The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Today is Memorial Day, the day on which we honor all those who have died serving their country. The first Memorial Day was observed in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where members of both the Union and Confederate Armies were buried. It was the idea of Commander-in-Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, who said he was creating Memorial Day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

It’s the birthday of Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (1955) (books by this author), best known for his novel Brooklyn (2009), about a young Irish woman who immigrates to America in the 1950s. Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in southeast Ireland. His grandfather and granduncle were members of the IRA. His grandfather took part in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy.

When he was 17, he got a job as a barman at the Grand Hotel in Tramore. He worked from six in the evening until two in the morning and spent his days on the beach devouring The Essential Hemingway. The book spurred him to think about becoming a writer, giving him “the idea of prose as something glamorous, smart, and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive.”

Tóibín’s first novel, The South, about a Protestant woman who leaves Ireland to live in Barcelona, was published in 1990. He worked as a journalist while he published several more novels, including The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), and The Master (2004), a fictional account of the author Henry James, Tóibín’s favorite writer. Tóibín most often writes about Irish identity and society, loneliness, and the creative process. He writes a lot about the drudgery of daily work, too. He says: “I think novels are filled with the world. I mean things in the world such as money, such as domestic interiors.”

His fifth novel, Brooklyn, brought him wide acclaim. It was made into a feature film (2015). He got the idea while he was living in New York City and feeling lonely. He suddenly remembered that when he was a child, he overheard a woman talking about her daughter that had moved to America. He wrote a short story about the young woman, but he didn’t start the novel in earnest until six years later, when he was reading a lot of Jane Austen. He began to think of Austen’s habit of examining a single psychology, using an introspective, sensitive character, and he began to write the story of Eilis, an introverted young woman. Tóibín says, “She thinks and notices and reflects with considerable force, but then she doesn’t act on her intelligence.”

Tóibín wrote most of Brooklyn while teaching at Stanford. One day he emailed a friend who lived in Brooklyn, in almost the exact same location as Eilis, and asked what he saw out the window. The friend responded immediately and Tóibín used those details in the novel.

Tóibín doesn’t view himself as a storyteller. He tries to make writing as physically uncomfortable as possible, sitting in a hardback chair that causes him pain. When he works on a first draft, he writes longhand, and only on the right-hand side of the page. He saves the left-hand side for notes and revision. When he’s done, he transfers everything to a computer in a different room. He says, “I write as though I will never get another chance.”

Tóibín’s latest novel, Nora Webster (2014), grew out of the early pages of Brooklyn, and explores the life of a widow in 1970s Ireland as she attempts to create a new life. Tóibín has taught at the University of Manchester, Stanford, and Columbia University. He writes frequently for the London Review of Books.

Tóibín is fond of comparing the process of writing to plotting military strategy. He says: “You’re operating tactically all the time. You’re thinking a number of years ahead. You’re planning and plotting and then you’re allowing the textured work to emerge without all that plotting.”

And, “Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep — it can’t be done abruptly.”

It’s the birthday of filmmaker Howard Hawks, born in Goshen, Indiana (1896). He’s best known for directing Westerns such as Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959), but he also made the science fiction movie The Thing (1951), the gangster movie Scarface (1932), the screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940), and the detective movie The Big Sleep (1946).

His family moved to Pasadena, California, when he was a boy, because the climate was better for his mother’s asthma, and so he grew up near Hollywood. He had a lot of interests as a young man: he drove race cars professionally for four years, studied mechanical engineering, and won the United States Junior Tennis Championship.

He served in the Air Service during World War I, and then got a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood. One of his first successful movies was Dawn Patrol (1930), about fighter pilots. At the time, most movies about flight showed planes doing things they couldn’t possibly do in real life. Hawks made his movie as aeronautically accurate as possible. He also wanted his pilots to sound like real people, so he hired actors who could improvise their own dialogue as if they were having real conversations.

He was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and he became known for shooting movies in the same clear and simple way that Hemingway wrote sentences. He almost always shot scenes at eye level, because, he said, “That’s the way a man sees it.” He never used camera tricks and he rarely even moved the camera. When asked about his style as a filmmaker, he said, “I just aim [...] at the actors.”

Hawks was a tall man: a gambler, womanizer, and drinking buddy of Faulkner. In his spare time, he liked to sail his 65-foot racing sloop, called the Sea Hawk; he hunted with Gary Cooper; he rode motorcycles in the desert with Steve McQueen; and he helped design the racing car that won the Indianapolis 500 in 1936.

He discovered the actress Lauren Bacall, who was a model and had appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. He said, “[she was] my kind of actress: slow, sardonic, insolent, leaning against something and sizing you up.”