FOR JIM – THE STORY I OWED YOU

 

Dad wanted to call him Rusty because when Mom first brought him home from the hospital he had an impressive crop of rusty red hair. I kind of liked the name, and still do. It's a real guy's guy name. It's the kind of name that gives a kid an edge before he even starts out and puts him a leg up on the Hermans and the Percys and the Lyles and the Francises and the Normans.

Dad's name was Norman, which was probably a good reason why he voted for Rusty, although most of the people who knew him from the time of his youth called him Whitie or Norm. Only the preacher and his mother and dad called him Norman…well, and Mom, whenever she was pissed off at him. I figure he must have liked the nickname Whitie, since his big brother Bob (not Robert, mind you, but Bobby Junior—why do parents do things like that to their kids?) was known as Red and Dad always looked up to him, so maybe that had a lot to do with the Rusty thing too. 

But I guess Rusty kind of smacks of nickname, like people are going to ask, "What's it short for?" or "So what's your real name?" Besides, Mom said she thought it was a dumb name unless it was for a dog. And she didn't want him having a name he was going to go around hating all his life like she did. (Mom's name was Reba–Reba Mae, actually–and she was always saying that every time she heard that someone was called Reba, it turned out to be a bloodhound bitch, or some woman from a hollow so far back in the hills that it had to have daylight pumped in. I do, however, recall her being fairly pleased when Nashville star Reba MacIntyre made the name famous later on.

But, of course, none of that kept her from naming me Danny – not Daniel, not even Dan – because her mother had always loved the song Oh Danny Boy, or from giving me my father's name as a middle name, so that my full name, Danny Norman Newland ended up having the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahah-nyahah quality of childish taunting. But anyway, Reba Mae nixed Rusty out of hand and with her usual bent for whimsical criteria decided that a great name would be that of her favorite TV sports announcer and game show host, Dennis James, who also advertised for Old Gold cigarettes. It didn't matter that the Jersey-born actor cum wrestling announcer's real name was Demi James Sposa. Reba Mae thought he was suave and looked so sophisticated puffing his Old Gold, and she fell in love with his moniker, so the name stuck.

Now, it wasn't until several days later when Reba Mae and Whitie actually started saying his name —"Coochi-coochi-coo Dennis, coochi-coo Dennis James, coochi-coochi Denny"—that they realized, with a histrionic slap to their collective forehead, that people were probably not going to call him Dennis or Dennis James, but Denny. And this was, after all, Ohio, where, particularly up on the lake, in places like Toledo, Akron and Cleveland, people didn't make much of a distinction between their pronunciation of short E's and short A's (as in "I'm going beck to Clevelend" or "I live near Ekron"), so Denny and Danny were going to end up often sounding almost indistinguishable from each other.

This meant that before the poor little kid was even able to pronounce goo-goo and gah-gah, his given name had been usurped in deference to his older brother and he was being called by his middle name. And then, not James either, but Jimmy and later, just plain Jim.

Of course, from kindergarten on, whenever roll was called at school it was with "real" names. So in the classroom little Jimmy quickly became Dennis (Denny, Den). Thus, his friends and classmates called him Dennis and his family called him Jimmy and the whole thing must have been really confusing to the little guy. I remember his first shaky-lettered attempts to print his name. After struggling through the six letters of his first name, he went to the considerable trouble of learning how to draw parentheses, and within them he scrawled, somewhat smaller and surely shakier, (J I M). Little wonder that he occasionally went dyslexic and turned the S in Dennis or the J in Jim inside out in his head and wrote it bass ackwards on the wide-lined, light green pages of his spelling workbooks.

Despite the fact that it might have been easier on his little-boy psyche, however, it was a good thing that Rusty never stuck, because it wasn't long at all before his prenatal shock of oxide red hair turn almost as blonde as Daddy Whitie's. I don't know whether it was the stress of not having a single first name to call his own or whether it was simply his nature, but if he wasn't born to be a redhead, he was certainly born with a redhead's temper. That was abundantly apparent from the outset. Never have I witnessed a more strongly emergent personality prior to the age of one in anyone else I've ever known. And it just kept getting stronger as he grew.

He was the most cantankerous toddler you could possibly imagine. Interested in everything from the time he could crawl, grabbing, touching, pulling and throwing everything in sight and crawling so fast that he almost moved at the rate of a small dog from one place to another on all fours. This meant that my beleaguered mother had to have eyes on him all day long in order to avoid catastrophe. For example, the time he spread the tines of a metal bobby pin he had found on the floor and plugged it into the electrical outlet, knocking himself for a loop, severely burning his index and middle fingers and (fortunately) blowing a fuse. Or the other time that Reba Mae was ironing in the dining room and cooking in the kitchen at the same time and left her ironing board for a few seconds to go check on whatever was in the oven. Jim’s screams brought her running, to find the hot iron on the floor, the cord in Jim’s hand and his tiny arm severely blistered from forearm to shoulder from the sizzling iron sliding down it. Indeed, he carried a scar on his shoulder from that burn for the rest of his life.

Screaming, by the way, was something at which he truly excelled. He was kinetically hyperactive from the start, and learned quickly to bow his back, kick his feet and scream bloody murder if he was picked up or otherwise restrained from doing precisely what he wanted to do. Screaming, in fact, became his main bargaining chip for getting his way, since he was nothing if not astute from the very beginning.

He had a scream that was shrill, incredibly loud and blood-curdlingly persistent. He had powerful lungs and was fully capable of screaming–not screaming and sobbing, mind you, just plain, ear-splitting, intolerably high-pitched screaming–for minutes on end, until he was provided with whatever it was he was screaming for (the toy he had been playing with and that had fallen out of the playpen, the household item he was told he couldn't touch, his pacifier, his “little blue blanket”—which he called boo-bukuck—whatever it happened to be). And he was just as capable of shutting off the screaming mechanism immediately, no tears, no sobbing, no wind-down, almost as if it were an electric siren with a switch, the split second that the desired item was placed in his hands.

