For this crazy-busy third Monday in November, herewith a post from the archives, originally posted on April 3, 2017:
In the shadow of the National Palace: La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América, the House of the First Printing Press in the Americas, Mexico City. Photo by C.M. Mayo, 2017.
…There is one more a pearl of a place that cannot go unmentioned in any discussion of our sister republic’s literary landscape…
From the Claustro de Sor Juana, in less than twenty minutes’ walk north and slightly east—weaving your way through the shoppers, touts, tourists, beggars, businessmen—honking cars and buses and motorbikes—and a skate-boarder or two—blaring music, freighters with their trolleys piled to toppling with boxes—don’t get run over by the pedicabs—and once at the Zócalo, wending around the Aztec dancers in feathers and ankle-rattles, the toothless shouter pumping his orange sign about SODOM Y GOMORRA MARIGUANA BODAS GAY, and an organ grinder, and to-ers and fro-ers of every age and size, you arrive, out of breath, at a squat, terracotta-colored three-story high building.
This is where the first book was printed in—no, not just in Mexico—then New Spain—but in the Americas. La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América.
To step into the foyer of its museum and bookstore is to relax into an oasis of peace.
The uniformed guard hands me a pen to sign the guest book. It’s late afternoon; I am the third visitor for the day.
I take a gander at the exhibition of contemporary textile art—a few pieces reference one of Frida Kahlo’s drawings in the Casa Azul of a tentacled monster of paranoia, each limb tipped with a staring eye.
In the second gallery I find the replica of our continent’s first printing press soaking in sun from the window. The wooden contraption is taller than I am, but so spare, it occurs to me that it might serve to juice apples.
How my Mexican amigos scoffed at the auction of the Bay Psalm Book in 2013. Not about the record sum—14.2 million US dollars—for which that little book, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, went to a private collector, but about the report in the international media that the Bay Psalm Book was “the first book printed in America.”
To Mexicans, America is the continent, not their sister republic. Mexico is part of the same continent, of course, and so the first book printed in America—or, as we estadounidenses prefer to say, the Americas—was
Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana (Brief and Most Comprehensive Christian Doctrine in Nahuátl and Spanish), printed right here, in Mexico City, in this building, in 1539.
Mexico beats out Massachusetts by 101 years! But this sinks to silliness. That printer in Cambridge, Massachussetts, was English, and the one in colonial Mexico City, a native of Lombardy named Giovanni Paoli, Hispanicized to “Juan Pablos.” The technology that found its way to the Americas with these printing pioneers—to the north, Protestants, to the south, Catholics, separated by religious schism and the whirlwinds of European politics, and that century, and moreover, by the staggering distance of desert, swamplands, oceanic buffalo-filled prairies, and sunless and unmapped forests—had one and the same root: the fifteenth-century workshop of a German goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg.
Gutenberg was inking his little pieces of movable type more than half a century before Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” and the indigenous on this continent chanced to hear the first stirrings of vaguest rumors and weird omens.
Still, 1539 is an early date indeed for that first book printed in the Americas: only eighteen years after the fall of Tenochitlán. Three years after Cabeza de Vaca’s miraculous arrival in Mexico City. Fray Sahagún was still a year away from launching the research that would result in the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, or the Florentine Codex. The lodes that would turn Mexico into an industrial-scale silver exporter had not yet been discovered. The Manila Galleons, treasure ships bringing porcelain, spices, and silks from China to Acapulco, would not begin their annual crossings for another twenty-six years.
In England, Henry the VIII was between wives three and four. It would be sixty-eight more years until the first, disastrous English settlement at Jamestown. The Pilgrims who would land at Plymouth Rock? As a religious community they did not yet exist.
Tucked in the shade of the National Palace and a block east from Mexico’s cathedral, the Casa de la Primera Imprenta was built, it turns out, over the ruin of the Aztec Temple of Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, trickster god of the night sky, of time, and of ancestral memory.
Aztec snake head on display, 2017.
Who knows what still lies beneath in the rubble? Dug up in the eighteenth century during a renovation, a gigantic Aztec stone snake head was, no doubt with a shudder of horror, reburied. But we live in a different time with a very different sensibility. In 1989 when renovations unearthed that same Aztec stone snake head—elegant with fangs, nostrils, scales, eyes the size of melons—it was carefully excavated and cleaned by archaeologists. This monumental sculpture, heritage of the nation, is now displayed atop a roped platform in the Casa de la Primera Imprenta’s Juan Pablos bookstore, surrounded by a shelf of fiction, a table of poetry, and a sign informing us that the Aztec snake head is carved from grey basalt and weighs approximately one and a half tons.
The Juan Pablos bookstore, named for that original printer Giovanni Paoli, retails books from the press of Mexico City’s Universidad Autónomo Metropolitana (UAM). Such are my interests du jour: I came away with a copy of the first Spanish translation of an eighteenth-century Italian’s journey to Mexico and the 2015 El territorio y sus representaciones.
A splendid and very important book: El territorio y sus representaciones by Luis Ignacio Sainz Chávez and Jorge Gonzlález Aragón Castellanos, winner of the 2016 Premio de Investigación. Published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico.
UPDATE: “Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla,” my long essay pon the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book, is now available in Kindle at amazon.com.
