Dark Whistling
by The Worried Happy Whistler
whistle while you work
whistle while you work
whistle while you work away
whistle while you work
Dear Reverend Sprundge,
Your assertions in the Hanover Review about the philistinism of my father, who left home (having had his eye accidentally punctured by his brother at such a young age and disliking farming) for the West Reserve for good to make a living on that side of the Red, I intend to challenge. You impute laziness and mental pallor to him for presuming permanently to turn his back on Steinbach, as if Steinbach were the New Jerusalem. Let me inform you better.
My father worked hard. He whistled when he worked. He whistled in the morning when he worked against time and was not getting ahead as planned. When he whistled he whistled shrilly, not in pleasure but in releasing pentupness. Being a myopic young teen, I naturally hated hearing him whistle because it made me see his walk as he did so. I’d clamp my hands over my ears. He walked briskly when he whistled, short, quick steps, because he wanted to have been on the road by now and was already an hour late and the best sales were mornings. It might have been okay if he’d been well-proportioned, like grandpa Zacharias, but he displayed all the disfavourabilities of Grandpa Reimer’s genes. Short torso, shorter legs, somewhat bow-legged, trousers just that much too short, a bit of white mustache and thinning gray hair, clothing (except for the white shirt) always in browns; caramel, chocolate, fawn, dun, coffee, mahogany. From shoes to jacket. And his blue eyes.
Henry James wrote a story about an entirely different sort of person in The American. In it, if my memory serves me right, a young man lives in a European country such as Italy where he becomes convicted of his own oddity, his preoccupation with money instead of things refined. Things refined includes a long list, things mercenary a short one.
This reminds me, before I set out these lists for you, of the thirtyish woman who acquired a handsome new male companion. His quirky behaviour did in time grow into a concern for her and she began to worry that maybe he lacked, shall we say, a certain fullness of intellectual strength. She deliberated at length by what means to address this concern, delicate matter that it was. Certainly not by direct inquiry, nor yet by accusation. Nor really by any emperical means, as in reading scholarship dedicated to the matter, and not either, strictly speaking, by lengthy observation. Finally it came to her. She turned to him in bed one morning and asked, “Duayne, when you went to public school, were you collected by a long bus or a short one?”
Now, James himself was a short man, hardly topping five feet. There are cultures where that would not have seemed unusual, say in Korea, Japan, or China, or even in the Andies. But in Texas where he lived most of those years before his exodus from the American scene, a man could hardly be a man unless five foot eight or more. James wrote about tall men, tall men who agonized at length over matters of depth, matters such as, for instance, O’Brien and the question of his marrying the British girl in Venice where he had met her in an outdoor apparel shop and begun, despite his foreboding, to obsess over her. O’Brien had never been able to force himself to love anyone, especially someone whom he suspected of caring for his wealth, and he was a wealthy man, scion of a Wall Street financial empire. The tall buildings which housed his father’s offices and his own future living hardly concerned him those days, travelling to the continent as if he were a prince during the reign of James I.
O’Brien lost the girl and failed to immediately find a replacement to satisfy the longing that plagued him. Instead of returning to his home country, he lived alone now along the Veridicci and wrote cloying letters to friends and family while copiously drinking the wine already infamously associated with Venice, a white named Blanco Savis, roughly translated as white saviour and suggesting in James’s narrative his protagonist‘s unrecognized (that is, by himself) preoccupation with matters religious. Much in the same general vein of preoccupation as my father whistling in the car garage while loading his Ford Fairlane station wagon with Rawleigh products for that day’s sales, anticipating his visits to farmyards around and about St. Joseph, St.Jean, Letellier or Plum Coulee, where in the morning, if he did get a good, unhindered start, he might just be the early bird catching the worm. The men would be outdoors doing chores and working fields and wives cleaning up breakfast, still half asleep, already contemplating about lunch sandwiches and supper, knowing that physical work would bring her men inside wild-eyed with hunger. His knock on their rural doors was a welcome reprieve. Him not knowing his own thoughts.
My father was an entirely admirable man, neither given to disloyalty nor, for that matter, passion. What he received at home on his return from the days’ sales at about 10 PM was plenty for that busy spirit of his, a busy spirit that slipped the traces of stress through a timely whistling, unless of course the recipient of his evening attentions suffered from some melancholy, a glitch that happens periodically to all good wives, short and tall, quiet and loud, friendly and ricocheting. Father struck me always as a modest man of small means and admirable appetites, not given to finding reprieve from hunger in places that were not meant for him. He worked hard all his life, he played horseshoes once or twice a year, he ate well until he got diabetes, and he never spent undue time with children. He got by marvellously, and no looking back over his own life after it was nearly over. I wish he had been able to spend a year or so of it in Italy where new ideas might have set him whistling another tune.
To make a long story short, I will just conclude by advising all of you who have not yet read James, to do so immediately without delay. His novels bear the stamp of genius and are a must for every man or woman who considers themselves educated. Good luck and all the best in your endeavors.
