Dust
by Danusha Laméris

It covers everything, fine powder,
the earth’s gold breath falling softly
on the dark wood dresser, blue ceramic bowls,
picture frames on the wall. It wafts up
from canyons, carried on the wind,
on the wings of birds, in the rough fur of animals
as they rise from the ground. Sometimes it’s copper,
sometimes dark as ink. In great storms,
it even crosses the sea. Once
when my grandmother was a girl,
a strong gale lifted red dust from Africa
and took it thousands of miles away
to the Caribbean where people swept it
from their doorsteps, kept it in small jars,
reminder of that other home.
Gandhi said, “The seeker after truth
should be humbler than the dust.”
Wherever we go, it follows.
I take a damp cloth, swipe the windowsills,
the lamp’s taut shade, run a finger
over the dining room table.
And still, it returns, settling in the gaps
between the floorboards, gilding the edges
of unread books. What could be more loyal,
more lonely, and unsung?


"Dust" from Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris, © 2020. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of American editor and biographer Justin Kaplan (books by this author), born in Manhattan, New York City (1925). Kaplan is best known for biographies of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Lincoln Steffens.

Both of Kaplan’s parents died of cancer by the time he was 13. He was raised by his older brother, an aunt, and the family’s West Indies housekeeper, who taught Kaplan to cook. Kaplan was an unusually bright boy who read Tolstoy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and the diaries of Samuel Pepys. He was admitted to Harvard University at 16. After graduating, he took a position as an editor at Simon & Schuster, which he called a kind of “summer camp for intellectually hyperactive children.”

In 1959, he went to see actor Hal Holbrook’s legendary performance as Mark Twain and became obsessed, reading everything by and about Twain. He presented a 10-page proposal and even wrote his own contract to his bosses at Simon & Schuster, who promptly gave him a $5,000 advance. He once said, “Biography emulates the imaginative world of the great 19th-century novels,” so he decided to organize Twain’s life like a novel. Instead of ordering the narrative chronologically, like most biographies, he began when Twain was 31. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for biography (1967).

Kaplan was also tapped to be the editor for the 16th (1993) and 17th (2003) editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which he set about modernizing by including four-letter words, women and minorities, rock lyrics, and more. He didn’t have the stomach for whimsy, saying, “I don’t care for withered flowers of poesy.” He was especially proud of adding a quote by soul singer James Brown: “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.”

Kaplan’s books include Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), and When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (2006).

About Mark Twain, he said: “It is too easy to sentimentalize him as the foxy grandpa of American letters, the author of wholesome books for the young. Twain was a man with an extremely dark imagination and a low threshold of annoyance.”

Kaplan died in 2014 from complications of Parkinson's disease.

On this day in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road was published by Viking Press. The Beat Generation classic was based on road trips Kerouac made with his friend Neal Cassady in the late 1940s. Kerouac started writing the novel on April 12, 1951, and finished on April 22. He taped together sheets of tracing paper to create a 120-foot-long scroll.

Jack Kerouac wrote: “In America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it [...] and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

It’s the birthday of American writer Ward Just (1935) (books by this author), born in Michigan City, Indiana. He is best known for his novels Echo House (1997), An Unfinished Season (2004), and American Romantic (2014), which explore the influence of politics on personal lives. Just was born into journalism: his grandfather, and then his father, published the Waukegan News-Sun in Illinois, and Just began his own career as a journalist for that newspaper. He later became a correspondent for Newsweek and served as the Washington Post’s point man in Vietnam.

Just said, “I had always had a novel in my bottom drawer, the way all newspaper reporters of my generation did.” He attempted to write a novel in the early 1960s, but quit because he felt he didn’t know enough about life. He said: “I think there are great natural geniuses who don’t have to know anything — it’s all in their head. I’m not that way. I have to see things. After I got back from Vietnam, I believed that I really knew quite a lot.”

In 1966, Just was seriously wounded by a grenade while covering a patrol in the Central Highlands. He refused to be airlifted out until all the enlisted men who were similarly wounded were airlifted to safety. He was 31 years old, embedded and entrenched in a war that he found increasingly morally wrong. Vietnam turned him from fact to fiction. He said, “It was an absolute wilderness of mirrors out there.” After he left Vietnam, he published a well-regarded memoir, To What End: Report from Vietnam, about his 18 months as a Vietnam war correspondent for the Washington Post.

On war writing, he said: “You could write stories without going to the front. The trouble is, they wouldn’t be very good stories. You had to see how the thing was done. You couldn’t get that out of a five o’clock briefing.”

His first four novels “came hard” and made little money, until his collection The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert: And Other Washington Stories (1973) changed everything. Just had found his subject and his style, capturing the syntax of Washington, D.C., and the delicate mechanics of politics, beginning a long series of works that became known as the “Washington Novels.” Just’s deft portrayal of Washington is exemplified by Sylvia Behl’s monologue on how scandals begin, in Echo House:

“[...] a leak of the purest spring water [...] as it meandered downhill it gathered force, joined here and there by other springs [...] less pristine [...] leak to freshet, freshet to torrent, carving an ever-deeper channel and at last slipping its banks, muddy now and eddying, thick with debris, a furious Amazon of rumor and speculation and innuendo — and at about that point it overflowed into the newspapers.”

Ward Just died in December of last year.

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

^