LUCK
by Mort Castle
Of late and also of early, I have been ruminating upon the role of Luck in the life of a writer (and these metaphysical ponderings, I am sure, are linked to my being closer to the end of Life than its beginning). Or in the lives of painters or singers. Or in the life of anyone dependent upon either a) critical assessment or b) public acceptance and acclaim or c) both.
Certainly it’s easy to dismiss Luck or even to say it doesn’t exist. After all, this is the United States of Self-Empowerment, wherein every bumper sticker seer and life coach exhorts us to fulfill all our (virtually limitless!) potential through Positive Thinking and maybe a Bow Flex, and every week, HBO presents a new “suggested by something like fact” film to show how, through old-fashioned ambition and persistence, that sharecropper’s inbred, illiterate, chinless son, Joe-Jimmy Jambalaya, becomes President of Harvard, and Pete Pieplate earns Olympic gold as a champion archer despite having no arms or legs, and Herb the Blind Hemophiliac attains his dream as a world class matador.
Me, I don’t believe in much of anything except the possibility of damned near anything …
Oh, that and Luck.
Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.
–R. E. Shay
So, I’m at a writing convention not terribly long back. I’m talking casually to first time novelist Marcus Sakey as he signs his quite wonderful The Blade Itself. He asks something like, “Things still going okay for you?” referring to the film deal I’d told him about a month or so earlier.
“Yeah,” I respond, which seems a reasonable thing to say. And then, with no modesty but with that innate honesty which has decreed I can never hope for a political career, I add, “I’ve got luck on this one.”
Said comment being overheard by a pleasant and smiling lady author. Who I later learn is a writer of Victorian Cozy Romance Mystery novels (though I do not learn what a Victorian Cozy Romance Mystery novel is nor do I intend to).
“Luck?” says the Pleasant Smiler, solipsistist and spiritual descendant of Ayn Rand. “You make your own luck.”
I shake my head.
Pleasant Smiler does the eyebrow thing. She sees I just don’t get it. She might have zinged me with something that she no doubt has on samplers and plaques in her cozy Victorian home:
Good luck is a lazy man’s estimate of a worker’s success.
–Anonymous
She might have savaged the Castle Creed of Luck with:
A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.3) –James A. Garfield
But what she chose to do, wisely, methinks, was to walk away. After all, there’s no talking to one who does not believe in the Triumph of the Will.
###
Of course I don’t think that elusive, indefinable Luck is a force in the Universe that yields its secrets to empirical observation and measurement. Nor do I think Luck can be petitioned with rabbit foot, pagan spell, or prayer. But experience and anecdote have convinced me that Luck is sometimes with you and sometimes not–and sometimes savagely working against you.
You don’t think Gladstone Gander was the product solely of Disney artist and write Carl Barks’s imagination, do you? We’ve all known real life Gladstone Ganders.
Mine is a friend named Gary Casper. In
This is not to deny, of course, the need for more than Luck alone.
Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.
- Lucille Ball
I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on.
- Samuel Goldwyn
Lucy and Sam are absolutely right to stress the work ethic and critical thinking skills: that’s what guided Uncle Joe to the crap game in the West Side alley. When he arrived home with the mink coat for Aunt Rose, though, he explained he had been a mere marionette twitching on the strings of the Cosmic Puppeteer: “Nothin’ but sevens and ‘levens, Ro. Luck was on my side.” Student of the Cosmos that she was, Aunt Rose took the gift of the benevolent Luck God.
Luck … Come on, you writers, tell me you haven’t … I don’t get it. His books are okay, pretty much, but he’s not got more snap, crackle, or pop than I do, so, how did he score a mega-bazillion dollar advance while I…
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
–Jean Cocteau
Luck. I thought its toothy smile was aimed at me when, in 1977, the Chicago Sun-Times featured my new novel, The Deadly Election, as the first page–all of the page–of the Entertainment section. The “Entertainment” section, read by living people who liked being entertained, and not the “Book” section, which would be devoted that week to a critique of the mumblings of Norman Mailer and a review of the annotated epistles of Anne Bradstreet.
Good Luck: Good guy, Roy Campbell, college professor and sometimes contributor to newspapers, had liked my stories in men’s magazines, contacted me, and asked if he could do a feature on Mort Castle.
Good Luck: Why, Roy, I have a book that will soon be coming out.
Bad Luck: When that inkus majorus feature appeared, The Deadly Election was on sale in two bookstores in the Chicago area.
Bad Luck: That paperback publisher was tied in to a distributor who couldn’t distribute disease if you took him out of the infectious ward and stuck him in front of a fan.
Just a question of luck?
No. In one of my earlier Unplugged rants, I maintained that all writers will attain success if they have a lot of persistence, at least a little talent–and are willing to define success as “being publishing in credible venues…eventually.”
But the rest, the “success” as defined by Mr. CEO accepting 400 million dollars severance pay instead of going to jail under the “Don’t Screw Widows and Orphans Act,” the success as your neighbor defines it, “You never been a movie, huh?” well, that sort of success is mostly Luck, Luck, Luck:
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
–Joseph Conrad
Me, I’m a believer.
And I hope Luck is running with you now, but if not
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
–Wilson Mizner
Good night and good luck.
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Comments
Hey, Mort, I’m with you. I’ve always been lucky, sometimes bad, mostly good. But, whatever the luck, it might have been altered had not the degree of work, talent, and striving been a part of it.
