In a Trance with Tom
McCann, William
BOOKS In a Trance with Tom by WILLIAM McCANN Shaky and unhinged after a reading romp with Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge one evening not long ago, I sent off a subscription to the Nostalgia Book...
...Anyhow, the result was a powerful beam that shone for miles and miles...
...As for Ned Newton, Tom's best chum, and Eradicate and Boomerang and Mr...
...Who else had a silent airship that could sneak up on smugglers...
...Andy, I may as well tell you, was one of the smugglers...
...It doesn't seem possible...
...Tom cried...
...It was a tough case, though, for Tom...
...I don't want, to go through that hell again.' " 'We'd better keep away from each other.' " See what I mean...
...What he needed was a powerful searchlight...
...that's all I shall say...
...Too many Marjorie Morning-stars, probably, too many Justines, too much Candy...
...I take Mary Nestor...
...The next rainy night, I'm going back and read Tom Swift and His Motorcycle...
...I don't know,' she said...
...Government men, led by Mr...
...Airships...
...My psychiatrist, a clever chap, told me, mercifully, "It's never too late to go back where you should have started...
...Take this bit, for instance, from Hemingway himself: " 'And there's not a damn thing we could do,' I said...
...Sam must be revolving in his grave like an electric egg beater...
...Soak your feet in a crystal-clear mountain stream...
...to the last, I was held in a restorative trance...
...Victor Appleton was actually a man named Edward Stratemeyer...
...Years ago, Sam Savacool, a gandy dancer on the old Chicago, Kalamazoo, and Saginaw, and a student of morals, often said to me, "Boy, I don't know what this world is coming to...
...This was Appleton's first book...
...Where is he...
...Smugglers using airships...
...In fact, he wrote nearly everything worth reading from 1910 to 1930...
...Tom couldn't sneak up on what he couldn't see...
...From the first sentence of Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight ("Tom, did you know Andy Foger was back in town...
...Tom Swift!' she exclaimed...
...I won't jam up the story for you by telling how it came out...
...It was published in 1910, the year Henry James published A Round of Visits...
...was fiddling around one night with one of Tom's electric lanterns...
...Why, I even have a fondness for Tom's noxious enemy, "the red-haired, squint-eyed bully," Andy Foger...
...But it was...
...Andy Foger, bless his black heart, was in it up to his crimson neck...
...From then on the smugglers had no peace...
...Go back to the Ozarks with Harold Bell Wright," he said, "and breathe some cool, clean air again...
...Daring smugglers, Tom learns, are moving goods across the Canadian border into the northern part of New York State, near Shop-ton...
...BOOKS In a Trance with Tom by WILLIAM McCANN Shaky and unhinged after a reading romp with Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge one evening not long ago, I sent off a subscription to the Nostalgia Book Club and took up Victor Appleton's Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight...
...But Richard Wilbur's great poem sold me on Tom Swift, "Who worked at none but wit's expense Putting dirigibles together Out in the yard, in the quiet weather, Whistling behind Tom Sawyer's fence...
...Illingway,' spoke Ned Newton quietly...
...Somehow he got "the alternating current from the automatic dynamo crossed with the direct current from the big storage battery in a funny way...
...All men today who don't trust anyone under forty-five were once devotees of Tom Swift...
...In no time Tom had the new light fixed on his noiseless airship, the Falcon...
...In the shambles of middle age I needed something to tighten my spiritual warp and woof...
...Listen: " 'Whose airship is this?' " 'Tom Swift's,' answered Ned, and at the sound of the name the woman uttered a cry, as she rushed into the motor room...
...Damon lived in the neighboring town of Waterford...
...That is precisely what they were up to...
...Now who will tell me that Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara.did not refine their artistry, their use of economical, allusive dialogue by the slavish reading of the Tom Swift epics...
...Night after night, Tom chased them back and forth across the border...
...Wakefield Damon ("Bless my suspenders"), they were wonderful...
...Wasn't this going back to buttermilk after a lifetime of bourbon...
...Not "funny" at all, the late Hugo Gernsback pointed out...
...Wires came unhooked...
...But I'm making up for it...
...Strate-meyer wrote the Rover Boys series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Nancy Drew mysteries...
...Koku (remember him...
...It is my misfortune I didn't find Tom sooner...
...You may have forgotten that Tom's mother was dead, and Mrs...
...Our story opens just as Tom was perfecting his noiseless airship motor ("the secret lies in a new way of feeding gasoline into the motor, a new sparking device, and an improved muffler...
...You'll feel better...
...You may have Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer...
...But the smugglers were flying under cover of darkness...
...But it didn't turn out that way...
...Koku, an amiable giant (good hearted but dumb), tried to hook them up again...
...Baggert kept house, and that Mr...
...Who else could hook a grappling rope to them and pull them down to earth...
...And Mary Nestor, Tom's girl—no Myra Breckinridge, she...
...But Tom himself admitted he wouldn't have thought of it in a hundred years...
...A bookish bartender suggested The Shepherd of the Hills...
...I had some misgivings, of course...
...Author Victor Appleton was a master of dialogue...
...A radical change of reading material, he thought, might do me good...
...Whitford, suspect the smugglers of using airships to transport diamonds and other valuables...
...He had to use both his electric rifle and his wizard camera before it was over...
...Andy was worse than the villainous Sam Snedecker...
...Oh, can it be possible that it is the same Tom Swift that rescued us in Africa?' " 'I think it is, Mrs...
...Do you remember that Tom Swift lived with his father, also an inventor of great note, in the town of Shop-ton, New York...
...Let me tell you how he got one...
...The Government naturally turned to Tom Swift for help...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
