Introduction to a Memoir

I find myself a first-time author, having produced a memoir of the first half of my life. (To buy the book, and then leave a glowing review, please click here). In my introduction to the book, printed below, I explain the why, how, when, and what of the whole thing.

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Fortunate One: From Nantucket to the White House — A Memoir

Introduction

I’ve been a little hesitant to tell people I was writing this memoir because whenever I did, they’d inevitably ask why, as in, who are you to write an autobiography? Trust me, it’s a question I’ve posed to myself. I’m not famous, don’t have a tragic childhood to resolve therapeutically through the written word, and have no commercial venture to advance through the promotion of a “personal brand.” 

I could fall back on the cliché that everybody has a story to tell, but if you’ve ever listened to a golfer recount his most recent round, you know that not every story is equally compelling. It will be up to you, Dear Reader, to determine whether my story was worth telling, but here are my goals: to recapture a world that no longer exists and to evoke what it was like to be born in the ‘50s, grow up in the ‘60s, attend college in the ‘70s, and start a career in the ‘80s. I know this isn’t exactly the same as Laura Ingalls Wilder recounting her experiences in that little house on the prairie, but the social and technological changes that have occurred since the 1950s are almost as dramatic as the ones she lived through. 

To some extent, my story parallels that of millions of other baby boomers born in the mid-1950s. I’m probably not the only seven year old who ate orange-flavored aspirin when he couldn’t find candy in the house or walked unescorted to school while dodging potentially pedophilic kidnappers and speeding 18-wheelers. I want readers my age to nod in recognition and say, “Yeah, that happened to me too,” and I hope that later generations will marvel that we ever survived childhood or managed to launch ourselves into adulthood.

But just as every index finger is fundamentally the same while every fingerprint is different, the story that follows is undeniably, uniquely my own. I entered the world on Nantucket Island, grew up in a declining industrial city, almost failed college, worked as a small-town reporter, and eventually landed in the White House. Along the way, I lived in a haunted house; had not one, but two lesbian girlfriends in high school; wrote newspaper stories about a Manhattan scientist who disappeared one morning from a remote, iced-in island; sparred with the owner of the Washington Post; chatted up a couple of U.S. Presidents; and helped prepare the debate remarks that almost torpedoed the re-election campaign for one of them.  

It’s taken me two years to write this book, but in truth, it’s been 60 years in the making. As long as I can remember, I’ve felt the autobiographical impulse. In the second grade, at the tender age of eight, I made my first attempt at a memoir, scribbling out three paragraphs before abandoning the effort to do my arithmetic assignment instead. Ever since, I’ve been cataloguing my life—a project that sometimes verged on hoarding. I kept every letter and postcard that arrived in my mailbox, stored many important school papers, and maintained boxes of junior and senior high school yearbooks, datebooks, calendars, and relevant newspaper clippings. My mother saved my report cards and my correspondence from vacations and college. Starting in my mid-20s, I religiously kept a daily diary. Holding onto memories, both through physical materials and, more mystically, in the inscrutable regions of the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala, has been a life-long obsession.

I reviewed all this documentation before I started writing, reading every letter and diary entry through November 1988. The experience mostly confirmed my existing memories, although in some cases I had been wrong about chronology or had remembered events out of sequence. In other cases, I was reminded of people who had completely vanished from my active memory. Who exactly was that college classmate who sent me those three letters in the summer of 1975? Had I really shared so many cocktails and dinners with those former colleagues in Washington, D.C.? Some of these rediscoveries I folded into this narrative; the rest I just re-deposited into my already overstuffed memory bank.

Excavating these memories was sometimes a delight, sometimes painful, and often just plain embarrassing, curing me of a misconception that life was better then than it is now. I wish I could send a message back in time and advise the earlier version of myself to lighten up, not fret about the future so much, and not get aggravated so easily. I would tell the younger Gary: You can’t control your destiny, but don’t worry, you’re lucky. You won’t win the lottery, but you will win the lottery of life.

In some respects, it was easier to write 100,000 words of memories than it was to come up with the two words that formed the title. My college friend, Jim Robinson, who plays such a crucial role in this story, initially suggested “Fortune Son,” which would have been perfect, except I didn’t want people thinking they were getting John Fogarty’s life story. In the end, he helped me settle on “Fortunate One.”

A political progressive might take one look at my life and dismiss it as “privileged.” A person of faith might look at the same set of facts and say I was “blessed.” Whatever term you want to use, I certainly concede that good fortune smiled on me from the day I was born. Being white, male, and straight provided me with advantages, but to be born in America to nurturing, hard-working, married parents was the biggest break of all. As if that wasn’t enough, I grew up free from financial anxiety because the small business my parents created prospered during a prosperous era. Although I skirted close to physical injury many times, I always escaped with mere scars or skinned knees. I had robust health, access to good education, and exposure to friends who stimulated me intellectually and socially. Importantly, the women I dated were perceptive enough to see that I was ultimately not right for them, so I was available when the right one did enter my life.

I can make the case that the children of 1950s America were the luckiest generation in history. The advances in medicine alone—the vaccines, antibiotics, and new surgical procedures—made sure that a record number of us reached adulthood. I had pneumonia in the fourth grade, something that merits a mere half sentence in this story; if I’d been born 20 years earlier, I might not have lived long enough to write anything. We were lucky to be born into the richest, most dominant national economy the world had ever seen, which created huge opportunities for us to leap ahead of our parents economically, a gift that has not always been available to our own children.  

More specifically, I’d argue that the boys born in 1954 were the luckiest of a lucky generation: old enough to experience the Beatles but just young enough to avoid getting drafted; old enough to benefit from the sexual revolution and co-ed dorms, but young enough not to come to maturity worrying about AIDS and STDs; old enough to feel safe and secure at school or walking down the street, but young enough to avoid the social conformities of the 1950s; old enough to assume college was a given for any smart kid, but young enough to miss the crippling anxiety of getting into the “right” school or assuming massive debt. 

Even with all this happy talk about good fortune, I’m no Pollyanna about the bumps along the way, and I’ve tried to be as truthful as possible without going out of my way to settle scores. My goal is not to embarrass people, so in a few cases I have changed names, particularly those of some former bosses and colleagues in Washington. I haven’t said anything libelous or even unfair; they were nice enough to hire me, so I don’t want to make them feel betrayed, even 35 years later. To avoid cumbersome circumlocutions like “my new boss, who I’ll call John,” readers can assume that if I provide a given name and surname, it’s real. If I only mention a first name, it’s been changed.  

