Puer Aeternus

I've just come back from volunteering at the Democratic National Convention. I was in the formatting squad of the Press Distribution team, so most of the time my job was to take speeches scripted for the teleprompter (odd punctuation, stage directions, no paragraphs) and format them to look like written English. When there was no formatting work I shifted to the "running" team, which involved getting the hard copies of those speeches to journalists scattered all over the Time-Warner Cable Arena.
       There's a lot I could say about the work itself (one tidbit: Bill Clinton originally planned to say "math" but changed it to "arithmetic" on the podium). I could also say some things about the politics of it all (I now know a great deal about moving forward by growing an economy that lasts, from the middle out, not the top down), about the strange culture of that world-within-a-world, and about my brief love affair with Charlotte, North Carolina. But what I'm thinking about right now is the unexpected joy of being a novice again.
       In my professional life I usually manage to come off as something of an authority. It's true that I've chosen to take on new skills a few times in my career: At 30, after starting as a humorist and pop-culture commentator I tackled the odd media of comics and screenplays, then at 40 started teaching myself to write some fairly serious nonfiction about psychology and cultural history, and around 50 started teaching writing classes. Even with those changes, though, I still always managed to be the guy who knew a lot about writing, who got his name on his books and classes, who ran his own show and got to pick his own learning curves.
       The convention was a different story. There I just had to show up and do what I was told. And if I didn't know how, I had to learn. Not that I was a novice at the art of punctuation or knowing where to break a run-on sentence; but because we were formatting for journalists, we had to match the AP Style Guide, which I didn't know. My supervisors also had special protocols they needed followed. And I had no idea in hell how to use Word for PC.
       So I had to be a rookie, a very green rookie, for the first time in a long time. I had to learn to ask for help, to get through the embarrassment of making the most elementary mistakes (sometimes twice on the same mistake), and to know I was the one who was holding the whole show up because I had to go back and redo everything I'd gotten wrong. I even had to suffer my comma-placement decisions being overridden by an 18-year-old intern.
      There was no glamor in it, either. I always like being the bright light in the room: my name on the book, running the class, tossing out references to my publishers and producers. But we worked in a narrow, dark, cyclone-fence-and-garbage-bag cage in the basement, next to the forklift ramp. In small talk we team members found out all the interesting careers and impressive accomplishments we brought in from the outside world, but none of it mattered when the work came in. We were all of us interchangeable and anonymous. My boss kept calling me "Jeffrey."

       I did begin to find my way in formatting as the days went on. There was a value to my decent knowledge of grammar and that experience dicing and splicing sentences that the obsessive writer will develop. But whatever special glow I thought I was building up within my team was instantly snuffed when I shifted to the running team. Suddenly it didn't matter in the least what I knew about the English language. All that mattered was how fast I could get my 55-year-old ass up four flights of stairs and find the right room. I had to learn to be a good delivery boy. Granted, I was a special sort of delivery boy. There is something more glamorous about bursting through a door and saying, "I have the Clinton speech," than bursting through a door and saying, "Did you order the pepperoni and mushroom?" But that didn't change the fact that nothing I'd ever learned as a writer meant squat.
       But the thing is...I liked it. I felt more fulfilled than I ever thought I would. What had sounded like a sacrifice to make for a greater cause turned out to be a reward. I'm already looking forward to 2016, and I find myself returning with a noticeable resistance and resentment to my ordinary life of autonomy, expertise, and distinction.
       One gift of it all was feeling that I belonged to the group. When I was younger I never felt I belonged to much of anything, so to compensate I took up a career that I hoped would make me stand out as something unique and exceptional. But of course that becomes a loop, because being exceptional can be a big barrier to belonging. Being inept freed me up to seek camaraderie instead of admiration, to let myself become truly part of a body whose overall success mattered far more than my own.

       Then there was freedom—that paradoxical freedom that comes from knowing exactly what we have to do and having to suffer no anxieties of choice. Kind of a heavily diluted version of that radical spiritual freedom Dostoevsky writes about in Karamazov: The more free I was from prioritizing, anticipating, managing, and second guessing, and the more free I was from caring about credit or blame or staking out my personal turf, the more free I could be just to show up for what I was living.
       But another gift of being a novice was feeling, as the etymology implies, new again. I've spent so much of my adult life trying not to feel the uncomfortable emotions of the young novice—insecurity, embarrassment, helplessness, panic, humility—that I forget how vivid those emotions are, how much I learn about myself in wrestling with them, and how generously they set me up to feel so much triumph for the smallest improvements. Every day I walked to the arena, I knew I was going to come out knowing vastly more by the time I staggered back out. Every time I was handed a new job, I knew it would scare me and beat me up and laugh at me but then, in the end, leave me changed for the better.
       When we talk about wanting to be young again, we usually mean being free of back pain or filled with more energy or blissfully ignorant of the workings of a 401K. But this felt like the real thing: all my fears and triumphs tumbling over each other in a forward rush, mastery and maturity always ahead of me and not ringed like a fortress around me. A beginner again, cracked wide open and taking nothing for granted. All the way in the present, for better and worse, in a way I'd nearly forgotten.

At the Pass

I’m writing this from the shore of Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. I’ve just come down from Dawson Pass, where my brother and I, accompanied by my son, scattered our parents’ ashes to the high-mountain winds.

