21: “Do Clams Bite?” began as . . .
21: “Do Clams Bite?” began as . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” the Preface begins
Preface
The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.
Dylan Thomas, “Reminiscences of Childhood”
“DO CLAMS BITE?” began as a single brief anecdote, the account of my first attempt to dig clams. Briefly, here’s how it goes. As soon as I was old enough to keep my chin above water in the clam flats of Bolotomy Bay, my big grandfather, my father’s father, took me clamming with him. He was a casual clammer who usually wanted only a few clams for dinner. He “treaded” for clams, walking around in the flats and feeling for the clams with his toes. He walked with a jerky, shuffling step, pushing against the bottom with the balls of his feet. When he felt a clam, he would duck beneath the surface and scoop it out of the sand. He’d bring it up and drop it into the front of his snug wool bathing suit. I watched him go through this routine, filling the front of his bathing suit, then waddling to the boat, his suit distended and lumpy, dumping his catch on the deck and going right back to the hunt. I saw at once that imitating this procedure successfully had something to do with being or becoming a man, but I thought there was a pretty high risk of being unmanned too. I wanted to ask Grandfather, “Do clams bite?” but I knew that if I asked, he would look at me with his smart gray eyes and know at once why I was asking, and that I’d be embarrassed, so I didn’t ask, and instead each time I found a clam I pretended that it squirmed out of my grasp before I could get it into my suit.
I had been using this little story effectively at dinner tables for quite a few years. Sentimentalists could release a wistful sigh or two for the innocent little Peter in it, and intellectuals could ride the castration theme for a couple of hours. One evening, early in the telling, just after I had introduced Big Grandfather and Big Grandmother, my father’s large and sturdy parents, the realization struck me that, over the years, as I had told the story, I had distorted the events and characters beyond recognition. It was time, I thought, to strip away the baloney and get down to the truth. The result of my effort to tell it without embellishment, just as it happened, is “Do Clams Bite?”
I’d like to give you an idea of how I went about reconstructing the incident and to point out one or two facts that I may have made up.
CONSCIOUSLY TRYING to revisit the past is a little like trying to see back through a long tunnel or, more accurately, one of those corrugated metal culverts through which streams are allowed to run under roadways. Bear with me through this. The culvert itself is the set of your current prejudices, desires, antipathies, enthusiasms, regrets, and whatnot that restrict your view of the past. You peer through this narrow tube and see only a tiny circle of light, though you are certain that there is more back there at the other end, beyond what you can see. Apparently, just looking won’t be enough. You are going to have to crawl through the culvert and see what is back there. If you make it all the way through, you will be surprised by what you find. You will have the odd sensation of being in unfamiliar territory and yet recognizing everything.
By crawling through that culvert, I discovered, to my surprise, that I had first begun using the do-clams-bite anecdote as a boy, just shortly after I had begun going on the clamming trips with Big Grandfather, and before I was even sure whether clams could bite or not. I was surprised and pleased to find that even in that very first telling I had altered the facts considerably.
That first telling occurred one magical night when I sat on the bulkhead along the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy River, at the end of the street where Big Grandfather lived, between two moonlit sprites, Margot and Martha Glynn. That occasion provides the ending for “Do Clams Bite?” and I have presented it exactly as it happened, except for one or two small adjustments that I had to make, primarily for structural reasons. For example, I have represented Margot and Martha as twins, although in fact Margot is a year older than Martha. The reason is that in that moonlight-on-the-Bolotomy scene I spend some time swimming in the river with one of the girls. When I had them read the manuscript, each claimed to have been the girl described. We spent a long time arguing before I came up with a change that all of us found acceptable: I made the girls twins, we flipped a coin to see which name I would use for the girl I described, and I added a passage that introduces some confusion over which of the girls is which.
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