Always wit, often wisdom, under a heavy cloud: Dorothy Parker

When they told her that the taciturn ex-President Calvin Coolidge was dead, she said, "How could they tell?"

Dorothy Parker never like the monicker or the reputation she had acquired as a "wisecracker," but that is indeed what she was. She was more, however. She was a poet, critic, screenwriter, and political activist, and as a writer she had a major impact on her time and place.

She was also a victim of alcoholism and depression and dealt with these conditions for most of her adult life. She made several attempts at suicide -- most of them thought to be half-hearted -- and went through many broken relationships. Her leftwing politics eventually got her blacklisted from Hollywood.

All the while, she continued to write and crack wise:

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

 

Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.

 

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.

 

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.

 

I hate writing, I love having written.

 

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

 

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.

The fact was that Dorothy Parker was a good writer, maybe even a great one. She received two Academy nominations for her screenplays, and her poetry is still read and honored. She died in 1967, but she is not forgotten. (For more on Parker and other off-kilter writers, check out Andrew Shafer's Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors.)

 

What makes readers buy books?

Maggie Lynch, author of numerous books and articles, has a roundup (Opinion: What Makes Readers Buy Books? | Alliance of Independent Authors: Self-Publishing Advice Center) of some of the latest research on the Alliance of Independent Authors website, and while most of it is common sense (readers buy books of subjects they like), some of it enlightening.

 Why do readers buy books?

It's an ancient question with no definitive answer, but fortunately folks keep searching for one.

Here's a list of reasons that was produced by the results of a large survey (2,697 participants) of  book buyers in Australia; the survey was conducted by Macquarie University for the Australia Council for the Arts:

1. The topic, subject, setting or style 89.7%
2. Read and enjoyed previous works by the author 77.9%
3. The book is available in the format I want 62.6%
4. Recommendation from a friend 59.7%
5. The price 44.9%
6. Reputation of the author 42.2%
7. Reader book reviews 25.4%
8. Type size 24.0%
9. People are talking about this book 23.1%
10. Professional book reviews 21.9%
11. Won or shortlisted for a prize 21.0%
12. Recommendation from a bookseller or librarian 20.5%
13. The length of the book 20.3%
14. Bestseller lists 18.6%
15. The jacket cover 18.4%
16. Promotional activity in the bookshop or library 7.9%
17. Recommendation by public figures and celebrities 7.3%
18. Cover endorsements 6.7%

What are some of the reasons you buy a book? Send me your list.

The long life of Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride"

 When William Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "Paul Revere's Ride" in 1860 and published it in The Atlantic in the January 1861 issue, he had a goal in mind. He wanted to create a clarion call to his fellow citizens to recognize the danger to the Republican by the secession of Southern states and for those citizens to take up arms to prevent it.

He accomplished that. The poem was wildly successful and reprinted in newspapers throughout the North.

But Longfellow accomplished far more than that, according to David Hackett Fischer in the historiography note in his book, Paul Revere's Ride.

That poem

-- raised Paul Revere from being a merely local hero in the New England area to the pantheon of national figures associated with the American Revolution -- figures such as George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson;

-- latched onto and added to the American myth of the lone individual who can make a difference in shaping the great events of the day;

-- itself became a national anthem, read and memorized by generations of school children, who were acculturated into the myths of the American Revolution.

Ever since its publication, critics and historians have made a cottage industry of pointing to the many inaccuracies in the poem. The main one -- not the only one, by any means -- was that Revere acted alone. He had plenty of help at every stage of the story. He was not even the only rider to alert "every Middlesex village and farm." William Dawes and Samuel Prescott also rode that night, partly with Revere and partly alone. Their names are unfamiliar to us because Longfellow excluded them from the narrative.

Longfellow was part of an abolitionist movement in Boston and was horrified at the potential breakup of the Union. His purpose was to create a hero -- a symbol that would enlist the minds of the fighting men and remind them why they had taken up arms. In that, he succeeded admirably.

A final point: Much of the criticism of Longfellow's shortcomings as a historian have been transferred to Revere himself. That is, many commentators have tried to diminish Revere's role in the American Revolution altogether. That is both unfair and inaccurate. Paul Revere was a central figure in the revolutionary politics of Boston in the 1770s. 

The Lincoln-Douglas debates, every word. How did that happen?

When political upstart Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic stalwart, for his U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, the campaign resulted in the Lincoln-Douglas debates -- seven meetings of the candidates that became the most famous discussion in American political history. The first debate occurred in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, almost exactly 160 years ago.

Two days after that debate, newspaper readers were able to read almost every word that was uttered during those three hours that were given to each of the debates.

With no modern recording devices at hand for journalists to use, how did this happen?

The answer lies with three now-forgotten journalists: Robert Roberts Hitt (The Chicago Press and Tribune), and Henry Binmore, and James Sheridan (The Chicago Times). They were the pioneers of a new method of reporting called "phonographic reporting," according to historian Harold Holzer, who edited and wrote the introduction for The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text.

In other words, the reporters used short-hand. Both sides set up a system whereby the reporters' short-hand could be transcribed and published as quickly as possible after each debate. Holzer writes:

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were the first sustained political encounter to inspire so-called "phonographic" reporting, and in this milestone lay the key to their early and enduring fame, as well as their ultimate distortion. (p. 10)

Holzer gives credit to the reporters for being thoroughly professional and noting what Lincoln and Douglas said as best they could. But the readers of the Press and Tribune, a Republican (Lincoln) newspaper, often read a different version of the speeches from those printed in the Times and other Democratic (Douglas) newspapers. That's because the partisanship of the editors led them to clean up the language and syntax of the candidate they favored and to leave intact the garbled ramblings of their opponent. Their actions set off a century-and-a-half debate among scholars about who said what and how it was said.

In truth, neither candidate filled the air with profound truths or soaring rhetoric, and reading through the speeches today is a hard slog. It is better to read about the debates than to read the debates themselves.

Still, we have three journalists to thank for creating a near-perfect record of this most important event in the life of the Republic.

 

Frances Hodgson Burnett, a rock-star writer of the 19th and early 20th century

When the serialization of Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1885, it was so wildly popular that readers waited breathlessly for the next installment and stood in line to buy copies of St. Nicholas magazine in which the episodes appeared. The story set off a fashion trend that eventually became the basis for the Buster Brown clothing line. The episodes were gathered together into book form in 1886 and became an international best-seller; the book was translated into 12 languages.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, another of The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, wrote prolifically and made a ton of money doing it. She traveled extensively, lived peripatetically, spent extravagantly, and maintained a lavish lifestyle that most of us could only imagine.

During her 30 years atop the world’s literary stage, she was one of the world’s most famous women.

Burnett was, indeed, the J.K. Rowling of her day.

We remember Burnett for her children’s books today, but during her time, she also wrote best-selling adult fiction and highly popular stage plays. Little Lord Fauntleroy was turned into the stage play title The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy. Burnett had discovered that an unauthorized version of the book was being produced in a London theater; she then pursued and won a ground-breaking lawsuit for copyright infringement. The play she wrote went on to make as much money as the book did.

Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849, but the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, during her teenage year, to be close to an uncle. After the Civil War, however, Knoxville could offer them little in the way of economic opportunity, so Frances took up writing to try to earn an income. She sold her first story to Godey’s Lady Book in 1868 and thereafter worked manically at her writing, often sacrificing her health to keep up a steady income.

Frances married Swan Burnett, a Knoxville neighbor, and they eventually left Knoxville to live in Washington, D.C. There she became famous for the literary salons she hosted on Tuesday evenings, which the rich, famous, and politically powerful attended. She also had two sons on whom she lavished attention. Vivian, the younger son, was the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her second marriage.

There is much more to her life’s story that what I have been able to relate here. She has been the subject of at least two major biographies:

Thwaite, Ann (1991), Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849–1924, David R. Godine, ISBN 978-0-87923-790-5

Gerzina, Gretchen (2004), Frances Hodgson Burnett: the unexpected life of the author of The Secret Garden, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-3382-1

In 2018, as writer-in-residence, I lived with Burnett and her work for several months as we at the Blount County Public Library decided to issue a new edition of The One I Knew Best of All, Burnett’s autobiographical novel of her childhood. The book is now available here on Amazon.

Costly commas

God save the Queen!

God, save the Queen!

The presence or absence of punctuation -- particularly the ubiquitous comma -- can change the meaning of a sentence. And it can have massive consequences.

This BBC website article,  Pocket: The commas that cost companies millions,  tells about how the absence of a comma in a contract cost a dairy company in Portland, Maine, $5 million earlier this year. And this is not an isolated story.

“Punctuation matters,” says Ken Adams, author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. But not all punctuation is made equal: contractual minefields are not seeded with semicolons or em-dashes (here’s one: – ) waiting to explode when tripped over. “It boils down to commas,” says Adams. “They matter, and exactly how depends on the context.”

Learning and applying the standard and well-evolved rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation is the key to effective communication. Despite the many changes that our modern lives have witnessed, the importance of the rules of the language still rules.

The scientific contributions and botanical art of Beatrix Potter

 All the world knows Beatrix Potter as the author of the Peter Rabbit stories.

As a 30-year-old woman, Potter tried to break through the Victorian-age social norms that precluded a female from being considered adequate as a scientist. She even wrote a scientific paper on mushrooms but in 1897 was refused the opportunity to present it to London's Linnean Society, the chief gathering of Victorian botanists, on the grounds that her ideas could not measure up to a male's observations. Her drawings were dismissed out of hand.

Some of the world knows that Potter also illustrated those stories. Probably even fewer people know that Potter was a scientist and a scientific artist, and her specialty was mushrooms.

As Maria Popova of BrainPickings writes:

. . . no aspect of Potter’s kaleidoscopic genius is more fascinating than her vastly underappreciated contribution to science and natural history, which comes to life in Linda Lear’s altogether magnificent Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature . . . — by far the best book on Potter and one of the finest biographies ever written . . . The little-known scientific contributions and mushroom drawings of "Peter Rabbit" creator Beatrix Potter

Subsequent generations of scientists recognized the error and unfairness when, a century later, the Linnean Society issued an apology.

But Potter, undaunted, moved on. Four years later, in 1901, she self-published a book about four little rabbits. The next year, that book had morphed into The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which became a huge and enduring commercial success. She continued her writing and artwork, growing more famous and wealthy.

Her exquisite botanical drawings still exist, fortunately, and you can see some of them here, or take a look at Anne Stevenson Hobbs' book The Art of Beatrix Potter.

King James I, perpetrator of a Biblical translation, hunter of witches

 The famous opening scene of The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare begins with the speeches of three witches. They predict what will happen in the play, but they are more than a dramatic device. They were a very pointed and obvious political statement.

That statement -- something of a cheerleader's "We're with you all the way!" shout-out -- was pointed directly at King James I.

We remember King James as the man who authorized the most famous translation of the Bible in history -- the King James Version. He not only authorized it; he sent some specific directions to the translators and monitored its progress, and that work can easily be compared to the work of any modern best translation services agency.

But there is another side to James that we forget today. He believed in witches and witchcraft and did his best to stamp it out both in Scotland, where he reigned as James VI and in England after he was crowned as James I in 1609.

James' belief in witchcraft and his campaign against it is outlined in an interesting article in HistoryExtra, the website of the BBC History Magazine and BBC World History Magazine. The article is Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King James’s witch hunts  and was written by Tracy Borman), who has authored a book about King James's attitude toward witchcraft. (Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts )

James’s obsession with witchcraft can be traced back to his childhood. The violent death of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to have inspired a dark fascination with magic. “His Highness told me her death was visible in Scotland before it did really happen,” related Sir John Harington many years later, being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air”.

The article is a fascinating account of the James we may have thought we knew.

Left-brain-right-brain: Time to get a new theory

 You probably run into the left-brain-right-brain theory of behavior a lot, as I do. It's undoubtedly a popular way to explain why people are different.

The left side of the brain is the analytical side; the right is the creative side. Or maybe I have that backward. Anyway, one side is supposed to be dominant, and that determines how we see the world and how we behave.

The problem with that neat little concept is that it's nonsense.

The brain and its functions are far too complex to be explained by this simplistic formulation. As Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ph.D., (psychologist and neuroscientist) and G. Wayne Miller (author) write in this Psychology Today article:

Neuroscientists have known for a long time that research does not support such sweeping claims about how people differ in their left and right sides, or hemispheres. The functions of the hemispheres are in fact different, but these differences aren’t what the popular culture holds to be true -- the differences lie in how each side processes very specific kinds of information. Example: The left hemisphere processes details of visible objects whereas the right processes overall shape. The left hemisphere plays a major role in grammar and decoding literal meaning whereas the right plays a role in understanding verbal metaphors and decoding indirect or implied meaning. And so forth. Hardly the sort of stuff that can guide your life! Source: Left Brain, Right Brain? Wrong | Psychology Today

Read the whole article, or maybe this one: The Truth About Being Left-Brained or Right-Brained.

If you're subscribing to this theory, it's time to get a new one.

Appalachian language and other myths about the region

 You've probably heard this rural legend (as opposed to urban legend): The people of Appalachia speak a dialect of English that harkens back to the English of Chaucer; it's older even than the English of Shakespeare.

No, they don't.

Just as everyone else's English has done, the English of rural Appalachia has constantly evolved and is the product of multiple influences.

That's the argument that Chi Luu, a computational linguist, makes in an interesting and arresting article in JSTOR Daily: The Legendary Language of the Appalachian "Holler" | JSTOR Daily

Language has an important place in the folklore of Appalachia and has evolved to become something quite different from its original linguistic sources. It’s one of the ways Appalachian communities show solidarity and belonging. Language lovers may marvel at this unique linguistic quilt, a thing of threads and patches, that extends across a region that often seems to have little else going for it. But in some ways, the folksiness, the romanticized hearkening back to the past, holds the region back from telling a more nuanced story about itself, where it came from, and where it might be going.

Luu posits that Appalachia should be recognized for its diversity -- cultural as well as linguistic -- rather than being thought of as fiercely and exclusively white descendants of Scots-Irish stock. Movement in and out of Appalachia was just as prevalent as in any other part of the country.

We may think of Appalachia as poor, rural, white, backward, and uneducated (and, in today's political climate, angry). But to do so makes us the fools rather than the people of this fascinating region. Or, as Luu puts it:

So the theory of the poor, white, rural Appalachian mountain men going it alone, preserving a pure and unchanging strain of archaic British English, isolated in a hardscrabble place far from civilization, could not be further from the truth. Without the influence of diverse communities of other Appalachians such as African American Appalachians, the southern Appalachian speech and culture simply would not be what it is today. To ignore their contributions to culture and language means Appalachia will always be a distant story, burdened by the myths and legends written by others, left half told.

 

'The Woman Who Smashed Codes' taught her biographer cryptology after her death

Journalist Jason Fagon, when he set out to write a biography of the extraordinary Elizebeth Friedman, America's chief codebreaker during World War II, had an obstacle to overcome that most biographers don't face: He had to learn cryptology, the art and science of secret writing.

Fortunately, Fagon had a good teacher: Elizebeth Friedman herself.

Friedman had been dead for more than two decades when Fagon began his research -- she died in 1980 -- but she had left much of her work in papers given to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia.

Fagon started by reading about cryptology and trying to get an idea of how it happened. He admitted in an interview with Fortune magazine that he didn't feel he had gotten very far.

But then this lucky thing happened, and I discovered a codebreaking manual written by Elizebeth herself, left behind in her personal archive. It’s an unpublished manuscript of a book she wrote for young adults, explaining how to break common types of codes and ciphers with a pencil and paper, in this very clear and encouraging and witty style. The spirit of the book is like: You can do it! Jump in! Have fun! It’s a game! Don’t be afraid! And it was perfect for me, as an amateur. That’s how I learned the basics of cryptanalysis, by reading Elizebeth’s own book and stepping through some of the example problems that she laid out. Elizebeth Smith Friedman: 'The Woman Who Smashed Codes'

Besides his willingness to dig into cryptology, Fagon had another advantage as a biographer: he had a spectacular and important subject that few people knew anything about. Friedman's life defies a short description.

She stumbled into cryptology after being asked by an eccentric millionaire to help prove that Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays of William Shakespeare. (He didn't, according to a book she and her husband wrote many years later.) This job led her to her working for the government during Prohibition, breaking codes of smugglers and testifying against them in court.

When World War II broke out for America in 1941, she became America's chief cryptanalyst, breaking Nazi and Japanese codes and helping the FBI track down Nazi spies throughout North and South America. Because her work was often classified and because she was a woman, and a modest one at that,  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover never gave her the credit she deserved for her work.

Fagon's book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, published in 2017, has helped to correct that injustice. The book has become a best-seller and was named as a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year. Stuart Smith's biography, A Life in Code: Pioneer Cryptanalyst Elizebeth Smith Friedman, is available at WorldCat at this link.

 

Antonia Fraser's writing day

 Fortunately for writer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser, she was pronounced as "uppity" when she was a girl attending convent school. The nuns, for some reason she doesn't specify, didn't like her.

They decided to punish by making her spend her Saturday mornings learning to touch type.

"In consequence," she writes, "I’m a touch typist – actually the most useful skill I ever acquired; so much for uppishness."

Fraser walls herself off for three hours in the mornings and writes "ferociously." Then she stops, has lunch, exercises and does other things in the after. In the late afternoon, she edits and revises what she had done in the morning, but it's at a much more languid pace.

The reason that this pattern of work-in-the-morning-only is something so deeply ingrained in me, is that I began trying to write history seriously when I had six children born in 10 years. I have actually written all my life, but history was It. So I devised a way of working like a bat out of hell, or anyway a bat out of the nursery, the moment I could cram the children into cradles, kindergartens, schools ... with the wild hope they would stay there. (There are wicked stories of notices on my door saying “Only come in if you have broken something”, which I utterly deny.) Under the circumstances, I never ever suffered from writer’s block. Source: Antonia Fraser: ‘I was forced to learn typing as a punishment for being uppish’ | Books | The Guardian

All this comes from a brief and delightful description that Fraser gave of her day to The Guardian a couple of years ago. If you are interested in how a good writer writes, you will want to read this.

Fraser is the author of many tomes of history (Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell The Lord Protector, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, etc.), a couple of memoirs, and a detective series -- among other works. S]Now in her nineties, she still writes and gives her full powers to it.