August Derleth

While on vacation the last week of July we traveled to southern Wisconsin. We toured part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate, Taliesen. We visited the House on the Rock, a monument to one man’s interests and obsessions. In the area we stayed in the town of Sauk City.
Sauk City is a pretty, small town which flows right into another such town, Sac du Praire, both communities nestled on the banks of the Wisconsin River. As we walked through the town, we could not help encountering the name of a favorite son, an author named August Derleth (1909-1971). The breakfast room of the hotel where we stayed had Derleth memorabilia in a glass case, and a few of his books for sale. The local restaurant where we ate dinner one night also had Derleth clippings gracing the walls of a space called “Auggie’s reading room.” I confess that I had never before heard of August Derleth, but he was a prolific author with over 150 books to his credit – children’s books, poetry, biographies, fiction and criticism. He had edited Madison’s Captial Times. In his home town he established Arkham House, a publishing company which has been credited with saving the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
Discovering a new author is a bit like making a new friend, a friend whose conversation enlivens and enriches. Before we checked out of our motel, I bought one of Derleth’s books from behind the glass case in the breakfast room. The book , Walden West, is a fictionalized chronicle of growing up in Sauk City, interspersed with poetic reflections.
Part of the wonder, beauty and mystery of words is the way they both help us articulate our experiences in ways that deepen our awareness and sharpen our perception of them, and also open us up to new experiences. My new friend August Derleth offers words that have some of that power. Here is a sample:
There was always in childhood that hour when the streetlights came on – on the edge of evening, at the beginning of night, when darkness had not yet taken all the village and the afterglow still burned saffron or cerise, copper or old rose, magenta or emerald or mother-of-pearl along the western rim…. I never saw them come on at this hour without a lifting pleasure, and I never looked down that street at the afterglow and the prairie beyond without a sense of adventurous expectancy, as if that moment and that hour must signal the approach of an adventure profound and stirring, not of the flesh, but of the spirit…. This was a mysterious and beckoning borderland; none could say what might emerge in it, what voice might rise, what adventure might come…. I suppose that it is possible to adduce any number of reasons for this attraction, beauty being in the eye of the beholder alone and predicated upon countless determining factors unknown even to the beholder; and I have no doubt there was and is a relationship between this sense of adventurous expectancy and the spiritual isolation which is the common heritage of every individual; but reason and explanation cannot alter the exhilaration and wonder so integral a part of that hour between day and night, that hour when the creatures of darkness briefly know their brethren of daylight, that hour when the soul and the body become fleetingly aware, one of the other. (Walden West, 12-13)

With Faith and With Feathers,

David