To Sir, With Love

(Years ago, I stumbled onto a C-SPAN interview with E.R. Braithwate, the author of "To Sir, With Love." The whole thing was delightful, but of course the part that fascinated me most was how his famous book happened, but almost didn't.

Link to the full interview here -- seriously, set aside some time to watch the whole thing. You'll be glad you did -- however below, please find the part where he talks about the book.)

"At the end of each day, because I did not know how to teach, I would go home, and in notebooks, record exactly what had happened that day in the classroom. I kept careful notes of what was said, what was done, not only what the children said, but how they said it. I tried as carefully as possible to recapture the atmosphere of the classroom. And as you can well imagine, after seven years or more, there were lots of these notebooks.

And long after I had established a kind of rapport with these students, and was able to work with them, I was sitting at home during the holiday season, thinking that these books were literally driving me out of my room. There were too many, and I planned to have a little bonfire in the back of the yard, and I’d taken out handfuls of them, and before burning them, I began rifling through the old days, remembering what it was like at first, reminding myself of many an instance when, if it were possible, I would have walked away from that school and never looked back.

And then Mom came out and said, “What’s going on?” I said, “Listen to this, Mom,” and I would read to her bits and pieces, and I would say to her, “Do you know, if only I had been sensitive enough, there was so much I could have learned so early!”

And she said, “What are you going to do with these?” I said, “I’m going to burn them.” And she said, “But, why? These could be useful to some other young student. Why don’t you write a book?”

Write a book? You don’t just ‘write a book.’ You need to be TAUGHT how to write a book, you need to go to university particularly to LEARN how to write books. I said, “I can’t write a book!”

Writing a treatise is not writing a book. To write a treatise you borrow from all sorts of sources, and then put it together and stick your name on it. That’s not writing. So I said, “I can’t write a book.”

Anyway, she gathered these and took them back indoors, and day in, day out, she would remind of this book I should write. And finally, one weekend I thought, “Okay. You want a book? You’ll have a book.”

So I went into the local town, I hired a typewriter, I bought some paper -- and I knew so much about writing a book, I forgot to get carbons. And beginning with the earliest of those notebooks, I tried to retrace my steps in this exercise called teaching.

When it was all done, one morning, I put it on her plate, breakfast time, I said, “There’s your book.” And she said, “Don’t give it to me. DO something with it!” But what do you do with it?

I went to the local library, and said to the librarian, with whom I’d established a kind of superficial friendship, and I said to him, “Look, I’ve written this thing. What would you advise me what to do with it?” So he said, “First of all, let me read it and I’ll tell you.”

I left it with him for a week. Then I returned and I said, “What do you think?” He said, “Well I’m not sure whether my reaction to it is because of our friendship, or because of the manuscript itself. Why don’t you take it to an agent?”

An agent? I said, “Look. I can’t afford even to go to the cinema, and you’re telling me I must hire an ag—“ He said, “See, I didn’t use the word ‘hire.” And he went to a shelf and brought back something called Authors and Writers Yearbook. In it were all the agents anywhere in England, dating back I suppose to – I don’t know, you pick. The old ones.

And he said, “Let’s go for one who has been in business longest!” I was willing to let him tell me. And we happened upon a firm, a firm of agents called, “Pern, Hollinger, and Hyam.” Very impressive names! So he said, “Try them. What have you got to lose? Nothing.”

Following day, no, that very day, I went to the local printers and had them put a cover – a paper cover – onto this ‘manuscript’ and, the binder said to me, “What do you want to call it?” And at the end of the manuscript, there was this label I had used. When the kids at the end of that term were leaving, they gave me a present, and on it they had put their names, and over their names, “To Sir, With Love.” And I thought to myself, “Strange title. Why not?”

So I put on the front, I wrote: To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite.

So that morning, I went to the West End of London, Dean Street Soho, very next to the red light district, if you know where that is. And I walked up these narrow stairs, and there was this elderly lady sitting at one of those little . . . telephone things with the horn, old fashioned, you plugged into the thing – not like today, you know, they just use their fingers.

