| Winter Twilight
by Anne Porter
On a clear winter's evening
The crescent moon
And the round squirrels' nest
In the bare oak
Are equal planets.
Anne Porter, "Winter Twilight" from Living Things. © 2006 Zoland Books. (buy now) It was on this day in 1848 that the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin played his final concert in his adopted city of Paris. Chopin only performed about 30 concerts during his lifetime; he wrote to his friend, the composer Franz Liszt, “I am not at all fit for giving concerts, for the crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me, I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb.” But his audiences loved his performances. A reviewer for a French music journal wrote, “Listen to Chopin play! It is like the sighing of a flower, the whisper of the clouds, or the murmur of the stars.” For this Paris concert, Chopin insisted that there would be no publicity and limited the venue to 300 people, mostly friends and acquaintances. He played at the same venue where he had played his first Paris concert 16 years earlier: Salle Pleyel, the concert hall owned by Camille Pleyel, one of the best piano makers in Europe. A week before the concert Chopin wrote to his family: “Pleyel always makes fun of my folly and to encourage me to give the concert is decking the steps with flowers. I shall be like in heaven, and only familiar faces will meet my eyes.” The concert went off without a hitch. There were candles in the windows and flowers everywhere. Chopin played études, waltzes, preludes, mazurkas, and his Barcarolle and Berceuse. He brought in a cellist and violinist to play his Cello Concerto in G Minor and a trio by Mozart, and a soprano and tenor sang a few pieces. The audience loved it and the reviews were flattering. Less than a week later, the Revolution of 1848 broke out in France; the music world was disrupted and he lost his main source of income when his aristocratic pupils fled the city. One of Chopin’s Scottish pupils convinced him to take a tour of Britain. His last public appearance was in London in November. When he returned to France he weighed less than 90 pounds, and he died of tuberculosis the following year at the age of 39. His funeral was a huge event; one of the pallbearers was Camille Pleyel. It’s the birthday of the printer Giambattista Bodoni, born in Saluzzo, Italy (1740). He came from a family of engravers, and by the time he died, he had opened his own publishing house that reprinted classical texts and he had personally designed almost 300 typefaces. His typeface Bodoni is still available on almost any word processing program. He said, “The letters don’t get their true delight, when done in haste and discomfort, nor merely done with diligence and pain, but first when they are created with love and passion.” It’s the birthday of Henry Adams (books by this author), born in Boston (1838). His grandfather was John Quincy Adams and his great-grandfather was John Adams. He wasn’t too thrilled about coming from such a prominent family, but he was encouraged to follow in the footsteps of his father, who was a lawyer, historian, and Massachusetts legislator. Like the three generations before him, he went to Harvard and then to law school. Then, as John Adams had done for his son, John Quincy Adams, Henry’s father, offered his son a position as his private secretary. Years later Adams wrote about himself in the third person in The Education of Henry Adams: “As for Henry Adams, fresh from Europe and chaos of another sort, he plunged at once into a lurid atmosphere of politics, quite heedless of any education or forethought. His past melted away. The prodigal was welcomed home, but not even his father asked a malicious question about the Pandects. At the utmost, he hinted at some shade of prodigality by quietly inviting his son to act as private secretary during the winter in Washington, as though any young man who could afford to throw away two winters on the Civil Law could afford to read Blackstone for another winter without a master. The young man was beyond satire, and asked only a pretext for throwing all education to the east wind. [...] Of all the crowd swarming in Washington that winter, young Adams was surely among the most ignorant and helpless, but he saw plainly that the knowledge possessed by everybody about him was hardly greater than his own. Never in a long life did he seek to master a lesson so obscure. Mr. Sumner was given to saying after Oxenstiern: — ‘Quantula sapientia mundus regitur!’ Oxenstiern talked of a world that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. [...] He had little to do, and knew not how to do it rightly, but he knew of no one who knew more.” He served as his father’s private secretary for seven years, accompanying him to England after Abraham Lincoln appointed the senior Adams as a diplomat. When Henry came back, he decided that, despite his father’s wishes, he did not want to go into politics. Instead, he became a political journalist and wrote smart and sometimes nasty political editorials. He particularly disliked Ulysses S. Grant, whom he described as “pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.” He became increasingly more frustrated with political life and decided to be a historian instead. His books included a nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison and biographies of George Cabot Lodge and Albert Gallatin. But he is best known for his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams. It’s the birthday of a novelist who said: “For me to do well at anything, I have to work harder than other people.” That’s Richard Ford (books by this author), born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). His father was a traveling salesman who left the house whistling on Monday mornings and returned the same way on Fridays, and Ford said his father’s whistling inspired in him the sense that work was something good and satisfying. When he was 16, his father died of a heart attack and Ford was sent to live with his grandparents, who ran a hotel in Arkansas. He said, “When you live in a hotel, you’re excluded from almost everything that goes on there. So I understood that in people’s lives, there was always an interior, private part [...] It made private lives — secret lives — seem very dramatic and attractive to me.” As a teenager Ford wasn’t particularly interested in writing. He was an average student who struggled with dyslexia, and he went off to Michigan State to study hotel administration. After a semester he switched to literature. He said, “When I read Absalom, Absalom! — the first novel I ever read — it just took me over. In a way, it left me with a reverence for literature which does not require an encyclopedic knowledge. I read what I read really closely. People always know more than I do, but what I know I know.” At Michigan State he fell in love with a fellow student named Kristina and the two were married in 1968. Ford went on to get his MFA and in 1976 he published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, set in the South. He was offered a tenure-track teaching job at the University of Michigan but his wife convinced him to turn it down and pursue his writing instead. She offered to earn enough money for both of them. He took her up on her offer and wrote a second novel, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). After his two books together only sold about 12,000 copies, he figured that he had tried and failed at being a novelist so he went to work as a sportswriter for Inside Sports. A year later the magazine folded; Ford applied to Sports Illustrated but they turned him down. He had committed himself to a career as a sportswriter but now, unsure what else to do with himself, he turned back to fiction. His wife suggested that he try writing about someone who was happy for a change. He said: “She’s a quite happy person by nature, and it might’ve been that she thought I’d find a wider audience if I stopped writing about dark souls and dark fates. In retrospect, I’d say she was right.” Since he himself had enjoyed life as a sportswriter, he made his new character a sportswriter named Frank Bascombe living in New Jersey, where he and Kristina had spent the past few years. He said, “I thought, well, nobody writes happy things about New Jersey. Nobody writes good things about New Jersey at all. And I thought, well, maybe that would be the thing to do.” The Sportswriter (1986) was a big success, and he ended up writing three more celebrated books featuring Frank Bascombe: Independence Day (1995), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land (2006); and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). His other books include Rock Springs (1987), Wildlife (1990), and most recently Sorry for Your Trouble (2020). He said, “I always think that if Frank and I agree on anything, I’m probably not doing my job well enough. I believe that a piece of imaginative work is better when it bears the least resemblance to its maker.” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 