Contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson would not be surprised that he left explicitly detailed instructions for the creation of his tombstone.

“A plain die or cube of 3 feet without any moldings, surmounted by an obelisk of 6 feet height, each of a single stone. On the face of the obelisk the following inscription, not a word more.

Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
Father of the University of Virginia”

Notably absent is any mention of his Presidency. Was it true humility or carefully concealed hubris?

The historian Joseph Ellis writes in his preface to American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson “…inspired by the example of John Adams to believe that affection and criticism toward Jefferson are not mutually exclusive postures.”

Like binary stars, Jefferson and Adams were bound together in a kind of intellectual gravity. Friends. Enemies. And friends again. It is not a coincidence that Adams left Washington at 4 AM on the day of Jefferson’s inaugural.

The great divide of the fledgling country was between the Federalists, who argued for a strong central government and the Democratic-Republicans, who argued for more states rights and smaller government.

Jefferson’s election was perhaps the most contentious in our history. [Far more controversial than Bush/Gore]. It took 36 congressional ballots to secure him the Presidency over Aaron Burr. It is in this crucible that Jefferson had to give the speech of his life.

We live in a time when most speeches no longer spill from the pen of the politician. The eloquence is manufactured and packaged. We do not remember speeches wholesale, but witness only those highlights filtered through endless media outlets.

What follows is a brief literary musing on a speech that was barely heard by those who were there, but loudly reverberates today as a reminder of how fragile and enduring is the idea of democracy.

*********************

The clatter and dust of President John Adam’s coach had barely drifted away on a brisk Wednesday morning in March 1801. A 6’2″ Virginian entered the breakfast room of Conrad and McCunn’s boarding house near Capital Hill where he had living in bachelor’s quarters during his Vice-Presidency.

The Federalists had many unsavory names for the Virginian, but he was known throughout the young nation as Thomas Jefferson. He had already labored through two drafts of his first inaugural address.

A few weeks earlier, he had written to his beloved daughter Maria (Polly) “I feel a sincere wish, indeed, to see our Government brought back to its republican principles, to see that kind of government firmly fixed to which my whole life as been devoted.”

As usual, Jefferson’s eloquence took its form on parchment not from the podium. He was, by all accounts, an inordinately shy and reticent public speaker. John Adams recalled that “during the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”

His lack of oratory skills was considered a liability because the Continental Congress was regarded as an arena for orators. Jefferson’s Virginia brethren were known for their oratorical brilliance.

The historian Joseph Ellis describes such luminaries as Edmund Pendleton — “the silver haired and silver-tongued master of the elegant style…Pendleton’s specialty was the cool an low key peroration that hypnotized the audience.”

Another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, was “more flammable and ostentatious. If Pendleton’s technique suggested peaceful occupation, Lee was a proponent of the all-out invasion…and the undisputed oratorical champion was Patrick Henry, whose presence in the Virginia delegation generated more public attention than anyone else except for George Washington.”

Henry was the equivalent of an evangelical preacher — who talked in cadences and seduced the audience in waves of emotional inspiration with equally powerful pauses.

At noon, dressed as “a plain citizen, without any distinctive badge of office,” Jefferson walked up Capitol Hill. Behind him was a small parade of dignitaries led by a cadre of Republican congressmen and two members of the outgoing cabinet.

In the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capital, he was met by Aaron Burr, who had already been installed as presiding officer and Chief Justice John Marshall, who administered the oath of office.

After a short pause, Jefferson stood to deliver his speech in a room that was, Margaret Bayard Smith claimed, “so crowded that I believe not another creature could enter,” and that according to newspaper reports held the “largest concourse of citizens ever assembled here. Another newspaper reported an audience of 1,140 in addition to members of Congress.

Jefferson rose and began reading his Inaugural Address in a tone so low that it could be heard by only a few in the chamber.

“Friends and Fellow-Citizens,” he began, “Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow citizens which is here assembled to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire.”

This opening was followed a few paragraphs later with, “To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”

And later, the oft-quoted “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Jefferson continues, “Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.

Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people…freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment.”

“I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts.”

Jefferson mastered that fine art of the aspirational speech. An art that deftly integrates the possible with the probable. The contradictions of his character and of the country were ultimately played out on the stage of politics.

Ironically, some of his great accomplishments as President were often a result of Federalist sensibilities. The Louisiana Purchase was not a democratic decision, but a Presidential one.  And he did not dismantle the financial machinations of Alexander Hamilton.

Christopher Hitchens has written that “Jefferson had, in the course of a long political life, contained ‘multitudes,’ in Walt Whitman’s phrase, to contradict himself with scope and with generosity. Historians still wrestle with his paradoxical writings on slavery and race.

But on that March afternoon in 1801, Jefferson whispered words that defined and refined a nation in search of identity.  Well done, Mr. Jefferson.

My thanks to Joseph Ellis, Christopher Hitchens, and Merrill Peterson.

The first draft of his novel, A Drink Before The War, was written in three weeks. He was 25 and needed a break from writing “really literary, avant-garde short fiction.” It was published in 1994 after 13 drafts and won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

The novel is the first in a series featuring Patrick Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro. Working out of an old church belfry, Kenzie and Gennaro take on a seemingly easy assignment for two politicians: uncover the whereabouts of Jenna Angeline, a black cleaning woman who has allegedly stolen confidential state documents.

The investigation escalates, implicating members of Jenna’s family and rival gang leaders while uncovering extortion, assassination, and child prostitution.

There is a moment in the novel, when Lehane shows his literary pedigree.

“We sat and watched the car, waiting for darkness to fall. The sun had set but the sky still held its warmth, a canvas of beige streaked with wisps of orange. Somewhere behind or in front of us — in a tree, on a roof, in a bush, at one with the natural urban world — Bubba lurked in wait, his eyes as constant and emotionless as T.J. Eckleburg’s.”

Bubba is Bubba Rugowski, a local gunrunner and sociopath. T.J. Eckleburg is the metaphorical and literal face of an optician that appears on a billboard in F. Scott Fitzerald’s, The Great Gatsby.

While the novels Mystic River and Shutter Island have catapulted Lehane beyond the mystery and private-eye genre, all of his novels have moments that transcend the expected in popular fiction.

My literary compass moves in the direction of John Updike, Richard Ford and Don DeLillo, but I always find my way back to Lehane’s ability to tell a story that doesn’t need to dazzle you with literary flourishes, but with language that engages and surprises you when you least expect it.

Here is the opening of A Drink Before The War. “The bar at the Ritz Carlton looks out on the Public Garden and requires a tie. I’ve looked out on the Public Garden from other vantage points before, without a tie, and never felt at loss, but maybe the Ritz knows something I don’t.”

And a few lines later:

“The Ritz is one of those hotels that is resilient in its staid opulence: the carpeting is deep, rich oriental; the reception and concierge desks are made of a lustrous oak; the foyer is a bustling way station of lounging power brokers toting futures in soft leather attaché cases, Brahmin duchesses in fur coats with impatient airs and daily manicure appointments and a legion of navy blue-uniformed menservants pulling sturdy brass luggage carts across the thick carpeting with the softest whoosh accompaniment as the wheels find their purchase. No matter what is going on outside, you could stand in the lobby, look at the people, and think there was still a blitz going on in London.”

How can you not love a writer who is willing and ready to employ so many semi-colons and commas in service of a long sentence?
Perhaps Papa Hemingway or Raymond Carver or a strong-fingered editor would have cut the entire paragraph leaving only the London blitz line, but it’s sheer tonnage is what seduces you.

What gives Lehane such freedom is that the novel is written from the perspective of Patrick Kenzie, a private detective from Boston. Since I grew up not too far from Boston, I can tell you that it’s a city that creates characters that can be profane and profound at the same time.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers.
He knows the seamier side of Boston’s blue collar neighborhoods and the equally seamier side of politics.

The author, John Dufresne wrote, “Reading A Drink Before The War is like watching Robert B. Parker and John Updike duke it out phrase by phrase on some steamy night in Boston’s Combat Zone. Christ, Lehane writes beautiful sentences.”

Stephen King pays an even more telling compliment, “The superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane became a kind of lifeline for me.”

There are times in his debut novel that Lehane seems to be a parody (or perhaps homage) of Raymond Chandler with echoes of Richard Price. But the 25-year-old writer is now in his mid- forties and each new work has his own singular voice and a lingering touch of melancholy — like a social worker or probation officer too long on the job.

The high-wire performance that Lehane accomplishes with every novel, particularly Mystic River, is remarkable. I don’t think it’s effortless, but his fiction is grounded in story and character.

And if an able critic wants to call it literature, then that’s fine with me.

“She saw the world through a dazzling prism of  authentic imagination. Lila Wingo would take the  raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.  With  her sons she was gentler, and  the results took longer to tally.”

What has always fascinated me about Conroy’s writing is that he can gentle weave a word like psychotic into such painterly prose without a hint of dishonesty or guile. It’s he legacy of his Southern roots, the unmistakable imprint of Thomas Wolfe the elder, and the sheer joy he takes in getting the words right.

In his latest book, My Reading Life, he revisits a life of reading from Gone With The Wind to the poetry of one of his mentors, James Dickey.

He writes, as expected, elegantly and profoundly on a variety of books and people that inspired him but his chapter on Why I Write is wonderful window into his own myriad motivations.

“Good writing is the hardest forms of thinking.  It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.  If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.  But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.”

A few sentences later he writes, “I’ve always taken a child’s joy in the painterly loveliness of the English language.”

Some writers write to make a living, but Conroy is a writer that needs writing to live. It is his alter and his alter ego. It is his way of turning his cascading thoughts and memories into something tangible and meaningful.

A few years ago, I wrote a short story while driving along a seemingly endless stretch of Texas highway.  One of the characters I created persisted in behaving in ways I did not imagine or anticipate.  The antagonist of the story surprisingly became the heroine.

In the briefest of moments, a conceit or a playful jumble of words evolves into a truth revealed. An emotion experienced.  Transcendence is the gift a writer receives by writing and hopefully one given in equal measure to the reader.

Pat Conroy isn’t always an easy read. But he’s nearly always transcendent.

Give yourself the gift of My Reading Life.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question”

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend.

And, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

The line comes from Polonius — an obsequious, windbag of a man who has been sent to spy on Hamlet by the King.  According to scholars, in the first quarto Polonius was  called “Corambis’ — which is derived from Latin and can be roughly translated as “reheated cabbage.”

Polonius speaks a numbing eleven lines including “brevity is the soul of wit.” The wonderful  irony is that there isn’t even the hint of brevity coming from him. He doesn’t talk, he spouts.  Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, finally interrupts him with the words, “More matter, with less art.”

Ay, there’s the rub.

Most of my writing career has been an attempt to find that delicate balance of matter and art.

No, eloquence is not dead. You can find it in the works of people like David Quammen — who writes elegantly and perceptively on nature.  Or in the ruminations of Nicholson Baker — who writes extraordinary things about the ordinary. Or in virtually everything Joan Didion puts on paper.

But in its apparent rareness, I see the slow and precipitous decline.  Can you imagine the Declaration of Independence being crafted by today’s congress?  Would the brevity and brilliance of the Gettysburg Address seem unfit for such an august and solemn occasion today?

Over time, eloquence has been elevated out of the expected. It almost feels baroque and suspect when it finds its way into print, into a speech, or worse, into ordinary conversation.

Eloquence feels like we are continually gilding the lily.

I don’t believe eloquence is about verbal virtuosity.  To me, true eloquence is about hitting the right chord of context, insight and artistry.

Eloquence can be found in sublime brevity.  Hemingway, who raised simplicity to an art, demonstrates eloquence in the last six words of his novel , The Sun Also Rises.

Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

You can only appreciate this line in the context of the novel’s long journey. This cynical and slighter bitter line also surprisingly poignant because it reveals the truth of a relationship that is more dream than reality.  It is the recognition of the impossible.

Norman Maclean’s opening line of his story, A River Runs Through It, may be one of the most eloquent beginnings of a story I have ever read.  “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

In Neuromancer, William Gibson opens his novel with “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

And in the screenplay of Doctor Zhivago, Robert Bolt puts a surprisingly eloquent line into the mouth of the antagonist Komarovsky.  Outside an upscale restaurant, a crowd of demonstrators and revolutionaries sing The International.

Inside the restaurant,  there awkward silence falls over the diners.  Then Komarovsky comments, “No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the revolution.”  The crowd laughs and for the briefest of moments, the revolution doesn’t seem so inevitable.

E.B. White, once wrote eloquently about Spring.

“One never knows what images one is going to hold in memory, returning to the city after a brief orgy in the country.  I find this morning that what I  most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands — she with a couple of of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip.

Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists — just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.”

There is eloquence in the spare prose of Cormac McCarthy.  In Joyce Carol Oates’ insightful book on boxing.   And in the sports writing of the late and irreplaceable Jim Murray.

This is not a plea for more eloquence or even a desire for it to permeate our daily communications.  But it is a small wish.  Please don’t let eloquence become so extraordinary that it becomes the pejorative.  Find the art in the matter.

When in doubt, err on the side of eloquence.

