Howling Fantods

A compendium of irritable unrest

Some people get a lyric stuck in their head, me, I get the whole howling fantods.

Thermal imagery of wolves howling near Yellowstone National Park, 2014. U.S. Geological Survey, CC

I’ve been walking around for some time now—perhaps tapping into the collective frenetic mood of the season of dipping temps, pre-election furor, a greater density of Goth tourists and traffic in the Hollow, and ever-heightening stress—with this phrase often on repeat. Sometimes it’s simply the fantods. But typically it’s howling.

As the self-declared sole proprietor of a wordsmithery shop (fancy moniker for: writer), I had to investigate the portal through which this phrase entered my mind and its origins. It’s impolite to be haunted by a word and not even know what it actually means or where it comes from.

“Fantod” is anxiety, discomfit. Defined by Oxford, a “state or attack of uneasiness or unreasonableness.” Or by Merriam-Webster, “irritability and tension, fidgets. An emotional outburst, fit.”

The first use of such a term for the willies, is reportedly, according to Etymonline, “fantasy”-based and from The Metropolitan, London, 1835. And in the plural and Capital F:

There is an indescribable complaint, which will never allow a moment’s repose to mind or body; which nothing will satisfy—which allows of no beginning, and no ending—which wheels round the mind like the squirrel in its cage, ever moving, but still making no progress. It is called the Fantods. From the diagnostics, we pronounce Lord Brougham incurably diseased with the Fantods.

Just a few years later, as this disease seems to be catching on quickly, crossing oceans, and becoming more commonly lowercase, American author Charles Frederick Briggs writes in 1839,

You have got strong symptoms of the fantods; your skin is so tight you can’t shut your eyes without opening your mouth.

By 1884 (UK) and 1885 (US), this F word hits the mainstream with a debut in none other than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck twice suffers the fantods, once when, hiding on Jackson’s Island, he spots a man sleeping on the ground who turns out to be the runaway slave Jim: “It most give me the fantods,” and another when he goes into length describing what is effectively a gallery of the dead:

They had pictures hung on the walls—mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called “Signing the Declaration.” There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before—blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.” These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fantods.

Fantod, from a clipping I found in a Reddit subgroup (because there is a subgroup for everything) was among the Sea Terms for the Use of Yachtsmen, Amateur Boatmen and Beginners by A. Ansted. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1898. Namely, defined here as,

One of the many opprobrious names given by seamen to an officer who is somewhat fidgety.

And the granddaddy of all of this tom-fantod-ery? Merriam-Webster speculates it was perhaps twisted from writer Charles Dickens who combined the possible original “fantastic” with “fatigue” in a newly minted term “fantigue,” referring to great tension and excitement. One of my life dreams, as such aforementioned wordsmith, is to invent a word that endures like that. Dickens, like Shakespeare, is attributed a slew of new words in his mid-1800s fictions, including, they say, my least favorite word boredom:

Bah humbug: exclamation of irritation or disgust

Boredom: state of feeling disinterested

Devil-may-care: reckless; careless or jovial and rakish in manner; seems to come from the saying, “The devil may care but I don’t.”

Doormat: used metaphorically, a person who is treated poorly

Creeps, the: a feeling of fear and revulsion. (“She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps’.” — David Copperfield

Abuzz: characterized by excessive gossip or activity

Rampage: destructive or violent behavior by person or group

Flummox: to confuse; perplex

Somewhere in the mix was supposedly this “fantigue,” though I can’t find any actual quote by Dickens.

And so it goes in the linguistic flow of time from fantasy to fantigue to fantod to fantods.

Weird and creepy author/illustrator Edward Gorey has for sale now on his posthumous Goreystore a “Fantod” pack of tarot cards, but there’s more history to this than I realized: Gorey in the 1960s created a whole Fantod Press to produce his own spurned works:

Resorting to the sure-fire means of getting one’s book published by becoming a publisher, Edward Gorey created The Fantod Press in 1962. His first title, writing as Ogred Weary, was The Beastly Baby, a small tale concerning a particularly unpleasant infant. Every publisher to which Gorey had pitched the work had rejected it. Over several decades, 27 more titles appeared with the Fantod Press imprint and wearing various author and illustrator names, names that were often anagrams of Gorey’s own. In addition to his frequent works for larger publishers, book-cover designs and magazine illustrations, set designs and theatrical puppet entertainments, the Fantod titles became an important part of Gorey’s work.

