IX
The First in the East
“I wans to make my Enemys grin in time Lik A Cat over A hot pudding and gone Away and hang there heads Down Like A Dogg… .”
TIMOTHY DEXTER
The year 1802 was a lusterless one in American literature. In that twelve-month period no novel or work of nonfiction gained widespread popularity or gave promise of any degree of permanence. Two years earlier, in 1800, Mason Weems, a traveling bookseller and part-time preacher nicknamed the Parson, had produced a success with his Life of George Washington; with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. In 1809, two volumes of A History of New York, by Washington Irving, were printed in New York, and were given a friendly reception and attained a moderate sale. But between these years lay 1802, a reproach to Yankee creativity and a barren island for book lovers.
Yet there are people well versed in curiosa who will dispute the last, who will insist that in the year 1802 American literature had one of its finest hours. And perhaps, after all, they are right. Certainly 1802 provided a volume that may still be regarded as one of the most unusual ever published in the United States.
It was not a best seller though its author had “thousands” of copies printed and distributed free of charge with his compliments. This distribution, as well as the curiosity of the book’s content, stimulated wide interest. Public demand for the volume grew until a market price of one dollar a copy was established. Through the years that followed, there were at least eight new printings of the work.
It was not, it might be added, a book of enduring literary quality though a century and a half later, erudite readers might find their discussions enlivened by the tome’s futuristic approach, and groups of select bibliophiles might continue to chuckle over its oddity.
The first edition was brought off the presses in Salem, Massachusetts, and doled out to all takers from a vast Georgian mansion in Newburyport whose grounds were decorated with forty life-sized wooden statues of such celebrities as Horatio Nelson, Adam and Eve, George Washington, Louis XIV, and the author himself. The book measured four inches by six. Its twenty-four pages of prose were bound in soft covers. The title page was conservative enough:
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones: or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress by Timothy Dexter, Esq … Salem: Printed For The Author. 1802.
It must be remarked at once that of freak books in literature there has been no end. Their quaint procession has been well documented by Holbrook Jackson and Walter Hart Blumenthal. In the two centuries before Timothy Dexter’s publication, and in the years since, literature has been exhilarated often, and debased infrequently, by eccentricity in the print shop or the author’s study. In France once appeared a book entitled Nothing, by Mathelà, which contained, appropriately, two hundred blank pages. Less amusing, as Carlyle would have it, was the appearance of the second edition of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, supposedly bound with the skins of French aristocrats who had laughed at his first edition. In England, in 1634, appeared The Feminin Monarchi, or the Histori of Bees, by Charles Butler, all set down in phonetic spelling, and, in 1866, an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress written and printed in Pitman’s shorthand. In America the reading public was astounded, in 1835, by Francis Glass’s Washington Vita, a biography entirely in Latin, and no less astounded five years later by the publication, in New York, of Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth. In Five Cantos, by Solyman Brown. By 1881 the reading public hardly lifted its collective brow when the book shops advertised a science-fiction novel entitled ! ! !, by George Hepworth. But before all these, in America at least, came A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, by Timothy Dexter. His assault on credulity was the first and perhaps the very best.
When the well-read New Englander of 1802 opened his copy of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, he found that the entire book was one long sentence or, rather, no sentence at all. Not a single comma, semicolon, quotation mark, apostrophe, exclamation point, or period marred its half-coherent text. Grammatically, it was without beginning or end. Thought melted into thought without stop. Like the universe, like time itself, it emerged from infinity and receded into infinity. Its organization was nonexistent. It was chaotic. Dexter literally wrote what came into his head, and what he put to paper antedated automatic writing and free-association techniques.
However, if the author ignored punctuation completely, he was lavish with capital letters. Words were capitalized throughout, even if they were the wrong words. The names of men and places were often demoted to lower case. A conglomeration of adverbs, adjectives, and verbs was elevated to upper case. Only one word was consistently capitalized sensibly enough, the pronoun I. As to spelling, it might be better to draw a veil over the entire subject. Dexter’s spelling was entirely by ear, by mood, by whim. Sometimes it was accomplished phonetically, more often by Divine Right.
“I Command pease and the gratest brotherly Love,” said Dexter, supporting his plan for a United States of the World. He suggested that “nasions” all “be Linked to gether with that best of troue Love so as to govern all nasions on the fass of the gloub not to tiranize over them but to put them to order if any Despout shall A Rise …” In the jungle of Dexter’s orthography the reader met strange, half-familiar creatures like “Jorge washeton,” who was once George Washington, and a mr bourr,” who had been better known as Aaron Burr; he came across rarely seen sites like “plimeth,” which had been Plymouth and “Nouebry Port,” which had resemblance to Newburyport; he saw—but not before passing a hand over his eyes—“a toue Leged Creter,” which was only a two-legged creature, “A Scoyer,” who was merely an “onnest” squire, and several “Rougs,” who proved to be harmless rogues, all this before sitting down to partake of “Loovs & Littel fishes,” which could be better digested when known to be loaves and little fish. This was the style and the form of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones. It might have given pause even to Jean François Champollion, conqueror of the Rosetta stone.
Timothy Dexter realized his mistake at once. A book without punctuation was hardly a book at all. He sought to correct this lapse. By some means possibly in a second printing now lost, or in a separate pamphlet, or in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper Dexter added one more page to his book. This page was bound in all printings after 1838. The addition, which appeared at the very end of his philosophical autobiography, secured Dexter his literary immortality. It read as follows:
fourder mister printer the Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in A nuf here and thay may peper and solt it as they please
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With this generous offering of punctuation, Timothy Dexter anticipated the vogue of do-it-yourself in the mid-twentieth century. It was a stroke of genius, this offering to the restless and overenergized reader an opportunity for therapy, a chance to work with his hands and his wits by peppering and salting the virginal book with punctuation. Surely, too, though he could not know it, and though he had no literary pretensions, Dexter anticipated, perhaps pioneered, an entire new school of writing. Imitators and converts followed in abundance. Just thirteen years after A Pickle for the Knowing Ones appeared, there was published in England a two-volume work called The Elements of Geometry by the Reverend J. Dobson. The Reverend’s hand faltered only at the end of paragraphs, when he laid down periods. Otherwise, his mathematical prose was as denuded of punctuation as Dexter’s. It was not until another age with the emergence of Knowing Ones like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and E. E. Cummings that Dexter’s advanced method, his lack of stops, his erratic capitalizations, his abstract approach, his stream-of-consciousness style, cam
e into full flower and found wide acceptance.
In Dexter’s own time his avant-garde effort was less appreciated. While his little book amused, even charmed, a few of the more tolerant and discriminating readers in America, its general tone provoked only irritation, especially in his own community. Those neighbors who had thought him a lunatic for earlier indiscretions were now positive of it mainly because A Pickle for the Knowing Ones was an egotistical, opinionated, coarse defense of Dexter, by Dexter, against all “Enemys” who were anti-Dexter.
The book opened with a flat declaration by its author of his own importance and his right to be heard. “line the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare …”
Before the befuddled reader could recover, the author hurriedly outlined his plan for a great “Dexters mouseum.” The museum, already begun, would feature wooden replicas of the most famous figures in history not only the author himself, but “mister pitt” and “the king of grat britton” and even “Loues the 16” of France. It would, Dexter promised, be one of the “grate Wonders of the world.”
Now the book became more autobiographical. “How Did Dexter make his money ye says …” He told how he made it by shipping warming pans to the West Indies, among other speculative follies. He told how much money he made. He gloated over the percentages of his profits. Next he discussed improvements that he contemplated on his house. Then he digressed on one “Bonne partey the grat,” who turned out to be Bonaparte the Great. There followed a discussion of the tomb the author had built for himself, with a list of its peculiar furnishings, some invective against politicians, priests, the devil, and college men, and an indignant recital of how a lawyer once tried to beat him up. After that, there was a learned discourse on the three bridges spanning the Merrimack, some angry words on why the author had separated from his wife and come to regard her as a ghost “I have bin in hell 35 years in this world with the gost” and an announcement that his house would soon be for sale. There was a modest hint that the author might make a good Emperor of the United States, a reminiscence of his youth, a suggestion for the names of his pallbearers, and, for a change of pace, the inclusion of two funny stories.
LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER
engraved from life in 1805 by James Akin
What did contemporary critics, and those who followed, think of all this?
Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, who knew Dexter and became his Boswell, thought that A Pickle for the Knowing Ones preserved “all the saws, shreds and patches that ever entered the head of a ‘motley fool.’” An anonymous critic for the National Aegis was even less kind. “For what purpose are riches given to some men,” he wondered, “unless to display in more glowing colours the disgusting deformities of their Characters? … In his Pickle for the knowing ones’ he had effectually preserved the full grown fruits of his nonsense.” After the author’s death the Newburyport Impartial Herald, which had once praised the book, did an about-face. Dexter’s “ruling passion appeared to be popularity, and one would suppose he rather chose to render his name ‘infamously famous than not famous at all.’ His writings stand as a monument of the truth of this remark; for those who have read his ‘Pickle for the Knowing Ones’, a jumble of letters promiscuously gathered together, find it difficult to determine whether most to laugh at the consummate folly, or despise the vulgarity and profanity of the writer.” Mrs. E. Vale Smith, preparing her History of Newburyport for publication in 1854, discussed Dexter and his book with many persons who had met him. Of the book she could only think that it was “a final effort for posthumous fame,” and of the author she could only remark that his “vices were profanity, a want of veracity, and irreverence, while his execrable taste led him into such vicious displays as were calculated to have an injurious effect, especially upon the young.”
