Sue Ingram Keller spoke to a group of Gilbert Byron aficionados recently at Pickering Creek Audubon Center, where the deceased author’s hand-built home is on display.
Keller discussed her newly published book, “Images of Simplicity – Gilbert Byron’s Lewes.”
The book focuses on Byron’s seven years as a teacher and principal in the coastal Delaware town during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The glossy, hardback, coffee-table-worthy book features a concise yet comprehensive history of Byron’s brief but dynamic time in Lewes, dozens of Keller’s photographs, and a solid selection of Byron’s poetry.
The photographs complement the poems. Together they provide a visceral sense of the people and environs that served as a generously inspiring muse for Byron as the budding author embarked on his decades-long literary career.
While focusing primarily on the author’s artistry, Keller’s book also deftly shines a light on the murky political scenario that ultimately led to Byron’s sour and abrupt departure from Lewes.
Drawing from a variety of Byron essays, unpublished works, and correspondence, Keller references a discussion the teacher had in 1933 with a history class at Lewes High School. In that discussion about ticket-splitting, voting for candidates in different political parties, Byron noted that he and his wife, Edna, had voted in the most recent presidential election for Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas for president and for a candidate from a different party for vice president.
That political bent didn’t sit well with the local school board, which subsequently stripped him of his principal position while allowing him to continue teaching.
That, in turn, didn’t sit well with Byron.
Keller quotes him from an unpublished 1947 manuscript referring to those events:
“The placing of an X on a supposedly secret ballot–and the teapot tempest which followed–cost me my job as principal, and expelled me from the little town that I had served for seven years. It provided a pink [communistic] label that colored my every unselfish act as ‘socialist,’ and furnished me with grave doubts about organized society–the kind that breeds neuroses…. I moved on to teach at another school and to ‘give the people time to forget’ as the state high school supervisor advised. Twelve years passed and the people still remembered.”
The years between World War I, the Russian Bolshevik revolution, the Great Depression and World War II were studded with several outbreaks of anti-communist “Red Scare” turmoil at local, state and national levels.
His departure from Lewes eventually led Byron to relocate to Old House Cove on the outskirts of St. Michaels on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There he lived out his days in a solitary but literarily productive existence.
Before his death at 87, in 1991, Byron had produced four novels, several volumes of poetry and thousands of newspaper columns, essays, short stories and letters. His poetic and prosaic focus on the watermen and natural beauty of the world surrounding him earned him in later years the title “Voice of the Chesapeake.”
In her book, following her text, Keller offers almost 50 pages of lovingly presented Byron poems blended with related commentary and photographs.
Ironically, my wife, Becky, could not attend Keller’s presentation because of her active role the same afternoon in the St. Michaels Women’s Club’s annual fundraising picnic. Ironic, because while she was serving deviled eggs and pouring cold drinks, Keller was reading a Byron poem written while he was still living in Lewes.
Titled “The Ladies Club,” Byron wrote it in apparent nervous anticipation of a speaking engagement with the ladies of the Lewes Zwaanendael Club.
Here is that poem, the lightest of all his works:
The Ladies Club
“Oh, the ladies’ club, the ladies’ club,
I’m going to speak to the ladies’ club.
Rub-a-dub-dub, I comb and scrub,
All for the sake of the ladies’ club.
Clad in my Sunday suit of clothes
I read them a poem replete with oaths,
They shudder and sigh in sympathy
For Captain Billy and the snickersnee.
If they could sense my trembling knee,
They’d sigh instead for timid me.
I’d be more at home, most any day,
Out in the middle of the bay.
Rub-a-dub-dub, one man in a tub,
All for the sake of the ladies’ club.”
Keller also includes the following more serious work.
A great lover of the serenity and vastness of Delaware’s salt marshes, the more spiritually provocative poem was one of Byron’s personal favorites.
Evening Marshes
“Marsh grass is golden
Under a late sun,
And wild ducks’ wings
Whistle with the wind.
We are one,
Wild duck and setting sun,
Marsh grass around the pond,
Earth smells and shadows,
Coming cold and winter night,
Evening star, and this
Great emptiness
Within me.”
Keller includes a touch of commentary from Byron about the poem:
“…over the years, a number of people have asked about ‘this great emptiness inside me’ mentioned in Evening Marshes. Usually I say that it was time for my supper. But I have found if different people read the same poem and come up with different meanings…this is one sign that you have written something with some merit.”
One of the last poems in the book, “Compensations,” finds Byron in a wistful mood. It concludes with this stanza:
“I will never feel old
unless I let regrets
take the place
of my dreams.”
For those interested in diving deeper into Byron, Keller provides a bibliography of sources that can be pursued, including Jacques T. Baker’s fine Byron biography titled “A Life Worth Examining.”
Keller’s 100-page volume retails for $38 and is available at Vintage Books in Easton, Browseabout in Rehoboth Beach and Biblion in Lewes. Books can also be ordered for mail delivery by texting Keller at 302-448-5639 or by emailing her at suepingram@gmail.com.
