The Ebb Tide

Uncle Wiggily, an Afterword to “The Ebb Tide”

Uncle Wiggily, By James P. Blaylock

As some few of my readers know (perhaps very few) the first of my stories involving Professor Langdon St. Ives appeared in UNEARTH magazine in 1977. It was titled “The Ape-box Affair,” and along with St. Ives it introduced the young Jack Owlesby, who in fact is a character in the story as well as the “I” who narrates it. (Although it’s often not revealed in the texts, Owlesby narrates all of the St. Ives stories, sometimes writing in the first person, sometimes in the third as the whim strikes him. Owlesby seems to want to be a writer as well as an historian.) It also introduced Dorothy Keeble, Jack’s future wife (named “Olivia” in the “Ape-box Affair” as a courtesy to the young woman: the events of the story are very recent at the time of the narration, and Owlesby would have avoided taking the liberty of using her actual name, although he doesn’t scruple against using the actual names of the other, older characters. One of the avowed purposes of his work is to promote and chronicle the adventures of Langdon St. Ives.) The plot of “The Ape-box Affair” hinges on a confusion of several mechanized boxes built by William Keeble, toy maker extraordinaire. Some of the incidents, characters, and trappings of “The Ape-box Affair” found their way into the first St. Ives novel, Homunculus, published several years later. Some of them did not — the picking and choosing having occurred, I’ll insist, in the interest of what might be called “truth,” which, like Uncle Wiggily’s infamous bar of laundry soap, is a slippery eel at best.

I had published only one real story previous to “The Ape-box Affair,” also in UNEARTH, a very different sort of piece involving an imaginative boy riding aboard a Greyhound bus that might or might not be bound for Mars, which he might or might not have confused with a red agate marble in his pants pocket. In the further interest of truth, such as it is, I’ll insist now that the boy in that story was me, although I didn’t know it at the time that I wrote it; certainly it was my agate marble that he had in his pocket, and his state of imaginative confusion was very like my own in those days.The story was generated by an incident that’s still fresh in my mind, although it occurred more than 35 years ago. A bunch of us — Tim Powers, Bill Bailey (later to marry Tim’s sister Beth) my wife Viki, and I were driving into L.A. in our friend Neil’s Volkswagen bus, bound for Canter’s Delicatessen. The usual wild conversation ensued nonstop, and someone put a question to me. I didn’t respond, my mind being elsewhere, as it so often is. After a silent moment Neil said, “Blaylock thinks he’s riding on a Greyhound bus to Mars.” Everyone laughed, including me, although I was already thinking about the story the comment suggested. In those days I carried several good luck charms in my pocket, including the agate marble that figures into that story. I sometimes still seem to be aboard that Greyhound bus — a long, strange trip….

“Uncle Wiggily went to a store where they sold toy circus balloons, and of the monkey gentleman who kept the store he asked:

‘Have you any flying machines?’

‘What do you mean — flying machines?’ asked the monkey gentleman. ‘Do you mean birds?’

‘Well, birds are flying machines, of course,’ the rabbit gentleman said. ‘But I mean a sort of airship that I could go up in as if I were in a balloon, and fly around in the clouds….’”

When I was growing up my family occasionally played the Uncle Wiggily board game, in which one was pursued through the swamp by the bad Pipsisewah and the terrible Skeezicks. I loved the game, even though it gave me nightmares. Later on I discovered the Uncle Wiggily books, written by Howard R. Garis, and I’m still particularly fond of Uncle Wiggily’s Airship, in which Uncle Wiggily builds his airship by tying balloons to a laundry basket. He fastens an electric fan to it for propulsion and contrives a sort of hockey-stick tiller and “a baby carriage wheel to steer by,” and then embarks on a series of high altitude adventures, often suffering crash landings when the balloons burst. In one adventure he’s saved by the ingenuity of Arabella the chicken girl, who blows flotational soap bubbles through a pipe: “Then she blew forty-’leven bubbles, or maybe more, for all I know. Uncle Wiggily caught them, and fastened them with silk threads and cobwebs, which a kind spider lady spun for him, to the basket of his airship….”

Back in the early 1980s a man in Long Beach fastened helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated high over the city, eating a sack lunch and rising to heights above 10,000 feet, where he was viewed with astonishment by pilots and passengers of commercial airplanes. When he landed, hours later, sunburned and amazed, he was cited by the FAA for having failed to file a flight plan. There were no other relevant laws on the books, apparently, although there are now. We’re living in an era when Uncle Wiggily would be an outlaw, and the monkey gentleman and Arabella the chicken girl accessories to a crime. (Uncle Wiggily, by the way, took a Japanese umbrella up with him to solve the sunburn problem.) We hear often enough that truth is stranger than fiction, which is obviously true if you keep your eyes open. It’s wonderful, however, when reality mimics fiction, and an unemployed car mechanic out in Long Beach goes down to a store where they sell toy circus balloons and becomes Uncle Wiggily for a day.

I remember reading the account of the balloon airship in the newspaper — reading it more than once — and then driving down to the Lucky supermarket on Chapman Avenue in a highly distracted state of mind. I bounced up over the curb on my way into the parking lot (my mind elsewhere) the jolt coincidental with the inspiration for the first chapter of what would become The Digging Leviathan. Later that afternoon I actually started writing the novel (which Lester del Rey would later reject unread, on the grounds that the idea of the book was “cultistic.” “You went to the same damned university that Powers went to, didn’t you?” Lester asked me over the telephone.) The episode of the balloon airship disappeared out of the book in the writing of it; it had simply been a sort of incidental muse.

When those first two UNEARTH stories were published, neither generated wild interest, but more than one reader commented on the odd differences in style and method, as if the stories had been written by different authors. I mean to address that phenomenon briefly, because those perceptive readers were to some small degree correct, and these thirty years later, after writing and publishing some sixteen novels and enough short stories to have lost count, I see no reason that the truth shouldn’t prevail, such as it is.

In 1975, Viki and I traveled to Europe for a period of nearly three months, spending some time in England and Ireland. We stayed briefly in Bristol with our friends Sue and Barry Watts. Barry had developed carpentry skills building wooden boats, and had recently contracted to do some restoration work at St. Mary Redcliffe Church. His project was to restore the large, wood-and-stone garden shed in back of the Sexton’s house next door. The shed was a comparatively recent addition to the grounds of the medieval church, having been built early in the 1920s. In World War II a German bomb blew apart a tramway nearby, the blast throwing a tram rail through the roof. (The errant rail is now a memorial on the church grounds.) The shed had been ineptly repaired, and time and the weather had been nearly as disastrous as the tram rail in the years since. Restoring the shed would take Barry a couple of months of finely detailed work. The details of that work, as interesting as they were, are irrelevant to this account, aside from my helping with the early business of removing the contents of the shed to a nearby garage. Over the years the shed had been used as a sort of warehouse, and it was packed with otherwise homeless junk. It reminded me a little of a yard sale, in that there was nothing apparently interesting about any of it except for the lurking possibility of some small, hidden treasure….

In the end, I had more fun puttering around in that old garden shed during the three days we were in Bristol than I had looking at all the cathedrals and museums and “sites” that Europe afforded us during the rest of our long holiday, and on top of that, I found my hidden treasure, such as it turned out to be. Statutes of limitation and copyright being what they are, there’s no danger in my admitting that now. There were a number of wooden crates with screwed-down lids piled against the back wall, and of course it was none of our business to look inside, although we wanted to badly. There was a steamer trunk, however, out of keeping with the rest of the crates and buried beneath them, which no one had gone to the trouble to lock. I simply couldn’t help myself; I took a look inside. I was disappointed at first to find nothing much in it — some personal documents and vaguely interesting old magazines (more interesting when I came to understand what they were). At the bottom of the trunk, however, lay a number of parcels wrapped in calfskin and tied neatly — manuscripts of some sort, apparently (or allegedly) written down nearly a century earlier. I had no idea by whom until later, when I had the leisure to study them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was that I left Barry to his work and read through some of it on the spot, quickly coming to a decision that — I’m ashamed to say — could be viewed as reprehensible, not least of all because I took advantage of a friend. That afternoon I boxed up the manuscripts and mailed them home. I wasn’t guilty of theft, mind you, because as soon as I had the opportunity I photocopied all of them and then mailed the originals back to Bristol, where Barry was just then finishing his work. He returned them to their trunk, put the trunk back into the pile of crates and junk, and several days later moved out to Harrogate where he opened a fish and chips restaurant.