Some “real” names I’d like to thank for being early readers and editors are three of my oldest school friends, Jim Robinson, Philip Tasho, and Liz Prevett, who confirmed many of my memories, called out awkward writing, and generally kept me from making self-inflicted mistakes. I also had close editing help from a former colleague, Tim Clifford, who tragically died of ALS before I finished the drafting. My wife, Meg Ricci, also read an early draft. Finally, I had the assistance of a professional editor, Chloë Siennah. I didn’t always take their advice, so they are blameless for any offenses made against the historical record or prevailing political and social orthodoxies.  

This volume ends when I’m 34 years old, which is chronologically the midpoint of my life—so far at least. It also marks the conclusion of my searching period. During these first three decades, I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be. By the time I reach the last pages of the final chapter, I am more or less fully formed. And upon reflection I’ve realized that most of the major lucky breaks of my life—the moments when my path could have veered significantly in another direction—occurred during this first half of my life. Good fortune has continued to bless me since then, but the only remaining “hinge” moment of almost unbelievably good luck left to describe is the birth of my son. He truly has been a “fortunate son,” but that’s for another book.

“A Catcher In The Rye” Anniversary

America loves its anniversaries, even literary America.  And yet there has been no discussion about the upcoming 70th anniversary of what is arguably the most important lost weekend in post-War American literature. 

I’m speaking of the “The Catcher in the Rye,” the novel by J.D. Salinger that has enthralled generations of disaffected young men since the 1950s and inspired at least two assassination attempts (on Ronald Reagan and John Lennon).

The story depicts 72 hours in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown after being expelled from his boarding school. Not wanting to face the music with his parents, Holden spends a long weekend wandering around New York City while musing on the “phoniness” of society.  

Although Salinger’s theme of teen alienation is nearly universal, the novel is unusually particular and specific about its time and setting.  In this respect it is similar to the peripatetic adventures of another lost soul: Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Like Bloom’s Dublin, Holden’s Manhattan is a very real place and his journey is easy to retrace even seventy years later.  And just as the action in Ulysses can be identified as a specific date (June 16, 1904, otherwise known as “Bloomsday,”) so too can Holden’s weekend be traced to a precise moment in time: December 17-19, 1949.

All it takes to establish that date is a quick Google search. According to the novel, Holden and his erstwhile girlfriend Sally Hayes go to see a Broadway show featuring “the Lunts,” (i.e., the actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne).  This must have been the now-forgotten “I Know My Love,” which ran on Broadway from November 2, 1949 to June 3, 1950. This narrows Holden’s weekend to December, 1949. A quick look at the calendar for that year shows that Friday, December 17 is almost certainly the night Holden leaves his prep school, Pencey, given that the previous Friday (the 9th) would have been too soon for the semester to be over.

“A Catcher In the Rye” is hardly the universal touchstone today that it was for knowing teenagers in the decades following its publication, but it still sells a quarter-million copies a year and every time I read it, my heart bleeds again for Holden and the sensitive boy that I, too, once was.  

The first time I opened those pages I was in the eighth grade and younger than Holden. Now I’m older even than Holden’s father, for God’s sakes, so my perspective has changed considerably.  I see now, for example, that no book, TV show, or movie did more to convince me that New York City was the most thrilling and exciting place in the world.  But I also realize that as a young teen I didn’t fully appreciate the sadness behind Holden’s weekend of night clubs, highballs, cab rides and cultural touchstones.  Instead, the novel made me yearn for the sophistication of a metropolis that was at the height of its power just a handful of years after World War II. And not only was Salinger’s New York glamorous, it was safe; Holden walks the empty streets and roams Central Park in the middle of the night without worrying about getting robbed, stabbed, or worse.

To a 21st Century consumer, what’s most striking about the New York of 1949 was how affordable it was.  Consider what Holden does with the birthday money from his grandmother. He stays at a midtown hotel, visits and buys drinks at three different nightclubs, buys two tickets to a Broadway show, sees the Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall, skates at Rockefeller Center, pays for a prostitute (granted, it’s only a “throw,” but still), makes a nostalgic return to the Museum of Natural History, and takes five or six cabs.  Today a weekend like that at Christmas would cost well over a thousand bucks.   

But if the New York City of “Catcher in the Rye” is a distant memory, its portrait of teen angst is more relevant than ever.   A common theme of 21st Century pop psychology is the loneliness of our youth in a social media-dominated world. And yet, even before Instagram and TikTok, Holden was deeply alone, an outsider longingly peering in at a society where everyone else seemed to be enjoying himself, no matter how superficially.  Out for drinks with his former dorm adviser, he admits “I’m lonesome as hell.” He invites his various cab drivers out for drinks, tries to get some little kids to socialize over hot chocolate, donates money to two nuns he meets at a coffee shop, and pays for the drinks of the three female tourists from Seattle. None of this addresses his alienation.

“Bloomsday” is celebrated each June 16, with marathon readings, pub crawls and other festivities.  We could do the same with Holden’s Weekend. For one thing, “Catcher” is a lot more accessible than “Ulysses” and would lend itself better to public readings.  And many of the locations mentioned in the novel are still standing, which would make for authentic Holden walks. But most important, now, more than ever, we need someone like Holden to take down the “phonies” and advance a discussion on how to make deeper human connections.

The Thirteen Books That Shaped My Life

There’s yet another Facebook challenge going around in which people are asked to post ten books that have been meaningful to them — similar to the ongoing challenge for the top ten records.  Once again I am violating the rules by listing them all at once, and with explanation.  This is decidedly not a list of my “favorite” books, which would rely heavily on classic Nineteenth Century novels, but it does include the books that most shaped my thinking.  And I could only narrow them down to 13 books. Here they are:

[Unnamed Disney book]

The image above, from the Sleeping Beauty story was the most vivid image in the book

When I was a kid our then-working class home was surprisingly full of books because my mother was a reader.   Regrettably, one thing we did not have was a collection of children’s books.  No Dr. Suess, Milne, Lewis Carroll.  But when we went to the supermarket my mother would occasionally let me pick out a little hardback Disney book that sold for a quarter.  And once she even bought me a fancy illustrated collection of classic Disney stories.  I know recognize this volume as an early attempt to extend the Disney brand into publishing, and I don’t even know the name of the book because it was so generically corporate.  But for me it was an important introduction into the world of imagination.  The book contained the novelization of about a half dozen Disney movies (none of which I had seen), ranging from “Snow White” to “Sleeping Beauty.”  It eventually fell apart from overuse and ended up in the trash.  That was before I developed a sentimental streak and, alas, exists now only in my memory.

America And Its Presidents

I still have this book — please note how beat up it is

Another book that my mother bought me was a Young Reader collection of presidential biographies, which fired my interest in politics and American history.  The bios are pretty sanitized and make every president — even the worst — seem heroic. My edition goes from Washington to JFK, so I must have received it in the third grade (my friend Rich had an edition that ended at LBJ and I later saw one that included Carter so the updates went on for a long time).  The book really does a pretty good job at telling the American story by recounting the life and times of each leader.  I still have my battered volume and just glancing through the pages reminds me of the days when I would lie in my bedroom dreaming of the day I would work in Washington DC.

