“The Peerless Prose Of America’s Summer”

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—One of my (many) eccentricities is that, for me, literature has always been seasonal. I’m not sure why this is but, somehow, certain books conjure up a feeling of the season, and reading them out of their designated season is somehow not satisfying.

My beloved Charles Dickens, for example, can only be fully enjoyed in the winter. Every year, usually in mid-November or maybe right after Halloween, I get into my Dickensian mood. The weather turns cold, the wind howls at the door and rattles the window panes, the snow begins to fall, and I immediately am in the mood for Dickens. Nothing is more satisfying than a huge tome by my favorite author, read in a fat, overstuffed chair by a crackling fire, a pot of tea by my side, a crocheted comforter on my lap, and a blizzard howling and tapping outside.

I think of the opening of Martin Chuzzlewit, where the wind rustles the trees and bangs the shutters on the windows and blows poor Mr. Pecksniff off of his own front porch. Or the bleak, cold fog of the opening of Bleak House and the raw, bitter cold that plagues poor Trotty Veck, working outdoors at the beginning of The Chimes. Or Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas party at Dingley Dell, with its ice skating on the pond, its joyous feasts and celebrations and dancing and fiddle music.

But now that summer is here, my literary thoughts are on that sun-toasted season. To me, Mark Twain is the ultimate summer writer. Interestingly, Mark Twain is the American Charles Dickens. There are so many things that the two literary giants have in common. Though they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each is without doubt the largest literary luminary of his respective nation (with the possible exception of Shakespeare in England, who is in a class by himself) and both have come down the decades as representatives of their nations and people. Dickens, the ultimate Englishman; Twain, the epitome of the American.

And just as Dickens conjures up images of wintry things—biting cold weather, fog-shrouded streets, plum puddings and skating parties, raw red frost-bitten noses— Twain makes one think of long, endless summer days. There is a lolling laziness in Twain’s prose. The never-ending season of summer coincides with the eternal days of American boyhood. Huck and Jim drift aimlessly and sleepily down the Mississippi on their raft, riverboats sound their long, plaintive whistles along that same all-American river (which never freezes over), boys skinny-dip in rivers and ponds, whitewash fences, play at being Indians. Stagecoaches travel west across burning deserts, tumbleweeds tumble and bounce across the dusty red earth. Summer is eternal.  Somewhere in my adolescence, I read a summer book called Dandelion Wine by the amazing Ray Bradbury, a book about the 12th summer of a boy’s life. And I can remember being mesmerized by Bradbury’s magic. How did he know? How did he know EXACTLY how it felt to be a boy in summer? His protagonist, Douglas Spaulding, is a 12-year-old boy living in Green Town, Illinois in the summer of 1928. I was a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, Ohio in the summer of 1956. Not so very different.

The same Midwest, the same long summer days, the same neighborhoods; their big houses with wide verandas, swings, turrets and cupolas; the same neighbors; the same magic of the world suddenly revealed. Bradbury shows us that before the age of 12, we are all basically sleeping; that we don’t really become alive or, at least, aware of our “aliveness” until that 12th summer.

To Douglas, it all hits him at once, as he is lying amid the dandelions, smelling the unmistakable smells of summer—the fresh-mown grass, the perfumes of flowers, the summer air, hearing the unmistakable sounds of summer—the clacking of the hand-pushed lawn mower, the tinkling of a teaspoon stirring a glass of iced tea. He describes how it feels to put on a new pair of tennis shoes, the ultimate summer ritual, after a long winter of wearing heavy brogans and boots; how you can bounce on foam and hurtle over buildings (nearly).

I remember that, in the summer of 1956, my 12th summer, Mars came closer to the Earth than it would again for decades. I remember lying in the grass on a Sunday night with a pair of binoculars, watching Mars glitter its red glow in the clear, star-flecked night sky. And, as I lay there, I was suddenly and clearly aware of my own “aliveness,” just the way it happened to Douglas Spaulding in a book I had yet to read. I felt the dewy wetness of the freshly-mown grass, smelled its unmistakable smell. Lightning bugs flickered around me, like tiny beacons; tree frogs and crickets trilled in the night air.

It was a warm summer night, long before anyone had air-conditioning, and so everyone’s windows were open and I could hear, from almost every house on my street, the sounds of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” everyone’s Sunday night ritual, drifting out into the warm humid air. And I felt so alive I swear I could hear the sap flowing through my body and I was filled with an excitement that was nearly uncontainable, an excitement for nothing in particular, just the realization that the world was unfolding around me and that I was a part of it, a new part, a part just starting out and ready to embrace it. A few years later, when I first read Bradbury’s magical book, I was nearly blown away by the author’s eloquently rendered experience that was so stunningly like my own.

It was much later in life that I discovered the next summer book that I want to mention. Or books, I should say. There are two of them. By Carl Sandburg. Sandburg (1878-1967) has long been regarded as one of America’s great writers. His Complete Poems and monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln (surely our most American of American presidents) both won Pulitzer Prizes and have become undisputed classics. He also is the author of a Pulitzer-nominated novel, Remembrance Rock, and a collection of folk songs called “The American Songbag.” His place in American letters is secure and he certainly needs no boost from the likes of me. Yet it seems to me that his most brilliant, imaginative, and joyful books—his summer books—are often overlooked.

I am talking about The Rootabaga Stories, two collections of wholly unique fairy tales for children. They are unlike anything else in American literature. Published in 1922-23 as Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, respectively, they are now available as Rootabaga Stories, Parts One and Two. Wildly original and highly imaginative, these books are lavishly and poetically written. As nonsensical as the writings of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, they are delightful and laugh-out-loud funny. With the exception of the Oz books, they are the only truly American fairy tales.

Sandburg admitted that he was tired of “princes and princesses,” and “sought the equivalent of elves and gnomes.” What he has created is a wild slice of the American heartland of the 1920’s, capturing its values, language and rhythms, incorporating folk music and jazz, movies, travel, home life, news events and America’s favorite summer pastime, baseball.

Rootabaga Country is Sandburg’s answer to the nonsense and topsy-turviness of Wonderland, yet it is unmistakably somewhere in America’s Heartland. It is prairie country, flat and wide, with eternal fields of corn. In Rootabaga Country, people work hard and take pride in their work. On the prairies, the farmers raise wheat and corn and harvest great crops of balloons; in the prairie towns, there are taxi drivers, circus clowns, policemen, movie stars, bag ladies and street musicians. Baseball players are everywhere.

Of course, the characters are wonderful. Based on recognizable American types of the 20’s, they are still unique individuals, most of whom appear and reappear throughout the loosely connected stories. There is the Potato Face Blind Man, an old blind jazz musician, who plays his accordion on the street corner and tells stories to children. He wears a sign that reads, “I am blind, too,” because, as he puts it, some folks “have eyes—but they see nothing.”

Each of the children in the book emerges as a distinct individual—Any Ice Today, Pick Ups, Lizzie Lazarus, Johnny the Wham (a rich kid who sleeps in money), Deep Red Roses, and lovely Pink Peony. There are also homeyglomies, zizzie bugs, moon spiders, flummywisters, jackrabbits, and rats.

Sandburg’s stories offer little of the moralizing so common in children’s books of the period—although nasty Bimbo the Snip does get his thumb stuck to his nose for making rude gestures at the postman. They are funny, whimsical, beautiful . . . and wise. And they may be, in fact, wasted on children. Read them in the summer, if you can. Preferably outside, in a hammock, with a cold pitcher of iced tea beside you (or maybe a beer, if you’re of age), and sun screen. They will last in your imagination long after the summer has ended