But his final book, Endpoint and Other Poems is an invitation to see him beyond his prolific pages. His diagnosis of cancer and the grim reality of his impending death influences many of the poems in the book.

This specter of mortality is present even in the seemingly mundane: copyright © 2009 by the Estate of John Updike.  It was a sad reminder that one of my muses was gone.

Clive James wrote  “Updike was always a clinical observer of his own body.  Right to the wire he took inventory; he had the mind of a regimental quartermaster.”  This is the lure of this poignant and serious volume of poems.

On his birthday in 2002, he wrote this poem that begins Endpoint.

“Mild winter, then a birthday burst of snow.

A faint neuralgia, flitting tooth-root to

knee and shoulder joint, a vacant head,

too many friendly wishes to parry,

too many cakes. Oh, let the years alone!

They pile up if we manage not to die,

glass dollars in the bank, dry pages on

the shelf. The boy I was no longer smiles.”

And a stanza later”

“Wife absent for a day or two, I wake

alone and older, the storm that aged me

distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow

so thin a blanket blades of grass show through.

Snow makes white shadows, there behind the yews,

dissolving in the sun’s slant kiss, and pools

itself across the lawn as if to say,

Give me another hour, then I’ll go.”

And the final stanza:

“Nature is never bored, and we whose lives

are linearly pinned to those aloof,

self-fascinated cycles can’t complain,

though aches and pains and even dreams-a-crawl

with wood lice of decay give pause to praise.

Birthday, death day – what day is not both?”

In a poem called Oblong Ghosts written just two months before he died, Updike writes:

“A wake-up call? It seems that death has found

the portals it will enter by: my lungs,

pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than

the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.”

And a few weeks later on 11/23 from Mass General Hospital in Boston, he wrote:

The Hospital

“Benign big blond machine beyond all price,

it swallows us up and slowly spits us out

half-deafened and our blood still dyed: all this

to mask the simple dismal fact that we

decay and find our term of life is fixed.

This giant governance, a mammoth toy,

distracts us for the daytime, but the night

brings back the quiet and solemn dark.”

And the final stanza:

“My wife of thirty years is on the phone.

I get a busy signal, and I know

she’s in her grief and needs to organize

consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;

her body is the only locus where

my desolation bumps against the wall.”

The other poems in this last book include sonnets and light verse covering everything from Doris Day and Payne Stewart to the painter Lucian Freud and baseball.

Getting the words right was always important to Updike.  Like another favorite author of mine, Thomas Wolfe, the elder, I revel in the parade of adjectives and the minute descriptions of things from plumbing fixtures to the way a woman’s hair is carefully braided. The criticism of Updike’s prose was usually about his verbal virtuosity – that his similes and metaphors short-circuited the reading experience…that the reader admired the sentences instead of losing oneself in the story.

I don’t disagree, but I have lost myself in so many stories and in so many authors, I read Updike or Tobias Wolff for other reasons beyond the story. It resonates with me like a Wyeth painting. An echo of the Updike’s essay-autobiography “Self Consciousness,”the prose is unabashedly self conscious.

But in Endpoint, Updike’s poems are even more directly personal and intimate. He is aware of his own self-consciousness but embraces death with the understanding of man as part of something larger – from his extended family to the world of letters.

So, I place Endpoint next to his collected short stories andRabbit Run. When I am short on insight and influence, I come back to bask in the words and a life well considered.  And well lived.

Sins real and imagined, inherited and acquired are the limitless fountain of many of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best works.

In my second reflection on his famous parable, The Minister’s Black Veil, I want to begin with a personal tale that took place 156 years after the story’s publication.

It’s a story of a minister’s fall from grace.  It was the minister that presided over my wedding.

In the early 1990’s he was accused and convicted of a sin so heinous and sensational, it became not only the talk of the town, but the centerpiece of an Oprah show.

It is an odd circumstance to know the parties involved and stranger still, not to know the full truth and consequences of the crime. I have a small collection of that minister’s sermons from the 1980’s and they are revealing more by what they are missing.

Many are intellectual tour de forces with keen insights and a delicate mixture of scripture,  philosophy and uncommon sense.  But there is more slickness than empathy, more sparkle in the prose than in having an enlightened conversation with a congregation.

Sadly, the marriage of sin and clergy is nothing new, and yet his mighty fall is yet another testimony to the sheer timelessness of human frailty and darkness.

All of which brings me to Hawthorne’s story, The Minister’s Black Veil.  Like Hawthorne’s most widely anthologized tale, Young Goodman Brown, it is about the omnipresence of sin.

