NONFICTION - April 30, 1995

PRINCIPAL PRODUCTS OF PORTUGAL by Donald Hall (Beacon Press: $23; 286 pp.) Here’s a New England primer: Henry Adams and parlors and Andrew Marvell and Boston and the Red Sox. Oh, and nostalgia: “The woods of New England were crowded with hermits, when I was a boy; if you traveled dirt roads in the hills, you had to watch out or you might trip over one.” Nostalgia for hermits! You gotta love ‘em. And there’s nostalgia for other things, too, like reading aloud, still a practice in Hall’s native town of Danbury, N.H., a “surviving culture of the 19th Century, like those Greek colonies in the Italian hills.”

In Hall’s wonderful essay on Henry Adams, described variously as “the tiny dehydrated author,” “the diminutive ironist,” Hall distills Adams’ thousands of pages down to the angry puritan nub: He “screams in our ears: People do the opposite of what they say they do! It’s true! Everything in this world turns into its own opposite! Doesn’t anyone notice?” Later in the same essay, Hall refers to Adams’ “familial Boston irony,” which “impeded a required poetic devotion.” It’s this very distance, sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes so bony, so sharply essential and moving that makes these essays gorgeous. The piece called “Trees” has some of the most affectionate and lovely writing in the book: “The tree is the rock that changes and the fern that endures. . . . Trees give shape to wind we cannot see; trees make the wind visible and audible: image and song, exhibition and concert, mobile of air and improvised stanza. Trees are clay for the sculptural wind; trees are strings for the virtuoso air; trees are tongues for the tongueless and shapes for blind eyes.” As for the ills of modern life, Hall may disagree with Octavio Paz on this one: “For the most part,” he writes, we no longer live close enough to graveyards.”