The Arts Fuse interviews S. T. Joshi about the grim genius of Ambrose Bierce

This week, as part of his review of Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs on The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx interviewed volume editor S. T. Joshi and extracted some intriguing insights:

AF: The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has generated new interest in Bierce’s war stories, which are hailed as the first depiction of the effects of modern warfare. Do you feel that Bierce’s writing was essentially shaped by his witnessing combat—a case of literary PTSD? 

Joshi: There is no question that the Civil War—in which Bierce served for the better part of three years (1861–64) before he was granted an honorable discharge because of a serious head injury—colored the whole of the rest of his life. The first of his Civil War stories (“George Thurston,” 1878) was not written until 13 years after the war was over, and the majority of them were written during his first five years on the Examiner (1887–92). Bierce claimed to have enjoyed his years as a soldier, and to the end of his days, he was certain that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the soldier and the civilian—that the latter could have no idea what the former had been through. This is why the first edition of his story collection is called Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). 

Whether Bierce could be clinically diagnosed with PTSD is of course impossible to answer, but he clearly required years, even decades, to process his war experiences before he could set them down on paper. He maintained that most of the incidents in his tales, however improbable or outlandish they were, were based on first-hand witnessing of real events. 

AF: Bierce seems to be one of the first writers to tumble into the popular/literary divide. Some critics dismiss his dark, comic tales of horror as potboilers, others see them as crucial links between Poe and Lovecraft. Could he be a little of both—a purveyor of what one critic calls “pulpy morbidity”? 

Joshi: It is not clear whether Bierce ever regarded himself as a “horror writer” in anything like the modern sense of the term. While he greatly admired Poe (perhaps more for his literary theories and his pungent reviews than for his horror fiction), he resented being considered merely a Poe imitator. Occasionally he would refer to his horror tales as “tragic” tales. 

Horror fiction (or weird fiction, as I choose to call it) was not a concrete or recognized genre at the time, and many writers—from Frank R. Stockton to Henry James—could dip into the mode as the spirit moved them. Bierce’s tales appeared in magazines or newspapers right alongside more orthodox, mainstream stories, and there does not seem to have been much prejudice against their subject-matter among critics of the day. 

Today Bierce is rightly seen as the most significant American horror writer between Poe and Lovecraft, and I don’t doubt that he would be proud of that distinction; but there is no clear divide, either in subject-matter or overall effect, between those of his tales that we call “Civil War tales” and those that we call “tales of supernatural or psychological horror.”

Read Bill Marx’s full interview with S. T. Joshi on The Arts Fuse
Read the LOA interview with S. T. Joshi on Ambrose Bierce

Also of interest:

• Stories by Ambrose Bierce on Story of the Week: “The Eyes of the Panther,” “A Horseman in the Sky,” “The Moonlit Road,” 
• Silence as a weapon: the two most embarrassing speeches Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce ever gave, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The poet-soldiers of the Civil War: Ambrose Bierce, John W. De Forest, Fitz-James O’Brien, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs

An interview with Stephen W. Sears about 1862 and America’s “path to emancipation”

Stephen W. Sears, historian and author of Gettysburg, recently spoke with us about The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived it, which he edited for The Library of America. The books, which shipped from the printer today, will arrive in the LOA warehouse early next week and will be available in bookstores in March.

What about the Civil War year 1862 do you think is especially interesting and important? Did this period pose any special/particular challenges for you as editor?

Militarily, 1862 was a roller coaster year, with the fortunes of North and South rising and falling from one battlefield to the next. What was a rebellion becomes a full-fledged war, but fortunately for those of us who try to chronicle it, Civil War soldiers were the most literate of any war up to that time. Not only generals but rear-rank privates put pen to paper.

What were your main criteria in choosing pieces for the book?

Only participants or eyewitnesses are represented here, in whatever format they selected—letters to home folks, soldier or civilian diaries, memoirs, state papers and correspondence, and the like, taken from published and in some cases unpublished sources.

As a leading Civil War historian, you’ve spent many decades with this subject. Did you make any discoveries or gain any new perspectives from your work on this book?

A core theme of 1862 is, of course, the path to emancipation. In assembling these documents and fitting them into the context of events, I gained a new respect for the way Lincoln wove his way through thickets of complexity and opposition to achieve his goal.

Do you have a favorite author or piece?

My personal favorite of all these pieces is the letter of Emily Dickinson’s treatment of the soldier’s death of a hometown boy she had known. The latest research suggests three-quarters of a million deaths in the Civil War. This commemorates one of them, memorably.

David Hanna on why America’s fledgling Navy vanquished the invincible Royal Navy so frequently in the War of 1812

Guest blog post by David Hanna, author of Knights of the Sea: The True Story of the Boxer and the Enterprise and the War of 1812

One of the remarkable things about the War of 1812 at sea (and on the Great Lakes) was how well the youthful U.S. Navy performed against the reputedly omnipotent Royal Navy. No one expected much from a navy that was outnumbered by a ratio of fifty to one. President James Madison claimed the war was about freedom of the seas, but in reality he was more concerned with expanding America’s frontiers and winning the 1812 election, then only months away. Thus it came as a surprise that so many early U.S. successes in the war were won at sea. How was this so?

The Royal Navy had earned its mystique the hard way—by being at sea year round, unlike its chief rivals. And the British naval high command indoctrinated its officers with an aggressive streak that bordered on the reckless. The commander of the Boxer, Samuel Blyth, came from a long line of seamen who had helped shape the Royal Navy's mystique. The victories over Spain, Holland, and France dating back to the late 1500s were Blyth's patrimony. The Royal Navy was Blyth's family, and this was the case for many other British commanders. By 1812, British officers and crews had come to see their success not as the result of hard work, but of genetic superiority. All they had to do was show up, be aggressive, and they would carry the day, or so they thought.

The U.S. Navy was small in 1812, but it was nimble, and willing. The wars against the Barbary pirates during the administration of Thomas Jefferson had served as an incomparable school for young American officers. Stephen Decatur, David Porter, Oliver Hazard Perry, Thomas MacDonough, Isaac Hull, as well as the Enterprise’s commander, William Burrows, had all served in these wars, and had proven to be good students. There was as yet no naval academy in Annapolis; young officers had to learn what they needed to know on the job.

At that time, American crews were composed entirely of volunteers—their counterparts in the Royal Navy were, by contrast, virtually maritime slaves. Anticipating their confrontations with battle-tested British forces, the American officers knew they would be competing on competence. They trained their crews more often, and more thoroughly, and took nothing for granted.

The result was that in the overwhelming majority of engagements in the War of 1812 in which American and British naval forces were more or less evenly matched numerically, the U.S. Navy emerged victorious: the Constitution over both the Guerriere and the Java; the United States over the Macedonian, the Wasp over the Reindeer; the Enterprise over the Boxer; and on the Great Lakes, the victory of Perry's squadron over Barclay’s on Lake Erie, and the victory of MacDonough's squadron over Downie’s on Lake Champlain.

Henry Adams describes with flair several of these historic matchups in his History of the United States of America during the Administration of James Madison. Here he details the confrontation in the Azores on October 25, 1812, between the 44-gun United States under Stephen Decatur and the 38-gun Macedonian, the first British frigate captured as a prize, under John Surman Carden:

At first the United States used only her long 24-pounders, of which she carried fifteen on her broadside, while the Macedonian worked a broadside of fourteen long 18-pounders. So unequal a contest could not continue. Not only was the American metal heavier, but the American fire was quicker and better directed than that of the Englishman; so that Carden, after a few minutes of this experience, bore down to close. His manoeuvre made matters worse. The cannonades of the United States came into play; the Macedonian’s mizzen-mast fell, her fore and main top-mast were shot away, and her main-yard; almost all her rigging was cut to pieces, and most of the guns on her engaged side were dismounted. She dropped gradually to leeward, and Decatur, tacking and coming up on his enemy’s stern, hailed, and received her surrender. . . Decatur showed his skill by sparing ship and crew. His own loss was eleven men killed and wounded; the Macedonian’s loss was nine times as great. The United States suffered little in her hull . . . while [aloft] the Macedonian . . . nothing remained standing but her fore and main masts and her fore-yard.

The only notable British victory at sea was that of the Shannon over the Chesapeake. In 1814, after Britain made peace with France to end (at least temporarily) the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy could tighten the screws on its blockade of the United States. From then on, any chance of a single ship engagement became a virtual impossibility. The quantitative edge was too great to challenge, but this in no way diminished the qualitative edge the U.S. Navy had demonstrated. Pound for pound, the Navy could claim that by war's end it was the finest in the world.

Later this year The Library of America will publish The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence, edited by Donald R. Hickey.

Also of interest:

• “The Sea Fight That Inspired a Longfellow Poem,” an excerpt from Knights of the Sea on The Atlantic’s website
• The War of 1812 website includes frequently updated links to new articles about the war
• In October 2011 WNED-TV Buffalo-Toronto and Florentine Films produced a new film, The War of 1812, as well as a downloadable smartphone app guide to historic sites and battlefields

Related LOA works: Henry Adams: History of the United States of America during the Administration of James Madison; James Madison: Writings; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (includes “My Lost Youth”)

Philip Schultz on Robert Long’s Blue: “Diligent watching and endless surprise”

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz, who published his memoir, My Dyslexia, in 2011, joins our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, history, and essays about works that have influenced them. Schultz revisits the work and achievement of poet and friend Robert Long.

Making claims about the importance of recently deceased poets is tricky, especially if the poet was a friend. Robert Long, who died in 2006, was a friend, a poet friend—and friendships among poets is a subject worthy of its own treatise. It’s impossible for me to be objective about his work without sounding self-serving or distorted by a perverse calculus of grief and identification. But I can say that his poems continue to surprise and delight me and that his work is both original and serendipitously blunt. I like bluntness, especially the indirect, somewhat back-stepping kind, the Frank O’Hara and E. E. Cummings kind.

Robert Long wrote one full book and three chapbooks that were filtered into the collection Blue (Canio’s Editions 2000), and De Kooning’s Bicycle (FSG 2005), the latter a brilliant novelistic prose celebration of the artists and writers who settled in the Hamptons in the ’50s and ’60s. As John Ashbery said of the book, it’s essentially “the history of mid-twentieth-century American art.” Long, who was the art critic for the East Hampton Star for many years, lived most of his life in East Hampton. While this last book is certainly special, it’s his poetry that will and should be remembered.

