Part 6

The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course, held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see the wind.”

Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ is here recorded. Other superstitions in this collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized. Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets, tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking for essentially native material there; but between these extremes, except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything deeper than their outward manners. In _Kentucky Superstitions_ we have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s _The Withered Arm_ in the Kentucky belief that “You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.” There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains: “A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’ If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man, whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”

PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST

It was idle, of course, to expect that Paul Bunyan would continue to be satisfied with the home in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes where that mighty man seems to have reached his majority. Call it invented, if you will; true it is that the epic Paul sprang from the imaginations of many lumbermen competing at evening fires for the honour of having told the biggest whopper about the career of Paul the logger’s darling. But a ghost of such heroic vigour is not lightly raised; Paul’s fame has widened out, by word of mouth alone till very lately, to a thousand camps in many forests; in that sense he has gone himself, for the man lives, like your true epic hero or your politician, by the breath of reputation. Now, as the first chapbook about Paul records for us, he has moved west and done magnificent new deeds under the sunset. The chapbook is called _Paul Bunyan Comes West_ and it should make all lovers of Americana and all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What are copies of the first _Faustbuch_ fetching now?

I admit that Paul Bunyan still lacks his Marlowe and his Goethe, but I contend that he is a fellow at least as well worth keeping an eye on as Bevis of Southampton or Guy of Warwick or any of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus or the Seven Champions of Christendom, to say nothing of Jack the Beanstalk-climber or Jack the Giant-killer. In this first book about him Paul Bunyan has fallen into the hands of a certain Yank, still living somewhere in the valley of the Willamette and devoting the hours he can spare from the neglect of his professional duties as camp cook to the elaboration of tales about Paul. Art thus makes an advance upon nature; in real life the mighty Bunyan grows almost by repartee, as when one logger tells one tall tale about his hero and another tries to go him rather better and some third attempts to outdo both; but the epic has its rights. Robin Hood moved from separate ballads to a ballad sequence, and the wily Ulysses from epic lays to the grand march of Homer himself. So Paul Bunyan starts up.

It will be a shame if, like George Peele and some others, he ends in a jestbook and never flies further. Exaggeration such as that in some of the stories presses upon genius. His pick drags behind him on his way West and the first thing he knows he has cut out the Colorado Canyon; he blows the new dinner horn and down fall three square miles of timber; with his Blue Ox to help him he brings an Alaskan glacier down to the States and digs out Puget Sound for the Government; he raises corn in Kansas enormous enough to suck the Mississippi dry and interfere with navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has “the last seven stories put on hinges so’s they could be swung back for to let the moon go by”; his ax “had a wove grass handle and Paul he jist swung it round in a circle an’ cut all the trees within reach to wunst.” He has a daughter Teenie of the same heroic breed, an adequate dog named Elmer, and the Blue Ox, Babe, “a ’normous critter—forty ax-handles an’ a plug o’ Star terbacker between the eyes.”

The question what the American imagination will make of Paul Bunyan is a curious one. Will it make him another Hercules or another Munchausen? Or will it extravagantly think itself rich enough to afford to neglect him?

THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK

Now and then an honest superlative is both a luxury and a necessity, and I take real pleasure in declaring my confident belief that the worst book in American literature is one which was written by Milo Erwin of Williamson County, Illinois, and published at Marion, the county seat, in 1876 under the title _The Bloody Vendetta_. Though intended to be an authoritative county history, it concerns itself chiefly with a feud which had lately flourished in the neighbourhood between the Bulliner and Henderson clans, with their allies. Only ruthless quotation can do the work justice.

“On the morning of December 12, 1873, George Bulliner started to Carbondale, on horseback. The sun was standing against the murkey haze of the east, red and sullen, like a great drop of blood. The pearly, vapour-like sails dotted the sky, and covered the more delicately sculptured clouds with their alabaster sides. The great oak trees lifted their parapets to the morning sky, and spangled the earth with shadows. The voiceless winds swept the earth with sublime resignation lawless through the leafless woods, and a melancholy breeze stirred the dead ferns and droping rushes. A cold-scented sleuth-hound had followed the tracks of Bulliner remorselessly. This morning two of them, with stealthy movement, took their position near the Jackson county line in an old tree top, on the ground. There, planted on the spot, their ears drank in every sound that broke the air, mouth half open, ears, eyes, soul, all directed up the road to catch, if possible, each passing object.... Bulliner came riding along and one of the assassins fired on him; only two or three of the balls took effect in his hip and leg; but his horse wheeled and threw his back to the assassins, who fired on him again, and forty-four buck-shot took effect in his back, and he fell to the earth. The assassins then escaped. Bulliner was soon found and carried to the nearest house, and his sons notified, but after desperate riding John reached the place only in time to hear his father say, ‘Turn me over and let me die.’ He did so, and George Bulliner escaped from the cruelties of earth to the charities of Heaven.”

A few months later David Bulliner, another son, was shot, also from ambush. "David was carried home by a host of friends, who had gathered at the gate. At the gate he asked ‘Is it a dream? is it a dream?’ and each broken word gurgled up out of the red fountain of his life. His brothers were standing around, their faces sealed with the death seal of inexpressible suffering, and their hearts hushed in the pulsation of woes. His mother lay trembling against the casement, her heart throbbing with its burden of sorrow, while the issues of life or death were being waged in the soul of her son. His sisters were standing in the vortex of misery, praying for the dreadful slaughter to be stopped, and suing for happiness with the sunny side of life in view....

“This was the worst murder of them all. No other equals it in heinousness. You may combine corruption, debauchery and all the forms of degredation known to inventive genius of man, and cord them together with strings drawn from maiden’s hearts, and paint the scene in human blood bespangled with broken vows and seared consciences, and still it will redden Heaven with revengeful blush and leave you blacken hell to make it equal.”

Thomas Russell, an ally of the Hendersons, was brought to trial for the murder. Here are sketches of certain persons present at the trial: “One of The People’s witnesses was Miss Amanda Bulliner ... about sixteen years old. She took the stand with a helpless and confiding look, her voice was a little softened by emotion, her rose-left lips curled delicately, but soon her clear, translucent eye lit up with a brilliant lustre. The shadows of misery seemed to depart. Her soft, round cheek dimpled and dimpled again, like the play [of?] waters in the sun, in the lovely and touch [touching?] assembly of charms. Her features were of classic regularity. Her presence seemed to shadow the place. So pure, so truthful, so charming her actions, that all pronounced her a most gentle, and most noble creature. Though never a jewelled wreath may span the curls of her beautiful brow, yet, happiness may as well erect its shrine around her, for Nature can no further gifts bestow.... One of the witnesses was the famous Sarah Stocks [John Bulliner and Russell had both courted her], who swore to threats. Her contour is not as faultless as a Greek goddess, but her form and features had caught some new grace from the times. Her eye was as clear and cold as a stalactite of Capri. She wore a sigh, and there is something in a sigh for everybody. But I will throw no shadow over her, for life in her is as mysterious as in the rich belle; and when the golden chariot of destiny rolls through the skies, she may take her seat among the great.”

Yet all these charms arrayed against Russell could not convict him. He was acquitted, and, though pursued by the Bulliners, got away. Fate, however, tangled him in the snare of Milo Erwin’s prophecy. “If Thomas Russell is guilty, it may be that the almighty sovereignty, love, was too strong for him, and envy seized him, and John and not Davis [David] was the one he wanted to kill. If he could have wrung this lady from John Bulliner, and unstained her life, I doubt not if the shadow of his own would not have again darkened it; and inasmuch as he did not, it may be that the arrowy words wrung by the hand of passion from each of them were destined to hang quivering in memory’s core till they festered and bled, making an irremedial wound, shaped in the red-hot forge of jealousy, and cured only by the exultant feelings of gratified revenge. These little bubbles of joy that jet up from the tumultuous waters of passion, soon evaporate, and leave but mingled dross and shame to fester and canker the mind of its possessor, who ever after leads a life of infamy and its accompanying wretchedness. Whoever committed the murders is the guiltiest of them all. It was he who with death first knocked at our portals, and with buck and ball opened the flood gates of misery, and let murder rush with living tide upon our people. And today his life is ruined, his hopes blasted, and sooner or later he will come to sorrow, shame and beggary, and have the scorpion thongs of conscience lashing his guilty bosom as he promenades the sidewalks of destiny.”

Consider the plight of the Bulliner boys, thus denied justice by the law. “Must they be driven to the bushes by this hard bargain, or be placed for a lifetime at the mercy of assassins, with their hearts enclosed in palisades of sorrow? They saw their father and brother shot down by vandal hands, and their own lives threatened by fiends stalking in midnight darkness.... What could they do but pick up the gauntlet hurled into their faces, and give vent to anger long pent up?... Embassadors were at an end. Words of menace and expostulation were exchanged for the thunders of the shot gun.... The god of the bushes had been invoked.”

This is enough to justify my claim for Milo Erwin’s book, but I must cite one anti-climax from the sequel touching Marshall Crain, who joined the vendetta and was later hanged for murder. “Soon after, Marsh’s wife entered his cell, and he took her on his knees and embraced her.... Her eyes glittered with a metallic gleam, and the soft curl of her lips was lost in a quiver of despair. Her’s was a deadly pallor. It was the incandescence, and not the flame of passion, that was burning in her inmost being. She would burst out into shrieks of great anguish, and then subside into sobs. She dreaded the heaving of her own bosom—dreaded the future and the world. If she could have died she would have been happy and holy in the hope of mercy. To be torn from a love made holier by past sorrows, was an insult to the attribute of Heaven. Marsh was in his sock feet, with a pair of jeans pants on, and a ragged jeans coat. He looked care-worn, and shed a few tears.”

AT THE SATURDAY CLUB

Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning, best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary. As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary, gradually faded, or rather gave way to the _Atlantic_ dinners; the Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September. Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes like a roof of a house.”

Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward Waldo Emerson’s _The Early Years of the Saturday Club_ somewhat in the likeness of _The Education of Henry Adams_ keeps reminding one of that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell, Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty feet to the lowest branch.

Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts: “I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature: “Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz, said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty, declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection with a poem sent to the _Atlantic_: “Let me hear from thee some way. If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas.

A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus: “Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that no person should dare to ask him a question ... eating his dinner and doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a canary.”