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Flanders: A Rough Theater for War

5/28/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
Author of Voss
Born May 28, 1912

P. White

My Book World

Groom, Winston. A Storm in Flanders. The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front. New York: Grove, 2002.

The author of Forrest Gump changes his hat to historian here. In 276 pages he does a superb job of summarizing this one battle of World War I. In some ways the war is a family squabble: “England’s George V, Russia’s Nicholas II, and Germany’s William II were all cousins, either directly or through marriage, descendants of England’s Queen Victoria” (6). Mostly, Groom documents the wastage: the millions of soldiers’ lives lost on all sides, the Brits, the Belgians, the French, and the Germans. (Not to mention civilians, the Canadians, and others who aid the Allies.) The huge “puddles” caused by shelling and excessive rain. The Christmas where all fighting stops and soldiers from both sides “celebrate” together. (What? you ask.) The lack of quality leadership on all sides. One failure passes off his work to another failure of leadership. And the only people who suffer are the men in the ranks and civilians. I don’t know about the Triumph Groom references in his title (except that the Allies “win”), but there is certainly a lot of Tragedy. Millions of people of one generation are never able to see their lives come to fruition, mostly because of the hubris of a few men.

NEXT BLOG: Tuesday, June 15, 2021

A Writer's Wit: John Cheever

5/27/2021

I got back to work on the book about a month ago, but was dealt some crushing financial blows three weeks later and now I’m back in the short story business. I want to write short stories like I want to fuck a chicken. [Excerpt from a letter to writer John Weaver, February 24, 1947.]
John Cheever
Author of The Wapshot Chronicle
Born May 27, 1912

J. Cheever

TOMORROW: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

A Writer's Wit: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

5/26/2021

We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Author of The Turkish Embassy Letters
Born May 26, 1689

M. W. Montagu

FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

A Writer's Wit: Ralph Waldo Emerson

5/25/2021

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics; to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social position; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived; this is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author of "Self-Reliance"
Born May 25, 1803

R. W. Emerson

FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

The Horizontal Near Southwest

5/21/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope
Author of The Rape of the Lock
Born May 21, 1688

A. Pope

My Book World

Flores, Dan. The Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest. Albuquerque: U of NM Press.

First of all, I love that Flores takes possession of this subject right away with the term, “Near Southwest”—a region stretching from eastern Louisiana and including all of Texas and New Mexico. I come over twenty years late to reading this elegantly scripted book about the area’s ecology, but the ideas he expresses here seem to gain urgency as time passes. Flores alternates sections of family history (French and Spanish) and other histories with first-hand accounts of living, say, on the Llano Estacado, as well as poetic and lyrical sections of fiction to bring alive said histories.

Flores is always on the move. After advanced schooling at Texas A&M, he explores, to mention a few places, the Chihuahuan desert, the Southern Plains of Texas (Llano Estacado or Steaked Plains), Abiquiu, New Mexico—finally lighting in Montana. But the Horizontal Yellow of which he speaks is the once real, now metaphorical, wave of yellowing grasses that cover what locals call, with a certain inelegance, the South Plains. It is where he builds a primitive place to live in Yellow House Canyon, about thirty minutes from where he teaches at the local university. It is where he lives with two wolf-dog hybrids as their alpha male (a role he doesn’t particularly relish; it’s the critters’ idea). It is a place remaining in his heart as he makes his home up north, where he can establish and retain a closeness to nature that the Texas South Plains has mostly expunged from its existence. His is an admired life but one I’m not sure I could pursue myself. I adore my life in town—Internet, TV, central heat and air—a bit too much.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders

A Writer's Wit: Margery Allingham

5/20/2021

Mourning is not forgetting . . . . It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.
Margery Allingham
Author of The Tiger in the Smoke
Born May 20, 1904

M. Allingham

TOMORROW: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow

A Writer's Wit: Lorraine Hansberry

5/19/2021

Children see things very well sometimes—and idealists even better.
Lorraine Hansberry
Author of To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Born May 19, 1930

L. Hansberry

FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow

A Writer's Wit: Patrick Dennis

5/18/2021

I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.
Patrick Dennis
Author of Auntie Mame
Born May 18, 1921

P. Dennis

FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow

Elegies for Two Homelands

5/14/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt.
Hall Caine
Author of The Shadow of a Crime
Born May 14, 1853

H. Caine

My Book World

Akhtar, Ayad. Homeland Elegies: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2020.

This is one of the most enjoyable and yet profound contemporary novels I have read in a long time. I had to keep reminding myself that it was indeed a novel, so interwoven is the plot with events we’ve all lived through in the last twenty years. The protagonist’s parents, both physicians, move from Pakistan to Staten Island in the early 1960s. When he is still young, the family relocates in Wisconsin. Throughout, readers get a feel for what it is like to live in America if you are not white-skinned, if you speak with an accent, or in any way attempt to retain religious or cultural customs from your former country. Not pleasant, to say the least.

At one point the car of the protagonist (by now a renowned playwright) breaks down in Scranton, PA. He is directed by a kindly highway patrolman (ah, good) to a mechanic who turns out to be related to the patrolman (uh oh). He is quoted a particular price for one problem, but when he picks up his car, he ascertains there is a second problem he’s not been informed about and is charged almost three times the original quote. He must phone his bank and make arrangements to raise his credit card level (and interest rate) to cover the cost.

The white-skinned reader must take note. This part is NOT fiction; this sort of explicit bias happens every day to dark-skinned, “other” people in America. People who work hard, people who pay their taxes, people who try hard to color inside the lines but somehow come up short in the eyes of so-called natives (whose ancestors were immigrants). The novel is really about how this man and his father handle their American lives differently: one an elegy for Pakistan and one for the USA. It is worth every minute of the reader’s time to live vicariously through these brave souls who come to American to build a better life. Theirs are true profiles in courage.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow

A Writer's Wit: Daphne du Maurier

5/13/2021

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
Daphne du Maurier
Author of The House on Strand
Born May 13, 1907

D. du Maurier

TOMORROW: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

A Writer's Wit: Philip Wylie

5/12/2021

Material blessings, when they pass beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.
Philip Wylie
Author of When Worlds Collide
Born May 12, 1902

P. Wylie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

A Writer's Wit: Zilpha Keatley Snyder

5/11/2021

Teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with ten or eleven years of experience as human beings. It is, I think, a magical time—when so much has been learned, but not yet enough to entirely extinguish the magical reach and freedom of early childhood.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Author of The Changeling
Born May 11, 1927

Z. K. Snyder

FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

A Wilde Man Indeed

5/7/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
Angela Carter
Author of Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales
Born May 7, 1940

A. Carter

My Book World

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

This book of exhaustive research concerning Wilde’s life is a pleasure to read from his family history to his imprisonment years later and his resulting exile in France. Prior to reading this book, I had always had the impression that Oscar Wilde’s life (except for prison) was one wild ride (pardon the pun). And in some ways it was. He, even after experiencing financial success, was always in want of money, primarily because he was such a spendthrift, spending or giving away money he honestly didn’t have. He cared not about what people thought of his extravagant ideas, his extravagant living. Yet Wilde faced great public disapproval of how he lived his life. His only friends were other homosexual men or those liberal enough to accept him.

His downfall came in the package of one man, Lord Alfred Douglas, a much younger man, an aristocrat who both loved and used Wilde. If Wilde had never met him, he might have met his match with some other party, but I doubt it. The latter part of Wilde’s sad life was battling Douglas’s father in court. Lord Percy Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, managed to have Wilde sent to prison for two years because he didn’t want Wilde near his son. Wilde did his prison time, and it broke him, both physically and emotionally. He never wrote anything substantial again, was always begging others for money, and suffered physical ailments that eventually brought on his premature death at forty-six. Ellmann’s distinguished book, more than thirty years old now, does great justice to the life of an extraordinary writer who lived, until he could no longer bear the speed of light, entirely ahead of his time.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

A Writer's Wit: Theodore H. White

5/6/2021

If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free—however free one can be on this planet.
Theodore H. White
Author of The Making of the President Series
Born May 6, 1915

T. H. White

TOMORROW: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde

A Writer's Wit: Sylvia Pankhurst

5/5/2021

I know we will create a society where there are no rich or poor, no people without work or beauty in their lives, where money itself will disappear, where we shall all be brothers and sisters, where every one will have enough.
Sylvia Pankhurst
Author of The Suffragette
Born May 5, 1882

S. Pankhurst

FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde

A Writer's Wit: David Gutterson

5/4/2021

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.
David Gutterson
Author of Snow Falling on Cedars
Born May 4, 1956

D. Gutterson

FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde