MONDAY, 2 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Poem I," by James Joyce, from Collected Poems (Viking)
I
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
There's music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of James Joyce, born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin (1882). He only wrote four books of fiction in his life, but they're all considered masterpieces: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
He was born into a middle-class family, but his father was a heavy drinker and couldn't hold a job. They moved from house to house in Dublin, each one smaller and cheaper than the last, until by the time James was a teenager they were almost living in poverty. He went to Catholic schools, and considered becoming a priest, but decided instead to go to college to study languages and literature.
Joyce almost became a professional singer. He came from a musical family, and learned piano as a child. Whenever he went to social gatherings in Dublin, he would entertain the guests by singing traditional Irish ballads, and he even sang in a few local concerts. When he was 21 years old, he still wasn't sure what to do with his life, and he entered a national tenor competition in Dublin. He pawned some books so he could pay the entrance fee, and then spent weeks taking voice lessons and learning songs. He ended up getting third place in the competition, and the judge recommended that he study music seriously. Joyce considered taking lessons from the best teacher in Dublin, but he finally decided that if he was going to be spending most of his time alone in a room, he would rather be writing stories than doing voice exercises.
Joyce thought that to become a truly great writer he would have to escape Ireland, which was still under British control at the time. He went to live on the Continent, first in Paris and then in Trieste. He wrote: "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning. ... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too."
His first work of fiction was the book of short stories Dubliners (1914). After he finished that he started writing the autobiographical novel that would become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The process took ten years, but the novel established Joyce as one of the best writers of his generation. It tells the story of the childhood and adolescence of Stephen Dedalus, who rejects an offer to become a priest so that he can try to become a writer. The book was revolutionary for its style: when Stephen is a small child, Joyce uses short simple sentences, and as Stephen grows older the language becomes more complex to reflect his growing maturity.
Joyce spent seven years writing his next novel, Ulysses, which many people consider to be his greatest work. He wrote most of it in Zurich during World War I. He would stay out late at night at cafés and bars, sleep late into the morning, and then spend the day writing and giving English lessons. He gathered the material for Ulysses from his own life. He based most of his characters on his friends and family members, and the story's action takes place in real places in Dublin. During the years he was writing Ulysses, friends would get angry with him because he always directed conversations toward the topic he happened to be writing about that day, hoping to steal their ideas. He carried around dozens of small slips of paper in his wallet, and he would make tiny notes on them throughout the day. The next morning, he would decipher his notes with a magnifying glass, and then decide where to include them in the novel.
Ulysses is about a day in the life of two Dublin men—Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man whose wife is cheating on him. The two men go about their daily business, and finally meet each other at the end of the day. One of the climactic moments comes when Bloom and Dedalus urinate together in Bloom's backyard. Joyce used Homer's Odyssey to come up with the elaborate structure for the novel, and he envisioned Bloom as a modern day Odysseus—but instead of being lost at sea for ten years and returning home to a faithful wife, Bloom wanders around Dublin for a day and returns home to an unfaithful wife.
Ulysses is famous for being one of the first works of fiction to make extensive use of internal monologue. Many chapters consist almost entirely of a character's thoughts, with no narrator to help the reader make sense of them. At one point, Bloom is sitting drinking wine in a restaurant and remembers one of the first times he kissed his wife, who he knows is now having an affair with another man:
"Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum... . Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still... . Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling ... She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.Joyce set the action of Ulysses on June 16, 1904 as a tribute to the love of his life, Nora Barnacle, since it was on that day that they had their first date. Joyce had first seen Nora ten days earlier, walking down a Dublin street. She was tall and beautiful, and Joyce approached her and asked her out on a date. They were supposed to meet on June 14, but she stood him up. Joyce wrote her a note that said, "I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected." She agreed to go on a walk with him two days later, on June 16, 1904. Today, June 16 is known in Ireland as Bloomsday, and thousands of people come to Dublin every year to celebrate Joyce and visit the sites mentioned in Ulysses.
Me. And me now."
TUESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "My Captain," by Maxine Cassin.
My Captain
Dear Captain Kangaroo,
It is all so quiet now
until I hear the news.
Then eulogies begin.
To think we never knew
how long you were in pain—
and no one wrote to you
to say that we are grown
and busy in our lives—
raising children too.
Your memory survives.
In the storage shed,
in corduroy once red,
by the ears he hangs—
his spectacles askew—
that bunny from the past
I once hung out to dry.
From the corner of my eye
I see him now and then
remembering our days—
the carrot-colored sun—
our future all ablaze.
Now that day is done.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Paul Auster, born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). He's the author of The Book of Illusions (2002), Timbuktu (2000), and many other novels. After he graduated from college, he got a job on an oil tanker, saved all the money he made, and then went off to Paris to become a writer. He started out translating French poetry and writing his own poems. After ten years, he had published a few collections of poetry, but he barely had enough money to pay for food. For a year, he quit writing and started looking for other ways to make money. He even invented a card game and pitched it to toy companies.
Then, in December 1978, he had an epiphany while watching a dance recital in New York City. He later said, "The simple fact of watching men and women moving through space filled me with something close to euphoria." The next day, he started writing again, but instead of writing poetry he wrote fiction. His first novel, City of Glass (1985), was published six years later. It's the first novel in his "New York Trilogy," which also includes Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1987).
It's the birthday of novelist James A. Michener, born in New York City (1907). He's best known for his epic historical novels such as Hawaii (1959), The Covenant (1980) and Poland (1983). His parents abandoned him soon after he was born, and he was raised by a poor widow named Mabel Michener. They moved from house to house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, sometimes in the middle of the night on just a few minutes notice. His foster mother read him Dickens and Balzac, and he grew to love their thick, old-fashioned novels.
Michener worked at a series of teaching and editing jobs until he was 36 years old. Then, in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy, and the next year he was sent to the South Pacific. One night, after he almost crashed his plane, he couldn't sleep and went for a walk along the airstrip of his ship. It was then that he decided that if he made it back home, he was going to quit his job as an editor and become a writer. He later remembered thinking, "When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man."
He came up with the idea for a series of stories about the war called Tales of the South Pacific (1947). He said he wanted to show young men what life in the military was really like. He stayed up late at night and typed it out on old envelopes and the backs of old letters from home. When he got back to the States, he gave the papers to a publisher at Random House without retyping it. They published it, and Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Two years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein made it into the musical South Pacific, and it made so much money that Michener was able to devote the rest of his life to writing.
Michener sold more than 75 million books in his lifetime. He has written novels about Israel, Colorado, Spain, Maryland's Eastern Shore, South Africa, Poland, Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico and the Caribbean. Most of his stories unfold across decades or even centuries, and include several pages of historical detail.
Michener said, "I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains."
It's the birthday of writer Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1874). When she was 30 years old she moved to Paris, and lived there for almost the rest of her life. She once said, "America is my country and Paris is my hometown." She covered the walls of her house in Paris with paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, and others. Her house became known as "The Salon", and writers and artists came from all over to get advice and encouragement from her. Ernest Hemingway once said, "Gertrude was always right."
She would hold dinner parties and then stay up afterwards to work on her own novels and essays. But she wasn't very well known as a writer until she published her autobiography, which she called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in 1933. It was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly and became a huge bestseller in the United States. Stein became a household name, and the next year she returned to America for the first time in over 30 years, to go on a lecture tour.
Stein said, "Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really."
It's the birthday of philosopher Simone Weil, born in Paris (1909). T.S. Eliot called her "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints." After getting a degree in philosophy, she worked in fields and factories, so she could write about what it was like for manual laborers. She gave most of her money to the unemployed, living on as little as possible. She wrote essays on political, social, and religious issues, but not many of them were published during her lifetime. During World War II, she fled to the United States and then to England. There, she was hospitalized with tuberculosis, and refused to eat more than she thought an average French person was getting on wartime rations. When she died soon afterward, it was ruled a suicide. After her death, her essays were published in Gravity and Grace (1947) and Waiting for God (1950).
Weil said, "Whenever, in life, one is actively involved in something, or one suffers violently, one cannot think about oneself."
WEDNESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "After Love," by Maxine Kumin, from Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).
After Love
Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Stewart O'Nan, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). He worked for years as an aerospace engineer, and when he came home from his work every day he would go down to his basement and write. He learned to write by copying out sentences from writers like James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Franz Kafka, and then trying to break them down into their component parts. He wrote some short stories and the drafts of two novels, but he wasn't satisfied with them.
Then, one summer, he got a job doing research on the writer John Gardner. He sifted through boxes of Gardner's drafts and revisions, and it was then that he realized how much work went into writing fiction. He later said, "It was not brilliance or facility that was necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper."
In 1994, he published his first novel, Snow Angels, about a murder in a small town in western Pennsylvania.
It's the birthday of fiction writer Robert Coover, born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). He's best known for his novel The Public Burning (1977). It's a satire about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Characters in the novel include Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers and Uncle Sam. Much of the book is narrated by Richard Nixon, who is portrayed as a slightly crazed, power-hungry politician. At one point, Nixon says, "In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities-why did I keep forgetting that?" Coover finished The Public Burning in 1975, but his publisher was afraid it was libelous, and it wasn't published for another two and half years. It became an instant bestseller. Coover's most recent novel is The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut (2002).
Coover said, "We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates."
It's the birthday of poet Gavin Ewart, born in London (1916). He published his first collection of poems, Poems and Songs, in 1938, but then he quit writing poetry for almost twenty years. He served in World War II, and when he came back he worked in publishing and advertising. A poetry editor encouraged him to start writing again, and finally, in 1964, he published his second book of poetry, a collection of light verse called Londoners. He went on to publish several more collections before his death in 1995. He once wrote a poem called "The Lover Writes a One-Word Poem." The word was "You!"
It's the birthday of novelist MacKinlay Kantor, born in Webster City, Iowa (1904). He was a prolific writer who produced over 40 books, including historical novels, westerns, crime novels, nonfiction and collections of poetry. Kantor wrote about the Civil War in novels such as The Jaybird (1932), Long Remember (1934), and Arouse and Beware (1936). He first became interested in the war when he was ten years old, after a salesman left some sample pages of a Civil War encyclopedia in his parents' house. He later discovered that his great-grandfather was an officer in the Union Army, and one of his aunts was a friend of Ulysses S. Grant. As a teenager, Kantor marched with the Grand Army of the Republic in Memorial Day parades and became an expert fife player. He spent more than 25 years researching his novel Andersonville (1955), about the Confederate prison camp where 50,000 Union soldiers were held. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.
Kantor's novel Glory for Me (1945), about the lives of three World War II veterans in a small Midwestern town, was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which won nine Academy Awards in 1946.
It's the birthday of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). His family wasn't religious, and they were shocked when he decided to become a clergyman as a young man. When Hitler began his rise to p1ower in the early '30s, Bonhoeffer was appalled by the complacency of most German Christians. He founded a new church called the "Confessing Church", which actively opposed Hitler's policies. Hitler declared the new church illegal in 1937, and two years later Bonhoeffer fled to the United States. After just a few months, though, he decided it was morally irresponsible to stay in America while there was so much suffering in his home country. He wrote to a friend, "I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people."
When he returned to Germany, he renounced his pacifism and joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. He took a cover job with German Intelligence, which gave him access to classified information, but he was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1943. He spent most of his time in prison writing sermons, letters, poetry, and fiction, much of which was published in 1951 in the book Prisoner for God. He developed the idea of "religionless Christianity," arguing that many Christians spend too much time hoping for salvation and not enough time living a life of virtue. He wrote, "To renounce a full life and all its joys in order to escape pain is neither Christian nor human." Bonhoeffer died after two years in prison.
THURSDAY, 5 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Sonnet: Daffodils," by Gavin Ewart, from Or Where a Young Penguin Lies Screaming (Gollancz).
Sonnet: Daffodils
Wordsworth really loved daffodils. He said they were flashers.
Certainly they must be the most exhibitionistic flowers
there are.
trumpeting their presence in yellow—by far the most
visible colour.
I grant that after a long hard winter
it's warming to see snow-drops and crocuses in that iron earth
and the very first daffodils (what a cliché) seem a
resurrection,
something it even seems appropriate to make a fuss about.
They look so perfect, though a bit self-conscious.
After a week or two, however, when Spring is established,
and everywhere you look there are oceans of daffodils
as arrogant as pop stars, they begin to seem ordinary.
You take them for granted. Like a love affair fading
they shrivel and go crinkly, papery and tired.
The Spring too (teenagers witness) has its own kind of
boredom.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of playwright John Guare, born in New York City (1938). His first job after college was with MGM in Hollywood, but he hated it and joined the Air Force so he could travel around Europe. After a couple of years, he hitchhiked from Paris to the Sudan, filling dozens of pocket-sized notebooks with drafts of plays. It wasn't long after he got back that he had his first big hit, with House of Blue Leaves (1970). That was followed by a pop musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), which started out being performed in public parks from the back of a truck, and ended up winning the Tony for Best Musical.
Guare's biggest success in recent years has been Six Degrees of Separation, which opened in 1990. It's about a rich white couple whose lives are changed by a young black man claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. The title of Six Degrees of Separation refers to the claim that it takes only six steps to genetically link any two people on earth. A character in the play says: "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names. I find that A] tremendously comforting that we're so close and B] like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection."
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Naked Lunch (1959), William S(eward) Burroughs, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1914). After he got a degree in English from Harvard, he went to medical school, studied anthropology, served in the Army, and worked as private detective. Finally, he settled in New York City, where he met his future wife, Joan Vollmer.
One day in 1946, Vollmer introduced him to two young Columbia University students, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It was the beginning of the Beat movement in literature. Kerouac said he found Burroughs "so interesting and intelligent and worldly wise that he seemed like some sort of intellectual spiritual man of distinction to us." The three men started meeting at Burroughs's apartment to talk about literature and philosophy. Burroughs was 35 years old and hadn't considered a career in writing, but Kerouac and Ginsberg were both trying to be writers, and they convinced Burroughs that he should write something too. His first book was an autobiography called Junky (1951), and Ginsberg used his connections to help get it published.
Burroughs was involved in the underworld of New York, and he eventually fled with his wife to Mexico. One night, at a party, his wife balanced a glass on her head and dared Burroughs to shoot it off like William Tell. Burroughs was drunk, and he accidentally shot his wife in the forehead. The authorities ruled her death an accident, and Burroughs went to live in Tangier, where he wrote most of his best-known works, including Naked Lunch.
Naked Lunch is a series of sketches about drugs, addiction, sex, politics and language. When Burroughs delivered the manuscript to his publisher, he plopped the sketches down in random order, deciding that it didn't matter how they were arranged. As a result, you can pick up Naked Lunch and start reading anywhere, and jump forward and backward whenever you want, without disrupting the flow of the novel. It was a national bestseller, and Burroughs went on to write many more novels, including The Soft Machine (1961) and The Western Lands (1987).
It's the birthday of priest, sociologist and novelist Andrew Greeley, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1928). He became a priest at the age of 26, and went on to get a degree in sociology from the University of Chicago. His first books were sociological studies of religion in America, with titles like Religion and Career (1963). Then, in 1981, he came out with his first novel, The Cardinal Sins, about the sordid underbelly of upper-class Catholic society in Chicago. He said he was inspired to write fiction by reading other Catholic authors like G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh. He's gone on to write many more controversial bestsellers about Catholicism in America, including Fall From Grace (1990) and September Song (2001).
