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Lou Gehrig and Creating Distance

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Video: Gehrig’s farewell

Actual, though partial, footage of Lou Gehrig’s farewell address.

 

I am a member of a movie club on Facebook, and in anticipation of the new Jackie Robinson film, 42, the club is watching a slew of nonfiction baseball movies. I recently took some time to watch The Pride of the Yankees, a 1942 film about New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, who died in 1941 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), now commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

What surprised me most was that the film reached the theaters almost a year to the day after Gehrig’s death. This is not uncommon for many biopics (think Ray or Michael Jackson’s This Is It for recent examples), but since Gehrig died so young and so many characters in the film were still alive (fellow former Yankees including Babe Ruth actually played themselves in the film), I believe the film suffered.

Compelling details from Gehrig’s life disappeared from the story. There is no mention of his father’s alcoholism. The Yankees clubhouse engages in innocent, childish frivolities. His run-in with NCAA regulations received no mention. And most strange to me: The writers changed the truth about his diagnosis (the movie has him hiding the diagnosis from his wife, Eleanor, but in reality the opposite occurred).

It was not just that they changed details about his life — alterations are necessary when transmuting real life into an artistic medium. No, what bothered me the most was that they changed reality in favor of milquetoast conflicts and melodrama.

A Rejection, Then a Masterpiece

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When you are trying to get your work published, especially if you receive rejections in the process, it’s difficult to take comfort in the fact that even books we now consider classics, including Animal Farm, Lolita, Moby Dick and Catch 22, were once rejected. What makes it difficult is the fact that creative writing, and by extension, publishing, is not an exact science. What one publisher may consider unpublishable, another may embrace. In listening to a number of editors and publishers, I have heard various factors cited as the reason manuscripts get rejected.

Aside work that is certifiably below par, books can be rejected for being too long or too short, too controversial or too safe, too predictable or too dubious—

Publishers can also reject work because it doesn’t suit their sensitivity, the theme is overdone, the writer is unknown, it’s too mainstream, or in the case of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, it’s too different.

I zero in on The Bone People because I find the story behind its publishing interesting. In the preface to the first edition, Hulme says, “… I was going to embalm the whole thing in a block of Perspex when the first three publishers turned it down … it was too large, too unwieldy, too different…”  This was after Hulme had spent 12 years working on it. In 1984, a Spiral Collective, a New Zealand feminist group, published it. The book went on to win the Pegasus Prize for Literature as well as the Booker Prize.

Today, a good 30 years later, The Bone People, this long, different, and difficult-to-categorize book is among the most discoursed literary works in MFA and other literature programs.

It makes for a great story, but does it make rejection any easier? Probably not.

Image credit: Typing Text by Francisco Farias Jr

Quitting Never Occurred to Us

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“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” -Mother Teresa

We live in a world of sci-fi robot airplanes ripping human beings to shreds; deforestation; climate change; amoral banking hives that deprive the majority while living in gaudy excess; global militant violence and genocide. All this, and still we must come to terms with the brevity of our own inhale of everything that is and was and will be, this thing called life.  In response to the current state of affairs on planet Earth, I don’t find cynicism wholly inappropriate.

So when Philip Roth indirectly announced his retirement from writing to debut novelist Julian Tepper by telling Tepper to quit writing, because it was “[j]ust torture,” it didn’t surprise me that Roth would say such a thing.

In a torturous existence, why are writers willfully torturing themselves for infinitesimal gain?

By now it’s clear that I’m not a very successful optimist.  But this is precisely why a positive voice–as unsettlingly cheerful as we may find it–can be so vital for the pessimists and cynics, if only for the sake of a balanced perspective.

Enter Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Gilbert’s response to Roth, essentially, was: Get over yourself.

George Saunders on Voice and Voices

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George Saunders, perhaps the most important living short story writer in the English language, served as a guest lecturer during the Tampa MFA program in the June 2012 residency, and as a component of his visitation, he delighted fans and acolytes alike with a reading of a few of his short stories.

After the readings, which were quite the highlight of the residency period, one of my colleagues mused: “Perhaps I would not have liked that particular story so much if he had not been reading it.”

Inside the Notebook

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WaltWhitman-Camden1891

It is typically easy to spot the writer on any given park bench. They sit lost in thought – looking either at the far tree line or into the pages of notebook as they scribble. A notebook is an invaluable device for a poet; most of us carry one. They serve as a place to record observations on the concrete world, capture stream-of-consciousness, or a delightful word, and the occasional salsa recipe.

Yesterday, in what began as a Google–search for “a poet’s notebook,” I happened upon several (now published) personal notebooks by famous writers, including a fascinating look inside Walt Whitman’s notebook. In this little book, Whitman began an on-going conversation with Abraham Lincoln, which later fueled inspiration for several famous poems, such as the venerated “WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D.”

By these accounts, Whitman and Lincoln never spoke to one another in real life, yet when Lincoln appeared on the national stage, Whitman was intrigued. Maybe even obsessed.

Sometime during the late fall or winter of 1860-61, Walt Whitman began an imaginary conversation with Abraham Lincoln that would continue for decades to come, inspiring several of the most famous poems in American literature. The poet began his dialogue with the president-elect “as in a dream.” — ADAM GOODHEART

In reading through Whitman’s notebook, there are passages that reflect his thoughts on political and philosophical divisions that were splitting apart the nation. And personal observations like a journal entry in 1863 where the poet wrote of the “deep latent sadness” in the President’s face as he witnessed Lincoln riding past.

Also inside Whitman’s notebook, there is imagery of storms and it’s tossings of the ship of state, strongly suggestive of Whitman’s thoughts about Lincoln. Easy to see in these brief fragments a foreshadowing of Whitman’s much later depiction, “O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN,” of the martyred Lincoln as captain of a ship.

I found this a very curious companionship and subject matter for a poet’s notebook, as Adam Goodheart notes, “A poet’s job is to speak the truth; a politician’s is … well, not to.”

There is a different sort of reveal and depth of personal thought within the intimate pages of Whitman’s notebook. Unpolished, uncensored, and untethered observations; everything a writer can turn back to for inspiration.

This week, carry a notebook if you don’t already. And prepare for that day when readers want to see your half-formed thoughts in addition to your crafted writings.