| Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:54PM | | | | Adventure in New York | Posted By: Robert Flynn
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| Tags: PEN, Peckinpah, Warner Brothers, Seven Arts, World Voices | Maggie Cousins was born in Munday, Texas, population 400, but went to New York where she became managing editor of McCall’s, then senior editor at Doubleday.
When she retired she returned to Texas. When she was well into her 80s I heard Maggie tell some young children that they should pursue adventure. “When I came to San Antonio, I decided to have an adventure every day,” she said. “If I lived in Munday, I’d manage to have an adventure every day.”
And she did. You don’t have to be young, or beautiful, or travel to Morocco to have an adventure. You don’t even have to have a book. All you need is an adventurous mind. The best adventures are in the mind. No one can take away your freedom to imagine.
But it’s hard not to have an adventure in New York City. My first adventure in the city was as a writer for “A Cowboy Legacy,” a two-part documentary for ABC TV. Rehearsals were at the old St. Nick’s Arena on West 66th Street. The show was live and I had to be there to add or cut lines if the show ran long or short. Two people working on the show took me to see a foreign film, the kind of movie that didn’t come to Waco, Texas.
The next time I was in New York I was returning from Europe. The Dallas Theater Center production of my adaptation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying had been selected as the US entry at the Theater of Nations competition in Paris where it won a Special Jury Award. Before the play was presented in Europe I received a transatlantic call from Chip Bohlen, US ambassador to France, who insisted the title of the play had to be changed. It was not long after President Kennedy’s death and the ambassador feared that posters with Dallas and “As I Lay Dying” on them would signify the Kennedy assassination. On a transatlantic telephone call I changed the title to “Journey to Jefferson.” That was an adventure in itself. I was raised on a farm. We didn’t have a telephone. After we got a telephone it was used for serious matters, like calling a doctor or bad news. A long distance telephone call meant someone had died.
Life photographer Eliot Elisofon and a writer from Time Magazine joined us in Paris and followed us to Bruge, Belgium. Photographs and story of the play production were to be published shortly after our return to the US and we decided to wait in New York, see museums, art galleries and other plays until the magazine was in our hands. Alas, at the last moment our story was replaced by one on show girls. Not all adventures are happy adventures.
There was another trip to New York for the publication of my first novel, North to Yesterday. I did some interviews, met with people from Warner Brothers/Seven Arts to discuss filming of the book, with Sam Peckinpah directing. My publisher at Knopf, Harold Strauss, honored me with a party and I was introduced to steak tartar. My family raised cattle and before eating cows we always wanted to be certain they were dead and above room temperature.
There were other other adventures, other visits to the city, one of them a solemn occasion. The Writers Guild and PEN, of which I was a member, met to discuss the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. My only contribution to the meetings was my suggestion that Mr. Rushdie’s agent walk 15 % in front of him.
This visit to New York will again be an adventure and in connection with PEN. I will be a blog reporter at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature with 160 writers from 50 countries. I invite you to join me as we venture into the greatest adventure of all, an adventure of the mind, as we meet the world’s finest artists of the written word. | | | |
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