The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt:
Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections
R. A. Christmas
R. A. CHRISTMAS is president of Ecosys-Utah!, an
environmental bio-tech company in Provo. He and wife, Carol Joyce
Christmas, are the parents of eleven children. Christmas earned a
Ph.D. in medieval English literature at the University of Southern
California in 1968. His poetry, fiction, and criticism on Mormon
subjects have appeared for over thirty years in Dialogue, Sunstone,
BYU Studies, Stories Southwest Southern Review, and Western Humanities
Review. "The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Some Literary,
Historical, and Critical Reflections" first appeared in Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 1.1 (Spring 1966): 33-43.
Several chapters from Pratt's Autobiography
are available at the Mormon Literature website beginning
here.
[01]
I suppose by this time the reader has either forgotten the
circumstances in which he took leave of myself, or else is somewhat
weary with the winding of the narrative and impatient for it to come
to a close. The only apology I have to offer for the many
digressions and wanderings through which he has been led is, that I
consider it impolite and disrespectful to get myself out of a bad
place until I have first seen my friends all safely out. True, I did
not strictly observe this rule of good breeding in the escape
itself; therefore it becomes me to take the more care to observe it
now, when there is no danger, excepting that of being deserted by
some of my readers before I am safely out. However, if you still
wish to accompany me in all the windings of my wearisome and
dangerous adventure we will now turn to the happy valley, where you
recollect leaving me on the morning of the fifth of July in the act
of breakfasting on a small biscuit, while, to all appearances, I was
lost to myself and to all mankind.1
[02] The
Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt has better things to offer
than this paragraph, but nothing that so clearly indicates the source
of the style. The voice is not Fielding's, nor is it Dr. Johnson's
(although "happy valley" may be an ironic echo of Rasselas);
but it rather skillfully follows the convention of authorial intrusion
that they, along with many others in the eighteenth century, brought
to perfection: the combination of familiarity and formality; the
sophisticated irony that comes from "glossing" a deadly serious
situation (Pratt has just broke jail at Colombia, Missouri) in highly
rhetorical terms; and the leisurely sense of the value of style for
its own sake--all of which recalls, say, Fielding's prefaces in Tom
Jones. Here, then, is a stepchild of the eighteenth century.
[03] Between his birth
in 1807 and his murder in 1857, Parley P. Pratt crossed the country at
least twenty times as a Mormon preacher; he traveled to Canada,
England, and Chile as a missionary; he composed his Autobiography,
more than fifty hymns and songs, and enough tracts and discourses to
fill another volume; he edited several Church periodicals; he spent
upwards of a year in prison; he suffered just about every disease and
physical hardship that the frontier had to offer; he baptized and
administered to thousands; and in the midst of a life that collapses
any mere summary he married twelve women and fathered thirty children.
[04] From the
beginning of his book we see that he was a very earnest, studious, and
spiritual young man. Pratt tells us of his "excellent . . . common
school education" and his fanatical reading:
[05] But I always
loved a book. If I worked hard, a book was in my hand in the morning
while others were sitting down to breakfast; the same at noon; if I
had a few moments, a book! a BOOK! A book at evening, while others
slept or sported; a book on Sundays; a book at every leisure moment
of my life. (20)
[06] His early and
absolutely constant religious zeal shows well in his description of
his feelings at twelve years--afraid that he might miss the
Millennium:
[07] I felt a longing
desire and an inexpressible anxiety to secure to myself a part in a
resurrection so glorious. I felt a weight of worlds, of eternal
worlds resting upon me; for fear I might still remain in
uncertainty, and at last fall short and still sleep on in the cold
embrace of death; while the great, the good, the blessed and the
holy of this world would awake from the gloom of the grave and be
renovated, filled with life and joy, and enter upon life with all
its joys; while for a thousand years their busy, happy tribes should
trample on my sleeping dust, and still my spirit wait in dread
suspense, impatient of its doom. (21)
[08] These opening
passages are, in a minor way, impressive and promising--in their
rhythms and in phrases like "trample on my sleeping dust" which show
an imaginative stylist at work. Others like "gloom of the grave" or
"in dread suspense, impatient of its doom" exhibit familiar
alliterative patterns that have always been one of the marks of the
best English prose.
