THE transcendental scribbler on Walden Pond once said the only point of a house is to mark the entrance to one’s burrow. Once winter gets cold enough that I keep the wood fire burning day and night, a burrow is quite what it feels like down here in my lair.
A few weeks ago, little D1D2, the kindergarten spitfire and stand-up comic (funny and knows she’s funny), expanded my thinking on the matter. As we were walking down a neighborhood street in long afternoon light, she pointed to a porch and said, “See that pumpkin? I could go get it and take it to my bandit house and make pumpkin pie.” My lair is just a burrow, I said. Yours is a bandit house? Count me in.
We get a little snow now and again. Will likely get more as the sun makes its way along Riverside Avenue to the turnaround tree. It’ll get there a week from today, hole up for a while in the fork of that black locust I can see from my writing desk, then it’ll start the long walk north.
Heavy rain and wind in recent days. Sometimes the iron piggy gets covered, sometimes not. She’s had and is having a hard life—but a good hard life. Been everywhere, seen everything.
The other day I managed to turn a few errands into 75 miles of letting the piggy have her head. Good for the soul, hers & mine both. There was quite a lot of salt on the road that day, washed away now. Doesn’t faze iron piggy. We’re out all winter, every winter.
I haven’t been up to the kids’ place in Vermont at all lately. Jonny D2H1 drove up yesterday, saw bear tracks by the building. I’ve walked every inch of the property, slept on the ground there probably 60 or 70 nights and have yet to see bear sign.
They had a thaw last week, bear woke up and went for a walk. I suggested that Jonny follow the tracks, see if he could find the den. Haven’t heard whether he did.
Now that winter’s just about here, we don’t travel much as a family. This might be my favorite of all the photos I snapped when we had the weather for family travel. This was August, when we brought the granddaughters north to Sullivan, Maine, on Flanders Bay, to meet their Great-Great-Aunt Roberta, our family matriarch. Roberta’s a joy. We should all be that alive at 92.
While we were there, Roberta said to Pam: Is there anything in the house you would like to have, Dear? (With her Downeast accent, it comes out DEE-ah.)
Whatever you want, she said, take it. It’s yours. I said, if that’s the offer, Roberta, we’re taking you home with us.
Pam’s been going through boxes of yesteryear lately, pasting old photos in a scrap book as a birthday gift to D2. Here’s one she unearthed: our gals & me in the days of my newspaper misadventures. As you can see, I had just gotten home from covering the embassy takeover in Tehran, this on an incognito basis. What you do to blend in, I discovered, is roll with it, go with the mob, pipe up now and again with a hearty Death to the Great Satan and whatnot. You’d be surprised how no one’s the wiser.
Last week, I got around to stringing lights on the ’49 truck. Adds a little color to these solstice-adjacent nights, and why not? It’s different. Neighbors seem to like it.
Life could be tougher than passing the shortest light of the year reading and writing here in the hill nestled under the house. It’s typically 80F in my lair, t-shirt weather. The rising heat makes for 70 on the next floor up, 65 on the one above that, where we sleep.
Here I am stoking the fire at 3 this morning. Often, I awake around then, read or write for a few hours, then back down for a few and I’m up for the day.
I typically have two or three books going at once. I was on a re-reading jag for a while, books I’d read a lifetime ago: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Then I was working my way through the collected stories of Stefan Zweig when I got diverted onto The Executioner’s Song, one of Mailer’s doorstops. I’m about 700 pages in, 400 to go.
My friend Roger in Chicago sent me a couple of Thomas Gifford thrillers he enjoyed; Gifford writing under one of his pen names, Thomas Maxwell. I’ll get to them after Mailer and two other volumes in the queue, essays by the late Leszek Kolakowski.
About The Executioner’s Song: I kind of surprised myself by delving into it. I’m not at all into tabloid lit. Many years ago, I set aside Capote’s In Cold Blood with something like 50 pages to go. Done with it. I’m most attracted to fiction in its purest form, fiction made of nothing. (Which might be why I so enjoy scribbling Lee Falk’s Phantom for King Features: nothing in it ever happened to anyone, anywhere.) I’m not much into these potboilers “based on” a true story, weasel words to that effect, or the roman à clef of the novelist settling scores without naming names.
True Crime Novel, what a misnomer. The only thing true in the ordinary sense of the word is the crime. A novel is never true in the same way. True Novel? Wha?
A real-world crime inspires a novelist to tell a story as if real events had unfolded with a novelist in the room; as if the novelist took notes on what everybody was thinking and feeling and saying without knowing a novelist was there. Oh, you can do the reporting job, score the interviews later on, but that hardly makes the novel true. You’re going by what the characters say they were thinking and feeling and saying. They might not know the truth of it themselves.
The truth of the True Novel, of course, is the attempt to say something artistically true. Not true, but true-to-life. True-to-life as if life were a novel. The reasoning-through of the artist, that overlay of an imposed narrative coherence, is both after-the-fact and after-the-facts.
I daresay most of The Executioner’s Song didn’t happen the way Mailer’s lowbrow narrator says it did (the narrator is nakedly Mailer; his prurient footprints are all over this yarn), but the felt presence of that narrator in the text, well, that’s a wonder. Sentence by sentence, words find one another in surprisingly inevitable ways.
That’s why I’m reading it: Not for the crime, not for the reporting job—certainly not for Gary Gilmore, the least interesting character in the book—but for Mailer’s masterful command of the language.
Books aside, I’m looking forward to the first of the year, when I’ll likely have time to get back out in the woods. This, in the interest of being a moving target. As you’ve discovered for yourself, things that stop moving go to hell pretty quick: machines, bodies, skills, talents, todo el mundo, amigo.
Last winter, I left trees on the ground in the woods behind D1’s house. If and when we have sled-worthy snow cover, I’ll buck the logs into rounds and sled them out to the road on plywood. Will quarter them with an ax and throw them in the back of the ’49 truck for a ride over here.
Last winter, I rolled or wheelbarrowed seven truckloads of rounds out of the woods, much bigger trees than these. Not bad for an old experienced buck full of cancer. Enjoyed every minute. Looking forward to more.
After I push the button on this Saturday morning whole bunch of nothing, I’m going to do a little scribbling for Mike Manley, then give a fresh read to something I wrote yesterday, an extended version of the Phantom’s origin myth.
Falk tended to vary the specifics in his 63 years of telling the Phantom’s genesis. He was hardly a stickler for continuity. The fundamentals were there, but names changed, language changed, the year changed, and details were left hanging.
To me, it’s fundamental that the myth be told through the eyes of the 16th-century man at the center of it. I’m resistant to the notion that the language ought to be updated in a way that imposes, upon that man, a sensibility it wasn’t possible for him to have. I’m interested in what the character knew when he swore the oath, what he could reasonably foresee about the legend. Did he understand that he was founding a legend? I’d much rather argue the No side of that proposition.
Fodder for another day, perhaps.
In a week or so, the talented Mike Manley should be clear of other obligations and available to draw this latest take on the Phantom myth. It’ll be his first time drawing the origin sequence in its fullest sense. Usually we make reference to it in a panel here, a panel there. I think my working draft from yesterday stands at 20 panels, the first two weeks of our next daily story in the queue. As always, I’m eager to see Mike’s interpretation of the text.
Cheers to all, and have a great weekend.
Tony DePaul, December 14, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
