MONDAY, 12 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Some Glad Morning," by Joyce Sutphen, from Naming the Stars (Holy Cow Press).
Some Glad Morning
One day, something very old
happened again. The green
came back to the branches,
settling like leafy birds
on the highest twigs;
the ground broke open
as dark as coffee beans.
The clouds took up their
positions in the deep stadium
of the sky, gloving the
bright orb of the sun
before they pitched it
over the horizon.
It was as good as ever:
the air was filled
with the scent of lilac
s
and cherry blossoms
sounded their long
whistle down the track
It was some glad morning.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition, for supporting the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a book called Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs, which argued that the sun was at the center of the universe and that the earth revolved around it once a year, while also rotating on its axis. For the next fifty years, most people didn't believe Copernicus; it seemed obvious that the earth wasn't moving at all, and that it was the sun that moved from east to west across the sky each day.
Galileo came to the conclusion that Copernicus was right when he was still a young man. He thought it was ridiculous that the Church had decided that the earth was the center of the universe without the support of scientific evidence. In 1597 he wrote to the astronomer Johannes Kepler, "Like you, I accepted the Copernican position several years ago and discovered from thence the cause of many natural effects which are doubtless inexplicable by the current theories." But Galileo knew that he would risk public ridicule if he supported Copernicus's theory, so he kept his opinions to himself and a few friends.
In 1609, Galileo collected even more evidence for the Copernican theory when he invented the refracting telescope. Many people were already using telescopes, but Galileo's was more than twenty times more powerful than the strongest to date. He set up his new telescope in the garden behind his house, and from it he observed the surface of the earth's moon, sunspots, and the four moons orbiting Jupiter, which provided a model for the planets orbiting the sun.
Galileo started sharing his discoveries at dinner parties and public debates in Florence, where he was living at the time. He thought he would be able to convince everyone that the earth moves around the sun, but many scientists and church officials still didn't believe it. In 1610 he wrote to Kepler, "My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who . . . have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?"
In 1613, he published Letters on the Solar Spots, which explicitly defended the Copernican theory of the solar system. A Florence priest named Lorini began regularly preaching against the "Galileists" in his sermons, and in 1615 he filed a complaint against Galileo with the Roman Inquisition. The next year, an Inquisition committee declared that it was heretical to hold the view that the sun is the center of the universe. They warned Galileo that if he continued to defend that view, he would be brought to trial.
Galileo remained silent on the Copernican theory for the next seven years. But then, in 1623, a new Pope was elected, Pope Urban VIII, who was known to be a supporter of the arts and sciences. Urban VIII told Galileo that he was free to discuss the Copernican theory, as long as he treated it as a hypothesis rather than a truth.
Galileo spent the next five years working on his magnum opus, the 500-page Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). In his book, Galileo presented a dialogue between two men, one who argued that the sun and the planets move around the earth and one who argued that the earth and the planets move around the sun. He was careful not to openly criticize the Church's official position, but in 1630 the secretary of the Vatican told him he would have to revise the preface and conclusion to make it more clear that he wasn't contradicting the official theory. Galileo started to think that his book might never be published; he wrote in a letter, "The months and years pass, my life wastes away, and my work is condemned to rot."
Finally, in February of 1632, the Church allowed the book to be published, and it was an immediate success. But just a few months later, Galileo got word that the Pope was angered by the book; he thought Galileo had intentionally ridiculed him by putting the Church's official views into the mouth of a simple-minded man. The case was referred to the Inquisition, and in 1633 Galileo was brought to Rome to undergo his trial. Galileo was already something of a celebrity, and the Pope wanted to make a statement to anyone who dared to challenge the views of the Church.
For over two weeks in April of 1633, Galileo was imprisoned in a small cell and interrogated by the Inquisition. He was tired of fighting against authorities; he wrote, "I curse the time devoted to these studies in which I strove and hoped to move away somewhat from the beaten path. . . . I feel inclined to consign [my writings] to the flames and thus placate at least the inextinguishable hatred of my enemies."
In late April 1633, he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a more lenient sentence. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was officially banned by the Church, and Galileo was sentenced to an unlimited period of house-arrest in his home in Florence. He gradually went blind, and died in 1641.
