W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe

The nonaggression pact signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, between Germany and the Soviet Union included a secret clause providing for the partition of Poland between the two signing powers. On September 1, German tanks and planes invaded Poland on three fronts and World War II began. The outbreak stirred W. H. Auden, 32 and newly arrived in the United States in January, to write one of his most anthologized poems, “September 1, 1939,” first published in The New Republic on October 18 of that year.

Set in “one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street” the 99-line poem attempts to locate the individual’s place in the world historical order. Whether Auden actually wrote it in a Manhattan bar or in the home of the father of his lover Chester Kallman is a matter of some dispute. In later years, as Auden moved away from politics, he came to disown the poem, calling it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written,” especially its most famous stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

The last line of this stanza—its most quoted line—troubled Auden the most, since we die whether we love one another or not. At one point, in granting permission to Oscar Williams to reprint the poem in an anthology in 1955, Auden changed the line to “We must love one another and die.”

Listen to Dylan Thomas read “September 1, 1939.”
Read the entire poem.

Five years later, on September 1, 1944, A. J. Liebling dispatched one of his most famous “Letters from Paris.” The Allied Forces had liberated Paris on August 25 and Liebling captures the joy and relief of a city transformed: “For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy. Moreover, since the city is Paris, everybody makes this euphoria manifest.”

As Liebling details how different factions in Paris came together to defeat their occupiers, his account can almost be seen as a response to the charge in Auden’s poem:

Happiest of all . . . are the police, who stand at street intersections with their thumbs in their belts and beam paternally at everybody instead of looking stern and important, as they used to. . . . For Paris, where the street cry has always been “A bas les flics!” (Down with the cops!), this is behavior so unprecedented that the cops sometimes look as though they think it is all a dream. There is good reason for the change of heart; for the first time since Etienne Marcel led a street mob against the royal court in about 1350, the police and the people have been on the same side of the barricades. It was the police who, on August 15th, gave the signal for a mass disregard of the Germans by going on strike. It was also the police who, four days later, began the street fighting by seizing the Prefecture of the Seine, their headquarters. . . . Three thousand of them, in plainclothes and armed with carbines, revolvers, and a few sub-machine guns, took the place over and defended it successfully for six days before being relieved by the arrival of the French armored division of General Leclerc.

Aiding the police were “boys fourteen or fifteen years old” who destroyed tanks by throwing bottles of incendiary fluid through their ports. “The youngsters who did the fighting were not always of the type that is ordinarily on good terms with the police. They included problem children of every neighborhood as well as students and factory workers. So the oldest of all Paris feuds has ended.”

Read the entire “Letter from Paris, September 1, 1944” (PDF).

Related LOA works: Poets of World War II; A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

James Baldwin: Sentences like no one else

One of the most striking passages in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, edited by Randall Kenan, appears in the 1961 essay “From Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve: A Forum:”

Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years if I'm lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy's mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country's mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn't want to be.... [W]hat really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro 'first' will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he will be president of?

What would Baldwin make of Obama’s America? This passage is vintage Baldwin, turning a question around to gain a new and provocative perspective. He did much the same trick in his famous riposte to a British television interviewer: “When you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual, you must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged could I get?’” “No,” Baldwin snapped back, “I thought I hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous you could not go any further. I had to find out a way to use it.” (see 0:32 of YouTube video)



In his review of the new collection in The Los Angeles Times Lynell George expands on how momentous Baldwin's attitude was for American culture:

We hit the jackpot—all of us—anyone interested in engaging in candid albeit stakes-changing debate, anyone who had an investment in equity, humanity and its future. We gained tremendously from the variegated prism through which he viewed and translated the world.

From the late 1940s until his death in 1987, Baldwin walked into the very center of the maelstrom—whether it was the rhetorical theater of debate or the very front line of violence of the Jim Crow South—but he wasn't simply everywhere at once: He was deeply invested in each and every outcome.

The pieces in the new collection bring to mind F. W. Dupee’s review of The Fire Next Time in The New York Review of Books in 1963:

As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto.

Dupee then quotes a passage from The Fire Next Time:

Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

About this passage Dupee remarks: “Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams.”

