One evening, ten or fifteen years ago, Peggy Joque Williams told me about les filles du roy—the King’s Daughters. “King” as in Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, who reigned from 1643 to 1715 and built the Palace of Versailles.
I remember our conversation vividly. A few of us ink-stained wretches used to meet for early dinner at the now-defunct Sunroom Café, up a long flight of stairs at 638 State Street in Madison, before the monthly meeting of the Wisconsin Screenwriters Forum in nearby Lowell Hall. The soups, wraps, and pastries were delicious, usually with a nice glass of wine on the side. Maybe those five-dollar glasses of wine were the reason they went out of business.
On this particular night, Peggy and I were the first to arrive, and over appetizers she shared her idea for a historical novel.
“The Daughters of the King,” she said, “were unattached young women of good character who went to New France—Quebec and Montreal—in the late 1600s at King Louis’s behest. The king paid for their passage and gave them dowries and trousseaux, on the condition they would marry one of the many single men in the colony. It was a plan to populate the French colonies in the New World.”
She went on to say that her own French-Canadian ancestors came down from one of more of the King’s Daughters. “Basically, they had their pick among the hardiest and most successful of the trappers, traders, farmers, and merchants who built French Canada.”
To me it sounded like a wonderful book—an adventure set among hunters and trappers, priests and soldiers, Frenchmen and indigenous tribespeople competing and cooperating for success in a rugged northwoods environment.
Fast-forward to 2024, and Peggy released her historical epic Courting the Sun: A Novel of Versailles. What? Versailles? Hall of Mirrors? What happened to the Canadian outback?
Because Peggy is my friend and I was excited for her new book release, I read it. It turns out she had to go through Versailles to get to Quebec. In Courting the Sun, her heroine, resourceful teenager Sylvienne d’Aubert, navigates the glittering, decadent world of Louis XIV’s royal court, rubbing shoulders with such historical characters as the actor/playwright Molière and the Marquise de Montespan, Louis’ official mistress.
“Williams’s sharp dialog, realistic characters, and rich descriptions of Bourbon court life keep you enthralled in ever-changing developments,” I wrote at the time. “The end of the story is more a beginning than an end, and one is left impatient to read the next chapter.”
Now, with Braving the Dawn, published in January 2026, Peggy delivers on that promise. And it was well worth the wait.
Women coming to Quebec in 1667, in order to be married to the French Canadian farmers. Painting by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945). Public Domain.
Sylvienne, now a bit older and a lot wiser, has been banished by the Sun King and arrives in Quebec among a shipload of filles du roy. Her own status is unclear. She meets, in quick succession, a protective order of nuns, a group of Native American girls, an amused militia captain, the governor-general of New France, the colony’s enigmatic administrator, and a notorious coureur du bois—a woods-runner—who trades in furs without a permit. Despite a plethora of woodsmen vying for her hand, she is resolved to avoid marriage. . . . Oh, did I mention she is concealing a pregnancy, a widowhood, and a secret lover?
There is plenty of plot to thicken in this tale of the French colonial frontier, and my friend Peggy handles it expertly. It’s useful to have read Courting the Sun first, because it adds depth to your understanding of Sylvienne and her motives—but it’s not really necessary. You can start with Braving the Dawn and find yourself caught up in an irresistible story. Either way, do yourself a favor and get into the compelling and accurate historical fiction of Peggy Joque Williams.
“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity.
Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.
You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship.
But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality.
It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.
I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.
Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows:
Lao Zi riding an ox. Painting by Zhang Lu (1464-1538). Public Domain.
The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.
The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . .
The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.
Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.”
But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.”
So that’s two.
The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.
And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.
Adoration of the Trinity, painting by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Father and Son upper center, with the Holy Spirit as a dove flying above them, and myriad beings surrounding them in adoration.
I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking.
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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined.
Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind.
When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism.
These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes.
We feel compelled to point out, in the best interests of the Reading Public, that Your New Favorite Author’s complete works are still available at their original cover prices:
In accordance with their ever-increasing value as actual, non-AI books written by a Living American Author whom you know, we were going to raise the prices by at least five dollars per book. However, we ran into the cruel ironies of the Third Book Business.
If we were McGraw-Hill, or Grosset & Dunlap, or one of the other titans of the old book industry of the last century, raising the price would be a no-brainer. The next time we did a print run of, say, 50,000 more copies, we’d naturally print a higher price on the covers. But in today’s book industry, books are printed one by one. That means we can change the cover any time we want,only we have to pay a special set-up charge any time we alter the image stored in the printer’s computer.
Forget it.
The only reason we mention this is because it means you can still buy these books at the same low price.
If you already own a copy of The Price of Passage and one of Izzy Strikes Gold!, thank you very much for your patronage. But if you have not yet purchased either or both of these books, what are you waiting for?
1853: Scandinavian immigrants ANDERS and MARIA meet DANIEL, a young slave fleeing brutal captivity. Will they do their legal duty by turning him in, or defy the laws of their new homeland and risk everything to help him gain freedom?
It’s an epic tale of America’s heartland, based on the author’s own Norwegian ancestors.
Order from HenschelHAUS Books, here, or use QR Code:
1957: Inquisitive 12-year-old IZZY squirms through a small-town childhood, helped and/or hindered by friends such as bombastic Andy Shore, bullying Lyle Haycock, bewitching Irma Ruger, and bewildering Mutt-mutt Corner.
Rooted in the author’s own 1950s boyhood, it’s a warm-hearted coming-of-age tale, suitable for young readers and their grandparents.
Includes discussion questions and a glossary of 1950s terms.
Order from HenschelHAUS Books, here, or use QR Code:
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Both books are certified by the Authors Guild to be free of artificial intelligence (AI) content.
That means, if you should happen to find any intelligence between the covers, you know who put it there.
My mother’s uncle, Harry Young, was the circulation manager of the Register-Mail, the daily newspaper of Galesburg, Illinois.
In those days, any city of 35,000, such as Galesburg, and many cities even smaller, had a daily paper—despite the cost and difficulty of printing the news every day.
There was no Internet. Computers were huge machines that took up whole rooms, and only rich corporations could afford one.
Glen Beck and Betty Snyder program the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in 1947 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. U.S. Army photo.
Almost everyone subscribed to the daily paper, giving it the ability to charge good rates for advertising space.
People got spot news from the radio, had done so for decades. Television was a new thing; most of the channels had an announcer behind a desk, reading news, for 15 minutes at six p.m. But to really get the news, you needed a broadsheet paper like the Register-Mail.
Did I mention, Dear Reader? It was made of paper!
Can you believe, kids used to have to deliver these things by hand? A stack of newspapers, photographed by Daniel R. Blume. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
They printed it fresh, with new contents, every day.
Reporters went out into the community, spoke with people, attended meetings, photographed events. Then they came back to the newspaper building—yes, newspapers had buildings—to a place called the newsroom, and pounded out their stories on manual typewriters, the kind with ink ribbons that were struck by metal bars with letters engraved on the end of them. Reporters and other typists had really strong fingers.
The stories rolled out as sheets of typewriter paper and were handed off to copy boys, who carried them to the copy desk, where an editor corrected errors with a blue pencil. Then it was off to the composition room, where skilled eyes and fingers, working from the edited copy, formed a body of type, one line at a time, out of molten lead.
Sheep on a ranch in Tierra del Fuego, photographed no doubt from the south. Antonio Quintana (book author and copyright holder is Fernando Duran) – Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, 1893-1943.
Sometimes there was blank space left over at the bottom of a column. You couldn’t just press a button to adjust the spacing, so instead you inserted a filler—something like, “Patagonian sheep bear wool only on the southern side” or “Bituminous coal sales increased last year to 370,000 metric tons.”
Through a series of arcane steps, all of these story-bearing type elements came together on a printing press, which impressed the type lines in black ink on long rolls of paper. The newspaper’s large pages—six to eight columns wide—were cut, folded, assembled into a compact publication, and stacked in bundles of fifty or one hundred.
At this point, Uncle Harry’s people—squads of paperboys and girls plus a few adult drivers for newsstands and rural deliveries—carried the newspapers to the reading public, in time to be read before supper. After supper, they were used to wrap the garbage.
Lots of other people were involved besides those already mentioned—clerks, librarians, stenographers, mechanics, pressmen, and part-time reporters called stringers. A typical small-city daily might give full-time work to dozens of people, and part-time earnings to many more.
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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha lived in a small, tidy brick bungalow on West Grove Street. It’s still there, decades later—or at least it was the last time Google drove by.
The Youngs’ house on Grove Street. Google Earth image.
Uncle Harry’s job was a day job, but it didn’t end when he left the Register-Mail building in the afternoon. Sometimes a subscribing household was skipped from the delivery. When they called the newspaper office around suppertime to complain, the call was forwarded to Uncle Harry’s home phone. He always had an extra copy or two in the car. Either before or after supper, he would drive out and make the delivery himself. This was a routine part of his otherwise managerial job.
Uncle Harry wore a suit and tie to work and wing-tip shoes that he kept highly polished. He made good money and supported himself and Aunt Bertha well. They had no children but lavished attention on their nieces and nephews.
They belonged to the Lake Bracken Country Club. Not for golf; they didn’t golf. But they loved to fish and spent many fine summer evenings fishing Lake Bracken, either from a boat or from the shore. They ate what they caught.
Uncle Harry broke his leg one time by stepping in a hole at Lake Bracken while carrying a load of fishing gear. Took him a long time to mend, since he was getting older.
He worked at the Register-Mail until he was too sick to work anymore. He died in his sixties from complications of emphysema, having been a lifelong smoker. Aunt Bertha—a happy, sweet woman who was a favorite of all the nieces and nephews—was devastated. She died soon after, of a broken heart.
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Uncle Harry and Aunt Bertha.
In balmier days, we enjoyed their company. My sister and I were great-niece and great-nephew to them. Uncle Harry had a wry sense of humor and always delivered a laugh line at family gatherings. Aunt Bertha did not work outside the home, and her household chores were not onerous, so she often piled us into her Ford Victoria and took us swimming at Lake Bracken.
There was a large clubhouse that overlooked the swimming beach. The lower story was given over to locker rooms and showers for swimmers. The upper story had a dining room for evening events and a daytime snack bar just off the dining room. It was a swell place, but it burned down years ago and was never replaced. Lake Bracken these days is mostly a golf course and a suburban community. I think there is a small clubhouse there, away from the lakeshore—a nineteeth-hole kind of place.
Times change.
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These days, journals of paper still exist, but they are less relied on. The Register-Mail still delivers a print version six days a week “for a retro feel when consuming the news.” (For example, if you’re a very old person.) But don’t worry—the print subscription includes the eNewspaper as well.
King Harald Bluetooth, right, is baptized by Poppo the monk, around 960 AD, in a relief dated around 1200. Photograph by Anagoria, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Today we have something called a news cycle, and it is 24/7/365. People pick up information on the fly—through their TV, their laptop, their tablet, their phone. By something called Bluetooth.
Bluetooth used to be an embarrassing dental condition. After that, it was the name of Norway’s king. Now, it’s a window to the world.
There’s no longer any need to touch a smeary piece of paper. You can have your content beamed straight into your head. Nobody needs linotype operators anymore. Nobody needs pressmen.
And, frankly, why bother to pay an editor? Fact-checkers? Reporters? Nah.
Even mere rewrite men are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence.
More and more, our window to the world is filtered by something people trust precisely because they mistrust their own intelligence.
Uncle Harry might not have a job in today’s world. Aunt Bertha might have to go to work, perhaps as a barrista, and would certainly not have time to take anybody swimming. But that’s okay, because the swimming beach is closed anyhow.
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Look at all we’ve gained.
Until next time, Dear Reader, blessings be upon you.
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.
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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.
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.
In August 1938, the musical von Trapp Family of Salzburg packed suitcases, walked out their back gate, crossed the lane to the railroad station, and caught the first train to Italy.
Movie poster for The Sound of Music. Fair use.
“NO, WAIT! You’ve got that all wrong, O New Favorite Writer. Everybody knows they slipped out of a performance, donned knapsacks, and hiked across the Alps to Switzerland.”
Au contraire, Gentle Reader. What Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and their adorable kids did in The Sound of Music would have required a mountain trek of 200 miles or more. Absurd, when there were trains every day from Salzburg to Italy—a place where, incidentally, they were already citizens.