But, she was sitting at this, and I said, “Good morning. I’ve brought a manuscript.” And when I said the word ‘manuscript’ she looked at those shelves, where the cobwebs were hanging on all these packages. I got the message, and I said “Okay” and I picked up my – I was leaving, and she said, “Just leave it there. Put your name and address and telephone number, and eventually . . .” She made eventually sound as if it had ten syllables. “E-ven-tu-a-lly.”

So I left it and I went home. And I was sitting in the backyard next morning, and mom came out and said, “You’re wanted on the telephone.” And I figured out, I didn’t have a girlfriend. Who was calling me? So I answered the telephone, and the person on the other line said, “Mr. Braithwaite?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “My name is Paul Scott. And I’m calling from Pern, Hollinger, and Hyam.” And so I said, “Yes?” And he said, “It’s about your manuscript.”

Have you ever heard such a beautiful word?

So he said, “When can you come that we might talk about it?” So I said, “How about tomorrow?” I would have gone that day if I could. So I went up and he told me that . . . it was in. He said there were two possibilities, either The Bodley Head, which was England’s most prestigious publisher, or another one he mentioned, Secker and Wahlberg. He said, “But let’s go for the best first. If they don’t like it,” he said, “we can always try Secker and Wahlberg.”

So he sent it off The Bodley Head, and they said they’d be happy to publish. And it became an overnight bestseller. And the only person who was not the least bit surprised . . . was mom."

Some final thoughts on The Dome

Me, last week:

And I suppose it's possible that an explosive ending will completely turn me around from my current "meh" thoughts about it.

If nothing else, I'm rooting for that.

Sometimes, you get what you root for.

(Caution: Spoilers ahead).

I’m talking of course about Stephen King’s “Under the Dome”, which I finished a few days ago. I’d been critical of it as I was reading it, so thought it only fair to say that it absolutely redeemed itself by the time it was over.

Yes, there were the obligatory deaths of most every character you’d been following for more than a thousand pages. However, as I tweeted with a few dozen pages to go, when reading Stephen King, don’t get too close to the kids or the dogs. It will only break your heart.

One of my criticisms was that I didn’t care about any of the people. Turns out, as they met their demise one after the other, I cared more than I realized. No doubt the weeks and weeks we’d been held hostage together (them, Under the Dome, me, compelled to finish the book) had something to do with it.

What truly salvaged the book for me was, a) what the Dome was, and b) who was behind it. ‘Course, you don’t find that out until the last few chapters. Aside from some folks in the book assuming it was extra-terrestrial, even that isn’t completely clear until you near the end.

So in a nutshell, I’d give it a seven out of ten and recommend it.

And as I assumed earlier, there are some who won't like the sometimes heavy-handed politics embedded within. But like I said, in my case he’s preaching to the choir. Nice anyway when something you’ve intuited comes true.

Random comment from Twitter:

Brotherhood, distilled

Alex put on jeans with a thick belt, a shirt with snap buttons, and Jarman two-tone shoes with three-inch heels. He shut down the stereo and left his room.

His brother Matthew, fourteen, was in his bedroom down the hall. Matthew was close to Alex's size and excelled on the football field, the baseball diamond, and in class. He was more competent in every way except the one way that counted between boys. Alex could still take him in a fight. It wouldn't be that way for much longer, but for now, it defined their relationship.

Alex stopped in the doorway. Matthew was lying atop his bed, tossing a baseball up in the air and catching it with his glove. He had thick, wavy hair and a big beak, like the old man. Alex's hair was curly, like their mom's.

"Pussy," said Alex.

"Fag," said Matthew.

"I'm headin out."

"Later."

- George Pelecanos, "The Turnaround."

10 Unforgettable Books of the Decade

The news business is jumping the gun on the end of the decade (which, of course, ends next year), and so we are greeted daily with "Top Ten" lists of this and that. My hometown paper, the Boston Globe, has produced their own "10 Unforgettable Books" list of the past decade.

I thought it might be helpful to provide my own quick take on the list (full disclosure: Juggle around these answers, and they are my standard response to most any "Top Ten Books" list):

1. Didn't read it

2. Didn't read it

3. Didn't read it, but tell people I did

4. Didn't read it, but loved the cover

5. Didn't read it, but probably should

6. A murder mystery narrated by a tree? Didn't read it.

7. Didn't read it

8. Didn't read it

9. Didn't read it

10. Didn't read it

I hope you found this helpful.

