Today in Literature History

[Noblejanobii]

Welcome to Today in Literature History!

Here you will find fun facts about each day in literature history! Everything from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde to Dr. Seuss can be featured here so keep an eye out for fun facts and the craziness that could easily surface here!

This is also an open discussion style thread, so feel free to discuss and mull over whatever fact has been posted each day! Below will be a list of each day's facts so if you want to find a particular one, the legend is below!

Facts of the Day:
-4/24/16: The Picture of Dorian Gray (http://www.pokemoncrossroads.com/forum/showthread.php?9626-Today-in-Literature-History&p=191207&viewfull=1#post191207)
-4/25/16: O'Henry begins to writer (http://www.pokemoncrossroads.com/forum/showthread.php?9626-Today-in-Literature-History&p=192236&viewfull=1#post192236)
-4/26/16: A Jazz Age author is Born (http://www.pokemoncrossroads.com/forum/showthread.php?9626-Today-in-Literature-History&p=192797&viewfull=1#post192797)
-4/27/16: Ralph Waldo Emerson Dies (http://www.pokemoncrossroads.com/forum/showthread.php?9626-Today-in-Literature-History&p=193288&viewfull=1#post193288)

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. The ever infamous story about morality, frivolity, insincerity and so much more. It's an ever controversial story that sold extremely well, which served to only escalate the controversy around the story. It's about a man who, the more he sins, the worse his painting of himself reflects it. His painting is his soul.

So what do you think? Was Oscar Wilde's story truly worthy of its controversy? What about the concepts behind the story? What is the message behind the work as a whole?

[Suicune's Fire]

UUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHH. I watch the movie adaptation of that which was released in...2009 or something? It freaked the fruitcake out of me and I hated it. xD It was sort of nightmarish. The concept is cool... The movie just freaked me out. Dx

[Noblejanobii]

I haven't watched the movie, so I can't say for sure how creepy it is, but when I read the book like… a long time ago (I can't really remember when and I don't believe I ever finished it because it was banned at my school) it was extremely creepy so I can see how it'd be pretty freaky in movie form too.

[Ganyu]

Oh my god, it is TODAY?! I should do something.... like take out my copy of the novel and read it!!

Never saw the film adaptation but the story itself is meant to be freaky xD And that's why I fell in love with it. It really inspired a lot of my poetry, which had a dark morbid beginning (still does, but I try to be less cynical nowadays :x), as well as my fledgling short stories/novellas.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1898 William S. Porter began his five year sentence for embezzlement. Better known by his pen name "O'Henry," Porter is a very famous short story writer than created most of his works while he was behind bars. These works include Cabbages and Kings, Roads of Destiny, and Whirligigs. Each of these is a collection of short stories best known for their complete surprise endings.

[Ganyu]

Never heard of him, but it's quite cool how he comes up with such witty short stories during his imprisonment.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

The author of a great jazz age novel was born! Anita Loos, author of the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was born on this day in 1893. Her story takes place in a Great Gatsby style and was inspired by real life events when Loos witnessed one of her closest friends go completely ga ga over a blonde woman. This story was so popular it subsequently became a Broadway show and a movie starring Marilyn Monroe!

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson died at the age of seventy-eight. This is the guy that you see with quotes on poster probably about twenty percent of the time in high school. He was a very influential journalist, poet, essay writer, and more. Even more so, he was a transcendentalist. Emerson often wrote about and gave lectures to show his support of his beliefs and is highly regarded in the literature community.

[Suicune's Fire]

I haven't heard of the guy, but I'm not particularly literature-history educated. xD I tried looking up transcendentalism but it was a little confusing.

[Ganyu]

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

Man, his quotes are everywhere. I've never read his essays but I definitely know of his name from the Transcendentalist movement (on one random day of Googling XD).

[Noblejanobii]

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

Man, his quotes are everywhere. I've never read his essays but I definitely know of his name from the Transcendentalist movement (on one random day of Googling XD).

My calculus teacher has like 7 different posters with quotes by him on them. I'd take pictures but she's very strict about phones.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1926 in Montgomery, Alabama, a legend in literature was born. Many years later, this woman would come to publish one the most well respected and most sold books in history, To Kill a Mockingbird. Today is Harper Lee's Birthday!

[Suicune's Fire]

Oh my gosh, she died this year! D: Shortly after my birthday. Aw. :c Well, happy birthday. It would have been her 90th!

I have not read that book, though.

[Noblejanobii]

Oh my gosh, she died this year! D: Shortly after my birthday. Aw. :c Well, happy birthday. It would have been her 90th!

I have not read that book, though.

Read To Kill a Mockingbird. It's like the second most sold book in the US. Don't read Go Set a Watchman though. That was published against Harper Lee's will and it sucks. Her family published it only because they wanted money.

[Suicune's Fire]

Read To Kill a Mockingbird. It's like the second most sold book in the US. Don't read Go Set a Watchman though. That was published against Harper Lee's will and it sucks. Her family published it only because they wanted money.
Yeah I've been hearing about it all my life but still haven't read it. xD And darn, really? I read on Wikipedia that To Kill a Mockingbird was the only book she published until last year... That was her draft for TKAMB, yeah? How rude that they did it against her will!

[Trainer17]

I'm learning hell a lot more here than I ever did in school. <3

Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk

[Suicune's Fire]

I'm learning hell a lot more here than I ever did in school. <3

Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk
Noble should have been your sensei. NOBLE-SENSEI!

[Trainer17]

Noble should have been your sensei. NOBLE-SENSEI!
She IS my sensei :3

Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk

[Noblejanobii]

Yeah I've been hearing about it all my life but still haven't read it. xD And darn, really? I read on Wikipedia that To Kill a Mockingbird was the only book she published until last year... That was her draft for TKAMB, yeah? How rude that they did it against her will!

Pretty much. It was a character development exploration draft. She never wanted it to be published. And she never wanted to publish another book because she knew it would never be as good as TKAMB.


I'm learning hell a lot more here than I ever did in school. <3

Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk

Good! Maybe you can put it to use one day!


Noble should have been your sensei. NOBLE-SENSEI!

She IS my sensei :3

Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk

.//////////.
But I'm younger than you.

[Trainer17]

Pretty much. It was a character development exploration draft. She never wanted it to be published. And she never wanted to publish another book because she knew it would never be as good as TKAMB.



Good! Maybe you can put it to use one day!




.//////////.
But I'm younger than you.

It doesn't matter! I'm learning a lot of things from you :'3

[Noblejanobii]

It doesn't matter! I'm learning a lot of things from you :'3

.///////. Well that's good! It's the purpose of this thread to provide fun facts to people.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1980, the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock died. Now I know what you're thinking, "Alfred Hitchcock isn't an author." And you would be correct, he's not. However, Hitchcock is most famous for boring from many different books to create his amazing movies and popularized many novels across the world through his works.

[Trainer17]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1980, the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock died. Now I know what you're thinking, "Alfred Hitchcock isn't an author." And you would be correct, he's not. However, Hitchcock is most famous for boring from many different books to create his amazing movies and popularized many novels across the world through his works.

Oh wowie. Now I didn't know that xD I never have seen his movies, but one name comes to mind. Mr & Mrs Smith anyone? :'3

[Ganyu]

Still not really convinced at the relevance to literature history but w/e. He works with writers, so I guess, he's more of an editor/publisher figure lol.

[Noblejanobii]

Today In Literature History…

You know how often times people create some amazing works while in prison? Well, this was also true back in the 1640s. On this day, in 1642, a man by the name of Richard Lovelace was imprisoned following his presentation of the Kentish Petition to the Parliament. The Kentish Petition was the most famed of the Kent petitions of the early 1640s and it supported the established Church, requested Parliament to reach an accommodation with the King and, most pointedly, condemned the militia ordinance of 5 March 1642 as the exercise of 'arbitrary power', as it unilaterally gave control of the militia to Parliament. This was a crucial constitutional point since, unlike statutes, parliamentary ordinances did not carry the consent of the King, and their use was interpreted by the growing body of royalist opinion as a tyrannical usurpation of the power of the Crown. After its presentation to Parliament, Lovelace was sent to Gatehouse Prison where wrote one of his most famous works, To Althea, from Prison. You might even recognize the final stanza's first line:
"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage".
The poem is quoted in the sixth chapter of Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette, and may have inspired the scenario of Emily Brontë's much-admired poem The Prisoner.
While it is unknown who exactly "Althea" was, there are two theories. One, it was just a made up woman, or two, (and evidence suggests this is more likely) it was a woman named Lucy Sacheverell. Sacheverell's identity is somewhat of a mystery when it came to my research, but the few sources I could find that had an identity for you labeled her as Lovelace's fiancé.
The purpose of the whole scandal, from the petition to the poem, was to argue for the repeal of Clergy Act 1640. It was eventually repealed by Clergy Act 1661.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

It's everyone's favorite bard! On this day in 1594, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was entered in the Stationers' Register by printer Peter Short. As early as 1538, Henry VIII had issued a proclamation against "naughty printed books," and the creation of the Stationers' Company was yet another attempt to regulate and censor the "many false, scandalous, seditious, and libelous" books that were emerging from the private presses. While this play may seem truly innocent, it can be interpreted in many ways. My favorite is when the ending speech is given sarcastically. Despite many aspects of the story having been borrowed, there was no flogging a dead horse in Shakespeare's Shrew, perhaps thanks to Kate's famous knuckle-under at the end. Her speech is often delivered as if ironic, or as if a new strategy in the battle of the sexes before a blinking, jaw-dropped and totally disarmed Petruchio. The closing lines:

...I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…


On this day in 1810 Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in emulation of Leander's legendary swims to visit his beloved Hero. Byron was twenty-two, and ten months into his two-year tour of the Mediterranean. He was not yet famous for his poetry or his profligacy, although he had just finished the first draft of Childe Harold, and had just ended, while in Malta, his first serious affair. This was with Constance Spencer Smith, a twenty-six-year-old married woman who was no Hero, but who had dazzled Byron with her beauty, mystery and unattainability. She had once been arrested on orders of Napoleon (for unclear reasons), and had escaped from prison by way of another enflamed twenty-two-year-old nobleman (plus a rope ladder, a boy's costume, a carriage and a boat). Byron at one point attempted to defend her honor in a sunrise duel.

Notwithstanding, the poem Byron wrote after the Hellespont swim shows him capable of poking fun at not only Romanticism but himself:
Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos

If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!

If, when the wintry tempest roared,
He sped to Hero, nothing I loath,
And thus of old thy current poured,
Fair Venus! how I pity both!

For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I've done a feat today.

But since he crossed the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo and Lord knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

'Twere hard to say who fared the best;
Sad mortals thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I've the ague.
The swim took Byron two tries, but he bested the one mile, the cold waters and the strong current -- he reckoned that he traveled over three miles downstream during the crossing -- in an hour and ten minutes. "Did it with little difficulty," he said in his journal entry; "I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical," he wrote in one letter home.

[Noblejanobii]

Pretty much the same status as the quote thread, this thread is on hiatus until at least next week or the week following as I can barely muster the time and energy to find some cool facts for this thread. I promise to come back soon, but in the mean time, if y'all have any cool facts that you want to post about this day in literature history, go for it!

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1593 Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council issued a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions." Five days earlier Marlowe's roommate and fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd, had also been arrested on similar charges; under torture (apparently a set piece on the rack called "scraping the conscience"), Kyd had claimed that the offending documents in his possession were in fact Marlowe's. While prosecutors prepared for trial Marlowe was allowed out on bail; the day before his scheduled court appearance, and at just twenty-nine years of age, Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye.

Though sensational enough, these facts do not nearly cover the controversial life and death of the poet-playwright who, many say, had the talent of Shakespeare. Marlowe was certainly a drinker, a hothead, and one often in trouble with the law; it is now also known that he had been recruited to be a secret agent while in his Cambridge days. Records show that the same Privy Council which arrested him for blasphemy in 1593 intervened six years earlier to explain to University authorities that Marlowe had cut classes to be of service to Her Majesty on "matters touching the benefit of his country." And it seems that Marlowe died not in a tavern but in a government safe house, in the company of other spies and spy-runners, some of whom had the personality and perhaps the motive to kill him.

Add to this Marlowe's free-thinking, as evidenced by his association with the so-called "School of Night" group, and in such plays as Doctor Faustus. Add also his free-loving, as in such lines as "Come live with me and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove." Allow, if you like, the more recent theory that Marlowe's hugger-mugger burial in an unmarked grave was a ruse, and that Marlowe was in a group of spies conducted across the Channel the day after his faked murder, and that he went on to not only write as well as Shakespeare but to become "Shakespeare." In any case, he remains a fascinating figure, as testified by the number of recent books and movies: Dead Man in Deptford, by Anthony Burgess (1995); The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, by Charles Nicoll (1992); and Much Ado About Something (a documentary film, 2000). Why Angelina Jolie sports Marlowe's motto -- "That which nourishes me destroys me" -- as a sub-navel tattoo still remains, for some, a mystery.

The last moments on earth for Faustus, the nourishing over and the destroying about to begin:

[The clock strikes twelve.]

It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
O soul, be chang'd into small water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!

[Thunder. Enter DEVILS.]

O, mercy, heaven! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books!--O Mephistophilis!

[Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS.]

[Noblejanobii]

Today is Literature History…


On this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson and the books which came from it, Boswell would have a secure place in literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters and personal papers which he kept, and which his friends and relatives kept from the world -- out of "Pride and Negligence," to use the title of Frederick Pottle's book (one of several) on the incredible story. When Boswell's papers were discovered in the 1920s and '30s the journals were eventually published in fourteen volumes, with one of these, his London Journal, now a million-seller. Other volumes of manuscripts, letters and such documents continue to be published in scholarly editions issued by the "Boswell Factory" at Yale University, which made front-page news when it purchased most of the known hoard in 1949 for almost half-a-million dollars.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1910, Margaret Wise Brown was born. Who is she? Well you've probably read her stories and never realized it. Most famously is the story, Goodnight Moon. I even have a copy in my house and when I cleaned my bookshelf out last summer, I had my mom tell me the story again while we looked for the little mouse on ever page. This woman was a large part of my childhood that I'll never forget.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and a handful of short stories. These had all been written over the previous decade, and the critics used the occasion of the omnibus publication to confirm thirty-four-year-old McCullers as one of America's most important contemporary writers, in a rank with Faulkner, de Maupassant and D. H. Lawrence, said V. S. Pritchett, for her ability to give regional settings and characters "their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy."

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, the family moving three years later to Yakima, Washington, where Carver grew up. Carver's biographical essay, "My Father's Life," tells about his upbringing what his highly-acclaimed stories tell about others: the grind of poverty, the ruin of alcohol, the permanent worry of cave-in or break-up, the resolve and dignity of those who keep going when their only sure direction is down. Many of Carver's poems are also biographical -- "Shiftless," for example, in which we learn what the Carvers were not:

The people who were better than us were comfortable.
They lived in painted houses with flush toilets.
Drove cars whose year and make were recognizable.
The ones worse off were sorry and didn't work.

Or "Luck," in which a 9 year-old wakes to an empty house and consumes the leftovers of his parents' party:

...And though I went from room
to room, no one was home.
What luck, I thought.
Years later,
I still wanted to give up
friends, love, starry skies,
for a house where no one
was home, no one coming back,
and all I could drink.

In his last years, Carver often talked as if his second birthday was June 2, 1977, the date when he stopped drinking for good. That year had seen him receive a National Book Award nomination for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, but it had also seen four hospitalizations in five months for alcoholism, and a doctor's prediction that he had six months to live. By the end of 1977 Carver would begin his "miraculous second life" with Tess Gallagher. This would last only a decade, when the lifetime of smoking would accomplish what the lifetime of drinking could not, killing him by lung cancer at age fifty.

Most of Carver's characters are alone, usually in anguished and irremediable ways. The poem "Distress Sale" -- like the better, story version, "Why Don't You Dance?" -- describes the front lawn sell-off of a family's belongings. It is one of Carver's end-of-the-line moments, one which "reduces us all" but can't be helped by any, least of all an alcoholic friend:

...Some one must show up at once to save them,
to take everything off their hands right now,
every trace of this life before
this humiliation goes on any longer.
Someone must do something.
I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:
I can't help anyone.

"Late Fragment," Carver's last-written lines, show him grateful for having found salvation in his last years with Gallagher, though he knew that they too were over:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window.

[Suicune's Fire]

Just wondering, where do you find all these 'today in literature history' facts? xD It's cool though. What happens when you roll over to the 24th of April 2017?! *dramatic music* (I guess more than just one thing happened per day...haha.)

Anyway, never heard of that lady but GOOD FOR HER.

[Noblejanobii]

Just wondering, where do you find all these 'today in literature history' facts? xD It's cool though. What happens when you roll over to the 24th of April 2017?! *dramatic music* (I guess more than just one thing happened per day...haha.)

Anyway, never heard of that lady but GOOD FOR HER.
There's a website literally called today in literature. Most of what I grab is straight from there but I try to add in my own stuff if I have time.

[Suicune's Fire]

There's a website literally called today in literature. Most of what I grab is straight from there but I try to add in my own stuff if I have time.
Oh, fantastic! 8D How handy. Do you know a lot of the people mentioned in each literature history fact?

