Confessions of a Mouthbreather

In 1938, afraid that the coming war in Europe might be the end of him, Henry Green decided to write, at 33, his autobiography, "Pack My Bag". It is an informative, entertaining account of a young man from the privileged class of England, a well-schooled lad with many insights to offer about the affects and effects of his upbringing on a Gloucestershire estate replete with horses, hounds, and the trappings of the hunt, his pressure-cooked Eton and Oxford education and engagement in the art of social climbing for one's very survival, and finally his happy brief time among the working-class at his parent's factory. The following excerpts are from these latter days among those common people whose company he enjoyed more than any others.

"I was soon to leave Oxford for good....I lived in lodgings, worked a forty-eight hour week first in the stores, then as a pattern-maker, then in the ironfoundry, in the brass foundry and finally as a coppersmith, and wrote at night. Week in week out I averaged eleven hours a day, so that I was only a visitor, I hardly took part at all in the life outside the "shop."...

"This was to make up for doing no work for years, with my hands or my head but only with my feelings. So that when I say I found the life satisfying and I had never before been satisfied, the long hours of being occupied may have coloured what I thought I saw so that it may only be, but surely this is more than just something, that the life was happy....

"The men themselves, the few that bothered to think about it, were of the opinion I had been sent there to be punished. They can take it from me theirs is one of the best ways to live provided that one has never been spoiled by moneyed leisure which is not as they would put it, something better....

"People are inclined to dismiss too airily the big difference money makes in the amount of security their money gives them. On three or four pounds a week life can be comfortable so long as the family is in good health, but what margin there is cannot cover protracted illness. That and the question of whether he can keep in work are the two great worries of the artisan, but this last does not bother him too much, if he knows his trade he can get another job except during one of the comparatively rare cycles of bad trade. As against this he need not think overmuch about his work while at it, and when he knocks off for the day he has no reason to think of it again until the next morning. On top of that there is the deep, the real satisfaction of making something with his hands. This has to be experienced to be believed, it is more than sensual and is obviously the purest form of self-expression....

"One and all are violently opinionated, it is not lack of education, I do not know what it is, and reading does surely require an open mind. They are like Americans, they may say they agree but they never listen, and this is one reason why they express themselves with an unheard of clarity. And their speech, unadulterated by literature as it is and unaffected when I was there by the B.B.C. has something which is much more than clearness. When they describe, as everyone knows, they are literally unsurpassed in the spoken word, as in the following:...

"In the trenches, in the War, before they were going over the top and they had an issue of rum, see, but one of the chaps felt a bit queer and put his down on the parapet because he reckoned he'd bring it up if he swallowed it. And a big rat come along and drank it down, then sits up and says, 'now for the cat'."...

"The gayest of all were the oldest labourers. Why this should be so I have no idea. It may be that their families had grown up so that the struggle to raise them was over at last, but most likely they had got into that blessed state when you forever cease to give a damn. Their obscenity, always in the form of comment or shouted advice was superb, beyond imagination magnificent. They had their off days but fewer than anyone else and some of the things they said, unprintable of course, will warm me always. If one should come to think of it at the end they would be worth dying for by those heroic comparisons in simple words so well chosen and arranged, so direct a communication they made one silly with laughing."

And Behold, A Living Rubric

Behold, the final paragraphs from "Hawthorne at Concord" exquisitely told by Philip McFarland:

<< "To sit down," a living consciousness had written on a certain Saturday in the fullness of life, twenty years before his death, "in a solitary place (or a busy and bustling one, if you please) and await such little events as may happen, or observe such noticeable points as the eyes fall upon around you. For instance, I sat down to-day--July 27th, 1844, at ten o'clock in the forenoon--in Sleepy Hollow, a shallow space scooped out among the woods." Just turned forty, Hawthorne was then living with his wife and four-month-old daughter at the Manse. Before him in his present solitude was this geologic opening, "pretty nearly circular, or oval, and two or three hundred yards--or perhaps four or five hundred--in diameter." A decade and more would pass before the concavity was made into the town cemetery. For now, nearby were surrounding woods, and a cornfield, and a pathway that knotted oaks overshadowed. Hawthorne would take note of it all: the twigs and decayed leaves on the pathway, the bird chirpings overhead, the "cheerful, sunny hum of the flies...so gladsome that you pardon them their intrusiveness and impertinence." In fact, at this instant a fly was "intent upon alighting on my nose. In my room, now--in a human habitation--I could find in my conscience to put him to death; but here we have intruded upon his own domain, which he holds in common with all other children of earth and 
air--and we have no right to slay him on his own ground."

