Who Wrote the Beaver Papers 2?

When I posted a quiz last month based on The Beaver Papers 2, the new humor book Will Jacobs have just had published, it was a unanimous hit! I liked it, Will Jacobs liked it, our publisher at Atomic Drop Press liked it, and not one person wrote in to disagree! With that kind of universal acclaim, how could we not do it again?

      Just in case you’ve forgotten, the new book, available from Amazon or straight from the publisher, is the very-long-awaited sequel to our “cult classic,” The Beaver Papers (recently released in a 30th Anniversary Edition).
      Below are excerpts from five of the 25 parodies in the new book, each positing what an episode of the classic sitcom Leave It to Beaver would have been like if written by a world-renowned author. Your job is to find a match for each from the list at the end!

1. It’s not that she feels unhappy, June thinks as she goes through the motions of vacuuming the floors and giving the boys hunks of milk as they barge in after school. It’s that she feels nothing. She wonders what real people feel. Then she wonders if real people even exist. Everyone around her looks like such a two-dimensional stereotype. The world seems to be entirely in shades of gray, and she begins to think that even the laughter she hears whenever one of her boys says something cute is only a tape recording played on cue.

2. Beaver has a hard time paying attention in school that day as he can’t stop thinking about Miss Landers being a Ganymedean slime mold. But at last he’s able to shake off the preoccupation. So what if she’s a particularly hideous alien life form, he tells himself. Since she’s able to project the image of a pretty young school teacher and rarely sends him to Mrs. Rayburn’s office, it doesn’t really make any difference.

3. Ward has seen Larry Mondello countless times before and felt nothing for him but a vague distaste, but until now he has never seen him wearing only swimming trunks. Awash in the vast, pale sweep of Larry’s flesh, the abandoned voluptuousness of his sheer corpulence, Ward is surprised to find himself strangely transfixed. He tells himself that he must surely be appreciating Larry at an aesthetic level. He wonders if Larry is the Platonic ideal of something and wishes he had studied more classical philosophy along with the Greek mythology.

4. Well, sir, I immediately went into my act, fiddling with my cap, making sure my shirt was buttoned to the throat, flashing my buck-toothed grin. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I always say. I’d worked dang hard on my perfect-child routine, and I knew there’d be trouble if the old bum had seen through it. As it turned out, though, he just wanted to tell me some of his musty old stories. Gus could lay on the corn as thick as I could. The only difference was, he meant it.

5. Beaver rushes away and is accosted by Eddie Haskell. Eddie cackles and makes a long speech about how, with Ward Cleaver gone, he’ll be free to give Beaver the business whenever he feels like it. But in the process he reveals how his concept of giving the business is built on moral cowardice and a fear of the rationality which is the foundation of man’s existence.


A.  Thomas Mann, Death in Mayfield
B.  Jim Thompson, The Beaver inside Me
C.  Sylvia Plath, The Beaver Jar
D.  Ayn Rand, Cleaver Shrugged
E.  Flannery O’Connor, A Good Beaver Is Hard to Find
F.  Philip K. Dick, Do Beavers Dream of Electric Creeps? 

Beaver Papers: The Sequel

So it's turning out to be simply too big a job to pull together an "expanded edition" for The Beaver Papers' 30th anniversary ebook reissue, as we were originally planning. Just proofing the original and doing the whole ebook-format learning curve is going to make it hard enough just to bring the original bookout next month as planned. Given that, we've decided that the 30th Anniversary Edition will consist only of the original book, with two new scripts, a new introduction, and some corrections of fact (or what passes for "fact" in the reality of The Beaver Papers), sold for a lower-than-planned $2.99.

      Which means we'll be saving the unpublished scripts we were gathering for the "expanded" edition—and coming up with a whole bunch more—for The Beaver Papers 2. Thirty years ago, when The Beaver Papers was new and doing well in the stores, we talked about writing a sequel...but life moved on and we never got to it. Now, almost by accident, we're finally doing it. 

       So far we know it'll include faux Leave It to Beaver script treatments by Ayn Rand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, W. Somerset Maugham, J. G. Ballard, John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges, and at least 15 others. Along with the story of what happened during "the Autumn of the Beaver," when the cast and crew fought to bring the show back to life after the heart-rending cancellation described at the end of the original book. It should be out in less than a year.
       Oh, and there will be a sneak preview of two of the scripts from the sequel in the Anniversary Edition next month: Beaver in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Do Beavers Dreams of Electric Creeps? by Philip K. Dick. That'll give you a chance to see if we've gotten better or worse at this parody thing in the past three decades.

       Better or worse, we've had a great time going back to that long-ago idea and bringing it back to life for our current selves. I really wasn't sure we'd have it in us when we started, but whatever drove us to write the thing in the first place is apparently still alive in us. I guess sometimes you can go home again.

