In God We Trust

by Jean Shepherd

  But their task is dwarfed by the legion of ready reviewers whose duty it is to transmute their inchoate lead into magnificent golden works of Art. His arsenal of phrases, like that of the Artist, is also limited, and hence sees repeated use:

  “Biting satire.…”

  “Scathing indictment of our Puritanical sexual mores.”

  “Brilliant parody—a real thrust at the Victorian ethos.”

  “Deliciously savage tongue-in-cheek treatment of.…”

  “Ribald, picaresque, rollicking novel that has a deep undertone of.…”

  “Ecstatic poetic vision, reminiscent of an enlightened D. H. Lawrence.”

  I repeat, theirs is not an easy task. Yet willingly, nay, eagerly, they sit imprisoned in their digs, eyes bulging, a work of Art clutched in their palsied talons. They suffer great insights for all of us.

  What has happened to the old-fashioned Dirty Old Man, not to mention the old-fashioned Dirty Young Man? The answer is obvious. They are now Artists, destined to stand in that great pantheon that stretches back through the mists of time to Euripides, marching forward with Melville and Conrad, Chaucer and Shakespeare. It has been a long, difficult process but we in our time have finally solved the old riddle of the alchemist.

  And yet, let us be honest. Deep down in the innermost recesses of our minds there is something that peers out at us with tiny, red-rimmed eyes, its mildewed beak chittering, that reminds us by its lewd cackling that we are scrawling pictures on the walls of our cave. There are times when you can ignore this insistent, omniscient beast, and then there are times when you can’t. There are just so many ways to spell “ass.”

  Not long ago I was subtly and forcibly reminded of that inescapable fact. It was Sunday, a gray, milky, Nothing Sunday in the great tradition. I lounged, coffee cup in hand, in my gilded cell, vaguely conscious of a gnawing and unfamiliar sense of shame and discomfort. Knee-deep in the Sunday papers I sat, futilely warding off those elusive pangs of shame and guilt. I am a Twentieth-Century Man. I should not know these feelings! Then why the vague feverish flush, the clammy palms, the fugitive desire to hide under the daybed? True, I had been in attendance at a monumental debauch the night before and had indulged myself strenuously, but, after all, the Debauch itself is now a recognized art form, and I merely an aspiring, creative performer. Then why this persistent sense of unease? Could it be that I was suffering from an attack of recurrent vestigial conscience? I immediately crossed that out, since, being a representative citizen of our time, I knew that it was an impossibility.

  It must be caused, then, by something from without my body and psyche, certainly not from within. But what?

  I looked about me. My television set droned on harmlessly in the corner with its endless professional golf match, its perpetual succession of Arnold Palmers, Julius Boros, Gary Players, Jay Heberts, and other heroic figures of our time, hitting little balls with short sticks perpetually over the green hills of TV Land. Surely it could not be this innocent vision. I looked about the room again. All was familiar and normally sybaritic.

  I sipped nervously at my rich, full-flavored, tepid instant coffee and tried to get my mind back into healthier channels. Forcibly I made myself think of Higher Things. I tried to recall a few of the better scenes from a magnificent 8mm Art film I had seen the week before at the Nouveau Cinematique Realité Festival I had attended. The Passionate Transvestite, a superb, delicate, subtly controlled delineation of a sensitive theme, and its attendant feature, Tilly the Toiler Meets Winnie Winkle, a wildly robust comedy making light of the Puritanical mores of our day. Passionate, as it is known to us cinema aficionados, was almost better than Candy Meets King Kong, a frank Anti-War statement couched in cuttingly sardonic Voltairean brushstrokes.

  It was no use. Something was troubling me. I stirred restlessly, kicking at the drift of newspaper that covered my ankles. Something caught my eye. And held it. Those sinister fugitive pangs of guilt rose to a crescendo. And then I knew! It was unmistakable! Draped over the toe of my Italian ostrich-skin, alligator lounging slipper, provocatively half-opened, was the Sunday Times Book Review Supplement

  It held my steady nervous gaze like a hooded cobra about to strike. But this was only the good old familiar Book Review Supplement, a trusted friend that had sustained me through many a slippery moment at countless cocktail parties. And yet now, for some unaccountable reason, this friendly, faithful companion had touched off that sinister, faint but insistent sickness of fear and humiliation, deep in my vitals where such things happen.

