How I Learned to Write -- Part 1

Poetry didn't work for me, neither did Bronte, but I could do it on my own

I’ve had a number of comments here on Sub Stack about my writing, most of them favorable, but some of them unfavorable…my work is too long…I’m insulting women…and my favorite, from “Elizabeth Poe,” that I write “like a six-year-old.”

I’m going to take a break from writing about the Holocaust to tell everyone how I learned to write. That should, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “put before mankind the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”

Here we go. Three parts:

I was in middle school and high school and making a fatuous mess of all of it. Being an Aspergian, I had trouble with what child authorities call “interpersonal relationships.” Nor are Aspergians good at playing sports. They can memorize baseball statistics, strategy, and stories, but they lack the physical skills to grab the bouncer to the right side and make an accurate flip to second to start an inning-ending double play. When they try to ask out a girl, they are either laughed at or smacked in the face. They are the class freaks, weirdos, dummies, and re-tards, and never mind their high grades – youth and adults alike rate intelligence on social skills and conformity, not book-l’arning.

Most Aspergians are good at mathematics. For reasons I would rather not rehearse and revisit, I was not. I got the lowest math grades in the history of my high school – for a student who was not high on drugs when he took the final. To this day, the only math I can do involves making change (I can see coins floating in the air) and baseball. Looking back, I realize that if I could have solved for X, my life would have turned out different…and better.

At the opposite end of this extreme, I aced all of my English, Creative Writing, and History classes. Even when I was 13, I could write, although I did not know it or think about it.

When my mother went in for parent-teacher conference day with my eighth-grade English teacher, Sarah Hardman, she said to Mom, “That boy is going to be a great writer.”

I was actually shocked, because I had never had an endorsement like that from a teacher before. It was usually, “Pay attention, Lippman,” or “Do more math, Lippman.”

I had not thought about the idea of writing very much. To me, English classes focused on many absurdities. We read novels and memoirs like “Down These Mean Streets,” in which young folks in the ghetto fought their way out of poverty. I did not live in the ghetto or in poverty. The book’s author, Píri Thomas, did drugs, did time for attempted armed robbery, and did rather well for himself after that as a cultural leader and international lecturer. I did none of the three, either. The only parts I liked, being a teenager with raging hormones, was when Píri made moves on very receptive teenage girls. Most of the girls I met were unreceptive, because I was a scary Aspergian.

We read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” in which Hester Prynne fought for her voice and her own power. Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” on the same subject, was really about McCarthyism and why all good men and women had to stand up to arrogant, overbearing tyrants, regardless of the century. We also read Lillian Hellman’s “Scoundrel Time,” written directly about how McCarthyism ruined her life. Only we later found out that her tales of woe and defiance were vastly overstated. All these books urged readers to stand up against totalitarianism of any kind, and for our consciences.

Then we were told: sit down, shut up, do the test, no talking, keep our eyes on our own paper, and not argue with anything, be it a mimeographed memo from the Principal’s Office or President Nixon saying, “I am not a crook.”

We read “Jane Eyre.” While the girls – who all identified with the poverty-stricken tutor – rolled their eyes in sympathy with poor ol’ Jane and sighed heavily over her, I wondered why Mr. Rochester did not toss his lunatic wife out of the tower and ride off into the sunset with Jane. He was a wealthy English Regency gentleman…they could get away with that behavior. I could not stand the book. Luckily for me, I had the Classics Illustrated comic version, which told the bulk of the story in solid cartoons. However, this abridgement deleted a side plot that added nothing to the original book but length.

Sarah Hardman was very puzzled as to why I had the whole book memorized except for those few chapters. I shrugged my shoulders and told her the truth.

“I couldn’t stand it,” I said. “So I read the Classic Comics version.” She nodded her head. I guess she realized that a guy who was fascinated by Chindits in Burma and Christy Mathewson with the Giants would have no interest in a Victorian-era romance involving the idle rich and the idle poor.

As it turns out, apparently Charlotte Bronte added the chapters I never read because, like most novels of the time, it did not come out in a book, but was serialized in a magazine. It was supposed to end on thus-and-such a date. But Bronte got a note from her agent, Seymour Percentage, which was the period equivalent of this: “Bill Thackeray went on a bender and punted the new book he’s supposed to start on February 29^th. Can you stretch ‘Jane Eyre’ out to the week before? I’m sure you can. Who loves you, baby?”

