A literary basis for Trick-or-Treating

Tonight I’ll be making the rounds with my 2^nd grade Harry Potter, kindergarten Cinderella and pre-school spiderman, reminding them to say thank you as the neighbors dump candy in their imitation jackolantern buckets. (The mrs and I will be going as Waldo and Wenda, thanks for asking.)

Like most people my age, I’ve got plenty of fond memories of trick-or-treating as a kid, but it’s actually a tradition that had only just taken off when my parents were young. In fact, it didn’t really  catch fire until the 1950s. But even though the internet tells me trick-or-treating probably stems from several quasi-religious, Old World customs, I was struck by a literary reference I happened upon the other day, which pointed to a more likely and immediate source: the Thanksgiving morning ‘ragamuffin’ tradition brought to life in Betty Smith's coming-of-age classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn :

“Most children brought up in Brooklyn before the first World War remember Thanksgiving Day there with a peculiar tenderness. It was the day children went around “ragamuffin” or “slamming gates,” wearing costumes topped off by a penny mask.

“Francie chose her mask with great care. She bought a yellow Chinaman one with sleazy rope mandarin mustaches. Neeley bought a chalk-white death head with grinning black teeth. Papa came through at the last minute with a penny tin horn for each, red for Francie, green for Neeley…

“The street was jammed with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin horns. Some kids were too poor to buy a penny mask. They had blackened their faces with burnt cork. Other children with more prosperous parents had store costumes: sleazy Indian suits, cowboy suits and cheesecloth Dutch maiden dresses. A few indifferent ones simply draped a dirty sheet over themselves and called it a costume.

“Francie got pushed in with a compact group of children and went the rounds with them. Some storekeepers locked their doors against them but most of them had something for the children. The candy-store man had hoarded all broken bits of candy for weeks and now passed it out in little bags for all who came begging. He had to do this because he lived on the pennies of the youngsters and he didn’t want to be boycotted. The bakery stores obliged by baking up batches of soft doughy cookies which they gave away. Children were the marketers of the neighborhood and they would only patronize those stores that treated them well. The bakery people were aware of this. The green grocer obliged with decaying bananas and half-rotted apples. Some stores which had nothing to gain from the children neither locked them out nor gave them anything save a profane lecture on the evils of begging. These people were rewarded by terrific and repeated bangings on the front door by the children. Hence the term, slamming gates.”

-from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith

The theory is that spectacles like the Macy’s parade and football games (not to mention shop-keepers fed up with the low-level extortion of snot-nosed neighborhood kids) sent the trick-or-treaters looking for a new holiday to occupy. Thank goodness they found one.

A hollow literary adaptation

Alright. Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . What you might not know, and what I myself didn’t know until I watched it last night, was whether I was a fan of Tim Burton’s film adaptation of “Sleepy Hollow.” Turns out I am not.

I mean, it was an alright movie. Johnny Depp was entertaining as Ichabod Crane, of course. And on the Halloween-movie spectrum of spooky vs. slasher it definitely tended toward the former, which is a good thing in my book. But what on earth did it have to do with Irving’s original story? Not a whole heckuvalot.

There were some recognizable character names, not to mention the 18^th century Hudson Valley setting…. aaaaand that’s about it. They transformed Ichabod from a skittish country schoolmaster to an indignant New York City constable. Then they invented a complicated cabal of village elders and backstabbing occult characters, and turned the whole thing into a serial-killer murder mystery where the headless horseman isn’t even the villain by the end of the movie.

Is it a passable Halloween diversion? Sure. But if you’re looking for a faithful literary adaptation, I’ll point you instead to the Bing Crosby-narrated Disney classic.

Haiku-ption Contest #11

Mine is below. Throw your own in the comments.

Will an ostrich do?

When she wanted a pony?

Sally’s face says “no.”

From the Pen of E.L. Doctorow

We’ve still got some folks weighing in on “Wakefield” a day or two later (I told you it was a long one,) so I thought I’d share a few of the lines that really struck me as I reread the story. These aren’t necessarily beautiful or flowery masterstrokes of style- I don’t think that’s Doctorow’s M.O. (see last paragraph of this article)- but there’s something about his writing that grabs you by the shoulders and makes you look at things from an unexpected angle, something that leaves you convinced that you’ve seen the person or thing exactly how he meant you to. Reminds me a little of Eugenides in that regard:

“That’s what she did when we argued- she used the last name. I wasn’t Howard, I was Wakefield. It was one of her feminist adaptations of the locker room style that I detested.”

“She still moved like the dancer she had been in college, her feet pointed slightly outward, her head high, her walk more a glide than something taken step by step.”

“From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient apple tree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it.”

“All that was wanting now was Diana’s mother, and by noon she was up from the city in her white Escalade- the widow Babs, who had opposed the marriage and was likely now to say so. Babs was what Diana, God help us, might be thirty years hence- high heeled, ceramicized, liposucted, devaricosed, her golden fall of hair as shiny and hard as peanut brittle.”

“I watched in the big mirror as, snip by snip, I travelled back in time. With each falling hank of hair, more and more of the disastrous lineaments of my previous self emerged, until, big naked ears and all, staring back at me was the missing link to Howard Wakefield.”

