SUBJECT: "Kindling", a short story by Raymond Carver
Mutt Ploughman I'm Mutt Ploughman, husband, father, New School graduate, sometime fiction writer and essayist. Welcome to "Literary Discussions", the first of an occasional series brought to you by The Secret Thread, in which we kick around literary matters – great writers and their work. Tonight, we take on a legendary American literary icon, Raymond Carver; more specifically, we will be discussing his short story "Kindling", which first appeared in Esquire in 1999, and was collected in 2000's Call if You Need Me. Joining me tonight: husband, father of four, published poet, amateur film critic, and the sole founder of The Secret Thread: Duke Altum. Say hello, Duke!
Duke Altum Hello sports fans! Nice background work there... I thought this was #2 though? 'Confederacy' [of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole] didn't count?
Mutt Ploughman We never finished it.....
Duke Altum I guess not... well, I will do my best to keep up...
Mutt Ploughman Great. Allow me to lay only two ground rules: 1. This is a discussion, not an interview, so there are no specified "questions". However, in a minute, I will kick things off with a question. 2. In order for us not to step over each other, I propose one man "chats" at a time, and when you've made your point, type an "*". I will then edit that out of the transcript.
Duke Altum OK, makes sense...
Mutt Ploughman Awesome. Maybe we'll start this way: what's your own personal background and experience with the writings of Raymond Carver?
Duke Altum Well it won't take too long to go through it. I know him by reputation really. I heard a fairly long interview with him (audio) on that Don Swaim radio program, so I learned some background information on him there. Then I read his collection, Cathedral, once. And that's about all of my familiarity with him or his writing. Besides this story now, I mean. Yours?
Mutt Ploughman Even less. I have never read one of his books, really. I have read a few of his stories here and there. "Cathedral", "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", now this one. As you said, I know him by reputation as well. He is very well regarded and respected and his personal story is well known. He also taught some great writers. I feel like his personal writing style precedes him, and most people interested in writing fiction have at least some idea of how he wrote and worked. I need to read him a lot more. What were your first impressions of this story, "Kindling"?
Duke Altum Oh I just thought of something else I should mention too... I heard a few of his stories on audio tape once, not all of which I remember but I do recall "Where I'm Calling From" and "Neighbors." Also I own a large collection of his stories called Where I'm Calling From, but haven't read them yet. But to answer your question, my FIRST impression was basically "Evocative writing, but there's not that much to this story." However, on my second read, I found more there to chew on...Perhaps not surprisingly...
Mutt Ploughman Well, before I share my own impressions, can you expand on that?
Duke Altum Well as with movies, I notice, I am definitely a second-time-around viewer/reader... first time I just seem to let it impact me emotionally......it's the second time [that] I tend to notice more details. So in this case, the second time around, things jumped out at me about the characters. Myers' guardedness and resistance to make any personal connection to the couple. Sol and Bonnie's seeming naiveté and innocence, and unhappiness (at least on Bonnie's part). Maybe 'unfulfilled-ness' is a better way to say it. I recognized these things in passing the first time, but didn't really notice them until the second read. And began to think about what they meant. I could go on, but that's an example...
Mutt Ploughman What do you think about Carver's vaulted prose style? What are your comments on the way he writes in general?
Duke Altum Not exactly sure what you mean by 'vaulted'. Can you clarify? Do you mean just, much praised?
Mutt Ploughman Yes. Or is it "vaunted"? I can't remember the right term.
Duke Altum Oh yeah... I think so. Anyway the second part of your question was what mattered. I like Carver's minimalistic style, mostly because it's deceptive in its simplicity. I noticed this while reading Cathedral. It's so spare you can easily mistake it for not saying anything. But the story is almost in the details he describes, and not the narration of the actual 'action.' Carver gets at his truth through details, gestures, glances, very subtle observations. It commands that you pay attention. But more often than not there is some interesting stuff going on underneath the surface. Again, I noticed that here, but only the second time around. But it can also be maddening, because he gives you not even one hint of what it might mean. It's entirely up to you to fill in the blanks.
Mutt Ploughman Good points. I find the experience - and I guess this is my third or so - sort of a mix of inspiring and frustrating. It reminds me a lot of my experience in reading Hemingway. Carver was obviously a very talented man and a very gifted writer. But there were some lines in this story that if I saw them anywhere else, I would have been nearly pissed off! It's a weird experience.
Duke Altum What's an example of that kind of line??
Mutt Ploughman I have one here...."...it was a matter of life and death that he do so. I must finish this job, he thought, or else....." If I had seen that in a New School story I would have killed the guy/woman.
Duke Altum Hmmm... yes I see your point on one hand. I wondered about that line too. But, maybe for a guy in his position, fresh out of rehab, he doesn't know where he's going... and doesn't understand his own desperation, maybe. He may feel that way and not really know why. He may at this point in his life not have a very good understanding of himself at all. The first line does seem to indicate he is in a kind of limbo... "he was between lives." I think that description in the very first line, right off, is significant.
Mutt Ploughman That's a good point too. I'm not saying that "matter of life and death" line is no good, but I am saying that if I had seen it in an amateur's story, I might have thought it was no good. Also all the repetition, nine mentions of the river flowing (I counted) in eleven pages. Repeated references to water. All of this could seem heavy-handed. That's why I had the weird experience while reading this story that I had read a million like it. It's because so many people since Ray Carver have wanted to write Ray Carver-type stories. But all the non-explanation of things bugs me a lot too, sometimes.
Duke Altum That's funny, I made the exact same count... for the same reason...hard not to notice that... but that's a good example of what you're talking about too. Obviously the sound of the water is significant in some way. But why? What does it mean? That's an example of one of those details I was talking about earlier, that Carver stubbornly refuses to give even a hint of an explanation about. What its significance is, to Myers or even to us, is entirely for us to decide, I can only conclude... if there is any.
Mutt Ploughman Well, this is the whole rub with this kind of writer. Hemingway, and Carver after him. They give you nothing. They don't want to give you any nods at all. You figure it out. It's part of a whole saga fiction went through in the last century. It was being simplified, taken apart all the time. Take a look at the last two lines: "He left the window open when he got into bed. It was okay like that." What the hell is that supposed to mean??? This kind of title bugs me too sometimes. "Kindling"? What does that have to do with anything? I remember a classmate at The New School, she used to do that all the time. She wrote about women in mental institutions, and in one story there was a candle and ONE time she mentioned a moth flickering around the candle, so the story was naturally called, "Moth". This kind of thing. What do you make of it?
Duke Altum I was going to ask you about the same thing... I can see that reaction too, because it's almost imposing on the reader some kind of symbolism that may or may not be there... it has you looking for some, anyway. Kindling is only mentioned once, as I recall, in passing. I really don't know why he called it that. Any explanation I can put to it feels like too much of a stretch. Again, it's like he's saying 'make of this what you will.' The ending is very cryptic, I agree... Hemingway at least tends to leave you with tangible despair, or loneliness, or some kind of strong emotion... but this story doesn't really. It just ends of a note of, "It was okay." It seemed like the passage Myers wrote down right before the end was coming towards revealing something, but then it kind of abruptly ends.
Mutt Ploughman Yes. And it's very hard to know what Carver was ultimately trying to say. Maybe nothing. Maybe his point is that there is nothing to say. Everything has already been said for Myers. I find myself really torn on Carver because I do admire his language and his attention to small details. His sentences here and there about the river and the land, though repetitive, are wonderful. To wit: "...slowed a little, as if it had spent itself, then picked up strength again and plunged into the ocean." So simple, but powerful.
Duke Altum Yeah I know what you mean but I do come down on the side that he is a fine and talented writer, as I know you do... his style is obviously not your favorite, and probably not mine either, but I admire the skill it takes to strip one's writing down to the bare bone and still make something interesting... of course maybe there is a fine line, razor thin, between 'still interesting' and 'kinda pointless' that he dances right along... I mean, I would say about half of Cathedral were 'hits' and half 'misses' for me, but the powerful ones stayed with me, as did the collection as a whole... but I do enjoy the hints he gives us of a rich, more complicated story under the surface of these lives. That is interesting and mysterious, and it's kind of fascinating how he butts up against that and yet, doesn't dive in. Like Myers writing to his wife, or his little notebook scribblings... or, the interesting small section where Carver gives us what each of the three dreamed about. Now that small passage hinted at some things there... did it not? Maybe you could argue Carver hasn't given us enough about them to really care, but it is nevertheless psychologically interesting... Sol and Bonnie both kind of dreamed happy dreams, kind of like wishes... but Myers' was all about regret, and was kind of a nightmare...
Mutt Ploughman I thought the dreams were convincing, especially Bonnie's. And I like how in this story and other Carver works you can feel the artist struggling to make something out of life, to understand this existence. There is a sadness, a melancholy at play. But at the service of a mysterious kind of talent. And he obviously cared a lot about his language, his use of words......
Duke Altum Oh yeah, Carver is definitely trying to get at a deeper meaning, if there is one, underneath so much mundane everyday stuff and sadness and frustration... frustration seems to be a major theme in Carver, unfulfilled dreams maybe... high hopes that don't get realized. By the way, do you think there is anything to the landlord's deformity? Or Myers' notebook? What's going on with those? Or are they just what they are, and that's it? I suppose these details could be more or less like the title, "Kindling"... will we ever know their meaning?
Mutt Ploughman I am not really sure about the deformity, what's being said there....or the notebook really....but I did find the notebook writings intriguing......almost like the guy was just trying give voice to whatever was going on in him. He just seemed lost. But see, the whole thing seems cliche when you attempt to describe it, but this guy was a pioneer of this kind of writing.
Duke Altum I don't think we'll really get to the 'why' of a story like this. I think it deliberately asks you to take it in your own direction. Again, I go back to the beginning, where he says Myers is between lives. At the end, there is that brief moment of introspection in his notebook, and he's just told them he's going to be leaving... so the reader is left to ponder whether things are going to get any better for this guy, or if he's just going to drift back into who he was before. Personally, and I'm not really sure why, I get a sort of hopeful vibe from this ending. I think he is trying to understand himself, and the fact that he was able to push through and get that one job done - finishing [chopping] the wood - was somehow significant for him. At the end of that he even gives them a grin. Maybe these small details indicate something. Maybe the next 'life' will be a better one for him.
Mutt Ploughman You do kind of get a sense that he has purged something out, and that there is another chapter opening for him somewhere and somehow. And I do admire the way Carver seems to capture that sense of life on the page. And he does it with minimal language. What I find hard about stories like this is the deconstructionism, the reduction of everything to small bits, so that every meaning you can find has to be located in a miniscule pinhole somewhere. I guess I feel like I am a sucker for more traditional pleasures of storytelling. But at the same time I feel other writers can learn a lot from reading Ray Carver. Any final thoughts on this?
Duke Altum I think you hit upon it for you, you can admire the skill involved but subjectively, his style is just not what most appeals to your own sensibilities... you like lush language, just like (interestingly) you like lush music... layered and complex... I like those attributes too, but maybe because I don't try and write fiction myself, I sort of am intrigued and impressed by what I said earlier, the truth and meaning of a story compressed into tiny details, gestures, glances... maybe that is the side of me that tends towards poetry talking, where every little word must be packed with meaning, and be exactly the right word... no fat, no throwaway words... perhaps it is significant that Carver also wrote poetry. By the way, [Denis] Johnson, who also as you know wrote poems, wrote in almost a Carveresque style in Jesus' Son. But somehow those stories seem to carry a lot more of a wallop. Think about it, those stories are incredibly spare too...
Mutt Ploughman You're right. Also I find it interesting that the poet in you admires Carver's style. I am looking forward to reading and learning more from Carver though. Good discussion. Let this be a first salvo. Next topic is your choice......
Duke Altum Cool... great organizing. Great idea. (Great drummer. Great look.) I definitely look forward to the next one... TST.
(c) 2010 The Secret Thread
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
Teen Night (a tongue-in-cheek original poem by Duke Altum)
A poem of this caliber doesn't merit much introductory commentary, but all I can say in my own defense is... I had fun with it. It came to me in a rush, out of nowhere, and since it's based on totally arbitrary moments from my distant past that have no real significance whatsoever, I thought I'd just go with the flow... see what ridiculous images might emerge from the dusty vault of memory.
Don't your middle school/early teen years seem, looking back on them from the safe distance of adulthood, like a trip once taken to some remote and bizarre planet? I can't be the only one who looks back at some of the things I remember from that time and thinks, "What were we even doing then? What was that all about? What were parents and teachers thinking, organizing such events?"
Those kinds of questions, and a sudden and random memory one afternoon of something we used to attend called (with a hilarious lack of imagination, as if tacitly acknowledging the boredom the event would only compound) "Teen Night," have brought this particular indulgence upon us.
Ah, to be young and stupid again in suburban New Jersey!!
*******
Teen Night
Not knowing what else to do,
we would hang around delinquently
along the back wall of the gym,
trying to out-cuss each other
over the squawk of Billy Squier or Def Leppard
from the pathetic little boom-box
on the stage across the room.
I might have been the one
getting stupid on No Frills grape soda,
working the sleeveless OP shirt
and the cut-off jean shorts,
thinking if I slouched at just the right angle
I might just pass for a blonde Ralph Macchio.
Meanwhile, the irony of the red-faced,
vein-popping gym teacher (Mr. Silence)
bellowing at us for no apparent reason -
“Either get your drinks, or GET OUT!!” -
wasn’t lost even on our blunt, hormone-addled brains.
And the girls? Needless to say
I can’t recall where they mingled
at these aimless gatherings,
but my memory’s brutally clear on this:
they weren’t anywhere near us.
Don't your middle school/early teen years seem, looking back on them from the safe distance of adulthood, like a trip once taken to some remote and bizarre planet? I can't be the only one who looks back at some of the things I remember from that time and thinks, "What were we even doing then? What was that all about? What were parents and teachers thinking, organizing such events?"
Those kinds of questions, and a sudden and random memory one afternoon of something we used to attend called (with a hilarious lack of imagination, as if tacitly acknowledging the boredom the event would only compound) "Teen Night," have brought this particular indulgence upon us.
Ah, to be young and stupid again in suburban New Jersey!!
*******
Teen Night
Not knowing what else to do,
we would hang around delinquently
along the back wall of the gym,
trying to out-cuss each other
over the squawk of Billy Squier or Def Leppard
from the pathetic little boom-box
on the stage across the room.
I might have been the one
getting stupid on No Frills grape soda,
working the sleeveless OP shirt
and the cut-off jean shorts,
thinking if I slouched at just the right angle
I might just pass for a blonde Ralph Macchio.
Meanwhile, the irony of the red-faced,
vein-popping gym teacher (Mr. Silence)
bellowing at us for no apparent reason -
“Either get your drinks, or GET OUT!!” -
wasn’t lost even on our blunt, hormone-addled brains.
And the girls? Needless to say
I can’t recall where they mingled
at these aimless gatherings,
but my memory’s brutally clear on this:
they weren’t anywhere near us.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
RAL 8.0
My father at eighty years old.
While I am in this world, there will only be one time – a handful of months – when I will be forty years old; my twin brother will also be forty; and our father, Richard Arlington Lovell, eighty. It’s coming up soon. If I contemplate this at any length, I may conclude that the same figure who loomed in my own and in my brother’s early life, the one who gave us our very maleness, really is no more than the sum of our two parts. If only I had understood this as a boy! For he seemed much larger at the time.
A few weeks ago, while at a lake house with a couple of old friends of mine, both men told me that when we were youngsters, they “feared” my father. Before even thinking about it, I blurted, “So did I.” Probably all boys are scared of their father at one time or another. But, growing up, we knew ours was different. For one thing, he was older – forty when I was born. Also, he was highly educated, a scientist; by the time I came into being, he had a Ph.D. in Neurochemistry, and post-graduate degrees and fellowships on his curriculum vitae.
And thanks to my brother and I, he went from having two children to feed to four, literally overnight. Later he would sire two more. No wonder he was feared in his time: he was a serious thinker, a mental giant; but he was also virile, something we could sense instinctively if not fully comprehend. He could giveth life – today there are six adults who can stand witness – but he could also explain it, at least scientifically, which to us was, well, inconceivable.
Today this man turns eighty. But getting here hasn’t been easy. He was born almost exactly nine months after the stock market crashed in 1929 to usher in the Great Depression, a fact that I’ve always found both funny and a little weird at the same time. He grew up in a tiny town in western Indiana, barricaded in by corn and soy plants, under circumstances that brushed up against poverty. His father was charismatic, earnest, ultimately troubled; his mother was gracious, resilient, and loving. It was the latter’s long example of self-sacrifice and spiritual fortitude that for him would resonate like the sustained closing chord of a Mozart concerto.
As a young man coming of age in the 1950s, my father cared a lot about facts. He cared about science, chemicals, statistics, molecules. He cared about books. But he also cared about mankind and his predicament; he cared deeply about God. So much so that he made a long, vigorous attempt to devote his adult life to His service as a Jesuit priest. For a dozen years he lived the minimalist lifestyle of a novice while enduring what for me is still the most punishing educational regimen I have ever heard of – everything from biochemistry to history to philosophy to Scripture. At Saint Louis University in the late 1950s, while studying moral theology, he took copious notes during lectures in miniscule, precise penmanship – all in Latin. Just looking at them gives one vertigo.
In the early 60s, he arrived at the great crossroads of his lifetime. After so much time, effort, and sacrifice, he found himself torn between what could seem like two poles: the pursuit of scientific knowledge in the service of reason, or the pursuit of holiness in the service of God. He had hoped as a Jesuit he would be able to blaze a trail down which his journeyman’s intellect could travel, all the way to Heaven perhaps, while satisfying his hunger to understand both sides. But as Christ himself once said about money, “No man can serve two masters.” The phrase seems applicable here as well. He left the Jesuit order in 1964, a man of 33, feeling shackled by his own indecision, and possibly by what he may have perceived as failure.
Yet his existential angst is responsible for my existence, so to me it was nothing of the kind. God had another summons for Richard Lovell. He wanted the man who never got to be called Father Lovell to instead be called a father.
