Spiro Agnew, my uncle Edgar and Vitalic Breathing

CLARENCE BROWN

A neighbour of mine at Princeton, Brock Brower, who once had the chore of inter- viewing our Vice-President, deleted from his copy a passage that would, be thought, have been deleted anyway. Of his own accord, Mr Agnew had observed that the generally tidy state of his clothing had more than once called forth admiring comment from this and that quarter. He then pro- ceeded to demonstrate, with gestures, his grooming hints for aspiring politicians. They boiled down to two: before taking your seat, always grasp the creases of your trousers between the thumb and index of each hand and raise each trouser leg about three inches above and to the left and right, respectively, of each knee. Then, when seated, do not under any circumstances lean back, which might induce unsightly wrinkles in the spine of your jacket.

Not long after that, with these eminently sensible rules still vibrating in my memory, I happened to see a photograph of the Vice- President standing in his wrinkle-free, not to say iron-clad, way and beaming at a dead sea of faces through the infinitely amused little rifle-slits of his eyes. He is certainly a fine figure of a man, I found myself thinking, and is clearly the most presidential timber ever to be so near col- lapsing upon the White House since Warren Harding, of fragrant memory. How truly splendid he will look that January day when he rides down Pennsylvania Avenue to accept the presidency from his present chief! And how sorry a figure John Kennedy cut, by contrast, when he tentatively set

Vitalic Breathing

the topper on his abundant and very un- presidential head of hair for a minute.

Looking at the Vice-President's posture and thinking these lonely minority thoughts, I suddenly had a sensation of dip) vu, and a flood of certain early memories. It is these that form the real subject of this note, and not the man whose general monumentality seems so little suited by the nickname 'Ted.' Thank you, Mr Vice-President.

My Uncle Edgar was what would be called in this irreverent day a 'health nut,' but in those far-away years in another country, the South, I do not recall that his little peculiarities ever occasioned any dis- respectful comment, at least not in the presence of us boys, his children and nephews. We were after all the chief lab- oratory material for his theories on the ach;-.Nement of mental and physical well- being, and we were sufficiently awestruck to be well along the road to discipleship.

Uncle Edgar was a Pneumanist, the pontifex maximus, in fact, of Pneumanism, a word of his own coinage, so far as I know, and deriving obviously from the Greek pneuma 'wind, breath, spirit', a word that blended matter and mind in a way that could only be pleasing to the many pure souls of that time. His school Hellenism had not advanced much beyond the Anahasis, I ought to add, and it found scant applica- tion in his day-to-day life—he managed a very successful lumber yard, inherited from his father-in-law, my maternal grandfather.

But Pneumanism was exclusively his, or so we then thought. It consisted, as the astute reader will have guessed, in a vigor- ous, scoutmasterly, hygienic and vastly therapeutic style of drawing the sweet air into the lungs and then exhaling what one had to visualise as the accumulated sewer- age of those organs with a kind of fas- tidious snort of disgust down to the last (gasp) filthy (gasp) particle of carbon (gasp) dioxide. He was the Teddy Roosevelt of the bronchial tubes.

Uncle Edgar convinced himself, several audiences of Rotarians and Elks, and of course us, that proper breathing was the answer to an astonishing range of bodily ills, from pellagra to pollution, only the former of which terms we boys were of an age to understand.

Not just any air would do. Like the high priests of every age and cult, Uncle Edgar found something essentially holy about the blend of chill, cockcrow, and a pale glow in the east; and the air to be had at the crack of dawn was not to be compared in its beneficial effects with the soiled and faded air of, say, noon. Some part of my general sympathy with England may derive from the shared torture of very early rising, cold ablutions (driving the blood away from the weakling epidermis, coddled by a warm bed, to the vital innards of heart and liver), followed by gulping fifteen minutes of hay- seed-laden morning air into a pair of stunned lungs, sinfully congested by the shallow inhalations of unconscious breathing. But such was the hypnotic appeal of my Uncle Edgar, and such were the joys of fellowship in his embryonic church of the well-venti- lated body, and such the glee of being taken in one of his trucks to the seaside for an orgiastic session of breathing oceanic air, that none of us ever cheated in his daily quota of S & E (Sniff & Exhale).

