by Anne Fadiman
In time a search takes on a life of its own. Unless the longed-for object is of inherent value—a jewel-encrusted falcon—it becomes secondary to the search itself. The Leather Pushers was just a book, but it was a book I read when there had been no end to novels every bit as wonderful as those by H. C. Witwer, when practically every novel that fell into my hands seemed absolutely right. At fourteen, I read quickly, furiously, compulsively. I went through five, six novels a week or suffered from withdrawal. Reading at this pace is not unique among the bookish young, but as with any obsession, there is something faintly suspect about it, as if the allure of books indicts the world’s ability to deliver an equivalent amount of pleasure or meaning.
Love of reading, or a reading dependency, is a phenomenon often acknowledged by those incapable of stopping. In Reading: An Essay, one of five small books in J. B. Priestley’s Pleasures of Life series, Hugh Walpole divides readers into two general categories: the ecstatic and the critical, allowing of course for the inevitable overlap. Whether one becomes one kind of reader or the other, according to Walpole, depends on “some dominating influence” that appears in the life of every future reader, usually at the age of fourteen or fifteen, “that solves, partly, the question as to whether he will be in later life an aesthetic or unaesthetic reader.”
For Walpole, it was Walter Scott’s Waverley novels that sent him tumbling down the ecstatic path. Scott did it for me too, but he had help from Rafael Sabatini, Alexandre Dumas père, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, Jack London, the two Edgars—Allan Poe and Rice Burroughs—and, yes, H. C. Witwer. Fourteen seems to be a magic age for the confirmed reader. In “The Lost Childhood,” his short essay on becoming a writer, Graham Greene asked:
What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? Of course I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr. E. M. Forster was going to appear this Spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman.
When Greene was fourteen, his library shelf delivered up Marjorie Bowen’s novel The Viper of Milan and “for better or worse the future was struck. From that moment [he] began to write.” Much as I’d like to say that The Leather Pushers made me into a writer, or even a golden-glove novice, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be true. Still, I can recall “the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee” I felt when the sequel to The Three Musketeers fell into my clutches. To be young was bookish heaven. At fourteen I read every word of every page; I didn’t know you could skip words. Why should I when all authors were infallible; all narrators, reliable; every detail, essential? Digressions simply did not exist. Even the famously long dissertation on the battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables was enthralling, as timely and material as any other scene.
And reading was fun—not serious fun, mind you, but sequestered, magical, self-absorbed fun. Nothing mattered but the story: who won, who survived, who ended up happy, who came up short. Moreover, all novels—adventure, historical, and fantasy—were on a par; all were equally good. If someone had told me then that the books featuring Tarzan, Scaramouche, the Count of Monte Cristo, Ivanhoe, Jean Valjean, Long John Silver, and Kid Roberts had been written by a single person using seven pseudonyms, I would have concurred at once.
Not that I entirely agree with Walpole. The nature of reading is less definitive than Walpole’s claims for it. Sure, there are intoxicated readers, but the high is modulated by the years. Once the young reader gets past the stage where the brain sucks in books as if they were bubbles of oxygen, he or she begins to sense that Melville is doing something different from Steinbeck, and that Dickens and Balzac resemble each other in certain respects, but not in all. As children, we crossed wide-eyed and trusting into the writer’s world; as adults, we invite the writer into ours and hold him accountable for how he behaves there.
Walpole erred on the side of optimism, trusting too much in the ecstatic reader’s resilience. Surely brevity is part of the ecstatic condition, and by omitting to put temporal brackets around ecstasy, Walpole conveniently forgot that reading evolves (devolves?) into the more or less critical. Schooling and swooning don’t mesh, and once we begin to differentiate the rhetorical devices that stylistically and thematically inform different narratives, the innocence, the thrill, and the trusting acceptance disappear. Replaced, to be sure, by the edifying feeling that one is learning something valuable. And of course there is pleasure to be had from analysis, but it is a more complicated pleasure than giving oneself over completely to stories. However you slice it, reading critically is a more solemn affair than reading ecstatically.
“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all bad and good bad books,” George Orwell mused, “create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments.” At fourteen I think I knew that boxing was not a happy or noble profession, but books about it did, in fact, become fabulous countries. From The Leather Pushers I went on to find Nat Fleischer’s Pictorial History of Boxing, which steered me to W. C. Heinz’s Fireside Book of Boxing, which drew me to biographies of John L. Sullivan and Joe Louis; and eventually I encountered the marvelous A. J. Liebling and, through Liebling, Pierce Egan, the first chronicler of the London Prize Ring.
Those repelled by boxing, or simply indifferent, may be surprised to learn of the vast literature devoted to it. R. A. Hartley’s History and Bibliography of Boxing Books mentions twenty-one hundred pugilistic titles published in the English language. One finds in it such names as Thackeray, Dickens, Byron, Hazlitt, Shaw, Conan Doyle, and Arnold Bennett. American authors are represented by Jack London, Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Heywood Broun, Hemingway, Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates. Witwer merits nine entries, which are immediately followed by four from P. G. Wodehouse. So many scribes of the scuffle, one ponders, so many literary eminencies drawn to the sport.