This Two Medicine area has been the axis of my family’s world since before I was born. In fact, it’s part of why I was born. In 1955, my parents were living in San Francisco, in an apartment they both hated, and not sure if they were going to stay together; my mom had blown things up with the most dramatic of her love affairs, and although the affair was over and my dad had moved back in, the emotions still ran high and dark. To get away, my father applied for a summer job with the National Park Service. Then he landed a new regular job, teaching high school English in the Santa Clara Valley, where new suburbs were spreading like fescue, uprooting old cherry and plum orchards. Whether his wife would follow him there was their lives’ central question, and that summer apart—he caretaking a campground in the quiet of Glacier, she and their nine-year-old son staying behind in the city—became their chance to answer it.
       In the end, they moved as a family to drowsy Los Gatos and started saving to buy a ranch-style tract home. They also launched a reconciliation baby—hence my existence. My mother was eight months pregnant with me when my father drove the family back to Glacier the next June.
       So it was that my first home was a log cabin, the caretaker’s residence in the middle of Two Medicine Campground, heated with a wood-burning stove and regularly invaded by mice, shrews, and weasels. That my mother would take that on with a newborn—after spending the preceding few years trying to establish herself as a sophisticated city girl—was a testament to her strength, her dedication to the new family agreement, and the masochism that got her through so much of her life.
       I spent my first six summers in that campground, and in my early memories it’s far more vivid than the pastel stucco world where I spent the other nine months of every year. My father had to give up the job after that, but we still returned to Two Medicine for at least a few weeks nearly every year into my teens. I suppose most of my real growing up happened in California—all the social and academic development that’s shaped who I am outwardly—but it was in that alpine quiet, skipping rocks alone over the glassy surface of Two Medicine Lake, that I discovered an inner self, learned the power of solitude, and first got it in my head that I wanted to spend my life telling stories. My memories took on a lonely depth that’s turned most of my wanderlust toward cities and valleys instead of mountains; but still, I went back to Glacier for my thirtieth birthday and my fortieth, and I took my son there as soon as I thought he could appreciate it.
       My brother’s life began there too, although not quite so literally. After being bounced around among neighbors and relatives while our parents fought, never fitting in at a blue-collar city school, Two Medicine became the first place where he truly felt he belonged. He started hiking the trails, at first with our dad but then on his own, and discovered an autonomy and liberation he'd never known. He exhausted the local trails and started heading off cross-country. He became a legend among the park staff as "that kid who hikes everywhere," and by his second summer there, at the age of eleven, he was selling his services to tourists as a trail guide. When our father let the job go, Ray got his own job with a Glacier Park trail crew, and from that time on he owned the park, and it owned him, more than any of us. It’s been his well-spring. His stories about it are endless. He can turn the telling of its geological formation into great drama. He raised both his children to love it, and this trip his eight-year old granddaughter came too. Like anyone who's spent any time in the glow of Ray’s radiant love of the place, she wants to go back.

       For our parents, Glacier was the source of a peace they seemed able to find nowhere else. It was the one place where I felt they were living shared lives and wanting the same things. My father had always craved quiet and solitude and liked knowing that he'd gone as far as possible from (as he liked to put it) the madding crowd. My mother could be frenetically social, at least in her manic phases, but she was high-strung and sensitive, and too much human society would tip her into her self-isolating depressions. In the campground at Two Medicine they both found an equilibrium, with each other and with the world. My dad was present and approachable in a way he rarely was at home; the closest I ever felt to him, at least until I took care of him after my mom died, was the summer I turned ten, when we two made the Montana pilgrimage alone. My mom was simply and profoundly at peace. She hardly drank. Her words were rarely bitter. And I believe that the good later years of their marriage began when my dad retired from teaching and retook that lost, idyllic summer job in Two Medicine campground that he’d had to let go of two decades before.
       Whatever spirituality I have springs ultimately from Two Medicine. The only deities my family ever honored were the mountains ringing the lake. Their names, a hectic mix of Blackfoot titles, some translated and some not—Rising Wolf, Lone Walker, Sinopah, Painted Teepee, Never Laughs, Appistoki—invoked a mystery in me from my earliest years that I think I’m still trying to comprehend.

       Rising Wolf so dominates the campground with his monumental mass, flashing light from his terrible cliffs in the morning and burying everything in his shadow by late afternoon, that I grew up unconsciously looking away from him as much as I could. My father and brother tried twice to climb to his summit and were turned back by pounding storms and unscalable masses of stone before, on their third try, he finally let them reach the top. (Even then, they never spoke of "conquering" him.) Sinopah, gazing at us serenely from across the lake, was our one real object of veneration. My father took thousands of pictures of her over the years in every light and every mood. As many times as we’d looked at her, the words "come look at the light on Sinopah" would bring us all tumbling out of our cabin or trailer.
       Dawson Pass holds a special place in that family mythology. It’s a short, steep, beautiful hike with a breathtaking consummation. The trail starts from the lakeshore at the foot of Sinopah and climbs along the shoulder of Rising Wolf, from a swampy, creek-watered valley of lush-leafed plants with fragrant blossoms, through a forest of firs that stand tall and majestic at the bottom but waist-high and wind-twisted by the top, and finally to the cavernous amphitheater of the high country. There, suddenly, as you push through the constant wind and cross over the pass, you find a whole new world of jagged peaks and plummeting gorges stretching away from you in every direction.