Catcher in the Rye

This is the book I’ve read more than any other (for more on that, see my other blog post here).  The first time was after I found it on my mother’s book shelf in the seventh grade.  I was so young that when a character claims he lost his virginity on Nantucket at age 14, I thought, “Hmm, well that sounds reasonable” because 14 sounded like a very mature age. I read it again in my ninth grade English class and have probably read it ten times since then.  It’s funny as hell and it had a huge influence on how I perceived “phonies,” those people who go through life pretending to be someone they’re not.  But “Catcher in the Rye” also taught me a lot about seeking out authentic and kind companions, something I’ve aspired to be myself but never quite achieved.

Advise and Consent

This is yet another book that I found on my mother’s book shelf.  It’s hardly great literature but it kindled my interest in political thrillers and in politics in general.  Advise and Consent is a potboiler that revolves around the question of whether the Senate will confirm the pacifist Robert Leffingwell as Secretary of State.  Even though it was written in 1959, the novel is still relevant for its depiction of a U.S. Senate full of peacocks, grinds, egomaniacs, idealists and cynics. I eventually did make it to Washington in the 1980s and learned that the race, gender and ideologies of politicians can change but the archetypes outlined in “Advise and Consent” never do.

The Sun Also Rises

I read this Ernest Hemingway classic in the 11th grade and the whole “Lost Generation” expatriate scene became a long-time escapist fantasy.  I was perhaps not the most discerning reader, though.  When I once ventured that I envied the lives of the characters, my friend Carol snorted, “Some life. One’s a nymphomaniac, one’s impotent, and the rest are drunks.” Hold on, what?  Someone’s impotent? Who?  Oh, the shame to be exposed as such a shallow reader in front of my friends.  I had become a little bit of the phony that Holden Caulfield had warned about.  But the experience taught me to read more deeply and to see the real story behind the outer plot of any good novel.   I still love the book but now understand that it’s a fundamentally sad story, written at a moment of existential despair in the years right after the trauma of World War I.  Whenever I reread it, I am reminded of my youthful self, full of enthusiasm and yearning for a more romantic life.

Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers

To the extent I have a favorite nonfiction writer it would be Tom Wolfe; and Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers is the book on this list that influenced me the most.  I read it in high school and it opened my eyes to the reality and power of status anxiety.  So much of what we do as a species is governed by our desire to, at minimum retain, our status, or if we’re ambitious, to enhance it.  The book is really two long essays.  The first is the hilarious account of a Black Panther fundraiser held in the penthouse apartment of Leonard Bernstein.  Wolfe mines the absurdity of the liberal intellectual elite hosting the armed revolutionaries from the hard streets of Oakland in an oh-so-tasteful apartment.  Bernstein’s reputation never really recovered from this skewering.  The second essay, which is less well known, describes how local community organizers intimidate well-meaning federal bureaucrats into funding their programs.  Again, phonies everywhere.

Walden

My copy of Walden, like my copy of Catcher in the Rye, is really falling apart

One person who was not phony was Henry David Thoreau — transcendentalist, naturalist, philosopher, virgin.  I’ve read this four times, first in high school and most recently for a book group, and every time I pick it up I am bowled over by his beautiful aphoristic writing and his advocacy for a simpler life.  He built a one-room cabin next to Walden Pond and lived there for two years, living mostly off the land.  Of course it’s impractical to live alone out in the woods, but at a time when most men live lives of quiet desperation, it is not impractical to simplify your life, stay in touch with the seasons, be mindful, and march to the beat of a different drummer.  Thoreau launched a million self-help books and another million books about environmentalism.  If either of those topics are your thing, start back at the source.

Free To Choose

This book really should be called “Adam Smith for Dummies.”  In 1980, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose created for PBS a 10-part series on the glories of the free market and this book was a companion piece.  I never saw the TV series but was deeply influenced by the book, in the way you’re “influenced” by a book that clearly articulates what you already vaguely feel.   I went all in for his philosophy of free markets, minimal regulation, and small government.  Seriously, how else can you explain why resource-poor places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Israel are wildly prosperous while their neighbors are so poor?  In any event, the book crystallized a world view and provided a solid philosophical foundation from which to argue politics for the rest of my life.

Two Cheers for Capitalism

This collection of essays by Irving Kristol was published in 1978, before “Free to Choose,” but I read it after the Friedman book.  This was the right order because it provided a good real-word explanation why a pure and unadulterated free market probably wouldn’t work.  Kristol was one of the original neoconservatives — that group of former socialists who moved to the right after the disaster of the 1960s.  Kristol expounds on two great insights that are more relevant today than ever before.  First, there’s a growing class of knowledge-based professionals (the media, professors, lawyers, intellectuals) whose power is enhanced by a bigger and more meddlesome government.  This observation seems at the core of why voters in the last election rejected the apotheosis of that class — Hillary Clinton — in favor of a seeming barbarian who promised to smash it all.  Kristol’s second observation is that regardless of how great capitalism is at creating wealth and improving living standards, it will ultimately destroy itself unless it is constrained with and buttressed by cultural norms, ethics and faith.  This was a warning that was ignored by too many companies over the last forty decades.  Just one example — to boost ratings, media companies now pander to audiences with TV shows fueled by sex and violence that would have been unthinkable forty years ago; and yet people wonder where “toxic masculinity” comes from.

Liar’s Poker

In this, Michael Lewis’ first book, he recounts his days as a bond salesman at the late Salomon Brothers, where the greed, gluttony, and ambition only seemed to illustrate Irving Kristol’s point that an economy unmoored by any sense of shame cannot long sustain itself (and eventually Salomon Brothers did vanish from this earth.)  According to Lewis, the deregulated financial industry of the 1980s had become a place where anything went as long as you were making gobs and gobs of money.  When Tom Wolfe turned to fiction, Lewis became the nation’s premier non-fiction writer, writing best-seller after best-seller, including Moneyball, The Big Short, and The Blind Side.  As someone who had recently moved out of Washington, I learned from Liar’s Poker (and other business books like Barbarians at the Gate and The Predators Ball) that the real future of the country was going to be decided in the private sector and that the government was increasingly irrelevant.  For better or for worse (and it appeared that Salomon Brothers fell into the latter category) the most meaningful place to be was not where they self-importantly made laws and passed regulations, but in the hundreds of thousands of workplaces where they made actual things.  We just had to hope that the good guys — the honorable business leaders — would win.

Pooh’s Library

When I was in high school many of the girls in my friend group had rediscovered Winnie the Pooh and would converse to each other in childish Pooh patois.  One of them even adopted the nickname Piglet.  I thought this was pretentious beyond belief and came to hate everything about Winnie the Pooh.  But when my son was born I gave A.A. Milne another shot and he became my favorite children’s author.  Pooh’s Library is a set of two collections of poems (When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six) and two collections of short stories (The House at Pooh Corner and Winnie the Pooh.) The poems, with their fluctuating cadences and rhythms and their creative vocabularies, are perfect for reading to a pre-verbal child; meanwhile the gentle and charming stories, which were bastardized into unfunny Disney cartoons, are funny warm and insightful.  This my go-to baby gift for first-time parents.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

I get the feeling that Harry Potter was to my son’s generation what the Beatles were to mine.  For about ten years no other piece of culture loomed larger in our family than these books and their follow-up movies.  My son was the perfect age for their arrival — about seven years old when the first book burst into our consciousness and 15 when the final one appeared. And he even LOOKED like Harry Potter, with his round glasses and shaggy dark bangs.

Tell me this kid didn’t look like Harry Potter!

Yet he was probably the only child of his generation never to read a word of the original books because I narrated all seven books to him end to end, sometimes for hours at a time on our porch. The first of the series is still my favorite.  It’s the tautest, with a fast-moving plot, as well as our introduction to all the characters and themes that would populate the rest of the books.  It was really several books in one — a great mystery story, a Dickensian tale of a once-abandoned now-found orphan, a fantasy saga and a bitter screed against conformity and the love of power.

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy, whose assassination received about a hundred thousand times the attention that Lewis’ passing did.  But once the last Baby Boomer dies, that ratio will shift. (As a thought experiment try to imagine that Thoreau and James Garfield had died on the same day and how people would have perceived that day then and now).  Mere Christianity is the most influential work of the most popular writer of faith in the 20th Century.  In simple conversational language he makes the case for God and Christianity.  For me the most revelatory section is his discussion of sin, in which he ranks the “cold” sins of pride, envy, greed and wrath, as worse than the “hot” sins of list, gluttony and sloth.  Those cold sins, after all, are generally committed against others while the warmer sins are usually sins against ourselves.  As Lewis memorably ends his chapter on sexual morality: “a cold self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute” This is a book that everyone who professes to be a Christian should read.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Now that I’ve put my list down in pixels I see a few trends emerging:

— It’s interesting to realize how important my mother was to early reading habits, either through the books she bought me or through the books I found on her book shelves.

—  Except for the Pooh stories, every book on the list is fundamentally about right and wrong and what is the proper way to respond to challenges and opportunities. Hmm.

— There’s a lot of dreaming on this list as well as a lot of books that demonstrate the power of imagination.

— There’s a lot of re-reading on the list too. Excluding the Disney collection, the Presidential series and the Pooh stories, all of which I’ve dipped in and out of so many times that it’s impossible to count, I calculate that I’ve read the remaining ten books a total of 27 times.  That’s an average of reading each book on the list nearly three times.

 

Happy Birthday Henry David Thoreau — A Dozen Great Quotes from “Walden”

July 12, 2017 is the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, the godfather of the Green movement, the original proponent of civil disobedience, a likely virgin and one of the world’s great aphorists.

Like many others, I first real “Walden” in high school, and found it inscrutable.  I reread it in college and was inspired by the themes of independence, simplicity and naturalism.  I thought it might change my life, but alas, it didn’t really. Or at least not too much.

And then as a worldlier adult I read it a third time and found myself vaguely annoyed at the impracticality of it all.  It’s all well and good for Thoreau to live simply because modern capitalistic society has made it possible for someone to easily acquire the basic necessities of life.  Five hundred years ago a person living in the woods alone would have spend all his time growing and hunting food and would have no time for writing books.

(My very dog-eared copy of Walden from high school)

It’s probably not useful today, if indeed, if ever was, to look at “Walden” as a practical guide to living.  However, it is a remarkable self-help book.  His exhortations to simplify your life, to stop chasing material wealth and to get more in tune with the natural world are more important today than ever before.

Walden Pond itself has been a place of pilgrimage over the years and I’ve been there twice myself.  Both times the site of Thoreau’s cabin was represented by some stone markers, although I understand an actual replica cabin has since been constructed.

(This was the site of the cabin in 1980)

(Here’s the cabin today)

Whatever you think about Thoreau’s philosophy, there’s no denying he is a remarkable writer.  Walden is full of beautiful inspiring language.  Almost every page has a sentence worth underlining (and having read the same volume three times, there is plenty of underlining in my copy.)  Here are some of my favorite quotes from Walden.  It would not be hard to assemble twice as many from his other writings.

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

• Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

• I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

• However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

• As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

• Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

• Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

• Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

• Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Elvis Faulkner

[Note: This post was originally published on another platform on April 6, 2011)

Graceland Living Room, Memphis Tennessee

William Faulkner and Elvis Presley, two sons of the South born 15 miles apart in Mississippi, were mama’s boys, barely high school graduates, champion substance abusers and of course artists at the pinnacle of their fields. They were also property owners, each purchasing large estates as soon as they could scrape the money together.

I recently visited both Graceland, in the Memphis suburbs and Faulkner’s lesser-known home, Rowan Oak, about 90-minutes south in Oxford, Mississippi. It was impossible to approach these places – especially Graceland – with an open mind, but that turned out for the best, because the contrast between what I was expecting and what I saw actually intensified the experience.

First consider the fact that they even have names.  You would expect a nouveau riche rock-and-roll star to give his new home a fancy title, but you wouldn’t really think that the greatest American novelist – a true artistic soul – would be so pretentious.  In fact it’s worse; Graceland is named after Grace Toof, the aunt of the original owner, so Elvis had no part in choosing that metaphorically apt name.  In contrast, Faulkner himself came up with “Rowan Oak,” which is also the name of magical tree in Celtic mythology.   Faulkner gets points for originality and romanticism, but still, it’s the kind of affectation you’d expect from the plantation owners in Gone With The Wind, not a Nobel Prize-winning writer.

What I did not expect was that Graceland and Rowan Oak would be about the same size.  Graceland is really not that big.  A classic Colonial built in 1941, it’s a comfortable home, but it’s smaller than about a dozen houses within a ten-minute walk of where I live.  Probably considered a mansion in its day, by today’s standards it’s only a lower-upper-class home.  The rooms are nicely proportioned, but there aren’t that many of them.  And the kitchen?  Well, let’s just say that this would be the first thing to go in any HGTV makeover.

Rowan Oak living room

Rowan Oak, a Greek Revival home built in the 1840’s, is almost as big as Graceland, with large spacious rooms and a gentile atmosphere. (To be fair, Graceland is definitely larger if you count the subterranean space – it has a huge cellar with numerous game and trophy rooms).  Faulkner bought the property in 1930, when he was only 32 and barely supporting himself with his writing; he struggled for years to pay for the upkeep and repairs, at one point even taking a job as a maintenance man at the local power plant.   In other words, he wanted to be true to his Muse, writing novels that were barely comprehensible to a popular audience; but he also wanted to live the life of a country squire even if that meant diverting time from those novels to churn out semi-trashy short stories for popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and spending years writing Hollywood screenplays.

Rowan Oak entrance

What’s most striking and unexpected about Graceland and Rowan Oak is their handsome grounds.  Both are 15- to 20- acre estates set in average middle class neighborhoods where the other houses sit on half- and quarter-acre lots.  They have beautiful sweeping lawns with paddocks and riding areas.  They are both fantasies of how landed gentry would live.  One of them even has a “meditation garden” – and it’s not Rowan Oak.

What makes them different is their overall ambiance and how they reflect on their owners.  Each is decorated to appear as they did when Elvis and Faulkner lived there and this has not been a benefit to Elvis’ overall image. As a poor boy who suddenly found himself rich, he spurned antiques and other classic decor as “old,” insisting instead that all his furnishings be new.  Unfortunately, he had the bad luck to die in the 1970s, a decade that now appears to be a bad joke all the way around.  I doubt that many of us would emerge with enhanced reputations if our 70’s interior decorating were exposed to the rest of the world.   To be fair to Elvis, though, much of the house, especially the living room and dining room, is actually quite tasteful (although I bet that, as in many homes of that period, these formal rooms were rarely used).  The famous Jungle Room is certainly over the top, but kind of fun and the TV and game rooms in the cellar are not that different from the game rooms of my youth.

In contrast to Graceland, which is frozen at the moment of Elvis’s death, Rowan Oak hearkens back to a period before Faulkner was famous.  Faulkner died in 1962 but it is clear that no fifties or sixties decorators ever set foot there.  I wonder if this is really the furniture that was left there in 1962 or if an attempt was made to recreate the years (in the 30’s and 40’s) when Faulkner was writing his masterpieces?  The furnishings aren’t the high-end antiques that Elvis scorned; these are just old tables, chairs and couches that were probably in the family for generations.  The house does have a lived-in feeling (lived in by the Waltons maybe) but there’s nothing to suggest anyone lived there after World War II.  The most revered item in the house is Faulkner’s Underwood manual typewriter, which could have come off the set of The Front Page.  The two concessions to modernity are a radio from the last 1940s in his daughter’s room and an air conditioning unit installed in his wife’s room the day after his funeral.

Elvis gets a bad rap for tastelessness and trying to rise above his station – kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies – but I think people should cut him a break.  Graceland is a little garish but not as bizarre as I’d heard;  what critics really object to is the 70’s itself and the refusal of Elvis’ fans to treat it as a joke.  Maybe some of that cynicism should be directed Faulkner’s way.  He too aspired to rise above his station but he worked harder than Elvis did at creating his own myth.  Or maybe we ask too much of our artists.  In the end they are human too, with the usual delusions, dreams and ambitions.  It’s one of the reasons we go to see where they live: to remind ourselves not just that they are people, but to hope that a little bit of the immortality they created will rub off on us.

A “Catcher in the Rye” Christmas

There are people who read a “Christmas Carol” every Christmas but my holiday tradition is a bit different: every five years or so I read “The Catcher in the Rye.”  It’s a Christmas story, it’s easy to read, it’s funny, and as I grow older it provides a good time to take stock of my own struggles with the “phonies”.

I first read “Catcher” when I was 13 and younger than the 16-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield.  I read it again when I was his age, and then again when I visited New York City for the first time, and again when I moved to New York City, and after I moved out of New York City, and now again when I am probably older than Holden’s father.  Each time I’ve experienced it from different perspective and a different appreciation of what J.D. Salinger was trying to say.

Here are my takeaways from my most recent reading:

December 17-19, 1949.  This is the first time I’ve fully understood the particularity of the story because it’s the first time I’ve read the book with an iPad at my side; it turns out that “Catcher” is as firmly rooted in a specific place and time as “Ulysses” is rooted in Dublin.  And just as James Joyce fans celebrated “Bloomsday” on June 6, so too should Salinger fans celebrate December 17-19 as “Holden’s Weekend.”  We know that the events occurred in 1949 because Holden and Sally go to see the Lunts (i.e., Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne) in I Know My Love,  which ran on Broadway from November 2, 1949 to June 3, 1950.  A quick look at the calendar for 1949 shows that Saturday December 17 is almost certainly the night Holden leaves Pencey, given that the previous Saturday (the 9^th) would have been too soon for the semester to be drawing to a close.

(This is Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne)

In other words, we just missed a chance to celebrate the 65^th anniversary of Holden’s weekend.  But more important for understanding the story, 1949 was only four years after the end of World War II, and the after effects of the War were still being felt.  With Europe in ruins, the New York of 1949 would have been by far the richest and most glamorous city in the world, but one full of veterans.  Holden’s brother, D.B., who had been in Europe for the whole American campaign, would have been one of those veterans, and after having seen what he would have seen, who could blame him for prostituting himself and moving to Hollywood? (Incidentally, here’s the place to remember that J.D. Salinger himself landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, experienced the Battle of the Bulge and helped to liberate a concentration camp.  No American writer other than Stephen Crane had as much war experience and it’s not really a surprise that he had a minor nervous breakdown in when the war was over.)

The Elasticity of Time.  I hate to be overly literal about the events in a novel, but when I reread Catcher this week, I realized that the time sequence as laid out in “Catcher” is a little iffy.  I can’t tell now whether the New York City of 1949 truly was the City That Never Sleeps, but consider this:  Holden leaves Pencey after his roommate Stradleter falls asleep (11:00 p.m. at the earliest) and takes a train to NYC.  It must be 1:00 a.m. at least when he checks into the Edmont hotel.  He then meets the three girls from Seattle in the Lavendar Room and then takes a cab to Greenwich Village to Ernie’s, and when he gets back to the hotel arranges to have a prostitute sent to his room.  By the time he declines her services and gets punched out by her pimp, it must be 6:00 a.m.

The same thing happens the next night.  Holden wanders around New York, and at 10:00 p.m. meets his friend Carl Luce at the Wicker bar at the Seaton Hotel (btw, this is a real place, which now looks like this).  He then hangs around Central Park in the middle of the night, visits Phoebe at his parents’ apartment and then shows up at the Antolinis’ at God-knows-what-time. Without ever sleeping, it’s early dawn when he flees the Antolinis’

All of which makes me realize that the breakdown that Holden has at the end of the novel is caused by sleep deprivation.  By my reckoning, he gets at most three hours of sleep Saturday night and two hours on Sunday night.  No wonder he passes out at the museum and breaks down crying while Phoebe’s on the carrousel.

The Role of the City. Perhaps no work of art – no TV show or movie – was more important than “Catcher in the Rye” in convincing me that New York City was the most thrilling and exciting place in the world.  All those night clubs, highballs, cab rides and cultural touchstones made me yearn for the sophistication of the City. And not only was it glamorous, it was safe; Holden walks the empty streets and visits Central Park in the middle of the night without worrying about getting robbed, stabbed, or worse.

To a 21^st Century consumer, what’s most striking about the New York of 1949 was how affordable it was.  Consider what Holden does with his stash of money: he stays at a midtown hotel, visits and buys drinks at three nightclubs, buys two tickets to a Broadway show, sees the Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall, skates at Rockefeller Center, pays for a prostitute (granted, it’s only a “throw,” but still) and takes five or six cabs.  Today a weekend like that at Christmas would cost well over a thousand bucks.   For me the telling detail that demonstrates the difference between then and now is when he gets to the American Museum of Natural History and buys an admission just to satisfy his nostalgia. Admission prices at the museum are now $22 for adults and $17 for students.  I know he’s a rich kid but today’s pricing makes the museum something you do as a special event, rather than something you do to kill time.

It’s hard now to know whether Salinger was playing as fast and loose with Holden’s spending capabilities as he is with his late-night timeline, but we have to assume that his readers didn’t scoff at Holden’s activities and find them out of the realm of possibility.  To his readers in the 1950s, it didn’t seem outlandish that an upper-middle-class teenager could afford to spend a weekend in New York but today, even adults would have to think twice about the expense.

Holden’s Loneliness.  It’s a truism that when you read a book multiple times you discover something you hadn’t noticed before, and for me the aspect of Holden’s personality that I never picked up on before was his extreme loneliness.  He has no friends at his prep school and the reason he’s wandering around New York and staying in hotels is that he has no friends in the city to stay with either.  The only people he likes are his younger sister and a girl (Jane Gallagher) that he knew from the previous summer but hasn’t kept in touch with.  He doesn’t particularly like his quasi-girlfriend Sally Hayes (and who can blame him) or his old dorm resident adviser Carl Luce (ditto).

At one point he pleads with Luce to stay for another drink, admitting “I’m lonesome as hell.” He also invites his various cab drivers to have drinks with him, tries to get some little kids to socialize over hot chocolate, flirts with and pays for the drinks of the three Seattle tourists and tries unsuccessfully to make connections everywhere.

I think we are supposed to think that Allie’s death from leukemia three years earlier is a precipitating factor in his depression (if that’s what it is) and alienation, but I think the real problem is loneliness and an inability to make friends. (And it’s worth mentioning that Salinger himself ended up as a hermit in a New Hampshire cabin, so he knew whereof he spoke when he described Holden’s social isolation.)

Holden’s worldliness.  As a 13-year-old, I assumed that by the time I was Holden’s age I’d be just as sophisticated and worldly, able to navigate my way through nightclubs with aplomb.  As a 16-year-old, I realized: forget it.  To be honest, I didn’t really have Holden’s confidence in getting around New York until about five years ago.  And now that I’m the father of a former 16-year-old, I am struck more forcefully than ever how outlandish the whole escapade seems.  There’s no way that I or my son would ever have been able to survive overnight in NYC if we’d been plopped down there as teenagers.  Now, is Salinger exaggerating the sophistication of a typical Manhattan teen from the 1940s?  He’s ordering drinks, finding his own hotel rooms, and bossing cab drivers around.  I do remember that when I went to college, the kids who’d gone to NYC private schools were considerably more worldly than I was, so maybe it’s not so far-fetched.  I think it’s fair to say, though, that unlike today, when adults want to act like teenagers, the youth of the post-War era yearned to act and be treated like adults, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that he puts on adult trappings.

One area where Holden is NOT worldly, though, is in his understanding of himself or human nature.  He can’t even begin to articulate his alienation.  In fact, he can’t really articulate much at all.  It’s to Salinger’s credit that Holden really does sound like a 16-year old when he’s talking to adults.  He’s a random piece of dialogue – his response when his history teacher asks him whether he has any concern about his future: “Oh, I have some concern for my future, all right. Sure I do.  But not too much, I guess.  Not too much I guess.”  Yeah, that’s how teens talk even today.

Mr. Antolini.  As a younger reader I took Holden’s characterization of Mr. Antolini as a decent caring teacher at face value, but as an adult I can see that he’s a bit of a pompous jerk.  He’s a capable and inspirational former prep school teacher who has married an older rich woman and now teaches part time at NYU.  He’s basically a kept man in a fabulous apartment on swanky Sutton Place (he sounds like a pedagogical Cole Porter).  He’s probably gay (or a “flit” as Holden contemptuously calls him). Not that there’s anything the matter with that, but he certainly did Holden no favors by scaring him out of the apartment with his creepy head-patting when he desperately needed sleep.

But the worst thing about him is that he’s such a blowhard!  Boy he sounds like a typical 1950’s intellectual windbag.  He’s lecturing at Holder when he he’s practically asleep on his feet and surprised that Holden can’t understand what he’s saying.  I finally acknowledged to myself that I can’t understand him either and it’s not my fault.

A couple of small points I noticed this time around:

• Holden’s visit to NYC is actually his second time in the city on December 17.  He’d been there earlier in the day with the fencing team, when he lost the foils on the subway.  I also note that Holden never takes the subway in the book.

• The living in NYC was a lot easier then.  If he and Sally want to go skating at Rockefeller Center they just walk up and do it – no 90-minute wait.  Same with the tickets to the Broadway show; they don’t have to buy them weeks in advance.  And he’s able to stash his luggage at the lockers at Grand Central Station – completely impossible now because of terrorism fears.

• Holden has good literary tastes.  He likes “The Great Gatsby,” Ring Larder and Emily Dickinson.  He doesn’t like “A Farewell to Arms.” Interesting that he singles out “The Great Gatsby,” which had been a dud when published 25 years earlier, and was not yet considered the great American classic in 1949. As for “Farewell to Arms,” I’m sure Salinger was reacting against Hemingway himself, not the novel.  If there’s anyone Salinger would have considered a phony it would have been Earnest Hemingway.

• The night that Holden visits Phoebe, Holden’s parents are in Norwalk, CT, which is about two miles from where I live now.  Huh.  If the book had been written today they would definitely not be visiting that city; it would be Westport, New Canaan, or Greenwich.  Also, it’s a little unlikely that they’d be out until 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday night, given that Holden’s father needed to go to work the next day as a corporate lawyer.

• What we don’t see is Holden’s actual breakdown.  By the end of the book, he’s a mess for sure, but not in bad enough shape to be sent to a mental hospital, which is where he is when he’s telling his story.   All he says is that he got “sick” later —  I wonder what THAT was like?

* * * * * * * *

 I think I’ve probably read “Catcher in the Rye” for the last time.  My book, bought for 75 cents in 1968, is literally falling apart now, and although it still amuses me tremendously, Holden’s adolescent angst is beginning to seem self-indulgent.  I always found his denunciations of “phonies” bracing, but not so much the last several times I read the book.  I realize now that we’re all a little phony from time to time.  We try to act more confident than we are, or nicer, or more successful.   It’s time to cut the human race a little slack.  So adieu Holden.  Hope you find what you’re looking for.  Be real.

Elvis Faulkner

William Faulkner and Elvis Presley, two sons of the South born 15 miles apart in Mississippi, were mama’s boys, barely high school graduates, champion substance abusers and of course artists at the pinnacle of their fields. They were also property owners, each purchasing large estates as soon as they could scrape the money together.

Several years ago I visited both Graceland, in the Memphis suburbs and Faulkner’s lesser-known home, Rowan Oak, about 90-minutes south in Oxford, Mississippi. It was impossible to approach these places – especially Graceland – with an open mind, but that turned out for the best, because the contrast between what I was expecting and what I actually saw intensified the experience.

First consider the fact that they even have names.  You would expect a nouveau riche rock-and-roll star to give his new home a fancy title, but you wouldn’t really think that the greatest American novelist – a true artistic soul – would be so pretentious.  In fact it’s worse; Graceland is named after Grace Toof, the aunt of the original owner, so Elvis had no part in choosing that metaphorically apt name.  In contrast, Faulkner himself came up with “Rowan Oak,” which is also the name of magical tree in Celtic mythology.   Faulkner gets points for originality and romanticism, but still, it’s the kind of affectation you’d expect from the plantation owners in Gone With The Wind, not a Nobel Prize-winning writer.

Graceland (Above) and Rowan Oak (Below)

What I did not expect was that Graceland and Rowan Oak would be about the same size.  Graceland is really not that big.  A classic Colonial built in 1941, it’s a comfortable home, but it’s smaller than about a dozen houses within a ten-minute walk of where I live.  Probably considered a mansion in its day, by today’s standards it’s only a lower-upper-class home.  The rooms are nicely proportioned, but there aren’t that many of them.  And the kitchen?  Well, let’s just say that this would be the first thing to go in any HGTV makeover.

Rowan Oak, a Greek Revival home built in the 1840’s, is almost as big as Graceland, with large spacious rooms and a gentile atmosphere. (To be fair, Graceland is definitely larger if you count the subterranean space – it has a huge cellar with numerous game and trophy rooms).  Faulkner bought the property in 1930, when he was only 32 and barely supporting himself with his writing; he struggled for years to pay for the upkeep and repairs, at one point even taking a job as a maintenance man at the local power plant.

In other words, he wanted to be true to his Muse, writing novels that were barely comprehensible to a popular audience; but he also wanted to live the life of a country squire even if that meant diverting time from those novels to churn out semi-trashy short stories for popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and spending years writing Hollywood screenplays.

What’s most striking and unexpected about Graceland and Rowan Oak is their handsome grounds.  Both are 15- to 20- acre estates set in average middle class neighborhoods where the other houses sit on half- and quarter-acre lots.  They have beautiful sweeping lawns with paddocks and riding areas.  They are both fantasies of how landed gentry would live.  One of them even has a “meditation garden” – and it’s not Rowan Oak. What makes them different is their overall ambiance and how they reflect on their owners.

Each is decorated to appear as they did when Elvis and Faulkner lived there and this has not been a benefit to Elvis’ overall image. As a poor boy who suddenly found himself rich, he spurned antiques and other classic decor as “old,” insisting instead that all his furnishings be new.  Unfortunately, he had the bad luck to die in the 1970s, a decade that now appears to be a bad joke all the way around.  I doubt that many of us would emerge with enhanced reputations if our 70’s interior decorating were exposed to the rest of the world.

To be fair to Elvis, though, much of the house, especially the living room and dining room, is actually quite tasteful (although I bet that, as in many homes of that period, these formal rooms were rarely used).  The famous Jungle Room is certainly over the top, but kind of fun and the TV and game rooms in the cellar are not that different from the game rooms of my youth. In contrast to Graceland, which is frozen at the moment of Elvis’s death, Rowan Oak hearkens back to a period before Faulkner was famous.

The Graceland living room

Faulkner died in 1962 but it is clear that no fifties or sixties decorators ever set foot there.  I wonder if this is really the furniture that was left there in 1962 or if an attempt was made to recreate the years (in the 30’s and 40’s) when Faulkner was writing his masterpieces?  The furnishings aren’t the high-end antiques that Elvis scorned; these are just old tables, chairs and couches that were probably in the family for generations.  The house does have a lived-in feeling (lived in by the Waltons maybe) but there’s nothing to suggest anyone lived there after World War II.

Faulkner’s sacred typewriter

The most revered item in the house is Faulkner’s Underwood manual typewriter, which could have come off the set of The Front Page.  The two concessions to modernity are a radio from the last 1940s in his daughter’s room and an air conditioning unit installed in his wife’s room the day after his funeral.

Elvis gets a bad rap for tastelessness and trying to rise above his station – kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies – but I think people should cut him a break.  Graceland is a little garish but not as bizarre as I’d heard;  what critics really object to is the 70’s itself and the refusal of Elvis’ fans to treat it as a joke.

Maybe some of that cynicism should be directed Faulkner’s way.  He too aspired to rise above his station but he worked harder than Elvis did at creating his own myth.  Or maybe we ask too much of our artists.  In the end they are human too, with the usual delusions, dreams and ambitions.  It’s one of the reasons we go to see where they live: to remind ourselves not just that they are people, but to hope that a little bit of the immortality they created will rub off on us.

Who Wants to be a Company Man? “The Strawberry Statement” Updated

For several months when I was in high school my favorite book was “The Strawberry Statement,” a first-hand account of the 1968 Columbia University uprisings by the 19-year-old James Simon Kunen.  Of course, even as a 14-year-old, I found those student protests slightly absurd, self-indulgent and somewhat akin to a temper tantrum, but I admired “The Strawberry Statement” itself because of Kunen’s breezy writing style, his you-are-there reporting and his disinclination to go in whole hog with the radicals.

More important, “The Strawberry Statement” realistically depicted what it might be like to head off to college at the very time I was beginning to get anxious about that upcoming experience. I read it as a guide to my future, a future that seemed exciting and important even if I didn’t plan to occupy the Dean’s office.

For my whole life, I’ve toted that book around with me as a talisman of the kid I used to be.  I’ve moved a dozen times and culled hundreds of books, but it always made the cut and still stands on my bookshelf.

Fast forward thirty years and I’m working for a corporate PR agency and one of my biggest clients is AOL Time Warner.  I’m invited to the lunch by one of their writers handling employee communications. As we make small talk sharing our life stories, he casually tells me that when he was in college he wrote a book called “The Strawberry Statement.”  Holy Toledo! This guy Jim Kunen who asked me out to lunch is actually James Simon Kunen, the author of the previously mentioned talisman of my youth.  This is almost like meeting Jerry Salinger and finding yourself with J.D. Salinger.

Of course I fall all over myself in a fairly embarrassing way telling him how much I liked the book etc, etc.  But in the back of my mind there’s this disquieting thought – why is James Simon Kunen, former revolutionary idealist, working as a company hack for one of the most corporatey, shark-infested companies in the world?

Now, it’s one thing for me to work in corporate communications.  As a right-wing Republican, I am ideologically inclined to be an apologist for The Man.  I don’t necessarily think corporate bigwigs are good people, although some of them are, I just believe, per Adam Smith, that a company that does everything it can to legally maximize profits will ultimately provide the most social benefit.  And I have no illusions about human nature, having absorbed the lessons of that other book from my teen years, “The Lord of the Flies.”  I don’t think there are more saints in government, the University or even the church than there are in the corporate world.   And you gotta work somewhere, so why not as a PR guy?

James Simon Kunen, though, is a different story; what’s he doing in a corporate headquarters?  And in employee communications, no less, which is the most propagandist wing in the communications field.  Even I wouldn’t have the stomach to write those feel-good newsletters, company magazines, and rah-rah videos  for very long.

I mention all this now because Jim Kunen has written a very good book on how he reordered his life when that job ended. “Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life” tells the story of how he got downsized (i.e., fired along with 500 other corporate employees when the AOL/Time Warner merger didn’t quite work out as planned.)

The story that emerges from “Company Man” is that of a typical idealistic Baby Boomer, someone who wanted to do good, but who also wanted to live a modest but comfortable life and send his kids to college.  Kunen started as a public defender, then became a journalist and somehow got talked into doing serious long-form articles for People Magazine.  Of course that couldn’t last at a magazine that takes the Kardashians seriously, so he wrote a heart-felt letter about the parent company’s mission to Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, which resulted in his being brought to corporate headquarters to write the company’s “Vision and Values” statement. Ugh.  My heart sank when I learned this because I’d worked on similar projects for other clients and the end product is always the same: a bunch of words that sound like every other vision statement and end up forgotten almost as soon as they’re committed to paper.

But Kunen is a believer and not a cynic, so instead of rolling his eyes like I would have done, he plunged in and when that project was done he ended up writing and editing employee communications materials, apparently believing that the company did have a mission other than making money. Turns out he was smarter as a 19-year-old.

The first third of “Diary of a Company Man” describes Kunen’s ultimate disillusion with his corporate experience, which culminates in him being “let go” after eight years at headquarters.  It’s not a happy ending – when you’re dismissed in one of these massive lay-offs the company usually confiscates your badge and declares you persona non grata on the spot.  Kunen felt particularly aggrieved about going from a trusted team member to a potentially dangerous outsider in less than 24 hours and this part of the book is a cautionary tale for anyone who’s thinking about working at the highest level of a corporation.

The rest of “Company Man” is actually more important and profound.  Because what do you do when you’re an aging Boomer and you’ve lost your job?  Your chances of getting another job like the one you just had taken away are slim, assuming you even want that life back.

Kunen knew he was through with the corporate world and found his niche as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher for adult immigrants. His tale of how he arrived at this place is compelling, but even more heart-warming are the stories of his students, who still believe in the promise of America.   Many of them were trained in their native countries as professionals, but are working in the U.S. as housecleaners and other entry level jobs (for more on this see this promotional video). Their  slow mastery of English will help them rise in America.  So Kunen is an actual hero, and although he didn’t change the system as much as he might have once dreamed as a Columbia revolutionary, he has made a significant contribution to many people’s lives.

Obviously Kunen’s path is not for everyone.  Whatever fleeting thoughts I might have once had about teaching ESL evaporated as I read this book and realized I wouldn’t have the temperament to inspire students.  The sub-theme of “Company Man” is that career satisfaction requires you to match your essential nature with the right job.  A tragedy of our time is that so many of our most ambitious college graduates want to go into whatever is the most remunerative and high-status career at the time: medicine two generations ago; corporate law a generation ago; management consulting a decade ago; and now Wall Street.

And yet it’s a fantasy to think everyone can be matched to a job that suits his hidden talents.  As Megan Draper’s mother recently pointed out on “Mad Men,”  “Not every little girl can do what they want. The world cannot support that many ballerinas.” Or that many novelists, video game developers or professional basketball players.

Nor is it true that everyone who takes a do-good social service job is happy with his career choice.  Kunen himself started his career unhappily as a public defender and the schools are full of people who decided to teach because it seemed like a safe career choice and have come to loathe their students (and their students’ parents).

And here’s the other hard truth.  The job that you might be best suited for doesn’t necessarily pay enough to support you in the style to which you have become accustomed.  The house, the car, the two-week beach vacation, the occasional night out, the cable and internet service and all the other accouterments of middle-class life add up pretty fast.  I don’t know anything about the finances of the Kunen family, but my guess is that the decades  he and his wife (a former radio news reporter) spent at high-paying jobs laid the financial groundwork for this new career as an ESL teacher.

Thoreau was right when he said that most people live lives of quiet desperation and of course it was fine for him, unmarried and childless, to live a couple of years in Walden woods.  But what about the rest of us?  I think it’s clear the pursuing a career for salary alone is the path to a mid-life crisis.  Assuming it even lasts to mid-life, because that gravy train can end pretty fast, as thousands of investment bankers and traders have learned in the past five years.  It’s also clear that you shouldn’t just drift into a job that offers the path of least resistance, because to be bored by your job and not get paid well is no bargain either.  If you can’t find your dream job, the trick is to make smart compromises and find something that’s interesting and moderately fulfilling, while being careful not to conflate your job with your real life.

“Diary of a Company Man” won’t capture the imagination of the youth market like “The Strawberry Statement” did, which is a shame, because it’s a more valuable guide to real life.  It really should be required reading for every college student, even if it does lead to that uncomfortable conversation you need to have with yourself about what truly makes you happy.  But trust me, it’s better to have that conversation with yourself when you’re 21 than when you’re 41 (or, God forbid, 61).