“I DO THEREFORE ON THE KNEES OF MY HEART, BESEECH YOUR MAJESTY . . .”

           Borrowed this line from a letter Sir Walter

           Raleigh wrote to the Queen of England begging
           forgiveness for some piratical activity. It
           sounded more like a title of a Motown tune, and
           I couldn’t pass it up. I hope Sir Walter didn’t
           turn over in his grave.

JB liner notes for “Down on the Knees of My Heart”                              
on Riddles in the Sand                                         

Elizabeth was no longer on the throne when Raleigh penned that line. The Queen had been dead nearly fifteen years when the thought popped into his mind, and Sir Walter was en route to the executioner's block for his misdeeds in his quest for El Dorado.

Over the course of a lifetime, Raleigh had been imprisoned in the Tower of London at least three times. First, he had married a member of Elizabeth’s court without the Queen’s permission. Then, when Elizabeth died, he was accused of plotting against her successor, King James I; however, he was released to continue his quest. On that second expedition in search of El Dorado, though, his men pillaged a Spanish fortress. So, Sir Walter was brought back to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death to appease Spain.

In a world lit only by the light of the sun or else by fire, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote down these impassioned words begging King James to spare his life.

“I do therefore on the knees of my heart, beseech your Majesty to take council from your own sweet and merciful disposition, and to remember that I have loved your Majesty now twenty years, for which your Majesty hath yet given me no reward . . . Save me, therefore, most merciful Prince, that I may owe your Majesty my life itself; than which there can be no greater debt. Lend it to me at least, my Sovereign Lord, that I may pay it again for your service when your Majesty shall please. If the law destroy me, your Majesty shall put me out of your power; and I shall have then none to fear, none to reverence but the King of Kings.”

Eloquent as they might be, those words fell upon deaf ears. On 29 October 1618, Sir Walter was beheaded after shouting out to the executioner, “Strike, man. Strike!” His head was then presented to his widow.


In addition to that memorable phrase, Raleigh's situation inspired just as much poetry as it did prose. Renowned as a renaissance poet, Sir Walter wrote one of his best poems, “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage” not long before his execution.


Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

    Blood must be my body’s balmer,
No other balm will there be given,
Whilst my soul, like a white palmer,
Travels to the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
And there I’ll kiss
The bowl of bliss,
And drink my eternal fill
On every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before,
But after it will ne’er thirst more;
And by the happy blissful way
More peaceful pilgrims I shall see,
That have shook off their gowns of clay,
And go apparelled fresh like me.
I’ll bring them first
To slake their thirst,
And then to taste those nectar suckets,
At the clear wells
Where sweetness dwells,
Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets.

     And when our bottles and all we
Are fill’d with immortality,
Then the holy paths we’ll travel,
Strew’d with rubies thick as gravel,
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral, and pearl bowers.

     From thence to heaven’s bribeless hall
Where no corrupted voices brawl,
No conscience molten into gold,
Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold,
No cause deferr’d, nor vain-spent journey,
For there Christ is the king’s attorney,
Who pleads for all without degrees,
And he hath angels, but no fees.
When the grand twelve million jury
Of our sins and sinful fury,
’Gainst our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death, and then we live.
Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader,
Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder,
Thou movest salvation even for alms,
Not with a bribed lawyer’s palms.
And this is my eternal plea
To him that made heaven, earth, and sea,
Seeing my flesh must die so soon,
And want a head to dine next noon,
Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread,
Set on my soul an everlasting head.
Then am I ready, like a palmer fit,
To tread those blest paths which before I writ.

Hang by your thumbs, and write if you get work.

dwd

A CLASSIC NUGGET FROM FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

“You never know where your window to the world will appear, but I do know that they seem to be fabricated out of dreams, visions and words from books. If you desire them to be more than that, then you follow the white rabbit down the hole like Alice or head to Nantucket like Ishmael. Now I know that Alice didn’t write back from an Internet Café in Wonderland and Ishmael never had the convenience of looking at his little handheld GPS unit and entering a quick waypoint titled “white whale” when Moby Dick first showed himself to the crew of the Pequod."

