“We’ll find gold in California, and all be rich” (166).
Akin to a parody of the westward journey in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor takes place nearly a century prior during the California Gold Rush (it is subtitled “A Novel of 1849 and the Rush to the Gold Fields”). This whimsical historical-picaresque novel is loosely based on several historical documents of the era including the journals of Dr. Joseph Middleton, a letter from the Bishop of Zacatecas (announcing a death in the final chapter of the book), the early street sermons of Reverend William Taylor published in the mid-1800s, and two paragraphs closely mirroring sections of the collected journals of Edwin Bryant “What I saw in California” in London in 1849. In fact, Mr. Taylor includes an extensive bibliography at the end of the novel citing these different works.
A wild ramble not unlike A.B. Guthrie’s The Way West (which also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950) The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is an outrageously hilarious satire of the California Gold Rush –classical satirists like Henry Fielding are even alluded to several times in the book. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is told primarily through the lens of a teenaged rapscallion named Jaimie McPheeters who recounts his journey using various recovered letters and scattered journal entries from his quirky father, Sardius McPheeters. Jaimie narrates the novel several years after-the-fact, taking place in 1849-1850, he introduces us to his world. The McPheeters reside in Louisville, Kentucky. The family patriarch, Sardius, is an eccentric Scottish dream-chaser and a medical doctor with a penchant for drinking and gambling. But he has run the family into debt all over town, and sometimes he gets drunk because he doesn’t like being a doctor, but he still serves as a comical Don Quixote with a hopeful vision of the future –he is “possibly a little peculiar in the head” with “bouncy spirits” and “one of the scatterbraindest fellows that ever lived.” As Jaimie says, “He wanted to be a smuggler, you understand, like everybody else along that coast, and engage in a respectable trade that brought in a steady living” (21). For example, Sardius has a certain degree of bitterness toward his late father-in-law for refusing to finance his idea of a convalescent home for drunkards. With his creditors closing in, one day Sardius gets the hair-brained idea to venture westward to California where “nature in her blessed bounty has seen fit to strew gold” all over the state. There he expects to find easy riches. Using Joseph E. Ware’s Immigrants Guide to California, Sardius persuades his wife, Melissa, to allow their son Jaimie to join the expedition.
Thus, leaving behind Melissa with two daughters, an African “nurse” named “Aunt Kitty,” and a billy goat named “Sam,” Jaimie and his father Sardius (carrying two books, Fyfe’s Anatomy and Lizar’s Surgery) embark for California on a wild rollicking adventure that introduces them to many colorful characters along the way (like Jennie, Coulter, the Kissels, and Po-Povie). It takes them on a boat trip up the Mississippi which quickly turns sour as Jaimie recklessly climbs down along the boat one evening in search of coins left behind by a drunken man who had fallen overboard into the boat wheel. Tragically, Jaimie falls into the cold water and eventually washes ashore where he meets a slimy couple who plan to acquire him for seven years of indentured servitude, but he is then kidnapped by a pair of outlaws who reappear at various points throughout the novel before Jaimie orchestrates a situation that eventually reunites him with his father in St. Louis, Missouri. So begins a haphazard tale.
There are numerous twists and turns throughout the novel –it would be impossible to summarize them all here– but as we head west from the “last outpost of civilization” at Independence, Missouri to Salt Lake City, Utah and onward to California, we encounter endless rugged terrain, unpredictable weather, and random accidents over the prairie, the alkali plains, the desert, the great Rocky Mountains, the High Sierras, as well as hopeless situations, like rabid wolf bites, deserters, duels, dead animals, fires, people scalped or skinned alive, and a variety of Indian tribes like the Sioux, Pawnee, Snakes, Crows, and Utes, as well as a confluence of international cultures and ethnicities like Mexicans, Chileans, Australians, English, French –all in search of gold. But perhaps none are described in less flattering terms than the Mormons in Utah. The “Saints,” as the McPheeters call them, are portrayed as an isolated cult with too much power and bound by restrictive policies. Polygamous and fearful of diseases for being demonic possessions, they are proselytizers who pressure outsiders to join (especially through a Mormon vigilante group known as the Danites). Consider the following passage in a letter by Sardius dated December 21, 1849:
“…we are finding it increasingly hard to maintain good relations with the Saints. These people can be irksome. Four times in the last weeks, we have been visited by a ruffianly oaf, heavy, sensual and coarse, named Muller, whose amorous propensities have been aroused by the sight of our Jennie. He sits making comments that are perilously close to vile, while eyeing her with thinly concealed lust. This makes for a delicate situation, since Muller has some influence and is exerting great pressure to accomplish his unworthy end. This he can do only if she abandons her present religion and adopts the Mormon faith” (332-333).
On this journey, Jaimie and Sardius meet various important historical figures like Brigham Young, John Murrel, Jim Bridger, John Sutter and others. When they finally arrive in California, Jaimie sets the scene “…we kept plugging, and always in the air, to keep us going, was the feeling that in the next ravine, just over the hill, lay a fortune. This sort of thing can give you a pretty good push of energy, the business of looking for something, with the idea of getting it free” (408). However, predictably their haul of gold proves to be minimal. They wind up working various schemes and odd-jobs en route from Sacramento to San Francisco, where Sardius turns to drinking and gambling again until he is unsurprisingly murdered. It is a sad moment in the novel which represents the death of a dream, the birth of disillusionment, much like the conclusion of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Sardius had served as a starry-eyed visionary, a businessman and a schemer, who was nevertheless a clumsy figure with an inflated sense of his own high-minded intellectualism. Jaimie writes to his mother to announce his father’s death, and she sells their family home in Kentucky in order to pay off the family debts. She then sets sail for California with her daughters (as promised at the beginning, “Aunt Kitty” has passed away and she never sees Jaimie again).
The narrative realism in this novel is shown at the end as Jaimie has been writing this book and collecting various documents for several years (he has frequently broken the fourth wall throughout the novel). He tells us about his location while he is currently finishing up the book: “Autumn has come, and I am on my way to San Francisco. I have a new suit. I am going on seventeen years old. I am scarcely aware of the river, or the boats, or, finally, the city where I lived in hardship for so long. There is a little stab of pain when I see the spot where the sailors’ tent stood, and think of my father’s plans in those days. But a ship is coming in toward the wharf; the lines are out; men are running up and down; a skiff picks out a lead line that falls short in the water; and the stream winches make a great noise” (535). He returns to San Francisco, hand-in-hand with his adoptive “sister” Po-Povi.
Thus, concludes a fun middle-of-the-road Pulitzer Prize-winner, one which sits squarely in the shadow of greater works, like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, but which is still a step ahead of many other forgettable Pulitzer Prize-winners in my view. In March 1958, The New York Times wrote: “This is a tremendously exciting novel, and it has the added zest of being in sharp focus historically. Some of the incidents of violence will curl the hair of many a reader.” The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters was later made into an ABC miniseries in 1963-1964 starring Kurt Russell, Dan O’Herlihy and Charles Bronson (Bronson appeared in the final 13 episodes of the series).
Notable Quotations:
“On the day when I first learned of my father’s journey, I had come back with two companions from a satisfactory afternoon in the weeds near Kay’s Bell Foundry, shooting a slingshot at the new bells, which were lying out in the yard and strung up on rafters” (9, opening lines).
“All about us the country, fertile and picturesque, undulates like a broad sea-swell, its various timbers –oak, maple, cottonwood, elm, and sycamore—forming darker oases in the polychrome carpet of prairie wild flowers. For that rolling immensity, the Prairie, begins here” (78-79 in a letter from Sardius to Melissa in Independence in 1849).
“…because I liked her, down underneath, and she truly was handsome with her shiny black hair, her rose-petal mouth and her face with its high color” (127-128).
“Everything happened fast on this prairie. One minute all was sunny and mild, and in the next the clouds were ripping and raging and tearing everything apart” (139).
“It was like the mirage they have on these plains –as you goon reaching out, it fades farther and farther back in the distance. And then one morning it isn’t there at all” (190).
“From what I’d heard of these Mormons, I didn’t care too much about them. Besides, we were supposed to be off adventuring after gold and not holed up with a bunch of mule-headed religious nuts. My father always claimed that people who took on about being pious would bear watching” (289).
“A month or so ran by. Winter came early to the valley of the Great Salt Lake that year. In November we had our first snowfall, a dry, white powdery dust driven by a chill north wind. Our adobe house was warm and snug, we were saving up our money…” (328).
“Within 1 ½ miles of Sierra Nevada foothills. Hills before us white with snow. Their Eastern face is sprinkled over with small green patches to the top, and the extensive valley at their bottom with grass of all kinds. This is luxurious to behold after such a long journey through such an inhospitable and barren wilderness” (375, written by Sardius upon witnessing arrival at the high sierras in a letter home to Melissa).
“…I dreamed practically the same dream I had the night before we left –about the prairie, and Indians, and my father practicing medicine—only this time when I awoke, we weren’t on our way to California. We were here, and gold lay just up these green wooded valleys” (406).
