Trumpus Possumus

Excerpt from The Secret Lodge Notebooks of the obscure Mr. Mizzle, stork, storekeeper and Walt Kelly scion

possum
[Trump.  I’ve been seeing and hearing this word on the wind lately, and I wasn’t sure if it was tramp , a trunk, a tromp or a reference to a temporarily designated powerful suit in some card games, maybe even an astonishing hair-do first seen in a Star Trek malefactor, or a realtor or a TV comedian who badmouths, browbeats then banishes masochistic minions with a wave of his wicked wand. As usual, when confounded by the mire of evidence before me, all further complexicated by my own native ignorance, I perambulate and bateau to the island to confab with my old mentor Pogo Possum of Okefenokee RFD and put the question to the nocturnal sage himself, who never fails to ponder powerful, muse mercilessly and shed substantial light, though he’s oft prone to hiss or drop off to dreamland if contradicted.

Pogo allowed as how a trump is a card that can whallop down or whup upon any other suit, though some using that name seem to be sporting suits which are not so suited to their configuration. And as a slang noun, it was once the word used to designate a fine fellow; as a verb, to excel or surpass. But these didn’t match up well with the palaver I’d been encountering, so Pogo pushed deeper into the swamp of my unknowing, saying that in Old High German it was trumba and meant a horn. Well, now we’re plowing a straight row, I thought. It also points to a kind of flower and a vine and a swan, all horn-shaped, excepting the swan, but I expect the old omnivore could guess by the dullness emanating from the windows to my soul that I still wasn’t able to line up my experience of the word with his information. So he sets in: Somehow trump’s an outlaw version of triumph, but a victory come by through other than gentlemaanly means. My eyes must of brightened up a bit, so he proceeded to add that the whole thing likely weasels around to us from the French.

Now I know how Mr. Twain felt about the French, but I decided to set that aside and take some heed anyway. “Do tell?” I said, encouraging like, “Dites moi.” “Tien,” says Pogo, in his best mud-Gallic accent, “eef vous go back to zee Meedle Engleach and Vieux Francais, you discover trompe, which eez meaning to deceive, hoodwink, dupe, hornswaggle. Vous have, sans doute, ecoutee of trumpery, weech eez twaddle, nonsense, zometheeng rubbishy. Zumwhere een zat word eez ‘rump,’ n’est-ce pas?”

I straightaway begged for mercy, merci, having had all the foreign lingo I could swallow for one season. “Shoot straight,” says I, and so Pogo reports the obvious. “Given le monde which we now find ourselves whiching in these days, trumpery is zee watchword of zee zeitgeist, ole buddy, zee flavor of zee decade, better than catfish and onions in a black moon iron skillet over a fire of cypress, cedar and driftwood.”

Pogo allowed as how in his Random House Webster’s trump is situated in a column between one column to the left with true in it (c’est vrai!) and a column to the right showing trust. Quelle fromage.

Sensing that my audience was likely at an end, as he produced a Ball jar of white squirrel-eye stockade from under one of his many stumps, I ventured a parting shot: “What about trumpet creeper? Isn’t that from China?” In betwixt swigs Pogo whispered, “Y’all got fooled on that one. It’s just a misspell. The old folks who dictionaried originally wrote trumpet creepier, like anthropaphagus, which is all I have to pronounce on the matter,” and then he was peregrinating off into the dark to canoodle with Miz Hepsibah, count his own spoondolicks or snout out some rare ripe deceased creature for a snack before Sarcophagus McArbre could spiral down on it. I could hear him humming through the ferns and ringlety mosses and the kent, kent of ghost ivory bills high on the dying trunks, “You get a line and I’ll get a poll, honey.” Bless his heart.

So I left that swamp a changed man, which is not to say a wiser one, but I got eat up by no see’ums and had to pick off ticks from first light to last – rowrbazzle! – so I’ve decided it’s useful if not vital for my self esteem if I reckon all this trinformation inextimably valuable, the tunnel at the end of the light. Thus self-persuaded, I felt compelled to share. Y’all come.

