Just as St. Fidgeta was the product of a time and place, John Bellairs' sophomore effort, The Pedant and the Shuffly, was shaped, in part, from his many years in academia. Up to that point he had been either a student or instructor in higher education for over a decade, as well as maneuvering through the thick sludgy bureaucracy of graduate school and attempting a doctoral thesis. These were chaotic times, notes Marilyn Fitschen, the book's illustrator, and such a lengthy and deep immersion in any atmosphere would allow only chaos to prevail. To which Bellairs said, in a 1971 commentary on the book, "chaos is more the rule in life anyway."
"John himself said that the notion of the Shuffly came from a very short sketch I wrote, with an accompanying cartoon," says Dale Fitschen. "The Shuffly was sort of a light hearted offspring of The Heap, and I was just writing a paragraph in an attempted Ray Bradbury style of colorful ominousness, with a jokey last line. The take-off was like this:
"Pleased and putrescent, the pimply Shuffly sloughed and chafed its batwing, brazening, bombastic bulk over coffined cobbles, leaves lashing in gusts of tree terror, sending sleepy sparrows spattering on black brick walls and mouse-twigged nests with tinsel and ripe grape eggs skittering and bursting on the cloud-hidden street. Shuffly never noticed.
The oozing ovula ogled with goggling lenses the blond boy engrossed in a book, beneath a parent-forbidden after ten lit lamp. Boy never heard, never felt a thing, as Shuffly tendrils seeped over the sill, paused and moaned. The boy hurriedly flipped a page and never noticed, until a great shadow slid over the desk and up the wall, and a hoarse morphitic murmur drizzled into his ear, "Wanna play?."
| The Pedant and the Shuffly is a fable pitting logic against chaos. I am on the side of the latter, since I know no one who uses logic who does not use it as a hammer. And chaos is more the rule in life anyway. |
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John Bellairs
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John, Dale says, did his own thing after that.
The page book tells the tale of those unfortunate souls who meet up with an antagonizing academic named Snodrog who, through the use of the art of logic and some wizardly sleight of hand, convinces his victims they are linen napkins, thereby actually turning them into linen napkins, or Flimsies as they are called. This had gone on for quite a while and would likely have continued had it not been for Sir Bertram Crabtree-Gore wandering into the tale. Crabtree-Gore – a rotund, amiable chap that boasts some of the same characteristics as his creator – tracks down one of the rare creatures of the land, the Shuffly, in an effort to give Snodrog a taste of his own medicine. As was noted, chaos ensues.
The Pedant and the Shuffly stands out as unique in Bellairs' bibliography: it arguably is his first to feature supernatural elements, it is completely illustrated unlike any book to follow, and its text has a somewhat flowery prose to it. It isn’t hard to miss. Bowen says that Bellairs once explained to him that these were deliberate parodies of items the Readers' Digest used to publish in a column called "Toward More Picturesque Speech." "The column specialized in similes and metaphors describing such routine phenomena as the sun, moon, clouds, birds, spring flowers – you get the idea – going about their customary activities, but couched in allegedly new and vivid terms. John felt that few of these efforts made valuable contributions to the treasury of English prose."
Hence Bellairs inspired to produce such mockeries of scene as these:
"On nights when the moon was a lost pale pizza floating above the quivering treetops...."
"One day, when the sun was like a milk bottle cap that has unaccountably gotten covered with tinfoil...."
His descriptions of Snodrog often strike a similar note:
"Snodrog laughed, but his laughter was like lead washers being dropped down a storm sewer grate."
"Now his voice was ominous, like soapy water drizzling from an overflowing bathtub."
It is also his shortest book, coming in at mere 79 pages, which makes it something of a "non-book," says Dale Fitschen, something "small and slight and in an odd literary niche."
Both Marilyn and Dale point out that it was never intended as a children book, more of an "illustrated adult book." Plus, what sort of children would understand “roots of the tree clutchant,” “ignoratio elenchi,” and the humour of "Four Hundred Variations of the Equilateral Triangle", anyway? However, a collegiate environment, much like the University of Chicago, which generated the book's mockery, is where a book like this would likely be welcomed, suitable for an erudite but specialized population.
Marilyn believes Macmillan was willing to publish “non-books” like Pedant “because of the culture of largesse the industry was going through. Printing and paper were relatively cheap, author royalties and advances were low, and people were buying books. Ten years later it was a different matter. Publishers were dropping whole genres of books. Others were merging or going out of business...we got started during the Golden Age.” Of Macmillan she also recalls Bellairs’ unhappiness at how little Macmillan pushed his books: “our contracts mentioned paperback rights, movies, foreign translations, etc. but our first two books never went into paperback...never went anywhere.”
The mock-seriousness intended for certain audiences was lost on the legendary and then Chicago-based author Saul Bellow, who snubbed the book upon its releases. Bellairs told many of his friends, among them the Fitschens and Al Myers, that Bellow entered Staver's Bookstore in Chicago during an autographing session, picked up a copy, riffed through it and gave it a derogatory snort before moving on.
Long out of print, The Pedant and the Shuffly was published in paperback when Mythopoeic Press reissued the title in 2001.
Bellairs left Mount Carroll in the spring of 1967 and although we don't know where he lived following his resignation, by mid-summer he had departed for an extended stay overseas in England. When he left Chicago this time, he said good-bye to the Midwest for good, returning seldom for brief visits with friends.
