W. Ross Winterowd
English Department
University of Southern California
In 1862, the Morrill Land Grant Act enabled hicks, rubes, farmers' sons and daughters, the offspring of factory workers, the marginal and even sub-marginal, the uncultured, the kids who wanted to gain a way to make a decent living and, perhaps, some upwar d mobility, the great unwashed, the masses the Morrill Land Grant Act gave these hordes the opportunity for an education (or at least training, depending on one's definition, though in 1862, "education" was associated with gentility and the professions of law and Christian ministry). Land Grant Colleges were required by law to offer courses in agriculture, home economics, engineering, and military science (ROTC). Think of a farmer's son from Brigham City, Utah, coming onto the campus of Utah State Agricultural College (founded 1888) to study poultry husbandry so that he can bring the latest knowledge to the family business. The lad is (inevitably) freckled; pomade pastes his hair shiningly to his pate; he wears a too-tight three-piece suit, and he repeate dly scrunches his neck, attempting to adjust to the high starched collar he wears. He gazes in awe at the towers of Old Main and resolutely enters the building to register for his classes, including, of course, freshman English. In that class, he might well encounter one of the 110 editions of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), which tells students that logical and ethical disquisitions show man how to improve his "understanding in its search after knowledge, and the directi on of the will in the proper pursuit of good. In these they point out to man the improvement of his nature as an intelligent being" (10). And this is a higher sphere than belles lettres.
They open a field of investigation peculiar to themselves. All
that relates to beauty, harmony, grandeur, and elegance; all that
can sooth [sic] the mind, gratify the fancy, or move the affections,
belongs to their province. . . . They strew flowers in t he path
of science. (10-11)
Here, then, is an image for you: an academic procession at Utah
State Agricultural College. Members of the English department,
each with a large basket, lead the way, gaily strewing flowers
in the path of the profs of agriculture, engineering, mathematics
, philosophy, and physics. Blair (about whom I will have much
to say) made the development (or refinement) of taste a central
goal of the humanities. There are three sorts of pleasures: those
of the senses are the lowest, and those of the intellect a re
the highest. The pleasures of taste are in the middle, higher
than the senses, but lower than the intellect. I dwell on this
point because the hierarchy that Blair sets up becomes an ongoing
crisis in English department humanities. That is, logical and
ethical disquisitions are the foundation and superstructure of
knowledge; belles lettres are the scrollwork and dadoes.
Taste is "the power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and art" (16). Its characteristics are "delicacy and correctness" (23). Now there are varying degrees of taste among men, and this variation results from nature and art. In other words , some people are just genetic slobs, and there's not much we can do about them. Others have the potential for developing refined taste, and art can help them. "For is there any one who will seriously maintain that the Taste of a Hottentot or a Laplander is as delicate and correct as that of a Longinus or an Addison?" (27). The paradox of taste is, then, fascinating. Men must have some kind of inborn capacity for good taste, else they cannot savor the finest pleasures of literature, but literature is the very basis of good taste. It would seem that a natural-born elite can find its heritage only in the literary canon.
Within the first couple of weeks, the freshman English class must have thoroughly confused the young poultry husbandry major. The text he was using argued that the subject matter of the class rhetoric and belles lettres was less noble and ennobling than . . . what? Philosophy? Theology? Where did poultry husbandry fit in the hierarchy of intellectual values? And the whole business about taste after all, the boy had come to Utah State to learn to grow chickens that taste good, not to develop his own g ood taste.
This representative anecdote is, in a way, an abstract of the book that follows. Furthermore, I will attempt to answer two interrelated questions: First, How did the humanities shape me? Second, How did what I call "English-department humanities" devel op? As my subtitle implies, this history will be both personal and institutional.
My story begins in 1945, in Miss Marjorie Hayes' sophomore English class at White Pine County High School in Ely, Nevada; it continues through my junior year in Mr. Glenn A. Duncan's English class and then shifts to Dr. Rebecca Price's freshman English c lass at the University of Nevada in 1947. It continues through three years at Utah State Agricultural College; a year of teaching at Carbon College in Price, Utah; a year as a graduate student and teaching assistant at Kansas U; four years in the same capacity at Utah U; four years as an instructor and then assistant professor at Montana U; and an eternity at the University of Southern California. However, my prelude will end with my initiation into the world of English-department humanities at the Unive rsity of Nevada. The excursion, the chapters that follow, will relate the adventures and misadventures which brought me to my current happy state of total despair for the institutionalized, professionalized humanities within the archetypal English departm ent and, for instance, the Modern Language Association of America. Since Miss Hayes will be a main character in Act II (i.e., the second chapter) of this drama, I will not discuss her in my Prelude; and the reader must wait until Act III to meet Glen A. D uncan. These two teachers embodied what might be called "the paradox of the humanities," though, of course, at the time I was unaware of that paradox (which is the Leitmotif of this book). In fact, we can trace the lineage of Miss Hayes and Mr. Duncan back through the centuries to classical Greece. We can see that Miss Hayes and Mr. Duncan are both descendants of Plato the idealist, not of Aristotle the empiricist. A family tree would show that their immediate forebears their clans, their particular families branched from the same limb at about the end of the nineteenth century. To give an adequate account of this genealogy is a purpose of my book; if we understand idealism, we can trace its premises and values through such monumentally important figures as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the spiritual and intellectual forefathers of Marjorie Hayes and Glen A. Duncan.
White Pine County (Ely, its seat), in east-central Nevada, lies in the Steptoe Valley, a land of silver sagebrush, pion pine, and purple mountains. Coming from Los Angeles, turn off I-15 about thirty miles north of Las Vegas and begin to meander due north on US 93, the longest road in North America, stretching from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Panama City, Panama. This is my home territory: the heart of the Great Basin, which covers almost all of Nevada, except the southern tip (where Las Vegas lies), a narrow strip along the Idaho border in the north, and a small enclave at the foot of the Sierras in the west, where Reno is situated. The basin slopes out of Nevada into Utah as far as Salt Lake City and north into the desert country of Oregon on the east side of the Cascades. To put it another way, the Great Basin extends 500 miles east and west, between the Sierra Nevadas in Nevada and the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, and 350 miles north and south, between the Columbia River Plateau and the Mojave Desert.
