Thoreau’s glass house

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Dexter's image

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Timothy Dexter’s reputation as a vainglorious self-promoter outlived him by many decades. In 1863, almost sixty years after his death, he was mentioned in an essay called “Life Without Principle,” published in The Atlantic Monthly. The essayist was none other than Henry David Thoreau — who I think should have known better than to believe what people said about a fellow nonconformist. (He licks his own reputational wounds in the same essay: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer.”)

Anyway, the passage I’m referring to is part of Thoreau’s attempt to explain the difference between meaningful and meaningless work. He writes that he watched a neighbor struggle all morning to drive a team of oxen hauling a slab of stone across a field. “Honest, manly toil,” he thinks as the sweat drips from the man’s brow. But he has second thoughts when he discovers the purpose of the stone.

The day went by, and at evening I passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster’s labor, in my eyes.

To Henry David, and to his Atlantic readers, Dexter is simply a type, a name for an extravagant buffoon. But I have a feeling that if H.D. had ever come to old Newburyport and shared a pipe with Dexter in the Temple of Reason — the glass-enclosed tomb Dexter erected in his back yard as a place to sit and think about life and mortality — and if he had read Dexter’s book of homespun wisdom, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, in a charitable enough frame of mind, he might have glimpsed a little of himself. Species recognition, we call it today.

Other than that, I have no complaints about “Life Without Principle.” Thoreau is refreshingly unrealistic — firing off zingers like “I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me,” and “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” Do not read the rest of the essay, though. It will make you quit your job.

Why Timothy Dexter

04 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in Book progress, Timothy Dexter

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The quote with which I kicked off this blog tells you all you need to know about why I chose to make Timothy Dexter the lead character of my planned stories and novels. It’s the opener to his little book, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones: Or, Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress, published in 1802, when Dexter was fifty-five. There is so much to explore in those few words: “Ime the first Lord in the younited States of A mericary, Now of Newburyport. It is the voise of the people and I cant Help it and so Let it goue.”

The first thing you notice is the inventive spelling. Some of it can be explained by a lack of schooling and a paucity of dictionaries. But a glorious mash-up like “the younited States of A mericary” — surely that belongs in a category by itself. Was the guy dyslexic? Did he have other “learning issues?” Did this hinder his quest for social acceptance? And what should we make of the missing punctuation marks (I threw a few in for readability)? Were they the spines on the pickle that Dexter was metaphorically ramming up his neighbors’ backsides? Answering those questions is a book in itself.

But dig deeper and the quote opens up a universe of paradox and pain. A lord. In the United States. The fledgling democracy has no use for a hereditary peerage, so Dexter’s title is bestowed by “the voise of the people.” He’s the first lord to be democratically elected! Not only that, but he “cant Help it.” The title has been foisted upon him by those who (I think) resent his rise from poor tradesman to wealthy merchant. The big house surrounded by statuary, the fancy carriage drawn by cream-colored horses, the expensive clothes — this was way too much upward mobility for a humble leather dresser.

The standard lore about Dexter says he “proclaimed” himself a lord, and did so out of vanity. But I say, poppycock. The Dexter in my stories — and I think the real Dexter — is a man of talent and imagination who goes along with the mock title of “lord” to show that he can take a joke. Just like Obama embracing the once-disparaging term “Obamacare,” or Volkswagen owning the term “bug,” or Target owning the “Tarzhay” label, Dexter “can’t help it, and so lets it go.” A little further on, he forgives the haters(and I’m transliterating): “No bones broken. All is well, all in love.”

As a writer, I am drawn to all of these tensions — between the man and his time, the man and his town, the man and his mythology. And of course the continuing struggle between the man and his native language. Somebody can have a hell of a lot of fun with this, and it might as well be me.