Writers

If I didn't have a tin ear I would be playing a banjo all the time. But alas, when it comes to pitch, I am equipped as U. S. Grant was. We have none. He said he could recognize only two tunes--"Yankee Doodle" and everything else. I am a bit better off than that, but not by much. When I start singing in the car, Kathleen turns up the radio.

So I try to make my music with words. And when I write history I try to write an entirely factual narrative--as factual as the sources permit--but make it read like fiction. Don't ask me how that is done. I have no idea. It is with writing a good narrative as Somerset Maugham said it was with writing a novel. There are three basic rules to writing a novel, Maugham said. Only three. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

I know great writing when I read it. And my favorite three writers down the years have been Shakespeare, the greatest in the English language, Ambrose Bierce the maddeningly clever 19th century satirist, and Abraham Lincoln, whose picture we all carry around with us in our wallets and purses on our $5 bills. Shakespeare in my book of greats is the greatest who ever put quill to paper. I have no idea how he could be so greatly eloquent and poetic so all the time--in nearly every line of every play.

As for Bierce, how can anybody resist his Devil's Dictionary and its wild definitions? Who else would think to define alone as "being in bad company," or noise as "the chief product of civilization," or a clarinet as "an instrument of torture played by a person with cotton in his ears," or an accordian as "an instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."
(Which reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about bagpipes: "Thank God they don't smell.")

As for Lincoln, no president has ever written better than that self-taught hick from the sticks. I cry whenever I read, "We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature."

Or these words by that great man who was himself touched by those better angels: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

And on and on. And to think those guys wrote it all themselves, without ghost writers, speech writers, or research assistants.