Rudyard Kipling's Finest Story in the World (1891).

There are a lot of reasons this blog exists.  One of them is because there are a lot of good stories worth remembering out there.  So, it's like, I kind of want to make sure they at least stand a chance of not getting lost to time.  No matter how obscure the artist or the work may be, if the story is even halfway decent, then it deserves a shot at preservation in my book.  The best I know of how to do that is to give the artist and their work as good an article here as I can manage.  It's not much, yet perhaps it makes difference enough to one person out there.  Out of such things, dynasties can sometimes be built, after all.  A second reason for starting up this operation is a lot more simple and common among fandoms.  I just like sharing and (if possible) getting a chance to discuss my favorite books and films.  The desire to share an enthusiasm with others has got to be one of the oldest instincts in human nature.  It might not get as big a press coverage as the ability to hunt, gather, and form communal bonds, yet I'll swear such a drive has to be a natural part of what makes us human.  One final reason for posting articles up here on this site centers around one enthusiasm in particular.  For whatever reason, I'm fascinated with the way that stories are created.  I'm one of those behind-the-scenes junkies who can sometimes get just as great a deal of enjoyment in figuring out how The Hobbit was put together just as much as I do reading it as a story.

This fascination with how and why stories are made might be described as perhaps one of the guiding purposes of this blog.  It's all tied up with this unshakable curiosity I have.  The best way to describe it might be to form it in the shape of a series of questions.  Why do stories exist?  What makes them work so well when the writing is good?  Also, what makes it all fail in various ways?  In other words, I seem to be fascinated just as much with the craft and imaginative inspiration that fuels the art of writing every bit  as I am with reading a good example of the finished literary product.  To cut it all short, I seem to be a by now incurable bookworm.  The kind of guy who takes the full ramifications of that title seriously and without a trace of irony.  I suppose that in itself is ironic, yet it's just the way everything has turned out for me.  And so here is this blog, and the fascination still remains.  How do good stories get told?  It's one of the considerations that powers the engine of this meager little site, and I'll probably still be asking it long after this article is no longer in my rearview mirror.  Sometimes a reader like me gets lucky, and runs across an actual literary artist whose mind is caught up in the with the same fascination of where do the stories come from?  One famous name who shares this enthusiasm was an author by the name of Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.

I've written about him once or twice on this blog.  What's interesting about guys like Kipling is that there's a sense in which he can be said to conform to type.  He's a problematic mind with an undeniable well of imaginative talent and creativity sharing the same mental office space with the kind of small-mindedness of, say, an H.P. Lovecraft.  The key difference (however much or little this counts) is that Kipling never seems to have been as virulent in his opinions as Lovecraft, even going so far as to count the actual native inhabitants of both India and Arabia as among his closest friends.  The result is one of those studies in contrast, a natural sense of humanism and empathy coexisting somehow within the politics of the British Raj.  The result is this strange picture of the artist as a kind of borderline figure, someone with a foot in two opposed worlds, and always struggling with how to hold each in the proper balance.  There's plenty worth talking about on that score, and maybe we'll have a chance to discuss it here as we go along.  Right now, it is enough to repeat what I've said above.  Kipling is unique in being one of the handful of artists who are just as much fascinated by why and how stories are told, just as much as he is interested in getting as much of the finished product on the page as far as possible.

This topic of why and how stories are made held such a fascination for him, that it eventually resulted in one of those stories about the making of stories.  The difference is the interesting twist that Kipling brings to the table when it comes to describing the writing process.  I call it different, yet maybe that's not quite so much the right word.  Perhaps when you put the writer's thoughts on the art of writing into the plainest life-size terms as possible, what you get is no more than the same thoughts of theorists like Coleridge and Jung.  However, even if this is the case, it's the way in which Kipling describes the creative process, and most of all, the way he talks about where do the stories come from that makes for such an interesting idea to unpack.  This, then, is Kipling's tale of "The Finest Story in the World".

Edith Nesbit's Accidental Magic (1912).

If there's any hidden thread of logic to history, then one of its unspoken rules seems to go as follows.  Most of the great pioneers will never get the credit they deserve.  Neither shall their names be written on anyone's hearts, nor must their memories be allowed to endure.  If that sounds harsh, then, it's like, I don't know what to say.  We've got all the opportunity in the world left for someone to rediscover the life and fiction and someone like Edith Nesbit.  I mean if anyone else would bother with such an effort, I'd be more than happy with that outcome.  And so the net result is no one offers themselves any other choice except to ask who or even what the fuck am I talking about?  And the literary accomplishment of one of the first major groundbreakers in the creation of the modern fantasy story goes by without notice.  All that happens then is that the story of a great talent goes untold.  I'm not sure you can describe that kind of outcome as fair.  It's just what happens, in spite of a lot of best efforts at keeping worthwhile memories alive.  So that's why blogs like this exist, to make sure that a lot of good names, stories, and narratives aren't entirely forgotten.  Edith Nesbit is just one such talent out there that deserves to be remembered.

In many ways, her own life reads like something of out of one of her own fairy tales.  I've written a previous article on this author that goes into much greater depth on her life.  Here, however, I'll have to settle for the truncated version of historic events.  Edith's story is told simply enough, though.  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who found herself turned into the protagonist of one of her own fairy tales.  It all started one day in 1858, when this young child found herself born to parents in the Kennington district of Surrey, England.  Together, they decided to call her Edith.  Her father, John, was a prosperous agricultural chemist who had even managed to build a successful school dedicated to that same farming practice.  The place was devoted to an Industrial Education, in other words.  It meant that John Nesbit spent a great deal of his life teaching farmers from both the local and distant countrysides how to survive and thrive in the often merciless, cutthroat world of mid-Victorian era London.  As a result, Edith's earliest experiences found the child surrounded by people from a majority working class backgrounds.  Since her father was a diligent advocate for the rights of England's lower class citizens, the greatest legacy he seems to have left his daughter was a willingness to see herself as no more than an equal with the poorest citizen of the metropolis.  Edith's education was lucky in that sense, anyway.

