Selling a Better Afterlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.