Galileo said, "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
TUESDAY, 13 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "A little Madness in the Spring," by Emily Dickinson.
A little Madness in the Spring
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown--
Who ponders this tremendous scene--
This whole Experiment of Green--
As if it were his own!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, born on his father's plantation in Albermarle County, Virginia (1743). While studying law in college, he began to read contemporary philosophers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Voltaire, who gave him ideas about freedom of thought and expression. He ran for political office in 1769 and was elected a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Though he had grown up with slaves, and later kept them himself, his first legislative act was a failed attempt to emancipate the slaves under his jurisdiction. He later said, "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise . . . in tyranny. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his . . . morals undepraved by such circumstances."
When the British government began to crack down on self-rule in the colonies, Jefferson got involved in revolutionary activities, and wrote an essay called "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" (1774). It was partly due to the success of the essay that Jefferson was asked to write the Declaration of Independence, which includes the lines, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
It's the birthday of poet Seamus Heaney, born in Mossbawn, Northern Ireland (1939). He's the oldest of nine siblings. His father was a cattle dealer, and Heaney grew up in a three-room thatched house. In the 1960s, he began publishing poems in magazines, about his childhood memories of ordinary things like potatoes and bullfrogs. He received a letter from the editor of Faber & Faber asking if he'd like to publish a collection. Faber & Faber had published T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Robert Lowell; Heaney said, "Getting that letter was like getting a letter from God the Father." That first collection was Death of a Naturalist (1966), and it made his name as a poet.
He's gone on to write many more books of poetry and prose, and in 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His most recent book of poetry is Electric Light (2001).
Heaney said, "[Poems] rinse things. . . . [They] rinse the words. . . but also perhaps rinse—and hang out again on the line—values of freedom, of spirit, and play."
It's the birthday of writer Eudora Welty, born in Jackson, Mississippi (1909). Her mother was a schoolteacher, and taught Welty to love books before she was even able to read them. Welty said, "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass." She moved to New York City as a young woman, but when her father grew sick with leukemia, she moved home to help her mother, and spent the rest of her life in the family home in Jackson.
She tried getting a job in advertising but, she said, "It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want." So she got a job writing reports for the Works Progress Administration, traveling to county fairs, market days, and Fourth of July celebrations, interviewing local people and taking their photographs. Over the course of her life she took many photographs of rural poverty in Mississippi. When she began to write short stories in the early 1930s, she thought of the fiction and the photographs as parts of the same project. Her first book of short stories was A Curtain of Green (1941).
She wrote her fiction by a window in her house, where she could hear the music from a nearby music school. She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972), but most critics consider her masterpiece to be The Golden Apples (1949), a book of stories about a magical Mississippi community called Morgana.
Welty said, "I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."
It's the birthday of playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, born in Foxrock, a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett studied French literature in college, and then went to graduate school in Paris, against his mother's wishes.
It was in Paris that he met James Joyce, who by that time was growing blind and working on his novel Finnegans Wake. Beckett became one of Joyce's research assistants. He read books to Joyce, took dictation, and walked with him around Paris. Beckett said, "There wasn't a lot of conversation between us. I was a young man, very devoted to him, and he liked me. . . . I was very flattered when he dropped the 'Mister.' Everybody was 'Mister.' There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest you would get to a friendly name was to drop the 'Mister.' I was never Sam. I was always 'Beckett' at the best." He so idolized Joyce that he began to smoke like Joyce and carry himself like Joyce; he even wrote like Joyce in his first long work of fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which wasn't published until 1993, after his death.
He decided to write his dissertation about Joyce and Proust, but when he submitted his proposal to the University, they rejected it on the grounds that the writers were too contemporary. He lost his teaching post and spent the next few years in despair, struggling to make a living on translations of surrealist poetry. He finally gave up and moved home to Dublin, where he fought with his mother and drank too much and started to suffer from panic attacks. He felt trapped and paralyzed and began to see Ireland as a kind of prison. After his father's death, he resolved to return to Paris, even if it meant living in poverty.
