Poetry Class!

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this is her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays through the hinge's chink.

Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, -
And the sweet white brow is all of her.

Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire and dew -
And, just because I was thrice as old
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?

No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.

But the time will come, - at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,
And your mouth to your own geranium's red -
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush, - I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret; go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.

"Evelyn Hope" - Robert Browning

tuck everlasting

Our book today is Natalie Babbitt's perfect little gem of a story, her 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting (with apologies for the movie-cover featuring the brainless Alexis Bledel and the tobacco-wasted Jonathan Jackson)(although if it's any consolation, the movie itself is quite good, with an especially brisk, reptilian performance by Ben Kingsley), which is just about as sweet and simple and penetrating a dramatization as I've ever read of what immortality might be like for a group of ordinary people who happened to stumble into it.

That group is the Tucks: father Angus, mother Mae, and their two sons, beautiful Jesse and brooding Miles, and Babbitt's story finds them all gathering together in the woods outside the village of Treegap. The Tucks make a point of coming together once every ten years or so, to spend some time as a family, and the locus they choose is the hidden spring in the center of the wood where, as thirsty prospective settlers eighty years ago, they paused to take a drink and found the water had made them immortal. They didn't realize what had happened to them at first - they moved on, Miles got married and had children - but eventually it became clear that everyone around them was aging while they stayed exactly the same. This has forced them to live a kind of gypsy life, never staying in any one place for more than about twenty years, lest the local inhabitants start to grow suspicious. Our story just happens to find them all gathered together for the first time in ten years, and on the cusp of that meeting, our ten-year-old heroine Winnie Foster, out wandering in the woods, spots Jesse sipping from the hidden spring and falls instantly in love (the book stresses repeatedly how beautiful he is, "even up close" - add that to the fact that he possesses a dark secret he's ambivalent about sharing with Winnie and you see just how close this book might have come to Twilight territory).

The Tucks bring her into their home in order to figure out what to do about the fact that she now knows about the secret spring, and when Winnie - who's been bossed and cosseted her whole life in her parents' tidy, expensive home - sees the lived-in ramshackle house of the Tuck family, she's right away likes it:

And still this was not all. For, on the old beamed ceiling of the parlor, streaks of light swam and danced and wavered like a bright mirage, reflected through the windows from the sunlit surface of the pond. There were bowls of daisies everywhere, gay white and yellow. And over everything was the clean, sweet smell of the water and its weeds, the chatter of a swooping kingfisher, the carol and trill of a dozen other kinds of bird, and occasionally the thrilling bass note of an unastonished bullfrog at ease somewhere along the muddy banks.

Into it all came Winnie, eyes wide, and very much amazed. It was a whole new idea to her that people could live in such disarray, but at the same time she was charmed. It was ... comfortable. Climbing behind Mae up the stairs to see the loft, she thought to herself: "Maybe it's because they think they have forever to clean it up." And this was followed by another thought, far more revolutionary: "Maybe they just don't care!"

The Tucks' main goal in showing her their home is to sit her down and try to convince her that telling anybody about the hidden spring would be a terrible idea - that it's not only natural but desirable that all things age and die and make room for new things. It's a lot to ask a ten-year-old to take in, but in Winnie is a wonderful character, wise beyond her years, and she's largely certain even before her talks with the family that she won't tell anybody. Angus Tuck takes her out on the pond for a heartfelt talk about how he and his family aren't really part of life anymore - and how distressing he finds that. And Miles takes her fishing on the pond and talks a little about that same distress, about knowing his own family grew up and grew old while he didn't change at all. Their talk is interrupted by a tug on the line:

And then Miles caught a fish. There it flopped, in the bottom of the boat, its jaws working, its gills fanning rapidly. Winnie drew up her knees and stared at it. It was beautiful, and horrible too, with gleaming, rainbow-colored scales, and an eye like marble beginning to dim even as she watched it. The hook was caught in its upper lip, and suddenly Winnie wanted to weep. "Put it back, Miles," she said, her voice dry and harsh. "Put it back right away."

Miles started to protest, and then, looking at her face, he picked up the trout and gently worked the barbed hook free. "All right, Winnie," he said. He dropped the fish over the edge of the boat. It flipped its tail and disappeared under the lily pads.

The plot thickens when a man comes to Treegap intent on finding the Tucks and their miraculous spring, and the last 50 pages of the book blur by, but for my money, it's these gentle ruminations on the nature of mortality that make Tuck Everlasting such a marvelous book (and such a perfect example of the phenomenon I've mentioned here at Stevereads often enough, how the best so-called "children's" and "young adult" fiction is really "everybody" fiction). The choice that Winnie makes at the novel's close is both predictable and stunning, and it will send the reader (perhaps especially the young reader) away with a head full of questions about what really matters in life. Excellent questions for anybody to ask, and a fine book to do the prompting.

The Grizzly Bear!

Our book today is Thomas McNamee's 1982 natural history masterpiece, The Grizzly Bear, the best, most poetic, most memorable book ever written about one of the world's most famous oversized Pleistocene holdovers. This is higher praise than it sounds, since the grizzly bear has inspired quite a few really good pieces of writing in the last hundred and fifty years. These animals have been hunted mercilessly, trapped, tormented, eradicated from over 90 percent of their old North American ranges, but they've also always held a particular fascination for human beings, and the reason is twofold. First and most obvious, grizzlies are spectacularly dangerous animals - the true size and heft of an adult male has to be seen up in person to be believed, and although the females are smaller, their legendary ferocity in defense of their cubs has been the well-known (and in once case, even, in the last artistic activity of the man's life, well-photographed) cause of many bear attacks. And second, grizzlies are oddly, very noticeably like human beings in many ways. As McNamee points out in his book, these bears are highly individualistic - they do things their own way, figure out problems with disarming speed, and are seldom too busy to stop and amuse themselves once in a while.

If you happen to do any back-country hiking in norther and western Canada, it's probably the first of these two things that'll be on your mind. It's a land-equivalent to the experience of swimming in the ocean with the possibility of sharks: there's something incredibly unnerving about knowing there's a larger-than-negligible chance you could run into a smart, irritable animal powerful enough to kill or maim you without even really trying. If you're hiking with a group of true and valiant dogs (basset hounds need not apply), you probably don't have to worry about the killing or maiming (even a full-grown grizzly is unlikely to attack a well-coordinated dog pack), but if you're without such company (McNamee has a hilarious, withering section about a whining young hiking couple coming witlessly close to encountering some bears) and you meet a bear in the wild, you're about as helpless as you can be. It can put a damper on even the prettiest walk.

McNamee knows his animal well. His book follows a fictional, slightly idealized trio of bears - a mother and her two cubs - for a year of seasons and problems and challenges. By taking his readers this way through the cubs' experience of learning how to be a bear (including "the three fundamental rules of grizzly bear cubhood: follow mother, obey mother, have, within those constraints, as good a time as possible"), he's hit on the perfect means to teach his readers the same things. The best parts of his book are the many places where he shows us just how much there is to learn:

A well-educated and experienced grizzly bear's knowledge of his home range is astoundingly comprehensive and precise. Our mother bear remembers not only where she found good things to eat last year but also where, six years ago, in a summer of drought, a low moist spot in an otherwise sere expanse of sun-parched timothy still held a pocket of lush bluegrass.She remembers which slopes and ridgetops are the first to be blown free of snow in spring. She remembers, even before their aerial parts appear, where the richest starchy roots and tubers may be dug. She knows the buried whereabouts of pocket gopher populations. She remember where, each fall, the squirrels have harvested and hidden their hoards of pine nuts. She knows the locations of all the avalanche chutes in her range, where the frequent snowslides have limited the vegetation to that which can withstand all that cascading snow - the grasses, supple-stemmed shrubs, and forbs (soft-stemmed plants that die down to the ground in winter, most of which are familiar as wildflowers) - and she remembers which of those avalanche chutes, facing south, are first to catch the sun and therefore first to green up. Even now, as they learn to grasp the blades of sedge in their back molars and roll their heads to snap it off, the cubs are storing up essential memories.

And that mention of squirrel pine nut hoards comes back later to demonstrate another of McNamee's strengths - his droll sense of humor. You very much want that in a natural history writer, but you don't often get it:

the bear is superbly adept at gobbling them [the hoards] up: she smashes the cones with her teeth or paws, spreads the debris out on the ground, and delicately licks up only the nuts. The few pine cone scales that find their way in with the nuts, she spits out the side of her mouth. With singularly ursine fair-mindedness, she will often also smash and eat the squirrels themselves.

I can't recommend coming anywhere near a wild grizzly (even the dog-company option runs the unfortunate risk of costing you a dog or two), but I recommend The Grizzly Bear whole-heartedly. It should be on every bookshelf of truly great works of natural history.

The Deep!

Our book today is the 1976 novel The Deep, and it's the answer to a question several of you have emailed me (because Gawd forbid any of you shy little buggers should, you know, post a comment or anything)(this has got to be the strangest blogger/reader relationship I know of - par for the course in my life, actually): did Peter Benchley ever write anything worth reading other than Jaws?

The answer is problematic, and it connects with a long-held belief of mine, which is that novelists very, very often write more than is good for them. I firmly believe that virtually everybody has one genuinely good book inside them, and I love the fact that typing, editing, and even publishing technology has become so easy and ubiquitous that hundreds of thousands more people than in, say, the 1960s can go a lot further toward actually writing that book than they could at any other time in history. Writing schools abound, writing groups populate the back booths of every Bickford's and Denny's from here to Costa Mesa, and of course the entire Internet is one gigantic, horrifyingly diverse exercise in writing. The making of many books has never been easier, and that's a good thing.

The problem is - and always has been, even before FicPro 2000 and the like - that once somebody actually writes a book, two powerful factors often propel them to write another. The first of these factors is inborn and intangible, but that doesn't necessarily make it right: it's intoxicating. Creating a fictional world, shaping it, populating it, driving that population - it's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't done it, but everybody who has done it will understand immediately. Crafting that creation, going inside it day after day, gradually orchestrating it to tell the stories you want it to tell, and then, when you're finished, writing 'the end' ... well, as difficult as it'll be for you non-writers to believe, there's really no feeling in the world that's sweeter. Once you do it, you very much want to do it again - whether you have the inspiration, industry, or information to make it work a second (or twenty-second) time.

The second factor is crass and therefore well-known: if you make money writing a novel, chances are very good you'll want to make even more money writing a second, and a third. Writers have often been contractually obligated to keep writing, even though, in my opinion, 99 percent of writers don't have much more than one worthwhile book inside them. Generally, that's the fiction math: one book that's wholly yours, irresistibly burning inside you to get out, to be expressed, and then maybe 20 percent material overspill that can, if stretched and fluffed, be made into a second novel that will more or less stand upright. Usually, everything else is dry humping.

There are exceptions, of course - probably you're thinking of the same exceptions I am. But keep in mind, if you can (and let's be honest here: I'm probably in a better position to do that than most of you are), the absolutely VAST amount of novels that have been published in the last 200 years. The number beggars description; trust me, the exceptions we're thinking of sink into that sea without even the smallest ripple. For every Tolstoy writing both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, there are, without exaggeration, 4 or 5 million one-hit wonders grinding out their fifteenth soulless book.

Benchley's fiction-writing career is a pretty close example of what I'm talking about. In Jaws he found his one perfect idea and knocked it out of the park - a giant killer shark preys on a popular beachfront community, thereby unleashing all kinds of predation between the humans involved. Almost everything he wrote after that book feels grasping, attenuated, and incomplete.

Almost everything. He, too, had that roughly 20 percent overspill, and he used it to craft an older manuscript into the adventure novel called The Deep, which is the only one of his novels other than Jaws that's worth reading. It's the story of a honeymooning couple in Bermuda - David Sanders and his much younger wife Gail, who while scuba-diving come across the wreck of a reef-torn ship and find not only WWII-era ampules of some sort of drug but also much, much older artifacts. Wondering what exactly it is they've found, they're directed by helpful locals to crusty old lighthouse keeper Romer Treece, who comes off as a slightly more eloquent version of Captain Quint:

The bottom of the sea is a living creature. She's whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That's happened. And we've had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.

But whatever native strength Benchley had as a storyteller is already beginning to weaken in this book, and the narrative quickly crowds up with predictability, including a slick villain - Henri Cloche - who sounds like he's reading his dialogue straight out of an old MGM handbook:

"They [the couple's motorbikes] will be returned in the morning. A final word: Make no mistake about it - should you still be inclined to be ... hasty ... and go to the authorities, you will find that, officially, I do not exist. And should you try to get out of this by leaving Bermuda, you will also discover that, in reality, I exist everywhere." His back stiffened. "There will be no haven."

What he wants Sanders and his wife to do, Mr. Bond, is dive ... dive the wreck and recover as much of its cargo as possible, for which service he will pay them one million dollars (which was a lot of money back then, as they say). You can probably guess the rest yourself, but the key here is to remember that all the movies and TV shows and Scott Smith novels this plot reminds you of came from this book, not the other way around. The plot itself - innocents find something deadly in a shipwreck and become morally compromised by it - is rock-solid. It's only Benchley's ability to fully exploit it as a writer that's flagging just a bit.

Just a bit. The Deep will still work on you - it's sharply, leanly told, and it will pull you in, and you'll be glad you gave it the lazy afternoon it takes to read it (like Jaws, it's very much a book you should read in one sitting). It's fathoms and fathoms better than all of Benchley's later books (they at best have only scattered worthwhile scenes, and sometimes only scattered worthwhile moments) - but it's no Anna Karenina, alas.

A Tale of Two (insert adjective) Writers in the Penny Press!

Lots of great stuff in the New Yorker this week, starting with a classic, gorgeous cover by Eric Drooker (and interspersed with a strong selection of cartoons this time around, quite a few of which strike exactly the right clever, citified tone for a New Yorker cartoon) and moving on to a funny "Talk of the Town" piece by Nick Paumgarten on those two Northwest pilots who overshot their runway by a hundred and fifty miles because they were absorbed on their laptops. Of course lots of commentary's been spilled on this, but Paumgarten is worth quoting at length:

Afterward, they explained that they'd logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed - not in Farm Ville or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline's new crew flight-scheduling procedure - that they'd essentially forgotten where they were or what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows - stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind - without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider's auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it's almost unimaginable.

Not sure what it'll take for states to enact the very, very obvious legislation needed to ban using cellphones and especially visual media like texting or laptops while operating heavy machinery at high speeds - it can't be deaths, since lots of people have already been killed through just such negligence - maybe notoriety? Maybe somebody texting-while-driving plows straight into the White House street barrier and dies in a hail of automatic weapons fire? Maybe an elementary school bus driver takes himself and his forty little charges off an overpass while texting? It's the dumbest thing in the world that the legislation hasn't happened yet, so I'm increasingly curious to know what the triggering event will eventually be.

But the main attractions of this issue, for me, were two pieces on authors with whom I have, shall we say, problematic reader relationships. Thomas Mallon turns in a long and wonderful synopsis of the literary and sociological phenomenon that is Ayn Rand. At first, I was worried that Mallon himself is one of her legion of mindless worshipers, but I was quickly reassured by some of his great quips about her unendurable books, like these two gems about The Fountainhead: "It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization," and "The novel's dialogue is never even accidentally plausible." Hee.

The other author is Jonathan Safran Foer, whose latest book Eating Animals is reviewed at length in a smart, argumentative piece by Elizabeth Kolbert. Foer's book is also damn near unbearable, but not, as in Rand's case, because it's poorly written - in fact, it - and Foer in general - would be far less irritating if it were possible to simply dismiss it as bad writing. No, Foer can definitely craft sound prose - but what he's done with that ability since he first easily, effortlessly gimmicked his way into public view with Everything Is Illuminated has been nothing but frustrating, and this book is no exception. In it, he hyperventilates about how the prospect of fatherhood forced him to re-evaluate his eating habits ... for every page of the book, he bounces between sounding like he's the first person ever to learn that meat consumption is wasteful and cruel and the first person ever to become a father. The end result is wearyingly narcissistic, despite the large amount of gruesomely fascinating data lucidly presented.


Kolbert soft-pedals a lot more than Mallon ("Some may object" and "others will argue" ... but not much more than a peep or two what she may object or will argue), which may arise from greater politeness or a sense of fellow-feeling (she is, it turns out, a bit insufferable herself, being one of those hobbyist chicken-raisers the entire rest of the country - for various and equally valid reasons - so rightly detests). But you have to give her credit for her well-written not-entirely-hypothetical defense of eating animals, on two grounds: people are, after all, still animals - geared by millions of years of evolution to eat meat, and animals are, in fact, not people - so they don't deserve the full panoply of rights and protections people extend to themselves. She acknowledges that Foer disagrees with both these points, and she goes on from them to make some serious body-blows against some of his book's points (like his wishy-washiness on calling factory farmers evil, or his apparent willingness to continue drinking milk and eating eggs). It ends up being every bit as satisfying as Mallon's piece.

There's other good stuff too in this issue - Jill Lepore writes about the staggering amounts of violence in American society, and Anthony Lane is his usual peppy, quotable self reviewing two movies nobody will remember next week. But for my money (which reminds me: really need to start subscribing to the New Yorker), it's the two literary pieces that sell the issue - just wish they were about less (insert adjective) writers ...

The Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey

Our book today is The Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey by his devoted servant George Cavendish, who wrote it in 1557 but dared not publish it in his lifetime, since its disclosures would certainly have ruffled feathers - not to mention getting its author strung up, disemboweled, and then torn in pieces by rearing horses. Talk about bad reviews.

The reason the book would have ruffled feathers is so simple, so much a given in our current understanding of biography, that it bears stressing: he tries his best, over and over, to tell the truth. In Tudor writings, especially anything connected with the court of Henry VIII, that really wasn't done. The portraits winding their way through this slim, highly enjoyable book - of Thomas More (Cavendish was married to one of the man's vindictive, chinless nieces), the king's earls and dukes, Thomas Cromwell, good queen Catherine, Anne Boleyn, and especially Henry himself - smack and strut of living veracity in a way that's absolutely captivating.

And more than any of them, Wolsey himself. Cavendish and his brother William, in the modern phrase, came from money, but both of them were bottomlessly ambitious when they were young men, and it was as young men that they attached themselves to Wolsey's service. And they came to love the man, to genuinely esteem him - so much so that they clung to him even in his downfall, when he had nothing to give them but his gratitude. Even long after the Cardinal's death, Cavendish could still fume about that downfall, when he came to put pen to paper. I love the shot across the bow that opens his book:

Meseems it were no wisdom to credit every light tale, blasted abroad by the blasphemous mouth of the rude commonalty. For we daily hear how, with their blasphemous trump, they spread abroad innumerable lies, without either shame or honesty, which prima facie showeth forth a visage of truth, as though it were a perfect verity and matter indeed, whereas there is nothing more untrue.

Cavendish's book is a priceless resource for historians; he was in the rooms during the King's Great Matter, his struggle to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn (and in the process seize all the Catholic Church lands and properties in England), and although he smarts continuously under the treatment given to his master (Wolsey's endless international scheming was going along just fine until the Great Matter erupted in their midst, trapping him in urgencies he knew perfectly well could eat him whole, as they indeed ended up doing), he's in all a remarkably faithful chronicler. In his account, all these famous figures - especially his master - come alive in their various moods and quips, as with Wolsey one hot day when the King summons him to yell at him:

Thus this court passed from session to session, and day to day, insomuch that a certain day the king sent for my lord at the breaking up one day of the court to come to him into Bridewell. And to accomplish his commandment he went unto him, and being there with him in communication with in his Grace's privy chamber from eleven unto twelve of the clock and past, at noon, my lord came out and departed from the king and took his barge at the Black Friars stairs, and so went to his house at Westminster. The Bishop of Carlisle being with him in his barge said unto him, (wiping the sweat from his face), 'Sir,' quoth he, 'it is a very hot day.' 'Yea,' quoth my Lord Cardinal, 'if ye had been as well chafed as I have been within this hour, ye would say it were very hot.'

Or later, when Wolsey has been banished from the court and is living anxiously in the country, constantly fretting and justifying himself and literally making himself sick:

When night came that we should go to bed, my lord waxed very sick through his new disease, the which caused him continually from time to time to go to the stool all that night; insomuch from the time that his disease took him, unto the next day, he had above fifty stools, so that he was that day very weak. The matter which he voided was wondrous black, the which physicians call choler adustine; and when he perceived it, he said to me, 'If I have not some help shortly, it will cost me my life.'

Cavendish's book circulated widely in manuscript long before it was printed - Shakespeare certainly read a close version of it, as scene after scene of his Henry VIII play show - and although part of that was due to titillation, a big part of it was due to something more straightforward: it makes fine, dramatic reading. I wish there were a handy popular paperback edition (it amazes me that Penguin never, to the best of my knowledge, made a version) to recommend to you all, but alas, there isn't. Then again, the perfectly serviceable 1922 version is probably one of those gazillion uncopyrighted books Google is hungrily scanning as we speak - ah, what a world poor George Cavendish missed.

November 2009 in Open Letters!

It's November everybody - and that means a brand-new issue of Open Letters Monthly to satisfy your curiosity and gratify your senses! And as usual, we've got a jam-packed issue for you: fun, informative pieces on everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. You can read about the new version of the you-be-the-dictator video game Tropico, the new movie (and accompanying novel) of Where the Wild Things Are, the new R. Crumb-illustrated Book of Genesis, the new Richard Patterson (writing history? about King Tut?), the new set of shocking findings from the guys who brought you Freakonomics, the new novels by Pete Dexter, A.S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel, the new movie Zombieland, and a new book about a Connecticut court case that says the government can take your house whenever it feels so inclined. We examine three new Young Adult novels, the career of Bob Seger, the poetry of Fiona Sze-Lorrain, and the beautiful city of New Orleans before Katrina struck. Our two ongoing series, "It's a Mystery" and "A Year with the Romans," are here with fresh installments, and we have a new look at a classic J.M. Coetzee novel. We top everything off with a poem by John Williams and an arresting painting by Carl Kohler.

So pull up a chair, a comfy couch cushion, or a sleeping basset hound and give us some of your reading time! And as usual, we're curious to know what you think, so send (or leave!) your comments on anything that strikes your fancy.