Things to Put Away

By John Thompson

John Thompson was part of the vibrant postmodern New York literary scene of the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies. That scene was famously fueled by love, liquor, food and parties, but most of all by ideas, by words, serious and witty, spoken and written. Thompson’s only novel, never published in his lifetime, tells the poignant yet humorous tale of a young boy in the Middle West in the 1920s. Each of the six chapters is written in a different voice, creating a powerful literary mosaic of a boy’s experience of tragic loss. In the author’s words, the stories in this semi-autobiographical novel, “design no more but to give a few glimpses of how some things used to be a long time ago, fictitious things, when the curtain of forgetfulness was falling as it must over our childhood.”

Edited by Louise Thompson and Ruth Losack

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Feb 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483476070

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AWAY

Copyright © 2018 Louise S. Thompson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7608-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7607-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916720

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 01/20/2018

ALSO BY JOHN THOMPSON

The Founding of English Metre

The Talking Girl and Other Poems

Straws in the Wind: John Thompson, Collected Work 1938-1995,

Volumes I & II

In slightly different form, Chapter 1 was published by Willie Morris in Harper’s, Chapter 4 by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary, and Chapter 6 by William Phillips in Partisan Review. To these editors and journals I am grateful.

—John Thompson

Editors’ note:

A longer version of The Sound of Voices appears in the companion anthology of Thompson’s work, Straws in the Wind.

—Louise Thompson and Ruth Losack

This book is for Susan Otis Thompson

THINGS TO PUT AWAY

Let me assure the reader, these memoirs, in formation homologue or hotchpotch as you find, design no more but to give a few glimpses of how some things used to be a long time ago, fictitious things, when the curtain of forgetfulness was falling as it must over our childhood.

—J.A.T.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I Corinthians 13:11

The Sound of Voices

Language is for communication, we say, and we all try to use it for that good purpose. We all know, too, how hard it is to get language to convey exactly what we mean, or want to mean, or think we want to mean, ought to mean; and at the same time, how hard it is—no it is impossible!—to keep our speech from telling more than we could ever want to tell about ourselves. Yet, knowing all this, we use language, we talk to one another, endlessly we keep on chattering to one another or we launch again and again into new conversations with someone new, knowing how hard, even how impossible it will be; not content with that jostle of words and counterwords, we write, setting down all the marks that will mean language to someone but can never quite exactly mean our very own language. For even there, in writing, where we can take all the time in the world to it if we want to, trying over and over again, we might well suppose we could never succeed, just by the nature of things; because who is it really who is speaking, and to whom, whose words in what air, whose meanings, whose searchings and whose concealments, whose? It is your voice now that is saying what I have written, not mine.

But we talk and we know we are right to do it. And we go on with our writing and our reading. Although as you read this, the lift and fall of your voice, unheard as it is, and your pause and attack, even as silent gestures of sound, can wittingly or not, deflect the course of the signs I make here, forming phrases that cannot be exactly mine, although, more subtly, as you move quietly through the marks I have written, responding with your breath, your throat, the resonant chambers between your skull and your facial structures, your tongue and your teeth and your lips, in your own melody of voice that even silently makes all that you know of language and makes too when you give it the dimension of sound that great part of yourself, the record of all your experience and all the particular ordering of bone and stuffing, fleshy straps and integument granted you to bear yourself into and through that experience, the record your friends catch in two notes on the telephone but which I, in all good chance, shall never hear, although all this lies like the Grand Canyon between us, we do understand one another. And we both know the truth.

In your language and in mine appears all the truth we know, far more than we think we mean, far more than we allow ourselves to hope for or to fear. … But thinking of language now, I think of something else, something that came to me without words. I know you understand it too; we could understand it together, you and I, I am sure, although neither the words I can suggest about it nor the voice you can bring to it will be completely right or completely true.

The rooms of the house I lived in as a child had walls as thin as partitions. The house was quite without any nostalgia of history, at least there was none for me when I was a child. As for language, for speech, I think no tongue but English of the good Midwest ever sounded there, or sounded anywhere on the street, two blocks long, under the maples and elms that held their masses of leaves over us all summer. Many a mother and father might well have had the power of strange words, one would suppose, as my own father might have had. The first language of his parents had been Norwegian. But unless it was in some idle exclamation or in some unattended voice out of sleep, nobody on our street ever summoned up that power, and the Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, was put by forever. Of course at the time I am thinking of now, speech itself was strange to me.

When I really try to imagine what it was like to hear these sounds without understanding them, to know only the music of speech, I recall a game my little sister and I used to play. As I said, the rooms of our house had thin walls; it was a small house, too. On our street most of the houses were big and square and wooden, with square wooden porches in front. The Bowles’s house and the Vandendam’s were brick, and the Zeemulder’s, Barbara and Otto’s house, was stucco, but they all looked pretty much alike. Inside, they were alike, too: living room, dining room, sun parlor, kitchen; pale flowered wallpaper, white gauzey glass curtains, dark oak; overstuffed mohair sofa and chairs; big attic, big basement; everybody knows what those houses were. Our house, though, and the Spence’s down the street, were what we called bungalows. They were intended, I believe, to resemble or to be reminiscent of one-storey houses. A narrow hat-brim of a roof sloped down from the high peak to the level of the porch roof, front and back, slanting past the two big dormers that made up the second storey. So there really was a second storey; the design succeeded only in keeping it small. If there’s a real name for such a house, I don’t know it. (Since, I have learned they were called Craftsman houses, a vogue of those hopefilled early years of our hopeless century.) You will recognize it, though: the siding in the low obtuse triangle of the eaves at either end was of cedar shingles stained green, the top half of each double-hung window had diamond-shaped panes: a bungalow. Every town in America must have at least a few of these bungalows. Ours had only two proper bedrooms to it. There were five of us. I loved that house but I have never been able to forgive it for being so small.

My little sister Dorothy slept in a curtained alcove, not much more than a closet really, off one side of my mother’s bedroom. Its ceiling fell sharply like that of a garret, because it was under one of those token edges of the roof. I was sleeping then in my father’s bedroom, across the hall. As I write this, I ask myself, And Mother, and Eleanor? Well let’s see, Eleanor was. … But despair tells me before the answer rises to the surface of my mind what had happened to bring about this particular arrangement of people in the upstairs of our house. No, I am going to speak now only of the little game my sister and I had invented for bed-time. And after that, I had better confess, there is not much more to this—this utterance. It tells only how my bed came to be moved from my mother’s room into my father’s, and that had already happened, as you see, before the time of this game of sounds that I am so long getting to, and which amounts to so little.

One of us would clap hands in the rhythm of a song, and the other would try to guess what song it might be. Probably we could do it because we knew so few songs at that age; it was likely to be Yankee Doodle or Onward Christian Soldiers or Swanee River, something out of the small repertory of children who haven’t even learned all the words. I don’t know, we may have invented the game to evade a prohibition on talking. Dorothy and I went to bed very early, and it must have been tempting to call back and forth in the warm dusk through the little distance of a hall and a room, with the doors open, when we were alone up there and everyone else was still wide awake downstairs.

No doubt we could play the same game now with more complicated songs. Or, I suppose, Dorothy and I could have used the clapping to communicate more than little tunes. Music itself has arisen from the unnoticed melodies and rhythms of the speaking voice, and from music we took for our game only the rhythm and two or three degrees of loudness; perhaps if we had been very clever children we could have skipped the music and we might have invented something out of the stress and pitch and junctures of English like the rumbling, tapping voice of the talking drums in Africa. (I am not so very great a traveler, but I have heard