Sometimes you wake up and say to yourself, “I want to be someone else now.” After two weeks in a rental cottage on Cape Cod, I wanted to walk away from the noise, but so much of it was coming from me, that I wasn’t sure how to put any distance between me and . . . me.

I can’t imagine this is an uncommon feeling; most folks must get the notion at some time or other. After all, you’ve probably been the same person in and out for years, and it’s been “all right,” but things fall a certain way one particular morning, and it just hits you: Fail.

The other day, we visited Edward Gorey’s house on Strawberry Lane in Yarmouth Port. Behind a plexiglass wall stands a headless mannequin wearing an outfit that Gorey used to wear — a beaver great coat, a mustard-toned cotton sweater, a necklace (he often devised his own from found objects), sneakers, and, if I recall, a loud wool scarf. Our docent explained that he wore something of the sort around the town and around the city, the big city. Regardless of any intent other than personal comfort he may have had, or the knowledge that when you produce works of the hilariously macabre, you might feel you have a reputation to defend, Gorey appeared in public as an eccentric.

He often used anagrams of his name as well. On exhibit at the house is a vanity plate bearing the first name of one his most well-known aliases: Ogdred Weary. There is something about stepping apart from the self, when altering your name or when dressing up to go out. Without knowing a stitch about Gorey’s inner life, or much more than the broad contours of his outer one, he impresses me as a sad man, one whose dread and weariness are in every line of his sketches, and that no matter how many visitors he may have had, how jolly his eccentric house may have been, or how joyfully mustard his sweaters, at the end of the day he was quite alone with Ogdred.

Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.

— George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys . . .

. . . let’s mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can’t quite be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera.

The chaos doesn’t really seem to abate, or the noise to soften, or the dripping mess of stuff I dragged downstairs to organize itself, even in these dark mornings at the table, but it was Agee who best showed me exactly what you could do with words.

Laurence Bergreen’s 1984 biography is pretty good. Robert Fitzgerald’s memoir is intimate and moving. There is apparently a new biography being written by Dwight Garner (I forget where I noticed that), and we could use it. It would be splendid if Blake Bailey did Agee but you can’t have everything you want.

After wondering, when he heard of his death, why they were not better friends, John Cheever wrote in his journal:

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

Am not sure this is entirely clear to me, but maybe Cheever is trying to get at that troubling sense that Agee was not as directed a novelist as he might have been, and that the “writer’s writer” aspect Agee’s work gets a bit tangled when you introduce the reading and buying public. Maybe he’s saying that while you might have loved the work, it’s ultimate importance may not have been as deep as, say, Cheever’s own. Cheever, of course, waffled between exaltation and denigration of his talent and self, and reputations waffle too, so let’s not choose. Besides, this was before A Death in the Family was published.

So, fine . . . Happy Birthday, Jim.

They come in threes, don’t they? Tuesday (when we’ll be on the road for a whirlwind, windstorm, stormfall trip to Cape Cod, which is why the pre-post), will see the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Truman Capote.

On August 25, 1984, Truman was holed up in Joanne Carson’s house in Los Angeles, fresh from his latest breakup with Jack Dunphy, his companion of thirty years, tortured by his seeming inability to write sustained fiction after In Cold Blood appeared in 1965 (and ’66, in book form), and still the social pariah after excerpts of his brilliantly snotty tell-all (and unfinished) autobiographical novel, Answered Prayers, appeared in Esquire.

In George Plimpton’s compilation biography, Truman Capote, someone named Andreas Brown dates the writer’s first thoughts about a scathing piece against cafe society all the way back to his mother’s suicide in 1954, a full thirty years before. Capote felt that Nina’s (nee Lillie Mae) longing to be part of a society she wasn’t born into caused her to yearn beyond her means, to batter herself against the walls that wouldn’t let her in, to destroy her will.

It makes interesting speculation, that for so many years, Truman held this in him. Of course, he had dived into that same society himself when the door was swung wide after the publication of his first, and most beautiful, work, Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, so this may not hold water, but we are fascinated by even the frailest of connections.

