"Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?"

Herman Melville (1870)
Oil Painting by Joseph Oriel Eaton

Perhaps all of my readers have read Herman Melville's most poignant story, Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street. If not, the story can be read online here - ironically, at "bartleby-dot-com - but what interests me is the story's penultimate paragraph, reproduced below, a sort of afterword, written in the aftermath of Bartleby's peculiar demise:

There would seem little need for proceeding further in this history. Imagination will readily supply the meagre recital of poor Bartleby's interment. But ere parting with the reader, let me say, that if this little narrative has sufficiently interested him, to awaken curiosity as to who Bartleby was, and what manner of life he led prior to the present narrator's making his acquaintance, I can only reply, that in such curiosity I fully share, but am wholly unable to gratify it. Yet here I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after the scrivener's decease. Upon what basis it rested, I could never ascertain; and hence, how true it is I cannot now tell. But inasmuch as this vague report has not been without a certain strange suggestive interest to me, however sad, it may prove the same with some others; and so I will briefly mention it. The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: - the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity: - he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

I wish to speculate on a puzzling sentence that Melville has his narrator offer:

"Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?"

I call this one sentence since Melville uses a small "d" in the word "does." At any rate, consider how one might answer Melville's question. I suspect that even with the utmost good will in all the world - indeed, in all the universe - no reader would imagine that "letters" sounds like "men"! For myself, I can scarcely conceive two words less alike! One's answer would thus have to be, "No, Mr. Melville, they sound nothing alike." What, then, is Melville up to? Possibly this:

"Dead 'mail'! does it not sound like dead 'male'?"

But perhaps "mail" was not used in the sense of "letters" in Melville's time? Oh, but it was! According to the OED, this sense goes back to at least 1654, and Melville's good friend Nathaniel Hawthorne used the word in this crucial sense in 1852, one year prior to Bartleby's publication in 1853, so Melville surely knew this usage. And just in case any ultra-skeptics would express doubt about the word "male" - its use with reference to "men" traces back to at least 1631.

I therefore humbly suggest that Melville had this unspoken pun "mail-male" in mind when he wrote, "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?" But why leave unspoken the pun in "Dead 'mail'! does it not sound like dead 'male'?" The query answers itself, for expressed, the pun is intolerable; unexpressed, it's brilliant!

Provisional "Introduction" for Presentation at Literary Festival in late September

Stamp of Approval
Google Images

From September 25 through 27, I'll be at a conference on "Literature and National Community," and I'll be speaking on "The United States and the Case of Stephen Vincent Benét."

Here's my provisional "Introduction":

I am informed that my presentation on "Literature and National Community . . . . will be representing the English speaking countries." That's a lot of countries, and I can probably only manage to represent myself, but since I'm American, I'll pretend to represent the United States. But what am I to say? I suppose I can start with Benedict Anderson's famous view of a nation: "In an anthropological spirit, . . . I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Limited, because there are other nations. Sovereign, because not under the rule of another nation. Community, because of a "deep, horizontal comradeship." And imagined, because members do not know most of their fellow-members, yet have a mental image of their communion (Anderson, 6-7). Where does this mental image come from? Partly, at least sometimes, from literature. Which brings me to my subject: Stephen Vincent Benét.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: 2006.

It's provisional because I'll be submitting it for approval late August . . .

Stephen Vincent Benét's Grave

Grave of Stephen Vincent Benét
Find a Grave
Photo supplied by Robert Rich

This webpage of Find a Grave offers viewers a few photos of Benét's grave, plus a brief but informative bio by "Iola" that tells me a few things I didn't know, including this:

A short story collection, 'Thirteen O'clock' published in 1937, included . . . one of his most famous stories, 'The Devil and Daniel Webster'. The story was later made into a play, an opera, and a film, the title becoming 'All That Money Can [Buy].'

Also, this information speaks to Benét's 'Americanism':

By 1940, Benét was a strong advocate of America's entry into WWII.

But the question is "Why?" For Europe's sake? Or America's?

Stephen Vincent Benét's Dark Moment of Optimism

By the Waters of Babylon
Google Images

Stephen Vincent Benét also wrote a post-apocalyptic short story, "By the Waters of Babylon (1937)," which I excerpt here, though I add a spoiler alert, for the two paragraphs below are the story's conclusion, in which a son tells his father what he has learned from his journey into manhood and priesthood:

I told and he listened. After that, I wished to tell all the people but he showed me otherwise. He said, "Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places." He was right - it is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.

Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now - there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken - but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods - the place newyork - not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others - the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.

The narrator has earlier explained that fire from the sky and a poisonous mist had destroyed the 'ancients' and their world. Much time has passed, and only a priestly class keeps some knowledge alive. The narrator, a young priest, tells of disobeying the law not to go east, but his discoveries convinced him that men must rebuild. His father, who listens to the tale, cautions him about revealing too much too soon, and the son sees the wisdom in his father's words. Note the subtle reference to the Tree of Knowledge in the words of the son: "in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast."

Oddly enough, even this dark story offers an example of Benét's 'Americanism.' The optimism that men can rebuild civilization is spoken by an 'American' . . . or, anyway, by a descendant of Americans. The title itself - "By the Waters of Babylon" (although a re-titling by Benét) - reminds the reader of the biblical line that follows, "we sat down and wept, for we remembered Zion," and just as Zion was rebuilt in the Old Testament, the New Zion known as "America" - the Shining City on a Hill, the Light unto the Nations - would be rebuilt.

Even in his darkest vision, Benét's "can-do optimism" is so very American.

Joan Shelley Rubin on Stephen Vincent Benét's 'Amercanism'

Joan Shelley Rubin
University of Rochester

In Songs of Ourselves (Harvard University Press, 2009), Joan Shelley Rubin describes Stephen Vincent Benét's 'Amercanism':

