In Maine: Storytellers Cast Their Ancient Spell

By Melvin Maddocks

Once upon a summer's morning, on the stage of the Opera House at Rockport, Me., a lanky bearded man in striped shirt and suspenders, looking as if he were off a potato farm, sits on a piano bench beneath an 1890s-style white-and-gilt proscenium arch. At the First Annual North Atlantic Festival of Storytelling, Michael Parents is speaking of creation.

The story Parents tells is from an Iroquois legend, explaining how birds got their song. God, it seems, decided on a fair and just competition. Each bird would fly upward as far as it could, and at that level where its lungs burst and it could fly no higher, it would hear the song it was destined to sing forever. The higher the level, the sweeter or more powerful the song. This was an ingenious idea, even for God, and he was, Parents points out, "kind of proud of himself, in a Great Spirit sort of way."

Then, suddenly, right before everybody's eyes, Parents transforms himself from storyteller into bird. He sinks his neck into his shoulders.

He flaps invisible but powerful wings. He crosses his eyes fiercely.

His hooked nose curves even more sharply above his downturned mouth.

With pride, with paranoia, he twitches his head from side to side. He becomes an eagle, the odds-on favorite to win God's most majestic sound. It may be Sunday morning in Rockport village in the year 1981, but now it is also the first day of creation. When Parents' unsuspecting eagle--with a thrush stowed away on its back--lifts off majestically at the upward wave of the storyteller's hand, the audience lifts off too, out the window of the Opera House, above the sun-dappled boats lying at anchor in Rockport harbor, beyond time, beyond space. Somewhere off in a primeval woods everybody's inner ear hears a sneaky, undeserving little hitchhiker of a thrush trill the loveliest of songs.

The exposition, quiet as a Sunday-school teacher's lesson, is over. The storyteller, in the fullness of his craft, has struck, and the spell is on, as surely as it was when Homer conjured up a fleet of ships on a wine-dark sea bound for the walls of Troy.

Again and again, during the two days and two nights of storytelling, the small miracle happens. There is a perfect gesture, an eloquent word, a scrap of song or dance, and the imagination soars. "Storytellers," said that old Celtic taleteller William Butler Yeats, "make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear, and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels."

It would be too much of a storyteller's exaggeration to suggest that in the middle of an electronic giant's bunk--presto! --the art of the storyteller is about to recapture the castle. But certainly more things are happening on the stage of the Rockport Opera House, and elsewhere, than the programmers of the age of television ever dreamed of. This year of the First Annual North Atlantic Festival is also the year of the First Storytelling Festival in New York City, the Second Annual Storytelling Festival in St. Louis and the Third Annual New Mexico Storytelling Festival in Albuquerque. Something called the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling in Jonesboro, Term., numbers over 800 members. Storytelling has become a respectable course in the college curriculum, without its old academic euphemism, the "Oral Literary Tradition."

Ten years ago, a storyteller was somebody who sat cross-legged on a classroom floor with a copy of The Brothers Grimm, locked in a losing battle with the attention span of first-graders. Under the ceiling fans in Rockport, 404 adults perch on folding wooden chairs for 12 1/2 hours, charmed by every possible kind of story from every possible kind of storyteller.

Bob Barton, from Toronto, favors contemporary fantasies, steeped in rue and irony, like The Porcelain Man by Richard Kennedy. With his bemused schoolboy's face, Barton roams the stage, bending at the waist to beseech from his listeners the sympathy due this magically animated figure of China who--would you believe it?--falls in love but, alas, keeps smashing himself into pieces and being reassembled as a porcelain horse or, worse, a dinner set just before he can properly go awooing.

Jackie Torrence, originally out of Granite Quarry, N.C., gives Appalachian Mountain tales her own Earth Mother Afro twist. Eyes rolling, hands fluttering, laughter spilling up and over, she can jolly an audience as nobody else. But watch out for the little sting afterward! Uncle Remus is not safe in her company. When she turns into a frog, warning of the approach of Br'er Rabbit, lily pads a mile away tremble at Torrence's harrumph.

If there is a genius among the storytellers of 1981, it is J. O'Callahan, from Marshfield, Mass., a man of such poetry, wit and elegance that, even in a rugby shirt, he seems Elizabethan. O'Callahan writes his own superb stories. The Herring Shed, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl learning the mysteries of her first job in Nova Scotia during the darkest days of World War II, is a minor masterpiece of coming-of-age literature. As she strings up her fish to dry, O'Callahan's young narrator is still a charming child, playing at a new game. When she learns, with her I, hands smelling of herring, of the death of her brother on a European battlefield. O'Callahan in one exquisitely touching moment transforms the girl into a woman.

At intermission the audience streams out of the Opera House into afternoon sunlight. If you stroll through the center of the village, past the New Leaf Bookshop, over the bridge above Goose River, you come to a gray colonial across the street from Enos Ingraham's general store. This is the home of David Outerbridge, an independent publisher and organizer of the festival. In the Outerbridge living room, half a dozen off-duty storytellers talk about their calling with nearly the same pleasure that they tell stories.

Barton has a confession to make: "Sometimes I control a story too tightly.

I sit on it. I'm holding it back. Then the moment comes when it flies--when it pulls you along behind it. That's a wonderful feeling. The story tells you."

There are polite disagreements about technique. Some encourage improvisation. Some stick strictly to their text. Some argue that the first law of storytelling is to keep up a flow of words. O'Callahan, who believes that storytelling is a kind of music, with the storyteller as the instrument, has advised in print: "Be brave enough to use silence."

But the one thing they all agree on is that storyteller and audience somehow constitute a single being, as inseparable as two lovers. One goes nowhere without the other. Either storyteller and audience are borne up together, like Parents' eagle and thrush, or else they are left earth-bound together, stranded, waiting for the small miracle to happen.

It is in the tradition of storytellers to be paid by food and lodging. The storyteller of the 1980s does better, though as yet baseball players need not worry. Torrence, with a repertoire of some 450 stories, makes a living by giving as many as 600 performances a year. (Storytellers get paid anywhere from $100 to $750 a day.) Most of the storytellers have to hold down a job. Barton works for the Ontario Ministry of Education. Even O'Callahan keeps a base on the faculty of the Lesley Graduate School of Cambridge, Mass. But the shoptalk is less about any collective or individual success of the storyteller in the near future than it is about the price of such success. "I remember what happened to folk music in the 1950s," Barton reminds everybody soberly.

Pure is a word used with some regularity. Outerbridge plans to produce a pilot series for television, but he is wary of gimmicks. "We won't have an enactment," he promises. The rules of the game are clearly understood. No antic chorus, no laugh track--not even an introduction by Alistair Cooke--can really make Parents' eagle soar. Parents sums up the ancient contract: "A live person is looking at you and telling a story. That's a pretty arresting thing." Outside, the late afternoon shadows are beginning to lengthen.

Somewhere an eagle flies. Somewhere a thrush sings. It is time to get back to the Stories.

--By Melvin Maddocks

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