Steven S. Drachman's Blog, page 3

Obscure Author Turns 51; still alive

I turned 51 last week, and I was unfortunately too bogged down with the-worst-cold-known-to-humankind to really enjoy it. Turning 50 was a bit comical – a milestone like that has a strange almost temporary feeling, like some kind of practical joke that fate played on a 40-year-old, and which I could correct once I find the right phone number to call – but 51 is chilling.

This has really happened, and it won’t get better. It is particularly unnerving to feel near death’s door when the fateful day arrives, and doubly unnerving when Prince, the 50-something superstar who is apparently quite a bit healthier than I am, dies the same day. I also quite distinctly remember poor Michael Landon, who the press always acclaimed for looking so darn young, and who died looking terrific at what seemed to me at the time a very-distantly aged 53. (I was in France when he died, and I distinctly recall seeing a headline that read, “Michael Landon ferme les yeux pour la derniere fois” – Michael Landon closes his eyes for the last time.

There is nothing particularly profound about this! But I said I would let you know what I’m thinking about these days, and this is what I am thinking about today, as a 51-year-old man sitting at home drinking chicken soup on an amazingly beautiful day on a dying planet. This is all inspiring me to try to finish the final book of my trilogy before too much more time passes, as well as to get to work on those books by Dickens that I somehow never got around to reading. (My daughter is pressing me to get started on A Tale of Two Cities; I’m sort of inclined to begin with Oliver Twist. I’ve had no luck whatsoever with Lord Jim and Catch-22 – I think great novels are the domain of the young.)

I’ve also been watching the greatest classic movies ever made that I have not yet seen and that I ought to watch before I die, and here are my thoughts:

Stagecoach: John Wayne was really great before he became John Wayne.

Shane: How was it possible that I’ve never seen an Alan Ladd movie before in my life? And where did he find a blow-dryer in the Old West?

Strangers on a Train: The book asked what it would take to corrupt an ordinary man. The movie asks what it takes for an incorruptibly terrific guy, falsely accused, to triumph. Since most of us are not incorruptibly terrific, the book was more interesting.

Dog Day Afternoon: What a great movie. Think what John Cazale might have done, had he lived. Think how happy Meryl Streep would be, had John Cazale lived. 40 years without those puppy dog eyes, those beautiful pouting man-lips. World cinema would truly have been a different thing, had John Cazale lived.

All the President’s Men: Not such a great movie, but, really, why didn’t Hoffman and Redford make 100 bromance movies since then? They could have been the new Abbott & Costello, if Costello had been a Jew. Really, a lost opportunity.

Fanny & Alexander: Can all one’s problems be solved, if one just gets in good with a troupe of magical, transgendered 19th century European Jews? Apparently so. I don’t really understand this movie, but I like it.

Paris, Texas: Harry Dean Stanton marries Nastasja Kinski, giving hope to unattractive and unappealing men everywhere. I am not sure why this 2 and a half hour movie was so hard to stop watching and why in the world I cared so much about these not-interesting people, and why this demonstrably-unbelievable movie seemed so authentic. Quite a remarkable specimen.

La Double Vie de Veronique: Interesting to see a movie in which every single character is downright decent and sympathetic (which the exception of the flasher in the park). Were these two women separated at birth? Are they flip sides of the same coin? What is consciousness? What makes a person who she is?

Next up: All Quiet on the Western Front.

Too Many Tomes, Too Little Time

When I am not writing my Book 3, or working my day job, I have taken it upon myself to read only “good” books and to watch only “good” movies. Now that I am very nearly 51 years old, it has occurred to me that I am unlikely to write seven “Watt O’Hugh” books (so I will leave it at three), but also that I am unlikely to read all the great works of literature and to watch the great movies unless I become very focused, and quickly. I love watching “Brisco County Jr.” and “Firefly” over and over again (not to mention Jackie Chan, the Panama scandal notwithstanding), but do I want to find myself on my deathbed shouting, “I never saw Persona or Roshomon! I never read Dickens or Moby Dick!” Well, I imagine that might not be the first thing on my mind when I find myself on my deathbed. But on the other hand, it might. You never know what might haunt me at a moment like that. "I've traveled to Istanbul, Paris and Jerusalem, but I've never read Moby Dick, and now I never will."

So I watched Shane and Stagecoach and Fanny and Alexander, and next up is Raging Bull. I read Updike’s Best Short Stories of the 20th Century and Catch-22, I'm halfway through Lord Jim and next I will turn to American Tragedy.

We will see how long it takes before I am spending all my time watching Roseanne reruns and reading re-reading Astro Boy manga, but for now I am feeling dedicated.

The Prisoner, Revisited

I've tried to get my geek kids interested in "The Prisoner," starring Patrick McGoohan, without any luck. I think this show may be a victim of its own success. Its paranoid conceit - fellow wakes up one morning in The Village, with no idea how he got there or who is running the show - has been stolen by any number of pretenders since then, most recently by "Wayward Pines," so it doesn't seem revolutionary or twisty anymore, at least not to the new generation. It is strange to live in a world in which nerds don't love "The Prisoner."

One other thought - it is very odd to look at him now! He's just a boy!

Just Saying Hi

Finishing the last book in my trilogy is turning into a big undertaking. The second book was published two years ago in May 2014, and I hope Watt and I will not be entirely forgotten by the time Book 3 comes out.

While I am working on this, and now that I do not have any immediate book to hawk shamelessly, I hope I can use this page to tell you a little bit about what I am up to; if any of you are fans of the books themselves you will get to know a little more about them and about me. If you are just fans of the same things that I like - historical fantasy novels, westerns, western-fantasies, and so on - maybe we will just be able to share some common interests.

Regarding the book itself: The problem, as anyone who has ever taken a shot at "universe building" can tell you, is that it is hard to build a little universe! Once your universe starts growing, it speeds up, until a single trilogy isn't big enough to contain it. My "Watt O'Hugh" adventures should really be 7 books (at least), but I am quite sure I will not live long enough to finish another five of these things. So a trilogy it will be.

Another problem is the immense amount of research that inevitably goes into these things. Back in the mid-90's, when I finished 2/3 of Book 1, the internet couldn't really help, and I trudged around to libraries and worked the phone. With each new book I become expert at other things. With Book 2, I became an expert on how to rob a train (among other things), hence the very train-robbery cover that resulted. (There are lots of train robbery methods, some more violent than others. The "Chapman Method" is rather tame, for example, but not very effective.) With Book 3, I am becoming an expert in the Days of Spring and Autumn period in ancient Chinese history. You never know exactly where a book will go once you start it. If this works right, it changes the author.

I've been working as often as I can at the coffee shop of a very weird museum here in Brooklyn called The Museum of Morbid Anatomy. That seems to provide just the right mood, although I am not sure why. If you see me there, say hello.

Max's Diamonds Givewaway

Foreword Reviews calls Max's Diamonds, by Jay Greenfield, an “incredibly engaging and thought-provoking story of one man haunted by the grief of his past ... an excellent new work of fiction." On May 1, 2016, Chickadee Prince Books will publish this stunning decades-spanning debut novel, but you can read it here first.

Giveaway now active - take a look, if you would.

Chickadee Prince Flies onward

Chickadee Prince Books is an independent cooperative not-for-profit press devoted to publishing quality and acclaimed authors that you won't find at the big houses. There are five authors on-board now, but we're always looking for more. If they are good.

Take a look at our website, and support independent publishing if you would -

Flash of Blue Sky giveaway

Chickadee Prince Books is publishing A Flash of Blue Sky by Alon Preiss on March 1. It's gotten great pre-publication reviews, and now there's a Goodreads giveaway. Support independent publishing, and take a look, if you would.

Info below:

KIRKUS REVIEWS calls A Flash of Blue Sky a “complex literary drama [with] a lively sense of humor.” To be published March 1, 2016: read it first here.

