August 16, 2024: this page is no longer updated. "Storytelling" is now updated here.
June 21, 2024 -- note to reader: I have two pages on this
literature blog that are almost identical -- "Story Telling 1" and
"Story Telling 2." I've long forgotten which one I update most often.
Both still need editing and formatting. I think I had personal notes on
one of the two pages and for that reason posted a second identical page
at the time, but deleted "personal notes." Now, I really don't know
which one to recommend. As a reference, one might want to check both,
using "word find."
Original Note, undated.
AKA "Chapter 24." This was original "Chapter 24" among my word documents in my diary folder.
Upon transcribing, the original links and bookmarks no longer work, but perhaps over time, I will correct that.
The
bulk of this original material was written during my voracious reading
period which I believe began around 2000 and lasted until 2007.
In
2000 I was transitioning from commanding one of the largest USAF
hospitals in the world for a headquarters job in San Antonio, TX. I
officially retired in 2007 but for all intents and purposes, I had
retired in 2000. "9/11" was in 2002 and shortly thereafter I met a
number of wonderful colleagues when on temporary duty to Menwith Hill
Station, Yorkshire, England, between 2002 and 2004.
This was
originally meant for me to keep track of things (I have a lousy memory)
but it appears that Laura may use it when home-schooling her two sons,
Judah and Levi.
Chapter 24: Storytelling
ENGLISH LITERATURE
The major periods:
- The Beginnings to 1500
- The Renaissance
- The Seventeenth Century
- The Eighteenth Century
- The Romantic Period
- The Pre-Raphaelites: the last phase of the Romantic Period; transitioned to
- "The Great Pause" -- a relatively recent term; most folks will not have heard of this term.
- Victorian
- The Victorian Period (1830 – 1901)
- The Georgian Period (1911 – 1936)
Belle Époque: the “classical” belle époque was the period between 1875 and 1914 in Europe and the United States; in hindsight it has been called the “Gilded Age.”
In his history of the Jews, Howard M. Sachar refers to the years after WWII as another belle époque.
INDEX
(Note:
much of the history of writing below was taken directly from the web.
Do not copy it for publication or school papers; it will easily be
identified as plagiarism.)
Personal Thoughts
Chet Raymo: Catholic Agnostic
Authors (those that have interested me)
- Overview
- The Brontës
- Jane Austen
- George Eliot
- Ernest Hemingway
- Eugene O’Neill
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Ovid
- T.S. Eliot
- The Romanticists
- Woolf
- Willa Cather
- Edith Wharton
Definitions, Writing, Concepts
Genres
- Epic Sagas, Oral
- Mythology
- Epic Sagas, Written
- Novella
- English Poetry
- Drama
- The Novel
- The Realistic Novel
Seventeenth Century
- The Novel
- The Realistic Novel
Nineteenth Century
- Pre-Raphaelites
- Pre-Victorian
- Victorian Literature
- The French and Russian Novel
- The Gothic Novel
- Romanticism
- The American Novel
- Exile Literature
- Fin de Siècle
- Decadence, Artifice and Aesthetics
Twentieth Century
- The Modernists
- The English Novel
- The American Novel
- American Writers
- The French Novel
- The Russian Novel
- The Mystery Novel
- Naturalism (Emile Zola)
- Kafka
- Graphic Novels
- Gonzo (Hunter S Thompson)
- Miscellaneous
Poetry: definition
Miscellaneous
- English Eras
- Lists
- Essays and Other Rambling Thoughts
- Books in Apartment
- Trivia – Connecting the Dots
Personal Thoughts
May 30, 2021: first started updating with personal thoughts, this date.
December 25, 2015:
somewhere I wrote this progression — I called it something like
“passing the baton.” I can’t find it now and can’t remember all the
authors, but hopefully I can either re-accomplish it or find it.
For now:
Defoe —> Robert Louis Stevenson —> Joseph Conrad —> Graham Green —> Ernest Hemingway —> Hunter S. Thompson
From wiki:
Stevenson
was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He
became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, condemned
by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor
Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard Woolf, and he was gradually
excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion
reached its nadir in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English
Literature where he was entirely unmentioned, and The Norton Anthology
of English Literature and excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st–7th
editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006).
The
late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of
great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social
critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands and a
humanist. He was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford
Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or
sheer imaginative power" and a pioneer of the Age of the Story Tellers
along with H. Rider Haggard. He is now evaluated as a peer of authors
such as Joseph Conrad(whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas
fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations
devoted to him. Throughout the vicissitudes of his scholarly reception,
Stevenson has remained popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.
July 10, 2019:
Jane
Eyre: A Portrait of a Life, Twayne's Masterwork Studies, Maggie Berg,
c. 1987. Wow, what an incredible book/explanation/background of
Charlotte Brontë, England at the time, and her autobiography, Jane Eyre.
March 9, 2019:
Something I had never heard before — “The Great Pause.”
Between the end of the Romantic Period and the beginning of the
Victoria Period, there seems to be a void. Lucasta Miller refers to it
as “The Great Pause.” Her second book, the biography of L.E.L. helps
fill in that gap. Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Lucasta Miller’s first book
was a biography of the Brontës — her thesis in that book: Elizabeth
Gaskell and the eldest Brontë conspired to develop the myth of the
Brontës. The great Romanticists: “shelleybyronandkeats” and the first
Victorian of note, Charles Dickens. I’ve now added a small section in
the body of “storytelling” below to include this phase.
January 14, 2019:
I
continue to read and I continue to take notes, but most of them are now
on “literature” blog. It’s too bad a lot of this will be lost when I
did, but I doubt the three grandchildren would have much time for my
writings.
February 27, 2018:
It’s
too bad the internet came along. LOL. Because of the internet, I spend
much more time “surfing” than I do serious reading. And, unfortunately, I
no longer, for the most part, keep journals. I update my blog —
including a literature blog. But my writings are strewn all over the
place. Today, I am reading Katherine Frank’s biography of “Crusoe” and
Daniel Defoe, c. 2004.
November 12, 2017: two days
ago I visited the library at a local community college, the Tarrant
County Community College. I was struck by the number of books devoted to
Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, it appeared the section on literary
authors was not alphabetical, but somewhat chronological. It was
interesting that after all the shelves on Shakespeare, the next author
that appeared was DeFoe.
November 12, 2017: I do a lot of
reading, although I have slowed down a lot since I started blogging
about the Bakken. In all the reading I have done, I had never come upon
“naturalism” or “realism” until I read Gilberto Perez’s essay (p. 445)
in New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner
Sollors. Today, I added a section on “naturalism” and “realism” but then
it appears I already had a section on naturalism. I added my “new”
comments on naturalism to the “Naturalism” section. Briefly, it appears
naturalism followed (or was a reaction to) Romanticism. Realism grew out
of naturalism, and one might argue that dystopian literature naturally
followed realism.
May 16, 2017: I look at all the books
I’ve read since I began my “reading program” in 2004. It is quite
impressive. Looking at the list of books I’ve bought over the years is a
diary in itself, reminding me what I was interested in at the time.
I’m listening to Leonard Cohen now and missing Pat immensely.
December 25, 2015:
somewhere I wrote this progression — I called it something “passing the
baton.” I can’t find it now and can’t remember all the authors, but
hopefully I can either re-accomplish it or find it.
For now:
Defoe —> Robert Louis Stevenson —> Joseph Conrad —> Graham Green —> Ernest Hemingway —> Hunter S. Thompson.
December 25, 2015:
our small apartment was becoming cluttered with way too many books. A
few weeks ago I put a large percentage of books in storage (a storage
closet on the patio of the apartment) keeping only the books I thought I
would be interested in this next year or so. I am hoping that a year
from now, I can go through storage, and throw away a large number of
books I will probably never look at again. One book I kept back was a
“throwaway,” American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever, c. 2006. It was a
very short book; the chapters were also very short. It was the story of
the Concord, MA, transcendentalists. It was really quite good; a nice
overview of that time and place. It got me interested (again) in the
subject, so I re-read a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne by James R.
Mellow. It was the worst biography I have ever read. The writing was
bad; there were errors; and, the subject of the biography wasn’t
particularly interesting to begin with. I slogged through, mostly
skimming through the chapters. However, I followed that with Megan
Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters, c. 2005, and a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize. It was incredibly interesting; a real pleasure to read. It would
be a good book for someone like Arianna to read when she is in her
mid-teens. By the time she is in her late teens it might be too late for
her to absorb some of the lessons learned by Elizabeth Peabody about
the issues facing a young woman coming of age.
January 20, 2015:
I continue to read but not the “same way” I read when I began this
project. I think the scaffolding has been completed in this word
document. Now I add to it. I won’t subtract stuff, except through
editing to correct errors, but I will add items and they may not be
updated in the body of the document.
November 17, 2012:
wow, three years since I have updated personal thoughts regarding my
reading program. My handwritten journals have been kept up to date. I
wish I had someone to share my reading with. May and I are on totally
different wavelengths. I don’t know if she knows how far our paths have
parted. Our only common interest: Arianna and Olivia. Right now I am in
my Cape Cod phase. It started with books on whaling, probably because
that was a subject I enjoyed with Arianna. May and I have taken several
overnight trips to Provincetown, Cape Cod, and that is clearly our
favorite getaway at the present time. I long to be in Provincetown every
weekend, but obviously that won’t happen, but we go as often as we can.
We should have been there this weekend, but Kiri and Josh wanted us to
babysit the girls tonight (Saturday). It appears they changed their
minds and we could have been in Provincetown; I’m not happy. When I am
not happy in the evening I ride to the Upper Crust for pizza and beer –
until this past week. They abruptly closed due to bankruptcy. Tonight I
am in the neighborhood Starbuck’s because no other place to go. I am
reading
Moby Dick, and two or three other books on Cape Cod, whaling, and/or Provincetown, Cape Cod.
November 11, 2009:
A couple weeks ago I deleted my blog (see July 5, 2009, entry) and
thus all the stuff I recorded regarding my reading program has been
lost. I will come back here to record my reading program.
I am currently reading a) a biography of Anaïs Nin, by Bair; b) a biography of Virginia Woolf; and, c)
Adam Bede by
George Eliot. The latter is the most boring book I have ever read but I
am slogging through it. It droned on and on and then all of a sudden
got very interesting with a real plot about 2/3rds of the way through.
Now I am finally enjoying it.
I forgot the plot of
Ethan Frome
(see July 5, 2009) so I had to quickly re-read it; then I remembered
the plot; it’s actually a pretty good book. They say Edith Wharton had a
great sense of humor and I enjoyed her biography; I find it fascinating
she could write such a dark, sad story as
Ethan Frome.
See the August 30, 2008, note in which I mention that I corresponded
with an American woman in England, Colette. My last note to her was
about June, 2009. She wrote about continuing problems with her husband
(infidelity, sex) and I did not answer. I felt that our notes were
becoming too personal with a very difficult subject. I would enjoy
hearing from her to get an update, but I don’t have plans to initiate a
new correspondence.
July 5, 2009:
I have run
into a dilemma. I am using my blog to record my reading program
milestones, my reviews, etc. Because I don’t like doing things twice,
that means what I put on my blog is not being put here even when it has
to do with my reading program. I’m not sure what to do. For now, if
there seem to be gaps here, check my blog:
http://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com. (It will link my literature
site.)
I am in my Edith Wharton phase: I have skimmed the Hermione Lee biography of Wharton; I have read Edith’s autobiography,
A Backward Glance, and I have just completed what she considered her best novel:
Ethan Frome.
I had always wanted to read Edith Wharton but a recent discovery of a
critical analysis of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton in Susan Gilbert and
Sandra Gubar’s
No Man’s Land spurred me into starting. I first read Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia and then moved on to Wharton. It was a slog to get through
My Ántonia (the
subject did not interest me, the writing was unsophisticated, and it
had no action/no plot) but by the time I finished I was a wreck; very
tearful, just a great story. Willa Cather really makes one believe that
Ántonia/Tony is a real person. It was awesome. After that I read
Ethan Frome, which did not have the same emotional impact.
December 13, 2008:
A comment on
Amazon.com’s
“Vine” program (see next entry dated September 2, 2008): I think this
program is a scam to some extent. I have ordered several books and they
are all very, very bad. I can see why they are giving them away. The few
good items they have, they run out of so quickly one cannot order them,
but it is very good advertising. I probably won’t order any more from
Vine.
Update, July 5, 2009: I continue to order occasionally from
Amazon Vine. My views have not changed. However, it’s a great marketing
ploy: a) first, they create some buzz on books by getting people to
review them; and b) they find out what we are interested in by teasing
us with products (non-books) that are not available. [
Update, April 17, 2017: I haven’t ordered a book from Amazon Vine in several years.]
September 2, 2008:
I am really happy with my reading program. Because of my history of
reviews on Amazon.com, I was selected (among thousands more) to become a
member of the “vine.” As a member, I am given the opportunity to
select up to four books about every two months which will be mailed to
me free and free to keep – as long as I place a review on Amazon.com on
at least three of the four selections. The first selection was a book so
bad I can’t remember the title and I can’t find it on my bookshelves.
It was a first-hand account of a lawyer who hated his profession and has
since dropped out to write. I think he is still a lawyer. Regardless
his stories of law school are truly disgusting.
Today, I was sent
When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy
by Chet Raymo. Raymo is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stonehill
College in North Easton, MA. He is the author of twelve books on science
and nature. He has written extensively on science, particularly nature.
For twenty years he was a science columnist for the
Boston Globe. In this slim book Raymo posits his “late-life credo,” in which
he traces his half-century journey from traditional faith-based Catholicism to scientific agnosticism.
It is a very enjoyable read. It dovetails nicely with my own reading
program. Herewith some fragments that remind me of my reading program
and of the wonderful opportunity to explore the world while in the Air
Force:
Chapter One: Teilhard de Chardin; Graham Greene (p. 3); Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain (p. 3); Trappist monk.
Chapter Two: Charles Darwin, comets.
Chapter Three:
Musee d’Orsay, Paris (p. 15); Richard Dawkins, p. 19; dervish, p. 21;
Cambellesque (Joseph Campbell), p. 21; Heloise and Abelard, p. 22.
Chapter Four:
London’s Victoria Station, p. 25; Charles Darwin (Down House, Downe,
England, fourteen miles south of London), p. 25; physician/essayist,
Lewis Thomas, p. 29; Goethe, p. 38.
Chapter Five: Goethe’s science led nowhere, p. 39.
Chapter Six: William of Ockham (14th century), p. 52
Chapter Seven: Florence Nightingale, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Updike, William Carlos Williams, John Ruskin.
Chapter Eight: Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Rene Descartes.
Chapter Nine: Francis Crick, Hamer: The God Gene, p. 91.
Chapter 10: --
Chapter 11:
Wow – the book he gave to graduating students – the 1200-page saga of
14th century Norway, Sigrid Undset’s 1928 Nobel Prize winning-novel,
Kristin Lavransdatter! Specifically Tina Nunnally’s translation.
Catholic literature, p. 122.
Chapter 12: On death, p. 128.
Chapter 13: --
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” wrote Lao Tzu, 2500
years ago. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” – p.
31. That reminds me of the Nietzsche phrase I placed in my retirement
luncheon program: That which we find words for is that which we cannot
hold in our heart. -- Nietzsche
How interesting: Thomas
Henry Huxley, Darwin’s 19th century champion, coined the word agnostic.
It was first used in 1870. Gnostics referred to those who felt they
knew the answer to the Big Question, as Raymo phrases it, whereas Huxley
was stating as an agnostic, he had no answer(s) to the Big Question(s).
Raymo provides an explanation why Goethe has failed to endure, p. 39. See
this link for a similar view.
Like so many other apologists, Raymo is hypocritical. “Still, for all
of my agnosticism, I call myself a Catholic. Not because I can recite
the Creed (I can’t), or because I practice that particular faith (I
don’t), but because the substance of Catholicism went into my system
like mother’s milk.” (p. 20 – 21). It appears he is saying that because
he was born and raised a Catholic, he calls himself a Catholic.
Interesting. For a professor emeritus that does not sound particularly
profound.
This is his credo: “I am an atheist, if by God one
means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I
am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial
and tentative – a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of
ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the
sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being
called divine. I am Catholic by accident of birth.”
It sounds
like he is still confused. Does one even need a credo? I am a
scientist who has trouble believing that “this” is just a random event
modulated by simple mathematical laws. That does not mean that “this”
might be all there is; it just seems hard to accept that.
[December 13, 2008: Even the title When God is Gone, Everything is Holy
– yes, like genocide, abortion? No, I think a moral compass is needed.
If there is nothing higher than man, then man can decide what is right
and wrong.]
August 30, 2008:
I have written
Colette in the past about my reading program but today I feel like
recording elsewhere (here). Colette is a therapist at Menwith Hill
Station; we struck up an e-mail relationship; she is happily married and
there is no other, than the e-mail, relationship between us. However, I
keep in touch with her because she may prove to be a link to others at
Menwith Hill Station in the future.
My reading program has
recently included Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. I have not
completed Sylvia’s journals; I have read several biographies of
Hemingway, and recently completed Islands in the Stream, the first
Hemingway novel after completing several biographies of him and his
wives.
Recently I completed Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the
Bible, Vol II: The New Testament. On page 540, Asimov writes: “The
church at Laodicea is bitterly condemned [by John], not for being
outspokenly opposed to the doctrines favored by John, but for being
neutral. John apparently prefers an honest enemy to a doubtful friend...
‘Laodicean’ has therefore entered the English language as a word
meaning ‘indifferent’ or ‘neutral.’”
Today, while browsing at
Half-Price Books (with a further 20% off this Labor Day weekend), I
stumbled across A Laodicean: A Story of Today by Thomas Hardy. Only a
few hours earlier I was reading Francis Wilson’s 1999 Literary
Seductions. In the introduction, early in the book, p. xviii, Wilson
discusses ‘On the Western Circuit’ by Thomas Hardy. I watched the
two-part TV adaptation of this story, Day After the Fair, with a friend
in 2003. It was a chick flick and something I would normally not watch,
but with that particular person I was game for anything. To the best of
my knowledge I have never read any Thomas Hardy novel but have always
been curious, and with that as background, I may be entering the “Hardy
phase” of my reading program. At Half-Price Books I bought a brand new
copy (soft cover) of Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean and a biography of
Thomas Hardy by Martin Seymour-Smith. In the introduction to A
Laodicean, the editor states that “In common with Hardy’s other novels, A
Laodicean, written on the threshold of early middle age draws on deeply
personal sources. He is reported to have claimed that it ‘contained
more of the facts of his own life’ than anything he had written.”
The story is summarized as follows in the introduction: “Its hero,
George Somerset, strongly resembles his creator’s younger self: an
architect inclined to introspection, Somerset has a history of writing
poetry and a lively interest in religious controversy…The novel,
however, largely turns its back on Hardy’s more distant past – the
agricultural setting of his childhood and adolescence that so richly
stimulated his imagination, provided the raw materials for much of his
fiction and also reverberated throughout his large poetic output.”
So, I may be moving into a new phase: Thomas Hardy. Something I never thought I would do.
June 20, 2008
I am typing the entire The Waves. [August 30, 2008: sometime in early
August I completed that project. I have typed The Waves in its entirety
and now I can go back and explore the novel, do some research.] I have
been unable to read The Waves so I thought if I typed it out I would be
forced to pay attention, and it has been interesting, annotating it
along the way. I typed the entire Mrs Dalloway in verse form some time
ago. While reading Mrs Dalloway the second time, I thought it read like
poetry; typing it in verse form confirmed it was poetry, and I saw many
things in verse form that I had not seen in prose alone.
June 11, 2008
Update my regarding program. I have finished several biographies of
Ernest Hemingway and am now ready to start reading his novels. The first
novel I read was Islands in the Stream; I finished it last night; I
wrote about it elsewhere.
I am now into my Sylvia Plath
phase. I have read two biographies of her; a biography of her marriage
to Ted Hughes; and a sort of biography which chronicled the biographers,
particularly Anne Stevenson. I started reading her only novel, The Bell
Jar, today and will eventually get to her poems.
April 18, 2008
Update regarding my reading program. I have moved into my Ernest
Hemingway phase. He is more incredible than I ever imagined. Again, it
is too bad that students are required / encouraged to read Hemingway
before first reading about the man himself. I first read Hemingway: The
Final Years by Michael Reynolds (c. 1999) which really got me interested
in Hemingway. It covers the years 1940 (WWII) to his suicide in 1961.
Then I started Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third
wife who was with him for eight years, most of them before WWII, with
them parting ways during the war. That was enough to get me started. I
had read much about Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald, so A Moveable
Feast was what I wanted to read first, two people Hemingway wrote about
in Feast. I really enjoyed the essays. Then, incredibly, I picked up a
hardcopy of Charles A Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway
for a measly $20 at a discount bookstore! And today I bought a hardback
copy of A Moveable Feast and started reading it again, now that I know
Hemingway better, understand the origin of his writing style, and know
more about the authors he wrote about. I just bought the life story of
Hemingway by Carlos Baker and Mary Hemingway (his fourth wife) but have
not yet started it. So, by the time I am well into my Hemingway phase I
will have completed not less than four books about him as well as A
Moveable Feast. At that point, I should be ready to tackle his novels.
So many vignettes. He is known to have written in short declarative
sentences, a style that he was forced to use when he wrote for the
Kansas City Star. Knowing that, he came a long way, and it must have
been very difficult for him to write the following paragraph – one long
sentence – in the opening essay of A Moveable Feast in which he
describes his early days in Paris when he was a starving author:
“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold
rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as
you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed
doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the
newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where
Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.”
Isn’t that a great sentence for Hemingway, someone noted for writing
short, declarative sentences? One of the greatest joys I have had in
life was reading in bed with the love of my life; she loved to hear me
read, and I loved to read to her. If I came across a really good
sentence, I would read it again, out loud, just so we could share the
sentence again. I wish I could have that, that experience, back. I
would read out loud, she listening, with her eyes closed, big smile on
her face, and I remember silently crying if the passage was particularly
sad. I don’t think May has ever seen me cry. Of course, the line
above is not sad, but it struck me not only because it is not a short,
declarative sentence, but because it is also the complete paragraph.
[December 25, 2015: subsequent to the above, I re-read Islands In The
Stream; I found the book incredibly boring, and it was nothing more than
a memoir of those times when his three sons stayed with him in Cuba.
Had the author not been Hemingway, it’s hard to believe this book would
have been published.]
December 15, 2007
Update
regarding my reading program. I finished two biographies of Zelda
Fitzgerald, one by Nancy Milford and one by Sally Cline, the latter from
England. This is what I recorded elsewhere regarding Zelda after I
finished the Sally Cline bio: “Tears are streaming from my eyes. I have
just finished Sally Cline’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald – the story of
a 20-something Southern belle who marries into the richness of the Jazz
Age, and in the process is chewed up, misdiagnosed as being
schizophrenic, and ends up living out her last 10 years without the love
of her life, in poverty, and alone. Very alone.” The price of genius?
Lately I have been attracted to biographies. I used to think that
biographies were quite boring but I now find them very, very
interesting; I wonder if this has something to do with age? Although I
do remember in middle school that I really enjoyed biographies of
Abraham Lincoln (Carl Sandburg) and Albert Schweitzer.
I
always try to carry a book with me wherever I go; this week I didn’t
have many unread paperbacks to choose from, so I chose a biography of
Leonard Woolf. The author argues that Leonard Woolf was responsible for
Virginia Woolf’s insanity which I find highly incredible: a) Virginia
had a family history of mental illness; and b) she had two documented
(major?) “nervous breakdowns” before she even met Leonard. I argue
that Leonard’s support “saved” Virginia from a) being placed in a
nursing home or mental health facility; or b) an even earlier suicide.
However, I do have two “new” books I am quite excited to start reading
– but too heavy to carry around. The first is Henry James: A Life, by
Leon Edel; and the second, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis,
by Paul O’Keeffe. I don’t recall ever reading Henry James in school,
but Colette mentioned remembering the pain of reading Henry James in
high school. When I saw the biography at Half Price Bookstores, I
picked it up remembering Colette’s comments. It appears that Leon Edel
spent his life researching and writing about Henry James; the book I
have is an abridged version of his five –volume biography of James.
About the same time I found a hardcover that attracted my attention.
The photo of the subject, Wyndham Lewis, piqued my interest, but I have
put it off until I finished the Zelda biographies. The other night,
while waiting for the trucks to return to the FedEx facility (I was
waiting for a package to be delivered; I was not home when they
attempted to drop it off the first time), I started reading the Wyndham
Lewis bio. Wow, the writing is outstanding. It starts out with an
excellent description of a pituitary tumor, the cause of Wyndham’s
death, which is some of the best non-professional medical writing I have
ever read. Paging through the book, it appears that Windham was part of
the Bloomsbury Group. We will see. I have not seen his name in all
the diaries, letters, or biographies regarding Virginia Woolf and the
Bloomsbury Group.
I completed Lucia Joyce (daughter of James
Joyce) by Schloss (the second time I have read this biography) last
week, and am still reading the bio of Edmund Wilson. I have also
finally started the biography of Albert Einstein, a gift from one of
May’s closest friends, Ellen Barry. Ellen sent me the book as a birthday
present last year, and I put it off until I thought I would be
interested in reading about Einstein (again). I remember reading an
Einstein biography many, many years ago.
November 26, 2007
I seem to be moving into a new phase: “my” F. Scott Fitzgerald /
Ernest Hemingway phase. It all started with, generally, Edmund Wilson
and then more specifically, with the Nancy Milford biography of Zelda
Sayre Fitzgerald. I am eager to read around and about Hemingway and
then his novels. Based on the Zelda biography and the little browsing I
have done at Borders Bookstore, it appears to me that there is no
comparison between these two, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It appears to
me that Fitzgerald struggled and in the end did not produce much in the
way of novels, although he may have had more success with short
stories. It also appears that he stole most of his material from
journals, diaries, letters of others, especially girl- and
women-friends. Only recently has it come to light that he stole from
Ginerva King, his first love, a 16-year-old, when he was a Princeton
student; he made typewritten copies of the love letters she sent him and
from those wrote one of his successful novels. He also stole directly
from Zelda’s diary and probably her letters. I was surprised by the
thinness of The Great Gatsby. It looks like it could have been written
in a long weekend. He also signed his name to many short pieces / short
stories that were actually written by Zelda, knowing that he had more
“star” power. He was an alcoholic from age 19 or so, and wouldn’t admit
to it. He was narcissistic – more than most, if that is possible – and I
think he had a lot to do with Zelda’s insanity.
On the other
hand, it appears that Ernest Hemingway was a serious writer and really
did some good stuff with his novels. I can understand why Hunter S
Thompson idolized Hemingway. I can’t wait to read some of Hemingway’s
best-known works. I will have to read one or two of Fitzgerald’s novels
and a couple short stories, but something tells me I won’t appreciate
him much.
November 24, 2007
Ref: Zelda by Nancy Milford; Lucia Joyce by Schloss; Edmund Wilson by Dabney Lewis.
Zelda and Lucia both very interested in dance; both trying ballet in
their 20s (way too late to begin ballet); both hospitalized by same
psychiatrist in same Swiss psychiatric hospital just a few years apart
(1930 vs 1934, roughly). Very interesting. Also, need to explore
“eurhythmics” more. Eurhythmics was a movement founded in Europe
(Geneva?); Lucia became interested in it, and of course, there was a
rock sensation in the 90’s: the Eurhythmics. Eurhythmics, also called
“rhythmic gymnastics” or simply “rhythmics,” is an approach used in the
education of children to music.
Reading about Zelda and Lucia
it is interesting to see how F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others
crossed paths. Simply fascinating. I find myself moving into phases.
I find myself moving into a new phase; I can’t remember how it first
started. I do remember that I read something that took me back to
Edmund Wilson, who seems to be the center of so much of the early 20th
century literature with which I am familiar. I am still reading Edmund
Wilson. Because of this reading, I will have to read some of Hemingway,
including A Moveable Feast, as well as Zelda’s only novel, Save Me For
The Last Waltz, which, based on excerpts, may not be all that good. We
will see.
So, my addiction to literature continues.
I have been typing quite a bit from Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae:
at least a few paragraphs from each chapter, and much more of several
chapters.
I am also typing a bit from Harold Bloom’s Critical Views of Virginia Woolf, an anthology of critical essays.
Stacked beside my reading chair is also an abridged edition of John
Ruskin’s Modern Painters and Tadié’s biography of Marcel Proust.
So, that’s my reading list for the moment.
November 19, 2007
Wow! I wish I had someone to share this with. I am so excited.
Sometime ago, perhaps two or three years ago I literally stumbled
across Edmund Wilson. I had no idea who he was, but I am now reading
him and those in his circle. Wow, what a trip! It’s a whole new world –
all the American writers in the early 20th century. I am reading a
biography of Edmund Wilson, and I am also reading a biography of Zelda
Sayre Fitzgerald. And their biographies overlap completely. And they
bring in so many other poets / writers I have read or read about:
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore (in fact I feel
connected with Marianne Moore in some way, and have “fallen in love”
with her, if that’s possible – after the rum and Coke, I think anything
is possible)[Commonplace Notes on Marianne Moore], T. S. Eliot, Gertrude
Stein. They don’t mention Virginia Woolf, but they do mention Anaïs Nin
– to whom Edmund Wilson wrote. Wow! It is very, very interesting.
I am now listening to Leonard Cohen Dance Me to the End of Love.
I am also reading the biography of James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce
– fascinating story. So simultaneously three biographies: Lucia Joyce,
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and Edmund Wilson. They all cross paths at
points – perhaps best connection is with Ezra Pound, who connects with
Edmund Wilson and with James Joyce. And, I am also re-reading and
typing some portions of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. We just saw
the new move Beowulf, so I pulled out my two copies of Beowulf [1.
Seamus 2. Norton Critical edition, prose translation] and looked at that
story again.
November 2, 2007
I am substitute
teaching at high school and middle school at Fort Sam Houston. I have
spent a number of days teaching 6th grade English. The teacher is
reading a contemporary novel Rats to the children, and currently the
children are reading, together, another contemporary novel, Hatchet. I
just took a look at my notes on Robinson Crusoe. It is obvious to me
that one could find a version of Robinson Crusoe that would be
appropriate for 6th graders. Robinson Crusoe is a classic, considered
the first English novel, and certainly a better choice than the
contemporary novel. I honestly don’t understand it; there is so little
time, and so little reading that is required, it seems that I would work
to make the most of that limited time, exposing children / adolescents /
young adults to best literature possible.
Currently
reading: Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia; biography of Edmund Wilson
(Lewis M. Danbey); edited Ruskin’s Modern Painters; Constants of Nature
(physics, math).
July 1, 2007
The biography of Graham
Greene, by Norman Sherry, led me to Joseph Conrad, and I have quickly
read, but need to re-read, Heart of Darkness, and am currently reading
Lord Jim. I assume I will complete Joseph Conrad by reading The Secret
Agent. (By the way, I am nearly finished with the first volume of the
3-volume biography of Greene by Sherry.)
While reading
critical essays on Joseph Conrad, I was led to Ford Madox Ford, a name I
recognized from my pre-Raphaelite readings. I was confused. It turns
out that Ford Madox Ford was the grandson of Ford Madox Brown, the
Pre-Raphaelite painter. The younger Madox (born Ford Hermann Hueffer)
wrote a biography of his grandfather.
Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier (1915), which has been tagged as the “best French novel written in English.”
Ford Madox Ford founded The English Review in 1908 and published
Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy,
and William Butler Yeats.
Finally, FMF collaborated on two novels with Joseph Conrad.
June 1, 2007
I am really enjoying the first volume of three of Norman Sherry’s
biography of Graham Greene, the famous 20th century English author:
self-destructive, suicidal, and oversexed. I have comprehensive notes
in a commonplace book elsewhere (not yet transcribed).
April 21, 2007
I have finished Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. By the time I got
about halfway through it was becoming quite tedious, too much detail. I
scanned through the last half fairly quickly. This is a great
reference book.
April 15, 2007
I am so excited! I
stumbled across a “new” biography of the Brontës! This is the biography
that may be the definitive biography of the Brontës (at least for the
next ten years). It is written by an English Ph.D. who was a curator at
the Brontë parsonage and museum for six years. This book, the product
of 11 years of research, 830 pages long, with an additional 152 pages of
notes, and 20 pages of index. This will keep me occupied for many
weeks. I have already 50 pages and so far it has only been about
Patrick Brontë, the patriarch, and finally he is engaged, but not yet
married, to Maria Branwell. Wow, this book gets into the weeds.
November 30, 2006
I love to write letters, and I love to talk about what I’m reading.
Unfortunately, I’ve not found anyone who shares my interests, and I
often feel my letters fall on deaf ears. The recipients always tell me
they enjoy my letters but they don’t seem to engender any further
discussion. The other night I realized that I have been blessed with
two grandchildren whom I will enjoy writing to.
In
addition, if Laura continues with her plans as a missionary, I am sure
she will enjoy letters from me, and who knows, perhaps she can share the
letters with those she ministers to. We will see.
August 24, 2006
I am reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, edited by her husband
Leonard, and first published in 1953. It is absolutely fascinating on
my levels, but for the purpose of this chapter, it is fascinating
because she mentions so many famous writers and how reading prepared her
for her own writing. She also wanted to a write a book compiling all
her essays about literature. She mentions all the great 19th century
female authors, the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austin, and then she
goes on from there. It is absolutely fascinating. I feel I have found a
soul mate. I’m not sure I can go back to Jane Austen or the others.
July 10, 2006
Now I have two grandchildren to read to. Olivia Rae was born on this
date, July 10, 2006, at York Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
May 10, 2005:
Somewhere at home, I have started a little book for Arianna -- about
the progression of storytelling; I forget the reference that got me
started.
I have started reviewing that very short anthology, and have started reading some of the selections.
It is interesting how fast so many literary dots can be connected.
I’m not sure how to organize my thoughts about the literature I’m reading, but I’m going to try.
So, let’s get started. Many of the longer passages below were “cut and
paste” items from the internet, so not all entries are original. It
should be obvious which writing is mine and which is taken from other
sources.
May 10, 2005, is when I first started this
chapter, but from this point on, I will update the information below but
will not date the additions or modifications. Comments regarding this
chapter will continue to be dated and will be placed at the top, in
chronological order, the newest entry at the top.
Evolution of Story-Telling
(also posted here)
Overview: Harold Bloom’s
Western Canon.
Authors 1. First, somewhere, I need to find the reference and then recap the progression of storytelling:
a. The Bible:
Book of J b. Oral sagas, poetry:
Iliad,
Odyssey c. Sagas, poetry:
Beowulf d. Sagas, prose:
Icelandic Sagas e. Historical, prose: Bede
f. Poetry, English: Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400), Spenser (1552 – 1599)
i.
Chaucer: father of English literature? ii.
Spenser: emigrated to Ireland; premier craftsman - English verse in its infancy g. Drama, poetry: Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Goethe (1749 – 1832)
h. Christian allegory: John Bunyan (1628 – 1688)
i. Novels; first one was Don Quixote; then Jane Austen, Thackeray, Brontës
j. Novellas
k. Mysteries: Poe (influenced Symbolism [French] which led to Modernism)
l. Modernism
m. Gonzo journalism: Hunter S. Thompson
n. Graphic Novels
2.
Brontës (the first of the 19th century Yorkshire women authors: Brontës, Austen, George Eliot) a. Much preparation [prepared myself well before reading the Brontës]
b. Re-read Wuthering Heights, Cliff’s Notes, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Brontë; Jane Eyre, Cliff Notes
c. The 19th Century Female Authors: represents the “renaissance
in female writing, see The Madwoman in the Attic by SM Gilbert and SM
Gubar
d. 1994 biography, The Brontës by Juliet Barker.
Great reference book; should be the last biography of the Brontës –
unless something new in the Brontë archives turns up. The author
suggests that Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy too closely to be a
coincidence. (April 21, 2007)
3.
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (I finished Northanger Abbey also in 2006)
4.
George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
a. Middle-march
1) This novel is referenced more often than I had noticed
before. This is a very important novel and I highly recommend reading
it as soon as one feels comfortable reading a long, 19th century novel.
5.
C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume I, 1905 - 1931
a. During the Lord of the Rings craze (due to the movies) I came to know of C. S. Lewis, a friend of JRR Tolkien
b. In addition, Laura, my daughter, has been influenced by C. S. Lewis and asked me to read some of his works.
c. So, when I found this volume in “Half-Price Bookstores,”
hardcover, published 2004, I couldn’t believe it. I love letters,
especially before the author is a known entity.
d. C. S.
Lewis had a classical English education and his letters are filled with
references to the classics and to English literature
e.
Interestingly enough, it appears that he was quite absorbed by the
Brontës when he was about 17 years old, and at college. I was reading
this in his letters at the very time I, coincidentally, was enjoying
Brontë, and then Austen, which C. S. Lewis also references.
f. I forget, but I believe I first saw a reference to Spenser in
C. S. Lewis’ Collected Letters. I bought a used copy of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene after reading about it on the net. It will be a challenge
to read this book but it is now on my reading list.
g.
In the minimal research I did on Faerie Queene I came across a book
called Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia that has piqued my interest.
Whether I read this book depends on whether I like it when I thumb
through it at the bookstore. Reviews suggest the first chapter is
excellent but then after that, it may not be so good. [Incidentally, I
do recall coming across this book and glancing through it at one time
while browsing in a bookstore; it was many, many years ago.]
h. During the year 1915 (his collected letters are arranged in
chapters based on the year they were written in), it seems C. S. Lewis
compared much of what he read to the Brontës.
6.
Hunter S. Thompson a. Speaking of letters, I believe
The Proud Highway is the first set of letters I had ever read, and enjoyed them immensely.
b. Prior to my newfound enthusiasm in literature, I had read a couple of HST’s books and thoroughly enjoyed them (
Hell’s Angels comes to mind); I recently finished his
Rum Diary
-- it was interesting; it was HST style, but it didn’t have a plot --
but many other great books did not have a plot, Joyce’s Ulysses and
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come to mind. Ulysses simply covers a day
in the life of Stephen Bloom and Mrs Dalloway simply covers one in the
life of Clarissa (?) when she goes out shopping, preparing for her
dinner party that evening, and the party itself.
7.
Ovid’s
The Erotic Poems
a. While searching “Half-Price Books” to satisfy my new
enthusiasm for literature, I came across a Penguin edition of this
book. It had a great introduction by Peter Green, who happened to be
born in London, and had had a classical education but ended up at the
University of Texas (Austin) and then the University of Iowa
b. Peter Green, in that introduction, references much of the
literature I am now familiar with, including Nabokov (see below),
Brontë, and Byron (see below).
c. In the introduction,
for example (p. 63): “No one would deny Ovid’s bookishness. But is it
inherently probable that he was the psychological forerunner of a writer
such as Emily Brontë? His cheerfully pragmatic attitude to sex shows
not a trace of that murky Gothic symbolism which always seems to hang
about the parthenogenetic Heathcliffs of the world.” Had I not read
Wuthering Heights, this reference would not have made any sense.
d. Green goes on to say in his introduction, “Any feeling he may
have retained for human relationships is carefully suppressed, and
further distanced by a battery of recondite allusions. Here one
suggestive modern parallel is T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, also the work of
a bookish and allusive author, similarly given -- perhaps, again, as a
form of camouflage or self-protection -- to literary quotation and
parody.
8.
T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land. I had vaguely heard of this book. Seeing a reference in Ovid’s Poems intrigued me, and I looked it up on the net.
a. Some consider The Waste Land the most important poem in the 20th century.
b. The Waste Land was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.
9. The Romantics. While reading a book review by Christopher
Hitchens of Lermontov’s A Hero in Our Time, I realized I couldn’t
understand his reference without a bit of background. Therefore I did a
quick review and this is what I discovered:
a. The three great Romantics are: Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Keats (or as I call them: shelleybyronandkeats)
b. Shelley and Byron were friends, and traveled in the same circles.
c. Shelley married Mary (daughter of one of the first feminists); she wrote Frankenstein
d. Having read the biographical thumbnail sketches of Shelley and
Byron, I now understand them better. I understand the Byron persona --
at least better than I did at one time.
e. Pushkin,
Russian-Ethiopian (black), took ideas from liberal, revolutionary Russia
and tried to instill them into his Tsarist Russia; he eventually gave
up and supported the Tsar
f. Lermontov took up the mantel,
where Pushkin left off, and subsequently wrote A Hero in Our Time. I
sent that review to Kiri, and learned that not only had she read that
novel in the original Russian, she had to write essays in Russian on the
novel
10. Virginia Woolf
a. The Bloomsbury
Group: very small, but very influential in the literary and the art
world. I know the general public is not aware how important this group
was. Even John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist, was part
of this group.
b. I think Virginia Woolf might be the most important, certainly the most influential, of the modernists.
c. I think Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was the feminist’s answer to
Joyce’s Ulysses. It would be a great doctoral thesis, although it has
probably already been done. Virginia Woolf did not like Joyce (too
sexist and rough) and her initial reactions to Ulysses were negative.
However, after the novel’s form and structure were explained to her, she
did note that she re-read it, probably more than once. She was
re-reading it at the very time she was working on Mrs Dalloway. Both
Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway take place in one day (dawn to late evening).
And whereas critics have pointed out how much Joyce described Dublin in
that novel, Woolf did the same in her novel, but London. Joyce loved
Dublin, as much as Woolf loved London. And, of course, the two novels
are both very autobiographical.
d. “Woolf was also a
master of a related literary form called free indirect discourse, in
which the identity of the narrator is not entirely clear. The novel
abounds with dialogue that is not demarcated by quotation marks, as well
as phrases and passages that could easily be spoken or merely thought.
This form of narration is told in the third person, but it conveys a
sense of the character's internal thoughts from the character's own
experience, thereby expressing these thoughts somewhere between a
first-person and third-person mode of narrative.” (Source:
http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lighthouse/fullsumm.html,
March 20, 2007)
e. “One of the great innovations of
modernist novels is the stream of consciousness technique, whereby the
writer tries to capture a character's unbroken flow of internal
thoughts. Thus an author can describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings
of a character without the devices of objective narration or dialogue.
In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf makes constant use of this
technique, and it is established as the predominant style from the
beginning. In this novel, the action occurs not in the outside world but
in the thoughts and feelings of the characters as exhibited by the
ongoing narrative. Although there is a narrative voice apart from any of
the characters, a large portion of the narrative consists of the
exposition of each characters' consciousness. Some sections use entire
pages without letting an objective voice interrupt the flow of thoughts
of a single character.
“As a literary device, stream of
consciousness was perhaps the most fitting counterpart to contemporary
work being done by Sigmund Freud regarding the existence and function of
the human unconscious. Freud newly posited the theory that there is a
portion of the mind to which we do not have complete access, with the
implication that we cannot know all of our own thoughts, fears,
motivations, and desires. Writers and artists of this period were
intrigued by this concept, and they sought in various ways to depict and
illuminate the human unconscious. Although stream of consciousness (as
its name implies) is the illumination of thoughts and feelings that
characters consciously experience, Woolf reaches much further into the
human mind than a conventional narrative about the past, providing an
intimate view of a character's interiority.” (Source:
http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lighthouse/fullsumm.html,
March 20, 2007)
11. The Poet:
Some
years ago, a close friend (Sebastian Vogt), a language instructor
(German and English), and literature teacher, told me he asked his
students to define a poet. I thought about and couldn’t do it. So now,
whenever I read something that talks about what a poet is, the subject
has special meaning. Elsewhere in this document I provide definitions
of a poet.
[CAVEAT: since this chapter was intended for personal
use only, much of the information is “cut and paste” directly from
internet sources, such as “wiki,” as well as some other non-internet
sources.]
Definitions, Writing, Concepts
Story vs plot, from Virginia Woolf, by Susan Dick, p. xi
The story is what happens
The plot is the “active” interpretative work of discourse on story, “the way the story gets told.”
Evolution of Storytelling
Epic sagas, oral: poetry
Epic sagas, written: poetry
Novella, written: prose
Drama: poetry
Novels: prose
Epic Sagas, Oral
Iliad / Odyssey: 6th century B.C.
6th
century BC, Homer “dictates” stories to scribe; based on earlier
material possibly dating back to the 8th century BC (two hundred years
earlier).
It should go without
saying that to really, really "understand the whole issue of Homer," one
must "know Milman Parry. Start with
the wiki entry if nothing else.
The GreeksKeep forgetting the order of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates? It’s very easy: SPA – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Socrates spoke; did not write. Plato published (wrote). And Aristotle added.
Plato was enamored with Socrates, who was tried, convicted and
executed. Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student. Aristotle is
considered the first scientist.
Plato’s dialogues: the
protagonist was often Socrates. Plato’s dialogues: early, middle, late.
The early dialogues followed Socrates closely, but middle and later
periods, Plato developed his own voice. The Symposium was written in
Plato’s middle period.
Epic Sagas, Written
Beowulf: 1100 A.D.
First thing to note -- look at the "distance" between Homer and the writer of Beowulf.
Written in Old English, about 1100 A.D.
Based
on exploits of a great Scandinavian warrior from the 6th century. May
and I saw the “animated” Beowulf epic, November, 2007; excellent movie;
the movie was ranked number 1 for the first couple of weekends. The
movie had an interesting story line: the King of the Geats was the
father of Grendel; and Beowulf was the father of the unnamed dragon
(mother of both Grendel and the dragon, of course, was the woman, who
was a beautiful, sexual being, according to the movie version). Much of
the original Beowulf is missing, and there’s no reason why this story
line couldn’t be accurate, especially given the fact that Beowulf only
stated he killed Grendel’s mother. Whereas he brought back the head of
Grendel, he never brought back the head of his mother. It does make one
wonder.
The Icelandic Sagas: 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries; anomalous for their times)
Novella
The Decameron: 1353
http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/N0178100.htmlA
novella is a short, narrative, prose fiction work. Like the English
word “novel,” the English word “novella” derives from the Italian word
“novella” (plural: “novelle”), for a tale, a piece of news. As the
etymology suggests, novellas originally were news of town and country
life worth repeating for amusement and edification.
As
a literary genre, the novella’s origin lay in the early Renaissance
literary work of the Italians and the French. Principally, by Giovanni
Boccaccio (1313 - 1375), author of The Decameron (1353) -- one hundred
novellae told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the
Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348; and
by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre (1492 - 1549), [aka
Marguerite de Valois], author of Heptameron (1559) -- seventy-two
original French tales (structured like The Decameron). Her
psychological acuity and didactic purpose outweigh the unfinished
collection’s weak literary style.
Not
until the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries did writers
fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and
rules. Contemporaneously, the Germans were the most active writers of
the Novelle (German: “novella”; plural: “novellen”). For the German
writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length -- a
few pages to hundreds --restricted to a single, suspenseful event,
situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point
(Wendepunkt), provoking a logical, but surprising end; Novellen tend to
contain a concrete symbol, which is the narration’s steady point.
In the German, the English word novella is novelle, and the English word novel is the German roman, this etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s (1881 - 1942), Die Schachnovelle (1942) {The Check Novel], translated (1944) as The Royal Game, is an example of a title naming its genre.
In
English, a novella is a story midway -- in length (30 - 40,000 words)
and structural complexity -- between a short story (500 - 15,000 words)
and a novel (60,000 words, minimum). A novella focuses upon a single
chain of events with a psychologically surprising turning point, e.g.,
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis
Stevenson (1850 - 94); and Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad
(1857 - 1924).
Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels;
though incorrectly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are
called novels, as are many science fiction works such as War of the
Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D. Occasionally, longer works are
addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the
novella-novel threshold. In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and
Nebula literary awards define the novella as “A ... story of between
seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000)
words.”
HOWEVER: there is a nice discussion of “novella” in the introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome:
Novel vs novella. How to classify the book remains a problems. Wharton herself referred to Ethan Frome
as a ‘tale,’ a story,’ a ‘novel,’ a ‘short novel,’ and, in Henry
James’s expression, a ‘nouvelle’; and the book is listed in indexes
today under similarly diverse categories. For many critics now, however,
‘nouvelle’ (or ‘nouvella’) seems a belittling term; and when applied to
fiction by a woman writer, it might seem to suggest a product less
robust and significant than the work of her fellow male artists.
Katherine Anne Porter forcefully dismissed the word, enjoining her own
readers in 1965:
[Please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novella.
Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing;
Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to
describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels.]
Nevertheless,
especially when used in its period context, ‘novella’ describes a
literary form with a rich history. Many of the most commanding works of
Wharton’s contemporaries among them, Conrad, James, Lawrence, Harding,
Davis, Chopin, Gilman) are novellas, and Wharton herself had already
successfully attempted the form in some of her most powerful early
fictions….
English Poetry
Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599):
The Fairie Queene, 1590
Very, very important, according to Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae
Top quoted poets:
Shakespeare, Tennyson, Pope (in that order)
English Poets
Spenser (1552 – 1599)
Shakespeare, William (1564 – 1616):
Major contemporary poets [their age when Shakespeare was 30]
Edmund Spenser, 1552 – 1599 [42]
Sir Philip Sidney, 1554 – 1586 [40]
John Donne, 1572 – 1631 [22] – works not published until 1633
Ben Jonson, 1572 – 1637 [22]
When you think sonnets (little songs), think Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
Donne: very convoluted
Jonson: very simple
Tennyson, Alfred (1809 – 1892): a number of phrases now commonplace in English language
“nature, red in tooth and claw”
“better to have loved and lost”
“Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”
“My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure.”
Pope, Alexander (1688 – 1744): greatest English poet of the early 18th
century; best known for his satirical verse and his translation of
Homer; a master of the heroic couplet (iambic pentameter, masculine
verse)
Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848)
From Reading the
Brontës: An Introduction to Their Novels and Poetry, by Charmian Knight
and Luke Spencer: “As well as my selection of Emily’s poems, there is
another poem here for you to read. It is by Sylvia Plath, the American
poet who spent some of her short life (like Emily, she died at thirty –
suicide, perhaps accidental) in the West Riding of Yorkshire and was
buried there in 1963. Caleld ‘Wuthering Heights,’ it registers Plath’s
strong response to the moorland surroundings of Haworth and can serve as
an introduction to the themes and images of Emily’s poetry which I want
to consider.” Earlier, Luke Spencer wrote: “Emily Brontë’s poetry is
generally regarded as some of the finest written in the 19th century and
at least the equal of anything produced by other women poets of that
period, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.”
Drama
Shakespeare: 1564 – 1616
The “five-act tragedy” and sonnets.
Shakespeare was writing at a time when Modern English was still in its
early stages. According to wiki.com: Modern English developed with the
Great Vowel Shift that began in 15th-century England, and continues to
adopt foreign words from a variety of languages, as well as coining new
words. The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of
the English language that took place in the south of England between
1450 and 1750.The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen
(1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
Shakespeare wrote in the late 1590’s and early 1600’s, literally right
during the Great Vowel Shift. The values of the long vowels form the
main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and Modern
English, and the Great Vowel Shift is one of the historical events
marking the separation of Middle and Modern English. Originally, these
vowels had "continental" values much like those remaining in Italian and
liturgical Latin. However, during the Great Vowel Shift, the two
highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an
increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front.
The Novel
Don Quixote: 1605
The novel: a merging of realistic and the romantic, the mimetic (the
imitative) and the fantastic (http://www.answers.com/novel).
