Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Lost King (2022).

It opens with a familiar line of text.  "Based on a true story".  Right away, you know it's going to be one of those films.  The history of cinema doesn't want for lack of any biographical pictures.  It's a veritable cottage industry unto itself.  It's a select sub-genre whose origins seem to reach as far back as the beginning of the medium itself.  The first major (if not initial) biopic was Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, way back in 1928.  It was a silent film, which means its an acquired taste these days.  It also went on to become one of cinema's first great blockbusters, a low-key version of Cecil B. DeMille before he was even a name.  Dreyer's film was also a first in another way.  It is just possible that this film marks the beginning of the long, infamous tradition of the clash between filmmakers and scholars over the accuracy of historical persons and events in an artistic medium.  There might be one or two elements of the subject the Dreyer film got wrong, for instance.  More than a few viewers were happy to point this out, and things have carried on in such a vein ever since.  Which means the same issue of being "True to Life" is bound to plague Stephen Frears' production of The Lost King.  It's story does center on a Maid, of sorts, but not of Orleans.  After being given proper warning from the "True Story" tag, we're given an extra bit of information from the opening credits.

The film, we're told, is not just based on a true story.  It's also "Her Story".  So long as we're playing the game of Art vs History, it might help to point out that even this initial statement counts as an example of "true so far as it goes".  Or rather "true" for a given amount of true.  In the strictest sense, what we're dealing with here is the story of a Maiden and a King, and the way the two somehow found each other.  That is still not quite the whole truth, however.  For you see, there is a third player in the make-believe dramatization of history that's about to unfold.  He's always hanging about in the wings of the film's narrative, always waiting, perhaps, for his own say on things.  He even gets name dropped more than once or twice, here and there.  However, in order to get the full picture, we have to take things in their proper order.  That means knowing when to start at the proper beginning of the whole affair.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Three Types of Modern Prose and Their Readers.

In some ways, I owe a debt of gratitude to Roger Ebert for this one.  Even if what I'm about to write ends up on a different critical outlook from that of the beloved film critic for the Chicago Times, credit has to go where it's due.  It was Roger who got the gears in my mind turning.  This whole article is therefore best thought of as something like his accidental brainchild.  It also owes its existence to the work of one other famous artistic personality.  This would be the once noted Horror writer, Peter Straub.  In fact, it was an observation made by the critic about the author that got this whole thing started.  During the course of his review of a film adaptation of Straub's 1979 novel, Ghost Story, Ebert mentions how he once tried to get into the literary source material.  His own reaction to the book was that, in his words, "I plugged away at it for what must have been hundreds of pages before his unspeakable prose finally got to me. At least, he knows how to make a good story, if not how to tell it, and that is one way in which the book and the movie of “Ghost Story” differ (web)".  Ebert then goes on to qualify his judgment call in the following terms.

"The movie is told with style. It goes without saying that style is the most important single element in every ghost story, since without it even the most ominous events disintegrate into silliness. And “Ghost Story,” perhaps aware that if characters talk too much they disperse the tension, adopts a very economical story-telling approach. Dialogue comes in short, straightforward sentences.  Background is provided without being allowed to distract from the main event. The characters are established with quick, subtle strokes".  Then, he closes it all off with the simple judgment call of: "This is a good movie (ibid)".  Well, for what it's worth, I took his advice, or recommendation, and gave the film a watch.  Even after trying to keep as open a mind as possible, I'm afraid I'll still have to side with another critic, Bill Sheehan, who in his critical study, At the Foot of the Story Tree, described the movie version of Ghost Story, as "a marvel of missed opportunities (80)".  Nor does the divergence of critical opinion end there.  My own experience of reading the original novel was and remains a complete opposite.


