Travels with Charley

Back in 1960, John Steinbeck took off on a trip around the country. He had not traversed America since the days of The Grapes of Wrath, and he wished to reacquaint himself with it, to find out what the people were like and how life was led. He got himself a truck (this is before the days of the RV) specially built with a camper top and every accoutrement then imaginable. He dubbed it Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse. He also took with him one lone companion, an aging blue standard poodle who could say “Ftt” named Charley.

His plan was to see the country at its circumference, starting off from his home on Long Island, proceeding northward to Maine and then westward across the northernmost tier of states to California. He would then return to New York via the desert Southwest and Texas and the Deep South. He tried as best he could to avoid the then-still-sprouting superhighways and kept to what we now call surface streets, even though the only streets you find that aren’t on the surface are called tunnels.

What’s important about this book, however, is not the trip itself or his itinerary. It is in the people he finds and his impressions of life in the modern America of 1960. He encounters, again and again, mobile homes and packaged foods and a style of living that he takes to be closer to existing than being. He constantly compares what was with what is and finds the new cleaner, more sterile, and lacking in flavor. When talking about the expedition of Lewis and Clark or that of a 16th Century Spanish explorer called Narvaez, he’s moved to exclaim, “There were men in those days.” He meets many people, few of whom are satisfied with their lives, most of whom have plans for a better time, an easier life, a smarter way.

All of these ruminations stop, however, once he leaves Texas and goes to New Orleans. Suddenly, in part four, it seems as though we are reading an entirely different book about a different place. Nothing is settled and bland.

He reaches New Orleans, a city he knows and loves, during a time when its schools are being forcibly desegregated. There are protests on the steps of the first elementary school to mix whites with blacks, and Steinbeck goes to see it and the performance of a group of ladies who have attained a measure of celebrity for themselves courtesy of their own gifts for hatred. They are known as the Cheerleaders. He gives a blow-by-blow description of the protest, including a description that moves me to tears to think of it:

Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. the little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.

The Cheerleaders spew profanities at the girl and at the white father and son who follow her delegation, and the crowd yelps its approval.

Despite the temptation, Steinbeck does not descend into lecture. He reports what he sees and reports the conversations he has with Southerners both white and black concerning the progress of civil rights. He understand the fear that rises from change and understands that correcting such a long-held wrong will have consequences for all involved.

Now that I write that, I see that the book as a whole is about fear and change, among other things. It is about a people who are adjusting to a society that is no longer simple and direct, but complicated and ever-changing. The solid ground beneath them turned to shifting sands, and they struggled to find their balance through improvisation and luck.

This is a brilliant book and a simple one. I have read it before and I shall read it again. Like another book of that era, To Kill a Mockingbird, I carrying it around inside me in little shards and pieces.

The America that John Steinbeck sought is not the America of today, but it is its forebear. To read Travels with Charley is to become acquainted with that world and, by doing so, to become acquainted with our own.

A Blessing on the Moon

Joseph Skibell’s 1997 novel, A Blessing on the Moon, is an allegorical tale of spiritual and religious rediscovery as experience by a Polish Jew who is murdered by the Nazis early in World War II. The book opens with Chaim Skibelski (a historic person; Skibell is his grandson) standing before an open pit with the other Jews from his town. German soldiers stand behind them and mow them down, one-by-one. Skibelski feels something at the back of his head and falls into the pit. He is still aware, though, and, in a panic, clambers out of the pit and runs back toward the town.

Chaim is, of course, dead, but he does not realize this at first. The book is the story of his life after death and the disappearance of the moon.

The plot covers 50 years, although much of that time is elided because Chaim no longer has a sense of time. He still feels, though, both physically and emotionally, and his body in death retains its wounds. He can see himself and can interact with the living world, although only the occasional living person–a drunken man and, more importantly, a tubercular girl–can see him. He goes through a variety of experiences, first with the dying girl, and then with her family and others in the town, before starting on a long march with the other Holocaust victims from his town. Chaim’s journey, of course, is allegorical, and parallels the development of Jewish spirituality in the shadow of the Holocaust.

The book is well written and poetic with dashes of humor. I’m not normally one to read books that deal with the supernatural, but I finished A Blessing on the Moon easily.

(Disclosure: Joseph Skibell teaches creative writing in the English Department at Emory University, where I work.)

(Mea Culpa:  I did something this morning to cause Herman’s post to disappear.  My bad.  Many apologies, Herman: ed.)

And the Pulitzer Goes to…

Among others, Emory University professor and poet, Natasha Tretheway.  This is someone I’ve actually spoken to.  I’ve sorted her mail.  And she just won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poetry, Native Guard.  Nice lady.  Great prize.  Congratulations!

Support Michael Drayton, Detective Guy

The first chapter of my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, is up on the First Chapters Writing Contest pages on Gather.com. Anyone who is interested is welcome to read the first chapters of manuscripts and rate them. You just have to sign up for a gather.com membership, which is free. Decisions concerning the first round will be announced on April 3rd.

My advice to one and all is to vote your heart if you vote at all. I’m not going to check either my ratings or any comments, since the possibility of being terribly hurt far outweighs the chance that I won’t.

The guidelines for voting read as follows:

All members who vote in the Competition as well as the Grand Prize judging panel must consider the following criteria equally when judging: 1) Quality of writing (including grammar and spelling); 2) Author’s ability to engage the reader; 3) Originality of the author’s voice; 4) Potential of the finished book in the marketplace.

