The Worst Hard Time:

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan (2006, Mariner Books)

            Maybe if they hadn’t changed the name from the Great American Desert, those settlers would have known what they were getting into. Early surveyors of the southern half of the Louisiana Purchase found “a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude” in what would become the northern Panhandle of Texas, the no-man’s-land Panhandle of Oklahoma, the southeastern corner of Colorado, and the western half of Kansas. 

 

            After the Civil War, though, an optimistic rebranding as ‘the Great Plains’ went some way to concealing how inhospitable the land actually was. High and flat, with terrible extremes of weather, it had sustained bison and Native Americans, especially after they acquired horses; in fact, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 promised Comanches, Kiowas, and their kin hunting rights west of the 100^th meridian. You can picture how long that lasted. In the last third of the nineteenth century, Texas slaughtered bison in order to drive the native people out, and liberate the land for cattle ranching. There was plenty of grass: twenty million acres of it in the Texas Panhandle alone, home of the palatial XIT Ranch. The flaw in that program was that while bison can stand the extremes of temperature that the desert offers, cattle are not so hardy. “Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hail-storms, flash floods, and tornadoes tormented the XIT. A few good years, with good prices, would be followed by too many horrid years and massive die-offs from drought or winter freeze-ups, making shareholders wonder what this cursed piece of the Panhandle was good for anyway.”

            According to the Federal government, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was good for homesteading. Wells powered by windmills could reach the Ogallala Aquifer, though it might take a hundred feet of drilling. “The pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that would never give out.” The soil under the grass seemed like another endless resource, as the Great War made wheat farming a can’t-miss enterprise. For a few years, every acre of sod busted with a plow meant a twenty-fold return, and there seemed no end to it. There were also a couple of boom years at the end of the next decade, and then, coincident with the stock market crash of 1929, it all came to an end. Though every city had starving people, prices for wheat were so low in 1930 and 1931 that piles of it rotted next to the railroad tracks.

            And then the wind began to blow, and bring the dust with it. And in short order, the dirt, as well. The duster was a completely new meteorological phenomenon, rolling along the ground picking up more dirt. There were no dwellings air-tight enough to resist the blowing dirt, even assuming the wind didn’t break the windows, or carry the whole house away. The storms also carried stunning amounts of static electricity, enough to short out a Model T’s motor or blight a watermelon vine. From time to time, they headed east to New York or Washington, D.C., and then on out to sea; more often, they carried Nebraska’s soil to Texas, and right on back again. People kept shovels in their cars to dig out of drifts on the roads, in the intervals between storms that darkened the world too much to even try to drive.

            The Dust Bowl was the worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century, but I don’t recall ever hearing much of its history before. Egan bases his telling on small-town newspapers, weather reporting, and interviews with a few hardy survivors, and he does a fine job of seeing both the human scale and the grand expanse. We meet the high schoolers whose class play is cancelled because the school gym has been turned into an infirmary, because so many people are down with dust pneumonia. We meet the tarantulas and the black widow spiders, the rabbits and the grasshoppers. We meet the photographers who left us images of desolation, and federal agents who promulgate their theories of land reclamation as part of the New Deal.

            It’s a captivating story, even when it reads like the Israelites in Egypt; we’re still living in its aftermath, and we forget it at our peril.

Any Good Books, December, 2023

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America

Paul Kix (2023, Celadon Books)

       When you think of Birmingham in the spring of 1963, perhaps you recall a striking photograph: a policeman has 15-year-old Walter Gadsden’s shirt in one hand, and the leash of a police dog in the other. Gadsden looks weirdly peaceful for someone whose flesh is about to be torn by snarling teeth. “Despite the ferocity of the assault, his body was relaxed and erect. His arms remained at his side…It was as if he were giving himself to the German shepherd–and to posterity.” The picture appeared across three columns of the New York Times’s front page, and in papers around the world, where it took the Birmingham civil rights protests to a new level of national urgency.

       Paul Kix turns his fascination with that picture to the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and how the SCLC decided to go to Birmingham and challenge the beast in its own lair. A white man with a Black wife and children, he has some skin in this game. He narrows his focus to ten weeks of that spring, and perhaps a dozen consequential characters, so that he can turn history back into a story. It’s a gift for his sons and daughter, to fortify them against the horror and despair that keep entering their home through the television set.

