Harvard University Press Blog

Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America - Part 5 - "The speech of our time”

In this final post in our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus talks about what Ann Marlowe’s essay “Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal” (which you can read here) revealed about the evolution of the American voice—a progression central to the book. Parts one, two, three, and four in this series appeared earlier.

"Group of men talking in street of Muskogee, Oklahoma," by Russell Lee, 1939. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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When Ann Marlowe took up Linda Lovelace, she watched “Deep Throat,” and then found and read all four of Linda Lovelace’s autobiographies. The first two—in which Lovelace declared that she lived for violation and libertinism and loved every second—were written by others. The second two, written with a co-author—with Ordeal, in 1980, the book that mattered—she was a sex slave, violated at every turn. But what Marlowe found was, in a negative sense, the whole story our own book had put itself together to tell—the search for a national voice, a form of speech that everyone could understand, and speak in turn. The true speech of democracy. At bottom, the book was nothing more than hundreds of different speakers, calling out to each other, to the past, to the future, to the present they were trying to enact, to make up the language of the made-up country as if it were everyone’s right to found the nation for the first time.

“Lovelace’s voice,” Marlowe writes—Lovelace describing how her mother gave up the child Lovelace had at twenty—never even mentioning, Marlowe notes, if it was a boy or a girl, only that it was in Lovelace’s word illegitimate—“Lovelace’s voice is the studiously bland voice we hear every day from politicians, in the smugness of op-eds, in the passive-aggressive niceness of airline employees. Hypocrisy has always been with us, but the mimicking of the colorless tone of down to earth ‘good folks,’ of what was once called Middle America, seems to have become prevalent after World War II.” As Gerald Early guessed, and Marlowe found, Linda Lovelace spoke the speech of our time. “The deliberate impersonation of a blameless dailiness”—and what a phrase that is, “blameless dailiness” all but hiding its argument, that in the present day all speech is second hand, received, an impersonation—“may have been an artifact of television, television commercials, and the televising of political oratory. All of this created a national speech.”

That was the treasure of ashes the book finally unearthed, without for a moment looking for it. In the narrative the book itself was searching for, the cards lay where they fell, and the people who made the book picked them up where they lay.

Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America - Part 4 - “Playing a hand”

Here is part 4 in a series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," drawn from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative in Cleveland last month. In a previous post (part 3, found here), Marcus talked about the deep continuities and themes that emerged, seemingly of their own accord, to lend structure to the book. In this post, he discusses instead a significant decision the editors made—inviting Carolyn Porter to write a single essay on both Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind—that shaped the book. Porter’s essay may be read here. Part 1 of the series is here; part 2 is here. The next post will conclude this series.

Photograph of the Pharr Plantation house near Social Circle, Georgia, built in 1840, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1937 for the U. S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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It was a kind of accident that John Rockwell’s essay on Porgy and Bess, Carolyn Porter’s on Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind, and Adam Bradley’s on the meeting between Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes in Harlem fall together—and speak to and through each other. Certainly no one said, let’s put them together—not even to see what happens. We went through the history of the country, debated year by year, event by event, and those three emerged out of 1935 and 1936. Their particular dates—the premiere of the opera, the publication of the books, the encounter outside the Apollo Theater—came together as other possibilities were put aside. No one was thinking about race, let alone synchronicity, let alone the great social movement that would be the spine of the book. But making a single essay out of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind wasn’t throwing cards up in the air—it was playing a hand.

We wanted writers to surprise us, to surprise readers, but also to surprise themselves, as they dove into the question they’d been asked. Did Carolyn Porter know, when she started her essay on Gone With the Wind and Absalom Absalom!, that both William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell would describe their stories in the same way, in almost exactly the same words? People imagine the South, Porter quotes Faulkner as saying, as “a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds that perhaps never existed anywhere”—even as, Porter says, he was “intent on understanding it, committed to getting at the truth behind the legend.” And Mitchell said of her book—her only book:

I have been embarrassed on many occasions by finding myself included among writers who pictured the south as a land of white-columned mansions

—in the book, Tara has no columns—

whose wealthy owners had thousands of slaves and drank thousands of juleps. I have been surprised, too, for North Georgia was certainly no such country—if it ever existed anywhere… But people believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1,037 page book.

Absalom, Absalom! was Faulkner’s ninth novel. He was a more than established literary figure. The book had a first printing of 6000 copies, while Gone with the Wind sold 1,700,000 copies in its first year. Porter notes that when Faulkner, working in Hollywood, heard that Mitchell had been paid $50,000 for the film rights to her book—readers were casting Clark Gable as Rhett in their imaginations before the producers did—Faulkner announced he expected $100,000 for his. He later tried to sell it to other screenwriters, for $50,000, playing up the sensationalistic angle: “It’s about miscegenation.”

But Faulkner was playing a different game, too. Porter begins with a conversation in Absalom, Absalom! between Mississipian Quentin Compson and his northern Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon: “Tell me about the South,” Shreve says. “What it’s like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

“Lacking the millions of readers Mitchell would command,” Porter writes, “Faulkner simply situated Quentin and Shreve as readers of the Southern past inside the covers of his novel, thereby representing an audience he knew his novel would never have.”

“An audience he knew his novel would never have”—that phrase rings down through all of American literary history, capturing the writer who knows it is his or her obligation to speak to everyone, fearing he or she will be heard by no one, and so creating characters to represent an audience he knew he would never have. But in that obscurity, that darkness, is safety—that is where the writer goes when he or she is afraid he or she may be afraid of the noise of his or her own words.

Gone with the Wind, Porter writes, was anything but a match for the South depicted in the works of the southern historians who, from the end of Reconstruction on, up to the 1960s, in essence won the Civil War for the Confederacy by rewriting it—and by playing on the racism of America, that legacy of slavery, as a whole. The fall of Tara and Scarlett’s return to it was, Porter writes, a Depression allegory—and the book had a “miraculous power to disrobe and then re-enshrine the South”; it “enabled its readers... to see through the sham of the aristocratic legend but to see it miraculously revived at the same time.” But “if it was a shared racism that enabled the nation as a whole to unite around the irresistible story of Scarlett O’Hara, it was the same racism that Faulkner set out to excavate in Absalom, Absalom! In the chaotic decades before the Civil War in northern Mississippi, a black and white marriage, an abandoned wife and a spurned black and white son who returns, unknowingly, to marry his white half-sister—it was a trap set for readers, and for the nation itself.

“What had not been faced prior to Absalom, Absalom! Porter says, “is the fact that at the source of the American Dream”—of striving, of opportunity, of nothing is impossible, of each American remaking and inventing him or herself as the nation itself was invented and made up, each individual standing for and embodying the nation itself, re-enacting its whole drama, its whole tragedy—“at the source of the American Dream itself lies slavery.” It was only on the backs of slaves that so-called, self-named Americans could affirm their uniqueness, their mission, their superiority over all the rest of the world and their fellow citizens as well—America, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope of earth.” And that, too, with nothing left out, with no irony—with no scare quotes—was the language of the last entry in the book.

The first of nine images Kara Walker created for A New Literary History of America’s final entry, “2008, November 4: Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.”

Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America - Part 3 - Throwing the cards in the air

In the third installment of our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus last month at the International Conference on Narrative, Marcus considers a challenge raised at the symposium Writing Cultural History Today, held in 2009 to coincide with the publication of the book, and what that question reveals about the book’s composition and (accidental) structure. At the symposium, a participant said: “This book covers all sorts of subjects. It ranges all over the place. But what it ignores are the great social movements—the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War—that truly shaped the history of the country.” Part 1 can be found here; Part 2 is here; and Parts 4 and 5 will appear soon.

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Thinking about the book in front of us, it became instantly clear that there was one great social movement that more than any other had shaped the country—and that was slavery. The War, Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, might have to continue “Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword”—and it is small-minded to think that that challenge ended when Lee surrendered to Grant. That is a story that began long before Lincoln spoke, and continues to this day.

Slavery and its legacies are not only addressed in the book—they turned out to be the spine of the book. And that spine is what holds it together, if anything does—that spine is what allows all of its limbs and appendages and internal organs and even its mind to work.

We never set out to make that book. This was something the book revealed to us. George Grosz, speaking of his time as a Dadaist in Berlin in 1920, said that “the point was to work completely in the dark.” We were working in the dark. If there was an engine powering the discussions that led to a choice of what subjects to include and which to leave out, the body of that engine might have been knowledge, but the fuel was ignorance. Again and again, as ideas and arguments flew around the table, we were amazed at the stories we were being told, thrilled by what we didn’t know.

There was no intention to make a point by setting Beverly Lowry’s essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin next to Winfried Fluck’s on Brook Farm and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance next to Liam Kennedy’s on Frederick Douglass’s address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July”—we didn’t think through the connections between the mid-1840s denial of original sin and the depravity of man, the idea of human perfectionism, spiritualism, and abolitionism that thread through the three essays. The writers didn’t work together to draw their themes together. Working on their own—in the scheme of the book, which no one, the individual authors least of all, could see—they were working in the dark. But they were all, it turned out, sitting around the same table, and they all heard the same spirits knocking.

Lowry begins by talking about the family Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in, where her father, the great preacher Lyman Beecher, had his ten children sit around the dinner table each night to debate the issues of the day. That table reappears in 1851, when readers waited for each issue of the Era for the next chapter in what began as “Uncle Tom’s Children”—the title, 87 years later, of a book by Richard Wright—the table where, in the words of one letter to the editor, “When the Era arrives, our family, consisting of twelve individuals, is called together to listen to the reading of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” The table reappears in the common dining hall of Brook Farm; it reappears with Margaret Fox’s spiritualist table in Rochester, New York, in 1852, where Frederick Douglass was a visitor—and, partly because of the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that table explodes into what in 1852 was the largest auditorium in the nation, Rochester’s new Corinthian Hall, where on July 5th—because he refused to speak on July 4th—Douglass gave his great speech to an audience of 700 people.

Lowry’s essay is about the focusing of a national mind, and the search for forms of speech everyone could understand—because in the American republic, in a democracy, that was the task of the American democratic writer. Incensed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (the Bloodhound Bill, abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe called it), Stowe slowly began to write, and found her way into a story, Lowry says, “that would rock the country and then the world.” Stowe was afraid to write the story of slavery, to make it real, to, in Lowry’s words, do “the unthinkable”—to affirm or even create that national mind, to transfer “her own sensibility, as a privileged, educated white woman into the consciousness of an enslaved black person,” presenting “the radical notion that slaves were capable of thoughts and feelings similar to hers, and, by extension,” to those of anybody else. “I dreaded to expose even my own mind” to the story she was going to tell, Stowe wrote later—and here again Georges Bataille’s curse against those afraid of the noise of their own words comes into play. And Lowry’s essay becomes a dramatization of how Stowe conquered her fear:

Sometimes a writer doesn’t know what she’s up to. Sometimes work makes its own demands. In cahoots with the work itself, the mind plays its own tricks. To calm our fears and uncertainties, it creates the notion of an attainable task ahead, easily completed. Under that illusion, we begin. And then the job asserts its demands. A short poem becomes a three-act play. A character sketch insists on stretching itself out to become a short story, a novella, sometimes even a novel. Such is almost certainly the case with Mrs. Stowe, who had already begun writing her sketches but perhaps could not imagine herself—a woman, after all, and the mother of seven—the author of a full-length novel.

With Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe searched for the speech that would speak to everyone: in her essay, Lowry emphasizes the way Stowe addresses her readers directly, as “you”—

“If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader,” Stowe wrote, trying to turn her readers into Eliza, “ . . . how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those brief few hours, with the darling at your bosom . . .?”

And so it is both a shock of recognition, planted just pages before, but also not really a surprise, to find Liam Kennedy, with no knowledge of the essay that would precede his, emphasizing the same form of address, the discovery of the same national speech, in Douglass’s overpowering address in Rochester. The Fourth of July, Douglass says, “is the birthday of your National Independence, of your political freedom.” But Douglass distances himself from his audience of white abolitionists only to, finally, perform the same act of communing with the dead—in this case, the dead ideals on which the country was founded and that the fact of slavery has so completely betrayed—only to perform the same act of transference Stowe performed, from the other side. At the same time as he distances himself from his audience, he speaks to its members as his “fellow citizens.” As Stowe did, and as Twain would do in Huckleberry Finn, he dramatizes a slave auction, to, Kennedy writes, lead his audience into an “identification with the plight of the slave”—but that is only half of the equation. “In doing so,” Kennedy writes, “he treats the Fourth of July as a symbolic repository of national memory and retells its narrative significance so as to record his own presence and that of Southern slaves within the origins and present crises of the body politic.”

Slavery and its legacies comprise the great social movement of the nation—what has, socially, moved it—and the book is, in part, and in a certain way as a whole, the literary history of that movement. But the cards were thrown up in the air and as they landed they made patterns, and laid themselves one upon the other, in a way that was implicit in the national narrative—but the narrative that emerged was never anyone’s explicit intention. As the book took shape, it wasn’t even necessarily recognized.

Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America - Part 2 - "Placing Bets"

Here's Part 2 of our series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," adapted from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative in Cleveland last month. Here, Marcus explains how the process of editing a project conceived so sprawlingly involves a good deal of "placing of bets, and how, once you're committed to taking these sorts of chances, the book can and will begin in some measure to assemble itself. Part 1 can be found here; Parts 3-5 to follow over the coming days.

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This was one discovery about narrative we found with this book. But the other had to do with the structure of the book—a structure that was formed as the book assembled itself, with all the disparate pieces coming together in a way that no one could have predicted or even intended. And that had to do with turning points and affinities.

It’s a matter of something that happened that left the landscape changed, even if it was only the landscape of a single person, a landscape that sooner or later would become part of the map carried in the minds of countless other people. When something that seemed impossible the day before something happened seemed inevitable the day after it happened.

Again, it’s a matter of placing a bet. When did Lincoln really become Lincoln? The day he brought the borrowed book back, or the night before, when he read it? The day he faced Douglas on the stage and knew he had him beaten and loved it? Or the day he realized, as he wrote to himself in the middle of the Civil War, that he had started something he was powerless to control or even end?

It was at our editorial board meeting that we fixed these turning points. Then, the authors who were asked to write the essays had to turn on those dimes or argue against them.

So Andrea Most’s entry on Arthur Miller, for example, is situated not in 1949, when “Death of a Salesman,” the main subject of the essay, was first produced, but in 1932, when at 16, in the ditch of the Depression, Miller decided to go into show business, and auditioned to become a radio singer in the Brill Building. Robert Polito’s entry on F. O. Matthiessen is placed not in 1941, when he published “American Renaissance,” but in 1924, when he met his life-long soul mate and fellow Skull and Bones member Russell Cheney, who led him to accept his homosexuality and turned Mattheissen toward Whitman as the heart of his life’s work. Jeffrey Ferguson’s essay in Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” is dated not 1922, when the book was published, but 1925, when the U. S. Chamber of Commerce declared that the word “Babbitt” had become “common coin,” that it belonged to everyone, and it was time for good and decent people to take the word back from Lewis’s satire of the American businessman and turn it into a mark of honor and greatness.

Out of the notion of constructing a narrative around turning points came the notion of collapsing two into one: double essays. It was a bet on affinities. It was a matter of rubbing two sticks together—and not from the same trees—to see if a fire might start, and what it might burn.

Part 3-5 to come ...

Greil Marcus - Notes on the making of A New Literary History of America - Part 1 - "Scare quotes are the enemy"

A few weeks ago, Greil Marcus, cultural critic extraordinaire and the co-editor, with Werner Sollors, of our mammoth A New Literary History of America, delivered one of the keynote addresses at a conference on narrative at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, taking as his subject what he discovered about writing and editing during the making of A New Literary History of America. What the audience got was a kind of field report from the trenches of modern-day storytelling, and, more particularly, a set of reflections on what it was like to try and assemble, with the help of 220 other writers and editors, a narrative as complex and multifarious as the one that emerges from A New Literary History of America, a project whose audacity continues to provoke discussion, post-publication.

When Greil shared his talk with us, we immediately thought it would make interesting reading for those of you interested in American culture, history, how to go about writing about those subjects, and how to go about writing more generally. What follows is part 1 of 5, in which we learn how the editor must turn epidemiologist in order that writers under his or her sway may avoid contracting the deadly "narrative disease" we know by the name of scare quotes.

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Greil Marcus - Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America

Adapted from a talk given at Case Western Reserve University on April 10, 2010

Part 1 - "Scare quotes are the enemy"

I’m going to talk about questions of narrative in a book I was lucky to co-edit with Werner Sollors—A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. And I’m going to start by talking about narrative and scare quotes.

The idea was to create a story made of pieces, of fragments—to tell the story of a country finding itself, creating itself, and ever after arguing over the meaning of that creation, over whether it was true or false, finished or unfinished, open or closed. Each essay—each 2,500-word piece in a chronological scheme of 220—had to clear and stake out its own ground, then build a house, identify its occupants, and then open the door—to proceed to tell the story of why and how what those people did was distinctive, why and how it was representative, and make room in that house both for the writer and the reader—and, if the implicit harmony the book was betting on was real, how that single house could stand for the country itself and all the twists and turns of its story.

Whether it was the slow fuse of the first appearance of the word “America” on a map, in 1507; whether it was the Declaration of Independence as written by Jefferson or the declaration of independence as written by Chuck Berry under the name “Roll Over Beethoven”; whether it was an imaginary meeting between Lily Bart of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Carrie Meeber of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie;whether it was the serialization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851 or Frederick Douglass’s address to the wonderfully, today impossibly-named Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society a year after that—somehow I can’t help thinking of the meeting of the Ladies Garden Club at the beginning of The Manchurian Candidate—in every case, the writer had to open that door wide enough that all of the country could pass through. To do that, you have to find the right words, and place your bets on them. And the enemy of that goal, we found, was scare quotes.

Recreating Emily Dickinson's Gardens

If you find yourself in New York between now and June 13, you’ll have the opportunity to see and walk through a collection of plants that you may know best in a less corporeal (and more metrical) form. The New York Botanical Garden show Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers aims to reconstruct the object of the poet’s other passion. The NYBG’s Karen Daubmann, Director of Exhibitions and Seasonal Displays, spoke to us about how the exhibit originated, what it tells us about the poet, and how we can garden like Dickinson.

Photographs of the exhibit are by Talisman Brolin.

Could you describe the various gardens in the exhibition and what they contain? In your YouTube videos ( 1 , 2, 3), you mention, and viewers can see, formal gardens and woodland gardens, as well as replicas of Emily Dickinson’s home and of her brother’s home.

The exhibition space in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is approximately 8,800 square feet. As you walk into the space from either entrance you first come upon a picket fence such as the one that surrounds the Dickinson property. At this point you are truly entering Emily’s world.

The conservatory exhibit is centered on Emily Dickinson’s home, The Homestead, re-imagined. The yellow-painted brick home is the central feature of the exhibition, with the woodland path leading to Austin Dickinson’s home, the Evergreens, off to one side and formal gardens (cutting gardens, peony beds, vegetable plots, and fruit trees) off in the other direction. The Homestead and Evergreens are connected by a path bordered on either side by a woodland-style garden with large rhododendron, evergreens, hemlocks, and ferns. It is this path that Dickinson described as “just wide enough for two who love”. She traveled the path to her brother and sister-in-law’s house often and would light a lantern in her window to signal that she returned home safely. Though Dickinson did travel to Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., she loved her home and would spend the majority of her life within the confines of the picket fence at The Homestead.

The entire space in the Conservatory is brimming with luscious plantings. Each day plants are groomed and replaced so that they are viewed at their peak. There is a mix of plants that Dickinson wrote about and collected as well as an assortment of plants that were known to have been grown in mid-19th-century gardens. Dotted among the plantings are interpretive signs talking about the poet and her life, pairings of verse with corresponding flowers, and a few lessons about Victorian floral symbolism from the texts that Dickinson studied.

The self-guided tour of the exhibit includes 35 poems posted throughout the garden, along with commentary on the poetry available via cell phone. How does Dickinson’s poetry shape your understanding of her garden?

There are ideas about what Dickinson’s garden looked like based on how the garden spaces relate to her home and her brother’s home as well as descriptions of flower beds, types of flowers grown, and the growing requirements for each, but there isn’t a definitive layout of these spaces. After reading her poems and consulting with our advisory committee members Marta McDowell and Judith Farr, Ph.D., we were able to imagine the lively mid-19th-century garden that could have been.

Having the full text of 35 poems on display through our gardens helps me to understand the diversity of the plants that she admired and the variety of settings that she explored. We’ve spread her poems so that they are appropriately located—in a meadow, in an orchard, under a pine tree, near a stream, etc.

What are some differences today’s gardeners will see between their gardens and Dickinson’s? 

Dickinson’s garden as created by the staff of The New York Botanical Garden is lush, filled with flowers, and fragrant; it includes layered plantings of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, vegetables, and bulbs. We’ve re-created Dickinson’s woodland path, meadow, orchard, vegetable garden, cutting garden, and conservatory.