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.

'Heirs of that first revolution'

 I’m not surprised that the Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution is controversial. Throughout our history, we’ve redefined what the revolution was about and what it might mean for the current generation.

Here’s John F. Kennedy, giving his Inaugural Address:

 

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

 

The current occupant of the White House is just as bold in redefining what the country’s about. At home, he is undermining “those human rights to which this nation has always been committed” — including the right to vote. Around the world, he blames the democratic Ukraine for being invaded by a despot and says supporting the fight for freedom is too expensive.

Freedom implies the ability to make choices. This country has made some bad choices.

The Roarer

 In 1751, Samuel Johnson was protesting a Bring Back the Good Old Days movement in Great Britain.

Members of the old guard opposed new people (including Johnson, Johnson thought) on principle. They attacked new art, new ideas, new sciences. Advances in medicine were viewed with horror, and, within a generation, the development of vaccinations would open new possibilities for culture wars.

Johnson complained that the gist of the movement was to see “industry defeated, beauty blasted, and genius depressed.”

He outlined the ways by which the old guard went about its business. He said the movement was made up of Roarers, Whisperers and Moderators. Here’s a portrait:

 

The Roarer is an enemy rather terrible than dangerous. He has no other qualification for a champion of controversy than a hardened front and strong voice. Having seldom so much desire to confute as to silence, he depends rather upon vociferation than argument, and has very little care to adjust one part of his accusation to another, to preserve decency in his language, or probability in his narratives. He has always a store of reproachful epithets and contemptuous appellations, ready to be produced as occasion may require, which constant use he pours out with resistless volubility.

 

To be fair, the old guard in London in the 1750s didn’t call itself the Make Great Britain Great Again movement.

But the claim that the movement that is crippling the United States today is something new — in its vision and leadership — is just silly.

• Source: Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 144, Saturday, Aug. 3, 1751.

A pear tree comes down

 I shouldn’t tell this story: I sawed down a 42-foot Bradford pear, dropping it between the Wise Woman’s greenhouse and a wooden fence.

The tree was on a slope, looming over the greenhouse. I had to cut it at an odd angle to make it fall into the narrow landing zone. On the way down, the tree missed the greenhouse by 6 inches and brushed the fence.

If my grandfather were telling this story, it would be OK. He grew up in East Texas and could handle a saw. He always put a stake in the ground where he wanted a tree to fall. He would drop the pine so that its trunk crushed the stake.

As they say in Texas, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

He could have told this story properly, as a matter of fact.

I, on the other hand, am telling it with such profound relief it feels like joy.

My grandfather was skilled. I was lucky.

Americans in troubled times

 In times when the country is deeply troubled, it helps to read of earlier times, when the country was deeply troubled too.

E.B. White described an air raid drill about 1950. The atom bomb was new and real, and so 8 million New Yorkers took cover. The staff of The New Yorker was to descend from the 19^th floor to the 10^th, although no one knew why the 10^th was safer. One took precautions without thinking about why one was any better than another.

A mathematically inclined person would think it was a descent of nine floors, but it was eight. There was no 13^th floor.

White thought that was the problem: Scientists had delved into the atom before the rest of society was ready to “look the number 13 square in the face.” He wrote:

 

The papers reported that millions of dollars in manpower were lost by the quiescence of eight million persons. For fifteen minutes wealth ran down the drain. This, like the missing thirteenth floor, was a mathematical enigma that stops us cold. What happened, exactly? Who lost what? How can anyone say for sure that millions of dollars were lost? Probably the dollars, like the people, were not lost — just deeply troubled.

 

One on one, Americans are thoughtful, reasonable people. Get them in a group, and they are not. The larger the group, the less reasonable Americans are likely to be. A seminar tests sanity. A townhall meeting goes beyond the frontiers.

Consider Americans as a whole, as a society, and you must resort to stretched metaphors and colorful slang.

It’s somehow comforting to realize that Americans have been like that since before I was born.

• E.B. White’s essay “Air Raid Drill” originally appeared in The New Yorker and was collected in The Second Tree from the Corner; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951. I found it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 552-4.

What nobody dares to say

 In 1868, T.H. Huxley declared:

Nobody outside the agricultural interest now dares to say that education is a bad thing.

 

He was speaking at the South London Working Men’s College, where people in the trades could get an education. In the rural areas, people with property and money considered education a waste of money. Most of the people in the farming regions were poor agricultural workers. The landowners wanted a permanent supply of cheap labor. They liked the idea of an uneducated class of poorly paid workers — people with so little education they had no choice but to stay on the farm.

The world has changed since then. Agricultural interests have invested in education.

Unfortunately, other moneyed interests have taken up the crusade against education. The White House, for example.

• Source: T.H. Huxley, A Liberal Education and Where to Find It; Girard, Kansas: Kessinger Publishing 2005. You can find a copy here:

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/LibEd.html