By 1965, everything had changed again. He was married to my mother, and in the early winter of 1968 she brought into the world the first of his six children. For the next quarter century he labored in the world of science, first as a research chemist, then in pharmaceutical drug development, in order to earn enough money to raise a large family in Reagan’s America. He was older, slightly more jaded, and far more intellectual than most of the other fathers I knew as a kid in suburban New Jersey. His professional career was continually hobbled by business politics and bureaucracy; it never fulfilled him. But he kept at it, and between his and my mother’s unflagging stamina in various jobs and in the household, they kept all six of us fed, clothed, educated, and happy. We attended Mass every Sunday; we prayed and ate together as a family. There was no violence, abuse, or other traumatic occasion to my childhood, and I bless my parents for that.
Although I believe his virtues as a father are many, and can’t all be examined here, there are two memories I have of my father’s paternal method that I have frequently returned to, especially as a father myself since 2003. For me they have been enough to overshadow his aloofness, his occasional bouts of explosive anger or impatience, his strenuous applications of discipline born out of a hardscrabble childhood (at one point he kept a yardstick over a doorway called “The Stick” that he would rap our behinds with if we really stepped out of line). They don’t necessarily stand up as examples of innovative parenting or extraordinary acts of personal sacrifice. But they have stayed with me throughout my entire life. I recall them again and again when I contemplate the essence of my childhood and my relationship with this unique figure of manhood, forty years my senior.
The first of these was his habit, when my siblings and I were small, of rising early on a Saturday or Sunday morning, slowly ascending the stairs to where we all lay, and choosing one of four bedrooms to quietly slip inside. I remember so many days lying there, faking my slumber, wondering if he would choose me. If it was your day, he would gingerly approach your bed, usually side-stepping someone else, and shake your shoulder gently. When you opened your eyes he would say, “Do you want to go to the store with me?” It was usually some sort of simple Saturday errand – a hardware store, a library, an oil change – but it meant that you would spend a few hours together, and it almost always meant lunch. He did this, week in and week out, for many years. In such a way he spent individual hours with each of his children, something I try to emulate today.
The second is the way he helped all six of us deliver The Newark Star-Ledger newspaper. He used to boast a lot about how he had three paper routes as a kid – particularly when we bitched about the one we had. Having a paper route became the only job ever held, at one time or another, by all six of us siblings. The job meant you had to get up much earlier than most kids, seven days a week, go out to your driveway in any weather, retrieve the bundles of paper your “manager” would deposit there at an even earlier hour, take them out of their bindings, and carry them around to the customers. My dad helped with this job every single day of the week for years and years.
He would rise, always earlier than everyone else, and go bring the newspapers in from the driveway himself. He’d prepare them for us to deliver while we were still trying to wake up and get dressed. On Sundays, because the newspapers were so thick, there was an entirely different process in which he would help us load them into the back of our family station wagon and drive them around while we grabbed them, one by one, from the back of the car to distribute. This little ritual resonated so memorably for me that I once wrote a short story about it called “The Races”, which remains a personal favorite. The point is, he was there, every day, rain or shine or snow.
It was early one morning in 1988 that Dad, while hauling papers on the driveway, suffered the first of two minor heart attacks he has survived. Since then he has had numerous physical struggles, most acutely in the last decade, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. In 2009 he had a difficult year, with numerous issues related to the disease and to medication; there was more than one time when our whole family worried for his long-term well-being. Yet in 2010 he has rallied. Today he is still sharp and engaged with the world and his family. There are times of struggle, as one can only expect from a man in his season of life; yet recently, one doctor commented on his remarkable resiliency, for a man entering his ninth decade, and suffering from a chronic condition like Parkinson’s.
I came across a line once in a novel by Denis Johnson, a writer I greatly admire, that for me rang out like a bell with mystery and truth. That doesn’t mean I understood it. I can relate to it on a level I cannot quite articulate, and maybe no man could. But I also like to imagine that my father, in his twilight – who has outlived his own father by almost half a century now – can find purchase in these words, and perhaps will dig into them up to his elbows in his own heart’s solitude:
A child stands like a priest under his father’s sky.
I thank God for my own father’s stamina and strength. He deserves credit for caring for himself in such a way as to live eighty years and still have more to contribute, both to this world and to the lives of those who love him. I congratulate him on his eighty years. I want him to live forever.
(c) 2010 by Jude Joseph Lovell.
While I am in this world, there will only be one time – a handful of months – when I will be forty years old; my twin brother will also be forty; and our father, Richard Arlington Lovell, eighty. It’s coming up soon. If I contemplate this at any length, I may conclude that the same figure who loomed in my own and in my brother’s early life, the one who gave us our very maleness, really is no more than the sum of our two parts. If only I had understood this as a boy! For he seemed much larger at the time.
A few weeks ago, while at a lake house with a couple of old friends of mine, both men told me that when we were youngsters, they “feared” my father. Before even thinking about it, I blurted, “So did I.” Probably all boys are scared of their father at one time or another. But, growing up, we knew ours was different. For one thing, he was older – forty when I was born. Also, he was highly educated, a scientist; by the time I came into being, he had a Ph.D. in Neurochemistry, and post-graduate degrees and fellowships on his curriculum vitae.
And thanks to my brother and I, he went from having two children to feed to four, literally overnight. Later he would sire two more. No wonder he was feared in his time: he was a serious thinker, a mental giant; but he was also virile, something we could sense instinctively if not fully comprehend. He could giveth life – today there are six adults who can stand witness – but he could also explain it, at least scientifically, which to us was, well, inconceivable.
Today this man turns eighty. But getting here hasn’t been easy. He was born almost exactly nine months after the stock market crashed in 1929 to usher in the Great Depression, a fact that I’ve always found both funny and a little weird at the same time. He grew up in a tiny town in western Indiana, barricaded in by corn and soy plants, under circumstances that brushed up against poverty. His father was charismatic, earnest, ultimately troubled; his mother was gracious, resilient, and loving. It was the latter’s long example of self-sacrifice and spiritual fortitude that for him would resonate like the sustained closing chord of a Mozart concerto.
As a young man coming of age in the 1950s, my father cared a lot about facts. He cared about science, chemicals, statistics, molecules. He cared about books. But he also cared about mankind and his predicament; he cared deeply about God. So much so that he made a long, vigorous attempt to devote his adult life to His service as a Jesuit priest. For a dozen years he lived the minimalist lifestyle of a novice while enduring what for me is still the most punishing educational regimen I have ever heard of – everything from biochemistry to history to philosophy to Scripture. At Saint Louis University in the late 1950s, while studying moral theology, he took copious notes during lectures in miniscule, precise penmanship – all in Latin. Just looking at them gives one vertigo.
In the early 60s, he arrived at the great crossroads of his lifetime. After so much time, effort, and sacrifice, he found himself torn between what could seem like two poles: the pursuit of scientific knowledge in the service of reason, or the pursuit of holiness in the service of God. He had hoped as a Jesuit he would be able to blaze a trail down which his journeyman’s intellect could travel, all the way to Heaven perhaps, while satisfying his hunger to understand both sides. But as Christ himself once said about money, “No man can serve two masters.” The phrase seems applicable here as well. He left the Jesuit order in 1964, a man of 33, feeling shackled by his own indecision, and possibly by what he may have perceived as failure.
Yet his existential angst is responsible for my existence, so to me it was nothing of the kind. God had another summons for Richard Lovell. He wanted the man who never got to be called Father Lovell to instead be called a father.
By 1965, everything had changed again. He was married to my mother, and in the early winter of 1968 she brought into the world the first of his six children. For the next quarter century he labored in the world of science, first as a research chemist, then in pharmaceutical drug development, in order to earn enough money to raise a large family in Reagan’s America. He was older, slightly more jaded, and far more intellectual than most of the other fathers I knew as a kid in suburban New Jersey. His professional career was continually hobbled by business politics and bureaucracy; it never fulfilled him. But he kept at it, and between his and my mother’s unflagging stamina in various jobs and in the household, they kept all six of us fed, clothed, educated, and happy. We attended Mass every Sunday; we prayed and ate together as a family. There was no violence, abuse, or other traumatic occasion to my childhood, and I bless my parents for that.
Although I believe his virtues as a father are many, and can’t all be examined here, there are two memories I have of my father’s paternal method that I have frequently returned to, especially as a father myself since 2003. For me they have been enough to overshadow his aloofness, his occasional bouts of explosive anger or impatience, his strenuous applications of discipline born out of a hardscrabble childhood (at one point he kept a yardstick over a doorway called “The Stick” that he would rap our behinds with if we really stepped out of line). They don’t necessarily stand up as examples of innovative parenting or extraordinary acts of personal sacrifice. But they have stayed with me throughout my entire life. I recall them again and again when I contemplate the essence of my childhood and my relationship with this unique figure of manhood, forty years my senior.
The first of these was his habit, when my siblings and I were small, of rising early on a Saturday or Sunday morning, slowly ascending the stairs to where we all lay, and choosing one of four bedrooms to quietly slip inside. I remember so many days lying there, faking my slumber, wondering if he would choose me. If it was your day, he would gingerly approach your bed, usually side-stepping someone else, and shake your shoulder gently. When you opened your eyes he would say, “Do you want to go to the store with me?” It was usually some sort of simple Saturday errand – a hardware store, a library, an oil change – but it meant that you would spend a few hours together, and it almost always meant lunch. He did this, week in and week out, for many years. In such a way he spent individual hours with each of his children, something I try to emulate today.
The second is the way he helped all six of us deliver The Newark Star-Ledger newspaper. He used to boast a lot about how he had three paper routes as a kid – particularly when we bitched about the one we had. Having a paper route became the only job ever held, at one time or another, by all six of us siblings. The job meant you had to get up much earlier than most kids, seven days a week, go out to your driveway in any weather, retrieve the bundles of paper your “manager” would deposit there at an even earlier hour, take them out of their bindings, and carry them around to the customers. My dad helped with this job every single day of the week for years and years.
He would rise, always earlier than everyone else, and go bring the newspapers in from the driveway himself. He’d prepare them for us to deliver while we were still trying to wake up and get dressed. On Sundays, because the newspapers were so thick, there was an entirely different process in which he would help us load them into the back of our family station wagon and drive them around while we grabbed them, one by one, from the back of the car to distribute. This little ritual resonated so memorably for me that I once wrote a short story about it called “The Races”, which remains a personal favorite. The point is, he was there, every day, rain or shine or snow.
It was early one morning in 1988 that Dad, while hauling papers on the driveway, suffered the first of two minor heart attacks he has survived. Since then he has had numerous physical struggles, most acutely in the last decade, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. In 2009 he had a difficult year, with numerous issues related to the disease and to medication; there was more than one time when our whole family worried for his long-term well-being. Yet in 2010 he has rallied. Today he is still sharp and engaged with the world and his family. There are times of struggle, as one can only expect from a man in his season of life; yet recently, one doctor commented on his remarkable resiliency, for a man entering his ninth decade, and suffering from a chronic condition like Parkinson’s.
I came across a line once in a novel by Denis Johnson, a writer I greatly admire, that for me rang out like a bell with mystery and truth. That doesn’t mean I understood it. I can relate to it on a level I cannot quite articulate, and maybe no man could. But I also like to imagine that my father, in his twilight – who has outlived his own father by almost half a century now – can find purchase in these words, and perhaps will dig into them up to his elbows in his own heart’s solitude:
A child stands like a priest under his father’s sky.
I thank God for my own father’s stamina and strength. He deserves credit for caring for himself in such a way as to live eighty years and still have more to contribute, both to this world and to the lives of those who love him. I congratulate him on his eighty years. I want him to live forever.
(c) 2010 by Jude Joseph Lovell.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Hand in the Air
for my daughter, CEL, born 7/22/2003
Were you born with the answers
To the questions we all ask?
Holding up your hand like you were
In your first grade class
Were you covering your mouth
To hide your grin?
Or were you waving at the world
As you came in?
Pretty little girl with the fuzzy brown hair
Came into the world with your hand in the air
The little girl lies sleeping
With one hand above her head
While a gathering of angels
Assembles 'round her bed
She's got a millions sights to see
And things to do
Teaching me the things
I never knew
Pretty little girl with the fuzzy light hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
Will you smile like your mother
So that everyone can tell
You're spreading love to others like
Your mother does so well?
When I look at you
I do not have to ask
I know my purpose in this life
I know my task
Pretty little girl with your curly light hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
Will I die with the answer
To the question that I've had?
Wondering if I was good -
Enough to be your Dad
Will you remember that I loved you
In every way?
And hear my voice inside your heart
Down all the days?
Pretty little girl with your fuzzy brown hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
My pretty little girl, when I am not there
Keep your father in your heart
And your hand in the air....
(c) Jude Joseph Lovell, 2003
Were you born with the answers
To the questions we all ask?
Holding up your hand like you were
In your first grade class
Were you covering your mouth
To hide your grin?
Or were you waving at the world
As you came in?
Pretty little girl with the fuzzy brown hair
Came into the world with your hand in the air
The little girl lies sleeping
With one hand above her head
While a gathering of angels
Assembles 'round her bed
She's got a millions sights to see
And things to do
Teaching me the things
I never knew
Pretty little girl with the fuzzy light hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
Will you smile like your mother
So that everyone can tell
You're spreading love to others like
Your mother does so well?
When I look at you
I do not have to ask
I know my purpose in this life
I know my task
Pretty little girl with your curly light hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
Will I die with the answer
To the question that I've had?
Wondering if I was good -
Enough to be your Dad
Will you remember that I loved you
In every way?
And hear my voice inside your heart
Down all the days?
Pretty little girl with your fuzzy brown hair
You came into the world with your hand in the air
My pretty little girl, when I am not there
Keep your father in your heart
And your hand in the air....
(c) Jude Joseph Lovell, 2003
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
In awe of the gift...
Behold, readers, I give you a great mystery... a miracle of sorts, really. I stand in awe of the gift that so very few people have, to take ordinary everyday experience and somehow filter it through their own tools of imagination, language and cadence to create something... transcendent, sublime. Very concrete and specific in its details, but universal in its meanings and resonances.
Seamus Heaney is, without question, one of those rare masters. Look what he does here with a simple childhood memory. I heard him read this brief poem in an audio interview recently, and was just amazed by it... how he could take something so simple and transform it into something so beautiful and profound. He explained before reading it that his childhood home (in County Derry, Northern Ireland) was very near to a train track which were lined with telegraph wires. As kids they would climb up the grassy hills and look at the wires following down the tracks, towards the horizon. They thought the messages moving through the lines were carried within the raindrops they'd see attached to those wires. That is all you need to know.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesmally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
That ending literally gave me goosebumps when I heard it - especially since it evokes, as anyone raised in a Catholic or Christian household will recognize, thoughts of the Kingdom that lies on the other side of that "eye" according to some very famous words from a very famous man... and with that one little hint, Heaney opens up a portal to another plane. He takes us to "the spirit level." To be able to do that with mere words is simply a marvel. I have no idea how it works, but when I hear something like that and feel its impact in the heart like some kind of pointed shaft, I'm just grateful to know that it does.
Seamus Heaney is, without question, one of those rare masters. Look what he does here with a simple childhood memory. I heard him read this brief poem in an audio interview recently, and was just amazed by it... how he could take something so simple and transform it into something so beautiful and profound. He explained before reading it that his childhood home (in County Derry, Northern Ireland) was very near to a train track which were lined with telegraph wires. As kids they would climb up the grassy hills and look at the wires following down the tracks, towards the horizon. They thought the messages moving through the lines were carried within the raindrops they'd see attached to those wires. That is all you need to know.
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesmally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
That ending literally gave me goosebumps when I heard it - especially since it evokes, as anyone raised in a Catholic or Christian household will recognize, thoughts of the Kingdom that lies on the other side of that "eye" according to some very famous words from a very famous man... and with that one little hint, Heaney opens up a portal to another plane. He takes us to "the spirit level." To be able to do that with mere words is simply a marvel. I have no idea how it works, but when I hear something like that and feel its impact in the heart like some kind of pointed shaft, I'm just grateful to know that it does.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Reflections on Typee
The Melville, Pennsylvania Project - Book X
Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, was published in 1846 to modest acclaim and fairly robust sales, for an adventure yarn by an unknown literary commodity. It was based on real-life experiences Melville acquired four years earlier, during his travels in the South Pacific seas. He took the challenges he encountered and overcame, first as a young sailor, then, later, as a deserter living in the wild among Polynesian natives, and he ficitionalized them in such a way as to compel, educate, shock, and entertain readers.
It if sounds as though the novel that landed Melville on the literary map was ready-made – that all he had to do was simply write down what he witnessed and presto! a best-seller – I can tell you even from my own personal experience that this is an illusion. Just because Typee flows smoothly and makes a rollicking entertainment doesn’t mean it was easy. I tried to pull off the same thing with my own early experiences as a soldier – not once, but twice. I first wrote a complete nonfiction account called Mech Soldier, about my first year as a mechanized infantry platoon leader; years later, as my graduate school thesis, I’m ashamed to admit, I worked for over a year on a foundering “novel” based on the same material. Both of these writings today are consigned to the loamy literary graveyard known as my basement, where they have earned their plots.
The point: it ain’t as easy as it appears. Melville’s novel, though not the mature and penetrating work his reputation rests on today, is an impressive, remarkably entertaining book. It has exotic backdrops, adventurous journeys, chases, tribal rituals, drug use (in the form of smoking strange weeds), humor, violence, inferences of sex (evidently edited down from earlier drafts, for fear of scandal), and, if all that’s not wild enough for you, an appetizing dollop of cannibalism. These disparate elements are blended together skillfully by the young Melville, who was obviously uncovering a gift for narrative structure, and knew how to present the material in digestible chapters that made readers hunger for more. He was not very advanced in years (he was about 25 when he wrote the novel), nor was he very long in the tooth in terms of literary experience. Prior to publishing this book, he had only written a few pieces for a newspaper called the Democratic Press in upstate New York, the most notable of which were two parts of a longer story called “Fragments from a Writing Desk” – a dark tale that testifies most convincingly to the long influence of Edgar Allan Poe.
So how did Melville bring off Typee? He did it the only way writers can: he recognized his talent and pushed it to its limits. In other words: hard work. A segment of a great volume I read earlier this year called Tales, Poems and Other Writings examines in detail an earlier version of Typee’s 14th chapter, the manuscript of which has fortunately been preserved. It clearly reveals the revisions and re-writing Melville put in to just this one section, toning down certain places, embellishing others, sometimes simply going through three or four individual words before settling on the correct choice. The result is impressive. Typee rolls right along, as though Melville himself were telling you the tale around a hearth – which, by all biographical accounts, was more or less the original method of delivery.