       We begin in January of 1963, at a secret meeting of the inner circle of the SCLC. Wyatt Walker, the group’s executive director, handed out an eight-page plan for “a campaign unlike any other. ‘I call it Project X,’ Walker said. Because X marked the spot of confrontation.” Walker had Martin Luther King's trust, and his backing. Everyone present was well aware of what a run of failure the SCLC had been experiencing, particularly in the previous year’s miserable Albany campaign. Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had rendered the SCLC’s protests ineffective by using non-violence of his own, arresting people gently and courteously.

      In going to Birmingham, Walker was making a very reasonable bet that Bull Connor would not do likewise. As Commissioner of Public Safety, Connor had a well-deserved reputation for making Birmingham’s Black residents far less safe, at any sign of their trying to exercise basic rights. And so it would prove, though Wyatt’s careful blueprint relied on some assumptions that didn’t exactly hold up, such as how many marchers he could attract through King’s oratory. James Bevel, who had been part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Nashville sit-ins in 1960, regarded this plan as another example of an arrogant SCLC parachuting in and dictating what local people could or would do, and it was this, Bevel thought, that had led to all those failures.

     As it happened, later that spring, it was Bevel who found the marchers who made the difference: teenagers, who weren’t putting their jobs and their families’ livelihoods at risk, as adults would have done. Bevel led training in non-violence, as he had in Nashville. He devised ways of spreading word of plans, including finding a DJ who could work coded instructions into his radio patter between R&B hits. In a short time, there were thousands of young marchers, whom Bevel could send out of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in organized squads. So many were arrested that some were housed in animal pens at the state fairgrounds; uncomfortable and frightening, to be sure, but also a sign that they were winning, because the jails were full and the world was noticing.

       Two of the most consequential events of that spring actually took place in New York City. The first was a March 31^st fundraiser hosted by Harry Belafonte at his palatial apartment on West End Avenue, where wealthy and influential New Yorkers were attracted by the chance to find out what Martin Luther King, Jr., would do next. They wound up ‘investing’ some $475,000 for expenses and bail money. 

       The second was on May 24^th, at an apartment on Central Park South, which belonged to Joseph Kennedy. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was trying to shape the government’s response to the crisis developing in Birmingham, and he called James Baldwin(!) to ask for a secret conversation with Black leaders. He got more than he bargained for, in anger and in hard truths; after some reflection, it caused him to go to bat for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

        Kix makes use of the whole range of sources we have now, after sixty years of study; not just Bearing the Cross, David Garrow’s history of the SCLC, and Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter’s magnificent book on Birmingham, but memoirs and biographies of Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and many others. And so on: newspaper files, oral history interviews, and FBI dossiers. But that’s all end notes, which would serve admirably as the syllabus for a class on the civil rights movement. 

      Don’t worry about that, unless you want to. Read it for the story.

Rules of Civility; The Lincoln Highway

 Two novels by Amor Towles:

Rules of Civility (Penguin, 2011)

The Lincoln Highway (Penguin, 2021)

         Katey and Eve start 1938 literally without two nickels to rub together. They have gone to a dive bar to hear some gloomy jazz, when in walks a handsome, well-dressed man, who winds up sitting at their table. The young women have no social standing whatever, but their new friend Tinker Grey is a banker of some kind, and a resident of a fancy apartment on Central Park West. Rules of Civility is Katey’s reminiscence, from thirty years on, of the eventful year that follows.

       1938 finds New York still mired in the Depression. Katey and Eve share a room in a boarding house and scrape an entry-level living; Katey because she has no family left, and Eve because she’s unwilling to accept help from her family in the midwest. The next eight months will find Eve travelling in the south of France, and Katey maneuvering her career into a track with a future. Katey’s social life takes a commensurate turn for the richer, involving wild parties in the Hamptons and a ‘camp’ in the Adirondacks. In general, though, it’s a New York life, lived in coffee shops, offices, taxicabs, and the occasional club.

       The Lincoln Highway occupies a much wider canvas. It begins in a tiny town in Nebraska, where Emmett Watson is coming home from eighteen months in a Kansas prison for juveniles. It’s 1954; his father, a failed farmer, has died, and Emmett is now responsible for his eight-year-old brother, Billy. They are planning to take Emmett’s car, and the ready money that remains, and head for California. But here comes trouble: two other young men have slipped away from the reformatory by stowing away in the trunk of Emmett’s ride home.

        Duchess is mad enough to avail himself of such a chance. His father is a traveling actor, the spiritual heir to the king and the duke in Huckleberry Finn, more than half a con man. Duchess is a wily kid with a talent for picking up things that don’t belong to him; and while he hasn’t had much practice with assault and battery, he picks it right up when he sees a need for it.

        He has brought along Woolly, who’s a few bubbles off plumb. According to Duchess, “[H]e’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.” Woolly has had some advantages in life, but he’s temperamentally unsuited to make the most of them: how do you get kicked out of three of the most exclusive boarding schools in New England? How do you mess up so badly you wind up in Kansas? He’s fundamentally a kind fellow, though, and he makes friends with Billy, who is both smart and knowledgeable far beyond his years.

        Agent of chaos that he is, Duchess takes off in Emmett’s car, headed in the wrong direction. He and Woolly have business in New York, involving some money that belongs to Woolly, which is in a safe at his family’s camp in the Adirondacks. Emmett and Billy follow by train, no small feat as most of their money departed with the light blue Studebaker. How in the world will Emmett find his friends, his car, and his money?

        The Lincoln Highway is full of wonderful tangential stories. It reads like something Charles Portis might have written, in contrast to the earlier book’s overtones of Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, and Charles Dickens. Towles has a precise control of his characters’ voices. Here’s Duchess, on the notion that clothes make the man: “Gather together a group of men of every gradation–from the powerhouse to the putz–have them toss their fedoras in a pile, and you’ll spend a lifetime trying to figure out whose was whose. Because it’s the man who makes the fedora, not versa vice. I mean, wouldn’t you rather wear the hat worn by Frank Sinatra than the one worn by Sergeant Joe Friday? I should hope so.”

        The books are connected, in fact, in a way that gave me particular delight: that camp in the Adirondacks is the same family place in both books; one character in Rules of Civility appears offstage in The Lincoln Highway. They also share an ethos: when you need help, look for the forgotten man, and listen to him. Emmett gets the right train to New York with the aid of a panhandler in a wheelchair. Katey gets a beautiful cache of journalistic gossip from doormen and elevator operators.

        The characters Towles loves most have a sense of wonder. Tinker’s brother praises Tinker’s this way: “Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine.” That’s the kind of wonder these books can leave you with.

 --

Codicil - the family that crosses the two books is actually part of my own; Woolly is called that because his middle name is Wolcott. The family consorts with Roosevelts in part because their second cousin married TR's first cousin - viz., my great grandparents. Wild!

 

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz (2010, Harper Collins)

To err is human; it’s also distressing, discouraging, and sometimes downright humiliating. None of us is perfect, just as none of us is immortal. Kathryn Schulz’s book is onto this right from the beginning: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.” All true, all familiar; we are, personally and as a society, terrible at simply acknowledging error.

So here’s a whole book about what Schulz calls ‘wrongology,’ treating error both as an idea and as an experience. Philosophers have thought about error for pretty much as long as there have been philosophers. Thomas Aquinas adhered to the pessimistic view, that error was a terrible defect, because people had a natural faculty for truth. William James was more accepting, says Schulz: “[I]f you believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact, because it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking glass–if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both explicable and acceptable.”

Both of those views have their appeal, and they remain in tension. It seems a worthy pursuit to narrow the distance between ourselves and truth, or perfection. That would seem to entail trying to eliminate errors; but “to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth–a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.” Or else, inevitably, we’d commit new errors in the process.

Modern science, since the seventeenth century or so, has turned that likelihood into a tool for truth-seeking. “These thinkers [Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes] weren’t nihilists, nor even skeptics. They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover it. But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like mistakes.” The scientific method, the practice of devising testable hypotheses and testing them, has brought the search for truth a very long way.

Soon enough, Schulz comes down from these dizzy conceptual heights. She tells stories from all over the map, about people who have made life-changing mistakes; or rather, had their lives changed by understanding themselves to have been mistaken. (‘I was wrong’ is a common enough sentence; ‘I am wrong’ is almost unheard of.) Some cases are rare, like the Klansman who recognized that his perceived adversary had all the same problems he had; others are as ordinary as a divorce lawyer’s waiting room.

This is really my kind of book: abstract, extensive, and wise. How about this: “When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt.” Allow me to wish you a life of doubt, perplexity and awe.

