The Saunterer

Norman Maclean on distorting truth for better nonfiction writing

    To go with the Saunterer’s post (12/24/08) of Georgia O’Keeffe’s reason for taking latitude in her painting, Norman Maclean gives below his reason for taking latitude in his writing. The interviewer (Nicholas O’Connell) asked: "So in what sense are your stories true? Do you tell them exactly the way they happened?" Maclean replied:

    No, I always allow myself a literary latitude. Often things don’t happen fast enough in life. Literature can condense them. I wrote the story on the Forest Service as if it happened all in one summer. But it happened in two or three summers. I didn’t consider that a violation at all.
    Everything in the story happened to me in the Bitterroots. In the story I have a big fight. The fight was actually in a Chinese restaurant, but in the story I had it in the Oxford, a restaurant and gambling joint in Missoula. It’s been there for sixty or seventy years and a lot of us Missoula guys were brought up in there. And they said, “God, how could you put the Oxford up there in Hamilton?” I don’t think it made much difference in terms of the story. I felt at home in the Oxford, and I didn’t feel at home in Chinese restaurants. Little things like that, mostly for the sake of hastening the story on, of sharpening it. (Quoted from page 174 of The Norman Maclean Reader. O. Alan Weltzien, ed. The University of Chicago Press. 2008.)

    For a brief biography of Norman Maclean, click here. (The Oxford is still going strong. For its picture and history, click here.)

The U. S. Forest Service gives The Saunterer its powerful cold shoulder

    Eleven years ago The Saunterer sent the Chief of the U. S. Forest Service the letter below. Neither he nor anyone under him acknowledged it nor acted on its suggestions. This signifies about the awful quality of the U. S.'s environmental guardian. We print it for the record.

May 22, 1997

Mike Dombeck, Chief
U. S. Forest Service

Dear Mr. Dombeck:

    First, I am writing to protest the U. S. Forest Service’s sanctioning the needless and wasteful cutting down last summer of one of the few largest, if not the largest, Ponderosa Pine on the Ashley National Forest, and perhaps in the states of Utah and Wyoming - girth more than 200 inches, diameter more than five feet, rarity of one in many many thousands, alive long before the time of Columbus, and with a chance to, in years to come, surpass the biggest of its species as recorded in The National Register of Big Trees. Second, I am writing to ask the F. S. to discipline any of its employees who were involved in the destruction in any way, from sanctioning it to actually participating in cutting it down. Finally, assuming the F. S. lacks regulations on cutting big trees, or did not follow those it has, I am writing to ask it to establish new regulations that will never again allow the F. S. to destroy a big tree without a formal review process that demands objective justification, with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to be notified of the cutting.
    Briefly the background of the tree’s destruction is this. An unfunded graduate student from my department, doing research in fire ecology on the Ashley, and at least one F. S. employee cut the tree. The student in September told me about the incident. A F. S. ecologist/ botanist knew of the tree’s location, took the student to it, and they cut it down, apparently for fire scar information and to have a cross section to display at a visitor’s center. Ever since, my spirit has been incensed, as have the spirits of at least a dozen I have told about it.
    I am not going to get into why hundreds of thousands of people in this country would feel that the spiritual value of this tree far outweighed the data its destruction contributed to science,  as well as outweighed any benefit a display cross section might have. I am confident when the time comes that I can defend in print that the destruction was wasteful, with the benefits coming nowhere near the costs.
    Through you I am asking the F. S. to do several things, and then tell me in writing if it has done them or not; and if not, why. I would like to know the answers by August 1. I will most probably make the incident known in environmental publications and the Internet, and of course say what the F. S.’s response was, as indicative of its values and attitudes. Here are my questions:
    1. Does the F. S. currently have regulations regarding the cutting of big trees? (If so, I would appreciate a copy, and especially to learn how a big tree is defined.)
    2. If the F. S. has regulations, were they followed?
    3. If the F. S. has no regulations, in light of this incident and others in the past, is it planning to enact procedures that involve a review and evaluation process for any big tree whose destruction is considered.
    4.  If the F. S. is planning to enact new regulations, when are the regulations expected to be in operation?
    5. Last, was the F. S. employee(s) who was involved in the cutting of this tree disciplined, and if so what was the punishment?

Sincerely yours,

H. Charles Romesburg
Professor

Georgia O’Keeffe on why art works

    Art works, said Georgia O’Keeffe, in this fashion:

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower - lean forward to smell it - maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking - or give it to someone to please them. Still - in a way - nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven’t time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.
    So I said to myself, - I’ll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
    Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don’t. (Quoted from page 32 of Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities. Little, Brown and Co. 2008.)

    For a brief biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, click here. For images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, click here.

Why Anne Sexton created

    Like every artist, Anne Sexton created to live. Hear her:

To work is to live. To create is to live. To perform (for me) is essentially false. Only as I write do I realize myself. (Quoted from p. 185 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)

    For a brief biography of Anne Sexton, click here.

Thornton Wilder on education

    Recently the Saunterer chanced upon a page in a book in the library in which Thornton Wilder said:

Mind and spirit will be the next climate of the human. The race is undergoing its education. What is education? It is the bridge man crosses from the self-enclosed, self-favoring life into a consciousness of the entire community of mankind. (Quoted from page 105 of Thornton Wilder: New Essays, by Martin Blank et al. Locust Hill Literary Studies, No. 26. Locust Hill Press, 1999.)

    For a brief biography of Thornton Wilder, click here.

The Catholic Church’s evil streak

    The evil streak runs long and deep - refusal to use its power to save Jews from Hitler - architect of the Roman Inquisition, seeing to it that heretics were burned at the stake. Listen to the Duke of Urbino’s description of the Church’s depravity when pope Clement VIII approved the execution of a Scottish unbeliever in 1592:

The execution was carried out in Campo de’ Fliori, where to terrify him a huge pile of firewood, charcoal, kindling, and more than ten cartloads of pitch had been prepared, and for the occasion a shirt of pitch was made for him that extended from his waist to his feet, black as coal, and then it was put over his naked flesh so that he would not die as quickly, and his life would be consumed in the fire as painfully as possible. He was conducted to the scaffold with a large escort, and made to sit on an iron chair next to the fire, which had already been lit. The usual protest was made on his behalf, as one does for good servants of God, in order to see him repent: that there was still time to obtain grace, but, as soon as he had mounted the iron chair, he threw himself with a great hurry into the burning flames, and buried in them, he died in these earthly flames to spend an eternity in those other flames of hell. (From page 11 of a book about another heretic the Church burned at the stake: Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic, by Ingrid D. Rowland. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2008.)

    Where once the Church was satisfied with burning people at the stake, today it aims to burn the entire Earth. We mean the Church’s anti-birth control policy which is responsible for the ever-increasing deluge of babies, and so global warming, destroying plant and animal life everywhere on Earth.
    Birth, birth, birth brings burn, burn, burn.

    For a brief biography of Giordano Bruno, click here.

Michel de Montaigne on self-appreciation

    How to appreciate yourself more? Follow Montaigne’s advice:

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. (Quoted from page 321 of Montaigne: A Biography, by Donald Murdoch Frame. Published by Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.)

    For a brief biography of Michel de Montaigne, click here.

Wallace Stevens on what drives artists

    Conscience is the fountainhead of all the arts, and so of poetry, as Wallace Stevens tells it:

Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of conscience because to every faithful poet the faithful poem is an act of conscience. (Quoted from Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, by Wallace Stevens. 1990. Random House.)

    For a brief biography of Wallace Stevens, click here.

Joseph Conrad on what fiction is for

    Logic is not used to communicate with another person’s temperament. Art, including fiction, is for that, as Joseph Conrad explains:

Fiction - if it at all aspires to be art - appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal, to be effective, must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. (Quoted from the Preface of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” by Joseph Conrad, R. Kimbrough ed., page 146. W. W. Norton & Co. 1979.)

    For a brief biography of Joseph Conrad, click here.

Thomas M. Disch on one of the purposes of art

    Science fiction writer and poet Thomas M. Disch said:

[It] is a central purpose of art, in conjunction with criticism, to expand the realm of conscious choice and enlarge the domain of the ego. It does this by making manifest what was latent, a process that can be resisted, but not easily reversed. And so even those who dislike what I have had to say may yet find it useful as a warning of how things appear to other eyes. . . . (Quoted from page 24 of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by W. G. Pearson, V. Hollinger, and J. Gordon. 2008.)

    For a brief biography of Thomas M. Disch, click here.