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I first heard of The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino on NPR. It was the first time I had ever heard of Poppa Neutrino, but I was immediately engaged by him. As soon as the interview concluded, I checked out author Alec Wilkinson’s account of the man and his extraordinary - and extraordinarily odd - life.
Neutrino is an unvarnished apparition from the psyche. The raucous, rambunctious, disorderly, and exuberant interior life raised up and given feet. He flamboyantly represents a version of the Other, and such people, while often having substantial glamour (the misanthropic cowboys Clint Eastwood has played, various poets and artists - Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, or Jackson Pollock, for example), such individuals even in their most favorable forms often carry for us an element of unease, of being necessarily regarded as sufficiently different from ourselves that we feel protected against the temptation they present - the resolve, that is, to live passionately and without restraint. From its least sympathetic forms - the bums, the vagrants, the sordid night figures - many of us all but recoil. Neutrino cultivates, exemplifies, and brandishes parts of our inner beings that most of us work assiduously to stifle in the interest of having orderly social lives, not to mention the regard and approval of our peers. Few of us embrace the role of the other, who always risks being shunned, but Neutrino has, and quite avidly. [p. 9]
Even when Wilkinson is not discussing Neutrino, the stories he tells are fascinating. He recounts the escape of two men from a French Foreign Legion troop ship headed for Vietnam in 1953 with impassive intensity.
When the sun rose, Ericsson and Tiira saw no shore. Because the raft was square, it spun when they paddled. The bread, sausage, cheese, and the wine they had brought with them in a hot water bottle they quickly finished. They ate crabs when they found them floating on strips of seaweed. The current carried them away from Sumatra, so they decided to try to reach India instead. From a shirt they made a sail. The center of the raft consisted of cloth webbing. When sharks attacked them, they beat them off with their paddles, but the sharks tore the webbing. They caught a turtle, killed it with a piece of glass from a broken mirror, and drank its blood. Each promised the other not to abandon his corpse. On the eighteenth day, when Ericsson died, Tiira lashed him to the raft. Sharks assaulted the raft so vigorously that eventually he had to release the corpse. It had kept him company, and the solitude was more imposing without it.
On the thirty-second day, a British freighter passed so close to Tiira that he could see the faces of the men on the deck, but they didn’t see him. He banged a flashlight against the metal raft, and someone aboard the ship, listening to sonar, heard it. He weighed only fifty-six pounds. [p. 115]
Of course, it’s Poppa himself who kept me reading to the end. His views on life are so sincere and well-considered that one is forced to admit that he isn’t simply insane, but a man of reasoned vision and distinct purpose.
“I know how to make the fire of life. I don’t know the truth of life, but I know how to make the fire. People have always been drawn to me because of it. I would say, ‘Do you want to live as you’re living, with no fire, or a fire that’s gone out, or with half a fire, or a fire that only works sometimes, or do you want to live like me, in the fire all the time?’ And they would point to the car’s flat tire, and say, ‘What about that?’ and I would shrug and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a problem, we’ll solve it.’” [p. 19]
“I knew that it was important to be extreme. People are always attracted to the extreme. If you’re eye-catching enough, somebody’s going to want to stop and talk to you. But if you try to blend in, nobody’s going to stop and talk to you. Why should they? When you cease to be extreme, you become part of the mass. That’s when you need to have a steady income. I have lived my life in such a way that day in and out I meet people who have remembered me for years.” [pp. 15-16]
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