Carl Sandburg as per Brenda Ueland

Can you imagine, in your wildest, dizziest thoughts, being a friend of Carl Sandburg and having him in your house?
by Charlie Leck

I’ve recently been on a Brenda Ueland binge. Her three published works have grabbed my attention and I keep working them over and I read various sections of them over and over again.

Ueland, a Minneapolis woman, was a blogger before we knew the word. She wrote every day. For a while she had a regular column in two of the Minneapolis newspapers. From the spirit and vitality of her writing, I am led to believe she is the kind of person I would have enjoyed as a friend. Though I had one, far too brief conversation with her back in the mid-seventies, I hadn’t read anything she’d written and I wasn’t aware of the fire and force, the grit, guts and humor, or the sparkle and spunk she possessed in aplenty.

And what a lovely, engaging writer she was. When you read Brenda Ueland, it is as if she is in the room with you. Her essays come alive with genuineness and sensibility. She invades you, for those moments, and drags you off with her to interesting places and to meet extraordinary people – people she actually knows and with whom she is a friend – Robert Penn Warren and her day of swimming with him; Eddie and Roy Shipstead, the founders of the Ice Follies; Paul Robeson and her very intimate interview of him; John S. Pillsbury of the Pillsbury Company; Countess Marja Smorczewska (just Mary to Brenda).

Susan Allen Troth, a professor at Macalester College said it awfully well of Ueland in the following:

“What one reads Brend Ueland for, in the end, is not just what she says or even how she says it, but for the stimulation of her company. She makes one want to get to know her, to observe her, and to learn from her something about how to live a full, rich and exciting life… And she is eager to tell us.” (1)

Ueland, for instance, writes of some of her friends and some of the people she knew well as if we all might have known them and associated with them. In one essay, for instance (again), she writes of having Carl Sandberg in her home.

“Later we drive to our house, and going around Lake Calhoun – “Can’t we stop a minute? The gunmetal sky,” he says. There it is. It is true – the pools of water on the ice reflect the sky, gunmetal and watery pink. And the lights at twilight are big rectangles. He looks across the lake for a long time. In dead silence.”

Sandberg communicated with Brenda regularly and during the time he was working on his six volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. One letter informed her: “I have reached 2 o’clock in the afternoon of Lincoln’s last day…”

She stopped one day to visit him in Illinois.

“Then I was in his house on Lake Michigan. I was driving home from New York and all Europe had fallen. England was holding off the Germans alone.

“August, 1940. I drive along the desolate highway from Chicago to his house and find it at last, in the soaking rain. A warm, lovely, familiar house high in the wooded dunes above the booming shore of Lake Michigan. There is his wife, two daughters, a girl to help, a little dog like a fox, two great cats on the upstairs bed in the sun. They went up to a high attic, an aerie, to find him. At dinner, the soft roar of Lake Michigan. Rain on the windows.”

“…He has a wonderful voice and I always think of Isaiah. And once I heard him swear and it is like thunder and music and wild as a pirate’s.”

“…But these few things tell nothing, nothing about him. He is a great man.”

What makes Ueland’s introduction of us to these people so charming, is that these presentations are so genuine and nonchalant (off the cuff). It is as if we are with her in her living room when Sandberg booms out about the slowness of America to go to England’s side in the war against the Nazi maniac, his voice shaking the house by its very timbers.

I won’t write of her again for a while. I’m about to receive her autobiography and that will make for wonderful reading, I am sure, and I may have to blog just a little bit about that sometime in the next month or so.

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(1) In a foreword to Strength to Your Sword Arm by Brenda Ueland [Holy Cow Press, Duluth, Minnesota, 1993]

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New Words & Walks

Could it be true that it is speech that develops the brain? I’m going to take a walk and think about it!
by Charlie Leck

I’ve been bringing myself down a peg or two lately by reading (rereading, really) Brenda Ueland. My, she was quite a broad. She was bright and creative and humorous. And, Lordsy, could she write. I’m trying to learn a thing or two from her.

One time a quite good friend of hers wrote to her and complained about her constant use of words that “ordinary” folk didn’t understand.

“We could easily race you around Lake Harriet and win,” wrote Agapetus, “but when it comes to language’s foggy labyrinth, we are regular Mutts and Jeffs.”

Ueland replied to her friend:

“No, Agapetus, you must look up the words, write them down and the derivation and then use them every day until they are a part of you. Now new and perfect words are a wonderful thing. They need not be long (I don’t like them long) but apropos. And you see the secret of being interesting is to be continually shocking the reader as he goes along with tiny shocks of surprise. When you are interested in talk, or in something written, there is a pull-along every second. You wait for each word, each phrase – because of the tiny shock of surprise in it – gratefully and eagerly as it comes.”

Further along in the essay, Ueland says, “…and the theory is that it is speech that develops the brain, and not the other way around.”

I image, at this point, Agapetus is shaking her head and conceding that Ueland is correct.

“The more words you know, the better, the more delicately, opulently you can think. Shakespeare, I was once told, used 39,000 words.”

One day I was reading through Ueland’s essays and I came upon this one, On Walking, which shocked me awake and brought a big smile to my face. I particularly include this excerpt for my lovely wife, known in her pre-marriage days as Anne Wakefield:

“The lake is turbulent and grey and cold. The sun at the horizon lights up the dun world with shafts of living gold light. And just crossing the bridge between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun I overtake Mr. Lyman Wakefield. He says he is walking from his house in Lynnhurst to the Minikhada Club. He says he agrees with me: It is much better to walk alone. Then is when you get recharged and it does wonders for you.”

That gentleman, I strongly suspect, was my wife’s grandfather, Lyman E. Wakefield, Sr.. It may have been her father, but, more likely, it was her grandfather, who lived in a lovely home in the Lynnhurst neighborhood and was a member of the Minikhada Club. A walk to the club would have brought him along the eastern shore of Lake Harriett, to where the old bandstand stood, and then up across the bridge to Lake Calhoun and along its western shore to the entrance of the club. For 7 or 8 months of the year it is a glorious walk.

I expect I’ve walked around Lake Harriett a year’s worth of times. They were glorious walks, even on very cold December nights. I gave thoughts to important agendas on those walks and calmed my mind. And, Mr. Wakefield was correct; for those walks did recharge me. I took one of them on the night I met my wife for the first time. We were both dinner guests at a home not more than 5 blocks from the home her grandfather built. I was quite taken by her that evening – as a matter of fact, I fell head over heels for her – and went walking around the lake to think about her. It was autumn and it was chilly; however, I felt only an extraordinary warmth burning inside me in a mellow way. On the peaceful stroll, I built up the courage and determination to call her within the next several days and that made all the difference.

I like Ueland’s rules about walking. She says there aren’t any. Establish your own pace. Just walk. Walk alone and allow your mind to establish its docket of thoughts. And, Anne’s grandfather was correct as well; for it does recharge you. I’m going to follow Ueland’s rules and start walking again; though I may take my dog along with me. He won’t be a bother. For old time’s sake, I’ll drive into Minneapolis on the first nice day and take a walk around Lake Harriett, to think about how lucky I’ve been.

Brenda Ueland: Strength to Your Sword Arm [Holy Cow Press, Duluth, Minnesota, 1993]

You can read about the Wakefield House, built by Anne's grandfather, on the City of Minneapolis web site/Wakefield House:

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If You Want To Write

What is the most important book you’ve ever read?
by Charlie Leck

It is Sunday morning, the sun is still low and breaking through the shades and shadows of the green tree-tops, a mug of hot coffee is at hand and the computer keyboard draws me to it because I want to write – and I don’t give a damn if anyone thinks I shouldn’t.

I awoke during the night thinking of Brenda Ueland.

