The Writer's Almanac for August 11, 2019 - Garrison Keillor

The Writer’s Almanac for August 11, 2019

Shady Grove
by Anonymous

Shady grove, my true love,
Shady grove I know,
Shady grove, my true love,
I’m bound for the shady grove.

Peaches in the summertime,
Apples in the fall,
If I can’t get the girl I love,
Won’t have none at all.

Wish I had a banjo string,
Made of golden twine,
And every tune I’d pick on it—
Is ‘I wish that girl was mine.’

Some come here to fiddle en dance,
Some come here to tarry,
Some come here to fiddle en dance,
I come here to marry.

Shady grove, my little love,
Shady grove, my darlin’,
Shady grove, my little love
Goin’ back to Harlan.

Fly around, my blue-eyed girl,
Fly around, my daisy,
Fly around, my blue-eyed girl,
Nearly drive me crazy.

“Shady Grove” by Anonymous.

It’s the birthday of playwright Fernando Arrabal (books by this author), born in Melilla, Spanish Morocco (1932). He became known writing plays of “theater of the absurd” style, and also for ones of an abstract style he developed and called “panic art” — the most famous example of which is his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967), in which the characters on stage exchange personalities as the performance progresses.

It’s the birthday of short-story writer Andre Dubus (books by this author), born in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1936). He wrote stories about regular people like bartenders, mechanics, and waitresses in collections such as The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989) and Dancing After Hours (1996). He said, “We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.”

It’s the birthday of playwright David Henry Hwang (books by this author), born in Los Angeles, California (1957). His father was an immigrant to the United States from Shanghai, his mother was an ethnic Chinese who grew up in the Philippines. His best-known play is M. Butterfly (1988), based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a long affair with a Chinese actress who was later revealed to be a man in drag.

Today is the birthday of Alex Haley (books by this author), born in Ithaca, New York (1921). He grew up in Tennessee, and often listened to his mother’s family tell stories of their slave forebears.

Haley was Chief Journalist of the Coast Guard, a position he held until he retired in 1959. After that, he went to work doing interviews for Playboy magazine. He interviewed Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. The interview with Malcolm X would turn into Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). It is one of the most-read books in the world and is a classic of African-American literature.

Inspired by the oral histories of his relatives, Haley began researching his genealogy in the late 1960s. He traced his family back to Gambia, where he interviewed tribal historians. It took him more than 10 years of international travel, interviews with tribal members in Gambia, and endless writing on long yellow legal tablets, but in 1976, his book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published. A mixture of fact and fiction, Roots covered seven generations of Haley’s family, from an 18th-century slave named Kunta Kinte down to the author himself.

Roots was adapted into a 12-hour television miniseries, and more than 130 million people tuned in to watch it.

It’s the birthday of American poet and critic Louise Bogan (books by this author). Bogan. W.H. Auden thought she was the best critic of poetry in America and gave the eulogy at her funeral.

Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine (1897). As an adult, she lived in Vienna for three years and then moved to New York City, where she fell in with fellow writers William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson. She worked in a bookstore with Margaret Mead, who would later find fame as a cultural anthropologist. It was Wilson who suggested she start writing reviews to make money. Her reviews were terse, astute, and sometimes very funny. About poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, she said: “They will never surprise anyone again…They are half-dead already.” She became the poetry editor of The New Yorker in 1931.

She was intensely private and most of her friends didn’t even know she had a daughter from her first marriage. In the 1930s, she had a brief, raucous affair with the poet Theodore Roethke. In a letter to a friend, she wrote: “I, myself, have been made to bloom like a Persian rose-bush, by the enormous love-making of a cross between a Brandenburger and a Pomeranian, one Theodore Roethke by name. He is very, very large (6 ft. 2 and weighing 218 lbs.) and he writes very, very small lyrics…We have poured rivers of liquor down our throats, these last three days, and, in between, have indulged in such bearish and St. Bernardish antics as I have never before experienced. … I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling about.” They remained dear friends after the affair ended.

Bogan’s New Yorker reviews are collected in the book A Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation (1970).