On one of his first nights back in Paris, Beckett was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp named Prudent, who barely missed his heart. Beckett later met his attacker at the police station, and asked why he had stabbed him. The man replied, "I don't know, sir." Beckett would later make the phrase "I don’t know, sir" a prominent line in his most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1952).
In 1940, he witnessed the German occupation of France, and he watched as many of his Jewish friends were rounded up and sometimes shot in broad daylight. In 1941, he joined the French Resistance, collecting military intelligence, translating it, and transporting it to the allies inside matchboxes and cigarettes. When the war ended, Beckett was overjoyed. He suddenly had more energy than he'd ever had in his life. In the course of three years, he wrote a trilogy of novels—Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). During the same period he wrote the play Waiting for Godot (1952), about two men named Vladimir and Estragon who are trying to kill time while they wait for a man named Godot. In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Beckett wrote, "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
And he wrote, "What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes."
WEDNESDAY, 14 APRIL, 2004
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Poems: "Classic Ballroom Dances," by Charles Simic, from Selected Poems 1963-1983 (George Braziller Publishers).
Classic Ballroom Dances
Grandmothers who wring the necks
Of chickens; old nuns
With names like Theresa, Marianne,
Who pull schoolboys by the ear;
The intricate steps of pickpockets
Working the crowd of the curious
At the scene of an accident; the slow shuffle
Of the evangelist with a sandwich-board;
The hesitation of the early morning customer
Peeking through the window-grille
Of a pawnshop; the weave of a little kid
Who is walking to school with eyes closed;
And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek,
On the dancefloor of the Union Hall,
Where they also hold charity raffles
On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1775 that the first American society for the abolition of slavery was founded. It was called the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negros Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Most of the ten original members of the group were Quakers, but Thomas Paine also attended the first meeting, held in the Rising Sun Tavern in Philadelphia.
Over the next ten years, only eight more people joined the society, but in 1784 the group reorganized and started expanding rapidly. Within two years, nearly a hundred people joined, including Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin became president of the society in 1787, there were nearly a thousand members, and other abolition groups began to form in New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. Lincoln was at the theater with his wife to see a comedy called "Our American Cousin." During the third act, while the audience laughed at a funny line, Booth snuck behind Lincoln and shot him in the head at point-blank range. Lincoln never regained consciousness and died early the next day.
The country went into mourning as soon as they heard the news. Stores closed, flags were raised at half mast, and people all across the country held spontaneous gatherings to share their grief.
It was on this day in 1912 that the R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the fifth night of ship's maiden voyage, on its way from Southampton, England to New York City. The night was clear and windless, with no moon. It had been an especially warm winter, and many icebergs had broken off from glaciers farther north, so the lookout men had been told to keep an eye out for them. At about 11:40, one of the lookouts, Frederick Fleet, saw a huge dark object floating in the water in front of the ship. He yelled, "Iceberg right ahead," and rang an alarm bell. A few minutes later, the Titanic ran into the iceberg. It sank early the next morning, killing about 1,500 people.
The Titanic had a double-bottomed hull that was divided into sixteen compartments. Four of these compartments could be flooded without affecting the ship's ability to float, so many newspaper and magazine articles about the Titanic had advertised it as "unsinkable." But when the ship hit the iceberg, five of the compartments were ruptured, and so it sank.
It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath was published. The novel tells the story of three generations of the Joad family, who lose their farm in Oklahoma and set off across the country for the paradise of California, only to encounter extreme poverty and corrupt corporations trying to make a profit off of them. Steinbeck interspersed the story of the Joads with chapters describing the migration as a whole, to give the impression of a social history as well as a personal story.
Between 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck spent several weeks in the valleys of southern California, observing the horrible conditions of the migrant farmers there and doing his best to help them. He saw entire families living in tiny tents flooded with more than a foot of water, with almost no food and no medicine. Sometimes he worked so hard bringing food and supplies to the farmers that he would collapse in the mud at the end of the day.
