Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Writing “Too Much of Everything”)

“I know I write too much of everything. The thing I am going to learn some day is that you might write one of the best things you ever put on paper, but it doesn’t necessarily belong in the book at hand. I am going to learn, though. I’ll work hard and I know I can do it.”—Thomas Wolfe quoted in “Brevity to be Goal of Thomas Wolfe,” The New York Times, July 5, 1935, in Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938, edited by Aldo P. Magi and Richard Walser (1985)

Thomas Wolfe, boisterous, needy man-child, overflowing with creative fecundity, had little time left to master the kind of Jamesian control over his material of which he was speaking here. Another 3½ years and he’d be dead, leaving behind another three books to be hewn from the mass he left behind for his second, final editor, Edward C. Aswell.

Truth be told, the kind of self-consciousness he was promising as he stepped off the boat from a trip to Europe wasn’t always everything it was cracked up to be. All that endless mulling and shaping of materials could leave aridity to one’s work—something that Marion (Clover) Adams, clever, suicidal wife of historian Henry Adams, noted when she observed, about the work of her husband’s friend, Henry James: “He’s chewed much more than he’s bitten off.”

That kind of self-control also implied the ability to sit still—and it was growing ever more obvious that the gargantuan, experience-hungry Wolfe didn’t possess this gene, either. Nevertheless, on the day before the above quote appeared in The New York Times, questions about his self-discipline were becoming increasingly constant, and eventually they would drive a wedge between himself and the man who met him on the dock that Fourth of July when he came back from a triumphant trip abroad, his first editor, mentor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.

Wolfe had become a kind of surrogate son for Perkins, father of five daughters, as the Scribners editor shaped the manuscripts of the hulking Southerner’s first two sprawling novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, into print. The novelist had frankly acknowledged his debt in a nonfiction account of his writing process, The Story of a Novel, as well as three months ago in his dedication of the just-published Of Time and the River. (See my prior post on Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway—the trio that Fitzgerald called Max’s “sons”—and their competition for his attention and approval.)

But now the whispers were growing louder about how much Wolfe was a creature of his editor. Before long, critic Bernard De Voto would bring these concerns to a fever pitch—and damage Wolfe’s reputation so much that it never fully recovered—in “Genius Is Not Enough.”

The German intelligentsia hadn’t minded Wolfe’s headlong romantic spirit. This, after all, was the country that had practically invented Romanticism, and the writers Wolfe met there embraced him eagerly. He exulted to Perkins about having awoken one morning, Byron-like, to find himself “famous in Berlin.”

Guided through Berlin by the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Wolfe’s sojourn was a triumph. Biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote a glittering description of this American giant in a nation otherwise increasingly fearful about exercising its own creative energies:

“The might and music of his personality exalted everyone he met; striding the streets with head aloft and his body full of lumbering rhythm, he personified the freedom and promise of America. For the first time since Hitler’s rise to power the Romanische Café, a former gathering place of artists and intellectuals, showed signs of life.”

Try as you might, you can’t really understate Wolfe’s puppy-like yearning for adulation or naivete. At the same time, we need to give him some credit—no matter how much he hated to notice faults in a country that paid no attention to his biggest creative limitation, he had, by the end of his sojourn in Germany, begun to be alarmed by that nation’s anti-Semitism, which was so virulent that it exceeded his own. It all manifested itself, insidiously, in "the solid, liquid smack of booted feet, and young brown faces shaded under steel goose-stepping beneath the green arcades of the Kurfurstendamm, the army lorries rolling past, each crowded with regimented rows of young, formal, helmeted, armfolded, ramrodded bodies.”

Wolfe, let it be said, did not become blind to a country that had lionized him, as Charles Lindbergh was about to do with Hitler’s Germany, or willfully uncurious about why intellectuals he had befriended were suddenly disappearing, as Paul Robeson would react when faced with the toll of Stalin’s purges. Two years later, his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You” would make unmistakably clear his break from the country he loved more than any other next to his own.

The novelist might have been talking about artistic self-control when he vowed “I am going to learn” when he stepped off the boat, but he did, in fact, learn something along the way before he died: not to allow ego or ideology to cloud his vision of the world before his eyes.