The tragedy of my Uncle Edgar's life was the appearance in 1921 of a book by one Thomas Robert Gaines called Vitalic Breathing. We boys knew nothing of its existence then and I learned only much later of the devastating effect that it had had on the central concern of my uncle's life. I expect he had come across an adver- tisement in the magazine of natural medi- cine to which he subscribed (it could hardly have been in the Baptist Courier, the only other periodical he received) and ordered it from the publisher in Chicago or from some bookstore in another town, there being none in ours. I imagine to myself now the incipient anguish occasioned by the full, final, mortifying realisation that Gaines had anticipated, under a mere change of name, the entire programme of Pneumanism.

Vitalic Breathing is elaborately introduced,

THE ELASTIC SirilY

first by Frank Kennicot Reilly, of the firm of Reilly and Lee, the publishers, and then by Edwin F. Bowers, MD, author of Teeth and Health, Bathing for Health, etc., and finally by the author himself. Dr Bowers begins his medico's imprimatur with words which must have inserted the knife, later to be turned so heartlessly. into Uncle Edgar's bosom: . 'From earliest recorded time, intelligent humans have noted the vital and stimula- ting properties inherent in air.' (I am not making this up.) `The "pneuma" of the old. Greeks was actually considered a bit of the same eth- ereal warp and woof of which the spiritual essence of the man was woven. Modern science recognises in this shrewd guess of the inspired philosophers and medical men a startling resemblance to a wonderful truth. `For, if oxygen be not a part of the vital spirit that animates us, it is, nevertheless. the most important of all means for main•

.

taining that spirit in status quo—for a time.

What must my Uncle Edgar's thoughts have been as he moved from these hasty. apercus, so nonchalantly making public the fruit of his own deepest reflections. into the body of the book, with its hatefully

resonant (and almost familiar!) chapters.

'What is Vitalic BreAthing?' the first chapter forthrightly asked, and responded with the evangelical and lusty loquacity that characterises its author's rhythmic style: short bustling paragraphs to define the basic unit, the 4N/italic Sniff.' After this exordium we get down to details:

The simplest and pleasantest form is to practise Vitalic Breathing while walking, using a sniff to each of two or three steps, and exhaling or expelling the air with the next two steps. In other words, in walking four or five steps sniff, or draw in air, during the first two or three steps, and expel the air during the last two steps. There is no hard and fast rule as to the number of miffs' (The italics are neither mine nor Mr Gaines's: they belong to some earlier reader of my copy.) But there is not room here to do more than suggest how massively and detestably Gaines had independently invented and thus forestalled the life-work of Uncle Edgar. Consider for example the following head- ing. where Uncle Edgar's 'Pneumatic Swing'

THE LIVER BRE/ITII

la violent twisting of the thorax back and forth on its axis above a stationary pelvis, arms flinging) is barely concealed as 'Vitalic Sway' THE. JOY OF EXERCISE. Make your body obey your will. Vitalic Breathing a somnifacient [coveys of question-marks in the margin of Earlier Reader]. The Vitalic Sway, the Internal Breath, the Upper Breath—sniffs to health. The Obesity Bend—the fat man's delight. The Vibration Breath—can you trill? The Tensing Breath—an awakener.

In the chapter entitled 'Be an Upstanding Man' (iv) the author combats 'body-slouch, health-slouch, mind-slouch,' and exhorts his reader, now fully erect, no doubt, to 'climb stairs, climb hills, sniff, and climb to health.' On we go, through the 'first shower bath, 126 nc (Asclepiades of Prusa, father of the douche; cf. Dr Edwin F. Bowers, author of Bathing for Health, etc) and Vitalic Breath- ing as a hair restorer ('Nature pulls your hair to make you breathe') to a couple of chapters in which Gaines lifts his sights from the merely personal to the broadly societal benefits of his doctrine.

These appear in the chapters for school teachers (vitt) and soldiers (ix). School teachers (`these devoted women') have the particular affection of Mr Gaines. Their low wages move him, for one thing, but, as might be expected, it is the ill-ventilated schoolroom that really concerns him most, for there the hapless teacher is the prey not only of bad air but also of the parents who seek her out in her exitless prison for complaints. The deserving teacher,' he heads the first section, and then: 'Vitalic Breathing a weapon . against nervousness and irate parents.' His sympathy exhausted, and know- ing her probable addiction to schedules. Mr Gaines appends a 'seven-minute daily schedule which will help to banish disease and lung fatigue from the children of America.' (Lung fatigue! Gaines! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! !) When it comes to soldiers Mr Gaines writes from experience, amply substantiated by a dim little photograph showing him in uniform in November 1898, at the close of the Spanish-American War (chest expan- ded: a measly thirty-one and a half inches, 'health and vitality in a most impaired state'). 'Sinew of the Nation,' our author, the phrase-maker, heads this chapter.

