The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. (buy now)

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
     As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
     Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
     Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
     Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
  Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
  Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
  To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1915, Henry James (books by this author) became a British citizen, to dramatize his commitment to England during the first World War. He lived for long periods of time in both England and America. He said: "I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America."

It's the birthday of Norwegian writer Dag Solstad (books by this author), born in Norway in 1941. He has written novels, short stories, and dramas, including Spirals (1965), Novel 1987 (1987), and Professor Andersen's Night (1996). He writes about intellectuals who feel out of place in today's culture.

On this day in 1951, J.D. Salinger's (books by this author) The Catcher in the Rye was published. Salinger worked on it over a period of ten years, in between writing stories for magazines like the New Yorker. At one point, he had a 90—page version of the novel accepted for publication, but he thought it wasn't good enough and continued to revise and add bits and pieces. The Catcher in the Rye is about a sixteen-year-old troublemaker named Holden Caulfield. He runs away from Pencey Prep School a few days before Christmas Break. He wants to head west to California, and live a quiet life in a log cabin, away from all the "phonies." At one point, Holden says, "I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all." The Catcher in the Rye got bad reviews when it was first released. A New York Times critic parodied the style of Holden Caulfield in his review, writing, "This Salinger, he's a short—story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. [But] he should have cut out a lot about all these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. They really do." Thirty years after its publication, The Catcher in the Rye was both the most banned book in America and the second most frequently taught book in public schools. The book has sold over 60 million copies around the world.

It's the birthday of the novelist Anita Brookner (books by this author), born in London, England (1928). She started writing fiction in the 1980s, and her most famous novel, Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize.

It's the birthday of Mary Baker Eddy (books by this author), born in Bow, New Hampshire (1821). She's the founder of the religion Christian Science, whose members believe that the mind is the sole reality and illnesses can be cured purely through mental effort. As a child, Mary was very prone to illness, and she began to notice a pattern that whenever she angered her mother or father, she would fall into a fever or catch a cold. Mary continued to have very fragile health in adulthood, and when she was about forty, she decided to travel to Portland, Maine to see for herself a famous healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. She became a disciple of his, and she claimed that being with him cured her immediately. Phineas died a couple of years later, and she became sick again until she started reading the New Testament. It was then, in 1866, that she founded Christian Science. She said it was "the superiority of spiritual over physical power." In 1875, Mary published a large volume called Science and Health. It explained all the principles and details of her new religion. She founded the Christian Science Association one year later, in 1876.

Poem: "Fairy Tale," by Ron Padgett, from You Never Know © Coffee House Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Fairy Tale

The little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around Copenhagen in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha, I have eaten this excellent meal
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!

Literary and Historical Notes:

Variety ran a famous cover story headline on this day in 1935, "Sticks Nix Hick Pix," which meant that rural Americans didn't like movies about rural America.

It was on this day in 1938, that a pilot named Douglas Corrigan asked permission from the Civil Aviation Authority to fly from New York City to Ireland. They denied his request, on the grounds that his plane was in poor condition. He seemed to accept the ruling, but when he took off for California, he banked sharply to the east and headed over the ocean. He landed in Ireland, and complained of a faulty compass. No one believed his excuse, and he lost his pilot's license, but he was greeted as a hero back in New York. Over a million people came out for a ticker-tape parade honoring "Wrong Way" Corrigan.

It's the birthday of Peter Schickele (books and music by this artist), born in Ames, Iowa (1935). He has written and arranged music for classical, jazz, folk, and rock groups, and for television and radio. But he is probably best known as P.D.Q. Bach, the fictitious son of Johann Sebastian Bach. He invented the character while studying at Juilliard, and writes satirical music under that name. P.D.Q. Bach's original operas include Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice (1990), and The Abduction of Figaro (1984).

It's the birthday of American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner (books by this author), born in Malden, Massachusetts (1889). He wrote over 80 mystery novels featuring the brilliant lawyer, Perry Mason. He was the best-selling American author of all time. He sold over 200 million copies of his books, and at the peak of his success he sold about 26,000 books a day. Gardner was kicked out of Valparaiso University after getting into a fistfight in his first semester. He went to work as a typist in a law office in California. He read so much of what he typed that he decided to take the bar exam. He passed it without any classes, at age 22. He went to work for a corporate law firm in Oxnard, California, and he defended poor Chinese and Mexican immigrants. He worked in law for 22 years, and he often wrote on the side. He became a popular contributor to Black Mask Magazine. They liked stories with Oriental heroes and villains, so he came up with many adventures of Soo Hoo Duck, King of Chinatown. He sent mysteries and western stories to pulp magazines at an incredible rate. He hired a team of secretaries to take down his dictations, and at one point he was producing 66,000 words a week for the pulps. Soon, he settled into writing his Perry Mason novels, one at a time, and gave them titles like The Case of the Amorous Aunt (1963) and The Case of the Fabulous Fake (1969). Erle Gardner said, "I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun."