“We’ll go down to that écrevisse hole, honey oh baby mine.”]


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

The Tennessee Waltz

tnsilThe Shadow Waltz

It’s hard to deny that Pee Wee King’s melody for “Tennessee Waltz” is haunting, mournful, not quite “Wayfaring Stranger,” but similar in its registration of heart-riving sorrow. It makes me lonesome just to listen to an instrumental version, and I’m not musicologist enough to offer a convincing explanation. I know it has darkness in it, a somber tempo and the nip of whiskey we like to imagine will temper loss but which often amplifies all the shivery yearning. The stately pace, repeated chords and weepy strings resist any attempt to buck dance, shag or hully-gully with that tune in the air.

TN authorsOther melodies have similar affects, but it’s Redd Stewart’s lyrics that really twist and wrench the listener, and not just for the narrative they unspool. The song offers an enigma as Mobius-like, trompe l’oeil and slight-of-hand as Wallace Stevens’s “I placed a jar in Tennessee.” Why is that?

Various artists have offered their renditions, most of them pretty similar (though I don’t really need Leonard Cohen’s spin on the story or Emmylou Harris’s more explicit version, especially the “it’s stronger than drink and deeper than sorrow”). It was written (partly on a matchbook, if Google has it right) in a limousine en route to Nashville in 1946 after the collaborators heard Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” on the radio, and you have to reckon timing and place played a substantial role. It was producer Fred Rose’s change from “O the Tennessee Waltz, O the Tennessee Waltz” to “I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz” that intensified the nostalgia/regret theme and made the darkness explicit, and the song was recorded the next year by both King and Stewart’s Golden West Cowboys and Cowboy Copas (can you believe spellcheck doesn’t recognize “Copas”?). Both versions became C & W top 10 hits.

But it’s really with us and in us because Patti Page recorded it on the flip side of “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus” for Mercury near the close of 1950. Off and running. Page’s version ran for 30 weeks on Billboard’s pop chart and stayed at number 1 for 9 weeks. Legions of other musicians covered it and had hits (Kitty Wells, Pat Boone, Emmylou, James Brown, Elvis, college bands, African Ray Dylan on his album “Goeie Ou Country,” Tom Jones backed by the Chieftains!).

The standard version is Page’s, which follows, with two little changes [indicated by brackets] which we hear in Patsy Cline’s more desperate and achy (at least as I hear it) version. I recommend a visit to You Tube to listen to the exquisite pain.cline
*
Tennessee Waltz (note the lack of an article in the title)

I was dancing [waltzing] with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her {or him} to my loved one
And while they were dancing
My friend stole my sweetheart from me

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I [Only you] know just how much [what] I have [‘ve] lost
Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing
The [That] beautiful Tennessee Waltz

I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her [him] to my loved one
And while they were dancing
My friend stole my sweetheart from me

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I [Only you] know just how much [what] I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz

*
A terrible beauty is born? Brevity is the soul of wit?
Some small change: * why, after “darling” and “sweetheart,” the demeaning or endearing “little darling,” back to “darling,” back to “sweetheart,” to end with “little darling”? Is this just the way that songwriters who say, “You decorated my life” or “You are the magnet; I am steel” differ from poets, who want to consider (some would say “micromanage”) ramifications and options, nuances and undertones? Call it “genre differences”; say musical accompaniment relaxes lexical responsibility; I can’t puzzle it out.
*Twice we’re told that the “old friend” (no comment) STOLE the sweetheart, but also twice we hear “I lost.” Sounds as if the narrator is torn between believing that the friend is a culprit, but four times there’s a suggestion of some blame for the narrator, two each in the four line stanzas. Ain’t that just the way of things? We can’t wholly resist the temptation to blame the victim, even if we’re the victim. Maybe especially.
* With Patsy’s preferred lyrics, we get implicated. “You” do. The “you” brings it all home, identifies the listener as a fellow sufferer, knowing and probably wounded kindred. It makes me feel buttonholed and drawn into the drama, a little like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s “Rime.” I mean, I’m just trying to get a beer here and rejoin my own sweetheart; why did you pick me to share this sad story? Which makes this song a cautionary tale, as well as a plaint. Maybe the “you know” is a little arch, faux-polite for “you’d better know, because those who don’t find out from hearing the story will have to live it.” Maybe we’re all really walking around in a country song and ought to remember what stuff happens in that free-fire zone.
*But my favorite aspect of the lyrics is that they name a song called “the Tennessee Waltz” which has no reality outside the song that names it. When I was younger, I was desperate to hear the song they were dancing to, because how could they be dancing to a song that already contains the narrative of the impending betrayal and torturous memories? But I’d never heard of Borges or seen a Renaissance painting of the artist painting that painting. Probably Pee Wee and Redd hadn’t either, but the air inside a limousine can have strange effects on people, pickers especially. Given the “you” in the Cline version, the singer’s not only in the song, but so am I. All makes me hear a lonesome whip-poor-will and feel I need to respond.TN sheet

But my responses are always somewhat tangled, and every thoughtful effort eventually overridden by a need to hum or sing the song, which dogs me like nothing else in Tennessee, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, Alabama . . . Verona, Paris, the Forest of Arden.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Is It a Sin to Kill a Watchman?

A question I’ve been hearing from students and acquaintances since winter is whether or not Nelle Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman ought to ever see the light of day. One source of the question seems to be an apprehension that the new book, which was Lee’s first attempt to write about the Finch family (sounds ornithological), would somehow tarnish the widely revered To Kill a Mockingbird. Although I haven’t yet seen the new (but older) book, I know a few things about it and read the first chapter in the Wall Street Journal last week. Adult Jean Louise’s narration is not so spellbinding as Scout’s, the background information is often mechanically wedged in, the impending drama forced, skids abound, though some gift is in evidence. Wise Blood’s train opening is better, though. Stylistically, Mockingbird displays an overall grace that Watchman might well lack, if the opening is representative. I don’t want to conclude too much from the sample, but it hasn’t altered my opinion about publication.

mock

Though the recently discovered narrative is likely to be disappointing, of course it should be available for those who want it, since the author and publisher are willing to show it. Students of the process of fiction are certainly curious, and I’m assuming that the earlier fears that Lee was being manipulated by lawyers and false friends were mostly hogwash. Lots of other lawyers and companions have weighed in, the Sybil herself is sometimes lucid and has spoken. Harper Collins does not act injudiciously, which is not to say “without greed,” which is indigenous to the publication business, because it is a business. The critics will raise the banner of caveat lector (I recommend Natasha Trethewey’s prudent and carefully considered review in the Washington Post), and devotees of Mockingbird should be guided by their own needs and fears, calculate their own sensitivities, read it now or later or never, then revisit the book they love, whether for its virtues or its forays into the sentimental and the “back in the day” atmospherics. Alabama’s motto is “We dare defend our rights.” The home guard is already mustered and armed. Let the games begin.

Reviewers are likely to discuss the altered natures of the characters (a now-flawed and more realistic Atticus [“from Attica, or Athens”], especially), the point of view, the novels’ different tactics for configuring the question of civil rights, pace, humor, childhood, human compassion, guardian angels, mob mentalities and the rights of man (and woman and child). What I want to recommend, aspirant owner of a copy that I am, is that we take the occasion of this book’s full public birth to consider what and how we think about the first one and what this volume has to show us about the mysterious way books get written.

