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.

Turning to Johnson

From W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson: A Biography:

Because he was so susceptible to symbols, his impulse had always been to deny their power over the imagination and to try to put them at arm's length. The dignity of human nature required this if one was to remain a "free agent." Typical was the way he would dismiss the effect on us of the seasons ("imagination operating on luxury"). But now, in many ways, he was changing--not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.

As November came to Litchfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again, he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace's odes especially (IV, vii) haunted him--the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man. Before Johnson left Litchfield he translated it into English verse. The snows of winter--the ode begins--are melting as spring returns. The fields and woods are again green. But the human being, after entering his own winter, will not return. He will be like those millions of others who have entered the night--"ashes and a shade." The ode, in its clear-eyed existential honesty and mellow acceptance, typifies what Johnson had prized in Horace when he was a boy at Stourbridge--a union of qualities he had associated with Cornelius, who had seemed to the half-blind, half-deaf, awkward youth such a model of grace and classical acceptance of fact. Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely. At moments it is even more condensed than Horace. "Each revolving year," says Horace, "each hour that snatches the day, bids us not to hope for immortal life." Johnson wrote, "The changing year's successive plan / Proclaims mortality to man." Yet this is balanced by a flourish of stoic gaiety that goes beyond Horace. "Who knows whether the gods," asks Horace, "will add tomorrow's time to the sum of today?" In Johnson this becomes: "Who knows if Jove who counts our score / Will toss us in one morning more?"

Dickens and Dostoevsky

The piano is eating up all my time tonight (remind me--why did I agree to be in a recital Sunday?), but I don't think you'll complain when you see what I have for you: a link to a story from the April 10 issue of the Times Literary Supplement wherein Eric Naiman takes last year's very strange kerfuffle over a purported meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky--noted in Claire Tomalin's biography and others--and starts pulling threads.

If I may engage in some wild, Friday night mixing of metaphors: the unraveling threads send Naiman down rabbit hole after rabbit hole into a world of fake names, fake citations, fake articles, and fake books, and even fake letters to the editor. I found it dizzying and deliciously entertaining, and I suspect that anyone even peripherally connected with academia--and its occasional log-rolling and insularity--will, at minimum, be amused.

Spidey's back!

Today I've got three quick things that I failed to work into last week's post about Spider-Man. A warning, though: comics, clearly, are off my usual beat, and we're getting pretty deep into the weeds on this post, so if superhero comics aren't your thing, you might duck out and come back later.

1 I can't believe I failed to note the appeal of Spider-Man's driving idea: With great power comes great responsibility. For an eleven-year-old, it doesn't get much simpler, or profound, than that. Then you add in the fact that Peter Parker is perpetually discontented with being Spider-Man--which is confusing to a kid because who wouldn't want to be a superhero?--and you've got a potent recipe for adding emotional complexity to simple stories, and beginning to introduce a young reader to irony, contradiction and ambiguity. And all with six lines that I'm guessing Stan Lee came up with over lunch one day when he had some pages to fill and no more time to get it done.

2 This will give you an idea of how much time I used to spend with each issue back in 1986: I used to pore over the Post Office–mandated Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation that Marvel ran in each title once a year. Seriously--the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man I read, #275, included it, and I was fascinated from the start. The USPS required them to list their base subscription price, their ownership down to holders of 1% of the stock, bond-holders, and, most interesting, their "Extent and Nature of Circulation"--numbers that I watched and compared, year after year, like the young nerd I was. They printed 476,932 copies of issue #275, down a bit from the twelve-month average of 498,367. Of those, a stunning 169,577 on average came back as returns from newsagents and stores. The death of the drugstore spinner rack solved that problem for comics companies, but I bet they'd be willing to take it back if they could get those overall circulation numbers back with it. (Oddly, DC never ran that statement; presumably they were set up under a different type of mailing license?)

3 To close, I'll share a discovery I made about fifteen years ago when I was reading through a long run of issues from the late 1970s. That period wasn't one of Spidey's best--it feels stagnant, with Peter Parker is running in place, so that more than at any other time you can feel the drag of having characters who can't really age. And in issue #188, from January of 1979, there's a letter from Kurt Busiek, at the time a reader but later to be an innovative, clever writer of comics for Marvel and other companies. I'm going to quote at length both because I haven't spotted this letter elsewhere online and because Busiek, at eighteen, did a remarkable job of diagnosing what was wrong with Spider-Man at that moment:

Dear Marvel,

When Spider-Man first appeared on the comics scene, he was immediately a smash hit because (if we are to believe the hype) he dared to do what had never been done before-to be unpredictable, to have that funky element of real life that you never know what's going to happen next. Spider-Man is stil the same as he was back then. But this is not such a good thing. Spidey is still daring to be different, but different from whwat super-heroes were in 1960. He was unpredictable back then, but he has now established a record of doing "unpredictable" things over and over again. Speculating about what will happen next in Spider-Man is like wondering if the good guys will win on your seventh viewing of Star Wars. Spidey has degenerated into a red-and-blue Mego doll; other than the fact that he's a nice package, he's the same as most of the other super-heroes around. He is no longer in the vanguard.

I was talking with some friends about issue #182 where Parker proposes to Mary Jane. It was fairly obvious that she was gonna say no. I mean, when has Marv Wolfman ever exhibited the urge to change something so it shows? Still, we mused, Spider-Man's concept is that of radical change. Wolfman is the new writer, so maybe he's trying to bring back the old unpredictable Spidey. We were wrong. We were caught on guard.

After so long with Gerry Conway and Len Wein, I thought we might be seeing daylight with Marv. So maybe his Spider-Woman and Nova mags aren't up to par. Dracula certainly is. Maybe we'll see that taut chracterization, those nice conflicts, in a super-hero mag. Maybe not. Blast! The idea of a married Parker, bouncing between a teacher's assistant job, the Bugle, home strife, and the usual plethora of super-villains, really appealed to me. It would open up a new vista of stories, guaranteeing that the writer would do something new. But with MJ's turn-down in #183, it is not to be.

I'm sure that Marv thinks he has gobs of "new, exciting ideas that'll really throw ya for a loop, effendis!" But I doubt it. You can't kill off another supporting character, and I'm sure readers wouldn't want you to. You've done it twice (Capt. Stacy and daughter), it won't be any good again.

