“There
are two kinds of writers,” Don Robertson liked to say,
recalling the classic contrast of Thomas Wolfe with F. Scott
Fitzgerald, “put-'er-iners and take-'er-outers. I'm a put-'er-iner.
If I'm a loud mouth or a windbag, so be it. Anyway, that's the
way real people talk-around the bush, repeating themselves.”
What Robertson was trying to capture, in all of his 18 published
novels, had to do with the endless twists and turns of existence:
the way we deal with what life throws our way, how we rise to
our heroic moments,
and the strange webs of family and fate that bind us together.
The
mother of the eccentric little girl from Shaker Heights in
Victoria at Nine (1979) turns out to be the younger
sister of Morris Bird III, the doomed boy hero of three of
Robertson's earlier books, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced
Bread (1965), The Sum and Total of Now (1966),
and The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened (1970).
Grandpa Bird tells the little girl of his own early days and
courtship in Paradise Falls, Ohio-where, we learn in Miss
Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe (1977),
his sister-in-law Pauline, the 1942 high school homecoming
queen (who appears in The Sum and Total of Now), made
out with the town's future mayor, Lew Amberson. (Paradise
Falls-written between the second and third of the Morris
Bird books-“began as a 945-page flashback”; Robertson
kept a copy of his huge 1968 novel of small town life on
his desk “as a basic reference work.”) Lew's parents
are the protagonists of Praise the Human Season (1976).
And so on.
The
fictional town to which many of Robertson's characters traced
their roots was modeled not on Chagrin Falls, to which he
moved in 1967 after the novel was completed, but on Logan,
a small town southeast of Columbus where he spent several
boyhood summers with his mother's family after his father
died. It is Robertson's Yoknapatawpha County, a kind of Calvinist
Eden from which all his later books, and their doomed protagonists,
flow. Paradise Falls, which runs to 1,000 pages,
unfolds over 35 years-from the end of the Civil War to the
turn of the century. It was no surprise when Robertson was
paid a hefty retainer by 20th Century Fox in the late
1970s to think up three of the four major plots around which
a revival of TV's Peyton Place was to revolve.
Born
March 21, 1929, to Josephine Wuebben Robertson and Carl Trowbridge
Robertson, an associate editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
he lived until 1946 in the east side Cleveland neighborhood
of Hough and attended East High School. After a stint in the
army, and unsuccessful attempts to fit in at Harvard and Western
Reserve University, he followed in his father's footsteps,
becoming a reporter and columnist for the Plain Dealer
(1950–55 and 1963–66), the Cleveland News
(1957-59) and the Cleveland Press (1968-82). In the
late '70s and early '80s he reviewed movies and plays on WKYC-TV
and won a following as a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it is radio
and TV talk show host. But it was his novels he lived for,
scribbling a paragraph while waiting to go on the air or typing
another page while dinner was cooking.
Robertson's
penchant for the sweep of history and human lives was already
evident in his first three novels (1959-62), a Civil War trilogy.
His next book, A Flag Full of Stars (1964), set during
the 1948 election of Harry Truman, won the Putnam Award. Then,
in 1966, came the first two of the Morris Bird books, for
which he won the Cleveland Arts Prize.
Set
in Cleveland between 1944 and 1953, each of the three novels
revolves around a major event in the city's history: the East
Ohio Gas explosion, the Indians winning the pennant, and the
Korean War. The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature
calls the trilogy, which reviewers compared to the works of
Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and J. D. Salinger, Robertson's
“most significant fictional accomplishment” and
predicts it “is likely to assume an important place in
American boyhood fiction.” In 1991, the Society for the
Study of Midwestern Literature presented Robertson with its
Mark Twain Award.
Though
Robertson's later books were sometimes criticized for their
violence and “sordid” tendencies, no less a figure
than Stephen King spoke warmly of his work as having been
an inspiration to him as a writer, and he published Robertson's
1987 novel, The Ideal, Genuine Man. A movie adaptation
of The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened, in which
the 17-year-old Morris is diagnosed with leukemia, aired on
NBC in 1977 starring Jimmy Walker and James Earl Jones.
And Praise the Human Season went into paperback printings
of more than 700,000 copies.
A
battler who fought his way back from two heart attacks in
1974, a series of strokes, lung cancer, and the loss of both
legs to diabetes, with the help of his wife, Sherri, Robertson
liked to refer to the nine novels he'd published after 1974
(and several more still in manuscript) as his “posthumous”
books. He was inducted into the Press Club of Cleveland's
Hall of Fame in 1992 and received the Society of Professional
Journalist's Life Achievement Award in 1995. He died on his
birthday in 1999.
text
by
Dennis
Dooley
1986
Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
Fall
2002
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1865
...
Here,
then, to begin, is the Truth of this place:
Listen
to the Truth. It abounds. Everyone has his own
truth, and every truth is true in the eyes of
its beholder, but all individual truths are simply
fragments, and thus the only true Truth (the only
true and complete and unswerving
truth) is the sum and total of all the right and
proper-and incomplete-individual truths. Ah, this
place. It is a saint. It is a whore. It is all.
