Hey all! I’ve been enjoying doing the length of review I’ve been writing lately. I hope you have too. I’m still working on Project reading. I’m still working on a novel, even! Maybe I should make a landing/explanation page for that… anyway, here’s some thoughts provoked by recent recreational reading. Enjoy!
I don’t remember where I first heard of Joyleg, a 1962 collaboration between Ward Moore and Avram Davidson. I had read a book by each man before and enjoyed them greatly. Moore’s Bring the Jubilee stands head, shoulders, and any other body part you care to name above any other “south wins the Civil War” narratives. Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror took the medieval myth of the poet Virgil being a sorcerer and built both a world and a pretty good historical fantasy mystery plot around it. Both played with history in profoundly sophisticated ways. Moore evokes the lived experience of a cramped, resentful United States left behind by history. Davidson takes you into a misty world governed by the mishmash dream logic of a medieval vision of classical life. Both are several cuts above standard in terms of prose quality, as well.
Another thing both Moore and Davidson did well in their respective major novels was to play with the sense of history, not just changes in dates, names, and borders, but with how people remember their past and make sense of their present. And so, seeing that they collaborated on a novel about the last living American Revolutionary War veteran – alive and well-ish in the early nineteen-sixties – being discovered by the modern world, I was interested in Joyleg.
Alas, while it’s not a bad read, Joyleg is definitely less than the sum of what both Moore and Davidson bring to the table. For one thing, Bring the Jubilee and The Phoenix and the Mirror both had better plots. The plot of Joyleg is that two rival congress-critters from Tennessee – a flinty mountain lady Republican and a gregarious lower-country dude Democrat – get into it over a VA pension of eleven dollars being delivered monthly to one Issachar Joyleg, who is in one or another of their districts. Lady GOP wants to prove that Joyleg is a petty chiseler, Dude Democrat wants to prove that a veteran is being nickel and dimed by the government, and since, somehow, he appears to live in some kind of interstitial space between their districts, both head down to Tennessee to figure out what is going on with Mr. Joyleg.
By and by – and way too much of this short book is taken up with figuring out travel, vaguely Rock Hudson-Doris Day type banter between the two, etc – they come to the hidden glen high up in the mountains where Joyleg lives with his little clan. Joyleg, a very old man, receives an eleven dollar a month pension, because that’s the pension you got when you were discharged from the US Marines after the end of the American Revolution. Due to a magical whiskey bath (I’m not making that up, and it’s easily the most patronizing towards Appalachian people the book gets, in my opinion), Joyleg is more like a spry (and randy) sixty than a hundred-something. After leaving the Marines, disgusted by “King Alex” (Hamilton) and the Federalist gang, he upped sticks for his mountain refuge and never left. The flow of goods and information slowed to a trickle over the years, so Joyleg has some idea of a war between the states, but for the most part, he understands changes in the world as having little to do with him and his.
Ok, so we have a neat premise. The congresspeople stop bickering, which is a relief, and start getting closer to an obvious romance, which is boring. Joyleg may not be up on the news, but is a courteous, clever man, a bit of a horndog (within the limits of an eighteenth century sort-of gentleman) and a bullshitter but a good host who quickly grasps whatever he’s told about the modern world- none of which seems especially novel to him. Great. Whither, then, our plot? Well, it turns out that in Joyleg’s seemingly bottomless trunk of historical knick-knacks is a deed signed by Catherine the Great for some Siberian land, which she gave to John Paul Jones (who did in fact know Catherine, and served in her navy after the Revolution), who, irked in exile from Russian court politics (and some pretty hair-raising allegations), gave it to Joyleg. Wouldn’t you know it, this deed includes the land under the main Russian nuclear warhead production facility! And, due to some real estate shenanigans involve the ephemeral State of Franklin, he also held the deed to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a similar facility for the US! Record scratch! Joyleg could put a stop to the Cold War!!