Bradbury Bets His Life

Saw this on Litkicks and BoingBoing. It's a 35 year-old Ray Bradbury, appearing on Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life."

Short Story Club: "Wakefield" by E.L. Docotorow

Welcome to short story club. It’s good to see you all after so long. Come on in and have a seat. Tucker’s just warming up some pigs-in-a-blanket and Orlando’s on the can. He’ll be out in a minute.

What did everyone think of “Wakefield?” I’ll probably be a little more negative than I typically am, but despite the criticisms that follow I thought it was a pretty compelling read.

The first time I read this story I was infuriated by the ending. I felt like punching Doctorow in the nose. He completely neglected the most interesting part of the story: what the hell would happen when Wakefield walked back through his front door.

But I'll give him credit for keeping me reading. It was a Kafka-esque exploration of an unthinkable "what if" scenario, but he managed to make it plausible. I found that fascinating. But it was the carrot of the ending that kept me going, and when I realized in the last paragraph that there was in fact no carrot... well, I felt used and dirty.

A couple more criticisms:

• his wife never called his cell-phone?
• the whole crux of the story was that he was this lucid, intelligent man, but then we're supposed to believe he survived for months on pristine table scraps from neighborhood garbage cans?
• We're supposed to believe that he did so without being noticed?
• He didn't freeze his butt off until after Thanksgiving? In a New York suburb? In real life he'd be dead by Halloween.
• The secretive aid of the mental patients was kind of hard to believe.
• At one point the mental patients all disappear, then magically reappear to give him a spongebath?
• And his own wife didn't recognize him after an absence of just 6 months or so? Really? Standing eye-to-eye?

I dunno. I'll call it a great story, and it did give me a lot to think about. I'll even say that the ambiguous ending is okay. But I think his editor failed him on a number of simple continuity errors, and I'm afraid they amount to a pretty tall tale when taken altogether.

But yeah, I actually really liked it. What did you think?

Short Story Club Returns

It’s been far too long since our last John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club post, but we’re going to go ahead and rectify that right here. This month’s story is a doozy- you’ve been warned- but I have to admit I was drawn into it completely.

As the autumn weather turns cold and our thoughts turn to the upcoming holidays we’ll be spending with our families, it’s only natural to read a story about a man who  decides, on a whim, to squat secretly in the attic above his own detached garage while his family copes with his supposed disappearance, right? Right.

Here’s the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s short story “Wakefield:”

“People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage.”

Read the rest here.   Then come back tomorrow for the discussion.   It’s on.

Cause or Effect?

Ernest Hemingway used a shotgun. David Foster Wallace used a noose of some sort. Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and walked into a river. Sylvia Plath lay down with her head in the oven and turned on the gas.

According to this wikipedia page, these famous authors  (not to mention 284 other writers) chose to end their lives prematurely through suicide. Why so many? This story in the Atlantic seems to provide some scientific background on the problem:

“When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.”

I’m not sure that statistic surprises anyone who reads it, but I think it reveals more about the virtues of writing than it does about how occupational choices affect our mental health. It’s a classic question of cause and effect: Are writers more likely to suffer from mental health woes because they’ve chosen a particularly painful career path? Or are those who suffer mental health woes more likely to choose an occupation like writing because it helps them process their thoughts, make sense of the world, and even escape from reality from time to time? I tend to think it’s the latter.

At least I hope so... because, ya know,... of this.

First Line Friday: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Whaddya say, shall we break the fourth wall today?

Do what with the which now, you ask? Break the fourth wall- that imaginary barrier between the actors on a stage and the audience in the theater (or for our purposes, between characters in a story and the reader turning pages.) Oftentimes, narrators and characters don’t even acknowledge the reader’s existence. Other times they step right up and introduce themselves. “Call me Ishmael,” says Hermann Melville in Moby Dick.  “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner,” says John Barth in his lead off to The End of the Road. 

In both cases you’ve got a first-person narrator, so it’s somewhat natural to address the reader directly, or make personal asides. Still, it’s an interesting choice to shake hands with the reader rather than launch into the story or kick off some tension-building plot point. I happen to like it.

And look at the amount of character info you can convey in just one sentence packed with dialect and mannerisms and tone:

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.” —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

But you don’t necessarily need a first-person protagonist to make this work. Before he tells us “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Kurt Vonnegut presents the reader with all sorts of personal vignettes, dirty limericks and the like in  his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.  How does that one begin?

“All this happened, more or less.”

And Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler  speaks directly to the reader because, well, it’s the reader that is the protagonist of that book. He makes that pretty clear in his famous, fourth-wall-breaking first line:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

There are plenty of other examples, too. This kind of opener can set tone, introduce a character or frame the main story:

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” —from Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

“For a long time, I went to bed early.” —from Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” —from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

As it turns out, I don’t mind in the least if an author breaks the fourth wall. If anything it personalizes what I’m about to read, puts me on an equal footing with the author and treats me like I’m worth their story-telling time. Anybody else a fan? Anybody hate it?

Mark Twain: 1909 (One year before he died)