Poem: "Having Children" by Barbara Tanner Angell, from The Long Turn Toward Light. © Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Having Children

A siren goes by,
the scream cuts through me
even though my child is home.
For a moment I think...

Where am I?
In the middle of the night
a cry, dreamed
or heard, a wave washes
over the body of my child.
I have let her drown

or fall. She has fallen
from a high balcony
and I have let it happen.
Negligence. I feel
as if I'm plummeting...

Oh let this be a dream.
I'll be better next time.
I'll watch, I'll watch, I'll watch.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (books by this author), born in Calcutta (1811). His father worked for the British East India Company. William Makepeace Thackeray said, "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know until he takes up a pen to write." He's best known for his novel Vanity Fair, the story of Becky Sharp, who fights her way up through society by any means necessary. Her character delivers the novel's most famous line when she says, "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year."

It's the birthday of Jessamyn West (books by this author), born in North Vernon, Indiana, author of The Friendly Persuasion.

It's the birthday of the playwright Clifford Odets (books by this author), Philadelphia, known for his plays Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy.

It's the birthday of Nelson Mandela (books by this author), born in Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (1918). His father was the chief of the Tembu tribe.

It was on this day in 1925, the first edition of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, was published.

And today, the 18th of July, is believed to be the anniversary of the fire that burned Rome in 64 AD, while the emperor Nero supposedly played his fiddle. In fact, he wasn't in Rome. He was away at his holiday villa on the coast, and when he heard about the fire, he rushed back to the capital and took charge of the operations.

The rumors about his playing his fiddle probably came from people in the Roman military who did not approve of Nero's artistic leanings. He'd come to power at the age of 16. He was the youngest ruler in the history of Rome. He was more interested in music and poetry than in battling the barbarians. And he didn't play the fiddle; he did play the lyre. But his real passion was singing. He was also known to be a transvestite, which did not endear him to the soldiers.

One of the rumors being spread at the time was that Nero had himself started the fire because he was disgusted by the architecture in Rome and wanted to rebuild the city. And to bolster his own image against these rumors, Nero decided that the fire needed to be blamed on someone else, and he picked out the Christians who were generally loathed by Romans.

The religion of Christianity was only a few decades old when Nero singled it out. Nero rounded up Christians; they were covered in the skins of wild animals, torn to death by dogs, crucified, or they were burned at the stake.

Most Romans at the time despised Christians, but Nero's program of persecution went further than the people wanted. It had the unintended effect of making people sympathize with Christians. And a little more than 200 years later, the emperor of the Roman Empire himself converted to Christianity, and it became the dominant religion of Europe.

Poem: "To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan, from The Imperfect Paradise. © W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1954, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which came out in 1937. Tolkien had written The Hobbit for his own amusement and didn't expect it to sell well. It's the story of a small, human-like creature with hairy feet named Bilbo, who goes on an adventure through Middle Earth and comes back with a magical ring.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe, like good, plain food, detest French cooking ... I am fond of mushrooms, have a very simple sense of humor ... go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much."

The Hobbit sold pretty well, partly because C.S. Lewis gave it a big review when it came out. And so Tolkien's publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien decided the new book would be about Bilbo's nephew Frodo, but for a long time he had no idea what sort of adventure. Finally, he decided it would be about the magical ring, though the ring had not been such an important part of The Hobbit.

Tolkien spent the next 17 years working on The Lord of the Rings. He was a professor at Oxford. He had to write in his spare time, usually at night, sitting by the stove in the study in his house.

He was well into his first draft by the time World War II broke out in 1939. He hadn't set out to write an allegory, but once the war began, he started to draw parallels between the war and the events in his novel: the land of evil in The Lord of the Rings, Mordor, was set east of Middle Earth, just as the enemies of England were to the east.

The book became more and more complicated as he went along. It was taking much longer to finish than he'd planned. He went through long stretches where he didn't write anything. He thought about giving up the whole thing. He wanted to make sure all the details were right, the geography, the language, the mythology of Middle Earth. He made elaborate charts to keep track of the events of the story. His son Christopher also drew a detailed map of Middle Earth.

Finally, in the fall of 1949, he finished writing The Lord of the Rings. He typed the final copy himself sitting on a bed in his attic, typewriter on his lap, tapping it out with two fingers. It turned out to be more than a half million words long, and the publisher agreed to bring it out in three volumes. The first came out on this day in 1954. The publisher printed just 3,500 copies, but it turned out to be incredibly popular. It went into a second printing in just six weeks. Today more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.

Poem: "My Aunt Raises Violets from Africa" by Janice Moore Fuller, from Sex Education. © Iris Press, Tennessee. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

My Aunt Raises Violets from Africa

All those loose threads
from her sewing, trailing
off bobbins toward Chattanooga,
Nashville, Myrtle Beach, Niagara
Falls. She snapped them at the hem
with her teeth, those worn
hitching posts.
She never learned to drive.
Didn't leave Grandma's
yard for thirty years.
Her Singer just hummed.

She never stopped wearing
that engagement ring he gave her at twenty,
measuring time by how deep
it sank into her finger
even after he died, still her fiancé,
an old man living with his mother.
We only whispered his name.

At night, after the Bible verses,
she'd coat herself with vapor rub,
thick and Vicks blue,
then dial up the DJ
who knew her voice,
yearning for the smooth of Englebert
soothing her into bed
back to back with Grandma.

When I spent the night,
we'd tend the violets
lined like bassinets
along the north:
double lavenders, crystal
stars, angel blues, pink
persuasion. So careful.
We never touched their velvet
not even the undersides.
We just turned them each day,
their faces straining
toward the sun.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Cormac McCarthy (books by this author), born in Providence, Rhode Island (1933). He's the author of the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.

It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. North America was home to the most numerous species of locust on earth, the Rocky Mountain locust. At the height of their population, their total mass was equivalent to the 60 million bison that had inhabited the West. The Rocky Mountain locust is believed to have been the most common macroscopic creature of any kind ever to inhabit the planet.

Swarms would occur once every seven to twelve years, emerging from river valleys in the Rockies, sweeping east across the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain—and the West had been going through a drought since 1873. Farmers just east of the Rockies began to see a cloud approaching from the west. It was glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.

People said the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter. They covered everything in their path. They sounded like thunder or a train and blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of them. They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path. They ate harnesses off horses and the bark of trees, curtains, clothing that was hung out on laundry lines. They chewed on the handles of farm tools and fence posts and railings. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.

Similar swarms occurred in the following years. The farmers became desperate. But by the mid 1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Within a few decades, the Rocky Mountain locusts were believed to be extinct. The last two live specimens were collected in 1902, and they're now stored at the Smithsonian.

Poem: "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Public Domain.

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine? —

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another,
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother,
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of cartoonist Garry Trudeau (books by this author), born in New York City (1948). He's the creator of the Doonesbury comic strip.

It's the birthday of poet Tess Gallagher (books by this author), born in Port Angeles, Washington (1943).

It's the birthday of novelist John Gardner (books by this author), born in Batavia, New York (1933). He's best known for his novel Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster.

And today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway (books by this author), born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He gave away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. And just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

He was one of the first Americans to return from the war, and that made him a kind of celebrity in Oak Park. He gave talks to high school students. He hung around his parents' house until they decided they wanted him out of the house.

He started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. They moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife traveled around Europe and went to the horse races and ate in nice restaurants.

He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés. He wrote about one of those cafés, "It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story."

He wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, The Sun Also Rises. Three years later, A Farewell to Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive, and young American men tried to act like "Hemingway heroes," speaking in staccato sentences out of the sides of their mouths. By the time he died in 1961, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

Poem: "Acceptance Speech" by Lynn Powell, from The Zones of Paradise. © University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Acceptance Speech

The radio's replaying last night's winners
and the gratitude of the glamorous,
everyone thanking everybody for making everything
so possible, until I want to shush
the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here
at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank

my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra,
my children for putting back the growl in hunger,
my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not
begrudging me this starring role—

without all of them, I know this soup
would not be here tonight.

And let me just add that I could not
have made it without the marrow bone, that blood—
brother to the broth, and the tomatoes
who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas,
the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne
and oregano who dashed in
in the nick of time.

Special thanks, as always, to the salt—
you know who you are—and to the knife,
who revealed the ripe beneath the rind,
the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.

—I hope I've not forgotten anyone—
oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip,
those bit players only there to swell the scene,
let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.

But not tonight, not when it's all
coming to something and the heat is on and
I'm basking in another round
of blue applause.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.

After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He tried to recreate it in his paintings.

He came back to New York and got a job as an illustrator at an ad agency. He hated the job. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons. He'd sold only one painting by the time he was 40, but his first major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 made him famous—paintings with titles such as "Houses by the Railroad," "Room in Brooklyn," "Roofs of Washington Square," "Cold Storage Plant," "Lonely House," and "Girl on Bridge."

He'd also been an illustrator for business magazines, and he became one of the first American painters to paint office scenes. Several of his paintings show office managers surrounded by gorgeous, buxom secretaries, or people working late at the office, sitting at desks high above the city.

He lived and worked in the same walkup apartment in Washington Square from 1913 until 1967. He ate almost every meal of his adult life in a diner. He never rode in a taxi. He loved the theater, but he always sat in the cheap seats. He never had any children with his wife, and he never included a single child in any of his paintings. The closest he came was a painting called "New York Pavements," showing a nun pushing a baby carriage. His painting "Four Lane Road" is his only painting that shows people actually communicating: a woman is yelling at a man.

Edward Hopper said, "Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

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