Cummings revealed

E.E. Cummings made more money reading his poems than writing them. That's just one of the fascinating tidbits Susan Cheever gives us in her excellent 2014 biography E. E. Cummings: A Life.

Another is this: Cummings may have been a radical in his poetic style, yet he was a firm anti-communist, unlike so many of his fellow intellectuals. Friends returned from Russia with praise for what they had found there, but Cummings turned against Stalin and communism almost from the moment he entered Russia. Everyone there seemed afraid. Nobody seemed happy.

Cheever gives us plentiful examples of his poetry, often playful, sometimes angry, usually obscure, always thoughtful. These poems provide commentary on his life, from loving memories of his clergyman father to his late-in-life fondness for birds.

The poet had difficulties with women: two marriages, two divorces. He never married the love of his life, who stayed by him until the end, although she was jealous even of his own daughter.

His relationship with Nancy, his daughter, makes a wonderful story in itself, perhaps even worthy of a movie. Cummings knew her when she was a little girl, but then his ex-wife took her away to Ireland, changed her name and refused to tell her anything about her real father. Years later, after Nancy herself had become a poet, Cummings reentered her life, yet for a long time refused to tell her he was her father. Only after Nancy declared her love for him did he reveal the truth.

Like her father, John Cheever, Susan Cheever is an outstanding writer, as her other books such as American Bloomsbury, have shown. This is a fine, revealing biography, perhaps too brief to be definitive, but beautifully written.

The quest for perfection

Iris Murdoch

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea," novelist Iris Murdoch said.

William Faulkner said something similar: "All of us failed to match our dream of perfection." Faulkner's thought can be expanded to include not just writers but everyone else. None of us quite achieve our dreams, not all of them anyway. Perfection is impossible in a universe where Murphy's Law seems to rule. Our dreams are one thing. Reality is another.

I once heard another novelist, Ann Patchett, say something along this same line, although I don't remember her exact words. The story she writes is never quite the story she imagined in her mind, she suggested. And this from someone who, like Murdoch and Faulkner, has written wonderful books.

Is this failure to achieve perfection as unfortunate as it seems? In Christian thought, imperfection when it is recognized — or repentance, if you will — is what opens the door to grace. It also inspires Christians to strive always to do better.

Faulkner saw it similarly for writers. "That's why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off," he said. "Of course he won't, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the short side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide."

Early success can spoil writers, just as it can spoil those in other pursuits. And success isn't even perfection. Actual perfection could destroy us. We all need struggle — and grace.

In black and white

I kept focusing on Nancy and the drive-in and that little pet cemetery. My American dream, drenched in blood and greed, but I didn't care. I wanted what I wanted.

Joe R. Lansdale, More Better Deals

Reading Joe R. Lansdale's More Better Deals (2020) is like watching classic film noir from the 1940s or 1950s. You might even imagine Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck playing the key characters.

Appropriately enough, Lansdale's story takes place in the 1950s. Ed Edwards sells used cars for a shady Texas dealer. He doesn't like cheating people, but it's a living. When he goes to repossess a Cadillac from the owner of a drive-in theater, the man is away, but his beautiful wife is home and quickly seduces Ed. Before long Nancy convinces him to help her kill her abusive husband. His reward: Nancy, the drive-in, a pet cemetery sideline business and a hefty life insurance payment.

Things don't go as planned, of course, and soon enough Nancy has talked Ed into another brainless scheme.

Ed isn't doing all this just for himself and Nancy. He and his beloved younger sister had a black father but are passing as white. He wants to use some of the money to get her a fake birth certificate and a college education. His life may be a mess, but hers doesn't have to be.

Lansdale keeps things moving, and as dark and grisly as the story becomes the reader nevertheless finds something in Ed, if not Nancy, to like. But in this kind of story, justice finds a way. 

On rereading books

Susan Sontag

"No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading," Susan Sontag said. Do I agree? Well, yes and no.

Yes

I used to say something similar: "Any book worth reading is worth keeping." I said that to justify having more than 5,000 books in my home. I believed it then and I would believe it now if I were younger and still had room for that many books.

But why keep books one has already read? Because they inspire memories, because they can be handy references for someone who writes about books and because they are worth rereading. I have reread many books, sometimes with more pleasure the second or third time than the first time. Good books, like good movies, reward you for revisiting them.

Books require much more time than movies, however. Even to read them once takes hours out of our lives. And so we might ask, why read them even once if they are not worth reading again?

No

Yet time is short and books are plentiful, and we don't really know how good a book is until we read it. Do we really want to devote our entire lives to reading relatively few books over and over again?

