Dr. Zhivago

Twenty four below and Dr. Zhivago abandons the city for the ice palace in the country. He and Lara know their time time is limited before the Bolsheviks come for them. I throw another log on the fire and stare out into the moonlit snow. Twenty four below and another million people will lose their homes this month. Zhivago and Lara enter Varekeno and find part of the old summer home where they can stay. Zhivago sees a table where he can write his poetry. He runs his finger through the dust and nods. "Yes this will do." The moon pearls the snow outside my window and the fire flickers as wars rage and banks fail. Lara and Zhivago sleep under animal skins and then he rises and lights his candle. Dr. Zhivago carefully takes out his pen and paper and slowly begins to write. He looks out the window across the Siberian landscape, seeing nothing but snow and ice under a blue moon. Wolves howl and he stares out into the darkness. We see the small candle from outside through the frosted window. The Russian Revolution has decimated the country and people live in fear for their lives. The houses around me are all dark. You don't' see people in this kind of cold, in these times, just homes belching steam. The middle class slumbers on under their increasing strain. Lara rises and touches Zhivago's shoulder as the wolves howl again. She cries out, "Oh...this is a terrible terrible time to be alive Uri..." Soon the Bolsheviks will come and they will be parted forever. Twenty four below and I slip down in front of the keyboard. The wind passes through the window as an icy hand. The wolves howl.

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Hemingway's Lost Short Story

You may or my not have heard about Hemingway's lost short story. The son of a friend apparently had been holding onto the story for all these years. Seems Hemingway in 1925 wrote this satire on bull fighting and sent it to this friend. Now it has come back into the limelight and the Hemingway estate does not want it published. It will be sold at Christies for about eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand dollars for a short story at a time when you couldn't' give away a short story. The form is basically dead. The heyday of the short story was in Hemingway's time when "slicks" like the Saturday Evening Post paid as much as four thousand dollars a story. In todays dollars, probably like twenty thousand, maybe more. Hemingway of course made his mark with the short story. In Our Time was a collection of stories that brought him to the attention of Max Perkins at Scribners. You know the rest of the story. So here we are in 2009 where a short story is discovered and people are willing to pay almost twenty thousand dollars for something the Hemingway estate deems unworthy of Ernest. As a writer I can only envy those days when the written word was held in such high esteem that a short story was like a movie today. Those writers were the celebs of their time, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos. Apparently the story spoofs bull fighting, something Hemingway held in high esteem, but others do not want to see the light of day. It is interesting that the Hemingway short story will get about what it would have in 1925 dollars. I guess some writers really are timeless.

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Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

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http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

The Call of Fame

The phone rings. I glance at the clock. Six A.M.
"Hello," I mumbled groggily."Mr. Hazelgrove, sir! I know it's early, but have you seen the paper?"
I stare at the ceiling with sleep circling somewhere above."No," I mumble."Sir," this very agitated voice continues. "You are PAGE ONE in the Chicago Tribune!""Page One," I repeat, sitting up. "YES SIR! This is John Tabot from Fox 32 television and we were wondering, sir, if you would consider being on the morning show?"
I hold my head, fog clearing by the second. "When?"
"This morning, sir! We have a crew standing by that can meet you at the attic, and we'll broadcast live! Can you meet us at 7?""I'll be there."I hang up the phone and run to the bathroom. My wife has just emerged from the shadow."That was Fox 32...They saw the Tribune article and want me live TV from Hemingway's attic," I say breathlessly."I'll watch the baby, "she says before I can ask.
Now I'm excited. It has all the earmarks. Awaked by a producer who wants me on television. I was being, dare I say, discovered! That was the way it always was, wasn't it? The writer from nowhere submits the dogeared manuscript to the sleepy editor and genius is discoveredon a nondescript morning. Wasn't that the way it happened to Fitzgerald and Hemingway? Waking one morning to find that and fortune hadknocked on their doors. I had opened that door many times to find no one there.