I almost want to claim that Ebert and I must have been reading dissimilar novels by entirely different authors.  So here I was faced with a challenge.  How do I account for the differences of opinion between Sheehan and myself, versus those of one half of Siskel and Ebert?  
It was the kind of remark that didn't just get my attention, it sort of forced me to take what Ebert was saying with a certain degree of seriousness.  The trouble is that doing so kind of forced me to confront a series of interrelated question.  For instance, what counts as "good prose"?  How does this maxim translate into "good writing"?  In other words, what kind of prose makes for a "good story"?  More to the point, can there ever be anything such as a perfect, indelible, and unassailable prose style when it comes to judging the quality of any given artistic work, whether a movie, or a book?  I'm sure many of you reading this have already arrived at what seems to be the obvious conclusion.  If you are one of these readers, then you can go ahead and skip all of what I'm about to say next.  This article is not directed at any of you.

Instead, I think this is a topic that needs to be addressed to the novices in the audience.  I think it's worth devoting some time and space here to an examination of the different types of writing styles to be found in works of prose fiction.  I think it's worth making such an effort in an attempt to meet the kind of challenge that Ebert's words set before any attentive student of literature (which is what I at least hope I am).  It's also a subject worth trying to tackle because of the light it might be able to help us shine on the different ways there are of reading as well as the art and craft of writing.  In essence, what you've got here is the kind of work that appeals most to a former high school going on college level English Major.  The sort of work that "Book People" will get excited about, in other words.  Articles like this always tend to run the risk of vanishing into the hazy mists of academic thought, and leaving the casual reader lost in the forest, unable to tell the different between the woods and the trees.

My promise (or at the very least, my hope?) is to avoid making this a boring slog by avoiding both too much technical detail, and (again, trying, anyway) to provide what I regard as various snippets and examples of what I consider to be Good Prose in the most genuine sense of the term.  That being passages of narrative action and description that not only demonstrate what good writing is like, but also does something else.  I tend to think the ultimate value of any good work of fiction lies in its ability to entertain its audience.  This is the ultimate goal to aim for, before any other.  Even if you're someone like Jon Swift or Mark Twain, and you want to bear your heart and soul in an effort to awaken your readers to the danger of racial injustice, all the good intentions in the world will turn to dust in an arena like this if you can't make a compelling narrative that grabs your audience by the throat and won't let go until the last line has been written and read.  It is the story, and its ability to entertain, which is the deciding factor here.  Applying it to an article like this means I'm going to have to make sure each passage from a book I might choose for demonstration is good enough to help keep the reader engaged.

It also means above all that I shouldn't get lost in the woods, and that I make sure the same applies to anyone kind enough to give me their valuable time of day.  The good news here is that we don't have far to go.  A careful look around at the contemporary writing scene has let me know that there are just a handful of choices left open to any would-be word-slinger.  All current ink-stained wretches have the limited options of just three styles of prose manners or voices to choose from.  Each of them are easy to distinguish and arrange into their respective categories, and there are enough good representatives of the "best and brightest" of each class of style to make this an interesting enough romp for those who either care about this sort of thing, or else are just hanging around looking for useful recommendation of any book out there whose contents at least sounds good enough to see if cracking their spines open is worth the effort.  So, with that in mind, let's take a look at what we mean by the term: Good Prose.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023).

I can't recall how I wound up learning about this movie.  All I can say for sure is that it was one of those "By Accident" situations that happen more or less all the time.  I might have stumbled across this by accident in the course of reading an otherwise unrelated article on a Media Entertainment website, somewhere.  Or else I stumbled upon it as a banner advertisement on IMDB, or a similar place like that.  In fact, now that I stop and think it over, the way it happened was this.  I was on YouTube and looking for some other video, and a trailer for this film either popped up as an add by pure chance, or else I saw the title of the film with it's main star, Simon Pegg in the thumbnail, and that was enough to catch my interest.  I think the reason for wanting to give this film a chance comes down to two factors.  The first was that Christopher Lloyd was featured in a supporting role.  In other words, the film was advertised as some kind of supernatural, paranormal mystery thriller, and Doc Brown was going to be a part of it.  I suppose it makes me look kind of stupid, considering that my immediate reaction was more or less, "Sign me up"!  My only defense for this reaction is the second factor that got my attention.  Neil Gaiman was touted as playing a key role as a mischievous prankster spirit.  I had to see what the final results were like.  And so, that was how I wound up learning about this peculiar anomaly of a film.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Lady on a Train (1945).