Special Note: I ever and always invite comments at the end of each blog post but for this post in particular I would especially like to hear comments and any tips from those of you who have been wrestling with your own working libraries. (It strikes me that in all the many writers’ workshops and writers’ conferences I have attended over the years I have never seen this vital practical necessity addressed. And what I have seen in terms of advice from librarians and personal organizers is not quite apt for a working writer’s needs. Have I missed something?)
Selected titles at-hand as I was writing an essay about Black Seminole oral historian Miss Charles Emily Wilson. This essay is destined for an anthology and will also be the Marfa Mondays podcast # 21, apropos of my book-in-progress about Far West Texas– for which I have a scary-big working library. I call it the Texas Bibliothek. My writing assistant Washingtoniana Quetzalpugalotl says it’s been exhausting, all the thinking going on, and books of so many smells going hither, thither & zither. She would like to take a siesta.
The scene as I was revising my essay. No worries, I certainly would not shelve my books over a radiator! They were here only temporarily. Shortly thereafter, I used my supersonic reshelving method, described anon.
Still working on the same essay… on this day, my other writing assistant having appropriated the chair, I was using my StandStand.
Why a Working Library?
Why should you have a working library? Well, dear writerly reader, maybe you shouldn’t. It depends on what you are writing.
Poetry or, say, a novel of the imagination might require nothing more than a dictionary and thesaurus–– and of course, you could access those online. Perhaps, should you feel so moved, for inspiration you might keep a shelf or two of books by your favorite writers, and perhaps another shelf devoted to books on craft, on process, etc. Or not.
The need for a working library arises when you attempt to write historical fiction or in some genre of nonfiction, for example, a biography, history, or travel memoir. And the problem is–– if I can extrapolate from my own experience––which perhaps I cannot–– but I’ll betcha 1,000 books and three cheesecakes with a pound of cherries on top that I can––you are going to ginormously underestimate how fast and how very necessarily your working library expands, how much space it gobbles up, and how quickly any disorganization unravels into further disorganization, and to muddle the metaphor, makes a clogged up mega-mess of your writing process.
you are going to ginormously underestimate how fast and how very necessarily that working library expands, and how much space it gobbles up, and how quickly any disorganization unravels into further disorganization, and to muddle the metaphor, makes a clogged up mega-mess of your writing process.
In short, by underestimating the importance of first, acquiring, and second, adequately shelving, and third, maintaining the organization of this collection, writing your book will turn into a more frustrating and lengthy process than it otherwise would have been. (Trust me, it will be frustrating and take forever and ten centuries anyway.)
Yes, I know about www.archive.org–– I oftentimes consult books there–– and I have accumulated a collection of Kindles. I also make use of public and university libraries when possible. (There is also the question of keeping paper and digital files, which would merit a separate post.) Nonetheless, my experience has been that a working library of physical books at-hand remains by far, as in, from-here-to-Pluto-and-back, my most vital resource.
About My Working Libraries, In Brief
First understand: I am not a book hoarder! When I do not have a compelling reason and/or space to keep a book, off it goes– to another reader or to donation. (See my previous post “How to Declutter a Library.”) I don’t live in a house the size of an abandoned aircraft hanger; it would be impossible for me to keep every book I’ve read in my life and still find my way in and out of the front door. Aside from a handful (literally maybe 10) that I hold onto for sentimental reasons, the books I keep for the long term I have a precise reason to keep: to assist me as I write my books. And I maintain them scrupulously organized as working libraries.
No, I do not have OCD. Scrupulous organization is terrifically important! My motto: A book I cannot find is a book I do not have. Disorganization is a form of poverty.
A book I cannot find is a book I do not have. Disorganization is a form of poverty.
Over many years of writing several books, each with its own working library, and also teaching, and so gathering an ever-growing working library on craft and process, I have accumulated a daunting number of books, and to keep them all accessible I have had to tackle some eye-crossing challenges. (Add to that moving house a few times in mid-book and, boy howdy, did I get an education in organizing!)
My books for which I assembled and continue to maintain working libraries include:
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire This working library is more substantial, as it should be for a novel based on the true story set during Mexico’s most complex, tumultuous, and thoroughly transnational episode. (So why did France invade Mexico and install the Austrian Archduke as emperor and then why did the latter make a contract with the family of Mexico’s previous emperor giving them the status of the Murat princes?!!! It took me several years to get my mind around it all…) Some very rare Maximiliana.
World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas (in-progress) I call this one my “Texas Bibliothek.” This one is just… sorry for the cliché… GIANT. Texans are far more literarily industrious than most people imagine, and there is endless celebration of and controversy about their culture and history. Some of the works published just in the last decade are paradigm-smashers. I’ve had a heap of very necessary reading to keep up with… Plus understanding Far West Texas requires fathoming what surrounds it– New Mexico to the west, Coahuila and Chihuahua to the south, the heartland of Texas and Gulf to the east, the Llano Estacado to the north…and the larger geological, geopolitical, and cultural context. Oh, and all about oil!! This has been my most challenging book yet. Wish me luck.
Plus, as mentioned, I maintain a working library on the craft of writing and creative process which I consult for both my writing workshops and my own writing. Accumulated over some twenty years, this is a substantial working library, but it is the smallest. I haven’t counted but I’d say this has some 250 books.
(Did I mention, I’m not 25 years old? If I live to 100… uh oh…)
Why, pray tell, keep all of these books, and even add to the collections, year after year?
(1) I often reference works in one collection for another another book (for example, in writing my book on Far West Texas I have consulted works in all four collections), and I expect this will continue with the projects I am contemplating for the future.
(2) I plan to see more of my books published in translation and so will require consulting some of the original texts (many in Spanish, some in German, a few in French) from which I quoted. This may or may not be an issue for you. But if it is, take heed. It can be crazy difficult and expensive to track some of these things down later.
(3) I often receive email from researchers, both amateur and academic, and I am delighted to assist, when I can, in answering their questions and for this oftentimes I need to reference a book or three in my collections. And what goes around comes around.
(4) I do not live near a relevant library and even if I did, many of the works in my collections are nonetheless exceedingly difficult to find. Plus, even if a nearby library were to have each and every book I would want to consult when I want to consult it, it’s a bother and a time-mega-suck to have to go to a library and call up so many books.
Yes, my working libraries take up a lot of space. This cranks my noodle. But a painter needs an atelier, no? Um, you aren’t going to bake bread in your lipstick compact.
Tips for Your Working Library (Future Reminder to Take My Own Advice)
With all due respect for the operations of institutional libraries, earning a degree in Library Science is not on my schedule for this incarnation. But as a writer with my own absolutely necessary working libraries, none of them large enough in scale to require professional cataloging, yet each nonetheless larger than I was prepared to manage efficiently, alas….. painnnnnNNNfully…. I have learned a few things. What I offer here for you, dear writerly reader, is not the advice of a knowledgeable librarian but what I, a working writer having muddled through writing several books, would have told myself, had I been able to travel back in time… to the late 1990s.
(1) If you have good reason to think you’ll need it, don’t be pennywise and pound foolish, buy the book! To the degree possible, it is better to buy a first edition in fine condition; however, cheap used / ex-library copies are fine for a working library. Many ex-library books in good condition cost just pennies. (Or did you plan to write an sloppily researched, amateurish book?)
(2) Go head and mark up those ex-library books and mass-market paperbacks, but if you happen to have in your hands a hardcover first edition in fine condition, take care! Keep the dust jacket, protect it from any bumps and the sun, and if you must mark the pages, use only very light erasable pencil. Drink your coffee and eat your snacks at another time, in another room. (I shall spare you the super sad episodes…)
P.S. More tips on care and preservation of books here.
A first edition of a Very Important book! Grrrr, I marked it up and I mistreated the dust jacket!! And I already knew better!! I used a highlighter!!!!! WAHHHH
(3) You will need bodacious amounts of bookshelf space. And more after that, and even more after that…. If you do not have it, make it. If you cannot make space, then probably you should reconsider embarking on this type of writing project. I am not kidding.
(4) For keeping the books organized you will need a system that is at once flexible, easy-peasy, and supremely useful to you. It may not make sense to anyone else, but Anyone Else is not the name of the person writing your book.
It may not make sense to anyone else, but Anyone Else is not the name of the person writing your book.
For example, for my Texas Bibliothek, right now I have about 30 categories, each with from 10 to approximately 50 books in each. Each category I have defined to my liking, broad enough that it doesn’t occupy more than a brain cell or two to figure out, yet narrow enough that I don’t need to bother organizing the books alphabetically.
For my writing workshop working library however, I do have the craft and process books organized by author alphabetically. I have never been able to find a reasonable way–– reasonable for me––to break down the collection beyond books on “Craft” and on “Process.”
(5) Of course, some books could fall into more than one category, e.g., Jeff Guinn’s Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro could be in U.S. Military; African American/ Seminoles; Texas History; Regional History / Fort Clark; US-Mexico Borderlands. (I chose African American / Seminoles. But I might change my mind.) For such endless little categorization conundrums, well, say I, just apply deodorant and do what seems most sensible to you. You can always change your mind, and you probably will.
To make sure you do not overlook important works in your collection, as you work with your library, and as you dust it, make an effort to let your eyes rove over the whole of it.
(6) Dust regularly using an ostrich feather duster. Seriously, go for the ostrich.
(7) For the shelves use BIG, READ-ICU-LOUS-LY EASY-TO-READ LABELS. I print these out on my computer, cut and tape them to index cards, and tape them on the shelves.
This is what I mean by a READ-icu-lous-ly big label. Huh, I can read it.
Tom Lea was a most elegant artist and novelist, El Paso’s best. And, yay, I found a place for my super chido “Honk If You’ve Seen La Llorona” bumpersticker! Maybe one of these days I will put it on my car!
That portrait on the spine of that book to the left is not actually Cabeza de Vaca. Everyone seems to think it is. Which kind of annoys me.
(8) Key is to be able to not only find, but lickety-split, without a thought––look, Ma, no brain cells!–– reshelve any and all books in your working library. Institutional libraries have catalogs you can consult and usually affix a sticker with the catalog number on each book’s spine, but for you, with your writer’s working library, this is probably going to be too fussy a process. And anyway you don’t want to be sticking anything on a rare or first edition book unless it has a mylar cover, in which case, you could put the sticker on the mylar cover. Mylar covers are nice… buying more is on my “to do ” list… but….
What works splendidly well for supersonic reshelving is a labeled bookmark. Yep. It’s this simple.
(9) To label each bookmark, get a typewriter because, for all the many other good reasons to use a typewriter, you can quickly type up legible labels on your bookmarks.
(=You can stop laughing now=)
Trying to make labels for bookmarks using a wordprocessing program and printer will give you a dumptruck of a headache. I used to be a fan of labelers such as the Brother Labeler. No more. Batteries, replacement cartridges… fooey. Yes, using your own handwriting may be the easiest of the peasiest, but it will slow you down when you are trying to reshelve books because the eye groks machine-written words so much faster.
Get the typewriter! A workhorse if you can, such as a refurbished Swiss-made Hermes 3000 from the 1960s-1970s.
No battery, no click-bait, no wifi! No need for any Freedom app, either. (And ecological. Um, my little tree huggers, have you ever actually seen a server farm? Or where and how they mine the stuff to make batteries?)
(1o) To make the bookmarks, use paper strong enough for the bookmark to always stand straight. I cut up left over or ready-to recycle file-folders for this purpose.
(11) To identify each working library (should you have more than one) place a sticker or stamp on each bookmark.
The sticker reads “C.M. Mayo’s Texas Bibliotek.” Make your own at www.moo.com.
(12) Another advantage of these plain paper bookmarks is that you can easily change them. Just cut off the top and type in the new label! As you delve deeper into researching and writing your book, you will undoubtedly find it convenient to both add to and reconfigure the categories in your working library, and perhaps several times.
(13) Further consideration: While many book collectors write their name in the book or paste in a book plate, I stopped doing this several years ago because I found this made it more difficult for me to let go of books that, after all, I wanted to declutter. I might change my mind about this. A custom-made ex-libris has always seemed to me a lovely idea. It’s in my Filofax for my old age when, maybe, I live in a house the size of an aircraft hangar.
(14) Cataloging? Nah. Even with a wall or six or seven or ten filled from floor to ceiling with books you are still far from operating at the scale of an institutional library. A catalog, whether low-tech or high-tech, will take too much time to figure out and maintain (ugh, more glitch-ridden software updates). Ignore anyone who tries to sell you library cataloguing software. Seriously, trying to do it digitally in some-fangled DIY way may also end up proving more trouble for you than it’s worth. (… cough, cough… ) With adequate bookshelf space (see tip #3, above) and meaningful categories with BIG, RIDICULOUSLY EASY-TO-READ labels (see tip #7, above) you can grok your whole enchilada at a glance, or two.
However, it may make sense to catalog the books when you get to your long-term plan (see point 16 below).
(15) Ignore ignorant people who tut-tut that you should declutter your books. Have they ever tried to write a book? No, they have not. Smile sweetly as you shoot them eye-daggers.
(16) Make a long-term plan for your books because obviously, at some point, perhaps when you move into smaller digs for one reason or another, or you die, they have to go. If you are incapacitated or dead, these working libraries may prove a heavy burden for your family, literally, figuratively, and financially. Chances are your family members won’t have a clue what to do with them, nor the time, and possibly, alas, they may not even care. I aim to write more on this sticky wicket of a subject later; for now, I point you to a fantastic resource, the Brattlecast podcast #57 on “Shelf Preservation” from the Brattle Book Shop.
One of the special treasures in my Texas Bibliothek is Cloyd I. Brown’s Black Warrior Chiefs.
Tipped inside my copy of “Black Warrior Chiefs” I found this letter from the late author (I blocked the name of the recipient to protect his privacy). Hmm, he says he has several hundred unsold copies… Only a very few show up for sale online as of 2019.
What has been your experience with your working libraries? Do you have any tips to share?
Ring-a-ling to Dr. Jung! I happened to get my hands on Turner’s memoir just before a trip to Paris in which, not having heard of his book, I had planned to visit St. Sulpice and so, by happenstance, on the very day I finished the book, which concludes in St. Sulpice, there I was, looking at the very same Eugène Delacroix murals. That was wiggy.
I regret that I do not have the time this week to give In the Land of the Temple Caves the thoughtful review it deserves. Suffice to say, it came out over a decade ago, and I am astonished that I had not heard of it earlier. It deserves to be considered a classic of American, and indeed English language, literary travel memoir.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of B. Traven’s best-known novels. It was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
The postcard from the B. Traven conference in the Mexican Embassy in Berlin. My translation: “It is not I who am important, but my work.”Reverse side of the postcard with schedule and participants.
Herewith, a few more photos:
Susana Garduño, director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Germany, interviews B. Traven’s stepdaughter, Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman.
Tim Heyman, co-director with his wife Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman of the B. Traven Estate, delivers his keynote speech about B. Traven’s origins.
Third from left is Adriana Haro-Luviano de Rall, UNAM-Alemania; second from right is Andreas Rosenfelder, Chief Cultural Editor, Welt.
The following day another conference was held in Brecht-Haus (the former home of Berthold Brecht) in East Berlin.
As I was leaving Berlin, a friend gave me a copy of this beautiful and unusual and highly detailed German language graphic biography of B. Traven, Portrait eines Beruhmten Unbekannten (Portrait of a Famous Unknown):
Something I happened upon a ways south of Berlin thereafter. My translati0n: “Reality is for those who cannot abide their dreams.”
My esteemed amigo Bruce Berger’sA Desert Harvest, just out from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, is sublime– and wickedly funny. Stay tuned for a Q & A.
Highly recommended also by my writing assistant. He claims this book tastes cactusy.
The brilliant Patricia Dubrava has translated the also brilliant Agustín Cadena’s flash fiction “Black Magic” in Lunch Ticket.
The Kindle edition of Mikel Miller’s mind-boogie anthology of English-language writing about Mexico (which includes something of mine), Mexico: Sunlight and Shadows, is on-sale for a ridiculous 99 cents.
Writerly Tools Nerd Alert: Moose Designs is Kickstarting their second iteration of the private workstation bag. If you have to work on your laptop on a crowded plane or train, this is a sanity-saver. (I have no relationship with Moose Designs; I am simply a delighted customer– I have their first version of the workstation bag. More about writerly tools here and here and here.)
Grace Cavalieri included my book Meteor in her review of poetry for Washington Independent Books: July 2019 Exemplars.
“Especially memorable in this candid energetic book is a sequence of poems (Section ll) ‘Davy & Me.’ They capture the mysterious rapture of comradeship that’s seldom been described better.”
Fave German Lesson, German with Jenny and Snoopy and Minou:
This finds me deep into drafting an essay, or rather a biographical sketch of a most fascinating Texas oral historian… More news about that soon. Meanwhile, from the archives, recently migrated from the old blog platform to self-hosted WordPress here at www.madam-mayo.com:
Mexico has been very much on my mind these past days because I have been working on some translations of works by Mexican writers Agustín Cadena and Rose Mary Salum... more news about those soon… and also (not entirely a digression from the book in-progress about Far West Texas) I have been working on an essay about books in Mexico entitled “Dispatch from the Sister Republic.” >> CONTINUE READING
Say “Texas” and the images that pop into most people’s minds do not include literary figures and their oeuvres. But trust me, as one who has been working on a book about Far West for more years than I care to count, Texas has one helluva literary culture, a long-standing and prodigious production, yea verily flowing out as if by pumpjacks, and if not all, a head-swirling amount of it is finer than fine, and there are legions of readers who sincerely appreciate and celebrate it, as do I. Know this: Lonn Taylor and Don Graham, both of whom just passed away, were giants among Texas literati.
LONN TAYLOR(1940-2019)
From my Texas Bibliothek: A selection of many treasured works by Lonn Taylor.
Lonn Taylor was an historian who wrote about many things including cowboys and the American flag and every nook and cranny and corner of Texas, so it seemed, always with erudition, elegance, and heart. I had some correspondence with Taylor before I met him in Fort Davis– to which town in Far West Texas he had retired with his wife Dedie after a career as an historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. In his book-cave of an office below the copper-red shadow Sleeping Lion Mountain, I interviewed him for the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project (listen in any time). I was at once charmed, grateful, and mightily enlightened about multitudinous things Texan. Later I saw him and Dedie at the annual Center for Big Bend Studies conference, and over the next few years, many an email zinged back and forth. I am but one of many people who counted Lonn as a personal friend and a mentor, and I am saddened by his loss more than I can say.
Taylor’s works are a cultural treasure, a monument. And he was wondrously productive. However did he manage to write all these books and his Rambling Boy column for the Big Bend Sentinel, and keep up with what surely must have been a daily hurricane of email? I was just about to email him a congratulations on his latest book, Turning the Pages of Texas, when I got the news from Carmen Tafolla, President of the Texas Institute of Letters, that in an instant– a stroke on June 26– he was gone from this world.
Also from my Texas Bibliothek: Some essential works by film historian and literary critic Don Graham.
Just days before Lonn’s passing, on June 22, Don Graham also died of a stroke. I never met Graham, the renowned J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of English at the University of Texas Austin, but I thought I would very soon, for I had been emailing with him about arranging a podcast interview on the latest of his many splendid books about Texas: Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber and the Making of a Legendary American Film.
I do not think it is possible to comprehend Texas as a cultural and political entity without taking into account the imaginal influences (and sometimes very weird echos) of fiction and films– and, in particular, the film based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel, Giant. And no one wrote about all of that, and Giant, more lucidly than Don Graham.
B. Traven, the naturalized Mexican who wrote in German and English, was an internationally best-selling novelist many of whose works were made into into movies, most famously The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart. In Mexico he remains immensely respected: recently, decades after his death, his life and works were celebrated with a splashy, crowd-pleasing show at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. But who was B. Traven? Where did he come from? Why, really, did he come to Mexico? And why was he so reclusive, and so fond of pseudonyms?
Many a member of the literary cognoscenti will tell you that the B. stood for Bruno. Not so. Ret Marut? Not so. Was he Prussian, Bavarian, Norwegian, American? Any number of claims and theories have been put forth over the years, one or more of which you can ever and always find, depending on who last logged in to edit that Maoist mashup otherwise known as Wikipedia.
In this month’s Letras Libres, 50 years after his death in Mexico City, B. Traven’s true identity has been revealed, and this time by someone whose closeness to the subject and research are flat-out impossible to beat: Timothy Heyman, who together with his wife, B. Traven’s stepdaughter Malú Montes de Oca de Heyman, administers Traven’s literary estate.
Because Traven had wanted it this way, after he died in Mexico City in 1969, his widow claimed that he was the German actor and journalist Ret Marut. But in fact Ret Marut was only another disguise.
Traven’s close friend the cinematographer Gabriel Figuera once claimed Traven was Moritz Rathenau, but for Traven’s biographers, that bit of intelligence seems to have been either overlooked or treated as nothing more than a wisp of a rumor among others. However, Timothy Heyman reveals, B. Traven / Ret Marut was Moritz Rathenau. And more: Moritz Rathenau was the illegitimate son of none other than Emil Rathenau (1838-1915), one of Germany’s richest Jewish industrialists, founder of AEG. His mother was Irish actress Helen Mareck. For his political activities in the violent tumult of post World War I Germany, as Ret Marut, he was condemned to death in 1919, and escaped to remain undercover in Germany. In 1922 his half-brother Walther Rathenau, then Minister of Foreign Relations, was assassinated by an extreme rightwing antisemitic group– an event some historians identify as the beginning of the Holocaust. The following year, as “B. Traven,”– B. for “Plan B”–Moritz Rathenau escaped what would in another decade become Nazi Germany, and– long story short– he lived a long life as an international literary star in wildly productive seclusion in Mexico.
Timothy Heyman’s article with all the details appears in the current issue of Mexico’s most prestigious magazine, Letras Libres.
Time snaps by. It is has been two days from a
year since Ann L.
McLaughlin passed away. How I miss my brave, graceful, and very wise
friend. Ann was a decade older than my mother but, curiously, that did not
occur to me until she had passed: There was something ageless about her. She
was a literary scholar and later, when I knew her, a writing teacher and an
artist, a novelist of the most seriously dedicated and generous of our kind.
I met Ann in, I think it was 1999, when, having just moved to the area, I read from my short story collection at the Writer’s Center, in Bethesda MD, just outside Washington DC; as a founding faculty and board member, Ann did me the honor of so welcomingly introducing me to that audience. Shortly thereafter, thanks to a good word from poet and Gargoyle editor and publisher extraordinaire, Richard Peabody, I joined a writing critique group. A crackerjack writing group it was! At various points it included Kate Blackwell, Susan Coll, Kathleen Currie, Katharine Davis, Solveig Eggerz, E.J. Levy, Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, Amy Stolls, Paula Whyman, and Mary Kay Zuravleff, among others– and always, always Ann.
When I joined the writing group, Ann was known for her loosely autobiographical novels Sunset at Rosalie, The Balancing Pole, and Lightning in July. Of the latter, set in Boston polio epidemic of the 1950s, Publisher’s Weekly lauds her “straightforward narration that transforms the events of a prolonged hospital stay into a richly textured tale.”
“So deeply tragic. So tremendously sweet. Ann McLaughlin has captured humanity at its bravest. Artistic, accomplished Hally Blessing is stricken with polio in the prime of her youth, only weeks before the first polio vaccine. Within mere hours, Hally progreses from the elation of her first major venue as a young flautist to the despair of being diagnosed with polio. Ovecoming the deep challenges of fear and disfigurement, Hally struggles to find the inner resources which eventually enable her triumph. The scenes, the characters (even the minor characters) are all vividly portrayed. This work is a victory for the human spirit.”
At that time, Ann was out and about promoting Maiden Voyage, a coming-of-age novel set in the 1920s on a newspaper magnate’s yacht. From Mimi Godfrey’s review in the Women’s National Book Association newsletter:
“McLaughlin is a clear-eyed and observant writer, and her evocation of 1920s Washington and the exotic ports of Julia’s trip– Madeira, Alexandria, Sicily, Greece, Zanzibar, Singapore, the South Pacific– is fascinating. But McLaughlin is more interested in charting Julia’s mind and heart, offering a kind of artist-novel of her development as a journalist and fledgling photographer. Julia wrestles with questions that were as vital today as they were in 1924: What is more important for a woman, a satisfying career or marriage and a family? Do the demands of a woman’s work matter as much as a man’s? Julia’s answers to these questions are, even more than the itinerary, what give this engaging novel its lasting satisfaction.”
For our writing group, Ann brought in draft after
draft of chapters from The House on Q
Street, her novel set in Washington during World War
II. After The House on Q Street came A Trial in Summer, set
in Depression-era San Francisco.
And although no longer in the writing group, for
I’d returned to live in Mexico City, I had a chance to read drafts from Leaving Bayberry
House and the proofs for Amy & George.
I was honored to contribute a blurb for the latter, which takes the reader to
1930s Cambridge, Massachusetts:
“Once again, with charm and heart, McLaughlin brings to life a tumultuous period of U.S. history as she probes and delves into a father-daughter relationship that is sometimes a seesaw, sometimes a dance. This is a wise novel.”
“George is dean of the Harvard Law School and Amy is his young, sensitive daughter. McLaughlin’s skill at portraying the quiet dangers of family life which culminate in an act of violence is tempered by a generosity of spirit and disarming honesty.”
As a member of her writing group I had a direct
window into the effort it took to write these books. I was, and remain, in awe
of Ann’s discipline. No matter what, and there were whats aplenty, Ann could
sit herself down in the chair every day, fire up the laptop, and do the work.
She had a truly rare dedication to craftsmanship, faith in her vision, and, at
the same time, the willingness and sheer grit to rewrite, and rewrite again,
and again, and again and, Lordy! as her characters often said, again.
And then whenever one of her books was
published– this is especially hard for shy creatures such as writers, and no
easy feat for one with health challenges– Ann would get herself out there, she
sent the postcards, kept up with the torrents of emails, and with smiling
aplomb, did the many rounds of readings and signings for her books. Her book
signings at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose– one of the last and most
prestigious of the great independent bookstores– were always packed, every
chair taken, fans standing in the aisles.
Among the many events for her novel A Trial in Summer was a party at my apartment. Somehow, my memory of that conflates with another party, for Mary Kay Zuravleff’s The Bowl is Already Broken, when Ann’s husband Charlie, an esteemed historian, was still alive. He was in a motorized scooter, but he had such joie de vivre, that scooter might have been a whim of a contraption for floating out of Oz. The picture I hold most vividly in my mind is of Charlie parked in the middle of that broad room, beaming, surrounded by so many, many of his and Ann’s adoring friends.
A few years after I had returned to live Mexico
City, it seemed there might be a chance on the horizon to come back to DC and
so, under the wing of Ann’s encouragement and endorsement, I joined the board
of the Writer’s Center. That turned out to be a short-lived commitment on my
part, alas, but what I remember so warmly– what magical moments!– was sitting
at the table in her kitchen in Chevy Chase, petting her cat pretty Booska,
while just the two of us talked writing and teaching writing and what we could
do for that beloved literary oasis.
At the Writer’s Center Ann’s workshops were legendary. Novelist Frank S. Joseph told me, “Ann was the best writing instructor I ever had.”
Year after year Ann gave her students her all plus ten. I knew, from our many conversations, how much they meant to her. In most people’s minds “Washington DC” does not conjure images of literary community, but the fact is, the Writer’s Center is one of the largest literary centers in the United States, and the capital and surrounding area, deep into Maryland, Virginia and even Delaware, is filled with writers who, at some point, took one, two, or several of Ann’s workshops.
Even in her last months, her health failing,
whilst in and out of hospitals, Ann kept on writing. She finished her ninth
novel, The Triangle,
and reviewed the page proofs. Her publisher, John Daniel, describes it thus:
“The Triangle returns to Boston’s 1955 polio epidemic, and combines the theme of coping with disability with that of struggle in the father-daughter friction and frustrated love. The author seems to have written the satisfying resolution to the two overlapping conflicts in her fictive life. This powerful novel is a satisfying finale of a brilliant career.”
Ann McLaughlin died at home on December 20, 2016.
I am but one of a multitude of people who can say
that Ann enriched my life, both as a person and as an artist, immeasurably. Yet
how fleeting the time I had with her, after all. Why did I not take one of her
workshops? Why did I not ask Ann more about her friend and correspondent, John
Updike, or about Janet Lewis, author of The Wife of Martin Guerre, whom
she knew from her years in California? And I regret immensely that we did not
talk more, in the most writerly vein, as we so easily might have, about the
novels of Virginia Woolf, which she surely knew by heart, every one.
I will miss Ann for the rest of my life. Her novels, a treasure of a consolation, will always have a special place here by my desk in my writing room, and in my heart.
Ann L. McLaughlin and C.M. Mayo, Washington DC, 2007 Photo by Alice J Mansell
Washington Post, January 1, 2017
ANN LANDIS McLAUGHLIN
Died at her home in Chevy Chase, MD on Tuesday, December 20, 2016 after a brief respiratory illness.
The daughter of James M. Landis and Stella McGehee Landis, she was born in 1928 and grew up in Cambridge, MA. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1952 and received a PhD in literature from American University in 1978. Mrs. McLaughlin began teaching several courses every year at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda when it was founded in 1976 and continued teaching until the last year of her life; she also served on the board there. She had fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the Studios of Key West.
Ann was the author of eight novels, all published by John Daniel and Co., and recently finished correcting the final proofs on her ninth, to be published in 2017. Her readers were particularly drawn to her portraits of girls and young women coming of age, often in Depression-era America. She wrote with feeling of the intricacy of relationships those between sisters and particularly those between daughters and their difficult, if brilliant fathers. Her long and happy marriage to Charles C. McLaughlin, professor of history and editor of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, ended with his death in 2005.
She overcame many challenges, including polio, which she and her husband both contracted during the 1955 epidemic in Boston, which principally affected her speech and swallowing for the rest of her life. But her temperament was remarkably buoyant in the face of adversity and she will be remembered as one of the strongest and kindest of women. She will be missed by generations of students, her family and a wide community of friends and colleagues who were inspired by her gallant, bright spirit, her humor, her gentle wisdom, and her warmth.
She is survived by her sister, Ellen McKee; children, John C. McLaughlin and Ellen M. McLaughlin; and two grandchildren, Rachel and Aaron McLaughlin.
This has been a year of extra-intensive reading, the bulk of it for my book in-progress on Far West Texas. Specifically, I’ve had some catching up to do on the oil industry and New Mexico history (impossible to grok Far West Texas without those subjects). I say this every year but truly, this may have been my richest year of reading yet. I feel so lucky to have encountered these works; each and every one of these authors has my sincere admiration and immense gratitude.
1. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather A deeply weird and profoundly American novel. I had been meaning to read The Professor’s House for years, and I finally did– and by uncannily felicitous happenstance, just after visiting Acoma, Chaco Canyon, and Mesa Verde. (P.S. Whoever calls this book flawed I call a puddinghead.)
2. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe A brilliant book that evokes the ghost of a lost book and the world it came out of so unfathomably long ago. This is one I look forward to savoring again.
For the past several years I have been reading intensively about Texas, and that includes its fraught ethnic relations, and with these two books about slavery– both recent and major scholarly contributions– by golly, the whole thang just gelled. For U.S. readers I recommend reading first Torget; then, without delay, Resendiz.
The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 by Genaro M. Padilla It astonishes me that so few Americans or Mexicans have ever heard of the epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico– and that would include Yours Truly, until I found The Daring Flight of My Pen. Padilla’s book about Pérez de Villagrá’s book rearranged all the furniture in the way I think about the U.S., about the Southwest, and about Mexico– and waxed the floor and put in new curtains, too.
7. Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitri Orlov This book has an important and urgent message, but it also comes with a gamelan orchestra of super-freaky esoteric undertones. In other words, to appreciate the clanging in there, you have to be ready to appreciate it. Not for the pleasantly numbed of Smombiedom.
8. Resist Much, Obey Little: Remembering Edward Abbey Edited by James R. Hepworth and Gregory McNamee Its impossible to go far into reading about the American West without encountering Edward Abbey and his works, and in particular his iconic Desert Solitaire. Resist Much, Obey Little, an eclectic collection of essays and interviews, is at once a festschrift and an adventure in the funhouse of Abbey’s mind.
9. Big Batch re: The Oil Patch Having crunched through a library’s worth of reading on the oil industry, herewith a selection of some of the more worthy tomes:
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power by Daniel Yergin This one won the Pulitzer Prize when it came out more than two decades ago, and most deservedly. It rewired my thinking about World War II, among many other episodes in the last century.
The Blood of the Earth: As Essay on Magic and Peak Oil John Michael Greer Reading Greer is akin to spooning up Swiss chocolate pudding: page after page of smoothly yumsie schoggi. Yes, even if it’s got crunchy stuff about oil and– keep your crash helmets on!– magic.
On his always thought-provoking blog, the author of Deep Work, Cal Newport, recently posted “Toward a Deeper Vocabulary” on how we need more words for “writing.” As a productivity expert (among other things) Newport has often been invited to “dissertation boot camps.” He writes:
“Something that strikes me about these events is the extensive use of the term ‘writing’ to capture the variety of different mental efforts that go into producing a doctoral dissertation; e.g., ‘make sure you write every day’ or ‘don’t get too distracted from your writing by other obligations.’ The actual act of writing words on paper, of course, is necessary to finish a thesis, but it’s far from the only part of this process. The term ‘writing,’ in this context, is being used as a stand in for the many different cognitive efforts required to create something worthy of inclusion in the intellectual firmament of your discipline.”
I agree. In writing all of my books it has been my consistent experience that “writing” is not a linear process akin to clocking in, and, say, ironing shirts. It’s a complex, zizaggily circular-ish process– to quote Newport, “involving different cognitive efforts”– that oftentimes doesn’t look like “writing.”
(That said, sometimes– sometimes— you’ve just gotta velcro your posterior to the chair and bang the words into the Word doc.)
As those of you who have been following my blog have heard ad infinitum, I am at work on a book about Far West Texas. Um, that means I need to write it. But there are other tasks directly relevant to ending up with a published book, for example, reading about Far West Texas, traveling in and observing Far West Texas, taking notes, transcribing notes as dictation, reviewing photographs and videos, interviewing people, transcribing those interviews, and so on and so forth.
If I were to simply sit down and commence typing, it would be akin to trying to cook without having assembled the proper equipment and ingredients. In other words, I need to have read Torget and Reséndiz (among many other works), to have transcribed my notes, and so on and so forth.
Not that I have not done quite a bit of the writing already, I mean, there are words on paper, there are bits and pieces, an introduction, some sections… Like I said, the process is zigzaggily circular.
I oftentimes compare “writing,” in its broadest mushiest sense, to cooking. And chefs will understand me when I say, you have got to master mis-en-place.
YE OLDE “MIS”
What is mis-en-plâce? In plain English, you don’t want to start the whipped cream for what might be a chocolate cake when your countertops, stovetop, and sink are cluttered with pots and spoons and dishes and splotches from the mushroom croquettes. Or whatever it is you were making. You need to start clean; then assemble your utensils and equipment; then assemble your ingredients; then wash, cut, chop; then cook.
So to follow the analogy of writing as cooking: reading and researching could be compared to assembling utensils and equipment; taking notes, transcribing, and filing could be compared to washing, cutting and chopping… and typing, say, to putting the skillet onto the burner… that is to say, actually, finally, cooking.
(1) Finish the editing on the transcript of my 2016 talk at the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference about the book (this is for an academic readership, extensively footnoted, and includes new material about another edition of Madero’s book)
(2) Finish a short video to share some images and information about four exceedingly rare books in my personal library, which for scholars of the Mexican Revolution, and especially anyone studying Francisco I. Madero, would be vital to see.
So that is what I did the past few days–I read Torget, I finished editing the transcript of my talk and posted the PDF (which you are welcome to download here), and, whew, I just uploaded that video I have been meaning to make since 2014(!)
C.M. MAYO TALKS ABOUT HER BOOK AND FOUR EXCEEDINGLY RARE BOOKS
Was this procrastination? No, gentle reader, it was good old-fashioned mis-en-plâce. Stay tuned for the podcast on the Seminole Scouts in Far West Texas. (Listen in anytime to the other 20 podcasts posted to date here.)
Back to the question of the writing process. How do you know when what you’re doing is a legitimate task towards finishing a book (or thesis or story or essay), and when it’s procrastination?
To my writing workshop students, I say, you need to decide that for yourself.
As for me, I rely on intuition and common sense (which sometimes contradict each other), and then, no drama, I just decide. Yes, once in a while (usually when I did not heed my intuition), I look back and think, hmm, maybe thus-and-such could be done differently next time. And whatever, it’s fine. I don’t ruminate about woulda coulda shoudas (that would be procrastination!), I just get to the day’s work, as best as I can.
> For more about the writing (and publishing) process, check out my talk of yore for the Writer’s Center, The Arc of Writerly Action.