In “Universal Blues,” her review of the new collection for Columbia Journalism Review, Kimberly Chou tries to locate the source of Baldwin’s incantatory prose:

A preacher’s son, Baldwin grew up in Harlem as a teenage evangelist, entering the pulpit at fourteen and abandoning it three years later. In his nonfiction above all, one can see that the skill for oratory stayed with him—transferred to the page for a wider audience. His language could sometimes be baroque. Yet his message always cut straight through, even when his opinions were hard to swallow. The reader feels compelled to keep reading, no matter how raw or unapologetic the subject material.

Lynell George takes the measure of the breadth of Baldwin's achievement:

... what this volume underscores is Baldwin's immense cross-disciplinary range—as a reader, thinker, lecturer and pundit. Though race was a theme that was never out of arm's reach, his preoccupation with societal ethics and humanity was tantamount. And though, as Kenan points out in his evocative introduction, Baldwin first and foremost considered himself a novelist, it was the essays—particularly "The Fire Next Time" and "Notes of a Native Son" that cemented his fate, which [Kenan points out in the introduction] "transformed Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and world at large—if the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement's Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah, despite his protestations of speaking for no one but himself."

Like many other writers, Baldwin felt the need to declare his independence from his literary forebears. The new book includes his savage review of Richard Wright’s Native Son, comparing it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wright had introduced Baldwin to the New York literati and their relationship never recovered.

In an interview with NPR, editor Kenan describes what he believes to be one of the reasons for Baldwin’s enduring appeal: “He lifts the veil,” Kenan says. “White people felt that they had an insight into black America that they didn't have before.”

Related LOA works: James Baldwin: Collected Essays; James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories

The centennial of Theodore Roosevelt's “New Nationalism” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas

On August 31, 1910—one hundred years ago—at the dedication of the John Brown Memorial State Park in Osawatomie, Kansas, former president Theodore Roosevelt gave the most memorable speech of his political career. Roosevelt’s delivery, the speech’s content, the audience’s response and the reaction that followed made it the high point of the sixteen-state, three-week whistle-stop tour by private railway car across the trans-Mississippi West.

The tour was a smashing success. In 1908 Roosevelt decided to honor the pledge he made after he won re-election in 1904 and not seek a third term. He handpicked William Howard Taft, his secretary of defense, to succeed him, thinking Taft the best choice to carry on his policies. But twenty months into Taft’s term, Roosevelt was having second thoughts. Republican leaders complained that Taft was no Progressive. They needed Roosevelt to unite them again. He had agreed to this speaking tour while he was abroad and now it was snowballing into something larger than Roosevelt had planned or imagined.

In an extensive article posted online in the Kansas Historical Quarterly Robert S. La Forte describes the scene:

All through the 30th, when the festivities started, people poured into Osawatomie—“singly … in pairs, by the dozens and scores.” They came “on foot, bicycles, motors, buggies, wagons, trains and [in] every manner … possible.” Even though it was raining, the Graphic reported, “they had on their sunshine disposition … and were ready to hear 'Teddy' speak.” But as the great day dawned the rain diminished and then stopped. And, while acres of people, as one observer described them, waited at the Osawatomie station for his arrival, they sang Moody and Sankey hymns to keep their spirits dry. Then the colonel's train appeared. Pandemonium broke loose! The crown shrieked, whistled, cheered, and cried “hello Teddy!” Roosevelt stepped out onto the rear platform and just smiled, bowed, and looked like he enjoyed it immensely. It was a bully occasion!

At 2:15 P.M. Roosevelt was introduced by Kansas Governor Walter Roscoe Stubbs to approximately 30,000 people in the park. Here is a man, Stubbs said, “whose name is synonymous for liberty, justice and righteousness in private and public life and whose power and influence for good is greater than any … ruler in the world today.” Then “Teddy” mounted the kitchen table which picturesquely served as his podium at Osawatomie. High above a surging throng which continually cheered, he spoke for one and one-half hours. The set up, reported in the Daily Capital, was much like a country fair, with booths where sandwiches and drinks were being sold. All during the speech people continued to buy food at those stands and the vendors continued to hawk their wares. Not everyone could hear his high-falsettoed voice, but everyone cheered.

President Taft had recently dismissed the writer of the Osawatomie speech, Gifford Pinchot, from his post of chief of the Agriculture Department’s Division of Forestry for insubordination. And some credit the caustic Kansas journalist, William Allen White, for several of the speech’s more colorful passages. As Roosevelt biographer H. W. Brands has written: Roosevelt “had never stated his objectives so comprehensively or packaged them so concisely as a single approach to the country’s problems.”

