Lawrence's "Ship Of Death"

Lawrence's "Ship of Death" March 2, 2011 On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another." [full story] Please use these links when purchasing books (or anything else): Amazon Books I promised myself that, even if the world turned upside down, I must have a little fiddle, let it cost me what it would. But what was I to make a fiddle out of? Of cedar wood, of course. But it's easy to talk of cedar wood. How was I to come by it when, as everybody knows, the cedar tree grows only in Palestine? But what does the Lord do for me? He goes and puts a certain thought in my head…. —from the story "The Fiddle," by Sholem Aleichem, born on this day in 1859 John Irving was born on this day in 1942. Irving says that his most recent novel, Last Night in Twisted River (2009), was twenty years in gestation, and that Bob Dylan was its midwife. Irving never starts a novel until he has its last line, and this one came to him while listening to Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue": "I had a job in the great north woods / Working as a cook for a spell / But I never did like it all that much / And one day the axe just fell…." In Irving's novel, initially set in a New Hampshire logging camp, the axe falls several times — a logging accident, several deaths by misadventure — and the cook flees with his son, Daniel, a twelve-year-old destined to be a writer. And in this novel the last sentence Irving got from Dylan does double-duty, in that it is also Irving's first sentence, because in the last paragraphs of Last Night in Twisted River Daniel discovers it as the first sentence of his new, autobiographical novel, which is the story we have been reading: Just then, without even thinking of it … the first sentence came to him. The writer felt it rising into view, as if from underwater; the sentence came into sight the way that apple-juice jar with his dad's ashes had bobbed to the surface, just before Ketchum shot it. "The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hestitated too long." Oh, God—here I go again—I'm starting! The writer thought. He'd lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels—how they simply couldn't be stopped. He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning—as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River. The critics are divided about Irving's book. Some find the 600 pages full of Dickensian plotting, with "vintage Irving motifs" and an "exuberance of detail"; others find "loose and baggy" storytelling, those vintage motifs (bears, tragic accidents, older woman-young man sex…) now all too familiar. I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept. The quotation is from a letter written on New Year's Eve, 1769 by Horace Walpole, who died on this day in 1797; "The Sorrowful Heraclitus" and "The Cheerful Democritus" are by Charles Coypel (1694-1752).

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