Her father may not have been able to help when it really counted, yet at least he was able to instill in her the idea that even the lowest classes of the UK had an inalienable dignity that meant they ought to be given a just and fair chance to better themselves and their situations.  In that sense, much in the way of stories like this, her father was able to give his favorite daughter a gift.  Also much in the vein of such folktales, this gift was never showy or extravagant, yet it wound up being among those talents that counted the most later on.  Edith was able to remember the lessons she learned from her father's encounters with England's working classes, and she used the knowledge gained from these early memories to become something of a tireless champion for the poor and the worker's rights.  Another gift given to Edith by her parents was that of the Victorian Childhood Nursery.  This was the second great teacher in the child's life, and it was the one that gave Edith her future fame and glory.

There is one big, long book to be written about the place of the Victorian Nursery in the development of the modern Fantasy genre and the stories that have gone on to become the guideposts and markers of its identity.  Many chapters of this story have already been written in the form of various studies and master's theses.  The best volumes out there to explore this topic still remain the same.  They are Morton Cohen's landmark biography of Lewis Carroll, Roger Lancelyn Green's Tellers of Tales: Children's Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1968, and Stephen Prickett's simply titled, yet comprehensive book-length study, Victorian Fantasy.  The best way to sum up a long yet fun story is to claim that Edith was the recipient of a collective gift.  The birth of the middle class type household into which she was born saw the invention and rise of the Nursery as a childhood social institution.  I'm not real sure its correct to describe these rooms that soon began to dot the landscape of both British and later American homes as a clear-cut example of the safe space.  That's especially not true when writers like Edith, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe would go on to look back at their semi-shared time in those places as one of learning how to confront their fears of the dark.  Instead, I subscribe idea that the parents thought they were giving their kids a safe space, however it just didn't turn out that way.

Instead, what wound up happening is that it's like we sort of ended up carving out a kind of ballpark in which for the first time the Imagination was allowed to roam free and play in.  It has to be remembered that nothing quite like this had ever existed before.  Until the Nursery came along, while the novel and the reading public had begun to cement themselves as permanent aspects of modern life, it was all still a relatively new social construct.  The first major publishing houses had just been set up in the 1730s and 40s during the last century by the likes of Robert Dodsley, and most of the fiction published tended to be in the Manners and Morals vein of Jane Austen, or else it was the first, halting attempts at building the first examples of the modern Gothic Ghost Story, with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, or the germ of the fantastic adventure yarn contained in the likes of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.  These were all very much baby's first steps, rather than the full-fledged fantastic genres as we know them now.  If authors like Scott and Dodsley were the ones to throw the ball into the playing pen, then it was kids like Edith, who grew up with this stuff in the Nursery to take the pitch and run with it.  That's because the Nursery was where all the folklore of the old world came to have its new Victorian home.

Since the Nursery was designed as a place for children like Edith to entertain themselves, that meant it had to be stockpiled with all the sorts of diversions that were thought to be fit for young adults.  The good news for the likes of Nesbit, Kipling, and a young West Midlands lad with the peculiar yet lyrical name of Tolkien was that the adults in charge of the Nursery all seemed to agree that there was no harm in passing along to their young charges reprintings and chap books containing the content from storytellers like Aesop, Charles Perrault, and the Brother's Grimm.  That's how a girl like Edith first made the acquaintance of Mother Goose and the denizens of fairyland as charted and cartographed by the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare.  This growing trend of the Nursery as the place for childhood idylls was helped along in no small part by the first major translations of The Thousand and One Nights made for children's mass consumption.  It made it possible for the YA of Queen Victoria's time to conceive of a visit to the Nursery as yet another chance to take journeys on magic carpets, or open enchanted casements onto a host of other worlds and adventures.  This, then, was the second and most telling influence on Edith's childhood.  It was enough to turn her into a lifelong fan of the Fantastic.

This initial fan girl crush soon turned into a lifetime professional occupation.  As she came of age, Edith soon found herself transforming from just a dedicated enthusiast in the crowd to one of the artists performing for the audience.  As she began to train her mind in the art of storytelling, she also began to discover how to take all of the folklore she'd devoured as a starstruck child and find an ideal modern form of creative expression for all of the old myths she used to love as a child.  In doing this, she sort of wound up creating the parameters of the modern Fantasy genre as we now have it.  A good way to gain a perspective on this achievement is with a simple formula.  No Nesbit, no Tolkien and Middle Earth.  Also no Neil Gaiman and practically everything he's ever done.  None of their later efforts would have been possible if Edith didn't turn out to be the one creative voice that wound up plowing the original field in the first place.  The main reason either of the two later names were able to succeed as well as they did was because Nesbit was the one who built the original ballpark for them to play in.  In honor of her unrecognized achievement, I thought it might help to remind everyone of what she did by taking a look at one of her short stories for children.  This one was a previous publication that was later added to a collection known as The Magic World, and Edith called it by the title of "Accidental Magic".

Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion by Philippa Pearce (2001).

I've already given readers of this blog their first introductions to a writer named Philippa Pearce once before.  For those who still haven't read that older Club entry, or those who have and just forgot, here's a bit of an abridged refresher course.  Just as everybody has to come from somewhere, it also makes sense to claim that every writer is the product of the influences that molded them into the specific type of artist that they have all become.  Shakespeare and Mark Twain, for instance, wouldn't have been capable of writing the works that made them famous without the imprints that time, place, and culture had left on their minds.  This is something that appears in all of their works, and its so much a part of who each writer is that it's like there's no way they could stop it from seeping into their words.  To read Shakespeare with due diligence is to slowly immerse yourself into the early modern mindset that was the Elizabethan World Picture.  Likewise, becoming a devoted fan of Twain's work is a good way to gain a working knowledge of both the pre and post-Civil War ethos of the American landscape during the middle and near end of the 19th century.  Twain, in particular, is a useful resource these days for the way in which even his most imaginative flights of fancy highlight all of the social issues that this Country is still dealing with.

In the same way, though in a much lighter vein, it is possible to get a sense of the influences that helped mold Philippa Pearce into the writer she became.  In her case, most of the shaping influences in her art can be traced back to her childhood, growing up in Great Shelford, near the River Cam, in Cambridgeshire, England.  Her parent's were merchant millers, yet their occupation never got in the way of their daughter's education.  A lot of that was conditioned by the location that Ernest and Gertrude Pearce decided to settle down and raise a family in, and which subsequently became the place of the artist's birth.  If you follow the course of the River Cam long enough in a certain direction, it will take you both through and right past the iconic town and College which have taken their respective namesakes from the water source.  It's one of those cases where, if you pay attention to the geography long enough, you can maybe begin to understand why sometimes even the children of the working class residents of the town dotted about the River could sometimes grow up with higher rates of literacy than elsewhere, and this includes Pearce herself, as well.  All of which is to say that the first and biggest influence on Philippa as a child was the fact that she grew up within the shadows, environs, and confines of Cambridge University.  As a result, she was something of a college town girl.

