Donald M. Murray, 1924-2006

Donald M. Murray, author of A Writer Teaches Writing (Heinle, 2003), died Saturday at 82. He was my journalism professor at the University of New Hampshire and my first and most important mentor.

Don inspired a generation of writers with his patience, compassion, and willingness to treat students not as subordinates but as partners in the struggle to write clearly, intelligently, and regularly. He gave his writing students a handout that said: Nulla dies sine linea. (“Never a day without a line.”) This was his creed: Writing is a process. Don sent me an extra copy of that handout long after I had graduated from college, started getting paid to write every day, and written two books (one dedicated to him). He didn’t want me to forget.

Years later Don provided more help after I began teaching journalism classes at major universities and serving as a mentor to students in the Writing for Publication program at Eugene Lang College at the New School in Manhattan. Much of that aid came from his books about how writers write. The most important is A Writer Teaches Writing (Heinle, 2003), which an Amazon reviewer has correctly described as “part manifesto, part how-to manual, part field guide).

One of the best books on teaching writing of the past several decades, A Writer Teachers Writing is full of practical tips for writing teachers. One of my favorites is Don’s suggestion that you pass out blank index cards to students after lectures to encourage them to ask questions they might be too shy to bring up. I do this often when I speak to college classes. And it always generates fascinating questions. These typically deal with topics such as discipline (“How do you find time to write every day?”) or the life of a writer (“What’s the best way too get a job on a magazine?”). Because Don had a wonderful sense of humor, I believe it would have amused him to know that not long ago, I also got the question: “Is that your real hair color?”

I learned of Don’s death this morning, and because it’s New Year’s Day, I thought of waiting until tomorrow to post this. Then I thought about that handout that says: “Never a day without a line.” It doesn’t say: “Except for New Year’s.”

Links: You can find an appreciation of Don Murray’s life at www.poynteronline.org, which includes a link to the Boston Globe obituary and and a space where people can leave comments about Don. You can find a quote from hbook A Writer Teaches Writing in my Jan. 29, 2007, post on One-Minute Book Reviews, archived in the “Quotes of the Day” category. The quote deals with a writer’s voice.

Janice Harayda

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

George Eliot: A Biography by Gordon Haight, the Best Book I Read in 2006, With an Excerpt Below This Post

A landmark of biography retains its appeal more than a century after it’s subject’s death

George Eliot: A Biography. By Gordon Haight. Penguin, 616 pp., varied prices, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

“What Middlemarch is to the English novel this biography is to George Eliot,” a critic for the New York Times wrote when this book appeared in 1968. Just as Middlemarch showed more of English life than any novel that had preceded it, this biography showed more of George Eliot than book that had come before it. Scholars have never stopped building on the work Gordon Haight did for this book, which you can still find easily in libraries and elsewhere.

A few weeks ago, the critic Simon Baker wrote in the British Spectator www.spectator.co.uk that the hallmarks of great biographies include “elegance, quality of analysis, attention to detail, balance, and worthiness of subject.” Haight’s book has those virtues and another: It has a subject whose character and moral courage remain inspiring more than a century after her death. Many flawed – even loathsome – men and women are worthy of biography because their villainy changed the world or has a unique fascination. And you may come away repelled from some of the biographies praised today as “masterpieces,” because the lives they describe are so sordid. George Eliot led a far more public and eventful life than Jane Austen did, but like Austen, she was a novelist whose books derive their greatness from a true greatness of spirit.

George Eliot (1819–1880) was the daughter of a well-off estate agent and had an easier childhood than contemporaries such as Charles Dickens. And she won worldwide fame in early middle age for her fiction, which includes Silas Marner and Adam Bede in addition to Middlemarch. But she faced profound hardships. She was so homely that Henry James called her “horse-faced.” She could never marry the man she loved, the writer George Henry Lewes, because a quirk of English law made it impossible for him to get a divorce, though his adulterous wife had two children with another man. When Eliot lived with Lewes, anyway, she was shunned by friends and family. She suffered from depression and other illnesses, including kidney stones that caused lasting pain. When she remarried soon after Lewes’s death, her second husband jumped off a balcony into the Grand Canal in Venice on their honeymoon, an apparent suicide attempt. Throughout all of it she showed exemplary patience, kindness, and literary integrity.

Haight describes all of this with rich insight and a restrained eloquence. His book avoids all the sins of modern biography, including special pleading, unmerited speculation, and drawing false parallels his subject’s art and life. It has more than 600 pages but never becomes tedious or overstuffed with extraneous detail. And Haight knows just when to turn the floor over to Eliot and let her speak through her own writings. An except from a letter to her closest friend is typical and seems especially fitting for New Year’s Day:

“When we are young, we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to our own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf that at midday there will be no trace of. This is no high-flown sentimentality, but a simple reflection which I find useful to me every day.”

I have read many wonderful books in 2006 but none more worthy of being written than this one.

Best line: Haight quotes this line from Eliot’s novel Felix Holt: “It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.”

Worst line: None, but some aspects of Eliot’s life remain a mystery. One is why she so quickly married her much younger and perhaps mentally disturbed second husband. Haight attributes the marriage to Eliot’s “essential conservatism” and belief in traditional institutions. This is plausible. But other writers have speculated that Lewes had affairs that Eliot learned of after his death and that contributed to her decision to marry. This seems a possibility, too.

Published: 1968 (Oxford University Press hardcover edition), 1985 (Penguin reprint)

FYI: Gordon Haight taught English at Yale University from 1950–1968. He was invited to speak at the dedication of George Eliot’s memorial at Westminster Abbey, a rare honor for an American. An excerpt from Eliot’s journal for New Year’s Eve 1857, taken from Haight’s book, appears in a post below this one.

Consider reading also: Marghanita Laski’s pictorial biography, George Eliot and Her World (Thames & Hudson, 1973), offers a good, shorter introduction to the life of the novelist that draws on Haight’s research and is available in libraries.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. Please visit www.janiceharayda.com for more information about her comic novels.

Watch this site for the short list Delete Key Awards, which will recognize the worst writing in books in 2006. The list will appear in early 2007.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

George Eliot’s New Year’s Eve Diary Entry for 1857

George Eliot wrote the following entry in her journal on Dec. 31, 1857, when she was 38. By then she was living openly with the writer George Henry Lewes, who was married, and had begun to call him “my husband.” In 1857 she had also started to publish fiction anonymously but to wide acclaim in Blackwood’s magazine.

“The last night of 1857 … My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year: I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened too: the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. I have some severe suffering this year from anxiety about my sister [who had tuberculosis] and what will probably be a final separation from here – there has been no other real trouble. Few women, I fear have had such reason to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age … so goodbye, dear 1857! May I be able to look back on 1858 with an equal consciousness of advancement in work and heart.”

From Gordon Haight’s George Eliot: A Biography