When his friends felt betrayed by his thinly disguised characterizations in the Esquire pieces, Capote countered with something like, “Of course, I was observing you. You didn’t think I was there to entertain you, did you?” Meaning, a writer owes no allegiances. He steals, he uses, he betrays — they’re byproducts of his creative art. It’s what he does and what he is.

There is a place in Chatham called The Blue Coral. It wasn’t around when Truman was alive, nor have I come across any mention of him on this part of the Cape. Nevertheless, a glass will be raised there. The further you get from 1984, the less it seems to matter (if it ever did to the reading public at large) who felt betrayed by what. So, we’re thankful for whatever a great stylist and observer gives us.

And the title of this piece? Something he muttered to Joanne on his deathbed (as reported by Gerald Clarke); we’ll let Truman have the last word:

“Just let me go. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve decided to go to China, where there are no phones and there is no mail service.”

While the bronze plaque outside the building does not mention his name (among Faulkner, Thurber, and others), today marks the 50th anniversary of Preston Sturges’s death at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Working on his autobiography (later published as Sturges on Sturges), he paused to order cole slaw and a couple of beers from room service, consumed same, complained to his secretary of indigestion, and keeled.

It struck me the other day that ten years ago at this time, I also happened to be in the city, delivering an ill-fated comedy manuscript to Pocket Books (it died aborning) that had the inspiration of Sturges’s comedies all over it, and stopped to raise a salutary glass to old Preston in the Hotel’s Blue Bar. I did again this past Tuesday. True, it wasn’t beer (I was soon to take part in an author reception at Scholastic as part of their Summer 2010 Sales Conference, so it was club soda), and I wasn’t in the mood for a side of slaw (if they even have it on the menu), but a glass was tipped to the master, and that’s the point. The marking of an anniversary. A death becomes a celebration.

Somewhere in my notes from the 40th anniversary is the actual room number where Sturges passed away, but I can’t find it now (a couple of computers ago). I think it was on the second floor. Back in 1999, I chatted with some folks, including a doorman who was at the same post from the early 1960s on, a real gem of a find these days. But this time, I was mute.

I was alone in the dim bar with the tender and an occasional waiter delivering a drink order. No, they wouldn’t know the name; why should they? Moving out of the bar through the narrow hall, I sized up the hotel lobby, its low tables, the registration desk staffed by twenty-somethings. But I couldn’t muster the words to try to explain Sturges to them, either — try to explain who he was or why it’s significant that fifty years ago a great light blinked out right above their heads. I could have asked for the manager, true, and proselytized about the zenith of screwball comedy, but everything sank. My heart wasn’t in it. Just as his wasn’t. It failed.

Sturges was an example of the outsider who made lots of money. The main incident I find myself ever referring back to was the Ella Raines episode at Paramount. The story goes that the front office didn’t like the rushes of her performance in Hail the Conquering Hero. They wanted her off the picture. Sturges insisted Ella stay, said that taking her off the picture after she’d been announced as a lead would ruin her career. He got his way, but his career at Paramount was over. His contract wasn’t renewed, and he was out. Studio wrath. True, he made scads of dough when he moved to Fox, but his amazing string of comedies at Paramount — Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — and that wholly particular feeling of them, ended on that sun-filled lot, that day.

The lesson of Preston’s Last Stand? Well, I don’t know. On the one hand, he was true to the picture, true to Ella, honorable as artist, and noble as craftsman. So studio be damned. He made a move so few of us are able to do; and why? Because we are not crying in the wilderness; we’re on payroll. And art doesn’t do its work unless it’s seen. On the other hand, the particular beauty and brilliance of his Paramount comedies — a real thing, the character of that studio behind the arch — had, in a single argument, maybe a single word, become a thing irrecoverable. Should Preston have held back, not stamped his foot, for the sake of retaining the status quo and the chance of producing more fine art? There are some, I’m sure, who would rate Sturges’s post-Paramount work as just as good, better, olympian. Maybe. But they never had that stamp of family (and I mean that in the best possible way) the way his work of the early 40s had.

