Notes from my recent reading….
“There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers. I can write perfectly well—anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. It’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.”
Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life
“He never squandered an hour or a good impulse.”
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
“She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.”
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
“If you can be indifferent passionately enough it almost has the virtue of a positive creed.”
Christopher Morley, Streamlines
“Treacherous are standards adopted by public or self-appointed censors. It is part of the American philosophy as expressed in the Constitution—that, except in the most extreme cases, people should be allowed to express their opinions, and that the result of this is to stir up thought and controversy, out of which will emerge the Truth. It is only what is false that is killed by discussion, not what is true.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins
“We are not a nation of children. Our citizens are presumed to be able to judge for themselves, to draw their own conclusions from what they read. In a republic, people are entitled to express their opinions.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author
“It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.”
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows.”
Socrates, quoted in Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
“I’ve never been one for the ‘take your medicine’ school of culture. I read what I read, for the most part, because I like it.”
Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet
“I am extra-big. I have been out in the weather. I look lazy and am. In the words of a Texas chick one time, I look as if I had been there and back.”
John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox
“I didn’t leave any visible marks. But I left the other kind. They last longer.”
John D. MacDonald, The Quick Red Fox
“Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber—36 hours of it—sleep that soaked like rain after drought.”
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
“The usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.”
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
“It be a bad night, doctor, for riding; the kind o’ night when dead things come out o’ their graves.”
Dick Donovan, “The Corpse Light”
“Though we are desirous to be cured of our faults, we are loath to part with them.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“Consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes.”
James Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife
“Sleeping well is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve all of your brain functions, as well as your ability to learn and remember new knowledge.”
Sanjay Gupta, Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age
“Be assured, and experience will convince you, that there is no truth more certain than that all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations, and to none does it apply with more force than to the gratification of the passions.”
George Washington, quoted in James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799
“Bugles and drums may come here [to Washington’s tomb] sometimes but they are out of place. Here lies greatness without ostentation, the dust of a man who denied the temptations of power as few other men in history have done. A man who desired from his fellow men not awe, not obedience, but love.”
James Thomas Flexner, George Washington
“He came expectant, with the pleasurable anticipation of disaster, and he was not disappointed.”
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale
“He said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper.”
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives Tale
Hitler “had no friends, no close confidants. It was, after all, difficult to be on familiar terms with a deity.”
Thomas Childers, The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
“Only weaklings cannot tolerate criticism.”
Thomas Childers, The Third Reich
“Every profession has its growing arsenal of jargon to fire at the layman and hurl him back from its walls.”
William Zinsser, On Writing Well
“The fact that the irresistible tidal forces in history are moral forces always escapes a man of dim moral perceptions.”
Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2: A House Dividing, 1852-1857
“He was ignorant, narrow-minded, fanatically prejudiced on many issues, highly tenacious, a thoroughly selfish egotist, ready to commit acts that others would term unscrupulous and to justify them by devious psychological processes, and a man with a vein of hard cruelty.”
Allan Nevins on John Brown, in Ordeal of the Union, Volume 2
“Many people hate to be disillusioned. They are frightened when cherished beliefs are taken from them. Naivete of this sort makes people vulnerable to quacks, to confidence men, to political tricksters, and to anybody who offers them shiny promises.”
Horace Coon, Speak Better—Write Better English
“We want gross miracles and miss the thousand daily wonders that lie all about us. We have forgotten how and where to look.”
The Journal of Samuel Martin
“It is from our wounds that our compassion flows. One cannot claim compassion and feel no pain.”
M.C. Richards, The Crossing Point
“All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming.”
Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
“Do you have hope for the future?
Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was”
David Ray, “Thanks, Robert Frost”
President Joe Biden announced last week that he will seek a second term. For some, the power of the presidency is irresistible. Almost no one walks away voluntarily from seeking a second term. Lyndon Johnson was the last man who did in 1968, but only after Vietnam and domestic unrest combined to nearly destroy his presidency. And he was swept into office in one of the greatest landslides in history just four years earlier.
