I may have made a start on getting over my reader's block. I've just finished King Spruce, the 1908 potboiler that's provided me with many hours of entertainment, ever since I first found the book on the side of the road.


King Spruce
Holman Day
New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1908


King Spruce was very entertaining; I enjoyed the story very much, even though all the happenings were loudly telegraphed from well in advance, and even though some aspects (the flawlessness of the hero; the blood-will-tell element to people’s fates; certain convenient changes of heart) needled at me.

It struck me as being a 1908 version of a John Grisham novel (Can I say that without having read a John Grisham novel? I’ve seen movies made from them; does that count?) By this I mean, it took a contemporary business/legal situation (corrupt lumber interests in Maine) and explored it, showed the workings of the industry, the reasons for the corruption, how those in power maintained it—and then toppled the bad guys most satisfyingly if, maybe, somewhat unconvincingly.

So, there’s the drama of the corrupt lumber barons, against whom our stalwart (and annoyingly flawless) hero, Dwight Wade, exerts himself. There’s also a romance: Wade is in love with Elva Barrett, the daughter of John Barrett, one of the lumber barons. Barrett has an illegitimate daughter, known as Kate Arden, whom the hero runs across in the forested mountains. She’s much finer and more intelligent than the good-for-nothings among whom she’s been raised (because blood will tell), but having been raised among them, and being illegitimate, she gets foisted off on a conveniently placed hot-blooded young lumberjack (Colin MacLeod) who at first scorns her but eventually comes round. I kind of hoped the hero would fall for her, but no, he remains devoted to the mainly absent (and pallid) Elva.

About the flawlessness of Wade. It was really quite remarkable. A college-educated schoolteacher, he’s got book learning—but he’s also the picture of physical vitality (he played football in college, you see), such that he’s able to take down Colin MacLeod when the occasion demands. He’s a quick study and, when he leaves schoolteaching for work up in the timberlands, earns the trust and admiration of all around him—except the wicked Pulaski Britt. Britt is Barrett’s right-hand man; he’s the one who gets up to all the true nastiness, which lets the author redeem Barrett: Britt can take the fall.

When Wade finds out the connection between Kate and Barrett, he tries to use moral suasion to get Barrett to do right by her, strenuously avoiding blackmailing him, although everyone and his brother is sure that blackmail is exactly what Wade will get up to. It made an interesting contrast with “The Mayor of Candor Lied,” a ballad by Harry Chapin that my daughter introduced me to recently, in which the song’s narrator tries to blackmail the father of his sweetheart when he learns of the father’s romantic indiscretions. The narrator does this so that he and his sweetheart can be together. It doesn’t work out (though there are added complications in the song that doom the romance, even if the narrator hadn’t tried blackmail). Wade, on the other hand, is above all that, and he ends up getting his girl.

In King Spruce, everyone around Wade behaves much more naturally than Wade himself. For instance, Barrett, when Wade first rescues him from burning to death (yes, Wade does this too; I swear, Wade does All The Things), is grateful and sincere, but, once danger is past, begins to have second thoughts about the whole situation and starts retelling the story to himself in a way that will let him renege on his word and not feel like that’s what he’s actually doing. So human! Not honorable, not good, but very real. Wade has no moments like that.

But Wade’s flawlessness didn’t make me hate him. He’s honorable, brave, and kind, so I liked him. It just would have been more interesting if he’d gone astray a little now and then.

I’m very glad I read the book. It was fun to experience pop literature of the first decade of the twentieth century, and I definitely feel the richer for it.