What literature needs now is editors, sweet editors
Joe David Brown's book is the printed source for the exquisite film Paper Moon.
The book was published in 1971 by Simon and Schuster, a major publishing house.
I don't know how it got published. Brown had to have had an editor. I would like to string up the editor.
I'm both parsimonious and voluminous in my reading. I vet books before I read them and I read every book that I can find that passes my vetting process. Life is too short to read bad books. Addie Pray is a bad book. I did not vet Addie Pray beforehand; I read it as the final, unfinished task in researching Paper Moon.
I have five criteria in judging the quality of a book of fiction.
1) Is the writing good?3) Does the book "transport" me to the scene so that I leave my world and enter the author's?
4) Are the characters well-drawn so that I can see them?
5) Is there a "moral" or lesson to the book?
Joe David Brown's writing is good enough. On all other criteria Addie Pray fails.
There is a story in Addie Pray, that of a precocious girl-swindler. The genre is the journey, as old as Homer. The journey speaks to something deep in mankind's soul. Making a child the title and central character is a winning twist. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. A girl, with her innocence, is a adorable.
Brown had a basis in his real-life experience to write this story: he was a police reporter for the Birmingham (Alabama) Post. But the story that Brown writes is attenuated beyond plausibility to the snapping point.
As I read and my boxes remained unticked I focused on the last of them. There is little innocence in Brown's Addie. She is only eleven when her journey with Long Boy (Moses Pray) begins. She had had even then a hard life, her mother was a party girl, a prostitute it seems, who was killed in a car crash when she was only six. Her father could have been one of three men, including Long Boy. Not going to get any good life lessons in a rural, white Southern ghetto life raised by a single mother prostitute anymore than boys get good life lessons in an urban Black Northern ghetto life raised by a single mother prostitute.
Brown goes here and there with the moral of Addie Pray, and with Addie Pray's morals. Addie is an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is a great man who helps the poor to her. Positive lesson. Addie gets Long Boy to take her to see FDR in person. Through impersonation (negative lesson), Long Boy gets her right at the foot of the train platform. Their take-away from seeing the great man up close in person is to run a scam selling framed portraits of him.
Brown tries the Robin Hood route to morality at one point. Addie and Long Boy use the proceeds from a scam to buy car-loads of food and dump it on the porches of shocked poor people. But the book is based in Depression Alabama. Not many wealthy people to steal from. Everybody was poor. So their go-to scam, selling bibles supposedly ordered by husbands before death to recent widows preys (prays) on the poor to benefit only two other poor people, Addie and Long Boy.
In the second half of the book the story-telling goes completely off the rails, as it did for Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. Brown realizes that he has to think of how this tale is going to end, and if he is going to make a moral or ethical point. Brown inserts preposterous a Yalie scammer and makes a feint toward the seriously high-brow in a conversation between the erudite Yale man and Addie. The lesson is on the nuanced distinction between the legal-illegal and the moral-immoral. But Brown bungles it.
"You truly don't know the difference between right and wrong."
"Why, I'm not bad."
"You have a keen awareness of the difference between good and evil ...[but not] whether society regards what you are doing [as] right or wrong."
It was his last attempt at moral philosophy.
They never get caught. Long Boy and Addie get into two scrapes with the law. They talk themselves out of one with the judge, and escape out of the jail house in the other. They travel all over rural Alabama and into Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana perpetrating scam after scam and leaving a trail of victims. They could not be more distinctive, a fully-grown adult male traveling and scamming with a pre-pubescent female. But they never get caught. Neither man's justice nor God's is served in the book.
How about the softer, feminine virtue of love? Does Addie love? Does she love Long Boy, even as a father? What of that sexually suggestive name "Long" Boy? In the iconic scene in Paper Moon, Addie primps in the hotel bathroom, dousing herself in her mother's perfume and posing suggestively in her underwear while Moze sleeps off a drunken liaison. Neither that scene, nor anything close to it, appears in the book. Sex, or even sexual attraction, is never hinted at despite all.
How about the love between daughter and father? Long Boy hems and haws not answering Addie's query if he is her father, but dotes on her and wants her with him in all of their shenanigans. He treats her like a father would. In Paper Moon, Addie clearly loves Moze as a father, or father figure, while Moze angrily denies parenthood, only begrudgingly accepts Addie on his travels, and always with the end in mind of dropping her off at her aunt's house. At one point on the road, when Addie asks, "You don't like me, do you?", Moze pauses half a beat and yells, "No. I don't like you!"
But in the book, to answer my own questions, no, Addie does not love Long Boy. It was jarring for me to read the first time Addie (the book is written in Addie's voice), talking in her mind, refers to Long Boy as "the old fool". It was puzzling to read the put-down repeated numerous times, and it was telling to read the last three words in the book: "the old fool." No, Addie does not love Long Boy. Period. In fact, she scams him and all others of her love.
The book ends with a final Baroque scam that is the tell in Brown's desperation to end it. The Yale man cooks it up and has it figured out to the last detail. Addie is to pretend to be the lost granddaughter found of a bitter, old, reputably wealthy widow near death in New Orleans. The scam is to cheat the widow's wealthy lawyer nephew out of his inheritance. The beneficiaries of the plot are the widow, her companion, Addie and Long Boy. The reputed wealthy widow, Amelia Sass nee Goldsborough, is in reality broke. She has lived for 75 years with her family's former slave and her closest girl-hood companion, Mayflower Goldsborough.
Addie gets dropped off in both book and film. In film, it is against her will, she wants to be with Moze; in book, it is with Long Boy's misgivings at being separated from her for the six weeks plus that the plot takes simmering. Addie is taken in lovingly by Mayflower, begrudgingly at first by Grandmama Sass. They eventually warm greatly to each other. The head spins, as Brown's does, and Addie tells all near the end: she is not the long-lost granddaughter. But (gotta wrap it up here!) it doesn't matter to Grandmama Sass nor to Mayflower by that time (six-eight weeks?); Grandmama Sass dies; after the funeral Addie and Mayflower have a tearful conversation of remembrance:
On that morning we sat in Grandmama Sass's room and talked for hours. Finally, at noon, I got up and kissed Mayflower. "I'll be back," I said. "Don't worry about that. I'll be back." Mayflower held me close and said, "You've got to come back. This is your home, cherie."
Calvin [a servant] had already taken my baggage downstairs. I walked out of the door across the verandah into the bright sunshne. Long Boy was waiting. ...
..."Thought we'd ride up to Kentucky. I've been studyin' on it, an' I've got an idea we can do some business with tobacco."
I got into the truck and--do you know?--it felt so good. Like I was home. ...
Long Boy cut his eyes at me. "Got me a V-twelve Cadillac engine in this ol' thing," he said. Then he turned and gave me the biggest widest, sweetest grin. He said, "Figured you 'n' me still got a long ways t' go, honeybunch. The old fool.
So no, Addie Pray did not love anybody and Joe David Brown had no moral to his story.
