Parnassus on Wheels (original 1917; edition 2012)

This is a pilot for a new feel-good tv series:

Opening Credits:
It is a glorious morning on a deserted track somewhere in the rural Midwest. Rolling on the lane is a long gypsy-type wagon being pulled by a great big horse. On the open seat upfront holding the reins is a cheery man of middle years with kind brown eyes who is laughing gently in a conversational kind of way with a fat, rather plain but very jolly lady. They are wearing clothes the era when cars and wagons shared the roads, 1917.

The Action:
The woman and her older brother have been happily managing their isolated farm together until the brother publishes a book and the success makes him uppity in the extreme and while he swans around being famous, she is left at home running the farm. This is seriously annoying his sister.

A travelling salesmen, selling books, comes to her door saying he is not just selling books but also his travelling bookstore and would her brother, the famous author, be interested in it? He wants to leave bookselling to go back to the city to write his book.

He shows her this wonderful, magical wagon full of all the necessities for life on the road and shelves and shelves of books. She jumps at the chance and deciding to spend her life savings and take over the business herself and leaving notes for her brother telling him to look after himself. She closes the front door behind her, jumps on to the seat next to the bookseller and off they go.

End of Pilot

Further episodes will include dialogue between the bookseller and the spinster laying out their lives. He is a city man, a professor who wants to write a book and is passionate about their ability to change lives for the better. She's a bit of a disappointed spinster who counts her successes in hens' eggs and loaves baked.

Plots would include:
1. Making the first sale.
2. The caravan being stolen and the bookseller turns out to be handy with his fists.
3. Drama over the cheque for payment being cancelled by the pissed-off brother.
3. A bank scene, an arrest, and a false imprisonment.

Then we get into love, the stranger with a get-out-of-jail-free-card. The inevitable marriage and then the final winning over the brother.

Can't you just see it? It was just made for tv. The late Mike Landon would have been perfect casting.

Brilliant, lovely, heart-warming book. Beautifully-written without any suspense at all. Each rather obvious episode gives warning of what is to come next and the whole thing unfolds in a pastoral, slower-times, comfy, apple-pie kind of way. A nice book to read if you have a touch of flu and are sipping a hot toddy curled up on the sofa. ( )

In the early years of the twentieth century, a woman who is bored playing housewife to her literary brother purchases Parnassus from a wandering book salesman. Parnassus is "a caravan of culture," a traveling book treasure trove designed to bring books to the masses in more rural and outlying areas.

I found Morley's attention to gender issues really interesting here, plus his mixture of a bibliophile's dream—who wouldn't want to travel for a living with books literally at one's back?—with a social message of spreading knowledge to the disenfranchised.

An adventure book about books if ever there was an adventure book about books.

Many kudos to Melville House for bringing this title back into print; here's hoping they bring the sequel back as well. ( )

Charming, quaint little story about book-people and the people who love them. ( )

Slight but charming little escapist romance, more or less in the style of G.K. Chesterton, but roughened up with a bit of New England homespun quality and a few in-jokes about the US publishing business. Not the sort of book to read too seriously: if you stop to think about it, you realise that it's deeply patronising in the way it treats the woman narrator. But if you take it on its own terms, there are some very good lines and a lot of period charm about it. ( )

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley ~ 1917. This edition: J.B. Lippincott, 1955. Introduction by John T. Winterich. Illustrations by Douglas Gorsline. Hardcover. 160 pages.

My rating: 9/10. An unexpected story, boisterously told. The point off is for narrator Helen’s continued refrain of “I’m so fat and plain! I’m so dull and unintellectual!” Well, Helen, if you continue to sell yourself short like that, don’t be surprised if people treat you like a doormat. A minor issue, but one that I ground my teeth at a bit. Helen’s actions negated her sorry opinion of herself, by the way.

*****

This is the prequel to the perennially popular 1919 bestseller, The Haunted Bookshop. Though the books share a certain joie de vivre, they are quite different in style and presentation. Parnassus on Wheels is much less consciously intellectual; the narrator has a distinctive voice which is exclusive to her story, while Bookshop is a different kettle of fish entirely. I liked them both, in different ways.

