Matt Witten's Blog: Matt Witten's Blog: Random Musings, page 2
June 14, 2021
My Favorite Professor Interviews Me
Last week I published my interview of my favorite college professor Bob Gross, acclaimed author of The Minutemen and Their World. That book was published in 1976, received the prestigious Bancroft Prize, and became a perennial bestseller. His next book, The Transcendentalists and Their World, will be published this fall – a full 43 years after Bob initially signed the contract for it! It’s an inspiring and moving story of four decades of perseverance.
This week I’m publishing Bob’s interview of me.
Q: You’ve gone from playwriting to crime/mystery novels to TV and movie scripts. In all of them you tell stories. How and when did you develop your interest in narrative?
A: Like everyone else, I’ve always loved stories. The first stories I remember hearing were from my father, when I was a kid. He used to tell tall tales about times when he was in great danger, about to be destroyed by some horrible enemy, and he would cry out, in desperation, “Davy Jones!” His agonized plea would resonate down through the sewers and rivers to the bottom of the ocean, where Davy Jones was hanging out at his locker with his friend the octopus. Davy would hear my father’s call and immediately race upward through the ocean, burst on the scene, and save my father just in the nick of time.
My father told another story, which I remember vividly to this day, about the time he was captured by cannibals and they were going to turn him into soup. But when they threw him into the pot of water, he kept eating all the vegetables in the pot, and since cannibals don’t like soup with no vegetables in it, they were unable to eat my father, so they let him go. This, by the way, is yet another reason to eat your vegetables!
I knew when I was in first grade that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I don’t recall how I came to that conclusion. I wrote my first full-length play when I was in college. It was called Alaska Fire, and it was based on a scary campfire story I’d heard about a man in Alaska who comes home from fishing one day and finds his entire family has burned up in a fire. He begins to wonder if he set the fire himself before he left the house in the morning.
Q: Do you see a continuity of interests amid these various genres?
A: No matter the genre, my work is often “political,” though you can make an argument that all work is political – you’re either fighting injustices or, by ignoring them, you’re supporting them. I like to put my characters in moral quandaries. I like writing stuff that’s meaty, but also has plenty of humor.
Having said that, writing in different genres does bring out different parts of me. My novels sometimes have a character who’s very much my alter ego. For instance, the main character in my four Jacob Burns mysteries is a Jewish aspiring writer with a wife who’s an English professor and two young sons. When I wrote these novels, all of this was true of me. But with writing for the stage, my most successful plays have main characters who are ostensibly very different from me. The hero of Sacred Journey is a homeless Native American man; the main characters in Washington Square Moves are Black ex-cons who hustle chess in Washington Square; and two of the three main characters of The Ties That Bind are lesbians.
With screenplays and TV pilots, I generally gravitate toward crime stories with heart. With characters we care about.
Q: You tell stories about American life. How much did your major in American Studies at Amherst College influence your approaches to our culture and society?
Majoring in American Studies, and being interested in politics and history from a very young age, and the ethical teachings I received from my Jewish upbringing, have been the backdrop for all my work. I try to think deeply about our country and all the different forces, both personal and societal, that affect my characters.
I believe that a great novel, movie, TV show or play has three types of conflict for the main characters: internal, within each character; interpersonal; and societal, where the characters are wrestling with larger social forces. Whenever I write, I try to keep these three different types of conflict in the forefront of my mind.
Q: I still remember the play you wrote for your senior thesis, Alaska Fire. Did that work anticipate your future interests?
The main character in Alaska Fire is a middle-aged man, and the theme is the inevitable discontents of marriage and choosing one path over another in life. What the heck was I thinking, writing that? I was twenty. I’d never had a relationship that lasted more than a year. I had never chosen a path that would be extremely hard to reverse. And yet I stretched my mind and wrote this play.
I’ve continued to reach and explore and stretch throughout my writing life.
Q: Have you worked on any projects for a long time that you have eventually jettisoned? How do you decide what will work and what won’t?
Unfortunately, yes, I have had that experience. I’ve spent six months apiece on two screenplays that never got produced. I’ve spent months writing pilots that never got produced.
And then there was the screenplay I wrote in 1995 and then got paid $86,000 for in 2018 and may get made one day! Not quite 43 years, but still a pretty long journey.
Nowadays, I really try to be sure a project is viable before I start it. I’ll pitch a one or two-paragraph version to my wife and/or friends and/or members of my writing group. We’ll talk things through, and if the project seems promising, I’ll write up a two-page version (single spaced). If it still seems good, then I’ll write up a five to eight-page version. If it passes that test, I start writing the actual novel or script.
This strategy has worked well for me. I used to sometimes write 20 pages of something and then realize it wasn’t a good idea. That doesn’t happen for me anymore.
The keys for me, when choosing a project, are: Is this a book/TV series/movie I’d enjoy reading or seeing? Would I be good at writing it? Do I have something special to contribute? Does this seem likely to be something other people would care about? If the answers to all these questions is yes, then I’m good to go!
This week I’m publishing Bob’s interview of me.
Q: You’ve gone from playwriting to crime/mystery novels to TV and movie scripts. In all of them you tell stories. How and when did you develop your interest in narrative?
A: Like everyone else, I’ve always loved stories. The first stories I remember hearing were from my father, when I was a kid. He used to tell tall tales about times when he was in great danger, about to be destroyed by some horrible enemy, and he would cry out, in desperation, “Davy Jones!” His agonized plea would resonate down through the sewers and rivers to the bottom of the ocean, where Davy Jones was hanging out at his locker with his friend the octopus. Davy would hear my father’s call and immediately race upward through the ocean, burst on the scene, and save my father just in the nick of time.
My father told another story, which I remember vividly to this day, about the time he was captured by cannibals and they were going to turn him into soup. But when they threw him into the pot of water, he kept eating all the vegetables in the pot, and since cannibals don’t like soup with no vegetables in it, they were unable to eat my father, so they let him go. This, by the way, is yet another reason to eat your vegetables!
I knew when I was in first grade that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I don’t recall how I came to that conclusion. I wrote my first full-length play when I was in college. It was called Alaska Fire, and it was based on a scary campfire story I’d heard about a man in Alaska who comes home from fishing one day and finds his entire family has burned up in a fire. He begins to wonder if he set the fire himself before he left the house in the morning.
Q: Do you see a continuity of interests amid these various genres?
A: No matter the genre, my work is often “political,” though you can make an argument that all work is political – you’re either fighting injustices or, by ignoring them, you’re supporting them. I like to put my characters in moral quandaries. I like writing stuff that’s meaty, but also has plenty of humor.
Having said that, writing in different genres does bring out different parts of me. My novels sometimes have a character who’s very much my alter ego. For instance, the main character in my four Jacob Burns mysteries is a Jewish aspiring writer with a wife who’s an English professor and two young sons. When I wrote these novels, all of this was true of me. But with writing for the stage, my most successful plays have main characters who are ostensibly very different from me. The hero of Sacred Journey is a homeless Native American man; the main characters in Washington Square Moves are Black ex-cons who hustle chess in Washington Square; and two of the three main characters of The Ties That Bind are lesbians.
With screenplays and TV pilots, I generally gravitate toward crime stories with heart. With characters we care about.
Q: You tell stories about American life. How much did your major in American Studies at Amherst College influence your approaches to our culture and society?
Majoring in American Studies, and being interested in politics and history from a very young age, and the ethical teachings I received from my Jewish upbringing, have been the backdrop for all my work. I try to think deeply about our country and all the different forces, both personal and societal, that affect my characters.
I believe that a great novel, movie, TV show or play has three types of conflict for the main characters: internal, within each character; interpersonal; and societal, where the characters are wrestling with larger social forces. Whenever I write, I try to keep these three different types of conflict in the forefront of my mind.
Q: I still remember the play you wrote for your senior thesis, Alaska Fire. Did that work anticipate your future interests?
The main character in Alaska Fire is a middle-aged man, and the theme is the inevitable discontents of marriage and choosing one path over another in life. What the heck was I thinking, writing that? I was twenty. I’d never had a relationship that lasted more than a year. I had never chosen a path that would be extremely hard to reverse. And yet I stretched my mind and wrote this play.
I’ve continued to reach and explore and stretch throughout my writing life.
Q: Have you worked on any projects for a long time that you have eventually jettisoned? How do you decide what will work and what won’t?
Unfortunately, yes, I have had that experience. I’ve spent six months apiece on two screenplays that never got produced. I’ve spent months writing pilots that never got produced.
And then there was the screenplay I wrote in 1995 and then got paid $86,000 for in 2018 and may get made one day! Not quite 43 years, but still a pretty long journey.
Nowadays, I really try to be sure a project is viable before I start it. I’ll pitch a one or two-paragraph version to my wife and/or friends and/or members of my writing group. We’ll talk things through, and if the project seems promising, I’ll write up a two-page version (single spaced). If it still seems good, then I’ll write up a five to eight-page version. If it passes that test, I start writing the actual novel or script.
This strategy has worked well for me. I used to sometimes write 20 pages of something and then realize it wasn’t a good idea. That doesn’t happen for me anymore.
The keys for me, when choosing a project, are: Is this a book/TV series/movie I’d enjoy reading or seeing? Would I be good at writing it? Do I have something special to contribute? Does this seem likely to be something other people would care about? If the answers to all these questions is yes, then I’m good to go!
June 6, 2021
A Book 43 Years in the Making
Do you sometimes feel like you’re a slow writer? Get envious of the guys who put out two novels a year? My favorite professor when I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, Bob Gross, signed a book contract in 1978 and he’s just getting it published this year! After 43 years! His first book was a big hit in the 70s, winning a major award and becoming a national bestseller; hopefully this book will be big too. It comes out this fall, and I’m excited to read it.
Recently I interviewed Bob about the 43-year process of writing this book. I found his story moving and inspiring.
Q: In 1976, you published your first book, The Minutemen and Their World. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a national bestseller. How did that change your life, or not change it?
A: The Bancroft Prize made my career. Despite the fact that I had been a by-lined book reviewer at Newsweek (1970-71) and had freelanced for other magazines, The Minutemen and Their World did not garner much national attention. The book was published by Hill & Wang in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, and was intended for a crossover market of academics and the general public. It took a fresh look at the coming of the American Revolution through a community study of the town where the War of Independence got its start. On April 19, 1775, Minutemen from Concord and militias from surrounding towns faced off against British Regulars at the North Bridge and, in Emerson’s words, “fired the shot heard round the world.” Why Concord? I asked. What brought these colonial subjects of the British Empire to rebellion? And how were the people of Concord affected by the long war and by the move to a self-governing republic, based on popular consent? How revolutionary was the Revolution in Concord?
These are questions of longstanding interest among historians. What made Minutemen different was that I was inspired by a movement known as “the new social history” to go beyond the words and deeds of elite white men – Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and their colleagues – and include people of all ranks and classes – ordinary farmers, common laborers, domestic servants, enslaved African Americans, women as well as men – in the historical narrative. This was an effort to write history “from the bottom up,” in the popular phrase of the day. The book gained its life, I think, from revisiting a familiar story – Minutemen meet Redcoats – and setting it in a much wider and more varied context than ever before.
But despite the efforts of my editor, Arthur Wang, co-founder of Hill & Wang, the book got little attention from the best-known reviewing outlets. Time and Newsweek paid no attention. Nothing appeared in the New York Times or the Washington Post. There was a scattering of newspaper reviews, but nothing that would propel the book onto any bestseller lists. Only the New York Review of Books weighed in with an immensely favorable review by the historian Edmund Morgan. It was not until a week or so before the Bancroft Prizes were announced that the New York Times, learning that it had failed to notice a book about to receive a major prize, finally ran a review, a short piece in the daily newspaper, full of praise but unlikely to make a difference.
The Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to two “distinguished” works about American history and diplomacy, put an imprimatur on the book, which went on to receive many favorable reviews in the academic journals. Minutemen was soon on reading lists for U.S. history courses in high schools as well as colleges and universities. Minutemen received the prize in 1977, during my first year as an assistant professor at Amherst College. t pretty well insured that when I came up for tenure, I wouldn’t have to prove the worthiness of my scholarship. It thus freed me to concentrate on teaching and advising students like you.
Q: Students like me benefited immensely! You were an incredibly insightful, thoughtful and caring teacher.
Your second book, The Transcendentalists and Their World, comes out this November from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Congratulations! I’m looking forward to reading it.
A: Thanks! I hope you find it a great read.
Q: When did you sign the contract for this book?
A: I signed the contract in 1978, and I promised to deliver a manuscript on or before January 1, 1982.
Q: Wow. So it’s been forty-three years! Did you have any idea when you signed the contract that it might take this long?
A: I knew that 1982 was an unrealistic date for delivery of the manuscript. But Arthur Wang was eager to sign me up for the next book, and I figured it would be a good idea, when I came up for tenure in 1979, to have a contract in hand for a forthcoming publication. But it was evident that telling the story of Concord in the era of Emerson and Thoreau would take a lot more research than did reconstructing the world of the Minutemen. Concord abounded in the records I would have to examine in order to write the social history: tax and assessment lists, deeds and wills, census returns, reports of births, marriages, and deaths, rolls of voters; minutes of town meetings; lists of officeholders and members of town committees; church records; a plethora of materials documenting the new voluntary associations like anti-slavery groups, and petitions to state and federal governments. And that doesn’t count the immense literary output of Emerson and Thoreau and their neighbors, especially the hundreds of manuscript sermons left behind by Emerson’s step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, the parson of the town. It is with good reason that nobody had ever sought to combine a new social history of the town with the cultural and intellectual history of the Transcendentalists.
Q: What was the process like with the publisher? Did they give you a hard time when you kept delaying? How many different editors did you have?
A: Arthur Wang was eager for me to finish the book as soon as possible, and he read the early chapters as I drafted them with enthusiasm. Time and again I had fellowships and leaves to concentrate on the project, but invariably, my hopes for completion fell short. So when Arthur retired in June 1998 he was disappointed, but that didn’t affect our friendship. The success of Minutemen was a boon to Hill & Wang in signing up other authors, who went on to win prizes for their works. And Arthur was proud to have taken a risk on me, an ex-journalist-turned-Ph.D. candidate, whose proposal for Minutemen had been turned down by several major publishers. According to Arthur, Minutemen turned out to be “Hill & Wang's all-time best-selling history paperback.”
Arthur’s successors made efforts to coax a book out of me, but never applied any pressure or threatened to terminate the contract. I once asked my agent, the late Wendy Weil, why she thought that Hill & Wang was so patient. She pointed to the strong sales of Minutemen. With those returns, the publisher had no reason to cut me off. Also, I was not making any work for the succession of editors – two or three at Hill & Wang -- assigned to oversee Transcendentalists. What was to be gained by canceling my contract? And maybe, I like to think, they had faith.
In any case, in 2013 I renegotiated the contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, which had bought Hill & Wang, and promised to deliver a manuscript by June 2015. Once again it was late, but not by that much. By November 2017 I had completed a first draft, only to find that it was far too long, some 374,000 words, for profitable publication. So I set to the work of restructuring and revising, cutting and condensing, not to mention doing a lot of new research, and by early 2020 I had a still substantial but publishable manuscript for submission. All through the process, my editor at FSG, Alex Star, has been both patient and supportive. I have been really lucky in starting out and staying with Hill & Wang/FSG.
Q: Why did it take so long? What were the obstacles to writing it? Were you ever afraid you’d never finish it?
A: Let me say first that I did not suffer the literary hang-ups of Donald Penn, the would-be writer in your first Jacob Burns mystery novel, Breakfast at Madeline’s, and keep writing the same preface over and over and over. Nor did I feel any paralysis owing to the early success of Minutemen. I never stopped writing about Concord, and as I researched aspects of the story of the town and its writers, I produced a steady stream of articles for academic journals and literary periodicals (e.g., American Scholar, Raritan, Yale Review). But I was also drawn to other interests and projects, most notably the rise of a new scholarly field known as the history of the book in America. This area of inquiry, which includes the history of authorship, publishing, and reader reception, beckoned, for I aimed to present Emerson’s career as a lecturer and writer and Thoreau’s as an author in my book. Their involvement in and reservations about the literary marketplace would be central to the story I wished to tell. Likewise, the cultural activities of Concord’s citizens – the books and periodicals in the local subscription library, the lecturers and topics for debate at the lyceum, the role of newspapers in spurring political participation and stifling or stimulating public debate – were all matters of interest. I threw myself into this new area, joined the editorial board of A History of the Book in America sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, co-edited a volume with Mary Kelley, and chaired the American Antiquarian Society’s Program for the History of the Book in American Culture.
More than anything else, I have to say, it was devotion to my day job – to teaching and advising students on the undergraduate and graduate levels – that consumed much of my time over the years. When I’m teaching a course, I throw myself totally into the effort, preparing and reading far more than I really need to, engaging students as fully as possible, and commenting closely on their essays, theses, and dissertations.
It was a joy to work with students like you; I got as much or more out of the experience that did the students. And if teaching and advising were not demanding enough, add the time spent as an academic administrator and the time absorbed in moving from one job (Amherst) to others (William and Mary, University of Connecticut) and one fellowship or visiting appointment to another.
Yet, all of these reasons/excuses, though legitimate, beg the question. My design for The Transcendentalists and Their World, was really too vast for one person to carry out, even if I have actually pulled it off with the help of various research assistants along the way. Reconstructing the social, economic, political, religious, and cultural life of Concord was a book in itself. Similarly, a large library of works deals with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Transcendentalism. How would I bring together an appreciation of the writers with a portrait of the changing community in which they lived and wrote? To answer that question was to confront a problem I should have been thinking about all along: the challenge of narrative. What was the main story I wanted to tell, and through what individuals and groups and what episodes did I want to tell it? The success of Minutemen owes much to its clear narrative line and its accessible prose. I have tried to reproduce those qualities in Transcendentalists, even as I tell a story that has a much bigger cast of characters, a more fluid society and culture, and a set of themes involving democracy, equality, and the freedom and potential of individuals for self-development that are, arguably, at the heart of an American idealism that still remains far from fulfillment.