  Ordinarily, on long, timeless Sundays, I save the supplement and the magazine section for last, as a kind of self-indulgent treat, but today, unmistakably, a new and alien note had been sounded. The Book Review Supplement had mysteriously stirred some long-dead, or at least sleeping, specter in my soul.

  Perhaps my language is a bit overwrought, but there are times when it is not easy to maintain the cool steady eye and the casual hand.

  What was there about this innocent fold of paper? I bent forward to look more closely at the cover page. Its familiar staid measured grayness suddenly came into sharp focus. “New Edition of Renaissance Classic”—the heading in bold type, and at center page a black and white woodcut showing a languorous youth lounging under a fairy-tale tree, and over him stood a Florentine lady wearing the flowing gowns of the nunnery. Where had I seen that lad, that spent lad, that lady of the Church before?

  And then, eerily, faintly perceptible, a voice drifted out of the bottomless depths of the swamp of my subconscious, the indistinct syllables bursting like bubbles of some loathsome combustible gas generated by the decomposed slime of prehistoric monsters. A feminine voice! What in God’s name is she saying to me?

  I strained to hear that ghostly caller. It seemed to come somehow from the very grain of the woodcut itself! Somewhere, in some far-off land, Sam Snead was sinking fifteen-foot putts, Cary Middlecoff was happily birdying, but there was no joy in my soul that day. I hunched even further, deeper into my motor-driven Vibra-Snooze lounging chair, alert, my senses tingling, ready for danger. The voice came nearer and nearer, and then, clearly, distinctly, I sensed it was asking me a question, a question I had been asked before, aeons before. My God! It was now impossible to evade!

  “Where did you get that book?”

  With an inchoate cry I leaped to my feet, sending that rank scorpion, that culture shark the supplement spinning into the corner where it lay for a moment, its pages sinuously fluttering like some ghastly living thing.

  Shaken to my underpinnings I stumbled, half-crazed with a terror such as I had not known since my days as a ten-year-old innocent. I rushed to my Inna-Wall sliding teakwood-paneled Danish bar and blindly pressed a button. Seconds later, clutching three fingers of Chevas Regal, I tried to regroup.

  But Miss Bryfogel pursued me, asking her question again and again, louder and louder! Miss Bryfogel! And then it all began to come back, the whole sordid, fetid mess.

  Shakily easing myself back into the comforting depths of my chair, driven by forces beyond my control, I painfully began to reconstruct that awful moment of my fall from Grace and Purity. I once was as pure as the driven snow, an apple-cheeked lad who delighted in the birds of spring and the soft humming afternoons of summer, and I was insanely, madly, totally in love. With Miss Bryfogel. My commitment was complete.

  Miss Bryfogel taught sixth-grade English, and for every fifty-five minute period that I was permitted in her presence I lay prostrate at her feet. Her soft heart-shaped face and dark, liquid eyes haunted me in my every waking hour. She never gave the slightest indication that she, too, was stirred to the depths. But I knew.

  Miss Bryfogel would read poetry to us, as my classmates, clods to a man, dozed fitfully. But I, love buds a-tingle, eyes misty, wept with her over Evangeline and Old Ironsides. I had only one way to tell her of my love. To speak to her through our mutual secret language, the one thing other than insane passion we shared together—the Book Report.


  Perhaps it is because we are a nation that, almost to the last individual, spent the greater part of its youth sweating over the accursed book report that we have become in our adulthood a nation of book-review readers. What is a book review but merely an overblown book report? And we all half suspect that, like our book reports of our dim past, the book reviewers rarely bother actually to read the books. We instinctively admire their suave fakery, their artful dodging, their expansive self-congratulatory phraseology, their mellifluous padding. We have been through it, too, and we know good trickery when we see it.

  Miss Bryfogel placed great importance on our weekly reports. Early in the semester she had issued a mimeographed sheet to us, called the Suggested Reading List, from which we drew our ammunition.

  I was never a stylist, but I felt that sincerity and neatness, as well as meticulous spelling and ample margins would get my subtle message through.

  As far as my actual reading went, I ran heavily toward The Outdoor Chums, which my Aunt Glenn persisted in giving me, Flash Gordon Meets Ming The Merciless, and Popular Mechanics. And three ancient copies of G-8 And His Battle Aces, which I had re-read at least seventy-four times, getting more from their rich mosaic at every reading. However, these were not Reportable.

  And so, every week was sheer torture as I phonied and nervously mocked up my Friday report. The books themselves were taken from the public library, and were doled out to us by Miss Easter. Miss Easter was a kindly, thin, ancient lady who had been born wearing a pair of gold-rimmed bifocals and with a full head of blue-gray hair, a true dedicated librarian; an alert protector of the morals of the young. I recall vividly one hellish week trying to read four consecutive words of something called Ivanhoe which had been highly recommended by both Miss Easter and my true Heart-Wound.

  My reports themselves actually ran to a sort of form. For example:

  “Robinson Crusoe”

  by

  DANIEL DEFOE

  “Robinson Crusoe is about this man who got lost on this island. He made a hat out of a coconut shell and found this foot-print on the beach. His island was named Friday, and they had a goat. This is a very interesting book. It was exciting. I think Robinson Crusoe is a good book.”

  Or,

  “Black Beauty”

  by

  ANNA SEWELL

  “Black Beauty is about this horse that got sold to a very cruel man. He hit Black Beauty and Black Beauty was very unhappy because Black Beauty was a kind horse and didn’t hit anybody. I think books about horses are very exciting, and Black Beauty is a very exciting book. It has three hundred and two pages, and I think anyone would enjoy reading Black Beauty.”

  I felt strongly that unqualified applause for any book on the Suggested Reading List would convey to Miss Bryfogel my deep feelings about the books she read, and also would net me at least a C.

  My love grew from Friday to Friday, and little did I realize that disaster was drawing closer and closer by the hour. Trouble invariably sneaks up behind on little cats’ feet; soft and innocent and shadowy. And it quite often results from an attempt to better oneself, to raise the sights, to elevate the standards, to break through into a clearer, brighter world.

  Miss Bryfogel continually encouraged something she called “Outside Reading,” which meant books not on the official list. Miss Easter had a vast file of these desirable Non-official Official books at her command. She worked hand in glove with all the Miss Bryfogels at the Warren G. Harding School, ceaselessly striving to push back the frontiers of Barbarism and Ignorance and to raise high the fluttering banners of Culture. And in Hohman, Indiana, that is not an easy task. Amid the dark, swirling mists exhaled by the Blast Furnace, the Coke Plant, and the Oil Refinery, Miss Easter quietly brooded over acres of silent kids hunched over The Lady of the Lake and David Copperfield in her brightly lit island of fantasy and dreams—her library.

  On several occasions I had gone the treacherous route of the Outside Reading. It was dangerous, and usually stupendously boring. But already I had mastered the art of manufacturing an entire book report from two paragraphs selected at random, plus a careful reading of the dust jacket, a system which still earns a tidy living for many a professional reviewer.

  However, the library was not the only source of books available to the probing mind. There was home. And in my instance, the bookcase in the dining room, filled to bursting with my father’s precious collection of bad books. We did not subscribe to Literary magazines. I doubt whether my father had ever read a book review in his entire life, if he even knew they existed, so hence he read for pure pleasure and ran heavily to The Claw of Fu Manchu, The Canary Murder Case, The Riders of the Purple Sage, and the complete exploits of Philo Vance. At least these were the books that he kept in the dining-room bookcase. I never really associated them with book reports. They were just Stories, and book reports were about Books.

  There were other volumes that were kept around the house, were not talked about much, but were just there. Not many, just a few mysterious books kept in my parents’ bedroom, or in the closet. No one ever said we shouldn’t read them. They were just kept out of our way. For as long as I could remember there had been this thick green-covered, bulky book on the bottom shelf of my mother’s end table. It had been there so long and was so much a part of the scenery that it wasn’t a book any more; just a Thing. It was always there. I had opened it maybe twice in my entire life—tiny print, incomprehensible; just a book. Until that pivotal day when everything changed.