The story itself is about a young sailor on a whaling vessel (what else?) in the South Pacific who decides that the brutal conditions aboard the ship are not for him, and determines to make an escape. According to critic Andrew Delbanco, “something like two-thirds” of all whaling crew members deserted “at one stop-over or another”. At the last moment, the sailor enlists a comrade who is of a similar mind, by the name of Toby. Together they successfully desert when the ship comes to port on an exotic island near the Marquesas, populated by two native tribes – the Happar and the Typee. Their information, acquired from other sailors, is that the former of these tribes is receptive and kind to visitors, whereas the Typee are vicious and belligerent cannibals. So the two adventurous men set out to cross the untamed island, dangerously straddling the line between getting caught and brought back by their own crew to face justice, or running smack into the Typee people. What they hope they will find first, of course, is a Happar settlement.
Melville writes of their initial escape and treacherous journey across the island convincingly. It’s no leisurely stroll through sparkling waterfalls and lush valleys:
The most annoying hindrance we encountered was from a multitude of crooked boughs, which, shooting out and almost horizontally from the side of the chasm, twisted themselves together in fantastic masses almost to the surface of the stream, affording us no passage except under the low arches which they formed. Under these we were obliged to crawl on our hands and feet, sliding along the oozy surface of the rocks, or slipping into the deep pools, and with scarce light enough to guide us. Occasionally we would strike our heads against some projecting hub of a tree; and while imprudently engaged in rubbing the injured part, would fall sprawling amongst filthy fragments, cutting and bruising ourselves, whilst the unpitying waters flower over our prostrate bodies.
I quote the above passage at such length because I appreciated the sheer earthiness of the writing, and I think it is illustrative of one of the most impressive features of Typee. It is written vividly enough to make you feel as though you are right there with the two fugitives, and honestly enough so that you don’t get the sense that they traveled with ease over totally unknown, rugged land. I think audiences responded to Typee for its particularly strong delivery of a “you are there” experience for a readership that would, in the greatest likelihood, never experience anything of the kind.
The two sailors – “Tommo”, as the protagonist comes to be known, and Toby, eventually run into a pair of ragged native children, reminiscent of Dickens – one boy and one girl, who lead them tentatively into the settlement of their tribe. But which tribe is it? Melville creates tension by presenting the village and its inhabitants from the perspective of the visitors, who have no idea if they’ve reached paradise, or a sadistic dinner party in which they themselves are the main course. Quickly they learn the truth, which is that they have landed among the Typees. But luckily for Tommo and Toby, what they have told by others about the nature of the tribe does not correspond to their experiences among the people.
Another of the great strengths of Typee is its debunking of expectations and stereoptypes, and its compassionate, sometimes philosophical reflections on the differences and the similarities between “civilized” 19th century society and communities built and perpetuated by “savages”. Nothing is quite as it would seem within the world of the Typee, Tommo learns. He and Toby are treated humanely, even to the point of being pampered with large meals, entertainments, rudimentary medical treatments, even luxuries like tobacco and massages. Tommo is continually impressed with the natives’ treatment of not only himself and Toby, but of one another:
Entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement, “Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence.” I will frankly declare, that after passing a few weeks in this valley … I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained.
Toby and Tommo, against expectations, are taken in and treated as venerated guests. Tommo is even allowed a kind of valet or personal assistant, by the name of Kory-Kory, who attends to him every waking moment. But eventually this begins to smother Tommo; he can’t help but wonder why the fawning and preening. It dawns on him that he is never left alone at any moment. His other problem is that he sustained an injury to one leg on the trek to the village that appears to be festering. When news reaches them that a ship from the “advanced” world has arrived on one of the coasts, the natives allow Toby to set out for it in the hopes of finding medical assistance for Tommo. Toby swears he will return, but is not heard from again, leaving Tommo to wonder if he was betrayed, or if Toby suffered some kind of unspeakable misfortune along the way.
While his leg eventually heals, Tommo grows more accustomed to the natives’ way of life, even exploring a semi-romantic relationship with a beautiful island woman named Fayaway. But it soon becomes crystal clear: the native don’t intend to let him leave. Have the Typee grown too attached to him? Do they want their “secrets” preserved? Or is it more sinister than that? One day Tommo strolls into a hut where he is clearly not expected, and sees some of the women and the men hastily wrapping up packages that appear to contain human heads. Understandably, from this point forward, Tommo wants out. Has he been pampered all along for a specific, horrific reason? Not particularly wanting to find out, he begins to actively seek a means of escape. This provides the set-up for the book’s gripping final quarter.
There are many reasons why Typee works, and has endured as one of Melville’s most venerated books, if any of his books outside of Moby-Dick are venerated. It frightened, provoked, even titillated readers. But Typee also asks larger questions about the nature of mankind and its relationship to both the natural world and to one another. Who is “civilized”? Who is a “savage”? Has the western way of life acquired a greater degree of moral solvency than others? Melville himself, in his novelistic inquiry, seems to uncover a convincing case in favor of the island society over our own:
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debt in honor of Typee, no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description … no beggars, no debtors’ prisons, no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum it up all in one word – no Money. The “root of all evil” was not to be found in the valley.
There’s an indispensible anthology of short fiction out there called You’ve Got To Read This, edited by two writers I admire greatly, Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen. The angle of this collection is that contemporary writers were asked to introduce short works of fiction that “held them in awe”. In this book, there is a wonderful piece by the novelist Mary Gordon in which she introduces James Joyce’s justifiably classic short story “The Dead”. Gordon closes her narrative hilariously with these lines, which I now borrow to conclude my own thoughts about Herman Melville’s impressive debut novel:
And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.
Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, was published in 1846 to modest acclaim and fairly robust sales, for an adventure yarn by an unknown literary commodity. It was based on real-life experiences Melville acquired four years earlier, during his travels in the South Pacific seas. He took the challenges he encountered and overcame, first as a young sailor, then, later, as a deserter living in the wild among Polynesian natives, and he ficitionalized them in such a way as to compel, educate, shock, and entertain readers.
It if sounds as though the novel that landed Melville on the literary map was ready-made – that all he had to do was simply write down what he witnessed and presto! a best-seller – I can tell you even from my own personal experience that this is an illusion. Just because Typee flows smoothly and makes a rollicking entertainment doesn’t mean it was easy. I tried to pull off the same thing with my own early experiences as a soldier – not once, but twice. I first wrote a complete nonfiction account called Mech Soldier, about my first year as a mechanized infantry platoon leader; years later, as my graduate school thesis, I’m ashamed to admit, I worked for over a year on a foundering “novel” based on the same material. Both of these writings today are consigned to the loamy literary graveyard known as my basement, where they have earned their plots.
The point: it ain’t as easy as it appears. Melville’s novel, though not the mature and penetrating work his reputation rests on today, is an impressive, remarkably entertaining book. It has exotic backdrops, adventurous journeys, chases, tribal rituals, drug use (in the form of smoking strange weeds), humor, violence, inferences of sex (evidently edited down from earlier drafts, for fear of scandal), and, if all that’s not wild enough for you, an appetizing dollop of cannibalism. These disparate elements are blended together skillfully by the young Melville, who was obviously uncovering a gift for narrative structure, and knew how to present the material in digestible chapters that made readers hunger for more. He was not very advanced in years (he was about 25 when he wrote the novel), nor was he very long in the tooth in terms of literary experience. Prior to publishing this book, he had only written a few pieces for a newspaper called the Democratic Press in upstate New York, the most notable of which were two parts of a longer story called “Fragments from a Writing Desk” – a dark tale that testifies most convincingly to the long influence of Edgar Allan Poe.
So how did Melville bring off Typee? He did it the only way writers can: he recognized his talent and pushed it to its limits. In other words: hard work. A segment of a great volume I read earlier this year called Tales, Poems and Other Writings examines in detail an earlier version of Typee’s 14th chapter, the manuscript of which has fortunately been preserved. It clearly reveals the revisions and re-writing Melville put in to just this one section, toning down certain places, embellishing others, sometimes simply going through three or four individual words before settling on the correct choice. The result is impressive. Typee rolls right along, as though Melville himself were telling you the tale around a hearth – which, by all biographical accounts, was more or less the original method of delivery.
The story itself is about a young sailor on a whaling vessel (what else?) in the South Pacific who decides that the brutal conditions aboard the ship are not for him, and determines to make an escape. According to critic Andrew Delbanco, “something like two-thirds” of all whaling crew members deserted “at one stop-over or another”. At the last moment, the sailor enlists a comrade who is of a similar mind, by the name of Toby. Together they successfully desert when the ship comes to port on an exotic island near the Marquesas, populated by two native tribes – the Happar and the Typee. Their information, acquired from other sailors, is that the former of these tribes is receptive and kind to visitors, whereas the Typee are vicious and belligerent cannibals. So the two adventurous men set out to cross the untamed island, dangerously straddling the line between getting caught and brought back by their own crew to face justice, or running smack into the Typee people. What they hope they will find first, of course, is a Happar settlement.
Melville writes of their initial escape and treacherous journey across the island convincingly. It’s no leisurely stroll through sparkling waterfalls and lush valleys:
The most annoying hindrance we encountered was from a multitude of crooked boughs, which, shooting out and almost horizontally from the side of the chasm, twisted themselves together in fantastic masses almost to the surface of the stream, affording us no passage except under the low arches which they formed. Under these we were obliged to crawl on our hands and feet, sliding along the oozy surface of the rocks, or slipping into the deep pools, and with scarce light enough to guide us. Occasionally we would strike our heads against some projecting hub of a tree; and while imprudently engaged in rubbing the injured part, would fall sprawling amongst filthy fragments, cutting and bruising ourselves, whilst the unpitying waters flower over our prostrate bodies.
I quote the above passage at such length because I appreciated the sheer earthiness of the writing, and I think it is illustrative of one of the most impressive features of Typee. It is written vividly enough to make you feel as though you are right there with the two fugitives, and honestly enough so that you don’t get the sense that they traveled with ease over totally unknown, rugged land. I think audiences responded to Typee for its particularly strong delivery of a “you are there” experience for a readership that would, in the greatest likelihood, never experience anything of the kind.
The two sailors – “Tommo”, as the protagonist comes to be known, and Toby, eventually run into a pair of ragged native children, reminiscent of Dickens – one boy and one girl, who lead them tentatively into the settlement of their tribe. But which tribe is it? Melville creates tension by presenting the village and its inhabitants from the perspective of the visitors, who have no idea if they’ve reached paradise, or a sadistic dinner party in which they themselves are the main course. Quickly they learn the truth, which is that they have landed among the Typees. But luckily for Tommo and Toby, what they have told by others about the nature of the tribe does not correspond to their experiences among the people.
Another of the great strengths of Typee is its debunking of expectations and stereoptypes, and its compassionate, sometimes philosophical reflections on the differences and the similarities between “civilized” 19th century society and communities built and perpetuated by “savages”. Nothing is quite as it would seem within the world of the Typee, Tommo learns. He and Toby are treated humanely, even to the point of being pampered with large meals, entertainments, rudimentary medical treatments, even luxuries like tobacco and massages. Tommo is continually impressed with the natives’ treatment of not only himself and Toby, but of one another:
Entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement, “Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence.” I will frankly declare, that after passing a few weeks in this valley … I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained.
Toby and Tommo, against expectations, are taken in and treated as venerated guests. Tommo is even allowed a kind of valet or personal assistant, by the name of Kory-Kory, who attends to him every waking moment. But eventually this begins to smother Tommo; he can’t help but wonder why the fawning and preening. It dawns on him that he is never left alone at any moment. His other problem is that he sustained an injury to one leg on the trek to the village that appears to be festering. When news reaches them that a ship from the “advanced” world has arrived on one of the coasts, the natives allow Toby to set out for it in the hopes of finding medical assistance for Tommo. Toby swears he will return, but is not heard from again, leaving Tommo to wonder if he was betrayed, or if Toby suffered some kind of unspeakable misfortune along the way.
While his leg eventually heals, Tommo grows more accustomed to the natives’ way of life, even exploring a semi-romantic relationship with a beautiful island woman named Fayaway. But it soon becomes crystal clear: the native don’t intend to let him leave. Have the Typee grown too attached to him? Do they want their “secrets” preserved? Or is it more sinister than that? One day Tommo strolls into a hut where he is clearly not expected, and sees some of the women and the men hastily wrapping up packages that appear to contain human heads. Understandably, from this point forward, Tommo wants out. Has he been pampered all along for a specific, horrific reason? Not particularly wanting to find out, he begins to actively seek a means of escape. This provides the set-up for the book’s gripping final quarter.
There are many reasons why Typee works, and has endured as one of Melville’s most venerated books, if any of his books outside of Moby-Dick are venerated. It frightened, provoked, even titillated readers. But Typee also asks larger questions about the nature of mankind and its relationship to both the natural world and to one another. Who is “civilized”? Who is a “savage”? Has the western way of life acquired a greater degree of moral solvency than others? Melville himself, in his novelistic inquiry, seems to uncover a convincing case in favor of the island society over our own:
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debt in honor of Typee, no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description … no beggars, no debtors’ prisons, no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum it up all in one word – no Money. The “root of all evil” was not to be found in the valley.
There’s an indispensible anthology of short fiction out there called You’ve Got To Read This, edited by two writers I admire greatly, Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen. The angle of this collection is that contemporary writers were asked to introduce short works of fiction that “held them in awe”. In this book, there is a wonderful piece by the novelist Mary Gordon in which she introduces James Joyce’s justifiably classic short story “The Dead”. Gordon closes her narrative hilariously with these lines, which I now borrow to conclude my own thoughts about Herman Melville’s impressive debut novel:
And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Reflections on Omoo
The Melville, Pennsylvania Project, Book IX
Anyone with a working man’s knowledge of Herman Melville’s life and his work knows that his first novel, Typee, was his most successful, and that it was based heavily on his experiences in French Polynesia after deserting from a whaling vessel. There in the South Pacific, on the island of Nuku Hiva, Melville spent a period of one month living in the wilds with a companion, a fellow deserter, among the indigenous population. The bulk of his first novel was a somewhat fictionalized rendition of this gritty and no doubt challenging real-life adventure.
The book appeared in 1846 and thrilled audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, so Melville was encouraged by his publishers to embark almost immediately on a sequel. Omoo, released in 1847, is that second installment, and so there is a natural tendency to group the two novels together. But the one thing I was surprised about after finishing Omoo, which means “rover” in the Tahitian tongue, was the differences between the two books. I am re-reading Typee now to help further distinguish the two, but I could tell as I was reading Omoo that from a tonal point of view, and in terms of pacing, it is a different experience altogether from its predecessor. And, it almost has to be said, a plodding, less accomplished novel.
Indeed, I do think the problem is one of tone or general feel of the second book. The atmosphere in Omoo is far more relaxed than the conditions Melville worked to establish in Typee. Omoo contains by far the least memorable or even likable of any of the ships' crews from Melville’s other novels. That includes not only Moby-Dick’s Pequod under Captain Ahab, but also the Neversink under the watch of Captain Claret in the novel White Jacket, as well as the rowdy crew of the villainous Captain Riga of the Highlander in Redburn.
The crew of the whaling vessel known as the Julia in Omoo, upon which the protagonist has just found passage as the novel opens, is by contrast a lazy, inharmonious, and incompetent bunch, under the ineffective watch of a sickly and weak captain who makes my own stint as an Infantry Platoon Leader in the U.S. Army circa 1993-1995 seem like the work of John Wayne. And that’s really saying a mouthful.
The novel opens, as I mentioned, with the same protagonist from Typee, after escaping from his “captors” in the Typee Valley, securing a place on the Julia. When he gets on the ship, however, he immediately notes the discord and overall dysfunction of the crew. In fact, things are so out of control aboard the Julia that the narrator has reason to fear for his own life:
The mere circumstance, therefore, of a ship like ours penetrating into these regions, was sufficient to cause any reflecting mind to feel at least a little uneasy….The many stories I had heard of ships striking at midnight upon unknown rocks, with all sail set, and a slumbering crew, often recurred to me, especially, as from the absence of discipline, the watches in the night were careless in the extreme.
Incidentally, one of the indicators that Omoo is not the same kind of story as the earlier book is the fact that the young narrator goes by the moniker of “Tommo” in Typee, but here is not named at all until late, and then his companion calls him “Paul”. Melville would fashion a whole career out of nameless and/or featureless narrators who happen to bear witness to the events his fictions depict. Everyone knows that Melville’s most famous narrator did, in fact, have a name: “Call me Ishmael.” But you never really learn a whole lot about him, and the same phenomenon takes place in most of Melville’s other novels – going back to Typee and Omoo. Why Melville created story-telling narrators but disliked fleshing them out into real, compelling, well-rounded characters themselves is something I am interested in learning more about.
After what does not seem like much time, the crew of the Julia grows tired of wandering around the South Pacific without a clue of their destination (“Where we were, exactly, no one but the mate seemed to know, nor whither we were going”). So they make a decision, while the captain lies ailing in his quarters, to stage a mutiny in order to bring the ship into port on the island of Tahiti, which according to the narrator, is “magnificent….one mass of shaded tints of green, from beach to mountaintop; endlessly diversified with valleys, ridges, glens, and cascades.” There they send the mate, named Jermin, ashore to seek medical assistance. But Jermin betrays them in the process, bringing back the English consul, Wilson, and a small band of Tahitian “authorities”, who take the “rebellious” crew into custody.
Potential criminals, take note: if you ever want to commit an act that will result in your incarceration, you may want to travel to Tahiti first. For, at least in the 19th century, a Tahitian prison is the easiest place in the world to do hard time, if Herman Melville’s account in Omoo has any basis in reality. A lighter fictional account of time spent in the slammer I have yet to come across anywhere else in literature. I sincerely hope writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn or that Irish guy that wrote Borstal Boy managed to miss this novel entirely. In any event, the “prisoners” loaf around, sometimes in "darbies" (to borrow a Melville-ism), sometimes not; they go on walks through the verdant landscape; they chat amiably with guards and curious natives; they visit with a well-meaning priest who comes to offer rather inept ministry; they gawk at a young English woman, the lovely spouse to an English official, who strolls around the island in search of distractions.
