Archibald MacLeish was a poet, a playwright, a great figure in American letters. He served as Librarian of Congress during the Second World War and apparently did a bang-up job of it. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—in 1933 and 1953 for books of poetry and in 1959 for a play, J.B.
In 1962, when I was a freshman at Knox College, Mr. MacLeish came to our school to give a speech. At the given hour—11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, as I recall—I came to Alumni Hall, our massive, neo-romanesque theater, clutching my softback copy of the published script of J.B., which the college bookstore had stocked by the gross to prepare for the playwright’s visit.
Climbing the front stairs and entering the small second-story lobby, I spied the literary lion in a tweed coat and dark vest, chatting with my English composition professor, Michael Crowell.
“Mister Sommers!” Crowell boomed. “Come and meet Archibald MacLeish.”
I stepped up and shook hands with the great man. He was trim and natty, with close-cropped gray hair, a hawklike nose, and dark, intense eyes.
He looked five times more awake than I.
I burbled a word or two and held out my book to him. He smiled, uncapped a huge silver fountain pen, and signed the title page in black ink. I thanked him and made a quick escape. I found a seat in the theater, and in due course he made his speech. I don’t remember what he said. Probably something about literature.
That I can no longer locate my autographed copy of J.B. may give you a reasonable estimate of the durability of literary fame.
#
I actually did read that play, J.B. It was supposed to be a modern American version of the biblical Book of Job. Not to throw shade on an undeniably fine poet and library leader, nor to quibble with the judgment of a bona fide Pulitzer Prize jury, nonetheless I recall feeling underwhelmed. It seemed to me the best parts of the play were long passages quoted directly from the Bible; the parts that had been rendered into a contemporary American setting were rather mundane by comparison with the scripture from which they sprang.
These recollections bring us, in a deplorably roundabout manner, to the Book of Job, one of the great works of world literature. Have you read it? It’s easy to find in any standard Bible, tucked right between Esther and Psalms.
It is a stark fable, a story of undeserved suffering and a seemingly callous God. It holds believers accountable for their faith in a way that no conventional tale could.
Job, the central character, is subjected to immense suffering and loss for no reason he can discern. Instead of giving him an explanation, God re-asserts his Almightiness and draws attention to Job’s creaturehood.
Three Friends Visit Job by Wanda Korzeniowska (Polish, 1874-1939). Public Domain.
In what screenwriting guru Robert McKee would label “an education plot,” Job’s inner landscape is changed—not by anything resembling justice in ordinary human terms but by the simple knowledge that God offers no rational choice except humility.
It’s a thoroughly Jewish answer to the problem of evil. If you feel the resolution of the story unsatisfying, you can hear the unseen narrator’s voice whispering: “Vell, vot did you expect?”
In today’s world, we see evil and injustice seemingly everywhere. The good are punished while the evil prosper. It seems, at times, unbearable.
One almost hates to mention in this regard: It was ever thus.
There is nothing new about evil. It still stinks.
We can fight it, but we won’t always win.
As in the days of the Old Testament, we can either cast aspersions at God or admit that the universe God has made is one altogether beyond our imaginations, where justice may have to be measured by divine standards rather than human.
Archibald MacLeish, wherever you are—I invite you to put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does.
Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain.
From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.
Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.
Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era.
In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it.
The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus.
Onized jacket. Fair use.
The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town.
It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.
The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.
BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.”
Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.
#
But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses.
My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.
The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.
Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)
But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.
A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.
We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.
So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?
I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.
I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it.
Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities.
Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work.
Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.
Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).
Dear Reader: Please pardon this repeat post. I’ll try to get you something new next week. But for now, please enjoy this bizarre bit of speculative fiction, first posted here five years ago. It’s not what I normally write, but maybe there’s a laugh or two in it for you. I would welcame any comments..
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PANADON, A GNOME OF THE INFERIOR GRADE, WAS GOBSMACKED. He had never seen a creature so bewitching as the one who admitted him to the back office of Novotny’s Pizza Palace.
It was taller than he by half, though not generally so wide as it was tall. It looked down at him from a round, freckled face and pierced him with a thrust of its violet eyes.
His granite composure crumbled to such a degree that he felt the full weight of the 247 pounds of gold in his left hand.
Where was he? What was he doing? What was his mission?
Oh, yes. “Novotny.”
“Mister Novotny is out.” The creature fluttered its eyelids. “I’m Lucinda Potts, his assistant. How may I assist you?”
Did Panadon look like one who needed assistance? If the creature assisted Novoty, why did it offer to assist Panadon instead? Irregular. It made him nervous. But he must make the delivery. He teetered on the wood threshold.
Lucinda Potts frowned. “Are you dizzy? Perhaps you should step inside.” Lucinda backed away from the door with that gentle, swaying grace that Panadon had imagined would be the way of she-gnomes. Not that he had any practical experience with she-gnomes. But, more to the point: Could this be a she-human?
He stumbled into the little office room. To stand near Lucinda Potts in cramped quarters was a delicious sensation, compounded of fresh Mediterranean herbs and essence of Lucinda. But, back to business. “I brought the gold.”
She zeroed in on the case at the end of Pandon’s arm. “You had better set it on Mister Novotny’s desk.” She glided across the room, swept a pile of papers from the desk.
Panadon laid the case down and opened it for inspection. Inside lay one bar of pure gold, about the size of a large paving block.
Panting, she placed a hand at her throat. “Forgive me. I’ve never seen so much gold.”
“Four million, six hundred eighty-two thousand, eight hundred seventy-three dollars’ worth,” Panadon said. A pointless precision, since no receipt was to be given; his orders had been explicit on that point. So why did he state the amount? To impress Lucinda Potts?
He felt hot and stuffy. “Why do you stare at me?”
“You’re not like the others.” She smiled. “They have pointy heads, but yours is flattened, as if it wanted to spill over the sides.”
He groaned. Why fixate on the shape of his head? The very reason all the hosts of the Gnomic ovals—or, rather, those few who took note of him at all—ignored his proper name and called him Muffintop. Must she, like they, pounce on a mere deformity?
He drew himself to full height, gazed upward, and spoke straight to her face. “Pay no heed to my head, Miss Lucinda Potts. I assure you I am all pointy inside.”
And why did she make a purring sound?
#
Malkebart stood before Clanbert Wabengner, Chief of Precious Metals Underwatch, Europe Division. He stood upright and trembled at proper intervals, though filled with glee.
“Malkebart,” the old gnome whined, “can you comprehend what a threat this was—is—to me? I was forced to dispatch a dolt with three full warkins of aurum lucidum to buy this Novotny’s silence.”
“A dolt?”
“Muttonchop, or Bufflehead, or some such. One of our toilers in the Far Beneath.”
Bufflehead? “Muffintop, you mean, perchance?”
“Yes, that’s it!” cried Clanbert. “Trufflescap.”
“Why him?”
“The most convenient dolt, you see, Malkebart. Detailed some ages ago to mind the slow congealment of a drift of gold some miles below Cisalpine-yet-Transpanadine Gaul, he watched over an inconspicuous lode large enough to make an impression on our pizza man.”
“Yet small and remote enough, I suppose, Your Slyness, that the Ultra-Gnomic Council’s auditors might easily overlook it?”
Clanbert Wabengner coughed. A look of pain settled on his conical old face. “Well, what was I to do? How did that Novotny get wind that I was connected to his scheme? There is my position to think about!”
“Calm yourself, sir. Apoplexy does not become you.” Malkebart raised his brows as if struck by a new thought, which was really only one that he had already thought and had conveyed to his cohort Novotny. “Those long-bearded ultras who run the Council pretend everything we do is for the good of humanity. If they thought you were using subterranean vectors to convey contraband—”
“Precisely, Malkebart. They would have me pickled in brine and replaced by one of their grand-nephews. Then they would crown one another with laurels for their virtue in the matter.”
#
“Nerves” Novotny crashed through the front door well before opening time. He shouted “Get to work! Put some zip into it!” as usual and rushed through the kitchen to his office.
There he stopped cold, because the oddest three-foot courier he had ever seen stood toe-to-toe with Lucinda Potts while she made strange, bubbly sounds. “What’s this?”
Lucinda swiveled her chubby head. “He has brought something you ought to see, Myron.”
