the reelacroy
the sharpest edges ever owned
It’s
somewhere around 1950, and I’m sprawled on the floor of my Uncle Wayne’s
bizarre loft-bedroom in his homemade farmhouse in Baxter County, Arkansas. Wayne himself is sort of crouched on
his bed. It’s dark, but I can make
him out in the faint glow of the radio diode. Now and again a flaring match briefly illuminates the whole
weird room as he lights a homemade cigarette, its tube of reelacroy paper
expertly glued with his spittle.
The radio’s volume is set very low so as to leave undisturbed the
house’s many sleepers, and we listen intently. What we are hearing is the play-by-play of a Saint Louis
Cardinals’ game. And there it is, the unmistakable rich slap
of ash wood against taut leather, the signature sound of Stan-the-Man Musial
hitting it long, long…
Stan the Man (note the smoothness of the chin)
Musial
featured no less prominently in the recorded advertisements played between
innings. There he sang the praises
of Gillette shaving gear, and especially of Gillette Blue Blades®,
“with the sharpest edges ever owned”.
He would apparently own no other.
And how fervently I, too, beardless child that I was, longed to own
them. Only much later, and then
accidentally, did I come to realize that Stan’s word was not owned, but honed. The word hone derives from OE hån, meaning a
whetstone. You don’t make razor
blades sharp by owning them but by honing them.
I
should have known that even as a child, but the mind can cheerfully accommodate
and rationalize almost any error.
That is no doubt why to this very day whenever I consult a certain of my
favorite reference books—as I frequently do—I am likely to conjure up in my
mind the pleasant whiff of loose Bull Durham tobacco and the crackle of an old
radio. For the three-volume
reference to which I refer make up Hone’s
Popular Works and Everlasting Calendar, consisting of the Year Book and two volumes of the Every-Day Book and Table-Book. I bought up these treasures for a song
early in my student years in England in the late 1950’s, when they were already
more than 120 years old.
William
Hone
William
Hone (1780-1842), though no longer a household name, was one of the world’s
most successful purveyors of household literature—what might be called
coffee-table books that people actually read. He was also an insufficiently appreciated hero in the continuing
struggle for intellectual freedom.
We are so used in this country to talking about the iniquities of the
“religious right” that we risk forgetting just how much of political liberty we
owe to the “religious left”. Hone
came from a modest dissenting family.
He was self-educated, and in his formative years the only book his
father would allow him to read was the Bible. He became a printer and a bookseller, and spent much of his
life in and out of bankruptcy and even the debtor-prison.
He
was the master of the trenchant political parody, often undertaken in
collaboration with the genius radical artist George Cruikshank, most famous as
the illustrator of Charles Dickens.
A famous series of pamphlets in 1817 were constructed in the form of
parodies of several texts In the Anglican Prayer Book: the litany, the
Athanasian Creed, and the catechism.
They were not making fun of these religious texts, of course, but
drawing on their energies to make fun of a meretricious administration. Nonetheless the Tory establishment
pressed a prosecution for blasphemy, which eventuated in three separate
trials—trials that now are regarded as milestones in the march of British
liberty. The deadly earnest of the
government is suggested by the fact that the Lord Chief Justice (Ellenborough)
personally presided at two of the trials.
Yet juries boldly acquitted Hone on all three charges, and he was
carried from the court as a conquering hero on the shoulders of the Friends of
Liberty. The legal historian Baron
Campbell later wrote in his Lives of The
Chief Justices that “The popular opinion was that Lord Ellenborough was
killed in Hone’s trial, and he certainly never held up his head in public
after.”
Hone himself went on to achieve temporary sufficiency if not affluence
with the eventual success of his domestic encyclopedias. Don’t ask me what is in them. Everything
is in them. His Every-Day Book has to be one of the most
prolific and delightful literary phantasmagorias ever recorded in print. Occasionally one has whiffs of his
radical and republican sensibilities, but mainly it is just any damned thing
that comes into his mind in relation to each of the 365 days of the year.
Should you turn to today’s pages, those for December 6th,
you would learn first that this day is sacred to Saint Nicholas. Hone then gathers various vaguely
Nicolaian items and presents them in no particular order. Some medieval English document, in its
account of the church of Saint Nicholas in Jerusalem, tells us that “the gronde
ys good for Norces that lake mylk for their children.” It was on December 6th, Hone
tells us, in the year 1826, that the Times
newspaper revealed the grisly punishment, meted out in absentia in a Parisian court, to the naughty composer Nicholas Bochsa. (He was to be sent to the galleys and
branded with the letters TF, travail
forcé. But they never caught
him and he went on writing operas and running off with people’s wives) We then
have a gobbet of lore about the “boy bishop” (with its obvious Nicholas
themes); but the main article concerns Henry Jenkins, who departed this life on
December 6th, 1670, at the age of one hundred and sixty-nine. Jenkins, otherwise obscure, was
apparently the oldest human being since biblical times. “Born when the Roman catholic religion
was established, Jenkins saw the supremacy of the pope overturned; the
dissolution of the monasteries, popery re-established, and at last protestant
religion securely fixed on a rock of adamant. In his time the invincible armada was destroyed; the republic
of Holland was formed; three queens were beheaded, Anne Boleyn, Catherine
Howard, and Mary queen of Scots; a king of Spain was seated upon the throne of
England; a king of Scotland was crowned king of England at Westminster, and his
son and successor was beheaded before his own palace; lastly, the great fire in
London happened in 1666, at the latter end of his wonderfully long life.”
He lived longer than men who were stronger
And was too old to live any longer.
Were he still around Mr. Hone would surely appreciate the fact that
today’s newspaper, dated December 6th, notes the death in Atlanta of
Besse Cooper, aged 116, and until yesterday the oldest living person in the
world.
