Live Fast, Die Young

On September 30, 1955, James Dean died in a head on collision while driving his Porsche Spyder to a race in Salinas, California. He was 24. He'd starred in three films, all made within the previous year, East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant, for which he received two Oscar nominations. James Dean appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Irony and Safire

William Safire, who died the other day, was a master of ironic commentary. Every Sunday I was impressed at the way he was able to turn his column about language and words into a forum on the shortcomings of liberals. So it was a pleasure to include him in my book, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, at age 48, for exposing the corruption in the Carter administration. Few knew corruption as intimately as Safire––he'd worked in the Nixon White House. The entry following the one about Safire is about Paul Newman, who at age 48, discovered his name was on President Nixon's enemies list.

Louis Armstrong speaks his mind

In September 1957 Louis Armstrong broke his long silence on the race issue in an interview to a young reporter for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. He was 56. It came as a shock to most Americans who were used to the trumpeter’s ingratiating smile and comic manner, but he was angry, and had been angry for a long time. The interview came two weeks after black schoolchildren were barred from schools in Little Rock by National Guardsmen. Almost a century since Emancipation, Armstrong was the first black man to stay in Grand Forks’ finest hotel. Louis Armstrong appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Tom and Viv

In September 1932, T. S. Eliot moved out of the London apartment he shared with his wife, Vivien. The poet was 43. They'd been married for almost twenty years, but her mental illness had made her increasingly difficult to live with. She had begun biting visitors. The poet (who was never married to the novelist George Eliot) appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Picking Winners

In September 1945, German scientist Wernher von Braun, architect of the V-2 rocket program which had been blowing large holes in London, surrendered to the Americans instead of the Soviets. Which is why people on the moon speak English today instead of Russian. He was 33 at the time. He was 57 when he watched the American moon landing from mission control. Mr. von Braun appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Epiphanies

One evening in September 1931, C. S. Lewis had one of those late night discussions about Christianity with his usual Oxford chums J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The next day he had an epiphany on his way to the zoo. He was on the back of his brother's motorcycle. Lewis later tells how when he started off for the zoo “I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Lewis was 32 and had always been a skeptic.

Life is full of journeys, long and short, with and without epiphanies. But there are discoveries of one kind or another waiting just outside our door. Even the minor ones are pretty interesting. Not everyone gets to discover the Pacific from a peak in Darien or the moons of Jupiter from a hillside near Florence. Sometimes, like Graham Greene, we come across something ordinary like a reasonably priced meal when that's exactly what we need. There are a lot of discoveries in A Book of Ages. They can happen at any age.

A Wild and Crazy Guy

On September 24, 1977 Steve Martin told a live network television audience that he was a “wild and crazy guy." He may have been wearing an arrow through his head. He was 32. Steve Martin appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Martha Stewart

In September 1965, Martha Stewart quit her modeling career after the birth of her daughter Alexis. She was 24. She would eventually find other work. The homemaking doyenne appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Keats

In one year, between September 1818 and September 1819, John Keats wrote most of the poems that would ensure his immortality, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn.” He was 23 years-old and would live another two years. Keats appears twice in A Book of Ages.

Gandhi

In September 1888, Gandhi sailed from Bombay to England, alone, to study law. He was eighteen years-old and a new father. Gandhi appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Frida Kahlo

On a rainy September day in 1925, Frida Kahlo was riding a Mexico City bus when it collided with a streetcar. She was treated for a broken pelvis, a dislocated shoulder, two broken ribs and shattered bones in her right leg and foot. A series of operations and painful convalescences were to follow. She put aside her plans to attend medical school and began to paint. She was eighteen. Frida Kahlo appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Ian Fleming

In September 1925 Ian Fleming received seven blackballs when his brother Peter put him up for membership in Pop, the exclusive Eton social club. The future author of the James Bond novels was 17. It must have rankled to be found not up to standard, not the right sort. He got his own back via Bond's arrogant perfection.

Fleming's life reads like a good novel. He was a scoundrel, a lowlife among the uppercrust, a borrower of other men's wives. In 1939, his great coup as a spy went awry when he was caught smuggling condoms out of the Soviet Union; his cunning idea was to have them analyzed to learn the state of the Soviet rubber industry. He was 30 and a bit old for a spy, really. In his novels he could fantasize about how a competent spy might operate. He named his hero James Bond after an ornithologist, an expert on the subject of West Indian birds, something Fleming was an expert about too, in a manner of speaking. Ian Fleming appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Paul Meets George

In September 1954, 12 year-old Paul McCartney met 11 year-old George Harrison on a Liverpool bus. A Book of Ages is full of crossed paths and lucky meetings. John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono at a gallery opening when he was 26; Elvis meeting the Beatles when he was 30 (he didn't know their names and couldn't tell them apart). Elvis meeting President Nixon. Che Guevara meeting Castro, Gertrude Stein meeting Alice B. Toklas, Lillian Hellman meeting Dashiell Hammett, J. D. Salinger meeting Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain meeting Sigmund Freud, Freud meeting Jung, Freud meeting Salvador Dali, Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, T. S. Eliot meeting Groucho Marx, Charles Lindbergh meeting Hitler. Sylvia Plath meeting Ted Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she bit his cheek till it bled. Rodgers meeting Hammerstein, Astaire meeting Rogers, Rolls meeting Royce. When partners meet there is an electric spark. It can happen anywhere, at any age.

Judy Garland

In September 1935 Judy Garland had a personal audition with Louis B. Mayer at MGM and was signed to a contract for $100 a week. She was 13, bright-eyed, pudgy, adorable and enormously talented. The talent came paired with a trembling vulnerability, the eyes almost on the verge of tears, the tremble in the voice. She starred in nine movies opposite Mickey Rooney, usually playing the true-hearted best friend, then in 1939 she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; she was 16.

Louis B. Mayer thought her plumpness unattractive and he and other MGM executives urged her to lose weight. She was given pills to accomplish this. She grew thinner but became addicted to the pills. Pills and alcohol made her an unreliable performer on set and she was fired from several pictures during production, she suffered nervous breakdowns and paralyzing episodes of self-doubt, but she remained a galvanizing presence on stage. Audiences sat mesmerized while she performed on that narrow space between perfection and collapse, an apt metaphor for stardom if there ever was one. Judy Garland appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Heart of Darkness

On September 6, 1890, Joseph Conrad took command of a small steamship traveling down the Congo River from Stanley Falls to Leopoldville. He was 32. Twelve years later, the experience formed the germ of his novel Heart Of Darkness.

Jesse James

Today is the birthday of Jesse James, born in 1847 in Clay County, Missouri. When he was 15 he rode with Quantrill's Raiders in a raid on the abolitionist settlement of Lawrence, Kansas, during which one hundred and fifty men, women and children were murdered. Shortly after the Civil War he and his brother Frank joined up with the four Younger brothers to form a gang. They robbed banks, businesses and trains across Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, shooting bank clerks, bystanders, children and horses who got in the way.

In September 1876 they rode north into Minnesota to rob the bank in Northfield, but the townspeople shot back, killing two of the bandits and wounding the rest. The robbers shot the bank clerk dead as they escaped. 1876 is considered the high water mark of the Wild West. That same summer, Wild Bill Hickock was gunned down in Deadwood, South Dakota and George Armstrong Custer died with all of his men at Little Big Horn.

Jesse James was shot to death by one of his criminal associates, Bob Ford, in 1882. He was 34. The Robin Hood image attached to James grew after his death, but there's no evidence he shared any of his loot with the poor or with anyone. Tyrone Power, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt are among the movie idols who have played him in more than twenty five films. Jesse James appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Buried Treasure

On September 4, 1666, diarist Samuel Pepys dug a hole in his back garden to bury his wine and his best cheese in, and hopefully save it from the Great Fire Of London, which was burning closer by the day. He was 33.

Snap

It was on this day in 1888 that George Eastman received a patent for the camera design he called a Kodak. It used film that unspooled like a strip of flypaper. It required chemicals and enlargers and skill and patience to convert the images to paper. Now we snap pictures with our phones. Thousands of them. Most of them we never develop or print at all. We look at them in miniature form on a tiny screen. We phone them to our friends who do the same before throwing them away. I expect most of the photography of our era will last no longer than the cheap ephemeral devices we carry them around in, devices which we replace every few years. I suppose that this is an improvement on the boxes and boxes of printed photos that sit unsorted in closets and under beds. Charles Eastman doesn't appear in A Book of Ages, but photographers Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, Lewis Carroll, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Louis Daguerre, Alberto Korda, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Mathew Brady, Annie Lebowitz and Abraham Zapruder do.

"Earth hasn't anything to show more fair"

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac reminds me that it was 207 years ago today that William Wordsworth composed his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge. Wordsworth appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Unity Mitford

On September 3, 1939, an hour after the declaration of war, attractive 25 year-old British upper-class Hitler-worshipper, Unity Mitford, sat down on a bench in Munich’s Englischer Garden and shot herself twice in the head. She didn’t die from it. She would live out the war in a vague, childlike state at her parents’ country house in Oxfordshire.

The Good War

Seventy years ago today Germany invaded Poland, assuming Britain and France wouldn't care about it any more than they had cared about Czechoslovakia. They did care this time. Neville Chamberlain was soon on his way out and Churchill, that irresponsible war-monger and back-number, was in Number 10 within the year. War would make him the man of the century.

But it's hard to call any war that killed 70 million people a good war. The heroes were heroic, mostly, and the villains were recognizable as monsters. The great novelists and artists of the 20th century set foot in this war. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Ernest Hemingway liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. James Michener wrote some tales about the South Pacific and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical about it. Norman Mailer was a rifleman in that same theater of the war. Graham Greene missed being killed by a German bomb because he was sleeping with his mistress at the time. Evelyn Waugh was an officer so hated by his men that he had to be reassigned for his own protection.

Joseph Heller flew combat missions. So did James Stewart. Afterwards he could no longer play wide eyed innocents. War added a layer of grit and cynicism and suppressed anger to his civilian roles. It was John Wayne, roughly the same age as Stewart, who stayed home to play war heroes on film. Heller's novel distilled war's insanity into a phrase: Catch 22. Vonnegut lived the firebombing of Dresden and wrote a novel around it. Salinger took a bullet out of the war and once everybody was home and safe he put it in the brain of Seymour Glass.

These personalities and their own particular versions of WWII are each included in A Book of Ages, as are Eisenhower and MacArthur and Patton and Roosevelt and Truman and Hirohito and Hitler, the people who made it happen. And Anne Frank, the quiet 14 year-old girl who died at Bergen Belsen.

The Merry Pranksters

In 1963, novelist Ken Kesey’s bungalow in the Bohemian neighborhood of Menlo Park, California, was torn down by developers so he moved to a place deep in the redwoods in nearby La Honda, where he'd heard "marijuana grows like a weed." On September 1, 1963, he formed “The Merry Pranksters.” He was 27. Ken Kesey appears twice in A Book of Ages.