Here
is a surprise in May. The war is finished, and
today the men of the old Paradise Falls Blues
are coming home. The sunrise is a green thief,
green and moist. It has abducted the night. A
red squirrel sits chattering high in a pin oak
behind the Underwood place on Cumberland Street.
Young Phil Underwood, darkly handsome, lying inertly,
his bones unvexed by sleep, makes fists. The red
squirrel is speaking for him. The red squirrel
wants to fight. It is a brave and unpleasant red
squirrel, and it is Phil Underwood's brother.
The thieving dawn brings a pale stuttering wind,
and here and there, hugging the grass, are thin
tracings of mist. The wind spins the mist, and
the mist goes away. On Main Street the flags and
banners hang limp. The wind is too weak to make
them move. Leaves rub. Phil Underwood is eighteen.
His parents never should have deprived him of
this war. He cannot, however, hate them. It all
would be so easy, if only he could hate them.
He listens to the red squirrel, and the red squirrel's
anger is dry and terrific. Phil Underwood closes
his eyes. He hears drums and gunfire. He imagines
himself brandishing a great silver sword.
They
are coming, these survivors of the Paradise Falls
Blues, in the steam cars of the Columbus, Paradise
Valley & Marietta. The train is scheduled,
God willing, to arrive at 11:38 this morning.
Phil Underwood will be at the depot. He will stand
off to one side. And he will mourn. And his parents,
his loving parents, will understand not a thing.
-Paradise
Falls (London: W.H. Allen, 1968)
He
supposed this was a good Christmas. The war in
Korea had given people a lot of money to spend.
Just about everyone was working-and making out
very well. He did not as a rule think much about
the war in Korea. Johnny Sellers, who had been
wounded, and a guy named Don Schwamb, who had
been killed, were the only people he knew who
had been directly involved in it. And, to be honest,
he'd never really given a hoot in hell for Don
Schwamb, who had been a loudmouth and a goddamn
bully. Don Schwamb had been drafted at eighteen
in the summer of 1951, and that fall he was in
Korea, and that winter he was killed, and it was
as simple as that. The way Morris Bird III understood
the story, Don Schwamb had been picked off by
a sniper while driving a truck somewhere near
a place called Orijong, which was right at the
edge of something known as, ha ha, the Demilitarized
Zone. Don Schwamb's younger sister Bertha attended
East High, and she told her friends he had been
shot right through the head. Bertha Schwamb was
fat, and she looked like the cleaning women Morris
Bird III occasionally saw slopping through the
halls on afternoons when he stayed after school
late for basketball practice or whatever, and
she seemed to take great pride in her brother's
death, as though by dying he had become something
great and renowned and legendary. But the plain
fact of the matter was that Don Schwamb had been
a bully, the sort of guy who would torment little
kids, take away their money and then beat them
up anyway. He walked as though he wanted the streets
to tremble ... one heavy foot, gallumph, and the
other heavy foot, gallumph, with his thumbs hooked
in his belt and his face all dark and bad,
he walked as though he dared the world to get
in his way, and he was about as popular as a sack
of warts. So how could you feel sorry for him
because he was dead, and how could you think of
him as being any sort of hero? Christ's sake,
a hero didn't beat up little kids and take away
their money. Being dead changed nothing, and anyone
who thought otherwise just didn't know which the
hell end was up. Only truth survived, not sentiment
and certainly not wishful thinking. (And truth
always had to be faced, right? How could you get
away from it? By holding your breath? By pulling
the covers over your head? Oh, Jesus...Jesus...)
Morris Bird III shuddered. ... Doctors were
only human, which meant that something they were
wrong, but of course they didn't want to admit
they were wrong, and so you had to prove it to
them.
...The
Public Square spun and sparkled with neon, and
an immense Christmas Tree stood all green and
white over in front of the Higbee
Co. building, and he saw great neon candles,
and a great neon sign that said NOEL, and another
great neon sign that said MERRY CHRISTMAS, and
another great neon sign that said PEACE ON EARTH,
and all these great neon signs had been made soft
and fuzzy by the whirling snow, and the sidewalks
were all asquirm with people, and he was aware
of stockingcaps and babushkas and teeth and feet
and white breath. He walked quickly, but he did
not walk too quickly. It was important
that he not seem too anxious. This was a very
big thing, and he could not afford to lose control.
(He told himself: Think of the way old Coop would
do it. The slow walk, with the bad guy at the
other end of the street. You face him squarely,
and you do not tremble. And you do not hurry.
That is Frank Miller down there at the
other end of the street. You face him squarely,
and you will not show a thing. It would be giving
away too much, and he would take advantage.) And
so Morris Bird III made sure his breath came evenly.
Nothing could be revealed.
-The
Greatest Thing That Almost Happened (New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970)
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