And oh, by the way: Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp’s second wife, Maria (think Julie Andrews), did not teach his children the elements of song (“Do—a deer, a female deer; Re—a drop of golden sun; Mi—a name I call myself . . .”). The whole family were already accomplished singers and instrumentalists when she came into the household as teacher to von Trapp’s third child, who had been sick.
And oh, by the way: The eldest Trapp child was not Liesl, but Rupert. And the next eldest Trapp child, the eldest daughter, was still not Liesl, but rather, Agathe. (None of them were Liesl, but it’s a nice, German-sounding name.)
1940 photo of Baroness Marie von Trapp (front) and five of her ten singing children (back row, left to right) Agatha, Hedwig and Johanna; (center, left to right) Marie and Martina. Photo by C.M. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.
Agathe von Trapp is the one who, still clear-minded and articulate at the age of ninety, published a 2003 memoir titled Memories Before and After The Sound of Music—a book Your New Favorite Writer has just finished reading.
The real story of the von Trapps lacks the surefire dramatic contours of The Sound of Music, but it’s compelling, charming, and inspiring in a different way. I found it a fascinating read, mainly because it’s a clear glimpse of a bygone world.
Agathe von Trapp was born into the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an entity that ceased to exist five years after her birth, when World War I ended. Her father had been an officer in the Austrian navy, which was no longer needed when Austria gave up its Dalmatian seacoast in the Treaty of Versailles.
Georg von Trapp lost his naval commission (demise of empire), most of his money (postwar financial crisis), and his wife, Agatha Whitehead (scarlet fever). When the new teacher, Maria Augusta Kutschera, came on the scene, the family needed a way to survive—and music became the answer.
The Trapp Family Singers sang themselves into Europe-wide demand in the few years before Hitler took over Austria. At that fateful moment, they had just received an invitation to undertake a coast-to-coast concert tour in the United States. Austria’s borders were about to be closed by the Nazis. Georg von Trapp was from Istria on the Balkan peninsula, a part of Austria which went to Italy in the postwar realignment, so the family had automatically become Italian citizens and received Italian passports. They just caught a train and got out of town.
Next season, they toured the United States and were warmly received everywhere. Coming to rest in Vermont, they built a resort hotel where music lovers could visit them in the summer, between touring seasons. After a few years, the children recognized they had to go their own separate ways, following individual dreams. But their family’s success during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had come from pulling together, intelligently and with love, acting together as a unit.
It was a delightful read, informed by Agathe’s accurate memory and illustrated by her own line drawings of important places and scenes. Like all the von Trapps, Agathe was a person of many talents. Her story, really the story of her family’s navigation from the Hapsburg Empire to modern times, is inherently worth a read.
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A whole different thing is what we get from And There I Stood With My Piccolo—one of three memoirs penned by the late Meredith Willson, floutist, bandleader, composer, and storyteller extraordinaire.
Publicity for the movie version of The Music Man. Fair use.
If you don’t know Meredith Willson, he is the fellow who created every bit of The Music Man, one of the great musical shows in Broadway history. He followed up The Music Man with another pretty good musical called The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But everybody would say The Music Man is his chef-d’oeuvre.
Some time ago, I read his memoir But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, in which he told the story of how The Music Man came to be created and produced. It was truly entertaining, but it left me with the feeling that somehow this corn-fed Iowa musician magically appeared on Broadway one day with the perfect musical show about musicians in Iowa.
This book tells the rest of the story. It was originally published in 1948, nine years beforeThe Music Man opened on Broadway. When Willson wrote this memoir he had not yet accomplished, nor even fairly begun, his life’s major work. But it shows that he did not come out of nowhere.
Meredith Willson in 1961. Public Domain.
“New York talk was a heck of a shock to me,” he says. Maybe that’s because, having lived his whole adult life in New York and California, he still talked like an Iowa boy. Or at least, he wrote like one.
This memoir builds on a big contradiction: A man who couldn’t wait to get out of Mason City and conquer the musical world of New York writes most eloquently and passionately about the sounds, sights, and memories of his boyhood in Iowa. Despite having spent decades hobnobbing with the glitterati of the show-biz world, and despite his obvious pride at having become one of them, he achieved his life’s masterwork by bringing Mason City to a New York stage.
He was born in 1902—eleven years before Agathe von Trapp was born in Austria! He wound up chronicling that innocent period before the Great War which was known, even in America, by French names like fin-de-siècle or Belle Epoque. In Iowa the Belle Epoque looked like farm boys smoking corn silk behind the barn. In this work we get a fair amount of very particular boyhood reminiscence.
But we get something else: We get a flying tour of the period between about 1920 and 1950—roughly the same between-the-wars era that Agathe von Trapp describes in the European context.
Willson’s life in these decades reads like it’s lifted from the pages of Variety. He clearly delights in dropping names. His recollections, interspersed with homespun Iowa philosophy, are mostly anecdotes involving famous musicians and other entertainers with whom Willson had business and personal relationships.
Meredith Willson in 1937. Public Domain.
To someone like Your New Favorite Writer, this book was a treasurehouse of innocent merriment. To you, Dear Reader, I would say it depends on your era and your historical interests.
Here is a sample of the people mentioned in this slim book, most of whom Willson knew personally: Eugene Ormandy, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, George Jessel, Chauncey DePew, Lee DeForest, Walter Damrosch, Arturo Toscanini, Nelson Eddy, Phil Harris, Ted Fio Rito, Horace Heidt, Anson Weeks, Kay Kyser, Carlton Morse, Bill Goodwin, Xavier Cugat, Ralph Edwards, Mel Blanc, Amos ’n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Mortimer Snerd, Stoopnagle and Budd, Gene Autry, Ferde Grofé, Pinky Lee, Jerry Lester, Pierre Monteux, Herb Caen, Lanny Ross, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Haley, Warren Hull, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Robert Montgomery, Norma Shearer, Ed Gardner, Darryl Zanuck, George Kaufman, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, Frank Morgan, Fannie Brice, Robert Young, Fred Waring, Adolph Zukor, Frank Sinatra, Ken Carpenter, Harold Lloyd, Ray Noble, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.
My point is: If half or more of these names ring a bell for you, then you’ll probably enjoy this chatty little book as much as I did. If not, you may still enjoy it—but you’ve got a lot of Googling ahead of you.
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Why do I combine these two books, one by Agathe von Trapp and one by Meredith Willson, in the same post? For one thing, I read them back-to-back. For another thing: They are scintillating memoirs by two people living through the same period of history—one in Old School Europe, the other in brash young America.
Both of them shed light not only on their own lives and doings, but on the whole milieu in which they lived—the fleeting years between the First World War and the advent of television. They were interesting years, “lost” years in some ways. They were mostly before my time, but I happen to like reading about them.
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE REST OF YOU. I AM STRUGGLING WITH WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD. ANY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT?”
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Yes, Kimberly, try these:
God is not finished with us yet.
It’s easy to get discouraged when we are fed a constant stream of the most outlandish and outrageous things happening somewhere, anywhere, in our tired old world.
But everything that’s happening now has happened before, over and over again.
There was a gag in the Fifties that went like this:
They told me, “Cheer up, things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough . . . things got worse!
In times like these, I feather my own nest; I tend to my knitting; I weed my garden. These are all metaphors, Kimberly. I don’t actually do those particular activities.
The point is, I show up every day. I take people one by one. I try to respond to their needs as I can discern them—especially each person’s need to be treated with dignity and respect.
I hear folks’ concerns, but when those concerns are political—usually informed by media reports of matters far from our daily lives—I safeguard them in File 13 and redirect the conversation.
An old Chinese poem, perhaps the oldest extant Chinese poem, says:
I focus on the here-and-now and on my own responses, which ultimately are the only things within my control. Yes, I can control my own thoughts, words, and deeds.
Some may think me cold-blooded, but I simply do not get urges of the heart that compel me to act out of character. My heart, if I have one, is not that kind of heart.
Calm, philosophical detachment may be impossible if you have another kind of heart. If so, all I can say is you are in for a lot of woe that I have managed to avoid over the past eighty years.
Despite my distance from the flames of passion—or because of it—I am active, upbeat, and productive in my actual life. I meet each day with a certain zest, untroubled by a whole world of troubles, confident the sun will rise again tomorrow.
In a recent workshop, novelist Barbara M. Britton said, “What are your three favorite movies? What do they have in common? Those are apt to be the themes and topics you hold dearest as a writer.”