All of this while the men await prosecution, which finally arrives in the form of a ramshackle legal procedure before a panel of local officials meant to intimidate. But the event simply musters up more chaos, with the crew shouting defiance at their captors. Eventually they are released without consequence, and little worse for the wear. In this segment of the book Melville affords himself ample opportunity to wax, sometimes hilariously, on native customs, British sanctimoniousness and imperialism, French Jesuits, and various other subjects.
After getting out of the brig, the men separate and find different means of employment on the island. The narrator and his steady companion, the Julia’s physician who goes by the curious moniker of Doctor Long Ghost, eventually try their hands in some actual work at a potato farm on the island; an endeavor that seems ludicrous, because of the island’s unsuitable conditions for this kind of crop and the abundance of other food, fruits, vegetables, and wild game. Finally, news that an American whaling vessel has landed upon the island reaches the two former mariners, so they once again set out across the island in the hopes of securing a passage on the ship. To do so requires many visits to native islander’s homes, descriptions of dances, naps, a large dinner party, and various encounters with tobacco. Melville describes all of these encounters vividly, but with a strong sense of leisure, for lack of a better term. Nothing in Omoo feels tense or even particularly substantive; it’s hardly more than series of strung-together anecdotes related in an agreeable and colorful manner.
“Paul” and Doctor Long Ghost finally make their way into the court of one Queen Pomaree Vahanee I, with the intention to seek permission to leave on the American ship. Pomaree is the local “monarch”, descended from a line of Tahitian royalty who act out of tradition as figurehead representatives of the English realm. Queen Victoria even condescends to deliver an actual crown to Pomaree as a measure of good faith, which is taken on the island as a badge of her legitimacy. There is an interesting description of the Queen’s inner courtyard, crammed with statues, small devices, machines, and other doodads that arrived as gifts from “civilized” society but have absolutely no value in an island setting. It’s the one visual metaphor in the entire novel that speaks the clearest and the loudest.
Once they are in the Queen’s court, however, Paul and Long Ghost find a way to unintentionally insult the monarch, and are both exiled from her presence. So they go to the ship anyway: only to be informed that there is room for only one. Our humble narrator departs for Cape Horn and then home (or straight into the 1850 novel White Jacket), but only after Long Ghost decides, somewhat inexplicably, that he intends to stay on the island longer. Cue the LOST title card!!
There is plenty to fascinate and ruminate over in the experience of reading Omoo. I also found that the book provided numerous occasions for Melville to deploy his sense of humor, nowhere more so than in this uproarious smack-talk about a French warship:
There is a good deal of French flummery about her – brass plates and other gew-gaws, stuck on all over, like baubles on a handsome woman …. To behold the rich hangings and mirrors, and mahogany within, one is almost prepared to see a bevy of ladies trip back and forth on the balcony for an airing.
Yet for all the enjoyment, the wonderful prose, and the general pleasure of this novel, it is hard to think of it as much more than a light volley among Melville’s other thunderous blasts. It may be because it was written to capitalize on the commercial promise of the first book he wrote, which is only reasonable; or, it could be because it was based more on his imagination than on his actual experiences. But it’s indisputable that Omoo lacks the tension and danger, and indeed, some of the guts, of its riveting and eager predecessor. To use a film analogy, Omoo is not Blair Witch 2 or anything, but it is Halloween 2 – slightly altered setting in the same overall locale, somewhat less gripping, and a good measure less convincing.
Melville would step forward from this novel into Mardi – a long, rambling, far more ambitious work that was summarily rejected by audiences and critics. But it’s notable for its sheer bravery and massive scope. And it helped pave the way for Melville to write the greatest of all his books, the indisputable masterpiece Moby-Dick. In Omoo, one can find only brief instances of the power and the struggle that Melville would go on to harness so completely. Yet the flashes are there, below the surface, glimmering through occasionally, for those who would care enough to look – as in this foreboding, prophetic, and deeply melancholy closing note:
Behold the fate of a sailor! They give him the last toss, and no one asks whose child he was.
Anyone with a working man’s knowledge of Herman Melville’s life and his work knows that his first novel, Typee, was his most successful, and that it was based heavily on his experiences in French Polynesia after deserting from a whaling vessel. There in the South Pacific, on the island of Nuku Hiva, Melville spent a period of one month living in the wilds with a companion, a fellow deserter, among the indigenous population. The bulk of his first novel was a somewhat fictionalized rendition of this gritty and no doubt challenging real-life adventure.
The book appeared in 1846 and thrilled audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, so Melville was encouraged by his publishers to embark almost immediately on a sequel. Omoo, released in 1847, is that second installment, and so there is a natural tendency to group the two novels together. But the one thing I was surprised about after finishing Omoo, which means “rover” in the Tahitian tongue, was the differences between the two books. I am re-reading Typee now to help further distinguish the two, but I could tell as I was reading Omoo that from a tonal point of view, and in terms of pacing, it is a different experience altogether from its predecessor. And, it almost has to be said, a plodding, less accomplished novel.
Indeed, I do think the problem is one of tone or general feel of the second book. The atmosphere in Omoo is far more relaxed than the conditions Melville worked to establish in Typee. Omoo contains by far the least memorable or even likable of any of the ships' crews from Melville’s other novels. That includes not only Moby-Dick’s Pequod under Captain Ahab, but also the Neversink under the watch of Captain Claret in the novel White Jacket, as well as the rowdy crew of the villainous Captain Riga of the Highlander in Redburn.
The crew of the whaling vessel known as the Julia in Omoo, upon which the protagonist has just found passage as the novel opens, is by contrast a lazy, inharmonious, and incompetent bunch, under the ineffective watch of a sickly and weak captain who makes my own stint as an Infantry Platoon Leader in the U.S. Army circa 1993-1995 seem like the work of John Wayne. And that’s really saying a mouthful.
The novel opens, as I mentioned, with the same protagonist from Typee, after escaping from his “captors” in the Typee Valley, securing a place on the Julia. When he gets on the ship, however, he immediately notes the discord and overall dysfunction of the crew. In fact, things are so out of control aboard the Julia that the narrator has reason to fear for his own life:
The mere circumstance, therefore, of a ship like ours penetrating into these regions, was sufficient to cause any reflecting mind to feel at least a little uneasy….The many stories I had heard of ships striking at midnight upon unknown rocks, with all sail set, and a slumbering crew, often recurred to me, especially, as from the absence of discipline, the watches in the night were careless in the extreme.
Incidentally, one of the indicators that Omoo is not the same kind of story as the earlier book is the fact that the young narrator goes by the moniker of “Tommo” in Typee, but here is not named at all until late, and then his companion calls him “Paul”. Melville would fashion a whole career out of nameless and/or featureless narrators who happen to bear witness to the events his fictions depict. Everyone knows that Melville’s most famous narrator did, in fact, have a name: “Call me Ishmael.” But you never really learn a whole lot about him, and the same phenomenon takes place in most of Melville’s other novels – going back to Typee and Omoo. Why Melville created story-telling narrators but disliked fleshing them out into real, compelling, well-rounded characters themselves is something I am interested in learning more about.
After what does not seem like much time, the crew of the Julia grows tired of wandering around the South Pacific without a clue of their destination (“Where we were, exactly, no one but the mate seemed to know, nor whither we were going”). So they make a decision, while the captain lies ailing in his quarters, to stage a mutiny in order to bring the ship into port on the island of Tahiti, which according to the narrator, is “magnificent….one mass of shaded tints of green, from beach to mountaintop; endlessly diversified with valleys, ridges, glens, and cascades.” There they send the mate, named Jermin, ashore to seek medical assistance. But Jermin betrays them in the process, bringing back the English consul, Wilson, and a small band of Tahitian “authorities”, who take the “rebellious” crew into custody.
Potential criminals, take note: if you ever want to commit an act that will result in your incarceration, you may want to travel to Tahiti first. For, at least in the 19th century, a Tahitian prison is the easiest place in the world to do hard time, if Herman Melville’s account in Omoo has any basis in reality. A lighter fictional account of time spent in the slammer I have yet to come across anywhere else in literature. I sincerely hope writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn or that Irish guy that wrote Borstal Boy managed to miss this novel entirely. In any event, the “prisoners” loaf around, sometimes in "darbies" (to borrow a Melville-ism), sometimes not; they go on walks through the verdant landscape; they chat amiably with guards and curious natives; they visit with a well-meaning priest who comes to offer rather inept ministry; they gawk at a young English woman, the lovely spouse to an English official, who strolls around the island in search of distractions.
All of this while the men await prosecution, which finally arrives in the form of a ramshackle legal procedure before a panel of local officials meant to intimidate. But the event simply musters up more chaos, with the crew shouting defiance at their captors. Eventually they are released without consequence, and little worse for the wear. In this segment of the book Melville affords himself ample opportunity to wax, sometimes hilariously, on native customs, British sanctimoniousness and imperialism, French Jesuits, and various other subjects.
After getting out of the brig, the men separate and find different means of employment on the island. The narrator and his steady companion, the Julia’s physician who goes by the curious moniker of Doctor Long Ghost, eventually try their hands in some actual work at a potato farm on the island; an endeavor that seems ludicrous, because of the island’s unsuitable conditions for this kind of crop and the abundance of other food, fruits, vegetables, and wild game. Finally, news that an American whaling vessel has landed upon the island reaches the two former mariners, so they once again set out across the island in the hopes of securing a passage on the ship. To do so requires many visits to native islander’s homes, descriptions of dances, naps, a large dinner party, and various encounters with tobacco. Melville describes all of these encounters vividly, but with a strong sense of leisure, for lack of a better term. Nothing in Omoo feels tense or even particularly substantive; it’s hardly more than series of strung-together anecdotes related in an agreeable and colorful manner.
“Paul” and Doctor Long Ghost finally make their way into the court of one Queen Pomaree Vahanee I, with the intention to seek permission to leave on the American ship. Pomaree is the local “monarch”, descended from a line of Tahitian royalty who act out of tradition as figurehead representatives of the English realm. Queen Victoria even condescends to deliver an actual crown to Pomaree as a measure of good faith, which is taken on the island as a badge of her legitimacy. There is an interesting description of the Queen’s inner courtyard, crammed with statues, small devices, machines, and other doodads that arrived as gifts from “civilized” society but have absolutely no value in an island setting. It’s the one visual metaphor in the entire novel that speaks the clearest and the loudest.
Once they are in the Queen’s court, however, Paul and Long Ghost find a way to unintentionally insult the monarch, and are both exiled from her presence. So they go to the ship anyway: only to be informed that there is room for only one. Our humble narrator departs for Cape Horn and then home (or straight into the 1850 novel White Jacket), but only after Long Ghost decides, somewhat inexplicably, that he intends to stay on the island longer. Cue the LOST title card!!
There is plenty to fascinate and ruminate over in the experience of reading Omoo. I also found that the book provided numerous occasions for Melville to deploy his sense of humor, nowhere more so than in this uproarious smack-talk about a French warship:
There is a good deal of French flummery about her – brass plates and other gew-gaws, stuck on all over, like baubles on a handsome woman …. To behold the rich hangings and mirrors, and mahogany within, one is almost prepared to see a bevy of ladies trip back and forth on the balcony for an airing.
Yet for all the enjoyment, the wonderful prose, and the general pleasure of this novel, it is hard to think of it as much more than a light volley among Melville’s other thunderous blasts. It may be because it was written to capitalize on the commercial promise of the first book he wrote, which is only reasonable; or, it could be because it was based more on his imagination than on his actual experiences. But it’s indisputable that Omoo lacks the tension and danger, and indeed, some of the guts, of its riveting and eager predecessor. To use a film analogy, Omoo is not Blair Witch 2 or anything, but it is Halloween 2 – slightly altered setting in the same overall locale, somewhat less gripping, and a good measure less convincing.
Melville would step forward from this novel into Mardi – a long, rambling, far more ambitious work that was summarily rejected by audiences and critics. But it’s notable for its sheer bravery and massive scope. And it helped pave the way for Melville to write the greatest of all his books, the indisputable masterpiece Moby-Dick. In Omoo, one can find only brief instances of the power and the struggle that Melville would go on to harness so completely. Yet the flashes are there, below the surface, glimmering through occasionally, for those who would care enough to look – as in this foreboding, prophetic, and deeply melancholy closing note:
Behold the fate of a sailor! They give him the last toss, and no one asks whose child he was.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Reflections on Billy Budd
The Melville, Pennsylvania Project, Book VIII
I’m at least as intrigued by the way Melville’s last published prose work, the novella Billy Budd, Sailor, came to be as I am by the story itself. For it was composed towards the very end of his life and literary career, after he had been working on poetry almost exclusively for the better part of three decades. When you consider the fact that the last work of prose writing to appear by Herman Melville had been published nearly thirty years before (The Confidence-Man, 1857), the fact that there is any Billy Budd to reflect on at all is pretty astonishing all by itself.
Although it wasn’t even published until well after Melville’s death (1924; Melville died in 1891), Billy Budd is still one of his best-known writings. Aside from Moby-Dick, it is the one story that most people I have asked have heard of before and can identify as belonging to Melville’s work. Many of my generation remember being assigned Billy Budd in high school English – my wife is one of these. I don’t remember ever being assigned anything Melville wrote, including Moby-Dick or the famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”.
(I never read anything I was assigned to in English class anyway though, so I’m the wrong person to ask. The only thing I can remember reading is maybe two chapters of Great Expectations, and the Cliff Notes for The Scarlet Letter. In my sophomore year of high school, I dropped from a 3.5 grade on a 4-point scale to a 1.0, or a “D”, in one marking period, chiefly because I didn’t read any of the books. That's an unbreakable record in my family.)
To address that elephant standing in the room, Billy Budd is also cited as “evidence”, for some, of at least a suppressed homo-erotic aspect to Herman Melville’s writings. There is a famous moment from the television show “The Sopranos” where the family engages in discussion of the book’s “gay” themes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyRPmMi1Mio) (kind of a funny scene really, or at least it is when Tony Soprano describes Billy as “the ship’s florist”!). I don’t know whether this book can be taken as proof of latent (or not) homosexuality on Melville’s part, nor am I all that interested in the subject. Although I am hopeful that one or both of the critical/biographical works I am planning to read in the next couple of months will at least help clarify the matter, for my own general understanding.
Certainly there are numerous references to Billy Budd’s great “beauty”, a word used often in the novella. He has a kind of angelic quality that Melville doesn’t really hold back on. But many have argued that Billy’s looks correspond to a religious subtext in the story, and the descriptions of the young man could be interpreted as being in the service of that. After all, Billy himself does end up dying a rather Christ-like death, fully turning the other cheek.
This subject, while not critical to understanding the whole story, does point in the direction of another question, which has to do with the overall intention of Billy Budd in the first place. Is it a character study, an expansion on the idea of a young, handsome sailor on a ship’s crew and how he may or may not get on with the rest of the men? In other words, is it strictly about men’s interactions, their relationships, their human concerns? Or, as some have speculated, is it really a kind of spiritual allegory, substituting Billy in the martyr’s role, willfully meeting death despite his youthful innocence? These are the questions that have driven the debate around this fascinating tale since the early 20th century.
For me, in general, Billy Budd was more difficult to latch on to than other short works by Melville I have read, or novels for that matter. I’ve spent several days trying to figure out why, and I still don’t really know. In addition to being well-known, it’s considered one of his finest writings by most critics. I can’t say exactly what it is about the novella that makes it more obscure and slightly more impenetrable to me than his other sea-stories, but I may be able to offer some theories.
There was a great deal of time and experience acquired by Melville between the years he wrote his other novella-length works, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”, and the time he was writing Billy Budd, and this naturally had a great effect on the final product. It’s my idea that as time went on, even as early as the later 1850s, when he was writing The Confidence-Man, Melville drifted away from the parameters of a more “conventional” story-telling style. After he concluded his last novel, and it received the usual half-hearted notices and public dismissal, Melville seemed more than ready to gravitate into other forms of writing – which he did, transforming himself into a poet almost overnight. For most of the next 30 years, as I said above, he wrote mostly poems, and some experimental poetry-prose mash-ups.
Indeed, Billy Budd, by all scholarly accounts, began as a poem entitled “Billy in the Darbies” – “darbies”, I have since learned, means irons or chains. The final version of the poem, that is only a couple of stanzas long, appears at the end of the novella. The volume I read which contained the final version of Billy Budd also, helpfully, contained early versions of the poem that led to the narrative story, which was originally longer. You can see how Melville initially planned to tell the story of a very handsome young sailor who was convicted for trying to generate a mutiny on board a whaling vessel, while remaining entirely innocent of the crime. Yet instead of attempting to defend himself against the charges in the impromptu court-martial, he fatally drops his accuser in one blow, then faces his own imprisonment and death with a Christ-like bravery and demeanor.
Looking to my own experience, being a terrible poet, I can’t say that I have ever come close to having a story develop out of a poem; I would think it would be easier to go the other way, and boil a story down to verse, but I can’t really say. I do know that given that provenance, it would seem impossible for Billy Budd to read the same way as the earlier stories that began as “normal” prose drafts and were refined and revised into the present versions. Is it too obvious to point out that the intellectual implements used to bring a poem into reality must be different from those used to draft a work of fiction?
Also, it seemed to me that even if Melville had not been writing poetry for all that time, he was clearly experimenting with narrative itself, and what it means to tell a story using a prose format. If you look at tales such as “The Two Temples” or “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”, those “stories”, while written in recognizable narrative prose, are not traditional fictions. As I have written here previously, they examine two similar situations with overlapping characters but in different physical settings. Sometimes described as “diptychs”, I am not sure what writings like this really accomplish, for lack of a better word – but I know for sure they don’t tell a gripping yarn. They’re simply not built for that. They’re more experimental.
Melville had proved more than once he could tell an exciting story. He was interested in different ways of employing his skills as an artist. Even earlier works such as the novel Mardi dabbled in experimental techniques by fusing poetry and prose in many segments, revealing that Melville was interested in such hybrid forms from an earlier point in his career. And clearly this desire to “mix it up”, to use current vernacular, remained alive in this vibrant and self-driven artist up through the very end of his writing life.