In 1844, explorer John C. Fremont named the Great Basin, not because (as is popularly assumed) it was the "basin" that held prehistoric Lake Bonneville (of which Great Salt Lake in Utah is the remnant), but because of its internal drainage: rivers that flow into the Basin do not flow out, disappearing into sinks or merely trickling away and evaporating.
The characteristic flora of the Mojave around Las Vegas is the indestructible creosote bush, deep green in even the driest, hottest weather. Sagebrush is scrub and sparse. Turn off I-15 onto US 93, and the sagebrush is more plentiful it is taller, bushier it is the "purple sage" of cowboy legend, the "silver sage" of song. (The Sons of the Cowboys sang, "There's silver on the sage tonight, / Sprinkled by the moon above, / So lie down, dogies, and let me dream / Of the one girl I love.") Sage is the most fragrant of plants, almost medici-nal in aroma. And on the mountainsides, scrub cedars, yes and piñon pines. (When I was a boy, I used to go out in the late fall with chums to gather pion pine cones. The pine tar was thick and more tenacious than any glue, and for weeks afterward, my hands still had traces of the gum. Mother roasted the cones for the sweet, oily pinenuts that had been a staple of the Native Americans.)
The vistas in the Great Basin are sublime. Long valleys, fading from green and brown to purple, laze in the afternoon sun, the sagebrush powdery silver, bright in the keen light against yellow sand and moist black earth. The near mountains might be bare and dun, but the far mountains are always lavender.
These valleys are the home of the jackrabbit, brush rabbit, sagehen, coyote, rattlesnake, badger. When the jackrabbit senses your approach, it perches on its hind legs, ears at the alert, front paws dangling and then, it is off, in a mad zigzag dash. (When I was a boy, my pals and I slaughtered jackrabbits senselessly, shamefully. I remember the unearthly scream of the rabbit, mad to escape, its delicate front legs clawing it forward, dragging the paralyzed powerful hind legs through the silvery dust, its ears flat along its back. My rifle still at my shoulder but unaimed, I listened and watched, detached and curious. The high noon sun distilled the wild, slightly sweet, medicinal odor from the sagebrush and seemed to draw the oozing blood from the wound that had severed the struggling rabbit's spine. At some point during that infinity of heat and dying, I brought the stock of my .22 to my cheek, took aim, and squeezed off a round that caught the rabbit in the head and left it trembling in the spasm of death.)
About half way between Las Vegas and Ely is Caliente, a now- defunct railroad town, where Norma and I spent the night five or six years ago and experienced what I call the Real West. We overnighted in a motel, the Shady Grove, if I'm not mistaken. Under whatever name ("Shady Grove Motel," "Kozy Kabins," "Travelers Treet"), the ecology of this throwback is roughly that of the jackrabbit and the rattlesnake, and it is largely an unknown quantity to the traveler in the West. The "Strictly Modern" motto is the essence and paradoxical synecdoche. The Shady Grove has plumbing (a shower rather than a tub), a gas heater, and kitchen facilities. But the charm of Kozy Kabins or Shady Grove Motel is that the units are separate, cabins, white cottages with green trim and they stand in a grove of trees, preferably poplars (hence the "Shady Grove"). The "motel" part of the name or the official listing in the phone book is more charming and wistful than practical, for travelers do not stay in the real West. The inhabitants are fairly permanent construction workers, a retired bachelor or two, a child bride and her sideburned man living on relief checks, and probably a mysterious stranger who comes and goes at all hours and keeps quite to himself. Somewhere in the grove there is likely to be a housetrailer that attests to the semi-permanent nature of the inhabitants. Travelers can get accommodations in the Real West, for at least one unit is always free, but they never ask. They prefer the pink cement-block "inns" with swimming pools, in many ways a logical choice but not for someone who wants to see the West.
My Missis and I (to the couple who run Shady Grove, she's always "the Missis") my Missis and I have poked about in the West a good deal, and we've stayed in countless Shady Groves. Years ago, we chose Shady Grove for one reason only: we could afford nothing else, but these American institutions never change, and we still patronize them. We have seen dozens of knotty pine interiors. The gas heater for cold evenings is dark reddish brown, and the vent pipe curves through the wall instead of ascending through the ceiling. There's an enamel sink and, above it, cupboards with curtains strung on a wire. The gas range is a black Monarch. Two straight chairs and a wooden table, plus the bed and maybe a nightstand, and the bathroom partitioned into one corner that's it, and that's the West.
Shady Grove has no history it's too new to have been a hideout for Jessie James or Butch Cassidy. There's no grandeur to the Shady Grove even the poplars are a bit unhealthy. And, after all, history and grandeur (with a booted and bluejean touch of the picturesque) make up the West, the West that the tourist wants to see, anyway. Shady Grove isn't the highest or the deepest or the biggest. It is a hundred, maybe a thousand, places. And it is so much a part of the West that canyons and cowboy boots and ghost towns lose their symbolic punch in comparison. Shady Grove, like the Wagon Wheel Cafe and the free snake exhibit, are the culmination of a tradition. The land and its wonders are circumstance. Cowboy boots are a chic anachronism. The quarter horse is a chunky polo pony. All that was the West is dead. Ronald Reagan couldn't revivify it, even though, as he said, the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse. Frank Dobie and Charles Kelly didn't even try. (But if you want to know what it was really like, there's no better source than Kelly's The Outlaw Trail.)
