The Paul Bunyan brought to life in Massachusetts-based writer Mark Cecil’s new novel, “Bunyan and Henry, or, The Beautiful Destiny” isn’t necessarily the folk hero Mainers think of when they picture the legendary lumberjack and his faithful companion, Babe the Blue Ox.
The Paul Bunyan we know is a giant of a man, more than 8 feet tall. He could fell a tree with just one swing of his enormous ax; he could eat more flapjacks than any man ever known; his mighty laugh would echo through the logging camps of Maine’s Great North Woods. A statue of him has stood in front of Bass Park in Bangor for more than 60 years, in honor of the city’s proud history as the one-time “lumber capital of the world.”
In “Bunyan and Henry,” however, Paul starts out far from achieving his monumental status as the iconic symbol of logging culture in North America. In his debut novel, which came out last month, Cecil imagines Bunyan as a kind of mythic everyman — a culture hero who, along with his friend, fellow tall tale legend John Henry, sets out on a quest and overcomes a series of uniquely American challenges in order to find himself.
Heroic tales are as old as the written word itself. When writing “Bunyan and Henry,” Cecil said he was inspired by ancient texts, such as the Hindu “Bhagavad Gita” and the 10th century Old English epic poem “Beowulf.” Cecil said the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh was a particular inspiration — in the book, he pictures Bunyan as a Gilgamesh figure, and John Henry as Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s loyal companion.
“The stories I love the most are big, epic stories. And I just think America doesn’t really have much like that. The closest thing we’d have today would be superheroes from Marvel or DC, or real people like George Washington or Babe Ruth or Sitting Bull. That’s just not quite the same thing,” Cecil said. “Paul Bunyan is one of the few examples of that sort of story.”
In Cecil’s imagining of the story, Paul Bunyan is just a man, barely scraping by as a miner in the village of Lump Town — a stand-in for any small U.S. frontier town. When his wife falls ill, he must set out to find a cure and confront El Boffo, the greedy industrialist who controls everything from the railroads to the mines.
Along his journey, Bunyan teams up with a new friend — not Babe, his beloved blue ox, but John Henry, another folk hero from the mythic past. In “Bunyan and Henry,” he is not yet the steel-driving railroad man of folklore but rather a man escaping the clutches of racism, on his way to glory.
Besides the pair of Paul Bunyan and John Henry making a great team within the context of his book, Cecil said he also wanted to write a story about interracial brotherhood, something he believes is sorely lacking in the American literary canon. As the father to four biracial children, he said he often tries to make up bedtime stories for his kids that reflect their experiences growing up with a white father and Black mother.
“I wanted to tell a story about a Black person and a white person who really love each other,” Cecil said. “I wanted to talk about how bonds between people of different races develop, and tell a positive story about race relations, which there really aren’t that many of.”
While Paul Bunyan’s story comes out of the woods of North America — be they in Maine, Wisconsin, the Pacific Northwest or Quebec — each place that claims him as their own feels a great deal of ownership. Bemidgi, Wisconsin, also has a famous statue of Bunyan, as does Klamath, California and Portland, Oregon. Like Bangor, all are places with deep connections to the lumbering industry of the 19th and early 20th century.
The Bunyan story has been shaped by things well outside the stories swapped around the mess halls in logging camps, from the famous Disney cartoon to advertising materials developed by lumber companies. Even today, so far removed from the world that created a character like him, Bunyan still captivates imaginations.
Cecil believes that the reason Bunyan resonates with us all these years later is less about the specifics of the story, and more about what tall tales like his and John Henry’s have to tell us about who we are and how we relate to the places we live.
“It’s an adventure story, and it’s very entertaining,” Cecil said. “But there’s also real wisdom about life in it. There’s a long chain of storytellers telling these stories, and I’m hoping this is part of that mythology.”
