BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING

AS A GUEST AT FRANCO’S PALACE FOR A PICNIC FILM STAR

ESTHER WILLIAMS LEAVES THE PARTY TO READ A NOVEL BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1961)

    ".. I withdrew from the group , stretched out 
on a blanket and pulled a book out of my purse that 
I'd been wanting to read. It was Ernest Hemingway's 
For Whom the Bell Tolls..
     Fernando (LAMAS) was all over me like a shot, with something resembling a flying tackle. He snatched the 
book out of my hand and hid it under the blanket.
     "Are you crazy?" he asked with a wild look in 
his eyes.
     "What the hell's the matter with you?" I was 
clueless.
     "Esther, don't you know that this is the most 
banned book in Spain?"
     "Banned? By whom?"I still didn't get it.
     "By who do you think? By your host this afternoon!"
...
     So what I'd done was no mere faux pas. It was 
roughly the equivalent to pulling out a copy of the 
Talamud at a Hitler Youth rally. If anybody else besides Fernando had seen me, we'd have been instant pariahs, 
and all the movie star celebrity in the world wouldn't have saved us.

Esther Williams. The Million Dollar Mermaid: 
an autobiography with Digby Diehl (New York: 
Simon & Schuster, 1999)

ON THE ROAD AND WOMEN READERS

"On the Road electrified young women as well as men. The
poet Janine Pommy Vega, then fifteen, who found in 
Kerouac's novel " the intensity that was missing in my
life," set out for New York, where she met Ginsberg, 
Huncke, and Peter Orlosky. The words of On the Road
shot through Marilyn Coffey, later a feminist activist
"like a fusillade of bullets." After buying some candles
and wine, she began to write, feeling "free to say
anything I wanted...the equal of any man." The Teenage
Janis Joplin, starving for companionship in Port Arthur,
Texas, first read about Kerouac in Time magazine. "I
said 'Wow! and spit." If feminism means the insistence 
on a woman's right to full, independent, and original
life, On the Road served in these instances as its
catalyst."

Ann Douglas. "Strange Lives, Chosen Lives: The Beat
Art of Joyce Johnson" introduction to Minor Characters
by Joyce Johnson (New York: Anchor Books, 1994)

A BOOK REVIEW -- LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley’s 
Lover has just been re-issued by Grove Press, and 
this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an 
English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest 
to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages
on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways 
to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the
Professional gamekeeper.
   Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many 
passages of extraneous material in order to discover 
and savor those highlights on the management of a 
Midland’s shooting estate and, in this reviewer’s 
opinion, this book cannot take the place of J.R. 
Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.

  
               Ed Zern in Field & Stream
*******

"I hated Madame Bovary when I was sixteen, and its
heroine too. I thought they were too emotional,
novel and protagonist alike, too overt with their
passions. But I love it now --the book, if not it
heroine. I enjoy analyzing her melodrama, even if
I haven't forgiven her for indulging it. I also
want it for myself.I always have those high and
lows of feeling,everything turned superlative.
I've lifted emotional blueprints from Emma just
like she lifted them from books of her own.

Leslie Jamison. The Empathy Exams (NY:Graywolf
Press, 2014)

PETER PAN AS A GREAT CHARACTER

"Peter Pan is great character. He's forgetful,
selfish, cruel. he's an eleven year old, right
at the cusp of his sexuality. He has this great
quote: "Oh, the wonderfulness of me." You hear
that from an adult, you go 'Eat my shorts.'"

Robin Williams. Playboy interview (January 1992)
**

ON BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers

"It's a book about ecological salvation that
somehow makes you want to flick an otter on
the back of the head, for no good reason at
all."
Dwight Garner. The New York Times (Sept.16,2021


**
EDNA FERBER , DETECTIVE

Fictional detectives come in numerous shapes &
sizes, but is there a term to describe real life
persons who are used by ingenious authors to
solve crimes in novels. Edna Ferber, for example,
was a best-selling novelist  (So Big, Giant) and a
Broadway playwright ( Dinner at Eight and Stage
Door). She, however, has been resurrected as a
detective in a series of eleven mystery novels 
written by
Ed Ifkovic.  A few of the titles are Lone Star (2009),
Escape Artist (2011) and Indian Summer (2020).
     I learned all of this by reading  Jon L. Breen’s 
article “Edna Ferber, Detective” in Mystery Scene magazine
(number 170, Winter 2021) in which Breen gives background 
and brief synopses of Ifkovics’ novels.
   Escape Artist, for example, takes place in 1904 when
Ferber is a 19 year old reporter in Appleton, Wisconsin,
where she and Appleton-born Harry Houdini work together 
to solve the murder of a high-school girl.
Jon L. Breen writes “Edna’s father, learning of her 
interview with Houdini, remarks. “All Jews are escape
Artists.” The meaning of this would be obvious to 
anyone who lived through the 20th century, if not 
to the young Edna of 1904.”

**


CHARLES T. YERKES & THEODORE DREISER

“Yerkes is remembered today for the observatory
Bearing his name, which he donated to the University 
of Chicago, and even more signally, perhaps, for 
serving as the model for the character of Frank 
Cowperwood, the hero of Theodore Dreiser’s novels 
The Titan and The Financier. In his own time Yerkes 
was better known as a man-eating shark of the 
transportation industry, whose formula for success, 
as he bluntly stated it, was to buy old junk, fix 
it up a little and unload it upon other fellows.”

John Burke. Rogue’s Progress: The Fabulous Adventures 
of Wilson Mizner (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,1975)

**