Item: Books, or A Case of Serendipity: I recently bought a copy of T.J. Stiles’s 2015 book, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History. As I was putting it on the appropriate shelf in my office, I noticed immediately beside it my copy of Evan Connell’s 1984 best-seller on Custer, Son of the Morning Star, which has been hailed as a masterpiece. I remember buying the book as an undergraduate at UGA just getting interested in history. Why had I never read it? And who was Evan Connell? I remember reading articles in the mainstream media (like Time magazine) about how this unusual book and author surprisingly took the literary world by storm that year. I did the usual Google searches on Connell and found myself fascinated by what I discovered. Suffice it to say, Connell is considered a writer’s writer, at home in nearly every genre, from fiction, essays, and short stories, to history, biography, and poetry. The contemporary of Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, and John Updike labored in comparatively undeserved obscurity, but hiding in plain sight was part of his deliberate brand. Connell, who died in 2013 at age 88, was a lifelong unmarried loner, the opposite of a self-promoter, who hated publicity and never courted the spotlight. He granted few interviews (none on camera) and if there’s a picture out there anywhere of him smiling, I’ve never seen it. He never did public readings of his work, never spoke publicly about his writing, never taught classes about writing or literature. He lived in the Bay Area much of adult life, spent some time in local watering holes, and formed few permanent attachments. He 
died alone in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And yet his novels reveal a remarkably penetrating insight into human relationships that are astonishing for someone who seemed to spend most of his life shunning them. His 1959 novel Mrs. Bridge (a National Book Award finalist) was praised as a masterpiece of spare, lean, concise story-telling, with not a spare word in it, as was his 1969 follow-up, Mr. Bridge. I bought and devoured them both and wished for more. I finally also read Son of the Morning Star (published by then-little-known North Point Press in Berkeley, now owned by FSG) and found it beautifully written and moving as well. The New York Times called it “impressive in its massive presentation of information” and added that “its prose is elegant, its tone the voice of dry wit, its meandering narrative skillfully crafted.” The Washington Post said it “leaves the reader astonished,” and the Wall Street Journal called it “a scintillating book, thoroughly researched and brilliantly constructed.” I can confirm that all of this is true. Happily, for people like me who are fascinated by him, there’s a new literary biography of Connell out by Steve Paul, Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, published in 2021 by the University of Missouri Press. And so, through the serendipity of shelving one book, Evan Connell is now on my list as a favored author whose writings I plan to work through patiently and in their entirety, one bite at a time. I’ll be spending considerable time with him in the coming years. If you love the power of words, I invite you also to get to know this talented, mysterious man in the only way we can—through his writing.
Item: Currently Reading: The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope (originally published in 1867), the final volume (of 6) in the Barsetshire series that begins with The Warden (1855) then continues with Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), and The Small House at Allington (1864), chronicling the always interesting goings-on in the fictional county of Barsetshire and its cathedral town of Barchester during the height of the Victorian Era. The county is peopled with delightful almost-living characters like The Rev. Mr. Quiverful, Mrs. Proudie, Sir Omicron Pie, Dr. Fillgrave, Sir Abraham Haphazard, Sir Raffle Buffle, and many, many others. The series is beloved by Trollope fans, who are legion, ranging from actor Alex Guinness (Obi-Wan Kenobi), who never travelled without a Trollope novel, to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, to author Sue Grafton. It’s taken me 14 years to read the series, not because the books are hard to read—just the opposite; one critic said they’re like eating peanuts, hard to stop—but because I let too many years elapse between volumes. After this, it’s on to Trollope’s 6-volume Palliser series, which I hope to finish in half the time. Maybe I’ll read those straight through? At any rate, Trollope is also one of my favorite authors, not only for his wonderful books but because of how he wrote them. He famously kept to a disciplined schedule, putting in 3 hours at his writing desk every day before going to his real job at the Post Office, where he is credited with introducing the ubiquitous red pillar mailbox to the United Kingdom (seen here). His literary output was prodigious by any standards: 47 novels, 42 short stories, 5 travel books, 2 works of non-fiction, and an auto-biography. I intend to read them all.