It's the birthday of a French woman famous for writing letters, Marie de Sévigné, born in Paris (1626). When she was 18, she married a nobleman who had good connections but not much money. By the time he was killed in a duel, six years later, she had made a name for herself in Paris salons as a brilliant conversationalist and letter writer. She wrote thousands of letters to friends, family members, and social acquaintances. When her daughter moved away from her, she wrote her a letter almost every day for more than 25 years. By the end of her life, her letters were already beginning to be copied and circulated, and she wrote them with the knowledge that they would be seen by many people.
Her letters were learned, witty, long-winded, and full of gossip. One began: "I am about to tell you the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most bewildering, the most unheard of, the most singular. ... I cannot bring myself to give it away. Guess."
FRIDAY, 6 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," by Christopher Marlowe.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote, "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove"— Christopher Marlowe, born in Canterbury, England (1564). He's the author of plays such as The Jew of Malta (c. 1590) and Dr. Faustus (c. 1594), and he was one of the most prominent playwrights of his lifetime. When he began his career, most English plays were written in rhyming couplets, but Marlowe wrote in blank verse. Other playwrights, including Shakespeare, followed his example.
He lived an exciting life. He was a child prodigy and managed to get in to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, even though he was the son of a shoemaker. His school records show that he was frequently absent from class because he was working for Queen Elizabeth's secret service. There is some evidence that he continued to work as a secret agent for the Queen for the rest of his life. In the 1590s, while he was producing his plays, church officials began to accuse him of espousing atheism, a charge that could be punished by torture. On May 18, 1593, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but he died in a fight over a bar bill before the police could find him.
Conspiracy theorists have wondered about Marlowe's death for centuries, and there is a group called the Marlovians who believe that Marlowe's death was actually faked by the Queen in order to protect Marlowe from the Church. They believe the Queen actually whisked Marlowe away to Italy, where he continued writing plays. They also believe that Marlowe used an actor named Shakespeare as a front man to cover up his identity. Marlovians point out that many of Shakespeare's plays mention places in Marlowe's home district of Kent, while they never mention the places near where Shakespeare was born. A tavern mentioned in Henry IV actually belonged to Marlowe's sister. Marlovians also point out that many of Shakespeare's plays deal with themes of exile and false identity. Few Shakespeare scholars, however, take this conspiracy theory seriously.
It's the birthday of lexicographer and writer Eric Partridge, born in Poverty Bay, New Zealand (1894). He wrote some of the first books about British slang, including A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937), Usage and Abusage (1942) and English Gone Wrong (1957). He served as a soldier in the Australian infantry during World War I, and he was fascinated by the ways soldiers used language, constantly making up new words and phrases. After the war, he became a professor of literature, but found after two years of teaching that he was just repeating himself in the classroom, boring everybody, including himself. So he became a freelance writer instead.
He published a few books of literary criticism before he finally decided to write about the slang of the British soldiers that had fascinated him so much during the war. His early articles about slang were popular enough that he was able to write his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). At the time, slang was not considered a serious subject of study, and many slang words were not included in dictionaries. Partridge felt that this language was vital and needed to be recorded, and his dictionary was a big success. He went on to write books about the slang used in Shakespeare's plays and the history of clichés and catchphrases, as well as the language of crooks, racketeers, beggars, tramps and convicts.
It is partially thanks to Partridge that slang is now taken seriously by linguists and lexicographers. In 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary included most of Partridge's examples of slang in its second edition.
It was on this day in 1937 that John Steinbeck published his novel Of Mice and Men, the story of two migrant farm workers, George Milton and his simple-minded friend Lennie Small, who dream of owning their own place and living off the fat of the land. In the novel, George Milton says, "We'd have a little house an' a room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an in the winter we'd keep a fire goin' in it. ... An when we put in a crop, why, we'd be there to take the crop up. We'd know what come of our planting. ... It'd be our own, an' nobody could can us."
He wanted his novel to reach the very workers he was writing about, but he knew that many poor farm workers were illiterate. He had seen theater troupes performing for farm labor camps, and he got the idea that he could write a novel that was made up almost entirely of dialogue, so that it could also be produced as a play.
Steinbeck had almost finished his first draft of the novel when his dog tore the manuscript to shreds. He wrote to his editor, "Two months work to do over again. ... I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically." He eventually rewrote the novel and it was published on this day in 1937. The play was produced soon after, and both the novel and the play were huge successes. Of Mice and Men has remained one of Steinbeck's most popular novels, and it's been made into a movie three times, in 1939, 1981, and 1992.
SATURDAY, 7 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "The Remorse for Time," by Howard Nemerov, from New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press).
The Remorse for Time
When I was a boy, I used to go to bed
By daylight, in the summer, and lie awake
Between the cool, white, reconciling sheets,
Hearing the talk of birds, watching the light
Diminish through the shimmering planes of leaf
Outside the window, until sleep came down
When darkness did, eyes closing as the light
Faded out of them, silencing the birds.
Sometimes still, in the sleepless dark hours
Tormented most by the remorse for time,
Only for time, the mind speaks of that boy
(he did no wrong, then why had he to die?)
Falling asleep on the current of the stars
Which even then washed him away past pardon.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, born Laura Ingalls near Pepin, Wisconsin (1867). When she was 63 years old she started writing about her pioneer childhood in books such as Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Little House on the Prairie (1935).
It's the birthday of the poet David Ignatow, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Russian immigrants, and he was inspired to become a writer by his father's love of literature. He said, "My father would sit relaxed in his soft chair under a floor lamp and reminisce of his readings in Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov in their original language. The reverence with which he spoke of them as men and writers impressed itself upon me indelibly." But when the stock market crashed in 1929, his father forced David to work in the family bindery company. He eventually became the president of the company.
While working at the bindery, he wrote poetry whenever he got the chance, and published several collections about the daily lives of urban workers. When his first collection, Poems, was published in 1948, William Carlos Williams wrote a review of it that said, "These are poems for the millions, in the cities and out of them, [for] those who would read . . poems such as these, if only they could get to them; manna in the wilderness." Ignatow went on to write many more collections of poetry, including Rescue the Dead (1968) and I Have a Name (1996).
It's the birthday of novelist (Harry) Sinclair Lewis, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885). His mother died when he was six years old, and he never got along with his father. Growing up in Sauk Centre, he was a gawky kid, uncoordinated and odd looking, and his only talent seemed to be imitating the voices of local teachers and priests. He never felt comfortable in his hometown and tried to run away to fight in the Spanish American War when he was thirteen.
As soon as he graduated from high school, he moved away to the East Coast for college and then almost never stopped moving for the rest of his life. As a young man, he traveled to Europe on a cattle boat, tried to get a job working on the Panama canal, lived on a socialist commune, and traveled all over the United States working as a journalist.
He published short stories in popular magazines and produced five novels, none of which got any attention. He said, "I lacked sense enough to see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue writing." He took a trip back home to Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and while he was there, he felt as though everyone was judging him and gossiping about him. The experience gave him the idea for a novel about a rebellious woman named Carol Kennicott who moves to a small town called Gopher Prairie and tries to bring it culturally up to date, only to fail miserably. That novel was Main Street (1920), and it was a literary sensation. No one had ever written such a fierce attack on small town American life. It was published at a time when Americans were moving in huge numbers from small towns to big cities, and it captured the way most young Americans felt about the small towns they'd grown up in.
Lewis described the people in his fictional Gopher Prairie as "A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
The town of Sauk Centre, which Lewis hated so much when he was growing up, now holds a festival every summer called Sinclair Lewis Days. The town also has a museum called the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, and a street called Sinclair Lewis Avenue.
It's the birthday of Charles Dickens, born in Portsmouth, England (1812). He's the author of many classic novels, including David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861). When he was eleven years old, his father was thrown into debtor's prison, and young Charles was forced to spend several months working in a factory. He never forgot the experience, and decided that for the rest of his life he would do whatever it took to be successful so that he'd never have to work a factory job again.
When he was a young man, he supported himself as a freelance journalist, writing short essays about the cabdrivers, beggars and clowns he met in lower-class areas of London. He eventually collected these essays and published them in the book Sketches by Boz (1836). The book got him some attention, and a publisher offered Dickens a job writing for a kind of serial comic book, with pictures provided by the famous artist Robert Seymour. Dickens and Seymour argued constantly about the storyline, but then Seymour committed suicide after the first issue, so Dickens took over. The first issue sold 500 copies, and the final installment sold 40,000. The chapters were bound together and published as Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837).
Dickens went on to publish all his novels in serial form. He published each chapter as soon as he finished it, which allowed him to shape the story based on his readers' reactions. When readers didn't like his novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), he abruptly sent the main character to the United States. He often found himself struggling to meet his deadlines. Once, he ran out of writing supplies and had to rush to the stationery store to buy more paper. He overheard a woman at the store inquiring about the next installment of his novel, which he was at that moment buying the paper to write.
Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time. Unlike Jane Austen or Sir Walter Scott, he didn't use a pseudonym, and so he became one of the first literary celebrities. One of the reasons his novels were so addictive and popular was that they had such elaborate plots and sub-plots. Some people have argued that by pioneering the serial novel, he also created the prototype for the soap opera. He gave his fictional characters some of the most peculiar and memorable names of English literature, including Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Wackford Squeers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Inspector Bucket, Volumnia Dedlock, Abel Magwitch, Miss Havisham, and Edwin Drood.
He was also a master prose stylist. His novel Bleak House (1853) begins: "Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."
SUNDAY, 8 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Lighting Your Birthday Cake," by Philip Appleman, from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996 (University of Arkansas Press).
Lighting Your Birthday Cake
Of course we didn't come this far
without leaving a trail, but it's only
footprints on a beach; one wash
through our memories, and it's gone. Strange,
so much passion, commitment, doomed
to be drifted over like
Troy and Babylon, pitiful echoes now
of all those eager heartbeats.
You've always cared so much,
about us, sure, but really everything—
hungry kids, dolphins, over-
population, and the old foes: batterers, bishops,
gunslingers, chauvinists—nothing escapes
your rage or compassion; earthquakes in Asia
shake our midnight bedroom. You always knew
that the bright bird of sympathy
is the only godliness on earth,
hovering over these grubby streets
on better wings than angels'. Now
I can't believe in a world without
your bonfire of outrage, small flame of anguish,
pink glow of happiness.
Remember how I need your warmth:
as you blow out these candles, make a wish
to keep the fires burning.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Philip Appleman, born in Kendallville, Indiana (1926). He's the author of many books of poetry, including Kites on a Windy Day (1967) and Let There be Light (1991), and novels such as Apes and Angels (1989).
It's the birthday of Robert Burton, born in Leicestershire, England (1577). He only wrote one important book in his lifetime, but many still consider it a masterpiece: The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). His intention was to write a book about depression, in order to distract himself from his own depression, but he ended up writing a book about everything that came into his head, from literature and philosophy to diet, exercise, and the pleasure of kisses.
He called the book, "a rhapsody of rags gathered from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out," and he filled it with quotations from more than 1300 writers. He wrote a preface that is more than a hundred pages long, and an index that included entries such as, "BALDNESS", "CROCODILES", and "SWALLOWS."
