A Book of Ages

Lucky Lindy

2010-05-21T11:21:00.004-05:00

On this day in 1927 Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris, where he was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd. He'd been alone in his plane for two days and hadn't slept in 55 hours. He survived on four sandwiches, two canteens of water and 451 gallons of gasoline. He might have landed anywhere from Portugal to Norway; the $25,000 prize was for crossing the Atlantic and didn't specify a destination. Still a crowd of 100,000 was at Le Bourget to greet him when his plane emerged from low clouds. They lifted him out of the plane like a newborn baby. He became an instant world celebrity, a role he never came to grips with. Fame led to the kidnapping and murder of his young son in 1932. World leaders courted him. In the thirties he became a friend and political ally of the Nazis. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering pinned a medal on him in 1936. Charles Lindbergh appears seven times in A BOOK OF AGES.

Truman's Very Bad Day

2010-04-12T11:12:00.003-05:00

Franklin Roosevelt died suddenly on this day in 1945. He'd been dying for a long time, but nobody wanted to admit it. Losing him was too big a catastrophe to think about. A nondescript man in glasses was quickly sworn in to replace him, but nobody knew much about the guy. He was from somewhere in the Midwest. He wore a panama hat and liked to play the piano. Roosevelt had been president for so long it was hard to remember him not being president. Businessmen hated him, giving him little credit for rescuing the economy. The rich called FDR a traitor to his class. To the working man he was almost God. He was enormously self-confident and reassuring, and he was ubiquitous. People hung his picture in their homes and offices. Everybody knew his voice from the radio. Nobody had ever heard of Harry Truman. When Truman expressed his condolences to Mrs. Roosevelt she said she felt more sorry for him. He was the understudy who wakes up onstage. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to act, to say something so they'd know what he sounded like, wondering how quickly he would fail. He was sixty years-old. Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt each appear five times in A Book of Ages. Eleanor Roosevelt appears three times.

Lee at Appomattox

2010-04-09T10:49:00.004-05:00

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his sword and his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. He was 58, but looks considerably older in the photos we see of him. His beard was white and his physique showed the effects of ill health. Abraham Lincoln had offered him the command of the Union forces in 1861 but he turned him down. He chose to lead the Army of Northern Virginia instead, a romantic and doomed cause, but not a hard choice for him. He performed brilliantly, of course. Prior to the Civil War personal loyalties were to one's home state. It wasn't until afterwards that most people spoke about being Americans. They were Virginians or New Yorkers or Iowans.

Lee was treated generously in defeat, not hung as a traitor as Washington would have had he lost the Revolution. That our better angels prevailed is more surprising considering Lincoln's assassination a week later. Lee went on to be a university president and have riverboats named after him. He died five years later. His last words were "Strike the tent." Or so the newspapers reported. He said that his greatest regret in life was receiving a military education. Robert E. Lee appears four times in A Book of Ages. Grant appears twice, and Lincoln nine times.

Chopin

2010-03-03T16:58:00.001-06:00

Frederic Chopin was born two hundred years ago this week, in the village of Żelazowa Wola. When he was seven months old the family moved to Warsaw, to a house located on the palace grounds which was a much better place for a prodigy to be discovered. His father played the flute and the violin, his mother played the piano. By age six Chopin was playing the piano too and by seven he was performing publicly and being compared to Mozart who was much older, lived in Vienna and had been dead for 26 years. Chopin also composed two polonaises when he was seven, playing them for the amusement of the son of the Russian Archduke who was ruling Poland at the time. (The Archduke, not the son.)

In his teens, while he was staying in the rustic village Szafarnia as a guest of Count Radziwill, Chopin was exposed to the folk melodies that would influence much of his later work, and probably also to the tuberculosis which gave him his intriguing pallor. During this same rural sojourn Chopin learned the characteristic cough of the region, which he took with him when he went to Vienna in 1830. He was twenty years old and an exile. From then on he always carried a small container of Polish soil with him in his luggage. He would never see his homeland again.

When he was 26, Chopin met Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, better known as the novelist George Sand. She'd been wearing men's trousers for the previous five years and was a formidable personality. The meeting took place at the apartment of Franz Lizst's mistress. Chopin disliked her immediately but soon enough the two were living together. Two years later the two of them vacationed á deux in Majorca, but they had a miserable time because the weather was cold and the rented villa was drafty, and Chopin had to put up with a lousy rented piano. Even though he was sick most of the time he still managed to compose 24 Preludes. Preludes to what? One might well ask; it's never really said.

He was plagued by a cough most of his life, which I speculate may just have been his way of trying to get a word in edgewise in conversations, which Ms. Sand tended to dominate. I also believe it was Chopin who introduced the nineteenth century custom of coughing during the quieter passages of classical music, though I have no way of proving this. George Sand broke up with him in 1847 when she suspected him of falling in love with her daughter Solange. Chopin appears five times in A Book of Ages (Harmon 2008/Three Rivers Press 2010); George Sand appears twice.

Judging a Book by its Cover

2010-02-02T16:35:00.002-06:00

When Whitney Cookman was designing the cover of my book in 2007 I showed him several of my dot paintings. He liked this one and used it. It has an apt pointillism; the book is, after all, a 300 page accumulation of pointed anecdotes, unrelated but linked by the accident of being placed next to each other, having taken place in the same year-of-age. What plot the book sustains is invented in the readers mind. The stories are amusing and bite-sized, like the candy the cover art seems to suggest. The paperback edition, published today by Three Rivers Press, has a different cover with a bright orange balloon on it, not painted by me. The balloon is supposed to push the idea that A Book of Ages is a perfect birthday gift, and it is that. Subtlety doesn't usually sell a million copies. But I did like the candy-colored dots.

O'Hara, Mailer

2010-01-31T10:59:00.003-06:00

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

2010-01-28T13:19:00.004-06:00

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

2010-01-27T10:20:00.007-06:00

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

2010-01-17T12:28:00.006-06:00

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

2010-01-15T10:34:00.004-06:00

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"

2010-01-13T00:23:00.001-06:00

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

2010-01-10T13:47:00.003-06:00

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

2010-01-08T11:51:00.004-06:00

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

2010-01-07T16:42:00.004-06:00

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

2010-01-06T09:26:00.004-06:00

(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

2010-01-04T09:56:00.005-06:00

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.)

How Old Were You When?

2009-12-22T12:01:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-21T00:28:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-18T10:01:00.004-06:00

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

2009-12-17T12:31:00.004-06:00

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

2009-12-16T09:41:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-15T10:39:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-14T09:37:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-12T11:37:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-11T10:20:00.001-06:00

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

2009-12-10T10:01:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-09T09:52:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-08T09:54:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-07T09:57:00.010-06:00

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

2009-12-04T10:34:00.003-06:00

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

2009-12-03T09:50:00.002-06:00

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

2009-12-02T09:53:00.005-06:00

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

2009-12-01T19:59:00.004-06:00

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.

Satire and Satirists

2009-11-30T15:51:00.003-06:00

Sometimes it seems as if modern events were written by a satirist, though a satirist might have thought a few public beliefs and behaviors too implausible for print or television. How can you tell if someone is joking? My wife says my lips move. But insane times are difficult for satirists. Good satire needs a solid rational footing to be funny. People need to be sane for something to strike them as funny.