But reaction was not all one-sided. In 1802 the Newburyport Impartial Herald had thought that Dexter’s book would “be a valuable acquisition to the lovers of knowledge and polite literature.” The passage of years brought others into the fold. Oliver Wendell Holmes was charmed by the “famous little book.” He wrote of Dexter: “As an inventor of a new American style, he goes far beyond Mr. Whitman, who, to be sure, cares little for the dictionary … I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who not only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Herald’s College to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they were at perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write without troubling themselves about stops of any kind.” In 1925 J. P. Marquand became a proselyte. “In all seriousness,” he said, “this bold Dexterian effort actually possesses a style of its own, which all its faults combine to give it, a strength and characteristic vivacity that many more accomplished penmen and spellers have tried in vain to achieve. Every page, every line has an utter naturalness that is refreshing to a jaded taste.”
Unfortunately, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones outlived its author. Few encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries remembered him. One that did called him that “Machiavellian parvenu and avowed toper” who became “an incomparable literary figure.” Parvenu he was, and toper and literary figure, too. But he was considerably more. He dwelt in an age of much eccentricity among the great, but few great eccentrics. The earliest days of the republic were serious days. Men were strait-laced and dedicated and often humorless. There was little time or patience for the nonconformist. It surprised no one that Thomas Paine called his second book Common Sense. Men like John Randolph, Israel Putnam, and William Franklin were individuals in their ideas and in their habits, but they were not eccentrics. They conformed to the ways of colonial society. They went along. Timothy Dexter did not go along. He was his own planet and his own civilization. Or, more accurately, when a new nation was formed, he did not join it. If the flag of the infant republic had thirteen stars, one had surely been omitted. For Timothy Dexter was the fourteenth.
In the New England Historical and Genealogical Register it is recorded that “Nathan Dexter of Maiden & Esther Brintnall of Chelsea” were married in the latter part of June 1744. There had been Dexters in Maiden, Massachusetts, since the first Dexter had emigrated from Ireland almost a century before. With the marriage of Nathan and Esther Dexter, the family line would remain unbroken. Nine months and two weeks after their wedding, they produced a son, Nathan, followed two years later by a second son, Timothy, and two years after that by a daughter named Esther.
Timothy Dexter’s birth was auspicious or so he always insisted. He was born on the morning of January 22, 1747, while a snowstorm raged outdoors. The constellations were so situated in the heavens on that day that young Dexter later became convinced he was “to be one grat man.” Nothing is known of his father’s occupation except that it brought little income. It is thought that young Dexter was exposed to a limited amount of schooling.
In May 1755, when he was eight years old, Timothy Dexter was sent to work on a farm in Maiden. This move not only lightened the burden on the impoverished Dexter family, but also gave the second-born adequate board and keep as well as instruction in a means of livelihood. Timothy Dexter remained a farm laborer for six and a half years. Then, aged fourteen, eager to acquire a trade that held more promise of profit, he left the farm forever and traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to become an apprentice leather-dresser. In “Chalston,” he recalled, “I stayed Leven months at Dressin of skins for briches & glovs—then went to boston there stayed till I was free …”
In Boston, a bustling metropolis of 17,000 persons, Dexter resumed his apprenticeship. leather-dressing was a popular craft in those times, and much in demand, but the work was harsh and exhausting. For seven years Dexter toiled amid the stench of hides and tannin, sleeping and living in a
cramped hovel and eating his employer’s leftover food, until at last his servitude was ended. His employer bestowed the traditional freedom-suit upon him, as a mark of his graduation and his maturity. The garment was, apparently, a splendid one, for Dexter always remembered it as made of “guinea Cloth” worth five shillings sterling a yard.
The moment Dexter was on his own, he disposed of the suit. He was ambitious, and he needed ready cash. He offered the suit to a Boston vendor, who disagreed with him sharply about its value. “I was angry,” admitted Dexter, but in the end he sold the suit for “Eight Dolors & 20 sents.” This modest sum, he was confident, would lay the foundation for his fortune.
His goal was the thriving community of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Only six years earlier Newburyport had become an incorporated town after 206 of its “water-side people” petitioned to be “set off from Newbury.” By 1769 its population was upwards of 2,300. The extensive shipbuilding activity in the one-square-mile seaport, encouraged by the British, provided employment for carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, and rope-makers. Warehouses were stuffed with local farm produce, cheaply made gold-plated beads, and rum, which would be exchanged for English calico, cutlery, and sugar. The general prosperity made retail shops in the community flourish. Individual fortunes were being amassed quickly, and the Yankee inhabitants were beginning to dwell in the splendor which they had so long admired in their English betters. Here, if any, was the place for a strong young enterprising leather-dresser. In the two weeks that elapsed between the time Dexter left his apprenticeship and the time he arrived in Newburyport, his confidence grew. “I had faith by reading A book,” he said. “I was to have this world’s goods and be Come grate and be Amonkest grat men in the East …”
The Square Pegs Page 28
