“I never promised you a rose garden.”

THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMOUS LINE: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”         Hannah Green (pen name of Joanne Greenberg; 1927–1996)        American author        Title of her 1964 novel                      This novel is the apparent source of the saying, though it was made even more famous by country music singer Lynn Anderson’s 1970 hit song of the same name. The well-known opening lyrics of the song, written by singer/songwriter Joe South, are: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”         Greenberg’s novel is a semi-autobiographical account of her struggle with schizophrenia as a teenager. In an emotional scene in the book, psychotherapist Dr. Clara Fried tells the main character, Deborah Blau: “I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is that so you can be free to fight for all of these things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie...and a bore too!” Dr. Fried is based on Greenberg's real psychiatrist, Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who treated her at the Chestnut Lodge hospital in Rockville, Maryland.        The novel was adapted into a movie in 1977. It starred Kathleen Quinlan as Deborah and Bibi Andersson as Dr. Fried. Mel Gibson made his screen debut in the film, in a small uncredited role as a baseball player. Many years later, Mel uttered his own scary quote about a garden. (See below.)

THE BADASS MARINE SLOGAN: “We don’t promise you a rose garden.”         U.S. Marines recruiting slogan used from late 1971 until mid-1984         The “Rose Garden” slogan was used in the first series of posters and ads that featured the tagline “The Marines are looking for a few good men.” Several posters in series showed Marine Drill Instructors yelling at new recruits, like the one shown here. The drill instructor in it is Sgt. Charles A. Taliano, who passed away in 2010.

THE BADASS JUDGE VERSION: “Nobody promised them [prison inmates] a rose garden…They have been convicted of crime, and there is nothing in the Constitution which forbids their being penalized as a result of that conviction.”        William Rehnquist (1924-2005)        Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court         From his written decision on the 1981 U.S. Supreme Court case Atiyeh v. Capps, explaining why the court rejected a lawsuit brought by a group of Oregon prison inmates against the State of Oregon. The inmates wanted Oregon prisons to be forced to reduce prison overcrowding conditions they contended were inhumane and illegal.

THE PASSION OF MEL VERSION: “Apparently Mel Gibson did promise his babymama Oksana Grigorieva a rose garden…But totally not in a good way. In the latest round of the seemingly endless parade of embarrassing tape leaks purporting to capture the Passion of the Christ helmsman in full meltdown mode, a new snippet of conversation has emerged, in which Gibson reportedly threatens to bury Grigorieva in the flower bed of his Malibu, California, mansion.”        From a now-deleted post on the PEACE FM Online site, July 9, 2010

THE PRESIDENTIAL VERSION: “I never promised you a rose garden but I guess [Press Secretary] Ron Nessen did. So, I hope you enjoy this new setting and the new format, and I hope I enjoy it, too.”        President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006)                      Comment in a news conference on October 9, 1974        Ford was joking about his newly announced plan to hold press conferences in the White House Rose Garden. When Ford and other presidents later started using this option during campaign periods to avoid the usual campaign travel grind while still generating news stories and looking presidential, it was dubbed the “Rose Garden Strategy.”

THE BIONIC VERSION: Col. Steve Austin (actor Lee Majors): “Now wait a minute, Jaime, you're not going out a torpedo tube. Now you felt the sub, it’s gonna be rough out there.”  Jaime Sommers (actress Lindsay Wagner): “You never promised me a rose garden.”                      Banter from the “Kill Oscar: Part 3” episode of the American TV series The Bionic Woman (Season 2, Episode 6, first aired in 1976).

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“The rich are different”… The real story behind the famed “exchange” between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

If you’re a quotation buff, you’ve probably heard of a legendary exchange about “rich people” that supposedly took place between the American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).

Fitzgerald is usually quoted as saying either “The rich are different from you and me” or “The rich are different from us.”

Hemingway is quoted as responding: “Yes, they have more money."

In fact, this quote-counterquote repartee never actually occurred. But it is based on things written by Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Here’s how it became a legend…

In 1925, Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled “The Rich Boy.” In 1926, it was published in Red Book magazine and included what became a very popular collection of Fitzgerald's early short stories, titled All the Sad Young Men.

The third paragraph of the story says:

     "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Clearly, that’s not a favorable view of rich people.

But years later, Ernest Hemingway, who had a sometimes-warm, sometimes-acrimonious relationship with Fitzgerald, decided to mock those lines from “The Rich Boy” in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway’s original version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was printed in the August 1936 issue of Esquire magazine. In a passage in that original version, Hemingway wrote:

     “The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”

Understandably, Fitzgerald was shocked and offended.

He expressed his dismay to Hemingway in a letter. He also complained to Maxwell Perkins, the editor who oversaw publication of both writers’ novels and story collections at the Charles Scribner’s Sons book company. Hemingway responded with what Fitzgerald described as a “crazy letter,” a rambling diatribe that offered no real explanation or apology.

Perkins tried to smooth things over between his two prized writers and used his editorial power to fix the source of the problem when Scribner’s reprinted “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1938 anthology of Hemingway stories, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.

In the version of the story in that book, the name “Scott Fitzgerald” was changed to “Julian.” It has appeared that way in most subsequent reprintings.

Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, he made the mistake of writing a cryptic entry in a personal notebook that cemented the legendary version of his “exchange” with Hemingway into literary history.

The entry said simply: “They have more money. (Ernest’s wisecrack.)”

After Fitzgerald died in 1940, his friend, the noted critic and book reviewer Edmund Wilson, compiled a collection of his essays and unpublished writings in a book titled The Crack-Up. It was published in 1945. Wilson included various entries from Fitzgerald’s notebooks in the anthology.

One of them was the brief note about “Ernest’s wisecrack.”

Wilson decided to add an explanatory footnote for that entry in the book. He wrote:

     “Fitzgerald had said, ‘The rich are different from us.’ Hemingway had replied, ‘Yes, they have more money.’”

Then, the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling repeated what he called this “famous exchange” that “everyone knows” in a review and essay about The Crack-Up, published in The Nation.

After that, many other articles and books cited this “exchange” as if it were an actual conversation between Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

And thus a famous quote-counterquote myth was born.

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“Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.”

THE ORIGINAL INSPIRATION FOR THE SIXTIES SLOGAN: “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”        Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)        American poet and writer        A line from Sandburg’s epic prose poem The People, Yes (1936)        In the 1960s, several variations of an anti-war slogan began appearing on posters, in print and in songs. The version that became most common (as shown by the comparatively huge number of Google hits it gets) is “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” Other variations include “Suppose they gave a war and no one came” and “What if they gave a war and nobody came.” It’s not certain who coined the most familiar version, but this much is clear: all of the various iterations of the saying are ultimately descended from a line in Carl Sandburg’s book-length ode to America and it’s citizens, The People, Yes, first published in 1936.        In the poem, the line is said by a little girl who sees a group of soldiers marching in a parade. It’s from a part of the poem in which Sandburg seems to foresee the potential devastation of a second and possibly a third world war:        “The first world war came and its cost was laid on the people.        The second world war — the third — what will be the cost.        And will it repay the people for what they pay?...        The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,         ‘What are those?’        ‘Soldiers.’        ‘What are soldiers?’        ‘They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill as many of the other side as he can.’        The girl held still and studied.         ‘Do you know ... I know something?’        ‘Yes, what is it you know?’        ‘Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.’

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SIXTIES SLOGAN: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.”         Possibly coined by James R. Newman         American mathematician, writer and editor of Scientific American magazine         In the 1960s, several updated versions of Carl Sandburg’s line became popular. They were often used in the context of opposition to the Vietnam War. The most common version, “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,” was used as a slogan on posters that were sold in Hippie shops in the late Sixties (like the blacklight poster shown at left). It was also used as the title of a comedy movie in 1970, giving it even broader recognition. Some posts on the Internet claim the now familiar words were first written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s. However, they give no source and I couldn’t find one, so I deem that claim doubtful. (As Abraham Lincoln said, “The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”)         In contrast, the origin of the variation “Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came” is well documented. It was used as the title of a widely-read article written by the American poet and author Charlotte E. Keyes (1914-1980). The article, about her growing admiration for the anti-war activism of her son Gene, was published in the October 1966 issue of McCall’s magazine. Charlotte’s other son happens to be the quote and phrase maven Ralph Keyes. He noted in his excellent book The Quote Verifier (2006) that his mother saw the phrase “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came” in a 1961 letter to the editor in The Washington Post, written by James R. Newman. Newman was referencing, but apparently misremembering, Sandburg’s line. Charlotte cut out and kept the letter for future reference and later adapted the title of her article from it. Newman may or may not have coined “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.” That paraphrase of Sandburg may already have been floating around at the time. However, I found no use of those words dated earlier than Newman’s 1961 letter in any newspaper archive or anywhere else online. So, he may deserve credit for creating the Sixties slogan (though perhaps inadvertently.)         Another variation, “What If They Gave a War and No One Came,” surfaced in 1968 as the title of a song by the now forgotten "Symphonopop" composer and musician Jonna Gault. And, in 1972, poet Allen Ginsberg echoed her version in his 1972 poem “Graffiti,” which included the lines “What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.”

