EVERYONE'S AN AUTHOR

EVERYONE’S AN AUTHOR

 

The seeds of this modest little book were planted a few years ago when I gave a talk at the Temple Terrace Public Library, Tampa, Florida, on May 20, 2014.  Author Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Hemingway, unable to be present to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, December 10, 1954, due to ill health, had United States Ambassador, John Cabot read this acceptance speech:

“Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate, but eventually, they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.”

Phase One of being an author

Although we are all talkers, that we all have stories to tell, despite the delight we derive in sharing these stories, we still construct barriers that block us from ever starting to write them down.

But there is no barrier greater than “I can’t do it.  I can’t write.  I’m not smart enough to write.”  These barriers are clinchers.  They stop us dead in the water.

I’ve never been the smartest kid on the block, but that has never been a barrier to me.  I've never stopped to say, “I’m not qualified to write.”  It never occurred to me to be relevant.

One person who has known me all my life said, “I never thought you'd turn out this way.” 

"How is that, Gussie?"

"You know, as a writer, that kind of deep stuff."

What he didn’t say but implied was, “Where'd you get the arrogance, Fisher, to think you could write?”

It wasn't arrogance.  It was a need, a need to express myself in words, symbols, language to make a connection with my thoughts and feelings, beliefs and biases, loves and hates, dreams and fantasies, to make peace with my demons and dreads.  Writing gave me a modicum of control.

The other thing is it made me feel comfortable in my own skin, comfortable with what I am and am not, can and can’t do, where I need help (weakness) and what I do well (strength).  Writing introduced me to myself.  In other words, I’ve never let others define me.

Moreover, I’ve always been attracted to people smarter than I am, people from whom I could learn. This has included dead authors. My granddaughter, Rachel, is like her grandfather in that sense, and she is an outstanding student.  I've been an outstanding student at every level of my education, receiving my share of academic honors despite an occasional misstep.  I'm not saying you have to be a good student to be a writer.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible student but a great writer so was William Faulkner, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  With my insecurity, I needed the affirmation of academia.  

I went from a Catholic grammar school to a public high school, and although an “A” student in the Catholic school, I was put in classes where “C” students were the norm.  I suppose – in this Protestant community – a Catholic “A” was the equivalent of a Protestant “C.”

Language was important in the Catholic school, especially grammar.  My teacher in my freshman year of high school was struggling in diagramming a complex sentence before the class and became frustrated in the process.  I went to the board, erased her work, and diagrammed the sentence properly, returned to my desk with a smile, and was promptly sent to the principal’s office with a pink slip. It kept me out of the National Honor Society, although I graduated in the top 10 percent of my class, as I did at the University of Iowa, and in graduate school.  I have received every academic honor offered at every grade level throughout my academic career with this high school exception because I paid attention albeit with periodic aberrant behavior that put my status in some jeopardy.

This is told to readers as I come from the lowest end of the food chain, and have known from the get-go that to climb up the ladder there would be no help, no safety net, no golden parachute, no convenient off-ramps to cool my jets, no one or nothing to break my fall.  I was on my own nickel, and I was going to do it my way or it was for sure the highway.

To put it another way, if I can write books, anyone can write books.  The only real qualification to write is to demonstrate the courage to start.  You can't worry about what others think or whether you're qualified or not.  No one owns that crystal ball.

Five things have worked for me as a writer: (1) I am not afraid not to be smart; (2) I'm not worried about letting the group down; (3) I'm not afraid of failure; (4) I accept the pain and the risk of coming up empty, which I often have; (5) when I succeed, and I have on occasion, I have no delusions of being other than the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad.

Readers of my books -- several people tonight have noted how wide and diverse my career -- try to define me, thinking I am an extrovert.  I am an introvert.  People are my laboratory, and all my works emanate from that laboratory.  I prefer only the company of my wife, Betty, and my books.

People wear me out.  This (tonight) wears me out because I leave my energy behind when I leave. 

Writing to me is serious business.  It requires thinking, and thinking is like meditation, not something you do with others.  We live in a society enamored of “groupthink,” which I appall.   

The satisfaction from writing comes in the doing, not in the concluding.  We make too much of the product, not enough of the process.  Stephen King has all the money he will ever need, but he is a compulsive writer, and admits it, once comparing it to trying to give up cigarettes.

So many books are written today because authors sense a connection with Aristotle’s “rational man” in this most irrational of times.  It has been my experience if you read for pleasure you will write for pleasure, too.

