Dear Reader: This is a reposting of a reflection originally posted June 20, 2020. It is as timely now as it was then. In fact, “timeless” would be a better word. Hope you enjoy it.
“Desiderata” is Latin for “things desired.” Often in difficult times, the thing we most desire is peace.
Max Ehrmann. Fair use.
The prolific, inspirational writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana, penned a prose poem that was published as “Desiderata” in 1948. It is the only one of his works to achieve enduring fame, and that only after his death.
For its tone and diction, and because it once appeared in a church publication with the legend, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692,” it is often assumed to be ancient, maybe even Scriptural in origin. “1692,” however, meant the date of the church’s founding, not of the poem’s writing.
Inspiration
“Desiderata” is neither Biblical nor liturgical nor even very old. But, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, it stakes a claim to an authenticity of its own. It swept the nation in 1971, when a voice artist named Les Crane released it as a spoken word recording. That was at the height of our nation’s internal turmoil over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. The serene, contemplative tone of the piece may have boosted its popularity.
Today we are again in a time of stress and conflict. Perhaps Mr. Ehrmann’s poem will be of some use to you. At least, it constitutes good advice.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Love . . . is as perennial as the grass. Photo by Мария Волк on Unsplash.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
The life of a Literary Lion is like that of the Spinning Plate Man who used to captivate me from time to time on The Ed Sullivan Show or other TV venues.
Maybe you’ve seen this act, or some version of it: A guy sets dinner plates to spinning on willow rods mounted on a table. Just as he gets them all going, one of the plates loses momentum and starts to wobble, so he has to run over and rev it up again by wiggling the rod. By the time he does that, another plate is about to fall. He dashes hither and yon, frantic to keep all the plates a-spin.
The Payoff, the ultimate satisfaction of our intolerable suspense, is when a plate shatters on the stage floor. Even then, Our Hero is not licked. He takes out a fresh plate and gets it started just before zooming to the far end of the table to keep another from falling. He is the poster boy for dogged perseverance in the face of momentous odds.
And so is the serious writer.
You must always be working on your new first draft. But you must also critique somebody else’s work; you must post your blog; you must polish a one-page synopsis to summarize your whole book for marketing purposes; you must go to a conference; you must get feedback on your first draft and make revisions; you must go to a craft fair and sell books.
You dash here and dash there and keep everything going at once.
But, sometimes, a plate crashes. That’s what happened at this address last week, Dear Reader.
I failed to post a new blog, so you saw the same post two weeks in a row.
Here is my mea culpa: I had a medical event the week before.
On Thursday afternoon, March 19, while working on Major Important Literary Things, I was suddenly swamped by dizziness, lost consciousness, and fell from my chair to the floor.
Aside from a goose egg on my forehead, I was unharmed. But Google told me to go to the Emergency Room, so I went. They did an EKG, a CAT scan, some stat blood work, and the usual neurological tests but found nothing amiss.
That in itself was unsettling. Something must have caused this event. So they scheduled some followup tests.
As a result, my life these days is punctuated with trips to high-class medical facilities for different kinds of cardiac monitoring. Also, my wife or a friend must chauffeur me everywhere—because, what if the same thing happened again, while I was driving?
The results trickle in, day by day, and pool around my feet. Yet so far, no doctor has put them together into a specific diagnosis. That kind of gnosis is hoped for in the near future.
MEANWHILE, Gentle Reader, life goes on. I heard from my highly-trusted advisor, the stellar Christine DeSmet, that she likes my new first draft (working title: Hard Feelings). It’s good that she agrees with me about that. I had hoped she would. It means there are only half a million small improvements that need to be made. You should see it in print in a year or two.
And here, somewhat late, is a new post—flogging this lame excuse, which is all I’ve got in my bag right now. I’ll try to have something better next week, Fair Reader.
Meanwhile, prayers and all good wishes gratefully accepted.
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.
Those Germans. They always know what they’re talking about, even if nobody else does.
Those Germans. Carl Burckardt, Die jungen Deutschen. Public Domain.
From the language that brought you Weltschmerz, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit, and Fahrvergnügen, comes our old friend, Schadenfreude—taking pleasure at the misfortunes of others.
Volksvagen’s “Fahrvergnügen” ad. Fair use.
