Ormondroyd Lost and Found

On Saturday morning, I finished reading Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top, which features as its narrator a Bay Area–author named Ormondroyd. However, that character doesn’t quite match the author described on the back jacket flap: no kids, no day job. That led me to wonder about the real man.

On Saturday afternoon, I opened an email from author Marc Tyler Nobleman reporting that he was about to post Ormondroyd’s first interview about his writing career, in two parts.

Now that’s service.

Actually, the interview didn’t answer my questions, and in fact raised others. But it was very interesting, including this exchange:

Did you ever consider a sequel to David and the Phoenix?

I not only considered it, I was fool enough to write it. Disaster! I threw away the whole book.

What was the sequel about? When did you write it? Did you save no copy?

Well, the Phoenix was irrevocably gone, so I substituted a gnome-like figure, and he and David set out on a quest, carried by a flying suitcase...but of course without the old Phoenix it was as useless as Gone with the Wind without Scarlett O'Hara. I can't remember when I committed this literary crime. No copy. My wastebasket is a receptacle of no return.

I think that reflects how the character of the Phoenix so dominated that book, and David was fairly blank. Any sequel would also have risked undercutting the first book’s theme of accepting the cycle of life and death. Ormondroyd did write a sequel to Time at the Top, once again featuring an author named Ormondroyd, and I may have to look that up now.

The Phoenix Rises Again?

Yesterday the Boston Globe featured economist Ronald F. Ferguson in its “Bibliophiles” column.

He “never developed a habit of reading novels,” he said, but spoke of his childhood reading this way, with one title lingering in his memory:

I had one special summer, after second grade, maybe, when I joined a book club and they would send a book every couple of weeks. They were storybooks. One was called “The Phoenix.” I just remember the title. It was a story of one of these birds that is reborn every 500 years. That summer is the summer that I developed a love of reading.

Was the book Ferguson remembered David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd? It’s the right vintage: the book was published in 1957, when Ferguson turned seven according to Wikipedia. It was a selection of the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club. And the phoenix’s death and rebirth forms the culmination of the story.

Worldcat lists only a couple of other candidates from the 1950s: a reissue of E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, and Marius Barbeau’s The Golden Phoenix, and Other French-Canadian Fairy Tales. Ormondroyd’s book stands out from those in being solidly grounded in contemporary American life.

Back in 2006 I quoted from an essay by Prof. Gerald Early, two years younger than Ferguson, about his fondness for David and the Phoenix. Once again I wonder if what I saw as a flaw in the story—the lack of specific traits for the young protagonist David—was actually a virtue for young African-American male readers in the 1950s like Early and Ferguson. They might have been able to imagine themselves in David’s shoes when few other stories were as welcoming.

Gerald and the Phoenix

Back in August, I commented on David and the Phoenix, a gentle 1957 fantasy by Edward Ormondroyd reissued in the 1990s by Purple House Press. In this 2004 Daedalus article, Washington University in St. Louis's Merle King Professor of Modern Letters Gerald Early wrote of his fondness for the book. His mother gave it to him while he was in third grade, and he feverishly read and reread it.

Early says:

The phoenix was especially appealing to me, since it personified resurrection, thus making death not death at all, but some sort of cosmic learning experience. (One feature of some American children's literature is its third-rate Emersonianism, its remarkable mixture of childhood angst and the regenerative power of pluck: Americans seem to insist, more than they have any right to, that even the most tragic situations must yield to a frightfully unreasoning optimism, so that all boats, in the end, are 'uplifted.')

(Yes, don't we all want that "sense of hope"?)

Early picks up the story when he was in college, listening to black-consciousness music:

In a spirit of racial holiness, I heard Doug and Jean sing, "Those that were lost shall surely be returned"—and out of nowhere I recalled David and the Phoenix. I knew that book as well as I knew my own name, but as a child I could not, for the life of me, explain what it meant to me. But when I heard Doug and Jean's song, I realized that David and the Pheonix had taught me two contradictory yet complementary truths about childhood. First, that some things about childhood are lost beyond recovery, and we are pained rightly or wrongly by the loss. Second, and more profoundly, that most children's literature is about lost children returning home.

Early's comments struck me in two ways. First, I wrote before about how I found David, the young hero, to be a blank, but wondered if that could help young readers project themselves into his story. Early was a black child born in 1952, and thus had little chance to read or view stories about other black children. This book's pictures show David as a white boy, but his otherwise generic character may have helped young Gerald identify with him.

Second, the theme of death and rebirth that Early found so powerful as a child and young man is actually a very small part of David and the Phoenix. The novel is episodic, and the conflict running through most of the book is the Phoenix's rivalry with a Scientist. Only in the last couple of chapters does it become clear that the Phoenix is about to immolate himself. Of course, if you know the legend of the phoenix going in, and especially if you're rereading the book for the fifth time in a month, then that fate hangs over the character all along. I think that's the experience that Early remembers, the dread of moving toward the end of the book, when he knows the Phoenix must die and be reborn. A "cosmic learning experience" indeed.

Next month, Phi Beta Kappa will give Prof. Early a special award for "for distinguished service to the humanities."

Ormondroyd and the Phoenix

Back when Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was in cinemas, I told friends that the movie had convinced me those dinosaurs were real, but when I watched the human characters carefully I could see that they were artificial. They just didn’t speak and act like real people. I got a similar sensation from Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix, originally published in 1957 and resurrected by the reprinter Purple House Press.

Ormondroyd is in the school of E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and Edward Eager, describing fantastic creatures within the real world his readers recognize rather than setting his story in a fairyland or parallel dimension. The Phoenix and many of his compeers (such as the Eeyore-like Sea Serpent) come to life through strong personalities and lots and lots of concrete detail. Sometimes Ormondroyd even uses the Rabelaisian technique of very long lists of objects in the scene. How can we not accept such a precise image?

But I never believed in David, the boy who trips across the Phoenix on a mountainside and is taken under the bird’s giant wing. He's a blank. What was his life like before that moment? How did he do in school? Did he like sports or games, music or art? Did he build things or tell stories? Did he have a gang of pals or one or two close friends? Is he tall for his age, skinny or fat? What does he want to be when he grows up? We never really find out.

For some young readers, that blankness might have been a virtue. It let them project themselves onto David. But it also leaves us little chance to imagine him as a real person, and thus to sympathize with his larger desires and anxieties. Of course, an author can overload the young protagonist of a simple, fun adventure story with psychological problems to work through. But giving a character some individual personality and history (i.e., character) makes any story more emotionally rich.

David's family and community are, similarly, simulacra, with details chosen to make the story more exciting rather than to reflect real life. The book starts with the family moving into a new house; within about a week, that house is filled with “fruit crates” and “old boxes” just right for David to hide things behind. A neighborhood blackout brings police, fire, and repair vehicles almost immediately. The main antagonist, a scientist referred to imaginatively as "the Scientist," wants to shoot the Phoenix rather than study it; that's a poor portrait of science, even by 1957 standards, but it raises the stakes in the story.