My parents were really distraught with this trait of Jim's and asked friends and family members for advice. Coming from immigrant Scots-Irish and German stock as they did, the most usual tip my mother and father received was to give the kid a sound spanking. But they seemed to realize, somehow, that this method not only wouldn't work but might also even make matters worse. The little guy was headstrong and resilient. And corporal punishment wasn’t likely to do more than make him madder and shriller.

My father, for his part, seemed to recall his older brother's having a similar screaming habit when he was a small boy and my Grandma Alice's having cured him of it forever by once heaving an entire dishpan full of ice cold water into his face in mid-scream. He had lost his breath, turned blue and fallen faint to the floor from the shock and my grandmother had had to whack him smartly on the back to get his respiration going again, but it had been the last screaming fit he had ever had. By this point Whitie thought it was worth a try, but Reba Mae felt it was too extreme.

She finally asked Dr. Clyde W. Berry, our family physician, what he thought and his advice was, "Ignore him. He'll get tired of screaming after a while if he realizes it won't get him anywhere."

So my parents tried that for a while and found it to be less than sage advice when dealing with someone as hyper-active and willful as little Jimmy. When he realized he was being ignored, he added new embellishments to his repertoire. First he would scream constantly for about five minutes, and if that brought no parental reaction, he would lie down on his stomach on the floor and continue to scream while pounding his fists and the toes of his shoes on the resounding hardwood. This he would do for another five-minute interval before still continuing to scream but now with his palms and toes planted firmly on the floor while slamming his forehead repeatedly with a sickening thud into the oak-wood grain. This always brought a reaction from Reba Mae, because the one time that she had ignored him, he had butted the floor with his forehead until it had knots the size of goose-eggs on it and until his nose had started to bleed.

But Dr. Berry, a World War II Army physician and former Lieutenant Colonel, insisted that infants didn't commit suicide and that Reba Mae should just let Jim pound his head on the floor until he got tired of doing it. When Reba Mae said that she simply couldn't stand Jim's screaming, Dr. Berry suggested she lock him out on the porch and let him scream to his heart's content.

She said that was easy for him to say but it was another thing to actually do it. Especially since, with as disturbing as his screaming could be, the neighbors were likely to think he was being beaten within an inch of his life.

Heartless as the medical advice appeared to be, however, she did finally take it. And doing so would provide an indirect solution.

One day when Jim was about four years old, and in a particularly vile humor over some unattended whim, our mother reached the end of her tether and locked him out on the screened-in porch of the rambling old house on the main street of town—which wasn't Main Street but Auglaize, although there was a Main Street in town, which wasn't the main street—to which we had recently moved. The raised wood-plank floor of that porch appeared to have a really satisfying resonance when my infuriated little brother battered it with his fists, forehead and feet. He became one with the sound, simply fell into sympathetic vibration with the reverberating porch floor, and it seemed that he might just go on forever producing that rumbling din and accompanying it with a singularly crystal-shattering scream that could be heard a block away...And was.

A delivery man who was passing by on the busy street in front of our house heard little Jimmy's screams over the noise of traffic and the sound of his own truck engine. Fearing the child was trapped or being murdered, he slammed on the brakes, left his truck idling by the curb and stormed up our driveway to the side door off of the screened-in porch. Jim was still pounding head, fists and feet on the echoing wood flooring, totally oblivious to the fact that the man was hammering on the hooked screen door to try and raise someone's attention.

Finally, over the intensity of the shrill screaming, the delivery man shouted, "Are you hurt, Sonny!? Are you hurt!?

Obviously taken by surprise, Jim abruptly stopped screaming, as if his “screaming plug” had just been pulled, sat up cross-legged on the floor in one swift movement and scowling disapprovingly at the poor shaken man, yelled, "NO!"

The man stalked back to his truck, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, and Jim just sat there looking after him as my mother stood snickering to herself in the kitchen, mortified but tickled both by the man's reaction and her irascible little boy's response. As she watched him through the kitchen window, she saw little Jimmy stand up, brush himself off, then sit back down and start playing with a toy truck that he had conveniently had with him when he was exiled to the porch. From that day on, he never again had a screaming tantrum.      

 

YANKEE REDUX – DUDLEY NICHOLS, LOCAL BOY MAKES GOOD

If you’ve ever heard of Wapakoneta, my home town, you’re probably a “moon freak” who knows the story of Neil Armstrong by heart, you stopped off at the Wapakoneta-Bellefontaine (which we say like bell-fountain) Street exit on I-75 to go to the Bob Evans and discovered that there’s an aerospace museum next door—can’t not have one of those in the town where the First Man on the Moon was born—somebody told you about Jim Bowsher’s incredible Temple of Tolerance and, even though you’re not an Ohioan, you decided to go see it for yourself (Johnny Depp did, and so did a number of other notables over the years), or you are a reader of this blog.

Dudley Nichols

But unless you were a real Hollywood connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to Wapakoneta to walk the same streets that saw Dudley Nichols grow to manhood, or to try and get a selfie in front of his family’s home. (If you did, you would be, as my father, the inimitable Whitie, used to say, “shit outa luck”). That house, where Dudley’s stepmother, Kitty, lived until her death, and that used to stand at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, has long since been torn down. Despite the good work of the Auglaize County Historical Society, Wapak (as we natives lovingly call it) has often been less than sensitive to historical value. Not long ago, for instance, what had once been the main station for the late-nineteenth-century Interurban Streetcar Line was purchased and torn down to provide more parking space to the pizzeria next door. But, c’est la vie.

Whether you’ve heard of him or not, Dudley was once a highly renowned personality—one of Hollywood’s most influential writers and a film director and producer in his own right. Born in 1895, the son of a Wapakoneta doctor, Grant Nichols, and his wife, Mary, Dudley got in on the ground floor of the golden age of cinema, the early years of “talking movies”, and earned a place for himself as a true Hollywood icon. He is credited by some film experts with having elevated the status of the Hollywood screenplay to a level of literary excellence, and with having almost single-handedly elicited a whole new realm of respect for the American screenwriter.