       It’s also the first saddle in a longer hike, the Dawson-Pitamakan Loop, famous among hikers as one of the most spectacular trails in North America. That trail was essentially created by my father and brother. When Ray was eleven, our dad discovered a trail marked on a 1938 USGS map that had apparently never been built, connecting what were in fact two dead-end trails to Dawson and Pitamakan Passes. So they headed out early one morning to reconstruct the original, hypothetical route across the slippery scree around the back of Mt. Morgan, building cairns along the way to mark the safest passage. After a few trips cut short by wrong turns and unexpected cliffs they had a trail marked out. My father then drafted a proposal, including a hand-drawn map, and sent it to park administration. It took quite a few years, but the trail got built.
       Almost nothing has changed in Two Medicine since then. I want to say that going back there stirs up old memories, but it's more than that: it’s as if the memories become my reality and everything I’ve ever experienced there is present again. It’s the life I’ve lived outside the park that feels old and distant. Timelessness is the soul of the place. The mountains themselves are made of ancient stuff, Precambrian mudstone heaved up over the much younger ground of the prairie. When you hike up to Dawson Pass you take a journey forward through time, from the green mudstone of the oldest stratum to the tawny limestone of the youngest; but the rocks are so old that after you've climbed upward for miles, at the very top of the trail, you find the ground strewn with stromatolites, stone remnants of the colonies of cyanobacteria who became the first creatures to enter the fossil record about a billion years ago. (No, my brother and I weren’t the first to mark the passage of time by scattering remains on the pass.)
       In another way the trail moves in reverse, a rapid hike back through time. Spring comes earlier to the lower reaches of the trail, where the snow melts first, and in the time-tight ecology of the high places that makes a difference: we found that the beargrass stalks near the lakeshore had already shed their blossoms, but two miles up they were in full bloom and two miles further were covered with buds. Right before the treeline, along the runoff from still-melting snow patches, we found a few that hadn’t even sprouted stalks. In a couple of hours we had marched a month backward along that timeline held in the bodies of plants.
       And, of course, there’s another way in which we journeyed through time, because we were climbing back to a time when our parents weren't dead. Among the unchanged monuments of stone and endlessly recycling organisms whose names I had begun to learn before I could write my own, they were there. When Ray and I looked back over the deep valley we'd just climbed out of and reminded each other yet again of some memory we'd created together half a century before and had been polishing on every trip to Glacier ever since, Mom and Dad may just as well have been barely out of sight around the bend of the trail ahead of us or waiting in the campground below. I could hear their voices: How was Dawson today? Any huckleberries?
       The ritual itself, when it finally came, was comfortingly casual. We settled in on the pass, meditated on the view, told Nicky the names of the mountains and glaciers, took some pictures, ate sandwiches, and finally came to the business of the two small, heavy bags we’d packed all the way up. We said a few unrehearsed words to our parents, welcoming them home and thanking them for giving us Glacier. Then we dug our hands into the ashes—Dad’s light and crunchy, Mom’s dense and powdery (and I sense a metaphor there about their lives and characters that I haven't found yet)—and started tossing.
       Although it took us a few handfuls to admit it, the tossing itself turned out to be invigorating. Fun, actually. The wind caught the ashes and sent them sailing over the pass, back toward Two Medicine Lake, as little clouds. Pretty soon we were positioning ourselves against the wind and tossing them as high as we could so they would twist into the air as animated vertical columns, looking like the ghosts in images of Victorian seances. Nicky had the camera, and soon the challenge became timing our throws so he could catch a picture of the perfect ghost. We admired how pretty they looked against the stark tallis and shadowed top of Flinsch Peak, and we laughed about how our parents would have loved the game and how our dad would have insisted on trying too if he’d been able to reach back across the Styx to grab a handful of his own ashes.
       But the moment when we each, simultaneously, tossed our final handful of ashes into the air—me the last of our mother and him the last of our father—we fell silent. We looked out where the white clouds could no longer be seen and listened to the constant wind of the mountains telling us that the longest story of our lives had finally ended, and that it would never end at all.

    

Silent Choice

Life is full of hard choices. Should I take a chance on being a writer or stay in college and find a normal career? Should I go on living for my work or learn what it's like to be a parent? Should I send my son to a private school or have a tiny bit of money left to retire on?

      But life has never thrown a tougher choice at me than the one I face this month. For 28 straight years I've attended the San Diego Comic Convention. For 14 straight years (minus one) I've attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Together they've filled my birthday month with a double celebration of visual narrative, cultural history, and esoteric connoisseurship. 
      This year, though, some cruel, cruel person in San Diego decided to move Comic Con a week earlier and place it directly up against the SFSFF. My 55th birthday present turns out to be an agonizing decision.

      I've wrestled with this for nearly a year, but in the end I've chosen the silents. Ultimately I suppose it's like choosing the temple over the marketplace. Comics and comics-inspired media are so much a part of the daily texture of our culture that even the biggest comics convention on earth can never manage to feel like much more than an extension of our ambient noise. But that most elegant of film festivals creates an alternate universe that for four days moves according to the rhythms, chiaroscuro, and orchestral textures of the shortest-lived of all the great art forms. 

      Of course there's the argument that comics are still alive and silent films aren't...but I never experience silent films as dead. There are still so many movies discovered that were thought lost forever, so many dug from under decades of obscurity, so many restored so thoroughly that they become entirely new works. And then there's all the new music being performed with them, and the hot arguments between those who want cutting-edge sounds from the Matti Bye Ensemble or the Alloy Orchestra to bring the old images closer to the present and the like-they-were-meant-to-be-accompanied purists. I thought a fistfight was about to break out during last year's music panel.

      The film festival is prettier, too: colossal black-and-white faces enshrined in the Spanish/Javanese/Beaux-Arts hodgepodge of the Castro Theatre instead of crayon-colored Avengers grimacing at the bleak concrete of the San Diego Convention Center. It sounds better: I'll take avant-garde mini-orchestras and sumptuous old-school organists over hyperamped videogame soundtracks just about any time. It's for a good cause, too, supporting the rescue and restoration of those vanishing films.
      When even all that failed to bring me to a decision, though, I fell back on professional rationalization: I've written many comics in the past and will surely write more in the future, but right now I'm finishing up a book about the cultural upheavals and moral revolutions of the early 20th Century, the birth of new patterns of communication and even a new kind of individual out of the first wave of mass media. And that, more than anything, is what the silent movies themselves were about. This year, those four days under the spell of century-old light will be my celebration not only of being a year older but of drawing The Undressing of America, at last, toward its close.

