COUSIN LEN'S WONDERFUL ADJECTIVE CELLAR by Jack Finney
Published in: The Third Level, Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1959
Read Thursday 17 August 2023
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Cousin Len found his wonderful adjective cellar in a pawnshop. He haunts dusty Second Avenue pawnshops because they're such a relief, he says, from Nature. Cousin Len doesn't like Nature very much. He spends most of his days outdoors gathering material for "The Lure and Lore of the Woods," which he writes, and he would rather, he says, be a plumber.

So he tours the pawnshops in his spare time, bringing home stereoscopic sets (World's Fair views, Chicago, 1893), watches that strike the hours, and china horses which hold toothpicks in their mouths. We admire these things very much, my wife and I. We've been living with Cousin Len since I got out of the Army, waiting to find a place of our own.

So we admired the adjective cellar, too. It had the grace of line of a fire hydrant, but was slightly smaller and made of pewter. We thought it was a salt cellar, and so did Cousin Len. He discovered it was really an adjective cellar when he was working on his column one day after he bought it.

"The jewel-bedecked branches of the faery forest are funereally silent," he had written. "The icy, steel-like grip of winter has stilled their summery, verdant murmur. And the silvery, flute-like notes of its myriad, rainbow-dipped birds are gone."

At this point, naturally, he rested. And began to examine his saltcellar, He studied the bottom for the maker's mark, turning it in his hands, the cap an inch from his paper. And presently he saw that his manuscript had changed. "The branches of the forest are silent," he read. The grip of winter has stilled their murmur. And the notes of its birds are gone."

Now, Cousin Len is no fool, and he knows an improvement when he sees it. He went back to work writing as he always did, but he made his column twice as long. And then he applied the adjective cellar, moving it back and forth like a magnet, scanning each line. And the adjectives and adverbs just whisked off the page, with a faint hiss, like particles of lint into a vacuum cleaner. His column was exactly to length when he finished, and the most crisp, sharp writing you've ever seen. For the first time, Cousin Len saw, his column seemed to say something. Louisa, my wife, said it almost made you want to get out into the woods, but Cousin Len didn't think it was that good.

From then on, Cousin Len used his adjective cellar on every column, and he found. through experiment that at an inch above the paper, it sucks up all adjectives, even the heaviest, At an inch and a half, just medium-weight adjectives; and at two inches, only those of three or four letters. By careful control, Cousin Len has been able to produce Nature columns whose readership has grown every day. "Best reading in the paper, next to the death notices,» one old lady wrote him. What she means, Len explained to me, 1s that his column, which is printed next to the death notices, is the very best reading in the entire paper.

Cousin Len always waits till we're home before he empties the adjective cellar: we like to be on hand. It fills up once a week, and Cousin Len unscrews the top and, pounding the bottom like a catchup bottle, empties it out the window over Second Avenue. And there, caught in the breeze, the adjectives and adverbs float out over the street and sidewalk like a cloud of almost invisible confetti.

They look somewhat like miniature alphabet-soup letters, strung together and made of the thinnest cellophane. You can't see them at all unless the light is just right, and most of them are colorless. Some of them are delicate pastels, though. "Very," for example, is a pale pink; "lush" is green, of course; and "indubitable" is a dirty gray. And there's one word, a favorite with Cousin Len when he's hating Nature the most, which resembles a snip of the bright red cellophane band from around the top of a cigarette package. This word can't be revealed in a book intended for family reading.

Most of the time the adjectives and adverbs simply drop into the gutters and street, and .disappear like snowflakes when they touch the pavement. But occasionally, when we're lucky, they drop straight into a conversation. 

Mrs. Gorman passed under our window one day with Mrs. Miller, coming from the delicatessen. And a little flurry of adjectives and adverbs blew right into the middle of what she was saying. "Prices, these halcyon days," she remarked, "are evanescent, transcendental, and simply terrible. Mark my maniacal words, things are going straight and preeminently to the coruscated, indomitable, allegorical dogs." 

Mrs. Gorman was pretty surprised, of course, but she carried it off beautifully, smiling grandly and patronizingly at Mrs. Miller. She has always contended that her ancestors were kings: now she claims they were also poets.

I suggested to Cousin Len, one time, that he save his adjectives, pack them into neatly labeled jars or cans, and sell them to the advertising agencies. Len pointed out, however, that we could never in a lifetime supply them in the quantities needed. We did, though, save up several shoe boxes full which we took along on a sight-seeing trip to Washington. And there, in the visitors' gallery over the Senate, we cautiously emptied them into a huge electric fan which blew over the floor. They spread out in a great cloud and drifted down right through a tremendous debate. Something must have gone wrong this time, though, for things didn't sound one bit different. 

We're still using the wonderful adjective cellar, and Cousin Len's columns are getting better every day. A collection of them appeared in book form recently, which you've probably read. And there's talk of selling the movie rights. We also find Cousin Len's adjective cellar helpful in composing telegrams, and I used it, mostly at the inch-and-a-half level, 1n writing this, which is why it's so short, of course.
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Author Jack Finney

Walter Braden "Jack" Finney (born John Finney; October 2, 1911 – November 14, 1995) was an American writer. 

Mr. Finney specialized in thrillers and works of science fiction. Two of his novels, The Body Snatchers and Good Neighbor Sam became the basis of popular films, but it was Time and Again (1970) that won him a devoted following. The novel, about an advertising artist who travels back to the New York of the 1880s, quickly became a cult favorite, beloved especially by New Yorkers for its rich, painstakingly researched descriptions of life in the city more than a century ago.

Mr. Finney, whose original name was Walter Braden Finney, was born in Milwaukee and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. After moving to New York and working in the advertising industry, he began writing stories for popular magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and McCall's.

His first novel, Five Against the House (1954), told the story of five college students who plot to rob a casino in Reno. A year later he published The Body Snatchers (later reissued as Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a chilling tale of aliens who emerge from pods in the guise of humans whom they have taken over. Many critics interpreted the insidious infiltration by aliens as a cold-war allegory that dramatized America's fear of a takeover by Communists. Mr. Finney maintained that the novel was nothing more than popular entertainment. The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade twice.

Mr. Finney first showed an interest in time travel in the short-story collection The Third Level, which included stories about a commuter who discovers a train that runs between New York and the year 1894, and a man who rebuilds an old car and finds himself transported back to the 1920s.

He returned to the thriller genre in Assault on a Queen (1959) and tried his hand at comedy in Good Neighbor Sam (1963), a novel based on his experiences as an adman, played by Jack Lemmon in the film version.

In The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968), Mr. Finney once again explored the possibilities of time travel. The dime of the title allows the novel's hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper.

With Time and Again, Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and attention not normally accorded to genre fiction. Thomas Lask, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, described it, suggestively, as "a blend of science fiction, nostalgia, mystery and acid commentary on super-government and its helots." Its hero, Si Morley, is a frustrated advertising artist who jumps at the chance to take part in a secret project that promises to change his life. So it does. He travels back to New York in 1882, moves into the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West and experiences the fabulous ordinariness of a bygone age: its trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, elevated lines, and gaslights. This year Mr. Finney published a sequel to the novel, From Time to Time.

Mr. Finney also wrote Marion's Wall (1973), about a silent-film actress who, in an attempt to revive her film career, enters the body of a shy woman, and The Night People (1977). His other fictional works include The House of Numbers (1957) and the short-story collection I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963). He also wrote Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (1983) about sensational events of the 19th century.

Excerpts from Wikipedia and GOOD READS