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.
Showing posts with label Stephen Crane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Crane. Show all posts
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Veterans' Day
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.
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Stephen Crane
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.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day
I associate Memorial Day with the small town parade of my childhood. Old men in carefully preserved uniforms. Small flags at the cemetery. It wasn't until I'd grown older that I realized what was on the minds of those old men in uniform. They'd grown old while comrades of theirs had not. What would those other lives have been like if events had turned out differently? Roles reversed. It's the kind of speculation the other bystanders are incapable of. They say crisis pulls all of history into a single moment. I wrote my book as a collection of moments, funny, sad, tragic, heroic and commonplace. Many of them take place in wartime, with lives suddenly put in the balance.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
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