Harvard University Press Blog

Annotating Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest in a five-volume collection of the poet’s correspondence. Gathering hundreds of Frost’s letters, most of them previously uncollected, Volume 3 follows Frost through a seven-year period in which he achieved new literary heights while also navigating great personal upheaval. In honor of Poetry Month, HUP Editor Emily Silk asked Mark Richardson, Volume 3 coeditor (with Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore) to share a behind-the-scenes look at editing and annotating Frost’s correspondence.

Tell us a bit about what readers can expect to see in Frost’s letters from this period. To whom is he writing? Any new or surprising correspondents, especially for readers familiar with the previous volumes?

This volume differs most from volumes one and two in the number of letters it contains from Frost to members of his family—to his son Carol, his daughters Marjorie and Lesley, his grandson Prescott, and his son-in-law Willard Fraser. In 1931, diagnoses of tuberculosis led Marjorie to move to Boulder, Colorado, for treatment (where she met and got engaged to Willard); and led Carol to take his wife Lillian (who’d also fallen ill), and their young son Prescott, to Monrovia, California (where the Pottenger Sanatorium was located). This family diaspora occasioned numerous letters. Readers will also find a rich series of letters to Frost’s friend and protégé J.J. Lankes, a woodcut artist who “decorated,” as Frost put it, a number of his books. A few things more. Reading this volume again in proof, we were struck by how much Frost has to say about marriage; about the nature and trials of the literary vocation (often in letters to younger, aspiring writers); and about book design and fine printing (he worked with some of the best printers in America).

What does the work of editing and annotating Frost’s letters involve? Did you make any unexpected discoveries as you annotated the letters in Volume 3?

I’ve been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. Making the letters fully “available” to readers involves considerable annotation. What we learn while annotating often surprises me. Consider, for example, a casual remark in an October 1932 letter Frost wrote from Massachusetts to his son Carol. Frost had just completed a cross-country trip by rail—New England to Los Angeles and back, with stops along the way in Colorado, Michigan, and elsewhere. “One thing in favor of all this travelling back and forth,” Frost writes: “it has got the country pretty well shrunk, so that we needn’t feel very far away from each other.…If it weren’t for the coal dust in trains which catches me colds, I shouldn’t mind being on the go between places half the time. I wish the locomotives would use oil or electricity.” That “wish” sent us into the history of twentieth-century rail travel. As we discovered, and as we indicate in a note, passenger trains in the US were coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. General Motors ameliorated Frost’s train-specific colds, when, in 1934, it debuted its Winton 201A diesel engine—the first in America suitable for powering passenger trains. I’d lived for decades in perfect ignorance of the fact that passenger trains in the US remained coal-powered all the way into the 1930s. Annotating another letter to Carol answered a second question it had never occurred to me to ask: Exactly when and where was the first attempt made to view the Leonid meteor shower from a high-altitude plane? In November 1931, on a triple-engine Fokker aircraft staffed by astronomers from Mount Wilson—which was visible from Carol’s residence—and flying above 10,000 feet. I wonder which I’ll forget first—that Winton 201A engine or that triple-engine Fokker.

Any favorite stories from the archive, as you conducted the research to prepare this volume?

Certainly—one associated, as it happens, with that October 1932 letter to Carol. To sort it all out we had to consult US Census and immigration records, old maps, Amherst town directories, and an archivist at the Hampshire County (Massachusetts) Registry of Deeds. In closing that letter, Frost relays a bit of gossip then circulating in Amherst: “You remember Toggles Thompson the [Amherst College] chemistry professor people used to make fun of gently? He’s just been in to interrupt me with an interesting story of the depression. He has a Polish tenant of a small place he owns down at Hockanum by the Connecticut River. The man is twenty-eight and has a wife and two children. He hasn’t had work for more than a year and is more than a year behind on his rent. Something put it into Thompsons [sic] head to propose going into the wood business with him. Thompson got him an old truck and bought a wood lot on this side of the Holyoke range—twelve acres. Then Thompson did the soliciting. The Pole is not only out of trouble, but making money and so is Toggles Thompson.…Toggles is a funny sentimental fellow and the whole thing makes him talkatively happy. He came to try to take me over onto the wood lot. It is of course a good story. The Pole was desperate and had no good out of this country since he came to it seven or eight years ago.”

Frost mistakes the age of Thompson’s beneficiary, but essentially gets the story right. It’s corroborated by a quitclaim deed dated July 30, 1934, held now in the Hampshire Registry of Deeds, and kindly made available to us by archivist Beth Callahan. The document, signed in one of the worst years of the Depression, records the sale of a twelve-acre woodlot, located along the Holyoke Range near a place called Hockanum Flat. The seller is Edward ‘Eddie’ Berestka (1913–1993), the eldest son, as census records tell us, of a Polish immigrant named Ignacy Beretska (1886–1956); the buyer is Joseph Osgood ‘Toggles’ Thompson. The purchase price was the nominal sum of one dollar, indicating that Thompson loaned the Beretskas the money to buy the land from one Carrie Marsh in 1929. City directories dating to the 1950s show that Eddie Beretska, with his family, went on to run a construction business on Lawrence Plain Road (now Massachusetts Route 47)—having got his start through the generosity of Toggles Thompson. I keep a copy of that quitclaim deed pinned to my office wall, as a token of gratitude to Ms. Callahan and the many archivists who’ve helped us.

You mentioned that you have been reading Frost’s mail for twenty years. How would you characterize Frost as a letter writer?

Frost’s letters are not simply a record of a remarkable literary life. They are themselves a remarkable contribution to American literature. He has as distinctive and lively a prose style as any American writer of the twentieth century—by turns gnomic, allusive, playful, mercurial, moving, and startling. Had Emerson forsaken Plato, and grown a sense of humor instead of sideburns, he might have written prose like Robert Frost. I offer here, in parting, some of the most astonishing sentences in the book. They occur in a 1935 open letter Frost addressed to undergraduates at Amherst College, where he taught English: “There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, but calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s cooperation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem.…The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?” Nothing at all, Professor Frost, nothing at all—and thanks for writing.

The Story behind Dante’s Bones

Last year, Italy decreed March 25 as National Dante Day. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To honor these occasions, Guy Raffa explains how he came to write Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, on what some might consider to be a morbid topic.

Dante’s Bones is the most personal book I have written. In it, I tell the story of the poet's adventurous physical afterlife—how his bones have been stolen, hidden, contested, discovered, examined, and, above all, venerated—and I unravel the meaning of these events at pivotal moments in Italian history from the late Middle Ages to the present. The book’s exploration of Dante’s graveyard history reflects an obsession I have had with cemeteries and tombs—how we mourn and honor the dead—literally for as long as I can remember. I trace this fascination to my earliest memory: watching President John F. Kennedy's funeral procession with my parents on our black and white television set in 1963, when I was three years old.

Now, just past my sixty-first birthday, my memory of the slain president’s funeral feels more like the memory of a memory. I've seen those iconic images many times since that first, live experience, but one moment brings an aching pang of recognition whenever I see it on a screen or in my mind: John F. Kennedy Jr., on his third birthday, saluting his father’s flag-draped casket after it has been carried outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, and begins its slow journey to Arlington National Cemetery. Forever fixed in my memory is one three-year-old boy watching another three-year-old boy say goodbye to his father.

Forty years later, in 2003, my own father died. Dante was on my mind as I addressed family and friends at his burial in Long Island National Cemetery (Pinelawn), not far from Smithtown Pines, the town where I lived as a child. The pine trees of my young life and my father’s final resting place (my brother is also buried there) joined in my imagination with the famous pine forest—the pineta—outside Ravenna, where Dante died and was buried in 1321. The poet modeled the Terrestrial Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, the most human-centered afterworld of the Divine Comedy, on this pine forest. My attachment to Dante’s Purgatory, the poetic site of loving care between purifying souls and living human beings, has grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Dante’s imagining of communion between the living and the dead is a big part of why I love reading, teaching, and writing about his Divine Comedy. This posthumous communion is also central to the adventurous afterlife of the poet’s mortal remains that my book recounts.

Personal and professional interests in Dante’s bones coincided when I learned that traces of the poet’s physical afterlife—a small packet of “Dante dust” and impressions taken of his skull—had been discovered in the National Central Library of Florence. On July 16, 1999, three days before the discovery, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bassette, died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I had always felt an odd sense of connection to this famous Kennedy son, whom I only knew through media coverage. Similar to how he was known as “John-John” to his family, my parents had affectionately called me “Guy-Guy” to distinguish me from my father, whose birth name (Gaetano) had been Americanized as “Guy,” my given name. Reclassification of efforts to find the crash victims from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery” appeared in newspapers on July 19, 1999, the same day as the discovery of the missing Dante relics. The sad news of JFK Jr.’s death inevitably reawakened my memory of him saluting his father’s casket, while news of the “Dante dust” and cranial impressions piqued my curiosity about the fate of the poet’s physical remains. The seeds of Dante’s Bones had been planted.

Much of what I subsequently learned about Dante’s physical afterlife came to light during the 600th anniversaries of his birth (1865) and death (1921). #Dante2021 and #Dante700 are popular Twitter hashtags recognizing that 2021 is another huge year for Dante Alighieri: the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death in Ravenna, where he is buried. He is thought to have died during the night of September 13-14, 1321. The year-long commemorations began in Italy on September 5, 2020, when Sergio Mattarella, the president of the Italian Republic, and Michele de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, presided over the opening of the refurbished chapel or tempietto (“little temple”) holding Dante’s tomb.

Celebrations of the poet’s life, works, and legacy have continued throughout the year not only in Italy but around the world, including a dynamic series of Dante-themed events in the United States—though the reality of life under COVID-19, with conferences, talks, and exhibits held remotely, has essentially erased borders and collapsed distances for the real-time dissemination of knowledge. While all-things-Dante are on the table for this milestone anniversary of his death, the occasion sparks special interest in the poet’s graveyard history, the subject of Dante’s Bones.

During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic.

New Year Poetry Playlist

Over the last several months, we’ve admired the creative ways in which colleagues across disciplines have preserved a spirit of community and collaboration in virtual classrooms, at-home offices, the “halls” of online conferences, and elsewhere. In anticipation of attending this week’s virtual MLA conference, HUP Editors Emily Silk and Joseph Pomp decided to put together a virtual collaboration of their own.

Missing the opportunity to swap reading recommendations with friends and colleagues in person at MLA, they invited several HUP authors of recent and forthcoming books to contribute to a “poetry playlist” for 2021. In thoughtful responses gathered below, some spoke of long-time favorites, others of recent discoveries, still others of poems that felt particularly resonant in this new year. Amidst the bustle of Zoom conferencing, we hope that you may find a few recommendations that speak to you, too; where possible, we have included a link to a publicly available text or audio recording of each poem.

 

“I was introduced to Brenda Shaughnessy’s work at a reading a few years ago and was drawn to the openness and warmth of her humor. When I tracked down her books—the most recent ones are So Much Synth and The Octopus Museum—I was struck by how the humor mixes with feelings of fury and helplessness and self-recrimination. That tonal range and her wild range of subjects have stuck with me; they seem right for 2021.”

—Calista McRae, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Since March 2020, when the poem was read at the end of a televised news report on the unfolding pandemic by the national broadcaster in Ireland (RTE), Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Everything Is Going to be All Right’ has been widely quoted in the Irish and international media. As with all great poems, even if readers already know it, the poem is worth reading again, and especially as we begin the New Year 2021. Mahon passed away in October 2020, leaving behind an amazing body of work that includes some of the best poems written in the English language over the last half century, including ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.’ Often complex in their philosophical and cultural allusiveness and depth, his poems can also be mischievous and fun. Mahon is willing to record all that can be seen by the ‘watchful heart’ but his poems also celebrate ‘the hidden source’ that is the basis for all great art.”  (Listen to Derek Mahon read “Everything Is Going to be All Right.")

—Philip Coleman, coeditor of The Selected Letters of John Berryman

 

“Arguably one of the most luminous, Black feminist affirmations of survival and euphoric resistance in contemporary poetry, Lucille Clifton’s ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a wondrous work of conviction and resolute determination. We all want to be with her on that ‘bridge between starshine and clay’ looking out across the vista of what’s ahead in 2021 and drinking up Clifton’s insistence on recognizing the miracle of her pure existence. Anything from Tracy K. Smith’s remarkable Life on Mars would seemingly be suitable for this moment in which we find ourselves, but ‘Everything That Ever Was’ especially sums up the feeling of cosmic enormity that remains especially palpable right now. In the whirlwind of catastrophic loss and urgent, necessary, everyday hope, Smith’s declaration that ‘…everything / That ever was still is, somewhere, / Floating near the surface, nursing / Its hunger for you and me…’ is a powerful reminder of the forces and the debris of life that constitute who we are, ‘the largeness we can’t see,’ as she puts it in the title of another one of her poems. Heavy words that capture the bigness of this universe, they encourage humility and reverence for the universe that we inhabit. Having just watched Sylvie’s Love, Eugene Ashe’s gorgeous African American homage to the golden age of cinematic melodrama, I’ve been drawn back to repeat listenings of Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly’s classic 1962 album. Wilson was a masterful song stylist, one of the very best of the modern era, and her stirring, sophisticated, and intelligent love songs with alto saxophonist Adderly are some of the best sonic articulations of epic and exquisitely realized intimacy, the ability for romance to be all-encompassing, sweeping, immersive. What could be more necessary now than our ability to get swept up with one another as we face an uncertain future?”

—Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (forthcoming, February 2021)

 

“The contemporary volume of poetry that I recommend most strongly is The Red List by my colleague Stephen Cushman. The Red List is a long poem that runs the length of a volume. The trigger for this magnificent work is the mental illness of the poet’s dear son. Cushman charts his and his boy’s sorrows and sufferings and their hopes for renovation and renewal in memorable, sometimes soul-piercing lines. It’s also a calendrical poem and explores the turnings of the season with exemplary grace. It’s a real achievement and deserves the widest audience.

—Mark Edmundson, author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“I have two recommendations that speak to our historical moment beautifully. First, if readers have not already read it, I would recommend Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. As an allegory against totalitarianism, it is one of the most moving and beautifully crafted books of poetry I have read in years. The second is Alice Quinn’s anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic. Taking its title from Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet,’ the book gathers a diverse group of poets and forms that speak to our isolation and our almost unbearable yearning for human connection. The great variety of responses to the pandemic not only salves the pain we are collectively feeling but also reveals the breath of imaginative ingenuity in American poetry.”

—Robert Bernard Hass, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“As a momentary stay against our current confusions, I recommend reading a poem by Robert Frost called ‘The Onset.’ How often in 2020 have we found ourselves where the first stanza leaves us, alone and despairing. But as the calendar turns, so may our fortunes, if we—like Frost—hold to a belief that a better community and world is always possible.”

—Donald Sheehy, coeditor of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929-1936 (forthcoming, April 2021)

 

“Seventeenth-century India saw the revival of an ancient genre—collections of 700 poems on love and other themes linking this world and eternity. The Hindi poet Biharilal (born c. 1600) composed one of the best known of these collections. In my new translation for the Murty Classical Library of India, his pithy, often aphoristic couplets overflow into three lines. Though subjected to many a long commentary, these short poems require little work on the part of an English reader with a taste for delicately poised sentiment and economy of wording. ‘Leaving me, he bears my joys away; / to summer days and winter nights / his parting gives long leases on my heart.’”

—Rupert Snell, translator of Biharilal’s Poems from the Satsai

 

“H. Leivick (born Leivick Halpern, 1888–1962) was an American Yiddish poet whose sensitivity to sound and language equaled his belief in repairing a fractured world. Born in the Belarusian shtetl of Igumen, Leivick was sentenced to a tsarist labor camp in Siberia for revolutionary activity, escaped to the US, and made his living there as a wallpaper hanger while becoming one of the world’s most respected Yiddish modernists. Over the course of his life, he wrote about topics ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the possibility of forgiveness. His knowledge of Jewish texts found its way into his avowedly secular verse, helping him to seek meaning in a particularly dark time.”

—Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine

(Listen to Glaser read and discuss Leivick's poem ‘Mem Haamekim’ on Hevruta: A Podcast from the San Diego Jewish Academy.)

 

“Thomas Hood’s terrifying ‘Dream of Eugene Aram’ left traces on Oscar Wilde’s late poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ But it’s another narrative poem by Hood, his comical ‘Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg,’ that we ought to be reading in the dog days of the Trump regime, as the first family packs its Gucci bags and heads to Mar-A-Lago. The hilarious story of the spoilt daughter of a property tycoon, who, following an alarming accident, insists on being fitted with a solid gold prosthetic limb, Hood’s poem is a biting satire of the corrupt moneyed elite of his day. First published in 1840, five years before Hood’s death, it is best read alongside Thomas Seccombe’s witty—and oft-reproduced—illustrations of 1870.”

—Nicholas Frankel, editor of The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Selection

 

“In his newest collection, Topsy-Turvy, Charles Bernstein includes a translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, III, the poetry match between Damoetas and Menalcas. The poem is titled ‘Echologs’ and pitches a wonderful homology between the Latin and American dialects aimed at a new turn, one that not just keeps the poetry fresh, but lets history remade freshen our own responses and habits of reading. What we thought we knew becomes new and what we had forgotten or not known gets worked into our responses and imaginations. The Arts and Letters pamphlet by Bernstein and Richard Tuttle, also called Echologs, includes following the translation a palimpsest of previous translations from the Loeb edition to David Ferry.

—Paul A. Bové, author of Love’s Shadow

(Listen to a 2015 recording at Bowery Poetry of Charles Bernstein introducing and reading “Echologs” on PennSound.)

Book Club Spotlight: The Origin of Others

We’re continuing our book club series with a look at one devoted to Toni Morrison. “Toni Morrison’s untimely death in 2019 gave me the idea of a year-long book club dedicated to her, to gather all of her fans and those who still haven’t touched her genius, to pay homage to the gifted writer,” said book club creator Aayushi Jain. “The book club was a success, and we are left with only one book for December and have finished all of her fiction.”

For #NonFictionNovember, the group read The Origin of Others, based on Morrison’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. In it, Morrison reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, and the desire for belonging. She asks questions such as what is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

We spoke to members of Jain’s book club about the experience they had reading The Origin of Others. Here’s what they told us:

“In The Origin of Others, Morrison discusses the concept of ‘otherness’ by drawing examples from literature and her own personal experiences. She discusses her earlier works and how her thoughts shaped the character and storyline she created in her book. This book gave another significant depth to her earlier works. It is really commendable that in a few pages, she addresses so many powerful and insightful messages. Morrison's writing always makes me think and eventually changes my perspective of the world, and this book was no exception.”

—Shraddha Sen

 

“The Origin of Others was introduced in the Toni Morrison book club for nonfiction November. And I am glad that I got a chance to come a little closer to Morrison through her words. Thinking of her words is to think of the emotional and physical domination the women had to go with. Her stories are all about what it feels like to be a woman and that of being a black woman. The story of not lagging but reigning under the same sky of moon and stars, where there is an assurance of scintillating dawn and a new beginning.”

—Akanksha Kinwaar

 

“Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period. Although a small book, The Origin of Others was an important read for me, all thanks to our book club. Growing up as a Northeasterner in India, I have always been on the receiving end of racism from the mainlanders because of my features. I am the ‘other’ to them, so this book hit close to home. The essays have opened my eyes regarding many international issues, especially in light of the recent BLM movement in the USA. The forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful one, too. I am going to reread, reflect, and absorb this book again.”

—Priyanka Elangbam

 

“I perceived this book to be about racism and I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is more about the important role literature plays in perpetuating certain concepts such as racist beliefs in our society. Morrison’s analysis of fictional works by Hemingway and Harriet Beecher Stowe opened my eyes to new perspectives. A key takeaway for me from this book is that a single word choice can have huge ramifications, and it is important for us as readers to also engage in self-examination in how we perceive literature.”

—Vasudha Nukala

 

“As an African American woman, Toni Morrison holds a special place in my heart. Even though I found her work later in life, Morrison’s writings have always spoken to the truth of my existence, and her stories never fail to turn my focus inward and back onto my Blackness and womanhood. In The Origin of Others, Morrison explores themes of race, the desire to belong, ‘othering,’ and society’s preoccupation with color amongst other subjects in the span of six lectures. Morrison’s writing within these lectures speaks to current events while also touching on her novels. As always, the gift of Toni Morrison’s writings stayed with me well beyond me closing the collection.”

—Adira-Danique Philyaw

 

“The title accurately reflects the ideas that would unfold in the book. With acuity that is characteristic of her, Morrison reflects on the germination of the idea of race, the genesis of the vile phenomenon, racism that has firmly spread its roots in our society, and also on the concept of us versus ‘others’ that has created irreparable chasms in humankind.”

—Prerna Mishra

 

“I had only read Sula by Toni Morrison and I loved her then and there. When I saw that Morrison’s nonfiction work had been picked for November, I got curious to know what her personal thoughts would be like. I got to know that she is a prolific essayist, and there are many other essays that I’d like to explore one day. One of the quotes in the beginning gave way to my curiosity about her. And it made me sure that I picked this book for the right reason and Morrison can never fail anyone. The quote says, ‘Race is the classification of species, and we are the human race, period. Then what is this other thing—the hostility, the social racism, the Othering?’”

—Niyati Thakkar

 

“Morrison and many such essayists have called out the Otherization of a race and also gender. The idea of Othering a race because of their color and because they are different is a topic debated across nations. Morrison states one simple thing that what is the need for discrimination when humanity itself is a race? We humans are one entire species among thousands more which are still unidentified. Having read almost all of her work, one thing is similar about Morrison that she believes in digging and re-rooting her history. Her characters have always vouched for her. You cannot separate Africa from America because of their history. You cannot separate the twins.”

—Aayushi Jain

 

Thanks to Aayushi Jain, and the members of the Toni Morrison book club for talking to us. You can follow Aayushi on Instagram at @_penandpapers to learn more about the book club.

