William Maxwell, novelist, editor, born 102 years ago

Today is the birthday of William Keepers Maxwell Jr. (1908–2000). Author of six novels and scores of short stories, he wrote his first story at 24 and continued to write and publish into his 91st year. A legendary editor at The New Yorker for more than forty years, Maxwell shaped the work and careers of writers who defined the literature of the second half of the twentieth century: Harold Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazzard, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, and the three Johns—Cheever, O’Hara, and Updike. In two volumes The Library of America has collected all six of his novels, 27 of his stories, several essays, and 40 of what Maxwell called “improvisations,” or literary fairy tales.

Maxwell moved from small-town Illinois to New York City when he was 25, but much of his fiction recreates his childhood world: “I had no idea then," he later wrote, "that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The look of things. The Natural History of home . . . All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story.”

As volume editor Christopher Carduff put it in one of his two LOA interviews about Maxwell, “I think Maxwell, in reaction against Spoon River and Winesburg and Zenith, wanted to bring fiction-readers the good and surprising news that one could be born, raised, and buried in a town like Lincoln, Illinois, and yet be happy and fulfilled and receptive to the best that life has to offer.”

When he was ten Maxwell’s mother died from the influenza epidemic of 1918 and this traumatic event governs the action in two of his most acclaimed novels: They Came Like Swallows and So Long, See You Tomorrow. Recalling the experience of reading So Long, See You Tomorrow (and then wanting to read “every short story I could find”) Alice Munro wrote, “I thought: so this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written.”

In May 1945 Maxwell married Emily Gilman Noyes, a woman thirteen years his junior he had met eight months earlier when she interviewed for a job at The New Yorker. They deferred their honeymoon until 1948, and their four-month tour of Europe became the basis for Maxwell’s fifth novel, The Château:

I walked into our house on a country road forty miles north of New York City, put the suitcases down, and with my hat still on my head sat down to my typewriter and wrote a page of notes for a novel. I thumbtacked it to the bookcase behind me and didn’t look at it again. For the next ten years I lived in my own private France, which I tried painstakingly to make real to the reader. It was my way of not coming home.

Interweaving travelogue and history, The Château follows the adventures of a thinly disguised couple as they tour postwar France, much of the drama drawn from the Maxwells’ own late summer stay with a family in Blois. Their experiences frequently diverge from what the guidebooks promise:

He yawned. The guidebook slipped through his fingers and joined the pocket dictionary on the rug. After a minute or two he got up and stood at the window. The heavy shutters opened in, and the blackout paper was crinkled and torn and beginning to come loose. Three years after the liberation of France it was still there. No one in a burst of happiness and confidence in the future had ripped it off. Germans, he thought, standing where he stood now, with their elbows on the sill. Looking off toward the river that was there but could not be seen. Lathering their cheeks before the shaving stand . . . Did Mme Bonenfant and Mme Viénot eat with their unwelcome guests, or in the kitchen, or where?

Summing up Maxwell’s achievement in his review of the two Library of America volumes in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote:

He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. In “Nearing Ninety,” he likened death to lying down for a pleasant afternoon nap and found “unbearable” only the thought that “when people are dead they don’t read books.” His shapely, lively, gently rigorous memoirs, out of the abundance of heartfelt writing he bestowed on posterity, are most like being with Bill in life, at lunch in midtown or at home in the East Eighties, as he intently listened, and listened, and then said, in his soft dry voice, exactly the right thing.

The LOA volumes include a detailed chronology written by Christopher Carduff which Updike singled out for praise: “[Carduff’s] twenty-nine pages labelled ‘Chronology’ approach the intimacy and interest of a full-length biography.”

Related LOA works: William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories; William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories

The Art of the Interview: Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Henry James

In a recent blog post for The American Scholar Bob Thompson shares the rules he developed—and the insights they unlocked—over his four years of writing about writers for The Washington Post. The most important rule he discovered when he interviewed Joan Didion in 2005:

Didion had just published The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the sudden death of her husband and the simultaneous, life-threatening illness of their only child. I had read the book in galleys and found it remarkable. “Are you going to talk to her?” an editor asked, and I quickly said yes. But I had not thought the assignment through. The real question, I soon realized, was what we were going to talk about. Here was a writer, after all, who had just put everything she knew about death and grief into print.