Shady Grove sits isolated from a town, and the town sits isolated, by mountains or desert or just plain distance, from other towns. The drive from Las Vegas to Ely is a wonderful experience. North Las Vegas, then nothing Alamo, then nothing Caliente, then nothing Lund, then nothing Pioche, then nothing. Ash Springs and Guyser Ranch are somewhere along the way, a U.S. Post Office at each, and a Texaco pump. At night, from the highway, you can see the occasional lights of ranches tens of miles away in the foothill valleys. But it's the nothing in between, and the hundred miles to the next town with, say, a hardware store, that add up to the real West isolate that sits among the poplars on the outskirts of town.
And the chauvinism of Green River, Utah Drummond, Montana and Ely. "Baker? Why, that's a hick town down the road about fifty miles. Really out in the sticks. Nothing there," says the old-timer from Ely, Nevada. Or the real Westerner, that cherisher of his tradition: he runs a gas station in Huntington, Utah. Somewhere near Huntington, my Missis and I were told, are exceptionally fine petroglyphs. I bought ten gallons of gas and asked the real Westerner, "Where can I find the petroglyphs?" He started for the station, stopped, turned back to me: "No. No use looking in the phone book. I know damn well there's no one by that name in this town." And is Huntington out in the sticks? Not by a long shot, but, now, you take Schofield, now there's a town that . . . .
So where's the tradition or, if you will, the history, the heritage, in Huntington. Nowhere. But Huntington sure as hell isn't out in the sticks. And besides, it's the finest town in America to raise a family in.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that for twenty-four dollars a night, double, you can experience the real West in Caliente, Nevada. My Missis and I did so recently. As the heat cooled toward evening, we sat under the poplars with the owner, a lady about our own age, and, sipping Jack Daniels before dinner at Henry's Cafe, talked about the days when Caliente was a division point for the UP. At Henry's, we had chili, on the recommendation of the owner-chef, and were fortified not only by the fiery concoction, but also by the hand-lettered philosophy on the walls:
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you spend your life with a bunch of turkeys."
Try Henry's chili. Guaranteed to cauterize hemorrhoids.
A sound night's sleep in the grove of poplars prepared us for the short drive to Ely next morning.
Fact: The Pizza Hut in Ely is the only franchise eatery in the 500 miles from Elko on the north to Las Vegas on the south. No Kentucky Fried Chicken! No McDonald's!
In popular history, mining in Nevada means "the Big Bonanza," silver, Virginia City Mark Twain of Roughing It and Dan de Quille of The Territorial Enterprise. However, the real Nevada bonanza was copper, and the center of that bonanza was Ely. The total yield of the Comstock Lode (exhausted by about 1877) was around $320 million. By the mid- 1960's, when the profitable ore in the lode was mined out, the yield of copper from the open-pit mine at Ruth, some ten miles northwest of Ely, was one billion dollars.
Ely, the seat of White Pine County, is the hub of the now-defunct Nevada Northern Railroad, which hauled ore from the pit at Ruth to the mill and smelter at McGill, thirteen miles to the north. Ely (population, an estimated 10,000) lies in a narrow valley between piñon-covered hills. It is a green and surprisingly staid town: red brick and white frame houses, sandstone courthouse, poplars. Aultman Street, which pulsed during the copper bonanza, is quiet, many of the businesses now boarded up. In the days of the Bonanza, when I was a child and then a boy, the Big Four was part of the social system, supplying female companionship to the bachelors who worked in the mine and at the mill and smelter. Mysteriously, times have changed. Though now in its decline, Ely has three brothels: the Big Four, the Stardust Ranch, and the Green Lantern. These establishments are grim-looking, prison-like cement block structures. The Big Four announces itself with a lighted sign and a traditional red light over the door. A Las Vegas-style sign glitters the name of Stardust Ranch forth. The Green Lantern's symbol is, naturally, a large green lantern.
Local Color: The motto over the door of the Green Lantern reads, "You've tried the rest, now have the best!"
In the days of the Copper Bonanza, McGill, company-owned and company-ruled, was grim. I remember the yellow, sulfurous smoke that poured from the stacks of the smelter; the dust cloud that smothered the town every summer afternoon; the drab houses, painted dirty yellow, gray, and white; and Main Street, with its confectionery, Rexall drug store, general store, and post office. I can still see the miles of desert stretching beyond town and smell the almost-chemical odor of sagebrush.
And the McGill Club my father had dealt roulette there during the Second World War, when that institution had served as social center for the community, the kids not allowed behind the partition that separated a soda fountain and ice-cream parlor from the roulette and blackjack tables, the bar, the brass spittoons, the mounted deer heads on three walls, all of this amounting to the "real" McGill Club, the heart and soul of the place.
We did a lot of tramping around the sagebrush flats, hunting rabbits, either with our single-shot .22's or our bows and arrows; we sat in the Candy Shoppe, sipping our Cokes and feeling our teenage juices either seep or rush through our systems. Some Friday nights one of us was lucky enough to get the family automobile, and we drove to a dance in the high school gymnasium in Ely. (The classiest auto we had access to was a white 1941 Plymouth, caressed and pampered by Don Johnson's father. I'm still partial to Chrysler products.)
The McGill Public Library was a single room in the Club House, a residence for unmarried male employees of Kennecott Copper a hulking, three-story, red brick building. How many volumes on those few shelves? I doubt that the total collection was more than, say, three thousand books. I vividly remember the librarian, but can't recall her name. She was not fat, but portly, in a dignified, patrician sort of way. She wore her salt-and- pepper hair in a bun, and she dressed more primly than anyone else in town navy-blue tailored suits, white frilly blouses, Red Cross shoes. She should, by all rights, have been a maiden lady, but she was married, to a Kennecott foreman, I think.