Who We Might Have Been, and Who We Will Become

Who among us hasn’t considered what our lives would be like if we had taken alternate paths, made different decisions? Storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have, says Andrew H. Miller, author of On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. As we live through a worldwide pandemic, the ideas of what might have been are even more appealing. Much like the adolescents on the verge of adulthood in Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, Miller tells us, we wait to see what comes next.

Asked to describe yourself, you might say many things. You might mention your habits or your looks, you might point to your work or your family or the town in which you live, or the town from which you came. In any case, you would probably talk about who you are. But sometimes we think about ourselves in a very different way, focusing not on who we are, but on who we’re not. We think about the lives we might have led, the people we might have become, had things gone differently in our past. Each of us no doubt could make a list: if my parents hadn’t moved from Connecticut when I was young; if I had gone to a different college; if I hadn’t taken that one class with that one teacher; if my girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me; if my parents’ hadn’t gotten a divorce; if I had taken another job; if my wife and I hadn’t had children.…What would my life be like? What would I be like? There are so many other paths I might have taken, so many other lives I might have led, and yet I find myself here, on this fresh June day, a middle-aged man in Baltimore, behind this narrow desk, looking out at those two children playing on the shaded sidewalk under the dogwood trees as I write these words for an unknown audience.…A life so unlikely, yet inescapable.

Such unled lives have long preoccupied a diverse set of authors, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Langston Hughes and Philip Larkin; they’ve preoccupied filmmakers, too, from Frank Capra to Charlie Kaufman and Greta Gerwig. Indeed unled lives have become more and more absorbing to authors, and have become a major theme in recent literature.  No doubt that when the wind slackened and the sun stood still Odysseus had some second thoughts, and Job, too, might have found things to regret. But, although it would be hard to take a census, I’m sure the number of people we are not, like the number of people we are, is on the rise. A list of living authors lately absorbed by unled lives could start with the novelist Kate Atkinson and end with the poet Rachel Zucker: Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Rachel Cusk.…

That list would certainly include Sally Rooney. During these months of enforced seclusion, both her novel Normal People and the series based upon it have been avidly consumed and widely praised. No doubt their popularity has been due in part to the pleasure in having distracting good literature to read and good TV to watch when other satisfactions are denied.  But the distinctive resonance of the story is less obvious than this suggests. It doesn’t come from the story itself, which in its broad outlines is familiar enough: two appealing Irish protagonists, Marianne and Connell, occasional lovers and deeply intertwined companions, are perched on the edge of adulthood. They are both bored and full of promise, wondering intensely what the future holds for them: “almost no paths seem definitively closed to her,” Rooney tells us of Marianne, yet “she has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.” So too with Connell, for whom the “ultimate question” is “what to do with himself or what kind of a person he is.” They wait, breath held, for life to start, and we wait with them.

It’s this sense of time idling that I think resonates in our vacant and febrile days, these days of collapse and revolt, of economic stagnation and social upheaval. Time arrested but leaning into a precarious future; it’s the time of early adulthood, but isn’t it our time, too? “Six Weeks Later (April 2011)…Two Days Later (April 2011)”: Rooney organizes her book in time-stamped chapters, each one dated and distanced from the one before it; we drift along and, shaking our head, discover that months have passed. Similarly, she clips off each of her short, declarative sentences from the next, so that gaps yawn between them.

For us, as for Rooney’s characters, this urgent, stilled time presses on us the question of what is to come. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you,” Connell says, as the novel closes. “It’s true,” Marianne thinks, “he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life.…And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely.” Between these two experiences—of life intensely felt but charged with uncertainty, and of the backward glance that understands life by contrasting it with lives unled—lies the novel itself. Like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Normal People is set in a time of vibrating possibilities seen from the future, when those many possibilities have become one single past. For us, too, when we look back, what will we see? What will we have become once we emerge, individually and collectively, from this urgent and unsettled moment? And what will we not have become?

Benjamin’s Arcades at 20 Years

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at HUP, reflects on its publication history.

I was asked to join with Howard Eiland, David Rodowick, and Bill Brown at events at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge last month to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the HUP publication of the translation of the book by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Here, now, it might seem easy to imagine the decision to publish not just The Arcades Project but also the Selected Writings was an easy decision. It was not. HUP has by now published 3,000 pages of the writings of Benjamin. He has become very famous in certain households, a secular saint, the most venerated literary critic in the Western world. But let’s not get carried away. Perhaps you saw Carrie Brownstein try to talk up Benjamin to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show recently, and she drew a blank from him. Benjamin is not a household name yet. People still keep using the Sprockets accent to pronounce his name: Valter Benyamin. But I still have a job, although I can easily imagine that my effort to publish Benjamin, the four volumes of the Selected Writings and The Arcades Project, might have turned out to be Lindsay’s Folly. People might have said: Waters seemed to have a promising career publishing books in economics, philosophy, and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Press. With almost no resources at his disposal, Waters, at his Little House on the Prairie, in a cinder block building hard by the wellspring of the Mississippi River, beside the bleachers where the Golden Gophers played football, did well enough. And then he came to Harvard where there were serious resources for publishing. He wasted them trying to revive a forgotten schlemihl who’d failed his PhD qualifying exams. Lindsay’s Folly and his ending, RIP.

Didn’t turn out that way. The twentieth anniversary of the publication of this huge tome might be a moment to stop and catch a breath. There is still more of his work that needs translating and editing. The hunger for his writing has only grown and grown, as Eric Banks’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife” in the Chronicle of Higher Education of March 21, 2014, lays out how Benjamin’s name has grown since the time he died until today—grown from nearly no references for forty years to a high of 775 references in 2007. His close friends, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, had worked hard to keep his name alive after his death in 1940. Adorno had arranged for the publication in 1950 of perhaps his most appealing work, his masterpiece in fact, his Berlin Childhood around 1900, in a deluxe slipcase edition with the case covered with a watercolor of the River Spree coursing through Berlin in the early twentieth century. It did not sell.

But a two-volume selection of his essays appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, the Schriften, and two volumes appeared in English from Harcourt Brace, and that led to a major essay by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, which won him additional readers. However, another essay by Arendt published in Der Merkur for January/February 1968, along with an essay by Helmut Heissenbüttel, reviewed the volumes Schriften and Briefe so critically that it caused Adorno to protest for himself and Scholem that “she would make us who alone kept him above water into his murderers.” But the two volumes of Schriften found readers in Europe, including Paul de Man, who was teaching at Zurich in the ’60s and who was the person from whom I learned decisively that people should begin to learn more about Benjamin’s writings. DeMan influenced me primarily by how much he changed his critical practice after he turned against Heidegger and Benjamin replaced him as his critical lodestar. I think primarily of the way de Man seized upon what Benjamin wrote about the facies hippocratica in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. But then I explored more and realized there was much, much more to Benjamin.

He was a veritable critical Atlantis, a buried island, a buried civilization under water in need of recovery, which it became my job to resurrect with help. When we began to talk with Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag about seriously publishing Benjamin in English at Harvard, just after I moved to Harvard from Minnesota in 1984, he wrote me on September 20, 1984, and gave me a proposition for a plan. In that plan, he suggested almost as an afterthought that we publish “a selection of the Passagen-Werk, which reduces the text to less than half.”

When we took the plan of Unseld for the Selected Writings and developed it, we presented it to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics with numerous letters of support. At the Syndics discussion, sociologist Daniel Bell became its champion and fended off objections about why we should publish the writings of a homeless man who’d never finished his dissertation and never wrote a proper book. The series of the Selected Writings began to appear in 1996. There were two critical issues to solve: should we publish the entire Passagen-Werk and how should we talk about it when we presented it to the world, as an unfinished and incomplete work or as a complete work?

Since we are celebrating The Arcades—Das Passagen-Werk in English—at twenty, let me recall its inception. I can see from the HUP records that the Press made a distinct decision to publish the PW in its entirety after we got the Selected Writings moving. I cannot remember exactly how this happened, but it makes sense that it did, because doing so meant going beyond what was suggested to the Press by Siegfried Unseld, and to do so was going to take a special effort. I presented the project to the Syndics in June 1988. We had presented to them in March 1985 the preliminary plans for an edition of the selected writings of Walter Benjamin. At that time Syndic Daniel Bell had “advocated a fuller selection, one that would give a better sense of the man and all the facets of his thought.”

The discussion of the PW translation with the Syndics led the Press to commit to translate the complete book as originally published in German in 1982, and the scholarly reports provided the guidance for how to talk about the book in publishing it. The then Harvard professor T.J. Clark argued that the Press should decide to publish the book, because this decision was on the same order as Penguin’s decision, “a decade or so ago, to do Marx’s Grundrisse in English.” He added, “The comparison is not frivolous, it’s very close. In both cases we have to do with a long, unfinished piece of writing, obviously in some sense ‘work in progress,’ and difficult to translate. In both cases it is the sheer stature of the writer, and the crucial place of the text in his work, that makes it essential that the text enter the English language. In one sense, the case is even stronger with Benjamin, since the Passagen-Werk is his Capital—for better or worse.”

