The Square Pegs (36 page)

“Why, Anne, you must acknowledge there are some good people in our ranks.”

“No, I don’t. There’s not one devil of you who cares a cent for his country. You would not give a farthing to save it from destruction. See how I live! see how I work to save my country! I am at work every moment see my house see, I have no bed to lie on no anything and then you tell about loving your country! Oh, you deserve to be lynched, every devil of you!”

After a half hour more of similar harangue, through which Barnum sat benumbed, Anne finally ran out of breath and invective. Her voice reduced to a mere shout, she studied Barnum a moment, and then suddenly apologized.

“Well, Barnum,” she said, “you are a good fellow, and I am really glad to see you. How sorry I am that we mentioned politics, for I am so nervous. Now, I want a real good talk with you… . Come, Barnum, go with me into the printing office, and there we can talk and work together.”

In the printing office, where a man and a boy were at the press, a large pile of wrapped newspapers lay in the middle of the floor. Anne commanded Barnum to sit with her and help sort them. “Anne then seated herself upon the dirty floor, and as there was no chair in the room, I sat down beside her, not daring even to spread my handkerchief or in any way remove the dust, lest she should construe it into an insult.” For a half hour more they assorted papers as Anne rattled on, recounting various incidents of her long life. When he could get in a word, Barnum wondered if he might sponsor her on a lecture tour through the East. She was not interested. When he left, she extracted his promise to call again. But thereafter, still shaken, he gave her a wide berth and admitted that he “never again met the eccentric old lady.”

In November 1836, inexplicably,
Paul Pry
which, said
The New England Religious Weekly
, “contains all the scum, billingsgate and filth extant” ceased publication, only to be supplanted a month later by a more conservative weekly called
The Huntress
. This new conservatism, intended to increase circulation by a decrease in muckracking, did not extend to the treatment of anti-Masons or Evangelicals. The smaller pages did little to confine the editor’s temper. Nor did her advancing years and growing infirmity mellow her opinion. When there was protest against Catholic immigration, Anne saw at once that the real threat lay in the tyranny of the overpatriotic, and she cried out against them in
The Huntress
: “A Catholic foreigner discovered America, Catholic foreigners first settled it. … When the colonies were about to be enslaved, foreigners rescued it. … At present, we verily believe, that the liberty of this country is in more danger from this native combination than from foreigners.”

For more than a decade she continued to occupy herself with
The Huntress
. Circulation was small, and she barely made ends meet. Once, she wrote a three-act play,
The Cabinet
: or,
Large Parties in Washington
, and Joseph Jefferson’s father agreed to produce it. On opening night, with tickets already sold, the show was canceled because of pressure brought to bear by church groups and anti-Masons. Though Masons came to her rescue, and gave the play one performance in their hall, it proved a financial disappointment. Above all, Anne persisted in her pension fight. When, at last, acting on an affidavit supplied by Lafayette, Congress conceded that Captain Royall had served the Revolution and that Anne had indeed been his wife, the petition was rejected because Anne had been married in 1797 and the law provided benefits only to widows who had been married before 1794. But in 1848 Congress liberalized the statute of limitations, and Anne’s excruciating, twenty-four-year struggle was capped by victory. She was offered the choice of a $480 annuity for life or a total payment of $1,200. As she was seventy-nine years old, ill, and in debt, she took the lump sum of $1,200. It was a mistake. She would live six years more. When her obligations were met and a new printing press installed, she was left with three dollars.

In 1854, aged eighty-five, she was still on the job. When she wanted to interview President Pierce, she was invited to the White House. She may have reflected on how the times had changed. It was a quarter of a century since she had been obliged to trap another president in the nude to obtain her story. Pierce was friendly, and her account of the visit in
The Huntress
was kind:

“He looked stout and healthy but rather pale. His countenance used to be gay and full of vivacity when he was a Senator in Congress several years ago, but now it wears a calm and dignified composure, tinctured with a pleasing melancholy… . We could not refrain from dropping a tear when he spoke to us of his lady, after whose health we inquired. The sad bereavement she met with in the sudden loss of her only and beloved boy has shadowed the bright walks which surround the Presidential Mansion.”

