The Myth of Ephraim Tutt: Arthur Train and His Great Literary Hoax

Foreword

Foreword Train and Tutt Let me begin by introducing myself: John Train, son of Arthur Train, and thus, as it were, stepbrother of Ephraim Tutt. When I was a boy, Eph Tutt practically lived in our house. He was always there, in that my father was usually thinking about the next Tutt story. He wrote them one after another , whereupon they reappeared in print after a while when the Saturday Evening Post came to the door. I am not aware of any other American publication so universally enjoyed by almost every household in the country as the Post, which claimed, incidentally, to have been founded by Benjamin Franklin. It was, so to speak, the reading of both upstairs and downstairs. (In our house, the situation was more complicated, since the stories were being created upstairs and then read downstairs.) My father, following the habit of a lifetime, wr ote everything with a very soft pencil on yellow legal pads. Having corrected the text, he mailed off the sheets to a man named Frank George, who worked in the Department of Agriculture in Washington. George’s advantage was not that he could refine any references to agriculture in the tales, since there were none; rather, he had the gift of being able to decipher my father ’s handwriting , which he then typed up and mailed back. o nce reviewed, the typed sheets went on to the Post in Philadelphia. This roundabout system worked very well for many years. x / Foreword My father had a room in our house on Seventy-Third Street where he did his writing—and enjoyed an afternoon nap. Alas, my mother took up painting in her middle age and liberated my father’s writing room to be her studio, so from then on he would walk down each morning to the University Club to do his writing in its wonderful barrel-vaulted library. Thereafter, for lunch, he would continue to the Century Club, which he found extremely congenial. In the summer the household moved to Mount Desert Island in Maine, where my father built a small, squar e, separate “writing house” with morning and afternoon desks to cope with the changing angle of the sunlight. There was also a deliciously comfor table daybed for the necessar y postprandial snooze and a potbellied sto ve for the cold days late in the sea son . Bits of Tutt memorabilia cropped up here and there, such as a stovepipe hat and fishing gear. (Like his creation, my father was a keen salmon fisherman.) He loved walking around the hills of M ount Desert and could be found up there many afternoons. In the city, the stroll from Seventy-Third Street to lunch and back was most of the exercise he got. Mr. Tutt’s experiences and ideas and ideals were my father’s, but physically they were quite unlike.Tutt was tall, whileTrain was short. And their upbringings could not have been more different. Far fromTutt’s origins in upstate New york, my father grew up in Boston, where his father, a lawyer , served for seven terms as attorney general of the state, until he was elected to Congress. So there we have two generations—my father and grandfather—dedicated to the furtherance of justice. And actually there was a third. Arthur Train’s grandfather graduated from Harvard, then a theological seminary, in the class of 1805, whose twenty-three members were intended for the ministry, which indeed he entered. However, he converted to the Baptist denomination, which meant that his parishioners, who were already paying tithes to the state to support the established church there, had to pay more all over again to support him and his church. This was the First Bap- Foreword / xi tist Church of Framingham, Massachusetts, a handsome structure where its founder, “Father”Train, is well remembered. Those, then, are the moral forebears of my own father, and thus of his creation, Mr. Tutt. v The ordinary citizen encounters the law at ev ery turn. Laws to do with marriage, children, education, housing, urban organization, tax es, elections , government, crime. There’s no end to the laws we must have if we are going to live together. However, there are many quite different philosophies of law. (I encountered thirteen of them in a course at the Harvard Law School.) Some seek to give the citizen wide latitude in life— freedom—others strengthen the...