On Poetic Realism

　

Realism in imaginative literature depicts people and events in a way that most readers would agree comports with probability. We can agree that what the author displays in his or her narrative could occur. Often realism is demonstrated by introducing circumstances that are non sequitur to the story. An index of truth is that the text contains elements that don’t "fit" and are not relevant to the plot. Since real life is jammed with people, places, and things that don’t make sense with respect to narratives that we impose upon our existence, authors sometimes introduce irrelevant material into their stories as a demonstration that the "slice of life" depicted is embedded in a larger matrix of random or indifferent events that can’t accommodated to narrative meaning.

Strictly speaking, one may dispute that ‘realism’ even exists as a literary convention. All novels and stories mean something. By contrast, we must impose meaning on existence by arduous arrangement: meaningless details must be eliminated and sequences of cause and effect have to be regulated to the effect that the writer wishes to achieve. When editing shapes cause and effect relationships, we are probably beyond the zone of realism – and all literary works, I think, operate within schemes of causal relationship that on closer analysis are fictional. Accordingly, the deployment of seemingly random details purportedly unrelated to the narrative or theme of the narrative is a literary device that simulates the indifference of the real.

Some writers use seemingly random or fortuitous details not only to simulate the chaos of the real world, but, also, as a symbolic commentary on the events related in the narrative. When an apparently random event can be construed within the larger context of the work as meaningful – that is, when the reader is invited to supply a meaning inaccessible to the characters – then, the work has the dimension of poetic realism. Theodor Fontane is an example of a great writer who works within the perimeters of "poetic realism."

　

　

　

Theodor Fontane was a Prussian novelist, flourishing (as the cliche would have it) during the two decades before the turn of the century. Fontane was a profoundly civilized writer. His books are delicately limned comedies of manners involving adultery and marriage. Sometimes in his novels, tragic events occur – there is, for instance, a pointless and mortal duel in his masterpiece Effi Briest – but his prose is exquisitely tuned to a key of refined equanimity and gentle resignation. The duel is described in a sentence, or, perhaps, a dependent clause in a sentence, and is meaningless in itself: the event’s significance is the misery that it induces in those affected by the quarrel. Fontane’s theme is how arbitrary social conventions distort and ruin lives. He writes entirely without anger or satire and, although his ironies are profound, they are not shouted or, even, stated, but rather whispered to us. The ambiguity in his books relates to his stance toward the social norms that restrict and, sometimes, destroy his character – is Fontane writing as an objective anthropologist? Is he critical of the conventions that he describes? Or does he suggest that these conventions are, in fact, a necessary aspect of our social and political lives and that we might be lost without them? It is tribute to Fontanes’s subtlety that these questions can be raised about his work but, never, definitely answered.

My purpose in this essay is to consider certain aspects of Fontane’s realism, often described as "poetic" in nature. To this end, I analyze closely a passage in which the author injects apparently irrelevant and, even, distracting detail into his book Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888). The book has been translated into English under several titles – one of them is Trials and Tribulations. In fact, those words don’t effectively capture the tenor of the German title: Irrungen means to wander about "in error" – that is, to be lost in one’s passage through a landscape or place. Wirrungen means to be confused – although the timbre of the word is understated: not confused in a way that is necessarily bad or frightening: indeed, confused in a way that might be exhilarating. I might be tempted be tempted to go wrong in a way different from "trials and tribulations" by putting the title as "Digressions and Diversions" or, even, better "Whither, Thither." (All translating involves putting things a little wrong.) "Trials" is too strong for Irrungen and "tribulations" doesn’t capture the sense of mild, even pleasant, confusion in Wirrungen. Fundamentally, the meaning of the title relates to the book’s plot: the novel is about romantic love and the illusions and pleasant bewilderment that such an emotion stirs in us. The notion of "going wrong" in Irrungen also suggests one of the book’s themes – that is, our hearts can lead us to places that our mind would put off-limits.

The novel’s plot can be simply stated. A young seamstress, Lene, lives with an elderly woman whom she treats as her mother – family relations between the poor people are somewhat vague, suggesting irregularity in the way that these people have led their lives. Lene is a tenant of Frau Doerr and her curmudgeonly husband. The book begins in media res. Lene awaits a visit from Baron Botho, a young Prussian military man, with whom she has formed a romantic relationship. Botho, we discover, loves Lene and woos her sincerely – he is a better man than the dissolute officers with whom he lives. In general, Botho’s intentions seem honorable. But he comes from decayed Prussian nobility and his family has next to no resources – they own a swamp, a manor house, and a carp pond somewhere in the Eastern forests. Botho encounters his uncle who reminds him that the family’s fate requires that he marry well – that is, marry a wealthy heiress of his class. And, indeed, both Botho’s uncle and mother remind him that he has been promised as husband to Kaethe von Sellenthin, a young woman from a well-to-do and noble family. Botho may be criticized, perhaps, for what he does next. He takes Lene to a place in the Berlin suburbs, Hankels Ablage, a resort with a restaurant and inn on the Damm river – this is place where people go for romantic assignations: there is lake and sailboats and a dark woods brooding over the water. After spending the night with Lene at the Inn, Botho encounters his brother-officers and their mistresses, probably prostitutes, at the resort. They have taken the train to the Berlin outskirts to visit him. Lene and Botho recognize that the difference in their social rank makes their relationship impermanent and, even, problematic for both of them. Lene, who has had a previous love affair with a young officer, knows what will happen: Botho will face pressure to leave her and, after recriminations, he will succumb. She breaks off the love affair. Within two or three pages, Fontane accelerates the action: Botho marries Kaethe, a sweet but irritatingly shallow woman. Lene’s stepmother dies and she moves to another part of Berlin to avoid encountering the married Botho – with his new bride, he has moved into a flat near the Zoological Garden where Lene lived in the Doerr house. Lene is courted by a religious man, Gideon Franke. Franke has come from the "States" as Fontane describes the USA and he seems to be some sort of lay-preacher for an eccentric sect. Franke also owns a factory, is prosperous, and described by Fontane as a Spiessbuerger – that is,

