More on the ephemera of fame

I was in a bougie furniture story in Denver yesterday, looking at bookcases with my wife, who soon found herself annoyed by my spectrumesque tendency to fail to focus on the bookcases because I was so fascinated by the books inside of them.

What was fascinating to me was that I didn’t recognize any of them — and not only the titles, but the authors: hundreds and hundreds of instances of cultural production that hundreds of intensely literary people had sweated blood and poured their souls into, and here I was, an intensely literary person, relatively speaking anyway, a few decades later, and I hadn’t heard of any of their works, let alone read a word. One title in particular for whatever reason gave me a particularly melancholy feeling: It was something like Stories From the Saturday Evening Post 1949. Yes I know the Saturday Evening Post was once a huge deal; I’m not as I already noted illiterate. But to me it and everything and everyone in it is barely a name, that reminds me vaguely of a T.S. Eliot poem about somebody reading the ephemeral evening newspaper. Howard Kurtz — he dead. (Not really but I’m looking forward to Erik’s obit).

Ah what am I talking about here again? I messed around with some best seller lists for five minutes and check this out (one of a zillion possible examples): The Number One non-fiction book on the New York Times best-seller list for every week of the entire first seven months of 1965 — I was in kindergarten so this isn’t about literature in Carthage or something — was . . .

This.

Now the striking thing here is that the author is or rather was a Famous Person, who I could readily identify although it would take me many attempts to spell his name correctly. (Side note: it’s hard to remember these days that the United Nations, and being Secretary General of it, seemed like a vastly bigger deal back then than it is today. An actual Supreme Court justice of the United States resigned to become the country’s ambassador to it. Can you imagine?) Anyway I had no idea he had written this Extremely Famous Book, a classic of spiritual literature per Wikipedia so you know it must be true, which in addition was published under fascinating circumstances (manuscript found after his untimely and tragic death, with a note to his executor to publish it posthumously).

That’s a great story, and maybe this book has actually been some sort of life-changing or at least influencing text for seven LGM commenters, and I’m just a semi-literate barbarian despite my literary pretensions, but . . .

And this all made me thing of Scott Joplin and The Sting, and how I know at least a tiny bit about Scott Joplin’s music because of that movie, which I saw in the theater 53 years ago now, which means that the distance between now and The Sting is nearly as great as that between The Sting and Scott Joplin, and of how many Scott Joplins there are that I’ve never heard of because there wasn’t a movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford featuring their music, and how many Paul Newmans and Robert Redfords there were who never got that break, and . . .

As always:

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.