Medical advice from Bertie Wooster

From the opening of Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974):

"Jeeves," I said at the breakfast table, "I've got spots on my chest."

"Indeed, sir?"

"Pink."

"Indeed, sir?"

"I don't like them."

"A very understandable prejudice, sir. Might I enquire if they itch?"

"Sort of."

"I would not advocate scratching them."

"I disagree with you. You have to take a firm line with spots. Remember what the poet said."

"Sir?"

"The poet Ogden Nash. The poem he wrote defending the practice of scratching. Who was Barbara Frietchie, Jeeves?"

"A lady of some prominence in the American war between the states, sir."

"A woman of strong character? One you could rely on?"

"So I have always understood, sir."

"Well, here's what the poet Nash wrote. 'I'm greatly attached to Barbara Frietchie. I'll bet she scratche when she was itchy.' But I shall not be content with scratching. I shall place myself in the hands of a competent doctor."

"A very prudent decision, sir."

There's nothing so comforting after a busy weekend of work than putting oneself in the hands of a competent gentleman's gentleman.

In the beginning

One reason I appreciate blogging is that it mostly relieves you of the stress of writing an opening. While each post is an individual piece of writing, it also has a place in an ongoing conversation; a blogger is allowed to presume that he and his readers are already friends, having been chatting about books for years now, with today's post just another byway in an endlessly digressive, destinationless journey. The problem of openings is thus solved.

Novelists, on the other hand--well, I feel comfortable assuming that it's hard for them not to obsess about that first paragraph. It's the handshake and greeting of someone new at a party--but unlike a meeting in real life, if your new acquaintance doesn't instantly find you engaging, he can just turn his back on you without apology or risk of censure, and you may never get a chance to convince him he got the wrong impression.

In just the past few days, I've read three great openings. Each one is different in tone and substance from the others, but they all succeeded: they made me want to keep going.

The first is from Dan Kennedy's caustic, uncomfortable--but very good--dark comedy American Spirit:

Ten years ago when someone asked Matthew the question, "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" he remained silent and tried to look like he had an answer and was only considering how to phrase it. Inside the head, however, the only answer he could hear was, Those days will eat me alive, and Matthew knew that probably wasn't what you were supposed to say. It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has. But it is hard to find a hint of promise in a calendar found suddenly blank; Monday through Friday wiped clean against one's own wishes or plans, a wide-open grid of Valium-and-Heineken-kissed dead end days with a horizon way past the weeks on the page. Maybe thirty-five now, maybe forty, close enough anyway--in America these days, one's forties seem to start at twenty-five.

What a combination of ominous content and tightly rhythmic prose! The implied whisper I always hear in italic speech--Those days will eat me alive--makes that unvoiced thought shiver with actual fear. And there's no way I wouldn't want to keep reading a writer who can manage the knocking of consonants (and consonance) in "It's ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that's standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has," with its hint of a corporate lingo persisting with bloody-nosed bravado amid failure. Kennedy's book is kin to other recent novels of male failure and degeneration--there are echoes here of Sam Lipsyte and Benjamin Anastas--but Kennedy's attention to his prose, and the compelling way he conveys his protagonist's internal narration, with its mix of startling truth and mediated (and medicated) self-deception, makes it stand out.

The second comes from one of my old standbys, Rex Stout. The problem of opening for a genre novelist, especially one writing about a series character, is on the one hand less acute (because his readers already know his work) but on the other more difficult (because he's written about these characters and similar situations over and over and over again already). In Death of a Doxy (1966), Stout solves the problem by simply throwing readers right in:

I stood and sent my eyes around. It's just routine, when leaving a place where you aren't supposed to be, to consider if and where you have touched things, but that time it went beyond mere routine. I made certain. There were plenty of things in the room--fancy chairs, a marble fireplace without a fire, a de luxe television console, a coffee table in front of a big couch with a collection of magazines, and so forth. Deciding I had touched nothing, I turned and stepped back into the bedroom. Nearly everything there was too soft to take a fingerprint--the wall-to-wall carpet, the pink coverlet on the king-size bed, the upholstered chairs, the pink satin fronts on the three pieces of furniture. I crossed for another look at the body of a woman on the floor a couple of feet from the bed, on its back, with the legs spread out and one arm bent. I hadn't had to touch it to check that it was just a body or to see the big dent in the skull, but was there one chance in a million that I had put fingers on the heavy marble ashtray lying there? The butts and ashes that had been in it were scattered around and it was a good bet that it had made the dent in the skull. I shook my head; I couldn't possibly have been such an ape.

