1970: SOUNDER by William H. Armstrong with illustrations by James Barkley
The tall man stood at the edge of the porch.
Who invented capital-P Posting? Was it Jack Dorsey writing “just setting up my twttr”? Was it Mark Zuckerberg ranking Harvard hotties? Obviously not, Posting existed before centralized social network software. So we’d probably have to go back to blogs and message boards. Was it Lowtax and Something Awful? Was it people sharing funny commercials on eBaum’s world? Was it the Drudge Report breaking the Monica Lewinsky story? That was a hell of a Post. Was it “My Immortal”, the maybe-parody Goth Harry Potter fanfic that presaged AO3 by decades? I mean, we’re all joking around here, because we all know the real inventor of Posting: sixteen-century French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne.
Michel de Montaigne, pictured here after a round in the head-stretching machine from Star Trek: Insurrection, was the first Poster. Put another way, he popularized, if not invented outright, the personal essay as an object of cultural consumption. Montaigne invented writing an essay about a thing that happened to him and how that thing made him think of a second thing, and how the second thing says something about Society. In his own words:
“Neither my anecdotes nor my quotations are always employed simply as examples, for authority, or for ornament...They often carry, off the subject under discussion, the seed of a richer and more daring matter, and they resonate obliquely with a more delicate tone.”
Not only did Montaigne do this and basically turn the personal essay into an actual literary genre, not only can you draw a straight line from his work to an essay I once made fun of in a Jesuit-run magazine about how the McDonald’s promotion for “Grimace’s Birthday” gave one despondent Catholic hope for the human race, but Montaigne put out a lot of essays. His three-volume Essais, collecting 103 different essays over the course of over two decades and available for free on Wikipedia, is clearly still influencing personal writing today, even down to the essay titles, usually starting with “On” and then the topic. Here’s the start of essay 23 in volume one, “On Pedantry”:
“I was often, when a boy, wonderfully concerned to see, in the Italian farces, a pedant always brought in for the fool of the play, and that the title of Magister was in no greater reverence amongst us: for being delivered up to their tuition, what could I do less than be jealous of their honour and reputation? I sought indeed to excuse them by the natural incompatibility betwixt the vulgar sort and men of a finer thread, both in judgment and knowledge, forasmuch as they go a quite contrary way to one another: but in this, the thing I most stumbled at was, that the finest gentlemen were those who most despised them.”
A thing (seeing a play as a child) made Montaigne think of another thing (teachers and knowledgeable people who like explaining things at length are not really respected in society), which made Montaigne think of a third, broader thing (damn, we live in a Society, don’t we?). Here’s the beginning of essay 35, “On the Custom of Wearing Clothes”:
“Whatever I shall say upon this subject, I am of necessity to invade some of the bounds of custom, so careful has she been to shut up all the avenues. I was disputing with myself in this shivering season, whether the fashion of going naked in those nations lately discovered is imposed upon them by the hot temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and Moors, or whether it be the original fashion of mankind. Men of understanding, forasmuch as all things under the sun, as the Holy Writ declares, are subject to the same laws, were wont in such considerations as these, where we are to distinguish the natural laws from those which have been imposed by man's invention, to have recourse to the general polity of the world, where there can be nothing counterfeit.”
Now, I’m not about to say that every single one of Montaigne’s essays was a home run. But still, you can see the structure here: a thing (being cold) made Montaigne think of another thing (moderately racist observations about the subcontinent), which made him think of a third thing (damn, we live in a Society, don’t we?). He would have murdered on Substack, he’d be making Heather Cox Richardson level money on there.
Look, this is what we do! This is what I’m doing right now! This is what my friends do! I literally sit down every week, read a book, think “well, I’ve got to find some way to 2,000 words here1, what’s the loosest possible segue into something I can riff on for a little bit longer?” Oh, okay, I can probably talk about Wheel Of Time or whatever, and then I can talk about a movie I saw once, or something funny my kid said, and then, depending on how good I am at writing, draw it all together into a broad statement about how damn we live in a Society (this has happened maybe two times in Newburied), or forgo the broad statement, make a callback to the first thing I talked about, and then call that an essay and go to sleep (this has happened a lot more than two times in Newburied). And you know what? I like doing it! I have fun doing it! And I have fun when I read my friends doing it! Personally, with this and The Other Newsletter - one which also makes broad statements about how damn we live in a Society - I find the essay form, the same one popularized by Montaigne, helpful in organizing my thoughts, in laying everything out to figure out what, exactly, it is that I actually think and feel, why I think and feel that way, and what makes sense to do as a response to how I think and feel. So I’m grateful that this form even exists, and far more grateful that there are people willing to read it okay so that’s about a thousand words right there, we can talk about Sounder now.
