Big men and big
woman with big ideas—that was the American 19th century.
It was a “can-do”
world. It was an engineer’s world. It was a world in which good fortune came
from harvesting nature’s resources and God’s gift of imagination and transforming
those resources and that imagination into food, building material,
transportation, health, adventure, faith, and wealth. Most of that world’s men and women did their
level best to understand the times in which they lived, to make their best
contribution, to support their families and their most compelling interests, to
rise out of bad times, to harm little, and to live much. Freedom was the
birthright of every American child. Equality
of opportunity provided every child with a chance.
The 20th
century used that confidence and can-do spirit—at mid-century—to defeat
tyranny. At about that time, I was
born.
During the next
decade or more, leisured ones in the West became self-reflective. They found badness in themselves, badness not
unlike the badness they had just defeated.
Shamed, they concluded that God must be dead. I grew.
I was educated. My father was a
poet. He sang a joyful—or a mournful—song. I was educated by listening, and I assumed God
was alive, after all, because otherwise the nay-sayers would be dead.
The
realities of the world made my father a son, a brother, a student, a seaman, a
husband, a teacher, a naval officer, a father, a salesman, and a teacher
again. More to the point, from his age
of sixteen, he allowed the Muse to have her way with him. He opened his heart, first, and then his
mind, second, to her blandishment.
I grew up. I married.
Dad enjoyed an eighty-five-year-long love affair with the Blakean
fire. He was, first and last, a
Romantic. Dad never needed a divorce; I
had one.
I
am Dad’s son. I am a different man, yet
I am the same. For example, I am a son,
a brother, a student, a husband, a teacher, a novelist, a husband again, a
teacher again, a father, a publisher, a salesman, a retiree, and a memoirist. Hmmm….
Other
similarities abound among the eight first cousins of my generation. Two of us are professional salesmen, three of
us have a professional connection with religion and with its institutions, four
of us have been, or are, teachers, several of us write for publication and two have
consciously published in the literary world,.
Hmmm, again….
Where
does my father stop, and where do I start?
As
a five-year-old (so the story goes) I was asked by casual passers-by, “What do
you want to be when you grow up, sonny?”
My mother recalls that I startled these questioners. They expected a conventional answer—a
fireman, a policeman. “I want to be a
poet,” I’d say. At which Charlotte
Wilbur—poet Richard Wilbur’s dear wife—broke into laughter and cautioned my
mother, “Don’t you ever break that wonderful spirit!”
In fact, I’ve
written only two poems in my life.
However, I’ve written and published novels, which Dad never did. “I’m too impatient,” he told me once, “for
fiction.” A collateral suggestion from a
close friend of our family, a priest and a cathedral dean: “Your father is in
love with the moment. In the end, he
doesn’t really care what happens next.
But what happens next is the meat of fiction.”
When
Dad was thirty, he published the poem which first made him famous, “The Groundhog.” When I was thirty-two, I published
my first novel, On the Verge. That
same year, Dad was seventy-four, and he published his twentieth book, Of Poetry and Poets, which went on to
become one of his bestsellers. I showed On the Verge to my father, and he liked
it. He wrote me a letter that I realized,
when I read it, I’d been waiting to receive from him all my life. It was written as one writer to another. “If you can tell this much of the truth,” Dad
wrote, “you can go on to tell more. If
you can tell the whole truth of your generation, you will have done what every
fine writer does.”
A little while
before Dad read On the Verge, he
received an inquiry from Barbara Holdridge.
Barbara was the publisher of Stemmer House Publishers, which she had
founded on the success she had enjoyed over years as the creator of Caedmon
Records. At Caedmon, Barbara had done a
record album of Dad reading and discussing his poems, so theirs was already a
fruitful relationship. (The coup which
gave Barbara her start with Caedmon was to capture the American rights to Dylan
Thomas’ voice. For years afterwards, many Americans loved to hear the Caedmon
record of Dylan reading his story A
Child’s Christmas in Wales—which he used to recite or read to me at bedtime. Barbara’s acquisition of those rights occurred
when he ceded them to her on a cocktail napkin—so our family story goes—while
he was staying with us in Cambridge, MA, in the early 1950s. As with a lot of poetry stories, it might have happened that way. True, Barbara was in the circle around my
parents in those days, but I think the assigning of Dylan’s voice in America to
Barbara more probably occurred at a bar in New York rather than at our house.)
Anyway, Barbara wrote
Dad to ask if, by chance, he had anything that she could publish. Dad didn’t have anything just then, but he replied,
“However, my son’s just done a good novel.”
So Dad sent my novel off to Barbara.
Two weeks later, I
got a call from Barbara late one night saying she wanted to publish my novel,
and then going on to say….
I’ve never been
sure what else she said. My heart was
beating too loudly for me to hear anything.
Dad also sent my manuscript off to Robert Penn
Warren—“Red” Warren of All the King’s Men—and
to James Dickey—of Deliverance. Warren and Jim Dickey were established poets
who made it big in fiction, too. Dad
asked them for blurbs, which each supplied.
Delightfully, the jacket of my first novel bears endorsements from these
giants of literature in two media—they were men to whom I’d passed the peanuts
at cocktails and for whom I had needed to stand to recite my Shakespeare. They were men who, as I said in my thank-you
letter to Warren, were gracious enough to respond fully when confronted by the
blandishment of the sons of one’s friends.
So I was now all
grown up and… on the verge. Barbara nominated On the Verge for both the Hemingway Award and the Pulitzer Prize to
try and draw attention to it. Dad was
never shy about putting himself forward literarily, and he often chided me for
my hesitation at doing the same on my own behalf.
Dad wanted nothing
but the best for me, I am sure—first novel and twentieth book, all in the same
year!
But Dad had found
my publisher, and Dad had gotten my blurbs.
That made it difficult for me to respond helpfully to unpublished
writers whom I met later during author signings. I had no war stories to share with them about
the difficulty of finding an agent or a publisher. I had become a made man without needing to shoot
anybody.
So,
first I was on the verge, and then I was over the verge, and now here’s the
rest of my resume.
I published
another and a much superior novel four years later—Paradise—which a number of readers have dubbed the greatest American
novel you have never heard of. However,
after that, I went off for twenty-eight years to make myself a success in a
career with which Dad had nothing to do.
I
wrote on the side of course, and I even did weekly newspaper features, but I
had no time for the business of book production—which does consume a great deal
of time, even when you think you are done with the book because you have 350
pages piled on the desk next to your laptop which were never there before.
If
you want to know more about all this—and there is much more funny stuff to
know—then take a read at the rest of the story, which is coming in June from
Tyndale House—a memoir, The Time Mom Met
Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told.
…and let me know
what you think.
Did anything like
that ever happen to you?
copyright, Dikkon Eberhart 2015
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