The story is about a reverend named Hooper, who begins wearing a black veil that “seemed to consist of two folds of crepe, which entirely conceals his features, except for the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things.”

The parishioners greet this odd affect with astonishment and fear.  “Such was the effect of this simple piece of crepe, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting house.  Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost a fearful sight to the minister, as his black veil.”

Hooper had a reputation as a good preacher but not an “energetic one” — striving to win his flock  heavenward by mild, persuasive influences, rather than drive them by the Cotton Mather-like thunders of the Word.

But under the veil, the good reverend’s sermon was “tinged, rather more darkly than usual, with the gentle gloom of Mr. Hooper’s temperament.  The subject had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest and fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting the Omniscient can detect them.

That evening, the reverend performed a wedding and after the ceremony, he “raised a glass of wine to his lips , wishing happiness to the new-married couple in a strain of mild-pleasantry that ought have brightened the features of the guests, like a cheerful gleam from the hearth.  At that instant, catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass, the black veil involved his spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others.  His frame shuddered, his lips grew white , he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet, and rushed forth into the darkness.  For the Earth, too had on her black veil.”

Hawthorne’s genius is such that the black veil and the supposed sin that it hides remains a mystery throughout the story.  Even approaching death, Hooper refuses to remove the veil or confess to any particular sin.

On his death bed, the reverend gazes upon the grim assemblage standing over him and says, “Why do you tremble at me along?” cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators,  “Tremble also at each other. Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crepe so awful?

When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of sin; then deem me a monster, then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die.  I look around me and, on every visage a Black Veil.”

Hawthorne has given us a curious and provocative story — he has literalized a metaphor and created a physical veil — a visceral emblem of hidden sin.  Wearing the veil serves both to isolate Hooper from the world and to make him “a very efficient” clergyman.

Hooper is set apart not by any named sin, but by the physical manifestation of sin — a precursor to his ultimate masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter.  Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand and the aforementioned, Young Goodman Brown also explore this fertile territory.]

A reminiscence by Hawthorne’s wife Sophia (“An Evening with Mrs. Hawthorne.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Contemporaries, 1899) reveals how closely readers identified Hawthorne with secret sin.  “… men who committed great crimes or those who memories held tragic secrets would sometimes write him or even come great distances to see him and unburden their souls. This happened after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as a father-confessor of all hidden sins.”

Would it have made a difference if my minister’s veil weren’t transparent?  If his sins were made readily visible?  Perhaps not to me, but to the victims of his sins and the congregation that gave him their trust.

What veils are we not seeing even in ourselves?

On that bright, crisp Wednesday morning, there was the lingering smell of gingerbread and spruce in the air. Thirty-seven students dressed in black silk robes borrowed from the neighboring clergy, walked to a platform constructed near a grove of pines and fir.

Among the graduates of the Bowdoin class of 1825 would be a renowned clergyman, the African American governor of Liberia, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a future President of the United States, Franklin Pierce.

And there was a shy student who three months earlier had been reprimanded by the college president for his frequent absences and banned from speaking at the commencement. His name was Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In his first year at Bowdoin, the same college President, the Reverend William Allen had written Hawthorne’s mother to ask her “to induce your son faithfully observe the laws of this institution.”

According to Brenda Wineapple, the author of Hawthorne, A Life – the restless Nathaniel “resented regulations stipulating how far a student could walk on the Sabbath and that forbade smoking a “seegar” on the street or consuming alcohol.”

Over the past 186 years, Hawthorne has emerged from wayward student to a writer forever doomed to the “required” reading lists of students. The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun. For some enthusiasts, the wish is that required became “desired” reading list.

I spent nearly a year walking the same pine-strewed paths at Bowdoin College as Hawthorne. It gave me an unwavering appreciation for a writer who was unfathomable to his closest friends and even to his wife Sophie.

After his death in May of 1864, his sister Elizabeth told Hawthorne’s son Julian, “Your father kept his very existence a secret, as far as possible.”

The classic biographer’s gem has been Julian’s visit with Herman Melville in 1883.  For years, Melville has been in decline and held “a secure but ignominious job as an outdoors custom inspector.”

According to Julian, Melville, “… said several interesting things; among which the most remarkable was that he was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret; which would, if known would explain all the mysteries of his career.”

Hawthorne’s secret.

In the post-Freudian era, it has been like Eve’s apple to biographers and scholars.  Philip Young makes the case for incest (With his sister Elizabeth) in Hawthorne’s Secret, An Untold Tale.

