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.

The Satirist's Satirist

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.

Papa's Birthday

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He learned to fish when he was 3. At age 12 his mother told him her dream was for him to become a concert cellist. At 18 he was serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, and was wounded saving the life of an Italian soldier. While in hospital he fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, but she wouldn't marry him. At age 22 he moved to Paris, and a year later he ran with the bulls at the Feast of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.

It is hard to think of a manly, romantic, heroic, enviable thing that Hemingway didn't do a century earlier (and then write about for large sums of money.) Which is why his life remains a touchstone or a benchmark for our own. He is the reason most of the celebrated watering holes around the world are celebrated by anyone. Men still like to dress like him, grin like him. Tough guys talk like him, even in Paris. When we behave like fools we are doing it in imitation. Hemingway is why literary men feel the need to be amateur boxers. American novelists are still working in his shadow, even though his short stories are arguably his best form. An eighth grader turning in an essay shorter than the requisite 800 words can explain, plausibly, that Hemingway would have written it in fewer than 250.

Hemingway appears 16 times in A Book of Ages.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Today is the birthday of the most influential novelist America has ever produced. Never mind J. D. Salinger and John Updike. Hemingway persuaded Americans to write shorter sentences, but Twitter would have done that eventually. Melville's novel didn't result in a ban on whaling. No, the most influential novelist in American history was a mother of seven from Cincinnati.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher. In 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was 40 years-old. The book went on to sell over a million copies. It was the first American novel to do so. It sold 10,000 copies in the first week, an astonishing thing considering there were no superstores then, no Amazon. In place of the author tour of radio stations and television talk shows, though, there were abolitionist lectures and meetings all across the North, where Uncle Tom's Cabin was talked about and quoted. It supplied the mythic underpinnings to the moral outrage that led to the American Civil War. A decade later, in 1862, there was the famous meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!" It was true.

Harriet Beecher Stowe appears on page 154 in A Book of Ages.

Johnny Depp

Today's the birthday of Johnny Depp. Born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1963, he appears three times in A Book of Ages, beginning at age 15. (Johnny Depp's family moved 30 times by the time he was 15.) Some of his more famous personas also appear: Hunter S. Thompson (7 times) and Keith Richards (4 times.) Celebrity has an interesting way of intersecting.

Marilyn

Today is the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1926, but baptized Norma Jeane Baker. Because of her mother's mental illness, Marilyn's childhood was spent in a series of foster homes. She lived with her mother for the first time, and only briefly, when she was eight years-old, in a house was just of Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

Monroe appears eight times in A Book of Ages, marrying at 16; at 19 dyeing her hair blonde and signing a $125-a-week contract with 20th Century Fox; meeting Truman Capote on the set of Asphalt Jungle at 24; marrying Joe DiMaggio at 27. A photograph she posed for in 1949 helped launch Playboy magazine in 1953. Her film persona was one of dim vulnerability, but she studied at the prestigious Actors Studio. She married brainy left-wing playwright Arthur Miller at a point when he was under fire for his political beliefs, and stood by him, risking being blacklisted herself. Her films show a performer of subtle and fragile complexity, of contradictions. She famously serenaded JFK on his 45th birthday in 1962, and died the same year at age 36.

007

Today's the birthday of Ian Fleming, the author of twelve James Bond novels, born in the posh Mayfair neighborhood of London in 1908. He appears seven times in A Book of Ages. Being blackballed from a social club at Eton, engaging in adultery and espionage (sometimes simultaneously) purchasing a book about the birds of the West Indies by an ornithologist named James Bond, and finally inventing the elaborate and enduring male fantasy which finally made him rich. A suave, companionable but cold-blooded man, Fleming was known to write polite thank-you notes to the husbands he was cuckolding. He died at age 56 of a heart attack, thereby certifying that he had one. He only saw one Bond film: Dr. No. He didn't particularly like the casting of Sean Connery.