The phrase “New Nationalism” did not originate with Roosevelt. It had been coined by the journalist and political philosopher Herbert Croly in his book, The Promise of American Life, which argued that a strong central government as envisioned by Alexander Hamilton could be used to serve Jeffersonian ideals better than Jefferson’s preference for a limited government. Roosevelt read and liked the book and adopted its ideas. As he described it in his speech:

This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.

Upon hearing about Roosevelt’s attack on the judiciary, President Taft became so outraged he reportedly flung a golf club across the course.

At one point Roosevelt deviated from his prepared text to say:

[W]ords count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life.

According to Roosevelt biographer Kathleen Dalton, his “audience thought he was saying President Taft needed to be ‘hunted out of public life’ and they cheered.”

Roosevelt would go on to call for directors of companies to be held personally liable for corporate actions, for the details of corporate affairs to be made completely public, for graduated income and inheritance taxes, a revamped financial system, a comprehensive workmen’s compensation law, a commission of experts to regulate the tariff, limitations on the political activities of corporations, stringent new conservation laws, and regulation of child labor.

Roosevelt had never before used phrases quite so radical: “The essense of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.” “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare. . . .” And he quoted Lincoln, “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Westerners cheered the New Nationalism. Conservatives in the east attacked it, calling it socialism, anarchism, communism. Yet much of what Roosevelt outlined here would in effect become the platform for his candidacy as the Presidential nominee for the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party in the election of 1912. The divisiveness cost the Republicans the election, however, and from then on Progressivism became for Republicans the path not chosen.

Related LOA works:American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton; Theodore Roosevelt: Letters and Speeches

H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt: “America’s foremost bachelor” tied the knot eighty years ago today

How ironic that H. L. Mencken should first meet Sara Haardt in 1923 at Baltimore’s Goucher College when he delivered a lecture on “How to Get a Husband.” Haardt was then a 24-year-old English professor at the women’s college, the youngest on the faculty, and Mencken eighteen years her senior. “Call me a liar if you will,” Mencken would write to a friend the day after the lecture, “but last night I lectured at Goucher College and discerned no less than 27 appetitizing [sic] cuties in the audience. It greatly astonished me; I always thought education ruined the complexion.” Mencken doesn’t mention that during a dinner party following the lecture he discovered that Haardt was an aspiring writer and asked her to send him some of her short stories. Haardt confessed that she had been submitting stories to The Smart Set, the magazine Mencken edited, since she had been “big enough to lift a stamp.”

So began the love affair of Mencken’s life. The world knew Mencken as a confirmed and outspoken bachelor. “Bachelors know more about women than married men,” he famously wrote. “If they didn’t, they’d be married too.” And on another occasion: “If I ever marry, it will be on sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.” But Mencken’s quips didn’t anticipate the tenacity and charm of the young writer from Montgomery, Alabama. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers recounts in Mencken: The American Iconoclast, shortly after their first meeting Haardt confided to a faculty friend, “I’m going to marry that man!” Rodgers provides a striking portrait of Haardt:

A contemporary wrote that from across a crowded room Sara looked “alarmingly beautiful: oval face full of magnolia blossom texture, fine features framed in dark curls, luminous almond-shaped eyes, full sensuous mouth”; a graceful figure with a soft cheesecake-y form that James Cain admired, and “well dressed in a quiet, tasteful way.” As for her voice, it was low like that of her childhood friend Tallulah Bankhead, gently Southern, as another put it, “without a trace of cawn pone.” Sometimes Sarah’s voice could verge on a growl when she said what she thought of people . . . “she had plenty of wit,” according to Cain, “of a smoldering, ironical kind,” accompanied by a throaty laugh.

Their courtship would last seven years, much of it conducted through letters. The seven hundred letters they exchanged during their twelve years together are collected in Mencken & Sara: A Life in Letters, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. The first letter occurred shortly after their first meeting in May, 1923, the last a few days before Haardt’s early death of tuberculosis on May 31, 1935. While we might characterize their correspondence as “love letters,” what they reveal is their growing discovery of each other’s intelligence, wit and culture, or as Rodgers puts it, “In this almond-eyed, delicate woman, Mencken was to find a soulmate.”

The actual marriage ceremony was brief. Mencken considered weddings “barbaric rites.” They moved the wedding date up a week from September 3 to August 27 to avoid the press, and only ten guests and one photographer joined them at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church for the event. It wasn’t until their train reached Halifax and their honeymoon began that the couple relaxed. “It is a grand experience to be able to look a hotel detective in the eye,” wrote Mencken to his close friend George Jean Nathan.

In her brief life Sara Haardt would write forty short stories and two short novels. Her death would interrupt her work on her most ambitious project, The Plantation, a “novel she hoped would provide,” in Rodgers’s words, “a greater understanding of the traditional Southern order and its effect upon those confined within it.” Mencken had edited and published several of her stories and he wrote the introduction to a collection of seventeen of her stories, Southern Album, he published after her death.

Mencken’s diary reveals just how much his wife’s last days and death affected him. There is barely a mention of her in 1935—only one entry for the entire year after May 31—and just a handful in 1936. It is not until the fifth anniversary of her death, on May 31, 1940, that Mencken addresses in detail his wife’s illness and death, his feelings for her, and what their life together meant to him. What follows is but a short excerpt from that entry in The Diary of H. L. Mencken, edited by Charles A. Fecher:

Sarah is dead five years today—a longer time than the time of our marriage, which lasted four years and nine months. It is amazing what a deep mark she left upon my life—and yet, after all, it is not amazing at all, for a happy marriage throws out numerous and powerful tentacles. They may loosen with years and habit, but when a marriage ends at the height of its success they endure. It is a literal fact that I still think of Sarah every day of my life, and almost every hour of the day. . . . Marriage is largely talk, and I still recall clearly the long palavers we used to have. . . . We had plenty to talk of. I talked out my projects to her, and she talked out hers with me. I don’t think we ever bored each other. I know that, for my part, the last days of that gabbling were as stimulating as the first. . . . I have never known a more rational woman, nor another half so charming. . . Thinking of her, I can well understand the great human yearning that makes for a belief in immortality, but I do not believe in it, and neither did she. . . I’ll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all. Whether or not it is better so I do not know, but there is the fact as I see it. We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end.

Read the exclusive LOA interview with Marion Elizabeth Rodgers about H. L. Mencken.
Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series

The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age Literature

Geoffrey O’Brien, editor-in-chief of The Library of America, recently published his latest book, The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America (Henry Holt). As the book’s title itself makes clear, the literature available to him during his day job influenced his writing, and we asked him to list those works that were particularly on his mind while he wrote this slice of American history.

In my book The Fall of the House of Walworth, I sought to reconstruct the inner and outer worlds of a distinguished but remarkably ill-fated nineteenth-century family whose lives were caught up in various kinds of mania and one spectacular murder. Although the book is non-fiction, the literary antecedents I bore in mind as I worked tended to be fictional. These were six that helped particularly in setting my course:

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of the Usher.” Poe was favorite reading matter for several of the Walworths, and the neurasthenic Roderick Usher might have served them as a perverse role model. My book’s title pays unavoidable homage to Poe’s long lingering influence.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables. The ancestral curse of the Pyncheons, symbolized by their elaborate dwelling-place, rhymed nicely with the 55-room Walworth Mansion and its gloomy heritage.

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland. The ancestor of American Gothic, Brown sounded themes of trance, madness, and religiously inspired murder in this dreamlike concoction.

Herman Melville: Pierre, or The Ambiguities. The early chapters of this often grotesque successor to Moby-Dick powerfully evoke the world of upstate New York that Melville knew well.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers. Cooper’s fictionalized version of Cooperstown, founded by his father, informed my sense of the earlier period in which Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth established his family’s power and prosperity.

Dashiell Hammett: The Dain Curse. A more modern version of Gothic from the 1920s, Hammett’s thriller, tinged with opium and cultishness, was a model of storytelling.

On its Paper Cuts blog, The New York Times has posted a copy of its June 4, 1873, article about the murder at the center of O’Brien’s book.

Laura Miller notes in her Salon review that “O'Brien was fortunate: The Walworths were prodigious writers—of letters, journals, poetry, monographs and, yes, novels.” But, Thomas Mallon adds in his review for The New York Times, “however central the novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830–73) may be to O’Brien’s crackerjack new history of one family’s mayhem, it seems safe to say that he will not soon be joining Welty, Wharton and Whitman at the right-hand reaches of The Library of America’s long, august shelf.” Or, as Geoffrey himself writes in the book, Walworth’s fiction displayed a “staggering slovenliness.” In at least one of the novels, “once Mansfield became embroiled in cataloging women’s clothing, it was difficult for him to get back to the story.”

