America Writes ...

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. I am an invisible man. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there". Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky. A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green. Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. This is America -- a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year of Our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York. Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem , a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happen to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvannia, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of the angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere nor a chair misplaced. We are alone here and we are dead. Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A womans' voice sang out impatiently: "Bigger, shut that thing off!" Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. Oh the infantree the infantree With the dirt behind their ears ARMIES CLASH AT VERDUN IN GLOBE'S GREATEST BATTLE 150,000 MEN AND WOMEN PARADE but another question and a very important one is raised.