Saturday Mar. 26, 2016

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Outliving One’s Father

I could feel, above me,
the hunger in his stride, the fear
that hurled him along an edge
where toothaches, low pay, discipline
problems in the classroom were shadows
of an all-dissolving chaos.

At his side, his shorter only offshoot,
I both sheltered and cowered. He was fallible
but doughty, even cocky as he drove
disintegrating pre-war cars down Reading’s
rattling streets, past coal yards,
candy stores, and dives
whose lurid half-glimpsed doings amused
his Presbyterian soul, bred of a Trenton manse.

The Middle Atlantic region was the humid hell
where he showed me how to go unscorched
by neon and glaring sidewalks. He
had been there before, my guide. Now where
can I shelter, how can I hide,
how match his stride
through years he never endured?

“Outliving One’s Father” by John Updike from Selected Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of Tennessee Williams (books by this author), born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi (1911), author of more than 24 full-length plays, including Pulitzer Prize-winners A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

His father was a vicious drunk; his mother was the daughter of a genteel family. It was his sister, Rose, he was closest to; they were rarely apart, and the family cook called them "the couple." When Tom was seven, the family moved from the Mississippi Delta to a tenement apartment in St. Louis. The filth and noise of the city shocked them.

In middle age, he was introduced to Princess Margaret at a party, and he said, "I'm afraid we can't talk to each other, ma'am, because we live in such different worlds." She asked him politely what world it was that he lived in. "Are you acquainted with the opera La Bohème, ma'am?" he replied. "That's my world."

In the stage directions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams wrote, "Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself."

He said, "I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

And, "A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

And, "Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else."

It was on this day in 1920 that This Side of Paradise was published, launching 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) to fame and fortune. It's the story of a young man named Amory Blaine who falls in love with a beautiful blond debutante named Rosalind Connage and then loses her because she doesn't want to marry someone with so little money. He goes on a drinking spree and has a series of bohemian adventures, only to wind up taking the blame for a crime committed by Rosalind's brother. An account of the crime appears in the newspaper alongside the announcement of Rosalind's engagement to another man.

The first version of the book was called The Romantic Egotist, and Fitzgerald had started writing it in the fall of 1917 while awaiting commission as an Army officer. He wrote most of the manuscript at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and sent chapters as he wrote them to a typist at Princeton, where he had been a student. In March 1918, he submitted the novel to Charles Scribner's Sons. Scribner's rejected the novel but encouraged Fitzgerald to revise it. He submitted a new version titled The Education of a Personage to Scribner's in September 1918, but that second version was also rejected.

In July 1919, after his discharge from the Army, Fitzgerald returned to his family's home at 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul, which he called "a house below the average in a street above the average."

Fitzgerald was at the end of a series of failures and frustrations. He'd dropped out of Princeton in 1917 because of poor grades, spent time in the Army during WWI and never saw combat or went overseas, had a New York advertising job that he hated, and his novel had been rejected. When southern belle Zelda Sayre broke off their engagement because she was afraid he couldn't support her, he spent a week drowning his sorrows. He said, "I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel."

Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, though rejecting The Romantic Egotist, had given Fitzgerald hope that it could be salvaged. Fitzgerald worked hard at revision for the next three months. He pinned revision notes to his curtains and used a speaking tube outside his room to order meals to be sent up. Fitzgerald rewrote much of the novel, using material he had published while a student at Princeton, including the short story "Eleanor" and the play "The Debutante." Fitzgerald also placed typescript pages from earlier versions, with handwritten corrections, into his new draft, producing discrepancies that eventually found their way into print.

Fitzgerald took a walk now and then for a break. He'd walk over to Selby Avenue to meet his friend Tubby Washington for cigarettes and Cokes at W.A. Frost's drugstore.

He was known to wander over to Mrs. Charles Porterfield's Boardinghouse on Summit, where he sat on the porch discussing literature with local teachers and writers.

In August 1919, Fitzgerald finished a new draft of the novel, now titled This Side of Paradise. He gave it to a friend from St. Paul for a final edit and sent the new typescript to Scribner's on September 4, 1919. Two weeks after he mailed the manuscript, Fitzgerald received Maxwell Perkins' letter accepting the book. Fitzgerald was so excited that he ran outside and stopped cars on the street to announce the news. He later wrote, "That week the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable topflightiness and promise."

The publication of This Side of Paradise on this day in 1920, made Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying — only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers."

Today is the birthday of the poet and classical scholar A.E. (Alfred Edward) Housman (books by this author), born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England (1859). He only published two books of poetry during his lifetime, but one of those was the 63-poem cycle A Shropshire Lad (1896). It includes the lines "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough, / And stands about the woodland ride / Wearing white for Eastertide."

A.E. Housman, who said, "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head."

It's the birthday of the poet who said "Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power." That's Gregory Corso (books by this author), born in New York City (1930). He was born on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. His parents were Italian teenagers, and a year after he was born, his mother went back to Italy. The boy spent his childhood in a series of orphanages, foster homes, New York jails, and even the Bellevue Hospital for "observation." When he was 16, he went to prison for three years for stealing food from a restaurant, and not long after his release in 1950, he met poet Allen Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village bar. Corso had done a lot of reading while in prison, and had started writing some poems himself; Ginsberg introduced him to more experimental forms. Corso became one of the leading poets of the Beat movement: in Ginsberg's words, "an awakener of youth."

In his poem "Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem," Corso wrote: "I learned life were no dream/learned truth deceived/Man is not God/Life is a century/Death an instant."

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