I nearly forgot I said this is a place to discuss, books, plays and short stories. As long as I’m finally getting around to plays, I’d like to start out with a favorite: A Moon for the Misbegotten. Every person has life-changing experiences. Some of these are obvious turning points like marriage or the death of a parent, some are not. One of mine was a play I saw at age fifteen, a modern drama. At fifteen, I couldn’t say why I identified with the characters or why it moved me so (other than it was a great performance) but the work and the author got under my skin for the rest of my adolescence. It is still a singular piece though now I understand it a bit more. It was written by Eugene O’Neill and it’s called “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” Few people outside of the theatrical world understand the impact of O’Neill but, to put it simply, he made American Drama human. Theatrical plays written in this country before O’Neill were either broad comedies or melodramas. I’m sure they were lots of fun to watch, containing virtuous heroes and dastardly villains but there was nothing an audience…
Kids take a lot of things for granted. It’s part of being a kid, to accept the world and its people as part of how life should be. That’s a terrible thing for kids who live with pain or deprivation but for a lot of us that meant a childhood where we took bicycles, birthday parties, vacations and our family’s love and devotion as part of our just due. We rarely said thank you. For example, I never thanked my folks for showing me why some stories are classics. Still, I haven’t forgotten our time with Treasure Island. I don’t know if Treasure Island is still one of the required books of childhood. There are so many other stories now and Disney has such an imprimatur on the pirate world these days that Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic may get lost in the shuffle. My folks had both grown up with the tale and I suspect they were a bit excited about sharing “their” story with me when I turned ten. Perhaps I was a bit young, but I already had my nose in a book all the time so why not give me one they loved? None of us expected…
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” So says John Steinbeck, the twentieth century novelist teachers forced you to read high school and professors mocked in college. Steinbeck who preaches in The Grapes of Wrath and makes you weep in Of Mice and Men, did you know he could be funny? That man, so serious and biblical in East of Eden (except for the scenes with the car), also knew how to relax. You wouldn’t guess it but Steinbeck was a versatile writer who loved life. Of all things, Steinbeck cared about people and that shows up in Cannery Row. Cannery Row was and is a waterfront street in the town of Monterey and for a while was the hangout of Steinbeck. Then, it was a rundown place full of abandoned buildings and homeless people who sheltered there. Other impoverished people such as artists, prostitutes and rejects from society lived on the row but, most remarkably, Steinbeck’s best friend, a self-taught naturalist named Ed Ricketts lived and worked there finding sea animals for university labs and zoos. All…
William Shakespeare, that quotable fellow, said “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” That’s how I feel about home. Many people I know are raised with a real sense of identity, knowing who they are and where they belong long before they learn how to read. That place of origin, for good or for ill, is home, undeniable as DNA. Others have to make a place for themselves in this world and a few of us enter a strange site and realize with amazement that this place centers us like no other. It’s a shock, like first falling in love, and it changes the folks who experience it. That realization of finding home is central to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s book Cross Creek because it’s not just about the first heady days of romance. Cross Creek is the love affair between a discoverer and place. The two were an unlikely match. Mrs. Rawlings was a thirty-two year old journalist whose career and human marriage were both showing wear but not many signs of success. She was educated, politically liberal and although she could write, she had not found her “voice”, that prerequisite of transcendent…
I remember the summer I met her. I was in junior high, to old for kid’s books and too young (and snobbish) for the historical romances my mother favored. When I whined that I wanted something new to read, Mom looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a library book with a drawing of the English countryside on the cover. “Try this” she said.”It’s surprising.” I glanced at the title, turned to the first paragraph and was hooked with the first line,”Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Some forty years later and I’m still hooked, returning as often as possible to the house in Cornwall called Manderly. You see, I’m obsessed with Rebecca. For Rebecca is a novel about obsession. The book began while the author, Daphne du Maurier, was living Egypt with her husband, Lt. Col. Tommy Browning and it grew out of two secret obsessions of her own: her intense homesickness for England and a packet of letters she found. The letters were from an unstable, beautiful woman Tommy had been engaged to for a short time, long before he met Daphne. Daphne and Tommy had not been married all that long when she found…