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Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle
Time and the Town was the last of Mary Heaton Vorse's books. It is about many things —a town and its people, the author, a certain kind of idyllic life. As much as anything else, it is the biography of the house Vorse bought in 1907 and lived in, off and on, for the next thirty-six years. The moods of the house mirrored her own. "Our houses," she wrote, "are our biographies, the stories of our defeats and victories."
Tinged with nostalgia and disenchantment, the book describes a Provincetown that has changed, a place on the verge of modernity. It is no longer a major fishing port. It has become a place whose business is tourism. Contrasting the old and the new, Vorse celebrates the enduring character of the town itself. She tells stories that are engaging and charming, droll and fabulous. The wrinkled Mrs. Mary Mooncusser who, though drunk and stark naked, conducts herself with great decorum when Vorse pays her a call, might have stepped out of the pages of Sherwood Anderson or Eudora Welty. In another anecdote, the townspeople scour the beaches for cases of booze dumped into the sea by rumrunners and are briefly inflated with the spirit of ancestral smugglers and buccaneers.
Vorse herself remained something of an outsider in Provincetown, despite her evident affection for the place and its inhabitants. They surely regarded her as simply another of those artist-intellectuals--many of whom appear in the pages of this book. The "off-Cape" outsiders put the town in the national limelight but took no interest in local matters. Vorse here ponders local matters exclusively, almost, one suspects, as a way of forgetting the more complex matters that occupied her--her agonies of parental guilt, her resentment of domestic obligations, her third marriage, her depressions and breakdowns. The town is in that sense beyond time.
Tinged with nostalgia and disenchantment, the book describes a Provincetown that has changed, a place on the verge of modernity. It is no longer a major fishing port. It has become a place whose business is tourism. Contrasting the old and the new, Vorse celebrates the enduring character of the town itself. She tells stories that are engaging and charming, droll and fabulous. The wrinkled Mrs. Mary Mooncusser who, though drunk and stark naked, conducts herself with great decorum when Vorse pays her a call, might have stepped out of the pages of Sherwood Anderson or Eudora Welty. In another anecdote, the townspeople scour the beaches for cases of booze dumped into the sea by rumrunners and are briefly inflated with the spirit of ancestral smugglers and buccaneers.
Vorse herself remained something of an outsider in Provincetown, despite her evident affection for the place and its inhabitants. They surely regarded her as simply another of those artist-intellectuals--many of whom appear in the pages of this book. The "off-Cape" outsiders put the town in the national limelight but took no interest in local matters. Vorse here ponders local matters exclusively, almost, one suspects, as a way of forgetting the more complex matters that occupied her--her agonies of parental guilt, her resentment of domestic obligations, her third marriage, her depressions and breakdowns. The town is in that sense beyond time.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
372 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 30, 2017
One of the best books I have read this year. Am sad I waited so long....wonderful! Now I want to know more about Vorse and Susan Glaspell....
September 27, 2021
Nearly every complaint people have today, MHV had in the 1940s. A friend said it best—living in Provincetown is like showing up to a party and everyone’s telling you what you’ve missed. MHV reminds us we’ve missed a lot.
August 31, 2024
Loved it! Picked up on my reading trip to P-town. It's amazing how the tensions of 100 years ago make such an entertaining read today. Walked around the village imaging MHV's voice describing the scenes in front of me.
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June 6, 2021Provided great insight into a part of the world I'm not that familiar with and an era long gone.
July 14, 2022
The type was itty bitty, but the parts I did read were charming.
July 22, 2016
My slow progress shouldn't suggest this isn't a wonderful read. If anything, I knew at the start that I could tear through such a tome of delightful stories about a town I love and wanted to read more carefully.
It's been a pleasure to dip in and out throughout this past year, reading here and there in between other things. It's a treat to read stories of the long past in a setting that's somehow remained the same despite the changes of the last hundred or so years.
Anyone who cares about Provincetown and the Outer Cape should add this to their reading list, if they haven't already checked it off.
It's been a pleasure to dip in and out throughout this past year, reading here and there in between other things. It's a treat to read stories of the long past in a setting that's somehow remained the same despite the changes of the last hundred or so years.
Anyone who cares about Provincetown and the Outer Cape should add this to their reading list, if they haven't already checked it off.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews