The Best American Poetry

Why We Read Mysteries (by Larry Epstein)

What's interesting about a killer orangutan and a purloined letter? Or about the endlessly fascinating literature that grew from Edgar Allan Poe's valiant effort to push back against the madness trying to create an empire in his mind? This is a mystery with no solution. We know the facts, but we never fathom the explanation. It's not that we haven't tried.

Maybe, some arguments go, we read mysteries for psychological reasons. Perhaps figuring out the puzzle or enjoying the vicarious thrill of the search provides emotional satisfaction. Or maybe mysteries provide us with the childlike delight of a sequence of surprises, comparable, say, to a Charlie Chaplin routine followed by a topper and then a topper to the topper. In one psychoanalytic explanation by Dr. Charles Rycroft, the victims are parents, the criminals the readers' anger at parents, and the detectives, well the detectives discover they are looking at that anger in themselves. Maybe the authors and readers are all the characters in a story, with their detective side punishing their criminal side for crimes--impulses they have or actions they've taken. Such a detection and punishment symbolically cleanses their sins. This symbolic cleansing is so pleasurable and so chronically needed that we seek it over and over. Maybe Freud was right. We are discontented with our civilization, always struggling with our primitive instincts. On this interpretation, we are the criminals, and being caught provides the symbolic punishment we need to exorcise our guilt for the instincts.

Perhaps readers of mysteries fear uncontrollable social change and see in mysteries the gallant defense of the status quo. This social defense theory has become complicated by many characters like Edward G. Robinson's Rico or Tony Soprano who make audiences question their identification solely with the forces of law.  Or consider Dexter, the serial killer who kills killers, and Vic Mackey of The Shield, who kept crossing the border between cop and criminal. These characters make audiences ponder the acceptable limits to controlling criminality.

Reading or watching mysteries provides a rehearsal for what might happen in our own social lives. Young girls watched Beverly Hills 90210 and its offspring to find models for their growing selves (a cringe-inducing fact for many parents) and experience situations that might occur in their lives before the incidents happened. So, too, mysteries prepare us for the crime we fear we might experience. Having read and seen enough examples, we have mentally rehearsed our various potential roles in any crime we might encounter.

Literary Anecdotes (by Larry Epstein)

Ever since I began reading adult fiction, I have been interested in anecdotes about famous writers. The principal reason for this was that in learning about writers I hoped I could somehow absorb their skills and derive directives for leading a literary life. I also simply enjoyed the stories.

For example, some readers wonder why Edna St. Vincent Millay had a man's middle name, and a saint's one at that. As it happens, Millay's mother had a brother named Charles Buzzell. One chilled February day, Uncle Charles, ill with fever, was on the docks in New Orleans. He watched as cotton was loaded on a ship bringing the cargo to New York. Buzzell went on board for a closer look, found a bale of hay, and promptly fell asleep. The crew didn't notice him, and he awoke only after the ship had set sail with the hatches battened down. His screams couldn't be heard, and so he was locked below decks for nine days without food or water. When he was finally discovered, near death, he was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in New York where, against all odds and the expectations of his doctors, he survived. His grateful sister wanted to memorialize the hospital, and so she used the saint after whom the hospital was named as her daughter's middle name.

Some literary anecdotes happened to me. When I was young, I lived in Sag Harbor, on Long Island, at the same time as John Steinbeck. The author was then researching his novel The Winter of Our Discontent. One the ways he did this was to visit my father's variety store, especially on rainy days, stretch out on the floor, lean back against the magazine rack, and observe the customers. When one interested him, he'd wait for the customer to leave and ask my father all about the person. My father, who had been born in Sag Harbor and served on a political committee with Steinbeck, knew everyone in town, knew their quirks and ancestors, their desires and their faults. Steinbeck heard their language, absorbed the stories and gossip about them, and began his construction of an American character.

