Sunday Apr. 17, 2016

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Taking It Home to Jerome

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to “take it on home to Jerome.”

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted
to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.
Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns
a full-size car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much
to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.

“Taking It Home to Jerome” by David Kirby from Get Up, Please. © Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). He won his first Pulitzer Prize when he was 30 years old for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). In 1934, he went to a lecture by Gertrude Stein in Chicago, and he was fascinated by her. She was 60 years old and he was in his 30s, but they were both dealing with sudden success — he from Bridge of San Luis Rey and his Pulitzer, she from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He invited her to stay in his Chicago apartment during speaking tours, and despite their difference in age and writing styles, they became good friends and corresponded for the rest of Stein's life.

It was The Making of Americans (1925) — Stein's difficult, experimental, 900-page novel — that inspired Wilder's most famous play, Our Town (1938). Like The Making of Americans, it traces the intertwining lives of two families, and Wilder used his own version of modernism — the set was minimal, and the play's narrator was in direct conversation with the audience. But where The Making of Americans was a commercial failure and didn't go over well with frustrated critics, Our Town was immediately popular — it was a big Broadway success, and Wilder won another Pulitzer Prize. Our Town has become one of the most-produced American plays.

In September of 1937, he wrote to Stein: "I can no longer conceal from you that I'm writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine. Every morning brings an hour's increment to it and that's all, but I've finished two acts already. It's a little play with all the big subjects in it; and it's a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it. And when I finish it next Friday, there's another coming around the corner. Lope de Vega wrote three plays a week in his thirties and four plays a week in his forties and so I let these come as they like. This play is an immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's called Our Town and its third act is based on your ideas, as on great pillars, and whether you know it or not, until further notice, you're in a deep-knit collaboration already."

It's the birthday of Isak Dinesen (books by this author), born Karen Dinesen on a rural estate called Rungsted near Copenhagen, Denmark (1885). She came from a wealthy family of landowners and writers. As a girl, she loved listening to stories about Danish mythology. She started writing at an early age, and one of the first stories she published was about a woman who has a love affair with a ghost.

She and her husband then moved to Kenya, where they started a coffee plantation. She fell in love with Africa, and she said, "The grass was me, and the air, the distant visible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me." But she and her husband separated in 1925. Alone and unhappy on the coffee plantation, she said, "I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times." After a swarm of locusts and a drought, she finally had to sell the farm to a local developer.

But just as she was leaving Africa for good, Dinesen sent some of her stories to a publisher, and they were published as the collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934). The book was full of wild, magical stories about such things as a group of people telling jokes while trying to survive a flood, and a woman who exchanges her soul with an ape.

Dinesen wrote, "Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. ... I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®