This Day in Literary History (Thoreau Moves to Walden Cabin)

July 4, 1845—With an exquisite, surely self-conscious, sense of timing, Henry David Thoreau moved on Independence Day into the small cabin he had just finished building on land owned by friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and began the 26-month sojourn that culminated in his 1854 masterpiece, Walden.

Many of the ideas in Walden—the ecstatic embrace of nature, the oscillation between society and solitude, self-reliance—can also be found in Emerson. 

And just as, eight years before, Emerson had, in effect, issued an intellectual’s Declaration of Independence in his lecture “The American Scholar,” his younger disciple now sought to extend that notion.

"I am very familiar with all his thoughts,” Emerson noted about his younger friend, “they are my own quite originally drest." Precisely.

Emerson exerted a more powerful influence in the 19th century than Thoreau through his notion of individualism, but his consistently high-pitched tone—the style of the former preacher he was—can lull a modern reader. 

On the other hand, Thoreau’s is a new, distinctive American voice—rhapsodic, surely, but also by turns cranky, jaunty, ironic and packing a whole complex of thought into a few terse words. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” he writes, bringing us up sharply (especially after having just mentioned “Chinese and Sandwich Islanders”).

But turn to almost any page in the book and you’re likely to be surprised. For instance, toward the end: “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” He continually brings you up short, not just with his insights, but with the concise manner in which he expresses them.

As I mentioned in a post last year, Thoreau came by his sense of isolation naturally, as many in Concord had come to sneer at him after he and friend Edward Hoar accidentally set fire to a large portion of its woods.

But Thoreau used his 26 months in the Walden cabin to great advantage. Walden, like all truly great revolutionary documents, continues to resonate years after the fact.

I’m not thinking here strictly of his care for the environment, his urging that readers forgo the material goods of this world, or his advocacy of nonconformity. 

In addition, I wish his chapter on “Reading” could be reproduced and handed out at any town meeting where short-sighted politicians decide the first thing they want to cut is a library or the school system. "If it is necessary," he wrote, "omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Immigrants’ Ties to the Declaration)

“Perhaps half our people…are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian…finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those [revolutionary] days by blood, they find they have none,…but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence…they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men….That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,…as long as the love of freedom exists.”—Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858

Yesterday afternoon, WNYC-FM’s Jonathan Schwartz played Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. It reminded me that, though Thomas Jefferson might have written the Declaration of Independence, it was Abraham Lincoln who had reinterpreted and extended it for generations to follow.

(By the way, in his haste to honor Lyndon Johnson for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on Independence Day that year, New York Times columnist Frank Rich today unaccountably—and inexcusably—left out Lincoln, the essential transitional figure between Jefferson and Johnson in expanding the American promise to all.)

I’ve read a fair amount of the 16th President’s writings as well as several biographies, but I only came across the above quote for the first time a week ago. As the son and grandson of Irish immigrants, it obviously has special resonance for me.

Lincoln Portrait, which Copland wrote himself, drew heavily on a number of the President’s speeches and writings, notably the Gettysburg Address and his annual message to Congress in December 1862. Perhaps the folksy overtones of the above quote (“That old Declaration of Independence”) might not have fit in that well with the austere majesty of the Portrait narration (rendered, on the recording I heard yesterday, by Adlai Stevenson, who sounded to me, on first hearing, like the late actor E.G. Marshall).

Nevertheless, the quote goes a long way toward explaining so much about American history: about why so many foreigners have taken the promise of the Declaration to such heart that many have given their lives in defense of their new country; about why, more than two centuries after the release of the Declaration, it still represented a beacon of hope to dissidents in places like Communist Russia and pre-Tiananmen Square China; and about why Lincoln himself has become such a towering figure not just in American but world history.

Song Lyric of the Day (Katharine Lee Bates, from “America the Beautiful”)

“America! America!

God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law.”—“America the Beautiful,” lyrics by Katharine Lee Bates, music by Samuel Ward, in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch (1990)

The words that everyone knows in this song come from the first stanza, the one filled with the astonishing physical beauty of the sprawling United States—notably, the “purple mountain majesties/above the fruited plain.”

But there’s more to the lyrics than that, and it’s worth recalling now, exactly 115 years to the day that the poem “America the Beautiful” was published by Wellesley professor of English Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) in the religious weekly The Congregationalist. She was lucky to live in a time when a) newspapers still proliferated, b) they loved to print poems, and c) poetry was unafraid to deal with accessible public concerns rather than allusive, private obsessions.

“America the Beautiful” was inspired by a western trip that Bates took in the summer of 1893, beginning at Niagara Falls and ending in Colorado. Upon ascending Pike’s Peak, she immediately wrote down her impressions, but it took her awhile to translate it into a form she felt worthy of publication.

Bates’ poem elicited an enormous response from readers, many of whom felt it practically begged to be turned into song. At one point, approximately 70 different melodies were proposed as possible accompaniment to the lyrics. The winner, by common acclimation, was a melody from a Christian hymn book, composed by New Jersey choirmaster Samuel Ward in 1882.

Bates (whose image accompanying this post reminds me of what another Kathy Bates might have looked like in youth—the Oscar-winning actress of Misery) revised the poem twice more over the next two decades, to make it more direct—and, one would hope, capable of being sung.

Those of a certain ideological stripe might well be put off by the unabashed patriotism of the poem. Though not as bellicose as, say, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” certain lines might raise hackles with those concerned with America’s wars (“O beautiful for heroes proved/In liberating strife”) or the impact of its westward expansion on the environment (“A thoroughfare for freedom beat/Across the wilderness!”)

But there’s the above quote, from the second stanza, implying so much more. America might indeed be beautiful, but it isn’t perfect. That “liberating strife” was present, for instance, because a queasy bargain had been struck at the nation’s founding that slavery would not be interfered with in order that a united front could be presented against Great Britain.

The child of a Congregationalist minister, Bates felt the nation required divine guidance to “mend thine every flaw.” At the same time, you can sense the insistent note of her religious tradition’s tendency toward ruthless self-examination—an impulse that, in the 19th century, manifested itself in one reform movement after another—in the couplet, “Confirm thy soul in self-control,/Thy liberty in law.”

In other words, Bates realized that America was beautiful not simply because of pristine wilderness but because of the second chance it offered—to battered foreigners starting over in life, as well as to native-born citizens bringing honor to a badly compromised past.

This Day in Yankee History (DiMaggio Tries First Base, Hates It)

July 3, 1950—In a particularly trying day in a trying season for baseball’s greatest team and greatest star, Joe DiMaggio—the standard of excellence for all future New York Yankee centerfielders—played first base, much to his unease. The 13 plays in which he was involved that day in Griffith Stadium against the Washington Senators came off uneventfully. Well, uneventfully for anyone not nicknamed “The Yankee Clipper.”

“He's worried all over,” teammate Tommy Henrich recalled for a PBS documentary in the “American Experience” series, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. “He's afraid of making a dumb play because he's not familiar with first base. It would have killed him to make a stupid play.”

Actually, Henrich was one of the reasons why DiMaggio ended up at first base. “Ol’ Reliable” was out injured (it would be the last season for the great 37-year-old clutch hitter), and his replacement, rookie Joe Collins, wasn’t hitting the ball with enough authority.

But even without these factors, the idea might have been implemented because of Casey Stengel. In his second year at the helm of the team, with a World Series win under his belt, he now felt more comfortable about asserting his authority.

Players were no longer sure of their roles. It went far beyond the platooning he would elevate into a science. (In future years, Whitey Ford would chafe at not pitching every fourth or fifth day, but instead being moved around in the rotation so he’d face an opponent’s leading pitcher, or even asked to come out of the bullpen.)

The lack of production at first base furnished Casey with just the opening he needed that, he thought, would not only extend DiMaggio’s career but (better yet) further solidify the reputation for managerial genius Stengel was now earning from beat reporters enthralled by his colorful antics.

DiMaggio’s body was, at long last, breaking down. His heel had given him such ferocious pain that he had missed the first couple of months in the prior season. His return to the team, in a crucial series with the Boston Red Sox, proved the spark the team needed in their down-to-the-wire battle with the Bosox (a race chronicled in David Halberstam's Summer of '49).

Installing DiMaggio at first base, Stengel thought, would save the slugger the inevitable wear and tear of patrolling the vast reaches of center field in Yankee Stadium.

