Does Every Hollywood Starlet Still Love Me?

Dozens of fabulous Hollywood starlets wrote me letters in the Vietnam war and sent me sexy photos from their latest movies. I read and reread them all in months of jungle rain and mud until they melted away in my hands. Oh, I suppose they wrote 600,000 other guys, as well, but their letters to me were more heartfelt, I could tell.

My Vietnam war ended 57 years ago. I have gray hair at one end and flat feet at the other but I don’t feel that old. Still feel 19 inside. Still marching off to see what battle is all about and if I’ve the courage to face it.

Today’s young soldiers look at me bemused, expecting to see the war fires banked in me. A war they see as way back there in the Stone Age is nothing to be upset about this century, is it? They don’t understand that my war can never end. Their wars may not, either.

There were as many Vietnam wars as there were soldiers and civilians to fight them. A million wars a day, I figure, when I was there at the height of U.S. troop strength in 1968-69. A million Yank, Republic of Vietnam, Australian, New Zealand, South Korean and Taiwanese mercenary wars each day. More counting Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. And the Vietnamese civilians caught in the crossfire.

Plus the million wars back home: Of those who never fought but ran away when the draft call came or hid out in college deferments or faked medical problems to dodge conscription. And of those with the moral courage to stand up against an unnecessary war by refusing conscription and going to prison.

Those were the men and women who marched in protest through the nation’s streets and surrounded the Pentagon to force their government to end the war. Who worked in devious ways to gum up the conscription of new soldiers. Who were the returning veterans, some wounded in body and others in spirit, who spoke the truth of war to their startled fellow citizens.

Those who stood up in protest made the Vietnam war a catalyst for much of what changed America in the 1960s. Much of that change was good for the country. It amplified calls for Black liberation, for a new role in society for women, for a radical freedom for the energetic young. It opened the way for gay liberation. It demanded that every American learn more about the great, broad world outside our borders, and recognize a shared humanity with the people out there.

Vietnam also changed the way Americans think about their government. Looking back, it’s hard to believe the country was ever so naïve, but before the war we trusted our political leaders to do the right thing. Now we don’t trust them at all.

But scars and politics aren’t why the Vietnam war will never end. Not for me with my memory of starlets’ love letters. Not for anyone who was there in the mud and misery. It cannot end because I have in me what Civil War veterans called “furious regret.” Regret that we as a people had failed ourselves and our dreams and what we hope is our better nature. That we made a war that did not need to be fought. When we could have taken a better, cleaner, more righteous road instead of a path to mindless slaughter and waste.

A couple of years after I mustered out of the army, I was in Paris living lean and trying to become human again. A veteran of France’s Indochina war stopped me on the street to demand money. He was homeless, ragged, drunk, crazy.

“Give me money!” he shouted, “because I held the line against Communism before you stupid Americans ever heard the word ‘Vietnam.’”

Yes, I thought, you held the line, but what line was that? France lost its Indochina war because the age of colonialism had passed. The U.S. lost its Vietnam war when Americans realized their government had no idea how to win a war adopted from France. Now here we are, two veterans set adrift from countries that already have forgotten the war and the soldiers they sent to fight.

I gave him money. I gave him money less out of generosity than superstition – I had been where he had been and I didn’t want to be where he was now. But there was something else. I realized then that his war would never end – and neither would mine.

No war ever really ends and more Hollywood starlets will write more letters to more soldiers, letters that aging veterans remember in their furious regret. Unless we search out that better, cleaner, more righteous road to solving problems. Unless we demand it of our leaders and of ourselves. And demand it now in the midst of another unnecessary war.

© 2026 Steven Hardesty

Veterans Day for Just One American Hero

I love marching bands and parades but I don’t go all soppy on Veterans Day remembering our fallen and wounded heroes in uniform. That is because November 11 is the day I reserve for a joyous thanksgiving for what those men and women gave us – our country, safe and whole. That makes it a second Fourth of July celebration for me. And the one day of the year I don’t think about one particular hero.

I can’t say why what happened to him affects me so much so many years after our war, but I think about him nearly every day. He has 364 Veterans Days with me. When a whiff of diesel from a passing truck gives me an unexpected flashback to the crank and roar of tanks. When the air on a hot, dusty day sets my teeth on edge like chewing tinfoil and I’m standing there again, beside the guns firing a mission, tasting cordite. Then I remember him. We were buddies in war. We went though officer candidate school together. Ended up artillerymen in the same piece of Vietnam. Faced the same hardships, the same risks, the same sniper fire, the same incoming rockets, the same humping the boonies with the grunts calling fire to keep us all alive and to try to win our war.

When I finished my year’s tour in the war zone, I went home, very happy to go home safe and whole. He stayed on. He had extended his tour of duty. But it wasn’t quite the same home I had left. There were no parades for me and no cheers. Girls wouldn’t go out with me – and that was very painful when I was young – because they believed me to be one of those doped-up, village-burning, orphan-making wild men they had heard about from some twisted characters on the grapevine. That was not a description of me or any other soldier I knew in the war. It was not a description of this one hero.

There was no good ending to that war. Too bad. I don’t care to argue politics here. I want to tell you about a letter. It was around Christmastime the year I got back Stateside. Here, the letter said, written by an adjutant in my old battalion, is some unhappy news. He was killed last week and we knew you would want to know.

He was killed on an artillery firebase. In the middle of a hot and dusty day. Mortar rounds were coming in and he was down deep behind sandbags, trying to stay alive. A mortar round struck a gun pit and guys were flung across the hardpan and were lying twisted and screaming for help. He was 23 and their captain and he ran out to help them.

I came home and he did not. I have a wife and child and made a satisfying career and he was denied all those things. Why did he do that, with the shells coming down and his chances very slim of getting across open ground to the wounded? You know the answer as well as I. He did it for his buddies. To save a life, if he could, by risking his own. Because there is something in the spirit of an American soldier, committed to the defense of his country and family, that he must protect his buddies who are his country and who are his family. What nobler thing can be said about anyone?

That is why on Veterans Day I cheer the parades and wave the flag and think not about the fallen and those war-wounded in body or mind but about what they did in 1776, and 1865, 1918, 1945 and 1969, to create this country and keep it safe. Veterans Day is my special day for cheering so many. Because on the other 364 days, I think about one special hero, and what he sacrificed for us.

(I repost this article every year for Veterans Day. Because I must.)

(c) 2011-25 Steven Hardesty

Image: “Tank from ‘Bravo’ Company, Tanks in support of Third Battalion Seventh Marines, 1st Marine Division, Vietnam 1968” U.S. Department of Defense photo.

Forgetting the Holocaust

For part of my childhood I lived in a neighborhood with Holocaust survivors. In an upstate New York of fields and forests for me to explore and peace. Barely a dozen years after World War II. I was a child and did not know what “holocaust” meant. But I felt the fierce attachment to family of the people around me. To what they had left of family.

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Now I am an adult and find that I live in a world where memory of the Holocaust is being forgotten or distorted by lies. We all are not Holocaust survivors but we all are family. We have to remember.

