An enforced hiatus

In the midst of all my happy research, I had a heart attack.

The resulting ban on stimulants put me into a rather befuddled state and, since my life is both enlivened and complicated by "Hunter" mindset (ADD to those who think it a disorder), I had to give up my chemical productivity aids. During this chaos both the book and the blog slipped entirely from my mind.

Now I am back at work and faced with a number of problems.

The first is to try to figure out how deep I want to go in my research and explanations. For example, the back story for Molly Ockett and her tribe/neighbors could probably occupy me for months. There are so many intersections and ambiguities. My research on another Tufts family member has led me to a possible link between Molly and a native American in Farmington, ME. It might be an interesting one.

But do I pursue it now ... or save it for a later time, or another book.

The second is how much money to invest in the project. Much of the material is available on microfilm or in digitized books, but one interesting source book is unavailable and the last copy sold auctioned for $12K+ (well out of MY price range).

An interesting side note. In the process of working on this book, I had assumed that Molly Ockett was an older woman, but now I realize that she was only eight years older than Henry. Since he was 25 when they met, she would have been 33.

Another interesting side note is that Henry seduces King Tumkin Hagen's (Tumhegan's) daughter. This Indian king later becomes a fierce enemy of the colonists. Is this a coincidence? Am I extrapolating too far?

Yeesh!

Something to keep in mind

Note to self:

1. If I am using voice recognition software to do my writing, and
2. If I have a freshly-brewed cup of French roast coffee sitting next to me as I work, and 
3. If a large black fly is pestering me, and
4. If I wave my hand to shoo it away, thereby
5. Tipping over the cup, and
6. Dumping the steaming coffee over the desk, and 
7. Into my lap, thereby
8. Triggering a long and extensive series of unsavory expletives, which
9. Continues for some time as the mess is cleaned up, and since
10. The voice recognition software was still on, and
11. Recorded the entire incident (with its own Puritanical assumptions about what I was yelling), then
12. The resulting text is nearly amusing enough for me to laugh at the entire incident.

Ego Trip

I just found a tasty bit of information that previous folk have missed. Damn! I'm good!

If I may paraphrase Harold Hill (from The Music Man, "You Got Trouble")

Why sure I'm a researcher,

A good researcher,

and I'm always proud to say it. 

I consider that the hours I spend 

With Google search are golden. 

Helps you cull the nonsense

And the fool threads 

And the troll bait. 

Did you ever try to use key words to 

Narrow a search algorithm on a body function 

To keep yourself out of the porn sites?

But just as I say, 

It takes Boolean algebra and curiosity to score

In the research game, 

I say that any boob can take

And copy a wikidedia article,

and they think they're smart! 

Okay, THAT's out of my system ... back to work.

What Entropy Means To Me

Multiple computer failures and human administrative tangles of cordons rouge have made my life more interesting than productive for the last few weeks. It's time to settle down and get some work done.

The gap this time ...

... is purely from frustration and my reluctance to swear on line.

The problem with Henry is that I never know how far he's bending reality to his own whim (I can't say purpose since it seems unlikely that some of these lies serve no purpose at all) or if it is faulty memory or general cussedness.

Now I have another factor to deal with. It seems that his original ghost writer may have been an active participant (collaborator, victim, or dupe) in some of these events. I was curious the first time his unusual surname cropped up in the book, but it now appears that he must have been well acquainted with Henry and his friends over a long period. This makes me wonder if there is an additional agenda. Is Tash lying about Henry's lies? Is he providing further complexity to obscure other events?

Perhaps that will become more clear as I plow ahead through Tash's turgid text.

In the meantime, the problem I face is trying to find out when or if Henry married Sally Judd. All the records that I've seen suggest that Henry has her father's name wrong, her brother-in-law's name wrong, and the date wrong (child brides were not uncommon and Henry is a reprehensible person, but I still have a hard time believing that he would have married a 12-year-old or that her father would have offered her younger sister in marriage).

