Monday May 11, 2015

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Mothers and Daughters

When I was a child
my mother and I traveled the long miles
to see her mother, once a year.
That hillside farm was mostly gravel,
the kitchen smelled like a churn,
guineas and chickens strutted the porch.
When we left,
my grandmother would stand
in her garden and wave.
I’d watch her a long time,
leaning out the window of the car.
My mother would say little on the way home,
her eyes now and then filling with tears.
Perhaps she was thinking of that garden,
the one she tried to replicate year after year,
every last pole bean and zinnia,
the one she left to me.

“Mothers and Daughters” by Jo McDougall from In the Home of the Famous Dead. © The University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It’s the birthday of Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in Tyumen, Russia (1888). He got his new name as the result of a printer’s error on the first song he ever sold; the printer typeset “Berlin” instead of “Baline,” so Irving kept the new name. His family immigrated to New York City when the boy was five years old, and his father, a Jewish cantor, died three years later. The son left school then, to go to work to help support the family. He sold newspapers and sang on the streets for handouts, and even worked for a singing Bowery beggar named Blind Sol, leading him to various bars, keeping track of his money, and occasionally singing with him. He was able to buy his mother a rocking chair with his earnings. Later, he got a job as a singing waiter in Chinatown, where he would occasionally write and perform songs with his fellow waiters.

He published his first song in 1907, and was paid 37 cents for it. His first big success came in 1911, with Alexander’s Ragtime Band. “Ragged time” music was the rage, and Berlin’s song became one of the most popular and enduring examples of it. Less than a decade later, he was writing complete musical scores, revues, and Broadway shows. He never learned to read or write music, and he only composed in the key of F-sharp. He once said, “I feel like an awful dope that I know so little about the mechanics of my trade.” He wrote many beloved American songs, including “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

In 1925, he fell in love with a debutante, Ellin Mackay. Her father, who was head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company and very wealthy, disapproved of this rags-to-riches Lower East Side immigrant upstart. He took his daughter away to Europe, but his “out of sight, out of mind” strategy failed, because Berlin reached her ears through the radio. He wrote romantic ballads like “Always” and dedicated them to her. They were married in a civil ceremony when she returned to New York, and they remained married for 62 years, until her death in 1988.

It’s the birthday of writer Mari Sandoz (books by this author), born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). Her parents were Swiss immigrants, and her childhood was dominated by her violent and passionate father. He was a homesteader, orchardist, agronomist, and a “homestead locator,” finding homesteads for hundreds of other settlers. This made him the enemy of local cattlemen who wanted to keep the land free for cattle. They even attempted to have him killed. He was frustrated by the harsh life of homesteading and the deadly tensions between homesteaders and cattlemen, and he took it out on his family. He often beat his wife, and his children, too — he first beat Mari when she was just three months old.

As the eldest of six children, Mari was expected to devote her time to helping on the farm and raising her younger brothers and sisters. When she finally went to school at age nine, not only was she illiterate, but her family spoke Swiss German so she also didn’t know a word of English. Her accent was so thick that the other students couldn’t even understand her name. She was determined and smart, and she taught herself English in the evenings. She attended school only erratically, but she learned English quickly and well. Her father disapproved of her reading, so she smuggled books in under her shirt and hid them in the attic in the straw mattress that she shared with the baby.

Sandoz was a good writer, and when she was 11, one of her stories was printed in the children’s section of the Omaha newspaper. She showed her parents, and her father was furious. He beat her, locked her in the cellar, and forbade her from ever writing again. She continued to write in secret. At the age of 17, she finally finished eighth grade. One day, badly dressed and weighing only 75 pounds, she sneaked off and rode a horse to a neighboring town to take the rural teachers’ exam. She passed the exam and hoped to escape her old life, but she ended up in an abusive marriage. Five years later, she petitioned for divorce, writing that she had suffered “extreme mental cruelty.” She moved to Lincoln, where she hoped to begin a life as a writer.

That life did not come easily. She worked menial jobs, and although she didn’t have a high school diploma, an administrator at the University of Nebraska found a loophole so that she could take classes. For more than a decade, she survived mostly on tea and crackers from the dining hall. She was severely underweight and wore threadbare clothes. She continued to write and submit short stories — she later estimated that she had received more than 1,000 rejection letters, which she saved in a scrapbook.

In 1928, she learned that her father was dying, and she went back home to see him. He had continued to disapprove of her life — he told her that writers and artists were the “the maggots of society” — and so she was amazed when, on his deathbed, he declared his last wish: that she write the story of his life. She threw herself into writing Old Jules, a biography of her father, but it was rejected by every major publisher in the country. Finally, in 1933, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was malnourished, exhausted, and poor. She took 70 manuscripts and burned them in a washtub in her yard, then moved back in with her mother; but she hadn’t burned Old Jules, and on a whim she submitted a revised version to a nonfiction contest through the Atlantic Press. She won the contest, Old Jules (1935) became a Book of the Month Club selection, and it sold so well that Sandoz was able to support herself.

She went on to write many more books of fiction and nonfiction, including Slogum House (1937), Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), and The Story Catcher (1963).

It was on this day in the year 868 A.D. that the Diamond Sutra was printed. It is the world’s oldest book bearing a specific date of publication. The Diamond Sutra is a collection of Buddhist teachings — the word sutra comes from Sanskrit and means teachings or scriptures. The Diamond Sutra is set up as a dialogue between the Buddha and Subhuti, one of his elderly disciples. This copy of the Diamond Sutra was printed with wood blocks on seven strips of paper — each page was printed from a single block. These seven sheets were bound together to form a scroll about 16 feet long.

The scroll was discovered in Turkestan, in 1900, among a thousand bundles of manuscripts walled up in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.

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