[Noblejanobii]

Oh, fantastic! 8D How handy. Do you know a lot of the people mentioned in each literature history fact?

I'd say it's about half and half. There are times where I don't know the person or their works at all and there are times where I'll either recognize the name or something they've written.

[Suicune's Fire]

I'd say it's about half and half. There are times where I don't know the person or their works at all and there are times where I'll either recognize the name or something they've written.
Do you consider yourself to be well-versed in literature?
/this sounds like an interview

[Noblejanobii]

Do you consider yourself to be well-versed in literature?
/this sounds like an interview

Hardly. I have barely touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to literature.
/lol I don't mind

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1907 Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her homestead is now a museum and educational center, though it includes only one of the sixty-five acres upon which Carson grew up and learned the life-lesson that she would teach the world: "The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky, and their amazing life" (The Sense of Wonder). It was Carson's mother who taught both the wonder and the sense, by not only taking her children on daily nature hikes but by not allowing them to collect or disrupt the natural treasures they would find, nor to become jaded to their splendor. Beyond her specific delight in ocean life (The Sea Around Us, etc.), and her forewarnings about contamination (Silent Spring), Carson's legacy is this urging of daily awe:

We lay and looked up at the sky and the millions of stars that blazed in darkness. The night was so still that we could hear the buoy on the ledges out beyond the mouth of the bay. Once or twice a word spoken by someone on the far shore was carried across the clear air. A few lights burned in the cottages. Otherwise, there was no reminder of other human life....
It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it. (The Sense of Wonder)
Carson was shaped by her mother's influence in other ways. Though too poor to have indoor plumbing, her mother subscribed to the children's magazine, St. Nicholas, whose mission included the "protection of the oppressed, whether human or dumb creatures." Like many other later-famous writers -- William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Samuel Eliot Morison, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. B. White, Eudora Welty, Ring Lardner, and more -- Carson published stories in St. Nicholas while still in her pre-teens, and early on became as committed to writing as she was to nature.

When Mrs. Carson died in 1958 her daughter was already deeply committed to the work that would become Silent Spring, published in 1962. While spending the last hours by her mother's bedside, Carson wrote a friend, "...occasionally I slipped away into the dark living room, to look out of the picture window at the trees and the sky. Orion stood in all his glory just above the horizon of our woods, and several other stars blazed more highly than I can remember ever seeing them." A later letter (this one to Marjorie Spock, sister of Benjamin and active in the environmental movement) makes the full legacy clear:

Her love of life and of all living things was her outstanding quality, of which everyone speaks.... And while gentle and compassionate, she could fight fiercely against anything she believed wrong, as in our present Crusade! Knowing how she felt about that will help me to return to it soon, and to carry it through to completion.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1849 Anne Bronte died of tuberculosis, at age twenty-nine. This was the third death in eight months among the Bronte siblings, Emily's and Branwell's coming earlier. A total of six Bronte children were born in a six-year period, 1814-1820: the two eldest died of tuberculosis at age eleven and ten, and within six weeks of each other; the three youngest died of the same disease (along with alcohol and opium, in Branwell's case), all three in their late twenties or early thirties; Charlotte would die six years later, age thirty-nine, during the last stages of pregnancy and from an unclear cause.

The standard view of Anne is that she had less talent than her siblings, and was cut from a plainer cloth: Charlotte was dominant and ambitious, Emily was odd and reclusive, Branwell was mercurial; Anne was meek, normal, and churchy. Compared to the opposite dramas of Branwell's and Emily's deaths -- Branwell indulgent, Emily a picture of "ruthless stoicism" -- Anne's death, as described by Charlotte, was almost a non-event.

She published a volume of poetry with her sisters (Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846) and two novels. Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. Like her poems, both her novels were first published under the masculine penname of Acton Bell. Anne's life was cut short when she died of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29.

Partly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne's death, she is not as well known as her sisters. Charlotte wrote four novels including Jane Eyre and Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is perhaps amongst the most shocking of contemporary Victorian novels. In seeking to present the truth in literature, Anne's depiction of alcoholism and debauchery was profoundly disturbing to 19th-century sensibilities. Helen Graham, the tenant of the title, intrigues Gilbert Markham and gradually she reveals her past as an artist and wife of the dissipated Arthur Huntingdon. The book's brilliance lies in its revelation of the position of women at the time, and its multi-layered plot.