Another explanation for my tardy posting is that I have been getting ready for winter. I've stacked a half cord of wood, harvested from the garden ... all those little chores that come with the season.

I've also done quite a bit of reading and have a couple of recommendations for anyone interested in colonial and revolutionary history. Both of these books are surprising since they provide a significantly different view of the period. I spent much of my time going "WHAT!!", "WAITAMINNIT!", and "NO ... Really?".

The first is Eric Burns' "Infamous Scribblers". Burns explains how the lies and misrepresentations of the highly partisan colonial newspapers were just as excessive as the British government's errors in judgment and mistreatment of the colonies. It is a thick read but fascinating, witty, and delightful.

The other book is Sarah Vowell's "The Wordy Shipmates", a cheerful and nicely irreverent view of the puritan settlers. The material is based on their own writings, but Sarah does a bit of interpretation and extrapolation.

As usual there are whiny reviewers on Amazon  kvetching about both of the above books, but there complaints can be summed up as "this book isn't boring enough to be history".

I recommend both of them.

OH! A word to the wise. Amazon sells a number of books that look like paperback reprints of old books but aren't. They are distinguished by their plain black and white covers and low price. In many cases there is no publisher listed.

What you get if you buy these books , at least in my experience, is a book that has been scanned in using OCR but without any quality checking or editing. This results in such horrors as

"COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE CUSTOMS"

being rendered as

"COUKTSHIP AND MAEEIAGE CUSTOMS".

Other travesties include: "An Extraordinary Cold Storm of TVind and Snow", "alchymyloralcamyne, oca- my", "New England Earities" ... but then there's my favorite:

"Dr.  Uriah Rogers, Jr., of Norwalk County of Fair- field takes this method to acquaint the Publick & particularly such as are desirous of taking the Small Pox by way of Innoculation, that having had Considerable Experience in that Branch of Practice and carried on the same bet season with great Success : has lately a cited a er.$TT::eTit Hospital for thai r:tos just wtxin the Jurisdiction Ioe of the Protinee of Xew York about sine mOes distant from X. T. Harbour where he intends to ... "

Obviously the problem is enhanced by the fact that the books I use often quote heavily from colonial sources with the usual pre-Websterian ingenuity in spelling. Frustrating and irritating as these badly published books are, it is good that most of them are already properly digitized and on line.

So don't waste your money.

Small Clues

Sometimes you just need to let your curiosity loose. I'm working away at Chapter 5 when I find an assumption in the text that a person mentioned got his "just deserts" and that his comeuppance is known well enough not to be further identified. Well ... not to me.

A few minutes of research and I had my answer, and a footnote that will take up 80% of a page. A wonderful and tragic story hidden in an off-hand comment, and, if I hadn't been puzzled enough to do a tiny bit of research, I'd have missed it completely.

Further research to get a few more details revealed an odd knot of interrelationships which caught me completely by surprise. I know these communities were small, but frankly the constant reappearance of certain people is really discombobulating. The name Tash pops up far too often.

Henry's about to marry his second wife without the knowledge of, or divorce from, his first..

Sackcloth and Ashes

I can't believe that I've let the blog lie fallow for so long. I had promised myself to update it daily, and I will try to do so from now on.

My only excuse is that I was over on the other coast for two weeks enjoying the company of children and grandchildren, telling them stories and playing while pretty much ignoring Henry. One of the stories I told will need to be written down soon, since it is entirely my own and it was quite popular with the kids.

Be that as it may, I have grown lax and must reinspire myself.

I am in the middle of Chapter 5 of the narrative and I am delighting in the fact that Henry is failing to recognize an opportunity to go straight with the assistance of a powerful businessman who thinks that Henry, the consummate liar, might make a good salesman.

I'm also in the process of writing a letter of intent that I hope will open the doors of rare book rooms, historical societies, and special collections. There is a meeting of the Salem Historical Society next week and I hope to meet some fanatics there, but most of my hopes are pinned to my requests for access to the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library's Rare Book Room and a couple of other sun-sources.

As a final note tonight, someone suggested recently that I was doing a disservice to the writing since "back then everybody wrote like that". But that is not true. The florid prose of Henry's narrative was NOT common to the time. One book that is a particular favorite of mine is "The Itinerarium of Doctor Alexander Hamilton". It is the journal of his travels (1624 miles) from May to September of 1744. It is witty and intelligent but it is also simple and clear with none of the ornamentations and complications of the prose used in Henry's tome.

I stand my ground.

A change of coast

Since my last post, I have retrieved my computer, done a ton of research, packed up and gone to visit the opposite coast.

It is the cool of the evening in Kirkland Washington, just across the lake from Seattle. I am sitting on the back deck of my son's house after a delightful dinner. The sky is a brilliant blue and the sun's low angle highlights the leaves of the laurel, the horse-chestnut, and the Douglas fir in what Kipling might have called "more than oriental splendor." Speaking of which, my soundtrack for this post is a quiet shakuhachi rendition of "Depicting the Cranes in their Nest" (Sokaku Reibo).

My oldest granddaughter just quietly sneaked out here and, announcing that she was a ninja (not a contradiction to someone who is almost five-years-old) stole my pen. She also tried to steal a fast-food premium toy that my youngest granddaughter had carelessly forgotten in my pocket, but I was quick enough to move it out of harm's way.

I've made some progress. I have now written my way into the first part of Chapter 4 and Henry's first attempt at a major crime, I spent a good portion of the day, however, pondering the problem posed to me by the writing group I participate in.

The question has to do with the formatting of the book. The group seems split on whether my use of footnotes as an integral part of the structure will annoy or repel a significant portion of my potential readers. Half of the group seems convinced that there is a strong prejudice against footnoted text no matter how entertaining. The other half seems to think, as I do, that in this case, since the footnotes constitute a parallel narrative, people will get over it and read them anyway. I can't help but think that if people can deal with "House of Leaves" they can deal with a book that has footnotes.

On the other hand, I do want to be able to sell this book, and although HoL has a reputation as an experimental novel, the truth is that I have not seen it mentioned on many 10 best lists other than those by gleefully obscurantist hipsters.

So it looks as if I need to think about this.

My immediate reaction is to say "to hell with it ... leave it as it is." It was good enough for Sir Richard Burton's translation of "A Thousand Nights and a Night." But it isn't as if there weren't some viable alternatives, to wit:

• I could increase the size of the footnote typeface to that of the text.
• I could draw a line across the page with the text on the top and the commentary on the bottom.
• I could do side notes a la The Annotated Alice.
• I could place the paragraphs of commentary immediately after that which is being commented on and in a drastically different typeface.

I'm not quite sure how to solve this. It is a puzzlement.

Sloane Ranger

I took a break from writing this morning and went out hunting. My fields were the second-hand bookstores of Newburyport and my prey was to be old magazines with useful engravings and woodcuts for my 18th and 19th century clipart files. In this, I was disappointed, but all was not lost.

Much to my delight, one of the stores had a handful of Eric Sloane books in hardcover and with plastic protective wraps over the dust jackets. They weren't cheap, but Sloane is such a blessing to people who work in subjects concerning early American life, that I didn't hesitate more than half a heartbeat before snapping all of them up. They will be the backups for the paperback versions that I have been using for so long. Some of which are tied together with twine to keep the loose pages from escaping.

Here's what I found today:
Sloane, Eric. Diary of an Early American Boy. New York: Funk & Wagnall's. 1962
Sloane, Eric. An Age of Barns. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. 1985
Sloane, Eric. The Seasons of America Past, New York: Funk & Wagnall's. 1958
Sloane, Eric. Eric Sloane's America. New York: Promontory Press. 1982

The best of the bunch for me is his "Diary of an Early American Boy" which is a core inspiration for my project about Henry, but "Eric Sloane's America" is also great since it is three books in one: "American Barns and Covered Bridges" from 1954, "Our Vanishing Landscape" from 1955, and "American Yesterday" from 1956. This is from the book "The Seasons of America Past".

I would love to be able to illustrate the way he does, but I cannot. I will have to hope for an artist who is interested in the material, or track down some ancient woodcuts or lithographs.

... and another reference! Alice Morse Earle mentions Henry in "Stagecoach and Tavern Days".

Curiouser and Curiouser ...

... as Alice might have exclaimed. I have just, this morning, found two books that mention Henry. The first is in a book that is still in print:

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun. New York: Vintage, 2002

Ulrich, also known for the wonderful "A Midwife's Tale" uses material from Henry's account of his meeting with Molly Ockett and his two year stay with the Abenaki. 

A somewhat more serendipitous discovery occurred as I was sorting some of the books that I've retrieved from my father's library. One of them, a slightly battered octavo bound in dark red buckram, turned out to be:

Charles Hamilton, ed. Men of the Underworld. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952

Chapter 1 of this book is "The Adventure of the Drugged Grooms" (Henry Tufts, Horse Thief). If you'd like to read it, I linked to the digital version of the book in Questia.

The funny thing was that I was sorting books to get away from Henry for a while.

I notice that my father bought it second-hand. He paid $2.50 for it, and judging by the handwriting used for the price, I'm guessing that he bought it from the Starr Bookshop which used to live underneath the Harvard Lampoon Building just outside Harvard Square. This might sound funny to folks in the age of Amazon, but those of us who love second hand bookstores quickly learned the various booksellers' codes and handwriting. At least a dozen books on my shelves have this particular handwriting on their flyleaves.

Another clue, of course, is that someone has written "Frank Monahan" in neat but childlike script about three quarters of an inch high using a fat-nibbed pen dipped in grass-green ink.

You can take yer damned kindle and its sterile interface.

Great good cheer!

One of the things that I've been meaning to do is find a copy of the original 1807 edition of the book.

It's not that I don't trust Edmund Pearson's instincts and editorial judgment, it's just ... well ... I always get a better feel for something if I have a more direct experience.

So I'm really happy today!

A few days ago Sara(h?) one of the reference librarians at my town's temple of words told me about how to get electronic access to a larger libraries databases. One of their databases contained a high-resolution scan of the book! SCORE!!

I still intend to travel to Boston's Rare Book Room or the American Antiquarian Society to actually lay hands on a copy (even if only through thin cotton gloves). One of the two is Thomas Higginson's personal copy. (I'll be speaking more about him later.)

Through the good auspices of a Boston reference librarian, I may have found one of the rare copies of "The Compendium of Tufts Kinsmen: a Substitutive Genealogy by Herbert Freeman Adams." at the Malden Public Library. Since it is listed as “In Library Use Only”, It sounds like a short road-trip is in my near future.

Speaking of which ... I am seriously considering an extended road trip to visit all the towns in which Henry stayed, stole, was jailed, or got married. I'd send out letters to the historical societies and libraries requesting access, and then just parallel his journeys. It seems like it would be an interesting trip; reading "then", seeing "now".

I've been meaning to do the same for another history project, but the subject of that one was more sedentary and I guess it just doesn't have the same appeal as tracing the vagabond.

A bit of a Hiatus

I had intended to post nearly every day, but the combination of research mania and having to conform to the library hours while my computer is held hostage by the repair company, has made for a series of "dammit I forgot again moments."

And don't think that I am complaining about the library either. Librarians are God's gift to researchers and writers. The fact that I want to work longer hours than they have librarians for is my problem. I am thankful for all the help and patience they have with me. They let me move in at opening and set up my barricades around a computer; piles of reference books, notebooks, and pads of paper topped off with my battered old straw hat as a single crenelation. Unlike the libraries of my youth, they even supply me with coffee (though I do wish that they'd dump the flavored stuff and get in some French roast).

I've run into a couple of stumbling blocks. Although I trust Edmund Pearson's assessment, I still think it behooves me to check out the original 1807 publication of the Tufts book. EP said that he'd seen it at the Boston Public Library, so I've sent off a note to them to make sure that it's still there and that I can get access. I also want to find a copy of Herbert Freeman Adams' Compendium of Tufts Kinsmen, to see if he was able to fill in some of the blanks that dot the mimeographed newsletter he sent out back in the 70s and 80s. The Kinsmen organization seems to still exist, but I am still trying to track down who is running or maintaining it.

I am about to start working on Chapter 4. I have left a trail of breadcrumbs behind me in the footnotes for areas of research which would just slow me down. For example, there is the question, "how much should I assume that people know about the period?" The problem is that so much faulty information is out there. The historical record is based so much on men of substance and power and so little on the ordinary man. I really want to paint a good and comprehensive picture of the time, but at the same time I want it to be readable.

Another thing that I have to think about is that my footnotes are becoming more conversational. I think I like the idea, I don't want my readers to have to deal with dry academic information, but I can't help but be a little nervous about going too far.

That's enough for today, though. Time to start Chapter 4.

Pen & Ink

My computer is still out for repair, so I must use the workstations at the library. This means that I am restricted to working only when the library is open (unless I decide to emulate the hero of my book and break-in during the dark of the night).

For someone like me, used to working late into the night, this restriction is a bit of a challenge, and my wife "The Compleat Technophobe" suggests that my crankiness is the result of digital withdrawal symptoms. This is, of course, utter bunkum. I am cranky because of the weather, because of the interference of social responsibilities, and because the library doesn't stay open until 3 am.

Rather than withdrawal, the lack of a computer is more like forgetting one's pocket knife, you keep reaching for a tool that you are used to having nearby. It's an irritation, not an insurmountable urge.

But not having the computer available has benefits. It forces me to work more deliberately and plan more carefully. This blog entry, for example, is being written during a sweltering Sunday afternoon, in longhand (italic, I hate Palmer Method), and, out of sheer perversity, it is being written with a dip pen.

Since I don't have air conditioning, a fan on the large oak table is giving me a bit of a breeze to make things more bearable. A couple of binder clips on the pad of paper keep the sheets from fluttering.

It is a good sensation to work this way. It's not just that I'm using writing tools that are not much different from those used by Major Tash, or whoever the ghostwriter of Henry's book was, it is the the forced change of pace. There's a lot to be said for low tech.

I'm not a Luddite, far from it, I love technology and gadgets, but I also have a certain discomfort at letting devices do too much. I carry a mobile phone, but not a PDA (at least not since leaving the corporate teat), and have seldom used a pocket-sized device to access the web (a situation that is unlikely to change as my eyes age. It confuses the heck out of people as I spend part of my time doing complex research over the internet and part of it analyzing and writing the results with a pencil or pen and a pad of paper.

When I was young, I was, for a time, an actor. One of my challenges was that it was difficult to memorize lines. I am, after all, the scatter-brained poster child for ADD. My options were to quit acting, try to apprentice myself to Marcel Marceau, or find some way to memorize better. In another context, my father had mentioned a theory of his that the act of writing something helps to embed it in one's memory. So I tried it. I wrote out all my lines and it worked. It worked even better if I wrote out the entire play. It worked if you typed but not as well, and this led to my conclusion that it wasn't the writing as much as it was the slower pace that forced you to think each word in order. It is a kind of physically imposed deliberation. When I moved from speaking the words of others to writing my own, I found that ideas and language that I composed in longhand were often better than those that I wrote directly on a typewriter. When word processors came along the difference remained.