The realistic and romantic tendencies converge in Cervantes’s Don
Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), which describes the adventures of an
aging country gentleman who, inspired by chivalric romances, sets out to
do good in an ugly world. A brilliant, humanistic study of illusion
and reality, Don Quixote is considered by many critics to be the most
important single progenitor of the novel.
Virginia Woolf
comments at some length on Cervantes / Don Quixote in her diary, see
Thursday, August, 5, 1920, A Writer’s Diary, published in 1953, and
edited by her husband Leonard.
Daniel DeFoe: b. 1660; five novels, 1719 – 1722 — Father Of The English Novel
Remember: Sir Walter Scott is customarily hailed as “the father of the
historical novel. Defoe’s place in its development is often slighted
when not ignored. Scott was fond of Defoe’s work and felt that Defoe
“would have deserved immortality for the genius he has displayed in A
Journal of the Plague Years as well as in the Memoirs of a Cavalier,”
even if he had not given the world Robinson Crusoe.” – John J. Burke,
Jr., in Daniel Defoe, Modern Critical Views, 1987 (edited by Harold
Bloom).
Several 18th century novels, each essentially
realistic (wow, until November 12, 2017, I had never paid attention to
that word, “realistic.” (see my entry dated November 12, 2017), has at
one time or another been designated the first novel in English. Daniel
Defoe is famous for Robinson Crusoe (1719), a detailed and convincingly
realistic account, based on a real event, of the successful efforts of
an island castaway to survive. Also in this realistic tradition is
Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders (1722), which relates the picaresque
adventures of a good-natured harlot and thief. Defoe is considered by
some to be the first journalist. According to “inventors.about.com”
(http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/printing_4.htm) Daniel
Defoe published The Review in 1704, making him the first journalist.
There were older newspapers and therefore older contributors to these
newspapers, but it is possible that the website considers Defoe’s
articles leading the way to the modern newspaper.
Samuel Richardson, 1689 – 1761; Pamela (1740); Clarissa (1748) and Pamela
Laurence
Sterne, 1713 - 1768, Tristram Shandy, nine volumes, 1759 – 1767. A
must-read is the Everyman’s Library edition, with an introduction by
Peter Conrad, c. 1991, but included in Everyman’s Library as early as
1912. In the introduction, these four novelists were, perhaps, the
“founding fathers” of the English novel: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne,
and Cervantes, though not English. Mentioned in passing in the
introduction: Marianne Moore, Jane Eyre, Don Juan (Byron), Hamlet,
Whitman’s Prelude, and many others, particularly Fielding’s Tom Jones.
From page viii of the introduction, “… Sterne discovers a new way of
writing and a new way of understanding human nature which makes his book
a sacred text both for Romantic poets and modern novelists, who like
him want to liberate literature from its self-imposed and unnecessary
rules.”
Note: Benjamin Franklin opined that “John
Bunyan was the first to mix narration and dialogue, a method very
engaging to the reader…” and went on to say that Daniel Defoe did the
same, as did Samuel Richardson (1689-1761).
The Seventeenth Century
Scientific Revolution: children of Francis Bacon and Galileo
Generally dated to have begun 1543: Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
The idea of progress pretty much an invention of 17th century Europe – Raymo, 2008
1637: Descartes publishes Discourse on the Method
Stands at dividing line between medieval and modern
Some say the Enlightenment began with Discourse on the Method
Generally, the Enlightenment is said to have begin in the 18th century
It ended with the French Revolution according to many historians
Modernity / rationalism allowed thoughts of sexual equality, sexual freedom
Philosophers now starting to hold sway; they held sway in 17th and 18th centuries
“Dechristianizing” became an official component of the modernizing program of the French Revolution (1789 – 1799).
The Eighteenth Century
The Romantic Period perhaps overlaps exactly the life of Goethe, born
in 1749 and died in 1832. Perhaps: Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delacroix are
most important.
Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761); major
English, 18th century writer, best known for his three epistolary
novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded; Clarissa: Or the History of a
Young Lady; and, Sir Charles Grandison. (I opined that Virginia Woolf
chose to name Mrs Dalloway after Richardson’s Clarissa.) Pamela became
the first novel printed in America when Benjamin Franklin reprinted it
from the fourth London edition! – p. 18. (1742 – 1744 edition)
In England, the Bluestocking phenomenon was, perhaps, the catalyst
that stimulated some of the great women writers of the 18th, 19th and
20th centuries. For background,
see:
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/wobrilliantwomen1.asp.
It is a difficult book to read, but The Journal of Eugene Delacroix,
edited by Hubert Wellington, c. 1951, 1995, Phaidon Press, is quite
interesting. It is said that the height of Romantic literature was in
1830 with Victor Hugo’s play Hernani.
The Gothic Novel
Ann Radcliffe, 1764 – 1823, English author; considered a pioneer of
the gothic novel. Mysteries of Udolpho Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
and also referenced in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Also
influenced Sir Walter Scott.
Transition to Romanticism
“They
(Samuel Johnson and Boswell) first met in the back parlour of Tom
Davies’s bookshop on the afternoon of Monday, 16 May 1763. Johnson was
born in 1709, so Johnson was 54 and Boswell was 24. If Johnson had been
born in 1680 and Boswell in 1710, the difference between them would
merely have been the difference between youth and middle age; but since
Johnson’s birth date was 1709 and Boswell’s 1740 they are separated by
one of those seismic cracks in the historical surface. Boswell is a new
man in Johnson’s world; he belongs to the epoch of Rousseau
(Romanticism; whereas Johnson was still classical); all the attitudes
that we associate with the end of the eighteenth century – the onset of
‘sensibility,’ the obsession with the individual and the curious, the
swelling tide of subjective emotion – are strongly present in him. Where
Johnson still belongs to the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, the world
of the giant system-builders, Boswell inhabits the ruins of that world.
Where Johnson instinctively proceeds by erecting a framework and then
judging the particular instance in relation to that framework, Boswell
is the sniffing bloodhound who will follow the scent of individuality
into whatever territory it leads him. The fascination of their dialogue,
that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized
his great Life, is that is it not merely between two very different men
but between two epochs. In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to
Renaissance Europe, and is answered.” – Samuel Johnson, A Biography,
John Wain, p. 229 – 230.
Romanticism
1749 – 1832
Rosseau’s essay: 1749
Death of Goethe: 1832
The big four: France – Rousseau
Germany – Goethe
England – Wordsworth and Coleridge
Romantics: Rousseau, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Lord Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats. William Butler Yeats,
born in 1865, referred to his generation as “the last romantics.” In
France: painters Theodore Gericault, Eugene Delacroix; authors Victor
Hugo and Stendhal; the composer Hector Berlioz. In Russia: Alexander
Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (influenced Lord Byron); the poet Fyodor
Tyutchev.
The French writer Rousseau is considered the father
of the Romantic Movement, following his essay published in 1749, as
part of a contest to answer the question: “Had the advance of the
sciences and arts helped to destroy or purify moral standards?” For
quick review of these advances, see notes on philosophy. (At that file,
scroll down to Chapter 3, “Brave New World.”)
It is
interesting to note that Rousseau’s landmark essay was published in
1749, the year Goethe was born. By the time of Goethe’s death, writing
was moving toward the “Modernist” era. One man, Goethe, can be said to
have spanned the exact era of the Romantic Movement.
The Romantic Period perhaps overlaps exactly the life of Goethe, born in 1749 and died in 1832.
Williams Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was a major English romantic poet
who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in
English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.
(Note: Romanticism was probably a reaction to scientific advances that
had occurred between the late 13th century and the 17th century. We
now refer to that period as the Renaissance. From wiki: “It was not
until the 19th century that the French word Renaissance achieved
popularity in describing the cultural movement that began in the late
13th century. The Renaissance was first defined by French historian
Jules Michelet (1798 - 1874), in his 1855 work, Histoire de France. For
Michelet, the Renaissance was more a development in science than in art
and culture. He asserted that is spanned the period from Columbus to
Copernicus to Galileo; that is, from the end of the 15th century to the
middle of the 17th century.” Others had their own definitions.)
More on Goethe: From The New Yorker, February 1, 2016, “Design for Living: What’s great about Goethe?” by Adam Kirsch.
“English
speakers are more hospitable to fiction in translation, and yet when
was the last time you heard someone mention “Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship” or “Elective Affinities,” Goethe’s long fictions? These
books have a good claim to have founded two of the major genres of the
modern novel—respectively, the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery.
Goethe’s first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” is better known,
mainly because it represented such an enormous milestone in literary
history; the first German international best-seller, it is said to have
started a craze for suicide among young people emulating its hero. But
in English it remains a book more famous than read.”
Pre-Raphaelites
The last phase (of the Romantic era) of transformation into Victorian culture.
See my Commonplace Notes.
I think I read somewhere the Pre-Raphaelite phase lasted only five (5) years – that needs to be confirmed.
The Realistic Novel
From John Wain’s biography of Samuel Johnson: “As a critic Johnson
was always rather unresponsive to the realistic novel, the most
important new form to arise in his lifetime.” – Samuel Johnson, A
Biography, John Wain, p. 203
The Nineteenth Century
Novel became the leading form of literature in English in the 19th century.
19th century often regarded as a high point in British literature
Popular works opened a market for the novel among the reading public.
Pre-Victorian authors: Jane Austen, Walter Scott (both perfected closely-observed social satire and adventure stories.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was the first American author to attempt
to make his living solely by writing. He was the inventor of the
detective novel and his genre was gothic.
There are numerous sub-categories of novel:
the realistic novel
the Bildungsroman (Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship)
the novel of adultery (Goethe: Elective Affinities)
The “Strange Pause”
1820s and 1830s
The “strange” pause coined by the historian G.M. Young
fell between the Romantics and the Victorians
modern
scholars unsure what happened during this troublesome transition phase
between the deaths of shelleybyronandkeats and the rise of Dickens
personality, novelist, poetess: Leticia Elizabeth Landon
Pre-Victorian
Sir Walter Scott: Waverley, 1814; Rob Roy
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816
The novel became the dominant form of Western literature in the 19th
century, which produced many works that are considered milestones in the
development of the form.
Sir Walter Scott is considered
the father of the 19th century novel and the historical novel.
[Remember, Defoe might be considered the father of the English novel,
but if so, with his Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a
Cavalier, he might contend with Sir Walter Scott as the father of the
historical novel.]
To date, the only Scott novel I have read
is Rob Roy, published the last day of 1817, although the author’s
“copyright” is 1818. I really enjoyed Rob Roy, perhaps because I had
spent so much time between 2002 and 2004 in northern England (Yorkshire)
just south of Scotland, and where much of action in Rob Roy probably
took place.
Juliet Barker, in her 1994 biography of The
Brontës suggests that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy
to be a coincidence.
“Modern” readers may prefer other Scott
novels, but Robert Lewis Stevenson considered Rob Roy “the best of Sir
Walter’s by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.”
See also Sir Walter Scott in How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
Victorian Literature
1830 – 1901
as defined by The Norton Anthology, English Literature
followed Romanticism
Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901) reign: 1837 – 1901
Victorian Age: Industrial Revolution (social, economic, technology change)
Expansion of the British Empire; became the foremost Global Power of the time
Almost entirely of German descent
Last British monarch of the House of Hanover
Qualities associated with Victorianism: earnestness, moral responsibility, domestic propriety
Victorian literature: link between Romantic Period and 20th century literature
Notable Victorian authors: Brontë sisters, Robert Browning, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins,
Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell,
George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker (Dracula), Philip Meadows Taylor, Lord
Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847 - 1848
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1920), the Wessex poems and Wessex novels
In Britain, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), about the 1745
Jacobite uprising in support of Charles Edward Stuart, inaugurated the
historical novel. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma
(1816), contemplating and satirizing life among a small group of country
gentry in Regency England, initiated the highly structured and polished
novel of manners. A variant with a wider scope is William Makepeace
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847 - 48), which dissects and satirizes London
society.
The serialization of novels in various periodicals
brought the form an ever-expanding audience. Particularly popular were
the works of Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist (1839) and David
Copperfield (1850). Readers were drawn by Dickens’s sympathetic,
melodramatic, and humorous delineation of a world peopled with
characters of all social classes, and by his condemnation of various
social abuses. Further portraits of English society appear in Anthony
Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, which scrutinize clerical life in a
small, rural town, and George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and
Middlemarch (1871 - 72), which treat the lives of ordinary people in
provincial towns with humanity and a strong moral sense. George
Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879) are
analytical tragicomedies set in high social circles. The conflict
between man and nature is stressed in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the
Native (1878) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).
Although
the great English novels of the 19th century were predominantly
realistic, novels of fantasy and romance formed a literary
undercurrent. Early in the century Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
explores a tale of horror. Later, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847)
and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) each present imaginative,
passionate visions of human love. The Brontës wrote a total of seven
published novels.
