June 26, 2008
Washington, DC

I suppose it had to happen. After our pilot-phase Big Read orientation here in Washington in 2006, a four-city orientation tour around the country the following year, and now three Minneapolis orientations, The Big Read has been discovered. Claire Kirch, ace Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly, saw NEA research and analysis director Sunil Iyengar and me on a panel at the annual book convention in LA a couple of weeks back. In a weak moment, I mentioned our then-upcoming orientation in Minneapolis. Next thing I knew, our modest little 500-grantee kaffeeklatsch was news.

I bring this up because our grantees are so conscientious about sending us their clippings, it seems only fair that we at the national level should pony up with ours. Claire wrote a nice story and took a photo of me and Big Read publicity honcha Paulette Beete flanking our new Big Read map with 208 little flags marked the locales of our new grantees. Every one of those flags represents another city or town embracing a terrific novel for a month or so at a time.

But there’s an underlying sadness in this for me, and it may help explain why I’ve been suffering from a pronounced case of blogger’s block ever since orientation: In a word, no more Big Reads till September.

The Big Read lays low over the summer, not to rev up again until school’s back in session. The office still hums, maybe faster than ever, since we have a slew of Big Read materials to turn out. But the subtle thrum of Big Reads by the dozens, all putting on programs and convening discussions and staging events — the nationwide shuffle of tens of thousands of pages all turning at once — that all falls quiet. Rosie the Big Ride, just donated to us by Ford, sits idle down in the Old Post Office building parking lot, slightly looking reproachful when I can even bring myself to look at it in the mornings.

This fall, Rosie and I will take to the open road again. Just the thought of it lifts my spirits. We’ve already got four site visit requests, and it’s not even July. In the meantime, though, I’m up on blocks, racing my engines and waiting for a starting gun that isn’t even loaded yet.

The logical thing to do, for me of all people, is read. I’m embarrassed to say which, but I’ve never even read one of the new Big Read novels. I’ve got biographies of Thornton Wilder and Edgar Allan Poe piled up on my nightstand, and a new review-model Kindle from Amazon to fool around with. I’ve got a commencement address to write, too, which won’t be easy in my current frame of mind.

Come the fall, I’ll probably look back on this brief interval of stasis and wonder how I could ever have taken it for granted. I’ll have too much to blog about, instead of not enough. I’ll file right away, instead of letting events blur before I blog them. Could this be what it’s like not to have literature in your life? To face each day without the consolation and stimulation of an evening’s reading ahead of you?
What an ingrate I am! Five hundred Big Read organizers have just converged on one overtaxed Midwestern hotel to learn how to share a great book with their neighbors, and all I can think about is September?

That tears it. I’m filing this blog, scoring some lunch, and coming back to my desk on a mission. The Big Read may be hibernating for the summer, but The Big Read staff is working harder than ever. It’s a privilege to work alongside them on a project I believe in, and I owe them my full commitment. September may be two months off, but there are people out there not reading, and preparation for the fall push is all. Come back Tuesday for another post, forgive me my punchiness in the meantime, and read yourself silly until we meet again…

June 22, 2008
Washington, DC

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his Hollywood days, when alcohol withdrawal reduced him to drinking Cokes by the crate Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress

For a commencement address I’m giving this weekend, I’ve been roughing out nine or so practical rules for better, more prolific writing. A tenth one just occurred to me, and it’s especially relevant to The Big Read’s writers: If drinking helps you write better, write fast.

I can almost forgive F. Scott Fitzgerald his drinking, since he fought the hardest against it. Drinking also gave Fitzgerald the opportunity to write about alcoholism as eloquently as almost anyone ever has. The scene of Nicole Diver holed up in the bathroom in Tender Is the Night, her childhood trauma sloshed up into the present by one highball too many, gives me the shakes even misremembering all these years later.

At least four Big Read writers shortened their careers by drinking: Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, and a newcomer to the list, Edgar Allan Poe. All but Hammett probably shortened their lives, too, and Hammett’s later life without writing was not a pretty one. He’d written well about drinking in a completely different way from Fitzgerald, making it uncomplicatedly glamorous in The Thin Man. Only a scold would begrudge Hammett the breezy comedy of Nick and Nora Charles’ liquid, lubricious rapport. But as his body lost its ability to metabolize the stuff, he kept coming back to the same half-written serious novel over and over, each time with diminishing returns. Alcohol became a way to assuage his guilt over success – if only by drinking away the proceeds.

London’s drinking rarely interfered with his 1,500-word-a-day quota, but it may have played hob with his choice and execution of material. Unlike Fitzgerald’s, London’s writing about dipsomania – principally the novel John Barleycorn – was not his best. Even though scholars have effectively ruled out biographer Irving Stone’s suicide scenario from Sailor on Horseback, it’s still hard to deny that a quarter century of drink had given his internal organs a good pickling.

Poe I know the least about, since work on his Readers Guide won’t start up in earnest around here until the most recent batch of guides is out the door. (I do have an eminently bloggable road trip coming up in a couple of weeks to prowl around Poe’s Richmond, and maybe his Baltimore.) But you don’t have to be a Poe scholar to know that he was no teetotaler, and died at 40 of murky causes possibly including “cooping” – the practice of keeping someone cooped up before election day, dosing him with alcohol, and then trotting him out under various identities to vote early and often. Even if unscrupulous campaigners indeed “cooped” Poe, they did nothing to him that he hadn’t done to himself on more than one occasion.

Women on the Big Read list seem to have dodged this particular bullet, with the possible exception of Carson McCullers, who certainly had more demonstrable physical pain to kill than any of the men. Why our women writers should be spared, I can’t guess, unless it’s that women like Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston had hurdles enough in cracking the boys’ literature establishment without booze to worry about. If Dorothy Parker ever follows Poe onto the list for short fiction and poetry, you can consider the omission corrected.

So — as I plan to rain on a good graduation party or two this weekend by saying — if drinking helps you write better, write fast. It’s not my place to go telling writers, least of all dead ones, how to live their lives. But what wouldn’t you have given for another few productive decades out of Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, or Poe?

June 10, 2008
Minneapolis, MN

He looked like a fourth Pep Boy. He wore a pencil moustache, a crew cut, and owlish black glasses. The cigar, I’m probably making up. And that voice! Brooklyn or the Bronx, whichever one’s thicker. He used it to talk about books the way a great sports-talk host talks about sports: volubly, without repetition, as if nothing else in the world could matter. He was Matthew J. Bruccoli, and he was one of the best friends American literature and The Big Read, and any of his friends, ever had.

I first encountered Matt Bruccoli years before I met him, as the author of the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Leave it to Matt, with his encyclopedic, even Googolic knowledge of Fitzgerald’s every word, to pick out from that treasurehouse the perfect, emblematic, unforgettable title.

Matthew Bruccoli. Photo courtesy of the University of South Carolina.

Meeting him had to wait until years later, not long after I arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle to become program director of The Big Read. Dan in audio was putting together one of our first Big Read CDs, about The Great Gatsby, and I just knew we had to get Bruccoli. It wasn’t easy. Arch-bibliophile that he is, Matt had taken to email like a duck to buckshot. Somehow, though, through a forest of intermediaries, I got through to him and, with a nervousness that looks absurd in retrospect, finally winkled him out of South Carolina and into the Big Read office.

My first impression was that he had walked up all seven flights. Bruccoli came in breathless, perspiring in suit and tie, carrying a plump satchel. After a few minutes of careening conversation that was like a table of contents for every conversation we would ever have, Dan ushered him into the audio booth, a notorious sweatbox.

In impassioned but scholarly, extemporaneous yet diagrammable paragraphs — not just on Fitzgerald, but on Hemingway and Hammett besides — Prof. Bruccoli held us spellbound for an hour easy, never once loosening his foulard, while all around him swigged water by the nalgene.

“Strivers!”, he cried, nailing for legions of Big Read listeners in one emphatically flung word the generation of ambitious dreamers for whom Gatsby stood in. Around the office even now, at the mention of Matt’s name, it’s a contest between Dan and me to see who can pronounce it with a more faithful New York honk. “Strivers!” The merest hint of an audible “r” is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Bruccoli was a striver too. Like the teenager in the stacks that Salinger and Updike used to fantasize about, Bruccoli was a bookish kid from an unbookish household. One day he wandered sweatily from a stickball game into a candystore, recognized Fitzgerald’s name on a paperback spinner from a radio play the week before, picked up Gatsby, and he was off to the races. If young Matt was anywhere near as good at stickball as he was at reading, the loss to American sport was incalculable.

Sixty years later, in the home he and Arlyn finally made in Columbia, S.C., he was still that same book-drunk Katzenjammer Kid, only all grown up, and living in the best candystore any kid with a sweet tooth for books ever had. People natter on a lot about book-filled houses, and they go on a lot about light-filled houses, too. Thanks probably more to Arlyn, their house is the only one I’ve ever visited that was both.

I’m sorry I’ll never see Matt lunging across his study to show me yet another association copy he’d picked up for a song. I’m sorry we’ll never put on the screenwriters conference we brainstormed about for the last year. And, maybe more than anything, I’m sorry for all the Big Read cities full of teenagers he won’t get to visit now, and contaminate with his enthusiasm for Fitzgerald in particular and life in general.

It wasn’t easy, but I had to smile when I saw in his local paper’s obituary that Matt had died “at his Heathwood Circle home.” That only made sense. Matt could never have died in a hospital room. Not enough books in it.

If I forced myself to sum up in a word this man so congenitally besotted with the American language, that word would be “bookman.” Matt Bruccoli was a bookman the way old wharf rats talk about “watermen,” men who, whether navigating the sea, fishing it or just looking out longingly at it, are unimaginable away from the their chosen element. Matt Bruccoli’s element was books, and I can’t even write about him without using the technology he so disdained to set this remembrance of him in the only possible font for it: Bookman Old Style.

June 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Last week in Los Angeles, thousands of publishing professionals descended on BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual four-day orgy of gladhanding and handwringing. If you’re reading this, the prospect of everybody from our Readers Circle member Azar Nafisi to Andre Dubus III converging just down the street from L.A.’s Original Pantry (”We Never Close”) might have had you calling friends in town for spare couch space.

But if you prefer not to read, especially novels or poetry — in common with more than half of America at the moment–then you probably don’t give a flying Wallenda. But, as it turns out, this nonreading cohort’s days may be numbered. If unemployment, prison, or early death don’t get them, as they disproportionately do with folks who know how to read but don’t, The Big Read is gunning for them too.

I need not to tell readers of this blog (recently recognized for excellence by the National Association of Government Communicators — which may explain why nobody’s heard anything about this ) that The Big Read is getting more and more Americans to pick up and devour good, meaty novels alongside their neighbors. What’s news is that, in addition to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Rudy Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, The Big Read and its Readers Circle have just added four new titles to our growing list:

• A special selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal short fiction and brooding poetry will acquaint cities and towns with this short-lived titan of American literature, whose dread-soaked dreams pioneered both the horror story and detective fiction. His verse marks the first appearance of poetry on the national Big Read list and, after The Maltese Falcon, the second appearance of a black bird.
• Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, will join the list and introduce readers to the agile, compassionate storytelling of a modern master, Her novels of immigrant and Native American families on the Great Plains have drawn accolades as recently as this year for her new novel, The Plague of Doves.
• Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey investigates the lives of five pilgrims killed in a bridge collapse, and deepens over scarcely a hundred pages to explore the question — sadly more contemporary than ever — of why violent, untimely death spares most of us, yet searches out an unlucky few. Also, for the first time among the now-twenty Big Read novels, students and theater companies will be encouraged to enrich their local celebrations of Wilder’s work with a production of his most enduring play: Our Town.
• The connected short fiction of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried follows a platoon of young soldiers into the jungles of Vietnam, where the brutality of war, the joys of camaraderie, and death’s fateful lottery await them all — and where even a fresh-faced American girl, visiting her sweetheart, can go frighteningly native.

Coming up in the blog: Posts on each of these books and writers, a Great Gatsby cruise, Big Read orientation in Minneapolis, and scads more…