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Mencken on being a newspaper reporter

• With the changes in the news business, will succeeding generations experience what H.L. Mencken did as a newspaper reporter at the turn of the previous century?

In all of the events of H.L. Mencken's eventful life, nothing matched his days as a young newspaper reporter (circa 1899):

My adventures in that character (a newspaper reporter) . . . had their moments – in fact, they were made up, subjectively, of one continuous, unrelenting, almost delirious moment – and when I revive them now it is mainly to remind myself and inform historians that a newspaper reporter, in those remote days, had a grand and gaudy time of it, and no call to envy any man. . . . I believed then and believe today, that it was the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth.

H.L. Mencken was a newspaper and magazine editor, critic of American letters, and chief curmudgeon of the first half of the 20th century. His sharp wit was always at war with pomposity and hypocrisy and earned him the title, “Sage of Baltimore.”

His experience as a newspaper reporter predated mine by about 60 years, but the feeling was the same. I, too, had a "grand and gaudy time of it, and no call to envy any man."

The passage quoted here is from his memoir Newspaper Days.

The anniversary of the death of a literary light

• Like that of Robert Kennedy, the anniversary of the death of an American who died too young occurred this past week.

Part of our collective conversation this past week has been remembering the death of Robert Kennedy, which happened 40 years ago. Kennedy, shot by an assassin in Los Angeles on the night he won the California Democratic primary, died too young. He was 42 years old.

Those who die too young provoke particular sadness.

Six decades before Kennedy was killed, on the same day that Kennedy died, American letters lost one of its brightest and briefest flames -- Stephen Crane.

Crane's one novel was the Red Badge of Courage, which contained descriptions of the confusion and terror of a Civil War battle so real that veterans of the conflict said Crane got it exactly right. Crane had never been in a battle when he wrote the book. He had been born six years after the war ended.

Crane did see action after the book was published and after he had achieved fame because of it. He took on the role of celebrity reporter for Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World when they were trying by any means to one-up their rival William Randolph Hearst and the New York Herald in covering the Spanish-American War in 1898. The World sent Crane to Cuba, and while he was there, the editors demanded "hair-raising dispatches (and) bombastic scoops on heroism," he said.

The young writer did see action and described it well, even helping fellow reporter Edward Marshall to safety when he had been shot. Crane recorded the last dispatch from the dying Marshall and filed it before he filed his own, which eventually landed him in some hot water with his editors, who accused him of disloyalty when he returned to America.

Crane quit the World and moved to England and continued to write fiction. He had come under heavy criticism from proper Victorians because of his choice of a mate -- a former brothel keeper from Miami who helped him run up massive debts while in Europe. Crane faced a tougher foe than critics or bill collectors, however. He contracted tuberculosis and spent his last months in a desperate attempt to find relief.

That attempt failed, and on June 5, 1900, he died. He was 28 years old.

__________

(Much of the informtion here about Crane's journalism comes from Denis Bryant, Pulitzer: A Life, John Wiley, 2001.)

James Madison on freedom of the press

• We have seen an erosion of freedom of speech and the press in the last few years, so it might be good to remind ourselves of what one of the Founding Fathers had to say about it.

James Madison:

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
– First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

• Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people ... is favorable to liberty.
– National Gazette, 1791

• It is to the press mankind are indebted for having dispelled the clouds which long encompassed religion, for disclosing her genuine lustre, and disseminating her salutary doctrines.
– Speech in the Virginia Assembly, 1799

Campaign finance laws, laws against hate speech, mandated disclaimers in political advertising -- all these may seem like good ideas, but they come with a cost. The cost is allowing government (courts, bureaucrats, legislators) to get the idea that it's okay to restrict what people say.

It isn't.

Writers writing: Anthony Trollope

• Anthony Trollope wrote for money. He made out a schedule and stuck to it.

The way writers write - their habits, productivity, quirks, methods of procrastination, etc. - fascinate a lot of people, including me.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is that of Anthony Trollope, the mid-19th century British novelist and author of the Barsetshire series and the Palliser novels. Trollope's books were highly popular in his day, and his work has retained many fans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Trollope was manic about his writing. He would arise at 5:30 every morning and write for at least two-and-a-half hours. He would produce 250 words every 15 minutes. In his early years as a novelist, he had a job with the Post Office that required some train travel, and he would keep this writing schedule even if he were traveling.

