MONDAY, 15 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Reunion," by Marie Howe, from What the Living Do (W.W. Norton).
Reunion
The very best part was rowing out onto the small lake in a little boat:
James and I taking turns fishing, one fishing while the other rowed
the long sigh of the line through the air,
and the far plunk of the hook and the sinker--
lily pads, yellow flowers
the dripping of the oars
and the knock and creak of them moving in the rusty locks.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the ides of March. In the Roman Calendar, each month had three division days: kalends, nones, and ides. For months that had thirty-one days, the ides occurred on the fifteenth of the month. Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 B.C. A group of Roman senators, led by Cassius and Brutus, thought Caesar was becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and they devised a plot to assassinate him at a senate meeting on March 15. Many of the conspirators were close friends of Caesar, including Brutus. At the meeting, the group of senators circled around Caesar and pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly, one of them grabbed Caesar's robe and yanked it off his neck, which was the signal to begin the attack. All of the conspirators were hiding daggers, and they each stabbed him as he staggered across the floor.
It's the birthday of Andrew Jackson, born in the Waxhaw settlement on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina (1767). He began his political career as a Tennessee congressman, but he wasn't nationally known until the War of 1812. After he led the defeat of the pro-British Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, he was placed in command of the defense of New Orleans, which was expecting an invasion by the British Army. The city was racked with malaria and dysentery, and Jackson fell sick soon after he arrived. When the British invaded on January 8, 1815, he was barely able to stand up without assistance. Still, he led the American troops to a decisive victory. He had his soldiers dig fortifications on short notice so they could fire on the British without being hit themselves. Over two thousand British soldiers were killed, compared to just eight Americans. As it happened, the Treaty of Ghent had been signed two weeks before that, and the British had already agreed to stop fighting, but news of the treaty had not reached New Orleans. Jackson became a national hero, and his victory helped to establish America as a legitimate international power.
He ran for president in 1824 and won a plurality of votes, but since no one got a majority the vote went to the Congress, and they chose John Quincy Adams. Jackson spent the next four years building a team of supporters and campaigning for the 1828 presidential election. He portrayed himself as a champion of the common man and appealed to working class voters, especially frontiersmen who were settling in the West. The election drew more than three times as many voters to the polls as the previous election, and Jackson won in a landslide. The 1828 election was what split the Democratic-Republican Party into two separate parties. John Quincy Adams became the leader of the Republican Party, and Andrew Jackson became the leader of the new Democratic-Republican Party, which we know today as the Democratic Party.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Ben Okri, born in Minna, Nigeria (1959). He lived mainly in England until he was seven years old, when his family moved back to Nigeria. He grew up surrounded by story-tellers; he said, "We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories."
After secondary school, Okri worked at a paint store, where he would write stories and poems on his lap under his desk when he was supposed to be writing letters to paint distributors. In the evenings, he wrote for Nigerian newspapers and magazines. He would see people laughing and arguing about his stories on the subway on the way home from work, and he thought that if he published a work of fiction he could move people even more. He finished his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), by the time he was eighteen years old. He moved to London in 1977, living for a time in subway stations and with friends. He published more novels and short stories, but he didn't really get much attention until his novel The Famished Road came out in 1991. It's about a Nigerian child who hovers between the real world and the world of spirits, and it describes the horrible poverty and oppression in modern Nigeria. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Britain's best novel in 1991.
Okri said, "Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. . . . The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens's characters are Nigerians. . . . Literature may come from a specific place, but it always lives in its own unique kingdom."
It's the birthday of biographer Richard Ellmann, born in Detroit, Michigan (1918). He's best known for his biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. He was also the first American to teach English literature at Oxford University. His father and both of his brothers were lawyers, but he decided to study literature at Yale. He became interested in William Butler Yeats, and at the end of World War II he went to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow, who gave him access to stacks of letters and manuscripts. He spent the next year writing a biography of Yeats, which was published in 1948.
One of the documents that Yeats's widow gave Ellmann was an account Yeats had written about his meeting in 1902 with a young writer named James Joyce. Joyce supposedly ended the meeting by saying, "You are too old for me to have any effect on you." Ellmann was intrigued; he began reading all of Joyce's works and researching his life. He spent ten years tracking down documents and interviewing friends of Joyce, and in 1959 he published a biography, James Joyce. It won the National Book Award in 1960, and it's been called the greatest literary biography ever written.
He spent the last twenty years of his life working on a biography of Oscar Wilde. Ellmann suffered from Lou Gherig's disease and pneumonia during the last few months of his life, but he continued to work on the biography on his deathbed, using special machines to type out revisions. Oscar Wilde was published in 1986.
TUESDAY, 16 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Black Stone Lying On A White Stone," by César Vallejo, translated by Robert Bly, from Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems (Beacon Press).
Black Stone Lying On A White Stone
I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside--
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.
It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.
César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also
with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Alice Hoffman, born in New York City (1952). She's known for mixing fantasy and magic with everyday reality, in novels such as White Horses (1982), Illumination Night (1987) and The River King (2001). Her first best-selling novel was At Risk (1987), about an eleven-year-old girl who contracts the HIV virus from a blood transfusion. The girl's body gradually deteriorates, and she begins to be feared by people in the community—parents don't allow their children to interact with her, none of the orthodontists in the area are willing to take off her braces—but a local psychic eventually helps her learn to accept her fate. Hoffman's latest novel, Blackbird House, is scheduled to come out later this year.
Hoffman said, "When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."
She also said, "No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written."
It's the birthday of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, born in Port Conway, Virginia (1751). He's known as the "Father of the Constitution." At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he was the leading voice of the Federalists, who argued for a strong central government to take precedence over the governments of the individual states. He introduced the "Virginia Plan," which called for a strong executive branch, long terms in the Senate, federal courts, and a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one part of the government would ever become too powerful. The "Virginia Plan" became the basis of our Constitution.
Madison said, "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
It was on this day in 1850 that Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, was published. Hawthorne finished writing the book on February 2, 1850. He was exhausted, and felt sick from spending so much time indoors, without exercise. The next evening, he read the conclusion to his wife; he said, "It broke her heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache, which I look upon as a triumphant success."
Hawthorne thought The Scarlet Letter was too bleak to be published by itself, and planned to include it in a collection with a few other short stories. His publisher thought it was good enough to stand alone, but Hawthorne still had doubts about it. He wrote, "Is it safe, then, to stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance? A hunter loads his gun with a bullet and several buck-shot. . . . It was my purpose to conjoin the one long story with half a dozen shorter ones; so that, failing to kill the public outright with my biggest and heaviest lump of lead, I might have other chances with the smaller bits."
2,500 copies of The Scarlet Letter were published on March 16, and they sold out within ten days. Critics loved it, and it established Hawthorne as one of the best writers in America.
The Scarlet Letter begins with Hester Prynne emerging from the town prison as a crowd of people look on. Hawthorne wrote: "When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A."
It's the birthday of poet César Vallejo, born in Santiago de Chuco, Peru (1892). As a young man, he worked as a miner, and then as a cashier at a sugar plantation that employed slave laborers. He was horrified by the exploitation of poor workers, and he later became a socialist. In 1920, he found himself caught up in a festival in his hometown that deteriorated into lootings and arsons. He was mistakenly arrested and thrown in jail, and he spent his next four months writing the poetry that would appear in his first major collection, Trilce (1922).
After he was released from prison, he moved to Paris, where he slept on subway trains and park benches for months. He was constantly sick and depressed, and he couldn't find a steady job. He wrote to his brother, "I . . . have the desire to work and to live my life with dignity. I am not a bohemian: poverty is very painful, and it's no part for me, unlike for others. . . . My will veers between the point at which one is reduced to the sole desire for death and the intention of conquering the world by sword and fire."