He began writing about what he saw in a 1936 article for the Nation. Between 1936 and 1938 he wrote several newspaper articles, the draft of an unfinished novel, and then a draft of another novel, a satire called L'Affaire Lettuceberg. He was about to send it off to his publisher when, at the last minute, he decided against it. He said it was a "smart-alec book" that was "full of tricks to make people ridiculous. . . . I had forgotten that I hadn't learned to write books, that I will never learn to write them. . . . I'm not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later."
In May of 1938, Steinbeck started work on The Grapes of Wrath. He wrote the novel at an incredible rate—about two thousands words a day—in a tiny outhouse that had just enough room for a bed, a desk, a gun rack and a bookshelf. He finished it in about five months.
The novel became a sensation as soon as it was published. It sold out an advance edition of 20,000 copies in just a few days, and eventually became the best-selling book of 1939, with over 400,000 copies sold. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a successful movie by John Ford. It eventually led to congressional hearings on migrant camp conditions and influenced FDR's labor policy.
Many people were offended by the novel. Steinbeck got angry letters from people who accused him of being a communist, and he was brought under FBI surveillance. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren called it "a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind," and Kern County in California banned the book for several years. Steinbeck wrote, "I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy." These days, it still sells over 100,000 copies each year, and since Oprah selected Steinbeck's East of Eden for her book club last year, sales have gone up even more.
The title for the novel came from Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn of The Republic": "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Steinbeck wrote in the novel, "There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a failure here that topples all our success. . . in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."
THURSDAY, 15 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Soundings," by Joyce Sutphen, from Naming the Stars (Holy Cow Press).
Soundings
In the afternoon of summer, sounds
come through the window: a tractor
muttering to itself as it
pivots at the corner of the
hay field, stalled for a moment
as the green row feeds into the baler.
The wind slips a whisper behind
an ear; the noise of the highway
is like the dark green stem of a rose.
From the kitchen the blunt banging
of cupboard doors and wooden chairs
makes a lonely echo in the floor.
Somewhere, between the breeze
and the faraway sound of a train,
comes a line of birdsong, lightly
threading the heavy cloth of dream.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1755 that the first edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was published. Johnson was forced to abandon his studies at Oxford when his father's business went bankrupt. He applied for the masters program at the University of Dublin, but he didn't get in, and so, to make some money, he was forced to take on the painstaking job of writing a dictionary. It took him almost ten years to finish, but when it came out everyone agreed that it was the best English dictionary that had ever been published.
It's the birthday of one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, Leonhard Euler, born in Basel, Switzerland (1707). He published more than eight hundred papers and books, and his collected works take up nearly seventy volumes. He's best known for developing the methods of calculus on a wide scale, but he also made important contributions in geometry, algebra and physics. He had amazing powers of memory and concentration. He could recite Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid word for word; he had thirteen children and often did his work while they played in the same room; and he could perform calculations of incredible complexity in his head. When he lost the use of his right eye, he said, "Now I will have less distraction."
It's the birthday of the man who painted the "Mona Lisa," Leonardo da Vinci, born in Vinci, Italy (1452). He was born to a twenty-five-year-old notary and a peasant girl, and his mother married another man and moved to another town soon after his birth. Leonardo had so many ideas that he found himself unable to complete most of the projects he started. Michelangelo is supposed to have said about him, "He cannot create, only imagine." From the time Leonardo was thirty until the time he was fifty-five he only completed about ten paintings, but those paintings included "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa."
It's the birthday of "Heloise" from the "Hints from Heloise" column, Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, born in Waco, Texas (1951). Her daily column of household advice is printed in more than five hundred newspapers in twenty countries. She's the woman who tells us that hair conditioner can be used for shaving cream, dirty dishes should be stored in the freezer so as not to attract fruit flies, boric acid powder and sugar makes a good roach repellent, and an iron can be used to remove candle wax from a carpet. She's come up with more uses for vinegar, baking soda, shampo, and nylon net than most people would have thought possible.
It's the birthday of novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). He's the author of over twenty novels, including Washington Square (1880), The Turn of the Screw (1898) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). As a child, he traveled back and forth between America and Europe. He spent time in Geneva, London, Paris and Bologna, and his parents let him wander around the streets of the great European cities and soak up their language and culture. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to Europe and wrote for magazines like the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, which is where his first novel, Watch and Ward was published in 1871.
