The Beaver of Wrath

Today is almost exactly, as well as I can remember, the 30th anniversary of the day my first published book appeared in bookstores. 
       Will Jacobs and I wrote The Summer of the Beaver in a six-week fever from the end of May to the beginning of July, 1981. He was twenty-six, I was not quite twenty-four. Things change fast when you're young; at the start of those six weeks we were just tossing off parodies to make each other laugh, at the end of it we were revising a book with editors in mind and strategizing how to pitch it to them. 
       I think we kind of knew that this was the first publishable thing either of us had written, but we weren't about to give up on our vain dreams of selling novels that quickly...and so we ended up birthing a monster of a query letter in which we pitched nine (yes, nine) books at once. A few years ago I read that letter out loud at a Writers Grotto event called Regretature, to the great amusement of people who were not only older and wiser but would have been smart enough not to do anything like that even in their twenties. Here's the video. 
       We sent off over 100 of those letters, and with them caught the interest of one one agent, Martha Millard, and one editor, Peter Cannon at Crown Publishing. We weren't surprised, deep down, when they both asked to see only the Beaver book.
      We were worried that a genuine, professional, New York editor would insist on messing with our idiosyncratic inventions—like asking us to substitute better-known authors for personal fascinations like William Saroyan and Alain Robbe-Grillet—but we had nothing to fear. Peter was a new editor, no older or wiser than we were, and he loved the book's peculiarity as much as we did. The 25 parodies and the bizarre historical narrative that holds them together saw print almost exactly as we'd written them, except that Peter (wisely) made us ditch the absurd first-person narrator we'd created, Starchy McGregor, a supposed stunt double for Jerry Mathers. He then made us cut (to our momentary horror but ultimate agreement) a ton of absurd narrative from the end of the book, including our synopsis for a politically-charged movie called Beaver Now. And he suggested a better title: The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season.
       A writer had to wait a long, long time in those pre-computerized days of publishing for his book to come out. We did our revisions through the summer of 1982 and publication was scheduled for a year later. But finally the day came when our beloved publicist, Sally Berk, called to tell us that our book was on the counter of a real bookstore in New York City. From that day on, although nothing quite went the way I'd fantasized it, nothing was quite the same either. 
       Let's pick up where we left off last time, with the fall-out from the arrival of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Beaver at the Leave It to Beaver production offices...
 

May 5-10, 1963

Mosher and Connelly were frankly perplexed by this submission. Although horrified at Kerouac's new interpretation of Eddie and Wally's morality, they were nonetheless flattered that such a literary giant would contribute to their show. Having nothing to lose, they presented the script to ABC executives. While they did not recognize Kerouac's name, the executives did seem tentatively interested in this new direction.

       Mosher and Connelly then showed the script to the cast. Hugh Beaumont, who brought Ward Cleaver to life on the show, commented, "I like the idea of Wally wanting to be a writer. I did a little writing myself when I was a young man." Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver's little friend Whitey Whitney, praised to the references to Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, whose works he greatly admired.
       Mosher and Connelly telegraphed Kerouac, asking if he would care to work with Roland MacLane and Dick Conway on future episodes should ABC reverse its decision to cancel the show. While they waiting for a response, the second submission arrived.
       The Gomalco Productions offices were rocked by the arrival in the mail of The Beaver of Wrath by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In this script, the aging Steinbeck seeks out the essential kinship between the migrants of the depression, whom he eulogized, and the Cleaver family, who epitomize for him the fulfillment of the promise of the Joads.



