I See By My Outfit  by Peter S. Beagle
Viking, 1965
Category: Biography

I learned to play "Streets of Laredo" on the guitar when I was in fourth grade. Not until reading this book did I learn that there was a parody version written by the Kingston Trio, which is where the title of the book comes from. The stuff you find out when you read, huh?

For the purposes of this project, I’ve lumped all sorts of biographical writing into the Biography category: biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. I See By My Outfit is Beagle’s account of traveling cross-country with his friend Phil on a couple of scooters, New York to San Francisco. Though it is technically a travel memoir, it’s less about the country than about the people they meet along the way. The style is pure Beagle: balancing on the precarious edge between poetry and purple prose, turning the journey of two madmen (did I mention the scooters? and how they don’t actually know how to repair them?) into something epic. They refer often to the journey to Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, which is with the title song one of the two main themes of the story. It sometimes shows up as a running gag; "This must be Mordor." "No, Mordor is at the end of the journey"–the humor being that the end of the journey is Enid, Beagle’s girlfriend and the reason he is making the trip.

It’s a little weird to read Beagle’s explanation of what The Lord of the Rings is, in this era when people living under rocks have heard of it–but he was writing in a time when the books had only just been reprinted in the "official" edition, when they were a touchstone for the counter-culture and not yet a culture in themselves, a time before the great fantasy literature explosion of the early ’70s.  But then Beagle himself was writing fantasy in this era, and sometimes I wish I’d been alive to read those novels without the background assumptions of modern fantasy.

I thoroughly enjoyed I See By My Outfit. It’s beautifully written, and I love the evocation of a time not that far off by the calendar, but a million miles from our own time in every respect.  Except, perhaps, the people–and maybe a travelogue of human culture isn’t such a strange idea after all.