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October Dreaming
October Dreaming
By David Daniel
October is a month of mystic meanings. Of marigolds and wild asters and the ripe-honey scent of Concord grapes on the vine. Of leaf peeping and football. Of “sweata weatha,” and Oktoberfest beer and the glossy squeak of grackles as they flock South.
October is contrasts: the first skim of ice on the birdbath and mellow-warm afternoons and chilly nights. It is a month of winnowing, of trees shedding after just a few short months of green newness. It is raking up the summer: June, July, August, September — a leaf for every minute. It is an ache and a beauty and a quality of light — “October Light,” as the novelist John Gardner called it — all its own.
In the old Roman calendar, when March was in the pole position and February came at the end with its tail pinched off short, October earned its name. In this hemisphere, it’s the angle of the lowering sun that illuminates the stark display of mortality. Summer is over, the harvest nearly done, and the careful listener becomes aware one night that the crickets have gone silent. If you shut your eyes, you can almost hear the clop of Pegasus riding the sky with the moon in Scorpio.
In fields where people gathered up tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn, the pumpkins — unnoticed through the months — have come. Avatars of autumn, they leer from front stoops.
Since the “twilight superstitions” of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, October has long stirred — and haunted — the artistic imaginations of writers. In his doleful poem “Ulalume,” Edgar Allan Poe writes, “The skies they were ashen and sober / The leaves they were crisped and sere . . . / It was night, in the lonesome October / Of my most immemorial year.”
Thomas Wolfe’s prodigious, inward-gazing novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River fairly ooze October. In the latter, he writes: “It was late October, there was a smell of smoke in the air, an odor of burning leaves . . . a pollinated gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful and exultant light of day.” In On the Road, Jack Kerouac memorably wrote: “I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.” Such is a wanderer’s yen for home in a season when, as Kerouac writes elsewhere in the book, “everything was falling down.”
Add Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Stephen King — the list is long. But the writer most indelibly linked to October has to be Ray Bradbury.
With words as chewy as candy corn, he celebrates the month in short stories and novels. In Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree, the very word “October” is like an incantation, invoking magic and casting long shadows over childhood innocence. Bradbury’s classic collection The October Country particularizes that place “where it is always turning late in the year . . . where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. . . . That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts [and who] . . . passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
Ah, the lyrical October rain, which takes away the leaves that the wind has missed.
This season never fails to bring a savor of melancholy and some vague impression of the unmet hopes of a year in swift decline, of the sweetness that fades — and the awareness, too, of winter tapping its foot impatiently and preparing to take the stage. But then, beauty is its own reward. It can be the very brevity of things that gives them their poignance.
And so, October burns down to its waning days, and tells us again, lest we forget, that what has been given will be taken away.
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This piece first appeared in the Boston Globe in October 2023. David Daniel will be speaking at the Gleason Library in Carlisle at 7 p.m. on Thursday November 13.
What a rich and evocative piece of writing. David Daniel is a Zen master of descriptive prose.
A wonderful piece, David! October has always been my favorite month…
(Reprinted from the Howe blog in October 2019.)
Twenty years ago this month, selections of Jack Kerouac’s early work appeared in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Viking/Penguin), which I had the great good fortune to edit.
Kerouac loved the month of October, which shows up in his prose and poetry including On the Road, where he writes: “In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”
The mighty month of October is fall, football, Halloween ghosts, New England’s red and yellow leaves, remembrance of summer joy and wistful thoughts of coming winter.
October is the annual Kerouac literary festival in his hometown, Lowell.
The excerpt below is from one of his poems written in 1941. He was nineteen years old.
from “Old Love-Light”
I thought the lonely little
houses, lost in the middle
of great tawny grass,
shaggy copper skies and
mottled orange forests, were
full of humanity that
I was missing. Instead, the
writer informed me that
it was chlorophyll that
colored the leaves. I
thought I had all the
significance of October
under my hat & pasted.
I thought that October
was a tangible being,
with a voice. The
writer insisted it was
the growth of corky cells
around the stem of the
leaf. The writer also
said that to consider
October sad is to be
a melancholy Tennysonian.
October is not sad, he
said. October is falling
leaves. October comes
between Sept. and Nov. I
was amazed by these facts,
especially about the
Tennysonian melancholia. I
always thought October was
a kind old Love-light.
—Jack Kerouac (1941)
Well said on all levels.
David Daniel is a world class writer. A Lowell legend who never ceases to take any subject he decides to write about and make it sing. “October” is a beautiful melancholy tune that both haunts and inspires so beautifully that I can hear the Beatles “In My Life” sub-consciously accompanying each word.
What an excellent piece of writing. It nearly makes me wish I were still teaching English, so I could have my students take this piece in.
Few are the pieces that nearly make me wish that.
Thank you Steve, Leo, Paul, Byron, Charles, and Jason for commenting. All of you are writers, so I’m honored by your words. Too, many of you are contributors to RichardHowe.com and help give the blog the vibrancy it has. I look ahead to reading more of your work.
It’s quite fitting that Dave Daniel’s wonderfully poignant ode to this autumn month appears here the very date Kerouac died in St. Pete, in 1969. Lifelong friend and brother in the art, John Clellon Holmes tenderly remembered The Great Rememberer in his essay, ”Gone in October,” published in ‘Playboy’ 1973 and later in book form.
Reads like poetry, Dave! Helps that I love the fall best of all too.Love that line too: “It is the raking up of summer”
Thank you, Jim. I’d forgotten about that JC Holmes’ essay. He was a humble guy who must felt in some ways that he was forever in the long shadow JK cast. It was Holmes who published the first beat novel, GO, and it’s skillful and works on many levels, but reading it years later it feels pretty conventional. More moderate than some of his Beat contemporaries, he lived to pen the epitaphs for many of them.
Only Dave can remind us how festive, colorful, and transitional October is, while entertaining us with a remarkable mix of refined prose, nostalgia, and literary enlightenment.
Dave is a cross between a Hawthorne, Updike, and a Hallmark store; he has a vault of pieces for any holiday, month, season, or anniversary. If compelled, he could turn a putrid dumpster into an interesting tale worth telling.
As a Lowell-area writer, I might be biased. I’ve enjoyed some works by each writer mentioned in this fall essay. However, overall, they don’t compare to the volume of stories and pieces by Dave Daniel that I have consistently enjoyed.
Aren’t we lucky to get an insider’s perspective on this talented author?
Many thanks to Dave Daniels for this homage to October, nature’s great gift to the calendar. He makes me want to savor every minute outside, more aware the counting down of daylight foretells the unwelcome dark of winter. I’m grateful for Dave’s lyrical and timely reminder of the treat that is this month.
Thank you, Ed and Terry. I’m humbled by your words. Next up, “Portrait of a Dumpster”
:)
What a wonderful piece of writing–what a wonderful writer. Happy Halloween!