The Night Country (1971)
Writing of his birth on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, the literary naturalist Loren Eiseley cast his nativity in the language of the poet: “I was born in the first decade of the [20th] century, conceived in and part of the rolling yellow cloud that occasionally raises up a rainy silver eye to look upon itself before subsiding into dust again.”11.
Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971).
It was there, where the overwhelming vastness fuses with the midnight stars, that Eiseley’s father held him aloft one chilly night, in 1910. On the far horizon, a radiant Halley’s comet rent the firmament like a gigantic sword. After a long and reverent silence, Clyde Eiseley told his three-year-old son to remember this night above all others, for the boy had a good chance of beating the odds that he would see the celestial visitor but once in his life. “If you live to be an old man, you will see it again”, his father whispered. “It will come back in seventy-five years.”22.
Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
courtesy Loren Eiseley in 1936
Perhaps young Loren understood his father, perhaps not. But he never forgot the person in whose arms he rested, who he would always care for more than any other, and who planted in his son the sense of wonder with the world that led Eiseley to create his own genre of prose: science nested beneath the wings of the humanities.
Seeing Halley’s comet might have been cold comfort to a shivering child, but it harmonized with what Eiseley clung to in his father. Clyde Eiseley, an itinerant hardware salesman whose meager wages barely kept food on the family table and a roof over their heads, had dreamed of becoming a Shakespearean actor, indeed had once traveled Nebraska’s dust-choked byways with a company of Elizabethan players. Eiseley listened in awe on those rare occasions when his father was moved to recite a passage by the bard, such as these lines from Coriolanus:
Put on my robes, give me my crown,
I have immortal longings in me.
At the opposite end of the family spectrum was Eiseley’s peculiar mother Daisey (née Corey), who was known for her flamboyant hats and razor-sharp tongue. She was constantly deriding Clyde and all he cared about, punctuating her cruel tirades with flailing arms and hands. Eiseley later wrote of her that she was stone deaf; others simply described her as hard of hearing. In either case, it mattered little to him, for he grew to hate her with an incandescence that only brightened with the years. He called her a witch to her face and would hide from her for hours at a time until, driven by panic, she began screaming so loudly that he would finally show himself. The family’s window shades were always drawn, and visitors rarely came. Daisey’s sister Grace hinted at the reason when she spoke in whispers of the “mad Shepards”, including her maternal grandmother Permila, who had been locked away in the attic, never to be seen by outsiders.
Because of her hearing loss, Daisey’s speech was discordant and jangling, her facial features menacing, or so it seemed to her young son. With time, the two succeeded in creating what Eiseley, the future anthropologist, later described as a primitive language not unlike that employed by the australopithecines. Elsewhere, he characterized the Eiseley household as a throwback to the Stone Age, a “house of gesture.”
That Eiseley should have taken refuge from his troubled childhood in books is hardly surprising. He was five or so when his older half brother Leo, Clyde’s child from his first marriage and a telegrapher with Western Union, returned home for a visit bearing a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Eiseley remembered it as a turning point of his youth, enthralled by the story of the marooned Englishman and his man Friday.
Thanks in part to Leo, Eiseley quickly became a voracious and eclectic reader, drawing no distinction between children’s books and those written for adults. It was not long before he had accumulated a little library whose volumes numbered in the dozens. (As a way of exaggerating his family’s poverty, he would later insist that he had no books of his own, and that almost all of his reading materials came from the shelves of the Lincoln City Library.) Each was inscribed with his name, age, address and date of acquisition. They often contained the name of the giver as well, usually his understanding father.
It was from Black Beauty that Eiseley became sensitized to animal suffering, particularly that of horses, still very much present in everyday life on the plains. The plight of the much-hated wolf touched him deeply after he read James Oliver Curwood’s he-man novel Baree, Son of Kazan and Charles G.D. Roberts’ Haunters of the Silences. For escape there was Jules Verne’s little volume of science fiction From the Earth to the Moon and the fantasy yarn Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island landed him square in the middle of the Spanish Main, where he joined the company of the great buccaneer navigators Lionel Wafer and William Dampier.