And do we even always want to read high-quality books?

I have rarely reread a murder mystery or a thriller. In fact, I can't think of any. And yet, like most readers, I enjoy a good mystery or a good thriller now and then. Must we deprive ourselves of books that entertain more than they enlighten? Can't a book be worth reading just once?

Old secrets

It may be more difficult to keep secrets in a small town, but Mary Alice Roth has managed to keep her secrets for years in The Old Place (2022) by Bobby Finger.

The former high school math teacher in Billington, Texas, Mary Alice did not retire gracefully. She even shows up to harass the new math teacher on the first day of school. She is a tormented woman who sees it as her mission to torment everyone else. She lost her husband to suicide, one of the secrets she keeps, then lost her son, Michael, soon after Kenny, his best friend and the son of Ellie, her neighbor, died in an accident.

As the novel begins, Mary Alice and Ellie have finally restored their broken friendship and have begun having morning coffee together. But then Katherine, Mary Alice's estranged younger sister, returns, threatening to reveal Mary Alice's even bigger secret. Her son isn't really dead — he had sent his own obituary to the newspaper — and is now at Katherine's house in Atlanta. She wants to take Mary Alice to him.

Ever obstinate, Mary Alice agrees to go, but only after the community picnic, which she is, as always, in charge of. And this delay leads to the final crisis.

The title, which for most of the novel seems odd, refers to a lakeside cottage owned by Mary Alice, which she has not visited in years. So isolated is it that its location is itself something of a secret. Yet so much of the back story happened there.

This is fine novel with many layers that offers much for discussion groups to talk about.

Getting the joke

One needs to know a lot to read Mad informatively, and it confirms one's sense of intelligence.

M. Thomas Inge, college professor

A joke isn't funny if you don't get the joke. In other words, you have to know something. The informed will always find more to laugh at than the uninformed.

When I read Mad magazine as a teenager there were a lot of jokes I didn't get. But these gags made me want to get them. They made me want to know more about the movies and books being parodied, about the politicians being ridiculed and so forth. Reading Mad made me a better newspaper and magazine reader, I believe. I wanted to get the jokes.

Thus, that magazine that many teachers and parents thought was a waste of time was, to my mind, educational. The magazine made me smarter, and the smarter I got the more I enjoyed the magazine.

The above quotation from M. Thomas Inge, a pop culture writer, suggests the satire magazine even had a certain snob appeal. It was to teenagers what Harper's or The Atlantic Monthly was to adults, a suggestion to peers of a certain level of intellectual elitism. You must know something if you read this magazine.

Gone Mad

Long-time readers of Mad magazine — by which I mean old men like me —will love Bill Schelly's Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created MAD and Revolutionized Humor in America (2015).

In the biography, richly illustrated with Kurtzman drawings, one encounters such names as Jack Davis, Bill Gaines, Wallace Wood, Al Feldstein, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee and Will Elder, all of which appeared prominently and frequently in the magazine during its prime. Gaines was the publisher, the others comic artists and writers.

Kurtzman, then working as a comic book artist and writer for Gaines, got the idea for Mad at just the right time. Not only was the world ready for a humor magazine of this sort in the 1950s, but Gaines was in financial trouble. Comic books were under assault for supposedly poisoning the minds of youngsters, especially the violent kind of comics that Gaines specialized in. Mad was a different kind of comic book, and very soon it evolved into a real magazine, not a comic book at all.

Yet Kurtzman and Gaines didn't get along, and Kurtzman actually worked on only a handful of issues of Mad, yet his influence remained throughout its long life. Years later he returned to the magazine briefly.

After he left Mad, Kurtzman struggled for many years. He started a number of other humor magazines, such as Humbug, Trump and Help!, but none of them caught on as Mad did. Mostly he lacked the financial backing to keep his magazines going until they found their audience. Then Hugh Hefner of Playboy came to his rescue. Soon Kurtzman and Elder were producing the Little Annie Fannie comic strip that appeared in the magazine for years. Kurtzman soon lost interest in the strip and hated Hefner's constant interference, yet it paid the bills.

Kurtzman's work, as well as his career as a teacher of comic art, influenced a great many younger artists, including Robert Crumb and Terry Gilliam. Feminist Gloria Steinem, briefly his assistant on Help! as Gilliam was later, also features prominently in his life.

This biography is thick, heavy and constantly entertaining, even if one chooses to read only the comics it contains.

Missing pieces

Imagine nearly completing a 1,000-piece jigsaw only to discover that one or more pieces are missing. Those of us who regularly do jigsaw puzzles don't have to imagine it. We've been there. This feeling is something like what one feels after reading The Laws of Murder (2014) by Charles Finch. There are pieces missing.

The novel opens in London in 1876 with the aristocrat Charles Lenox, having left Parliament, a partner in a struggling detective agency. The other partners are carrying their weight, but for all his previous successes, Lenox is struggling to attract business.

Then Jenkins of the Scotland Yard is found murdered next to the home of Wakefield, a lord with a suspicious background. Jenkins had left word that if anything happened to him, Lenox should be called in to help with the investigation. The first suspect, naturally enough, is Wakefield — until Wakefield's body is found in the hold of ship about to leave for the Orient.

The investigation, with its many turns, and the office politics within Lenox's agency keep the reader engaged. Arrests are made, yet it never becomes clear who actually committed the murders. Will the murderer go free for lack of evidence? Or has the killer yet to be found? Do we have to read the next book in the series to find the answers?

Missing puzzle pieces are a joy to find while the mostly assembled puzzle is still on the table. Similarly, readers prefer fictional puzzles to be solved with the book still in hand, not in some other book that may or may not ever be read. Or, worse, never solved at all.

Zero marketing

Zero may be nothing, yet zero seems to be becoming really something in the marketing industry in recent years.

It started, I believe, with Coke Zero. We already had Diet Coke, which contains no calories, so I never saw the point of Coke Zero. Coke Zero may taste better, although I am not certain of that, but if so, why? And if not, why have two products that are essentially identical except for the name?

Yet Coke Zero has become so popular that now virtually all soft drink companies offer their own zero brands.

Other food products, too, highlight the word zero and have mostly dropped phrases like sugar-free and no carbs from their labels.

Weight Watchers now promotes "zero calorie" foods. You can find Zero Milk Chocolate, East Zero products, Vitamin Water Zero, Camp-Zero Coolers, Zero Odor Eliminator and Colgate Zero toothpaste, among other products.

Interestingly, the zero trend has not seemed to have impacted the sports world. Football announcers still report scores as seven to nothing, not seven to zero, and British soccer announcers still say a scoreless game is nil-nil, not zero-zero.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the Budweiser folks are planning a comeback with a new beer called Bud Zero.

A hurricane in detail

Hurricanes do terrible damage and kill people even when you have days to prepare for them. In early September of 1900 when a hurricane leveled Galveston, Texas, it came as a complete surprise. The U.S. Weather Bureau at that time didn't even like to use the word hurricane for fear of frightening people.

Worse, the bureau ignored warnings coming out of Cuba because those at the top didn't trust Cubans. They chose to believe what they wanted to believe, that a minor storm was heading northeast.

Erik Larson tells us just about everything you might want to know about this hurricane in Isaac's Storm (1999). The Isaac in the title refers to Isaac Cline, the meteorologist in charge of the Galveston station. The book paints him as being as much a victim as every other resident of the city, which at that time rivaled Houston for dominance. 

Not that Isaac didn't make mistakes, one of which was believing his house would be strong enough to withstand the wind and water. This mistake cost him his wife, though miraculously he was able to save his daughters.

Another part of the drama is that Isaac's brother Joseph, also a meteorologist and jealous of Isaac's success, lived with the family and advocated flight. He was overruled.

Larson tells many other stories of heroes and victims, those who made good decisions and bad ones. The villain, if there is one, was Willis Moore, then head of the Weather Bureau. He was more interested in protecting the bureau (and himself) than in protecting American citizens, and even after the hurricane he altered history to cover his tracks. Larson sets the record straight.

Thousands died from the hurricane, and Galveston was never the same.

Paradise lost

Horses were a gift; how many people have such a constant in their life, separate from the rough and often beautiful mess that is their family?

Anton Disclafani, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

Thea Atwell loves horses and at 15 is already an expert rider, yet when she is sent to a riding school in North Carolina in the midst of the Depression, it is more a punishment than a reward in The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton Disclafani (2013).

She has grown up in happy isolation, a doctor's daughter, in rural Florida. She spends her days with her beloved horse, her twin brother, her parents and occasionally her cousin, Georgie, and his parents. She has been educated at home. What Thea did to warrant exile to a girls camp Disclafani keeps a secret for most of the novel, leaking out subtle clues here and there. The truth turns out to be even more shocking than what the reader may have imagined.

Yet what happens at the riding camp becomes more shocking still. as Thea, who narrates her own story, pursues the handsome headmaster while his wife is away trying to raise money for the school. This teenage girl, like most of the rest of us, behaves shamefully one minute and heroically the next. For all the tension in this novel, the tension the author maintains between good and bad may be her greatest achievement.

Disclafani makes the Depression a significant part of her story. The girls at the camp come from wealthy families, yet some of these families lose their wealth during this period, and Thea's family is also impacted  and must move into a smaller home, one without horses. While at the camp, Thea only wants to go home, yet a year later, when she is exiled back to her parents, her home and the ideal life she once knew there no longer exist.

Maureen's pilgrimage

It has taken her 10 years, but Harold Fry's wife finally takes her own pilgrimage in Maureen (2022) by Rachel Joyce.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Joyce's first novel, was an unlikely bestseller. It tells the story of a retired man who, hearing that a woman he used to work with is dying, sets off on foot to post a letter to her. Instead he keeps walking, realizing he must deliver his letter to Queenie in person, while Maureen, his wife, frets at home.

Harold loves his wife, not Queenie, yet still their work relationship was close and Maureen disapproved. In The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy, Joyce gives us Queenie's story. It turns out that she, in fact, has loved Harold for years. Now Joyce completes the powerful trilogy.

In the background of each novel stands the tragic suicide of Harold and Maureen's son, David. He has now been dead for 30 years, yet Maureen has not stopped mourning. As if Harold walking all the way to see Queenie one last time were not bad enough, Maureen has learned that Queenie had built a garden in tribute to David, which has now become a small tourist attraction. Maureen decides she must finally visit that garden, and so she sets off on her own in a car one morning.

Joyce paints a picture of an introverted, easily offended woman uncomfortable around strangers. And so her pilgrimage is much different that her husband's. Her trials are many, yet she ultimately finds the garden, finds David, finds a friend and finds a way to repair her broken life and appreciate her loving husband.

A calendar of movies

When I choose one of those page-a-day books to accompany me through a year, they are usually devotional or inspirational in nature, but my 2023 book was different: A Year of Movies (2016) by Ivan Walters.

So many of the movies we watch include scenes that occur on a particular date. Groundhog Day is obvious. So is Tora! Tora! Tora! (about the bombing of Pearl Harbor). And Gettysburg. Other films aren't usually associated with particular days of the year, but Walters gives us a movie for each date on the calendar. Actually he gives us two, for on each day there is an alternate film. If you'e already seen Groundhog Day, you might want to watch Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story on Feb. 2.

Each entry includes a synopsis of the film, as well as the cast, director, running time and a brief review suggesting whether the movie is worth watching or not.  Walters also tells us exactly the point in the movie where the date applies. In some cases, the date is never mentioned in the movie but is revealed in the book upon which the film was based or in some historical record.

All of this sounds much more interesting than it actually is. Walters clearly went through a lot of trouble to put all this together, but was it really worth it? Who really cares that a scene in The Terminator took place on May 12?

I tell myself I devoted just two minutes a day to the book, which is reassuring until I multiply that by 365.

Too many books?

You can have too many cats. I knew a man, a former police officer, who had at least 17 cats in his small apartment. His landlord didn't permit any.

You can have too many spouses at the same time or too many tattoos or too many cars in your driveway. But can you have too many books? I doubt it.

David Quammen

I came upon this quote from science writer David Quammen: "Of course, anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper." I love that. Let me break it down into pieces.

Anyone who truly loves books. Loving reading is one thing, but loving books is something else. A love of reading can be satisfied at the public library. If a book is purchased, it can then be read and discarded. Those who love books also love reading, but they also love the books as objects — the sight of them, the smell of them, the thought of them.

In one fleeting lifetime. Two years ago I was forced to part with about half of my books when I sold my house and moved into a Florida condo. Even so, I have more books than I can possibly read in the years I have left, and I continue to acquire more. I am now more likely to part with books I have read, knowing I will never read them again and wanting to lessen the burden on my son when I am gone. Even so, I own thousands of books.

A good book resting unopened. I take this to mean "a good book resting never opened." The "good book" is an assumption, but in my experience most of the books I open turn out to be good. Those that I never finish reading are rare.

Full of majestic potentiality. An unread book is something like a newborn baby. It is full of potential. One never knows how it will turn out, but it could be great.

Most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper. Because of space limitations, the books I read, if I choose to keep them, must go into boxes in my storage unit. My bookcases mostly contain unread books, which I find a somewhat less comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper than books I've read. Simply glancing at books I've read while walking by can trigger memories of what they contain and, more likely, what I felt when I read them. But if unread books don't quite make as good a wallpaper, they do instill a greater will to keep living and keep reading. And tdhey hold so much exciting potential.