Seeing Eye to Eye With More Couch Potatoes

My confession that my wife and I are beginning to vegetate before our television set has brought numerous confessions from readers who fear a similar degeneration.

“You diagnosed my problem with 100% accuracy!” writes Norma Jones of Encinitas in a letter reflecting the sentiments of several others.

My reminiscence about “Gunsmoke,” and the moral lessons our two sons used to draw from it brings a nostalgic sigh from John Mantley, who produced that “grand old show” for more than a decade.

“Your comment about being spared sweaty close-ups between Matt and Kitty was really what triggered my flashback, because John Leonard (of the New York Times) homed on this same topic, and Brooks Atkinson wrote that “Gunsmoke” was America’s most “uplifting and ennobling weekly lesson.”

Donald McDonald of Santa Barbara said he was reminded of Robert Hutchins’ farewell address to students at the University of Chicago in 1951, when TV was a fledgling.

“The horrid prospect,” Hutchins said, “that television opens before us, with nobody speaking and nobody reading, suggests that a bleak and torpid epoch may lie ahead which, if it lasts long enough, will gradually, according to the principles of evolution, produce a population indistinguishable from the lower forms of plant life.

“Astronomers at the University of Chicago have detected something that looks like moss growing on Mars. I am convinced that Mars was once inhabited by rational human beings like ourselves, who had the misfortune, some thousands of years ago, to invent television.”

By the way, McDonald notes that Hutchins himself once denied, to McDonald, authorship of the line almost invariably attributed to him: “Every time I think about exercise, I lie down until the thought passes.” Hutchins said the author was the humorist J. P. McEvoy. (Alas, the error lies entombed in hundreds of writings, including my column, and I doubt that it can ever be erased.)

I am pleased to say that several readers have written to correct me on the authorship of that horror story I used as a metaphor for our metamorphosis into couch potatoes.

I said I believed it was written by A. E. Coppard. As I remembered the story, a young couple are cast away on a remote island. Like the natives, it is covered with what I remembered as a “white fuzz.” In a hideous ending, the young couple notice spots of white fuzz on their own faces.

I am reminded that the story was named “The Voice in the Night,” and its author was William Hope Hodgson. Elaine T. Mills of San Pedro sent a copy of the story from “A Treasury of Short Stories” (Simon & Schuster, 1947), with the comment: “You must have read the story in the same collection, for I, too, always want to attribute it to the better-known Coppard, whose name appears just above (Hodgson’s) in the table of contents.”

She adds: “Your metaphor of the encroaching ‘fuzz’ in reference to television was most apt. In fact, of the two, the fungus of television is far more insidious in that its effects are interior.”

In the story, the young couple, who are engaged, are left behind on a sinking ship by the crew, who escape in lifeboats. They make a raft and abandon the ship. Days later they drift into an island lagoon. The island is covered with “a gray lichenous fungus” (the white fuzz of my memory), except for a sand-like beach on which they camp.

In time the woman notices a spot, like a small gray mole, on the thumb of her right hand. As the man is cleaning it off, she notices a spot on his face. The spots become more widespread, and ineradicable. Accidently the woman tastes the fungus. It is sweet and edible. They become obsessed with desire for it, despite guilt at their degradation. Venturing into the island, the man encounters a man-like being who is a mass of the gray fungus. He is evidently one of the escaped crew. In him, the young man sees his own end and that of his fiancee.

Curiously, almost nothing is known about Hodgson, except that he was born in 1901. No Who’s Who, encyclopedia or almanac mentions him. No publisher knows whence he came or where he went.

Perhaps, like Hutchins’ prophetic address, Hodgson’s weird parable was indeed a warning about TV.