He formulated a plan to stick to questions about writing. “Talking about writing, we both managed to keep our composure for an hour and a half.” This became his Didion Rule: “When in doubt, ask writers about writing.” Thompson goes on to describe what applying this rule revealed in his discussions with Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Marilynne Robinson, Art Spiegelman, and, in the category of “toughest interviews,” Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth.

Roth started things off by imposing the Didion Rule preemptively: he said he would discuss only his writing and would answer no questions about his personal life. Fine. Yet in Roth’s case, this created a major hurdle, because, as his readers know, he is an exceptionally brazen alchemist of the personal into the fictional.

Thompson dramatized the hurdles Roth threw in his path in his account of the interview—and it worked. When he called Roth months later to interview him about winning the PEN/Faulkner award, Roth surprised him by saying, “I liked what you wrote.”

But the Didion Rule may sometimes yield more than an interviewer bargained for. Henry James notoriously gave only three interviews during his lifetime. The New York Times headlined his third and last interview in 1915, “Henry James’s First Interview,” perhaps because it was the only interview over which James exerted complete control. Having recently been made honorary chairman of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, James, at 71, had been busily writing impassioned letters, articles, and essays on behalf of the war effort. As part of this campaign he agreed to be interviewed in February by Preston Lockwood, a young Times correspondent. But he wasn’t happy with the result. As James’s secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, wrote in her Diary Notes:

H. J., finding that it wouldn’t do at all from his point of view, has spent the last four days re-dictating the interview to the young man, who is fortunately a good typist. . . . I think the idea of H.J. interviewing himself for four whole days is quite delightful. [from Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, by Pamela Thurschwell]

Knowing how closely James managed the account of the interview makes the following passage all the more remarkable:

Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color of his kindly eyes. Before taking in these physical facts one receives an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added: “Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?”

“Dash my fame!” he impatiently replied. “And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer shade still than the dash. * * * But what on earth are we talking about?”

To be fair, James agreed to the interview, which was conducted almost exactly a year before he died, because of his deep feelings about the important service the ambulance corps was providing in France as the German front moved closer to England. He anticipated the impact the war would have:

“. . . such things may any day begin to occur at the front as will make what we have up to now been able to do mere child’s play, though some of our help has been rendered when casualties were occurring at the rate, say, of 5,000 in twenty minutes, which ought, on the whole, to satisfy us. In face of such enormous facts of destruction—”

Here Mr. James broke off as if these facts were, in their horror, too many and too much for him. But after another moment he explained his pause.

“One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”

For the past four years The Library of America has been conducting its own exclusive interviews with the editors and authors of each new LOA collection. You can find interviews with John Ashbery on his Collected Poems 1956–1987, Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick (one for each volume), Pete Hamill on A. J. Liebling (one for each volume), J. D. McClatchy on Thornton Wilder, Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson, and many more in our interviews archive.

Related LOA works: Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (includes four pieces by Joan Didion); Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959–1995 (six volumes); Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers & English Writers

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne first meet 160 years ago

On an August day in 1850, one of the most momentous meetings in American literature occurred. During a picnic hike up Monument Mountain, near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville met for the first time. Hawthorne was 46, Melville fourteen years his junior. Publisher James T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the hike's organizer, Dudley Fields, brought Hawthorne. Editor Evert Duyckinck and writer Cornelius Mathews invited Melville.

David B. Kesterson on Hawthorne in Salem quotes Duyckinck’s colorful account of the hike, which occurred on Monday, August 5:

As we scrambled over the rocks at the summit . . . a black thunder cloud from the south dragged its ragged skirts towards us . . . They talked of shelter and shelter there proved to be though it looked unpromising . . . Dr. Holmes cut three branches for an umbrella and uncorked the champagne which was drunk from a silver mug . . . we scattered over the cliffs, Herman Melville to seat himself, the boldest of all, astride a projecting bow sprit of rock while little Dr. Holmes peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac. Hawthorne looked mildly about for the great Carbuncle . . . ." [Evert Duyckinck to his wife, Aug 6-Leyda, Melville Log, 384]

Hawthorne had reviewed Melville’s novel Typee favorably four years earlier (“The book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life.”). Within days of their meeting Melville wrote an exultant review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (a book published four year earlier): “. . . it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes & fascinates me.”

Melville quickly became a frequent visitor at Hawthorne’s home and in conversations that lasted deep into the night he and Hawthorne plumbed what Melville called “ontological heroics.” Hawthorne’s wife Sophia gives a vivid description of Melville in a letter to her mother shortly after their first meeting:

When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected, an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.

The younger novelist seemed to find in Hawthorne’s writings and companionship the inspiration he needed to recast his work in progress. When he published Moby-Dick in November, 1851, he dedicated it to Hawthorne. Sadly, by then their relationship appears to have mysteriously cooled. After the publication of Moby-Dick they would meet again only twice.

In a recent blog post Caleb Crain, author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation, muses on the Melville-Hawthorne relationship and on whether Melville’s elegiac poem, “Monody,” may have been written with Hawthorne in mind.

Related LOA works: Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick; American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (includes Melville’s poem “Monody”)

Charles Sherrod and Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, August 1964

The 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City was supposed to be a simple and straightforward coronation of Lyndon Johnson as the presidential candidate. However, it opened on August 22 with nationally televised hearings before the Credentials Committee of delegates from the rogue Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) demanding to be seated. The MFDP was challenging the legitimacy of the state’s official delegation, because the Mississippi Democratic Party excluded blacks from membership and because its platform called for a rejection of civil rights and a repudiation of the national Democratic platform. The dramatic testimony by MFDP delegates like Fannie Lou Hamer (Hulu video below, prefaced by an ad), a sharecropper who described being beaten and shot at simply for trying to register to vote, so galvanized the country and upset the administration that President Johnson interrupted televised coverage of the hearings by calling a presidential press conference.

As field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the organizations behind the creation of MFDP, Charles Sherrod was an eyewitness to the tense negotiations at the convention between MFDP and such national Democratic leaders as Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey. The MFDP’s proposed compromise of “proportional representation” was rejected and countered with a compromise offering non-voting seats to two members of the MFDP delegation. A heated debate ensued with many influential leaders, including Martin Luther King, recommending the compromise. Sherrod explains the MFDP’s final decision in “Mississippi at Atlantic City,” an excerpt from Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973:

Our society is famous for its buck-passing, white-washing tactics. That is one reason the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party could not accept the administration’s compromise. It was made to look like something and it was nothing. It was made to pacify the blacks in this country. It did not work. We refused to adopt a “victory.” We could have accepted the compromise, called it a victory and gone back to Mississippi, carried on the shoulders of millions of Negroes across the country as their champions. But we love the ideas of our country; they mean more than a moment of victory. We are what we are—hungry, beaten, unvictorious, jobless, homeless, but thankful to have the strength to fight. This is honesty, and we refuse to compromise here. It would have been a lie to accept that particular compromise. It would have said to blacks across the nation and the world that we share the power, and that is a lie!

Forty-six years later, in his January 2010 keynote address at “Fifty Years after the Sit-ins,” a conference at the University of Virginia School of Law, Charles Sherrod—husband of former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod—recollects Emmett Till, working on a chain gang, fear, and passing the torch. Joan Walsh recently posted an appreciation of Charles Sherrod’s civil rights career on Salon.

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963; Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963–1973 (includes Sherrod's "Mississippi at Atlantic City" and two profiles of Fannie Lou Hamer)

Henry David Thoreau: August 9, 1854: “ ‘Walden’ published.”

Henry David Thoreau published only two books during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (James Munroe and Company, 1849) and Walden, or, A Life in the Woods (Ticknor and Fields, 1854). Thoreau began A Week when he went to live at Walden Pond in 1845. Intended to be a memorial to his older brother John, who had died of lockjaw three years earlier, the book was based on a boat trip they had made together in 1839. On the website dedicated to the writings of Thoreau at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Elizabeth Witherell and Elizabeth Dubrulle describe how the creation of A Week ended up overlapping with Walden:

At Walden, Thoreau worked diligently on A Week, but he also explored Walden Woods and recorded his observations on nature in his Journal. He entertained visitors and made regular trips to town; friends and neighbors began to inquire about his life at the pond. What did he do all day? How did he make a living? Did he get lonely? What if he got sick? He began collecting material to write lectures for his curious townsmen, and he delivered two at the Concord Lyceum, on February 10 and 17, 1847. By the time he left the pond on September 6, 1847, he had combined his lectures on life at Walden with more notes from his journal to produce the first draft of a book which he hoped to publish shortly after A Week.

Unfortunately, A Week sold only two hundred copies during the first years after publication. In a Journal entry of October 28, 1853 (PDF) Thoreau describes receiving from the publisher “in a wagon” 706 copies of its printing of 1,000.

