Today in Literature History

[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.