At a cold, wide spot in the road

The mercury's dropping tonight and most Southerners I know hate the cold.  We're starting school later, turning on space-heaters, taping shut doors and doing every last thing we can think of to avoid exposure to frost.   Well, some Southerners can't handle cold.  We can tolerate endless heat, corrupt politicians and bad manners from visiting outsiders but our homes and our lives aren't made for frigid temps and sub-zero windchills.  So we check our weather apps and complain about the artic blasts because most Southerns prefer not to suffer in silence.   For cold tolerance and stoic behavior you have to travel to the plains where I grew up.   Kansans have made an art form out of endurance.   Maybe that's why William Inge's prairie characters work so well in his plays, especially "Bus Stop".  These folk know how to deal with a cold, dark night.

If you've seen the movie Bus Stop (and if you haven't, don't bother) you may think this is another Marilyn Monroe vehicle but the play is not.  Bus Stop is really about feeling cold and lonely  and there are few places as cold and lonely at a diner in the middle of Kansas.  Some of the characters wear their loneliness like a uniform and they accept it as part of their being.   To others, it's an ache they want to ease or medicate with booze.  All of the characters in Bus Stop are familiar with isolation, from the grass-widowhood of Grace, to Bo's orphaned life on his ranch and all of these unattached people seek love as an antidote for their solitude.

But love is a questionable entity as the characters in Bus Stop understand it.  The much-used Cherie wonders if, "You hear all about love when you are a kid and just take it for granted that such a thing really exists.  Maybe you have to find out for yourself it doesn't."  Dr. Lyman comments, "How defiantly we pursue love, like it was an inheritance due" but he points out that love requires a person to think of someone besides him or herself and many don't have that ability.  During the stay in the diner, each of the characters in Bus Stop learns whether he or she has the ability and chance to be that generous and not all of them do.  Nevertheless, it is clear they are loved as characters.  The playwright gives each of them a resolution that fits.

So when you're on the road some night, in a place that progress forgot, try stopping at the local diner.  Fast-foods franchises can't qualify as diners and the menu must include pie.  Chances are you'll like the waitress and if she smiles it's because she means it; if she doesn't, she'll still try to give you decent service.   The prices will be reasonable and if the food's not on a heart-healthy diet, it will satisfy your hunger and warm you.  If you're out on your own, it will still be all right because you won't be completely alone. And that's good to know when you're living life in a wide, cold spot in the road.

A story closer to home

I'm usually a lukewarm John Grisham fan.  I was a youngish paralegal when he hit it big with The Firm, but I found too many holes in the next few legal thrillers to enjoy them much.  I'm too much of a southern girl not to love A Time to Kill and I like some of his non-legal stories.   I love what he did for the Oxford American.  All in all, you could say there are writers I usually like more but that's not true today. Today, I found out about Gray Mountain and this evening, I read the book.   I had to because this Grisham thriller touches a field close to home.   This is his book about coal.

For those who don't know, coal generates a lot of the USA's electricity.  Right now, it supplies about thirty-nine percent, more than any other single source, and that's way down from what it used to be.  Coal mining is a big, tough industry and it has a huge impact where I live.  People have jobs and incomes  here that they probably wouldn't have except for coal.  On the other hand, the toll mining takes on a human body is scary.  Even with safety precautions, mining is a dangerous, physically demanding job and the people who do this work for years sometimes get injured badly.   It's not unusual for a miner, still in his prime, to have undergone multiple surgical procedures for torn shoulder injuries, messed up knees or bulging discs in his neck or back.  Some miners also end up with a lung disease that comes from exposure to coal mine dust. The dust settles into their lungs and creates scars that impair their breathing.  The disease, known as Black Lung, often doesn't appear until after the miner has retired and there's no cure or effective treatment for it, short of a lung transplant.  I know this because I work with folks that help eligible miners receive benefits.