First cobweb to clear away: Go Set a Watchman is not a sequel or a prequel, no progression from the finding of the One Ring to its casting into the flames. It’s action occurs long after the events of Mockingbird have transpired, but the appearance of passages identical to those in Mockingbird, accompanied by complete reboots of some events in the earlier publication, make it clear that the pair of books is not a sequence, not a relay, but rather two separate heats, two very different encounters with some basic material concerning where and when and who and why. Watchman was written first, and an amazingly perceptive editor named Tay Hohoff said something akin to, “Not yet, ma’am, but keep trying,” but also made a major suggestion, to focus more on Scout, her mind and her involvement with the central public narrative in Maycomb. So Lee set aside the typescript and went back into the same woods by a different path and different phase of the moon, seeing things from an altered perspective, one that charmed out of her a song that was far more spellbinding than the one she’d found for Watchman. Maybe the books are like fraternal twins, one just developed smarter and more beautiful than the other, but a reader can’t start cross-referencing and try to mesh them into one plot. From my seat of high ignorance about most of the text, that looks like a fool’s errand. The people have not simply gotten older, they started older, and by the way, they’re not people at all.
watch

Though based, sometimes loosely, sometimes precisely, on real people, who have been pulled apart and reconfigured by fictive imperatives and the prism of the imagination, Dill, Boo, Jem, Jean Louise and Atticus are constructs, fictional manifestations of a dream dreamed while waking and while working like a mule and a thoroughbred at once. This fact eludes many of the spellbound, who want to see the characters as subjects of a jigsaw biography of Monroeville. The Finches follow the rules of plot and character, rather than the rules of life and personality, and though those two fields are similar (else all fiction would be mere distraction and entertainment), they are not identical. I’d wager there’s a demographic who constitute almost a cult of devotees, not quite Trekkies (or Mockies), but people whose feelings about Atticus and his cadre are not primarily about an aesthetic appreciation of fine writing, the old verities, the whole question of how the narrative theater offers story as vicarious experience. They’ve left the “vicarious” behind and so admire Atticus that they might feel a hankering to sue or duel someone for defaming Galahad’s character. Maybe even sue his creator for meddling after the book became a public treasure.

I might have been one of those Mockies when I was young, but I was confused by something I suspect jangled quite a lot of Mockingbird fans from the start. I cannot now say whether I read the book before I saw the movie. The former is more about the coming of age story, human development and dignity; the latter is more about the trial and the civil rights conflict, the application of the concept of dignity to the explosive (then, now, let’s pray not forever or even much longer) question of race. And the movie has Gregory Peck, not to shortchange the exquisite performance of ten-year-old Mary Badham (who could not pass for the six-year-old prodigy of the novel, but who’s counting?). If I got the word imagery first, it was quickly complicated by the cinematic version, and I was more taken with picture shows back then than with books about serious moral dilemmas and atrocities. Even when I read the novel again about five years ago, the knot was too tight for me to untangle it – Gregory Finch. The novel and the film and what we know about Peck’s life and career have all created a strange piece of psychological architecture in a fashion that might resemble the Huckleberry Finn complex, except that the text in that example is so revolutionary and (even with is problematic ending) bold and brilliant that even Twain’s remarkable life doesn’t amplify or impede the text. Lee’s novel may be unique in the way it engages us, and the fact that she never wrote another book after Mockingbird feeds the speculative, myth-making crowd. We do love our intrigues.

While I don’t believe that Go Set a Watchman will very much alter the peculiar way American readers (we few, we happy few?) cherish (or chastise – see the opinions of writers like Francine Prose) To Kill a Mockingbird, I do believe that the conversations – about fiction, childhood, even race – will be refreshed in many healthy and useful ways, which is not to say that foolish things may be said, not even to guarantee that I haven’t just said some of them, but it’s too late, isn’t it, to post my own caveat lector sign? And yet: BEWARE OF BLOG.

n.b.  This morning I had a thought and prospected till I found my old Signet paperback of  Mockingbird.  Scout narrates the story of those early years from a distance: “When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.”  Readers of the novel know it was no accident that left Jem’s arm damaged, but Ewell’s vicious attack on the children, but besides the camouflaging rewrite of personal history, what Jean Louise reveals here, as the style of her narration does throughout Mockingbird, is that J. L. F.  is seeing these famous childhood events from an adult perspective, with the rhetorical powers of an adult.  She could be the same Jean Louise going home on the train at the beginning of Watchman.  The same, but more savvy and wise, as Lee probably was when she wrote the very good book, after she wrote the one that didn’t cut the mustard but which everyone’s wolfing down right now.

And the movie scene on the cover of my copy means the movie was out before I owned a copy.  But had I seen it yet?  I can’t afford the squad of shrinks needed to ferret that answer out.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Ghost Cat

On a Christmas week in the early 70’s I solo hiked into Linville Gorge in the North Carolina mountains. Hatchet and knife, compass and tent, food and flint, mummy bag and canteens. I left my VW bug on the rough road that led to Wiseman’s view, where one could view the Brown Mountain Lights (spectral light from a servant’s lantern as he sought his lost master a century before – see the Tommy Faile song) and stars at night, the laurel-tangled wilderness and white Linville River by day. I wasn’t looking for ghosts but was on one of the many self-discovery treks and rides of the decade, the kind of “roughing it” that looks foolish and a little dangerous decades later. As I said, ghosts were not my pursuit, but I thought just for a spell that I “encountered” either a living eastern mountain lion or the ghost of one.

cougar

Panther, painter, catamount, puma (Quechua for “powerful”), cougar. We have many names for felis concolor, but when I was a young man the prevailing theory was that North America had given birth to two subspecies, one eastern and one western. The latter had thrived, and the former was vanishing due to diminishing food source (deer, coon, possum, squirrels, even grasshoppers) and shrinking territory, due to human encroachment. Although scores of residents of the far hollers, swales and peaks would swear on a Testament that they’d seen one, still photographs and film footage were rare and questionable, assigning the animal a legendary presence as much as a zoological one, much like the “Lord God bird,” or ivory-billed woodpecker of the swampland further south. In short, a ghost cat as much as a resident.

The cougar is a large and graceful “ambush predator” that can weigh 200 pounds and leap 20 feet, cover 25 miles in a night’s hunting and snap a neck with its mighty jaws. We still read of occasional attacks out west and see news clips of the effects – torn carcasses covered over with brush as caches for further feeding. The cats gravitate to high ground and love shadowed shelves, caves, crevices, Mostly solitary, they are born with blue eyes that turn green (legend says: at first kill; scientists say, if nope). They’re tawny as their African cousins but with white and bisque underside, black facial markings and a long, heavy, crow-tipped tail that drags and bounces on the ground, making their trail in snow more than the lobe-and-petal paw prints.

Besides their fierceness and near-invisibility (“rare” to “endangered,” and as of last month officially “extinct”), I believe the feature that keeps alive their presence or spirits hunting and haunting, feeding and filling the highland night in the minds of Appalachians and tourists is the scream. A panther’s vocal chords (closer to fiddle than bass) lack the range to roar , but it’s howl-scream is blood-chilling. You can’t hear it by extrapolating on what you know of house cats, and it’s generally claimed to sound something like a woman in labor just as she completes an excruciating birth. I’d heard it (or some facsimile) in movies and TV (often on the dependable Rawhide) since I was young, and it never fails to shiver through me and raise my neck hairs.

cougar

So there you have it, a putatively indigenous murderous night wanderer in the season of hibernation that puts some feasts out of reach, and an exhausted young man with substantial imagination and no firepower beyond sparking steels. I’d pitched my camp on the Linville’s shore by rugged rapids, collected wood and built a dry fire, eaten my beanie-weenies and apple, filled my canteen, read by flashlight from my beloved camp-rough copy of Treasure Island (young Jim’s pistol ball knocks Israel Hands from the crow’s nest again) and lay back against my branch-and-brush chairback to practice surveillance on the stars. It might have been nine or ten o’clock, and there was no moon. An hour or so later I heard it, but not the same as in the movies. The growl/yowl/scream/screech was the perfect chord of hunting. The three-part sound carried claws and fangs and the fetid breath of a big beast. Not just primal but primitive, and it carried a harsh note of absolute and immediate need. Upriver. A hundred yards away? Closer? I was terrified, and all I knew to do was hack away at the understory and feed the fire, let it do my roaring. Did I say it was cold? Must have been, given the way I was shaking. Flurries swirled off and on during the night, providing even more strangeness from which my eyes could conjure a cat from blurry foliage and adrenalin.

