Ledge Short Story by Lawrence Sargent Hall

¶ … Ledge Hall Lawrence Sargent Hall's short story, The Ledge, is characterized by a devastating emotional pull, compelling prose, and vivid characterization. The Ledge won the O. Henry Award and been included in a number of anthologies. While Hall's literary career was marked by great success of The Ledge and other writing, he also had successful academic, public service and naval careers. Lawrence Sargent Hall's life was marked by his notable academic career, his services in the navy, and his writing career.

Born in 1915 April 23, 1915, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Hall graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1936. He then went on to teach from 1935-1938 at Deerfield Academy at Deerfield, Massachusetts. After his tenure at Deerfield, Hall obtained his Ph.D. from Yale in 1941. He then taught at Yale in 1946, and in Ohio University in Athens from 1941-1942. In 1946, he became a professor of English at Bowdoin in 1947, a position that lasted until 1967. Hall acted as a visiting professor at Columbia in 1956. He retired as Henry Leland Chapman Professor in 1986 (Bowdoin Anthologies).

Hall's career in public service is as accomplished as his academic endeavors. He was appointed to the Governor's Council on the Arts & Culture in Maine in 1964, followed by a time on the Maine State Commission on the Arts & Humanities from 1965 to 1968. He also acted as the director of Maine Citizen's Association for Cooperative Planning from 1966 to 1969, and acted as a consultant for the Family Practice Residency Institute in Augusta in 1973 (Bowdoin Anthologies). After receiving his Ph.D.

from Yale in 1941, Hall became a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946. He taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., as well as served sea duty in WWII. In 1942, Hall acted as director of censorship intelligence at the Office of Strategic Services (Bowdoin Anthologies). Hall married three times. His first marriage to Margaret Mellor in 1938 produced two children, Lawrence and Marion, before ending in divorce in 1954. In 1954 Hall married Marcia Skillings, followed by a marriage to Janice Tracey Nelson McCarthy in 1981.

Janice died in 1990, and Hall himself passed away on October 8, 1993 (Bowdoin Anthologies). During his literary career, Hall contributed to a number of important publications, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Hudson Review, Down East, The Skipper North American Review, and The Reporter. He won the 1961 William Faulkner Award for Stowaway in 1961. In addition, Hall wrote A Grammar of Literary Criticism in 1965, Hawthorne: Critic of Society in 1943 and How Thinking is Written in 1963 (Bowdoin Anthologies).

While Hall's literary, academic, and naval careers are certainly impressive, he may ultimately be best known for his short story, The Ledge. The story, first published in 1959, won first place in the prestigious O. Henry Prize Collection in 1960. Impressively, since its initial publication The Ledge has made an appearance in more than thirty anthologies (Bowdoin Anthologies). The Ledge tells the story of the demise of a fisherman, his thirteen-year-old son, and his fifteen-year-old nephew.

The boys and the fishermen go duck hunting one early Christmas morning, lose their skiff, and find themselves stuck on a ledge named Devil's Hump, slowly being consumed by freezing water. Writes Hall, "they found the fisherman at ebb tide, his right foot jammed cruelly into a glacial crevice of the ledge beside three shotguns, his hands tangled behind him in his suspenders, and under his right elbow a rubber boot with a sock and a live starfish in it.

After dragging unlit depths all day for the boys, they towed the fisherman home in his own boat at sundown, and in the frost of evening, mute with discovering purgatory, laid him on his wharf for his wife to see." Perhaps the most compelling component of The Ledge is its disturbing and devastating emotional pull.

Writes Bernard, The Ledge "packs a menacing emotional pull with beautifully controlled, moving prose." This is clearly seen in the final moments of the fishermen and the boys, where Hall's words bring about a sense of fear and impending doom and death. Writes Hall, "The fisherman, rocked to his soul by a sea, held his eyes shut upon the interminable night. Is it time now? The boy said. The fisherman could hardly speak. Not yet, he said.

Not just yet." Here, Hall creates a feeling that their deaths are unavoidable, and makes the reader cringe with the anticipation that the sea will swallow them and destroy them. Earlier, Bernard writes clearly of the drowning of the fisherman's faithful dog, an event that foreshadows the terror of the deaths of the boys and fisherman himself.

Writes Hall, "the dog, having lived faithfully as though one of them for eleven years, swam a few minutes in and out around the fisherman's legs, not knowing what was happening, and left them without a whimper. He would swim and swim at random by himself, round and round in the blinding night, and when he had swum routinely through the paralyzing water all he could, he would simply, in one incomprehensible moment, drown." The Ledge is also characterized by Hall's carefully chosen and almost poetic language.

The story gets a great deal of its appeal from Hall's "beautifully controlled, moving prose" (Bernard). This beautiful control of language is seen in the story's ending, as the fisherman's wife views the corpse of her drowned husband.

Writes Hall, "She, somehow, standing on the dock as in her frequent dream, gazing at the fisherman pure as crystal on the icy boards, a small rubber boot still frozen under one clenched arm, saw him exaggerated beyond remorse or grief, absolved of his mortality." In The Ledge, Hall creates complex and vivid characters. The fisherman's relationship with his wife is drawn in careful detail, and plays an important role in the story.

May and Magill note the fisherman's "insensitivity has long made his wife yearn for a different kind of life." Her needs and wants are subjugated to those of her husband, and she is seen as feminine and 'weak', in contrast to her masculine and abrupt husband. Notes Hall, "Always in winter she hated to have them go outside, the weather was so treacherous and there were so few others out in case of trouble.

To the fisherman these were no more than woman's fears, to be taken for granted and laughed off." Despite this, she chooses to live with him, despite his faults. The.