Around this time he started running out of money, and he had to decide whether he wanted to go back to America, where he had a better chance of getting more books published, or stay in Europe. His brother William wrote to him, "It is a fork in the path of your life, and upon your decision hangs your whole future." Finally, in October 1875, Henry James wrote to his family, "Dear People All. I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!" He would live in Europe for the rest of his life.
He started writing his most famous book, The Portrait of a Lady, in an apartment in Florence overlooking a waterway. It's about a woman named Isabel Archer who goes to England to live with her aunt and uncle and their son Ralph. Isabel inherits some money and goes to Italy, where she decides to marry a rich widower named Gilbert Osmond and spends the rest of the novel dealing with the horrible consequences of her decision. The novel begins, "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."
James became a British citizen near the end of his life, as a show of support for Great Britain in World War I. He once said, "I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it." One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."
But he started feeling nostalgic for America at the beginning of the twentieth century. He hadn't seen his home country in twenty-five years, and he wanted to know how it had changed since he left. He dreamt about kicking through the leaves on Fifth Avenue and wanted to see if the trees he remembered were still there. He wrote to a friend that he wanted to "lie on the ground, on an American hillside, on the edge of the woods, in the manner of my youth." He had trouble raising the money, but he finally left for America in August 1904. He loved the big open spaces of the American West and the sunny weather in California, but he said the country was "too huge . . . for any human convenience."
James is known for writing big, challenging novels made up of long, complex sentences. He once said, "We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick." And he once called his books "invincibly unsalable." For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s.
James said, "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."
FRIDAY, 16 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "a song in the front yard," by Gwendolyn Brooks, from Selected Poems (Harper Collins); and "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," by William Carlos Williams
, from The Collected Poems 1909-1939 (New Directions).
a song in the front yard
I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.
I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.
They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it's fine
How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).
But I say it's fine. Honest, I do.
And I'd like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
The Widow's Lament in Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Kingsley Amis, born in London (1922). His novels include That Uncertain Feeling (1955), The Anti-Death League (1966) and The Old Devils (1986).
He became friends with the poet Philip Larkin at Oxford, and began writing poetry and short stories. He served in Belgium and West Germany during World War II, and then taught college English for several years. In 1954 he came out with his first novel, Lucky Jim, about Jim Dixon, a medieval history professor at a small university. Jim hates teaching, but at the same time he realizes that it's probably the only real job he's qualified for. After Lucky Jim came out, many people grouped Amis with the "Angry Young Men," young British writers of the 1950s who wrote about working-class people frustrated by the class system in England.
Amis was a socialist as a young man, but as he grew older his politics gradually drifted to the right. In 1967, he surprised everyone when he came out in support of America's war in Vietnam. He said, "I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics. . . . Many of the evils of life—failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate--are ineradicable by political means. . . . All you can reasonably hope for is keeping things going."
It's the birthday of playwright John Millington Synge, born in Rathfarnham, just south of Dublin, Ireland (1871). He was often sick as a child, and so instead of playing sports he spent his free time roaming around the hills and valleys near his home. He joined the Dublin Naturalist's Field Club when he was fifteen, and spent the next two years gathering insects and plants and looking at them under a microscope.
He spent seven years in Paris, writing literary criticism for magazines and newspapers. Then, in 1896, he met the poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats told him that instead of trying to work his way into literary circles in Paris, he should go to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland and write about the Irish-speaking peasants who live there. Yeats told him to "live there as if you were one of the people themselves. Express a life that has never found expression."
So, in 1898, Synge went the Aran Islands, and he spent the next four summers there. He explored the craggy, barren landscape, took notes on the Irish language, and wrote down the folktales of the islanders. In 1907, he published an account of his time there, and the material he gathered formed the basis for his two most successful plays, Riders to the Sea (1903) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907).
It's the birthday of writer Anatole France, born in Paris (1844). He wrote poems, plays, essays, short stories, and more than twenty novels, including At the Sign of the Queen Pedauque (1893), Penguin Island (1908) and The Gods Are Athirst (1912).