1970 medalist Sounder is very dark, and very strange, and unlike most of the other medalists I’ve read. For one thing, none of the characters are named, except for the title character, who is a dog, and who is not really in the book very much at all compared to the human characters. The family of sharecroppers that is actually at the center of the story is torn apart in the opening pages as the father is arrested for stealing a ham to feed his family, thrown into prison, and eventually sentenced to hard labor on a chain gang. The novel is told from the limited third-person point of view of The Boy, whose only real link to his father is their dog, Sounder, who is viciously wounded during the father's arrest, so much so that the next time The Boy sees Sounder after the arrest, “One front foot dangled above the floor. The stub of an ear stuck out on one side, and there was no eye on that side, only a dark socket with a splinter of bone showing above it.” After the father gets sent away for the hard labor sentence, The Boy spends years trying to find him, enduring the cruelty of various white Southerners and letting violent fantasies boil over in his mind:
“He had thought how he would like to chain the deputy sheriff behind his own wagon and then scare the horse so that it would run faster than the cruel man could. The deputy would fall and bounce and drag on the frozen road. His fine leather jacket would be torn more than he had torn his father’s overalls. He would yell and curse, and that would make the horse go faster. And the boy would just watch, not trying to stop the wagon.”
I don't know what to make of Sounder. It's either a weird misfire or the most brilliant novel I've read for the project, and I can't decide which. The absolute barrenness of the prose, the dehumanizing of every character in the book except the injured dog, the bleakness that surely is a decent reflection of the Black American sharecropper experience, the imagined violence that our protagonist can't stop from wishing yet can't act on, all of it is unlike any other Newbery medalist. Towards the end of the novel, the father does find his way back home - and Sounder is there to welcome him - but half of his body is mutilated from an accident he suffered during his sentence. He can barely walk and move, but he wants to get back to his family and his loyal dog, as “he resolved he would not die, even with a half-dead body, because he wanted to come home again.” Maybe that's some small bit of hope to end on, and that's barely hope, but it's something, some “I am here” in an unrelenting darkness. And the book ends with The Boy thinking this:
“He had learned to read his book with the torn cover better now. He had read in it: “Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead.” He had asked the teacher what it meant, and the teacher had said that if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever. It blooms on for whoever has seen it blooming. It was not quite clear to the boy then, but it was now. Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.”
Oh yeah, the book. That abandoned book in a trash can is The Boy’s companion as he walks the roads looking for his imprisoned father, and while he doesn't understand it at first - he's barely literate - he finds a kind schoolteacher who takes him in and teaches him to read and write, offering room, board, and education in exchange for work. Someone believes in The Boy, someone is kind to The Boy when he doesn't have to be, and that ends up being the difference between a life that goes somewhere and complete desolation. The Boy catches the teacher's eye because of the book he's carrying:
“I found the book in a trash barrel. It has words like I ain’t used to readin’. I can read store-sign words and some newspaper words.”
“This is a wonderful book,” said the teacher. “It was written by a man named Montaigne, who was a soldier. But he grew tired of being a soldier and spent his time studying and writing. He also liked to walk on country roads.” The teacher lit two lamps. The boy had never seen two lamps burning in the same room. They made the room as bright as daylight. “People should read his writings,” the man continued. “But few do. He is all but forgotten.” But the boy did not hear. He was thinking of a cabin that had two lamps, both lit at the same time, and two stoves, one to cook on and one to warm by.”
Hey, look, there's Montaigne, there's our callback!
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1980 medalist, A Gathering Of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal 1830-32 by Joan W. Blos.
Or, depending on my mood and how late it is, let’s say 1,600 words.