Thursday
I am back with my mother in my childhood home in Sewanee, Tennessee and sometimes, for a break from my sabbatical project, I revisit my old books. These include the once beloved House on the Cliff, the second book in Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys series.
Let’s just say that some books age better than others.
My cousin Phoebe Conant alerted me to an old Gene Weingarten article in The Washington Post where the author describes himself having a similar experience. He says that he once considered The Missing Chums to be a “pinnacle of human achievement, a meticulously crafted work of American fiction in which Frank and Joe Hardy, the sons of famed sleuth Fenton Hardy, braved choppy seas and grizzled thugs to rescue their kidnapped friends.”
Then he went back and reread it. Missing Chums opens as follows:
“You certainly ought to have a dandy trip.”
“I’ll say we will, Frank! We sure wish you could come along!”
Frank Hardy grinned ruefully and shook his head…
“Just think of it!” said Chet Morton, the other speaker. “A whole week motorboating along the coast. We’re the lucky boys, eh Biff?”
“You bet we’re lucky!”
“It won’t be the same without the Hardy Boys,” returned Chet.
Looking through the other 15 Hardy Boy books on his shelf, Weingarten notes,
They all read the same. The dialogue is as wooden as an Eberhard Faber, the characters as thin as a sneer, the plots as forced as a laugh at the boss’s joke, the style as overwrought as this sentence. Adjectives are flogged to within an inch of their lives. “Frank was electrified with astonishment.” Drama is milked dry, until the teat is sore and bleeding: “The Hardy boys were tense with a realization of their peril.” Seventeen words seldom suffice when 71 will do.
And further on:
Physical descriptions are so perfunctory that the characters practically disappear. In 15 volumes we learn little more than this about 16-year-old Frank: He is dark-haired. And this about 15-year-old Joe: He is blond.
Weingarden quotes Thomas Wolfe’s maxim, “You can’t go home again,” but then asks,
But shouldn’t you be able to saunter past the old neighborhood without throwing up?
When I look back at my childhood, there are things that would literally, not just metaphorically, make me throw up today, like fizzies and moon pies and drinking straws with sugar (or something) in them. To this day I don’t know why I thought they were so great.
The memories, on the other hand, are wonderful. I remember reading the Hardy Boy books while curled up on the couch in our old stone house on Mississippi Avenue. I remember noting at the time the repetition from one book to the next, but somehow that didn’t bother me then. I had figured out the formula and was reassured that the books conformed to it. I guess this means that I was in the process of becoming a genre scholar.
Now that I think about it, reading the Hardy Boys was like eating a Big Mac. I knew exactly what to expect and then I got it.
Then, one day, I stopped reading them, a bit like my children losing interest in a food item they had demanded for weeks or months (like Darien with apples). Maybe it’s because, after once being reassured that the disruptions to the world could all be neatly solved, I suddenly wised up.
There are other books from my childhood that haven’t held up much better. The Bobbsey Twin series are pretty bad, and I remember that I couldn’t bring myself to read the Paddington books to my children, despite fond childhood memories. They are guaranteed to bore an adult to death.
I don’t think I was harmed by any of this reading. Educator John Holt says that children should be encouraged to read whatever attracts them because their reading tastes will naturally evolve. Quantity will lead to quality.
And I was reading quality as well. I didn’t distinguish the Hardy Boys, Tom Sawyer and the Narnia Chronicles. It’s just that the Dixon books vanished from memory whereas Twain and Lewis have provided literary memories that live on and on.