American Fantastic Tales nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award

The 2009 World Fantasy Award Nominees were just announced and we were delighted to find The Library of America's two-volume set American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps/from the 1940s to Now, edited by Peter Straub, among the nominees in the Anthology category.

We got an additional thrill when we saw four of the contributors to American Fantastic Tales among the nominees in other categories:

• Caitlin R. Kiernan, who contributed the story “The Long Hall on the Top Floor,” was nominated for her novel, The Red Tree.
• Jeff VanderMeer, who contributed the story “The General Who Is Dead,” was nominated for his novel Finch.
• Brian Evenson, who contributed the story “The Wavering Knife,” was nominated for his collection Fugue State.
• And Gene Wolfe, who contributed the story “The Little Stranger,” was nominated for two collections, The Very Best of Gene Wolfe and The Best of Gene Wolfe.

When American Fantastic Tales was published in October 2009 volume editor Peter Straub gave The Library of America an exclusive interview in which he discussed the tricky question of how writers and readers of Fantastika may (or may not) differ from writers and readers of literary fiction.

Library of America: In his famous essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft wrote that tales of “cosmic fear” would always find an audience among those of “requisite sensitiveness” but that “relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside.” By contrast, Joyce Carol Oates has explained the addictiveness of “tales of the gothic-grotesque” by noting that “readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call ‘literary fiction,’ assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose?” Are they talking about the same readers? How would you characterize the audience for American Fantastic Tales?

Peter Straub: Lovecraft supposed that his tales would find their best audience among the imaginatively refined, while Oates wishes to remark the inherent superiority of realistic literary fiction over hypothetically cruder, more compromised genre work. It does not seem likely that they are speaking of the same readers. Over Lovecraft’s supposition hovers the flavor and atmosphere of Decadence, of The Yellow Book and Swinburne and Ernest Dowson; Oates’s position is more daylit and reasonable, but both positions are radically divisive. Lovecraft’s assumptions about his audience are completely personal to him, and of interest primarily for psychological reasons. Oates expresses a deeply familiar literary opinion, one with wide general acceptance. For that reason, it is worth looking at.

All fiction, literary or genre, seeks to manipulate its readers. Every novel is an effort to present a completely formed and coherent view of the way its particular world works, and every novelist is doing her best to make her case persuasive. As Marilynne Robinson once remarked, novelists are always standing on top of a hill, shouting, “No, you’re all wrong, this is how the world works.” In this regard, there is no essential difference between the writer of a literary novel and the writer of a crime novel. The differences have to do with matters other than manipulation: open-endedness, psychological acuity, formal beauty, the quality of the prose, depth of feeling, alertness to ambiguity, suggestions of the world’s depth and richness, supple transitions, and a hundred other things. A writer of the fantastic may or may not possess the kind of writerly authority implied by these considerations, but if she does, her work might as well be called “literary.” It won’t be, though; the fences are too high. However, to be completely frank, work of this kind is always as good, in a literary sense, as most “literary” efforts, and often better than most.

To see what I am talking about, a reader could turn to John Cheever’s “Torch Song,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover,” or M. Rickert’s “The Chambered Fruit.” Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” is one of the greatest stories of the past two decades, worthy of a dozen rereadings. To answer your final question, the audience for these stories is open-minded, imaginatively playful, and interested in complicated, richly rewarding pleasures.

Related LOA works: American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now (boxed set); H. P. Lovecraft: Tales

A toast and a tear for Dorothy Parker, writer and poet, for her 117th birthday

Project Elegance celebrated Dorothy Parker’s birthday yesterday with a bouquet of quotes. Our favorite: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

In “A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker,” his 1944 review of The Portable Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson reflected on the close connection between Parker’s work and her era:

. . . the thing I have particularly felt is the difference between the general tone, the psychological and literary atmosphere, of the period—the twenties and the earlier thirties—when most of these pieces of Mrs. Parker’s were written, and the atmosphere of the present time. It was suddenly brought home to me how much freer people were—in their emotions, in their ideas, and in expressing themselves. In the twenties they could love, they could travel, they could stay up late at night as extravagantly as they pleased; they could think or say or write whatever seemed to them amusing or interesting. There was a good deal of irresponsibility, and a lot of money and energy wasted, and the artistic activities of the time suffered somewhat from its general vices, but it was a much more favorable climate for writing than the period we are in now.

And on Parker in particular:

When one has bought Dorothy Parker . . . one has really got a book. She is not Emily Bronte or Jane Austen, but she has been at some pains to write well, and she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed.

Laurence Senelick echoed Wilson in his introduction to “The Jest,” his selection of one of Parker's drama reviews from Vanity Fair for The American Stage:

In the age of disillusionment that followed the Great War, the wisecrack best conveyed the fashion for cynicism. No wonder that the “Round Table” at the Algonquin Hotel, the journalists’ luncheon club she frequented with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Woolcott, and George S. Kaufman, was commonly known as the Vicious Circle. The bon mots of these mauvais langues—such as the barb that Katherine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”—were made public in their columns the next day.

Parker would not have been happy being characterized as a wisecracker, since she once wrote: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

The Dorothy Parker Society website contains a great deal of material about Parker’s life and work. The society has a newsletter; it conducts an Algonquin Round Table walking tour, and the site has a page filled with audio of Parker reading her poems (requires RealPlayer).

Related LOA works: Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays of the 1930s and 1940s; The American Stage: Writings on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Frank Kermode (1919–2010), leading literary critic of his generation

In his epilogue to the 2000 reissue of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, a collection of lectures Allen Tate has called “a landmark in twentieth-century critical thought,” Frank Kermode makes one of his signature observations:

It was my belief that in referring to the sound of a clock not as “tick-tick” but as “tick-tock” we substitute a fiction for the actual acoustic event, distinguishing between genesis of “tick” and apocalypse of “tock,” and conferring on the interval between them a significance it would otherwise lack. The fictive end purges the interval of simple chronicity. It achieves a “temporal integration”—it converts a blank into a kairos, charges it with meaning. So it can be argued that we have here a tiny model of all plots. . . . our sense of, or need for, an ending transforms our lives between “the tick of birth and the tock of death,” and stories simulate this transformation but must not do so too simply.

This brief excerpt illustrates what students of literature and even casual readers have come to cherish in Kermode’s criticism: the graceful, effortless movement from common observation to thought-provoking insight.

On Wednesday The London Review of Books posted a short notice that Frank Kermode died on August 17. What Kermode meant to the Review was quietly on display in the cascade of links below the notice: more than 200 articles and reviews he had contributed over the past thirty years. LRB’s blog linked to Kermode’s June 1979 article in The Observer that called for a new literary journal and prompted the Review’s founding.

Frank Kermode wrote his first book at the age of twenty, a study of Aaron Hill, the eighteenth-century theater manager who introduced castrato singing to England. The publication of his last book, Concerning E. M. Forster, was timed to coincide with his ninetieth birthday. In the intervening years Kermode published more than sixty books, held professorships at six different universities, served as a visiting professor at many colleges and universities in the United States, was a judge for the first Booker prize, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, the first critic to be so honored since William Empson.

In 1963 Richard Poirier offered this appraisal: “Frank Kermode is generally regarded as the best practicing critic in England today, free of the polemical or theoretical limitations that have been ascribed to F. R. Leavis or I. A. Richards and credited with the power, which Matthew Arnold required of good criticism, “to ascertain the master-spirit.” Thirty-three years later, in 1996, David Lodge confirmed Kermode’s enduring status, writing “In my opinion, and that of many others, Frank Kermode is the finest English critic of his generation.” Writers also perceived a different sensibility at work in Kermode’s judgments. Philip Roth admitted that although he dislikes reading reviews, "if Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read it".

Kermode’s breakthrough critical work came in 1957 with The Romantic Image, which John Mullan briefly summarized in his obituary for The Guardian:

It was an account of the continuities between Romanticism and Modernism, with the poetry of Yeats at its heart. With its easy erudition, but not a footnote in sight, this book seems a long way from today's average academic output. In range it is huge, reaching into European and classical literature, aesthetic philosophy as well as poetry, verse from the Renaissance as well as the 19th and 20th centuries–yet in tone it is modest, provisional (it calls itself an essay). Learning with a certain lightness was his style.

Throughout his career Kermode moved easily between modernism and other literary periods. “Wallace Stevens, as even hostile critics will admit, is a deeply interesting poet” begins Kermode’s short (just 134 pages) introduction to the prose and poetry of Wallace Stevens (1960), a book credited with introducing Stevens to the English speaking world as a “maker of worlds.” His Arden edition of The Tempest in 1961 set the standard for annotated editions of Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s Language (2000) became a bestseller in England.