Right now, however, I’m focused on loyalty, and I’d like to commission the German language, if possible, to give us a word meaning nostalgia for the old loyalties of yore, now lost in our benighted era.
In May 2024 Your New Favorite Writer posted a piece, “A Time Travelogue,” and a man wrote this week to thank me for it.
The original post was a visit to the now-distant past, to the time when I was a boy in Streator, Illinois. I happened to mention “the Onized Club”; my correspondent happened to be Googling last week for “Onized.” That was, as investigators say on TV, the nexus.
Onized jacket. Fair use.
The Onized Club was a company-sponsored club for the thousands who worked for Owens-Illinois Glass Company and their families. Owens was far the largest employer in Streator. The word “onized” was a transform of the words “Owens-Illinois” and “organized.” By going to work for Owens you became onized. People were proud of this club, which gave them various benefits—especially, wearing spiffy “Onized” fan gear around town.
It was a company town. During the years when glass jars and bottles were being displaced for many uses by cheaper plastic or coated-paper containers, every quart of milk sold in Streator carried the legend: “See What You Buy—Buy in Glass!” Those who were onized naturally wanted to keep their high-paying jobs. They were grateful to the company. They were glad to be in the club.
The man who wrote me had been commissioned to do a project of some kind for the Streator Onized Credit Union. Puzzled by the term “onized,” he Googled it to find out what it meant and, voilà! found my blog post, which enlightened him on the origin of the term.
BUT HERE’S THE TWIST: As he continued reading, he “became nostalgic for a time I never knew when the richest among us funded the public good. A time when companies cared about their employees enough to spin up a credit union to make sure they had access to banking. A time when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways. . . . [Y]our article reminded me of what life could be like and for a moment, I was there – imagining I was Onized and cheering for my team.”
Aw, gosh—now I’m all choked up.
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But wait a minute, Dear Reader. Hold your horses.
My new friend seems nostalgic for a time he never knew, “when employees had an actual reason to be loyal because the respect went both ways.” Hence the need for a new German word. Perhaps Loyalitätsnostalgie—nostalgia for (an era of) loyalty.
The thing is: I have lived in both eras, and I’m not sure they’re all that different.
Don’t get me wrong. I venerate the ’50s and ’60s as a wonderful time—a golden era, with all sorts of good things that have been abandoned in our heedless rush for modernity. (Or, these days, postmodernity.)
But that’s partly because memory dwells on the good stuff. At least, my memory does.
A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. One remains useful; the other, not so much. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.
We all look back to the early years of our lives as the standard against which we measure all things. That’s why old duffers who have not touched an M-16 rifle or used a P-38 can opener in sixty years wear baseball caps with patches representing their old units and blubber unashamed tears when they meet fellow vets. It’s not because the service was so wonderful—it often wasn’t—but it was the capstone or climax to the early years of a person’s life, the passageway to adulthood. Often enough, as adults, we look backward to the more exciting and heady days of youth.
So what about it, Gentle Reader? Has the two-way tug of loyalty between employer and employee gone the way of the Great Auk? Does it live only in the past?
I don’t think so. To begin with, it’s not clear that all rich people, or all large corporations (the two categories are not identical) were stalwart stewards of the public good in old times. Second, for every splashy billionaire we see in today’s media behaving like an ass, there is a quieter billionaire out in the hinterlands working patiently for a better world. We have a good example right here in Wisconsin: Judith Faulkner, creator and sole owner of Epic Systems, Inc.—who, besides having invented a very beneficial medical software, is methodically working to give away 99 percent of her net worth to worthy causes during her lifetime. There must be many other examples.
I know there are a lot of lesser companies in small towns across the nation, delivering great goods and services with workforces who are proud of what they are doing and of the company in whose employ they do it.
Loyalty will always be with us. It’s the glue that holds our society together. It works so well because it is a two-way street. Smart bosses go to extraordinary lengths to get and keep good employees, and those employees work not only for their bosses but for their communities.
Relationships of mutual loyalty not only abound in the business world, they also make schools, churches, libraries, hospitals, and all kinds of nonprofits work.
Those who do not live within a web of loyal relationships would be well advised to keep seeking. Such relationships are out there for the having. When you find an employer, a partner, or an institution worth giving your loyalty to, make sure you respond in kind.
Then you’ll truly know the joys of Beziehungsglück (relationship happiness).
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.