In his debut novel, Alon Preiss tells a truly global tale: A gun-toting Moscow starlet, on the run from the mob, in a Russia struggling to rise from the embers of Communism. A beautiful young divorcee, lost on the West Coast, seeking a soul-mate without an overabundance of optimism. A prince, overthrown in a bloody revolution, wanders the world looking for the woman who once saved him. An attorney in New York, choosing between the two women who love him, and between failure and corruption. A Cambodian warlord, plotting a return to power from his jungle hideout ....

Welcome to the 1980s, and a turbulent world eating itself alive.

Never Finding Neverland

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of J.M. Barrie’s novel version of Peter Pan. Not the musical show nor the Disney movie. The novel, it seemed to me, was pretty dark and not whimsical, and it didn’t sugar-coat childhood. Was it a good thing to remain a child forever? It certainly didn’t seem this way. While other fantasy novels, like the Narnia books, sent the kids back from their adventures at the precise moment they left (sparing their parents the anguish of their disappearance), the Darling children of Peter Pan are more than happy to abandon their parents, as Peter believes his mother abandoned and forgot him, because children are “innocent and heartless,” the three words that end the book.

What would power and magic really be like in a child’s hands? What would happen if a child could indeed refuse to grow up? He would turn into a cold-blooded killer, perhaps, who cares for no one and nothing but himself.


“Who is Captain Hook?” he asked with interest [when Wendy returned to Neverland the following year.]

“Don’t you remember,” [Wendy] asked, amazed, “how you killed him …?”

“I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly.



Does he remember an old friend like Tinkerbell, someone who drank poison to save his life?



“Who is Tinkerbell?”

… [E]ven when she explained, he could not remember.

“There are such a lot of them,” he said. “I expect she is no more.”

I expect he was right [explained the author], for fairies don’t live long[.]



Peter Pan bears more resemblance to the Billy Mummy episode of the Twilight Zone than to the candy-colored Pan imagined by Walt Disney.

This book I have loved so much for so many years, from childhood through my mid-life, is so downright strange that I probably avoided learning anything about its author, fearing that he would turn out to be equally strange. When Finding Neverland, the movie biography, came out, I stayed away. My wife finally convinced me that I would be reassured if I watched it.

And so I did, and I was. Indeed, James Barrie was a fine fellow, I discovered.

When he met a tragic young widow, Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies, and her four sons (George, Jack, Peter and Michael) in the park, he became her generous and utterly platonic friend and their role model. This was especially the case for young Peter, a particularly traumatized boy and a budding author, who bloomed under Barrie’s tutelage. When Sylvia, in turn, grew sick and died, Barrie promised Sylvia that he would care for her children, and he consoled them through this second bout of tragedy. Indeed, his play was something of a tribute to his time with the boys. When he named the main character after Peter, the lad declared it “the best gift” anyone could ever have given him.

The play, which my wife and I saw this past week, was the same, only more so, and less so. Boy band power pop ballads and whatnot. The platonic friendship with Sylvia is only slightly less platonic; a crowd-pleasing kiss is added, and the audience cheers.

After we returned from the play, my wife wondered what had become of the boys. I assumed that Peter had become a writer. I assumed they had all turned out all right.

Reality, unfortunately, was less rosy that I’d expected.

Barrie did not meet Sylvia after the death of her husband, Arthur. He met her during her husband’s illness. He began hanging inappropriately about the home, much to the dying husband’s anger, who resented a strange man insinuating himself into the household, replacing Arthur before the body was even cold. (Barrie did not actually meet Sylva at the same time as he met the boys – he began playing with the boys in the park a few months before any other adult entered the picture, a behavior that modern audiences would have found odd.) A few months after her husband’s death (or perhaps near the end of the illness), Sylvia gave birth to a child, Nico, who is conveniently absent from both the film and Broadway show. As an adult. Nico insisted that Barrie was asexual, and therefore not his father. "I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call 'a stirring in the undergrowth' for anyone,” he insisted. (I guess one MIGHT call it that, but I’d prefer one not.) On this, Barrie’s wife agrees: "Love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced."

Surely he must have had a wonderful way with the boys! Otherwise, why would Sylvia have granted him custody? Sylvia did not grant Barrie custody, as shown in the film and the play. In fact, he forged her will. Said Peter: “The whole business, as I look back on it, was almost unbelievably queer and pathetic and ludicrous and even macabre in a kind of way."

Did Barrie remain loyal to the boys, as he promised Sylvia in the play? Although a foster father to them after Sylvia’s death, he devastated and betrayed Peter when he left his entire estate to his secretary.

And how did Peter feel about his foster father’s famous creation, that great gift? Said Peter’s son: “[T]he notoriety he had experienced since being linked with Peter Pan [was] something he hated.”

But surely their time as boys with Barrie was like a wonderful dream? According to a childhood friend of Michael’s, Michael's relationship with Barrie at that time was “morbid” and “unhealthy,” the stuff of naked photographs and unfulfilled yearnings. As Barrie wrote to Michael on his 8th birthday: “Dear Michael, I am very fond of you, but don't tell anybody.”

But Barrie’s tutelage helped the boys grow up into happy adults, certainly? George was killed in action in 1915 in the Great War, Michael committed suicide by drowning in 1921 (a double suicide with another boy, possibly a lover), Peter, teased throughout childhood over his connection with Peter Pan, became an alcoholic adult and threw himself under a train.

Barrie was something of a predator, it seems, although perhaps not a sexual one (naked photographs notwithstanding). He does seem to have pilfered the lives of the Llewelyn-Davies family, enriching himself, and leaving them nothing.

* * *

So there are a couple of things to think about here.

First, why take an awful story, about a creepy childish guy who torments a dying man and ruins a family’s life, and turn it into a heartwarming musical about a wonderful, impish and childlike saint who teaches a family wonderful lessons about life and love? One can argue that it’s a better story (although I would dispute that), but even if that were true, so what? Both the movie and Broadway musical are sick and terrible and wretched lies, through and through, alternative reality speculative fiction of the worst sort.

Giving J.M. Barrie’s life a hagiographic Disneyfied Broadway musical is particularly inappropriate, because the story of Peter Pan, the “demon boy” as Barrie described him, is a story of the darkness and heartlessness of childhood, not the burst of candy and sunshine the world would insist that it is. And neither was Barrie.

Does the sordid life of a beloved public figure undercut the art that the beloved public figure created? Many (and many more) of our authors were not particularly lovely people, or even bearable. In the past, authors were names on the covers of books, and no one cared. It’s only in today’s world, where authors are expected to tweet daily and to friend their fans, that we expect them to be nice folks, and our pals, in addition to great talents.

If that’s the standard for lasting art, we will either find ourselves depriving ourselves of books we ought to read, or lying to ourselves. In the case of J.M. Barrie, it’s the latter, seven days a week, and twice on Wednesday.

How I Spent My 50th Birthday

A few weeks ago, I turned 50, and before I turned 50 I wrote an allegedly hilarious description of all the things I had planned for the day. So what did I really do? I guess I owe everyone a full description.

I planned to drive up to Bear Mountain very early and hike to the top. Although it sounds like a cute place to hike, it’s actually pretty grueling. But there was terrible monsoon-type weather, a really ferocious storm. My religious friends tell me that a 50-year-old man with really only one actual leg should not really go on that kind of hike by himself. (My left leg was massively reconstructed some time ago and now is mostly metal and screws.) So G-d, with this terrible monsoon, was stepping in to protect me. That seems pretty unreasonable to me. Even if true, I think He should have more important things on his mind. Why should He have made everyone’s life miserable to keep a 50-year-old man from falling on his ass? Why would G-d protect me, rather than John Lennon, whose unrecorded recordings over the last 35 years would undoubtedly have brought the world far more joy than the final book of the Watt O’Hugh trilogy? Anyway, I don’t buy it.

But what was I to do? I’d taken the day off, and told my family that I intended to spend it on the top of a mountain. Now I had the whole day to myself.

Oddly enough, although I didn’t plan to do this, I wound up watching an old Cavett episode on the web. When I was a kid, old people loved Dick Cavett. He was like a really attentive nephew. On the episode I saw, he politely listened to Groucho Marx and Truman Capote debate books.

Capote: I think [comic writing] is the hardest form of writing there is. … A writer like Evelyn Waugh, you know, is a great comic writer.
Groucho: Who’s that?
Capote: Evelyn Waugh? English novelist?
Groucho: Yes. Yes. Ring Lardner wasn’t bad either.
Capote: But I don’t consider him a comic … I don’t consider Ring Lardner a comic writer. I mean …
Groucho: He’s a dramatic writer, actually …
Capote: Yes, see? [Capote smiles extremely smugly. Audience laughs.]
Groucho: And, but he wrote, and all those books that he wrote, they were – Golden Wedding and all those? Eventually there was another one.
Cavett: Yeah.
Groucho: And Lardner, well of course, I was always crazy about Lardner.
Cavett: I find that people who like those writers of that period often – they always say Lardner was – they often say Lardner was the best, for some reason. I don’t know why.
Groucho: Well, I think he was close to it, in that era.

Wow, that was boring! I am not making that up. An actual conversation on the Dick Cavett show from 1971.

So I got up and went to the Guggenheim. The entire museum was filled with postcards that a conceptual artist had filled out. Floor after floor of postcards. I'm not making this up. Every day he wrote down what time he got up in the morning and mailed it out to some poor guy, some acquaintance who was doomed to receive a stupid postcard every day. One might say, “I got up at 10:30.” Another might say, “I got up at 11:45.” (He always managed to get a good sleep well into the morning, which pissed me off. Sleeps late, writes a postcard, gets a show at the Guggenheim.) This was part of a work called (appropriately) “I GOT UP.”

According to the Guggenheim, “Through radically restricted means, [his] work engages the personal and historical consciousness of place and time … Like his other serial works, I Got Up combines a rote, impersonal system with the communication of personal information. The mass production of postcards and mechanical stamps contrasts with the handmade nature of the work—the physical gesture of stamping—and the intimate moment it records. The series also contrasts a regular, repeated act with the act of doing something each day at changing times.”

Hmm. The communication of personal information. The time you get up is "information," and sending it to someone is "communication." The act of doing something at changing times. Like one morning getting up at 11 and the next morning getting up at, I dunno, some other time. The consciousness of place and time. Like if you get up at 11 in the morning, that's a time, and if you write it down, that’s the consciousness of time. Because if you weren't conscious of it, you couldn't write it down now, could you?

I guess I get it.

But can the guy paint a picture of a flower? I mean, I can write a postcard!

Look, I don't begrudge the guy making money off this. More power to him. Really. Because maybe he was a really nice guy.

I had budgeted three hours for the Guggenheim, but it really took me only about 15 minutes. I stood in front of a display of postcards and nodded. I read a few. I looked around to see what everyone else was making of this.

The day ended with a meal of shakshouka with the wife over on 10th avenue. That brought back memories. All’s well that ends well.

Greetings from a Middle-Aged Author

Monday is my 50th birthday, and I’ve kind of planned the day out already. I’m going to wake up on my own at 5:30 in the morning, make myself a big bowl of oatmeal and a big mug of Postum, take some blood pressure pills, then some pills to counteract the side effects of the blood pressure pills, and then I will go out for the vigorous walk that the doctor recommends. When I get back, I’ll take some Metamucil, fall asleep and dream about Alice Faye. When I wake up from my mid-morning nap, I’ll realize with some shock (not to mention disappointment) that Alice Faye does not love me, and that I’ve slept through my pool aerobics class, so I’ll watch the morning reruns of Matlock and Murder She Wrote, then I’ll watch some Cavett on PBS before my early afternoon nap. Cavett is very thoughtful for a young person, I will think, as my head starts to nod. While I am asleep, Ira and Saul will come by for our bridge game, but I’ll be asleep, so they’ll go play bingo on 4th Avenue. The Hell with them, anyway. When I wake up, I’ll look around for those racy paperbacks about sexy ladies from Venus, a planet where no one wears any clothes and everyone is a sexy woman, which I stashed somewhere in the apartment back in the 1950s, and when I can’t find them, I’ll start boozing. At around 4:30, I’ll head over to Pete’s (you know, on the corner) for the early bird special, but on the way I’ll break my hip.