Our parents and teachers believed children could commit poetry to memory.
It was not only possible; it was desirable.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of “The Midnight ride of Paul Revere,” photographed in 1868 by Julia Margaret Cameron. Public domain.
Not only possible and desirable, but important.
“That kid is smart as a whip,” Grandpa would say. “She knows Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by heart.”
We could memorize rhymed, metrical verse. And not just rhymed, metrical verse, but any form of poetic, exalted language. And that was important.
Types of Poetry
Poets today concentrate on depth, originality, subtlety. Poems probe the psyche, exploit the mutability of language, deconstruct human relationships—as if human relationships were not deconstructed enough already.
Poetry has become—I almost hate to say it—an intellectual exercise.
Our poems used to tell stories, or spin metaphors, of personal, spiritual, or civic virtue. Poetry was less a private thing and more a public thing. It was common coin of the realm, a language we understood together.
If you spoke of Barbara Fritchie, your uncle might chime in:
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
John Greenleaf Whittier in 1885. Public domain.
Barbara Fritchie was an elderly widow in Frederick, Maryland. Her legend, spoken in verse, had meaning for us all. A Unionist, she allegedly stood up to Stonewall Jackson and his troops by flying the national flag from her upstairs window. When the general told his troops to take down her flag, she spoke out.
John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote up the fabled encounter in thirty rhymed couplets of iambic tetrameter. The poem was revered not only for the old woman’s patriotic outburst but for its dramatic context. Her words pricked the heart of the Confederate general:
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
Who speaks of Barbara Fritchie nowadays? Nobody. The only thing that brought her to our lips occasionally in the old days was that we all knew the poem. The poem and its message, encapsulating the lesson of the Civil War, are mostly forgotten these days.
And yet, we’re still fighting the Civil War.
Not Only Verse
The poetry in which we children were marinated encompassed not only verse, but also prose: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Constitution and Jefferson’s introit to the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Such words gave us a common mental furniture that let us live together.
Maybe that’s not so much the case anymore.
Entertainment Also
Poetry also served more frivolous, pedestrian ends. Hazel Felleman’s classic anthology Best Loved Poems of the American People, contains a whole section dedicated to “Humor and Whimsey.” It includes “Strictly Germ-Proof” by Arthur Guiterman, which tells the adventures of the Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup. It contains “Evolution” by Langdon Smith (“When you were a tadpole and I was a fish / In the Paleozoic Time . . . “).
Carmen Possum. Photo by Cody Pope, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.5.
For you classical scholars there is even a poem, “Carmen Possum” that features a hilarious mix of Latin and English:
The nox was lit by lux of Luna, And ’twas a nox most opportuna To catch a possum or a coona; For nix was scattered o’er this mundus, A shallow nix, et non profundus. On sic a nox with canis unus, Two boys went out to hunt for coonus. . . .
Et, for the record, cetera.
Best Loved Poems of the American People was first published in 1936 and includes more than 575 poems. They are old-fashioned. They are also superior to much of today’s poetry. These verses, high or low in theme, have stood the test of time.
From the Heart
But there is another dimension to this business of learning poetry by heart, Dear Reader. I have saved it for last, because it is best.
If learning poetry helped us bind our own fortunes to that of the commonwealth, and if it gave us enjoyment and even belly laughs besides, it also imprinted our souls with deep truths of human life that stood us, and are standing us, in good stead as we go through this mortal experience.
Miss Ruth Breiseth was your stereotypical old maid English teacher of yore—prissy, pedantic, and tyrannical. She measured the margins of our handwritten compositions with a ruler and marked us down if they varied more than a hair from one inch on the left and three-quarters of an inch on the right. If there were two Toms in one class, never mind their surnames, she addressed them as “Thomas One” and “Thomas Two.” The Toms were expected to know their numbers. The Marys, too.
And she made us memorize poetry. Not just any poetry, either. High-class poetry, mostly American poems from the nineteenth century.
There are deep lessons in some of those poems, things you can carry with you through life and come to appreciate more as you get older.
Byant, c. 1876. Photo by José Maria Mora. Public domain.
William Cullen Bryant, addressing a waterfowl, observed
There is a Power, whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost.
This is a religious message, yet it was taught in the public schools. A funny thing about education: Once you learn something, especially by heart, it’s apt to get stuck there.
Your New Favorite Writer’s own life seems to be following the pattern suggested to Oliver Wendell Holmes by a lowly shellfish:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
—“The Chambered Nautilus,” 1858
Cutaway view of a nautilus shell. Photo by Chris 73, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
What of the Future?
At the height of the covid pandemic, my wife and I were given the unanticipated pleasure of providing a free-form curriculum every Wednesday for our grandchildren Elsie and Tristan, then eleven and eight years old, respectively.
My part boiled down to a weekly lesson in “literature.” We sang songs and read stories. I introduced them to poetry and even encouraged them to memorize a bit of it.
They both liked Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Committing all four stanzas to memory was a harder slog. Today’s children do not expect to encounter such a challenge.
Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl, c. 1727. Public domain.
One item I did force them to memorize, a simple couplet from Alexander Pope:
Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
If Elsie and Tristan can carry those two lines with them—learn them by heart, take it to heart—it will be a great comfort to their old-fashioned grandpa.
It’s been warm and sunny, the curled-up foliage mostly dry. My wandering mind carried me back to days of yore. I took joy in the tumble and jumble of brown leaves. My nose appreciated the musk of decay whipped up when my rake stirred them.
Just when my shoulders grew weary with the strain, who should happen along but my old chum Milo Bung, out walking his spleen.
“Ho!” Milo declaimed. “What have we here? Work being done? On a Sunday afternoon?”
“It’s not a sin, you know,” I said with greater asperity than the occasion demanded.
“But the Packers are on!”
“So, what are you doing away from the TV at a time like this?”
“Oh, I don’t follow them,” Milo sniffed. “But I thought you did.”
“I’ve been known to watch,” I admitted, straightening up and stretching my back. “But the city aims to pick up the leaves soon, maybe tomorrow. So I got out here, and it turned out to be a bigger job—”
“Y’oughta use a leaf blower.”
Milo can bring out the worst in me. I couldn’t admit that the leaf blower had been Plan A.
“Leaf blower, schmeaf-blower,” I said. “Fifty years ago we didn’t have your fancy leaf blowers. We did it all with strong arms and backs.”
“True,” Milo said, defusingly.
But now I had begun, he was going to get all three acts. “I remember when I was a kid, in Illinois—”
“Way back in the Fifties—”
“Exactly. See, we lived in various little towns, but the routine was the same everywhere. On the nicest Saturday in the fall, when all the leaves were down, everybody came out, and we all raked our leaves into the street. Then one of the dads would take his Zippo lighter—”
“They all had Zippos in those days,” Milo reminisced.
“Course they did. But you digress. I was saying, they lit them on fire!”
“Couldn’t do that now.” Milo shook his head. “Too many people. That’s why they have no-burn ordinances.”
“Oh, yeah?” says I, in hot pursuit of contention. “Then answer me this. Are there any more leaves?”
“More leaves?”
“Yeah, more leaves. Unless there are more leaves, you wouldn’t have any more smoke from burning them now than there was in 1955.”
Milo leaned back and stared down his nose at me.
“Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter how many people there are. We don’t have any more trees now than we had then. And they drop the same amount of leaves.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point?” I rubbed my chin. “My point. Well, something about—”
“How nice everything was, back when we could burn our leaves.” He grinned to show he had my number.
“That’s right! My mom brought out potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and baked them in the burning leaf-piles.”
“Oh, the humanity!” cried Milo. “Think of the cancer.”
“You don’t get cancer from baked spuds. Or burning leaves, for that matter.”
“Well, pollution anyway.”
I always knew he was a tree hugger.
“Look,” I said. “You remember it as well as I do. Don’t you miss those old days?”
“I don’t miss all the pollution, that’s for sure.” He raised his eyebrows as the AHA! of a new idea struck him. “The only reason burning leaves smelled good to you . . . was that as soon as we finished burning leaves, we started burning coal for the next five months, just to keep warm—and anything would smell sweet compared to that.”
“Good God, man. Have you no romance in your soul?”
“Not since they installed self-service elevators,” Milo said.
I knew what he referred to. Milo had yearned to become a professional elevator operator and suffered permanent chagrin when the occupation vanished in the Sixties. He had to settle for professing French medieval literature and has been sore about it ever since. But I wasn’t about to indulge his self-pity.
“Some people’s elevators,” I said loftily, “don’t go all the way to the top.”
Milo rolled his eyes. “Spare me.”
“Now for romance, I’ll see your François Villon and raise you two John T. McCutcheons.”
John T. McCutcheon’s “Injun Summer,” first published in the Chicago Tribune 30 September 1907. Public domain.
“McCutcheon?”
“Sure. You know, on the front page of the Chicago Trib. He was the guy that drew those panels about Injun Summer. You remember, the ones with the old man and the little boy, just finished raking leaves, and the day fades to dusk, and—”
“Yeah, got it. Check.”
“Well”—and neighbor, please know I infused that “well” with JackBennyesque hauteur— “doesn’t that move you with just a teeny bit of good old-fashioned nostalgia?”
“If it does, a little bicarbonate of soda makes it go away.”
“Good idea.”
“What?”
“Go away.”
Milo went off in what passes for a huff—but his huffs never last—and I got back to raking up a huge pile of leaves, the old-fashioned way.
Winston Churchill was prime minister of the United Kingdom when I was a boy. That was during his second of two stints in the top job, 1951-1955. The first had been ten years earlier, during the Second World War.
I saw Churchill as a distinguished, therefore stuffy, personage, because he was old, wore funny clothes, smoked big cigars, and was called “sir.”
Distinguished he was. But stuffy? Assuredly not.
I have just worn myself out reading Andrew Roberts’s 982-page tome Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Roberts mines a huge lode of facts, stories, recollections, inferences, opinions, and quotes to sketch a stunning and well-rounded portrait of this remarkable statesman. Churchill became the giant of the twentieth century by being the quintessential nineteenth-century man.
Oldman as Churchill. Fair use.
We have seen Churchill twice in recent years: As the unbeatable war leader brought to life by Gary Oldman in the film Darkest Hour (2017), and as the aged lion embodied by John Lithgow in the Netflix TV series The Crown (2016 and later). Both performances were first-rate.
But they were performances. Roberts’s book fills in the actual dimensions of Churchill’s greatness. If I sketch that story for you here, you won’t have to read the Roberts book—unless you happen to be afflicted, like me, with History-Reading Syndrome (HRS).
Winston Spencer Churchill was born in 1874, at the height of the Victorian era. His place of birth was Blenheim Palace, ancestral seat of the Dukes of Marlborough.
Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a reckless, meteoric figure in British politics, was disdainful toward the boy, treating him with such coldness as ought to have wilted his self-esteem. But Winston’s self-esteem was unwiltable.
Born into the top tier of British society and immune to any middle-class self-doubt, Churchill set out in 1897, when he was 23, to “devote my life to the preservation of this great Empire and to trying to maintain the progress of the English people.”
He was a champion of tradition and old-fashioned Englishness. He never thought to apologize for defending the British Empire, the concept of noblesse oblige, the “white man’s burden,” and his exalted notion of the destiny of “the English-speaking peoples”—under which rubric he included not only the Commonwealth nations but the United States as well.
2nd Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in 1895. Public Domain.
After attending Harrow, one of England’s leading public schools, Churchill skipped university studies and joined the Army. He trained at Sandhurst and served as a young officer in India, then Egypt and Sudan. Less than two years later he fought the Boers in South Africa while also serving as a war correspondent for the Morning Post of London.
Churchill in 1900, when he first won a seat in Parliament. Public Domain.
Having gained fame through his newspaper dispatches, he stood for election to the House of Commons. From 1901 onward, Winston Churchill, enfant terrible of the aristocracy, rambunctius and irrepressible, tilted at every available windmill in the high councils of British government. He changed positions, contradicted himself, fought his own party, even crossed the floor twice to join the opposition. People marked him down as a self-seeking opportunist.
He made a serious study of oratory and mastered the art thoroughly. He was the embodiment of active energy, indefatigable, as willing to battle over trifles as over the great issues of the day. Almost everyone who knew him thought him brilliant, and everyone did know him.
He was obviously destined to be prime minister someday, if only one could trust his judgment. Like his father, Winston was liked, respected, and feared, yet seen as erratic.
Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill, center, commanding the 6th Battalion, The Royal Scots Fusiliers, in the lines behind Ploegsteert in Belgium, circa 1916. Public domain.
He believed his life would be short; therefore he was in a rush to achieve greatness. He was pushy and intransigent. As first lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, he browbeat his naval colleagues into supporting an invasion of Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula. It made strategic sense, but in execution it was a ghastly failure costing 250,000 caualties. Winston resigned the Admiralty and went to France to serve as a junior Army officer in the trenches.
For decades, whenever Winston seemed on the brink of political success, people would whisper, “Remember Gallipoli,” and he would be passed over. He became an embarrassment to the government, which was run by his Conservative colleagues.
When Hitler came to power and started re-arming Germany, Winston warned incessantly of the need to confront him. Neville Chamberlain’s Tory government followed a deliberate plan of appeasement, allowing Hitler to claim more and more European territory. Chamberlain was not alone; appeasement was blessed and praised by the whole British establishment. Only Churchill and a few sidekicks, though Tories and thus theoretically on Chamberlain’s team, spoke against it.
The Führer invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Chamberlain dithered for two days before declaring war, but when he did, he appointed a War Cabinet that included Churchill—ironically, in his former position as first lord of the Admiralty. For eight months Churchill toiled loyally in Chamberlain’s government. But by May 1940, Chamberlain had lost the confidence of the Labor Party. His wartime coalition dissolved and he had to resign. Viscount Halifax would have been Chamberlain’s logical successor, but Halifax had been a leading architect of appeasement.
Lord Halifax, left, pays a visit to Hermann Göring in 1937. German Federal Archives, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de.
Churchill thus became inevitable. For a decade or more, his had been the only significant voice raised against appeasment. Only Churchill’s prodding had raised up a Royal Air Force with a bare chance of challenging German bombers. Now, against frightful odds, with France on the verge of collapse and Hitler on the march, King George VI asked Winston to form a government.
“The important point about Churchill in 1940,” says Roberts, “is not that he stopped a German invasion that year but that he stopped the British Government from making peace. If Churchill had not been prime minister, Halifax undoubtedly would have been, and he wanted at least to discover what Hitler’s terms might be.”
