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Orlando Benedict Mayer (1818–1891)
- University of Missouri Press
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281 Orlando Benedict Mayer (1818–1891) One of the South Carolina Dutch Fork humorists, like his close friend and kinsman Adam G. Summer, Orlando Benedict Mayer was born and raised in Pomaria, an area between the Broad and Saluda Rivers in central South Carolina, and spent most of his adult life as a country doctor in the town of Newberry. Many members of the Dutch Fork group published humorous tales and sketches in the Columbia South Carolinian, a weekly newspaper specializing in agriculture and state politics and edited by Summer. Familiar with the genre of Old Southwest humor, Mayer wrote some of the most entertaining and best-crafted works featuring Dutch Fork settings, culture, and characters. A graduate of South Carolina College and the Medical College at Charleston, Mayer, spent the early 1840s in Europe, studying culture, language, and medicine , and returned to his home in Pomaria in 1847 to resume his medical practice and then moved to nearby Newberry. His first known story, though not of a humorous kind, is a travel sketch entitled“A Sunday Evening in Germany,”which was published in the South Carolinian on November 5, 1847. There followed other sketches based on his European travels and in the popular Gothic mode reminiscent of works of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. It is Mayer’s humorous work, however, upon which his reputation rests, tales with Dutch Fork settings and featuring customs, folkways, and characters re- flective of the Teutonic culture which first settled the region. Mayer published his best comic sketches under the pseudonym“Haggis”in the South Carolinian. The first of these, “The Innocent Cause, Or How Snoring Broke Off a Match,” employs the epistolary form of the yokel letter to the editor, a familiar staple of Southwesthumor,andfeaturesacomicrogueof thesamefabricasGeorgeWashington Harris’s Sut Lovingood. “Snip—A Tale,” a sympathetic piece on courtship , focusing on a rural Dutch Fork wedding and customs, showcases instances of physical and congenial comedy.Two Dutch Fork courtship sketches followed. “The Easter Eggs,” featuring vernacular dialect, employs a performative boast between two competitive suitors and “The Corn Cob Pipe,” inspired by Irving ’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” examines a power conflict between a 282 Southern Frontier Humor spirited Dutch Fork farm girl and her parents concerning the man whom she should marry. In addition to his South Carolinian sketches and tales, all of which Mayer publishedin1848 ,healsowrotefictionfor Russell’s Magazine andtheSouthernBivouac, the best of which is “Aberhot Koselhantz, the Wizard Gunsmith,” a tale published in Russell’s in May 1857 that effectively combines humor and Dutch Fork folklore. Mayer also wrote a novel, John Punterick, a fragment which he probably penned in 1860, but which was not published until 1981. John Punterick employs a framework with friends swapping tales about the Dutch Fork days of old, some of which are farcical and employ motifs common to Old Southwest humor. In helping to popularize a pocket of traditional culture known as the Dutch Fork, which was passing into history, and treating it with sympathetic levity and understanding, O. B. Mayer helped to open up new territory for humor. In describing Mayer’s achievement as a humorist, Edwin T. Arnold, who regards Mayer as one who had a knack for reconciling opposites, writes that “his combination of propriety and absurdity, of melancholy and merriment, of commiseration and comedy sets him apart from most his fellow humorists in a manner that is much to be admired.” Text:“The Innocent Cause, or How Snoring Broke Off a Match,”Columbia South Carolinian , January 25, 1848 The Innocent Cause, or How Snoring Broke Off a Match A TALE OF HOG KILLING TIME Dear Colonel.—Here is a letter written to me long ago by my esteemed friend, Belt. Seebub, or Belzebub, as he was more generally known. What he records may be true, or it my not: my opinion is, that there is something in it. My Dear Sir:—After spendin an agreeable time among you down there, jest as I was mountin my hoss to bid you adiew, you requested me to write to you a long letter narratin some adventure of my own personal occurrunce. It seems that fate was aware many centuries ago, that you was goin to make sech a request , for I had’nt been home here more then two weeks when the very thing, the all-firedest, cussedest thing tuk place as ever yet had tukken place in relation to me. I’ll write it down jest as...