Bless the Beasts and Children by Glendon Swarthout

First published: 1970

Type of work: Psychological realism; social realism

Themes: Emotions, friendship, social issues, and death

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Box Canyon Boys Camp, Arizona

Principal Characters:

• Cotton, (
• John Cotton, ), a young man who is alternately indulged and disciplined by his often-married, socialite, alcoholic mother, who takes on the leadership of his five cabinmates, the Bedwetters
• Teft, (
• Lawrence Teft, III, ), a boy who grinds his teeth in his nightmare-ridden sleep and has one goal in life: to deny his parents their desire for a perfect, conventional son
• Sammy Shecker, the grossly overweight only son of a professional funnyman and obsessive gambler
• Stephen Lally, (Lally 1) and
• Billy Lally, (Lally 2), the psychotic sons of jet-setting parents who begin divorce proceedings at least once a year
• Gerald Goodenow, a fourteen-year-old boy whose widowed mother insisted her son sleep with her for most of his childhood; he habitually wets the bed, hates his stepfather, and threatens suicide

The Story

Bless the Beasts and Children is principally a story of defiance that focuses on the failure and rediscovery of love. Six protagonists, each with a history of emotional disturbance, have been sent to Box Canyon Boys Camp to be “molded” into decent, conventional citizens who are obedient to authority. Though their backgrounds are dissimilar, they have a mutual history of burgeoning juvenile delinquency. They have defied all efforts by their parents, teachers, and therapists to “control” their behavior. They believe it is not their behavior that needs correcting but that of their troubled parents. Their understanding of why they have been rejected is that they are “dings,” unworthy of love. Their perception of why they have been shunted off to this quasimilitary summer camp is acute: Nobody wants them. The six become cabinmates through a process familiar to them: The counselors and other campers identify them very quickly as “dings,” and nobody at camp wants them either.

Forced by rejection to share a cabin, the six have no one to take charge, no leader. Cotton, whose greatest need is for a father, watches for a time the inept attempts of the other five misfits to win a place for themselves in the competitive camp life. As he identifies the symptoms and needs of the other five, he reluctantly concludes that, if they are ever to win respect, “they must have a leader who understood their problems, but at the same time made them snap crap.”

Cotton will use any means at hand to whip his cabinmates, who are assigned the camp name “the Bedwetters,” into fitness. Cotton’s rules for survival are simple and few: Nobody is to write home, telephone home, or ask for help from anyone other than group members. As they have been cast out and are on their own, their “mothers and fathers can go to hell.” They will call each other by last names only and will stoically ignore any jeers from the other campers and all directives from the camp director and counselors. They will “spit life in the eye.”

Driving back with their counselor from an overnight campout, the Bedwetters spot a sign advertising a buffalo reserve. As it may be their only chance to see live buffalo, they beg to be taken into the reserve. It is the second day of a widely advertised, well-attended “hunt” staged by Arizona’s Game and Fish Department. The “scientific ratio” of buffalo to habitat is maintained by selling permits to shooters who then come to sit comfortably on a platform, their rifles ready, while horsemen stampede the reserve buffalo into the killing ground.

The Bedwetters are horror-stricken at the killing. Their reactions threaten to overwhelm what little order Cotton has managed to achieve among them. Billy Lally (Lally 2) tries to run away and, in the pursuit of the youngest member of the group, the idea is born: Save the remaining buffalo by stealing a “Judas Truck,” a truck that leads cattle by distributing feed, and guiding them to freedom. The Bedwetters, with Teft’s expertise at hot-wiring and under Cotton’s guidance, set off for the game reserve. Though their ineptness astonishes Cotton, he manages to lead them through crisis after crisis. They run out of gas, escape a gang of young toughs, and encounter buffalo that, once they are freed from the pens, do not seem to want to run away from the Judas Truck with its tasty bales of hay.

Cotton has the answer once again: He will see the buffalo out of danger if he has to die to do it. The child who watched the Vietnam reports every night when he was growing up scares the buffalo into stampeding by the only means at hand—the truck’s horn. As the authorities arrive at the field, he accelerates, forcing the buffalo out toward the empty expanse of freedom. The buffalo run free as Cotton commits suicide by driving the truck off a canyon rim. The authorities are left with five defiant youngsters filled with grief as well as triumph and one dead hero.

Context

The arena in which Swarthout chooses to have his characters move is one filled with the horrors of society’s throwaway mentality. He presents his readers with the Bedwetters and the buffalo as innocent victims of a society that they can neither un-derstand nor control. The boys and animals alike stand as a reproach to society’s tecnologically oriented institutions. The buffalo are being “scientifically maintained,” rather than living out their existence within their natural habitat; the children are “scientifically maintained” by textbook therapists, teachers, and parents whose chief emotional investment is in themselves rather than in their children.

A source of identification for young readers undergoing their own journeys toward maturity exists with Swarthout’s choice of protagonists. The Bedwetters are not lovable. Teft steals cars and vandalizes with grim pleasure; Lally 1 beats his brother’s pets to death; Shecker retreats into both obsessive eating and the frenetic telling of ethnically offensive jokes that make him an unusually obnoxious companion. Yet Swarthout succeeds in bringing his readers to an empathetic, compassionate view of the boys. The reader begins to understand that only through compassion for others do people develop the required deeper understanding of themselves, a trait so necessary for growth and change.

To succeed in his quest, the hero must face a grave danger, representing his greatest fear. It is a mark of the human condition that personal growth requires the taking of risks. At the outset, there is seldom much to love: Self-destructive impulses of the individual manifest themselves outwardly through such symptoms as violence toward living creatures and the surroundings. As the boys begin to assess the destruction of the buffalo as a part of their environment, the reader is required to reevaluate his own responsibility to himself and his fellow creatures.

Characteristic of modern society is the loss of the credible hero figure, together with the advent of institutionalized morality and scientific, impersonalized “maintenance” of the individual. Swarthout’s book stresses objectively the dangers of allowing fear, apathy, and uncritical acceptance of “the way things are” to keep a person from the vital goal of self-integration. Bless the Beasts and Children makes the reader the hero of his own life and asks him to solve the trick questions of myth that must be answered not only to avoid unhappiness but also to achieve independence and growth.

Bibliography

Bridgers, Sue-Ellen. “Bless the Beasts and Children by Glendon Swarthout.” In Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1993. An informative essay devoted to the reasons why Swarthout’s book has been censored.

Conner, John W. Review of Bless the Beasts and Children, by Glendon Swarthout. English Journal 61 (January, 1972): 139. The reviewer points to the book’s use of archetypal patterns and situations as well as exuberance and wit. Praises Swarthout for retaining a hold on the general populace and not relying on the avant-garde.

Garfield, Brian. Review of Bless the Beasts and Children, by Glendon Swarthout. Harper’s Magazine 240 (April, 1970): 107. Garfield calls Bless the Beasts and Children a compassionate and compelling drama about six adolescents who start out on a quest for “redemption, pride and justice.” The novel, Garfield says, is one superb example of what happens “when a writer’s craft is equal to the grandeur of his theme.”

Schickel, Richard. Review of Bless the Beasts and Children, by Glendon Swarthout. Saturday Review 53 (May 2, 1970): 29. Although Schickel calls the novel an exciting adventure story, he is careful to make the point that the novel uses adolescents as major characters but is not for adolescents. The death of Cotton, Schickel believes, is necessary, because the author needed an event of such magnitude to underline the proportions of the change in the characters.