Churchill’s decades of practicing the art of public rhetoric now paid off. In speech after speech he gave voice to Britain’s desire not to be enslaved by a foreign power. The bred-in-the-bone aristocrat who defended tradition, yet who flouted convention, gained the ear of the man in the street. And people gave him their allegiance.
There followed five years of Herculean effort. At the beginning of the war, Churchill had no idea how England would prevail; he knew only that it would. Because he knew this, everybody else knew it too. He welcomed Russia and the U.S., however tardily, into the war. Often irritated with his allies—Roosevelt, Stalin, and especially the insufferable Charles DeGaulle of France—he swallowed his pride again and again to preserve Allied harmony.
Churchill, left, meets Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in February 1945. Public Domain.
“The only occasions on which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill were all together were at Teheran in 1943 and at Yalta in 1945. Yet Churchill and Roosevelt met on eleven occasions, and Churchill and Stalin on three, whereas Roosevelt and Stalin never met alone except on the margins of the two trilateral meetings. Churchill’s travels during the Second World War provided the glue that held the Big Three together.” So says Roberts in his concluding chapter, evaluating the sum and substance of Churchill’s impact.
As soon as the war was won, the British electorate turned out Churchill and his Tories, giving a mandate to the Labor Party under Clement Atlee. Churchill was philosophical. When a colleague spoke of the people’s ingratitude, he replied, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.”
At seventy and out of office, Churchill found himself with time on his hands. He launched into writing The Second World War, six volumes of memoirs totalling 4,200 pages. This was a small fraction of his lifetime written output of 6.1 million words—more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined— in thirty-seven books, not to mention screenplays he wrote for Hollywood and the British film industry. It was his writing income, not government pay, that enabled Churchill to live a lifestyle widely noted for its extravagance.
Though short and incresingly rotund as the years went by, Churchill was large in every other respect. He wept at the drop of a tissue. He forgave betrayals by political friends and enemies, often appointing them to new positions where they might do better.
His consumption of alcohol was not excessive so much as unceasing. A friend opined that Winston was not an alcoholic, because “no alcoholic could drink that much.”
He was a serious painter whose works sold for substantial sums. He derived great satisfaction from the craft of laying bricks, which he used to improve his home at Chartwell.
He was an expert on military subjects. In the First World War he was the father of the armored tank as well as the Gallipoli disaster. Later, in the early 1920s, he may have been the first politician to grasp the military significance of nuclear fission.
He confessed to making many mistakes but kept things in perspective. “I’ve done a lot of foolish things that turned out well,” he said, “and a lot of wise things that turned out badly.”
In 1951 he was returned to the office of prime minister and served until 1955, when he was eighty. Roberts sums up this period: “Churchill’s Indian Summer premiership had seen the end of the Korean War, a million houses built, the abolition of rationing, the end of austerity and the beginning of a return to prosperity. Britain had become a nuclear power; no part of the British empire had been liquidated; the Coronation [of Queen Elizabeth II] had been a great success, and Mount Everest had been conquered. In retrospect . . . the first half of the 1950s were something of a golden age for Britain, and at least some of the credit for that must go to the Prime Minister of the day.”
The queen had offered him a dukedom in his own right, but he refused. He did, however, accept the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthood, having turned it down twice before. So in 1953 he became Sir Winston.
Health problems slowed him down. He resigned in 1955 but lived another ten years in retirement, dying at age ninety.
So much for his fear that he would live a short life. The hurly-burly political warfare of his early years prepared him for major historic contributions, which all came after he was sixty-five.
And the causes he won, he won through stubborn, unflagging determination. In October 1941, addressing that year’s students at his old alma mater Harrow, he said—
Surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.
I am a Twentieth-Century Man—the very embodiment of up-to-date-itude.
I am sleek and powerful, like the Super Chief and the Twentieth Century Limited, streamlined trains that could whisk you from coast to coast in under three days. I am as modern as a 1955 Chevrolet, as efficient as a new Amana refrigerator with its Stor-More door, as timeless as a Sheaffer White Dot fountain pen.
To me, the twentieth century signifies modernity. To my grandchildren, it sounds antique. Even their mother, my daughter, looks askance when I say “the greatest thing since sliced bread” or “hold your horses” or “now you’re cooking with gas!”
Katie, born in 1976, has at least one foot in my century. Elsie and Tristan are innocent of all centuries but the twenty-first, poor darlings. They will live their lives in a postmodern world. It makes me shudder.
My grandparents were born in the nineteenth century, but all four of them lived past the midpoint of the twentieth. They were old-fashioned people. When they were young, horseless carriages, hot-and-cold running water, and indoor toilets were new things. They lived life before modernity came along.
People in those days were conscious of passing a century mark. As the year 1900 approached, the term fin de siècle came to denote the years of the 1880s and 1890s. “Fin de siècle” only means “end of century,” but the fancy French term gave dignity to an uneasy sense of living at the end of Time itself. After great wars in Europe and America, life had become stately, decorous, refined, and calm. Pointillist painter Georges Seurat captured it with A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86). But people knew that orderly society could not last long.
Seurat’s masterpiece. Public Domain.
King Edward VII. Public Domain.
When the calendar rolled over, nothing much happened. Folks just had to remember to write “19__” on their checks. A new term, la Belle Époque, the Beautiful Age, seemed to describe the opening years of the twentieth century. In England, it was the Edwardian era; in America you might recall the setting of Vincente Minelli’s excellent film Meet Me in St. Louis. On both sides of the Pond, it was a time of continued calm.
But chaos lurked around the corner. War erupted in 1914, and all the European states joined in. The hounds of hell got loose. Nothing was the same after that.
Many historians say the Modern period of history ended in 1914 and everything since has been, for want of a better word, postmodern. After two world wars and a host of smaller ones, two global pandemics, and three or more technological revolutions, we feel somewhat the worse for wear.
I was privileged to be born and raised in the eye of the storm—the Postwar Years from 1945 to 1963 when everything seemed normal. But by the 1990s, I had pretty much forgotten that idea. The shooting of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 marked the beginning of endless turmoil. A long war in Southeast Asia, race riots and Marxist-inspired student uprisings, and political scandals at home.
No wonder when another turn of the century approached, we were spooked. Like our ancestors a hundred years before, we seemed to be living at the end of Time itself. At the turn of the millennium, we would be ruined merely by the Law of Unintended Consequences. Society was scheduled to implode on January 1, 2000—when clocks built into all computer programs would fail to demarcate events correctly. At long last, Chicken Little would be vindicated. The sky would fall.
I worked for the adjutant general of Wisconsin, in the Department of Military Affairs, closely allied with the Division of Emergency Management. On New Year’s Eve—December 31, 1999—I huddled with a few other bureaucrats in the state’s emergency operations center, waiting for a deluge of news media representatives seeking information on the cascading disaster for the ten o’clock news.
Once again, nothing happened. All we had to do was remember to write “20__” on our checks. (We still used paper back then.) It turned out the nation’s computer boffins had fixed the Y2K bug ahead of time. It was a non-event.
There ensued a brief period of calm. But on September 11, 2001, our world caved in when terrorists attacked the United States. There followed a difficult and troublesome Global War on Terror, a major financial meltdown, additional wars, and then a highly virulent global pandemic.
Sigh.
Where will this all end?
I do not know. All that I do know is that the future is unpredictable.
Mark Twain, who did not say everything attributed to him. 1907 photo by A.F. Bradley. Public Domain.
Why then do I continually harp on the past, trying to bring vanished scenes and happenings back to people’s consciousness? I just think if you know about the past, you’ll have a better chance of recognizing the future when it treads upon your toe.
Somebody—most likely not Mark Twain—said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
If you aspire to Literary Lionhood at all, you are already a person for whom reading is an unalloyed pleasure. Maybe even a chief cornerstone of your life.
But when you are a serious writer, reading is a job requirement.
As anyone who has ever had a job can tell you, there is some distance between an unalloyed pleasure and a job requirement.
Kinds of Reading
Let us consider the kinds of things you might read.
Books for meals.
First of all, there is Unalloyed Pleasure Reading—any book or books you are so eager to read that you pick them up whenever you have a spare moment. You take such a book with you to the doctor’s office to make good use of your waiting time. You read it on the bus. Those are the books I’m talking about. For me, anything by John Grisham, John Steinbeck, or Jack Finney.
Second, there are Exemplar Books. These are either so well-written or so ill-written that reading them will help you become a better writer. You can emulate their prose, or avoid it, as you evolve your own unique and compelling voice. Such a book may or may not give unalloyed pleasure. Even if it’ s a chore to read, you grit your teeth and get through it. For me, the phrase “good writing to emulate” brings to mind William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, and Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti mysteries, among others. I won’t mention a specific example of writing to avoid. Suffice it to say, they are legion. You will discover them on your own.
Third are the books about how to write books. At least a million are in print, with hundreds more published every day. They are all above average. More than two-thirds of all writers who have written any book at all have also written a book about how to write a book.* (*Proceedings, Institute for Fabricated Statistics, Vol. X, pp. y-z.) In fact, many writers who have never written a book have nevertheless written a book about how to write a book. This could get out of hand. Take my advice: choose one or two of those listed below, and let it go at that.
Poetics, by Aristotle (No last name. You know: That Aristotle.)
Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maass
Story, by Robert McKee
Books to the left of my laptop.
Fourth are books about how to sell books. There are works about how to find an agent, how to get your book published, and how to sell lots of copies once it is published. It seems every writer who has written a book about how to write a book has also written one or more books about how to sell your book once you have written it; and every writer who has written a book about how to sell anything at all has also written one or more books about how to sell, specifically, books. As to recommendations: Even I, Dear Reader—your reliable Guru of Literary Lionhood, famous for rushing in where angels fear to tread—even I tremble to recommend any one of these volumes. If you are thinking of consulting any part of this 21st-century cornucopia of unsolicited-yet-pricey advice, consider this free bit of wisdom from the late Sir William of Goldman:
“Nobody knows anything.”
He was talking about the movie business, but it applies equally to all forms of publishing. This may strike you as dismal news, but consider it in this light: You know as much as anybody, so plunge in. Just do something. Or don’t do something; just stand there. It might work as well as anything.
Books to the right.
Fifth are the Obligated Reads. These are books by friends or acquaintances which you have agreed—perhaps unwisely—to read and review. Some are beta reads, works in progress whose authors want useful feedback from you, so they can make their work better. Others are published books whose authors want your endorsement, in the form of a published review or a blurb for the book cover. When the author is a particular friend and the book is something you just can’t hack, then you are stuck with what our cousins across the Pond call a sticky wicket. If the book happens to be the second or subsequent installment of a series, you have an easy out. “Author Johnny Johnson has done it again!” Otherwise, you’re sunk.
Sixth are books you need to read, or at least skim, as research for something you are writing. For us historical novelists, this kind of reading is broad and wide-ranging. But almost any writer* will need to do some research.
*Well, not writers who are actually Artificial Intelligence programs. AI bots can just make something up that reads as if it is based on research, but it’s actually just pieced together with likely-sounding phrases stolen from thousands of real, and mostly starving, writers. But then, you’re not an AI bot. Are you? I feel like I should insert a Captcha box here.
Coping With the Deluge
All these reading demands can actually get in the way of one’s writing.
Books awaiting attention.
Upon becoming a Literary Lion, I increased my already liberal use of the South Central Wisconsin Library System. There’s something called LINKCAT, which is a wonderful thing. I can go online, find any book that exists anywhere within 51 included libraries, place it “on hold,” and it will be delivered to me at my local library, usually within a few days.
Because of the numerous reading interests noted above, books—those being read, those to be read, or those already read—reside in stacks all over my house.
I repeat, it’s getting out of hand. Last week, I realized these demands were forcing me to avoid reading what I most wanted to read, because I had to read something less pleasurable and, in the grand scheme of things, less important.
So I’ve drawn a line in the sand. From now on, I will only acquire books I actually look forward to reading, in the sense that I have a credible expectation of joy; or, those needed for specific bits of research. That’s it—only Unalloyed Pleasure or Necessary Research. Away with all other pesky categories! I hope that holds up.
A Final Word
I tell you as a bona fide Literary Lion: Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
As Dorothy Parker once said: “If you have friends who aspire to be writers, give them The Elements of Style. Then shoot them while they’re still happy.”
He stood no more than five feet six, a bit of gray hair fringing the bald dome of his head. He must have been in his fifties, an old man to have sired my friend Ron who was 12, like me. He talked and acted old-fashioned.
He was our scoutmaster, Ralph Kirkpatrick.
No relation to the harpsichordist of the same name.
1951 Nash. Photo by Lars-Göran Lindgren, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
When we moved to Kenosha in 1957 and I joined Troop 27 at the Methodist Church, Mr. Kirkpatrick—none of us boys would have called him Ralph—still drove his 1950 Nash, the bulbous bomb manufactured locally. Behind the Nash he towed a trailer with a ten-foot green plywood box. That box held enough tents, cook kits, water cans, axes, and incidentals for our whole troop of nearly forty boys.
A funeral home sold him a huge old Packard for fifty dollars—on the condition that he would use it to haul Boy Scouts. From then on, it was the Packard that towed the long green box trailer, when needed.
In winter, we went on hikes, Klondike Derbies, and other tests of our ability to out-gruel any challenge. In summer, we did a troop campout almost every other weekend.
We went to Fox River Park or the Public Hunting and Fishing Grounds at Lily Lake. Each patrol of six to eight boys had an assigned space where we pitched our two-man explorer tents. We cooked on charcoal stoves some dad had fabricated from steel barrels cut lengthwise, with metal legs added.
We worked on skills like pioneering, axemanship, firebuilding, knot-tying, and wigwag signalling with red and white flags. We tramped through marshes, orienting ourselves on a contour map using Boy Scout compasses. We searched out edible wild plants.
Page from 1961 Boys’ Life on wigwag signals.
At night we ranged the woods in wide games, tagging one another in dark thickets and meadows. Afterward, around a fire of blazing logs, we sang songs, presented skits, and told ghost stories.
Ralph Kirkpatrick orchestrated our fun in minute detail. Everything we did notched points so we could advance in rank from Tenderfoot through Second Class, First Class, and all the way to Eagle Scout. Older boys were taught to lead and mentor the younger ones.
Our 1960 Jamboree Troop. In the inset, upper right, Ralph Kirkpatrick stands behind three Scouts, including Your New Favorite Writer, who scowls at lower left.
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One Saturday in April we traveled south in the Packard, without the trailer, to hike the twenty-mile Lincoln Trail, a jaunt that led from the restored pioneer village at New Salem, Illinois, to the state capitol in Springfield. We stayed overnight in an old Civilian Conservation Corps barracks.
Sunday morning, we started in the dawn chill, wearing spring poplin jackets and Boy Scout caps. Snow came down in tiny flakes, blown by a whirly wind from the north. If you live in the Upper Midwest, you know the kind of snow I’m talking about.
At mid-point on the route stood a country store. We asked very politely to use their bathroom. Some of us bought candy bars while we waited our turn to use the facility, under the staid gaze of old farmers gathered round a pot-bellied stove. A radio played gospel hymns.
Back on the road, the snow blew straight sideways. A few boys had brought earmuffs or stocking caps. Those without gloves at least had pockets to jam their hands into.
We walked fast. Exertion generates heat.
We reached downtown Springfield in mid-afternoon. Mister Kirkpatrick awaited us with a hearty smile. The storm had moved on. Only a few flakes drifted down in watery yellow sunlight.
The Illinois State Museum stood close at hand.
“This is one of the great museums,” said Mr. Kirkpatrick. “You don’t want to miss this.”
We went floor by floor, viewing life-sized dioramas of prehistoric man and the tribal life of plains Indians. The walls were festooned with woven baskets, arrowheads, and old costumes. It was very thorough, archeologically speaking.
At sundown, we piled into the Packard and started back toward Kenosha. On today’s roads, it would be about a four-hour drive, but that’s because we have an Interstate Highway System. In those days it took five hours, in good weather.
Only the weather was not good. We were driving north into a major blizzard, the storm that had already brushed us with its fingertips.
At midnight, traffic stood still. The Packard halted in the middle of a busy intersection, the Yorkville Y (or Wye) in the Chicago suburbs. We sat idling in a line of cars as the lights changed from red to green and back to red, over and over.
Ralph Kirkpatrick shut off the engine, took off his cap, and went to sleep. He advised the rest of us to get some shut-eye, too.
There were I think eleven of us Scouts in the seven-passenger car. That was before seat belts and shoulder straps. Young boys being made of rubber, you could cram almost any number of them into a given space.
Some slept, but I stayed awake. I worried that our parents expected us home long before. No telephone booth was in sight, no way to get a message to them.
I also worried that traffic would start again, and we would be obstructing it, our driver asleep at the wheel.
After forty-five minutes, the traffic did resume its flow. At that very moment, our scoutmaster sat up in the seat, put his cap on, started the car, and drove forward.
Before long, we reached the portion of I-94 that had already been completed. The Packard slithered up the long curve of the ramp, its rear drive wheels slewing left and right on the snow-covered pavement. The rear end of the car slumped off the edge of the road. Mister Kirkpatrick touched the gas lightly, and the heavy beast—ballasted by one scoutmaster and eleven boys—regained the road.
I got home at four a.m. and went straight to bed.
When I woke Monday morning, Dad had already left for work.
Mom hummed contentedly as she fixed a quick breakfast.
“Weren’t you worried about us?” I asked, stacking up my books for school.
“Worried?” Mom said. “Oh, no, not at all. We knew you were with Ralph.”
September 19 falls on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is the day I post each installment of this blog, and . . .
September 19, of course, is . . .
International Talk Like a Pirate Day!
So cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of mayhem.
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Avast!
International Talk Like a Pirate Day may be abbreviated to just Talk Like a Pirate Day, making it more wieldy in the mouth.
Since 1995, it is a day when those starved for amusement interject “Aaarrr!” into every other sentence. Lest that become boring, the day’s inventors, John Baur and Mark Summers, have provided a complete lexicon of pirate phrases. Conveniently, they all begin with the letter a—as in “ahoy,” “avast,” and so on. No sense wearing yourself out on the rest of the alphabet.
In this euphoric pursuit, one can’t help wondering where the very concept of talking like a pirate came from, can one?
Piracy, after all, is a crime. Its practitioners are known criminals. One might expect them to be unsavory characters, but—how, precisely, would they talk?
What about Long John Silver, the most famous pirate of all? He’s an invention of nineteenth-century writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John is the prime villain of Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island. Before he reveals his villainy, however, he talks like this:
See here, now, Hawkins, here’s a blessed hard thing on a man like me, now, ain’it? There’s Cap’n Trelawney—what’s he to think? Here I have this confounded son of a Dutchman sitting in my own house drinking of my own rum! Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights!
Now, that’s more like it—a bit rough around the edges. Still, it’s hardly the slavering, bloodthirsty banter we might have expected from Long John Silver. For that, we must go to the man who became Long John Silver—actor Robert Newton.
Newton as Long John Silver. Public Domain.
Newton (1905-1956) first appeared as Silver in Walt Disney’s British-made film adaptation of Treasure Island in 1950. Two years later he played Edward Teach in Blackbeard the Pirate. He reprised the Treasure Island character in a 1954 Australian-made film, Long John Silver, and in a 26-episode TV series, The Adventures of Long John Silver, in 1955.
By March 1956, the hard-drinking fifty-year-old actor was dead. He left behind a varied and impressive catalog of important film roles. But he will always be remembered as the complete owner of Long John Silver. Today, almost seventy years after his death, it is Newton’s voice—an exaggerated version of the West Country accent of his youth—that today’s pirate talkers mimic.
A younger Newton, channeling Laurence Olivier. Public Domain.
And a typical Hollywood thing happened: Long John Silver went from fearsome villain to endearing rogue. He became the protector of, not so much a threat to, young Jim Hawkins. That’s how it had to be for a half-hour television series to be watched by the young people of the English-speaking world.
So powerful was Newton’s characterization that Long John migrated to center stage and become the hero of the piece. Thus he became not only the locus classicus of offically approved pirate speech but also the very embodiment of The Lovable Pirate.
Lovable, tender-hearted, heroic, or repentant buccaneers were nothing new. The nineteenth century gave us romanticized pirates in Walter Scott’s The Pirate, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.
But Robert Newton stamped the worn-out stereotype with a twentieth century gloss, bringing it to life on screen with his memorable portrayals of Long John Silver and Blackbeard.
Former English poet laureate John Masefield, a lover of the sea, let slip something nearer the sad truth of piracy in his curiously schizophrenic poem, A Ballad of John Silver, to wit:
. . . Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains, And the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people's brains, She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank, And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.
O! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop) We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken-coop; Then, having washed the blood away, we'd little else to do Than to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to. . . .
It was just one of those things,
Just one of those crazy flings,
One of those bells that now and then rings—
Just one of those things.
(words and music by Cole Porter)
Let me explain.
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Soon after launching my writing career in 2016, I learned one must start building a platform right away. An “author platform” is an identifiable following. Many things go into a platform, but most authors feel a need to be present in one or more forms of social media.
I was already on LinkedIn and Facebook. I added a “LarryFSommersWriter” page on Facebook, linked to my regular “Larry F. Sommers” page.
In April 2019 I started a weekly blog, “Reflections,” at https://LarryFSommers.com. “Reflections” was both a form of social media and something else altogether. I hoped the blog would publicize my novel-in-progress, but I also hoped it would form a body of writing that readers might value for its own sake. To that end, I posted original articles on past and present, story and narrative, writers and the writing life, and other topics.
Now, since I want my blog to offer lasting value, I spend at least one day creating each week’s blog post. To attract readers, I routinely announce each post with brief publicity snippets on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. These own-horn-blowings also take a bit of time to generate.
That’s the full extent of my social media. In each venue, I have a modest following.
But social media are only part of the platform. I know a lot of folks in person, not filtered by the Web. Now that my novel, Price of Passage, is published, I go to bookstores, public markets, and book fairs to tout my book face-to-face. I love these real-life interactions. I also give book talks or speeches about Price of Passage and the process of becoming a Great American Novelist. All these activities are planks in my platform.
Then my friend Dan Blank spoke favorably of Substack. It’s a website that allows authors to post their writings and attract readers. It also allows those readers to pay subscription fees or voluntary donations to support the authors they like.
Dan Blank is a wise guru. When Dan recommends something, I pay attention.
I decided to go for it. But I didn’t want to write something completely different for Substack. Nor did I want to abandon my WordPress site—at least not until I decided that Substack could rerplace it. So I just added “Reflections” to Substack, making it available in two places now instead of only one. I chose not to require a subscription fee, but to allow readers to donate if they so chose.
So you see, I did not plunge into Substack but dipped my toe in the water.
Substack has been sending me emailssuggesting authors whose writings I might want to follow. Naturally. One of the best ways for a writer to gain a following on Substack is to follow other writers’ posts and comment favorably on them. Of course! That makes sense.
The problem is, I didn’t want to spend my time reading a lot of posts from Hamish McKenzie, George Saunders, or myriad other fine authors who appear on Substack. I had been thinking of Substack as a place where I could publish mywork. But it is at bottom a social medium. Social media thrive on reciprocity: You read my blog, I’ll read yours.
Meanwhile, I struggle to set aside productive times for writing my World War II novel and a Vietnam-era personal memoir. Alot of reading and research goes with these challenges. And I’ve got a tall stack of books to read for my own general education. Do you know Your New Favorite Author has never read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey? Well, I’m working on that.
I love to be generous with my time, but I do have a lot of irons in the fire.
Substack feels “fun and refreshing” to Dan Blank. To me it feels inauthentic and oppressive.
Thought experiments can be worthwhile. I abandoned Substack in my head. Boy, did that feel good. What a relief!
That got me thinking about all the artificial things I do to chase an expanding platform. Things like Twitter and LinkedIn.
Years ago, I worked in a semi-corporate setting, and LinkedIn’s professional networking opportunities were a boon. Now on LinkedIn, I’m just a troll hawking a product.
And I never had any desire to Tweet. I only did it to draw people to my WordPress blog.
After my book was published I started sending out a newsletter, using MailerLite. But lately I get the sense that few people eagerly await the next edition of The Haphazard Tiimes.
There’s nothing wrong with MailerLite. Nothing wrong with LinkedIn. Nothing wrong with Twitter.
For that matter, there’s nothing wrong with Substack.
But I’m a writer. I need to work on writing—both my weekly romance with the Great World-wide Blog Public, and also my novel, memoir, and short story projects.
The only social medium I have bonded with is Facebook. For all its faults—and they are legion—it is the place where I often interact with friends, 796 of them at the moment. Most of those are people I actually know. If I met them on the street, face-to-face, I’d recognize them, and they me. That’s not a huge number of possible readers, but it gives Facebook the one thing none of the other media has for me: Authenticity.
I don’t do Facebook primarily to promote my writing. I do it to keep in touch with my friends. Maybe for you that’s Instagram, and God bless you. But I’m sticking to Facebook.
Substack simply became the stack that broke the camel’s back.
Good-bye, Substack.One-too-many stack,Unlike Lot’s wife, I won’t look back.Good-bye, Substack.
Good-bye Twitter, LinkedIn, and MailerLite, too.
I will keep writing.
I will promote my writing on Facebook, a world populated by friends of mine. Only now my Facebook posts won’t have to meet the format needs of three social media outlets simultaneously. Maybe I can make the Facebook outreach more personal and unique.
I will continue to sell my books in markets, bookstores, festivals, and elsewhere.
What is all this for, if not to leave some lasting literature behind me?
So the first thing, and the hardest thing, is to create some great stuff.
Even if that great stuff is not “discovered” in my lifetime, I’ll still be one up on van Gogh. At least I have both ears.
Dear Reader—You’ll know from last week’s post that wonderful things can happen when you’re a Literary Lion.
One example is that I discovered Steve Fox’s debut short story collection, Sometimes Creek. I heartily recommend it. You may just be captivated by Steve’s unique slant on stories that in other circumstances—for example, if I had written them—would be ordinary.
The stories in this book are far from ordinary. Here’s my review:
Sometimes Creek
by Steve Fox
It’s real life as lived in the Upper Midwest on those days when the air is numinous and reality must be seen on a slant to be viewed at all.
The seventeen stories in Steve Fox’s collection Sometimes Creek are regional, populated by folks you know from down the block. They are also universal tales where things happen, in the plot but most of all inside the characters, that stand your expectations on end and make you think about the human condition.
In “The Butcher’s Ghost,” a man and woman slip, separately, into a clifftop bistro with a haunted past—each taking refuge from world-woundedness. The two lonely souls seem like ships passing in the night, but you realize gradually that something more is going on.
The title story, “Sometimes Creek,” gives us a father and daughter in the grip of overpowering grief, who must relocate their household into a neighborhood crazed with its annual Halloween rituals. The neighbors welcome their healing hearts with a mix of help and hindrance, which may or may not make things come round right in the end.
Each of the stories in this collection is multi-layered, dense with nuance and surprise. They are stories that will repay a second or even a third reading. You notice something new each time around.
If you’ve been captured by such masters as Jack Finney and Stephen King, these stories may transport you to similar territory. Two thumbs up, but only because that’s all the thumbs I’ve got.
Another part of the world has been heard from regarding Peco Yeh’s extant paintings.
Peco Yeh is a Chinese artist who plied his wares in Taipei in the latter half of the last century. Your New Favorite Writer had the opportunity to meet him, and I bought a painting from him for a scandalously low price. I have written about that painting, a waterscape, and the experience of acquiring and owning it, in this very blog, here and here.
In the latter post I also mentioned Earline Dirks, who emailed me that she owns a Peco Yeh painting—an interesting study of two figures, one a young boy, examining a lantern.
Now another collector steps forth. Joshua Lowe of Beckley, West Virginia (“Right in the middle of the Appalachian coal fields”) wrote me as follows:
“It was 2012 maybe 2013, a friend of mines uncle had passed and his house was scheduled for demolition. I was asked if I would come to the property with my metal detectors, he wanted to scan the property before the dozers arrived. We scanned found some coins nothing notable. The home was dilapidated and the family had split and taken all the possessions that they where fond of or deemed valuable. I was asked if I would like to “tour the home” and was told anything I like just take it, because everything else would be left in the home during demolition and hauled off. We went room to room thru the home nothing notable or out of the ordinary for an abandoned home. There where dishes and faux silverware scattered thru the kitchen, magazines and stacks of readers digests lay scattered in most of the living areas!
