LINKS:
Entertaining and Useful New Telling of an Old Story
Treasure Cave is a late addition to the
"Seckatary Hawkins" series of boys' stories and books written by
Robert F. Schulkers from 1918 to 1942, with Treasure
Cave written by Gregg Bogosian and published by him in 2017. In terms of Schulkers's time-line, Treasure Cave is additionally somewhat
backdated, so to speak, being set mid-June to early July of that crucial year,
1914: i.e., climaxing around the time of the US Fourth of July celebration
preceding the start of World War I on 28 July 1914.
Bogosian
has produced an interesting and useful volume.
Treasure Cave is first of all an entertaining
original novel set in the tradition of "boys' adventure novels" such
as "Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn,
Treasure Island, Kidnapped and many others," as Bogosian's Preface
indicates (p. xiv) and alluded to in the novel when we get the titles of some
of the books on "a big shelf" in the bedroom of the co-hero, Sam
Morgan (p. 5, quoted here).
I
liked the novel.
One
of my pleasant childhood memories is exploring the basement of the duplex we
had started renting in and coming across a box of old boys' books, which
included such classics of the form as Tom
Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) and stories of the derring-do of American volunteers in the RAF and
later the US military during World War II. So Treasure Cave pushed hard on some of my nostalgia buttons.
I
also liked what I've called above the "volume," with a less innocent
appreciation: as someone who was a working member of an English department in
the late 20th and very early 21st centuries. For Treasure Cave as a volume, a book,
contains a variation on an old-fashioned "boys' book" novel and other
material that make it — with "it" hovering in its reference between
"the novel" and "the volume" — that make it a serious look
at boyhood in the river boundaries between Ohio and Kentucky in the between-war
period (i.e., US Civil War and the Great War in Europe), a kind of metafiction,
and a highly contemporary exercise in bringing into question a central binary opposition
and taking a stab or two at some of polite America's sacred cows.
Warning:
SPOILER follows eventually, and more quickly a partial disclosure on my part (nobody can give full disclosure), and
some mild pedantry.
The
disclosure can start with my noting that I don't know if the
metafictional/deconstructive stuff was Bogosian's intention. I do believe that
Gregg has a sound background in at least the basics of literary criticism and
production since he took an English course from me early in my career in college
teaching and near the beginning of his college-studenting; and he and I were
two of three co-authors of an unpublished, highly allusive, Leftist novella set
in — at the time of composition — the still fairly distant turn of the
millennium (with a very elegant science-fictional premise suggested by Gregg).
It is quite possible the postmodernist or postmodernish aspects of the Treasure Cave volume just follow from
Bogosian's ethics and thoroughness as a scholar.
The
volume has four main parts: a 6.5-page preface by Bogosian informing his
readers about the "Seckatary Hawkins" stories by Schulkers; then
there's the Treasure Cave novel in
188 pages; and then over 45 pages of Endnotes, and a scholarly Bibliography of
seven pages.
One
kind of metafiction might be said to remind us that we're reading fiction by
laying bare some of figurative framework of the figurative architecture of the
story. By the time he's finished with his scholarly apparatus, Bogosian has
revealed the interior frame, plumbing, wiring, and construction schedule (and
invited such an extended metaphor by featuring in the novel the hero's figuring
out the details of the architecture of a house).
Anyone
teaching how to write historical fiction would do well to consider assigning Treasure Cave for a step-by-step
walk-through of how an author uses historical materials.
The
volume is also useful for anyone looking at images of childhood and indirect
evidence on actual childhood, especially of the boy variety in a period
different from our own but relatively close in time.
An
adventure tale is going to be far more adventurous than real life, and this
adventure story is undoubtedly far from the verity of kids' lives in southwest
Ohio and northern Kentucky ca. 1914, even when school is out. Still, stories
must be verisimilar: offering not verity —historical truth — but what can pass
in literature: verisimilitude.
As
Bogosian points out in his Preface, Schulkers shows a pretty rough world, where
pubescent boys form gangs (in the old, neutral sense of the word), own rifles,
and have dogs for fighting as well as pets; and a boy shooting an enemy's dog
attacking a friends is a serious event, but definitely a possible one (p.
xix-xiv). Depending upon age and class, near-teens and teenagers might be employed
in manual labor, go on camping trips on their own, swim in rivers, hunt small
game, explore caves, and, generally, manage much of their affairs without
adults.
This
is an important point about some continuity and also important changes in
American childhood. My students barely believed that we had high school
sororities and fraternities in late 1950s North-side Chicago, and year-clubs
and other clubs as well; and those teen-run groups organized softball and
touch-football leagues and dances and in one case ran a charity. I didn't own a
rifle in Chicago, but I certainly fired 22's from an early age, and I owned
knives and was pretty good at throwing them. And I'm talking here of a nice
Jewish boy from a middle-class urban family.
