THE NEXT MORNING, I began writing the story down. I think that I might have been able to complete it very quickly if I hadn’t tried to verify some of the facts. When I did, I found to my surprise that I had made up two essential ingredients.
As part of the story as I told it to Porky White, I had included the version of the fable of the fox and the clam that I remembered from the first real book that I owned, The Little Folks’ Big Book. Before I began writing, I went downstairs to the library to see how accurately I had remembered the fable. When I opened the Big Book I was surprised to find that the fable of the fox and the clam was not in it. I had been certain that I had first encountered it there. I had read and reread the Big Book so often as a child that I could recite most of the stories in it, and the memory of the fable of the fox and the clam returned to me with such clarity and force that I was sure it had been one of the stories I had memorized from the Big Book.
A little shaken, I searched through my class photographs from grade school to find a picture of Matthew Barber, a boy who figured prominently in the story as I had told it to Porky. He was not there.
I was rattled. These discoveries were terribly disturbing, because they demonstrated to me that the memories, fabrications, and unrealized desires from my past were in even more of a muddle than I had thought. If I couldn’t separate them from one another, then I really didn’t know any longer who I was. Fabrications from my Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations were invading the territory that had once been held pretty securely by memories from my life. Dazed and confused, I wandered absently to my workroom and stood at the window, staring.
After weeks of introspection, during which I spent much of each workday standing at the window of my workroom watching the Jolly Tinkers build a foundation for the cottage and move it into place, I came to understand why I had fabricated my memories of Matthew Barber and the fable of the fox and the clam.
So that the reader may be spared the time and effort required to come to a similar understanding, I include here a summary of my conclusions.
TO UNDERSTAND the relationship between experience and imagination, one must be familiar with the paint-by-number canvases that were popular when I was a boy. These were canvases or canvas-textured boards on which were printed, in pale blue, the outlines of portions of a picture, each portion to be filled in with paint of a color indicated by a numeral within the outline. It was often not immediately obvious, from looking at the pale blue outlines alone, what some parts of the picture were supposed to depict, but when all the oddly-shaped pieces had been filled with paint, one could see the whole picture—if the painting had been done with care and the viewer stood a considerable distance from it.
It seems to me that my earliest experience with something creates, in my mind, a sketch like the pale blue sketches on those paint-by-number canvases. This sketch then becomes a framework for all my subsequent experiences with similar things. In most of my later life, I’ve been putting paint into the oddly-shaped segments of a picture that I sketched very early. However, as time has gone on, I’ve run out of space on the canvas of experience, and in order to accommodate new experiences I have had to paint over some of the older ones. You can, no doubt, imagine the results. The outline and the earliest experiences are soon obscured. The picture grows more distorted as time passes, at least in the sense that it departs more and more from the original outline. However, since the earlier experiences have been obscured by the later ones, I am forced to rely on memory and on the assumed congruity of the later and earlier experiences to reconstruct the earlier ones, and that reliance has been the source of several illusions.
Take, for example, my understanding of the Big Book.
From the Big Book, right from the start, I got the idea—or the pale blue outline of an idea—that all the characters in the Big Book lived in the same place, a place that was as comfortable a home for talking squirrels as it was for dashing knights. Over the course of the years, this childish idea has persisted, although as a young man I came to regard it with the patronizing indulgence that so many of us, as soon as we become young men and women, feel for ourselves as children and our childish misconceptions, and I felt embarrassed by the idea, as I did by many other ideas that seemed like unbecoming baggage for a young man, the intellectual equivalents of hand-me-down cardboard suitcases plastered with stickers from one’s parents’ travels. But after I had finished being a youth I rediscovered my affection for the idea and began painting away at it.
I have now a fond affection for the idea that all the characters in books live in the same place, the Big-Book place, and I’ve painted in so much of it over the years that I have a picture of a well-populated town, where, with Albertine on my arm, I sometimes walk along a shady street on a summer morning and pause to watch the talking squirrels gather nuts in Emma Bovary’s front yard while Tom Sawyer paints her fence.
At the same time, I seem to have been expanding and distorting the memory of the Big Book itself to include every story that I’ve ever enjoyed, or every story that has had a strong effect on me. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that in the picture I formed of the Big Book I included the fable of the fox and the clam, although in fact it was never there. Nor is it surprising that in the mental pictures I had of my early grade-school years, I painted in the pale and dour face of Matthew Barber, though I didn’t meet Matthew until I entered high school.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
July 28, 1983
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
🎧 97: The next morning, I began . . .