2010

January 1, 2010, was the first New Years Day that I woke up without calling my friend Marty. Marty was my Army pilot, my Spurs buddy, and one of the Best Men at my and Alice's wedding. Marty made me laugh, taught table manners to my boys, and I once watched him call the police and a wrecker when a wise guy in a sports car shot him the finger as he parked and walked away from a disabled parking space (the car was towed by the time wise guy got back). I guess I should mention that Marty lived his last twenty-five years in a wheelchair after a helicopter accident made him a paraplegic, a fact that he never mentioned to anyone in all the years I knew him. Marty left us in November, a hard final few weeks and sad end for a most loving and generous man. New Year's Day was cold this year.

It was also cold for my friend Beth Ozmun because her husband, my friend Scott, died unexpectedly early in the year. And for my friend Jane Hudson Burroughs; her brother, my high school friend Carl, died within days of Marty, in November.

But Alice reminds me that for every cold day there are two that are warm. In early Spring our friends Lee and Leslie gave birth to Annabel a/k/a June Bug. In September our friends Ben and Christin married on a mountain top in Colorado. We spent almost two weeks last summer with our nephews and we know that there are babies percolating and weddings planned for 2010.

Birth, marriage, and passing. So, goodbye to last year, hello to this year. Life is good.

The Books of Others

Alice called me during a book festival signing last Saturday and asked a rather pointed question -- "Are you bringing home more books than you took to sell?" Her concern, driven by the need for more bookshelves, neither began nor ended two weeks ago but that is a good point in time to start.
Two weeks ago Andrew Finkelstein invited me home to dinner with his wife (renewed acquaintance) and daughters (brand new for me). To not talk about law we talked about travels, ideas, interests, languages, a perfect salon in a lovely home with a gracious family. The conversation turned to Amsterdam, to the Anne Frank house and, finally, to the Resistance Museum, a museum that was life-changing for me and for Alice. At the moment, Finkelstein fille slipped away from the table and returned with the loan of The Book Thief, by Zusak, an incredible novel of a German girl whose adoptive family resists... well, I hope you will read it. I will send it back to Andrew and family any day now, I promise. As I said, it was a loan.
Denys Finch Hatton reportedly said of his books (according to Berkely Cole, telling Karen Blixen), he would not lose a friend over a borrowed book, but one of his borrowers had lost one. I say bad form. I have both a borrower and a lender been. Thus, to my friends who have lent these, I promise to finish and return them:
Marc, The Power of One, Body and Soul, and The Children's Book by Byatt (signed and unread!). To Kathie, So Great A Heritage (a swap, actually). To Patrick, Taulus, A French Autobiography. To Stewart, Inside the Sky (a swap loan, for The Book Shop). To Dan, No Better Place to Die. To Russell, Running Across Countries. To Tom, The War of Art. And to Keith, Cellini, Autobiography. And that is just over the last few weeks.
To my friends from whom a few of those were gifts, I say again, thank you. And to my friends who have my copies of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, A Dance to the Music of Time (Volume 2), The Remains of the Day, A Farewell to Arms, twelve various volumes of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Matarin novels, and The Discovery of Heaven, I say to you "Fear not -- I have no idea who you are, hope honestly that you enjoy them, and tell you frankly that I have no idea what else is missing."
So, thank you for the books, but thank you more for the friendship. The books on loan will make their way back, but the friendship I want to keep.
Jack

PS: French Letters -- the sequel: Bart Sullivan was last seen in the back seat of the green sedan. Are you wondering what became of him? Of Sheriff Hoskins? Whether Shirley will become worthy of Hoyt?
Time will tell. Soon. -- J

In Memory of Characters

My friend Mitchell, in charge of machine guns for Colt Firearms, was the first civilian flown to Pearl Harbor, arriving late on December 8, 1941. Hours before the President announced to the country that the Japanese had attacked, the Army had hustled him under cover from Connecticut to Hawaii and straight to a smoking hangar where there was laid out an array of machine guns, their barrels disfigured from overheating. Mitchell’s job was to figure out how to keep them from melting, a problem he ultimately solved with a secret blend of ceramics added to the barrel metallurgy. I met him over forty years later. Our friendship lasted until he died.
Mitchell’s stories were rarely true and never dull, beginning with the claim that at age 14 he crawled down a drain pipe to run away from boarding school and made it all the way to El Paso, where he enlisted in the army and became a skinner for General Pershing's cavalry riding all over northern Mexico in a vain search for Pancho Villa. Mitchell also told me that he lived for years as an exporter in Venezuela, drilled for oil in the Gulf, and that his only wish was to die in the bed of another man’s wife. When I knew him he had retired from Colt’s and, along with Captain Robert Hunt of the Naval Academy, started Trident Engineering in Annapolis. I do know that their first project of consequence was an engagement by the Warren Commission to reconstruct the shooting in Dallas of President Kennedy.
Mitchell called me one day and, through a terrible connection, asked if I would come get him out of jail. He and his grandson had made it as far as Tierra del Fuego on a merchant ship before his grandson gave up and flew home. Mitchell’s wife had passed away four years earlier. He was 83 or 84 years old and alone in one of the loneliest places on Earth. "Jack, the situation is this --they say I have a choice. I can stay in jail here, or I can marry this girl. She’s pregnant. Oh, and she's 17." Mitchell always told enough of the truth that I called the embassy in Santiago. They called back to say that Mitchell was not in jail. When he called again, he just asked if I would fly on down and come back on the boat with him. We laughed about 'the girl.'
Several years later I left my son in college in Philadelphia and drove to Annapolis. We sat in Mitchell's pristine retirement apartment and talked about machine guns and the grasping attitude for profits that had made him redundant at Trident. We spoke of his grandson and of President Kennedy. His mind was very sharp as he laid before me a sheet of calculations he had prepared more than ten years earlier for powder charges to be applied Fort McHenry’s cast iron cannons that would shoot flames toward the SS Constellation, anchored across Baltimore Harbor, for the show we had attended together on July 4, 1986. He was too tired to go for lunch, and when I drove away I knew that I would not see him again.
He died two weeks later. In the photographs of his grave side service I recognize Captain Hunt and friends and colleagues from Trident Engineering. I see his daughter and grandson. There is a contingent of people whom I am told are retired faculty from the Naval Academy. And, peeking out from between them, is the unmistakably South American face of a sad, round-eyed, dark haired girl, whom I estimate to be about nineteen or twenty years old. It made me smile then, and now, to have known someone who gave so much to so many of us.
I have lost two classmates, from a very small school, in the last two weeks. It makes me smile to think of them as well, not because they fixed machine gun barrels in wartime or took tramp steamers around the tip of South America but because they and others populate my memories with things I remember them doing, small, private, kind things, giggling on a school bus, singing at church, nothing daring or risque. They were, are, special people and, like most of us, just people who became characters only because they let you get to know them privately.

They may be gone, now, but their characters are not. I'll try to keep them going.

-- Jack

If Superman's costume was indestructable.....

...how did Clarke Kent's mother make his costume?

It took me over four years to write French Letters: Virginia's War. Why? It's not that long and compared to, say, War and Peace or Harry Potter, not all that complicated. Answer: Because almost every night for four years, I woke up worry about the equivalent of what to say when asked the equivalent of how someone could sew up Superman's costume from an indestructible baby blanket. It didn't matter that no one but me might read Virginia's War and question whether I had the right kind of airplanes flying from the Clovis Army Air Field (B-24's), what kind of engine would run the cotton gin (Bessemer), and how Poppy Sullivan could counterfeit red or blue ration stamps if the Tierra Times was printed only in black and white. The fear of being wrong caused author's agony, and four years of research to not make those kinds of mistakes.

Oh -- Superman's costume. The answers on my Facebook posting and emails: A secret kryptonite laser. Kryptonite needles. A Super Sewing machine. An author's license. 'Mothers are magic like that.' And, drum roll, best answer: "She unraveled the threads and rewove it."

None of those is correct, of course -- Superman is a comic book. It's crazy to think that a baby could survive a blastoff from Kryton, land on earth, become a super farmboy who tosses tractors around, ages appropriately for a while before becoming -- get this -- a reporter and man of steel, and no one catches on. But, if you accept that the whole thing is crazy and buy into the storyline, all you have to do to explain the costume is come up with something that, while not correct (since it never happened....) is nevertheless believable. The comics appear to have never told the story of how Mrs. Kent made the costume (or had the foresight to put a big 'S' on his chest years before anyone ever called him Superman) but a reader poll also said that she re-wove it from the baby blanket threads, occasionally tricking little Clarke to use his X-ray vision to burn a few in two in lieu of wasting time with scissors.

So.... it's fiction. Unless I wanted someone to point out the mistakes and the story went up in flames, I had to worry .... Was there really a State Line Bar near Clovis? Did it sell Pabst Blue Ribbon? Did people like Bart go to places like that to look for girls?