      I confess that I'm going to cheat on this a little: since Comic Con starts a day earlier, I'll pop in for that one day to keep my 29-year streak intact on paper. But then I'll fly north. The silents will still know that they've won my heart.
      The festival, once again, is presenting some rare and magnificent works, including a new restoration of the breathtaking Wings, another Ruan Lingyu heartbreaker from the golden age of Shanghai romanticism, and an Ernst Lubitsch movie (love that guy) long thought to be lost. The schedule is here.

    

Fathers and Days

The last time I saw my father outside a hospital and fairly aware, able to carry on something of a conversation, was Fathers' Day a year ago. That was also the last time my son saw his grandfather at all. Nicky's big news at the time was that, after years of struggling through debilitating migraines, he had graduated high school. My father wasn't able to grasp what that was about, or even quite what his relationship was to this kid, but he understood that Nicky was someone who mattered to him and that something good had happened. 

      Today is my first Fathers' Day without a father. It's also the first in this new era of my own life as a parent, as Nicky pulls steadily out from under his health issues and starts to get his life back, getting ready for a summer trip to New York to stay with a friend and then an autumn in Japan to study, needing me less and less all the time. Today we're going to a local county fair to wallow in pig races, junk food, and Mexican music, a fair we saw together years ago when he was little, the kind of cornball thing my dad would have liked. Meanwhile my father's ashes wait in my bedroom in a little box for the trip to the Montana Rockies my brother and I will be taking next month to scatter him in the place he loved best.

      I never did care much about Fathers' Day as such. Contrived commercial holiday and all that. But I like it as a day to stop and look around, to note where I am on this long, good course.

  

Transparency

I like to tell my writing students that no matter what we're writing about, at some level we're always writing about ourselves. That, in fact, every extensive writing process is a process of self-discovery and self-transformation. And sure enough, it's clear to me now that the huge changes I've put The Undressing of America through reflect changes in its author.
      I always worked behind a curtain. I'd disappear into my writing, not show anyone pieces until it felt good enough, dance around questions like "how's the book going," say little about my inner life, and finally unveil the finished work as the image of me I wanted the world to see. It was a strategy learned in childhood, and it worked well for me for a long time.
      For a while I collaborated on humor writing with Will Jacobs and on comics with artists and editors, but then I consciously turned my career toward books and screenplays I could write alone. I wanted always to be the captain of my own ship, and only to be seen when I sailed into port. (And if possible with time to change into my dress whites before anyone saw me.) Nor was that just in my work life: I worked just as hard to keep my messier thoughts and emotions to myself too, along with some big arenas in my private life.

      Much of what drew me to the story of Bernarr Macfadden in the first place was his unbendable self-direction, his extravagant, swaggering, bull-headed, frequently absurd but strangely admirable belief that he'd learned from his own experience everything he needed to know about everything.
      But the more I worked on this book, the more a different element of his life and character came to fascinate me: he was a pioneer of the 20th Century passion for self-exposure, offering himself as an example to others not only through images of his nearly naked body but with retellings of some of his most intimate and painful experiences. 
      He embodied that passion in a magazine, True Story, that changed popular culture forever by founding an industry on the stripping away of polite concealment, for the purposes of both titillation and inspiration. Another of his magazines ran one of the first mainstream endorsements of Alcoholics Anonymous and its idea that telling our own stories with rigorous honesty can bring recovery.
      For quite a while I followed my shifting interest and thoroughly rethought the book before I put the pieces together: the focus of the story was shifting largely because my own strategies of concealment were no longer working. Without going into too many gory details, my solitary decision making and compartmentalizing had cost me friendships, nearly killed my marriage, and left me feeling deeply isolated. I'd also slammed into a stone wall on the solitary writing road. I could just no longer make myself go on alone.
      Out of sheer necessity I managed to transform my personal life by pulling down the curtains and throwing open the windows. In one of those twelve-step "rigorous honesty" programs I learned that the antidotes to shame and fear were to tell my whole story, and I found, contrary to everything I'd grown up thinking, that people were more likely to accept me if I showed up before them completely transparent.
      In my work life, though, I was far slower to pry off the lid. I sought a community by joining the San Francisco Writers Grotto, but I resisted admitting how stuck I was on this book. Pretty soon, in fact, I was resisting even showing up there, so I wouldn't have to face too many people asking, "How's the book going?" I found alternatives to isolation—collaborating again with my old friend Will, teaching writing classes, helping with Grotto events—but still kept my struggles with this book very private. 

      I did start to blog about it all, and then to tell a widening circle of friends that this book was "giving me trouble," but that was more translucency than transparency, and colored translucency at that, a Coke-bottle-green version of the truth. But I could never really get this final draft rolling until I was willing to tell the world the one thing I was most afraid to say: that I needed help. 
      Because that's always been the one thing I've never wanted to admit. That I couldn't handle a situation all by myself. That I wasn't in control. That I needed someone else to help me. Hence the appeal of solitary writing in the first place. I could create a project that was all mine, withdraw into it, deflect everyone's concern, and emerge only when I'd fixed everything.
      Except this time I wasn't fixing everything. This time I had to admit that I was powerless against my own confusion and fear, that I needed other people to know what I was facing and help me straighten it out. So, like the Ancient Mariner, I told everyone who would listen how pathetically far behind I was and what a terrifying mountain of work rose still ahead of me. To those who wanted to help I've handed my schedule, made regular  productivity reports (or non-productivity confessions), talked through my confusion, and showed chunks of lumpy prose as quickly as I churned them out. In return, I've offered myself as an accountabilibuddy (to steal a term from South Park) in their work.
      It's worked, too. What I was unable to do alone I've been able to do as part of a community. As we were too fond of saying in the '90s, it takes a village. But village life is not conducive to privacy and self-direction. Everyone in a village knows your business, and everything you do affects everyone else. 
     It was the intimacy and communality that comes with transparency that I'd been looking for all along, and it was this book that brought me to realize it, in more ways than one.