JB's liner notes to Far Side of the World (2001)

This is the sort of stuff that I've been noting down through the years, and my brain is littered with the scraps of so-called intellect. I am thankful that there is no such item as a mental Post-It! or else my head would be one yellow clump of gumsuch. (Yes, I did just invent that word.) So, that's why Lewis Carroll made it between the covers of The Occasional Margareader, but there's only one excuse for leaving out Ishmael, Queequeg, Capt Ahab, and their little buddy Moby Dick. And that excuse is simply space. No, not "the final frontier" space, but the number-of-pages space.

     While I did locate the pages in Melville's epic novel wherein "Moby Dick first showed himself to the crew of the Pequod," the best context for presenting them still required quite a few out of the 400 in this anthology. And keeping Melville in, meant keeping out two or three other writers. So, I made that editorial decision to remove those pages from Moby Dick and save them for a time such as this.

    Now, I could send you off on a wild goose chase (better yet, a wild whale chase!) looking for this; however, I'm not that kinda guy. So, here's a selection from "The Chase - First Day" / Chapter 133 (Holy cow! Are there really THAT many chapters before they first spot that damn thing?)

The Chase - First Day

a selection from
MOBY DICK / Chapter 133

That night, in the mid-watch when the old man - as was his wont at intervals - stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

     The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

     "Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"

     Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their hands.

     "What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

     "Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.

     "T'gallant sails!- stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

     All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air. "There she blows!- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"

     Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

     "And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him.

     "I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out," said Tashtego.

     "Not the same instant; not the same - no, the doubloon is mine! Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first. There she blows!- there she blows!- there she blows! There again!- there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. "He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,- quick, quicker!" and he slid through the air to the deck.

     "He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet."

     "Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!- brace up! Shiver her!- shiver her!- So; well that! Boats, boats!"

     Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set- all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.

-- 30 --

AFTER THE STORM

Scratch the bark on any American family tree and you are likely to find some maritime heritage, no matter how landlocked that family might be. So it is with Ernest Hemingway, whose great-grandfather on his mother’s side had been the captain of a five-masted schooner that sailed from England to Australia, by way of the horn, before he settled his family in the land-locked state of Iowa. So impressed was Hemingway’s grandmother with her experiences at sea, that she would take her children each summer to the island of Nantucket, where they might experience the sea firsthand. This would become a tradition, as well, with Ernest Hemingway’s mother; however, she handled it in a more personal way. One by one, the six Hemingway children would spend a month during each child’s eleventh summer with their mother on Nantucket; Ernest’s eleventh summer fell in 1910
     And so it was on Nantucket that an eleven-year-old Ernest Hemingway first set foot upon an island, first sailed upon saltwater, first caught a fish in the sea, first met an old fisherman with a tale about catching a swordfish, and first found inspiration for a short story that he called “My First Sea Vouge [sic].”
     Among those whom young Ernest met during his stay on Nantucket was an artist and playwright name Austin Strong, who had established a small sailing school for his own nieces and nephews. Strong was born in San Francisco, but was raised in Hawaii and in Samoa, where he was told many tales of the sea by his own grandfather, Robert Louis Stevenson. There can be little doubt that Stevenson’s grandson shared some of these very stories with a young Ernest Hemingway, but none of those quirky little facts is among the strong ties that bind Jimmy with Papa Hemingway.
     Of The Old Man and the Sea Jimmy says, “I first read it when I was eight years old. The relationship between the old man and the boy is what was most touching, because it reminded me so much of my grandfather and me.” Regardless of the tale’s genesis, the novella was completed at Hemingway’s farm outside Havana in 1951, and it was the only one of his works ever to receive any literary award. The Old Man and the Sea, however, was not Hemingway’s first story involving Cuba. The first one was “One Trip Across,” which was written during Hemingway’s Key West years, and it became the basis for To Have and Have Not. That novel’s the only story he ever set in Key West, but it was written while he was at The Compleat Angler in Bimini. And Jimmy says he stayed in that same room and sat at the same table where Papa is said to have worked on that book. Ironically, when William Faulkner wrote the screenplay for Hemingway’s Key West story, he set the tale in Martinique; the movie version features Humphrey Bogart in the lead role and introduced Lauren Bacall in her first motion picture role.
     Meanwhile, the story called “After the Storm” is about the closest thing you can have to a Key West story by Hemingway without excerpting a passage from either “One Trip Across” or To Have and Have Not. “After the Storm” was written in 1932 during Papa’s Key West years, as well as at the height of his short story period. The tale reveals a bit of the rough and tumble waterfront night life during that period, but its facts are based upon the sinking of the Spanish steamer, Valbanera, at the height of a 1919 hurricane that swept across the Keys, then on through the Gulf of Mexico to the coastline of Texas. More than 600 people were killed in its wake, and 488 of those were aboard the steamer. The tale merges the strengths of Hemingway’s journalism skills with those of his storytelling ways.