“How many times I gotta tell you, it’s Mister Novotny in front of the help,” he said, not taking his eyes off the gnome with the big head.
“Nonetheless, you ought to see.” Lucinda turned away from the creature, waddled over to Novotny, grabbed him by the left hand, and dragged him to his desk, where a small leather case lay.
“Open it,” said Lucinda.
He lifted the lid and staggered back. “Is that . . . what I think it is?”
“Pure gold, Mister Novotny,” piped the gnome in a treble, not unpleasant, voice. “Raised and harvested it myself.”
“Raised. You grew it?”
“After a manner of speaking. Metals take form, as Mister Aristotle so clearly explained, when vaporous exhalations are condensed underground. I cannot make gold grow, but I have attended its growth since youth. It has now ripened and is yours.”
“Mine.” Novotny stepped up to the brick and tried to lift it. “Ow, it’s so heavy I can’t get my fingers under it. That’s a lotta gold.”
“Four million, six-hundred-some thousand dollars, he says,” noted Lucinda.
Novotny looked Panadon in the eye. “What’s the catch?”
“Catch? There is no catch. We earth-cruisers delight in supplying worthy humans such as yourself with as much wealth as they can use. It is our duty.”
“Right.” Novotny frowned. “Lucinda, how we gonna get this in the closet? I can’t even lift it.”
“I can help you with that,” said Panadon. He stepped forward, closed and latched the case, and hoisted it by its handle with ease.”Where do you want it?”
“Over here.” Lucinda opened a door. She pointed inside. Panadon began to set the case on an overloaded wooden shelf beside a lot of whitish, cakey things, then thought better of it. The shelf might collapse.
He set the case of gold on the floor. “You have a lot of white powder, in cake form,” he said, by way of conversation.
Novotny slammed the closet door. “We, uh, use it in the pizza dough.”
Panadon, whose head had just missed being pinched as the door slammed shut, wheeled to face Novotny. “No. You don’t.”
“What?”
“You do not use those white powder cakes to make pizza. You use them for something else. Something nefarious.”
Nerves Novotny grew red in the face. “Nefari—Listen, buddy, go back where you came from. Tell your boss thanks for the gold. I don’t need you around here with insinuations about drugs.”
Lucinda gasped.
“So, drugs, then, is it?” said Panadon. “That’s illegal and immoral. You’re not a fit recipient of our largesse. I must take the gold back.” He reached for the handle of the closet door.
Something clanged against the narrow side of his flat head. Ouch!
Panadon looked around and saw that Novotny had whacked him with a large pizza tray, then tossed it aside. Now he held a nasty-looking pistol, aimed at Panadon. “Over your dead body, Shorty.”
At that moment, Lucinda gracefully swooped over and bit Novotny on the gun hand.
“Ouch!” cried the crook as the gun fell to the floor.
Panadon stepped forward, picked up the pistol, crumpled it in his hand. Then he advanced on Novotny. Nerves fled his restaurant the way he had come in.
Lucinda gaped, awestruck, at Panadon. “All those powdery cakes were delivered by pointy heads. They kept bringing them, but the stash in the closet never got bigger. I wondered about that. Almost like somebody came and took them away in the night. How did you know they were illegal drugs?”
“I did not know. I only sensed a great wrong. We have, ahem, a certain intuitive gift.”
“Aw, gee,” said Lucinda.
“I’ll take my gold now,” Panadon said, almost apologetically.
She opened the closet door. “It’s a shame you had to come all this way.”
#
Crime does not pay. So stood the unanimous view of the ultra-gnomes gathered in the Council chamber forty miles below The Hague.
They had polished off today’s agenda rather handily: Ousted the poltroon Clanbert Wabengner from his post and banished him, with his henchman Malkebart, to the quasi-pre-Cambrian lead mines in the deep crust; appointed one of their own number, Grizedek Bomf, in his place; and bestowed a Certificate of Merit plus a nice promotion on the oddly-shaped gnome who had uncovered Clanbert’s vile subterfuge.
As Panadon left their august presence, assured of the opportunity to supervise a dozen underwatchers on a large platinum deposit beneath Saskatchewan, he thrilled at the thought that some of his new colleagues would be she-gnomes. Perhaps one would remind him of the gracious Miss Lucinda Potts, now installed in his mind as Permanent Dream Girl.