To prevent this state of affairs (and to avoid having to keep paying him his veterans pension), a mean government lawyer digs up Joyleg’s dirt. He had deserted not just the Pennsylvania militia but also the Continental Army to join the Marines. He had participated in the Whiskey Rebellion and maybe some of Aaron Burr’s schemes. And he was probably a polygamist at various times, given his habit of lovin’ and leavin’ the bar wenches. The two congress-critters, by then enamored of the old man, watch forlornly as the press, at first eagerly eating up the Joyleg phenomenon, turns on him, the way mass media does. There’s a happily ever after, involving Joyleg getting a bigger pension, a fresh green waistcoat (with which he can go a-courtin’) every year, and getting to stay in his State of Franklin shangri-la permanently, uncorrupted by the outside world.
So, not much of a plot. A lot of the supposed emotional payoff comes from Dude Dem and Lady GOP putting aside their partisan bickering and learning to both help out an old guy, and to love, amounts to little except a time capsule of what partisanship looked like at the halcyon of the “consensus era” i.e. getting sweaty over eleven dollars a month and bragging rights.
Joyleg is the star of the show, as you might expect from a title character and a supporting cast of boring politicians to bounce off of. Moore and Davidson don’t do Rip Van Winkle with him, showing him shocked at everything modern (except women wearing trousers). But insofar as there’s much juice in this story, it comes from Joyleg’s recounting of various bits of history from his unique vantage point. This basically means him interjecting bits of historical color into his conversation. “I haven’t seen X since Y historical thing happened,” “A reminds of B historical figure.” It’s cool that Moore and Davidson don’t do the classic scifi infodump, which is usually much more flagrant in alternate history fiction. The various cuts across the grain of accepted American historical memory Joyleg makes are interesting (more later), but especially given that the plot they’re wedged into is such a trifle, this awkward doling out of odds and ends in otherwise boring conversations can be frustrating. Surely there were better uses of this character and his basic deal of alluding to weird old history.
Because, insofar as this work has interest, it is in the “weird old America” (to take a phrase from Greil Marcus, who took it from Bob Dylan) that Joyleg and his happy hollow represents and which Moore and Davidson contrast to the then-ultramodern America the two congresspeople (and much more so the mass media which comes in their wake) represent. Both congresscritters think they can get Joyleg to Washington (“so, the old scoundrel named a city after himself!” Joyleg says, or words to that effect) to inspire the American people with the spirit of 1776, until Washington comes to them and is mean. But Joyleg’s version of American revolutionary spirit would be something quite distinct from the spirit of the founding as understood by the consensus view of American history, which had by 1962 become a part of the creed of American civic religion.
The Founders were no quasi-divinely-inspired band of brothers, nor were they beneficiaries of some essential liberal nature of American politics, in Joyleg’s tellings- they were just another bunch of crooked politicians, revenuers and conscriptors, better than the Brits but mostly on the grounds of prejudice for local boys. He has no regard for the Constitution (but prefers it with a Bill of Rights), seeing it as a pact between a crooked ring of land speculators and bankers. In general, laws and especially bureaucratic procedures are, in Joyleg’s world, mostly there to be gotten around. Why should he stay in an army if he feels he’s not treated right or paid enough, and which, moreover, probably won’t catch him if he deserts? “If it sucks, hit the bricks!” might be his motto. He takes plenty of pride in his region, nation, and Corps, but understands citizenship as fungible and transferable, like a lot of people in the eighteenth century (and later) did- see his friend and commander John Paul Jones. For all that, he’s no Confederate, neo- or otherwise- what was the CSA but another government trying to meddle with him?
None of this is especially new news to me – I know enough history to know well that not everyone loved the Founding Fathers and that nation-states used to be less well established – but I am interested in the way Moore and Davidson compile their vision of a looser, weirder American past, and how it connects to others who played with a similar topos. Gore Vidal was doing “Aaron Burr good and cool in a way now vanished, Alexander Hamilton kinda sucks in an all too contemporary way” not that long after this one came out. Ishmael Reed conjured up numerous weird old Americas, pastiched from a wide range of historical, literary, and contemporary sources, in his early novels. On the opposite end of the literary quality scale, hack scifi writer L. Neil Smith uses a turning point around the time Joyleg was getting his pension to create a whole libertarian utopia, where the Articles of Confederation are in force and monkeys vote, just like the NAP intended. I’ve written about this in a couple of my birthday lectures, a sort of countercultural nostalgia for a less organized America, but am still getting my arms around it. It’s like they couldn’t imagine a way out of the aspects of midcentury American culture they didn’t like – from nuclear paranoia to consumerism to the Organization Man to, in Smith’s case, child labor laws – without turning back the clock on a century or two of history. You can call it “conservative” with some validity, but that’s not all it is. Anyway…
In terms of both writing style and particular flavor of Americana, Stephen Vincent Benet, who’s name-checked at one point in Joyleg, is a clear influence here. Does anyone still read him? “The Devil and Daniel Webster”? Bueller? Bueller? Well, he did a similar thing, tying in the kind of popular American history you might (or might not, as the case may be) learn in school with stories of the everyman as well as the fantastic. He was big stuff back when.
There’s also the figure of the Coot. It’s weird how often Coots figure in midcentury scifi. Old but vigorous (vigor often proven by horniness), wise and contrarian, gruff but with a good heart, simply too old for your shit but not (always) too old for an adventure, you see him crop up all over the place. He may look to the past, but to only to parts of the past commonly thought of as being more individualistic- the frontier, not the Victorians. Robert Heinlein loved the Coot, his self-inserts were generally coots well before he got all that old himself, and his ultimate alter-ego, Lazarus Long, is basically the Coot as God. Asimov, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, DeCamp, Bradbury, all those guys had Coots somewhere in their stories, even if sometimes they were Coots in Space and so a little fancier. Philip K. Dick went a little off center, like he did- instead of Coots, he based characters on decent old bosses from small companies that had fired him at various points. Joyleg is a big old Coot, for sure.
I guess it makes sense why you’d put your points in the mouth of a Coot. Their advanced age makes them sound wise, whereas their attitude shows they’re not just mouthing received ideas. But it seems to me both the frequency of the appearance of the Coot, and the centrality of the Coot in many works, has more significance than that. Midcentury American liberalism associated itself with the prime of life- that men in that stage of life were overseeing a society that had reached a new plateau of excellence, from which it would advance still further. The Coot works to refute this.
There’s a memetic association in pop-criticism between midcentury liberal smugness and midcentury scifi, both being about Rational Men Solving Problems. Well, yes and no. It might all look the same to us. But consider it from the perspective of a Heinlein or a Herbert. Where’s the room for individual initiative and derring-do in even something as action-packed as war, as understood by a Robert McNamara? How can you imagine new and evocative types of life and society if you think civilization reached its apex with Clark Kerr’s master plan for the California higher ed system? The Coot talked back against this, not just in his opinions but by his very existence as, essentially, a fossil that’s simultaneously more vital than the world around him. Different authors deploy the Coots in their varying ways, but I think they all carry with them that rebuke of the idea of their time as the time with the answers.
Nowadays, what you get is the debased version, the old but still-with-it voice of wisdom, ironically bypassing the counterculture that most of the SFF Coots at least flirted with and passing on (a cheap simulacra of) pre-Baby Boom wisdom to adoring children. I understand that a right-libertarian book series for children that facebook occasionally sees fit to advertise to me heavily features a Cuban grandma with a time machine, a big mouth, and positive opinions about cryptocurrency. I don’t think she’s the only fictive ancestor our contemporary culture deploys that way. That’s no true Coot. Coots aren’t supposed to be that convenient to the world around them, even if plenty of them, like Lazarus Long, are plenty convenient for their creators. Well, we’ve lost plenty, these last decades… Uh oh… perhaps I am becoming a Coot!
Anyway! This book is more thought-provoking, and really mostly in a context of other random shit I’ve read, than it is actually good. The plot is, intentionally, a trifle- part of me wonders if our pair intended it to get adapted into a light stage comedy. But it’s not such a trifle that it can’t get in the way of whatever historical hall of mirrors the character of Joyleg, and the perspectives that the authors try to summon by contrasting him with the present, sustains. It could be that the authors really believed that injecting some Joyleg into American life would have been as tonic as the viewpoint characters thought, and hell, maybe it would- but that kind of perspective, a sort of scifi/oddball Benet perspective, doesn’t compel me, not without more meat on the bone. All in all, I’m glad I read Joyleg, it clearly proved thought-provoking, but couldn’t help but be somewhat underwhelmed.
Joyleg might not be perfect, but I know someone who is
Great! I like the stock-character concept of 'the Coot.' It is also a fun word to say. Mithra is looking particularly divine here.