James Magnuson—novelist, playwright, for many years the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and for even more years than that the bosom buddy of Joan and John Fleming—has just come out with a timely new novel you would do well to check out during the Christmas season: Young Claus.* The biographical subject here is not the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, but old Saint Nick, the Fed Ex of children’s Christmas gifts, whose actual biography has been seriously confused over the centuries in the local traditions of the many lands of Christendom. Sound historical information has been wanting. Though there have been significant advances in Kringleology since Leclerc’s breakthrough and still controversial study of 1896 (Le Père de Père Noël), surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the obscure infancy and early development of the Gifter Who Keeps on Giving. It is this much-needed lacuna that has been filled, albeit it in an occasionally speculative manner, by Magnuson’s Young Claus. I was privileged to read this work in an early stage of its development.
The intensity of the season and the publication of my friend’s book set me on a trip down Memory Lane concerning a Klaus-figure in my own early life and, in particular, of a marvelous Christmas episode related to him. It is the story of my Uncle John and the magic Christmas tree. There is a fancy anthropological term, avunculate, that refers to the special relationship to be found in certain old societies between nephews and maternal uncles. It is of importance in some works of our early literatures. The relationship was one of mentoring, of protecting, and sometimes of discipline. (The word “mentor,” incidentally is highly literary, being the personal name of a character in Homer’s Odyssey, the tutor of Telemachus.) I did have one maternal uncle, Uncle George, but I barely knew him. It was from my father’s two brothers, John and Wayne, and especially John, whose namesake I was, that I benefited from abundant traditional avuncularism. John was my beloved mentor when I was young. And with him mentoring more than once meant joining in secret conspiracies.
There were seven Fleming siblings, three men and four women who at various times lived in proximity in a sparsely populated community south of Mountain Home, Arkansas. This area was six or seven miles south of the town and not too far from the north bank of the White River. In what I shall call the main house lived my two uncles, both unmarried, and, at various times, no fewer than four aunts, two of whom never married. At the time of today’s story, the nuclear family of which I was a part lived in a smaller house about a mile away. My Uncle John visited us very often. He was particularly devoted to my mother, with whom he played endless games of cribbage. He also liked to give her surprise gifts, trophies from the fields and the woods through which he often wandered for miles: flowers, leaves, interesting fungi, beautiful or curious stones, beautifully weathered wood, things like that. My mother, who for many years was nearly housebound, had a small museum of such trophies.
One Christmas my dad and I had hurriedly cut a Christmas tree in a nearby glade and brought it to the house. It was a cedar. There is not a lot of evergreen in that part of the mainly hardwood Ozarks, except for two or three slightly different species of cedar. The cedar is a beautiful tree with a beautiful smell, but is generally pretty clunky as a Christmas tree. My mother, who could be difficult, complained about the somewhat awkward and uneven specimen we had brought home. “It’s too big,” she said, “takes up too much room.” She went on to say that one day she would like to have “a perfectly shaped little tree, and put it in the bedroom.” Well, we did put up the cedar tree, which in truth did occupy too much space in the so-called living room. But it happened that my Uncle John had been present to hear my mother’s complaint. Later that day he took me aside. I could tell he was about to engage me in conspiracy. He said to me, “What’s wrong with having two trees? I know where there is a perfect tree for Jan. What do you think?” But there was a problem—two problems, actually. This perfect tree was about three miles away—from his house that is, at least four from mine. He didn’t even know whose land it was on, but certainly not on any of ours. At that time there was still a lot of the deep woods that seemed to belong to nobody in particular and had been seized a half a dozen times for non-payment of the (now) unbelievably low property taxes. I doubt that the County Assessor actually knew who was supposed to own it. But John was a stickler about his neighbors’ property lines, and I was both shocked and titillated that he seemed so nonchalantly to be suggesting the plunder of a tree of unknown ownership.
So the next day we set off from “his” house armed only with a slightly rusty medium-sized pruning saw about eighteen inches long, a tool I had never seen before and certainly never seen in use. The day was quite cold, but crisp and bright. The first part of the journey was into some densely wooded hills to the southwest. Within a half a mile we were in the deep boonies. There were a few deer paths, but absolutely no signs of human presence. It was pretty much of a slog. I don’t know how well Uncle John knew the topography of the back of his hand, but I’m pretty sure he knew that of his corner of Baxter County even better. Within fifteen minutes I had only the slightest idea where I was, though I never lost my sense of the general direction to get to the river. The rough Ozark topography is pretty much of sameness, but it can surprise you. We came to a hollow where a sizeable stretch of beautiful white quartz-like stone lay semi-exposed in large quantities. Beyond that was a kind of semi-hillock at the top of which, amid all the grays and blacks of a winter forest, was the light green crown of a single pine tree about three and a half feet tall. We had not seen another pine on our miles-long walk. God alone knows where it came from, but it was absolutely perfectly formed, with soft, gentle, pliant clusters of needles. Yet the most striking feature of this arboreal aberration was that it seemed to be growing not in soil but atop a large flat gray rock! Forty years later or so, when I was seriously studying Italian Renaissance paintings, I got used to trees growing out of rocks. There is a memorable such tree in the “Saint Francis” of Giovanni Bellini, a painting to which I devoted a whole book. Of course the roots of such trees actually are in small crevices in the rock in which a certain amount of soil has been caught. The unyielding constriction stunts them as Nature’s own bonsai, I suppose. But this one, my first, amazed me. It seemed to me marvelous and mysterious. And, yes, we committed the sacrilege; and yes, my mother loved it. But do you have any idea how hard it is to carry even a small tree through a couple of miles of thick winter forest without damaging so much as a twig of it?
Let me wish to my regular readers and, indeed, anyone who has come across this essay by typographical error or other misadventure, a very happy Christmas and a good beginning to the New Year.
*Young Claus (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2023); pp. 335, ISBN 9780875658360