And there’s a harmless little guy he dubbed Fantod to give us a nice visual, if calmer and sweeter than what we might expect from the previous squirrels in cages, and from a guy who basically draws all the folks in Huck Finn’s death gallery above:

Fantod is an archaic nineteenth century word meaning “a state of irritability, anxiety, or fidgets.” Gorey gave life and character to the word with his small benign dragon-like creature that became not quite a logo but a recurring motif on his Fantod books. Gorey introduced the creature in his first published book, The Unstrung Harp (1953). In this tale, Mr. Earbrass encounters the Fantod in an antique store as a stuffed creature under a glass dome. Usually depicted sucking on its tail, the Fantod was perhaps inspired by the Ouroboros, an ancient emblem of the cyclic nature of the universe that is portrayed as a dragon or serpent feeding on its own tail.

I love a good ouroboros that picks up where you left off, or circles back to where you started.

So, finally the howling.

This important part comes in much more recently from, as modern mythology states, the mother of doomed author David Foster Wallace (dead by suicide at the age of 46, 2008). In the 1990s he used the term many times in his infamous gargantuan (obese) 1,000-plus page book Infinite Jest that made him famous. He attributes his mother, Sally, to adding the howling part to make the phrase she used regularly to describe intense fear or repulsion, her special heebie-geebies. (Lit nerds in that Reddit discuss this and remember author Thomas Pynchon also had the fantods, but in his case, in Gravity’s Rainbow, there were “urban fantods” and not the wilderness howling type the original questioner in the forum, like me, was seeking.)

Mothers say the darndest things and apparently DFW also credits his mom with Dickensian liberties, such as conjuring the terms, among others listed in this Atlantic article,

twanger (something whose name you didn’t know or remember)

and greebles (bits of lint, especially those brought into bed by feet).

Everyone in Infinite Jest seems to suffer it, with no less than six references. Perhaps the book itself is a howling fantod. Hitting you upside the head with all of it is a fantod onslaught, and especially out of context, but such is the nature of the beast and ’tis the season:

1. Orin’s special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There’d been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he’d refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies’ eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus—the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant—and were reportedly blinding them; par-ents’d come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer.

2. …and sometimes Hal at his mother’s late suppers, because Avril has some auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does not exit a living corporeal head, and though Avril’s made it clear that Mario’s free at any time to activate and align the Tatsuoka’s ghostly-green tuner to whatever he wishes, he keeps the volume so low that he has to be lowered onto a low coffee table and lean in and almost put his ear up against the woofer’s tremble and concentrate closely to hear YYY’s signal over the conversation in the dining room, which tends to get sort of manically high-pitched toward the end of supper.

3. Unit #4, more or less equidistant from both the hospital parking lot and the steep ravine, is a repository for Alzheimer’s patients with VA pensions. #4’s residents wear jammies 24/7, the diapers underneath giving them a lumpy and toddlerish aspect. The patients are frequently visible at #4’s windows, in jammies, splayed and open-mouthed, sometimes shrieking, sometimes just mutely open-mouthed, splayed against the windows. They give everybody at Ennet House the howling fantods. One ancient retired Air Force nurse does nothing but scream ‘Help!’ for hours at a time from a second-story window.

4. The following things in the room were blue. The blue checks in the blue-and-black-checked shag carpet. Two of the room’s six institutional-plush chairs, whose legs were steel tubes bent into big ellipses, which wobbled, so that while the chairs couldn't really be rocked in they could be sort of bobbed in, which Michael Pemulis was doing absently as he waited and scanned a printout of Eschaton’s highly technical core ESCHAX directory, i.e. bobbing in his chair, which produced a kind of rapid rodential squeaking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods as he sat there kitty-corner from Pemulis, also waiting. The printout kept rotating in Pemulis’s hands.

5. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They’d tried Tricyciics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitors, 283273 the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They’d scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man’s case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine.

6. …something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle’s body pucker and distend. It wasn’t that Avril Incandenza was one of the tallest women Joelle had ever seen, and definitely the tallest pretty older woman with immaculate posture (Dr. Incandenza slumped something awful) she’d ever met. It wasn’t that her syntax was so artless and fluid and imposing. Nor the near-sterile cleanliness of the home’s downstairs (the bathroom’s toilet seemed not only scrubbed but waxed to a high shine). And it wasn’t that Avril’s graciousness was in any conventional way fake. It took a long time for Joelle even to start to put a finger on what gave her the howling fantods about Orin’s mother.

After all of that somatic unrest, we need a palette cleanse. Perhaps a song?

Sure enough, the howling fantods—don’t you agree?—would be a great name for a band, so one of course has indeed already existed in Philly, described as just the maker of a “one-off song” of “sarcastic pop” in this “Top of the Pops” entry from 2012.

On that note, do you suffer or enjoy a howling fantods sort of feeling this time of year? What makes you feel a certain kind of crazy?

Or just let out a barbaric yawp below.