which, in 1776, lay where 43rd Street is now, and the city of New York was a few church spires on the horizon.
I worked on a memoir (“A Boyhood on the Mississippi”) and wrote a few thousand words about fishing and rafts and camping on islands and then decided that Mark Twain had done this much better.
I tried writing a piece about 44th Street when it rains and the taxis glisten as they race through the puddles and the hotel doormen hold their big umbrellas over the elderly couple looking anxiously up the street, late for their flight home to Cleveland, and decided that E. B. White did that sort of thing to perfection and why should I do a poor imitation?
I began a profile of Arthur Godfrey (“The man in the tan raincoat and the gray homburg who entered the Columbus Circle subway station was undistinguishable from any other straphanger until he asked the woman in the ticket booth if the uptown B train was still skipping its 81st Street stop on account of the construction project that has been going on there for most of the fall and she recognized one of the most familiar voices in the history of radio and said, ‘You’ll want to take the C train to 72nd and walk, Mr. Godfrey. It’s quicker, and it’s a nice day for a stroll.”’) only to realize that he’d been dead since 1983.
I thought about writing a profile of Robert E. Lee. Then I thought about Peggy Lee, and Lee Radziwill, Will Rogers, Rodgers and Hart, Huntington Hartford, Ford Madox Ford, Betty Ford, Earl Battey, Katherine Lee Bates, Kate Smith, Howard K. Smith, Maggie Smith, Sal Maglie, Sol Hoopii and His Royal Hawaiians, Jane Wyman, the YMCA. Jack Dempsey. Dumpsters. Teamsters. Hamsters. Hamilton Jordan. Jergens Lotion. The Locomotion. Perry Como. Barium. Syngman Rhee. Ralph Stanley. Stan Musial. The musical Oklahoma. Hummus. And so on.
I looked in the box that Salinger left, and it was not so different from any other New Yorker memoir. Tales of gloomy mild-mannered eccentrics and their tiny feuds and Ross loping down the hall and yelling, “God bless you, damn it! ” and Thurber’s noontime assignations at the Hotel Seymour and White’s agonies of revision and the tragedy of Liebling, who needed a big windfall success and never got one and worked himself to death. I couldn’t let Salinger ruin his reputation with this crap. I lifted the box up to the open window and let the pages waft out and flutter toward 44th Street. One line caught my eye as the page flew away—“Mr. Shawn threw Hemingway to the floor and got him in a leg scissors before calmer heads—” and then it was gone.
Dear Mr. Blue,
I have been a voracious reader since childhood, devouring fiction, history, science, philosophy, like a vacuum cleaner. I’m the only person I know who’s read everything by Sartre, Simeon, Dickens, Trol lope, Patrick O‘Brien, and Jean M. Auel. I’ve read the Koran, the Buddhist canon, the C. H. Mackintosh commentaries on the Bible, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas. And now, at the age of 48, I seem to have crashed. I have not opened a book in the past two years. It doesn’t interest me. I look at the books on my coffee table and they’re like bricks to me. Any ideas?
—Scorched
Dear Scorched, No sin to be aliterate. There’s a whole world out there that writers write about that you can discover for yourself. Cooking, travel, clinical depression, exile, self-destructive behavior, the accumulation of vast wealth, inappropriate romance, just to name seven. I’m on the other side of the canyon from you, a writer who is staring at a blank page and trying to figure out how to make a brick out of it. Someday, somebody should bring nonwriters together with nonreaders to see what they have to say to each other. I was okay. My candle still had two good ends left and I flapped around town like a fruit bat, hanging out with socialites and starlets and literati, feasting off publishers’ parties, hobnobbing, charming the pants
I worked on a memoir (“A Boyhood on the Mississippi”) and wrote a few thousand words about fishing and rafts and camping on islands and then decided that Mark Twain had done this much better.
I tried writing a piece about 44th Street when it rains and the taxis glisten as they race through the puddles and the hotel doormen hold their big umbrellas over the elderly couple looking anxiously up the street, late for their flight home to Cleveland, and decided that E. B. White did that sort of thing to perfection and why should I do a poor imitation?
I began a profile of Arthur Godfrey (“The man in the tan raincoat and the gray homburg who entered the Columbus Circle subway station was undistinguishable from any other straphanger until he asked the woman in the ticket booth if the uptown B train was still skipping its 81st Street stop on account of the construction project that has been going on there for most of the fall and she recognized one of the most familiar voices in the history of radio and said, ‘You’ll want to take the C train to 72nd and walk, Mr. Godfrey. It’s quicker, and it’s a nice day for a stroll.”’) only to realize that he’d been dead since 1983.
I thought about writing a profile of Robert E. Lee. Then I thought about Peggy Lee, and Lee Radziwill, Will Rogers, Rodgers and Hart, Huntington Hartford, Ford Madox Ford, Betty Ford, Earl Battey, Katherine Lee Bates, Kate Smith, Howard K. Smith, Maggie Smith, Sal Maglie, Sol Hoopii and His Royal Hawaiians, Jane Wyman, the YMCA. Jack Dempsey. Dumpsters. Teamsters. Hamsters. Hamilton Jordan. Jergens Lotion. The Locomotion. Perry Como. Barium. Syngman Rhee. Ralph Stanley. Stan Musial. The musical Oklahoma. Hummus. And so on.
I looked in the box that Salinger left, and it was not so different from any other New Yorker memoir. Tales of gloomy mild-mannered eccentrics and their tiny feuds and Ross loping down the hall and yelling, “God bless you, damn it! ” and Thurber’s noontime assignations at the Hotel Seymour and White’s agonies of revision and the tragedy of Liebling, who needed a big windfall success and never got one and worked himself to death. I couldn’t let Salinger ruin his reputation with this crap. I lifted the box up to the open window and let the pages waft out and flutter toward 44th Street. One line caught my eye as the page flew away—“Mr. Shawn threw Hemingway to the floor and got him in a leg scissors before calmer heads—” and then it was gone.
Dear Mr. Blue,
I have been a voracious reader since childhood, devouring fiction, history, science, philosophy, like a vacuum cleaner. I’m the only person I know who’s read everything by Sartre, Simeon, Dickens, Trol lope, Patrick O‘Brien, and Jean M. Auel. I’ve read the Koran, the Buddhist canon, the C. H. Mackintosh commentaries on the Bible, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas. And now, at the age of 48, I seem to have crashed. I have not opened a book in the past two years. It doesn’t interest me. I look at the books on my coffee table and they’re like bricks to me. Any ideas?
—Scorched
Dear Scorched, No sin to be aliterate. There’s a whole world out there that writers write about that you can discover for yourself. Cooking, travel, clinical depression, exile, self-destructive behavior, the accumulation of vast wealth, inappropriate romance, just to name seven. I’m on the other side of the canyon from you, a writer who is staring at a blank page and trying to figure out how to make a brick out of it. Someday, somebody should bring nonwriters together with nonreaders to see what they have to say to each other. I was okay. My candle still had two good ends left and I flapped around town like a fruit bat, hanging out with socialites and starlets and literati, feasting off publishers’ parties, hobnobbing, charming the pants
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