Stengel wasn’t the last manager to have the brainstorm of shifting a superstar to a less physically demanding spot on the diamond. His successor in the dugout at Yankee Stadium, Ralph Houk, would have Mickey Mantle take on first base at points in his last few seasons. Davey Johnson eventually nudged a recalcitrant Cal Ripken from shortstop to third base. In this decade, Mike Piazza barely controlled his annoyance when he learned from beat reporters rather than the front office that Mets manager Art Howe wanted him to lay down his catcher’s mitt and get used to a first-baseman's glove.

The Piazza case became fodder for sports radio jocks and the blogosphere. A good thing they weren’t around five decades earlier, because behind the scenes DiMaggio was fielding Stengel’s maneuver with far less aplomb than he had displayed with booming line drives that invariably ended up in his glove.

* The move brought to the fore his growing dislike of Stengel. Sure, the manager had been deferential the year before with DiMaggio, Henrich, Phil Rizzuto, and the other vets when he thought he needed them. But his famous comment after his World Series victory—“I couldn’t have done it without my players”—rankled DiMaggio.

* Stengel didn’t meet DiMaggio man to man beforehand to discuss it. Perhaps the manager sensed that his superstar was casting a jaundiced eye in his direction, because he decided to enlist someone else to secure his cooperation: Yankee co-owner Dan Topping. If Stengel was right about one element in this strategy—Topping was so charming that DiMaggio wouldn’t bite his head off for even broaching the idea with him—he was wrong about another: it only decreased DiMaggio’s disaffection with Stengel, for not giving him the courtesy of discussing this face to face.

* DiMaggio had no time to prepare for the move. The Henrich-Collins situation, occurring in the middle of a season—and another pennant race (this time with the Detroit Tigers)—was, admittedly, inopportune for Stengel. But it also meant that DiMaggio didn’t have time to master this new position—and, at this stage of his career, relying on knowledge of the pitch, wind conditions, etc. was more essential to DiMaggio in the field than it ever was. It’s impossible to convey just how perfectionist DiMaggio was, just how much he hated not merely making a mistake but even looking less than graceful.

And that’s what happened in the one game he ever played at first base, a 7-2 loss. The final box score did not show an error on his part, but on one particular play he lost his footing and ended up in the dirt, looking bad.

DiMaggio’s horror was so self-evident that Stengel never repeated the experiment. Another Yankee injury—this time, to rightfielder Hank Bauer—allowed the manager a face-saving maneuver by claiming that plugging the hole in the outfield was even more crucial than the one at first base. (Henrich’s return from the injured list to first base also helped immensely.)

But Stengel wasn’t done with wounding DiMaggio’s pride. No matter how incensed Alex Rodriguez might have felt by being dropped from cleanup to eighth by Joe Torre in the playoffs several years ago, that was nothing compared with DiMaggio’s deep annoyance when his batting slump led Stengel to have his star batting fifth instead of cleanup, a spot the slugger had taken over from an ailing Lou Gehrig 11 years before.

The last straw, though, might have been an even riskier move on Stengel’s part: when DiMaggio’s hitting woes persisted, the manager benched him for a few days—again, without talking about it with him first.

When he came back to the lineup, DiMaggio—whether from rest, rage or both—experienced a rejuvenation at the plate, batting .370 for the rest of the year, giving him a .301 batting average, 32 homers, 114 runs, and 122 RBIs for the season, and helping the Yankees win their second World Series in a row. The next year, as Stengel had—correctly—feared, physical woes really took a toll on the batting statistics that gave DiMaggio so much pride.

The weight of expectations—from teammates who idolized him (even as, they frankly admitted, they didn’t understand him), from the media who made him into an American hero, and most of all, from the inner work ethic that wouldn’t allow him to accept less than perfection—was enormous for DiMaggio to carry. But he left the game a winner, as few before or since have been: In 13 seasons, he led the Bronx Bombers to 10 pennants and nine World Series victories. One speculates how much more he could have accomplished if he had even a few more healthy years, as Stengel had hoped. But what he did, in the relatively limited time he had in the game, was surely enough.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on the “Care of Freedom”)

“We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid.”—President Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), first inaugural address, January 20, 1953

Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, on “A Kind of Immortality”)

"The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality."—Attributed to John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), child of the new republic, diplomat, senator, secretary of state, President, congressman, lover of liberty, “Old Man Eloquent”
(Thanks to my friend Brian—who has influenced more people than he’ll ever realize—for the suggestion)