Goods
by Wendell Berry

It's the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

“Goods” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. Counterpoint © 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). He won his first Pulitzer Prize when he was 30 years old for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927). In 1934, he went to a lecture by Gertrude Stein in Chicago, and he was fascinated by her. She was 60 years old and he was in his 30s, but they were both dealing with sudden success — he from Bridge of San Luis Rey and his Pulitzer, she from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He invited her to stay in his Chicago apartment during speaking tours, and despite their difference in age and writing styles, they became good friends and corresponded for the rest of Stein's life.

It was The Making of Americans (1925) — Stein's difficult, experimental, 900-page novel — that inspired Wilder's most famous play, Our Town (1938). Like The Making of Americans, it traces the intertwining lives of two families, and Wilder used his own version of modernism — the set was minimal, and the play's narrator was in direct conversation with the audience. But where The Making of Americans was a commercial failure and didn't go over well with frustrated critics, Our Town was immediately popular — it was a big Broadway success, and Wilder won another Pulitzer Prize. Our Town has become one of the most-produced American plays.

In September of 1937, he wrote to Stein: "I can no longer conceal from you that I'm writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine. Every morning brings an hour's increment to it and that's all, but I've finished two acts already. It's a little play with all the big subjects in it; and it's a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it. And when I finish it next Friday, there's another coming around the corner. Lope de Vega wrote three plays a week in his thirties and four plays a week in his forties and so I let these come as they like. This play is an immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's called Our Town and its third act is based on your ideas, as on great pillars, and whether you know it or not, until further notice, you're in a deep-knit collaboration already."

It's the birthday of fiction writer Cynthia Ozick (books by this author), born in New York City (1928). For years, she wrote full time, supported by her husband, but didn't publish anything. She was working on a huge novel called Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, which she called "MPPL" or "Mippel," and which she never finished. She said: "I had a youthful arrogance about my 'powers,' and at the same time a terrible feeling of humiliation, of total shame and defeat. When I think about that time — and I've spent each decade as it comes regretting the decade before, it seems — I wish I had done what I see the current generation doing: I wish I had scurried around for reviews to do, for articles to write. I wish I had written short stories. I wish I had not been sunk in an immense dream of immense achievement. For most of this time, I was living at home in my parents' house, already married. But my outer life was unchanged from childhood. And my inner life was also unchanged. I was fixed, transfixed. It was Literature every breathing moment. I had no 'ordinary' life. I despised ordinary life; I had contempt for it. What a meshuggener!"

She did publish a few poems, and an agent saw her short biography statement in the back of a poetry magazine and read that she was working on a novel. So he contacted her and ended up finding a publisher for it. When she was 37 years old, she published her first novel, Trust (1966). Later, she said about Trust: "Nobody has ever read it. If someone will give me some real proof that he has made it from the first page to the last I will have a gold medal struck." But it started her literary career, and from there she turned to short stories. Her story collections include The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1989), and Collected Stories (2007). Foreign Bodies (2010) was a loose retelling of The Ambassadors by her literary hero, Henry James. Her most recent work was the essay collection Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016).

It's the birthday of novelist Nick Hornby (books by this author), born in Maidenhead, England (1957). He wrote Fever Pitch (1992) at a time when football fans were generally looked down upon by the British upper class. He also wrote High Fidelity (1995), the story of an obsessive record collector and record store owner who copes with the failures of his life by creating numerous lists: his top five favorite albums, top five TV shows, top five ex-girlfriends, and so on. The book was made into a movie in 2000, and a Hulu TV show earlier this year.

According to legend, it was on this day in 1397 that Geoffrey Chaucer (books by this author) recited The Canterbury Tales to the court of Richard II. Although there is no evidence that this actually happened, it is easy to imagine the scene, in part because of a famous painting of Chaucer reciting his poetry to the court, painted in the early 15th century. The prologue of Canterbury Tales opens with the famous lines:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthein sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous examples of Middle English. Translated into modern English, it's something like:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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