Lene is not a virgin, something that troubles Franke. He looks up Botho and, essentially, asks him for a reference on the "damaged goods", that is, Lene. Botho still loves Lene and speaks highly of her. Ultimately, Gideon Franke marries Lene. Kaethe reads the marriage announcement in the paper and makes fun of Franke’s name "Gideon". The book ends with Botho pronouncing these words: "Gideon is better than Botho." Critics are divided as to what this final line means.

When the novel was first published, it was controversial. A newspaper, remarking on the book, called it a Hurengeschichte –that is "whore-story." Today, the uproar caused by the novel is explained in this way: Fontane doesn’t apologize for his heroine’s sexual encounters before her marriage to Gideon Franke, Franke accepts her without recriminations, and the novelist suggests that the most ethical and moral person in the book is the gentle and loving Lene. Berlin hypocrisy was alive and well in 1888 and Fontane was attacked for his realism – everything in the book seems plausible and, indeed, rooted in real life. You can draw a map of Berlin and environs from descriptions in the book and the novel names many real people in painting a portrait of the social milieu – the Prussian aristocracy, the common people, the libertine military, and administrators employed by Bismarck’s regime. It seems readily evident to the reader that Fontane is describing a situation that was probably familiar to the decrepit Prussian nobility and the bourgeois world that they inhabited. Mesalliance and, even, exploitation of working class girls was probably endemic.

In it’s 17^th chapter, about two-thirds of the way through Irrungen, Wirrungen, Fontane introduces Gideon Franke. After great sorrow, Lene has put aside her feelings for Botho and looks to the future. Fontane tells us that the only exterior sign of her inner struggle is a swath of white in her hair. With Frau Nimptsch, Lene has rented an apartment in a quarter of town remote from where she knows Botho and Kaethe to live. The next-door tenant in the apartment is Gideon Franke. Although he is a religious zealot, and, apparently, the founder of his own sect, Franke is a congenial fellow and relaxes his moral objections to gambling sufficiently to play cards with Lene’s stepmother. (He is drawn into a relationship with Frau Nimptsch because of his interest in Lene.) Frau Doerr, Lene’s previous landlady, remains close friends with the family and she visits Frau Nimptsch:


As one might think, all of this (Gideon Franke’s interest in Lene) aroused the greatest curiosity in Frau Doerr. She never tired of posing questions and making conjectures on the subject, although only when Lene was engaged at work or had business in the city. "Tell me, my dear Frau Nimptsch, what is he actually like? I paged through the directory and he’s not listed. My husband only has last year’s address book. His name is Franke?"

"Yes, Franke."

"Franke. There was one on Ohm Street, a cooper – he had only one eye. That is, the other was still there, but completely white and, actually, looked something like a fish-bladder. What was this about? A hoop that he was trying to bend, sprang back at him and, with its point, took out his eye. That’s what happened to it. So is he from around here?"

"No, Frau Doerr, he is not from here at all. He comes from Bremen."

"Oh, I see. Then, naturally, it’s another."

Frau Nimptsch nodded in agreement, there being nothing to add to Frau Doerr’s assurance that the man was "naturally" another, and, on her part, continued: "And from Bremen to America, that’s 14 days. He went there. And he was something like a plumber or locksmith or a machinist, but he saw that this didn’t suit him so he became a doctor and went around with nothing but little bottles and he’s supposed to have preached also. And because he was such a good preacher, he was installed as a pastor with...Well, I’ve forgotten it again. But they are certainly very pious people and also very moral."

"Good lord, my friend," Frau Doerr said: "he isn’t one of those... Ach, what are they called, those ones that have so many wives, always about six or seven, and many even more...I don’t know what they do with so many."
In the paragraph preceding this passage, Fontane has used his omniscient narration to tell us that Franke is a Konventikler – a word that I translate as "Covenanter". The "Covenanters" were Scottish Presbyterians whose religion was prohibited by the Crown. (The word appears in some short stories and novels by Robert Louis Stevenson). The German term seems to be more broadly construed: it means a member of a non-orthodox religious sect. Fontane tells us: ...he was first a Mennonite and then later played a role with the Irvingists more recently founding his own sect. The "Irvingists" were followers of Edward Irving, a Scottish preacher who founded the Catholic Apostolic Church. Irving denied the divinity of Christ and asserted that all believers were "prophets" ordained to preach the second coming of Christ. Unfortunately, so far as we can ascertain, Christ didn’t come. The Church decreed that its teachings were true only to the extent that they were confirmed by utterances of Irving and performed as part of an extremely elaborate liturgy. Irving died in 1834 and his last living apostle passed from this earth in 1901. These deaths imposed upon the Church a period called "the time of silence" which has lasted more than a century – the Church now has no members although some of its majestic worship places are maintained, vacant and unused to await Christ’s coming. As we have seen, Frau Nimptsch believes Gideon Franke to have worked in various capacities in "the States" as Fontane describes it and, perhaps, peddled patent medicine (the meaning I presume of her comment about little flasks or bottles. Frau Doerr wonders if the man isn’t a polygamist Mormon. Somewhat later in the book, Fontane uses the word "monogamy" in a chapter in which Botho counsels his raffish cousin, Rexin, about an imprudent love affair between the young man and working class girl of questionable repute.. Rexin says that he believes in "monogamy" and loves the working class woman with whom he is having an affair – indeed, loves her to the extent that he wishes that he were free to elope with her to Sacramento and the gold mines. Apparently, late 19^th century Germans thought of California as a place where people could live freely in accord with their desires, thereby escaping the tyranny of society and family. Within the structure of the book, Gideon Franke seems to represent two completely opposing values: the antinomian freedom of the United States where a man can found his own religious sect but, also, the repressive values of the German Spiessbuerger – that is, the narrow-minded, philistine petite-bourgeois. (Spiessbuerger is the term that Fontane applies to Franke.)