So I wrote a novel - Parade of Silence - to protest forgetting and as a call to remember the truth. I know it is not as good a book as those written by Holocaust survivors. But it’s the best I can do to speak out against forgetting.

The e-book is available on Amazon (click the cover image to access) and the paperback will be available in a few weeks. If you choose to read the story, perhaps you would pass it on.

Stolen Valor and the Something Else

I see in the news that another handful of politicians has been outed for falsely claiming military valor medals. So, as a novelist determined to tell honest war stories, I feel compelled to out myself. Did I ever mention the Bronze Star medal with valor-V device that I never got in the Vietnam war?

The Central Highlands. 1968. Deep in the boonies. We climbed this mud-slippery mountain so steep we had to cling to tufts of grass to pull ourselves to the top. Looked down into the valley below to see another Yank company being shot to pieces by Viet Cong guerillas. Knew we were next. Circled up, dug in. I was at the far end of our FOB (that’s Forward Operating Base, a grand phrase for a circle of hastily dug foxholes) with the company commander, a captain, when we heard thook-thook-thook! – enemy mortar tubes firing from cover in the trees over there.

Mortar rounds arc so far up overhead before they dive down that you’ve got, oh, 15-20 seconds from thook! to bang! on the top of your skull. The captain’s foxhole was stuffed with guys squirming to get as far down into the hole as they could to get away from the falling mortar rounds, no room for me. I ran to the next hole. Stuffed. Next. Same. Ran around half the FOB, no space for me anywhere. Finally, I shouted, “I’m coming in!” and dived headfirst into my own foxhole at the far end of our base, squeezing out a couple of grunts who ran for other holes.

Found my radioman down there, his back against the muddy wall of the foxhole, frozen, eyes bugged. My recon sergeant grinding his face into the mud, praying. “Where’s the damn radio?” I said. “Wooo?” they croaked. Forgotten topside on the lip of our hole when they jumped in. I was the artillery forward observer assigned to the company and what’s an artilleryman without his radio? I jumped up, grabbed the radio, a rocket-propelled grenade zipped over my head spitting flames, and dragged the radio down into the hole to call for artillery fire.

We were so far out in the boonies that I had to call fire from long-range 175mm cannons. One-seven-fives are beautiful weapons but at max range they have max error and could smack down on me as easily as on the enemy. Just one “short” round could blow away our entire FOB and a lot more. But I was desperate after we’d seen the mauling of that company in the valley. I called for zoomies, too, and gunnies, anything, everything. I could hear wounded screaming all around, enemy mortars and rockets blasting at our foxholes, machinegun bullets streaking over my hole. Had to use both shaking hands to hold down the radio handset’s press-to-talk button. Bad, bad, bad.

Later, after dustoff had lifted away our casualties and the rest of us had returned to patrolling the boonies, the captain said to me, “Saw what you did out there, going to write you up for Bronze Star with V.” “What did I do, Captain?” “Why, I watched you run from hole to hole under mortar fire rallying the troopies.” Oh?

Well, we got busy, more stuff happened, the captain forgot about my medal with valor-V, so did I. Too many artillerymen got blown away that season and I was transferred out of his company to another company on patrol and then to another to cover shortages. Saw too much more of war, too much more of the waste of a beautiful country, too much more of military mismanagement leading to pointless deaths, too much American and Vietnamese misery. And came to realize I should’ve reminded the captain to write up my valor-V. Why?

Because war had made me so bitter about making war – about the lives and hopes thrown away for the stupidities that drive war – that I wanted to be able to flash my V and tell the equally bitter story of how I won a valor medal running to find a hole to hide down.

© 2025 Steven Hardesty

Sometimes You Write a Book

Sometimes you write a book and when you finish tapping the last key and have a zillion words staring back at you from the laptop screen you realize the book’s just no damn good and you’ve got to start over but how?

Now on Amazon…

Well, first you pour a bucket of ice over your head to chill your inner fury at messing up a good story idea. Then you stuff the manuscript into some secret place so no one else can see it and shame you. Let it simmer there all by itself. Until, one bright day bingo! you decide to take it up again.

Of course, that bright day dims just a bit as you pull on sterile gloves to pluck the manuscript from hiding. Fan off the bad odor. Clap on dark glasses to shield your eyes. And search through the pages with a good sharp ax to uncover those few bits worth salvaging in rewrite.

You ax away words in their thousands. Hack away hundreds of pages. Chop out all that overwriting, all those arcane similes and comic cynicisms, all that too much too much. Until you’re left with the skeleton of your story idea staring back at you pleading to put good meat on its bones.

But meat with a cocky new attitude that will snare a reader and draw him/her into a story you once believed in and now can believe in again.

Ah, I suppose you want an IRL example of all this? Okay. Long ago, I decided to rewrite the Arthurian legend based strictly on sixth century A.D. facts and possibilities. No myth, no magic, no fantasy, just the real stuff. Good solid historical fiction.

Had a ball doing the research and writing. Published the novel. Waited for the cheers of gratitude from readers. Crickets. No one wanted to read it. Oof! So I dared give the book a readerly read. Yep, it wasn’t worth the eyestrain – nothing but endless brawls between unwashed knights and backstabbing ladies, pretty much what history tells us late Roman Britain was all about. Lots of gut-turning scenes do not make the soul-wrenching core of a novel to grip readers.

I yanked the book from publication and pretended I’d never heard of the guy who wrote it. Hid away the manuscript and let the story idea simmer a looong while. Before I took up my word-cutting ax and grabbed my laptop to re-flesh the skeleton with a dash of, oh, snark.

Snark became the book’s core because snark is very human. We all like snark, except when it’s aimed at us. But we really like reading snarky stories because they are very human stories.

I stuffed lots of the stuff into Merlin in the Mirror to make a weird fantasy of a lady Merlin who doesn’t believe in magic, a boy Arthur who doesn’t want to be king, a grimy old sword stuck in a rock and, toward the end of the tale, a vegetable starship or two and a vintage Ferrari. Plus a couple of kind words about those chummy black holes. Does that promise enough snark to persuade you to sample the novel on Amazon?

I hope so. Because, if no one reads this version, as everyone on Earth quite sensibly chose to ignore the original, I’ll have to give up fine literature and concentrate on training my flea circus.

© 2025 Steven Hardesty

Go On, Have a Happy New Year’s War

Every new year’s first blog post should be bright and chirpy but that’s not for me. I write war novels. So how about a biting lesson on an always popular sport – war – and how to survive it?

There are two great lessons a soldier must learn in order to put him- or herself in the right frame of mind to do what must done in combat and, incidentally, survive war. I'll tell you about the first lesson now and the second some other time, if you insist.

Lesson One: Yes, yes, you really really really want to learn to be the best soldier you can be. Not because being best is any guarantee that you'll live to stagger out the ass-end of your war. But because it means you'll have some slight chance to kill enough of the enemy to justify – at least to you – your own risk of death in combat.

Because the best soldier with the best training and the best weapons and the very best bloody-minded combat attitude has no more chance of survival than that confused Sad Sack over there deep down in the next foxhole too frightened to poke up his/her head to fire a weapon.