In the last analysis, It’s a Wonderful Life is all about home and family. Public Domain photo.
That impressed me, because it’s true.
How does it apply to Your New Favorite Writer? My three all-time favorites are sentimental Christmas movies.
I like many kinds of films. I’m tickled by screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or The Gods Must Be Crazy. I like great political satires such as Romanov and Juliet, Dr. Strangelove, or The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. I’m bolstered by writing, directing, and acting brilliance as displayed in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, or any film by the late, great Hitchcock.
But the three I would choose to answer Barbara’s question are: Meet Me In St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life, and We’re No Angels. The first is a cozy domestic drama, the second a stark morality play with an Everyman hero, and the third a blackish comedy in which the stock villain gets a hilarious comeuppance.
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So, what do these three flicks have in common? And what does that say about the subject matters and themes in my own writing?
“Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Judy Garland comforts Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis. Screen grab, fair use.
These films are old. Meet Me In St. Louis came out in 1944, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, and We’re No Angels in 1955. I like people and things that are my age. This backwards look is my brand, if I have a brand. The fiction I write tends to be historical. Most of the posts here relate, one way or another, to times past. I like to explore the days of yore because I think that all treasures worth having, all the secrets of life, reside there.
Why Christmas movies, in particular? I happen to be a Christian and attach theological meaning to Christmas. To me, it seems Christmas is when our Creator showed how much he cares for us by taking on all the burdens of our creaturehood. The birth of Jesus is the event that starts the reconciliation of God and man. That theme strikes a deep chord in my heart.
In these films, the characters—ordinary folks like you and me, not rich and powerful people—have their lives, their homes, and their families restored to how they should be. In a deep sense, this is a kind of homecoming.
One of the chief plot lines of literature is that of someone returning home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, E.T., Dorothy Gale—all are bound on homeward journeys. In the films I love most, the characters have not necessarily left home, but their homes are threatening to leave them.
The Smith family of St. Louis, the Baileys of Bedford Falls, and the Ducotel family in the French Caribbean colony of Cayenne all face crises in which their homes are about to disappear, leaving them suspended, as memoirist Dinty W. Moore might say, “between panic and desire.”
The purpose of the plot is to break open a new dispensation, a new state of affairs in which the characters can find their way home. A path is opened. In each case, this shifting paradigm of reality comes as a mental transformation.
Three of Santa’s helpers drop in on a distraught family, just in time for Christmas. Aldo Ray, Humphrey Bogare, and Peter Ustinov in We’re No Angels. Fair use.
In St. Louis, Alonzo Smith suddenly realizes that success is not counted in dollars or prestige, but in his family’s happiness. In Bedford Falls, George Bailey is awakened, through Divine Intervention, to the fact that all these years he has not been wasting his time in meaningless sacrifice but investing in the currency of abiding love. In Cayenne, the inward epiphany comes not to the family whose home is saved but to the trio of criminals who enact that salvation. It doesn’t seem to matter who has the revelation, as long as the audience gets to experience it.
So I guess the cat is out of the bag. I like stories that bring people home, bring them in from the cold, reunite families, and restore harmony in local communities.
In The Price of Passage, I wrote about people displaced from their homes—Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves. They prove Thomas Wolfe’s assertion that you can’t go home again. They are called to rise above their loss of home and create new spaces where they and their offspring will eventually find their harbor.
In Izzy Strikes Gold!, I focused on a 12-year-old boy being jolted from his comfort zone by family circumstances. Will Izzy have to leave home? If so, will he find a new home? Those are the dramatic questions addressed.
My current manuscript follows two brothers who can’t coexist at home with each other; their mutual resentment is too great. War intervenes and poses the question whether the brothers will ever be able to find each other again and re-establish their family relationship. I don’t know that answer because I haven’t read the book yet.
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What is the point of all this rumination? Simply to help me find and become more aware of the central themes in my writing. Ideas that reside close to the writer’s heart make for authenticity in his voice. So these are the kinds of things a guy likes to know.
See you next week, Dear Reader, when it will be about Something Completely Different.
Visit of the Wise Men, from an 1894 Sunday School lesson, by lithographers Harris, Jones & Co. of Providence. Public Domain.
Tomorrow will be Christmas Eve. On Thursday morning, as Santa’s sleighbells jingle away to the North, the Big Day itself will arrive.