  It was a chill, dark, lowering afternoon. Faint puffs of oily wind bearing the essence of Phillips 66 and the Number-One Open Hearth through the gaunt trees, and under the eaves. I was home alone. And itchy.

  These are dangerous conditions, known to us all. Ranging through the empty house, looking for something to do, somewhere to light, chewing a salami sandwich, I homed in inevitably to the Fountain of Evil. I rarely went into my parents’ bedroom, because it was somehow off my main beat. Nothing Freudian or Victorian; it just wasn’t where my action was. However, as the barometer fell and my itch increased, I drifted in past the brass bed, just looking. Drawn.

  The how and why of the exact instant the Book came into my hands I do not clearly recall, and perhaps even that fact is significant. I somehow knew without even being told that it was wrong. I somehow knew that what I was doing was vaguely on the other side of the line. Our instincts run deep.

  I dragged the book, my ears acutely alert for footsteps on the porch, into the bathroom and began my descent into iniquity and degradation.

  The title of the book meant nothing to me. I had not seen it on Miss Easter’s shelves, nor on Miss Bryfogel’s Selected lists, but it was thick and had small print, so I figured it must be good. Or at least Official. Not only that, it had a foreign name, and anyone who has ever gone to school knows that any book with a foreign name is Important.

  Well, I hadn’t read four sentences when I realized that I had in my hands the golden key to Miss Bryfogel’s passionate heart. Not only was this book almost totally incomprehensible, it was about friars and abbots, counts and countesses, knight errants, kings and queens, and a lot of Italians. It also had pictures, woodcuts that reminded me of other Important books that Miss Bryfogel spoke highly of. In accordance with my usual practice of book reporting, I looked through the Table of Contents to pick out something specific to read and to quote in case of embarrassing questions.

  I had never seen a Table of Contents like this before. It was listed:

  “Day The First”

  “Day The Second”

  “Day The Third”

  and under that heading something caught my eye:

  “The First Story:

  Massetto of Lamporeccio feigneth himself dumb and becometh gardener to a convent of women, who all flock to lie with him.”

  Well, this was a natural, since I knew what “dumb” meant. There were plenty of dumb kids in my class. And Mrs. Kissel, next door, had a garden. I was on home gr
ounds.

  I plowed ahead, and the more I struggled to read the more I realized that this was good for at least a B+. My senses alert to sounds in the driveway, I forged into unknown territory. There was something about that story that drew me on like some gigantic magnet hauling an atom of iron with its unseen, mysterious force field. Does the iron understand magnetism? Did I understand what went on in the convent? As the gardener lieth with the abbess?

  I somehow got the idea that an abbess was either a safety patrol lady or some kind of bad tooth. But there was something about it! I could not lay it down. And I began, mysteriously, to sweat, a telltale cold clamminess.

  The stories didn’t exactly end. Not like The Outdoor Chums, where Dan, the bully, shakes his fist at Will, the fun-loving Chum, and, retreating in his cowardly way, surrounded by his toadies, says:

  “Will, and all the rest of you Outdoor Chums—I’ll get you yet! Just wait and see!” Brandishing his clenched fist in the air while the Outdoor Chums laughed gaily, mounted their electric canoe, and headed for camp. No, these stories didn’t exactly end. They just petered out. But I was hooked.

  Steamily, itchily, I read on and on and on. And on. The house grew darker and colder, the winds were rising. On the far-off horizon the night shift took over in the vast, sinister steel mills. The skies glowed as the Blast Furnaces and the Bessemer Converters painted the clouds a dull red and orange. My eyes ached throbbingly, my throat was dry and parched. I read of maidens and virgins, nightingales and cuckolds—a small, yellowish, canary-like bird. Finally, palsied with fatigue, a changed man, I carefully replaced the green volume in its regular spot and went into the kitchen to knock together another salami sandwich. It was a good afternoon’s work. Wait till Miss Bryfogel sees what great books I’m reading now.