Today in Literature History

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Though a prolific writer -- the complete works run to thirty-six volumes -- Bentham's most famous connection to literature is as satiric target in ****ens's Hard Times. ****ens shared many of Bentham's enthusiasms, such as prison reform and the guarantee of a minimum wage, but he was horrified by what he took to be the general Utilitarian attitude. Bentham wrote of arriving at "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" through a "felicific calculus" in which pleasure and pain were clearly quantified, and upon which laws could incontestably operate; ****ens wrote of Mr. **** and his kite, of "what larks!" Pip and Joe Gargery shared, of such incalculables as Tom-All-Alone's and the Marshalsea.

****ens spoke out against the Utilitarian approach whenever given the chance. An early satirical sketch entitled "Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association" documents the outrage of the statistician, Mr. Slug, when reporting "the result of some calculations he had made with great difficulty and labour, regarding the state of infant education among the middle classes of London." Mr. Slug had discovered that "within a circle of three miles from the Elephant and Castle, the following were the names and numbers of children's books principally in circulation":

Jack and the Giant-killer . . . 7,943
Ditto and the Bean-stalk . . . 8,621
Ditto and Eleven Brothers . . . 2,845
Ditto and Jill . . . 1,998

Some of the children appeared to believe in dragons and to wish to grow up to slay them; very few had a solid grasp of mathematics; "Not one child among the number interrogated had ever heard of Mungo Park -- some inquiring whether he was at all connected to the black man that swept the crossing."

"Mudfog" was 1837, five years after Bentham's death; Hard Times, seventeen years later, shows ****ens still at it. In this passage, the circus girl Sissy Jupe stands condemned for thinking a horse might be more than the graminivorous quadruped that Bitzer eventually anatomizes:

'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?'
'Sissy Jupe, sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
'Sissy is not a name,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.'
'My father as calls me Sissy. sir,' returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
'Then he has no business to do it,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?'
'He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.'
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
'We don't want to know anything about that, here. You mustn't tell us about that, here. . . . Give me your definition of a horse.'
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours. . . .'

Bentham died wealthy, and used his estate to finance University College in London. As dictated in his will, his embalmed and dressed body was put on display there; it still sits today in a cabinet in one of the main College buildings.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

Today's a double doozy!

On this day in 1977, Anais Nin's Delta of Venus was published; also on this day in 1980, Henry Miller died. Delta of Venus was originally written as Nin's contribution to the dollar-a-page pornography that she, Miller and others contracted to write for an anonymous client in the 1940s. Although much of it was taken from or inspired by her journal, of which she was so proud, Nin viewed her pornography work as an embarrassment, and a detraction from the feminist-literary image she wished to promote. During her last year -- she died of cancer in 1977, six months before the book's publication -- Nin became convinced that her erotica might help support her two surviving husbands, and she reluctantly agreed to posthumous publication. The convincing was done by one of the husbands, the one sixteen years younger than Nin; he would also bring to market the second volume, Little Birds and, says Nin's biographer, Deirdre Bair (National Book Award, 1995), announce after Nin's death that it had been her last wish to have her diaries appear in unexpurgated versions -- or, more accurately, in versions expurgated by him. Four new volumes of diaries soon appeared, as well as the journal-based Henry and June and Incest -- the last a graphic record of her relationship with her father, not to be confused with her novel, House of Incest.

Delta of Venus became Nin's first best seller and, according to those familiar with the genre, a groundbreaking classic for its "sensitive descriptions of women's sexual feelings." The pornographer who bought the material originally had complained of this, telling Nin to cut the poetry. This leads to the kind of 'life imitating art imitating life' situation which few but Nin could manage: in her 1941 journal she records that her editing of the "erotic madness days" recorded in her 1930s journals in order to make them graphic enough for her pornographic boss she became so "powerfully excited" by recall and invention that "I had an orgasm while I wrote, then I went to Henry and he was passionate, then to Gonzalo who was passionate. Responded to both."