Elementary, My Dear Watson

These are words never uttered by Sherlock Holmes, at least not as written by Arthur Conan Doyle. He did say it onstage and Basil Rathbone said it quite a few times onscreen. Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed by more than 70 actors in over 200 films. Two new ones arrive in theaters this summer.

Today is the birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock Holmes. He was born in 1859, grew up in Edinburgh and eventually went to medical school there, studying under a remarkable man named Joseph Bell, who had an uncanny gift for presuming things, knowing where people had been from the mud on their trouser cuffs, the habits of the patients he saw from the condition of their hands. He became the model for the great detective.

Doyle was an unsuccessful optometrist when he wrote A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. He was 28. Holmes made Doyle famous and very prosperous indeed. Even so, the author began to resent his invention, and arranged to have Holmes murdered a half dozen Christmases later. The public was outraged. The public was amused and perplexed when Doyle announced in 1916 that he believed in ghosts. In 1920, the 61 year-old novelist told the readers of the Strand Magazine that he believed in fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle appears on pages 94, 124, 214 and 226 in A Book of Ages.

Because he is much more famous than his creator, Sherlock Holmes appears in the book eight times. The last time we see him is at age 49 when he retires to a farm in Sussex to keep bees.

Atlantic Crossings

On May 20, 1927, at 7:53 in the morning, Charles Lindbergh took off from an airfield on Long Island, New York, headed east. He was alone, except for 450 gallons of gasoline, a Wright Whirlwind J-5C radial engine, coffee and sandwiches. The fabric-covered Spirit of St. Louis had no radio, no navigation equipment and no forward window for him to see where he was going. Lindbergh was 25. The flight to Paris took him 33 1/2 hours. When he arrived at Le Bourget Field he was greeted by a crowd estimated at 150,000 people. He was very tired, but he was suddenly the most famous man in the world and would remain so for many years. Lindbergh appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

May 20th is also the birthday of the actor James Stewart, who played Charles Lindbergh in the film The Spirit of St. Louis. He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart also appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Christopher Columbus died, largely forgotten, on May 20th, 1506. He was 54. He'd crossed the Atlantic in 1492, landing in the Bahamas, but he died still believing he had reached the coast of Asia, unaware or not believing that he had discovered (or actually rediscovered) a new continent. A few months after his death a mapmaker in France named the New World after somebody else. Columbus appears twice in A Book of Ages.

Hope I Die 'fore I Get Old

It's the birthday of Pete Townshend, the lead guitarist of The Who, writer of operas, smasher of guitars, editor of books, born in 1945. He wasn't as handsome as bandmate Roger Daltrey or contemporaries Lennon and McCartney, or as sexually perplexing and magnetic as Mick Jagger. He was simply an angry working bloke with a mean guitar. Still is. Nowadays he is also an important fundraiser for the hard of hearing.

Rock stars are interesting to chronicle because their lives are one long battle against age. Loud Peter Pans who refuse to outgrow tight pants, criminals who write poetry, travel armed with guitars and banned substances.

Townshend broke his first guitar in concert at age 19. It was an accident, but the crowd loved it, so he made it part of the act. On his twentieth birthday, on a train between London and Southampton, he wrote the anthem of his generation, which featured the nihilistic line "Hope I die 'fore I get old."

But he didn't. Keith Moon and John Lennon and others did, becoming permanent youthful icons. At 31, Townshend suffered permanent hearing loss during a concert at Charlton Football Ground. At 35 he nearly died of a drug overdose at the Club For Heroes. At 38 he dissolved The Who and became an employee of the publishers Faber & Faber. Did he become a man of letters? Not really. Eventually he went back out on the road, as all rock stars do. Is that Townshend I sometimes see pitching Time Life Rock 'N Roll collections on late night TV? When you live that long and play that hard it becomes harder to surprise people.

Rock stars are my favorite subcategory in A Book of Ages. Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Lennon and McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are our Keats and Shelley and Byron. Doing outrageous things, but somehow managing to remain poetic, funny, sometimes tragic, always interesting.

No Place Like Home

It's the birthday of L. Frank Baum, born on this day in 1856. His life was a mixture of failure and temporary success, with stretches spent writing plays, newspapering, selling door to door and running a shop, until 1900 when he sat down and wrote a book for children. He was 44. The book was called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

There's an interesting story about the making of the 1939 movie. Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard, Professor Marvel and several other parts, was outfitted with a frock coat purchased from a Hollywood second hand store. During filming he noticed L. Frank Baum's name stitched onto the inside pocket. Baum appears on page 172 in A Book of Ages.

The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, premiered on this date in 1928. Five years earlier, at age 21, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with $40 in his pocket. At 35, in the midst of the Great Depression, he would invest a million and a half dollars to make a feature length cartoon about a young woman living with seven men. Disney appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Restlessness

People change. Authors dress differently and stop eating in the same restaurants after they hit the bestseller lists. Hemingway's second wife was rich and he began wintering in Gstaad instead of Schruns. Ballplayers reach a sweet spot in their careers and decline from there, becoming clubhouse sages and managers and posing in ads for Interwoven socks. Rock stars continue on and on, always wealthy, always attractive, because they sell their souls to the devil. This is why lives are interesting to read. Writing A Book of Ages it was these transformations I jotted down. When did Robert Benchley have his first drink? When did Julia Child discover French cuisine? When did the prophet receive wisdom? When did Ty Cobb invest in Coca Cola and make himself a millionaire?

May 13th is the birthday of the writer Bruce Chatwin, born in 1940 in England's industrial midlands. He was an attractive and ingratiating youth, beginning his working life as a lowly usher at Sotheby's, the auction house. His job was to schlep the artworks around. But he had a magic quality that caught the eye of his upperclass bosses. More importantly he had an eye for good art, a nose for the "genuine article." And he spoke his mind. He rose quickly, becoming one of the directors of the firm, a recognized art expert. Then he quit to become a nomad. He wrote articles about places he visited, and published in top London newspapers. He also became what friends describe as a professional houseguest. Then he wrote a novel, and another, metamorphosing into a bestselling novelist. He was charming and charmed, attractive, enigmatic––and everywhere. Then he contracted a rare disease and died in a matter of months. He described his disease as something he'd picked up in central Asia or Africa, depending on who he was speaking to. But it was AIDS. He died a relatively young 48, a decade and a half older than Byron but rather Byronic. Bruce Chatwin appears on pages 46, 117, 136 and 185 in A Book of Ages.

Beethoven, The Brownings, Seabiscuit

On May 7, 1824, Beethoven conducted the first performance of his Ninth Symphony. The setting: Vienna’s Kartnertor Theater. The orchestra and soloists were told to ignore the composer and instead follow the count of the assistant conductor. Beethoven was, by this time, completely deaf and couldn't hear the orchestra or the applause. Despite the packed house he lost money on the night. Beethoven appears on pages 187 and 211 in A Book of Ages.

Composers Johannes Brahms and Pyotor Ilich Tchaikovsky were both born on this date, Brahms in Germany, in 1833, Tchaikovsky in 1840, in Russia. Tchaikovsky appears in four anecdotes in A Book of Ages.

It's the birthday of Robert Browning, born in 1812, in suburban London. On January 10, 1845, he sent a rather chaste love note to Elizabeth Barrett, beginning one of the great love affairs of the Post Romantic era. He was 32 and ordinary looking. She was 38 and plain. He was energetic and active. She was a semi-invalid, living like a prisoner in her father's house on Wimpole Street. But they were both poets, she, arguably, the better one. They eloped to Italy in the following year, settling in Pisa and then in Florence. They appear five times in A Book of Ages.