So who was H. C. Witwer? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what his initials stood for, since the 1921 Grosset & Dunlap edition I now owned neglected to say. But I knew where to look. Page 290 of volume 21 of The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography shows one column of seventy-five lines for Harry Charles Witwer—not a bad testimonial for a writer no one remembers. Of German extraction, Witwer was born in 1890 in Athens, Pennsylvania, and died thirty-nine years later in Los Angeles. A short life, but one that netted him a considerable reputation as journalist, humorist, fiction writer, and screenwriter. As a young man in Philadelphia, Witwer held down a bunch of odd jobs—errand boy, hotel clerk, salesman, fight manager—before landing a position with the St. Cloud (Florida) Tribune. From there he moved on to the New York American, the Brooklyn Eagle, and the New York Sun, for which he covered the First World War.
“Meantime his attempts to write conventional magazine fiction in correct English were unsuccessful,” moralizes The National Cyclopaedia. “Ordinary language failed him as an effective vehicle for his vein of humor.” Indeed, had it not been for Mrs. Witwer, clearly an estimable woman and critic, The Leather Pushers might never have become my pugilistic Rosebud. It was she who “finally set him on the right path by suggesting that he write as he spoke,” the result being an “unexampled outflow of slang stories … and with the first one printed he won the interest of the large American reading public which prefers its fiction in the vernacular.” During a fifteen-year period, Witwer published four hundred stories, twenty-five screenplays, fourteen novels, and four plays. Whew, to use the vernacular.
When Mrs. Witwer advised her husband to write as he spoke, she was clearly giving the raspberry to Comte de Buffon’s dictum that “those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.” Knowing instinctively that such a rule applies less scrupulously if one speaks like a mook to begin with, Mrs. Witwe
r urged her husband on. A good thing too. Witwer’s prose is brisk, workmanlike, and certainly superior to that found in the story weeklies, dime novels, and hundreds of pulp magazines that catered to the tastes of a vernacular-preferring public:
Me and Cockeyed Egan was tourin’ “God’s Own Country” (Russian for the West), where the natives would rather be Harold Bell Wright than be president, each with a stable of battlers, picking up beaucoup sugar by havin’ ‘em fight each other over the short routes, when Kane Halliday skidded across my path. Besides Beansy Mullen and Bearcat Reed, a coupla heavies, I had a good welter in Battlin’ Lewis, and Egan had K. O. Krouse, another tough boy, which made up a set. Them last two babies mixed with each other more times a month than a chorus girl uses a telephone.
Although Witwer wrote about the sharpies, hustlers, louts, and swaggerers of the sporting world, he wrote about them with elan. Loftiness is a question more of style than of substance. And perhaps with the good Mrs. Witwer proofing the pages as they rolled off the Underwood, H.C. mined a vein of hard-boiled prose that appealed to the audience that pshawed the pulps. He wrote with a wink and a nudge, his style an implicit compact between author and reader in which each knows better than the malapropisms and solecisms that bedeck the printed page. In short, we and Witwer are in cahoots. Twain had already led the way with Tom and Huck, and if Harry Witwer is no Mark Twain, neither is he any less proficient than Damon Runyon at conjuring up an urban America that was beginning to strut its stuff in books and movies. The obvious resemblance, of course, is to his exact contemporary Ring Lardner, who, although a more serious and more subtle comic writer, might have no cause to resent comparison.
Having now reread The Leather Pushers, I am amazed at how much must have gone right by me. Who in blazes is Harold Bell Wright, and why would some people rather be him than be president? (Wright was a bestselling novelist ninety years ago, author of The Winning of Barbara Worth and The Shepherd of the Hills, which romanticized the lives of country folk.) Other allusions to historical figures and events—“He won more gold and silver cups than the Crown Prince lifted from Belgium”—also could have made no sense to a fourteen-year-old. But what did it matter? The prose had verve, it had attitude. The Kid is introduced:
This guy had been committed to college with the idea that when he’d come out he’d be at the very least a civil engineer, though most of the engineers I know learned their trade in a round-house and yard and was civil enough as far as that part of it goes. Halliday’s people was supposed to have a dollar for every egg in a shad roe, and the boy treated the civil engineer thing as a practical joke and college as somethin’ he had been gave for Christmas to play with.
I can’t say I’m all agog, but I do see how an adolescent male would find something terrifically adult about this kind of writing. Of course, at fourteen I also thought the narrator just a means to an end, a way of getting to the real story of Kid Roberts, whose actual name is the phony-sounding Kane Halliday. The truth is that the narrator is more likable and more interesting than his highborn hitter. Kane Halliday is that stock character in popular novels of the period, “the Gentleman”—noble as the day is long, a defender of women, a dutiful son, a boon companion, and as brave a man as ever fastened on a pair of spats. In short, the Kid’s a snore.
At fourteen, however, I must have admired him enormously. In fact, it says something that thirty-five years later I could be disappointed at hearing him admit: “When I first went into this game, I made up my mind that under no circumstances would I ever step into a ring with a colored man. Never mind my reasons—they’re ethical and my own.” But the Kid does fight a black man because “a real champion should bar no one, whether it be a contest of brains or brawn.”