The pizza place that I mentioned earlier is in the same building that my grandfather, Murel Newland, built in 1945-46 so that three of his sons, who had gone off to service “for the duration” during World War II, would have a place of business to come back to. And it was there, shortly after the war, that Whitie, his big brother Red and their younger brother Chuck opened the Teddy Bear soda fountain and sandwich shop, which, over the years, would morph into a family restaurant. The Nichols home was just a couple of doors away at the corner of Blackhoof and Main, and Dudley’s widowed stepmother Kitty lived there alone but rented part of the house to a single schoolteacher named Jessie Crawford. Kitty was a "stepmother" in name only, since she and Dudley’s were only eight years apart in age. Dr. Nichols, her husband and Dudley's father, died in 1944 at the age of eighty-two and Kitty never remarried. Curiously enough, she and Dudley both died in 1960, Dudley aged sixty-four and Kitty seventy-two. 

Kitty became a Teddy Bear regular from the outset. She mostly liked the coffee and the pie, but would now and then eat a meal as well. I was only a little boy when Kitty used to come into the Teddy Bear daily, but I remember her well. She seemed somehow regal and a little intimidating if you didn’t know her. I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, elegant with her long silver hair pulled back tight and tied in a kind of ponytail with a velvet ribbon, her makeup ever perfect. I loved her full, pleated, ankle-length skirts and starchy white blouses, her slender hands with their red-painted nails, the long fingers that held her cigarettes the way female-lead movie stars did, up close to her scarlet lips, her elbow propped on the table.

Kitty liked Whitie and he liked her. She often came in between rush hours, and when he had time, Whitie would sometimes pour both of them a cup of fragrant, steaming Continental coffee and sit down with her to chat for a while. She never sat in a booth, always at a table, usually a square table for four right at the end of the counter.

Kitty wasn’t much for small talk. She could be, in fact, a bit cantankerous, so her conversations with Whitie usually verged on serious. Whitie, who was obsessive-compulsive to a fault, often tried to steer the conversation toward religion, or at least toward “belief”. My father had been brought up to be a devout Methodist and it was inconceivable to him that anyone could be an atheist, which Kitty was, and didn’t care who knew it.

This bothered Whitie. It bothered him for her, he said, because he liked her a lot, and he felt that anyone who believed in “nothing” was damned from the get-go. So he tried, as subtly as he knew how (which, if you knew Whitie, was anything but subtle) to convert her. Or at least to get her to say, unequivocally, that she believed in something.

One day, Whitie came home crestfallen. He said that he had suggested that Kitty must believe in something. He just couldn’t believe that she believed in nothing. So after he had badgered her into a state of acute ill-humor, it seems Kitty snapped, “I didn’t say I didn’t believe in anything, Norman. I said I didn’t believe in God. I do believe in something. I believe in money!”

Although few people I’ve ever met were more interested in money than my father—perhaps because he never was able to figure out how to make a ton of it and had to make do with being just “comfortable”—this statement of Kitty’s shocked him. “How could she say that?” he wanted to know. “Money couldn’t buy happiness, could it?”

“It will buy a hell of a lot more of it than poverty will,” Kitty Nichols responded. “The more money you have, the more insulated you are from hardship, and therefore, the happier you’ll be. Money is the solution to almost everything.”

Despite this answer that was very apparently designed to get Whitie to put a sock in it, however, he persisted, for as long as he knew Kitty, in trying and get her to admit she was a believer at heart. He felt that he should know. He’d been through several years of combat during the war and he’d seen it time and again. When shit started flying, even the most ardent non-believers started praying. But he never managed to convince her, even though they remained friends for years.

There was lots of talk over the years about Dudley and Kitty. Some said that they didn’t get along at all, that there was a lot of resentment over his father’s having married a much younger woman. Others said they got along very well indeed. Too well for some of the worst tongue-waggers around town. Still others said they had practically no relationship at all, since Dudley left home quite young and, basically, never went back. But it was through Kitty, via my father, that I knew that Dudley was a famous writer, and since I was in awe of writers and, more than anything in the world, wanted to be one myself, I always fantasized that Dudley might drop by for a visit and come to the Teddy Bear, where I might meet him while he was having coffee and pie. But, no such luck.

Already at age eighteen, Dudley was getting his first communications experience as a radio operator aboard a ship on the Great Lakes. From 1914 through 1917, he furthered his education at the University of Michigan. There, one of his activities was working as a student assistant in the university’s radio laboratory.

This experience both on the Great Lakes and at the university, served him well during the two years that he spent in the Navy, right at the end of World War I. Such was his expertise that, while in service, he created two highly useful inventions. One was a new kind of electronic discharger that would find application in commercial radio following the war, and the other was a new method of electronic protection for naval minesweepers. The new Nichols Method was successfully used in the sweep-up of some fifty thousand mines in the North Sea after the war. It was because of these inventions that Dudley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920. And it was during this period that he honed technological skills that he would later be able to apply to movie-making.

After his discharge from the Navy, Dudley went straight to the Big Apple to start accumulating the skills that he would need to become a successful writer. Hollywood was nowhere in his plans at the time. Like many writers before him, he believed that the best place to learn writing skills was in journalism, and there was no better place to do it than in New York City.

The World Building

His first writing job was at the New York Evening Post in 1920. Before long, however, he sought and got a job at New York World, which operated out of New York’s World Building. The paper, which was founded in the 1860s, and had featured the likes of Mark Twain, among other renowned writers, was owned by the Pulitzer family. Joseph Pulitzer himself commissioned construction of the World Building, located at 99 Park Row, specifically to house the paper. Built in the 1890s, it was one of New York’s early skyscrapers, a “towering” twenty floors, designed by famed architect George Browne Post. If you’re planning a trip to New York, however, you won’t be able to visit it, since it was razed, unfortunately, in 1955.