Grisham writes about the coal dust in Grey Mountain and what it does to the miners and their families.  He also writes about the environmental problems caused by mining and some high-risk litigation adventures but his best passages, as always, are about working for "real people".  These are the people at the center of every lawsuit, some good, some bad, but usually all overwhelmed souls.   They don't trust anyone completely, including their own counsel, but they need help so they feel their way along, hoping it will come out all right, a thing they and their attorney know doesn't always happen.  In turn, their attorneys try to do the best they can for the clients, spent more time worrying than they like to admit and work for less money than most of them expected back in law school.   It's the life of a plaintiff's attorney and that's what Grisham knows best.
 
There's the usual plot of the youthful, in-over-the-head lawyer who gets to see some unexpected sides of the law and if the critics complain about that part of Grisham's formula,  well, it still sells books.   But if you read Gray Mountain, keep an eye on the background, on the small-town folks who (as George Bailey said) do most of the living and dying in the Appalachian Mountains.  They're the real heroes of this book and they sell their lives to mine coal.

An original voice: I Capture the Castle.

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."  So begins seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.  You've got to admit that's an interesting opening line.  Only eight words and  you know something unusual must be going on because who sits in a sink to write?

Well, Cassandra does and she has a good reason to since that position catches the last of the daylight.  The Mortmain family doesn't have electricity.  They're a 1930's family living in a medieval castle and they use lamps and candles after sunset.  If they sound romantic and eccentric, I Capture the Castle suggests that normalcy may be something only  people with an income can afford. The Mortmains might still be eccentric under regular circumstances but right now they're too poor to be normal.

Once Mr. Mortmain wrote a successful book and their income was such that eccentricity was more acceptable but that was before his leviathan-sized writer's block moved in.  Since then the family has been making do on his ever-decreasing royalties, the money his second wife brings in from artist modeling jobs and what the family gets from selling the castle's furnishings.  (Not really their property).  It is obvious to Cassandra and her elder sister, Rose, that they must shore up the family income.  So they decide Cassandra will teach herself to write novels and Rose must marry a rich husband.

If that sounds a trifle Jane Austenish, well it should; the alternatives for a grown woman to earn an lving in England had improved some between the early 1800's and 1900's but in both eras most women made their futures through marriage. Rose's wish for a suitable suitor is granted but there is where the troubles really begin.

Dodie Smith talks about the relative meanings of wealth in this book as well as distractions, creativity and, of course, the question of love.  She does it all through the original voice of Cassandra Mortmain, that precocious child with breezy descriptive powers and acute insight into people.  Through Cassandra we see the characters of ICTC move into realized dimensions: the father, embittered by years of frustration and despair; the bohemian stepmother whose care for a husband, a family and herself is creating a wall of exhaustion; the love-lorn stable boy is there, as well at the desperate girls and then the set of brothers who may make or ruin the fortunes of this family.  None of them are good or evil, just caught in circumstances beyond their control. 

The book is loaded with as much charm as you should expect from the woman who created A Hundred and One Dalmatians but don't expect any split-haired villainess or talking family of pets to take over the scene.  There are the Mortmains, the people they care about and an English summer.  That is all the charm any reader needs. 

When the backstory is even better.

In May of 1959, a musical opened on Broadway that became an landmark show.  With "Gypsy", Styne, Sondheim and Laurents created a terrific play with songs that have become standards and a role actresses fight to play like actors fight to portray King Lear.  The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee which were, according to her sister, pretty loose with the truth already.   What people see on the stage is a compelling, entertaining, occasionally disturbing story of show business and family.  Karen Abbott researched the lives of Miss Lee, her sister, June Havoc and their mother Rose Thompson Hovick for her book, American Rose and showed that the musical barely scratched the surface.

If survivors are worthy subjects of study, then college courses should be dedicated to the Hovick sisters.  Their very identities are a mystery.  They were born in the northwest during the first years of the twentieth century's second decade but their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick  forged so many birth certificates with different birth dates and names that neither woman could be sure of those details later on in life.  What their mother was sure of was her vision: both of her girls should be on stage, with the youngest in the spotlight.  Pushed, coached and pilfered for by Mama, both girls were professional performers before either of them turned five.

It is not surprising that June and Gypsy had difficult childhood.  Besides the chaos that comes from living on the road, they grew up with the stress of being the family bread-winners, particularly June.  And, even though they were raised by the stage mother from hell, Gypsy and June had limited futures as child performers.  First, despite coaching and her own hard work, the elder girl did not have the talent of her younger sister.  June was a gifted dancer and star of the family act, on and off stage.  Also, the girls went to work during the final years of vaudeville, where groups of entertainers performed live in local theaters.   As films replaced vaudeville, those entertainers either drifted to the coasts in search of work or got out of the business.  Finally, time was not on their side.  Every day the Hovick girls spent on the circuit as child performers was one day less of the time they had as cute little girls.  Eventually they would become adults and want lives of their own.  When they did, the conflicts got worse.

The girls had many things in common.  First and always was their mother, who saw everyone as either someone she could manipulate or an enemy she had to vanquish.  With Mama came a host of secrets and the sisters learned to work together to avoid  the woman, keep her secrets and minimize her attempts at blackmail or murder.  (At least two questionable deaths are tied to Madame Rose, a hotel proprietor when June was about 13 and in 1937 a woman named Ginny Augustin who boarded with Rose.)  Second, they both had great intelligence and drive.  Neither Gypsy nor June had any formal education to speak of but both became well-read, self-educated women as well as acclaimed entertainers, published writers and shrewd business women.  They also had each other, although that wasn't easy.  Because of their mother's clear favoritism, the girls were competitors as well as allies and neither could let that contest go: Gypsy, because she had been belittled and shunted aside in favor of her sister and June because her hard work and drive in the theatre were usually overshadowed by Gypsy's claim to fame as a stripper.  Yet, they could depend on each other.  When June was opening in the musical, "Pal Joey", she turned to Gypsy to help pull her costumes together and Gypsy dropped everything to help.   Then Gypsy sat in the opening-night audience and cried so hard, she stopped her sister's show.  In turn, June  threatened the production of Gypsy with litigation white it was still in development until part of the musical was rewritten in her favor. 

Karen Abbott trace the history of the Minksy brothers in this book, those famous burlesque producers that helped make Gypsy Rose Lee a legend, and included interviews with the late June Havoc and Gypsy's son, Eric Preminger in her research but the book's ultimate focus is the incredible Gypsy Rose Lee.  In many ways, Gypsy is a harbinger in American entertainment, always reinventing and representing herself and her act.  As a promoter, she eclipses Madonna and Lady Gaga and leaves Jayne Mansfield in the dust.   Other performers incorporate sex into their act to get attention; Gypsy went the other way, using comic timing  and intelligence to turn her strip act into a career where she kept her clothes on.  She and her sister started in one century and hung around long enough to become part of American Theatrical History.  Not bad for two little girls with drive and a cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs Mama.


I've had the pleasure of reading Erik Peminger's memoir My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage With Gypsy Rose Lee as well as June Havoc's Early Havoc and More Havoc .  I recommend them all if you are interested in learning more about these fascinating sisters. 

What do you say about a classic?

There's a shiver I get when I first pick up certain books.  Reading is almost an autonomic function for me and nothing is more inviting than the site of a new, fat book but every so often I will pick up a book, read a few pages and get the "Aha" kind of shiver.   It's a reflex of recognition, when my eyes fix on some indefinable thing that says this book is really something special.  This is one of those books that seems to walk and talk under its own power and will become a beloved friend.  This book will transcend its time and be loved by people for centuries.  This one is a classic.  Other people have already awarded that title to The Bridge to Terabithia but I didn't know that until I picked up the book.   The shiver told me everything.

For one thing, it's so universal.  Every kid that ever went to school has lived in one of two camps.  Either you have been the new kid in class, like Leslie Burke or you are Jess Aarons, who has never been the new kid.  Either status has its own brand of hell.  The new kid is supposed to move from the spotlight of introduction and meld seamlessly into a group of strangers who aren't exactly welcoming.  It's like trying to tap dance with a load of dynamite in your arms: any missed step brings disaster.  On the other hand, the established kids have reason to fear this unwilling stranger.  It's hard enough to find your own place in the class pecking order without some new kid waltzing in to take your place as the best singer or math whiz kid or fastest runner in class.  Why make friends with a jerk like that?   Still, that's what Leslie and Jess do once these two opposites meet.  The rural boy and the girl with well-off writers for parents find common ground and develop the kind of friendship every lonely person needs to get through childhood.

Friendship is the central theme and gift of Terabithia; how caring for each other improves us in ways we could not master on our own.  By himself, Jess is a boy who can't see his family members, his classmates or anyone else as an individual with personal burdens and sorrows. In all fairness, no one else seems to see Jess either, except for a kind-hearted music teacher.  Leslie's friendship changes everything in Jess's life.  Suddenly there is someone to plot and plan with, someone who understands and values him. With Leslie's perspective to guide him, Jess sees the world differently.  The entire planet becomes a bigger, better place where Jess learns to master his fears.  All of this is threatened when their friendship ends prematurely.

I understand many parents have a problem with Terabithia because it deals with one of the saddest, most terrifying issues anyone has to face.  Some parents even fight to take this book off the shelves for that reason.  I understand their concern but I can't agree with them. Because Katharine Paterson captured the pain and conflicted, surrealistic stages of early grief in this book, The Bridge to Terabithia should be read by children, hopefully before they face such an event and those feelings on their own.  Grief is a difficult process and death a fearful event.  Terabithia eases some of the fear associated with these as it teaches that friendship has a way of improving a person even after the friendship has ended.

That's the final miracle of first friendships, how they open us up to new people who will care about us in the future.  It prepares a bridge, like the one to Terabithia, that we cross as we recognize the connection that turns a stranger becomes a friend.  It's almost an electrical impulse, this shock of recognition.  Like the shiver when you first read a classic.

I want a Year in Provence

Ok it's January, cold, bleak and raining.   The decorations have been packed away, the weight from party nibbles has been packed on and I'm uncomfortably aware of  the low balance in the checking account and the high one on the credit card.  I don't want to sound ungrateful after all of these winter festivities but I think I need a vacation.   I want to go someplace warm where life's pace moves with the seasons and nothing moves too fast.  Someplace where living well is more than the best revenge.  Oh heck, I want A Year in Provence.

A Year in Provence is one of those miracles that hit the publishing business about twenty years ago.  Picture this: British author and advertising executive, Peter Mayle, accumulates enough money to retire early and move into an old, stone, farm house in the South of France.  Living there, he finds, is both less relaxing and more fun than he ever anticipated.  He writes an account of the strange and wonderful things he finds there (under the heading of strange include a neighbor who expects him to cook a fox; the expert who teaches him how to handicap a goat race; the winter gales that are cited as an affirmative defense in criminal cases and most of his visitors from England. Wonderful things include the light, every meal, every glass of wine, his wife's patient optimism and the way everything seems to work out though never as expected).   The book is published and becomes an international best seller.   The poor man now has more money than God but  no privacy because of all the tourists and book groupies beating a path to his door.  He has to move to New York for some peace of mind.  (Irony was created for situations like this.)

The thing is, A Year In Provence is about how to enjoy life as well as where to enjoy it.   Mayle moved to France and, until the tsunami of popularity hit, enjoyed every minute there, even with frozen plumbing and a construction crew that demolished his kitchen in a day but took a year to rebuild it.  Yes, he got frustrated on occasion but nothing was worth staying angry about.  When the local butcher gave him an unrequested lecture on how to cook Pebronata, Mayle didn't tap his watch and get impatient; he relaxed and enjoyed the butcher's performance.  When a rug or wine salesman tried to interest him in a pricy product, Mayle understands a salesman's job depends on getting the customer to spend handsomely and the final choice to buy is his.  He even learns to relax about the house improvements that take a year to complete.  It will get done eventually and getting angry does nothing except raise the victim's blood pressure.

As I said, I could use a vacation and when this column is finished, I'll travel to the Luberon, if only in my mind.  The temperature will be warm, the roads dusty and the light will explain why Impressionists painted outdoors.  I'll stop at one of the little roadside cafes and park my espadrilles under some quiet table where I can watch the old men playing at boules.   The waiter will pour a glass of the  vin ordinaire and serve the bread and tapenade that goes to each customer while I consider the menu.   Am I cold?  Am I tired?  Don't be ridiculous.   I'm on holiday, lost somewhere in Provence.