It is easy today to underestimate the extent to which the novel challenged existing social and legal structures. May Sinclair, in 1913, said that the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England. Anne's heroine eventually left her husband to protect their young son from his influence. She supported herself and her son by painting while living in hiding, fearful of discovery. In doing so, she violated not only social conventions, but English law. Until 1870, when the Married Women's Property Act was passed, a married woman had no independent legal existence apart from her husband; could not own property, sue for divorce, or control custody of her children. If she attempted to live apart, her husband had the right to reclaim her. If she took their child, she was liable for kidnapping. By living on her own income she was held to be stealing her husband's property, since any property she held or income she made was legally his.

[Ganyu]

Wow...I feel so sad because I literally have not heard of her works nor her name, even though I have read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights...

[Noblejanobii]

Wow...I feel so sad because I literally have not heard of her works nor her name, even though I have read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights...

Right? That was my exact feeling. It's why I posted so much about her and her work, because she deserves to be known.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1914 the first installment of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology was published in Marion Reedy's weekly magazine, The Mirror. Over the next six months Masters would write the remainder of his 244 "epitaphs," publishing them in book form in 1916. Both the magazine and book publications carried the pseudonym of "Webster Ford" as protection: Masters was a successful lawyer, and he feared that the backlash from local readers who objected to his unflattering view of life in a Midwest village -- a "degenerated" New World Eden, said one critic -- would ruin him. The book was an instant hit and soon became the best-selling book of American poetry to date; when the author was revealed he was indeed targeted, but the national praise so outdid the local anger that Masters was eventually able to give up legal practice and become a full time writer. Of his fifty books -- poetry, novels, plays, biography -- none would come close to the popularity of Spoon River.

In his 1936 autobiography, Across Spoon River, Masters reflected on "the really glorious year of 1914 that was making all of America happy." Gone were the Republicans and the "puerile imperialism" of Roosevelt; here was Wilson and the New Deal. Masters was forty-three, but feeling younger:

The ideas of Ibsen, of Shaw, of the Irish Theater, of advancing science, of a re-arisen liberty were blossoming everywhere, and nowhere more than in Chicago, where vitality and youth, almost abandoned in its assertion of freedom and delight, streamed along Michigan Avenue carrying the new books under their arms, or congregated at Bohemian restaurants to talk poetry and the drama. All this came to my eyes as though I had been confined in darkness and had suddenly come into the sunlight.

Into this springtime came Masters' mother, for a visit. They reminisced about the old days in Lewiston and Petersburg, Illinois, "bringing up characters and events that had passed from my mind," tracing their neighbors "to their final fates, to the positions in life that they were then in." On the morning his mother left, Masters went home and wrote "The Hill" and the first prose-poems of those who would speak out from their graves there:

...Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked With venerable men of the revolution?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying--
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary's Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1960 Boris Pasternak died, at the age of seventy. Pasternak's last years were dominated by the publicity and persecution which attended the publication of Doctor Zhivago (1958 in the U.S., 1988 in the Soviet Union), and the announcement that he had won the 1958 Nobel Prize. The Soviet line, communicated by quiet threat and noisy rhetoric, was that Pasternak and his novel were anti-communist; that by accepting the Nobel, Pasternak was agreeing to "play the part of a bait on the rusty hook of anti-Soviet propaganda"; that he was worse than a pig for having "fouled the spot where he ate and cast filth on those by whose labor he lives and breathes."

Pasternak was un-Soviet but passionately Russian, and he had severe medical problems: in response to calls that he be "allowed" to go to his "capitalist paradise," he not only did a turnaround on the Nobel -- thus becoming the first ever to refuse it -- but more or less apologized to the authorities. This would in turn bring contempt from many of Pasternak's peers, Solzhenitsyn and others, who believed that he acted cowardly in choosing contrition over New York or the Gulag.

Letters revealed after Pasternak's death show that he was more persecuted throughout his last eighteen months than previously thought. It also became clear that one of the major reasons he was desperate to stay in Russia was his mistress and collaborator, Olga Ivinskaya. She had already spent five years in a labor camp for her association with Pasternak, and he felt that his presence in Russia was her only protection from further attack. This proved to be true: within six months of Pasternak's death Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years in Siberia. She had been Pasternak's model for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, and all this seemed to echo Lara's fate: "One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid. . . ."

