Notes on "Carruthers Smith's Museum" – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, some notes on the subtext and background of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released in this blog last week.
This story about Carruthers Smith was born out of a dream I had at some point between 5:00 am and 9:00 am on Saturday, November 23rd, 2024, after a late night working at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. I often have quite thematic dreams like this one, and so when I woke from this particular dream, I knew I had a story to write. The dream itself only lasted as far as Part I of the story you will have just read, or perhaps heard if you prefer the podcast version. I began writing it shortly after waking and finished it close to 3:00 pm on that same Saturday. It proved therefore to be one of the quicker ones that I’ve written in quite some time, though one of the stranger ones at that. I wanted to write out several notes about the story, its characters, and its setting so you might better understand the subtext behind the story, and to preclude any other interpretations of what I’ve written.
In my original dream none of the characters had names. I observed the action from the perspective of Agent Pat O’Malley, which is why in the first part of the story he is the narrator. In my original dream he was filing some sort of metallic slide rule for the character that became Carruthers Smith, a reversal of roles as in the dream I was initially there to interrogate Smith for some uncertain cause. The setting of the story, Carruthers Smith’s Museum, was there in the original, though now writing this nearly 18 hours after waking today I remember it looking more like an art gallery built on a platform above the sanctuary of some old Upstate New York church with a big square base to the bell tower and a more Victorian looking wooden exterior that I often saw in the small villages in Broome, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties on my drives between Binghamton and Ithaca when I lived in Binghamton between 2019 and 2022. Agent Penny Wilson’s character was in the dream yet taken off-stage by Smith’s accomplice, trapped somewhere, yet my character couldn’t prove they were so entangled and thus I had no reason to properly accuse Smith’s character. At that point of desperation, I awoke and began writing.
My characters’ names are always quite intentional and tell more about the characters than their actions or dialogue in the story might convey. Carruthers Smith was the first character who I named in this story. I wanted the villain to be a looming WASPish figure, the last scion of the Gilded Age living a recluse in this vast museum he built for himself somewhere far from the great cities of the Northeast yet still within a day’s drive of any of them. I settled on Southeastern Delaware as the setting simply because it seemed most practical for the federal agents to drive there from Washington than if they were in New Jersey, on Long Island, or on Cape Cod. Lewes became the setting for the story because I’ve always liked that name and its connections to the county town of East Sussex in the south of England. I went back and forth for a minute between the names Smith and Jones; several weeks ago, I’d gotten the idea for a story about a man who is always wrong about everything named Erroneous Smith, which I haven’t written yet though I took aspects of his sketched character and took them into the less comical Carruthers Smith. As for his first name, I drew that from an old Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” published at the beginning of 1904 in The Strand Magazine in London and a month earlier in Collier’s in New York. The 1984 Granada TV adaptation of the story featuring Jeremy Brett as Mr. Holmes was my introduction to the story and remains etched into my memory from watching that series in the early mornings on PBS during my high school days. Carruthers is one of the two suspects in Conan Doyle’s story, and it’s a British-enough name that it felt fitting for the old colonial New York type of person I was looking for.
The federal agents were all named in quick succession. Bill Hardy is named to make him appear as non-descript and American as I could with a nod to the Hardy Boys. I know a lot of Bills, though none from Buffalo, and so it seemed a fitting name to use here without nodding to one in particular. Pat O’Malley drew from the idea that I can best write from the perspective of someone like me, that is a fellow Irish American. My family comes from the townlands around Newport, County Mayo a part of the country which before colonization was ruled by the O’Malleys and Burkes. Everyone around Clew Bay is related to some degree or another if you go far enough back, and I have a handful of O’Malley ancestors myself. Patrick was an easy choice, it’s the most accepted Irish name in the English-speaking world, with my own Seán in all its phonetically spelled variations reflecting each country’s version of English coming in second, though Liam, the Irish version of William, is quite popular now too probably thanks to the recently buried Liam Payne of One Direction. Penelope Wilson was a harder one to name. I’ve used the name Penelope in my long awaited second novel in my romantic comedy series which I dramatically call the Plumwoodiad and was hesitant to use it again. It’s in part a nod to Penny Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory, one of my favorite TV shows, yet more so a nod to the original Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. At one point when I stepped away from my desk yet was still engrossed in this story while making breakfast, I considered putting a line in there about her having to wait a long time to find a man who can string her husband’s bow. The name Penny was intended to give her a deep well of resilience and strength that she would call on to save everyone else from Carruthers Smith. Wilson was another choice of trying to make her sound as American as possible, and while I did have President Woodrow Wilson in mind a bit here, I also thought about Robert Sean Leonard’s character Dr. James Wilson in the Fox series House in mind with this name.