Therefore, Ms. Bronte, after popping a few antacids, dreamed up some unnecessary chapters, and shrugged, saying that at least she would earn more money from a book that only overheated teenage girls in middle-school English classes read centuries hence.

Meanwhile, we were hit in class and on tests with questions like “Why do you think Jane Eyre fell in love with Mr. Rochester?” Maybe because he possessed more money than the Rockefellers have and boasted chiseled abs.

“Why did the Martian colonies fail in ‘The Martian Chronicles?’” Because Mars has no oxygen. And Elton John says “It’s cold as hell!” Next!

“Why did Píri Thomas reform his life after doing seven years in prison?” Maybe he did not want to go back to prison.

“Why is Captain Ahab so obsessed with the Great White Whale?” Because Moby Dick bit off his leg, which is unlikely, as whales eat plankton.

Disgusted with Herman Melville’s anti-environmentalist tone, immense length, and three chapters on the biology of whales, I rooted for the whales, including Moby Dick himself, and was very happy when he wiped out the Pequod and its crew.

My favorite scene? When a whole bunch of them snuffled up to a small rowboat out of curiosity, and Second Officer Stubbs said, “He wants his back scratched,” and did so. It made the whales far more lovable than the humans. After that, I drew happy whales on tests, quizzes, and to this day, meeting notes and memos.

Poetry wasn’t much, either. Edna St. Vincent Millay was tolerable. The Great War poets had an eye for history and horror. We also did e.e. cummings every year. As far as I was concerned, the guy was either lazy or had a broken typewriter. You’re supposed to have working capital letters, fella! I didn’t “get” Lewis Carroll and his “Jabberwocky,” either. Except for Rolfe Humphries’ “Polo Grounds,” on baseball, I neither understood nor remembered most poetry. Teachers asked me what I thought of some poet or poem, and I shrugged my shoulders.

I was not impressed by “great novels” or “great poetry.” They had nothing to do with the evacuation of Dunkirk or Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

Yet, I suddenly began to realize that when I wrote an essay or a term paper for school, my paragraphs ended with a hard snap that increasingly felt – to me at least, as a baseball fan – like a slider exploding in the strike zone and nicking the corner or a 100-mile-an-hour fastball in the zone. Either way, the reader – the hitter – was frozen at the plate for a called third strike and could only shuffle back to the bench, muttering curses about how he should have taken me downtown, while I turned around and ignored him. It was something I saw, but not something I noticed. I had other stuff to deal with. My English grades shot up. My English teachers – Sarah Hardman was only the first – gave me more respect. I started saying, “Hey, I have something here.”

Two powerful forces made me the journalist I am 44 years after graduating high school, and four powerful forces made me the writer I am. I only needed one powerful force to become the historian I am.

I learned my journalism skills first from my father, who was one of the world’s great advertising copywriters – in addition to being a typewriter historian. When I was age four, he told me, “Dave, unless you want to shove racks of clothes up and down Seventh Avenue in the rain, you’re going work in an office. That means you have to type, and that means you have to touch-type.”

Therefore, he taught me to touch-type. I got pretty good at it. By the time I was enduring typing tests at personnel agencies after I graduated from NYU, was doing 110 words-per-minute, hacking through ghastly sentences like “I wonder what Jack would think if I asked Major Crag for some more work,” and “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.”

More importantly, he taught me how to write headlines, how to use as many different verbs as possible, avoid using clichés except in headlines, and most of all…when I’d written something, put it aside – for a day if possible – and look at it then with a clear eye. “It’s impossible to edit your own work, particularly right after you finish it,” he said. “You have to give it time.”

In the summer of 1980, I began a four-year internship and lifelong friendship with legendary hockey and subway writer Stan Fischler, his wife Shirley, their two sons Ben and Simon, and their dog, Chase, who was large, friendly, and spent most of his time lying directly where people were walking. This fun crew all lived and worked in an apartment on West 110^th Street in Manhattan. I learned a lot there about deadlines, professionalism, AP structure, and many other realities of journalism. Shirley taught me a lot about women’s issues as the first female official scorer in ice hockey. I taught Ben and Simon how to read. Even though Shirley died years ago of breast cancer and Stan is retired and living in Israel with his grandson, I can still hear their voices when I tackle news stories, sports stories, and now, press releases.

The historian was and still is Dr. Elihu Rose, a major New York developer who became the world’s leading expert on military mutinies, writing a terrific paper on the subject that wound up with him lecturing on the subject at major military academies and conferences, as well as getting the nickel tour of our forces in Afghanistan. Between the lectures and the developing, he had plenty of time and resources to visit such incredible places as the Somme, Normandy, and Corregidor.

He also found time to teach the only class I actually really enjoyed in my four years at New York University: “The Anatomy of War.” The class was not a history of wars and warfare. It was a class on how wars worked; training, organization, morale, mutiny, even the “laws of war.” It was astonishing to discover that it is perfectly legal in war to climb into a fighter aircraft and shoot your enemy in the back, while it is illegal to shoot him in the front of the head with a “dum-dum” bullet. We all watched the movie Breaker Morant, in which a British officer and Australian officer (Edward Woodward and Bryan Brown, respectively) stand trial in a British Field General Court-Martial for a variety of offenses that included every subject the class had discussed, except mutiny.

There were Boer commandos who were mostly civilians carrying out acts of sabotage, some while dressed in British Army uniforms. There were questionable orders about whether or not to kill civilians. There were British troops placing Boer civilians in open cars in front of trains to prevent the Boers from blasting those trains; captured Boer commandos possessing dum-dum bullets; a captured Boer breaking from his buddies to attack an Australian officer; and a neutral German missionary being ambushed and shot. At the end, who was responsible, and who was being scapegoated? What defines a “war crime?” It was the kind of movie that every Sandhurst or West Point cadet should have to watch.

My paper was about how the British mobilized to fight the Falklands War. It got an A, but something more important, which I’ll discuss in a minute.

More importantly, it was the first time Elihu Rose taught that – or any other – class. As he went on, he taught a class on the history of the Second World War – after I graduated. The attendance in that class went from 10 students to 150, and 35 years later, he still does it. The class opens with wartime music, except for the one on the invasion of Normandy. That shows the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

Anyway, after I took the class, got the A, and moved on, I pitched the Falklands mobilization article to the US Marine Corps Gazette. They published it. I was astonished. Those folks print articles by high-ranking officers in the Corps or professors at Annapolis or some other think tank. Compared to them, I was a nobody. It made me think that I could, if not make a complete living from writing about World War II, supplement my modest journalism income by writing about World War II.

By now, two names had made my writing stronger. The first was one of the few schoolteachers I have great regard for: Frank McCourt. That Frank McCourt. Creative Writing, two-and-a-half years. Many students took his course because he was an easy grader. I took it to learn how to write and avoid diagramming sentences. To this day, I do not know how to or why you “diagram” a sentence. Nor do I use the term “split infinitive,” but I know when something’s wrong in a sentence when I see it. English teachers call it a “split infinitive,” “misplaced modifier,” or a “dangling participle.” I just look at the sentence for a while and say, “That looks h********,” and clean it up. It’s one of the few times I’ll use an obscenity, because I can’t find a better way to define the disaster.

What I learned from McCourt was to observe detail and ritual. He required students to report every day on what they had for dinner last night. Who cooked it? Who set the table? What kind of tablecloth? What was the initial course? The main course? Did anyone say grace? Who cut the meat? What was discussed? Who cleaned up the table? Who did the dishes? It was learning to observe details and then render them…to paint pictures with words.

Every Friday, we had to read stuff we had written. It was the usual mixture of teen angst, sophomoric humor, and cynicism. One girl in our class was very annoyed that her boyfriend was failing to relieve her of her virginity. I did not know what to think about that one – if her boyfriend didn’t want to do it, I was happy to.

After the students were done, McCourt himself read his own material, handwritten on yellow legal pads. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first draft of his Pulitzer-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” When it came out and I saw the exact lines I’d heard, it chilled me to the bone.

We never forgot each other. When I applied in 1999 for my MFA Creative Writing program at the New School for Social Research, he wrote me a letter of support. He thought I was that good.