“But from here to the garden gate Where the sweet wild roses wait It’s a little world.” Gretchen Peters, Little World, from the album Hello Cruel World
“The little world of Don Camillo is to be found somewhere in the valley of the Po River. It is almost any village on that stretch of plain in Northern Italy. There, between the Po and the Apennines, the climate is always the same. The landscape never changes and, in a country like this, you can stop along any road for a moment and look at a farmhouse sitting in the midst of maize and hemp – and immediately a story is born.
Why do I tell you this instead of getting on with my story? Because I want you to understand that in the Little World, between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs, have souls.”
Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo
I have been long fascinated by the power of well written fiction to transport me to some place I have never been. In analyzing this emotive power, I realize that not only do the words have to captivate, but so does the story. Too many words or too poorly written text combined with a great storyline do not suffice to trigger the effect; sparely written, fine texts combined with a crummy story line don’t either. Both are needed and, even when they coalesce, the resulting fiction must appeal to the particular idiosyncrasies of the individual reader for the reader to be transported.
For me, Giovanni Guareschi is a storyteller who combines good writing with a charming story line. His books about Don Camillo, a Roman Catholic priest, and Peppone, the communist mayor of his village, are not only funny and charming, but replete with wisdom and a sense of basic human decency and morality. While reading these books I am forced to think through my laughter to contemplate the meaning of the basic nub of humanity that is the charming essence of any particular story.
Alas, the Don Camillo books – and there were several published in the decades of the Fifties and the Sixties – are out of print. They reappear periodically in paperback, but are no longer fashionable. There was a brief reappearance on the heels of a regrettable television series portraying the Little World, but if you go to find them now you will be hard pressed to do so. I suggest used book stores where they might be found if only one exercises the necessary sort of patience that arises from the love of well-crafted things. Fortunately, my library contains a complete run of first editions of all of Mr. Guareschi’s books and all I have to do is go upstairs, find the right shelf, and hunt down the right book, as I did last night while thinking about writing this piece.
Another charming author who has suffered the same fate as Mr. Guareschi is Robert Nathan – not Robert Stuart Nathan, the author of several insufferable thrillers, but Robert Nathan, the Harvard educated author of some 90 novels who, when he died, was married to the actress Anna Lee, the movie Bronwyn of How Green Was My Valley. Mr. Nathan specialized in morality tales. I have seen websites that categorize his work as speculative fiction, a form of fantasy. To so categorize him is to do him a serious injustice, especially as much of the writing in this genre is so unbelievably poor. Most of Mr. Nathan’s works are literary morality plays with a few angels or ghosts tossed in to cause the reader to arrive at the desired point of understanding.
Like any of the stories in the various canons of The Little World of Don Camillo, each of Nathan’s novels can be read in a single sitting. They are candy for the eye, reading quickly and smoothly because of the spare prose and a succinct tale – the kind of story that was written and edited many times prior to publication to achieve the perfection of simplicity. Well satisfied when finished reading, I put each one down at the end of a long day, sigh softly, and turn over in my bed to find sleep. Upon rising the next morning, I inevitably ask myself some combination of “what did he say?” or “how did he get to that conclusion?” and reach again for the book to find a particular well-turned phrase I remember or to revisit the quirk in the story line that led to an unexpected moral. I often re-read whole chapters and, occasionally the entire book, in doing so. Finally, I have to shake my head over the realization that Mr. Nathan, once again, made me think past the charm and the simple pleasantness of his tale to contemplate much deeper matters involving love, death, morality, wonder, and human nature.
The principal difference between Mr. Guareschi and Mr. Nathan is the kind of charm each brings to his work. Mr. Guareschi is darkly humorous, laughing equally at his own foibles or those of others. His work can always bring about a grin and, on occasion, a belly laugh. Mr. Nathan is replete with gentle, charming characters not wholly centered in mundane worldliness; nondescript, solemnly eccentric folks who exist in uniquely weird and offbeat worlds unknown and upsetting to their fictional neighbors, but which enchant the reader. I always wonder whether Nathan’s seemingly oddball characters aren’t really the ones who see the world correctly; they certainly have far more fun than the rest of us.
Fun is the other element that brings these two authors together in my mind. There are few other authors who can allow me to laugh and feel warm and fuzzy while simultaneously causing me to think deeper thoughts, thoughts about the meaning of morality and its philosophical underpinnings.
Little worlds also exist in song. The best songwriters create them seemingly effortlessly. In her song Five Minutes from her album Hello Cruel World, Gretchen Peters manages to create a complete, comprehensible world of a single mother who has lived by compulsion rather than reason and never really understood love. The pathos of her existence is created in 6 stanzas, and charmingly so despite the bleak message conveyed by the content of the material. The 5 minutes of the title are spent smoking a cigarette behind the diner where the narrator works as a waitress, and the entire tableau of a life emerges in the lyrics of a song that lasts exactly as long as its title suggests.
“Between the workin’ and the livin’ and the ghosts that haunt my dreams I’ve got five minutes and I’m gonna smoke this cigarette”
For those of you unfamiliar with the American Northwest, you won’t find Humptulips County on any map other than my own internal, mental map. Humptulips County exists because of my fascination with these – and countless other – little worlds. Authors like Guareschi and Nathan and composers like Peters are among the headwaters of inspiration for my vision of Humptulips County. Other sources of inspiration include:
-
E. B. White’s canny, witty and sensitive observations of life on his Maine farm and human activity in general.
- The quirky, slightly off-true, whimsical humor of James Thurber.
- The convoluted, heavy-going brilliance of William Faulkner which is worth all of the effort reading his material for comprehension entails, since his imagery is fantastic.
- The America of John Steinbeck, with his particular focus on things Californian.
- The seemingly never-ending cornucopia of tales created and sung by singer-composers of the likes of Richard Thompson, Rodney Crowell, or John Prine.
- The wondrous and poetic mysticism of songwriters such as Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen.
- The inspirational evocations of regional blessings and attributes by writers such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Walter van Tilburg Clark or Wallace Stegner.
- The constant investigation of literary form undertaken by John Barth.
-
The woodblock art of Barry Moser which has served to illustrate many classics such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, A River Runs Through It, and Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books.
-
The inspirational poetry of Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot and others of a generation of poets who consistently spoke of things bigger than miniscule human events.
And the list could go on for many more pages. How could it have omitted the likes of Mark Twain or Ray Bradbury? But I must quit here for now. Rest assured that I still enjoy the privilege of working through the body of work of those listed above as well as that of countless others, known and as yet unknown, and that I will be at this, my true life’s work, for as long as I am able.
These Humptulips County pieces may not match the charm of the work of those on this list and may lack their ability to achieve seeming simple, but otherwise multilayered, tales through sparely refined language and the charm of a fine story line, but Humptulips County is my little world. It is a place where I can live my fantasy to be a writer, and you are welcome to visit this little world, or not, as you may choose. I won’t be offended which you choose as you pause at this garden gate and consider coming inside.
From here to the garden gate
It’s just a world that we create
Just a little world
Just a little world.*
*Gretchen Peters, Little World