It makes sense, therefore, that spending most of her childhood within reach of one of the most iconic and greatest centers of learning in the world meant her formative years were spent in an atmosphere that was always being molded at some fundamental level by the demands and enticements of academia.  It's no surprise, therefore, that growing up in such a collegiate setting would mean both an easy access to books, and eventual result of both an academic, as well as literary frame of mind on the part of the author.  All available indications point to Philippa taking a somewhat natural interest in the world of Arts and Letters at an early age, no doubt shaped in large degree to the influence that Cambridge University and its administration was able to exert on the daily workings of life in her hometown.  She was further assisted in this growing interest in the Realm of Letters by the fact that her parent's business as millers left them well off enough to send their daughter to Cambridge's Girton College.  She was thus able to graduate with a successful degree in both English and History (web).  It was this nurtured interest in Art and is relations to historical events which seems to have colored Philippa's work for the remainder of her days.  Her fictions tend to coalesce around a number of themes and settings.

In one sense, she's very much a writer concerned with the potential dramas of the domestic scene.  The vast majority of her work takes place in the lower and middle class houses containing the types of families that she knew growing up.  In this she shares a lot in common with Mark Twain.  Both artists can be described as regional authors, or Writers of Place.  Like Twain, in other words, Phillipa always seems to have been at her best when bringing the Cambridgeshire town and country settings she knew as a child to life on the printed page.  Twain did the same thing with his boyhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.  Or, for that matter, in much the same way Tolkien did for the West Midlands country of his own Victorian/Edwardian youth.  Philippa's stories tend to be a lot quieter in their focus on the domestic than either the rambunctious mischief of Twain, or the soaring epic qualities of Tolkien.  However, that's not the same as saying that she was unfamiliar with the tropes of the Fantastic.  While the domesticity of Cambridge country life might have been the author's main primary setting, much like the work of Stephen King, Pearce's backdrops were often the stage for various happenings and occurrences of the otherworldly variety.  What's remarkable and somewhat gratifying to learn is just how much of these Fantasy elements took the form of the traditional Gothic framework.

Also much like King, Philippa's stories concern the ways in which the hidden and sometimes troubled aspects of life can erupt into an otherwise normal setting in the form of the supernatural.  The major difference between the two is that Pearce's approach to this same material tends to take a much more gentler guiding hand, for lack of a better word.  A lot of this seems down to the fact that when it came time to find her niche in the world of letters, Phillipa somehow wound up settling on the venue of children's author as the mode that allowed the best possible expression of her own creative voice.  Nor is there anything to complain about, really.  Much like the work of R.L. Stine, or Bruce Coville (or closer to home, E. Nesbit and M.R. James), at her best Pearce's efforts can act as a very useful gateway entry to the wider world of Gothic fiction.  She does this by manufacturing narratives of the ghostly and the whimsical that in some ways can almost be said to signal the future work of authors like Neil Gaiman.  One such story is what we'll be looking at today.  It's called "Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion".

Charles Beaumont's The Wages of Cynicism (1999).

I think by now most readers of this site have a passing familiarity with a writer named Charles Beaumont.  Not too long ago he was the subject of a documentary devoted to not just to his life, work, and memory a documentary devoted to not just to his life, work, and memory.  It was also about the legacy and thumbprint he was able to leave on pop culture, in terms of the specific kind of stories he managed to tell.  In the strictest sense, I suppose there's nothing intrinsically new or original about the kind of work Beaumont wrote.  He was a fantasist, first, last, and always.  Perhaps the best phrase I can use to describe him as an artist it to claim that Beaumont stands as an all too often overlooked literary inheritor.  His work emerges or steps onto the public stage as the product of a long and venerable tradition of Fantastic fiction the includes influences from all three of the major popular genres.  This is a list that would have to include all the usual suspects: H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells.  The biggest influence, however, seems to have belonged to Ray Bradbury.  These seem to have been the determining names that went on to shape the kind of fiction that Beaumont churned out from what turned out to be a surprisingly short run of time, from 1951 all the way up to 1965.  If that time span gives the impression of a promising career brought to an abrupt and sudden halt, that's because it really was.

Perhaps the biggest reason that most people are no longer familiar with the name and writings of Charles Beaumont is because his life was taken way too early by illness.  What's remarkable about his career as an author is just how vast an amount of material he was able to churn out in such a short span of time.  It all reads very much like how both his friends and favorable critics once observed.  Beaumont always seemed to work as if some inner aspect of his personality knew that he was maybe never going to have all that long, so it was best to try and tap into the Imagination for all it was worth, and leave as great a mark on the world of the storytelling arts as he possibly could.  In a way, it's just possible to claim that he's succeeded.  You may no longer know Beaumont's name, though for the most part, you sure as hell can't escape the legacy he's left behind.  It's no mistake to claim Chuck Beaumont as a writer with something of a pioneer status to his work.  While the passage of time has rendered a lot of his writings as either obscure or too familiar sounding to be worth much comment, it helps to keep in mind that back when he was writing, Beaumont and his friends were busy finding what was then nothing less than a new and modern voice for tales of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.

The kind of writings Beaumont was famous for are very much as described by author Christopher Conlon.  "They have the power of fables: simple, direct, allegorical, they pull you in and hold you—but they teach you something too. They’re the kind of stories SF master Theodore Sturgeon called “wisdom fiction.” And while these particular tales are the work of completely different writers—Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Charles Beaumont (“The Howling Man”), William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run)—they almost seem as if they might all have been hatched from a single brilliant, fantastically inventive imagination.

"This is no accident. For these men were, from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, part of a close-knit brotherhood of writers centered in the Los Angeles area that came to dominate not only printed SF and fantasy, but movies and TV as well—scripting between them many of the period’s best-known films (including most of the Roger Corman / Edgar Allan Poe movies), along with classic segments of Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, and virtually every episode of The Twilight Zone. At its peak this association of creative artists also included, among others, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Jerry Sohl, Ray Russell, and Harlan Ellison. These outstandingly gifted men were collectively referred to by several names, including “The Southern California School of Writers” and “The Green Hand” (after the Mafia’s “Black Hand”). But they were most commonly called, simply, “The Group.”