How to Sum up the Year: Just an Ordinary Day

I've thought a lot about this entry because it falls on a calendar date of some significance.  Of course, calendar holidays aren't usually the ones that make big dents in our memories (unless we're talking about bicycle gifts for holidays or a wedding celebrated on Valentines).   The days you hold on to, good and bad, aren't marked on someone else's calendar.  And of all of the marked days, New Year's Eve isn't anticipated by loads of people outside of the liquor business.  Still, it has significance and so does the book, Just an Ordinary Day despite it's title, because its author was no ordinary writer.

Just an Ordinary Day is a selection of stories written by Shirley Jackson.   Some of these are previously unpublished stories that seem to go back to her college years and the final one was published three years after she died.  She created a lot of material between those two events that fall into several different genres.  There are the psychologically disturbing stories that made her famous, the domestic ones that made her loved and several tales that resist categorization of any type.  As a guess, I suspect Ms. Jackson would like that.  Her stories tended to show the dichotomies of life.

For example, take the title story of the volume, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts."  The central figure, a Mr. Johnson spends his day doing good deeds everywhere.   He smiles at people, looks after children and shares his peanuts and money.  He turns strangers into friends, helps the poor and directs the lost.  No apparent reason, no motivation.  He's just a very kind, generous man.  At the end of the day he sees his wife, a smiling comfortable woman who reports on her day.  She accused an innocent person of shoplifting, sent three dogs to the pound and probably got a bus driver fired.  Is Mr. Johnson angry at his wife's behavior?  Here's what follows:

"Fine said Mr. Johnson. "But you do look tired.  Want to change tomorrow?"

"I would like to," she said.  "I could do with a change."

 In other words neither one of them is, by nature, good or bad.  Good and evil are behavior choices people make and the results of those choices make up the yin and yang of our lives.  Life isn't one thing or another, it's a bunch of things all mixed up together and so are most people.  Just like no ordinary day is really ordinary.

Think about it.  What was your yesterday like?  Was it good?  Bad?   Let's say it was an ordinary day for you.   But yesterday (odds are) someone fell in love and somebody got married.   Other people fell out of love and someone got divorced.  A baby was born that was wanted.  Another unwanted one was too and we can only hope those parents change their minds.   Someone old died.  Someone young died.   Someone took their first step.  Someone probably took their last one.  It all happened yesterday, during your ordinary day.  A day that wasn't ordinary at all.

That's a bit far afield from Shirley Jackson except her stories make a person comfortable with profound thoughts.  Those stories had the habit of standing some ordinary convention on its head so the reader could look at it in a different way.  If the reader didn't like what he or she saw,  well, maybe the convention needed rethinking or the reader could shut the book.  What he couldn't do again was accept the convention at face value.

So think about your last year with all of its calendared holidays and non-holidays with singular memories.  If you want, read some Shirley Jackson stories and remember life is varied and convention is seldom as it seems.  Share your peanuts or don't but remember if you get tired of who and what you are, you are free to change tomorrow.

A favorite son and one loud-mouthed little girl: Addie Pray

Birmingham, Alabama has a favorite son and I'll bet they've forgotten his name.  He was an editor and minister's son, a foreign correspondence that parachuted into Normandy during World War II and a novelist.   Of all things, Joe David Brown was a very good novelist who invented a great loud-mouthed little girl.  Her name was Addie Pray.

Does that child's name ring a bell?  Probably not if you're less an 45 and that is your misfortune,  Miss Addie Pray is a pragmatic girl with a will of her own.  Book critics have called her a cross between Huck Finn and Scout Finch and they're just scratching the surface.  Add that she shares the indomitable will of True Grit's Mattie Ross and the picture becomes clearer.  Of course she can steal your heart but that's to be expected.   Addie Pray is a trickster, a confidence kid and the heroine of Paper Moon.

Let me backtrack a minute.  During the Depression (before he parachuted into Normandy and won a chestful of medals) Joe David Brown was a reporter for the Birmingham News.  A police reporter, specifically.   Part of his beat took him down among those guests of the county who were awaiting arraignment or trial.   And he learned about confidence games.

A good confidence game rarely separates the victim from all of his money, just enough to keep the confidence man in business and the victim a little more watchful in the future.   Joe David Brown learned how con men audited the obituary columns and then showed up at the doors of bereaved widows, brandishing a cheap bible and a story about how the deceased had ordered it for her.  The widow is transported to hear of her late husband's thoughtfulness and insists on paying a handsome fee for it.  The con man gets away with a bulky profit.

Or the con artist could make a killing selling fictitious crops to a dealer with a handful of the dealer's tags and some "samples" he found blowing down the street.  (Anyone who has ever been in a cotton town during harvest will tell you small bolls escape from the truckloads of picked cotton and lay in the gutter looking like handfuls of dirty snow.  Clean up some of that gutter cotton up, blow off the dust and put it in a paper cone and you have yourself some decent samples.)  Joe David Brown heard all of the stories of obtaining unearned wages and he remembered them.  After winning his medals and serving as a foreign correspondence he decided to write one more book about Alabama.  The result was Addie Pray.

Addie is the daughter of Essie May Loggins, the wildest girl in Marengo County.  When Essie dies unexpectedly, Addie's informally  adopted by "Long Boy" (Moses) Pray, a friend of her mom who finally realizes how the presence of "a little daughter" can help whenever he's trying to look innocent in front of a mark or a judge.  Between "doing business" (their term from running a con game) and staying ahead of the authorities, they do pretty well traveling around Alabama  during the Depression.  You could say they kept the money in circulation.

This tale might sound a bit familiar.  Two years after Mr. Brown published Addie Pray, a film director named Peter Bogdonavitch turned it into a movie called "Paper Moon" that did a fair amount of business, enough to get Mr. Brown to republish his book with the new title.  Mr. Brown died shortly afterwards so there were no further adventures of Addie Pray. It's a shame; you knew that young lady had more tales to tell.

The book is a delight, especially if you live in Alabama.  There are enough local spots mentioned that you can map out the adventures of Addie and Long Boy without any problems.  But Addie appeals to more than local pride.  She is a scallawag, a survivor, a fan of Franklin Roosevelt and a good heart who can pick out a mark at 30 paces. She's one of a kind and I want to be just like her when I grow up.

A spell-binding voice of uncertain truth: Lillian Hellman

I'm a big believer in role models.  While we are growing up, we emulate the behavior of those we admire, hoping we'll be admirable too.  Eventually we sort our our own priorities and personalities but until then, it helps to have someone to follow.  Given all that, I probably could have picked a better person to imitate than Lillian Hellman.  For one thing, Lillian Hellman was a professional dramatist and I don't like her plays.  As dramatic vehicles they are "theatrical" pieces where characters quiver, thunder or plot but rarely come to any realizations and the plays are aging as well as my old Earth Shoes.  In other words, not.  So Lillian's plays are out.  Her integrity was attacked often and well, most notably when Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie—including 'and' and 'the.'"  Those who tracked down the details suggest there's some exaggeration in Miss Mary's statement but not enough to acquit Miss Lillian.  So she wasn't a good example there either. Nevertheless, I was looking for a unique voice and shimmering images of words when I found Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman.  One role model, made to order.

An Unfinished Woman was popular around the time I started looking for complex characters.  Like many adolescents, I believed that  unhappiness and ambiguity suggested a more developed, subtle mind and I wanted to become a complex, challenging woman.  I found my heroine in Miss Hellman, a woman who rarely suffered fools and never took the easy way out of a difficult situation.  I overlooked the extra pain she brought to herself and her friends because of the brave way she sailed into each disaster.