Trollope saw novel-writing as work that had to be done. He wasn't interested in inspiration nearly as much as productivity.

When I have commenced a book, I have always prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face - and demanding of me increased labour.

Trollope made no secret of the fact that he wrote for money - something the critics of his day disdained.

• The Anthony Trollope website
  
  
• The Anthony Trollope society

The audacity and hope of Barak Obama, the writer

• Barak Obama wrote his own book -- no ghostwriters or co-authors. He did the literary heavy-lifting himself.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barak Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him -- an assumption that would be true, of course -- but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else's whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
  
  
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa and Hawaii;
  
  
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn't suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published this week by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair -- even audacity -- using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn't happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing and structure. He edited, rewrote and rethought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn't pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
  
  
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 -- a review of Dreams From My Father

Jim Webb, writer - and also a senator

• A writer is supposed to "render to the audience things they haven't seen." So says Jim Webb, writer. He's also a senator.

Politicians who put their names on a book and claim authorship are not unusual. The ones who actually write the book are unusual indeed.

And the politician who says of himself, "I am principally a writer": Now that is rare.

And that is Jim Webb, the freshman senator from Virginia.

Webb makes that legitimate claim as he goes around the country touting his new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America.

Webb was interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air this week, and much of the interview deals with Webb's book, his background and the political issues of the day. But about 24 minutes into the 30-minute interview, Webb talks about his becoming a writer, something he "never thought he would end up as," after he had returned from Vietnam and left his military career.

Webb wrote Fields of Fire, a novel about Vietnam, in 1978, and the book has become a classic in the area of writing about the Vietnam combat experience.

Webb has written five other novels and a number of non-fiction works as well. He was an embedded journalist with troops in Afghanistan in 2004.

The duty of a writer, Webb says, is to "render to the audience things they haven't seen."

And the process of writing, he adds, is to study something, think deeply about it, and then "go on the record."

Not a bad trait for a politician.

A seventh edition

• A textbook that goes into multiple editions can be like a child who grows up but doesn't leave home.

Textbooks can be funny things. If you write a textbook, you want it to be widely adopted so that about four years later the publisher will ask for a second edition (because, while your royalties don't amount to much at that point, the publisher is making a ton of money).

Only a few textbooks, maybe 15 percent, make it into a second edition. (I don't have a reference or stats to back that figure up.)

But then, the text may begin to gather new adopters and hang onto a few of the original ones. If that happens, about four years later, the publisher will ask for a third edition. And so it goes.

Sometimes a textbook can be like a child who grows into adulthood but never leaves home.

Those are a few of the thoughts I'm having this morning (May 20) as I am procrastinating doing work on the seventh edition of Writing for the Mass Media. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon, and the good folks there want the revised edition from me by June 1. That's why the posts on this blog and others I maintain have been a little thin in the last few days.

During its quarter century of existence, Writing for the Mass Media has been adopted as a textbook at nearly 500 colleges and universities (mostly in America but also in places across the globe). The sixth edition was used at 240 different schools, and many of those places are multi-year adopters.

So, this job is well woth doing (and has even become financially justifiable). But it's hard -- and a little boring and tedious. Fortunately, it's almost done.

And to make sure it's done, by June 1, I had better get back to it.

You can find out more about Writing for the Mass Media at these spots:

• Description on JPROF.
• The book's web site at Allyn and Bacon
• Amazon page.

On being an author - without doing any writing

• Margaret Truman, Eliot Roosevelt, Steve Allen - mystery writers? Did they really take the time out of their celebrityhood to craft, write and rewrite those mystery novels you see on the bookshelf?

We all know that politicians don't write their own speeches.

But novelists? Mystery novelists, in particular?

Surely no "novelist" would lend a name to a book that he or she hadn't written. Well, if you think that (as I did for a long time), you are most naive. This kind of intellectual dishonesty goes on more than you would think.

Over at the DorothyL listserve, a neat and lively community devoted to mystery and suspense writing, the topic of the "celebrity" author, who really isn't an author, comes up regularly. This week's discussion produced an interesting story about Steve Allen, the actor and television comedian who really began the Tonight Show.

Allen was a multi-talented guy who has his name on a number of mystery novels, and during his lifetime, he insisted that he wrote them. Not so, says Enid Shantz. She and Tom Shantz operate Rue Morgue Press, which is devoted to re-publishing the "traditional mystery which first came to prominence during the Golden Age of detective fiction (1920-1940)." They used to run a bookstore also named Rue Morgue when they encountered the Steve Allen/mystery writer conumdrum.

Here's the story Enid tells (reproduced here with her permission):

Did Steverino write his mysteries?

We had long been told by insiders that he didn't and mentioned this in our store newsletter a number of years ago. One day a few months later a man came into the store, looked around hesitantly, and then bought several books upon Tom's recommendation and left. That evening when we were going through our credit card receipts we saw the name "Steve Allen" on one of them, and remembered he was in town speaking at the library.

Several weeks later a customer mentioned that during Allen's talk, he had been asked about the persistent rumors that he didn't write his books, which he had heard from the Rue Morgue, and that Allen became quite angry and said he was going to march right over to the store and set us straight.

I guess he lost his nerve--but a few days after his visit we did get a phone call from "Mr. Allen's secretary" informing us that Mr. Allen did indeed write his own books, in word for word the same way he told Betty Webb that he did. So we thought, well, maybe he did--after all he's a smart, multitalented guy who did publish some literary short fiction in the 50s and 60s.

But wait, there's more.

Some time after that incident we were having a signing at the store for Robert Westbrook, a New Mexico author who had written several paperback mysteries set in Taos. Westbrook is the son of Sheila Graham, the Hollywood gossip columnist who had the fabled affair with Scott Fitzgerald. (Westbrook is not her son by that union, but from a later one with either Robert Taylor or Victor Mature.) He was an entertaining speaker, who told us that he had started his writing career as a teenager when his mother frequently turned her columns over to him to write when she was too incapacitated to do so herself.

He bounced around from one writing job to another--including one, many years later, ghostwriting the Steve Allen mystery series, for which he was a natural because of his Hollywood background. The way he tells it, he conceived and wrote the books in their entirety and the only contribution Allen ever made was to insert a few inappropriate reminiscences and anecdotes into the stories.

However, Westbrook didn't write the final book in the series--his wife did, as he had other deadlines to meet and she'd always wanted to write a mystery. Other than the fact that of course he had been contractually obligated at the time not to disclose all this (the contract was long over by then), he said that Allen was so accustomed to having other people write his material that he truly came to think of it as his own, an extension of his own personality.

But you know, people are going to keep on believing that Allen wrote his own books, just as they believe that Margaret Truman did and that the late Eliot Roosevelt really did leave behind a trunkful of unpublished manuscripts when he died. They'll believe it because they want to.

Ghostwritten celebrity mysteries have been around since at least the thirties, with people like Helen Wills Moody, Queena Mario, Helen Traubel, and later George Sanders and possibly Gypsy Rose Lee employing ghost writers to produce mysteries published under their names. According to Jeff Marks, the jury is still out on Gypsy, but so far as I know the only celebrity, if he can be called that, who has beyond a doubt written his own mysteries is Kinky Friedman.

Lots of people claim to have done things they have never done. They say they fought in wars they were never close to. They say they have degrees they never earned. They say they knew people they never met. I don't like any of that, but I guess I can forgive it.

But this one -- claiming to have written a book you didn't write. Somehow, that really offends me.

The Indiana primary - 40 years ago

• The upcoming Indiana primary is the most important primary election in the state in 40 years. The last time it happened, I was there, and I shook hands with Robert Kennedy.

The talking heads of the TV babblerati certified it to be true -- this is the first time in 40 years the Democratic primary election in Indiana has been important. That would be 1968, and Robert Kennedy had just jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination after Lyndon Johnson had just bowed out.

I know. I was alive. And I was there -- in Indiana, the weekend before the primary election.

At the time, I was a sophomore at the University of Tennessee and news editor of the UT Daily Beacon. As news editor, I was running a staff of reporters, editing copy and having the time of my life. The war in Vietnam meant something to all of us. The designation on my draft card was II-S, which meant I had a student deferment. That could change quickly and did for some people I knew.

I was at my desk one afternoon in late April when I got a call from Fred Parke, leader of UT's Young Citizens for Kennedy. Parke said the group had chartered a bus and were taking about 30 Tennessee students to Indiana that weekend to canvas for Kennedy. It would be the last weekend before the primary election on the next Tuesday. There were two seats left on the bus.

Would I like to go? Parke asked.

You bet.

Do you think there's a Beacon photographer who wants to come along?

Sure, I said.

I rounded up the Beacon's chief photographer, Terry Moore, and a couple of days later, on a Friday afternoon, we found ourselves bundled up with a bunch of Kennedyites and headed north toward a small town called Columbus. We would be staying in cabins at a summer camp nearby, and the group would spend Saturday dividing up the town and going door to door, handing out literature and soliciting votes for Kennedy.

We arrived sometime after midnight and found ourselves billeted in cabins with no heat to guard against the spring cold and no hot water. But the next morning, coffee, donuts and orange juice at the local Kennedy headquarters lifted everyone's spirits, and the students hit the streets. I played my role as reporter and wandered around town to see what I could see. My first stop: the local newspaper office where the local journalists were putting together the Sunday edition. I talked with several people on the staff, including the editor, and they invited me to the backshop to watch them make up the paper. (The paper was "hot type," which will mean something to journalism folks over forty but doesn't bear much explaining otherwise.)

I also met the mayor who explained the Republican nature of the area and said he didn't think people of his town were very excited about the presidential campaign. They did like having visitors from Tennessee, however. That evening, the townsfolk threw the group a fried chicken dinner and provided everyone a warm bed to sleep in. Most of the people who did this were not Kennedy supporters, just folks who wanted to be hospitable.

The canvassing continued on Sunday, and late that afternoon, we boarded our bus for the drive back to Knoxville. We stopped at the last town in Indiana before crossing the Ohio River -- New Albany -- where Kennedy was scheduled to speak. A massive crowd of about 4,000 people gathered around a small Knights of Columbus hall and went into a frenzy when Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel arrived with their campaign entourage.

Kennedy spoke for a few minutes and then a handshaking line formed, and Kennedy shook the hand of every person there -- including mine. While he spoke coherently, I remember thinking that he looked like he was in a daze, undoubtedly fatigued from four weeks of non-stop campaigning. Still, the people with whom I was traveling were thrilled to see him, and the memory was burned into their heads.

And into mine, especially because of what happened shortly thereafter.

On the next Tuesday, Kennedy won the primary and became the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Four weeks later he was dead, assassinated on the night he won the California primary.

I have thought of that trip often in the ensuing years, and I was happy to recently find a book about the Kennedy campaign in the Indiana primary. Ray Boomhower has written a lucid account of what happened and how important it was in Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Primary -- a small piece of history worth knowing more about.

The fiction writer's bookshelf

If you are interested in writing fiction, here are two of the best books you can have:

Christopher Vogler
The Writer's Journey

Renni Brown and David King
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

(These are the Amazon links.)

No one explains "story" better than Vogler.

I'm going to post these to a couple of lists to which I subscribe and see if any of those folks have suggestions. If they allow it, I'll post them here.

Alexander McCall Smith on NYT Book Review podcast

• Alexander McCall Smith talks about his latest efforts on the NYT Book Review podcast.

Lovers of Alexander McCall Smith's books may want to tune in (so to speak) on the audio interview with him by the New York Times Book Review podcast.

Here's the page with all the podcast links going back to 2006, and you can go directly to the podcast with this link.

Smith is famous for his Number One Ladies Detective Agency stories -- among others.

The Invention Conceit

• In our modern Scots-invented world of bloviation, headlines and titles can't stand the heat of a literalist's kitchen.
  

Being a literalist when it comes to words and their usage (though not without a sense of humor, I hope), I tend to pay attention to headlines and titles and to parse them unmercifully.

That's why, when I got my copy of Sports Illustrated last week, I was taken aback by the headline on the cover. (Yes, I get a hard copy of Sports Illustrated. It apparently comes as part of the audio subscription I have with Major League Baseball. I didn't ask for it and wouldn't buy it otherwise. I even turn down the copy of the swimsuit issue, which probably disappoints the editors because they use their highest level of sports knowledge to produce this profound epic. But I digress.)

The headline on this week's issue of SI reads: The Best Game Ever. One of the subhead is "How John Unitas and Raymond Berry Invented the Modern NFL."