But not so: Olga Ivinskaya returned from Siberia, and championed Pasternak until her death in 1995. She lived to see Doctor Zhivago finally published in Russia, and to write her memoir, A Captive of Time: My Years With Pasternak (1978) -- in which she quotes these lines from Pasternak's poem, "Autumn":

You fall into my arms
You are the good gift of destruction's path,
When life sickens more than disease
And boldness is the root of beauty --
Which draws us together.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1962 Vita Sackville-West died, at the age of seventy. Easy to lose in the glare of one so filmed, written and gossiped about is the fact that Sackville-West was a prolific, prize-winning and commercially successful author. She won the 1927 Hawthornden Prize for poetry with "The Land," rose to best-seller status in the 1930s for novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and wrote some fifty books in all -- not just novels and poetry but travel books, biography (fittingly, on Aphra Benn and Joan of Arc), and eight books on gardening. Nonetheless, it is Sackville-West's personal life which continues to claim attention -- the jodhpurs-and-pearls Vita, the bedmate of Virginia Woolf and others, the cross-dressing master gardener of Sissinghurst Castle.

Now run by the National Trust, the Sissinghurst Castle Gardens were begun in the '30s by Sackville-West and husband Harold Nicolson. The Gardens are said to be the most viewed in England, and the gardeners' unconventional marriage cannot be far behind, given son Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage, the recent Masterpiece Theatre mini-series based thereon, the editions of husband-wife and lover-lover correspondence, and Woolf's Orlando. Nigel Nicolson describes the novel as "the longest and most charming love letter in literature," in which Woolf weaves Vita "in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her, and ends by photographing her in the mud at Long Barn, with dogs, awaiting Virginia's arrival next day." Such a visit prompted this Woolf diary entry:
I like her and being with her and the splendour - she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung.... What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is her maturity and full breastedness; her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down back-waters. . . .

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published. It was a commercial and critical success, and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers, but it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age, and with another forty-five to go, Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing. Forster's comments that he felt bored by the genre, or felt it to require "a certain amount of stability" that the modern world did not provide, are often interpreted as evidence of old-fogeyism - the idea being that the man could be friendly to Virginia Woolf but the writer was stuck in the old style. Just after finishing A Passage to India, Forster told a friend that he planned to "never write another novel" because "my patience with ordinary people has given out"; to another, he admitted his "weariness of the only subject I can and may treat." Interpreting "ordinary people" and "only subject" to mean "straight," some conclude that Forster stopped writing novels because he couldn't voice his own homosexual reality. His only such book, the autobiographical Maurice, was published posthumously.

Forster continued to write short stories, biography and essays, and in his last decades was highly respected as a man of letters, and a voice of reason and compassion -- in PEN and the Civil Liberties Union, and as a witness for the defense in the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. He turned down a knighthood, though not an Order of Merit; thus, says one biographer, he stayed true to that class of Cambridge men who "only accepted honours which came after their name."

This would be in contrast to Sir Vidia Naipaul (BA, Oxford), who found an opportunity in a 2001 interview to trash both Forster and A Passage to India. The man was a "nasty homosexual" whose knowledge of India was limited to "the court, and a few middle-class Indians, and the garden boys he wished to seduce." The novel was "utter rubbish," especially those passages which made a "pretence of poetry" out of India's three religions. Thus, poor Mrs. Moore, and generations of readers, unnerved for nothing by the empty enigma of the ou-boum in the Marabar Caves:

The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur 'Pathos, piety, courage-they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.' If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same-'ou-boum.' If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present, and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge and bluff -- it would amount to the same, the serpent would descend and return to the ceiling.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1910, O. Henry died in New York City at the age of forty-seven. His death from alcoholism-related illnesses was the farthest thing from a surprise ending, but his last months and hours were in other ways characteristic of the fiction: the down-on-his-luck hero, the small-detail-revealing-all style, the polished-perfect irony.

The previous year Henry had made a desperate attempt to get sober, healthy and out of debt. Although already separated from his new wife, Henry knew that his only chance at reforming his New York ways was to accept her invitation to Asheville, North Carolina -- her hometown, and not far from Henry's birthplace of Greensboro. (This was also hometown to Thomas Wolfe; only nine years-old here, he too would famously try to go home again.) Henry's plan involved not only drying out and patching up, but writing the novel he'd promised both himself and Doubleday, whose $1500 advance he'd already spent. The drying and patching progressed; the novel, following all too closely to the proposed story-of-my-life theme, met delay after delay. Then, when a Broadway producer offered Henry escape in a chance to turn one of his stories into a play, he took it (and the $500 advance), setting in motion the chain of events that would do him under.

Unable to complete the dramatization too, Henry agreed to sell the stage rights to the Broadway producer. In no time, the producer had someone else turn "A Retrieved Reformation," based on a crook who does manage to change his ways, into the play, "Alias Jimmy Valentine." It became a hit of the season, then a hit around the world, and then a hit as a silent movie, one of the first in the gangster-as-hero genre. The producer, believing Henry only needed encouragement to try again, mailed him copies of the box-office returns and of the royalty payments made to the hack who had replaced him as dramatist. Henry saw that he had made $250 while the hack was on his way to making $100,000, and concluded that he had other stories that could be dramatized. He also saw the wagon, the wife and the mother-in-law in Asheville. He took the producer's advance of $1250 and headed back to New York, full of promises.

"The train for happiness is late," Henry had told a friend not long before. He never wrote a line of the new play, as far as can be determined. The producer never heard a word from or about him, until he heard that he was dead. Nor did many of Henry's old friends, Henry apparently preferring to unretreive his reformation quietly, by drinking himself to death alone. This took a little over four months. When he checked out of his hotel, heading for the hospital, he shook hands with everyone. When he checked into the hospital, he emptied his pockets, saying, "Here I am going to die and only worth 23 cents." When, the last night, the nurse turned out the light, he had her turn it back on, saying, "I don't want to go home in the dark."

William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. O. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favorite works were Lane's translation of One Thousand and One Nights, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Porter traveled with Dr. James K. Hall to Texas in March 1882, hoping that a change of air would help alleviate a persistent cough he had developed. He took up residence on the sheep ranch of Richard Hall, James' son, in La Salle County and helped out as a shepherd, ranch hand, cook and baby-sitter. While on the ranch, he learned bits of Spanish and German from the mix of immigrant ranch hands. He also spent time reading classic literature. Porter's health did improve and he traveled with Richard to Austin in 1884, where he decided to remain and was welcomed into the home of the Harrells, who were friends of Richard's. Porter took a number of different jobs over the next several years, first as pharmacist then as a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began writing as a sideline.

Porter led an active social life in Austin, including membership in singing and drama groups. He was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin. He became a member of the "Hill City Quartet", a group of young men who sang at gatherings and serenaded young women of the town. Porter met and began courting Athol Estes, then seventeen years old and from a wealthy family. Her mother objected to the match because Athol was ill, suffering from tuberculosis. On July 1, 1887, Porter eloped with Athol to the home of Reverend R. K. Smoot, where they were married. The couple continued to participate in musical and theater groups, and Athol encouraged her husband to pursue his writing. Athol gave birth to a son in 1888, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, in September 1889. Porter's friend Richard Hall became Texas Land Commissioner and offered Porter a job. Porter started as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) in 1887 at a salary of $100 a month, drawing maps from surveys and field notes. The salary was enough to support his family, but he continued his contributions to magazines and newspapers. In the GLO building, he began developing characters and plots for such stories as "Georgia's Ruling" (1900), and "Buried Treasure" (1908). The castle-like building he worked in was even woven into some of his tales such as "Bexar Scrip No. 2692" (1894).

In Honduras, William became friends with Al Jennings, a notorious train robber, who later wrote a book about their friendship. He holed up in a Trujillo hotel for several months, where he wrote Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term "banana republic" to describe the country, a phrase subsequently used widely to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America with a narrowly focused, agrarian economy. Porter had sent Athol and Margaret back to Austin to live with Athol's parents. Unfortunately, Athol became too ill to meet Porter in Honduras as he had planned. When he learned that his wife was dying, Porter returned to Austin in February 1897 and surrendered to the court, pending an appeal. Once again, Porter's father-in-law posted bail so that he could stay with Athol and Margaret. Athol Estes Porter died from tuberculosis (then known as consumption) on July 25, 1897. He had fourteen stories published under various pseudonyms while he was in prison, but was becoming best known as "O. Henry", a pseudonym that first appeared over the story "Whistling ****'s Christmas Stocking" in the December 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine. A friend of his in New Orleans would forward his stories to publishers so that they had no idea that the writer was imprisoned. Porter's most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization, and plot twists were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics. Porter married again in 1907 to childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting his native state of North Carolina. Sarah Lindsey Coleman was herself a writer and wrote a romanticized and fictionalized version of their correspondence and courtship in her novella Wind of Destiny.

[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!