JOURNAL ENTRY #30
December 1, 2008
Fantasy Book asked about my favorite books of the year. While I wandered around the house thinking about it, and looking over titles, I began thinking about books that had had a lifelong effect. And I mean beyond simple admiration. But those that had seriously influenced the way I looked at the world.
When I was about nine years old, an aunt gave me a copy of Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels. Halliburton was an adventurer, a real Indiana Jones, who wandered the planet and wrote about the Hanging Gardens and the Alexandrian Lighthouse and the Great Pyramid. The book was enormous, a doorstop, with lots of pictures of ruins and the Parthenon and the author riding a camel and headed for the Ka'bah, in Mecca. (I was amazed to read that the Ka'bah, which the believers connected with Abraham, was probably a meteor remnant. And that Halliburton would be in extreme trouble if he were caught.) I loved that book, but somewhere I lost track of it. It left me with an enduring passion for artifacts. For lost architecture. For an entire world now long gone.
Stephen Potter's Three-upmanship arrived during my British comedy period. It portends to be a manual on how to keep a step ahead of the opposition. "If you're not one up," Mr. Potter tells us, "you're one down." It became a movie, one of that brilliant series of comedies made during the fifties, starring people like Alistair Sim, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, and Terry-Thomas. If someone asked me to list my ten favorite movie comedies, seven or eight of them would come from this period. These were the days when I discovered that the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and Bud & Lou weren't nearly as funny as I thought. And while we're on the subject, I hope Hollywood will not try to remake any more of them. They made a hash of The Ladykillers. As it now looks that they're demolishing The Day the Earth Stood Still. But that's another subject.
The Thurber Carnival is a dazzling collection from, of course, James Thurber. My favorite story is: "The Greatest Man in the World." Smurch is an obnoxious, egotistical American hero, clearly a guy who will be an embarrassment to the nation when the public gets to meet him. He's especially adept at insulting other nationalities. Ultimately, he is invited to meet the President in a skyscraper, where a staff member, signaled by a desperate FDR, pushes him through a window. The government declares an annual day of mourning, but secret service agents have to be sent to keep his mother from smiling during the ceremonies. If there is a single short story anywhere that I'd like to claim as my own, this is it.
Don Marquis's archy and mehitabel is another favorite. Archy is a cockroach who, in an earlier life, was a free-lance poet. Mehitabel is his alleycat pal. Archy comments on the world by jumping up and down on typewriter keys, producing columns published by the New York Sun. Many of the lines have remained in my mind for more than forty years. On one occasion, freddie the rat tangles with a "thousand-legs" who was bullying archie (no capital because archie can't shift into upper case) and his friends. Freddie takes out the thousand-legs, but loses his life in the process. In the morning, says archy, "we dropped freddie off the fire escape with military honors."
Then there's the more serious stuff. The Brothers Karamazov contains a sequence narrated by Ivan, an atheist, to his brother, Alyosha, a strong believer. Ivan describes a Russian duke who decides to seduce one of the women who work for him. The woman is the mother of two young children. She refuses his request, and he responds by throwing one of the children to the dogs, which tear the child apart while she watches. When it is over, he glances at the remaining child, and repeats his question. Ivan asks Alyosha what in eternity can ever compensate the mother for the horror of that event? The author's intention was to raise some of the objections that were commonly raised against religion, and to respond to them. If the response was adequate to the task, I can't say. I don't remember it.
Another moment, from War and Peace, has stayed with me. It is only an instant, and probably easy to miss. Napoleon is giving out medals to his troops during the invasion of Russia. How much does it mean to him? He proceeds, accompanied by two officers. One hands him the medal. Napoleon presses it to the recipient's chest, removes his hand, and moves on. Pressing business elsewhere. Can't waste a lot of time with these ceremonies. It's up to the second officer to prevent the medal from falling to the ground and fasten it to the uniform.
And finally, "A Christmas Carol." If there's a work that might serve as an instruction kit for those who'd like to become good writers, this is it. Example: The most common reason that most written work goes wrong is that the author writes too much. He goes on and on, explaining this and describing that. One way to avoid this, aside from getting rid of adjectives and adverbs and getting to the point, is to get the narrative on stage. Nothing is more boring than the interposition of explanations by the writer. It's useful to watch how Dickens handles things. Take, for example, the scene in which Scrooge and the Spirit arrive outside Bob Cratchett's home. The reader meets the family. We're not told anything about them; they simply show up and perform. One of them, of course, is Tiny Tim, hobbling about on his crutch.
The child looks feeble. "Spirit," Scrooge says, "will Tiny Tim survive?"
Dickens could have had the Spirit shake his head and say, "Nope. He's gone. Out of here. By this time next year, he'll be dead." But he doesn't. We're on stage, so he puts everything up there for us to see: "I see a crutch without an owner," the Spirit says, "and an empty chair by the fire."
Remember those symbols high school teachers used to talk about? That's the writer putting the action on stage. It matters.
Jack