Anyway, Happy Birthday to Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, born on November 30th in 1667 and 1835 respectively. People didn't always know that Swift was joking, for instance when he modestly proposed to end poverty and starvation in Ireland by feeding the children of the poor to the upper classes. People were outraged––but they were perpetrating the same ends by other means, and that was Swift's point. We recall Gulliver's Travels as a whimsical bit of children's literature, which it's not; it's a brilliantly extended piece of satire, wonderfully deadpan and perfectly targeted at follies our "civilization" has yet to outgrow. Swift appears in four fairly cunning anecdotes in A Book of Ages (which, I modestly propose, contains its own ingredient of satire.)

Twain is better known today as a gentle kidder, a grandfatherly teller of jokes, but he really was a merciless scold, an irate crank, a persistent progressive, enemy of the gilded wealthy, and an undying unapologetic atheist. (Imagine that.) If pious parents had any idea what his politics and beliefs were they'd ban his books from children's bookshelves. He was a great celebrity and a huge success, but his own spectacular bankruptcy made him more understanding of failure in others, and a greater respecter of luck as a shaper of human events. He was the opposite of the Horatio Algers and Norman Vincent Peales and the modern day charlatans who preach (for large sums) that all it takes to be rich is hard work and regular church attendance. Twain vivisected that kind of phony philosophy a century ago, but it's still around. Which is why we need satirists today more than ever. Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages.

(Have I reminded anyone lately that it's the perfect Christmas and birthday gift?)

Evolution and other events

2009-11-25T15:07:00.005-06:00

I somehow failed to notice that yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, an event I didn't forget to include in A Book of Ages. What people forget is how scrupulously cautious Darwin was as a revolutionary. He checked and double checked before leaping to a dangerous conclusion. He also remained firmly in the fold of believers. Would this make him a Creationist? Not ideologically, not to fly in the face of science, no. Darwin appears three times in A Book of Ages.

November 24th is also the day Agatha Christie's play "The Mouse Trap" opened in the West End of London. It's still running. I note this event on page 229. Christie was 62.

A Dynamite Idea

2009-11-25T12:42:00.006-06:00

On this day in 1867 armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel patented a new explosive which he called Dynamite. It changed warfare and the craft of bank robbery forever, and gave Alfred Nobel a nickname he disliked. In 1888 he read a premature obituary of himself in the newspaper and was so appalled by what people thought of him that he made a decision. To leave his immense wealth to an organization dedicated to undoing what he'd spent his life at. He was 54. You can call the Nobel Peace Prize a change of heart or a masterful public relations achievement, but one thing's certain: when people hear the name Nobel, the first thing that comes to mind isn't blowing people up. Alfred Nobel appears three times in A Book of Ages. His is only one of many life-changing moments I included in the book.

Laurence Sterne, inventor of the inside joke

2009-11-24T13:03:00.003-06:00

On Laurence Sterne's birthday, it's appropriate to acknowledge his invention of jokes only well-read people would get. Tristram Shandy remains the longest and best inside joke in literature, and maybe the joke is on modern readers who try to discover things in it that aren't there.

I'm curious to know if anyone who's read A Book of Ages has discovered the inside joke I inserted alongside Laurence Sterne. (Write to me if you have.) As with most jokes, it's all about context. Juxtaposition.

Having read Shandy once, I prefer to have it read to me these days. (John Moffat's Naxos reading is wonderful.) It's like rewatching a familiar episode of Seinfeld in which nothing really happens. (Jerry Seinfeld also appears, once, in A Book of Ages.)

Ben Franklin, the ideal dinner guest

2009-11-24T11:19:00.004-06:00

I read in the paper this morning about a new Ben Franklin exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. Who better to spend an hour or two with over Thanksgiving? (Remember it was Franklin who wanted the turkey to be our national emblem, rather than the ill-behaved bald eagle.)

As I was collecting anecdotes and episodes for A Book of Ages, Franklin was the hardest to keep under control: there were so many stories, and so many begged for elaboration. But B. of A. is an ensemble piece. Each story is told at the right length for retelling in one elevator ride. Franklin appears 13 times, the same number as Freud, three fewer than Einstein, one more than Nixon.

At a dinner table ringed with personalities (which is how the book reads) Franklin is the most surprising, the most voluble. The kite is there (did he actually fly it in a thunderstorm?), the illegitimate son, the meeting with Voltaire in Paris (which many consider the high moment of the Enlightenment), his comment about the first manned flight (asked what good it was, he answered "What good is a newborn baby?"), as well as everyday matters of life and age: his retirement fund, his gout. Also his inventions: bifocals, the fire department, etc. Does anyone remember that Franklin was America's first best-selling author? On that score alone he'd have been an interesting person to know.

One item I edited out of the book (I had to edit out some things): it was Ben Franklin who brought rhubarb to America, in 1772.

"Four Score, etc."

2009-11-19T10:01:00.008-06:00

It was on this day in 1863 that Abraham Lincoln stood up to say a few words about the Union and Confederate dead at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Address was around 265 words long (it wouldn't have qualified as a minor essay in one of our children's writing classes), and it only took a couple of minutes to deliver it. The president was preceded on the program by Edward Everett who spoke for over two hours. There is one photograph of Lincoln on the occasion. It shows him getting down from the podium, which suggests that the photographer had barely gotten set up when he realized the speech was over, which is a bit like life itself, isn't it? Two years later, the war was over and Lincoln was dead. Abraham Lincoln appears nine times in A Book of Ages. Edward Everett doesn't appear at all.

Mark Twain

2009-11-18T10:57:00.003-06:00

On this day in 1865, Mark Twain made his first impression on the reading public with the publication of "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press. He was 29. The story was retitled "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and became the title story of his first book in 1867.

Twain was a Midwesterner transplanted to the California gold fields writing for a New York audience, but there was something universal, or at least All-American, in his colloquial humor and his mixture of high and low life. People felt they knew his characters; the lowlifes put on airs and the toffs were phonies, and only the reader and the author were wise.

Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages. When he was 21 he was training to be a riverboat pilot. (An education as rigorous as becoming an airline pilot today, a process he describes in his book Life on the Mississippi). At age 27 he set aside Samuel Clemens and began writing under the famous pen name. He didn't write his masterpiece until he was 49.

At 60 he was a famous novelist––and bankrupt. To recoup his losses he embarked on a world lecture tour. He met Gandhi and Sigmund Freud, visited Rome and the Taj Mahal. He had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. He owned a grand house in Connecticut. But his finances were always tenuous. Success was a fragile thing. This realization fed his cynicism and made him the greatest American writer of his time.

"I am not a crook"

2009-11-17T17:10:00.004-06:00

It was on this day in 1973 that Richard Nixon qualified for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Just five words. Five words everybody knew were not true. "I am not a crook." It happened in Orlando, Florida in front of a few hundred AP editors, which made it hard to retract or clarify. By then he didn't have anybody skilled enough to clarify him out of his situation. He hung on for another ten months. He was 60 years-old.

It's hard to correct the habits of a lifetime. What I remember, watching as a kid from my Republican household, was a kindly, sincere, trustworthy man in a conservative banker's gray or blue suit. His eyes twinkled. He smiled at you right through the television. Behind the facade there was a lot of animal cunning. He was especially good at seeing and exploiting weaknesses in other people. He beat Helen Gahagan Douglas for his Senate seat by suggesting she wore pink underwear. Everybody knew that closet Communists wore pink underwear, but he never offered any eyewitness testimony. He was 37 when he got into the Senate. When he was 30 (the age Hitler was when he grew his famous moustache) Nixon won more than $10,000 off fellow servicemen in the South Pacific. I wonder what that did for morale.

I can still see Nixon's face and hear his voice, coming out of the old Zenith. He seemed so believable, but maybe it was the medium. We believed people we saw on TV. In 1977 the deposed Nixon appeared on TV with David Frost and explained that when a president does something it's not illegal. Nixon appears a dozen times in A Book of Ages. This isn't counting all the times he shows up in other people's stories. Like Kissinger's and Rose Mary Woods', Nixon's loyal, and remarkably elastic, secretary. Nixon's name comes up when Paul Newman finds he's on the president's enemies list, and he comes to mind when William Safire wins a Pulitzer Prize (Safire was a Nixon speechwriter before he became a trusted columnist.)

I'm not changing the subject too much when I mention this. It was on this day in 1970 that Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for his part in the My Lai Massacre. Calley appears twice in A Book of Ages. 102 villagers died in the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 Vietnamese civilians had been killed in similar incidents in that same period. The Courts Martial eventually found Calley guilty of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

The public reaction was mixed. The day after Calley was sentenced President Nixon ordered him transferred from Leavenworth Prison to house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the end he only served 3 1/2 years of his sentence. After his release Calley managed to lead a fairly normal life. He worked in a jewelry store. He got a divorce. In August of this year, he apologized for what he had been a part of. He'd gotten on with his life. What a burden to carry, though. But people didn't stop him on the street. They didn't associate the guy passing them on the sidewalk with something that had happened long ago in a war zone. I suppose the name rang a bell when he wrote a check; maybe he paid cash. The thing is he looked just like everybody else. So did Richard Nixon.

Moby Dick and the life around it

2009-11-14T10:44:00.006-06:00

Moby Dick was published on this day in 1851. It was Herman Melville's sixth book and his most ambitious, but it didn't sell, and the experience nearly destroyed him. Readers wanted roistering sea tales more than deep dish metaphors. Melville's family life suffered. He drank. His wife's relatives urged her to have him put in an asylum. In 1852 the New York Day Book published an article titled "Herman Melville Crazy." Perhaps he was. He continued writing. He wrote an epic poem of 16,000 lines, which also failed. He eventually retired on legacies from dead relatives.

Herman Melville grew up in New York, the third child of a merchant and importer, descended from an old New England family––Melville's grandfather had participated in the Boston Tea Party. But the family fell into poverty when the import firm collapsed. Allan Melvill died bankrupt when Herman was 12, and his widow added an "e" to the end of the family name. Melville went to sea when he was 20. When he was 23 he jumped ship onto an island in the south Pacific, where he lived among the natives for several weeks. No clothes, free love and cannibalism provided material for a book which he called Typee. Despite the title, the manuscript was handwritten. He followed Typee with four other books about the sea, which found a ready audience. But this is the loop often followed by authors: repeated effort finds success and success creates a thirst for deeper significance, a masterpiece is written and published and the author learns that readers only wanted to be amused. They wanted sensation more than meaning. Herman Melville died at age 72, a forgotten author. Moby Dick had only sold a little over 3000 copies. Nobody read it in school. It wouldn't become the great nineteenth century novel until well into the twentieth.

Herman Melville appears three times in A Book of Ages. I have never read Moby Dick, though I admire people who have tried. I put it in a special category among books written to be written about, and maybe that is its problem. I remember reading Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" with a classroom of serious literary types––I could barely keep a straight face. When it comes to downbeat books about Man's Fate I prefer brisker, funnier, more ironic books, like Waugh's "A Handful of Dust", and Voltaire's "Candide". Among the hundreds of allusive fictions set upon the sea––Hemingway's, Jack London's, Joseph Conrad's, Waugh's, Homer's and Virginia Woolf's––I prize the short story by Stephen Crane most, perhaps because it is so brief and simply told. When he was 25 he was shipwrecked and set adrift in an open boat. The story begins "None of them knew the color of the sky." Now there is a description of man's helplessness.

The events of life gather their significance from what is occurring around them, the juxtapositions, tragedy alongside comedy, innocence beside grim experience, goodness prosecuted while villainy proceeds uninterrupted, seriousness (like Melville's) mocked and ignored while frivolousness sells and bad writing makes authors rich. Juxtapositions supply the irony. In A Book of Ages, the entry about Melville's Moby Dick is preceded by Clare Boothe finally letting Henry Luce go "all the way" on a trip to Florida. The next entry is about Carl Jung meeting Sigmund Freud for the first time; they spent thirteen hours talking about word association. Speaking of word association: the title Moby Dick always made adolescent boys laugh in the back of the classroom. I wonder what Melville was thinking. All of the authors cited here appear multiple times in my book. It's as if they are still conversing among themselves.

Veterans' Day

2009-11-11T11:48:00.007-06:00

Ninety one years ago, at 11 minutes and 11 seconds after 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month, the war ended. Sixteen million had died. Twenty one million were wounded. Blinded and maimed veterans would populate city streets for years, selling pencils or pen-wipes or whatever passersby might want. An entire generation was depleted, offices couldn't find the people they needed, women didn't marry. Poets and authors and painters didn't create great works because they died in the trenches.

Some did survive. J. R. R. Tolkien began writing about elves and hobbits while hunkering in a dugout on the Somme. E. E. Cummings wrote The Enormous Room about his experience being imprisoned in France; he'd written about the insanity of the war, and the generals didn't like it.

Ernest Hemingway was wounded on the Italian Front; he was a noncombatant, an ambulance driver. He had over 200 pieces of shrapnel removed from his legs. He was 18. He met and fell in love with a nurse; years later he wrote a book about it. Gertrude Stein called them The Lost Generation, a name that suited them, they were survivors but the battlefield would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

A few days before his 21st birthday, Robert Graves was wounded on the Western Front. His death was reported in the Times. His parents received his belongings. But he wasn't dead. He would survive another 69 years and write more than a hundred books.

War supplies the defining moment in many novels, some written by authors who were there, others, like Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage, written by authors who weren't even born when the conflict took place. Some of the most vivid depictions of heroism are acted out by film stars––John Wayne comes to mind––who stayed home. And then there are combat veterans like James Stewart––who was also too old to be drafted––who avoided war movies, instead playing disappointed men like George Bailey and Elwood P. Dowd. Veterans of World War I wrote America's musical comedies and edited its newspapers, performed surgeries, taught school and invented everyday products, built its cars and designed its skyscrapers. Many of their stories are in A Book of Ages. Whichever era they fought in, war runs like a seam through hundreds of the lives I included in the book, and it reverberates down the years, coloring everything they did.