But maybe you could clear up some of the long-running plot threads and replace them with new ones we're not expecting. Spider-Man's biggest gimmick is his cavalcade of personal problems. What's wrong with his life that hasn't been done before. A three-year-old could clear up Parker's life. Take his "wanted by the police" schtick. That has not only been over-used in Spider-Man, but in most of Marvel's other books as well, not to mention a few of DC's. Why not clear him?

Is Spidey in the forefront of the field today? When people ask that question Marvel usually points to the sales figures and says, see, see, ain't he great? Well, that red-yellow-and-blue goon at DC has pretty impressive sales figures, too, but in no way is he in the artistic forefront of the industry. Which is where Spidey was back in the Stan Lee days. Spider-Man was once famous for his radical changes. Not raditional comic book "changes" that appear for about eight issues and fade away to be replaced by the standard. I mean lasting changes like Peter's high school graduation, his love life, and the Gwen Stacy affair. Something that will still be important fifty issues later.

This may seem a little emphatic and overemotional, but believe me, this letter has been building for some time. The Mary Jane affair was just the proverbial straw. Thanks for the chance to berate you like this. It may not help, but it makes me feel better.

The editors' response is very polite, if a tad defensive--but most amazing is that they apologize for not having printed his letter in full! There's more that they cut out!

Seems to me there's only one proper response to a letter like that: "All right, kid, send us a script. Let's see what you can do."

Details, details

Every once in a while as a reader you encounter a detail in a novel that is so perfect, so unusual, and so strictly unnecessary, that you can't help but assume it comes direct from the author's experience--adapted as needed for the fictional situation, but still seeming to carry with it a whiff of reality that extends beyond the page.

My two favorite examples come from Joseph Conrad and Lawrence Block. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Conrad tells of a terrible storm:

On the lee side another man could be seen stretched out as if stunned; only the washboard prevented him from going over the side. It was the steward. We had to sling him up like a bale, for he was paralysed with fright. He had rushed up out of the pantry when he had felt the ship go over, and he had rolled down helplessly, clutching a china mug. It was not broken. With difficulty we tore it away from him, and when he saw it in our hands he was amazed. "Where did you get that thing?" he kept on asking us in a trembling voice.

Conrad of course drew on his experience at sea throughout his books, but that one moment--the extraneous detail of the miraculously (and inconsequentially) unbroken china cup feels as straight from life as anything else in his fiction.

Lawrence Block's moment comes in the best Matthew Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. Published in 1986 but set in the '70s, back when Scudder was still a heavy drinker, it portrays the run-down, nigh-lawless New York of that period--the city, like Scudder, still mostly functional but clearly heading downhill fast. At one of the many drinking sessions in the book, a guy is prompted to tell a story of one of the strangest things he's ever seen in New York: leaving his girlfriend's house on West End Avenue in the 80s early one morning, he sees three black men standing in the street, "wearing fatigue jackets, like, and one's got a cap. They look like soldiers." He continues:

"Well, it's hard to believe I really saw this," he said. He took off his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. "They took a look around, and if they saw me they decided I was nothing to worry about--"

"Shrewd judges of character," Skip put in.

"--and they set up this mortar, like they've done this drill a thousand times before, and one of them drops a shell in, and they lob a round into the Hudson, nice easy shot, they're on the corner and they can see clear to the river, and we all like check it out, and they still don't pay any attention to me, and they nod to each other and strip the mortar down and pack it up and walk off together."

"Jesus," I said.

"It happened so fast," he said, "and with so little fanfare, I wondered if I imagined it. But it happened."

"Did the round make a lot of noise?"

"No, not a whole lot. There was the sort of whump! sound a mortar makes on firing, and if there was an explosion when the round hit the water, I didn't hear it." "Probably a blank," Skip said. "They were probably, you know, testing the firing mechanism, checking out the trajectory."

"Yeah, but for what?"

"Well, shit," he said. "You never know when you're gonna need a mortar in this town."

If Lawrence Block didn't at some point see some dudes firing a mortar into the Hudson--or, at minimum, hear about it from someone else he knew, I'll buy him a steak dinner. Or maybe some beef tongue. (You'll see why in a minute.) The Scudder stories portrat a New York that's always believable, even in--or especially in--its seediest aspects. But that moment? Whump! Just too real.

All of which leads, with my usual obliqueness, to the book that brought these instances to mind: Kate Atkinson's Life after Life. I've got a lot more tolerance for historical fiction than Jessa Crispin, who recently gave up on the book because she "got about three pages in . . . and suddenly Hitler is there," but as I near the halfway point I'm not yet wholly sure of the book either--despite finding it engaging. That said, leaving Hitler aside Atkinson does wear her research well--the fundamental requirement for a historical novel that's not dreck. Her descriptions of daily life and its accoutrements feel like typical novelistic description rather than gawping at the past or detail delivered for its own sake.

There was, however, one moment that did feel like the fruit of research, a discovery so entertaining that Atkinson surely couldn't help but include it. In that regard, it's like the mirror image of the moments in Block and Conrad, shining more brightly than its surroundings not because it's crafted from lived experience but because it's the sort of thing that only the haphazardly diligent magpie's research of a novelist would likely turn up. See what you think:

Mrs. Glover was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf's tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press.

If I may take a moment to play the squeamish vegetarian: There is such a thing as a tongue press! Good god, I hope it has gone the way of sock garters and collar stays, beef tea and pink shape.

Finally, I won't blame you if you begin to suspect that I wrote this whole post for the sole purpose of sharing the following line--which a friend credits to me but I have to believe I stole from someone more clever:

Tongue--the meat that tastes you back.

Good night, folks.

An announcement and a call for help--Or, When the man sat down at the typewriter . . .

{Donald E. Westlake loses to Brian Garfield at the storied Mysterious Bookshop floating poetry game sometime in the early 1970s. Photographer unknown. For more about that game, see my interview with Garfield on the University of Chicago Press blog.}

Donald E. Westlake opened most of his Parker novels with a sentence that began with the word "when." You can read them all at  the Miskatonic University Press site, but the best of them definitely comes from Firebreak: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."

In other words, the man didn't mess around. You can't mess around if you're going to make your living with your words for more than half a century. You can't mess around if you're going to write more than 100 books, and end up with dozens of them firmly ensconced in the canon of crime fiction. Like Parker, Westlake was a pro--a working writer who simply went about the work of writing, day after day.

