If wishes were fishes

Each of us suffers from a tendency to believe what we want to believe, never mind evidence to the contrary. Erik Larson’s 2011 book In the Garden Of Beasts illustrates how this tendency played out while Hitler was strengthening his grip on Germany in the 1930s.

The German people wanted to believe in their country's greatness and that Nazi excesses against political opponents, Jews and others were just temporary or weren’t nearly as bad as some were reporting.

Other governments, including those in the United States and Great Britain, wanted to believe Hitler would stop short of war.

The focus of Larson’s book is William E. Dodd, President Roosevelt's unorthodox choice as ambassador to Germany. Most ambassadors, then as now, were wealthy men rewarded for their political contributions. Nobody else wanted the German post, however, so FDR settled on a college professor of modest means. Dodd had fond memories of living in Germany as a student, and he wanted to believe that Hitler’s Germany was the same country he had known before. At first he was even given to speaking of “the Jewish problem” in much the same way the Nazis did, and he often complained of "too many Jews" working in the embassy.

Gradually, however, Dodd came to see Hitler for what he was, a threat to world peace. “I have a sense of horror when I look at that man,” he wrote in his diary. Still he couldn’t convince those back at the State Department that the man was as dangerous as he knew him to be. Washington didn’t want to believe it. Nor did others in the diplomatic corps want to believe that Dodd, of all people, could possibly know what he was talking about.

Another important figure in Larson’s book is Dodd’s promiscuous daughter, Martha, who accompanied her parents to Germany. Married or not, she had a string of lovers, some of them from the literary world, including Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe. In Germany, she too believing what she wanted to believe, her lovers included various Nazis. She was introduced to Hitler himself, but neither found the other attractive, so the relationship never got beyond him kissing her hand. Yet the man she most loved, and the one she wanted to marry, was a Soviet spy. Boris Winogradov, however, was less interested in marrying Martha than in turning her into a spy. She did, in fact, become a spy but, according to Larson, was an ineffectual one.

Larson has a knack for writing history as riveting as almost any novel, and this is an example of him at his best.

Sincerely yours

Most of us, like onstage performers, struggle for a graceful way to get offstage.

William Safire, On Language

William Safire

Sure email and texting are quicker and easier ways to communicate in writing, as opposed to good old-fashioned letters, but for me the big advantage is that, in most cases, they do not require a salutation or complimentary close.

Salutations in letters are less a problem, as long as you know the name of the person you are writing to and don’t have to resort to Dear Sir or Madam or To Whom It May Concern, but still the use of the word dear, even if proper and commonplace, often seems awkward and insincere. Do I really want to refer to someone I don’t know, or someone I know but don’t particularly like, as dear? In an e-mail you just start with the person’s name, if that.

The bigger problem with letters is how to close them because there are so many options. In his best-selling book On Language (1980), a collection of excerpts from his New York Times column, William Safire comments on many of those options.

Regards — “pedestrian”

With warm regards — “may be more than you want to say”

Warmly — “not cool”

Cordially — “has a slightly patronizing air”

Yours — “meaningless”

All the best — “insipid”

Personal regards — “a weak effort to add humanity to a business communication”

Your friend — “written only to people the friendly signer does not know”

Affectionately — “what it says is ‘I have this feeling for you that I am not prepared to call anything profound'”

That pretty much leaves us with the old standbys, Sincerely and Yours truly in business letters and Love in letters to those we actually love. Even then we may wrestle in our minds over which, if any, works best.

Safire writes that Jimmy Carter, the president of the United States at the time his book was published, routinely omitted the dear and the complimentary close at the end of handwritten White House memos. One can imagine all the time that must have saved. Carter, years before the invention of email, was a man ahead of his time.

The library window

Returning to Mardy Grothe’s book Metaphors Be With You and its metaphorical quotations relating to literary topics, let us today consider some of those about libraries.

Jorge Luis Borges

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. — Jorge Luis Borges

Don’t we all, if we imagine Paradise at all, imagine it as being full of those people and things and activities we like best? Or how else can it be paradise? For someone who loves books, a paradise needs books. I tend to think of a library, particular my own personal library, as a kind of earthly paradise.

