Fred's Book Club: Hermit.

I thought we might try a new feature here on the ol' blogeroo, the Wednesday Fred's Book Club. Just a brief run-down of books I have read, whether I liked them or not. It does not require audience participation; there is no obligation to read a book, even if I go gaga over it like an idiot tween over an Auto-Tuned pop star. However, if you'd like more information, or want to weigh in on my selection, please pile on in comments.

Since I want to do this on Wednesdays, I'm calling this the Humpback Writers feature -- this does not indicate that any of our writers in fact have or had humps on their backs, nor are or were they ungulates in the Camelus family. Just that it's Hump Day, and here's a book, and a writer wrote it.

Our first selection is one that I have found very useful over the years:

Will Cuppy, book reviewer and humorist best remembered now for The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, published the helpful guide How to Be a Hermit in 1929. It was inspired by his time of living alone in a shack out on Jones's Island, which is what Jones Beach was before it became Jones Beach State Park under Robert Moses. He survived in solitude with his typewriter and his rowboat, with the help of his razor-sharp mind, his manly fortitude, and the Zach's Inlet Coast Guard Station, without whom he could not change the ribbon on his typewriter.

I love this book, and not just because of the strong urge I have sometimes to find a hole somewhere and pull it in after me. Cuppy's wit suffuses the whole thing, of course, and he has very helpful tips for the hermits among us (or should I say not among us). For example, here is Cuppy on...

Cleaning:

My windows are something else again. Whoever built my house was an ardent advocate of those windows with twelve little panes of glass in each, and how he managed to get six windows into one small shack beats me. That makes seventy-two panes, all rattling at once. "They must be awfully hard to keep clean," a lady once observed, and I often wonder if she wasn't kidding me. It was the first time that aspect of the subject had occurred to your humble hermit. They must be, indeed. I must leave my readers to decide for themselves how I solve this part of my housecleaning problem.

Organization:

It may prove helpful, and the moral harm practically nil, to spend a part of each Sunday in searching for household necessities that have been lost in the shuffle. That's the one little weakness of the Cuppy Plan, you never know where the can-opener is. Short of attaching it to one's person with a piece of stout cord and dragging the rest of the essentials about on a leash, there is no way of getting around that sort of thing—you just have to put up with it. Why not make capital of this small fault? You need never subscribe to a memory strengthening course if you try to remember that the nail that pries open the pantry door is probably under the newspapers in the corner behind the stove, that the salt water soap doubtless got mixed up in the winter woolens and extra bedding on the tool chest (where it's as good as in a safe-deposit vault), that the review of J. S. Fletcher's latest must have blown out the window and that the Coast Guards borrowed the camphorated oil summer before last that time Comanche had the lumbago. I couldn't swear to where much of anything is in my house, but it's not as if I had spectacles to lose. I haven't the faintest where my dustrag is, and I care less. I haven't seen it in the last six months, and good riddance.

Survival:

Clothes, of course, one can't get away from. The weather being what it is, and it is certainly all of that, we of Great South Bay require a lot of good durable clothes; though, truth to tell, the changing fashions do not disturb us at all. Why should we be slaves to some dim arbiter in Paris, who couldn't tell a stiff gale from a cyclone? What do they know in Paris of the needs of High Hill Beach, Goose Crick and Crow Island? The hermit will do well to leave to the very last his pink pajamas, silk socks and suchlike, including first in his budget the best obtainable grade of hip boots, oilskins, flannel shirts and woolen breeches—that's where the money goes. And if the Rue de la Paix objects, he can tell the rue to lump it.

He also gives some helpful recipes for the nascent bachelor slob, such as for Poor Man's Duff and a marvelously complex sardine sandwich.

The book is available for free on Australia's Project Guternberg site, but of course you'll want your own physical copy to treasure and mark up and take with you where WiFi has no sway. Fortunately it is still in print and can be purchased online.

Sadly, Will Cuppy was forced off his island in the end as the state park was being constructed, and became a hermit instead on Manhattan, but it just wasn't the same. Happiness eluded him, and he died in 1949.

O Cuppy! O Humanity!