Other proposed but unsubstantiated secrets include molestation from his Uncle Robert with whom he shared a room in Salem for many years. For a literary detective there’s a trove of evidence in Hawthorne’s own oeuvre — from the story “Alice Doane’s Appeal” to the Scarlet Letter.

In Hawthorne’s work there is much light and perhaps even more darkness.  He used his darker imaginings so effectively that Henry James believed his “darkness” to be a mere fanciful playing, with evil and pain used simply as counters in his fictional game.”

As a lover of 19^th Century literature (Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe and Dickens), I believe that the further removed from context and time, the more we need the nuggets of literary biography as back story.

In Twain, for example, we do not need to know his life to appreciate or enjoy his writings.  But as one explores the world of Samuel Clemens, you realize the impact that a black slave named Uncle Daniel had on his story telling sense and his ability to mimic dialects.

Or how the death of Twain’s younger brother in a steamship accident created a consciousness of guilt for the young Clemens.

So, what is it about sin and Hawthorne?  The black and white of his life?  How do you explain the gossamer like veil between Hawthorne and his family?

In the next issue of BakerMuse, I explore one of his darker stories from “Twice Told Tales” — it is called The Minister’s Black Veil. (1836)

It’s a story of a reverend who curiously dons a veil that covers his features except for the mouth and chin.  This veil confounds his congregation and his friends and acts as a parable — that the reverend’s  perception of the human condition and his willingness to expose it — leads to his isolation.

“What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self !”  Nathaniel Hawthorne

On a balmy morning in January 1952, Ian Fleming, an ex-stock broker, intelligence officer, journalist and unabashed womanizer, had just finished breakfast and taken a swim in front of the villa he called Goldeneye.

He sat down at a brown, roll-top desk and began typing at a 2-year-old Imperial portable typewriter and began to write the novel that was to become James Bond’s debut –Casino Royale.

As John Pearson, a friend and colleague, wrote “…he had no notes, had made no preparations.  He simply began to type, and the next seven weeks he kept at it steadily.”

On March 18^th, six days before his marriage. he had finished the novel that was to launch his new career as a novelist and introduce a cold, similarly womanizing British agent named Bond – after the author of a book about the birds of the West Indies.

The novel begins at a casino in the town of Royale-les-Eaux.  “The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.  Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling — a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”

Fleming’s inspiration for the novel came from his experiences at the French seaside resort Deauville in 1938.  He discovered the “Greek Syndicate,” a partnership of wealthy Greek financiers and ship owners who purchase from a casino the right to run a baccarat game.

In Casino Royale, the syndicate is Egyptian. Fleming immerses the reader into the scent and smoke of the tense, late hours of the casino.

“Bond lit a cigarette and settled himself in a chair. The long game was launched and the sequence of these gestures and the reiteration of this subdued litany would continue until  the end came and the players dispersed. Then, the enigmatic cards would be burnt or defaced, a shroud would be draped over the table and the grass-green baize battlefield would soak up the blood of its victims and refresh itself.”

Most critics aren’t particularly kind to Fleming. But his admirers like John F. Kennedy and Raymond Chandler appreciated the Fleming touch like Bond appreciates a well-shaken martini.

The author and critic Christopher Hitchens wrote that “Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed, the Russian mafia, as well as the nightmarish idea that some fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually collar some weapons-grade plutonium,”

”Bond is actually rather a cardboard guy,” Hitchens continues, ”He doesn’t change much. It’s a series of affectations and poses and designer elements. I’ve always found it difficult to really visualize him. That’s why he’s so protean in the movies as well. But the villains are always extremely good. I think that’s true without exception. They are quite believable even though very incredible.”

One only has to peruse the index of Andrew Lycett’s 1995 biography, Ian Fleming:  The Man Behind James Bond to get a sense of Flemings mercurial personality.

“Characteristics: Moodiness and melancholy, conformism, self-centeredness, complexity and contradictions, deference to older men, superciliousness, attitude toward women, self-consciousness, enthusiasm, Puritanism, domineering personality, aloofness, coldness, remoteness from life around, rudeness, xenophobia, caution, generosity.”

Generosity is the only positive characteristic to counterbalance this litany. Many of the unsavory traits made their way into Bond’s DNA.  Here is a revealing passage from Casino Royale:

‘With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair.

The conventional parabola –sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical.

Even more he shunned the mise en scène for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain…”

It is nearly impossible for today’s reader to escape of the sheer pull of the cinematic Bond. Sean Connery as 007. The unmistakable Bond music that still resonates 50 years later.

