Still on deadline (3 novels due like NOW… and I keep getting distracted by some film scripts and graphic novels that I’m always adding to), so haven’t done much but sit and write. This is what I’ve been listening to — pretty random mix, no special order, and I’ll often hear an artist in here and then decide to put their entire album on instead.
Use Somebody Kings of Leon
All I need Air
Clair de lune Debussy
Guaranteed Eddie Vedder
Paparazzi Lady GaGa
Sex On Fire Kings of Leon
High and Dry Radiohead
No Surprises Marissa Nadler
Best Friends Amy Winehouse
Bittersweet Symphany The Verve
We Are The People Empire Of The Sun
New York Eskimo Joe
Ragoo Kings of Leon
Till I Collapse Eminem
Foolish Games Jewel
Who Knew Pink
No Surprises Radiohead
Cry Me A River Michael Buble
Gloomy Sunday Heather Nova
Mr. Pitiful Matt Costa
9 Crimes Damien Rice
How To Save A Life The Fray
All I Need Radiohead
Breathe Me Sia
Electric Feel MGMT
Running up that Hill Placebo
Good Life (ft. T-Pain) Kanye West
sinnerman (felix da housecat mix) Nina Simone
Paranoid Android Sia
Beware Of The Boys (ft. Punjabi MC) Jay-Z
On Call Kings of Leon
Shadow Of The Day Linkin Park
Videotape Radiohead
Home (feat. Jay-Z) Kanye West
Falling Slowly Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
One U2
Love Stoned Justin Timberlake
Watch Over Me Bernard Fanning
Aint No Love Jay Z
I Want You Kings of Leon
The Last Day On Earth Kate Miller-Heidke
Elephant Damien Rice
Lucky Man The Verve
Somewhere Over The Rainbow Norah Jones
Night Drive Gotye
Let The Drummer Kick Citizen Cope
I Don’t Like Mondays Tori Amos
Nobody Sees Powderfinger
Everybody Hurts R.E.M
Walking On A Dream Empire Of The Sun
Blackout Muse
The Drugs Don’t Work The Verve
Breathe Me (Fourtet Remix) Sia
Every you every me(Single Mix) Placebo
Dream catch me Newton Faulkner
Signal Fire Snow Patrol
Heartbeats Jose González
Take A Bow Muse
Black Eyed Dog Nick Drake
Pruit Igoe & Prophecies The Philip Glass Ensemble
Last Request Paolo Nutini
Butterflies and Hurricanes Muse
Judas The Verve
I’m Yours Jason Mraz
blackbird Sarah McLachlan
Hallelujah Jeff Buckley
chocolate Snow Patrol
Time After Time (Acoustic) Norah Jones
Times They Are a Changing Bob Dylan
Pure Morning Placebo
The Sounds of Silence Simon and Garfunkel
In The House - In A Heartbeat John Murphy
99 Luft Balloons Nena
All I Wanna Do Is ‘Bang Bang’ And Take Your Moneys MIA
Mad World Gary Jules
Fix You Coldplay
The Metre Powderfinger
Fake Plastic Trees Radiohead
Rob Dougan - Clubbed To Death Rob Dougan
I’m busy wrapping up Fox 5 at the moment, so apologies for the delay in replying to the emails that have come through over Christmas — I’ll get to them asap. Thanks again for the feedback; it’s been great for me to hear how well LIQUID GOLD has been received… so far so good.
This year I have a busy publishing schedule. August we will see Fox 5 hit the shelves and it’s by far the fastest thriller I’ve written with the whole story fitting into a day so it can be pretty much read in real-time… if only the writing process went so quick. The first novel in my ALONE (teenage) series will appear in May, and its sequel comes out October. I’ve also contributed to some short story anthologies and serialised novels, starting with:
http://watchlistbook.net/
Happy reading, more soon.
JP.
My good American friend Allana Solo was around the other day so we recorded a little chat for this site, here’s the transcription:
AS: You wrote your teenage novel ALONE over a year ago?
JP: Yeah, and I’ve written one and a half Lachlan Fox novels since.
Is it still fresh in your memory?
Memory for me has nothing to do with time. It’s more about how and why I’ve stored the item away in my memory banks. When you have an emotional memory or sensational memory it comes back very, very easily if your mind is in tune, or your heart is in tune with a kind of call. Not to mention the trivial and mundane things that are vital to a writer, they’re an essential part of our toolbox. So I’d say I remember very precisely the writing process of ALONE, which was short but very intense. I remember the sensation of discovery, because it stays in you forever, especially with a character like Jesse. Even in FOX HUNT, the novel I wrote the first draft of in 2000 or 2001 or something like that — the dates I often can’t remember, nor the back-breaking hours at the keyboard tapping away to flesh out the scenes — it’s the story beats themselves I can remember, the breakthrough moments, and the magical sensation of creating that’s what’s always there. An afterglow of creation. It’s like each novel has been a little piece of my life, a little snapshot of where I was and how I saw the world in that moment.
Did you rely on your own memories form when you were Jesse’s age — he’s 16 in ALONE, yeah?
Yeah, and it was a great exercise in bringing back pivotal memories, a first kiss or learning to drive, that sort of thing. Something has to recall it, a trigger in every day life that may come along every now and then, but working on this book has been to immerse myself back in that time, with those moments. And I can say that being a teenager a second time around isn’t any easier — all the emotions are so raw and new intense in that period. You remember the sensation, even though there’s something that’s beyond time, and as an author that’s what you catch. You re-create the moment, because you catch with the sensation, with that sensory memory.
Where’s ALONE at now?
Editing the Australian edition, just about to send the finished draft out to my overseas literary and film agents. First project I’ve been involved with where publishers, film production companies, and book industry people have been asking well in advance about it — I mean, the book is still taking form in the editing room and I have all these people asking if they can read it — it’s crazy but I guess such early buzz is a good thing, and hopefully it translates to an appreciative audience.
And what else are you doing — Fox 5?
Getting there, don’t remind me! It’s a mind f*ck at the moment. Actually, that’s not true, it’s JUST these last few days broken through that awful stage where it takes on it’s own life and propels itself to the finish line.
Where’s it set?
France, mainly. It was going to be Istanbul and then somewhere on the Med coast but a character in the book who was a real life person compelled me to start off in France.
Real life?
Yeah, Paris is where he died, so it’s integral to the story.
Any clues as to who he was?
That would give away too much - this book ain’t out for about a year! How about this… he was a Russian diplomat, and his diary serves as a MacGuffin to the story - it’s what sets it in motion and propels them to the first act climax and to what they’re all really after. That said, perhaps what Fox has been really after is right next to him through the whole story…
Kate?
Yeah. It’s fun to write a love story over what is now a 3 book arc –
Separated by BLOOD OIL.
Exactly! Glad to see you’ve been paying attention.
And what’s this something that they’re after?
You won’t get it out of me today. Let’s just say it’s something key to the make up of America as we know it. I read a few good books on the history of the US and I’m always fascinated by the purchases and cessation of land that would eventually be the make up of the USA: California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada ceded from Mexico in 1848, Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 pretty much doubled the size of the US. So, somewhere in all that is a trilling tale, and that’s what I’m exploring through Fox now.
You’ve written about France before…
Yeah, a little bit in PATRIOT ACT. This time Paris is a central character.
What does the city mean to you?
I think you get attached to a place because you either have a personal history with it or you’re fascinated by it for some reason or other. You have memories with it, thoughts that may be yours or someone else’s, some kind of ideal of what it could be like. Paris has plenty of such thoughts and memories for me. Going back to Jesse’s teenage story and beyond, whether it’s the first kiss, or the first split-up, or the first betrayal, the first job… you remember them as turning points somehow. And Paris, or any city where you are when you are going through those things, becomes sort of the map of your heart. And so as I’m writing, I’m in tune with those memories, with those sensations. This time for Fox it’s as much a love story as it is a race against the clock for America’s — the whole book fits neatly into a single, frenetic, day.
So you’re saying that in your head there’s an emotional map of a city that overlaps with the street map?
Yeah. While I’m writing I have street maps of Paris and France and of course Google maps too — mine’s full of little pins on the map and highlighted routes where they’re going, all locations with several meanings — one of which is the Fox/Kate love story.
How do you fell about writing about overseas settings, like Paris or New York?
I believe you need distance to write about somewhere, to see it more precisely, and be interested in writing about it. I remember a quote from Victor Hugo, which I think about from time to time although I may have bastardised it a little: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong, but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” Having experienced the whole world as a foreign land I occasionally want to settle, and while I feel at home here in or near Melbourne I also have that feeling in New York, and France and Italy have some places that I find very appealing.
Through Fox and Jesse they see these places in a similar fashion to how I see them. I wanted full involvement with the world, in some way, and the ability to cease observing from time to time and this, it seemed to me, required a solid footing geographically, this required belonging. And what belonging seemed to mean was perceiving oneself as so intrinsically a part of something — village, nation, community — that to be constantly wondering about it would be like questioning the necessity of your heart. I’m not sure if that’s intrinsically a guy thing or not? Anyway, in leaving the US, Fox leaves a place in which had begun to reconcile some of the relationships between himself and a place. Fox has spent a few years now as a foreigner. Granted, being Australian in the United States is not as strange as being an Aussie in Russia, or in the mountains of Afghanistan, but it does entail constantly being reminded of one’s origins and of one’s foreignness. And to this extent one has to make oneself feel at home whereas when you are a native, you are at home, you don’t have to contemplate your being quite so much, you don’t have to act like a one-man country, an island nation, a self-governing overseas dominion.
Just for one day?
Fox 5 spans one day, but he’s been in country a little longer, with Kate and Al. By then end of the book… he may not return to New York.
Got a title?
Yes, but it’s secret for now. Actually, it has ’secret’ in the three work title. That’s all you get.
So at the end of LIQUID GOLD, when Fox is on his on his BMW motorbike and rides off into the sunset –
Don’t give the ending away!
