“Tell it again! Tell it again!”
And I, who had never heard Shelley tell anything at all, but was thoroughly caught up by the enthusiasm, cried: “Well, then, tell us a new one!”
Smiling a little in the direction of the rubber on his left sneaker toe, Shelley rose to take a seat on a fallen log. He put his hands on his knees, leaned forward and said, “All right.” He looked up at us. “Tonight I shall tell you the story of …”
The story that he told was called Who Goes There? He told it for an hour and a half that night, stopping in the middle. We gathered outside Brooklyn College the next night and sat on the flagstones while he told us another hour’s worth. And two nights later we gathered in one of the tents while he gave us the concluding half hour under the kerosene lantern hanging from the center pole.
“Did you make that up?” somebody asked him, when he was finished.
“Oh, no. It’s by somebody called John W. Campbell,” he explained to us. “It’s a book. I read it a couple of weeks ago.”
At which point our counselor told him, really, it was well past lights out and he simply had to go.
Our counselor blew out the light, and I lay in my cot bed thinking about storytelling. Shelley was perhaps thirteen, back then. I was nine or ten, but even then it seemed perfectly marvelous that somebody could keep so many people enthralled for four hours over three nights.
Shelley was the first of those wonderful creatures, “a Storyteller,” whom I had ever encountered.
A summer camp is a very small place. Shelley’s reputation spread. Some weeks later, he was asked to tell his story again to a much larger group—bunk five, bunk six, and bunk seven all collected in the amphitheater behind the long, creosoted kitchen house. On a bench this time, once more Shelley told the story Who Goes There? This time it took only a single hour sitting.
We who’d heard it before, of course, had the expected connoisseur reaction: Oh, it was much better in the longer version. The intimacy of firelight and roasted marshmallows vastly improved the initial sequence. And lanterns were essential for the conclusion to have its full effect. But the forty-odd people who, that evening, heard it for the first time were just as enthralled as we had been. More important, I got a chance to look at how Shelley’s tale was put together.
The first thing I noticed the second time through was that the names of all the characters were different from the first time. And when I got a chance to look at the novel myself a year or so later, I realized with amusement that the names in neither of Shelley’s versions corresponded with those of Campbell’s.
The second thing I noticed was that a good deal of the story was chanted—indeed, in the most exciting passages very little was actually happening; and you had sections like:
They walked across the ice, they slogged across the ice, there was ice below them and ice all around them …
Or, when the monster was beginning to revive, I recall:
The fingers rose, the hand rose, the arm rose slowly, a little at a time, rose like a great green plant …
Needless to say, you will find none of these lines in the book.
What Shelley was giving us was a very theatrical, impromptu, and essentially poetic impression of his memory of the tale.
When I did encounter Shelley again in Bronx Science, I had just joined the staff of the school literary magazine, Dynamo. I was delighted to discover him. That was one of the first times I made the discovery that three years difference in age is a lot more at nine or ten than it is at fourteen or fifteen.
At any rate, I bumped into Shelley—literally—behind the projection booth in the auditorium balcony. We recovered, recognized each other, enthused for a while, and I asked him if he would be doing any fiction or poetry for Dynamo. He looked quite surprised. No, he hadn’t thought about it. Actually his interests were in theater.
I was quite surprised. But creative writing, he explained, had never particularly attracted him.
Later, Shelley turned in quite a credible performance as Jonathan in the senior play, Arsenic and Old Lace. And a few weeks ago, after having not seen him since, I learned, via the blurb on the back of The Careless Atom, that “Sheldon Novick is Program Administrator of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also Associate Editor of the journal Scientist and Citizen and is a frequent contributor of articles dealing with atomic energy.” I can recommend the book to anyone interested in the recent developments of the practical side of reactors and reactor plants. (Even more recently, Novick is the author of a fascinating and controversial biography, Henry James: The Young Master [Random House: New York, 1997], as well as a life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He is also editor of Holmes’s collected works. –SRD, 2005)
But let’s get back to “storytelling.”
The second “storyteller” I encountered was Seamus McManus. He was the grandfather of one of my elementary school classmates. Mr. McManus had been born in Ireland. His father had been a professional storyteller who went from cottage to cottage and, for lodging and meals and a bit of kind, kept the family entertained in the evenings with what were called “faerie stories,” in which an endless number of heroes named Jack, always the youngest of three brothers, set out to seek their fortune and, after encountering multiple old women, magicians, giants and elves, magic mills, and enchanted apples, married the beautiful princess and lived happily ever after.
Mr. McManus had made the reconstruction of these classic Irish folk tales his hobby. He told them at children’s parties—indeed, it was at his grandson’s, Fitzhugh Mullan’s, birthday party that I first heard him. Sunlight streamed through white organdy curtains while the gray-haired gentleman sat forward in the armchair, and the rest of us, sitting on the rug and hugging our knees, were bound in the music of his brogue. Over the next few years, I heard him several times more, once at a children’s library, and once in a program in the school’s auditorium. And, after the initial magic, again I got a chance to look at what was going on.
The action in these stories—and you always left a McManus storytelling under the impression that you had just been through the tremendous and hair-raising adventures—the action, when you looked at it up close, was usually dismissed in a sentence or two: the typical battle between Jack and one of his numerous adversaries was usually handled something like this:
“You want to fight?” said Jack. “Well I’m a poor sort of fighter but I’ll do my best, and the best can do no more.” So they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and they fought, and—(here Mr. McManus would snap his fingers)—Jack slew him with a blow.
There was your action.
On the other hand, the things that stuck, the things that remained, indeed the things that took up most of the time, were the ritual descriptions and incantatory paragraphs, the endless journeys that all went from tale to tale, from story to story:
So they lifted up their bundles, and set out in high spirits. And they traveled twice as far as I could tell you, and three times farther than you could tell me, and seven times farther than anyone could tell the two of us.
And when, in a year or so, I first read the Iliad, I think this contributed much to my understanding of those ritual descriptions that are repeated word for word throughout the poem—like the sacrifices that come with exactly the same words nearly a dozen times, at each point the Achaeans are called on to perform one:
When they had made their petitions and scattered the grain, they first drew the heads of the animals back; they cut open their throats; they flayed them. Then from the thighs they cut slices and wrapped them in fat folds with raw meat above them. These the old priest burnt on the wood, and he sprinkled wine on the fire, and the young men gathered around him, five-pronged forks in their hands. When the thighs were burnt up, and they had all tasted the organs, they carved the remains into small pieces and pierced them