 

 

Any Good Books, September 2023

 

The Anthropocene Reviewed

 

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

John Green (Dutton, 2021)

John Green has been a book reviewer and a novelist, and, more recently, a podcaster. This book would probably make a great audio book, since some of it was originally written for the podcast. I think that has influenced the writing toward smoothness and lucidity, and toward a very personal point of view. The fact that podcasts became a common reality only in this century is a pretty good example of what the essays are about: we are surfing on our own history, and it might be well to take a good look around.

 

The Anthropocene, for one thing, is what many geologists are calling the era we’re living in, when human activity is having measurable effects on conditions on earth. We live in a world partly of our making, right down to the temperature of the sky and the sea. Nothing else on earth can escape our influence, either, which is appalling to remember, because we have certainly set forces in motion that we neither understand nor control. 

 

The internet, of course, is one such force. There’d be almost no way to go back and decode the algorithms that know us so well, if we have any kind of presence online, whether we’re reading, shopping, or listening. Google music wants a thumbs up or down, to tune itself to my taste; Google and Amazon want reviews on a scale of five stars. “The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.” 

 

And now it’s everywhere. “The five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers. The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.” Green cheekily stretches the form by applying the system to Diet Dr. Pepper, Teddy bears, and Canada geese, but he does so in a familiar and recognizable way. In his early drafts, he tried to write from a disinterested, ‘neutral’ point of view, as he had when he reviewed books in for Booklist. Fortunately, his wife turned him around, pointing out that “in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.” If you love Diet Dr. Pepper, and hate Canada geese, you might as well say so. 

 

“With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.” Would you believe they had almost been hunted to extinction a hundred year ago? Now they live nearly everywhere we plant Kentucky bluegrass, which is pretty much everywhere, between lawns, parks and golf courses. “Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.” The geese end up with a lowly two stars. 

 

There’s a marvelous range to this book, from the minute (Staphylococcus aureus) to the immense (Halley’s Comet); from the very old (the Ginkgo Tree) to the very new (Super Mario Kart); from the general (Sunsets) to the particular (Jerzy Dudek’s performance [as a soccer goalie] on May 25^th, 2005); from the sublime (Our Capacity for Wonder) to the ridiculous (The World’s Largest Ball of Paint.) And everything, so to speak, in between.

 

And what could be more in between than Indianapolis? Green lives there because his wife has an art museum job there; they live in one of the economically and racially diverse ZIP codes in the United States. It’s a place so average as to be almost a joke: “The city’s nicknames include ‘Naptown,’ because it’s boring, and ‘India-no-place.’” But it’s also a place where people meet up with friends and ride their bikes out to the Speedway to watch the Indy 500, along with a quarter million or so other people. In 2020, when Covid-19 stopped the race, Green and his buddies made the trip anyway, just for the joy of it.

 

Read this book, or listen to it, just for the joy of it.

Furious Hours

 

Any Good Books, May 2023

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Casey Cep (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours is a story about a story, a book about a book that didn’t happen. It’s a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book about loose ends, ambiguous heroes, and lost drafts. This befits its subject, Nelle Harper Lee, who achieved literary success beyond her wildest dreams, only to find the fame deeply burdensome, and the wealth expensive.(The top tax rate was still 90% in 1960, when the royalties for To Kill a Mockingbird began flooding in. The book has been in print ever since.)

Cep’s book opens in Alexander City, Alabama, in 1977, at the trial of a man, Robert Louis Burns, who shot another man in front of three hundred people. The shooter and the victim, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, were black, as were most of the witnesses; the jury, the judge, and all of the lawyers were white men. Harper Lee sat among the press. She was there at the invitation of the defense lawyer, Tom Radney, whom she’d met in New York at a party connected to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

The man who was shot, the Reverend Willie Junior Maxwell, lived a lavish life for a part-time preacher living in the wide spot in the road that was Nixburg, Alabama. In addition to preaching, he worked in a rock quarry, reducing rock to gravel and dust, and ran a pulpwood crew, delivering soft Alabama pine to paper mills, possibly the only man ever to do so in dapper three-piece suits.

In 1970, Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found beaten to death in her car, a short way from home. Her life was unusually well insured, and her husband was the prime suspect. The Reverend had policies with companies all over the country, not only on his wife, but on “...his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated.” The initial charges were dismissed for lack of evidence; the following summer, new evidence and a new indictment led to a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile, Tom Radney was helping the Reverend sue for Mary Lou’s death benefits, and taking a hefty cut when he won.