Stanley and Livingstone

2009-11-10T17:05:00.006-06:00

Victorian newspapers thrilled their readers with tales of explorers finding the sources of tropical rivers, discovering unknown species of birds and lost tribes. Often as not the famous explorers eventually disappeared themselves, which is what happened to African explorer, Dr. David Livingstone. When Henry Morton Stanley set off to find him in the spring of 1871, Livingstone hadn't been heard from for six years. Stanley found him on November 10th, uttering the famous words "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," or so it was reported in the New York Herald. The Herald paid Stanley's expenses and the story sold a lot of papers. Livingstone had survived pneumonia, exhaustion, disorientation, kidnapping, theft and extreme conditions. At one point the natives confined him in a roped enclosure where he begged passersby for food. Though Stanley found him, he couldn't make him leave. Livingstone died in central Africa two years later, of malaria and an advanced case of dysentery. He was 60. Stanley and Livingstone both appear in A Book of Ages, as do Hernando De Soto, Hernan Cortez, Robert Falcon Scott, Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Roald Amundsen who discovered the South Pole and Christopher Robin Milne who discovered the North Pole in a memorable expedition described in one of his father's books.

The High Priest of Self-Centeredness

2009-11-09T10:30:00.003-06:00

There are two new biographies of Ayn Rand on the market. She of the icy glare, the modified Hitler hairdo, the large dollar-sign brooch. Her philosophy behaved more like a religion or a cult, with fierce dogmas and sudden excommunications. But her devotees are legion. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was one of the earliest, sitting at her feet during her living room sermonettes in the early days in New York. And her books have sold millions of copies, mostly, it seems, to disgruntled and arrested adolescents who think nobody understands them.

Rand was traumatized by the Russian Revolution. Her family lost everything when the Bolsheviks took over. Impoverishment at the hands of Russian governments has shaped some of the greatest and most peculiar literature we have, from Conrad to Nabokov (his sister was Ayn Rand's best friend). None, perhaps, as odd as Rand's. Nabokov's peculiarities are well cataloged in A Book of Ages. Had these Rand biographies been published earlier I would have included more about her. She preached holy individualism, and fixated on muscular, dominant males in her novels, yet she kept her husband in a state of servility. He was fully informed about her twice weekly sexual intercourse with her lover and deputy. She made Frank wear a bell on his shoes so she could hear his movements around the house. During the 1970s her Wednesday evenings were devoted to watching Charlie's Angels. Odd doesn't begin to describe her.

The Revolution

2009-11-07T15:59:00.007-06:00

On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the short-lived democratic government that had replaced the Tsarist government, putting in place a ragtag, ruthless, disorganized, incompetent, religiously committed but fanatically irreligious Soviet government that nobody thought would last three months, much less 70 years. It lasted far longer than the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis, who had superior planning and machinery, not to mention far better art direction. In the end it was hard to distinguish the heroic statues promoting the two violently opposed ideologies. The two systems weren't that different in their design and operation. Both kleptocracies, both wonderfully efficient at appropriating property and killing their citizens.

During the Twenties capitalists didn't sleep at night, worrying about the Red Menace, expecting a Revolution to occur here any day. Communism made the Nazis seem far more attractive to people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and the Duke of Windsor, something I note in A Book of Ages. When the Crash came in 1929 Capitalism appeared doomed. For three years, the Hoover administration waited patiently for the economy to revive itself magically, but it didn't. It turned out that money hidden away by plutocrats was no more useful at stimulating an economy than money stolen by Bolsheviks.

Then on November 8th, 1932, FDR was elected president. He quickly betrayed his fellow patricians and rewrote the rulebook. His regulatory system presided over the best half century the US or any nation ever enjoyed. Until Ronald Reagan arrived and put things back to where they were before. But pure, unopposed capitalism is uninteresting on its own. It doesn't galvanize people. Twenty years after its death, Communism remains the energizing philosophy of an important part of the American political spectrum––not the left, but the right. They love it still. It's why they exist, even when it isn't there.

Guy Fawkes

2009-11-05T00:16:00.000-06:00

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England with bonfires and with stuffed effigies that children use to extort money and sweets.

On November 5th 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught leaving a rented cellar adjacent to the Houses of Parliament where a subsequent search discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough explosives to break all the windows within a kilometer's radius and exterminate the Mother of Parliaments and King James I during the State Opening scheduled for that day. The Catholic conspirators also planned to kidnap the royal children. They expected a popular uprising to follow that would restore the kingdom to the Catholic faith. If they had succeeded the King James Bible would, like the breed of spaniels, have been named after James's son Charles instead. Unless, of course, the kidnapping had succeeded as well; in that event, who knows. History is a mare's nest of causes and effects.

James I appears once in A Book of Ages. Charles I also appears once. Fawkes doesn't appear at all, but does feature prominently in the film "V for Vendetta." Some consider Guy Fawkes the patron saint of anarchists and pyromaniacs. What the anarchists couldn't achieve, Parliament achieved, at least partly, by legal means, when they beheaded Charles I in 1649.

Did Not Invent Levis

2009-11-04T13:57:00.003-06:00

I just read the obituary of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who died last Friday in Paris. He was 100. Why didn't I include him in the book? Why indeed.

Although he didn't invent Levis (that was a different Levi Strauss entirely) Claude L-S changed the way we thought about humanity by asking questions that sounded fundamental and were. "Who are we? How did we come to be be in this time and place?" Questions which conjure the same thoughts of simultaneity raised by A Book of Ages. If I ever get asked to publish a French edition I might have greater latitude to include the kind of public intellectual they have in France. Not pundits but thinkers. If Letterman were on TV in France, Claude Levi-Strauss would have been a regular guest.

Walter Cronkite

2009-11-04T09:21:00.002-06:00

Walter Cronkite was born on this day in 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. The family lived in Missouri until he was ten, when they moved to Houston. He was a Boy Scout and went to church. The family changed denominations three times when he was a kid, finally settling on Episcopalian. Young Walter was a member of a youth branch of the Freemasons. He joined things. He joined a theatre group in college; two friends in the company went on to successful film careers. He wrote for the newspaper at the University of Texas, but he dropped out of college in his junior year to become a newsman, and he was a newsman for the rest of his life. He was 20 years old.

Cronkite was more trustworthy than glamorous. One doubts he would be given an anchor chair today, not in any major TV market anyway. Not pretty enough. He didn't have the jawline or the hair for it. He wore a mustache. He exuded affability tempered with seriousness, tolerance (up to a point; no tolerance for bullshit,) sincerity, sympathy, judgment, and what used to be called "sound Midwestern values." Although that term has suffered noticeably in recent years. When he gave his opinion, as he did in his report on the Vietnam War in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, it was a departure from form and done only after careful sifting of evidence and information. He'd been lied to; we all had. As I mentioned in a post just the other day, the Johnson administration had decided to spin the dispatches from the war zone. The president himself had lied us into the war. For a man from Missouri, especially a newsman, this was intolerable. It demanded a reality check, and he delivered one.

