Beauty as with art is said to be in the eye of the beholder; nevertheless certain standards of beauty have withstood the test of time, and few would dispute these standards apart from the enemies of beauty, those who are envious and jealous of beauty and dedicate themselves to marring or destroying it wherever they can. These are the truly ugly among us, easily distinguished by their lack of civilized good manners and civilized speech, attacking all those who would take a stand for beauty and try to emphasize its standards whether of Mozart, the sonnets of Shakespeare, or those things that once distinguished real ladies and gentlemen.

While being ever so grateful for the Turner Classic Movie Channel, I did take it upon myself a couple of years ago to send a letter to Robert Osborne chiding him for neglecting A Girl of the Limberlost, the film version of Geneva Grace Stratton-Porter’s novel of the same title. As a child my mother took me to see the film at the Nile Theater and it made an indelible impression on me. Of the several memorable scenes in the film even after all these years one stands out.

Elnora, the young girl of the Limberlost finds companionship among the various creatures of the swamp. But a girl where she goes to school becomes envious of the attention being paid Elnora. At one point in the film a beautiful butterfly alights on a curtain, and before Elnora can capture it and set it free outside this other girl runs over and smashes the butterfly.

There are many enemies of beauty, those so ugly in their own minds and lives out of jealousy and envy they are dedicated to the marring or destruction of beauty, a subject I deal with at length in my book Birds With Broken Wings and my novel Donnie and Jean, an angel’s story about two children growing up in WWII Bakersfield. In both books I explore this envy and jealousy of beauty. The Huntington and Getty are not the only places you find a genuine tribute to beauty; it can be found in Kern County as well if you know where to look.

My generation of WWII antecedent to TV was not forced to read books; we were born to read, we were readers, and books were a natural and quite normal way of life to us. I was fortunate to be born into a family of avid readers, therefore from earliest memory I was surrounded by and immersed in good books and magazines, an encyclopedia and dictionary, newspapers, and like little Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird who in Jem’s words to Dill was “readin’ ever since she was born,” and notwithstanding Jem’s hyperbole so it seemed with me. And there was radio with a multiplicity of programming; that like good books and before the advent of TV required the constant exercising of ones imagination as well as the intellect.

Among the books of my childhood were the novels not only of those like Scott, Cooper, Clemens and so many others, but those by women as well. One of my favorite woman authors was Geneva Grace Stratton-Porter. She wrote her first novel The Song of the Cardinal in 1903. The next story, Freckles, written 1904 is about an orphan who gets a job as a timber guard in the Limberlost, a forested swamp in Indiana. Due to an accident Freckles has only one hand; however, he falls in love with a young girl, the beautiful “Swamp Angel.” Believing he is impoverished, his mysterious, noble past is finally made known; he is the nephew of “Lord O’More.” The book was made into a film in 1935 followed by a remake in 1960.

A Girl of the Limberlost written in 1911, and also made into the film I mentioned, is about a poor girl, Elnora Comstock, who grows up on the edge of the Limberlost swamp. Her father had died tragically, and when her mother is withdrawn and cold toward her she finds companionship with the Limberlost. There she discovers how Limberlost can teach her in ways no formal education could.

Sharing a like love of nature, Geneva’s life at the Limberlost from which she drew so much of her writing had much in common with that of Henry’s at Walden. In many ways Geneva’s writing prepared me for my life as a boy in the Sequoia National Forest, and for the later friendship and kinship I would find with Henry.

Of all her several novels and writing, Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost continue to be most vivid in my memory. There are two incidents remarked of the young forester that made a great impression on me when I first read the book; the first being his coming across a footprint in the forest made by his Swamp Angel. After pressing his lips to her imprint, the young man uses a piece of bark from a tree to carefully cover and protect this precious evidence of “his angel.” The second incident occurs when the young man is abed recovering from wounds received from rescuing the angel. She declares her love for him at this time, and says “he shall have his angel” notwithstanding his seeming poverty, his ancestry not then known, and his being crippled.

Elnora was the girl counterpart of me as a boy. Her evident love of nature, her courage, and sense of exploration and adventure made us soul mates from the moment I started reading the book. It was not so much Sheena of the Jungle with whom I related, but Elnora of the Limberlost. Tom Sawyer had Becky Thatcher; I had Elnora Comstock to whom I wanted to be a hero just like the young forester to his angel.

Life has a cruel way at times making cynics of people, and the universities and Hollywood substituting their versions of “reality” for good books and the exercising of ones imagination, trading the coarse and profane “literature” of those who obviously could never relate to Scott, Cooper, and Geneva, had they even known of them, those who never realized or cared what was being betrayed our young people were deprived of the very best humankind had to offer by way of civilized thought and manners, cheated and betrayed of the real progress of civilization. As a result, the Angel, Elnora, and the young forester have been cheated and betrayed as well, as have I.

Somehow, the sop to women on the part of the committee adding Austen, Cather, Elliot, and Woolf to the Great Books does not go nearly far enough. Honoring the “compatibility of differences” is not seen at the United Nations, nor is it seen in America. Perhaps it can only be seen and understood by those like Elnora, the young forester and his angel, by those who can understand them and enter into the kind of relationship that honors and dignifies the compatibility of differences.

Few today could read either Emerson or Thoreau without yawning or becoming glassy-eyed, few today could read Geneva without thinking her writing altruistic, simplistic, or at the best “quaint.” But we seek in vain for any marked advance of civilized good manners and morality that has supplanted these works of the past and the standards of beauty they championed.