His first wife’s was not the only unresolved death. In the next two years, his older brother and his second wife also met suspicious ends. Some insurance companies had begun to refuse his business, but others paid some $80,000 on Mrs. Maxwell’s death. Then a nephew who worked on the pulpwood crew was found dead in a car; and then a teenage girl his third wife had taken in. It was at her funeral that Robert Burns drew a gun and shot Willie Maxwell three times at close range.

The trial chapters are riveting. “Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns, and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses, and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their neighbors.”

Here was a story, after all those years, that called out to Harper Lee. She had grown up watching her father in courtrooms. She had gone to Kansas with Truman Capote to dig into the murders of the Clutter family for In Cold Blood. Her interview notes, and the way people opened up to her who found Truman Capote too exotic to deal with, contributed immeasurably to the success of that book. In Alex City, she spent time with Tom Radney, and became friendly with a young local journalist named Jim Earnhardt. She interviewed everyone who remembered Reverend Maxwell, including his killer. Burns had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity, but passed through the state mental hospital in short order, and was already home. She went home to New York to start writing with a hefty valise full of Radney’s files, and Earnhardt’s reporting scrapbook.

And then… what? “Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most starts out blank.” The tale was, in the first place, exceedingly tangled; where she needed facts, she had rumors, conjectures, and lies. She was lacking the help her first agent and editor had given her on Mockingbird. Those people were dead, and no one could replace them. And was the public ready for the story of a black serial killer, from the author of such a beloved book?

Casey Cep has done an exceptional job reconstructing all of this, especially the social and economic fabric of Alexander City. If we can’t have Lee’s book, I’ll gladly take this one.

The Art of the Wasted Day

 

Any Good Books, July 2023

The Art of the Wasted Day

Patricia Hampl (Penguin, 2019)

The never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better. That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that: what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree, that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious enough to be worth going to hell for.

Of course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list, which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details. “Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list.

So Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for. “...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’ apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.”

What did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks, correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.” Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world. Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the possibilities.

As she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’ though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.”

If the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.” Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually, there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship, remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely thing to witness.

Left on Tenth

Left on Tenth – A Second Chance at Life: a Memoir

Delia Ephron (Back Bay Books, 2022)

In 2015, Delia Ephron’s husband died of cancer. She was seventy-one, and they’d been married for more than thirty years, supporting each other in diverse and successful writing careers. He died at home, thanks to hospice, but it was exhausting and disorienting. With the help of sisters and friends, she planned a memorial, and reoriented her life toward taking care of herself. Her sister Nora had died of leukemia in 2012; Delia had been seeing Nora’s hematologist regularly, and she had seven years of ‘all clear’s.

“People always asked ‘How are you?’ Emphasis on the are so I knew it was a serious question. But I never had a clue how to answer it...I couldn’t articulate my grief. And to try seemed to cheapen Jerry’s memory.”

A year and a couple of days after his death, Delia got a message from a man in California who wanted to reopen an old acquaintance; old, as in, they went on a few dates when she was in college. But in the present, they had a number of interests in common besides their recent widowhood. The e-mails that ensued are reproduced in the book – they read like the first drops of a monsoon. She liked him, he liked her, they talked on the phone like teenagers used to do. Peter flew to New York a couple of weeks later. “Looking back, we were already in love and possibly set up for catastrophe. The phone calls and e-mails were almost dreams, perfect versions of ourselves.”

But at the next blood test, things are not so good. “I should say that I am someone who keeps myself nearly completely medically ignorant. In spite of all the googling I do, I have never googled myelodysplastic syndrome or AML...Everything else is about to change on this day, but my attitude toward illness will not.” Like her late sister, she has leukemia. Dr. Roboz says, not for the first time, that she is not her sister, and her illness is not her sister’s. Possibly more to the point, treatments have advanced continuously, and there are new drugs and procedures to try. It’s good news that her new boyfriend is a doctor; a Jungian analyst, actually, but a trained scientist, who’s happy to handle what the doctors need to tell them.

Delia and Peter get married in the hospital where she goes for the first treatment with CPX-351, a drug so new it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a optimistic move for two seventy-two-year-olds, but it bespeaks a hope that could only help, over the coming months. This first time is not so bad; five weeks to kill the bone marrow white cells and hope that only healthy ones grow back. But no – her disease comes back, and the doctors want her to have a bone marrow transplant.