The tension between petite bourgeois factory owner, who quizzes Botho on Lene’s sexual history, and his status as religious zealot and cult leader, is so fraught that if the book’s structures were to spring apart one might lose an eye. Gideon Franke, Lene’s wooer, is pointedly said to be of uncertain Titulator" – that is, Botho’s servants are unclear as to how to address the man. He seems to not fit into the established categories of rank and class in Berlin society and, therefore, is, perhaps, the harbinger of a future in which social and military rank will be irrelevant. Botho, the scion of decayed nobility with manor houses, unproductive fields, and carp-ponds, represents the past; the factory-owner and cult-leader, Gideon Franke, seems to point the way to the future.

But what of the other Gideon Franke, the cooper on Ohm Street who lost an eye to his trade. Why does Fontane cast a glance in his direction. First, and most obviously, the mention of the tradesman Gideon Franke, complete with his address, is a warrant as to the book’s realism. The author injects detail into the book that isn’t obviously thematic and has no narrative significance. This detail warrants to the reader that the book is rooted in the messy, indecorous, and random reality of the every-day world in which we live. I will have more to say about cooper Franke as an index of verisimilitude. Here, it suffices for me to observe, that inserting this anecdotal vignette into the novel is a device for assuring the reader that the book is true – Frau Doerr has a city gazetteer; you can look people up.

All of these conjectures and references are, certainly, very interesting but the reader might legitimately ask what this has to do with the main narrative line in Fontane’s book. (Indeed, the paragraph above in this essay shows how far afield annotation of references to Franke’s past leads the reader.) This shell of religious speculation, however, encloses another non sequitur　– that is, the misidentification of Franke with the tradesman notable for having only one functioning eye.

Bakhtin argued that the novel is a polyphonic form. Novels contain different voices without necessarily privileging any specific perspective. (The Russian formalist’s analysis, of course, presupposes an ideology that discovers evidence of class struggle in all cultural artifacts. Irrungen,Wirrungen can be readily accommodated to Bakhtin’s model: the book dramatizes interactions between members of the decayed feudal class and the lower working classes, providing dialogue in diction specific to each category. Gideon Franke, the new middle-class capitalist – he owns a factory – ultimately mediates between high and low.) Irrungen, Wirrungen is composed in four voices: Fontane’s compassionate, cosmopolitan and mildly ironic narrative in which we find embedded the demotic slang and dialect of the street, the snarky libertine voices of the young Prussian military officers and noblemen, and the stilted diction that Franke uses with Botho during their interview. From a narrative perspective, the film is binocular (two-eyed): the lower class is viewed through the lens of anachronistic upper class families; conversely, the upper class is assessed against the backdrop of their relationships with their servants: high looks down on low whilst low gazes up on high. This perspective is materialized in the two narratives that the book sutures together with innumerable parallisms and rhymes: Botho’s love affair with Lene provides a critique of his marriage to Kaethe – similarly, Botho is explicitly compared with Gideon Franke. Thus, the books’ narrative is fundamentally binary: two things are compared and contrasted.

The cooper’s dead eye suggests that one of the two elements compared is ruined. When Kaethe returns from taking the waters at Schlangenbad ("Serpent’s bath"), the servants post a sign reading "Welcome" – but they spell the word wrong "Wilkommen" with one "L" as opposed to the proper orthography "Willkommen." Of course, Lene’s name begins with an "L". (And Lene is associated with clear handwriting but with some misspellings; by contrast, Kaethe spells words right but her handwriting is illegible.) Lene says that leaving out the "L" means that she and Botho will experience only "half" of the happiness otherwise possible to them. This statement, read in the context of Kaethe’s flirtation with a dashing Scottish military man at the spa, seems ominously portentous. "L" means Lene and half of Botho and Kaethe’s marriage is disfigured by his dissatisfaction with the silly and shallow Kaethe whom he contrasts with the simple but profound lower class girl. One half of a binary pair is damaged – one eye is ruined and white as a fish’s bladder. In Fontane’s world, love isn’t wholly blind – one eye keeps a shrewd gaze directed at social and economic realities: love is only half-blind.