So
I find it realistic that relatively rural kids such as those we see in Treasure Cave have access to small-caliber
rifles and can own some pretty tough dogs — and spend a lot of time without
adult supervision and working through largely on their own issues of race and
class: there are still Civil War vets alive in 1914, and the War was still a
conscious issue in border-state Kentucky and only mostly-Union Ohio. Since
Bogosian was compiling his research, the US Civil War has again become a
conscious issue, so that point readers
should accept without difficulty.
Kids'
actually finding treasure is less realistic.
SPOILER
REMINDER.
All
of Treasure Cave is divided into
three parts, the first part narrated by and starring Sam Morgan, nicknamed "Scout":
not Seckatary Hawkins, but a smart kid, and a good and brave one, if a little
impatient with a younger sister and all "Frilly girl things" (p. 2).
A standard enough boys book hero. Part II introduces Sam and other young Morgans
to Hawkins and his club, and we learn that "Sam" is short for
Samantha, who is a tomboy in
the terminology of the time (and since at least the 16th century), if
not in the book.
And
here let the argument begin.
Sam
"Scout" Morgan shows no solidarity with other girls, who are rare in
this boys' book. But Sam lives in Kentucky in the time of the Kentucky Equal
Rights (for women) Association (pp. 11, 192 n. 3), not in the time and places
of the National Organization for Women, much less the 1969 and briefly
following Redstockings
of New York and San Francisco. And definitely female Samantha is a co-hero of a
classic boys' book.
Is
this «Good for the women?» Segue here to arguments over Ellen Ripley in Alien (1969) and Aliens (1986), and thereafter, or Sarah Connor of Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991). Except in Treasure Cave — when the argument
returns to Treasure Cave — such
contentious issues are usefully complicated by the distance of time and
culture, the esthetic decorum of having Sam a 1914 tomboy, and the whole issue
of girls at any time who act in the world as they please and are willing to
tell disapproving older sisters to cram it (although Sam would never, ever say
such a crude thing).
Bogosian
is provoking an argument here, one basic to the book. And in smaller things he
provokes some useful peripheral arguments.
For
example ….
For
example, a rather obnoxious young visitor to the Morgans, with the improbable
name of "Mickey Maus," brings news about an explosion on a steamboat
and is asked "Was anyone hurt?" and replies, "No'm. Killed a
nigger." This raises some consternation from his small audience of women
from the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, but he is confronted on his word
choice and attitudes by Sam (p. 12). Bogosian doesn't endnote Maus's words,
counting — possibly with too much optimism — on his readers to recognize his
lifting some famous lines from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” / “No’m. Killed
a nigger.” Followed by Aunt Sally's reaction, very different from that of the
women in Treasure Cave, “Well, it’s
lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt" — and on for a long, totally
insensitive speech by Twain's
character, Aunt Sally.
Huck Finn was acculturated in a White
racist society and has to overcome what respectable people in his society have
told him was the respectable Christian way; Mickey Maus is just a young racist,
and that's believable. Huck would say "nigger"; Mickey Maus would say
"nigger"; it's crucial to the point of the scene and important for
what follows that Maus say "nigger"; and Bogosian has him say it.
Similarly, Bogosian kind of takes on
the Commonwealth of Kentucky and a good deal of contemporary political culture
in having a singing of "My Old Kentucky Home" with the word
"darkies": which Seckatary Hawkins, as one of the "white
fellas" stops, while the "colored boys" stop his stopping them
and give the Whites, and most directly Hawkins, "A bit of a history lesson" (p. 158-59). Here and in an endnote (p.
230, n. 5), readers get "A bit of a history lesson" on Stephen
Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" as "actually an
anti-slavery ballad," with "the darkies" or similar phrase necessary
to make the point. (The song opens with The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky
home. / 'Tis summer, the darkies are gay," but Bogosian passes on what to
do with "gay" for an audience nowadays.)
So:
The plot of Treasure Cave is a
serviceable boys' book adventure of boys' (and one girl's) squabbles and fights
and cooperation and finding various treasures through what educated Medieval
sorts would have called sapientia et
fortitudo: the wisdom — or intelligence or cunning — of Romance heroes, and
their strength and fortitude and courage: mostly Sam and Seckatary's
intelligence, but with respect for all these virtues in many of the characters.
And Treasure Cave has a happy and
properly educational ending with, as the chapter title hath it, "The Best
Treasure of All" (hint: it has to do with reuniting families, a major
motif since, say, Joseph identified himself to his bothers in ancient Egypt [Genesis 45]
through Tom Cruise reuniting with his ex-wife and kids in the most recent War of the Worlds [2005]).
It's
not a book for everyone, but Treasure
Cave should be read and used and argued about by a substantial audience.
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