Miller could manage the sex but not the writing. He found the pornographer's dollar-a-page, hundred-pages-a-month job to be "hard labor," the pornographer found the bizarre tales he invented unsatisfactory, and Miller quit before he was fired. This pleased Nin, who thought it wrong that Miller should have to undergo "some Dante punishment" in which he was unjustly "condemned to write about sex when today he is a mystic."

A situation somewhat the reverse and brimming with its own set of ironies developed late in Miller's life. His last relationship was with Brenda Venus, a young woman from Biloxi, Mississippi with a Playboy body (July, 1986), some B-movie credits, and aspirations to fame. Miller was eighty-four and in failing health, but with still enough sex drive to be responsive to the first letters and photographs that arrived from Venus in 1976. (His fifth wife, a young Japanese pop singer, had recently moved on, eventually to open a Tokyo nightclub called "Tropic of Cancer".) Miller wrote her over 1500 letters during his last four years; published by Venus in 1986 as Dear, Dear Brenda, they show the charm of the Miller-of-old, and that the old Miller could now do little more than write about sex - and Venus says that she pretty much avoided that little more. In his introduction to the letters, longtime Miller friend Lawrence Durrell wrote that the "generosity and tact" that Venus did provide literally added several years to Miller's life and "allowed him to end his days in a marvelous euphoria of loving attachment."

They certainly brought life to Venus: she went on to write the best-selling sex books, Secrets of Seduction and Secrets of Seduction For Women. Those who have the $11.95 can read here how to go "from flirtation to foreplay to sexual ecstasy"; those who wish to actually do the Venus Butterfly should note that in a recent stage adaptation of Dear, Dear Brenda in Russia (at the Moscow Art Theatre of all places, home of Chekhov), Brenda Venus is played by Svetlana Khorkina, the medal-winning Olympic gymnast.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1880 Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow. The speech, or rather the wild enthusiasm which it inspired, is regarded as not only a historic moment in Russian literary history but the high water mark of Dostoevsky's public fame. Coming just six months before his death, the event eventually represented as much a memorial to him as to Pushkin.

Pushkin (1799-1837) was and is revered throughout Russia as the National Poet. His statue had been financed by public donations, and immediately became a symbol of the national literary consciousness. The dedication ceremony was seen as a battleground for those who wished to define that consciousness, with the speeches of Turgenev and Dostoevsky -- Tolstoy was already in the grip of his religious fundamentalism, and had declined to attend -- as the main battle. The Paris-living Turgenev represented the "Westernized" writers who promoted a more European outlook, while the peasant-loving Dostoevsky was the voice of what was exclusively Russian. He saw his Pushkin speech as an opportunity to promote his blend of mystical nationalism and devout Christianity over Turgenev's educated liberalism. Dostoevsky was in failing health, but as he says in one letter home to his wife in St. Petersburg, written several days before his speech, acutely aware of the moment:

... I am needed here, not just by the Friends of Russian Literature, but by our whole party and the whole idea for which we have been struggling for 30 years now. For the hostile party (Turgenev, Kovalevsky, and almost the entire university) is determined to play down the importance of Pushkin as the man who gave expression to the Russian national identity, by denying the very existence of that identity.... My voice will carry weight and our side will prevail....

Turgenev's speech was warmly received; Dostoevsky's speech was a hymn to the Russian spirit, a prophecy of Russian greatness, a messianic call to those present "to become a real Russian. . .and a brother to all men." All reports, including Dostoevsky's letter to his wife that night, indicate that the showdown was no contest:

When I appeared on the stage, the auditorium thundered with applause.... I bowed and made signs begging them to let me read -- but to no avail.... At last I began reading. At every page, sometimes at every sentence, I was interrupted with bursts of applause. I read in a loud voice and with fire.... When at the end I proclaimed the universal oneness of mankind, the hall seemed to go into hysterics, and when I finished, there was -- I won't call it a roar -- it was a howl of elation. People in the audience who had never met before wept and threw their arms around one another, solemnly promising to become better, and not hate, but love one another....

One listener wrote that it was as though "the walls in the auditorium had been replaced with a gigantic bonfire," and that if "our saint, our great prophet" had asked it, those present were willing to "rush into the flames and die in order to save Russia!" Dostoevsky reported that someone rushed out to buy a laurel crown, and that at the end of the evening "a throng of women (more than a hundred of them) stormed the stage and crowned me with the wreath in front of the whole audience."

Pushkin was immune to the purges, icon-bashings and statue-topplings that swept the USSR in the 20th century, and his monument in Pushkin Square is as popular as ever today as a place for gathering and reading poetry -- although it looks out on what is reportedly the most frequented McDonald's in the world.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1381 preacher John Ball spoke at Blackheath to those assembled for the Peasants' Revolt, inciting them with perhaps the most provocative rhymed couplet in history:

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The rebels apparently took up this chant as they marched on London to demand of fourteen year-old Richard II and those about him why they had the easy life while the peasants still had the digging and spinning: "They are clothed in velvet and soft leather furred with ermine, while we wear coarse cloth; they have their wines, spices and good bread, while we have the drawings of chaff, and drink water; they have handsome houses and manors, and we the pain and travail, the rain and the wind, in the fields" (from a John Ball sermon, in Froissart's Chronicles). Though defeated -- leader Wat Tyler killed in a knife-fight and John Ball hung, drawn and quartered -- Ball's poetry lived on, says one historian, as the embodiment of "a spirit fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages."

One of the most interesting and influential reiterations of Ball's couplet -- though not his alone, as the lines have been traced back to the 1340s -- came 500 years later, through William Morris. Lucky the medieval lord who might have had Morris about the manor, for his industry as well as talent: architecture, textiles, stained glass, wall paper, furniture, and of course books. His Arts and Crafts Movement would revolutionize Victorian taste, but in his politics he was literally a rebel, working tirelessly for the Socialist League, and marching in the 1887 "Bloody Sunday" demonstration beside George Bernard Shaw. That year too, he published A Dream of John Ball, a socialist, time-travel fantasy in which Morris promotes his vision of an idealized world of craftsmen and compassion, built upon the exhortations of his preacher:

Forsooth, brethren, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man's life upon the earth from the earth shall wane....

Morris's John Ball would inspire many in England, not least post-WWII Prime Minister Clement Atlee. He would often quote the above passage and say "how much more Morris meant to us than Karl Marx" -- although, as Fiona MacCarthy says in her fascinating 1994 biography of Morris and his times, Morris would have been at least skeptical of Atlee's Welfare State.

When Morris started his famous Kelmscott Press several years later, one of his first books was his own edition of A Dream of John Ball, with a frontispiece illustration of the delve-span couplet by Edward Burne-Jones. Perhaps in this book, at least, Morris realized his composite ideal of medievalism, socialism and craft-as-art. A first edition now costs $3,000 -- not the $75,000 needed for the Kelmscott Chaucer, described as a "pocket cathedral" and said to be the most beautiful book ever printed, but not chaff and water either.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird (1965), this plan went horribly wrong. When six-year-old Jerzy became separated from his parents he was given up for dead; he spent the next three years roaming the Polish countryside, witnessing and suffering such atrocities that he was struck dumb, recovering his speech only years later when, now reclaimed by his parents from an orphanage and enrolled in a school for the handicapped, he was jolted back to speech by a skiing accident.

Or so the story went, until a 1982 Village Voice article challenged it and just about everything else about Kosinski. The list of charges is lengthy, and some remain only half-substantiated -- or muddied by anecdotes about Kosinski's academic failings, sexual eccentricities and talk-show personality -- but a 1996 biography by James Park Sloan maintains that the main accusations are indeed true. These include the revelation that The Painted Bird, which Kosinski either promoted as an autobiographical novel or allowed to be so interpreted, was the furthest thing from personal experience: the Kosinskis remained together throughout the war, safe and even comfortable. Noting Kosinski's inability to express himself clearly in written English, Sloan says that he hired teams of editors to virtually ghostwrite his books, and that Being There, his 1971 hit, was not only polished by hirelings but Polish in origin, the plot stolen from a book published in the 30s back home.

When the charges first appeared, some close to Kosinski refuted them but others came forth with corroborations. Kosinski's literary reputation certainly went into a tailspin; when he committed suicide in 1991, some cited the allegations as cause. Some Jewish critics say that, whether true of Kosinski's youth or not, The Painted Bird is still a powerful and representative book; some Polish critics say that Polish peasants could not have committed such atrocities upon him or anyone. Some praise the book as a simply-told parable; others say that whether the writing style is Kosinski's or not, the atrocities found in it are all too representative:

The miller, evidently annoyed by the cats' play, kicked the animals away and squashed the eyeballs with his heavy boots. Something popped under his thick sole. A marvelous mirror, which could reflect the whole world, was broken. There remained on the floor only a crushed bit of jelly. I felt a terrible sense of loss.

In Being There, much of the above seems to reappear as theme -- the almost-mute Chauncey Gardiner, the parable truths concocted from nothing much, the rise to fame in a world of spin and respin:

Thinking that he ought to show a keen interest in what EE was saying, Chance resorted to repeating to her parts of her own sentences, a practice he had observed on TV. In this fashion he encouraged her to continue and elaborate. Each time Chance repeated EE's words, she brightened and looked more confident. In fact, she became so at ease that she began to punctuate her speech by touching, now his shoulder, now his arm. Her words seemed to float inside his head; he observed her as if she were on television.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date, thus giving Joyce the day upon which he would base Ulysses, and giving the rest of us "Bloomsday." Had Nora not stood Joyce up on their scheduled first date, this most famous of literary days would have been June 14; had that first date not happened at all, there very well may never have been any Bloomsday, or any Ulysses. The ways in which Nora Barnacle is and is not Molly Bloom continue to be discussed -- in Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography Nora: The Real Molly Bloom, for example, and the 1999 film based upon it -- but it seems agreed that she was Joyce's only irreplaceable relationship. And we do know that she was the only one allowed to call him Jim.

When they first met on the streets of Dublin, Joyce was a bright-talking and hard-drinking 22 year-old, already with something of a name for himself in the local pubs and poetry circles. Not that Nora would have known: she was a 20 year-old chambermaid from Galway, just arrived in the big city. Still, it was Nora that made the biggest impression on their date -- a walk along the River Liffey, during which she seems to have taught the know-it-all Joyce a few things that he didn't know after all. Within four months they were back at the harbor, sailing for Europe. When Joyce's father was told that his favorite son had run off with an unknown Galway girl, he responded with typical family wit: "Barnacle? She'll never leave him."

Nora was no-nonsense -- she included Ulysses in the nonsense category, and refused to read it -- and not the 'quiet helpmeet' type, but through decades of poverty, rootlessness, drunkenness, literary rejection, Joyce's failing eyes, their son's alcohol problems and their daughter's insanity, she remained the stable center of Joyce's eccentric, expatriate life. So Molly anchors the wandering Bloom, even as her climactic monologue shows her memory drifting to others:

...we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

[Noblejanobii]

On this day in 1914, the first issue of the radical arts magazine, Blast, was published. This was "A Review of the Great English Vortex," and though neither the magazine nor "Vorticism" would last very long, the art-literary Establishment was jolted into taking notice. The cover was a violent pink, the typography and lay-out were an assault on Victorian order and ornateness, and though the specific lists of Blasted (English humor, do-gooders, sportsmen, aesthetics. . .) and Blessed (trade unionists, music halls, hairdressers, aviators. . .) might have been a bit of a puzzle, the manifesto sounded a trumpet for modernism:

We stand for the Reality of the Present - not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past.
We want to leave Nature and men alone.
The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously.
WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY - their stupidity, animalism and dreams.
We believe in no perfectibility except our own.
Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content.
WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel its crude energy flowing through us . . . .

