Stuck at the border

The door to ordinary places was the door that I had missed. ...  I would live in the other places, among the exiled ping-pong players and the old ladies with dogs on their arms, and my true companions would be Godwin and Jenny and all those who had missed the same door,

Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Danny Deck, the young Texas writer who sells his first novel early in Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), feels sorry for himself, but readers may not feel sorry for him. If he has missed the "door to ordinary places," it is because he himself has chosen other doors that lead nowhere.

McMurtry's title sounds like that of a comic novel, and for a number of pages that appears to be what we have here. Then the title turns out to be the literal truth. All his relationships are bridges burned by the end. Mostly those relationships are with women — usually married women, a Mexican prostitute he asks to run away with him, a beauty who wants his baby but not him. "I have no real resistance to temptation," he says early on. He can resist neither women nor alcohol, and both lead him where he really doesn't want to go.

McMurtry refers again and again to borders and rivers, his other metaphors of choice. His novel ends with Danny "drowning" his second novel in the Rio Grande, the border between the United States and Mexico. Danny seems stuck on the border, or just on the wrong side of the border that separates the ordinary life he craves from the restless, purposeless life he has fallen into.

In a preface to this edition, McMurtry says he wrote the novel in a rush immediately after finishing Moving On. He calls it a kind of afterbirth to that much longer novel. Of Danny Deck, he writes, "He wasn't me, but there was no large gap between his sensibility and my own." What this suggests is that Danny is. in fact, him: a young Texas writer with early success struggling to discover whether that was a fluke or whether he really does have talent worth cultivating. McMurtry found his own way across the border, across the river and through the door to ordinary places. It is left unclear whether Danny Deck can do the same.

The self-invented man

Lewis Mumford called Olmsted's combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading "American education at its best." He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance

Many young men who don't know what to do with their lives never find a satisfactory answer. Frederick Law Olmsted had the good fortune to have a father affluent enough and patient enough to allow his son the time he needed to find his career, and eventually the career found him, as Witold Rybczynski tells the story in a fine biography, A Clearing in the Distance (1999).

Olmsted spent a year as a merchant seaman, became a farmer and then a nurseryman, tried his hand at journalism and wrote some influential books, with his father making up the deficits in his various enterprises. Today we associate Olmsted primarily with the design of New York City's Central Park, assuming it to be the culmination of his career. Instead it was the beginning, where he discovered his true calling.

Olmsted and Calveret Vaux were hired to make a park out of a few blocks of mostly vacant land in the city. Olmsted had been to Europe and remembered parks he had seen in England and France. These observations, plus the knowledge he had gained working with plants and trees on his farm, led to the design of a park that surpassed expectations. Yet Olmsted was frustrated by New York politics, everyone trying to cut funding or change the plan. Some politicians wanted to plant flowers in the park, while Olmsted thought flowers had their place, but that place wasn't Central Park. He wanted a more natural look to the park.

He was glad to finally be rid of Central Park, but by then he had plenty of other opportunities for his thriving new business in what he called landscape architecture. Over the next decades he designed numerous public parks, grounds for public buildings, college campuses and private estates, including most famously Biltmore in Asheville, N.C. Other projects he worked on included Belle Isle in Detroit, the World's Fair in Chicago, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, National Zoological Park, Smith College, Notre Dame University, Duke, Vasser, Yale and Stanford. A more complete list takes up three pages in Rybczynski's book.

Olmsted saw himself as an artist, not a landscaper. His art has changed through the years, much of it no longer recognizable, yet enough of his work remains, including Central Park, to still impact American culture more than a century after his death.

Meaningless twaddle

So much of what we say says nothing. And often that is entirely the point. When we say things like "how are you?" and "nice weather we're having," we are just filling blanks. Eventually, if we're lucky, a real conversation might get started. In the meantime, we exchange meaningless twaddle until somebody says something meaningful, or at least interesting. Sometimes that never happens and the small talk continues until one party breaks away and tries again with somebody else.

Yet so often even meaningful conversation contains meaningless twaddle. Consider some of these phrases that we hear all the time:

"It's as easy as ABC"

"Going forward"

"Crunch the numbers"

"Give 110 percent"

"Not exactly rocket science"

"Knock on wood"

"Let me put in my two cents"

"On the same page"

"Let's not reinvent the wheel"

And so on.

Sometimes such phrases are not exactly meaningless, for some cliches do mean something. They can be a shorthand way of saying something that would take more time to say if we avoided the cliches. Yet so often they add nothing at all to the conversation. Instead of saying "let me put in my two cents," why not just say what you have to say? Rather than "give 110 percent," saying simply "do your best" covers the same ground without causing a cringe among those who know 110 percent is mathematically impossible.

"Not exactly rocket science" stopped being amusing ages ago, as did "reinventing the wheel." Such phrases add absolutely nothing to the conversation. Nor do they add anything to the reputation or prestige of those who say them.

Nobody escapes to jail

Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula Le Guin made her living creating fantasy, so it stands to reason that she would defend it. Yet like Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were highly intelligent, very rational individuals who wrote (and read) fantasy, and one could name any number of others like them. Lewis remembered as a schoolboy that the fantasy stories he read seemed more rational, more relevant to his own life, than the more realistic stories he read. The latter always seemed phony, somehow always unlike the real world.

Fantasy is often equated with daydreaming, which is a waste of time, at least according to most parents, teachers and employers. Better to focus on real people, real problems, real solutions. or so we've been told. They're right, but only up to a point. We all do need to live in reality, but many successful careers, my own included, have been inspired by childhood fantasies?

If fantasy always fails reality, why did our parents and teachers tell us those stories about Cinderella, the Three Bears, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, etc.? Even in adulthood, don't we sometimes recall some of these stories and relate them somehow to our own lives?

Fantasy is often referred to as escapism, a charge to which Ursula Le Guin had an apt reply: "Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"

Style wins

Style wins every, every time.

Susan Hill, Howards End Is on the Landing

Susan Hill

What separates the great writers from the pretty good writers? Style, says Susan Hill in Howards End Is on the Landing. It's not their story plots or their characters or even their message. It's always their style. Ultimately that's why we return to their books again and again, even long after their deaths.

She mentions several writers to illustrate her point. Raymond Chandler, for example. You may not always understand what's going on, but his writing style places him at or near the top of most lists of great hardboiled  mystery writers. John Le Carre holds that position for espionage novels for the same reason.

Mostly Hill writes about P.G. Wodehouse, whose plots, as I've mentioned before, are usually very similar. But one reads Wodehouse less for the plot than for the Wodehouse style, his humorous way of saying things that no other writer of comic novels has been able to equal. (Donald E. Westlake came close, I believe. And what's remarkable about Westlake is that he developed a very different style for his many serious, totally humorless novels.)

We can all think of writers we love mainly for their style. In my youth I devoured books by John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger for this reason. Ernest Hemingway's reputation has everything to do with his unique, often imitated but never equaled style.

For young writers trying to make it in publishing, developing their own style is usually the key. Often this is called their voice. The clearer, the more distinct the voice, the more the writer will stand out from others. Writers with style still have to have something to say, of course. But writers with something to say will be more likely to find readers if they also have a style.

Stop by anywhen

Anywhere is a common English word, as is anyhow. So why not anywhen? We say whenever, as we do both wherever and however. So again, why not anywhen?

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) did, in fact, introduce the word, but for some reason it never caught on. Instead we say sometime or anytime or whenever. Anywhen sounds funny to us, but then so would anywhere if it weren't so familiar. The same is true of most English words, including your own name. The more we hear a word, the more acceptable it seems.

Obviously we don't need anywhen, but there are numerous words we don't actually need. Teenager, for example. We could say adolescent or simply teen. Or we might even say teener. But somebody came up with the word teenager in the 1940s, and it stuck. We didn't need 24/7 either because we already had 24 hours and around the clock, but 24/7 came and conquered in the 1980s.

English has a huge vocabulary in comparison with most other languages. This is due to the way English speakers welcome new words, including those from other cultures. This is in sharp contrast with the French, who actively discourage new words, especially English words, from spoiling their beautiful language. Listen to Germans speak and you will frequently hear English words tossed into the mix. This happens much less commonly when French people talk.

Despite their welcoming attitude, English speakers don't embrace every new word that comes along, and we can be grateful for this or the English vocabulary might be twice the size that it is. Anywhen is but one of countless words that have been tried and found wanting, for whatever reason. Some words never get off the ground. Others, including many slang terms, have their day in the sun, then fade away.

Some words may be fairly common in one region, yet unknown elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This is especially true of slang terms, such as horse-pint, used in parts of Appalachia to be mean a large pint, something like a baker's dozen.

Or a word may simply fall out of use with the passage of time. When asked about why the war was going on for so long, Abraham Lincoln said, "If we just keep pegging away it'll turn out right." Today we would say pecking away.

Our language changes constantly, but also gradually, and that is a good thing. As James Greenough and George Kittredge said in their 1914 book Words and Their Ways in English Speech, "Both the purist and the innovator are necessary factors in the development of a cultured tongue. Without the purist, our language would change with extravagant rapidity. ... Without the innovator, our language would come to a dead stop ..."

Bewitched

Jodi Picoult gives her own unique twist to the Salem witch trials in her 2001 novel Salem Falls.

This time it's not a witch put on trial because of a community's mass hysteria but a man named Jack St. Bride. He has a doctorate in history, knows the question to every Jeopardy answer and was once a teacher and soccer coach but now feels lucky just to have a job washing dishes in a diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire. That's because he was just released from prison.

Jack had taken his lawyer's advice to plead guilty to a lesser charge after being falsely accused of raping a student in another town. But now he must register as a sex offender in Salem Falls, and soon everyone in town is talking about him and warning their daughters to stay away from him.

By this time, however, Addie Peabody, his boss at the diner, has already fallen in love with him. Addie herself had been raped years before — as it happens, by the cop who will eventually arrest Jack for the same crime — and she is torn over what to believe when a Salem Falls teenager accuses Jack of raping her.

Gillian, the girl, had been playing at witchcraft with friends on the night in question, thus creating a situation where a "witch" falsely accuses someone else of a crime, reversing the Salem situation. Also, it is Jack who bewitches, because of his good looks, teenage girls into falling in love with him and turning their imaginations into a false reality. I don't think I am giving anything away, for readers will be confident of Jack's innocence all along, even though the evidence appears to be stacked against him. 

Most the rest of the novel takes place in the courtroom, where Jack's attorney must first convince himself, then the jury, that his client did not really rape Gilliam. But if not Jack, then who? In the end, that is the novel's most enticing mystery, unresolved, or even mentioned, until the very last sentence.