Why I Write (updated)

A while ago I waxed philosophical and autobiographical on why I've chosen to be a writer. Something about solitude and community, I think, and something else about the relationship between creativity and economic reality. All quite valid for when I wrote it, I'm sure, and it will no doubt all seem relevant again. But now I'm going to tell you why I'm a writer today.

     The oven light went out. It's a new oven, and I was annoyed that the light died so quickly. So I went to fix it but, probably because I was annoyed, I jerked the glass cover off the bulb instead of detaching it gently—the result being that the light bulb snapped off at the base. So now an extremely simple bulb change was turning into a chore, which had me more annoyed, at the bulb, at Frigidaire, but mostly at me. I've done this plenty of times before, though, taking a broken light bulb out of a socket by turning the glass rod in the middle. I shut off the electricity, gripped the rod, and turned. Except this time it snapped off in my hand. Probably because I was so annoyed.

     So I went to my next recourse, which I've also succeeded at several times over the years: twisting the bulb out of the socket by grabbing the edge of the metal base with a pair of pliers. I grabbed. I twisted. A sliver of metal tore off. I grabbed elsewhere, twisted again. It tore again. 
     The base was frozen into the socket, and gripping little bits of brass with the tip of my needle-nose pliers was getting me nowhere. Clearly what I needed to do was hold more of the base with a bigger pair of pliers. So I got a flat-head screwdriver, jammed it between the base and the socket, and bent it inward. Then I grabbed a whole hunk of brass with my vice-grip pliers and twisted with all my might. The ceramic ring holding the socket against the back of the oven shattered.

     I saw the good side to that, though: now I might be able to pull the socket through the hole toward me and get a better grip on the whole thing. So I brought the pliers up against the edge one more time—and the socket dropped behind the back wall of the oven. Now it's sitting in there, an open electrical socket leaning against a metal wall, useless and dangerous and unreachable without taking the whole appliance apart. So I can't use my oven until Friday when the repairman comes and charges me a fortune to get me right back to where I was this morning, ready to replace a 69¢ bulb.

    There have been many reasons in my life to make a career of writing: some practical, some daring, some wise, and some reckless. Today I write because I can't fucking do anything else.

Naked Men and the Scientific Utopia

This is the last excerpt I'll be blogging from the rough draft of The Undressing of America, because it's time to forget everything else except getting the thing done and onto the shelves.  

The muscle-building movement that swept up Bernard McFadden in the 1880s poured largely from a surge of Prussian nationalism seven decades before. Humiliated by Napoleon’s armies and wanting to regain their momentum as the rising power of central Europe, Prussia’s leaders embraced a system of physical education for their upper-class schools, their gymnasia, a rigorous individual development of muscles and agility that they called Turnverein but that the English-speaking world would come to call gymnastics.

       It was a more mythological than practical gesture, for just as the practice of combat was being taken from the nobility and mercenaries and assigned to masses of conscripted commoners, as industry replaced human physical labor, as men’s lives grew steadily more room-bound and sedentary, the nation gave itself to the creation of an ideal citizen modeled on the warriors of classical Greece. But the ideal rang deeply in the hearts of the European, and soon physical fitness became part of the education of every young man of the dominant classes.

       By mid-century the interest in building muscles had spread to men of the middle class, although in a far more individualized and less romantic form. Strength was a way to press back against the unhealthiness of industrial life and a compensation for the obscurity and impotence of the new urban society. But as ever, the alternative to industrialization followed industrial logic itself: repetitive motion, rigid control, valorized tedium, the mastery of physical power through planning and discipline. Weight training became especially popular in England, the most industrialized and urbanized of nations. Soon after, it jumped to America, where it took on a particular edge of competitive individualism, as well as a romantic primitivism, as images of Indian braves with naked torsos and the strong men of a pre-mechanical democracy—the village smithy with arms like iron bands—still stood for perfect manhood in the national imagination.

       Mass print carried the new fascination from nation to nation and from city to small town to farmhouse. Books and pamphlets on self-improvement had become a mainstay of cheap publishing, as the culture of progress, competition, and the conquest of nature stirred vast numbers of young men to lift themselves by their mental, professional, and physical bootstraps. Fitness books enabled them to become men of robust power like the heroes of the popular novels on sale at the same newsstands. Improvements in the cheap reproduction of artwork in the final few decades of the century served physical fitness instruction especially well by enabling positions and exercises to be clearly demonstrated. By the end of the 1880s authors were promoting competing fitness systems and selling their own dumbbells and Indian clubs from ads in the backs of their books.

       Then Prussia once again brought a new twist to the relationship of man and his muscles. The boy was born just a year before Bernard McFadden, although not in a land laid low by civil war but in an ascendant nation just uniting Germany and poised to avenge itself on France; to grow up in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s was to grow up believing that the world was one’s future spoils. Like McFadden, he discovered weight training early and made it the great passion of his life. His dedication was so great that by his early twenties he was touring international stages as a strong man, whereupon he abandoned the name Friedrich Müller—as common a name as a German could have—and billed himself, with an echo of Polish exoticism, as Eugen Sandow. (The fallen kingdom of Poland embodied a lost nobility in the imaginations of men on the eastern edge of the German Empire then; a young scholar named Friedrich Nietzsche, also consumed with visions of the superior man, made spurious claims to Polish descent.)

       Strong-man exhibitions were popular enough all over Europe, but by the late 1880s they’d become especially popular in England. Sandow stood out among them all: he broke chains and bent metal rods with the best of them, but most compelling about him was his sculptural perfection. Sandow more than any of his predecessors cared about the appearance of his naked body, and his particular system of weight lifting and resistance training created sharply delineated muscles of a sort that men concerned only with power could not provide. The crowds cheered when he swelled his chest and sent a snapped chain flying; but, as clever promoters would observe, they gasped when he flexed his arms. The previous champion strong man of England—whom Sandow defeated in the public competition that made him famous—called himself Charles Sampson and sought to evoke a Biblical awe. Sandow was immediately compared by the popular press to Greek and Roman statues.

       Yet what Sandow pioneered—what soon came to be called “body building”—was far less a return to Classical aesthetics than a new and very modern vision of the human body. Old-style strong men played carnival side shows; Sandow commanded music-hall stages. Admiration for Sandow was not admiration for native strength but for the work he had brought to making himself a new kind of man. He provided a new dream of perfectibility, of complete reform of the individual body, that resonated with the utopian aspirations then ascendant in the West. But he also promised the mass replicability of that perfection, because everyone in his audience knew that he was no freak of nature but a normal man who had found the way to make himself like that. Sandow promised that with scientific logic and discipline we could all become perfect.

       Such was Sandow’s international reputation that in early 1893 one of New York’s most successful opera and musical theater impressarios, Maurice Grau, brought him across the Atlantic to serve as the crowd-pleasing finale to a very slightly risqué comedy called Adonis; after the final scene, the curtain reopened to reveal Sandow striking poses to show off his contours, then performing feats of strength. Almost immediately, however, the star was stolen by a sharper and younger promoter, a German-American Sandow’s own age, named Florenz Ziegfeld.

        Ziegfeld saw in Sandow what no one else had, because he stood, like so many young Americans, between two worlds. His family in Friesland had been affluent and cultured; his father moved to Chicago to found a music school. Young Flo, however, was of a racy new generation, young men who came of age in swelling American affluence and under the ever-brighter lights of the booming cities. He repeatedly dropped out of school and clashed with his parents, preferring clothes, girls, and gambling to the sedate world of the respectable bourgeoisie. He understood the duality of American taste, its young love of sensation and its nervous pursuit of the “high class,” and he saw how perfectly Eugen Sandow bridged that split. Flo Ziegfeld knew that people liked to look at naked flesh and exceptional bodies. And he knew that the way that the way to ease the self-consciousness of the better class of customer enough that he or she would pay to see it—and the way to quiet the censors—was by dressing that flesh in high-minded artistry.

        He brought Sandow back to Chicago to feature him at the Columbian Exposition, where together they developed a new presentation: living man as classical statue. Sandow dusted his skin with white powder and, clad only in a loincloth, struck the poses of the Discus Thrower, David, Hercules, and others that the crowds would recognize from books and illustrated postcards. Carefully placed spotlights, blacking out while Sandow changed position and clicking back on from new angles, gave him a glow of unreality. When Sandow lifted great weights he did so in static tableaux.

       Then Ziegfeld played his trump: he invited Chicago’s most prominent society ladies and promised that anyone who gave two hundred dollars to charity would be granted a back-stage audience with the great man himself, including a chance to feel his mighty arms. On opening night he snagged the wife of George Pullman, king of railroad sleeping cars and founder of a planned, utopian town bearing his name. Sandow the Magnificent became an instant sensation.

      Sandow wasn’t the only performer at the Chicago fair to bring in huge crowds by exhibiting his body, but he was the one who seemed to dodge the criticism of the defenders of decency. Other attractions on the Midway—most famously Little Egypt, the “hoochie-coochie” dancer—were assailed by church and civic groups and occasionally shut down by the police. Among those who attacked such exhibits most vigorously was Anthony Comstock. After twenty years as the dominant censor in America and then at the zenith of his power, Comstock had been broadening his sights beyond the obscene publications that he had largely driven underground to include larger cultural targets: theaters, art galleries, and world’s fairs. But Sandow he seems never to have remarked on. The ethnographical interest of Little Egypt may not have been enough to deflect his ire, but Sandow’s commitment to health and art apparently was, at least for the moment.

       Bernard McFadden was aware of none of this as he filed into the dimly lit theater and saw the first spotlights go on. He thought nothing about cultural changes or moral battles. He was aware only of the breathtaking sight of Sandow the Magnificent—and of the endless line of people still behind him beyond the theater doors, every one of them eager to lay down his money for a glimpse.

Sonny Rollins, the Bridge, and Me

When he was twenty-eight years old and rocketing to the peak of his fame as a jazz saxophonist, Theodore "Sonny" Rollins decided to take a break. "I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own." For three years he didn't record or play publicly. For three years he just practiced.

     At first he practiced at home, but out of consideration for a neighbor with a baby, he decided to lug his axe instead to the nearest public space and practice there. So was created one of the great romantic images of American music: a lone genius playing to the night on the Williamsburg Bridge.

     When Rollins returned to performing, his work was not as dramatically different as his followers either hoped or dreaded it would be. For a while in live performances he teamed up with some of the architects of the new "free jazz" sound and ventured a ways into new territory, but in the studio he stayed pretty steadily on the hard-bop road that he already knew. He went deeper, though. He made it more his own. He pushed the edges, and he wouldn't stop pushing them for decades to come.

     Now, there are a lot differences between Sonny Rollins and me. For one, I don't play the saxophone. For two, I'm not a genius. And for three, I didn't choose my years-long hiatus from my primary work; it just happened to me. (Okay, and I'm not twenty-eight, either. Fine.)