If we stick to verifiable facts, it is clear that Lillian was "a difficult child who grew into a difficult woman."  Smart, insecure and argumentative, she recognized the virtues and failings of her charming, faithless father, his shy, dominated wife from Alabama and the segregated South she was raised in.  Observant and merciless, Lillian could also be a gigantic pain but there's something interesting about a person who never chooses the comfortable, easy roads in life and on that scale Lillian Hellman is interesting.  She rejected the triple play of  childhood-to-marriage-to-motherhood that most American women of her generation repeated.  She carved out a place for herself in a notoriously difficult industry.  She also found politics and unerringly sided with whoever antagonized the most people in power.  If the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee didn't trust her judgment, at least two friends did.  Both Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker trusted this woman's angry judgment enough to make her their literary executor. If she made mistakes discharging those duties, (and there are those who suggest she made many) the errors were made in favor of guarding the privacy of her dead friends not enriching herself.   In those ways she could be seen as  trustworthy.

Eventually I read An Unfinished Woman as a memoir instead of a manifesto or guidebook and I've never developed Ms. Hellman's tension or work ethic.  To tell you the truth, I don't want to be that angry. I still admire her uncompromising battle with life and I appreciate her illuminating prose.  I just choose which battles I fight.  Which, come to think of it, is exactly what she did.

When a book turns your world around

I still remember the first day I saw it, upright in a metal paperback stand in my English teacher's class.  Because I recognized the author's name, it took me a week or two before I asked about the paperback; I was already a dweeb to the other students and I didn't need that image underscored by carrying around this book.  The teacher probably guessed I was interested but he played it cool saying the books in the rack were for borrowing as long as we wanted to keep them and didn't say a word about the author.  That's all it took.  One reading lead to another and another until I had to replace the disintegrating paperback.  I've read a lot of books that achieved a new point in literature but few things have amazed me as much as Woody' Guthrie's Bound for Glory.

Before I picked up this autobiography, my thoughts of Mr. Guthrie were tagged to grade-school sing-alongs of "Roll On Columbia" or "This Land is Your Land."   I appreciated the simple lyrics and catchy melodies but I really didn't know anything about the man other than he was from Oklahoma, like my dad's family.  His autobiography was a revelation.

First, there was his writing style. Woody's formal education ended before high school and although he read everything he could find, public libraries weren't as common or stocked as they are now.  You would expect his prose style would either be hideously limited or an imitation of what he read in "important" books.  It's neither.  Although Woody keeps the optimistic low-key vernacular found in his song lyrics, his sentences have an immediacy and drive that put the reader dead center in every scene. There are a lot of professional writers who can't write this well or this way.  Woody tells the story of his life as if each scene is happening in front of his eyes and that's how you see it too, partly because he doesn't pull any punches about what he sees.

The second thing is his emotional honesty.  Woody writes like his priority is to tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts.  As an adolescent, he watched his mother's mental and physical deterioration from what would later be diagnosed as Huntington's Chorea (the disease that eventually killed him.)  He describes her slide into insanity in these unforgettable lines:

'She would be alright for awhile, and treat us kids as good as any mother, and all at once it would start in something bad and awful something would start coming over her, and it would come by slow degrees. Her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show. Spit would run out of her mouth and she would start out in a low grumbling voice and gradually get to talking as loud as her throat could stand it; and her arms would draw up at her sides, then behind her back and swing in all kinds of curves. Her stomach would draw up into a hard ball, and she would double over Into a terrible-looking hunch and turn into another person, it looked like, standing right there before Roy and me.

I hate a hundred times more to describe my own mother in any such words as these.  You hate to read about a mother described in any such words as these.  I know. I understand you.  I hope you can understand me, for it must be broke down and said.

Woody doesn't spare words in Bound for Glory, on himself or anyone else.  This is his life, the way he saw it.  That level of integrity, despite the pain, moves me.  It makes me want to tell the truth.

When other people sing the phrase "Bound for Glory" their emphasis is on the last word, as if they're saying, "I'm going to be star."  I would say becoming a star was the last thing on  Woody Guthrie's mind.  He walked out on auditions, played for no money and always managed to irritate the right people.  Instead, Woody's emphasis was on the first word in his title not the last.  He was headed in the right direction, on his way and the journey was more important than the destination.  As long as the train was still moving, Woody Guthrie was on it and searching for a better place.  In the meantime, he left us behind, sadder for his absence but more articulate because of his words.

So Long, it's been Good to Know You

So Long, it's been Good to Know You

So Long, it's been Good to Know You

It's a long time since I've been home

And I've got to be drifting along.