Thirty-nine-year-old spinster Helen McGill lives a contented life on the small farm she owns with her brother Andrew. At least, it was contented, a happy contrast from her previous occupation as a governess in the city, which she joyfully left in order to join her brother in his quest for a more congenial way of life to combat his ill-health. The farm was just the ticket; Andrew has been usefully occupied with crops and pigs and mild rural pleasures, while Helen has kept the home fires burning and her chickens productively producing eggs.

But something has happened to change all of that. An elderly great-uncle has died, leaving the two his library, and Andrew, stimulated by the sudden abundance of literature at his disposal, has decided to become a writer himself. He pens an ode to the rural life, Paradise Regained, and sends it off to a New York publisher. The book catches the fancy of the jaded city dwellers everywhere, and Andrew is suddenly a best-selling author. He has started neglecting the farm to hob nob with the urban literati, and between city visits tramps the countryside looking for new material. Happiness and Hayseed follows, and then a book of poems. Through all of this Helen keeps the home fires burning and the farm on an even keel, but she is starting to get rather jaded herself in her role as “rural Xantippe” and “domestic balance-wheel that kept the great writer close to the homely realities of life”, as she has seen herself described by one of Andrew’s doting biographers.

Helen is ripe for rebellion, and when her chance to shake her brother up a bit comes she seizes it with both hands. Andrew is out one day, when up drives a horse-drawn van, with the following legend painted on its side:

R. MIFFLIN’S

TRAVELLING PARNASSUS

GOOD BOOKS FOR SALE

SHAKESPEARE, CHARLES LAMB, R.L.S.

HAZLITT, AND ALL OTHERS

The driver of the van, one Roger Mifflin, is looking for Andrew McGill. He presents Helen with his card:


ROGER MIFFLIN’S

TRAVELLING PARNASSUS



Worthy friends, my wain doth hold

Many a book, both new and old:

Books, the truest friends of man,

Fill this rolling caravan.

Books to satisfy all uses,

Golden lyrics of the Muses,

Books on cookery and farming,

Novels passionate and charming,

Every kind for every need

So that he who buys may read.

What librarian can surpass us?

Helen chuckles, and is immediately interested. She does, after all, appreciate a good book herself, though not to the excess her brother has shown. And Roger Mifflin has a business proposition of sorts. The van is a travelling bookshop, and he thinks it would be just the thing for Andrew to take over. Roger announces his intention of selling his business, lock, stock, horse Peg (short for Pegasus), and all.

Helen, imagining an even more complete neglect of the farm should her brother take on this attractive offer, is aghast. She tries to send Mifflin on his way, with no success.

The two joust back and forth, and Helen gets the gleam of an idea. She will purchase the travelling bookstore, and leave Andrew to watch the farm. She has some money saved, and turn-about is fair play, after all…

The deed is duly done, and, leaving the Swedish hired lady in charge, Helen hits the road with Roger along to show her the ropes. Needless to say, Andrew is flabbergasted at his sister’s sudden whim, and sets out in hot pursuit.

Hi-jinks ensue for numerous chapters, until a satisfyingly romantic conclusion is reached.

A grand little romp of a book, something of a period piece, but happy and playful, and well worth the short few hours it takes to gobble it up.

Lippincott’s 1955 edition, which I was lucky enough to stumble upon in Langley last week, has the extra bonus of a very informative explanatory foreword by John Winterich, which added greatly to my understanding and enjoyment of both Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop - I believe it was written to accompany the omnibus volume of both stories which I’ve seen listed on ABE - though this is a stand-alone volume. Clever line illustrations by Douglas Gorsline added an extra fillip to the tale.


*****

After I’d read Parnassus, I stumbled upon a little bit of interesting news regarding Christopher Morley’s inspiration for the story. Turns out that this novel is a send-up of another contemporary novelist of best-selling “rural odes”, one Ray Stannard Baker, writing under the pseudonym David Grayson. Baker-Grayson’s 1907 book, Adventures in Contentment, was immensely popular and gained a large following of people yearning after “the simple life”; it was followed by eight other volumes. Though Baker himself lived a completely urban lifestyle, as a hard-hitting newspaper reporter and journalist, his alter-ego “Grayson” fictionally left the city for the peaceful rural life of a small farm, where he was joined by his sister “Harriet”; the two enjoyed a rural idyll centered on the simple pleasures of country life and wholesome labour. ( )