[09] In 1826, Pratt
was seeking a homestead in the Ohio wilderness when the weather caught
up with him "about thirty miles west of Cleveland":
[10] The rainy season
of November had now set in; the country was covered with a dense
forest, with here and there a small opening made by the settlers,
and the surface of the earth one vast scene of mud and mire; so that
travelling was now very difficult, if not impracticable.
[11] Alone in a land
of strangers, without home or money, and not twenty years of age, I
became discouraged, and concluded to stop for the winter; I procured
a gun from one of the neighbors; worked and earned an axe, some
breadstuff and other little extras, and retired two miles into a
dense forest and prepared a small hut, or cabin, for the winter.
Some leaves and straw in my cabin served for my lodging, and a good
fire kept me warm. A stream near by door quenched my thirst; and fat
venison, with a little bread from the settlements, sustained me for
food. The storms of winter raged around me; the wind shook the
forest, the wolf howled in the distance, and the owl chimed in
harshly to complete the doleful music which seemed to soothe me, or
bid me welcome to this holy retreat. But in my little cabin the fire
blazed pleasantly, and the Holy Scriptures and a few other books
occupied my hours of solitude. Among the few books in my cabin, were
McKenzie's travels in the Northwest, and Lewis and Clark's tour up
the Missouri and down the Columbia rivers. (28)
[12] This was toward
the end of the early period of westward expansion, which we usually
associate, in literary terms, with Cooper; but Pratt's obvious delight
in the natural economy of the situation--"the stream near my door
quenched my thirst"--his "few books," and his somewhat romantic
response to winter--"music which seemed to soothe me"--recall, in a
distant and primitive way, Thoreau's experiment some twenty years
later. In view of this less-selfconscious (but more cliche-ridden)
"Walden," and his many similar adventures in the thirties and forties,
we should not be surprised to find that he spends only two short
chapters on the epical crossing of the plains and the settlement of
the Salt Lake Valley, and that he never mentions the much belabored
miracle of the seagulls and crickets. To a man who had seen and
suffered so much in the twenty years before the Church went west, and
who continued in equally active and dangerous travels thereafter, the
trip from Winter Quarters to the Salt Lake Valley could not possibly
seem as unique as it does to many Mormons today; nor would a swarm of
crickets be likely to overly impress a mind that had been through
several versions of the following:
[13] Next morning
resuming our journey, we crossed the Okah river on a bridge, but the
bottoms for two or three miles were overflowed to various depths,
from six inches to three or four feet, and frozen over, except in
the main channels, with a coat of ice, which we had to break by
lifting our feet to the surface at every step. This occupied some
hours and called into requisition our utmost strength, and sometimes
we were entirely covered with water. At length we got through in
safety and came to a house where we warmed and dried our clothes and
took some whiskey. Our legs and feet had lost all feeling, became
benumbed, and were dreadfully bruised and cut with the ice.
[14] On the next day
we had to cross a plain fifteen miles in length, without a house, a
tree, or any kind of shelter; a cold northwest wind was blowing, and
the ground covered with snow and ice. We had made two or three miles
into the plain when I was attacked with a severe return of my old
complaint, which had confined me so many months in Jackson County,
and from which I had recovered by a miracle at the outset of this
journey--I mean the fever and ague.
[15] I travelled and
shook, and shook and travelled, till I could stand it no longer; I
vomited severely several times, and finally fell down on the snow,
overwhelmed with fever, and became helpless and nearly insensible.
This was about seven or eight miles from the nearest house.
[16] Brother John
Murdock laid his hands on me and prayed in the name of Jesus; and
taking me by the hand, he commanded me with a loud voice, saying:
'In the name of Jesus of Nazareth arise and walk!' I attempted to
arise, I staggered a few paces, and was about falling again when I
found my fever suddenly depart and my strength come. I walked at the
rate of about four miles per hour, arrived at a house, and was sick
no more. (75-76)
[17] Since both of
these last two passages rather obviously have more historical than
literary significance, we should stop to mention some of the ways in
which they show Pratt's stylistic weaknesses. In the first, phrases
like "doleful music," "holy retreat," and "hours of solitude" are
certainly formulaic and worn out; "a dense forest" is repeated twice;
and as we might expect after all this, the "winter raged," "the wolf
howled," and "the owl chimed in"--all of which tends to dissipate a
magnificent experience. In the second, "became benumbed," "to various
depths," "or any kind of shelter," "my old complaint," and "became
helpless and nearly insensible" are redundant and awkward; and "shook
and travelled" and "I walked at the rate of about four miles per hour"
are belabored. Prolixity, repetition, and triteness, then, are Pratt's
general faults.
[18] But just as
important, what these passages--and the whole book for that
matter--offer is a different perspective on Mormon history: a
revealing and often moving picture of the early eastern and midwestern
mission of the Church, at the end of which the exodus to the Rockies
seems more like a tragedy than an epic, in view of the great failures
of community relations and democratic process during the Missouri and
Illinois periods. Although primarily published to provide
Church-members with "interesting sketches of Church history" and to
"promote faith," Pratt's Autobiography has additional value as
a general reflection of frontier manners. Aside from its didacticism,
it provides an informative mirror of the times: the strange
juxtaposition of free and easy hospitality and savage religious and
economic warfare; the bitter competition between the popular roving
preachers; the poverty and physical sufferings of the settlers as
opposed to the incredible richness of the land; and the agonizing
slowness of travel contrasting with an amazing rate of change. Two
years after his winter in the Ohio wilderness, Pratt returned with his
first wife to homestead the same ground: "Other houses and farms were
also in view, and some twenty children were returning from the school
actually kept by my wife, upon the very spot where two years before I
had lived for months without seeing a human being" (31).
[19] Pratt's longing
for religious certainty, his interest in preaching, and his desire to
convert the Indians soon took him out of Ohio, into the Mormon Church,
and on to Missouri, where most of the best scenes in the book are set.
For example, his account of the eager Mormon missionaries meeting with
the chief of the Delawares:
[20] He was seated
on a sofa of furs, skins and blankets, before a fire in the center
of his lodge; which was a comfortable cabin, consisting of two large
rooms.
[21] His wives were
neatly dressed, partly in calicoes and partly in skins; and wore a
vast amount of silver ornaments. As we entered his cabin he took us
by the hand with a hearty welcome, and then motioned us to be seated
on a pleasant seat of blankets, or robes. His wives, at his bidding,
set before us a tin pan full of beans and corn boiled up together,
which proved to be good eating; although three of us made use
alternately of the same wooden spoon. (53)
[22] In the last
sentence, the humorous contrast between "good eating" and "the same
wooden spoon" is delivered neatly by the periodic subordinate clause,
and a corresponding sense of light anti-climax develops in the rhythm
after the semi-colon. Note the agreement of sound and sense--and again
the effective use of periodic structure--in this description of the
place where Pratt lay sick for a winter in Colesville, Missouri:
[23] The winter was
cold, and for some time about ten families lived in one log cabin,
which was open and unfurnished, while the frozen ground served for a
floor. Our food consisted of beef and a little bread made of corn,
which had been grated into coarse meal by rubbing the ears on a tin
grater. (72)
[24] and this fine
paragraph on the hardships of winter travel:
[25] In the
beginning of 1831 we renewed our journey; and, passing through St
Louis and St. Charles, we travelled on foot for three hundred miles
through vast prairies and through trackless wilds of snow--no beaten
road; houses few and far between; and the bleak northwest wind
always blowing in our faces with a keenness which would almost take
the skin off the face. We travelled for whole days, from morning
till night, without a house or fire, wading in snow to the knees at
every step, and the cold so intense that the snow did not melt on
the south side of the houses, even in the mid-day sun, for nearly
six-weeks. We carried on our backs our changes of clothing, several
books, and corn bread and raw pork. We often ate our frozen bread
and pork by the way, when the bread would be so frozen that we could
not bite or penetrate any part of it but the outside crust. (52)
[26] The rhythm and
diction show Pratt at his best; the only obvious improvements I can
think of would be to cut "trackless," find a better adjective than
"vast," and end the first sentence with "skin off."
[27] Pratt's account
of his capture by the Missouri militia and his imprisonment at
Richmond and Colombia from November, 1838, to July, 1839 (chapters
XXII-XXXIV) is probably the best stretch of narrative in the
Autobiography. It begins with the disarming of the Mormons at Far
West and the humiliating exhibition of the Mormon leaders through the
state; and it ends with Pratt's escape from the jail at Colombia on
the evening of July 4, 1839, and his foot-journey into Illinois, from
which we quoted at the beginning of this paper. In this sequence the
style is improved by some skillful dialogue and characterization and
the author's rare and fortunate sense of humor, as in this description
of his fellow inmates Luman and Phila Gibbs:
[28] He was a hard
faced, ill formed man, of about fifty years of age; full of
jealousy, extremely selfish, very weak minded, and withal, a little
love cracked; and, I may say, that he seemed not to possess one
redeeming quality.
[29] His wife was
about the same age, and withal, a coarse, tall, masculine looking
woman, and one of whom he had no reason to complain or be jealous.
True, she did not love him--for no female could possibly do that;
but then no one else would love her, nor was she disposed to court
their affections. However, he was jealous of her, and therefore,
abused her; and this kept a constant and noisy strife and wrangling
between them whenever she was present. . . .
[30] On one occasion
they had quarreled and kept us awake all night, and just at break of
day we heard a noise like a scuffle and a slamming against the wall;
next followed a woman's voice, half in a laugh and half in
exultation: "Te-he-he-he, Luman, what's the matter? What's the
matter, Luman?" Then a pause, and afterwards a man's voice in a grum,
sorry, and rather a whining tone was heard at a distance from the
bed, exclaiming: "Now, I swan, Phila, that's tu [sic] bad."
[31] The truth of
the matter was this: She had braced her back against the wall, and
with both her feet placed against his body, had kicked him out of
bed, and landed him upon the opposite side of the room. (235-36)
[32] Pratt handles his
escape similarly well. He has the rhetorical skill to interrupt his
own story in order to get his "friends all safely out"; and these
interpolated vignettes and the account of his own journey through "a
hundred miles of wild country" contain some interesting attempts to
imitate frontier dialects as well as several memorable moments--among
them his disguises and politic lies to hostile settlers, bedding down
with a rattlesnake, the boy who strands him on an island in the midst
of the Mississippi, and, as always, the continuous struggle with a
weary body:
[33] I now pursued
my course the remainder of the night with renewed courage and
strength, although so very lame, foot sore, and so much exhausted
that, in lying down to refresh myself, I could not again rise and
put myself in motion short of extraordinary and repeated exertion,
sometimes having to crawl on my hands and knees till I could get
sufficiently limbered to arise and walk, and frequently staggering
and falling in the attempt.... As I was walking along the road I
could scarcely open my eyes for a moment to look my way for a few
rods ahead, and they would then close in sleep in spite of all my
powers. I would then proceed a few paces in my sleep till I
stumbled. (271)
[34] It would be a
mistake, of course, to imply that the writing is as generally good in
the rest of the book as it is in the Missouri section. Even in the
passage above a little editing is needed to avoid prolixity and
redundancy, and in other places the style breaks down entirely:
[35] Even the fierce
and ravenous beast of the desert (which in his native solitude,
announces with doleful and prolonged howls the midnight hour, or
wakes the weary traveller at early dawn, and gives the signal for
another day of thirst, and toil, and suffering) is lacking
here.(389)
[36] The
overgeneralization is obvious, but Cooper and other nineteenth century
stylists have the same problem. It seems to result from the desire to
dramatize, describe, and universalize, all at the same time. Old
poetic formulas (probably from the large eighteenth-century
storehouse) are plugged in, and the result is extreme subjectivity and
imprecision. Pratt's "beast of the desert" is so buried in cliches and
bandied by the syntax that we can hardly figure out what sort of
critter it is.