The Book Industry Turns a Page

Happened to tune into NPR yesterday and a discussion about the ongoing changes in the book industry. Among the points made that will seem familiar to many of us:

ROBERTS: We are also joined on the line by ZZ Packer. She's the author of "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." She has a new book coming out next year titled "The Thousands." She joins us now from member station KUT in Austin, Texas. Welcome.

So you published your first book in 2003, before Kindle and Facebook and all these other digital tools, but your next book will be out next year. How is being an author changing?

Ms. PACKER: Well, I think one of the things that happens or has happened is that now the author is sort of expected in a way to sort of be, in a way, partly their own publicist, and you know, I guess a person or an author doesn't have to do that, but there are now more tools at their availability.

So there is Twitter. There's Facebook. Some authors in the New York Times just had a profile of an author who, you know, created this sort of YouTube video first and got - and generated a good deal of interest.

So now you're expected, in a way, to be present more as an author, and what you're expected to do is to kind of not just have a sort of shelf life for your book, but your book has to have also sort of this virtual life as well.

ROBERTS: And is that an asset or a burden?

Ms. PACKER: I think that it can be both. I mean, I think some of the advantages of the Internet and creating this Internet presence and presence for one's book is that so much of what Tina was saying in terms of you can now create this groundswell and have more of a sort of - instead of the top-down model of publicity, where it goes from the publishing house and then later through the newspapers and magazines, and eventually people hear about the book, you know, now authors can get on Facebook, get on a blog or create a blog and generate all of this interest beforehand and during the process and basically take a little more control, and so that is great and it provides a way for some books that wouldn't get heard or talked about or even reviewed in some of the major publications to be able to have this readership.

I know that Rebecca Wells' "Ya-Ya Sisterhood," you know, kind of began as this kind of cult - you know, she went from bookstore to bookstore and eventually just developed this cult following, and that eventually led her onto the New York Times bestseller list, and then you have the same with people like Lakoff in non-fiction with "Don't Think of An Elephant." So in a way it does provide a way to break that chain of, you know, only the sort of big names getting, you know, the big bucks and the big publicity. So now authors can kind of wrest control a little bit.

But a disadvantage would be that, you know, if you're not a natural performer, or if you're a person who, you know, you'd rather just sort of spend your time writing and not necessarily having to hit the pavement as much, then, you know, it becomes - it does take away time from writing to write a blog every day. And it does become very difficult to, you know, go out in front of, you know, book groups if that's not your forte.

Well worth a read and / or listen. The transcript and audio of the discussion is located here.

My Personal Vision of Hell

From today's Boston Globe:

For nearly a century, the ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain.

The students who have long cherished the small library inside Dunster House, Harvard’s oldest dormitory, discovered a new feature there this week:



two brass bars stretching across nearly every shelf, making the books impossible to peruse.

Link to full article here.

I Just Wasn't Made for These Times

From today's Boston Globe:

"Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital."

Link to full article.

My Favorite Moments in Fiction

(Was actually gonna publish this tomorrow, but in an effort to push down my previous post and keep the David Foster Wallace folks and their pitchforks at bay, I rushed to complete this one! All anecdotes are from memory, so apologies for any errors, omissions, or complete fabrications.)

Sharing the memorable anecdote from Infinite Jest in my previous post (did I mention that "Infinite Jest" uses footnotes? Footnotes! Hundreds and hundreds of footnotes!) got me thinking about other moments in fiction that will always stay with me. You know, those times when you simply have to lower the book for a moment and say "wow."

I'm not talking about twists, necessarily, or even clever turns of plot. I'm talking about something that seeps into your very soul, that fundamentally changes you or the way you think about things, and that reminds you why you've come to both love, and need fiction in your life.

If you've ever experienced it (and I know that you have) you know exactly what I'm talking about.

So, with no new acceptances or submissions (or frankly, any new writing) to report, here's a completely random and off the top of my head list of moments from other books that have left an indelible impression on me. Though they are numbered, except for the final entry, I could have listed them in any order.

WARNING: If you haven't read the books I reference, there are, of course, spoilers ahead.

10. The scene early on in Appointment in Samarra in which Julian English throws a cocktail into the face of another partygoer at the country club and thus begins his self-destruction.
    
    You know, I hadn't thought til this very moment just how much the film "American Beauty" owes to O'Hara's masterpiece. Both chronicle men who, for reasons even they cannot truly fathom, find themselves embarked on a path leading to their own destruction.
    
    And for some reason, I've also never forgotten the name of the street he lives on: Lantenengo Street.
    
    If you haven't read "Appointment in Samarra," stop reading right now and pick up a copy.

9. I read Herman Wouk's The Winds of War in high school and thought at the time it was the best book I ever read (gimme a break. I was in high school.) Not long afterward, I was in the bookstore and wondered if there was anything else by Wouk I might like.
   
   I wandered over to the W's and picked a thick something off the shelf, discovering only at that very moment there was a sequel to "The Winds of War." I'd had no idea.
   
   Course "The Winds of War" ending on the eve of Pearl Harbor should have told me something . . .
   
   But the scene I am referencing comes from its sequel, War and Remembrance, when Aaron Jastrow is led into the gas chamber. I can't imagine there is another fictional chronicle anywhere that captures better exactly what it must have been like more than this scene. And yet, Wouk somehow makes it a triumphal moment.
   
   Now, had it ended there, it would have been memorable enough. But it doesn't. We follow Jastrow's journey from the floor of the gas chamber, to the crematorium, through the chimney, out the smokestack, and to freedom.
   
   Yes, freedom.

8. Too numerous to mention scenes from The Pillars of the Earth, but I'll try:
   
   Prior Phillip making his reappearance after hundreds of pages to purchase all of Aliena's cotton.
   
   Phillip shouting, "I see you William Hamleigh!" as the knights come in to murder Thomas Beckett.
   
   Phillip dipping his cloak in the Archbishop's blood and then leading the parade through the town declaring him a saint and a martyr.
   
   One of the greatest fictional characters of all time. One of my favorite books.

7. When you think about it, the demise of the Soviet Union also brought about the end of an entire genre of fiction, the Cold War melodrama. Some of the greatest books of the second half of the twentieth-century were devoted to this subject ("The Manchurian Candidate" comes to mind) and then one day it was all gone.
   
   This list would not be complete without a mention of Nelson DeMille's The Charm School.
   
   A recent college graduate in Russian studies gets a gift from his parents of a trip to Russia. He takes a wrong turn – a very wrong turn – and, after stumbling around a while in the dark in what he thinks is a military installation, he hears a Texas drawl.
   
   If you've read the book, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, well . . . you know what to do.

6. It's probably no secret by now I'm a fan of Florida Fiction, though I came to it in a circuitous route. A good friend of mine turned me on to Carl Hiaasen years ago, and I've since devoured the works of Laurence Shames, Tim Dorsey, S.V. Date, etc.
   
   Who can forget poor Chemo in Hiaasen's Skin Tight, his face forever scarred when his dermatologist has a stroke while performing dermabrasion? Or his losing an arm and then replacing it with a weed whacker?
   
   But it is Tim Dorsey who has created one of the funniest comic characters of our time, a serial-killing, Florida-loving romantic named Serge Storms. I'll confess right here that I've fallen away from Dorsey, as it started to seem (to me, anyway) that he was re-writing the same book over and over again. But his first few books are truly wonderful.
   
   There's a scene in his first book, Florida Roadkill, in which Serge finds himself in Key West during the annual Hemingway lookalike festival, where he sparks the very first "Running of the Hemingways." You gotta read it to believe it. Truly laugh out loud funny.

5. I wouldn't categorize this as one of my favorite books, but three indelible scenes from The World According to Garp come to mind.
   
   Perhaps because I read it in high school, the scene in which the coach meets his demise while pleasuring himself led to some of my worst adolescent nightmares.
   
   The crash and then the heartbreaking loss that resulted from Garp's broken stick shift and his habit of shutting off the lights while coasting down the driveway . . .
   
   which ended in (if I remember the length correctly) a handwritten note reading "two inches is not enough."
   
   Brrr.

4. The final scene from A Farewell to Arms, in my opinion the greatest love story ever written.
   
   So near . . . and yet so far.

3. Three specific scenes from Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life come to mind. Another of my favorite novels which I re-read every few years.
   
   Early on in the book, not long after school ends for the year and before anything really mystical or magical happens, the young protagonist and his buddies go for their annual bike ride, and like they do every year, they begin to fly.
   
   Man, do I remember when I could fly.
   
   Later on in the book, Cory runs away from home and finds himself in a railroad car with three vagrants. One of them is dressed in rags, with a voice like dust. Another has an aversion to the sun. The third has a curious bolt coming out of his neck. In their various ways, they persuade young Cory that . . . perhaps . . . there's no place like home. Pure magic.
   
   And honorable mention to the scene where he discovers this great new rock band. I tellya, that scene was as if McCammon had been watching my own boyhood unfold.
   

2. The final scene in Dan Simmons Hyperion, when the motley band of pilgrims finally enter the Time Tombs, and the song they sing while doing it.
   
   Someday, I'll tell you the story of my quest to read "Hyperion." But not today.

1. I've named this number one only because it is my favorite book of all time. To read its prose is akin to reading a beautiful symphony, and the moment I turned its last page, I reflected for a while before turning again to the first page and starting all over.
   
   Now, I don't know if this is true, but long after I read and fell in love with it, I read somewhere that Tender is the Night is also Ray Bradbury's favorite book. He is said to make an annual pilgrimage to Paris, toting his battered copy of the book, for the sole purpose of reading it there.
   
   I'll pick two scenes from this one:
   
   Early on in the book, after a delightful day at the beach among friends and a lovely dinner party, Rosemary has her first breakdown. I probably should have known more about the book before I started reading, but didn't. I had no idea going in about Zeld . . . err . . . Rosemary's difficulties.
   
   The scene in which Dick Diver is in Switzerland and has to burn his beloved books for heat. As he burns them, he reflects on each specific book and what it has meant to him.
   
   He realizes then that he is not really losing the books by burning them, because he has read them, and having read them, the books themselves have become a part of him.
   
   And I suppose when you get right down to it, that's kinda the point of this entire post.

* * *
Couple of Honorable Mentions that came to mind while I was writing this:

1) The final scene of John Grisham's The Firm.

"Did you ever make love on the beach?"

There's a reason the guy sells millions of books.

2) An anecdote told in Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore.

The book itself was published in 1996, and I suppose I read it about 2003. Anyway, the way I remember it, the main character wanted to leave his midwest home and head for the big city. He got an offer to work for a company that was headquartered in the World Trade Center.

His father forbade him from taking the job, said he could move to San Francisco if he wanted to, but he would not allow his son to work in any building that terrorists were trying to knock down.

Wow.

So what about it, folks? If you've made it this far, I'd love hear to about your own "wow" moments with things that you've read.

100 Essential New England Books

Yesterday's Boston Globe published an interesting link titled 100 Essential New England Books (page takes forever to load because of numerous graphics, but if interested in New England literature, it's worth the time.)

While there, you can click on those you have read and rank them on a 1-5 star system.

I was surprised to go there a moment ago and discover David Foster Wallace's execrable and masturbatory "Infinite Jest" is now number one on the list (the default number one yesterday was "Moby Dick.") Apparently, the page is now sorting on reader favorites.

Don't mean to diss "Infinite Jest" too bad, but I couldn't get through it and suspect that's part of its snob appeal. There are those who can get through it (and laugh and laugh at the upper class, tennis lesson, sleepaway school humor) and us peons who can't.

Only got through the first hundred pages or so myself, and have since actually and literally and without irony used the thing as a doorstop.

Did I mention it has footnotes? Hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of fictional footnotes. Not my idea of reading pleasure.

But one anecdote within will stick with me forever. The way I remember it, there's a character who is somewhat schizophrenic and believes that aliens wish to put him into a machine and suck out his soul or something. When he does eventually find himself in the hands of the medical establishment, what's the first thing they do?

Stick him into an MRI.

Now THAT's funny.

Oddest Book Title of the Year

Ran across a humorous article in the New York Times about the Diagram Prize for the oddest book titles of the year.

Sponsored by Bookseller Magazine, this year's prize goes to:

“The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.”

Previous winners include: “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” “Reusing Old Graves,” and “How to Avoid Huge Ships.”

Maybe my own titles don't suck as bad as I think they do!