The Best American Poetry

Writing a Lost Generation Novel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I wanted a writing challenge, as though my original plan of trying to write a complex mystery filled with twists, red herrings, and a sympathetic hero weren’t enough. Since the hero was a young American who liked literature, I decided to set the mystery in an interesting literary time and place. And so, 1925 Paris became the setting.

This immediately provided the first obstacle. I knew a good deal about the time and place, but not nearly enough to write fluently and with sufficient control over the subject. And so the research began. I re-read Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels, works by Gertrude Stein, non-fictional studies of the era, and whatever else I could find. I watched the films (including, of course, another viewing of Midnight in Paris). I listened to music of the era. I got guidebooks, read newspapers, tracked down the many memoirs.

When I finally felt ready, I cast about for characters. On the one hand, my story was armed with some of the richest characters in American literary history. On the other hand, how was I going to write dialogue between my hero and these witty, startlingly creative people? I didn’t just want to write about the authors. I wanted to have my protagonist helped by someone I deeply admire, Sylvia Beach who found the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Indeed, I decided to open the book by having the hero enter the store. Writing, I thought, would give me a decent chance to introduce readers unfamiliar with Beach to a most extraordinary person. I had seen videos of her speaking and read what she had written in an attempt to capture her voice. Although she had, with remarkable bravery, published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would, I wanted to write more about Hemingway. He had introduced himself to her by walking into the store, taking off his shoes and socks, and showing Sylvia his war scars. Sylvia Beach fed the writers and painters who needed food and loaned money to others. Her bookstore served many visitors, including Hemingway, as the local post office. She would also help my hero.

My novel began populating itself. The Lost Generation, I decided, would wander through the pages. I particularly enjoyed writing about Gertrude Stein, who terrified some of the writers. I also sought out some of Paris’ seedier locations for my characters to visit. The novel includes a true story of one of the most astounding con games in history. I put a murder mystery into this world and had my protagonist deal with the recurring emotional wounds that opened up in a horrific incident during the First World War. Satisfied that the dramatic material was there, I thought it would make for an exciting if daunting effort to write such a mystery novel.

That novel, Exiles: A Mystery in Paris, is available as a free Kindle ebook for five days, from today through Thursday. To get the book, just go to the Amazon page and download it. Feel free to let others know about this free novel. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

The Man Who Helped Writers

Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project

Susan Rubenstein DeMasi

McFarland, 2016

Writing biographies is a particular challenge. There is a normal literary reflex to turn a life story into a chronological account of events instead of locating the arc of the subject’s principal accomplishments. Facts pile on facts covering up the real story underneath. Additionally, sometimes it seems that it is a biographer’s nightmare to leave out a piece of research, no matter how trivial. It is a curse of biographers to be convinced that readers must be interested in what the subject had for lunch on Thursday afternoons before napping.

Susan Rubenstein DeMasi is to be highly commended not only for navigating around these dangers but also for taking on the task of writing about a subject who is not well-known. Henry Alsberg’s spirit is surely doing hand spins, for DeMasi has rescued him from undeserved obscurity and then told his fascinating life in clear and well-written prose.

Some subjects are cursed by the settings of their lives. The world itself provided insufficient background for them to lead an interesting life. Alsberg faced no such hardship. The Great Depression, alongside the Revolution and the Civil War, is one of the principal defining eras of the American experiment.

Writers were among those who suffered economic deprivations. The Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration, was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s programs to help the unemployed. The project hired more than 6,000 people, mostly young and from the working class. 

It was Henry Alsberg, a journalist with an eye for understanding the social forces at work in the society and a moral compass with social justice as its true north, who was appointed to direct the Project. 

Because Alsberg himself came from the political left, and many projects were deemed left-wing, it didn’t take long for the House Committee on Un-American Activities to identify the Project as a threat to the country.

Alsberg deserves the principal credit for what turned out to be a thousand publications under his tenure. Ultimately, for example, there were 2,300 accounts of what it was like to have been a slave. Alsberg labored to ensure that such a vital history was collected.

In a way, Alsberg was the man who wrote America. The American Guide Series provided histories of each of the 48 states then in America. It took 6,000 writers to produce this invaluable series, which came under attack from some individual states for their inclusion of sharecroppers and workers.

The Project and its accomplishments are important stories in American life. It is odd, therefore, that Henry Alsberg’s name is not more widely-known.

DeMasi is out to correct that. Here’s Alsberg helping Jews who survived pogroms in Eastern Europe. There he is with Emma Goldman. Turn a page in DeMasi’s impressive book, and you find Alsberg aiding political prisoners.

Alsberg led a quiet personal life. It would have been easy to miss the inner man and focus just on the more famous aspects of his external life. But DeMasi, who did a jaw-dropping amount of original research, has determined that Henry Alsberg would be saved from oblivion.

She has done her job.

A Mystery Novel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I’ve spent my life writing non-fiction almost exclusively, and I thought it was time to walk down a mean mystery street. I could have sat down at the computer and just started typing to see what came out. But I thought of Ernest Hemingway. He once told George Plimpton in The Paris Review that he had re-written the final page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. Eventually, the endings were discovered in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Only Hemingway was incorrect. There are in fact forty-seven different endings.

I didn’t have Hemingway’s talent or doggedness, so I figured that maybe before I started writing I should do a whole lot of planning. I knew I wanted to write a mystery. I wanted to make it in the 30,000 word range (it ended up being 32,000), and I wanted for several reasons to publish it as an ebook. That still left about 125 empty pages.

I knew that any planning was tentative. I knew that as I wrote new ideas would arise. New characters would pop out of nowhere. Elie Wiesel once told the story of taking a character out of a story only to have the character appear in a dream that night and beg to be put back in the novel. Wiesel obliged, and the character returned. My characters were not so bold or lively, but I expected some would by force of personality need to be included.

I wanted to have a protagonist who was struggling to be moral and live at an interesting time in an interesting place. If there were a literary genre titled “Ethical Novels,” then I wanted to try to write a book that would have found a home in that genre. I considered various options and recalled how much I had enjoyed researching my book At the Edge of a Dream about Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. So I had a location. I picked the year 1914, just as World War I was beginning and therefore just as the world that existed was ending.

Having a setting, I sat down to consider the other elements of fiction, plot (including point of view), characters, theme, and language. All the guidebooks say to start with characters, but after I had the setting, I looked at the themes I wanted to develop. That led me to characters. I was partially constrained in choosing characters because in a mystery there are specific sorts of characters to develop.

As with a thriller, the mystery story really begins with the villain’s plans. A killer had to choose a victim. Then I had to find a hero to confront the villain. There needed to be suspects, red herrings, and carefully planted clues. 

My book is titled The Gallery of Missing Husbands. As I write on my website, the title refers to a weekly section of the newspaper Jewish Daily Forward. The Gallery consisted of mostly grainy pictures of men who had abandoned their families. The novel opens as the protagonist, Daniel Levin, witnesses the death of the area’s greatest psychic. Asked by the victim’s attractive sister-in-law to investigate, Levin uncovers a web of romantic deceits, blackmail, and murder. His investigation leads him to a midnight break-in at the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital, an anarchist determined to avoid being forced back to Russia, a corrupt police officer filled with hate, and a friendship with a crime reporter. Eventually, Daniel understands the complexity of missing husbands and fragile families.

If you would like a free PDF of my mystery, it is available at http://www.lawrencejepstein.com/the-gallery-of-missing-husbands/.

You can also get an ebook for 99 cents at any of the normal places. Here’s a link to the Amazon site for the Kindle version: https://amzn.com/B01GQFFCUA

The Solitary Life (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

When I was young, I went to Woodstock one day to visit the artist Clarence Schmidt. Clarence lived alone in a treehouse. The property he owned had rusted automobiles, wooden stakes with dolls’ heads stuck on them, and aluminum foil wrapped around much of the place.

I knocked at the small door of the treehouse. Clarence opened up. There were a lot of Table Talk pie wrappers. He was lying flat. He showed us a magazine spread of his paintings. He was proud of them and the fact that they were recognized. We talked for a while, and then I asked him why he had wrapped so much aluminum around his belongings. He looked at me slyly and said, “To keep out the death rays.” I think he meant that the aluminum was a border to stop the insane content of the outside society from killing him. Among those I was with was a young woman who had remarkably smooth skin. Clarence, whose skin was rough and tattered, asked her if he could rub her cheek. She let him. After a while, he said he needed to be alone again.

I was very taken with Clarence. I thought he was alone but not lonely. For an artist, the solitary life away from the bustling intrusions of society allowed for uninterrupted and private thought. Wordsworth called it “that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.” Artists in this role are metaphors for humans deeply in need of silence not for its own sake but as a prompt for constructing a castle of private thought.

I once heard Andy Warhol interviewed as he walked out of a play. The interviewer asked him what he thought of the play. Warhol responded, “I thought it was boring. But I like being bored.” It struck me that his life was so busy that an unengaging play gave him an unusual moment to be with himself. Boredom became a rare but valued friend.

A lot of people mistakenly believe Thoreau was a hermit at Walden Pond and deliberately went there to live separately. Thoreau’s friends had helped him. The cabin was built on Emerson’s land. Bronson Alcott, an educational reformer and Louisa May Alcott’s father, loaned Thoreau the axe to fell trees for the cabin’s construction. And these and many other friends came to visit him. He liked having them there. He also liked walking home to have lunch with his mother. Thoreau’s isolation was undertaken to have an opportunity to study nature, what he considered to be the source of eternal truths. Solitude, when he had it, let him focus on the natural world.

Emily Dickinson’s solitude came from what was probably a nervous disorder, an inability to leave their home. During her last years she left it only once to go next door to her brother’s house because her much-adored nephew was dying. She had to rush back quickly. This solitude, imposed by her psychological make-up, certainly gave her time to write, but no emotional satisfaction. She was unable to publish more than a few of her poems in her life and those were mostly published in a local paper. Her solitude was a sad one. Many are fascinated by her posthumous fame, but in her case the solitude was only accidentally helpful. Mostly, it was devastating.

All these people provide lessons for us about how to live, and how not to live if we can help it. For those making “a separate peace” with the society, the solitary life offers valuable opportunities. For those so used to a world that is “too much with us,” however, it is more difficult to slow down.

From a social point of view, many baby boomers have retired or will soon retire. They will encounter a sort of aloneness they have never experienced. They will need models of a productive solitary life.

Word Counts in Novels (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Among the vast number of contradictory phenomena I don’t understand there is this: Why do Americans seem to have a decreasing attention span (witness the popularity of tweets and the fact that interest in a YouTube video declines after thirty seconds) while at the same time publishers and presumably readers want longer novels? For example, I read a lot of mysteries, and it turns out that between 1960 and 1979 the median length of novels that won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery was 72,001 words. However, since 1980 that medium length has been 102,533. There are a lot of theories about why the length of all novels has increased. One person in publishing told me readers feel cheated if they pay thirty bucks and get a thin novel. Or maybe novel readers take a look at the world and have a greater need to escape than they once did.

For those of you who enjoy or write novels under 65,000 words, I thought I’d compile a list of brief novels. I figured I’d list ten classic novels under 50,000 words to emphasize the point. Here are the titles, authors, and word count of those novels:

Animal Farm, George Orwell, 29,966

A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens, 28,944

Farenheit 451. Ray Bradbury, 46,118

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 47,094

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, 29,160

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway, 26,601

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane 47,180

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 37,761

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 49,459

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle, 49,965

There are also many great classic mystery novels that are relatively brief. James M. Cain was a master of brief novels. Double Indemnity, for example, had 30,072 words. I don’t have the exact word count for The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it was about 35,000 words. Cain wrote such tight prose with compelling narratives that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the films made from these two novels are among the best mystery films ever made.

Of course, this is not to suggest that great novels need to be brief. In the 19^th century, without all the distractions of contemporary life and without radio, film, audio books, television, video games, and the internet to offer alternative ways for readers to find the pleasures of storytelling, novels were often much longer. War and Peace was 587,287 words. Tolstoy was, by comparison, a slacker in creating Anna Karenina. That was only 349,736 words. In the United States, Melville took 206,052 words to compose Moby-Dick. Emily Bronte was, by comparison, frugal with her words. She used only 107,947 of them to write Wuthering Heights. Jane Austen was somewhere in the middle. Emma was 155,887 words.

I personally often prefer shorter novels. I can carry the characters and the plot completely in my head throughout the story. I can finish a book in one sitting. A briefer novel can, at its best, carry the power of a poem. But, judging by novels now being published, I am in the distinct minority.

I’ve been thinking about writing a literary mystery. However, if I do, it will be brief, and I therefore wonder how it would ever be published and, if it were, whether readers would feel cheated, as though they bought a blouse or shirt only to discover a sleeve was missing.

What strange literary questions contemporary America engenders.

P.G. Wodehouse, the Nazis, and Ozymandias (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I recently watched the British comedy series Jeeves and Wooster for the third time since its release in the early 1990s. While viewers are never in danger of being exposed to an idea, the series is particularly artful in its use of language, using vocabulary that would stump too many SAT takers and a subtle sarcasm and dry wit that are hilarious. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie offer perfect renditions of P.G. Wodehouse’s inimitable characters.

There was, however, a nagging companion to my enjoyment of the shows. I found myself haunted, even as I laughed, by the burdensome knowledge of P.G. Wodehouse’s radio broadcasts for the Nazis.

