The First Drafts of Myth: Telling Stories

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“We must restore to poetry the force of narrative.”—James Dickey

“Abstractions are best understood in a story.”—Anonymous

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—6/27/11—The deeper I sally into my “anecdotage,” as H.L. Mencken called the chatty age, the more concerned I am when I see two college students in a restaurant “building communities,” twittering on their cell phones with invisible parties while ignoring each other. Or three friends headed to the gym each rolling to a different beat emanating from their iPods. Is the oral tradition in its death throes? I trust not, for I have many tales left to tell, but what’s a tale to a self-absorbed audience?

I credit my old mentor, James Dickey, with convincing me that the best teaching is anecdotal. He told a rapt class that when Deliverance was filmed, the corpse that Dickey as the sheriff unveiled was not the actor playing Drew, as he had expected, but Christopher, his son. Surprise! For years, when I taught the novel, I told this and other Dickey-ian tales, and I sensed that they lent my comments an intimacy and gravitas they might not otherwise have enjoyed.

Dickey was hard to follow, but eventually I understood what he’d been trying to dramatize for his classes. Early in my teaching career, I remember rattling on to a class of sophomores about Alexander Pope’s rococo masterpiece The Rape of the Lock. I looked up from my lecture notes and saw two students sleeping and the rest staring at snow drifting across the campus. I quietly elbowed my Norton Anthology off the lectern to wake the sleepers, and said, “What the Baron does to Belinda is a bit like the time I got drunk in the army.” The few heads not turned my way after Norton hit the floor now snapped to attention. “I went home from the Florida Bar with a woman named Doris, had a schnapps, and fell asleep in an easy chair. Little did I know that Doris’s sister Babs lived in the apartment as well, for this was the first and last time I was ever there.”

“Sure it was,” muttered a youthful cynic.

“When I awoke,” I continued, ignoring the titters, “both women were giggling over me, one with a razor in hand, the other with a bowl of water and a towel. When I asked what the joke was, Doris handed me a mirror. One look and I realized that I was no longer a unibrow.” I told the suddenly interested class that I understood how violated Belinda had felt, for no one wants his or her appearance altered without consent. Belinda stormed off to the Cave of Spleen, and I slunk back to the barracks with my hat pulled down low.

The interjection of self into a classroom presentation virtually assures attention will be paid, but nothing can guarantee quality. However, one test of a good story is how often it is misappropriated.

My old friend Harold Woodell, a gifted storyteller, found the perfect place to insert the bittersweet tale of his mother’s stroke in an American Humor class. It seems that his mother blacked out as she was driving in an urban-industrial area and ended up wedging her car between two telephone poles, leaving it, he added, “like a tube of toothpaste squeezed at one end.” When she came to, bruised and embarrassed, a cameraman was shooting through a broken windshield, and a television reporter was thrusting a microphone into her face asking her how the accident had happened. In words inappropriate for the news at 11 or any other time of day, she told the reporter where she could file her microphone. As Harold was winding up his tale, a student said, “That was Dr. Smith’s mother!”

“It was not!” exclaimed my colleague. “I have pictures of the accident we took for the insurance adjustor.” After searching his memory banks, Harold realized he had told the story in the faculty lounge when Dr. Smith was present. Smith then appropriated the tale and told it, slightly modified, in classes of his own. Apparently, he’d been dining out on the story’s strength for years. Perhaps Smith “winked” and the student missed it, or he’d told it so often, he’d convinced himself it was his own.

Speaking of the storyteller’s wink, the Arabs start a fairy tale recitation, “There was, there was not.” This provides the teller a convenient escape route, not inherent in “Once upon a time,” should the audience question the truth of a tale. The last time we hired an arborist, I started my usual round of questions, probing for a story.

“Squirrel,” as this patched-eye, pulpwood cutter had been dubbed, was well known in the greater Pickens County area for his tall tales. As we chatted over the hood of his old pick-up while his two sons went to work on a dead pine, a red-tailed hawk appeared, wheeling and screeching between us and the moon. Immediately, Squirrel whistled back, and the two began a shrill dialogue that lasted a couple of minutes. When I managed to get his attention again, I said that it appeared the hawk recognized Squirrel.

“I saved his life a couple of years ago,” he said. “He was diving after a rabbit when he smashed into the grill of my truck. I stopped and pulled him free before driving to the vet. She patched him up, and my wife and I fed him raw hamburger for a few weeks. Ever since, he has followed me to every job I’ve worked. Hawks are loners with a taste for warm blood, but they never forget a favor.”

Maybe it happened, maybe not, but what Squirrel said next had the imprimatur of Bishop Truth.

As the hawk sailed off, I asked him how he’d lost the vision in one eye. He said his crew had been taking down some trees for a contractor in Clemson while he did what he did best, supervise. His sons were grinding tree limbs beside an office complex under construction. Suddenly and violently, their father was struck in the face by a flying object of unknown origin. One of the sons called an ambulance, and in less than 30 minutes, Squirrel was in the OR at Oconee Memorial. Everyone assumed that something had been kicked back from the limb grinder, but the surgeon discovered a 12-penny nail lodged across the cheekbone and eyebrow, which accounted for the vertical facial scars before me. Had the projectile, which came from a nail gun at the construction site, been turned at any other angle, it would have flown through the eye and into his brain.

Oral tales lose so much in transcription that I wonder sometimes why I bother to write them down. My best answer is that despite recent technological threats to face-to-face conversation and storytelling, we are at heart a narrative species, just as chimps are groomers and dolphins love to play.

Instinctively, we all want to know, “What happened next?” or, “How did it turn out?” Often the verisimilitude of a tale is immaterial because each, modified to suit the teller, has its own truth. Most events in our lives do not have a neat beginning, middle, and end, but we all have a right to structure the record to express the point we wish to make. Utilizing “the creative possibilities of the lie,” as James Dickey called it, often is the difference between a riff and a melody.