For a lot of writers, that means taking up any job that comes along: book reviews, features, essays, forewords--any old thing that will help an editor fill a hole and bring in a check. Westlake, however, always kept his focus relentlessly on his fiction, so when he did turn to nonfiction, you can be confident he was taking on a subject he cared about.

Which leads me to today's bit of good news: I've just signed a contract with the University of Chicago Press (my employer when I'm wearing my publicist's hat) to edit a volume of Donald Westlake's nonfiction--a celebratory miscellany, sort of like the wonderful Charles Portis volume that was published last year.

The plans are still at a very early stage, but what we're envisioning is a volume that would bring together the best of Westlake's nonfiction, including reviews, essays on favorite writers, magazine pieces, occasional writings, and more. In addition, it would likely include a couple of the most interesting interviews he sat for over the years; a piece or two by prominent fans, friends, and critics about Westlake and his work; and possibly even letters and e-mails. The goal is to give Westlake's large and ever-growing fanbase insight into how his inquisitive, inventive, alert mind worked over questions of genre, form, talent, and more--helping us to see the man behind the books we've all loved for so many years.

I'm already making great use of a small cadre of Parker-fan advisers who have helped me through the years as Chicago has republished that series, but I also could use help from the fan community at large: if you know of any Westlake nonfiction pieces that you even suspect I may not have heard of--anything that's all obscure, or old, or forgotten--I'd love it if you'd drop me a note or leave a comment below. I'll be doing some digging in libraries and archives, so I hope I'll be able to find plenty of good material in addition to what I already have, but I also am well aware that the crime fiction community is incredibly knowledgeable, and I would be grateful for any tips or thoughts folks are willing to share.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this from me in the months to come--and I hope you're as excited as I am!

Twenty-five thoughts about Spider-Man for his fiftieth birthday

1 The first Spider-Man comic I ever read was issue #275 of The Amazing Spider-Man.

2 I was eleven and a half, an age when that extra half-year retained some vestigial importance. Spider-Man the character was twenty-three. Peter Parker was somewhere in his vague late twenties.

3 It was the first issue of a subscription I'd signed up for using an ad in a G.I. Joe comic. I don't know why I chose Spider-Man over G.I. Joe, but I do remember that it cost $7.50 for sixteen issues. The cover price at the time was $.65, though within months it would rise to $.75.

4 The issue arrived the day of the Challenger explosion, January 28, 1986. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor of the living room reading and re-reading the comic rather than watch the video being replayed and solemnly discussed. I won't pretend I took refuge in thoughts of "If only Spider-Man were real"--I was eleven, and smart enough to know better--but I did appreciate being able to bury myself in this fantasy story rather than watch the reality.

5 That issue was a good place to start: not only did it feature a full-fledged battle with the Hobgoblin, but it also included a reprint of Spidey's origin story from Amazing Fantasy #15, the comic in which Spider-man had made his first appearance.

6 Twenty-seven years later, two aspects of that comic, and the experience of reading it, stand out strongly: the sense that there was something real and important at stake in Spider-man's battles and his life--that Peter Parker was an adult facing adult problems--and that by starting to read this comic I was entering into (and possibly, if I was lucky, would become part of) something bigger and longer-lasting than me, a piece of a story that stretched far back into the past.

7 This was issue #275, after all. And the cover proudly proclaimed that 1986 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Marvel Universe. Twenty-five years! Add in the annuals (18 at that point for Amazing Spider-Man)--to say nothing of the other two active Spider-Man titles--and you're talking about 6,000 pages of Spider-Man adventures, all happening to the same hero with the same friends in the same city.

8 For an American kid, especially an American boy, it seems like there's never a time when you didn't already know Spider-Man, and Superman, and Batman. You knew he was Peter Parker, and that he was a good guy. But that was about it before the mailman brought the comic that day.

9 Reading that 275th issue, the 6,000th or so page of an ongoing story, felt like being thrown into a deep, fast-moving river--but one that was surprisingly buoyant, so that I quickly realized that I didn't really need to worry about swimming, but could just let it carry me along.

10 What I mean is that many things were instantly clear. The Hobgoblin was Spider-Man's arch-enemy. Peter Parker was grown up now. His old girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, had been killed by the Hobgoblin's predecessor, the Green Goblin. His girlfriend now was Mary Jane Watson--and, surprisingly, she knew he was Spider-Man. He had a sleek new black costume. Peter was working for the Daily Bugle, and he had a number of friends who themselves had problems, but none as big as Peter's: the responsibility of being Spider-Man was wearing him down.

11 All of that came through in just 22 pages. And in addition, there were flashbacks--and editorial notes, too, alerting readers to the earlier issues in which they could find the stories the characters were referring to.

12 The result was a feeling of being invited into an incredibly populous, complicated story that stretched farther back into the past than my eleven-year-old brain could comprehend--and being invited in comfortably. By the time I got to the end of the issue, I was hooked.

13 And there at the end was the letters page, which sank the hook. Letter after letter from fans who clearly lived and breathed this stuf, full of praise, criticism, ideas, and--most important right then--speculation about the identity of the Hobgoblin.

14 When you're that age, some combination of brain plasticity, near-pathological focus, and endless free time combine to make it possible for you to utterly absorb new information in a  way that, looking back, seems almost unfathomable. I read and re-read that issue, did the same for each one that came over the next year, and with the help of cross-references, letters pages, and digging for cheap back issues, it didn't take long before I knew Spider-Man and his world. (I would do the same for baseball history a few years later.)

15 I thought then, and I still think now, that I got lucky and entered at a high point. The mid-1980s were a good time to be a fan of superhero comics, especially on the Marvel side. The Marvel universe was riding high, with a huge number of titles that were each selling ten times what issues today sell. They were still widely available in spinner racks in drugstores, groceries, and chain bookstores. And they were cheap, relative to their competition for the youth dollar--just a bit more than a candy bar.

16 Oh, the seeds of the fall had already been sewn, and were even beginning to sprout. The age of the crossover had begun just a few years before, and the collector-frenzy bubble was clearly starting to inflate. But at the time it all felt like a big, cohesive universe just bursting at the seams with stories.

17 I gave up on comics after high school and stayed away for a good while after that, but I've been back for several years, and for the most part it's been enjoyable. It's still fun to open the mailbox and find a comic book there.