In the mid 1600's, days of quill pens and before there was a single paved road in America, France built the Canal du Midi, connecting the Atlantic and Mediterranean with a waterway that runs up and over mountain ranges and through craggy rocklands and dense forests. Canals became the fastest way to move anything anywhere until the development of railroads. They now are the fastest way to do one thing and one thing only -- recharge batteries.
Alice and I spent a week on the Canal before I flew off to Boston to begin a trial. We rented a houseboat in Castelnaudary, ate cassoulet and stocked up on cheese and plonk, then raced toward Carcassonne at 3 kilometers per hour (not counting delays to navigate the locks). A week later, after castles, street markets, boulangeries, and endless rounds of Boggle, we turned the boat in at Hompes.
The result: I slowed down enough to finish the last chapter of the sequel to Virginia's War. I am putting the last touches on Will right now, then will ask some technical readers to take a look before I send it to Vire's editor, Mindy Reed. Look for it; it's coming.
Thanks, and see you soon.
Jack

Scriptorium

Where I write….
When I signed French Letters at Hastings Book Store in Amarillo a week or two ago one proud owner of a signed first edition looked at my illegible scrawl and said ‘Well, I hope you can type --you can’t write worth a damn.” I do admit that my typing is easier to decipher than my handwriting. In my defense, I say that writing should be more than typing and handwriting.
The scriptorium was the room in the monastery where monks copied text into manuscripts. By the tenth century some parts of Europe were sufficiently stable that some educated clerics sat in their scriptoriae and copied down ballads and legends. By the fourteenth century Chaucer composed fiction and did so in English rather than French or Latin.
My scriptorium is a bit different than a cold bench in a dark monastery. It is the Town Lake Hike and Bike Trail in Austin. I don’t actually handwrite or type there --most of my composition takes place at my notebook computer overlooking the pink rose bush out the back window of our piano room. Most of my research takes place on airplanes when I read source records or saved internet sites while I fly to one city or another for a trial. But there is no doubt that whatever spiritual awakening and mental clarity I get that becomes my writing comes when I am alone, jogging along Town Lake in Austin.

I have run since the mid-1970’s. I am one of the lucky ones who, while not getting faster or fitter or better looking, get a runner’s high. My runner’s high is introspective thinking, such as it is. My characters often are born there and always are developed there. A gasping sprint across the Barton Springs footbridge inspired me to imagine Sandy and Butch and the boys slipping away from Sheriff Hoskins at the quarry. A car roaring away from one of the bars on Barton Springs Road became Bart’s Ford at the State Line near Clovis. I can see these things in my mind’s eye as I run, and they become stories or characters or revisions.
Our publisher, Jen Ohlson, is the author of Every Town Needs a Trail, a classic book of photos and stories of the Trail and the people on it. My runner’s high, or trail high, is shared by Austinites you know -- Willie Nelson, Matthew Mcconaughey, the ghost of Stevie Ray Vaughan -- and by ordinary mortals like me and stroller moms and middle aged people out with their dogs. For many of us the Trail is not why we live but why we live in Austin, the place where we can let our minds work in their own way and at their own pace.
It works for me. I write there. I hope it works for you and that, someday soon, I will see you there, in my scriptorium. -- Jack

Where there's a Will

Colleville sur Mer, France

(Photograph taken by Ian and Wendy)

The American military cemetery at Colleville is humbling, a vast, quiet, immaculate resting place for thousands of young men. Alice and I went to Colleville, to Ste. Mere Eglise, and to the Cotentin Peninsula and it changed us. I served in the Army as a Quartermaster Officer during 1970 - 1973. Between the Army and work and a sense of duty we have been to Washington DC, to New York and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to the Golden Gate and post-Katrina New Orleans. Nothing, absolutely nothing, makes me feel more like an American than to be in Colleville sur Mer. The stories about 'the French hate us' are absolutely hogwash; stop to chat with anyone in Ste. Mere or St. Laurent, wander through the farms of Normandy, and you will quickly learn that, as an American, you are an honored visitor.

I don't know when Ian and Wendy took the cemetery photograph but it recalls the wind rustling through the trees on the edge of a cliff that had to be scaled by young Americans in their first day of battle. It reminds me of tears leaking down my face at the base of crosses and Stars of David for men whose family names were completely unknown to me.

It made me believe that French Letters had to be written before World War II becomes World War I, a jumble of generals and battle names soon forgotten after the last widow of the last soldier has died and no one personally remembers anyone who had any involvement in it.

French Letters: Will is the sequel to French Letters: Virginia's War, and it is coming along quite nicely. I was asked in an interview (Romance Reviews Today) "What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?" Answer: "I create maps of the scenes, then print them and use them for reference. Virginia's hometown is sitting in my manuscript, completely drawn out, as is the village and chateau in France where Will does his service."

Will is an Army doctor whose field hospital is right behind the lines as the battle moves toward St. Lo during the same weeks that things are unfolding in Tierra in Virginia's War. His story is a war story in the same way that Virginia's War is a war story, a battle within himself in the middle of something so large that he is blown about in it with no idea how to take his life back, just as happened to all the Wills and the Virginias who lived through it then, and are dying now.

It is one more story in the book of our parents and, eventually, of who we are.

Thanks for reading.

Jack