At New York World, Dudley not only met, but worked alongside such writing legends as Dorothy Parker—the brilliant satirist and short story writer who would also later turn to screenwriting, only to be blacklisted for her left-wing politics during the McCarthy Era—and Heywood Broun, founder of the American Newspaper Guild. Dudley would spend the next decade in New York City, working as a court reporter and theater critic for the World, and eventually as one of its columnists. He also free-lanced for other publications during that time.

Dudley in Hollywood

Dudley fit beautifully into the glimmering world of Hollywood. He was over six feet tall, a handsome, slender man who wore a suit well. And his elegance and intellect, combined with his superior writing skills, made him an almost overnight success. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood.

Despite his enormous success, Dudley remained a highly principled man, a democratic liberal with a strong sense of solidarity. I never tire of saying that Wapakoneta has had two major firsts: the first man to walk on the moon, and the first person ever to refuse an Academy Award.

This last happened in 1936, when Dudley Nichols was granted the Academy Award for best-written screenplay, for the 1935 hit, The Informer. The movie, directed by iconic film-maker John Ford—with whom Dudley would work on another dozen pictures—is set in 1920s Ireland and is about a former Irish rebel named Gypo Nolan. The plot finds Gypo recently ousted from the rebel movement and on the point of starving. When he finds out that his destitute lover Katie has turned to prostitution in order to make ends meet, Gypo decides to accept a twenty-pound bribe from the British authorities to rat out a former fellow rebel and the tense storyline recounts the consequences of that decision.

At the time, film companies were involved in a stand-off with screen writers and other unions in the industry. For obvious reasons, the Academy opposed independent unions, claiming that the Academy itself was the sole representative of all people working in the motion picture industry. If the Academy refused to recognize his guild, Dudley reasoned, he would refuse to recognize the Academy by turning down its award and boycotting the Academy Awards ceremony.

Twice the Academy tried to mail the Oscar to Dudley, as a de facto means of forcing acceptance, since his unprecedented snub was a slap in the face to film industry leaders. But both times, Dudley mailed it back.

His stubbornly ethical stance paid off, and, in 1938, two years after the boycott, the Academy finally certified the Screen Writers Guild as a bona fide and representative labor organization, and Dudley finally accepted his Oscar for The Informer. By that time, Dudley had been elected president of the guild, a post he held in 1937 and 1938.

Over the course of his career, Dudley Nichols garnered numerous honors. The same year that he won the Academy Award, he also won the Venice Film Festival Prize for best-written screenplay, also for The Informer. In 1940, he was nominated for an Oscar for best-written screenplay for The Long Voyage Home. He was nominated again in 1943 in the category of Best Original Screenplay for Air Force. He received the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1953 for his contribution to screen writing, and was nominated again for an Oscar in 1957, for Best Writing and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. It was for his original story, The Tin Star, which became an Anthony Mann movie starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Perkins and Betsy Palmer.

He had one spectacular flop—the 1947 screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Mourning Becomes Electra, for which Dudley wrote the screenplay as well as directing the picture, for RKO. It starred Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey. Despite the fact that it was critically acclaimed and that Michael Redgrave was awarded Best Actor for his role, the picture was a box-office disaster on which RKO lost 2.3 million dollars—at the time, the most money a film company had ever lost on a movie. But he bounced back in the fifties with new hits including not only The Tin Star, but also films like Rawhide, Return of the Texan, The Big Sky, Prince Valiant, Run for the Sun, The Hangman and Heller in Pink Tights.

In all, Dudley Nichols—Wapakoneta boy made good—wrote, directed and/or produced over sixty motion pictures, including some like Bringing Up Baby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Stagecoach and The Bells of St. Mary’s that were destined to become film classics. But he never forgot his activism for democratic and humanitarian causes. In 1947, at the outset of the so-called “Red Scare” and its attendant “McCarthy Era” of persecution, paranoia and anti-democratic witch-hunts that wrecked numerous lives and careers—nowhere more than in Hollywood—all-time emblematic silent film star Charles Chaplin wrote a letter to Dudley praising him for his independent stance. On meeting Dudley at a mutual friend’s house, the British-born Chaplin, who, himself, would be persecuted and deported for his socialist political stance, seemed to recognize a kindred spirit, and wrote in part: “It is deeply gratifying to know that in these reactionary times of hate and conspiracy, there are still voices of protest and sympathy for what is being done to individuals by the so-called ‘free press,’ which is so violent and crude that intelligent criticism is inadequate to cope with it.”

Small-town people, like those of us from Wapakoneta, all too often think that “nothing ever happens here.” But it’s not true. Quite often, stars are born among us and we fail to see them until they wander elsewhere and then streak through a different sky with blinding light.   

 

YANKEE REDUX — HEM AN' ME

When I first met up with Hemingway, I was eleven-and-a-half years old. I didn’t actually meet him. He had already been dead for a couple of weeks or so by then. But you could say that was when he first came to life for me.

I was visiting my Grandma Myrt. It was summer and I had ridden my bike over to her house. Just to visit. I did that frequently, rode over to the house of one of my grandmothers or the other when I didn’t have anything else to do and it was still too early to go to the public swimming pool or to tool around town on our bikes with one of my neighborhood friends or with my cousin Greg. Other kids slept in on summer mornings when there was no school to worry about. But I liked to get up and see that new day stretching in front of me, full of possibilities and promise.

Me with little brother Dennis at Grandma Myrt's

Grandma Myrt was an early riser, like her daughter, my mother, Reba Mae, and I had inherited that trait. My dad Whitie and two of his brothers had a restaurant called the Teddy Bear and Whitie opened at 6 a.m. for the breakfast crowd. Grandpa Vern was superintendent at Greenlawn, the town’s main cemetery and started work at seven. Mom and Grandma always got up around five to see them off and to start the day’s chores. They seemed optimistic about it always, the women, I mean—the men always seemed grim—with their cups of black coffee right there handy on the kitchen counter and their radios on low, tuned to the local AM channels from Dayton and Lima, or to WOWO, the big voice of the big Midwest, out of Fort Wayne, across the West Ohio line in Indiana. And I never wanted to miss that magical time when working people rose to meet the dawning of a new day. In fact, on summer mornings, I took finding out what the day had to offer almost like an occupation, getting up, having my breakfast and getting out into the world like a man with a mission.