“It was Brenda Ueland!”

I’d sat up in bed, startled, and I shouted it out. Fortunately my wife was off in Toronto for the weekend and wasn’t there to be frightened by me. Only the dog, sprawled in his bed across the room from me, lifted his head in curiousness and then lowered it again in disinterest.

Someone had asked me, during the afternoon on Saturday, to declare to him the most important book I had ever read. I have often been asked that question by friends and associates. I don’t know why people find it such a fascinating topic of conversation.

“I would like to think about that,” I said to this fellow at the Farmers Market yesterday.

“No, no,” he replied to my request for thinking time, “I want to hear it off the top of your head.”

It was like a challenge he’d thrown at me; you know, the big dare or double dare was out there and demanded some response. I shouldn’t have, but I bit!

“Okay,” said I, “then I’ll say it is Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States.”

“What?”

There was a long, silent pause and I felt his consternation and condemnation.

“Never heard of it!”

He’s a bookish, intellectual fellow who likes to come around when I’m at the Market, to chat about his latest read. He’d expected something more of an answer out of me.

“Not Dickens? Or, Tolstoy, Melville, Hugo, Dostoyevsky – or even Bellow?”

It had begun to rain and we were both trying to squeeze under the big umbrella that covered the table from which we marketed our butchered lamb to customers there at the Farmer’s Market. The rain was blowing somewhat sideways and we were both getting wet.

I raised my defense of Zinn, telling the fellow how much “true” history I’d learned about my nation and I explained how carefully the author had sourced all the “new facts” he laid before me.

The rain became too much for him and he deserted me with a disappointed wave of his arm and hand. He moved off to the vendor just to the east of our booth because they had a large tent under which he could find shelter.

I was left alone and wondering. Perhaps my answer should have indeed been Charles Dickens. Even James Joyce or Henry James would have shown me to be more of an intellectual.

I drifted off last night, thinking about it. I could imagine the guy going back to the University and talking about me in one of his lectures, chuckling at my limited imagination and narrowness of interest.

“Homer!” That was my last conscious thought of the evening. That would have been a popular and acceptable answer.

I must have continued to think about the matter as I slept; for it was nearly three o’clock when I awakened and pounced up and called out Brenda Ueland’s name.

I was introduced to the extraordinary woman many, many years ago, when I was a young man. A friend, who told her who I was, explained to her that I enjoyed writing poetry and that, he thought, I was damned good. I remember how excited she got and she shook with happiness and said all kinds of encouraging things to me.

From the public library I got her book, If You Want to Write, shortly after that meeting and happily read it. I managed to find, in a used book store, my own copy and it became my “bible” for quite some time. I often found myself going back to it again and again. It gave me courage – encouraged me – and freed me up to be myself.

Everyone who teaches writing, and all those who just want to write, should read Brenda Ueland’s book and encourage others to read it. It is because of this wonderful woman that I write without fear or inhibition. She gave me an extraordinary gift that has lasted me for so many, many years. Hers must be the most important book I’ve ever read.

“The creative power and imagination is in everyone and so is the need to express it, i.e., to share it with others. But what happens to it?

“It is very tender and sensitive, and it is usually drummed out of people early in life by criticism (so called ‘helpful criticism’ is often the worst kind), by teasing, jeering, rules, prissy teachers, critics and all those unloving people who forget that the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life.” [Brenda Ueland: If You Want to Write]

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“A Postscript: At a time when I was writing the book, Carl Sandburg, an old friend, was at our house. Sometimes, looking out at Lake Calhoun in the wild November evening, he would begin to thunder in his mighty voice (so much like Isaiah’s, I used to think) about the grey waves, the North wind, the new moon, the gunmetal sky.

“He liked the book. He said: ‘That is the best book ever written about how to write.’” [Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write, in the preface to the second edition, February, 1983]

It is because of Brenda Ueland that I sit here on this beautiful morning, with the sun splashing in through the windows, writing.