The Connie Willis . Net Blog

BOOKS I LOVE: THE CONNECTICUT CONTINGENT, PART II

5.  THE EIGHTH DAY by Thornton Wilder
In my last post, I talked about four of my favorite Connecticut-connected authors:  Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ursula Curtiss, and Sigrid Undset.  But my absolute favorite is Thornton Wilder, and he’s not just one of my favorite Connecticut writers, but one of my favorite writers of all time, so it’s sad when people say, “Thornton Wilder who?” to me when I mention his name.
By rights, he should be just as famous as his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  (Notice that nobody says “Who?” when you mention them.)  Thornton Wilder’s the only writer ever to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and drama, and one of the few to win a Pulitzer for drama more than once.  He also won the National Book Award, Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And he wrote a play, OUR TOWN, that’s been done by practically every high school in the country.  He also wrote brilliant novels, and THE MATCHMAKER (which HELLO, DOLLY is based on), and THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, an impossible-to-describe play about Adam and Eve–and Moses, Plato, Muses, fortunetellers, famines, singing dinosaurs, sniping maids, Ice Ages, wars, a casting crisis in the middle of Act Two, the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and Armageddon.
And unlike his contemporaries, everything Wilder wrote is completely different from everything else.  Which is probably why his name isn’t as well known as the more easily described Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Wilder is serious and off-the-wall funny and deeply philosophical  He’s also the most quotable author I know.  His work is full of great lines, and at our house we quote him constantly, from Barnaby and Cornelius’s code word for adventure:
“Pudding, Cornelius?” “Pudding, Barnaby.”
to Horace Vandergelder’s:
“‘Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.'”
and Emily Webb’s:
“‘Goodbye, Grover’s Corners.  Goodbye to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful to realize you!'”
It’s impossible to read Thornton Wilder without a pencil to underline memorable lines with, and sometimes you end up underlining the entire book.  Everything he wrote is chock-full of memorable comments–and dialogue–like:
“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous, it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”
* * *
“Money, pardon the expression, is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.”
* * *
“We’ve always had two children…just not the same two.”
* * *
“…every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor- edge of danger and must be fought for.” * * *
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“Any man who goes to a big city deserves what happens to him.”
* * *
“Dr. Gillies was lying for all he was worth.  He had no doubt that the coming century would be too dreadful to contemplate–that is to say, like all other centuries.”
* * *
“Have you milked the mammoth?”* * *
“There are the stars–doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky.  Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet…seem to think there are no living beings out there.  Just chalk…or      fire.  Only this one is straining, straining away all the time to make something of                itself.  Strain’s  so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.”
Even Wilder’s stage directions–“No curtain, no scenery”–and the warnings his characters give the audience–“I advise YOU not to think about the play, either”–are worth writing down and keeping.
Wilder also wrote two of the best endings in literature.  The first, from THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, about a random group of people killed in the collapse of a rope bridge in the Andes in 1714, is so hopeful and true I’ve read it aloud at several funerals, and the British prime minister Tony Blair read it at a memorial service honoring the victims of 9-11.
Wilder’s talking about the five people who died in the bridge’s collapse, and he says, “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The ending of THE EIGHTH DAY, which begins, “There is much talk of a design in the arras…” is even better.  Which is doubly remarkable because THE EIGHTH DAY also has one of the best first lines ever: “In the early summer of 1902, John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown.”
The paragraph goes on to tell us,
“He was found guilty and sentenced to death.  Five days later, at one in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution.”
There’s enough plot in that paragraph for an entire novel, but Wilder’s just getting started, in a story that’s part murder mystery and part quest and part family saga, and yet not really any of those.  The novel starts in the middle and goes not just  backward and forward, but off in all directions, reading sometimes like MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS and sometimes like AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY and sometimes like a post-modern work of metafiction–and nothing like any of them.  As Wilder himself said, “It’s not really like usual novels.”
I’ll say!  And because it wasn’t, the critics had no idea what to make of it (or its ending).  Some of them thought it was too ambiguous and depressing.  Others called it old-fashioned and “too optimistic.”
They were right.  THE EIGHTH DAY is all those things, cutting-edge and old-fashioned, ambiguous and crystal-clear, cynical and optimistic.  And also wrenching and compulsively readable, full of indelible characters like Porky and Sophia and Dr. Gillies–and of adventure and tragedy–and plot twists that leave you gasping.  It’s full of digressions and impromptu sermons and stray comments and asides.  And suffragettes, journalists, nuns, singers, shooting matches, South American mines, Aphrodite, sea voyages, saloons, lemonade stands, boardinghouses, chinchilla pelts, newspapers, and homemade fudge.
It’s about no less a theme than history and the small, obscure part we play in it.  Or about fate.  Or that design in the arras, which may or may not be decipherable, which may or may not even be there.
All that makes THE EIGHTH DAY sound ponderous and heavy, but it’s not.  It’s fascinating, fun to read, and light as a feather, written with what John Updike called “globe-spanning nimbleness and cosmic lift-off.”  And full of marvelous insights, marvelous lines.  Which is why it’s one of my favorite books.
NOTE:  I said Thornton Wilder wasn’t as famous as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but actually that’s not true.  On any given evening of the year, OUR TOWN is on stage somewhere, to say nothing of matinees.  Pixar introduced HELLO, DOLLY to a whole new generation in WALL-E. A new production of THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH was produced off-Broadway this year, and Bette Midler just won a Tony playing Dolly Levi opposite David Hyde Pierce (you know, Niles from FRAZIER) in a Broadway revival of HELLO, DOLLY,  so I can hardly complain.  I just wish people knew Thornton Wilder wrote them all.  And that they were reading THE EIGHTH DAY.