“And what was that young fellow’s name again?” asked an aged member of the Ultra-Gnomic Council. “The one with the flat head?”
“Mumblestump,” said the member on his left as each awarded the other a fresh laurel wreath, in cognizance of their mutual virtue.
The End
How could this story have been better? Feel free to post a comment, or email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com.
Simplicity itself, I think you’ll agree. But authors still struggle with it. Especially Step 3.
Dear Reader, I ask you: What’s the difference between an author and an extra-large pizza?
Answer: An extra-large pizza can feed a family.
Believe me when I tell you the book business is tough.
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Castleman
Fortunately for us literary lions, historical perspective is close at hand, courtesy of Michael Castleman. The author of many books, both fiction and non-fiction, Castleman has had a ringside seat to the book business for decades. For the last eighteen years, he has been working on a book about it. Now, after three rejected drafts and much revision, he brings us The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (The Unnamed Press, 2024).
This volume is indispensable reading for any author, publisher, agent, or bookseller. It covers the waterfront. The author’s nuanced and occasionally sardonic view of the industry may be inferred from a few of his chapter heads:
“Gutenberg Went Bankrupt”
“How to Reduce the Price of Books: Piracy”
“Goodbye Forever, Mrs. Weathersby, I’ve Joined Book-of-the-Month”
“Everyone Struggles With Amazon”
But though Castleman presents an unvarnished chronicle, one feels somehow encouraged: After hundreds of years of commercial publishing, replete with blighted dreams and corporate connivery, we still want to make books and people still want to read them. There must be something all right with a business like that, even if most of its denizens are going broke.
Castleman touches lightly on the period from troglodyte narratives offered around the fire through the production of medieval texts by hand copying. But his real focus is on the business of printed books, from Gutenberg till now.
He says there has not been one book business. There have been three.
The First Book Business
Johannes Gutenberg. Public Domain.
“The first book business,” Castleman writes, “began with Johananes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and lasted 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century.” It was an author-centric cottage industry. You wrote a book, hired someone with a press to print it, and hawked copies to the public on the streets if need be. All authors were what today we call self-published. A few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Second Book Business
“By World War I,” the author says, “industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called ‘traditional publishing,’ though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years.”
This second book business was publisher-centric. Now, instead of paying a printer to print his manuscript, the author, likely represented by an agent, could sell publication rights to a publisher. This professional publisher then would pay the printer, market the books through bookstores, and feed back to the author a fraction of the revenue as a royalty—keeping the rest as profit.
This “traditional publishing” model is the one we think of as normal. You know, where the author pockets a huge advance and goes on a nationwide promotional tour arranged and paid for by the publisher. But in reality, only a few authors receive large sums of money in the form of advances or earned royalties. Even authors whose books sell well usually have to take their publishers’ word on how much money they are owed. And successful books have always been subject to piracy by foreign publishers.
In the second book business, a few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Third Book Business
“Around the millennium,” Castleman notes, “the digital revolution launched the third book business.” This business—the one we work in now—is still in its birth pangs. Huge conflicts and controversies abound. No dust has settled, and great clouds of it are being kicked up by everything from Kindle and audiobooks to print-on-demand and artificial intelligence.
It’s enough to make a literary luminary swoon, Gentle Reader. We are all—from Stephen King down to Your New Favorite Author—all of us are treading warily through terra incognita.
Only a few make any serious money; but that’s how it always was.
Steinbeck with Charley. Photo by Hans Namuth/Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.
The late John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, The Pearl,Travels with Charley, and a long shelf of other highly acclaimed books during the middle part of the previous century, once said:
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
And these days, in the time of the third book business, still it can honestly be said: A few get rich, but most have to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
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Don’t underestimate that motive, Dear Reader. There is something wonderful about seeing your words in print. It’s a thrill, no matter how much it costs.
So now, having vented my thoughts about the book business, thanks to the spur of Michael Castleman’s wonderful book, I shall retire to my library full of leather-bound volumes, don my herringbone tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, pack and light my Kaywoodie briar pipe, and bang away at my trusty old Underwood typewriter till dawn.