The great racehorse, Seabiscuit, died on this date in 1947, of an apparent heart attack, six days short of his fourteenth birthday. His greatest moment came in 1938 when the one-in-four underdog beat War Admiral at Pimlico. Forty million people listened to the two-horse race on the radio. In December of that year he was named one of the top newsmakers of the year, along with FDR and Adolf Hitler. Seabiscuit was a lifelong bachelor. He appears on pages 3, 5, 9 and 30 in A Book of Ages.

Alice in Wonderland

Alice Liddell was born on May 4, 1852, in London where her father was the Dean of Westminster School. Soon afterward the family moved to Christ Church College in Oxford, where Alice became the favorite of a young mathematics tutor who enjoyed riddles and taking pictures of little girls. On July 4, 1862, Charles Dodgson took 10 year-old Alice and her sister for a boat ride on the Thames and told them a story about Alice falling down a rabbit hole.

In 1953, when they were twelve years-old, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang together for the first time in a sixth grade production of Alice in Wonderland at P.S. 164 in Queens, New York. Paul played the White Rabbit. Arthur played the Cheshire Cat. In 1966, when he was 66, Sir John Gielgud played the Mock Turtle in a film version directed by Jonathan Miller.

Alice Liddell appears three times in A Book of Ages, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) eight times, John Gielgud seven times, Paul Simon six times, and Art Garfunkel five.

Crosby

It's the birthday of Bing Crosby, born in 1903 in Spokane, Washington.

Bing was the first hip white man in America. This persona wasn't something invented by the P.R. department at Paramount Studios. Crosby earned his reputation among the jazz players and the side men he played with. He knew as well as the instrumentalists that the essence of Swing was slowing down to let the accompaniment run past. Taking it easy but always getting there on time. Long before Miles Davis invented the pose, Bing was cool.

He was always the dark horse in the Road Pictures he made with Bob Hope. The unflappable one who got the girl. His jokes were effortless, the songs performed as if they were an afterthought, but perfectly. One of the secrets of his relaxed demeanor? Marijuana, a then-legal relaxant Louis Armstrong introduced him to in 1928––when alcohol was verboten. This and other Crosby anecdotes appear on pages 81, 138, 145 and 254 in A Book of Ages.

On May 29, 1942, Bing recorded "White Christmas" in a studio in Hollywood, California. The session lasted 18 minutes, probably because Crosby wanted to get out to the track. The weather outside was seventy degrees under sunny skies. (I consulted the archives of the Los Angeles Weather Bureau to find this out.) He was 39. If he'd wanted to he could have retired on the earnings from this one song, but he didn't. He was relaxed, but not lazy. He died just after finishing a round of golf at age 74. He shot an 85.

The Marriage of Figaro, Catch 22

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered a brand new opera on this date in 1786. It was called The Marriage of Figaro, and the composer had high hopes. For one thing, it was absolutely brilliant. All his operas were. Colorful costumes. There were tunes you could hum. The characters were lovable, if a bit low-life for the fancy Viennese audiences. It closed after only nine performances, and Mozart went back to giving piano lessons.

It was a hit in Prague.

Mozart appears on pages 7, 10, 13, 17, 104 and 128 in A Book of Ages. He was a child prodigy and died young.

Joseph Heller was born on this day in 1923. He flew sixty missions as a bombardier for the Army Air Corps in World War II. Later he wrote a book about it, which he called Catch 22. He'd wanted to title it Catch 18 but his agent pointed out to him that there was another book with 18 in the title, so he changed it, and Catch 22 quickly entered the language as a byword for official absurdity. When the book came out he was working as a promotions manager for McCall's magazine. The book became a hit and was made into a film by Mike Nichols. Heller wrote other books, but none made as big a splash as his first. Joseph Heller appears on pages 63 and 143 in A Book of Ages.

Ellington and Strayhorn

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on this day in 1899, in Washington D.C. Duke began piano lessons at age 7, but preferred baseball. He got his first job selling peanuts at Washington Senators games. He was 28 when he played his first gig at the Cotton Club in Harlem. The engagement lasted three years.