18 When I made my first trip to New York as an adult, it was hard not to see it simply as the embodiment of the city I'd seen in Marvel comics for years. Even now, I find myself look at the tops of buildings and imagining what it would be like to see Spider-Man up there.

19 Reading superhero comics as an adult requires accepting some frustrations. The characters, still resonant from childhood, draw you in, but the stories often disappoint. Frequently they're simply not very good, or are too juvenile even to serve as simple entertainment. But more often the problem is the ways the characters and stories are being deformed by external forces.

20 Comics, I think, suffer more than any other form from the demands of money and marketing: characters are regularly being re-conceived, storylines thrown up in the air, whole histories shuffled, in order to meet the needs of a current crossover plan, or align a story with a forthcoming movie, or simply match up to a new marketing strategy.

21 Movies, of course, also suffer from the demands of money. But a movie, even an installment in a series, is wrapped up in one sitting--mistakes and bad decisions, however maddening, are contained in that one unit. With comics, however, what you're buying is a serial narrative, a story that implicitly promises to keep going, month after month, continually adding to the skein that's been being woven for decades. When marketing or sales needs force changes that essentially abrogate that promise, the damage isn't so easily contained.

22 And then there's the different--and almost opposite--problem presented by a serial narrative that now stretches back fifty years: it's impossible. With reasonable suspension of disbelief--such that we're willing to accept that many, many things can happen yet Peter Parker could still be in his late twenties--it seems just possible to have twenty-five years of such a narrative hold together as essentially one story, but much more than that seems completely unworkable. (Try to follow the thread in the Wikipedia entries for, say, Jean Grey, or the Green Goblin, if you need convincing.)

23 But the serial nature of the narrative is what I love about it. Like with baseball, I love the sense that this is a soap opera of sorts that goes on and on and on. If that story becomes too complicated to sustain, and thus has to be repudiated and re-thought at regular intervals, the attraction diminishes. When I was eleven, a fight between Spider-Man and the Hobgoblin was inherently fascinating; now it's only of interest if it's embedded in a creative story that promises to go on and on, drawing on and refracting and building on stories I've already read and a history I already know.

24 Guilty pleasures aren't part of my way of thinking about culture. Pleasure is pleasure, and I'm grateful to any creator who delivers it. There's no question that comics are less important to me than novels--they're essentially a disposable distraction, something I enjoy and then move on from. But once in a while there are series and storylines that achieve something beyond that--Jonathan Hickman's recent multi-year run on the Fantastic Four, for example, or Darwyn Cooke's amazing The New Frontier--and they make me glad the medium still exists, and that I've stuck with it. I still like Spider-Man, and even with all the frustrations I'm still glad to know month after month what he's up to.

25 And behind it all is that comic that arrived in the mail twenty-seven years ago. I wrote this post before I looked at the issue, but I just brought it up from the basement--and page after page, image after image, whole words and phrases, are exactly as I remembered them, crystal clear. They're called formative years for a reason, and you could have far worse figures doing the forming than Spider-Man. Thanks, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, for what you gave us. Happy birthday, Spidey.

Writing home

One of the problems of not having children and not practicing any religion is that spring break sneaks up on you. Judging by the lack of commuters on the L today, I suspect that the Internet may have already packed its Speedo and headed out the door for the weekend, hying (or, since this is the Internet, perhaps "hai-ing"?) to Daytona Beach to pound some Jager and barf intricate patterns onto the sand?

Well, just in case I'm wrong, let's look at some letters! And today's subject is perfect: Faulkner, a master drinker himself, a man who--to his ultimate detriment, one suspects--could have out-Jello-shotted your average Chi Delt Biff of Tri Delt Betty any day. This day, however--January 12, 1925, when he was twenty-eight--the pleasures on offer were more modest and quiet. He writes to his mother from the house of a friend, where he's visiting:

We got there Saturday evening in time for dinner. They are grand people, they let you do whatever you want to--dont try to entertain you, you know. Dr Rainold is a funny light little man, and Mrs Rainold is like Mrs Eatman. They were sitting before the fire reading, and spoke to us, and then went on reading. I have never felt as completely at home. They didnt try to 'talk' to me at all, let me get a book and read too.

Ghosts of the Rainolds: if you're listening, you're welcome to haunt the Rocketship any time you'd like. We've got books a-plenty. Just watch the ectoplasm; it ruins books.

Because I'm going to be spending at least part of my weekend proofreading--and thus ever-so-briefly regretting that I chose the glamorous field of publishing--I'll close with a reminder that the world is made up of readers and non-readers, and we, friends, are not in the majority. From a letter Faulkner sent home from Paris on November 9 of that same year:

I'm having one high and elegant time. With my $200.00 check I got to the American express Co. bank. I stand in line for a long time and then am told I must see a manager. I go to the manager's office: i is 12:30 then, and he is gone to lunch. He returns at 2:15, followed by a train of people all talking at once--like Moses crossing the Red Sea with his gang. After a San Francisco woman gives him hell for thirty minutes, I get to speak with him. Well, he never heard of Boni & Liveright--not a reading man, he explained. He looks in Bradstreet & Dun, Liveright is there, but no rating whatever is given. So he wont take the check.

The American consul also turns him down. What he doesn't do is go try Sylvia Beach--surely she, at least, would have honored the check? He might not have been able to turn it into food or booze, but books are a better consolation than nothing.

A rule for used book shopping

{Photo by rocketlass of marginal commentary in the University of Chicago Library's copy of Richard Stark's Plunder Squad.}

The paperback editions of the Nero Wolfe novels that Bantam published in their Nero Wolfe Library in the 1990s all carry introductions by contemporary crime writers. For the most part, those introductions, while well-meaning, do little but remind us of the vast number of relatively cozy crime writers working at that time--almost none to my taste, but not out of place introducing Wolfe. Nearly all the introductions explain how the writer first came to the Wolfe stories, then, as I've done here many a time, point out some of the reasons they endure. Wholly inoffensive, but far from essential, in other words.

