Tales from Silver Lands (1925)
Tales from Silver Lands by Charles Finger
The Newbery Award is “restricted to authors who are citizens or residents of the United States,” but you couldn’t have guessed that from the initial slate of winners. The first two winners, Hendrik van Loon and Hugh Lofting, were respectfully Dutch and English, though both lived in the States for years. Charles Hawes, author of The Dark Frigate, was born and raised in the States, but his book was about England. For an award that was designed to be distinctly American, the Newbery selection committee sure seemed to be working to make it seem as worldly an award as possible.
That trend continues with the next couple of books, each of which are collections of short stories about far-away lands, neither written by people actually from those places. Charles Finger, the British-born son of German and Irish immigrants who spent years traipsing around South America before settling down in the United States, was about as vaguely “international” as an American children’s author could have been in the 1920s, and it seems that was the winning formula of the day. For what else could explain Tales from Silver Lands winning the award in 1925?
Tales from Silver Lands is ostensibly a collection of folktales that Finger gathered during his years as a traveler, stretching south from Honduras to the far reaches of Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia. Patagonia as we know it today—endless pampas dotted with cattle-herding gauchos—was just emerging, which is to say the indigenous tribes of southern Chile and Argentina were close to being wiped out in service of expanding agriculture. But as new frontier opened up, young men from further north found opportunities to ranch, herd, and guide visitors through the eerie landscape. Finger put in some serious miles on his journeys, coming into contact with similarly-minded adventurers from Bolivia and Peru. Once he moved to the States, he began writing out a far-flung collection of stories he’d picked up, both from his fellow cowpokes and the native peoples of the land he traveled through. That explains the diversity of the stories present, which really have no collected theme or idea except “listen to this wacky tale I heard somewhere!”
Assuming that these really are all folktales from different cultures, that makes Silver Lands something like the written equivalent of a mixtape. Charles Finger didn’t come up with any of these stories. In several of them, he writes in quotation marks as if the story was dictated to him directly from someone else. There’s something that seems disingenuous about listing yourself as the “author” of what is, essentially, an anthology of other people’s work. In the 21st Century, it feels especially disingenuous (and a little slimy) to call yourself the author of another culture’s folklore.
Turns out, Charles Finger had a bit of a pattern of claiming authorship over collections of other people’s work. This Library of Congress article lays out a number of examples from Finger’s work where he seemingly copy/pasted existent materials into thematic collections, then claimed them as his own remembrances. (The article also has recordings of Finger singing sea shanties and photos of him posing like a fratty Mark Twain who wants to show you how edgy he can be. I highly recommend checking it out.) That didn’t stop him from becoming a successful author, though, and it didn’t stop him from winning the Newbery Award, either.
If Tales from Silver Lands was charming or well-written, one might be able to forgive the more questionable aspects of its origins. Alas, Silver Lands is about as bland and confounding a collection of short stories as I’ve read. Some are completely asinine (“The Humming-bird and the Flower”), and many of them seem so stitched together, filled with non-sequiturs and disjointed narrative pieces, that they reminded me of a group of kids making up a story sentence-by-sentence (“The Magic Ball”). Narrative structure transcends culture, and even if Finger was simply recording the stories as told to him, he could have streamlined them to make more sense.
Of all 19 stories recorded here, there were four that stood out as interesting, even touching. One tells the tale of a brother and sister who, each suffering from different disabilities, use their strengths to care for each other in isolation until they’re rescued from loneliness by a kindly witch (“The Bad Wishers”). Best of all is the final story, “The Cat and the Dream Man”, which is almost Lynchian with its surrealistic imagery and dark outbursts of violence. But Finger undercuts himself by pushing these longer, more interesting stories to the very end of the book. Judging by the Goodreads reviews, a lot of readers never got there.
This won’t be the last culturally-appropriated short story collection we see in this list, but it is the last we’ll see of Charles Finger. In 2021, the University of Arkansas Press is publishing a biography called Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger. Apparently, Finger was a semi-closeted homosexual who built up a queer midwestern literary community called Gayeta. (Subtle.) That sounds like a fascinating book, and I’m almost positive it’ll be more interesting than Tales from Silver Lands.