In the early part of the century, Fitzgerald was pulled from anuncertain career in advertising and Hemingway rescued from obscurity on Paris's Left Bank y the legendary editor Max Perkins. Their books published , the writers were left to explore the world. Fitzgerald went on a 10 year party from New York to Paris to Switzerland and back to New York. Hemingway drained absinthefrom cafes in Paris, then on Africa, the Germans, loyalist Spain, and basically had a hell of a time while his books propelled him on. That was the fare modern writers grew up hearing. That was the way it was then. Now lets take a modern writer such as myself. After more than 100 rejection letters, I found a printer in Chicago who would bring out my first novel. A printer. Max Perkins had changed vocations. My book, RIPPLES, recieved critical praise. I kept my job on the night shift in a bakery. My second book, armed with the good review of first, was roundly rejected again. I went back to the printer. My second go round started with a starred review from Publishers Weekly for Tobacco Sticks. After 10 years publishers came knocking, I sold the paperback rights, the foreign rights, Book of the Month Club rights, even the movie rights. I recieved money. it was time to explore the world as my predecessors had and reap forturnes bounty. But it is the late 20th century. Things change. Oh, it was time to hit the road alright. Muncie Indianna was where I started with a book signing. Then I was off to the South , pushing my novel in the area where it would be read, talking to newspapers, TV stations and radio along the way. This was gritty hard work. Not even remotely glamourous. Where the hell were the book parties? The tete-a-tetes on the Left Bank? The drunken brawls of the success in the Plaza Hotel?
The literary author of today must write what he or she believes in or perish. It is the only way one can stay with it. The money is scant for so long, the work outrageous, the future uncertain. But the work drives one. The novel becomes a grail that, like your children, you will do anything for. In todays mass culture the task is titanic. To quote a rejection letter from an agent, "You write well, but unfortunately, seriel sex muders are what is selling. Keep at it. Quietly good books get published."
Still, one cannot help but feel a little like the huckster. Wasn'ttalent supposed to be discovered? Wasn't a book supposed to catch fire like a lightning storm in a dry forest? It seems unnatural to fight for something that should be natural. Surely the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald can't be completely gone. But now I'm writing in Hemingway's attic and the paperback of TOBACCO STICKS is just out. I dress quickly because fame has finally knocked on my door. I am about to leave when the phone rings.
"Mr. Hazelgrove, sir, this is John Tabot the producer at Fox 32.
"Yes, I'm on my way.""Yes sir, well...there is a fire on the west side and our crew has been called away...so we're going to have to wait on this.""I see," I say slowly.
"But listen, we can do this sometime in the future...Let me know if you get in PEOPLE magazine and we'll do it for sure."
I hang up the phone. Fame, that willowing ghost had slipped away again. I look at the front door then open it. There is the dewy morning and the sun on the porch. I close the door slowly and stand there. Maybe it was my imagination, but I swear I heard someone knocking.

The Great Quiet of Hemingway's Attic

These days, there is Marcelline's old steamer trunk, a wine bottle from Spain, a cello, two wrought-iron gas stanchions from the late 19th century and National Geographics from 1912, 1915, and 1918 complete with scribbling on the pages from Ernest's father, or perhaps from Ernest himself. There are two small lithographs from 1945 advertising bullfights in Spanish, parts of a Victorian bed and a crib, as well as boxes and boxes of bronze heads that look curiously like the great writer, marked "Hemingway Busts." There are doors propped up that are from the days when a young Ernest Hemingway burst through a screen door on a hot summer day in Oak Park. There's also the normal bric-a-brac of any attic at any time: a wrapped Christmas tree, ornaments, and sheets spread over nondescript boxes. But that is all that remains of the man and his era. The big adventure of the 20th century drew to a close and all those larger-than-life writers are making their exit along with it. I came up here to find the ghost of a man who did not grow up on television, a man for whom commerce was a necessary stream, not the flood we find ourselves in now.
I write on Marcelline's stremer trunk. She must have opened it many times while crossing the wide dark seas in the last adventure of our time. Marcelline would open her trunk and sit down to write in a room of wood paneling while the ocean liner crashed throught the stormy night. She may have felt the roll of the seas, and her one lamp was small in the baseless night as a yellow beacon of humanity against the black sea. There was no jet screaming overhead, no disembodied voice instructing her from afar. She was simply writing letters to her brother in Africa, Spain, Paris, and Key West. And while she sat with only the sounds of her pen scratching on paper and the distant howl of the ocean, she possessed what frustratingly eludes us now--the great quiet of the moment.
The trunk no longer makes voyages across seas to an old world. That world has come to rest here among the dusty rafters and the pattering of squirrels across the roof. My mind is not as hers. Mine is cluttered, over instructed, overfed. Flickering ghostly images crowd out the single moment, and at times there seem a hundred different voices competing for my attention.I realize now, that for all our progress, our technology, we still can't buy passage on that liner crossing the stormy seas of our dying tranquility.

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