Readers will know that he lives — you’re writing the sequel. Anyway, he’s riding off and these bad guys in Umbra are out there looking for him and Kate and their man Babich — what happens with that?
That all comes to a head, in Paris. I thought about having Fox squeeze in a little hiatus from saving the world, you know, him and his bike headed west living the Easy Rider life, the life of outlaws, freedom, dust and bourbon. The America of Brando, of Jim Morrison and Dennis Hopper; the America of the sixties and seventies, of movie posters on adolescent bedroom walls. It was tempting to put a little break in there, maybe have it flashback in the book or referenced or something, and for me it was tempting because like so much of Fox’s adventures it contrasts nicely to my experience my experiences: of never-ending graduate school, of home ownership and taxes and jobs involving desks and coffee and consumer concerns. Yeah, I’ve been my own nation the past four or so years as a full-time novelist, but I’m still surrounded by bluepill-popping people who have traded in their version of an Australian or American dream for a reality more akin to those people plugged into The Matrix. Becoming a novelist I took that red pill and I’m discovering with every page I write just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
But every now and then, man, if only you’d taken that bluepill!
Oh yeah, the blissful ignorance of illusion versus embracing the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, truth of reality of the redpill! But I was too aware, have been forever, that I want to know more and do more. Novels and the post-grad study are my exploration for now. Fox lives in the States but it’s not America as increasingly defined by Gap or Starbucks, by Idol and 2 1/2 Men, the America of commuters, computers, and the therapy and firearms to make it all bearable. He’s his own island (hence he literally moved from Christmas Island when we first met him way back when, and now that larger island of Manhattan… maybe he’ll end up home one day a long time from now, in that big island content of Australia) and though he’s surrounded by those inside the white-collar gilded cage, the urban middle class America where people were tied to desks and tied down by the debt, he’s been surrounded by so much closeness to death that he’s attune to life in a way that’s beyond most of us. Too may of us in America or in our Little America of Australia have lost sight of that adventure. That said, I think this touches on something that has made the Fox books so successful — that the issues are so readily identifiable to the world around us and Fox gets to do and say things that we want someone out there doing as we maybe feel that our government isn’t doing it for us or because we’ve lost some confidence in our nation’s military and intelligence capabilities. I think this is ultimate strength of Fox series, in terms of what sets it apart from the other thrillers out there, that they reside in the sense that the story really exists — we have a real identifiable man being chased while he’s pursuing some illusive truth that’s important to all of us — with a strong contemporary edge, it’s all happening on the page in a world with stories that seem like they’re ripped from tomorrow’s actual headlines.
Who’s his closest literary antecedent?
He has a few. Way back in high school Henry Lawson’s Jack Mitchell provided a skeleton for his character –
You a Lawson fan?
No. Barbara Baynton is my Aussie lit hero, she was just a phenomenal writer, really the writer of that time, but back to Fox!
Ok.
So, Mitchell because he was a successful persona rather than a fully-developed character, and I love that aspect or writing where the reader creates a bit of their own character and story — it helps us put some of ourselves in the character’s shoes.
You give them just enough.
Yeah. So, Mitchell, like Fox, is a man on his own except when he finds a mate to travel with — he’s firmly related to the Romantic outcast figure of The Wanderer. Aragorn is another one. Fox kind of I plays it like a guy who is beating himself up a lot, and as capable as he is, it’s like he’s almost trying to ignore every aspect of the confident hero of the story — he’s always searching for some form of identify and belonging, some kind of redemption from and for himself and atonement for his sins. Other characters that were influential for Fox were Siddhartha (and Govinda for Al Gammaldi), and Rorschach from Watchmen. In the tradition of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan, and Dirk Pitt, Lachlan Fox has a short-lived military background as it gives him a handy skill set.
The protagonist in ALONE, Jesse, has a few literary models and his closest literary parentage would probably be Frodo.
That’s interesting…
I can’t explain that further as it may give away too much of where his character goes in future books.
Back to your post grad stuff –
I’ve just taken six months leave from my PhD to write my next 3 novels. So back to the books come April 2010, and I’ll wrap it up next year.
Right. After completing your M.A., you did some teaching at university in what, creative writing?
Kind of. I did indeed teach a couple classes per semester for a few years, in the M.A. Writing course that I completed with high honours –
Summa cum laude.
We’re not that big on Latin in Aus, but yeah, I guess that’s right. Anyway, this Masters degree is in ‘writing’ rather than ‘creative writing’, so it was a broad coanvas with as much or more non-fiction (journalism, writing history, essay writing, etc) content as fiction (scripts, prose, etc). The M.A. was via coursework, not by thesis.
So the goal is not to produce a novel at the end of it.
Correct. Weekly work, say an essay in response to the lecture material and tute question, and then a major assignment for each subject at the end of the 12 week semester.
Dare I ask, why write thrillers?
I’ve answered this so many times already… ‘thriller’ is such a loose term, and critics and others will apply it to anything that’s exciting. You have to work on each scene and each story beat on so many textual levels, and I love that aspect. It’s vital that the thriller writer knows what he or she is doing and has a clear image of what they’re trying to achieve — I always know the sense of emotions I want to elicit in the climax and coda. The thriller is based upon a relationship between a protagonist and an antagonist, in which the protagonist is somehow the victim of this villain — we always work towards that obligatory scene where the protag has to face off the antag. I love exploring themes and issues and people involved — human beings are angel and devil, and a most are a perfect balance of the two, and novels can look deeply into these extremes. With human beings you never know from one day to the next which you’re going to get: on Monday they build Notre Dame cathedral and on Tuesday, Auschwitz, and which is it going to be? And you only need to pick up a newspaper from one day to the next, and you see this constant manifestation of the deep evil in human beings. And what all of us try to do, of course, is deny it exists in us. Storytelling, when it is art, is not about the middle ground of human experience, we go through the middle ground of human experience to get to where we’re going, and where we’re going is to a story climax that will be at the limit of human experience. And art, which has the power to illuminate these dark corners of human nature, can make us understand that it’s us, and it’s in our nature. It doesn’t mean that we’re evil ourselves, that we’re going to be overcome by our own evil nature, but it’s always there, and the power is there, and as long as we understand that and are aware of it, then we can keep ourselves in balance and go round being a decent human being. Fox has that struggle on a daily basis but I like to think I’m painting a picture of a guy who’s getting it together more and more with every outing.
Will you always write contemporary settings?
For now that’s what interests me. Director Paul Greengrass said of contemporary relevance: “Film shouldn’t be disenfranchised from the national conversation. It is never too soon for cinema to engage with events that shape our lives.” I feel exactly the same of novels: they are part of our greater discussion as a society, people read them and talk about them and study them for good reasons.
You must do so much research.
Yes but that’s boring to talk about. I read a lot, I talk to plenty of people, I travel with my eyes open. I take plenty of notes. That’s the short version.
Okay, what about weaponry?
Research-wise? Well, I make sure I have the rights units, say the FBI’s HRT or the Secret Service guys or 10th Mountain, using the right gear.
I noticed Fox used an FN Five-Seven pistol in the last book –
Or was it BLOOD OIL?
I think it was LIQUID GOLD.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a gun at all in that book.
Shouldn’t you know these details?
You’d think. The FN is a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that has armour-piercing capabilities because of the unique type of round it fires. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven in the bloodbath at the Texas military base. Hasan had bought the weapon legally at a gun store close to Fort Hood in August and practiced at a nearby shooting range. Terrible.
Should those weapons be banned?
For civilian use, yes. What’s the need? You’re minding your own business and come up against a guy who’s wearing body armour, you’re in more trouble than an FN pistol can get you out of.
Okay. You’ve written a bit since the last couple Fox books… I see you have a whole shelf dedicated to short story anthologies you’ve been published in over the years.
Yeah, and the beauty is that I’ve had maybe eight short stories published but some have appeared in five or six books, so it looks like more work than it is! I only write two short stories per year — they take too long. There’s this great line and I forget who wrote it, maybe Hemingway or Twain, but he wrote a letter to a friend and prefaced or ended it by the line: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
If only we had more time to chat…
True, but I’ve got some books to write.
Time to reveal that project I was involved with… THE COPPER BRACELET - the sequel to the Audiobook of the Year, THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT – is coming Oct. 29! If you can’t wait, you can download the first chapter for free right now. Just go to www.audible.com/copper (Registration required. No credit card needed.)
Sixteen of the world’s greatest thriller writers collaborated on The Copper Bracelet. Once again, as he did with The Chopin Manuscript, Jeffery Deaver wrote the first chapter. Then, each successive author wrote a chapter in turn, finally returning it to Deaver to complete this thrilling sequel.
A peaceful picnic in the French countryside explodes in violence. A mysterious assassin hisses a deadly threat. And events are set in motion that could propel India and Pakistan down the road to nuclear confrontation.
Two years after the events of the “Audiobook of the Year” The Chopin Manuscript, former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton and his Volunteers once again must crack a secretive conspiracy that not only threatens their lives, but the stability of the world. Their race against time will take them from London to the U.S. to Russia and beyond. And at the heart of it all is one question: what is the secret of the Copper Bracelet?
We wrote the book last summer (well, it was summer for me, winter for the other novelists involved) and it was my job to put together the penultimate chapter. It’s a fun read, and it’s first coming out as an audio book, narrated by Alfred Molina, and then as a published book titled WATCHLIST in January 2010.
The Copper Bracelet was written by:
Jeffery Deaver
Gayle Lynds
David Hewson
Jim Fusilli
John Gilstrap
Joseph Finder
Lisa Scottoline
David Corbett
Linda Barnes
Jenny Siler
David Liss
P.J. Parrish
Brett Battles
Lee Child
Jon Land
James Phelan
LIQUID GOLD:
The first fan-mails for LIQUID GOLD are in and they’ve been great — my thanks to those who took the time to send in feedback. I’m writing the fifth Lachlan Fox thriller at the moment. It concludes a three-book arc started in BLOOD OIL, where Fox finds himself up against UMBRA. It’s heaps of fun dipping back into this world that has really taken on a life of its own, especially so after several years of having these characters in my head and on the page. There’re always a few new characters in each book, and keep your eyes peeled in LIQUID GOLD for Art Kneeshaw and James Riley, both characters based in part on real people who in 2008 bought the naming rights at auction to help charities of the Fight Cancer Foundation. I do this with two characters in each book, and I’m currently working on where to fit in the next couple…
ALONE:
My first teenage novel, ALONE, is published here in Australia in May 2010 and I’ll start editing that soon. I wrote a novel for a teen audience because I’ve always wanted to create something that had a special story to tell to that age group. It’s such a formative time — it’s an age when you’re discovering and connecting with emotions and the world in new and extreme ways — and most of my favourite songs, films and books I discovered when I was 15 and 16. This first novel is in essence a story about identity, and by the end it leaves us with the sense that no matter what’s going on and no matter where you are, you’re never really alone. The subsequent books look at the wider world around our protagonist, so that by the end of book 3, where our lens has been getting wider and wider, we can decide for ourselves what has taken place and what it all might mean — for our characters, for the world around them, and for us. Like the Jason Bourne movies, the three parts to the ALONE series build on one-another to reach a point where our character (and readers) will finally learn the truth - and we empahtise in the feelings of what that really means.
I took plenty of risks writing it but then that comes with the territory of honest writing; it’s a story that I had to tell and I went into it knowing that its style and content is fresh and unique. It owes as much to THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Anne Frank), as it does to novels such as LIFE OF PI, ENDER’S GAME, SIDDHARTHA, THE LAST MAN, and THE ROAD (as Cormac McCarthy said: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books… The novel
depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”). Prior to putting pen to paper I had some meetings with publishers, and while I’m sure they would have been happy to publish something that was safer to define (say, a Lachlan Fox-type thriller series for teenagers) this was the story I just had to tell. There’s something extremely fulfilling about charting new creative territory and I think that the take I took on a post-apocalyptic scenario was a bold move — so bold, I was worried I couldn’t pull-off the ending of the first book but I soldiered on in a feverish writing frenzy… and discovered that, with a lot of effort, the ending did work. Advance readers I trust have loved what I created and they’ve all said that my passion for the story has come across — many have asked if the apocalyptic scenario in New York was in reference to the collapse of the global financial system, and a couple thought it was swine-flu related, and maybe they’re all right. What I love about the story is that people will all take something different from it (much like my appreciation of Radiohead’s songs, I’d rather they resonated with my own interpretation). That’s what I dig about writing. Good fiction doesn’t tell you what to think or how to think. But it certainly encourages you to think and feel something. I could tell readers what I think the story of ALONE is about, but the right answer is what the audience thinks. As an author, when you go into a project knowing you have a unique vision of story you just have to tell, you have to trust that your passion and drive will carry you through to the end. With ALONE I enjoyed every minute of creating it and I can’t wait to write the sequels and explore the hows and whys of this new world.
In the meantime I’m lucky enough to be exploring what happens to Fox post-LIQUID GOLD, and THAT’s the story that’s exciting me today. So, back to the deadlines and back to what I love most: taking risks.
Cheers,
jp.
My first published book, “Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame” (my proposed title was “The Australian Writer’s Desk’… John Wiley and Sons knew better) was a series of 21 interviews with authors and publishing industry peeps. Each week I’ll start adding samples of each interview on this site.
That idea for that book came from the Paris Review author interviews, as well as some conducted by the New York Times. Here’ s a sample from the NYT’s Writer’s on Writing (http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Writing-Collected-Essays-Times/dp/0805070850), which includes the impressive and interesting Susan Sontag on reading and writing.
I agree with her here, mostly. For me, writing fiction is getting easier with each book. Indeed, it took me my first three novels to realise that I could actually do this. Anyway, I’m sure Susan is up there somewhere, enjoying a continuous unexhausted reading. Enjoy:
New York Times
August 4, 2009 (originally from 2000)
Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed.
Reading novels seems to me such a normal activity, while writing them is such an odd thing to do. . . . At least so I think until I remind myself how firmly the two are related. (No armored generalities here. Just a few remarks.)
First, because to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written and see if it’s O.K. and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it - once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,” Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading.
But is what you’ve written straight off never all right? Yes, sometimes even better than all right. And that only suggests, to this novelist at any rate, that with a closer look, or voicing aloud - that is, another reading - it might be better still. I’m not saying that the writer has to fret and sweat to produce something good.
“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” said Dr. Johnson, and the maxim seems as remote from contemporary taste as its author. Surely, much that is written without effort gives a great deal of pleasure.
No, the question is not the judgment of readers - who may well prefer a writer’s more spontaneous, less elaborated work - but a sentiment of writers, those professionals of dissatisfaction. You think, “If I can get it to this point the first go around, without too much struggle, couldn’t it be better still?”
And though the rewriting - and the rereading - sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of “literature” in your head, is formidable, intimidating. A plunge in an icy lake. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit.
Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be - what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. You read the sentences over and over. Is this the book I’m writing? Is this all?
Or let’s say it’s going well; for it does go well, sometimes. (If it didn’t, some of the time, you’d go crazy.) There you are, and even if you are the slowest of scribes and the worst of touch typists, a trail of words is getting laid down, and you want to keep going; and then you reread it. Perhaps you don’t dare to be satisfied, but at the same time you like what you’ve written. You find yourself taking pleasure - a reader’s pleasure - in what’s there on the page.
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom. To be strict without being too self-excoriating. Not stopping too often to reread. Allowing yourself, when you dare to think it’s going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along. No waiting for inspiration’s shove.
Blind writers can never reread what they dictate. Perhaps this matters less for poets, who often do most of their writing in their head before setting anything down on paper. (Poets live by the ear much more than prose writers do.) And not being able to see doesn’t mean that one doesn’t make revisions. Don’t we imagine that Milton’s daughters, at the end of each day of the dictation of “Paradise Lost,” read it all back to their father aloud and then took down his corrections?
But prose writers, who work in a lumberyard of words, can’t hold it all in their heads. They need to see what they’ve written. Even those writers who seem most forthcoming, prolific, must feel this. (Thus Sartre announced, when he went blind, that his writing days were over.) Think of portly, venerable Henry James pacing up and down in a room in Lamb House composing “The Golden Bowl” aloud to a secretary. Leaving aside the difficulty of imagining how James’s late prose could have been dictated at all, much less to the racket made by a Remington typewriter circa 1900, don’t we assume that James reread what had been typed and was lavish with his corrections?
When I became, again, a cancer patient two years ago and had to break off work on the nearly finished “In America,” a kind friend in Los Angeles, knowing my despair and fear that now I’d never finish it, offered to take a leave from his job and come to New York and stay with me as long as needed, to take down my dictation of the rest of the novel. True, the first eight chapters were done (that is, rewritten and reread many times), and I’d begun the next-to-last chapter, and I did feel I had the arc of those last two chapters entirely in my head. And yet, and yet, I had to refuse his touching, generous offer.
It wasn’t just that I was already too befuddled by a drastic chemo cocktail and lots of painkillers to remember what I was planning to write. I had to be able to see what I wrote, not just hear it. I had to be able to reread.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write - and rereading the beloved books of the past - constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration.
Of course, not all writers will admit this. I remember once saying something to V. S. Naipaul about a 19th-century English novel I loved, a very well-known novel that I assumed he, like everyone I knew who cared for literature, admired as I did. But no, he’d not read it, he said, and seeing the shadow of surprise on my face, added sternly, “Susan, I’m a writer, not a reader.”
Many writers who are no longer young claim, for various reasons, to read very little, indeed, to find reading and writing in some sense incompatible. Perhaps, for some writers, they are. It’s not for me to judge. If the reason is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry. If the reason is lack of time - there are only so many hours in the day, and those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one could be writing - then this is an asceticism to which I don’t aspire.
Losing yourself in a book, the old phrase, is not an idle fantasy but an addictive, model reality. Virginia Woolf famously said in a letter, “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” Surely the heavenly part is that - again, Woolf’s words - “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” Unfortunately, we never do lose the ego, any more than we can step over our own feet. But that disembodied rapture, reading, is trancelike enough to make us feel ego-less.
Like reading, rapturous reading, writing fiction - inhabiting other selves - feels like losing yourself, too.
Everybody likes to think now that writing is just a form of self-regard. Also called self-expression. As we’re no longer supposed to be capable of authentically altruistic feelings, we’re not supposed to be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves.
But that’s not true. William Trevor speaks of the boldness of the nonautobiographical imagination. Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.
Needless to say, I lend bits of myself to all my characters. When, in “In America,” my immigrants from Poland reach Southern California - they’re just outside the village of Anaheim - in 1876, stroll out into the desert and succumb to a terrifying, transforming vision of emptiness, I was surely drawing on my own memory of childhood walks into the desert of southern Arizona - outside what was then a small town, Tucson - in the 1940’s. In the first draft of that chapter, there were saguaros in the Southern California desert. By the third draft I had taken the saguaros out, reluctantly. (Alas, there aren’t any saguaros west of the Colorado River.)
What I write about is other than me. As what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. My books know what I once knew, fitfully, intermittently. And getting the best words on the page does not seem any easier, even after so many years of writing. On the contrary.
Here is the great difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a skill, at which, with practice, you are bound to become more expert. What you accumulate as a writer are mostly uncertainties and anxieties.
All these feelings of inadequacy on the part of the writer - this writer, anyway - are predicated on the conviction that literature matters. Matters is surely too pale a word. That there are books that are “necessary,” that is, books that, while reading them, you know you’ll reread. Maybe more than once. Is there a greater privilege than to have a consciousness expanded by, filled with, pointed to literature?
Book of wisdom, exemplar of mental playfulness, dilator of sympathies, faithful recorder of a real world (not just the commotion inside one head), servant of history, advocate of contrary and defiant emotions . . . a novel that feels necessary can be, should be, most of these things.