They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.

Thoreau would revise Walden seven times before it was published on August 9, 1854. His Journal entry for the historic day (PDF) is brief:

Aug. 9. Wednesday. —To Boston.
“Walden” published. Elder-berries. Waxwork yellowing.

His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson captures a less Stoic post-publication Thoreau in a letter to a friend: “He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectations.” Walden fared much better than A Week. By the end of the year 1,744 copies of the 2,000-copy first printing were sold and reviews were mostly favorable, even as far away as England. Reviewing Walden for The Westminster Review, George Eliot wrote “. . . we have a bit of pure American life (not the ‘go-ahead’ species, but its opposite pole), animated by that energetic, yet calm spirit of innovation, that practical as well as theoretic independence of formulae, which is peculiar to some of the finer American minds. . . . There is plenty of sturdy sense mingled with his unworldliness.”

Related LOA works: Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod; Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems

Flannery O'Connor: the writer vs. the believer

There’s a lively debate currently energizing the posts at Big Questions Online over whether a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1958 to a friend troubled about his faith—especially the lines “You don’t serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective. . . Your pain over its ineffectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God”—provides a persuasive counter-argument to the reasons Anne Rice gives in her recent public announcement on Facebook that she is “quitting Christianity.”

Many readers find it difficult to reconcile O’Connor’s devout Catholicism with the dark often horrific comedy of her fiction. Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: The Life of Flannery O’Connor, addressed the question in an exclusive 2009 interview with The Library of America:

LOA: Your biography closely chronicles what a devout Catholic O’Connor was: a daily communicant who enjoyed reading and discussing scholarly theological treatises. Yet she didn’t entirely discourage writers who took contrarian readings of her works. For instance, you recount her telling John Hawkes that she “liked very very much” his essay “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” in which he finds her “authorial attitude in itself in some measure diabolical . . . that is, ‘the disbelief that we breathe in with the air of the times’ emerges fully as two-sided or complex as the ‘attraction for the Holy.’” Was it her aim, do you think, to create works that could be interpreted in antithetical ways?

Gooch: O’Connor forever crossed wires in her life and work. Conan O’Brien wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on O’Connor. One night on The Charlie Rose Show he put the riddle succinctly: “You’d think it was this bitter old alcoholic who’s writing these really funny, dark stories. Then you find out that she’s a woman and that she’s devoutly religious. It’s the opposite of what you would expect.” She definitely designed her stories to be read in a world not as given as she to literal belief in God or the devil. Such a trick was not easy and took a while to develop. While at Iowa, she sought guidance from a local priest: how could a Catholic girl be writing about snarly types like Haze Motes, who calls on a town prostitute. The priest told her she didn’t need to write for 15-year-old girls. She slowly parlayed this advice into a more sophisticated apology, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas by way of Jacques Maritain: art is a habit of the practical rather than the moral intellect. As she put it: “You don’t have to be good to write well. Much to be thankful for.”

But the issue of contrary readings of O’Connor’s fiction is compelling, and has never been raised more provocatively than by her friend John Hawkes during her lifetime. Borrowing a line of reasoning from Dr. Johnson when he claimed that Milton was “of the Devil’s party” because Paradise Lost loses its zing when Satan is offstage, Hawkes finds the “diabolical” to be the guilty pleasure in O’Connor’s work. Privately—not to Hawkes—she judged the theory “off center.” But Hawkes was not alone in the camp that felt O’Connor was not the best reader of her own work, and her theological gloss perhaps spin, whether conscious or not. Firmly planted in this opinion was her progressive friend Maryat Lee, who found dissonance between O’Connor the story writer and O’Connor the theologian. “The writing is one thing and the thinking and speeches are another,” she wrote to a mutual friend. “Jekyll and Hyde if you will. Perhaps.”

Read the entire interview here (PDF).

There are an impressive number of websites dedicated to aggregating online essays and information about Flannery O’Connor. See in particular Comforts of Home, the O’Connor Collection at Georgia College & State University, and the Andalusia Foundation, which keeps her farm open to the public and which you can support with purchases from its gift shop—including the classic “I’d rather be reading Flannery O’Connor” bumper sticker.

Related LOA works: Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works

Paul Bowles centennial year: A tribute sparks a memory (updated)

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Paul Bowles (1910–1999), expatriate novelist, story writer, poet, composer, and translator. The author of four novels and dozens of short stories, Bowles is best known for his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949)—the haunting story of the misadventures of three young Americans trekking across the Sahara—and for his travel writing. His collection of travel essays Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue chronicles the 25,000 miles he traveled in Morocco in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant to record indigenous music for the Library of Congress. It regularly appears on lists of best travel books (most recently on World Hum’s 100 Best Travel Books).

A social outsider, Bowles spent the last 52 years of his life in Morocco. Critics often find it difficult to categorize Bowles. Robert Craft has called him “the last of the ‘Lost’ Generation and the first of the ‘Beats’.” Edmund White puts it more simply: “one of the four or five best writers in English in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Little Augury’s appreciative blog post yesterday about Paul Bowles’s and Cherie Nutting’s collaborative book, Yesterday’s Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles, prompted the book’s designer Elizabeth Avedon to recall her meeting with Bowles and Nutting to discuss the assignment:

Yesterday's Perfume holds the last work of Paul Bowles. I was fortunate to be invited to visit him in Tangier, Morocco, where he'd lived for 52 years, by Cherie and Paul about a year before he died in 1999. He’d liked a book I designed for photographer Peter Beard, Longing For Darkness: Kamante's Tales From Out of Africa, and I believe he mistakenly thought I needed to meet him to be able to design a book for them. I didn't tell anyone it wasn't necessary to travel to Morocco to design a book, I just packed my bags and filled them with a long list of sought-after American items he missed. He was very frail, but insisted on hosting the most wonderful dinner parties for me in Jane Bowles’ apartment, upstairs or downstairs from his own. He dressed for these occasions in an elegant Ralph Lauren robe and slippers. Sitting opposite me on the couch, he charmed me with fascinating stories about his travels in Mexico.

Readers can find information about upcoming events celebrating the centennial (in Portugal, Morocco, and Santa Cruz, California) at the official Paul Bowles site.

Update (8/15): Cherie Nutting recently sent along her own recollections of how Yesterday's Perfume came about:

In 1986, on my first visit to Tangier, I mentioned to Paul my idea to make a scrap book. He handed me Peter Beard's book (which Elizabeth had designed) and thought I might like it. I did. But it was actually Bruce Weber who, more than a decade later, urged me to contact “Betty” Avedon.

I contacted Elizabeth and asked her to design my book, and I showed her my ideas. I invited her to come to Tangier. I thought by coming to Tangier and meeting Paul, it would give her a better feeling for the work. Paul graciously invited her for tea in his apartment, which he had for himself and any guests each afternoon at 4. Paul Bowles didn't have dinners for others in his own apartment, because he was too old, but neighbors downstairs in Jane Bowles's apartment invited Paul, Elizabeth, and me for a few dinners during her stay in Morocco.

I was very pleased with Elizabeth's work. She transformed my ideas into a work of art.

Related LOA works: Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings (includes Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue); Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House

John James Audubon: Evidence of his first published drawing found

For his first forty years, even while he was creating the outsize, visionary paintings that would become his self-published masterwork, Birds of America (1827), John James Audubon (1785–1851) struggled financially to support himself and his family as a drawing teacher and itinerant portrait painter. His first big potential break came in 1824 when, he noted in his diary, he received a commission to draw birds for a New Jersey bank note. (There was no national currency in those days. Independent banks printed their own currency. ) This would have been Audubon’s first published work, but no one has been able to find an example of the bank note or the illustration—until now.

After a decade-long search, Robert Peck, 57-year-old curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and Eric Newman, a 99-year-old numismatic historian from St. Louis, have recently located what they believe to be the missing image among the sample sheets of a contemporary Philadelphia engraver. They recount the details of their discovery in the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic (available August 31). As The Academy of Natural Sciences reports:

The bird illustration itself merits special attention. Although the heath hen drawing lacks the glorious colors and monumental scale of the images found in Birds of America, its qualities presage those that distinguish the subjects in the later masterwork. This humble grouse is depicted in an active, life-like pose rather than the stilted dispositions typical of the time. Moreover, details of its pose and placement in its habitat demonstrates the artist's first-hand and thorough knowledge of his subject.

Robert Peck suspects, however, that the bank note never made it into circulation. The bank probably found it unremarkable “especially in comparison to the majestic eagles, military heroes, and draped figures of Lady Liberty that typically adorned the paper money of the day. . . . A skittish, shy, running grouse doesn't instill great confidence in the bank,” Peck said

Listen to an NPR interview with Robert Peck about the discovery.