We know, because she survived to write this book, that it worked, but, wow, what a harrowing ride it would be. Delia doesn’t know this, because she doesn’t want to know it. “If I do research I will panic, I will become hysterical, I will misunderstand, I will obsess.” Instead, she marshals friends and friendships, right down to a neighbor she knows from dog-walking.

The marrow graft means another six weeks in the leukemia wing, so many pills, so little appetite, so much weakness. Worst of all, after the graft is in and starting to work, she’s visited with a crushing depression. She hates it all, and wants to die–but then she doesn’t, and lives to tell about it. Credit the doctors and the inventors of CPX-351; credit Peter’s love, wisdom, and constancy; credit all those devoted friends. “And luck. Is luck another word for miracle?” Maybe not, but does it matter? She’s grateful, and so am I.

 

 

Any Good Books, June 2023 by email 6/1/23

 

Why Fish Don't Exist

 

Any Good Books, April 2023

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

Lulu Miller (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Lulu Miller’s father is a cheerful nihilist. When she was about seven, she questioned him about the meaning of life. “He turned to me grinning and announced, ‘Nothing!’ It felt like he had been waiting eagerly, for my whole life, for me to finally ask.” No God, no destiny, no meaning. You don’t matter. “He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code, While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.” As a grown man, full of vim and bonhomie, he could afford to believe that Chaos is the bottom line, but this revelation had a depressing effect on his youngest daughter, causing her to wonder if her life was worth living at all.

Miller was attracted to the story of David Starr Jordan because he seemed like a man in whom Chaos might have met its match. He was a naturalist from his youngest days, on a farm in upstate New York, obsessively drawing and mapping the world around him. This was seen as an old-fashioned and even useless pursuit by his mother, who had a practical, Puritan turn of mind. But in 1873, when Jordan was twenty-two, he had a chance to spend the summer on a small, treeless island off the coast of Massachusetts, under the tutelage of Louis Agassiz. The great geologist proposed to get young scientists out of the classroom and into the natural world. On the shores of Penikese Island, on Buzzards Bay, Jordan found his life’s work: catching, preserving, and naming the world’s fish.

Agassiz promoted taxonomy as the study of how the living beings of the world could be ranked, to indicate the hierarchy dictated by God. He saw fit to use his own moral sentiments in the service of establishing the great ladder of being. “Lizards, for example, would score higher than fish because they ‘bestow greater care upon their offspring.’ Parasites, meanwhile, were clear lowlifes, the lot of them.”

The results of Jordan’s energetic collecting were first amassed at Indiana University, where he ascended to the presidency at the age of thirty-four. In 1890, Leland and Jane Stanford came to Bloomington to recruit Jordan to be the first president of their new university. In California, his collection continued to grow, until the earthquake of 1906 threw the whole thing to the floor, in a shower of broken glass. Miller was greatly inspired by the thought of Jordan picking up fish and sewing their tin labels onto them, so that when they were put back into new bottles, with fresh preservative, the crucial information would be preserved as well. Such a rebuke to Chaos! Such perseverance! Such grit!

Or, possibly, such hubris! In the aftermath of the earthquake, Jordan would write, “For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.” Is it? Really? Miller says that this “was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell himself. It was the kind of lie he had warned would lead to evil.” Which indeed it did, though Jordan would never see it that way. He was young enough to accept the principles of Darwin (as Agassiz never did), but also these of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton thought that if natural selection was good, selective breeding–of humans–would be better. “There’s a chance that eugenics could have remained in the realm of speculative fiction had a small group of influential scientists not championed its cause so zealously.” Jordan had the prestige and perseverence to make eugenics a much more powerful force in the United States that Galton would ever have managed without him. State after state passed laws permitting the sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit,’a category that inevitably reflected the prejudices of those making the determination. In Germany, the Nazis would read Jordan’s work, and defend their horrific acts as the natural outcome of scientific reasoning.

Miller points out that Jordan, like Galton and Agassiz, entirely missed Darwin’s point. In fact, it’s variation that gives all life its vigor. We use different tools for different jobs.“This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms.”

About those fish: drawing on the work of Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Miller explains that the category of ‘fish’ doesn’t work as an evolutionary category. A scientifically drawn tree of descent would show that sharks and eels and lungfish are more historically distinct from each other than they are from some land animals. If this idea threatens to unmoor us, it also frees us from the illusion of some cosmic moral order. Miller has “come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath.” A purpose to life, after all!

Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Vintage Contemporaries: a novel

Dan Kois (Harper, 2023)

        Dan Kois’s lovely novel starts in 1991, with young Emily Thiel, newly in New York, getting her first job as assistant to a literary agent. Her first new friend is called Emily; in today’s terms, we might call them Lawful Emily and Chaotic Emily. Emily T. keeps jobs, even if they are terrible, and Other Emily is the employee of your nightmares, until she quits on a whim. “She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma. She knew that she was the boring one. But she also knew that Emily depended on her, and that Emily was extraordinary.” (Kois throws us a bone by letting Genius Emily rename Emily Thiel ‘Em’, for the two sections of the book set in the Nineties. In the sections set after the turn of the millennium, Emily takes her name back. To which Emily says, “That’ll confuse the readers, but sure.”)

        Em also gets to know her mother’s friend Lucy, a divorced mom with a novel to sell. It’s less ‘literary’, that is, gloomy, than most of the well-received novels of the time, but Em warms to it. It’s about two young women in New York, friends with opposite temperaments… wait a minute, are we swallowing our own tail? Well, waving at it, certainly. Kois is not shy of the theme with variations: he will give us two pairs of sisters, two pairs of friends crying together after pregnancy scares, and plenty of subtle-but-not-secret foreshadowing.

      Kois has said in interviews that this book is, in part, an homage to Laurie Colwin, a novelist and food writer of the later twentieth century, who died too young. I’m taking that to mean that Lucy has some of her attributes, especially the ability to write well and seriously, without dwelling in realms of despair and gloom. Lucy’s philosophy is optimism: “I love writing about characters who are living the best they can, who are in love, whose circumstances may be complicated but whose days are full of joy. I love writing about the food they cook, the wine they drink, and the hangovers they don’t regret.” Unfortunately, the occasion for the essay in which she says this is an announcement that she has ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease – and her a Mets fan, with a Yankee disease! Colwin left us a couple of great memoirs with recipes, and Emily helps Lucy write one, as well.

       We leap ahead to 2005, and find Emily with a husband and a baby, and a much better job at a small publisher, though the babysitter costs nearly as much as she makes. They live in Manhattan, but just barely–they’re in Inwood, up at 207^th Street. She encounters Emily again, and they have lunch, but there’s a real question about on what terms they could become friends again. The next chapter, set in 1993, unpacks some of the difficulties that led their friendship to unravel.

        That chapter is also a deep dive into New York’s housing situation. Em lives in a dark, damp apartment on the Lower East Side, whose kitchen is “the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now.” Chaotic Emily lives a few blocks away in an actual squat: an illegally occupied building that is as squalid as it sounds, but is also communal and political in some ways we have forgotten about.

        We also get a day-to-day view of the publishing industry, and the terrible entry-level jobs it offers bright young English majors. We see Emily progressing through its ranks, beginning with the tedium of slush piles, the casual ogling and sexist comments, the lousy pay, the general sense that this hazing has been going on forever. Later in her career, when she has an assistant instead of being one, she is proud to have survived tough, demanding bosses; she also sees that some of the demanding conditions were genuinely out of line. The general lack of respect for assistants lies too deep in the culture to fix, but she can steer a few people away from outright sexual harassment, before leaving for another job, herself.

        Being a mother is a delight for Emily, as little Jane progresses from being a squashable baby to being a three-year-old who believes she can do cartwheels. She also makes time to work with Other Emily’s site-specific theatrical productions, which have somehow progressed from the pipe dreams of their youth to actual shows, with actors and sets and audiences. Emily’s editorial eye is actually just what is needed; her questions and suggestions make the work better, and it’s enough.

 

 

 

Any Good Books, March 1 2023

 

Lost and Found

Lost and Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

Kathryn Schulz (2022, Random House)

 

In the fall of 2016, Kathryn Schulz lost her father. He was seventy-four, so one of the things she lost was what might have been another couple of decades of delight in his company. The first section of Lost and Found is an extended consideration of what it means to lose things, from the smallest shirt button, through keys, and jobs, and friends, and so on up to glaciers and species. It’s a wonderfully personal look at a perennial and universal problem: “Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation against lying about finding someone else’s lost property.”

 

Her atheism, and her Jewish heritage, dispose Schulz against a belief in life after death. Her father is entirely gone, not sitting around in heaven. It pleases her, on the other hand, to imagine a place where all the lost things are collected. L. Frank Baum called it the Valley of Lost Things. “In my mind,” Schulz says, “it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning.”