“We came into the den and a stack pictured laid against the wall, most where nothing more than everyday prints that you would find in any cut rate motel, Home interior or pier 21. As I went thru the stack of pictures, it was there. It jumped out ! It was something did not belong in this stack! I had no idea who Peco Yeh was! But, that did not matter, I knew this one was painted and framed by hand, I knew this one had some age and it grasped my attention and knew that it did not belong in the trash! I took the painting with me that day. I still appreciate and admire it as much now as I did then! I was told that the original owner was military and was stationed in Southeast Asia many years ago. Thru the little research I have done I have no doubts that this was bought during his tours in Southeast Asia maybe even from Peco Yeh himself.”
Here is a photo Joshua Lowe took of his Peco Yeh painting:
On the face of it, it’s a simple urban scene, a narrow street or alley vanishing into the distance in a classic perspective drawing exercise. Right at the convergence point is a small white-clothed figure—male or female, impossible to tell. In my view, it’s that human figure alone who gives this scene a spark of interest. Unlike the boatman in my painting, who is clearly a boatman: or the young boy in Earline’s painting, who is clearly a young boy: this person is a mere sliver in the distance—enigmatic, mysterious. The alley is ordinary, but the person—is he, or she, coming or going? Is he, or she, carrying something on his or her head? The legs, vague and spindly though they are, convey a feeling of motion, dynamism in a static setting. Wouldn’t you like to know who it was that Peco had in mind? I sure would.
I have no reason to think Peco was a great artist. Yet here are three paintings—mine, Earline’s, and Joshua’s—that lead the eye to explore a bit beyond the deceptively simple surface of things. For that, I thank him.
I never aspired to be Longfellow. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Or Marilynne Robinson.
I just wanted to write something.
And to have it read by somebody.
Who would be moved by it.
To achieve these aims, I found it necessary to become a Literary Lion first.
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After years of storm and struggle, I retired in 2009 and found the perfect part-time job to entertain me in retirement.
I was the husband of a good and loving wife, the father of an outstanding daughter, and the grandfather of two sparkling cherubim.
Our house was paid for and had a large backyard with plenty of shade in which one could lollygag to one’s heart’s content.
And my heart, Dear Reader, was content.
At age 70, I was a success.
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Only: I had not yet written the Great American Novel.
Back in 1953, I wrote a story—a private-eye saga on two sheets of lined paper in my Big Chief pencil tablet.
I wrote it at my third-grade desk, when I was supposed to be doing something else. But I had already finished doing that other thing, whatever it was, and some of my classmates were still toiling away.
In those days, most teachers did not go out of their way to encourage creativity. But dear old Mrs. Winders, as she walked the aisle looking over her pupils’ shoulders, chose to look elsewhere as she walked by me. So I finished my detective story.
Robert Frost, ca. 1910. Public Domain.
It had a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as Aristotle recommends. There may even have been a reversal of fortune or two. It was pretty good but, alas, has been lost to posterity.
I always meant to follow it up with more stories—and books, lots of books. But stray fortunes led me down a different path. You know how it is. (If you don’t, check with Robert Frost.)
So here I was, at threescore and ten, not yet the author of a major work of fiction.
You know how, when you get an itch, you need to scratch it?
At the end of 2015 I retired from my retirement job with a respectable church magazine to become a full-time fabulist. Editing The Congregationalist was the best job I ever had. I enjoyed it well and could have kept doing it for a long time. But sometimes you have to choose one thing or another.
Satchel Paige advised, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” I reckon he was right. Look what happened to Lot’s wife.
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I wanted to write fiction. I did not know what fiction to write, but I figured it would come to me.
And so it did.
I wrote a few stories about a 1950s boy named Izzy Mahler. I submitted them to the Saturday Evening Post and they published two of them on their website. They honorably mentioned another in their Great American Fiction Contest and published it in the 2018 contest anthology.
Chalk it up to beginner’s luck.
As I groped for a topic or theme for a novel, my wife brought forth genealogy on Anders Gunstensen, my great-great-grandfather, who emigrated from Norway in 1853. Based on her research about Anders and his wife, Johanne-Marie Elizabeth Nybro, a fictitious story flashed into my mind—one that could be wedged into the wide spaces between the few known facts.
So in 2017 I started to write a historical novel in which the main characters, Anders and Maria, move from Norway to America and become involved in a black slave’s escape from slavery.
I had attended the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s 2016 “Write By the Lake” conference. There, the great Laurie Scheer had led me to believe that I could actually write such a book and that somebody might read that book.
So on I wrote.
Meanwhile, I joined a local writers’ group, Tuesdays With Story, a twice-monthly gathering for mutual critique, moderated by the great Jerry Peterson. I submitted raw chapters of my novel for comments by fellow writers. My mind stubbornly resisted many well-meant suggestions from these colleagues. Eventually—when my original approach left me stuck with nowhere to go—I came to understand what my Tuesday night friends were telling me about narrative structure. Aided by these generous critics, I trudged up the Fiction Writers’ Learning Curve, which turns out to be a lot steeper once you are climbing it than it looked from the bottom.
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I attended the 2018 UW-Extension Writers’ Institute and suddenly realized the writers gathered there had become my tribe. Though they wrote different kinds of stories and took much different approaches, they shared my affliction. Many of them were presenting more advanced symptoms.
I was the new kid on the block, yet welcomed freely into their midst.
They warned me it is hard to get a book published and hard to sell copies of it once published. You need a “platform.” Now, if you happen to write nonfiction and are already a known expert in your field—perhaps you make lots of speeches and presentations around the country—then you already have a platform.
If you’re a mere fabulist—a writer of fiction—then you need to build a platform from scratch. It takes connections, relationships, and social media. Don’t wait till your book is published to get started.
One of the best things to pre-sell my writing was to write a blog, they claimed. That sounded like a great deal of work. I would have to rent space on the Internet and post new writings regularly. What could I think of to write a blog about? And, thus occupied, when would I find time to do my real writing?
It preyed on my conscious thoughts. My Tuesday night mentor Jerry Peterson said, “Well, you might try writing a blog just for its own sake. Don’t think of blog posts as just a way to promote your writing. They might actually be your writing—or at least, part of it.”
I launched a blog in April 2019. I called it “Reflections” and defined its focus as “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.”
You see, I had figured out by then that all my writing is about plumbing the depths of the past. My genre preference of historical fiction might have been a clue.
I soon found that, keeping that focus in mind, I do find topics to blog about, week after week. It can take a whole day or more out of my writing week to do the blog. But I enjoy it, and people read it.
Thus far I’ve blogged for more than four years, for a total of perhaps a quarter of a million words.
Jerry was right. Blogging is writing. It stands on its own.
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This post—a particularly long one—is titled, “Confessions of a Literary Lion.”
Pause a moment to reflect, Fair Reader.
I set out, in January 2016, to become a writer of fiction. In pursuit of that dream, I found I had to do several things:
I had to write fiction. Not sporadically, but with regularity and dedication.
I had to attend conferences and classes to learn how to write fiction.
I had to join a writing group and learn how to use astute critiques to improve my work.
I had to spend quite a bit of time reading other people’s work and crafting astute comments to help them improve their work.
I had to plunge into social media to build a platform.
I had to write a blog—yes, to boost my visibility (platform), but also simply to spread my writings abroad. To reach people who might never read my historical fiction.
Oh, and besides all that: To learn the art of fiction, to learn the trade of marketing, and to better grasp that past which I am so eager to share with those who inhabit the present—I had to read a great many books. Books of well-written fiction. Books of poorly written fiction (learning what not to do!). Books on how to write. Books on how to get published. Books on how to sell books. Books of history and biography, surveying the terrain of the past. Books that zero in on specific past events and settings that relate to the story I’m writing. And by the way, books read for the sheer joy of reading, which I have always done.
I have become one of the leading customers of the glorious South Central Wisconsin Library System. I’ve become a patron in good standing of Amazon and local independent bookstores.
All the pursuits mentioned above, in the aggregate, are so sedentary that I find I need a determined effort to get regular exercise. Yet I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.
However, one must face the fact: I’ve become a Literary Lion.
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This fait accompli of Lionhood became clear to me in mid-2020, with the Great American Novel still unpublished. I posted a blog series titled “Six Simple Steps to Literary Lionhood.”
I considered it a public service to writers. If you know you must become a Literary Lion even before you have any tangible sign of literary success, it puts things in perspective.
The main thing it puts in perspective is that, if you’re serious about writing, you give it your all.
You will soon be neck-deep in drafts, revisions, critiques, reviews, conferences, events, relationships, and books. You may as well buy an ascot, a smoking jacket, and a briar pipe, because you’ve become Mister Writer (soon to be Mister Author)—or Miz, as the case may be.
At any rate, you may stop asking people, “How do I know if I’m really a writer?”
Just suck it up and get on with it.
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When this Buddha-like moment of Enlightenment came to me, it was on the whole a good thing, because it prepared me to dig in and take the next major challenges in stride.
You see, while undergoing a Gregor Samsa-like metamorphosis into something both fascinating and repellent (note the high-class literary allusion there, Gentle Reader?), I had been diligently pecking away at the Great American Novel.
I finished the first draft—“finished” in the sense of typing “The End” at the bottom—in late summer of 2019. After a period of extensive and exhaustive revision, I felt it was ready, under the title Freedom’s Purchase. So early in 2020 I began querying agents and publishers to see if they would read it and publish it.
Here’s how the publishing business works: You don’t just send somebody the whole manuscript of a book. That’s asking them to commit hours or days of their time to reading something they never heard of before. All agents and publishers receive hundreds or thousands of queries a year.
So the procedure is to send a brief query letter giving just a brief description of the book’s contents and your own qualifications as a writer. Some agents and publishers want a one-page plot synopsis in additon. Some want an author’s biography or resumé. Some want to see the first ten pages, or the first three chapters, of the text. You send them exactly what they ask for, and then you hope they will ask to see the whole manuscript.
Mostly, they don’t. On those rare occasions when they do, it’s cause for rejoicing.
But be prepared to receive a rejection.
Among the rejections I received for Freedom’s Purchase were two that included a sentence or two of explanation why they passed on the opportunity to publish my book. One said the story “just didn’t feel big enough” to succeed in today’s very competitive book market.
The other said, “I’m afraid I’m going to take a pass on this one. The plot as described in the query had not begun to develop in the first 50 pages, and I frankly lost interest in the story at that point. You might want to consider rearranging some of your chapters, assuming the escaped slave story did eventually materialize, and have it interspersed with the character/scene development that was all at the beginning.”
When you have been in labor for years to give birth to an 80,000-word manuscript based on a furtive gleam in your mind’s eye, it can be hard—I mean, disappointing—to read such words.
However, they can be very much worth reading, because it can be just what you need to know.
A light bulb went on in my head.
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All I had to do to make the story publishable was take it apart completely, throw out most of the best passages, reinvent the entire structure of the plot, make a minor character into a major character, ignore previously-received advice about the need for a unitary protagonist, invent oodles of new plot developments, and rewrite the whole thing from the ground up.
That’s all that was needed. And, Gracious Reader, you must understand—on account of the two informative rejections, I could see how to do it, except for all the details I would have to make up as I went along.
It would be the work of a year or more. It was disheartening. I felt defeated.
But I was now a Literary Lion. The Lionhood membership card came to my rescue. Becausethis latest twist in the saga of my novel begged to be blogged. I wrote,
My two helpful rejectors had made me realize something: I had gotten so good at query letters and plot summaries that when professionals read my book, the manuscript did not fulfill the promise of the synopsis. . . .
I would love to believe that I wrote a terrific novel that these dolts simply aren’t discerning enough to appreciate. But I would be a fool to stand on my greatness and fail to hear what these astute individuals are telling me.
What was I to do? Upon reading my blog post, the great Christine DeSmet, book coach par excellence, sent me an email. I did not save her exact words, but they were to this effect: “You can do this, Larry. Don’t give up.”
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Being a Literary Lion, I confess, has its burdens; but there are great benefits as well. One of them is the opportunity to receive precious encouragement just when you need it.
I did not give up. I spent the year that it took to completely remake Freedom’s Purchase. Christine not only encouraged me, she helped me with many valuable insights about story, plot, and narrative methods. When I was done, I had a book that was at least 500 percent better than before, and a new title: The Maelstrom.
The first people I queried were the two publishers who had given me the informative rejections. I explained that although I sent them something before, the Maelstrom was a whole new book, and wouldn’t they like to read it?
One of them declined. The other, Daniel Willis of DX Varos Publishing, a traditional small press publisher in Denver, Colorado, said: “Send it.”
Dano read it, he bought it, he published it August 23, 2022. A year ago tomorrow. With a new title: Price of Passage.
We had a wonderful launch party for the book at Mystery to Me bookstore in Madison. Lots of hoopla among my friends and confidants.
The next day, I was once again just a struggling writer. Yes, a published author, with a book to sell. But the state of publishing today is that the author must do almost all the selling. While working on other literary output. And balance it all.
I already had another book—a middle-grade historical novel about my old short-story hero Izzy Mahler. Children’s books are not in Dano’s wheelhouse, so he declined the opportunity to look at it. I’m still trying to find an agent or editor who is interested.
Meanwhile, I’m working on another book. A World War II novel. That’s all I’ll say, because it’s not very far along.
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So here are some things that have been added to my Literary Lion duties:
Book fairs. On certain weekends, I pack up a box or two of Price of Passage copies and go someplace to pitch my sales canopy and hawk my book, one copy at a time, to interested readers. I sold seventeen copies last weekend to people in Middleton. New Glarus, Waunakee, and Verona are coming up.
Bookstore visits. Sometimes I just pop into a local independent bookstore and pitch Price of Passage to the owner or manager. They don’t always agree to stock it, but sometimes they do, and I’ve sold some copies that way.
Speeches. I’ve appeared at the Sun Prairie Public Library and a Norwegian-themed women’s book club called Gudrid Circle. I’m scheduled to speak September 30 in Stevens Point at the Central Wisconsin Book Festival. These speeches are also opportunities to sell books.
I’m still a member of a writers’ mutual-critique group—two of them, actually, one meeting monthly and the other biweekly. By default, I have become the convener/moderator for both of them. I guess because I’m a Literary Lion.
Recently, I added Substack.com as a venue where my blog appears, in addition to my own site at LarryFSommers.com. It’s an experiment. I don’t know if I’ll gain readers or not, but at least people who read my posts on Substack will have an easy way to sponsor my writing with a cash donation. We’ll see what happens.
I’m considering finally reading The Iliad and The Odyssey. In translation, of course. I need to understand heroes better.
There’s always something new and different in the life of a Literary Lion.
I’m pretty sure this is not how Shakespeare did it. Or Walt Whitman. Or Agatha Christie.