'In the army men are taught how to stand, walk, run, exercise, and bathe. They are instructed in all the essentials of per- sonal hygiene. The danger of contracting venereal disease is almost daily impressed on their minds, and it is only through our high schools, universities, and military in- structors. that we can ever hope to eman- cipate the human race from the leprous contamination of sex diseases.'

'God speed the day,' Gaines piously and prophetically apostrophises, 'when such training will be made compulsory for the young men of America!' Finally, helplessly, Gaines bursts into the lyrical finale of his patriotic exertions: 'Sniff, sniff, sniff, the boys go marching . .

, But, reader, it was an earlier day. Twenty- two years later, in November 1920. and in a much more vivid photograph. the author of Vitalic Breathing appears in that res- plendently mnemogenic pose, hands in pockets, chest thrust out (forty-three and a half inches!), and nostrils flaring. He is flourishing still, for all I know, practising the Liver Breath, the Elastic Sway. or Dormant Walking at the very least ('Sniff- ing and exhaling must be continuous while you practise Dormant Walking, no laughing, talking, or. mouth breathing should be in- dulged in'). Above all, I should think, no laughing. He might be in his nineties.

As for my Uncle Edgar, he breathed his 'last in 1933. My Aunt Lucille's death in 1928 from, of all things, pneumonia had struck him as one final blow from the gods. whose onslaught had begun in 1921 with the appearance of Vitalic Breathing. He never truly regained the buoyancy that had so distinguished him before that time. Now that I think back on these matters, which were of course beyond my powers of analy- sis at the time, I find myself wondering why the book should have meant so much to him. So far as I know, he never intended to publish his own doctrine of Pneumanism, but even had he wished to do so, I think the thing might still have been managed, for there was less essential overlap between the two than at first appeared. (Gaines had ignored the whole question of Sea Air, for instance, and the tricky rhythms of the `Apple-bobbing breath.') Besides, the mar- ket for such manuals seems almost bottom- less, and my Uncle Edgar might still have

DORMANT WALKING

gained recognition as the natural genius of hygiene that he thought himself to be.

But no—the effect of the book was to make him abandon Pneumanism altogether. It took the wind, so to speak, right out of him. Never again were we boys summoned to his fragrant barn for sessions of ecstatic sniffing and exhalation, and we quickly learned that he did not wish to he reminded of that business at alt. Uncle Edgar was a \ kindly, affectionate man, and that makes it all the more painful for me to contem- plate what I now think to have been the real explanation: he saw himself reflected in the author of Vitalic Breathing as a fool and charlatan. Robust and handsome, he had never in his life resembled the weakling of that smudgy snapshot. But the likeness of his ideas to those of Mr Gaines caused him to despise them as the portly, park- bench philosophy which, in fact, they were. Perhaps it was the preposterous figures in the illustrations to Gaines's book that ac- complished what Uncle Edgar's unaided contemplation of his image in the mirror could never have done. He withered away into something like our present-day estimate of that lavishly nonsensical claptrap.

And yet I see him still, in occasional figures of our own time. standing before audiences as immune to ridicule as any that rhythmically respired to my Uncle Edgar's coaching. or practised Vitalic Sniffs in step with the wizard of Dormant Walking. They stand with a posture that he and Gaines would have applauded in fraternal unison. They impart little secrets of sartorial fresh- ness with an air of having just invented them, exactly as Pneumanists annd Breathers disclosed the truth that had blinded them with its novelty: that men need air to live.

My Uncle Edgar. now I think of it, was fortunate. Certainly his awakening was rude, and painful, but he survived it to live out the rest of his days with a sad dignity that was secure from parody:The Vice-President reminds me powerfully of those blissfully good-hearted simpletons: but he has yet to meet his Gaines—some genius, say, of the permanent crease—to see himself as he is, and so he–is trapped within his own self- estimate, and that of his fabricators: be- yond parody, as parody is, alas, beyond him.