A VARIATION ABOUT A DONALD TRUMP DEBATE NOBODY REMEMBERS: “What if they gave a debate and nobody came?”        Brad Knickerbocker        Staff writer and editor for the Christian Science Monitor         His humorous question in an article about the December 2011 Republican “debate” hosted by Donald Trump, which all but two Republican presidential candidates declined to participate in. (Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were the only candidates who agreed to appear.)

THE VIAGRA VARIATION: “What if You Took Viagra and Nobody Came?”         Double entendre title of an article in the Jan.-Feb. 1999 issue of Mother Jones magazine        The tongue-in-cheek article discussed some non-drug alternatives to Viagra, such as an artificial nylon-polypropylene penis, penile implant surgery — or a Corvette.

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Hemingway’s “grace under pressure” – original uses & interesting variations...

  

THE USE THAT MADE IT FAMOUS: “Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?” “I mean,” Ernest Hemingway said, “grace under pressure.”                     Ernest Hemingway‘s definition of guts (or courage), as quoted by Dorothy Parker in her profile of Hemingway in the November 30, 1929 issue of New Yorker magazine.                     Some books and websites mistakenly claim that Hemingway said, “Courage is grace under pressure.” He didn’t. However, according to Parker, what he did say was part of a conversation about courage.        Here’s the full context of the quote in Parker’s article:        “That brings me to the point which I have been trying to reach all this time: Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage...Mr. Hemingway did not use the term ‘courage.’ Ever the euphemist, he referred to the quality as ‘guts,’ and he was attributing its possession to an absent friend.        “Now just a minute,” somebody said, for it was one of those argumentative evenings. “Listen. Look here a minute. Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts’?”        “I mean,” Ernest Hemingway said, “grace under pressure.”        Parker’s profile of Hemingway, titled “The Artist’s Reward,” made the phrase “grace under pressure” famous. But Hemingway had used it before. One previous recorded use was in a letter Hemingway wrote to his fellow writer and frenemy F. Scott Fitzgerald on April 20, 1926.        Fitzgerald had mentioned to “Papa” that he’d told a mutual friend something Hemingway once said about the bravery involved in bullfighting. Interestingly, in the 1926 letter, Hemingway specified that he “was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers.”        Thus, either Hemingway later changed his mind about the meaning “grace under pressure” or Parker put that spin on it in her New Yorker piece.        In the book Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, author Sally Cline documents a third reported use of “grace under pressure” by Hemingway and suggests it may have been a favorite phrase he liked to use. It also appears that Hemingway coined the phrase, since his is the earliest documented use.        EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to my friend, environmental activist Tamela Fish, for asking me about the origin of “grace under pressure,” which led to this post.

A BULLFIGHT OPPONENT’S COUNTERQUOTE: “I went to a bullfight once in Mallorca. It was ghastly; horrific. No grace under pressure, no death with dignity. Just cruelty and butchery and degradation of man and beast.”        Peter Murtagh                     Irish journalist and author.        An observation he makes in the book Buen Camino!, co-written with his daughter Natasha

CLARK’S COUNTERQUOTE: “Real courage is not grace under pressure. It’s doing the right thing when it’s frightening and hurts.”        Ramsey Clark        American lawyer and activist who served at U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon B. Johnson         A comment he made about feisty attorney Stephen Yagman, who is known for taking unpopular cases, particularly lawsuits against local and federal law enforcement officials, in an article in George magazine, June 1998.