I lke your quotes. Here’s another, “… the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Ecclesiastes 9:11,
Frank
I’ve been snake-bit and I’ve been lucky to the point where you tremble with gratitude. Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics to call it “luck.” Maybe the gods of irony are having their game. The improbabilities in my corner of the universe are convincing, though. I don’t challenge them. For every time I’ve paid the price in frustration, futility, incredibly bad timing, it seems like there’s a transcendent moment or a fortuitous meeting that saves or changes a life — mine. And once, my son’s. Or is that all the scorekeeper’s bias? If you try to keep track, you invite the silver pinball to track a new route. We are tokens in a cosmic game. Don’t mess with the players.
Hey, Mort, dunno how the hell you came up with “luck” as a topic, but it was…uh, lucky. Opens up some ephemeral possibilities in this blog for me, and man, you know I don’t stick to the rules very often.
– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)
Luck is the wind. Sometimes it’s with you, sometimes it’s against you, some times you can predict its course, sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Sometimes you have to fight it, sometimes you can ride it. But it never stops blowing.
–M
Luck is the wind. –M
& Wild is the Wind, forget who wrote it but Nina Simone’s version is the one.
Mort
Wonderful article, Mort. Made me smile and thank my lucky stars.
You got me thinking that good luck is sometimes couched in what looks like the dark kind. We’ve all had that flat tire that made us late to a potential accident. And many of us have had that nasty “for sure” acceptance fall through only to have the story later picked-up for a much better publishing opportunity. So I suppose luck may sometimes be in the perspective we take…short-term or long-term may be the telling of the tape.
Thanks for a great read!
Warm Hugs from COLD CT,
Fran Friel
Way to go and mess with my mind, Mort.
I still don’t know where I fall along the continuum, and am now probably more confused than ever.
Although I do think that luck is so often all in the timing. When cars go careening, half a second either way can mean the difference between the luck of the angels or the worst, and possibly final, day of your life.
I’m reminded, speaking of movie deals and luck, when my co-authored screenplay adaptation of Nightlife got into the hands of Wes Craven’s longtime … Production Designer, was it?
Oh, she loved it. Really wanted him to do it next. She was thinking of Stan Winston for the effects. She had Craven read the screenplay, and he quite liked it. So much that he even read the novel, and liked that too.
But he’d decided he didn’t want to do any more horror films. He had this comedy coming out shortly. Thought that might be more along the lines of where he wanted to go in the future.
It bombed.
A year or two later, he was back in the theaters with Scream.
Ya just gotta laugh.
And think better luck next time.
My wife has often told me I lead a charmed life, that things seem to come my way.
I don’t dispute her contention, but neither do I act upon it. I’ll just keep slogging away, and if lady luck continues to smile on me from time to time, I’ll tip me hat, say thankee ma’am, and carry on.
Ya just gotta laugh.
And think better luck next time–says Brian Hodge
if lady luck continues to smile on me from time to time, I’ll tip me hat, say thankee ma’am, and carry on. –says Bev Vincent
Prezackly, fellers … When it’s the Luck for you to win the contest, even though you didn’t enter it, you win the contest … and when the Luck is against you, why, your prize is a first class ticket on the Titanic.
Mort “Call me Mr. Luck”
I wish more people would realize this really is part of the equation in so many cases. I often get asked how I managed to get published, and I say it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. No secret formula. Unfortunately, it’s not an answer everyone likes.
I also enjoyed Fran’s observation that sometimes things we initially see as “bad luck” end up working out for the better. That’s been the case with me countless times.
Good stuff. The point about the stage of progress is telling, too. Reminds me of the ‘good news, bad news, good news…’ shorts, where just as the interpretation is being taken as good, the teller says: no, the bad news is… etc.
Luck, good or bad, and perception thereof in one’s life struck a chord with me, too. At one stage in my life I lost my brand new parked car to a crash when someone swerved to avoid hitting a dog; my job because the superintendent wanted to hire his neice for the job in the next school year; and my fiance because I lost my job and I needed to move on and find work or somewhere to bind my wounds elsewhere: all within a two week period.
I look back at all that bad luck and thank my lucky stars. It was a definite fork in the road, message from the universe, karmic redirection (pick your philosophy) that pushed me toward a much different life than I had ever envisioned for myself.
Luck, or fortune, good or ill, may be just the right thing at the right time, even if you’re dying or celebrating in the short term.
I’m a firm believer, and I tend not to look the lucky horse-gifts where their choppers snap. While the successes that would set me up for life haven’t happened, there is something in my life that - every time things are down and seem to be continuing down without end - saves me. Literally. I’ve been destitute and desperate and suddenly gotten a letter explaining how my parents, divorced for decades, found some stocks they forgot they owned and by the way, here’s my $4,000 share. Not enough to make me rich, but enough to even the keel. I can’t count the number of times this has happened, right down to the day I first reached San Diego after Navy Electronics school.
I’d lost my wallet on that last day, gotten wired enough from my grandmother to get a ticket to San Diego, and stood in the airport w/out the money to get a cab to the base.
I had very short hair, nearly shaved, because of a final inspection in Illinois.
Along comes a Hari Krishna, shaking a book at me and telling me how it’s the answer to life, the universe and everything, and they are giving it away. I take it. Said Hari Krishna begins haranguing me then about how it is not REALLY free, they are giving it away for donations, yada yada. I turn out my pockets, show him I haven’t a cent, but keep the book and gush about it. Confused, disappointed, and probably wondering how he’ll explain the loss, he leaves.
I stare at the book, smile, and look for a rich businessman coming in on the plane.
Excuse me sir (blank eyes, dull expression) we are handing these out for a small donation…they are the answer to …
I got to the base.
Luck? At least a little…
I liked this essay…(can you tell?)
DNW