The Noir story is a particular sub-genre of fiction that I don't think we've ever discussed in that much detail here at the Scriblerus Club.  We might have tackled stories that work as examples of this type of narrative, here and there.  Though always the focus was on the story as story.  I don't think we've ever paused here before to take stock of the nature of the genre as a whole.  Perhaps it's high time we did just that.  It can't hurt to broaden the media literacy of an age, and besides, it can help us to situate the nature of the movie that's on offer for today.  As per usual, though, here is where the trouble tends to start.  For the record, I'd argue that it's not impossible to get a good reading of precisely what a Noir story is.  In order to arrive at the proper definition, however, you do have to go through a number of baby steps, in order for a full understanding of the nature of the sub-genre to take effect.  In a PBS documentary on this subject, for instance, Richard Widmark (a frequent marquee headliner in films of this sort) describes the Noir narrative in the following terms:  "It was the 40s, right after the War.  Going to the movies was like going to a candy store.  Something for everybody.  Popular films were Melodramas, Romances, (and) Musicals.  The Big Song and Dance.  But that's not my kind of of movie.

"You could always find me in the theater round the corner.  People like me liked our pictures dark and mysterious.  Most were B movies made on the cheap.  Others were classy models with A talent, but they all had one thing in common.  They lived on the edge.  (They) told stories about life on the streets: shady characters; crooked cops; twisted love and bad luck.  The French invented a name for these pictures: Film Noir.  'Black Film', that's what they called them; about a darker side of human nature; about the world as it really was".  That description is a bit hyperbolic, yet it does convey perhaps a good sense of the atmosphere that these types of stories tend to evoke.  Another ingredient in the fiction of Noir is the way a lot of its most famous creative expressions seem to have been generated by the emotional fallout of the Second World War.  Edward Muller details this in his book Dark City.

"Film noirs were distress flares launched onto American movie screens by artists working the night shift at the Dream Factory.  Some shell-shocked craftsman discharged mortars, blasting their message with an urgency aimed at shaking up the status quo.  Others were firecrackers - startling but playful diversions.  Either way, the whiff of cordite carried the same warning: we're corrupt.  The nation's sigh of relief on V-J Day ought to have inspired a flood of "happily ever after" films.  But some victors didn't feel good about their spoils.  They'd seen too much.  Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress.  Unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging doubts about ingrained venality, ruthless human nature, unchecked urban growth throwing society dangerously out of whack.  Artists responded by delivering bitter dramas that slapped romantic illusion in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie.  Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it (ix)".  Once more, we are in the realm of grandiloquent hyperbole.  Muller's style is often prone to the same sense of the theatrical that infuses Widmark's own two cents on the matter.

It is still possible to give both commentators credit where it's due, though.  Widmark does a fair enough job of suggesting the specific type of emotional response that stories or films of this caliber were and are meant to suggest to the reader, or audience in the aisles.  Muller takes Widmark's comments on the proper atmosphere and does manage to expand the scope of things, at least by a bit.  His words bring the place of the trauma suffered by American soldiers during WWII to the forefront.  This is an important aspect of the Noir genre to keep in mind, as it is just possible to claim that one of (if perhaps not the) major driving factor that caused Noir stories to spike in the aftermath of that conflict was the sense of unrelieved tension that a lot of GI's brought back with them from the European Theater.  In fact, such a setup does serve as an unspoken background element in a 50s adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, where Mike Hammer, the film's anti-hero private detective has items and mementos lining the walls or boxes of his house that hint at the past of a bright faced, maybe even sophisticated college kid who's entire nature was re-framed by the incidents sparked by Pearl Harbor.

So it is possible to see this as an ingredient in the makeup of the modern form of Noir.  The problem with leaving it at this, however, is that it still doesn't bring us to the core of the sub-genre.  Neither Widmark nor Muller are able to lead us to the beating heart of the contemporary Mystery Thriller, and show us the engine that has kept powering this type of narrative throughout the years.  In order to do that, we have to go beyond and before the War years, out of the realm of cinema, and way back into the field of literature.  We have to go right back, in fact, to that same strand of literary Romanticism that Widmark and Muller claim to repudiate.  A closer look at the genre's origins, however, reveals that such clear-cut separations are less easy to make, and that perhaps the true allure of the Noir story is that it in fact does have a Romantic strain all its own.  It may count as something of a riff on a more familiar generic type of fictional narrative, yet the Romance of it all still remains, even when painted in darker shades.  The best excavation of the nature of this type of storytelling comes from the pages of Paul Meehan's Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet.  His basic premise, that the fiction of gangsters, detectives, psychos, femme fatales, and the type of alienated, lonely protagonists who stalk the world of Martin Scorsese's films all have their origin in the Horror genre is the most convincing.


It gives a greater sense of scope, perspective, and literary weight to the sub-genre, and helps us to gain a better sense of its overall artistic nature.  As Meehan helpfully informs the reader, "When it first emerged as a genre during the 1940s, film noir derived its distinctive visual style from the horror film.  Like horror, film noir exists inside a shadow realm of fear, darkness, fate and death.  Both forms exhibit a propensity toward nightmarish dream imagery and surrealism.  While it's more difficult to discern commonalities between the realms of science fiction and film noir, the connection with the horror genre is much more obvious.  The modern horror and mystery literary genres both had their origin in 18th and 19th-century gothic fiction, where the workings of human perversity were played out amid the trappings of the supernatural.  The works of authors Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle defined the emerging mystery genre in these early years, and the grotesqueries of gothic fiction were later reflected in the works of proto-noir American writers like Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain (1)".  I think Meehan's insight of Noir's relation to Gothic fiction is the key one.

It provides the final puzzle piece that completes the picture, and allows a greater sense of coherent order to the more impressionistic thoughts of Widmark and Muller.  In making a sustainable claim for Noir as an offshoot of Horror fiction, it also expands our understanding of a very particular mid-20th century expression of the American Gothic, and allows us the opportunity of viewing Noir as a sub-genre of Horror with a shared storytelling vocabulary, allowing for a greater sense of thematic overlap.  It also gives a better sense of generic definition.  Looked at from this angle, a Noir is little else except the setup and format of the classic 19th century Gothic novel of manners updated to a modern urban setting and environment.  The feasibility of this definition can be found by appealing to an undisputed master of the sub-genre.  Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca is based off of a 1938 novel written by Daphne Du Maurier.  With the exception of the book's then contemporary setting, the plot itself is nothing less than the kind of 1800s style bodice ripper complete with star crossed lovers, a Byronic hero with a troubled past, and a creepy housekeeper who knows where all the skeletons are in the closets.


Rounding it all off is the setting of the main action in a spooky, old dark house straight out of Poe or Mary Shelley.  The entire plot amounts to a kind of B grade melodrama, however Hitch's direction manages to give it an A list budget.  In both its story and atmosphere, Rebecca is the kind of tale that validates Meehan's thesis that Noir is, in the last resort, an off-shoot of Horror.  This is not to say that either genre has to be taken in a one-hundred percent serious tone.  Sometimes even the genre of crime and corruption can surprise you with its sense of humor.  That's the case with today's film.  Produced in 1945, and directed by a forgotten filmmaker known as Charles David, this is Lady on a Train.

Saturday, January 13, 2024

Catch Me If You Can (2002).

There's an old saying that goes "Truth is Stranger than Fiction".  In a way, I guess time has told on that adage.  You here phrases bandied about such as "Post Truth", or "Alternative Facts" when it comes to attempts at delineating the kind of society we all live in.  For my own part, I prefer to use a much older model or lens through which to view these contemporary conundrums.  So far as I can see, it really takes no more than a few good read throughs of Classical Philosophy to realize that what's happening in the world at large now is no more than an old challenge showing up once again.  This time it comes in a suitable, modern appearance which fits the time and age of its recurrence.  All we're dealing with today is nothing less than the same challenges that Plato outlined in his Allegory of the Cave.  For the longest time, it seems, we thought we had a pretty good grasp on the nature of reality.  Then advances in science and technology have come along and more or less proven to us all that this conviction was perhaps always little more than a convenient, but ultimately unworkable mask, and that the column of reality always had more than a few holes in it.  The result seems to have left us all in an unenviable position.  We've seem to have reached a point where its now become part of our daily routine to separate truth from falsehoods.

Rather than becoming a vehicle of spreading truth and democracy, it seems as if the advent of the Internet, and its attendant "digital village" has instead served to effectively dismantle the public square.  The net result of this successful attack is that it becomes possible to claim that any legitimate forum for public debate has, in effect, become co-opted.  Free speech, in other words, has been successfully infringed.  And the real kick in the teeth is how to do you regulate such infringements when the reach of the entire problem seems international in scope?  The sad part is I really can't offer you any solutions to these problems.  All this is just the simple train of thought kicked off by an encounter with Steven Spielberg's 2002 film, Catch Me If You Can.  I almost described it as an adaptation in that last sentence, for the simple reason that this is what it is.  The movie is based off of a book by the same name.  It was published way back just as the director of Jaws and Indiana Jones was getting his start.  It was also written by an otherwise unknown face in the crowd by the name of Frank Abagnale.  For reference and convenience I always pronounce that particular moniker as follows: "ABA-nail".  Hope that helps.

So who is this name from nowhere in particular, or Anywhere, USA?  What was it about this guy that caught the attention of the creator of E.T. ?  What particular story does he have to tell, and is it worth a hearing?  More important than all of this, what can something such as the nefarious life, times, and exploits of a simple, unassuming con artist tell us about the struggle to get at the truth in an era where such ventures can sometimes be a necessity of survival?  Some of that is a tall order to ask for.  So I won't even to pretend to go and look for all the answers with the help of a simple early 20s rom-com-drama.  It's a lot more the case of a critic wondering if the story of someone like Abagnale can help ease us into the task of learning to tell false fronts from reality by presenting us with a useful, and thankfully less vitriolic case study, both on and off the screen.  So with that in mind, let's a game of play catch-up.

Saturday, December 30, 2023

An Adventure in Art (1958).

I'm trying to recall the first time I met Mickey Mouse.  One of two possible candidates, or images stand out in my memory.  The first involves a picture of three figures trapped in an out-of-control mobile home as it's careening down a cliff.  Mickey himself is there, hanging on for dear life, alongside two others.  One of them is a cantankerous duck named Donald.  The other is someone who I think is a kind of dog person?  Anyway, the other fella's name is Goofy.  No, I mean that's his actual name, for some reason.  Not a description of his character, sorta.  The point is that's the initial candidate for the first time I ever met the Mouse and his two famous friends.  On a hook-up live-in trailer that's come unlatched from its 1930s Model T car, and is now literally tumbling it's helpless occupants to their certain deaths.  I'm not sure how the travails of Clarke Griswold and his amusing brood hold a candle to the sort of classic slapstick I'm thinking of now.  The name of the cartoon where all this action took place is called Mickey's Trailer, and I first saw back when I must have been no more than anywhere between five or six years of age.  The second contender for the first time I ever saw these three was in a short titled On Ice.  It featured all three of these characters once again.  This time they were getting into trouble on a simple skating trip.

I know I saw each of these cartoons in turn when I was a child.  I just can't tell you what order they were in.  If I had to take a wild guess, then I'll have to go with Mickey's Trailer as the first time I ever made acquaintance with the work of Walter Disney.  I was just a kid visiting my grandparents one Saturday, and it was at their house that they surprised me with a tape recording they'd made of a series of both Mouse House and Warner Bros. cartoons.  This was a treat they made a habit of for me when I was in their care, growing up.  Thanks to their efforts, I got to meet not just the Don, the Mickster, and the Goof.  I also ran into a rascally rabbit named Bugs, and yet another duck named Daffy.  There was also a cat named Tom and yet another mouse, this one named Jerry.  Last yet not least, I can never forget the wit and wisdom passed down to me and other children of that era through the efforts of three wise, humanist sages by the names of Larry, Curly, and Moe.  And I sort of owe all of these acquaintances to my dad's folks.  My grandparents were kind of awesome like that for some reason.