Marking anniversaries of events big and little, visiting the places where things happened, standing in writers’ rooms, placing the fingers on Balzac’s desk or Melville’s doorknob — these are richnesses in a fairly drab life, after all.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of speaking about literacy at Channel Thirteen’s Celebration of Teaching and Learning in New York. For their educational blog, I wrote a few words, and also chatted on the panel about a problem I see, and I’ve been wanting to look at this in more depth. I’ll begin here by excerpting a bit of the original post, but over the next weeks I want to develop the idea of quiet — in our minds, our lives, our reading. Quiet is becoming impossible to attain, because of the accumulated noise from public soundtracks, the jabbering of loud people, the roar of transportation devices, the blather in our own heads; for one, I’m convinced that we are losing or have lost one of the signal joys of human — to shut it all down and simply be.

I’ll begin with the idea of quiet reading.

As I see it, among those who do read, “quiet reading” — the manner of reading without distraction — is at least fiercely under attack, at most doomed. Because of the homogenization of culture and the pervasiveness of technology, even the youngest readers face a bewildering spectrum of distractions that cut into their time and ability to focus on reading.

Even then, much of the reading being done is secondary to the activity — such as Internet reading, the “reading” of video game manuals, web browsing, and the like. We could call this “noisy reading,” in which the paradigm of the solitary reader interacting with words on the page is drowned under near-constant music, whining computer fans, and flickering images, not to mention the “horror” of being alone.

The concept of quiet reading is probably already terminal; at the very least it faces awesome competition by an uncomprehending world. Authors for children have had to face this competition and adapt to it, hoping that books can form a part of that busy spectrum of activities — such as the inclusion of computer and non-book elements into the storytelling. But this is a losing battle.

To give a specific example of how adults have become inured to the problem, we carry books around with us. This is a defense, you say, against falling prey to the blaring world at large. But to admit that is to avoid the deeper issue. You may think you are reading Robert Frost on the subway, shelled up in yourself against the multitude of distractions of public transportation — but you are not reading Robert Frost. The quality of your reading is marginal. You want points for trying. You insist it’s better than looking at the shoes of the person across from you — which it is, certainly; all of that — but that tiny pride will work against you when you try to sit in silence and engage with words. You will hear a ghost, an apparition. Not the living breathing speaking man.

Of course, there are a thousand caveats. I live an hour from New York City. There is no quiet here. The bucolic parkway a mile from my house is a constant white roar. Hand tools, compressors, refrigerator motors, the sheen of noise when the water is run. Sure. Sure. They insist, too, that the past is the one place you can’t go to, so get used to it. I still think that there is something in words on paper that I’m not hearing or feeling or knowing because of the constant hiss of life but that is essential — or more than essential, if there is such a thing.

So the search begins . . .

If I return, the first place
is a room, my first sense of it feverish,
the air thickening in it

and difficult to breathe.
A shadow like a smudge
in one corner of the ceiling prints

a dark brown hole in the white
over a posterbed
half slept in by my brother.

God knows what my dream was that sick night
when I thumped around and around
till the crib had wheeled across

the floor and pinned the door slam shut,
but when morning came
they pushed the room awake

and found me soaking
in a drift of covers,
the beat-up sunken rag of a toy

like a trophy in my hands,
his poor head
dangling empty from the legs

and a hundred
little bits of foam dribbling
down to the headboard

where I’d pulled all of his guts
out in my sleep.
My mother stood there, hushed

in the half light.
My grandfather was pragmatic:
“he’ll do it again,”

and shook his head.
My part in that collusion was saying
nothing, for I knew I had been right

to unstuff him,
and knew somehow that he assented, as if
it was a kind of purgation

like sweating out a fever
I had to do to keep him safe.
I knew we’d both come out alive.

But the dream began to loosen, and fell quickly
when she picked me up
trailing swaddles of bedclothes back to the bed.

Why all the fuss? I’d had a fever. It was simple.
But it was out of my hands.
I remember my grandfather

waiting in the hall
as I was lifted, dried and dressed.
It came out slowly,

days after the event,
that he’d taken that toy down to the basement
and shot it right into the furnace.

Later I went down to find some trace
left in the chamber.
I brought up a stool to the iron

face, pulled on the coiled grip
and looked in as the vent swung back
at cool stacked wood just lying there

dusty in the stairlight
from the kitchen. Another time,
though I was not alone, I stood

and peered at sparks
and ashes spitting off
the so-red center of the fire.

. . . were the lovely and dismissive words spoken by Robert Mitchum to Jane Greer in Out of the Past, the 1947 film noir, and one of the best of the genre. Like bits from Seinfeld, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and the final line from Chinatown, along with other masters of the craft, Mitchum’s line comes up a lot here at the ranch. It signifies much.

In talking about the Outsider (see below), I have been struck since I first read it by Denis Johnson’s brilliant interview with Bret Anthony Johnston on the occasion of his winning the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke in 2007. (You can read the full interview somewhere at www.nationalbook.org). What I have loved and admired — and confess myself in awe of, in the same way I am of the simple brilliance of Mitchum’s line — is the writer’s response to this particular question:

Bret Anthony Johnston: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?

Denis Johnson: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.

I had occasion to quote this response to a group of children’s writers, some published, some not, as something we’d all, perhaps one day, like to be able to say.

Question: Does your story work?

Answer: Baby, I don’t care.

This is another little view of the Outsider. I have found myself wanting to say it relative to my own stories sometimes. And, in fact, should you worry if your story doesn’t work — in the sense of working for a particular reader or group of readers? Should you care whether your piece doesn’t fall within the bounds of what has been written before? This is the struggle between art and commerce. Between stories and, say, publishing. There shouldn’t be any rules, not even for children’s writing. If the story “works” is, in a way, a trivial attribute of the story. Maybe a story’s not “working” can sometimes be a sign that the reader is not trying hard enough, not that the writer has failed to write it properly. The idea that a certain set of rules defines a story’s success is similar to saying that a certain length of nose or plumpness of calf defines a person’s beauty. I don’t know. Maybe it does. But it seems it shouldn’t. You get the drift. Or maybe you don’t. Either way . . .

. . . is a term of power and sorrow, anger, dissolution, humor, and victory. Among other things, it is the title of Richard Wright’s novel about a man driven to violence by his realization that the world values power and that the single individual is “nothing.” This little essay is the first of an occasional series on the concept of the outsider.

As readers of her fiction and letters will know, Flannery O’Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award in 1947. She had been a student of the School of Writers at the University of Iowa, and her short stories, a few of which would become chapters in her novel, Wise Blood, were submitted by her teacher in the School, Paul Engle. The award included an advance of $750 against royalties if the publisher, Rinehart, in New York, accepted the finished novel.

Flannery came from the tiny town of Milledgeville, Georgia, but had made friends at Iowa and later at and through the writing colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Engle; she was appreciated by writers and critics of the highest level, and this, before she was much published.

Things did not go well with Rinehart from the beginning:

January, 20, 1949, to her agent:

“Here are the first nine chapters of the novel, which please show John Selby [the editor at Rinehart] and let us be on with financial thoughts.”

February 17, 1949, the same:

“I received Selby’s letter today. . . . I presume [he] says either that Rinehart will not take the novel as it will be if left to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that Rinehart would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a conventional novel.”

There is more, and writers of all stripes are urged to read about these first months of Flannery’s dealings with the publishing world, but this last line touches on what I mean by outsider. With the help of her agent, she is able to disentangle herself from Rinehart, move to Harcourt, from whom Wise Blood appears in 1952, and finally follow Robert Giroux to Farrar, her publisher until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.

There were undoubtedly miscommunications on both sides — when Flannery pulls away from Rinehart finally, she describes it to her old friend Engle thus:

“Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.”

This also is important, the more so because the phrase was hers. Flannery learns she has lupus in 1950 and soon decides that she cannot live north any longer and returns to Milledgeville to live with her mother.

During her life, she published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a collection of stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. After her death, a second collection of stories appeared, Everything That Rises Must Converge, a selected letters, The Habit of Being, and a miscellany of occasional prose, Mystery and Manners.

Finally, from a brave series of letters in her last weeks:

June 17, 1964, about her posthumous collection:

“I wrote Giroux and asked him to hold off the publication date of the stories until spring. In that way I thought I could probably manage another story.”

July 15:

“I have drug another out of myself and I enclose it. . . . I’m still in bed but I climb out of it into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.”

July 21:

“I’m still puttering on my story that I thought I’d finished but not long at a time. I go across the room & I’m exhausted.”

July 28, her last letter before her death on August 3:

“Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.”