Sincerely,
Walter Whistler
by The Worried Happy Whistler
whistle while you work
whistle while you work
whistle while you work away
whistle while you work
Dear Reverend Sprundge,
Your assertions in the Hanover Review about the philistinism of my father, who left home (having had his eye accidentally punctured by his brother at such a young age and disliking farming) for the West Reserve for good to make a living on that side of the Red, I intend to challenge. You impute laziness and mental pallor to him for presuming permanently to turn his back on Steinbach, as if Steinbach were the New Jerusalem. Let me inform you better.
My father worked hard. He whistled when he worked. He whistled in the morning when he worked against time and was not getting ahead as planned. When he whistled he whistled shrilly, not in pleasure but in releasing pentupness. Being a myopic young teen, I naturally hated hearing him whistle because it made me see his walk as he did so. I’d clamp my hands over my ears. He walked briskly when he whistled, short, quick steps, because he wanted to have been on the road by now and was already an hour late and the best sales were mornings. It might have been okay if he’d been well-proportioned, like grandpa Zacharias, but he displayed all the disfavourabilities of Grandpa Reimer’s genes. Short torso, shorter legs, somewhat bow-legged, trousers just that much too short, a bit of white mustache and thinning gray hair, clothing (except for the white shirt) always in browns; caramel, chocolate, fawn, dun, coffee, mahogany. From shoes to jacket. And his blue eyes.
Henry James wrote a story about an entirely different sort of person in The American. In it, if my memory serves me right, a young man lives in a European country such as Italy where he becomes convicted of his own oddity, his preoccupation with money instead of things refined. Things refined includes a long list, things mercenary a short one.
This reminds me, before I set out these lists for you, of the thirtyish woman who acquired a handsome new male companion. His quirky behaviour did in time grow into a concern for her and she began to worry that maybe he lacked, shall we say, a certain fullness of intellectual strength. She deliberated at length by what means to address this concern, delicate matter that it was. Certainly not by direct inquiry, nor yet by accusation. Nor really by any emperical means, as in reading scholarship dedicated to the matter, and not either, strictly speaking, by lengthy observation. Finally it came to her. She turned to him in bed one morning and asked, “Duayne, when you went to public school, were you collected by a long bus or a short one?”
Now, James himself was a short man, hardly topping five feet. There are cultures where that would not have seemed unusual, say in Korea, Japan, or China, or even in the Andies. But in Texas where he lived most of those years before his exodus from the American scene, a man could hardly be a man unless five foot eight or more. James wrote about tall men, tall men who agonized at length over matters of depth, matters such as, for instance, O’Brien and the question of his marrying the British girl in Venice where he had met her in an outdoor apparel shop and begun, despite his foreboding, to obsess over her. O’Brien had never been able to force himself to love anyone, especially someone whom he suspected of caring for his wealth, and he was a wealthy man, scion of a Wall Street financial empire. The tall buildings which housed his father’s offices and his own future living hardly concerned him those days, travelling to the continent as if he were a prince during the reign of James I.
O’Brien lost the girl and failed to immediately find a replacement to satisfy the longing that plagued him. Instead of returning to his home country, he lived alone now along the Veridicci and wrote cloying letters to friends and family while copiously drinking the wine already infamously associated with Venice, a white named Blanco Savis, roughly translated as white saviour and suggesting in James’s narrative his protagonist‘s unrecognized (that is, by himself) preoccupation with matters religious. Much in the same general vein of preoccupation as my father whistling in the car garage while loading his Ford Fairlane station wagon with Rawleigh products for that day’s sales, anticipating his visits to farmyards around and about St. Joseph, St.Jean, Letellier or Plum Coulee, where in the morning, if he did get a good, unhindered start, he might just be the early bird catching the worm. The men would be outdoors doing chores and working fields and wives cleaning up breakfast, still half asleep, already contemplating about lunch sandwiches and supper, knowing that physical work would bring her men inside wild-eyed with hunger. His knock on their rural doors was a welcome reprieve. Him not knowing his own thoughts.
My father was an entirely admirable man, neither given to disloyalty nor, for that matter, passion. What he received at home on his return from the days’ sales at about 10 PM was plenty for that busy spirit of his, a busy spirit that slipped the traces of stress through a timely whistling, unless of course the recipient of his evening attentions suffered from some melancholy, a glitch that happens periodically to all good wives, short and tall, quiet and loud, friendly and ricocheting. Father struck me always as a modest man of small means and admirable appetites, not given to finding reprieve from hunger in places that were not meant for him. He worked hard all his life, he played horseshoes once or twice a year, he ate well until he got diabetes, and he never spent undue time with children. He got by marvellously, and no looking back over his own life after it was nearly over. I wish he had been able to spend a year or so of it in Italy where new ideas might have set him whistling another tune.
To make a long story short, I will just conclude by advising all of you who have not yet read James, to do so immediately without delay. His novels bear the stamp of genius and are a must for every man or woman who considers themselves educated. Good luck and all the best in your endeavors.
Sincerely,
Walter Whistler
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