The McGill Theatre "The Last Picture Show." The feature started at 7:30 p.m., but the doors opened at 7:00. Christine Constantine, a stunningly beautiful Greek girl, sold the tickets. (Her father had given me a taste of his "peach" wine. It turned out to be retzina, or "pitch" wine.) By the time Christine started selling tickets, the first batch of Jolly Time had been popped, and its smell was irresistible. In the lobby, blonde, rosy, well-fed Connie made and vended the popcorn, tinged with the yellow of imitation butter and salted to just the right tang; and no other has ever equaled its crispness and its wholesome aroma. At Eastertide, Jim, the irascible old projectionist, always played "White Christmas" as prelude music for the half hour from the opening of the doors until the short subjects began; and at Christmas he played, yes, of course, "Easter Parade." At two or three minutes before 7:30, "The Star Spangled Banner" rang through the auditorium, and we all stood, hands over our hearts.
We lived, during those years, above the J. C. Penney store on Main Street, across from the McGill Club, the saloon and gambling hall where my father was a croupier. Next door to us, on the south, was Assuras Meat Market, and the Oddfellows Hall was on the north. We didn't live in a penthouse on Park Avenue, but we resided comfortably in a four- room apartment, with bath, above the J. C. Penney store, in the very middle of town, the center of action, if you will.
In those days, Kennecott Copper Corporation elaborately segregated McGill. The heart of town, "Townsite," was on the gentle slope toward the eastern range of mountains. In this enclave lived the "white mechanics," that is, "Aryan" skilled workers. Across the main street westward lay "Greek Town." Northeast was "Bohunk Town" and beyond it, "Jap Town." (On Monday morning, December 8, 1941, I rode my bike past Jap Town on my way to school. Barbed wire rolls encircled the houses, and a deputy sheriff stood guard. On the morning of December 9, Jap Town was deserted.) "Nigger Town" was two isolated families whose backyards were the dusty tailing flats below town. Foremen lived on "K" street in slightly larger houses than those of the "mechanics," and superintendents lived royally on the Circle, which was out of bounds to mortals not ennobled by Kennecott.
The people of White Pine County were, I think, a unique breed. There was old Doc Hovey (Walter Hovenden, M.D.), the only person in the world known to have been born with a smoldering Camel cigarette dangling from his lips. When Doc Hovey gave an injection, the Camel dangled; when he applied the stethoscope, the Camel dangled; it is sus pected that the Camel dangled when he delivered a baby. A young man (whose name was common knowledge) came to Doc Hovey. "Doc," he said, "a friend of mine got the clap. He's afraid to tell anybody, so he wants me to find out what he should do." Doc Hovey, Camel dangling, replied, "Take your friend out of your pants and let's have a look at him." This story is not apocryphal. Doc played cards with my father every afternoon and told the story during a game of pinochle.
Dragline Miller with his Teddy Roosevelt campaign hat, his riding breeches, his gleaming boots, his regal dignity was the virtuoso of the badger fight. A newcomer to town stands at the bar in the Bank Club, the Capitol Club, the Hotel Nevada, or the Eagle Club. Dragline approaches, introduces himself, and offers to buy the stranger a drink. The stranger reciprocates. Gradually a small crowd forms around the two, and good fellowship prevails. On perhaps the third or fourth round, Dragline says, "You came to White Pine County at the right time, friend. Tomorrow is our annual badger fight."
"Badger fight?" asks the stranger. "What's that?"
"A great sporting event and local tradition," says Dragline. "Once a year, we capture a badger vicious brutes, you know and pit it against the meanest dog in town. A fight to the death."
The stranger is probably a bit squeamish, but now the locals in the group begin to tell of the excitement of the fight and how everyone in the county men, women, and children come to participate in the event.
"Say, Dragline," says an onlooker, "have we chosen the puller yet?"
"Not yet," replies Dragline. "I was thinking we might ask Mayor Broadbent or Sheriff Hand to do the honors."
A pause. Dragline is obviously thinking. And then: "Stranger, how would you like to pull the badger?"
With a good deal of encouragement, some good-natured razzing, and several shots of whiskey, the stranger is persuaded to accept the honor of pulling the badger. At the appointed time on the morrow, the stranger appears among the crowd gathered on Aultman street in front of the Bank Club. The deputy sheriff is restraining a large, fierce-looking dog, and in the center of the circle formed by the crowd is a substantial crate with a hinged door on the front and a rope leading from under the door to approximately eight feet away from the crate. The sheriff and the deputy are armed with shotguns, obviously to shoot one or both animals should the spectators be endangered. Dragline puts stovepipes on each leg of the puller as protection against the badger. When Dragline fires the starting pistol, the puller, holding the far end of the rope, is to drag the badger from the crate and get out of the way, for the moment the dog sees the badger, the fight will begin.
Dragline fires the pistol. The puller pulls. Out of the crate, tied to the rope, comes a chamber pot. The glee of the onlookers is heartwarming and is the occasion for a good deal of conviviality in the bars on Aultman Street for the rest of the day.
I have actually seen two badger fights, and I laughed as heartily as did the other onlookers. I admired Dragline for his noble mien, his sartorial splendor, and his consummate skill in arranging badger fights. Incidentally, I have no idea how Dragline made a living, though all the time I knew him he was, I suppose, retired. But from what? I'm glad that I didn't ever find out because such knowledge would have diminished his mythic stature.
Father McDenough, the whiskey priest, might have been conceived by Graham Greene. His de facto parish was the bar in the McGill Club, and once when my father reminded him that it was midnight Saturday, time for abstinence from food and drink until after mass on Sunday, the father replied, "My son, it's only eleven o'clock in California."