Robert Louis Stevenson revived the
adventure tale and the horror story in Treasure Island (1883) and The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). At the beginning of the
20th century, horror and adventure were combined in the novels of Joseph
Conrad, notably Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902), both
works achieving high levels of stylistic and psychological
sophistication.
Thomas Hardy advanced issues of sexuality;
particularly notable was pioneer description of lesbianism in his first
published novel, Desperate Reviews.
Thomas Babington
Macaulay (1800 – 1859), historian, loved the changes. Melancholy poet
Matthew Arnold felt all the change in the Victorian period exhausted
man. From The Norton Anthology, English Literature, Volume E, The
Victorians:
Although many Victorians shared a sense of
satisfaction in the industrial and political preeminence of England
during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something
lost, a sense too of being displaced persons in a world made alien by
technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the
adaptive powers of the humane psyche.
Victorian
Gothic Horror Novel
Dracula, Bram Stoker
some key dates:
Bram Stoker, Irish writer, 1847 - 1912
Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, 1854 - 1900
Dracula published: 1897
Émigré Literature
(began in the late 18th century; extended into modern times)
This is a minor fork down the road of storytelling but I stumbled
across it in Judith Thurman’s biography of Isak Dinesen. From page
260: “As a young woman starting out in life, Tanne Dinesen had been
caught in a typically Romantic predicament. She was estranged from the
values and milieu of her family; her inner life was at odds with her
reality, and she felt cheated of that intensity which comes when one’s
desire and experience are not in conflict. Her struggle for a passionate
life between the ages of ten and seventeen – a struggle to ‘become
herself’ – bears a close resemblance to the struggle of a whole
generation of poets and artists who had grown up at the close of the
eighteenth century, entered adolescence with Napoleon, believed his
promises and in his example, and were left stranded in the 1820s feeling
rootless, powerless, and betrayed. They took refuge from their
disappointment in nostalgia for the past, in dreams of adventure and
rebellion, in eccentricity and fantastic stories, in opium, in the cult
of the personality or in the forests of America, and they created what
Georg Brandes called an émigré literature. Some of them were actually
émigrés from the ancien régime, and some were spiritual émigrés from
their own disillusionment.
“Their sense that society did not
offer adequate scope for their desire and potential – for their humanity
– split them and their work, and set the pattern for an entire century.
Each successive generation of artists, from Lamartine to Ibsen, took a
course it believed was necessary or virtuous or noble or inevitable, and
also lamented: the sacrifice of ‘life’ for ‘art.’” See also exile
literature elsewhere in this document.
19th Century
US: Transcendentalism (need to flesh out; complete this section)
A quick short book with an overview of Transcendentalism: American Bloomsbury,
Susan Cheever, c. 2007: Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, Margaret Fuller,
Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne; peripherally the Peabody
Sisters.
I was in my "transcendental" phase and
read a lot of these authors when we were living with Josh and Kiri in
Belmont, MA, a suburb of Boston, when Josh was getting his MBA at
Harvard.
1830’s: Concord, Massachusetts
- Emerson
- Margaret Fuller
- Peabody Sisters
- Henry David Thoreau
- Branson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Little Women; Elizabeth was “Beth” in Little Women
- Elizabeth Peabody Alcott: transcendentalism
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: from
The Annotated Emerson, edited by David Mikics / foreword by Phillip Lopate:
- a giant of American literature; perhaps the greatest essayist,
certainly one of our finest nonfiction prose writers; but seems to be
forgotten; influence was less than deserved; I suppose to some extent,
folks "outgrew" essays;
- "Emerson is our Shakespeare"; a born rebel;
- I've never "read" Emerson; I need to get to know him; I wonder what Harold Bloom has to say about him.
- went by his middle name, Waldo.
- Boston, MA; b. 1803; d. 1882 (age 78)
- major event in his life, the Civil War?
- coming of age years: War of 1812
- led
the Transcendentalist Movement (see below). New England, 1820s and
1830s; similar to Unitary church as taught at Harvard Divinity School
First American memoir and nature writing in one stroke: H. D. Thoreau,
Walden
Memoir writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne (married Sophia Peabody, see below). 1804 - 1864.
Transcendentalism: we are
born believers vs Calvin - Calvin: we are born sinners
- Massachusetts: Boston, Salem, Concord
- Peabody Sisters
- Mary
- Sophia - married Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1809 - 1871 (61 years)
- Elizabeth
- She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in
Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo
Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the
famous Dial and other
imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for
historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual
intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions,
Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as
Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.
- Transcendentalism (movement led by R. Waldo Emerson): Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School
- Bronson Alcott daughters
- Anna Alcott:
- Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (Elizabeth was “Beth” in Little Women); 1832 - 1888 (55 years)
- Elizabeth Peabody Alcott: is she the daughter of Elizabeth Peabody-Bronson Alcott?
- Record of a School: based on Bronson Alcott’s school
- Wordsworth requested a copy
Herman Melville:
Established
writer; well received; 15 years younger than Hawthorne; halfway through
Moby-Dick (The Whale), Melville reads House of Seven Gables and Scarlet
Letter (one or both, can’t remember); very disturbed by Hawthorne’s
“darkness.” Around chapter 23 (according to Carol Oates), Melville
changes writing style completely in Moby-Dick. The critics hated the
book; the public hated the book, and Melville “destroyed.” By Hawthorne —
according to Carol Oates and Susan Cheever.
The French and Russian Novels
Major 19th-century French writers also produced novels in the romantic
and realistic traditions. Romance can be found in Alexandre Dumas’s
Three Musketeers (1844) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1844), both of
which are melodramatic and swashbuckling, terrifying and poignant.
Honore de Balzac’s Human Comedy (1829 - 47), on the other hand, is a
series of novels that offer a realistic, if cynical, panorama of life in
Paris and the provinces.
In the 19th century Russian
novelists quickly gained world reputations for their powerful statements
of human and cosmic problems. If Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
(published in installments, 1865 - 69) is a God-centered novel, Feodor
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) can be considered a
God-haunted one.
American novels in the 19th century were explicitly referred to as romances. James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
(1851) -- the latter two heavily allegorical and containing
supernatural elements -- properly belong in this category. In the last
decades of the century, however, a shift toward realism occurred. Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), a revival of the
picaresque novel, is romantic in its Mississippi River setting but
realistic in its satirical attack on religious hypocrisy and racial
persecution. [See twentieth century for Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature.]
Great
American Novel, definition: The "Great American Novel" is the concept
of a novel that most perfectly represents the spirit of life in the
United States at the time of its publication. It is presumed to be
written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state,
culture, and perspective of the common American citizen. It is often
considered as the American response to the tradition of the national
epic. (Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the first Great American Novels.)
Exile Literature
Dante, Conrad, Naboko, and countless others
Jewish Diaspora; Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
The German Jews, from 1939 onward represent largest source of exile literature
According
to Judith Thurman in her biography of Isak Dinesen describes émigré
literature which sounds similar to exile literature. See émigré
literature elsewhere in this document.
I wonder if Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, elsewhere on this page, might be seen as a form of exile literature?
Fin de Siècle
Decadence, Artifice and Aesthetics
From
wiki: “In literature, the Decadent movement—late nineteenth century
fin de siècle writers who were associated with Symbolism or the
Aesthetic movement—was first given its name by hostile critics, and then
the name was triumphantly adopted by some writers themselves. These
"decadents" relished artifice over the earlier Romantics' naive view of
nature (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Some of these writers were
influenced by the tradition of the Gothic novel and by the poetry and
fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.
Oscar Wilde gave a curious
definition: "Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole;
decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts." By this
definition, Charles Dickens would qualify as decadent, [citation needed]
because his "minor" characters often obscure the "major" ones—or at
least are more interesting than them. For example, consider Mrs Sarah
Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewitt.”
From the web: “Artifice
implies both art and agency, rather than "artificiality" as the opposite
of the natural. As aesthesis, art includes modes of making, doing, and
seeing. Artifice, when understood as art as well as acting or
performing, calls attention to the possibilities of inventing and
imagining new forms of life through the intertwinement of the aesthetic
and the political. Encompassing the imaginative, the technological, the
theoretical, and the artistic, artifice as a term emphasizes the
politics of art and the art of politics in the invention of life forms,
both individual and collective.”
From wiki: “From
the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a
slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British
thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the
aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at beauty.
Nineteenth Century Womanhood
Great
French and Russian portrayals of anguished, transgressing 19th century
womanhood, Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
(1877), but few know the German entry in this field, Theodor Fontane's
Effi Briest, a dry, quiet little masterpiece.
-- Derbyshire, Unknown
Quantity, p. 235
The Twentieth Century
Writers:
- Edith Wharton
- E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, 1910
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 1913
- James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
- F. Scot Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929
Also:
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, our daughter Laura gave me a softcover copy after I kept losing my copy, LOL.
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934
- Anaïs Nin, House of Incest, 1936; Winter of Artifice,
1939; for quite some time I was in an "Anaïs Nin" phase -- many books
and many biographies of her; most have been thrown away simply because I
ran out of storage room.
The Twentieth Century: The English Novel
The Georgian Period
1911 - 1936
World War I and its attendant disillusionment with 19th-century values
radically altered the nature of the novel. In search of greater
freedom of expression in English writers like E. M. Forster in Howard’s
End (1910), D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers (1913), and James Joyce in
Ulysses (1922) described more explicitly than ever before the conflict
between human intellect and human sexuality. Joyce, along with Dorothy
Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915 - 38) and Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), carried Freud’s discovery of the
unconscious into art by attempting to portray human thought and emotion
through the stream of consciousness technique.
Virginia Woolf, January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941:
Her novels directly challenged the Bildungsroman
James Joyce, February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941:
D.H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930:
Lytton Strachey introduced a new way of biography with The Eminent Victorians
The Twentieth Century: The American Novel
In the United States the profound postwar (WWI) dislocation of values
is evident in such novels as The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, about a romantic bootlegger whose version of the American
dream of success is shattered by a corrupt reality; The Sun Also Rises
(1926), by Ernest Hemingway, concerning a group of disillusioned
expatriates in Europe who find meaning only in immediate physical
experience; and The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner,
about the disintegration of a once-proud Southern family.
Note: Hemingway completed The Sun Also Rises in six weeks, writing at
his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas.
For now, I will place Henry Miller in this category; I don’t know
where else to put him. Having read Tropic of Cancer (published 1934) it
appears that it was writers like Henry Miller that paved the way for
modern American novels and the 20th century movies in which frank
language could be used. It took someone to be the first with such frank
language – language considered to be pornographic by many – but in
Tropic of Cancer, Miller was describing things as they really were, and
using language that he really used. He truly broke new ground, as far as
I know. One may argue that Henry Miller’s success was tied directly to
encouragement from Anaïs Nin.
Edith Wharton: Edith Newbold
Jones – “keeping up with the Joneses.” When you get into your Edith
Wharton stage, consider skimming Hermione Lee’s very long biography of
Edith Wharton, then read Ethan Frome, and then read her autobiography, A
Backward Glance.
[2019] From Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures:
I
think Fitzgerald absorbed the techniques and the attitude of the
emerging genre of hard-boiled fiction while he was intermittently living
in and close to New York City from the late winter of 1919 to the
spring of 1924. So much of the sturdy fabric of Gatsby — the criminal
underworld, the tough-guy lingo, the obsession with the past, the
violence, the doom-laden sense of fated-ness, the voice-over narration,
the death by drowning — were staples of the hard-boiled tales, including
the Alan Ladd Gatsby of 1949. The hard-boiled element in The Great Gatsby accounts for some of the dark magic of this very strange and un-American Great American Novel.
American Writers of the 20th Century
Hunter S. Thompson, in Hell’s Angels mentioned Nelson Algren. [A Walk on the Wild Side; which I discoverd in 2024 and began reading at that time.]
Nelson
Algren, 1950’s writer: “Novelist and reporter, poet and social
conscience through fifty years of drastic change in America, including
changes in literary fashion, Algren repeatedly located himself among
those who have stood up for the accused and the down-and-out: a
tradition in American literature that he saw extending from Walt Whitman
and Herman Melville through Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore
Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill to Richard Wright, Jack Conroy and himself
[this list should include Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, and later,
Hunter S. Thompson].
Insofar as he was a Chicago
writer, Algren took his place among a group of socially concerned
writers that included Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, James T. Farrell,
Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Edna St. Vincent
Millay.” [The “St.” in Edna’s name stands for Stephen.]
The Twentieth Century: The French Novel
The greatest masterpiece of the 20th-century novel in France is widely acknowledged to be Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
(1913 - 27), a monumental work in seven parts that is at once an
inquiry into the meaning of experience, a study of the development of an
artist, and a detailed portrait of life within a particular segment of
French society. Also important are Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), both fictional explications of existentialism.
In the late 1950s there appeared in France the so-called new novel,
in which traditional elements such as plot, characterization, and
rational ordering of time and space are abandoned and replaced by
flashbacks, slow motion, magnification of objects, and a scenario
format, all of which produce a mutant -- the novel influenced by films. New novelists include Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute.