A library doesn’t need windows. A library is a window. — Stewart Brand

Libraries, or at least small libraries, tend to have few windows. That's because windows take up wall space, and small libraries, such as that room in your home where you keep your books, may need all the wall space possible. Larger libraries, such as the Largo Library where I sit now, have interior shelves, where most books are stored. So there are windows that let in plenty of light. The natural light helps, but still Brand's comment is correct. Glass windows or not, a library gives its patrons a glorious view of the world around them.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. — Germaine Greer

One of those windows that a library provides, at least for youngsters of a certain age, is that one allowing a peek into sexual matters. Nowadays computers and Google provide that window, but in my day there was National Geographic magazine, dictionaries and the dirty parts of novels to sweep innocence away.

Your library is your portrait. — Holbrook Jackson

I have touched on this subject many times, but it bears repeating. We are what we read. Our books, those we find important enough to keep in our homes (whether we actually read them or not) describe us, sort of in the way that our Google searches describe us.

Friends and authors

Many of “history’s greatest metaphorical quotations” collected in Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You relate to literary topics. So I thought I might occasionally focus on some of these quotations in this blog. Today let’s look at some metaphors about authors.

Choose an author as you choose a friend. — Wentworth Dillon

A scene from The Fault in Our Stars

A friend tends to be someone with similar interests, a similar worldview and even a similar personality. The authors we like best probably have the same things in common with us, or at least their books suggest this to be true. Books can be misleading, however.

Earlier this week Linda and I watched the movie The Fault in Our Stars, in which two teenage lovers, both with terminal cancer, travel all the way to Amsterdam to meet an author whose book they love. The author turns out to be an obnoxious drunk, not what they imagined at all.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. — Gustavo Flaubert

Others have made this same comparison of an author to God and a book to the universe. The writer is the creator, the one who determines who lives and who dies, what happens and what doesn’t, where it begins and at what point it ends. Of course, an author, unlike God, has an editor.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so. — W. Somerset Maugham

This seems like a continuation of Flaubert’s observation. Although authors manipulate their characters and stories, their objective is to disguise this from their readers. The story, ideally, seems real to the readers, each development flowing naturally from what has gone on before, almost as if the author were not there at all. And so it is with the universe with respect to God.

A novel for grownups

It took me more than 50 years to finish Middlemarch.

George Eliot

I started George Eliot's novel as a college sophomore when it was assigned for a course in Victorian literature. Each week we had to read a different novel, and Victorian novels tend to be monsters. I got through most of them, and some, like Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Scott’s The Heart Of Midlothian, I greatly enjoyed. Middlemarch, however, gave me problems, and I gave up before I got very far into it.

Even 54 years later I nearly surrendered at about the same point in the book, that point where characters and plotlines multiply to the point where none of it makes sense. Fortunately, this time I was listening in my car to a reading of the novel by Nadia May, so even when I lost interest, May kept going. Eventually the various threads came together and the story became interesting.

Virginia Woolf once called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and perhaps she was right. If, on the surface, it is the story of how the saintly Dorothea Brooke and other young residents of Middlemarch fight through trials to find love, it is also a novel, loaded with literary and historical references, about economic challenges in 19th century England, inheritance (always a popular topic in Victorian literature), morality, social progress and, as the subtitle suggests, provincial life. If it seems like a complex novel, that’s because it is.

I wasn’t ready for Middlemarch as a college sophomore, though perhaps I could have gotten through it if I had had Nadia May to read it to me.

Metaphors for all occasions

Dr. Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You is more than just a sequel to I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like. The earlier book is a collection of metaphors organized by topic. Metaphors Be With You purports to collect the ten best comments, most of them in the form of metaphors, ever said about 250 topics from Ability to Zeal. There is some repetition from the previous book, but less than you might expect.

If none of the quotations Grothe selects as the very best suit you, you can jump to his website (www.drmardy.com/dmdmq) for many more. Also there are references to similar topics covered in the book where the quote you are looking for may be found. So this is a handy book, as well as an entertaining one.

Certain writers (and most of the sources are writers) pop up frequently. Among those quoted most frequently include the likes of Emerson, Twain, Shakespeare and Thoreau. Other people are cited only once, and then somewhat unexpectedly: Julie Andrews, Rick Warren, Julia Roberts, John Lennon and Penn Jillett among them. Many of those quoted are people you have never heard of, which seems encouraging. One need not be famous to say something famous. Although it certainly helps.

One of the best things about the book is that Grothe tries to verify sources of his quotations. Often he notes that a quote commonly attributed to a famous person cannot be found in that person’s work or was found to have been actually said, or said first, by somebody else. As an example, the line, “And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom” is attributed on most Internet sites to Anais Nin. Grothe says it was the lesser known Elizabeth Appell who said it.

In one case, a quotation he himself attributed to Andy Rooney in I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like is listed as Author Unknown in the newer book.

So give Mardy Grothe a lot of credit for his scholarship. As well as for his clever titles.

A patriotic thriller

Thrillers don’t normally have themes. Their object is just to thrill, to entertain, not to make statements. But Susan Isaacs’s 1998 novel Red, White and Blue, with its title and from first sentence to last, does make a statement, a statement about America and about what it means to be an American. The question is, does her focus on her theme help or hinder her story?

Certainly it delays the story, or at least the main part of the story. Here Charlie Blair, a Wyoming rancher turned FBI agent, volunteers to work undercover in a racist, anti-Semitic group called Wrath that may have turned violent. Lauren Miller, an ambitious Jewish reporter from New York City, sees a Wyoming bombing as her opportunity to make a name for herself. True love, as well as true adventure, happens when the two of them meet.

What Charlie and Lauren don’t know, but Isaacs tells her readers, is that both of them share a common great-great-grandmother. She devotes the first half of the book to describing in great detail how one branch of the family ended up in Wyoming, becoming Protestant, while the rest stayed in New York. We get the stories of each link in the chains leading to Charlie and Lauren. Isaacs is a gifted writer and all this makes fine reading, yet it may feel like little more than an unusually long prologue to some readers. (The book actually does have a prologue, which Isaacs calls a preamble, in keeping with her theme.)

I, for one, am glad Isaacs chose to give her book its theme, making it less a thriller but more a serious novel.

Not too late

"The more I find out about your mother's remarkable life before me, the more it emphasizes that I've never done anything adventurous, or traveled, or met anyone that I might have had an impact on ..."

"But you are doing that now. It's not too late."

Phaedra Patrick, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

No, Phaedra Patrick's The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper cannot be considered great literature. It is too sentimental, too orchestrated for that. Still it makes great reading.

Her story tells of a 69-year-old man, widowed one year before, who decides the time has come to dispose of his wife's things. He finds something he doesn't remember ever seeing before, a charm bracelet that makes him wonder where Miriam collected those charms and what their significance could have been. Why did she never mention them in 40 years?

Arthur Pepper, a retired locksmith, has always been a quiet, colorless man, even more so in the year since his wife died. He rarely leaves the house, and Bernadette, a neighbor known for adopting lost causes, sometimes has to leave her food offerings at his doorstep because he won't answer her knock.

The charms, however, spur Arthur into action. One in the shape of an elephant has a telephone number on it. He dials that number and reaches a man in India who says Miriam cared for him when he was a small boy. Arthur never knew his wife had been in India. Other charms lead him to Paris, to London, to an art school where Miriam's image still hangs on the wall and even to an estate where tigers roam and where a former playboy still lives. What kind of life did Miriam lead before marrying Arthur? And why did she marry him, of all men, then never tell him about her earlier life? Was she really happy?

The man's journey of exploration, of course, brings him out of his shell and, more than that, affects his ability to relate to other people, including Bernadette and his grown children who, with problems of their own, have become distant. Neither of them even attended their mother's funeral.

Patrick, even when stretching belief, keeps all this not just interesting, but compelling. She answers all of Arthur's questions and leaves him, and her readers, satisfied.

Let's pretend

"Oh, I see."

Actually I don't see at all, but sometimes you have to pretend you do understand just to make people feel comfortable. Just as (much more often, in my experience) you sometimes have to pretend that you don't understand what someone has said or what's going on, otherwise things can get awkward.

Steff Penney, The Invisible Ones

To pretend, at least in the world of adults, is usually viewed negatively, as just another form of lying. Someone pretends to be a friend in order to get something from you. A salesman pretends to be looking out for your interests when his main objective is his own. However, one of the narrators in Steff Penney's novel, The Invisible Ones, makes the case that pretense in conversation can sometimes be the morally correct thing to do.

Can that be right? I think it can, at least sometimes.

Harold A. Mapes

Even in middle age my father enjoyed telling stories about his experiences, but as he aged, telling his stories became one of his few remaining pleasures, the others being eating, sleeping and taking long walks in the woods. On occasion he might tell a story I did not remember hearing before, but usually they were stories I had heard many times. He would often tell the same stories in the same order as before. Yet I listened, as if hearing them for the first time.

Late in life Dad admitted that he knew he was repeating himself, that he told his stories for his own benefit, because they helped him remember. But they were for my benefit as well, because their repetition helped me remember at least some of those stories as if they were my own.

When I was a newspaper reporter I can recall asking sources for information I already possessed. It was a way double-checking both the information and the source. That seemed like a good thing to me.

But what about normal conversation? This is what is being discussed in the novel. Is it morally OK to pretend to understand when we really don't or to pretend not to understand when we really do? The character offers his justification. In the first instance, it makes people feel comfortable. In the second, it avoids awkwardness. In social intercourse, each is a moral good.

Yet harm can be done, and that harm may be to yourself when you pretend to understand something, such as directions to a certain place, when you really don't. Pretending not to understand what the other person is saying, thus making repetition necessary, can cause awkwardness, or anxiety, rather than avoid it.

'The Grapes of Wrath' endures

In No Time to Spare, a collection of short essays from her blog, Ursula K. Le Guin twice addresses the subject of The Great American Novel, which she abbreviates to TGAN. Mostly she resists the notion, not just of designating one great American novel but also of making lists of the greatest novels. Such attempts, she writes, omit genre writing (she mostly wrote science fiction) and tend to favor male writers from the eastern half of the United States.

"But mostly because I didn't and don't think we have much idea of what's enduringly excellent until it's endured," she says. "Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with."

The passage of time is important not just for individual novels but for a nation's literature itself. For a long time after the colonies were settled and after the nation was founded, American literature was not regarded highly, not even by Americans. Americans who read mostly read books imported from Europe, mostly England. Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens and others were the writers that mattered, the ones taught in American schools and checked out of American libraries.

Gradually writers like Emerson, Poe, Twain and Melville raised the possibility that such a thing as a great American novel might exist, if not yet, then some day. Henry James, an American who spent most of his life in England and was respected on both sides of the Atlantic, helped raise the stature of American literature, as did a host of other writers who emerged in the 20th century. And so people started to talked about The Great American Novel, one piece of fiction that not just represented the nation and what it stands for but also can stand up proudly in comparison with the best Great Britain or France has produced.

Given what Le Guin writes about the very notion of TGAN, it is surprising that she actually nominates a contender for that title. Actually she nominates two, but she has little to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her main focus is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which she says she reread in her old age and was more wowed by it than she was when she read it in her youth.

Steinbeck, perhaps because of his popularity especially with young readers, is usually overlooked whenever critics write on the subject of the best American novelists. William Faulkner, less read and less understood, rates higher with the intelligentsia.

Interestingly, Le Guin refers to Steinbeck as "Uncle John." He was not her uncle but the uncle of a college friend of hers, and she got to spend time in his company. Even so, not until she returned to Steinbeck's Depression novel decades later did she appreciate the novel's power.

She writes, "So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel ... a year ago I would have said -- for all its faults -- Huckleberry Finn. But now -- for all its faults -- I'd say The Grapes of Wrath."

After the passage of all those decades, it endures.

Hiding in a story

Ursula K. Le Guin

In her essays in No Time to Spare, Ursula K. Le Guin often turns to the subjects of writing, writers and language. As those are the very subjects this blog specializes in, let's examine some of what she says.

I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

For an introvert, as Le Guin was (she died in January), conversing with strangers doesn't necessarily get easier when it isn't done face to face. Telephone conversations, letters and e-mail or texting can be nearly as difficult. She says she resisted starting her blog, from which these essays came, because she didn't like the idea that strangers could comment on what she wrote and then she would be obligated to reply. Even a gifted writer like Le Guin can find it difficult finding anything to say in a written conversation with a stranger. She prefers to say what she has to say in a story or poem (or essay).

To many people this may make no sense at all. To introverts, and I am a member of that tribe, it makes perfect sense.

Meaning in art isn't the same as meaning in science.

I wish I could quote everything Le Guin says about meaning in literature, but instead I will just focus on some key points. Readers, she says, often ask what a particular story of hers means. "But that's not my job, honey. That's your job," she says, or would like to say. Scientific meaning is the same in every place at every time with every person. Not so literature, where meaning is fluid, ever changing, sometimes crystal clear, other times a complete blur. "Art isn't explanation," she writes.

Words are my matter -- my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.

Words Are My Matter is the title of an earlier collection of Ursula K. Le Guin essays, so I was interested to find the phrase here. I like the image of words, or language, as raw material. We all use this same raw material to communicate, but there are those who use it to create something special, perhaps even art.

Spare time?

Just a matter of days after acquiring Ursula K. Le Guin's No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, I saw that the author had died. She died on Jan. 22 at the age of 88. Truly she didn't have time to spare.

The author of more than a score of novels, mostly science fiction, and several books of poetry, Le Guin turned to blogging when she reached her 80s. It was a way to stay in the writing game, but with short essays rather than an exhausting book, a book she might never live to finish. This book collects the best of her blog.

Her book's title comes from the last line of its first essay, one called "In Your Spare Time." This was triggered by a questionnaire she received from Harvard for her 60th class reunion. (She actually graduated from Radcliffe in 1951, but Radcliffe was affiliated with Harvard.) One question asked what she did in her spare time.

Le Guin reflects on how the meaning of the phrase "spare time" changes as one ages. For younger people it means "leisure time," whatever time is left after work and after household chores and parenting and other responsibilities are taken care of. At some point, after retirement, virtually all time becomes leisure time, meaning people can use their time however they wish. At least this seems true in theory, however untrue it may be in practice. Yet because time grows short as we age, there really is none to spare.

From there Le Guin goes on to tackle a variety of subjects, some relating to aging, others to literature, nature, her cat and, in one of her most entertaining pieces, putting our soldiers in camouflage. "I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus."

As for her cat, she writes about Pard more than any other topic: how she got him, how he misbehaves only when he has an audience, how he catches mice but doesn't know what to do with them, and so on. Another essay focuses on a much bigger cat, a captive lynx that captivates her.

Conflicting gospels

In Donald Ray Pollock's novel The Heavenly Table, Cane, Chimney and Cob Jewett don't have much after their father dies suddenly, but their meager possessions do include two books. One is their father's Bible, from which Pearl Jewett had assumed came his theology that by working hard and suffering one will one day sit at the heavenly table with all the other hard-working, suffering saints. Thus Pearl and his boys had worked hard for little reward. The reward, Pearl insisted, would come later.

When Pearl dies, Cane and Chimney decide they favor the gospel found in the second book, The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, an old dime novel about a former Confederate soldier who turns bank robber. Cane, the smartest of the brothers (which isn't saying much), argues that if they can rob a bank, then flee to Canada (they live in Georgia), they will have enough money to live comfortable and respectable lives.

They don't plan on hurting anyone, but things happen in robberies, and soon the Jewett Gang is wanted, dead or alive, for multiple robberies and murders. The year is 1917, but like desperadoes in the Old West, they head for the border on horseback.

Meanwhile Pollock introduces us to a variety of characters in Ohio, more characters than you might think he could possibly need. Yet skillfully he gives each of these people a purpose when the brothers finally reach Ohio.

The Heavenly Table, although a terrific novel, is the kind of book that once might have been sold under the counter. It is as full of sex, violence and vulgar language as any you might find anywhere. So be forewarned. Much of it is also hilarious.

Still the novel has a heart, and that heart belongs to Cob, the simplest and most innocent of the brothers. The question of whether he will ever sit at the heavenly table remains unanswered, but Pollock shows how, for him at least, a place at an earthly table might seem like heaven.