“From the standpoint of climate, San Francisco wasn’t any bad place to be destitute on the streets in this autumn of 1850” (471).
On the 1959 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1959 Fiction Jury was composed of another pair of two recurring members instead of the standard three-person jury:
- Carlos Baker (1909-1987) was notable man of letters. He was the former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton (his PhD dissertation explored the influence of Spencer on Shelley’s poetry), retiring in 1977. He penned a critically lauded biography of Ernest Hemingway (authorized) in 1969 which was nevertheless criticized by Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn. Baker also wrote well-regarded biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he edited volumes of poetry on Shelley, Keats, Longfellow, Coleridge, Fielding, and others. He contributed book reviews for numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, he published a novel entitled “A Friend in Power” in 1958, and a collection of poetry entitled “A Year and a Day” in 1963. In 1976, Mr. Baker served as chairman for the editorial committee of the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration which selected 100 masterpieces of American literature for publication by the Franklin Library. During his tenure at Princeton, Baker was the teacher of A. Scott Berg, the contemporary biographer who has written bestselling books about Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Katharine Hepburn, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Lindbergh (a book which later won the Pulitzer itself).
- John K. Hutchens (1905-1995) was an author and book critic (at both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times Book Review), as well as a long-time judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He was born in Chicago and grew up in Montana –later penning a memoir of his youth– before becoming a leading editor of modern literary anthologies.
In the 1959 Jury Report they strongly recommended From The Terrace by John O’Hara for the prize, comparing its scope and depth to John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy. The second choice was The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor, and the third choice Home From The Hill by William Humphrey, which they compared to William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom!
Until 1959, the Board continued a practice of convening on a Thursday in April known during “Newspaper Week” to make its judgements before formally ratifying them in the Trustees’ Room the following day. But in 1959, the Pulitzer Board began its longstanding tradition of meeting in the World Room in the Pulitzer Journalism Building which was graced with a large stained glass display featuring the Statue of Liberty (the impressive stained glass display was taken from Joseph Pulitzer’s old World building on Park Row before demolition began). Per John Hohenberg, this striking work of art is “the only remaining memento for the Advisory Board of the donor of the prizes.”
Who Is Robert Lewis Taylor?
Robert Lewis Taylor (1912-1998) was born in Carbondale, Illinois. He worked as newspaperman for The Carbondale Herald, The St. Louis Dispatch, and later The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest. He would go on to write widely hailed (and bitingly witty) biographies of W.C. Fields and Sir Winston Churchill. He attended Southern Illinois University (where his papers are now housed) and he graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1933.
Taylor served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and wrote several training manuals as well as fictional stories about his experiences, including “Adrift in a Boneyard,” an extended work of fiction about the survivors of a disaster. After the war, he wrote several books in addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (of which the film rights were purchased by MGM but never made into a feature film), including A Journey to Matecumbe (an adventure set in the South during Reconstruction) which was adapted into a film in 1976 by Disney as Treasure of Matecumbe, and he also penned a novel entitled Professor Fodorski which served as the basis for the 1962 musical All American.
By all accounts, Taylor was an eccentric and a staunchly conservative man. He supported U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, and he backed Barry Goldwater. In his later years, he “drifted away from the magazine [The New Yorker] into wealth and a querulous political recidivism.” He lived in rural Connecticut and died in 1998. He was survived by two daughters.
Film Adaptation:
- None.
Literary Context in 1958-1959:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1958): awarded to Russian author Boris Pasternak “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”
- National Book Award (1959): The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestselling novel was Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Other books on the list included: Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and From the Terrace by John O’Hara.
- In the lawsuit In One, Inc. v. Olesen, the Supreme Court finally affirmed that homosexual writing was not considered obscene.
- Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States.
- Boris Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize for Literature lead to him being denounced in the Soviet Union with threats of expulsion.
- Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published in this month’s Esquire magazine.
- The first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative was published in the United States.
- Ken Kesey was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University.
- Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published.
- Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence was published.
- Ian Fleming’s Dr. No was published.
- Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published.
- Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans were both published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Robert Lewis Taylor’s The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is a perfectly fine enough novel to win the Pulitzer Prize –it is not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, but it does offer a rollicking fun adventure. The consideration of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s or perhaps one of Jack Kerouac’s novels like The Dharma Bums would have been a far more daring, impressive choice for the Pulitzer Prize in 1959, but I suppose The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters will have to suffice.
Taylor, Robert Lewis. The Travels of Jaime McPheeters. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, NY, 1958.