They were not the only trumpet, but the Vorticists scoffed at the Bloomsbury crowd, rejecting their modernism as class-bound and clever, a tea-room movement. Vorticists hung out at the underground nightclub, The Cave of the Golden Calf, a place whose walls were "hideously but relevantly frescoed," and "splashed with the blood of exhausted heroes." In the world of the avant-garde, they were the bad-boy Marlowe to the Bloomsbury Shakespeare, and Blast was conceived as their "battering ram."

As a word, "Vorticism" was coined by Ezra Pound. As a movement in painting and sculpture, it was a branch of abstract art, as were all its fledgling cousins -- Futurism, Rayonism, Fauvism, Orphism, Suprematism, etc. As a literary movement, it was harder to define, the first issue including poems by Pound (in which he taunted the "continuous gangrene" of "gagged reviewers" and "slut-bellied obstructionists"), a suffragist story by Rebecca West and an early version of Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." But the major force in Blast and Vorticism, as both painter and writer, was Wyndham Lewis. The first issue of Blast contained his play, "Enemy of the Stars," and many of his declarations in favor of raw energy, hard edges and the helter-skelter life:

Our Vortex is not afraid of the past: it has forgotten its existence.
Our Vortex regards the Future as as sentimental as the Past.
Our Vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your Impressionistic fuss.
Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red-hot swiftness.

Looking back from 1956, Lewis would say, "Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did or said at a certain time." This is confirmed by an anecdote from Ford Madox Ford in which he remembers walking with Pound and Lewis near his house, the "incomprehensible Philadelphian" talking in his one ear while Lewis played a second Mephistopheles at the other:

"Tu sais, tu es foutu! Foutu! Finished! Exploded! Done for!... What people want is me, not you. They want to see me. A Vortex. To liven them up ... I ... I ... I ...." He struck his chest dramatically and repeated: "I ... I ... I .... The Vortex. Blast all the rest."

Neither Blast nor Vorticism lasted long, both falling victim to either the dogs of WWI, or just the dogs: "The common homo canis," said Pound, "snarls violently at the thought of there being ideas which he doesn't know."

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1982, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published by Norton and Company in "the only complete edition from the original manuscript." All previous editions incorporated all or most of the cuts and changes that had been made to Crane's manuscript for its original publication in 1895. Crane had made these changes, but many now agree that they were coerced by an editor with an eye to the marketplace, and were so significant as to distort and muddy the story Crane wrote and the theme he intended. The original edition, writes the Norton editor Henry Binder, remade Crane's hero into "a youth who finds courage and self-possession, instead of one who, if he changes at all, becomes at the end even more egotistical and obtuse than he is at the beginning."

The Norton Red Badge comes with a lengthy essay which attempts to back up the above claim. The general argument is that the original edition cuts and downplays Henry's attempts to escape responsibility for his behavior, and correspondingly overplays his growth. At the very end, for example, a final sentence not in the original is added (in italics below), helping to suggest a real reformation out of the ironic one Crane intended -- or so the Norton editor's argument goes:

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks -- an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

Crane had to publish his first novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, on his own money, and he could not have guessed that The Red Badge of Courage was going to be an immediate best seller. When he sought advice from Hamlin Garland on his book he was poor nearly to the point of starvation, able to take only the first half of his manuscript with him because the second half was in hock to his typist. (Garland thought Crane's story so good that he gave him $15 for the typist, and a steak dinner.) If the editors at Appleton, the only publishers that seemed to want his new book, insisted on changes that would make it more upbeat and heroic for the public, this must have struck the twenty-four-year-old Crane as a deal he could live with, or survive on.

[Noblejanobii]

I'm going to be preemptively closing this until July 21 (or shortly there after) because I will be quite absent until then. Hope to see you all soon!