Yesterday I tied up some loose
ends. I had to rewrite a chapter of the book I'm writing on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, putting in some new information that changed the chapter significantly, and yesterday I finished up a week's work. Nice. Now I can think again about making some forward progress. Lateral is good, and necessary in this case, but forward progress is what I'm after. So tying up that loose end felt very good, especially because the lovely Roberta Louise and I are heading to exotic Istanbul on Sunday, and after a week there, we are going to Malta--the island country south of Sicily and north of Africa in the Mediterranean. I really wanted to get this new information into my chapter before we leave. Some things you just don’t want to carry over for even a short, two-week vacation.
Another loose end that got tied up yesterday was finally reading John Williams’ Augustus (1972). I met Williams once in the early 1990s when I
was interviewing people for my biography
of poet/translator/scholar John Ciardi.
They knew each other from Bread Loaf, once called the grand-daddy of all
writers’ conferences, where for a few years in the 1960s, Ciardi was the
director and Williams was on his fiction faculty.
Williams
was then living, dying actually, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, one of God’s green
places that is home to the state university, and I found myself with a few
hours of free time from one of the Ciardi projects I was then involved in, a
book that would be published by the university press, The Selected Letters of John Ciardi (1992). I was at the same time collecting
information for a life of Ciardi, which came out in 1998, so spending an hour with John Williams made a lot of sense.
But
I wasn’t ready to talk to him, hadn’t
read any of his books, and barely even knew his reputation. We talked pleasantly for an hour or two, had a drink together, but it was unproductive. Which was my fault. I just didn't have time back then to read some of Williams' work. I figured I'd get to it later. But I never did.
That’s
how it stood until a man from Sarasota writing Williams’ life contacted me for an interview here in Dade City some six
months ago. We spent a good afternoon
chatting, but still I hadn’t read anything by Williams. But now that I'm retired and splitting my time between Longfellow and the golf course, I knew I could fit Williams in. And so I did.
I read Stoner (1965) first--and immediately fell under Williams’ spell—he’s that good. I was doing handstands at being the most recent reader to have discovered this great book. And of course I immediately thought back to that missed opportunity, when I could have asked the man to tell me about the book Morris Dickstein in The New York Times Book Review called "a perfect novel."
And then, with all those good vibes about Stoner still washing over me, I went online to find a copy of Augustus, which won the National Book Award in fiction in 1972. But it took a couple of weeks to arrive, plenty of time for me to get involved in some other book, some other writer, so when it did get delivered to my front porch, I promptly put it aside for a while, until an article in The New York Review of Books (August 2014) came out on Williams and Augustus, the men and the book. As it happens, last week I was also contacted by another potential Williams biographer for yet another interview.
The universe was sending me some not-so-subtle messages to tie up this loose end. So I did. Finally, and to my great pleasure, I read Augustus.
Neither a small-town college professor in Stoner, nor the mighty Caesar Augustus himself can match up against a universe that will have its way with them. That's one of the insistent themes at the heart of both of these great Williams books. But I don't want to talk about the books, don't want to review them or critique them. I was just tying up a loose end--and by doing so discovered a novelist worth reading, worth holding in the highest esteem. Now that's one good loose end. I can leave for Istanbul in peace.
I read Stoner (1965) first--and immediately fell under Williams’ spell—he’s that good. I was doing handstands at being the most recent reader to have discovered this great book. And of course I immediately thought back to that missed opportunity, when I could have asked the man to tell me about the book Morris Dickstein in The New York Times Book Review called "a perfect novel."
And then, with all those good vibes about Stoner still washing over me, I went online to find a copy of Augustus, which won the National Book Award in fiction in 1972. But it took a couple of weeks to arrive, plenty of time for me to get involved in some other book, some other writer, so when it did get delivered to my front porch, I promptly put it aside for a while, until an article in The New York Review of Books (August 2014) came out on Williams and Augustus, the men and the book. As it happens, last week I was also contacted by another potential Williams biographer for yet another interview.
The universe was sending me some not-so-subtle messages to tie up this loose end. So I did. Finally, and to my great pleasure, I read Augustus.
Neither a small-town college professor in Stoner, nor the mighty Caesar Augustus himself can match up against a universe that will have its way with them. That's one of the insistent themes at the heart of both of these great Williams books. But I don't want to talk about the books, don't want to review them or critique them. I was just tying up a loose end--and by doing so discovered a novelist worth reading, worth holding in the highest esteem. Now that's one good loose end. I can leave for Istanbul in peace.