TRYIN' TO FIGURE OUT HOW JIMMY EVER GOT HERE

The main character in Tom McGuane’s second novel migrates from Michigan to Montana, then down to Key West, which was pretty much the writer’s own course in those days. Because The Bushwhacked Piano was published in 1971, however, readers will never know just how Nicholas Payne ever might have fared during Key West’s “decade of decadence” that was the Seventies. McGuane, on the other hand, came to know that reckless period quite well, for often the writer was right there in the eye of its storm. And while he somehow managed to weather it all, the young storyteller of that time had no trouble fitting a constant full-tilt feeling into his next two novels: Ninety-two in the Shade in 1973, then Panama in 1978. Populated with shrimpers and smugglers and artists of every stripe, the island life had changed quite a bit since the arrival of Nicholas Payne. And it had become a whole lot different than McGuane’s very first look, as well.

A much younger Tom McGuane had been introduced to Key West when his father brought him down from Michigan to fish. That little father-and-son excursion played out in the more tranquil Fifties: Tom was in his teens, Truman was out of the Little White House, and the Old Town of the Cold War years still struggled in somewhat of a stupor. The water-based economy relied fully upon some spongers and turtlers, along with struggling shrimpers, as well as the U.S. Navy. Nonetheless, there was more than enough water surrounding the Keys to make young Tom McGuane want to come back some day, a sentiment best stated by his fishing-guide hero of Ninety-two in the Shade. “God, if they will only leave the ocean alone,” Tom Skelton exclaims, “I can handle anything.”

In the years between that first look and his second, McGuane fished the waters of his home state Michigan and enrolled at Michigan State. There he met Jim Harrison, who would prove in time to be the charter member of a rather remarkable circle of lifelong friends. As a student in the early Sixties, McGuane had dreams of becoming a comic novelist; Harrison, a poet. The two of them shared a fondness for the written word, as well as a mutual affection for hunting and for fishing.
Once McGuane’s graduate work in both dramatic literature and playwriting was finished at Yale, he accepted a fellowship at Stanford, where in 1969 he managed to churn out The Sporting Club in less than two months. He was thirty years old, and that first novel proved worthy of the sort of critical acclaim that labeled him “a language star.” It was the sale of the film rights to that story, however, that enabled the newly-minted novelist and his wife to purchase a ranch in Montana and to spend some winter month’s on Florida’s Summerland Key, where McGuane could fish and work on The Bushwhacked Piano.
Before long there emerged a sporting club of sorts that orbit around this language star. Harrison was lured down for the fishing, and a guide named Woody Sexton drove down a client named Guy de la Valdéne to meet up with the fishing novelist on Summerland. In time, Guy would become known affectionately as “The Count,” and one day would produce a documentary about fishing the flats entitled Tarpon. This circle of friends was just beginning as the McGuanes would move further on down US 1 to Key West in another season or two.
In career terms, Tom McGuane was a bit more like Hemingway than he was Nicholas Payne. After all, Papa had been attracted to Key West not so much by the island’s working conditions as by its fishing opportunities . . .  Not to mention its somewhat lawless social recreation: rumrunners and smugglers are one and the same. And just as Hemingway had regularly contributed pieces on deepwater fishing to a new magazine called Esquire, so McGuane contributed several of his own about flats fishing to Sports Illustrated, including his classic essay about permit fishing on the flats entitled “The Longest Silence.” In fact, some of Sports Illustrated’s very earliest articles about Key West’s sport fishing had come from Martin Kane, who -- in his retirement -- remained a rather flamboyant member of the McGuane circle at the Chart Room Bar. Jimmy’s own SI article about fishing in the 2004 swimsuit issue gives a tip of his fishing cap to the legendary Marty Kane.

In retrospect, one can only wonder what life might’ve been like for Jimmy if he’d never met up with Tom McGuane. Perhaps someday Jimmy will recount for us those stories about how he came to live under the same roof with Tom and Becky and young Thomas McGuane, as well as how McGuane introduced him to bartender Phil Clark, about whom Jimmy composed “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” But those tales, along with those of the Full Moon Saloon, of the Snake Pit, of the Club Mandible, and of McGuane’s self-described “Captain Berserko” period must wait for another volume.

Still, this much remains clear: without Jimmy’s meeting Tom McGuane, the Count might never have photographed the cover image for A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, and “the language star” might never have composed those liner notes on the back that say (among other things): “What Jimmy Buffett knows is that our personal music history lies at the curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet with somewhat less animosity than the theoreticians would have us believe.”

Without McGuane, we might never have had a film called Rancho Deluxe along with Jimmy’s trek to Montana to compose the musical score with “Livingston Saturday Night,” to meet the writer Richard Brautigan, and to stumble upon the dying town of Ringling. Without Guy de la Valdéne’s Tarpon, we’d never have his footage of flats fishing, of the Seventies Key West, and of the young Harrison, Brautigan, and McGuane holding forth together on the topic of fishing the keys. And without Tom McGuane, Jimmy might never have had such a talented writer for a brother-in-law.

As for the McGuane selection included in The Occasional Margareader, the source is from Jimmy’s own liner notes in 1985 for “Desperation Samba” on The Last Mango in Paris, where he’s written this little nugget: “This song brings to mind two things. First, an image of Robert Mitchum standing in the doorway of a bar in Tijuana, and second, a line by Thomas McGuane, my brother-in-law, from his book, Panama, ‘The night wrote a check the morning couldn’t cash.’” By then, the McGuanes had moved back to the ranch.

So, of all the marvelous prose that Tom McGuane has produced over the years, it’s Jimmy who’s directed us to this particular passage that concludes with that specific line. From drinks at the Full Moon Saloon to the oyster shell parking lots of Garrison Bight, Panama provides a panorama of the island that’s just as sweeping as that in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. And in a great many ways, none of the things had changed at all since Papa had roamed those streets. There can be doubt that you will be reading all of McGuane’s island stuff; then, you’ll move on with him to his stories from Montana. After all, Deadrock seems a lot like Livingston(e).

TODAY'S THE DAY !

After all these years, The Occasional Margareader is finally in print.

Believe me when I tell you that this project first began years ago, when I began to make mental notes about the allusions that Jimmy was putting in his songs, not to mention the quotations that he was dropping onto the back covers of his record albums (those round, black vinyl things), as well on the liner notes of the record sleeves inside. These were not at all secret messages, but things that Jimmy wanted us to know. The lines came from writers such as William Faulkner and John D. MacDonald, Don Blanding and Ralph Middleton Munroe.

Most of these things appeared in the early years, when Jimmy hung around with published authors and yearned to develop that same reputation himself. One such scribbling in his notebook simply read: "For inspiration: Hunter Thompson, Robert Penn Warren, E. B. White, Juan Cadiz." In one way, all these things were a sort of shorthand for Jimmy to convey a grander idea; in another, they were sort of a treasure map for interested parties to hunt down the rest of that wealth of information. For me, though, it was another thing that I had in common with Jimmy. Aside from having been raised here where the river meets the sea and having a sea captain or two in my own family lineage, Jimmy and I both seemed to have let a few other universal truths through our little, hometown minds.

At some point in the early 90s, I sent a note to Jimmy and suggested that we create a library of books that he would want to have with him on that proverbial deserted island. He liked the idea, and that was not only the beginning of Margaritaville Books, but also The Shipwreck Editions. (Because those were printed as hand-numbered limited editions of only 3,000 copies each, you'll probably have a tough time finding them now. Still, good luck in that search.)

Not long after, though, I began to write down my mental notes, then track down the full sources of all those references I'd been discovering over the years. I knew that any eventual book would require a lot of paperwork to publishers and agents to ask about the rights to such things. That much I had already learned with The Shipwreck Editions. After all, if we could interest Parrot Heads in such writings, why wouldn't any publisher simply to sell those fans those books they had already printed and promoted? Good question. That would take some convincing, as well as some money to protect their own share of the market. But enough of that business talk.

Then came Jimmy's Barometer Soup, the album whose songs were inspired by a whole shelf of writers, including Mark Twain, Jim Harrison, Carl Hiaasen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This not only added to my list, but also served as a further impetus for The Occasional Margareader.

So, when I say this book's been years in the making, I truly do mean years. These things take time, but now I hope that you'll take time to look into it.  The website is: www.margareader.com, and you can read more about it there..