Important work

Close physical contact with the field of juvenile literature leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children —  reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.

E.B. White, One Man's Meat

E.B. White

What's interesting about the above comment by E.B. White is that it appeared in The New Yorker in 1938, more than a decade before he wrote Charlotte's Web, (1952), thus becoming one of the most beloved writers of children's books of all time. In 1938, however, he was known only as a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His essays, such as the one called "Children's Books," were later reprinted in One Man's Meat.

White had moved from New York City to a farm in Maine with his wife, who reviewed children's books. As a result of Katharine's career, White found children's books lying everywhere in their home. Sometimes he read these books, and this led to the essay that included the somewhat prophetic comment about how fun — and easy — it must be to write books for children. Perhaps this is when the idea that he might do it himself first came to him.

Writing for children may, in fact, be relatively easy. I base this conclusion simply on the fact that so many Hollywood celebrities and Washington politicians seem to be able to write children's books. I have a friend who has had more than 500 children's books published. Not that she isn't very talented or that she doesn't work very hard. The best writers for children, including White, do work very hard, although I suspect it is also fun for them.

And sometimes, as with Charlotte's Web, their work becomes important to generations of children.

White actually made a second prophetic comment in this same essay: "Incidentally, one of the few books that struck me as being in the true spirit of nonsense is one called The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss." Dr. Seuss was just getting started at this point, having gotten his first children's book published in 1937. Yet White singled him out from all the scores of writers whose books filled his house as someone special.

Storybook stuff

They were worlds apart in everything but the simplicity of their humanity, and so they were really not apart at all.

Paul Gallico,  Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris

It's good to be Cinderella, but it's also good to be the Fairy Godmother,  as Paul Gallico shows in his charming 1958 short novel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris.

Ida Harris, a middle-aged widow, spends her days tidying up the clutter left by wealthy Londoners. The only beauty in her life, other than her friendship with another charwoman and her memories of her late husband, is found in flowers. Then she sees a costly Christian Dior gown in the closet of one of the women she works for, and she resolves to own a Christian Dior dress no less beautiful. She has no place to wear such a gown, yet still she desires it more than anything.

It takes her years to save enough money, but she has nothing else to save her money for. When she thinks she has enough, she heads for Paris and the exclusive Christian Dior shop, thinking she can pick a gown off the rack and be back in London by the end of the day. It's not that easy, of course, especially not for a humble middle-class working woman among the snobs and elites found in an exclusive Paris dress shop.

But this is "storybook stuff," a phrase Gallico uses in his book, and over the next few days Mrs. 'Arris, as she calls herself, transforms the lives of several of the people she meets more than they transform her.

Gallico's little book holds up well after more than 60 years, and a reader today can easily understand why it was once so popular with readers.

Catching readers, holding readers

I've learned that if I don't love a book by the first twenty pages, chances are I'm not going to love it for the next three hundred.

Caroline Leavitt, author's note, Pictures of You paperback edition

Caroline Leavitt

Most novelists realize, as Carolyn Leavitt does, that first chapters are important. That's why they usually devote so much attention to those early pages. Catch readers and maybe you can hold them.

Yet second chapters are important as well. There have been many novels that I loved by the end of the first chapter, then abandoned before reaching the end of the second or third chapter. So many writers start their novels in the middle of their story, or sometimes even at the end, when there is enough tension to entice a reader, then shift back to the slow, ponderous actual beginning of the story in chapter two. But do beginnings really have to be so slow and ponderous?

One of the things that most impressed me about Mystery Ride, a novel I reviewed here a few days ago, was the way Robert Boswell started at the very beginning of his story and still made it riveting. Yet his second chapter and then his third chapter are no less riveting. There isn't a dull chapter in the novel, no chapter devoted solely to dull description, scene setting or back story. Each chapter advances the plot and each holds the reader's interest. Caroline Leavitt does something very similar in Pictures of You.

Thomas Hardy, although one of my favorite writers, is not known for his entrancing opening chapters. He favors description and scene setting in the early pages. So it is ironic that Hardy wrote what has been called the best first chapter in literature, in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It's hard to top a chapter in which a man gets drunk and sells his wife. It's a pretty good novel as a whole, but the rest of it never quite equals that first chapter.

So in one regard Robert Boswell, whom few people have heard of, beats Thomas Hardy, whom everybody has heard of: He gives every other chapter as much attention as he gives that first chapter. Readers get hooked and stay hooked.

Blending fiction into history

E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) could be a history book that reads like a novel or a novel that reads like a history book. That it is actually the latter we know because it tells us that on the cover. Doctorow blends fact and fiction as well as any historical novelist, a plot coming into form only gradually. Historical figures like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, Evelyn Nesbitt and Sigmund Freud are as much characters as the two families, one black and one white, that eventually take over the story.

The book is narrated by someone who is just a boy when all this takes place, and he identifies members of his family only as Father, Mother and Mother's Younger Brother. He does not give a name even to himself.

An elegant black musician named Coalhouse Walker comes each week to their house to try to convince their maid to marry him. They already have a baby boy. Sarah finally agrees to the marriage, then tragedy strikes. Coalhouse is persecuted by members of a fire department, who destroy his new Model T. He insists they restore it to its original condition, even though as a black man he has virtually no power.

