Judging a Book by its Cover

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.

Mozart & Lewis Carroll

Two famous birthdays today.

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

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

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

Evolution and other events

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.

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.

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in America on this day in 1958, three years after its publication in France. The author was 59. The novel is about the relationship between a besotted older man and a young girl. It quickly went to the top of the bestseller list. The book’s success paid for the Nabokovs' move to Switzerland, where the author lived out his life on the top floor of a luxury hotel. Nabokov appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Hard Boiled

Today is the birthday of hard boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler. He was born in Chicago in 1888, but he moved to England as a boy and spent most of his childhood there. He went to the exclusive Dulwich College, where he was a couple of years behind a kid named Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

Chandler spent most of his working life as an oil executive in Los Angeles. In his mid-forties he found himself out of a job, and he turned to writing stories for the pulp magazines. Atmospheric thrillers about smart aleck tough guys suspended midway between the underworld and an often corrupt police department. He was 51 when he published his first novel.

The Big Sleep was narrated by a world-weary but stubbornly romantic detective named Philip Marlowe, who had a knack for annoying people with guns, and described his mishaps in colorful similes. Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in the film version. Chandler also collaborated with film director Billy Wilder on a script of the James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity. It was the first product in an entirely new artform called "film noir." He wrote another screenplay from a Patricia Highsmith novel for director Alfred Hitchcock, titled Strangers on a Train.

Raymond Chandler appears three times in A Book of Ages. My favorite anecdote is about his first meeting with fellow crime novelist Dashiell Hammett at a Black Mask dinner in 1936. Hammett, who was six years younger than Chandler, had written his last novel four years earlier; Chandler's first novel wouldn't be written for another three years. Similar novelists, different career arcs.

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty died on July 23rd, 2001, at age 92. She lived in Jackson, Mississippi most of her life, much of it in the house her father built in 1925. She never married. She appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Adolf Hitler, Celebrity Memoirist

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published on July 1, 1925. The author, a malcontent and former draft dodger, was 36. Hitler appears 11 times in A Book of Ages.