O'Hara, Mailer

Today is the birthday of John O'Hara. Nobody had more stories published in the New Yorker magazine, and no one was better at describing 20th century American life.

He was born in 1905, the son of a Pottsville, Pennsylvania physician. When he was twelve years-old his father offered to pay him $10,000 if he would agree to become a doctor. The boy refused. Instead, when he was 14, he stole his father's Buick. This harum-scarum tendency lasted him all his life. He possessed a devout wish for approval but he was as likely to throw the approval directly back in someone's face. He was social, but volatile, a swell friend but sensitive to slights and prone to grudges. Everybody in New York literary circles had their own O'Hara story. His drunken behavior, his kindnesses, his feuds, his sulks and bragging.

This alternately harsh and tender personality finds vivid expression in his stories. They may be the best picture we have about being alive in America at mid-century. What makes his writing so compelling is the transparency of the style. He is unfussy. Less blunt and mannered than Hemingway. Not elaborate like Faulkner, but detailed in his descriptions of place and time and relationships. Unlike Cheever or Fitzgerald, his sentences don't interpose a lovely style between the reader and the material described. The conversations sound spoken. It is all simply there and happening before you. His novels (except for Appointment in Samarra) tend to be baggy and undistinguished, but his stories deserve a much larger audience. John O'Hara appears five times in A Book of Ages. In 1970, the year he died, he was living in Princeton, New Jersey. He dressed in gentleman's tweeds and drove a Rolls Royce. It was also in this last year that he finally learned to swim. He was 65.

It's also the birthday of Norman Mailer, another writer with a chip on his shoulder, a product of New Jersey and Brooklyn, born in 1923. He wrote his first story when he was ten; it was 35,000 words long. He fought in the Pacific during World War II, and described the experience in his novel The Naked and the Dead. At the age of 44 he was arrested for participating in a march on the Pentagon, protesting the war in Vietnam. He wrote another book about that; The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize. Norman Mailer appears eight times in A Book of Ages.

Salinger and Holden

Word has gone out that J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. The story was broken by his agent, Harold Ober Associates, whose job since the early sixties has been to cash checks and discourage biographers; Salinger has published nothing in recent years. One pictures his house filled with boxes of stories he disliked as soon as he'd written them, unless he burned them to warm the house in the New Hampshire winters.

His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did. Is it the business of an author to be a public personality? Catcher in the Rye inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin, but was Holden Caulfield a self-portrait? Salinger attracted disciples, most of them young. One of them wrote a memoir about her creepy adolescent relationship with the famous novelist. It was a bestseller; but which of them was creepier?

Salinger was once a rebellious teen, but he also also put on a clean shirt and worked as a recreation director on a cruise ship, mustering a phony bonhomie for the prosperous vacationers. He wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, which was scheduled to run in the New Yorker when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, suddenly making his story too trivial to publish.

He joined the army, and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris, and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. Then he came home and wrote "the novel" and nothing was the same for him again. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters. It's all he needed to be. J. D. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Mozart & Lewis Carroll

Two famous birthdays today.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on this day in 1756. When he was three he was playing the harpsichord. At five he was composing. At six he played for the emperor, sat in the empress's lap and met seven year-old Marie Antoinette. When he was eight he played for George III of England. Brilliant, precocious, and a bit odd, but so would you be if you spent your childhood as a performing curiosity. (But the music is sublime.)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January in 1832. He was good at math, and enjoyed devising riddles and stories that turned logic on its head. When he was seventeen he developed a stammer, but he was never as shy or retiring as his subsequent reputation has painted him. He enjoyed the company of children because they laughed at the same things. There's been considerable speculation about these relationships, partly because he never married, but fellows of Oxford colleges in those days could not marry. When he was thirty he took the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church for a row on the Thames, and told them a story about one of them falling down a rabbit hole. Three years later he published it under the name Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll appears eight times in A Book of Ages, Alice Liddell three times, and Mozart six times. (A Book of Ages makes a fun birthday gift.)

Public Intellectuals

Yesterday was Susan Sontag's birthday. The New York intellectual with the pale streak in her hair was born in New York City in 1933, but grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles, graduating from North Hollywood High School at age 15. It's interesting to note when intellectuals become intellectuals, when they self-identify as such. And how do they do it exactly? Does it begin with the black turtleneck? Do they start carrying a copy of Schopenhauer around with them? In 1948, Sontag, then called Susan Rosenblatt, bought her first copy of Partisan Review at a newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard. She was a deep thinker already, but that moment is significant. She was fifteen. When she was 31 she was screen tested by Andy Warhol, and her famous essay "Notes on Camp" appeared. In Partisan Review, of course. When she was 43 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and given two years to live. They were wrong about her ability to survive. She lived another 28 years, writing 19 more books. At her death, her personal library contained fifteen thousand books, arranged by historical period. Susan Sontag appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Today is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the first public intellectual in America and the most famous person of his time. Franklin invented the role of the brainy celebrity, toying with the media of his day, provoking and amusing, pushing Americans towards independence and away from slavery, taking unpopular and untimely stands, inconveniencing people. He drove John Adams nearly mad. He was reckless and calculating. Hard to pin down. He was famously agnostic but he knew how to invoke God to make his adversaries look ridiculous. He was a libertine, an unwed father, a poor parent but full of wise advice on parenting, a wit, a scold, a public-spirited liberal and a famous millionaire. He retired in his early forties, but never really retired. Franklin appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, but the stories about him are so numerous and engaging I could have included him a dozen times more. The thing most appealing about Franklin? He made being old seem glamorous.

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on this day in 1929, in Atlanta. A soft-spoken man, conservatively-dressed in suit and tie, a Baptist minister, a believer in common ground and non-violence, King still managed to upset a lot of people. White people accustomed to the Jim Crow traditions of the South felt threatened by him. Even so, his protests were more like walks than marches. They sang hymns.

Martin preached the part in the Bible about turning the other cheek, about answering violence with gentle but firm persistence, even when the police got out the fire department's water cannons. He didn't believe in giving in though. Gentle firm persistence was met with more violence. J. Edgar Hoover set the FBI onto him to destroy his reputation. King was eventually murdered like others in the civil rights movement had been.

He came to national attention in 1955 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery Alabama bus. King led the bus boycott that followed. He was 26. In 1963 he delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and died in 1968 at the age of 39. Martin Luther King Jr. appears four times in A Book of Ages.

I hear the train a-comin"

On this day in 1968 Johnny Cash performed two concerts at Folsom Prison in California, one at 9:40 AM, the other at 12:40 PM. The album recorded from the two sets was released in May of that year and helped resuscitate the singer's flagging career. He was 35.

Cash wrote "Folsom Prison Blues" in 1955. It's about a man stuck in Folsom Prison for not listening to his mother. (She'd urged him not to play with guns, but he subsequently shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.) Johnny Cash appears three times in A Book of Ages. The most poignant anecdote is about the time he met June Carter. It was love at first sight, but as so often happens in country music, Miss Cash was already married.

Common Sense

By the time he was 38, Thomas Paine had been a tax collector, a schoolteacher, tobacconist, journalist, grocer, a failed inventor, an impoverished immigrant and a multiple bankrupt. On this day in 1776 he became a bestselling author. The book wasn't even a book, really; it was a pamphlet titled Common Sense. But it sold a half million copies, and it persuaded a sufficient number of Americans toward independence that independence was declared that summer. Paine also came up with the name for the new country. No mean accomplishment for someone who began his working life at age 13 making women's underwear. Later in 1776 he published another pamphlet, titled The Crisis, which Washington had read out to the troops at Valley Forge. It begins with the words, "These are the times that try men's souls." Thomas Paine appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Stephen Hawking... and Elvis

There must be something cosmic I could write about these two, but words fail me. It's the 75th birthday of Elvis. It's also the 68th birthday of cosmologist Stephen Hawking. And that's cosmologist, not cosmetologist. I realize scientists are not as famous as pop stars but Hawking comes as close as anyone to being both. Elvis appears nine times in A Book of Ages. Hawking appears twice, beginning with the entry from age 21. It was during his third year at Oxford that he began experiencing clumsiness in his limbs. The doctors were unsure what it was, but thought it would probably kill him within a few years. It did not. The doctors prescribed vitamins, and Hawking began listening to Wagner. (An entirely logical prescription.) He went on to change the way we perceive the universe, but has been has confined to a wheelchair for many years.

Galileo

On this day in 1610 Galileo saw the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time. He was 45. It was the first time anyone had seen the moons of Jupiter, and it's hard to think how anyone Galileo spoke to made sense of what he was describing. The moon, our moon, was a large bright disk in the sky; Jupiter was a pin prick by comparison. Brighter, certainly, than the other stars, but it was hard to imagine moons revolving around something so insignificant.

Galileo was a revolutionary. His telescope made the universe more enormous than anyone knew, larger than we could imagine, in a word: infinite. You might think this would make God infinitely larger as well, something the church would applaud and advertise. But it was mischievous to change the way people thought of the heavens. Faith doesn't know how to handle adjustments. Faith is supposed to be uniform and unchanging. The Vatican was his employer, and they thanked Galileo by freezing his salary. Eventually they stood him up in front of the Inquisition and had him recant what he knew. Galileo appears six times in A Book of Ages.

When you think about it, most of the great revolutionaries haven't been wild-eyed youths but middle aged men and women. People who've lived long enough to recognize that change is a natural part of how the world operates. People like Rosa Parks and Charles Darwin, Ben Franklin and Galileo precipitated revolutions that endured beyond their own time.

A New Year for the Ages

(This essay first appeared in Leite's Culinaria in 2009, where it has been reprised this year.)

Early January has always been a time for rethinking and reinvention. New destinations get mapped out, new partnerships are sealed over lunch. Seed catalogs arrive while the garden is buried under snow. New projects are often dreamed up during the fallow week between Christmas and New Year’s. When nobody is doing business, everyone is planning.

New ventures seem like an especially good topic for this January, with its dramatic sea changes ushered in a year ago. January 2009 saw a new president, a new Congress, a harsh economic winter, and radically shifting circumstances. Our empty larder required all new ingredients. But there’s reason for hope in 2010: As a Chinese philosopher pointed out, crises also present opportunities.

Such opportunities can unfold swiftly, especially when we’re young. On a Christmas ski trip from Paris to Switzerland, Ernest Hemingway lost a suitcase containing all of his early stories; the ones he rewrote (often at tables in Paris cafés) are the ones that made him famous. A lost purse aboard a New York bus changed Carson McCullers’s career plans from concert pianist to author; she was 17. When he was 17, Aristotle Onassis was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Argentina. But not for long. James Beard failed at acting before he turned to cooking for a living. He was 32 when he opened a small catering business in New York in 1935.

Youth is open to new possibilities because everything is possible and nothing is certain. There is so much that has not yet been tried. Robert M. Parker was 20 and spending Christmas in France when he tasted his first glass of wine. Did it make a crucial difference that Alice Waters, when she was 19, transferred from the University of California in Santa Barbara to Berkeley? It was in Berkeley where she opened Chez Panisse in 1971, when she was 27. Often it’s a matter of being at the right place at the right time. When he was 19, film director David Lean had a job serving tea and pastries. The job just happened to be at London’s Gaumont film studio.

New beginnings can happen at any age. Julia McWilliams was well into her thirties before she learned to cook. In 1942 she was living in Washington D.C., in a two-room apartment in the Brighton Hotel, working for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. What cooking she did was managed on a hotplate she kept atop the refrigerator in her living room; being 6′2” made this a bit easier. She met fellow spy Paul Child on the veranda of a tea plantation in Ceylon (a perfect place for spies to meet.) Paul introduced her to some of the better things in life, including proper, interesting food. They married, and in November 1948, Mr. and Mrs. Child arrived in France. Her first visit. Somewhere on the road between Le Havre and Paris she had her first French meal: oysters, sole meunière, salad, cheese, and coffee. France changed her life. Her experience of France changed ours.

Necessity and boredom often provide the spur that launches us in new directions. Martha Stewart quit the modeling business when she became a mother at 24. Home and kitchen were a new field, with a new skill-set, a new area of competence. But it would be another eleven years before she became a food maven at 35. Irma Rombauer was 52, a widow, with grown children, when she took a sheaf of old mimeographed recipes to an inn in Charlevoix, Michigan, and began writing a cookbook. In 1930 there were millions of American women who suddenly needed to cook for themselves, by themselves. (One of Rombauer’s helpful instructions: “Stand facing the stove.”) The Joy of Cooking made Rombauer a household name. Alice B. Toklas published her famous cookbook in 1954, when she was 77. She too had been collecting its recipes all her life. Anna Mary Robinson Moses spent many years raising children, putting up preserves and selling homemade butter and potato chips before she took up painting and became famous at age 78. Her first paintings were shown at the county fair in upstate New York; her raspberry jam won a ribbon, but her art did not.

Food is a key ingredient in many creative endeavors. Proust begins A la recherche de temps perdu with a bite of a madeleine, which unleashes the subsequent thousands of pages. Dickens’s first novel also begins around a table. Truman Capote’s most famous story is about breakfast in a place that doesn’t serve breakfast; his best-loved story is about fruitcake. It is significant that Hemingway titled his last book, A Moveable Feast. One of the most important stories in the Bible involves a bite from an apple. Cezanne’s most sublime paintings are of apples and pears, but apples and pears like no apples and pears we’ve ever eaten, as if the artist needed to reinvent the fruit before setting brush to canvas. You could say that cooking was humankind’s first invention, our first improvement on nature, taking raw ingredients and circumstances and making the best we could of them, something enjoyable and worth living for.

Perhaps it’s a good idea to begin the New Year in the kitchen, trying something new. Experimenting, discussing, tasting, attempting, sharing. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

(These stories and many others appear in A Book of Ages, which is an appetizing read for any year.)

Motorcycle Diaries

On January 4th, 1952, Che Guevara set out from Buenos Aires on his motorcycle, la Poderosa. He was 23 years old, a child of privilege, a medical student, ambitious, inexperienced, more than a bit naive about motorcycle mechanics and life, but his eyes were wide open. The journey took Che and his companion, 29 year-old biochemist Alberto Granado, to Chile, Peru and over the Andes into Amazonia, where they wound up working at a leper colony. Che Guevara appears five times in A Book of Ages, including the crucial meeting with Fidel Castro, being photographed by Alberto Korda, addressing the United Nations and having dinner with the Rockefellers, and finally being captured and executed in a remote area of Bolivia at age 39.

(A Book of Ages makes a perfect birthday gift for intelligent people of any age, whether they are revolutionaries, monarchists or Republicans. A useful book to take on any journey.)