SOURCES

Jeffries, Stuart. “Secrets and Pies.”
The Guardian
, March 19, 2003.

Plant, Sadie.
Writing on Drugs
. New York: Picador, 2001.

U
NDER
W
ATER

The Wyoming Water Resources Data System provided the information on the Green River’s flood conditions in June of 1972.

After I read this essay at Wesleyan University in 2005, a man in the audience—Bill Johnston, a professor of Asian history—introduced
himself. He told me that the boy who had drowned in the Green River had been his best friend when they were teenagers in Rawlins, Wyoming. I had written that I had forgotten Gary’s last name, the color of his hair, and the sound of his voice. Now I know that Gary’s last name was Hall, and his hair was blond.

Eleven of these essays first appeared in
The American Scholar
. I’ve made
minor changes in all of them. (For the compulsive writer, few things are more satisfying than reinstating a sentence that didn’t fit the allotted space or de-clunking a phrase whose off-rhythm has been jangling in your head for years.) My seven years at the
Scholar
were bliss. I have never had, and probably will never have again, such kind and careful colleagues as Jean Stipicevic and Sandra Costich.
They worked on these essays after midnight, before dawn, and on Christmas Eve, adjudicating fine points of grammar and, through their combination of intelligence and good humor, serving both as dear comrades-in-arms and as ideal readers. John Bethell, my mentor since college, is a consummate wordsmith whose 2:00 a.m. e-mails were familiar essays in miniature. He edited my paragraphs with attention
and artistry and confirmed that there is no greater pleasure than working alongside a friend. Bill Whitworth gave me daily instruction in the English lan
guage. Aaron Matz energetically ferreted out sources and plugged fact-holes.

Several friends lent warm hands. Adam Goodheart dispensed sterling editorial counsel, told me about French coffeepots and Sicilian
granite
, and, on a desperate afternoon
when I couldn’t find an English version of Diodorus Siculus’s description of Procrustes, translated the Greek. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang guided my reading of Darwin and Wallace during a fellowship year at Stanford and suggested sources on natural history, e-mail, and English coffeehouses. Peter Gradjansky refreshed my memory of our coffee-drinking rituals in Dunster F-13. Charlie Monheim recalled
the night we saw Halley’s Comet from the Tasman Glacier. My aunt Carol Whitmore filled me in on my pioneer great-great-grandfathers. Hugh Bethell, Dan Fromson, Campbell Geeslin, Nancy Pick, Henry Singer, and Evelyn Toynton gave me help of various kinds. My friendships with Jane Condon, Maud Gleason, Lou Ann Walker, and Tina Rathborne were wellsprings, as they have been for more than thirty years.

How many writers can say that their publishing house is also a home? I’ve felt that way about Farrar, Straus and Giroux since the day fourteen years ago when my remarkable editor, Jonathan Galassi, called to tell me he was going to publish my first book. I would also like to thank Corinna Barsan, Susan Goldfarb, Jim Guida, Jonathan Lippincott, and Susan Mitchell.

I am indebted to Dorothy Wickenden
at
The New Yorker
for asking me to write “Under Water” and to Deborah Treisman for editing it so sensitively.

No literary agent could do more for a writer than Robert Lescher has done for me.

The following scholars and librarians generously shared their expertise as well as the resources of their institutions: Philip Cronenwett, formerly Special Collections Librarian at the Dartmouth College
Library and now director of the Burndy Library; Doug Hesse, the Marsico Writing Program at the University of Denver; Frans Jorissen, the Académie Française de Philatélie; Carl H. Klaus, the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa; Heather Lane, the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University; Ken Lawrence, the American Philatelic Society; Andre Mignault, the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard; James Mitchell, New York University Library; Ellen Peachey, the American Philatelic Research Library; Nick Roberts, the Punch Cartoon Library in London; and Bonnie Turner, Sterling Memorial Library at Yale.

I am grateful to my children, Susannah and Henry, for indulging my weakness for shells and butterflies and, whenever they saw twenty books open on my desk and twenty more
on the floor, realizing I was working on an essay and tiptoeing through my office.

My parents, Clifton Fadiman and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, were both alive when I started this book but died before I finished. Their influence is as strong as ever.

My husband, George Howe Colt, and I spent hundreds of hours in bed, under the watchful gaze of the wooden birds I wrote about in “Night Owl,”
debating the relative merits of various word choices. “Summary”
or “essence”? “Inspect” or “keep tabs”? “Exceptional” or “superlative”? “Imperishable” or “inextinguishable”? The essence of our relationship is the way he keeps tabs on my words and my life, both superlatively, as a result of which my love and gratitude are inextinguishable.

Kim Fadiman, to whom
At Large and At Small
is dedicated,
has been the co-curator of the Serendipity Museum of Nature, my companion on many memorable wilderness trips, and, for fifty-three years, an incomparable brother. We talked endlessly about each of these essays, just as we had talked endlessly about luna moths and pickled tapeworms when we were children. We no longer collect nature, but Kim is still my favorite person with whom to watch it, preferably
before making, and then eating, a batch of liquid nitrogen ice cream.