Like Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan; Fleming is less famous than his creation. In the United States, nervous publishers even changed the title to You Asked for It.

The critical reviews were mixed. The New York Times wrote:

“The first part of the book is a brilliant novelette in itself, dealing with the unlikely but imaginative plot to ruin a Communist agent by gambling against him for high stakes…but then he decides to pad out the book to novel length and leads the weary reader through a set of tough clichés to an ending which surprises no one save operative 007.”

But tough cliché’s and weary readers aside, the character Fleming created on that January day in 1952 still reigns as the most famous “secret agent” in fiction.

In the first chapter, Fleming etches the Bond character in our memory with a single sentence. “Then he slept, and with the warmth and humor of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold.”

Bond is a guilty pleasure, made guiltier over time by Fleming’s unveiled attitude towards women. “And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On the job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.”

So what are we to make of the ironical, brutal, cold and sexist Bond in our modern age?

I will play the Joseph Campbell card and say that Bond has become a mythic hero.  Despite his Achillian flaws, we know that he will save the day.  No matter how dire the circumstances, Bond always triumphs over adversity.

Sure, it isn’t plausible or real. But that’s what being a mythic hero is all about.

In just seven weeks, Fleming created his own kind of miracle. A character that hasn’t merely survived, but endured.

David Long

I discovered David Long in the pages of a tattered copy of GQ carelessly tossed among week-old newspapers in a laundromat in Maine. The story was called Eggarine and it was a joy and revelation from beginning to end.

It was the summer of 1994 and I’d moved to an island in Maine to write a book of short stories. I had willingly given up reading fiction so I wouldn’t be caught in the wake and seduction of other writer’s words, turns of phrases, and dialogue.

But since my island was 13 miles from the laundromat, I was a prisoner of time and opportunity.  So, I read Long’s story with the sound track of whirling dryers and the rhythmic beat of washers.

There are some stories that take you outside of yourself into an unfamiliar world.  And others that deftly illuminate your own world. Great stories, do both.

Eggarine is a story of a young man whose has both the blessing and pain of being born to older parents.  Years after his father’s death and with his mother’s growing infirmity occupying his mind, he begins to untangle the submerged and complicated feelings about his father.

If there is a emotional vein that permeates Long’s work, it is estrangement in all it’s various colorings.  In Eggarine, the estrangement isn’t a singular dramatic event but the natural evolution of a young man growing up and leaving home.

What resonated with me were the parallels with my own life.  Like my own family, the characters lived in a small town in Massachusetts.  And like me, the main character was born when his father was 40 and his mother in her late thirties.  The mother called him a “miracle baby” because he was born so late in her life.  I was a miracle baby in that I survived when my twin sister did not.

“Sometimes I caught her staring at me as if I were miraculous, and therefore exempt from judgment.”

But it’s the description of the father that so closely mirrors my own: “Aside from reading, my father had no pastimes — cared nothing for televised sports, joined no group he didn’t absolutely have to.  What he did, mainly, was keep the property up.”

My father’s passion was reading and the gentle caretaking of the lawn and flower garden.

Like the main character’s father, my father was forced to retire early after over 30 of years at one firm —  “without ceremony, without complaint.”

Long continues, “I’d always thought of him as an envoy from a time beyond reach, but oddly, he seemed no older at sixty than I’d ever remembered him.  No weaker, no less cheerful — no more profligate with advice, either.”  My father was weakened by heart problems but, he too, was no more profligate with advice as he grew older.

I won’t give up the ending which is surprising in its poignancy.  But, like the best of John Updike, the story is about the slow revelation of insight through memory and observation.

It’s also about what remains. The aftermath of his father’s death is also a story of a mother’s life endured.  The main character has both the guilt and the freedom of living too far to be an anchor in his mother’s new life until she becomes ill.

What Long does so well is to combine the soul of a poet with the art of keen insight into everyday people. His characters aren’t necessarily heroic or charismatic — but they unfailingly human.

Here is the beginning of Eggarine.

“My father walked with a cane all his life. He had been born with a withered leg, and it had grown into a bony shank, the muscles like long whittlings of white wood.  He wasted no effort trying to hide it.”

The great joy of being a writer is the alchemy.  It doesn’t matter how Long came to give this father a withered leg.  Stories are inventions and their moving parts a mystery.  My father didn’t have a gimpy leg or visible wound.  He had the wound of living as a semi-orphan and the horror of being a medic in the Pacific in World War II.