    

THE BEAVER OF WRATH

John Steinbeck


The gray soil of Metzger's Field turns to white and the red tanbark of the schoolyard is burned a pale pink by the sun. The people of Mayfield, the people of the land from Camelback Cutoff down to Bell Port, watch Miller's Pond dry into its own mud.
       Beaver walks down the road toward home, just released from Saturday school detention for punching Larry Mondello in the stomach. He finds the people of Mayfield streaming out of town in their station wagons. Eddie Haskell wanders by, philosophizing humbly. Beaver says, "Creep! Creep! Creep!" Eddie shakes his head. "Nope, I used to be a creep. But I asked myself, What is it a man can be a creep about? and I knew it was only hisself. I heard you punched a squirt." Beaver says, "Yeah, and I'd do it again if I had to."
       They find Ward, in golf sweater, tie, and overalls, squatting in the front yard, drawing patterns in the dust with his newspaper. Wally squats beside him, saying, "Gee, Pa, it's Satiddy afternoon and thar ain't no water in the pond. The fambly ain't got a chancet of a good picnic now." June says, "I seen in the picture books oncet how they's water up to Friend's Lake. I'd like to get me one o' them little picnic tables with trees all around." She spies Beaver and says, "Praise Gawd for vittory! Now I got my whole Cleaver fambly about me again! And if it ain't the old creep!"
       Eddie says, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, but I ain't a creep no more. No man's got business bein' more of a creep than any other." June loads the station wagon with pork bones and baloney sandwiches. Gilbert, Richard, Whitey, Larry, and Violet Rutherford pile on the luggage rack. Wally leads Lumpy to join them. Lumpy says, "Gosh, will there be rabbits we're going, Wally?" "Sure, Lump, you'll have lots of rabbits." "Oh, boy, Wally, and can I eat the rabbits, Wally, huh?"

       On the way out of town they meet Gus Chong, the old Chinese fireman and crooked merchant. Wally buys Ward a dog and Beaver beats Wally to a pulp. They find work selling frogs at demeaning wages. In moral outrage, Eddie becomes a creep again and is beaten up by Richard and Gilbert. Beaver is bruised and knows he must go. 
       June struggles to keep her fambly together, but Beaver says, "Don't be thinkin' about me bein' gone, Ma. Wherever there's kids in trouble, I'll be there. Wherever there's a creep givin' the business to a squirt, Ma, I'll be there." June dries her tears on the dusty sleeve of her old gingham dress.

    
TAG: At night, Wally is doing his 'lectronics homework at his desk. Beaver is packing peaches into a crate. He says, "Hey, Wally, are there any brothers in the Bible with the initials W and B?" Wally says, "Gosh, Beav, I don't know. I ain't no preacher. I'm just a man o' the land." They collapse exhausted into bed and turn out the meager light, but the room goes on glowing warmly. 

Dharma Beaver

Thirty years ago this month, my first book was published... and in the process served up one of the more amusing ironies of my life. 
       Before we wrote The Beaver Papers, Will Jacobs and I had worked constantly, furiously, and obsessively to become published novelists. Nothing else had mattered to either of us since our teens except "becoming a writer," and to us, like most young lit-heads, that meant novels. I'd dropped out of college to write novels; Will had refused to go in the first place. We met at a used bookstore, where we'd both taken jobs in order not to have to think about anything but books. We'd each written a few of the things, every one of them completely dismissed by every agent and editor we sent them to. Then we wrote one together—in multiple Faulknerian first person voices—which garnered no greater worldly success than the comment by our boss at the bookstore that "it's actually not as bad as I thought it would be." Ultimately we even compromised our literary purity just so we could jam a foot into the doorway of publishing: Will wrote a hard-boiled mystery and I wrote a kids' book. Those didn't work any better than the Faulkner homage had.
       During those years of frustration, we would blow off steam by writing nonsense to make each other laugh. We discovered that parody enabled us both to try on the clothes of the writers we loved and to make fun of the crap that we saw other (luckier, less deserving) writers getting away with. We wrote intentionally bad poetry and mock scholarly reviews. And we wrote summaries of episodes of Leave It to Beaver as if they'd been written by all our favorite authors. None of it intended for anyone's eyes but our own...and sometimes those of a long-suffering roommate.
       But when those roommates—Jim Zook for me, Chip Kabrich for Will—started laughing out loud at our Beaver parodies, we experienced, for the first time in our lives, what it was like to write for an audience that actually wanted to hear us. It was a heady feeling, enough to make us write twenty-five of those parodies and read them to anyone who would sit still. At some point, I don't remember when or how, we realized that we might be able to get a book out of them, and maybe even sell it to a publisher...and if we could get any book into print, even this silly thing, then surely that would open the door to getting our novels published!
       We were almost right about that. Every sale we've made since then—humor articles, comic books, nonfiction books, screenplays—has happened, directly or indirectly, because of this book that we knocked off to distract ourselves from the frustration of not being able to sell any of the books that we were determined to build our careers on. But one thing still hasn't happened: after thirty years, neither of us has gotten a novel published. God, as they say, has a good sense of humor. 
       Now, on to the second excerpt and the first parody...
      

May 5, 1963

Jack Kerouac, leading voice of the Beat Generation, often wrote about the search for America. Here, on the heels of his Big Sur, he brings to light the search theme that was always latent in Leave It to Beaver. 

DHARMA BEAVER

Jack Kerouac

Eddie steals a bike and passes Mary Ellen Rogers' house on the way to Wally's. Mary Ellen, on the porch with her friend Elma, nudges her and says, "There goes Eddie Haskell. I wonder where he's going to?" Elma looks mystified and says, "I wonder where he's coming from?"
       At Wally's, Eddie says, "Hey, Sam, what state are we in?" Wally, at his desk in his bedroom, typing on a huge roll of paper, says, "Aw, go on, Eddie. I don't have time to think about things like that. I'm writing a novel." Eddie says, "Oh, yeah? Do you have time to notice that?" He points to the bike out the window. "Gee, where'd you get the new wheels?" asks Wally. Beaver, reading A Coney Island of the Mind, says, "Aw, he probably swiped it." Eddie says, "Shut up, squirt. You don't know the meaning of Beat."
       Beaver asks, "Hey, Wally, what direction is San Francisco from here?" Wally looks mystified: "Gee, I dunno, Beav. In geography class they told us it was on the West Coast, but...." Eddie says, "Come on, Gertrude, don't be such a square. Why do you think I swiped the wheels? These old-timers don't know any more about where we are than we do. We've got to found out for ourselves." "Gosh, I don't know, Eddie," says Wally. But Eddie insists and Wally agrees. Eddie says, "All we've got to do is make tracks until we get to some city we've heard of. Then we'll know what state we're in."   

       On the way out of Mayfield they pass the Rutherfords', where Lumpy is sitting in a Lotus position on the front lawn. When the boys ask him what he's doing, Lumpy responds, "I'm getting ready for my trip to Japan." Wally says, "Gee, you mean your dad's letting you go? What are you gonna do there?" Lumpy says, "I'm gonna be a Buddhist monk and write poetry." "A Buddhist monk, Sam?" says Eddie. "Those old Chinamen won't let you eat!" Lumpy says, "Really? Gosh, Daddy didn't tell me that." Wally asks, "By the way, Lumpy, what direction is Japan from here?"
       They pass a road sign reading, BELL PORT, 5 MILES. Wally says, "Gee, Eddie, it's like we're in search of America." Eddie says, "To hell with that, Sam. I just want to know where in America we are."
       They arrive in Bell Port, buy a bottle of whiskey, drink themselves blind, and recite Ginsberg's Howl in chorus. They accost strangers and ask where they are. Unanimously, the strangers answer, "In Bell Port." They ask, "But where's Bell Port?" The strangers look at them, mystified, and walk away.
       They awake among empty bottles in a sleazy hotel. Suddenly Ward enters to take them home. At home, in the den, Ward says, "When I was your age, Wally, I went looking for America too. But then I realized that this was America, right here in Mayfield." Wally says, "Sure, Dad. But what part of America?" Ward looks mystified. 

TAG: Beaver bursts into the boys' bedroom waving an envelope. "Hey, Wally! Hey, Wally! Look, you got a letter from Viking Press." Wally opens the envelope and says, "Holy cow, Beav. They're publishing my novel." Beaver teases him good-naturedly in his screeching falsetto: "Bookworm! Bookworm!" Wally good-naturedly hits him with a pillow.


Next week: John Steinbeck's The Beaver of Wrath.