Book Festival Surprises? Funny You Should Ask.

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 1, 2007

We're ashamed to admit it, but we had no idea Joyce Carol Oates could be funny.

There she was at Saturday's National Book Festival on the Mall, being introduced as one of America's greatest writers. She looked frail and elongated and deadly serious, as befits a venerable literary figure who seems to have cranked out an average of 37 books a year for the past 50 years and whose fictional worlds inspire reviewers to employ the word "grim" with great frequency.

"It was the greatest introduction, but I wonder if I heard correctly," Oates said. "Did you say I have been some sort of writer for -- did you say 50 years? Did he say 50? Okay. Ohhhh.

"Well, I guess I've been around a little too long."

She talked about her latest novel, "The Gravedigger's Daughter," which was inspired by the life of her paternal grandmother. Oates discovered, many years after the old woman's death, that her grandmother had been Jewish. ("When I told my friends in Princeton about it, they said, 'Well of course. You look Jewish.' ") The family had emigrated from Germany in the 1890s and settled in the freezing Snowbelt that is Upstate New York.

"They had a very unfortunate life, it was a hellish life," Oates said. "But as I say, it was Upstate New York, so you can't always tell that."

As for that great literary figure thing: "I live with two cats who are completely unimpressed. They just don't care at all. Like, major American writer -- yawn."

To wander the Book Festival on a brilliant, blue-sky day was to be surprised by more than Oates's comic timing. And as always, the annual festival -- the seventh since Laura Bush teamed up with the Library of Congress to launch it three days before Sept. 11, 2001 -- was overflowing with appealing authors. (Full disclosure: The Washington Post is a festival sponsor.) We felt a lot like one of those supermarket prize-winners who'd been given a shopping cart and told they had 15 minutes to fill it up.

Quick, let's zip down the Fiction and Fantasy aisle to pick up Terry Pratchett and Thomas Mallon! On to History and Biography for Ralph Ellison (represented by his biographer, Arnold Rampersad) and Diane Ackerman! But wait, there's Patricia MacLachlan over in Teens and Children!

MacLachlan, who's best known as the author of "Sarah, Plain and Tall," talked about how she became a writer.

"My father acted out books with me every single day," she said. She would play Peter Rabbit and he would be the angry gardener, Mr. McGregor. Her father was "a terrifying Mr. McGregor," but he was also a philosopher, so after the game "we'd have a dialogue. . . . He would say, 'Peter, why are you so mischievous? Are you bored, alienated?' "

"So this is how I grew up," MacLachlan said. "Books were as real as my everyday life."

A bit later, we heard Brian Haig tell a somewhat different story about becoming a writer. We also wondered: Are we the last to learn that the son of Gen. Alexander "I'm in control here" Haig -- Richard Nixon's chief of staff during Watergate and, briefly, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state -- now makes his living writing thrillers?

"I was an Army officer, a career officer, for about 22 years and had absolutely no training as a writer," Haig said. Then "one night my beautiful wife, Lisa, turned to me and she said, 'Hey, stud, I'm pregnant with the fourth kid.' "

Haig promptly sat down to study a book by Tom Clancy.

"I read the book and then the next day I read that Tom Clancy was worth $500 million," he explained. "I said, 'Hey, honey, I'm going to become a writer. If I can be 10 percent as good as this schmuck, we're going to be in good shape.' "

Edward P. Jones -- who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Known World" in 2004 -- offered yet another take on writerly inspiration.

Jones started out reading comic books, he said, although "in Washington they don't call them comic books, at least when I was a kid, they called them 'funny books.' " At 13, he ran out of funny books at his aunt's house and happened upon "a real book, with no pictures." It was called "Who Killed Stella Pomeroy?" and what fascinated him about it "was the fact that I could read something and create my own pictures in my head."

He was raised by his mother, who washed dishes to support the family. "Of course her salary wasn't the best," he said, "and we ended up moving from place to place. We'd move into one rathole and in about a year or so, we would move to another." He'd make friends in each new place until at some point, in his early teens, "something took hold of me and I didn't go out and make friends anymore."

Books replaced them. "Had I been a kid of the streets," Jones said, "I'm not sure if I would be standing here talking to you today. I think the books sort of saved me."

At the Children's pavilion, Rosemary Wells got into some call and response.

"Where's our 'W' word?" Wells asked the audience packed in to hear her read "Max's ABC," starring her most beloved characters, the persistent toddler Max and his bossy older sister, Ruby.

"Woo woo!" came the reply.

Then Wells switched gears and read from her new young adult book, "Red Moon at Sharpsburg," about a girl's experience during the Civil War. "We live in a time of war," she said, "and it is often difficult to try and explain to young people what that exactly means."

In History and Biography, documentarian Ken Burns and his print collaborator Geoffrey Ward -- whose book "The War: An Intimate History, 1941-45" has just been released in conjunction with their ongoing public television series -- were scheduled to talk about what Burns called "the American experience" in World War II.

Before they took the stage, however, Stanford historian David Kennedy offered a dramatically different take on the same subject.

Instead of focusing on the valor and life-changing travails of individual American soldiers, Kennedy outlined the bigger picture. He focused, at one point, on a "showdown meeting" between the American military and its civilian overseers. It took place on Oct. 6, 1942, in the Washington office of Donald Nelson, "the head of something called the War Production Board."

Nelson's job was to marshal economic resources to support the war effort, but he had concluded that the scale and pace of the mobilization advocated by the military "was not feasible." The White House backed Nelson and two momentous decisions resulted. The D-Day invasion was delayed by a year and the existing plan to conscript and send into battle 215 Army divisions was scaled back. Instead, just 90 divisions were to be deployed.

The result? World War II was fought more with American money and machines than with American men -- and "America's World War II was like no one else's." We lost more than 400,000 dead, Kennedy said, and "we do them all honor." Yet the Soviet Union lost 24 million and even a relatively small country such as Yugoslavia lost five times as many as the United States.

Just down from History and Biography was the Poetry pavilion. We got over there to hear N. Scott Momaday, who offered one more priceless festival moment.

Once again we were feeling ignorant. Momaday is a distinguished Native American author who won a Pulitzer for his novel "House Made of Dawn," but we didn't know he was a poet -- or, as it turned out, a fabulous storyteller.

Momaday read a poem called "Forms of the Earth at Abiquiu," which he wrote after meeting Georgia O'Keeffe. He introduced it by telling the tale of that meeting.

Invited to visit the then-80-year-old artist in New Mexico, he knocked on her door. O'Keeffe answered wearing a tuxedo and they fell immediately to talking. Eventually his hostess realized that she hadn't offered her guest refreshment, so she got up to fetch him a scotch and soda -- and did not return.

Nervously, Momaday waited and waited. Ominous bangings emerged from the kitchen. Eventually, O'Keeffe came back, confessed she didn't have the key to the liquor pantry -- and disappeared again.

More nervous waiting ensued before she finally appeared with the drink on a silver tray.

"It turns out that Georgia O'Keeffe had taken the pantry doors off at the hinges with a screwdriver," Momaday said as his audience roared. "And of course, I had to write a poem."