As for whether there will continue to be readers who share this high notion of fiction, well, “there’s no future to that question,” as Duke Ellington replied when asked why he was to be found playing morning programs at the Apollo. Best just to keep rowing along.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/18/arts/18SONT.html
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Just got back from a couple weeks in NYC and LA. Always a lot of fun, and as great and fun as I find those places and the friends and agents I have there, it’s always good to be home. Ah, Melbourne… la dolce vita.
Well, just about a week now until my 5th book, LIQUID GOLD, is out (and the BLOOD OIL paperback). When I got home I had boxes waiting for me at the post office, and the new covers of the novels look fantastic. It’s always fulfilling to see the work being put out there to readers.
Next week I’m giving a few talks: Box Hill TAFE on Monday night (27th July), Belgrave Library 11am Thursday then Watsonia Library 7pm (both 30th July), and a day at Geelong College on Friday 31st. After that I’m sure I’ll do a bit of touring around to promote the new Fox novel, LIQUID GOLD, and I’ll post the details here.
I’m still getting plenty of emails about the craft of writing and, yes, I will get around to putting some tips up here once we launch our redesigned site. I guess in essence there’s no real method to my creative madness — for me, writing is about self-exploration and an attempt to make sense of the world around me; I’m lucky in that I’ve found a job that means so much to me that I’ve discovered myself through it. I enter each new book expecting to find similar creative confines to the last outing, and anything that emerges beyond those limitations is a welcome surprise. The day that stops happening, I’ll hang up my pen.
Happy reading,
jp.
May 21, 2009
Text: Obama’s Speech on National Security
Following is a text of President Obama’s speech on Thursday on national security issues, as released by the White House.
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Please be seated. Thank you all for being here. Let me just acknowledge the presence of some of my outstanding Cabinet members and advisors. We’ve got our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. We have our CIA Director Leon Panetta. We have our Secretary of Defense William Gates (sic); Secretary Napolitano of Department of Homeland Security; Attorney General Eric Holder; my National Security Advisor Jim Jones. And I want to especially thank our Acting Archivist of the United States, Adrienne Thomas.
I also want to acknowledge several members of the House who have great interest in intelligence matters. I want to thank Congressman Reyes, Congressman Hoekstra, Congressman King, as well as Congressman Thompson, for being here today. Thank you so much.
These are extraordinary times for our country. We’re confronting a historic economic crisis. We’re fighting two wars. We face a range of challenges that will define the way that Americans will live in the 21st century. So there’s no shortage of work to be done, or responsibilities to bear.
And we’ve begun to make progress. Just this week, we’ve taken steps to protect American consumers and homeowners, and to reform our system of government contracting so that we better protect our people while spending our money more wisely. (Applause.) The — it’s a good bill. (Laughter.) The engines of our economy are slowly beginning to turn, and we’re working towards historic reform on health care and on energy. I want to say to the members of Congress, I welcome all the extraordinary work that has been done over these last four months on these and other issues.
In the midst of all these challenges, however, my single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe. It’s the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning. It’s the last thing that I think about when I go to sleep at night.
And this responsibility is only magnified in an era when an extremist ideology threatens our people, and technology gives a handful of terrorists the potential to do us great harm. We are less than eight years removed from the deadliest attack on American soil in our history. We know that al Qaeda is actively planning to attack us again. We know that this threat will be with us for a long time, and that we must use all elements of our power to defeat it.
Already, we’ve taken several steps to achieve that goal. For the first time since 2002, we’re providing the necessary resources and strategic direction to take the fight to the extremists who attacked us on 9/11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’re investing in the 21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of a nimble enemy. We have re-energized a global non-proliferation regime to deny the world’s most dangerous people access to the world’s deadliest weapons. And we’ve launched an effort to secure all loose nuclear materials within four years. We’re better protecting our border, and increasing our preparedness for any future attack or natural disaster. We’re building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. And we have renewed American diplomacy so that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world.
These steps are all critical to keeping America secure. But I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents that we hold in this very hall — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights — these are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world.
I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offered. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land. My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words — “to form a more perfect union.” I’ve studied the Constitution as a student, I’ve taught it as a teacher, I’ve been bound by it as a lawyer and a legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never, ever, turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.
I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset — in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.
Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.
It’s the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s Armed Forces than from their own government.
It’s the reason why America has benefitted from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp, moral contrast with our adversaries.
It’s the reason why we’ve been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty.
From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology.
After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era — that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.
Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent.
In other words, we went off course. And this is not my assessment alone. It was an assessment that was shared by the American people who nominated candidates for President from both major parties who, despite our many differences, called for a new approach — one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Now let me be clear: We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability. For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass. And that’s why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.
First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America. (Applause.)
I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. (Applause.) What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all. (Applause.)
Now, I should add, the arguments against these techniques did not originate from my administration. As Senator McCain once said, torture “serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.” And even under President Bush, there was recognition among members of his own administration — including a Secretary of State, other senior officials, and many in the military and intelligence community — that those who argued for these tactics were on the wrong side of the debate, and the wrong side of history. That’s why we must leave these methods where they belong — in the past. They are not who we are, and they are not America.
The second decision that I made was to order the closing of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. (Applause.)
For over seven years, we have detained hundreds of people at Guantanamo. During that time, the system of military commissions that were in place at Guantanamo succeeded in convicting a grand total of three suspected terrorists. Let me repeat that: three convictions in over seven years. Instead of bringing terrorists to justice, efforts at prosecution met setback after setback, cases lingered on, and in 2006 the Supreme Court invalidated the entire system. Meanwhile, over 525 detainees were released from Guantanamo under not my administration, under the previous administration. Let me repeat that: Two-thirds of the detainees were released before I took office and ordered the closure of Guantanamo.
There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.
The third decision that I made was to order a review of all pending cases at Guantanamo. I knew when I ordered Guantanamo closed that it would be difficult and complex. There are 240 people there who have now spent years in legal limbo. In dealing with this situation, we don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. We’re cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess — a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country.
Indeed, the legal challenges that have sparked so much debate in recent weeks here in Washington would be taking place whether or not I decided to close Guantanamo. For example, the court order to release 17 Uighurs — 17 Uighur detainees took place last fall, when George Bush was President. The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican Presidents — not wild-eyed liberals. In other words, the problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place. (Applause.)
Now let me be blunt. There are no neat or easy answers here. I wish there were. But I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo. As President, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. I refuse to pass it on to somebody else. It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.
Now, over the last several weeks, we’ve seen a return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years. I’m an elected official; I understand these problems arouse passions and concerns. They should. We’re confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the last eight years. I’ll leave that to others. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans.
And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country. So I want to take this opportunity to lay out what we are doing, and how we intend to resolve these outstanding issues. I will explain how each action that we are taking will help build a framework that protects both the American people and the values that we hold most dear. And I’ll focus on two broad areas: first, issues relating to Guantanamo and our detention policy; but, second, I also want to discuss issues relating to security and transparency.
Now, let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as I can: We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people. Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders — namely, highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety.
As we make these decisions, bear in mind the following fact: Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal, supermax prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists. As Republican Lindsey Graham said, the idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.
We are currently in the process of reviewing each of the detainee cases at Guantanamo to determine the appropriate policy for dealing with them. And as we do so, we are acutely aware that under the last administration, detainees were released and, in some cases, returned to the battlefield. That’s why we are doing away with the poorly planned, haphazard approach that let those detainees go in the past. Instead we are treating these cases with the care and attention that the law requires and that our security demands.
Now, going forward, these cases will fall into five distinct categories.
First, whenever feasible, we will try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts — courts provided for by the United States Constitution. Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists. They are wrong. Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists. The record makes that clear. Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. He was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons. Zacarias Moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker. He was convicted in our courts, and he too is serving a life sentence in prison. If we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons, then we can do the same with detainees from Guantanamo.
Recently, we prosecuted and received a guilty plea from a detainee, al-Marri, in federal court after years of legal confusion. We’re preparing to transfer another detainee to the Southern District Court of New York, where he will face trial on charges related to the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — bombings that killed over 200 people. Preventing this detainee from coming to our shores would prevent his trial and conviction. And after over a decade, it is time to finally see that justice is served, and that is what we intend to do. (Applause.)
The second category of cases involves detainees who violate the laws of war and are therefore best tried through military commissions. Military commissions have a history in the United States dating back to George Washington and the Revolutionary War. They are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war. They allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence-gathering; they allow for the safety and security of participants; and for the presentation of evidence gathered from the battlefield that cannot always be effectively presented in federal courts.
Now, some have suggested that this represents a reversal on my part. They should look at the record. In 2006, I did strongly oppose legislation proposed by the Bush administration and passed by the Congress because it failed to establish a legitimate legal framework, with the kind of meaningful due process rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.
I said at that time, however, that I supported the use of military commissions to try detainees, provided there were several reforms, and in fact there were some bipartisan efforts to achieve those reforms. Those are the reforms that we are now making. Instead of using the flawed commissions of the last seven years, my administration is bringing our commissions in line with the rule of law. We will no longer permit the use of evidence — as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods. We will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay. And we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel, and more protections if they refuse to testify. These reforms, among others, will make our military commissions a more credible and effective means of administering justice, and I will work with Congress and members of both parties, as well as legal authorities across the political spectrum, on legislation to ensure that these commissions are fair, legitimate, and effective.
The third category of detainees includes those who have been ordered released by the courts. Now, let me repeat what I said earlier: This has nothing to do with my decision to close Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The courts have spoken. They have found that there’s no legitimate reason to hold 21 of the people currently held at Guantanamo. Nineteen of these findings took place before I was sworn into office. I cannot ignore these rulings because as President, I too am bound by the law. The United States is a nation of laws and so we must abide by these rulings.
The fourth category of cases involves detainees who we have determined can be transferred safely to another country. So far, our review team has approved 50 detainees for transfer. And my administration is in ongoing discussions with a number of other countries about the transfer of detainees to their soil for detention and rehabilitation.
Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here — this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We’re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
Now, as our efforts to close Guantanamo move forward, I know that the politics in Congress will be difficult. These are issues that are fodder for 30-second commercials. You can almost picture the direct mail pieces that emerge from any vote on this issue — designed to frighten the population. I get it. But if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes. And if we refuse to deal with these issues today, then I guarantee you that they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.
I have confidence that the American people are more interested in doing what is right to protect this country than in political posturing. I am not the only person in this city who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution — so did each and every member of Congress. And together we have a responsibility to enlist our values in the effort to secure our people, and to leave behind the legacy that makes it easier for future Presidents to keep this country safe.
Now, let me touch on a second set of issues that relate to security and transparency.
National security requires a delicate balance. One the one hand, our democracy depends on transparency. On the other hand, some information must be protected from public disclosure for the sake of our security — for instance, the movement of our troops, our intelligence-gathering, or the information we have about a terrorist organization and its affiliates. In these and other cases, lives are at stake.
Now, several weeks ago, as part of an ongoing court case, I released memos issued by the previous administration’s Office of Legal Counsel. I did not do this because I disagreed with the enhanced interrogation techniques that those memos authorized, and I didn’t release the documents because I rejected their legal rationales — although I do on both counts. I released the memos because the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known, the Bush administration had acknowledged its existence, and I had already banned those methods. The argument that somehow by releasing those memos we are providing terrorists with information about how they will be interrogated makes no sense. We will not be interrogating terrorists using that approach. That approach is now prohibited.
In short, I released these memos because there was no overriding reason to protect them. And the ensuing debate has helped the American people better understand how these interrogation methods came to be authorized and used.
On the other hand, I recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by U.S. personnel between 2002 and 2004. Individuals who violated standards of behavior in these photos have been investigated and they have been held accountable. There was and is no debate as to whether what is reflected in those photos is wrong. Nothing has been concealed to absolve perpetrators of crimes. However, it was my judgment — informed by my national security team — that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.
In short, there is a clear and compelling reason to not release these particular photos. There are nearly 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm’s way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as Commander-in-Chief. Nothing would be gained by the release of these photos that matters more than the lives of our young men and women serving in harm’s way.
Now, in the press’s mind and in some of the public’s mind, these two cases are contradictory. They are not to me. In each of these cases, I had to strike the right balance between transparency and national security. And this balance brings with it a precious responsibility. There’s no doubt that the American people have seen this balance tested over the last several years. In the images from Abu Ghraib and the brutal interrogation techniques made public long before I was President, the American people learned of actions taken in their name that bear no resemblance to the ideals that generations of Americans have fought for. And whether it was the run-up to the Iraq war or the revelation of secret programs, Americans often felt like part of the story had been unnecessarily withheld from them. And that caused suspicion to build up. And that leads to a thirst for accountability.
I understand that. I ran for President promising transparency, and I meant what I said. And that’s why, whenever possible, my administration will make all information available to the American people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable. But I have never argued — and I never will — that our most sensitive national security matters should simply be an open book. I will never abandon — and will vigorously defend — the necessity of classification to defend our troops at war, to protect sources and methods, and to safeguard confidential actions that keep the American people safe. Here’s the difference though: Whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons, I will insist that there is oversight of my actions — by Congress or by the courts.
We’re currently launching a review of current policies by all those agencies responsible for the classification of documents to determine where reforms are possible, and to assure that the other branches of government will be in a position to review executive branch decisions on these matters. Because in our system of checks and balances, someone must always watch over the watchers — especially when it comes to sensitive administration — information.
Now, along these same lines, my administration is also confronting challenges to what is known as the “state secrets” privilege. This is a doctrine that allows the government to challenge legal cases involving secret programs. It’s been used by many past Presidents — Republican and Democrat — for many decades. And while this principle is absolutely necessary in some circumstances to protect national security, I am concerned that it has been over-used. It is also currently the subject of a wide range of lawsuits. So let me lay out some principles here. We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government. And that’s why my administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of this practice.
And we plan to embrace several principles for reform. We will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the state secrets privilege. We will not assert the privilege in court without first following our own formal process, including review by a Justice Department committee and the personal approval of the Attorney General. And each year we will voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why because, as I said before, there must be proper oversight over our actions.
On all these matters related to the disclosure of sensitive information, I wish I could say that there was some simple formula out there to be had. There is not. These often involve tough calls, involve competing concerns, and they require a surgical approach. But the common thread that runs through all of my decisions is simple: We will safeguard what we must to protect the American people, but we will also ensure the accountability and oversight that is the hallmark of our constitutional system. I will never hide the truth because it’s uncomfortable. I will deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. I will tell the American people what I know and don’t know, and when I release something publicly or keep something secret, I will tell you why. (Applause.)
Now, in all the areas that I’ve discussed today, the policies that I’ve proposed represent a new direction from the last eight years. To protect the American people and our values, we’ve banned enhanced interrogation techniques. We are closing the prison at Guantanamo. We are reforming military commissions, and we will pursue a new legal regime to detain terrorists. We are declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions, and we’re narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege. These are dramatic changes that will put our approach to national security on a surer, safer, and more sustainable footing. Their implementation will take time, but they will get done.
There’s a core principle that we will apply to all of our actions. Even as we clean up the mess at Guantanamo, we will constantly reevaluate our approach, subject our decisions to review from other branches of government, as well as the public. We seek the strongest and most sustainable legal framework for addressing these issues in the long term — not to serve immediate politics, but to do what’s right over the long term. By doing that we can leave behind a legacy that outlasts my administration, my presidency, that endures for the next President and the President after that — a legacy that protects the American people and enjoys a broad legitimacy at home and abroad.
Now, this is what I mean when I say that we need to focus on the future. I recognize that many still have a strong desire to focus on the past. When it comes to actions of the last eight years, passions are high. Some Americans are angry; others want to re-fight debates that have been settled, in some cases debates that they have lost. I know that these debates lead directly, in some cases, to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an independent commission.
I’ve opposed the creation of such a commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws or miscarriages of justice.
It’s no secret there is a tendency in Washington to spend our time pointing fingers at one another. And it’s no secret that our media culture feeds the impulse that lead to a good fight and good copy. But nothing will contribute more than that than a extended relitigation of the last eight years. Already, we’ve seen how that kind of effort only leads those in Washington to different sides to laying blame. It can distract us from focusing our time, our efforts, and our politics on the challenges of the future.
We see that, above all, in the recent debate — how the recent debate has obscured the truth and sends people into opposite and absolutist ends. On the one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and would almost never put national security over transparency. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “Anything goes.” Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants — provided it is a President with whom they agree.
Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty and care and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That’s the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That’s what makes the United States of America different as a nation.
I can stand here today, as President of the United States, and say without exception or equivocation that we do not torture, and that we will vigorously protect our people while forging a strong and durable framework that allows us to fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law. Make no mistake: If we fail to turn the page on the approach that was taken over the past several years, then I will not be able to say that as President. And if we cannot stand for our core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall. (Applause.)
The Framers who drafted the Constitution could not have foreseen the challenges that have unfolded over the last 222 years. But our Constitution has endured through secession and civil rights, through World War and Cold War, because it provides a foundation of principles that can be applied pragmatically; it provides a compass that can help us find our way. It hasn’t always been easy. We are an imperfect people. Every now and then, there are those who think that America’s safety and success requires us to walk away from the sacred principles enshrined in this building. And we hear such voices today. But over the long haul the American people have resisted that temptation. And though we’ve made our share of mistakes, required some course corrections, ultimately we have held fast to the principles that have been the source of our strength and a beacon to the world.
Now this generation faces a great test in the specter of terrorism. And unlike the Civil War or World War II, we can’t count on a surrender ceremony to bring this journey to an end. Right now, in distant training camps and in crowded cities, there are people plotting to take American lives. That will be the case a year from now, five years from now, and — in all probability — 10 years from now. Neither I nor anyone can stand here today and say that there will not be another terrorist attack that takes American lives. But I can say with certainty that my administration — along with our extraordinary troops and the patriotic men and women who defend our national security — will do everything in our power to keep the American people safe. And I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda. Because the terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate America from our allies, and they will never be able to do that if we stay true to who we are, if we forge tough and durable approaches to fighting terrorism that are anchored in our timeless ideals. This must be our common purpose.
I ran for President because I believe that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together. We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides America — it can and must be a cause that unites us as one people and as one nation. We’ve done so before in times that were more perilous than ours. We will do so once again.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)
FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.text.html
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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I have a few short stories out there in anthologies and here’s one that has just come out in an exciting new publishing concept of remixing author’s work: “Remix My Lit”.
Through the Clock’s Workings was launched at the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom Conference at Old Parliament House (OPH) in Canberra on Wednesday 27th May by Dr Terry Cutler (Cutler and Co Melbourne). The conference Keynote Speaker was Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School. Copies of the anthology were sold on the day.
Hard copies of the book are now available through the SUP eStore: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/9781920899325.
The eBook will be available for free download from the RML site: http://www.remixmylit.com
There are a few magazines and periodicals that I really enjoy, my must reads being: National Geographic, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Economist. I’ll occasionally flip through some others - The Believer, GQ, Delicious, Belle, and Gourmet Traveler are semi-regulars around the house - but the former mags are always great value for their content (although it kills me to read how cheap US subscribers get them for), and nothing makes me laugh and teaches me ‘how to be a man’ as much as Esquire. Anyway, here’s a brilliant piece on a slice of 20th century book publishing, from the July 2008 edition of The New Yorker. I do hope that Condé Nast’s 5% Plan does not harm their good editorial.
Reading this piece, I could not help wondering how far our publishing business has come, and whether today’s publishing staff (and librarians and teachers) are cognisant of the history that comes with their roles. BTW, my favourite line below is “. . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” I’ve been fortunate enough to have had such dreams where I’ve met some very special characters, and they’re beautiful moments to be in and emerge from.
