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While pitching the Travis McGee series to a friend via email, which was prompted by my paraphrasing Meyer's belief that the written word was the best way to convey complex ideas (said email and this blog not necessarily included), I had to look up a factoid (guess where I went) and while browsing the page came across something I'd never heard of before:
Unknown to most followers of McGee, the Library of Congress's "Center for the Book" commissioned a short work by MacDonald. He responded with an essay entitled "Reading for Survival", which is a conversation between McGee and Meyer on the importance of reading. The 26-page essay was released in a limited edition of 5,000 copies and was available for a small contribution to the Center for the Book.
To those of you searching for last minute gift ideas: hint, hint.
Anyway, I had a fantasy that I could find this online somewhere (my inner wingnut wants to say SINCE MY TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR IT). I haven't come across the full text yet, but I did find some excerpts posted on the Rambles and Byways web site. Which, of course, I shamelessly CTRL-Ced and now shamelessly CTRL-V SINCE MY TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR IT:
"The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the one born every minute. The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him. And so, out of pure emptiness, he will eagerly embrace spiritualism, yoga, a banana diet, or some callous frippery like Dianetics..."
"Here in America, as elsewhere, there will always be tremulous little people of dim intellect and hyperactive imagination, burning for explanations to all life's vicissitudes. They grow impatient with learned analyses of the present. They are defeated by histories that illuminate the past. No species of scholarship or analysis could ever satisfy them; for they need that Wondrous Explanation that will quiet all their fears, thrill them with villains to revile, and never tax their feeble powers of intellection."
"The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled "The True Believer". Hoffer's theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong."
"My point is that the man who reads is using the fabulous memory storage and relationship analysis of the brain his ancestors developed eons ago. He is facilitating his survival in the contemporary world. He will recognize the pockets of fanaticism around him and know what is causing these universal foci of dementia. Of course, he will be called an egghead or a bleeding heart or a secular humanist, but he can lean back and, in a certain way, enjoy the marvelously crackpot rantings of a Jesse Helms, a Botha, a Meese, a Kohmeni, a Falwell, a Qaddafi, a Gorbachev, an Ortega, a Noriega----people from both ends of every spectrum, whooping and leaping and frothing, absolutely livid at the idea their particular warped vision of reality is not shared by everyone. Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept."
Awesome.
Thanks, Internet!
I forget, did I say this already? Hint, hint.
3 comments:
I will note (as a person who was a mad fan of Travis McGee back in the day and still has many of the books on my bookshelf) that I don't find that MacDonald stands the test of time. That preacherliness (if I may), in many ways similar to that of Robert Heinlein, is for a different time and place, I think.
As a one time fan who still has all the McGee novels on the shelf, I have to agree, Don. But it's really the plots and zeitgeist that have changed over time. Travis' view that the solution to every woman's problem is a good lay by a sensitive male such as Travis doesn't resonate today. What does stand the test of time is that MacDonald was a master at characterization. I can still bring to mind most of the villains and many other characters in the novels from 40 years ago. With Erle Stanley Garner's Perry Mason books I can't think of a single villain or any other characters except Della and Paul today. Same with Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder series. Those are still being written and are more recent than the MacDonald books, but I can only bring to mind a character here and there from them.
Travis was kind of a good 'ol southern Boy and the resolution to most of the books was a violent fight or shoot out. There might be some clever twists along the way, but in the end you had to have a showdown with force. That got kind of old for me as I got older, but it's still standard fare for a lot of movies and TV. Still the MacDonald books put you back in the head space of the time when they were written as the Jjames Bond books put you back in the cold war days of the 50s and the Perry Mason books put you back in the head space of the 1930s when they were written, and there's a certain enjoyment in re-living those times in your head.
Don:
I can see your point, but I guess I am able to transpose for the change in time in my head for the parts where JDM was speaking with a voice of a different era. I also think lots of his observations, in fact, do stand up. The excerpt in this post, though not from a Travis McGee book, has the same tone as a lot of McGee's and Meyer's observations -- hard-headed, clear-eyed, impatient with quick fixes and the latest fad, and the hucksters who try to push them. And I will always give him props for being waaaaay ahead of the curve on the ruining of Florida by real estate slimes and the politicians they owned.
Maybe I don't mind his "preaching" because I'm squarely in his choir. The same probably applies for Heinlein -- I still like all the books by him that I ever liked. Both could go a little farther than I'd go in some cases, but I still agree with most of what both had to say.
I also think JDM's prose and dialog stands up, as does his eye for timeless human foibles. He's skeptical without being overly cynical. His minor characters are instantly believable. Whoops. I see TC just said that.
TC:
I take your points, too. I won't argue against the "good lay solution," since I agree with that. As to the violence -- matter of taste, so no point in arguing there.
That's an interesting observation about the Scudder books. As much as I like them, you're right: it's hard to think of a lot of memorable characters. Elaine, of course, and TJ. And certainly Mick Ballou. And that pimp who turned into an art dealer. And, um, his old cop partner, and his AA sponsor. And that other guy in that other book.
But yeah, there's probably at least 25 characters I could rattle off from the McGee books.
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