He grew up in an apartment above his father's bookstore, where he would roam through the stacks of books as a child. He fell in love with reading at a young age, and almost all of his jobs were related to books: he worked as a bookseller, a cataloguer, a publisher's assistant, an editor and a librarian, writing poetry and fiction on the side. His first big success came in 1881 with the novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, a satire set in eighteenth-century France. He went on to become one of the most successful novelists in France, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921.
France said, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it."
And he said, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread."
And, "Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness."
SATURDAY, 17 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Wedding," by Alice Oswald, from The Thing in the Gap-stone Style (Oxford University Press).
Wedding
From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it's like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it's like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions . . .
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, born in New York City (1928). Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and both worked as pharmacists. Ozick grew up in the care of her grandmother, who was always telling her stories. She grew up to write several more novels full of Jewish mysticism and history, including The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) and The Puttermesser Papers (1997), but she's perhaps best known for her essays, collected in Art and Ardor (1983), Metaphor and Memory (1989) and Quarrel and Quandary (2000).
Ozick said, "I believe a writer can weave in and out of genres—do it all. It is a gluttonous point of view, to be sure. Then again, when it comes to writing, that is what I truly am and nothing less: a glutton."
It's the birthday of Isak Dinesen, born Karen Dinesen on a rural estate called Rungsted near Copenhagen, Denmark (1885). She came from a wealthy family of landowners and writers. Her grandfather was a friend of Hans Christian Andersen. Her father committed suicide when she was ten years old, and she spent the rest of her childhood in a house full of women—her mother, her grandmother, and all her aunts. As a girl, she loved listening to stories about Danish mythology. She started writing at an early age, and one of the first stories she published was about a woman who has a love affair with a ghost.
In college she fell in love with the son of Baron Blixen of Sweden. But when he refused to marry her, she decided to get revenge by marrying his twin brother. She and her husband then moved to Kenya, where they started a coffee plantation. She fell in love with Africa, and thought of it as a kind of Eden. But she and her husband did not get along, and they separated in 1925. Alone and unhappy on the coffee plantation, she said, "I began in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times." The plantation grew less and less profitable, and she struggled to stay in business. After a swarm of locusts and a drought, she finally had to sell the farm to a local developer.
But just as she was leaving Africa for good, Dinesen sent some of her stories to a publisher, and they were published as the collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934). Her American publisher wanted her to write a new book as soon as possible, to capitalize on her success, so she decided to write about her experiences in Africa. Instead of writing an ordinary memoir, she wrote about her time in Africa as though it were a half-remembered dream. She wrote, "Looking back on a sojourn in the African high-lands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air." That book became Out of Africa (1937), and it made her one of the most popular Danish writers of all time. Years later, when Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said that it should have gone to her.
Dinesen said, "All sorrows can be borne, if you put them into a story."
It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). As a boy, he lived near a university theater where they performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member of the chorus. He never forgot the experience, and decided then that he would try to write for the theater someday. He produced his first play, The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), while he was still an undergraduate at Yale.
After graduating from college, his father sent him to Rome, where he worked on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Roman ruins. He later said, "Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again." The experience inspired him to begin writing fiction about characters caught up in the forces of fate and history. His second novel was The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), about a group of unrelated characters who are all killed by the collapse of a bridge in Peru. That novel was a huge success, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder got a job at the University of Chicago, and began to write a series of experimental one-act plays that used almost no scenery or props, and often included an all-knowing character called the Stage Manager. Then, in 1938, he produced the play for which he is best known, Our Town, one of the first major Broadway plays to use almost no stage scenery, so that the audience had to imagine the world in which the characters lived. Wilder said, "Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not in things, not in 'scenery'. . . . [A play] needs only five square feet of boarding and a passion to know what life means to us."
Our Town is about the New England village of Grover's Corners, where the characters George Gibbs and Emily Webb grow up, fall in love at the soda fountain, and get married. When Emily dies in childbirth, she gets to relive the day of her twelfth birthday and realizes how little she cherished life while she was alive. She says, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it,—every, every minute?" The play ran for 336 performances on Broadway, and it also won a Pulitzer Prize.
