Dan's Papers - March 21, 2008

As you may know, I've written a book called IN THE HAMPTONS that will come out this spring. It's a memoir about all the changes I've seen in almost a half century in this place, and it is being published by Harmony Books, which is a division of Random House.

I've never had a book published nationally before. And so I have never had a national review of my work published before. Until now. Though the book is not scheduled to be launched until May 6, the first critique of it has appeared in the highly respected Kirkus Review, which is a monthly trade magazine for those in the book publishing and book selling industries.

Here is what it says:

IN THE HAMPTONS: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities.

"(This) intrepid guide to native life in the fabled Long Island utopia offers a memoir of a half century spent tracking its inhabitants as proprietor of the Hamptons's newspaper of record.

Well-known to the beautiful people and old timers of resort villages from Shinnecock to Montauk, the weekly Dan's Papers (probably the nation's first free newspaper) reports the doings of literary lions, blue bloods and red bloods. Though he now has a staff to do most of the work, for years Rattiner set the type, snapped the photos, wrote the stories and, he gleefully admits, when news was slow invented something entertaining. Here, he tells a few tales of porgies, fluke and blackfish, then moves on to the bigger fish swimming around former potato farms now flooded with rich and infamous painters, writers, performers and patricians. From the depths of his files Rattiner draws names like Cavett, Plimpton, Steinbeck, Pollock, Warhol, de Kooning, Billy Joel and Richard Nixon. Read about the building of his father's corner pharmacy, movies made just down the street, impossible young love, seasonal liaisons and East Hampton's annual Artists and Writers Baseball Game, guest-umpired in 1988 by Gov. Bill Clinton. Geographic highlights include private clubs, local bistros, Sag Harbor's garbage dump, a historic lighthouse and a pond with imaginary monsters. Bucolic concerns and innocent gossip are guilelessly interspersed with business and beach news. Publisher-editor Rattiner may not be the East Coast's answer to William Allen White..."

I am not the East Coast's answer to whom? Who is William Allen White?

I have a degree in English literature. In college I studied Chaucer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Swift and George Bernard Shaw. In American literature we read the works of Melville, Twain, Sandburg, Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Hemingway. I never heard of William Allen White. I cranked up the computer, searched Wikipedia, and found him there. I also found him in an article in the Kansas Historical Society. William Allen White was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1868 and died 76 years later. He spent his whole life in Kansas. When he was 27 years old, he bought his hometown newspaper, The Emporia Gazette, for $3,000 and for the next 50 years wrote stories for it.

"For half a century, Emporia newspaper editor William Allen White had something to say on virtually every topic that had anything to do with Kansas or the nation," the Kansas Historical Society wrote about him.

Hey! This is another guy writing a newspaper for 50 years!

"He rocketed to national fame and influence in the Republican party with an August 16, 1896 editorial 'What's the Matter with Kansas,'" wrote Wikipedia. "He was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 after getting arrested in a dispute involving free speech, he ran for Governor in 1924, but lost, and his autobiography, which was published posthumously in 1947, won another Pulitzer Prize."

"He was known as 'the Sage of Emporia,'" wrote both Wikipedia and the Kansas Historical Society. The University of Kansas Journalism School is named after him. Okay, a guy BETTER than me writing a newspaper for 50 years. But in Kansas.

Here was an example of the way he wrote, courtesy of Wikipedia. In this piece, he is referring to the First World War. He wrote it in 1933.

"The boys who died just went out and died. To their own souls' glory of course - but what else? ... Yet the next war will see the same hurrah and the same bowwow of the big dogs to get the little dogs to go out and follow the blood scent and get their entrails tangled in the barbed wire."

Well, that indeed is really, really good writing. But does he write about Frank Mundus catching a 3,500-pound shark? Does he write about the Andy Warhol estate? The time Willem de Kooning got so drunk at the Silver Sea Horse? The morning George Plimpton tried to set off the biggest firework in the world at the dump? No.

And what did William Allen White's writing accomplish back then in 1933 in Emporia? Did it stop 20 million people from getting killed in World War II during the next decade? It did not.

And would anybody read that flowery stuff about the entrails on the barbed wire if I wrote it today? I doubt it. Here's how I would write about the pointlessness of war.

"The next time we have a war, the big shots are going to send out the little shots just like they did before. They'll be brave, but they'll still get killed. What's the point? The whole thing makes me want to throw up."

Well, okay, that's not going to make much difference either. Here is how the reviewer for Kirkus finished his piece about IN THE HAMPTONS.

"...Redolent of saltwater and printers' ink - perfectly suited for comfortable days at the beach."

Well, I've done my best. I've retold some of the best stories I know, and I've written some other stories that have never been told before.

Why not pre-order IN THE HAMPTONS from BookHampton, East End Books, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com or any other place that sells books before they run out? Go ahead. It'll cost you big-time, maybe 25 bucks. And some day we can raise a glass to William Allen White, the late Sage of Emporia, for what he did to cut a path for me even though I'd never heard of him. He may have been better than I by a mile. And that's okay. But he knew squat about the Hamptons.