WEBSITE UPDATE 8/13/2017
BOOKS I LOVE: THE CONNECTICUT CONTINGENT

We went to Connecticut this summer on a combined research and family trip. It’s our fiftieth wedding anniversary this year, so my husband and our daughter and I went back to Branford, Connecticut, where we lived when we were first married, to visit our old haunts. We did a lot of other stuff, too, and saw submarines, dinosaur tracks, panes of propped-up glass like the ones in Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days,” waterfalls, Gillette Castle, and Gilmore Girl-esque village greens (about which more in later posts). And we visited assorted literary haunts, of which there are tons. Authors from Arthur Miller to Maurice Sendak, Wallace Stevens, Rex Stout, Suzanne Collins, and Ira Levin lived there. Here are my favorite Connecticut-connected books:

1. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI by Mark Twain

People always associate Mark Twain with Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mississippi, but he actually wrote most of his novels, including LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, while living in Hartford, Connecticut, in a gaudy red mansion that his biographer called “part steamboat, part medieval fortress, part cuckoo clock.”

The house was filled with cats–“A home without a cat–and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat–may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?” he wrote–and little girls, whom he also adored, and he told them stories, watched the plays they put on, was the elephant on their safaris, and let them play with the carved wooden cherubs that formed the posters of their bed, allowing them to put diapers and talcum powder on them.

And somehow find time to write LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. It’s a wonderful, funny, rambling memoir that feels less like a book than like sitting on the porch of Mark Twain’s Hartford house, watching him smoke his cigars and listening to him talk. The book’s got wild tales, jokes, tragic stories, and reminiscences of his days as a steamboat pilot.

My favorite thing in the whole book is his description of how he “learned the river” and went from merely seeing it as beautiful to knowing what every sandbar and sunset and submerged log meant. “Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet,” he wrote, “I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”

I’ve always felt that passage (and the whole book) was as much about being a writer as about being a riverboat pilot, and maybe that’s why it’s remained my favorite, though I also love ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, and THE PERSONAL REFLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC.

And, of course, HUCK FINN. It’s one of those “too good to be true” coincidences that the two great classics of American literature about race and slavery, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, were written within shouting distance of each other, and together they changed the way Americans felt about race and slavery.

It’s hard to say which book had the greater impact on the subject, though HUCK FINN is clearly the better of the two and it’s quite possibly The Great American Novel.. It’s also fun to read and as relevant now as the day it was written, and I saw the line “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” quoted on a political website just the other day.

2. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN isn’t nearly as fun to read, and in fact, hardly anybody has. But in spite of that, it’s one of those books everybody knows all about–or thinks they do. They’re familiar with Eliza’s flight across the frozen river with her baby, pursued by the slaveowner and his bloodhounds, and about Topsy and Little Eva. They’ve seen the play, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” in THE KING AND I (“Run from Simon, run, Eliza, run!”), and they know that when Abraham Lincoln met the author, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” The terms “Uncle Tom” and “Simon Legree” have entered into the lexicon, and everybody has an opinion about the book, usually that it’s badly written, overly sentimental anti-slavery propaganda, and full of demeaning stereotypes. But nobody’s actually read it.

Which is too bad, because like most really famous books, it’s much different from its common image. And so’s the author. Harriet Beecher Stowe wasn’t just any “little woman.” She was the daughter of a famous preacher and the sister of an even MORE famous one, and her whole family was right in the thick of the abolitionist movement. When Harriet found out that her black servant girl’s former owner was looking for her, she, her husband, and her brother hustled the girl to safety, “under cover of night and armed with guns.”

She interviewed numerous liberated slaves for the book and asked Frederick Douglass to put her in touch with others so she could “make a picture that shall be graphic and true to nature in its details,” and her book presented a number of things that were new to her readers: the barbarity of slave auctions and of families being torn apart as slaves were sold down the river, the forcing of slaves to whip each other, the ruthless hunting down of escaped slaves. She personalized slavery and made its horrors real, and the result was a book that had more influence on events than possibly any other novel ever written.

Just like her book isn’t what you’ve been led to believe, neither is she. She wasn’t a humorless fanatic; she was intelligent and charming and funny. She lived right across the street from Mark Twain, and she rose enormously in my regard when I found out she absolutely adored him.

Mark Twain once wrote, “When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” and I feel the same about Mark Twain. Nobody can really call themselves a writer if they don’t love Mark Twain and appreciate his humor.

Harriet clearly did. She loved to tell the story of how she was leaving for an extended trip, and Mark Twain, when he found out, came running over to tell her goodbye. He had been at breakfast, so he came in just his shirt and trousers, with no coat, and when he went back home, his wife Olivia, ever the proper Victorian, was horrified. So he sent his butler over with his collar and cuffs on a silver tray with the note, “Here is the rest of me to say goodbye.”

The fact that Harriet thought that was hysterical and that she told the story to everyone she knew isn’t what you’d expect from the author of a book like UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. And the book isn’t what you’d expect either. I recommend reading it and HUCK FINN together. After you’ve read LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

NOTE: I suppose I should have picked A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT as my favorite Mark Twain book instead of LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, it having Connecticut in the title, but I hate the ending of that book so much I can’t bring myself to recommend it. (If you want to read it, I suggest reading to the end of Chapter 39, which is all quite fun, with time travel and eclipses and lightning rods and a very annoyed Merlin, and then stop before Twain’s fury at the world makes everything go smash. Especially now, when Twain’s ending seems all too likely.)

3. THE BIRTHDAY GIFT by Ursula Curtiss

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Next to Mary Stewart, Ursula Curtiss is my favorite romantic suspense writer. Her books are beautifully written and diabolically plotted, and her heroines are smart and resourceful and able to take care of themselves–or would be if they weren’t bound by a promise to a friend and if they didn’t have a small child to take care of. Or a high fever.

Ursula Curtiss was born and grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and about half of her novels are set there, among them WIDOW’S WEB, THE WASP, THE DEADLY CLIMATE, THE SECOND SICKLE, THE NOONDAY DEVIL, and THE BIRTHDAY GIFT.

Curtiss does a beautiful job of capturing New England’s small villages and coast, its idyllic summers and winter snowstorms and deadly (sometimes literally) fogs, and I read her when I’m homesick for New England. But a warning: if you pick up one of her books, make sure you’ve got some time to read it all the way through. There’s no putting it down.