Longtime readers of Nero Wolfe stories will, I think, recognize immediately that there's something off here: we've seen Archie Goodwin at plenty of crime scenes, and in plenty of places where he shouldn't be--but this time the worry feels different, more deep-rooted. So we read on, and we soon learn why . .  .

I'll close with the opening of Alice Thomas Ellis's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987):

I remembered her all my life. For years the image of her had hung in my mind like a portrait in a high room, seldom observed but unchanging. Sometimes, unawares, I would see her again suddenly revealed in the vaulting halls of my head. She was sitting on a grassy bank, leaning forward a little, a cigarette between her fingers, and she was speaking. I could not remember what she was saying, nor even if I had understood her, but I knew that what she was saying must be, in some sense, significant. She wore a cream-coloured cotton frock with large puffed sleeves, sprigged with tiny brown flowers; he stockings were cream-coloured too and on her feet were white, barred shoes. Her hair grew in dry red curls, dark red like rust or winter bracken. She was not at all beautiful, but even with her likeness before me I had always assumed that she must be, since she carried such conviction in her forgotten words and her enduring appearance. Her name was Lili.

This one, I'll admit, comes close to cliche: even a beginning writing student could see the way to create suspense and intrigue with an opening like this. What saves it for me is the imagery ("the vaulting halls of my head," "dark red like rust or winter bracken"), and the fact that the words--the content of the woman, in some sense--have been lost, and what remains is simply the deep understanding of her significance. Ellis's novel is now, thankfully, back in print, available as part of The Summer House Trilogy from Paul Dry Books. I've raved about her quite a bit before, and my enthusiasm is undimmed.

Observing May 12, 1937

Wandering my bookshelves on Saturday, I happened to pull down a volume from the Faber Finds series: a publication from the Mass Observation program in England titled May the 12th. Being as the day itself was May the 12th, I opened it up.



For those of you who don't know, Mass Observation was a program aimed at setting down the character of everyday life in Britain, the ephemeral as much as the important. From 1937 until the early 1950s, a combination of volunteer diarists, paid investigators, and mail surveys built up an archive of British daily life that, years later, can astonish you with its evocative detail. David Kynaston's incomparable histories of postwar Britain draw heavily on Mass Observation reports, and the result is that his books convey the texture of daily life, and the immediacy of individual voices, like few histories.

Because I was supposed to be working--prepping for publicity calls or working on my Donald Westlake book, one or the other--I didn't sit down and read May the 12 from cover to cover. But I did flip through it and note some passages worth sharing, in case you were wondering what was going on in England at this time of the year seventy-six years ago, the day that George VI was crowned at Winchester Cathedral.

The first I'll share comes from a twenty-eight-year-old single woman who worked as a children's nurse and identified herself as a Conservative and a member of the Church of England:

One Wednesday, May 12, 1937, I was awakened at 2.10 a.m. by a newsboy yelling Daily Mail. I crawled out of bed and was quite surprised to see that the Hotel opposite and the streets were alive with all types of people. I admit I thought London had gone crazy and felt annoyed with the world in general. I returned to my bed, determined to sleep. It was impossible, the rush of cars and noise of heavy traffic was deafening. I tried counting sheep but to my horror found I was counting human footsteps. I think I must have dozed off when I was suddenly awakened by a man's voice shouting through the keyhole, "Nurse, it's a quarter to five." It was the cook. That seemed to me the last straw. For a moment I wondered if he had taken leave of his senses, but the steady tramp of feet on the pavement outside brought home to me in a flash that the Great Day had dawned. "At least," I said to myself "I hope their Majesties are also getting up at this unearthly hour." I dressed and after the inevitable cup of tea I went to the nursery.