I passed a restless night, chopping, stirring the coals, sharpening a spear (futile but distracting) with my Gerber, seeing movement in shadows, green eyes in the night, always aware that the cougar is expert at stealth, with a sudden rush at the end. For a while I sat on a rock in mid-river because I knew the animal called by hill people the “catamount” did not much savor a swim, but I couldn’t stand the wet wind away from my fire, and I had to keep the flame high.

Before dawn I was so exhausted I crawled into the red tent with spear, sheath knife and hatchet all close at hand. I planned to feed the fire every half hour, but I soon fell asleep from effort and fear, and it was almost nine when I woke, the real snow having fallen late, maybe three inches. When I poked my blue-tobogganed head through the flap, three crows on a nearby limb seemed the remnant of night, everything else pristine, contoured, somehow comforting. I survived, through no art of my own. Maybe, I thought, I’ve just outlasted another fit of my imagination, a misinterpretation of wind honed on rock, but maybe the threat had been real, and dire.

I mustered my courage and began to scout upriver, spiraling, seeking signs. When I found the tracks about 150 yards away, I was double-punched, as I realized the animal had been there after the snowfall, while I was asleep. Talk about a chill running to the heart. But then I felt relief: by my reckoning the prints were too small, not deep enough, though the span of its leaps was too long for a cub. The answer had to be the bob-tailed common bobcat (Lynx rufus), a lesser critter, half the length of a panther, both more familiar to me (even these days, on winter nights, one will visit the stone wall around my property) and uninterested in as big a target as I present. The relief I felt was considerable, but not without a note of regret. A panther would have been of more consequence, both a more instructive memory and a better story.

bobcat

When I did see a panther in the wild, it was 1988 in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and I was walking along a dry ridge at midday, a day pack and Winchester slung over my shoulder. To the north, across an arroyo maybe an eighth of a mile away I noted, scanning with my field glasses, something irregular along the buff-colored ledge. Kneel, strip off my gear, focus. An unmistakable cougar/ mountain lion/ puma (Guinness lists some 40 names) in profile, larger than my 180 pounds and staring right back, probably – given the wind direction – smelling my sweat, my deodorant, my whole soup of human scents. Its head was turned to the side to scout my ridge, but it soon swiveled and walked along its path, no hurry, no concern, mutual disinterest. My pulse had raced at first glimpse, but that passed quickly. I had at least seen a western mountain lion in its native habitat, but it actually didn’t quite match the swarm of rubythroats which later that day developed such a threatening, diving interest in my scarlet long john top that I had to strip it off.

These narratives and speculations matter to me because, after holding out long after other agencies, the Fish and Wildlife Service has finally declared the eastern panther, if there ever was such a separate subspecies, extinct. Case closed. But I don’t want to give up on the ghost cat. Survival against the odds, a clever predator lurking and bounding on the margins, both mischief and mayhem. A magical being who, like Faulkner’s bear Old Ben, you will only see in the Appalachian deep woods if you stray, if you become like the cat “a wanderer.” I’m getting too old and infirm to get out there and see for myself, but I cling to our beautiful monsters, especially the indigenous ones. And it’s hard to prove a negative, a nothing that’s there. I keep my field glasses close to hand, just in case, but I’m also ready (if rain, if snow, if any wet weather allow) to pile on the fuel and let the flames claw at the sky.
snow cougar

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.