I did fear that I would never get done and grew tired of offering reassurances to friends, editors, and fellowship-granting bodies. So I retired in 2015 at age 70 and moved with my wife Ann to Concord, where I have given my undivided attention to writing, researching, and revising. The Transcendentalists and Their World, as it will appear in print, is really the product of a half-decade or so (2015-2021). The book had a long preparation before taking shape in a concentrated period of time.
Q: I’d like to interject that I have vivid memories of the pages-long, single spaced responses you would give to my essays, and other people’s essays too. I teach TV Writing at UCLA Extension, and I’ve been inspired by your example to give the same kind of care and attention and long, carefully thought out responses to my students. I have spoken to other of your ex-students who are also teachers now, who feel the same way. So not only have your students’ benefited, but also your students’ students!
Q: How does it feel to finally have the book done?
A: Relieved, happy with the result, but regretful that I’m not a lot younger, since I have lots of ideas for other projects to do.
Q: How did the book change over the years? How has your point of view on the subject matter changed – or stay the same?
The book had a few false starts. It began as a narrative of Concord’s history from 1790, at the dawn of the American republic, to the outbreak of Civil War in 1861. But as I researched the first part of the story, I discovered so much material that it was taking forever to get to the mid-1830s and 1840s, the heyday of the Transcendentalists. Would any reader of a book called The Transcendentalists and Their World be willing to follow the course of the town’s development for several hundred pages, while Emerson and Thoreau waited in the wings? At the same time, once the Transcendentalists came on the scene, their activities and writings would, in turn, threaten to overshadow the developments in the town.
So, I reconceived the book to focus roughly on the years from 1820 to the late 1840s. This quarter-century or so constituted an epoch of transformative change: the integration of Concord into regional, national, and global markets; the rise of textile mills and the industrial revolution; the surge of popular democracy and partisan politics; the break-up of the Congregationalist religious establishment and the growth of religious diversity; the push for educational and social reforms by a host of voluntary associations; the anti-slavery movement and the persistence of white racism; and the articulation of new ideologies favoring a new premium on the individual. These changes were set in motion well before Emerson settled in Concord and while Thoreau was a boy in the town. The Transcendentalists came on the scene during the third act of the play.
How to deal with this problem? I divided the book into two parts. Part 1 presents “The Changing World of the Transcendentalists.” It sets forth a narrative of important changes that are framed by the experiences of Thoreau’s family: his father’s pencil-making, his mother’s boardinghouse-keeping, his aunts’ role in the breakup of the religious establishment, and the Thoreau children’s experiences in school during an era of educational improvements. Part Two, “The Transcendentalists and Their World,” shifts the focus to Emerson and then Thoreau, as they emerge on the public stage, draft their lectures and essays, and engage their fellow inhabitants.
This turned out to be a useful design, even if I fell into it without pre-planning. For Emerson was working out his boldest, most radical ideas during the very years he was settling into Concord, and like any newcomer to a community, he attended closely to the neighbors and to the life of the town. The social upheaval of Concord would inform the way he saw the world. His America, I argue, was Boston and Concord writ large. Similarly, Thoreau came home after graduating from Harvard in 1837, became a protégé and friend of Emerson, and struggled to find his own voice and support himself as a writer without compromising his ideals. The book follows Emerson from a parochial figure to the eve of his emergence as a public intellectual with a national following, and it takes Thoreau from his years at Harvard through his sojourn at Walden Pond, from which he emerged with the first draft of his classic book. The central theme running through this narrative is the rise of individualism (a term coined and popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville about the same time as Emerson was giving it voice), in tandem with the fraying of the bonds of interdependence that had formed the world of Revolutionary Concord.
Q: What were you so passionate about with this book that you stuck with it all these years?
A: I wanted to tell the stories of the many people I had discovered in the course of research: the free people of color trying to forge independent lives in the face of white racism; the hardscrabble farmers struggling to stay afloat (as Thoreau observed); the women devoted to church and charity, with some full of zeal for social reform; the educators intent on improving schools and bringing the latest knowledge to their neighbors; the ministers competing with one another to support congregations; the politicians clashing furiously, occasionally engaging in voting fraud, and bidding to shut down critical newspapers; the editors trying to survive in the face of advertiser boycotts, canceled subscriptions, and criminal prosecutions for libel; the idealistic young women taking their lives in despair; and the townspeople of all political and religious sides striving to find ways to live together. This is a story of a community remaking the ties of interdependence in a new world of individual possibility.
Q: What are you going to write next?
Stay tuned.
A: What would the transcendentalists think of our politics today? Do you think they’d be involved in it?
Emerson and Thoreau were appalled by the party politics of their day. They decried the perversion of newspapers by blind partisanship, the readiness of voters to cast party-line ballots, and the surrender of individual judgment and conscience to the demands of the bosses and the crowd. They called for individuals of principle, deliberating in private and acting on conscience for what they know, in their hearts and minds, is right. Both writers would take action to protest slavery and injustice, but usually on their own, rather than as members of any group. Theirs was a faith in the power of the single person to inspire others through dramatic acts in a moral cause. Such statements can be powerful inspirations. But can they provide a route to change? Emerson and Thoreau would have a hard time accepting the necessity of collective action in the modern world.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
A: Read the book. And thanks for the forum.
Recently I interviewed Bob about the 43-year process of writing this book. I found his story moving and inspiring.
Q: In 1976, you published your first book, The Minutemen and Their World. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a national bestseller. How did that change your life, or not change it?
A: The Bancroft Prize made my career. Despite the fact that I had been a by-lined book reviewer at Newsweek (1970-71) and had freelanced for other magazines, The Minutemen and Their World did not garner much national attention. The book was published by Hill & Wang in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, and was intended for a crossover market of academics and the general public. It took a fresh look at the coming of the American Revolution through a community study of the town where the War of Independence got its start. On April 19, 1775, Minutemen from Concord and militias from surrounding towns faced off against British Regulars at the North Bridge and, in Emerson’s words, “fired the shot heard round the world.” Why Concord? I asked. What brought these colonial subjects of the British Empire to rebellion? And how were the people of Concord affected by the long war and by the move to a self-governing republic, based on popular consent? How revolutionary was the Revolution in Concord?
These are questions of longstanding interest among historians. What made Minutemen different was that I was inspired by a movement known as “the new social history” to go beyond the words and deeds of elite white men – Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and their colleagues – and include people of all ranks and classes – ordinary farmers, common laborers, domestic servants, enslaved African Americans, women as well as men – in the historical narrative. This was an effort to write history “from the bottom up,” in the popular phrase of the day. The book gained its life, I think, from revisiting a familiar story – Minutemen meet Redcoats – and setting it in a much wider and more varied context than ever before.
But despite the efforts of my editor, Arthur Wang, co-founder of Hill & Wang, the book got little attention from the best-known reviewing outlets. Time and Newsweek paid no attention. Nothing appeared in the New York Times or the Washington Post. There was a scattering of newspaper reviews, but nothing that would propel the book onto any bestseller lists. Only the New York Review of Books weighed in with an immensely favorable review by the historian Edmund Morgan. It was not until a week or so before the Bancroft Prizes were announced that the New York Times, learning that it had failed to notice a book about to receive a major prize, finally ran a review, a short piece in the daily newspaper, full of praise but unlikely to make a difference.
The Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to two “distinguished” works about American history and diplomacy, put an imprimatur on the book, which went on to receive many favorable reviews in the academic journals. Minutemen was soon on reading lists for U.S. history courses in high schools as well as colleges and universities. Minutemen received the prize in 1977, during my first year as an assistant professor at Amherst College. t pretty well insured that when I came up for tenure, I wouldn’t have to prove the worthiness of my scholarship. It thus freed me to concentrate on teaching and advising students like you.
Q: Students like me benefited immensely! You were an incredibly insightful, thoughtful and caring teacher.
Your second book, The Transcendentalists and Their World, comes out this November from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Congratulations! I’m looking forward to reading it.
A: Thanks! I hope you find it a great read.
Q: When did you sign the contract for this book?
A: I signed the contract in 1978, and I promised to deliver a manuscript on or before January 1, 1982.
Q: Wow. So it’s been forty-three years! Did you have any idea when you signed the contract that it might take this long?
A: I knew that 1982 was an unrealistic date for delivery of the manuscript. But Arthur Wang was eager to sign me up for the next book, and I figured it would be a good idea, when I came up for tenure in 1979, to have a contract in hand for a forthcoming publication. But it was evident that telling the story of Concord in the era of Emerson and Thoreau would take a lot more research than did reconstructing the world of the Minutemen. Concord abounded in the records I would have to examine in order to write the social history: tax and assessment lists, deeds and wills, census returns, reports of births, marriages, and deaths, rolls of voters; minutes of town meetings; lists of officeholders and members of town committees; church records; a plethora of materials documenting the new voluntary associations like anti-slavery groups, and petitions to state and federal governments. And that doesn’t count the immense literary output of Emerson and Thoreau and their neighbors, especially the hundreds of manuscript sermons left behind by Emerson’s step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, the parson of the town. It is with good reason that nobody had ever sought to combine a new social history of the town with the cultural and intellectual history of the Transcendentalists.
Q: What was the process like with the publisher? Did they give you a hard time when you kept delaying? How many different editors did you have?