I think you could probably separate the world meaningfully into those who view the morning cuppa as a pleasure and those who refer to it as "inevitable."

I'll quote two passages from the next observer, identified only as a Platonist. (Seriously!) After opening his notes with, "I noticed with malicious pleasure that the weather was not fine," and assuaging his regret at the lack of rain with hope that the situation might change, he starts to go about his day:

After breakfast I put some hair oil on my head, as a prophylactic against threatening baldness, noting the resemblance between the King and myself in respect of this action. At this time (10 a.m.), when I was in my bedroom, I was a little startled to see a bird (a sparrow, I fancy) beating its wings for a short time (perhaps three seconds) against the window-pane. For a moment I thought it was perhaps imprisoned between the panes of the open window. On going nearer I concluded that it had seen, and was trying to get out, a daddy long legs or some such creature, which was motionless in an approximately upright position (i.e. head near ceiling) against one of the panes. I thought (i) of "nature red in tooth and claw" (ii) that the bird was observing the source of its sustenance, even as the Coronation crowds would be doing, (iii) that the bird's observation of the daddy long legs ought to be included in mass-observation. I noticed also the terrifyingly fragile and almost beautifully exact structure of the insect. (I wondered whether it was technically an insect, and counted six legs on it.) I thought also that it was too transparent for decency. This last thought arose from my squeamishness.

The second passage comes from later in the day:

At about 5:45 an unexpected incident happened to me, to which I recall no parallel in my life. I opened a "printed paper rate" postal communication from the Cambridge Preservation Society. This communication had reached me about three weeks earlier, but, having been extremely busy, and perhaps also not anxious to explore a request for money, I had left it unopened. (The envelope bore the words "Cambridge Preservation Society.") Inside, besides the printed communication from the Cambridge Preservation Society, I found a sealed envelope addressed to a person whom I did not know, and bearing undistributed tamps to the value of 1-1/2d. Rather impulsively, I opened it up, and found inside a document evidently not belonging to the communication from the Preservation Society, and of a suspicious and perhaps illegal nature. In some alarm at my unintentional but still reckless participation in an affair that might possibly lead to legal proceedings, I resolved to send the document to the Secretary of the Cambridge Preservation Society. This, coming at the end of a boring and long-drawn out stretch of work, too me by surprise.

But what was in the envelope? What sort of shady dealings? Money, murder, general mayhem? Alas, Mass Observation will never know!

I'll close with a passage from a 21-year-old woman from a small village in Essex. After spending the day in the village listening to the broadcast of the service, she helped serve the village's free supper and managed some of the details of the public dance. Then she went off on her own adventures:

After this I went to a more sophisticated dance at a nearby town where they had a pageant representing the different colonies in the Empire--then home to bed at 4 a.m.--slightly whistled!

With which we gain a new word for drunkenness, one that even Edmund Wilson's Lexicon of Prohibition knows not. Work be damned, that seems enough achievement for one weekend, no?

John Ford and cultural lenses

Still waylaid by work and such, but I did want to take a moment and share an essay I just read from Film Comment in which Kent Jones takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford. It's not strictly speaking book-related, but I wanted to share it because 1) I'm a Ford fan and 2) this passage encapsulated a particular problem of contemporary American cultural life better than any writing I've come across before:

It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

Can we really afford to keep saying “them” instead of “us?” Is it useful to keep looking back at the past, disowning what we don’t like and attributing it to laughably failed versions of our perfectly enlightened selves?

Jones nails it: despite the fact that we should know better, that we've seen the past products of American culture ourselves and know they're more complicated than that--and that our own era is always more complicated, more two-steps-forward-one-step-back than the surface narrative would suggest, we're still stuck in this very 1960s mode of gawping at history. The past is littered with moral failures; the present is as well. Saying that we've gotten better at recognizing humanity and fighting injustice need not require us to simplify the past nor amplify its flaws.

The only other time I've encountered thinking this cogent about our lingering Boomer cultural mindset, and its insistence on opposition and outsiderism (which necessarily requires insiders and villains) is in a post from New York magazine music critic Nitsuh Abebe a few years back. The post, titled "You Are All Still Boomers: A Sort of Modest Proposal," highlights the degree to which we're still wedded to that worldview:

We often worry about the health of our undergrounds, or worry about the possibility of having one. If we can’t find one, we get sad. People get older and shake their heads about it: where are the vigorous pop-culture insurgencies of yesteryear? It’s just a basic of our rhetoric: if I’m trying to explain to you why one piece of art is better than another, it’s a standard tactic to say, well, this thing represents an underground, a revolution, a next thing. And I don’t want to turn into Thomas Frank here, but this is so rote that it’s long been part of advertising, even, which’ll pitch almost anything as a counterculture alternative. Because advertisers know that’s just how we think.

And there are loads of perfectly good reasons for this — this whole map/narrative is often a workable and effective way of looking at things. I’m not necessarily arguing with it. The thing I find myself dwelling on lately, though, is that it’s also a pretty old way of looking at things. We could trace it backwards through art far enough into history that I wouldn’t know what I was talking about anymore. Wikipedia tells me the first use of the term “avant-garde” to describe the purpose of the artist came in 1825. And there’s the rise of a western-European bourgeoisie, with the image of the artist as anti-bourgeois. And there’s modernism. And then most of all . . .

Well, if you’re American, here’s the part that might depress you: the map/narrative we’re talking about is basically a Baby Boomer thing, isn’t it? Isn’t the use of this map basically an attempt to relive the narrative Boomers brought forward out of the 1960s? Obviously I’m pretending to be a bit naive here, because I think you probably realize this already: the template and narrative for how modern Americans think about counter-culture and social change is insanely influenced by the Boomer experience.

Acknowledging the lens is the first step to actually seeing what it reveals.

I'll close with a (perhaps inevitable?) turn to Mad Men, our culture's most prominent current ongoing engagement with history. Simply put, it is dull when it focuses on the sins of the past--Look, pregnant ladies are smoking! People are homophobic!--and fascinating when it shows us that every life is lived within constraints, and that the individual struggle to escape or come to terms with those limitations is what is interesting. The past may have been less enlightened than the present, but it was no less complicated and multifaceted. As Jones says, it shouldn't be "them" and "us"--it's all us. We'll be the past ourselves soon enough.

A bit of Waugh

As I warned last week, the combination of work and the early stages of assembling The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Miscellany have stolen away any hope of proper blogging this week.  But just now as I was flipping through The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III, I came across a section of their 1963 interview with Evelyn Waugh that seemed worth sharing.

First, when asked if he would like to choose any other historical period to live in, Waugh responds,

The seventeenth century. I think it was the time of the greatest drama and romance. I think I might have been happy in the thirteenth century, too.

I understand the appeal of the eighteenth century--what lover of words could fail to fall for the Age of Johnson? But the seventeenth, with the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War and essentially unending strife? And the thirteenth century? Really? One might almost as well opt for caveman days and fervently hope for a good cave and reasonably strong teeth.

The second part is a moment when Waugh reveals his reliable snobbishness and dyspepsia. After having it pointed out that he had never created a sympathetic working-class character, he replies:

I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or as pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

It's interesting that fifty years later, Waugh's position--that writers address the working class out of self-interest rather than actual interest--can still be found reflected in conservative politics, whose leaders not infrequently reduce any attempts to ameliorate inequality to simple vote buying.

The dyspepsia, however, gives way to enthusiasm quickly--and amusingly--with the next question:

INTERVIEWER

What about Pistol . . . or much later, Moll Flanders and--

WAUGH
Ah, the criminal classes. That's rather different. They have always had a certain fascination.
You can almost see the gleam in his eye as he makes that reply.