Robert Crais's introduction to Before Midnight, however, deserves to be preserved. That's not because of any particular insight he offers into Rex Stout, and not even because he mentions Donald Westlake and Richard Stark. No, it's because his story of first encountering Wolfe is great fun. As a young man living in Baton Rouge, Crais haunted a used bookstore,

a grungy, dirty, seedy kind of place, but I discovered Chandler there, as well as Ted Mark and Donald Westlake and Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark. A paperback cost nineteen cents. If it had no cover, it cost a dime. I had gone through the Chandlers and was working on the Hammetts and I walked into the little store that day very much wanting a copy of Red Harvest. The stacks were divided by category (western, mystery, science fiction, etc.) but were rarely alphabetized, so if you wanted a particular author, you had to look through all the mysteries, ofttimes a tedious process. There was only a single copy of Red Harvest, and some yo-yo had written BITE ME across the cover in green ink, so that ended that. I won't buy a book with BITE ME on the cover. Not even for half price.

A good rule, and one that led him to pick up the next book that looked of interest, which happened to be by Rex Stout. Sorry, Hammett. If only you'd attracted a better class of reader . . . (and if people are writing BITE ME on Hammett, good god, what must they be writing on Jim Thompson? Or--shudder--Mickey Spillane?)

Mr. Wolfe prefers not to.

One of the things Rex Stout does best--and most entertainingly--in his Nero Wolfe novels is to portray the imperious presumption of executives . . . and then show what happens when it comes up against the 300 pounds of immovable object that is Nero Wolfe.

Before Midnight (1955), the Wolfe novel I read this weekend, offers some particularly fine examples, among them Wolfe turning down a $50,000 check to preserve his dignity ("Dignities are like faces," he says in explaining his opposition, "No two are the same."), tearing up a retainer check, and hiring, firing, and briefly re-hiring a lawyer.

The best moment, however, features Archie Goodwin as Wolfe's immovable proxy. Goodwin meets perfume exec Talbot Heery while on a mission to retrieve from a safe-deposit box some poetry, related to an advertising contest for Heery's company--a contest that became of interest to Wolfe when it led to murder. Archie introduces Heery by saying,

I could merely report that I kept my two-thirty appointment and got the verses and the answers, and let it go at that, but I think it's about time you had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Talbott Heery.

Heery doesn't make much impression until Archie takes him up on an offer to share a cab and get dropped off at Wolfe's on Heery's way downtown:

As we stopped for a red light at Fifth Avenue, headed west on Forty-seventh Street, Heery said, "I have some spare time and I think I'll stop in for a talk with Nero Wolfe."

"Not right now," I told him. "He's tied up."

"But now is when I have the time."

"Too bad, but it'll have to be later--in fact, much later. He has appointments that run right through until late this evening, to ten-thirty or eleven."

"I want to see him now."

"Sorry. I'll tell him, and he'll be sorry, too. If you want to give me your number I'll ring you and tell you when."

He got a wallet from his pocket, fingered in it, and came up with a crisp new twenty. "Here," he said. "I won't need long. Probably ten minutes will do it."

I felt flattered. A finiff would have been at the market, and a sawbuck would have been lavish. "I deeply appreciate it," I said with feeling, "but I"m not the doorman or receptionist. Mr. Wolfe has different men for different functions, and mine is to collect poetry out of safe deposit boxes. That's all I do."

Returning the bill neatly to the wallet, he stated, with no change whatever in tone or manner, "At a better time and place I'll knock your goddam block off." You'll see why I wanted you to meet him.

The scene could serve as an exemplar of a key aspect of Stout's genius, and the pleasures his books afford: it's the feeling of returning again and again to the familiar--familiar settings, characters, situations--while each time seeing a new set of changes rung. We've seen many an exec try to browbeat Archie, and plenty try to bribe him. Rare is the exec who tries both--and Heery, stand six foot though he may, is the only one bold enough to offer to knock Archie's block off.

Which, you'll not be surprised to learn, he doesn't get to do. We live in a fallen world, and not everyone gets everything he wants all the time--even executives.

The Wodehouse cure

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Among people who are willing to countenance the possibility that ghosts exist, one of the most common explanations for haunting--for why this person returns be-sheeted while that one sleeps peacefully in the grave--is that the person died with some important business left undone on this plane.

If that's the case, the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters may explain why no one has ever seen the Master's ghost wandering the stately homes of England, harrying aunts and aiding nephews. For with the next-to-last letter in the book, undated but from very late in Wodehouse's life, and addressed to Godfrey Smith, editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Wodehouse discharged a duty:

Jeeves's bracer does not contain dynamite as is generally supposed.

It consists of lime juice, a lump of sugar and one teaspoonful of Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. This, it will be remembered, is the amount of the Buck-U-Uppo given to elephants in India to allow them to face tigers on tiger hunts with the necessary nonchalance.

Imagine the loss to humanity had Wodehouse gone to his grave with this recipe a secret!

Now to lay in a store of Buck-U-Uppo. Next time I'm in New York, I'll have to stop by the Butler Supply District and claim a case or two.

Updike reminds us what it's like to be twenty

A month ago, Patrick Kurp, on his Anecdotal Evidence blog, mentioned in passing a John Updike story, "The Happiest I've Been," first published in the New Yorker in 1959. Patrick described the story as,

the best fictional treatment I know of the exhilarating free-fall between high school and college, adolescence and faux-adulthood.

We all have those writers whom we've simply failed to read, not through distaste or deliberate choice, but simply because, as Hussain Haddawy put it in the introduction to his translation of some of the Arabian Nights stories, "There are other fair creatures in the world." Updike has long been one of mine, wholly unread--though in recent years I've been edging closer: I read Nicholson Baker's U and I, and sentence after sentence that he quoted impressed me, as did his--and other writers'--tales of Updike's courtesy and kindness, the notes he would send to young writers whose work he appreciated, the professionalism with which he seemed to approach his work. For all that I enjoy reading about the Byrons of the world, my heart (to say nothing of my admiration) is with those artists who evince kindness and courtesy.

Patrick's praise was enough. I sought out "The Happiest I've Been"--and if all you want to know is whether Patrick is right, you can stop reading here: the first thing I did after reading it was make two copies to send to friends. It's that good, full of sharp observations expressed in sentences whose every word seems diligently labored over, glowing with a sense that it was chosen through deliberation aiming at perfection rather than the logorrhea of chance.

The story, told in the first person, relates a night-long party in the narrator's hometown, a party to which he's taken unexpectedly by a friend with whom he's supposed to be sharing a ride to Chicago a few days before the end of the Christmas break of his freshman year of college. He only learns of the party after he's been loaded into the car, and, "In everything that followed there was this sense of my being picked up and carried somewhere."

That's a feeling that will be familiar, I suspect, to anyone who was fortunate enough to ease into their twenties largely in the company of others who were doing the same--and a feeling that most of us rarely re-encounter in later years. What Updike does brilliantly is to show us all the ever-varying vantage points we had on those moments: enjoyment and abandon, uncertainty and isolation, confusion and anticipation. "The party was the party I had been going to all my life," the narrator notes: a girl cries and dances at the same time; three former athletes, "still . . . with that well-coordinated looseness, a look of dangling on strings," crash the party, then disappear silently into the basement; the host plays the same jazz record over and over and over, deliberately soaking in melancholy.

When the host's parents return home, the narrator realizes that they, too, see the same party they've always seen: "It was a pleasant joke to see in their smiles that, however corrupt and unwinking we felt, to them we looked young and sleepy: Larry's friends." But the few months that the narrator has been away have been enough to make him feel estranged. At one point he wanders off and buries himself for a while in the first book he finds, the second volume of Henry Esmond; at another, the sight of a pile of shoes discarded by the girls at the party brings unexpected emotion:

Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment, as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged, they would have seemed less tragic. But the girls who had stepped out of these shoes were, with few exceptions, the ones who had attended my life's party. The alterations were so small: a haircut, an engagement ring, a tendency toward plumpness more frankly confessed. While they wheeled above me I sometimes caught from their faces an unfamiliar glint, off of a hardness I did not remember, as if beneath their skins these girls were growing more dense. The brutality added to the features of the boys I knew seemed a more willed effect, more desired and so less grievous.

These are the people he knew, but he no longer knows them; he wonders "at the easy social life that evidently existed among my friends at three-thirty in the morning." And later, his sense of being out of time and place, focused on one person and one relationship, reaches an acuity that verges on cruelty:

So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering the personality of a childhood friend so seriously, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn't even deeply believe that in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me.

That's the moment that Updike recreates so well in this story and carries through to a perfect ending: the time when we've worked enough slack into our family ties to feel free and the ties to old friends--stripped of the circumstances that catalyzed them--have atrophied to the point of inexplicability, yet the claims of our future have not yet been made. At twenty, on the right night in the right circumstances, we are as close to being free as we ever will be--and, briefly, it can seem like the best possible way to live.

Wodehouse's letters

In need of a quick post today, I find Jeeves coming, as usual, to the rescue. Well, not Jeeves so much as his creator: I can't believe I've not yet mentioned the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters.

For a proper review of the volume, you couldn't do better than my fellow Invisible Librarian Ed Park's for Bookforum (which I just amused myself by mistyping Bookfuror). One of Ed's most interesting observations concerns the disjunction between Wodehouse's meticulous plotting and an expressed desire for its opposite:

How interesting, then, to read what a younger Wodehouse wrote to a friend in 1914: “That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good.” Voice is subservient to narrative. Of course, an author as long-lived as Wodehouse will change his views on craft and ambition over the years. But in that contradiction between form and style—in a pinch, predestination and free will—lies a curious truth. Could it be that for us readers (after all, the most important part of this equation), Wodehouse in the end achieved his goal of dispensing with “any real story”? “It’s just a question of detail,” Wodehouse remarks about the composition, after the heavy lifting is done. Perhaps the aspects of his books that give us the most pleasure—the utter insouciance, the similes of fizzy genius (comparing, to pluck at random from the sacred oeuvre, a dour countenance to a “V-shaped depression off the coast of Iceland”)—could only be arrived at once the scaffolding was absolutely secure. Which is to say, a reader with much on his mind about the uncertainties of life might well have deeper reasons for immersing himself in a story called “There’s Always Golf.”

It's well worth clicking through to read the rest--there are few writers whose comedic sense I trust more than Ed's, and that comes through in his choice of lines to quote.

For my part, I'll share just two of the bits that have greatly amused me as I've flipped through the book. First comes from a letter to Wodehouse's daughter, Leonora, of July 3, 1921:

Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I'll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me "other Wodehouse books," but I smiled gently on them and legged it.

Just as Bertie would have done.

Then there's this account, sent to his friend William Townend in 1932, of a visit to H. G. Wells's house:

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he's living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can't believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

What makes that letter even more deliciously amusing is that--as editor Sophie Ratcliffe points out in a note, Wodehouse used that very image a mere six years later in The Code of the Woosters. Bertie explains that at the house of a newly married friend he'd seen, over the fireplace, "the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest,' and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it."

I would be falling down on one of my self-imposed Internet duties if I didn't close with some lines from Wodehouse's one letter to Anthony Powell, from 1967. A bookseller had sent him Powell's 1939 novel What's Become of Waring, and Wodehouse sent Powell a note of appreciation:

I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.

Which leads to two thoughts:

1 It's interesting that Wodehouse likes Dance, for Powell's sense of time couldn't be more different from Wodehouse's: the latter's characters are trapped in amber, living forever in a prelapsarian (or at least pre–World War I) wonderland, while Powell's are forever moving, paced by death and driven by various and sundry furies, acted upon by time in ways they could never have predicted.

2 I'm pleased that Wodehouse uses the word "charm." It's undeniably one of Dance's great qualities, yet it's not one I've ever properly identified by that name. But Wodehouse is right: there are few books whose wit and humanity are more delicately charming than Dance.

The spy in the tree

In case Monday's post didn't convince you to buy Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, I'll share a couple more good bits today.

1 One of the things that comes through most clearly is how many times Fermor could have easily been killed while working as an operative on Crete during the war, a role that was about midway between that of a spy and that of a guerilla organizer. The most memorable came when he and two colleagues were caught out in a field as more than a hundred Germans began pouring up the hill. The three

scrambled into the woods and hid in a thick cypress tree. They spent the rest of that freezing day (it was 25 January) in its branches, scarcely daring to move. The German patrols went to and fro, shouting to each other; some soldiers passed almost directly beneath them. But in the late afternoon the Germans gave up the search when a mist rolled in and snow began to fall.

Fermor and his companions climbed down and clambered uphill to safety . . . of a sort: they spent the night in a damp hole before making their way to a friendly village.

My first thought on reading that was of the Royal Oak, in which Charles II took a similar shelter (with the wonderfully named Lord Careless) after having his forces crushed by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester in 1651--and I was pleased to learn from Cooper that Fermor took to referring to the escape oas "Oak Apple Day" in honor of the historical parallel.