     Still, I turn to him often for inspiration and reassurance. Because I sold a book idea in 2006 that I thought I would finish within two years, and here I am six years later just pulling together the first polished draft. And there are so many nights when I look back and ask myself what I lost and what I gained in all that time.

     I hasten to say that I haven't been idle. In those years I was hired to write two screenplays adapting my own earlier work, a web comic and graphic novel for a lobbying group, and a series of ten kids' books based on a Japanese comic book. I've created and taught several terms of a class at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto on "Finding Your Story," which is evolving into a book of its own. I reunited with my collaborator from my salad days, Will Jacobs, to write a series of short stories that became another series of short stories that became a book that we'll be bringing out sooner or later. There's been a lot going on other than professional work, too: my son's years-long health issues, massive upheavals in my private life, and a transformative journey into twelve-step recovery (no, not substance addiction—I'll fill you in in another blog).

     Some of those were tasks I honestly had to do; some of them, I must confess, were just to avoid writing the book I was supposed to be writing. That book revealed itself, for one thing, as a far more complex project than I ever anticipated. At one point I had to throw it all away and reconceive it because someone else surprised me with a too-similar book. Then the research for the next conception turned out to be nearly impossible because seemingly no one thought to preserve the periodicals I planned to write about. Then I trashed it and reconceived it again, partly because of that research problem but also because I just came up with a way better idea.

     But apart from all that, there were times I just couldn't write it. The fall-back description of the phenomenon is "writer's block," but I don't believe it was anything so monolithic. It was, at times, an inarticulable awareness that I didn't yet have the idea worked out right, and at others an inchoate admission that I hadn't yet brought my chops up to the point that I could pull it off. Sometimes, too, it was what Sonny said: I was taking on too much too soon and I didn't want to let publication schedules push me out there so I could fail. I had to get myself together on my own. Just that Sonny caught on to that quickly and made a decision, where I had to rely on my unconscious—dependably much smarter than my conscious—to drag me there.

     In the end, I am here, where I am. The book will be finished, then it will be edited, then finished again, then published. It won't be as powerful, I'm afraid, as The Bridge, Rollins's comeback album. But it will be who I am now, not who I was when I laid down Men of Tomorrow and cooked up this follow-up idea. It will be me after multiple reconsiderations of the idea and myself, after herculean (or sisyphean) parenting labors, after several competing projects and a few alchemical relationships and twelve tall steps. I don't know if I'll be glad of those four or five years of unexpected delay, but I know I'll see the results of them. I'm curious to learn who I am when I come back from my own long nights on the bridge.

Does Publicity Sell Books?

A few weeks ago an email conversation broke out within the SF Writers Grotto trying to answer that question (in response to a fellow member getting a lot of great TV appearances out of her new book but not seeing sales go up the way she hoped), and I responded with my own experiences. A few people told me that what I wrote was helpful, so I thought I'd share them here.

One thing I've figured out after decades in this screwy game (next month is the 30th anniversary of the sale of my first book) is that actual book sales are only part of the picture. I've gotten a lot of paying gigs talking to colleges and other institutions, and those can keep rolling in long after the shelf-life of the book: Killing Monsters came out in 2002 and I'm still getting interesting speaking jobs out of it, including trips to Brazil, England and other places (I spoke to a conference in Nottingham just a few months ago). And I know that's been helped along by publicity, even when the publicity didn't directly sell books.

     In terms of perceptible Amazon up-ticks, the only broadcast media that ever helped were NPR interviews where I got to talk about the content of the book at some length (Fresh Air helped, but the biggest jump was after Talk of the Nation). Mass-audience radio never did squat, not even Howard Stern in his pre-satellite days, nor did TV. But a speaking agency picked me up and landed me a series of public debates after I appeared on the Today Show, which in turn led to other stuff. I also had a university events programmer tell me he was already interested in bringing me in but didn't really decide until he saw that I'd been on Bill O'Reilly's show.

     I've picked up quite a few article- and editorial-writing gigs off my books, at least some of which were helped along by publicity. A BBC appearance got me an offer from the Guardian to write something, and I think that may be why the Times of London asked me for something soon after. It also just looks better in the pitch for an article if you can list a bunch of high-profile appearances.

     I've found that initial sales usually don't matter that much; publication is just the beginning of a long trudge. But the rewards of the trudge can be a lot greater than you think they might be while you're still processing the realization that you're not going to soar onto the NYT bestseller list (which is an angsty process, I know). And the publicity that seems not to be doing a damned bit of good in the moment can pay off down that road.

     Basically it's all about showing up for opportunities and rolling with the fact that there will be baffling disappointments and unexpected gifts, some of which don't show up until you've forgotten what you even did. Kinda like life, only less real.

Wrestling, Weightlifting and the Birth of a Crusade

Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America, as our hero flees the brutal farmer to whom he has been indentured and finds himself in the boom town of St. Louis...

Fame and fortune did not come quickly for Barney. The jobs for an adolescent runaway were not many, and he found himself scraping by as a delivery boy and an office boy. Then the print revolution came to his aid. The wave of mass print that had inundated New York and other coastal cities in the middle of the century had flowed more slowly to Missouri, but as the economy rebounded in the wake of the Civil War it began to rise. A penniless immigrant named Joszef Pulitzer rode the rails from New York to St. Louis after the war and by 1883 was making a fortune as the publisher of the city's largest newspaper and was poised to return to his former city as owner of the New York World—the same that fifteen-year-old Bernard McFadden took a job as a printer’s devil at a St. Louis print shop.

