9 - Ernest Borneman's Tomorrow Is Now (1959): Thoughts about a Lost Novel, with Glances toward Samuel Johnson and other Modernists

Summary

My title is partly serious, partly facetious, as is the subtitle of Borneman's novel—The Adventures of Welfare Willy in Search of a Soul. Among the most useful definitions of literary modernism is one that sees it as a reaction against (as well as a successor to) nineteenth-century realism. The limits of labels, of course, become apparent in attempts to trace the roots of the seemingly more straightforward term realism. Ignoring the collateral branch of naturalism, we still find ourselves expanding the term when we trace realistic prose fiction back through Jane Austen to Samuel Richardson to Daniel Defoe—the differences among those three seem far more important than their similarities except within this critical exercise. How, then, can we profitably apply the more slippery term modernist to someone like Samuel Johnson, who falls so far outside the chronological limits? One answer is to see how the attitudes and approaches to literature and life that Johnson exhibited lead us to insights about a twentieth-century writer largely unknown to mainstream criticism, one who is undoubtedly a modernist at his best and perhaps betrayed by his realism. This essay attempts to triangulate on Borneman from the seemingly disparate points of Johnson on the one hand and modernism on the other. The choice of Johnson is not arbitrary, for he would have been at once a sympathetic and harsh critic of Ernest Borneman. Both showed themselves to be comfortable with mixing compositional conventions and defying narrative expectations, while simultaneously aiming at popular trends in order to realize commercial success.

It always gratifies curiosity to trace a sentiment.

Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Waller”

In 1959 very few people read the first paragraph of Borneman's Tomorrow Is Now: The Adventures of Welfare Willy in Search of a Soul and even fewer have read it since—more about that later—but those who did may have been reminded of the opening of a novel published four decades earlier. Borneman's work begins,

Once upon a time Monica Moss, 5, was walking down a dirt track in Missouri. From the other side came a bearded farmer with a beardless goat. At the crossroads they met up with a stew bum. The stew bum looked at the goat, then at the farmer, then at Monica. Then he got mad and said to the farmer: “Hey, give that goat back his beard.”