Billy Budd, in the final version, is closer to traditional story-telling than many of his other later works, but it doesn’t feel, to me anyway, like a traditional story. It is marked by Melville’s wandering intellect, vast body of experiences, and inclination towards uncharted literary territory. Perhaps this corresponds to his physical wanderlust as a younger man, characteristic of a brave soul who was always willing to discover new things, and to push himself into undiscovered intellectual and even spiritual challenges.
Even if I cannot say Billy Budd is my favorite among his works, my admiration for it as a final cannon blast from the deck of one of literature’s most intrepid man-of-wars is here given earnest, if imperfect, testimony.
I’m at least as intrigued by the way Melville’s last published prose work, the novella Billy Budd, Sailor, came to be as I am by the story itself. For it was composed towards the very end of his life and literary career, after he had been working on poetry almost exclusively for the better part of three decades. When you consider the fact that the last work of prose writing to appear by Herman Melville had been published nearly thirty years before (The Confidence-Man, 1857), the fact that there is any Billy Budd to reflect on at all is pretty astonishing all by itself.
Although it wasn’t even published until well after Melville’s death (1924; Melville died in 1891), Billy Budd is still one of his best-known writings. Aside from Moby-Dick, it is the one story that most people I have asked have heard of before and can identify as belonging to Melville’s work. Many of my generation remember being assigned Billy Budd in high school English – my wife is one of these. I don’t remember ever being assigned anything Melville wrote, including Moby-Dick or the famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”.
(I never read anything I was assigned to in English class anyway though, so I’m the wrong person to ask. The only thing I can remember reading is maybe two chapters of Great Expectations, and the Cliff Notes for The Scarlet Letter. In my sophomore year of high school, I dropped from a 3.5 grade on a 4-point scale to a 1.0, or a “D”, in one marking period, chiefly because I didn’t read any of the books. That's an unbreakable record in my family.)
To address that elephant standing in the room, Billy Budd is also cited as “evidence”, for some, of at least a suppressed homo-erotic aspect to Herman Melville’s writings. There is a famous moment from the television show “The Sopranos” where the family engages in discussion of the book’s “gay” themes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyRPmMi1Mio) (kind of a funny scene really, or at least it is when Tony Soprano describes Billy as “the ship’s florist”!). I don’t know whether this book can be taken as proof of latent (or not) homosexuality on Melville’s part, nor am I all that interested in the subject. Although I am hopeful that one or both of the critical/biographical works I am planning to read in the next couple of months will at least help clarify the matter, for my own general understanding.
Certainly there are numerous references to Billy Budd’s great “beauty”, a word used often in the novella. He has a kind of angelic quality that Melville doesn’t really hold back on. But many have argued that Billy’s looks correspond to a religious subtext in the story, and the descriptions of the young man could be interpreted as being in the service of that. After all, Billy himself does end up dying a rather Christ-like death, fully turning the other cheek.
This subject, while not critical to understanding the whole story, does point in the direction of another question, which has to do with the overall intention of Billy Budd in the first place. Is it a character study, an expansion on the idea of a young, handsome sailor on a ship’s crew and how he may or may not get on with the rest of the men? In other words, is it strictly about men’s interactions, their relationships, their human concerns? Or, as some have speculated, is it really a kind of spiritual allegory, substituting Billy in the martyr’s role, willfully meeting death despite his youthful innocence? These are the questions that have driven the debate around this fascinating tale since the early 20th century.
For me, in general, Billy Budd was more difficult to latch on to than other short works by Melville I have read, or novels for that matter. I’ve spent several days trying to figure out why, and I still don’t really know. In addition to being well-known, it’s considered one of his finest writings by most critics. I can’t say exactly what it is about the novella that makes it more obscure and slightly more impenetrable to me than his other sea-stories, but I may be able to offer some theories.
There was a great deal of time and experience acquired by Melville between the years he wrote his other novella-length works, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”, and the time he was writing Billy Budd, and this naturally had a great effect on the final product. It’s my idea that as time went on, even as early as the later 1850s, when he was writing The Confidence-Man, Melville drifted away from the parameters of a more “conventional” story-telling style. After he concluded his last novel, and it received the usual half-hearted notices and public dismissal, Melville seemed more than ready to gravitate into other forms of writing – which he did, transforming himself into a poet almost overnight. For most of the next 30 years, as I said above, he wrote mostly poems, and some experimental poetry-prose mash-ups.
Indeed, Billy Budd, by all scholarly accounts, began as a poem entitled “Billy in the Darbies” – “darbies”, I have since learned, means irons or chains. The final version of the poem, that is only a couple of stanzas long, appears at the end of the novella. The volume I read which contained the final version of Billy Budd also, helpfully, contained early versions of the poem that led to the narrative story, which was originally longer. You can see how Melville initially planned to tell the story of a very handsome young sailor who was convicted for trying to generate a mutiny on board a whaling vessel, while remaining entirely innocent of the crime. Yet instead of attempting to defend himself against the charges in the impromptu court-martial, he fatally drops his accuser in one blow, then faces his own imprisonment and death with a Christ-like bravery and demeanor.
Looking to my own experience, being a terrible poet, I can’t say that I have ever come close to having a story develop out of a poem; I would think it would be easier to go the other way, and boil a story down to verse, but I can’t really say. I do know that given that provenance, it would seem impossible for Billy Budd to read the same way as the earlier stories that began as “normal” prose drafts and were refined and revised into the present versions. Is it too obvious to point out that the intellectual implements used to bring a poem into reality must be different from those used to draft a work of fiction?
Also, it seemed to me that even if Melville had not been writing poetry for all that time, he was clearly experimenting with narrative itself, and what it means to tell a story using a prose format. If you look at tales such as “The Two Temples” or “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”, those “stories”, while written in recognizable narrative prose, are not traditional fictions. As I have written here previously, they examine two similar situations with overlapping characters but in different physical settings. Sometimes described as “diptychs”, I am not sure what writings like this really accomplish, for lack of a better word – but I know for sure they don’t tell a gripping yarn. They’re simply not built for that. They’re more experimental.
Melville had proved more than once he could tell an exciting story. He was interested in different ways of employing his skills as an artist. Even earlier works such as the novel Mardi dabbled in experimental techniques by fusing poetry and prose in many segments, revealing that Melville was interested in such hybrid forms from an earlier point in his career. And clearly this desire to “mix it up”, to use current vernacular, remained alive in this vibrant and self-driven artist up through the very end of his writing life.
Billy Budd, in the final version, is closer to traditional story-telling than many of his other later works, but it doesn’t feel, to me anyway, like a traditional story. It is marked by Melville’s wandering intellect, vast body of experiences, and inclination towards uncharted literary territory. Perhaps this corresponds to his physical wanderlust as a younger man, characteristic of a brave soul who was always willing to discover new things, and to push himself into undiscovered intellectual and even spiritual challenges.
Even if I cannot say Billy Budd is my favorite among his works, my admiration for it as a final cannon blast from the deck of one of literature’s most intrepid man-of-wars is here given earnest, if imperfect, testimony.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Reports of My Death (or the Death of This Blog) Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Contrary to what some of you out there must be thinking, this blog is not only about the work of Herman Melville. Nor is it only a showcase for Mutt's talents as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction (click the links to check out his latest efforts in both). And, lastly, ol' Duke is not dead, I am happy to say. Just quiet on the blogosphere. Lately.
Now before I go any further, one thing I want to make clear: I am huge fan (obviously) of Mutt's writing, and I am personally grateful to him for pretty much single-handedly keeping this blog going for most of the past year. He has consistently generated interesting and creative content, and even if it's not your bag all the time, the man is working - and that's saying something, trust me, if you know anything about his ridiculous personal workload and schedule!!
As for me, I suppose there are a million lame excuses I could offer, but it all basically comes down to one thing: I really haven't figured out a way to organize what little free time I have (as a husband, father of four children and full-time worker) so that I can contribute consistently to these pages. In the beginning I was better at it, but as my family grew and my responsibilities along with it, I have found it harder and harder. But then that's obvious, I suppose, from my lack of posts lately. (And yes, lest you feel the need to point it out: I am aware of how much more lame these ramblings sound directly after praising Mutt for his prolific output at TST despite an incredibly intense schedule. Duly noted!)
The desire has always been there. Believe me, there is always something I want to be sharing through this forum about great books I've read, movies I've seen, music I've been listening to, fascinating articles you might have missed, and all that good stuff. I try to use my Twitter page to share some of that stuff, so if you're a Twitter user and share some common interests with Mutt and I, I enthusiastically invite you to follow me! I'm not promising a constant stream of profundities, but I do know through experience that sometimes Twitter is a great way to catch up with something that may have flown below your radar. I've been turned on to numerous great links and articles since I started using it. (I've also dutifully tweeted about most of Mutt's Melville entries, in the hopes that more folks might visit these pages and have their interest ignited in this amazing writer through Mutt's thoughtful and entertaining reflections.)
Anyway, back to that desire of mine: because it's still burning strong (despite all evidence to the contrary), and because I believe that great books and one's interior life are still among the things most urgent to be writing and thinking about, this blog shall soldier on. There's so much of the good, the true and the beautiful out there left to explore... we have not even barely scratched the surface in this enterprise... "the world is charged with the grandeur of God... it gathers to a greatness," as Gerard Manley Hopkins so famously (and magnificently) put it. We cannot not continue this project, because as my man G. K. Chesterton once said, "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
So then, in the spirit of "doing it badly" (as opposed to not doing it at all!), here are some items worth sharing:
Now before I go any further, one thing I want to make clear: I am huge fan (obviously) of Mutt's writing, and I am personally grateful to him for pretty much single-handedly keeping this blog going for most of the past year. He has consistently generated interesting and creative content, and even if it's not your bag all the time, the man is working - and that's saying something, trust me, if you know anything about his ridiculous personal workload and schedule!!
As for me, I suppose there are a million lame excuses I could offer, but it all basically comes down to one thing: I really haven't figured out a way to organize what little free time I have (as a husband, father of four children and full-time worker) so that I can contribute consistently to these pages. In the beginning I was better at it, but as my family grew and my responsibilities along with it, I have found it harder and harder. But then that's obvious, I suppose, from my lack of posts lately. (And yes, lest you feel the need to point it out: I am aware of how much more lame these ramblings sound directly after praising Mutt for his prolific output at TST despite an incredibly intense schedule. Duly noted!)
The desire has always been there. Believe me, there is always something I want to be sharing through this forum about great books I've read, movies I've seen, music I've been listening to, fascinating articles you might have missed, and all that good stuff. I try to use my Twitter page to share some of that stuff, so if you're a Twitter user and share some common interests with Mutt and I, I enthusiastically invite you to follow me! I'm not promising a constant stream of profundities, but I do know through experience that sometimes Twitter is a great way to catch up with something that may have flown below your radar. I've been turned on to numerous great links and articles since I started using it. (I've also dutifully tweeted about most of Mutt's Melville entries, in the hopes that more folks might visit these pages and have their interest ignited in this amazing writer through Mutt's thoughtful and entertaining reflections.)
Anyway, back to that desire of mine: because it's still burning strong (despite all evidence to the contrary), and because I believe that great books and one's interior life are still among the things most urgent to be writing and thinking about, this blog shall soldier on. There's so much of the good, the true and the beautiful out there left to explore... we have not even barely scratched the surface in this enterprise... "the world is charged with the grandeur of God... it gathers to a greatness," as Gerard Manley Hopkins so famously (and magnificently) put it. We cannot not continue this project, because as my man G. K. Chesterton once said, "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
So then, in the spirit of "doing it badly" (as opposed to not doing it at all!), here are some items worth sharing:
- I've finally added another quick film recommendation to the left-hand margin... Waltz With Bashir is an incredible movie and all, but really it was high time to move on to something else, don't you think??
- I recently finished reading Ron Hansen's latest novel Exiles, and for my money it's yet another in a long string of underappreciated works from one of America's most overlooked and talented writers. I think part of the reason Hansen is not more widely read is his refusal to write about conventional or "hot button" subjects. Imagine being in the offices of whoever his publisher is when he told them he was working on a novel about the inner life of Gerard Manley Hopkins (two mentions, one post!) and the real-life sea tragedy behind his famous poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." I can practically hear the sustained, awkward silence... and yet somehow, against all odds and expectations, this is both a gripping account of a disaster at sea (some written scenes will powerfully remind you of some of the better moments of James Cameron's Titanic) AND a penetrating, profound exploration of a poet/priest struggling with the difficult question of how to best use his creative gifts and yet live out his calling as a servant of God. A combination like that makes this a book unlike 95% of novels ever written, and the clear, elegant prose also sets it apart. Hansen is a gifted and insightful writer who deserves to be better known. If you want to learn more about the book, I recommend Mutt's concise review, "Suffering the Storm," from earlier on this blog.
- This week the New York Times published an illuminating article about the archives of John Updike, which I would recommend to anyone interested in the craft of writing. Of particular note is the way it reveals his revision practices, and how he went about editing and improving his own prose. I'm nowhere near the biggest Updike fan in the world (though I do admire many of his short stories, especially earlier ones such as "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You"), but his productivity and precision as a writer are the stuff of legend, and it's fascinating to get a glimpse of his development and practices over the decades of a celebrated career.
- Utterly random item of the day: you know what the symbols for the U.S. dollar, the euro, the English pound and the Japanese yen are... what about the Indian rupee? Give up? That's because there's never been one! But that's about to change, interestingly... what does this have to do with books, you ask? Absolutely nothing, but I thought it was mildly interesting.
- I'm just about to finish Arthur Koestler's chilling novel Darkness at Noon, which may be the single most effective rendering of the brutality and cold logic of totalitarianism ever put to the printed page... and, book nerd that I am, I noticed recently that it means that I will have read all but one of the top 10 novels in the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of All Time list. How many of them have you taken on? (The one I haven't gotten to yet? Joseph Heller's Catch-22.)
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A Hen, A Lion, A Passenger, & A Pachyderm
A tale of imagination by Mutt Ploughman.
ALTHOUGH I have lived in a number of other places, my life began in the city of Chicago, in the shadow of elevated trains. My family left there when I was still young, and I have not often returned, so it feels inauthentic to identify myself as a Chicagoan. Yet, though a tree’s branches may sprawl out high and far, its roots stay put. So perhaps my trunk still remains, cooling in that same shadow.
Also, both of my parents were raised there. Their answer to the question Where are you from? has less ambiguity than mine. They were married in 1965 and set themselves up in an apartment on the west side in 1966, just as my big sister Sandra was born. I came along in 1970. Then we moved away, in 1977.
So, am I from Chicago or not? Beats me. But the question seems important, because Chicago, as I have seen, and as this story will show, is not a typical American city. It sits over another place, a kind of reservoir, like the mossy stones of an ancient well. I want to know if I can claim some of that magic history for my own. Perhaps telling the story now, as I have done only once before, will reveal the answer.
*
My mother used to take my sister and I on walks through the neighborhood around where we lived, west of the city. I know all those streets in my memory. They were arranged in perfect squares, lined with sidewalks, street lamps of gothic black metal, and huge oak and elm trees along either side that were old enough for their boughs to form church-like ribs over the cars that processed underneath.
Indeed, the whole neighborhood has a cathedral-like feel to me in retrospect. The sun would lance in downward shafts through those branches in bursts of illumination, as through stained glass. And each time you rounded a corner to walk up another straight-edged avenue it felt as though you were approaching a mystery.
She’d spent her entire life there, my mother, and she loved those streets with all her heart, all her mind, and all her soul. But even then I think she knew that she would soon depart from them and not return again but as a visitor. This may explain why it seems in my memory as though we were walking every single day, the three of us, but that can’t be true. Sandra would have been in school a lot of the time for one, being four years older than me. Plus for 50% of the year the weather wouldn’t have allowed it. Yet it seems like there were thousands of those walks – like it was all we did. I found out later that for a long time we only had one family car, so that could account for some of it.
Of course I have a father, but didn’t see him much: he was at work all the time in those days. I knew by then that he was a scientist. I remember being so proud of that, without even fully grasping what it meant. I knew he had to make heavy use of his brain, and I knew it was funny to mention that because the human brain was what he was studying. You have to use your brain to learn about your brain, he would say to me. What I had absolutely zero notion of at the time, of course, but found out decades later, was that he was a research chemist, and during those very years he was involved in a massive grant-funded study. The subject? The effects of L.S.D. on human cognitive processes.
He worked at the University of Chicago. The word I would use to describe him during that time is not Tall or Warm or Stern or even Intimidating. The word I would use is Gone.
*
Autumn, 1975. I think all we needed that day was milk. Or that’s all I can really remember, anyway. I don’t think it was a Saturday, yet Sandra was with us, so who knows. It might have been Columbus Day. It might have been one of those ‘teacher meetings’ days, where the parent doesn’t realize it’s coming up, in spite of repeated warnings, and finds themselves at home with all their children and no plan. On days like that, one way or another, you gotta get out of the house.
Either way my mother had resolved to take a walk with the two of us, and my father was customarily absent. Within walking distance of our house was a corner convenience store, and it was towards this destination that we embarked. It wasn’t a cold day, but in Chicago, autumn afternoons are chilly and windy enough to require some sort of parka. I didn’t need a lot of encouragement to wear my Bears jacket with the hood – my favorite item of clothing in the world. I never paid much attention to Sandra, but for whatever reason I remember that day she had two barrettes in her long and straight brown hair, parted down the middle; the barrettes had these red ribbons with colorful beads on them hanging down on either side. I can also see my mother as vividly in my mind’s eye as any of the other sights that have remained with me from that particular day.
She had thick, brown hair, wavy, cut to about shoulder length at the time. She had always been slight of frame, short, but her body seemed to exude energy; she was one of those rather small women that seem to compensate for their lack of physical presence with superhuman tirelessness and a form that was rarely at rest. She flounced along those concrete sidewalks at a clip I couldn’t keep up with.
The one thing I can visualize most clearly in hindsight is the poncho she wore. She kept it for years and years, but at that time it was new. My father had gone on a business trip to Mexico that year, and he had brought her home this handmade garment that she really seemed to adore. It had Technicolor autumn tones – red, brown, orange, yellow – in a wild tangle of crooked stripes. The poncho seemed wonderfully suited for that time of the year, draped over my mother’s frame to repel the strafing winds. It was like she had the season itself thrown protectively over her shoulders.