And why is the simile of the "fish’s bladder" used to describe the damaged and blind eye? Fontane’s Berlin is watery, a floating world. (This is simply realistic: Berlin in the 1870's consists of a central walled city with adjacent small villages located along the Spree, Havel, and Damm rivers. The terrain is swampy with numerous lakes. In modern Berlin, the water table is 8 to 10 feet below grade and construction sites have to pump vast amounts of water away from where work is being performed.) Botho meets Lene as a result of a boating incident – Lene and two female friends using a row-boat are almost capsized and drowned by a steamship plying one of the rivers. The resort, Hankel’s Ablage (or "wharf where goods are warehoused"), overlooks a river and its habitues go boating. And, of course, Botho’s family has a manor, some farmland, and a carp pond. Thus, fish’s bladder is a simile consistent with the book’s terrain and milieu.

Finally, the image of the cooper, a master craftsman, disfigured by the practice of his trade seems, as I have intimated above, descriptive of Fontane’s art. A cooper devises a structure that arches back into itself so as to contain contents under pressure. Such a structure is an analog for the novel. The two stories bend together, combining elements of high and low that are usually disparate. The tension of sexual attraction pulls the double narrative together although their elements strain to be apart. Clearly, Botho and Lene don’t belong in the same plot, but the narrative seals them together and, in fact, holds them in a proximity that casts a skeptical eye on the socially acceptable relationship between the Baron and Kaethe, two characters that also don’t really belong together. Bakhtin’s model of the novelistic genre’s polyphony presupposes the co-existence within a narrative of elements that don’t match, disparate levels of society, intelligence, and interest. The novelist’s work is to bend these opposing forces into a well-wrought structure.

In the novels of Dickens and Elliot, that is to say, in the novels written during the middle of the nineteenth century, a Roman was built from narrative into which the narrator’s commentary was inserted. Thus, a reader discovered in most novels a story or plot, narrated in detail, together with the writer’s analytical commentary on this plot and its characters. The commentary might be empathetic, analytical, ironic or sardonic – but readers expected the author to intervene from time to time and explain his or her perspective on the events narrated or what the story was supposed to mean. By contrast, Fontane presents his story without explicit editorializing. Instead, he displaces the commentary by interpolating symbolic objects or anecdotes. Fontane invests incidental details with relevance to his narrative – the reader’s role is to decode material that is apparently non sequitur or merely peripheral to the main action. These peripheral details, when examined in light of the novel’s plot and thematic concerns, usually have symbolic or metonymic meaning that provides a commentary on the book’s plot and characters.

For instance, Fontane begins Irrungen, Wirrungen with a paragraph about the cottage that Lene rents from Frau Doerr and her husband. In the first sentence, he provides the literal address of the property – a gesture suggesting (ostensibly) Fontane’s truthfulness, and indexing the text to a veridical reality. But the description of the property, then, veers into symbolic territory: the premises are located on a sliver of land implying that their inhabitants are socially inconsequential; buildings and trees form a Kulisse, that is, stage scenery that obscures the view into the recesses of the property where Lene lives; finally, there is a decaying tower, a diminutive structure inhabited by birds. The concealed (secret) garden and the fairy-tale tower establish a faint, but pervasive sense of the uncanny – Lene has bewitched Botho or, perhaps, Botho appears as the gallant prince who may redeem Lene from her poverty and uncertain reputation and restore her to the role of princess. In his book on Adolf Menzel, the great German artist of the Gruenderzeit (the age of Bismarck), Michael Fried comments on the painter’s obsessive sketching and his incorporation of incidental make-shift details into his paintings. Menzel is the master of incidental details that take on a poetic character. He shows us the backyards of homes in shabby, neglected neighborhoods, a dusty lot with an old wooden privy with door askew, a strange sluice rigged to run water from a rural-looking hand pump into some sort of trough. We are shown damaged shingles, tattered bushes, the back court to a yellow palazzo where workmen are napping after their lunch in a green glade of trees with odd labyrinthine paths forking out around them. These details are prosaic in the extreme, but, somehow, this makeshift apparatus provides a commentary on the principal subject of the canvas – in his boldest pictures, the makeshift, incidental stuff is the subject of the picture itself.

Fontane’s "poetic" realism invokes the same faintly uncanny, baffling mood that we find in many of Menzel’s best paintings. The effect arises from an oscillation between foreground and subject – sometimes, the junk lying around in Menzel’s paintings is directly significant to our understanding of his subject. Similarly, the incidental details in Fontane’s novel sometimes loom up over the author’s plot and themes that seem to recede into the distance. The notion of the Doppelgaenger or the double is ubiquitous in German literature and introduces the uncanny ("unheimlich") into the narrative. Here Gideon Franke, factory-owner and religious zealot, has a double, at least, in name. This detail injects a faint element of the uncanny into Fontane’s novel – this is the poetic trace-element in the book’s alloy.

At the end of the novel, Kaethe returns from the spa. She acknowledges an innocent, or, perhaps, not so innocent, flirtation with a Scotsman also taking the waters at Schlangenbad. After praising the other man, Kaethe asks for a "sacred kiss", perhaps to signify Botho’s forgiveness – he is supposed to plant the Geweihkuesse on her forehead. Geweih means something like consecrated, sacred, or holy. But there is another meaning to the word: Geweih also means the antlers of a stag. To be "horned" is to be cuckolded. So the kiss upon which Kaethe insists may have a sinister meaning – either reflecting on something that happened at the spa or premonitory. Impetuously, Kaethe insists on a trip to Charlottenberg and its imperial palaces. (She describes the air in Berlin as suffocating after her sojourn at the bath.) Botho and Kaethe tour a mausoleum on the palace grounds. Botho lectures the bubble-headed Kaethe "man-splaining" to her the history of the old Prussian kings. He mentions one ruler who was under the influence of a general reputed to be a mystic, necromancer, and member of the Illuminati. For a brief moment, Botho and Kaethe, a couple whose marriage is haunted, as it were, by Lene’s ghost, are touring the uncanny kingdom of the Dead.

On the Wakonda Spring

　

　



　

　

　

Waconda is a town described in fabulous detail in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion. As Melville reminds us: "it’s not on any map, real places never are." In Kesey’s book, Waconda stands in for any number of small towns on Oregon’s Highway 101 facing seaward at the mouths of short, violent rivers churning down from the rain-sodden coastal ranges. When Paul Newman adapted Kesey’s book into a movie, he imagined the town to be at the mouth of the Siletz River somewhere between Florence and Lincoln City, northwest of Eugene. Newman was a rip-roaring stud of a movie star in those days, long before his autumnal stint as the chairman of a charity manufacturing pasta sauce and salad dressing bearing his name. Places like Depoe Bay and Newport invite visitors to taverns where Newman allegedly got drunk – in one of these places, legend has it that the pool table was too high for Newman and he used a chainsaw to cut its legs down to size. Notwithstanding the local color, Waconda is an imaginary place; indeed, Kesey tells his readers that it is generic and represents any number of villages similarly situated alongside the great and ferocious ocean.

Waconda, often spelled "Wakonda", refers to the Great Spirit (or chief divinity) in the Siouan languages – the word exists in Omaha, Osage, and Ponca vocabularies. It’s not clear how the word migrated from the Missouri River Valley in Nebraska to Oregon. The Indians indigenous to Lincoln County, the area where Kesey stages the events in his book, spoke Suislawan, an "isolate" language, extinct by the time the novel was written. The Indians now living in the county describe themselves as the Siletz confederation – they have a number of parcels of territory comprising 5500 acres in the coastal range. Previously impoverished, they now support themselves primarily with gambling money acquired through the Chinook Winds Casino located in Newport. (Indian Jenny, a character in the book, must have been imagined as either a Coos, Siuslaw or Kuitsch Indian.) Kesey’s Waconda is not to be confused with the mythical sub-Saharan kingdom of Wakanda, the home of the Marvel super-hero, the Black Panther.

Similarly, Waconda in Sometimes a Great Notion should not be confused with Waconda or Great Spirit Spring, a place located about 40 miles south of the Nebraska border in the arid country midway between the east and west boundaries of the State. (The place is near modern-day Cawker City in Mitchell County, Kansas. Cawker City pop. 470 is the home to the largest ball of sisal twine, a great brown globe more than 12 feet in diameter and wound by Frank Stoeber. This ball of twine competes with the great twine ball in Darwin, Minnesota, pop. 350 made by Francis Johnson – as a loyal Minnesotan, I assert that our ball of twine is bigger than their ball of twine. But who really knows?)

Waconda Spring, a place that no longer exists, was an interesting natural phenomenon ultimately destroyed by its own success. Here is what is known about that spring.

Waconda Spring was a natural artesian well located about 500 yards from a bend in the Solomon River. The spring was bubbly with mineral-impregnated brine and overflow deposits had built a roughly conical mound of salt said to be forty feet high. The spring itself was completely spherical, about 30 feet across. Early engravings show a steep-walled volcano-shaped formation with veins of water trickling down its stratified sides. Several small figures seem to be excavating at the top of the rock formation. The Solomon River flows picturesquely along side the strange turret of rock and, in the background, there are gentle rolling hills with trees nestled in their folds. In fact, this engraving of so-called Wakonda da, Great Salt Spring is immensely exaggerated. Early photographs show an acre of blistered-looking salt deposits rising almost imperceptibly to a crater filled with water. Although scale is hard to determine, it seems unlikely that the salt crater cradling the spring rose more than ten or fifteen feet around the surrounding landscape. Some barren hills are visible in the background with trees occupying some of the gulches leading down toward the river-bottom where the salt spring is located.

The Pawnee or Kanza named the spring and, supposedly, had a legend about it. Warring tribes fought over the verdant Solomon River Valley. One day, a maiden strolling along the river saw the spring and approached it. She met a warrior from another tribe bathing in the brackish water and fell in love with him. She and her lover enjoyed trysts by the spring, but, when her father discovered the illicit romance, he tracked her to the salt water well and, with a single shot of his bow and arrow, transfixed the enemy warrior. He fell backward into the spring and, crying out his name, the young woman dived after him. Of course, neither was ever seen again because the spring was bottomless. Indeed, early white settlers claimed that the spring rose and fell with the tides and that it was, in fact, fed from sea-water passing through the earth in labyrinthine and endless tunnels. Maids and their demon lovers are common around artesian wells: Coleridge imagined such a place in his fragment Kubla Khan and the spring fountaining forth in that poem is also connected by subterranean channels by a mazy river running to the sea.

Zebulon Pike sighted the Spring in 1806. While crossing the plains, he learned from Indian informants that there was a sacred spring in the Solomon River bottoms. The Pawnee regarded the spring’s waters as medicinal and brought sick people there to be healed. On occasion, the spring was the site of Indian powwows and intertribal gatherings. The Indians said that the spirit of the maiden lived in the spring – this sounds like the pagan European notion that springs are haunted by seductive water nymphs. My guess is that these legends are later accretions, like the deposits of salt built up around the shimmering lidless eye of the spring, probably invented for marketing purposes.

Early settlers staked some claims near the spring, alarming the Indians. They made some desultory raids on wagon trains, without much success, it seems, and, then, captured three White women. By this point, the tribes understood that interfering with White women was a recipe for swift and sure disaster and, so, they returned their hostages unharmed the next day. The course of empire in this part of America was swift and sure and the Indians were soon displaced. But, as we will see, a connection to Native Americans, so long as there no real Indians involved, can be a commercial boon. Later advertising for water pumped into bottles from the Spring asserted that the natives had defended the area with such vigor and ferocity because of their desire to preserve the salubrious, life-giving and healing spring. Waconda Water marketed as a "gentle but sure" natural laxative, was peddled in bottles bearing as a mercantile emblem the profile of a beautiful Indian maiden wearing a single eagle feather in her hair and seeming to wink over her graceful shoulder at the consumer.

With the Indians driven away, a hotel was built near the Springs and a town platted a mile south. Initially, efforts were made to harvest salt from the deposits near the Springs – this effort, I think, eliminated the florid-looking salt terraces around the water and flattened the terrain. But the project failed. At first, however, the village of Waconda Springs flourished. By 1872, the town had 250 residents and an eccentric medical doctor, a Canadian named Chapman. Chapman worked to promote the health benefits of the Springs, planned to vivify the economy with silk production, and established a small museum containing interesting mineral specimens and other oddities he had collected in his spare time. (The silk culture plan failed to win investors – another town in Kansas, prosaically named Silkville, complete with ailanthus trees and a cocoonery, collapsed into barnkruptcy around the same time.) Unfortunately, another nearby town competed with Waconda Springs for businesses and residents – this was Cawker City, still in existence, located about two miles north. Both villages offered incentives to a local merchant to build a large general store in their town. Ultimately, Cawker City prevailed, the big general store was erected on its Main Street, and Waconda Springs withered on the vine. By 1880, most of the town was in ruins except for the public school that had been built eight years earlier. But that structure also collapsed and was gone by the time the Depression gutted the arid county in the dirty thirties.

At the springs, a resort hotel was built, followed by an actual private sanitarium. Promoters of the hotel and, then, sanitarium, said that the springs were as sacred to the local Pawnee as "Jerusalem" and that the water flowing from the "crater of the volcano" was invested with miraculous medicinal powers. The crater impounding the wonderful water was described as "bottomless." There was some truth to these claims. The local Pawnee had certainly regarded the Spring as a kind of holy site – it was one of five locations where tutelary animals, the nahurac, sent by the Great Spirit resided. (The Pawnee where divided into five gens or clans – each affiliated with a feature in the landscape and an animal totem. The gens living near the Spring seems to have been the "beaver" clan – this is surmised by a large geoglyph cut as an intaglio relief into a bluff about two miles from the spring: the intaglio is made from curving trenches shaped into a four-legged animal, most probably a beaver. The people who made the intaglio geoglyph maintained and renewed the image over a period of, at last 200 years.) Divers sounded the spring to the depth of 30 feet and didn’t find bottom. The water itself seeps upward through 600 to 700 feet of porous sandstone to create the formation.

The Cawker City historical society maintains images of the spring and the adjacent hotel. These stereograph pictures show that the terrain beyond the Spring on the opposite side of the sanitarium descends steeply to the Solomon River terrace. In this area, the landscape is broken into stratified cliffs of white sandstone, approximately 8 to 12 feet high. Apparently, water seeps through this formation and there are pockets of brine entrapped in these badlands. Some photographs show groups of pioneers with their wagons gathered atop the cliffs – it is from these images, I surmise, that the more picturesque engravings of the Springs were derived. (One stereograph labels the obviously sedimentary layers of rock comprising the low escarpment near the springs as "Lava Cliffs", a nod to the notion that the water itself occupied a "volcano crater.") Viewed from certain angles, the oculus of the Spring does seem to bubble out of the crest of a rugged steep hillside. On the sanitarium side of the Spring, the slope up to the water is imperceptible, a gentle rise in what looks like an alkali flat (I presume the white deposits are salt) to the brine-filled crater. The hotel on this more temperate side of the spring, the crater squashed down as it were into the ground, is a large building with a wrap-around porch sporting a shapely woodworked balustrade. In 1884, the original hotel building was two stories, about 80 feet long, with six gables in the attic and a big flagpole on one end of the building. I am attempting represent this landscape in some detail for a reason – none of this is visible today.

One picture shows a cowboy and woman sipping water from a mug in the sandstone cliffs. In white handwriting, someone has inscribed the picture: Fountain of Youth, Waconda Springs. Some photographs made inside the hotel show a dining hall with pretty plates and porcelain teapots arrayed on shelves. Another picture shows men playing billiards in a pool-room on the premises. By this time, the Springs were entirely fenced with a wrought-iron barrier with the tips of the stakes shaped like arrowheads.

Apparently, the hotel was successful. Pictures show that it grows larger around the turn of the century and several outbuildings have been raised. By the turn of the century, the sanitarium is made of red brick embedded in a thick matrix of white grout. An orchard occupies part of the property. Some of the salubrious water seems to have been impounded in a small irregularly-shaped lake. Outbuildings by the lake are presumably bottling plants. At the St. Louis State Fair in 1904, bottled Waconda Water received a special blue-ribbon prize for its medicinal property – "there were very few ailments in the world," advertising touted, "that this water could not heal."



In 1907, a man named Abraham bought the springs. He made additional improvements on the property including installing piping that conveyed Waconda Water directly into the hotel. At that time, the taps ran with the stuff. Pictures show a man decked-out in a lugubrious-looking deep sea diving gear. This was 1908 when a diver was sent down to explore the spring’s depths. Photographs show a row of local citizens, some of them in black suits, peering down earnestly at the diver bobbing in the middle of the round aperture of waters. The diver, not surprisingly, emerged from the Spring with the report that was, indeed, bottomless and that the shelves of stone in its seep chimney were laden with Indian beads and arrowheads, some of which were displayed to the public. By this time, the hotel had 48 rooms, a majestic brick facade, and there were horse- and dog-tracks adjacent to the property as well as a small casino.

After the Great Depression, people no longer had money or time to "take the waters." The sanitarium failed and was shuttered. The Abraham family petitioned the Federal government to have the site purchased by eminent domain and transformed into a national monument. Pictures show signs announcing the forthcoming national monument and there was a plaque erected at roadside. But floods ravaged Topeka a few years later. Some of the flood waters were traced to the Solomon River. Authorities decided to dam the river for flood control. This measure, the Glen Elder dam, ultimately inundated the Springs as well as the site of the ghost town of Waconda Springs and the place where the sanitarium had been built. The Abraham family protested but without avail. The Army Corps of Engineers issued studies calling Waconda Springs a "mud puddle." The world is now disenchanted. An army diver sounded the Springs and determined that it was 115 feet deep.

Bulldozers knocked over the remnants of the sanitarium and its buildings, plowing them into the Spring. Then, the dam was built and the Springs vanished under the water.

A local entrepreneur erected a half-scale model of the springs near Cawker City, a steep conical hill with a concrete-lined pool at its center. There are plans today to re-name the Solomon River valley according to its old Indian appellation – Nepahoola ("Water-on-a-hill" in Kanza). With the Indians gone, we can afford to name places after them. Local opinion as to the facsimile spring is divided: some think the artificial hill made of packed dirt and the concrete-lined pool is poignant tribute to the vanished Waconda Water or "Great Spirit" springs; others, find the place unconvincing and tacky. Soon enough, the controversy will vanish just like the formations and hotel foundations drowned in modern Lake Waconda – there will be no one left alive who can recall what the old springs were like.

On Anderson Cooper's NewYear's Eve -- 2018

　


　

　

　

　

I’ve never liked the forced hilarity of New Year’s Eve. The festivities always seem more than a bit panicked and hysterical to me. Unlike most holidays, New Year’s Eve is efficiently simple-minded and stark: it’s about the passage of time and nothing else, and, as we grow older, time is the one thing that we realize that we will never have enough of. It’s like checking your fuel gage to learn that you are almost out of gas.

And 2018 was not particularly pleasant for me – my youngest son remains unwell, my wife is sad, my brother died, the old keep getting older and more frail and the future of the young seems to me increasingly clouded. The government is shut down and the country is afflicted by terrible spasms of rage and cruelty. The darkness seems to be gathering. So there doesn’t seem to be much worth celebrating on that arbitrary night at the beginning of the long winter when media and, even, our friends demand that we celebrate.

I made nachos for supper with crackers and crab dip and shrimp. We ate a salad that I garnished with strips of red pepper, mushrooms, olives, and some green onions. I cooked posole in the crockpot and had a tureen of the soup at midnight on the East Coast, eleven o’clock Central Standard Time and, then, I went to bed cold sober. An awful stench in our house has been tormenting my wife (I can’t smell it) and, so, she sleeps with the window cracked open and, as I lay amidst the cool sheets and covers, I could hear the village outside celebrating in its customary way –loud drunken laughter in the alley, fistfights under the streetlights, music throbbing from cars, sirens. The cold air hovered over my face and, when I closed my eyes, there was eidetic imagery – a short circuit of retinal neurons arcing to make sparks that gradually coalesced into a jovial giant, half-naked, a grand muscular fellow with a wreath around his brow above his ruddy face. The jovial giant grinned at me and tried to hand me a proclamation of some kind written on parchment but I couldn’t accept the document. The giant existed in one sphere and I was in another. And in the place in which I was sleeping, I had eyes and consciousness but no arms, no hands, no corporeal body at all and so I had nothing with which to reach out to take the parchment proffered by the laughing giant.

Earlier in the evening, my son and I began watching Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of the Wooden Clogs. When the movie was new, it played for many, many weeks during the cold winter of 1978 into 1979 at the University Film Society. At that time, I was finishing my last year of law school and, of course, I was very apprehensive about the bar exam and my prospects for employment. I had a girlfriend at that time, Tarin H–, and, one Sunday afternoon, we walked across the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University to see Olmi’s movie. The movie is very long and slow-paced and, I suppose, it was selfish of me to ask Tarin to attend a film of this kind. She liked Hollywood melodramas about young women who had to suffer for love. I recall seeing The Other Side of Midnight with her in Hopkins, the suburb where she lived in an old house occupied, on its first floor, by her grandma – a house that was at the edge of the Twin Cities as it existed in those days, poised against swamp and stony fields where raspberries were grown. She also liked comedies in which perky young women overcame obstacles to win the love of handsome young men. I was reasonably certain that she wouldn’t like The Tree of the Wooden Clogs but the local newspaper, the Star and Tribune said that the movie was perfect holiday-fare, emotionally satisfying and profound, and, therefore, mandatory viewing.

Things didn’t go well at the screening of the movie. Tarin was raised on an impoverished truck farm and, although her family had become very wealthy from selling its fields to real estate developers, her childhood involved much hard work raising vegetables. I think the movie’s representations of peasant life were, perhaps, too close to her past – or, more prosaically, she didn’t care to watch farm people butchering hogs and geese and tromping through snow and mud. She punched me a couple times in the shoulder and, then, went outside to stand in the lobby, enraged that I had made her sit through forty minutes of this stuff. Of course, I was very angry with her and we quarreled. It was a cold dark day and we walked back across the gloomy bridge – this was the place where people on campus committed suicide by throwing themselves into the icy Mississippi (a few years before the poet John Berryman had killed himself in that way.) On the bridge, there is a heated causeway. Tarin walked in the causeway but I walked outside along the rail overlooking the black water below. We met at the far end of the bridge and she refused to come to my apartment – instead, we walked to her car, arguing all the way, and, then, she drove alone back to Hopkins.

Because of that quarrel, I didn’t really have much interest in the movie. I bought a DVD of Olmi’s film six or seven years ago, but never watched it. After all, the picture is 177 minutes long. But Olmi had died this last year and, since 1978, I had grown to appreciate his other work, and so I thought that my son and I could watch the movie together on New Year’s Eve.

After about forty minutes, my son said that he didn’t have sufficient attention to watch the movie and that it was annoying to him. He left and walked back home. I watched about two hours of the film and, then, at ten o’clock switched channels to CNN to watch the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square with Anderson Cooper and the comedian Andy Cohen.

Anderson Cooper is quite literally square. He has a strangely box-like white head and his neck has always seemed to me abnormal, webbed or something. Cooper holds his head up very straight, as if his spinal vertebrae have been fused. He has piercing eyes and, I think, he’s a pretty good newscaster – when he interviews someone, half of the time he asks the obvious follow-up question that has occurred to the viewer and, then, might follow-up again with another cogent question. (For a TV newscaster, this equates to brilliance.) Cooper is gay although he doesn’t make that much about it. His sidekick in Times Square, Andy Cohen, also is gay. (He riffs more on his sexual preference than the stoic, and reticent Anderson Cooper.) It was pouring in Times Square and both Cooper and Cohen seemed to be drenched. Earlier, security guards had confiscated their umbrellas as potential weapons – this is life in post 9-11 America. Something was wrong with the sound, perhaps, the more sophisticated broadcasting systems had been shorted by the deluge. Both men seemed to be speaking to the audience through an antiquated telephone system and their voices seemed squawky and far away.

On public TV, there was black-and-white film of an old concert featuring Roy Orbison, a devilishly handsome and young Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits playing keyboard and looking very puzzled. The concert was pretty good and I turned to it during commercials on the CNN broadcast. My wife, Julie had gone to bed an hour before and the dog was sleeping in the corner of the couch. My daughter Angelica had gone out with her friend Keesha. The ball dropped in Times Square. People who looked like half-drowned water rats kissed one another. Anderson Cooper hugged Andy Cohen. Out of nowhere, the dapper Richard Quest, another CNN pundit had appeared – he was wearing a tuxedo and his glasses were fogged with raindrops and his hair slicked down on top of his head. The camera operators tilted their rigs to show sodden-looking fireworks reflected in big puddles of rain-dimpled water.

I went to the crockpot and got a tureen of posole – midnight in NYC, 11:00 in Austin. Angelica came inside from outdoors. She was very angry. Keesha’s adopted father was alone at the family house – his wife and daughters had gone to Tennessee for some reason, presumably, I suppose, to visit family. The father, who works as a butcher at a grocery store, was getting very drunk. He had sent out some texts that alarmed his wife and she had deputized Keesha to check on him. The man was dangerously intoxicated and, when Keesha went inside to speak with him, there was some kind of fight. Angelica sat in the car parked outside the house for an hour waiting for things to calm down. But things didn’t calm down. So Keesha brought her home.

Angelica said: "This is not how I wanted to spend my New Year’s Eve."

I ate my posole.

The TV flashed to a crowded bar in New Orleans where CNN anchors Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon were holding several dogs on their laps and getting drunk on champagne and tequila shots. This was CNN’s central standard time New Year’s s Eve. Don Lemon is also gay. The chemistry between the glamorous Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon was not good. In fact, it was awful to see.

CNN cut back to Andy Cohen, Cooper, and the drenched but stalwart Richard Quest. Cooper seemed a little drunk. Then, he said this: "I remember one New Year’s Eve a few years ago. It was just after my Dad had died and I was having a bad time." Cooper said that he had been very lonely on that New Year’s Eve and that, of course, he was not alone although he had felt that way. Then, he said that there were probably many people watching the show who were sad and lonely. "This is not always the best time of the year," he said. "But I want you to know that we’re here for you and things will be better."

Of course, Anderson Cooper was acknowledging something very obvious. The mere fact that the viewer was watching him in Times Square on New Year’s Eve was telling. Don’t you, my dear viewer, have some place else to go? Shouldn’t you be surrounded by your own friends and family? Why are you alone in a darkened room watching TV? Of course, you are sad and lonely – this is shown by the fact that you are celebrating New Year’s Eve by watching a CNN news commentator standing in a downpour in Times Square.

January 1, 2019