Looking back on those times now, I suppose the most remarkable thing is that I still own most of those pre-recorded tapes that they used to plunk me down in front of their living room TV to watch as a kid.  To any 80s kids who care about that sort of thing, I guess I count as somewhat lucky.  One thing I notice, going back through a few of these old VHS heirlooms, however, is that some of the content on them are of an interesting quality.  Here's where I have to jump in ahead of the reader and either assure and/or let some of them down.  Don't worry or get your hopes up.  This is not the lead-in to some hackneyed internet Creepypasta.  I'm sticking to real life here, and the content I'm talking has no curses, no secret message, or otherwise displays the by now hoary old trope of the ghost in the machine.  What I find fascinating about these old tapes instead is that my grandparents sort of wound up doing me a bigger favor than they realized.  It's like they created an accidental time capsule of TV shows past.

Now I don't think I'm saying anything too original here.  All I've said is something that a lot of old VHS collectors know about at first hand.  The luckier among us get to collect whole libraries of forgotten celluloid lore, complete with nostalgic scratches and long vanished TV static.  It's a shared memory that's since turned into both its own aesthetic and musical genre.  My interest in all this rests with the few bits of recorded history tapes like mine can tell us about some of the entertainment we grew up watching in an era before the digital revolution swept it all away.  One item in particular that keeps cropping up across most of my grandparents old video cassettes is not such much the constant, lingering presence of Mickey and his kingdom.  Instead, it's more to do with the fact that most of the Mouse's material is confined to a very specific programming block.  Back then, as now, if you wanted to see anything related to the Happiest Place on Earth, you had to look to the Magic Kingdom's considerable PR arm.  What this meant in practice is that every time my grandparents were able to capture a bit of that very same Kingdom on tape, it always came from just one, single source the whole time.

This came in the form of a TV show which had a lot of names when it was around.  I'm not even sure it exists anymore, if I'm being honest.  The title that I came to know is the one that I'm going to use here and throughout the rest of this article.  Both because it's the shortest and most digestible descriptor I can think of, and also I guess just because it was my introduction to it all, if that makes any sense.  So for the sake of clarity and ease, the program was called Walt Disney Presents.  It had it's start way back in the year 1954, and was still hanging around when my dad's folks recorded reruns of it for me when I was born.  That's how I first made acquaintance with Uncle Walt and his enchanted realms.  It was on an obscure variety program that I think has turned into the analog equivalent of an endangered species with the advent of platforms like Disney Plus.  In a way that is a shame, as I think it robs the company of easier access for its fans.  It used to be you could catch all the magic you wanted on your TV virtually free of charge.  If, that was, Mommy and Daddy continued to pay the cable bills.  As a result, I'm one of a generational cohort that came to know of Disney through this one, charming program.

I've even talked about it a bit, once before on this very site, in fact.  Not too long ago I used a book called Disney TV to provide as good an overview of that show as I could at the time.  Whether I've gotten any better at this is something others will have to judge.  I guess now is as good a time as ever to come clean and admit that brief review of an obscure critical study was meant as a kind of appetizer.  Something that could maybe prepare the reader for more where that came from, and so the time has arrived.  What I've begun to realize for a while now is the extent to which this old, forgotten variety program has gone on to shape a lot of my own tastes.  I'm not sure if it's right to say they've shaped the lens I use to either read or watch stories.  However, this simple TV show does tend to act a lot as a cornerstone that I find myself wanting to return to now and again to gain a sense of bearings.  That's why I thought now might be the time to help unearth a rare, and unheralded gem by taking a look at one of its forgotten episodes.  This is something I've just been able to do for the very simple reason that I'm not alone.  Turns out there are a lot of Mouse House fans who grew up under the same circumstances.


