John the Revelator
Anyone interested in literature has his/her own nominee for greatest American stylist. I think, overall, I’d go with Herman Melville (more on that another time). In the 20th century, you’ll find votes for H.L. Mencken, a man of cutting wit, rambunctious verbal hijinks and unlimited opinion.
Well, here’s someone who can match Mencken. John Greenway was an anthropologist on the faculty of the University of Colorado. He was also one mean son of a bitch who disliked most other anthropologists and all levels of authority, respected yet castigated the peoples he studied and breathed fire across the broad swath of modern civilization.
He hated liberals, but like many another sum’bitch rightist (Mencken, Westbrook Pegler), he had intense personal loyalties for those few, who, in his lights, devoted their time and existence to the honorable work of the world. (Rightist sum’bitches are loyal to individuals; leftist sum’bitches are loyal to causes.)
I first ran across Greenway from an album of folk songs he put together in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. He was a terrible singer—high-pitched, wavery, uninflected, almost unlistenable. I’m sure he didn’t care; only the music he was presenting mattered.
To be fair, I’ve read only one of his books, and that only twice. On the other hand, there are few books I’ve read more than once, even those I dote on in theory. I generally hate re-reading something until I’ve forgotten its incidents and it’s become fresh again.
Down Among the Wild Men: The Narrative Journal of Fifteen Years Pursuing the Old Stone Age Aborigines of Australia’s Western Dessert (doesn’t the title alone give you those 18th-century shivers?) came out in 1972. I read it first during my “Australian phase,” when I was madly enamored of a place I’d never been and which would probably destroy me if I went: As a near albino, spending any time in the Outback would likely turn me into a 5’4” festering boil within half an hour.
The book wasn’t what I expected, what I think anyone would expect if looking for a dispassionate scientific treatise. It’s a blistered disembowelment of the very idea of ethnography, of keeping an objective eye on the inviolate subjects of observation.
Greenway is never shy of presenting the Truth, as spoken by John. Thus, on religion: “…despite the received error of millennial analysis, what I have to say is right. It is based upon adamantine, indubitable theory, and all contrary evidence is spurious, all contrary argument is specious. I know more about religion than the Pope.”
I won’t quote any more. You can dip into the book virtually anywhere and find that level of language, that level of delightful hubris. Funny as all hell, too.
Greenway isn’t quite up to Pogo Possum’s friend Porky Pine, with his truculent mutter of “Don’t like anybody,” but he’s damned close. Constantly pissed off at the obstinacy of natives who won’t cooperate with attempts to collect their urine for analysis, he nonetheless wholly respects their attempts to foil such intrusions into their lives and their devotion to the land and the essentials of existence.
He unreservedly reveres those hidden but dedicated toilers, such as Norman Tindale, who have devoted their years to a detailed, unwavering, incisive study of Australia and its early inhabitants. Without exception, he sees them as men (and one or two women) who have worked alone or nearly so, largely unaffected by the evils of modern life.
Similarly, Greenway lionizes the grand, often harebrained early explorers who stomped out into the endless deserts that cover some 80% of the island continent. Overburdened with tons of useless supplies loaded onto horses—animals unsuited to the waterless terrain—they disappeared or returned half mad from thirst and sun—then re-outfitted and charged out again.
The epitome was the Scots-English Ernest Giles. (As a Scots’ descendent myself, I full understand his bullheaded inability to listen to reason or experience.) His second expedition was a disaster from which only a Scot could return alive—barely. The goosebumpiest episode in Greenway describes his finding the iron head of Giles hatchet in the middle of nowhere, an item whose loss Giles had catalogued close to 100 years before. Such things don’t happen to most people, but they would happen to Greenway.
In his epilogue, Greenway takes a gratuitous swipe at the hippy generation in a recapitulation of riots in an around Boulder, Colorado. He had no time for flower children or the ‘60s progenitors of slackers. He backs up his gripes with solid details (underwear scissored off hospitalized protestors because it had become one with their flesh), but the simple fact that he would include such material reflects both the depth of his disdain and the breadth of his interest in things ethnologic.
Working in pre-personal-computer days, Greenway assured that his data would remain inviolate by shackling his case of 3x5 cards to his ankle when he traveled; neither he nor anyone else could remove it without also removing his foot.
I was amazed to find that he had died. I didn’t think he would allow it.
by Derek Davis