I'm no expert, but I know a little bit about the history of professional football in this country. I was alive in 1958 and remember listening to the Giants-Colts game on the radio in my room where I grew up in Nashville, Tenn. (It was on Sunday afternoon, and in my household at that time, we didn't watch television on Sunday.)

True, this was the first of an era of popularity of professional football that still has not run its course. And true, it was a great game with many great players. The stuff of legend, as they say. I don't quarrel with the assertion that it might have been the best game ever.

But really . . . to claim, as the subhead does, that a couple of players "invented" professional football is a bit over the top. It certainly doesn't qualify as being discrete or modest in the use of the language. In fact, it goes too far in the other direction by being splashy and overblow -- and by ultimately being wrong.

But this article, which concentrated far more on Raymond Berry than Johnny Unitas, is actually an excerpt from a forthcoming book, and it got me to thinking that this is not the first time that I have run into this "invention conceit." A quick search of Amazon reveals the following:

• Frank Deford, The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball
  
  
• Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It
  
  
• Arthur DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times
  
  
• Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
  
  
• Andrew Wilson, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex
  
  
• Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• Daniel Stashower, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

The list could go on, and I'm sure you get the point.

These are probably all terrific books. I have read only one of these books: Frank Deford's book on John McGraw and Christy Mathewson. It was okay though in the end disappointing because Christy Mathewson died early and for some very wrong reasons. He was from all accounts a truly fine person and did not deserve his fate. (BSP alert: The watercolor of him at right can be found at First Inning Artworks.)

But nowhere in the book does Deford really make the case tht McGraw, Mathewson and the Giants invented modern baseball. How could he? It is a ludicrous argument to embark on in the first place.

By the same token, I'm pretty sure that the Scots did not invent the modern world. Don't get me wrong. I love Scotland. I lived their for several months once. At no time did I hear any Scot bragging about inventing the modern world. The Scots do brag about inventing golf. I'll give them that one.

Herbert Matthews, I'm confident, did not invent Fidel Castro. If he did, he has a lot to answer for. The Jews didn't invent Hollywood, Mary Rogers and Edgar Allen Poe didn't invent murder (that one goes to a guy named Cain) and Harold Robbins didn't invent sex. I know I'm on solid ground with that last one.

The only one I'm willing to concede is the last one: Arthur Conan Doyle probably did create Sherlock Holmes.

Because that's what authors do.

Updated May 4, 2008.

First things first

You won't find too many partisan political statements on this blog unless they come from commenters. But there is one thing I believe in: the idea behind the First Amendment.

People have the right to speak, write and think as they please.

Jeremiah Wright, Pat Robertson, and anyone else in the public realm may say things that are mean, stupid, wicked or offensive. They may also be speaking the truth -- uncomfortable truths that we would rather not hear. Whatever the case, if America means anything, it means that they have the right to speak.

We should be zealous in guarding that right.

The self-publishing phenomenon

It used to be hard thing to get your book published. Now it's not.

Rachel Danadio has an interesting essay, "You're an Author? Me Too," in the New York Times on the self-publishing phenomenon. And you get the feeling that she'd rather return to the good old days when agents and publishers and book review editors like Danadio had more control over the barricades:

In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.

Well, not everyone. Still, it's worth the read.

Review: The Last Casualty

• An Episcopal priest hears the confessions of a dying man. Get ready for a ride.

THE LAST CASUALTY, (Amazon) the latest thriller by Cyn Mobley, is like an Indiana Jones movie, a wild ride that never lets you catch your breath. David Dalt is a U.S. Navy Episcopal priest and an ex-SEAL -- except that apparently there are no ex-SEALs. (Just as Marines will tell you there are no ex-Marines.) Dalt is drawn back into the life when he hears the confession of a dying man. The man is a spy who has betrayed Dalt's old unit. Dalt's vows won't allow him to violate the confessional, but they can't stop him from trying to save his comrades.

It's a complex tale that moves at the pace of a speeding train.

Recommended.

(Disclosure, BSP: Cyn Mobley is a good friend. Her publishing company, Greyhoundbooks, will unleash my debut novel, Kill the Quarterback, sometime later this year.)

Wolhwend in the NYT

Good friend Chris Wohlwend has an article in the New York Times about University of Tennessee footballer Jackie Walker, one of the first black players for the Vols in the late sixties and early seventies. Walker's take is a sad one, but he finally getting some of the recognition that should have been his years ago. Congratulations to Chris on a fine article.

Good writing from a baseball insider

• When is the last time you called a major league baseball player a good writer?

Lots of talented authors have written superbly about baseball. Among all our national games, baseball is a game that lends itself easily to good wordsmiths. But rare among those smithies is an author who has played the game at the highest level. Now we have one.

Doug Glanville played major league baseball for nine years for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers. He is bringing all that experience to bear in a series of occasional pieces for the New York Times.

He is also bringing an easy, readable style that is all the more remarkable when you find out that he has an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

His latest offering, It Gets Lake Early Out There, is now on the New York Times web site. You can find links to his two previous pieces there, too.

Good column, good game, good stuff.

Eliot Spitzer as fiction

Novelist Richard Russo puts Eliot Spitzer into the realm of fictional hero -- or protagonist.


Some disagreement with Russo, but it's an interesting thought.

What if you wrote a novel about Eliot Spitzer? What would it look like?

That's the question that novelist Richard Russo considers in an interesting column in the March 16 in the Washington Post.

The news media, Russo says, have reduced the Spitzer story to a one-dimensional tale of hypocrisy outed, and while Russo didn't say this, they have thrown around the word "tragedy" a little freely. The real story of Spitzer is certainly as sad as it is surprising, but we would have to know more to bring it to the level of tragedy.

But what if we did know more? And what if, like a good novelist, we could make it up? That's what Russo does to some extent. First he considers the character of Spitzer himself.

But I don't mean to jigger the facts; fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught. And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent. For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly. He will swerve at the last moment. The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him.

Even worse, though he knows that the world doesn't work this way, he convinces himself that if he's caught, people will treat him fairly. Sure, he has shamed himself, but he's done a lot of good things, too, and people will remember that. He has always employed a kind of moral arithmetic, and he'll expect that same math to be applied to him -- all his virtues set up on one side of the ledger, his one weakness on the other. People will understand that he's mostly good. By the time my Eliot realizes that he's wrong about all this, it's too late. The damage is done. He has betrayed his wife, his children, his best self, and it's all his fault.

Russo goes on to talk about Spitzer's wife and family.

First, Eliot's wife -- and here I sense a mystery even deeper than the mystery of Eliot himself. Why does she stand there beside him at the podium when he confesses? Why do they all? I feel uniquely unqualified to look inside her heart, to ferret out her motives. I make a list of what I know (not much) and what I suspect (not much more) and wonder whether imagination will fill in all those blanks. I'm relatively certain of one thing: It's not this woman's fault. I won't portray her as frigid or otherwise complicit in what has transpired. She hasn't driven Eliot to any of this. I don't believe in perfection, but I've decided for the time being that she's been a good wife, a good mother.

Russo makes some interesting observations about how the story might play out. He gives Spitzer a sidekick who can inject a little humor into this tale. This would be a good character, as Russo conceives him. He can give Spitzer a different look at the world, as opposed to the self-center take he always has. Russo takes a look at Spitzer's daughters to see what effect their father's actions might have on them.

How does the story end? Here is where I would part company with what Russo has written.

There's also a story in which Eliot isn't even the main character. Because how believable is it, really, that they came across him by chance on that wiretap? His many enemies are justly famous as the dirtiest of tricksters. Maybe I should be writing a thriller, but I dislike and distrust plot-driven narrative and have grown fond of my own messed-up, untidy Eliot, so American in both his ambition and the disgrace that seems to flow from it so naturally. I might not know precisely why he's done what he's done, but he connects to my long-held conviction that people (in fiction, in life) aren't meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That's the hard lesson Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.

I'm not sure why Russo distrusts "plot-driven narrative." I'm not even sure what that means.

In my take, a good plot comes first, characters second. I can see Spitzer brooding about his losses and his own stupidity, searching for some redemption. But he doesn't brood for long. He acts in character. One storyline is that he has been set up. Someone somewhere has taken advantage of his foibles to do him in. Maybe there is ample justification, something we don't know yet. Spitzer goes on a quest to discover what he doesn't know.

I think I'd like to go with him.