“Emily Muir is familiar with the scene and people of ‘Small Potatoes’ from the twenty summers which she has spent in Maine. She has painted its landscape in oils and water colors, and now in words.”
So reads the inside flap of the dust cover of Emily Muir’s first and only novel, Small Potatoes, published by Scribner’s in 1940. The book recounts the coming of age of Nathan Billings in a small fishing community modeled on Deer Isle where the author had summered and where she and her husband, sculptor and watercolorist William Muir, settled in 1939. As the disclaimer notes, “The color, characters and anecdotes are typical of the Penobscot Bay region of the Maine coast, but the narrative and incidents are fictitious.”
Now in her late 90s, Muir has published her second book, an autobiography. While one presumes that the many stories she relates are based in fact, this collection of reminiscences — or “meanderings” as the author self-deprecatingly and unfairly refers to them — has the engaging quality of fiction. These are the tales of an adventurer with a marvelous memory and a wonderful eye for detail.
The Time of My Life starts in 1903, Muir’s birth year, in Chicago where her father was an electrical engineer. Soon after, the family — Emily, her parents and her brother, Killian — moved to Brooklyn, New York, which is where the story of her life truly begins. From there, an engaging blend of personal anecdote and world events carries us through two world wars and the Depression, various schooling (including a stint at Vassar), the travails of a budding artist, a remarkable companionship and a long affair with the coast of Maine.
The book covers a good deal of geography, from Vermont to Trinidad to Scandinavia. After Emily and Bill married in 1928, they traveled extensively in the West Indies, Europe and South America, creating dioramas and custom window displays for steamship companies and travel agencies from sketches made during these sojourns. During World War II, Emily followed her husband, who had enlisted in the Navy, from base to base: Newport, Rhode Island, Brunswick, Maine, and Mare Island, California.
The book is illustrated with photographs of the Muirs and reproductions of their art. Emily’s marine-related paintings are especially noteworthy, be it portrayals of purse seiners folding nets on a Deer Isle dock or a view of the New York Boat Show. She maintains a place in that Maine school of painters that includes the likes of Leo Brooks, Waldo Peirce, Francis Hamabe and James Fitzgerald. Stonington Fireworks, reproduced on the cover, recalls the northern expressionism of Edvard Munch. “Art is a lonely business,” Muir writes, “but it is enduring.”
Toward the end of the book, the author states, “I am most proud to be listed as a designer of houses in Design International.” Nearly 60 years old, with no formal training in architecture, she set out on this new venture. Over the past three-plus decades she has designed 40 houses, 30 brand new and 10 “remodeled jobs,” on the island.
The beauty of the Muirs’ surroundings in Stonington nurtured their art (as it had another artist couple, Marguerite and William Zorach, earlier in the century). The island also helped to stimulate Emily’s environmental ethic. This ethic grows stronger in the latter third of the book, from the time she expresses her disappointment with the building of the bridge across Egge-moggin Reach, which “insulted” the insularity of Deer Isle, to the establishment of the Emily and William Muir Fund at the Island Institute.
The final section of the book, “Musings,” offers commentary on the state of the world as viewed by someone who has experienced nearly a hundred years’ worth of living in it. Muir takes the opportunity to advocate for peace, for the one world that Wendell Wilkie dreamed of. “Good feeling among mankind” is what this “poor old militant world” needs, she writes, words that never rang truer.
Carl Little is director of communications at the Maine Community Foundation.
Proceeds from the sale of The Time of My Life will go to the William and Emily Muir Fund at the Island Institute. i>