A: Arthur Wang was eager for me to finish the book as soon as possible, and he read the early chapters as I drafted them with enthusiasm. Time and again I had fellowships and leaves to concentrate on the project, but invariably, my hopes for completion fell short. So when Arthur retired in June 1998 he was disappointed, but that didn’t affect our friendship. The success of Minutemen was a boon to Hill & Wang in signing up other authors, who went on to win prizes for their works. And Arthur was proud to have taken a risk on me, an ex-journalist-turned-Ph.D. candidate, whose proposal for Minutemen had been turned down by several major publishers. According to Arthur, Minutemen turned out to be “Hill & Wang's all-time best-selling history paperback.”
Arthur’s successors made efforts to coax a book out of me, but never applied any pressure or threatened to terminate the contract. I once asked my agent, the late Wendy Weil, why she thought that Hill & Wang was so patient. She pointed to the strong sales of Minutemen. With those returns, the publisher had no reason to cut me off. Also, I was not making any work for the succession of editors – two or three at Hill & Wang -- assigned to oversee Transcendentalists. What was to be gained by canceling my contract? And maybe, I like to think, they had faith.
In any case, in 2013 I renegotiated the contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, which had bought Hill & Wang, and promised to deliver a manuscript by June 2015. Once again it was late, but not by that much. By November 2017 I had completed a first draft, only to find that it was far too long, some 374,000 words, for profitable publication. So I set to the work of restructuring and revising, cutting and condensing, not to mention doing a lot of new research, and by early 2020 I had a still substantial but publishable manuscript for submission. All through the process, my editor at FSG, Alex Star, has been both patient and supportive. I have been really lucky in starting out and staying with Hill & Wang/FSG.
Q: Why did it take so long? What were the obstacles to writing it? Were you ever afraid you’d never finish it?
A: Let me say first that I did not suffer the literary hang-ups of Donald Penn, the would-be writer in your first Jacob Burns mystery novel, Breakfast at Madeline’s, and keep writing the same preface over and over and over. Nor did I feel any paralysis owing to the early success of Minutemen. I never stopped writing about Concord, and as I researched aspects of the story of the town and its writers, I produced a steady stream of articles for academic journals and literary periodicals (e.g., American Scholar, Raritan, Yale Review). But I was also drawn to other interests and projects, most notably the rise of a new scholarly field known as the history of the book in America. This area of inquiry, which includes the history of authorship, publishing, and reader reception, beckoned, for I aimed to present Emerson’s career as a lecturer and writer and Thoreau’s as an author in my book. Their involvement in and reservations about the literary marketplace would be central to the story I wished to tell. Likewise, the cultural activities of Concord’s citizens – the books and periodicals in the local subscription library, the lecturers and topics for debate at the lyceum, the role of newspapers in spurring political participation and stifling or stimulating public debate – were all matters of interest. I threw myself into this new area, joined the editorial board of A History of the Book in America sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, co-edited a volume with Mary Kelley, and chaired the American Antiquarian Society’s Program for the History of the Book in American Culture.
More than anything else, I have to say, it was devotion to my day job – to teaching and advising students on the undergraduate and graduate levels – that consumed much of my time over the years. When I’m teaching a course, I throw myself totally into the effort, preparing and reading far more than I really need to, engaging students as fully as possible, and commenting closely on their essays, theses, and dissertations.
It was a joy to work with students like you; I got as much or more out of the experience that did the students. And if teaching and advising were not demanding enough, add the time spent as an academic administrator and the time absorbed in moving from one job (Amherst) to others (William and Mary, University of Connecticut) and one fellowship or visiting appointment to another.
Yet, all of these reasons/excuses, though legitimate, beg the question. My design for The Transcendentalists and Their World, was really too vast for one person to carry out, even if I have actually pulled it off with the help of various research assistants along the way. Reconstructing the social, economic, political, religious, and cultural life of Concord was a book in itself. Similarly, a large library of works deals with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Transcendentalism. How would I bring together an appreciation of the writers with a portrait of the changing community in which they lived and wrote? To answer that question was to confront a problem I should have been thinking about all along: the challenge of narrative. What was the main story I wanted to tell, and through what individuals and groups and what episodes did I want to tell it? The success of Minutemen owes much to its clear narrative line and its accessible prose. I have tried to reproduce those qualities in Transcendentalists, even as I tell a story that has a much bigger cast of characters, a more fluid society and culture, and a set of themes involving democracy, equality, and the freedom and potential of individuals for self-development that are, arguably, at the heart of an American idealism that still remains far from fulfillment.
I did fear that I would never get done and grew tired of offering reassurances to friends, editors, and fellowship-granting bodies. So I retired in 2015 at age 70 and moved with my wife Ann to Concord, where I have given my undivided attention to writing, researching, and revising. The Transcendentalists and Their World, as it will appear in print, is really the product of a half-decade or so (2015-2021). The book had a long preparation before taking shape in a concentrated period of time.
Q: I’d like to interject that I have vivid memories of the pages-long, single spaced responses you would give to my essays, and other people’s essays too. I teach TV Writing at UCLA Extension, and I’ve been inspired by your example to give the same kind of care and attention and long, carefully thought out responses to my students. I have spoken to other of your ex-students who are also teachers now, who feel the same way. So not only have your students’ benefited, but also your students’ students!
Q: How does it feel to finally have the book done?
A: Relieved, happy with the result, but regretful that I’m not a lot younger, since I have lots of ideas for other projects to do.
Q: How did the book change over the years? How has your point of view on the subject matter changed – or stay the same?
The book had a few false starts. It began as a narrative of Concord’s history from 1790, at the dawn of the American republic, to the outbreak of Civil War in 1861. But as I researched the first part of the story, I discovered so much material that it was taking forever to get to the mid-1830s and 1840s, the heyday of the Transcendentalists. Would any reader of a book called The Transcendentalists and Their World be willing to follow the course of the town’s development for several hundred pages, while Emerson and Thoreau waited in the wings? At the same time, once the Transcendentalists came on the scene, their activities and writings would, in turn, threaten to overshadow the developments in the town.
So, I reconceived the book to focus roughly on the years from 1820 to the late 1840s. This quarter-century or so constituted an epoch of transformative change: the integration of Concord into regional, national, and global markets; the rise of textile mills and the industrial revolution; the surge of popular democracy and partisan politics; the break-up of the Congregationalist religious establishment and the growth of religious diversity; the push for educational and social reforms by a host of voluntary associations; the anti-slavery movement and the persistence of white racism; and the articulation of new ideologies favoring a new premium on the individual. These changes were set in motion well before Emerson settled in Concord and while Thoreau was a boy in the town. The Transcendentalists came on the scene during the third act of the play.
How to deal with this problem? I divided the book into two parts. Part 1 presents “The Changing World of the Transcendentalists.” It sets forth a narrative of important changes that are framed by the experiences of Thoreau’s family: his father’s pencil-making, his mother’s boardinghouse-keeping, his aunts’ role in the breakup of the religious establishment, and the Thoreau children’s experiences in school during an era of educational improvements. Part Two, “The Transcendentalists and Their World,” shifts the focus to Emerson and then Thoreau, as they emerge on the public stage, draft their lectures and essays, and engage their fellow inhabitants.
This turned out to be a useful design, even if I fell into it without pre-planning. For Emerson was working out his boldest, most radical ideas during the very years he was settling into Concord, and like any newcomer to a community, he attended closely to the neighbors and to the life of the town. The social upheaval of Concord would inform the way he saw the world. His America, I argue, was Boston and Concord writ large. Similarly, Thoreau came home after graduating from Harvard in 1837, became a protégé and friend of Emerson, and struggled to find his own voice and support himself as a writer without compromising his ideals. The book follows Emerson from a parochial figure to the eve of his emergence as a public intellectual with a national following, and it takes Thoreau from his years at Harvard through his sojourn at Walden Pond, from which he emerged with the first draft of his classic book. The central theme running through this narrative is the rise of individualism (a term coined and popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville about the same time as Emerson was giving it voice), in tandem with the fraying of the bonds of interdependence that had formed the world of Revolutionary Concord.
Q: What were you so passionate about with this book that you stuck with it all these years?
A: I wanted to tell the stories of the many people I had discovered in the course of research: the free people of color trying to forge independent lives in the face of white racism; the hardscrabble farmers struggling to stay afloat (as Thoreau observed); the women devoted to church and charity, with some full of zeal for social reform; the educators intent on improving schools and bringing the latest knowledge to their neighbors; the ministers competing with one another to support congregations; the politicians clashing furiously, occasionally engaging in voting fraud, and bidding to shut down critical newspapers; the editors trying to survive in the face of advertiser boycotts, canceled subscriptions, and criminal prosecutions for libel; the idealistic young women taking their lives in despair; and the townspeople of all political and religious sides striving to find ways to live together. This is a story of a community remaking the ties of interdependence in a new world of individual possibility.
Q: What are you going to write next?
Stay tuned.
A: What would the transcendentalists think of our politics today? Do you think they’d be involved in it?
Emerson and Thoreau were appalled by the party politics of their day. They decried the perversion of newspapers by blind partisanship, the readiness of voters to cast party-line ballots, and the surrender of individual judgment and conscience to the demands of the bosses and the crowd. They called for individuals of principle, deliberating in private and acting on conscience for what they know, in their hearts and minds, is right. Both writers would take action to protest slavery and injustice, but usually on their own, rather than as members of any group. Theirs was a faith in the power of the single person to inspire others through dramatic acts in a moral cause. Such statements can be powerful inspirations. But can they provide a route to change? Emerson and Thoreau would have a hard time accepting the necessity of collective action in the modern world.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
A: Read the book. And thanks for the forum.
May 17, 2021
Audiobook of The Necklace with Harley Jane Kozak
I’m thrilled to report there will be an audiobook of my novel The Necklace – and the amazing actor/writer Harley Jane Kozak will be narrating! So happy the novel is in such good hands – or should I say such good vocal chords?
May 12, 2021
Why Are Crime Writers So Darn Nice?
Promoting a novel you’ve written can be nerve-wracking, so last week I called up Matt Coyle, author of the Rick Cahill private eye series, for advice about marketing my upcoming novel The Necklace. I’d never met Matt, but I was hoping he’d give me a few minutes of his time and make some general suggestions.
Instead, by the end of that day, he called a bookstore owner he knew and set up a signing for me there; offered to interview me on his podcast; and got me onto another podcast that I’d been hoping to get on, but figured I wasn’t famous enough. I was stunned by Matt’s generosity.
The thing is, as gracious as he was, he wasn’t all that unusual. A few months ago, my publisher assigned me the daunting task of getting blurbs for my book. I was given the names and email addresses of seven bestselling crime writers.
Seriously? Why would these famous authors take the time to read my book and write an advertisement for me? What was in it for them? I dutifully emailed all seven, saying how much it would mean to me if they would consider blurbing my book. I expected all of them to say no, or simply to say nothing at all.
Shockingly, four of them said yes.
Again: why?
All I can say is, crime writers are just really warm people. I think they’re the nicest people I know. Certainly they’re the nicest writers I know.
I’ve been writing for TV for the past twenty years, and I’ve met a lot of wonderful TV writers. I’ve made lifelong friends. But in general, as a group, I’d say their goodness quotient is about average. I’ve talked with other writers I know who have written both TV shows and novels, like Lee Goldberg, and they agree with this assessment.
Like people in most walks of life, there are a lot of forces encouraging TV writers to be cooperative. When you’re in a writers’ room together, it’s exciting to build on each other’s ideas and create something special. Ideally, the group becomes better than the sum of its parts. Then, once you’ve written your first draft, you get help from the show runner and the other writers. Thanks to them, your script gets better.
But there are plenty of forces pushing TV writers to be competitive too, even cutthroat. Even with the explosion of cable and streaming TV, there is still a limited number of shows to write for, and limited jobs. A friend of mine says he used to hate me because his agent told him he was the second choice for two jobs that went to me. I still remember the name of the guy who got a job I really wanted and barely missed out on, writing for The Closer. Also, when you do make it onto a TV staff, everybody jockeys for recognition and promotions. Every year writers get let go; depending on the show, turnover can be over fifty percent. And the financial stakes are huge: in an instant you can go from making zero dollars in a year to half a million, and vice versa.
But with novel writing, we’re not battling each other in our pursuit of money and success. It’s not a zero sum game. So there’s a lot less envy among us. It’s not like TV, where staff writers will whisper to each other in their private offices about what a crappy writer their mutual colleague is. I’m not saying envy is unknown among crime novelists; you’ll occasionally hear crime writers criticizing a bestselling author, and no doubt much of that is jealousy. But there’s a lot less of it.
Now there may be additional, totally unrelated reasons why crime novelists are so gracious. I’ve heard the theory that we put all our evil impulses onto the page, and this frees us to be relatively good people in our actual lives. Or maybe we write crime novels in the first place because we’re wrestling with questions of good and evil, and that’s connected to a deep desire on our part to be good. Or the novel writing biz can be so difficult, we band together for warmth.
Whatever the reason, crime writers are generous people! I try to live up to that. The very night that Matt Coyle did me a solid, or three solids, I got an email from a crime writer asking me to blurb her book. Ridiculous! I’d never met her and I was on deadline. But of course I said yes.
Instead, by the end of that day, he called a bookstore owner he knew and set up a signing for me there; offered to interview me on his podcast; and got me onto another podcast that I’d been hoping to get on, but figured I wasn’t famous enough. I was stunned by Matt’s generosity.
The thing is, as gracious as he was, he wasn’t all that unusual. A few months ago, my publisher assigned me the daunting task of getting blurbs for my book. I was given the names and email addresses of seven bestselling crime writers.
Seriously? Why would these famous authors take the time to read my book and write an advertisement for me? What was in it for them? I dutifully emailed all seven, saying how much it would mean to me if they would consider blurbing my book. I expected all of them to say no, or simply to say nothing at all.
Shockingly, four of them said yes.
Again: why?
All I can say is, crime writers are just really warm people. I think they’re the nicest people I know. Certainly they’re the nicest writers I know.
I’ve been writing for TV for the past twenty years, and I’ve met a lot of wonderful TV writers. I’ve made lifelong friends. But in general, as a group, I’d say their goodness quotient is about average. I’ve talked with other writers I know who have written both TV shows and novels, like Lee Goldberg, and they agree with this assessment.
Like people in most walks of life, there are a lot of forces encouraging TV writers to be cooperative. When you’re in a writers’ room together, it’s exciting to build on each other’s ideas and create something special. Ideally, the group becomes better than the sum of its parts. Then, once you’ve written your first draft, you get help from the show runner and the other writers. Thanks to them, your script gets better.
But there are plenty of forces pushing TV writers to be competitive too, even cutthroat. Even with the explosion of cable and streaming TV, there is still a limited number of shows to write for, and limited jobs. A friend of mine says he used to hate me because his agent told him he was the second choice for two jobs that went to me. I still remember the name of the guy who got a job I really wanted and barely missed out on, writing for The Closer. Also, when you do make it onto a TV staff, everybody jockeys for recognition and promotions. Every year writers get let go; depending on the show, turnover can be over fifty percent. And the financial stakes are huge: in an instant you can go from making zero dollars in a year to half a million, and vice versa.
But with novel writing, we’re not battling each other in our pursuit of money and success. It’s not a zero sum game. So there’s a lot less envy among us. It’s not like TV, where staff writers will whisper to each other in their private offices about what a crappy writer their mutual colleague is. I’m not saying envy is unknown among crime novelists; you’ll occasionally hear crime writers criticizing a bestselling author, and no doubt much of that is jealousy. But there’s a lot less of it.
Now there may be additional, totally unrelated reasons why crime novelists are so gracious. I’ve heard the theory that we put all our evil impulses onto the page, and this frees us to be relatively good people in our actual lives. Or maybe we write crime novels in the first place because we’re wrestling with questions of good and evil, and that’s connected to a deep desire on our part to be good. Or the novel writing biz can be so difficult, we band together for warmth.
Whatever the reason, crime writers are generous people! I try to live up to that. The very night that Matt Coyle did me a solid, or three solids, I got an email from a crime writer asking me to blurb her book. Ridiculous! I’d never met her and I was on deadline. But of course I said yes.
December 31, 2020
The Cello
(Note: The Cello is a short short story I wrote last year. It was published in Flash Fiction Magazine.)
Doug waited in the audience for his wife’s cello to appear, in the arms of a young man named Christopher Hsieh, according to the concert program.
He had met them – his wife and her cello, that is – sixty-one years ago, at a performance of the Dutch Symphony Orchestra. Before the Telemann concerto ended, he was smitten with both. Rachel was a thin brunette with dreamy eyes who swayed to the music as she waited for her cue. The cello, Elisabetta, was deep brown with a soft shine, made in the 1700s as he later learned. Together, the young woman and her cello created a sweet but powerful resonance that lingered. In his case, forever. Geography kept them apart for seven years; he was a physics student at Berkeley, and she played in orchestras in Europe. But love overcame distance, and in 1964 they were married.
For forty-two years Doug listened to his wife and her cello. At concert halls, himself bringing flowers. At home, her practicing for hours and him doing physics, as the music floated into his study.
Then the fibromyalgia hit, and the music slowed and then stopped.
But Rachel bounced back. Though she could never play Elisabetta again, not for longer than a couple minutes at a time, she began acquiring students. Music came back into their home. She was a marvelous teacher as it turned out, not that it surprised him. The two of them went to her students’ concerts together. They brought flowers.
The breast cancer was harder to beat than the fibromyalgia. After two years, she was dead. Her students filled the church and, one by one, gave testimony to the wonderful woman who had inspired them.
And him.
The cello stood in a corner of the bedroom, the smell of the ancient maple and spruce comforting him when he came near and caressed her. He closed his eyes, feeling his wife’s wisdom and beauty in her curves.
But he couldn’t keep Elisabetta there, alone, forever, her voice silenced. Rachel would not have wanted that.
The cello was of the old baroque style, which was coming back into vogue. The internet said she would sell for at least three million dollars. He could travel the world, stay at five-star hotels, sip the finest French cognacs.
Instead he donated the cello to the UCLA music program.
There were kids coming into UCLA from all over the world, poor talented kids on scholarships, playing on cheap cellos with chipped varnish that would keep their music from ever sounding as beautiful as it could be. With cellos like those, the UCLA kids could never, ever soar like Rachel did.
But with Elisabetta, one of them would at least have a chance.
Tonight was the annual freshman Vivaldi concert at UCLA. It would be Doug’s first chance to hear the cello since Rachel died. The concert would begin with five pieces for violin and viola soloists, and then the sixth and final piece would feature Elisabetta.
He sat in the concert hall at Powell Library, surrounded by strangers, and read the program. He was disappointed. This young man who had been given the cello, this Christopher Hsieh, didn’t thank him or his wife in the bio. He listed everything he’d ever done – this concert, that concert, this summer music program, that famous teacher – but never mentioned the three-million-dollar cello that had been loaned to him for the next four years. Several of the other students did thank their instruments’ donors. But Rachel and Doug were not recognized.
It was like Rachel had never existed.
He was being petty, he knew. He took deep breaths and tried to forget about it. His wife was not a small-minded woman. She wouldn’t have cared.
The ensemble came onstage, and then the first soloist. Doug made himself politely applaud along with the rest. The music began and he closed his eyes and listened. It released him. Vivaldi’s violin concerto in G major… exquisite. The viola concerto in G minor… fast and flashy, with a sequence of ascending arpeggios his wife had always loved.
Then came the cello piece. Christopher Hsieh came onstage carrying Elisabetta.
As his name indicated, he was Asian. Chinese, Doug thought. Handsome, with even features and dark eyes that were big and… dreamy, Doug decided.
But Doug didn’t like him. He should have mentioned Rachel in the bio.
The guy sat down to play. But instead of nodding to the ensemble to begin, he cleared his throat and began to speak. Doug was puzzled. None of the other soloists had spoken.
“Before I begin,” he said, “I believe Mr. McKinnon is in the audience somewhere. Could you stand up, sir?”
Doug was a shy man, and taken by surprise, so he sat there. Christopher scanned the audience anxiously, obviously worried he wasn’t here. Finally Doug stood up.
Christopher smiled, relieved, and gave Doug a wave. “I want to thank Mr. McKinnon for donating the cello that belonged to his wife, the brilliant musician Rachel McKinnon. It’s meant the world to me.”
The entire audience started clapping, and the ensemble too. Doug felt his face reddening. He could barely move his body, but knew he was supposed to respond. He nodded stiffly. Then he sat down.
Christopher continued, “This cello is so beautiful and elegant” – yes, thought Doug, that’s the right word for it, elegant – “that I call her Mona Lisa. And I promise that I will always approach her politely and treat her with courtesy.”
The audience applauded again, and looked Doug’s way. He nodded again.
Rachel would be so happy, he thought. Mona Lisa. He just hoped this Christopher could play. He wanted to tell Christopher, don’t be too courteous to this cello. Rachel played her with passion and power. She got the full range of emotions out of her.
Christopher nodded to the ensemble and they began to play. It was Vivaldi’s cello concerto in C minor, RV 401, a piece Doug knew well, had heard many times over the years in his study.
By the fifth note, he knew he had nothing to worry about. Christopher made love to the cello with his whole body, from his perfectly balanced feet to his swift, flying hands. The passion and the power, Christopher had them both.
It was Rachel, come back to life.
He closed his eyes.
At the end of the concerto, he applauded along with the rest of the audience. Christopher bowed, smiling, and walked away. The audience kept applauding, and he returned.
This time, instead of bowing, Christopher motioned for Doug to come up and join him. Doug could hardly feel himself rising to his feet. He walked up to the stage.
Luckily he had remembered to bring flowers. He brought them up and handed them to Christopher. Then the two men embraced, as the audience applauded.
The cello saw everything, and would remember it all for the next time she was played.
Doug waited in the audience for his wife’s cello to appear, in the arms of a young man named Christopher Hsieh, according to the concert program.
He had met them – his wife and her cello, that is – sixty-one years ago, at a performance of the Dutch Symphony Orchestra. Before the Telemann concerto ended, he was smitten with both. Rachel was a thin brunette with dreamy eyes who swayed to the music as she waited for her cue. The cello, Elisabetta, was deep brown with a soft shine, made in the 1700s as he later learned. Together, the young woman and her cello created a sweet but powerful resonance that lingered. In his case, forever. Geography kept them apart for seven years; he was a physics student at Berkeley, and she played in orchestras in Europe. But love overcame distance, and in 1964 they were married.
For forty-two years Doug listened to his wife and her cello. At concert halls, himself bringing flowers. At home, her practicing for hours and him doing physics, as the music floated into his study.
Then the fibromyalgia hit, and the music slowed and then stopped.
But Rachel bounced back. Though she could never play Elisabetta again, not for longer than a couple minutes at a time, she began acquiring students. Music came back into their home. She was a marvelous teacher as it turned out, not that it surprised him. The two of them went to her students’ concerts together. They brought flowers.
The breast cancer was harder to beat than the fibromyalgia. After two years, she was dead. Her students filled the church and, one by one, gave testimony to the wonderful woman who had inspired them.
And him.
The cello stood in a corner of the bedroom, the smell of the ancient maple and spruce comforting him when he came near and caressed her. He closed his eyes, feeling his wife’s wisdom and beauty in her curves.
But he couldn’t keep Elisabetta there, alone, forever, her voice silenced. Rachel would not have wanted that.
The cello was of the old baroque style, which was coming back into vogue. The internet said she would sell for at least three million dollars. He could travel the world, stay at five-star hotels, sip the finest French cognacs.
Instead he donated the cello to the UCLA music program.
There were kids coming into UCLA from all over the world, poor talented kids on scholarships, playing on cheap cellos with chipped varnish that would keep their music from ever sounding as beautiful as it could be. With cellos like those, the UCLA kids could never, ever soar like Rachel did.
But with Elisabetta, one of them would at least have a chance.
Tonight was the annual freshman Vivaldi concert at UCLA. It would be Doug’s first chance to hear the cello since Rachel died. The concert would begin with five pieces for violin and viola soloists, and then the sixth and final piece would feature Elisabetta.
He sat in the concert hall at Powell Library, surrounded by strangers, and read the program. He was disappointed. This young man who had been given the cello, this Christopher Hsieh, didn’t thank him or his wife in the bio. He listed everything he’d ever done – this concert, that concert, this summer music program, that famous teacher – but never mentioned the three-million-dollar cello that had been loaned to him for the next four years. Several of the other students did thank their instruments’ donors. But Rachel and Doug were not recognized.
It was like Rachel had never existed.
He was being petty, he knew. He took deep breaths and tried to forget about it. His wife was not a small-minded woman. She wouldn’t have cared.
The ensemble came onstage, and then the first soloist. Doug made himself politely applaud along with the rest. The music began and he closed his eyes and listened. It released him. Vivaldi’s violin concerto in G major… exquisite. The viola concerto in G minor… fast and flashy, with a sequence of ascending arpeggios his wife had always loved.
Then came the cello piece. Christopher Hsieh came onstage carrying Elisabetta.
As his name indicated, he was Asian. Chinese, Doug thought. Handsome, with even features and dark eyes that were big and… dreamy, Doug decided.
But Doug didn’t like him. He should have mentioned Rachel in the bio.
The guy sat down to play. But instead of nodding to the ensemble to begin, he cleared his throat and began to speak. Doug was puzzled. None of the other soloists had spoken.
“Before I begin,” he said, “I believe Mr. McKinnon is in the audience somewhere. Could you stand up, sir?”
Doug was a shy man, and taken by surprise, so he sat there. Christopher scanned the audience anxiously, obviously worried he wasn’t here. Finally Doug stood up.
Christopher smiled, relieved, and gave Doug a wave. “I want to thank Mr. McKinnon for donating the cello that belonged to his wife, the brilliant musician Rachel McKinnon. It’s meant the world to me.”
The entire audience started clapping, and the ensemble too. Doug felt his face reddening. He could barely move his body, but knew he was supposed to respond. He nodded stiffly. Then he sat down.
Christopher continued, “This cello is so beautiful and elegant” – yes, thought Doug, that’s the right word for it, elegant – “that I call her Mona Lisa. And I promise that I will always approach her politely and treat her with courtesy.”
The audience applauded again, and looked Doug’s way. He nodded again.
Rachel would be so happy, he thought. Mona Lisa. He just hoped this Christopher could play. He wanted to tell Christopher, don’t be too courteous to this cello. Rachel played her with passion and power. She got the full range of emotions out of her.
Christopher nodded to the ensemble and they began to play. It was Vivaldi’s cello concerto in C minor, RV 401, a piece Doug knew well, had heard many times over the years in his study.
By the fifth note, he knew he had nothing to worry about. Christopher made love to the cello with his whole body, from his perfectly balanced feet to his swift, flying hands. The passion and the power, Christopher had them both.
It was Rachel, come back to life.
He closed his eyes.
At the end of the concerto, he applauded along with the rest of the audience. Christopher bowed, smiling, and walked away. The audience kept applauding, and he returned.
This time, instead of bowing, Christopher motioned for Doug to come up and join him. Doug could hardly feel himself rising to his feet. He walked up to the stage.