I thought I remembered a good account of that scene in Jenny Uglow's engaging biography of Charles II, A Gambling Man, but on turning to it I discovered that she refers to it only in passing. Her overall account of the king's dramatic escape, however, is worth sharing:

Although a huge reward of £1,000 was on his head, and all were asked to watch out for "a tall black man, over two yards high," Charles dodged his pursuers with the help of the royalist network and his own wits and charm. He took refuge with Catholic gentry in Shropshire and Staffordshire before cutting his long black hair short and working his way across the West Country as a servant of Jane Lane, a colonel's daughter travelling to help her sister-in-law in childbirth. As a servant should, he rode on horseback with her, doffing his cap to his betters, overseeing the shoeing of a horse, fumbling with a kitchen jack, joking with ostlers and grooms. Finding no chance of a boat from Bristol or Bridport in Dorset, both bristling with Commonwealth troops, Charles turned east, along the south coast. In Brighton, as he stood with his hands on the back of a chair near the fire, an innkeeper knelt down and kissed his hand, "saying, that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going."

2 I shared a handful of very brief points of interest (or amusement) on Twitter earlier this week that I'll repeat in case you didn't see them there. Lawrence Durrell, on first meeting Fermor, called him "A wonderful mad Irishman . . . quite the most enchanting maniac I've ever met," while Steven Runciman called him "a very bright, very grubby young man." And then there's this, which Cooper reports from Fermor's time on Mount Athos during his trans-European hike: "He also saw the cook's cat, which could do somersaults." My cats are even lazier than I thought.

3 Finally, as it's Friday, I'll close with two bits about drinking, which Paddy and his friends did prodigiously in the years before, during, and right after the war. As Greece teetered on the verge of civil war in 1946, Fermor was hired by the British Council to travel the country giving lectures on British culture--but he relatively quickly found himself instead telling the story of how he led a team that kidnapped a German general from Crete. (That adventure is told well in Ill Met by Moonlight, written by Fermor's companion on the raid, W. Stanley Moss.) Cooper tells of the first lecture about the kidnapping:

At the lectern Paddy had a carafe and a glass, from which he took repeated sips as he told the story. When it was nearly empty, he refilled it from the carafe. A roar of approval went up from the crowd as what remained in the glass turned milky-white--Paddy had been drinking neat ouzo.

Then there's Fermor's account of the regular drinking--and its effects--when he got back to London, a bit at sixes and sevens like so many following the war, in the spring of 1947:

"It was a marvellously exhilarating time: hangovers were drowned like kittens the following morning in a drink called either a Dog's Nose or a Monkey's Tail: a pint of beer with a large gin or vodka slipped into it, which worked wonders."

I think--and I suspect that Aesop might back me up--that that's not how one drowns a kitten, but a lion. Have a good weekend, folks.

"In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

One of the many commonalities between Rex Stout and P. G. Wodehouse* is that their characters are essentially stuck in time. For Wodehouse, that era was gone by the time he really established himself as an author: it's early Edwardian. As Orwell explained in "In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse,"

The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the "clubman" or "man about town," the elegant young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties. It is significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier. But the traditional "knut," the "Piccadilly Johnny," ought to wear spats.

Stout's characters, meanwhile, are forever of the 1930s, the period of his first success. Though the Depression barely makes an appearance--the Wolfe stories are more akin to the Busby Berkeley musicals than, say the realist movie that John L. Sullivan wants to make in Sullivan's Travels--but the characters, from the thugs and Inspector Cramer to, more importantly, Archie and (sigh) Lily Rowan, are the familiar fast-talking slang-shooters of period's brilliant screwball comedy.

Such stasis is no small part of the comfort these books afford--a comfort matched by few, if any, other writers. Yet both writers continued working regularly until the 1970s, and both, in familiar series tradition, let their characters float in a vaguely defined eternal present rather than having them age or specifying that their new adventures are taking place in the past.** And thus it becomes interesting to note where the present (now well past) creeps in. Christopher Hitchens, for example, once pointed out the ghastly strangeness of Bertie Wooster--allied to no cause aside from aunt-baiting--running into an anti-war demonstration in the 1974 novel Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. With Stout, the dislocations are never jarring, merely interesting.

Such a moment appears in In the Best Families (1950), one of the most clever and satisfying Wolfe stories. Archie has been dispatched to a country house under slim cover, pretending to investigate a mere dog poisoning (shades of the Philo Vance Kennel Murder Case?) while really looking into murder, and after dinner he's stuck in the living room with all the suspects as they watch television:

Nintey minutes of video got us to half-past ten, and got us nothing else, especially me. . . . Television is raising hell with the detective business. It use to be that a social evening at someone's house or apartment was a fine opportunity for picking up lines and angles, moving around, watching and talking and listening; but with a television you might as well be home in bed. You can't see faces, and if someone does make a remark you can't hear it unless it's a scream, and you can't even start a private inquiry, such as finding out where a young widow stands now on skepticism. In a movie theater at least you can hold hands.

I'm no detective, but I sympathize. As March crawls past, insisting on its pretense of being winter with all the wheezy grotesquerie of a past his prime ladies' man bathed in cologne, the Baseball Machine at the Rocketship maintains its winter dormancy. If Archie wants to bring some suspects by, I'll be happy to help him catch a murderer while the cathode rays sleep.

Highlights from Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

When I was in London in January I picked up--on the advice of one of the sales reps I work with, who said it was the best book he'd read all year--Artemis Cooper's new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Forty pages in, I feel I've already been repaid for lugging it o'er the seas in my luggage. Some early highlights:

1 Patrick Leigh Fermor's mother's name was Aeileen, but as a girl "she signed herself 'Avrille' or 'Mixed Pickles' when writing to her parents, while they and her husband most often referred to her as Muriel." Patrick's father, named Lewis, she called Peter. Patrick, meanwhile, was known to all as Paddy, which is much more straightforward.

2 You get the impression that no school could have held Paddy--his person or his attention--but he does seem to have been subjected to a couple that were exemplars of English strangeness and decrepitude. His first, Walsham Hall, was run by Major Faithfull, "a pioneer of the wilder shores of education, . . . with messianic eyes and a shock of grey hair." Cooper describes the curriculum:

Lessons were very haphazard; there was also what Paddy described as "a lot of lying down and doing free association while Major Faithfull took notes. I used to invent all sorts of things for him." Most bewildering of all were the country dancing and eurhythmics, in which both staff and pupils participated in the nude. "Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger's Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole."

