April Fools Day has come and gone, a passing unlamented by anyone who recognizes that a practical joke’s success depends upon the degree to which its target feels unease, disappointment, even fear or anger. As a shy, socially awkward kid, I was often conscripted to play the part of victim—I remember an early example, getting to school one morning and being asked by other kids if I had studied for the test. What test? Had I completely forgotten? My face must have been a stark display of panic before the perpetrator loudly declared “April Fools!” and the air filled with gusts of laughter. I felt relief—how could I not?—but I didn’t laugh along with the others; what I also felt was a hot simmer of resentment at being regarded the worthy butt of a joke.
Mental Floss, the website that brings us such invaluable information as “The Twenty Most Commonly Mispronounced Names in the World” and “11 Fascinating Facts About Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women,’” observes that a number of theories have been posited for the origins of April Fool’s Day, including one in which the Roman emperor Constantine allowed his jesters to rule on that day. But a Boston University professor later admitted to making that up, and Mental Floss goes on to assert that people who study such things generally agree that April Fool’s originated in France as poisson d’avril, which literally translates as “April fish.” Details that might shed further light on that curious fact are apparently murky.
The Museum of Hoaxes, another fascinating internet repository of the strange and arcane, informs us that the earliest unambiguous reference to April Fool’s Day is in a poem by Flemish poet Eduard De Dene, published in 1561. With the mouth-filling title of Refereyn vp verzendekens dach / Twelck den eersten April te zyne plach, the poem described a nobleman who sent his servant back and forth on various absurd errands on April 1st, ostensibly to help prepare for a wedding feast. The poem makes clear that the servant knew he was being played for a fool, but whether or not he was amused by his master’s sense of humor isn’t obvious. But in Belgium, April 1 is still referred to as Verzenderkensdag or “fools-errand day.”
Here I have to submit a confession. Years ago, I was supervising the remodeling of a house when April 1 rolled around, and without thinking about it in advance I told the crew that a brand-new project had come into the pipeline. Getting carried away by my invention, I said that the house in question was architecturally interesting, had a panoramic ocean view, and would provide work for up to a year. But even before someone eagerly asked when I expected this project to begin I was starting to feel guilty, and when I said, “April Fool’s!” the few chuckles and meager grins were ample evidence of disappointment. I realized that I’d inadvertently exacted revenge on innocent parties for my own childhood humiliations. It was cruel, and I resolved from then on to let the first day of April pass as just another date on the calendar.
April is the cruellest month...
There’s no evidence that T.S. Eliot had April Fool’s in mind when he wrote the opening line to “The Waste Land,” one of the most famous in English literature, and possibly one of the most debated by readers of a poem that has been the subject of lively critical analysis since its publication in 1922. Eliot later said that the scene that follows the opening line was drawn from a conversation with Countess Marie Larisch of Bavaria. It goes on:
...breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
I’m not a literary scholar trying to peer into Eliot’s mind for clues to his thinking, although it’s obvious to me that the cruelty in the opening line isn’t to be taken literally, at least in the meaning we usually ascribe to it. But the cruelty at the heart of April Fool’s jokes is real, and is easy to demonstrate to anyone who doesn’t relish the good, clean fun in pranks that I’ve experienced, like being told that the principal is looking for me or that the prettiest girl in the class has a crush on me. The “exhibits” in the Museum of Hoaxes include far too many April Fool’s Day jokes to mention here, so I’ll just take note of one perpetrated in 1974 by an Alaskan named Porky Bickar. His world-class prank consisted of air-dropping a collection of old tires into Mt. Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano, then setting them on fire. As he had hoped, the plume of black smoke that rose from the volcanic cone alarmed people in nearby Sitka who feared an imminent eruption. Bickar and others who helped him in this enterprise were ostensibly delighted by the commotion they aroused; people who believed they might have to deal with smoke and lava and the other disorders that accompany a major volcanic eruption, maybe not so much.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
The cousin was Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, and both he and Marie Larisch were figures in an 1889 scandal known as the Mayerling Incident, when the married prince apparently shot and killed his 17-year old mistress before turning the weapon on himself. Marie had allegedly acted as a go-between for the lovers; as a consequence she was banished from the Austrian court and had to move back to her native Bavaria. Eliot said her appearance in “The Waste Land” came about as the result of a meeting and conversation, although some critics have questioned the veracity of this account and suggested that he borrowed the scene from “My Past,” the countess’s 1913 memoir.
Two of those lines caught my attention when I first read “The Waste Land” for a college literature course. In the mountains, there you feel free. My love affair with mountains hadn’t developed beyond a nascent stage, but the line expressed something I felt the few times I had found myself amid wild landscapes of peaks and cliffs and canyons. The last line, though, was a mystery. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. I don’t remember if it was discussed in that literature class, and I was beginning to feel bored by the question students were expected to answer in their analysis of any literary work—What does it mean? Since I did most of my extracurricular reading late at night, after finishing assignments or closing textbook covers in exhaustion, and because I had a recurring dream of soaring through the sky like a bird, the line deeply resonated. I had little desire to delve into the author’s intention—was he quoting Marie? Was the winter the same as the one in the fifth line? Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow. I loved that line, but I had no desire to ponder Eliot’s juxtaposition of winter and warmth, or try to figure out exactly what he meant by “forgetful” snow. For me, the line evoked images and feelings—it awakened both the senses and emotions— which is precisely what a literary work should do.
A poem, a short story, a novel can also take us out of a world where scenes and accounts of the most loathsome acts of cruelty are only as far away as the TV set or the daily newspaper. In a world beset by wars, famines, acts of unspeakable violence, some might tell us that it’s cowardly to escape into fictional artifices, but I disagree. In such a world the experience of art and literature seems doubly important, reminders that the human spirit isn’t just capable of creating instruments of destruction but works of great emotional and aesthetic power. I suppose that a reader might assert that T.S. Eliot’s well-documented antisemitism makes him a poor exemplar of literary greatness, and I have no rebuttal to offer. The same criticism could be made of Shakespeare, although the societies in which they lived and plied their literary trade were much different.
In Sonnet XCVIII, Shakespeare wrote, April hath put a spirit of youth in everything. The month of optimism, new beginnings, young love. How about replacing April Fool’s Day with a day in which artifice doesn’t depend upon the cruelty of a practical joke, but upon a sense of hope? A year ago, on April 1, my grandson and his bride stood in a leafy garden and exchanged wedding vows. In a volatile, uncertain world, I felt a sense of hope that these two people would find contentment and happiness. That’s the feeling I want when April Fool’s Day rolls around each year. Two young people, surrounded by trees and flowers, gazing at one another with affection and longing. That is the image I want to hold in my head.
I reread this and really liked it.