We set off briskly, and I settled into my well-worn retinue of hurdling the cracks in the sidewalk, beaning the lampposts with small stones, and picking up sticks in an infinite quest to locate the perfect sword. Sandra ambled ahead, at pains to put space between herself and her pipsqueak brother, lest she be spotted by one of her friends or even a remote acquaintance from school. My mother was jabbering, asking questions.
She spent a great deal of time with us already, but these walks seemed to be the times when she would make a concentrated effort to genuinely connect with us. Of course, at that time, it wasn’t her I longed to connect with, it was my father. She seemed to know that this wouldn’t happen, and perhaps the conversation she was always trying to engage us in came from her feelings about that.
What are you going to do with it when you find it? she asked that day.
Find what?
The right stick.
I’m not looking for the right stick. I’m looking for a sword.
When you find the right sword, then. What will you do with it?
Stab me, probably, Sandra offered from ahead.
I dunno. Cut things. It’s just a game I like to play sometimes.
How are things going with Miss Richlick? She shifted the subject, agonizingly, to my kindergarten teacher.
Good.
Do you like her?
Yeah. She’s nice.
Do you still like the reading unit?
Yeah. I got in trouble for reading ahead two chapters.
Well, not every child in the class reads as well as you do.
I know. I just wanted to know what would happen next.
Don’t we all.
*
It was called The White Hen. I never knew why, and didn’t become aware until sometime later that it was a chain and that more of them existed elsewhere. I thought there was only one, and that the name was a tangled mystery for me personally to unravel. But I never did.
I can see that white silhouetted figure on the lit up sign rising high above the corner, like some kind of sentry at the gates of the world of wild fowl. It was painted in profile, facing towards its left, my right, over the top of the store towards the back. It seemed to point the visitor towards the door. Who knew a hen could look so dignified? Weren’t they girls? This one struck me as a proud hen, and otherwise I never would have had much occasion to consider whether a hen had anything to be proud about. In fact I would never have taken hens into any consideration whatsoever, not being from a rural area. I hadn’t even known what a hen was before we started going to that store.
The White Hen faced a busy avenue, congested with heavy traffic no matter what time of day. But behind it was a different story. There was a small parking lot with a dumpster, and behind that, my all-time favorite outdoor spot: a playground. These days I get the feeling that every park is an elaborately engineered, exorbitant affair – with six or seven big lakes, a fitness trail, volleyball and tennis courts, lawn bowling lanes, parking for pregnant mothers, a place to land a helicopter, and so on. Back in the 70s, they seemed to be stuffed in wherever they would fit, no matter how illogical the spot. All you really needed was a set of monkey bars, a couple of swings, and a slide or two.
This park, which I considered my own personal stomping grounds – even though it was always overrun with kids, sometimes tough ones – had those things, as well as a tether ball pole, some of those metal horses mounted on thick springs that you could buck back and forth on, a see-saw, a steel merry-go-round that creaked agreeably as you rode it in circles, and a drinking fountain. I’ll get to that last item.
I can’t bring this park back from the annals of my memory without mentioning the steep grass hill behind it, the kind you could roll or sled down, as long as you didn’t climb all the way to the top. Because what was positioned on top of the hill was most definitely off-limits for children. My father had told me once to stay away from the tracks of the El train because of something he called ‘the third rail’. If you stepped on that particular rail you would get zapped by a massive bolt of electricity, like lightning, and probably die. This is why as long as we had been coming to this park I never really went close to the top of the hill. But I knew it was a stop on the El, because you could see and hear, of course, the trains speeding by as you rambled through the park below. Like most small boys, I never got tired of the spectacle of big metal cars whizzing by at dangerous speeds. They were a large part of why I loved that park in the first place.
I never knew what she did in there, aside from buying whatever it was we’d come for. Meet a neighbor? Talk to the guy behind the counter? Read the newspaper? Maybe even smoke a cigarette? But my mother always gave me time to play. Parental oversight, even though we were living on the outskirts of the third largest city in America, was a little more relaxed than it is today. When my sister was with us she would keep an eye on me, in an extremely half-ass manner, until my mom came back. Even if we didn’t have Sandra, my mom still sent me back there to run around. It wasn’t fenced in or anything, and God only knows who was coming through that park or what transactions were taking place. And yet, nothing untoward ever happened. To me, it was just a place for kids to play, with an El train stop on top of the hill.
From time to time a train would come to a screeching halt and disgorge a stream of weary-looking passengers, men and women with shopping bags and briefcases, dressed in nursing outfits, hard hats, suits and ties. They all seemed to get off in a hangdog manner and trudge off towards their separate homes without saying anything to one another. It seemed to me like the exact opposite of the way in which my friends and I disembarked from the school bus. It came across as a none-too-subtle discouragement from ever reaching the age of adulthood.
On the particular day I’m talking about – and in one sense, it’s the only one from my Chicago days worth remembering – we were dispatched to the back of the store as usual, and Sandra, none too pleased with anything happening that day and especially with the prospect of baby-sitting for me, grabbed my hood, yanked my neck and head back abusively, and growled, Don’t. Go. Anywhere. Meaning, stay in the park. I wriggled free from her grasp.
Release me, tyrant! I shouted, using a line I had come across in a book. Hadn’t she figured out yet that there was nowhere else I wanted to go? Sometimes Sandra was just plain dumb.
She then set out to separate herself from me, showing me her back, her long hair, and the clicking beads. I watched her go without misgivings. She’d post herself on a bench somewhere if she couldn’t find kids her age, and I was free to explore whatever I wanted.
I’ll admit that I was, and still am, a bit of a loner. Being by myself has never been troublesome. I ignored the other kids that were hanging around in that park whenever I visited. They usually seemed iffy anyway, as I alluded to earlier, and as far as I was concerned, there were better things to do than to get amoeba’d into one of those globules of city kids.
The reason why I loved going to that park behind The White Hen in the first place, though of course I would not have explained it this way at the time, was that it was an ideal grounds for both my body and my mind to run around simultaneously. Even back then, I loved having the space and time to let both of them romp around uninhibited. The playground seemed to provide the right backdrop for creativity and imagination to take over the helm of my existence, and I loved that about it.
There were countless props and triggers in the park that could generate make-believe scenarios. The monkey bars were a castle; the metal horses my cavalry; the tetherball tower a monolith; the sloping grass hill the untamed landscape that fell within my realm; the El train a cosmic transport, or a huge metal serpent, or a dragon; the disembarking passengers invading hordes.
And then there was the lion.
*
I never knew what it was about it, but I knew in the very bottom of my gut, from the first moment I set eyes on it, that there was something else to it. It wasn’t only an artificial lion, and it certainly wasn’t just a drinking fountain. Over the years since this well-remembered day I have wondered whose brainchild it was to make a large plastic or fiberglass lion’s head, paint it red for some reason with a brown mane and yellow eyes, and plop it over the top of a standard-issue city drinking fountain. So that in order to take a drink you had to approach the thing, stomp on a foot pedal sticking out from the base of the lion’s neck like an arrow, and then shove your head straight into the beast’s jaws. Oh, and if you were going to do it at all, you may as well make it the fiercest, meanest-looking fake lion imaginable, with oversized white teeth bearing down on the vulnerable flesh of a young child’s neck, and an aspect of eternal malice on its painted face.
Because today I happen to have small children myself, I know that at the age of five, or thereabouts, they’re getting big enough to read and explore and go to kindergarten and all of that, but they’re still young enough to have unrestrained terrors of certain things. The lion in that playground, for me, was such a terror. It was located to one side, fortunately, isolated in a kind of imaginary ring of doom, as though it had wandered in off of some killing plain in the realm I’d created and decided to station itself there to watch. One day, I was sure that the thing would simply come alive and attack, even though it was only a head and neck; it would attack disembodied, thereby making the inevitable about ten times scarier in my imagination.
Sandra released me from her clawed grip and wandered off, and I kept to the right side, avoiding the beast on my far left. I didn’t want to even look at it unless I had to. Eventually it might come to the point where I would require a drink, but I found that if I didn’t go too crazy in the time I had, especially during the fall, I could get by without one.
I don’t entirely remember what I did first. In my memory I see only a smattering of other kids there. Sandra, near the swings, had engaged in conversation with three boys that seemed to be older, but she was on her own on that score. Surely she would not want me to interfere, to start hacking protectively at the boys with that stick/sword I had never found……I think I sat for a while on the creaky merry-go-round, the cold metal no doubt freezing my buttcheeks right through the corduroys. But unless you have a grownup there or a bigger kid to set the thing to spinning, all you can really do is sit there, or maybe alter your position slightly with one of your feet. You may as well sit on one of the benches, or somewhere else……
Owing to that semi-contemplative side that I brought up before, I was capable of occupying myself longer than most kids simply by finding a quiet but interesting place to sit and mull things over. I don’t know if this made me an introvert or anti-social or what; if you put those questions to my wife today she would say Yes, and yes. To me, however, it just means I like to look and listen and think. It doesn’t feel anti-anything. Whatever you call it, this quality was as true of me at age five as it will be at fifty-five. That’s why it’s no surprise that I ended up seated about halfway up the sloping grass hill, towards the El stop, looking down at the park with my back towards the rails. The hill was steep enough that it gave you a kind of towering perspective, at least to my perception, and that was agreeable. It spoon-fed the imaginative process I so loved to engage.
Here sits the King, aloft on his Judgment Seat, surveying the breadth of his lands, when suddenly—
The lunatic screech of metallic brakes behind and above me shattered whatever waking dream I was having. I had my elbows on my knees, and was painstakingly pulling apart a dead maple leaf that crumbled to flakes in my chapped and dirty fingers when the train arrived. For some reason I hesitated before looking over my shoulder to see the train. I figured it was disgorging passengers into the autumn gusts, a displacement of moody people from one corner of the city to the next, like some depressing riff on cross-pollination. Yet I remained fixated on the destruction of the maple leaf. I can still see that desiccated thing in my fingertips, piffling away to nothing.
Then I heard the whistle blast, screaming out across the city, as the cars slowly propelled themselves forward, blue sparks crackling between wires, steel wheels grinding on the rails. No longer able to hold back, I turned around, over my right shoulder. I watched the train pulling away, but instead of the usual stream of melancholy workers heading towards parking lots or sidewalks, chased by the wind, I saw only one figure: a very tall man. But he was not walking away. Standing on the top of the slope, somehow on my side of the tracks, he was staring straight at me.
Once the train was completely gone, he stepped off in my direction down the hill.
*
A giant was coming down the grassy slope. I was riveted to the cold ground. I wanted to escape but I couldn’t stand. I turned my torso back around quickly to see if anyone else was observing his approach, but the number of kids had diminished even more by that point, and Sandra was still talking to the boys with her back to me. Not paying any attention. This guy could march right down the hill and abduct me for all she seemed to care.
Twisting back around so that I faced awkwardly up the slope again, I got a better view of the approaching figure. He was like no stranger I had ever encountered. Immensely tall, much more so than my father; I knew he had to have been over six feet. This man was very thin and seemed almost rubbery, to judge by his delicate, loping strides down the incline.
What he was wearing greatly contributed to how slender and how high his form seemed to reach into the air. On top of his narrow head was a vertical, black, stovetop hat, which I only recognized from having endured a little learning unit in my pre-K class on American presidents, mainly Washington and Abraham Lincoln. For the moment I thought the man was Abraham Lincoln, for after all, this was Illinois. Was he still alive? But that impression changed after I could see the man’s face a few moments later.
He also wore a body-length, tattered brown overcoat, cut like a suit jacket towards the top, with a high waist and wide lapels, but slowly broadening out towards the bottom like a dress. The hem was ringed with a mangy-looking fringe of what appeared to be some sort of animal fur. This coat extended all the way down to the man’s ankles, and billowed loosely around his feet as he walked, over black shoes that tapered to an almost sharp point. It looked like he had been wearing that coat for a very long time, like I was hoping to do with my Bears coat (sadly, I no longer fit into it less than three months later). I noticed that small circles of the same fur enclosed the wrists also, like fuzzy handcuffs.
The closer the man came to me the odder he looked, and the more terrified and simultaneously ossified I became. I saw that he wore a brightly colored vest underneath the coat, with rainbow stripes running lengthwise, buttoned up neatly; below that was a lavender shirt, believe it or not, with ruffles leading straight up to his cleanly shaven but chicken-like neck. I know nothing about fashion or clothing, but I did have a big sister who seemed to have an inexplicable fixation, as many girls do, with how well one article of clothing matches another. This guy clearly did not share the same weird proclivity. Even I could tell that the clothes he was wearing did nothing to complement each other. He looked both dapper and utterly ridiculous at the same time.
As he approached, and it was clear there would be no protective intervention from elsewhere, I found the courage to look up. When I did I encountered a face that could only be described as hatchet-shaped. It was like watching the blade-like hull of a warship drift brazenly into your personal space. Except for the man’s wild, jet-black, curled moustache, which one usually didn’t find underneath a ship’s figurehead. He had long, thin lips, which the moustache did not obscure, that when I first saw them were flattened broadly in a wide, inviting grin.
Time seemed to suspend, and the surrounding noises stopped, or maybe they all merged somehow into one steady tone, a chord, ringing out over everything. Yet I could also hear the wind, the ever-present wind, the perpetual rush of air. The giant-man seemed to descend the hill in three to four long, bow-legged strides. Suddenly he was standing right in front of me, still seated on the grassy slope, looking up the long, absurdly draped flagpole of him. The man bent down at the waist, his ship’s-prow nose and the bridge above it carving its way to the point that I almost thought it would ram into mine. It stopped just short, so that the man could inquire:
Boy, have you seen an elephant near here?
A wizard, I thought. A magician. The only possible explanation for who this man could be. My throat froze and my vocal chords flat-out vanished. I stared up at him. He waited. The man had wrinkled skin, parchment-like, but his eyes were the most unusual green-blue shade I had ever seen. They bore deeply into my own and dragged up from within me a memory, some moment when I had spied a shade of the exact same color. Then it came to me. A few months earlier my family had spent two days at a hotel right alongside Lake Michigan. This man’s eyes were the exact same color as the water, the way it looked from our hotel balcony. My mom had called Sandra and I out to look at it as the sun was falling one night. But I had forgotten about that.
The man still waited for my answer. I tried to remember what he had asked. My voice suddenly returned, sort of.
I’m not supposed to, you know, talk to people like you.
You’ve never met a person like me, said the man, leaning back to an upright stance. His voice was dry and wistful. He sounded old, but it was hard to tell exactly how old he might have been.
Well. People I don’t know, I said.
Yes, but we do it anyway, don’t we. Your sister’s doing it.
Yeah, but she’s not supposed to.
Don’t you want to know how I know she is your sister, boy? Aren’t you curious? The man dragged out that last word to twice its length, again drawing his face nearer to mine.
I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged my shoulders. He was starting to scare me, if you want to know the truth. He reminded me of something…..
The man leaned back again, standing upright.
Hmmm, he said. I hope you’re a more curious boy than that. I think you are a more curious boy than that. I think I’ve just startled you, is all. You haven’t seen me before.
I shook my head.
Yet I’ve been around for so long – right here in Chicago. A really, really long time.
Again I couldn’t think of a reply. I felt like had been there a long time too. But I was pretty sure he was talking about a longer period.
How long? I asked.
Too long.
Who are you?
Just a passenger.
But … but … what’s your name? What do I call you?
Oh, you know, said the man. How about Passenger. I’m James T. Passenger. And I’m at your service.
He suddenly reached up, plucked the stovetop hat off his cylindrical skull, and executed a long, graceful bow. It seemed like something he had done before, perhaps lots of times.
Oh. Okay. Well … I’m …
Not to worry, boy. I know who you are. Which is good, because I always will, after today, know who you are. More importantly, you will know me. There won’t be another day when you don’t.
I was not sure what was happening, for I felt intrigued and confused at the same time; scared out of my wits and yet enthralled. I did the only thing I could think, which was to twist around, stand up, and look for my mother. But she wasn’t there.
Ah. Thanks for reminding me, said the strange man. She’s not done yet, boy. But there’s not much time. So, have you seen one or not? He stepped up next to me, on the side of the hill.
Seen what? I almost whispered.
What was going to happen? For some reason, although I didn’t want to, I turned slowly to look at his face, where I found his eyes boring directly into mine once again.
An elephant. A huge, white, unmistakable elephant.
Around us, the kids that were still left kept right on playing. Sandra had finally moved away from, or more likely had been dismissed by, the older boys, and I could recognize her bunched over brooding posture from five miles off. She wasn’t even facing away from us anymore, but she was in her own world. She didn’t see either one of us on the hill.
I haven’t seen any elephants, I said. I don’t think they live around here. But I did see a lion.
I never did know why I said that. I knew the man wasn’t talking about an artificial elephant. That seemed clear. Yet, for whatever odd reason, he terrified me in the exact same way that lion did – the drinking fountain. I never felt that I was in physical danger. It was a terror more difficult to name, or to explain away. Like a dreadful anticipation of something you think may be coming, but you just aren’t sure of. Something that could happen, that maybe should have happened, but by some inconceivable calculus of chance and conditions, hasn’t happened yet.
In any case, as soon as I said that, the man’s lake-eyes widened, and for a moment that water, or at least the color of it, seemed to flood out over everything in the world. But then he was in front of me, dry, his face near to mine yet again, asking me a question in one drawn-out word:
Where?
I pointed past his upper arm to an area behind him, towards where that lion held its empty court, waiting patiently for victims. But I wouldn’t look at it. For my fear of that lion, and of James T. Passenger, had reached their apex, together, at that very moment. Whatever is happening here, thought I, it doesn’t include me, it has nothing to do with me.
But of course it had everything to do with me.
*
Next thing I knew, I was trying to make a getaway. I had my back turned to Passenger. In another instant I would have taken off at a sprint, forgetting my sister. But I was too slow, and the stranger’s long hand with its talon-like fingers outstretched had grabbed the hood of my Bears jacket. The very same way Sandra had! Could it be possible that she had cooked this guy up somehow, elaborately, to bump me off? If so, at the very least, Sandra was more inventive than I had previously given her credit for.
Are you sure you have not seen an elephant? asked the stranger.
The iron-like grip guided me, not particularly harshly, backwards, until I took the not-very-subtle hint and turned around. He stepped to one side, and there was the lion, the fountain, mostly at a profile to where we were stationed. But that was not all I saw. The breath flew right out of my lungs. For reaching out of the lion’s wide open jaws – slowly, waving around in the air, as though feeling for something not seen – was a massive white trunk. An elephant’s trunk.
*
I knew it, he was saying. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder lightly, protectively. Like a father’s.
As soon as I set eyes on you from the window of that train, I knew it. I don’t know how I knew, but there was something about you that told me instantly that you would be able to see. That you are one of those who can perceive what so many others cannot.
I stared at the elephant’s trunk, just waving around, from inside the drinking fountain. How could that be? How many times had I stuck my own head into those same jaws? Had I ever seen a hole, a tunnel … a passage? No. But my eyes were seeing, obviously, what this man’s were.
Yet, the other kids, the adults walking by … no one was making any noise, or saying anything. No one acted like the trunk was even visible! Let alone the weird-looking man towering over the innocent five-year-old on the side of the hill! It seemed as though only selected people could see these events. Where that left me was something I didn’t really have time to consider.
I could not remove my eyes from that waving appendage. Now that the shock of seeing it had sunk in a little, I wondered what the thing was doing, why it was sticking up out of there in the first place. What was it hoping to find? Where did it come from? Would it grab hold of, or injure, the next child that approached, looking for a drink?
I felt the man place one hand on either of my shoulders, so he could gently turn me away from that wildest of visions and talk to me face-to-face, mano a mano.
Boy, he said, leaning over so he could look at me closely once again, his eyes twinkling with a rejuvenated energy and excitement I hadn’t seen there before. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this. How long I have searched for it!
What is that thing? I asked.
An elephant. As I’ve been saying all along. I finally tracked it down. Or it tracked me down.
What’s it doing?
Looking for me, just as I am looking for it. Its job is to carry me across.
Across what?
I will try to tell you, he said.
*
You may not understand all of this now, but that’s okay.
Believe it or not – and I put it that way because it’s the truth, whether anyone believes it or whether they don’t – a long time ago, there were a lot of people around here that were like me. There was, right here in this city, a great big gathering of people from all over the world, with all kinds of events and exhibits, entertainments, tents, carnival rides, crazy inventions, food stands, even wild animals. People came from near and far to share their culture, their experiences, to see how other people lived, and, most importantly, to share stories. It was glorious. It lasted for weeks and weeks. So many people gathered together at once, interacting, sharing, learning from each other.
Along the way, while all this was happening, something took place. Something amazing! With so many people visiting it at once, so many cross-currents of stories, so much energy and information and memories together at one huge event, the city of Chicago created its own great big imaginary world – its own place that people could visit in their minds, in their hearts. It’s a little hard to explain. It’s as though everyone in the city combined their ideas and creativity together and came up with an alternate universe. Then they put a lot of things in that world: all kinds of people and animals and fantastic machines and vehicles. I am one of them – a man, yes, but constructed of the memories, ideas, and imaginings of a million different people. That’s why I seem so oddly assembled.
I stared at him, completely dumbfounded. Yes, I was having a tough time understanding. But then again, somewhere inside of me – this is a feeling I can remember so clearly, and that I have tried to recapture for my entire life – there was a small light glowing, gathering heat, trying hard to catch fire. In a way that I could not put a finger on yet, what he was saying made perfect sense.
For a while, the man continued, all of us, the creations of this city’s imagining, lived here, together. Adjacent to your world, but accessible to nearly everyone. Over time, though, something terrible took place. Other human events occurred, awful ones, which tore people’s minds away from the stories they’d created. There were wars, great crime waves, fires, bouts of destructive weather, political battles. It all led to one simple but devastating tragedy: the city began to forget. It became disconnected from its own experience. It lost its stories. And its humanity soon followed.
Those of us who were living in that sideshow world, the alternate place, became separated, and gradually began to fade into nothing, one by one. There was a great agony of confusion. We no longer belonged anywhere. We wandered for years in darkness, looking for each other. We tried to reach people in your world, talk to you, but it was as though no one could see or hear us anymore.
You folks changed. Everyone began to look and act differently. Only rarely, on occasion, would someone be able to see us or recognize us. But by then so much time had passed and so many other events had happened that our world had been dismantled, disbanded. Some of us were still alive, still around, but there was no longer one place for us to go.
Along the way, I heard somewhere, I don’t remember where, rumblings that a new place had been created for those of us who were still left. Whether it was created by the same people, their children and grandchildren, or by one singular imagination that had not been around here before, I have never known. I’m hoping to find out – today, in fact.
There were rumors among my kind, those of us who could still be found, of a creature, a carrier – a white elephant. If you could find the elephant, it would carry you into that new place. There you could find out who was responsible for the place and why it had been created. Who it was, singular or plural, that had saved us from being irretrievably lost and forgotten.
Thus, I began to search for the elephant, so that it could carry me there. Only the white elephant knew where to find the passage through. I hunted high and low for years and years. And now, through you, I have found it.
*
Time to go, he said.
Can I go with you?
No. It’s not the right place for you. But you can visit. In fact, you will need to. However, you will have to find your own passage. You have a lot of searching and exploring to do.
Will I need the white elephant?
I don’t know the answer to that.
Will I ever see you again?
I don’t know the answer to that either.
And with that, the stranger turned on his heel and started off towards the lion. The wind threw leaves at his ankles and danced with the fringe of his overcoat. I watched his back as he walked away, in a state of wonder. Suddenly, he turned around again.
Oh. One more thing. Someday, I don’t know when, you will discover the courage to tell this story. As soon as you do, I tell you now, someone will be there to say it isn’t true. Don’t believe it. You know better.
He turned again and walked off.
When he got to the fountain, with the white trunk still flailing around, he positioned himself directly in front of the lion’s open maw. Out of nowhere, clouds rumbled thickly overhead. He did not touch the trunk, but it seemed to sense his presence. He leaned forward at the waist one more time and whispered something.
Then, very deliberately, he looked at me one final time. The elephant’s trunk slowly, painstakingly, encircled the man’s waist. The stranger removed the stovetop hat and tipped it in my direction. I held up my hand.
Next, in one shocking, rapid motion, defying everything I understood to be possible, the trunk simply whisked the man into the lion’s jaws. All of him. The hat, clutched in his long fingers, vanished last.
*
Last year, when I was having a hard time, I acted in opposition to my better judgment – it just sort of happened – and told this story aloud for the first time, to my former therapist. She listened closely, then nodded with a curt smile.
Well, she said.
Well what?
There’s obviously only one explanation for that.
Really. What is it?
Well, naturally. Your father was studying L.S.D.? Obviously you got into it somehow. Tell me, did he bring it home often? Was he an addict?
I feel sorry for her, truthfully. For such people will never understand. And it’s so simple. Unless you are willing to pursue the world within the wonder, the wonder within the world will never pursue you.
(c) 2010 by Jude Joseph Lovell
ALTHOUGH I have lived in a number of other places, my life began in the city of Chicago, in the shadow of elevated trains. My family left there when I was still young, and I have not often returned, so it feels inauthentic to identify myself as a Chicagoan. Yet, though a tree’s branches may sprawl out high and far, its roots stay put. So perhaps my trunk still remains, cooling in that same shadow.
Also, both of my parents were raised there. Their answer to the question Where are you from? has less ambiguity than mine. They were married in 1965 and set themselves up in an apartment on the west side in 1966, just as my big sister Sandra was born. I came along in 1970. Then we moved away, in 1977.
So, am I from Chicago or not? Beats me. But the question seems important, because Chicago, as I have seen, and as this story will show, is not a typical American city. It sits over another place, a kind of reservoir, like the mossy stones of an ancient well. I want to know if I can claim some of that magic history for my own. Perhaps telling the story now, as I have done only once before, will reveal the answer.
*
My mother used to take my sister and I on walks through the neighborhood around where we lived, west of the city. I know all those streets in my memory. They were arranged in perfect squares, lined with sidewalks, street lamps of gothic black metal, and huge oak and elm trees along either side that were old enough for their boughs to form church-like ribs over the cars that processed underneath.
Indeed, the whole neighborhood has a cathedral-like feel to me in retrospect. The sun would lance in downward shafts through those branches in bursts of illumination, as through stained glass. And each time you rounded a corner to walk up another straight-edged avenue it felt as though you were approaching a mystery.
She’d spent her entire life there, my mother, and she loved those streets with all her heart, all her mind, and all her soul. But even then I think she knew that she would soon depart from them and not return again but as a visitor. This may explain why it seems in my memory as though we were walking every single day, the three of us, but that can’t be true. Sandra would have been in school a lot of the time for one, being four years older than me. Plus for 50% of the year the weather wouldn’t have allowed it. Yet it seems like there were thousands of those walks – like it was all we did. I found out later that for a long time we only had one family car, so that could account for some of it.
Of course I have a father, but didn’t see him much: he was at work all the time in those days. I knew by then that he was a scientist. I remember being so proud of that, without even fully grasping what it meant. I knew he had to make heavy use of his brain, and I knew it was funny to mention that because the human brain was what he was studying. You have to use your brain to learn about your brain, he would say to me. What I had absolutely zero notion of at the time, of course, but found out decades later, was that he was a research chemist, and during those very years he was involved in a massive grant-funded study. The subject? The effects of L.S.D. on human cognitive processes.
He worked at the University of Chicago. The word I would use to describe him during that time is not Tall or Warm or Stern or even Intimidating. The word I would use is Gone.
*
Autumn, 1975. I think all we needed that day was milk. Or that’s all I can really remember, anyway. I don’t think it was a Saturday, yet Sandra was with us, so who knows. It might have been Columbus Day. It might have been one of those ‘teacher meetings’ days, where the parent doesn’t realize it’s coming up, in spite of repeated warnings, and finds themselves at home with all their children and no plan. On days like that, one way or another, you gotta get out of the house.
Either way my mother had resolved to take a walk with the two of us, and my father was customarily absent. Within walking distance of our house was a corner convenience store, and it was towards this destination that we embarked. It wasn’t a cold day, but in Chicago, autumn afternoons are chilly and windy enough to require some sort of parka. I didn’t need a lot of encouragement to wear my Bears jacket with the hood – my favorite item of clothing in the world. I never paid much attention to Sandra, but for whatever reason I remember that day she had two barrettes in her long and straight brown hair, parted down the middle; the barrettes had these red ribbons with colorful beads on them hanging down on either side. I can also see my mother as vividly in my mind’s eye as any of the other sights that have remained with me from that particular day.
She had thick, brown hair, wavy, cut to about shoulder length at the time. She had always been slight of frame, short, but her body seemed to exude energy; she was one of those rather small women that seem to compensate for their lack of physical presence with superhuman tirelessness and a form that was rarely at rest. She flounced along those concrete sidewalks at a clip I couldn’t keep up with.
The one thing I can visualize most clearly in hindsight is the poncho she wore. She kept it for years and years, but at that time it was new. My father had gone on a business trip to Mexico that year, and he had brought her home this handmade garment that she really seemed to adore. It had Technicolor autumn tones – red, brown, orange, yellow – in a wild tangle of crooked stripes. The poncho seemed wonderfully suited for that time of the year, draped over my mother’s frame to repel the strafing winds. It was like she had the season itself thrown protectively over her shoulders.
We set off briskly, and I settled into my well-worn retinue of hurdling the cracks in the sidewalk, beaning the lampposts with small stones, and picking up sticks in an infinite quest to locate the perfect sword. Sandra ambled ahead, at pains to put space between herself and her pipsqueak brother, lest she be spotted by one of her friends or even a remote acquaintance from school. My mother was jabbering, asking questions.
She spent a great deal of time with us already, but these walks seemed to be the times when she would make a concentrated effort to genuinely connect with us. Of course, at that time, it wasn’t her I longed to connect with, it was my father. She seemed to know that this wouldn’t happen, and perhaps the conversation she was always trying to engage us in came from her feelings about that.
What are you going to do with it when you find it? she asked that day.
Find what?
The right stick.
I’m not looking for the right stick. I’m looking for a sword.
When you find the right sword, then. What will you do with it?
Stab me, probably, Sandra offered from ahead.
I dunno. Cut things. It’s just a game I like to play sometimes.
How are things going with Miss Richlick? She shifted the subject, agonizingly, to my kindergarten teacher.
Good.
Do you like her?
Yeah. She’s nice.
Do you still like the reading unit?
Yeah. I got in trouble for reading ahead two chapters.
Well, not every child in the class reads as well as you do.
I know. I just wanted to know what would happen next.
Don’t we all.
*
It was called The White Hen. I never knew why, and didn’t become aware until sometime later that it was a chain and that more of them existed elsewhere. I thought there was only one, and that the name was a tangled mystery for me personally to unravel. But I never did.
I can see that white silhouetted figure on the lit up sign rising high above the corner, like some kind of sentry at the gates of the world of wild fowl. It was painted in profile, facing towards its left, my right, over the top of the store towards the back. It seemed to point the visitor towards the door. Who knew a hen could look so dignified? Weren’t they girls? This one struck me as a proud hen, and otherwise I never would have had much occasion to consider whether a hen had anything to be proud about. In fact I would never have taken hens into any consideration whatsoever, not being from a rural area. I hadn’t even known what a hen was before we started going to that store.
The White Hen faced a busy avenue, congested with heavy traffic no matter what time of day. But behind it was a different story. There was a small parking lot with a dumpster, and behind that, my all-time favorite outdoor spot: a playground. These days I get the feeling that every park is an elaborately engineered, exorbitant affair – with six or seven big lakes, a fitness trail, volleyball and tennis courts, lawn bowling lanes, parking for pregnant mothers, a place to land a helicopter, and so on. Back in the 70s, they seemed to be stuffed in wherever they would fit, no matter how illogical the spot. All you really needed was a set of monkey bars, a couple of swings, and a slide or two.
This park, which I considered my own personal stomping grounds – even though it was always overrun with kids, sometimes tough ones – had those things, as well as a tether ball pole, some of those metal horses mounted on thick springs that you could buck back and forth on, a see-saw, a steel merry-go-round that creaked agreeably as you rode it in circles, and a drinking fountain. I’ll get to that last item.
I can’t bring this park back from the annals of my memory without mentioning the steep grass hill behind it, the kind you could roll or sled down, as long as you didn’t climb all the way to the top. Because what was positioned on top of the hill was most definitely off-limits for children. My father had told me once to stay away from the tracks of the El train because of something he called ‘the third rail’. If you stepped on that particular rail you would get zapped by a massive bolt of electricity, like lightning, and probably die. This is why as long as we had been coming to this park I never really went close to the top of the hill. But I knew it was a stop on the El, because you could see and hear, of course, the trains speeding by as you rambled through the park below. Like most small boys, I never got tired of the spectacle of big metal cars whizzing by at dangerous speeds. They were a large part of why I loved that park in the first place.
I never knew what she did in there, aside from buying whatever it was we’d come for. Meet a neighbor? Talk to the guy behind the counter? Read the newspaper? Maybe even smoke a cigarette? But my mother always gave me time to play. Parental oversight, even though we were living on the outskirts of the third largest city in America, was a little more relaxed than it is today. When my sister was with us she would keep an eye on me, in an extremely half-ass manner, until my mom came back. Even if we didn’t have Sandra, my mom still sent me back there to run around. It wasn’t fenced in or anything, and God only knows who was coming through that park or what transactions were taking place. And yet, nothing untoward ever happened. To me, it was just a place for kids to play, with an El train stop on top of the hill.
From time to time a train would come to a screeching halt and disgorge a stream of weary-looking passengers, men and women with shopping bags and briefcases, dressed in nursing outfits, hard hats, suits and ties. They all seemed to get off in a hangdog manner and trudge off towards their separate homes without saying anything to one another. It seemed to me like the exact opposite of the way in which my friends and I disembarked from the school bus. It came across as a none-too-subtle discouragement from ever reaching the age of adulthood.
On the particular day I’m talking about – and in one sense, it’s the only one from my Chicago days worth remembering – we were dispatched to the back of the store as usual, and Sandra, none too pleased with anything happening that day and especially with the prospect of baby-sitting for me, grabbed my hood, yanked my neck and head back abusively, and growled, Don’t. Go. Anywhere. Meaning, stay in the park. I wriggled free from her grasp.
Release me, tyrant! I shouted, using a line I had come across in a book. Hadn’t she figured out yet that there was nowhere else I wanted to go? Sometimes Sandra was just plain dumb.
She then set out to separate herself from me, showing me her back, her long hair, and the clicking beads. I watched her go without misgivings. She’d post herself on a bench somewhere if she couldn’t find kids her age, and I was free to explore whatever I wanted.
I’ll admit that I was, and still am, a bit of a loner. Being by myself has never been troublesome. I ignored the other kids that were hanging around in that park whenever I visited. They usually seemed iffy anyway, as I alluded to earlier, and as far as I was concerned, there were better things to do than to get amoeba’d into one of those globules of city kids.
The reason why I loved going to that park behind The White Hen in the first place, though of course I would not have explained it this way at the time, was that it was an ideal grounds for both my body and my mind to run around simultaneously. Even back then, I loved having the space and time to let both of them romp around uninhibited. The playground seemed to provide the right backdrop for creativity and imagination to take over the helm of my existence, and I loved that about it.
There were countless props and triggers in the park that could generate make-believe scenarios. The monkey bars were a castle; the metal horses my cavalry; the tetherball tower a monolith; the sloping grass hill the untamed landscape that fell within my realm; the El train a cosmic transport, or a huge metal serpent, or a dragon; the disembarking passengers invading hordes.
And then there was the lion.
*
I never knew what it was about it, but I knew in the very bottom of my gut, from the first moment I set eyes on it, that there was something else to it. It wasn’t only an artificial lion, and it certainly wasn’t just a drinking fountain. Over the years since this well-remembered day I have wondered whose brainchild it was to make a large plastic or fiberglass lion’s head, paint it red for some reason with a brown mane and yellow eyes, and plop it over the top of a standard-issue city drinking fountain. So that in order to take a drink you had to approach the thing, stomp on a foot pedal sticking out from the base of the lion’s neck like an arrow, and then shove your head straight into the beast’s jaws. Oh, and if you were going to do it at all, you may as well make it the fiercest, meanest-looking fake lion imaginable, with oversized white teeth bearing down on the vulnerable flesh of a young child’s neck, and an aspect of eternal malice on its painted face.
Because today I happen to have small children myself, I know that at the age of five, or thereabouts, they’re getting big enough to read and explore and go to kindergarten and all of that, but they’re still young enough to have unrestrained terrors of certain things. The lion in that playground, for me, was such a terror. It was located to one side, fortunately, isolated in a kind of imaginary ring of doom, as though it had wandered in off of some killing plain in the realm I’d created and decided to station itself there to watch. One day, I was sure that the thing would simply come alive and attack, even though it was only a head and neck; it would attack disembodied, thereby making the inevitable about ten times scarier in my imagination.
Sandra released me from her clawed grip and wandered off, and I kept to the right side, avoiding the beast on my far left. I didn’t want to even look at it unless I had to. Eventually it might come to the point where I would require a drink, but I found that if I didn’t go too crazy in the time I had, especially during the fall, I could get by without one.
I don’t entirely remember what I did first. In my memory I see only a smattering of other kids there. Sandra, near the swings, had engaged in conversation with three boys that seemed to be older, but she was on her own on that score. Surely she would not want me to interfere, to start hacking protectively at the boys with that stick/sword I had never found……I think I sat for a while on the creaky merry-go-round, the cold metal no doubt freezing my buttcheeks right through the corduroys. But unless you have a grownup there or a bigger kid to set the thing to spinning, all you can really do is sit there, or maybe alter your position slightly with one of your feet. You may as well sit on one of the benches, or somewhere else……
Owing to that semi-contemplative side that I brought up before, I was capable of occupying myself longer than most kids simply by finding a quiet but interesting place to sit and mull things over. I don’t know if this made me an introvert or anti-social or what; if you put those questions to my wife today she would say Yes, and yes. To me, however, it just means I like to look and listen and think. It doesn’t feel anti-anything. Whatever you call it, this quality was as true of me at age five as it will be at fifty-five. That’s why it’s no surprise that I ended up seated about halfway up the sloping grass hill, towards the El stop, looking down at the park with my back towards the rails. The hill was steep enough that it gave you a kind of towering perspective, at least to my perception, and that was agreeable. It spoon-fed the imaginative process I so loved to engage.
Here sits the King, aloft on his Judgment Seat, surveying the breadth of his lands, when suddenly—
The lunatic screech of metallic brakes behind and above me shattered whatever waking dream I was having. I had my elbows on my knees, and was painstakingly pulling apart a dead maple leaf that crumbled to flakes in my chapped and dirty fingers when the train arrived. For some reason I hesitated before looking over my shoulder to see the train. I figured it was disgorging passengers into the autumn gusts, a displacement of moody people from one corner of the city to the next, like some depressing riff on cross-pollination. Yet I remained fixated on the destruction of the maple leaf. I can still see that desiccated thing in my fingertips, piffling away to nothing.
Then I heard the whistle blast, screaming out across the city, as the cars slowly propelled themselves forward, blue sparks crackling between wires, steel wheels grinding on the rails. No longer able to hold back, I turned around, over my right shoulder. I watched the train pulling away, but instead of the usual stream of melancholy workers heading towards parking lots or sidewalks, chased by the wind, I saw only one figure: a very tall man. But he was not walking away. Standing on the top of the slope, somehow on my side of the tracks, he was staring straight at me.
Once the train was completely gone, he stepped off in my direction down the hill.
*
A giant was coming down the grassy slope. I was riveted to the cold ground. I wanted to escape but I couldn’t stand. I turned my torso back around quickly to see if anyone else was observing his approach, but the number of kids had diminished even more by that point, and Sandra was still talking to the boys with her back to me. Not paying any attention. This guy could march right down the hill and abduct me for all she seemed to care.
Twisting back around so that I faced awkwardly up the slope again, I got a better view of the approaching figure. He was like no stranger I had ever encountered. Immensely tall, much more so than my father; I knew he had to have been over six feet. This man was very thin and seemed almost rubbery, to judge by his delicate, loping strides down the incline.
What he was wearing greatly contributed to how slender and how high his form seemed to reach into the air. On top of his narrow head was a vertical, black, stovetop hat, which I only recognized from having endured a little learning unit in my pre-K class on American presidents, mainly Washington and Abraham Lincoln. For the moment I thought the man was Abraham Lincoln, for after all, this was Illinois. Was he still alive? But that impression changed after I could see the man’s face a few moments later.
He also wore a body-length, tattered brown overcoat, cut like a suit jacket towards the top, with a high waist and wide lapels, but slowly broadening out towards the bottom like a dress. The hem was ringed with a mangy-looking fringe of what appeared to be some sort of animal fur. This coat extended all the way down to the man’s ankles, and billowed loosely around his feet as he walked, over black shoes that tapered to an almost sharp point. It looked like he had been wearing that coat for a very long time, like I was hoping to do with my Bears coat (sadly, I no longer fit into it less than three months later). I noticed that small circles of the same fur enclosed the wrists also, like fuzzy handcuffs.
The closer the man came to me the odder he looked, and the more terrified and simultaneously ossified I became. I saw that he wore a brightly colored vest underneath the coat, with rainbow stripes running lengthwise, buttoned up neatly; below that was a lavender shirt, believe it or not, with ruffles leading straight up to his cleanly shaven but chicken-like neck. I know nothing about fashion or clothing, but I did have a big sister who seemed to have an inexplicable fixation, as many girls do, with how well one article of clothing matches another. This guy clearly did not share the same weird proclivity. Even I could tell that the clothes he was wearing did nothing to complement each other. He looked both dapper and utterly ridiculous at the same time.
As he approached, and it was clear there would be no protective intervention from elsewhere, I found the courage to look up. When I did I encountered a face that could only be described as hatchet-shaped. It was like watching the blade-like hull of a warship drift brazenly into your personal space. Except for the man’s wild, jet-black, curled moustache, which one usually didn’t find underneath a ship’s figurehead. He had long, thin lips, which the moustache did not obscure, that when I first saw them were flattened broadly in a wide, inviting grin.
Time seemed to suspend, and the surrounding noises stopped, or maybe they all merged somehow into one steady tone, a chord, ringing out over everything. Yet I could also hear the wind, the ever-present wind, the perpetual rush of air. The giant-man seemed to descend the hill in three to four long, bow-legged strides. Suddenly he was standing right in front of me, still seated on the grassy slope, looking up the long, absurdly draped flagpole of him. The man bent down at the waist, his ship’s-prow nose and the bridge above it carving its way to the point that I almost thought it would ram into mine. It stopped just short, so that the man could inquire:
Boy, have you seen an elephant near here?
A wizard, I thought. A magician. The only possible explanation for who this man could be. My throat froze and my vocal chords flat-out vanished. I stared up at him. He waited. The man had wrinkled skin, parchment-like, but his eyes were the most unusual green-blue shade I had ever seen. They bore deeply into my own and dragged up from within me a memory, some moment when I had spied a shade of the exact same color. Then it came to me. A few months earlier my family had spent two days at a hotel right alongside Lake Michigan. This man’s eyes were the exact same color as the water, the way it looked from our hotel balcony. My mom had called Sandra and I out to look at it as the sun was falling one night. But I had forgotten about that.
The man still waited for my answer. I tried to remember what he had asked. My voice suddenly returned, sort of.
I’m not supposed to, you know, talk to people like you.
You’ve never met a person like me, said the man, leaning back to an upright stance. His voice was dry and wistful. He sounded old, but it was hard to tell exactly how old he might have been.
Well. People I don’t know, I said.
Yes, but we do it anyway, don’t we. Your sister’s doing it.
Yeah, but she’s not supposed to.
Don’t you want to know how I know she is your sister, boy? Aren’t you curious? The man dragged out that last word to twice its length, again drawing his face nearer to mine.
I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged my shoulders. He was starting to scare me, if you want to know the truth. He reminded me of something…..
The man leaned back again, standing upright.
Hmmm, he said. I hope you’re a more curious boy than that. I think you are a more curious boy than that. I think I’ve just startled you, is all. You haven’t seen me before.
I shook my head.
Yet I’ve been around for so long – right here in Chicago. A really, really long time.
Again I couldn’t think of a reply. I felt like had been there a long time too. But I was pretty sure he was talking about a longer period.
How long? I asked.
Too long.
Who are you?
Just a passenger.
But … but … what’s your name? What do I call you?
Oh, you know, said the man. How about Passenger. I’m James T. Passenger. And I’m at your service.
He suddenly reached up, plucked the stovetop hat off his cylindrical skull, and executed a long, graceful bow. It seemed like something he had done before, perhaps lots of times.
Oh. Okay. Well … I’m …
Not to worry, boy. I know who you are. Which is good, because I always will, after today, know who you are. More importantly, you will know me. There won’t be another day when you don’t.
I was not sure what was happening, for I felt intrigued and confused at the same time; scared out of my wits and yet enthralled. I did the only thing I could think, which was to twist around, stand up, and look for my mother. But she wasn’t there.
Ah. Thanks for reminding me, said the strange man. She’s not done yet, boy. But there’s not much time. So, have you seen one or not? He stepped up next to me, on the side of the hill.
Seen what? I almost whispered.
What was going to happen? For some reason, although I didn’t want to, I turned slowly to look at his face, where I found his eyes boring directly into mine once again.
An elephant. A huge, white, unmistakable elephant.
Around us, the kids that were still left kept right on playing. Sandra had finally moved away from, or more likely had been dismissed by, the older boys, and I could recognize her bunched over brooding posture from five miles off. She wasn’t even facing away from us anymore, but she was in her own world. She didn’t see either one of us on the hill.
I haven’t seen any elephants, I said. I don’t think they live around here. But I did see a lion.
I never did know why I said that. I knew the man wasn’t talking about an artificial elephant. That seemed clear. Yet, for whatever odd reason, he terrified me in the exact same way that lion did – the drinking fountain. I never felt that I was in physical danger. It was a terror more difficult to name, or to explain away. Like a dreadful anticipation of something you think may be coming, but you just aren’t sure of. Something that could happen, that maybe should have happened, but by some inconceivable calculus of chance and conditions, hasn’t happened yet.
In any case, as soon as I said that, the man’s lake-eyes widened, and for a moment that water, or at least the color of it, seemed to flood out over everything in the world. But then he was in front of me, dry, his face near to mine yet again, asking me a question in one drawn-out word:
Where?
I pointed past his upper arm to an area behind him, towards where that lion held its empty court, waiting patiently for victims. But I wouldn’t look at it. For my fear of that lion, and of James T. Passenger, had reached their apex, together, at that very moment. Whatever is happening here, thought I, it doesn’t include me, it has nothing to do with me.
But of course it had everything to do with me.
*
Next thing I knew, I was trying to make a getaway. I had my back turned to Passenger. In another instant I would have taken off at a sprint, forgetting my sister. But I was too slow, and the stranger’s long hand with its talon-like fingers outstretched had grabbed the hood of my Bears jacket. The very same way Sandra had! Could it be possible that she had cooked this guy up somehow, elaborately, to bump me off? If so, at the very least, Sandra was more inventive than I had previously given her credit for.
Are you sure you have not seen an elephant? asked the stranger.
The iron-like grip guided me, not particularly harshly, backwards, until I took the not-very-subtle hint and turned around. He stepped to one side, and there was the lion, the fountain, mostly at a profile to where we were stationed. But that was not all I saw. The breath flew right out of my lungs. For reaching out of the lion’s wide open jaws – slowly, waving around in the air, as though feeling for something not seen – was a massive white trunk. An elephant’s trunk.
*
I knew it, he was saying. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder lightly, protectively. Like a father’s.
As soon as I set eyes on you from the window of that train, I knew it. I don’t know how I knew, but there was something about you that told me instantly that you would be able to see. That you are one of those who can perceive what so many others cannot.
I stared at the elephant’s trunk, just waving around, from inside the drinking fountain. How could that be? How many times had I stuck my own head into those same jaws? Had I ever seen a hole, a tunnel … a passage? No. But my eyes were seeing, obviously, what this man’s were.
Yet, the other kids, the adults walking by … no one was making any noise, or saying anything. No one acted like the trunk was even visible! Let alone the weird-looking man towering over the innocent five-year-old on the side of the hill! It seemed as though only selected people could see these events. Where that left me was something I didn’t really have time to consider.
I could not remove my eyes from that waving appendage. Now that the shock of seeing it had sunk in a little, I wondered what the thing was doing, why it was sticking up out of there in the first place. What was it hoping to find? Where did it come from? Would it grab hold of, or injure, the next child that approached, looking for a drink?
I felt the man place one hand on either of my shoulders, so he could gently turn me away from that wildest of visions and talk to me face-to-face, mano a mano.
Boy, he said, leaning over so he could look at me closely once again, his eyes twinkling with a rejuvenated energy and excitement I hadn’t seen there before. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this. How long I have searched for it!
What is that thing? I asked.
An elephant. As I’ve been saying all along. I finally tracked it down. Or it tracked me down.
What’s it doing?
Looking for me, just as I am looking for it. Its job is to carry me across.
Across what?
I will try to tell you, he said.
*
You may not understand all of this now, but that’s okay.
Believe it or not – and I put it that way because it’s the truth, whether anyone believes it or whether they don’t – a long time ago, there were a lot of people around here that were like me. There was, right here in this city, a great big gathering of people from all over the world, with all kinds of events and exhibits, entertainments, tents, carnival rides, crazy inventions, food stands, even wild animals. People came from near and far to share their culture, their experiences, to see how other people lived, and, most importantly, to share stories. It was glorious. It lasted for weeks and weeks. So many people gathered together at once, interacting, sharing, learning from each other.
Along the way, while all this was happening, something took place. Something amazing! With so many people visiting it at once, so many cross-currents of stories, so much energy and information and memories together at one huge event, the city of Chicago created its own great big imaginary world – its own place that people could visit in their minds, in their hearts. It’s a little hard to explain. It’s as though everyone in the city combined their ideas and creativity together and came up with an alternate universe. Then they put a lot of things in that world: all kinds of people and animals and fantastic machines and vehicles. I am one of them – a man, yes, but constructed of the memories, ideas, and imaginings of a million different people. That’s why I seem so oddly assembled.
I stared at him, completely dumbfounded. Yes, I was having a tough time understanding. But then again, somewhere inside of me – this is a feeling I can remember so clearly, and that I have tried to recapture for my entire life – there was a small light glowing, gathering heat, trying hard to catch fire. In a way that I could not put a finger on yet, what he was saying made perfect sense.
For a while, the man continued, all of us, the creations of this city’s imagining, lived here, together. Adjacent to your world, but accessible to nearly everyone. Over time, though, something terrible took place. Other human events occurred, awful ones, which tore people’s minds away from the stories they’d created. There were wars, great crime waves, fires, bouts of destructive weather, political battles. It all led to one simple but devastating tragedy: the city began to forget. It became disconnected from its own experience. It lost its stories. And its humanity soon followed.
Those of us who were living in that sideshow world, the alternate place, became separated, and gradually began to fade into nothing, one by one. There was a great agony of confusion. We no longer belonged anywhere. We wandered for years in darkness, looking for each other. We tried to reach people in your world, talk to you, but it was as though no one could see or hear us anymore.
You folks changed. Everyone began to look and act differently. Only rarely, on occasion, would someone be able to see us or recognize us. But by then so much time had passed and so many other events had happened that our world had been dismantled, disbanded. Some of us were still alive, still around, but there was no longer one place for us to go.
Along the way, I heard somewhere, I don’t remember where, rumblings that a new place had been created for those of us who were still left. Whether it was created by the same people, their children and grandchildren, or by one singular imagination that had not been around here before, I have never known. I’m hoping to find out – today, in fact.
There were rumors among my kind, those of us who could still be found, of a creature, a carrier – a white elephant. If you could find the elephant, it would carry you into that new place. There you could find out who was responsible for the place and why it had been created. Who it was, singular or plural, that had saved us from being irretrievably lost and forgotten.
Thus, I began to search for the elephant, so that it could carry me there. Only the white elephant knew where to find the passage through. I hunted high and low for years and years. And now, through you, I have found it.
*
Time to go, he said.
Can I go with you?
No. It’s not the right place for you. But you can visit. In fact, you will need to. However, you will have to find your own passage. You have a lot of searching and exploring to do.
Will I need the white elephant?
I don’t know the answer to that.
Will I ever see you again?
I don’t know the answer to that either.
And with that, the stranger turned on his heel and started off towards the lion. The wind threw leaves at his ankles and danced with the fringe of his overcoat. I watched his back as he walked away, in a state of wonder. Suddenly, he turned around again.
Oh. One more thing. Someday, I don’t know when, you will discover the courage to tell this story. As soon as you do, I tell you now, someone will be there to say it isn’t true. Don’t believe it. You know better.
He turned again and walked off.
When he got to the fountain, with the white trunk still flailing around, he positioned himself directly in front of the lion’s open maw. Out of nowhere, clouds rumbled thickly overhead. He did not touch the trunk, but it seemed to sense his presence. He leaned forward at the waist one more time and whispered something.
Then, very deliberately, he looked at me one final time. The elephant’s trunk slowly, painstakingly, encircled the man’s waist. The stranger removed the stovetop hat and tipped it in my direction. I held up my hand.
Next, in one shocking, rapid motion, defying everything I understood to be possible, the trunk simply whisked the man into the lion’s jaws. All of him. The hat, clutched in his long fingers, vanished last.
*
Last year, when I was having a hard time, I acted in opposition to my better judgment – it just sort of happened – and told this story aloud for the first time, to my former therapist. She listened closely, then nodded with a curt smile.
Well, she said.
Well what?
There’s obviously only one explanation for that.
Really. What is it?
Well, naturally. Your father was studying L.S.D.? Obviously you got into it somehow. Tell me, did he bring it home often? Was he an addict?
I feel sorry for her, truthfully. For such people will never understand. And it’s so simple. Unless you are willing to pursue the world within the wonder, the wonder within the world will never pursue you.
(c) 2010 by Jude Joseph Lovell
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