THE GRACE VS. DISGRACE APPLICATION: “It is a bonus for baseball fans that Derek Jeter’s final season as a New York Yankee will be one that Alex Rodriguez spends in baseball banishment. Jeter will be feted in 2014, A-Rod will be forgotten. It would have been indecorous and incongruous to see them sharing the left side of the Yankees infield, Jeter at shortstop and Rodriguez at third base, the captain and the charlatan, grace under pressure next to disgrace under pressure.”        Christopher L. Gasper        Sports columnist for the Boston Globe        In his February 14, 2014 column in the Boston Globe        Gasper went on to explain: “Jeter will be remembered as one of baseball’s classiest competitors and a consummate winner. A-Rod, sitting out the 2014 season with the longest performance-enhancing drug suspension in major league history, will be remembered as one of baseball’s biggest frauds and fallen heroes.”

THE KITTEN KILLER APPLICATION: “When they make the Bill Frist biopic, it's got to be called Disgrace Under Pressure. (Either that or Silence of the Kittens, given his med-school penchant for adopting shelter kitties and then dissecting them for ‘science.’)”        Shelley Lewis        American journalist, news producer and writer                     One of the comments Lewis makes about William H. Frist in her book Naked Republicans: A Full-frontal Exposure of Right-wing Hypocrisy and Greed        Frist is a doctor who became a Conservative Republican politician, serving two terms as U.S. Senator for Tennessee. As noted by his political opponents and critics like Lewis, when Frist was a medical school student in the 1970s he performed fatal medical experiments on cats he acquired from animal shelters by falsely claiming he wanted to adopt them.

KUSHNER’S ARGUABLY IRONIC CLAIM: “It took real courage for Ivanka to stand before 35 million Americans...to help advance substantive policies that will dramatically improve U.S. law in favor of all women, parents and children. Grace under pressure is what she does best.”        Jared Kushner                     Wealthy businessman and husband of Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump        In an he wrote article titled “Why Ivanka Trump Is the Perfect Champion for Women’s Issues,” published in Variety magazine in September 2016        (Cartoon by the great political cartoonist Jeff Danziger. To read some of the news stories behind it, click this link.)

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“Ignorance is bliss” – except when it’s not…

FAMOUS POETIC ORIGIN: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.”        Thomas Gray (1716-1771)         English poet        From the last two lines of his poem “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College.”        This is the origin of the proverbial phrase “ignorance is bliss.” In the poem, it referred to young people who are happily oblivious to the difficulties they will face as adults — and to the ultimate, inescapable fate of death.        “Ignorance is bliss” is now more widely used in one of two ways: to suggest that it is sometimes better not to be aware of something that might make a person unhappy; or, as a satirical remark about people who try to ignore issues they should be concerned about and dealing with.

THE POSITIVE SIDE OF IGNORANCE: “Ignorance is bliss. Without sufficient appreciation of our own ignorance, we cease to be curious, we cease to be receptive to new ideas and we cease to be respectful of other people. Awareness of our own ignorance is a virtue: knowing that we do not know everything makes us humble, patient, open to compromise and collaboration. You may have noticed that these qualities are in short supply. Embracing your ignorance is good for you and it’s good for the world.”        William C. Dudley        President of Washington and Lee University        In his commencement speech to graduating students on May 25, 2017

THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF AWARENESS: “Comedians can be a sad bunch, you know. You know what’s the saying? Ignorance is bliss. So if ignorance is bliss, what’s the opposite of ignorance? Must not be bliss. And your job as a comedian, you know, is basically to notice everything. And the better the comedian, the more aware he or she is of the world around them. So you know, it can be not a happy place. Sometimes you can have too much information. Sometimes you can know too much.”        Chris Rock        American comedian and actor        His response in an August 12, 2014 interview about the death by suicide of his friend Robin Williams

STEPHEN FRY COUNTERQUOTE: “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people in the world?”        Stephen Fry        British actor, author and wit        On the BBC comedy panel game show QI (short for “Quite Interesting”)

THE MANLY AVERSION VERSION: “When it comes to anything found on the shelves of the feminine hygiene aisle, ignorance is bliss.”        Daniel M. Cruse        American author and EzineArticles.com contributor        In his post about “Air Intake Systems”

THE STD VARIATION: “When it comes to communicable diseases, ignorance is not bliss.”        Kay Robertson                   Communicable disease expert        At a recent public hearing in Helena, Montana

THE PARTY BOY’S ANSWER: DERRICK (actor John Cameron Mitchell): “O’Neal, settle a bet. Is ignorance bliss?” O’NEAL: (actor Matthew Borlenghi): “I don’t know. I just wanna be happy!”        In the TV series Party Girl (1996)

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“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

TOLSTOY’S FAMOUS LINE ABOUT FAMILIES: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”        Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)        Russian novelist, playwright and essayist        The first line of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1878)        This sentence—one of the most famous opening lines in literature—is also sometimes translated as “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”        The character Anna Karenina is an aristocratic Russian woman who leaves her husband for a rich count named Alexei Vronsky. Their affair has tragic consequences for Anna. In a contrasting subplot, a country landowner named Konstantin Levin finds happiness in his marriage to Kitty, the sister-in-law of Anna’s brother.        Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina during a period when his own life with his long-suffering wife Sophia (who he nicknamed Sonya) was becoming increasingly unhappy for both of them. The story was initially published in installments in the journal Russkii Vestrik (The Russian Herald, a.k.a. The Russian Messenger) from January 1875 to April 1877. The first complete book version, in Russian, was published in 1878. The first English translation was published in 1918. Since then, Anna Karenina has often been cited as one of the greatest novels of all time, though some modern readers find it a bit boring (in its own classic way).         Nearly twenty film and TV adaptations of the novel have been made. Actresses who have played Anna Karenina in those adaptations include Great Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Nicola Paget, Jacqueline Bissett, Sophie Marceau, Helen McCrory and Keira Knightley.        I'm hoping Carol Peletier from The Walking Dead TV series will play Anna in the zombie adaptation, which is bound to come sooner or later.

NABAKOV'S COUNTERQUOTE: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.”        Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)        Russian-born American novelist and entomologist         His response to Tolstoy’s famous line in the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)

FULFORD’S COUNTERQUOTE: “It may be the silliest damn sentence ever set down by a great author, Leo Tolstoy’s opening of Anna Karenina...He got things backwards. Experience and literature both demonstrate that happy families come in all shapes and sizes, but the burdens of unhappy families (emotional indifference, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsibility) are painfully predictable.”        Robert Fulford        Canadian journalist, broadcaster and editor        Comment in his weekly column for The National Post, August 2, 2005

THE STARVING ARTISTS PRINCIPLE: “To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy musicians are all the same. For the Taylor Swifts of this world, life is one big frosted cupcake. Wretched artists, however, are godforsaken each in their own way.”        John Pitcher        American classical music and dance critic        In a 2013 article about the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in on NashvilleScene.com

THE GRAMMY RED CARPET VARIATION: “To paraphrase the great fashion critic Leo Tolstoy, each of the terrible red carpet looks from the 2012 Grammy Awards were terrible in their own way. Sacrilegiously terrible: Nicki Minaj, who showed up in a blood red wimple and studded cloak with her own personal confessor. Turns out that was just a prelude to her performance art piece later in the night, ‘The Exorcism of Roman.’”        Vicki Hyman        American celebrity news journalist        In a post in her column on the The Star-Ledger website

TOLSTOY’S FIRST RULE OF POLITICS: “All winning campaigns are brilliant in hindsight — it’s Tolstoy’s First Rule of Politics (corollary: every losing campaign is dysfunctional in its own way).”        Molly Ball         American journalist who writes regularly for The Atlantic and Politico.com          Her astute observation in a February 1, 2012 post on The Atlantic website about the Presidential primary election

THE STUFFED BREADSTICKS COROLLARY: “I believe it was Tolstoy who once wrote, ‘Tasty fast food items are all alike; every crappy fast food item is crappy in its own way.’ To this principle I must add a corollary which shall forevermore be known as the Stuffed Breadsticks Corollary: …but some crappy fast food items are crappy IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE.”         “Jasper,” the online fast food critic and impulse buy reviewer         In his April 11, 2011 review of the Dunkin’ Donuts Stuffed Breadsticks (Pepperoni & Cheese and Cheeseburger) on The Impulsive Buy website (known for “Putting the ‘ew’ in product reviews”)

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