But there was so much more to see in one quiet interlude, an inexhaustible panorama: last year's acorn chips strewn about, suggesting table services at fairy banquets, oak balls that kittens love to play with on the carpet, mosses, "And how strange is the gradual process with which we detect objects that are right before the eyes; here now are whortleberries, ripe and black, growing actually within reach of my hand, yet unseen till this moment. Were we to sit here all day, a week, a month, and doubtless a lifetime, objects would thus still be presenting themselves as new, though there would seem to be no reason why we should not have detected them all at the first moment." The shadow of a bird flits across a patch of sunlight on the ground. The blue sky, the fragrance of white pine, a breeze sighing with hardly imaginable gentleness, a red squirrel shrilly chirruping--and suddenly a mosquito, about which instinct prevails over "all the nonsense of sentiment; we crush him at once, and there is his grim and grisly corpse, the ugliest object in nature." Then comes the striking of the village clock, a a cow bell tinkling, and the whistle of a locomotive, telling its story of "busy men, citizens, from the hot street."

Yet look even closer at hand. Mushrooms. A colony of anthills. Like some malevolent giant, the observer dribbles grains of sand over the entrance of an ant dwelling. "And, behold, here comes one of the inhabitants, who has been abroad upon some public or private business, or perhaps to enjoy a fantastic walk--and cannot any longer find his own door. What surprise, what hurry, what confusion of mind, are expressed in all his movements! How inexplicable to him must be the agency that has effected this mischief. The incident will probably be long remembered in the annals of the ant-colony, and be talked of in the winter days, when they are making merry over their hoarded provisions."

All of Hawthorne's wonderful achievement would seem to be here in microcosm: the sharp observation, the freshness of insight, the recognition of truth's complexity, the incipient compassion, the wit, the stylistic charm, the story forming that involves dark fate. Yet, he concludes, "how narrow, scanty, and meagre, is this record of observation, compared with the immensity that was to be observed, within the bounds which I prescribed to myself. How shallow and scanty a stream of thought, too.--of distinct and expressed thought--compared with the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, associations, which were flowing through the haunted regions of imagination, intellect, and sentiment, sometimes excited by what was around me, sometimes with no perceptible connection with them. When we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any man ever takes up a pen a second time."

To our benefit, this man, Nathaniel Hawthorne, did take up his pen again and wrote The Scarlet Letter, wrote The House of the Seven Gables, here having used it to record a single Concord day, now long dead, that the wonder of his art keeps miraculously alive. >>

What the Dickens Sayeth He?

Concluding remarks from American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens:

"It is an essential part of every national character to pique itself mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its wisdom from their very exaggeration.  One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust.  Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence."

"‘You carry,’ says the stranger, ‘this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life.  By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates for the suffrage, who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice.  It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts.  Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed.  You will strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence, however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden with unworthy doubts and mean suspicions.  Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?’"

"The answer is invariably the same: ‘There’s freedom of opinion here, you know.  Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached.  That’s how our people come to be suspicious.’"

The Hole of It: Mythadventures

When I was enjoying a tender age (pre-"Shot Heard 'Round the World") [Bobby Thomson's shot, not Lex. & Con.'s.] I had two children's books within my sticky-fingered grasp at home. One was an illustrated Children's Bible, and the other was R. L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. I never bothered to look for and read the Fairy Tales of the Grimm brothers, having already learned that I lived in an amoral society, I didn't need to have it rubbed in, or Lewis Carroll's, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, because Walt Disney ruined it for me by doing such a great job with his feature-film when I was 8 going on 9 in 1951.

So, ironically, thanks to Hollywood, I dove right into the other available books on my father's bookshelves. I was seven when I began to read Hervey Allen's trilogy (which weighed more than I) The City in the Dawn. I might finish reading it this year if my local library can track it down. There is supposed to be one copy extant in my surrounding counties where they are hopelessly searching. I want to finish reading it (not really) before I die, even if it kills me (also, not really.) [I think I read somewhere that Allen did, in fact, die before finishing it.] I see things through, usually (well, once-in-a-while) to the bitter end, out of stubborn habit (that part's on the bloody money) and a cautious pessimism borne of a cynical, skeptical, quasi-pragmatic, pseudo-longing for improbably happy endings. I have such foolish hope for the planet Earth, which by the way...ahem...brings me to the subject at hand for this particular blogposting: Fantasy & Science Fiction.

This is a very large subject, so I will probably need to post several additional components to round out and solidify my thoughts about both of these fields. To begin with, I have enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course the (coursera.org/course/fantasysf) which started a week ago and will run for another nine weeks. I was assigned to read finally, in my dotage, Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, which I found, I think, more fascinating now than I would have when I was a kid. I would have thought it pure bunk back then when I knew everything, but now that I know better it struck me as being worthy of being called "art" (by me--who is always the final arbiter of such matters. My formula is simple, if I like it, it's art. If I don't like it, it may or not be somebody else's art. This evaluating mechanism has never failed me.) [By the way, when I put something in parentheses, it is because I am inviting you deeper into my mind, so take your shoes off, won't you, before you enter.] And alway, always, tread lightly, especially if you enter within any bracketed material.

