The Best American Poetry

"Famous Blue Raincoat" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Were the haunting, breathtaking, painful lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat” written by almost any other songwriter besides Leonard Cohen, there would be no question about the song’s meaning.  It appears to a straightforward confessional letter about a love triangle between “L. Cohen” his woman “Jane” and their mutual friend, a man with a blue raincoat who has gone to the desert and at one time had a brief affair with Jane.

As such, the song is deeply, almost embarrassingly, personal, an epistolary song about a wounded man who cannot help forgiving the friend.

The overpowering emotion of the song inhibits another look at the lyrics, but Cohen’s autobiography immediately suggests problems with this common interpretation.  Specifically, it is Cohen’s life that is being described both as the narrator and the other man.

It is the friend in the song not “L. Cohen,” the narrator, who has a “famous blue raincoat.” But as the real Cohen noted in liner notes to the 1975 collection The Best of Leonard Cohen, the blue raincoat was his. “I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959….It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”

In the song, the narrator asks the friend, “Did you ever go clear?” This is a reference to Scientology and its state of “Clear.” Cohen himself for a brief time at least was a Church of Scientology member.

In the song, “L. Cohen” sings to the friend:

“You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene “

But in his concert introduction to Chelsea Hotel #2, Cohen said, “Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel… I wasn’t looking for her., I was looking for Lili Marlene.” The song “Lili Marlene” (there are variants in the spelling of her name) was a popular love song from World War II although it had been written in Germany in 1915 during the First World War. The song is about a soldier who stands waiting by a lamppost for his love, Lili Marlene. That is, Lili is a symbol of perfect love that has gone away.

But if it is Leonard Cohen who has experienced all that is attributed to the friend, then to whom is “L. Cohen” singing? To ask the question is to answer it. “L. Cohen” is one part of Leonard Cohen singing to another part of Leonard Cohen. Call that other part, the friend in the song, “Leonard Cohen.” “L. Cohen” is faithful to women. “Leonard Cohen” is not. Leonard Cohen, the real songwriter, is writing about a romantic triangle, but he is both men in that triangle. “Jane” is any woman Leonard Cohen has been involved with.

Using this premise, it is possible to work through the song.

It opens with this line: “It's four in the morning, the end of December.” Clearly, given the time of day and year, the setting is cold and dark. It is a line reminiscent of Robert Frost’s famous line in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” an evening the speaker calls

“the darkest evening of the year.” In both cases, the setting represents the speaker’s profound sense of loneliness, of sorrow, of a depression like no other. In this despair “L. Cohen” writes to himself, seeking understanding perhaps even a reconciliation.

And so, in a step toward that reconciliation, “L. Cohen” sings: “I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.” “L. Cohen” wants the two sides to be friends.

“New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.”

Clinton Street is on the Lower East Side in New York. Leonard Cohen really lived there. Clinton Street is named after the Revolutionary War hero General George Clinton who went on to become the first Governor of New York after independence and, in 1804, the Vice-President of the United States. The area, that is, is drenched in both Jewish and American history and has its own ongoing soundtrack. Unlike “Leonard Cohen,” “L. Cohen seems content, pleased about where he is in life.”

“I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert.”

“Leonard Cohen” is not like “L. Cohen.” He is emotionally apart from other people, far away from them in his mind. A desert is so dry that it can support only very sparse vegetation if any at all. The desert is a perfect metaphor for “Leonard Cohen’s” mind: it is so dry no fertile ideas can grow there. The desert also has multiple religious meanings. In Judaism the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt stayed in the desert wandering for forty years, but they also received the Torah at Mount Sinai and did eventually get to the land of Israel. In Christianity, Jesus was tempted by the Devil in the Judean desert. The desert is a place of testing and “Leonard Cohen” was just in such a place in his mind.

”You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.”

This line, of course, has a double meaning. “Living for nothing” can mean living without cost, but it more likely especially means living without a purpose, desperately searching. “L. Cohen,” ever the optimist wants “Leonard Cohen” to mine the despair for material, to keep a record.  

“Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?”

“Jane” is the woman in both their lives. The romantic “Leonard” has given her a memento to remember him by as he left to go on a spiritual exploration.

 “Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.”

“Leonard’s” depression is aging him. The blue raincoat is a central symbol in the poem. A raincoat is a protection against wet weather, against the storms of life. “Leonard’s” raincoat was famous, because it had always protected him. He was lucky, blessed by life. All had gone well for him as he walked through life. Others got drenched, but he had his coat, his ability to conjure up the right language in the right order and put that language to music. Now, though, the raincoat is torn. It is no longer working as it once did. “Leonard” is getting a bit wet because the raincoat has torn.

 “You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene.”

Poor “Leonard” has been looking for the perfect woman, but he cannot meet her.  

”And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.”

 “Leonard,” the great romantic has bothered to give a discarded piece of himself, a flake, to Jane, but, given that it was “Leonard,” they broke up and she returned to the faithful “L. Cohen” but she had been permanently changed. She had discovered that she wasn’t anyone’s attachment. She wasn’t defined just by her relationship to a man.

“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief.”

“L. Cohen is angry in these lines, mocking “Leonard’s” romantic pose, his Gypsy-like nomadic attitude, but in his case being a nomad meant traveling not from place to place but from woman to woman. “L. Cohen” believes in devotion to one woman for life. “Leonard” does not seem capable of that.

The end of the song is the attempt at reconciliation. “L. Cohen” misses his “brother” despite the fact that this double has killed part of him. “L. Cohen” will not put up a fight if “Leonard” returns.

And so the two sides of Leonard Cohen, the responsible side who gives voice to the song, and the depressed romantic side that is scolded and reprimanded, reach a truce. The songwriter has come, for the moment, to accept a self he’s not entirely comfortable with but recognizes as irreversible.  

As if Cohen’s lyrical achievement weren’t enough in this song, there is a technical poetic point that should be mentioned. A good deal of the song is written in amphibrachs. An amphibrach consists of a stressed syllable which has an unstressed syllable on either side of it. Consider, for example, these two lines. I have underlined the stressed syllables:

It’s four in the morning, the end of December.

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.

What better way to write a poem about a love triangle than to have a syllabic triangle with a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables.

I’m aware of the 1994 BBC interview in which Cohen expressed ambiguity about the nature of the song, and it’s certainly open to a wide variety of interpretations. That’s what makes Leonard Cohen so mysterious and worthwhile.

What Nighthawks Says About Fiction (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

 

Seventy years ago Edward Hopper completed his masterpiece, a chilling painting that captured the reality and pain of human loneliness. (For the information completist, the painting was finished on January 21, 1942). Nighthawks has become the iconic symbol of a supposed human inability to speak with others, much less understand them. The four figures in the painting do not speak. Hopper used himself as the model for both the man sitting next to his wife and the stranger sitting alone, as though he couldn't communicate with either his spouse or even his own self. His wife Jo was the model for the woman.

Much has been made of the fact that there is no entrance or exit from the diner, as though this were an existential illustration of being trapped in a world with lights so bright they don't let us hide and situated in a cosmos as impenetrably dark as a black hole.

When I look at the picture, I understand the standard critical reaction, but I see Nighthawks not only as a human but also as a writer. For me, the picture illuminates the writing condition, not just the human one.

To adapt the language of surrealism, Nighthawks shows a reality that looks like reality--like a photograph--but that pictured reality was never real. The picture describes a fictional world but with the verisimilitude to make viewers believe it genuinely existed. Indeed, based on a misleading statement by Hopper that he used a real diner as his model, generations of fans went in search of the place. It took an intrepid blogger named Jeremiah Moss to search diligently among historical documents in New York City and sadly conclude in a New York Times article that "the discovery that the "Nighthawks" diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper's imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition."

Let's call what occurs in the real world "real reality" and what happens in the painting "seeming reality." But this seeming reality is better than real reality (it's ironically more real) because real reality has limits that seeming reality doesn't. Hopper needed for there to be a diner on that corner with those people sitting just where they sat when he wanted them to sit there. But the diner and the people weren't really there. (The surrealists, of course, called the seeming reality super real and then elided the words to form the word "surreal"). Seeming reality, however, differs from super reality because surrealist art focuses on scenes that appear to have a photographic reality but can't, even in principle, occur in real life. Melting pocket watches can't hang limply over tree limbs (as in Dali's The Persistence of Memory). Neither can a bird in a cage replace a head and body (as in Magritte's The Therapist). In contrast, as in Nighthawks, seeming reality could in principle occur in real life.

By using seeming reality, Hopper was able to offer not just a picture of reality that appeared to cohere with the real world, but emotional insights that would not have been available had he limited himself to real reality. This seeming reality, like realistic or naturalistic fiction, is revealing. By being able to be more flexible than real reality, it can present images to us that distill and illuminate the human condition more forcefully and better than real reality. That is why realistic fiction and other arts are so incredibly valuable and so needed by society.

Hopper sought to find a way to illustrate human loneliness and found in his imagination an image not available in real reality. From the reaction across the generations, the picture's audiences found Hopper's efforts painfully powerful.            

Gracie Allen for President (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Stephen Colbert's mock exploration of a presidential run this year was not the first time a comedian satirically sought the highest office. Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor, and Pat Paulsen were among the others.

But of all the aspiring leaders, Gracie Allen was my favorite comedic candidate. Gracie, along with her partner and husband George Burns, made up one of the most successful comedy teams of all time. Gracie's character had a unique mind filled with what George called illogical logic.

Writing for Gracie wasn't easy. One day in 1940 the writers were trying to come up with an idea about how Gracie might spend some spare time. One of the writers noted that she had done everything except run for president. George immediately loved the idea.

In real 1940 politics, President Franklin Roosevelt was running against Wendell Wilkie. When Gracie entered the race she said that she'd been laughing at presidential candidates for years and so decided she should run herself. She declared herself the candidate of the Surprise Party. After all, she noted, her father was a Republican, her mother was a Democrat, and she had been born as a surprise. Her campaign slogan was "Down With Common Sense. Vote for Gracie."

Audiences reacted so well to the idea that the writers decided to continue the gag for a few more shows. Suddenly, though, the success was such that the publicity stunt took on a life of its own. The Union Pacific Railroad donated a campaign train for her to ride to Omaha for a convention. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited Gracie to Washington. A campaign song was born. At her first press conference, Gracie promised to settle the simmering border dispute between California and Florida. When asked about the Neutrality Bill, she asserted that we should pay it if we owe it.

Thousands of people greeted Gracie at each stop the train made. There were parades. When babies were thrust in front of her, she claimed she wanted to wait until the male babies reached twenty-one before she kissed them. The nominating convention was held on May 17th. Eight thousand fans were there to greet Gracie. She told them she didn't want a vice-presidential running mate because she didn't want any vice on the ticket. After the convention, Harvard University announced that it was endorsing her. The reaction of President Roosevelt, a Harvard alumnus, was not recorded.

Gracie received several thousand write-in votes on Election Day. The good people of Menominee, Michigan nominated Gracie for mayor, but they noted that she couldn't serve unless she was a resident. Gracie wrote back complaining about the residence requirement because she couldn't live in two places at once. There were some complaints that Gracie wasn't taking the presidency seriously enough so she made a speech noting that she had meant no disrespect.

There are those observers who claim that some presidential candidates provide enough unintended satire to render professional comedians superfluous. Perhaps, but as Gracie Allen demonstrated, Americans need what comedians always provide: a good laugh and, underneath that, sharp insights about the society.

I wish Gracie were around to run again.

A Heart Attack and a Novel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Edmund Wilson called it a "shock of recognition," the realization of a truth that you knew but did not previously recognize. It took me twelve hours to be shocked into realizing that the small pain in my right shoulder with radiating lines flying out from it across my chest might be a heart attack. Then it took fourr days to get to a doctor and a hospital, have tests, wait for results, get scheduled, and undergo surgery requiring six by passes. I did inquire when I woke up if they had contacted the Guiness people to see if anyone had topped me. 

 

Unfortunately, the surgery was just the beginning. I had a series of bad reactions, so far requiring four stays in the hospital, having needles stuck into my back and side and up and down my arms.

Of course, coming face-to-face with age, illness, and mortality is difficult for everyone. I experienced it, though, not just as a person but also as a writer. I had the energy to read and watch television but not to shape sentences and paragraphs.I couldn't write for months.

It was my cardiologist who told me to work on another book. Indeed, he got animated, declaring it as a medical necessity for me to begin writing again, to take my mind off my body's betrayal. That day I contacted my editor and got approval to write a book about American Jewish films. I'm going to begin writing that book soon.

That was good, but I had a deeper emotional need. I began thinking about a novel I had written just before the attack. I had put it aside, ignoring it in the face of grappling with survival. The Land of Eighteen Dreams is an episodic novel made up of eighteen chronologically-conected stories, each of which is self-contained. All of these episodes concern Lily, who grows from age eight to adulthood, and her grandfather. His stories distill the inherited folk wisdom of Eastern European Jews and serve as an ongoing account of American Jewish life.

I sat there and read the novel again. I had set the early part of it in Queens, where I grew up next to La Guardia Airport. I used to duck when the planes flew over. I had included some of the neighborhood characters, such as Dan, the Ice Cream Man who gave quizzes and then gave free ice cream to those who answered correctly. His first question to me was "How much is 8 and 6?" I pondered long and hard before answering, wondering if the laws of mathematics had changed since I learned how to add. They hadn't, and I got my ice cream.

Flooded by memories, I wanted to publish the novel. My agent was kind and was willing to approach publishers. But here my health became a giant barrier. I wasn't allowed to drive. I was too weak to travel. I couldn't visit potential editors. And, worst of all, I couldn't participate in the required active promotion of a book. There was going to be no novel because of the heart attack.

A friend of mine came over for a visit. He had published various novels and even had one made into a television movie. Now he was self-publishing. I'd never considered doing so but there was a logic to the approach for this novel. I found a reputable place (one that didn't accept all that was submitted) and arranged for the novel to be published.

Mystery Authors Who Write Fast (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In her posthumously published autobiography, Agatha Christie revealed that she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first detective novel, in two weeks. Ed McBain wrote his early 87th precinct novels in about a month each. Christie and McBain were in the company of the titans of what are known as "industry writers," people who can turn out one extraordinary book after another, people who vie for the title "Fastest Typewriter in the West," or anywhere else. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote mysteries for half a century and delivered more than a thousand books. In 1939 alone Gardner published four novels, eighteen novelettes, two short stories, and five articles. John Creasey wrote more than five hundred novels between 1932 and 1979. In 1939, Creasey published thirty-eight novels.

There were many other mystery writers who wrote quickly. Between 1906 and 1932 Edgar Wallace wrote more than one hundred and seventy books. Phillips Oppenheim wrote more than one hundred and fifty novels and short story collections between 1887 and 1944. In the eleven months between May 1932 and April 1933 Georges Simenon wrote ten novels. His goal was to write a novel in eleven days. He wrote two hundred and twenty novels in his career.

Sometimes genre writers are accused of being able to write quickly because the novels are generally briefer and supposedly have less psychological depth, thematic complexity, and linguistic density than "real" literature. Such an assertion ignores literary writers. John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath between June and October in 1928. Herman Melville took just six months to write Moby-Dick. (I think it took me six months to read it.) Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in six days. There are claims Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment very fast to pay off gambling debts. And Robert Louis Stevenson's stepson wrote that the famous author composed Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days. These feats are not just true of literature. Handel wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus" in three days and the whole of The Messiah in three weeks.

Mystery writers who write quickly are not necessarily shortchanging literature. Certainly mystery authors writing a series book start off with an advantage. The setting is usually familiar as is the protagonist and the protagonist's surrounding entourage. But the plots have to be worked out and the language has to be enticing.

Mystery writers sometimes work rapidly for the same reason as other artists do. Tlhey are inspired. Or the writing is a powerful and constantly needed release from anxiety. Or the tension is only relieved when the book is completed so there is great incentive to finish it quickly.

But I think the crime novel uniquely benefits from being quickly written. Authors can keep the entire story in their minds. Writing a mystery requires a specific mental framework in which characters, plots, motives, clues, red herrings, setting, literary devices, and other matters all must be in perfect harmony and perspective. There are more novelistic aspects in a mystery than in a "regular" novel. Time dissipates the mind's ability to hold all these in a pattern. Writing quickly enhances the virtues of the tightly-woven mystery tale. Mystery authors should be celebrated and recognized because theirs is a complex intellectual task that, when done well, is compelling to readers' minds and hearts. 

The First American Fictional Detective (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

All detective story readers know that C. Auguste Dupin, first appearing in the 1841 tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," was the orignal fictional crime solver. Poe created him even before the word "detective" existed. But Dupin was French. Wikie Collins created British detectives, Walter Hartright in The Woman in White (1860) and Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868). Sherlock Holmes was as British as British could be. He first appeared in "A Study in Scarlet," published in 1887.

The first American fictional detective arrived after Dupin and Hartright but more than twenty years before Holmes. His name ought to be well-known. He was, after all, a pioneer. But James Brampton hasn't gotten the attention he deserves. Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective: The Private Record of J.B. was originally published in 1865. John Babbington Williams (1827-1879) was Brampton's creator, but not much more is known of him other than that he was a medical doctor who wrote various stories for some of the dime magazines that then existed. Happily, Westholme Publishing reprinted the book in 2008, making its 29 "leaves" available for the contemporary reader.

While it would be an exaggeration to claim that Brampton is in the same crime league as his better-known early colleagues, nevertheless the stories are intriguing precisely because Brampton relies on making close observations and drawing general conclusions from those observations. Poe had done this and Arthur Conan Doyle made such efforts famous. But Williams lack Poe's unmatchable linguistic precision or Doyle's sheer pleasure in telling the stories. Too many of the stories reach abrupt conclusions. Too many of the criminals are obvious, too many of the clues are discovered by chance, and too few of the plots are seasoned with surprises for current audiences.

The book opens with an introduction in which the author supposedly meets Brampton in a Georgia bar. Brampton immediately bets the doctor that a young man who enters the bar has stolen money from his employer. The explanation folows. The premise of the book is that Brampton has retired and sends his case notebooks to Dr. Williams who will edit and publish them. Unlike Watson, that is, Dr. Williams is not the narrator of the stories.

Not all of those stories can genuinely be considered true detective narratives. There are medical crime stories, which are not as good as the regular detective stories. There are also courtroom dramas and what might be termed thrillers. Williams, that is, deserves credit for exploring the then unchartered logical geography available to the fictional detective.

While most of the stories are set in New York, a couple are set in Baltimore. Clearly, that is, Williams was aware of Poe. And modern readers should be aware of Williams.

The Draft Dodger Blues (by Larry Epstein)

People want me to join the Grand Army of Literary Pessimists. A recruiting sergeant for the Army comes to visit me regularly in the darkest corner of the night when I'm unable to sleep. He begins with an accusation. "Are you blind? The book is on life support. You and your friends read books because you've read them since you were young. Do you really think that in 2061 people will be reading physical books? Do you think there will be bookstores? Or libraries? Or corners of IKEA stores where you can buy bookcases? Ha. They'll all be gone. Just this week, a researcher at North Carolina State University announced the development of a computer chip that can store a library's worth of information on that single chip. In ten years e-books will make up more than 80% of book sales. Look at the sales figures or estimates for the SONY Reader, the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, or Google's new platform that makes e-books available on almost all web-enabled devices."

"Ha, yourself," I yell back. I'm not that articulate in the middle of the night. "Just call yourselves Luddites and be done with it. I admit I like the feel of the book, the slow unfolding of the pages and the plot or argument, the shocks of recognition that spring from the page to my mind. But you sound like those people who moaned and groaned that the world would end when this guy Gutenberg invented the printing press. How, they wondered, could the world survive without parchment? So what if people read on the screen instead of from a book? What's the difference how you're reading Flaubert. Le mot juste can be in print or pixels."

"If only it were that simple, Larry." It's an old sales trick. He repeats my name to make me like him. "But it's not. People won't be reading Flaubert or Dickinson. Have you never seen how people read online? They don't sit there and focus the way you do with a book. They grow restless. They read the first few lines. Their concentration has been reduced to tweets. They jump around. And the people who produce the materials for these e-readers aren't stupid. They want to attract consumers. The iPad is a sign of the future. It's not a dedicated reader. So you read a sentence, and then you text a friend. Then you read a few more words and listen to a Lady Gaga song. You listen to the radio on the new Nook. The writing will be filled with hyperlinks because there will be pictures to see and just a perfect YouTube video to watch instead of struggling with those long, hard words.

"And I'm not done, Larry. Forget the music and the videos. Just look at the writing of the future. The words will be simple. Who is going to take the time to craft words and ideas carefully when there won't be an audience, or the current audiences won't read them or won't understand them?

I shake my head. "Great books are still being published. There are extraordinary writers out there."

"That's the last desperate flicker of light. We're entering a new Dark Ages. It will take some time, but we're getting there. Oh, we had a good run. A few centuries with the novel and a bit longer with other kinds of writing in the modern world. But soon enough our literate civilization will decay. And you're just reading through the apocalypse. You should join our Grand Army."

The night ends. I want to be a draft dodger, to resist signing up with the Grand Army. I want to keep on writing and reading books. I want to believe in the future of books and readers and publishers and bookstores and libraries and bookcases. That is, I want to believe in the future of humanity, at least as I understand it.

But I keep having the draft dodger blues.

Jewish True Tales by Larry Epstein

I'm celebrating this first day of Hanukkah by launching a new project called Jewish True Tales with stories about Jewish life. The first post has anecdotes about Einstein, Emma Lazarus, and Leslie Howard (above), the British actor and anti-Nazi activist. You can find the blog here. 

Leon Uris and the Power of Words (by Larry Epstein)

It's been fifty years since the film version of Exodus was released. I first read the book when I was thirteen, and, though I didn't know history well enough to grasp the full power of the words, I was entranced by the story of Israel's struggle for re-birth.

I met Leon Uris some years later, thirteen years before his death in 2003. By then I was familiar with the Holocaust and Jewish history, and I had visited Israel. I also knew that the literary establishment had dismissed Uris as a propagandist at worst and a producer of a document rather than a novel at best. Uris had overcome a lot of writing self-doubt. He had failed English three times in high school. When I saw him, he pulled out a yellowed, folded piece of paper from his wallet. It was a composition he had written in sixth grade. The teacher had written a particularly brutal comment. Despite his international fame, Uris still carried a wound.

Later, I contacted him asking about the most inspirational story in his life for a book I was writing. He suggested a story about how Exodus had been received in the Soviet Union in the years after its initial publication in 1958. Because of anti-Semitism and Soviet support for nations opposing Israel, the Soviets had banned the book. Members of Israel's embassy staff smuggled copies of the book through diplomatic pouches and distributed the novel to Jewish underground activists. At the time, duplicating machines were illegal for Soviet citizens, so translators typed the book a page at a time (there were 626 pages in the hardcover version) making as many carbon copies as possible.

Exodus had an extraordinary effect on Soviet Jews. For many of them, the novel was their first encounter with Jewish tradition and history. They had learned that Jews were cowards, but in those pages Jews were heroes. The Soviet Jews who read the book became instant Zionists and felt deeply connected to their still budding Jewish lives. The book was a master narrative for them, a counter-history to all they had been taught about themselves. In it, they found for the first time a positive image of Jewish life, of their ancestors, of Israel, of their families, of their friends, of their own beings. Whatever a great novel is, surely Exodus qualifies in the sense that its power changed lives, re-framed identities, instilled pride, and profoundly stirred elemental human passions.

Leon Uris did go to the Soviet Union. It was that visit that he called his most inspirational moment. Many Soviet Jews were particularly enthused about the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah which celebrates the completion of the annual reading of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. For Soviet Jews, the holdiay came to symbolize their public assertion that they were Jewish. With twenty thousand people in the streets outside the synagogue, and thousands more inside, Uris made his way to the seat set aside for him. To prevent publicity, the State-run television cameras turned off as he walked. Even the rabbi looked nervous because Uris was so prominent a Zionist. Someone rushed to the microphone and announced that Uris was in the synagogue. There was a gasp followed by loud cheering. Uris was asked to carry a Torah around the synagogue, but, overwhelmed by the reaction he had received, he declined. He was seated next to Connie and Joe Smukler, a couple from Philadelphia. Connie turned to Uris and said, "Leon, just because you didn't write it doesn't mean that you can't carry it."

Uris agreed, and, holding the Torah, he walked into the crowd. Hands reached out to touch the scrolls and Uris. The crowd began kissing both. People wept so much that Uris said he felt as though he almost drowned in a sea of tears.

The Detective Hero (by Larry Epstein)

Did Robert B. Parker ever write a bad sentence? The question arose as I read Parker's latest Spenser novel, Painted Ladies. The book has a bittersweet aura. I always enjoy Parker's spare prose and crackling dialogue seasoned with wisecracks and literary allusions. Parker writes in the new novel that actors use the word "indicating" to mean the moment when audiences can tell an actor is acting. Parker never indicates that he is writing. But this is a posthumous book. Parker died this past January. There will be one more Spenser novel published next May and supposedly a holiday novel or even others at some point. Every page of this book is haunted by the fact of the author's death.

I used my reading to ponder why Parker was so good. I first ruled out plotting. The books generally have no intricate plots. There aren't red herrings and mysterious clues. Final pages don't offer shocking revelations. Mostly Spenser puts himself in harm's way to lure the evildoers. Some fans don't like Susan Silverman, Spenser's idealized lover, or Pearl, his dog. But they were a crucial part of his world. They propelled his character. Spenser was a gourmet cook, a weight lifter, an ex-cop and ex-boxer, a man who loved to be wanted by women he could then tell that he was taken. Spenser's Boston world was interesting but not interesting enough to explain the character's success.

Many of Spenser's fans believe that Spenser's relationship with Hawk is the key ingredient. The idea of two males of different races joining in friendship is deeply embedded in American literature. And, indeed, much of the banter between the two men takes note of Hawk's blackness and therefore his differences with Spenser. But Hawk's appeal is not really because of racial complementarity. The appeal stems from Hawk's toughness. Spenser is hard; Hawk is steel. Spenser is a descendent of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe who, unlike, say, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, discovered that reason was enough to solve crimes. They had to mix a quick intelligence with brute force. Spenser and Hawk both had that mix, but Hawk was more willing to rely on the force. His understanding of the human condition didn't have Spenser's romantic dimension. The two men were two sides of a single total hero. Hawk was the rougher side, the godfather of many characters who would emerge as the more violent sidekicks of detective heroes. Think of Joe Pike who teams with Elvis Cole in Robert Crais' books or Win Lockwood who teams with Myron Bolitar in Harlan Coben's books.

What separates Spenser from relying solely on his physical prowess is his code of ethics. Susan reminds him of that code. His work tempts him to cross the line. It is this internal struggle between thug and hero that is the moral center of every book. Spenser is both civilized and discontented with civilization. He knows what the real world is like but struggles to create his own honorable world within the real one.

Parker's books about Spenser are dramatic morality plays, often about women or adolescents in trouble. Spenser makes readers see the gradations of morality, the interstices of relationships where insights often hide. If we readers can't go around punching people the way Spenser does, we nevertheless can learn from him how to see the moral dimensions in our own lives in new and deeper ways. We can learn from Robert B. Parker how to be detectives of the human soul.