'The American Revolution'

 Twelve hours is a lot of film for me. Still, I’d recommend The American Revolution, the six-part series directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. My 2 cents — or 4 bits:

• First, even if you’re a historian, you’ll probably find something you hadn’t seen in quite the same light. I’d never been able to picture the thousands of enslaved people who sought shelter in British lines in the southern colonies. And I’d guess that if you asked which British colony was the first to be lost during the war, few people would come up with West Florida.

• Second, it’s good to be reminded that Americans have had trouble in governing themselves from the beginning. I’m talking about the problem of basic competence. How’s this for a low bar for judging competence? In an eight-year war, can you find anybody in America who can make sure that the soldiers are fed, clothed and paid? The answer: No.

• Third, the film has some weak points. The battle of Saratoga was a turning point in the war. The American victory led the French to intervene. I understand why Britain’s overly complicated plan for the invasion failed. I don’t understand why, after the fight at Bemis Heights on Oct. 17, 1777, the British army under John Burgoyne had to surrender.

• Fourth, the film’s weak points will make you go to the library. The best way to watch the film is with a pencil in hand. Burns and company interviewed historians for their viewpoints. Every time one of them said something interesting, I wrote down the historian’s name and promised to look for one of his or her books. My list has more than 20 names.

J.F. Powers

 I’ve been meaning to read J.F. Powers for years. He’s always described as a Catholic writer. When people told me about Powers, the implication was that I’d have to read him if I ever hoped to understand the thoughts and feelings that pop into the head of any person exposed to that form of nurture.

I finally found “The Valiant Woman,” which is about Father Firman and his housekeeper, Mrs. Stoner. Mrs. Stoner is a character. Father Firman sometimes wonders who, among all the priests he knows, has the most insufferable housekeeper. His brooding includes this memory:

 

She was a pie-faced girl then, not really a girl perhaps, but not too old to marry again. But she never had. In fact, he could not remember that she had even tried for a husband since coming to the rectory, but of course he could be wrong, not knowing how they went about it.

 

• J.F. Powers’s story “The Valiant Woman” appeared in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories; New York:  Doubleday and Company, 1947. I find it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 521-8.

‘Blue Brick from the Midwest’

 The blockbuster poem in Kim Stafford’s Singer Come from Afar is “Blue Brick from the Midwest.”

When the poet’s father, William Stafford, was dying of a heart attack, he scrawled to his wife, Dorothy:

 

and

all

my

love

 

The shaky handwriting is reproduced, a stolen stanza, in Kim’s poem.

William, also a wonderful poet, was stoic, principled, granite in grief.

But the blue brick in the poem is a block of love letters from Dorothy, written during their courtship, hidden at the bottom of his desk.

My favorite lines:

 

His way was trenchant, oblique. He mistrusted those who

talk about God, preferring to honor the holy with a glance,

a nod, or silence.

 

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, pp. 112-13. Several notes on this book appeared in November.

The bones of our story

 I’m enjoying conversations with friends about Ken Burns’s new series on the American Revolution.

We Americans are so swamped with the received text of this story — layers and layers of self-serving myth — that it’s hard to find bedrock for a foundation.

I’d suggest this: Imagine you’re a biologist looking at how life changed on the continent from 1492 to 1776. Imagine all the new plants and animals that arrived on ships — crops grown in North America for the first time, new livestock, new pests. Imagine the weed seeds that hid in sacks of grain, giving North America new thistles as well as new wildflowers. And of course there are new microbes, including smallpox.

A biologist might say that the environment itself had changed.

Let’s say the place changed.

Now imagine that you’re doing a population survey on one species: homo sapiens.

• The part of the story we are told: Myriad Europeans — English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German — came in waves to settle a new land.

• The part that we gloss over: The waves of enslaved Africans were even bigger. Africans were dragged from their homeland to be exploited because few wealthy Europeans wanted to pay workers the market rate.

• The part we can’t grasp: From 1492 to 1776 the total population of North America declined. All those waves of immigrants, willing and enslaved, couldn’t make up for the losses. All those ships were carrying microbes along with everything else. There was no immunity in the original populations.

Those are the bones of the story — our story.

It’s not that hard to imagine a different one, a story with less greed, cruelty, inhumanity.

• Source and note: One of the historians who is interviewed in Burns’s series is Alan Taylor. I’ve admired his work since seeing American Colonies; London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Nettel: “Life Elsewhere’

 Guadalupe Nettel’s “Life Elsewhere” might be the best new short story I’ve seen in 2025.

It starts with a hunt for an apartment, and I thought it was going to be a story about a couple growing apart. The narrator, a frustrated actor, wants a place in the theater district. His wife, a book illustrator, wants a bigger place with more light.

But it’s a deeper tale. Sometimes, when we seem to want a different apartment, we really want a different life.

Perhaps this story hit me in a blind spot. I’m one of those people: I am immersed in the details of the life I have and don’t spend much energy imagining a life I don’t live. I know that such people are out there. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one portrayed so well in fiction.

• Source: Guadalupe Nettel, “Life Elsewhere,” translated by Rosalind Harvey; The Yale Review, March 11, 2025. It’s here:

https://yalereview.org/article/guadalupe-nettel-life-elsewhere

Another thing a writer might learn

 In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a letter to his friend and editor in London, telling him about a slender gentleman who sauntered out from a house on Bush Street in San Francisco a couple of times a day.

“The gentleman is R.L.S.,” Stevenson said. The letter describes RLS as a character in a story that old editors called “a slice of life.”

RLS was pinching pennies. When he needed a break from writing, he went out on walks. He carried a book on Benjamin Franklin, hoping it would help him understand Americans. RLS sauntered out to the Sixth Street branch of the Original Pine Street Coffee Shop, where he got coffee, a roll and a pad of butter.

 

A while ago and R.L.S. used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art of exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this reflection, he pays ten cents, or five pence sterling (£0. 0s. 5d.).

 

A lot of odd stuff goes into the education of a writer.

• Source: Robert Louis Stevenson’s letter to Sidney Colvin, Jan. 10, 1880, is in The Stevenson Companion, edited by John Hampden; New York: Medill McBride Company, 1950, p. 130-2.

‘What every writer must learn’

 John Ciardi, a fine writer and a teacher of writers, doubted that writing could be taught. 

A good teacher, whether in a college classroom, a Parisian café, or a Greek marketplace — can marvelously assist the learning. But in all writing, as in all creativity, it is the gift that must learn itself.

 

I smiled when I read that. I’m working on some new pieces that are different than things I’ve written in the past. I’m having to learn as I go along. It’s a humbling thing — and a good thing — to do when you’re past 70.

Ciardi’s essay “What every writer must learn” has a lot of good advice. I like his insistence that a piece of writing has to be about something. He claims that Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” has all the details of building a stone wall you’d expect to find in a bulletin from the Department of Agriculture. That might be a stretch, but I see his point.

Old newspaper editors used to tell cub reporters: Always do some reporting before you sit down and face a blank page. Ciardi said it better:

 

I know of no writer of any consequence whatsoever who did not treasure the world enough to gather to himself a strange and wonderful headful and soulful of facts about its coming and going.

 

• John Ciardi’s essay “What every writer must learn” originally appeared in The Saturday Review, Dec. 15, 1956.I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 227-35. The quotations are on pp. 227-8 and 230.