Keep the Music Playing

If we are lucky, we learn music first from our parents. We become aware, slowly or suddenly, of the music they love or the songs they sing. In my case, I was smitten early by the classical music my parents loved. Though their tastes were different (Mother loved opera more, my father orchestral music), the end result was the same for me.

But the first sounds I remember are the popular songs is my mother sang to me. Her name was Ruth, and she had a strong, wonderful voice and loved to sing to her babies. She sang to me and my older brother Mark, and when Laura Jane came along nine years after me, she sang to her, too. Mother was a soprano and was in the church choir for years. All of us grew up to be musicians--Mark as a fine guitarist who actually played in bands, Laura Jane as far and away the best pianist among us, and me as as composer.

I daresay that all of us, though, still carry the sound of our mother's voice with us. That's why the death of Patty Andrews yesterday (on my birthday) makes me so wistful.

Patty Andrews

Our father never like popular music--he is serious (but joyful) about music, still, at the age of 90. He especially loves Classic and Early Romantic composers. Mother, on the other hand, loved many kinds of music, especially popular music on the radio. She died in 2008, but she has never left us, and when I saw early this morning about the last surviving Andrews sister's death at 94, I immediately heard my mother's voice.

She sang many Andrews sisters songs to me when I was little, but I especially remember "A Bushel and a Peck," which came out the year I was born. I can imagine her listening to the radio as she did her chores with two small children, learning a song's lyrics almost on a single hearing. She also sang "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" to us (obviously she sang to Mark, too), as well as standards from many other singers of that era.

I think Mother probably sang to (and with) Laura Jane more than either of her sons, but the bond of a mother and daughter is a special and perhaps sacred thing.

Our parents were both World War II veterans, too, and in my growing years I began to get a sense of what the Andrews sisters meant to all the heroes who offered themselves to serve our country during that terrible time. In the online guest book for Patty Andrews this morning, a man named Joseph Pegler from San Diego spoke for an entire generation when he wrote, "The three of you got a lot of us through the South Pacific during WW2. God bless you for ever."

My blessings for Patty Andrews and her sisters are just as heartfelt but from a very different place inside. I would want to thank her for giving my mother songs that my mother then gave me. They live, and they go on, and their rhythm is a heartbeat that will be with me until my own song has ended.

Pride and Prejudice

I'm sure you've read it, but that lovely book by Jane Austen is 200 years old today. I read it first when I was in college, and I've always been a sucker for the romance of outer restraint and inner rapture. 

My favorite film of it by a long shot is the marvelous 2005 version with Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley.

Here's the book at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342.

My papers

I will be in discussions shortly about donating my papers to the University of Georgia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library where they will be open to the public.

I have a great deal of affection for the libraries, especially the Main Library on North Campus, which I began haunting on an almost daily basis when I was a freshman at UGA in 1968. In those days, the large addition in the back hadn't yet been built, but even so, it was an amazing place. 

Over the years I became friends with Porter Kellam, who was named director of the Library in 1950 and was still there in 1968. He retired, I believe, in 1970, but he was around and active for many years after that. He was a marvelous and warm man, and he was generous and thoughtful to my wife Linda, who worked in the Main Library's Copy Room when we were both in graduate school in the early 1970s. I have been delighted to be friends also with successive administrative people in the Libraries as well.

UGA Main Library

Here is what they say online about Hargrett:

"The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a leading repository on Georgia history and culture, holds 200,000 volumes in its rare book and Georgiana collections, 6 million pages of historical manuscripts and photographs, along with maps, broadsides, and UGA archives and records. Of particular note is one of the largest collections of Confederate imprints, as well as material of a specialized nature, such as broadsides, historical maps, and sheet music. In addition, the holdings include programs, posters, drawings, photographs, engravings, and other ephemera relating to early American and British theater and the motion picture industry. Other areas of emphasis include performing arts and natural history. Holdings date from the 15th century to the present."

Anyway, as this unfolds, I'll be sure to add more information about my papers. 

Rethinking My Books

I have lately been going back and back to the beginnings of my career as a writer, seeing how I got here from there.

The journey has been anything but smooth, but I think most writers would say the same thing! I know people who take pride in not having changed in any essential thing throughout long lives. I have changed though, and those changes are probably most obvious in my books.

The first piece of sustained fiction I ever wrote was an Avant-Garde novella set in a corn field in Mexico, where I have never once set foot in my life. A volcano erupts. This causes no end of personal and relationship problems for the people who live there. I knew, when I finished it--I think I was about 19--that it was junk. But I also knew I'd written something around 75 pages long, and before doing it, I had no idea I could.

At the time, I mostly saw myself as a poet and was already publishing in little magazines across the country by the time I got to college. And in truth I had never thought much about long-form fiction until the summer I was fifteen. That was when I read two books: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English and, though I didn't know it then, abridged.)

During my years from 19 until about 27, I was almost exclusively writing poetry and learning my craft as a journalist. But my wife Linda kept nudging me to write a novel, and I finally did in 1977-78--a turgid mess called Let Us Have Madness. It was just over 400 pages long and dealt with a small-town newspaperman who discovers a small cadre of ex-Nazis living in his county. (To be fair, this was only a little more than 30 years after the end of the war, and a great many vets of all sides were still in their 30s and 40s.)

Looking back, I realize I didn't know a thing then about rewriting. This was also in the typewriter days, so a second draft meant starting from scratch. A clean copy was a nightmare from which I still haven't awakened, as Stephen Dedalus might say. I let a friend read Let Us Have Madness, and he gave it back and said it was hilarious. I didn't bother explaining that it wasn't supposed to be. It was like someone thinking Moby-Dick was a sit-com.

By then I was in my late 20s, and my choice was to quit fiction entirely or to approach it in a different way. So I decided to write only about things I knew and loved, and so I made a list of those things, and from that list came a plot and characters.

And also from it came what was to be my first published novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, in 1984.