“It’s an astonishing story,” says Marc Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion. “Many of these writers would not have been nearly as creative without each other. It was genuinely a gestalt that made these people deeper, better—made them stretch to places they never would have gotten to without each other.” Group member William F. Nolan, whose film credits include Burnt Offerings and Trilogy of Terror, explains: “We’d talk plot, read stories we’d finished for opinions, talk about markets and what was selling and who was buying, discuss character development and structure, and, yes, we’d argue, but in a constructive way. We all helped each other…and inter-connected on projects.”

“Sometimes, of an evening,” Ray Bradbury has written, “Richard Matheson would toss up there merest dust fleck of a notion, which would bounce off William F. Nolan, knock against George Clayton Johnson, glance off me, and land in [Charles Beaumont’s] lap. ..Sometimes we all loved an idea so much we had to assign it to the writer present who showed the widest grin, the brightest cheeks, the most fiery eyes.”  Direct collaborations between Group members were common. And no wonder. In those early days, most of them—particularly the “inner circle” of Nolan, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and novelist John Tomerlin—were men in their twenties who were just beginning their careers. They found strength, encouragement, and a sense of solidarity in the company of other struggling young writers. Because of the Group, says Nolan, “We were not alone; we had each other to fire us creatively, to bounce ideas around, to solve plot problems. It was the best kind of writing class that could ever be imagined.”

"But the closeness of the Group members went beyond the writing. According to Johnson (scriptwriter for Twilight Zone and Star Trek): “We knew each others’ wives, we went to each others’ houses, we shared holidays together, we went to movies and other things together…[We] would go out on the town and zoom around from place to place, stay out all damned hours. We’d just do anything you can think of. We’d go to strip joints to watch the strippers strip and be embarrassed to be there, but nonetheless whistling and whooping it up and trying to act like college kids…We’d go to nice restaurants like Musso and Frank’s or we’d end up at Barney’s Beanery. Or someplace along the beach. It hardly mattered.” The central members were as open to a carnival as they were to an art-house film. More than any particular activity, the joy was in each others’ company.

"And, most especially, the joy was in the company of one man—a lanky, charismatic young author of screenplays (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao) and teleplays (Twilight Zone) as well as essays, short stories, and novels, who is described by Nolan as having been “the hub of the wheel,” the Group’s “electric center”: the vibrant, brilliant, and tragic Charles Beaumont (Conlon, California Sorcery, 1-3)".  A lot of this will be familiar to older readers of the Club.  For those who are new, however, a handy general guide to Beaumont and his life's work can be found here, at this link.  I'd urge novice readers to start out with the article contained in the link above, and then come back here for further exploration when and if you feel like it.  For those veteran readers who are already familiar with the material of Beaumont's life and writings, I kind of owe you a bit of gratitude.  For whatever reason, my previous article on the obscure California Sorcerer has wound up becoming one of the most popular pages on this blog.  For that reason, I think a bit of a reward is in order.  That's why I've decided to revisit this particular well.  Today, we'll take a look at one of the short stories Beaumont seems to have written yet never published within his lifetime.  It's an unknown piece with the simple title of "The Wages of Cynicism".

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939).

It was not too long ago that I discovered I was a character in a work of fiction.  At least that's how the whole business seems have turned out.  It was not the discovery I was expecting to make, by any means.  It's not like you can just wake up one morning and expect to find that the nature of your entire life is akin to that of words made of ink on a page?  And so, here am I.  The way it all came about was simple.  To tell you truth it was all down to nothing more than what I would have otherwise thought of as little more than a minor private pastime.  In order to explain why something like a seemingly inconsequential personal hobby can be enough to turn a flesh and blood human being into just another picture in a book, some explanation is in order.  I've been a reader and a viewer all my life, you see.  I can still recall the first clear and unbroken memory I ever had of single day in my life.  I must have been no more than five, and I'm walking into my family living room.  The TV is on, and the first thing I see, my first complete memory, is of an animated TV show featuring characters created by a man whose name I will later learn is called Jim Henson.  As my young self continues to watch the show, all that happens is Uncle Jim metaphorically takes my hand, and proceeds to teach me the value of the Imagination as a means of creativity.  Looking back, that seems to have been the start of the whole business, really.  I've been a fan of the arts ever since.

It really does seem like from that moment on, my focus in life was on the world of the Arts.  The Imagination and its ability to tell stories seems to have become one of the key guiding passions of my life.  One of my main avenues for plugging into reality, if that makes any sense.  Thanks to the efforts of Henson, and others like Spielberg and Don Bluth, I was granted the ability to be curious about how stories are made and what they all mean.  It's a path I haven't really strayed from since.  Looking back, I think the best part of getting hooked on all of this stuff was that was I never aware at any point that I was receiving a lesson.  I was just having too much darn fun to bother with the notion that I might have been learning something at the same time.  Looking back on it now, I've come to regard stumbling upon gifts like that as perhaps the best and truest way to teach any valuable subject to a person, no matter their age.  Anyway, the point is that from that moment on, I was a student of film, and later books.

When I learned to read for myself it was like discovering yet another key to an unnoticed secret casement.  The best way I can describe the value of becoming a bookworm is to say that it's like being able not just grasp or reach at least some kind of understanding of reality, it's also that for a moment or two, you're able to hold a potentially valuable aspect of it in your hands.  I can't tell how much sense I must be making now.  I'm also not so sure it matters.  Those who know what its like to come under the spell of good storytelling will know what I mean.  If a filmmaker like Henson was the gardener who planted the original seed in my mind, then it was later writers like Dr. Suess, Charles Schulze, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J.R.R. Tolkien who taught me that the essence of stories all comes from the words on the page before it ever can or will exist anywhere else.  

So, to reiterate, I was a reader and a filmgoer to begin with.  These twins aspects of a life must be kept in mind, because otherwise nothing I'm about to explain about the occasional hobby that grew out of this process will make sense.  It's only with the full picture in place that you'll be able to understand what it's like to turn into a work of fiction.  The way this latter half of my tale came about is natural enough if you're the kind of person who likes to read and watch a lot of stories.  As I got older I began the normal process of growing up to be a discerning reader.  Rather, let's say that I've gotten somewhat better at being able to tell a good work of narration from either the minor, or else just plain bad.  What I think few people, even the professionals never bother to keep in mind, is that the Art of Writing is very much one big game of chance.  I've heard the act of literary composition described as the same type of job as any other manual labor, like brick laying or architecture.  I'm willing to admit a great deal of truth in that sentiment.  What I think even the best authors seem to miss about this aspect of the trade is that their really describing no more than the Craft of their jobs.  When it comes the actual capital-A Art of telling stories, then I'm afraid everyone is either a rookie or veteran Vegas gambler, and the house odds are always stacked against your favor.  Good writing isn't just labor, it also involves a lot of dumb luck.

