The free verse epitaphs of Masters’ best-known work were modeled after The Greek Anthology but based on people he’d known. These told the truth behind the flattering or laconic statements on the tombs and gravestones. The departed spoke of their lives as they had really been. Some were happy, productive, even creative and heroic. But most recite chronicles of hypocrisy, misery, misunderstanding, failed dreams, greed, narrow-mindedness, egotism, persecution, madness, connivance, cowardice, stupidity, injustice, sorrow, folly and murder.
In other words, the Spoon River citizens were just like big-city residents.
Among the graves in the cemetery of Petersburg are those of Judge Somers and his son, Jonathan Swift Somers II. Neither has any marker, though the grandson has made arrangements to erect stones above both. Masters has the judge complain that he was a famous Illinois jurist, yet he lies unhonored in his grave while the town drunkard, who is buried by his side, has a large monument. Masters does not explain how this came about.
According to Somers III, his grandson, the judge and his wife were not on the best of terms during the ten years preceding the old man’s death. Somers’ grandmother would give no details, but others provided the information that it was because of an indiscretion committed by the judge in a cathouse in Peoria. (This city is mentioned now and then in the Spoon River Anthology.)
The judge’s son, Somers II, sided with his father. This caused the mother to forbid her son to enter her house. In 1910 the judge died, and the following year the son and his wife were drowned in the Sangamon during a picnic outing. The widow refused to pay for monuments for either, insisting that she did not have the funds. Her son’s wife was buried in a family plot near New Goshen, Indiana. That Samantha Tincrowdor Somers preferred not to lie with her husband indicates that she also had strong differences with him.
Jonathan Swift Somers III was born in this unhappy atmosphere on January 6, 1910. This is also Sherlock Holmes’ birthdate, which Somers celebrates annually by sending a telegram of congratulations to a certain residence on Baker Street, London.
The forty-three-year-old grandmother took the year-old infant into her house. Though the gravestone incident seems to characterize her as vindictive, she was a very kind and probably too indulgent grandmother to the young Jonathan. Until the age of ten, he had a happy childhood. Even though the Somers’ house was a large gloomy mid-Victorian structure, it was brightened for him by his grandmother and the books he found in the library. A precocious reader, he went through all the lighter volumes before he was eleven. The judge’s philosophical books, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al, would be mastered by the time he was eighteen.
Despite his intense interest in books, Jonathan played as hard as any youngster. With his schoolmates he roamed the woody hills and swam and fished in the Sangamon. He gave promises of being a notable athlete, beating all his peers in the dashes and the broad jump. Among his many pets were a raven, a raccoon, a fox and a bullsnake.
Then infantile paralysis felled him. Treatment was primitive in those days, but a young physician, son of the Doctor Hill whose epitaph is in the Anthology, got him through. Jonathan came back out of the valley of the shadow, only to find that he would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. This knowledge resulted in another paralysis, a mental freezing. His grandmother despaired of his mind for a while, fearing that he had retreated so far into himself he would never come back out. Jonathan himself now recalls little of this period. Apparently, it was so traumatic that even today his conscious mind refuses to touch it.
“It was as if I were embedded in a crystal ball. I could see others around me, but I could not hear or touch them. And the crystal magnified and distorted their faces and figures. I was a human fly in amber, stuck in time, preserved from decay but isolated forever from the main flow of life.”
Amanda Knapp Somers, his grandmother, would not admit that he would never walk again. She told him that he only needed faith in God to overcome his “disability.” That was the one word she used when referring to his paralysis. Disability. She avoided mentioning his legs; they, too, were disabilities.
Amanda Somers had been raised in the Episcopalian sect. She came from an old Virginia family whose fortune had been ruined by the Civil War. Her father had brought his family out to this area shortly after Appomattox. He had intended to stay only a short while with his younger brother, who had settled near Petersburg before the war. Then he meant to push on west, to homestead in northern California. However, he had sickened and died in his brother’s house, leaving a wife, two daughters and a son. The wife died a year later of cholera. The surviving children were adopted by their uncle.
Amanda came into frequent contact with the fundamentalist Baptists and Methodists of this rural community. Though she never formally renounced her membership in the Episcopalian church, she began attending revival meetings. After marrying Jonathan Swift Somers I, she stopped this, since the “respectable” people in Petersburg did not go to such functions. Now, however, with her husband dead and her grandson crippled, she went to every revival and faith healer that came along. She insisted on taking young Jonathan with her, undoubtedly hoping that he would suddenly be “saved,” that a miracle would occur, that he would stand up and walk.
This went on for two years. The child objected strongly to these procedures. The tense emotional atmosphere and the sense of guilt at not being “saved” wore him out. Moreover, he hated being the center of attention at these meetings, and he always felt that he let everybody down when he failed to be “cured.” Somehow, it was his fault, not the faith healer’s, that he could not rid himself of his paralysis.
During this troubling time, several things saved young Jonathan’s reason. One was his ability to get away from the world into his books. The library was large, since it included both his grandfather’s and father’s books. Much of this was too advanced even for his precocity, but there were plenty of adventure and mystery volumes, and even fantasy was not lacking. Moreover, though his grandmother had some narrow-minded ideas about religion, she made no effort to supervise his reading. She gave him freedom in ordering books, and as a result Jonathan had a larger and more varied collection than the Petersburg library.
At this time he came across John Carter of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, Professor Challenger and Sherlock Holmes. In a short time he had ordered and read all of the works of Burroughs and Doyle. A copy of Before Adam led him to Jack London. This writer, in turn, introduced him to something besides fascinating tales of adventure in the frozen north or the hot south seas. He gave young Jonathan his first look into the depths of social and political injustice, into the miseries of “the people of the abyss.”
It was not enough for him to read about far-off exciting places. Unable immediately to get the sequel to The Gods of Mars, he wrote his own. This was titled Dejah Thoris of Barsoom and was one hundred pages, or about 20,000 words, quite an accomplishment for an eleven-year-old. On reading Burroughs’ sequel, The Warlord of Mars, Jonathan decided that he had been out-classed. Years later, however, he used an idea in his story as the basis for The Ivory Gates of Barsoom, his first published novel. This was his first John Clayter story. Clayter is, of course, a name composed of the first syllable of Tarzan’s English surname (Clayton) and the last syllable of John Carter’s surname. At the time of this novel, the spaceman John Clayter has not lost his limbs.