Archives for February 2004

Many thanks to Sarah for directing me to this Denver Post article about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, longtime object of my affection/obsession. Things I learned:

Originally McGee’s first name was to have been Dallas. Then John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and MacDonald didn’t want to have that association. When he was casting about for a new name, fellow writer MacKinlay Kantor suggested that Air Force bases had nice-sounding names, and MacDonald settled on Travis.

Various means were considered to enable readers to distinguish one book from another in the series. Use of numbers was rejected because readers might think they had to read them in sequence. Eventually he and his publisher came up with color, and MacDonald went back and dropped color references into the four manuscripts he already had written.

MacDonald placed McGee across Florida in Fort Lauderdale because he had a hunch the books would catch on and didn’t want his privacy in Sarasota disturbed by gawking McGee enthusiasts.

Gawking TMFTML enthusiasts, on the other hand, can train their binoculars here. And don’t forget this more out-of-the-way gaping spot.

“I hear you laugh at me for being happy in the country, and upon this I have a few words to say. In the first place whether one lives or dies I hold and always have held to be of infinitely less moment than is generally supposed; but if life is the choice then it is common sense to amuse yourself with the best you can find where you happen to be placed. I am not leading precisely the life I should chuse, but that which (all things considered, as well as I could consider them) appeared to be the most eligible. I am resolved therefore to like it and to reconcile myself to it; which is more manly than to feign myself above it, and to send up complaints by the post, of being thrown away, and being desolate and such like trash. I am prepared therefore either way. If the chances of life ever enable me to emerge, I will shew you that I have not been wholly occupied by small and sordid pursuits. If (as the greater probability is) I am come to the end of my career, I give myself quietly up to horticulture, and the annual augmentation of my family. In short, if my lot be to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Holland, September 9, 1809

I left my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 9:15 yesterday morning, and arrived at my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., at 4:15 yesterday afternoon–an eight-hour trip, allowing for the change in time zones. The reason why it takes so long is that Smalltown, the place in southeast Missouri where I grew up and where the rest of my family still lives, isn’t close to any major airports. It’s a two-hour drive south of St. Louis and a two-hour drive north of Memphis. To get there, I take a taxi to LaGuardia, a plane to St. Louis, and a regional shuttle bus to Smalltown. Short of chartering a helicopter, I couldn’t make the trip in much less time than that.

Every time I visit Smalltown, I’m struck all over again by the sheer size of the United States, something that never fails to impress visitors from elsewhere, though Americans take it for granted. We’re not the only big country in the world, but I wonder if we might not be the only one whose citizens commonly travel such long distances by such circuitous routes. Perhaps Canada is like that. A Canadian friend of mine tells me that Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow” sums up her life pretty accurately: “I took a ferry to the highway/Then I drove to a pontoon plane/I took a plane to a taxi/And a taxi to a train/I’ve been traveling so long/How’m I ever going to know my home/When I see it again?” On the other hand, I doubt a resident of downtown St. Petersburg would make his way to Siberia all that often, even if his mother did live there. When my mother was a girl, Americans didn’t take such journeys lightly, and her parents were both born in an age when eight-hour trips were more likely to be made by horse. You can’t get very far on a horse in eight hours. Back then, the world was what you saw outside your window. Now it’s what you see on TV.

I’d never do it again, but I once traveled all the way to Smalltown and back again in a single day to attend my grandmother’s funeral, an experience I wrote about many years ago in a memoir of my small-town youth:

Once upon a time, the children of America stayed close to the nest and ate Sunday dinner with their parents and went to work in the family business. Now they seek their destinies in faraway lands called Chicago and Paducah and Memphis and New York, though they come home as often as they can: for Christmas usually, for funerals always.

I glanced at my watch. My brother would be doing the driving, and he drove nearly as well as my father, so I had nothing to worry about. I squeezed my father’s hand and listened to the preacher. A few hours later, I looked down at the lights of New York through the scratched window of a jet airliner, marveling at the thought that I could eat breakfast in New York and go to bed in New York and, in the middle of the day, help to bury an eighty-four-year-old woman in a cemetery deep in the Missouri wildwood. Perhaps I was not so far from home as I thought. Perhaps I had not traveled so far as I thought.

Perhaps, indeed, I haven’t–and in some ways, Smalltown and New York are growing closer every day. My brother, for example, knows the rumor du jour about John Kerry, not because he heard it on the evening news or read it in the Smalltown Standard-Democrat but because he has a computer and a high-speed connection to the Internet. Nevertheless, Smalltown is still a long way from New York, not just in clock time but by other yardsticks as well. No sooner had I unpacked my bag, for instance, than my sister-in-law was asking me if I’d seen a preview of The Passion of the Christ, and whether I thought it’d be any good. They’re talking about Mel Gibson in Smalltown, and not the way they’re talking about him in New York, either, even though the people here also watch Seinfeld reruns and read blogs. It’s a big country, big enough that there are still plenty of nice places to live that are two hours from the nearest airport, big enough to be infinitely more varied than a lifelong Manhattanite who gets all his news from the New York Times can imagine.

I love that difference, and the vastness that makes it possible. On Sunday afternoon, I climbed into the shuttle bus (a minivan, actually) and headed down I-55 from St. Louis to Smalltown. It’s a beautiful drive, especially north of Ste. Genevieve and most especially in winter, when the leaves have fallen from the trees that cover the rolling hills, leaving behind a narrow but subtle palette of colors, nothing but tan, brown, grey, and dark pine green, all set in a big bowl of blue sky, with an occasional bright billboard to remind you that people live here, too. As I drifted off to sleep just south of Ste. Genevieve, the radio in the van was playing the Eagles; when I woke up again, the hills had flattened out and the radio was playing Dwight Yoakum. That’s how I knew I was close to Smalltown. I always know my home when I see it again.

“One of the things I learned very early is that students always recognize a good teacher. They may be overimpressed by second-raters who only talk a good game, who are witty and entertaining, or who have reputations as scholars, without being particularly good teachers. But I have not come across a single first-rate teacher who was not recognized as such by the students. The first-rate teacher is often not ‘popular’; in fact, popularity has little to do with impact as a teacher. But when students say about a teacher, ‘We are learning a great deal,’ they can be trusted. They know.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

I am now officially ensconced in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I’ve set up my iBook on a card table in the guest bedroom (which used to be my bedroom, back when I wasn’t a guest), and I’m speaking to you by way of a dialup connection so slow that you can hear it creak. As a result, I will not be checking my blogmail until I return to New York on Thursday, so please don’t be offended.

Job One: sleep late. After that, I have quite a few postings bouncing around in my head, and I’ll write them as the spirit moves me. I might even do some work on the Balanchine book. And I think I’ll have a piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, subject as always to the vagaries of newspaper scheduling.

All this and more after I wake up, O.K.?

I see Terry has ambushed me when I wasn’t looking! I like the questions, but I’m going to take my sweet time answering them: I’ll field a question a day over the course of this week, moving from easiest to hardest. A few of you have already written with your own answers; keep them coming and we’ll post a selection of readers’ responses next week.

For the purposes of the first question, “What book have you owned longest?” I’ll only count the books that live with me, not those that still reside in my parents’ house. 99% of the books with me here in Chicago date from my college career or later. Of the handful of older books, the oldest by far is a hardcover copy of Ellen Raskin’s Newberry Medal winner The Westing Game, published in 1978. Twenty-five years–not too shabby. Why, that’s as long as some very accomplished bloggers have been around!

I wonder whether kids are still reading this book. It’s a deeply silly and extremely devious mystery about an elaborate game created by an eccentric millionaire to decide who will inherit his fortune. When I discovered it, I thought I had died and gone to literary heaven.

As much as I adored The Westing Game, there were other books I loved as well, and I’m not sure why it’s the only one of its vintage in Chicago. I can’t remember making a conscious decision to bring it with me, and I haven’t taken it off the shelf in recent memory, until today.

Some runners-up from the high school years: a well-worn paperback copy of Alain-Fournier’s amazing The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes in french); Charles Baxter’s Harmony of the World; the Norton Heart of Darkness, complete with embarrassing marginalia; and, natch, some Raymond Carver.

Many thanks to all of the readers who wrote this weekend with answers to my query about a Simone Weil quotation. Several folks sent this one, which made me fear I had misremembered the force of the remark by a full 180 degrees:

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, full of charm.

The source is an essay called “Morality and Literature,” first published in Cahiers du Sud (January 1944). However, the following quotation, tracked down by one intrepid reader, seems to vindicate my memory without contradicting the above. Here Weil claims that the greatest literature is that which manages to make good interesting, and thus comes closest to a particular kind of realism:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Therefore ‘imaginative literature’ is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art–and only geniuses can do that.

This can be found in an essay called “Evil,” reprinted in The Simone Weil Reader and Gravity and Grace.

There for the seeing

Is all loveliness,

White limbs moving

Light in wantonness.

Gay go the dancers,

I stand and see,

Gaze, till their glances

Steal myself from me.

“Obmittatus studia,” Carmina Burana (trans. Helen Waddell)