Far from the seafaring world, Eiseley discovered another, even more compelling one that would eventually lay claim to the better part of his adult life. Jack London’s Before Adam and Stanley Waterloo’s Story of Ab introduced him to Darwin’s principle of evolution by natural selection a decade before the celebrated Scopes “monkey trial” played itself out in a Tennessee courtroom. Hoping to learn more about evolution, he paid frequent visits to the science museum on the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, to which the Eiseleys had moved a few years earlier. Though architecturally bland, the sprawling red brick structure housed an exciting array of exhibits on anthropology, zoology, geology and archaeology, including thousands of Indian relics once strewn across the Great Plains.
After studying the drawings of early human skulls, with their steeply slanting brows, cavernous sockets and giant mandibles, Eiseley decided to model his own examples of the human saga. Some of his clay constructs were supplied with matchstick teeth while the mouths of others were adorned with mother-of-pearl scavenged from old buttons in his mother’s sewing basket. When all was ready, his Grandmother Corey baked the skulls in the oven on cookie sheets, albeit not without protest: “Mind you”, she scolded her grandson,
this is getting out of hand. There’s no ordinary heads in there and no young’un can tell me so. They’ve got that . . . Darwin look. You’ve got to stop it ‘fore the Devil gets you by the feet.3
Linked to Eiseley’s emerging understanding of Darwinism and the role played by chance in the biological order was a mythical creature he called the Other Player. The two first crossed paths as Eiseley explored an abandoned house on the outer fringes of Lincoln one evening. As luck would have it, he came across a pair of ivory dice, which he began casting with abandon, making up his own rules as he went along. Suddenly, and without his consent, the rules of the game changed. He was no longer playing against himself but against something latent and lurking, something capable of crushing him with the idle flick of a finger, something he would come to equate with the universe itself. When, a few years later, the Great Depression slammed into Nebraska like an iron fist, forcing Eiseley and many thousands like him to take to the rails, his imaginary Other Player was waiting for him inside a freezing boxcar untold miles from home. “Behind nothing, before nothing, worship it the zero”, came the Other Player’s voice from out of a fitful dream Eiseley later rendered into prose poetry.44.
Eiseley, All the Strange Hours (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975).
It was he who controlled the roll of the dice after all; he who would determine some destiny not decided.
Having dropped out of high school, Eiseley was bumming around the country by freight when he received word that Clyde was dying, his body ravaged by carcinoma of the liver and stomach. Eiseley made it home in time to watch as his father lifted up his hands and gently smiled, as if to say: “The hands [are] playthings and [have] to be cast aside at the last like a little cherished toy.”55.
Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).
As Eiseley told it, twenty years passed before he could afford to put a stone on his father’s grave. Of his mother he said, “Her conduct was one long persecution of father. My mother was a woman who invited murder.”66.
Gale E. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley (Henry Holt & Co., 1990).
With his father dead and his mother no company he desired, a deeply alienated Eiseley was about to sustain yet another psychic wound destined to plague him for life: insomnia. It typically began with the incessant ticking of the clock in his bedroom while he stared numbly into the blackness of the sleeping house. Despairing of a reprieve, he turned on the light in hopes of reading away the small hours, though rarely to positive effect. But he came to realize that he was not the only inhabitant of the emotional place he later called the Night Country, the title of one of his most hauntingly evocative and widely read collection of essays. His Grandmother Corey lay awake in the next bedroom, waiting patiently for a sliver of light to appear beneath his door. When it did, she came in and, without speaking a word, sat down in the chair beside his bed. Malvina Corey was no psychiatrist, yet her grandson sensed she was there to protect him from the curse of the mad night-prowling Shepards. “I knew she had saved my sanity.”77.
Eiseley, The Night Country.
For a while Eiseley returned to tramping, but he eventually enrolled in the University of Nebraska at the age of 23, in 1930. Though a diffident student, he soon joined a group of emerging writers who had come under the influence of English professor Lowry Charles Wimberly, a Poe-like figure largely responsible for founding the Prairie Schooner, one of the most influential and durable “little mags” of all time. “The deeper the mind probes”, Wimberly once confided to a friend, “the less spontaneously it reacts to enjoyment.”88.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
Wimberly’s credo became Eiseley’s as well. Many of the themes that would come to dominate his poetry and prose are rooted in the angst of his Schooner years: banshee winds, blinding snows, haunted roads at midnight, burial grounds, loss and death.
Men die
Grass crawls over
Cities and builders. Why
Should I be glad a child is born
Tonight?9
By now, having settled into the Lincoln campus, Eiseley had pretty much given up life in the hobo camps, where he had huddled with his fellow travelers around sprawling fires that from a distance looked like great armies on bivouac. He chose instead to spend his summers with a small band of paleontologists known as the South Party. Their quarry, which they shipped back by rail to the very University of Nebraska museum whose corridors Eiseley had haunted as a youth, consisted mostly of the fossilized remains of hulking mastodons, saber-toothed cats with fangs as sharp as Toledo steel, beavers the size of young steers, and a long extinct species of buffalo that once covered the land like a moving robe. Here, in Nebraska’s desiccated Wildcat Range, was Darwin’s concept of evolution writ large, and here, too, the fodder for enough essays and poems to last a perceptive nature writer a lifetime.
To his friend Wilbur Gaffney, another of Wimberly’s many acolytes, Eiseley wrote of the physical and mental price he was paying for each one of his discoveries, and of the “overnight fungus” that is civilization. “Love is a faint far cry along the wind here—an old troubling lament from the world’s edge. . . . Not real. Something suffered a long time ago before I stepped out of time. That is the way it is here. Or was.” And this to Wimberly himself: “There is a whole heaven fall of stars and I can only repeat again inarticulately that it is lonely . . . lonely. You can’t believe civilization exists here. . . . And by the way—have we become a myth?”101.
0.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
Though Eiseley’s words made it seem as if he had spent years collecting fossilized bones and extinct elephant teeth the size of a man’s fist, such was not the case. He had ranged the Dakota and Nebraska Badlands for only a month and was in the field with the South Party fewer than six months altogether. Despite his love of nature, he did not particularly enjoy roughing it. Like Thoreau, his favorite and oft-quoted transcendentalist, he was partial to pot roast and biscuits for Sunday dinner, not to mention banana cream pudding.
Having received his diploma, Eiseley headed east after his last summer on the Plains, where in 1933 he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. There he would study anthropology under the renown scholar Frank Gouldsmith Speck, learning the ways of Native Americans from Florida to the Labrador Peninsula. Graduate school was largely the idea of Mabel Langdon, a willowy brunette and honor student to whom Loren had become engaged before he departed for Philadelphia. Knowing full well her fiancé’s tendency to procrastinate, she refused to become his wife until he earned his Ph.D. and took a teaching position. For the next few years, at least, Eiseley would be doing little creative writing of the kind that had gained him the reputation of a solitary genius back in Lincoln.
Eiseley got his Penn doctorate in anthropology in 1938, married Mabel and accepted a teaching position at the University of Kansas. From there he went on to become chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio’s Oberlin College, then back to Penn in 1949 to head the Anthropology Department after Frank Speck’s retirement. One thing the couple agreed upon was that there would be no children. According to Mabel, her husband “wouldn’t have gotten anything done.’’ As Eiseley himself put it more ominously to his niece Athena Spaulding, “Children spell trouble.”
Eiseley’s dream had always been to become a poet of the first order, and to this end he never tired of quoting such literary lights as G.K. Chesterton, Archibald MacLeish and Robinson Jeffers. Mabel, however, knew better. Her husband’s true gift, she always believed, was for prose, both poignant and melancholy. Besides, there was little money in poetry, even if one was lucky enough to secure a publisher.
Mabel’s literary sensibilities were soon proven correct. Eiseley’s articles had begun to appear in such prestigious magazines as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly and the American Scholar. A decade later, in 1957, a dozen of them were brought together in his first and most popular book of essays titled The Immense Journey.
From the outset, Eiseley was influenced by a long line of romantic and Victorian naturalists, such as Charles Lamb, James Henry Hunt, William Hazlitt, Gilbert White, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Yet he differed from each of them in one critical respect: the advent of what he called the “concealed essay.” It was his intention to provide science, and most particularly evolution, with a human face by drawing on some personal experience or anecdote to make a point. By this method he managed to live his life as a kind of connective tissue between science and the humanities, drawing the empirically minded toward the chords of poetry, and humanists toward the wonders of scientific discovery.
