Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”

The author of the forthcoming biography William Wells Brown: An African American Life, Ezra Greenspan edited William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings, which has just been published by The Library of America. Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

Why read William Wells Brown, and why now?

Why Brown? Because he pioneered virtually every genre of African American writing. Want to know black culture in his revolutionary time and as it has come down to us today? Read William Wells Brown. Because he was the most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era. And because he was, as a mid-twentieth-century critic noted, a person unable to be uninteresting.

Why Brown now? Because he was arguably the parent of our postmodern cultural concerns/preoccupations a century before they were born. Fragmentation, alternating perspectives, sampling, multimedia, generic confusion were his signature practices—all the more interesting for us because they came about in a different cultural era and in response to different historical exigencies.

Clotel concerns a subject—Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants—that has drawn an unusual amount of interest. Why is this subject so fascinating?

An undergraduate student commented to me earlier today that one needs to be careful in Texas about challenging core beliefs about myths of American origins and exceptionalism. I don’t think Texas is exceptional in that regard. Clotel puts on a show that fascinates, in part, because it savages such beliefs. It goes after the father of American fathers and exposes the fundamental hypocrisy between his creed (“all men are created equal”) and practice. The fictions of blood, family, and national union that Jefferson (and Brown’s white father) created and embodied still survive in our culture and polity, though with greater contestation than in Brown’s time. Are we one people? On what basis do we define our peoplehood? And what has skin color got to do with it? Clotel asked hard questions that we are still asking today.

Discoveries made while preparing the collection? While writing the biography?

Many, many—out of which a few. Ralph Ellison had profound reasons for calling people of color “invisible.” One that I discovered in the course of researching Brown is that, politics and ideology aside, it is very hard to make people visible who left behind no archive of papers, letters, diaries, and the like. To this day, I have not seen a single letter between Brown and any member of his family—this, and he is the most prolific African American writer of his era. Writing full-scale biographies of minorities is excruciatingly difficult work.

A second: the kind of singular personhood that I had thought I would find in Brown’s writings did not exist. He danced around the expected correlation between his life, authorship, and autobiographical subject. I don’t mean to say that Brown fabricated his life, say, in the Narrative of William W. Brown, but he was a crafty fellow and many people have read him too literally and simply. My lesson: check the facts as carefully as possible before accepting his testimony.

How would you compare Brown to his famous contemporary Frederick Douglass? How did Brown himself view the comparison?

FD v. WWB—One, the greatest nineteenth-century African American public figure; the other, the greatest nineteenth-century African American cultural figure.

Men with strikingly similar backgrounds (white father, black mother; border state background; extraordinary powers of observation, expression, persuasion; unswerving sense of duty to the collective).

Equally, men with strikingly different temperaments and powers: Douglass a charismatic figure who sucked the oxygen out of a room, intellectually powerful, inclined to the dramatic, a natural leader; Brown culturally sophisticated, personally polished, inclined to indirection and irony.

Brown would have sided with Dogberry: comparisons were “odorous.” He was constantly compared to Douglass and hated it.

What qualities as a writer and a man allowed Brown to pioneer so many different genres of African American writing?

For one thing, lack of formal education. He did not have to unlearn deeply engrained lessons about literary forms. I would guess, rather, that he could see the forms (and their arbitrariness) all the more clearly for viewing them from the outside in. For another, endless curiosity, flexibility of temperament, and heedlessness about the possibility of failure.

What drew you to Brown as the subject for a biography?

The books. So many remarkable books, I thought, without at first connecting them back to their source. Then, once I started to think biographically, the person. When the life and the work start to converge in intriguing fashion, literary biography gets born.

Forthcoming from The Library of America (Fall 2014)

The staff of The Library of America is putting the finishing touches on the upcoming American Musicals collection, and all remaining Spring–Summer 2014 titles are currently at press.

Even though spring hasn’t yet arrived (and a look out the window tells us it is nowhere in sight), we’re already thinking thoughts of autumn. Below are the titles we have planned for the remainder of 2014.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES

Elmore Leonard
Four Novels of the 1970s
Gregg Sutter, editor
Fifty-Two Pickup • Swag • Unknown Man No. 89 • The Switch
September 2014
Library of America #255 / ISBN 978-1-59853-305-7

Louisa May Alcott
Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
Susan Cheever, editor
September 2014
Library of America #256 / ISBN 978-1-59853-306-4

H. L. Mencken
The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, editor
Happy Days • Newspaper Days • Heathen Days • “Days Revisited: Unpublished Commentary” (200 pages of never-before-published material embargoed for twenty-five years after Mencken’s death)
October 2014
Library of America #257 / ISBN 978-1-59853-308-8

Virgil Thomson
Music Chronicles 1940–1954
Tim Page, editor
The Musical Scene • The Art of Judging Music • Music Right and Left • Music Reviewed: 1940–1954 • uncollected writings
October 2014
Library of America #258 / ISBN 978-1-59853-309-5

Art in America 1945–1970
Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism
Jed Perl, editor
Selections by John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Edwin Denby, Willem de Kooning, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Hilton Kramer, Dwight Macdonald, Frank O’Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Susan Sontag, Tennessee Williams, and many others • Lavishly illustrated with scores of black-and-white images and two 16-page color inserts
October 2014
Library of America #259 / ISBN 978-1-59853-310-1

SPECIAL PUBLICATION

Football
Great Writing about the National Sport
John Schulian, editor
Selections by Grantland Rice, W. C. Heinz, Frederick Exley, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton, Jennifer Allen, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Price, Charles P. Pierce, Roy Blount, and many others
August 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-307-1

BOXED SET

The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It
Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors
All four volumes of the critically acclaimed series chronicling our nation's greatest conflict, now in a collector's boxed set • With full-color poster enlargements of the maps in each volume
September 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-350-7

PAPERBACK CLASSIC

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Introduction by John Stauffer
September 2014
ISBN 978-1-59853-351-4

The Library of America’s Best-Selling Titles (2014 update)

As we did last year, below we present a list of the Library of America series “backlist titles” (i.e., volumes published prior to 2012) selling the most copies in 2013.

There are some noteworthy movements in this year’s list. Perhaps not surprisingly, the debut volume of the LOA edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s collected fiction tops the list in its first year of eligibility. An end-of-the-year Ben Stiller remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty more than tripled sales of the LOA James Thurber edition. Likewise, a screen adaptation of On the Road motivated readers to snap up the Kerouac volume containing the novel; its sales increased by over 30% in 2013. An encore broadcast in August of the American Masters program James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket fueled a similar increase in sales of the collection of Baldwin’s essays.

Just as impressive was the 50% increase in sales for the Ulysses S. Grant volume, probably helped along by commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Somewhat mysterious are the unexpected 30% increases in sales for such stalwart evergreens as John Muir and John Dos Passos's U.S.A.—not that we’re complaining. At #15, sales of the Dos Passos volume were virtually identical to those of Shirley Jackson and Walt Whitman, which also enjoyed modest lifts.

Following each entry are the year the volume was originally published and last year's ranking:

1. Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973 [2011, —]
2. The Philip K. Dick Collection [three volumes, 2007–2009; ranked #1 last year]
3. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988; #3]
4. Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960 [2007; #7]
5. Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [2009; #4]
6. H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005; #5] *
7. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters [1990; #14] *
8. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [2004; #6] *
9. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau [2008; #2]
10. Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels [1999; #8]
11. John Muir: Nature Writings [1997; #13] *
12. James Thurber: Writings and Drawings [1996; —] *
13. James Baldwin: Collected Essays [1998; —]
14. The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams [two volumes, 2000; #11]
15. John Dos Passos: U.S.A. [1988; —]
    (tie) Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories [2010; —]
    (tie) Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose [1982; —]

* Titles indicated by a red asterisk were available this past year as e-books, which contribute a relatively small—but rapidly growing—source of sales for LOA backlist titles. For a complete list of LOA e-books currently available, visit www.loa.org/ebooks.

* * *

This past year also marks a milestone of sorts: with the publication of volume #246 (Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s), the LOA series now contains over a quarter of a million pages.

WORDLESS! The Library of America’s Lynd Ward collection inspires new Art Speigelman show

A few years back (in the summer of 2010, to be precise) Art Spiegelman edited Six Novels in Woodcuts, The Library of America’s two-volume collection of Lynd Ward’s wordless novels. This past weekend he sent an e-mail message to LOA staff members: “Look what kinda ‘trouble’ you guys caused recruiting me into the Lynd Ward project and re-igniting my interest in Wordless books!”

The “trouble” we caused is WORDLESS!, Spiegelman’s self-described “odd hybrid”: a multimedia extravaganza featuring slides, talk, movies, and musical performance created in collaboration with acclaimed jazz composer Phillip Johnston. In his introduction to Six Novels in Woodcuts, Spiegelman wrote that Ward is “one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a ‘graphic novel’ until the day before yesterday.” WORDLESS! brings together that handful of illustrators—Frans Masereel, Milt Gross, Otto Nückel, and Si Lewen, in addition to Ward. The innovative performance also showcases new original work by Spiegelman.

In celebration of the show, Speigelman has set up a special Tumblr page, featuring a brief trailer, images, and reviews of the acclaimed worldwide premiere in Australia. The 90-minute program will make its American debut in Brooklyn this weekend before going on tour for two performances in Chicago and Colorado Springs:

• Saturday, January 18 – Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
• Wednesday, January 22 – Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO
• Saturday, January 25 – University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

How Jonathan Edwards talked about God

The William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Philip F. Gura is the editor of Jonathan Edwards: Writings from the Great Awakening, just published by The Library of America. Among his many previous books are Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical and Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel.

The following essay originally appeared online in the “On Faith” section of The Washington Post (November 21, 2013).

Why should one be interested in the writings of the eighteenth-century American revivalist and theologian Jonathan Edwards?

Edwards the merciless logician who published lengthy tomes in which he denied that we have free will and defended the notion that all humans struggle in bondage to original sin? Edwards, the fire and brimstone preacher who stared dispassionately at the bell rope across the space of the meetinghouse as he described God’s everlasting and just hatred of sinners and their proper condemnation to a vividly imagined hell? Edwards the apologist for emotional religious revivals that made his spiritual descendants Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and Jimmy Swaggart into household names?

The answer is simple. We should read him for his mastery of language, and that is why he is in the Library of America. All attempts to speak of ultimate things are metaphorical and as such depend finally on the resource of language. Words are all we have to express such thoughts and perhaps our only way of “knowing” the world. And in this case in particular, Edwards helps us, as far as language goes, to understand our humanity. His language bends backward and forward, and allows us better to know ourselves, no matter in what religion we believe.

Consider two central matters for such self-knowledge: the presence in the world of sin or evil, and of its opposite, grace. With respect to the former, Edwards did not believe that some evil quality is “infused, implanted, or wrought” into human nature. Rather, evil is privative, “the withholding of a special divine influence to impart and maintain those good principles, leaving the common natural principles of self-love, natural appetite” to themselves without the government of superior motives. Innate depravity is spiritual emptiness, a longing for something larger than us, a lack of something that only grace can restore.

Edwards’s elaboration of this concept is striking. When man sins, he argued, superior principles leave his heart, as “light ceases in a room when the candle is withdrawn.” He is thus left in a state of “darkness, woeful corruption, and ruin,” like “a fatal catastrophe, a turning of all things upside down, and the succession of a state of most odious and dreadful confusion.” To compensate for this loss of spiritual compass, man acts predictably, immediately setting himself and his natural inclinations in God’s place.

Now consider Edwards’s Personal Narrative, in which he describes what he believed a genuine conversion. Just previous to this moment he had continued to rebel against the seemingly irrational notion of God’s utter sovereignty, “in choosing who he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased.” This seemed a “horrible” doctrine. “But I remember the time very well,” Edwards wrote, “when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty . . . but never could give an account how, or by what means, I was thus convinced; not in the least imagining, in the time of it, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God’s spirit in it; but only now that I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it.”

There was nothing special in the event, yet the experience was utterly transformative. Moreover, it pertained to the matter of sight. Edwards “saw further”—we would say he had insight—and his life was irrevocably changed. “The appearance of everything,” he continued, “was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything . . . in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature.” It was a transcendent, with a small “t,” experience.

In his Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, Edwards explains this further. When one receives grace, “There is a new inward perception or sensation of their minds, entirely different in its nature and kind, from anything that ever their minds were the subjects of” before. In the experience of a saint, something new “is felt, perceived, or thought” which could be “produced by no exalting, varying or compounding of that kind of perceptions or sensations which the mind had before; or there is what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea.”

Edwards borrowed the notion of “a new simple idea” from John Locke. After one experiences something new, he has a new idea of it that reorganizes all previous knowledge, makes everything congruent to it, much in the way that William James describes truth’s instrumentality. Something is true for us when it works for us, James explains, when it accords with other parts of our belief system.

But after Adam’s transgression, man was incomplete. He lacked something. His heart, or soul, or, as Edwards would say, his “affections,” were defined and dominated by self. When grace is added to that picture, though, all in the heart is realigned, so that goodness flows. One sees the world aright, sees what matters, and is a different being. Edwards thought this a supernatural event, God’s arbitrary and free gift. But the power of the experience—and how his words speak to us—resides in Edwards’s notion of a radical realignment of one’s sensibility as the result of purely natural phenomena, specifically, a right perception or seeing. New simple ideas can and do occur at frequent points in our lives; but the key is to recognize them as significant, as true, in such a way that they have a transformative effect on us.

Edwards speaks to us in this way, enlightening us as to what matters in our lives, and does so in language that, while it partakes of the clarity and symmetry of eighteenth-century rhetoric, continues to move our heart, our “affections,” as he would say. To borrow a sentence from Edwards in his discussion of grace, “Unless this is seen, nothing is seen that is worth the seeing.” That is why we should read him.

The Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863): “Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

On the afternoon of November 25, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant stood on Orchard Knob east of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and pondered what to do next. It was just over a month since he had arrived at the town where the Army of the Cumberland, in the aftermath of its defeat at Chickamauga on September 20, found itself besieged by the victorious Army of Tennessee under the command of Braxton Bragg. Grant’s job was to break the siege and defeat the enemy.

It was a daunting task. The Confederates looked down upon their beaten foe from defensive positions along Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. The Rebels had also moved westward along the Tennessee River to sever the Yankee supply line, leaving the Army of the Cumberland in a perilous situation. The Lincoln administration labored to relieve the beleaguered army, dispatching two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and one from Grant’s Army of the Tennessee in Mississippi to do what they could to pry open the Confederate grip on Chattanooga. Having lost faith in the ability of William S. Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland’s commander, to salvage the situation, President Lincoln turned to the victor of Vicksburg to save the day. Elevated in mid-October to a command that spanned the area from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River valley, Grant took advantage of an option provided in his orders to replace Rosecrans with George H. Thomas, who promised Grant that he would hold Chattanooga until his men starved.

By the time Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, the Union forces were ready to take action. Rosecrans and his chief engineer William F. Smith had already framed a plan to reopen a supply line along the Tennessee River. Grant ordered that it be implemented. Meanwhile, he hurried forward William T. Sherman’s troops from the Army of the Tennessee, intending to entrust the key blow of the upcoming battle to Sherman instead of Thomas or Joseph Hooker, who had come westward with the Potomac soldiers. It was not until November 23 that Grant could set his plan in motion. That day Thomas undertook a reconnaissance in force that easily captured Orchard Knob. The result was more than Grant expected. Still, one observer noted that he was “well pleased at what had been accomplished. He seems perfectly cool, and one could be with him for hours, and not know that any great movements were going on. Its a mere matter of business with him.”¹

That night there was a near total eclipse of the moon. Major James A. Connelly of the 123rd Illinois Infantry noted that “it was ominous of defeat, but not for us; we concluded that it meant Bragg because he was perched on the mountain top, nearest the moon.”² As noon came on November 24 “the fiercest and most tremendeous roars of both cannon and musketry” broke out along Lookout Mountain. Hooker’s men scrambled up its slopes, driving the enemy away. That night Union observers could see “Camp fires and flashes of musketry” illuminate the mountain’s slopes: the following morning Grant’s headquarters discovered that Hooker’s men had planted a United States flag at the summit.³ Meanwhile, Sherman had moved into place opposite the Bragg’s right on Missionary Ridge, ready to smash the Confederate flank and drive the Rebels off the ridgeline.

On the morning of November 25 Sherman attacked, only to discover that he has misjudged the terrain in front of him. Patrick Cleburne’s division repelled several Union assaults, and by early afternoon it was clear that Sherman was getting nowhere. On the Union right Hooker’s men found it tough going to make progress against the Confederates, in part because they needed to replace destroyed bridges. At Orchard Knob, Grant, Thomas, and several officers stood in a cold wind and contemplated what to do next as Confederate shells “whizzed past” every few minutes.⁴

By mid-afternoon Grant knew he had to do something. He directed Thomas to order his four divisions to move forward and capture, the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, and then await further orders. When the moment was right, he would order them to resume their advance.

It didn’t quite work out that way. After Union artillery commenced shelling the ridge, Thomas’s men “moved forward at the rifle pits of the enemy as if they knew they were going to succeed,” as Smith described it. The Confederates “broke from behind their protection and up the hill, our men following with chear upon chear and the cannon and musketry on top of the hill pouring shot and shell upon them.”⁵

In truth, the advancing Yankees had no choice. Having taken the rifle pits with relative ease, they discovered that they were now vulnerable to deadly fire from the ridge above them. Withdrawal would only expose them to more fire. The only option was to advance without waiting for orders from headquarters. Some commanders thought that the crest of the ridge was the ultimate objective; others thought the advance was to stop at the rifle pits. That confusion no longer mattered. “The line ceased to be a line,” Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The men gathered towards the points of least difficult ascent” and streamed up toward the crest. Although Confederate artillery fired away, Major Connolly later explained that “they couldn’t even scare us, as they couldn’t depress their guns to reach us, but had to blaze away far over our heads.” As Smith described it, “Regiment after regiment gained the top and planted their colors—most of them gaining it by the many roads that passed from the valley to the top of the ridge.”⁶

That was not how Grant had planned it. Meigs recorded how Grant declared that “it was contrary to orders, it was not his plan—he meant to form the lines and then prepare and launch columns of assault, but, as the men[,] carried away by their enthusiasm had gone so far, he would not order them back.” What had seemed at first akin to suicide had turned into a smashing success.⁷

That evening no one could quite believe what they had seen, although it did not take long for the assault on Missionary Ridge to pass into legend. Bragg’s “beaten and discontented army” was “in full retreat”; Tennessee and Kentucky were now safe from invasion. It was, Meigs decided, “[t]he grandest stroke yet struck for our country.… It is unexampled—Another laurel leaf is added to Grant’s Crown.”⁸

Years later the editors of Century Magazine suggested to Grant that Bragg had detached some of his army to attack Knoxville in early November because he thought the Missionary Ridge position was impregnable. With “a shrewd look,” Grant replied: “Well, it was impregnable.”<sup>9

1</sup> William Wrenshall Smith: Journal, November 13–25, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 576.
² James A. Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, December 7, 1863, ibid., 593.
³ Smith, ibid., 577-78.
⁴ Montgomery C. Meigs: Journal, November 23–25, 1863, ibid., 585.
⁵ Smith, ibid., 580.
⁶ Meigs, ibid., 587; Connolly to Mary Dunn Connolly, November 26, 1863, ibid., 590; Smith, ibid., 580.
⁷ Meigs, ibid., 587.
⁸ Ibid., 589.
⁹ Ulysses S. Grant: Chattanooga, in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1888), vol. III, 693n.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Jefferson Davis tries to rally Confederate morale (Fall 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)

David Rieff on how his mother, Susan Sontag, lived as “a citizen of the Republic of Letters”

The author of Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (among many other books) and the editor of the journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag, David Rieff spoke with us recently about Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s, the collection of his mother’s writing that he edited for the LOA.

In Sontag’s view, who were the most important European writers undiscovered or neglected in the U.S.? Did she think of herself as a critic who bridged the intellectual worlds of Europe and America?

As an American, my mother was uncompromisingly engaged in the great political issues of her time—the Vietnam War, feminism, American power after the Cold War. But as a writer, and without denying or repudiating her “American-ness,” my mother saw herself as an international person, if you will, a citizen of the Republic of Letters—an idea that, while of course she knew it to be metaphoric, counted for her. So the idea that the U.S. and Europe were two separate and distinct worlds did not make much sense to her. That said, as someone steeped in French culture particularly, early in her career she brought writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Roland Barthes, E. M. Cioran, and others to the attention of New York publishers. Later in her career, my mother often offered to write prefaces to works she hoped U.S. publishers would have translated.

The seminal essay “On Photography” changed the way people thought and wrote about photographs. What led Sontag to her interest in photography?

I don’t believe there was one event. In cultural terms, at least, and perhaps in others as well, my mother was interested in virtually all the arts, not only photography. I simply think, as with many writers, there were some subjects about which she felt she had a great deal to say (like photography) and others, such as, for example, ballet, which she loved and followed, where her relations to them was as a devotee rather than as a critic.

Several of the previously uncollected pieces in the volume explore cultural attitudes toward women, beauty, and aging, speaking to issues central to the emerging women’s movement. Did Sontag identify herself as a feminist?

Unquestionably. But what my mother meant by identifying herself as a feminist and what others wanted her to mean by it, were two very different things.

Did Sontag have any personal favorites among these essays?

I think like most writers, my mother liked best the essay she was working on at the time. She was not a great one for looking backwards in any domain of life including her own work.

How, in Sontag’s view, were her essays related to her other work (fiction, filmmaking, playwriting, etc.)?

I don’t think she thought in such terms. I do know that she treasured her identity as a novelist and short story writer, and at least in some ways, valued it above that of all her work in other genres. But this was a feeling, not a judgment or any sort of demotion of her work as an essayist, filmmaker, playwright, etc.

Jefferson Davis Tries to Rally Confederate Morale (Fall 1863)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Chair in Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this year.

The summer of 1863 had been a poor one for the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee’s army was not just repulsed from its invasion of Pennsylvania but bloodily beaten at Gettysburg. At the same time, William S. Rosecrans maneuvered Braxton Bragg’s Confederates out of Middle Tennessee at the cost of less than six hundred Union casualties. Farther west, Ulysses S. Grant had at last captured Vicksburg, the strongest Confederate citadel of the Mississippi, and delivered complete control of the “Father of Waters” to the Union. Lee safely retreated into Virginia and spent the rest of the year rebuilding his army, aided partly by a controversial offer of amnesty to deserters who returned to their units.

The only good news came in September when Bragg, after receiving reinforcements from Mississippi and Virginia, took advantage of Rosecrans’s dispersed positions in northwest Georgia south of Chattanooga. The ensuing battle along Chickamauga Creek on September 19–20 devastated the Union Army of the Cumberland and forced it to retreat back into the city. Bragg initiated a siege, but his senior commanders expressed great frustration that they had not aggressively pursued Rosecrans’s fleeing army and taken Chattanooga. As a result, Jefferson Davis found himself traveling to Georgia in an attempt to contain something close to a generals’ mutiny. When Davis arrived at the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee overlooking Chattanooga on October 9, four of Bragg’s corps commanders called for his replacement. Addressing the army the next day, Davis reminded them that “obedience was the first duty of a soldier” and “prompt, unquestioning obedience” of superiors “could not be too highly commended.” He then confidently predicted that the Army of Tennessee would soon “plant our banners permanently on the banks of the Ohio.”¹

Davis toured through Alabama, eastern Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas after he restored a semblance of order to the Army of Tennessee. In Wilmington, he celebrated the steadfastness of North Carolina residents, particularly in the “Eastern portion of the state which had suffered the most from the enemy and was perhaps the most loyalty and devoted portion of the whole State.”² Davis was undoubtedly thinking of western North Carolina, which some Confederates believed was infected with the same poisonous unionism that defined East Tennessee. Despite Davis’s pronouncements about solidarity between regions, the Mountain South remained suspect throughout the war. But Davis himself overlooked a much more serious problem in eastern North Carolina: the continuing exodus of black families from the region. The Union army had captured New Bern in March 1862 and black residents began fleeing to Union lines almost immediately. In late 1863 Brigadier General Edward Wild recruited a sizable number of black North Carolinians into his “African Brigade,” which then began raiding tidewater plantations to free more enslaved people and recruit more soldiers for the Union. Davis’s vision of the Confederacy excluded free black people, but they nonetheless represented an increasing threat to the survival of southern independence.

If Davis ignored the determination of many black North Carolinians to fight for the Union, he confronted head on the problem of white southerners who their personal welfare ahead of the well-being of the Confederacy. In his speech at Wilmington, Davis condemned “the wealth gathered and heaped up in the spirit of Shylock, in the midst of a bleeding country” that “would go down with a branding and a curse.”³ As Davis knew, the opportunities for profit in running the Union blockade were substantial, especially in Wilmington, the last open Confederate deep-water port on the Atlantic. Loyal ship captains were supposed to return with cargoes of weapons, ammunition, medicine, shoes, and salt, but few could resist the temptation to stock their holds with luxury goods that sold quickly to still-wealthy members of the southern elite. In urban areas inland shopkeepers often withheld goods from sale until the prices rose. Confederate newspapers labeled such practices “extortion” and condemned merchants as public enemies, but no easy solution presented itself. What was the appropriate profit to make in a time of war? Shopkeepers had to pay their rent and feed their families like anyone else. Nonetheless, they became ready scapegoats for a Confederate government that needed targets for the mounting public anger over the toll, duration, and experience of the war. Military reverses in the summer of 1863 did not guarantee Confederate defeat in the war, but they did increase pressure on the Davis administration to ensure that sacrifices were borne equally, and that such sacrifices would ultimately produce victory.

¹ Jefferson Davis: Speech at Missionary Ridge, October 10, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 547.
² Jefferson Davis: Speech at Wilmington, November 5, 1863, ibid., 553.
³ Ibid., 552.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: The Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Grant lays siege to Vicksburg (May 22, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)

Wendy Wasserstein: Edith Wharton’s “desire to love & to look pretty”

Born sixty-three years ago, on October 18, Wendy Wasserstein (author of such plays as the The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig) was taken from us much too soon. In 2001 she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy and had to scale back her speaking engagements and workload. Then, in 2007, after battling lymphoma, she died at the age of 55.

First page of Wendy Wasserstein's speech,
found in the LOA files. (Click to enlarge.)

While organizing a trove of files for the Library of America archives, we came across the typescript for a speech by Wasserstein, with her handwritten notes over each of its three pages. A decade ago, on April 8, 2002, Wasserstein was one of six prominent writers who delivered a few remarks at the LOA’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, which took place at the The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Joining her on the stage were Gail Buckley, Michael Cunningham, Elmore Leonard, Richard Price, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The presenters were asked to speak about writers from the LOA series for whom they feel a special affinity. Wasserstein chose Edith Wharton, and her remarks appear below. (She opened with a reference to Henry Adams, the subject of Schlesinger’s comments.)

* * *

I think, I hope, that Henry Adams would be happy. I’m going to talk about Edith Wharton tonight, but first I want to say that Terrence McNally came by my house yesterday and he saw my shopping bag from The Library of America full of books and he said to me, “They are the best publishers of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and I can’t tell you how much those volumes have meant to me.” So he was very jealous at first when he saw the shopping bags and then when he saw it was Edith Wharton, he calmed down.

The other thing I want to apologize a little bit for is my speech; I currently have Bell’s palsy and I was thinking tonight, what would an Edith Wharton character do in this case? And I thought Undine Spragg would think, who’s on the guest list tonight, and should I come there to be socially and literarily ambitious? And then I thought May Welland would have done the proper thing and taken to her bed. So actually what I do at most times in these cases is consult Edith Wharton herself. I actually have a letter of Edith Wharton’s that I keep above my desk, and I will read this letter to you. It is a letter she wrote after she received a request from the American Women’s Pen Association. She answered them:

Dear Madam,
I have received your kind note in behalf of the League of American Pen Women inviting me to the authors’ breakfast which you are to hold in April in Washington. Unfortunately, I had to postpone my visit to America and see no way of my being there this spring. Would you kindly tell your committee how much I am gratified by their invitation and how greatly I regret being unable to accept it. Please believe me.
Yours truly,
Edith Wharton

So in my mind, Edith Wharton did what she really wanted to do. Following Edith’s lead, my feeling was, I really wanted to come to The Library of America tonight, and therefore am here.

Future generations of readers have benefited from Edith Wharton’s ability to write “believe me” letters and stay home to write. Edith Wharton’s life spanned two centuries. She was born in 1862 in New York, and died in 1937. She lived in Paris for the last three decades of her life as an ex-patriot. Looking over her work in Library of America editions, what is remarkable is how prolific she was. She was the author of more than 40 published volumes, including novellas, poetry, war reporting, travel writing, and books on gardens and house décor. Recently, we’ve come to know Edith Wharton as almost an American Jane Austen, a basis for Merchant-Ivory and Martin Scorsese period films. Her works have become the costume dramas of a kind of Masterpiece Theater cinema. But if you read Edith Wharton, it’s far deeper and richer than that.

I first came across Edith Wharton when I was in high school. I frankly had no idea that there was a New York woman writer of that era who had written so much and written so well. In high school we had read Jane Austen. But we had never read Flannery O’Connor or very many other American women novelists, and on top of that I went to a women’s high school. I found Edith Wharton on my own actually, in Scribner’s bookstore. And when I came across her that first time, I read The House of Mirth, and I was amazed by it. I thought, I can’t believe someone did this and got the city so well, and pictured it so acutely, and I also remember thinking, I can’t wait until I’m older and I really know that this is right. And I read her again in college, The Age of Innocence, and again I went to a women’s college, and we weren’t really studying very many women writers then either.

And so Edith Wharton became more and more of a beacon light to me. As I read more Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, those authors who were thought to know about class and money, to my mind Edith Wharton knew just as much and more. To my mind, she was like Chekhov, because she knew about a society in which class was changing. She knew about a society, beginning with details like spoons and forks, place-cards, and suddenly expanding to the much larger aspects of life and how that society was changing. As I began writing plays, Edith Wharton’s knowledge of a New York dinner party seemed to me like Chekhov’s knowledge of afternoons at a Russian dacha, and who came to sit and have tea and how things changed regarding love and marriages, all beginning with those smaller moments.

What I came across as I was looking through Edith Wharton in the Library of America collection was the autobiographical fragment [“Life and I”] that had never been previously published, and I’m just going to read a little bit of this to you because I thought it was extraordinary. It begins:

My first conscious recollection is of being kissed in Fifth Avenue by my cousin Dan Fearing.

It was a winter day, I was walking with my father, & I was a little less than four years old, when this momentous event took place. My cousin, a very round & rosy little boy, two or three years older, was also walking with his father; & I remember distinctly his running up to me, & kissing me, & the extremely pleasant sensation which his salute produced. With equal distinctness, I recall the satisfaction I felt in knowing that I had on my best bonnet, a very handsome bonnet made of a bright Tartan velvet with a white satin ground, with a full ruffling of blonde lace under the brim. Thus I may truly say that my first conscious sensations were produced by the two deepest-seated instincts of my nature—the desire to love & to look pretty.

She then goes on to say that that yearning to be pretty was not vanity, but rather an idea to look at the world as harmoniously composed. And I thought that yearning for both love and prettiness could be discarded in a politically correct manner of the writing of a privileged woman, or you could look at it in another way, of a woman actually telling the truth, and saying that this is what I see in this world. And as I look at photos still in style pages, on party pages, documenting life in New York, I think, Edith Wharton knew somewhere there is a subtext of looking for love and wanting to look pretty. And it’s an honor to talk about her tonight. Thank you very much.

Previously on Reader’s Almanac
Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: Henry Adams's predictions for the future

How Leonard Schneider became Lenny Bruce: The influence of Joe Ancis, Joe Maini, and Lord Buckley on his early career

This week marks the publication of The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground, a collection of 57 selections—memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics. Edited by Glenn O’Brien, the anthology takes the reader on a journey through America’s subterranean scenes: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks—from Bop to Beat to Punk.

In the following guest blog post, Lary Wallace, a writer for Prestige magazine, reviews the early career of comedian Lenny Bruce, whose routine on the danger of drugs is reprinted in The Cool School, and the influence of his friends Joe Ancis, Joe Maini, and Lord Buckley (whose irreverent piece “The Naz” is also included in the book).

*     *     *

Maybe it really was those days and nights out at sea that did it. Stationed aboard a Navy destroyer in his late teens and early twenties, young Leonard Schneider would “[s]ometimes . . . talk out loud up on the bow,” vocalizing all those thoughts he’d be thinking because, after all, “out at sea you have a lot of time to think. All day and all night I would think about all kinds of things.” A couple decades later, when he wrote his memoir, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965), that’s how Lenny Bruce chose to frame his stylistic development—or this aspect of it, anyway: “[t]his process of allowing one subject spontaneously to associate itself with another.” Which is, Lenny added none too modestly, “equivalent to James Joyce’s stream of consciousness.”

I’ll leave to others any comparisons with Joyce, but to pursue the question of where Bruce got his style—not just his free-form and -flowing spritz but the entire repertoire, the slang, the Yiddishisms, the scandalous and sacrosanct subject-matter—we need to take our inquiry beyond the sailor’s lonely days and nights at sea and into the places where Bruce began honing his craft in earnest, after getting himself discharged—by pretending to be a cross-dresser—from the Navy.

His first gigs after the Navy were doing impressions-based routines, Sid Caesar–derivative, around Brooklyn and Coney Island. It was this material that got him his first big break when, in 1950 at the age of 25, he was invited to appear on the popular radio show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. His mother introduced him to the audience—it was that kind of innocent—whereupon Bruce proceeded to do imitations within imitations: a Bavarian imitating Bogart, a Bavarian imitating Cagney, a Bavarian imitating Edward G. Robinson. You get the idea. But Bruce would soon be putting his gift for mockery to far more mischievous use, because Bruce had met Joe Ancis.

He’d met Ancis hanging out at Hanson’s, the New York City delicatessen where all the comics liked to gather, bullshit, commiserate, and show off for each other. Nobody showed off like Joe Ancis. He was “the original sick comic,” writes Albert Goldman in Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!! (1974), the book that’s done more than anything to keep Ancis’s legend alive over the decades:

Joe was never a professional performer. Too terrified of rejection to risk the flak from the ringsiders. Yet he was so heavy that guys like Buddy Hackett and Lenny Bruce sat for hours listening to Joe’s rap without ever sticking in a word of their own.

Even though Ancis was too sensitive for any venue larger than Hanson’s luncheonette, his act did make its way indirectly into some of the largest venues in America, via the comics he’d influenced. Primary among these was Bruce himself, who’d acquired from Ancis a more refined version of the kind of free-association spritz he’d been developing on the USS Brooklyn—a spritz that now entailed, in Goldman’s words, “serious rapping about intellectual themes, taking off into wild way-out travesties and extravaganzas. All the tricks of stand-up comedy—the timing, mugging, dialects and sound effects—but also physical clowning and practical jokes and crazy bust-out gags.” From Ancis, Lenny also acquired, for better and worse, his preoccupation with Jewish themes and his liberal use of Yiddish-language phraseology employed as slang.

Bruce succeeded where Ancis did not because Bruce knew how to take rejection and return for more. After his showing on Talent Scouts, Bruce started getting slightly better gigs up in the Catskills and down on Broadway. But soon he left with Honey, his wife, for California, where he tried and failed dismally to make it in movies and where he started playing the burlesque houses, some of the bawdiest in all of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, at one point even partnering up with Honey as a stripper-comic team.

Although Ancis had already turned Bruce on to jazz by the time he got to California, it was another man, Joe Maini, who made him a full initiate to the jazz lifestyle. If Ancis turned Lenny on to the potential of Jewish humor, Maini turned him on to the artistic and existential potential of the black man’s sensibility. “Every bopper was supposed to be as good with his needle as he was with his horn,” Goldman writes. “Joe Maini was one of the best with both.”

One other figure who should not be ignored—although Goldman all but does so—is Lord Richard Buckley, the “Hip Messiah,” who by the late 1940s had already “become a legend among working comedians and a favorite of bebop jazz musicians,” according to Stephen E. Kercher in his wonderful book Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (2006).

Onstage Buckley was a one-of-a-kind performer who combined the manner of an English patrician with the imagination and spontaneity of a surrealist artist (he wore a distinctive Salvador Dali mustache) and the irreverent, outlaw attitude of a hipster from the streets (he earned a reputation for smoking marijuana onstage). Buckley was most famous for appropriating the patois of urban African Americans (which he believed possessed great “power, purity and beauty”) and then rapping in his “Hipsomatic” dialect free form, parodies of the Gettysburg Address (“Four big hits and seven licks ago, our before daddies swung forth upon this sweet, groovy land, a swingin’, stompin’, jumpin’, blowin’, wailin’ new nation, hip to the cool groove of liberty . . .”), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and, most notoriously, the lives of Mahatma Gandhi (“The Hip Gahn”) and Jesus (“The Naz”). Overall, Buckley's unique characterizations and free-form improvisations made a lasting impression on Bruce, particularly at a time when he was struggling to forge his own technique.

All the elements were now in place for Bruce. The finely honed impressions and accents would be put to much more gravitational purposes than simply yukking off of movie stars, while the flair for a seamlessly incorporated and varied slang would flatter the sensibilities of the self-styled hipster as it also lent a singular kind of music to his ideas. He hadn’t stopped being Leonard Schneider just because he’d changed his name to Lenny Bruce. But he hadn’t become Lenny Bruce just by changing his name from Leonard Schneider, either.

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