Talk by John Burt Foster, Jr.

In Praise of Storytelling
John Burt Foster, Jr.
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
July 17, 2005

Opening Words:
Among its other achievements, our “green” services in the last three weeks have shown, most impressively, how today’s visual and audio equipment can bring a message closer to our minds and hearts. Today, as we celebrate storytelling in word and song, we will step back from our advanced technology to pay tribute to the human voice, that deceptively simple means of communication. For even without movies, recordings, or books, stories are woven tightly into the texture of our lives, as gossip, as anecdotes, as evening rituals with small children, as a sharing of experiences at the end of the day, as memories we turn to for comfort and guidance. Maxine Hong Kingston has a colorful expression that brings out the face-to-face immediacy of storytelling plain and simple—“talk story,” she calls it, inspired by her China-born mother’s inventively eloquent English. And of course, as our guest musician Elaine Silver will show us, storytelling often gains new vividness and depth when it comes to us as “sing story.”

Readings:
Today’s readings are from James Joyce and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though they are written texts, their authors wrote them as tributes to the power of storytelling on people of all ages. The readings will be followed by an opportunity for quiet meditation.

The Joyce reading involves the opening lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

The Coleridge reading is the first five stanzas of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me.

The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eye Mariner.

SERMON:

Remember, from the readings, how storytelling appeals to people of all ages. There was the little child charmed with the words of a simple tale, even with nonsense like “baby tuckoo” and “nicens.” There was the old man obsessed with telling, again and again, about the suffering, transgression, and atonement that he feels others have to know. And finally there were the adults who as a favor to their children get carried away with storytelling, but can become impatient with a storyteller because they have other, important things to do. I want to begin my talk today by exploring another form taken by this universalism of storytelling, its appeal to people worldwide. I’ll do so by telling a story myself.

The Universality of Story Telling

I once spent a year in Germany, and began with an intensive, two-month language course. My fellow students came from all over the world: there was a large contingent of Japanese businessmen-in-training, there was a Korean Lutheran come to study theology at its Protestant source, there were three inseparable Rumanians (inseparable we later learned because one was a security agent in charge of watching the other two), there was a Bolivian woman doctor who wanted to treat alcoholism among the Indians in the high Andes, there was the brother of some official in the Central African Republic, there was a Ukrainian Australian whose parents didn’t want her to come to Germany because they had been commandeered as slave laborers during World War II. In short, this was the largest variety of people that I had ever mingled with on a daily basis, and in addition we were all on an “even playing field” as far as language was concerned.

The first day of classes began with four straight hours after breakfast. The teacher had us read a short piece by Kafka called “The Imperial Message.” This can’t really be called one of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “talk stories,” but it does resemble storytelling because in one way it suggests a parable and in another the kind of strange dream you might retell at breakfast. Here is a sample, about the painful slowness of the messenger who needs to bring the message to a remote corner of the empire: “. . . how vain are his efforts, he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; he will never get to the end of them; and even if he did, he would be no better off; he would have to fight his way down the stairs; and even if he did that, he would be no better off, he would still have to get through the courtyards, and after the courtyards, the second outer palace enclosing the first; and more stairways and more courtyards; and still another palace . . .” You get the picture; this is the very essence of the Kafkaesque. What I want to emphasize, however, is the electrifying effect that this miniature story had upon the class. Though we had just arrived in Germany, and many of us were still jet-lagged, and though the school was certainly generous in calling us intermediate German speakers, we spent the whole four hours before lunch in lively, unflagging discussion of this enigmatic, dreamlike parable of Kafka’s. Responding to the story was so energizing that somehow we found the words to speak, even in a foreign tongue. I have personally met no equally convincing example of the universal infectiousness of storytelling.