Among Eiseley’s most compelling essays from The Immense Journey is a piece titled “The Flow of the River.” “If there is magic on this planet”, he begins, “it is contained in water.” He next describes a day swimming in the shallow but swift-moving Platte River when he discards most of his clothing, lies back and pushes off, his body merging with the exhilarating flow. Beneath him, in liquid form, spins the great wheel that is evolution:
I slid over shallows that had buried the broken axles of prairie schooners and the mired bones of mammoth. I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water and the unspeakable alchemies that gestate and take shape in water, the slimy jellies that under the enormous magnification of the sun writhe and whip upward as great barbeled fish mouths, or sink indistinctly back into the murk out of which they arose.
There was no containing his imagination now:
I, too, was a microcosm of pouring rivulets and floating driftwood gnawed by the mysterious animalcules of my own creation. I was three fourths water, rising and subsiding according to the hollow knocking of my veins: a minute pulse like that eternal pulse that lifts Himalayas and which, in the following systole, will carry them away.11
By the time Eiseley reached his late thirties, he had no intention of undertaking any more extensive field work, and so passed on a golden opportunity to join the anthropologist Louis Leakey in his hunt for human origins in Africa’s fossil rich Olduvai Gorge. (The Nebraska novelist Wright Morris, who had become one of Eiseley’s few close friends, lamented this fact when he pondered what Eiseley might be giving up both in terms of science and grist for future essays. “Schmerzie”, as Morris dubbed him—short for Weltschmerz, or world pain—was close to writing his own obituary, the obituary of a bone hunter.) Instead, Eiseley holed up in his apartment on Philadelphia’s Main Line, where concrete parking lots and strip malls were fast overrunning that patch of North American nature. Still, he continued to make music out of thistledown and desiccated cocoons.
So, too did he garner self-styled lessons from the sea while vacationing in Florida each winter. After another one of many sleepless nights, he donned a slicker and began trudging down the shoreline in the wake of a powerful storm. The foaming beach was strewn with the remains of countless dead and dying creatures whose passing had gone unmourned, save by one. In the distance, Eiseley could just make out the figure of a man, who occasionally reached down, picked up an unseen object, and flung it back into the heaving brine. When he finally caught up with the mysterious stranger, Eiseley saw that it was stranded starfish he was returning to the sea.
“Do you collect?” Eiseley shouted above the thundering surf.
“Only like this. And only for the living”, the star thrower replied.
“I do not collect. Neither the living or the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.”
Nearing a bend on the coast, Eiseley turned and saw a final starfish arching in the wind:
For a moment, in the changing light, the sower appeared to be magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god. . . . [But] he is a man. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every sea beach in the world.12
In spite of recent attempts to turn Eiseley into a dyed-in-the-wool conservationist, he was never that. The return of the next great ice—or what he termed “The Angry Winter”—would wipe the slate clean of all living things, including humanity itself:
Hard it is on earth…
Ax-time, sword-time…
Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls
Nor ever shall men each the other spare.13
Neither could one escape the “cosmic prison” in which we all find ourselves, for the universe is much too vast to countenance the leaving of our terrestrial home.
It came as a shock to the likes of intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford when, toward the end of his life, Eiseley veered sharply off course from what others considered to be the humanistic tradition. He wrote to a besieged Richard Nixon in the White House, pleading with the President not to lose his resolve in the face of massive protests against the Vietnam War: “Many people, particularly the young, are the more or less innocent dupes of unseen elements making use of the mass media for the purposes of propaganda.” And when Eiseley got word that four students had died in a salvo unleashed by the National Guard at Kent State University, he was overhead to remark, “They got what they asked for.”141.
4.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
The great comet had circled in its track across the blank void and was streaking earthward once again when Eiseley, like his father, was felled by cancer. He died on July 9, 1977. Yet while he did not live to see the comet’s return, Eiseley’s own comet, his words, ever eloquent and beautiful, abide.
1.
Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971).
2.
Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
3.
Eiseley, The Night Country.
4.
Eiseley, All the Strange Hours (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975).
5.
Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).
6.
Gale E. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley (Henry Holt & Co., 1990).
7.
Eiseley, The Night Country.
8.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
9.
Quoted in Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
1.
0.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.
1.
1Eiseley, .
The Immense Journey (Random House, 1957).
.
1.
2.
Eiseley, The Star Thrower (Times Books, 1978).
1.
3.
Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe.
1.
4.
Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge.