Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon, by Jim Paul

My life has been formed by books, and this is one that really wormed its way into me. It’s a big part of the reason I live in San Francisco now.

firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved

Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
spent a couple of years in my harem of bedside books, during which time I read it, in out of sequence bits and pieces, over and over and over and over, perhaps 15 times all told. In a sentence, Catapult is about Jim Paul’s desire to build a working catapult, and use it to throw rocks into the Pacific Ocean; he obtains a grant to do so, and persuades his friend Harry to help him build it. That said, the book is nearly perfectly unclassifiable (hence its obscurity) being roughly equal parts how-to, history, meditation on war, art philosophy, travelogue, personal essay and memoir. Too, Catapult is not exactly mass entertainment—though very funny, it is not comedy; historically accurate, it is not exactly educational; a book about the nature of family and friendship, it is too personal and idiosyncratic for direct application to any would-be reader’s family… Catapult is a cipher, and if you read it I promise you will have a heck of a time explaining to anyone around you just why you continue to dip into it.

Paul, now director of the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona, recently spoke with me about Catapult. He was relaxed, unpretentious, and seemed both pleased and bemused that it still has a following after ten years. I asked what Catapult meant to him.

“Well, the catapult was just a vehicle, a way to talk about my friendship with Harry, and about male bonding; and about that time in my life – everything seemed to change after that. Catapult is like a snapshot album for me now.”

After the book was published,

“Harry was pissed off, at first. He said that having a book written about him was worse than having his picture taken. But he got over it. We both became ‘known’ in San Francisco for Catapult. People say he’s not really like that, but he is.”

Finally, I asked Paul how he would classify his book. He laughed.

“I don’t know. Harcourt Brace is going to bring it out as fiction, which seems crazy, because it makes me and everyone I know fictional characters!”

What Catapult is, is interesting. Each page, each sentence even, is gripping in itself and seems inextricably linked to the material before and after so that one is seduced into flipping back and forth from any random starting point, reading the book from the inside like a worm eating its way out of an apple.

Here, for example, is Paul speaking of Archimedes’ invention of the catapult,

“Relatively speaking, human beings were exponentially weaker, both physically and socially, in the presence of these engines of war, and what strength they had began to be valued to the degree to which they had control over the machine.”

This insight is preceded by a fascinating account of Archimedes’ defense of Syracuse, and leads into one of Paul’s central points, that the catapult, as the first weapon of war to rely only incidentally on muscle power, led more or less directly to the elevation of the technologist as a powerful caste in human culture and this is followed, logically enough, by Paul’s first naïve attempt to buy parts for his brainchild and his getting swindled to the tune of 60 bucks. Catapult is a very ’sticky’ book; I pick it up, intending to read a paragraph or two, and find myself an hour later engrossed in an account of the largest trebuchet ever built, of the Oppenheimer brothers, of drilling holes in spring steel, or of Paul dropping off his mother at summer camp. Paul makes all these fascinating; he even manages, by some alchemy, to make one book out of them.

As Paul says, at heart Catapult is a tale of the friendship between Paul and his friend Harry. Opposites, they need each other to build the catapult. Paul—a writer, medievalist, poet and artist – obtains the grant that funds the project, but actual tools and solid materials render him clumsy and inarticulate. Harry, by contrast, is an aggressive doer and maker and builds the catapult to his own design, arguing with Paul at every step. So Paul couldn’t build the catapult without Harry, but Harry wouldn’t build it without Paul’s goading; to be fair, Harry would have been perfectly happy never building it. So Catapult is partially about how we get friends to do things. Here are the two of them, building a model of the catapult.

“Harry broke up the clock spring when we got back to the studio, snapping it in his bare hands. Then he punched holes in it with a nail, and made a pair of layered wings for the model, which now looked like an odd, squared-off slingshot. He bound the springs into slots in the wood with picture-hanging wire, which he also used for a bowstring, and stole a piece of the boy’s Lego set for a cup to hold the projectile, a marble we found. He wouldn’t let me anywhere near the model. I shouted corrections at him and tried to grab it. Harry just barked at me, pulled the model away and resumed straining over it. Finally I followed him out of the studio, and up the stairs to the roof of the warehouse.”

After the struggle to build the thing, firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved. The real action comes a week after the firing when, to satisfy grant requirements, Paul is to give a “presentation of findings”… Harry insists on participating. To say more would be a spoiler, it’s a scene you should read for yourself.

Tagged as: book reviews, people, philosophy, science, writing