An unlikely hero

After reading The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (2012) by H.W. Brands, what impresses me most is that before the Civil War, Grant failed at virtually everything he tried, yet within a few years he became one of the most important figures in United States history, a hero not just in America but around the world.

He was a West Point graduate and had served bravely and ably in the Mexican War, but he had no interest in being a career soldier. Mostly he wanted to be near Julia Dent, the woman he loved. He tried farming and various business ventures, succeeding at nothing. Neither Julia's family nor his own father thought much of him. Then the war rescued him.

Officers were desperately needed for a rapidly expanding army, and Grant quickly rose in the ranks, soon becoming a general. While President Lincoln became increasingly frustrated by Union generals in the East who, despite advantages in men and arms, were continually reluctant to challenge Robert E. Lee, he noticed that Grant kept fighting and kept winning in the West. It was probably inevitable that Grant would eventually be brought East to settle matters with Lee.

One might think the title The Man Who Saved the Union refers to Grant's military heroism, but that is only partly true. No less important, according to Brands, was his service to the country after the war was over when he served two terms as president. Saving the Union involved more than just winning the war. It also meant unifying a nation that now included former slaves with all their rights of citizens and whites, both north and south, who were unwilling to accept that fact. Finding a place for Indians in the reformed nation was another challenge Grant tackled. He wasn't entirely successful, as everyone knows, yet he tried valiantly and, according to Brands, did more for civil rights than any American president for the next 100 years.

Grant isn't remembered today as one of the great U.S. presidents. Scandals and controversy filled his two terms in the White House. Brands finds him honest, but a bit naive. He expected everyone to be as committed to serving the public good as he was and to act just as honorably. This wasn't true in the political world, at least as divided then as it is now, and Grant paid a price for trusting people who were unworthy of trust.

Even so, after he left the presidency, many Americans clamored for him to run again, and he was mentioned as a possible nominee for president at every Republican national convention for years afterward. He never sought the office, not even in 1968 when he was first elected. In fact, the only political speeches Grant ever made were for somebody else.

Grant acted heroically even when he was dying, staying alive with throat cancer just long enough to finish his memoirs, the sale of which would support his wife for the rest of her life.

This a truly fine biography, worthy of the man, and its vigorous prose and brief 87 chapters make the 600-plus pages fly by.

Blown by the wind

She got out of the car, steadying herself against the wind,

Colm Toibin, the last line in Brooklyn

In the classroom and in the workplace, Eilis Lacey shines with confidence and competence. Only in her personal life is she overcome with uncertainty and easily led by others. Many readers will identify with the central character in Colm Toibin's fine 2009 novel Brooklyn, the basis for an equally fine movie.

Jobs are scare in the Irish village where she lives in the 1950s. Her brothers have already gone to Liverpool to work. Eilis works only on Sundays in a small shop. Even so she loves her village and is surprised and disappointed when her mother and older sister conspire with an Irish priest in Brooklyn to find her a job in America.

She crosses the ocean alone and afraid. In Brooklyn the priest has found her a room in a boarding house for young working women and a job as a clerk in a department store. She begins attending college classes in accounting, then meets Tony, a young Italian plumber who falls instantly in love with her. Her own affections ignite more slowly, and meanwhile she feels manipulated by Tony, by her landlady, by the priest and by her employers. These are good people who think highly of her, yet still she feels unable to express her own feelings or her own wishes.

The death of her sister takes her home again, although not before Tony insists they marry secretly. He fears, correctly as it turns out, that Eilis might not want to return to Brooklyn. Back home her mother conspires again, this time to keep her home to fill the hole left by her sister. Her reluctance to admit she is married leads to complications with a young man.

Will Eilis finally act on her own for herself, or will she be continue to be led yet by circumstances and by the people in her life? Toibin keeps us guessing. His novel allows readers to know Eilis better that anyone else knows her, perhaps even better than she knows herself.

Encountering true art

True art, according to Ford, is never created but always encountered.

Kenneth Slawenski, J.D. Salinger: A Life

Slave Market with the Disappearing
Bust of Voltaire

The Ford in the above equation is Raymond Ford, a character in the J.D. Salinger short story "The Inverted Forest." Real people have said similar things. Elsewhere in that story Ford says, "A poet doesn't invent his poetry — he finds it ..."

This is an interesting idea, and I believe a true one, at least up to a point.

Speaking of invention, we might say that everything necessary to make a light bulb had been there all along. Thomas Edison simply found a way to put it all together. Yet doing that did require some creativity. If it was easy, as the saying goes, anybody could do it.

So it is with poetry, fiction, music, fine art, etc. It is all there in our world — the words, the ideas, the images, the musical notes, the colors, etc. — just waiting to be encountered and put to use in certain ways. Yet only certain people seem capable of doing this. If we don't call these people creative, then what do we call them?

Last Thursday I revisited the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. So unique, so original, so outlandish are Dali's paintings that it is impossible to imagine anyone else creating them. And creating does seem like the proper word after all.

A little goes a long way

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's

Stephen King, On Writing

I hate it when an author tells me a character has dark hair after I have already imagined her as a blonde. That is not the author's fault, or mine, but it does illustrate the power of a reader's imagination to fill in details.

Like me, Stephen King has little patience with writers who go overboard with their descriptions of characters and scenes. Not only does it slow down the story, but it can bore the reader. Do we really need to know every detail of a person's face or every detail about a room. Sometimes a little bit of description is all we readers need. Our own fertile minds can fill in the rest.

"I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader's sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players," King writes in On Writing. "Nor do I think that physical description should be a shortcut to character. So spare me, if you please, the hero's sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine's arrogant cheekbones. This sort of thing is bad technique and lazy writing ..." If characters are intelligent, determined or arrogant, their words and actions should tell that tale, not their eyes, chins and cheekbones.

King goes on to say, "For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will be the first ones that come to mind." If a writer has to labor over a description, he seems to be saying, perhaps  it's more description than is necessary.

Play this movie again, Sam

Film critic Roger Ebert said he regarded Citizen Kane as the best movie ever made but that Casablanca was the movie he liked best. Yet if Casablanca is the favorite of so many people over so many generations since its release in 1942, perhaps an argument can be made that it is the best movie ever made. After all, how many people call Citizen Kane their favorite? Popularity and art are hardly the same thing, yet film is a popular medium, an entertainment medium. It's all about selling tickets and engaging viewers.  This is something Casablanca does best and has done best for a long time.

Noah Isenberg's We'll Always Have Casablanca (2017) fully explores the Casablanca phenomenon, from its origins as an unsuccessful Broadway play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, to the making of the film and finally to its enduring afterlife.

The reasons for the film's success are many, and Isenberg considers them all. It was a movie than came out at just the right time, soon after America's entry into World War II, and the themes of standing up to oppression and making sacrifices for that cause rang true then, and still do.

The cast was perfection itself. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan or George Raft in the role that went to Humphrey Bogart or Ann Sheridan or Hedy Lamar, not Ingrid Berman, playing Ilsa? Isenberg notes that most of those in the cast were born outside the United States, and many cast members were in fact refugees — ideal for a movie about refugees trying to get to the United States.

The film's screenwriters had much to do with the movie's enduring popularity. Consider how even people who have never even seen Casablanca know many of its classic lines. Yet many people had a hand in working on the script, and for years afterward there were conflicts about who deserved credit for what.

Casablanca has been shown on Turner Classic Movies more than any other film, both a sign of its lasting popularity and a reason for it. Countless movies and television shows have made reference to it, including The Simpsons on numerous occasions and Saturday Night Live. There must be few people in the English-speaking world who have never laughed at another's or attempted their own witty remark based on such lines as "we'll always have Paris" or 'here's looking at you, kid" or 'this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or "play it again, Sam" (even if that exact line isn't even in the movie).

Casablanca lives on in everyone who has ever seen it and many of those who have not. Can that be said of Citizen Kane?

Still the best medicine

The books we keep by our beds usually serve one of two purposes — to either put us to sleep or keep us awake. The latter has never made much sense to me, yet some people do take a thriller or some equally compelling book to bed with them and then tell later about not being able to sleep until they had finished it.

For busy people, bedtime may be their only opportunity to read, but most likely it is also their only opportunity to sleep. So which has priority, and if they were busy all day, how can they stay awake long enough to read more than a few pages? I never could, no matter how exciting the book.

Books to help one sleep seem to me the best ones to keep by the bed. Even when one is wide awake in midday, some books make one drowsy almost instantly. Those are the books to keep by the bed. 

My own current bedside book may seem a bit odd: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States. I never read it before I go to sleep at night because I'm sleepy then, but only if I wake during the night and can't get back to sleep. This happens once or twice a month. After I toss and turn for 30 minutes or more, unable to let my mind rest, that's when I turn on the light and read a chapter of Dave Barry.

This is outrageously funny stuff, often making me laugh out loud. Even the chapter titles are funny. He calls chapter 10 "The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball" and chapter 11: "The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven."

I find that this works better than Henry James or Ford Madox Ford. Laughter may be more effective than any sleeping pill.

I am also reading a David Baldacci thriller, but that I open after dinner each evening, when I want to stay awake.

Memories and longings

Tenderness. Sensitivity. Delicacy. Such are the words that come to mind when I consider the short stories in William Trevor's 2004 collection A Bit on the Side.

Trevor, who died in 2016, spent most of his life in England, but he was born and raised in Ireland, where most of the dozen stories in this book are set. He writes about wounded, mostly introverted people who live on memories and longings. And for some reason they usually have black hair. I can't guess why that is, but for some reason whenever he mentions someone's hair, it is black.

In "Justina's Priest," my favorite story in the book, Trevor tells of a woman, Justina, with the mind of a small child. Devout in her faith, she regularly makes her confession, although her priest wonders why because she never has any sins to confess. She just talks about her life. Justina's only friend, Breda, has moved away and invites Justina to visit her in the city. The priest fears she may run away and get lost in Dublin while trying to find Breda. He warns her family, even though this means breaking his vow not to reveal what he hears in confession.

In "An Evening Out," Trevor tells of two middle-aged people who meet through a dating bureau. It turns out, however, that the man, a photographer, is really looking for someone to drive him around London and carry his equipment but whom he would not have to pay.

"The Dancing-Master's Music" is about a servant girl from an impoverished background who is invited, along with the other servants in a large house, to listen to a musical recital. For most of us, music is a fleeting thing, but for her this music has permanence. Trevor concludes his story with this line, "She knew it would be there when she was gone, the marvel in her life a ghost for the place."

In the title story, "A Bit on the Side," two people, each married to someone else, conduct a long-term affair that becomes threatened when the woman gets a divorce. This may sound like a familiar story, but not in Trevor's hands.

"Sacred Statues" tells of a couple with more children than the husband can support. Meanwhile a childless couple has a good income. Certainly some kind of arrangement can be worked out, or so the mother, pregnant yet again, assumes.

These and other stories in the collection make us mourn William Trevor's passing all the more.

Common ground

Machines began to affect creative artists. In fact, some people noticed that poets were particularly fond of word processors because poets change what they write more than any other type of writers do.

Hugh Downs, Perspectives

When I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville a few years ago I was struck by a display showing rough drafts of notable country songs. One could see how songwriters crossed out words and replaced them with others and, in some cases, rephrased entire lines. (That's a Waylon Jennings song at right.) Some songwriters and poets may still work on paper in this way, but most have probably moved on to computers, where their verses can be changed without leaving a trace of what came before. (This may actually be unfortunate for those of us who enjoy seeing how great writing evolves. That Nashville display could never happen in the Computer Age.)

In an essay in his 1995 book Perspectives, Hugh Downs remembers when, not so many years ago, those at home in the world of art and humanities and those at home in the world of technology and science had very little in common. On any university campus it was usually easy to see which students belonged to one group and which belonged to the other. They dressed differently, they acted differently and they rarely mixed together, at least not after the required freshman courses, or had reason to.

This situation changed with the advent of computers, Downs observes. Very quickly both the tech geeks and the art geeks began using the same tools and began to in some extent speaking the same language. Like engineers, scientists and even auto mechanics, artists and writers began using computers to do their work. This doesn't mean, of course, that there are no longer two different worlds, but just that these different worlds have more common ground than they once did.

I came of age during the typewriter age. I wrote my high school and college papers on a typewriter, and when I still fancied myself a short story writer, I wrote those stories on a typewriter. Later I worked for newspapers and for many years did my work on typewriters. At a newspaper we corrected our mistakes and improved our writing using copy pencils. A pristine appearance was not important until the work appeared in print. In letters, college term papers and the like, however, corrections were difficult. Many times I had to retype entire pages simply because I wanted to changed a few words around.

Today all this seems as antiquated as moving about in a city using horses. (In another essay Downs notes that traffic actually moved through New York City more quickly with horses and wagons than it does today with cars.) I now find it difficult to write more than three or four words in a row without making a typo. How did I ever manage with a typewriter?

A man who did everything

Hugh Downs, who died last July at the age of 99, was something of a Renaissance man. We remember him best for his frequent television appearances. I am old enough to remember when he was Jack Paar's sidekick on Tonight in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Later he hosted the Today Show, appeared on various game shows and a variety of other programs. But he was also an author, a composer, a pilot, a scuba diver, a sailor, a magazine columnist and a special consultant to the United Nations, among many other kinds of activities.

His 1995 book Perspectives gives some idea of the breadth of his interests. The book is a collection of short essays first presented on the ABC radio show Perspective. Not until the acknowledgements at the end of the book does he acknowledge that many of these essays were co-written by his son, H.R. Downs.

Some of these essays are now dated. Others just aren't very interesting, more a recitation of related facts than the expression of an original idea. Yet most of them make amazing, entertaining and informative reading.

He tells of visiting the South Pole and of, in his words, "literally going around the world in twenty-four steps." In another essay he has us imagine the entire solar system as being the size of your thumbnail. In that case, the Milky Way would be the size of the state of Alaska. He writes that clothing is "a kind of advertising," and he says that trousers were invented in Scotland because those kilts can get a bit drafty in the winter. At first men just put a wool sleeve called a trowse on each leg. When eventually sewed together, they became trousers.

He writes about motorcycles (who knew Hugh Downs rode Harleys?), gambling, horses, phobias, left-handedness, dogs, coins, tipping, the free press and other subjects both serious and whimsical. Sometimes he gets personal, as when he tells about appearing on television before he had ever had the chance to watch television.

It was an endlessly fascinating world from Hugh Downs's perspective. A quarter century later his Perspectives remains worthwhile reading.

Down with flashbacks

As a reader I'm a lot more interested in what's going to happen than what already did.

Stephen King, On Writing

Stephen King

That is Stephen King's way of saying he doesn't like flashbacks. Neither do I, either in novels or in movies. Just tell the story. If there's a back story, maybe that should have been told first.

Later King puts it a little differently: "I'm an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies."

I suspect many other readers and viewers feel the same way. We like our stories told in chronological order: First this happened, then this, then this. Instead we so often get: This happened, but before that this happened, and then finally this happened.

Flashbacks, King writes in On Writing, "always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it's sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed convict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn't yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief."

Some back story is often necessary, of course. There are usually things that happened earlier that we need to know about. But that, in most cases, can be done without an annoying flashback interrupting the story. In the two novels I wrote about a couple of days ago, Any Place I Hang My Hat and Big Stone Gap, the authors do need to fill in some blanks for their readers, telling us something about their main characters' past lives. This is essential to each story. Yet Susan Isaacs and Adriana Trigiani do this skillfully without flashbacks, introducing just a few details at a time without interrupting their stories.

Often writers of mysteries and thrillers think they need to hook their readers early with a murder or something equally dramatic in the first chapter. Then they go back and explain how the situation got to this point, thus telling readers what happened before, when readers want to know what happens next.

No less annoying than flashing back is when writers flash forward. This often happens in a prologues, which I find annoying enough in themselves. (Just start with chapter one already!) In The Limehouse Text by Will Thomas (reviewed here a week ago),  the prologue takes us to a climatic part of the story, leaving readers at the edge of a cliff. Then they have to read most of the novel to get to that cliff again. Yet Thomas makes his first chapter interesting enough to draw a reader's attention. His "preview of coming attractions" serves no purpose that I can see, other than to give away part of the ending.

Different novels, same story

When I happened to read Any Place I Hang My Hat (2004) by Susan Isaacs and Big Stone Gap (2000) by Adriana Trigiani back-to-back, I noticed they tell essentially the same story: An independent woman, still young but with her clock ticking, decides to locate a parent she has never known, while at the same time realizing that the man she has discarded may actually be the love of her life.

Of course the details are quite different.

Isaacs tells us of Amy Lincoln, whose mother abandoned her when she was still a baby, leaving her to be raised by her paternal grandmother, a woman who mostly supported herself by shoplifting. Amy's father, though a caring parent, has been in and out of prison for most of his adult life. Nevertheless Amy managed an Ivy League education and now works for a prestigious magazine full of political news and commentary.

While covering a senator running for president she meets a young man who claims to be the senator's son from a youthful fling. Her magazine doesn't do scandal, but the young man's search for his father's acceptance inspires her to search for her mother.

Meanwhile her relationship with John, her longtime boyfriend, seems to be going nowhere. When she catches him at a concert with another woman, she decides to end it. But somehow it's not really the end.

While Amy lives in New York City, Ave Maria Mulligan lives the same story in Big Stone Gap, Va. She owns a drug store, rides in the community ambulance on emergency runs and directs the annual summer pageant in her community. She loves her life but, approaching 36, she wonders if this is all it will ever be. For her, it is the death of her mother that triggers a change.

Her mother was an Italian immigrant who ended up in a small town in the Virginia mountains married to a pharmacist. A letter to Ave given to her after her mother's death reveals that Ave's actual father was her mother's Italian lover, a married man. Her mother had left Italy in shame, and in America Fred Mulligan agreed to marry her. He, however, was never much of a husband — or a father. Can she find the father she never knew she had? She gives away her business and decides to go to Italy to find a new life, perhaps her true life.

But then there's Jack MacChesney, a shy coal miner who has had a crush on her since they were in school together. When he asks her to marry him, she scorns him. Yet Jack and, as it turns out, his mother don't give up so easily.

Both Isaacs and Trigiani tell their stories with humor and compassion. Even if they are essentially the same story, they are different enough and the writing good enough that reading both of them, even if back-to-back, is a pleasure.

Dictionaries change their meaning

Sooner or later discussions about linguistics usually lead to the words descriptive and prescriptive. A descriptive approach describes the way a language is used. A prescriptive approach declares how it should be used.

Your elementary and high school teachers probably followed the prescriptive model. They taught proper grammar, proper spelling, proper pronunciation, etc. Propriety was the true objective. Today the enforcers of politically correct speech take a similarly prescriptive approach, even if it sometimes differs from that of our English teachers. For example, you must never use the pronoun he when referring to a person whose gender is not specified, although for some reason the pronoun she is perfectly acceptable.

Dictionaries, however, have traditionally been descriptive. Scrabble players may view them as prescriptive, since a word not found in the dictionary is not allowed in the game, but dictionaries usually considered themselves descriptive. They listed the words people actually used, the spellings actually used, the definitions actually used and the pronunciations actually used. That's why you can find ain't in a good dictionary — because real people use the word, whether their English teachers would have approved or not.

It helped that dictionaries were printed on paper and it took a number of years for a new edition to be prepared. Thus lexicographers had sufficient time to determine whether new words and new usages had become accepted into the language enough to become worthy of inclusion. Some slang expressions, for example, turn out to be fleeting, falling out of the language as quickly as they enter it.

Today, however, dictionaries are online, meaning that changes can be made quickly and constantly. One unintended consequence of this is that dictionaries have, like so much else in our society, fallen victim to social and political pressures, making them less descriptive and more prescriptive.

Two instances of this have come to light in recent months, both involving the Merriam-Webster dictionary. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Comey Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States, Barrett used the phrase "sexual preference" in the way it has been used for a number of years, including undoubtedly by most members of that Senate committee. One senator immediately objected, stating that the term was offensive to LGBTQ activists. Within hours the dictionary added an entry stating that the term sexual preference was considered offensive.

Then the dictionary changed its definition of racism after a recent Drake University graduate complained that the given definition did not take into account the presumed systemic nature of racism.

In earlier times, the dictionary would have, by necessity, taken time to consider whether a significant number of English speakers actually understood sexual preference and racism in these ways, and only then making descriptive changes. Instead the dictionary now prescribes usages it considers proper, just like our English teachers used to do.

A satisfying mystery

The Limehouse Text (2006), despite its bland title, makes a worthy entry in the Barker and Llewelyn series of Victorian mysteries by Will Thomas. Just the third book in the series — there are now more than a dozen — the novel continues with the business of introducing continuing characters for the benefit of both readers and Thomas Llewelyn, our narrator and enquiry agent Cyrus Barker's new assistant.

The murder of Barker's previous assistant remains unsolved, and another murder, that of a Scotland Yard inspector, and the discovery of a small book written in Chinese appear to be related to that earlier murder. In fact, other mysterious deaths may also be related, and Barker determines to get to the bottom of it all.

That book, the Limehouse text of the title, contains secrets about killing people in such a way that it appears to be a natural death, usually from sudden kidney failure. Barker himself is nearly killed in this way.

Many men desire to gain possession of the tiny text, including those who don't even know what it contains, leaving Barker with an abundance of suspects. Thomas gives readers action aplenty, yet he properly lets Barker solve the mystery with more brain than brawn, while Llewelyn remains confused most the time in true Dr. Watson fashion.