Edna Ferber - A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2014

Copyright 1963 by Edna Ferber

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, in 1963.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-345-80580-5

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To Julie Goldsmith
and to
Peter and Kathy Klein, a new young generation in an old tough world.

To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledgethis is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.

Hundreds of millions of people never once in their lifetime reflect on the stupendous fact that they are alive. They merely live. They walk talk work play love hate and die a little daily without marveling at these fascinating processes. Whether madness or magic, perhaps to do so is to possess a sixth sense. Having this, you must adjust to a double life in which you are both actor and audience. You are marching in the parade even though you stand at the curb watching the parade go by. Any writer whose work, as you read it or hear it, gives you a fresh and more dimensional impression of life and living, a keener awareness of the world about you, has that magic sixth sense.

It may be fortunate that this mildly schizophrenic state is not widely prevalent. Nature doubtless knows precisely what she is doing when she protects the great mass of humanity from conscious personal awareness of living in the kaleidoscopic and improbable world in which it moves. Yet, in a way, a pity. For our most fundamental acts, consciously noted, may seem miraculous.

Take walking as an example of ordinary performance. Here is this fragile, vulnerable and mobile box called the human body in which, with incredible intrepidity and good luck, we move around on the perilous planet Earth. A single blow, a misstep, can shatter the delicate piece of mechanism.

This body-box is your slave, ordinarily obeying your every reasonable (and frequently unreasonable) command. On the telephone you say to a friend, Ill meet you at the corner of Park and Fifty-seventh in fifteen minutes. Without giving the negotiation another conscious thought you are miraculously conveyed to your destination by your obliging body.

Perhaps on the way your slave may protest faintly, saying, Look, Ive been lugging you around all day. Im tired.

You retort, Tired shmired, you go on and do as I say. So off you go to keep your appointment, defiantly brisk in spite of that whimpering inner voice. On the way you are regaled with the sights and sounds of the human race in action; surely the greatest free show on earth.

The catch in it is that all this constant awareness of being alive may become a wearing process to you and a source of irritation to your friends. Wisely you refrain from mentioning it. Occasionally the numbed behavior of a fellow human being moves you to protest. This may be a workman performing badly and carelessly the services of his craft.

Im sorry, but youve made a mistake, you say. Look, its all wrong, here and here and here.

I only work here, lady.

But if you work here youre interested, arent you! You can see its wrong.

I dont know about innerested. Talk to the boss. I only work here.

He is not living. The orbit of his being is walled by darkness.

To give the possible reader who has traveled thus far a fair chance to walk away from the printed page I must now state that I not only work here I live here I love it here. When I realize that I may not be here an hour from now and that it is absolutely mathematically certain that I shant be here to celebrate that great round plump date, for good or for evil, January First in the year 2000, I am filled with a fury of frustration. While I cannot honestly say that I consider this the best of all possible worlds it definitely is the best of which I personally have any firsthand knowledge. This includes that rather tiresomely described haven known as heaven. Until the diligent scientists have completed comfortable tourist arrangementsincluding room bath and board, with air-conditioningon another planet, this Earth is my favorite abode, grumble though I may. My chief criticism is that the entire production is frequently melodramatic, and the curtain uncertain.

Through the centuries we have arrogantly assumed that ours is the only habitable planet. We have named it the planet Earth and, arbitrarily, have bestowed the titles Mars Jupiter Saturn Venus Neptune Mercury upon various other planets. About Neptune we are somewhat sniffy. Rarely mention him, in fact. Yet he is third largest in the really stylish and important major group. Perhaps we are embarrassed to admit that Earth and Neptune are under-privileged planets. These two alone are equipped with only one moon each. The astronomers tell us that other planets are gifted with twofoureven nine lavish moons. Imagine the romantic possibilities of nine moons. Not to speak of the astronautic frenzy that these would entail. It is a prospect to give pause even to a Communist. And what names have these other-planet scientists given the tiny globe we call Earth? Do the three-eyed males on Saturn or the four-armed creatures on Mars refer to our planet as Bzzck? Or Mogwap? Or just Itsy Bitsy? Do their astronomers report that Itsy Bitsy is in the ascendant this week and some crackpots think it is inhabited by wee things that stump about on only two legs and havent even the power of self-levitation? The air is too heavy.

Throughout my adult life until very recently a sort of navet perhaps prevented me from realizing that the world as I viewed it was as though seen through a double magnifying lens. If at times it seemed to me that I was more conscious of the minutiae of living than were others I assumed that this was due to the surroundings and training of my formative years. These included a troubled childhood, chancey, sometimes tragic, always fascinating, spent in various Midwestern small towns of the United States, with Chicago thrown in occasionally by way of variety; and a four-year period between the impressionable ages of seventeen to twenty-one when I worked as a newspaper reporter. Those years were to serve as an apprenticeship to a half-century of fiction writing but I definitely didnt know it then. Starting blithely at a minimal salary of nothing a week on the Appleton Wisconsin Daily Crescent I soared after a mere three months to $3 a week, then $5, then up the dizzy heights of affluence to $8 (and no Federal tax). Crazed with success and in love with my job I was the town scourge. A plump seventeen, my hair tied back in a bunch of wiry black cork-screw curls I daily ranged the news spots from the jail and courthouse to Pettibones Drygoods Store. The advantages and perquisites attendant on the duties of a reporter working on a small-town daily afternoon newspaper were many and varied, ranging all the way from delirious to practical and including free theatre tickets, contact with every variety of human being extant, a rapidly growing knowledge of these humans as they functioned under stress,