When aspiring young authors come to me and ask what books I think it essential for a modern writer to have read, I am hard pressed for an answer. I dislike talking about writing, because I believe that the job of a writer is to write rather than talk, and that real writing is something so deep within one that any discussion profanes it. In addition, I have a profound distrust of listsâthe ten-best this, the twenty-worst that. Such lists strike me as a characteristically American oversimplification of life's diversity. Like most writers of any experience, I fear making lists simply because I fear leaving something out. Young writers, however, can be very insistent (I have found), and, as no less an authority than Flaubert once said, “what a scholar one might be if one knew well merely some half a dozen
books.” So I have decided to tackle this difficult task despite my misgivings. The following six works are ones that I believe every writerâin fact, every educated personâshould know as well as he knows his own name and telephone number:
Remembrance of Things Past.
Marcel Proust's lyric, luminous evocation of lost time is arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Moving from private to public scope, from the narrator's boyhood in the small provincial town of Combray, through the glittering salons of the Faubourg-Saint-Germain in Paris, to the sun-blinded hotels and beaches of Hawaii's Diamond Head, this monumental work has as its intent the precise description of Time itself. Time is as much a character in the book as the narrator, Marcel, or his ex-wife, Valerie. When Marcel meets Valerie on a flight to Honolulu, she is much changed since he saw her last; now she is an international diamond smuggler, and the mob has put a hundred-thousand-dollar price on her head. Again, Time is the genie who reveals to Marcel unguessed secrets about a woman with whom he was once deeply in love. Many writers have imitated Proust's generous, untrammeled, multihued prose; none has ever equaled it.
Madame Bovary.
In Emma Bovary, Flaubert created a character who will live as long as there are books and readers. Flaubert, we are told, wrote slowly and carefully; I try to take the same care when I read him. In the marvelous scene when Emma first discovers that the petit-bourgeois pharmacist, Homais, is operating a baby-stealing ring, the intricate chiastic imagery switches from the look of horror on Emma's face to the happy, gurgling laughter of the innocent babies in
their makeshift cribs in the garage behind the drugstore. Flaubert's genius for the accumulation of observed detail in delineating character showed the way for many later writersâparticularly James Joyce.
War and Peace.
Tolstoy's epic novel of Russia during the Napoleonic era is, in essence, a parable about the power of the media. Pierre Bezuhov is the ambitious young reporter who will go to any length to get a story âincluding murder. What he doesn't know is that Natasha Rostov, Moscow's feared “Dragon Lady,” wants Pierre iced, and the hit man is Prince Andrei, Pierre's old college roommate! No writer who ever lived possessed a surer sense of plot than Tolstoy.
Buddenbrooks.
Meet Antonie. She's beautiful. She's talented. She's sexy. She's the daughter of rich German businessman Jean Buddenbrook. And she's a walking time bomb. Somebody wants her dead, and she has been infected with a deadly virus that takes twenty-four hours to work. Half the city of Frankfurt goes underground looking for the antidote, and the police, in desperation, join forces with the mob. Author Thomas Mann interweaves these many strands so effortless that it is easy to see why he, along with Proust and Joyce, was considered one of the three main architects of twentieth-century literature.
Bleak House.
This is the one with the car chase, right? And the exploding helicopter at the end? Excellent! A neglected book but one of Dickens's best.
Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, star of James Joyce's Ulysses, teams up with twelve beautiful lady truckers to find the madman responsible for a series of brutal murders. When Stephen himself becomes a suspect, he turns to his old buddy from 'Nam, Jim Rockford.
Jim comes up with a great plan, which is to pretend that Stephen is dead and to plant a fake obituary in his brother-in-law's newspaper. Then Jim, Angel, Molly Bloom, Buck Mulligan, Rocky, Stephen, and the twelve beautiful lady truckers fly over to Dublin, Stephen's hometown. It is St. Patrick's Day, and in the mass of people the killer escapes. Then the action moves to New Orleans, where Mardi Gras is in full swing. Then it's down to Rio, for Carnaval. All this time, Joyce keeps the reader informed as to what is going on inside each character's head.
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My list is, of course, only a beginning. View it as the foundation of a literary mind; do not mistake it for the edifice itself. If you approach these books with passion, with an eye to their symmetries and harmonies and violent dissonances, you will not necessarily learn how to write. But you will certainly come nearer an understanding of what it is, gloriously, to read.
At a little after noon on Friday, August 6, Marcie Chang, anchorwoman on TV 8's Newsbeaters evening news show, picked up her envelope at the pay window on the studio's fifth floor, bought a ham-salad sandwich and a cup of coffee from the lunch wagon in the hall, and took the elevator back to her office on the tenth floor. Sitting down at her desk, she tore open the envelope, which contained the first payment of the lucrative new contract that the station had offered her in the spring. She took one look at the check and collapsed. She was dead before her face hit the desk top. A few minutes later, TV reporter Kerri Corcoran, a colleague and friend, came into Marcie's office, saw her, looked at the check she still held in her hand, and crumpled, lifeless, to the floor. The same fate met the
receptionist who came to Marcie's office to find out why she wasn't answering her phone, and the building security guard, who was summoned by the cleaning woman after she had noticed the pile of bodies.
Nor was that the end. In quick succession, three police officers, a fireman, a newspaper reporter, and a pathologist from Mount Sinai were added to the death list. Alarmed public-health officials called on the Institute for Catastrophe Control in Princeton. With grim predictability, two of the institute's top scientists soon showed the seriousness of the challenge when they, too, were felled. Within forty-eight hours, scientists from the institute who had taken over the case were fairly certain that the fatal agent was the check that Marcie had picked up that Wednesday afternoon. They examined it through heavily tinted safety glasses, in sections, with no one scientist viewing the entire check. Within another forty-eight hours, Dr. Leo Wiedenthal, director of the institute, knew what he had on his hands. In a statement released to the press, he said that there was no evidence of a super-toxin or highly contagious disease on the fatal paycheck. Rather, he said, “Marcie Chang and the eleven other victims almost certainly died as a result of what they saw on the check. Through a computer error, Marcie's check was made out to an extremely high number. Apparently, the computer made Marcie's check out to the sum of one killion dollars. The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big that it kills you.”
Since the days of Archimedes, man has known that numbers could attain great size. The Greeks could count up to a million, and the Romans, in their turn,
made it to a billion and a trillion. Then man had to wait almost fifteen centuries, until the gilded arms of the Renaissance had flung open the shutters of the Dark Ages, before he could move on to a billion trillion, a million billion trillion, and, finally, a zillion. In 1702, Sir Isaac Newton, father of the theory of universal gravitation, experimented with numbers as high as a million billion trillion zillion, at one point even getting up to a bazillion. These experiments convinced him of the theoretical possibility of the existence of the killion. He stopped his experiments abruptly when, as the numbers approached one killion, he found himself becoming very sick. The German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss, hearing about Newton's discovery from someone he met at a party, was so upset by the thought of a killion that he made up his own numbers, called Gaussian numbers. These were numbers that could get big, but not that big. Unfortunately, Gauss's brave attempt to develop a risk-free numerical system wound up on the scrap heap of failed theories. In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein made some calculations that brought him right to the very threshold of the killion. But here even Einstein halted. Probably the smartest scientist who ever lived, Einstein also had a great, abiding affection for life. After the invention of the computer, it was Einstein who insisted that each one be equipped with a governor that would shut it off automatically if it ever approached a killion. Were it not for Einstein's farsightedness, the dawn of the computer age might have had frightening consequences for mankind.
So what went wrong in the affair of Marcie Chang's deadly paycheck? Why did the network computer, running
a routine payroll program, make an error that no computer had ever made before? To understand this question, it is important to understand how a computer works. People unfamiliar with computers sometimes find it helpful to think of them as fairly good-sized, complicated things. Computers range in size from as small as a motel ice bucket to as large as an entertainment complex like New Jersey's Meadow-lands, including the parking lot. Inside, a computer will have a short red wire hooked to a terminal at one end and to another terminal at the other end. Then there will be a blue wire also hooked to terminals at either end, and then a green wire, and then a yellow wire, then an orange wire, then a pink wire, and so on.
This particular computer was so big that when expert technicians began to disassemble it to find out what was the matter with it, they soon had more wires, terminals, and other parts lying around than they knew what to do with. The technicians spread the parts all over the floor of an unused equipment shed, and finally they found one that they identified as the governorâthe little safety device that could trace its lineage back to Einstein's terrifying vision on that rainy February afternoon in Munich so many years ago. When they examined it closely, they discovered the problem. It was completely covered with gray stuff, kind of similar to the gray stuff that collects on rotary hot-dog grills. There was so much gray stuff that the little armature that was supposed to fit into a V-shaped groove on this other armature couldn't fit in at all. No one knew where the gray stuff could have come from, so there was nowhere to fix the blame. That did not change the fact that a small amount of
gray stuff you could blow from your palm with one light breath had cost twelve human lives.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, many people asked, “How can such tragedies be prevented in the future?” Well, you could give your paycheck to the bank teller every week without looking at itâtaking such risks is what bank tellers are paid for. But then you would never know how much money you had. You could move to a country where people have never heard of computers. But that might be awfully far away, and it might be years before you felt comfortable there. You could vacuum computers at least three times a week to remove any foreign matter. But, on the other hand, what if that didn't work?
One hard, indisputable truth remains: There is nothing anybody can do about the killion. It is not a person, or a product, or an institution, and so need answer to no one. It will always be out there, in the far range of mathematics, where space bends and parallel lines converge, and I don't know what all. In the end, the best you can really do is hope that if the killion gets anyone, the person it gets won't be you.
If you think that when you look at me you're looking at rock, rhythm and blues, jazz, classical, or pop, then you are wrong, because I am country from my head down to my boots. If you're looking at me, then by definition you are looking at country. When I was in my early teens, the great Hank Williams told me, “Son, you ain't country unless you've looked at a lot of miles over the back end of a mule.” Unfortunately, because of conflicts in my schedule at the time, I did not have a chance to look at as many miles over the back end of a mule as I would have liked to. Hank, however, made some excellent videotapes of miles with the back end of a mule in the foreground, and I spent countless hours screening those tapes.
Excuse me. That's my phone.
Sorry. That was the lonesome highway calling me. It calls me just about every day at this time. Just about every day, I get calls from the lonesome highway, the gentle Southern summer breezes, my Smoky Mountain memories, and that lonesome freight-train whistle's whine. If I'm not in, they leave messages. I don't mind all these calls, because they remind me that I'm just a country boy and that's all I'll ever be. (Although sometimes that lonesome freight-train whistle's whine can be a little irritating. I pick up the phone and all I hear is this whine.)
I like it when the lonesome highway calls, because for a long time it has been my only friend. I don't know exactly why I always keep moving on down the road. One reason might be that I've got a different girl in every town you can name. There's a Cajun Queen down in Baton Rouge who usually tries to avoid me. And in North Dallas there's a rich man's daughter who says she doesn't like me that much. In old San Antone there's a dark-eyed senorita who didn't have a very good time with me, while up in Memphis there are several Tennessee belles whose feelings toward me are lukewarm at best. I tell them all the same thing: “I am not the kind of man to hang around with any one woman for too long, because I am always chasing rainbows. So please bear that in mind.” That is not an easy thing to tell someone (particularly if you have to yell it through her locked door), but I know myself well enough to say that it is nothing more or less than the simple truth.
I am country today, and I was country this time last yearâI have photographs to prove it. I was country back before Hollywood brought Texas to New York
and imitation drugstore cowboys turned up all over the Sunset Strip. I was country in '80, '79, '78, '77, '76 âit doesn't matter how far back you want to go. I was country when country wasn't cool. In fact, I was country back when it was forbidden by law in most states and the federal government turned a blind eye to this blatant violation of the rights of its people. I was country back when if you were intelligent enough to buy beer and you tried to be country you could be fined, or even imprisoned. Now it is hard to believe that such times ever existed.
My daddy was just a simple backwoods art director (B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design) out of Checotah, Oklahoma. He raised me right. He insisted that I spend at least three hours out of every day honky-tonking, and he was very strict. I had to bring him bar tabs from as many places as I could, to prove I had really bar-hopped. He also made me practice cheating and slipping around behind my wife's back. Of course, I was much too young to be married, so we pretended I was married to Yeller, my dog. Then I would go over to our neighbors' yard and sweet-talk their dog, Blue. “What part of heaven did you fall from, angel?” I'd say. “No, no, no!” Daddy would holler. “Say it like you mean it! Put some ol' country sorghum in your voice!” And he'd make me try it again and again, until I finally had Yeller howling with jealousy. At the time, I have to admit, I hated my daddy for being so hard on me, but now I understand what he was doing, and I thank him for it.
Many of the experiences of my life were like that; I did not understand at the time that they were molding me into pure country, which is what I am today. Like
when I went to tennis camp with Bob Wills and several of the Texas Playboys. Or the time I made a snow sculpture with Ernest Tubb. Or the time I went on a two-month tour of the canals of Europe with Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman. Each of these experiences taught me a little bit more about what country really means.
So when people who don't have the benefit of similar experiences ask me “What is country?” I don't know what to tell them. Country is so many things. It's knowing how to find the country station on your radio dial. It's watching the TV pages to see when the next country-music awards show is on. It's knowing the location of the aisle labeled “Country” at your record store ⦠It's all these things, and yet, somehow, it's more. It's ineffable, really. And when my friends, all of them country “kickers” like myself, and I watch people who just plain ain't country trying to pretend they are âwhen we watch them fumble with their radios searching for a country stationâwell, then we just smile. Because if you're not country, then there's nothing you can do about it. Because real, down-home country is something that comes from the heart. Because there is no way if you aren't country that you can ever possibly become countryâcertainly not without working at it for, at the very least, seven to ten years.