books

Timber hoarding toys. There's Big Mean Kitty, colored fleecy ball, new hard orange ball that makes funny noises when he chews on it and, somewhere in there, a deer antler tine (one of the greatest chew items ever). It was such a funny thing--he spends a lot of time in his crate, but he doesn't generally carry all his toys in there.

Books: Did you ever read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter? Fascinating book, even though, as my English-major brother says, it's the hardest thing he ever read, including Ulysses and Ghormengast. But definitely worth every mental charley-horse you get reading it. Hofstadter has a new book out, I Am A Strange Loop, reviewed by Peter D. Kramer in the Washington Post Book World, a review available through Powell's here: http://www.powells.com/n/220/wpb/review/2007_05_04 Sounds like more heavy, but fascinating, lifting.

On the lighter side: Our elementary school librarian, Miss Evans, who had been terrorizing children for 30 years, loved me, because I loved books. I always checked out as many as I could carry and I always brought them back on time. I often renewed books I loved. While boys my age were reading about baseball and cars, and other girls were reading nurse stories and summer camp romances, I was reading books like Lad, A Dog and Smokey the Cowhorse and Howard Pyle's Robin Hood (I was the only kid in my class who knew that "a score," like "five-score and ten," was 20). And, for some reason, over and over, a set of books by Joseph Altsheler called The Young Trailers. Written between 1907 and 1917 (I think), they're the adventures of 5 pioneers of "Kain-tuck-ee" at the outbreak of the American Revolution. I'm not quite sure why I was so fascinated--partly because they were so unlike typical Western adventures, perhaps. And I loved the images of the primeval American forest and its inhabitants. I must have liked the characters, as well, since many years later I put two of them into a story.

For years I wanted to re-read those books (what happened to them after the Lab School was closed? Were they, horrors, simply thrown away?) to see if they were as good as I remembered them to be. I discovered the first book in the series, The Young Trailers, at Amazon, and ordered a copy. Then I found that book and the next two in the series online at the Gutenberg project, so I downloaded the two I didn't have. Last night I read all three of them.

Did they live up to my memory? Well--yeah, kinda. Henry Ware, the main character, is sort of like Tarzan in Appalachia--I don't think I ever did really like him, he was just too perfect, everything came too easily to him--there was never any doubt that Henry Ware would save the not just the day but the world. Altsheler wobbles between violent racism about the native tribes and a certain kind of luke-warm sympathy for them being forced off their lands. He has the pre WWI conviction that Western European ways and values are the best ways and values--even Henry, who can't be confined by cabin or fort and prefers living in the forest, works to further the safety and goals of the group of settlers his family belongs to. The white villain, Braxton Wyatt, is given absolutely no motivation at all for becoming a traitor who goes to live with the Indians and helps them in their attacks on the settlers. The Indians are merciless savages (except for a band of Shawnees who are so overawed by the god-like young Henry that they adopt him); even when an elderly pair wishes to adopt Henry's friend Paul as a replacement for their dead son, they're described with a mixture of sympathy (for their loss) and revulsion (for their race). It makes me want to smack somebody.

(And what is it, btw, with the name "Paul" as a synonym for dreamy, sensitive, artistic temperament? Paul Cotter in The Young Trailers series and Paul in the Anne of Green Gables series are virtually interchangeable, except one is an 18th century pioneer boy and other is a 19th century Canadian boy.)

(Also, from this vantage point, the whole thing fairly screams "slash!!"--Henry and Paul, Jim and Sol--as someone said about Frazer and RayK, "they are so doing it." I hear Joseph Altsheler rolling over in his grave, and wish him peace; I mean no harm. The age I live in is not such an innocent one.)

So, you may be thinking, it doesn't sound like these books have any redeeming qualities. Well--they do. The secondary characters of Paul, Tom, Sol, and Jim are fairly two-dimensional, but likeable and interesting, as is the schoolmaster, Mr. Pennypacker. The tempo moves right along, it's never boring. I don't know how historically accurate the details are, although Altsheler wasn't too far removed from the time; he was born in 1862 and probably heard stories about what the first pioneers had to face when they came over the mountains from their children and grandchildren. The writing is typical for the period in which it was written, journeyman writing, just very slightly over-the-top ("...the ferocious whine burst into a long, terrible howl, and the dusky forms, running low, gaunt and ghostly in the shadow, shot from the forest...") ("Then an extraordinary thrill ran through him; it was an emotion partaking in its nature of joy and anticipation; he was about to be confronted by some danger, perhaps a crisis, and the physical faculties, handed down by a far-off ancestor, expanded to meet it. He knew that he would conquer..."). Yes, almost all of the sentences are like that, not too many simpe declarative sentences, but there's nothing wrong with that. Please note, too, that these were written as children's books. Imagine a children's book written with long, complex sentences like that these days.

I'm still not making my case, am I? Okay, what can I say? They're silly and have that Meet-Me-In-St.-Louis, Anne of Green Gables quality of High Romance and nature worship. And I still love his picture of the Forest Primeval, with gigantic trees and pure cold water and wood buffalo and thousands of birds. I like the Robinson Crusoe quality of making a hut out of slabs of tree bark lying around (!) and fishing with a thread and a bent pin. There's a remote kinship to Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, living free in the greenwood and feasting on venison.

Okay, so I can't explain it. I just like them, even though now the non-PC attitudes make me uncomfortable.

And you know what? Those copies the Lab School threw away would be worth a very small fortune today--only 4 of the 8 are currently in print, and of the other 4, I saw one used volume offered at $1200. That's Twelve Hundred Dollars. The hardback version of another runs around $120.