Clark’s Grammar
Books talk to us. The voices we hear will vary. Hearing your own inner voice is like catching your shadow by the hand. Sometimes hear the author’s voice (extrapolated from interviews) or the voice of a person who introduced the book to me, be it a teacher or a friend.
And, we talk back to books with furrowed brows or frowns and occasional out-loud laughter. You can close the covers on a book, which is as effective as any teenaged door slam. But, our conversations with books are not limited to body language.
Albert W. Eames had a lively dialogue with this school book and, through it, with his friends. It begins on the humble brown paper overcover. A cloud of Twombly-like pencil scrawls seem more like camouflage than absent-minded doodling. There may be something underneath. Inside the wrapping, Eames noted the place and date: Ashland, Mass, Sept 22 1862. And elsewhere: Ashland, October 17th 1862, all in his best script. He was fifteen years old.
Then, you can hear the chair scrape back on the floor and his desk-mate leans in. Charles Curtis signs his name, then adds the name Ellen Stearns below it. The boys play a game, crossing off letters, imagining what it would mean to combine these proper nouns to form one word: a couple. This is their “Practical Grammar: In Which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices, and Their Various Relations to One Another.”
Albert writes the two family names on one line: Curtis Stearns. From here and now, outside San Francisco on May 27th 2021, I wonder: wouldn’t it have been easier if, instead of forcing Victorian women to abandon their maiden names, we’d taken Charley’s route instead?
One of the boys prints Albert’s name, wobbly and uncertain, maybe upside down: Albert W. Eames Esq. More dreaming. Someone signs Jonathan.
The boys tire of the name game and one of them starts another.
And now they’re speaking to me. The second-person always speaks to me. Or you. I turn the page. To the Preface they have added “Katie’s ^TTY” to make Katie’s PRETTY FACE.
On past diagrammed sentences, adjectives in predicate, and the annotation: “How dear to my heart are the scenes the belles of my childhood.”
Past an example of transitive verbs: ‘The damsel could not say “to be loving,” without embarrassment,’ to which the boys replied in small penciled script: “That is just so.”
Until we arrive:
The book itself is half leather with buckram-wrapped boards and marbled edges, though no matching endpapers. It was mass-produced, printed in New York for the growing common school market. But, it spoke to the boys and they were compelled to speak back.
On the title page, that paratextual site par excellence, a quote floats: “Speech is the body of thought.” This book promised speech, but it offered text. Through their immediate correspondence, Charley and Albert gave body to their thoughts. They drew their dreams in pencil and talked back to the book and to each other through the book.