Meanwhile Sarah is killed by the police when she is only trying to summon help, and Mother takes over the care of her child, which distances her from Father. In desperation, Coalhouse turns violent, backed up by several young black men and even Mother's Younger Brother, who after being rejected by Evelyn Nesbitt is ready to use his talent with explosives for Coalhouse's hopeless cause.

The period of history is just before the First World War, and Doctorow gives us the flavor of that time. This may be his best known novel, although it is hardly his best.

Life's a mystery

They were on the ride together, Rox thought, feeling the thrill of it. The mystery ride.

Robert Boswell, Mystery Ride

Life is a journey, so we say. So is marriage or any kind of relationship. You start in one place and end up somewhere else, and how you get there is something of a mystery even after you've arrived at the end.

Robert Boswell's 1992 novel Mystery Ride is not read much today — try finding it in a bookstore — but in the 1990s it was a bestseller. The title may have been a bit deceptive. One wonders how many people bought it assuming it to be a murder mystery, perhaps taking place during a drive across the country. There's plenty of travel in Boswell's story, yet the ride of the title takes place mostly on an Iowa farm.

Very much in love when they buy the farm in 1971, Angela and Stephen Landis each envision a different kind of future. She sees the farm as just a youthful fling, a charming place to live during their extended honeymoon. He actually wants to become a farmer. And so she divorces the man she still loves and moves west with their young daughter, hoping he will follow her. He doesn't.

The story skips forward a number of years when their daughter, Dulcie, has become a troubled teenager whom Angela can no longer manage. She decides to take the girl back to the farm for the summer to see if Stephen can control her. Meanwhile she has remarried to a dashing but unfaithful man named Quinn, while a woman named Leah and her own teenage daughter, Roxanne, have just moved into the farmhouse with Stephen.

In other hands this plot could easily turn into a comedy, but Boswell has other, better ideas. Readers, like the characters themselves, have no idea where this ride might take them.

We like what we like

It seems to me there are two sorts of critics — one lot would prefer to like the things they review, the others prefer to dislike the things they review.

Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979

Michael Palin

This particular diary entry on March 31, 1977. refers specifically to reviews of Jabberwocky, a new film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Michael Palin, yet Palin's comment applies to all critics of all movies, books, plays, television shows, etc. In fact, it applies to all of us at all times: We tend to like what we want to like and dislike what we want to dislike. Old opinions color new opinions.

Reviewers, of course, are supposed to be more professional and thus more objective than the rest of us, as if an objective opinion were possible. Yet their biases sway their opinions, just as the rest of us are swayed by our own biases. Critics who like a certain director are more likely to like that director's next film. Or perhaps they liked a director's last film so much, they decide going into the theater that the new film cannot possibly be as good.

I wrote book reviews for a newspaper for many years. At one point my editor, concerned about ethics and the appearance of ethics, decided that my being sent books for review by publishers might slant (or appear to slant) my reviews in their favor. His remedy was to give me a monthly budget to purchase books to review. What actually happened was that I tended to buy books I most wanted to read by authors I most admired. Negative comments in my reviews became more scarce than when I reviewed random books sent by publishers. Soon we reverted to the old system of reviewing books sent by the publishers, although I think that had less to do with ethics than with budget concerns and the high price of new books. Why buy books that publishers are willing to give to you? And I think my reviews became more fair as a result. At the very least a wider range of books was reviewed.

(And publishers continued to send review copies while I ignored them all. This failure to review any of them did not seem very ethical to me.)

We may have preconceived opinions, yet minds can be changed, and that's what really good books, really good movies or really good actions by people we despise can sometimes do.

The Python diaries

Michael Palin's diary had a timely beginning, timely because he started it just a month before he and five other young men got together to form what became known as Monty Python. For more than a decade Monty Python would entertain millions with a television series, movies, stage performances, records and books. Palin gives us a day-by-day account of all this in his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (2006).

Diaries are by nature personal and subjective, and so the book shows us Python only from Palin's perspective. It places him at the center of everything and makes him the observer of the foibles, weaknesses and habits of the others. John Cleese contributes a blurb to the cover saying that Palin never stops talking. That's the kind of thing we don't learn from the diaries themselves.

The diaries are about much more than just Monty Python. There's much about Helen, his wife, and their three young children, and about his aging parents. (His father dies during these years.) He writes about hosting Saturday Night Live three times and about trying to write a novel. Yet Python always remains the main attraction.

Palin and Terry Jones had been friends and writing partners since their university days, and according to Palin he and Jones are the core of the comedy group, the ones who do most of the writing  and can be most depended upon to be where they are supposed to be and do what they are supposed to do.

Cleese comes to the group early and is a massive talent, yet also something of a prima donna. He would much rather be on holiday in France than working in England. In 1978 Palin quotes Cleese as describing his own classic TV show Fawlty Towers as "hack work," something to pay the bills.

Graham Chapman tended to be insecure, always late and often drunk, at least in the early years. Eric Idle was one for extremes, feeling one way about something on one day and totally different the next. Terry Gilliam, the only American in the group, isn't mentioned much early in diaries. He is the illustrator, seldom used as an actor, and so was not usually at the center of things. Later as Gilliam's talent as a director begins to emerge, he earns more mention in the diaries, especially with respect to Jabberwocky and the early work on Brazil (in which Palin will eventually play an important role).

For Python fans — and who else would read this massive book? —the best entries will be those about the making of favorite scenes, such as the "Pet Shop/Parrot" sketch and the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" sketch. If only Palin had known which bits would become most beloved, he might have written more about them at the time.