This will be my eightieth Christmas on Earth.
The first few of those eighty are lost in the mists of time, permanently and perpetually outside my experience. But I recall clearly the next several after that. I remember times of gathering and feasts of togetherness.
After the workday—most folks used to put in a whole day on December 24—Mom and Dad piled us into the car and we drove in darkness over the hundred miles from the city of Streator to the little town of Knoxville on the Illinois prairie, to gather with family.
1936 Plymouth, from an old postcard. Fair use.
The car was a 1936 Plymouth or a 1939 Chevrolet—both of them relics from an old-time gangster movie—or, later, our first modern car, a 1954 Plymouth. I sat in the back seat with my sister Cynda. We all four sang Christmas carols all the way down the road. Over the river—both Illinois and Spoon—and near some woods but mostly through plateaus of snow-dusted corn stubble, to Grandmother’s house we went.
It was all about gathering. Being together.
The “-gether” part of “together” is really the same word as “gather.” From Old English gaderian, meaning to unite or join.
We gathered together with Grandma and Grandpa, with Uncle Dick and Aunt Jane and Cousin Rick, with Uncle Garrett and Aunt Edith and Cousins Steve and Betsy, with Aunt Jo and Uncle Earl, with Aunt Jean and her boyfriend Richard Henderson, with Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda; with Grandma’s sister Aunt Bertha and her husband Uncle Harry Young; with Dad’s parents, my Grandma and Grandpa Sommers, who had no other children left in the Midwest and so joined the LaFollette mélange; and sometimes we would even see Grandma LaFollette’s brother Uncle Roy Dredge and his wife, Aunt Eva.
Eighteen of us including the unpictured photographer, who is probably Aunt Bertha, plus General George C. Marshall on the cover of Life to prove it’s Christmas 1950. Your New Favorite Writer is the boy at lower left, chin on hands.
That made twenty to twenty-five of us all celebrating Christmas in Grandma’s house. Gathered. Together. And the best part was: we all knew each other. We knew one another very well. We were kin. There’s hardly a better way of understanding love than gathering at Christmas.
“Fear not,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; even every one that is called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him.”
It’s a grand vision of gathering together, members of one tribe, one kindred.
That’s what we did on those long-ago Christmases. Our tribe came together, at least those of us who could. We came from east and west and north and south and called one another by name.
I did not know this fact at the time, but I know it now: It was not the toys that mattered most, nor the turkey and dressing and pie and cake. It was the coming together of the people. The spindly tree, illuminated by strings of gaudy colored lights over which Uncle Dick and Uncle Garrett and Uncle Earl had slaved for hours on the living room floor getting all the bulbs to light up at once, was the totem pole, the magnet that gathered the kin.
Rice pudding with lingonberries. Fair use.
In my wife’s family it was much the same, only with a Swedish accent, because her mother’s folk were all Swedes, first- and second-generation Swedish Americans. So they had warm glögg with almonds and raisins in the bottoms of the cups; rice pudding with lingonberries; meatballs and gravy; limpa rye bread and dopp-i-gryta, the dipping of bread in fatty broth. But mostly with them, it was the people coming together, even if they were all Swedes except my wife’s father, who was Norsk.
The decades bring forth change. Families are smaller now. Folks tend to be more spread out, east and west, north and south. In our house this Christmas we will have Jo and me, my sister Cynda and her husband Steve, our daughter Katie and her children Elsie and Tristan (teenagers!). Plus Katie’s friend Valerie. Eight, all told. Still, it’s a coming together, a gathering.
Most of us will attend our church’s Christmas Eve service. It’s a Congregational church, meaning the local congregation governs itself autonomously. Such a church is said to be a gathered church, that is, one formed by a process of kindred souls simply gathering together. And indeed it’s more like a family than like a formal institution. We’ll read the Scriptures and sing the carols and burn up a few candles in the process. But the main thing is, we’ll gather together.
We have within us the seeds of hate and the seeds of love. When we gather together around the Christmas tree or the communion table, we nurture the seeds of love and starve the other ones.
Two greatly different realities are available to us in this world. I prefer the gathered one.
May you gather this season with whomever you have to gather with. And treasure the time, the place, and the gathering. It’s the best Christmas gift.