What Nero Wolfe was disliking on TV in 1966

As I've noted before, one of the great pleasures of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books is their essential timelessness. Like Wodehouse, Stout found his world--essentially 1930s New York--and stayed there. Both authors make passing acknowledgments of change, but they don't allow external changes to affect their characters or settings in any substantial way.

Which is one reason that I always notice when Archie mentions that Wolfe once in a while watches TV. Wolfe gets a TV pretty early--a real Stout fanatic would have the date at his fingertips, but I'll just say I vaguely remember him having one in a novel from the very early 1950s (and having a remote for it!). But Death of a Doxy (1966) is the first time I've encountered any specifics about what Wolfe actually watches. Archie, having been out all day on a Sunday, thinks it likely that while he was gone Wolfe engaged in

his weekly battle with television. That may occur almost any evening, when he has got disgusted with a book, but usually it's a Sunday afternoon, because that's when TV is supposed to be dressed for company. He turns on one channel after another, getting grimmer and grimmer, until he's completely assured that it is getting worse instead of better, and quits.

What Wolfe fan doesn't immediately want to know what Wolfe was watching on that Sunday in January or February of 1966?

I turned to my old friend Jim Ellwanger, whose knowledge of TV is encyclopedic. Within hours, he'd replied in great, fascinating (to this fan of Wolfe and TV history) detail:

My first thought is that my father turned 17 in February 1966, and being in New Jersey, he got the same TV channels Nero Wolfe did in Manhattan -- and probably had the same opinion about them.

Anyway, I actually have a TV Guide from the time period in question, the January 29, 1966, issue.



It's not the New York City edition, it's the Western New York State edition. Still, I can tell you exactly what network shows aired (and it's a pretty safe bet that they all aired on the owned-and-operated stations in New York):

12:30 (CBS) Face the Nation: "Scheduled: Secretary of the Treasury Henry H. Fowler is interviewed in Washington by CBS News correspondents Martin Agronsky and David Schoumacher; and Edwin L. Dale, Washington Bureau, New York Times. (Live)"

1:00 (NBC) Meet the Press: "(COLOR)" [unfortunately, no further details in this TV Guide]

1:30 (ABC) Issues and Answers: "Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon is interviewed in New York City by White House correspondent William H. Lawrence." [This is the predecessor to what's now "This Week."]

2:00 (ABC) NBA Basketball: "The Cincinnati Royals meet the Hawks at Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis. Chris Schenkel and Bob Cousy report. (Live)"

2:30 (CBS) CBS Sports Spectacular: "Scheduled: hunting and bowling. The finals of the $100,000 National Individual Match Game Bowling Championships are telecast live from Lansing, Mich. Also: Hunting authority Lee Wulff narrates films of turkey and quail shooting in Georgia. (Live and tape; 90 min.)"

4:00 (NBC) NBC Sports in Action: "Scheduled: lumberjacking and the Wengen International Ski Races. The ski races started Jan. 11 near Wengen, Switzerland. The World Lumberjack Championships were held last fall at Hayward, Wis. (60 min.)"

4:00 (ABC) The American Sportsman: "(COLOR) Actor Fess Parker joins guide Fred Bear to track down a Canadian grizzly in Northwestern British Columbia. Off Islamorada, Fla., fishing expert Joe Brooks goes after tarpon. Also: a comic underwater look at an Australian grouper (sea bass) that can't decide whether to swallow an attractive but somewhat suspicious piece of bait. (60 min.)"

4:30 (CBS) Ages of Man: "(SPECIAL) Sir John Gielgud reads from the works of Shakespeare in the conclusion of this adaptation of his one-man Broadway show. (60 min.) 'Mister Ed' is pre-empted." [In this, its final season, the regular time slot for "Mister Ed" was Sundays at 5:00 -- its last first-run episode aired 2/6/66.]

5:00 (NBC) Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom: "(COLOR) 'Chacma Country,' second of a two-part study of the chacma baboon. In Southern Africa's Victoria Falls region, host Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler follow the baboons on a search for water and food."

5:30 (NBC) G.E. College Bowl: "(COLOR) The University of Tulsa (Okla.) vs. Newcomb College, New Orleans. Moderator: Robert Earle. (Live)"

5:30 (CBS) Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour: "Ted Mack introduces tenor Victor LaTorre; the Dukes, vocal-instrumental group; Elyse's Twirlettes, baton twirlers; singer Ronald Henry; tap dancer LaVerne Huselton; the Fraine Brothers, vocal group; ventriloquist Cassie Booker; and singer Linda Powell."



In addition to Nero Wolfe's network stations (2/WCBS, 4/WNBC, and 7/WABC), he also had three independent stations (5/WNEW, 9/WOR, and 11/WPIX) and an educational station (13/WNDT), and, if he could get UHF, he also had a second educational/public-interest station (31/WNYC). The latter two may not have been on the air for all of Sunday afternoon; the one educational station in Western New York, 17/WNED in Buffalo, didn't sign on until 4:00 P.M., and its programming looked like this:

4:00 Antiques: "George Michael shows a collection of antique bottles, and describes their origins and uses."

4:30 French Chef: "Julia Child shows how to prepare Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) cake."

5:00 Open Mind: "'What Kind of Preschool Education for Your Child?' A discussion of the relative merits of the progressive, public and Montessori methods of early education. (60 min.)"

As for the programming that aired on the independent stations, as well as on the network stations in between network programming, there were a couple of syndicated series and specials that were on multiple stations in Western New York:

The Flying Fisherman: "(COLOR) Gadabout fishes for bass at Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee."

Ski Championships: "(SPECIAL) In the first of three televised meets sponsored by the newly formed National Professional Ski League, skiers compete individually and as members of three-man teams. Entrants in today's races, taped Jan. 26-27 at Stratton, Vt., are Olympic gold medalists Stein Eriksen (Norway), Pepi Gramshammer (Austria), Christian Pravda (Switzerland), and Hias Leitner (Germany). (60 min.)"

Other than that were the movies. Some of the titles that aired in Western New York on this particular Sunday:

The Ghost Goes West (1936)
Elephant Boy (1937)
Ma and Pa Kettle (1949)
The Son of Hercules in the Land of Darkness (1964)
Reap the Wild Wind (1942)
Drum Beat (1954)
Damn Yankees (1958)

As they say: education isn't so much about knowing the answer to a question, as knowing where to get the answer. Jim, that's where.

The fate of Samuel Holt

In between bouts of research for my forthcoming Donald Westlake nonfiction collection last weekend, I also read one of the forty or so Westlake novels I'd not yet gotten to, Sacred Monster (1989). It's far from his best: a story of a self-involved movie star whose only mode of existence is playing a part, but no Westlake book I've encountered yet is worthless, and this one has its moments.

The bit that amused me most, however, comes in an aside, when the star is recounting his life story and tells of a new house he and his wife moved into, which had until recently been owned by

a television star named Holt who'd committed suicide when his series was canceled.

That, Westlake fans will quickly realize, is surely Samuel Holt, star of a Magnum, PI-style crime show--and author of four books about his inadvertent real-life adventures solving crimes . . . which were written by Westlake in the early 1980s and published under Holt's name as a Richard Bachman-esque test of the market. In the foreword to the Felony and Mayhem editions of the books, Westlake explains that he'd gotten his publisher to agree not to put his name on the books, and he was ready to see whether he could sell just on the strength of his writing--but then

The first book was published, and in the window of my local bookstore was a sign saying Samuel Holt was me. The publisher had told his sales staff the "secret," and encouraged them to pass the news on to the bookstores.

Coming at this from the other end--working in a publisher's marketing department--I have to admit that it would be very hard to grit my teeth and not share the secret.