Kermode’s writings often seemed ubiquitous. As Helen Vendler observed in the Washington Post obituary. “You were either reading a new book by Sir Frank or else reading a book he reviewed. He was always in the present." He patterned his “literary journalism” after Edmund Wilson. In his introduction to Continuities, one of his many collections of essays, he explains:

Wilson can deal justly with other writers without neglecting the meditative movement of his own mind, and he can satisfy, without loss of intellectual integrity, the non-specialist’s urgent and entirely proper demand for amenity of exposition and fine texture. This is the kind of journalism I call valuable and rare. It is rare not because those who could easily do it have better things to do, but because it is more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship. It calls incessantly for mental activity, fresh information, and civility into the bargain.

Kermode famously testified for the defense in 1966 when a Conservative Member of Parliament initiated a private prosecution to declare Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby Jr., obscene. The trial lasted nine days and the court found for the prosecution but when the decision was overturned in 1968 it was considered a turning point in British censorship law.

Alan Samson, Kermode’s publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, revealed what he will miss to the Guardian's Alison Flood:

He's probably the greatest literary conversationalist I've ever known - it wasn't just the lectures and the monographs and the books, it's the fact that just talking about a writer he'd say incredibly pithy, intelligent things which would prompt you to go and read them again. He knew he had exceptional gifts, but there was a modest manner about him. He knew he was smarter than everyone else, but he was this pipe-smoking, beguiling man who listened to what you had to say.... It's the wreath of pipe smoke, and the benign smile and wisdom, which I'm really going to miss.

Readers can experience some of this beguiling modesty in the video of the ninety-minute interview Alan Macfarlane conducted with Kermode in February 2008.

As wide as his interests ranged, Kermode kept returning to one poet. As he put it in the epilogue to The Sense of an Ending:

[Wallace Stevens] remains the poet who, when the mood is right, speaks most directly to me; he understood fictions, and he understood the radiance associated with the notion of kairos, a radiance he sometimes associated with the seasons (kairos, after all, means “season”). He also understood that the imagination is always at the end of an era, and that “One day enriches a year.” . . . He wrote of midsummer that it was

. . . the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

In 1997 Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson co-edited Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Reviewing it in The New York Review of Books. Helen Vendler wrote: “Now at last—in a handsome thousand pages [Kermode and Richardson] have given us—in the durable and elegant Library of America format—a Stevens for the foreseeable future.”

Excellent obituaries of Frank Kermode can also be found at The Telegraph and The New York Times.

Related LOA works: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

After what he called “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov finished writing Lolita in December 1953 and began submitting it to publishers. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So went one of the many rejection letters. Five leading publishers—Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking—all turned it down.

That was when Nabokov’s European agent, Doussia Ergaz, recommended Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, publisher of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Nabokov was then teaching Russian Studies at Cornell and feared he would be fired unless the book was published under a pseudonym. Girodias would publish it, but only with Nabokov’s name as author. Nabokov agreed but was wary, as he expressed in a letter in July 1955: “You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succès de scandale would distress me.”

Girodias printed 5,000 copies of Lolita in English in September 1955. It sold mostly to English tourists and did not receive any critical attention until, in an interview with the London Times, Graham Greene named it one of the three best novels of 1955. This prompted John Gordon of the Sunday Express to order a copy and to denounce it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The ensuing brouhaha (Gordon pointed out that Greene had been sued by Shirley Temple “for having said the little girl made her living out of displaying her thighs for the delectation of middle-aged gentlemen”) made Lolita into an international sensation. Responding to Gordon’s attack in Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote:

I cannot regard it as pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind. It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls ... an anguished book, but sometimes wildly funny, as in the saga of his travels across and around the United States with her.... [Nabokov’s] command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—alright then—a great book.

The New York Public Library “Sessions” pages, edited by Rodney Phillips and Sarah Funke, recount the dramatic story of the American publication:

Though copies of the Girodias edition were making it into the United States, Nabokov still wished for an American edition. Jason Epstein, then an editor at Doubleday, hoped to convince Doubleday's president, Douglas Black, to take the novel, by playing upon Black's desire to refight the court battle he had recently lost over Edmund Wilson’s The Memoirs of Hecate County. In an attempt to gain ground, Epstein arranged for an excerpt (about a third of the novel) to appear in Doubleday's June 1957 Anchor Review, with critical praise from Partisan Review editor F.W. Dupee. The Anchor volume featured Nabokov’s specially written explanation of the genesis of the novel and his defense of it on the grounds of “aesthetic bliss”: “On a Book Entitled Lolita.”