As you will recall, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse and his wife moved from Great Britain to Le Touquet, France evidently to avoid taxes on his writing. The Germans entered Le Touquet on May 22, 1940. Two months later all male enemies under 60 were interned. Wodehouse was 58. After being moved several times, the prisoners were sent to Tost in Upper Silesia.

On June 21, 1941, members of the Gestapo visited Wodehouse, gave him ten minutes to pack, and took him to the fancy Hotel Adlon in Berlin. While staying at the hotel, Wodehouse agreed to make five radio broadcasts to the United States (which had not yet then entered the war) for German radio. The broadcasts were Wodehouse’s “humorous” accounts of being an internee. He even, very gently, mocked the German captors. He did not, that is, voice any support for the Nazis, mock or attack the Allies, or talk about much else other than his own existence.

The recordings were later broadcast in Great Britain. The British were shocked. Some libraries removed Wodehouse’s works. Politicians denounced him as a traitor. He did have his defenders, including Sax Rohmer (creator of the Fu Manchu series) and the famous mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers. The Department of War in the United States saw the interviews as perfect anti-Nazi propaganda. Later, in early 1945, George Orwell wrote an essay titled “In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse” in which he argued that at worst Wodehouse was only guilty of stupidity. Orwell thought Wodehouse’s moral development remained that of child in school. When MI5 representatives later examined the case, they concluded that Wodehouse had not consciously provided assistance to the enemy. There were, therefore, insufficient grounds on which to prosecute him. However, there was a meeting in 1946 in which an MI5 officer met with the director of public prosecutions. The director noted that if Wodehouse ever returned to the country he should be prosecuted. Wodehouse never did return. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States.

Wodehouse himself blamed prison life for sapping his intellect. He claimed never to think politically and that he simply wanted to let all his fans know that he was still alive. He also claimed the broadcasts were to thank other prisoners for their support.

And so, for people like me who find that the broadcasts dilute the pleasure with which Wodehouse may be read or viewed, the question is a simple one. Was P.G. Wodehouse so naïve that he didn’t understand the nature of the Nazi manipulation?

I was thinking of all this as I watched each Jeeves and Wooster episode. Not having the generosity of spirit to forgive people who cooperated in any fashion with the Nazis, I felt I had neither the desire nor the right to forget those broadcasts.

But I did think of another way of looking at the broadcasts, a way I very much wish Wodehouse himself had offered.

I thought of Ozymandias, the great sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem is mostly thought of as a reproach to those who ruthlessly seek power. But in the context of my Wodehouse problem, I more closely considered the hero of the poem, the sculptor who made those “two vast…legs of stone.” The “traveler from an antique land” describes the scene:

“Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.”

I thought of that sculptor ordered to make the statue. The sculptor’s heroism lay in being “the hand that mocked” Ozymandias’ cruelty. “Mocked” here has two meanings. The first meaning is the original sense of the word to imitate reality. Indeed, we still use terms like “mock-up”. The sculptor captured the tyrant’s cruelty perfectly. This no doubt pleased Ozymandias. It wouldn’t do to have those who saw the statue think of the ruler as kind or sympathetic and therefore soft. No, the ruler wanted his fierce cruelty, his unforgiving nature, his automatic thirst for revenge if wronged to come through. But the sculptor was more subtle than the ruler. The sculptor also used the statue to mock the ruler in the sense of ridiculing him.

I wish this is what Wodehouse would have understood himself as doing, creating a radio show as the Nazis wanted but in doing so making clear to listeners that he was using the program to mock the very people on whose broadcast he spoke.

As it is, I do think Wodehouse was genuinely naïve and don’t think he was a collaborator. It is this belief that allows me to read his work and watch the shows based on them. But it is Wodehouse’s very naiveté rather than a political wit sufficient to mock the Nazis that prevents me from a full enjoyment of the work. 

WHEN THE WORDS STOP (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Sometimes when I doubt my mental acuity or the worthiness of a paragraph slowly taking shape on my computer screen, I think about writers who have stopped writing.

A writer’s creative desert is much in the news now because of the publication of Harper Lee’s old-new novel Go Set a Watchman, which is in fact the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird so that its publication does not truly end Ms. Lee’s streak of not writing.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in college when Henry Roth’s 1934 novel Call It Sleep was re-issued in 1964. When I later became Arts Editor for my college paper, I reviewed the book. I was astonished that the author of so brilliant a book, so joyous in its Joycean delight with language, so able to apprehend a child’s sensibilities, had simply stopped writing. When the novel was re-issued, Roth was making his living breeding ducks and geese and selling their carcasses and feathers. I didn’t find out until much later that Roth’s complaints of a sore elbow or depression or Jewish self-loathing or anti-Semitism or struggles with his Communism were not the sole reasons for his silence. In 1994 he published the first volume of his series with the overall title of Mercy of a Rude Stream. That work contained a revealing tale of incest between the protagonist and his sister, and then his cousin.

Of course I knew that Rimbaud was infamous for giving up poetry at the age of nineteen. But I soon learned of the many other examples of sustained literary silence. In the very year of Call It Sleep’s awakening, Joseph Mitchell, the writer who has my nomination as the greatest article writer of all-time, produced the still-astounding piece, “Joe Gould’s Secret.” After Mitchell published that piece, he showed up at The New Yorker office each day for the following thirty-two years. He was duly given a salary but never handed in another article. As my education proceeded, I encountered a cascade of similar stories. Coleridge’s famous poems were mostly written when he was in his mid-twenties. An opium addiction and some “indescribable Terror” occupied much of the remainder of his life.

I still don’t know what to make of the incomparable American hard-boiled mystery novelist, Dashiell Hammett. When he was in his thirties, he produced four novels in three years. His fifth novel, The Thin Man, was published in 1934, the year Call It Sleep was first published. Hammett was thirty-nine. He lived until the beginning of 1961 managing to make plenty of money in Hollywood, serve as a lover and mentor to Lillian Hellman, endure the McCarthy years, and never publish another novel. Perhaps Cyril Connolly was correct when he said, “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.”

Ralph Ellison did not produce another novel after Invisible Man was published in 1952. He died in 1994; his literary executor assembled a one-volume novel out of the writings Ellison left. Juneteenth was published in 1999 to mixed reviews.

Laura Riding, a poet associated with the Fugitives and, by general consensus, the cause of the failure of Robert Graves’ first marriage, published her first book of poems in 1926. She stopped writing poetry in 1941 although she lived for fifty more years.

There are too many others to mention. E.M. Forster, for example, lived for forty-six years after he quite writing. And notice that until now I have not even mentioned J.D. Salinger, the high priest of authorial silence. Like Harper Lee, Salinger’s silence was a perpetual driver of curiosity and fame.

