My Edgar Pangborn Tribute…
“A lovely book, a rollicking book, a cadenced, surprising, provocative and musical book.” Theodore Sturgeon on DAVY by Edgar Pangborn.
Edgar Pangborn’s “Tales of a Darkening World” series is a unique and wonderful addition to the Post-Apocalyptic Future genre. Warm, humourous, sentimental, tragic, painful and completely human, his Darkening World yarns have generated decades of intense reviews. Some derisive. Some filled with love.
Edgar was inspired by Humanist writers like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. And he inspired Peter S Beagle, Spider Robinson and Ursula K Le Guin. And the present writer.
Author, composer, painter, Edgar Pangborn died at age 66 and we missed him immediately. Still do.
Edgar’s Darkening World tales included short stories and novelettes like “The World is a Sphere,” “The Freshman Angle” and “Mam Sola’s House.” The collection STILL I PERSIST IN WONDERING. And the novels THE JUDGMENT OF EVE and THE COMPANY OF GLORY.
And our beloved DAVY.
Davy by Edgar Pangborn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was 18 when I first read Edgar Pangborn’s DAVY. Which may have been the perfect age to discover Pangborn’s gentle, sentimental and oft-tragic worldscape, I don’t know.
I found it in the paperback rack in the long, narrow tobacc0 and newspaper store next to the SMT bus station on Saint John’s King Street.
The front page blurbs compared it to HUCKLEBERRY FINN and Fielding’s TOM JONES, both of which I loved. I read Pangborn’s Note on the copyright page: “The characters in this novel are fictitious in a limited sense. That is, they won’t be born for several hundred years yet.” I was hooked. And then I read the opening lines: “I’m Davy, who was king for a time. King of Fools, and that calls for wisdom.” Hooked and reeled in, I began reading the novel on the bus ride home. I almost missed my stop.
DAVY told of a New England of a future time after a global nuclear war. DAVY told of a time of medieval ignorance and superstition, of spreading green forests and sheltering villages, of mutant children and wild tigers. Oh, and DAVY told the tale of a young rogue, an inn boy who wants to see more. And in his own fumbling words, tells us his tale…
Since then, I’ve gathered all of Pangborn’s available works, favourites including, “Angel’s Egg,” THE JUDGMENT OF EVE and STILL I PERSIST IN WONDERING. Everything except his historic novel A WILDERNESS OF SPRING, which only had one printing in 1958, and owners display their wisdom and love by never selling.
“Live Free, Mon Ami!” – Brian Alan Burhoe
“The poetically magnificent language which makes this such an exuberant book to read, also makes it so moving that you put it down almost with tears in your eyes.” Groff Conklin