Another way to say it is that the best writing often winds up as one big game of Go Fish.  The artist tries to turn their attention to the Imagination, and then just hopes and prays that something will happen.  That a really creative idea will pop up into their head, like a flair sent up from the middle of a vast lake.  I've read and studied this phenomenon enough to know that this is pretty the ultimate standard operating procedure for all writers.  All are at the mercy of the Muse.  The trouble with this method of operation is that when you get right down to it, all that the literary game of Go Fish amounts to is just gambling with the odds.  It's the basic idea of rolling the dice or betting on the lucky number by other means, no more, no less.  In that sense, much like running and playing the odds in Vegas, all the really best books amount to little more than hopeful bets that somehow managed to come up all Aces and Jacks.  An even better way to put it is that the successful story belongs to whoever is lucky enough to draw that tricksy wild card in their favor.  If all that sounds less than promising, then the real kick in the teeth is that there is no sure-fire formula for working the odds in your favor.  It's proven impossible to cheat the Imagination.  You either play by its rules and wind up with a maybe publishable book, or else you take your little red wagon and go home, never to show your face at this particular dice table ever again.

There is one aspect to this whole literary gaming table that's begun to fascinate me in recent years.  I'm not talking about the blockbuster successes or the cringeworthy failures anymore, here.  Nor am I thinking about at all about the middle of the roaders, the types of storytellers who are good enough to be remembered, even if they're not in the company of the greats.  The type of stories that have begun to draw more of my attention of late are the ones where the roll of the dice somehow just didn't pay out, yet you'll swear its almost possible to see the faint hints, traces, and outlines of how things could have worked if the writer had just a little bit more careful.  What I'm talking about now, in other words, are those moments where you run across a story that is an objective poor showing, if maybe not just plain bad.  These are the less than successful efforts where nonetheless a careful study of the material leaves the notion that you can just begin to see how things might have been able to work out with better success.  If only the artist had paid greater attention to the artistic material they were working with.  If they had just taken a bit more time to work out this particular plot point, or chosen to explore this otherwise unexamined bit of narrative thread, then things might have been different.  I don't say the finished product would have been a masterpiece.  Yet at least it might have had a better chance of being a genuine entertainment.  These are the ground rules for the kind of unfinished story I'm thinking of.

There are some books and films out there, in other words, where you can tell there was a lot good potential to be had, and yet the bet just never came off.  The author didn't play the cards he was dealt as well as he should or could have.  Are you starting to see what I mean when I say that writing is like gambling?  You take a chance on a roll of the dice, and the worst plays are the one's where you can see in retrospect how things could have been better if you'd just played your cards different, or given the writing a bit more of the effort needed to be, at the very least, a pretty decent read.  I've been fascinated by those almost success stories for sometime now.  What happened is I'd get to mulling over various finished products where I could tell the story still needed a bit of work.  The pastime I mentioned before got started when I began the serious effort of giving some actual thought into the question of whether or how could an essentially incomplete story be made better than what we got, or wound up with?  That was the key to the whole thing for me.  If you can find any halfway decent answer to that question, then you might have learned a thing or two about the Art of Storytelling that's not in any of the official dossiers.  So that's the hobby I've started.  I've taken works that seemed unfinished, and I began to mentally consider the all of the possible ways and means in which a mediocre tale can be a good one.

To my own surprise, I've managed to come up with a few possible solutions to a few final products that seemed lackluster.  I kind of surprised myself by stumbling upon what (to me, at least) sounds like a more promising narrative through line than the official one we've gotten for every single release in the Destiny video game franchise, for instance.  I'm not saying I've managed to find anything like a definitive storytelling solution.  Just one that grants the secondary world of those games a better overall plot, and hence a greater use of its recurring cast of characters.  That's a story for another day, however.  The point I've been working up to with all of this is that it was this relatively recent hobby of mine that lead by pure accident to the discovery that I was just a picture in a book.  The way that came about was that I happened to stumble by pure chance on the account of someone else who seems to have had the exact same idea more than 40 years before I was born.  I was doing nothing more than looking for something to read, and then I ran across the history of how some enterprising young wit in Argentina came to similar conclusions about how a merely competent story could become a potentially great one with just a bit of proper rewriting.  This is the story of "Pierre Menard", by Jorge Luis Borges.

Stephen Kings Harrison State Park 68 (1968).

Let's get one thing clear, I am not an expert on modern poetry.  In fact, aside from one very recent instance, I can't for the life of me recall how many times I might have used snippets of the art form even for the sake of simple quotation.  I'm not even sure just what kind of reputation poetry enjoys at the moment, if I'm being honest.  The best understanding I've got on the situation is that the poem, while not disappeared, is very much a mode of writing that is sort of in a state of retreat, or eclipse.  It seems to have been subsumed once back into the particular type of art out which it originally emerged from, music.  That's where poetry got its start, after all.  Before there was the poem, there was the song.  Singing appears to have been one of mankind's oldest forms of artistic creation, something that goes all the way back to the time when we used to huddle in caves for shelter, and we all lived in the forest, because no one could live anywhere else.  What this turn of fortunes says about the popular reception of poems appears to mean that we no longer see the art of verse in quite the same way that our ancestors in the Renaissance or Victorian eras might have.  We're no longer part of a universe in which the rhyme couplet or the blank verse is considered to have any kind of intrinsic value of its own.  Prose has overtaken the practice of poetry.

If I had to take a guess for why that should be, then I'd have to chalk it up to an evolution in human artistic taste, pure and simple.  The poem proper seems to belong to a time when the prose story as we now have it wasn't even a glimmer of possibility in the mind of any of the major writers prior to the 18th century.  If you go back and look at the historical record of mankind's written works, you'll soon find that there was a time when the major form of literary expression wasn't the prose line, but rather that of verse.  Even every single line of dialogue that Shakespeare ever wrote has more in common with poetry than it does the kind of stylistic practices we expect from modern stage plays.  This is all because it really does appear to have taken us that long to perfect the idea of the prose mode of expression.  This in itself points to a whole history of how human beings conception of the art of storytelling tells its own tale of mental evolution.  One of those fundamental concepts that are so obvious its no wonder it takes so long for any of us to notice it.  It's a topic well worth digging into some other time, perhaps.