Vallejo eventually founded a literary magazine in Paris, and published several more collections of poetry. He spent the last years of his life promoting Russia's communist policies, and trying to gain support for the rebels in the Spanish Civil War.
WEDNESDAY, 17 MARCH, 2004
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Poems: "The Trees," by Philip Larkin, from Collected Poems (Noonday Press).
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is St. Patrick's Day, the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland. There will be parades and celebrations in cities all across the world, but the holiday has always been most popular in the United States, especially in cities with large Irish-American populations. The first large-scale St. Patrick's Day celebration in America took place in Boston in 1737, and that city still draws huge crowds for its annual parade. In Chicago, they dye the Chicago River green every year. And in New York City, there's a big parade that goes up Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to 86th Street, past St. Patrick's Cathedral.
St. Patrick was born around the year 385, in a village in Wales. When he was sixteen, a group of Irish pirates raided his village and took many of the young men back to Ireland to work as slaves. Patrick worked for six years as a herdsman in the Irish countryside. In his sixth year, he escaped and made his way back to Wales. But, according to his autobiography, soon after he got back home he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity. That's eventually what he did, but first he went to France to visit monasteries and study religious texts. After twelve years in France, he went back to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools, and churches and converted much of the island to Christianity.
It's the birthday of playwright and novelist Paul (Eliot) Green, born on a farm near Lillington, North Carolina (1894). He's known for writing about conflicts between whites and blacks in the southern United States, at a time when it was hugely controversial to write about such things. He grew up on his father's farm in North Carolina, where he picked cotton, shucked corn and cut wood side by side with black laborers. He bought as many books as he could and read them as he plowed the fields. He taught himself how to play violin by taking a correspondence course and practicing in the pine woods. As a young man, he played semi-professional baseball until he saved enough money to go to the University of North Carolina.
Several of his early one-act plays had all-black casts, which was almost unheard of at the time and allowed many black actors to act in their first starring roles. His first full-length play was Abraham's Bosom, produced by the Provincetown Players in 1926. It's about a black man who, against the opposition of his white half-brother, opens a school in rural North Carolina to try to improve the education of blacks in the area. He ends up killing his half-brother, and is then killed by members of the Ku Klux clan. Abraham's Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. In 1941, Green collaborated with Richard Wright to produce a dramatic version of Wright's novel Native Son (1940). The first production of the play was directed by Orson Welles.
In 1937, Green began a new movement in American theater when he wrote the first of what he called his "symphonic dramas," The Lost Colony, about the first British settlement in America. It combined drama with music, dance, poetry, and folklore, and had a cast of more than 150 people. It was first produced in a huge amphitheater on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, and there are still performances of the play every summer. In the following decades, many southern cities commissioned him to write "symphonic dramas" about events in their local history. He would do research on the city, find a story he thought looked interesting, and write a play about it. He even composed much of the music for the plays and helped to build many of the amphitheaters where his works were performed.
It's the birthday of Kate Greenaway, born in London (1846). She was one of the most famous illustrators of children's books in the nineteenth century. Her father was a wood engraver for the London magazine Punch, and Kate spent six years working as a designer of Christmas and Valentine cards. One of her cards sold more than 25,000 copies in less than a month, but she didn't make very much money off them. She began drawing illustrations for children's books in 1877, specializing in little children wearing bonnets and playing in the English countryside. The 20,000 copies of her first book sold out in just a few weeks, and 70,000 more were printed. She became hugely popular; people sold pirated copies of her books in Europe and America, and manufacturers came out with Kate Greenaway wallpaper, plates, vases, scarves, dresses, and dolls. She eventually made enough money to have a mansion built for her in one of the nicest neighborhoods in London, where she spent the rest of her life drawing illustrations, painting watercolors, and walking through her gardens.
It's the birthday of novelist and children's author Penelope Lively, born in Cairo, Egypt (1933). She's the author of the novels The Road to Lichfield (1977), Treasures of Time (1979) and According to Mark (1984), among many others.
Lively wrote, "We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. . . . Words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."
It's the birthday of Frank B. Gilbreth, born in Plainfield, New Jersey (1911). He worked for years as a journalist for newspapers in New York, North Carolina and South Carolina—but he's best known for a book he wrote with his sister about his family, Cheaper by the Dozen (1949). His father, Frank Gilbreth Sr., was a renowned construction engineer and efficiency expert, and his mother was also an efficiency engineer. In Cheaper by the Dozen, Gilbreth wrote about how his parents applied the same time- and energy-saving techniques that they developed for their jobs to raising their children. They planned a family of twelve children, and held weekly "family councils" to work out the family budget by giving contracts for household tasks to the lowest bidder. They eliminated all of the repetitive aspects of education by having their children skip grades and holding them out of unnecessary classes. And instead of writing to all of their relatives, they made a family magazine with articles contributed by each of the children, which was sent out to the entire extended family. Cheaper by the Dozen was a bestseller in 1949.
THURSDAY, 18 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring," by John Updike, from Collected Poems, 1953-1993 (Knopf).
The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring
When winter's glaze is lifted from the greens,
And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing,
Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens
In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.
This year, he vows, his head will steady be,
His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal;
And so they are, until upon the tee
Befall the old contortions of the real.
So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from
Hibernal months of television sports,
Perfects his serve and feels his knees become
Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.
Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss,
Which shall be high, so that the racket face
Shall at a certain angle sweep across
The floated sphere with gutty strings--an ace!
The mind's eye sees it all until upon
The courts of life the faulty way we played
In other summers rolls back with the sun.
Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of John Updike, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). He's a prolific writer and the author of many collections of short stories and novels, including The Centaur (1963), Of the Farm (1965), Marry Me (1976) and Roger's Version (1986). He grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, where he was an only child and suffered from hay fever, psoriasis, and a bad stammer. He took refuge in writing in drawing. His family subscribed to The New Yorker magazine, and when it came to the house each week, he would pore over the articles and stories and cartoons. First he wanted to become a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and then he decided that he wanted to be a writer for the magazine. He went to Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon, and he published his first short story in The New Yorker the year he graduated.
He moved to New York City so he could work for The New Yorker full-time, and he wrote light verse, stories, and "Talk of the Town" articles. He had wanted to live in New York and write for The New Yorker his entire life, but after a couple of years there he discovered that he didn't like the competitiveness of the literary scene, so he moved with his family to Ipswich, a small town in Massachusetts. His first book was published the following year—a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958). That was followed by his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), about a fair held by the elderly residents of a poorhouse.
Updike's first big success was the novel Rabbit, Run (1960), which tells the story of a man named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. He's in his mid-twenties and lives in the suburbs, his wife is an alcoholic, he's not happy with his job, he's scared of the responsibility of raising a family, he finds himself pining for the days when he was a high school basketball star—and so one day he just runs away. Updike went on to write three more "Rabbit" novels, following Rabbit's life through the course of the second half of the twentieth century—Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990). His latest novel, Seek My Face (2002), was published two years ago.
Updike said, "I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."
It's the birthday of poet Stéphane Mallarmé, born in Paris (1842). He was one of the leaders of the Symbolist movement in poetry, whose members wrote poems around a central image, or symbol. He was an anglophile, and as a young man all he wanted to do was teach English to French students. Then, in 1861, he came across Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems, The Flowers of Evil. He fell in love with the rhythm of the lines and the beauty of the words, and he set out to write poetry himself. He was known for spending years on his poems, revising them until he thought they were almost perfect, and so he ended up publishing only a few books of poetry in his lifetime. His best-known work is The Afternoon of a Faun (1865), which presents the thoughts of a faun on a beautiful summer afternoon. It inspired a tone poem by Claude Debussy and a painting by Edouard Manet.