I discovered while doing this week's Lewis Carroll assignment this, for example:

"A Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

'Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe."

"Hence the literal English of the passage is:

It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots, and the grave turtles squeaked out."

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The above can be found in the Barnes & Noble Classic Edition ($7.95) of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, illus. by John Tenniel. With comprehensive material, including Introduction, Chronology, Notes, Biography, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and suggestions For Further Reading all by the author, artist, critic and poet, Tan Lin.

Now young heads might roil with a swift swipe of a card,
Yet who would not gift such should it crack open a Bard?--REK

I Wrest His Case

When I was an adolescent, that is, before I learned that I didn't, in fact, know everything there was to know, I used to pick up the books that my father had just finished reading and read them on the sly. Just to keep him honest, I guess. Although, I guess he wasn't doing a good job of keeping me honest, because often I slid a Camel out of his sleeping packet, or relieved him of pocket change so I could buy editions of the Journal-American, or the World-Telegram and Sun, two newspapers that he felt unworthy, even, for wrapping fish. To my credit, I did deliver, door-to-door, Dorothy Schiff's Bronx Home News and imbibe, by inky osmosis, I suppose, a sense of what those commie-pinkos at the Post were trying to put over on us. All of this changed one day when he finished reading and closed a book that opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I didn't know everything after all.

That book was Philip Wylie's, "An Essay on Morals": A Science of Philosophy and a Philosophy of the Sciences / a Popular Explanation of the Jungian Theory of Human Instinct / a new Bible for the Bold Mind and a Way to Personal Peace by Logic / the Heretic's Handbook and Text for Honest skeptics, including a Description of Man suitable for an Atomic Age /  together with a Compendium of Means to Brotherhood in a Better World / and a Voyage beyond the Opposite Directions of Religion and Objective Truth, to Understanding / with a new preface by the author" (1951)

Below is an excerpt from that new preface to Wylie's, "An Essay on Morals"

"In the same letter in which he has expressed his general satisfaction with this effort to explain his basic theory, Dr. Jung has also said it may be five hundred years before the principle is popularly understood or widely put to use. If it is, I feel sure that man faces the worst half-millennium in his terrifying history. For man, today, must either quickly learn who and what he is and how he is governed by Nature or else he will indubitably employ the very forces of the sun to bring upon himself a sequence of hideous nights--of wars, rebellions, rampages, continental ruinations and sterile centuries. In such a case, this essay and all similar works will stand as mere inscriptions to be comprehended by the descendants of any who may have survived the agonies. The knowledge existed and was ignored, our voices will say: Kilroy was here. That token, and the present value of truth-seeking to such individuals as will undertake it, are the reasons for attempts to share an advanced science with a currently regressive society."

From an Air of the Troubador

"It is doubtful that any author could be as home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk."

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubador, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

From Kiowa Trail, one of the more than 100 books by the Medal of Freedom-winning author:

"It was after we got back to the ranch that Jim Sotherton started my education.

"Somehow or other we got on the subject of poetry and I quoted him some of 'Marmion' that I recalled from the readings at home. After that, there was a change.

"While I taught him to track and to live off the country like an Apache, he taught me all he could think of about English literature, history, and other subjects. At some time or other he had been an instructor in a military school in England--I think it was Sandhurst--and he knew a good deal about teaching.

"We spent a good bit of time riding over the country, and from time to time we went to San Antonio or to Austin, and then one day to New Orleans. There we went to a bank and Sotherton picked up some money, quite a lot of it, in gold.

"Then he bought some books and some new equipment, and he bought me a Henry .44 rifle.

"It was the day after we got back to the place at the foot of Burro Mesa that I found the tracks--and they were not Apache tracks. Somebody had been around the place while we were gone.

"Every man's track is distinctive. A man's trail is as easily recognized as his signature. In my own mind I was sure one of the men whose tracks I saw was . . . "

Retrieving Our Beautiful Due

Tomorrow it will be 6 years since John Updike died. He is noted for remarking that he wanted "to give the mundane its beautiful due," and it cannot be denied that he best succeeded when he applied himself to describing the life and times of Mr. Everyman, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. It is notable that when I came across the following poem written by another gifted writer, also a poet, her words conjured up for me, despite the degrees of separation in their socio-political views, an image of these two authors at rest, peaceful and hugely satisfied, melding well, at one with each other and as well with our Universe.

Come into Animal Presence

Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm bush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

--Denise Levertov