MONDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "At Becky's Piano Recital" by Carl Dennis, from New and Selected Poems © Penguin. Reprinted with permission.
At Becky's Piano Recital
She screws her face up as she nears the hard parts,
Then beams with relief as she makes it through,
Just as she did listening on the edge of her chair
To the children who played before her,
Wincing and smiling for them
As if she doesn't regard them as competitors
And is free of the need to be first
That vexes many all their lives.
I hope she stays like this,
Her windows open on all sides to a breeze
Pungent with sea spray or meadow pollen.
Maybe her patience this morning at the pond
Was another good sign,
The way she waited for the frog to croak again
So she could find its hiding place and admire it.
There it was, in the reeds, to any casual passerby
Only a fist-sized speckled stone.
All the way home she wondered out loud
What kind of enemies a frog must have
To make it live so hidden, so disguised.
Whatever enemies follow her when she's grown,
Whatever worry or anger drives her at night from her room
To walk in the gutsy rain past the town edge,
Her spirit, after an hour, will do what it can
To be distracted by the light of a farmhouse.
What are they doing up there so late,
She'll wonder, then watch in her mind's eye
As the family huddles in the kitchen
To worry if the bank will be satisfied
This month with only half a payment,
If the letter from the wandering son
Really means he's coming home soon.
Even old age won't cramp her
If she loses herself on her evening walk
In piano music drifting from a house
And imagines the upright in the parlor
And the girl working up the same hard passages.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of English man of letters J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley, born in Bradford, England (1894). He was one of the great English men of letters of the 20th century. He wrote more than a hundred books of fiction, essays and drama. His novels and plays were all popular successes, but critics didn't take him seriously, because they thought he wrote too much and in too many different areas.
He said, "A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow."
He served in World War I and it was the defining experience of his life. Most of his friends were killed, and he believed that England was never the same afterwards. He never wrote fiction about the war, because he thought it would be disrespectful. His favorite of his own novels was Bright Day (1946), about his hometown before the war. He said, "I belong at heart to the pre-1914 North Country."
Near the end of his life he refused knighthood because, he said, "I started as J. B. Priestley and I'll finish as J. B. Priestley."
It's the birthday of Sherwood Anderson, born in Camden, Ohio (1876). He was working at a mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio, writing in his spare time, when one day at work, he stood up and walked out of the office and wandered off, ignoring everyone who asked where he was going. He was found four days later, wandering around in nearby Cleveland. He said later that he had pretended to be crazy so that the paint company wouldn't take him back. He moved to Chicago and became friends with writers like Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser.
He wrote every day at a desk watching people walk by his window. He said, "Sometimes it seemed to me...that each person who passed along the street below, under the light, shouted his secret up to me." One rainy night, Anderson got out of bed without any clothes on, and began to write. Sitting there in front of the window, with the rain blowing on his bare back, he wrote the first of the stories that became his masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio (1919) about people in a small town, their misery and sexual frustration and violent desires. He dedicated the book to his mother, saying, "[Her] keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives."
Winesburg, Ohio influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway. Anderson met the young Hemingway a few years later and wrote him letters of introduction so that he could go to Paris and meet writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He also encouraged the young William Faulkner, whom he met in New Orleans. He inspired Faulkner to write his first novel and helped him get published.
Sherwood Anderson said, "I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them."
And, "It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect."
It's the birthday of Roald Dahl, born in Llandaff, South Wales (1916). He's known for children's books such as James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). His parents were Norwegian, but they lived in Great Britain so he could attend British schools, which his father believed were the best schools in the world. But Dahl didn't do well at school. On one of his end of term reports, his teacher wrote, "Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel."
As soon as he finished high school, Dahl took a job with the Shell Oil Company to get as far away from England as possible. He went to live in Africa and loved it. When World War II broke out, he quit his job, drove to a British base in Kenya, and signed up with the Royal Air Force. He served as a fighter pilot until he was shot down over Egypt, and he barely crawled out of the plane before the gas tanks exploded. Doctors had to remove the end of one of his leg bones, and he kept the bone for the rest of his life, using it as a paperweight in his office. He was a compulsive collector of all kinds of things. He saved all the foil sleeves of the chocolate bars he ate as a young man, and molded them into a ball. He still had the ball at the end of his life.
Dahl's first published book was The Gremlins (1942), which was the first book to popularize those trouble-making creatures that supposedly lived on fighter planes and bombers and were responsible for all the crashes. Mrs. Roosevelt, the president's wife, read the book to her children and liked it so much that she invited Dahl to dinner, and he and the president soon became friends.
But Dahl made his name as a writer of short stories for adults. He specialized in dark stories with a twist at the end. In one story, a woman murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the lamb to the police when they come looking for the murder weapon. His stories were published in collections such as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss, Kiss (1959).
When he got married and had children, he started telling them stories every night before they went to bed. He found that their favorite stories were those in which adults met terrible ends. In his first children's book, James and the Giant Peach (1961), Dahl wrote, "One day, James's mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in fully daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros, which had escaped from the London zoo. Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience."
Dahl went on to write many more children's books, and he said that the secret to his success was that he conspired with children against adults. Some critics attacked him for the violence in his books, but he said, "[Children] invariably pick out the most gruesome events as the favorite parts of the books...I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like."