It reminds me of the school in which another young Patrick was once placed, by his Auntie Mame:

"So like your father," she sighed. "By the way, I know the most divine new school that a friend of mine is starting. Coeducational and completely revolutionary. All classes are held in the nude under ultraviolet ray. Not a repression left after the first session."

3 His next stop was King's School, Canterbury, which was founded by Henry VIII and boasted Christopher Marlowe among its graduates. By Fermor's time, it was utterly run down, but it's not clear that even the most up-to-date and resource-rich of schools could have handled the young Fermor. His fellow student Canon Hill

remembered that Paddy's arrival had had an immediate impact on the school. He spoke in elaborate sentences, a mode of speech quite unlike the monosyllabic schoolboy slang of his contemporaries. He would launch into blank verse or Shakespearean dialogue at the drop of a hat, and recited poetry by the yard. Hill remembers once coming back from games and hearing someone singing "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones," an unusual choice from the English Hymnal. Intrigued, he followed the sound and found Fermor dancing about in the showers, stark naked, singing "Alleluia! Alleluia!" at the top of his lungs, all by himself.

I suppose it wouldn't be an English school if there weren't a lot of stories of nudity. Of more interest are the stories Cooper relates of Fermor's daredevilry and recklessness:

The sort of myths that float around schools tended to settle on Paddy. It was said that someone heard Fermor creeping out of the dorm in the middle of the night, and decided to follow him. Lighting his way with a torch and unaware that he was being shadowed, he made his way to the gym, which had a very high ceiling spanned by a great beam, hung with climbing ropes. Hidden in the shadows, the boy watched with mounting alarm as Fermor shinned up one of the ropes, clambered on to the beam and walked from one end to the other. Having completed this feat, he came down the rope and made his way back to the dormitory.

Cooper goes on:

If anyone was caught hanging around the betting shops, smoking cigarettes, clambering over the roof or getting into fights, it was probably Fermor; and his sins were compounded by a fearless swagger and total disregard for punishment.

What an intoxicating combination that must have been for his fellow students, especially when coupled with the charm to which everyone who ever met Fermor attests!

4 He was, unsurprisingly, expelled--though for the relatively pedestrian sin of holding hands with a girl while out on the streets of Canterbury, a dual no-no. He then spent the spring and summer of 1933, when he was eighteen, racketing about London and falling in with the Bright Young People whom Waugh would satirize so mercilessly in Vile Bodies. At one of their haunts, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, he became a favorite of the proprietress, Rosa Lewis, which leads to this priceless anecdote, apparently related by Fermor directly to Cooper in conversation:

Mrs Lewis thought that Evelyn Waugh's description of her as Mrs Crump in Vile Bodies did not do her justice. "If I get my 'ands on that Mr Woo-aagh," she told Paddy, her false teeth rattling ominously, "I'll cut 'is winkle orff!"

Fair or unfair, it's not hard to see why Lewis would be after Waugh's winkle. To take just one example of many in Vile Bodies, here's Crump at her most obtusely unfeeling:

"We've all been upside down this morning. Such a fuss. Had the police in we have, ever since I don't know what time, drinking up my wine and asking questions and putting their noses where they're not wanted. All because Flossie must needs go and swing on the chandelier. She never had any sense, Flossie. Well, she's learned her lesson now, poor girl. Whoever heard of such a thing--swinging on a chandelier. Poor Judge. What's-his-name is in a terrible state about it. I said to him it's not so much the price of the chandelier, I said. What money can make, money can mend, I said, and that's the truth, isn't it, dear? But what I mind, I said, is having a death in the house and all the fuss. It doesn't do anyone any good having people killing theirselves in a house like Flossie did.

Interestingly, though Cooper points out that through this circle--at another bohemian haunt, the Gargoyle Club--Fermor became friends with Constant Lambert and Cyril Connolly, he seems to not have crossed paths in any memorable way with their mutual friend Anthony Powell. What would Powell have made of him? I suspect that his oddity was, in a way, too foursquare to be the sort that drew Powell as a writer, too well-grounded in confidence: Fermor, it seems clear, did things in order to do them rather than as a means to power, fame, sex, or any of the other phantoms we chase, and whose obsessive pursuit so interested Powell.

5 At the same time that the young Fermor was clubbing it up in London, he was essentially broke, and to alleviate that he took a job selling stockings door to door to suburban London ladies, a job he was good at but hated. Cooper tells a story that Fermor told her:

One evening at the Running Horse [Pub], the boss singled him out as a star salesman and asked him to give the other members of the team a few tips. According to Paddy, he pulled a stocking over his hand and described its properties as if it were a condom--which had the team howling with laughter, and his boss purple in the face with rage. He was sacked immediately.

The whole episode reminds me of Julian Maclaren-Ross, who at a similar period in his life sold vacuum cleaners door to door. He, too, hated it--but without even the consolation of being good at it. In his Memoirs of the Forties, he recounts a conversation with Graham Greene before a lunch that he'd managed to land in order to talk about adapting A Gun for Sale for radio:

"What d'you do meantime? Besides writing radio plays I mean."

"I sell vacuum cleaners," I said.

Greene, almost on the threshold of the pub, halted abruptly and turned to take a good look at me. Unlike the housekeeper, it was clear that he'd not suspected this. "Vacuum cleaners?" he said.

"Yes."

"Are you doing it to get material?"

"No, I'm doing it because I wouldn't have any money otherwise."

"But do you earn much as it is?"

"I don't do bad at the moment. Eight to ten quid a week."

Greene said: "Good for you," plainly surprised. . . . "I thought of signing on myself at one time. To write a book about it afterwards of course. I never knew one could actually sell the damn things."

Despite his protests, Maclaren-Ross did make use of his experience, building his bleakly comic novel Of Love and Hunger around a failing vacuum cleaner salesman. Maclaren-Ross, however, didn't have the luxury of going out with a bang like Fermor: he was sacked by Electrolux for simply failing to sell cleaners, then, after signing on with their rival, Hoover, was sacked by Hoover for selling a second-hand cleaner at the secret behest of his unscrupulous supervisor.

Which just goes to show, yet again, that we can't all be Patrick Leigh Fermor. Alas.