The book was incredibly popular when it was published, and Burton spent the rest of his life adding to it. James Boswell said that it was the only book that could get Samuel Johnson out of bed "two hours sooner than he wished to rise." It fell out of print in the nineteenth century, but it has been republished periodically ever since. The most recent edition came out in 2001.
It's the birthday of one of the fathers of science fiction, Jules Verne, born in Nantes, France (1828). He's best known for his novels A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Growing up, he was obsessed with machines and travel. He loved to go to factories and to the shipyard, and when he was ten years old he tried to hop a boat to the West Indies, but his father caught him just before the boat set sail.
He fell in love with literature as a young man, and hoped to write important novels in the style of Victor Hugo. But in order to make money he was forced to write adventure stories and scientific articles for popular periodicals. Then, one day, he got the idea of combining an adventure story with his scientific knowledge. It was the height of the industrial revolution, and technology was on everybody's mind, but most writers who had written fiction about technology had taken a pessimistic view, predicting that technology would destroy the soul of humanity. Verne was an optimist, and he began to write a series of novels about people traveling around the world in exciting new vehicles, the first of which was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1869).
He anticipated many inventions in his fiction, including automobiles, airplanes, helicopters, fax machines, tanks, skyscrapers, televisions, and picture phones. His novels were hugely popular. When he wrote Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), a shipping company persuaded him to have his hero ride on one of their ships in the novel. It was one of the first examples of product placement advertising.
Jules Verne said, "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real."
It's the birthday of novelist John Grisham, born in Jonesboro, Arkansas (1955). He's one of the best selling novelists in history, and his legal thrillers include The Pelican Brief (1992) The Rainmaker (1995) and The King of Torts (2003). His first success came with his second novel The Firm (1991), about a young law student who takes a job with a firm, which he later comes to realize is connected to the mafia. The novel was a huge bestseller, and Grisham went on to publish another novel every year for the rest of the 1990s, all of them bestsellers.
Some critics believe the reason he's so successful is that he writes about the corrupt American legal system, which so many Americans love to hate. Between 1965 and 1990, the number of lawyers in the United States increased from 296,000 to 800,000, at a rate more than four times as fast as the increase in general population. During that same period, lawyers became the targets of jokes and newspaper editorials, and people began to say that America had become the most litigious society in the history of the world. Grisham began publishing his novels at the height of anti-lawyer feeling in this country, and in most of his novels he writes about innocent people fighting for their lives against a vast army of evil lawyers.
It's the birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). Her father died when she was a little girl. Her mother had an emotional breakdown from grief and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. Elizabeth spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father's family in Massachusetts. For the rest of her life, she was obsessed with travel, though she never felt at home anywhere.
She was shy and quiet in college, but during her senior year she mustered up all her courage and introduced herself to the elder poet Marianne Moore, whom she deeply admired. The meeting was awkward at first, but then Bishop offered to take Moore to the circus. It turned out they both loved going to the circus, and they both also loved snakes, tattoos, semiprecious stones, exotic flowers, birds, dress-making, and recipes. Moore became Bishop's mentor and friend, and Bishop said that every time she talked to Moore she felt, "uplifted, even inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I'd done my best with it, no matter how many years it took."
Moore persuaded Bishop that poems could be precise descriptions of ordinary objects and places, and didn't have to be about big ideas. Bishop began to write poems about filling stations, fish, and the behavior of birds. Her poems rarely revealed her emotions. When other poets like Robert Lowell and John Berryman began to write confessional poems, she said, "[I] just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."
Bishop's first collection of poetry, North & South, came out in 1946. That same year she took a car trip to New Hampshire, but as she was driving, she impulsively decided to drive all the way to Nova Scotia, which she hadn't seen in more than fifteen years. The trip brought back all kinds of memories from her childhood, and it inspired many of her best poems, including "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "The Moose." When she moved to Brazil a few years later, she found herself thinking about almost nothing but Nova Scotia.
She was an extremely slow writer, and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "One Art" for more than fifteen years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right.