Our folks managed to snag VHS copies of whole episodes of a TV show that Walt started back before the idea of recordable home media was just a pipe dream.  And so now I'm able to recapture moments of my past that I thought I'd lost forever.  Or else I can now watch episodes that I've never even seen before, and knew only from old broadcast listings.  To tell you the truth, I thought most of this stuff had vanished into the sands of time long ago.  Instead, I now have the opportunity to live up to the goals of this site, and rescue an overlooked work of Disney's from the ash heap of obscurity.  I think it fair to warn the reader that this is probably the kind of thing I'm going to make a habit of going forward, every now and then.  This first offering is best looked at as an opening salvo, of sorts, then.  I think we'll start out on an episode of Walt Disney Presents with a very apt title.  It's called An Adventure in Art.

Saturday, December 16, 2023

A Child's Christmas in Wales (1952).

 "When I was a boy, every thing was right" - The Beatles, She Said, She Said.

"And I was green, and carefree...Time let me play and be...", Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

In some ways, I guess I was always trying to find my way back to those first Christmases.  You must have some idea of what I mean.  For this is something almost everyone has stockpiled in the attic storehouse of the mind.  Christmas was something else when you're young.  This is not to say that it isn't special (to me, at least) now.  Far from it.  As of this writing, I can claim with a certain sense of relieved pride that it's still one of my favorite times of the year.  There may be a bit of competition between the Winter Holiday, and the Autumn Festival known as Halloween.  Yet on the whole, it's still the damn near perennial image of the Yule Tree that manages to win out time and again.  Pretending or else acknowledging that you're a ghost, or some other creature of the night will always have a certain element of fun and truth in it.  However, enchantment not only has its place, but will always have its day in the end.  I think the reason most of us tend to gravitate toward Christmas so much is because its kind of the one time in the year when we can permit ourselves to be reminded of the Romantic potential invested in the strange order of things.

When I was a boy, Christmas was different.  It's true enough as these things go.  Though I'll swear I may never know how to get others to believe it.  Rather, let's say belief isn't the issue.  There's tons of us out there who have had similar experiences.  Odds are even if you put us in a room together, and made us compare notes, what you'd get is this single story made up of separate voices.  Each of them combing together to create a collective collage tapestry of decked halls, lights strung upon fences, branches, and house tops.  Along with the requisite number of other familiar elements.  Aside from the necessary inclusion of shops filled with toys, decorations, and paraphernalia, you also had a complete childhood cabinet full of Holiday viewing fare, including all your old friends, such a Big Bird, Frosty, the Grinch, and Rudolph (whose story may have been a secret parable about the treatment and plight of Judaism during the Season, though this is something you only pick up on once you get older).  Then come the personal elements of the Holiday.  This is the realm of memory.  That moment when Christmas ceases to be a public institution, and instead becomes a part of whoever you are, because you were a child, once.  When you're a kid, life is Epic even before you know the full meaning of the word.


And the Season held you green and carefree under the mercy of its means.  It's the moment, in other words, where Christmas becomes something you were almost able to hold in your hands, once upon a time.  For me, the moment when it's time to bring a fresh cut tree into our house was always something special.  It was never just a matter a looking for the prime decoration to install in some out of the way place.  It was a lot more like going on a grand hunt.  The journey was to make your way through a sea of green, and it was never really a tree you were after.  Instead, then as now, what I look for is that same picture postcard, faded perhaps here and there, yet still vibrant in a way that time can't reach.  You must know something of what I'm talking about.  It's not the tree itself.  Or at any rate, it's never just the next specimen you happen to run across.  Instead, it's the Ur example.  The primordial product that catches your eye, and lets you know that you've found not just the last grand decoration of the season, but also something of an icon that symbolizes not just a Holiday, but anything that can be called right in life.

When I was a boy, bringing home the tree for the Holidays was almost like a solemn occasion.  The kind of moment filled with a world of import that only little kids can manage.  So no.  It wasn't a tree my parents and I brought.  It was this strange yet magnificent god of the earth, made of wood and pine.  And whenever you tried to gaze up and take it all in, you might have been lucky enough to recapture at least a sliver of the mindset that once made the ancient Vikings who dwelled the in the Northern Forests regard it as just a mere branch of Yggdrasil.  The great cosmic tree whose trunk and branches make up the very roots of the world itself, and on who all rely, in one way or another.  At least that's what some of our ancestors might have believed, or hoped was true anyway.  It's also close enough to what a Christmas Tree looks like when you're just a kid.  All of which is to say that as things stand, the childhood oriented nostalgia attached to the Holidays has become a kind of cottage industry all of its own.  In fact, I'm guilty of offering my own two cents to this growing field of memoir writing.

Though I suppose it does raise a question in the minds of the more curious among us.  Where did such a literary-artistic tradition come from in the first place?  Along with the stockings, Yule Logs, and gift giving, perhaps the most common and therefore unremarked aspects of the Season is the tradition of what might be termed the Holiday Memories genre of storytelling.  The examples of the kind of tale I'm thinking about now are thankfully still well remembered and loved to this day.  The best sample specimen of this seasonal tradition remains Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story.  These are the narratives in which the storyteller and the protagonist are one and the same.  And we follow along with the narrator as they try to recount what their own experience of that fabled Time of the Season was like when they were just kids.  The usual contents of this type of a autobiographical narrative are often expressed in a predominantly comic vein, or mode of expression.  It's almost become a formula at this point, in other words.  We follow the main character over the course of one Season, and observe how their experiences of that time may have helped them learn and grow.  Sometimes this can result in the familiar trope of nostalgia tinged with sadness and loss, though it's the comic that continues to be the ultimate defining trait of the sub-genre.  Sometimes being no more than recounting a funny incident.


So while the idea of the Christmas Memoir has been around for a while, and some efforts like Shepherd's have become world famous, that still leaves the question of origins unresolved.  Where did this particular Holiday sub-genre come from, and who helped give it its start?  I think it's useless to try and appeal here to the likes of Shepherd, Charles Schulze, or even Dr. Seuss.  These are the most famous literary icons of the Season.  However, only one of them has ever written down a proper a Christmas Memoir.  The other two don't really count.  Schulze is just so good at being a storyteller that he can sometimes make you think he's being autobiographical when in fact he's not.  All Seuss is doing, meanwhile, is telling no more than just a straight made-up fable about personal alienation in relation to the Holiday Festival itself.  The kind of narrative we're looking for (the one that guys like Shepherd have gone on to make famous, in other words) is a much more elusive beast.  It has its ultimate origins in the field of personal recollection.  And yet for that very reason, it's history and beginnings can be harder to pinpoint for those who are content to just rest easy in the winter festival itself.  

For those of us with a more bookish turn of mind, finding out where your favorite stories come from is all part of the fun.  In the case of Memoirs of the Holidays, it's kind of amazing just how sparse the bread crumb trail turns out to be.  As near I can tell, the writer who came closest to first breaking ground in this sub-genre might have to be Washington Irving.  Turns out the writer most famous for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also penned an article about Christmas customs in England way back in the day.  It was a short non-fiction piece called Old Christmas, that Irving later incorporated into his volume of short works known as The Sketchbook (which also contain the first appearance of Ichabod Crane and his fatal Hallow's Eve Ride).  While a convincing case can be made that Irving deserves a place of honor as one of the key shapers or architects of the ways in which the Holiday is celebrated in America to this day, I'm still not sure whether he counts as the first person to create the Christmas autobiography as we now know it.  If he does, then the caveat is that he makes for a very rough prototype.  Unlike Shepherd, Irving is less interested in recounting his own Yuletide experiences, than in tracing down the history of Christmas itself, and the customs this has given birth to throughout history.  To be fair, Irving's own writings on the subject make for a fascinating topic in itself.


However, I'm not so sure this is what we're talking about when we think of the modern seasonal reminiscence as we know it today.  The perfect irony here is that the best possible candidate for this kind of writing doesn't even have its roots in the United States, but rather the Welsh seaside of England.  In a way, I suppose this is kind of fitting.  As it ties into Irving's own explorations of the history of Christmas Customs.  However, the irony is doubled in a further sense.  Because while the ultimate origins of this story lies in a childhood lived out among the Welsh Coast, it's actual literary start came about once upon a time, somewhere in the very middle of the Beat Era New York City.