I didn’t initially plan on making everyone else in this story Irish Americans. This is something which makes me laugh now thinking about it. I’ll make a small digression here, if you’ll permit me. When I was in elementary school, I remember one day my teacher brought out a stack of books for us to all read together as a class that was about a character who she said, “was from an ethnic group that aren’t often talked about in books.” I remember thinking then how the only book about Irish people or Irish Americans I could remember reading in my school was Tomie de Paola’s picture book about the life of St. Patrick, the namesake and patron saint of my elementary school, St. Patrick’s in Kansas City, Kansas. That’s nagged at me since, and I do think we Irish Americans tend to get forgotten because the Carruthers Smiths of this country have largely accepted us as white in the last sixty years since the first of our kind was elected President. It’s often forgotten today how we Irish Americans were reviled by the old English colonial population in this country for a long time. I heard some stories about this, and in the older histories of my alma mater Rockhurst University, there are stories of Rockhurst students in the 1920s and 1930s sneaking into Klu Klux Klan rallies to try and fight back against their banality. And yet, all that fit neatly into the background of Carruthers’s assistant, who I decided would be a first-generation Irish American, whose parents crossed the Atlantic during the big wave of migration among our people to this country in the 1890s. That character developed into Peter Dougherty. I had to be careful here, the first couple of names I gave him ended up being changed because I realized they were the names of actual people I know either in the Kansas City Irish community at large or nationally among my brothers in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. I imagined Peter was a sort of Bob Newhart type character who spent his early life trying to get by amid the shifting tides of the world around him, and once he found Carruthers Smith he was eventually willing and able to give up on trying to just survive and instead enjoy something more comfortable even if it meant sacrificing the woman he loved. That woman became the penultimate character I named in this story. At first her named was Bridie McGinty, Bridie being a pet form of the Irish name Brigid, yet that changed near the end of the story when I decided instead to name her after my great-great aunt Delia McDonnell who came to America from Ireland in the 1940s or 1950s. yet I had a mental image of her from the start. She was going to be a cross between Mamie O’Rourke in the 1894 classic song The Sidewalks of New York, Dorothy Day, and many of the women who I’ve known in my life who day in, and day out work in the schools and hospitals and for nonprofits trying to make life better for others. There’s a subtle yet profound truth in this: if you make life better for other people who’re worse off than you are, it’ll eventually make your own life better too. Call it trickle-up economics if you will. Lastly, there was the town doctor, who got the name Ronald out of a desire to find something that felt like it’d fit a character born in the 1940s or 1950s, and Yancey because it was the end of the story, and I was looking for something at the end of the alphabet.
Let me say something briefly about the time in which this story is set. From the first moment I thought of this story taking place in 1990, thirty-four years ago. I felt this was far enough removed from the turn of the twentieth century to have much of the off-stage action feel removed yet still before the millennium which feels like a profound break in time in my own life. I did have aspects of the lived environment of the 1979 Peter Sellers film Being There in mind when I thought of the décor and technology that Carruthers Smith would have in his museum, where the building itself was largely designed forty years earlier in the first few years just after World War II, yet the technology kept getting updated to a certain point at which Carruthers no longer felt comfortable replacing things. I’ve seen this in people who prefer to stick with certain technology that they’re most familiar with even if many years or decades have passed since that technology has been commonly sold or can be repaired with replacement parts on hand with the manufacturer. Doing the math here, this places Carruthers Smith’s birth in 1914, Peter Dougherty’s in 1899, and Delia McGinty Dougherty’s in 1898. The agents meanwhile are largely children of the 1950s and 1960s, with Penny Wilson the youngest at around 25 years old. It seemed less important for me to settle their ages than it did the characters in Carruthers’s orbit. There is something of the nostalgic for me writing about characters in the seventies, eighties, and nineties who were born in the decades just around the turn of the twentieth century. These birthdates were the norm for the oldest generations when I was born in 1992, and today I do miss something of the expectation that my great-grandparents’ generation born between 1890 and 1918 would still be living in our world with us today. I in fact only met one of my eight great-grandparents, the last of them to be born, who died when I was three years old.
Finally, I want to end by addressing the museum itself. I love museums, or musea as Carruthers would surely use the Latinate plural of that word, and so Carruthers Smith’s Museum was intended to be a twist on that happy place of mine as it was in my dream. The museum is made of one long gallery whose white walls and white marble floors match the place where I work yet whose shape is more akin to some of the galleries at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, yet I often thought of how it appeared with its own internal lighting in a manner similar to the private archive of Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane with its long shadows and stark surfaces. That warm and welcoming space is twisted however when you remove all of the art from its confines except for something that seems eerily out of place. The great rubber artifact is a phrase that made me laugh the first time I wrote it, and yet what’s essentially a giant eraser-shaped blob of milky white goo became the unintended means of Carruthers Smith’s fall into depravity. Was he ever afraid of it? I think so at first, yet by the time we met Carruthers he’d lost any real desire to live and was happy to have something that could take his life at any moment be a constant presence in his life. He may have once loved another, he may have once been happy with his success, he may have once believed in being the patriotic good boss whose tires helped drive the Allied advances across North Africa and Europe, yet by the time we meet him he is so jaded about life itself that he sees no reason to cherish it. I imagined this rectangular piece of rubber standing atop a foot-tall podium, with the object itself reaching up to about six or seven feet in height, so it would tower over anyone who approached it, yet not by too much. Was the rubber alive? Perhaps in a sort of imagined monstrous way, yet only as much as a Venus fly trap is alive.
The giant rubber monolith in the center of the room stands for the corruption at the heart of Carruthers, his willingness to sacrifice others for his own success. His two-faced approach to people like Peter who keeps the keys to his house, yet he still sees as little more than a servant speaks to just how morally bankrupt Carruthers is. Here is a man who was once on good terms with presidents for his wartime industrial service. In one line which I cut he admitted for the first time how on the morning of the 1948 election he voted for Dewey and then put a call to President Truman to wish him good luck because if Truman thought Carruthers Smith was a friend then maybe he’d sign another contract for more tires and tank treads for the impending war in Korea. Money for the sake of money alone is the corruption at the heart of this man, a heart that’s been hollowed out so he can hide away even more of his gains. He is the true face of an oligarch who puts on a nice mask for the sake of selling his wares in a democracy yet would rather all the nice people who buy those goods stay out of his way and leave the governing of society to the captains of industry and their cronies in government.
Carruthers Smith then is a warning, a vision of the last echoes of the First Gilded Age at the dawn of its successor. All the successes for expanding suffrage, workers’ rights, and improving our education, healthcare, and overall quality of life are at risk if we allow the oligarchs of today try to return us to a limited regulation small government policy of the late nineteenth century. If we let the wolves into the henhouse the chances are good that they’ll turn it into a buffet for themselves to feast upon while everyone else is left out in the cold to fight over scraps or starve. Of all the federal agents who seek to bring Carruthers to justice, it’s Penny Wilson who is successful. Without her tenacity or her compassion for Peter Dougherty that reinvigorates his soul after decades of uneasy slumber in his boss’s shadow, Carruthers would have remained at large, a glowering menace on the far horizon of the seat of our democracy. The youngest of all the characters in this story is the one who saves them all.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 