Roald Dahl wrote, "A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men."
And, "A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."
TUESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poems: "A Farm Picture" and "Reconciliation" by Walt Whitman, from Whitman: Poetry and Prose. © Viking. Reprinted with permission.
A Farm Picture
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sunlight pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.
Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sister Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin - I draw
near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in
the coffin.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of suffragist and journalist Alice Stone Blackwell, born in Orange, New Jersey (1857). She grew up in a family of abolitionists and feminists. Her father had a $10,000 bounty on his head, because he had helped smuggle a slave girl out of the south. Her mother was one of the founders of the suffrage movement. One of her aunts was the first woman in the United States to receive a medical degree and another aunt was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in the United States. She became a journalist and wrote for the Woman's Journal, a newspaper her parents had founded. She became the editor when her parents died, and remained editor until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and women got the vote.
She said, "Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both."
It's the birthday of humorist Seba Smith, born in Buckfield, Maine (1792). He created the Yankee, cracker-barrel philosopher Jack Downing, one of the most popular literary figures of the early 1800s. Jack Downing was a fictional farm boy from the fictional town of Downingville, Maine. Smith created the character to write about politics in the Portland legislature. He said, "The plan [was] to bring a green, unsophisticated lad from the country into town ... let him blunder into the halls of the legislature, and after witnessing for some days their strange doings, sit down and write an account of them to his friends at home in his own plain language."
Jack Downing became so popular that Smith eventually sent him to Washington, D.C. to write about the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He was a new kind of American character, the country bumpkin who tells the truth about the world, the ancestor of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Forrest Gump.
It's the birthday of novelist Hamlin Garland, born in West Salem, Wisconsin (1860). He is best known for his autobiographical trilogy A Son of the Middle Border (1917), A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921) and Back-Trailers from the Middle Border (1928). He grew up on a series of homesteads in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota. After he failed to make it as a farmer himself, he moved east and became a writer.
He was one of the first novelists to write realistically about American farmers, in books like Jason Edwards, An Average Man (1892). Where other writers had written about the farmer's noble taming of nature, he described the grasshopper plagues, the droughts and the blizzards, and the economic oppression that the average farmer experienced.
Hamlin Garland wrote, "There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmer's [life]."
It's the birthday of essayist Barbara Harrison, born Barbara Grizzuti in Brooklyn, New York (1934). She grew up with an abusive father, but when she was nine years old, she and her mother became Jehovah's Witnesses, and she spent the rest of her childhood evangelizing. When she was 19, she went to live in the giant Watchtower Bible and Tract Society headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. She gave up the faith three years later and got a job as a secretary.
She started writing journalism on the side, and in 1978, more than twenty years later, she came out with Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses. In the book, she described how she struggled with her memories of the Witnesses, because they had been controlling and oppressive, but also tremendously kind and courageous. She went on to write several more books of essays, including Off Center (1980) and The Astonishing World (1992).
She said, "To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort."
And, "Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people."
It's the birthday of philosopher and educator Allan Bloom, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1930). He's best known as the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), about what he believed was the decline of higher education in the United States.
He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Cornell, and he witnessed the student protests in the 1960s that forced universities to stop teaching their required western civilization classes. He argued that by giving up on the Western canon of literature, Americans had given up on wisdom. He wrote, "We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. [We] play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."
He called the book "a meditation on the state of our souls." Even though it was filled with difficult philosophical writing, the book became a bestseller. His friend, the novelist Saul Bellow, used him as the main character in a novel called Ravelstein, published in 2000.
Allan Bloom said, "The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is."
It was on this day in 1812 that Napoleon's army invaded the city of Moscow. Napoleon had hoped to conquer all of Europe, and he had almost succeeded. He had invaded Russia in June of 1812, but the Russian forces kept retreating, leading his army further and further into the country.
The Russians practiced a scorched earth policy of retreat, burning all the farmland so that the French army wouldn't have any food to draw on. Still, Napoleon pressed forward, hoping that if he took Moscow, the Russian Tsar would surrender. As he galloped toward the city, his men heard him chanting in time with the horse's movement, "Moscow! Moscow!"
The troops were exhausted and hungry by the time they reached Moscow on this day, in 1812. Napoleon's secretary later wrote, "A curious and impressive sight was this sudden appearance of the great city ... spreading out at the end of a naked plain, topped with its 1,200 spires and sky-blue cupolas, strewn with golden stars, and linked one to the other with gilded chains."
Napoleon was eager for battle, and he had hoped to capture shelter and provisions when they took the city. But as they approached, they found the gates standing open and the streets deserted. Then they noticed that all over the city, small fires had started. The Russians had set fire to their own city. By that night, the fires were out of control.
Napoleon's secretary described the burning of Moscow as, "One mighty furnace from which sheaves of fire burst heavenwards lighting up the horizon...masses of flame, mingling together, were rapidly caught up by a strong wind which spread them in every direction."
The French writer Stendhal was among the troops that day, and he watched the city burn. He wrote in his diary, "It was a splendid spectacle, but it would have been better to be alone, or else surrounded by intelligent people in order to enjoy it."
Napoleon watched the burning of the city himself from inside the Kremlin. His second in command watched him standing at the windows, watching the red glow of the city, muttering, "What a dreadful sight! Their own work! So many places! How stupendous a decision!" He refused to leave the Kremlin even as the flames approached and it grew difficult to breathe. He stood there in front of the hot windowpanes, sweating. He finally fled when a fire broke out inside the Kremlin itself, and barley escaped the city alive.
Since it was impossible to spend the winter in the ruined city, Napoleon began his retreat on October 19 across the snow-covered plains. It was one of the great disasters of military history. Thousands died of starvation and hypothermia. Of the nearly 500,000 men who had set out in June, fewer than 20,000 ragged, freezing, and starving men staggered back across the Russian frontier in December.
WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "ONE WEEK" by Juliette Torrez, from Madness and Retribution © Manic D Press, San Francisco. Reprinted with permission.
ONE WEEK
on Sunday she moved out of the house
amidst a nasty cat fight
on Monday her favorite uncle died of cancer
on Tuesday her boyfriend seemed to disappear
and a close friend thought she found a tumor
on Wednesday her cousin shot his wife
in the driveway then himself
with all the kids watching
she couldn't remember what happened Thursday
on Friday she started looking for her boyfriend
the way he was nowhere got her attention
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of children's author Robert McCloskey, born in 1914 in Hamilton, Ohio. He's best known for his book Make Way for Ducklings (1941), about a real family of ducks in downtown Boston. The ducks became so popular that a statue was put up commemorating them. McCloskey kept four mallard ducks in his apartment while drawing the illustrations.
He said, "The ducks had plenty to say—especially in the early morning. I spent ... weeks on my hands and knees, armed with a box of Kleenex and a sketchbook, following the ducks around the studio and observing them in the bathtub."
He went on to write many other books for children, including Blueberries for Sal (1949), A Morning in Maine (1953), and Time of Wonder (1958). With Make Way for Ducklings and Time of Wonder, McCloskey became the first author to win two Caldecott Medals.
It's the birthday of humorist Robert Benchley, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1889). When he was in school, he became famous for his creative interpretation of essay assignments. When asked to write an essay about how to do something practical, he wrote an essay called "How to Embalm a Corpse." When asked to write about the dispute over Newfoundland fishing rights from the point of view of the United States and Canada, he chose to write from the point of view of the fish.
Benchley tried to work as a journalist, but he had a terrible time because he hated intruding on people's privacy. His editors started letting him write feature stories and humorous essays with titles such as "Did Prehistoric Man Walk On His Head?" He got a job at Vanity Fair in 1919, and it was there that he met Dorothy Parker, who became his best friend.
Benchley and Parker became known at the magazine for their pranks. When the management asked staff members not to discuss their salaries, Benchley and Parker got their salaries printed on placards to wear around their necks. Benchley resigned from Vanity Fair when Parker got fired, and he went on to become the drama critic for Life magazine and The New Yorker. He knew nothing about drama, so he turned his reviews into humorous essays.
He once wrote a review of the New York City Telephone Directory. He said it had no plot. He was a notorious liar. When he was asked to provide a brief biography of himself to an encyclopedia, he said he was born on the Isle of Wight, wrote A Tale of Two Cities, married a princess in Portugal, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
His work was collected in many books, including From Bed to Worse (1934), and Why Does Nobody Collect Me? (1935) and My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How It Grew (1936).
Robert Benchley said, "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
It's the birthday of the first best-selling American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, born in Burlington, New Jersey (1789). For most of his life he was known as James Cooper, but after his father's death, he tried to have his name legally changed to Fenimore, so as to inherit some property from his mother's family. He didn't get the property, but the name stuck.
He started out as a Navy man, but after he got married, his wife persuaded him to quit the sea and stay home. He struggled to run the estate he had inherited from his father, and he got into terrible debt. One day, he was reading aloud to his wife from an English novel, and he said he thought he could write a better novel himself. His wife laughed at him, because he didn't even enjoy writing letters much, but he sat down and wrote a book and it was published as Precaution (1820). He wrote six novels in the next six years.
He became best known for his series of five novels called the Leatherstocking Tales, including Last of the Mohicans (1826), about frontier violence and adventure. At the time, most Americans read English literature about kings and queens, because they thought it was more romantic than their own difficult, colonial lives. James Fenimore Cooper was the first American author to make the wild, untamed life in America seem romantic.
During his life, he was widely respected as a great novelist, but after his death, Mark Twain wrote an essay called "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895) that helped to destroy his reputation. Twain wrote, "[The rules of literature] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in [Cooper's books]." But Fenimore Cooper is still remembered for making America a subject for adventure and romance.
It's the birthday of the mystery novelist and playwright Agatha Christie, born in Devon, England (1890). Her father died when she was little and she was raised by her mother. She never sent to school or university, but her mother encouraged her to write from an early age. She wrote her first story one day when she was home sick with a cold. She kept writing for most of her adolescence, but she said, "[Back then I wrote] stories of unrelieved gloom, where most of the characters died."
During World War I, she was working as a Red Cross nurse, and she started reading detective novels because she said, "I found they were excellent to take one's mind off one's worries." She grew frustrated with how easy it was to guess the murderer in most mysteries and she decided to try to write her own. That book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) about a series of murders at a Red Cross hospital.
Christie's first few books were moderately successful, and then her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926. That same year, Christie fled her own home after a fight with her husband, and she went missing for ten days. There was a nationwide search, and the press covered the disappearance as though it were a mystery novel come to life, inventing scenarios and speculating on the possible murder suspects, until finally Christie turned up in a hotel, suffering from amnesia. During the period of her disappearance, the reprints of her earlier books sold out of stock and two newspapers began serializing her stories. She became a household name and a best-selling author for the rest of her life.
Christie averaged about two novels a year for most of her writing life. She is not known for her prose style or her vivid characters or settings, but for the plots she constructed like puzzles. She jotted down ideas for ingenious murder methods all the time, on scraps of paper and napkins. Her murderers were always members of the upper class, people who dressed well, spoke well, and had great manners, but who just happened to also be killers. She said, "I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest."
Her most famous character was the eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. She described him, "An extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg. . .His moustache was very still and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound." He appeared in over thirty books, including The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and The A.B.C. Murders (1935). She grew to dislike Poirot and later called him, "An ego-centric creep." So she created a busybody named Miss Marple to solve her crimes.
When asked why she set so many of her books in the English countryside, rather than more modern places, like New York City, she said, "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."
Once, after reading in a magazine that she was "the world's most mysterious woman," she said, "What do they suggest I am? A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber's wife? I'm an ordinary successful hard-working author—like any other author."
Agatha Christie recently became the best-selling English writer of all time, having sold more books that Shakespeare, about 2 billion copies. Worldwide, she sells about 14,000 copies every day of the year. In 2002, her play The Mousetrap (1952) had its fiftieth anniversary on the London stage. It had been performed there more than twenty thousand times, to audiences adding up to about ten million people, making it the longest-running show in theater history.
The Agatha Christie industry has spawned films, audio-recordings, museums, exhibitions, theater festivals and murder weekends in her name. Most recently, several of her novels are being made into video games. There has been talk of building an Agatha Christie theme park.
Agatha Christie said, "Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend."
And, "The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes."
THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "What The Cat Contemplates While Pretending to Clean Herself" by Nancy Boutilier, from On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone © Black Sparrow Press. Reprinted with permission.
What The Cat Contemplates While
Pretending to Clean Herself
So attentive
to her paws
she seems
leaning over
licking
tirelessly
but thinking
not about what dirt
has climbed under her claws.
No, the cat sees herself
sternly stepping to the plate
spitting in her paw palms
and gripping the bat just so.
With the look of feline indifference
she tends to one final itch
before staring down the pitcher
in the last instant before delivery.
When she rubs
her wet cat wrist
behind her furry ear
you'd think she had a spot
of mud there
or a flea
but really
the cat is signaling
the runner at first
to stretch that lead a little further down the baseline.
By the time
she is perched
on her hind legs
lapping at the fur
of her underside
the cat is sliding safely
into home.
Literary Notes:
On this day in 1620 the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World. There were 102 passengers aboard the ship on the voyage across the stormy Atlantic. Captain Christopher Jones was in command. Those men, women and children, now called the Pilgrims, founded Plymouth, the first permanent colony settled by families in North America.
The Pilgrims left England because they wanted religious freedom. King James of England expected everyone to belong to the Church of England. While on the ship the colonists wrote up an agreement called the Mayflower Compact, providing for a government chosen and made by common consent.
During the 66-day voyage, nobody had privacy. There were no sanitary facilities, and there was little fresh water for washing. Many of the passengers became seasick. They ate cold food—hard biscuits, cheese, and fish or salted beef. Occasionally hot food could be cooked over an open charcoal fire in a box of sand. Without fresh food, many passengers contracted scurvy. They suffered from exposure to bitter winds and icy waters.
On November 11, the Pilgrims anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor. They had reached North America, having suffered only the loss of one servant and one sailor. The men set out to explore Cape Cod and gather firewood, while the women went ashore to do laundry. As the ship lay anchored at Cape Cod, a woman named Susanna White gave birth to a son, whom she named "Peregrine"—meaning, "one who has made a journey."
The Pilgrims spent the next month searching for a place to settle. On December 21, just over three months after they left England, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, their new home.
It's the birthday of scholar and critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., born in Keyser, West Virginia (1950). He is known for his books on literary history, and wrote about the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, the first published black poet in the United States, in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (2003).
Gates also held great interest in a story of a slave's life written by a woman named Hannah Crafts. In the winter of 2001, while he was at home in Cambridge nursing a sore hip, Gates was looking through a New York auction catalog when the Hannah Crafts manuscript caught his eye.
Over one hundred and fifty years before, a young African American woman escaped from slavery and took with her the makings of a novel based on her own life.
In her own handwriting, Crafts wrote about the distinctions slaves made among themselves based on skin color, house-versus-field jobs, and class. She wrote about sex but argued against slaves marrying and having children on the grounds that slavery is hereditary and can't be escaped. She portrayed the relationship of a white mistress and black slave as full of mutual intimacy.
Gates didn't believe that white authors would pretend to be black in the mid-19th century. He was convinced the manuscript was the first novel by a female slave and possibly the first novel written by any black woman. He believed there was more literacy among the slaves than anyone imagined.
Because Gates' hip injury prevented him from traveling to New York, a colleague attended the auction and bid on the manuscript on Gates' behalf. He got it for $8,500. The manuscript was recently valued at $350,000.
Gates and a group of experts set to work proving that Hannah Craft's book was the real thing. The most compelling evidence was Crafts' own words and the natural way she treated black characters. Slaves weren't identified first by their race, as was the custom with white writers of that time. For Crafts, their basic humanity came first.
Her seemingly normal, ordinary thoughts on slave life convinced Gates that Hannah Crafts was a real person. Gates turned Crafts' manuscript into The Bondwoman's Narrative and published it in 2002. It quickly became a national best seller.
It's the birthday of American novelist John Knowles, born in Fairmont, West Virginia (1926). He is best known for his novel A Separate Peace (1959), based in part on Knowles' experiences at Phillips Exeter Academy. It the story of two friends, Gene and Phineas, one an intellectual and the other an athlete, and their summer together at an expensive American prep school during the early years of World War II.
A Separate Peace is one of the most widely read postwar American novels. It is frequently compared critically to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was in its sixty-fourth Bantam paperback run in March 1986, with more than seven million copies in print. In 1960, Knowles won the first William Faulkner Foundation Award for this notable first novel.
It's the birthday of short story writer James Alan McPherson, born in Savannah, Georgia (1943). He is best known for his two short-story collections, Hue and Cry (1969) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Elbow Room (1977). The 10 tales that make up Hue and Cry are about victims of discrimination. The dust jacket of Hue and Cry contained an endorsement from Ralph Ellison, who had befriended McPherson, became a mentor to him, and encouraged McPherson's belief in the shared cultural heritage of all Americans.
McPherson grew up in a lower-class section of Savannah. His father was for a while the only black master electrician in Georgia. McPherson's mother was a maid in a white home. McPherson went to segregated schools, to college in Atlanta, and worked summers as a dining-car waiter on the Great Northern Railway between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. After hearing stories from the older waiters and porters, he began writing fiction of his own.
It's the birthday of poet and scholar Alfred Noyes, born in Wolverhampton, England (1880). He's best known for his poem "The Highwayman." The poem begins,
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— Riding—riding— The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Invitation" by Carl Dennis, from New and Selected Poems © Penguin. Reprinted with permission.
Invitation
This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play
At Jackson Park Middle School
8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947.
Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare
And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio
With scenery from Miss Ferguson's art class.
A lot of effort has gone into it.
Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school
Week after week with their teachers
Just to prepare for this one evening,
A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual.
Even if you've moved away, you'll want to return.
Jackson Park, in case you've forgotten, stands
At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill.
Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition.
This is the play for you if you've been tempted
To claw your way to the top. If you haven't been,
It should make you feel grateful.
Just allow time to get lost before arriving.
So many roads are ready to take you forward
Into the empty world to come, misty with promises.
So few will lead you back to what you've missed.
Just get an early start.
Call in sick to the office this once.
Postpone your vacation a day or two.
Prepare to find the road neglected,
The street signs rusted, the school dark,
The doors locked, the windows broken.
This is where the challenge comes in.
Do you suppose our country would have been settled
If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?
Somewhere the students are speaking the lines
You can't remember. Somewhere, days before that,
This invitation went out, this one you're reading
On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk
Piled beside you. Forget about your passport.
You don't need to go to Paris just yet.
Europe will seem even more beautiful
Once you complete the journey you begin today.
Literary Notes:
On this day in 1787, the U. S. Constitution was completed and signed by a majority of delegates attending the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. The State House (where the Declaration of Independence was also signed) was filled with representatives from every existing state, except Rhode Island. The oldest member of the convention was Benjamin Franklin (81), of Pennsylvania, called the "Sage of the Constitutional Convention." The youngest was Jonathan Dayton (26), of New Jersey. The majority of those present had studied law, and there were soldiers, planters, educators, ministers, doctors, financiers and merchants.
George Washington was chosen unanimously to preside over the convention. It began on May 25, 1787, and it took fewer than one hundred working days to frame the Constitution. A Committee of Detail was named to write a draft. It was finished on August 6 and included a Preamble and 23 articles. On September 8, a Committee of Style was appointed to revise the draft, which was finished in four days.
The Constitution began with the Preamble, drafted by a man from the Bronx named Gouverneur Morris: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Once the document was completed, it was rewritten prior to its signing by an assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania State Assembly named Jacob Shallus. He was paid $30. to transcribe and engross the words of the Constitution. It was four sheets long, each measuring 28 3/4 in. by 23 5/8 in. The Constitution has 4,534 words, including the signatures of the 39 deputies who signed it. It takes about half an hour to read.
On February 2, 1790, about nine months after George Washington was inaugurated as President, our government began operating under the Constitution of the U. S.
Two hundred and ten years after its signing, in 1997, Constitution Day was created, on which day the Preamble is recited in celebration of the work of these men.
It's the birthday of Ken Kesey, born in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He's best known as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He grew up in Oregon—swimming, fishing, and riding the rapids on the Oregon River with his brother, Chuck. He was a wrestler and a boxer and was voted "most likely to succeed" in his high school graduating class.
Kesey went to Stanford University, where he studied creative writing. At the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, he earned $75 a day as a subject in experiments on the effects of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. He stayed on as a night attendant in the mental ward, the basis for his first and most famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962).
In 1975, Pauline Kael wrote (about Kesey's book), "The novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counter-culture ... it contained the essence of the whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic ..."
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was made into a film in 1975 and won five Oscars the following year. Kesey wrote two other novels, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), and Sailor Song, which was not published until 1992. He died in November 2001.
Ken Kesey said, "The thing about writers is that they never seem to get any better than their first work ... This bothers me a lot. You look back and their last work is no improvement on their first. I feel I have an obligation to improve, and I worry about that."
He also said, "You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things."
And, "The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths."
And, "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."
It's the birthday of doctor and poet William Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and became a doctor. He said, "There are few things in life that one comes to want to do as one grows older, apart from turning over a little cash...I've been writing...ever since I started to study medicine...Both seem necessary to me. One gets me out among neighbors, the other permits me to express what I've been turning over in my mind as I go along."
Williams wrote many books of poetry, and a biography of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams (1959), who lived with Williams after his father died in 1918 until her own death in 1949.
He said, "I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it."
Williams is best known for his shorter poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1962):
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
It's the birthday of poet Carl Dennis, born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri. Dennis grew up in the Midwest, where he began to write poetry as a teenager. He graduated in 1961 from the University of Minnesota. He went to Berkeley, and later took a job teaching at the State University of New York in Buffalo. His colleagues encouraged him to pursue his own interests in poetry.
"I came into a world where there was a poetry reading every night," he said. "I found that writing poetry...was the thing that gave me most pleasure, the thing that I felt most alive when I was doing. So ... I wanted to do as much of it as I could."
He wrote eight books of poetry, including The Near World (1985), The Outskirts of Troy (1988), and Ranking the Wishes (1997). In 2001, Dennis won the Pulitzer Prize for his eighth book, Practical Gods (2001).
Carl Dennis said, "The poetry I admire most tries to relate society to solitude, common life to privileged life, and hope to memory."
It's the birthday of novelist and movie playwright William Wister Haines, born in Des Moines, Iowa (1908). He is often called the author of the first important literary work about World War II. Command Decision (1947) was about the bombing of German plane factories. Haines wrote it first as a play but found no interest from producers, so he turned it into a novel. When that version proved successful, it was turned back into the stage drama he originally intended. The Broadway hit opened Oct. 1, 1947, and ran to Sept. 18, 1948, for a total of 409 performances. A year later, it became a movie starring Clark Gable.
Haines' mother was Ella Wister Haines, an author of mysteries and serial stories, many of which appeared in The Des Moines Register. Her brother was Owen Wister, author of the 1902 novel, The Virginian, which set the standard for the Western genre.
William Wister Haines' first novel was Slim (1934). The book was made into a movie in 1937 starring Henry Fonda and Dubuque-born Margaret Lindsay. Haines' other film credits include The Texans (1938), Beyond Glory (1948), The Wings of Eagles (1957)—a John Wayne film, and Torpedo Run (1958).
William Wister Haines said, "Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. They're more easily handled than dumb mistakes."
On this day in 1862, 23,000 men from the Union and Confederate armies were killed or wounded at the Battle of Antietam, in the fields near Sharpsburg, Maryland. It's known as the "bloodiest day in American History."
SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "The Loony" by Sandy McKinney, from Body Grief © The Bromley Bookstore, Stamford, CT. Reprinted with permission.
THE LOONY
Saturday nights the village toughs line up
to chase him past the church, the hardware store,
the graveyard. When he hammered at my door
I let him in, gave him a cup of tea.
Across the table when he spoke, his words
were soft, made sense enough.
Since then, I've greeted him along the road
a dozen times. He never knew me.
All afternoon he stands out in the snow,
his fingernails too long and turning blue,
staring at his little cloud of breath.
I know him by an hour's chatter and a name.
Why do I dream of combing out his hair,
of rocking with him in a scented bath?
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of actress Greta Garbo, born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden (1905). She was in twenty-seven movies, including Anna Christie (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), Anna Karenina (1935), and Camille (1937). She was known as "the screen's first lady." Alistair Cooke described her as "every man's fantasy mistress."
Garbo earned more than three million dollars from her movies, but she grew up in poverty. Her father was an unskilled laborer and often couldn't find work. He fell ill when Greta was thirteen, and she quit school to take care of him. He died the next year, so Greta got work at a barbershop and a department store. The store cast her in a promotional movie, which led to other things in Stockholm and Berlin, and eventually to Hollywood.
Garbo said, "Every one of us lives his life just once; if we are honest, to live once is enough."
And she said, "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."
It was on this day that the first edition of the New York Times was published (1851) in a dirty, candle-lit office just off Wall Street. It cost one cent. It was founded as The New-York Daily Times by Henry J. Raymond and George Jones. They wanted a serious paper, not another popular sensationalist tabloid.
On the first page there was an article about mail ships arriving from Europe. There were articles about political affairs being quiet in England, the upcoming presidential election in France, hostility against the government in Austria, and a fugitive slave riot in rural Pennsylvania.