The Twentieth Century: The Russian Novel
After
1917 Russian Revolution, much of the country’s literature reflected
Marxist ideology. Maxim Gorky was the leading exponent of social
realism. In 1933, Ivan Bunin became the first Russian to be awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel in the Soviet Union either
avoided offending the Communist party or, by reflecting a dissenting
outlook, avoided publication in the USS. Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic
series about the Don Cossacks, including And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), met the first qualification; Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (1957), about life in Russia from 1903 to 1929, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968) and First Circle
(1968), both realistic, powerful accounts of life under Stalin’s
regime, met the second and were published outside the Soviet Union.
The Twentieth Century: The Mystery
The
origin of the mystery is uncertain, but it can be traced back to
ancient times. As long as there has been crime, there has been mystery:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002344/History.html
The very first mystery / detective story was published in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe. The title of his book was The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
He inspired many others to write mysteries, including the famous Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about his well-known character, Sherlock
Holmes.
The Twentieth Century: The Modernists
The
great modernists (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books,
August 13, 2015): Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner.
Revolutionaries in technique, their subjects were intimately bound up
with their own lives and their own regions; the modernist is one who is
likely to use his intimate life as material for his art, shaping the
ordinary into the extraordinary.
The Modernists: a reaction to
the Industrial Revolution and how society was changing quickly in the
first three decades of the 20th century. They were concerned about the
loss of their “way of life” – a life of leisure, wealth, literature, art
– although they only saw the literature and art as being important.
Perhaps the best quick look at the Modernists is Stephen Klaidman’s Sydney and Violet, c. 2013. I read an advance copy.
It seems Sydney and Violet Schiff (he was a wealthy average novelist
who kept popping up during the birth of the Modernists; she as a
remarkable editor) were instrumental in moving the Modernists along. The
book revolves around the Schiffs, Marcel Proust, TS Eliot, and Wyndham
Lewis.
Violet’s favorite writer when she married Sydney was Henry James, p. 55.
On page 46: “The key sociopolitical distinction the modernists made
was between classical (conservative) and romantic (liberal). …
Modernists of the Pound, Eliot, and Lewis school were classicists (human
beings are limited animals with a fixed nature); many others were still
romanticists (humanity’s inherent goodness justified liberty for all).”
– paraphrased.
[“The modernists were hardly the first to
recognize the relationship between music and felicitous language. But
they believed this relationship transcended beauty, that it was more
than a pleasant sensation independent of meaning. Many of them believed
that along with concrete images musical elements were indispensable for
communicating feelings as precisely as possible. – p. 54 – 55]
The literary journal for the modernists’: TS Eliot’s The Criterion:
contributors were a Who’s Who of modernism: William Butler Yeats, Luigi
Pirandello, Ezra Pound, EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, WH
Auden, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, Herman Hesse, and Hart
Crane. (James Joyce about the only one not on the list.) -- p. 94 of
Klaidman’s book. [Elsewhere, I think Hart Crane is Harold Bloom’s
favorite — see The Daemon Knows.]
Klaidman says, p. 110, Joseph Conrad is “a godfather of modernism.”
One of bits of trivia I learned about the Modernists from Klaidman was
that they were obsessed with time (this explains, of course, Proust)
but then another Scottish poet with an incredible story, Edwin Muir
(1887 - 1959) who wrote in his diary, 1937 – 1939):
"I was born
before the Industrial Revolution and am now about two hundred years old.
But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in
1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in
1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it
was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been
burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and
remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to
overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time."
(Extract from Diary 1937-39.)
Edmund Wilson, in his landmark
and career-making book, Axel’s Castle [Commonplace Notes], writes about
six Modernist writers, more specifically the Symbolists:
W.B. Yeats
Paul Valéry
T.S. Eliot
Marcel Proust
James Joyce
Gertrude Stein
To Edmund Wilson’s list, add Virginia Woolf, as a modernist but not a
symbolist. I have not less than five books written by or about VW
sitting on my desk, ready to be read (summer, 2006), including The
Common Reader. [By December, 2006, I think I had at least a dozen
Virginia Woolf books (either books by Woolf or books about her or her
works). At this time, she and her works intrigue me the most. --
January 1, 2007] Woolf, herself, said she wanted to write in the style
of Joyce; I forget whether she stated she could do a better job at Joyce
than Joyce himself. I will most likely come across that diary entry
again some day. [Lots of notes on Woolf in this Commonplace Book.]
It is “impossible” to read Gertrude Stein’s first book, The Making of
The Americans. To some extent, I think she was “famous for being
famous.” She cultivated friendships with avant-garde writers and
painters, especially Picasso. She lived through two wars, WWI and WWII,
and experienced WWII up close and personal by remaining in France when
Americans were advised to leave. Despite being female and Jewish, she
survived the German Nazi occupation of France. Apparently she was a
great conversationalist, and a great speaker, and that’s probably what
helped establish her myth.
I had always been intrigued by the
author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and a couple of good
articles in The New Yorker got me started. Again, I think Gertrude
Stein is more interesting as a personality (“famous for being famous”)
than as a writer. [October 7, 2007: a new Gertrude Stein biography has
just been published – Two Lives. The author is Janet Malcolm and is it
she who wrote three or four articles for The New Yorker. So, although I
don’t have the four New Yorker articles, her book is now available.]
Another writer that might be considered a modernist, although she
wrote more conventionally, is Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen. She was
definitely a feminist; whether her writings revealed that or not is
something I have yet to discover.
Gorsky said that “Virginia
Woolf speaks for the modern period. Modernism is the most important
aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. Along with such experiments
as Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, and Lawrence, Virginia Woolf is a
prime representative of those so strongly affected by the tumultuous
transition to the current [20th] century.” According to Gorsky, at the
time of Virginia’s birth, “Victorian England was becoming increasingly
aware of the tumultuous change which introduced what today is called the
modern age. This period of upheaval witnessed frequently disruptive
events in history and literature. The breakdown of the traditional
Western family and of class structure, the coming of a major economic
depression, the accelerated shift from an agricultural to an urban and
industrialized society – these general trends were supported or
symbolized by specific occurrences, among them the death of Queen
Victoria, in 1901, the flights of the Wright brothers in 1903, and in
1914 the great climax of the first World War. At the same time,
startling new ideas were being promulgated by Carl Jung in anthropology
and psychology, by Sigmund Freud in psychology, by William James in
philosophy and psychology, by Henri Bergson in philosophy, by Albert
Einstein in the sciences, and by Sir James Frazer in anthropology.
However little or much the theories of these important thinkers may have
been understood by their popular audiences, there can be no question of
their impact. For example, Jung’s work suggested strange and universal
links among all people, an idea supported by Frazer’s study of myths
which repeat themselves from one community to another, from one culture
to another. The explorers offered support for each others’ ideas, and
the ideas themselves inflamed the curious and sensitive who learned of
the new discoveries.” Somewhere Gorsky stated that the transition from
the Victorian Age to the Modern Age was as remarkable as the transition
from the Dark (Medieval) Ages to the Renaissance Age. That is a
remarkable statement if one stops to think about it a moment.
****
Concepts of interior monologue, James Joyce: A Literary Life, Morris Beja, p. 67.
Concepts of “female writing,” James Joyce: A Literary Life, Morris Beja, p. 69.
The Confessional Poets
The
confessional poets (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books,
August 13, 2015): Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne
Sexton, Sylvia Plath, to a degree Elizabeth Bishop — rendered their
lives as art, as if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as
seemingly divers as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created
distinguished careers out of their lives, often retuning to familiar
subjects, lovingly and tirelessly reimagining their own pasts as if
mesmerized by the wonder of “self.”
The Twentieth Century: The Obelisk Press
Instrumental in publishing “modernist” writers in the first half of the 20th century when other publishers refused.
Reading the Wyndham Lewis biography (O’Keeffe) brought me to this via a Google search.
The Guardian’s review of Neil Parson’s Obelisk: A History of Jack
Kahane and the Obelisk Press, publication date: February 15, 2008
"Neil Pearson’s book is a work of enthusiastic bibliographical
scholarship, a brief biography, and a series of well-turned pen
portraits. . . . Pearson is as adroit a writer as he is watchable an
actor. . . . Everyone with an interest in literary history will enjoy
Pearson’s narrative. His portraits of minor figures such as Marjorie
Firminger, who had the misfortune to became infatuated with Wyndham
Lewis, are particularly touching and sympathetic."—Guardian
Book Description
Obelisk:
A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press details the history of
one of the most extraordinary—and controversial—publishing enterprises
of the twentieth century. Publisher simultaneously of the infamous
novels of the literary elite as well as low-budget erotica and “dirty
books,” Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press published the likes of Henry Miller,
James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, and D.H. Lawrence, alongside a lengthy list of
censor-baiting eccentrics like N. Reynolds Packard, the New York Daily
News’ Rome correspondent and the self-styled “Marco Polo of Sex.”
Here,
for the first time, is the story of this remarkable venture, which
captures some of the twentieth century’s most outrageous literary
personalities and their often scandalous exploits, including the failed
golf club society magazine run by Nin, Miller, and Lawrence Durrell and
the tortured relationship between Obelisk author Marjorie Firminger and
Wyndham Lewis. A richly illustrated cultural history of 1920s Paris, a
fully-narrated bibliography of works published by an unforgettable
literary institution, and a glimpse into the remarkable life of the
Press’s creator, Jack Kahane, The Obelisk Press is a publishing event
not to be missed by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century
literary lives and letters.
The Twentieth Century: The Surrealists
I
don’t know much about this genre yet; it appears Anaïs Nin may be the
prototype. Could she be considered the Ur-Surrealist? Zelda Fitzgerald
(1900 – 1948) would definitely be considered a surrealist. Surrealism
was a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s.
The
Surrealists (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books, August 13,
2015): the Surrealists considered the world a vast “forest of signs” to
be interpreted by the individual artist. Beneath its apparent disorder
the visual world contains messages and symbols — like a dream? Is the
world a collective dream?
Surrealist artists —> photography.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, Garry Winogrand, the
newly discovered Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, (whose strategy was “to go
where I’ve never been”), and numerous others.
The Twentieth Century: Symbolism
See Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 – 1930, (1931), which was a sweeping survey of Symbolism. It covered Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
(Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin came later in terms of publishing their first novels, in the mid- to late-1930’s.)
I wonder if I need to include a section on Edmund Wilson. Having read
Dabney’s biography and having read summaries of that book and the life
of Wilson on the web, it makes me wonder how I missed Wilson all these
years. And if I missed him, how many other people have missed him.
The Twentieth Century: Naturalism
While reading Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, I came across Stephen Crane. His first novel (novella) was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
From wiki:
“Stephen
Crane’s Maggie is regarded as the first work of unalloyed naturalism in
American fiction. According to naturalistic principles, a character is
set into a world where there is no escape from one’s biological
heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds
himself will dominate one’s behavior, depriving the individual of
responsibility. Although Stephen Crane denied any influence by Emile
Zola, the creator of Naturalism, on his work, examples in his texts
indicate that this American author was inspired by French naturalism.”
Naturalism and Realism
Naturalism
is a literary movement that emphasizes observation and the scientific
method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Novelists writing in the
natural mode include Emile Zola (its founder), Guy de Maupassant, Thomas
Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.
The Twentieth Century: Franz Kafka
Kafka:
- 1883 – 1924
- Age 41, tuberculosis
- Published posthumously:
- The Trial, published by Max Brod
- The Castle, completed and published by Max Brod
- Amerika, published by Max Brod
- The introduction by Max Brod to Amerika is particularly enlightening. Max Brod specifically notes that Kafka was NOT a surrealist; he wrote his introduction in 1940.
The Twentieth Century: Graphic Novels
Numerous websites. Graphic novels have probably been around since the 1940’s; considered by some to be of American origin.
The Twentieth Century: Gonzo Journalism
Of American origin, specifically: Hunter S. Thompson, in the 1950’s, first with Hell’s Angels.
I first read
Hell’s Angels,
and thus became acquainted with HST, in the summer of 2000, when I was
living in my office at the 1st Medical Group, Langley AFB, VA, as I
transitioned from commander at that hospital, to a staff position at the
Air Intelligence Agency, Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX. I was
incredibly depressed at this point in life.
The Twentieth Century: Theater
Eugene O’Neill: four Pulitzer prizes; first (only?) American playwright to be awarded Nobel Prize (1936).
Everything changed with Eugene O’Neill in Provincetown, Cape Cod, 1916.
From
Leona Egan: “Why this instantaneous approval of O’Neill? Most of the
artists and writers were familiar with the leading playwrights of
Europe, such as Strindberg and Ibsen, whose work had inspired O’Neill.
O’Neill had adopted the Europeans’ melancholy and introspective themes
to become America’s own apostle of woe.
Until
O’Neill, no American dramatist had brought the new genre to home
shores. He was the first to challenge the century’s materialism; the
first to stage the lower-class idiom and life on an American stage; and
the first to American playwright to work solely as an artist.
Many
of the innovative techniques that he later employed in his major dramas
– poetic use of light and sound, dialect, dramatic narrative – had
their beginnings in his germinal play (Bound East for Cardiff), the one he selected for his premier.” Eugene O’Neill was only American playwright to win a Nobel Prize (1936).
The Twentieth Century: Miscellaneous
1. I found the biography of Daphne du Maurier [Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller] by Margaret Forster particularly interesting.
Some highlights, maybe to be filled in later.
I first came across Daphne du Maurier in my “classic movie” phase, and
I happened to watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and was curious about the
author of that book.
Daphne was born in a literary family;
her grandfather was a writer, and her father was a successful English
playwright who plays were staged in London.
She therefore had
the name, the money, and the time, as well as the open doors of
publishers, to become a writer. She wrote much but is remembered most
for Rebecca, a novel, which was made into a very successful movie by
Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first movie made after he
moved to the US. He moved to the US because he felt Hollywood was where
the action was, where one’s name would be made in filmmaking.
Interestingly enough, one of her many short stories, The Birds was also made into a very successful movie by Alfred Hitchcock.
She married a major in the British Army, Tommy Browning, who rose to
the rank of Lieutenant General during WWII and who was responsible for
merging the gliders and the paratroopers into the 1st Airborne
Division. Tommy Browning was the subject of a book and movie, A Bridge Too Far,
in which the British were depicted as overstretching their men and
failing miserably when trying to re-take Arnhem in WWII. Browning,
after the war, became the comptroller for Princess and then Queen
Elizabeth. Daphne was a close friend of the Royal family.
Daphne is a minor author in the big scheme of things, but an important writer, nonetheless.
2. Monica Ali, Brick Lane
a. A recommendation from Colette Luscomb, Menwith Hill Station,
when I told her about my newfound enthusiasm for literature
b. This contemporary novel was an exception in my reading program;
before reading a whole lot of contemporary “stuff,” I want to read the
“classics”
c. I see this book, soft cover, frequently
featured at Borders. It must be relatively well read among contemporary
novels
Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, later Isak Dinesen.
Tim O’Brien: excellent novels about the Vietnam war, perhaps along the line of Ernest Hemingway. I’ve read Going After Cacciato and If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home; I think I might enjoy The Things They Carried.
Poetry: A Definition
New Yorker,
6 Nov 06, Robert Gottlieb, quoting a 1950’s publisher: “... a
freshness and liveliness of feeling, a gift for imagery, and a power of
expression that were quite exceptional -- in short, a poet.”
“Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion.” Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, c. 1990, p. 18.
From
wiki: Louise Bogan, 1897 – 1970; an American poet who felt that “lyric
poetry” if it at all authentic…is based on some emotion – on some
occasion, on some real confrontation.”
Paul Dirac, one of the
creators of quantum mechanics: “As a physicist I take what is
complicated and make it simple. But the poet does the very opposite.”
Personal
thoughts: one cannot be sentimental in novels (there can be sentiment,
but the author cannot be sentimental); however, poetry is all about
emotion, including sentimentality.
Poetry: Miscellaneous
Edna St Vincent Millay: first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (The Harp Weaver)
Love interest of Edmund Wilson, and others
Sylvia Plath:
the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (note: not just the
first woman, but the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously);
1982; she died 1963
Poetry
Faulkner (1897 - 1962) -- near contemporary of my maternal grandmother, Reka Flessner
- (Contemporary of Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
- “On the Demands of Writing Short Stories”
Q: Mr Faulkner, you spoke about The Sound and the Fury
as starting out to write a short story and it kept growing. Well now,
do you thin that it’s easier to write a novel than a short story?
A:
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in it and be
excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every
word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be
careless but in the short story you can’t. I mean by that the good,
short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second – it’s
because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to
be slovenly and careless. There’s less room in it for trash. It’s got to
be absolutely impeccable, absolutely perfect.
-- From Faulkner in the University
-- edited by Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner
The Villanelle
I think I recall seeing a reference to the villanelle earlier, but I
explored this form of poetry more seriously after reading Sylvia Plath’s
journals when she said she had written some villanelles.
According to wiki, “A villanelle is a poetic form which entered
English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French
models. A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third
lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the
third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A
villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one
concluding quatrain.
Poetry
Sylvia Plath
In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems.
In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University
discovered a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath in the archives
at Indiana University. She claims the 14-line Petrarchan sonnet, Ennui, was created from notes Plath wrote in a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Poetry
Stephen SpenderSpender.
Born 1909. Autobiography at age 40; written 1947 – 1950 at Frieda
Lawrence ranch overlooking Taos, New Mexico. A fellow classmate at
Oxford (one year his senior):
WH Auden
WH
Auden. Starting in his last year at Oxford and for three years spent
six months of every year (1930 – 1933) in Germany. Saw rise of Hitler.
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood, a close friend. Enjoyed T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway. The afterword he wrote for his autobiography, World Within World,
must be read before reading the autobiography. He wrote the
autobiography when he was 84 years old; he died the next year. He felt
his life was divided into two halves: pre-Spanish Civil War (late
1930’s) and post-Spanish Civil War. He was too young to fight, but old
enough to remember WWI; he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War;
did not fight in WWII as far as I know. I’ve not read any of his poetry,
only his autobiography.
ENGLISH ERAS
The eras:
- Elizabethan era: reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1558 – 1603, golden age of English history
- Jacobean era: reign of King James I (father of Charles), 1603 – 1642,
- [Shakespeare died about 1611]
- Jacobian: derived from Hebrew name Jacob, the original form of the English name James
- Caroline era: coincides with the Stuart period, 1603 – 1714;
- Coincides with reign of King Charles I, 1625 – 1642
- English Civil War, 1642 – 1651; Parliamentarians and Royalists
- English Interregnum, 1651 – 1660
- Began with the regicide of Charles I (1649; ended with restoration of Charles II, 1660)
LISTS
Book Lists
Other Lists
ESSAYS / RAMBLING THOUGHTS
RECREATIONAL READING: Connecting the Dots
The Romantic Period: 1798 - 1832
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) - Death of Göethe
May 24, 2005:
I am currently reading many, many books -- voraciously reading as a way
to stem off depression and a way to appear to be actively engaged in
something.
During the summer year between my junior year and
senior year in high school I attended a summer course at St Olaf
College, Northfield, Minnesota. The course was on the Romantic Period.
At the time, I had no clue what the Romantic Period was all about.
Either I was a bit dense or the instructors (at home and at St Olaf) did
not adequately explain what the Romantic Period was all about. [Looking
back on this, my Williston high school English teacher who had offered
me this opportunity to spend the summer studying the Romantic Period,
could have spent some time with me, giving me special instruction on
Romanticism. Of course, I could have done that on my own, but it never
occurred to me to do that.]
I now understand that period
very, very well, at least as JRR Tolkien would state, I have established
my myth as regards this period.
The Romantic Period is
generally agreed to begin with Wordsworth’s publication of the Lyrical
Ballads in 1798 and ended with the passage of the Reform Act in
Parliament (England) in 1832 . [ British poet whose most important
collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798), published jointly with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, helped establish romanticism in England. He was appointed
poet laureate in 1843.] [Göethe was born in 1749 and died in 1832.]
Regardless of whether I understood any of the Romantic Period that
summer at St Olaf -- and I don’t think I understood much -- the fact
remains that the phrase “Romantic Period” stayed with me, not far from
my daily consciousness.
How ironic, then, about 40 years
later, I end up in England, visiting the Brontë parsonage and museum, a
product of the Romantic Period. Earlier this year I went through my
Brontë phase (discussed elsewhere) but through Brontë I have been drawn
ever deeper into the Romantic Period. I love connecting dots and each
day it appears I find more dots to connect.
Briefly this is
where it stands. The dots (I will leave it to the reader to connect the
dots): The St Olaf summer course on the Romantic Period, 1965.
Visiting the Brontë museum in Yorkshire, 2003. Going through a Brontë
phase in early 2004. Reading Christopher Hitchen’s book review of a
newly translated version of the Russian novel, A Hero in Our Time, by
Lermontov. Not understanding that review (Christopher Hitchens can be
hard to understand) I did some background research on Lermontov and
learned that Lermontov took on the mantle of Pushkin; Pushkin, who
traced his growth and philosophy to Byron. That prompted me to some
background research on Byron to learn that he is one of the triumvirate
that exemplifies the Romantic Period: the triumvirate of Byron,
Shelley, and Keats. [Or as I now write: byronshelleyandkeats, like
lewisandclark, peanutbutterandjelly, byronshelleyandkeats.]
The dots continue: Mentioning to her that I enjoyed Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre, a friend [Colette Luscomb] suggested Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice. I completed my Austen phase -- not quite as expansive or as
extensive as my Brontë phase, but I can always return to Austen -- but
then somehow I learned of George Eliot. I don’t recall how I learned of
Mary Ann (Marian). These three women (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen,
and George Eliot) all published anonymously, and perhaps while reading
one of their bios George Eliot was referenced.
I asked Mary
Corbin, San Antonio, 2005 who had her master’s degree in British
Literature and taught British Literature most of her life, where to go
next. Among many works, she mentioned (and raved about Silas Marner by
George Eliot). I had read Silas Marner in high school but did not
recall it. I went to the half-price bookstore and bought a copy of
Silas Marner but saw a thicker novel by George Eliot that intrigued me
even more: Middlemarch. At the time of this writing, I am now halfway
through that novel and enjoy it immensely. [I read Silas Marner later.
To say that Silas Marner was incredible is an understatement. My
contemporaries remember Silas Marner being about “a creepy man” if they
remember the story at all. The story is so wonderful on so many
levels. I want to read it again; I now understand why people read great
books over and over.]
After background reading, going
through my Brontë phase, and now my Austen phase, I now find reading
these 19th century novels a bit easier. For example, I learn that the
term “Miss ______” designates the young woman as the elder daughter of
the family, and the one who the parents are eager to marry off first.
Once she is married, the next oldest daughter becomes the “Miss
_______.”
While reading these books, I somehow came across
Göethe. Perhaps I remembered that I read some of his works (probably
Faust) during that St Olaf summer. I never understood a thing I read in
Faust, I don’t remember any of it, and I certainly don’t know anything
about Göethe. [Even now I have trouble understanding it; it seems it
would help students immensely for professors to provide the background
necessary to understand the story; the fact they do not, suggests that
even professors have trouble understanding the story. Interestingly,
having read synopses of Faust and the biography of Göethe, suggests some
interesting similarities between the Faust myth and Göethe himself.]
So, one day, while surfing the internet, I find that Göethe's “official
biographer,” Eckermann published a book called Conversations with
Göethe. I ordered it, and find it intriguing. Perhaps more on that
later. Interesting, Göethe died in 1832, the year that historians
generally agree was the end of the Romantic Period. Coincidence? I’m
not sure. [In March, 2006, I began reading the 3-volume biography of
Göethe by Nicholas Boyle. Sebastian Vogt showed me the biography, in a
chance visit, to his and Ruth Robinson’s home.]
Göethe, in
Conversations with Göethe, makes numerous references to Byron. It
appears that the star in front of Göethe is Byron. Byron appears to be
the brightest dot, and centered among all the rest of the dots. I may
save my “Byron phase” for last.
Meanwhile, through unrelated
reasons, I am reading Volume I (and the only volume published to date)
of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Throughout the Letters, C. S.
Lewis references many of the same books I’m reading; early on (his high
school years) there are many references to the Brontës and Jane Austen.
His letters, in a vague sort of way, help connect some of the dots.
At the half-price bookstore, I also came across an old copy of
Norton's Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. The preface and
introduction do a great job providing further background to the Romantic
Period, the Victorian Period, and the 90’s.
Trivia – Connecting the Dots
1. Virginia Woolf – Septimus – Thomas Hardy
Martin Seymour-Smith in his biography of Thomas Hardy mentions a
“Septimus Brooke” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I don’t recall, and can
find no evidence, that Mr Brooke’s Christian name was ever provided in
the novel. Either Martin Seymour-Smith made an error (unlikely; but no
footnotes or bibliography to cross-check) or the serial of Middlemarch
included Septimus as Mr Brooke’s first name. Let’s assume Seymour-Smith
has it right, that Mr Brooke’s first name was Septimus.
Critics thought anonymously published novels by Thomas Hardy were in
fact by George Eliot [Thomas Hardy, 1840- 1928; George Eliot, 1819 –
1880].
Leslie Stephen (1832 – 1904) was the editor of the
magazine that published serializations by Thomas Hardy. In addition,
Hardy himself stated, according to Seymour-Smith, that “his [Stephen
Lewis] thinking had influenced him [Hardy] more than that of any other
contemporary.” – p. 182, Seymour-Smith.
Leslie Stephen was
Virginia Woolf’s father. It is not a stretch to think that Virginia
Woolf (1882 – 1941) would have heard of “Septimus” from her father.
In
Mrs Dalloway,
Clarissa’s doppelganger is a shell-shocked man named Septimus. The
dots don’t connect perfectly but Septimus is an unusual enough name to
suggest that there may be a connection between George Eliot – Thomas
Hardy – Stephen Leslie – Virginia Woolf.
