How Old Were You When?

Shirley Temple stopped believing in Santa when her mother took her to see him at a department store and he asked for her autograph. True story. She was six and barely came up to your elbow. You'd never know from her subsequent performances that she'd become a cynical disbeliever, which just shows what a damn good actress she was. It's ironic, though. Hollywood is a dream factory but it makes it harder for us to believe anything. A Book of Ages is full of similar moments of truth. Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Luther, Einstein, Temple. Rebelieving something is very hard. Galileo tried and it didn't work.

Christopher Robin

Christopher Robin Milne received a stuffed donkey for Christmas in 1921. He was one year-old and had already received a stuffed bear for his birthday in August. You know the rest of the story. His clever father wrote a book about Christopher Robin and his toys, and then another. They were bestsellers, which embarrassed the boy no end when he went away to school. (The other boys enjoyed chanting "Hush hush, whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers!")

The books, in their fiftieth printing by now, were read to you when you were small, long before you understood the wit. Then you reread them in college. Trying to recapture the innocence of childhood worked as a temporary respite from first semester finals. Christopher Robin eventually grew up. He was wounded in action in World War II, married, and opened a bookstore in Dorset. He later wrote a book about the difficulties of living a famous childhood. He appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Merry Christmas from Richard Nixon

On this day in 1972 President Nixon announced the Christmas bombing of North Vietnamese cities. Nixon appears 12 times in A Book of Ages. That's not counting the times he appears in other people's anecdotes. I'm thinking of Paul Newman discovering he was on the president's enemies list. Nixon spent Christmas 1972 in Florida with his old friend Bebe Rebozo. At the last moment he uninvited loyal acolyte Henry Kissinger who'd planned to join him. Who is invited to whose Christmas party has always been an interesting mark of favor and popularity. As we look back on Christmases past we remember each year by who we were with and how we celebrated, Christmases spent in a war zone far from home or in a balmy climate with friends or stuck in an airport somewhere. When he was 19 George Washington spent Christmas alone, aboard ship returning from Barbados. J. D. Salinger spent his 25th Christmas in deep snow in the Ardennes, fighting the Battle of the Bulge.

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire

The Simpsons premiered on this day 20 years ago. The first episode, titled "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", was about the family's Christmas being ruined because Homer didn't receive his Christmas bonus. Which is happening a lot this year, unless you work on Wall Street. I see people nodding their heads in recognition. The Simpsons is one of those cultural touchstones that everybody can relate to. Your life is not remotely like theirs, but then again it is. Partly because the program has been running underneath your experiences for the past twenty years, like the commentary track on a DVD. The Simpsons only appear once in A Book of Ages, and only parenthetically, when George Plimpton (age 75) does a guest shot on the program as a corrupt spelling bee judge. Appearances on the cover of Rolling Stone, or on the Tonight Show or in the Doonesbury comic strip are similarly noted in the book.

Holiday Tea Party

It was on this day in 1773 that Paul Revere and his fellow Sons of Liberty dressed up as Indians, boarded a merchant ship and dumped the cargo of tea into Boston Harbor. If you are picturing a delegation of clear-eyed, well-spoken idealists, think again. This was a mob action pure and simple, however legitimate their grievances were. Likely it was some of the same men who precipitated the Boston Massacre. Remember, John Adams defended the British soldiers charged with firing on that crowd––and won the case.

The origins of our Revolution are complex and not always pretty. Resentment of taxation began it, but once Washington's army was in the field, this same resentment of taxation left his soldiers hungry and barefoot through much of the war. During his second term, President Washington himself rode at the head of an army to put down a tax revolt on the frontier. Which places the Father of Our Country squarely on the side of taxing and spending. He was accused of betraying the principles our country was founded upon. Was he? Washington believed in a strong central government, which is why we stress the first word in our country's name. We are the United States, not a loose association of separate principalities. Washington learned from experience that the union meant something, and it also cost something to run.

It's interesting to consider the ages the founders were when they did these things. Paul Revere was 38 when he led that violent mob. (He didn't fit the profile of your average anarchist. He was a businessman.) John Adams was 34 when he defended the British soldiers who fired on a similar mob. Washington was 62 when he put on his old uniform to assert the government's taxing authority. Each of them appears several times in A Book of Ages, at critical moments in their lives.

A Kid in the Choir

Gone with the Wind had its premiere on this day in 1939, at the Leow's Grand Theatre in Atlanta. The theatre front was turned into a plantation mansion for the three-day gala, complete with white pillars. Searchlights filled the sky. Crowds filled the intersection of Peachtree and Pryor. Newsreel cameras caught everything. Clark Gable chatted with the mayor, Vivien Leigh chatted with Margaret Mitchell. And somewhere in the commotion there was a boy's choir with a ten year-old member named Martin Luther King Jr. who probably thought this was the biggest day of his life, the most famous he would ever be. Martin Luther King Jr. appears four times in A Book of Ages. (Margaret Mitchell appears once, and Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh don't appear at all.)

A Story Everybody Read in School

It's Shirley Jackson's birthday today. Born in 1916 in San Francisco, she wrote short stories for the New Yorker and other magazines. One of them made her famous. She was 28 and had recently moved to Vermont with her husband, who taught at Bennington. One morning while she was walking her children to school she thought of a story. By the time she arrived back home it was completed in her head, and she typed it out before the school day was over.

"The Lottery" appeared in the June 26th, 1948 issue of the New Yorker. Her life was never the same again. We all know what the story's about. If you don't I won't ruin it. It became a controversial part of the curriculum in thousands of high school English classes, where it provoked discussions about what human beings are capable of. Arriving as it did, in the aftermath of the war and its atrocities, it made perfect sense, still it floored the comfortable post-war readers who came upon it unawares. It upset their idea of American exceptionalism. "Nothing like that would ever happen in small town America forgodssake." People canceled their subscriptions and wrote angry letters aimed at the author. Many people thought the housewife in the story was going to win a washer-dryer. Imagine their surprise.

I first came across Shirley Jackson in the book catalogs we brought home from junior high. I gave two of her books to my mother for Christmas. "Life Among the Savages" and "Raising Demons" were about Jackson's disordered family life in Vermont. Individual chapters had run in women's magazines. I remember my mom reading them with tears running down her face, laughing. I read them next and they became my guidebook to family life from an adult point of view. She wrote another story I like to read at this time of year: "My Life with R. H. Macy" describes Jackson's short, comical career as a salesperson during the Christmas rush. Shirley Jackson appears one time in A Book of Ages.

Writer's Block

I used to suffer from writer's block. In my twenties I wrote with a bottle of Scotch next to my small, antique Remington, to give me courage. I outgrew that crutch, but remember how it was then: change your mind or make a mistake halfway down a page and the page was ruined. Say what you will about the computer, it has made the exercise easier. The imagination is another thing. Imagination is fickle. So, on Flaubert's birthday, I raise a glass to all those who suffer from creative stoppage. He once said:

"Happy are they who don't doubt themselves and whose pens fly across the page. I myself hesitate, I falter, I become angry and fearful, my drive diminishes as my taste improves, and I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well-proportioned paragraph."

It took Flaubert five years to write Madame Bovary. It took me twenty years to write A Book of Ages. (I am not making literary comparisons.) Writing takes time. Successful writers (many of them owners of large oceanside homes and yachts) have compared it to different varieties of torture. Some of them drank to make it easier and the drinking ruined their lives. All of which makes writing sound like a miserable enterprise. Can I help it that I enjoy it? I avoid writer's block by having a few dozen stories running simultaneously. One of them is bound to work on a given day. Poor Flaubert. He appears twice in A Book of Ages, once writing about Emma Bovary and again in an anecdote about Nabokov, who had his Cornell students memorize Emma Bovary's hair-styles.

Gone with the Windsors

On this day in 1936 Edward VIII became the Duke of Windsor. The abdication came as an enormous shock to an empire that was already in a precarious condition. Royal doings had no real importance here in America, but the reports were very interesting, especially on some phone exchanges in Upper East Side New York and Palm Beach. The idea that a king would give up his throne and his important job of opening grocery stores and accepting keys to cities to marry an American divorcee, actually a double divorcee. It makes you wonder what marital skills the duchess possessed. It's rumored she was a hermaphrodite (unproven) and a bit of a gymnast (not hard to visualize with that hairdo).

The Duke and Duchess were and remain interesting for being trivial, and A Book of Ages includes many of those small, telling details. For instance, the last thing Edward VIII did as king was have his toenails done. I also chronicle the Duke's flirtation with the Nazis, the number of pieces of luggage he took with him on his sudden escape from France in 1940, his card playing habits, his wife's complaints, the couple's various haunts down the years. He defined the role of "has been", which makes him a useful marker in a book about career arcs.

Emily Dickinson

It's Emily Dickinson's birthday. I always picture a pale woman in sateen dress and a tight bun in an upstairs room comparing hope to a thing with feathers. Am I the only one who sees a facial resemblance to David Byrne? Maybe. She spent most of her later years inside her house in Amherst, but she wrote letters and had friendships. When she was 25 her bread won second prize at the county fair, so she did occasionally venture outdoors. Her personality, though, is preserved in the tightly wrought poems; they are her legacy. An agile mind darting around inside a narrow house. Emily Dickinson appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Paradise Lost

Today's John Milton's birthday. Born in 1608, he lived through one monarchy, a revolution, a brief republic, a dictatorship (disguised as a protectorate), then a restoration of monarchy. Being politically active, a political flack in fact, he rose and fell as changes occurred, spending time in favor and then in prison. He was also going blind as surely as Thurber, whose birthday was yesterday. He dictated much of his poetry to assistant Andrew Marvell, who was himself a great poet. Milton wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. For the former landmark in English literature his publisher paid him £10. He also wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (he was unhappily married), which probably means he was no Puritan, despite his allegiances. John Milton appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Thurber

It's James Thurber's 115th birthday, which means I'll have to pick up one of my Thurber collections and find something to read before I go to bed. Or bed might be the best place. There is something reassuring about Thurber, almost soporific. His best material explains why you think and behave the way you do, why everybody is so foolish, and why that foolishness is so utterly predictable and repetitive. We work to a pattern and patterns are endlessly amusing.

Half blind from age seven, he was completely blind by the time the New Yorker assigned an eighteen year-old Truman Capote to help him around, which meant helping him visit his mistress during lunch hours. Blindness made him angry and being angry made him unpleasant, but his writing was always graceful and companionable. The reader was his intimate friend, his accomplice, sharing his grudges and mistakes. The interiorness of his world conjured stories to flesh out what he couldn't see.

He was a two way threat, a writer who also drew. Office-mate E. B. White would rescue his doodles out of the wastebasket and put them in the magazine. They were throw-away drawings, but that was their charm. They were transcribed thoughts.

James Thurber appears six times in A Book of Ages.

A Day That Will Live In Infamy

Leafing through A Book of Ages, you begin to realize how many lives were changed by the events of that one day. Courses changed, careers delayed or created, stories rewritten.

Churchill gained an ally and Hitler an enemy. The war in Europe had transformed Churchill from a back number into the indispensable leader, and December 7th made it likelier he would prevail, because FDR suddenly had the ability to act. FDR became a war president. Douglas MacArthur, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower had a reason to put their boots on. (MacArthur's most recent engagement had been against World War I veterans camped on the Capitol Mall.)

Men at arms were relevant, and thousands of people who never thought of themselves as military men (or women) were put into uniform. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut would write war novels out of the experience. J. D. Salinger's story about a prep school boy named Holden Caulfield was slated to appear in the New Yorker that December. After Pearl Harbor was attacked the editors set it aside for the duration; it suddenly seemed frivolous. Salinger would see action on D-Day and meet Hemingway in Paris, and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The war would send echoes down through his subsequent work, in characters' disrupted lives and sudden suicides in postwar living rooms.

Hemingway had seen World War I as a teenager; now he was too old to fight, but he outfitted his fishing boat to hunt submarines. In 1944 he single-handedly liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. Edward R. Murrow became "Edward R. Murrow" reporting on a war that America was half interested in. That too changed. Walter Cronkite cut his journalistic teeth as a war correspondent, and Martha Gellhorn outran most of her male counterparts to get the big story. Her professional rivalry with Hemingway ended their marriage.

Richard Nixon's war was spent playing cards in the Pacific; he won enough from poker to win a seat in Congress. James Michener would write stories about his own experiences in the Pacific, and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical from them. James Stewart enlisted and rose through the ranks to become a bomber pilot over Germany. John Wayne, a near contemporary, made the decision to stay home and play war heroes in movies. Bandleader Glenn Miller lost his life over the English Channel. On FDR's death Harry Truman was transformed from an obscure figure to the most powerful man in the world, burdened with the decision to deploy the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who marshaled the hundreds of scientists to create that weapon, was dismayed by what he had created. Charles Schulz discovered first-hand how inhuman humanity could be; he would express this cynicism in a comic strip.

The most galvanizing event in American life in the 20th century was triggered by the events of this day 68 years ago on an obscure island in the Pacific. Nobody's life would be the same again.

Cincinnatus

On December 4th, 1783 George Washington made his famous final farewell to the band of brothers, his officers from the revolutionary army. The farewell became famous because Washington carefully organized all of his public relations. But final? Not really.

The event took place over drinks at Fraunces Tavern, around the corner from Wall Street in lower Manhattan. There's a plaque there. There are at most places Washington ate, drank or slept. The walk away from power is probably the most remarkable item in Washington's biography. Instead of using his adoring army to leverage himself in the new republic, he rode home to Mount Vernon, arriving there on Christmas Eve. He wanted to be a farmer again, or so he said, albeit a farmer whose slaves did the work.

For the past few weeks I've been reading Joseph Ellis's biography of Washington, and the man is a fascinating mixture. Honest but calculating. Wise and naive. Modern, yet bound by ancient Classical forms of behavior and honor. He freed a nation of yeoman farmers but had more in common, philosophically, with the landed aristocrats of England. At the same time he was saying goodbye to his loyal officers, he and they were organizing themselves into an elite club to rule the new nation. They called it the Society of the Cincinnati after Cincinnatus, the general who left his farm to fight for the Roman Republic, then returned to the plow after the war was won. The idea had a noble air about it, but it's motives were self-serving. For one thing, the membership wasn't just exclusive but hereditary.

Washington distanced himself from the group after Jefferson and others explained how bad it looked, even though he didn't quite understand the contradiction. How could anything he'd been involved in be dishonest or ignoble? He was always concerned about appearances, his legacy, his sacred reputation. It's why we have the marble statue today. The picture was so carefully composed it's hard to imagine a person underneath it. It's the contradictions that make him seem human today.

We think of the founding fathers (or some do) as the mythic creators of our national religion, fierce enemies of taxation and elitism. But Washington was elite and proud of it. (He envisioned his vast landholdings beyond the Allegheny being farmed by tenants, which was the European model. One scheme involved bringing in German immigrants to work his land as serfs.) He wasn't a Christian along the lines of modern fundamentalists; he was a child of the Enlightenment, speaking of Providence rather than God, a skeptical agnostic at best. He believed in a strong central government, primarily for the purposes of taxation. He'd spent the entire war feuding and fighting with a "no taxes" crowd in the Congress and the state legislatures. He'd won the war in spite of their refusal to fund the enterprise. Once he was pulled back into public life and made president, one of his most significant acts was to send an army to the frontier to put down a tax revolt. If he were our president today he would be the one sending in the black helicopters.

He presents an interesting and complex picture. I'll never look at a dollar bill the same way again. Washington appears 10 times in A Book of Ages.

Peanuts

A Book of Ages is full of touchstones, just as our lives are. If we can't invent our own touchstones, they're provided for us by sit-coms and columnists and comic strips and stand-up comics. They fit neatly into a book like mine. I included as many of them as I could think of. Little annotations explaining our lives to us. Sometimes it's only a deadpan commentary. We didn't get Peanuts in our daily paper; it came in the evening edition, hardly fair. Luckily it's in reruns now, and it's as if my childhood is being explained to me. Though I doubt I was as percipient as Linus. Looking at the photograph of me sitting on the stoop in my snowsuit I may have been about as downbeat as Charlie Brown. Sometimes anyway.

Today's Peanuts strip is a pretty good reprise of my book's take on life. We always figure we could have done better. Charles Schulz appears 14 times in A Book of Ages, getting a dog, having his cartoons rejected by his high school yearbook, having his marriage proposal rejected by a young woman with red hair, starting a comic strip, introducing us to the idea of the football we will never be allowed to kick, explaining why Christmas is sometimes so depressing. So many of his strips were touchstones. I enjoy picturing Schulz as Grand Marshall of the Rose Bowl Parade. An unlikely apotheosis.

Napoleon, Brown, Ford, Fermi, McCarthy, Castro

There are some days when nothing happens, but December 2nd isn't one of them.

On this day in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France. He was 35. France hadn't had an emperor since Charlemagne a thousand years earlier.

On December 2nd, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his violent attack on the military arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He was 59. If you've seen the famous painting of him, he looked a lot like God. The federal troops that captured Brown and retook the arsenal were under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee.

On this day in 1927 Henry Ford replaced the famously reliable Model T with the Model A. Ford was 64 and still innovating. The Model T had been in production for the previous 19 years and came in a variety of colors, all of them black. That was the joke, anyway.

It was on this day in 1942 that Enrico Fermi initiated the first sustained nuclear reaction, the first step toward the production of an atomic weapon. It took place in a secret laboratory under the bleachers of a university football stadium. On the same day the State Department announced the deaths of 2 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Fermi was 41, and a recent immigrant from fascist Italy.

Fifty five years ago today the Senate voted to censure Joe McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." He was 46. He was still in office when he died two years later.

On December 2nd, 1956 Castro, Ché Guevara and 80 other members of his July 26th Movement landed in Cuba to begin their revolution. On December 2nd, 1961, his revolution completed, Castro announced in a nationwide radio address that he was a Marxist. He was 35.

All of these stories, and hundreds of others, appear in A Book of Ages. Monarchs, revolutionaries, soldiers, scientists, authors, painters, inventors, demagogues, tycoons; what they did, and how old they were when they did it.

Woody Allen

On Woody Allen's 74th birthday, it's worth recalling that when he was 18 he got a D in film production at NYU. And subsequently dropped out. He did all right, though. He eventually got a job writing jokes for Sid Caesar, the hottest comedian on TV.

Allen appears nine times in A Book of Ages, including his early discovery of George S. Kaufman (he was much younger than I was when I discovered Kaufman), also his first Bergman film, and other moments of truth. (Bergman, Kaufman and Caesar, both Sid and Julius, also appear in the book.)

I am going to watch my favorite of Allen's films tonight. It's probably not the one you think.