A real Dahl

Most people are walking contradictions, but the writer Roald Dahl perhaps more than most, as Nadia Cohen shows us in her enlightening biography The Real Roald Dahl (2018).

The author of so many popular children's books lived an R-rated life. As a young man he attracted older women, most of them married and famous. Cohen tells how he once attended a movie premiere with actress Nancy Carroll and left with Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, both women married and much older. Later he left his wife for a younger woman.

Although one of the most kind and generous of men, he also loved an argument and could be insufferably rude, even to guests at his own parties.

Although a literary man with no medical training, his pioneering efforts led to the invention of the Dahl-Wade-Till Valve used to save the lives of nearly 3,000 children around the world. This work was inspired by the brain damage suffered by his son, Theo.

Brain damage became a strange and tragic family curse. He had suffered head injuries as a pilot in World War II. His wife, actress Patricia Neal, had a brain-damaging stroke. His daughter Olivia died from a brain injury. Another daughter had a brain tumor.

Through it all Dahl wrote James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other gems that children have loved for generations.

Roaring Twenties words

The Twenties were really roaring by 1923. This is reflected in some of the words coined that year, according to Sol Steinmetz's book There's a Word for It. The Charleston dance craze began that year. Shimmy became a verb. Heebie-jeebies, wham, moonchild and fag entered our vocabulary.

Other words first recorded in print that year may suggest another time: aerosol, comfort zone, compartmentalization, debunk, mass media, media, mastectomy, microworld, robot, ultrasound.

That was also the year the country welcomed debunk, deplane, fundamentalist, hijack,  intro, junkie, moviegoer, muscle head, nonjudgmental, popsicle, posh, sleepwalk and spotlight into the language.

Americans that year were dancing, going to movies, beginning to fly in planes, enjoying the fruits of science and just having fun. The war was over. The Depression hadn't started yet. The new words hint at the kind of year it was a hundred years ago.

Empty spaces

... the artists who invented xieyi painting were scholar-amateurs, and they were not interested in depicting the physical likeness of things. They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence.

Pik-Shuen Fung, Ghost Forest

In her first novel, Ghost Forest (2021), Pik-Shuen Fung gives us the literary version of the xieyi painting she describes. Absence is as important as presence. Even the title suggests this idea. There's a forest there, but you can't see it.

Hers is minimalist writing with short chapters, sometimes just a few sentences long. Lots of empty space. The reader can fill in the blanks. Reading it is almost like reading poetry.

Like the author herself, the narrator was born in Hong Kong, moving to Vancouver with her family as a little girl just before Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese. Yet her father stays behind to work in Hong Kong, and she, her mother and younger sister usually see him just once a year. Her father is, for the most part, an empty space.

Most of the novel takes place after she reaches her adulthood and her father is dying of cancer. She has always had an uneasy relationship with her stern, unsmiling father. She doesn't miss him when he's gone, yet she cries whenever they must part. Now that he is dying she begins to build a relationship with him, even to the point of telling him she loves him and hearing him say "I love you" back. Such exchanges are rare in Chinese families, we are told.

Yet there is not enough time, and the novel's last pages are full of regrets and white space. Earlier Pik-Sheun defines the Chinese phrase lik bat chung sam. "It means, what your heart wants but you can't do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It's the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to." And those final pages describe that feeling very well.

Out of the past, into the future

She struggled to recall anything but, as with most things concerning her mother, her memory was more wish than real.

Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

Zoey Hennessey had hardly known her mother at all. She had been a prostitute who died young. But she had left an apartment for her daughter on Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina, and now as Other Birds (2022) by Sarah Addison Allen opens, Zoey, 19, moves to the island to discover her future, and perhaps something about her past.

She quickly becomes involved in the lives of the four other tenants in the small apartment building owned by a man named Frasier. Two of the tenants are sisters, Lisbeth and Lucy. Lucy is a hermit, rarely seen. Lisbeth, meanwhile, is seen too much, always complaining about everything her neighbors do. The others living there include Mac, a talented chef, and Charlotte, a talented henna artist. Every character, it seems, either has a past to discover or a past to hide.

And then there are the ghosts, more than you will find in most ghost stories, yet none of them is frightening. They are ghosts who behave more like angels, looking out for those they love. The novel also has many birds, who may also be angels. "Birds are supposed to be messengers between heaven and earth," Charlotte says at one point. Zoey has her own bird, Pigeon, whom nobody else can see.

So, yes, this novel is a bit weird, yet it also proves tender, moving, meaningful, beautiful. Ghosts disappear. Love happens. The past fades as the future opens up.

Mastering chess

The world is playing chess, and you're playing checkers.

Robert Dugoni, The World Played Chess

Good Vietnam War novels are still being written, even if those who experienced the war are getting a bit long in the tooth, and Robert Dugoni's The World Played Chess (2021) is one of them. As the title suggests, it's a complicated world out there, in peace as much as in war.

Dugoni tells three related stories at the same time. One is the journal kept by William while a marine serving in Vietnam. Other marines die around him, and later his guilt from what he did in the war is compounded by the fact that he survived and they didn't.

After the war, he works with Vincent, a recent high school graduate, on a construction crew. Vincent makes his own mistakes, faces his own dangers and takes his own risks even without a war. Meanwhile William shares a little about his Vietnam experiences.

In the third story, Vincent is a middle-aged adult with children of his own when he receives William's journal in the mail. Meanwhile, Vincent's son. Beau, is also just out of high school and struggling into manhood in a dangerous, complicated world.

With parallel stories of boys becoming men and facing many of same struggles, Dugoni weaves a compelling story about growing into manhood. This novel was recommended to me by a woman, so obviously its message is not for men alone.

Looking in the mirror

Many things have been powerful influences on literature, the invention of the printing press, for example, and the spread of literacy beyond the clergy and the upper classes. For individual writers, their work is influenced by their early lives, their failures and frustrations, their painful rejection slips, etc.

Steven Johnson

Yet in his book How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson points to something I would have never guessed — the mirror.

He gives credit for this insight to Lewis Mumford. "Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself," Mumford wrote. There was a time, not so many centuries ago, when people had little or no idea what they looked like. The mirror had a profound impact on people, and especially on artists. Painters began to paint self-portraits. If no model was handy, they looked in a mirror. The mirror allowed the Renaissance to happen, Johnson argues.

Writers, too, felt the influence of the mirror. They began thinking more about themselves. They began writing first-person novels. "The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in the mirror," Johnson writes.

This argument requires a certain degree of conjecture. Certainly people thought about themselves a great deal even before the invention of the mirror. There are first-person accounts in the Bible and elsewhere. Yet it's not hard to believe that commonplace mirrors must have had a huge impact on human lives, just as commonplace cell phones have. And surely some of that impact must have affected how people write and what they write about.

After the hanging

The Grace Fox murder case is so cold that hardly anybody still remembers it or, if they do, still considers it an open case — until Chris Lowndes, a Hollywood film composer, returns to England and unknowingly purchases the large house where Grace Fox supposedly poisoned her husband. She was hanged for the crime in 1953. Chris moves into the house in 2010.

This is the situation in Peter Robinson's amazing standalone novel Before the Poison (2012).

A fan of Robinson's Inspector Banks novels, I was initially disappointed when I started reading this book and realized it is not part of the series. Yet I was quickly engrossed and wondering why he hasn't written more novels that stand on their own. Before the Poison demonstrates even more clearly than his mystery series what a talented writer Robinson is.

Chris is a man not unlike Banks, especially when it comes to his love of music and his ability to solve mysteries. Unlike Banks, this man mourns his deceased wife and sees ghosts. Perhaps one of the ghosts is that of Grace Fox. At any rate, he decides Grace wasn't really guilty of murder and that there must be much more to the case than came out at the trial. And so he begins to dig.

Not many people remain alive who remember Grace Fox, but Chris travels to Paris and to South Africa to track them down. He works with Louise, Grace's granddaughter, who also wants to believe in  her innocence.

In the end, Grace helps solve the mystery herself after her journal describing the horrors she experienced as a nurse in World War II is discovered

You wouldn't think the investigation of a murder case this old could have so many twists and turns and surprises, but Robinson gives us everything you might hope for. And more.

Around the world

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Truth or lies? There's probably some of each in Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897), although I was more concerned with what was interesting and what was not. And most of Twain's account of his trip around the world is not that interesting, at least not to 21st century readers. There's a lot of stuffing — copied material from other sources,  dull stories told by fellow travelers and memories from previous journeys not special enough for other books, for example.

Yet it is a long, long book, and Twain strikes gold here and there. Some of the better portions consist of his diary entries, such as this one: "Sailed in the Rosetta. This is a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk." That sounds like the Mark Twain we love. I was fascinated by his long list of odd town names in Australia, such as Goondiwindi, Tungkillo and Woolloomooloo. 

He goes into much detail in describing Thuggee and suttee practices in India. The former involved a religious cult of murderers and the latter widows who burned themselves with the bodies of their husbands. The British had mostly eliminated these practices by the time Twain visited.

Although Twain made the journey with his wife and daughter, he hardly mentions his family at all in his book, and never by name.

Much in the book will shock today's readers. He brags about killing 16 tigers in India. About South Africa, he writes, "The great bulk of the savages must go," and suggests humane ways of "diminishing the black population." Elsewhere he writes, "The world was made for man — the white man." One wonders why Adventures of Huckleberry is controversial, while Following the Equator isn't. Perhaps it's because few people still read the latter. And for good reason.

The network of ideas

It's not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that's because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas.

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now

Like James Burke, whose Connections series ran on BBC and PBS in the late 1970s, Steven Johnson is interested in how one thing leads to another. Ideas are built on other ideas, often in surprising ways.

Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, How We Got to Now, was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.

The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes.

As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning.

Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be.

We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare.

Facing fear

Our fears can do one of two things: prevent us from doing what we want to do or inspire us to overcome those fears by doing what frightens us. Those people we are most likely to have heard about are those who chose the second option. Those who take the first option are the ones sitting alone somewhere. They never asked out the girl who charmed them. They never applied for the job they wanted. They never wrote the book they only thought about writing.

Ralph Keyes

Writing takes courage, as Ralph Keyes tells us repeatedly in The Courage to Write. That's what the book is about, after all. All writers are afraid, he says. They are afraid of rejection. They are afraid of being laughed at. They are afraid of getting it wrong. They are afraid of hurting those they write about. They are afraid of being unable to equal prior successes. Fear for a typical writer never stops

Keyes goes so far as to call fear a necessity for writers. Fear is, he says, "an invaluable part of the writing process." Fear inspires us. It heightens our awareness and sensitivity. It makes us more careful, more diligent. Fear makes success and survival all the more sweet.

Yet there is another invaluable part of the writing process. And that is overcoming that fear. Writers must finally be willing to write and put their work out there for others to read and judge, come what may.

A crime-free mystery

Real crime was rare in Venice: the worst problem they had was a handful of bored adolescents using the cover of night to break into shops long closed by the pandemia to steal, or vandalize, merchandise in which they had little interest.

Donna Leon, Give Unto Others

Somehow Donna Leon has managed to write a successful series of mysteries set in Venice, a city in which serious crime is rare.

For much of Give Unto Others (2022), set at the close of the Covid pandemic, it appears as if there is no crime at all. An old woman, a neighbor he remembers from when he was a child, comes to Commissario Guido Brunetti to ask him to discover why her son-in-law acts so strangely. There appears to be nothing going on but a little adultery, but Brunetti, having nothing better to do, agrees to look into the matter. He feels guilty about using police resources to investigate a private matter, and even guiltier after he enlists the aid of several of his colleagues. who also apparently have nothing better to do.

Eventually Brunetti finds a charity in Belize that may not be on the up and up, and there's a vandalized veterinary office operated by the woman's daughter. An intriguing mystery does eventually develop, although still without a serious crime. No one is charged with anything.

I am a Donna Leon fan, yet I found this entry in the series a disappointment. What Venice needs is a good murder.

That's wonderful

"He certainly didn't ever want me to say I didn't like something," admitted John Steinbeck's widow, Elaine. "He wanted me to say, 'That's wonderful,' and I did."

Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write

We all want someone to tell us, "That's wonderful," and believe it to be true, although the latter is optional.

I took several creative writing classes at Ohio University, and each week we would critique one another's stories. Mostly we criticized them. We searched for things we didn't like or didn't believe. We found grammatical errors and spelling errors. But what each of us really wanted was something on the order of, "That's wonderful." The poet Cecil Hemley, one of my instructors, called one of my stories "artful," a comment I have treasured for decades.

Scott Adams

Recently I heard Scott Adams, the "Dilbert" creator, talk on the radio about a Dale Carnegie class he attended where only positive comments were allowed. The group was intended to train people to speak effectively in public. He remembers one shy woman who gave a terrible speech. What positive comment could possibly be said about it? The instructor told her how much courage it must have taken for her to stand up before the group and speak. Her next speech was much better, as was the one after that.

Years after college I attended a retreat for editorial writers, where a group of us commented on one another's editorials. As in those creative writing classes, we mostly criticized each other's work. When my turn came I had found nothing wrong with the editorials in question. I felt like a failure. Yet when I said the writing was flawless the smile on the writer's face told me I had said the right thing, the best thing.

Most of us remember criticism longer than we remember praise. Perhaps the sting can motivate us to do better next time, if it doesn't discourage us from ever trying again. And if nobody points out those grammatical errors and factual errors, etc., how might we ever find out about them?

Even so, you can't beat "That's wonderful."

Wild books

Virginia Woolf

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Virginia Woolf

There truly is something wild about the books one finds at a used book store or a library sale or the book table at a Goodwill store. They may not be organized in any way. They may be forgotten books by forgotten authors. Or they be former bestsellers who now years later nobody cares to read. And the books certainly are homeless, some of them looking as bedraggled as an old dog at the pound.

Each of these books has an unknown history, although some of them may have the name of a previous owner printed on the inside front cover.

Perhaps the saddest-looking used books are the newer ones, whose previous owners didn't think enough of them to keep them very long after their purchase, whether read or unread. Older books must have had an owner who treasured them on a shelf for years, or perhaps a series of owners who loved them before passing them on to someone else, who may also have loved them.

In a store that sells new books, all the books look new. They appear more domesticated, as Virginia Woolf put it. Or perhaps they are just virginal. With used books, one never knows. Some look as good as new. Others show their age. Some have pages folded over. Some have coffee stains or food stains. Some may even have passages underlined, a clue showing that a previous owner found something of value inside.