        (Actually, that's someone we haven't parodied yet: Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Beaver?)

Thirty Years

It hit me recently, with a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and horror, that I was up against the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book. It was August, 1983, that The Beaver Papers, written with my friend Will Jacobs, first hit the bookstores and launched the long, strange trip of my career. 
       That's a long time, thirty years. A lot can happen in that much time. In that much time, nations can fall and new industries can be born, careers can begin and end, babies can grow up and have babies of their own. In that much time, a bright-eyed, nervous, inexhaustible, naive 26-year-old who thinks his life will be perfect if he can only get a book published can turn into a tired, slightly cantankerous 56-year-old who sometimes wonders why the hell he ever wanted to write books in the first place. (Not saying that did happen. But it could have.)
       This is how long ago it was: Will and I wrote it with pens on paper, then revised it on a typewriter, fixing our mistakes with Liquid Paper. We could only work together when we could physically meet or when we were each at our homes, so that we could talk on the telephones plugged into our walls. When it was done we went to the library and collected agents' addresses from a book called Literary Marketplace, then we had copies of a cover letter run off at Kinko's, folded them and put them in envelopes, licked stamps and stuck them on the outside, and carried them to a mailbox. Then we waited, knowing it would take days to get even the quickest responses. It's amazing that anything got published at all in those days. 
       Also how long ago it was: Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that we had both been fascinated with since childhood, off the air for twenty years and already feeling like an echo of a distant era, was being shown every afternoon on broadcast television. (Now it's been off for fifty years, a number I can hardly make sense of, and although it hasn't been entirely forgotten, it's not the icon it was; at that time, though, everyone knew it and got what it represented.) Somehow or other, Will and I started watching it together, making fun of it but also yearning a bit for that lost world—which was the lost world of pre-Vietnam America but also the lost world of wholesome TV and the lost world of our own suburban childhoods, before we became city boys and drove ourselves into anxious madness with dreams of being professional writers.
       Then one of us, we don't remember who, made a joke about what if some unwholesome, un-TV writer of the time—very possibly Jack Kerouac—had written about the Cleaver family. 
       To honor this anniversary of mine, I've decided to post an except from the book every few weeks from now through August. I'm sure I'll also try to dust off some memories of how it all happened. I'll have to resist the temptation to rewrite as I go—that young me and young Will could turn out an infinite variety of clunky sentences and bad transitions, but I have to admit that they were able to do things we could never do now. Even as I cringe at my old lack of polish, I can't help admiring my old energy, impulsiveness, and cock-surety. 
       Let's start with the original, preposterous introduction...  

On May 3, 1963, the news filtered down from ABC to Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly that "Leave It to Beaver" would probably be canceled. Just a month before, network executives had told Mosher and Connelly, producers and head writers of the show, that if new blood could be put into "Beaver," the series might be saved. But after weeks of frustrating meetings with regular writers Dick Conway and Roland MacLane and multi-talented director-star Hugh Beaumont, it was conceded that no new ideas could be contrived. 
       Mosher suggested an episode in which brother Wally gets drunk on near-beer, but Connelly vetoed it as being too outlandish. Connelly suggested an episode in which June appeared in a pair of slacks, but Beaumont considered it lewd. Beaumont suggested an episode in which Beaver actually metamorphosed into a rodent, but Mosher and Connelly denounced it as derivative.

       MacLane and Conway completed a script in which Beaver gets a flat tire on his bike and conceals it from his parents, but network executives, although impressed with its daring, decided that it didn't quite fit their standards for new blood.
       By May 5 the staff had cleared their desks and prepared to go to pasture when, with the afternoon mail delivery, the first submission arrived. 
       Clearly the news of Beaver's impending cancellation had leaked out quickly, evidently reaching as far as Lowell, Massachusetts, for Jack Kerouac was the first to rise in support of Beaver. His script, Dharma Beaver, was the first drop in a deluge of literary brilliance to flood the network offices. From Montmartre and Tokyo they flowed in; from North Beach and Greenwich Village, from Majorca and Fresno; and from as far away as Moscow and Nigeria. The cry rang like a trumpet blast through the artistic community of the globe: "The Beaver is endangered! Save the Beaver!" Even the petition to free Jean Genêt from prison did not inspire such solidarity among the literati of the world. Before the summer was through, mankind would witness a flowering of the arts since it had not seen since the Italian Renaissance. 
     Now, after years of diligent research into old studio files, we have pieced together the story of the "Lost Season." We present here the events of that summer, along with summaries of the twenty-five unproduced scripts that were slated for the 1963-1964 season of "Leave It to Beaver." Although dozens of other scripts were submitted, we include only those that meet the highest literary standards. 
       We  have endeavored to preserve the writing styles and dialogue of the scripts wherever possible. The fruits of the "Lost Season" have been harvested at last.

I'll post the first fruit, Dharma Beaver, next time.