Advertisements for Myself

   While I filch Norman Mailer’s title, I should really change the plural to the singular, since I have only a single theme in mind: my recent Kindle book, A Sailor Writes Home from His Time in the U.S. Navy: Letters of 1945-1946, Aftermath of World War II. As I mention in its introduction, I discovered those letters quite recently when I finally looked into a box that I had taken home from my mother’s apartment after she passed away. My father, a super-orderly person, had collected the letters I had written home from my year in the Navy and carefully preserved them in temporal order. He never told me that he had done this.

   I was delighted to find those letters, only occasionally typed, so, with some help, put them into canonical Word form and, with a few illustrations, brought them out as a Kindle book, now available on Amazon¹. People who have dipped into my blog now and then are probably aware of all that.

   During the time between my discovery of the letters and the collection’s publication, I read them of course. But not really. I read them with a view to putting them into a book—to see what translation was needed, since chunks were written in German, to determine where identifying notes were called for, and the like. I did not really read them just for what they were, not to mention think about them or evaluate them as examples of prose.

   After the book was out, my friend David Brown suggested that I select some of the letters and follow up with brief accounts as to what happened to topics raised in 1954-46 in the years afterwards. To implement that idea, I read quite a few of the letters for the first time carefully. Somewhat to my surprise, that led me to gain considerable respect for those epistles, noting how varied were the topics taken up and especially about the quality of the prose of a kid just out of high school. I even wondered whether more might have been made of them had the set come out just after the end of the war, instead of as relics nearly seventy years later.

   What, in a way, I found out is that I already brought something to the writing courses I took in college. Besides taking the not-very-memorable required writing course from a not-remembered instructor, I signed up for an elective taught by Professor Quentin Anderson, then just an assistant professor. We had to write an essay every week, not a long one, on a topic of our own choosing. Anderson’s comments were often quite cryptic, pronounced in a basso profundo voice while he looked out of the window to his left rather than at our small class. You might say that Quentin didn’t teach us anything. Nevertheless, I think I learned a lot that semester, just in writing those weekly essays. That course was also my first conscious experience that you learn to write by writing, a message I have preached in my later role as teacher, together with the strong advice to think of several drafts of anything that matters—a maneuver greatly facilitated by the computer.

   As a college senior I took a seminar with Jacques Barzun on fin de siècle history that called for writing two major papers. I profited a lot from Jacques’ comments, quite a few of which were very practical writing suggestions. But I benefited even more from the fact that he arranged to get one of those seminar papers published, giving me my first publication!

   Now in my old age, I am prepared to say that writing is the only one of the activities that  I have been engaged in that I would claim to do at a professional level, and that just limited to expository prose. My computer contains more than one sketch on what it is to be an amateur. I have wanted to become clearer on that subject because I think of myself to be an amateur or if you prefer the less favorable label, a dilettante. I’ve been an amateur woodworker, especially in turning a great many bowls, trays, and candlesticks on the lathe; that activity was later transformed into a quite extensive career as a wood sculptor; I was an amateur art collector that led to a collections of prints by sculptors, an amateur musician as a member of quite a few choruses. I’m also inclined to say that I have been an amateur philosopher, since, in spite of my a doctorate in that subject, I did not exactly earn it—a long story. You might also include my role as academic administrator; fair enough. But I shudder when I think of what a professional administrator would be.

   So maybe I should stop claiming that I am a professional writer and just assert that I am a proficient member of the species of writers.