3. More About Papa

It having thus appeared that Alexander Jackson Douglas was not geared for the Lutheran ministry, he resolved to pursue his earlier intention to become a lawyer.

On my desk, as I write, there is a copy of a “whosis,” entitled Representative Men of Indiana (1880) containing the log of Papa’s rather rugged journey, teaching part time in an Ohio academy while reading law, of his marriage to the youthful Mary Jenner, of his migration to Columbia City, Indiana, where he was progressively a Prosecuting Attorney, a State Senator; and, to fill a vacancy, Superintendent of the Whitley County Schools. After a while this was made a permanent position. Papa seems to have traveled far and wide visiting schools. The Lutheran Church in Columbia City, temporarily without a minister, asked him to preach for them until they found a regular pastor. Apparently they didn’t hunt for one with any zeal, for Papa continued as their Sunday preacher while attending to his duties in the county schools. He must have been a busy man.

My papa was an excellent public speaker. He often talked to me, in my youth, about the importance of voice cultivation, no matter what profession one practiced. If you wanted to make yourself attentively heard, either in public address or private conversation, you should pitch your voice in the lowest register at your command. High-keyed shouting would earn you nothing but the other fellow’s suspicion that you were in doubt or insincere. You should be careful to enunciate your consonants clearly: the vowels would look after themselves. No matter what he talked about, when my papa spoke, his audience listened. You could hear a pin drop.

He liked to recall a speech he had heard Stephen A. Douglas make in the Fair Grounds at Fort Wayne before a crowd of more than ten thousand people. To make himself heard by that large open-air audience (and, as everybody knows who has tried it, to speak successfully to an out-of-doors crowd, well stocked with crying babies, and the inevitable confusion around the edges is the toughest assignment imaginable) this gifted orator omitted all the little words, such as articles and prepositions and pronouns, in order that he might stress the vitally important nouns and verbs. Papa said that Mr. Douglas began his speech with the following sentence: “Washington… farewell… address… warned… people… beware… factional… parties.”

In this same connection, Papa had something to say about the proper use of descriptive and qualifying words which, like seasoning, could easily be overdone. “Be mindful,” he would say, “not to pile on too many adjectives; and remember to select your adverbs with care, for they are associated with your sentence at the point where it is really doing business.”

I’m afraid I have often disregarded that good advice about oversweetening with adjectives. A few years ago, Mr. Bernard DeVoto wrote, in reviewing one of my novels, “Whenever Douglas is in doubt which of two adjectives to use, he uses both of them.” I made no attempt to defend myself, for the accusation was true… However, a writer—if he has any sense at all—doesn’t talk back to his critics, even when they are unfair. Not long ago, a reviewer said that my composition was “almost ungrammatical.” My curiosity was stirred. What kind of sentence could be “almost ungrammatical.” My notion was that a sentence might be grammatical or ungrammatical, but I hadn’t previously known about this No Man’s Land, this twilight, where one spoke almost incorrectly… But, as I have just remarked, a prudent author does not get into a public debate with his reviewers, no matter how roughly they tousle him. Occasionally some indignant victim impulsively blows his top with white-hot invectives, whereupon Time and Life and The Saturday Review of Literature swarm in on him, so that “the last end of that man is worse than the first.”

I know of one case in which an enraged novelist ransacked the Thesaurus for impolite epithets to hurl at her detractors in an “open letter.” The tough-skinned editors were delighted, for no profession more faithfully believes in the maxim, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

In the second round of this battle between the author and her critics, they found a candid photograph of the lady with her mouth wide open and an angry frown on her face, and turned the picture loose with no comment under it; just her name… It was fun for them, no doubt; but not what you would call “good, clean fun.”

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