Singing Gus the rumor was that he had been a rising star in the opera, but that the booze got him. Clad eternally in bib overalls, a line of tobacco juice from lips to chin on each side of his mouth, he shuffled about town humming to himself. Joe the Glut ate at the company boarding house in McGill and was legendary for the amounts of meat and potatoes and pie he could consume and for putting a hunk of roast or a steak in each pocket, to take back to his room as a snack. George Marsh, a bookkeeper for Kennecott and the most genteel, tweedy person I have ever met, gave me this advice when I was a boy: "Always buy the best. If you have only one suit, make certain it's the best money can buy." (I suppose George would be sadly disappointed in me if knew where I do my shopping. George is still alive; he must be in his nineties.)
So the population of McGill consisted of bachelors who lived in austere dormitories (if they were common laborers) and the clubhouse (if they were mechanics, i.e., plumbers, electricians, carpenters, steelworkers) and of families who rented their frame houses from the company. When my sons first experienced McGill, they asked, "Why would anyone want to live in this place?" The answer, of course, was the Great Depression. A Kennecott employee lived in a relatively decent, though drab, house and earned enough to buy a car; he got two weeks' paid vacation every year and could drive the family to Salt Lake City or Reno or could go camping in the Duck Creek Mountains. There were no more solid families in the nation than the Robbs, the Johnsons, the Holmans, the Hogans, and the Rogers the group that constituted my parents' circle, who gathered for pangingy games and chili on Saturday night, who went from house to house for eggnog on Christmas day.
We were a noisy crew; the sun in heaven beheld not vales more beautiful than ours; nor saw a band of happiness and joy richer or worthier of the ground they trod.
Neither my mother nor my father had graduated from high school, but they were idiosyncratic autodidacts and ardent readers of virtually everything. Father admired, among other writers and poets, Donald Henderson Clark (Louis Beretti), Shaw, Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker, Robert Service, Alexander Dumas, Omar Khayyam (in the Fitzgerald translation), and Mark Twain. He didn't ever miss an issue of Black Mask detective stories or of Sporting News.
Mother's literary taste was more pragmatic; she read mainly political books, the names of which I have forgotten. However, I recall that Lost Horizons and Of Human Bondage moved her deeply.
In another place (Winterowd 140-46), I have told the story of literature and literacy in my home, but I must retell it here, for one of the main purposes of this book is to explore the relationship between one individual's cultural background and the institutional culture of English- department humanities.
It was Christmas, 1943. Almost every day there was news of someone from White Pine County dying on a Pacific island or in Africa. Mr. Maw, who ran a gas station in Ely, was never right after he received word of his son's death and threatened to incinerate any Japanese who came to the station. "Where's Davie?" he would say to his old dog, and the dog would search frantically about the premises of the service station, looking for the boy who would never return.
That Christmas a somber time in American history my parents gave me The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas, and Trelawny, by Margaret Armstrong, two books that my father had enjoyed. The night of the 26th of December Mother and Father were away, and I climbed into their bed, in the well-heated bedroom-living room, and began to read The Three Musketeers: the marvelous swashbuckling of Porthos, Athos, Arimas, and their noble friend D'Artagnan. Beside me was a box of chocolate mint patties left over from Christmas, and as I read, I sucked on these delicacies. This was the first time that I had been completely im mersed in a book, so deeply taken that time was not a dimension of the experience: just the soft bed in the warm room, with the drama of the tale unfolding and the mint patties melting in my mouth, on a bitterly cold winter night in Nevada.
I still have the book. The Three Musketeers. Great Illustrated Classics. Published in the United States of America, 1941 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. A handsome gray book, with dark blue design and gold lettering. The price, in pencil, is still on the fly leaf: $2.50.
Without paying any attention to the sword, Milady endeavoured to clamber onto the bed to strike him, and she did not stop until she felt the sharp point at her throat. She then tried to seize the weapon in her hands, but D'Artagnan eluded her grasp; and presenting the point sometimes to her eyes, sometimes to her bosom, slipped out of the bed, endeavouring to retreat by the door leading into Kitty's room.
The Three Musketeers was, then, the first book that had completely captured me, that had given me the almost mystic experience of total immersion, and from that time on, I lived an extremely "bookish" life. Sitting in our kitchen, next to the coal stove (to provide warmth in the late night hours), I read Maugham's Of Human Bondage; the Horatio Hornblower sea tales; Tap Roots, a Civil War epic after the manner of Gone with the Wind, by (as I recall) James Street; David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations; a whole string of cowboy stories, which have no individuality for me now.
During that Christmas season of 1943, I also read the other gift book, Trelawny, by Margaret Armstrong: bound in crimson cloth with gold lettering, published by the Macmillan Company in 1940 and priced at $3.50. "There are no imaginary characters, events, or conversations in this book. It is fact, not fiction. The narrative is based on Trelawny's writings, corrected and amplified from reliable sources."
Trelawny, friend of Byron and Shelley, was himself as romantic and swashbuckling as D'Artagnan.
Now and then a man is born with a surname that fits him so well it might have been chosen for him by poet or a painter. Edward Trelawny was one of those fortunate persons. There is a wild flavor in Trelawny that would lend a touch of romance to the most commonplace family; and that the Trelawnys never were. They were courageous, adventurous, full of vitality, eccentric, unreliable, prone to extremes; never, to judge from the family records, commonplace.
As I look back, I think that The Three Musketeers and Trelawny were just the right books for the right person at the right time. They were guaranteed to provide escape from the squalid camp in which I lived. In any case, they hooked me. Trelawny, the first biography I had ever read, created for me a lifelong interest in that genre.
The second noteworthy event in the development of my passion for reading came when my mother left town for a weekend, to attend a convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, of which she was an officer. Father and I were left to our own resources, which turned out to be unconventionally delightful and intensely literary.
Dad and I went to the Cononelos market and bought two huge jars of green olives, a stack of salami, a loaf of bread, some cheese, undoubtedly potato chips, and other ready edibles. Dad arranged a small table between two easy chairs, with a floor lamp just behind the table. On the table, he put a bowl of green olives, potato chips, salami, bread, mustard, and, I'm sure, raw onion. Then from somewhere he produced The Favorite Works of Mark Twain, DeLuxe Edition, Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1939 1178 pages in all.