It's the birthday of Wilfred Owen, born in Shropshire, England (1893). He's known for his poems about the violence and cruelty of war, and he was killed while fighting in World War I. Just four days before Owens died, he knew the war was coming to a close. The Germans were in full retreat and the French had joyfully welcomed the British troops. Owens wrote in a letter to his mother, "It is a great life. I am more oblivious than yourself . . . of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here." He was killed by enemy fire a few days later, on November 4, 1918, just a week before the end of World War I.
It's the birthday of George Plimpton, born in New York City (1927). He was the son of a diplomat and went to college at Harvard, where he edited the humor magazine, the Lampoon. He went to Paris in the spring of 1952, staying in a small apartment and living the life of a bohemian. Along with his friends Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Guinzburg, and Donald Hall, he founded the literary magazine The Paris Review. Most small literary journals at the time focused on criticism and reviews, but Plimpton wanted The Paris Review to be filled with poems and short stories by young, upcoming writers. It was the first magazine to publish stories by Philip Roth, Terry Southern, and Samuel Beckett. It also published fiction by writers like Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence when their work was still considered obscene in America. Plimpton continued to edit The Paris Review from his apartment in Manhattan up until his death last year.
FRIDAY, 19 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "The Bath," by Russell Edson, from The Tormented Mirror (University of Pittsburgh Press).
The Bath
A man was taking a bath in a tub of turkey gravy; floating a rubber duck to while away eternity. Eating mashed potatoes, dipping forkfuls in his bath . . .
It was gorgeous, the whole thing, he thought, me in soak with a duck, having mashed potatoes and gravy, while out there a whole crazy world . . .
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Irving Wallace, born in Chicago, Illinois (1916). He was the son of Russian immigrants, and decided at a young age that he wanted to be a journalist. He sold his first article, "The Horse Laugh," to Horse and Jockey magazine when he was fifteen. After graduating from high school, he and some friends traveled to Honduras, hoping to be the first Americans to find the legendary "Fountain of Blood" hidden in a remote mountain jungle. He did find it, and wrote about it for several newspapers, but it turned out that the fountain's water was red because of mineral deposits. After working in Hollywood for a few years, he got an idea for a novel about the impact of a sex survey on suburban housewives in California. It became The Chapman Report (1960), and it was a huge bestseller, in part because it was so controversial. The book was made into a movie starring Jane Fonda in 1962.
Wallace went on to write a string of best-selling novels, including The Man (1964), about the first African-American president of the United States, and The Fan Club (1974), about the abduction and enslavement of a movie star. He also published many books of non-fiction, including The Nympho and Other Maniacs (1971), about women in history who have defied conventions. He was one of the best-selling authors of his lifetime. He died in 1990.
It's the birthday of playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute, born in Detroit, Michigan (1963). He was the son of a truck driver and a hospital receptionist, and he became interested in morality at a young age. He went to church and Bible study, even though his parents didn't, and he chose to attend Brigham Young University even though he wasn't Mormon. He said, "I liked the challenge of going somewhere so strict. I found it refreshing. You weren't surrounded by people smoking and swearing. It was this wave of niceness." He later converted to Mormonism. While in college, he staged a production of David Mamet's play Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and he loved the strong reaction it got. He thought that the purpose of drama was to make people confront the ordinary evil that they usually didn't notice, and he started to write about misogynists, homophobes, and philanderers. He moved to New York and started producing plays. In 1992, during a performance of his play Filthy Talk for Troubled Times, he saw an audience member stand up and shout, "Kill the playwright!" LaBute said it was one of the best theater experiences he'd ever had.
In order to make his first movie, In the Company of Men (1997), he borrowed 25,000 dollars from two of his friends who had received insurance money from a car accident. He shot the movie in eleven days, with only two takes per scene. He submitted a black and white video version of the film to the Sundance Film Festival, and it was accepted. The film won the Filmmaker's Trophy and received a standing ovation. He's gone on to write several plays that he's turned into movies, including Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) and The Shape of Things (2003).
It's the birthday of novelist Philip Roth, born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a crowded Jewish neighborhood, and he always loved listening to the conversations of his neighbors. He said, "In warm weather, people sat on the stoops and on beach chairs in the driveways. [At night] you'd be sweating, trying to sleep, and you'd hear them, you'd hear their conversation all the time, and it would be very comforting." At an early age, he began to rebel against the expectations of his community, where all the parents demanded that their kids would become successful doctors and lawyers without losing touch with their cultural roots. He said, "Newark [was] the battleground . . . between the European family of immigrants . . . who clung to the rigorous orthodoxy and the [American] children who wanted to be rid of all that because they sensed immediately that it was useless in this society."
After high school, he left Newark to go to college in Pennsylvania, because, he said, he wanted to see, "the rest of America." He went on to the University of Chicago to study English literature, and it was there that he began to write his first short stories. He published a few stories in small literary journals, and then in 1959 he published his story "Defender of the Faith" in The New Yorker magazine. When the magazine came out with his story in it, he said, "I'd open it and close it, and look at it from here and look at it from there, and read it, read it and then the words would just blast out of my mind and it all made no sense. It was terribly thrilling." But a few days later, his editor told him that the magazine had received hundreds of angry letters from Jewish readers, including one from the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that Roth had insulted the Jewish race by writing about a selfish and conniving Jewish character.
He published his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it got good reviews and won several awards. But a few years later, he went to speak at a university in New York City, and the audience attacked him, shouting that he was writing anti-Semitic literature. When he tried to leave the stage, a crowd surrounded him, shouting and waving their fists, and he barely got away without being hurt. Later that night he said, "I'll never write about Jews again." He worked on a novel with no Jewish characters called When She Was Good (1967), but it wasn't any fun to write, and he realized that he couldn't give up on writing about his background. He figured that if everyone thought he was offensive, he might as well try to write a book that was as offensive as possible. He set out write a novel in the wild, obscene voice that he remembered from his childhood friends. He had started psychoanalysis at the time, and he got the idea of writing the book from the point of view of a patient on his psychoanalyst's couch.
That book became Portnoy's Complaint (1969), about Alexander Portnoy—his obsession with sex, and his struggles with his Jewish parents, especially his mother. It begins, "She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." It was one of the most sexually explicit books ever published, and it became one of the best-selling books of the 1960s. Jewish critics attacked Roth for his portrayal of Jews, and others attacked him for his obscenity, but he had decided that he no longer cared if he offended his readers. He said, "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."
He has gone on to write many more novels, most of them narrated by a fictional writer named Nathan Zuckerman, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). His most recent novel is The Dying Animal (2001).
Roth said, "The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress."
SATURDAY, 20 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "startled into life like fire," by Charles Bukowski, from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (Black Sparrow Press).
startled into life like fire
in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes
he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree
neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn
if I were all the man
that he is
cat--
if there were men
like this
the world could
begin
he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth is tilted on its axis, so as it travels around the Sun each pole is sometimes tilted towards the Sun and sometimes tilted away. It is this tilt that causes the seasons, as well as the shortening and lengthening of daylight hours. On this day, the north and south poles are equally distant from the sun, so we will have almost exactly the same amount of daytime as nighttime. For the next few months, we in the Northern Hemisphere will begin the slow tilt toward the sun that will bring longer days, warmer weather, blossoming flowers, green leaves, and everything else.
It's the birthday of the poet Ovid, born in the village of Sulmo, just east of Rome (43 B.C.). He came from a wealthy family, and his father sent him to Rome to study rhetoric so that he could become an orator. Ovid began a legal career, but he quickly gave it up for poetry. At a time when other poets were flattering soldiers and politicians, he made his name with a book of poems about seduction, The Amores (c. 16 B.C). The Roman emperor Augustus had just instituted a new family values program in the Roman empire, encouraging fidelity and good manners. Ovid openly defied the emperor by writing a poetic how-to manual about adultery called The Art of Love (c. 1 B.C.). It made him the most popular poet in Rome. Ovid's poetry encouraged people to pursue love before all other things, and he became an enemy of the government.
After having written many light, popular works, Ovid began his masterpiece, The Metamorphoses (c. 8 A.D.), a collection of all the Greek and Roman myths that deal with transformation, told in chronological order from the origin of the universe to the death of Julius Caesar. It begins, "Of bodies changed to various forms I sing: / Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring."
Ovid had just completed The Metamorphoses when he received word that Augustus had banished him from Rome. Historians do not know precisely what crime he committed, but he had to spend the last years of his life on the edge of the empire, in a tiny outpost on the shore of the Black Sea. In a letter from exile, he wrote, "The country here is grotesque, the people savage, the weather awful, the customs crude, and the language a garble. . . . [The people] all carry knives at their belts and you never know whether they're going to greet you or stab you. . . . Among such people your old friend, Ovid, the dancing-master of love, tries to keep from hysterical laughter and tears."
The Metamorphoses went on to become one of the most popular works of classical literature, influencing writers such as Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. It helped preserve many of the myths of Ovid's day, including the story of Venus and Adonis, Echo and Narcissus, Pygmalion, and King Midas.
Ovid wrote: "There's nothing constant in the world,
All ebb and flow, and every shape that's born
Bears in its womb the seeds of change."
It was on this day in 1852 that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. It was the first widely read novel that attempted to portray the lives of African-American slaves. The Mexican War had just ended, and there was a fierce debate about slavery in the United States. Huge areas of land in the West were being settled and turned into states, and people fought bitterly over whether they would be slave states or free states. In the years before she began writing her book, Stowe lived in Cincinnati, where she met and got to know many fugitive slaves fleeing from the South. Her husband was a conservative Bible scholar who believed that abolitionists were too radical, but the more abolitionists that Harriet met, the more she felt persuaded by their ideas.
Then, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which punished anyone who aided or abetted a slave's escape from his or her master. Stowe was outraged, and she decided she had to aid the cause of abolition. She wrote, "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject. . . . But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."
The book was an immediate sensation, selling more than three hundred thousand copies in its first year and more than three million copies by the start of the Civil War. It was translated into thirty-seven languages, and Stowe traveled the world talking about it.
It's the birthday of playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in Skien, Norway (1828). He is generally considered to be the father of modern drama. His father was a wealthy merchant in Norway's timber trade, but when Ibsen was eight years old his father went bankrupt, and the family had to move to a rundown farm outside of town. Their family friends stopped talking to them, Isben's father became abusive, and his mother fell into depression. When he was sixteen, Ibsen left home and never saw his family again. He worked for a while at a pharmacy, writing poetry on the side, and then moved to the capital to try to make it as a playwright. He got a job as assistant stage manager for a new theater, where it was his job to produce a new drama each year based on Norway’s glorious past. He produced a number of plays, but none got any attention. Overworked and on the edge of poverty, he applied to the government for a stipend to travel abroad, and got it. He spent the next twenty-seven years living in Italy and Germany.
He found that by leaving his homeland, he could finally see Norway clearly, and he began to work on creating a true Norwegian drama. At a time when most people were writing plays full of sword fights and murders, Ibsen started to write plays about relationships between ordinary people. He used dialogue rather than monologues to reveal his characters' emotions, and he stopped writing in verse. He said, "We are no longer living in the age of Shakespeare. . . . What I desire to depict [are] human beings, and therefore I [will] not let them talk the language of the gods."
One of Isben's first realistic plays was A Doll's House (1879), about a woman named Nora who refuses to obey her husband and eventually leaves him, walking out of the house and slamming the door in the final scene. When it was first produced, European audiences were shocked, and it sparked debate about women's rights and divorce across the continent. It also changed the style of acting. At the time, most actors were praised for their ability to deliver long poetic speeches, but Ibsen emphasized small gestures, the inflection of certain words, and pauses, and he inspired a new generation of actors to begin embodying the characters they played.
A Doll's House made Ibsen a controversial celebrity across Europe. When he published his play Ghosts (1881), about a man with venereal disease, it was so scandalous that no one would produce it onstage for two years. A London newspaper called it, "An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly." But eventually, after writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde began calling him the greatest living playwright, audiences began to accept his work as literature.
After publishing several more plays, including The Wild Duck (1885) and Hedda Gabler (1890), he finally moved back to Norway, where he had become a national hero, and lived there for the last fifteen years of his life.
SUNDAY, 21 MARCH, 2004
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Poem: "Permanently," by Kenneth Koch, from Selected Poems, 1950-1982 (Vintage).
Permanently
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Each Sentence says one thing—for example, "Although it was a dark
rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure
and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the
green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window
sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from
the boiler factory which exists nearby."
In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat--
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach, Germany (1685). He came from a family that had produced musicians for seven generations. Both his parents had died by the time he was ten, so he went to live with his older brother, a professional organist who taught him to play a variety of keyboard instruments. He went to the local music school, where he sang in the boys' choir, and by the time he was eighteen he got his first job as a church organist. While working at his first job, he often got in trouble for wandering off to nearby towns so that he could hear performances of other famous organ players. He had a short temper, and once got into a swordfight after calling one of the players in his orchestra a "nanny-goat bassoonist." Members of his congregation were annoyed by his habit of improvising while playing hymns, which made it difficult for people to sing along.
He eventually left his first job and spent several years traveling around Germany, giving performances and winning competitions. He developed a reputation as one of the best organists in the country. A prince at one of his performances was so impressed that he gave Bach a diamond ring from his own finger. Bach spent several years as the court organist at Weimar, and when he decided he wasn't happy and tried to resign, the Duke had him thrown into prison for four weeks. He eventually moved to Leipzig, where he worked as the city's director of church music for the rest of his life, and where he composed most of his major works. He earned a decent living in Leipzig, but he had a grueling workload. He had to write a cantata every month, so in order to get ahead of the deadlines, he wrote one every week for the first two years. In addition to serving as organist and musical director at church services, he had to teach a boys' class in Latin and music, and he was continually frustrated by his undisciplined students and the inexperienced musicians he had to work with.
Despite all his difficulties, he managed to compose some of his greatest works of music, including The Passion According to St. John (1723), The Passion According to St. Matthew (1729), Mass in B minor (1733), and the Goldberg Variations (1742). During his lifetime, almost no one appreciated his music. He was composing baroque music just as baroque music was going out of style, and people thought of him as hopelessly old-fashioned. When he died in 1750, he was hailed as a great virtuoso on the organ but nothing more.
In 1829, the composer Felix Mendelssohn staged a revival performance of The Passion According to St. Matthew, and Bach finally began to be recognized as a genius. Later, Robert Schumann helped to publish Bach's complete works, and people realized that even the stylistic exercises he wrote for his music students were complex and innovative.
Bach said, "Music . . . should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamor and ranting."
It's the birthday of journalist, novelist, and memoirist Ved Mehta, born in Lahore, India, which is now part of Pakistan (1934). His father was a doctor who had been trained in England, and who became an important figure in India's public health service. When Mehta was four years old, he contracted meningitis and went blind. He spent the next ten years adjusting to his blindness, while all around him India was moving toward independence. Then, when he was fifteen, his father sent him to the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, Arkansas. In Arkansas, his teachers realized how smart he was, and they taught him to develop his touch and hearing, and especially his memory. He went on to college and eventually graduate school at Harvard, where he began to write his first book, the memoir Face to Face (1957), about his blindness and his journey from India to the United States. The book got great reviews, and after contributing a few articles to The New Yorker, he became a staff writer for the magazine.
He went on to write many books of fiction and non-fiction, but he's best known for his books of autobiography, including Walking the Indian Streets (1960), about his first trip to India after living in the United States for ten years, and The Ledge Between the Streams (1984), about his experience of India's independence and the formation of Pakistan. His most recent book is Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island (2003).
