Better in small doses

(Ogden) Nash has been applauded for his industry and his verbal ingenuities. Both are virtues, but they become vices with Nash. For one thing, he writes too much. At first his work seems amazing; then it becomes amusing; after too many repetitions of the same effects, it descends to the mechanical. The present volume contains almost three hundred pages; were it half as long it would be twice as good.

Louis Untermeyer, Saturday Review, June 4, 1938

I understand what literary critic Louis Untermeyer was talking about in his review of one of Ogden Nash's collections of light verse, but I disagree with him just the same. The problem was not that Nash wrote too much but that Untermeyer read too much at one time. Nash is one of those writers best appreciated in small doses.

This is why Nash's books are perfect for bedtime reading. By reading just two or three verses at a time before turning out the light and going to sleep, I find his poems delightful, as when he rhymes aristocrats with sophistocrats and clamoring with Gotterdammerung in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, which was published in 1938 and was probably the book Untermeyer was reviewing. Try to read more than that at one time and the poems gradually lose their charm, which is what Untermeyer found. Reviewing a book for a weekly publication, however, he couldn't very well have taken weeks to read Nash's book.

Ogden Nash sold his verses one at a time to various magazines, and every few years they would be collected into books. Untermeyer's complaint should have been with Nash's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, for waiting too long before putting a book together and thus making it too long for the critic's taste, not with Nash himself for making his living selling as many poems as possible to so many different magazines. For readers of those magazines, reading one Nash poem at a time was ideal.

But if Ogden Nash didn't write too much for his own good, what about certain other prolific writers? I'll get into that subject next time.

20th century history made simple

You could read a few history books to learn how the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke led to the start of the Great War, how that war killed so many combatants, how the eventual peace treaty sowed the seeds for a Second World War, how the Russian Revolution resulted in worse oppression than that which the revolution was supposed to correct or how Prohibition in the United States fueled organized crime. Or you could read Ken Follett's massive, yet always interesting, novel Fall of Giants, the first volume of his Century Trilogy.

Follett explains these historical events through the lives of fictional characters in Great Britain, Getmany, Russia and the United States. Through their lives, we experience something of the lives of millions of people actually living during the years from 1911 to 1924, the span of time covered by Follett's novel. Real historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, also play roles in this drama.

Coincidences happen in real life, but not to the extent they happen in Fall of Giants, where main characters seem to be running into each other everywhere, even on the battlefield. As unrealistic as this may be, it does make the story easier to follow and eliminates the need for scores of additional characters. The scores we already have are plenty.

A more serious problem with the novel is that Follett attempts to turn it into a 920-page political tract. All of the characters portrayed positively share the same political ideas, as do all those portrayed negatively. In real life, there are intelligent and noble individuals at both ends of the political spectrum.

When books become something else

Sometimes books are more than just books. Sometimes they become something else. During those periods of history when books have been piled high and burned, those books were symbols for hated people or ideas. Books can be used for decorative purposes or to give their owners an intellectual air, whether or not the books have ever been read. Books, unlike e-books, can also serve utilitarian functions. Last night, for example, my wife and I watched some slides from the 1970s, and I used a book to prop up the projector. Here are some other examples of when books become more than just books.

Books as a harem

James Salter

James Salter makes this suggestion is his introduction to Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves. He writes, "The bibliophile is, after all, like a sultan or khan who has countless wives already but another two or three are always irresistible." Of course, he could also have compared the bibliophile to the billionaire who just wants a few million more or the football coach with a 30-point lead with three minutes left in the game who wants another touchdown. Those who have want more. This analogy speaks to me as I consider my stacks and stacks of unread books yet still desire a few more for my harem, er, library.

Books as toys

"I like to play with my books, to mark them up, to give them a lived-in look," Joe Queenan writes in One for the Books. "I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters -- height, color, thickness, provenance, publishers, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were." I may not play with my books in the same way Queenan does, but still I know what he is talking about. Reading books are not the only way in which they give pleasure.

Books as sacred objects

Joe Queenan

Queenan also says this, "People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mystics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness." It is probably not a coincidence that most major, and even minor, religions have holy books. I wouldn't go so far as to call all books sacred objects, yet there can often be something mystical about them. Authors all die, yet their ideas, the images produced in their minds, live on in their books.

Books as friends and lovers

"A person's relationship with books does not remain static throughout his life," Queenan writes. A relationship? With a book? Well, yes. I can recall writing a couplet in college that went something like this: "My friend, the book/Holds my hand on cold nights." Not all readers are lonely introverts, but many are, and to them favorite books can be viewed as friends and/or lovers with whom one holds conversations.

Because of the relationship one forms with books, they can be hard to part with. But Queenan also observes, "Sometimes even the most loyal reader may feel a need to part company with a writer he once admired greatly. It is almost as if one is picking a fight, looking for an excuse to bit an old lover goodbye."

Smiles in similes

P.G. Wodehouse

British novelist Evelyn Waugh once observed that his contemporary P.G. Wodehouse wrote three original similes per page. I long ago realized that similes were central to Wodehouse's wit. Oh, yes, he could create some outrageous situations that produce belly laughs, but until those plots approach their hilarious climax, it is generally Wodehouse's similes that keep the reader smiling. But three a page? Surely that is an overstatement. Or could it be an understatement?

To get an idea of how close Wodehouse's prose might actually come to Waugh's three-similes-per-page estimate, I decided to put him to the test.  I chose one of Wodehouse's books at random from my shelf, finding Jeeves and the Tie that Binds in my hands, and opening it at random, finding myself on page 93 in my edition, the beginning of chapter 10. Let's start counting.

1. In the very first line, Bertie Wooster reflects, "I breathed rather in the manner copyrighted by the hart which pants for cooler streams when heated in the chase."

2. The next sentence: "The realization of how narrowly I had missed having to mingle again with this blockbusting female barrister kept me Lot's-wifed for what seemed an hour or so ..." He continues with the same simile in the next sentence when he says "gradually I ceased to be a pillar of salt."

3. Still in the first paragraph of the chapter, Bertie says: "It was as if Napoleon had dropped in for a chat with Wellington on the eve of Waterloo or District Attorney Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason."

Page 94

1. "Aunt Dahlia's (voice), of course, would be audible if you were at Hyde Park Corner and she in Piccadilly Circus."

2. "I have often thought that the deaf adder I read about when I won my Scripture Knowledge prize would have got the message right enough if the aged relative had been one of the charmers."

The rest of the page is mostly dialogue, so that's it for similes.

Page 95

1. "Whether of not Aunt Dahlia bridled, as the expression is, I couldn't say, but I think she must have done, for her next words were straight from the Frigidaire."

2. "I don't say that even now she would have asked Ma McCorkadale to come on a long walking tour with her, but her voice was definitely matier."

OK, so Wodehouse isn't quite averaging threes similes a page in my little sample. Even so he bats for a higher average than any other writer I know, and most of them are gems. His similes illustrate why it has been so difficult translating Wodehouse's humor to the screen when adapting his stories for movies. Similes are just not easy to slip into a screenplay, and that's where most of the humor lies.

Sixties slang revisited

Leafing through Tom Dalzell's Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang, I stopped leafing and started reading when I reached the 1960s, the time of my own youth. I found myself sorting the various slang terms into groups.

Slang I don't remember ever hearing, either then or since

all woke up - Well informed on the latest styles and fashions. (Maybe that's because I have never been well informed on the latest styles and fashions.)

bad motorcycle - A person who is cool but manipulative.

bag some food for the brains - Study hard. (I was in college during the Sixties, but I'm pretty sure I never heard this term.)

eatin' the grapes right off the wallpaper - Very disturbed.

messy attic - A confused or distracted mind. (I like this one and wish I had picked it up at the time.)

submarine races - Lovers lane.

There are dozens more, but that's a good sample.

Slang I knew but would have never used

burn rubber - To leave quickly. (I tended to avoid slang that sounded like slang.)

make the scene - To visit, to stop by. (To this day I recoil at that phrase.)

sock it to me - let me have it.

You ain't front page news - You're not as cool as you think you are.

Z's - Sleep.

Slang I actually used

ace - To do very well. (Back in college, we all spoke about acing tests, although I always assumed it meant getting an A, not just doing well.)

check it out - To listen, to investigate.

hairy - Difficult.

rinky-dink - Trivial.

shot down - To be rejected.

womp - To defeat soundly.

Slang still used today

bod - Body or physique.

boob tube - Television.

jock - An athlete.

lame - Out of style, pathetic.

moon - To expose one's buttocks

straight - Honest, on the level.

tennies - Tennis shoes.

Last night I happened to watch an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies from the 1960s in which the Clampetts come to the aid of a hipster who, because he speaks only in slang they cannot understand, they assume to be mentally ill. Youth slang begins with the purpose of separation, the young from the old, the cool from the uncool. Eventually the slang terms age right along with those who use it, and they become part of common speech.

How movies benefit literature

More people watch movies than read novels, yet the movie industry still benefits novelists. Let us count the ways.

1. The sale of movie rights keeps writers writing.

It can take months, even years to write a novel. For full-time writers, that can mean a long time between publishers' advances (if any) and royalty checks (if any). When authors can sell movie rights to one of their novels for a good sum, that can be enough to feed their families while allowing them time to write their next book without having to look for a job.

Graham Greene hated most of the movies made from his novels, but he took a philosophical view. "You take the money, you go on writing for another year or two, you have no just ground for complaint. And the smile in the long run will be on your face. For the book has the longer life." Greene wrote this before Turner Classic Movies, DVDs and Netflix made it possible for movies to live forever, but even so his viewpoint is sound. When an author sells the rights to his novel, the director then has the right to change the plot, change the characters and even change the title as desired. Whether the movie succeeds or flops, the author still has the money to continue writing. And the quality of the movie does not affect the quality of the novel.

2. Novelists are in demand as screenwriters.

This is another way Hollywood provides writers with income to supplement their writing careers. Sometimes authors are asked to write the screenplays for their own novels. Other times they are asked to adapt someone else's novel or to write original screenplays. They may be invited to revise another person's screenplay or to collaborate with other screenwriters. This can be a frustrating life for a writer, who feels Hollywood is pulling him away from his novel writing even as it is giving him the money to do it.

Among the many novelists who have spent time as screenwriters are William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, William Goldman, James Agee, Larry McMurtry, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Raymond Chandler and John Steinbeck. Some have begrudged their time spent in the film industry, while others, like McMurtry, treasure it for it has given them money to pursue their first love, while in some cases providing them with ideas for new novels. (Consider McMurtry's Loop Group, set in Hollywood.)

3. Movies can help sell more books

Not that movies adapted from novels always boost sales of those novels. I suspect that the long ride of The Girl on the Train at the top of the best-seller lists will soon end now that the movie version is out. Those who haven't already read the novel may feel less inclined to do so after seeing the movie. They already know what happens. But the sales of other novels, those that never became best-sellers, can jump when the film is released and a movie tie-in paperback edition is published. Popular movies can also prompt fans to seek out other novels by the same author on whose work the film was based. I suspect the other novels by Charles Portis, to cite one example, sold much better after True Grit became a hit movie. I know I bought several of them.

4. Some movies celebrate writers and their work.

Consider the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris in which a fictional contemporary writer finds himself magically transported to Paris before World War II, where he meets Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Or consider Shakespeare in Love, The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane (also about Jane Austen), Miss Potter (about the life of Beatrix Potter) and any number of other movies about writers and books. Even the romantic comedy You've Got Mail could be placed in this group.

Whether or not films about books and about writers increase the sales of books, they nevertheless do honor the world of literature. And that can't be a bad thing.

Esperanto lives, sort of

Ludwig Zamenhof created Esperanto in 1887 with the dream that it would be a language easy enough for everyone to learn so that everyone could communicate, whatever their native language might be. That dream never became reality, yet Esperanto is not the dead language many people assume it to be. Thousands around the world do speak Esperanto, and there is even a village in Brazil where it is the primary language.

Esther Schor describes both Esperanto's past and present in Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language.

At the end of this book she describes Esperanto as a language that is "radically chosen." And that may describe the problem it has faced since 1887. Except in that village in Brazil and in a relative few families around the world, it is not a language people learn as children. When someone chooses to learn a second language, that language is likely to be the one that will prove most useful. Around the world, that is usually English. In English-speaking areas, it is likely to be French, Spanish or German. Esperanto is a radical choice. If you want to learn the language, you may have to seek out someone to speak it with, which explains the appeal of those Esperanto conferences that Schor visits around the world to interview people who speak the language.

Although Zamenhof dreamed of a universal language, there have since been attempts to give it a narrower focus. Schor tells of those who have sought to make Esperanto the language of Jews, the language of blacks, the language of the political left (it is not by accident that Schor's travels take her to such places as Hanoi, Havana and Eastern Europe), the language of peace, the language of the Baha'i faith and the language of spiritism, among others.

She frequently refers to Esperanto as a movement, which may describe another problem it faces. Most of us want a language that allows us to make statements understood by others, not a language that itself makes a statement.