Dad and I would have a weekend of reading.
I don't remember what Dad read on that marvelous weekend, but I had four complete books (in one volume) to choose from: Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, not to mention sixteen other shorter works: stories, excerpts from books, and sketches. At Dad's suggestion, I started with Tom Sawyer and then went on to A Connecticut Yankee, which Dad particularly liked.
The result of this experience was inevitable. I became an ardent Twain-ite, and I still am one. (In my opinion, Life on the Mississippi and the Autobiography are his masterpieces.)
My third experience with reading at home in the apartment above the J. C. Penney store was not so much one event as an ongoing series of experiences. My father had an eclectic love for poetry, and we read a good deal of verse, particularly on Sunday mornings before the gigantic brunch that my mother always prepared (grapefruit, fresh side pork or pork loin, baking powder biscuits, gravy, eggs, pastries, coffee).
Dad, a skeptic, took great glee in The First Mortgage, a doggerel verse telling of the Bible story, by a poet named Cook:
Sometime, and somewhere out in space,
God felt it was the proper place
To make a world, as he did claim,
To bring some honor to his name.
And we read, I think, every word written by Robert Service:
Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing,
Islands of opal float on silver seas;
Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.
Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing;
Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky;
Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing,
Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.
Dad loved to declaim verse from The Pious Friends and Drunken Companions (The Macaulay Company, 1936):
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked in Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen,
Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.
Dad enjoyed both Dorothy Parker (Enough Rope) and Shelley. But I don't remember ever hearing him read the American classics: Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Dickinson. His taste, with few exceptions, was definitely for the comic and ribald, though I think probably Dad quoted from his elegantly bound copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (translated, of course, by Edward Fitzgerald) more often than from any other poet or book. His favorite stanza:
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and then let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of the distant Drum!
Though purists might deplore my father's taste for florid or ribald verse, nonetheless poetry became a part of my experience; from my early teens onward, I did not view it as something strange, exotic, with hidden meanings, accessible only to the few. No, poetry (whether written by T. S. Eliot or Robert Service) was to be enjoyed.
From early days, beginning not long after that first time in which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart, I have endeavoured to display the means whereby this infant sensibility, great birthright of our being, was in me augmented and sustained. Yet came the time when from the sagebrush flats and pion mountains I absented myself to stock my mind with science and the lore of ages.
In 1947, I entered the University of Nevada in Reno. Of college labours, of the Lecturer's room all studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, with loyal students, faithful to their books, half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants, and honest dunces of important days, examinations, when the man was weighed as in a balance! of excessive hopes, tremblings withal and commendable fears, small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad let others that know more speak as they know. Such glory was but little sought by me, and little won. Yet from the first crude days of settling time in this untried abode, I was disturbed at times by prudent thoughts, wishing to hope without a hope, some fears about my future worldly maintenance, and, more than all, a strangeness in the mind, a feeling that I was not for that hour, nor for that place.
Neither Mr. Duncan nor Miss Hayes had prepared me for Dr. Rebecca Price, just out of Yale, her dissertation on Alexander Pope. Texts for the class were T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1935 Brave New World Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a fill-in-the-blanks grammar workbook. The first assignment in the class was to read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and to write a ballad. Dr. Price gave me my first encounter with literary Kultur.
The UN-Reno campus was and still is lovely, just the sort of place to film Mother Was a Freshman, with Loretta Young An Apartment for Peggy, with Tom Drake and Edmund Gwenn and Mr. Belvedere Goes to College, starring Clifton Webb. In the fall, Lake Manzanita, in the middle of the campus, was a stopping place for flocks of Canadian honkers, and in the spring, weeping willows laced out, and crocuses and tulips flowered in the beds before Mackay Hall and Admin. Reno itself was Walter van Tilburg Clark's City of Trembling Leaves and for me, might well have been the Pulpit Hill of Look Homeward Angel, the great extracurricular literary experience of my freshman year. (No one beyond the teens should be allowed to read Look Homeward Angel, and The Ambassadors should be banned from anyone younger than fifty.)
"Let us go, then, you and I." . . . Lying on my bunk in Lincoln Hall, that's about as far as I got in my understanding of "Prufrock." Patients etherized on tables and women talking of Michelangelo had great meaning, I was certain, if I could just dig it out, but regardless of my efforts, I was unable to get through the overburden of words to the lode of meaning, to the Big Bonanza of comprehension. Though I couldn't understand the poem, I could memorize it, and I did so, that mellow autumn afternoon, lying in a park on the banks of the Truckee, and reciting to myself until the words were mine. The memory is poignant, a moment that I would not lose. The weather was superb season of mellow fruitfulness" and the giant sycamore leaves, as golden as aspen, were falling. The riverrun I heard and the gleam when I looked up from the page became part of the words and of the meaning I derived.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Those indescribably melancholy, beautiful words said during that golden afternoon.
Back in class the next day or the day after, Dr. Price introduced us to explications de texte. That class is as vivid to me as it was the day it took place. Dr. Price her slightly pudgy face, her glasses low on her nose, and the "new look" skirts that came to her ankles asked, "Well, if a patient is etherized upon a table, does he have any control over what will happen to him, or is he at the mercy of the surgeon?" "What sort of women talk of Michelangelo? Have you ever heard the term 'bluestocking'?" And so on. By the end of the class hour, I felt that I did understand the poem. Yet that understanding was not then and never has been as important to me as the resonances evoked. "Prufrock," autumn, Reno, the Truckee River, and the great golden sycamore leaves mean everything.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
That passage evoked this:
Two odors, aromas, smells. Frying pork chops and burning leaves
one richly oleaginous, the other spicily acrid.
