The writer who roars and purrs
Leonard Wibberley in his Hermosa Beach home in 1975.
Editor’s note: the following interview first appeared in the February 27, 1975 issue of Easy Reader. Wibberley died in 1982.
“I’m not a fashionable writer, and I’m not a successful writer. And I don’t particularly care,” said Leonard Wibberly, author of “The Mouse That Roared” and over 50 other books. “But if I bore someone, then I’m crushed.
“I’m so hurt I get enraged if I feel I’m criticized unfairly. And I get childishly elated if a critic praises my work. This upsets my emotional balance, which I must have under control to work. So I tell my publishers never to send me reviews.”
Having made a living writing what he chooses for the past 20-odd years, earning comparisons to Swift for his satire and to Hemingway for his short novels, one could take issue with Wibberly’s assertion of being unsuccessful.
Wibberly is dogmatic, reclusive and unlike most writers of the day, obsessed with craftsmanship. Except for the fact that he appears to prefer making violins to writing, and that what remains of the hair on his head sticks straight up over his bald dome like the horns of the helmet of a knight from the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, there is nothing notably peculiar about his life in a small beach cottage in the valley section of Hermosa, where he lives with his wife of many years and his several sons.
He regards Steinbeck as the greatest American author of the twentieth century and doesn’t read fellow contemporary fiction writers.
“My advice to young writers is to read established works. Not Henry Miller.
“I think Steinbeck was far greater than Hemingway. He could write about the details of people’s existence down to the lowest level. He understood thirst, dust, aching feet, and hopelessness. And he understood that we will endure and finally conquer these things.”
“Your own books also generally concern people close to the earth, such as fishermen and soldiers. Is this because you feel these people are closer to the truth?” I asked.
“I’ve known more of these types of people, and naturally tend to write about people I know. It’s easier. I do think you learn more from the earth and stones and being out among natural things than by reading up on dogma.
“I’m a child, a child with a beard and a bald head. And I have this childish point of view that there’s such a thing as goodness in the world.
“The child in me is shocked, terrified, when I hear stories like the one the other day of a 15-year-old girl being raped, and her cries for help ignored. But I recognize there is evil in the world, and there is a contest between the two. This isn’t just a banality, it’s a real truth which has been recognized in every civilization. Always there is a man whose job it is to cast out evil, and one whose job it is to bring in good.
“I hope my books add a little kindness and comfort to the world. If two and a half million people add a little kindness to the world each day, it makes up quite a lump of kindness to offset the evil which we can do nothing about. It sounds Pollyannaish, but maybe Pollyanna was the greatest woman the world’s ever known,” Wibberly said.
Then he chuckled as he frequently does when concluding a remark which leaves him vulnerable.
Despite his unshakable belief in the goodness of mankind, he’s about as enthusiastic as Pope Paul about the direction western culture has taken.
“Our society is doomed,” he says without qualification.
“Effort is necessary for human health and it’s too damned easy for us now. We say we are so strong no one dares attack us. But so said the Romans. ‘We can move a legion 20 miles in a day,’ they said. And the weakest tribes of Germany bowled them over.”
“Do you see an antidote to what you regard as our debilitating decadence?” I asked.
“Yes, but I don’t think the country will ever adopt it.
“A book I wrote last year, The Testament of Theophilus, which should have won an award for the most unfashionable book of the year, it dropped dead, is about a Roman slave who buys his freedom and becomes a friend of the gospel author Luke.
“While doing research for the book I learned there is no era in history which so closely resembles the fall of Rome as the present one. I’m a bit of a nut on the subject.
“When the empire was strong, news had only to reach Rome that the German tribes were stirring on the Rhine for every young man to rush down to join the army. One hundred years later when news reached Rome that the barbarians were crossing the Rhine, young men rushed down to the slave quarters and made themselves into slaves because slaves couldn’t be drafted.
“Jupiter, Janus and the other gods credited with taking care of Rome and previously worshipped religiously in the temples were replaced by foreign gods, of the Zoroastrians, the Jews and Christians.
“Farmers lost their land to large landowners and fled to the cities where they were unable to compete with the slave labor. So welfare programs were established.
“Gladiatorial battles for the entertainment of the mobs were offered in the same way as we’re offering them on television.
“Our young, who are strangers to me, it’s almost as if they were Martians or beasts, are turning from the Christian God to Oriental religions, to gurus. Maybe I should set myself up as a guru,” Wibberly said, chuckling again.
“Perhaps young people think the churches and government have lost their right to power and respect,” I suggested.
“I’m not decrying what’s happening,” Wibberly replied. “I’m just pointing out that this is what happened in Rome. And because our culture is so accelerated, we’re repeating history quickly.
“We are cutting ourselves off from the roots that have nourished us, the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Jewish Bible and all the rest of the tremendous accumulation of human wisdom, which is considered horseshit now, by people turning to the latest guru. No one’s ever surpassed the Greeks in philosophy. Since Rome, we’ve stopped arguing philosophy and have only been arguing over the meaning of words.
“Without a code of ethics, men go mad, their lives become unmanageable.”
“But you’re making a god of authority,” I observed.
“Eventually a society winds up with the submission of individuals to authority.”
“Are you saying that’s desirable?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you foresee a society which is neither mad and unmanageable, nor restrained by fear and faith in an arbitrary authority?”
“Such a system should be able to evolve, but it won’t under our present systems.
“I’ve just finished a science fiction book in which the Chinese are contacted by a civilization in outer space, 12 billion years old. It’s been through the problems facing earth and offers to help.
“Cardinal McGurtin of New York is asked by the president how the churches will react to the earth accepting the offer of help. He answers, there could be no objection because it is the basic assumption of all western religions that there is not one but two superior civilizations, one benevolent and malevolent.
“The advice offered all basically involves population reduction. But it’s discovered the civilization advising earth destroyed itself millions of years ago. Only a memory bank remained. In other words, all the advice is death advice.
“I think that is what we have today. We pretend we’re thinking of life, but our solutions are abortion, sterilization and war.
“In this book the people who oppose the advice given by the memory bank are put in lunatic asylums.
“But Cardinal McGurtin, who is in the asylum, points out to his fellow inmates that there is another civilization of superior intelligence which they can appeal to, which men have appealed to for millions of years.
“I’m not on the side of doom. Man has endured for a long time. I don’t think he’s capable of wiping himself out.
“An interesting thing about Christ is he didn’t preach to Pilate of Caliphia or Caesar. He preached directly to the human heart. And the changes which are gradually coming about are not changes in government, but changes in the human heart. Good old Pollyanna,” Wibberly said, chuckling again. B