 

The period after her father’s death felt to Schulz like a visit to that random, melancholy world. She lost her balance, she lost her way. It was hard to know what to do, because she’d never imagined what would happen after the worst happened. Not only could she not write, she could scarcely read. “I did not exactly feel lost, as my father was to me. I felt at a loss–a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.” Exhaustion, irritability, boredom, occasionally sadness itself–all these had their way with Schulz, unpredictably and uncontrollably. 

 

The second section of the book, about falling in love, largely overlaps the first section in time, beginning a year and a half before her bereavement. I think Schulz is wise to treat them separately, but the connections between losing and finding keep making themselves felt. How much of either, for example, is due to our own efforts, and how much to the larger forces of the way the world is? How much is simply the luck of timing? For a long time, she was a single woman in her thirties, with a quiet home north of New York City and an established writing career. One fine spring day, a friend of a friend stopped in her town to break up a long drive, and they had lunch together. A few more emails, another meal a week later, and C. became the woman Schulz was going to marry. 

 

As with loss, Schulz gives us love on all possible scales, from the smear of jam on early-morning pancakes to the outer reaches of the Solar System. There’s the feeling of deep, homely comfort, and a profound astonishment, as of a new planet discovered. They agree on the weighty matter of baby corn (they disapprove); they have vastly different views on religion. Schulz leaves it alone, while C. is an Episcopalian with a serious church habit, yet the matter rests easily between them. 

 

Their origins seemed worlds apart, too: Schulz came from a wealthy Midwestern suburb, C. from Maryland’s rural Eastern shore. Schulz started to worry about that gap on their first trip to see her parents, but, really, she says, “Most of us fit only partially into our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison.” 

 

I love the writing in this book, and the thinking. I love its specificity, and its sense of spaciousness. It ends with a wedding, which abides in a haunting photo of Schulz and her mother, and the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay where her father would have stood: “In a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting.”

 

Let the people say, Amen.

 

 

Any Good Books, February 2023

 

The Hero of this Book: a novel

 

The Hero of this Book: a novel

Elizabeth McCracken (2022, Harper Collins)

“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else.” Well, all right, this book is a novel, shaped very much like a memoir, in the same way that an epistolary novel resembles a collection of letters. The plot, such as it is, is a simple solitary perambulation around London, on a warm August day in 2019. Our narrator, who declines to name or describe herself, is accompanied by her memories of her mother, dead since November, and several London trips they had taken together.

They liked London for museums and theater, but particularly for ease of access. The mother had difficulty walking all her life. She used two canes to get around, most of her life, graduating in later years to a motorized scooter; but in London, all of the black cabs have ramps, so she could go anywhere without a lot of planning and difficulty. In a sense, it’s a book about the mother’s particular body, small and fragile, and subject to falling; but since she’s never let it stop her, it seems to affect other people more.

Of course, there’s so much more to her life. There’s her marriage to the narrator’s father, who is tall and heavy in a way that makes them quite an odd couple. (“My parents were a sight gag.”) There’s her interest in theater, and her professional life doing editorial work for Boston University. And there’s her approach to motherhood: “...on some fundamental level I’m not sure my mother, anyhow, cared about my inner life. This was a parenting gambit: Therefore I was allowed to do, think, whatever I wanted.” Perhaps that’s how writers are made.

Our narrator is a writer, a published novelist and sometime teacher of writing, which makes the veil between author and narrator very thin indeed. She’s wonderfully wry about it, though. Of her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she says, “Authorial intrusion was seen as a great aesthetic crime in the 1980s. We accused one another of it all the time, those moments our shadows fell across our fiction. I can’t remember why we thought it was so awful. Maybe it was supposed to be a sign of ego.”

That makes sense, as one of the tensions McCracken is exploring. How do you celebrate your parents while preserving their privacy? You make them characters. It’s none of our business as readers whether the events of the story are eighty per cent factual, or twenty per cent. As we say of the Gospel where I go to church, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

She’s just one person, but having aging parents (with their health problems and their overstuffed, deteriorating house) is a widely recognizeable story, verging on universal.

As for ego, I leave you with this gem: “As a writer, I claim to be modest, but I have delusions of grandeur. I call them delusions in order to sound modest.” Again, I can’t really tell, and don’t really care, if that’s the author or just her persona. It’s as good an explanation of the authorial impulse as I’ve ever heard.

Any Good Books, January 1 2023