It’s hard to pick a favorite–they’re all good–but I’d start with THE BIRTHDAY GIFT–about a young woman back from the Southwest to New England for a wedding who’s supposed to deliver a gift for a friend in Santa Fe–and then read THE SECOND SICKLE, which also involves a favor for a friend. In this case, the friend’s asked her to cover for her being gone for a weekend, and Victoria does, but now the weekend’s over, her friend’s still not back, and her family and fiancé are demanding to see her…

4. KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER by Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset didn’t live in Connecticut, she lived in Norway until World War II, then fled to the States, though still not to Connecticut, (she lived in Brooklyn Heights, New York), and returned to Norway as soon as the war was over. KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER isn’t set in Connecticut either–it’s set in Norway long before America was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

But I include it here because I first read it in Branford after checking it out (and having to renew it a couple of times) from the Blackstone Public Library, one of my favorite libraries of all time. It was an elegant marble-domed library completely unlike any library I’d ever encountered before, and it imbued all the books I checked out from there with a romance completely separate from the books themselves.

Which was a good thing because the book had a hideous cover with a long-braided Valkyrie-type maiden on it that would have completely daunted me if I’d found it any place else. Plus, it was massive, a fourteen-hundred page tome with tiny print instead of the easier-to-hold three-volume set I later found it in (THE BRIDAL WREATH, THE WIFE OF HUSBABY, and THE CROSS.) But the size and illustration seemed completely appropriate for the Blackstone wrought-iron shelves, and as I’ve learned through a lifetime of publishing, you should NEVER judge a book by its cover.

Because KRISTIN was wonderful–my favorite novel, in fact. It’s the story of the life of a young woman in medieval Norway, which sounds as bad as that Viking-maiden cover, but Kristin’s no ordinary daughter. She’s headstrong and passionate, and once she meets Erlend, the story turns into a can’t-put-it-down tale of forbidden meetings, lies, kidnappings, fights, accusations, imprisonments, estrangements, treason, deaths, and disasters.

All that makes it sound like a mere soap opera, but it’s so much more than that. Her characters are wonderfully drawn, Kristin’s life is riveting as she struggles with her faith and trying to find meaning in her life, and her world is more real than our own.

That’s because Undset was the daughter of an archaeologist who grew up steeped in medieval history and culture and then became an authority on the subject herself, visiting medieval churches and monasteries and studying old Norse manuscripts and chronicles. Her research is impeccable, and her skill at working it into the story is phenomenal. When I wrote DOOMSDAY BOOK, KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER was my Bible.

And in my mind, impossible to separate from the Blackstone Library. I got to go back and visit this summer and it’s (of course) changed a lot from the 1960s, but it still looked like something straight out of THE MUSIC MAN, and it still had the openwork iron spiral staircase up to the stacks, and the ancient open-cage elevator I remembered, and it still had a copy of KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER, though this one, thank God, had a better cover.

And 5. THE EIGHTH DAY by Thornton Wilder.

No, on second thought, that’s such a wonderful book and he’s such a wonderful author they deserve a post all to themselves. I’ll save them for a future post. After I tell you about my favorite letter of all time.

Connie Willis

Connie at The Blackstone Library in Brandford, CT

Inside the Blackstone Library

Connie with a copy of KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER by Sigrid Undset

WEBSITE UPDATE: ECLIPSE REDUX

“When suddenly, and without warning, there was this total eclipse
of the sun…”
Little Shop of Horrors

Witnessing a total eclipse is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and that’s definitely what I thought it would be when I set off for Lewistown, Montana with my husband, daughter, and our friend, science-fiction writer Ed Bryant in 1979.

It seems foolhardy now to have driven across the wilds of Wyoming and Montana, famous for their blizzards, in the dead of winter, but we were blessed with great weather all the way, and when we arrived in Lewistown, we found what Ed described as a “Woodstock for geeks,” hundreds of people with cameras and eye patches (to help your eyes adjust to the darkness) and telescopes, all talking about pinhole cameras and shielded lenses and telescope settings and Baily’s beads. And the weather.

ESPECIALLY the weather. Eclipse-viewing is fraught with the anxiety that comes with having no control over what happens. Just because you’ve driven 750 miles, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually get to see the eclipse. All you can do is show up at the right place at the right time and hope the sky’s clear.

Which it wasn’t when we got up at five a.m. the morning of the eclipse. It was completely overcast, and we had to decide whether to head to Helena (which a number of people did) or stay where we were.

We stayed put, which turned out to be the right thing to do–Helena was completely fogged in. (Though we can’t claim any credit for making a smart decision. It could just as easily have turned out the other way around, and we’d have missed the eclipse altogether.)

But, whatever, as the partial eclipse started, the clouds began to thin, and half an hour before totality, they parted altogether, and we got to see everything: Baily’s beads, the diamond ring effect, and, best of all, the shadow bands. I’d read about the other things, but not them. They happen because the eclipse is already total west of you and the ground under it in shadow, so if you’re in an open area, you can see the darkness rush toward you across the fields like the wings of some huge bird. Except that there’s no accompanying rush of wind, no sound, and watching it swoop down on me across the snow, I could see why early humans were terrified by eclipses.

The eclipse itself was amazing. The blur of the corona flickered pinkly around the blacked-out sun, and an orange-red solar flare lashed out on one side as we stared transfixed at it. Afterward, people clapped, Ed shouted, “Encore, encore!” and a group of college kids stuck a tape of “Here Comes the Sun!” into their car’s tape player.
“One of us should write a story about this,” I said.
“Well, we can’t both write one,” Ed said. “They’d be too much alike. The first one to finish theirs gets dibs on the eclipse.”

I don’t believe for a minute that our stories would have been anything alike, but nevertheless, I wrote mine in the back seat of the car on the way home. It was called “And Come from Miles Around” and explained why the weather cleared up so miraculously. Now I’m sorry–I’d have loved to read Ed’s eclipse story. And I’d have loved to have him with us at this year’s eclipse, which was even total in Wheatland, his hometown.

We didn’t go there–or anywhere in Wyoming. The word was that the state’s population was going to triple on August twenty-first, and they were predicting bumper-to-bumper traffic north on I-25. (Sadly, that turned out to be true, and I read several accounts of people who were stuck in their cars and who ran out of gas–in short supply–or who couldn’t make it up to the area of totality in time, and missed the eclipse altogether.)

We also knew I-25 was pretty much the only route north for people from Denver, Colorado Springs, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and points south, so we decided to go to Nebraska instead. We picked Kearney because 1) August weather in Nebraska is usually sunny in the morning, with the thunderstorms not usually building up till late afternoon and 2) there were still hotels available there when we tried to get reservations in January.

We made our daughter get plane reservations at the same time, and last Sunday set out for the eclipse, taking back roads to avoid the mess on I-80. Once in Kearney, we connected with my husband’s cousin (who’d gone to Minden), a college friend of my daughter’s, and a science-fiction friend, who’d all convened for the big event, and congratulated ourselves on the fact that the weather forecast said sunny.

Not so fast, Mother Nature said. That afternoon the forecast abruptly changed from sunny to “intermittent clouds” and then “cloudy,” and when we got back to our hotel a group of seventy-two Minnesotans staying there were anxiously consulting their computers and talking about going back to Alliance (four hours away) to try to get west of the front. Should we?

We fretted (and/or dreamed) about it all night long, woke up to cirrus clouds that looked like they might get thicker, and sat through an anxious breakfast, looking out the window and trying to decide what to do. In the end, we decided to stay where we were, just like we had in Montana, except for going thirty miles north to the little town of Ravenna, which was on the center line, to gain an extra thirty seconds of totality.
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On our way there, we passed people parking along the road with binoculars and picnic lunches, and Ravenna itself was full of signs directing you to eclipse T-shirts (already sold out) and viewing locations. We settled on a big green field in city park because 1) there was room for my husband to set up his telescopes, cameras, and pinhole-camera viewing devices, and 2) there was plenty of shade, though we weren’t going to need it if the clouds got thicker.

They didn’t. By ten a.m. the clouds had dwindled to wisps, and by 10:30, they’d disappeared altogether, and I’d stopped worrying. In the field with us were people from Canada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Texas, and even Ravenna, though they pointed out that they could sit in their own front yards and watch it. The atmosphere was less Woodstock than Picnic, with lots of kids running around, people sharing watermelon, pears, homemade cookies, and viewing tips.

Everyone was really well-informed, except for one guy who said, “Once it gets to 95% total, you can look at it with the naked eye.”
“No, you can’t!” everyone else, even the kids, shouted, and kept their glasses on as the moon kept taking bite after bite out of the sun.

It began to get noticeably cooler, the colors of the sky and field and surrounding trees seemed to grow sharper and clearer, a rooster crowed, and the kids called me over to look at the road through the park, where the trees were acting as a pinhole camera and making dozens and dozens of crescent-shaped shadows on the white gravel.

It got even cooler, the light began to dim (oddly, not in a smooth progression, but in abrupt steps, like what happens when you switch a lamp from bright to medium to dim), and the rooster got more hysterical. He sounded like he was shouting, “WHAT is going ON?” and continued to crow right through the eclipse to the very end of the partial.

The sky turned sapphire and then dark, dark blue, and, to the east and west, you could see the sunset, all pink and yellow. Venus came out, bats began circling, and everyone got out their cameras.

I actually missed the start of the total eclipse. I was scanning the ground to the west, looking for the shadow bands, someone shouted, “There it is!” there was a collective gasp, and I looked up.
And there it was.

It looked completely different than it had been in Montana, where there must have been some haze obscuring it. This time the outline was sharp and defined and the sun coal black, jet black, pitch black. It looked like a hole had literally been punched in the sky. Around it, the corona was ghostly white, feathery, and just as sharply defined against the navy-blue sky in which Venus glittered and the stars could be seen if you really looked. At one o’clock in the afternoon.

Words can’t really describe how beautiful it was. I’ve seen lots of pictures and videos of eclipses, but they’re pale and flat compared to the real thing, and, as I learned in Ravenna, each one is completely different. I can see why people become eclipse chasers.

Afterward, giddy with delight, we said goodbye to everybody, had lunch at the local Creamery, and went back to Kearney to try to track down T-shirts of the occasion, finally succeeding at the T-shirt screening place, which printed out a new batch just for us. While we waited, we chatted with a family who’d come all the way from Plymouth, England, to see the show. “There won’t be one in Europe during our lifetime, so we decided to come here,” they said, and they were really glad they had. Just like we were.

That night we toasted Ed Bryant, the sun, the moon, and eclipses in general, and started making plans to go to the next one. Which you should definitely go to. There’s one on April 8, 2024, which goes north from Texas through Missouri, Chicago, Indiana, and New York, and then another on August 12, 2045, which starts a little south of where this one was and goes all across the U.S., ending in Florida. And I won’t have to go farther than Colorado Springs to see it. If I’m still here. But even if I’m not, I’ve gotten to see two total eclipses in the United States in my lifetime. To say nothing of a bunch of partial eclipses and lunar eclipses, the aurora borealis, Comet Kohoutek , the Perseids, and Halley’s Comet. But I have to say this was the best!

Connie Willis

P.S. Just in case you were worrying about those people who went to Alliance, we at first heard they were clouded over, then that they’d seen it just fine. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for Lancaster, Kansas, Nashville, and parts of Charleston, South Carolina. I’m so sorry you didn’t get to see it!

P.P.S. My story “And Come from Miles Around” can be found in my short story collection, FIRE WATCH.

BOOKS I LOVE, PART 2: OXFORD BRANCH

When I visited England the first time, the place I most wanted to go was Oxford, the home of some of my favorite writers.  I wanted to see the Bridge of Sighs where Lord Peter proposed to Harriet, and the gate of Christ Church where Peter’s nephew collided with Harriet and spilled the bag of meringues, and the deanery garden at Christ Church, where Charles Dodgson first met the Liddell girls, and then I wanted to go have a pint (well, of shandy) at the Eagle and Child, where the Inklings used to meet to read and critique each other’s manuscripts.

Many of my favorite writers are associated with Oxford and/or wrote about it.  Here are some of my favorite books of theirs:

THE PERELANDRA TRILOGY by C.S. Lewis

I discovered the Inklings, that band of writers who assembled at the pub, the Eagle and Child (or, as they called it, the Bird and Baby) and which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and assorted other professors and writers, through C.S. Lewis, whose work I first read in college.  I loved his religious allegories–THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS and THE GREAT DIVORCE and A GRIEF OBSERVED–and his reworking of the story of Psyche and Eros:  TILL WE HAVE FACES.  It’s probably his best work.  Because his faith is so intertwined with his writing, he can sometimes be annoyingly preachy, but in TILL WE HAVE FACES, he’s working outside that world, so that he focuses entirely on the story, and when he does that, there’s nobody better.

But my favorite C.S. Lewis work has got to be the PERELANDRA trilogy–OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, AND THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.  It’s part science fiction, part religious allegory, and full of fascinating ideas.  Especially about the nature of evil, which Lewis sees not as grandly Mephistophelian or even clever, like Ray Walston in DAMNED YANKEES, but petty and pointless and gratuitously cruel.  His scene with Weston and the Venusian frogs has stayed with me for fifty years.  Plus, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH has a great Merlin in it.  And Coventry.

Lewis is one of those writers who’s just exploding with ideas, and is full of opinions, with the result that the meetings of the Inklings were often contentious (especially after Lewis, who’d refused to allow women into the group, insisted that his wife be included), and I have a feeling that if I’d been allowed into the Inklings, I would have been mad at Lewis most of the time.  As it is, I disagree with lots of what he says, but he’s still one of the most interesting writers I know, and I highly recommend his work.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien was responsible for my getting married.  I’m not kidding.  When I was a senior in college I flew out to Connecticut over spring break to break up with my boyfriend (which for some unknown reason I thought it would be kinder to do in person).  Flights took even longer than they do now, so I went to the bookstore to find something to read on the flight, and picked up a trilogy with strange pinkish and purple creatures on the front.

I knew nothing at all about Tolkien at that point–it was way before “Frodo Lives” and decades before Peter Jackson and Viggo Mortensen, but the blurb on the back looked intriguing, and from the moment I opened up the first volume and read, “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” I was entranced.  Here was a fairy tale–for grownups!

By the time I arrived at Newark Airport, I was so deep in the story and so worried about Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin I couldn’t think about anything else.  “The Black Riders are after them,” I told my boyfriend, “and nobody knows what’s happened to Gandalf, and I’m not sure they should trust Strider,” and completely forgot to break up with my boyfriend.  As a result, we are about to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and I’m still in love with him, and with LORD OF THE RINGS.

Tolkien gets all sorts of praise for creating languages and inventing an entire world, complete with geographic, history, and maps, but it’s the story that keeps us riveted–the tale of a small, ordinary person (just like us) who finds himself caught up in events beyond his control and beyond his abilities, facing enemies of great power, somebody who can’t possibly win but who simply has to.  It’s a timeless story that never gets old.  I’ve read it many times, and it only gets better each time.

If you’ve never read it, you should probably start at the beginning and read THE HOBBIT first.  And I’d also recommend Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories.”  But skip The SILMARILLION.

3. DESCENT INTO HELL Charles Williams

Charles Williams, the third of the Inkling triumvirate, is the least known of them.  I once got into a fight with a clerk at Blackwell’s because they didn’t have a single one of his books.  “How can you not have Charles Williams?” I said.  “He was an Inkling.  He lived here.  And he worked for the Oxford University Press!”

He may be the least known, but to my mind he’s the best of them.  Tolkien’s the best storyteller, C.S.  Lewis has the clearest prose style, but Williams has the most imagination.  I know that sounds like an unlikely claim when you’re talking about the authors who invented Perelandra and Middle Earth, but it’s true.  Williams’s books are so strange and visionary that there’s simply no way to describe them.

Some reviewers have called them “supernatural thrillers,” which has an element of truth to it, but gives completely the wrong impression.  Others have called them “religious mysteries,” and one even said he wrote about the occult and “talking animals,” which gives totally the wrong impression.

But I can understand their difficulty–I have no idea how to describe them either.  They do deal with the supernatural–and I guess they are thrillers–there are villains and car chases and even murders–but none of those definitions do his books justice or tell what they’re actually about.  WAR IN HEAVEN, for instance, begins with the finding of the Holy Grail in a little church in rural England.  ALL HALLOW’S EVE begins with the heroine standing on Westminster Bridge, looking across the Thames at the plane crash in which she has just been killed, and in THE GREATER TRUMPS, the figures on the Tarot cards come to life and head out into the world. And they’re all full of unsettling insights about love and faith and reality.

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DESCENT INTO HELL begins with the heroine, on her way home from a play rehearsal, seeing her doppelganger walking toward her.  It also involves a suicide, trapped in a half-constructed netherworld of two-by-fours and ladders and scaffolding.  It’s also about a martyr being burned at the stake and a play that may be more than a play–and the true meaning of bearing one another’s burdens.  A brilliant book.

It’s like no other book you’ve ever read, eerie and touching and infinitely strange, and the only things remotely like it are Williams’ other novels.

They’re sometimes difficult to read.  Reading Williams’ prose can sometimes be like hacking your way through a thicket, and on several occasions I’ve reached the end of a page only to think, “I have no idea what I’ve just read,” and have to go back and read it again, but his books are definitely worth the effort.

4. GAUDY NIGHT by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Sayers didn’t just live in Oxford, she went to Somerville College and worked at Blackwell’s Bookstore.  She also wrote about it, and her mystery Gaudy Night is probably the best novel ever written about Oxford.

Not only does it have punting on the river, the May Day celebration on top of Magdalen Tower, dinner in a college hall, getting caught out after hours, and a concert at the Sheldonian, but it’s about Oxford, the scholarly research and the faculty infighting and the undergraduate excesses.  And the spell it casts over anyone who spends time in the “city of dreaming spires.”  Plus, it has the delightful romance between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, though to get the full effect of that, you need to read STRONG POISON, HAVE HIS CARCASE, GAUDY NIGHT, and BUSMAN’S HONEYMOON in order.

I took a walking tour in Oxford one time with a bunch of tourists who yawned at the sight of Shelley’s Memorial and Lawrence of Arabia’s college and Einstein’s blackboard.  But when the tour guide showed us the Bridge of Sighs, and said, “This is where Lord Peter proposed to Harriet Vane,” everyone took their cameras out and began clicking madly away, in spite of the fact that they weren’t real.

But that’s just the point–they are real, and they’ve made just as indelible a mark on Oxford as Einstein and T.E. Lawrence and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Sayers’ other mystery novels are good, too.  I especially recommend Murder Must Advertise, Clouds of Witness and Nine Tailors.

5. ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Lewis Carroll.

Charles Dodgson is even more of an Oxford writer than Sayers or the Inklings.  Not only was he a professor at Christ Church his whole life, but his rooms overlooked the deanery garden where he saw the Liddell girls playing and were right across the street from the little shop he immortalized in THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS as the Sheep Shop and just up the way from the river up which he took Alice and her sisters on that most famous of all picnics.

ALICE and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS are quoted far more than they’re read (in fact more often than anything else besides Shakespeare and the Bible and there’s been a sharp increase in these Wonderland-like times.  I must have heard, “We’re really down the rabbit hole now,” at least a dozen times in recent days, followed closely by references to Alice’s telling Humpty Dumpty, “The question is whether you can make words so many different things,” and Humpty Dumpty’s replying, “The question is which is to be master–that’s all” and to the Red Queen.) but you really should read the books themselves, especially if you haven’t since you were a kid.

Alice is wonderful, the voice of common sense in a world in which everyone else is clearly mad.  Except for the White Knight, who’s one of my favorite characters in all of literature.

I’d also recommend watching DREAMCHILD, a movie about the real Alice and Charles Dodgson, and SyFy’s miniseries, ALICE, a Nick Welling miniseries set in Wonderland a hundred years after the original Alice visited.  It’s a science-fictional take on the story, with Wonderland a dystopian place, Hatter as a drug-dealer, and unexpected takes on the Dormouse, Owl, and Caterpillar.

DREAMCHILD is a British film about a real event.  In 1932, Alice Liddell was invited to accept a posthumous honor for Dodgson at Columbia University, and the movie tells the story of her trip to America, during which unsettling memories of her childhood and the books begin drifting to the surface.  It stars Ian Holm and Coral Browne, and is unfortunately nearly impossible to locate, but it’s worth the search.  It’s my favorite movie of all time.  Absolutely beautiful.

Connie Willis