I think of these people when my muse has gone on vacation. But beyond lacking their talent and fame, I also lack the demands of their audiences and publishers and the too often accompanying pressures and self-doubts. My life isn’t convoluted enough to torture me. My addictions are limited to reading, writing, and pizza, not necessarily in that order.

I continue to write even when doubts accompany every keystroke. I identity more with Trollope than the writers who stopped writing. Famously, Trollope got up each morning at 5:30 (here Trollope and I part company) and wrote for three hours. He kept his watch by his side. He wanted to make sure that he wrote 250 words every fifteen minutes. As every would-be novelist already knows, if Trollope finished one novel between 5:30 and his ending time of 8:30, why he simply took out a new piece of paper and started on his next novel. After he finished writing he began his regular job with the postal service. For the record, Trollope wrote 49 novels in 35 years. And some of those novels were substantial. The Oxford University Press edition of Vanity Fair weighs in at 976 pages.

I should keep a picture of Trollope above my computer.

Who Was Herzl? Part Two (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I previously wrote about my writing a book detailing the origins of Zionism and the role of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the political movement that eventually led to the birth of Israel. In that earlier article, I explored how Herzl desperately searched for a response to the murderous attacks on Jews especially in Russia and finally concluded only a Jewish nation could protect against ongoing anti-Semitism.

He planned his first action in May 1895. He thought there was a trade to be made. Turkey, the center of the Ottoman Empire, controlled the Land of Israel. But Turkey was deeply in debt. Herzl saw his answer: he would provide debt relief and in return Turkey would allow Jewish sovereignty in part of the Jews’ ancient homeland. Herzl therefore went to wealthy Jews to seek the funds for his vision. Much to his shock, wealthy Jews didn’t think his idea feasible. Maurice de Hirsch had his own alternative: sponsoring the growth of Jewish communities in Argentina.

Anguished, Herzl thought of a way to present his idea to the world. He considered writing a novel but then decided that he had to be more direct. The plan took shape. He would write a brief publication offering the idea that Jews needed their own nation.

Der Judenstaat was published on February 14, 1896. It is the seminal work of political Zionism. The pamphlet is often translated as The Jewish State. This translation carries political implications, as though the state established by Herzl’s ideas was intrinsically Jewish, that its essential character was Jewish. In such a state, the national anthem should reflect Jewish thought. The laws of the state should give provide special privileges for Jews, such as the right of Jews throughout the world to return to their ancestral home as citizens.

It is this interpretation that has caused some later readers of the pamphlet such as the prominent Israeli novelist Amos Oz to use a different translation, to call Herzl’s pamphlet The State of the Jews. This translation is meant to convey the notion that no state can be “Jewish” in its nature. A state of the Jews is a state with a Jewish majority but without special privileges for Jews stemming from the nature of the state.

However, both of these translations are incorrect. The correct translation is The Jews’ State. The word “Juden” was frequently used pejoratively by those who hated Jews. What Herzl had in mind was a bold, defiant, assertive title to say to the haters that even the Jews that were hated, the Juden, could form their own nation. Herzl, however, did not intend a specific political dimension in his title. It might be noted that The Jewish State does not need to be used with political implications but simply as a more polite way to translate the title than The Jews’ State.

The pamphlet’s intentionally stiff, legalistic prose, written in that way to avoid charges of utopianism or romanticism, lays out Herzl’s analysis of why people hate the Jews and what the Jews can do about it, specifically establishing their own nation. Herzl had absorbed a lot of lessons while reporting on French political life. He had learned to think like a politician. For example, at one point in his pamphlet Herzl notes that the exact location of the Jewish nation is not clear. Perhaps, he suggested it would be in Palestine (then a neutral term used to describe a territory of the Ottoman Empire, not a separate nation.). Or, alternately it could be in Argentina. But as he had told a group of Jewish students a few days before Der Judenstaat appeared, Herzl had mentioned Argentina so that the Turks wouldn’t think that Jews would only settle for some Turkish territory and therefore would be subject to whatever price the Turks offered.

Herzl’s pamphlet had the effect of a bombshell. Orthodox Jews were mostly horrified that a journalist would take on the role that was traditionally expected from the Messiah. Reform Jews were mostly adamant in their opposition, saying the Jewish mission required that they live among the nations.

And Herzl wasn’t finished. Having created a stir throughout the Jewish world, he decided that offering the idea wasn’t enough. He had to act on it.

Herzl had a staggering political idea. He would found a movement to turn his idea into reality. That movement would be created at a meeting which has come to be called the First Zionist Congress. Herzl’s aim was nothing less than to create a Jewish parliament, to make the Zionist movement an international one. It was a bold move that reversed history. Usually a state existed and then a parliament was selected. Herzl called for the parliament itself to shape and organize the existence of the state.

The book I am writing tells the story of that First Zionist Congress.

Who Was Herzl? (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I’m currently writing a book on the origins of Zionism, the political movement to re-establish a Jewish nation in the Land of Israel. One of the great pleasures of writing the book is learning more about Theodor Herzl, the writer who made the idea of a return to Zion popular and who organized the movement that eventually led to the birth of Israel.

Herzl was a deeply unlikely hero of the story of Zionism. He identified with German culture. For example, he loved going to Wagner’s operas. He kept a Christmas tree in his home. He didn’t know the Hebrew necessary for religious ceremonies or a lot about Jewish life, traditions, or history. He was, that is, hovering over the precipice of assimilation. Herzl was born in Pest (later Budapest) in Hungary on May 2, 1860 in a building next to the Dohany Synagogue. He was next to Judaism but not part of it.

After attending law school and starting a career in the law, Herzl eventually found his way into journalism. When he was 22, Herzl first became aware of the depth of hatred of the Jews. Although the Dreyfus trial is often considered to be the triggering event in Herzl’s conversion to Zionism, in fact his desire to solve the problem of anti-Semitism started after he read Eugen Duhring’s book The Jewish Problem as a Problem of Race, Morals and Culture. No book on a Jewish subject took up more space in his reading journal. Duhring’s stunningly horrific conclusion to his analysis of Jews as a race was that the Jews could not be absorbed into European societies and therefore had to be annihilated.

Herzl took these words more seriously than other Jewish readers. Intellectuals saw the power of words, but to them words of hate were either dismissed as without influence in polite circles or, if serious, countered by other words. Herzl was a different kind of intellectual. He was deeply attracted to the emotional power of words, but as his interest in the theater and opera showed him, words accompanied by a setting, costumes, and dramatic events taking place in front of him, were even more powerful than the words alone. Somehow, Herzl differed from many other Jewish intellectuals in that he was not satisfied in live in the world of German. He had to take the world he created in his head, the world of ideas, and travel with it to the real world. This was the crucial difference in his personality.