THE LION AND THE MOUSE
The battle that reshaped children’s literature.
by Jill Lepore
JULY 21, 2008
Anne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from Aesop’s Fables, and a grandmother with no small fondness for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Annie, whose taste ran to “Little Women,” was a reader and a runt. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York, where she more or less invented the children’s library.
At the time, you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into the Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens (one century’s garbage being, as ever, another century’s Great Books). Samuel Tilden, who left $2.4 million to establish a free library in New York, nearly changed his mind when he found out that ninety per cent of the books checked out of the Boston Public Library were fiction. Meanwhile, libraries were popping up in American cities and towns like crocuses at first melt. Between 1881 and 1917, Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away, because they needed to be protected from morally corrupting books, especially novels. In 1894, at the annual meeting of the American Library Association, the Milwaukee Public Library’s Lutie Stearns read a “Report on the Reading of the Young.” What if libraries were to set aside special books for children, Stearns wondered, shelved in separate rooms for children, staffed by librarians who actually liked children?
In 1896, Anne Carroll Moore was given the task of running just such an experiment, the Children’s Library of the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, built at a time when the Brooklyn schools had a policy that “children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books.” Moore toured settlement houses and kindergartens (also a new thing), and made a list of what she needed: tables and chairs sized for children; plants, especially ones with flowers; art work; and very good books. The kids lined up around the block.
The cornerstone of the New York Public Library was laid in 1902, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. Four years later, after the library’s directors established a Department of Work with Children, they hired Moore to serve as its superintendent, a position in which she not only oversaw the children’s programs at all the branch libraries but also planned the Central Children’s Room. After the library opened, in 1911, its Children’s Room became a pint-sized paradise, with its pots of pansies and pussy willows and oak tables and coveted window seats, so low to the floor that even the shortest legs didn’t dangle.
Much of what Moore did in that room had never been done before, or half as well. She brought in storytellers and, in her first year, organized two hundred story hours (and ten times as many two years later). She compiled a list of twenty-five hundred standard titles in children’s literature. She won the right to grant borrowing privileges to children; by 1913, children’s books accounted for a third of all the volumes borrowed from New York’s branch libraries. Against the prevailing sentiment of the day, she believed that her job was to give “to the child of foreign parentage a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country his parents have left.” She celebrated the holidays of immigrants (reading Irish poetry aloud, for instance, on St. Patrick’s Day) and stocked the shelves with books in French, German, Russian, and Swedish. In 1924, she hired the African-American writer Nella Larsen to head the Children’s Room in Harlem. In each of the library’s branches, Moore abolished age restrictions. Down came the “Silence” signs, up went framed prints of the work of children’s-book illustrators. “Do not expect or demand perfect quiet,” she instructed her staff. “The education of children begins at the open shelves.” In place of locked cabinets, she provided every library with a big black ledger; if you could sign your name, you could borrow a book. Moore considered signing the ledger something between an act of citizenship and a sacrament, to be undertaken only after reading a pledge: “When I write my name in this book I promise to take good care of the books I use in the Library and at home, and to obey the rules of the Library.” During both the First and Second World Wars, soldiers on leave in the city climbed the steps past Patience and Fortitude, walked into the Children’s Room, and asked to see the black books from years past. They wanted to look up their names, to trace the record of a childhood lost, an inky, smudged once-upon-a-time.
In the first half of the twentieth century, no one wielded more power in the field of children’s literature than Moore, a librarian in a city of publishers. She never lacked for an opinion. “Dull in a new way,” she labelled books that she despised. When, in 1938, William R. Scott brought her copies of his press’s new books, tricked out with pop-ups and bells and buttons, Moore snapped, “Truck! Mr. Scott. They are truck!” Her verdict, not any editor’s, not any bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate. She kept a rubber stamp at her desk that she used, liberally, while paging through publishers’ catalogues: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” The end.
The end of Moore’s influence came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight.
E. B. White, born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, was a generation Moore’s junior. As a boy, he was frustrated that there were books in his town library he wasn’t allowed to look at. He had a pet mouse; he thought he looked a little mousy himself. In 1909, when he was nine, he won a prize for a poem about a mouse. The New York Public Library opened the year he turned twelve and won a silver badge for “A Winter Walk,” an essay published in St. Nicholas, a magazine that Moore stocked on the shelves of her Children’s Room. White grew up and in 1917 went to Cornell, where he became the editor of the college paper, the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1918, Anne Carroll Moore wrote her first book review, in The Bookman. That review marks the birth of serious criticism of children’s literature. (The next year saw still more firsts: the first Children’s Book Week, organized by Moore, and the appointment of Louise Seaman—soon to be Louise Seaman Bechtel—to head the first children’s department at a major publishing house, Macmillan. In 1922, the Newbery Medal was first awarded.) Moore’s column ran in The Bookman until it folded, in 1926, the year after Harold Ross launched The New Yorker, where he hired White as a writer and a crackerjack thirty-two-year-old freelancer named Katharine Angell as a reader of manuscripts. Not long afterward, Angell became the magazine’s fiction editor.
About this time, E. B. White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White had eighteen nieces and nephews, who were always begging him to tell them a story, but he shied away from making one up off the top of his head. Instead, he set to writing, and stocked a desk drawer with tales about his “mouse-child . . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” He named him Stuart.
Anne Carroll Moore had an imaginary friend, too. “I have brought someone with me,” she would tell children, singsongy, as she fished out of her handbag a wooden doll she called Nicholas Knickerbocker. She even had letterhead made for him. “I’m the sorriest little Dutch boy you ever knew over your accident,” she once wrote, signing herself “Nicholas,” in a letter to Louise Seaman Bechtel. (When Moore forgot Nicholas in a taxi, her colleagues did not mourn his loss.)
In 1924, Moore published her own children’s book, “Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story.” It begins with Nicholas’s Christmas Eve arrival in a New York Public Library Children’s Room filled with fairy creatures:
The Troll gave a leap from the Christmas Tree and landed right beside the Brownie in a corner of the window seat. Just then the Fifth Avenue window swung wide open and in walked a strange boy about eight inches high.
It has not aged well.
From 1924 to 1930, Moore reviewed children’s books for the New York Herald Tribune; beginning in 1936, her reviews also appeared in The Horn Book. She could be a tough critic, especially of books that violated her rules: “Books about girls should be as interesting as girls are” or “Avoid those histories that gain dramatic interest by appeal to prejudice. Especially true of American histories.” But merely in bothering to regularly criticize children’s books Moore was ahead of everyone. Only in 1927 did The Saturday Review begin running a twice-monthly column called “The Children’s Bookshop.” The Times Book Review didn’t routinely review children’s books until 1930. In 1928, The New Yorker’s Dorothy Parker, in her Constant Reader column, reviewed A. A. Milne’s “The House at Pooh Corner.” (Moore called another Pooh book “a nonsense story in the best tradition of the nursery.”) Pooh’s wasn’t just a Good Hum and a Hopeful Hum, Parker noted. It was a hummy hum. “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings,” Parker wrote, “that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
In 1929, E. B. White married Katharine Angell and, with his office mate, James Thurber, published his first book, a lampoon featuring fake Freudian sexologists, titled “Is Sex Necessary?” (Their answer: not strictly, no, but it beats raising begonias.) In 1933, when the Whites’ son, Joel, was three, Katharine, who also had two children from her first marriage, began writing an annual and sometimes semi-annual roundup of children’s books for The New Yorker. Katharine White’s taste in children’s literature, if it fell short of Tonstant Weader’s fwowing up, was more than spitting distance from Moore’s indulgence in the adventures of Troll, Brownie, and Nicholas Knickerbocker. White found an A. A. Milne introduction to Jean de Brunhoff’s “Travels of Babar” to be “an unnecessary and misleading condescension, since de Brunhoff is witty without being Poohish, and Babar is an elephant who can stand on his own feet.” She favored sturdy characters and spare prose. But there was something else at stake. White’s column, which she once titled “The Children’s Shelf,” called into question the very idea of a children’s library. Maybe all kids needed was a shelf?
Then, as now, some of the best prose and poetry, not to mention the best art, was to be found in books written for children—disciplined, inspired, elevated, even, by the constraints of the form. Katharine White loved many books for children; above all, she admired the beauty and lyricism of picture books and readers for the under-twelve set. But she had her doubts about books aimed at older kids:
It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as “suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.” Their implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn’t so simple.
And who decides what’s suitable, anyway? Parents? Librarians? Editors? White had her own ideas about who should draw the line, if a line had to be drawn, between what was good for children, what was childish, and what was just plain rotten. About Anne Carroll Moore she once fumed, “Critic, my eye!”
Sometimes, books labelled juvenile are, instead, antique. Children’s literature, at least in the West, is utterly bound up in the medieval, as Seth Lerer, a Stanford literature professor, argues in “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.” Lots of books for kids are about the Middle Ages (everything from “The Hobbit” to “Robin Hood” and “Redwall”), but the conventions of the genre (allegory, moral fable, romance, and heavy-handed symbolism) are also themselves distinctly premodern. It’s not only that many books we shelve as “children’s literature”—Grimms’ Fairy Tales or “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Huck Finn”—were born as biting political satire, for adults; it’s also that books written for children in the twentieth century tend to be distinctly, willfully, and often delightfully antimodern. “The Phantom Tollbooth” has more in common with “The Pilgrim’s Progress” than it does with “On the Road.” Lurking in the stacks of every “children’s library” are dozens of literary impostors: satires, from ages past, hiding their fangs; and shiny new books, dressed up in some very old clothes.
Today, children’s book publishing—an industry richly described in Leonard S. Marcus’s excellent new book, “Minders of Make-Believe”—is one of the most profitable parts of the book business. But that industry exists only because, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century middle class invented childhood as we know it, early-twentieth-century writers, illustrators, editors, and publishers—and, most of all, Anne Carroll Moore—invented children’s literature. It would be convenient if White and Moore stood on either side of a divide between antimodernist and modernist writing. But things don’t really sort out along those lines. A better way of thinking about it might be to say that Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy. “There are too many coy books full of talking animals, whimsical children, and condescending adults,” White complained.