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nabokov endured delays and denials by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and even Putnam’s. He settled on the small independent publisher Ivan Obolensky, but when his offer, too, fell through, Putnam’s made good on an earlier proposal, and went into production.

On publication day [August 18], Putnam’s president, Walter Minton, sent a congratulatory telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS ON PUBLICATION DAY.

By the end of the day, 2,600 orders had been received.

The “blast” referred to by Minton was Orville Prescott's pan, although Elizabeth Janeway's review that had appeared the previous day in the Sunday Times was a rave. Lolita would go on to be the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 in its first three weeks.

In a 1964 interview for Life Magazine, Jane Howard asked Nabokov, “which of your writings has pleased you most?”

I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Related LOA works: Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 (includes the screenplay Nabokov wrote for the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film. It differs substantially from the final film.)

Ira Gershwin, a writer of immortal songs and “an unshowy show-business professional”

Ira Gershwin (1896–1983), author of indelible songs that continue to permeate the airwaves, died twenty-seven years ago today. He began writing songs with his younger brother George (1898–1937) in 1917, but it was with Lady Be Good in 1924 that they scored their first Broadway hit. The show starred Fred and Adele Astaire and included the songs “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm,” still standards today. Over the next thirteen years the Gershwin brothers would write thousands of songs, including hits for more than a dozen musicals and four films. In 1932, Of Thee I Sing, the show they wrote with George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, became the first musical comedy to win a Pulitzer Prize.

WICN.org’s extensive post on the history of the Gershwin song, “Embraceable You,” captures how the brothers worked together:

The perennial question in songwriting of which came first, the words or the music, is easily answered in the case of the Gershwins. George’s music came first, followed by brother Ira’s lyrics. George explained, “I hit on a new tune and play it for Ira and he hums it all over the place for awhile till he gets an idea for a lyric. Then we work the thing out together.” Ira confirmed that the music was first, saying, “Since most of the lyrics … were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.”

Ira could spend hours finding the one right word. As he described it to Robert Kimball, editor of Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, he tried to “capture the way people spoke to each other—their slang, their clichés, their catchphrases.” Clichés were his gold mine. “The literary cliché is an integral part of lyric writing. The phrase that is trite and worn-out when appearing in print usually becomes, when heard fitted to an appropriate musical turn, revitalized, and seems somehow to revert to its original provocativeness.”

The brothers differed both in working styles and in temperament. As Brad Leithauser characterizes this difference in his New York Review of Books essay assessing several books about Ira:

Most of the writing about the Gershwins has, understandably, highlighted George, who brought genius to a partnership to which Ira contributed talent. In addition, George—the taller, handsomer, and more sociable of the two, the “ladies’ man” who had affairs with a French countess and Paulette Goddard—had a near-monopoly on glamour; no cocktail party was ever heated up by spicy speculations about what the bespectacled, square-headed, and very married Ira might be up to. Almost proudly self-effacing, Ira was somebody who took satisfaction in being an unshowy show-business professional. It’s an irony he would have appreciated: that so unromantic-looking a man did so much to mint the language of romance in his time.

While they were working on the movie The Goldwyn Follies, George collapsed into a coma from an undiagnosed brain tumor and died two days later. It would be three years before Ira wrote again. He would go on to create popular songs with Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen, including the Oscar-nominated “Long Ago and Far Away” (with Kern) and “The Man That Got Away” (with Arlen).

Leithauser notes that the last song George and Ira wrote together was “Love Is Here to Stay.”

As parting shots go, it’s pretty much unbeatable, both for the sweetness of its melody and the agile tenderness of its lyrics. The sentiments may be familiar:

In time the Rockies may crumble,
Gibraltar may tumble
(They’re only made of clay),
But—our love is here to stay.

Yet if this looks like the usual outsize boasting of the Tin Pan Alley suitor, one need only substitute “music” for “love” in the last line in order to change hyperbole to understatement. The music of the brothers does more than endure. It ramifies.

More information about the Gershwins and many excellent recordings of their songs can be found at their official site.

Related LOA works: Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics; George S. Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies