The last Model T automobile rolled off the assembly line on this day in 1927. Ford had produced 15,007,003 of them. Henry Ford was 64.
He'd formed the Ford Motor Company when he was 40. Ten years later he began building the Model T on an assembly line modeled after the disassembly line that Armour & Co. used to turn hogs into canned hams. In 1914 Ford began paying his workers the preposterous wage of $5 per eight-hour day. The auto worker was suddenly able to afford to buy what he made; as revolutionary an idea as the assembly line itself. The other nice thing about the Model T was it ran forever.
Henry Ford appears seven times in A Book of Ages. We first see him walking to Detroit to look for a job. His last appearance is at age 78 when he finally allows his employees to unionize. We see him on vacation with his friends Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. He is also a collector of antiques, and, in 1922, a large contributor to a new political party in Germany. A grateful and admiring Mr. Hitler hangs Ford's picture in his office.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
007
Today's the birthday of Ian Fleming, the author of twelve James Bond novels, born in the posh Mayfair neighborhood of London in 1908. He appears seven times in A Book of Ages. Being blackballed from a social club at Eton, engaging in adultery and espionage (sometimes simultaneously) purchasing a book about the birds of the West Indies by an ornithologist named James Bond, and finally inventing the elaborate and enduring male fantasy which finally made him rich. A suave, companionable but cold-blooded man, Fleming was known to write polite thank-you notes to the husbands he was cuckolding. He died at age 56 of a heart attack, thereby certifying that he had one. He only saw one Bond film: Dr. No. He didn't particularly like the casting of Sean Connery.
Famous Childhoods
Watching eight adorable children tumble across the TV screen puts me in mind of earlier versions of the same thing. I sometimes wonder what America will be remembered for. Will it be Coca Cola or baseball or will it be famous children? They are the quintessential American product.
It's a familiar story: a family hoping to change its luck thrusts the cute youngster on the stage. Child saves the family farm. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in the old barn were only re-enacting their life stories. Garland started at age two, Rooney at 17 months. Being famous can be a terrible burden on the very young, but is stardom any worse than being poor? Some children thrive on it. Some adjust. Some never find their feet in life. Shirley Temple turned out all right, protected by a remarkable and practical stage mother. Shirley was the most famous person in America at age 5. The worst disillusionment occurred at age 7 when a department store Santa asked for her autograph. But years later, there she was, bright as paint and adorable as ever, on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper. As if she'd never grown up.
America didn't invent the child star. Mozart was one, playing the piano for crowned heads before his feet could reach the pedals. Christopher Milne was an ordinary shy London child, neglected by his society mother, adored by his nanny, observed from a discreet distance by his father who wrote comic verses for Punch. "Hush, hush, whisper who dares/ Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." Then there were the clever books about the boy's adventures with a stuffed bear. None of it went down particularly well when Christopher Robin went away to school, but his toilet training wasn't available on DVD.
Playwright James Barrie befriended a family of little boys in a London park. He gave them gifts and told them stories and played games with them, behaving very unlike a respectable London adult. When their parents died he adopted them. He wrote a very famous play about the youngest one, named Peter, imagining a boy who never grows up at all. But they did grow up, and all their ends were tragic. Biographers have suggested that Barrie corrupted them, but there is no real evidence. The story reminds us of another former child star who lives a strange, secluded life at a California ranch called Neverland. When the whole world is paying attention to you it must be very hard to grow up normal and average and happy. But there are cases where it's been done.
These and other famous childhoods are included in A Book of Ages.
It's a familiar story: a family hoping to change its luck thrusts the cute youngster on the stage. Child saves the family farm. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in the old barn were only re-enacting their life stories. Garland started at age two, Rooney at 17 months. Being famous can be a terrible burden on the very young, but is stardom any worse than being poor? Some children thrive on it. Some adjust. Some never find their feet in life. Shirley Temple turned out all right, protected by a remarkable and practical stage mother. Shirley was the most famous person in America at age 5. The worst disillusionment occurred at age 7 when a department store Santa asked for her autograph. But years later, there she was, bright as paint and adorable as ever, on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper. As if she'd never grown up.
America didn't invent the child star. Mozart was one, playing the piano for crowned heads before his feet could reach the pedals. Christopher Milne was an ordinary shy London child, neglected by his society mother, adored by his nanny, observed from a discreet distance by his father who wrote comic verses for Punch. "Hush, hush, whisper who dares/ Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." Then there were the clever books about the boy's adventures with a stuffed bear. None of it went down particularly well when Christopher Robin went away to school, but his toilet training wasn't available on DVD.
Playwright James Barrie befriended a family of little boys in a London park. He gave them gifts and told them stories and played games with them, behaving very unlike a respectable London adult. When their parents died he adopted them. He wrote a very famous play about the youngest one, named Peter, imagining a boy who never grows up at all. But they did grow up, and all their ends were tragic. Biographers have suggested that Barrie corrupted them, but there is no real evidence. The story reminds us of another former child star who lives a strange, secluded life at a California ranch called Neverland. When the whole world is paying attention to you it must be very hard to grow up normal and average and happy. But there are cases where it's been done.
These and other famous childhoods are included in A Book of Ages.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Big Bad Wolf
On this date in 1933 Walt Disney released an animated short featuring three enterprising pigs. Homeowners, if you will. The perils of home ownership and finance were something Americans had become deeply aware of since the onset of the Depression four years earlier. The film is most famous for the song it introduced. "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" expressed a new, almost jaunty, hopefulness. FDR had been in office for 84 days. The wolf might still be at the door but people had a new song to whistle at him.
On the same day in Washington, the new Federal Securities Act was signed into law. One more item in the president's New Deal, it introduced the novel idea of regulating markets. There were now rules that large financial operators, banks, stockbrokers––wolves, if you will––were expected to follow. The American economy has been a less dangerous place in the generations since.
It seems funny to celebrate Walt Disney and Franklin Roosevelt in one breath, but both took the side of the little guy. Disney wasn't always the name on an enormous company. He began as an individual, a small businessman. He arrived in Hollywood penniless. He took enormous risks. He worked very hard and was incredibly talented, but he was lucky and he knew it. He was banking on the luck of his audience too. He chose a mouse for his hero, not a large animal, not a wolf. Disney appears at ages 21, 26, 35, 53 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
Franklin Roosevelt, whom capitalists sneered at and called a "traitor to his class," was born rich, but his ability to understand the fundamental importance of the little guy in the market equation probably saved American capitalism. Remember, this was a time when extremisms of one sort and another were taking over around the globe, in Japan and Germany, Italy and Russia and China. FDR understood that capitalism needs its customers to prosper too.
Roosevelt had never been poor but he understood hardship of another kind. Just as his political star was rising he contracted polio. He was 39, and he would never walk unassisted again. He went to Georgia to convalesce, and it was at Warm Springs that he met people of all classes and types who were in the same boat he was. He was no better and no worse than they were. Their courage helped him find his own. It was at Warm Springs that FDR learned the common touch that helped him––helped America––work its way through the hardest times the country had encountered since the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt appears at ages 23, 39, 50, 53, 54 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
On the same day in Washington, the new Federal Securities Act was signed into law. One more item in the president's New Deal, it introduced the novel idea of regulating markets. There were now rules that large financial operators, banks, stockbrokers––wolves, if you will––were expected to follow. The American economy has been a less dangerous place in the generations since.
It seems funny to celebrate Walt Disney and Franklin Roosevelt in one breath, but both took the side of the little guy. Disney wasn't always the name on an enormous company. He began as an individual, a small businessman. He arrived in Hollywood penniless. He took enormous risks. He worked very hard and was incredibly talented, but he was lucky and he knew it. He was banking on the luck of his audience too. He chose a mouse for his hero, not a large animal, not a wolf. Disney appears at ages 21, 26, 35, 53 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
Franklin Roosevelt, whom capitalists sneered at and called a "traitor to his class," was born rich, but his ability to understand the fundamental importance of the little guy in the market equation probably saved American capitalism. Remember, this was a time when extremisms of one sort and another were taking over around the globe, in Japan and Germany, Italy and Russia and China. FDR understood that capitalism needs its customers to prosper too.
Roosevelt had never been poor but he understood hardship of another kind. Just as his political star was rising he contracted polio. He was 39, and he would never walk unassisted again. He went to Georgia to convalesce, and it was at Warm Springs that he met people of all classes and types who were in the same boat he was. He was no better and no worse than they were. Their courage helped him find his own. It was at Warm Springs that FDR learned the common touch that helped him––helped America––work its way through the hardest times the country had encountered since the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt appears at ages 23, 39, 50, 53, 54 and 63 in A Book of Ages.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Mysteries
I couldn't fit everything or everyone into A Book of Ages. I left out interesting people whose significance was hard to explain in a short paragraph. I also left out events I couldn't pin down. Today is Miles Davis's birthday; he was born in 1926. Charlie Parker is in the book, so are Dave Brubeck, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but no Miles.
The book is about changes and inspirations: Pete Townshend breaking his first guitar, Bob Dylan going electric, Duke Ellington meeting Billy Strayhorn. I wanted to include the moment when Miles Davis started playing with his back to the audience. It was a well known part of his stage mystique. Miles was an aloof genius who didn't cater to his fans. His posture when playing resembled a question mark. I asked friends who write about jazz and looked through the Miles Davis biographies to find out when and why he turned his back on his audience. I couldn't nail it down to a month or a year, so I left it out. If anyone out there knows, I'd like to know too. Happy Birthday Miles; Detour Ahead is on the turntable.
Today in 1828 a teenage boy was found wandering alone in the streets of Nuremberg. He could barely speak. A note he carried suggested his father had been a soldier and that he would like to be one too. The word "horse" was part of his limited vocabulary. He also knew the words "Don't know," which he repeated to most questions put to him. He had apparently lived all of his short life in a dark basement with little or no human contact except with a godlike jailer who fed him and taught him to write his name, which was Kaspar Hauser.
It was rumored that Kaspar was the bastard son of Mitteleuropean royalty, but he really was a bastard child of the European Enlightenment. A strange, cruel experiment, an intellectual puzzle. Soon enough his case attracted the attention of writers and the kulturati of the time. They were fascinated. He was a blank slate onto which the German Romantics could write their philosophies. He was a polemic in a revolutionary era. He was a cautionary tale. Kaspar Hauser was also a very bright pupil, but angry, devious, mercurial and remote as you would expect any child to be who had grown up without human contact. He was adopted by a schoolmaster, but it wasn't a happy home.
Kaspar Hauser isn't included in A Book of Ages either. Partly this is because he didn't have a birthdate, and nobody knew his age. His date of death is known. On December 14, 1833 he was lured to the garden of a local aristocrat where he was given a note even more cryptic than the one he'd been carrying when he was found five years earlier. The mysterious individual who gave him the note also gave him a stab wound in the chest, from which he died three days later. Life is full of metaphors, but it's often hard to say what they mean.
The book is about changes and inspirations: Pete Townshend breaking his first guitar, Bob Dylan going electric, Duke Ellington meeting Billy Strayhorn. I wanted to include the moment when Miles Davis started playing with his back to the audience. It was a well known part of his stage mystique. Miles was an aloof genius who didn't cater to his fans. His posture when playing resembled a question mark. I asked friends who write about jazz and looked through the Miles Davis biographies to find out when and why he turned his back on his audience. I couldn't nail it down to a month or a year, so I left it out. If anyone out there knows, I'd like to know too. Happy Birthday Miles; Detour Ahead is on the turntable.
Today in 1828 a teenage boy was found wandering alone in the streets of Nuremberg. He could barely speak. A note he carried suggested his father had been a soldier and that he would like to be one too. The word "horse" was part of his limited vocabulary. He also knew the words "Don't know," which he repeated to most questions put to him. He had apparently lived all of his short life in a dark basement with little or no human contact except with a godlike jailer who fed him and taught him to write his name, which was Kaspar Hauser.
It was rumored that Kaspar was the bastard son of Mitteleuropean royalty, but he really was a bastard child of the European Enlightenment. A strange, cruel experiment, an intellectual puzzle. Soon enough his case attracted the attention of writers and the kulturati of the time. They were fascinated. He was a blank slate onto which the German Romantics could write their philosophies. He was a polemic in a revolutionary era. He was a cautionary tale. Kaspar Hauser was also a very bright pupil, but angry, devious, mercurial and remote as you would expect any child to be who had grown up without human contact. He was adopted by a schoolmaster, but it wasn't a happy home.
Kaspar Hauser isn't included in A Book of Ages either. Partly this is because he didn't have a birthdate, and nobody knew his age. His date of death is known. On December 14, 1833 he was lured to the garden of a local aristocrat where he was given a note even more cryptic than the one he'd been carrying when he was found five years earlier. The mysterious individual who gave him the note also gave him a stab wound in the chest, from which he died three days later. Life is full of metaphors, but it's often hard to say what they mean.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day
I associate Memorial Day with the small town parade of my childhood. Old men in carefully preserved uniforms. Small flags at the cemetery. It wasn't until I'd grown older that I realized what was on the minds of those old men in uniform. They'd grown old while comrades of theirs had not. What would those other lives have been like if events had turned out differently? Roles reversed. It's the kind of speculation the other bystanders are incapable of. They say crisis pulls all of history into a single moment. I wrote my book as a collection of moments, funny, sad, tragic, heroic and commonplace. Many of them take place in wartime, with lives suddenly put in the balance.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Inventor of Dreams
Americans adore their own mythology. Maybe it's because we're still young enough as a country. The biggest manufacturer of that mythology is and was the movie business, which was a far more energetic and prolific creative force earlier on, during the Studio Era. The era, to take two examples, of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Both pictures are fundamental to how America imagines itself. Both were made in one year, 1939, by one film director who hardly anybody remembers today: Victor Fleming.
Fleming gets his desserts (or is it deserts?) on page 211 of A Book of Ages, and is one of only a handful of unfamous people in the whole book. But his imprint is so indelible our forgetfulness ought to be a crime. The half of us who don't dream about Oz dream of Tara.
Fleming also gets a well-deserved treatment in this week's New Yorker magazine, in the capable hands of David Denby. The occasion is a new biography of Fleming by Michael Sragow. Biographers are like entrepreneurs in one important sense. They devote years of toil based on a hope that people will give a damn, if I may quote Rhett Butler. In this case, the subject is fascinating and important but virtually unknown, less famous, for instance, than Chelsea and her vodka.
Fleming gets his desserts (or is it deserts?) on page 211 of A Book of Ages, and is one of only a handful of unfamous people in the whole book. But his imprint is so indelible our forgetfulness ought to be a crime. The half of us who don't dream about Oz dream of Tara.
Fleming also gets a well-deserved treatment in this week's New Yorker magazine, in the capable hands of David Denby. The occasion is a new biography of Fleming by Michael Sragow. Biographers are like entrepreneurs in one important sense. They devote years of toil based on a hope that people will give a damn, if I may quote Rhett Butler. In this case, the subject is fascinating and important but virtually unknown, less famous, for instance, than Chelsea and her vodka.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Book Signing at St. Olaf
I'll be signing books at St. Olaf College for a couple of hours tomorrow. Saturday, May 23, Buntrock Commons, midday. Hope to see you there.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
These are words never uttered by Sherlock Holmes, at least not as written by Arthur Conan Doyle. He did say it onstage and Basil Rathbone said it quite a few times onscreen. Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed by more than 70 actors in over 200 films. Two new ones arrive in theaters this summer.
Today is the birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock Holmes. He was born in 1859, grew up in Edinburgh and eventually went to medical school there, studying under a remarkable man named Joseph Bell, who had an uncanny gift for presuming things, knowing where people had been from the mud on their trouser cuffs, the habits of the patients he saw from the condition of their hands. He became the model for the great detective.
Doyle was an unsuccessful optometrist when he wrote A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. He was 28. Holmes made Doyle famous and very prosperous indeed. Even so, the author began to resent his invention, and arranged to have Holmes murdered a half dozen Christmases later. The public was outraged. The public was amused and perplexed when Doyle announced in 1916 that he believed in ghosts. In 1920, the 61 year-old novelist told the readers of the Strand Magazine that he believed in fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle appears on pages 94, 124, 214 and 226 in A Book of Ages.
Because he is much more famous than his creator, Sherlock Holmes appears in the book eight times. The last time we see him is at age 49 when he retires to a farm in Sussex to keep bees.
Today is the birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock Holmes. He was born in 1859, grew up in Edinburgh and eventually went to medical school there, studying under a remarkable man named Joseph Bell, who had an uncanny gift for presuming things, knowing where people had been from the mud on their trouser cuffs, the habits of the patients he saw from the condition of their hands. He became the model for the great detective.
Doyle was an unsuccessful optometrist when he wrote A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. He was 28. Holmes made Doyle famous and very prosperous indeed. Even so, the author began to resent his invention, and arranged to have Holmes murdered a half dozen Christmases later. The public was outraged. The public was amused and perplexed when Doyle announced in 1916 that he believed in ghosts. In 1920, the 61 year-old novelist told the readers of the Strand Magazine that he believed in fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle appears on pages 94, 124, 214 and 226 in A Book of Ages.
Because he is much more famous than his creator, Sherlock Holmes appears in the book eight times. The last time we see him is at age 49 when he retires to a farm in Sussex to keep bees.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Atlantic Crossings
On May 20, 1927, at 7:53 in the morning, Charles Lindbergh took off from an airfield on Long Island, New York, headed east. He was alone, except for 450 gallons of gasoline, a Wright Whirlwind J-5C radial engine, coffee and sandwiches. The fabric-covered Spirit of St. Louis had no radio, no navigation equipment and no forward window for him to see where he was going. Lindbergh was 25. The flight to Paris took him 33 1/2 hours. When he arrived at Le Bourget Field he was greeted by a crowd estimated at 150,000 people. He was very tired, but he was suddenly the most famous man in the world and would remain so for many years. Lindbergh appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
May 20th is also the birthday of the actor James Stewart, who played Charles Lindbergh in the film The Spirit of St. Louis. He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart also appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
Christopher Columbus died, largely forgotten, on May 20th, 1506. He was 54. He'd crossed the Atlantic in 1492, landing in the Bahamas, but he died still believing he had reached the coast of Asia, unaware or not believing that he had discovered (or actually rediscovered) a new continent. A few months after his death a mapmaker in France named the New World after somebody else. Columbus appears twice in A Book of Ages.
May 20th is also the birthday of the actor James Stewart, who played Charles Lindbergh in the film The Spirit of St. Louis. He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart also appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
Christopher Columbus died, largely forgotten, on May 20th, 1506. He was 54. He'd crossed the Atlantic in 1492, landing in the Bahamas, but he died still believing he had reached the coast of Asia, unaware or not believing that he had discovered (or actually rediscovered) a new continent. A few months after his death a mapmaker in France named the New World after somebody else. Columbus appears twice in A Book of Ages.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Hope I Die 'fore I Get Old
It's the birthday of Pete Townshend, the lead guitarist of The Who, writer of operas, smasher of guitars, editor of books, born in 1945. He wasn't as handsome as bandmate Roger Daltrey or contemporaries Lennon and McCartney, or as sexually perplexing and magnetic as Mick Jagger. He was simply an angry working bloke with a mean guitar. Still is. Nowadays he is also an important fundraiser for the hard of hearing.
Rock stars are interesting to chronicle because their lives are one long battle against age. Loud Peter Pans who refuse to outgrow tight pants, criminals who write poetry, travel armed with guitars and banned substances.
Townshend broke his first guitar in concert at age 19. It was an accident, but the crowd loved it, so he made it part of the act. On his twentieth birthday, on a train between London and Southampton, he wrote the anthem of his generation, which featured the nihilistic line "Hope I die 'fore I get old."
But he didn't. Keith Moon and John Lennon and others did, becoming permanent youthful icons. At 31, Townshend suffered permanent hearing loss during a concert at Charlton Football Ground. At 35 he nearly died of a drug overdose at the Club For Heroes. At 38 he dissolved The Who and became an employee of the publishers Faber & Faber. Did he become a man of letters? Not really. Eventually he went back out on the road, as all rock stars do. Is that Townshend I sometimes see pitching Time Life Rock 'N Roll collections on late night TV? When you live that long and play that hard it becomes harder to surprise people.
Rock stars are my favorite subcategory in A Book of Ages. Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Lennon and McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are our Keats and Shelley and Byron. Doing outrageous things, but somehow managing to remain poetic, funny, sometimes tragic, always interesting.
Rock stars are interesting to chronicle because their lives are one long battle against age. Loud Peter Pans who refuse to outgrow tight pants, criminals who write poetry, travel armed with guitars and banned substances.
Townshend broke his first guitar in concert at age 19. It was an accident, but the crowd loved it, so he made it part of the act. On his twentieth birthday, on a train between London and Southampton, he wrote the anthem of his generation, which featured the nihilistic line "Hope I die 'fore I get old."
But he didn't. Keith Moon and John Lennon and others did, becoming permanent youthful icons. At 31, Townshend suffered permanent hearing loss during a concert at Charlton Football Ground. At 35 he nearly died of a drug overdose at the Club For Heroes. At 38 he dissolved The Who and became an employee of the publishers Faber & Faber. Did he become a man of letters? Not really. Eventually he went back out on the road, as all rock stars do. Is that Townshend I sometimes see pitching Time Life Rock 'N Roll collections on late night TV? When you live that long and play that hard it becomes harder to surprise people.
Rock stars are my favorite subcategory in A Book of Ages. Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Lennon and McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are our Keats and Shelley and Byron. Doing outrageous things, but somehow managing to remain poetic, funny, sometimes tragic, always interesting.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Marrying Well
On this day in 1152 Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry, the Duke of Normandy and soon-to-be King of England. It was her second marriage. Until six weeks earlier she'd been married to the King of France. Two of her sons with Henry II would become Kings of England too.
Richard I and John were difficult offspring, fighting between themselves and with their parents. Eleanor and Henry were played in the 1968 film by Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. For those of you keeping score, that's Queen of France, Queen of England and an Academy Award. At one point Eleanor conspired to take her husband off the throne, after which Henry put her in prison for 16 years. It wasn't an easy marriage but it was far from dull. Eleanor of Aquitaine has been the subject of several excellent biographies. She appears on page 101 in A Book of Ages.
There are dozens of other famous and cringe-making marriages in A Book of Ages. The horrifyingly funny union of Martha and George, as played by Dick and Liz in Mike Nichols' film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Also Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and George and Martha Washington, the famous Shelleys, the happy George Eliots and unhappy T. S. Eliots, the E. B. Whites, the serial Updikes and Hemingways and Mailers and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Tudors. Marriage is one of life's significant landmarks, or watersheds, depending how you look at it. The institution contains an odd assortment, and each couple writes its own rules of engagement, has its own habits and rituals, which I enjoyed collecting and putting into words.
Richard I and John were difficult offspring, fighting between themselves and with their parents. Eleanor and Henry were played in the 1968 film by Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. For those of you keeping score, that's Queen of France, Queen of England and an Academy Award. At one point Eleanor conspired to take her husband off the throne, after which Henry put her in prison for 16 years. It wasn't an easy marriage but it was far from dull. Eleanor of Aquitaine has been the subject of several excellent biographies. She appears on page 101 in A Book of Ages.
There are dozens of other famous and cringe-making marriages in A Book of Ages. The horrifyingly funny union of Martha and George, as played by Dick and Liz in Mike Nichols' film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Also Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and George and Martha Washington, the famous Shelleys, the happy George Eliots and unhappy T. S. Eliots, the E. B. Whites, the serial Updikes and Hemingways and Mailers and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Tudors. Marriage is one of life's significant landmarks, or watersheds, depending how you look at it. The institution contains an odd assortment, and each couple writes its own rules of engagement, has its own habits and rituals, which I enjoyed collecting and putting into words.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Bulls and Bears
The New York Stock Exchange was formed on this day in 1792. Located on Wall Street, the stock exchange became a place of wild ups and downs, frequent panics and frauds. It remained so until 1934 when FDR formed the S.E.C. Since then the American economy has enjoyed a steady, mildly fluctuating prosperity, with no great panics and only occasional frauds, unless you consider Market Capitalism a fraud. Roosevelt put Joseph Kennedy, one of the greatest of Wall Street's buccaneers, in charge of cleaning the street up. Kennedy did a remarkable job and kept a straight face enforcing the rules that would have prevented him from acquiring his fortune. You could say FDR and Joe Kennedy were mother and father to the American middle class
Left to its own devices, life is a rollercoaster, and A Book of Ages reads like one. Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Thomas Paine, Ulysses S. Grant, Alfred Nobel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary McCarthy, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Dickens, Georg Friderich Handel, and Philo T. Farnsworth (the man who invented television) all experienced bankruptcy firsthand. Churchill lost everything in the Crash of '29 and had to write his way back to properity. John D. Rockefeller lost half of his fortune in 1929, but he still had enough left over to restore colonial Williamsburg, create Grand Teton National Park, build Rockefeller Center and found the Museum of Modern Art. Being rich insulates you from life's troubles. John Steinbeck wrote about the other 99% of us in The Grapes of Wrath, which I also mention. I sometimes think a book is a better monument.
“The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.” Denis Diderot, Elements of Physiology (1774-1780)
Left to its own devices, life is a rollercoaster, and A Book of Ages reads like one. Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Thomas Paine, Ulysses S. Grant, Alfred Nobel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary McCarthy, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Dickens, Georg Friderich Handel, and Philo T. Farnsworth (the man who invented television) all experienced bankruptcy firsthand. Churchill lost everything in the Crash of '29 and had to write his way back to properity. John D. Rockefeller lost half of his fortune in 1929, but he still had enough left over to restore colonial Williamsburg, create Grand Teton National Park, build Rockefeller Center and found the Museum of Modern Art. Being rich insulates you from life's troubles. John Steinbeck wrote about the other 99% of us in The Grapes of Wrath, which I also mention. I sometimes think a book is a better monument.
“The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.” Denis Diderot, Elements of Physiology (1774-1780)
Friday, May 15, 2009
No Place Like Home
It's the birthday of L. Frank Baum, born on this day in 1856. His life was a mixture of failure and temporary success, with stretches spent writing plays, newspapering, selling door to door and running a shop, until 1900 when he sat down and wrote a book for children. He was 44. The book was called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
There's an interesting story about the making of the 1939 movie. Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard, Professor Marvel and several other parts, was outfitted with a frock coat purchased from a Hollywood second hand store. During filming he noticed L. Frank Baum's name stitched onto the inside pocket. Baum appears on page 172 in A Book of Ages.
The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, premiered on this date in 1928. Five years earlier, at age 21, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with $40 in his pocket. At 35, in the midst of the Great Depression, he would invest a million and a half dollars to make a feature length cartoon about a young woman living with seven men. Disney appears five times in A Book of Ages.
There's an interesting story about the making of the 1939 movie. Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard, Professor Marvel and several other parts, was outfitted with a frock coat purchased from a Hollywood second hand store. During filming he noticed L. Frank Baum's name stitched onto the inside pocket. Baum appears on page 172 in A Book of Ages.
The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, premiered on this date in 1928. Five years earlier, at age 21, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with $40 in his pocket. At 35, in the midst of the Great Depression, he would invest a million and a half dollars to make a feature length cartoon about a young woman living with seven men. Disney appears five times in A Book of Ages.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Prodigies
On May 14, 1643, Louis XIV was crowned king of France. He was four years old. History is full of four year-old monarchs, hovered over by helpful and malign viziers and privy counsellors and stage mothers, all lovingly asserting their own power. It's a familiar picture. Mary became Queen of Scots before she celebrated her first birthday. She was given lots of advice by her French uncles.
The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet could reach the pedals. Judy Garland made her stage debut when she was two. Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at three. And so on. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly picked up my book and worried that it was a catalog of prodigies. He was pleased to see it included unprodigies as well. Dolts like Albert Einstein who didn't speak until he was three, and Thomas Edison who was removed from school because the teacher thought he was too stupid to learn.
Mostly, childhood is a forbidding sort of place where children are right to be afraid and puzzled, and grateful for every friend they meet. Mick Jagger met Keith Richard when he was four, a meeting I imagine like d'Artagnon meeting Aramis. The best accounts of childhood are a bit surreal, like Alice in Wonderland, or strangely funny, like Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, or Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield. In A Book of Ages you learn that James Thurber was four when his family purchased a dog that bit people. Alice Liddell was ten when she became the heroine of her famous story. Flannery O'Connor was five when she became famous for teaching her chicken to walk backwards.
Even famous childhoods are full of loss: Isaac Newton losing his mother, Ray Charles losing his sight, Jerry Garcia losing the end of his right middle finger, Mike Nichols losing all of his hair including his eyebrows, Shirley Temple losing her belief in Santa Claus. Children learn things to compensate. We begin rehearsing the things we will become as adults. Bobby Fischer learned chess at age six. J. K. Rowling wrote her first story when she was six; it was about a rabbit with measles. Prodigious or not, every childhood is an odd mix of danger and possibility. Which is why the stories we read are simultaneously funny and sad, strange and familiar.
The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet could reach the pedals. Judy Garland made her stage debut when she was two. Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at three. And so on. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly picked up my book and worried that it was a catalog of prodigies. He was pleased to see it included unprodigies as well. Dolts like Albert Einstein who didn't speak until he was three, and Thomas Edison who was removed from school because the teacher thought he was too stupid to learn.
Mostly, childhood is a forbidding sort of place where children are right to be afraid and puzzled, and grateful for every friend they meet. Mick Jagger met Keith Richard when he was four, a meeting I imagine like d'Artagnon meeting Aramis. The best accounts of childhood are a bit surreal, like Alice in Wonderland, or strangely funny, like Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, or Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield. In A Book of Ages you learn that James Thurber was four when his family purchased a dog that bit people. Alice Liddell was ten when she became the heroine of her famous story. Flannery O'Connor was five when she became famous for teaching her chicken to walk backwards.
Even famous childhoods are full of loss: Isaac Newton losing his mother, Ray Charles losing his sight, Jerry Garcia losing the end of his right middle finger, Mike Nichols losing all of his hair including his eyebrows, Shirley Temple losing her belief in Santa Claus. Children learn things to compensate. We begin rehearsing the things we will become as adults. Bobby Fischer learned chess at age six. J. K. Rowling wrote her first story when she was six; it was about a rabbit with measles. Prodigious or not, every childhood is an odd mix of danger and possibility. Which is why the stories we read are simultaneously funny and sad, strange and familiar.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Restlessness
People change. Authors dress differently and stop eating in the same restaurants after they hit the bestseller lists. Hemingway's second wife was rich and he began wintering in Gstaad instead of Schruns. Ballplayers reach a sweet spot in their careers and decline from there, becoming clubhouse sages and managers and posing in ads for Interwoven socks. Rock stars continue on and on, always wealthy, always attractive, because they sell their souls to the devil. This is why lives are interesting to read. Writing A Book of Ages it was these transformations I jotted down. When did Robert Benchley have his first drink? When did Julia Child discover French cuisine? When did the prophet receive wisdom? When did Ty Cobb invest in Coca Cola and make himself a millionaire?
May 13th is the birthday of the writer Bruce Chatwin, born in 1940 in England's industrial midlands. He was an attractive and ingratiating youth, beginning his working life as a lowly usher at Sotheby's, the auction house. His job was to schlep the artworks around. But he had a magic quality that caught the eye of his upperclass bosses. More importantly he had an eye for good art, a nose for the "genuine article." And he spoke his mind. He rose quickly, becoming one of the directors of the firm, a recognized art expert. Then he quit to become a nomad. He wrote articles about places he visited, and published in top London newspapers. He also became what friends describe as a professional houseguest. Then he wrote a novel, and another, metamorphosing into a bestselling novelist. He was charming and charmed, attractive, enigmatic––and everywhere. Then he contracted a rare disease and died in a matter of months. He described his disease as something he'd picked up in central Asia or Africa, depending on who he was speaking to. But it was AIDS. He died a relatively young 48, a decade and a half older than Byron but rather Byronic. Bruce Chatwin appears on pages 46, 117, 136 and 185 in A Book of Ages.
May 13th is the birthday of the writer Bruce Chatwin, born in 1940 in England's industrial midlands. He was an attractive and ingratiating youth, beginning his working life as a lowly usher at Sotheby's, the auction house. His job was to schlep the artworks around. But he had a magic quality that caught the eye of his upperclass bosses. More importantly he had an eye for good art, a nose for the "genuine article." And he spoke his mind. He rose quickly, becoming one of the directors of the firm, a recognized art expert. Then he quit to become a nomad. He wrote articles about places he visited, and published in top London newspapers. He also became what friends describe as a professional houseguest. Then he wrote a novel, and another, metamorphosing into a bestselling novelist. He was charming and charmed, attractive, enigmatic––and everywhere. Then he contracted a rare disease and died in a matter of months. He described his disease as something he'd picked up in central Asia or Africa, depending on who he was speaking to. But it was AIDS. He died a relatively young 48, a decade and a half older than Byron but rather Byronic. Bruce Chatwin appears on pages 46, 117, 136 and 185 in A Book of Ages.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Father's Day
Is it too early to talk about Father's Day? I don't think so. Men buy their wives Mother's Day presents the afternoon of the day before; women are more organized and probably bought the father of their children a gift in the post-Christmas sales. So, I am counting on the kids.
Kids? Fathers love books. Biographies are great. Military biographies even better. Sports biographies, excellent choice. Political biography?
It's getting hard to choose isn't it? Which do you go for? The safest idea might be to spread your bets out a little. Cover the board. Buy Dad A BOOK OF AGES. It's got sports heroes, famous generals, film stars, chefs, cowboys and Indians, bank robbers, mountain climbers, spy novelists and real spies, rock stars, business tycoons, famous explorers, presidents, philosophers, inventors, scientists, heroes and arch-villains.
And A BOOK OF AGES is fun to read. Men love facts, and every page is jammed full of interesting facts, funny stories, amazing moments from over 700 amazing lives. Bite sized paragraphs. Dad will start reading them aloud to you: "Did you know that Ted Williams homered in his last time up?" "Did you know that George Washington didn't win a battle until he was 44?" "Did you know that Pete Townshend broke his first guitar onstage when he was 19?" (All true.)
And I know you will act as if you are interested when he does this because dads are at their most lovable when they are dispensing bite sized bits of wisdom. They are happiest when they are doing this. He will love this book. And you will refrain from rolling your eyes when he is reading from it, at least until you have left the room.
But seriously, it is a perfect gift. Suitable for grandfathers too.
Kids? Fathers love books. Biographies are great. Military biographies even better. Sports biographies, excellent choice. Political biography?
It's getting hard to choose isn't it? Which do you go for? The safest idea might be to spread your bets out a little. Cover the board. Buy Dad A BOOK OF AGES. It's got sports heroes, famous generals, film stars, chefs, cowboys and Indians, bank robbers, mountain climbers, spy novelists and real spies, rock stars, business tycoons, famous explorers, presidents, philosophers, inventors, scientists, heroes and arch-villains.
And A BOOK OF AGES is fun to read. Men love facts, and every page is jammed full of interesting facts, funny stories, amazing moments from over 700 amazing lives. Bite sized paragraphs. Dad will start reading them aloud to you: "Did you know that Ted Williams homered in his last time up?" "Did you know that George Washington didn't win a battle until he was 44?" "Did you know that Pete Townshend broke his first guitar onstage when he was 19?" (All true.)
And I know you will act as if you are interested when he does this because dads are at their most lovable when they are dispensing bite sized bits of wisdom. They are happiest when they are doing this. He will love this book. And you will refrain from rolling your eyes when he is reading from it, at least until you have left the room.
But seriously, it is a perfect gift. Suitable for grandfathers too.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Mother's Day
On the day after our maternal parents have been celebrated, kissed, given potted plants and cards drawn with crayon and plaster handprints of small children, we are left to wonder what it's all about. Motherhood is one of many themes in A Book of Ages. No surprise, really. It's a book about life's changes, the relationships we nurture and endure, and there is no relationship more profound than that of mother and child.
Famous people have mothers too. Mothers who died young, like Lincoln's, Somerset Maugham's, Poe's, Orson Welles's and Mary McCarthy's. Allen Ginsberg's mother was institutionalized when he was six, Cary Grant's when he was nine. Marilyn Monroe's mother was unable to raise her. Hitler's smothered him with affection. Buster Keaton's and Judy Garland's parents took them into the family business, which happened to be show business. Eudora Welty surrendered her New York writing career to care for her mother back in Mississippi. Child monarchs receive a legacy as heavy as any family curse. Most parents do the best they know how in the circumstances they are given, and their children muddle through. I found this again and again in the lives I describe in the book.
When P. G. Wodehouse was two his parents returned to British Hong Kong, leaving the youngster in the care of assorted maternal aunts. The adult Wodehouse didn't bear a grudge. Dickens's mother allowed him to be removed from school and put to work in a shoe polish factory at the age of twelve, and he never forgave her. In both cases, these events became part of their fiction. In an important sense we are children all of our lives, and as parents we re-enact what we learned.
Famous people have mothers too. Mothers who died young, like Lincoln's, Somerset Maugham's, Poe's, Orson Welles's and Mary McCarthy's. Allen Ginsberg's mother was institutionalized when he was six, Cary Grant's when he was nine. Marilyn Monroe's mother was unable to raise her. Hitler's smothered him with affection. Buster Keaton's and Judy Garland's parents took them into the family business, which happened to be show business. Eudora Welty surrendered her New York writing career to care for her mother back in Mississippi. Child monarchs receive a legacy as heavy as any family curse. Most parents do the best they know how in the circumstances they are given, and their children muddle through. I found this again and again in the lives I describe in the book.
When P. G. Wodehouse was two his parents returned to British Hong Kong, leaving the youngster in the care of assorted maternal aunts. The adult Wodehouse didn't bear a grudge. Dickens's mother allowed him to be removed from school and put to work in a shoe polish factory at the age of twelve, and he never forgave her. In both cases, these events became part of their fiction. In an important sense we are children all of our lives, and as parents we re-enact what we learned.
Heroism and Anti-Heroism
On May 10, 1873, Father Damien arrives on the island of Molokai in Hawaii. He is 33. He will live there as parish priest to the leper colony until he dies in 1889.
On May 10, 1775, American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen capture Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The 34 year-old Arnold then leads a 1100 men on a heroice but unsuccessful invasion of Canada, where he is wounded in the assault on the citadel of Quebec. He is wounded again, more severely, winning a brilliant victory at Saratoga in 1777. Five years later, feeling unappreciated by his superiors, and having survived a court-martial for mismanaging funds, Arnold enters negotiations with the British. His career doesn't prosper very well in their employ either.
Paul Revere dies, a much revered and prosperous 83, on May 10, 1818. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is only 11 years-old at the time and it will be another 45 years before he writes his famous poem.
Doris Lessing writes in the Sunday Times on May 10, 1992: “The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.”
These and other stories can be found in A Book of Ages.
On May 10, 1775, American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen capture Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The 34 year-old Arnold then leads a 1100 men on a heroice but unsuccessful invasion of Canada, where he is wounded in the assault on the citadel of Quebec. He is wounded again, more severely, winning a brilliant victory at Saratoga in 1777. Five years later, feeling unappreciated by his superiors, and having survived a court-martial for mismanaging funds, Arnold enters negotiations with the British. His career doesn't prosper very well in their employ either.
Paul Revere dies, a much revered and prosperous 83, on May 10, 1818. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is only 11 years-old at the time and it will be another 45 years before he writes his famous poem.
Doris Lessing writes in the Sunday Times on May 10, 1992: “The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.”
These and other stories can be found in A Book of Ages.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America on this date in 1831. He was 25 and, as the "de" before his last name indicates, an aristocrat. His purpose was to observe the American penal system, but he saw other things as well, town government in action, street mobs, political machines and what Europeans called vox populi. We called it something else. He was sharp-eyed and sharp-penciled. Simply by travelling around the country for eight months he was able to collect enough insights to lard the after-dinner speeches of American politicians for the next 175 years.
De Tocqueville appears twice in A Book of Ages.
De Tocqueville appears twice in A Book of Ages.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Acknowledgments
I thought I'd take a day to thank some people.
Firstly, I owe a debt to the magazines I read. The critics who've taught me most of what I know about the authors and poets and artists and composers and performers who create the culture. The analysts who explain politics while events are still warm, before they become history, and the history in the background of those events.
In the book I thank the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the New York Times and their book review, the BBC and NPR and PBS. And Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which has influenced my voice, as his, I'm sure, was influenced by White and Thurber and Benchley and Leibling, and theirs by Addison and Steele and Hazlitt and Lamb.
I owe them all. They are the voices speaking in my head as I write. The New Yorker crowd especially. White and Thurber and Benchley are in A Book of Ages several times each, as are Dorothy Parker and J. D. Salinger and William Shawn and Harold Ross and Saul Steinberg and S. J. Perelman and John Updike and Calvin Trillin, all part of that miscellaneous genius that arrives here in Minneapolis once every week inside a brilliantly illustrated cover. With cartoons.
Keillor should have been in the book too, but somehow he seemed too contemporary. I'd met him and, like Groucho Marx, we tend to disparage clubs that allow us to be members. I'd have included Garrison's first visit to the Grand Ol' Opry, which gave him the idea he might be up to doing a weekly radio variety program. He'd already hosted a daily one, which I'd listened to mornings while getting ready for work.
Every day I read the paper. Every week the handful of magazines arrived full of new material. As I read I jotted. As I heard anecdotes I asked myself "When did that happen? How old was he, or she?" The jottings became a collection and the collection became a book.
What's interesting is how the many (over 700) different personalities I included––authors being the largest group, but also poets and painters, composers, rock stars, cooks, politicians, husbands and wives, film stars and film directors, generals and assassins and bank robbers, monarchs and revolutionaries, wits and fools, celebrities and journalists–-all of them began talking to each other, adjacent entries commenting on each other, presenting mute ironies and unexpected punning references back and forth. But all of it originated in, was heard or read, in other sources, who read or heard it in other sources themselves. That's the culture for you.
Firstly, I owe a debt to the magazines I read. The critics who've taught me most of what I know about the authors and poets and artists and composers and performers who create the culture. The analysts who explain politics while events are still warm, before they become history, and the history in the background of those events.
In the book I thank the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the New York Times and their book review, the BBC and NPR and PBS. And Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which has influenced my voice, as his, I'm sure, was influenced by White and Thurber and Benchley and Leibling, and theirs by Addison and Steele and Hazlitt and Lamb.
I owe them all. They are the voices speaking in my head as I write. The New Yorker crowd especially. White and Thurber and Benchley are in A Book of Ages several times each, as are Dorothy Parker and J. D. Salinger and William Shawn and Harold Ross and Saul Steinberg and S. J. Perelman and John Updike and Calvin Trillin, all part of that miscellaneous genius that arrives here in Minneapolis once every week inside a brilliantly illustrated cover. With cartoons.
Keillor should have been in the book too, but somehow he seemed too contemporary. I'd met him and, like Groucho Marx, we tend to disparage clubs that allow us to be members. I'd have included Garrison's first visit to the Grand Ol' Opry, which gave him the idea he might be up to doing a weekly radio variety program. He'd already hosted a daily one, which I'd listened to mornings while getting ready for work.
Every day I read the paper. Every week the handful of magazines arrived full of new material. As I read I jotted. As I heard anecdotes I asked myself "When did that happen? How old was he, or she?" The jottings became a collection and the collection became a book.
What's interesting is how the many (over 700) different personalities I included––authors being the largest group, but also poets and painters, composers, rock stars, cooks, politicians, husbands and wives, film stars and film directors, generals and assassins and bank robbers, monarchs and revolutionaries, wits and fools, celebrities and journalists–-all of them began talking to each other, adjacent entries commenting on each other, presenting mute ironies and unexpected punning references back and forth. But all of it originated in, was heard or read, in other sources, who read or heard it in other sources themselves. That's the culture for you.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Beethoven, The Brownings, Seabiscuit
On May 7, 1824, Beethoven conducted the first performance of his Ninth Symphony. The setting: Vienna’s Kartnertor Theater. The orchestra and soloists were told to ignore the composer and instead follow the count of the assistant conductor. Beethoven was, by this time, completely deaf and couldn't hear the orchestra or the applause. Despite the packed house he lost money on the night. Beethoven appears on pages 187 and 211 in A Book of Ages.
Composers Johannes Brahms and Pyotor Ilich Tchaikovsky were both born on this date, Brahms in Germany, in 1833, Tchaikovsky in 1840, in Russia. Tchaikovsky appears in four anecdotes in A Book of Ages.
It's the birthday of Robert Browning, born in 1812, in suburban London. On January 10, 1845, he sent a rather chaste love note to Elizabeth Barrett, beginning one of the great love affairs of the Post Romantic era. He was 32 and ordinary looking. She was 38 and plain. He was energetic and active. She was a semi-invalid, living like a prisoner in her father's house on Wimpole Street. But they were both poets, she, arguably, the better one. They eloped to Italy in the following year, settling in Pisa and then in Florence. They appear five times in A Book of Ages.
The great racehorse, Seabiscuit, died on this date in 1947, of an apparent heart attack, six days short of his fourteenth birthday. His greatest moment came in 1938 when the one-in-four underdog beat War Admiral at Pimlico. Forty million people listened to the two-horse race on the radio. In December of that year he was named one of the top newsmakers of the year, along with FDR and Adolf Hitler. Seabiscuit was a lifelong bachelor. He appears on pages 3, 5, 9 and 30 in A Book of Ages.
Composers Johannes Brahms and Pyotor Ilich Tchaikovsky were both born on this date, Brahms in Germany, in 1833, Tchaikovsky in 1840, in Russia. Tchaikovsky appears in four anecdotes in A Book of Ages.
It's the birthday of Robert Browning, born in 1812, in suburban London. On January 10, 1845, he sent a rather chaste love note to Elizabeth Barrett, beginning one of the great love affairs of the Post Romantic era. He was 32 and ordinary looking. She was 38 and plain. He was energetic and active. She was a semi-invalid, living like a prisoner in her father's house on Wimpole Street. But they were both poets, she, arguably, the better one. They eloped to Italy in the following year, settling in Pisa and then in Florence. They appear five times in A Book of Ages.
The great racehorse, Seabiscuit, died on this date in 1947, of an apparent heart attack, six days short of his fourteenth birthday. His greatest moment came in 1938 when the one-in-four underdog beat War Admiral at Pimlico. Forty million people listened to the two-horse race on the radio. In December of that year he was named one of the top newsmakers of the year, along with FDR and Adolf Hitler. Seabiscuit was a lifelong bachelor. He appears on pages 3, 5, 9 and 30 in A Book of Ages.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Freud, Eiffel, the Four Minute Mile
It was also on this day, in 1954 that a 25 year-old medical student from Oxford University ran the first mile in under four minutes. His name was Roger Bannister. His record lasted less than a month before it was broken by an Australian whose name nobody remembers. Bannister retired from running within the year, but he will always be the first to break this arbitrary barrier, just as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had been the first to climb Everest a year earlier.
It was on May 6, 1889 that Eiffel's amazing tower was opened to visitors. Eiffel was 56 and had designed and would design many far more useful structures around the world, but it is with this tower in Paris that his name will always be associated. When it opened most Parisians thought it was a terrible eyesore.
Eiffel and Bannister appear once each in A Book of Ages.
May 6th is also the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in 1856 in Freiburg, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, not just speculating about dreams, but collecting knick-knacks, being given a couch by a grateful patient, having his portrait sketched by Salvador Dali, meeting a rival psychoanalyst, giving up cigars, losing all his savings in an economic downturn, and, perhaps most memorably, seeing his mother naked when he was three years old.
It was on May 6, 1889 that Eiffel's amazing tower was opened to visitors. Eiffel was 56 and had designed and would design many far more useful structures around the world, but it is with this tower in Paris that his name will always be associated. When it opened most Parisians thought it was a terrible eyesore.
Eiffel and Bannister appear once each in A Book of Ages.
May 6th is also the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in 1856 in Freiburg, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, not just speculating about dreams, but collecting knick-knacks, being given a couch by a grateful patient, having his portrait sketched by Salvador Dali, meeting a rival psychoanalyst, giving up cigars, losing all his savings in an economic downturn, and, perhaps most memorably, seeing his mother naked when he was three years old.
The Sack of Rome and The Sun King moves to the Suburbs
May 6th, 1527 is the date of the infamous Sack of Rome. Most people think this took place during the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made famous in the book by Edward Gibbon (p 158 in A Book of Ages). Actually, the Empire collapsed a thousand years earlier. This episode took place at the end of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo was living in Florence at the time and missed the whole thing. Three years later the greatest sculptor of the age, the painter of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, was employed designing fortifications. He was 55. Times change and we take the jobs we can get. Michelangelo appears on pages 87, 118, 135, 199, 209, 227, 250, 251, 256 and 278 in A Book of Ages.
On May 6, 1682 Louis XIV, the Sun King, moved to the suburbs. He was 43, but by most accounts looked fabulous. Why the move? Was it was the crowds or the smells or the violence? Ennui? Probably a combination. In any case, he'd had a little bijou residence thrown up in a rural hamlet called Versailles, and it it was from there that French monarchs ruled tastefully until the Revolution came along a century later and ruined everything.
The neat trick about Versailles was how it kept the aristocracy entirely dependent on the king. This hothouse world is the one seen through the eyes and machinations of Madame de Pompadour, whose rise and fall is chronicled on pages 20, 39, 73 and 100 in A Book of Ages. (Louis XIV only appears twice. Vive la femme.)
On May 6, 1682 Louis XIV, the Sun King, moved to the suburbs. He was 43, but by most accounts looked fabulous. Why the move? Was it was the crowds or the smells or the violence? Ennui? Probably a combination. In any case, he'd had a little bijou residence thrown up in a rural hamlet called Versailles, and it it was from there that French monarchs ruled tastefully until the Revolution came along a century later and ruined everything.
The neat trick about Versailles was how it kept the aristocracy entirely dependent on the king. This hothouse world is the one seen through the eyes and machinations of Madame de Pompadour, whose rise and fall is chronicled on pages 20, 39, 73 and 100 in A Book of Ages. (Louis XIV only appears twice. Vive la femme.)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Coco Chanel, Kubla Khan and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
On May 5th, 1921, Coco Chanel introduced the perfume she called Chanel No. 5. She was 37. It was 1926 when she created her signature "little black dress." Later, an attractive, fashionable woman in her fifties, Chanel managed to survive World War II by living with a Nazi officer at the Ritz Hotel. Chanel appears on pages 80. 134, 165, 213, 250 and 275 in A Book of Ages.
On May 5th, 1260, Kubla Khan ascended the throne of the Mongol Empire. Five centuries later, in the autumn of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and dreamed a poem about it. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure dome decree/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man" Sadly, just as he was writing it down, a man from the neighboring town of Porlock stopped by and interrupted him. Coleridge was 25. He would never remember the remainder of the poem he'd dreamed, and by 1800 he'd written himself out.
Coleridge was brilliant, but uneven, prone to interruptions, depressions, manias and addictions. At the age of 42 he moved in with his doctor and spent the rest of his life there. At age 60 he entertained the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson at his doctor's home in Highgate, London, squeezing six names into one very small room. He died a year later. Samuel Taylor Coleridge appears five times in A Book of Ages.
On May 5th, 1260, Kubla Khan ascended the throne of the Mongol Empire. Five centuries later, in the autumn of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took two grains of opium and dreamed a poem about it. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure dome decree/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man" Sadly, just as he was writing it down, a man from the neighboring town of Porlock stopped by and interrupted him. Coleridge was 25. He would never remember the remainder of the poem he'd dreamed, and by 1800 he'd written himself out.
Coleridge was brilliant, but uneven, prone to interruptions, depressions, manias and addictions. At the age of 42 he moved in with his doctor and spent the rest of his life there. At age 60 he entertained the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson at his doctor's home in Highgate, London, squeezing six names into one very small room. He died a year later. Samuel Taylor Coleridge appears five times in A Book of Ages.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Alice in Wonderland
Alice Liddell was born on May 4, 1852, in London where her father was the Dean of Westminster School. Soon afterward the family moved to Christ Church College in Oxford, where Alice became the favorite of a young mathematics tutor who enjoyed riddles and taking pictures of little girls. On July 4, 1862, Charles Dodgson took 10 year-old Alice and her sister for a boat ride on the Thames and told them a story about Alice falling down a rabbit hole.
In 1953, when they were twelve years-old, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang together for the first time in a sixth grade production of Alice in Wonderland at P.S. 164 in Queens, New York. Paul played the White Rabbit. Arthur played the Cheshire Cat. In 1966, when he was 66, Sir John Gielgud played the Mock Turtle in a film version directed by Jonathan Miller.
Alice Liddell appears three times in A Book of Ages, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) eight times, John Gielgud seven times, Paul Simon six times, and Art Garfunkel five.
In 1953, when they were twelve years-old, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang together for the first time in a sixth grade production of Alice in Wonderland at P.S. 164 in Queens, New York. Paul played the White Rabbit. Arthur played the Cheshire Cat. In 1966, when he was 66, Sir John Gielgud played the Mock Turtle in a film version directed by Jonathan Miller.
Alice Liddell appears three times in A Book of Ages, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) eight times, John Gielgud seven times, Paul Simon six times, and Art Garfunkel five.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Lord Byron swims the Hellespont
On May 3, 1810 Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, the channel separating Asia and Europe, not far from the buried ruins of ancient Troy. It took him an hour and ten minutes. He'd failed on his first try, having misjudged the currents. In the legend Leander crossed it so he could sleep with his beloved Hero. Byron did it so he could write letters home about it. He wrote many of those, as well as a famous poem. He was 22 and just beginning to write his own legend.
Byron was the first great literary celebrity. Aristocratic, talented, scandalous, handsome, competitive to a fault, self-promoting, larger than life. Far too outsized for proper London society, which is why he spent most of his adult life on the Continent. He had a troublesome habit of falling in love with married women. In 1812 he had his famous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. It was Lady Caroline who described Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know."
In several ways he is the perfect hero for a book like mine. The word Byronic describes a certain kind of man, young, ambitious, poetic, dangerous, daring, romantic and a bit doomed. Byron died young while taking part in a revolution in Greece. He presided over the Viking funeral of Shelley on the Italian coast. He proposed the storytelling contest that resulted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Half Peter Pan and half Odysseus, he is the prototype for millions of young men since, and several others described in the book: Bruce Chatwin, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Mick Jagger.
Byron appears on pages 21, 61, 66, 76, 77, 95, 117, 128 and 130 in A Book of Ages.
Byron was the first great literary celebrity. Aristocratic, talented, scandalous, handsome, competitive to a fault, self-promoting, larger than life. Far too outsized for proper London society, which is why he spent most of his adult life on the Continent. He had a troublesome habit of falling in love with married women. In 1812 he had his famous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. It was Lady Caroline who described Byron as "mad, bad and dangerous to know."
In several ways he is the perfect hero for a book like mine. The word Byronic describes a certain kind of man, young, ambitious, poetic, dangerous, daring, romantic and a bit doomed. Byron died young while taking part in a revolution in Greece. He presided over the Viking funeral of Shelley on the Italian coast. He proposed the storytelling contest that resulted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Half Peter Pan and half Odysseus, he is the prototype for millions of young men since, and several others described in the book: Bruce Chatwin, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Mick Jagger.
Byron appears on pages 21, 61, 66, 76, 77, 95, 117, 128 and 130 in A Book of Ages.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Crosby
It's the birthday of Bing Crosby, born in 1903 in Spokane, Washington.
Bing was the first hip white man in America. This persona wasn't something invented by the P.R. department at Paramount Studios. Crosby earned his reputation among the jazz players and the side men he played with. He knew as well as the instrumentalists that the essence of Swing was slowing down to let the accompaniment run past. Taking it easy but always getting there on time. Long before Miles Davis invented the pose, Bing was cool.
He was always the dark horse in the Road Pictures he made with Bob Hope. The unflappable one who got the girl. His jokes were effortless, the songs performed as if they were an afterthought, but perfectly. One of the secrets of his relaxed demeanor? Marijuana, a then-legal relaxant Louis Armstrong introduced him to in 1928––when alcohol was verboten. This and other Crosby anecdotes appear on pages 81, 138, 145 and 254 in A Book of Ages.
On May 29, 1942, Bing recorded "White Christmas" in a studio in Hollywood, California. The session lasted 18 minutes, probably because Crosby wanted to get out to the track. The weather outside was seventy degrees under sunny skies. (I consulted the archives of the Los Angeles Weather Bureau to find this out.) He was 39. If he'd wanted to he could have retired on the earnings from this one song, but he didn't. He was relaxed, but not lazy. He died just after finishing a round of golf at age 74. He shot an 85.
Bing was the first hip white man in America. This persona wasn't something invented by the P.R. department at Paramount Studios. Crosby earned his reputation among the jazz players and the side men he played with. He knew as well as the instrumentalists that the essence of Swing was slowing down to let the accompaniment run past. Taking it easy but always getting there on time. Long before Miles Davis invented the pose, Bing was cool.
He was always the dark horse in the Road Pictures he made with Bob Hope. The unflappable one who got the girl. His jokes were effortless, the songs performed as if they were an afterthought, but perfectly. One of the secrets of his relaxed demeanor? Marijuana, a then-legal relaxant Louis Armstrong introduced him to in 1928––when alcohol was verboten. This and other Crosby anecdotes appear on pages 81, 138, 145 and 254 in A Book of Ages.
On May 29, 1942, Bing recorded "White Christmas" in a studio in Hollywood, California. The session lasted 18 minutes, probably because Crosby wanted to get out to the track. The weather outside was seventy degrees under sunny skies. (I consulted the archives of the Los Angeles Weather Bureau to find this out.) He was 39. If he'd wanted to he could have retired on the earnings from this one song, but he didn't. He was relaxed, but not lazy. He died just after finishing a round of golf at age 74. He shot an 85.
Friday, May 1, 2009
The Marriage of Figaro, Catch 22
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered a brand new opera on this date in 1786. It was called The Marriage of Figaro, and the composer had high hopes. For one thing, it was absolutely brilliant. All his operas were. Colorful costumes. There were tunes you could hum. The characters were lovable, if a bit low-life for the fancy Viennese audiences. It closed after only nine performances, and Mozart went back to giving piano lessons.
It was a hit in Prague.
Mozart appears on pages 7, 10, 13, 17, 104 and 128 in A Book of Ages. He was a child prodigy and died young.
Joseph Heller was born on this day in 1923. He flew sixty missions as a bombardier for the Army Air Corps in World War II. Later he wrote a book about it, which he called Catch 22. He'd wanted to title it Catch 18 but his agent pointed out to him that there was another book with 18 in the title, so he changed it, and Catch 22 quickly entered the language as a byword for official absurdity. When the book came out he was working as a promotions manager for McCall's magazine. The book became a hit and was made into a film by Mike Nichols. Heller wrote other books, but none made as big a splash as his first. Joseph Heller appears on pages 63 and 143 in A Book of Ages.
It was a hit in Prague.
Mozart appears on pages 7, 10, 13, 17, 104 and 128 in A Book of Ages. He was a child prodigy and died young.
Joseph Heller was born on this day in 1923. He flew sixty missions as a bombardier for the Army Air Corps in World War II. Later he wrote a book about it, which he called Catch 22. He'd wanted to title it Catch 18 but his agent pointed out to him that there was another book with 18 in the title, so he changed it, and Catch 22 quickly entered the language as a byword for official absurdity. When the book came out he was working as a promotions manager for McCall's magazine. The book became a hit and was made into a film by Mike Nichols. Heller wrote other books, but none made as big a splash as his first. Joseph Heller appears on pages 63 and 143 in A Book of Ages.
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