His poems cut back and forth from image to insight to insinuation like brush strokes off a highly colorful palette, making a provocative collage /parade of the casual and profane: 

It’s like walking into a room
And suddenly realizing you’ve had sex with everyone there
At least once, watching your friends’ lives
Tangling as you all grow somewhat older,
Somehow more resolute. Bookshelves grow, too,
And you notice your handwriting becoming more matter-of-fact;
It’s as if all that comic smartness we glided through in youth
Were somehow desperate. And now we come to terms
With the sidewalk’s coruscating glamour,
The rows of dull but neat garbage cans,
Each with its own painted number,
The poodles and patrol cars, the moon rising high,
Like aspirin, over Eighth Avenue.
(from “Chelsea”) 

Few poets are able to cram so much keen lyrical feeling and diverse imagery into such a small space with such an entertaining sense of urgency. His was a visual virtuosity born of an intense appreciation of his own odd-minded obsessions with, say, the art of De Kooning, Pollock and Tiepolo; Formula One racing cars; and the visual splendors of the East End of Long Island; not to forget Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and Ninth Avenue, among others. The language in his poems whirls, zigzags, and flows erratically, as if uncontrollable, though all by design. His prepossessing emotional dexterity was fashioned over a lifetime of looking at art. There’s something profoundly subliminal, yet at the same time spontaneous and private in his work.

Although his being gay is present in the poems, it’s no more a subject than his politics, or his profound respect for his environment; it was what art turned, agitated, and reconstituted things into that mattered most to him, not ideas in and of themselves. His poetry is, essentially, as introspective and formally causal as he was, proffering an attitude of prepositional forlornness. Even the love poems are addressed to an unnamed anonymous “You,” coloring the intimacy with a second-person sense of privileged familiarity.

                        The other night I could hear

An ordinary car gliding past my house
And your regular breathing all those miles away,
In your room, on the other end of the phone,
Lying on your bed, speechless, receiver

To your ear, both of us not wanting
To hang up. And when we finally did,
You said “Seeya,”
Though you won’t, ever again.
(from “Little Black Dino”) 

His is a world of drugs, booze, fast living, and intimate, resigned reflection—with a coating of nostalgia for Nowhereville, where angels write postcards and talk on the telephone. The lines whiz by on Librium, the images speak to one another in their own whispered jazzy two-tone argot, a disjointed language of self-avowal, diligent watching, and endless surprise.

I’m comfortable here, on 50 mg. of Librium,
Two hundred bucks in my pocket
And a new job just a week away.
I can walk the streets in a calm haze,
My blood pressure down to where I’m almost human,
Make countless pay-phone calls from street corners—
Buzzing, they go by in near-neon trails,
People, people like me, headed for black-bean soup,
For screams in alleyways, for the homey click
Of the front door’s closing, heading home
Past all those faces you know you’ve seen before…
(from “Chelsea”)

I’m playing the dilettante,
But it’s all out of my hands. One time,
I bought a velvet jacket from a speedfreak
on your corner. It was December. It was cold.
We had this great chat about the necessity
Of transacting business politely. We walked to the
Grocery so I could get change of a five, after
I’d tried on the jacket, out on the street.
People walked by. I had my gloves between my teeth.
“Whaddaya think, I said. “Looks good,” he said.
(from “East Ninth Street”) 

The wonderful lack of judgment, explanation, or apology throws the reader headlong into the drama and desperation of the scene. Frank O’Hara, an early influence, did his own version of excited conversational truth-telling celebration, but Robert Long has taken that a step further. In the world of his poems the everyday lives side-by-side with off-kilter, hallowed feeling, a place where “St. Lucy is the patron saint of eyes” and we all get a “package from the Dessert-of-the-Month Club,” whether we subscribe or not.

His finely honed, keen ability to see beyond where he’s looking probably accounts for his brooding sympathetic music, and the high-mindedness of his anxious intelligence. He knew how to mix the high and the low, raw emotion with restraint, in order to register the deeper mysteries in the silence between words. De Kooning rode a bike but Robert preferred Enzo Ferrari’s Dino, a six-cylinder understated miracle that was “more beautiful than most painting, most poetry.” He deserves another look, as he speeds by. Who knows—maybe we’re all a little more ready for him now.

In 1987 Philip Schultz founded The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing in New York City, and he has been its director ever since. He is the author of seven books of poetry and winner of numerous awards and fellowships. Reviewing Failure (2007), co-winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Gerald Stern singled out Schultz’s “heartbreaking tenderness that goes beyond mere pity . . . It’s as if he bears our pain.” In 2010 Houghton Mifflin published The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems, which Mark Doty called “a restless, energetic act of inquiry.”

Excerpts from Blue by Robert Long (2000) copyright © 2000 by Robert Long. Reprinted by permission of Canio's Editions.

Also of interest: 

• In 2009 the KRUU-FM radio show Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost devoted a half hour to the work of Robert Long 
• Other “Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Lev Grossman, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Emma Straub 

“Enamoured with Freedom”: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor on Paul Jennings, servant to James and Dolley Madison

Guest blog post by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons

Photo of Paul Jennings
courtesy of Mary Alexander

Paul Jennings was considering running away, and his master—the President of the United States—knew it.

In January 1817, with only two months remaining in his eight-year administration, James Madison received a letter from his nephew alerting him to a rumor that Jennings and two of the Madisons’ other home slaves in Washington intended to enlist illegally as cooks on sea vessels rather than return to the Madisons’ Virginia plantation.

We can imagine Jennings gnawing on the possibility of escape as he walked Washington’s city streets. Just ten in 1809 when he was selected to be part of the White House domestic staff, he had come of age in the nation’s new capital. Jennings would later chronicle many of the stirring events he witnessed during the War of 1812 in the first White House memoir, including his eyewitness account of the rescue from the torches of the invading British army of Gilbert Stuart’s iconic (and enormous) Lansdowne portrait of George Washington.

The decision Jennings wrestled with now centered not just on personal risk, his willingness to chance being arrested and punished. Strong family ties bound him to the plantation. Could he abandon the scene of his boyhood, the home of his mother, never to return?

It is not known if Madison confronted Jennings with his nephew’s letter but in the event he did go back to Virginia and was “promoted” to the role of personal manservant to the former president. Over Madison’s two-decade-long retirement Jennings served as barber and dressing man, traveling companion and—as Madison’s health declined—intimate caregiver.

Always present yet invisible, Jennings was there as the former president received a queue of notables: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster. Young men of learning came, too. They were enthralled as the sage held forth on the fine points of the Constitution and other political and literary subjects. As the constant servant in Madison’s study, Jennings listened to this “feast of reason” on a daily basis. The Madisons’ niece said that Jennings “sighed for freedom . . . was enamoured with freedom.” Considering what he was hearing, how could he not? Jennings absorbed the theoretical underpinnings that allowed him to identify his innate yearning for freedom as a natural right of man.

James Madison died in the early morning of June 28, 1836 and his manservant left the only eyewitness account: “he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.” Jennings had reason to expect his liberty by the terms of Madison’s will. Edward Coles, a protégé of Madison concerned with his legacy, thought he had talked his mentor into freeing all one hundred of his slaves. He was devastated when he discovered that Madison had instead bequeathed them to his wife Dolley. “Mr. Madison’s course has been most unfortunate for his memory, and for the peace and happiness of his Widow,” wrote Coles, “he had now died without having freed one [slave]—no not even Paul.”

The widow Madison (“as she knew was her husband’s wish”) included a term in her 1841 will that would free “my mulatto man Paul,” the only slave so treated. But when Dolley sold the plantation and moved back to Washington, she considered Jennings an integral member of the household and brought him with her, separating him from his wife and children, who were owned by a Virginia neighbor. Shortly thereafter, in 1844, Jennings’s wife died. Thinking of his now motherless children, the youngest only two, Jennings knew he needed his freedom now.

He determined to raise his sale price, “whatever he (sic) might be.” Dolley set the price at $200, below Jennings’s worth as a skilled houseman, but more than he could possibly pay. In financial straits herself, his mistress hired out Jennings to President James Polk at the White House, just a block away from her Lafayette Square home, but kept his wages “to the last red cent.”

That was when Jennings knocked on the door of Senator Daniel Webster. Even for a slave, it helps to have acquaintances in high places. Webster came to the rescue, loaning Jennings his purchase price, and striking a deal whereby Jennings would work in Webster’s employ to reimburse the advance at the rate of $8.00 per month.

On an early spring day in 1847 Webster handed Jennings the document that at last granted him, at the age of forty-eight, his liberty. He still owed Webster a substantial sum, but this he would pay back “with his own free hands.”

Also of interest:

• Electronic edition of A Coloured Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison by Paul Jennings at the University of North Carolina “Documenting the South” website
• Read more about Paul Jennings at James Madison’s Montpelier, where Elizabeth Dowling Taylor was formerly Director of Education
• Watch an interview with Elizabeth Dowling Taylor on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Related LOA works: James Madison: Writings; Slave Narratives

Looking back: the most viewed Reader’s Almanac blog posts

Are we surprised that the most-read post on our “literary” blog in 2011 is marketing copy? Not if it’s written by Andy Borowitz. We always thought he was funny; and, apparently, quite a few readers do, too. Just published in October, the book he edited, The 50 Funniest American Writers*: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (*According to Andy Borowitz), has become quite a sensation: the first Library of America book to make The New York Times Best Seller list. Given this, it’s no surprise that the book resulted in two of the top four 2011 blog posts. It is possible to be literary and funny.

Readers do like lists: from our announcement of best-selling and forthcoming titles to Adam Levin’s list of the works that influenced The Instructions to what you can discover when you compare two lists of “best short stories” a century apart. Readers also responded positively to our “Influences” series—writers describing the authors or works that most influenced them. Three of those—by Levin, Jim Moore, and Lev Grossman—made the top ten. We deeply appreciate that so many writers have generously agreed to contribute to this ongoing series. And seeing two posts on poetry—Moore on Kenneth Rexroth and John Ashbery on Arthur Rimbaud—become so popular confirms what we have long believed: the audience for poetry has been sorely underserved.

Reader’s Almanac Top Ten for 2011

1. Andy Borowitz’s marketing copy for The Library of America: “Does being funny get you girls?” – March 17, 2011
2. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
3. Forthcoming from The Library of America (Summer—Fall 2011) – February 7, 2011
4. The 50 Funniest American Writers: Who made the list? – August 11, 2011
5. Adam Levin: American literary influences on The Instructions – January 19, 2011
6. Jim Moore on how reading Kenneth Rexroth changed his life – August 16, 2011
7. John Ashbery translates Rimbaud’s Illuminations, “the book that made poetry modern” – May 16, 2011
8. James Baldwin on hearing Martin Luther King preach in Montgomery – January 14, 2011
9. Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises – August 30, 2011
10. The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations – June 6, 2011

The Library of America launched Reader’s Almanac in July 2010 and has published some 270 blog posts since. To date our “all time” top ten are evenly spread between 2010 and 2011. Web searches probably account for the continuing popularity of the 2010 entries: Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Jack Kerouac’s grave; the cautionary tale of publishers rejecting Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; Mark Twain inventing how to sell a banned book; Elaine Showalter (our first guest blogger) parsing the parallels between Philip Roth’s Nemesis and Albert Camus’s The Plague; and the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston’s little known early ethnographic work. We suspect that these posts will continue to attract new Library of America readers; time—and many more page-views—will tell. In the meantime, we look forward to another season of “seeking the enduring.”

Reader’s Almanac All-Time Top Ten (from 2010-2011)

1. Andy Borowitz’s marketing copy for The Library of America: “Does being funny get you girls?” – March 17, 2011
2. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
3. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
4. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
5. Forthcoming from The Library of America (Summer—Fall 2011) – February 7, 2011
6. The 50 Funniest American Writers: Who made the list? – August 11, 2011
7. Adam Levin: American literary influences on The Instructions – January 19, 2011
8. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
9. Elaine Showalter on Philip Roth, Albert Camus, and plagues – October 20, 2010
10. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

Also of interest:

• “Influences” posts: Deborah Baker, Lev Grossman, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Emma Straub

Looking back: what readers enjoyed most from Story of the Week

With the end of 2011 The Library of America’s Story of the Week completes its second full year—and the continued response from readers—in signups, comments, suggestions for stories—confirms this as one of the LOA's most satisfying initiatives. This milestone prompts a review. Which stories did readers like best? Do any themes connect them?

Take a look below at the list of last year’s top ten stories. Humorous stories abound (#3,#4,#5, #7 and #8), suggesting that Story of the Week readers like to laugh—even at themselves, since Edith Wharton’s “Xingu” pokes fun at reading groups (not yours, of course, just the pretentious ones).

When readers aren’t laughing, are they yearning to be forever young? How curious that the most popular story by several thousand views, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” was a fable written more than 170 years ago about the hubris of science and the yen for eternal youth? And there’s sparse humor in #2, “Why Don’t You Dance?”—available to Story of the Week readers for a limited period—Raymond Carver’s brief, bleak vignette of a furniture sale in the aftermath of divorce.

Stories of challenge best characterize two other top entries. More than a hundred years ago, Mary Church Terrell, an early activist for women’s rights and civil rights, delivered the stem-winding speech “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States.” Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” dates from around the same time, but his unnamed “man” confronts quite a different challenge: striving to staying alive, alone with his dog in the Yukon at fifty degrees below.

Story of the Week's Top Ten for 2011

1. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” Nathaniel Hawthorne – week of June 26, 2011
2. “Why Don’t You Dance?” Raymond Carver – September 25, 2011
3. “A Box to Hide In,” James Thurber – June 19, 2011
4. “Shiftless Little Loafers,” Susan Orlean – October 16, 2011
5. “The Ransom of Red Chief,” O. Henry – August 21, 2011
6. “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” Mary Church Terrell – January 16, 2011
7. “A Dog’s Tale,” Mark Twain – April 17, 2011
8. “Charles,” Shirley Jackson – June 6, 2010
9. “Xingu,” Edith Wharton – January 23, 2011
10. “To Build a Fire,” Jack London – February 27, 2011

Two things seem clear: First, good yarns have long lives. And second, new Story of the Week readers are avid archive combers. What else explains how Shirley Jackson’s “Charles,” first posted in June, 2010, became #8 in 2011?

New readers seeking out previously posted stories is the only explanation we can think of for why only three new 2011 entries made it onto the “all-time” top ten (“all-time” meaning, of course, the past two years). Here, amid the entertaining treats from Jackson, Thurber, and Twain, atmospheric tales from Hawthorne and Carver find fellowship with three much more ominous classics: “The Little Room,” “I’ll Be Waiting,” and “The Train.”

Story of the Week All-Time Top Ten (from 2010-2011)

1. “Charles,” Shirley Jackson – week of June 6, 2010
2. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” Nathaniel Hawthorne – June 26, 2011
3. “Why Don’t You Dance?” Raymond Carver – September 25, 2011
4. “The Lady on the Bookcase,” James Thurber – April 25, 2010
5. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 17, 2010
6. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 5, 2010
7. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – November 21, 2010
8. “A Box to Hide In,” James Thurber – June 19, 2011
9. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 3, 2010
10. “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” Mark Twain – December 19, 2010

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations
• What “The Lottery” taught Shirley Jackson about her readers
• Kurt Vonnegut on “the only thing you can teach” writers

Herbert Leibowitz on William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound: Episodes from a Sixty-year Friendship

Guest blog post by Herbert Leibowitz, founder and editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and author of “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams

Few literary friendships can compare to the strange, contentious alliance between Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, which spanned sixty years, ending with Williams's death in 1963. They met in Philadelphia, where Williams was starting his first term at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Pound, two years his junior, was an undergraduate studying Romance Languages at the University. For Williams, a sheltered, naïve, young man from Rutherford, New Jersey, with inchoate aspirations to make his mark on the world as doctor and poet, encountering Pound was like being struck by lightning.

The two could not have been more different. Where Pound was voluble and cocksure in his opinions, Williams was cautious and diffident. Already playing the role of flamboyant literary agent provocateur, Pound aimed to drive the poetasters from the Temple of Art and seize the throne of modernist poetry czar for himself. Williams, with tastes formed by after-dinner readings at home from Shakespeare and Palgrave’s Victorian anthology, still had an adolescent’s romantic crush on Keats.

Williams enjoyed Pound’s sophisticated shoptalk and spellbinding riffs on just about any topic, An apt pupil and rapt listener, he absorbed Pound’s obiter dicta and stored them away until he had time to test their validity. Early in their friendship, a paradigm was established: Williams impressed by Pound’s dazzling erudition and precocious mastery of poetic forms, Pound enjoying the amiable and intelligent openness Williams so willingly provided. They shared common interests: fencing, theater, pretty co-eds, and dreams of future success. And if Williams was at times a reluctant disciple, that was a piquant challenge for the two to spar, as they did fencing with épées.

Ever self-centered, Pound never noticed Williams sizing him up. In a letter to his mother, on March 30, 1904, Williams drew a shrewd psychological profile of his new friend:

Pound is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor.

In his 1951 Autobiography, Williams recalls a school performance of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis in which Pound played a woman of the chorus: dressed in an outlandish, ill-fitting wig and gesticulating wildly, he “heaved his massive breasts in ecstasies of extreme emotion,” as though mentally unbalanced. Pound seemed to drill home the dangers of living or dying for art; Williams refused “to be bedbug food for it,” and instead chose to earn his living practicing medicine.

Once Pound became an expatriate, restlessly moving from London to Paris to Rapallo, the two poets saw each other only for short periods and communicated mostly by mail; their exchanges could be volatile, hilarious, pontifical, or insulting—all in one letter. When Williams visited Pound in London in 1910, Ezra tried to cure Bill’s literary provinciality by introducing him to Yeats and giving him a tour of cosmopolitan London’s cultural treasures, but Pound’s garrulous salesman’s pitch left Williams feeling self-conscious and defensive; he couldn’t wait to escape the stifling ambience of hothouse aestheticism.

Pound had a famously generous side: he arranged for the publication of The Tempers (1913), published Williams’s “Postlude” in the Imagist Anthology (1914), and pushed Harriet Monroe to accept some of Williams's poems in Poetry. Williams was grateful for his pal’s assistance, but it came at a high price: in letter after letter, Pound bombarded him with advice, excoriated him for his ignorance of the classic poets, and ridiculed him for embarking on a fool’s quest for the holy grail of an American poetic idiom. Williams tolerated these hectoring outbursts, for the most part, with stoical calm. He respected Pound’s technical skills and found his advice in that area useful. When Pound’s belligerence and condescension wore him down, however, he would erupt in molten anger. The fact is, Williams freely admitted, he could not stand Pound’s company for more than a few hours at a time.

Their friendship almost crumbled when Pound edited and championed T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which instantly became the modernist long poem. It is no exaggeration to say that Williams felt betrayed by Pound, the pain more stinging because he had lost his oedipal rivalry to a poet he loathed. Williams reacted in two ways: he turned Eliot into a bugbear whose glory he envied and whose supercilious manner he despised; and steeling his will, he sat down to write a long poem, Spring and All (1923), he hoped would eclipse or at least compete with Eliot’s (he did not let Pound read or vet the manuscript before publication). The desired vindication failed to occur. The Waste Land was talked about everywhere, whereas Spring and All, Williams’s breakthrough poem, went virtually unread. (Half of its 350 copies were confiscated by the U. S. Post Office, probably because it was printed in France, and assumed to be salacious.) Because of their artistic disagreements, the friendship cooled, only to flare up ten years later.

Pound’s greatest gift to Williams was urging James Laughlin, the tyro founder and publisher of New Directions, to sign the Bard of Rutherford to a contract. Until 1936, Williams’s books had mostly appeared in small editions and quickly vanished. As New Directions prospered under Laughlin’s leadership, Williams’s readership began to increase. Having studied at the “Ezuversity,” Laughlin knew by heart the Pound catechism, bombast, foibles, and encyclopedic knowledge of poetry. But even he was unprepared for what occurred in the 1930s: the horrific spectacle of Pound’s mind demonstrably unhinged: the shrill propaganda broadcasts for Mussolini and the applause for Hitler and Franco’s massacres of innocents were undeniable symptoms of a descent into madness.

Williams, too, was appalled and disgusted that his old friend had become a prisoner of Fascism. The character flaws and affectations he had early intuited in Pound had metastasized into delusions of grandeur and apologies for moral and political evils. Williams flayed Pound for his cruel, unforgivable blindness to human suffering on a massive scale. Pound’s toxic fulminations could not be explained away as mere rhetorical overkill. Realizing Pound was beyond the reach of logical argument,Williams was on the verge of terminating their long friendship.

Undoubtedly, Williams’s gratitude for Pound’s tutelage and benefactions held him back from an irrevocable rupture, as did his abiding respect for Pound as a titan of poetry. After Pound was arrested for treason in 1945, he was transferred to Washington, D.C. for arraignment and incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He presided there for the next twelve years like a deposed monarch in exile, surrounded by his books, adding cantos to his long poem, and exchanging anti-Semitic slurs with the weird, bigoted people who visited him.

Williams corresponded infrequently with Pound in those years and, when he did drag himself to Washington for a long-postponed meeting, it was an awkward reunion. Williams could not help noticing that the old centaur had scarcely changed: the high, whinnying laugh and the spate of allusions, epigrams, and judgments ranging from the brilliant to the crackpot were as familiar as Pound’s epistolary voices.

Always eager to ground himself in plain talk with common folks, Williams described Pound to the black taxi driver who returned him to the city and asked his opinion of his friend's behavior. “He’s not crazy, he just talks too much.” Although a glib response that lets Pound off the hook, it echoed Williams’s own inner debate: is Pound to be condemned or do his magisterial contributions to poetry mitigate his guilt? This debate became public when Pound's Pisan Cantos won the Library of Congress's first Bollingen Prize in 1949—and Williams bravely and vociferously argued the latter stance.

In the last phase of their friendship, each poet lapsed into silence. For several years Pound rarely spoke, as if belatedly atoning for the diabolical words and rants he had spewn; and Williams, reeling from several strokes, could communicate only in broken phrases or in anguished stammering. When Williams died in 1963, Pound wrote to Williams's wife Floss in uncharacteristic humility: “He put up a great fight for you & he bore with me for 60 years. I shall never have another poet friend like him.”

Death had finally sundered their friendship—and how sad that Williams could not hear those plain words of tribute.

Related LOA works: Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations; William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems; American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume one: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (includes poems by Pound and Williams)

Turning high fashion into politics: Henry Louis Gates Jr. on W.E.B. Du Bois and the New Negro movement of 1900

"African American Girl, Half-Length Portrait,
with Right Hand to Cheek, with Illustrated
Book on Table." 1899 or 1900.

Throughout the month of December WNYC talk show host Brian Lehrer conducted a series of interviews with Henry Louis Gates Jr. about his new book Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History 1513–2008. Gates dedicated the book to his father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., who died on Christmas Eve 2010 at the age of 97 and a half. Designed as a “lavishly illustrated coffee table book,” the volume selects some 789 illustrations from the 26,000 in the archives of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute (where Gates is the Director) to “recreate the sense of wonder” one gets in seeing a period of history brought visually to life.

In the second interview Gates describes how W.E.B. Du Bois turned “high fashion into politics” in creating the Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900:

Lehrer: For the rest of today we will linger around the turn of the twentieth century. Your section on that is titled “New Negro, Old Problem.” What does the term New Negro refer to? 

Gates: This is my favorite period in African American history. My colleagues look at me and say, “Why?” For the Negro it was the end of the world. Remember: the Civil War ends in 1865. Reconstruction is 1866 to 1876. The first black senator is elected. Black members of the House of Representatives. Black people had never been freer. But because of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise—Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president—the Reconstruction period ends and a huge onslaught against black people begins. And it culminates in the 1890s with the birth of Jim Crow laws. Most people don’t realize that those separate but equal laws really were codified in 1890 and reached a zenith in 1896. 

What happened in the race was that a lot of black people became migrants and started migrating north as early as 1890. And here’s what happened within the race and it’s something that a lot of people don’t talk about or don’t want to talk about. Remember that you had these established free Negro communities in the north—slavery was abolished here in Massachusetts in 1783—so you had these long established lower middle class and middle class but free and literate black communities. All of a sudden these free Negroes are being confronted by illiterate Southern rural sharecroppers, former slaves. And a huge cultural clash ensues.

So in 1894 someone writes an essay and says “these people are Old Negroes. Those of us in the north are New Negroes.” By 1900 Booker T. Washington himself publishes a book, A New Negro for a New Century. And the new Negroes would be distinguished from the old Negroes. The new Negroes would be educated, they would be refined. They would embody what my colleague the historian Evelyn Higginbotham calls “the politics of respectability.” And they would be the vanguard of the race. They would be the part of the black community—Du Bois went on to call them “The Talented Tenth”—that would be most readily positioned to integrate, and be seen as equals with their white middle class counterparts. So in a way the Old Negro/New Negro movement was the first public class schism within the race.

Lehrer: This section of your book includes two contrasting photo essays. One of portraits of well-dressed black people – what you call the New Negro. The other being photos of sambo art. Did you juxtapose the two for this reason?

Gates: Absolutely. The photo essay you refer to was done by the great W.E.B. Du Bois. I’ll remind listeners that he was the first black man to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, and he was the greatest black intellectual of all. Essentially they were World Fairs but they weren’t called World Fairs then. There had been one in Chicago called the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893 which prevented black people officially from being part of it. And then Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Exposition speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895.

The one in Paris in 1900 was called the Paris Exposition Universelle. Du Bois was determined to establish the presence of the Negro there. So he and his Fisk University classmate—Du Bois went to historically black Fisk before he went to Harvard so he had two Bachelor’s degrees—he and his classmate, Thomas Calloway, a black lawyer, assembled this collection of photographs of these amazingly well-dressed and well-heeled upper-class black people into two albums. One was called “Types of American Negroes,” the other was called “Negro Life in Georgia, USA.” Listeners can see the whole collection online at The Library of Congress website.

There was one black congressman left in the House of Representatives. He was George Henry White from North Carolina. He would be the last black congressman to serve—he left office in 1901— until 1928. One of the last things he did was to get Du Bois $15,000 to fund what they called the Negro Exhibit. It opened on April 14, 1900, and it showed the most successful middle class African American men, women, skilled workers and business people. It showed their good taste in clothing and furnishings and culture. The pictures are full of people surrounded by books and pianos. It even included charts and graphs and maps and copies of patents black people had filed for, and lists of books written by black authors, over 1,400 books. It was the proof of the existence of the New Negro.

Lehrer: It was fashion and high culture as a civil rights strategy.

Gates: You got it. David Levering Lewis, the great historian, wrote a book about the Harlem Renaissance and he said, the Harlem Renaissance was civil rights by copyright. This was civil rights by middle class photography. And there were two reasons why Du Bois felt he had to do it. The first was the birth of Jim Crow. Separate but equal laws that had come into being since 1890, culminating with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. But the second was this huge proliferation of what we call sambo art. Every place a middle class white person looked from the time they shut off their alarm in the morning and went downstairs: their tea cosy, their egg cup, postcards, trade cards, advertisements. Every place they looked they saw a deracinated sambo image. This is horrible but you could even go into a drug store on vacation and buy a postcard of a lynched black man and mail it . . . They also would show black people stealing chickens, looking lasciviously at white women, stealing watermelons, eating watermelons . . .

Lehrer: That’s how black people were depicted in popular culture art to white people and Du Bois was trying to counter that with these other images.

Gates: Du Bois was trying to deconstruct it and it led to two or three New Negro movements between 1900 and 1925 culminating in the Harlem Renaissance, which was also known as the New Negro Movement.

Also of interest:

• The University of Miami website includes an extensive portfolio of pages reconstructing “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900
• How Sam Hose’s lynching became an awakening for W.E.B. Du Bois, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute website
• W.E.B. Du Bois online resources at the Library of Congress

Photo credit: W.E.B. Du Bois Albums of Photographs of African Americans in Georgia Exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 

Related LOA works: W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (includes “The Talented Tenth”); American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (includes Booker T. Washington’s Address at the Atlanta Exposition); Harlem Renaissance Novels (boxed set)

Naughty and Nice: Laurence Maslon on Kaufman & Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner

Guest blog post by Laurence Maslon, associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University and editor of Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies for the Library of America.

Christmastime has a hammerlock hold on pop culture entertainment; frequent repetitions have made plays and movies about Christmas feel effortful, obligatory, or manipulative. Yet, encountering a play or movie that just happens to have Christmas in it can be delightful, like unwrapping an unexpected stocking stuffer. The Shop Around the Corner and Auntie Mame (and the musicals based on them), for example, wield the holiday season subtly. And that over-roasted holiday chestnut, It’s a Wonderful Life, was originally released in the first week of the New Year, 1947; Christmastime was simply the final chapter in its epic story.

No play has ever exploited the incidental dramatic potential of Christmas better than Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1939 comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner. Its main character, Sheridan Whiteside, was transparently based on one of the most dramatic, infuriating, and improbable celebrities of the era between the wars: Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was a drama critic, raconteur, radio host, essayist, and charter member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, but that barely suggests his influence then on middlebrow culture. He was a tastemaker of popular fiction on a scale that would have made Oprah Winfrey’s encomiums seem like fortune cookie messages. His barbed wit would have sliced Simon Cowell for breakfast. (Reviewing a volume of inferior poetry entitled And I Shall Make Music, his sole critique was “Not on my carpet, lady!”)

Famous coast-to-coast by 1938 as the host of a radio show called The Town Crier, Woollcott regaled his audience with an idiosyncratic mix of stories, reviews, and personal predilections. Although he could be quite vicious, Woollcott had a wide sentimental streak and often devoted broadcasts to wrongly convicted murderers, war veterans, seeing-eye dogs—and, of course, Christmas. Eventually, Woollcott fancied himself an actor and demanded that his pals Kaufman and Hart concoct a play for him. It wasn’t difficult to put the melodramatic Woollcott on stage—what to do with his character once he got there was another matter.

The premise of the play was simple enough—while the cosmopolitan Whiteside is lecturing in the Midwest one winter, he slips on a patch of ice and is forced to recuperate in the stifling confines of a middle-class family—but Woollcott/Whiteside’s acidulous aphorisms had the potential to wear an audience down. Kaufman and Hart solved the problem by setting the comedy during Christmastime. The charm of the holiday season would be the perfect foil for the misanthrope’s venom; it worked for Ebenezer Scrooge—why not for Sheridan Whiteside?

Kaufman and Hart also exploited Woollcott’s sentimental attachment to the Christmas season. As they have Whiteside’s secretary explain: “Christmas is Mr. Whiteside’s personal property. He invented it and it belongs to him. First thing tomorrow morning, Mr. Whiteside will open each and every present, and there will be the damnedest fuss you ever saw.” Indeed, Whiteside turns the household upside down by inviting his own badly behaved holiday guests, receiving exotic presents from around the world (including a crate of penguins from Admiral Byrd), and making long-distance calls to far-flung chums.

The climax of this occupational siege comes on Christmas Eve, when Whiteside has commandeered his hosts’ living room, replete with radio technicians and producers, to broadcast his fabled holiday program. As he begins—“This is Whiteside speaking. On this eve of eves, when my own heart is overflowing with peace and kindness . . . ,” an errant nurse barrels through the broadcast shrieking, “A penguin bit me!” An unfazed Whiteside continues to intone his tribute to that “still and wondrous night, two thousand years ago . . .”

With the character of Whiteside, Kaufman and Hart captured a Victorian sensibility during the last gasp of Art Deco modernity. Woollcott/Whiteside held on to the values of the nineteenth century with a sentimentality that was two generations removed and increasingly, if not embarrassingly, out of place. As The Man Who Came to Dinner was in rehearsal for its Broadway premiere in October 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. The comedy went on to become a huge hit, providing much-needed laughter during what was surely the most anxious Christmas in recent memory. In fact, the war in Europe necessitated a script change by June of the following year: Whiteside’s annual custom was to ring his chum Gertrude Stein in Paris to hear the Christmas bells of Notre Dame chime over the telephone—after Paris fell to the Nazis, the phone call was changed to Whiteside’s ringing Walt Disney to hear instead the voice of Donald Duck.

If Christmas sentimentality was a useful dramatic device for Kaufman, he had little use for it off-stage (Hart was another story—his wonderful autobiography, Act One, contains one of the most sentimental Christmas stories of all time). At one point, Woollcott played the part of Whiteside in a West Coast tour. He had a mischievous penchant for inverting one of the comedy’s lines: “At Christmas,” he would say, “I always feel the needy.” “The word is ‘feed’,” asserted Kaufman, who was also the play’s director. “That’s something you aren’t going to be able to do for yourself if you don’t keep the lines straight.”

Also of interest:

• What George S. Kaufman learned from the Marx Brothers, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Read more about George S. Kaufman at the website created by Laurence Maslon
• Below, Alexander Woollcott re-enacts his radio show The Town Crier in the opening minutes of Babes on Broadway (1941) 

Related LOA works: Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies (includes The Man Who Came to Dinner); The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (includes a review by Alexander Woollcott and Morton Eustis’s account of Kaufman directing the rehearsals for the Broadway premiere of The Man Who Came to Dinner)