Luckily he had remembered to bring flowers. He brought them up and handed them to Christopher. Then the two men embraced, as the audience applauded.
The cello saw everything, and would remember it all for the next time she was played.
Searching for Bobby Fischer, Again
I went to the tiny town of Laugarvatn in southern Iceland to spend a month at an artists colony writing a novel. Little did I know that I was about to become re-re-obsessed with Bobby Fischer.
I initially became obsessed with Bobby Fischer back in the early 70s, when he dominated the chess world like Balanchine dominated dance, or Babe Ruth dominated baseball. He became the world champion when he won the most famous chess match in history, in Reykjavik in 1972. He was one of the most brilliant human beings of the 20th century. His chess games were Mona Lisas.
I became re-obsessed with Fischer in the early 2000s, when his anti-Semitism reached virulent new heights – “Jews are a filthy, dirty, disgusting, vile, criminal people,” he said in one interview – and his anti-Americanism led him to proclaim that the 9/11 attacks were “wonderful news. It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.” How had this man, this genius, turned into such an evil idiot? How had this American, born to a Jewish woman no less, developed such self-loathing? Seeing him speak back then, I wanted to shake him. “You’re Jewish, for God’s sake! Pull yourself together!”
But eventually, since no better explanation for his behavior was ever forthcoming, I just said to myself, he’s crazy, and forgot about him. He went into hiding in Asia for a few years because he’d broken a United Nations embargo against Yugoslavia. Then the law caught up with him. Pictures surfaced of Fischer in a Japanese jail, wearing a scummy beard and an old gray ballcap. Underneath it you could still see those brilliant eyes, but something was wrong with them. They were both unfocused and way too intense.
He was crazy.
He had renounced his American citizenship, so he was without any place to go. But then seven elderly men from Reykjavik, who had met Fischer way back in 1972, petitioned the Icelandic Parliament to declare him a citizen of Iceland and give him a home.
The Parliament said yes. Fischer flew to Iceland and spent the last three years of his life there, before dying in 2008.
I had forgotten this last portion of Fischer’s life. But then I arrived in Laugarvatn and learned that Bobby Fischer was buried only forty kilometers away, in the small town of Selfoss. There is a museum dedicated to his memory: the Bobby Fischer Center, open every day from 1 to 4 p.m.
And that’s when I got re-re-obsessed. The great Bobby Fischer, the horrible Bobby Fischer, buried in a tiny town in Iceland? How could this be?
And what did the Icelanders think of him? How did they feel about his anti-Semitism? Were they anti-Semitic, in this quiet little island that, at least in June when I was there, was as close to paradise as any place I’ve ever been?
I don’t have to tell you that anti-Semitism is back in fashion today in the United States and Europe. Now for me personally, as a Jew, this is not a huge surprise. I’ve never felt totally safe in the United States. Yeah, we’ve had a good two-hundred-and-fifty year run, but I know my history. Every country we’ve ever been in, we eventually got kicked out.
So all my life, I’ve kind of kept my eyes open for possible escape hatches, if it comes to that: Israel. Ireland. New Zealand. Iceland.
But now was Iceland going to be out of the question? So I went in search of, not so much Bobby Fischer, as what Icelanders thought about Bobby Fischer.
I began with Katla, the pixyish blonde artist who ran our artists colony. “Katla,” I said, “I noticed Bobby Fischer is buried near here.”
“Yes,” she said, as she kneaded a loaf of rye bread she was making for us starving artists. “Isn’t that great?”
“He was a great chess player,” I said, “but he was kind of crazy too.”
“Crazy? How do you mean?”
“Well, he had some pretty out-there views,” I said.
“Out there?”
I decided not to mince words. “He was very anti-Semitic.”
English isn’t Katla’s first language. “Anti-Semitic? You mean like, anti-Jew?”
“Yes, he was very anti-Jewish.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
She didn’t know? Did Icelandic people not care enough about his anti-Semitism to talk about it?
Later I asked Katla’s husband Einar about Fischer. Einar, it turned out, knew of Fischer’s anti-Semitism. He said, “Yes, Fischer was very, shall we say, eccentric? In Iceland we tend to be very, what’s the expression – ‘live and let live.’”
“Huh,” I said. Eccentric? The man was a monster. Well okay, maybe you could say he was more mentally ill than monstrous, but he believed that “these goddamn Jews have to be stopped. They’re a menace to the whole world.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “to me being anti-Semitic or racist or whatever is worse than just being eccentric.”
“You have to understand,” said Einar. “When Fischer came to Iceland, and insisted that we have the world championship here, this put Iceland on the map. That’s how you say, right? ‘On the map’?”
The next night Einar and Katla invited a woman named Hekla over. Hekla is a published fiction writer and a former candidate for president of Iceland. That’s not quite as impressive as it sounds; Iceland is full of people who are former candidates for president, and she only got about one and a half percent of the vote. But still. No doubt Hekla could give me the worldly Icelandic view of Bobby Fischer.
“Sure, Bobby Fischer,” she said when I mentioned him. Her face brightened. “My uncle owns a bookstore in Reykjavik. Bobby Fischer used to hang out there all the time.”
“Really,” I said. “What was he like?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “He just used to hang out there. A lot of people would hang out there. It’s that kind of place.”
“Did he seem, you know, crazy?”
Hekla looked at me, puzzled. We were standing around in the kitchen before dinner. “Crazy? No. My uncle said he was a nice guy. Why do you say crazy?”
Did she really not know what I was talking about?
“Well, he had some pretty extreme views.”
“Oh yes, he was very anti-American.”
“And anti-Semitic. He was terrible that way.”
“Well, you know, people have a right to believe what they believe.”
At this point, Katla noticed that the conversation was about to go off the rails. She swooped in and noisily offered everyone wine.
Later, over dinner, Hekla described some of her experiences as a child traveling in the Middle East. It became clear to me that she herself was not anti-Semitic.
But if I knew somebody was a virulent racist, would I say hey, he has the right to believe what he believes? I mean I guess that’s technically true, but this stuff kills people.
I’m scared that during the next twenty or thirty years, many Jews may be about to die in Europe because of anti-Semitism. Not that we Jews are the only ones at risk there because of ethnic hatred. We have plenty of company.
I finally hustled up a car ride to Selfoss to visit the Bobby Fischer Center. It was on the second floor of a building on the main street. On the first floor, you could buy tourist knickknacks.
It cost one thousand Icelandic krona to get in. But if you’re thinking of going, don’t stress too much. That’s about eight dollars.
The museum, I must say, was quite moving. There were pictures of Fischer at his handsomest, most alive, with alert flashing eyes. And pictures of him forty years later in that funky beard and ball cap, looking drugged. There were books and videos of his most famous chess masterpieces.
There were also displays of Iceland in the early 70s, with videos of joyful natives greeting Fischer and descriptions of how much the world championship match had meant to them. The match took place less than three decades after Iceland finally gained independence, and it was their national coming out party. They were forever grateful to Fischer for insisting the match be held in Iceland.
And.
Much to my relief, the museum acknowledged Bobby Fischer’s anti-Semitism. It was conveyed on at least three different plaques with great sadness. The Icelanders in charge of this museum were very aware that his views weren’t just eccentric or crazy, they were evil. The museum made no lame apologies on Fischer’s behalf.
But.
These people still… As Einar might have said, “They still, how would you say… love? Admire? Respect? They have great interest in Bobby Fischer.”
Well, I can relate; I have great interest in him too.
And I guess you could say, who am I to judge? I’ve admired the writing of people who held slaves and seen movies directed by people who were probably rapists.
After I left the museum, I walked the mile and a half to Fischer’s grave. He’s buried in the front yard of a small, white, wooden church on the outskirts of town. The church probably fits eighty people inside if they all jam close together. His tombstone just gives his name, date of birth, and date of death. It’s small, no bigger than any of the fifteen or twenty other tombstones. There were no flowers, no nothin’. Just Bobby Fischer’s grave.
So anyway, I went searching for Bobby Fischer, and I guess I found him.
Now I guess I do have one more thing to say. I had a great time in that tiny Icelandic town. Katla was a generous host, and Einar drove us to nearby waterfalls and ice cream restaurants. Baldur, at the diner down the road, gave us free Icelandic skyr cake and hung out with us. The phlegmatic teenage lifeguard at the municipal swimming pool, after he got to know me, actually smiled when he saw me coming – and Icelanders, though friendly, are not known for smiling. It’s something that, as an American, you have to get used to.
And we had a lot of good communal meals at the artists’ colony. The lesbian poet from Tennessee, the Indian from Australia who wrote “weird fiction” as he called it, the British visual artist who painted a chair blue and took photographs of himself carrying it all over Iceland, the Native American memoirist who was writing about his father, and the Jewish crime writer from Los Angeles (that’s me) all cooked up a storm and had a great time together. We ate communal dinners at the dining room table overlooking the town and had hilarious debates long into the night about whether the blue chair was Brit or Hindu or Jewish, eventually deciding it was all three.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a lot of love in the world too. The corny stuff is true: we’re all pretty much the same, and person to person, we’re usually nice to each other.
So who knows? Maybe this current wave of hatred in Europe and the United States will subside. And if not, well, let’s root for New Zealand.
Note: This piece was originally published in the Jewish Journal.
I initially became obsessed with Bobby Fischer back in the early 70s, when he dominated the chess world like Balanchine dominated dance, or Babe Ruth dominated baseball. He became the world champion when he won the most famous chess match in history, in Reykjavik in 1972. He was one of the most brilliant human beings of the 20th century. His chess games were Mona Lisas.
I became re-obsessed with Fischer in the early 2000s, when his anti-Semitism reached virulent new heights – “Jews are a filthy, dirty, disgusting, vile, criminal people,” he said in one interview – and his anti-Americanism led him to proclaim that the 9/11 attacks were “wonderful news. It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.” How had this man, this genius, turned into such an evil idiot? How had this American, born to a Jewish woman no less, developed such self-loathing? Seeing him speak back then, I wanted to shake him. “You’re Jewish, for God’s sake! Pull yourself together!”
But eventually, since no better explanation for his behavior was ever forthcoming, I just said to myself, he’s crazy, and forgot about him. He went into hiding in Asia for a few years because he’d broken a United Nations embargo against Yugoslavia. Then the law caught up with him. Pictures surfaced of Fischer in a Japanese jail, wearing a scummy beard and an old gray ballcap. Underneath it you could still see those brilliant eyes, but something was wrong with them. They were both unfocused and way too intense.
He was crazy.
He had renounced his American citizenship, so he was without any place to go. But then seven elderly men from Reykjavik, who had met Fischer way back in 1972, petitioned the Icelandic Parliament to declare him a citizen of Iceland and give him a home.
The Parliament said yes. Fischer flew to Iceland and spent the last three years of his life there, before dying in 2008.
I had forgotten this last portion of Fischer’s life. But then I arrived in Laugarvatn and learned that Bobby Fischer was buried only forty kilometers away, in the small town of Selfoss. There is a museum dedicated to his memory: the Bobby Fischer Center, open every day from 1 to 4 p.m.
And that’s when I got re-re-obsessed. The great Bobby Fischer, the horrible Bobby Fischer, buried in a tiny town in Iceland? How could this be?
And what did the Icelanders think of him? How did they feel about his anti-Semitism? Were they anti-Semitic, in this quiet little island that, at least in June when I was there, was as close to paradise as any place I’ve ever been?
I don’t have to tell you that anti-Semitism is back in fashion today in the United States and Europe. Now for me personally, as a Jew, this is not a huge surprise. I’ve never felt totally safe in the United States. Yeah, we’ve had a good two-hundred-and-fifty year run, but I know my history. Every country we’ve ever been in, we eventually got kicked out.
So all my life, I’ve kind of kept my eyes open for possible escape hatches, if it comes to that: Israel. Ireland. New Zealand. Iceland.
But now was Iceland going to be out of the question? So I went in search of, not so much Bobby Fischer, as what Icelanders thought about Bobby Fischer.
I began with Katla, the pixyish blonde artist who ran our artists colony. “Katla,” I said, “I noticed Bobby Fischer is buried near here.”
“Yes,” she said, as she kneaded a loaf of rye bread she was making for us starving artists. “Isn’t that great?”
“He was a great chess player,” I said, “but he was kind of crazy too.”
“Crazy? How do you mean?”
“Well, he had some pretty out-there views,” I said.
“Out there?”
I decided not to mince words. “He was very anti-Semitic.”
English isn’t Katla’s first language. “Anti-Semitic? You mean like, anti-Jew?”
“Yes, he was very anti-Jewish.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
She didn’t know? Did Icelandic people not care enough about his anti-Semitism to talk about it?
Later I asked Katla’s husband Einar about Fischer. Einar, it turned out, knew of Fischer’s anti-Semitism. He said, “Yes, Fischer was very, shall we say, eccentric? In Iceland we tend to be very, what’s the expression – ‘live and let live.’”
“Huh,” I said. Eccentric? The man was a monster. Well okay, maybe you could say he was more mentally ill than monstrous, but he believed that “these goddamn Jews have to be stopped. They’re a menace to the whole world.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “to me being anti-Semitic or racist or whatever is worse than just being eccentric.”
“You have to understand,” said Einar. “When Fischer came to Iceland, and insisted that we have the world championship here, this put Iceland on the map. That’s how you say, right? ‘On the map’?”
The next night Einar and Katla invited a woman named Hekla over. Hekla is a published fiction writer and a former candidate for president of Iceland. That’s not quite as impressive as it sounds; Iceland is full of people who are former candidates for president, and she only got about one and a half percent of the vote. But still. No doubt Hekla could give me the worldly Icelandic view of Bobby Fischer.
“Sure, Bobby Fischer,” she said when I mentioned him. Her face brightened. “My uncle owns a bookstore in Reykjavik. Bobby Fischer used to hang out there all the time.”
“Really,” I said. “What was he like?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “He just used to hang out there. A lot of people would hang out there. It’s that kind of place.”
“Did he seem, you know, crazy?”
Hekla looked at me, puzzled. We were standing around in the kitchen before dinner. “Crazy? No. My uncle said he was a nice guy. Why do you say crazy?”
Did she really not know what I was talking about?
“Well, he had some pretty extreme views.”
“Oh yes, he was very anti-American.”
“And anti-Semitic. He was terrible that way.”
“Well, you know, people have a right to believe what they believe.”
At this point, Katla noticed that the conversation was about to go off the rails. She swooped in and noisily offered everyone wine.
Later, over dinner, Hekla described some of her experiences as a child traveling in the Middle East. It became clear to me that she herself was not anti-Semitic.
But if I knew somebody was a virulent racist, would I say hey, he has the right to believe what he believes? I mean I guess that’s technically true, but this stuff kills people.
I’m scared that during the next twenty or thirty years, many Jews may be about to die in Europe because of anti-Semitism. Not that we Jews are the only ones at risk there because of ethnic hatred. We have plenty of company.
I finally hustled up a car ride to Selfoss to visit the Bobby Fischer Center. It was on the second floor of a building on the main street. On the first floor, you could buy tourist knickknacks.
It cost one thousand Icelandic krona to get in. But if you’re thinking of going, don’t stress too much. That’s about eight dollars.
The museum, I must say, was quite moving. There were pictures of Fischer at his handsomest, most alive, with alert flashing eyes. And pictures of him forty years later in that funky beard and ball cap, looking drugged. There were books and videos of his most famous chess masterpieces.
There were also displays of Iceland in the early 70s, with videos of joyful natives greeting Fischer and descriptions of how much the world championship match had meant to them. The match took place less than three decades after Iceland finally gained independence, and it was their national coming out party. They were forever grateful to Fischer for insisting the match be held in Iceland.
And.
Much to my relief, the museum acknowledged Bobby Fischer’s anti-Semitism. It was conveyed on at least three different plaques with great sadness. The Icelanders in charge of this museum were very aware that his views weren’t just eccentric or crazy, they were evil. The museum made no lame apologies on Fischer’s behalf.
But.
These people still… As Einar might have said, “They still, how would you say… love? Admire? Respect? They have great interest in Bobby Fischer.”
Well, I can relate; I have great interest in him too.
And I guess you could say, who am I to judge? I’ve admired the writing of people who held slaves and seen movies directed by people who were probably rapists.
After I left the museum, I walked the mile and a half to Fischer’s grave. He’s buried in the front yard of a small, white, wooden church on the outskirts of town. The church probably fits eighty people inside if they all jam close together. His tombstone just gives his name, date of birth, and date of death. It’s small, no bigger than any of the fifteen or twenty other tombstones. There were no flowers, no nothin’. Just Bobby Fischer’s grave.
So anyway, I went searching for Bobby Fischer, and I guess I found him.
Now I guess I do have one more thing to say. I had a great time in that tiny Icelandic town. Katla was a generous host, and Einar drove us to nearby waterfalls and ice cream restaurants. Baldur, at the diner down the road, gave us free Icelandic skyr cake and hung out with us. The phlegmatic teenage lifeguard at the municipal swimming pool, after he got to know me, actually smiled when he saw me coming – and Icelanders, though friendly, are not known for smiling. It’s something that, as an American, you have to get used to.
And we had a lot of good communal meals at the artists’ colony. The lesbian poet from Tennessee, the Indian from Australia who wrote “weird fiction” as he called it, the British visual artist who painted a chair blue and took photographs of himself carrying it all over Iceland, the Native American memoirist who was writing about his father, and the Jewish crime writer from Los Angeles (that’s me) all cooked up a storm and had a great time together. We ate communal dinners at the dining room table overlooking the town and had hilarious debates long into the night about whether the blue chair was Brit or Hindu or Jewish, eventually deciding it was all three.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a lot of love in the world too. The corny stuff is true: we’re all pretty much the same, and person to person, we’re usually nice to each other.
So who knows? Maybe this current wave of hatred in Europe and the United States will subside. And if not, well, let’s root for New Zealand.
Note: This piece was originally published in the Jewish Journal.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
For my very first post ever, I thought I should say something really profound. So I decided to tackle the age-old question above.
But the truth is, nobody really knows why the chicken crossed the road.
But the truth is, nobody really knows why the chicken crossed the road.
Matt Witten's Blog: Random Musings
Thoughts about writing and the world
- Matt Witten's profile
- 168 followers