The most prominent and influential individual to make poetry a weapon to aid the Allies [against the fascist Axis powers in WWII] . . . was Stephen Vincent Benét . . . . When he arrived at Yale in 1915, Benét already thought of himself as a poet . . . . He evinced as well an earnestness about both his calling and his country: as his friend MacLeish later observed, "Steve was more conscious of being an American than any other man I ever knew" . . . . The critical reception of [Benét's 'Americanist' epic poem] John Brown's Body [thirteen years later] was decidedly mixed; a number of reviewers thought the poem uneven and overreaching. Nevertheless, it was among the best-selling nonfiction books of 1928 and the only sustained work of poetry to attain a wide popular audience in the early twentieth century. Although reviewers frequently compared Benét to Whitman because of their shared scope and subject, readers' responses to the poem, as Benét's biographer has pointed out, resembled the enthusiasm the public had shown for Longfellow. Edited by Benét's close friend from Yale, John Farrar, and published by the fledgling firm of Doubleday, Doran, the book sold 130,000 copies in the first two first two years after publication; even in the depths of the Depression, Americans bought an average of 6,000 copies a year at the volume's original price . . . . In sum, John Brown's Body reasserted the figure of the poet as both sage and intimate at a time when high modernism had eroded those roles for many American publishers and readers . . . . John Brown's Body also capitalized on the surge of interest in American culture during the 1920s, and particularly the Lincoln boom of the period. As countless fan letters of the period attest, various qualities of the text itself judiciously appealed to a range of readers: Benét acknowledged the suffering of both North and South, balanced depictions of "virile" action with passages of feminine emotion, and tempered modernist devices such as Eliotic allusions with old-fashioned narrative clarity. The result of all these factors that Benét's best-seller recentered poetry as an American medium suitable for transmitting an American message. John Brown's Body seemed especially susceptible to rereading. "I have no way of telling you the place in my life your [book] has found," a Texas man declared in a letter to Benét. "Let me say this - it is the book I pick up when I am frayed out, disgusted, exhausted - and it always brings back my balance." The response to the work by Benét's readers shaped his cultural function after 1940, as first the threat of fascism and then the outbreak of World War II engaged the country's attention. One concrete result of the persistent popularity of John Brown's Body was its issuance in 1943 in an Armed Services edition. In the wartime context, the principle of freedom from slavery for which Brown had sacrificed his life became the basis for battling the Nazis and Japanese. More generally, the consensus Benét had forged about the centrality of the Civil War for all Americans served as the foundation for his stance as champion of national unity to further the Allied cause. On the air and in print, Benét rallied his audience to hear a single message: American citizens must defend their democratic traditions against the enemies threatening their free way of life.

Among the writings in which Benét expressed that view were those reprinted in A Summons to the Free, a pamphlet in the series "America in a World at War" which Farrar and Rinehart published in 1941. The pamphlet, containing both prose and verse, concluded with Benét's "Nightmare at Noon," a poem that had first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in June 1940. The text depicts Nazi occupation of northern Europe and prods complacent Americans into envisioning what their own cities would be like if fascism prevailed. One passage succinctly reiterates the principle of civic nationalism: "You can be a Finn or a Dane and an American. / You can be German or French and an American, / Jew, Bohunk, Nigger, Mick - all the dirty names / We call each other - and yet American." Acknowledging that American ideals did not always correspond to reality, Benét nevertheless affirmed that "as a country, we try." Still an exemplar of balance - here between isolationists and left-wing ideologues - he thus earned praise from a reader who told him that she wanted to send copies of the text both to "every official in Washington" and to "careless-thinking young radicals" contemptuous of "the American way of living." (Rubin, Songs of Ourselves, pages 230-233)

The crucial point is this: "Benét's best-seller recentered poetry as an American medium suitable for transmitting an American message," and the message was one of national unity achieved through the democratic freedom to be an individual whose unique voice could be raised and heard.

There were obvious tensions in this message since some of those unique voices were the "careless-thinking young radicals" contemptuous of "the American way of living."

Chauncey Brewster Tinker - Inspiration to Stephen Vincent Benét?

Chauncey Brewster Tinker
Yale University Art Gallery

In his Foreword to Stephen Vincent Benét's juvenalia, Young Adventure: A Book of Poems (1918), published when Benét was merely 20, the professor of English literature at Yale and leading Boswell scholar Chauncey Brewster Tinker wrote the following words:

[Prior to the Great War,] we passed into a false freedom [in poetry] that had at its heart a repudiation of all law and standards, for a parallel to which one turns instinctively to certain recent developments in the political world. We may hope that the eager search for novelty of form and subject may have its influence in releasing us from our old bondage to the commonplace and in broadening the scope of poetry; but we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that it has at the same time completed that estrangement between the poet and the general public which has been developing for half a century. The great mass of the reading world, to whom the arts should minister, have now forgotten that poetry is a consolation in times of doubt and peril, a beacon, and "an ever-fixed mark" in a crazed and shifting world. Our poetry - and I am speaking in particular of American poetry - has been centrifugal; our poets have broken up into smaller and ever smaller groups. Individualism has triumphed.

In this collection of poems, Benét never once mentions America, but he was perhaps affected these words by Tinker, namely, that "[o]ur poetry - and I am speaking in particular of American poetry - has been centrifugal; our poets have broken up into smaller and ever smaller groups," for Benét went on in his more mature works to make an attempt at bringing the varied pieces of America together in a single vision, as we have already seen in his Invocation to John Brown's Body some ten years later, in 1928:

So, from a hundred visions, I make one,
And out of darkness build my mocking sun.

In adopting 'Americanism,' Benét set himself up for "some critics to label him an old-fashioned, quaint, and chauvinistic writer," as has been widely noted.

But Benét is broader than that, as we have seen and shall again see . . .

Stephen Vincent Benét: American Name?

Stephen Vincent Benét
Google Images

I'm still trying to pinpoint precisely what Stephen Vincent Benét's 'Americanism' consisted of, and where might one better look than at his 1927 poem "American Names":

American Names

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy's horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Are the most American names the odd ones derived from British English but given an oddball American twist? Not only. Consider John Brown's Body, published a year later (1928):

Call up the American names,
Kagi, the self-taught scholar, quiet and cool,
Stevens, the cashiered soldier, bawling his song,
Dangerfield Newby, the freed Scotch-mulatto,
Watson and Oliver Brown and all the hard-dying.

The name "Kagi" doesn't sound typically American, but the others certainly do. Or did. But what about Stephen Vincent Benét's own family name . . . did it sound 'American'? Was he overcompensating?

Invocation to Stephen Vincent Benét's Epic Poem John Brown's Body

Stamp Honoring Stephen Vincent Benét
Google Images

Note the allusion to the Civil War in the stamp's background - those marching African-American troops - an allusion also related to today's blog topic, which I foreshadowed yesterday with my promise to post the Invocation to Stephen Vincent Benét's epic poem John Brown's Body (1928), so here it is:

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land,

As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

Swift runner, never captured or subdued,
Seven-branched elk beside the mountain stream,
That half a hundred hunters have pursued
But never matched their bullets with the dream,

Where the great huntsmen failed, I set my sorry
And mortal snare for your immortal quarry.

You are the buffalo-ghost, the broncho-ghost
With dollar-silver in your saddle-horn,
The cowboys riding in from Painted Post,
The Indian arrow in the Indian corn,

And you are the clipped velvet of the lawns
Where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods,
The grey Maine rocks - and the war-painted dawns
That break above the Garden of the Gods.

The prairie-schooners crawling toward the ore
And the cheap car, parked by the station-door.

Where the skyscrapers lift their foggy plumes
Of stranded smoke out of a stony mouth
You are that high stone and its arrogant fumes,
And you are ruined gardens in the South

And bleak New England farms, so winter-white
Even their roofs look lonely, and the deep
The middle grainland where the wind of night
Is like all blind earth sighing in her sleep.

A friend, an enemy, a sacred hag
With two tied oceans in her medicine-bag.

They tried to fit you with an English song
And clip your speech into the English tale.
But, even from the first, the words went wrong,
The catbird pecked away the nightingale.

The homesick men begot high-cheekboned things
Whose wit was whittled with a different sound
And Thames and all the rivers of the kings
Ran into Mississippi and were drowned.

They planted England with a stubborn trust.
But the cleft dust was never English dust.

Stepchild of every exile from content
And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack
Shipped overseas to steal a continent
With neither shirts nor honor to their back.

Pimping grandee and rump-faced regicide,
Apple-cheeked younkers from a windmill-square,
Puritans stubborn as the nails of Pride,
Rakes from Versailles and thieves from County Clare,

The black-robed priests who broke their hearts in vain
To make you God and France or God and Spain.

These were your lovers in your buckskin-youth.
And each one married with a dream so proud
He never knew it could not be the truth
And that he coupled with a girl of cloud.

And now to see you is more difficult yet
Except as an immensity of wheel
Made up of wheels, oiled with inhuman sweat
And glittering with the heat of ladled steel.

All these you are, and each is partly you,
And none is false, and none is wholly true.

So how to see you as you really are,
So how to suck the pure, distillate, stored
Essence of essence from the hidden star
And make it pierce like a riposting sword.

For, as we hunt you down, you must escape
And we pursue a shadow of our own
That can be caught in a magician's cape
But has the flatness of a painted stone.

Never the running stag, the gull at wing,
The pure elixir, the American thing.

And yet, at moments when the mind was hot
With something fierier than joy or grief,
When each known spot was an eternal spot
And every leaf was an immortal leaf,

I think that I have seen you, not as one,
But clad in diverse semblances and powers,
Always the same, as light falls from the sun,
And always different, as the differing hours.

Yet, through each altered garment that you wore,
The naked body, shaking the heart's core.

All day the snow fell on that Eastern town
With its soft, pelting, little, endless sigh
Of infinite flakes that brought the tall sky down
Till I could put my hands in the white sky

And taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongue
And walk in such a changed and luminous light
As gods inhabit when the gods are young.
All day it fell. And when the gathered night

Was a blue shadow cast by a pale glow
I saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow.

And I have seen and heard you in the dry
Close-huddled furnace of the city street
When the parched moon was planted in the sky
And the limp air hung dead against the heat.

I saw you rise, red as that rusty plant,
Dizzied with lights, half-mad with senseless sound,
Enormous metal, shaking to the chant
Of a triphammer striking iron ground.

Enormous power, ugly to the fool,
And beautiful as a well-handled tool.

These, and the memory of that windy day
On the bare hills, beyond the last barbed wire,
When all the orange poppies bloomed one way
As if a breath would blow them into fire,

I keep forever, like the sea-lion's tusk
The broken sailor brings away to land,
But when he touches it, he smells the musk,
And the whole sea lies hollow in his hand.

So, from a hundred visions, I make one,
And out of darkness build my mocking sun.

And should that task seem fruitless in the eyes
Of those a different magic sets apart
To see through the ice-crystal of the wise
No nation but the nation that is Art,

Their words are just. But when the birchbark-call
Is shaken with the sound that hunters make
The moose comes plunging through the forest-wall
Although the rifle waits beside the lake.

Art has no nations - but the mortal sky
Lingers like gold in immortality.

This flesh was seeded from no foreign grain
But Pennsylvania and Kentucky wheat,
And it has soaked in California rain
And five years tempered in New England sleet

To strive at last, against an alien proof
And by the changes of an alien moon,
To build again that blue, American roof
Over a half-forgotten battle-tune

And call unsurely, from a haunted ground,
Armies of shadows and the shadow-sound.

In your Long House there is an attic-place
Full of dead epics and machines that rust,
And there, occasionally, with casual face,
You come awhile to stir the sleepy dust;

Neither in pride nor mercy, but in vast
Indifference at so many gifts unsought,
The yellowed satins, smelling of the past,
And all the loot the lucky pirates brought.

I only bring a cup of silver air,
Yet, in your casualness, receive it there.

Receive the dream too haughty for the breast,
Receive the words that should have walked as bold
As the storm walks along the mountain-crest
And are like beggars whining in the cold.

The maimed presumption, the unskilful skill,
The patchwork colors, fading from the first,
And all the fire that fretted at the will
With such a barren ecstasy of thirst.

Receive them all - and should you choose to touch them
With one slant ray of quick, American light,
Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,
Even the worst will glitter in the night.

If not - the dry bones littered by the way
May still point giants toward their golden prey.

Most of you probably didn't read the entire Invocation. I've had to read it three times to understand it. Basically, the poet calls upon the unnamed American muse - which he compares to a seven-branched elk, a buffalo-ghost, a broncho-ghost, a running stag, a gull at wing, and a mysterious bird of the snow, all of which he is actively pursuing, in effect, hunting - in hope that this muse will aid him, "So [that], from a hundred visions, I make one, / And out of darkness build my mocking sun." By "mocking," he doesn't mean that he is ridiculing the theme he has chosen. Rather, he means that he hopes to imitate the sun that lights "a hundred visions." Benét celebrates America's diversity, but he is no multiculturalist, for he seeks the completion of e pluribus unum ("Out of many, one"), not the division of ex uno, plures ("Out of one, many"). That's the sun that unifies the manifold visions.

Benét is not uncritical, for does refer to the European settlers as "Shipped overseas to steal a continent." And his poem is about slavery . . .

Back to Benét: References to America in John Brown's Body

Tragic Prelude (1938–1940)
John Steuart Curry
Wikipedia

I actually saw this mural when I visited Topeka, Kansas with Sun-Ae and my older brother way back around 1993. The image of a gigantic John Brown makes him to be a force of nature like the fiercely whirling tornado and the wildly raging fire in the painting's background.

Anyway, in line with my investigation into Stephen Vincent Benét's 'Americanism' for the upcoming conference on "Literature and National Community," I was wondering how many references there are to America in Benét's poem John Brown's Body, first from the "Invocation":

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land . . .

Never the running stag, the gull at wing,
The pure elixir, the American thing . . .

To strive at last, against an alien proof
And by the changes of an alien moon,
To build again that blue, American roof
Over a half -forgotten battle-tune . . .

Receive them all and should you choose to touch them
With one slant ray of quick, American light,
Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,
Even the worst will glitter in the night . . .

That's four references. Now from "Prelude: The Slaver":

His hand made the outflung motion of a sower
And the mate, staring, seemed to hear the slight
Patter of fallen seeds on fertile ground,
Black, shining seeds, robbed from a black king's storehouse,
Falling and falling on American earth
With light, inexorable patter and fall,
To strike, lie silent, quicken . . .

That's one reference. Several passages from the long poem itself:

The bearded faces look strange
In the old daguerreotypes: they should be the faces
Of prosperous, small-town people, good sons and fathers,
Good horse-shoe pitchers, good at plowing a field,
Good at swapping stories and good at praying,
American wheat, firm-rooted, good in the ear.
There is only one whose air seems out of the common,
Oliver Brown. That face has a masculine beauty
Somewhat like the face of Keats . . .

A Mr. Brua, one of Brown's prisoners,
Strolled out from the unguarded prison-room
Into the bullets, lifted Stevens up,
Carried him over to the old hotel
They called the Wager House, got a doctor for him,
And then strolled back to take his prisoner's place
With Colonel Washington and the scared rest.
I know no more than this of Mr. Brua
But he seems curiously American . . .

When the news of Beckham's death spread from bar to bar,
It was like putting loco-weed in the whiskey,
The mob came together at once, the American mob,
They mightn't be able to take Brown's last little fort
But there were two prisoners penned in the Wager House . . .

One need not weep romantic tears for them,
But when the last moonshiner buys his radio,
And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl
Is civilized with a mail-order dress,
Something will pass that was American
And all the movies will not bring it back . . .

Call up the American names,
Kagi, the self-taught scholar, quiet and cool,
Stevens, the cashiered soldier, bawling his song,
Dangerfield Newby, the freed Scotch-mulatto,
Watson and Oliver Brown and all the hard-dying . . .

Singing at night against the banjo-moon
That you will be a match for any song
Sung by old, populous nations in the past,
And stand like hills against the American sky,
And lay your black spear down by Roland's horn . . .

And with these things, bury the purple dream
Of the America we have not been . . .

That's seven references. Looks like twelve references all told. Not many, especially for an epic poem, but I was relying on a search function, which can miss a misspelling (I caught one that it missed). The call to the American muse is full of patriotic fervor, but many of the other instances of American references are neutral or even critical, as you can see in these passages even without a context.

I'll look more closely at the invocation tomorrow.

Basil Davenport on Stephen Vincent Benét's Americanism

Stephen Vincent Benét
Google Images

In the Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét, Volume One: Poetry (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1942), Basil Davenport writes in prefatory remarks of Benét's "Americanism":

Americanism is so much in fashion now that Benet's Americanism, for all its brilliance of technical achievement, its breadth of sympathy, and its depth of feeling, is apt, now that the intellectual climate of the day has caught up with it, to seem less remarkable than it is. It is worth remembering that when other young men of his age were writing rondeaux and villanelles and tales of far away and long ago, Benet was already turning the ballad to American themes; and that at the end of the tinsel twenties, when it was the fashion to say that American life was rootless, drab, and everywhere the same, Benet was already writing John Brown's Body, with its sensitive feeling for half a dozen countrysides and racial strains, and for the American wilderness and the old English songs that frame the exquisite idyll of Jack Ellyat and Melora Vilas . . . . There is no one to touch Benet in the variety and skill of his treatment of American themes; yet even his Americanism is only the outcome of something deeper. If he says, "Dear city of Cecrops," it is because that is the nearest earthly approach to the dear cry of God. He loves New York as the communal achievement of the spirit of man; he loves America because there every man can most freely become what God meant him to be . . . . When the free life of man is threatened by the cult of death, by those who deliberately make their souls eunuchs for the sake of the kingdoms of this earth, it is such a man who has both the surest guard against ultimate despair, and the most tragic sense of immediate peril. (pages xii-xiii)

I now see that I misunderstood a remark in an earlier post when I read that Benét's writing had sometimes been accused of "chauvinism or narrow nationalism" ("Stephen Benet: The Ultimate Objectives of Free Men are to be Discovered in their Arts and Letters," Life, April 5, 1943, page 22, column 3). I opined that, "The charge is immediately refuted, but in a time of National Socialism in Germany extolling Teutonic nationalism and Aryan racial superiority, the strong American patriotism of Benét perhaps needed some defense."

Actually, as I now see, Benét was more popular during WWII because of his Americanism, which Davenport believed helped mold those men who, "[w]hen the free life of man is threatened by the cult of death," have "both the surest guard against ultimate despair, and the most tragic sense of immediate peril." In other words, Benét's Americanism was the best antidote to the Nazis.

And in "radio broadcasts" of the early forties he inveighed "particularly against Nazis," especially in letters to "Adolf" but died in 1943, his job unfinished . . .

Companion to Literature on Stephen Vincent Benét

Amazon Books

In the Companion to Literature: Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story (edited by Abby H. P. Werlock Infobase Publishing, 2009), the entry on Stephen Vincent Benét says the following:

His work is characterized by his interest in FANTASY and American themes, including stories of American history, stories celebrating the country's ethnic and cultural diversity, and contemporary narratives. The patriotic and romantic themes of Benét's work (see ROMANTICISM) became less fashionable after his death and led some critics to label him an old-fashioned, quaint, and chauvinistic writer who wrote "formula stories" designed to appeal to mainstream readers. However, his use of fantasy and of American historical and folk events and his idealized, lyrical style created a subgenre of writing known as "the Benét short story" that continues to attract readers in the early 21st century. (pages 80b-81a)

We see that his "patriotic . . . themes" get him labeled a "chauvinistic writer," but the anonymous author of this entry does not seem to agree.

Michael Kammen on Stephen Vincent Benét's "chauvinism"

Michael Kammen
Google Images

In Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), Michael Kammen offers a passage on collectors of Americana that might shed light on what led some critics to charge Stephen Vincent Benét with a "narrow nationalism":

If we ask why these people collected, the answers are even more diverse than what they sought to possess. Begin with the most obvious reason, sheer love of country: old-fashioned patriotism that often verged upon chest-thumping chauvinism. We find it, for example, in a fascinating "open letter" to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., written by the editor of The Americana Collector. It is an unabashed appeal for the creation of a Rockefeller Foundation of Bibliographical and Historical Research because "such an institution would become one of our richest assets for a patriotic people. Our heritage from the heroic past must be preserved as continued guidance and inspiration to ourselves and to all mankind." The same spirit animated one of Stephen Vincent Benét's most striking ballads, written in 1927, "American Names." It opens with the line "I have fallen in love with American names," and the fourth stanza contains both the geographical range desired and the nemesis being rejected:

I will fall in love with a Salem tree.
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea.
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

One can see why some of Benét's works were criticized for their "narrow nationalism," though today's critics would more likely be disturbed by the fourth line of the fourth stanza. But Benét probably spoke as a man of his era in his use of the N-word, and the context makes clear that he was was praising the blues singer (though this doesn't efface the offence), precisely as he was extolling the "Salem tree," the "rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz," and the "bottle of Boston sea."

This makes twice now in my research, by the way, that Benét has suggested the superiority of the American muse.

Stephen Vincent Benét's "chauvinism or narrow nationalism"?

Daniel Webster

Wikipedia

In the April 5, 1943 issue of Life magazine's editorial on the recent death - March 13, 1943 - of Stephen Vincent Benét, "Stephen Benet: The Ultimate Objectives of Free Men are to be Discovered in their Arts and Letters," is found an admission that "[b]ecause of his strong American utterance, Steve Benét has sometimes been accused of chauvinism or narrow nationalism" (page 22, column 3). The charge is immediately refuted, but in a time of National Socialism in Germany extolling Teutonic nationalism and Aryan racial superiority, the strong American patriotism of Benét perhaps needed some defense. He had, after all, opened his epic poem John Brown's Body (1928) with an invocation to the "American muse":

American muse, whose strong and diverse heart
So many men have tried to understand
But only made it smaller with their art,
Because you are as various as your land . . .

And his 1937 novella The Devil and Daniel Webster, Benét has the famous senator, orator, and lawyer Daniel Webster defend a New Hampshire farmer who had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for good luck. In the course of an argument between Webster and the devil, the latter insists that he himself is American, at which point Webster persuades the devil to let his client have a trial by jury:

"I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

"The case is hardly one for an ordinary court," said the stranger, his eyes flickering. "And, indeed, the lateness of the hour-"

"Let it be any court you choose, so it is an American judge and an American jury!" said Dan'l Webster in his pride. "Let it be the quick or the dead; I'll abide the issue!"

The devil agrees to the conditions, but fills the American jury with traitors, criminals, and other unsavory men nursing a grudge against America. Webster, however, rises to the challenge:

He started off in a low voice, though you could hear every word. They say he could call on the harps of the blessed when he chose. And this was just as simple and easy as a man could talk. But he didn't start out by condemning or reviling. He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man.

And he began with the simple things that everybody's known and felt - the freshness of a fine morning when you're young, and the taste of food when you're hungry, and the new day that's every day when you're a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man. But without freedom, they sickened. And when he talked of those enslaved, and the sorrows of slavery, his voice got like a big bell. He talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days. It wasn't a spread-eagle speech, but he made you see it. He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.

Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was an ordinary man who'd had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he'd wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it - it took a man to do that.

And by his eloquence and gentle manner, Webster reminded those twelve damned men of their innocent childhoods in what came to be America, and of the mistakes that men make, and he even succeeded in getting Stone released from the conditions of his contract with the devil - all by reminding men of what being free Americans felt like, even if the twelve had gone on to err in their adulthood.

From these passages I've quoted, I wouldn't call Benét's nationalism "chauvinism or narrow nationalism," though it is an American-centered nationalism . . .

Stephen Vincent Benét: National Literature?

Stephen Vincent Benét

Wikipedia

I am scheduled to give a talk of 15 to 20 minutes about "literature and the national community" on September 26th, so I'm thinking about some of the influences of American literature on my own writing, for example, a story about the devil by Stephen Vincent Benét. In Jackson J. Benson's book Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work, we find a remark about Benét:

Benet (author of John Brown's Body, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Listen to the People) was interested in native materials and the importance of bringing forth (as Emerson had advocated a century earlier) a uniquely national literature divorced from the influences of Europe. (Benson, pages 64-65)

The so-called "influences of Europe" alludes to a long-held American belief that Europe was corrupt and corrupting. The story titled "The Devil and Daniel Webster" was about powerful patriotism, a strong love of country, so strong that it could even defeat the devil. Of this powerful patriotism, John Griffith - writing the entry on "Stephen Vincent Benét, 1898–1943" for The Poetry Foundation - informs us:

From his earliest years, Benét developed a taste for romantic, melodramatic, and heroic fiction and poetry, a sympathetic observer's interest in America's regional cultures, and an old-fashioned devotion to domestic and patriotic values[,] . . . . his patriotic love of the United States . . . [stemming from his appreciation of America's] vital complex of culturally distinct regions and heritages."

I'll have to give this issue a lot more thought, perhaps by looking back at Emerson's call for a national literature . . .

Carter Kaplan on Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

My friend Carter Kaplan recently sent me a copy of his International Authors (IA) edition of The Scarlet Letter, and it arrived more quickly than expected. Most of you will have heard of but not (yet) read Hawthorne's famous novel on the trials and tribulations of an adulterous woman in Puritan New England, and you probably know that the scarlet letter of the title is an "A" that stands for "adulteress." Or does it? This IA edition has a ninety-page afterword by Kaplan himself, titled, "'A' is for Antinomian: Theology and Politics in The Scarlet Letter." It begins as follows:

While it feels natural to read The Scarlet Letter as an expression of modern secular sensibility, the novel also provides evidence of political and theological concerns that resonate deeply with a radical "post-Calvinist" Protestant nexus construed along the lines of Socinus, Arminius, Cromwell, Milton, Locke, various Independent American churchmen (and women) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Thomas Jefferson. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Act of Religious Freedom, The Scarlet Letter stands on the shoulders of well-evolved political and theological discussions advancing a range of independent notions concerning human nature, individualism, community, open public disclosure, the "real" authority of law, separation of government institutions and powers, and the separation of church and state. An examination of these ideas as they existed in England and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century -- especially the 1640s, the time of the novel's setting -- brings to light the novel's complex philosophical dynamics, which resonate with the anthropological and political understanding that attends skeptical-empirical science and analytic philosophy. As a phenomenon of intellectual history, The Scarlet Letter represents an important formulation of the classic liberal ideas that mark the emergence of the modern world. (p. 230)

One might be taken aback at the assertion about "skeptical-empirical science and analytic philosophy" -- what's a novel about religious obscurantism got to do with science and logic? -- but Carter's essay is full of human understanding and sharp analysis, as I know from proofing an earlier version. I even contributed some ideas, which Carter notes:

Horace Jeffery Hodges has suggested some intriguing possibilities for the symbology of the letter A: "It's the alpha awaiting its omega in the end. It's Arminius, always offering grace to our free choice. It's amiability, opposed to Chillingworth. It's grade 'A' because Hester's really a good egg." (p. 324, n. 51)

I hope that all readers realize my suggestions are meant tongue-in-cheek! But not everyone will catch the dry humor, so I have to be explicit, I suppose. In short, I'm joking about the letter "A."

Anyway, readers who love American literature would benefit from reading Carter's serious essay on the intellectual history behind this novel, for there is much to think about -- and much, indeed, that goes rather far beyond American literature, e.g., this remark defending Locke:

[John] Locke has . . . been identified as part of a larger Enlightenment straw man that is the target of those seeking to advance the authoritarian agenda of Continental philosophy, which as a program, in anthropological terms, seems to be the logical systemic outcome of an increasingly corporate, nihilistic and authoritarian Academy.

On that note, let's segue to the quintessential song of American exceptionalism . . .

Appreciative Note from a Student: Research on Jean Webster

Daddy Longlegs

Wikipedia

I sometimes receive notes of appreciation from my Korean students. Such appreciation always goes beyond what I deserve, but it occasionally verges on the metaphysical. One student, who wrote a research paper during the Fall 2011 Semester on Jean Webster's famous novel Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), left me the following note just yesterday:

You are the first one [i.e., instructor] I'm writing to. First of all I want to express my gratitude to you. I really appreciate you. I owe you so much. You greatly helped me when I was goofing around from the first of the semester. I couldn't narrow down the right topic, I didn't know how to write a thesis statement, a proposal, works cited and I never knew how to google something to find information. Then you helped me to go through everything from A to Z. You told me how to come up with a specific topic, how to build a structure, how to google the resources, and how much I was surprised when you suddenly approached me and said "Spiderman: Daddy-Long-Legs as Ambiguous Benefactor -- that's your title."

That title always showed me the right direction when I was in a maze. While I was writing the thesis overtime [i.e., over time?], I couldn't help but think you Jeffery Hodges was [sic., "were"] ambiguous. Your first impression was scary somewhat, your eyes were so bright and straight like a pair of laser shots, you weren't sugar-coated, you weren't so funny but as time went by you turned out to be sooooooo generous daddy [sic., "such a generous 'daddy'"], always willing to help students, and sometimes even funny too! I believe you are also an ambiguous teacher. Are you Daddy-Long-Legs? You are NOT a spider and you are NOT strange Jervis Pendleton. Now I draw up a conclusion: you are an angel with a pair of laser shots . . .

Again, thank you very very much for teaching me academic writing. Now I have my own thesis. Actually I revised it a bit more and want to give it to you . . . .

Did I tell you I'll be an exchange student in State University of New York at Stony Brook this year? My adventure continues. I'm thrilled. Wish me luck.

After I come back to Ewha, I'd love to take [another of] your . . . class[es].

Thank you so much . . . .

An "angel"? Maybe a fallen one, but that gets us into Milton's territory, and we'd best stick to Jean Webster. Her novel -- in case you're unfamiliar with it -- is about an orphan girl (Jerusha "Judy" Abbott) who is given a college scholarship by an secretive benefactor (Jervis Pendleton), whom she calls "Daddy-Long-Legs" because she happened to glimpse his long-legged shadow. That's the reason offered by Jerusha, anyway, but I suggested to my student that this nickname might signify Jerusha's sense of an "ambiguity" in the benefactor's character since the nickname calls up an image of the identically named spider-like creature, spiders being the scary stuff of nightmares even if the arachnid known as daddy longlegs is less frightening in appearance than a true spider, and was sometimes considered beneficial by children (e.g., the game "Daddy Longlegs, Daddy Longlegs, where are the cows . . .").

Anyway, to assist in the search for secondary literature that might support an ambiguous reading of the novel, I directed the student to feminist articles, which I didn't doubt would supply more-than-adequate critiques of such a controlling figure as Daddy-Long-Legs. Those critical readings, combined with recognition of the benefactor's acts of generosity, filled in the details needed as evidence for an ambiguous reading -- and possibly a contribution to the critical literature on this novel.

LeRoy Tucker, Climax I: Cotton on the Rocks Press Release

Press Release

Climax I: Cotton on the Rocks

LeRoy Tucker

Mr. LeRoy Tucker sent me the following press release for Climax I: Cotton on the Rocks, so I suppose his book is now officially available. Readers of this blog might be able to click on that image above to enlarge for readability, but I've reproduced a slightly edited version of the document below for easiest convenience:

Lives Unfold In Climax

New book presents a collection of stories that capture the flavor of earlier times and events that happened in a small southern town over a period of thirty years.

Xlibris, the print-on-demand self publishing services provider, announced today the release of Climax I: Cotton on the Rocks. Authored by L. "Tuck" Tucker, this book presents thirteen short stories all connected and all reflect unusual circumstances including incest, murder, humor and more all occurring in the remote village of Climax, Arkansas over a period of thirty years.

Climax I Cotton on the Rocks, presents thirteen short stories and a mixed lot of twenty pieces of hill lore including hill humor, pathos, joy and sorrow, gardening and hunting the old way.

It opens with "The Farrar Incident" in which Sheriff Alfred "Bulldog" Martin is challenged as he deals with the knotty problems resulting from a murder that disturbed the community and tries the sheriff's ethics as never before.

This work is united along one theme, the community of Climax, Arkansas, a community of poor hardscrabble people joined together in common, making a living from the poor rocky and gravely soil of the fictional La Clair County. Inevitably there arise combinations of circumstances resulting in stories that are sometimes funny, sometimes strange, and stories that are merely humorous, like "The Electric Chicken," and stories that have it all including mystery, like "Hoops." Even one story about an overzealous preacher and self mutilation and a poignant little love story, "Cadillac Pie" that will stir the hardest of hearts.

With just the right blend of mystery, humor, adventure and wit, Climax I: Cotton on the Rocks captivate and shock readers with the raw earthiness, with the wit and with its variety and surprises with every turn of the page. For more information on this book, interested parties may log on to Xlibris.

About the Author

L. "Tuck" Tucker was born Jan 7 1931 in Fulton County, Arkansas, hill country where the great depression lasted on into the early fifties. He started grade school at age five in California's central valley, "a grapes of wrath experience," he jokingly explains. Later, he attended school in Texas where he delivered the Texarkana Gazette and The Dallas Morning News. At the war's end, the family returned to the hills, where Tuck finished high school and was soon married to his high school sweetheart Patsy Sutherland.

Tuck says, "I really never gave college a thought." He was employed by GM two times as an hourly employee. After ten years service, he entered management and completed thirty years of service and retired in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where he managed a Parts Distribution Center. "I write for fun," he laughs, "never learned grammar. Like a country picker, I do it by ear." Humor comes naturally to Tuck. "I have achieved more failures than most men have held jobs," he claims.

He is a former marine, drafted in 1952 and was inducted in Little Rock along with seven other draftees and one volunteer and marine regular, a youngster named Charles Portis who was the man in charge during the boozy three-day train ride to the marine base in San Diego and who later wrote the great classic True Grit and other fine novels.

Tuck now lives in Jonesboro, Arkansas with his wife of sixty-one years. They have three daughters and many grandchildren.

That "sixty-one years" refers to the length of LeRoy's happy and successful marriage to his charming, lovely, and intelligent wife Patsy, whom I met last summer when the two of them visited me in Salem, Arkansas during my return to the Ozarks for a few weeks in August.

Anyway, I strongly recommend Tucker's book. You can find a bit more information online here, a slightly different version of this press release. Or you can order here.

For those who need the proof of the pudding, I've offered a preview from the story "Rolland Burdick" here.

LeRoy Tucker: Climax 1: Cotton on the Rocks

Climax 1: Cotton on the Rocks

LeRoy "Tuck" Tucker

(Image Used by Permission)

LeRoy Tucker's first set of Climax stories is now on the book market and looks something like the mock-up cover depicted above. As can dimly be seen, a blurb by yours truly appears on the back:

I still remember my reaction when I first read some of these stories online: "I have stumbled across a genius named LeRoy Tucker." I had been searching for information on the Ozarks and stumbled across Mr. Tucker's blog, Folk Liar of the Ozarks. When I looked more closely, I realized what an authentic treasure I'd discovered. This self-proclaimed 'folkliarist' writes with a gifted literary hand, captures the Ozark dialect that was already fading in my childhood, and has a gift for storytelling like the one ascribed to one of his more memorable minor characters, the preacher Az Bronson:

"Ole Az can start spinnin' out another'n now. It's the beatenist thing. Most preachers has about a half a dozen sermons, an' that's all they needs. Ole Az, he jest starts talkin' . . . . Sermons jest rolls out of Ole Az like mule turds rolls down a steep hill."

Like Az with his sermons, Mr. Tucker gets one story after another rolling down a slippery slope. The reader is in for a wild but enjoyable ride.

The publishers not only reveal my name, but even my 'horsepower' (as Mr. Tucker calls my PhD), though I'm not sure that these will actually help sell any books. What will sell them is Mr. Tucker's own excellent writing, of which you can be reminded -- or first become aware -- by reading the selection below from the story "Rolland Burdick," which features the characters Sheriff "Bulldog" Martin, Doctor "Doc" Clift, and Johnny "Frog" Robbins and which also supplied the above quote concerning "Ole Az," a 'scoundrelous' Ozark preacher in the great state of Arkansas:

"Damn!" exclaimed Bulldog. "There is ole cussin' Rolland Burdick, at church. I saw his team tied in front of the courthouse last night."

"That's right," said Frog. "He took a load of ties off yesterday. You don't suppose he got religion over in Hardy? That don't hardly seem possible. Quiten' cussin' will spile his personality. He won't be his self no more. I reserves my opinion. Us give this a little time. They is somethin’ unnatural about it."

"He pays his debts. Not in money if he can 'void it, in whiskey, an' he makes the best homemade I've ever found. I hope he don't ketch too bad a case. Whiskey makin' is an art. Not many of 'em ever learn how to do it right," observed B.D.

"Rolland might quit for a little while if he takes up with them Campbellites," said Frog. "Mor'n half them fellers keeps a gallon in the barn. No, they'll need ole cussin' Rolland jest as bad atter they take him to the pond. Hit'll be alright."

"Jest fer a while, 'splain that?" said B.D.

"Hit takes a while fer a Campbellite to do his 'prentiseship. At first he would be jest a learner without none of the rights an' privileges that goes with the position. At first his job is to be peaceful and quiet, observin' and learnin' how it's done an if he don't let his mind wander too bad he won't have to go home nekkid more'n a couple or three times 'fore he gits aholt of it an' then he can start bein' a good Campbellite like all the others 'cept the real old ones or the ones that's sick and skeered."

"Well now," said the doctor, "it seems like you have given this a good deal of thought, more than I have to be sure. You lost me there somewhere about the going home naked part."

"First a new Campbellite has to learn how to forgive the Campbellite way. The way they sees things is that anything's fair. Cheatin' on Sunday afternoon is risky, the riskiest part of the whole week to swap a feller out of ever thing, includin' even his last pair of overalls. Sinnin' on a Sunday after church is the riskiest time they is. The safest time would be on a Sunday mornin' jest before Sunday school takes up. Pint is that ever Sunday they gets together and forgives each other. Whether a feller needs it or not he gits forgave. Timin' is important. Hit's a matter of exposure. When a Campbellite is tradin', the farther he is from Sunday the dangerouser it is. Late Saturday or early on a Sunday is best 'cause they ain't too much exposure 'fore he gits forgave again. You have to be a Campbellite to plumb understand it. That's the best I can do."

"And that's all there is to it Frog?"

"They is more but that is the big one. They sings hymns an' they have the pursue'nst preachers of any. Preachers talks about Jesus and hell an' heaven while the older more 'sperienced Campbellites sets an' plots out the week's business 'cause the forgivin' part is already done over with."

"Doctor Clift, Frog here ain't got much use for that perticuler brand of Christian. He might be a little harsh on 'em," joked B.D.

"No Sheriff, that ain't right. I done considered my own personal prejudices an 'lowed fer that. Doc, is them Campbellites good pay?"

"Frog, you know I can't talk about that."

"I rest'es my case," said Frog. Then he asked, "Have you fellers noticed how that little Baysinger gal has growed lately?"

"I noticed that you noticed an' I doubt the preacher will overlook it," said Bulldog. "An' most of the young fellers that's more in her age bracket. The doctor here, he don't never lust. He sees ever thing in a purely professional, clinical sense. Ain't that right Doc?"

"That's true as a general thing," said the doctor, "but I'm no eunuch. But Johnny, how does a man become so prejudiced? I know most of those folks. Your narrow minded assessment don't fit'em. If you're serious you are the most prejudiced guy I've ever known and then some, so tell me."

"Hit's the levity of it. The Campbellites is the one's havin' a meetin' right now. You ortn't to believe me when I'm jest jokin'."

"And you ortn't to use words like levity either, not here in Climax anyway. Folks will lose their confidence in you."

"Folks ain't here. Ain't nobody here but jest us. Us bein' the three most pusillanimous, oh pardon me, Doc, scoundrels in Climax. That's right though; I ort to be keerfuller. I'll tell you fellers sumthin' else. By the time this meetin' is over ole Preacher Bronson will have the dimensions of ever purty Campbellite woman in Climax set so solid in his mind that he could ride a wind broke mule all the way to Texas and pick out a new frock fer ever one of 'em. Ole Az got a eye fer the ladies. I don’t hold that agin' him much. I'm kind'er jealous, that's all. It seems to me like he is in the wrong trade fer a feller which is disposed like that."

"Frog, preachers don't pick their trade like other fellers," observed Bulldog. "Preachers jest wakes up one mornin' with a hard on, cravin' fried chicken. They ain't in control of their own fate, as the feller said."

"What can we do to keep Rolland making at least a little whiskey?" asked Dr. Clift.

"Does he like you or does he owe you?" asked Bulldog."

"Both I hope."

"I see. He owes you. Rolland don't like nobody, but he pays what he owes, with whiskey if he can. He makes maybe fifty gallon a year. He drinks about a gallon a month. He don't exactly sell none. Rolland trades where he can pay with whiskey. If he goes Campbellite, they ain't no tellin' fer shore but my feelin' is he'll keep right on makin' about fifty gallon ever winter. Rolland saves. He saves ever dime he can. He don’t like to swap money for anything. Tradin' with reg'lar money nearly makes him go to bed, sick. He would have to use money to buy sugar to make whiskey an' he jest cain't do that. He makes his'n out of jest corn that a'course he grows his self. He is the only one we got like that. All the other'ns makes jest sugar, rot gut. He ort to make a good Campbellite though. I doubt he'll go home nekkid even once. Them Campbellites better watch their own britches. They done met their match. Anyway, all of 'em are gathered up in the buildin'. Ole Az can start spinnin' out another'n now. It's the beat'nist thing. Most preachers has about a half a dozen sermons an' that's all they needs. He jest starts talking.' without no idie what he's goin' to say. Sermons jest rolls out of ole Az like mule turds rolls down a steep hill.

There. If that lyin' don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansas!

UPDATE: Some folks were asking about how to order a copy, so I found the publisher's site: Xlibris.

Saddle Store Redux: More on LeRoy Tucker's "Cadillac Pie"

Saddle Store in the 1980s

(Image from Folk Liar of the Ozarks)

In my Ozark Mountain post for the last day of February, I showed a borrowed newspaper photograph of Saddle Store but implicitly lamented the tiny picture. Perhaps Mr. LeRoy Tucker noticed this, for he has posted not just one, but even two photos of this store in Saddle, Arkansas, the factual site of his fictional story "Cadillac Pie," along with some images of the dam at the mill pond fed by springs that offer a cold, inviting pool of water for the protagonist Winfield to dive into on a hot day and lose his heart:

Leaving a window slightly open to avoid the gathering of heat he carried his bathing suit the second story of the gin where uncertain of the privacy, he sought out a dark corner and changed hurriedly. Standing at the opening of the window he gathered his courage and leapt full into the water twelve feet below.

It took his breath. He had tried to steel himself against the shock but the terrific change simply could not be anticipated. "I've swam here dozens of times, maybe hundreds," he reminded himself, "but you just can't remember what it's like -- "you just cannot remember it," he thought as he surfaced gasping, treading water waiting, adjusting to the change and then he saw her. She was sitting on the dam smiling at him.

"It's a shock," she said, "but it's great when you get used to it."

"I know, I growed up here, I'm Winfield," he answered, adding "but dang it's a shock at first." He was treading water and starting to breathe normally. And it was then that her beauty struck him. Her face was perfect. She was smiling, the warmest, friendliest smile he had ever seen. At that instant something struck Winfield and somehow he knew that his life had changed permanently, forever. Her modest swimsuit was high and unrevealing but he couldn't help observing that she was shapely even though her lower body and legs were under water, distorted by the waves generated by the swimmers.

"I'm Doris," she said, "Doris Sutherland, I remember you now. I don't suppose that you remember me." She added knowingly, "I was little then -- before you went off to work I mean."

He knew that ordinarily the sound of her voice would be drowned by the noise of the falling water, "but I can hear her, that ain't natural," and he knew that her voice was soft and subdued but mysteriously he heard every word clearly, perfectly and he felt magic in the very air and there was the glow of a sensational wish for the impossible, he wished that magic, for that moment to last forever. He heard the always before unnoticed sounds of birds in the marsh upstream and the sound of the playful children. And he was suddenly aware of a painful aching longing and of one thought almost discernable, "I'm lost, I like it, I don’t even care."

That was the end of Mr. Tucker's first post on the story at his literary blog, Folk Liar of the Ozarks. For readers interested in the entire story, go here. If you do read the entire story, you'll notice that I've very slightly edited the passage quoted above, mostly to distinguish the speakers clearly, for I think that in Mr. Tucker's copying and pasting his story from a computer document, some of the paragraph divisions were lost.

But not as lost as Winfield's heart . . .

Requiem for John Updike

John Updike's Proleptic Demise

(Image from Slate, by Elliott Erwitt)

John Updike died the other day at 76, and I've been wondering what to say, but as I see from Wednesday's New York Times, he put the words best in a recent poem soon to be officially published in Endpoint and Other Poems:

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise -- depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

Perhaps thinking of this posthumously appearing poem, Verlyn Klinkenborg, writing for the Times but whose column I first read in this Friday's Seoul edition of the International Herald Tribune, remarked:

"If you had to choose a writer to report from the afterlife, could you do better than John Updike?"

Maybe, but maybe not, as the photo above suggests. Perhaps he'd have few definite answers to report on from the world to come, and new doubts would doubtless arise in the mind of a man such as he, who stands like a perplexed Kierkegaard before a church door through which he never quite fully enters in.

Or rather, he gazes still like Robert Frost into that mysterious winter forest, watching the snow fall with easy wind on downy flake, reminding us that the woods are lovely, dark, and deep but also real, and dark, and huge, and God's last promise we should keep, to end our shabby subterfuge.

Rest in peace, Mr. Updike.