Katharine White also hated the word “juvenile,” and sorely regretted, in the nineteen-thirties, that “it still adequately describes the calibre of the great majority of these books.” But what about her husband’s teensy talking mouse-child? True, Stuart was six inches shorter than Nicholas Knickerbocker. Whether he was juvenile remained to be seen, because, for now, he was still stuck in that desk drawer.
In April, 1938, Life ran a photo-essay called “The Birth of a Baby,” still shots from a film that depicted one woman’s pregnancy, labor, and delivery. The film had been banned in New York. Even the photographs proved too much for the American public, and the issue was pulled from newsstands in thirty-three cities. In The New Yorker, E. B. White offered a lampoon called “The Birth of an Adult,” stills of a film—drawings by Rea Irvin—portraying “the waning phenomenon of adulthood.” (Frame 1: “The Birth of an Adult is presented with no particular regard for good taste. The editors feel that adults are so rare, no question of taste is involved.”) “I have written a fine parody of Life’s ‘The Birth of a Baby,’ ” White wrote to Thurber, adding, “I also have a children’s book about half done.” He had, at last, opened the drawer.
That summer, the Whites moved to the tiny town of North Brooklin, Maine. In a November, 1938, essay for Harper’s, White complained that review copies of children’s books, two hundred of them, sent to his wife by publishers, were spilling out of the cupboards, stuck under sofa cushions, tumbling out of the hearth. About the only one he liked was Dr. Seuss’s “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.” The rest were cloying, clunky, and hopelessly naïve. (“One laughs in demoniac glee,” he wrote, “but this laugh has a hollow sound.”) What E. B. White found most depressing—and he was pretty discouraged in 1938, “this year of infinite terror”—was the looming war that threatened to make the whole planet unsuitable for anyone, while, in the world of children’s literature, “adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.”
In his Harper’s essay, White mused, “It must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.” After Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) pointed White’s essay out to Anne Carroll Moore, she sent White a letter. If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it? “I wish to goodness you would do a real children’s book yourself,” she wrote. “I feel sure you could, if you would, and I assure you the Library Lions would roar with all their might in its praise.” (Moore often inscribed her letters with a return address of “Behind the Lions.”) White replied that he had started writing a children’s book, but was finding it difficult. “I really only go at it when I am laid up in bed, sick, and lately I have been enjoying fine health. My fears about writing for children are great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”
Moore pursued the correspondence. In early 1939, she pressed upon White no fewer than five letters. She sent him copies of her reviews. She gave him writing tips: “Let it flow, without criticizing it too close to its creation.” She inquired after his family, asking, more than once, after his child. She was very, very keen to make the acquaintance of his wife: “I’d like to include Mrs. E. B. White in this letter for two reasons. The first that she is the mother of the boy, or is it a girl? And second because she reviews children’s books for The New Yorker or some other magazine.” She begged him to get back to his children’s book. “Can’t you achieve a temperature, without getting sick, and finish it off?” She was attempting, as she often did, not only to cultivate this author but to claim him. “No one will be more interested than I when your children’s book is ready,” she wrote in February. “Let me know if I can be of service at any stage.”
In March, White sent an unfinished manuscript to his editor at Harper & Brothers, Eugene Saxton. “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it,” he offered, adding, “You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse.” Saxton was far from grieved. He wanted “Stuart Little” for a fall, 1939, publication date. Anne Carroll Moore would have liked that, too, eager as she was to take credit for the book. But that mouse would have to wait for a pack animal to budge. As White gently warned the pestering librarian, “I pull back like a mule at the slightest goading.”
Two books that were published in 1939, Gertrude Stein’s children’s book, “The World Is Round,” and John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” reveal a bit more about what was turning into a baby battle of the books. Anne Carroll Moore applauded Stein’s book. Katharine White found it numbingly insipid. (It begins, “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around. Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was.”) In her New Yorker column, White took aim at Moore: “A number of experts in children’s literature have pronounced ‘The World Is Round’ a good book, but that does not surprise me, since, with a few exceptions, the critics of children’s books are remarkably lenient souls. They seem to regard books for children with the same tolerant tenderness with which nearly any adult regards a child. Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go on from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”
“The Grapes of Wrath” met with the disapproval not of Anne Carroll Moore but of Annie Dollard, the librarian of a private subscription library in Brooklin. “She was a tiny spinster with firm convictions about which books were fit to read,” E. B. White wrote. “The library had acquired ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ but Annie took it off the shelf and placed it on her chair and sat on it. That solved that.” Of course, that didn’t solve that, and Katharine White decided to do something about it, to make the library public, and better. Those two hundred review copies her husband had been tripping over before Christmas? She hauled them to the Brooklin library.
In November of 1939, Katharine White wrote to “Miss Moore,” for the first time, delicately hinting that she stop bothering her husband about “Stuart Little”—“I’ve decided that the less we say the sooner it will be done”—and steering the correspondence in another direction by seeking advice about how to apply for Carnegie funds for the Brooklin library. She also inquired, a little wickedly, after recommendations from the formidably humorless Moore for material for an anthology she and her husband were compiling, “A Subtreasury of American Humor.” Moore, apparently, was unhelpful.
Anne Carroll Moore did not write again to E. B. White until February, 1941, alerting him, in confidence, of her plan to retire: “I am telling you because I would love to make one of my very final recommendations a large order for E. B. White’s children’s book.” White wrote back to say how impressed he and his wife were by her “long and fruitful service to the children of the world,” which he considered “one of the great and honorable careers—none finer.”
Meanwhile, Katharine White had become something of a librarian herself. “Public libraries have more and more seemed to me a democratic necessity,” she wrote to Moore in 1942, “so most of my war efforts so far, instead of going into civilian defense proper, have been devoted to keeping alive the little library in this town.” What with all her donations of The New Yorker’s review copies, her little library, now public and incorporated, boasted “the best collection of children’s books in the country.” The only reason she was still writing her children’s literature column, she wrote, probably not entirely in jest, “is to have the books for the Brooklin library.”
Katharine White believed passionately in public libraries, and in stocking them with books for children. What worried her was tiny spinsters sitting on books. Making a room for children was one thing. Guarding the door was entirely another. And then there was the matter of setting traps for mice.
“A Subtreasury of American Humor” was published in 1941. As for including humor from children’s books, “we gave it up,” the Whites admitted; there wasn’t any. The next year, E. B. White wrote a wartime pamphlet on freedom of speech. In the winter of 1943-44, the Whites moved back to New York. Katharine began editing Nabokov. Her husband’s nerves were shot. He felt as if he had “mice in the subconscious”: “The mouse of Thought infests my head, / He knows my cupboard and the crumb.” Then, miraculously, over eight weeks in late 1944 and early 1945, he finished the book that he had been writing all his life. Saxton, White’s editor, had died in 1943. White sent the manuscript of “Stuart Little” to Ursula Nordstrom, the director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls; so great was Nordstrom’s influence that she sometimes called herself Ursula Carroll Moore. (When the real Moore asked Nordstrom what possibly qualified her to edit children’s books, Nordstrom replied, “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”)
Anne Carroll Moore had been waiting for “Stuart Little” for seven years, and during that time she had claimed E. B. White, the most celebrated American essayist of the century, as her writer. She may have been retired, but her grip on power had scarcely loosened. She still showed up for meetings at the New York Public Library; she still ran those meetings, dismaying her successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, who tried switching meeting places, to no avail: “No matter where you held them, she was there.” (In an oral history conducted at U.C.L.A. in the nineteen-seventies, Sayers admitted that she found it all but impossible to stand up to Moore, who made her life “an absolute hell” by refusing to cede control: “She hung on to everything.”) Moore had come to think of recruiting E. B. White to the world of juvenilia as her final triumph—a victory over Tonstant Weader, a victory over Katharine White. “Stuart Little” was to be Anne Carroll Moore’s lasting legacy to children’s literature. In her mind, it was her book. There was nothing for it: Nordstrom sent her a galley.
“I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore declared. She summoned Nordstrom to her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she warned her that the book “mustn’t be published.” To the Whites she sent a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment, and begging the author to reconsider its publication. Exactly what the letter said, and even to whom it was addressed, is much disputed. The Whites threw it away—in disgust, Katharine said—and only six pages of an incomplete copy in Moore’s hand survive. But even in this expurgated version Moore’s criticisms were severe: the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy—“The two worlds were all mixed up”—and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered. Everyone agrees that Moore made a threat and meant to carry it out: “I fear ‘Stuart Little’ will be very difficult to place in libraries and schools over the country.”
“It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children,” E. B. White admitted, “but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature—rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” He shrugged it off: “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe. They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”
White did not write back. His wife did. “K refused to show me her reply,” White wrote to his brother, “but I suspect it set a new world’s record for poisoned courtesy.” It did and it didn’t. “I agree with you that schools won’t be likely to use ‘Stuart Little,’ ” Katharine wrote to Miss Moore, “but, to be very frank just as you have been, I can’t imagine libraries not stocking it.” And she couldn’t help asking, “Didn’t you think it even funny?”
On October 17, 1945, some fifty thousand copies of “Stuart Little” hit the shelves. The book’s pictures, by Garth Williams, share with its story a quiet tenderness, hushed but somehow breezy, too. (Nordstrom and White had rejected seven other illustrators, whose mice looked too slick, or too much like Mickey.) On the cover, little Stuart, in his shorts and shirtsleeves, paddling his canoe—a boat named Summer Memories—is at once so tiny and so grown up that he could easily have illustrated White’s wistful 1941 essay “Once More to the Lake,” about going camping with his son at a place in Maine where he had long ago gone with his father, and coming to realize that he wasn’t so sure, anymore, just who was who. (“Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.”)
The most disappointing book Anne Carroll Moore ever read begins with these words:
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse.
Two days after “Stuart Little” was published, an unhappy Harold Ross stopped by White’s office at The New Yorker. White recalled:
“Saw your book, White,” he growled. “You made one serious mistake.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Why, the mouse!” he shouted. “You said he was born. God damn it, White, you should have had him adopted.”