[37] Another problem
is the tendency for the style to succumb too readily to the hyperbolic
nature of the events described. This is partly due to the fact that
many of the events were, as far as I can tell, beyond the abilities of
a good minor stylist, but this is no excuse:
[38] This was the
most trying scene of all. I went to my house, being guarded by two
or three soldiers; the cold rain was pouring down without, and on
entering my little cottage, there lay my wife sick of a fever, with
which she had been for some time confined. At her breast was our son
Nathan, an infant of three months, and by her side a little girl of
five years. On the foot of the same bed lay a woman in travail, who
had been driven from her house in the night, and had taken momentary
shelter in my hut of ten feet square--my larger house having been
torn down. I stepped to the bed; my wife burst into tears; I spoke a
few words of comfort, telling her to try to live for my sake and the
children's; and expressing a hope that we should meet again though
years might separate us. She promised to try to live. I then
embraced and kissed the little babes and departed.
[39] Till now I had
refrained from weeping; but, to be forced from so helpless a family,
who were destitute of provisions and fuel, and deprived almost of
shelter in a bleak prairie, with none to assist them, exposed to a
lawless banditti who were utter strangers to humanity, and this at
the approach of winter, was more than nature could well endure.
(189-90)
[40] The scene has
some power, but the hyperbolic "most trying scene of all" and "more
than nature could well endure" at the beginning and end signal Pratt's
failure to realize the event in its own terms. The situation requires
some precise understatement, a technique which Pratt only partially
mastered; the high level of generality in the diction produces the
maudlin "woman in travail" and the phantom "lawless banditti who were
utter strangers to humanity."
[41] Another kind of
ineffective overstatement is caused by Pratt's view of history. This
is to say that he tends, like many another fundamentalist before and
since, to see history only in terms of God's dealings with men, or to
put it perhaps more clearly, only as a record of God's chosen people
and their conflicts with the "gentiles." The results in a kind of
leveling in which people are estimated only according to their
spiritual standing or, shall we say, only in terms of how they live
the gospel or, if gentiles, how they treat the Mormons. Thus Pratt
very aptly calls Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs "a living stink,"
but cannot resist comparing him, in the same paragraph, to Cain and to
Herod, who "died of a loathsome disease, and transmitted to posterity
his fame as a tyrant and murderer" (213). At another point, Pratt
feels obliged to cite several instances of "holy" lying in the
Scriptures in order to justify his lying to protect himself while
escaping from Missouri, in the course of which we find that Parley P.
Pratt's lying is even more justified than King David's because Pratt
has "a greater work to accomplish than he ever had" (267) . Finally,
toward the end of the narrative the style rises to a kind of tasteless
exaltation, as Pratt in an aside hammers home the familiar "fates of
the persecutors" myth, which he undoubtedly helped to create in
passages like this:
[42] A colonel of
the Missouri mob, who helped to drive, plunder and murder the
Mormons, died in the hospital at Sacramento, 1849. Beckwith had the
care of him; he was eated with worms--a large black headed kind of
maggot--which passed through him by myriads, seemingly a half pint
at a time! Before he died these maggots were crawling out of his
mouth and nose! He literally rotted alive! Even the flesh on his
legs burst open and fell from his bones! They gathered up the rotten
mass in a blanket and buried him, without awaiting a coffin! (425)
[43] This does not
fail of a certain gothic excellence, but Pratt dwells too lovingly and
irrationally on the details. The five exclamation points are forced
and phony; the same could as well have happened to a man who shot it
out with the Daltons.
[44] Pratt never lived
to finish the Autobiography or to revise the later notes which
now appear in the printed version. The last eight chapters or so are
journal entries apparently added by his son. But uneven as it is,
Pratt's book is perhaps the outstanding literary achievement of
Mormonism to date; it points to a literary tradition in the early
Church that may well have produced other minor masterpieces: journals,
letters, sermons, and memoirs stylistically and thematically related
to a great and established tradition in English prose. Pratt's success
calls for similar examinations of the Journal of Discourses,
Wilford Woodruff's Journal, John D. Lee's Diary, B. H.
Roberts's and Orson F. Whitney's histories, and all of our known and
unknown writers up to and including James E. Talmage, where, as nearly
as I can judge, the literary quality of our religious prose falls off
rather badly. These men were well trained in the humanities. Their
rather wide reading and their apparent concern to imitate the masters
of English prose in their own writing has lapsed today into a kind of
pragmatic banality, a businesslike rat-tat-tat that usually begins
with something like "I sat next to a man on the airplane the other
day."
[45] This is not the
place to make any eternal judgments, but Pratt's Autobiography
does seem superior to most of the other works of literature connected
with Mormonism that I have seen. Even as excellent a piece of closely
historical fiction as Samuel W. Taylor's Family Kingdom seems
rather paltry beside it, because Taylor, for all his skill, cannot
achieve the same degree of immediacy. By the time we reach the remove
of pure fiction, as in something like Richard Scowcroft's Children
of the Covenant (though by no means the worst example), the Mormon
experience seems bankrupt and watery; the truth still seems to be
stronger than any fiction, and deeply pious experience in any of its
forms has tended, historically, to find its best expression in the
genres that deliver that experience most directly--the sermon, the
journal, and the biography or autobiography.
[46] If I may, I would
like to add a short postscript on Mormon literature--as I know it--to
our discussion of Parley P. Pratt. The Autobiography, at least,
is a sign that Mormon letters in the nineteenth century may not be as
dead as we sometimes think; and this thought leads to the possibility
that something like Pratt's pious tradition may be renewed in the
future. Missionaries or General Authorities might find time to compose
beautiful journals or correspondence, and those who have not succumbed
to the prevalent "utilitarian" short-hand of Church periodicals and
popular doctrinal books might yet deliver sermons that aspire to
Wulfstan or Donne. We might even get our great novel; Wallace Stegner
said awhile back in the Atlantic that it might be lurking
somewhere in Idaho Falls. I see no reason to gainsay him, but I often
get the feeling that we are going to have to wait until "the next
persecution."
[47] To change the
subject again, perhaps some other form, like the lyric, is better
suited to Mormon writers today. We have had a few fair poets in the
Church, Pratt himself among them, although the quality is quite below
that of our prose. Orson F. Whitney is probably the best, in his
hymns; but his banal and impossibly mannered epic Elias or his
Love and the Light (written in the Hiawatha meter) show
how far our verse has been from anything traditionally respectable.
But even Eliza R. Snow wrote one poem, "Mental Gas," in which she
avoided the fawning romanticism and melodrama of most of her verse;
and there may be others--although one look at the poems now appearing
in Church periodicals is enough to make the critical task seem
hopeless, so far has sentimental indulgence corrupted style. Of
course, it is also possible that we will have no "Mormon" literature,
in the stricter sense, in the future, because of the attraction of
secular forms and themes. I mention these things not as conclusions,
but rather in the hope that other writers and scholars will begin a
dialogue on this neglected subject.
[48] In the meantime,
we have the Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, and a reasonably
distinguished tradition of Mormon literature which includes some works
of real power. We ought to find them, study them, and criticize them
honestly, in the hope that readers--in cases like the Autobiography--will
begin paying a little more attention. Looking back, we may find a few
more things like this--from a letter written by Pratt on the ship
Henry Kelsey, in the Pacific (Lat. 24 N., Lon. 1 15 W.), September
15, 1851:
[49] Just imagine
sundown, twilight, the shades of evening, the curtains of the
solitary night gathering in silent gloom and lone melancholy around
a father who loves his home and its inmates; his fireside and the
family altar! Behold him standing leaning over the vessel's side as
it slides over the waters of the lone and boundless Pacific, gazing
for hours in succession into the bosom of its dark abyss, or
watching its white foam and sparkling spray! What are his thoughts?
Can you divine them? Behold, he prays! For what does he pray? For
every wife, for every child, for every near and dear friend he has
on earth, he prays most earnestly! most fervently! He calls each by
name over and over again, before the altar of remembrance. And when
this is done for all on earth, he remembers those in Heaven; calls
their names; communes with them in spirit; wonders how they are
doing; whether they think of him. He calls to mind their acts and
suffering in life, their death, and the grave where sleeps their
precious dust. (389)
[50] This is not
Melville's "Symphony"; but it invites humble comparison; and I
sometimes catch myself thinking that it is about as close as we are
likely to get.
Notes
1. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt,
ed. by his son Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City, 1874), p. 263. Page
references are to the paperback fifth edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book Company, 1961) and will be hereafter noted in parentheses.
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