Those who downplay Cronkite's plausibility today or call him biased tend to be implausible and biased themselves, many of them tied in with a cable news organization that was created to spin the daily news feed, disguising it as "fair and balanced." Cronkite recognized their product as packaged, adulterated baloney, and said so, but he no longer had an anchor desk to broadcast from. Walter Cronkite appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Snapshots

2009-11-03T10:29:00.002-06:00

Today is the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis in 1903. His father abandoned the family when he was 15, and it was around this time that Walker picked up his first camera. It was a Kodak Brownie. He took it around Toledo, everywhere he went, taking pictures of people unaware, "like a spy" is how he later described it. He spent a year in Paris, thought about being a painter, then settled in New York among the Bohemians. His first published photographs were of the Brooklyn Bridge. They appeared in a 1930 book of poems by Hart Crane. Evans was 27. Most of his photography was of people, though, people sitting on stoops, people working, people sitting on subways who didn't know they were having their picture taken. He took pictures of working men's bedrooms and empty houses.

In 1935 he embarked on a tour of the South, paid for by FDR's Farm Security Administration. Until this time poverty was a private matter, something that wasn't reported in newspapers, wasn't measured, certainly wasn't shown. The photographs appeared in a book accompanied by a text written by James Agee. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men wasn't about famous men at all, but about invisible men––poor men, women and children. Most didn't like having their pictures taken, some were too worn down to protest. Viewers took umbrage, but it brought poverty into the open where people felt obliged to do something about it. For a while anyway. After the Depression was over, poverty went back in the back of the closet. After World War II, Walker Evans spent twenty years taking pictures for Fortune magazine, and he and his wife moved to Connecticut. He appears five times in A Book of Ages.

(Other photographers appear in the book too: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Mathew Brady, Louis Lumiére, Alfred Stieglitz, Alberto Korda, Lewis Carroll, Annie Lebowitz, Abraham Zapruder among them.)

Shaw, Icarus and Keith Richards

2009-11-02T16:11:00.005-06:00

I am reminded by today's Writer's Almanac that George Bernard Shaw died on this day in 1950. He was 94, too old to be climbing trees, but that's what he was doing. Not whimsically or playfully. He died of injuries after falling out of the tree he was pruning.

Which makes me think of Keith Richards who fell out of a palm tree while vacationing in Fiji in 2006. Richards survived, and he continues to defy the actuaries' predictions about his lifespan. Based upon his smoking and drinking and carrying on they had arrived at a life expectancy of 52. He is now pushing 66. I doubt he will rival George Bernard Shaw, though, who was a teetotaler, vegetarian and a bit obsessive about physical fitness. I am sure pruning a tree seemed a sensible thing to do at the time. Mr. Richards and Mr. Shaw appear several times each in A Book of Ages.

Cheerleading and Unwarranted Optimism

2009-11-02T09:52:00.005-06:00

I learned during my random reading this morning that cheerleading was invented 111 years ago today. At the University of Minnesota of all places, which makes me either proud or embarrassed or both. There are no cheerleaders or former cheerleaders in A Book of Ages. George W. Bush's cheerleading career was edited out last fall. W. did have an interesting rollercoaster life, full of cautionary notes and alarming incidents. He might have been an excellent baseball commissioner.

It was on this day in 1967 that Lyndon B. Johnson and his privy counselors decided that Americans should be fed a sugar-coated account of "progress" in the Vietnam War. Cheerleading began almost immediately. The daily briefings began to sound chirpier, more upbeat, like something being written by a chamber of commerce booster or a public relations writer.

The war was a trap Johnson had been caught in. After Truman's experience at the hands of the McCarthyites no Democrat dared step back from a fight, afraid of being labelled "soft on Communism". So in we waded, right up to our necks. Johnson didn't send himself or his wife or daughter to fight and die there, but he did sacrifice his beloved Great Society to avoid losing a war. Vietnam has become a metaphor for avoidable failure and political quagmire, taking the place of the term "albatross" which had been put into service by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1800s.

The unnecessary war is a recurring theme in A Book of Ages, seen through episodes in the lives of LBJ and JFK, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. who got into fights over it, Daniel Ellsberg, and Richard Nixon who sent his plumbers after Ellsberg, and Bob Woodward who told us about the plumbers, and Henry Kissinger who won a Nobel after washing his hands thoroughly, and Walter Cronkite and one Lieutenant Calley. We see Lieutenant Calleys in every war. A sad business all around, but probably no more rife with cockups than any war, except that it was foolish to begin with. Like Iraq, some say. Which should remind us why we need newspapers and clear eyed journalists, even though they are expensive to send places. They are our eyes and ears.

Stephen Crane

2009-11-01T11:21:00.003-06:00

It's Stephen Crane's birthday. He was born in 1871 and died in 1900 at age 28. Several diseases and conditions conspired to kill him, but his life had already worn him to the bone. He went everywhere covering wars and exploring hardships, acquiring yellow fever and malaria and no doubt a level of pessimism that made it harder to survive his illnesses. A Book of Ages began with the details of his short life. I was curious about people who lived to be famous and then died young. He appears in the book four times, writing his masterpiece at age 24, being shipwrecked, marrying a former bordello owner, settling in England, writing his way out of serial poverty––he told a friend he couldn't afford a typewriter. Stephen Crane is the model for every modern writer-adventurer, the reckless youths who travel to dangerous places and eat strange things and write about them for our safe amusement.

Selling a Better Afterlife

2009-10-31T00:01:00.003-05:00

On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther composed a ninety-five point complaint against the Catholic church and nailed it to the door of his church in Wittenberg, Germany. He was especially angry that the church charged people to see holy relics and sold “indulgences” in exchange for fewer years in Purgatory. He was 33 and had no idea what he was unleashing. He considered himself a Catholic till the day he died. Luther appears one time in A Book of Ages.

Halloween is as good a day as any to think about the afterlife. Where can you buy one? Are the specs guaranteed by any reputable rating agency? Why aren't reliable afterlifes available through your bank or insurance agent? (Discuss.)

The Crash

2009-10-29T00:32:00.008-05:00

Eighty years ago this week Wall Street laid an egg. That, at least, was the famous headline in Variety. It began on a Thursday, Black Thursday, October 24th. Thursday was followed by Black Friday. Then Black Monday, when losses set in in earnest. By the time Black Tuesday closed stocks traded on the New York Exchange had lost 17% of their value. And the slide would continue, jigging up and then dropping like a stone into 1931. The lives of millions of Americans changed dramatically. Some knew it immediately. For others the realization would dawn more slowly, like a landscape adjusting to a drought. Even those who survived relatively intact, employed and fed and housed, carried scars from the experience.

Writing this book I developed the habit of looking at people's dates. Looking at anyone's life that began in the few decades before the Crash, rich or poor, famous or not, you can think about 1929 as a pivot point. It's been said that people who purchased stocks in 1929 never saw them recover their value during their lifetime. The Crash, and then the Depression, created several generations characterized by caution and insecurity. But there were still risk takers. Some took chances on new ideas because they had nothing to lose. Ideas were their capital. And ruin was commonplace enough to make failure less stigmatizing. There was less to be cautious with. A generation that had grown up during the Depression was perhaps readier––fatalistically or realistically––to undertake a World War. Perhaps their parents made that war more likely by being afraid to confront it early and boldly.

Great lives have defining moments. FDR arrived at his inauguration prepared to deal with a paralyzing crisis because he had experienced his own in 1921, at age 39, when polio took away the use of his legs. He had the necessary courage and resolution, but it was Eleanor whose eyes and ears told him what was happening on Main Streets and back streets across America. Harry Truman had already experienced the failure of a small business. He'd been there. William F. Buckley Jr. was four years old at the time of the Crash, living in Paris with his family, and had yet to learn English. His family had experienced reverses, mostly because of the revolution in Mexico, though they were hardly paupers. Far from it. Winston Churchill, who visited Wall Street on Black Thursday, lost most of his money and began writing books for a living. He was 55 and considered a failure by most observers. Ninety year-old John D. Rockefeller lost half of his fortune but still had enough left to build Rockefeller Center, found the Museum of Modern Art, restore Colonial Williamsburg and buy enough of Jackson Hole to create a national park. Richard Nixon never forgot being poor and eating ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Lyndon Johnson saw poverty firsthand. He was a 21 year-old school teacher in 1929. F. Scott Fitzgerald's father had lost his business when Scott was a boy. Scott's fiction forever balanced on that razor's edge between euphoria and ruin. In 1929 he was spending much of his income on Zelda's care in private asylums. The Crash informed the films made by Frank Capra and John Ford, the novels written by John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison, the poems of Langston Hughes, the film performances of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, the songs written by Yip Harburg and Johnny Mercer and sung by Billie Holiday, the music composed by Aaron Copland. References to the Great Depression appear at different points in many lives throughout A Book of Ages. It all began during one late October week eighty years ago.

The Satirist's Satirist

2009-10-28T12:31:00.002-05:00

Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903. He was the second son of a prominent London publisher whom he cordially loathed. It was a childhood of mutual disappointment. In true English lower-upper-middle-class fashion Evelyn worked very hard at appearing not to try or to care and unsurprisingly failed at everything. He scorned everything valued by the society he grew up in while secretly coveting it all. He was sent down from Oxford after two years, considered becoming an illustrator, learned fancy cabinet-making, failed as a schoolteacher, attended parties with the Bright Young Things of the time. When he was 24 he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. He turned back after being stung by a jellyfish.

At age 26, on a madcap impulse, he married the daughter of a Lord. She was also named Evelyn, and they became known as She Evelyn and He Evelyn, a matched set of semi-androgynous wits. He was 27 when they divorced. It was a cruel blow to his ego, but by this time he'd become a bestselling novelist, turning his disappointments into fiction.

His style is one of joyful malice, but reading about his life it's hard to tell whether he or the world was guilty of the first cruelty. Was he unloved or unlovable? Judging by his letters and books he seems thoroughly misanthropic, but he was much loved and had many friends. He climbed into the fashionable Country House set he admired but dressed and behaved in an aggressively unfashionable manner, which outraged everyone––but amused them privately. His most successful novel was probably his worst, a soppy, sentimental hymn to a rapidly declining aristocracy. His best novels are his earliest, funniest, bitterest ones, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop. Evelyn Waugh appears six times in A Book of Ages, and could have appeared a half dozen more.

It's worth noting that he passed his gifts along to his children. One son, Auberon, became an even more cynical, amusing, pitiless scold than his father.

Mao Played by a Tenor

2009-10-27T00:03:00.001-05:00

On October 27, 1987, Mao Zedong was played by a tenor wearing a Mao suit in the premier of John Adams’ Nixon In China at the Houston Grand Opera. Mao had been dead for eleven years. Nixon was 74 and still living, but didn't attend, nor did Madame Mao, who was in a Chinese prison for her part in the Cultural Revolution. (The Cultural Revolution, by the way, was not a reenactment of the Italian Renaissance.) The Nixon part was sung by a baritone. My favorite number from the opera is The Chairman Dances. Mao Zedong appears five times in A Book of Ages. Fellow revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ché Guevara, Malcom X, George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robespierre and Jesus of Nazareth also appear several times each.

John and Abigail

2009-10-25T00:38:00.000-05:00

Twenty-eight year-old John Adams married Abigail Smith on October 25, 1764. The lawyer, founding father and second president appears five times in A Book of Ages.

I Get a Kick Out of You

2009-10-24T00:25:00.000-05:00

On October 24, 1937, Cole Porter went for a ride at the Piping Rock Club on Long Island. The horse shied and fell on top of him, crushing both of his legs. While waiting to be rescued he passed the time trying to come up with witty lyrics to the song “At Long Last Love.” He was 46, and would live the remainder of his life in constant pain. Cole Porter appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Arthur Rimbaud: Poet, Arms Dealer

2009-10-22T00:41:00.001-05:00

On October 22, 1885, the former poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother from Ethiopia, telling her he was giving up coffee trading in favor of gun-running. Rimbaud appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Jackie and Ari

2009-10-22T00:37:00.001-05:00

On this day in 1968, Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy. He was 62. She was 38. After five years as the grieving widow of a martyred president she suddenly became Jackie O. Her new husband was rich, magnetic, mysterious, but to a public accustomed to pairing beauty with glamor he seemed strange and a bit creepy. Aristotle Onassis appears six times in A Book of Ages, emigrating penniless from Turkey, working as a dishwasher, smuggling cigarettes and opium, sleeping with Evita Peron and Maria Callas.

George Sand and Frederic Chopin

2009-10-21T10:41:00.000-05:00

In October 1836, Frederic Chopin met George Sand at a party at the Paris apartment of Franz Liszt’s mistress. Chopin was 26, Sand was 32. She was assertive and self-possessed and he took an instant dislike to her. In spite of this they became one of the most famous couples in the history of art and literature. He played the piano and coughed a lot. She wrote sensational novels and wore men's clothes. Having seen the film Impromptu I can't help picturing Hugh Grant and Judy Davis. Grant is prettier, but Davis is more interesting. Together and separately, Chopin and Sand appear seven times in A Book of Ages.

Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up

2009-10-20T11:32:00.000-05:00

On October 20, 1928, Dorothy Parker reviewed "The House at Pooh Corner" in the New Yorker magazine. It was an inspired pairing. A. A. Milne was a cozy writer most famous for light verse about bunnies and honeybees. Parker was the most savage wit of the Algonquin round table, whose remarks were avidly recorded by the New York columnists. Parker's book reviewing byline was Constant Reader. Not surprisingly Parker found Milne's book about stuffed animals painfully twee, and she decided to say so in the appropriate baby voice. When she got to the part where Pooh is feeling "hummy" she announced that "Tonstant Weader fwowed up." But books of this type are immune to sarcasm. Pooh's devotees thought Parker was just being mean. A new book of Pooh stories has just appeared, with a new author channeling Milne's sensibility and a new illustrator imitating the inimitable Shepard. Ms. Parker is no doubt throwing up in her grave. Dorothy Parker appears six times in A Book of Ages, Christopher Robin Milne also appears six times.

