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June 19, 1999 |
Those splendidly perverse characters were driven by an odd human trait -- a
craving, really -- that forces some to abandon logic and common sense and leave
the comfort and safety of the familiar in pursuit of a vague goal in a distant
land from which they may never return. That craving has generated myriad dramas
and fed the armchair adventurer's hunger for vicarious thrills for centuries. But
perhaps no writer has dug to the heart of this irrational passion -- really
gotten it -- with the acuteness that Evan S. Connell did in his books "A
Long Desire" (1979) and "The White Lantern" (1980), both of which are out of
print, but not impossible to find. Douglas Cruickshank Douglas Cruickshank's Rogues' Gallery appears every Thursday. The Raw and the Cooked appears every Saturday.
Connell may not be the most famous of writers, but he's far from obscure and he's one of the finest. A native of Kansas City, Mo., he first attracted widespread attention with his signal 1957 novel, "Mrs. Bridge," succinctly described by critic Webster Schott as a "saga of sweet joylessness and blunted sensibility of marriage, family, and middle age on the Plains of Protestantism." And Connell's greatest popular success came with "Son of the Morning Star," his exquisite, "Rashomon"-like account of Gen. George Armstrong Custer's catastrophic undoing at the Little Big Horn. But his two volumes on exploration and explorers are the ones I find myself coming back to. In the first, "A Long Desire," Connell ranges over a herd of out-of-round obsessives seeking Atlantis, the seven cites of Cíbola and the Northwest Passage, as well as legendary persons such as the (possibly fictional, possibly not) Christian king of Africa, Prester John, Christopher Columbus, desperate treasure hunters, Victorian lady adventurers and a regular dynasty of alchemists including the gloriously named "quasi-genius" Phillippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus ab Hohenheim -- Parcelsus, for short. Like Connell's other subjects, Parcelsus indulged his urge to wander with a vengeance beginning in the early 1500s. He was also a medical intuitive of uncommon skill -- or luck. "The great teachers were known to be in Italy, so he went to Ferrara but his studies were interrupted by war," Connell writes. "He fled south and became an army surgeon. It was customary to dress wounds with a poultice of feathers, dung, snake fat, and whatever else looked appropriate. The result was usually gangrene. Parcelsus, with nothing to support his heretical opinion, refused to apply these poultices and to everybody's amazement quite a few of the patients recovered. Though he did on occasion use frog eggs as disinfectant -- without knowing that they contained iodine. At the same time he thought frost blisters should be treated with children's hair boiled by a red-headed person."
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