How can that be when the best is best, isn't it? Oh, maybe in a competitive sport like basketball or love. Not in combat. Combat isn't a sport and not a competition. Not at the level of the grunt in the mud. It isn't even movie gladiators in the Colosseum, with or without added raging lions.

No, combat is about filling the air around a soldier with little bits of steel. Like bullets and shrapnel. All designed not merely to kill but to so mangle and maim any it does not kill so as to force the enemy nation to waste resources meant for winning its war on caring for the war-wounded, instead.

Imagine yourself standing up-up-up in all that air filled with little bits of steel flying around you at supersonic speeds. Because that is what a soldier (or sailor or Marine or airman) is expected to do. At that moment, which would you rather have handy to keep yourself alive – the very best training-weapon-combat attitude or just a tiny bit of good luck?

Luck, ladies and gents, boys and girls, is what separates the quick from the dead in combat. Thus endeth Lesson One.

Oh, not quite. Because I can hear your puzzled whimpers and the fierce grumbles of the old soldiers who train new soldiers.

Question: Why do armies grow weaker as their wars grow longer? Because they've used up all their best soldiers, those so trained and self-driven as to laugh at luck and take the lead charging into the enemy's killing machine.

Consider the Russians in Ukraine, for example, who now shove convicts and their allies' soldiers into their front lines ahead of Russian troops. A curious thing to ponder, isn't it?

But don't soldiers learn anything in combat to help them survive? Of course they do. There were GIs who fought all across Europe after Normandy and came home to tell about it. Combat trained them to be the greatest soldiers this country ever produced. But how many other soldiers original to their companies sailed home with them? Very few. Those greatest soldiers were also the luckiest.

Consider the famous Omaha Beach invasion scene from the film Saving Private Ryan. How many best soldiers died on that beach beside all the average and mediocre before any of them fired a single bullet? Luck decided.

Or consider wounded Audie Murphy standing on a burning tank destroyer firing its .50 machine gun and calling in artillery support to hold off German tanks and soldiers as his outnumbered company fell back to better fighting positions. A superb soldier and great hero but luck offered him no help? (Btw, his To Hell and Back is one fine war memoir.)

I think of seeing a soldier, going-home orders in his pocket, clinging to the strut of a chopper lifting him and the wounded out of jungle combat when the chopper jinked and he fell into the trees and broke his back. Of a mech infantry trooper who, napping after an exhausting patrol, had his head crushed beneath the track of his own armored personnel carrier. Or of the old NCO on his second combat tour running through bullet-heavy air, blood streaming from a zip! across his shaved scalp, shouting, “I’m going home I’m going home!”

Luck decides all in combat for the individual soldier.

So how can a soldier get a fair share of combat luck? You can't. It happens to you or it doesn't. Like love or a lightning strike. Which leaves us with two last things to say about luck:

As combat luck is uncertain, choose your war. If it’s December 7, 1941, go fight and take your chances. There’s nothing else you can do. But if it’s some other date, give the thing real thought before you sign up to tease your luck.

Then recall that the novelist James Jones fought on Guadalcanal where the combat was so murderously awful that he and his buddies preemptively gave themselves up for dead. Giving up, he said, relieved fear and helped them survive, and win the grueling battle. If luck is so damn fickle, then you might as well follow his example and go to war considering yourself dead – after all, you being dead is what any war you join is all about. But that attitude just might maybe bring you the slim luck that let James Jones survive to write The Thin Red Line.

If all this sounds too grim for a jolly New Year’s post, then tell me – what do you think war is?

© 2025 Steven Hardesty

Writing with a Sixgun

I write Westerns not because I’m a Westerner (well, I am) or live the cowboy life (I do know a real cowboy) or even like horses (the last I rode threw me down in the dirt and galloped away sneering). I write Westerns because the Wild West is another world, a stranger world than I ever knew, and a terrifically exciting place to live for the weeks-months-years of writing a Western novel.

Whoa! Let me correct one Wild West oddity here at the start so you get the feel for what comes next: The 19th century word was not “cowboy” but “cow-boy” (Billy the Kid can confirm, so can Ike Clanton). A name never meant to be flattering or heroic but to brand a delinquent or crook or cattle rustler. And may have started out racist – 20% of men working cattle drives and ranches after the Civil War were Black (plus many Native Americans and some Japanese and Chinese and a few Canadians who couldn’t read North on a compass to get out of the heat).

Although the word’s antique origin from the Mexican word vaquero (really the Spanish of Seville, where all things cowboy were invented in the 16th century and brought to the Wild West in the sprawl of the Spanish empire) does translate “cowboy.” But the Old West made “buckaroo” of that word.

So cow-boy is the word in all my books. Just as no sensible person in my books loads six rounds into a six-shooter or stands up in a dusty street at high noon to gun-duel with a villain.

True, the Old West was a time and place where folks were more direct and open than in our own. But that doesn’t mean they jumped into gunfights or “showdowns,” as Wild Bill Hickok called them. And Wild Bill was pretty much the first – in a duel over a pocket watch – and certainly the greatest of “shootists”. (Btw, Libbie Custer thought him the handsomest man she ever met, though she never told husband George, which likely spared them both a showdown.)

No, gunfights were shocking town spectacles that made the big newspapers back East because they were less common than TV and Hollywood teach. After all, what fool would facedown another man or woman heavily armed and with murderous intent? No, no, no. Best to shoot him/her in the back, which is how front page arguments more usually were resolved (Morgan Earp was backshot likely by Johnny Ringo and died on a pool table after the OK Corral gunfight and Wild Bill was backshot at cards in Deadwood Gulch).

Seems to me the last official gunfight on record in Sacramento, California, my hometown and last station on the Pony Express (Mark Twain wrote for the newspapers there), was in the mid-1960s. When city police interrupted two idiots chasing each other around a parked car firing off shots at each other as in a Yosemite Sam cartoon. (Wyatt Earp’s ashes and those of the woman sort of his wife who was part-cause of the Tombstone fiasco are buried near Sacto. Wyatt’s post-OK Corral advice: Never walk into a gunfight without a pistol in your hand.)

So if the Wild West wasn’t that wild, what makes it worth writing about? Well, it was filled up with the same immigrant trash that filled the American Colonies, the impoverished and desperate people who had no hope in their home countries but had the courage to cross the blustery Atlantic in hope – in hope, that’s the key – of a better life.

I.e., ordinary people who became cowhands, ranchers, farmers, shopkeepers, mothers, fathers, kids happy to live the Tom Sawyer life. Of all colors, creeds and backgrounds. Ex-slaves from the ruined South, wrecked veterans of the Civil War, escapees from big city ghettos and slums. Wanderers, adventurers. Some few who tried to do right by the Native American and Mexican (and Russian and French) populations settled there before the newcomers arrived.

All making a very human story of endurance, sacrifice, heroism and prejudice. But of people forced by brushing up against other people and by the sprawl of the West to become better than they were. Making a story worth telling beyond the gaudy tales of gunfights and gun-men.