Phase Two of being an author

The newspaper lady in the back who is writing a book about the role God has played in her life can appreciate what my mentor told me about my audience, which is top management and professionals:

One is “More is less."

Two is “You know that it (could that be God?) knows, and you know that it knows that you know, and you know that it knows that you know that it knows that you know.”

So, this limits gamesmanship.  Neither the writer nor the reader can play dumb.  This cuts to the quick.  My mentor is wise and knows that I will struggle with this until it is my own.

Phase Three of being an author

Everyone has a story crying within to be told, and I suspect, that is the reason you are here.

How do you get started?  How do you put yourself in the mood to begin?

Abraham Lincoln wrote and rewrote his “Gettysburg Address” while traveling to that destination, feeling he had failed, as he was not an orator.  He spoke for a few minutes, while celebrated orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours. 

Lincoln understood my mentor's admonition subconsciously if not consciously.  Less proved more and Lincoln made the connection; Everett did not.  Lincoln had a wheezing voice in his massive body, while Everett had a booming voice in his stout diminutive one. 

Everett was a performer; Lincoln was a communicator.  Lincoln was meditative, Everett was charismatic.  Lincoln was an introvert; Everett an extrovert.  Lincoln was writing to himself; Everett was speaking to an audience.  Lincoln made a spiritual connection with himself and hit his target; Everett was a mechanic and spoke over their heads.  Our times more resemble Everett than Lincoln.  This should give us pause.

Someone asked: “How do you get your thoughts and the way you speak to translate to make sense on the page?”

Lincoln, who was essentially self-educated, an autodidact, read a lot, and loved the music of language, and came to master its rhythm and make it his own.  For the rest of us, we have to simply practice, practice, and practice.  Even then, it is difficult to match precisely what we think with what appears on the page.

My wife Betty chimed in, “Jim talks to himself.  He talks out loud as he thinks about what he is about to write.” 

Yes, that is true.  I must hear how it sounds “out loud” before I commit it to the screen.  That said I write and rewrite and rewrite some more, as it takes several attempts before it makes sense to me, and resembles what I am thinking.  Still, I am subject to many errors because I am an imperfect editor. 

When I was back in my hometown researching my book on my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE), I would walk through the streets of this small town, tape recorder in hand, talking as I walked.  Three African American boys stopped and stared at me.

One boy said, “Look at that man?”

The second boy said, “What?”

The third boy said, “Can’t you see?  He’s talking to himself.”  He rolled his finger in a circle by his ear, "Crazy, man!"

“I’m talking into my recorder,” I said.  “I’m writing a book.”

“Oh, yeah," they giggled in unison, "He's writing a book!"

Talking to myself is my way.  It is not the only way, but it seems to help me match my thoughts with what eventually gets written.  Now, it is hard to find cassettes for my micro recorder.  Society has moved beyond my limited technology, but human behavior has not, which makes writing a constant as people throughout history remain essentially the same.

Phase Four of being an author

Genius is not rare, but pervasive.  We often look for it in all the wrong places.  That is also true in the case of writing.  Genius has a conceptual foundation, not a recall foundation as displayed on such television game shows as “Jeopardy.”

A few years ago, the Temple Terrace Public Library had a writing contest for young people nine to twelve to write what the library meant to them.  Some forty young people participated.  I had the privilege of being one of the reviewers.

Some of these essays were so pristine they looked as if they came out of a published book; some had a vocabulary that indicated more than a little help from a parent.  Then there was one handwritten essay that stood above all the others.

It was captivating from the first sentence.  For this writer, the library was a dream fulfilled.  He said when I walk into the library -- and I’m paraphrasing now -- it opens up to me as if it belongs to me, and it directs me to where I want to go.  I pick up a book, and my whole world changes.

I wrote in my evaluation that this essayist should one day be a writer.  I wasn’t there when they gave out the prize.  Nor did I know that this writer had won.  I understand that a little African American boy in the back of the room, rushed up to accept his prize grinning from ear to ear, saying to no one in particular, “Can you believe this!”

Phase Five of being an author

My daughter, Laurie, is a professional model.  We share one common thread of professionalism, rejection!  We are familiar with being rejected.

I came back from South Africa in 1969 something of a broken man after experiencing that assignment (see DEVLIN – A Psychological Novel – on Kindle), having retired (the first time) only in my thirties, writing to The William Morris Agency in New York City asking that agency to represent me as a writer.  I had no idea how absurd that request was. 

I told the agency that I "had retired" from my high-paying executive position to write books.

The William Morris Agency wrote me a blistering letter in reply, stating it thought it had heard everything, but that I took the cake, nothing was more maddening than what I had done or proposed to do.  I still have the letter.  I never heard from the agency again.

Hemingway advised a would-be-author to write about what he knew.  I had written “Sales Training & Technical Development” in South Africa for the new company.  So, when back in the States, I wrote a book on selling, which I completed in six weeks, and sent it off to Prentice-Hall, calling it “Let’s Take the Worry Out of Selling."  Two weeks later, it was accepted. 

It was published with the title, “Confident Selling," published in 1970 with 1971 copyright.

The book sold 25,000 copies in the first two months, and was in print for 20 years, only with Prentice-Hall’s copyright, not mine.  Caution: don’t give up your copyright if you can help it.

That was so easy that I sent other manuscripts off to a bevy of publishers receiving form rejection letters, enough to paper a room. 

Discouraged, I turned my attention to reading books, then going back to school to earn my Ph.D., not publishing again until 1990 with Work Withoug Managers (1991).

At the same time, I launched a website with a blog, finding an open market for my essays in trade journals, newspapers, and periodicals.  None of them paid me a sue.  Only Reader’s Digest did when I sent them "Twenty Points of Light."  It was accepted in January 1993 with a check being received two weeks later for $2,000, saying the piece would be published June 3, 1993.  You have to sell a lot of books to make $2,000 in royalties.

The following month of that publication, Reader’s Digest informed me in a letter that requests for reprints of that short article had passed 30,000.  The first line of that piece: “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.”  This led to my writing of "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996).

Phase Six of being an author

If you think publishing a book is like winning the lottery, think again.  If you want to be famous, want to be a celebrity, make a lot of money, read the blistering letter I received from the William Morris Agency.

There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, especially in this era of print-on-demand books and e-books in which the authors don’t make expenses.  I’m one of such authors.  I lost a bundle early in my writing career thinking everyone would want to read my works.  Not true.

On the other hand, if you have the confidence and have a passion to write if only your family reads your work, this could make it worthwhile.  Remember, publishing is a business, and publishers have to find a lot of willing gamblers for them to afford to give large advances to celebrities whose book sales seldom match their advances.

A friend of mine is writing her family history.  She is as genuine as they get.  She was as a young girl, and now a grandmother with the same vigor and élan that she had as a youngster.  She is writing her story, which should be appealing because she has lived a fascinating life.

My favorite cousin, who died a few years ago, wrote a book for his family titled “An Insignificant Life.”  I’ve never been able to read it because I become all choked up after the first few pages.

Robert earned a BSEE, went into the US Navy and became an officer in Naval Intelligence, and found himself in the Arctic at an outpost monitoring the Soviet Union’s nuclear program.  He was at his post in 1952 when Russia detonated its first hydrogen bomb, years ahead of what the CIA and NSA expected. 

He alerted his commanding officer, who told him to call the White House, which he did with trepidation.  Later, he went back to school and took a Ph.D. in economics, and became an economist for the State of Colorado.  Insignificant my foot!  But modesty was natural to him from his Norwegian side of the family.

Phase Seven of being an author

We desire to be authors because we want to make a connection, to get outside ourselves to connect with ourselves in another way.  That is the mystique of the social network.  How many here are on Facebook – most everyone.  Do you feel connected?  Of course, you do.  We seek the approval of others to approve of ourselves. 

It is too funny.  We are not a reading public.  Less than 10 percent of Americans are regular purchases of books, yet nearly everyone tweets, which requires reading.  Put all the tweets together after a day, and it would likely make a fairly good-sized book.  But it is not considered reading, certainly not book reading, so it is absolved from that connection.  Who knows, maybe book reading one day will reach 11 percent.

The Information Age has made everyone readers despite themselves.  I’m a fairly good typist.  Now I learn typing is passé with all you need is two thumbs.  Can you imagine that?

Phase Eight of being an author

I would encourage you to have a conversation with yourself, keep a diary, scribble notes, write poetry, or fragments of philosophy, as I did in the early 1970s.  One day you will pick it up and say, “Wow!” 

In my case, what I had written some thirty years ago seemed as relevant as if it had just been written.  “Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for an Anxious Age” was the title, which TATE Publishing will release later this year which was so generated.  It occurred to me that my books are chapters of the same story:

·      why do we remain stuck,

·  why do we treat ourselves so poorly,

·  why do we keep running from ourselves?

In the 1970s, the narcotic of our escape was psychedelic drugs, now it is the societal ubiquitous mobiles of social media.  The irony is while we are prisoners 24/7 to our handheld electronic devices thinking we are networking with others we have little or no time to network with ourselves in wondering.

I am a confessed wonderer.  That said, my books have no answers but attempt to ask the right questions.  I believe that the problems we experience once honestly defined reveal the answers.

Twenty-four years ago WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS was thought to be angry, if not crazy, yet in 2014, it is clear we don’t need managers.  We don't need them at all, yet we still have them, and chances are 24 years hence we'll still have them.  See why I think we are stuck?  Our lies and deceits become our Tar Baby, and we get stuck on this barrier, ignoring the problems we face and solving the problems we don't face.   

This is what I write about so I'm not surprised if I'm not a household name to you.   I'm encouraged, however, to hear from people like Eric, Klaus, and Ted who are in the audience.  They stimulate my mind when they write, as they cut through all the folderol, and penetrate the nonsense. 

Some of you may have your own strong views but are afraid to share them.  You shouldn't.  We are all trying to get inside the limits of language to the ideas buried inside.

My writing is meant to inspire people to have more confidence in themselves, and to take charge and control of their lives, as tenuous as that may be. 

Our culture isn’t serving us very well, yet it refuses to change.  It is hard to get a sense of ourselves in a time of pervasive sameness.  The lady writing about God in her life says she isn't religious but spiritual.  Did we ever imagine a dichotomy between the two?  It is hard to be spiritual in a secular world, and equally hard to be religious.   That doesn’t mean that we need to abandon the spiritual or religious but does mean we cannot count on others to carry our burdens, not politicians, pundits, priests, or prognosticators.  I think that is wrong.  That is why I write.© James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., May 20, 2014.

WITH LUCK and PLUCK

 

With Luck and Pluck

It was a hard-knock life for Irish-Americans.



By James R. Fisher, Jr. , Ph.D. © March 23, 2021

NOTE: This is an essay that will appear in a new book by Ken Shelton and Thurl Bailey titled “Rachial Synergy.”



In the mid-19th century, a million Irish immigrants left Ireland due to hard circumstances, such as the Irish potato famine, aka the Great Hunger. It began in 1845 when a fungus-like organism spread rapidly throughout Ireland. The infestation ruined half of the potato crop that year, and three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years. Since tenant farmers of Ireland—then ruled as a colony of Great Britain—relied heavily on the potato for food, the infestation had a catastrophic impact on Ireland, resulting in the death of roughly one million Irish from starvation and related causes forcing more than a million to leave their homeland.

No Irish Need Apply

When they arrived in America, many Irish faced prejudice, discrimination, and limited employment opportunities. In fact, in 1854, the phrase No Irish Need Apply was a terse summation of the job discrimination that Irish immigrants faced in America in the mid-19th century. The phrase turned up frequently in classifieds ads for jobs, and the sentiment was wider than the frequency of those exact words. Hundreds of other classified ads specified that job applicants be Protestant or American, effectively excluding Irish-Catholic immigrants. Whether the exact phrase “No Irish need apply” itself was ubiquitous, the sentiment certainly was.

My Irish-Catholic Ancestors

My ancestors on both my mother’s and father’s side came from Ireland. They were Irish Catholic and were mainly families of railroad workers in the Dingle Bay region just outside the Six Counties of Northern Ireland which were Protestant and loyal to the British Crown. One uncle and my mother’s brother-in-law’s people came from the Six Counties. Once in the United States in the mid-1830s, they settled in such places as Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, Illinois with some coming as far as Clinton, Iowa to work on the railroad.

None of them were farmers or tradesmen but what became known as Shanty Irish as they either worked mainly on the railroad or as domestics. Lace Curtain Irish were tradespeople, exporters, and importers with family trees of some distinction. This was the case with the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds of President Kennedy’s family.

In the 19th and early 20th century, Clinton, Iowa had the largest network of railroad yards west of the Mississippi. There they manufactured boxcars for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad freight car operations carrying freight to the West Coast and the Pacific Ocean.

Many members of my immediate and extended family in Clinton, including my grandfather, worked at one time or another in the Chicago Northwestern shops that extended for three miles along Camanche Avenue in Clinton.

Uncle Leonard Becomes My Model

My uncle Leonard, who became the model of my life, had two sisters and five brothers. He had to quit school in his freshman year at St. Mary’s High School to work as a telegraph operator for the railroad in support of the family. After four years of this, he quit and moved to Iowa City where he did four years of high school and four years of college at the University of Iowa in four years, going on to earn Ph.D.’s in psychology and economics. Having acquired these credentials, he pursued an academic career first at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, then DePaul University in Chicago, eventually spending 20 years at The University of Detroit, a Jesuit university.

From age 12 to 15, I spent summers at his summer retreat at Higgins Lake in central Michigan. Lunchtime would be sessions on the Upanishads, Zoroaster, origins of monotheism, and some such after my uncle tired of my cousin Robert and I arguing about baseball.

When I was a student at Iowa, I took an elective in Catholic History from Father Kelly, whom my aunt told me was a distant cousin of mine, a relationship I never alerted the professor to, feeling he might favor me. I still got an A grade. Another rumor was that author James T. Farrell, a famous Chicago novelist for his urbane and social consciousness novels, such as the Studs Lonigan Trilogy was a distant relative as my grandmother’s maiden name was O’Farrell. I would read Farrell’s Studs Lonigan at Iowa in a required humanities course, staying up an entire night to read the trilogy, fascinated with Farrell’s sense of our Irish heritage. I was equally moved by his short stories which often exposed our false pride.

Equal Justice for All?

I recall this quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in circumstances confronting him.”

Since I witnessed a lot of injustice and inequality for all, I once considered anger to be my greatest motivator to write. I confess to angry being close to my nature. This was suggested 50 years ago when I was incensed with how one side seemed to have all the political/cultural answers, and of course, and the other side to have none of them. Sadly, for the past four years, I have watched this drama intensify with increasing polarity and blowback on both sides. It resolved nothing as accusatory fingers never do.

Now hate seems to be consuming our culture at Mach speed. And yet haters don’t see themselves as haters but believe those who differ with them are. They can quote all the talking heads, pundits, and sophisticates that sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and are amazed when you don’t appreciate the same sentiments they express. We’ve moved so far from being in control of our lives that we are numbed to our essence, much less our senses.

Less Unity, More Uniformity

Only last Thanksgiving I had a discussion about organized labor unions with a highly successful electrical engineer of biomedical systems of hospitals and clinics in the Northeast. His company does not have a union, and he asked what I thought about unions. He believes in the catechism of what unions purport to stand for—job security, pay, entitlements, bonuses, perks, pensions, and familial benefits, such as childcare, and the like.

He was hoping for an endorsement of unions, but I feel the same way about unions as I do large corporations: as long as the company is viable, the corporation and unions mimic each other in structure, function, mission, authority, and in the infallibility of their “business as usual” practices. Translated, they have all the power and control, and the workers—be they in a union or with a nonunion company—have no power. When the national economy suffers a cold that triggers a fever, all bets are off. Corporate executives protect their elite while union leaders abandon their members conceding concession after concession to their corporate masters to survive.

This is absurd as workers have the knowledge power, critical to operations, whereas management has position power which is now atavistic. The same is equally true of labor unions which are structurally and functionally a mirror image of the anachronistic corporation.

Labor unions boomed after WWII and continued to do so as long as the world, decimated with war-time destruction, was in recovery. Today, 75 years, later the world is mostly back on its feet and successfully competing with American markets. Today labor unions are a minuscule entity of industrial and commercial enterprise in comparison to what they once were. Why? Because corporations now have found a way to finesse unions by duplicating what unions once offered while solidifying their control even more comprehensibly over workers!

Just as unions reached their zenith in authority and power, corporations are maxing out but no one is paying attention. Individualism is not dead—it has just faded. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace four titanic Big Tech corporations —AMAZON, FACEBOOK, APPLE, and GOOGLE—that are frenetically determined to control the world and its mind. Like religion of the late Middle Ages, these monolithic monsters purport to make the world a better place, while they systematically lay waste to individualism, privacy, spontaneity, creativity, and freedom. Consequently, we are now more alike than ever before in history as products of these corporations have become our ubiquitous pacifiers and “Toys of the Mind.”

Cultural Civil War

The mock cultural wars of disinformation with which they periodically orchestrate have further reduced the masses to puppets on a string without a mind. Consequently, we are now in a cultural civil war in which both sides are equally pusillanimous be the polarity race, gender, politics, religion, values, beliefs, interests, appetites, or yes, hatreds.

People rant passionately from whatever their platform with nothing changing. Why? Because they are yelling into an isolated echo chamber isolated from the reality of experience, unaware that everything is only getting worse. It is not fair, not constructive, and certainly not supportive of freedom, dignity, and human understanding to be lock-stepping to a figment of the imagination. This inclination has promoted the chaotic world that is now the American nation, a nation in retreat from self-interest and self-regard. This gigantic retreat has made us truly “a lonely crowd,” and for that reason, I still find myself quite angry.

Prison of Prisms

By 1996, America had the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in its past, but I continued to see our principal failure to be of not being on the same page while talking over each other had risen to the level of being endemic. The problem?

We all view life through our own unique personal prism, while society attempts to have us view life through its prism. The same is true individual to individual. Of course, this doesn’t work; and so, at best, it is difficult for us to communicate with each other. The media, change masters, politicians, academics, parents, writers, philosophers, and, yes, friends want us to see things as they would have us see them which is through their respective prisms because in that manner they attain personal credibility.

Today we flaunt our stuff rather than apologize for it. We see the world through rose-colored glasses and different prisms. Whatever the prism that is the reality we staunchly defend, and sad to say, a reality far afield from that of a different prism. None of this is dishonest, but it leads to a painfully comic and counterproductive society, a society that has little sense of the rhythm of the universe or the thematic poetry to existence. With clashes of prisms, we have clashes of cultures – a morose if not moronic hypersensitivity on display, but little poetry.

An obsession with prisms leads to inescapable tension which finds the individual the enemy of his society. It places him in an impossible double-bind. If the individual acquiesces and conforms to the crazy quilt montage of societal prisms, he suffers the loss of personal freedom and identity. If the individual parks his prism at the door and views life with objective discernment, he suffers anomie or personal and societal disaffection. He can’t win for losing!

Viewing life through the prism of government idolatry is fashionable. Government, as a ubiquitous therapist, reveals a paradox: we keep ceding more of our sovereignty to a government that we trust less and less. We are angry but unwilling to take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong—from the National Debt to escalating crime and inflation; for the decline of the family to the rising rate of illiteracy, racial inequity, and religious bigotry and discrimination.

Release from Prism Prison

One remarkable man in my life showed me how to escape religious discrimination. My first cousin, Jack Clegg, had an Irish Catholic mother and an Irish Anglican Protestant father. He, in turn, married an Irish Protestant girl who, like Jack, was indifferent to religion. Jack Clegg was on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, with his repair ship the USS Vestal moored to the battleship The USS Arizona with nearly 1,000 entombed on the ship when it sank in nine minutes. Cousin Jack Clegg was in the engine room of The Vestal when the battleship sank suffering a broken back. He stayed in the Navy and became a certified welder, using that training to pursue a lucrative post-war career once out of the Navy.

Jack’s firstborn son, Timothy, was raised Protestant but would dress up with sheets to resemble a Catholic priest’s vestments and pretend to be conducting Mass when he was seven with his little sister as his audience. Though reared Protestant, Timmy never lost his interest in Catholicism. Thanks to his father making a good living building nuclear power plants in the American South, he was able to attend university in France after high school and then attend a French Catholic seminary at the expense of his father, and ultimately to be ordained a priest in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome by His Holiness Pope Paul VI.

Timmy was a free agent as he was not obligated to any American diocese for his education. Once ordained, he traveled the world as an independent agent ministering to Catholics and Protestants alike, eventually following his father’s footsteps to become a chaplain in the U. S. Navy. Thus Father Tim quietly got beyond the rift that persists between Catholic and Protestant to our day. Remarkably, Father Tim doesn’t consider his scaling the breach between the two denominations especially noteworthy as intolerance of any kind is beyond the pale of his temperament.

What Happened to Pursuit of Happiness?

The youth of the day view life through a prism of cynicism. Their limited experience tells them that the best is past and they are being weaned on leftovers. This generation born between 1961 and 1975 is a product of too much too many too soon. The generation has been overexposed to stimuli to the point of distraction devouring new products senselessly as their consciousness is now electronically controlled by savvy corporate marketers.

When I was a little boy, I was told by my dad that our forefathers established American democracy for us to be happy and content. He told me this during The Great Depression when he had no job but still believed in America. In retrospect, it seems incongruous. Out of work but still undaunted, he remained secure in the glory of The Declaration of Independence. He read this to me then: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This declaration became the bible of my existence and blueprint to a long and fulfilling life. My wonder now, however, is whatever happened to that pursuit?

How many are yawning at the suggestion of this rhetorical question? If you are between the ages of 25 and 54, you likely are. Pollsters tell us you are blasé about politics, bored to death with the media, and distrustful of government—as if the government is an entity beyond your concern, when in fact you are the government. Syndicated columnist Charley Reese writes:

“The view among political, business, and media elites is that the goal in life is to make as much money as possible and to accumulate as many toys as possible. The media are fascinated by the rich and often fawn over them. Politicians are always talking about economic prosperity as if that was the main goal of government. Business people watch every little blip of the stock market like a casino operator watches the daily take. Statistics are poured over like a fortuneteller looking at tealeaves.” The pursuit of wealth has become synonymous with the pursuit of happiness, but does this pursuit have legs?

Confusion between Need and Want

There is great confusion between need and want. The American ethic would have you trade in a perfectly serviceable automobile (need) for a bigger, more expensive, more powerful, and enviable machine (want) simply because you can.

My daughter’s 30-year-old married friend sold his $250,000 home for a $500,000 replacement because “I can afford it on my $100,000 income.” The need however was not in the equation. He who has the most toys is the winner, or is he?

Jobs are on the move. Pundits predict between 3 and 5 million high-paying jobs will leave the U.S. permanently in the next few years. It is no longer just blue-collar workers who are vulnerable, but the best and the brightest. While the 24 to 54 age group is buying bigger houses, more expensive clothes, luxury cars and boats, playing golf, jet skiing, or acquiring fashionable vacation homes, somebody else is eating their breakfast; and, if they don’t watch out, maybe their lunch and dinner as well.

The idea has evolved that free love (and free everything else) was the ticket to happiness; that we were too uptight, too regimented, too constrained for our own good. The sexual revolution has proven, however, that sex is neither love nor free. If you fail to see this revolution with the rise in venereal disease, broken marriages, shattered lives of men as well as women, where the belief persists that any inconvenience or disagreement is meant for the parties to move on, not to work out their differences; that the way to peace is through the avoidance of pain, not through the embrace of its source, then chances you are part of this quandary.

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

The world is catching up with the United States. Computers and electronics have sped up the process by 50 years. In time, wages about the world will come into balance; new jobs will be created requiring different tools and skills, making it insane to hide behind protective tariffs and “us against them” games. In time, we will realize we are part of a mutually interdependent global village. Then, we Americans will have no other choice than to finally grow up.

Just as there is confusion between need and want, there is similar confusion between aims and means. Dr. Hans Selye writes:

“A clear distinction must be made between our final aims – the ultimate achievements that give purpose to life – and the means through which we hope to attain them. For example, money is never a final aim; it has no value in itself. It can only act as a means, helping us to reach some ultimate goal which, to us, has inherent value.”

The pursuit of happiness will bring no peace of mind if the differences between aims and means are misunderstood. Means are good only to reach some final accomplishment which deep in our soul we can truly respect. With happy people, this is usually the urge for self-expression—doing what brings pleasure and comfort to others in some meaningful work. Dignity doesn’t come simply with a paycheck. Dignity comes with self-respect, and that comes from performing your role in life, whatever that is, and or doing your job well. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes:

“If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

There is nothing wrong with society producing entrepreneurial millionaires and billionaires. Where it gets confusing is when people see the wealth of a Bill Gates and that is all they see. They don’t see a pioneer, risk-taker, adventurer, or philanthropist, only ostentatious wealth. They don’t see the pursuit of happiness as the journey that it is. They prefer instead to see it as an end in itself. They don’t see the hard work or the constant embrace of adversity, challenge, setback, and failure—all fundamental to the pursuit of happiness.

Several years ago, in the company of my executive colleagues in a restaurant in Amsterdam, somebody asked, What would you like to do? Not one of us said it was what we were currently doing. It reminded me of the final lines of the Sinclair Lewis novel, Babbitt, where middle-aged real estate broker, George F. Babbitt, confesses: “I never did a single thing in my whole life that I wanted to do.” It would appear Babbitt still lives.


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Jammes R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., author of several books in the genre of social & industrial psychology, is a former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, SA. His books are available online with www.amazon.com, www.barnes&noble.com, www.AuthorHouse.com, or a local bookstore. Email TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com.

WRITING

 

WRITING

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 15, 2021

 

INFLUENCE OF ERIC HOFFER & ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON MY WRITING

 

              Eric Hoffer came late to writing his epic “The True Believer” which was published when he was in his 50s.  Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, established himself as a writer publishing “The Sun Also Rises,” when he was in his twenties. 

Hoffer claimed to have “a taste for the good sentence,” whereas Hemingway referred to this as a quest “for the true sentence.”  Like Churchill, Hemingway became celebrated for his simple declarative sentences.  He believed “what you left out of a sentence was more important for what the sentence failed to contain was necessary for it to be true.” 

He constantly rewrote at his standing desk, similar to how Goethe and Thomas Jefferson wrote, saying, it saved his back and kept his butt from spreading out like a sack of groceries. 

Hoffer didn’t write as economically as Hemingway as he was too enamored of colorful epigrams and aphorisms.  He never had the luxury of a standing desk.

My first book was published in my thirties; my second book in my fifties.   Along the way, I published an occasional newspaper or magazine article but filled the void by reading everything written by these two authors or that I could find written about them.  

Hemingway wrote:

“There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

 

Hoffer would find this claim a bit melodramatic.  Moreover, he never learned to type, wrote all his missives in longhand, and sent them off to Harper & Row to be typed but not edited.  From the beginning, he didn’t like editors.   Now, with Hoffer, the writing wasn’t a chore; it was a celebration.   After publishing "The True Believer" in 1951 to modest if significant sales, everything changed for the longshoreman laborer and philosopher in 1967, sixteen years later, when Eric Sevareid had him as a guest on CBS-TV.  He proved to be quite a self-promoter and actor, as was Heminway.  Hoffer was 69 at the time. 

Hemingway glamorized war to project his macho persona.  Biographer Jeffrey Meyers wrote:

“Because of Hemingway’s tendency to obscure the distinction between his fiction and his life, he was temperamentally primed for corruption by publicity and wealth.  He inflated his genuine heroism in war through newspaper interviews and public speeches while still in his teens.”

In my parlance, Hemingway was never an adult whereas Hoffer was having no choice to be otherwise.

Hemingway wrote – as he did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Sweden in 1954 having suffered two plane crashes in Africa in a matter of days and was recovering from his injuries:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.  For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.


Hemingway died of suicide in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961 at the age of 61; Hoffer died of natural causes in 1983 at the age of 84. Hemingway was rich, celebrated throughout the world, a guest of the incredibly wealthy as well as royalty, whereas Hoffer was of modest means and suffered grave hardship in his early life. Hemingway was a world celebrity traveling widely whereas Hoffer never left the continental United States.

Hemingway left 332 manuscripts of unpublished works with his wife, Mary, at his death.  Hofer has some 75 linear feet of his papers and books at the Hover Institute of Stanford University.  Hemingway’s papers are at the John F. Kenney Presidential Library in Boston. 

MY REASON FOR SHARING

Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, I completed two manuscripts: EVERYONE IS AN AUTHOR: Confessions of an Existential Amateur and MIRROR OF THE PSYCHE: A Study of the Writing of Eric Hoffer from the perspective of The Fisher Paradigm©™.

In July 2019 on July 2, I had open-heart surgery, and have been dealing with that ever since.  To put it simply, I’ve never recovered sufficiently to write with the energy and abeyance that I once did. An essay such as this is about my limitations.

I don’t have 332 unpublished manuscripts in my repertoire,  but I do have some 1500 essays on my blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com and a few manuscripts such as THE TRIPLE FOOL and IN SEARCH OF THE REAL PARENTS OF MY SOUL. 

The first is a novel of a middle-aged man who loves the comfort of his study where he has a conversation with his books in Latin, while he reminisces about the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith while experiencing teleportation to his son who is a Catholic Priest in Rome in residence at St. Paul’s Outside the Wall in Rome, Italy.  

The second is something like a Kahlil Griban mystical journey into knowing only centered on being both inclusive and beyond all religions.

Like Hoffer, I do write in notebooks, but not systematically as my writing is of whole cloth highlighted with my empirical experience never thinking of an audience.  Hemingway, on the other hand, can think no other way.  He writes:

“Writing is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

 

This was what I have been thinking today, March 15, 2021, The Ides of March.