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On Becoming a Man: Guest Post by David Nichols

June 10

In the northern Melbourne suburb of Hadfield are two op shops, actually two outlets of the one ‘shop’, one (furniture ,electrical goods) staffed by men and the other (clothes, books) by women. The first is run by a coterie of oldies who – if my 15-minute experience is representative - sit around gabbing, baiting each other and laughing at death. It is one of the last places in Melbourne I suspect where I, at 44, can be referred to unironically by the gentleman in charge as a ‘young feller’.

The other shop is far more genteel, and it is here I picked up a tome by Harold Shryock entitled On Becoming a Man: a book for teenage boys. The copy in question is in beautiful condition, to the degree that I suspect whoever was once given it did not actually read it, or if they did, they respected it immensely. Since the subhead is 'A book for teenage boys', the first five words in the title create the name OBAMA, an extraordinary piece of prediction (though it doesn't explain the rest of the acronym, which reads in full OBAMABFTB) The 20th century Nostradamus responsible, Shryock, has a name which can form an anagram for Hard Rocks Holy or Arch Lord Oh Sky and yes, it is a religious work in essence. The internet tells me the book was first published in 1951, though it was still apparently in print in the late 1960s, and this undated edition has a vibe from somewhere inbetween those two times. Though it is American (Shryock was from the College of Medical Evangelists, Loma Linda, CA) it was published in Warburton, outside Melbourne, by a publishing house called Signs. I can picture it now.

Jackjoanne

I haven't read it from cover to cover, and life is too short, besides which I have already Become a Man without Shryock’s guidance, for better or worse (perhaps worse, since I certainly did a lot of the things he warns against). Shryock adheres to the interesting fallacies of the mid-20th century on, for instance, homosexuality: he sees gay men as frozen in an emotional state by, for instance, the death of a family member at a sensitive time, but considers a two-step scenario the most likely, wherein a boy is oriented to homosexuality by personal tragedy but only then activated - turned on, if you will - by an exploitative older man. Anyway, Shryock doesn't pull too many punches, except perhaps the punch that, while the book is plainly a Christian book, it doesn't say anywhere that it's a Christian book, until you start reading it.

The pictures are possibly the best bit (since I'll never read it fully I'll never ever know). They are a mixture of oddly posed photographs and strangely but finely painted scenarios. This one intrigues me, not just because I believe its central message to be true:

Teacher

But also because I wonder what the hey this trusted pedagogue has drawn on his board. I mean, really:

Ontheboard

It's so easy to laugh at this kind of stuff (I don't mean this picture specifically, but the whole book) that it's almost not funny. I suppose there is a generation or two of people whose knowledge, such as it is, of this sort of cheesy upright western civillisation certitude is derived entirely from retro greeting cards with funny talks balloons. This thing was probably published in my lifetime but I could never have ever looked at a picture like this without simultaneously finding it creepy, possibly funny, eminently defaceable, ridiculous, and standing in some ways for many things it is meant to be entirely the opposite of.

Shaving

I mean, the world moved on; it doesn't matter particularly. But it does bear some consideration, that this kind of thing - I was almost about to say this kind of garbage, because that just seems so self-evident - represents a universe that is entirely gone now, with a huge amount of evidence left behind, but evidence which is for most of us entirely meaningless because the certainty is missing. I am not saying people don't still believe in families or America or god or whatever this stuff is supposed to represent, but that the certainty of its moral position and the coccoon-like right places for everyone has been entirely assailed and to my mind destroyed. When I see a picture like this, the endpapers of the book which for some reason I've made really teensy but you can still make it out kind of:

Obamendpapers

I can only see a phallic building over the back fence, a perverse set of relationships between the women in the picture and the young man in purple, and the whole thing so unutterably fraudulent and sterile, yet fraught with strong and corrupt meaning. None of these people can ever be happy until they cast off their crippling stereotypes. I mean maybe it's just me. Is it just me?

Cross-posted at Lorraine Crescent


 

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Comments

by Francis Kelly
19 Feb 10 at 16:27

Would you be willing to sell your copy of this book as I have a friend who is collecting Shyocks works? Thanks.

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by David Nichols
14 Dec 10 at 14:58

I would be willing to pass it on to anyone who wanted it.

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