Burning the Husband's Erotica

2009-10-19T00:43:00.000-05:00

On October 19, 1890, explorer, Orientalist, and translator of erotica, Richard Francis Burton died in Trieste. He was the first non-Muslim to visit the holy city of Mecca, completing the trek in mufti, speaking the native tongues. Burton also spent years searching for the source of the Nile (it was ultimately discovered by his erstwhile exploring partner, John Hanning Speke) but he died in more mundane circumstances. Hoping to save his reputation, his wife lit a bonfire in the backyard of their house in Mortlake outside London. Among the things she burned were his unpublished translation of the erotic classic The Scented Garden, which he’d been working on for 14 years. She was offered the astounding sum of £6,000 to publish it. Burton was 69. Burton appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Tchaikovsky's Last Symphony

2009-10-16T00:34:00.000-05:00

On October 16th, 1893, Piotr Ilyach Tchaikovsky premiered his Sixth Symphony in St. Petersburg. He was full of plans: trips to Odessa and Moscow, an opera based on a story by George Eliot, or perhaps The Merchant of Venice. The symphony was a great success, but audiences were puzzled by how it ended. One critic sensed a premonition of death in the Adagio. Nine days later the composer was dead of cholera at age 53. Tchaikovsky appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Marie Antoinette

2009-10-16T00:05:00.000-05:00

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined in the center of what is now the Place de la Concorde in Paris. She was 37. During the previous four years in prison her hair had turned white. The charges that led to her death were high treason and illicit sexual practices, but most of the resentment was over how much she spent on jewelry. Marie Antoinette appears twice in A Book of Ages.

Lincoln's Beard

2009-10-15T00:30:00.001-05:00

On October 15, 1860 Abraham Lincoln received a letter from eleven year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, in which she advised him to grow a beard. He did so, and a month later won the Presidency. He was 51. Abraham Lincoln appears eight times in A Book of Ages.

The First Family

2009-10-14T00:46:00.000-05:00

In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 26 year-old lounge pianist Vaughn Meader recorded a comedy album. In those days people used to sit around in apartments, drinking cocktails and eating canapés, listening to comedians on the stereo. Meader called his album The First Family. It featured his dead-on imitation of President Kennedy, speaking in that odd way he had––half Boston sophisticate, half Cape Cod fisherman. The album was a huge hit, selling 200,000 copies in its first week, 7.5 million in 12 months, and winning the Grammy for album of the year. JFK, supposedly, sent a hundred copies as Christmas gifts. Meader appeared on Ed Sullivan. Then, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated, and it was all over. Comedian Lenny Bruce sighed and said “Vaughn Meader is screwed.” Meador lived another 41 years, playing the occasional piano gig in small bars. He never did his JFK bit again. Vaughan Meader appears once in A Book of Ages.

William the Conqueror

2009-10-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

On October 14, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold, the last of the Saxon kings of England, at the Battle of Hastings. The decisive moment comes when William pretended to withdraw his force, luring the Saxons out of their defensive position. At age 38, Duke William became known as William the Conqueror and King of England. He appears once in A Book of Ages.

Nero

2009-10-13T00:37:00.000-05:00

On this day in 54 A.D. Nero was made Emperor of Rome on the death of Claudius. He was 16. According to Tacitus, Claudius was poisoned by Nero’s mother Agrippina. The helpfulness of mothers is a recurring theme in A Book of Ages.

Paul Isn't Dead

2009-10-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Forty years ago this week a rumor raced around the world that Paul McCartney was dead. He was 27. The main evidence, apparently, was the message heard by teenage fans who played Revolution 9 backwards. McCartney had also been photographed walking ominously barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road, and there was that hand of benediction over his head on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. How could anybody doubt it?

The rumor began in September with an article in a student newspaper at Duke University. Then on October 12, a listener called WKNR FM in Detroit, announcing that "Paul is dead", and supplying elaborate evidence, including the phrase "Turn me on, Dead Man" on Revolution 9. Two days later an article spelling out more details appeared at the University of Michigan. On the 21st, an overnight disc jockey discussed it incoherently and at length on WABC in New York. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey hosted an hour-long television program exploring the evidence, but nobody went to the effort to pick up the phone and call McCartney. If Paul wasn't dead, though, the Beatles were. The band had broken up, and Paul verified the fact in an October 24th magazine interview. The interview appeared in LIFE magazine. Paul McCartney appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

(I remember hearing this rumor, just as I remember hearing about the Kennedy assassination and the murders committed by the Manson Family, on the school bus.)

Naked Lunch

2009-10-10T00:18:00.001-05:00

William Burroughs published his seminal work in October 1959, in Paris, where novels of this sort were usually published. Then to be smuggled back into England and the U.S. in the suitcases of graduates of the Sorbonne, and young women who had gone to France to "be finished." I have a feeling, though, that the last of the Beat novelists would have blushed at some of the passages in Updike and Roth. Despite looking as if he'd slept the previous night in a seedy hotel, Burroughs was an heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune. He was 45 when he published Naked Lunch. He traveled everywhere with a notebook in which he recorded the things he was doing, reading and thinking in separate columns. In 1994, when he was 80, he did a TV commercial for Nike. Burroughs appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Chez Panisse and Gourmet Magazine

2009-10-09T00:46:00.000-05:00

Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse entered the public consciousness thirty four years ago after a rave review appeared in the October 1975 issue of Gourmet magazine. Waters was 31. Suddenly everything changed. Foodies began to camp outside the restaurant. People started calling from other time zones asking for a reservation. Alice's restaurant is still there, just a few steps up from a busy commercial strip in Berkeley, but Gourmet magazine is ceasing publication this month after 68 years.

I still remember getting my first illustration assignment from Gourmet, twenty years ago. I called their offices on Lexington in the Upper East Side of New York from a phone booth a few blocks away. It was pouring rain. We had just spent an hour at the Frick. The art director was very nice, but too busy to see my portfolio, but he assigned me a feature illustration over the phone. I think it was a map of a wine region. I was 33, and it was a big deal appearing in such a magazine. That winter, on a trip to San Francisco, we drove over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley and had lunch at Chez Panisse. It was delicious. Alice Waters appears five times in A Book of Ages.

The Death of Che Guevara

2009-10-08T00:20:00.001-05:00

On October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was leading a small group of revolutionaries in a remote valley in Bolivia when he was captured by government forces. As the soldiers moved in he shouted “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead.” He was executed early the next afternoon. He was 39. The CIA agent who had been hunting for him took Guevera’s Rolex for a souvenir. Che Guevara, motorcyclist, physician, revolutionary and t-shirt icon, appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Joe Bananas

2009-10-07T13:36:00.006-05:00

In October 1964, Guiseppe Bonanno, a.k.a. “Joe Bananas”, was allegedly kidnapped by alleged mob rivals Peter and Nino Magaddino, while allegedly walking down Park Avenue in New York City. Bonanno was allegedly released after he agreed to retire from the business he was engaged in. But according to Sam “The Plumber” Decavalcante, none of this ever happened. Mr. Bonanno was 59. He appears five times in A Book of Ages.

I leavened the mixture of sports heroes, rock stars, politicians, film actors, authors and artists with a selection of anti-heroes, rogues, bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde, and a few murderers. It gave the book more flavor. Bonanno finally died of natural causes in Tucson, Arizona at age 97. Clean living and regular habits, I guess. After the boss's death, Joseph "Big Joey" Massino and Richard "Shellackhead" Cantarella immediately started singing to the Feds.

Howl

2009-10-07T10:07:00.003-05:00

Allen Ginsberg was six years-old when his mother was committed to an insane asylum. He was 18 and a student at Columbia when he met Jack Kerouac. He was expelled from the university the next year and joined the Merchant Marine. In 1948 he was back in New York, sitting in his Harlem apartment, when he had a vision of the poet Blake. He described it as “a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise." But writing poetry didn't pay the rent, so he got a job at an advertising agency located in the Empire State Building, where he wrote ads for Ipana toothpaste.

On October 7, 1955 Ginsberg read Howl for the first time to an audience in San Francisco. He was living in North Berkeley then, Kerouac was staying with him. They rode the bus together across the Bay Bridge and then bummed a ride in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Aston Martin to the Six Gallery near Fillmore and Union. Ginsberg was the fifth poet on the program. He began with the famous line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Afterwards, Ginsburg, Kerouac, and a few others went out for Chinese. He was 29 and had finally arrived. Allen Ginsberg appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Lumberjack, Parrot-Fancier, Geographer

2009-10-06T11:13:00.006-05:00

Last week 66 year-old former Python and world traveler Michael Palin became the new president of the Royal Geographical Society, one of those clubbish, leather-armchaired institutions that maintains vague associations with the Royals and underwrites expeditions to save tropical butterflies. The RGS supported the expeditions of Edmund Hillary, Charles Darwin, Robert Falcon Scott, Stanley and Livingstone, and Richard Francis Burton, all of whom appear in A Book of Ages. Most of the Society's past presidents were named Viscount This or Earl That. They were Important People with ancestors and large houses in the shires, the sort of people Monty Python liked to lampoon by wearing balaclava helmets and acting inanely brave or bossy.

Michael Palin appears in A Book of Ages only once, in 1969, at age 26, when he and Terry Jones wrote and performed the famous song about a lumberjack with very secure self-esteem. That year they also collaborated on a sketch about a couple who try to order breakfast in a café but are constantly interrupted by Vikings singing about processed meat. The Spam obsessed Vikings later influenced the naming of the junk mail that relentlessly fills our email inboxes. In 66 years, Michael Palin has become an influential person without losing his charm or his ability to act silly.

A Letter to 84 Charing Cross Road

2009-10-05T00:08:00.001-05:00

Sixty years ago today, on October 5, 1949, Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a bookstore in London. Marks & Co. was located at 84 Charing Cross Road; Miss Hanff was located on East 95th Street in New York City. She'd read their ad in the Saturday Review (a magazine once influential and now dead) and asked if they could send her "clean secondhand copies" of books on a list she enclosed. Hazlitt, Stevenson, Leigh Hunt––she loved books of essays. Also English authors, mostly 19th century. (In the letter she disparages the "grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies" available at Barnes & Noble, which was where NYU students flogged their books.) This initial note began a twenty-year friendship.

Helene Hanff was a 33 year-old writer of radio and television scripts and unproduced stage plays. She never visited Marks & Co. Friends of hers who visited London stopped by the shop and described its details and its people to her; that's the closest she came. By the time she could afford the fare to London the store had closed and her book-dealer correspondent, Frank Doel, had died. Hanff didn't particularly like travel anyway. She traveled through books, and the books traveled to her. Despite her love of cigarettes and martinis, she lived to be 80. Helene Hanff appears once in A Book of Ages, writing that first of many letters. In 1970 the two-way correspondence was collected into a book of its own, which I still reread occasionally. It remains in print.

I remember reading 84 Charing Cross Road when it was first published. I was a 14 year-old book collector, and obtained most of my books not by catalog but by bicycle. I rode the ten or so miles from suburban Minneapolis to Nelson's Book Shop and Oudal's Used and Rare located downtown, bringing the books home in a backpack. Hanff and I had similar tastes, though I preferred Charles Lamb to Hazlitt and Hunt. I still have the books I bought then, the prices I paid remain unerased inside the endpapers. The 1900 Dent edition of The Last Essays of Elia (with illustrations by C. E. Brock) cost $2.

Apollo 11

2009-10-04T12:39:00.000-05:00

On October 4, 1969, former German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun watched the Apollo 11 moon landing with the other NASA scientists on the little TV’s at Mission Control. He was 57. Thirty years earlier he'd been designing rockets for Germany to use in the destruction of London. Wernher von Braun appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Patriotic Gore

2009-10-03T11:43:00.004-05:00

Gore Vidal first enjoyed the public gaze at age three when he became the first child to fly across the United States in a plane. He's enjoyed attention ever since. A preening, arrogant, articulate, intelligent, entertaining scold. A critic of almost everything Americans do or say or think, but a defender of our rights to be as stupid as we are, which makes him the most valuable kind of American: a troublesome patriot. I like Barbara Ehrenreich's line: "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots." He and H. L. Mencken serve as bookends to the American sensibility, one left-wing, the other right, both discontented and contemptuous.

Gore Vidal was born on this day in 1925 in, of all places, West Point, New York. His mother was an actress and New York socialite. His father, a former West Point All-American quarterback, was the academy's first aeronautics instructor when Gore was born, and went on to direct FDR's bureau of air commerce in the Department of Commerce. Which is how the toddler wound up in a plane at such a tender age. At age 11 Gore was flying his own airplane in a Pathé newsreel. He fought in World War II and wrote a novel about it. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (provocative title) was daring enough to suggest that homosexuals were as normal as anybody else, which caused the New York Times to ban reviews of his next five novels. He was 22. He wrote the script for Ben Hur, became friends with Tennessee Williams and the Paul Newmans. In 1960 he ran for Congress––and lost. His most celebrated moment may have been his televised scuffle with William F. Buckley Jr. during ABC's coverage of the the 1968 Democratic Convention.

In the 1970s Vidal said this: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Thus proving he could be very right and very wrong in one paragraph, but always provocative and intelligent. In spite of everything, he always considered himself a conservative. If conservative means preserving what works, for instance a functioning and fair-minded government to serve public needs, then he probably is one, and so am I. Gore Vidal appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Peanuts

2009-10-02T11:34:00.000-05:00

On October 2, 1950 Charles Schulz debuted his new comic strip in seven newspapers. The syndicate paid the 27 year-old cartoonist $90 a month. Peanuts. Schulz appears 13 times in A Book of Ages.

Career Tracks

2009-10-02T09:56:00.006-05:00

Wallace Stevens was born on this day in 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He always wanted to be a writer but then he studied law, as his father urged him to do, and spent his whole working life in the insurance business, eventually becoming an executive for the Hartford. Which is the story of everybody's life. Most of the novelists you read pay their mortgages by teaching. Poets write advertising copy. T. S. Eliot was an editor. Edgar Lee Masters wrote poems while sitting in a courtroom where he was defending a Chicago waitresses' union. For a while in his twenties Allen Ginsberg wrote ads for Ipana toothpaste. We live our lives on separate tracks. Wallace Stevens walked two miles to work every morning and two miles back home, composing his poems along the sidewalks of Hartford. An irreproachable life apart from the incident in Key West when he broke his hand on Ernest Hemingway's jaw. Stevens appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Live Fast, Die Young

2009-09-30T00:06:00.001-05:00

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

2009-09-29T08:49:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-29T00:36:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-28T00:32:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-27T00:28:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-25T00:53:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-24T00:10:00.001-05:00

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

2009-09-23T00:09:00.001-05:00

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

2009-09-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-21T00:08:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-20T00:04:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-19T00:24:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-18T00:08:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-17T09:26:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-06T23:15:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-05T00:03:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-04T23:19:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-04T00:41:00.000-05:00

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.