I think my story scores well on all four counts, but you can never tell how these things will work out.

Anyway, if you’re interested, go take a look. You don’t have to be a member to just read, only vote, so why not go and see what you think. It might turn out to be worth your while.

1776

A head of state named George goes before his legislature to ask for authorization to send troops from the most powerful nation on earth to deal with insurgents fighting thousands of miles away. No, this isn’t the beginning of Bob Woodward’s latest book or Harrison Ford’s next movie, it is the starting point for 1776, David McCullough’s wonderful telling of the struggles faced by George Washington, his staff, and soldiers during that momentous year.

Like most Americans, my knowledge of the Revolutionary War is dismal, filled with hazy fragments leftover from a clutch of unreliable sources. (Not including history classes. I can’t remember a single one that got past Lexington and Concord and “The Shot Heard Round the World.”) Reading 1776 was a pleasure for many reasons, not least of which was that I could feel that I was finally righting an old wrong and was getting a bit more of our founding conflict into my aging brain.

This book is eminently readable, and McCullough’s distinctive voice rises from the page in the same stately, measured tones he uses as the narrator of Ken Burns’s Civil War and several of the films offered on The American Experience. The approach is balanced, with the perspectives of the British and the Loyalists presented as well as those of the rebels. We see Washington most as he learns through trial and a great deal of error how to command an army and fight an enemy that is better trained, equipped, and supplied than his ever will be.

He starts out with an unexpected victory in the siege of Boston and then endures a series of defeats in and around New York, being outflanked and outgeneraled the whole way. A series of retreats leaves the remnants of the Continental Army on the far side of the Delaware River across from Trenton licking their wounds while the British prepare for winter quarters and a renewal of their offensive in the spring.

The story is well told, and I learned more about Nathaniel Greene (who haled from my family’s hometown of East Greenwich, RI) from this book than I did in six years of history classes in Rhode Island. This is a solid popular history that gave me some interesting perspectives on the headlines I read in The Times every day.

Too Soon to Say Goodbye

In February of 2006, Art Buchwald checked into a hospice in Washington, D.C. His right leg had recently been amputated to the knee and his kidneys were failing. Rather than go on dialysis, he decided that, at age 80, he’d prefer dying to endless medical care. Perhaps since he was a humorist, a funny thing happened. He didn’t die. In fact, his kidneys started functioning again, something that left the doctors scratching their heads. He spent five months in the hospice and then checked out so that he write one more book (number 30), Too Soon to Say Goodbye.

The book is a humorous look at a dreadful subject. He never discusses the process of coming to terms with death, but champions the concept of hospice and drops the names of the many famous people who come to visit, which is a considerable number because he knew a lot of famous people. Much of the book would fall under the category of memoir as he touches upon his difficult childhood (his mother was committed to a mental hospital immediately following his birth; he and his sisters were farmed out to foster homes for most of their youths), his military service in World War II, his college years, and his years as a columnist living in Paris in the ’50s. He discusses some of his sexual history, and the image of Art Buchwald cavorting with some young lady is a picture I regret having planted in my head. Mostly, it’s about the famous people he’s known.

It was an easy book to read, which is perhaps an astonishing thing to say about the chronicle of someone’s death, but there is a cheery tone to it, even through the eight eulogies written by four famous people, two not-so-famous-but-successful people, and two of his children that form the epilogue. It is fun and interesting, but as shallow as a Republican’s ethics.

Mr. Buchwald, who was given two-to-three weeks to live in February 2006, died last month–almost a year later–of kidney failure. He certainly made it seem like a good way to go.

Mrs Rushdie

After a hard day of fatwas and PEN conferences, it’s important to have the right little woman to come home to. Here’s the fourth Mrs. Rushdie:

I don’t know if she’ll be joining him at Emory, but if I’m still working at the English Department there when he arrives, I’ll keep everybody apprised.

I’ve Been Memeing to Do This

1. One book that changed your life: I’d say The Bible only I’d be lying. The first one was probably Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, which I read in one sitting when I was 14.

2. One book you’ve read more than once: Catch-22. I read it four times in highschool and never again.

3. One book you’d want on a deserted island: Ulysses. I’ve been saying this for years. I’ve never finished it, and the only way I can think of to do so is to take a month on a beach to read it real slow.

4. One book that made you cry: Having never read Old Yeller, I’d have to go with The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

5. One book that made you laugh: Acres and Pains by SJ Perelman. Chapter Two is the funniest thing I’ve ever read in my entire life.

6. One book you wish had been written: The Autobiography of Jesus H. Christ.

7. One book you wish you had written: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Why? Because of passages such as this:

“You may smoke, sir. I like the smell of tobacco.”

I lit the cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole. The faint smile pulled at the shadowed corners of his mouth.

“A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy,” he said dryly. “You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There’s very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

The General half-closed his eyes. “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

8. One book you wish had never been written: Unfortunately, one is presented in this question with an embarrassment of riches. there are entire sections of bookstores that could be done away with and nobody would really lose any sleep over it. For now, I’ll just the the collected works of Barbara Cartland.

9. One book you are currently reading: Shadowplay by Clare Asquith. It is an inquiry into “the hidden beliefs and coded politics of William Shakespeare.” The basic idea is that Shakespeare was a Catholic dissident in tudor England and that he encoded a bunch of double meanings into the plays and poems.

10. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Dozens and dozens of them, but I’ll choose The Idiot by Doestoyevsky, which is apparently about half the drivers in Atlanta.