“The Ape-box Affair” was (substantially) one of those manuscripts — and so my guilt perpetuated itself when I mailed it to UNEARTH as my own work, although the story originated with Jack Owlesby. I’ll insist, however, that his was unpublishable as it stood. Parts of it were fragmentary, for one thing: the first half was mainly a collection of notes and odd paragraphs. The alchemy that turned it into a story was of my own devising. I considered sending it out as the work of Jack Owlesby, but it seemed to me that UNEARTH, having published one story by Blaylock, might be induced to publish another, whereas they wouldn’t have heard of Jack Owlesby, and wouldn’t be able to contact the man in any event. You can imagine that I wasn’t keen on the idea of explaining how the manuscript had fallen into my hands. The editors wouldn’t have touched it. It turned out to be monumentally simple to rationalize the entire business, and to incorporate Jack Owlesby into myself, so to speak: Owlesby was a mere ghost, after all (and so didn’t need the forty dollars, money being of no value in the afterlife).

It’s sufficient to point out that Jack Owlesby didn’t live to publish his own manuscripts, or to explain or eradicate their inconsistencies and put them into order. You might suppose that I myself would have eradicated inconsistencies, both of style and content, but that would have required reading and reworking the entirety of those bundled manuscripts — essentially rewriting all of it — back in 1976. I didn’t have the patience for it then, and I don’t have the patience for it now, except in my piecemeal fashion. All in the fullness of time, I say, and to hell with the flight plan.

And so the voice, literarily speaking, of the “The Ape-box Affair” is to some small extent my own, as is the voice of The Ebb Tide, although I’m certainly not the “I” of either story, as has already been revealed. It’s best, I suppose, to say that the voice is collaborative (which tells us nothing, since voice in that sense is always collaborative: it can’t exist without character, and character can’t exist without an author. Huck Finn’s “voice” isn’t Twain’s exactly; but is a collaboration between the living author and the imagined character). Plenty of authors have insisted that their characters “write” their stories, and that they — the authors — simply follow along, and I suppose that’s more or less true; it’s simply a little more true in the case of the St. Ives stories.

Ultimately, to what extent the stories of Langdon St. Ives are my own, and to what extent they’re the work of Jack Owlesby, is neither here nor there. Haggling over the issue is pointless. The copyrights are mine. I’ll insist that if I hadn’t borrowed the manuscripts, and if I hadn’t rewritten them and finished them and published them as my own, Langdon St. Ives and his many adventures would still lie buried in the darkness of that steamer trunk, in much the same sense that unwritten stories lie buried in the writer’s mind. Jack Owlesby would remain a mere ghost, living in a garden shed in Bristol. In the end, that intrepid car mechanic in Long Beach, whether he knew it or not, owed a debt to Uncle Wiggily, who perfected the science of balloon airship navigation seventy years earlier, and who never bothered to file a flight plan, either.

It’s my belief that “The Ape-box Affair” was undertaken as a work of fiction, with certain recent incidents in the life of Langdon St. Ives being the inspiration. It’s apparently the work of a young writer. The Ebb Tide, however, which occurs at the time of the Phoenix Park murders (and so we can set the date absolutely — May 6, 1822, some seven years after the events chronicled in Homunculus) is something more like a history or a memoir. Owlesby is older now, not half so giddy. There are fewer apparent fabulations and shaggy-doggisms, and Owlesby has developed some admirable self-doubt and a penchant for philosophizing. That’s due, I’ll insist, to the increasing sobriety of age, and it’s altogether fitting that I was a young writer myself when I undertook to put “The Ape-box Affair” into publishable shape.

One interesting thing: there’s no indication anywhere concerning when, exactly, the stories were in fact written. I’ve merely been speculating. Owlesby might have written “The Ape-box Affair” in later years, perhaps when he was doddering into a second childhood, or — equally possibly — after he had taken to drink. I speculated when I first read the manuscript (speaking again of muses) that Owlesby had been heavily influenced by Stevenson, in particular by The Dynamiter and the stories in The New Arabian Nights, although when I checked copyright dates I discovered that those books weren’t published until the mid 1880s, and the events of “The Ape-box Affair” must have occurred prior to 1875, a decade earlier. All of my speculations, in other words, might be nonsense. Questions of origin are further muddled by the fact that in the original texts there are very few clues to reveal when the various events actually took place.

Truth (that slippery eel) exists, but time and tide have hidden it from us, and there’s no way to get at it now. If we’re to keep afloat, we’re left to balloons and an electric fan, and to the bubbles and cobweb of the imagination.

— Jim Blaylock