It was her last major story. On Sunday morning, October 1, 1854, she died in her sleep. “To the hour of her death,” noted the
Washington Star
, “she preserved all the peculiarities of thought, temper, and manners, which at one time rendered her so famous throughout the land.” She was laid to rest in the Congressional Cemetery. There was no money for a gravestone. Her total legacy amounted to thirty-one cents.

IX

The First in the East

“I wans to make my Enemys grin in time Lik A Cat over A hot pudding and gone Away and hang there heads Down Like A Dogg… .”

TIMOTHY DEXTER

The year 1802 was a lusterless one in American literature. In that twelve-month period no novel or work of nonfiction gained widespread popularity or gave promise of any degree of permanence. Two years earlier, in 1800, Mason Weems, a traveling bookseller and part-time preacher nicknamed the Parson, had produced a success with his
Life of George Washington; with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen
. In 1809, two volumes of
A History of New York
, by Washington Irving, were printed in New York, and were given a friendly reception and attained a moderate sale. But between these years lay 1802, a reproach to Yankee creativity and a barren island for book lovers.

Yet there are people well versed in curiosa who will dispute the last, who will insist that in the year 1802 American literature had one of its finest hours. And perhaps, after all, they are right. Certainly 1802 provided a volume that may still be regarded as one of the most unusual ever published in the United States.

It was not a best seller though its author had “thousands” of copies printed and distributed free of charge with his compliments. This distribution, as well as the curiosity of the book’s content, stimulated wide interest. Public demand for the volume grew until a market price of one dollar a copy was established. Through the years that followed, there were at least eight new printings of the work.

It was not, it might be added, a book of enduring literary quality though a century and a half later, erudite readers might find their discussions enlivened by the tome’s futuristic approach, and groups of select bibliophiles might continue to chuckle over its oddity.

The first edition was brought off the presses in Salem, Massachusetts, and doled out to all takers from a vast Georgian mansion in Newburyport whose grounds were decorated with forty life-sized wooden statues of such celebrities as Horatio Nelson, Adam and Eve, George Washington, Louis XIV, and the author himself. The book measured four inches by six. Its twenty-four pages of prose were bound in soft covers. The title page was conservative enough:

A Pickle for the Knowing Ones: or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress by Timothy Dexter, Esq … Salem: Printed For The Author. 1802
.

It must be remarked at once that of freak books in literature there has been no end. Their quaint procession has been well documented by Holbrook Jackson and Walter Hart Blumenthal. In the two centuries before Timothy Dexter’s publication, and in the years since, literature has been exhilarated often, and debased infrequently, by eccentricity in the print shop or the author’s study. In France once appeared a book entitled
Nothing
, by Mathelà, which contained, appropriately, two hundred blank pages. Less amusing, as Carlyle would have it, was the appearance of the second edition of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s
Social Contract
, supposedly bound with the skins of French aristocrats who had laughed at his first edition. In England, in 1634, appeared
The Feminin Monarchi, or the Histori of Bees
, by Charles Butler, all set down in phonetic spelling, and, in 1866, an edition of
Pilgrim’s Progress
written and printed in Pitman’s shorthand. In America the reading public was astounded, in 1835, by Francis Glass’s
Washington Vita
, a biography entirely in Latin, and no less astounded five years later by the publication, in New York, of
Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth
. In Five Cantos, by Solyman Brown. By 1881 the reading public hardly lifted its collective brow when the book shops advertised a science-fiction novel entitled
! ! !
, by George Hepworth. But before all these, in America at least, came
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
, by Timothy Dexter. His assault on credulity was the first and perhaps the very best.

When the well-read New Englander of 1802 opened his copy of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, he found that the entire book was one long sentence or, rather, no sentence at all. Not a single comma, semicolon, quotation mark, apostrophe, exclamation point, or period marred its half-coherent text. Grammatically, it was without beginning or end. Thought melted into thought without stop. Like the universe, like time itself, it emerged from infinity and receded into infinity. Its organization was nonexistent. It was chaotic. Dexter literally wrote what came into his head, and what he put to paper antedated automatic writing and free-association techniques.

However, if the author ignored punctuation completely, he was lavish with capital letters. Words were capitalized throughout, even if they were the wrong words. The names of men and places were often demoted to lower case. A conglomeration of adverbs, adjectives, and verbs was elevated to upper case. Only one word was consistently capitalized sensibly enough, the pronoun
I
. As to spelling, it might be better to draw a veil over the entire subject. Dexter’s spelling was entirely by ear, by mood, by whim. Sometimes it was accomplished phonetically, more often by Divine Right.

“I Command pease and the gratest brotherly Love,” said Dexter, supporting his plan for a United States of the World. He suggested that “nasions” all “be Linked to gether with that best of troue Love so as to govern all nasions on the fass of the gloub not to tiranize over them but to put them to order if any Despout shall A Rise …” In the jungle of Dexter’s orthography the reader met strange, half-familiar creatures like “Jorge washeton,” who was once George Washington, and a mr bourr,” who had been better known as Aaron Burr; he came across rarely seen sites like “plimeth,” which had been Plymouth and “Nouebry Port,” which had resemblance to Newburyport; he saw—but not before passing a hand over his eyes—“a toue Leged Creter,” which was only a two-legged creature, “A Scoyer,” who was merely an “onnest” squire, and several “Rougs,” who proved to be harmless rogues, all this before sitting down to partake of “Loovs & Littel fishes,” which could be better digested when known to be loaves and little fish. This was the style and the form of
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
. It might have given pause even to Jean François Champollion, conqueror of the Rosetta stone.

Timothy Dexter realized his mistake at once. A book without punctuation was hardly a book at all. He sought to correct this lapse. By some means possibly in a second printing now lost, or in a separate pamphlet, or in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper Dexter added one more page to his book. This page was bound in all printings after 1838. The addition, which appeared at the very end of his philosophical autobiography, secured Dexter his literary immortality. It read as follows:

fourder mister printer the Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in A nuf here and thay may peper and solt it as they please

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

:::::::::::::::

……………

…..!!!!!…..

……!!!……

…….!…….

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

…..?????…..

With this generous offering of punctuation, Timothy Dexter anticipated the vogue of do-it-yourself in the mid-twentieth century. It was a stroke of genius, this offering to the restless and overenergized reader an opportunity for therapy, a chance to work with his hands and his wits by peppering and salting the virginal book with punctuation. Surely, too, though he could not know it, and though he had no literary pretensions, Dexter anticipated, perhaps pioneered, an entire new school of writing. Imitators and converts followed in abundance. Just thirteen years after
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
appeared, there was published in England a two-volume work called
The Elements of Geometry
by the Reverend J. Dobson. The Reverend’s hand faltered only at the end of paragraphs, when he laid down periods. Otherwise, his mathematical prose was as denuded of punctuation as Dexter’s. It was not until another age with the emergence of Knowing Ones like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and E. E. Cummings that Dexter’s advanced method, his lack of stops, his erratic capitalizations, his abstract approach, his stream-of-consciousness style, came into full flower and found wide acceptance.

In Dexter’s own time his avant-garde effort was less appreciated. While his little book amused, even charmed, a few of the more tolerant and discriminating readers in America, its general tone provoked only irritation, especially in his own community. Those neighbors who had thought him a lunatic for earlier indiscretions were now positive of it mainly because
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
was an egotistical, opinionated, coarse defense of Dexter, by Dexter, against all “Enemys” who were anti-Dexter.