Right now, the main point is that this evolution in our understanding of how stories can be told means that with the advent of prose, the artistic expression of prosody soon found itself relegated to a kind authorial second-class citizen status.  As time went on, and some of the best names in the business came along and helped to develop the idea of the good prose line, the art of versification began to take a backseat to all the windows onto new vistas that were opening up for artists and audiences around the world.  This constant strand of development and craftsmanship applied to the non-lyrical mode of storytelling has lead us, with the passage of time to the current situation we now find ourselves.  The practice of novelistic literary writing seems to have reached its apex.  We're now perhaps as close to artistic perfection as the prose line is ever going to be able to achieve.  What few of us seem to have realized until just now is how this accomplishment in stylistic excellence has come at the cost of poetry itself.  It's as if there's been an unconscious law of exchange involved here.  Something that was always going on, yet we were too preoccupied to see it.  The better we were at using prose, the less of a need we had for the use of poetry.  It's gotten to the point where the very verse form that was once considered the height of literary sophistication is now regarded as something like an extra accessory implement.

Poetry has managed, through no fault of its own, to achieve the status of a mere literary tool, in other words.  It is no longer regarded as something of value on its own terms.  Instead, it's seen more as an accessory to other artforms like the novel, or even more to the point, the song of music.  When looked at from this perspective, the story of the poem has this strange, almost perfect cyclical quality.  It's practically a novel epic in its own right.  The story of a genre with lean and musical roots that is able to claim one bright and shining moment for itself, before slowly sinking once more back into the primordial cauldron of music from which it emerged.  The history and fortunes of poetry are pretty remarkable when you think about it.  What's even crazier is the idea that someone like Stephen King would even have anything to do it with.  Here's another instance where the curse of pop culture expectations comes into play.  So far as any of us know, Stephen King is just that guy who writes a lot of Horror stuff down in books.  He's never really been much of anything else so far as the mass audience expectations have been concerned.  So what on Earth is there to be said about the writer in connection with the lost art of verse?  Well, here's where Bev Vincent comes into the picture.

In an essay with the suggestive title of The Dead Zone (not the novel of the same name) Vincent makes a number interesting observations on the relation that King has to the writing of poetry.  "In a 2011 interview with the Atlantic, Stephen King shared his thoughts about poetry. “[Poetry] takes ordinary life,” he said, “it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that’s what you get.” He singled out Philip Larkin and James Dickey as poets who express life’s sometimes inexpressible beauty and mysteriousness and concluded, “poets … do speak God’s language—it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives (web)".  From there, Vincent goes on to make a very obvious admission on the subject.

"King might seem an unlikely arbiter of poetic language. His best-selling novels, short stories, and film adaptations—mostly but not exclusively in the horror genre—have earned him sobriquets ranging from “America’s Storyteller” to the “populist poet of American doom.” But King is also a committed poet, albeit not a prolific one. He’s published barely more than a dozen poems over the past five decades, most in small literary journals, although hundreds more exist on scraps of paper or in half-used notebooks, and several others appear in his novels as the work of his characters (ibid)".  The idea of King as someone with a commitment to poetry is an interesting idea.  The open question for me has to do with just how valid it is?  There's one poem of King's in particular that I recall reading not too far back, and for whatever reason (whether good or bad) it has always remained stuck in my head.

The title was Harrison State Park 68, if I recall.  It took a while to track down a useable copy of the poem online.  However, I now have the whole thing in my possession.  Having a chance to go over it once more has been an interesting sort of experience, and I'd like to share the results of it with you now.  In going over the 68 poem, I'm going to have to make considerable use of Vincent's essay.  In many ways, what follows is going to be something of a dialogue with the critic's views about the relation of King to poetry, as well as whatever merits the author deserves as a poet.  With this in mind, I think it's best if we let the original poem itself do the talking as a good way to start things off.

The Nature and Origin of American Fiction and Letters.

American fiction was born in a state of protest.  It was also Gothic at its core.  These are the two interrelated points I want to argue for in the essay that follows.  In many ways what I'm about to say next has little excuse for existing except for another two reasons.  The conclusions arrived at here were nothing else except the result of a long gestation period.  Something that happened at such a gradual pace that it was like assembling an entire picture puzzle without even knowing what you were up to.  Once the picture was complete, however, there was just no denying either the direction it pointed at, or the conclusions it lead you to.  The second part of the intellectual journey to the writing of these words is that it really was a simple case of reading a lot, and then noticing how a lot of important themes kept recurring in the works of different authors across a span of decades, and almost centuries.  The timespan I aim to look at in the following essay encompasses a reasonable short enough space.  It starts at the tail-end of the Eighteenth Century (when the Nation was founded), and culminates at the exact mid-point of the Nineteenth (when the Civil War took place).  It's focus won't be on any one literary name.  Rather I intend to take a series of short thematic looks into the writings of what I consider to be the four authors who did the most to help set what I have to term the defining keynotes of American fiction in stone.  These are the Names who helped mold the contours of what creative writing in the United States still remains even to this day and era.

That sounds like one hell of a tall order, I know.  Who the hell am I, anyway?  And what makes me think it's possible to say anything about early American fiction and its creators that would make any of it valid for study today?  In answer to the first question, I'm just some nothing bookworm who thinks (or hopes) he's discovered a pattern of literary themes and ideas that were shared out over more than one ink-stained wretch as the former British Colonies were busy transfiguring themselves into something most folk at least hoped was something approaching a United American state.  The answer to the second challenge is a bit more interesting.  In first noticing, and then deciding to make a careful study of four writers who seemed crucial to the construction of anything approaching a viable American literary identity, it soon became possible to realize that what I'd stumbled upon might just amount to something of a genuine, unremarked artistic legacy from the past.  One whose continuity extends from the Founding Era right up to this very moment.  The potentially good news is this may turn out to be a case where examining a legacy from the past doesn't amount to something like a outmoded institution that has worn out its welcome, and is better left abandoned.  On the contrary, what marks each of the authors under discussion here today is there seemingly admirable qualities.  Virtues (for lack of any better word) that prove more than compatible with the values of inclusion and equality of today.

And so, I repeat what I said right at the start.  The origins and nature of American fiction are defined by two things.  It's acute sense of moral outrage, and protest, coupled with a series of artistic tropes and practices that when placed together, give us the beginnings of a workable form of American Gothic letters.  As I've also said, there are precisely four writers who I believe best exemplify the neglected legacy.  In terms of brand name recognition, it's sort of like a half-and-half deal.  Two of them have something approaching a legitimate shelf-life, while the other two don't even register as a blip on the radar.  In the case of the latter two, that amounts to not just a real shame, it might also count as a form of criminal negligence.  With this in mind the shared themes and ideas we'll be looking at here today can all be found within the work of the following Names.  The are: Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, and Phillis Wheatley.  I've decided against taking their efforts in any precise chronological order.  My reasons for doing this is because it seemed better to tackle each author vignette in terms of thematic importance, rather than having the importance of the ideas they helped express in their works get lost in the natural shuffle of a strict chronology of years

As such, I've decided to shape the chain of letters in terms of greatest importance, starting from the lowest level to the highest.  With all this in mind, I reckon it's time to get acquainted with the men (and one very important woman) who each helped to set the stamp on what American fiction can be at its best.

The Death of Cicero by Charles Brockden Brown.

Here at the Scriblerus Club, it's part of what might be termed the "company policy" to hunt around for obscure and forgotten names or titles, in order see if it's possible give them a second chance in the spotlight.  My reasons for doing this every now and then are pretty simple.  I don't see why the value of literary art has to be this kind of time bound phenomena.  If a story is good, there's no reason why its shelf life should have to come with a built-in sell-by date warranty, where it's no longer of use.  If that were the case, if all writing was doomed to remain forever beyond the reach of audience tastes, then someone's going to have to explain to me why folks like Beowulf and Grendel, or Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat are still household names.  Also, remember, two of them came from a time long before the advent of modern Britain.  We still don't even know who wrote the damn thing, and yet generations of readers have never let that stand in the way of enjoying a good narrative.  There's a kind of unspoken sentiment, or agreement in operation with cases like this.  The unsaid idea seems to be that good stories, the kind that authors like Peter S. Beagle would describe as having "True Magic" in them, are able to last for a whole myriad of good reasons.  There's a quality to the plot or narrative that is able to overcome even the longest and strongest barrier of time and place, and it's an idea that I'm more than willing to give a heartfelt applause.

Maybe I'm just one of those helpless Romantics.  However, the really weird fact is I just can't shake the idea that all potential narratives can amount to something of importance.  From what I can tell, that also seems to have been the idea held by the forgotten name under discussion for today.  In the strictest sense, Charles Brockden Brown doesn't seem to count as a household name on the tip of anyone's tongue.  He appears to be a living example of yet another, related maxim.  Just as all stories can be of potential value, so time and tide can be even a good author's greatest enemy.  A tale is mute without an audience to receive it, and sometimes they just don't stick around long enough for the artist to leave as big of a mark as they perhaps deserve.  That seems to have been the case with Charlie Brown.  He was something of a groundbreaker in his day, and yet the passage of time has all but erased his name, works, and accomplishments from the annals of popular memory.  If ol' Chuck has any viable shelf space left out there, then it's within the confines of the very niche category of die hard nerds and historians of the Gothic genre.  It's a legacy that I'm starting to think might deserve a rescue from the scrap heap.

So, with this in mind, I thought I'd take things slow, and one at a time.  Part of the reason for this is because while it's true that Brown's name and work have no choice except to remain unfamiliar to the vast majority of contemporary readers, the good news is that in his case, that's not the same as saying there's not a lot to talk about, or much in the way of a historical breadcrumb trail to go on.  On the contrary, despite the relative obscurity of his popular reputation, it turns out Brown was kind enough to be one of those writers who was able to leave enough historical details behind to begin to fashion a whole biography out of.  If the good news is that its possible to arrive at a more or less complete picture of the author, it's still not the same thing as saying that you can just take any of his writings, place it in the spotlight, and expect anyone to just "get it" automatically.  Whether or not that's how people expect taking any potential work of art is supposed to go, experience has taught me time and again that sometimes you just can't rush either an artist or his artwork on an audience that hasn't been well trained before showtime.  Often, the case is you have to prepare the reader for the type of story they're about to receive.  It means you've got to awaken their imaginative sympathies for older forms of storytelling.

I'm not saying this is an impossible task, by any means.  The fact that most of us are still familiar with the traditional Bardic Meter of the Beowulf Poet, or the Elizabethan Blank Verse of Shakespeare says that we still have some familiarity with how older stories used to be told.  Nor is it the case that Brockden Brown presents the reader with any great challenges in terms of reading comprehension.  It's just that sometimes obscure authors need to have the ground prepared for them ahead of time.  It's less a matter of being too obscure to understand, and more a case of everything old is new again.  I wasn't lying when I called Brown a trendsetter, for instance, and while that is an important, defining part of his legacy, the obscure quality of his name and efforts (all inevitable football related jokes aside) means that I think it's best to work our way up the ladder of his artistic achievements.  So we'll start out slow, just taking our time, and looking at something he's written in an effort to see what makes any of it valuable.  Later on, there may be plenty of time to go into the nature of Brown's accomplishments as a premiere American Gothic artist.  For the moment, we'll settle into the nature of his work with a simple, out-of-the-way short story.  It's an interesting piece is historical fiction called "The Death of Cicero".

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice told Tales (1851): David Swan.

First introductions are always the most important.  It's the first impression a person leaves on you that can sometimes wind up counting the most.  That's shallow as hell, I know.  Yet it also doesn't stop such results from being an on-going fact of human nature.  It also doesn't get rid of the truth that sometimes bad first impressions exist for a whole lot of very good reasons.  Some of us carry a palpable sense of threat around with us, like the dangerous warning sign it is.  Whenever that happens. first impressions can be a matter of life or death.  At the same time, this need to make a good introduction is always in need of balance.  Sooner or later, most of us have to learn to look beyond the surface appearances of the people we meet in order to get to know them.  This is another inescapable fact of life.  So you you've got these two social demands vying for attention and always competing and/or cooperating with one another.  When it comes to introducing the reader to a new author, the task of making a good first impression counts for a hell of a lot more than normal.  The trouble with artists is they come with this built-in expectation that a proper sense of entertainment has to always be a part of the package.  They are always supposed to be "on-stage", with the lights up, and the audience waiting for the show to begin, in other words.  So when it comes to a writer like Nathaniel Hawthorne, the modern reader needs just the right introduction to get interested.

If I had to find the right words to describe the writer under discussion here today, then the good news is I don't have to do this job on my own.  Turns out the words of author Rosemary Mahoney can do a better job of giving readers the best first impression of Hawthorne than I ever could.  That's why I want to let her words take over for a minute or two.  I'll just set the stage for Rosemary by letting the reader know that it all started one day while she was at the check-out like in a now defunct bookstore chain, and she got into one of those brief moments of animated discussion with the cashier.  It's the kind of conversation you can expect to find in even the most commercial of bookseller retails.  The kind of informal discussion that can only mean anything to someone with a genuine love for books, in other words.  Mahoney was just handing over her purchases to the clerk behind the counter, when the guy noticed it was a collection of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Twice Told Tales.

"Remember 'Young Goodman Brown'?" I said. Nick stretched a startled finger at me.  "Oh, my God.  Freaky!  That's actually what I was thinkin' of!  And 'The Minister's Black Veil.'  Beneath the bland fluorescent gloss of Borders lights Nick seemed to bask in the pure spooky pleasure of Hawthorne's stories, like a child delighting in a fleeting fright..."And how 'bout..." he raised a knowing brow, "...'Wakefield'?...That one creeped me totally."  "Me too," I said, which was true: totally and memorably, the story "Wakefield" had creeped me.  I asked Nick what else he liked to read.  Vonnegut, Stephen King, Harry Potter.  As I prepared to leave, he passed my book over the counter and said with almost wistful affection, "I hope you enjoy them!"

"When I first read them - in, of course, high school - I had not really enjoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories.  With it's required reading lists and its parochial and obsessive emphasis on symbolism, structure, metaphor, and all the rest of it, high school had a way of tainting the classics; it turned books into tests and clumsily clawed apart their art.  It was difficult to relax into any book with the exacting eye of a teacher watching and waiting for the usually elusive "right" answer to pop out of my mouth; when, now and then, answers did pop, they popped in anxious fists not dissimilar in style to the process of reverse peristalsis.

"Under the circumstances, I read Nathaniel Hawthorne with one eye on the clock and failed to recognize the beauty of him until I was thirty-four years old, free of the scholastic tax, and living in a solitary lighthouse on a tiny island in Maine with no electricity, no telephone, no human company, and nothing to read but a motley collection of books marooned on a rickety shelf beside the fireplace in the lighthouse parlor.  The fire was long unlit, and the shelves, softened by the ocean damp, bowed like hammocks under their burden.  In their midst was a collection of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, a musty hardcover mildewed with fog; it had tissue-thin pages and tiny type and the portentous density of the Bible.  It smelled of bedsheets, brine, damp dust, and mice, and sadly of school.

"One night, driven by boredom and depression, I sat at the kitchen table and by the yellowish light of a kerosene lamp began, skeptically, to read these stories.  "Wakefield," "The Minister's black Veil," "The Hollow of the Three Hills."  I read for an hour or so, hunched and squinting over that cinderblock of a book, and at some imperceptible moment during the hour my mood shifted from boredom to fearsome unease.  Something made me look up from the book.  I had the powerful sense that a pair of glittering eyes just outside the house was watching me with sinister interest.  I could feel them fixed upon my figure.  The sensation was so strong that I got up, locked the door, and slid the curtain across the black, rain-spattered windows.  I turned up the flame in the lamp, pushed the book under a pile of dishtowels, and although I tried to think of pleasant things, the rainwater that funneled down the drainpipe in gusts and knocked on a trim board at the base of the house kept sounding like heavily booted footsteps.  

"The waves crashing against the rocks just below the house kept sounding like desperate sighs.  Wide-eyed and mute and stiff with dread I sat on a wooden chair and stilled my own breathing now and then, the better to listen for more human noises.  The Twice-Told Tales had tipped me so thoroughly into Hawthorne's occult universe that finally, hot with apprehension and unable to support my own anxiety, I had to go upstairs to bed so that no one (who was not there) could see me.  I lay in bed waiting for the malevolent thud of Wakefield's footsteps on the lighthouse stairs.  I was, to put it mildly, totally creeped.  The next day, though, the book lying in its bed of dishtowels on the kitchen table was just a book, a block of paper bound in faded cloth, and the stories within it were just a series of shapely ink spots.  Daylight had soothed my imagination and dissolved my fear.

"Last night, in reading Hawthorne's own apologetic preface to these stories - a preface written in 1851 (long after the stories were composed and compiled) in a mood of retrospective correction and fatherly forbearance for his younger, supposedly less talented self - I was surprised and pleased to read this sentence: "The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages."  Hawthorne well knew what he had created: a series of sketches - for more than a few of the stories are snapshot short, miniscule in their scope...that depend somewhat on the mood and suggestibility of the reader; fabular inventions calculated to stimulate that part of the mind that thrives on, even craves mystery and wonder and terror (xiv)".  It's for these reasons that I thought it worth while to take a look at the writings of Nate Hawthorne.  He's one of those Big Names whose reputation is a combination of critical darling and mainstream obscurity.  He's a great writer who everybody hates, except for the rest of us who don't know why, or even who this guy is.

For the longest time, he was just a some byline on a handful of books that I've known more through reputation rather than any legit first-hand knowledge.  Strange as it may sound, I've never really read a single thing by Hawthorne until just recently.  I guess that makes me something of an anomaly.  I've managed to escape the curse that makes writers like him the scourge and bane of all high school and college student's existence.  I never learned a thing about this guy in either of the two main academic settings where his name is most likely to crop up.  The result is this kind of weird, blue moon style situation.  I'm allowed a privilege that I think few of Hawthorne's readers are given.  I'm in a situation where I have no other choice except to go into this guy's work with a more or less blank slate frame of mind.  I can just pick up any of his works that I might like, and then reach my own conclusions on what kind of stories the writer from Salem might be telling, and what he's trying to say in and with them.  With all this in mind, I thought I'd start out small.  I knew the first Hawthorne story I tackled on this blog would have to be both graspable and yet representative of the type of story he specialized in.  It had to be a simple narrative that also stood for the overall outlook and effect of all of his fiction, in other words.  I may have found the right specimen in the course of the curious story of "David Swan".