When I was still young enough to believe that you were not allowed by federal law to dislike, much less detest, the President of the United States, my father detested Warren Gamaliel Harding.
This worried me. Having my father clapped into a federal prison for treachery or treason might just call attention to me and the crime of being his son and might send me to reform school, the Siberia of boyhood.
Father’s reason for considering Warren Gamaliel Harding despicable (the word would show up years later in Daffy Duck’s mouth as “dethpicable”) was not because he was a crook—that was to be expected—but because of his grotesque sloppiness in his slander of the English language. If Robert Frost’s lumbermen could only judge a man by the way he handled an ax, Father would only judge the intellect of a man (or a woman) by the way he or she handled words.
“Warren Gamaliel Harding,” he grunted angrily, “shovels words with the same lack of respect we would show in shoveling manure. As long as it sounds portentous, it doesn’t matter to him if it has meaning. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘meaning.’”
Recently I came across an example of the kind of ostentation that so enraged my father. This from Harding’s first Inaugural speech:* “When one surveys the world about him after the great storm, noting the marks of destruction and yet rejoicing in the raggedness of the things that withstood it, if he is an American, he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mixture of regret and new hope … standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of the occasion, feeling the emotions which no one more is a public mandate in manifest understanding.” No wonder H. L. Mencken described Harding’s prose style as a “hippopotamus struggling to free itself from a slough of molasses.”
“Mush! Mush!” My father was on the verge of imploding. “If a man cannot manage his native language, how can he manage his native land? Who is he talking about? What is he talking about, and when is he talking about it?
“Listen.” He snatched up a book, although he probably didn’t need it. “‘Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago, Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow.’ That’s Rudyard Kipling! Everything you need to know about his subject, Cro-Magnon man: Who. What. When. Where. In poetic form! In one sentence! And later in the same poem, describing the rest of the tribe: ‘Men of the berg-battered beaches, men of the boulder-hatched hill’ … Doesn’t that sing? Doesn’t that evoke a wonderful, powerful image of what it was like in the ice age?”
Indeed it did, and indeed it does today, those words pound like surf, and thrust aside all the mealymouthed slop of the Warren Gamaliel Hardings of the world.
One fateful day our family moved into a rented house, furnished with a complete set of Mark Twain, and my life changed forever. What grapefruit was to Johnson the cat, Mark Twain became to me.
For instance:
Mark Twain used words the way the graphic artist uses line control. He was terribly afraid of what he called his “darlings.” That is: phrases of such delicious mushy grandeur and mellifluous cadence that they protruded from the clean line of his prose like a puce Christmas tree. He “murdered his darlings” without mercy, but admitting to the same agony that we all feel when we sense that what we see in our drawing is more than is there. Dorothy Parker said it more clearly after seeing a brilliantly pageanted, dull musical comedy called Jumbo. “There is less here than meets the eye,” she said. Tattoo that across your reluctant retina and you will never confuse superficial technique with the subject matter at hand.
I first became interested in the Coyote while devouring Mark Twain’s Roughing It at the age of seven. I had heard of the coyote only in passing references from passing adults and thought of it—if I thought of it at all—as a sort of dissolute collie. As it turned out, that’s just about what a coyote is, and no one saw it more clearly than Mark Twain.
“The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless … even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede … He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.”
Who could resist such an enchanting creature? He and I had so much in common! Rushing to the encyclopedia, I found our measurements to be about the same, too: four feet long in our stocking feet; weight about fifty pounds stripped (fur long and coarse, grizzled buff below and sun-bleached whitish above—a minor detail). But the clincher was this: “Noted for its nightly serenades of short yaps and mournful yowls.” That was me all right, I had been assured too often by parents and siblings alike that my nocturnal serenades consisted of short yaps and mournful yowls.
I cannot begin to express the relief I felt at finding a companion to my own unique ineptness. It was so reassuring to find someone else of my own age (another characteristic we shared was our age: between seven and eight) who also could be
