A MAN WITH A MISSION

         Born and bred in Illinois in the late 19^th century, Edgar Lee Masters was offended by East-Coast intellectuals’ condescension towards America’s heartland. (Sound familiar?) He wanted to set the record straight, telling true tales about his region, the complexity of its towns and inhabitants.  

         A Chicago lawyer in his day job, the would-be author was warned by his law partners, including the renowned Clarence Darrow, not to quote or profile actual neighbors too closely, lest he end up on the receiving end of lawsuits for slander.

         Masters’ compositional solution was nothing short of genius. To avoid possible legal objections, he bypassed real places and persons entirely and instead invented a make-believe Midwestern town. To animate this community with a representative breadth and depth of local characters, he populated his Spoon River with 240, named, three-dimensional residents. To let these locals speak candidly, free from facades and pretenses, he laid them to rest in the town cemetery and empowered them to deliver their own epitaphs.  

         To reflect realistic community complexity and dynamism, Masters wove in dozens of relationships, private and public. And to make sure the soliloquies addressed his region’s main priorities and concerns, he created memoirs spanning law and order, politics and history, wealth and inheritance, love and lust, immigration and emigration, organized religion and mysticism.

         The result was a convincing tapestry of a time and a place, mobilizing fiction to convey layered truths. Small wonder that Spoon River became the best-selling book in the United States; or that French and Italian impresarios soon converted it for the opera stage.

ART AND CRAFT

          What first impressed me about this epic was its architecture: the scope and interlocking intricacy of its narrative design. As I navigated through dozens of individual soliloquies, I became equally taken by the quality of Masters’ writing. Intense, compact epitaphs capturing personalities, relationships, emotions and even national conflicts in a few taut lines. (Not to mention sustaining this disciplined drafting through 200+ portraits.)

         Here’s one of my favorite examples. Listen to Hanna Armstrong’s tale, retrieving her family’s Civil War in 130 words. (If you read it aloud, you can hear her grass-roots grit in the cadence.)

I wrote him a letter asking him for old times’ sake

To discharge my sick boy from the army,

But maybe he couldn’t read it.

Then I went to town and had James Garber,

Who wrote beautifully, write him a letter,

But maybe that was lost in the mails.

So I traveled all the way to Washington,

I was more than an hour finding the White House.

But when I found it they turned me away,

Hiding their smiles. Then I thought:

“Oh, well, he ain’t the same as when I boarded him

And he and my husband worked together

And all of us called him Abe, there in Menard.”

As a last attempt I turned to a guard and said:

“Please say it’s old Aunt Hannah Armstrong

From Illinois, come to see him about her sick boy in the army.”

Well, just in a moment they let me in!

And when he saw me he broke in a laugh,

And dropped his business as president,

And wrote in his own hand Doug’s discharge,

Talking the while of the early days,

And telling stories.

          This poignant vignette could be a stand-alone short-story. But because Masters has embedded it in the matrix of his regional saga, it resonates with and enriches a number of his priority themes. The gaping geopolitical distance between the hinterlands and coastal capitol. The dismissive disdain of gatekeepers charged with insulating political representatives from their petitioning constituents. Abraham Lincoln’s mythic humility and accessibility, never forgetting his Illinois origins.  The rustic phrasing carries and colors the tale.    

          My second illustration of Masters’ nimble narration is the tragic Merritt love triangle. Three principals contribute overlapping but contrasting soliloquies: Tom Merritt, a cuckolded husband, Mrs. Merritt, his adulterous wife, and Elmer Karr, her teen lover.

          A conventional early-20^th-century melodrama might have riddled this telling with clichés. A neglectful or abusive husband who catches his unfaithful spouse in a revealing lie or discovers a dropped love note. A wife fearful of her betrayed husband’s rage and revenge. A besotted lover fleeing town just ahead of the husband’s buckshot.

          Instead, we can savor Masters’ consistent inventiveness. No oblivious brute, this alert-antennaed husband suspects his wife simply because “she acted calm and absent-minded.” She, in turn, isn’t alarmed about her husband’s wrath but her high-testosterone lover’s reflexive violence. (“You will do some terrible thing.” Despite his macho protestations, the husband doesn’t give hot pursuit but walks, unarmed, into an ambush. The detected boyfriend doesn’t hightail it out of town as common sense and his mistress were counseling. His follow-on run-in with the husband suggests the detected adulterer is going about his daily business as usual.   

         The wife’s and lover’s soliloquies extend into court proceedings and incarceration records. Peter Neal playing Elmer Karr in our performance asked what I made of the murdering philanderer’s come-to-Jesus repentance. I suggested the author might deliberately be leaving these earnest declarations open to readers’ divergent interpretations. On the one hand, Elmer’s remorse might be genuine, and so persuasive that he talked his way out of prison and back into his parish (“loving hearts that took me in again.”) On the other, he might have been conning all the authorities. Certainly, to most modern readers, the glaring discrepancy between the male’s 14-year sentence and the female’s (30 years served and continuing at her death) seems outrageous. Yet this imbalance might represent the lawyer/author’s implicit social commentary.

          Not all of Masters’ writing in this historic saga is equally skillful. He appends two annexes to the central Anthology. Imitating a Homeric epic, he recites a “Spooniad,” recounting a political street brawl, blow by blow. Then he attaches an Epilogue in which Olympian gods and goddesses lounge on clouds to belittle disappointing mortals. Both pieces are overwrought and affected. Not in the same class with the work’s main community chronicle.

SELECTION AND ADAPTATION

         Determined to adapt Spoon River for our Play Readers’ presentation, my obvious threshold challenge was downsizing. How to squinch 240 soliloquies into an hour’s staged performance, while preserving the original work’s multiple virtues?  My approach focused on three criteria. Having worked with Nancy to arrive at an estimated average running time of about two minutes per soliloquy, I aimed for a program of 26 (allowing brief minutes for the director’s introductory remarks.) This would invite each Play Reader to voice two characters.

         By allocating Masters’ soliloquies among his dozen or more main Midwestern themes and then selecting examples from each, I could ensure that our audience at least sampled his full range of offerings. The printed program identified the clusters.

          Then I took care to include examples of overlapping relationships. And fished for soliloquies with especially evocative characters and writing to showcase the peak of his powers.

         One selection challenge took me by surprise. It turned out that 188 of Masters’ characters were male; only 50, female. This may have reflected the gender imbalance in 1915 Midwestern public life; or, hopefully unlikely, the author’s misogyny. Our troupe contains more women than men. This took some editorial attentiveness to select first-rate roles for both genders.

         I chose a pied-piper character (Fiddler Jones) to lead off the presentation and an upbeat coda to conclude our recitation to give our program a sense of beginning and ending.  

THROWN OFF STRIDE

         Our Spoon River performance was scheduled for April 15, with rehearsals on the first and the eighth. While cast members studied the script to express interest in preferred roles, Nancy and I slipped away for a brief road trip to Cambria and Hearst Castle.

         One hour from home, we pulled into a Morgan Hill filling station for gasoline. Coming out of the restroom, I stepped off a three-inch curb, lost my balance and toppled forward onto a concrete pavement.

         Although it took two men to help get me back onto my feet, I was more embarrassed than concerned. I hadn’t hit my face or head; there were no open wounds. I walked back to our car, climbed into the passenger seat, and told Nancy I had fallen but didn’t think I was seriously hurt. I’d fallen before without damage. We decided to continue on with our excursion.

         When we stopped for lunch at Soledad and I tried to step out of the car, the pain in my left leg was excruciating. At the local urgent-care clinic, the doctor on duty pulled no punches. After examining my swollen, heated thigh, he sternly advised us to abandon our vacation, turn back north to Salinas so that hospital’s Emergency Room could x-ray my leg for “possible fractures.” Plural.

         The Salinas ER X-rays and CAT scans were negative. But the hospital kept me overnight and recommended two weeks of local acute-care physical therapy. Since we were now only two hours from home, Nancy and I opted instead to return to our Retirement Community’s Skilled Nursing Facility.

          After a few days in this campus Health Center, the Medical Director referred me to Stanford Hospital because my falling hemoglobin levels might have indicated continuing internal bleeding, a potential threat in light of my post-cardio blood-thinner. Stanford tests confirmed this was not a danger, but their sonogram revealed a deep-tissue hematoma or blood pool in my thigh, “as big as a football.” This plus a severely damaged knee.

         Back in Skilled Nursing, I’m receiving twice daily Physical and Occupational Therapy, supported by 24-hour nursing care. My agreed rehabilitation objective is “patient persistence.” No rushing but also no slacking. The Medical Director and my Primary Care Physician concur that eight weeks is normal recovery time for someone in my age group. The Director’s prognosis is “excellent” so long as I keep stretching and moving. My therapists’ mantra is that “Motion is Lotion.”

CURTAIN UP

         Nancy and I were determined that Spoon River must go on. The full team was enthusiastically supportive. She stepped into my producing and directing shoes, in addition to her responsibilities as Play Readers Coordinator and actor. Other cast members volunteered to sub in my parts.

          Our Medical Director authorized my wheelchair passage to observe the performance. I wanted to attend in person in order to honor Nancy and the company for carrying our production across the goal-line. Just being out of doors for the first time in a month was exhilarating. With a care-giving aide contributing the propulsion, I inhaled spring fragrance from trellised wisteria above the Health-Center gate.

         The performance was in The Lounge, a cozy Retirement-Community public space. No longer Producer/Director or cast member, I could now enjoy facing the performers from the audience. Nancy introduced the program and thanked the Players for supporting our family during this medical marathon. The dozen actors delivered two or three soliloquies each, shifting personalities and voices. While Masters’1915 language was a tad unfamiliar and formal for modern ears, soon I found myself entering into provincial Illinois. It was a window into American cultural history. Our Play Readers were bridging the centuries.