Victorian Valentine

SUNDOWN (82 pp.)--M. A. DeWolfe Howe--Little, Brown ($3).

In a pleasant garden on Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine, a rosy old man sat tootling on a recorder. "I'm not really musical," he explained to a guest, between puffs, and proceeded to prove it with a squeaky rendition of Finlandia. Suddenly he blew a sour note. "Oh, thunder!" exclaimed Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe. "That makes me so angry!"

Too Comprehensible. As a rule, Musicmaker Howe is far from angry. One of the last of Boston's gentleman-writers--he was the reputed model for Horatio Willing, the biographer-friend of The Late George Apley--Mark Howe is a calm and gentle writer of calm and gentle books. This week Howe celebrates his gist birthday with the publication of Sundown, a thin volume of verse, his 36th published work. While Howe's poetry is often as amateurish as his performance on the recorder, his poems have the nostalgic appeal of a Victorian valentine. "The trouble is," says Howe, "they're too comprehensible."

The poems celebrate birthdays of old friends, weddings, meetings of Harvard alumni. There are several fond tributes to Howe's beloved Boston, and here and there, the old man has dropped in roguish jingles:

A classicist in the Antipodes

Devoted his life to Euripides.

His bottle and jigger

Played hob with his figure,

But gave him some sweet serendipities.

Mark Howe also sets down the fears of a nonagenarian mind that has retained the freshness and keenness of youth:

Now, thieving Time, take what you

must--

Quickness to hear, to move, to see . . .

Yet leave, O leave exempt from plunder

My curiosity, my wonder!

Although Sundown is his eighth volume of poetry, Mark Howe is better known as a prolific historian, biographer (his life of Harvard's great Barrett Wendell won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize) and leading citizen of Boston. As a longtime editor of the Youth's Companion and the Atlantic Monthly, Howe has moved throughout his life near the stamen of flowering and fading New England. Since his wife's death he has lived at 16 Louisburg Square with an old friend and an Irish housekeeper. Most of his books are as Bostonian as the Old North Church. Samples: Semicentennial History of the Tavern Club; Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries. Yet for all his patina, Howe is not a proper Proper Bostonian at all.

Too Tolerant. "My father cannot be considered a typical Bostonian," admits Mark Howe's son, Radio Commentator Quincy Howe. "He's not caustic enough. He's not a scold. He has a tolerance that is not typical of Boston. Mother was a real Bostonian, from a family of Brahmins. She was always crabbing about something."

Mark Howe was born in Bristol, R.I., and would not even have achieved a New England birth but for the caprice of a summer vacation. His father was Episcopal bishop of central Pennsylvania, wrote his sermons in Latin and begat 18 children. Young Mark grew up steeped in respectability, devoutness and Victorian culture. By the time he went to Harvard in 1886 and met James Russell Lowell and the senior Holmes, he knew where he belonged. Another adopted Bostonian, Philosopher-Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, once said that if he were asked to pick one person to send to Mars as a representative of the human race, he would choose Mark Howe.

Of Sundown, Author Howe says: "This will be the last, of course." Still, he puts in a morning with his secretary each day, working over various literary projects, and regularly turns out verse, in meticulous longhand. His latest:

Why blow my heart out on this poor

recorder,

Striving to master every flat and sharp,

When soon, across the inexorable border,

I may be taking lessons on the harp?

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