The Self-Empowerment of Stories

Let me now say more about the self-empowerment that comes with storytelling. We can see it so clearly in the reading from Joyce. The child listening to the story about baby tuckoo himself becomes baby tuckoo – presumably a wonderful transformation – and he delights in his connection with the moocow, so much so that it walks down his very own street, right to where Betty Byrne sells that ever-so-special treat of “lemon platt.” Another form of self-empowerment appears in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, for example in “Piglet Meets a Heffalump.” After Christopher Robin casually mentions the existence of this odd creature (again we get a nonsense word), Pooh and Piglet decide to catch one, and for that purpose dig a deep hole baited with a jar with some honey at the bottom. Pooh, however, cannot resist the honey, sneaks back to finish it off, and gets his head stuck in the jar. When the small and vulnerable Piglet arrives next morning, he sees with terror that the trap has done its work: “‘Help, help!’ cried Piglet, “a Heffalump, a Horrible Heffalump!’ and he scampered off as hard as he could, still crying out, “Help, help, a Herrible Hoffalump! Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump! Holl, Holl, a Hoffable Heller¬ump!” What gales of laughter this passage unleashed in our household when read at bedtime to children who felt a secret affinity with Piglet. Presumably the laughter helped to melt their own nighttime terrors. If the Heffalump was just simple Winnie-the-Pooh, did you really need to worry about the wolf that might be lurking in the shadows of the closet?

Now, while we’re on the subject of children’s stories, is the time to say “Hurrah for Doctor Seuss!” and to honor all his books that were so very delightful to read aloud. As big brother in a family whose final arrival consisted of twins, and twins moreover with an insistent appetite for stories not just at bedtime but all through the day, I often had to serve as a stand-in for my parents. So even at eight or nine, I knew exactly what Coleridge had in mind when he wrote “listens like a three years’ child”—except that there were two of these attentive and demanding listeners. I remember Thidwick the Moose and Horton the Elephant, both so much more big-hearted than the birds whom they housed in their antlers or whose eggs they undertook to hatch. Or there was that king who frolicked on red stilts and whose kingdom, surrounded by dike trees, was threatened by nizzards, the vicious birds who pecked at the dike-trees’ roots and endangered the kingdom with flooding. Above all, there were the child heroes with imaginations as extravagant and liberating as Doctor Seuss’s: “If I ran the zoo, said young Gerald McGrew / I’d make a few changes, that’s just what I’d do.” And what amazing changes that young fellow was able to think up!

Memory and Storytelling

Within a family, probably the closest you get to the traditions of oral storytelling and to memory’s powerful role in such stories comes with the stories that your grandparents tell you as a child. In my family it was the grandfathers who stood out as storytellers, at least for the grandsons; but with only one of them did I get to enjoy the slow, spacious periods of leisure on which storytelling thrives, especially during the summer vacations we would spend at my grandparents’ lakeside cabin.

This grandfather had been a star quarterback in the early days of football, and in his twenties had taught and coached at a boy’s school, then became a businessman once he married and had a family to support. After retirement he told us a lot of stories, some of them rather dutiful ones about business success, others in a much more enthusiastic vein about football heroics. It wasn’t hard to see that sports and the outdoor life had counted for more in his life than his business career. “Be physically active” and “bond with others” overshadowed “get rich and get ahead” as the true message of his stories, whatever his conscious intentions might have been. One great thing about stories is the way they communicate more than their tellers think they mean.

Only once, however, did I have what deserves to be called an “ancient Mariner” experience with my grandfather, and even so it rates as an “ancient Mariner” story at one remove. Along with my younger brother, we were planning to go bass fishing one evening, and to catch bass you needed frogs. So in mid-morning my grandfather and I headed about a mile down the beach to a place where a sand-bar had formed across an inlet, cutting it off from the lake. Over the years the former inlet had begun to dry out and get overgrown, forming the kind of sheltered and bepuddled area that was ideal for frogs. They were hopping everywhere, and it was a cinch to catch them by pouncing with your hand just one-hop length ahead of the frog. You had to grab them at the shoulders, though; their legs were just too slippery to grasp. Soon the small tent-like contraption we had brought for our captured bait was resounding in a satisfying way with froggy mini-thumps against its canvas sides. We were ready for the evening.

It was then, as we rested a bit before walking back up the beach, that my grandfather told his story, which began – haltingly – as a story about the stories that his father, the real ancient Mariner of this tale, would tell while my grandfather was growing up, the youngest in a family of ten. This father, my great-grandfather, had been a prisoner-of-war during the Civil War, captured with his entire company of 96 men somewhere in Tennessee and sent first to a prison near Richmond, Virginia, and then to the notorious Andersonville Prison in central Georgia. He ended up being one of only three men from that army company to survive, returned home to a wife who at first was unable to recognize him, but then went to live another sixty years.

This, however, was not the point of the story my grandfather told that day on the bog-like stretch of beach. His father’s ordeal during those years of captivity had been so painful and traumatic that, like the ancient Mariner, he couldn’t stop talking about them, again and again, to whoever happened along. But my grandfather, not at all like Coleridge’s wedding guest, simply did not choose to hear. He was young, popular, a fine athlete, and to hear about so much suffering and misery – he now told me ashamedly – was more than he could stand. He tried to block it out, he even made a point of not hanging around the house. Now that he had the time and found himself thinking back on those days, he realized that he had forgotten most of what his father had been through.

Then, after a pause, he dropped the other shoe. Just as an after-thought, he added that his father had been swindled in his later years by some kind of itinerant preacher. “And he always insisted that it was his religion that got him through Andersonville,” my grandfather remarked, shaking his head in disbelief and speaking in a tone of outraged bafflement. It was as if he were appalled that someone could be willing to exploit another’s beliefs in such a way, especially ones that had been vital for that person’s very survival.

Needless to say, for a boy of eight or nine to hear this story, so different from the ones that my grandfather usually told, was a confusing experience. No doubt he was himself confused, as his shame at not having listened welled up and as he faced the paradox of a man both saved and swindled by his faith. But as is obvious from my telling, it is this type of story that really sticks with you. I’ve returned to it in memory many times over the years, despite its gaps and its inconclusiveness. One lesson it definitely taught me is my personal UU principle, number eight right after the words about the “interdependent web of being”: “Religion is a powerful sustaining force, but watch out – it can and will be abused.” Another lesson is how a story can reveal and hide at the same time, as with the old spiritual, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen,” which never says what the troubles were but does let you know that they exist. If my grandfather, to his shame, no longer knew the details of his father’s troubles – the most he could come up with was “Every week felt like a year” – he did succeed in passing the knowledge of them on.

In the years since, I have often wondered what made him tell this story. I know that after his retirement my grandfather did visit Andersonville while en route to Florida for the winter. When I went there myself several years ago, I noticed that it was located on a hillside sloping down into marshy ground. That marsh was probably the source of the diseases that brought so many deaths during the prison’s existence. So I began to think that it was the association of our lakeside bog with the unhealthy conditions at Andersonville that had forced the story out of my grandfather. But now I realize that maybe it was the thumping of those doomed frogs in their canvas prison that linked our routine morning expedition to his father’s suffering.

The Long Life of Storytelling

At the time my grandfather told his story, it had survived, however precariously, for close to a hundred years. But how far back into the human past does storytelling as such reach, and how much of that fund of stories still survives? Surely it must date back as far as we can imagine people able to talk to each other with some sophistication. But if you ask anthropologists about this development, their answer turns out to be highly speculative. For until the invention of writing some five to six thousand years ago, speech, unlike cooking or hunting or painting, could leave no material traces. Despite the complex physical and mental effort involved in talking and remembering, there is no storytelling equivalent to the Lascaux cave paintings. We are reduced to guesswork based on the size and shape of skulls and on the amount of space among the neck bones for a voice box of the right size and position. Much is made of the uniquely human intersection of the throat and the wind-pipe, an evolutionary trade-off through which, it is contended, “safety and efficiency in eating and breathing are sacrificed to a significant extent for the sake of speaking.” If we settle on 250,000 years ago as the date, that leaves perhaps ten thousand generations of storytelling, practically all gone without a record. So when anthropologists ask me about my interests in novels, I have to say that I research stories from the extremely recent past, just the last 250 years or so.

To get some handle on the long life of storytelling, however, I’d like to look at that well-known ballad “Barbara Allen,” which goes back at least a dozen generations. Though its words have been written down on many occasions – an unfamiliar example from the mid-19th century appears on our order of worship – it is also still passed around by word of mouth. As a result it has undergone the kind of variations typical of the oral tradition.

Such stories depend for survival upon their being retold, and this activity brings you closer to a story than reading usually does. To some extent you must commit it to memory, and as a result you find yourself living through the story with a greater sense of participation than in the more passive situation of a onetime reader. At the same time you may find yourself puzzled by or disagreeing with aspects of the story. I think here of my daughter’s reaction, when she was five or six, to a story she didn’t like. “What kind of story is that?” she exclaimed in disgust when I read the final words. So there is a tendency to want to change the story even as you retell it, or – in a less conscious process – to forget over time the parts that didn’t interest you. This is certainly what has happened to “Barbara Allen,” which exists in at least one hundred versions.

Probably the best-known way of telling this story is, again, the one found on the order of worship, an inferior version to my taste whose title leaves no room for doubt about the meaning it wants to get across: “The Cruelty of Barbara Allen.” It actually tells the story in a rather biased, highly didactic way, but it does respond to one of the ballad’s best-known lines—“Hard-hearted Barbara Allen.” This line usually appears when the young woman, “a fair maid” in most versions, hears the church bell tolling for the death of the young man she has scorned. One good reason to distrust the version that I’ve reprinted, to my ears, is that it replaces this vivid phrase with “Unworthy Barbara Allen,” which sounds written rather than spoken, Victorian moralistic rather than impassioned and folkloric. “Hard-hearted” is not only a sterner accusation, but the fact that it usually resounds in the young woman’s conscience, in short is a self-accusation, suggests that in fact she is not so hard-hearted after all. Why else should she, in another one of the story’s memorable phrases, “die for him tomorrow”?

Now let’s look at another, even more striking way that the story has varied over the years. In many versions, the lovesick young man is named “sweet William,” which would seem to load the dice against the “hard-hearted” woman. Yet older versions of the song paint a picture that differs in important respects. In place of “sweet William,” we get a man named “Sir John Graeme,” who, rather than asking for Barbara Allen by sending “his servant to the town,” invites her to come by sending “his men down through the town.” A poor young fellow with just a single servant has become a man of wealth and standing, someone who commands a whole group of men and whose request for her presence begins to sound like a show of force. Did the man in this story actually start out as a robber baron of sorts and the woman as a mere townsperson whom he could never be expected to marry? Here someone like me, who read Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” at an impressionable age, remembers the old country legend in that Sherlock Holmes story, about a loose-living baron who abducts a farmer’s daughter; she then escapes across the moors only to be hunted down by a pack of hounds. Is it the threat of such violence that explains, in a stanza that almost always appears in the ballad (it can even be found in our facsimile version), why she responds so reluctantly to the young man’s illness?

So slowly, slowly she got up
And slowly she drew nigh him,
And the only words to him did say
Young man I think you're dying.

Once “Barbara Allen” crossed the Atlantic to the United States, of course, there was no longer any point of having a man with a British title, and “Sir John Graeme” turned into variants like “Jemmy Grove” or “William Green” before “Sweet William” won the day. Yet even this name is not as simple or straightforward as it might seem. When Elaine Silver warmly recommended to me the recent movie “Songcatcher” for its picture of the world of these songs – it includes no fewer than three performances of “Barbara Allen” – I noticed that the credits suggested that the movie was loosely connected with the work of song collectors Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp. Intrigued, I went and found Sharp’s mammoth collection of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians and discovered a song called “Fair Margaret and Sweet William.” This sweet William, it turns out, chose to marry another woman instead of fair Margaret, in circumstances that vary wildly from version to version. She dies or kills herself, he learns of the event in a nightmare or by chancing to see her coffin, and then he too dies. The song ends with the same briar and rose imagery that is another hallmark of “Barbara Allen,” but with the fates of the man and woman reversed:

Lady Margret was buried in the old church yard,
Sweet William was buried by her;
From her there sprung a red, red rose,
From his there sprung a briar.

