Friday Apr. 10, 2015

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Moving to Malibu

Some nights I think of it,
moving to Malibu, just as I stretch,
like a cat stretches, to my full length,
as though I am easing into cool waters.
I imagine the blue of the sea;
the bright green leaves of the geranium
on the patio, the bright pink blooms,
the yellow sun and white sand,
in the distance, white triangles,
from the deck, wind chimes.
I will be as content and as happy
as Balboa. I will have breakfast
at my wicker table and in my wicker chair,
with the cats watching. I will taste
salt on my lips after coffee.
My door will be open. When you come,
you will carry a loaf of bread,
a bunch of flowers. The sunset
is brilliant; we might as well be anywhere.

“Moving to Malibu” by Mary K. Stillwell from Maps and Destinations. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

The first law regulating copyright in the world was issued in Great Britain on this day in 1710, making it possible for authors to truly own their own work. It read, in part:

“[...] the Author of any Book or Books already Printed, who hath not Transferred to any other the Copy or Copies of such Book or Books, Share or Shares thereof, or the Bookseller or Booksellers, Printer or Printers, or other Person or Persons, who hath or have Purchased or Acquired the Copy or Copies of any Book or Books, in order to Print or Reprint the same, shall have the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and Books for the Term of one and twenty years [...]”

The Great Gatsby was first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 90 years ago today, in 1925. Even though F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) already had two successful novels under his belt — This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) — Gatsby’s reception was, at best, mixed. The novel sold fewer than 20,000 copies its first year in print, and Fitzgerald went to his grave in 1940, at the age of 44, believing he was a failure. Reviews were tepid, and most readers saw it as little more than a nostalgic period piece. One reviewer said the book was “clever and brilliantly surfaced but not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” H.L. Mencken called it “a beautiful anecdote.” Fitzgerald believed the book flopped because it lacked a likeable female protagonist and at that time most readers of novels were women. Later critics speculated that it was the disconnect between the novel’s wealthy characters and the tough real-world economic times that left readers cold. Matthew Josephson wrote of Gatsby in 1933 that “there are ever so many Americans who can’t drink champagne from morning to night, or even go to Princeton or Montparnasse.”

But during World War II, a group of publishers created the Council on Books in Wartime. The council sent books to soldiers overseas, and Gatsby was one of those books. In 1942, long past the Jazz Age, young Americans could appreciate the poignancy of the story. The Saturday Evening Post proclaimed the book “as popular as pin-up girls” among the boys abroad. One hundred and fifty thousand copies were shipped out to soldiers, and this was about 100,000 more than were sold in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Literary critic Edmund Wilson helped promote Gatsby by including it in his edition of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon in 1941, and this also led to readers’ renewed interest. It’s now considered one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

The book’s final line is also Fitzgerald’s epitaph: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

It’s the birthday of William Hazlitt (books by this author), born in Maidstone, England (1778). When he was 19, he walked 10 miles to hear Samuel Coleridge and then he walked 200 miles to visit Coleridge at home. Hazlitt became a portrait painter and then, when he started a family and needed to support them, he was a journalist and essayist for The Morning Chronicle and The Examiner. He wrote about art and sports, drama, politics, reviewed books, and then took up lecturing, which was lucrative. He was an innovator in the development of the personal essay — the essay written in the first person, which is more discursive and is free to wander away from the main theme.

Hazlitt said, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.”

And, “The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.”

It’s the birthday of Anne Lamott (books by this author), born in San Francisco in 1954. Lamott was an alcoholic who went to rehab, became a Christian, started teaching writing, and published a journal of the first year of her son’s life, Operating Instructions (1993), to great acclaim.

She said: “Nothing can break the mood of a piece of writing like bad dialogue. My students are miserable when they are reading an otherwise terrific story to the class and then hit a patch of dialogue that is so purple and expositional that it reads like something from a childhood play by the Gabor sisters. [...] I can see the surprise on my students’ faces, because the dialogue looked okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi.”

It’s the birthday of prolific travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux (books by this author), born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). He was an “omnivorous” reader, but he didn’t consider writing to be a manly occupation, so he entered college with the plan to become a doctor. A creative writing course changed his mind. He entered the Peace Corps, where he taught school in Malawi, Africa, and sold articles and stories to magazines back home.

Theroux continued to teach in Uganda and Singapore before he followed his wife to London and began writing full time. Within a decade of his undergraduate graduation, he’d published eight books, a breakneck pace that has remained consistent through his career. Yet he still claims: “Writing fiction — the whole creative process — I find very difficult. Physically and mentally, it is an enormous effort of imagination. Writing a good sentence is not simple.”

His first major book, the one that became a best-seller and established his reputation, was his 10th: The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue of his four-month trip across Asia that is today considered a classic of its genre. He has continued to write about his travels in books and essays, and has continued to publish novels.

His advice for aspiring writers? “Leave home. Because if you stay home people will ask you questions that you can’t answer. They say, “What are you going to write? Where will you publish it? Who’s going to pay you? How will you make a living?” If you leave home, no one asks you questions like that.”

His advice for aspiring travel writers is, of course, the same: leave home. But without a companion, he stipulates, and never by plane. “You can’t just take a trip and think, I might write about it,” he told The Guardian. “That won’t work. That’s just a paragraph in an autobiography: ‘I went to Turkey.’ This is an account of what happened over a period of time, and ideally there’s a change in your thinking or some kind of enlightenment.”

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