On this particular morning, a beautiful July summer morning, with a spanking new blue sky and some sparkling dew still on the grass, I decided to pedal on over to Grandma Myrt’s to hang out and talk to her for a while, “but don’t make a nuisance of yourself,” Reba Mae warned, “because Grandma’s busy”. It probably wasn’t much later than nine when I arrived, but for a woman that got up with the chickens, that was mid-morning, and when I rapped on the back screen door and then strode across the enclosed back porch and into the kitchen, she was just pouring herself a second cup of coffee. Two in four hours might seem like slow coffee-drinking to some country folk but Grandma Myrt had this habit of making it last. She called it “letting it rot”. It involved pouring a big mugful of black coffee for herself at about a quarter to six when Grandpa Vern got up and setting it on the shelf in the cupboard. And as she took care of her morning duties, she would go from time to time to the cupboard and take a sip of java from the cup. Obviously, the longer she took between sips the cooler the coffee got, until, finally, it would be stone cold. But she didn’t seem to mind drinking cold coffee, as long as it was piping hot to start with. That too, I inherited from her—not from Reba Mae, who always drank hers hot enough to skin hogs—and I can still make a mug of coffee last hours while I’m working at my desk.

Anyway, what immediately grasped my attention on this morning, after Grandma had said, “Why hullo, honey!” and given me a hug and offered me a glass of milk and one of the sugar cookies she had made, was a magazine that was lying on the kitchen table, and which she had apparently been perusing. I recognized the masthead. It was Life and in those days, when television was a relatively new medium—if wildly popular—and print media still reigned supreme, it was hard to go into a Midwestern home that didn’t have a copy of the major “picture book” magazines like Life or Look, with their captivating, artful photography, on coffee tables, or in the living room magazine rack, or on a “library shelf” in the bathroom. But at Grandma Myrt’s it was odd to see a magazine—or anything else, for that matter—out of place and that’s probably what drew my eyes to it.

Although the house was on the edge of town, it was a big country barn of a place, with all of the inviting simplicity of country life and all of the clean, tidy look of the old German farms in the area. There was no big library of any kind in the house. Books cost money and my grandparents didn’t have much of it. What books there were, were Grandma’s and she kept them tucked away upstairs in her room. Grandpa had learned to read as a grown-up and liked cowboy novels but I suspect that once he had read them he passed them on to Grandma’s younger brother Jessie, who was way poorer than her but had scores of adventure novels and magazines, kept in neat stacks along with his arrowhead collection and other paraphernalia on a big table in the living room of the tidy but tumbledown house he shared with my great-grandmother. Grandma Myrt, on the other hand, had a really good education for a rural woman born in 1900, having graduated eighth grade with a vocational certificate. She had a love of learning and reading, which she passed on to my mother and Reba Mae to my older sister and me. And she was always looking up where any of her grandchildren was at any given time—in the United States or in the world—in her geography books, or reading to us from books of tales by Andersen or Aesop or the Brothers Grimm. And then too, we had a good public library in town. But there was a magazine rack in the living room and both she and Grandpa were partial to “looking at” magazines, as they said. It’s just that you were never going to find either books or magazines strewn around there. A place for everything and everything in its place: Their house was an illustration of that adage.

The cover of the magazine lying on the linoleum table top showed a huge head shot of an aging man with a still powerful face, big-boned, grey-bearded, uncommonly intelligent-looking, sensitive, yet every bit as intimidating as my own Grandpa Vern's face—and, believe me, Grandpa could look a hole right through you. It was a cover I would see many times after that, a classic, a collector’s item, the famous cover story of July 14, 1961, that Life published to honor perhaps it's most famed contributor ever.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Ernest Hemingway, honey,” Grandma said.

“Who's he?”

“Oh, a very famous American writer.”

And then she told me a little about him, about The Old Man and the Sea, about some other books. But mostly she told me about his being bigger than life, an American icon. Although she didn’t say he was an icon because people didn’t call other people icons back then. She said he was a hero, an adventurer, like somebody out of a storybook. I asked if she knew him and she laughed and said no but that he was so famous that it was as if just about everybody knew him. It was really sad, she said, a big strong man like that taking his own life.

And, of course, that launched us on a discussion of a grave we had seen once in a cemetery in some other town—we sometimes "looked up" old relatives in west central Ohio cemeteries when she and Reba Mae and we kids would go on a Sunday afternoon drive—that had a wrought-iron fence around it and of how she had told me that in some places they did that, fenced off the graves of suicides, because they didn’t figure a person that took his own life was fit to lie in hallowed ground with the rest of the Christians.

But when she said she had to get busy with her chores, I asked her if I could have a look at the magazine and she gave me permission “if I was very careful with it”. And I sat quietly on the back steps of the house studying the pictures and reading the text, understanding what I could of it and trying to get as deep into the scenes as I could. So that when Grandma Myrt finally said, “Your Mom just called and said you’d best be getting home for lunch,” I was already hooked on Hemingway and was feeling a distinct loss, sad that I had missed out on knowing him, sorry I never would, that there would be no chance, even if, someday, I too became a famous writer.

That was the point at which I decided I really wanted to be a writer, stopped playing around pretending to be one and started trying my hand at writing little stories and puttering around with plotlines and reading more and more. I had done a lot of reading when I first learned how and now I returned strongly to the habit, going to the library with my studious sister, Darla, and asking her to recommend books that she had read when she was my age.