       Mass print came to the boy’s aid emotionally as well. His formal education was done, but he read. In his tiny room at a boarding house, with no one who cared much about him, lacking the skills and probably the inclination to make friends, isolated and unhappy, his only companions were cheap books, especially the “nickel libraries” and “dime novels” ground out by the fiction factories in New York. He surely read manly adventure stories, but it seems that his favorites were romance novels—a genre then very different from those later incarnations directed exclusively at female readers. The popular romantic novel of the 1880s, usually telling of a humble but virtuous young man who must conquer the forces of corruption and wealth to win the heart of an equally humble and equally virtuous young woman, often through episodes of fisticuffs and daring rescue, appealed strongly to young males and females alike. Lonely Barney, who seems to have had no girls in his life during those years, no doubt took great solace in seeing himself as such a dashing young man in the making.

       Work in the printing business took something away from the young McFadden too. During those months of laboring over presses and plates he found himself losing muscle. He began to cough at night, which he feared was an early warning of the tuberculosis that he believed had killed his mother. Years later he would write of wasting away, his arms and legs slimming down, his skin turning pale, his newly won sense of vitality giving way to a familiar pessimism, malaise, and resentment. But like a hero in a cheap novel, mass print arrived to rescue him in the end. In a local gymnasium he found a pamphlet on weight training. 

      Strength and vigor it promised him. In the privacy of his room he could recapture the power that had set him free of Jenkins’s farm. He saved his money for a pair of fifteen-pound weights and devoted himself to daily exercise. Weight lifting became his routine, his passion, his prayer, and his reason to be. 

       McFadden was short but broad-framed, and he carried his muscles well. He’d learned that he enjoyed fighting in his youth, and now, as he built up his strength, he began to take up wrestling. A common feature of the carnivals that roamed the middle of the country in those days was the strong man who doubled as a wrestler: after demonstrating his power by bending steel bars and lifting heavy weights he would challenge any man in the audience to grapple with him in the ring, offering a cash prize to any who could last a full minute, or two or three. Most often the first challenger was a plant, an ally of the strong man who would win the prize and embolden other rubes to follow his example. After that first phony match, the strong man rarely lost. An exception came the first time the seventeen-year-old Barney took the bait. With few moves but with simple strength and brute stubbornness he lasted the three minutes and collected his money. From there, the natural step was to join the carnivals himself.

       Over the next several years his movements are largely unknown, but he seems to have spent a fair amount of his time scrabbling around the Mississippi Valley, fighting in arranged matches, serving as a plant, and gradually, under his full name, Bernard McFadden, becoming a top-billed strong man and wrestler himself. In addition to wrestling moves, he learned the art of the kayfabe: tricking the rubes. Much of his approach to selling and public speaking in the years to come showed the influence of the carnies.

       He also developed his own regimen for health and strength. He may have begun with someone else’s book, but the young McFadden acknowledged no authority, and soon he was working out his own system of muscle-building exercises. For his diet, he drew from the health food movement of the time but ultimately did whatever made him feel strongest: cracked wheat, copious milk, days of fasting. He had a bad reaction to a vaccine in childhood and thereafter declared vaccination a dangerous hoax. He slept on the floor with his windows wide open, wore the loosest of clothing, walked barefoot in order to connect with the magnetic vitality of the earth. His only master was nature, and he believed he was penetrating nature’s secrets on his own.

       Wrestling in the dirt rings of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Iowa was not, however, the stuff of careers. McFadden wanted to be not only strong and full of life and known among other strong men but rich and respected. He wanted to conquer America on all its terms. He tried various money-making schemes, including opening a laundry; it failed quickly, however, and he blamed his lazy employees. He learned the hard way that he was neither a manager of men nor a conventional businessman, that everything he succeeded at was driven by his singular passion for physical fitness.

       He found a way to use that passion in teaching. American schools were beginning to imitate the gymnasium system of Europe and add “physical education” or “physical culture” programs, and qualified teachers were in demand. In 1892, at twenty-four years of age, McFadden took such a spot at Marmaduke Academy, a military school in central Missouri. He surely impressed the students with his physical prowess, and although he was unpolished and socially awkward, he had the charisma of zeal and self-certainty. There he first experienced the satisfaction of influencing others, a heady feeling for a young man who had grown up discarded and ignored.

       In the course of teaching, he found another way to inspire boys to strive for physical fitness: he wrote a novel. He was far from unique among readers of popular novels to try his own hand at them; but in his case, romantic daydreams and hopes of being the next Horatio Alger were not sufficient motivation. He wanted to use the form to spread his personal gospel.

       The Athlete’s Conquest is the story of a robust young woman who enjoys tennis, swimming, other physical pursuits—girls of a new sort, colloquially called “amazons,” who were becoming numerous in those fitness-conscious years—seeking a suitor worthy of her. At first she won’t take our hero seriously because he has no money or “sophistication,” but gradually she sees the hollowness of wealth and sportiness and intellect not founded in physical health, and she realizes that her future happiness (as well as her dream of bearing a large, robust, and happy family) depends on finding a man of strength and vitality. The athlete of the title wins her heart with victory in a footrace, and so happiness and health are assured for both characters and their descendents.

       It was a dreadful novel by any standard, and McFadden failed to interest any publisher in it. But he was determined to get his message to the world, so he paid for the book to be published by the largest of New York’s vanity presses and sold the copies to his students. So far as we can tell, it attracted no other attention and vanished from the face of the earth. McFadden would attempt no more novels, although in the next few years he proved that his confidence in his ability to persuade others through the written word was not much shaken.

       Bernard seems to have finished the school year with no money in his pocket, and he scratched out a bit of income by giving private boxing and wrestling lessons. He was determined, however, not to spend the summer in Missouri. As soon as he could buy the train tickets, he made the trip that every young man in the Midwest was taking that summer of 1893, the trip that showed him his destiny: to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

To be continued...