Despite what we learn in Sacred Monster, however, I'm not at all convinced that Holt actually killed himself. He just didn't seem like that kind of guy: he's not exactly happy-go-lucky, but he's resourceful and determined, and while his show was clearly important to him you don't get the sense from the books that it's a matter of life and death. All these years later, we'll likely never know, but I suspect foul play. Does that loose-lipped publisher have an alibi?

Spring is here?

Saturday morning we woke to snow covering the roofs and the cars. Today, we touched sixty degrees, and the kite-eating tree in the lakefront park was displaying the broken bones of its first victim. Spring is here--and more than six hundred years later, we still follow Chaucer's lead in this season:

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-

So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

And that's where I'm headed tomorrow: a pilgrimage to Donald E. Westlake's house, to look through his files with the help of Ethan Iverson, who knows Westlake's work as well as anyone on the planet. Blogging may therefore be a bit spotty in the coming days--and even the coming months, frankly. Editing a book is a new plate to add to my juggling act, and since it comes with a deadline, with all the looming that implies, it has to take priority. Hopefully the occasional dry spells here will be more than made up for down the road by the appearance of the book. I spent most of the weekend using the University of Chicago Library--from my couch!--to dig up more nonfiction pieces by Westlake, and the combination of what I found and what I've got on the way from other libraries has got me very excited about the project!

So thanks for your patience, and enjoy the spring. If, that is, you're in one of those areas that's bothering to have it. As for Chicago, I'll believe it's here to stay around July.

Things to do with books--other than read them, that is

On a Friday night at the close of a strange and unpleasant week, I'll turn the mic over to Ford Madox Ford, who, on being asked by an American editor to write a few hundred words on the uses of books, replied, in this letter from September 14, 1929:

Books can be useful from so many points of view. In my early days, for example, I used to use the Encylopedia Britannica as a trouser-press and certainly the house that was without it was to be pitied. Books are also very useful for pulping; bibles and other works set over the heart will deflect bullets; works printed on thin india paper are admirable if you happen to run out of cigarette papers. Their use for that purpose is in fact forbidden in France where there is a tobacco monopoly. In fact, if you are ever without a book you are certain to want one in the end. For the matter of that, my grand aunt Eliza Coffin used to say: "Sooner than be idle, I’d take a book and read." According to her the other uses of books were (1) for the concealing of wills (2) for the ditto of proposals of marriage by letter; (3) for pressing flowers; (4) folios piled one on the other will aid you to reach the top row in the linen cupboard; (5) they have been used as missiles, as bedsteads when levelly piled, as wrappings for comestibles; (6) as soporifics, sudorifics, shaving paper etc.

I was once accused of using slices of bacon, at breakfast, to mark my place in a book. That is untrue.

Glad we got that last bit cleared up.

Brothers Keepers

Donald E. Westlake wrote more than 100 novels. It's a daunting number, but fortunately there are plenty of places where a reader just coming to his work can begin. Like comedy? Try the first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock, or the standalone Somebody Owes Me Money, with its brilliant opening line:

I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn't so eloquent.

Want something more hard-boiled? Try 361, which Westlake himself described as an exercise in writing with absolutely no hint of emotion, or the first Parker novel, The Hunter.

One place not to start is with Brothers Keepers (1975). Yet as I was reading it recently, I kept thinking that it serves almost perfectly as a demonstration of the qualities that make a Westlake novel entertaining. It's about a monastery in Manhattan whose residents realize that they're about to be booted so that the property owner can build a soulless office tower. Westlake described the writing process to Ethan Iverson like this:

I have to tell you a teeny thing about the genesis of Brothers Keepers. It all began with a title; The Felonious Monks. They would commit some sort of robbery to save the monastery. So I started it and introduced them and realized I liked them too much to lead them into a life of crime. So, to begin with, there went the title. "Okay," I said, "let's see what a caper novel looks like without the caper." Turned out to be a love story; who knew.

Surprisingly, it works--and what makes it work is the simple fact that shines through even the hardest-boiled of Westlake's novels: this is a man who enjoyed writing. He enjoyed setting difficulties and seeing how he could get out of them. He enjoyed pointless asides, and dumb jokes, and goofy displays of knowledge. All those come into Brothers Keepers at some point, and they're delightful.

The light touch of the opening gives a good sense of Westlake's off-kilter sense of humor:

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession."

"Yes, yes. Go on."

Why does he always sound so impatient? Rush rush rush; that's not the proper attitude. "Well," I said, "let's see." I tried not to be rattled. "I had an impure thought," I said, "on Thursday evening, during a shaving commercial on television."

"A shaving commercial?" Now he sounded exasperated; it was bad enough, apparently, that I bored him, without bewildering him as well.

"It's a commercial," I said, "in which a blonde lady with a Swedish accent applies shaving cream to the face of a young man with a rather prognathous jaw."

"Prognathous?" More bewildered than exasperated this time; I'd caught his attention for fair.

"That means, uh, prominent. A large jaw, that sort of sticks out."

"Does that have anything to do with the sin?"

"No, no. I just thought, uh, I thought you wanted to know, uh . . . "

"This impure thought," he said, chopping off my unfinished sentence. "Did it concern the woman or the man?"

"The woman, of course! What do you think?" I was shocked; you don't expect to hear that sort of thing in confession.

"All right," he said. "Anything else?" His name is Father Banzolini, and he comes here twice a week to hear our confessions. We give him a nice dinner before and a nightcap after, but he's surly all the time, a very surly priest. I imagine he finds us dull, and would rather be hearing confessions over in the theater district or down in Greenwich VIllage. After all, how far can a lamb stray in a monastery?

"Um," I said, trying to think. I'd had all my sins organized in my mind before coming here, but as usual Father Banzolini's asperity had thrown me off course. I'd once thought I might jot down all my sins in advance and simply read them from the paper in the confessional, but somehow that lacked the proper tone for contrition and so on. Also, what if the paper were to fall into the wrong hands?

He goes on to confess stealing an orange Flair pen from one of the other brothers, for which he's given "two Our Fathers and oh, Seven Hail Marys."

Westlake's plots are airtight--even this crime novel without a crime features a complicated plot--and efficient in their workings. But while he never wastes any time, he also doesn't hesitate to use time, to take advantage of what's offered in a scene to have a little fun, even silly, mostly pointless fun. The best example of that in Brothers Keepers, a scene that had me giggling to myself on the L, is when Dwarfmann, the guy who's going to build the office tower, unexpectedly draws a Bible verse and begins combat:

"My days," he said, "are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Let's get back down to business."

I'm sure Brother Oliver was as taken aback as I was. The imagery, in Dwarfmann's rattly style of speech, seemed wildly inappropriate. Then Brother Oliver said, in distinct astonishment, "Was that from Job?"

"Chapter seven, verse six," Dwarfmann snapped. "Come, come, if you have something to say to me, say it. Our time is a very shadow that passeth away."

"I don't know the Apocrypha," Brother Oliver said.

Dwarfmann gave him a thin smile. "You know it well enough to recognize it. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter two, verse five."

"Then I can only cite One Thessalonians," Brother Oliver said. "Chapter five, verse fourteen. Be patient toward all men."

"Let us run with patience," Dwarfmann or somebody said, "the race that is set before us."

"I don't believe," Brother Oliver told him, "that was quite the implication of that verse in its original context."

The duel continues for nearly two pages, and after Dwarfmann leaves, the monks are still a bit stunned:

Shaking my head, I said, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

Brother Oliver gave me a puzzled look. "Is that New Testament? I don't recognize that."

"Uhh, no," I said. "It's Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice." I cleared my throat. "Sorry," I said.

As much as any writer I can think of, Westlake demonstrated that he understood that we aren't coming to these books to improve ourselves, or learn life lessons (though, to be fair, you can learn a hell of a lot of life lessons from the Parker novels), but to have fun. And if he's getting the most possible fun out of the writing, we're likely going to feel the same way in the reading.