So there’s no reason to think that the name “sweet William” has necessarily loaded the dice in this story, after all.

The process of probing and sometimes twisting every detail in the story that I have just re-enacted still continues in the memories and imaginations of people today who have heard it. Here is a sample of the wide range of opinions that I found after spending several entertaining hours on the internet:

It has always seemed strange to me, as a woman singer, that Barbara should be branded "hard-hearted" simply because she did not reciprocate a man's love.
In "Barbara Allen" a young woman is summoned to the sickbed of her sweetheart, who had earlier slighted her by toasting another woman at a local tavern. He tries to arouse her pity ("Yes, I'm surely dying"), but his stratagem fails and she rejects his explanation of the tavern incident. [Notice that “The Cruelty of Barbara Allen” omits this incident and so strengthens the case against Barbara Allen.]
This poem was a friend of my youth. I'd forgotten most of it completely, except for the last two verses, and therefore remembered it as a poem about a woman who scorned her true love, and then killed herself out of repentance. Rediscovering the fact that he had slighted her first was quite a surprise.
It is the story of "a spineless lover who gives up the ghost without a struggle, and of his spirited beloved who repents too late." This is clearly someone who has taken a fancy to Barbara Allen himself and refuses to sympathize with the young man’s predicament. He understands “sweet William” more in the sense of “namby-pamby” than as “guiltlessly mistreated.”
"Barbara Allen" can be summarized thus: a young man is dying of unrequited love for Barbara Allen; she is called to his deathbed but all she can say is, “Young man, I think you're dying.” After his funeral, Barbara repents, takes to her bed, and dies. The young man can be considered a symbol of Jesus and Barbara Allen representative of humankind.
The story is dramatic enough and simple enough to catch the attention. The listener can take sides. Is he the one to blame? Surely he has suffered enough if he is. Is Barbara hard-hearted, or is she in the right? Is she being dignified, or is she being heartless?
The ballad became popular in the 1660s because it gives a veiled condemnation of Barbara Castlemaine, the greedy, faithless, nasty, and much hated mistress of Charles II, then king of England.
(The following is a literal-minded comment that doesn’t accept the romantic idea of love-sickness.) How did the young man die? From fever? Plague? And she caught it from him? (This makes “Sweet William” the villain for deliberately exposing Barbara Allen to a virulently infectious disease.) Or did she poison him, and then herself? (Now Barbara Allen is the villain, who then turns on herself.)
In a similar literal spirit: “Fun little recording about a poor unfortunate Miss Allen. Too bad she didn't have the proper health coverage. Liked the hillbilly feel this song had.”
And finally I must mention the home page of woman who proudly claims descent from a family of prominent Italian aristocrats but who, a few years after her emigration to the United States, made the decision to change her name to Barbara Allan. She is now a Hollywood publicity agent.

Notice how these comments all suggest different ways of making sense of the story, some better than others. In any form, however, they continue the spirit of an oral tradition that can turn the listener from a passive consumer into an active, imaginative participant who in some way starts to refashion the story.

But if you’re wondering at this point, what is the real point of this story, which Elaine Silver will sing for us in a moment during the offering, I’d like to share two valuable suggestions that I’ve come across. One is from Dave Marsh, in a book published just this year called The Briar and the Rose, which returns to the question of taking sides. It proposes an even-handed answer based on the assumption that sweet William never really declared his love until the end: “What’s amazing is our ability to ignore the lesson that ‘Barbara Allen’ has to teach, which is the peril of denying the complicated mysteries that throb within our hardened hearts and the equal peril of horsing around instead of acknowledging our love for one another.” The other comes from Carl Sandburg in the 1920s: “Sometimes, in the singing of this song, I get the feel of old gnarled thorn-apple trees and white crabapple blossoms printed momentarily on a blue sky, of evanescent things, of the paradox of tender and cruel forces operating together in life. Perhaps something of that paradox working in the hearts of people has kept the Barbara Allen story alive and singing through three centuries and more.” This comment I think does catch something powerful in both the song and its story: the intensity and complexity of romantic love and the tragic swiftness with which these feelings can arise and then vanish.