Once a high school friend of mine and some pals of his broke into Steinbeck's house. I assume they thought the famous author would have a lot of money. They didn't get much and discovered that the heavy television set they had taken was beyond their ability to carry. They dumped in in a local pond. They were quickly apprehended, but Steinbeck refused to press charges, and they were set free. I asked my friend why Steinbeck had let them go. Neither one of us could figure it out, unaccustomed as we were to the emotional generosity possible from a heart as big as Steinbeck's.

Literary Sites (by Larry Epstein)

When I was a teenager I convinced my family to go on a literary tour of New England. We went to all the usual spots such as Walden Pond, Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Hawthorne's house, and Emily Dickinson's house. I was also interested in utopian movements, so we stopped at Harvard, Massachusetts to see Fruitlands, the doomed community started by Bronson Alcott who was not only Louisa May Alcott's father but also the man who loaned Henry David Thoreau an ax to chop down trees for his cabin in the woods.

A couple of years later, a friend and I drove around the country, and we made sure to stop in such places as Hannibal, Missouri and Hartford, Connecticut to join Mark Twain's youth to his old age.

All these places are well-known. But there are lesser-known literary sites.

For example, Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in the narrowest house in New York City, at 75 1/2 Bedford Street. The house is nine and a half feet wide. It is a three story brick building constructed on what was once a carriage alley. Millay lived there in 1923 and 1924. Cary Grant and John Barrymore also later lived in the house. In the fifties, William Burroughs lived a few doors down at 69 Bedford.

Then there is the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Many famous guests have stayed at the Willard, including writers and presidents who were also writers. Abraham Lincoln and his family lived there for several weeks before his inauguration. Indeed, Lincoln's first presidential paycheck was used to settle his bill. It was for $773.75. And one morning in 1861 a woman from Boston was awakened by the harsh sound of soldiers marching beneath her window. They were singing "John Brown's Body." She liked the tune but not the words. So she climbed out of bed, sat at her desk in her room at the Willard, and there Julia Ward Howe wrote the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." President Ulysses S. Grant fled the White House to find some peace and quiet in the Willard's lobby. Sadly, many people followed him there begging for political favors. He called these people "lobbyists," and the word stuck.

I'm not sure why I've always enjoyed literary sites. Maybe it's a mystical hope that some of the talent that resided there will find its way into my mind. Maybe it's a way to understand the writers better by seeing where they wrote. I'm aware, of course, that such visits are no substitute for reading the words of writers, but I often find I enjoy the reading more after I've seen an author's home. The visits offer an author-reader connection across time. Visiting sites where the authors lived or stayed helps both the authors and me cheat their deaths. I like to think they're glad about that.

The Great Baseball Song (by Larry Epstein)

It's the roaring wave of noise, the crack of the bat, the dazzling flow of the grass across the field, the throat-killing cheers and boos, the willing suspension of disbelief that this is just a game. This is baseball. And what would baseball be without its anthem?

It was in 1908 that the songwriter and performer Jack Norworth was on the subway. There in front of him was a sign that read "Baseball Today--Polo Grounds." Norworth wished he could be there, but, unlike the untold numbers of people who had the same longing but who were without a way to express it, he could at least write a song. Norworth found an envelope and wrote the lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." (That piece of paper is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

It should be noted that while Norworth loved the Giants, he had never attended a baseball game in his life and wouldn't for another 32 years. (He must not have been happy later that year; the Cubs beat the Giants in the league championship and went on to win the World Series. It was the last time the Cubs won a World Series. Maybe it's because of the unrecognized Norworth Curse).

Norworth took the lyrics to Albert Von Tilzer, the younger brother of Harry Von Tilzer, a popular songwriter and publisher on Tin Pan Alley. The original family name was Gumbinsky (or some variant). Aaron Gumbinsky changed his name first to Harry Gumm and then to Harry Von Tilzer--Tilzer being his mother's maiden name and Von literally meaning "from" because it was a sign of German nobility. However odd a choice that might have been for Jewish songwriters, Albert adopted it as well. (If the name "Gumm" sounds familiar, it was Judy Garland's birth name.)

Albert was no more a visitor to ball parks than Jack Norworth. It took Albert two more decades before he attended a game. But Albert liked the lyrics, wrote the music, and on May 2, 1908 the pair sent two copies to the Copyright Office. One of America's favorite songs was born. Nora Bayes, a popular vaudeville star and Norworth's wife, introduced the song and helped make it popular.

While all baseball fans join in the rendition of the song during the seventh-inning stretch, they really are only singing the song's chorus. The complete song is about Katie Casey (or, as the 1927 re-working of the song has it, Nelly Kelly). Katie tells her boyfriend she prefers a ball game to a show. This romantic element, crucial to its vaudeville success, has been completely removed leaving the baseball game as some kind of utopia for fans who never want to leave. That is, the brilliance of the song (beyond its being both rousing and easy to sing) is that it isn't really about baseball but about a feeling of being away from the troubles of the world, happy, and in a community with thousands of temporary friends. This joyful mental place releases people from worries and responsibilities, from concerns about diets and debts. People eat and spend with abandon at games because of that feeling.

Indeed, the song's (that is Katie's) plea to buy Cracker Jacks caused sales of the product to soar. It had been introduced at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago by a popcorn company and first offered in ballparks in 1907.

The song continued to grow in popularity. The newly-emerging nickelodeons used the song during intermissions. The lyrics were reproduced on painted-up lantern slides so the audience could sing it. Today crowds no longer need any lyric prompts. Everyone knows the words, and everyone knows the tune. Not bad for two all-but-forgotten songwriters.

The Birth of the Jukebox (by Larry Epstein)

Ah, the jukebox. Bob Dylan once said that in his youth he had been a "Woody Guthrie jukebox." The metaphor is telling. All of us have whole songs or partial lyrics stored within us that we can recall with the push of a mental button.

It's appropriate to remember the jukebox, in part because 2009 marks its 120th birthday. It was on November 23, 1889 that the Nickel-in-the-Slot machine made its debut. The setting was the Palais Royale Saloon at 303 Sutter Street in San Francisco. Louis T. Glass--generally considered the father of the jukebox--operated the machine. Fred Mergenthaler, the Palais Royale's proprietor, was willing to let Glass experiment with the new device. Glass, after all, was the general manager at the Pacific Phonograph Company just two blocks away on Pine Street. It was there that Glass, working with his business partner William S. Arnold, had built the machine.

Glass used four listening tubes that looked like stethoscopes and attached them to an Edison Class M electric phonograph. The whole device was put inside an oak cabinet that was altered to have a coin mechanism. Customers could listen to the music using any one of the four tubes. They could only listen to the same single song which was on a wax cylinder. The songs were changed usually once a day. Each tube was activated by inserting a nickel so that, in theory, four separate people could listen to the song at the same time. Customers could tell others about the song, but without amplification no one else could hear the music. Of course, that made people more willing to put the nickel in the slot themselves. When customers finished listening, they wiped off the end of the tube with a towel that was supplied. And what songs were available for the customers? Perhaps they heard "The Rip Van Winkle Polka" or "Down Went McGinty," or, sadly, the popular saloon songs that mocked various racial and religious groups.

The good people of San Francisco loved the device. Within six months 15 more machines were installed, and not just in bars. The Oakland-San Francisco ferries had them as well.

Glass, who was 44 when he first displayed his device, died in 1924 at age 79. He didn't, that is, live to see the repeal of prohibition in 1933. That event was crucial in making the jukebox popular. Once the ban on selling liquor was lifted, the jukebox dealers made a proposition no cocktail lounge or bar owner could resist: if the owners put in the jukeboxes the customers would get cheap entertainment, and the owners would get a new source of revenue.

The term "jukebox" became popular a few years later, perhaps at the beginning of the 1940s, and evidently derived from the popular "juke joints." The slang word "juke" meant disorderly and had sexual connotations as well.

Louis t. Glass has been forgotten, but, a nickel at a time, he accumulated a lot of money and changed the way Americans listened to music.

The Greatness of Bookstores (by Larry Epstein)

Bookstores are sacred spaces. Their promise of wisdom and discovery, their anchoring communities of thoughtful readers, and their providing people who can offer informed reading suggestions make them indispensable. I think it's a good goal in life to have a bookstore as the place where everybody knows your name.

Of course, the independent bookstore I describe is endangered, overwhelmed by retail giants and online competitors. Those of us lucky enough to be been in some great stores will always remember them. I can still recall the moment, decades ago when I was very young, wandering into City Lights in San Francisco and being delighted and astonished that the store provided comfortable chairs to sit and sample a book. Reading was as prized there as on my own couch 3,000 miles away.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce
in front of Shakespeare and Company

Among the many dedicated booksellers in history, Sylvia Beach is one I most admire. Sylvia--it's revealing that after reading so much about her, I can't call her by her last name--opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She was among the brave young women who had flocked there for personal freedom and to champion the modern in art and literature. Sylvia sought to give birth to herself; she had even changed her birth name of Nancy. She wanted to live in a world of her own making, then a difficult task for any young woman, much less a minister's daughter who loved other women.

She moved to Paris and noticed that a literary review she wanted could be purchased at Adrienne Monnier's bookshop. Sylvia went to buy the review, and met the woman with whom she shared a long-term love relationship. Monnier offered French books, but Sylvia was determined to provide American books. After opening a shop around the corner, she eventually moved Shakespeare and Company across the street from Monnier's store. Both women saw their bookshops as lending libraries. Women readers didn't have the funds to buy books. Because women were excluded from universities, Sylvia knew those women ached for knowledge. Sylvia also thought a book ought to be read before it was bought.

Sylvia pioneered the art of making a bookstore's windows attractive. She carefully placed literary magazines there, and readers were enthralled to discover the author of a story or poem in such magazines might be inside the bookstore ready for a chat. What an array of writers showed up there to borrow books or to give readings or--who knows?--maybe even to buy a book. T.S. Eliot was there, as were Gide, Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, Janet Flanner, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and many others. Hemingway walked in for the first time announced himself by taking off a shoe and sock to show Sylvia his war scars. She fed the artists who needed food and loaned money to others. Her store served as Hemingway's post office.

Americans came to Paris to see the Lost Generation, a term first used by a garage mechanic with whom Gertrude Stein spoke at a hotel. Hemingway used the phrase as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, making it famous. The Americans transformed the lending library into a bookstore. They spent real money, probably shocking Sylvia.

In 1922, Sylvia published Ulysses. No one else would take the chance, and very few would work with an author as demanding as James Joyce.

Sylvia kept Shakespeare and Company opened from 1919 until 1941 when the Nazis occupied Paris. The store was closed after Sylvia refused to sell a Nazi officer her last remaining copy of Finnegans Wake. Sylvia spent six months in an internment camp. She never opened her store again.

Larceny at the Movies (by Larry Epstein)

Take the Money and Run and The Pink Panther. Raising Arizona and The Naked Gun. The history of criminal comedy films--comedies in which the protagonists are cops, gangsters, or thieves--goes back at least to 1912 when Mack Sennett produced Hoffmeyer's Legacy, the first of the Keystone Cops films. (The spelling "Kops" evidently only emerged in 1955 in the film Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops.)

The criminal comedies have great appeal because they infantilize dangerous people and make them appear safer for audiences. The criminals in these films typically use more words than weapons.

Larceny, Inc. starring Edward G. Robinson is an enjoyable film in that tradition and deserves greater recognition. Robinson filmed three important criminal comedies working with the director Lloyd Bacon. Bacon had acted in various Chaplin films such as The Tramp and Easy Street, and so, in tandem with Robinson's tough-guy roles starting with Little Caesar, they formed a well-schooled team. Some people think the first of their trilogy, A Slight Case of Murder (1938), was their best. Brother Orchid (1940) with Humphrey Bogart was the second. Larceny, Inc. was the third film, released in 1942. The film's cast included Anthony Quinn and a young Jackie Gleason, who had only been in his first films a year earlier. It's a well-written farce and, if it doesn't have the clever and brisk give-and-take of the best screwball comedies, it's well-constructed with wonderful character actors and an adept Robinson.

The basic plot involves Robinson as a released criminal in need of money. He decides to rob a bank. to do this, he purchases a luggage shop next door to the bank and with his cohorts begins to dig a tunnel in the store's basement. To their shock, the luggage shop becomes successful, but they are pressured by a gang member to continue their original criminal intentions.

If that plot sounds familiar, it's because Woody Allen employed the same premise in Small Time Crooks. There are differences and who knows where Woody got the idea. It may have come from his own inventive mind, or the Robinson film, or the failed play on which the movie was based. The Night Before Christmas opened in April 1941 and closed after 22 performances, but it was by Laura Perelman (sister of the great writer Nathaniel West) and her husband, the dazzlingly clever comic writer S.J. Perelman, a man Woody Allen deeply admired. Perhaps Woody saw the Perelman mind at work in the film.

Larceny, Inc., that is, has a title that can serve both for the film and for some part of the artistic enterprise. Stealing is such a cruel word. Pete Seeger uses the words "the folk process" to describe such lifting in music. He once told me he doesn't think of it as stealing at all but just as a normal part of adapting a tradition to the times.

Perhaps such borrowing reflects artistic insecurity or the fact that some artists work best by bouncing off another person's idea and then changing it. Perhaps the demands of producing successful art on a schedule become so overwhelming that the temptation to borrow is difficult to resist.

Sometimes the remake is clearly indicated, as in Mel Brooks' production of To Be or Not to Be, which was based on the unforgettable Jack Benny film with the same title. Sometimes the borrowed material is less obvious. For example, the comedy writers Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby were brought in to work on the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera. They suggested a plot about scoundrels overselling backers a musical that was bound to fail. The idea was rejected--but Brooks famously put it to use in The Producers.

I invite readers to provide other examples.    

The Funniest Man Who Ever Lived (by Larry Epstein)

Here's an excerpt from one of the early vaudeville skits performed by George Burns and Gracie Allen:

George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?
Gracie: Oh, no. We couldn't afford a nurse. My mother had to do it.
George: You had a smart mother.
Gracie: Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
George: Gracie, what school did you go to?
Gracie: I'm not allowed to tell
George: Why not?
Gracie: The school pays me $25 a month not to tell.

Many in the vaudeville audiences either did believe or wanted to believe that Burns and Allen were just reflexively funny. Great comedians could do that. Their well-rehearsed seeming spontaneity made it appear that they were thinking of the lines as they spoke them.

Of course, those lines had been carefully written. However, comedy writers rarely got any public recognition for their efforts. The writers knew the illusion that the comedians made up the material was part of the job. And they knew a joke was not just in the writing. The line had to be delivered well by a comedian the audience liked playing a character with whom the audience could identify.

There have been many great comedy writers, but Al Boasberg (right, with Marx brothers Chico and Harpo) gets my nomination as the greatest comedy writer of all time. Boasberg, the son of a Buffalo jeweler, was born in 1891. He sold pinky rings backstage at a local vaudeville theater. Soon he began selling $5 jokes to the comedians. George Burns found Boasberg in that theater, and the two joined together. Boasberg wrote many of the early Burns and Allen routines.

Jack Benny bought the first joke he ever told on stage from Boasberg for $25. The comedians of the day were called monologists. Monologists told a few jokes, but most of their act consisted of telling long stories or reciting some famous piece of literature. Boasberg thought Benny worked best just with the jokes. They developed Benny's character as a skinflint and then had the character tell joke after joke. The monologist had become a stand-up comic, and a new art form was invented.

Boasberg was the person who suggested that Bob Hope be given a screen test and then helped Hope develop his character. He told a 16 year old Milton Berle to go on stage and say he'd been accused of stealing jokes, the running gag of Berle's long career. Boasberg wrote the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera and wrote for Buster Keaton's The General. Boasberg rarely wrote the entire films on which he worked. He wrote gags, making the material others had written funny or funnier.