So my books are not Hollywood or TV Westerns. No stereotypes or cliches allowed, no sir. If you spot one lurking on a page, expect it will suffer a sudden twist to become something else. Something more real to the Wild West in its true time and place.

Because the true story of the West, without all its mythic trappings, is the story of ordinary people jammed into a desperate corner who must become very near to heroes to survive. That is the story I write. Sixguns and all.

© 2023 Steven Hardesty

The Mistake of Clearing Your Bookshelves

A book is a conversation, isn’t it? and yesterday I thought to clear off my bookshelves to restock them with fresher conversations. But a good book is one you want to read again, said Mark Twain, and I made the mistake of opening each book I pulled down to replace and now I have to read them all again and keep them. Except one.

After all, who can give up...

Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten (with a cover by Roy Lichtenstein)

I had not opened this book in a long while and had forgotten how startling are Tuten’s stories. I like the physical structure of the narrative and their dreamy quality. The first story, “Voyagers,” opens the door to all the others because it tells of a writer's mind not always on the present planet. A story of those who dream and act on their dreams. I act on my own dream memory of the first time I read the story and sit down to re-read it in the bright sunlight streaming across bookshelf. I let Frederic Tuten tell me the story a second time and that hardly seems enough.

“Voyagers” is the price of admission to the book’s strange ordinary world. A story that makes Tuten’s story-telling career a triumph. A story that deserves vast prizes. I read it a third time, sitting in the brightest sunlight so I am sure to hear every word of its conversation.

Words that make me dream of an aboriginal priest on a stone pyramid staring at the Moon and wondering, wondering, wondering when the electric toaster will be invented and by whom and how a great empire of industry and invention must be raised up to do it. How can I find that tower to share a place on the pyramid’s peak beside the aboriginal man so we stare together at the Moon?

Grand as are all the other stories in Self Portraits, "Voyagers" is a perfection. Wish I could write like that.

I wonder, Where have I heard this voice before, or something similar? Brautigan! Yes, “Voyagers” shares Richard Brautigan’s dream:

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

Like the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, Trout Fishing in America ought to be a seminal document of American culture. Especially the ejaculation scene. (Pardon the pun.)

I have read this book a hundred times (who hasn’t?) since I first heard Brautigan’s name in the 1960s. Heard that great story of his printing his home phone number on the album jacket of a reading of his poetry. Thinking people would see his number and phone him for a chat. But no one did. No one really believed he would publish his phone number that way.

I had never heard the album and lately I did. Brautigan recited in a whiny, sing-songy poetry voice that made it impossible for me to listen to the words I so much enjoy reading. I’ll keep Trout Fishing on my shelf because no library in America can be an American library without it.

But I will pull the thin tape out of the old cassette of his recital and toss it on the rubbish heap. Better that than remembering a voice so much poorer than his powerful words.

There, on the shelf too near Brautigan and Tuten, is a book I will not name because it was the first book I ever destroyed with malice:

A Book Unnamable by an author I won’t name

Looking back, I wonder that I was not shocked to destroy that book. It was, after all, the contents of a man’s synthesis and calculation, of his own strange ideas justifying Hitler, and he was free to speak his mind. But revulsion for his thinking was in me. Revulsion for his falsifications of history, his apology for a monster and his war. I was not much an historian when I bought the book and read it hoping for insight into the man who made a world war that murdered sixty million – probably 100 million – human beings, six million of them in the grinding horror of his concentration camps.

One true thing came from reading that book – a reminder that human beings can be savages. But “Voyagers” and Trout Fishing are antidote to savagery, horror and falsehood. Tuten and Brautigan are the bright, dreamy half of the human split personality. The half that will endure. Or so I hope. We on this pebble spinning through cosmic emptiness must live in hope and dream. What else can we do?

Night by Elie Wiesel

There, in a corner of my bookcase, is a book almost too white-hot to touch. The most terrible book I have ever read. The story of one of those concentration camps. After one reading, it will be years before I can take it down to read again, to hold it burning in my hands and read the fire once more. It is a story of such terrible power I feel compelled to ask, Can we human savages ever deserve the redemption we seek?

When I learned my daughter’s school would teach the book to her at age fourteen, I went in to protest. It takes a prepared spirit to read that book, I said, and no child can be ready for it. “But Anne Frank,” the headmistress said, “was just past fourteen when she was sent into the concentration camps.”

My daughter read the book. I could not talk to her about it. I could not say, even in a coward’s voice, that the price of knowing the truth about human selves can be too terrible to pay. That others have paid the price for us, and we must make our lives worth their sacrifice.

I keep that book shimmering in fire on my shelf and look for another conversation to relieve for a moment the unrelievable, and that’s...

Side Effects by Woody Allen

Here is another book that rebels against the encroachment of lies and terror. A lot of baggage to carry for a little paperback full of funny stories. I like best “The Kugelmass Episode” about a magic cabinet that sends Kugelmass off into the pages of a great novel to become Emma Bovary’s lover.

This is a story for voyagers and trout fishermen and far too good, even in my flaking paperback edition, not to keep. I’ll re-read it tonight in bed, beside my wife. Perhaps it will transport us into, oh, Pamplona for the running of the bulls with Jake and Brett and the wounded matador. Or to a steamboat on the Mississippi with the leadsman calling out “Mark twain!” Or maybe to meet a fellow named Rick and a woman named Ilsa in a town called Casablanca. Yes, maybe so…

Goodnight, sweet princes and princesses all. A good night and better reading.

(c) 2023 Steven Hardesty

Going to War, Maybe?

When I finish writing a novel I fall into a ghastly funk. Because all those wild characters I meet in my stories – so unlike the people I know IRL – have taken off for other mad adventures elsewhere and left me behind and alone.

Not this time, no, no, no. I’ve just finished indie-publishing on Amazon an anti-war war novel (see the image next door) that started out jolly good fun but ended surprisingly grim-grim-grim and war-horrible. What else can you expect from a war novel gone anti? And I don’t want to see those characters ever again. Here’s why:

Not many people are in favor of war, least of all the soldiers who fight wars. That’s my experience as I was a soldier in war once-upon-a-time. But a lot of those not-in-favor don’t much care if somebody else makes war on somebody even more else. This story focuses on the hapless adventuring through the Army and the Vietnam war of the nameless main character, a young, ambitious, befuddled, brand-new soldier. But the book really is aimed at Those Others.

Young people do the heavy lifting in war and most of the being torn up and made dead. So I thought I’d start the book with a young person’s excited ambition to go to war and build to the tell-it-like-it-is. All the way to the bitter end I saw.

Ah, well, better writers have told the war story better – James Jones (The Thin Red Line, The Pistol), Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front). And, of course, Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five) and George MacDonald Fraser (Quartered Safe Out Here).

But those books did not focus on the young man or woman 18-25 years old – prime conscription/enlistment age – who most needs to think about war before s/he signs up to fight. Some wars need to be fought (December 7, 1941) and some don’t (my war). Took me years to figure out which is which and that is what I want to tell the 18-25 readers. So they don’t do what I did and go fight the wrong war.

Just added the paperback version on Amazon. Now you’ve two formats to use in telling me if the novel hits its target. Or that I must try again. As bitter experience makes me want to tell well a story worth its telling.

© 2023 text and image Steven Hardesty

Here’s some shouting

Every novel offers the same thing - the chance to jump into a fabulous new world and there discover a surprise dream and a fresh understanding of how human beings work. Am I right?

True, some novelists work it all backwards and that can read crazy. Some do it inside out and that’s just weird. But I discovered to my surprise that I am boldly different: No matter what genre I choose in which to tell a story - and I write Westerns, romcoms, space opera and anything else that promises fun - I always tell the same story. A story of war with life.

After all, how better to capture a dream and an understanding of human beings than in a war story that is not a war story but something very different?

I got to thinking about all this the other day when I hit the halfway mark in drafting a new novel. An historical Western called Cradle of the Wind about a buffalo hunter off the Great Plains tracking down the mystery of a woman’s lost head. Halfway through the manuscript was the point at which I realized I was writing two books on the same page.

After a good many years’ writing in whatever genre pleased me at the moment, and thinking what a clever fellow I am, I realized that I’ve been writing just one story all along. The story of my Vietnam war.

Yes, I’ve written four war novels. But that war crept into everything else I wrote - the romantic thriller Woman on Fire, the sci-fi/fantasy The Prince of Cowards, the horror In the Season of Poison, even comic capers like The Feathered Virgin. And now Cradle of the Wind.

In all those non-war stories, I tell just a bit of the everyday horrors and miseries of war. Only once did I try to tell the bigger, scarier truth of what happens to a soldier and his family when a war is done, and that was in a non-war war novel called Poisoned Hearts.

Now, half through the writing of Cradle of the Wind - set in the Old West in those hard, unsettled years after the U.S. Civil War and the collapse of Reconstruction - I discovered myself writing a post-war war novel with no chance of escape back to the Wild West romp I’d originally intended to write.

I refuse to take all the blame, though. Two books boosted me to understand any novel, including Cradle, can be and probably ought to be more than just a romp. First was the beautifully written West with the Night, Beryl Markham’s 1942 memoir of Africa and early aviation. There is war in it - the Great War - but not much. What struck me was its depth of understanding of narrative and swift characterization of complex characters. And, behind it all, something much more than one woman’s adventure - a casual courage and fixed determination.

At the same time, I read Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel The Passenger (1938) about a man trying to outrun the Holocaust but betrayed on all sides and by his own confusion and indecision. Boschwitz himself escaped Nazi Germany but died in a U-boat attack in the North Atlantic. His story of a man’s desperate inability to accept a bitter reality and his sinking into a kind of self-betrayal is stunning for the silent question it asks - “Me, too?”.

As relief from the bright and gloomy shocks of these two books, I took up Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, a book I’ve never been able to read much past the first chapters although I’m a Brautigan fan. Big mistake. Here’s a classic lighthearted story that offers up the unhappy possibility that all life is a child’s prank. Brrr.

Markham and Boschwitz, and Brautigan, made me realize that when a thing needs to be said it must be shouted out or no one will bother to listen. So Cradle of the Wind is going to do some shouting. Or so I hope.

© 2023 Steven Hardesty

What Next?

Moping around the house today feeling bored and pointless, getting in my wife’s way at every turn in my wanderings up and down stairs. Yesterday I finished and published on Amazon a book I’d worked on for the last 7 years (The Glass Horseman) and now I don’t know what to do with myself. Too exhausted to start another manuscript.

Before all you young whippersnappers out there jeer for my writing so slooowly, I’ll say that during those 7 years I finished and published a dozen other books. Including a seven-book series (the Harry Seaburn crime capers) I wrote in a speedy 10 months. But other novels, well, the record-keeper took me 30 years to get just right (In the Season of Poison) before I dared put it between covers.

In progress, sort of…

Mark Twain needed 10 years to finish Huck Finn. By that standard, I’m both slower and faster than the greatest American writer. That’s something, isn’t it? Well, I think so.

It is not as though I’ve nothing else handy to work on. I often write two-three projects at a time, jumping from one to another as it pleases me and bringing to fruition whichever seems ready to take off on its own. The book just finished is my first stab at a weird Western (that’s The Glass Horseman). Lots of fun and lots of hard work. But I also had two other manuscripts in that horse race – a classic Western story and a Western comic mystery – and now I’ll see which of them seems likely to rocket away.

Or maybe I’ll go back to that bit of nonfiction that my writing group scorned last online meeting or revive the vampire romcom for which I’ve got a great cover or dredge up from the bottom of the drawer a sci-fi detective story or, oh well. Maybe I’ll just go paint a wall. I’m looking at a wall that needs it.

© 2023 Steven Hardesty

The Weirder Wild West

I never tried to be weird until just now.  Today I published my first weird Western – The Glass Horseman – at such a good price on Amazon that I’m sure you will want to buy dozens of copies to thrust on all your friends and acquaintances. 

It’s the story of a lone, lost cowboy dragged by an Ike Clanton very different to the character mere history and first-person accounts tell us he was into all the Gunfights with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday at the O.K. Corral.  (You knew there were more than one, didn’t you?)  And sort of what happens to him afterwards.  Sort of. 

Here’s the pretty cover made by James at GoOnWrite.com and if you tap on the cover the book’s Amazon buy page will pop up and you, too, can be a very happy weird Western reader.  Go ahead, tap tap tap!

(c) 2023 Steven Hardesty

The People Who Never Lived

I’ve got the greatest job in the world.  Not just because I’m a writer and can sit around the house all day eating bonbons and listening to counter-retro jazz fusion while everybody else is slaving away for cruel taskmasters.  No.  Because I spend all my working hours with the most fascinating people who never lived. 

The kind of people who populate my thrillers, Westerns and love stories and do fabulous and exciting things, often in exotic places or in an even more exotic past century.  The kind of people who make parties fun and brawls unspeakable.  The folks you’re happy to join for a beer but don’t want moving into the house next door.  Because some of the things they do – well, a lot of the things they do – are anti-social or howling nuts. 

Let me give a for-instance.  I just finished the first draft of my first weird Western – The Glass Horseman – and, as usual after a novel’s finish, I’m feeling blue.  I had such fun for so long with the people who live in the story – a young cowboy lost in the wrong world, charming outlaws and grumpy lawmen, a very strange lady coffin-maker and her stranger waterboy, all harried by targeted tornadoes, invisible walls and a gunfight at the O.K. Corral over and over again – that now, the draft finished and them gone away, I miss ‘em. 

Well, some I don’t miss – the villains.  They were especially villainous.  In fact, the main evildoer invaded The Glass Horseman from my historical Western novel The Gunfighter. And I wished he’d stayed there.  Ah, well, so did the hero, Leander Phipps, who is an even callower version of the hero in that series. 

All the villains – Ike Clanton, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Gleason brothers gang – proved so aggressively awful and committed such savage crimes that I took a lot of pleasure in letting my young hero finally do unto them as they deserved to be done unto.  Or sort of. 

That’s another joy of the writing life – you can take revenge on every character who deserves it and get away with it.  Shoot this one with a six-gun, stab that one with a salad fork, shove another off the boat into the Arctic Ocean with the snapping polar bears.  No worries about cops knocking on your door.  Or friends of villains potshooting you in a parking lot. 

On the other hand, when you stumble across a hero or heroine, like Young Phipps, standing battered but determined in the face of misery and outrage, you can feel that you too are standing there alongside, ready to fight for the right and the decent.  Ready to help civilize the Wild West or bring down the mafia or comfort the lost and forlorn victims of war. 

It’s a great feeling when you see those things happening on the page you’re writing.  You forget you’re a bum sitting on your bum in front of a computer screen tossing back bonbons.  You remember the whole point of a writer’s life – to say as best you can what you have to say about being a decent human being in a world where decency too often is in short supply. 

We live in a real world of sprawling tyrants, sneering bullies and gutless liars no different than the villains in my fiction.  But ours also is a world of decent folk who deserve a break in life and sometimes, but only sometimes, get it. 

So it’s as much a surprise to me as I bet it is for my readers when the good guy wins in my novels.  Because I never know what’s going to happen in a story until I write it.  I don’t write to outline, you see, I write by the seat of my pants.  Flying blind through the story pretty much the way you read it, not knowing what’s going to turn up on the next page.  I do that because, if I plot a story in advance then I’ve told the story and it’s dead to me and I can’t write it. 

Usually, I get within 30 or 40 pages of “The End” before I can see where a novel is going and how the hero is going to squeeze out of his or her fix.  Sometimes I can’t see clearly how it will wrap up and I write many pages past The End and must go back and cut text to reach the true end point. 

With Glass Horseman, however, I had no idea how the novel would end until an hour or two before it happened.  Then – bingo! – those two magic words popped up.  Ending all my jittery worries that this story might go on forever and never find its End. 

But I was shocked to see how many engaging characters had to be sacrificed to the weirdness all around them, and to the villains, to reach a powerful endpoint.  I hated to see them go.  I’d hoped that one or two could become the hero/heroine of their own spin-off novels.  But that didn’t happen.  And all I could do was watch, stunned and wondering, as other things happened to all these people. 

I suppose it would be cliché to say that the process of writing, like the process of living, is a mystery too full of “Whys?” and too empty of Answers. 

So, too, writing, like life, is too full of villains and too short on heroes.  And it feels great when a story like Glass Horseman wraps itself up as it did, with a hero who has come to know himself.  (Sort of.) Making him a hero worth your knowing (I hope), not just to share a beer in the tavern down the road but to welcome into the neighborhood.  (Or maybe not.) 

That’s why, this weird manuscript done, I miss ‘em all. 

PS:  The Glass Horseman should be ready for publication and available on Amazon shortly. 

© 2023 Steven Hardesty  

Something Strange Happening Here

Yes, yes, I know you’ve heard me complain before when characters in my latest story take over and go their own ways. But this time I’m desperate and need your help!

I was staring into empty space and thinking, as one will, about George Pocock and his invention of the Charvolant – a four-wheeled, six-passenger buggy pulled by a kite that made 20mph and outran a fast mail coach in England in 1826 – and voila! there’s the nub of a story for a fab Wild West novel.

But who do I give it to? Which of the protagonists in my other Western novels can carry the weight of such a grand idea?

The unreformed gunfighter Spotted Billy Sumpter?* The boy Ronas, an accidental gunfighter?* Hamish Stark, evading a noose by hiding behind a stolen sheriff’s badge?* The amnesiac cashiered buffalo soldier Easy Holloway?* Even Leander Phipps, a cowboy lost in a very strange world?* Or someone completely new?

I inclined toward Hamish Stark because his perpetual confused desperation and bright hope to give up gunfighting to own a bi-cycle repair shop appeals to me. I began to scratch the first words.

Old Stink and Pike, one a mountainman and the other a plainsman, popped up on the page in those first words. Oh, well, thought I, they can introduce the story as they do the Ronas novels. Let Hamish Stark swoop in to take over at the right dramatic moment.

But Stark never rode over the horizon. Instead, it was Old Stink who stood up to the task, yearning to get out of the flatlands and back to his mountains where gravity is less a bother, and Pike with his opinionated mule. All three startled to see a huge box kite flying a woman across the prairie.

Hamish Stark let me down and Old Stink fled back to his mountains. Pike, only ever meant to be a minor character in other stories, was the last man standing in the scrubgrass plain and he took over. I didn’t plan that. Didn’t expect it. Surprised to find him there anxious to rough-ride across my and George Pocock’s beautiful ideas. I barely know Pike, don’t know what he’s going to do next or where he will take this story. But I’m stuck with him.

Hamish Stark, you hear me – I’ll get even with you for this. The price for treachery is the rope and I’ll see that those three posses coming after you get a lot closer a lot sooner in your next novel.

Meantime, I’ve got to deal with Pike who bizarrely considers all the Great Plains his personal property, who is haunted by what he had to do in “the late war,” and whose moral compass will not deviate from the true no matter if death jumps up before him. Yet he is not a good man.

What’s the help! I need from you? Tell me how to write a good bad man or a bad good man called Pike. Maybe then I can wrestle this story away from him and make it my own.

© 2022 Steven Hardesty

Writing Monsters

To write is to feel like a god. But sometimes even gods don’t get things right.

Tell me, what do you call that weird feeling you get when you’ve written something that runs completely out of your control – “Frankenstein’s Monster Syndrome?” Now tell me why that monster’s still chasing me years after leaping from my first Kindle novel.

I only realized the beast was loose when a reader asked me why my first two-fisted, globe-trotting thriller – Woman on Fire – has a female protagonist when I am, well, not female. (As Joe E. Brown said in the last scene of Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect!”) My novel started out with a male lead character and I still can’t figure how the heroine crept into the story and booted him out.

Yes, yes, I’ve tried to piece together the evidence from early drafts – not easy to do when dealing with speedy electrons – and I think this is how it happened:

I’m not the sort who can write a book in his/her head or even scribble a few plot notes, then key it into a neat manuscript and zip it off to fame and fortune. Because that’s telling the story. Once I’ve told the story to myself that way, it’s dead to me and I just can’t write it down. What I do instead is stumble across a good idea, a handful of outrageous characters and a rough direction for the story and just start hammering keys excited to see how it all turns out.

That didn’t quite happen with Woman on Fire. I had this fellow in my head – a wretched fellow lost in life, desperate to change everything, no idea how to do it. Suddenly, fortune followed by disaster! How does he handle all that? What changes does it make in him? Can he survive?

Hot with curiosity, I popped open my trusty clunky desktop PC and began keying the opening paragraph. But he wasn’t there in the first sentence. Or the second or third. She was there, this very strange woman. Staring at me out of the computer screen daring me to carry on the story without her. She took over the novel, lock, stock and down to the last exclamation mark, and believe me by then I was making a lot of exclamations.

Where she came from and how she did all that, I don’t know. And it worries me. Because I have to wonder, Will she come back and what story will she take over next?

I have no defenses against her because I don’t write stories, I listen to them and they are first of all for me. I write novels that I cannot find to read on a library shelf or a bookstore or even Amazon. The stories I like best are those of ordinary people who find themelves doing unexpectedly extraordinary things. People who, when their backs are against the wall, decide to be heroes, if for just this one moment.

In Woman on Fire, Kathryn Teal starts the story living the life of a coward but she ends a hero. I think she proves Buster Keaton wrong – every now and then some man or woman really does achieve a kind of perfection.

This post in a somewhat different form was part of an Indie Author Blog Tour hosted by Meghan Ciana Doidge’s MadebyMeghan blogsite at http://wp.me/pP9tA-aK.

The Vanishing Boomer

Proud to say I’m a Boomer because we changed the world and all of you out there who aren’t haven’t.  I mean all you sneering Millennials, Gen-Zers and other such with cute names.  What have you done and why aren’t you getting down to doing something? 

That’s the subject of my latest book-in-draft called Boomers End. 

When I say changed the world, just think (if you dare) what music was like before we Boomers took over.  I don’t mean Ellington jazz or Goodman swing.  That stuff’s grand and eternal.  But pop music from Doris Day and Perry Como, folk music (can you really listen to the lyrics of Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” without cringeing?) and whining hillbilly (“D-I-V-O-R-C-E”). 

We Boomers shoved aside all that nonsense for Elvis! Chuck Berry! Otis Redding! James Brown! Tina Turner! the Jefferson Airplane! and Janis Joplin!  When they died there was no more music, as I’m sure you know.  Well, except for the Rolling Stones who, as good Boomers, don’t seem willing to fade away. 

How about books – Holden Caulfield, that Gone With the Wind nonsense and Rod McKuen’s poetry?  Give me a break.  We stomped all that and took up Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.  Alan Ginsberg.  Harper Lee.  A Confederacy of Dunes.  Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. 

Our changing music, books and movies (Go Tell the Spartans) pushed along changes in the way people thought in the Age of Boomers and that pushed for a war on race hate in this country.  An end to a useless war in Vietnam.  For full and fair treatment of all people.  And for something else: 

Does it ever occur to you why a Boomer will rinse the top of a tin can before opening it to fork out canned tuna or pour tomato soup?  No, it isn’t to rinse off the supermarket shelf dust.  But to rinse off (and sometimes scrub with soap) the nuclear fallout.  From atom bomb tests in Arizona and hydrogen bomb tests in Siberia and Bikini. 

Boomers are the last of the World War II generation and we fought in the coldest part of the Cold War.  Born in those years right after the WW2 ended.  Raised by parents who had suffered through the war against fascism and, before that, the Great Depression.  We’re the last who truly remember that war.  Too young to fight it, yes.  But not too young to be reminded of it each day of our youth in a dozen unconscious and sometimes very conscious ways by our parents and by post-war society. 

We’re the ones trained to outsmart Russian nuclear missiles by hiding under our school desks.  Prepared to crawl into holes dug deep in the backyard to wait out nuclear war and then to crawl out into a ruined world to try to re-start the planet.  Told life could be nasty, brutish and short and probably would be. For us.  Very short. 

When we grew old enough to shout against all that horror, we saw we also had to act against the race hate that murdered four schoolgirls in a Birmingham church.  Against abuse and belittlement of women and their hopes to fully join society in all its aspects.  Against denying fellow citizens all that any citizen (and taxpayer!) has a right to expect from this country.  Against a foreign war that was unfair, unjust and unnecessary.  Against a corrupt election system and a lazy government. 

Against all the evils that, despite the progress we thought we were making, did not change that much.  Because life changes by increments and only rarely by leaps.  Oh, you hope for a leap, prepare the groundwork for a leap, maybe even achieve a leap.  But if you don’t push the increment, you make no progress at all. 

That’s why a Boomer out of habit still rinses the lid of a tin can before s/he cranks the old-fashioned manual can opener around the lid to cut it open.  Because you’ve got to crank hard to make progress, and any progress at all is progress.

© 2022 Steven Hardesty

No End of Fried Chicken

Robert E. Lee was a traitor and a slaver but there’s one story about him I enjoy retelling because it’s any soldier’s story and I was a soldier once.

Lee, riding along the trenches to check the dispositions of his army during Grant’s siege of Richmond/Petersburg in 1864, met two ladies in a buggy out to sightsee his army.

“General,” they said to him, “what do you hope to do after we win the war?” Thinking, no doubt, that he would reply, Become president of the Confederacy.

But Lee got a dreamy look in his eyes and said, “I want to eat fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two fried chickens. I want no end of fried chicken!”

No end of fried chicken.

That’s what every soldier wants. In Ukraine and in Russia. In my war in Vietnam. Standing against the enemy hordes at Chosin Reservoir. Grinding over the Nazis in Patton’s tanks.

Because a soldier doesn’t want war. Oh, sure, he or she trains for war all across a twenty or thirty year military career. But in all those years s/he is likely to go to just one war. And once s/he sees war, once is enough.

For more of war’s hard truth, read “The Heart Attack” from page 49.

The TV news that brings the Ukraine war into our homes every hour presents plenty of horror but it does not show the real war that a soldier must live. No, real war is what you read on the grim front pages of newspapers from places like Uvalde, Texas – parents stunned and weeping at the massacre of their children in their school classrooms. Little bodies torn to pieces by automatic rifle fire. Children dying in pain and surprise. Dying in fading hope of rescue. Stunned, puzzled, wretched.

Soldiers this hour standing on distant frontlines to protect this country must look back at Uvalde and wonder, What am I protecting if we massacre our own children?

A soldier may want no end of fried chicken. But today he or she craves something more – a country with the courage to stop making war on its own children. A country worth the soldier’s protection and risk. Worth the soldier’s staring into the awful face of war abroad.

We need to measure up, we need to stand up like soldiers. Admit that the frontline is here within ourselves. That we may be defenders of this nation but we are its besiegers, too. And then do what must be done to reshape ourselves and re-form this country and stop making war on our children.

© 2022 Steven Hardesty

The Wonder of War

I am not a Hollywood celebrity or social media influencer so my opinion on war means nothing. But I am a combat veteran and will speak out in my novels even though TikTok has no interest. And I say war is a wonderful thing.

In the antique meaning of the word – full of wonders horrific and a rare few that are grand.

There is an over-plenty of war right now and I hate all of it. I’ve stood there in the dragon’s hot breath and testify that it’s foul stuff. But it is what comes after the dragon has swept past that I want to talk about. Because that’s the hardest part of war.

I mean what happens to you and me after war.

Yes, some wars have to be fought – for Americans, that’s 1861 and 1941. The U.S. Civil War and World War II were medicine to purge evil. Those wars were worth fighting. Just too bad we did not apply better preventive medicine.

But even after a “good” war the misery remains – ruined lives, ruined hopes, ruined dreams, wrecked families, orphaned children, spoiled fields and factories, poisoned harvests and rivers. You and me struggling wretched through long nights wondering why we did what we did and why we were not clever enough or humane enough to trek a different trail.

That’s the story of Poisoned Hearts, a novel about the aftereffects of the wonderful Vietnam war. It’s where I get to say – even though I’m not a celebrity influencer – what too many combat veterans experience in the dread time after war and what their families experience with them.

There is a very big war going on now. It will not end when it ends. No war ever does. This war, no matter who wins, will ricochet through all the decades ahead. The twisting misery it inflicts today will not stop. War poisons hearts. We all are being poisoned now.

We have to stop this war and chain up the dragon to prevent another. Or we all become combat veterans unable to sleep in grim night.

© 2022 Steven Hardesty

Just One Good Book, Maybe

I never wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be a boutique chicken rancher.  But that’s a post for a different sort of blog.  My writing ambition is to write one good book.  I’ve tried 34 times so far.  Trying to come up to Mark Twain’s standard – “A good book,” he said, “is one you want to read again.”  So what makes a book re-readable? 

Good question.  What novels have I read that I read again every year, and so should you? 

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, for a start.  Why?  Well, it’s full of demented characters harrying you with pitchfork and rake through a wild tale of romantic gloom on a par with the greatest medieval epics.  I weep at reaching the ending.  Not because it’s so sad or so happy (it’s both) but because once again an American novelist fails to concoct a decent ending for his fabulous invention.  Every re-read I snap it shut before The End so that Ignatius J. Reilly can run on with his story, and on and on, in Toole’s wild New Orleans, with me happy to catch up with him next re-read. 

Richard Brautigan’s Troutfishing in America.  Yes!  This is the novel of American civics every voter should be required to read before any election day.  So rich in humanity, antique common sense and hippie craziness that any reader will devour it like a-cheeseburger-and-a-beer. 

How about Thomas Berger’s Neighbors?  Oh, yes, I reread Little Big Man now and then.  But Neighbors is True American Life.  A suburban survival guide.  As Berger says, a shotgun and a fist in the face makes for good neighbors. 

William Faulkner’s collected short stories, especially “Turnabout,” which I took as a model for my first published short story.  Every few years I attack The Sound and the Fury (best listened to than read to hear the rhythm of Faulkner’s language opening new avenues into the tale).  But Faulkner wrote short stories as poetry and I like them better. 

Now for Melville and his horrid whale.  Moby-Dick.  Yes, I re-read it every year and sometimes all the way through.  Sometimes its adventure and horror are too overwhelming to continue.  Sometimes I get bored with all that boiling down of blubber.  But Melville and Huckleberry Finn are the bedrocks of American literature and too grand not to read often.  Also Poe’s poetry, but poetry’s too scary to mention here, isn’t it? 

Of the great Brit comic writers (Brits are natural comedians but don’t seem to know it), I re-read every year Pride and Prejudice by Jane Whosit for obvious reasons (even if it weren’t so funny, the writing’s just too good not to re-read).  Pamela Hansford Johnson is as sardonically comic as only a post-Austen Brit can be, and I re-read her The Unspeakable Skipton or Night and Silence Who is Here? or Cork Street, Next to the Hatters in rotation every year or so.  Same-same for Tom Sharpe’s Wilt and Blott on the Landscape. 

Pardon if I mention Catch-22 (Heller), Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) and The Pistol (James Jones), but I was a soldier and these tell a soldier’s bitter story, which is why I read them bitterly. 

Every now and then I re-read Ishmael Reed, of course (who wouldn’t hunger for a re-read after a first read?), Richard Wright, Shalako (where I learned the importance to a story of the feeling of grit in desert sand), Fitzgerald who wrote the most beautiful American English or Hemingway who only wrote about the Hemingway he wanted to be.  Also the original Hornblower trilogy I first read as a boy, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Keith Laumer (I sort of knew him), The Big Sleep which I  can never figure out, Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes, and Out of the Silent Planet (C. S. Lewis), the first sci-fi novel I ever read and still think best of breed. 

Tonight I’m going to add to my re-reading list The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen (Herbert Tarr).  Been on my shelf or in my soldier’s rucksack for these many decades, still un-re-read, but I keep hold of it because I know its worth.  Just seeing it on my bookshelf reminds me how I discovered it, where and when, and that’s important because Chaplain Cohen helped me through my war. 

So what are you re-reading tonight or are you wasting your brains on booze, wild sex and bingeing Scandinoir?

© 2021 Steven Hardesty

The Reader Is Not the First Victim

Every book is an hallucinatory experience for a reader, isn’t it? as all its grand and awful characters rise up from the page.  You meet someone you’re delighted to know or wish to God you had never met and then snap! that vision is gone at the last page.  You have to read the next book in the series to grab that wonderful hallucination again.

It’s all a writer’s trick to keep you stuck on buying his books, you say?  Noooo.  The truth is far more terrible.  Because the trick isn’t a trick.  And the writer is its first victim.

Just for you and just for now, I’m going to break my oath of eternal silence to the Secret Society of Writers and reveal the unbelievable truth:  No writer has any idea what’s going to pop off a page until he or she writes it there.

Not those who meticulously plan a novel.  Not those who merely bang away from page one with no idea what comes next.  Not the guy who wrote Beowulf, or Agatha Christie or Gabriel García Márquez.

Here is what really happens, and it’s so unbelievable to experience I will have to give you an example or you will never grasp the metaphysical mechanics of the marvel:

The book is called Dead Hand, a Western in the classic style and true to its historical context.  I wanted it to say something special about the Old West and the hard men and harder women who lived there.

So this gunfighter is my carefully chosen protagonist.  He rides out of a bitter cold Arizona winter into a village of Exodusters, his trail-weary horse scattering children at their play, and into the warm, straw-smelling comfort of a stable.  Where he has an argument with a boy in tattered jacket and broken shoes about the cost of caring for his horse.

Up to this moment, the gunfighter is my chosen protagonist.  He’s going to carry the story along and embody what I want to say about those people in those times.  But a man in a flat-brimmed Stetson comes out of stable shadow raising a Buffalo Soldier’s old rifle to end the argument between gunfighter and stableboy.  And bingo! he’s my protagonist now.

How the dickens did that happen?

I don’t mean the man in the hat blazes away with his rifle to grab the novel’s lead role.  No, far worse.  He and the gunfighter and the stableboy share a bit of limburger cheese while ghastly shadows creep into their conversation.  And suddenly my chosen hero is unemployed!

This other guy is just too interesting, too dynamic, too much more the Western man.  He grabs the protag’s job.  He takes over the story.  And he drives everything to a boil until it all ends where I never expected the story to end.

Now that’s some weird and freaky magic.  But it happens all the time to a writer.  You’re popping along with a scene and suddenly Annie Oakley walks into it and where did she come from?  Or you finish an especially good line of dialog and wonder, What would happen next out of all this? and the “next” pops up on the page and you wonder how those sentences got there.

Or you’re coming to the end of the story and you’ve no idea how to get to The End (as with my first draft of Prince of Cowards just finished) when suddenly your hero runs off thataway and slaps The End at the bottom of the page for you and it’s all done.

There’s the writer’s most secret secret, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls - no writer knows what he or she is doing.  It all just happens.  Scary, yes, but wonderful.  And it’s best when the reader finds it scary and wonderful, too.

© 2021 Steven Hardesty