On the second page was printed: "We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sunday's excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come ...Upon all topics,—Political, Social, Moral and Religious, —we intend that the paper shall speak for itself ...We do not believe that everything in society is either exactly right, or exactly wrong; —what is good we desire to preserve and improve; —what is evil, to exterminate, or reform."
It's the birthday of British writer and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, born in Lichfield, England (1709). He is best known for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Lives of the Poets (1781). Johnson's father was a bookseller, and Johnson fell in love with reading at a young age. He was bright and hardworking and attended Oxford. But he left after a year without a degree because he was embarrassed about being so poor. He opened school of his own near Lichfield, but it was a failure. Only eight students showed up.
Johnson's first writing was anonymous, and much of it was hack journalism. He made a name for himself with the poem "London" in 1738, and later wrote a prospectus for something that had been on his mind: a new dictionary of the English language. He went on to write his famous dictionary which took him more than eight years to finish. He did it mostly by himself, with little financial support. For the eight years of work he received about $887 a year—out of which he had to pay his six secretaries. It was the first dictionary to use quotations to illustrate word usage, and it became the standard English dictionary for the next 150 years.
Dr. Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
And, "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
And, "He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty."
And, "Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed."
And, "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."
It's the birthday of French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, born in Paris, France (1819). He also invented the gyroscope and took the first clear photograph of the sun. introduced and helped develop a technique of measuring the absolute velocity of light with extreme accuracy. He is probably best known for originating the pendulum that demonstrated the earth's rotation.
In his book, Foucault's Pendulum (1990), Umberto Eco wrote, "The Pedulum told me that, as everything moved—earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion—one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience. I, too, moved with the all, but I could see the One, the Rock, the Guarantee, the luminous mist that is not body, that has no shape, weight, quantity, or quality, that does not see or hear, that cannot be sensed, that is in no place, in no time, and is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, number, order, or measure. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth."
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer William March, born Edward March Campbell in Mobile, Alabama (1893). He is best known for his first and last novels, Company K (1933) and The Bad Seed (1954).
In 1917, March enlisted in the Marine Corps and served as a sergeant with the Fifth Marines in France during the First World War. He was wounded in the head and left shoulder at Belleau Wood and returned to Mobile a decorated hero. He began to write short stories after that, and his first novel, Company K, is regarded as one of the finest works of American war fiction. Graham Greene wrote in the Spectator, "His book [Company K] has the force of a mob protest; an outcry from anonymous throats." March's work was thought by some to be superior to William Faulkner's.
Company K captures just about every aspect of the war. It contains 113 small chapters arranged in the manner of the Spoon River Anthology. Each of over one hundred soldiers of a World War I Marine Corps rifle company tells his story in his own words. Private Harold Dresser says, "In my home town people point me out to strangers and say, 'You'd never believe that fellow had a hat full of medals, would you?' And the strangers always say, no they never would."
March's last novel was The Bad Seed, about an ordinary family into which a child serial killer is born. After its initial publication in 1954, the book went on to become a million-copy bestseller, a wildly successful Broadway show, and a Warner Brothers film. The chilling story of eight year-old Rhoda Penmark had great impact on the thriller genre.
The Bad Seed begins, "Later that Summer, when Mrs. Penmark looked back and remembered, when she was caught up in despair so deep that she knew there was no way
out, no solution whatever for the circumstances that encompassed her, it seemed to her that June seventh, the day of the Fern Grammar School picnic, was the day of her last happiness, for never since then had she known contentment or felt peace."
William March died of a heart attack at sixty, with—as he told his friends—at least five more books in his head.
SUNDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Not Moving Even One Step" by Jane Hirshfield, from The Lives of the Heart © Harper Perennial, 1997. Reprinted with permission.
Not Moving Even One Step
The rain falling too lightly to shape
an audible house, an audible tree,
blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.
He knows the field for exactly what it is:
his limitless mare, his beloved.
Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned
in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.
Slow rain streams from the fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,
while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees.
The muzzles almost touch.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Literary Notes:
It's the anniversary of the day that poets Robert Browning, 34, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 44, eloped (1846). They had married secretly seven days earlier in St. Marylbone Church in London. Their witnesses were Robert's cousin James Silverthorne and Elizabeth's maid, Elizabeth Wilson. The next day, a Sunday afternoon, Robert wrote to her that she had proved her love for him and that he would spend his life trying to prove his affection for her. He wrote, "Do you feel what I mean, dearest? How you have dared and done all this, under my very eyes, for my only sake? My own eyes have seen—my heart will remember!"
The Brownings met for the first time in 1845 and over the next twenty months exchanged 574 letters. Elizabeth's father didn't want her to marry, so their courtship and marriage were kept a secret. During the six days between their wedding and the day they eloped to Florence, Elizabeth wrote letters to her friends and family, and to her father. Her letters revealed everything. They were her only goodbye. When the letters were read, she would be gone.
The night before they eloped, Elizabeth wrote to Robert, "Is this my last letter to you, ever dearest?—Oh, —if I loved you less ... a little, little less."
Robert and Elizabeth read and critiqued each other's poetry, and while together they wrote the best poetry of their lives. Robert often called Elizabeth "my little Portuguese" because of her dark complexion.