But it wasn't until 1938 that he met his muse and collaborator Billy Strayhorn. Ellington was 39, Strayhorn 17. Ellington called him "my right arm, my left arm... the eyes in the back of my head." Together they wrote such classic numbers as Lotus Blossom, Chelsea Bridge, Satin Doll and the Ellington band's greatest hit, Take the A Train. Ellington appears six times in A Book of Ages.

As interesting as the lives and incidents are the conversations that strike up between the characters in the book when they find themselves in the same chapter. We have Robert Frost, at age 41, publishing his poem The Road Not Taken, and in the next breath Duke Ellington, also 41, recording Take the A Train, the one artist answering the other. I chose these incidents because both the poem and the song were about choices people make. Choices and decisions are a theme in the book. The juxtaposition was serendipity. A lucky chance I didn't catch until I was sorting the entries in that chapter. These small jokes are here and there in the book, like the casual comment someone makes at a party that you didn't realize was funny at the time, and you laugh about it on the way home in the car.

Alice and Julia

Alice Waters was born on this day in 1944. She was 27 when she opened her famous Berkeley California restaurant, Chez Panisse. On that first night they served a set menu: paté en croute followed by duck with olives, salad, and almond tart; $3.95. But they ran out of silverware.

When I'm reading a life story I am always looking for signposts, points along the way where the person chooses this road instead of that one, where they meet someone or learn something that changes their life. When Alice Waters was 19 she transferred from the University of California at Santa Barbara to Berkeley. Would she have become the same person if she hadn't moved to Berkeley? Could Chez Panisse have started a food revolution anywhere else?

Alice Waters was 21 when she visited France for the first time. France, too, has a habit of changing people in profound ways. In A Book of Ages I note the Paris arrivals of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Giacomo Casanova, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, J. D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert M. Parker, Frederic Chopin and Adolf Hitler.

Julia Child was 36 the first time she saw Paris. She'd never cooked before. Up to this point she'd been employed as an American spy. But she would learn to cook in the French manner, and so would we.

Mockingbird

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac has just reminded me that it's also Harper Lee's birthday. She's written only one novel in her life. Luckily that one novel was To Kill a Mockingbird, which is read by every American school kid between 13 and 15. She was also the childhood friend and helpful writing colleague of Truman Capote. Ms. Lee is noted on pages 110, 118 and 123 in A Book of Ages.

Churchill, Trollope, De Kooning

On this day in 1953 Winston Churchill became Sir Winston Churchill when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He was 78. She was 27 and had been Queen for a little over a year.

Churchill dominated his era by force of personality more than talent, although he had that too. He was a dismal student, but wrote his classmates' school essays for them. His reputation as a heroic soldier might have had something to do with the vivid personal accounts he wrote for newspapers and in books. At one point he was the highest paid journalist in the world. (People forget that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 as well as the knighthood.)

Yet he was constantly in debt, hated paying tailor's bills, drank prodigiously, smoked religiously, alternately charmed and insulted his peers, and, until late in his political career, was considered an unreliable hothead, a rogue, a bit of a charlatan, not to be trusted with high office. At age 40, he was fired from his post atop the Admiralty and retired to the country, where he took up painting. All of this came long before May 1940, when he became the hero of the age. Churchill appears on pages 47, 88, 154, 223, 235, 248, 260, 262, 273 and 275 in A Book of Ages.

April 24 is the birthday of the English novelist Anthony Trollope, born in 1815. Methodical, conservative, retiring, discreet, cautious, predictable, but enormously productive. Novels poured from his pen at the constant rate of 250 words every fifteen minutes. He wrote for three hours every day. But he was a spare-time artist. His days were spent behind a desk at the Post Office. In 1855, at age 40 he invented the familiar red pillar-box where the English still deposit their letters. Trollope appears five times in A Book of Ages

It's also the birthday of the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. After arriving in America as a stowaway, he worked for a time painting houses in Hoboken, New Jersey before joining the art community in Manhattan. De Kooning appears four times in A Book of Ages.