In the almost dark of a mid-October six o'clock, the entry light
and the windows of the red-brick apartment house glow through
the chilly haze. The poplars between the sidewalk and the curb
are bare, their brittle gold and brown leaves filling the gutter
and lying in puddles on the lawn. Parked at the curb is a shining
new Hudson Hornet, silver and gray, sleek, streamlined. A radio
somewhere in the building, turned too high (or at least high enough
to be heard on the sidewalk), plays "On the Steppes of Central
Asia."
The building is two-story, with a front door of oval plate-glass
set in heavy, much- varnished hardwood , with a brass loop handle
and thumb- trigger.
The carpeting in the hall is worn maroon, with large, stylized
flowers in green and yellow. The chipped paint on the wainscoting
is off-white , an al most ashy gray. The doors to the apartments
are the same much-varnished hard wood as the front door, and each
has a brass numb er: 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6, 8. "On the Stepp
es of Central Asia" is now virtualy a roar, but then sudden
silence: the radio has been snapped off. The smell of pork chops
frying is almost palpable.
Before the door of apartment 3 lies the evening paper. The door
opens, and a woman in a cotton housedress (white, printed with
violets) stoops, picks up the paper, and glances momentarily down
the hall. She has the classic, almost masculine face of a Venus
de Milo her hair is drawn into a bun at the back of her neck her
breasts are full, and her hips are broad and capable.
The hall is lighted by three meager frosted-glass, one-bulb fixtures
space d down the ceiling, and in the light, almost as if from
candles or lanterns, the aura is golden, mellow, with the maroon
of the carpet, the rich smell of the pork chops, the dark wood
of the doors , and the many-layered paint on the wood work . A
woman's gentle laugh is barely audible. And then a metallic clang
, perhaps a pan that had fallen , and a man's voice: "Damn!"
The radio plays again, now softly: "In a Persian Market."
A woman appears beyond the glass of the front door and, holding
a large brown paper sack in one arm, opens the door and enters
the hall. Her tan plaid skirt stops just above her knees. The
coat, with its fur collar, is chocolate brown. Her brown hair
tumbles from beneath a brown tam. Her shoes are spike-heel black
patent leather. She glances down the hall and then hurries up
the stairs, which creak slightly with her every step. Behind her
hovers the aroma of cosmetics, face powder, and perfume.
Throughout the city, brick apartment houses: sooty yellow or deep
red. At six o'clock of an October evening, they glow at entryways
and windows. They smell of frying meat. Their halls are musty
and dimly lighted. From behind the doors come muted sounds of
voices.
In the chill haze of an October evening, brick apartment houses.
Mystery and romance.
I realize now that I was an outsider, gazing longingly into the mystery and romance of the apartment houses and of the literary Kultur that Dr. Price represented. I am still such an outsider. I am at ease with my colleagues who represent the Kultur of literature, am even fond of most of them and am a close friend of two or three, yet I am still as much outside as I was in that 1947 freshman English class at the University of Nevada.
Brave New World was fun, and even my friend Latch understood it. Though Latch was a problem student. He had lost a leg in the South Pacific, and he had the amazingly distracting habit of playing mumbly peg on his wooden prosthesis during class. Thunk! (Dr. Price winces.) Thunk! (Dr. Price glares.) Thunk! (Dr. Price makes a half-turn toward the window and goes on with her lecture on Aldous Huxley.) What can one do about a genuine war hero, even if he does not show proper respect for Kultur?
Portrait of the Artist was not beyond even my limited hermeneutic ability, but I did not like the book, and I still find it repellent, precisely the kind of statement that ennobles Kultur and devalues the culture of my home in McGill and that of my wife's home in Fairview, Utah. (More about Fairview hereafter.)
Dr. Price was, of course, a Kulturelle rebel. She defended Erkine Caldwell and in so doing prompted me to read God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road, two books that I suspect my father would have enjoyed. Of course, those whose professional allegiance is to Kultur must prove their independence by not only admitting but flaunting their independence: an addiction to soap opera or "The Price Is Right" or, in Dr. Price's case, Erskine Caldwell.
It was also the age of Forever Amber, the first naughty novel to be widely available. (At that time, I had never heard of Lady Chatterley, let alone Fanny Hill, delectables of which I would not partake until I was doing graduate work.) Nancy, a petite, sleek flight attendant (i.e., stewardess) who was taking classes at the university while her divorce pended loaned me her copy of the book, and I failed to take the hint, not from a sense of honor, but from mere naivet. I remember very little about Forever Amber, except that Linda Darnell played the title character in the movie version.
Quite on my own I discovered Look Homeward Angel, a book that, as I said earlier, should be proscribed for anyone beyond, say, twenty-one, at the outside.
They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say whatever disenchantment follows that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This would endure. (Wolf 455-56)
On the banks of the Truckee, where I had mastered "Prufrock," and in my room in Lincoln Hall, I lived with Gene Gant, even, I suppose, became Gene Gant, searching for a Laura, she of the finespun maidenhair.
As early as my seventeenth year, I was gaining subconsciously acquiring, not consciously learning a sense of the fit and the unfit, the proper, and Kulturelle. I had Dr. Price's warrant for God's Little Acre, and I knew intuitively that Forever Amber, which I had enjoyed luridly, was mere trash. The syllabus certified Brave New World and Portrait, but I sensed that Look Homeward Angel was on the periphery of Kultur, for its sprawling sentimentality. Could a book that had affected me so deeply really be respectable? From the class discussions of Brave New World, I learned that one could respond to wit and irony "Prufrock" and Portrait taught me that reading literature properly is an intellectual exercise. But what could one do with Look Homeward Angel? It was completely without irony, and it was amorphous, sprawling, uncontrolled. I think that I spoke to Dr. Price about the book, and I think that she made a witty remark about sloppy sentimentality, and I know that she said to me, in her office (as she smoked a Camel in a long ebony holder), "I'd rather flunk my Wasserman test than read a poem by Eddie Guest." (Well, after all, even my first literary mentor, my father, was not high on Guest.)