Next, Edmund Wilson caught White in the hall. “I read that book of yours,” he began. “I found the first page quite amusing, about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.”
White tried to laugh about all this—“the editor who could spot a dubious verb at forty paces, the critic who was saddened because my innocent tale of the quest for beauty failed to carry the overtones of monstrosity”—but then Malcolm Cowley, reviewing the book in the Times, proved skeptical, too: “Mr. White has a tendency to write amusing scenes instead of telling a story. To say that ‘Stuart Little’ is one of the best children’s books published this year is very modest praise for a writer of his talent.”
The real blow came when Frances Clarke Sayers, presumably acting on Moore’s orders, refused to buy “Stuart Little” for the library, sending a signal to children’s librarians across the country: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” In November, a syndicated New York Post columnist squibbed, “There will be a to-do about the New York Public Library’s reluctance to accept ‘Stuart Little.’ ” For this unsavory gossip, White graciously apologized in a letter to Sayers, assuring her that neither he nor Nordstrom had planted the notice to apply pressure on the library (as, clearly, Sayers suspected), and that he regretted the appearance of “dark and terrible goings on in the world of juvenile letters.”
One way to read “Stuart Little” is as an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture. Published just a year before Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” might justifiably have been titled “The Birth of an Adult.” That or “Is Childbirth Necessary?” The Washington Post even ran a review in the form of an affectionate imitation of “Is Sex Necessary?,” right down to the idiotic sexologists. (“ ‘Lacks verisimilitude from the very first line,’ said Herr Von Hornswoggle. ‘Man or mouse, homo sapiens or Mus musculus—no little rodent can sail a ship in Central Park lagoon while still teething. Much, much too Jung.’ ”)
Whether Mrs. Frederick C. Little had given birth to a mouse or to a creature that just looked like a mouse was, especially in 1945, poignant social commentary about a culture that refused to look at the facts of life. The one thing Stuart wasn’t was a baby. No bottles, no diapers, no nighttime feedings, no prams, no cribs. No baby talk. From the first, Stuart dressed himself and was helpful around the house. The Littles’ biggest problem was that mice were so badly treated in children’s books. Mr. Little “made Mrs. Little tear from the nursery songbook the page about the ‘Three Blind Mice, See How They Run’ ”:
“I don’t want Stuart to get a lot of notions in his head,” said Mr. Little. “I should feel badly to have my son grow up fearing that a farmer’s wife was going to cut off his tail with a carving knife. It is such things that make children dream bad dreams when they go to bed at night.”
The Littles also questioned the suitability of “ ’Twas the night before Christmas,” when not a creature stirs, not even a mouse. “I think it might embarrass Stuart to hear mice mentioned in such a belittling manner,” Mrs. Little told her husband. They settled, at last, on another kind of bowdlerizing:
When Christmas came around, Mrs. Little carefully rubbed out the word mouse from the poem and wrote in the word louse, and Stuart always thought that the poem went this way:’Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a louse.
Tearing the pages out of books and rubbing out words that might worry their little one—it was just what Katharine White had been complaining about all along. In “Stuart Little,” her husband backed her up. And, in her next children’s-books column, she, in turn, vindicated him, lamenting the pitiful state of a literature “careful never to approach the child except in a childlike manner. Let us not overstimulate his mind, or scare him, or leave him in doubt, these authors and their books seem to be saying; let us affirm.”
“Stuart Little” leaves you in doubt, a good deal of doubt, really; it doesn’t exactly end so much as it’s just, abruptly, over. In Chapter VIII, Stuart falls in love with a bird named Margalo, and when she flies away he goes on a quest. In the book’s last chapter, he stops his coupe at a filling station and buys five drops of gas. In a ditch alongside the road, he meets a repairman, preparing to climb a telephone pole. “I wish you fair skies and a tight grip,” Stuart says, thoughtfully. “I hope you find that bird,” the repairman says. Then come the book’s final, distressing lines:
Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
Stuart Little isn’t Gregor Samsa. He’s Don Quixote, turning into Holden Caulfield.
Anne Carroll Moore tried very hard to insure that schools would ban “Stuart Little.” Some did. But some schoolteachers decided, instead, to teach the book. In February, 1946, a fifth-grade class in Glencoe, Illinois, was assigned the task of writing a different ending. One little girl managed, with felicitous economy, to get to a happy ending in just nine paragraphs:
After talking to the repairman, Stuart took the road heading north. “Chug chug” went his car. “Five drops running out,” thought Stuart. “I’ll stop at that filling station just ahead.” So he drove in.
“What do you want?” said the man.
“Five and one-half drops,” said Stuart. “The last five drops I got didn’t take me as far as I wanted to go.” Just then Stuart saw a bird hop out of the filling station.
“This is Margalo,” said the man.
“MARGALO!” yelled Stuart.
“You must know each other,” said the man.
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Stuart. “I’ll give you a whole ten dollars if you’ll let me have your bird.”
“It’s a deal,” said the man.
“Hop in, Margalo,” said Stuart and away they went. They were married back in New York and raised a family of half mice and half birds.
That little girl cleared the fence by a good three feet.
And the New York Public Library? Did the mouse scamper past the lions? In late 1945, the library’s director, Franklin Hopper, invited Louise Seaman Bechtel, the pioneering editor of children’s books at Macmillan, to deliver an endowed lecture on book publishing. Bechtel had discovered that although Sayers had bought a copy of “Stuart Little,” she kept it under her desk. At the library, Bechtel, appalled, urged Hopper to read it. He did, and wrote to Bechtel the next day. He liked it very much. He was furious: “Have those who talk about its abnormalities no imagination?” Did Anne Carroll Moore think she could rule his library from the goddam Grosvenor? Hopper ordered Sayers to take Stuart out of his hiding place. “He got into the shelves of the Library all right,” E. B. White wrote, “but I think he had to gnaw his way in.”
For a while, many American libraries did ban “Stuart Little.” But the best librarians, like the best schoolteachers, have a genius all their own. In March, 1946, the seventh graders at the Clifton School, in Cincinnati, Ohio, mailed a letter:
Dear Mr. White:
We have just finished your book “Stuart Little.” Our school librarian asked us to read it to help decide whether it would be a good book for the library. We think it would be.
It’s a quiet little letter. But that noise, the scritch-scratch of pen across paper, those thirty-eight seventh graders signing their names at the bottom of that letter? That’s the sound of a horse falling down.
In January, 1946, when Louise Bechtel delivered her lecture at the New York Public Library, Anne Carroll Moore was sitting in the front row, glaring. Undaunted, Bechtel made a point of plugging “Stuart Little”: “I hope it gets all possible awards and medals.” Moore made her disapproval known. “E.B.W. will be tickled to hear that A.C.M. sent me a blast,” Bechtel wrote to Katharine, afterward. Very likely, he wasn’t so tickled. He didn’t much like the dark and terrible goings on in the world of juvenile letters.
Moore, in her rage, fallen but still kicking, seems to have used her influence to shut “Stuart Little” out of the Newbery Medal, a prize awarded by a panel of librarians, including, that year, Frances Clarke Sayers. White’s book was not even among the four runners-up. The day after the awards were announced, Bechtel was “still grinding my teeth in rage,” she wrote to Katharine White, complaining about “these stupid unliterary women in charge.”
Harper, meanwhile, headed Moore’s criticism off at the pass. “Some people—those who think they understand a thing if they can paste a neat label on it—will call ‘Stuart Little’ a juvenile,” the press’s publicity material read. “They will be right. They will also be wrong.” In December, 1946, while Katharine White was ushering J. D. Salinger’s first New Yorker story to press, a story that turned into “The Catcher in the Rye,” Nordstrom told E. B. White that there were now a hundred thousand copies of “Stuart Little.” White invited his editor to a posh lunch to celebrate. “You can eat 100,000 stalks of celery and I’ll swallow 100,000 olives. It will be the E. B. White-Ursula Nordstrom Book and Olive Luncheon.” Not exactly happily ever after, but close.
atharine White wrote her last children’s-books column in 1948. Her own children were grown. The Brooklin library would survive without her review copies. But she was exasperated, too. “No one who has examined five hundred and more juveniles, as I have this year,” she wrote wearily, “could say that the American child now occupies a submerged position in an adult world. There can surely be no childish taste, good, bad, or indifferent, that the eager publishers have not tried to satisfy.” In those baby-boom years, you couldn’t walk a block without bumping into a pram. Did American letters, too, have to make way for babies?
E. B. White published a second children’s book, “Charlotte’s Web,” in 1952. His wife said that he considered it “his only really completely satisfactory children’s book,” and it was adored, as far as I can tell, by everyone—everyone, that is, except Anne Carroll Moore, who complained that Fern’s character was “never developed.” Nordstrom, after hearing of Moore’s reservations and reading a rave by Eudora Welty in the Times, gleefully wrote to White, “Eudora Welty said the book was perfect for anyone over eight or under eighty, and that leaves Miss Moore out as she is a girl of eighty-two.”
Anne Carroll Moore died in 1961. “Much as she did for children’s books and their illustrators at the start of her career,” White wrote to Bechtel, “I can’t help feeling her influence was baleful on the whole. Am I wrong?”
The Central Children’s Room at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street closed in 1970; it reopened at the Donnell Library Center, on Fifty-third, the next year. Next month, the Donnell is closing, to make way for a hotel. Plans have been made for a new children’s room to open in a different space at the main library sometime after the building’s centennial, in 2011. (This fall, kids’ books will circulate from a temporary space on the ground floor.) To augur the return of the Children’s Room to Forty-second and Fifth, Christopher Robin Milne’s stuffed animals, Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, and Kanga, donated to the library in 1987, have been installed on the third floor.
“Stuart Little” has now sold more than four million copies. In later editions, E. B. White made a tiny change. Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son is no longer born. He arrives. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: IAN FALCONER
(sorry that wouldn’t paste here)
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