January 28, 2008
Auburn, Indiana

What if they held a Big Read and nobody came? I never expected to be asking myself that question when I reset my watch to match the dashboard clock in my rented PT Cruiser outside the Ft. Wayne, Indiana, airport. I’d had only the highest hopes as I tooled up the highway to Auburn, site of the first Big Read I’d ever attended for The Call of the Wild, Jack London’s indestructible story of the stouthearted sled dog Buck. Terra Firma, the education initiative of the DeKalb County Community Foundation, had pulled together a strong application. A nearby radio station was slated to cover the 1 p.m. kickoff festivities at the Eckhart Park Pavilion. The local constabulary was sending out their K-9 Unit. Stacks of mass-market paperback copies reposed on a card table by the door.

But there at the stroke of one stood TerraFirma director Judy Sorg, spruce in her January-weight jacket under the unheated pavilion’s drafty rafters, surveying a turnout consisting of two co-organizers — one of whom was turning around to leave. Worse, Judy seemed oblivious to the whole debacle. Was she deluded? One of those blithe Pollyannas whose façade of chipper optimism never permits a crack?

She’d seemed normal enough, even engaging, when I met her in Minneapolis at orientation in November. Then again, I was hardly one to talk. Here I was, about to preside over my first clunker after two years of unfailingly innovative local celebrations of American literature, and I was playing along, humoring poor Judy in her desperate charade.

I forget how exactly I realized that the PT Cruiser’s clock had been off by an hour. But you could safely color me relieved — maybe a bluish shade of relieved, since warm for Auburn can nevertheless feel a tad nippy to a fugitive Californian. Suffice to say that an hour later, all 151 souls allowed by the fire marshal, and perhaps a couple extra, had warmed matters up considerably. There were dog-safety demonstrations for kids, dog-sled demonstrations for would-be mushers, and a fascinating talk from Gail, the wolf expert at nearby Wolf Park, whose lupine howls had canines fooled for versts around.

The kickoff hosted at least the allowable 151 Auburnians; several live, stuffed and balloon animals; and one sociable 6-foot plush mascot frog, who probably qualifies as both. Photo by David Kipen.

Kids abounded, painting soup bowls and each other, nervously eyeing dogs up for adoption and parents who might or might not be. Each clutched a newly bestowed copy of The Call of the Wild in one hand and a Klondike bar in the other, unsure which to devour first.

Later, chowing down on cheese curds and other delicacies indigenous but far from indigestible, I congratulated Judy, her husband David (soon to appear in a much-anticipated local production of Much Ado About Nothing), Gail the uber-zoologist of the Midwest, Wendy Oberlin of the community foundation, and so many delightful others I’d rather omit here than misspell. As Buck and his teammates in the traces could have told you, it’s amazing what you can pull together when you pull together.

My memories of reading Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima last week in Marfa, Texas, are already receding into the selfsame happy, retrospective blur that this blog was designed to prevent. So, before memories of my present New York swing displace Marfa any further, a flashback…

The most outrageous story to come out of those 36 idyllic hours in Marfa, I didn’t even recognize as such until I casually mentioned it to Marcela Valdes at the National Book Critics Circle award nominations last week. Like the good journalist she is, she kindly pointed out that what I’m about to recount was a good story. The implication was that if I didn’t at least rough out a version of it somewhere fast, she’d be forced to do so herself and win embarrassingly wide acclaim for it.

I heard the story from Big Read co-organizer Joe Cabezuela as he toured me through his childhood alma mater, the Blackwell School. Joe is a friendly middle-aged Marfan, recognizable, with only a little prompting, from one of the high-school team photos that line the walls. Empty now but for memorabilia, the school isn’t a school anymore. From Joe’s description, in a way it never was.

Blackwell was where Marfa sent its nonwhite children. Despite some happy memories of Joe’s, and some good teachers who apparently did a lot with next to no funding, it sounds uncannily like the substandard school in Topeka that I visited in 2006 as the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site. If not for a PTA that did what the school board wouldn’t, Blackwell might conceivably have been a school without books.

Nowadays, Joe wants to turn the Blackwell School into a historic site too. On the basis of something he showed me, I don’t blame him. There, in a corner of the surviving building, almost lost among yellowing photos and frayed uniforms, lies the coffin of Mr. Spanish.

