16A Maine Sunday Telegram, September 2, 1984 ARTS/BOOKS An a.m. with the author at he B.J. Morison has no qualms about eavesdropping on Bar Harbor's cr By John Rolfe ERE at the Bar Harbor Club at 11 H o'clock on a weekday morning the egalitarian sky is overcast and grey. Below the wide brick steps at the rear of the clubhouse the lawn, dotted with round tables sporting furled umbrellas, is nearly deserted, the defiantly aqua pool unswimmed in. From the tennis courts, the harbor visible beyond their fences, comes a desultory plocking sound. At a table to the left sits a solitary female figure, occupied, as anyone who's read B. Morison's second novel "Port and a Star Boarder" might expect, with a book: "Nowadays, I've noticed, the more 'social' members go to the right side of the steps we just came down' (one character observes to her guests at the Club) 'and the recluses like Henry and me, who just want to sit quietly and read and swim, go to the left." In "Port" that luncheon proves especial- ly memorable when a deranged mongrel named Muffin, belonging to an only slight- ly less deranged Bar Harbor Matron, Mrs. Constanza de Parma, runs amok. Muffin savages the lifeguard, the manager and a dowager and drives 'three portly matrons in modest printed swimming costumes, all wearing coiffure-preserving caps of exoti- cally coloured flowers," into the pool. B. J. Morison, for it is she upon the sward, agrees that today is likely to offer no such threat or diversion. All the same, she B.J. Morison at the Bar Harbor Club: Mystery, comedy, and 'a dose of Mt Desert' are the says, she loves to come here just to sit, watch and listen; conversations overheard three main ingredients, she says, of her books on 'little Maine murders.' being a fine source of raw novel material. The tables are set just far enough apart to teries or suspense novels; I hate suspense traditional mystery writers: she admires make eavesdropping a challenge. books. They (hers) are unassuming things, 'When I die, I don't P.D. Michael Peter Dickinson, She laughs at remembering one Maine but not as trivial as has been said." She is Dorothy this a critic who, reviewing her first, 1982 novel pleased to think that someone noted that "Champagne and a Gardener," speculated "Champagne," "also dealt with poverty and want to go to friend day chucks a Dickinson that the author wrote it in the Club bar. He old age, the despair of growing old." onto lend- imagined her "a faded debutante," or some- "There are smarter novelists who can heaven. I want to go ing it thing like that, fueling her fictions with write to enlighten people. I just want to give The lunch drink. an enjoyable respite from life's sorrows." to Boston.' crowed, Di- Mrs. Morison, who prefers "B.J." and Mystery, comedy, and "a dose of Mt Desert" rectly one woman mur- James, the and to "You pausing lawn her. several L. table then paperback Sayers. have is and her filling to of just attention thanks As whom has pass Innes, mystery met if up left to the Morison stop Mrs. with reinforce wanders Morison by time to de the talk. for of as loathes "Betty Jane," exhibits none of the are her three main ingredients, she says. murs, Parma." sourness implicit in that image. She isn't In "Champagne," though, the mystery is "It broke me up. And I thought about it over Now she drinking. She is lively and talkative. suffocated by the manners. "Port," while re- the years. But for the child's remark catches, here and there, shreds of "dia- The many cigarettes she smokes with taining the comedy, is streamlined by com- anyway, I read once that that's a perfectly logue." such conviction have perhaps contributed to parison. People's clothing is not described kosher way to get a title." With her novels emphasizing the dichoto- her husky speech, if not to the occasionally with the obsessive ardour of yore; fewer set "And, with 'Port' I wanted to carry on my between "summer people" and Maine arch tones which recall her authorial voice. descriptive pieces clot the narrative. Ms. with the 'Champagne and a Gardner' (con- natives, B.J. Morison has been taxed with Her heavy-lidded, almost hooded brown Morison allows that hers is lapidary prose, cept)." writing unflatteringly of the latter. She in- eyes hint at a reserve not otherwise appar- "but, I've toned it down a bit in 'Port. Hence review copies of "Port" were sent sists, however, that she writes of everyone, ent. out accompanied by a bottle of Sandeman regardless of economic or social status, with The critic, she says sardonically, "should 'P port, as "Champagne" had come with a plas- equal acerbity, if acerbity is called for. She see me on my knees cleaning toilets seven ORT" takes place in 1972, three years tic rose and bubbly. Not the author's idea, thinks the natives, anyone, are portrayed days a week," at the Criterion, the movie after the inaction of "Champagne." Several she says; she thought it was "tacky." But the most sympathetically. theatre she owns and operates. Actually, of the old characters are back, most notably they weren't bribes. If we were going to She is impatient with soft-focus, cant ter- she took him at his word and wrote lot of the precocious Elizabeth Lamb. Having un- bribe reviewers we'd have sent Cordon minology. "There's no sense in calling a re- 'Port' last summer here at the Club," though masked the murderer and escaped being Rouge." tarded child 'exceptional.' not in the bar. Nor was she averse to heed- drowned in the earlier book, she has at- In a half-finished third novel "Beer and Writing of Worthingtons and Wasgatts, ing and profiting by other criticisms of tained to the ripe old age of 11. Skittles," she is chronicling the further ad- people who needn't worry about their next "Champagne," like the one claiming that This time a lobsterman is killed by spec- ventures of Elizabeth Lamb, who repairs to meal so much as about who is going to serve she couldn't plot her way out of a paper bag. tacular means aboard his boat, the "Free- Northeast Harbor in the aftermath of it to them, she is not of them. "My idea of a "Of course, I knew that already," she bawn," on the Fourth of July. Mrs. Morison "Port's" tragedies. And in a fourth, Eliza- good time is dinner and a movie." She has laughs. The eyebrows go up - "I'm not "first thought of a lobsterman getting mur- beth "will be on her way to Mt Desert with a worked all her life, she says; here at the really stupid, you know." dered, and for that I wanted a nautical title." group of interesting people." Club she feels something of an outsider, an B.J. Morison's two novels are comedies of A friend's unwitting mention of port and Mrs. Morison does not intend to bring her observer. She was born neither to the Mt Desert manners, built around traditional starboard supplied that. to sexual maturity, however - "Can you purple nor the green. mystery stories. Each is deprecatingly sub- Just as, "in the late '60s, my middle imageine Elizabeth Lamb on a date?" she She did marry into it when she became titled, "A Little Maine Murder." They are daughter who is now 27 said to me 'I'm asks rhetorically. the wife of Peter Grene Morison, son of his- entertainments, she says, "little divertisse- going to marry a millionaire someday and torian Samuel Eliot Morison. But before ments" as she identifies "Champagne" in its then you can have everything you want- dedication. M that, life had strewn a fair share of banana champagne, and a gardener.' MORISON acknowledges that her peels in her path. "They're not standard, orthodox mys- That she coveted neither didn't matter. methods owe much to the school of English She remembers that in high school she er Club usty upper set was "the only kid who couldn't afford to go to a Frank Sinatra concert." Born on Bastille Day 1924 - "my father was born when Licoln was president"--he family moved to Philidelphia when her father died in 1929 and then to New Jersey, where she finished high school at 16 and went to work for $12 a week. Which wasn't bad, considering that her mother had supported B.J. and her grand- mother all along on the same sum. Still, a partial scholarship to NYU went by the board when the family couldn't make up the difference. "When you've grown up in the Depres- sion, it's as if you're from another country," she reflects. "I started to go to the dentist only when I got my first paycheck." She studied accounting, worked at Bonwit Teller, and then met Harry Conover, he of the big modeling agency. She mod- elled for Vogue and Town & Country. In 1949 she married Morison. She remembers dining one night with her in-laws' Boston family and with Sir Richard Livingston, an Oxford lecturer over on a visit. The elder Morison upbraided his three Swiss-boarding-school-educated daughters, saying that only his daughter-in-law, "who'd educated herself at the Camden, N.J. public library," could make intelligemt conversa- tion at the table. "Oh, Pa," one daughter re- proved him. "When die," B.J. Morison says, "I don't want to go to heaven. I want to go to Boston." IN 1966 the Morisons with their three chil- dren moved to Bar Harbor and brought the Criterion. In 1969, "when Peter died, he thought it was broke," Morison says, "but I found $2,000 in the candy account. Let that be a lesson to you - learn to balance a checkbook." Morison wrote book reviews in high school, dreamed of becoming a foreign cor- respondent, but she has, she concedes, come rather late in life to the novel-writing game. Before "Champagne" she'd written only movie ads for the theater and innumer- able letters-to-the-editor of the Times, "which were never published." Now she writes when she's not working. "By hand, chapter by chapter, putting things in, toning them down" - and she hates it. "The thought of getting everything to- gether and starting to write," she explains, "just the effort, used to make me feel nau- seous, physically sick. It's getting better, but, I hate writing. I don't know why anyone doesi it." Well then ? As she says she told an eighth-grade class, "I write because I do like to read what I've written." She'd read through all the mystery authors, and "no one had written the books that I wanted to read." Once underway, Morison found that she couldn't help but write about "the funny ob- servations of people, the ideas and charac- ters from people I've known - it's impossible not to let them into your writ- ing." Lunch time has almost passed, and as a democratic drizzle descends on the Club lawn, fragments of verbal absurdities drift over from the direction of the pool. Mori- son's radar picks it out. "Any kind of psychology?" she repeats wonderingly. "Psychology the whole week long?" John Rolfe lives in Portland.