In 1850 she published her most famous work, a collection of poems called Sonnets from the Portuguese. In it, she wrote, "If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange / And be all to me?"
And, also from Sonnets from the Portuguese: "Beloved, my Beloved, when I think / That thou wast in the world a year ago, / What time I sat alone here in the snow / And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink ..."
On the morning of June 29, 1861, as Elizabeth lay dying, Robert fed her jelly with a spoon. "Our lives are held by God," she said. A short time later, she died in his arms.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding, born in Cornwall, England (1911). Golding's parents pressured him to study the natural sciences at Oxford. But after two years, he decided to study English literature instead. His first book of poems was published a year later, in 1934.
After three formula novels were rejected in the late 1940's and early 1950's, Golding decided to write as his own heart and mind dictated. He said, "I believe that we have a great capacity for love and self-sacrifice, but we can't refuse to recognize that there is active human evil."
The result was Lord of the Flies (1954), about a group of English schoolboys who become stranded on a desert island and struggle for survival. One of the boys tries to establish a democracy, but a bunch of boys break off from the main group and it turns into violent anarchy. The book became a bestseller when it was discovered by American college students. It became a staple on high school and college reading lists and an international bestseller.
Golding wrote eleven more books, including The Spire (1964) and The Double Tongue (1995), and in 1983 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1993.
William Golding said, "Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry."
On this day in 1995, The New York Times and The Washington Post published the Unabomber's Manifesto. The manifesto was a 35,000-word treatise that criticized science and modern technological advances. The first line read, "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." The cost of printing the treatise—estimated to be between $30,000 and $40,000—was shared by the Post and New York Times.
First mention of the manuscript came in a letter from the bomber to The New York Times in April 1995 promising to stop mailing bombs if the manifesto would be published in the newspaper, Time or Newsweek. The writer also demanded publication of several later installments.
Investigators hoped the manifesto's publication would sound familiar to people who knew him when he was younger. Some 50 or 60 copies of the manifesto also were distributed to college professors in hopes that they would notice some grammatical tic that would trigger a memory of a former student.
"It's extraordinarily well-written," said David Lindberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. "It's good prose. The sentences flow well into one another, the paragraphs are coherent. The Unabomber even knows how to punctuate, and that's a very rare gift."
His brother, David, who contacted authorities after he read the Unabomber's manifesto, turned Ted Kaczynski into the FBI. He had noticed similarities between the text and his brother Ted's writings.
Ted Kaczynski, 55, a former Berkeley math professor, had attended Harvard, taught at Berkeley, and spent twenty-six years living in a rural cabin in Lincoln, Montana. When federal authorities arrested him there in April of 1996, they found piles of writings and letters, as well as bomb-making ingredients. Kaczynski was accused of being responsible for one of the worst serial bombings ever in the United States. His defense team planned to argue that he was mentally ill, presumably a paranoid schizophrenic.
The typed original of the manifesto was found during the search of the cabin and matched to one of the typewriters removed from the cabin.
The publication of the manifesto sparked a heated debate over ethics in journalism. William Ketter, editor of the Patriot-Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said publishing the manuscript "would open the pages of the newspaper to every nut case in the country."
Ted Kaczynski was incarcerated in 1998 and is serving four consecutive life sentences. He is in an ultra-maximum security prison in Colorado for murdering three and injuring dozens of others. Since then, his brother David has not had any contact with Ted, who refuses to answer his letters.
It's the birthday of Arthur Rackham, born in London (1867), one of the most famous illustrators of children's books. He worked for a long time as an insurance clerk to pay for his training at art school. He was a meticulous and hardworking illustrator. He took careful records of his models and supplies, and he always dressed in a neat, navy blue suit. In 1900 he got his first commission, to illustrate Grimm's Fairy Tales (1900), and he soon became famous for his highly imaginative drawings. By 1904 he was known as "the Goblin Master." He illustrated some of the most famous children's books, including Peter Pan (1906), Gulliver's Travels (1900), Mother Goose (1913), and Sleeping Beauty (1920).
By 1936, Rackham was suffering from cancer and was forced to rest at home. But he received a final commission to illustrate Kenneth Grahame's book The Wind in the Willows (1908). He was bedridden for nearly the entire project. When he finished the last picture Rackham said, "Thank goodness, that is the last one." Then he lay back in bed and died shortly afterward.
It's the anniversary of the death of President James A. Garfield in 1881. He died after spending nearly three months trying to recover from two bullet wounds. Garfield had only been president for four months before he was shot as he was about to board a train in Washington, D.C. A man named Charles J. Guiteau fired the shots. He was an unsuccessful lawyer, evangelist, and insurance salesman. He thought that Garfield owed him a position in the government and that Garfield was destroying the Republican Party.
The President's doctors could not find the bullets in his body. So they called Alexander Graham Bell to try out his invention called the "electromagnetic induction balance"—one of the first metal detectors. But no one realized that Garfield was lying on a bed made with metal springs—a rarity back then. Bell's machine emitted a constant hum, and the bullet was not found.
Eventually the wound became infected and the President died. Americans were angry and saddened. Abraham Lincoln had been shot sixteen years before, and it would be sixteen more before William McKinley would take office, the next president to be assassinated.
President James Garfield said, "I have had many troubles, but the worst of them never came."
