Book # 36

The Best of My Life

An Anthology of Memories

Edited by Judith Leet

This book contains excerpts from the autobiographies of famous persons. 

The lives recalled are:

James Thurber, Agatha Christie, Russell Baker, David Niven, Ben Franklin, Arthur Rubinstein, Mary McCarthy, Margaret Mead, Gloria Vanderbuilt, Anne Frank, N. Scott Momaday, Patricia Hong Kingston, John Waters, Eudora Welty, Henry Adams, William Nolan, Richard Fenyman, Clyde Beatty, Marion "Clover" Adams, Hellen Keller, Malcolm X, Thomas Merton, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass, Lillian Hellman, Shirley MacLaine, Irene Mayer Selznick, Henry David Thoreau, May Sarton, E.B.White, John Ciardi, Golda Meir, Victor Frankl, John Montgomery, Mary Heaton Vorse, Bertrand Russell.

I thought that I enjoyed reading autobiographies, but while reading this anthology, I found that I don't enjoy reading ALL autobiographies, but there were several of these I liked very much.  I will mention a few. 

Agatha Christie was born in 1890, at the end of what would be called the Victorian Age. She spoke at length about the "great Victorian Christmas feasts" of her childhood., which had me alternating between envy and nausea. But what I really liked were her thoughts about work and of the position of women. She wrote, "There seems to me to be an odd assumption that there is something meritorious about working. Why? In early times man went out to hunt animals in order to feed himself and keep alive. Later, he toiled over crops, and sowed and ploughed for the same reason. Nowadays, he rises early, catches the 8:15, and sits in an office all day-- still for the same reason. He does it to feed himself and have a roof over his head-- and if skilled and lucky, to go a bit further and have comfort and entertainment as well. It's economic and necessary. But why is it meritorious? The old nursery adage used to be "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." Presumably little Georgie Stephenson  (inventor and engineer  of steam engines) was enjoying idleness when he observed his mother's tea kettle lid rising and falling. Having nothing at the moment to do, he began to have ideas about it. I don't think necessity is the mother of invention -- invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. That is the big secret that has brought is down the ages hundreds of thousands of years, from chipping flints to switching on the washing-up machine."

What she said about the position of women made me laugh out loud.  I don't necessarily agree with all she wrote, but she does make a point. "The position of women, over the years, has definitely changed for the worse. We women have behaved like mugs. We have clamored to be allowed to work as men work. Men, not being fools, have taken kindly to the idea. Why support a wife? What's wrong with a wife supporting herself? She wants to do it. By golly, she can go on doing it!....You've got to hand it to Victorian women, they got their menfolk where they wanted them. They established their frailty, delicacy, sensibility -- their constant need of being protected and cherished. Did they lead miserable, servile lives, downtrodden and oppressed? Such is not my recollection of them. All my grandmother's friends seem to me in retrospect singularly resilient and almost invariably successful in getting there own way. They were tough, self willed, and remarkably well read and well informed....In daily life a woman got her own way while paying due lip service to male superiority, so that her husband should not lose face. "your father knows best, dear," was the public formula. The real approach came privately. "I'm sure you are quite right in what you said John, but I wonder if you have considered..." 

The last thing she said  that I liked was "It is astonishing how much you can enjoy almost everything. There are few things more desirable that to be an accepter and an enjoyer." Seems like a simplistic statement, but think about it.... Who do we prefer to be around? Someone who is cheerful and accepts any  life situation they are in, and accepts YOU as well? Or someone who is whiny and complains about everything they encounter? We don't like being around the whiner, but we often don't hesitate or even hear ourselves being the whiner. Thou shalt not whine is one of my 2012 resolutions. I want to be an enjoyer and accepter.

The other entry that I particularly enjoyed was about Russell Baker, a prize winning New York Times writer and humorist. He wrote about how his father died when he was 7 and how his widowed mother struggled to make something out of him. She forced him to sell magazines door to door. He hated sales. "Three years in that job...produced at least one valuable result. My mother finally concluded that I would never make something of myself by pursuing a life in business and started considering careers that demanded less competitive zeal. One evening when I was eleven, I brought home a short composition on my summer vacation which the teacher had graded with an A. Reading it with her own school teachers eye, my mother agreed that it was top-drawer seventh grade prose and complimented me...."Buddy, she said, maybe you could be a writer". I clasped the idea to my heart....I loved stories and thought that making up stories must surely be almost as much fun as reading them. Best of all, though, and what really gladdened my heart, was the ease of the writer's life. Writers did not have to trudge through the town peddling from canvas bags, defending themselves against angry dogs, being rejected by surly strangers. Writers did not have to ring doorbells. So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work. I was enchanted. Writers didn't have to have any gumption at all....I decided that what I'd like to be when I grew up was a writer."

I found the story of Shirley MacLaine's rise to fame pretty interesting. She came from a dull, uninspiring, middle class family in Virginia. Because of weak ankles as a child, her mother signed her up for ballet. She excelled and I was impressed by her self motivation. She would go to rehearsals after school, which would last until midnight. She would take the hour and a half bus ride home, walk to a dark house, where she usually ate a dinner of saltine crackers smothered in ketchup and Tabasco, and drink a quart of ginger ale. She'd get to bed by 2am, and was up again at 6:30 for school. Her story of going from amateur ballerina to famous film star is pretty amazing.

The most amazing story to me was of Malcolm X. He was an underworld street hustler serving a ten-year prison sentence for burglary. While in prison he became converted to the black Muslim faith led by Elijah Muhammad. He wrote, "I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there, I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn't articulate, I wasn't even functional." So he began to teach himself by reading the dictionary. He would read and copy word for word a page of the dictionary, and then read aloud everything he'd written. The next day, he would see how much he could remember, and review the words whose meanings he didn't remember. As his vocabulary grew, he began to read in every spare moment he had. He said that he would get annoyed when lights out at 10pm came along, but would continue reading in the dim glow of a light in the corridor. He would have to jump into bed and feign sleep every time a guard came by. He said that he slept only 3 or 4 hours a night. Now that is impressive dedication!

The last one I will mention was written by John Ciardi. He was an author of poetry and children's books and was the poetry editor of the Saturday Review. He wrote an essay titled "What is Happiness?"  He wrote, "The forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy our desires but to create them - and to create them faster than any man's budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability....Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the founding fathers declared for us as an inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness... A nation is not measured by what is possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become." The essay is very good but very long, so I only shared a tidbit.

OH, there is just one more...by Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel 1969 to 1974. In 1971, she visited the grade school that she attended as a child in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She spoke to the school children and this was one of the things that she said, "It isn't really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live."

Until Next Time :o)