I have just finished the infinitely charming, funny, and fascinating All Creatures Great and Small, the first of James Herriot’s “memoirs” of his early years as a farm veterinarian in Yorkshire in the 1930s. The book has regained popularity due to the PBS show. Both are lovely. And I have a lot to say about it (though this is not Festivus and the “Airing of Grievances”). One can learn a great deal from the book, and not just about farming in northern England. One can learn how to tell a story.
First, a comparison of the show and book, followed by how he tells a story and what that means.
Despite the reference to the old hymn:
All things bright and beautiful,all creatures great and small,all things wise and wonderful,the Lord God made them all.
He gave us eyes to see them,and lips that we might tell how great is God Almighty,who has made all things well.
… there is little here about the Christian faith. That’s okay, although maybe some misleading advertising. I was a little surprised by the cursing and the drinking, since the PBS show keeps it pretty clean and anodyne. He writes about drunk driving over the moors, but no one else was out there but the cows and sheep. There’s a lot of “bloody” this and that and swear words. Siegfried is also a much bigger jerk, tyrant, drinker, and ladies’ man in the book, but I came to the conclusion that he’s either exaggerated or made up of whole cloth. Tristan of the book and Tristan of the show are pretty much the same, a lazy git who tries to lead James astray, a bit.
In this book, the whole narrative of Helen being engaged to another, wealthier, man is missing; it is implied that her father wants her to marry the son of a rich farmer they know. Helen and James' courtship takes up far less of the book than the show. Perhaps Herriot did not want to embarrass his wife with too much detail. There are some very funny chapters about their disastrous dates, though, especially one in a rather primitive movie theater with real-life farm humanity who do not understand cinema-watching etiquette.
But it is the storytelling that sings. Of course, one might argue that he only tells stories of success. No animals die or are harmed in this book. They all get better, no matter how dire the disease or circumstance. This would account for its long-running success—no one wants to read of a cow or horse sent to the butcher after the vet’s heroic efforts. And after 2/3 of the chapters, some of the suspense is gone. One has to know that no matter how serious the cases—fevers, abscesses, calves that won’t come out due to “torsion in the uterus”—it will be all right. Like the hymn, I suppose.
Storytelling lies in the arrangement of details. As such it is an art form that requires elimination and rearrangement and at times addition of elements. We might say “what happened to me today” or he could have presented a log of all his cases. That is not storytelling. Storytelling is making meaning of the day-to-day to connect the dots that we cannot see in the moment, only in retrospect.
Storytelling requires some altering to heighten the drama, to make the connection seem more united in time, to exaggerate the moment. For example, Herriott tells the poignant story of caring for a rich man’s dog. He visits the estate and as is often the case, sits down to high-end whiskey with the landowner. The man, a former industrialist who has hand tremors (either from Parkinson’s or alcoholism, he posits), is treated rudely and dismissively by his wife and daughter. Later that day he visits a poor, hardscrabble Yorkshire farmer to take care of an animal. There the overburdened man has a teenage daughter who, instead of rolling her eyes and insulting her father, leaves to cycle two miles to town to buy her father a bottle of Guinness. Herriot muses whether he wanted the life of the well-off industrialist or the farmer, and chooses “the Guinness.”
Of course, my summary bears no comparison his telling, where his humanity and wit bear the reader along to the short last paragraph of his musing. One doesn’t expect it, and yet one does not find it the least intrusive or out of place.
It is a winsome story with just a hint of moralism in the end. Yet . . . did both these visits, so contrasting, take place on the same day? This is an example of collapsed time to draw a sharper difference, but is its use honest? Does a good story have to be so honest, if the meaning is true to the author’s experience? Like the old saying, “Don’t the let facts get in the way of a good story.” How much of the book is true, one might ask? I think the parts about his wife (which are at times hilarious, touching, and humane; his dates with Helen and with other women are self-deprecating and laugh out loud funny) ring 100% true, as do the scientific/veterinarian parts and the depiction of farm life in the 1930s in Yorkshire. Tricky-Woo and some of the quirky or outlandish characters are no doubt embellished. No matter. The stories are true because they are overall honest records of a slice of time and place.
Which is storytelling: a slice of life. It is all about punctuation. We think of punctuation as little squiggly marks on a page that an English teacher penalizes us over and that boring editors make their living by. Punctuation is about the beginnings and ends, the stops and starts, of human action, life, thought and meaning. When does a story start? When does it end? What happens in between? Do I start the story of my day when the alarm goes off, when my feet hit the floor, when I feed my insistent dogs, drink my coffee, shower, or realize I am alive for the grace of another day? When did my family’s story begin, the family that I know formed me? Certainly not when Cornelius Vanover left the Netherlands in the late 1600s, but much later, perhaps? My story is how I choose to punctuate that genealogy.
And let me add, punctuation is not just about little squiggly marks; the placement of a comma can make a lot of difference. The old “Woman without her man is a savage” v. “Woman: without her, man is a savage” still holds true.
The point is, we choose our punctuation, and our stories. And they choose us.
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