A little of this kind of rhetoric goes a long way, though never toward making a character likable. Halliday sounds like a caffeinated Edward Everett Horton, but without the grace to look foolish while declaiming on this or that outrage. Witwer may have been giving his audience what it expected from someone who had all the advantages except knowing what life was all about, but the Kid’s formal speech grates rather than amuses. Speaking of speaking, an irony almost too good to be true is that a few years after the novel’s publication, an actual boxer appeared on the scene—Gene Tunney by name—who, tough enough to outpoint Jack Dempsey twice, resorted, especially when the press was around, to loony locutions that he regarded as college-speak.
Will I now go on to read or reread Witwer’s thirteen other novels, including Fighting Back, the sequel to The Leather Pushers? Probably not, though From Baseball to Boches and The Classics in Slang make tempting titles. My search, after all, is over. I have my book and I’ve read it too. And I learned something. I learned that Kid Roberts didn’t actually like to fight; he fought because his father made some unsound investments and lost the family fortune. Nor, as it turns out, did Dad disapprove of his son’s profession; in fact, he got a kick out of it. As for the beautiful, classy young woman, a senator’s daughter, even she rooted for the big educated palooka when he stepped between the ropes. Oh, it was Yale the Kid went to, not … I mean, a heavyweight champion from Harvard? Come on.
So memory has been corrected. But there is more than a tinge of melancholy in such emendation. Neither the book nor its youthful reader can ever exist for each other in quite the same way. The Leather Pushers is dated, long-winded, not without its dull patches. The same might be said of its middle-aged reader. But something else can be said as well. For just a few minutes while paging through the novel, I sensed through the haze of years and the intellectual veil lowered by critics and well-intentioned professors what it was like to read as if there were no tomorrow. The pure joy of reading may never be regained, but if we’re lucky, we can chance across one of those “good bad books” we read thirty or forty years ago and recall what it’s like to be a child who reads. Such books are like old snapshots taken at the age when the baby fat is just swimming off the bone, when the personality is just beginning to acknowledge what it will find forever interesting, when the eyes begin to reveal for the first time the person who will be using them for the rest of his life.
DIANA KAPPEL SMITH
My Life with a Field Guide
A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America, by Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny
I was seventeen when it started. My family was on vacation in Maine, and one day we went on a nature walk led by a young man a few years older than I. Probably I wanted to get his attention—I’m sure I did—so I pointed to a flower and asked, “What’s that?”
“Hmmm? Oh, just an aster,” he said.
Was there a hint of a sniff as he turned away? There was! It was just an aster and I was just a total ignoramus! The tidal weight of my blithering ignorance was a thing I remember clearly, even now.
And I remember the aster. Its rays were a brilliant purple, its core a dense coin of yellow velvet. It focused light as a crystal will. It faced the sun, rigid with delight; it was the sun’s echo.
Later that day, a book with a green cover lay on the arm of an Adirondack chair under an apple tree. It was the same volume that our guide had carried as he marched us through the woods. Everyone who had been on the walk had gone into the nature center for milk and cookies, and the book had been left there, by itself. It was a thing of power, as totemic in its way as an orb and scepter. In the thin summer shadow of the tree, quivering, like a veil—green on green on green—the book was revealed, and I reached for it. A FIELD GUIDE TO WILDFLOWERS—PETERSON & McKENNY, its cover said. Its backside was ruled like a measuring tape, its inside was full of drawings of flowers. By the end of that week I had my own copy. I have it still.
Over the next several years this field guide would become my closest companion, a slice of worldview, as indispensable, finally, as eyes or hands. I didn’t arrive at this intimacy right away, however. This wasn’t going to be an easy affair for either of us. And—unlike other love affairs—our liais
on began in a way that gave no pleasure at all.
I’ll give you an example of how it went. After I’d owned the Peterson’s for about a week, I went on a hike with some friends up a little mountain in Maine, taking the book along. Halfway up the mountain, there by the trailside was a yellow flower, a nice opportunity to take my new guide for a test drive. “Go on ahead!” I said to my hiking companions. “I’ll be a minute …” Famous last words.
I had already figured out (intuitive, isn’t it?) the business of the colored tabs. I turned in an authoritative way to the Yellow part and began to flip through. By the time the last of my friends had disappeared up the trail, I’d arrived at a page where things looked right. Five petals? Yes. Pinnate leaves? Whatever. Buttercup? There are, amazingly, eleven buttercups. Who would have thought? However hard I tried to make it so, my item was not one of them. Next page. Aha! This looked more like it. Bushy cinquefoil? Nope, leaves not quiiite right, are they? As the gnats descended, I noticed that there were six more pages ahead, each packed with five-petaled yellow flowers—St. Johnsworts, loosestrifes, puccoons. Puccoons! What the … heck! I’ll do this some other time! I started up the trail, swatting away, at which point I realized that I couldn’t hear my friends anymore, and began to run. The trail forked, and there were a few bad moments before I caught up to the group, sitting by a streamside sipping from water bottles. By that time I was hot and in a foul mood and still gripping the culprit—the consarned book.