Tales of Waring: tempering Fred Waring

personal gift to Fred Waring from American cartoonist, educator, writer, and connoisseur of good music
Gregory d’Alessio[1]

The Huron waged various kinds of campaigns. Occasionally, in retaliation for some serious injury, a band of several hundred warriors would lay siege to an enemy village...[2]

Young, wet-behind-the-ears brain-shrink, and drafted story-reporter mj lorenzo sincerely wanted to understand his interviewee's unforgiving siege against his boss and enemy, but mj was making the mistake of doing the easy thing. He was trying to find understanding in places familiar to him, places where anyone in the Western world would have looked in 1974, like Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He was not original enough in his thinking. He had not yet realized that you could not judge Bill by standards that practically anyone in the Western world would understand, or by standards that would apply more appropriately to regular, card-carrying, insider members of that 20th-century 'Western' civilization. The movie in his mind was trying to warn him of the error; but he kept suppressing it.

The ‘movie’ was just what he needed, however: it wanted him to see Bill as a man who thought like a Bronze Age warrior hero; a Hercules; or a noble and proud Huron headman; as the poor interviewer figured out years later when he tried this approach finally, in his head, years later when all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place at once, and made sense immediately, finally.

"That's a different kind of sure territory,” mj said. “Fred can count on certain kinds of reactions from others, and certain ones from you, and both are secure." The strong-charactered way Bill treated Fred, some aspect of it at least, must have appealed to Fred all those years, or he would hardly have kept Bill around so long.

As soon as the Huron had an enemy in their power they tore out his fingernails.... [etc.]...[3]

"Well no," mj said, for he still thought he'd found a possible way through some of the tortured mess. "He knows he's going to get an honest reaction from you!"

These injuries made it difficult for him to escape from the leather thong with which his arms were then bound.[4]

Bill battled another wacko schoolbook shrink theory as he had the others. He drew on standard authorities of mixed repute and social status, such as 'God'; or 'the office'; to strengthen his case against the young doctor’s interpretation: "Honest to GOD, mj, he does not want the truth, listen, we had long discussions about this in the OFFICE over the last few weeks."

But something had bound the two men, Bill and Fred, together for years, enough so that they could collaborate; some common ground, some shared purpose; just as Hercules and Dionysus had remained gods together in the Greek pantheon, despite personality differences; just as Huron head man and Jesuit priest had worked together for years despite lifestyles hugely contrary, before everything fell apart.

"I think he wants it the way some people like to be whipped,” said mj, “like a kid needs and even 'wants' to be spanked, as some parenting counselors might say."

Bill was lost to this kind of thinking. "Well, there's no way. That can't be true either. There's no way I can spank him."

"Oh, yes you can." Mj was confident of this. "Like the first time, where you said, 'Don't talk to Loftesness, talk to me 'cause I'm the best in the field?' Well, as you know, as you've said, nobody else can talk to Fred like this. And this, to him, is tantamount to a whipping. I mean that metaphorically."

At the same time, the Huron reminded him of the cruelties he and his people had practiced on them, saying that he must now be prepared to suffer likewise.[5]

"Yeh, but that was not attacking Fred. Now we're talking about attacking Fred, and Fred just won't stand for this."

"When a father spanks a son, it's not an attack. It's a chastening, a redirecting, a rebuke."

"I put Ray Loftesness down in his eyes," Bill argued. "But I didn't put Fred down."

Bill's notions of prowess were heroic. He used heroic lingo often. Now he said, "And I came on like Gangbusters. And what I think that was, he likes to associate with winners. And he thought, 'This is a winner'.

"Where, in this deal we're talkin' about now, where he comes in my office, I have an answer for everything. And I see that it frightens him because he thinks, "This man sees me for what I really am!"

"Well, maybe that's true," mj said, still confident of his brilliant insight. "But I'm looking at it from a different angle. I can see where Fred, who didn’t have a forceful father when he needed one, would not know how to handle a man who had any kind of –."

"...relaxed firmness, just a relaxed male determination and self-confidence. And Fred, as you know, does not have people around him like this."

They also made him sing his personal chant, which prisoners often continued to sing all the way to the Huron country.[6]

The interviewer was feeling his way with confidence again, looking for still firmer ground: "And if he found somebody, he would love it and hate it at the same time!"

"It's true. I see that." Bill pulled with mj, finally. "I never thought of it that way, but it's true!"

They were BOTH pulling so hard together now, Dr. Lorenzo explained to Sammy later, that exactly at this point in the interview, he had the sense they had plied their 'boat' plum out of the foggy moonlit Aegean Sea, where they had spent so much of the night, with mj feeling so lost. They left the space between Crete and Greece proper, sped hell-bent through the Mediterranean, roared past the Pillars of Hercules, crossed the ocean to the new world, paddled upriver, slowed, and rocked near a peaceful meadow that was dark except for moonlight.

Young mj landed in the older man's world in a new way. He was elated to the point of dizziness. Bill had bought into a psychoanalytic ‘interpretation’ of his, finally, a suggestion that he was a kind of father to Fred. It was pure Sigmund Freud. "The irony of it is,” he said, “that you were hired by him! He's your boss! And yet, you come off like you're his father!"

"And it's an impossible situation," Bill added. He backwatered quietly but decidedly, and drew their boat ashore near a long, moonlit, bark-covered structure. Holes aloft and at the ends of the Huron longhouse let out smoke and flickering firelight.

Mj almost jumped out of the boat before it landed solidly, he was so happy. "NO, it's not impossible. It happens! Many historic relationships have been like this!!"

"But you can't very well be a father figure to a man who is a tyrant!" Bill began to doubt the theory already. "He is a little boy, he throws his temper tantrums and must have his own way! And there's no way I can stop him from having his own way."

"No! But you could temper his temper! I mean, you are a temper-tempering influence! You can help save what's left of him that's worth saving."

Mj paused for effect, then reiterated, "There's something worth saving there!!" They had rammed ashore, beaching the argo-canoe in a new world, and there was so much heroic brilliance flashing everywhere, he was dizzy and blinded.

Super-genius leaders of human history should be given appropriate place in species regard, even IF miserably super-flawed, he was trying to tell Bill.

Fred was still with them for whatever reasons, mj could tell; in spite of where things now seemed headed; or maybe because of it. Fred had to hear and listen carefully to the case being brought against him, one supposed. It could hardly have been much fun attending your own tortured prosecution though.

As... prisoners passed through each village, they were stripped, bound hand and foot, and slowly led between two lines of Huron, who tortured them with clubs, thorns, knives, and firebrands, but were careful not to kill them.[8]

People who could temper other people’s anger were needed in the world to help keep peace. It was a bigger problem than Fred and Bill. Tolerance was needed everywhere. Consideration.

Sometimes peacemakers stuck up for losers, even for people morally defective like Fred. Every day at work mj defended losers. Addicts and alcoholics had to have treatment, with no fear of discovery by their community. He had to go to bat for them in many ways, in the office and community. Even in court, at times. He would end up defending losers his whole life. He understood them. He was one of them, in a way. Maybe that helped explain why he was still defending 'THE MAESTRO' now, even with Fred's high and mighty panoply of negative qualities.

[1] When Sammy Martinez’ high school after-reading club in Española, New Mexico, saw this illustration in the Beta version of the present work, they wanted an explanation from Dr. Lorenzo, who had just left them and driven across country to Penn State, photographed the Waring cartoon collection, and recommended this cartoon be placed here. In general the younger generations in the USA were increasingly interested in American cartoon art and artists during the early 21st century due to the fact that by then so many movies and TV programs were based on same, like Superman, Batman, and many, many more. A large percentage of Sammy’s students were of Native American stock and asked the Dr. specifically for an explanation of the two ‘Indians’ in the window. Early in 2019 he wrote them the following:

“Gregory d’Alessio died in 1993 and I am not an expert on American cartoon art, but here is my take on this work. It is a personal gift to Fred, with a personal message that is a bit hidden, probably because one side or the other might be embarrassed by or sensitive about the true underlying meaning. My theory is that d’Alessio, who was only 4-5 years younger than Fred, and in 1975 (the date on the cartoon) was about 70-71, maybe because of the usual very exhausting activities during the annual June ‘outing’ of the National Cartoonists Society at Fred’s Shawnee Inn, or maybe because of his age, slept in his Inn room through a golf date with Fred, or through the final annual show put on by the Pennsylvanians for the cartoonists, and provoked a not-so-pleasant reaction from Fred, and felt he owed an apology. A (Manhattan) city boy born and bred, he pictures Shawnee-on-Delaware as a woodsy trapper’s outpost and himself as a hunter pro tem. A hunter-trapper (notice the coon hat on bedpost and all the many traditional backcountry leather togs) may sleep late, but not if ‘THE MAESTRO’ is overseeing things, and not if ‘redskins’ are at the window grinning. In American iconography, movies or wherever, Indians grinning at a window while someone sleeps inside can mean only one thing, TROUBLE, especially when THE MAESTRO is watching TOO. The ‘Zleep Zleep Zleep’ refers to Fred’s famous theme song and suggests the worst of all possiblities, perhaps, that d’Alessio fell asleep while sitting in the front row during the final show that Fred and the Pennsylvanians did every year especially for the cartoonists at the Inn, and maybe fell over and landed on the floor with a big bang. Whatever it was, d’Alessio is saying, with wit, “It was your own fault I slept through your thing. You wore me out and lullabied me with your darn music and everything else!” Fred, with his closest friends and ‘equals’, so to speak, which included many cartoonists, especially those around his age, and especially those, like d’Alessio, who put their own personal selves on the line during World War II (in the Service or out), Fred had feisty, prankstery, teenagery relationships. He was ‘extremely competetive’, as Bill said early in the night, and would ‘cheat’ or ‘do anything to win’, including shortening the golf holes on his course. Many of the cartoons in the Fred Waring’s America collection reflect the very intense individual reactions of all kinds from dozens of individual cartoonists to Fred’s enormously provoking personality, a point which supports young Dr. Lorenzo’s argument with Bill in this chapter, “Tempering Fred Waring:” that Fred could go overboard, often, and needed ‘tempering’. D’Alessio’s work of witty cartoon art here is an attempt to ‘temper’ and appease THE MAESTRO on the wall – ‘with respect and affection’, of course – and maybe even get maestro laughing at himself, for once, which many found impossible to accomplish.

“It might also be relevant that d’Alessio hobnobbed with artists of very high caliber and great fame, like Carl Sandburg and Andres Segovia, the former a top-flight American poet whose poems have appeared in many high school and college textbooks, and the latter, Segovia, the king of the Spanish classical guitar, specifically the single man most responsible for the classical guitar gaining recognition and popularity in mainstream 20th century America. Accordingly, d’Alessio himself played the guitar (he was secretary of the New York Classic Guitar Society), and as Bill observed, top-notch classical musical artists sometimes provoked in Fred a sense of inferiority, discomfort and awkwardness, because he had never formally studied music. d’Alessio wrote and illustrated a book about Sandburg and his friends, including Segovia, entitled “Old Troubadour, Carl Sandburg With His Guitar Friends,” a book with which Waring may have been familiar, perhaps even having received it as a gift from d’Alessio.

“d’Alessio and his art were brilliant, as can be seen more quickly in the other d’Alessio cartoon included in the present work, in Tale 1, “Vishnu’s Pulse.” Like Shakespeare’s ‘plays within plays’, that cartoon shows one art project inside another, an artist nonchalantly dragging a guitar in the left hand, whipping off graphic art with his right hand about a choir, which he then begins talking to, instructing in singing as if they were a real choir, a rather complex concept, but easily captured by d’Alessio, and instantly comprehensible to an average viewer. In that drawing, the waving paint brush is also a stand-in for Fred’s conductor’s baton, or bare conductor’s hand. That cartoon is also a self-portrait, in a sense, because it shows the artist, presumably d’Alessio himself, at work drawing a cartoon; furthermore it echoes or “quotes” (or mimics) one of the most famous works in the history of Spanish European art, which Encyclopedia Britannica describes as: “Las Meninas (with a self-portrait of the artist [Velásquez] at the left, reflections of Philip IV and Queen Mariana in the mirror at the back of the room, and the Infanta Margarita with her meninas, or [little] maids of honour, in the foreground), oil on canvas by Diego Velázquez, about 1656; in the Prado [museum], Madrid [Spain].”

“The most amazing thing about the annual cartoonists’ get-together at Shawnee Inn was that, year after year around June 9^th, Fred’s birthday, quite close to the summer solstice, some of the country’s greatest musical artists would throw away free million-dollar musical art on cartoonist friends, while great cartoon artists would throw away free million-dollar cartoon art on musical friends. It was like a huge Dionysian splurge-fest of ecstatic high art (ha)! It was also something like a British Columbian Kwakiutl-tribe Potlatch!!! Except that the gifts were not food and property, but high art: cartoons and music. As the Encyclopedia Britannica says ever so blithely, yet amazingly fittingly: “...the main purpose of a potlatch was not the occasion itself but the validation of claims to social rank. The potlatch was also used as a face-saving device by individuals who had suffered public embarrassment and as a means of competition between rivals in social rank.” (See Bibliography under “potlatch.”)

“Is there anything like a potlatch in the northern New Mexico Pueblo tribes’ calendars of annual holidays? Educate me! Here’s your chance, o ye lucky high school student tutor-ees of Sammy Martinez! (He doesn’t even charge you!)”

[2] Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, p. 70.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Op cit, p. 72.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] A conference in the USA on the Waring trilogy which turned out to be of the type Dr. Lorenzo often disliked, produced a questioner with whom he had the following back-and-forth:

Questioner: Dr. Lorenzo, begging your pardon, but I think your geography is wrong in ‘Tempering Fred Waring’.

Dr. L.: How’s that?

Q.: Upriver to Huron country would require going upstream over Niagara Falls backwards in a rowboat.

Dr. L.: Are you by any chance a conservative Christian?

Q.: Yes, how did you know?

Dr. L.: Do you believe in the literal interpretation of Scripture?

Q.: Always. Yes, of course, always and everywhere. God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th. We know the ‘days’ were ‘literal days’ because Moses says in Genesis specifically, “The evening and the morning were the first day.” Moses put that in there to make sure that everyone would comprehend that the ‘days’ were literal 24-hour periods.

Dr. L.: What makes you think Bill paddled to Huron country, and not to Minisink where he had his own particular ‘Huron longhouse’ and the rest of the hellish torturing of Fred Waring was about to take place?

Q.: Oh. I’m sorry. I was picturing the ‘upstream’ as up the St. Lawrence, not up the Delaware and Minisink Creek.

Dr. L.: Yes, I understand. But allegory and metaphor are mere decoration to create atmosphere. Sometimes metaphor and allegory are more real and convincing than bare reality, and that’s why writers use it, especially poets. But when you read allegory, it’s most important to dwell on the essential point which the allegory is attempting to make, not on the allegory itself, which always runs the risk of being faulty in a manner or two, since it is mere allegory, not actual reality. And the point is, they were paddling hellbent together, and landed together, up Shit Creek without a paddle. Why? Because they were only pulling together for about two seconds, and immediately after that, they were again pulling in opposite directions. If one paddles one way, and the other paddles the other, that’s the same as having no paddle, or direction, at all, isn’t it?

Q.: Yes. I see. OK. Thank you for explaining that. I’ve been wondering about it for a while.

Dr. L.: What we all should be wondering about is how the United States of America and the Western democracies, and all of the other nations and peoples in the world too, are going to survive and thrive if we do not all paddle together. Anyone who reads my books, and books about my books, who comes away not asking that question, not attempting to answer it, and not succeeding in answering it, has missed the rowboat. I mean, the point.

[8] Trigger, ibid.