I end the chapter with "An Autobiography of My Development in the Esthetics of Literature," which I submitted to Dunc at the end of my senior year in high school (1946-47). Those who find the development of my psyche less fascinating than I do can, without losing whatever continuity my story and argument might have, go on to the next chapter yet comparing the "eyewitness" account of my literary sensibility with my memories from a perspective of some fifty years is instructive. Further, my teenage autobiographical narrative probably captures something of the literary spirit prevailing in textbooks and English classes throughout America in the 1940s. In any case, verbatim,
My first discovery of beauty and its powers was naturally in nature. I had had close contact with her frequently, and as I became more familiar with her she assumed a new form and meaning. Previously she had caught my eye and I drank in the beauty almost completely hedonistically. Gradually I began to see her in a different light. She assumed the perspective of calmness and of tranquility, and acted as a soporific to overwrought nerves. In her most base form I found beauty. In her loftiest attire I found a lesson and a friend.1
So it has been with literature. It has the same powers and properties that does nature. All fine things assume this beauty and have these nymphian powers. My primary purpose in reading was escapism. I read that I might run from life. I buried my head in the sands of romance and let the world pass by. Somehow, however, I encountered Robert Service. He was, to say the least, a poor songster compared to some, but he was a start.2 He was a step from the novels and biographies and popular fiction flooding in torrents from every direction.
I suppose after Service I mucked through Kipling and Whittier and the rest of that tiresome tribe. My impressions of these are very dim, so I must not have taken them too seriously.
I remember a distinct nausea when I encountered Sandburg. I also remember calling him a "towheaded asshole."3 Beyond that these gentlemen never ruffled the skin on the back of my neck as have so many poets and writers.
I retain as an idol Thoreau, who at the time I read him fitted very nicely with my plan to become a hermit. Thoreau, though, had a tenderness and true love of nature seldom encountered. He tood [sic] no particular joy in natures greatness and irresistable ness, but more in its sublimety and minuteness. He didn't love the towering peak, but more the bud peeping through the spring turf. This does not conform to my liking for nature, but none the less he wrote with fervor and conveyed a sense of beauty to the reader. But poor Thoreau was soon forsaken for another love.4
Next came Muir. Now here was a man I could appreciate. He watched nature withstand the storm, and it exhilarated him. He climbed a tall tree and looked over vast expanses of forest with mighty peaks rearing above. This was a man I could appreciate. He ate in the scene with great gusto , still, enjoying each morsel singularly, in that each minute part of the scene went into the make up of the whole thing. I don't know how many times I read "A Wind Storm In The Forest," but at any rate I spent more time on it than I shoul d have.
Along with Muir I encountered Burroughs. I read him, but not avidly, as I had Muir. Burroughs took the whole thing rather casually and I couldn't help feeling he was missing something.
And so I lingered with Muir and Thoreau until the end of my junior year.
My encounter with most of the writers my senior year was not impressive. I think I enjoyed them all, but only four have left me with a real impression. These four are Gray, Tennyson, Shelley, and Shakespeare. Gray and Tennyson are far outshadowed by my two literary idols, Shakespeare and Shelley.
My first encounter with Shakespeare was interesting, but not so consuming that I wanted to continue to devour his complete "table de hote." Thereafter I dribbled in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" a bit and then forgot him to be sickened by Mumford's garbage.
On Christmas vacation as I opened a gift from an uncle early, I was also opening the door to the greatest reading experience of my life. Contained there in was a book of seven of Shakespea re's plays. Having nothing better to do, I opened it to "Julius Caeser" [sic] and close d it after "exeunt omnes." As time permitted I eliminated "Romeo and Juliet " and "Hamlet". For the first time I had read for beauty of expression rather than merely for the outcome of the plot. The word s and phrases in the plays held me enthralled and the ones I liked I read over and over again. I wouldn't venture to guess how long I spent on the balcony scene of Rome o and Juliet . "To be or not to be" was equally as good. Of all the plays, Hamlet was the best.
Somehow after I had finished these three great works I was sorry because I had already gone through this experience. I was like a little child crying because Christmas is over.
Shelley, too, is in a class by himself. He, however, is like fine wine, never to be taken at a gulp, but should be read a little at a time allowing each sip to permeate throught [sic] one's mind thoroughly before more is taken. Shelleys' smeaning [sic] at times may be obscure, but his flow of words and pictures bubbling forth so freely leads you on. The effervesesy [sic] of his speech and pictures creates such a mood that it is not necessary to seek out his meaning. For this reason he should never be read but once. Read the first time for the shear beauty of poetry. The second time read to gain some of the greatest lessons of life ever expounded, and then read again and again to double the harvest each time.
Noticeable in this account is the absence of Wordsworth, who so obviously was a major influence in my personal and literary life. I think the reason for the omission is this: I was writing for Dunc, who had so immersed me in his beloved Wordsworth that it would have been redundant to recount my experiences with that Romantic poet.
In any case, the last words in my literary autobiography (up to the age of seventeen years) is an apt conclusion for this "Prelude": "So goes it. One must grow. This is how I have grown mentally."
1My discovery of natural beauty sounds, now, terribly erotic. I think perhaps I was unable to separate natural beauty from my sexual fantasies about Loraine Bushnell, Anne Hole, and Joyce Gidley. 2By the time I was fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen, I had obviously learned LC (Literary Correctness). 3In Dunc's class such language was acceptable, in our writing, at least. Dunc himself used an occasional "damn," "hell," and "shit" when talking to his students, but this was,after all, frontier Nevada. 4Was I revealing some sort of problem with sexual identity?
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