Seeking an appropriate response to anti-Semitism, Herzl first considered doing what European aristocrats had always done to deal with opponents—challenge them to a duel. He quickly realized that he could not duel to the death every anti-Semite in Europe, and so his search continued. Herzl’s next possible solution rested on his reasoning that those who hated Jews would not let them assimilate because they remained Jews. Herzl thought if they converted to Christianity they would then be accepted. He envisioned himself, with a few other non-converting leaders, bringing the Jewish masses before the Pope to convert. But his newspaper publisher made light of the idea, both its improbability and the more telling argument that Herzl had no right to set himself up as the end point in Judaism, which had preserved itself through the generations.

Again at bay, Herzl considered the revolutionary movements of socialism and communism then popular in Europe. But his deep respect for the law, his sense that legal order overlapped the nineteenth century’s notion of legal order as nationhood, and his belief that the radical utopian visions offered no immediate practical relief for suffering Jews made him reject all these alternatives.

The answer for him almost seems inevitable. That answer was that for the Jews, the escape from anti-Semitism required them to have a national home, a haven from hatred. Although Herzl and the other Zionists did not know it, he was in a race with history and Hitler. Sadly, the Zionists lost that race. But that was certainly not for Herzl’s want of trying.

The idea of a nation developed and then exploded in his mind, refusing to depart for a moment, leaving him haunted by it day and night, seeing all his other work as pitifully meaningless.

And so his Zionist work began.

And that story will be in the next post about Theodor Herzl.

A New Book (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I am just beginning to write a new book. The idea for the book came after I had read enough about efforts to question Israel’s right to exist. I was riddled with questions. Judaism is a religion for people who like to keep asking questions, who can tolerate ambiguity, who can temper justified true beliefs, also known as knowledge, with a morality-fueled ability to be uncertain. The Talmud begins with a question, and so would I.

It’s never clear where an idea begins. Zionism, at least in its modern political formulation, did have a beginning. It started when an assimilated Viennese playwright, a man so enmeshed in European culture that he listened to Wagner to relax and kept a Christmas tree, was overwhelmed by the hatred of the Jews. He had read the anti-Semites. Theodor Herzl was also there as a journalist in Paris when Dreyfus was put on trial and when he was publicly humiliated. Herzl had no knowledge of his predecessors who had thought of the idea of reviving a Jewish nation in their ancient homeland, so this most unlikely of people cast to play the role of a modern Moses set about his life’s work. He first wrote a pamphlet.

And then, incredibly, he decided to hold a meeting of Zionists, what in essence was a parliament, an international Jewish political organizational meeting for the first time in almost two thousand years. Chutzpah does not seem like an adequate enough word.

But he did it. For the last three days of August in 1897, Herzl ran the First Zionist Congress. There he established the organization that would eventually lead to statehood, established the national anthem and flag, and did so much more.

Herzl, of course, had his opponents. Some thought the Jews had to await the Messiah to return to the Land of Israel. Some thought their patriotism would be questioned if they claimed to be citizens of a country that didn’t even yet exist. Some, a very few, pointed out that the sacred homeland was not an empty land, that thousands of Arabs were living there. They demanded to know how to think through that issue.

I looked around for a book on the First Zionist Congress. I found chapters in some histories of Zionism or biographies of Herzl. I found a book which focused more on Switzerland and Swiss Jews than what in fact transpired at the Congress. That is, when the search was completed, I was astonished to discover that one of the seminal and consequential events of Jewish history, and arguably of modern history, did not have a book devoted to it.

As I thought about the book, I very quickly realized I wanted to do more than describe Herzl’s extraordinary achievements and personality and even more than delineate who attended the Congress and what exactly they did there.

Driven by the Jewish insistence that a moral career must accompany any other, I realized that, however distasteful it might be, I had to look the reality of Zionism directly in the face. The book was my chance to explore the moral foundations of Zionism, and I couldn’t look away.

I’m going to blog about my experience of writing this book. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to do so afforded me by Stacey Harwood and David Lehman.

I’m used to being asked hard questions and getting called names. So feel free to ask me those questions. The only ground rule for me and for you is that naked assertions need to be clothed in facts. Stale and old arguments are uninteresting for everyone. I invite you to accompany me on this journey. I’ll be making some unusual stops, such as deciding what music to be inspired by as I write the book.

I hope you’ll join me.

First Lines of Mystery Novels [by Lawrence J. Epstein]

There are readers, and, I suspect, editors and agents who see the first line of a mystery metaphorically, as an anecdote is used. The line is both different from other lines but emblematic of them just as an anecdote is a unique experience in a person’s life but ironically also revealing of the whole life. A great first line uses language in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, with a sense of rhythm much in the same way that a song’s lines might. And, like a reverberating line from a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen song, a first line can be aphoristic and therefore memorable.

A great first line sets up the whole story or novel. Consider this opening line from Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” The story, not routinely listed as one of his mystery stories, is an extraordinary study of the motive and strategy of a murder. Here is the line: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Look at what this line contains. It has both of the principal characters in the story, the narrator and the tragically misnamed Fortunato. It contains the speaker’s motive: revenge. And it has anticipation through unanswered questions: what will the revenge be? What was the insult that triggered the desire for revenge? We learn the chilling answer to the first question; the second remains a mystery.

A mystery in part provides the intellectual pleasure of a puzzle, but much more importantly it provides an exploration of issues involving our own life and inevitable death. All this has to be contained in a single line. No wonder some writers agonize so painfully over that line.

Of course, it is agonizingly difficult for a writer to construct a first line that contains all of these elements. So most first lines settle on their most crucial task, which is getting us to read the next line. Consider the first line of Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca: “The last camel died at noon.” As a perfect title does, a good first line provides readers with a picture. We can see that camel dying. We have a sense of the setting. There’s a lot of information in those six words. Consider the single word “last.” It’s a crucial word, for camels provide transportation. If the last one has died, will a character or characters be stranded?

Many popular first lines overwhelm us with charm or bowl us over with the power of their imagery and language. Consider, for example, the well-known first line from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." Now, that’s a line.

My favorite Dashiell Hammett first line is this famous one from Red Harvest: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” The first-person narration Hammett uses, so typical of hardboiled detective fiction, eventually brings us right into the face of the violence. The use of first person prevents us from moving further back from the violence. Hammett’s slang, often borrowed from the underworld, is used by people like prisoners who want to create a special code so as to give themselves power when in fact they are subservient to the prison authorities and, for them and all the rest of us, to the society and world in which we live. Hammett’s detective, the unnamed Continental Op, can size people up quickly using almost a shorthand. First lines need to have a fast delivery.

Here, randomly are other great first lines:

From Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers"

From James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice:“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

From Richard Stark’s The Mourner: “When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.”

Please feel free to comment on your favorite first lines.

Authors (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Authors were the people who had the greatest influence on me. They weren’t the people I loved the most. That group includes my wife, children, grandchildren, and extended family.

The authors weren’t even the people I necessarily admired the most. Many of them made morally repugnant political judgments. The America First Committee was a pressure group founded before World War II that urged Americans not to intervene as much of Europe was conquered, British bombed, and Jews, among others, rounded up for what would become systematic murder. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, was a member. So was the poet E.E. Cummings (or, if you prefer following his own example e.e. cummings). A young Gore Vidal, then a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, was a member of the student chapter there.

In 1937, the philosopher John Dewey headed a commission. It included the novelist James T. Farrell. The Commission was inquiring into charges against Leon Trotsky at the show trials Joseph Stalin had set up. A year earlier sixteen well-known Bolsheviks “confessed” to having plotted with Trotsky to kill Stalin. The defendants were sentenced to death as was Trotsky in absentia. There were four show trials; they ended in the death of every member of the Politburo Lenin had set up except for Stalin. Of course, Stalin ended up purging millions of people, including many writers and intellectuals.

A month before Dewey left on his inquiry, a group of Americans wrote an “Open Letter to American Liberals.” In the letter, this group attacked Dewey and his Commission for questioning the assertions of the Soviet Communist Party that the Bolsheviks convicted at the trials were traitors. Signers of that Letter included Nathaniel West, Dorothy Parker, Henry Roth, Lillian Hellman, Malcolm Cowley, and Theodore Dreiser.

Of course, Celine, Ezra Pound, and Knut Hamsun (who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920) were notorious racists and anti-Semites. There are, sadly, many other examples of authors with repugnant political views. But it is not for political guidance that I admire authors.

What authors have done is not provide social or political guidance, but a guidance that is much more personal. Many people like to point to a parent, a friend, or a teacher who changed their life, and pointed them in a direction that proved decisive in the definition of their lives. Such writers provided those directions either through an epiphanic insight, what Edmund Wilson termed a “shock of recognition,” or a reasoned argument or the emotional sway and linguistic dazzle of a well wrought novel.

What is interesting in the author-reader relationship is that the two participants rarely meet, and when they do the meeting doesn’t go so well. Their intimate relationship involves authors providing a road map to the bottom of our souls and readers taking the tour of that soul and learning from it as they continue their own journeys.

The last line of the Leonard Cohen song “Stories of the Street” is “and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.” This is a striking image that perfectly describes the author in the modern world, a thinker surrounded by noise, by people rushing to their next stop, by being part of what David Riesman called “the lonely crowd.” The author, in the middle of all that, tries to find a human contact, tries to look at us, and get us to look back.

As for me, I like to go where readers congregate, to bookstores and libraries and classrooms, to literary blogs and websites, to lectures, and I also like to sit in the corner, quietly, and hold up a book or my iPad and make my way to another person’s imagination.

And so, thank you Sinclair Lewis, for writing Babbitt, the book that introduced me to adult literature, made me realize that it was possible to get at truth, and allowed me to escape the mundane world I lived in as a thirteen year old. And thank you to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for writing God in Search of Man and for rendering the search for wonder and awe in such poetic prose. And thank you to the untold hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of writers I’ve read since I began. And thank you to the teachers to showed me how to read more intelligently than I could have on my own.

And thank you, the readers, for allowing my words into your minds.

Sarah Kain Gutowski (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I recently read a new chapbook of poems by a former colleague of mine. I thought the poems were so intelligently constructed, so perceptive that I wanted to introduce them to readers of The Best American Poetry Blog. I decided the best way to do that would be to conduct an interview with the author.

Sarah Kain Gutowski's poems have appeared widely in such places as The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk County  Community College. She lives on Long Island with her husband and what she describes as "their circus of children and dogs." FABULOUS BEAST The Sow is available from Hyacinth Girl Press. This chapbook is part of a wider collection of poems for which she is currently seeking a publisher.

LE: The book is about a sow that can shift shapes and take the form of a human. (My favorite image is her as the farmer's wife playing at the piano). What special perceptions can you achieve by using a sow as the narrator? How did you come up with the idea of using a sow as the controlling image?

SKG: The sow character developed as a reaction. I didn’t want to write first-person lyric, sometimes-confessional poems anymore. There isn’t anything wrong with first-person lyric/confessional poems – in fact, that describes many of my favorite poems – but I’d been doing that too much. Or rather, I’d done that too much; I wrote the first sow poem after almost two years of relative silence. Occasionally I’d write, but those attempts felt lackluster. I was rehashing the same content with the same forms. I needed a change.

So the sow was my way of coming back to writing. I decided I would write poems about a character, in the third person. I gave myself an assignment; I knew, and know, that inspired writing rarely comes from assignments, but I needed a focus. Also, I stopped worrying about whether or not what I was going to write well. I needed to write, period.

I have a spectacularly terrible memory, and yet I can remember the moment I conceived the sow image, which tells me that even if no one else were to identify with these poems, this character was the right one for me: It was at night, and everyone else in my household was in bed, and I decided to take my notebook out on the deck, and sit in the dark, and actually think about a character. My first thought was to choose an animal – something physically very different from myself – and my next thought was of a pig. And then she was a female pig, and then she was waking up in the dark, and then she was there, outside with me.

 I’m not sure about special perceptions, but the sow character allowed me to write at a distance from myself. Or, really, it allowed me to believe I was writing about something other than myself, even though it’s obvious, after reading the collection, that the opposite is true.

 LE: The sow is in a sense at everyone's mercy--the farmer who will render her for meat, the boar (now there's a descriptive term) that fathers the brood, and the piglets she must attend to constantly. She’s even at the mercy of her own physical appearance. To what extent do you think this is descriptive of the existential condition of women? 

SKG: That’s a good question. If you’re using the term “existential” to mean “pertaining to existence,” I don’t believe that the above description rings true, actually (in that the sow represents the existence of all women). I mean, yes, you’re right -- the sow in all of her different roles is at the mercy of those she serves – that entire list. But the human female is rarely at everyone’s mercy at the same time in the same way that the sow is at everyone’s mercy. Well -- the white, middle-class, female citizen of the United States in the twenty-first century is rarely at everyone’s mercy at the same time in the same way that the sow is at everyone’s mercy. It’s important to make that distinction.

If you’re using the term “existential” by way of the philosophy, existentialism, then yes, I think the term fits. I do believe that we are responsible for ourselves, and to ourselves, and that we are agents of our own existence – and I think the chapbook supports this.

 Let’s put it this way:  I think it’s important to acknowledge the very real difference between the human and the sow at the end of the collection. Yes, the sow’s story is an analogy for childbirth and the (my) postpartum experience, but at the end of the collection, this fable, we leave the sow after she’s changed into the farmer’s wife, and she’s holding the farmer’s infant son, who woke in the night. There’s a particular freedom in the human experience that she can’t find in the sow’s form, or with any other animal form.

So, ultimately, the sow can’t make choices the way a human female makes choices. Where motherhood is concerned, the human female is subject to her own choices and conflicting desires more than she is victim to (or governed by) any outside oppressive force. (But again – I’m talking about a very particular, contemporary female. I can’t speak very well to the experiences of women in other parts of the world, or of the experience of the female in our own country a hundred or more years ago.)

LE: The symbol of the farmer is interesting. Is it misreading the book to consider the farmer as a God figure? In one sense the act of slaughter fits, but in another the sow snuggles with him as his wife. That doesn't fit with a God figure neatly. Or does it? Who is this farmer?

SKG: I don’t think it’s a misreading to consider the farmer a god figure, but I suppose I was considering the relationship between the farmer and the sow as more symbiotic than the traditional Judeo-Christian God-Human relationship. (Although, to be honest, I don’t feel versed enough in any religion to make that statement definitively or comfortably.) I was striving to recreate that complex dynamic between caregiver and cared-for (the parent-child, the owner-owned, the lover-loved). It’s not a neat fit, no, but I believe it works.

Someone asked me once if the farmer was my husband, as if the sow was a stand-in or symbol representing myself, but that’s too “tidy” of a reading as well. Sometimes, yes, the sow embodies all of my own emotions (or ambivalence) regarding motherhood; at other times, I find the sequence makes clear the very real contrast between the sow’s predicament and the human female’s (my own). So for most of the book, the farmer is just the farmer – but his role on the farm, and in the sow’s life, is complex. He is kind at times, cruel at others, and he carries with him his own struggle with parenthood and the role of caregiver. And he has even less guidance as he navigates through this role than the sow. I don’t see him as tyrannical or despotic or a demon, and he’s missing the confidence and assuredness of a God figure. I have a great deal of sympathy for him, actually.

LE: The book in some sense reads like the sow struggling for an identity as a mother, trying to understand what that means. Do you think the sow finally comes to terms with the strange feelings she has as mother?

SKG: I think she begins to appreciate the role; I’m not sure there’s evidence that she understands it any more than she did at the beginning of the tale. This is, of course, a parallel with my own experience: writing the collection was my way of attempting to understand my conflicting emotions regarding motherhood. In the end, I’m not sure I’ve come any closer to an answer; this chapbook isn’t a decoder ring or an instruction manual, by any means. But through writing these poems, I’ve come to appreciate my role as a mother, which is difficult and inconsistent, and messy in its contrariness, but also weird and wonderful.

LE: What are your writing techniques? How long does it take to finish a poem?

SKG: Reading poetry, reading fiction, reading articles about poetry and fiction and the craft of writing-- and listening to the natural world, and to music -- help me find my way back to writing. My writing habits are not consistent and regular, and that’s largely because of my life right now – I’m the mother to three small children, one of whom is under the age of one, and I’m mid-level in my career (of which writing is, unfortunately, a much smaller part than I’d like to admit).

But as my youngest child grows older and falls into a more regular rhythm of sleeping and waking, and when I’m less embroiled in activities at the college, I’ll use reading as a way to challenge, inspire, and motivate myself to return to the page. At the moment, I’m writing only once in a while. I’m jotting down ideas for poems more than the lines themselves. When I arrive at the point where I can wake up, relatively well rested and in advance of my children, and then write for an hour or two before they rise – that’s when I’ll work on poems again.

As for how long it takes to finish a poem . . . a long, long time. Like, years. And not just because “a poem is never really finished,” an adage many people espouse but really use as a nice and convenient way to compensate for flaws in craft. (I’d rather just say, “Here’s my poem. It’s finished, and sure, it has some flaws, but it’s complete.” We are none of us without flaws, and that makes us interesting. Poems with flaws are interesting, too.)

Lately, first drafts of poems take hours, and that’s because I’ve moved from free verse to writing in meter. I realize that’s kind of backward for a poet, but that’s my path. And writing metrical verse takes intense concentration and, for me, an immense amount of reflection and listening – I have to reread the lines to myself constantly and really listen to them to make sure the music is right. So sometimes I leave my morning writing sessions, the better part of an hour or two hours, with no more than nine lines. And they might not even be good lines. It’s a risk and a challenge, particularly for someone who doesn’t have a lot of writing time at her disposal – but I’m enjoying the challenge, and I find the risk, so far, pays off. I’m learning a lot.

LE: Which poets have had the most influence on you?

SKG: It’s cooler and trendier to disparage the whole MFA program thing and proclaim loud and long about its flaws – but the poets I took classes with at New York University had an immense and lasting influence over me, and I recognize my luck, my sheer luck, in having sat in their craft classes and workshops.

I read Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Phil Levine when I was an undergrad at JamesMadisonUniversity, taking creative writing courses with Susan Facknitz. Then years later I was able to actually take classes with Kinnell, Olds, and Levine at NYU. How cool is that? How many people can study with the authors they’ve admired for years? And then there were the poets I was introduced to through the program: Derek Walcott, Philis Levin, Elizabeth Alexander, and Eamon Grennan. All of them -- some more than others, but all of them – left an impression on my writing and my psyche.

Contingent to my teachers are my peers. I continue to admire and be amazed by the work and accomplishments of Adam Penna, Aracelis Girmay, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Ruth Irupe Sanabria, Adam Day, Stephanos Papadopoulos. My conversations with Adam Penna, in particular, have been incredibly formative. He’s been my sounding board for ideas and drafts of poems for years.

And lately I’m in love with Melissa Green (The Squanicook Eclogues) and Alison Seay (To See The Queen). Gorgeous, gorgeous work that has me thinking about the choices one makes as a writer, and about restraint (in subject matter and form).

Library Memories (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Public libraries shaped my life.

In the sixth grade I went regularly to a library in Queens. Most of my friends who went there were more intrigued by the bakery across the street. The main attraction was at a side window where this new food called pizza was being served. But I was going to the library for a project. My class was assigned what was called a special interest report. I wrote mine about Israel. This subject choice would have astonished my Hebrew school teachers. They had rarely encountered a student who so exquisitely combined indifference and inability. I wasn’t sure why I picked Israel. No one ever talked about the country. This was 1958, and it wasn’t particularly in the news. For whatever reason, I dutifully scanned the shelves, taking down books, reading them. I met another boy from another school. We agreed to meet each week so we could read together. That was a special kind of friendship. My work was the first research I had ever done. I didn’t know it then, but doing that research prepared me for my entire life.

My family moved to Sag Harbor, a small town on the eastern end of Long Island, a year later. The John Jermain Library was a few minutes walk from my house. It was a pleasant place, even if its collection was restricted. I read my first adult novel there. I was thirteen, unsure what to read. I was in the library looking for material when the librarian told me the place was closing in a few minutes, and I had to choose. My mind rushed. I didn’t know any title or any author. Then I saw the title Babbitt. I had no idea what the book was about, but I did recall that I had seen an Abbott and Costello cartoon in which the Costello character had called the Abbott character “Babbitt.” I thought the book must be funny. I took it home, sat on a couch, and began reading. I hadn’t finished half a page before I rested it against my chest and said words to myself to the effect that I couldn’t believe someone could get down so much truth on a page.

And so I began serious adult reading, starting with all the Sinclair Lewis books in the library. This resulted in a problem later that year. The film version of Elmer Gantry was released in July 1960. Following the advice of her sister, my mother told me that I was not allowed to see the film. I argued that I had read the book and so I knew what the film was about. It didn’t work. She wouldn’t change. I was still thirteen, and I didn’t understand why she couldn’t see that I was old enough to watch the film. As I got older, I found it easy to forgive her. For the rest of her life, though, she periodically apologized to me for what I thought was the only parenting mistake she ever made in her life.

The library in Sag Harbor was an unusual place. One day I stood in line next to John Steinbeck waiting to check out books. I had some strange experiences in the library. When I was fourteen, I took to reading novels about World War II. I read The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, and others. I wanted next to read From Here to Eternity, in part because James Jones was then living in nearby East Hampton. I went to the appropriate library shelf, but no Jones book was there. It was famous, I thought, and so it had to be there. Finally, I asked the librarian. “Oh,” she said, “We keep it up in the attic.” I gently asked if it would be possible for her to get it because I wanted to read it. “Do your parents know you’re getting the book?” she asked. My eyes were unblinking. “Absolutely,” I unashamedly lied, “In fact they suggested it.” This seemed to provide enough emotional cover for her, and she got me the dusty copy of a great book.

My mother was drafted into driving me to the much larger library in Southampton. There I could get books on philosophy. I read The Myth of Sisyphus and Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy. I was quite taken by Kant and was determined to read him. I took out Critique of Pure Reason. I read through two pages and thought that perhaps I had gotten the Ukrainian edition. Kant went back to his place in the library.

That was the beginning. Later, there were many other libraries in my life, the lives of my children, and, soon, in the lives of my grandchildren.

But libraries are changing. People research on the internet. They go to the libraries to rent CDs and videos as much as books. I don’t know what the libraries will be like in ten or twenty years. Perhaps they will transform into community centers. I don’t mind change. And it wouldn’t matter if I did. It is just that, in my mind, the library in its traditional form saved my life. I want them to be around to save others.   

The Little-Known Film That Changed History (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Pimpernel Smith is the most morally influential film ever made. The 1941 adventure film focused on the main character’s rescue of innocent people from the Nazis. The film was made by Leslie Howard using money he had earned from co-starring in Gone With the Wind.  Pimpernel Smith directly influenced extraordinary acts of heroism. For example, in 1942 the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg attended a private screening of the film with his half-sister Nina. She later noted, “On the way home, he told me this was the kind of thing he would like to do.” Surely, there were other influences on Wallenberg, but the film was one of them. Working in Budapest during the War, Wallenberg issued passports and housed Jews. He saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis. He was later arrested by the Russians and disappeared in the Gulag prison system.

Leslie Howard sought to transfer the heroism he portrayed on the screen to his own life. He made other anti-Nazi films and appeared on radio broadcasts. His work was so effective that Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called him, “the most dangerous propagandist in the British service.” When Pimpernel Smith was released, the worried Nazis pressured neutral countries not to screen it in public. That’s why Raoul Wallenberg had to see the film within the confines of the British embassy.

Eventually, the Nazis were so fearful of Howard’s work that on June 1, 1943, they shot down a civilian airliner over neutral airspace because they knew he was on board. According to a recent, credible study by the Spanish journalist Jose Rey-Ximena, Howard had been personally sent by Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a successful mission to keep Spain out of the war and was returning on that flight.

Beyond these two extraordinary cases, Pimpernel Smith stirred the patriotic feelings, provided emotional strength, and offered inspiration to untold millions of British citizens and alerted people around the world of the dangers of Nazism.

Given this incredible history, it is both sad and unfair that Pimpernel Smith remains virtually unknown. Beyond its staggering influence, the film provides a gateway to crucial historical questions because Pimpernel Smith was one of only a few films that deliberately tried to influence America to fight the Nazis.

Along with such films as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, Pimpernel Smith raises the question of the moral obligations—as distinct from business and aesthetic interests--of films and the film industry. Pimpernel Smith was not allowed to be released in the U.S. until February 12, 1942 (that is, until after America’s entry into the War and even then under another title, Mister V), almost seven months after its release in England, and To Be or Not To Be’s release was delayed until March 6, 1942. Chaplin and Lubitsch came under enormous pressure in Hollywood, which depended on European, including German, markets.

Pimpernel Smith thus needs to be seen against a specific historical background, the reluctance of America to enter the Second World War as exemplified in such organizations as the America First Committee which favored not intervening in the War (and included among its members Gerald Ford, Walt Disney, and many other prominent Americans.) Against such efforts, a relatively few voices spoke up for the moral imperative to confront Nazism. 

Pimpernel Smith also raises the question of how a film affects its audience. The movie is about a hero. As Horatio Smith, Howard was a British gentleman with guts, a gentle, understated scholar with a splendid heart. The character was deliberately given the surname “Smith” by Howard to illustrate that ordinary people can be heroes. The film thus becomes a means of self-examination by audience members to determine their own capacity for heroism in their personal lives.

Beyond its influence and good intentions, what is amazing about Pimpernel Smith is that it is artistically an enormously successful film.

The film’s making is a personal drama about Leslie Howard, one that pits the still, small voice of duty against the loud siren calls of alluring Hollywood party life. It is a drama that reveals the triumph of conscience over commerce and of obligation over personal safety. Pimpernel Smith in this sense is the story of how Leslie Howard became morally mature. He had starred in the successful 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel, playing a British aristocrat who secretly smuggles French aristocrats to safety during the French Revolution. When he appeared in The Petrified Forest (1936), he demanded that Humphrey Bogart cast in the film because the two had appeared on Broadway together in the play. Warner Brothers had planned to hire Edward G. Robinson. Howard said he would not appear in the film without Bogart. It was The Petrified Forest that made Bogart famous, and in appreciation, the tough-guy actor named his daughter Leslie after Howard. This private bravery and the playing of the hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel helped propel Howard to meet the call of history. Gone With the Wind gave him the money and the fame to allow his conscience to be heard around the world. When others fled west away from Europe toward America, Howard left the comfortable security of Hollywood fame and a Beverly Hills home and returned home to England

As the child of a Hungarian Jewish father and British Jewish mother, Howard had a first-hand knowledge of anti-Semitism. He determined to call the world’s attention to the dangers of Nazism. Pimpernel Smith was his chance to do so, and he succeeded in creating a remarkable film that deserves to be known for its artistry to be sure but most especially for its pivotal role in world history.

"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.