Image: Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society

Related LOA works: John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings

Ernie Pyle still sets the style

To think that Ernie Pyle would have turned 110 today is one way of measuring just how far in the past World War II lies—and how enduring Pyle's reporting has proved. Ernie Pyle had already developed a following for his folksy syndicated columns about daily life in America when he began covering the war from London in 1940. Over the next five years his dispatches from Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific would make him the most read—and most imitated—reporter on the war. On April 18, 1945, Pyle was hit in the temple by Japanese machine-gun fire on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa Honto, and died instantly.

In a 1950 reminiscence in The New Yorker, his colleague, wartime correspondent A. J. Liebling, offered this profile, “Pyle Set the Style”:

The thin old-looking reporter who was killed by a Japanese sniper on Ie Shima in April, 1945 (he was only forty-four, but to enlisted men he seemed as old as a senior admiral), contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, Ernest Taylor Pyle, to give him the full name nobody ever called him by, added G. I. Joe, the suffering but triumphant infantryman. The portrait was sentimentalized but the soldier was pleased to recognize himself in it, and millions of newspaper readers recognized their sons and lovers in Pyle’s soldiers and got some glimmer of the fact that war is a nasty business for the pedestrian combatant. Through millions of letters from home enclosing clippings, the soldiers learned that their folks read Ernie Pyle. He provided an emotional bridge. . . . He was the only American war correspondent who made a large personal impress on the nation in the Second World War.

Pyle’s dispatches focused not on military strategy but on the experiences of the common foot soldier, as in this report, “The God-Damned Infantry,” from Northern Tunisia in May 1943:

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else. The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men. There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn't remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

The above excerpts are from Reporting World War II: 1938-1946 (two volumes) and A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings.

Nathanael West as online muse

In his brief life Nathanael West wrote four darkly comic novels, two of them acclaimed masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts, a devastating portrait of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ sufferings, and The Day of the Locusts, an apocalyptic vision of the underside of the Hollywood dream. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in 1997 Virginia Heffernan wrote “[West] seems to have become a writer, like Frank Norris or Djuna Barnes, whose work is periodically 'revived,' appreciated, and explained, and then returned to the hands of more stalwart fans.” Based on recent evidence a sustained revival of Nathanael West seems to be at hand.

For one, West today has his own Twitter account. Marion Meade, author of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, a dual biography of West and his wife, hosts both the Twitter account (in West's voice) and http://www.nathanaelwest.com/, a site devoted in equal parts to West, McKenney, and the book, and featuring a good deal of trivia and media about the couple.

Joe Woodward’s blog, The Nathanael West Project, chronicles on an almost daily basis his writing of a biography of West. Last week he posted a lengthy rumination for 3:AM Magazine, which included a description of the fateful last dinner party at West’s home in North Hollywood on Friday, December 13, 1940. That night West and McKenney hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham, Dorothy Parker, the screenwriters Albert and Frances Hackett, and the artist Hilaire Hiler.

No one at the party that night could have known it, but it was the last time any of them would see F. Scott Fitzgerald or Nathanael West alive. Fitzgerald would never finish The Last Tycoon and never see the whole of his Pat Hobby short story cycle published. And West, he would never get beyond the start of that fifth novel. The following weekend they would both be gone. Scott would die at the age of 44, the following Saturday, of a heart attack while reading the Princeton alumni magazine, and West, at 37, and his new wife Eileen, at 27, would die in a horrific car accident in the middle of the California desert.

A 1932 editorial in Americana, the short-lived magazine West co-edited with the Dadaist George Grosz, proclaimed. “We are the laughing morticians of the present.” This may help explain why West’s Wikipedia entry is one of the few with a link to Findagrave, a website where visitors can locate the graves of more than 4,000 writers and commemorate them with virtual flowers and comments.

On a livelier note, many clips are surfacing online of West’s screenwriting efforts, giving glimpses of his mordant style. Fans of Lost may enjoy the trailer for one of West’s last screenplays, Five Came Back (1939). Lucille Ball’s badinage in this clip from the same movie has a Westian flair. And Peter Lorre seems the perfect vehicle for West’s offhanded menace in Stranger on the Third Floor.

Related LOA works: Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings; Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology