"Autobiographical novel recaptures early days at Fort Hays Kansas State College...hardships of life on the Kansas and New Mexico frontiers...what it was like to live during the Great Depression and the dust bowl of the '30s. When Fox wanted to attend Fort Hays Kansas State College, he had to work two years to save $100 for admission to the school. After graduating from FHKSC and losing three graduate assistantships due to World War II, Fox joined the Navy in 1944 and was stationed in Pearl Harbor and Guam. While at FHKSC, the young man in the book, named Robin Stackpole, spends his freshman year...trying to discover his own identity. Stackpole struggles to keep in contact with friends. Eventually he meets a girl, Molly, in Hays...and marries her." --
-The Alumni News of Fort Hays State University: Spring 1998"The Great Depression lays waste the romantic plans of farmboy Robin [Stackpole] and his inamorata." --
-The New York Times: October 11, 1998In
The Long, Happy Life of Robin Stackpole: A Novel of the Twentieth Century, Maynard Fox takes readers back to the early years of this century, a thrilling time for both the world at large and the book's hero. --
From the Publisher
ROBIN STACKPOLE began as an attempt at straight autobiography, but with nothing written down it quickly became an autobiographical and historical novel. I know those years and those people because I struggled there with them. Biography and history are turned into believable fiction in order to bring out various elements more colorfully than they would otherwise have been.
The novel extends from 1901 to the end of the twentieth century in order to pick up information and perspective from both the Stackpole and MacGreggor grandparents. The leading plot ends in 1934, but the MacGreggor part of the family becomes the center for Robin and his wife with the surprise ending.
This novel is in part ordinary, in part extraordinary. Robin first needs information about his own identity: Am I bad because I am part German (the bad guys in World War I)? Did we start wars with the Indians? Am I different from a girl in any special way? Why don't people tell us answers to these questions? And as time goes on, Can I ever believe that people in any way resemble bulls, like our bull courting a cow? I don't believe it; at least I won't ever do anything dirty like that. Then after he loses out because of his late puberty, How can I become a normal teenager, especially in talking with girls?
Robin's religious background lurks in the shadows about him. Is the Creation story in "Genesis" a word by word literal telling of God's creation of man and the universe? What will the Scopes "monkey trial" do to Protestant Americans as "fundamentalists" and "liberals" square off in the fight over Darwin's greatest work? Must the believers subscribe to a lengthy creedal statement to be accepted by those who have some creedal differences with them?
Other thematic elements stand out in the novel: Robin's rejection of dirty stories about the forbidden topic of sex. He begins to lose Wilsey when drought takes the Family back to Kansas from New Mexico. He suffers estrangement from her in part because he loses contact with other teenagers, so that when he enters college in 1933, he is still searching for an identity as a normal young man who is able to talk with girls.
Robin has two love affairs, and he celebrates success in both on the same day. This is not scandalous. Instead, it is a celebration of his maturity in discovering who he really was and is.
Strong in the story are the farm wives who have no running water in the house and who have heavy work in doing the laundry. Mother has too many children, and her strength is sapped until she breaks down of nervous prostration. She has to be put into the care of a female practitioner to give her rest for some months from family duties beyond those of caring for their year-old daughter.
In the family at the center of this novel, questions about profanity and substitutes for profanity linger in the atmosphere of the family home as a small difference between Papa and Mother. It touches tender spots in Mother's more rigid code. It is not a fundamental division between the parents, and the children know it; yet, there is that unstated weakness in Mother. Notes about style: The title of the book, The Long, Happy Life of Robin Stackpole, and inclusion of the Two Innocents page are ironic. The title is based on Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
The Stackpole family members know who they are--proud members of an American subculture using the language appropriate for their traditions. Papa reads from the stately King James Bible each morning before breakfast. How rude it would be in the moments following the Bible reading for the writer to show them saying I seen him, I done it, I ain't going. On the other hand, Mother is allowed to say "If it wasn't for" instead of using the subjunctive "If it weren't for". The writer himself uses the informal "different than" instead of "different from".
Mother sets the tone of a family discussion. If a child mentions the chamber pot at dinner, no one must laugh. Papa may not use words that seem to imitate profanity--"darned" for "damned", "by golly" for "by God", etc. The Dunkards are not given to cursing, and thoughtful neighbors do not curse before their children.
The children know the language of the farm--singletree, not whiffletree, for this is not in the South. They know the kinds of cultivating machinery--the harrow with teeth, the lister, the one-way, the disk, the moldboard plow. They know the difference between a halter and a bridle, a cow's stanchion and a horse's stall.
The effort, in the choices made by the writer, was to avoid artificiality and to use the language fitting for the occasion in the lives of the people who inhabit the pages of the novel.
The author, Maynard Fox (maynardfox@iname.com)