The following year or the year after, I really can’t recall exactly, I saw Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, the 1962 film directed by Martin Ritt. It was based on Hemingway’s famous Nick Adams series. This was a collection of short stories that he wrote over the years whose main character was an adventurous young man called Nick Adams, who was obviously the writer’s surrogate. The screenplay was put together by Hemingway’s long-time friend and biographer, A.E. Hotchner (Papa Hemingway), and the cast included Richard Beymer (of West Side Story fame, as Nick), Paul Newman (as the punch-drunk fighter from Hemmingway’s The Battler), Diane Baker (as Carolyn), Corinne Calvet (as la Contessa), Ricardo Montalban (as Major Padula) and Jessica Tandy (as Mrs. Adams). The cast also included such heavyweights as Eli Wallach, Dan Daily and Susan Strassberg.

The film got badly panned by the most elite of critics, despite its five Golden Globe nominations. It was a time of growing interest in the psychological novel and in the film thriller, and critics who were busy learning psycho-babble probably found it naïve. But those stories were “boy’s life” tales at their finest and that picture brought them to life in my early-adolescent mind. I wanted to do exactly what Nick Adams had done: run away from home and go off to see the world. Following the lines of the short stories, the film has Nick riding the rails until a mean-spirited railroad agent heaves him off of a freight train. He then meets up with a has-been fighter (Newman) and a booze-sodden advance man for a traveling burlesque show during his journey in search of a job as a newspaper reporter. But after getting laughed out of a newsroom he finally ends up volunteering for duty as an ambulance driver in the Italian medical corps during the First World War, where he is severely wounded. While recovering, he falls in love and has his first real romance with a Red Cross Nurse (the part played by Diane Baker), before returning home a hero and bent on pursuing his writing career now that he has something to write about — all based, of course, on the real earliest adventures of Hemingway himself.

It was the summer after seeing that picture that a friend and I started climbing an apple tree onto the roof of the shelter house in the picnic grounds at Harmon Field, our town park. We would sit there after dark talking and smoking filched cigarettes, while listening to the freight trains that rattled and blew through town at practically all hours of the day and night, imagining the exciting places they were going and dreaming of riding along. That was also the year that I started gradually working my way through every one of Hemingway's books, buying them with money I earned selling papers and cookbooks, cutting lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow or working as an usher at the local movie theater. And by the following year, when I had turned fourteen, I was not only writing short stories but had started working on a novel, a cross between Moby Dick and the Nick Adams series, about an irascible retired sea captain and a young man who becomes his only friend. I would work on that book in fits and starts clear through high school, before promptly ripping it up and throwing it into the trash after showing it to my English 101 professor in my freshman (and only) year at Ohio State and reading her comments.

The point is that I cut my teeth on Hemingway and although hundreds of other authors came after him in my life, my real, first, deep and serious interest in writing grew out of not only reading him, but also reading about him. And that, I think, is how it should have been, because Hemingway made a difference in American literature, marked a before and after, set a standard for concise, stark, yet beautiful writing that has influenced the writing of just about every American male author who has come since and a lot of foreign authors as well.

Hemingway matters, and later I’ll talk about some more reasons why. But as far as I myself go, although I have developed a natural style of my own over the years, Hem an' me are bonded for life.

 

TELL ME YOUR DREAMS

Brilliantly breaking a long-held unwritten rule that claims dream sequences in novels are tough to bring off at best and should probably be avoided entirely, author Cormac McCarthy ends No Country for Old Men with one. And it’s one of the most perfect endings ever. There also couldn’t have been a better actor in the film version to play the part of the dreamer, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, than an aging Tommy Lee Jones.

The images Sheriff Bell describes matter-of-factly to his significant other, Loretta (Tess Harper), while sitting at the breakfast table, are nothing short of compelling. The sheriff, who has just decided to retire, after a very dangerous and utterly failed case, in which he admits feeling “outmatched”, describes how, in the dream, he and his father are making their way through a mountain pass on horseback in the snow. He says it’s “peculiar”.

 “I'm older now'n he ever was by twenty years,” says Sheriff Bell, “so in a sense, he's the younger man.”

He describes what he saw, as if it were perfectly recorded in his mind.

“It was cold and snowin', hard ridin'. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.”

Then Sheriff Bell pauses, as if still seeing the images in his mind, before he says, “And then I woke up.”

But the part of that excellent final scene that I most identified with was that quiet morning portrait of Ed Tom and Loretta sitting there at the kitchen table, where she has just poured them each a cup of coffee.

“How'd you sleep?” Loretta asks.

“I don't know. Had dreams,” says the laconic sheriff.

“Well you got time for 'em now,” says Loretta. “Anything interesting?”

“Well they always is to the party concerned,” says Ed Tom.

“Ed Tom,” says Loretta patiently, “I'll be polite.”

The reason I identified was because, up until that moment, the scene could have been taking place in my own kitchen. Except that, re-written for Virginia and Dan, it would have gone like this.

“How'd you sleep?”

“I don't know. Had dreams.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me about!”

“But they were really interesting.”

“Maybe, to the party concerned.”

“But not to anyone else?”

“Exactly!”

And there the conversation would have ended.

Virginia’s right, of course. Dreams are most often one of those “you’d have to have been there” propositions.  They seem so brilliant and revealing when you’re in the midst of them, but in the clear light of day, when you try to articulate them, they can become a really amorphous hash.

But hey, you’re my readers, a captive audience, so today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk a little about dreams.

I used to not think of my dreams as dreams. I tended to think of them more as a sort of separate reality. A world I lived in beyond the material world. A place where things might look familiar, might even imitate reality effectively, but a world where none of the rules of everyday life applied. In dreams, anything was possible if you could learn to focus and place yourself at their disposal. They were important to me, a kind of twilight zone where, I fancied, I could resolve things that vexed and escaped me in the waking world, in which I was, all too often, powerless.

I was reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda back then. And that led me to read a number of Native American writers as well. They all only underscored my suspicion that dreams weren’t nothing. They were something, I sought to convince myself. A real place, a real world that inhabited a separate reality.

One of the things I discovered in reading Castaneda was his quandary about the advantages and disadvantages of disembodiment in the dream world. One of the major problems with our flights of fancy in the real world is how our necessarily physical state fails to accompany them. In this earthly world, everything takes tremendous physical effort. A simple example is the very real physical difficulty and stress involved in traveling long distances. Cars, buses, trains, boats and planes, to say nothing of ports, stations, airports and terminals, as well as security, immigration, customs and so on and so forth, are factors that tend to dampen dreams of all travel, foreign and domestic. If you want to see something, first you’ve got to get there.  And that’s complicated. In fact, it quite often becomes the deciding factor in not entertaining any such desires.

Dreams simplify that. For those lucky enough to learn to fly—I, for instance, don’t possess that dream-world art and have never gotten off the ground in any of my dreams—it’s just a matter of spreading your “wings” and soaring to wherever you like. And since time, as Einstein suggests, is an invention of the conscious world, dream-flying from place to place can often take no time at all. My wife and I haven’t talked about dreaming in a very long time, but I recall that she used to be a “frequent flier”. She indicated that she could usually just leap into the air and soar off over whatever destination she wished.

Indeed, she couldn’t understand why I didn’t fly. For her it was like, “But it’s so easy. You just let yourself go and you fly!” Well, I never knew how and never learned. Perhaps, better said, what I never learned to do was “let myself go.” The best I could sometimes manage was to take very long, elastic, gliding strides that helped me to cover ground quickly.

But in my dream world, I eventually opted, as on earth, for conveyances. Big American sedans from the fifties and sixties that were so versatile they could take me from one season to another, from Europe or South America “back home” to Ohio, and from my remote mountain home to the avenues and dark bowels of a major metropolis. And those fabulous cars could do it in the blink of an eye. Or sometimes I would “fall asleep” at the wheel and wake up again in a brand new dream-world location. In other dreams I traveled by train, either on the surface of a world the tracks knitted according to their (or my) whimsy, or else I might take a subway that would plumb depths beyond the normal underground routes and wend its way into perilous caverns with sulfurous air and steaming pools, where the stations were caves in which passengers hurried on, but no one got off. I occasionally was on horseback in landscapes I’d seen before, or simply on foot but finding that my walks no longer took me to the places I knew but to what they were “now” in some dystopian future where nothing remained of how it used to be.

As I say, back when my dreams were of far more interest to me than they are now, I started taking Castaneda’s advice (or better said, the advice of the Yaqui mentor, Don Juan, that he claims to have had) and, when a dream began to overwhelm me and make me feel powerless to change its outcome, I would try to look at my hands. That’s right. That, according to Don Juan, was how to gain a measure of control over the action. If you could see your hands, you weren’t some virginal and disembodied spirit completely at the mercy of ancient powers much stronger than you were. If you could see your hands, you were you and could command reason and self-control, avoiding immobilizing panic.

Now, looking at your hands sounds easy-peasy in the waking world, but it is exceedingly hard in sleep. Or at least it is for the non-flying dodo likes of me. It took me a long time to be able to do it. The first thing was to remember, while still conscious, that once you fell asleep and started dreaming, you were going to have to attempt to see your hands. After consciously working on that unsuccessfully for, perhaps, months, I finally, in the midst of a terrifying dream in which I was paralyzed with fear, heard a little voice say, “Look at your hands!”  And suddenly, there they were, my hands, completely recognizable. Incredibly, once I could see them, I was able to take charge of the situation and either cope with whatever fearsome enemy I was facing, or run and manage to get away.

It wasn’t a perfect method, of course, but it worked more often than not. And overachiever that I tend to be, I figured if looking at your hands in the dream world could imbue you with a certain amount of power, how much more so if you could see your face. So I started working on that, with the ultimate goal being to look into my own eyes. With a great deal of practice, I got so I could see parts of my face in a dream-world mirror—my jaw, an ear, my lips and chin, a piece of my forehead, my hairline. And those things gave me an added measure of control over the action. But I was never able to look into my own eyes. I assumed, for a time, that no one could. But I later found out there are indeed people who can…just not anybody I’ve ever talked to.

Ignoring, like Cormac McCarthy—well, not exactly like McCarthy, but in the (lesser) style of him—I’ve included dream sequences in at least one unpublished novel of mine. Indeed, I did that long before I’d ever read Cormac McCarthy. That novel has been lying around in my desk drawer for a spell (like, say, twenty years or so).

Anyway, two friends got me in touch with two different Manhattan literary agents who agreed to have a look at the manuscript and see if they wanted to represent me.

The first one read it (or at least part of it) and said she, “hadn’t fallen in love with it”. And right away I figured the dream sequences were part of what she didn’t fall in love with. But then again, maybe she thought the whole thing stank, who knows?

The other one said it was “quite well written,” but wasn’t the sort of writing he represented. When I asked why, he said, “It’s just not the sort of thing that, say, my friend John Updike would write.”

Now, I’ve read a lot of Updike and my impression has always been that he is an incredibly good writer, but with just as incredibly little of importance to write about. So I couldn’t help but respond to the agent and “Updike friend” by saying, “Yes, indeed, I agree. It’s not. Thank you and good-bye.”

Even now, re-reading it, I wouldn’t take the dream sequences out of the book. Don’t tell Virginia I’m doing this, but if anybody’s still here reading this essay and has not yet dozed off, here are a few excerpts from one of the dreams, which wasn’t fiction at all, but a real dream of my own that I incorporated into the manuscript. Perhaps you’ll tell me what you think…or not.  Here goes…

…As I turn onto this road, I know that I have seen all of this before, but I can't recall where or when. I only know it is poignantly familiar, something more than déjà vu. It is the absolute knowledge that I have been in this place at another time, and that on the other side of the next rise there is a destination that fills me with apprehension, yet attracts me like a magnet, irresistibly, inexorably toward it.

I continue over the rise, almost beyond my own volition, and a church suddenly looms before me—a huge, cathedral-like church, a European-style cross-shaped colossus, complete with soaring towers bedecked with fearsome gargoyles and stern, immutable saints. It stands alone and monstrous amid the sterile-green hills, imposing and awesome, a terrifying intrusion on the otherwise uneventful landscape.

I fight my relentless compulsion to continue, knowing full well that the cathedral is my unyielding destiny, that I have been here before, driven to it like now, unable to help myself…

The chilling monotony of muffled Gregorian chants mesmerizes me, drags me forward, even while filling me with almost uncontrollable dread. Now inside the building without passing through any portal, without the slightest idea of how I have arrived, I am nearly overwhelmed by the certain knowledge that this is not what it appears to be, not a sanctuary, not a haven of peace and tranquility. The cathedral seems shrouded in a force-field of foreboding, cloaked in darkness, a place where details are frighteningly unclear, where twilight, candlelight and dusty, stained glass-filtered daylight anemically permeate the dense atmosphere...

…The chanting remains muffled—a droning, constant background from somewhere behind the dense stone walls. It is almost not a sound, but a monotonous, maddening hum inside my head. Despite the incantations, the silence in the nave is such that I can actually hear the hot drippings of the sputtering red candles as they spill from their gutters and spatter the altar stones, beneath which, I am suddenly aware, lie blood-filled chalices, teeth, bones and hair, relics of ancient, nameless martyrs.

 Abruptly, the chanting is absorbed through the normally impenetrable walls and becomes an undeniable presence all around me in the desolation of the nave. I turn in a cautious circle to see the owners of the advancing voices but find myself totally alone…

My feet itch to run, but I am riveted on the course my captive brain is setting. The chanting is now as loud as if I were in the midst of the chorus of hooded, faceless singers and yet they are nowhere to be seen. They chant to the deafening pounding of my own heart that throbs painfully in my head and ears, as my feet carry me involuntarily toward the main altar, where I can now clearly see an ornate burial casket on a sumptuous brass and hardwood bier. I am still beneath the raised altar and can only see the coffin — fine, burnished mahogany trimmed in gold so soft and pure that it glints instead of shining and clearly contrasts with the brass of the bier. I focus on details, the smoky gloss of the waxed wood in the unsteady candlelight, the delicate filigree designs of the gold trim, the solid weightiness of the hardware and carrying rails attached to the sides of the casket.

Hypnotized, my brain pulls me forward with morbid curiosity. I suddenly have an urgent need to see inside the coffin. But at the same time, my mind is split and one half is trying to pull back, stop my feet, turn me around, make me reverse my course. But the morbid side is stronger, involuntary, impossible to quell. And as it draws me forward, I can hear the other side of my brain whimpering and protesting to no avail… Again I wonder too if, in fact, God, whatever God might be, has anything to do with this place, because what I feel here is nothing like goodness.

 I am now standing beside the casket on its bier. But for some reason the sides of the coffin are still incredibly high— too high for me to see over, high as a garden wall that must be climbed to satisfy one's curiosity about the mysterious world on the other side. I stretch my hands high over my head and barely grip the slick-waxed edge of the casket. As I start to heave myself upward, I have a sudden twinge of apprehension, the same pit-of-the-stomach, scrotum-tightening chill I used to feel as a child, when I would leap into bed from a yard away to make sure the ax-murderer who lurked beneath my berth would be unable to grab my ankles, draw my child's body effortlessly under, and cleave my head from shoulders with one smooth, razor-honed stroke…

Chinned up over the "wall", elbows straining as I hang from the seemingly ever-taller side of the coffin, I can now see its contents. In this position, my face is only a few inches from the waxy-yellow countenance of the deceased—a bishop, I discover, laid out in royal purple regalia, ebony crucifix and rosary wound between the death-stiffened fingers of his inter-laced hands. At a distance, the cadaver would look impeccable, wax-figure-like in the absolute stillness of death. But at such close-quarters, my view of the body is practically microscopic.

Though I try to ignore it, though I make an effort to retrieve my vision from the spot, I cannot turn my eyes away from the bishop's miter. It is not the liturgical headdress itself that interests me. I am, instead, inescapably, morbidly drawn to the constant, evil trickle of yellowish-brown fluid that escapes from the golden and white headband and is channeled down behind the stiff, dry ear of the corpse, to soak, almost (but not quite) out of sight, into the purple head cushion of the casket, just above the dead cleric's shoulder.

A large, hairy blow-fly buzzes past, banks a hundred and eighty degrees and returns to perch on the deceased's cheek. It crawls over the cool-dead flesh, toys with an eyelid, then makes a brief flight to my lip, where it comes to rest an instant until I feel its tickly legs and sputter in desperate disgust to make it fly away. It returns to the corpse, sits on the miter, studies the fluid that my obsessive eyes refuse to abandon and crawls blithely down behind the shell of the dead bishop's dehydrated ear. I try to shut my eyes to the horrific sight but can't, as if it were an act beyond my will.

Just behind my left ear, a hoarse, unnerving whisper advises me, as if I were blind and couldn't see the truth for myself, that "the bishop is rotting" ("El obispo se pudre," the voice advises almost gleefully) and my face is involuntarily drawn nearer the sick-colored liquid coursing slowly but steadily from under the episcopal miter. I hold my breath. I struggle. I try to let loose of the box and drop to the altar, but I can't. Nor can I shut my eyelids, no matter how hard I try. I grit my teeth, hear myself groan, strain until my neck feels as if it will break, but I am inescapably locked on the image of the dead cleric.

Then, just when I think I might die of panic, a clear, calm, reassuring voice, this time close behind my right ear, says simply, "Come with me." I suddenly go limp and let go of the coffin, only to find that I am not hanging from a steep wall as I had been so sure I was. My feet are on the ground, and I am looking into the casket at the bishop's body, which, even perched on the bier, is only about chest high to me. Then, I turn effortlessly and walk away as commanded by the disembodied right-side voice...

Things grow even more horrific after that, but you get the idea.

In short, maybe my wife is right. Maybe dreams are nonsense, all chemistry, electrical short circuits in the brain, too much food and drink too late at night, mental flatulence, as it were. Who knows? Or perhaps it’s more like Castaneda suggests, and there are dreams and dreams. “Power dreams”, as he calls them. The mystery is, what—on earth—are we supposed to do with them?

Pleasant dreams!