Tag Archives: writing

67. ‘Twas the Night . . .

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220px-Diedrich_Knickerbocker

Everybody reads Washington Irving in college because he is IMPORTANT. Almost nobody reads him afterward for pleasure. Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle live in our racial memory, but nobody actually reads the stories.

I tried to read Knickerbocker’s History of New York and liked it as far as I got. However it was a satire disguised as a history, so I couldn’t enjoy it as fiction and I couldn’t trust it as history. My pleasure died of whiplash.

What does this have to do with Christmas? A great deal, actually. In his “history”, Irving included a dream in which

St. Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children

This is apparently the first introduction into American society of Sinterklass, the Dutch version of St. Nicholas from which our Santa comes. Others took up the banner. We will look at them below, but first let’s see what else Washington Irving did for Christmas.

In 1815, Irving moved to England, and five years later published his Sketch Book. Five of the chapters from that work, frequently published separately today as Old Christmas, extolled the nostalgic joys of the old, rural Christmas traditions of England. Widely read in the United States, it was instrumental in giving Christmas respectability at a time when it was reviled by the religious establishment and degenerating into drunken rowdyism among the working classes. 

Irving was a prominent member of the Knickerbockers, a conservative group opposed to the rise of the mob – that which most of us call democracy. They were particularly horrified by the excesses and vandalism of Christmas as it was practiced at that time. They worked to move the center of celebration from the street to the home.

In 1809, Irving published his History on St. Nicholas’ day. In 1810, the Knickerbockers released a broadside extolling St. Nicholas for his bringing of presents to good little girls and boys – and punishment to the rest. A poem about him appeared that same year. I won’t inflict all of it on you, but the last two lines tell you enough.

From naughty behavior we’ll always refrain,
In hope that you’ll come and reward us again.

Twelve years later another poem called the Children’s Friend was published, with “Santeclaus driving his reindeer o’er chimneytops” and giving gifts to the good little children, but still leaving a switch for the parents to use on the rest.

There is little question that Clement Moore, a Knickerbocker since 1813, knew Knickerbocker’s History, Old Christmas, and both poems when he wrote a poem of his own combining all the happy elements and leaving out the preaching and punishment.

A Visit from St. Nicholas, which we usually call ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, was the result. Ironically, a group of grumpy, nostalgic elitists who loved order and discipline and hated democracy, eventually gave us a poem which would enthrall children for the next two hundred years.

*     *     *

The poem Children’s Friend is just good enough to be amusing rather than repulsive. You can see a facsimile of an original copy at http://pastispresent.org/2009/good-sources/christmas-treasures-flip-through-the-pages-of-the-children%E2%80%99s-friend/ .

Here it is in plain type. I would be surprised if you like it, but it may give you a greater appreciation of what Clement Moore made of the same materials.

Children’s Friend

Old Santeclaus with much delight
His reindeer drives this frosty night.
O’er chimneytops, and tracks of snow,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.

A steady friend of virtuous youth,
The friend of duty, and of truth,
Each Christmas eve he joys to come
Where love and peace have made their home.

Through many houses he had been,
And various beds and stockings seen,
Some, white as snow, and neatly mended,
Others, that seem’d for pigs intended.

Where e’er I found good girls or boys,
That hated quarrels, strife and noise,
I left an apple, or a tart,
Or wooden gun, or painted cart;

To some I gave a pretty doll,
To some a peg-top, or a ball;
No crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets,
To blow their eyes up, or their pockets.

No drums to stun their Mother’s ear,
Nor swords to make their sisters fear;
But pretty books to store their mind
With knowledge of each various kind.

But where I found the children naughty,
In manners rude, in temper haughty,
Thankless to parents, liars, swearers,
Boxers, or cheats, or base tale-bearers,

I left a long, black, birchen rod,
Such as the dread command of God
Directs a Parent’s hand to use
When virtue’s path his sons refuse.

Yeah, me too! Same as you, I’ll stick with The Night Before Christmas.

 

66. Five by Dickens

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DSCN3975 Everybody knows the story of Scrooge. Everybody from Alistair Sim to the Muppets to his namesake duck has played him. I won’t waste your time talking about the story, but have you read him?

Everybody knows Dickens, but did you like him when you met him? I didn’t, in high school. Great Expectations was the most boring, pointless, excruciatingly unending experience of my reading life. My only expectation was that it had to end eventually, and my only hope was never to have to read Dickens again.

A Christmas Carol isn’t like that at all. It is a joy to read.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to.

You can’t beat writing like that. And it’s short; it makes its point and shuts up.

There seems to be something magical, or at least natural, about novella length. A Christmas Carol and The Old Man and the Sea were both novellas, and either would have been destroyed if it had been stretched out to novel length.

(TOM&TS a novel? Forfend! You’d need the heart of a bookseller to make that claim.)

Dickens was in financial and artistic trouble when he wrote A Christmas Carol and it was the making of the rest of his career. You can get the whole story of its origin from either The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford or Inventing Scrooge by Carlo De Vito.

A Christmas Carol was prefigured by the story of Gabriel Grub, chapter 29 of The Pickwick Papers, a story within a story which is often reprinted separately today under the title “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” Old Grubb was so miserable that he chose to spend Chrismas night in a graveyard to avoid human contact. Goblins caught him there and put him through miseries which led to his redemption. The parallel is obvious.

After the ringing success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens wrote another Christmas novella during each of the succeeding four years. These five little books were published together during Dickens lifetime as Christmas Books. That version, with original illustrations, is avaliable from the series The Oxford Illustrated Dickens.

That volume often appears in bookstores seasonally, but you don’t have to seek it out. There will be some kind of Dickens Christmas collection every year. I have in front of me A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Classics, 2012, Fall River Press, which has the five novellas and seventeen other Dickens seasonal stories. Again, however, there is nothing special about any particular version. The stories have been around a hundred and seventy years and they don’t change.

Yesterday, I saw this year’s version in Barnes and Noble, leather bound, red, with gold and white pen style illustrated cover. This version is called A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Stories. It looks like the kind of book you would put in the living room to impress your snooty guests, but the stories inside don’t care about the cover.

As a point of honesty, I slipped into the B&N website just now to confirm my memory. This version was the 300th book that came up when I searched Dickens Christmas. Obviously more people buy Dickens than read him.

A few years ago I decided to read one of the other stories each year at Christmas time. That isn’t as logical as it seems, since Christmas is not a time of leisure. I eventually got through three and a half of the other four. I read The Chimes first and enjoyed it. It was something of a Christmas Carol reprise, and not as good as the original, but worth reading. A Cricket on the Hearth was once the most popular of these books. I didn’t get through it, not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because that was the year time did me in. I still plan to read it someday. Maybe June would be better. The other two were worthwhile but not earth shaking.

For the sake of completeness, the Dickens Christmas books, in order, are:
     A Christmas Carol
     The Chimes
     A Cricket on the Hearth
     The Battle of Life
     The Haunted Man

65. Winter Solstice

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DSCN1841The calendar says “first day of winter”. The astronomically inclined say “winter solstice”. Since this is the day that the sun appears to be as far south as it ever gets, it bothers me sometimes that the first day of winter (speaking with a northern hemispheric bias) comes when, by the sun, winter should be half over. That feeling comes of having a certain kind of over-picky mind; pure experience, of the shivering kind, recognizes that there is a delay effect in seasonal changes. Meterologically speaking, the phrase “first day of winter” fits pretty well. It’s going to get a lot colder before it gets warmer again.

What if it didn’t get colder, or warmer? What if we had no seasons? What would that do to your heating and cooling bills? What would it do to your wardrobe? Would you even wear clothing?

It’s easy enough to arrange; just choose a planet with no axial tilt. Like Cyan.

Late in the novel Cyan, while some of the scouts are on a rescue mission to save a group of Cyl (non-human natives) by transferring them to the southern hemisphere, we get a detailed picture of what Cyan looks like.

In the cockpit, Debra was alone with her thoughts while Tasmeen attended to piloting the landing craft.  The sky outside was black with stars. She had never expected to see the stars from space again. Beneath them, Cyan spun lazily. Clouds blanketed various portions of the temperate zone where humans lived, and only a bit of the torrid zone which was the domain of the Cyl. Further north than that, where Keir and the children were, clouds massed high and storms raged.

The lower latitudes passed beneath them. This was the band of eternal desert, where every island and fragment of a continent was dry lifeless rock studding a lifeless sea. There were few clouds here, but ahead of them now was the equatorial cloud band. The heart of the great heat engine that was Cyan, where the water steamed in the relentless light of Procyon A, pumping moisture into the atmosphere and sending it northward and southward, over the lifeless bands too hot for coalescence and on up toward the dry Cyl lands and the wet human lands and the great snowcapped poles.

They passed the clouded equator, the southern dead zone, spiraling down toward the southern torrid, the zone where neither Cyl nor man had ever set foot, and where the Cyl could live secure from the depredations of man.

Aside: Cyan was originally scheduled for publication in January, but has been pushed back to April or May.

61. Christmas Potpourri

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Welcome to my favorite season.

But first, a word from our sponsor. My upcoming novel Cyan has been delayed. It will be out in April or May, not in January as originally announced. Because of this, about a dozen Cyan related posts had to be replaced with new, season appropriate material. All that is done now, and things are back to calm.

*****

When I was a child, I enjoyed Christmas without having the full joy of it. That came later, with marriage to the right person. On our first Christmas together, we decorated the tree on my early December birthday, and that tradition has continued unbroken since.

The season of our second Christmas the musical Scrooge came to theaters. Even though I had no VCR, I bought the tape while I had the chance. Who knew it would be around forever.

Seeing Scrooge led to reading A Christmas Carol, and that led to reading the four other Christmas stories Dickens wrote in subsequent years.

I was vaguely aware that our Christmas was an amalgam of Christian and pagan practices and, being historically minded, I sought out the details. That led me through a forest of books, which I will share tomorrow.

*****

One of the difficulties of being an underpubished writer is all the novels bubbling in your head that you fear will never come to be written. One of these is a novel of lives lost and reclaimed in and around Philadelphia in 1789, set during the Christmas season and giving a picture of Christmas before Santa was invented. As an early Christmas present this year I gave myself permission to write the Christmas Eve chapter of that unwritten novel and present it here. Unfortunately, time came too short. Maybe next year.

Instead I am presenting the Christmas section of a completed novel Symphony in a Minor Key. It tells the story of Neil McCrae, a teacher, during the Christmas season of 1989. Symphony in a complex novel, and the excerpt given only touches on surface events. Nevertheless, Neil and his girlfriend Carmen are nice people, and I think you will enjoy spending the holidays with them. Pop on over to Serial where the story starts today and runs through Christmas day.

Symphony Christmas, 1 of 10

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This is from the novel Symphony in a Minor Key, a complex book with a number of intertwined story strands. This excerpt describes the experiences of Neil McCrae, a teacher, during Christmas 1989, leaving out a good deal of material you would have to read the whole novel to follow. I particularly like this piece because it is not a story. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, and everything is not wrapped up in a shiny Christmas bow at finis.

Symphony Christmas
Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

On the day appointed for Neil’s evaluation, the principal came earlier than Neil had expected and sat down before the tardy bell had rung. The more mature students tried to look at him without seeming to do so. The others just stared. Neil rapped the desk for attention and took roll. Then he said, “I had intended to tell you today that Mr. Campbell would be coming by for evaluations, but he has gotten here sooner than I had expected. How many of you have been through these teacher evaluations before?”

Probably all of them had; a third of them remembered it well enough to raise their hands.

“Who can tell me what their previous teacher told them at evaluation time?”

Tony Caraveli thought he could remember. Neil distrusted the devilish look in his eye, but told him to go ahead.

“Make me look good!” Tony said.

The children all laughed, but it had a nervous and restrained sound. Bill Campbell did not react, which made them more nervous. Neil said, “Whoever told you that was probably joking.  Who else can tell me?”

Sabrina said, “Ms. Thompson told us to just be ourselves and act like there wasn’t anyone in the room.”

“Good. That is just what I want you to do. Ignore Mr. Campbell; it won’t hurt his feelings.”

This time the children’s laughter was more relaxed, and Bill acknowledged it with a wave of his hand.

Neil read to his class for twenty minutes from The House Without a Christmas Tree. He led a discussion about the story, and from that drew the children into talking about how their families celebrated the season. Neil made notes from their discussion on the chalkboard, then told them to write a paper on Christmas in their homes.

Neil’s lesson plan had been worthwhile but unexceptional. He had not intended for it to be earth shaking, but when he sat at home that night reading the papers, he found that he had cut close to the bone.

Casey Kruger wrote:

We don’t hav Christmas at our house.  My parents say that it is a peagan rittul.  Jesus was born in a stabul and din’t have any presents, so we don’t have any present either.  I wish we did.

I would really like to have a real Christmas this year.  continued

60. Thank You, Harold Goodwin

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BOOKSI have a December birthday, which worked out well as a kid since books were my favorite gifts, and winter is a prime time for reading. The gifts I got were locally sourced and cheap, mostly published by Grosset and Dunlap, Whitman, or Golden. For anything by a normal publisher, I depended on libraries.

Heinlein’s juveniles were legendary, but he wasn’t the only writer of juvenile science fiction. Norton made a carreer of it before she branched into fantasy. Donald Wohlheim wrote a eight book series about a secret project of young astronauts called Quicksilver which shadowed the accomplishments of Project Mercury. Joseph Green wrote a six book series built around the character Dig Allen. All of them kept me entertained through long Oklahoma winters.

Nobody, not even Heinlein, did it better than Harold Lee Goodwin, although the comparison is apples to oranges. Heinlein’s juveniles were set in space and used future science reasonably  extrapolated from the present. Goodwin’s stories, with one exception, were set in the present and built on extant science.

If you’ve never heard of Goodwin, its largely because he worked under the pseudonyms Blake Savage and John Blaine. If he gets no respect, it’s largely because he was published by Grosset and Dunlap. That meant Goodwin’s Rick Brant books shared bookstore space with Tom Swift, Jr and the Hardy Boys – series that were written to outline by anonymous hack authors.

I read all three G & D lines as a kid, and enjoyed them because they were all I had. They taught me to read and to love reading. But when I try to reread Hardy Boys books today, they come off dull and dumb. Tom Swift, Jr. – well, I can’t force myself through them, although I still try from time to time.

Rick Brant holds up. A few years ago I reread the whole series from start to finish and they were as good as I remembered them. The same was true of Goodwin’s single outer space adventure, sometimes titled Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet and sometimes Assignment in Space with Rip Foster.

Rick Brant lived the perfect life. I would have traded with him in a heartbeat. He had adventures, twenty-six eventually, which he shared with Scotty (Don Scott) who was the ideal older brother figure. They appeared to be seventeen and eighteen in the first book and were still the same age forty-three years later. That’s good work if you can get it.

Rick lived with his family on Spindrift Island where his father was the head of a diverse group of scientists. Each had a different specialty, allowing for a wide range of stories, and they formed a dozen of the best uncle figures any boy could imagine.

Rick was bright and a bit precocious, but he wasn’t a wunderkind. Elsewhere he might have seemed nerdy, but on Spindrift he simply seemed a bright young scientist among brilliant experienced older scientists. He was always learning. He often saved the day, but he never had to save the world.

In short, he seemed real.

I wish I could recommend Rick Brant to today’s audience. Certainly it would be hard to match the series’ quality, but the same timeliness that made it work on publication, makes it dated today. A kid with a smart phone is not likely to be impressed when Rick invents a miniature walkie talkie, and that’s just too bad.

Harold Goodwin was a diver, worked for Civil Defense, NASA, NOAA and other agencies, and said that his books “were often a spinoff from my technical work.” His lengthy obit is reprinted in Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3487756.Harold_Leland_Goodwin?from_search=true

 

58. God, if he were God

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170px-1099jerusalemMankind has problems, vast, complex and intractable. We pray for help from a wide variety of Gods. But God, if he were God, might well find that all of our problems stem from one excess, which we could correct ourselves, if we only recognized it.

The imagery, of course, comes from  growing up with thrice weekly sermons of hellfire and Armageddon ringing in my ears.

God, if he were God

God, if he were God,
Would call up troops of angels,
Asbestos wings and swords of fire.

And setting out to cleanse the Earth, would stamp
His heavy booted foot upon Jerusalem.
Where men of every race and creed
Cry out his name, while each the other rends.

There God, if he were God,
Would pause and see.

This crowded planet,
Multiplying sorrows,
Where every baby born,
Every ailment cured,
Every life revived,
Compounds the horror
Of numbers grown
Beyond endurance.

One alone is empty.
Two may reside in love,
Three, a family make,
And a hundred make a town.

But the numbers that beset this earth,
Create a taste of Hell.

56. Cinn Sings a Folksong

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Sometimes I write poetry as poetry. Sometimes I write it to fill story needs. This folksong was written for Valley of the Menhir to give Tidac and Cinnabar a romantic moment early in their courtship.

She showed him how to hold the thyril and how to strike the bass strings with his thumb while his fingers touched the trebles. His left hand stopped the trebles; the bass strings rang free. He tried manfully – which is to say, clumsily – to coordinate his two hands and was becoming frustrated when she stopped him with a giggle.

“You try too hard,” she said. “You aren’t trying to overcome an armed opponent; you are trying to coax the music out.”

Next he tried to pick out the simple lullaby which she sang over and over for him. He had not heard her sing before; her voice was small but sweet. After a time the tune came, and still later it came freely. Cinnabar kissed him noisily and congratulated him.

Then Cinnabar picked up the thyril and began to play. The melody was sad, but it brightened slowly. She raised his eyes to his and they were full of promise. She began to croon very softly:

*****

I reach for her, lying in her linen bed;

My fingers draw her forth into my arms.

Her rounded hip against my belly —

Her slender neck is in my hand.

My fingers touch and stroke her strings

     evoking music

          the thrumming that fills my loins

               the dry treble that excites the night.

Sometimes she is cold within my arms

And I must coax her voice to life.

Tonight she is fire,

Yielding to the motion of my hands.

My fingers touch and stroke her strings

     evoking magic

          the crying bittersweetness of the night

               wraps its hands around my heart.

*****

An ambiguous song, equally applicable to the thyril or the woman who held it. Whatever I am, or have been, or wish to be, Tidac thought, is now wound up with her.

Cinnabar smiled up at him and laid aside the thyril.

*****

I wrote that scene about 1978, and it remained in every revision until about 2010 when it was cut as a part of a major push to tighten up the pacing of the early part of the story. Too bad; I always liked it.