A few years ago I tried the experiment of writing with a dip pen. It slowed the writing down in a different way. Now, I was forced to take odd little breaks in order to dip the pen again. I found it pleasant and a useful way to work. I've had a dip pen on my desk ever since.

I don't use a quill pen (I'll go into the historical quill pen mistake another time). I use a General's #204B penholder with a cork grip, and a Speedball "Bowl Pointed" steel nib which I dip into either Pelikan 2001 Blue or, if I'm feeling fancy, Norton's Walnut ink I keep the open inkwell in a wide raku bowl in case I have an attack of the klutzes. Squares of salvaged t-shirt material are pen wipes, extra nibs are in a medicine bottle and a plastic eyedrop bottle holds cleaning water. More pens are in a container that my wife made for me; reed pens, crow quills, and others.

And when I put my pen down, for a moment it rests easily on a six inch long cast-iron paperweight shaped like the upper surface of a log with two frogs on it.

What is the name of the damn book?

That's not a simple question. It has two different names already, and I'm about to give it a third.

The original book was published in 1807 by Samuel Bragg, Jr. (a Dover NH printer) as:

"A Narrative of the Life, Adventures, Travels and Sufferings of Henry Tufts, Now Residing at Lemington, in the District of Maine. In Substance as compiled from his own Mouth."

It was republished in 1930 as:

"The Autobiography of a Criminal"

This edition was edited by Edmund L. Pearson, a librarian and writer of true crime accounts, best known, perhaps, for his book on Lizzie Borden. Pearson edited out some of the more egregious flights of fancy and superfluous preaching and added an excellent introduction and end note.

It was republished once more, with the same title, by Loompanics Unlimited of Port Townsend WA, the sadly defunct counter cultural publisher. This edition used Pearson's edits, but excised his other supporting material, replacing the introductory essay with one by Neal Keating.

Omission?

It occurs to me that I haven't yet identified the book. Fear not! I shall in my next post.

Not really a wasted day

My computer is out for repair, so I came to the library with my thumb drive and the best of intentions. I got all set up, opened my portable apps, and was about to start work, when I realized that I had a question that I hadn't answered.

The Tufts and Pearson families are intertwined in the genealogies, and the question had occurred that Edmund L. Pearson, who had edited the second (1930) edition of the book, might possibly be a relative of Henry's ... though probably much removed.

So I went looking.

Pearson was born in Newburyport, MA which might be a clue, but I'm not ready yet to start subscribing to the genealogy websites to try to nail down the relationship.

But I found out some other good stuff about ELP. There's a true crime writer, Laura James, who writes about him on her blog CLEWS, and a number of his books are available at the Internet Archive. I'm going to have to set some time aside to read them, but not until my computer gets back from the hospital. I just don't have enough time at the library, and frankly his prose calls for late evening and a glass of good scotch.

At that last site, I also found a bit of a gem; a genealogy of the early Tufts which confirmed that Henry's first lie was on page 1 of his autobiography. Very cool!

Unfortunately it is time to pull my thumb out of the library's computer and wander home to take care of more corporeal responsibilities.

What?!

I am going to tell you a story about telling stories. It is a story about a liar supposedly by himself and the challenge of trying to figure out when ... or if he tells the truth. The liar at the heart of the story is long dead self-confessed criminal and his "autobiography" was "ghost-written" and published more than 200 years ago.

The book is a poisonous confection. It consists of layers of confessed crimes flavored with lies and misdirection and frosted with an indigestible sugary frosting of flowery language and superfluous classical allusions, resulting in a torte of torts.

... and yet ...

There are some great virtues to this book. I think it will be worthwhile for me to edit and expand it; to make it palatable for a modern audience and make it more meaningful than it has been.

From the little work that I have already done, I know that the effort will affect me, it already has, so it might be useful for me to document my reactions, what bubbles up from my life or seeps down into it as I go about the work of extracting his story.