Mr. Spanish was the name given to an effigy created and buried by the students — under teacher supervision — in a solemn assembly on school grounds. From that day forward, the speaking of Spanish was forbidden on campus, and anybody caught speaking his first language risked a good cuffing around. To contemplate that day, to stand next to the grown man once forced to participate in it, and then to look around at Marfa today, with its art galleries and fine independent bookstore and terrific new partly-bilingual public-radio station, is enough to give a visitor vertigo.

Marfa isn’t all the way there yet. To an extravagantly welcomed stranger passing through, the old Marfa and the new seem on cordial, nodding terms, friendly but not yet friends. That’s what made the Big Read kickoff at the stylish dancehall-turned-art-gallery Marfa Ballroom such a revelation. All of Marfa looked to be there, young and old, natives and new arrivals, all scoring their brand-new, free copies of Ultima. When San Antonio-based folksinger Azul invited the throng to join in on “Cielito Lindo,” there wasn’t a dry eye, or a silent voice, in the house.

In the mid-1960s the Blackwell School was closed, and all the students had to carry their desks through the streets to join their new classmates across town at the white school. The Blackwell School sat more or less empty until Joe and other alumni began to envision it as a new community center in town. A few years ago, they publicly disinterred Mr. Spanish from his shallow grave and restored him to his current place of honor in the Blackwell School exhibit. The irony is, they had to make a new Mr. Spanish for the occasion, because the old cardboard coffin and its contents had long since crumbled away to nothing.

January 8, 2008
San Francisco, CA

“The picture [of small-town Missouri in Tom Sawyer ] will be instructive to those who have fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come to represent the Southwest in literature. ”

–William Dean Howells’ review of Tom Sawyer in the Atlantic Monthly

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

I know I only mentioned Howells’ reputation-making review of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad on Friday — at a link that appears to have crashed the University of Virginia’s server, no less. But I ran across this quote from Howell’s friendly piece on Tom Sawyer and just had to work it in.

The review may indeed be a little too chummy, considering that Howells and Twain had since the earlier review become quite close friends. What jumps out at me, though, is Howells’ endearingly Bostonian ideas about North American geography. First there’s his reference to “Pike County” — evidently more a byword for backwoods caricature then than now. Either that or maybe Howells was just, in Thomas Pynchon’s great phrase about misunderstood regionalism, showing off his ear before he had one.

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.

I’ve been griping about the coast-ism of the phrase “Pacific Northwest” for years, but it never occurred to me that the ever-mysterious East might have needed a Pacific Southwest to go with it. Then again, I can still remember the storied $25 no-reservation midnight flights between LA and San Francisco on PSA, alias “Pacific Southwest Airlines,” so traces may yet persist. Of course, by Tom Sawyer’s appearance in 1876 — fully a quarter century after California statehood — Howells should have known better. Sometimes they can be a little slow on the uptake out there in the Atlantic Northeast.

Time this morning to try something new to the blog: its first notes column. Gone the usual carefully developed arguments, the lovingly re-created site visits. In their stead, a grab bag of ideas, observations, three-dot items, IOUs for longer posts, and generally whatever crosses my mind. Serve me right if a couple-three quick takes, rather than another indigestible embolus of bloviation, gets more hits than anything in weeks…

For example, there are officially no shipping days left till Christmas — or at least, not for any out-of-town friends or relatives. That shopping ship has sailed, replaced by guilt, recriminations, and pledges to do better next year. Unless, that is, you take my new-minted advice and call a well-stocked independent bookstore near those last far-flung names on your shopping list. Browse around at your local store or online first, but then ring up long-distance and charge a book or two right around the corner from the recipient in question. Then get in touch with the giftee and tell them where their present awaits.

This obliges them to leave the house, of course, but it’s also easier than tracking down the shipping address in question, and it’s good for their local indie. Might even inspire your pal to polish off some last-minute shopping of their own in the same establishment. Mind you, I haven’t actually tried this myself yet, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work. I don’t know about you — I sure wouldn’t mind a holiday call from kith or kin telling me there’s a paid-for, maybe even gift-wrapped something waiting on that ever-enticing shelf behind the counter…

And didja notice, as Herb Caen or Jack Smith might’ve said on a slow day, that Joyce Carol Oates has just edited Best American Essays of the Century? (Insert obligatory hardest-working-woman-in-literature joke here.) Christina Nehring over at truthdig.com pointed this collection out, and I’m grateful for it. A logical follow-up to Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike a few years back, this one contains work by everybody from John Muir to Joan Didion, plus no fewer than four Big Read authors.

The latter pieces in question are “A Drugstore in Winter,” Cynthia Ozick’s reminiscence of her family’s apothecary shop in the Bronx; “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s account of his nervous breakdown; “Pamplona in July,” Ernest Hemingway on the running of the bulls, a subject he wrote about much more famously in The Sun Also Rises; “Corn-pone Opinions,” yet another in Mark Twain’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of brilliant toss-offs we’ve never even heard of; Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” a mainstay of our Big Read materials; plus Alice Walker’s canon-exploding essay about Hurston, “Looking for Zora,” just for lagniappe. (By the way, following Updike’s lead, Oates has included one of her own pieces in her collection. If I am not for myself, quoth Rabbi Hillel, who will be for me?) There are also century collections of sports and mystery writing out by now, but so far no 100-year floods for the same publisher’s spiritual and travel writing collections, and certainly none yet for Dave Eggers’ comparatively overnight perennial chrestomathy, Best American Nonrequired Reading. And Best American Book Reviews? Keep waiting…

I could go on, but word limit and deadline are creeping up on me in their uncanny perpetual tango. Did this disorganized impromptu grab bag (or, considering there’s only two items, coinflip?) pass the time agreeably? Or should I go back to my wonted one-hobbyhorse-per-blog format when post time rolls around again next Tuesday? Answers to kipend@arts.gov, and may your holiday be filled with rectangular packages…

December 18, 2007
Washington, DC

Pretty soon they’re going to have to start a special portion of the paper devoted exclusively to alarming news about reading. Can’t you just imagine it? Right between BUSINESS DAY, PAGE C1, and SCIENCE TIMES, PAGE D1, please turn to KISS LITERACY GOODBYE!, SPECIAL ILLUSTRATED SECTION.

First came the NEA’s elegiac To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (http://www.arts.gov/research/ToRead.pdf). This delivered the cheering news that, the less you read, the likelier you are to wind up jobless, in jail, and funny-looking.

Then, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the paper, today brings tidings that J.K. Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic, has commissioned a series of books called The 39 Clues, written by a tag-team of young-adult writers and augmented by a formidable online onslaught of “web-based games, collectors cards and cash prizes.” According to writer Rick Riordan, who will inaugurate the series come September with The Maze of Bones, “Some kids are always going to prefer games over books. But if you can even reach a few of those kids and give them an experience with a novel that makes them think, ‘Hey, reading can be another way to have an adventure,’ then that’s great. Then I’ve done my job.”

Way to aim high, Rick. This news item is also notable for its “Law & Order”-ization of creativity. Just as that TV show pioneered the interchangeability of actors as a way of lowering the price of popular talent, Scholastic appears eager to sell books without writers, or at least without the recurring name recognition that makes writers so all-fired expensive.

It only gets better. Also according to this morning’s paper, 545 writers have just sent a letter to 10 Downing Street imploring Prime Minister Gordon Brown to mandate at least an hour per schoolday of reading instruction. Reportedly, one-fifth of 11-year olds leave primary school without meeting the minimum level of reading competence. (No word on how students are faring on their O-levels, or tripos, or other mysterious British academic hurdles that are fun to say.) “As authors” — per signatories including the versatile genre writer Ian Rankin, poet laureate Andrew Motion, underrated god Nick Hornby, and the inarguably literate Jackie Collins — “we are deeply concerned at the low levels of childhood literacy across Britain.

When reading is tanking in England, traditionally the lone holdout with steady reading rates among industrialized nations, it’s definitely time to muster the militia. Hence the less than imaginative, but forgivably necessary, title of today’s blogpost. The Big Read isn’t going to solve this country’s reading crisis overnight, or even singlehandedly. But it’s a start, and — take it from someone who’s seen more Big Reads up close than anyone else has, or is ever likely to — it works. That’s why I urge every city or town within reach of this blog to pull together an application by Feb. 12, 2008. If you’ve never done a citywide reading program, where everybody in town reads the same book for a month and hashes it out six ways from Sunday, The Big Read is your perfect bunny slope. And if you’ve done one but want to do it better, then The Big Read offers a nearly surefire way to roll it up a notch. Aside from the many communities who come to us for the first time, it would be interesting to tabulate who re-applies to us more: Big Read towns who’ve never given it a go solo, or the cities who’ve both gone it alone and thrown it their lot with us, and recognize how much easier it is to undertake something like this with a little help.

Either way, here at the NEA we hope all the Big Read rookies out there won’t sit back and let the re-uppers have all the fun. It’s easy and just one click away at http://www.neabigread.org/application_process.php

And now, pardon me while I get back to work writing the Mark Twain readers’ guide, coming this fall to a city or town near you…

Translation is both the most parasitic form of writing and the purest. It’s writing without storytelling, without plot, or character, or any of the other gifts that only a few lucky fictioneers have it in them to deploy. No, translation is writing at its most elemental linguistic level, with the kit provided and only the words missing. It belongs alongside singing or acting or symphony conducting — an interpretive art, but no less an art for all that. Translation is what painting by numbers would be, if only the painter had as many colors handy as there are words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Is it Tolstoy… or Tolstoy?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I just finished up a translating project from the Spanish, but also because we only recently got our Tolstoy materials back from the printer and the CD presser. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich marks our first novel in translation — chosen for a reciprocal Read with the Russian cities of Saratov and Ivanovo, who’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird this fall while five American cities and towns prepare to tackle Tolstoy next spring.

Because we had to agree on a common translation just for consistency’s sake, we went with Lynn Solotaroff’s Bantam edition, but no preference or endorsement should be inferred. So long as folks are on roughly the same page, I kind of like the idea of multiple readers around the country getting together over different translations, comparing notes and discovering anew how even the tiniest decisions of diction and syntax can make all the difference.

Just look at the last line of Solotaroff’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Spoiler alert here, by the way, for anybody who expects Ivan to live happily ever after.) Solotaroff translates Ivan Ilyich’s end as, “He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out and died.” It seems a fairly straightforward sentence, one whose original Russian couldn’t possibly allow for that many variations.Now look at Louise and Aylmer Maude’s once-standard translation of the same sentence: “He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.” At first blush, they seem more or less the same sentence twice. Each starts with the same five words, and each ends with the same two.

In between, though, discrepancies creep in. Per Solotaroff, Ivan dies in the middle of his last breath. But according the Maudes, Ivan completes the breath, and only dies while sighing afterward. I tend to prefer the first version, since that one doesn’t oblige poor Ivan to breathe and then sigh, two operations that seem a little too similar to be readily separable. Points to Solotaroff here.

But now look at the other divergence. The Maudes have Ivan simply stretching out, whereas Solotaroff’s Ivan stretches himself out — as if there were anyone else Ivan might conceivably be stretching. Points to the Maudes here, and so a split decision overall.

Which one is closer to Tolstoy’s original? Which the more literal? And are they the same thing? You’d have to ask a Russian speaker for those answers, but the translators are presumably fluent, and it didn’t keep them from preparing subtly different interpretations. Still, each retains the indispensable idea of a life interrupted.

My translation work so far hews toward the irreverent, making free with a lot of colloquialism, anachronism, and general puckishness. My Spanish isn’t the greatest, either, so I probably couldn’t be slavishly faithful to the original if I tried.

Maybe most important, I’m translating a comic short story and novella by Cervantes and Cervantine comedy lends itself to a more timeless, postmodern tone than Tolstoyan solemnity. I’m hoping that readers can hear a Spanish magistrate say “I’m hauling you in” without thinking, “Hmmm. Would a 17th-century Englishman even say that?” By contrast, though, nobody wants to read The Plotzing of Ivan Ilyich.

Nobody besides me, anyway…

December 7, 2007
Washington, DC

Recently, a colleague was in my office and we were talking about our exposure to books as children. I mentioned that even though neither of my parents had attended college (my dad went later in life on the GI Bill), books were highly prized and everywhere in my home growing up. She said, “Ah, then your parents were bookworms.” Her choice of words reminded me that when I was about six or seven, my parents enrolled me in “The Bookworm Club”, a summer reading program at the Camden Public Library in Camden, Maine.

In the early 60s, before its award-winning 1996 underground expansion, the library was relatively small. A beautiful brick building on a hill overlooking perhaps one of the worlds’s most photographed harbors. To a pre-electronic age six-year-old, the interior of the Camden Public Library was like something out of a …book. High ceilings with tall windows that cast long beams of sunlight across hardwood floors, long wooden tables with low lights, high-backed wooden chairs, card catalogues clustered at the center of the main room, and behind the central desk the ever present, ever pleasant librarian, Nellie Hart.

Each Saturday through the summer, we’d go and select a couple of new books. My first selection was Tim Tadpole and the Great Bull Frog. (How is it, I can remember this, and yet I can’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday?) Another favorite was Hercules, the story of a horse-drawn fire engine who felt his days were numbered as the “horseless carriages” came to town. Perhaps this is where my personification of books began. (See blog entry July 20, 2007) As further enhancement to these stories, my brothers helped me capture tadpoles in the pond behind our house and my dad took me to see the Molyneaux, a horse-drawn fire engine on display at the Camden Fire Department.

A trip to the public library got me: free books, time with my family, stories to read, and subsequent adventures to learn more about what was in the books. I loved The Book Worm Club and all that came with it — including a wooden, black and orange bookworm pin. And in this, I am not unique. As we saw in the release of the NEA’s analysis, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, little kids love to read. They love the new adventures that are opened to them through books. It’s like when you graduate from your tricycle (and mine was metal with streamers, not one of those new-fangled Big Wheels. What? Those aren’t new? Well, they’re fangled.) to a bicycle and you’re allowed to ride beyond the driveway. No one has to drive you or walk you holding your hand. You can go places! Books can give anyone the same freedom and thrilling joy of discovery at any age. I was lucky enough to have a whole family holding my hand to get me started so that when they let go, I was able to go places on my own.

I like to think of the Big Read as a giant Bookworm Club. Looking across the country at our hundreds of Big Read communities and the programming that they’ve put in place to enhance the reading experience of these great novels, I am certain that people of all ages will have similar awe-inspiring moments tied to a good book. Some may even get a pin.

December 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Sometimes, even if the picture won’t win any prizes, the subjects are the story. Snapped here are Big Read partners Jane Wood and Henry Fortunato, flanking a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jane presumably brings the same dynamism to chairing the English department at Park University that she’s brought to co-organizing a Big Read, while bemused, voluble Henry directs public affairs at the nearby Kansas City Public Library. Darwin, meanwhile, helped start World War I, if you believe a text panel accompanying this display inside Kansas City’s new National World War I Museum (one of Jane and Henry’s Big Read partners). But more about that later.

It was my privilege to fly into Kansas City two weekends ago for the finale of their salute to A Farewell to Arms. What I saw there capped a series of fine recent Reads, each superlative in its own way. Attleboro, Mass., whose Fahrenheit 451 Read I posted about not long ago, drummed up some of the strongest school participation I’ve seen yet. Rochester, N.Y. — not surprisingly, in light of its Kodak history and consequent movie madness — programmed an ambitious film series around The Maltese Falcon, and created a readable, handy, stylish Big Read calendar that could serve as a model for Big Read cities everywhere. And in White Plains, a SUNY Purchase English professor hosted an absolutely exemplary book discussion, putting aside academic jargon to engage a score of townspeople whose demographics rivaled Pauline Kael’s proverbial World War II movie bomber crew for diversity.

Back in Missouri, the celebration of A Farewell to Arms combined sturdy versions of these three Big Read components with a positively unprecedented amount of workplace participation. At least five local corporations distributed books to their employees and invited an especially industrious KCPL librarian to lead office discussions. Kansas City Star arts columnist and book critic Steve Paul, who had already keynoted KC’s kickoff event with a talk about Hemingway’s year as a cub reporter at his newspaper, moderated a reputedly overflow office book group at the international headquarters of Hallmark. (If you see a spate of Hemingwayesque greetings cards in the coming months, feel free to blame the Big Read.) All these so-called “Corporation Big Reads” must’ve gone over well, because every last company involved is already clamoring to know which book — Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, in particular, came up — they want to do next year.

On the Origin of Species, as a work of British nonfiction, won’t be appearing on the Big Read list anytime soon. But its prominent placement in the WWI Museum raises the question of its alleged role in the runup to the war that wounded Hemingway and so many others. It’s an interesting hypothesis, casting a gentle naturalist’s case for the theory of natural selection as the trigger for what became, in its time, probably the bloodiest war in human history. All the combatant countries had considered themselves “naturally selected” for greatness, of course, and assumed that in a war of all against all, they’d surely come out on top. None of them was right.

Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war.” So, did Darwin really help make an even bigger one? Me, I’d hang more of the blame on the British political economist Herbert Spencer. He’s the one who perverted “natural selection” into “survival of the fittest” — a phrase Darwin never used.

But there’s another dimension to all this. Kansas has played host to some of the most contested litigation in recent years over the teaching of evolution. By placing Darwin in one of the very first display cases at the World War I Museum, our docent noted that curators were implicitly defending a book often under attack elsewhere in their state.

Then again, they were also blaming a five-year bloodbath on that same treatise. Books are dicey things, and mean different things to different people. To Kansas City, A Farewell to Arms has meant the chance to come together around a single book in their schools, their libraries, their spectacular new museum and, most originally, around the office water cooler. Only light, not blood, was shed. Arguments broke out in book groups all across town, but no gunplay. To my knowledge, no book discussion has ever ended in violence.

Might make a good novel, though. Watch this space.

November 30, 2007
Washington, DC

As I read some of the recent blogs—Paulette’s about her commendable effort to give up TV and David’s about what constitutes “literature”—I was reminded of the first time I encountered the art of Dashiell Hammett.

Ten years ago, before becoming the Publications Manager at the NEA, I was living in Norway with my wife, in Bodø, roughly 60 miles above the Arctic Circle (about 100 kilometers for those counting in metrics). We had no television for the year we were living there, which left time for lots of reading. I had already plowed through the small quantity of books we brought, which was a problem—I tend to get anxious if I don’t have something to read. When I don’t have a paper in the morning, I start reading the cereal box, or the wrapper of whatever food substance I am ingesting. This became problematic as my knowledge of Norwegian was quite bad.

So I went in search of reading material. Unfortunately, we were living in a small, isolated town whose library had a very limited books-in-English section. There was a used book store with English books, but they were mostly romance books, science fiction, and mystery novels—nothing I relished reading (though I did do a fair amount of sci-fi reading as a teenager). Still, it was something to read, so I picked three authors that I recognized but had mostly stayed away from due to their reputation as “genre writers” or “popular writers.” They were Martin Cruz Smith Gorky Park, Graham Greene The Power and the Glory, and Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon. I had always assumed that if a writer was popular, it was probably because his/her writing was appealing to the lowest common denominator. Never have I been so wrong about authors as I had been about these three.

Although I knew Greene as the author of The Quiet American (which I hadn’t yet read at the time) and the short story “The Destructors” (which I read in high school and enjoyed), his work was regularly shunned in college. An English major as an undergraduate and an MFA recipient as a graduate student, I took many literature classes—not once did I read a Greene book. So The Power and the Glory took me by surprise with its strong narrative and amazingly perceptive character study of a drunken, fornicating priest on the run during the religious persecutions in Mexico in the 1930s. It was anything but a genre book—it was literature, and at the same time an exciting read (believe me, that is not always the case). The same was true of Gorky Park, which followed Moscow detective Arkady Renko during the Cold War years of the 1980s as he tries to solve the murder of two people in city’s park. The strong attention to character development made it much more than a run-of-the-mill detective story. And then there is Hammett.

Now I had seen the movie of The Maltese Falcon, the John Huston version, many times. I enjoyed it each time—from Bogart’s tough guy Sam Spade to Peter Lorre’s fey Joel Cairo to Sidney Greenstreet’s unforgettable Gutman—but had never picked up the book before. I have found that the best movie adaptations are often of books that are mediocre, and that good books just as often make wretched films (not always the case, as I was to find out). So I picked up The Maltese Falcon with trepidation; I was afraid it might ruin the movie for me.

Two things immediately struck me: one, the description of Sam Spade resembled nothing of Humphrey Bogart, and two, the brilliant dialogue from the film seemed to have come entirely from the book. In the first paragraph, the description of Spade is of a “blond Satan,” his face a series of v’s. Not exactly what you think of when you think of Bogart’s fleshy face. Throughout the book, there’s a hardness to Spade that Bogart managed to soften in the film, but to the character’s disadvantage in my view. The reason Spade survives is through his hardness and his unwillingness to “play the sap” for anyone.

And then there’s the dialogue—I say without hyperbole (okay, maybe a little) that Hammett is one of the finest writers of dialogue in the English language this side of Hemingway’s short stories. They are tough, simple sentences, but like Hemingway’s, say more than just the words alone. There’s implications and unspoken allusions sneaking around the edges of the sentences, which in a mystery like The Maltese Falcon, add to the intrigue. And they’re something that Hemingway’s often isn’t: funny. Hammett has his way with wisecracks and witty repartee that would make Oscar Wilde smile.

Years after I read the book, I came across a story, possibly apocryphal, about how director John Huston wrote the screenplay. Huston was way behind in writing the screenplay for the film, so finally he ordered his secretary to take the book and type out all the dialogue, and he would use that to work on the screenplay. She did so and left the typed pages on her desk before she went to lunch. In the meantime, the producers of the movie came by to see where Huston was with the screenplay. They were reading the typed pages when Huston returned. They congratulated him on an excellent screenplay and Huston just smiled and said nothing. A strong endorsement of the writing in the book if nothing else…

The Maltese Falcon compelled me to be less likely to categorize and dismiss a book because of its popularity or the “genre” it was written in. Good writing is good writing, whether it is decreed from on high by the literary gods to be “literature” or a paperback picked up at the airport. All that matters is the words on the page. And that’s the stuff that dreams are made of (which, incidentally, isn’t a line from the book—allegedly it was thought up by Bogart on the movie set…).

October 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Watching Charles Osgood on CBS Sunday Morning commemorate both the golden anniversary of Sputnik AND Gene Autry’s centennial, I couldn’t help wondering what our society will find to commemorate 50 years from now — the 50th anniversary of the 100th anniversary of Gene Autry’s birth? Really, isn’t there any new news worth reporting? Maybe a certain nationwide reading program, which could do with a little extra national attention, might come in for a few lumens of limelight? As you probably already know, The Big Read is never far from my thoughts. That, plus maybe the morning coffee was a tad too strong, may have given rise to the following hallucination from the Sunday paper…

It may be difficult for American youngsters today to understand the nationwide panic that greeted Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago when it first streaked across the literary firmament 50 years ago this fall. Long crippled by Soviet-style social realism, the sparsely funded Russian fiction program shocked the world with Zhivago’s meteoric rise. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially dismissed the novel as only of “literary interest,” but America’s hitherto unquestioned superiority had plainly suffered a serious blow.

Meanwhile, youthful English majors had no such jingoistic pride to bruise. Across the nation, readers listened spellbound to the steady “ka-ching… ka-ching… ka-ching” ringing out from bookstore cash registers everywhere. Bobby Troupe and Julie London scored big with their novelty chart-topper, “Moon Over Stalingrad” and its uptempo flipside “Hot-Cha in the Dacha.” Merchandising entrepreneurs did a land-office business in “Yuri & Lara” lunchboxes.

To his credit, Ike soon realized that he had gravely underestimated the threat to U.S. novelistic hegemony. He promptly chartered the National Aesthetics and Style Administration, a crash program designed, among other worthy goals, to close the “simile gap.”

The fledgling agency’s first results were hardly encouraging. Several early prototypes experienced problems in the idea stage. Some painstakingly developed characters never even made it off the page before imploding.

Gradually, however, U.S. efforts began to close the distance. By executive order, Ike put campus writing programs on a war footing. Federal funds began pouring into promising startups including the Stanford Writing Program, under the direction of Canadian defector Wallace Stegner. There, under Stegner’s stern tutelage, such writers as Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), Ernest J. Gaines (A Lesson Before Dying), and Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) made their first tentative experiments in narrative-driven propulsion.

A small Christmas grant to writer Harper Lee resulted in the 1960 publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, restoring some measure of pride to the country’s beleaguered literati. John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960, in part by accusing the Eisenhower administration of being “soft on modernism.” He soon committed the country to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a novelist atop the bestseller list and returning him safely to the literary establishment.” By 1969, with Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, American national literature had made good on Kennedy’s vow.

Recalling those heady days, novelist Thomas Pynchon recently allowed as how “1958, to be sure, was another planet. When the Zhivago reviews hit, I remember sitting around the Cornell Student Union drinking Red Cap Ale with Richard Farina, Jules Siegel and Mike Curtis, all those guys. We swore we were going to do Pasternak one better – not for America so much, but just for literature. I changed my major from engineering to English the next day.”