The writer’s art is often to create a wound or a tic or a passion that reflects what one has observed.  The mind serves up a kind of emotional breeze and you bask in it and you drop words into it and see how far it moves.

David Long’s work is moving because for all its poetry and sublime language, it’s real.  It comes from someone who observes the world with a desire to understand how the decisions we make affect us and how we live with the consequences.

You can find Eggarine in David Long’s commendable short story collection, Blue Spruce or if you’re fortunate enough, in a small Laundromat with a few hours to spare.

Melville’s great creation,Captain Ahab, would have a defiant answer to God: Yes.

Biblical scholars debate whether this mighty Leviathan is really a crocodile or a formidable serpent, but that taunting question is ultimately about man’s need to remain humble in God’s universe.

Melville’s Moby Dick remained humble for over 70 years after its publication in 1851.  Lewis Mumford’s 1929 biography begins with an honest appraisal of Melville’s legacy.

“When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day, The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.”

“Mr. Melville has carried his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied; a flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one thing: but the shark that glides white through a sulphurous sea was quite another.  In Moby Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become obscure; and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.”

Mumford then uses his own literary hook to lift the Melville reputation to new heights bestowing upon him the distinction of being the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced.

In the 20^th Century, Melville’s stock rose and along with Twain, and Hawthorne, he has emerged as one of the leading lights of our literature and the bane of many a high school and college reader.

Laurie Robertson Lorant’s excellent biography of Melville has many valuable insights but one that particularly resonated with me.

On June 4, 1839, Melville signed on as a cabin boy aboard the St. Lawrence, a relatively small, three-masted square-rigged merchant ship.  The humbling of the 19-year-old Melville began with his name listed on the crew roster as “Norman Melville.”

“As a new boy and a “lubber,” he was assigned such unpleasant tasks as clearing out the pig pens and chicken coops and swabbing the head, and such dangerous ones as scampering up the rigging to reef the sails in a storm.”

Lorant adds, “As a greenhorn, he was the lowest of the low in a tough, hierarchical world that valued him less as an individual than as a cog in a bewildering machine.” She references Melville’s own words:

“On board ship a sailor was expected to follow orders, not understand them, but jumping to execute commands was difficult when commands were issued in an almost entirely foreign language. What I did know, for instance, about striking up a top-gallant mast, and sending it down on deck in gale of wind?  Could I have turned in a dead-eye, or in the approved nautical style have clapped a seizing on the main-stay?  What did I know of passing a gammoning, reeving a Burton, stapping a shoe-black, clearing a foul hawse and innumerable other intricacies. “

“Loving the sounds of words, Melville learned quickly, and his vocabulary was the richer for the colorful expressions he heard around him.  Unusual words like spanker boom, scuttle butt, jolly boat, reef point, skysail, holystone, belaying pin, scupper-hole, monkey-jacket …tasted good on his tongue and sounded good to his ear even before he understood them.”

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) would build a different nautical vocabulary as he learned how to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi River.

Lorant’s observation takes Melville out of the “rarefied air” and puts him on Earth — a teenager thrust into a foreign world and fighting to survive both physically and emotionally.

If I taught the sheer tonnage of Moby Dick to students, I would probably begin by describing this 19-year-old entering a foreign world — humbled by his station and his innocence in this indescribably difficult profession.

When you add the sad biography of his father’s death and financial disgrace seven years earlier and his family’s economic plight — Melville goes beyond a name on a book cover and becomes remarkably human.

The psychological similarities of Melville and Twain begin with the early deaths of their fathers and the unfortunate economic aftermath. And they each had a love/hate relationship with an older brother.

In a serendipitous parallel (intended or not) to the biblical Job verse 41, chapter 41 of Moby Dick deepens the relationship between the Ahab and the “leviathan” Moby Dick.

“All that maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes of the brain; all the subtle demonizations of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibility personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

What a well-crafted, evocative paragraph.

The joy and genius of the novel, is in its foreignness.  Even to Melville’s contemporaries, the intricacies of the whaling industry was foreign and exotic.  That genius is enhanced as readers continue the voyage and that foreign world reveals universal themes — personal themes of fate, revenge, the limits of knowledge and the often exploitive nature of commerce.

I have a deep and lasting admiration for all those teachers, like Laurie Robertson Lorant, who guide readers through this masterpiece — putting it in context and shedding light on the foreignness and ultimately its romantic exploration of the seminal questions of our own humanity.

The hook is in me.