A SETTLED FACT compiled by J. L. Herrera To the Memory of My Grandmother Hilda Clarke (née Colgan) who loved books. And with Special Thanks to Madge Portwin, Cheryl Perriman, Isla McGregor, Margaret Clarke, Laurie Zambon, Jane Walker, Sue Wilson, Edwin Clarke, and Cris Henderson. INTRODUCTION Every so often I say to myself ‘I’ve done enough writer’s calendars—it’s time to do something else’. But the simple fact is—they are a kind of addiction. All those interesting little snippets that aren’t a story in themselves (well, maybe they are but I am content to leave them as fragments) but which seem to beg me to do something more than jot them on the back of an envelope or piece of junk mail. So I thought I would do some shorter calendars. Instead of massive things that seem to go on for ever and which can’t be fitted on a disk without being fiddled round with or turned into a zip file and such worries I would be content with something of a hundred pages or so. Instead of doing one book in three years—what if I were to do one book in one year and three books in three years? Would it substantially change anything other than the length? And yet, what is it about the form or the idea that is so disarmingly attractive? It might be that I was brought up on a stern regimen of ‘waste not, want not’ though wasting not never stops people from wanting; they just turn their smug sense of being good and conscientious into the corollary: ‘I really think I deserve to let my hair down now’. It might be something a little sorrowful in the idea that something written with such care gets no more response than me saying ‘well, that was interesting’ as I close a book and put it in a box for a market stall or op- shop; the feeling that some things deserve more. And it might be the sense that writers’ calendars invite didacticism whereas that is usually a death knell to novels. I can divert this aspect of myself into my calendars and, with luck, leave imagination to flow untrammelled in more creative work. Perhaps it is all of those things. It doesn’t matter. My hope is always that joy in compilation translates into pleasure in reading. J. L. Herrera 2 Hobart 2007. A SETTLED FACT January 1: J. D. Salinger * * * * * There is the authorised biography where friends and relatives come round the writer, breathe down his neck, make sure he keeps the halo shining, the pay-off being the promised land of access to letters and diaries fiercely guarded by those same friends and rellies … and its opposite, the unauthorised biography where unnamed ‘friends’ provide the scurrilous, the scandalous, the titbit which is never properly sourced and remains to hang over all subsequent work. And then there is plain biography, usually of the long dead, and purporting to be calmly accurate. J. D. Salinger was possibly luckier than he deserved to be when his daughter Margaret Salinger wrote her memoir Dream Catcher. At first I thought she had probably decided to write in response to one of those dreaded unauthoriseds—when she says, ‘My father’s nickname, Sonny, was given to him at birth by his parents. Ian Hamilton, in his book In Search of J.D. Salinger, claimed that it was at the McBurney School, which my father attended in ninth grade, that “he was nick-named ‘Sonny’ by his chums, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.” Please, chums. On the West Side of Manhattan, perhaps? Several of my dad’s army buddies in the foxholes and bloody battlefields of World War II were referred to, by the same scholar, as his colleagues. “Let me confer with my colleagues, Rocco,” Jerry said. “Oh, Rocco, would you be so kind as to pass me the ammo?” “Right-o, Sonny old chum,” Rocco expostulated laconically…. I can’t stand it.’ (The J. D. stood for Jerome David.) She sets up the reader’s sympathy in the early pages, ‘In mainstream magazines, such as those in which my father published his first stories, as well as in daily newspapers and other forms of mass entertainment, anti-Semitism ran rampant. That bastion of the mythical “good old days” Americana, The Saturday Evening Post (which would later publish several of my father’s early stories), published a series of articles from 1920 to 1921 alleging that the Jews of Poland (such as my grandfather) were, among other things, “human parasites … mongoloids not fit to govern themselves.” ’ (I suppose it is something that they did publish his stories … something they might not have done if his name had been Barack Obama … but I was interested to see Marion Maddox’s assertion in God under Howard that The Saturday Evening Post was a staple of the Howard household and did a lot to formulate his view of the world. It would seem to have quite a lot to answer for!) When he married he insisted that his teenage wife give up all contact with her friends and family and he took her away to a remote house in New Hampshire with no mod cons where he demanded five-star-hotel type service whilst constantly changing his adherence to various strange cults and demanding that she constantly change her views in line with his. In this abusive relationship it is not surprising that she slipped into severe and damaging post natal depression. The one amazing thing to come out of the whole saga is that every player in Salinger’s life survived, reasonably intact, though needing varying amounts of therapy to pull through … 3 The trouble was, at the end of it, I realised I didn’t want to go back and re-read Catcher in the Rye … nor did I want to read a biography, authorised or not, of him. I can remember people who loved his famous character and saw Catcher in the Rye as a coming-of-age book. I know others who invested Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with this same halo. It is a fascinating question: do young people need a coming-of-age book in the way that other rituals and ceremonies have been used down the centuries? And if they do—should the book be more than a ‘good read’ or does it just need a sense of speaking to that deep desire to cut loose and live as an independent being? And if its influence can be profound then what might we hope young readers get from such a book? * * * * * January 2: Isaac Asimov January 3: J.R. Tolkien January 4: David Allen Brian Mackness January 5: Umberto Eco January 6: Kahlil Gibran January 7: Stewart Fraser January 8: Wilkie Collins January 9: Morris Gleitzman Robert Drewe January 10: Robinson Jeffers January 11: Alan Paton January 12: Dorothy Wall January 13: Michael Bond January 14: Hugh Lofting * * * * * “Cher Ami was the most famous pigeon of World War I, perhaps of history. During the war, a battalion had been cut off. No one knew where it was, so it became the “Lost Battalion”. The Lost Battalion sent pigeons out with word of its location, but the birds were all shot down. However, Cher Ami, with part of her leg shot off, managed to get through to headquarters. What drove Cher Ami on no one will ever know. Perhaps she ate a better brand of birdseed. But she saved many lives. The only birdbrains in that entire operation belonged to those gentlemen who managed to misplace an entire battalion in the first place.” (How to Live with a Pampered Pet by Eric Gurney.) And on a more serious note; R.V. Jones in Most Secret War wrote, “Another wartime experience that made me wonder was the ability of pigeons which had spent their entire lives in England to home back to their bases after we had dropped them on the Continent. I spent some time with the Air Ministry Pigeon Service in the months after the war, learning from the experts what pigeons could do. There was evidence that the last twenty or thirty miles of their journeys were made by visual means, and that they used landmarks such as coastlines: the Norwich fanciers, for example, complained that in pre-war races from France their birds were always about twenty minutes later than those of the Lowestoft fanciers, the theory being that all the pigeons flew up the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk, when the Lowestoft birds could simply drop into their lofts, while the Norwich birds had another twenty minutes flying overland once they left the coast. Geographical landmarks, though, could not explain a good deal of the wartime flying, and I began to wonder whether the birds had developed a form of inertial navigation, based on the semicircular canals in their heads, which were known to be accelerometers. We tried to keep the Air Ministry Pigeon Service in being after the war, with a view to organizing a prolonged series of experiments, but the scheme fell through when both the pigeons and I left the Air Ministry.” * * * * * 4 “If I could only write a book I would write one on men, and I would call it Rats, Rape and Rheumatism. Oh, what fun I would have with that book, Foster! Imagine the face of a publisher when I took him a book with that title! He would say: ‘Eh — but — eh — we cannot publish a book like this, you know!’ And I would say: ‘And why not, pray? Look at Mrs.