Wilder went on to write many more plays, screenplays and books of fiction. Near the end of his life, he realized that he might not be remembered as well as some writers who had written darker stories, but he said, "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate."
SUNDAY, 18 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "The Prodigal Son's Brother," by Steve Kowit, from The Dumbbell Nebula (The Roundhouse Press).
The Prodigal Son's Brother
who'd been steadfast as small change all his life
forgave the one who bounced back like a bad check
the moment his father told him he ought to.
After all, that's what being good means.
In fact, it was he who hosted the party,
bought the crepes & champagne,
uncorked every bottle. With each drink
another toast to his brother: ex-swindler, hit-man
& rapist. By the end of the night
the entire village was blithering drunk
in an orgy of hugs & forgiveness,
while he himself,
whose one wish was to be loved as profusely,
slipped in & out of their houses,
stuffing into a satchel their brooches & rings
& bracelets & candelabra.
Then lit out at dawn with a light heart
for a port city he knew only by reputation:
ladies in lipstick hanging out of each window,
& every third door a saloon.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1906 an earthquake struck San Francisco. It was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. At the time, San Francisco had a population of about 450,000 people and was the busiest port on the Pacific coast of the United States. Business had been booming, and new office buildings, factories, mansions, and hotels had been constructed all over the city.
The earthquake began near dawn, at 5:12 AM on a Wednesday morning, and lasted for a little over a minute. Scientists later determined that the San Andreas Fault had moved about twenty-three feet. The quake measured 8.3 on the Richter scale, and it was felt from southern Oregon to south of Los Angeles and as far east as central Nevada. The epicenter was near San Francisco.
A San Francisco journalist named James Hopper said, "The earthquake started . . . with a direct violence that left one breathless. . . . There was something personal about the attack; it seemed to have a certain vicious intent. My building quivered with a vertical and rotary motion and there was a sound as of a snarl. . . . My head on the pillow, I watched my stretched and stiffened body . . . springing up and down and from side to side like a pancake in the tossing griddle of an experienced French chef."
A policeman said, "[The streets] began to dance and rear and roll in waves like a rough sea in a squall, [then] sank in places and vomited up car tracks and the tunnels that carried the cable. These lifted themselves out of the pavement, and bent and snapped."
After the quake ended, most people tried to get out of their homes. One man said, "Humanity began to pour out of the buildings like ants. . . . I saw women in their night robes, and men in pajamas and striped underwear all around me. Many knelt down and prayed while others laughed . . . at the outlandish array of wearing apparel."
The world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso had performed at San Francisco's Grand Opera House the night before, and he woke up in his bed as the Palace Hotel was falling down around him. He stumbled out into the street, and because he was terrified that that shock might have ruined his voice, he began singing.
There was a loud sound of an explosion as the city gas plant blew up. Wooden structures caught fire from overturned stoves and immediately began to burn. The fire department went out to fight the fires, only to find that the city had lost all of its running water. Firemen attempted to stop the spread of fire by dynamiting whole city blocks, but despite their efforts, the fire raged for three days and most of the city burned to the ground.
One man took refuge from falling debris in a meat locker, only to find himself freezing to death. Then the fire came and kept him from freezing, and the freezer saved him from the fire.
People slowly began to realize the extent of the destruction. Hundreds of houses had collapsed, hotels had broken off their foundations and toppled over. Thousands of chimneys had fallen through roofs. The new city hall was destroyed. More than 500 city blocks and more than 28,000 buildings were in ruins. 250,000 people were left homeless. Nearly 3,000 people died. Americans mourned the loss of San Francisco, one of the country's greatest cities. The journalist Will Irwin wrote in the New York Sun, "The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. . . . San Francisco is the city that was."
But people immediately began rebuilding the city. In three years, about 20,000 new buildings went up. Someone wrote an anonymous rhyme to boost morale in the building effort; it went, "Hear the hammers click and clatter? Hear the donkey-engines snore? We are making San Francisco four times bigger than before."
Since it was rebuilt, San Francisco has continued to be one of the most beloved cities in America, and one of the most beloved by writers. John Steinbeck said, "[San Francisco] is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away." And William Saroyan said, "If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco."