Tim Clark’s advice to the Press was prescient. The book turned out to be not a white elephant, a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. That this publication would not turn out to be Lindsay’s Folly was testified to by the appearance in the New York Times for January 16, 2000, of a front-page story in the “Arts & Leisure” section by Hubert Muschamp that began this way: “Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects for years to come.” Our book was on its way to being recognized as a modernist masterpiece, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Dylan’s The Basement Tapes—all these “unfinished” works that were as finished as their composers could make them before they died.  The debate Mike Jennings, Howard Eiland, and I had among ourselves was how to handle the unfinished nature of The Arcades. Once we published our edition, Mike argued that we should republish the book in the order that some researchers had discovered, but we decided not to do that. Stanley Cavell seems to me to have captured the truth of the matter when he declared inArtforumof the book Suhrkamp and we published: its incompleteness “strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity.” In this book, Benjamin wrote that in shopping malls he had discovered the secret history of the bourgeoisie and liberated the suppressed history that lays underneath the ideological masks. The greatest single testimony to the effectiveness of the book is a book that mimics it in its essentials, right down to duplicating the Parisian arcades with the Parisian Palais-Royal, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch. We did not know what we had on our hands when we began to publish Benjamin, but it turned out to be something great.

Remembering Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the literary critic who championed the Western canon, died at age 89 last month. Lindsay Waters, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities, looks back on their publishing history, their friendship, and Bloom’s great contributions to the literary community.

Harold always lived at 179 Linden, New Haven. Always. “Send the book to my home address. Do you have it? Are you sure? I really need that book.” “Yes. Have it. Will do.” So it’s hard, almost impossible, to remember that he and Jeannie almost moved to Cambridge, Mass. For years no name said Yale as forcefully and clearly as Harold Bloom. I first met Harold when he and nearly the whole Yale School of Critics picked me up at the New Haven Amtrak station in 1981 so I could have lunch—not with all of them, dear God!—but with Paul de Man. Paul could drive, but he did not drive so well, as all the dents and nicks in his car made clear. Harold could not drive at all; Jeannie did. Even then it felt a lot like I was being picked up by all the Marx Brothers, everyone doing their own schtick; looking back to that moment feels funny, fills me with nostalgia.

But back to that moment: I’d been picked up by Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Groucho, but my lunch date was with de Man. Still, there they all were—Paul, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, the heart of the group, missing only Hillis Miller—in a car driven by Renee, Geoffrey’s wife. So they picked me up and drove Paul and me to lunch, not at cozy Naples Pizza, a favorite of Yale Comp Lit, but at Mory’s, a place that might have been as comfortable as Naples when it originated in 1849. Was de Man trying to impress me by taking me to “the tables down at Mory’s”? That was not like him, but who knows? Maybe. The rest of them disappeared. How perfect! I’d already published the new edition of Paul’s Blindness and Insight. Paul and I were in business together. We’d met in Chicago and Minneapolis before. I remember during our lunch at Mory’s asking him about Hans Robert Jauss, for whose book he had just written the introduction for the THL series. I asked him if he thought Jauss, whom I was about to publish, was the equivalent of Erich Auerbach. He tried gently to lower my expectations. In fact, de Man’s introduction had itself been a subtle skewering of Jauss. I did not know Paul so well, as well as I’d come to know him. And I had no idea how close de Man was to Bloom.

Harold’s name was synonymous with Yale for me as a humanities editor from the University of Minnesota Press—Harold, as I said, not a member of the Bush family or William F. Buckley, Jr., author of once-famous God and Man at Yale and then famous for his TV show Firing Line, and a hero to my mother, a conservative Catholic. A few years later, after Paul had died in 1983, I had business with Harold. This would have been 1987, the year Harold gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and dallied in false surmise, to use a Miltonism, the false surmise being that he might move to Harvard. He negotiated for months with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president, and then decided against moving. I would experience the complications of negotiating with Harold several times. Nothing was too small to fuss over. But the very chance that he might move and the fact that he was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard helped make the year 1987–1988 a very exciting one for many of us in Cambridge. Those lectures, after touch-and-go negotiations with Harvard University Press director Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher as exciting in his own behavior as Professor Bloom, became the book Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (HUP, 1989). What we did not know when Bloom delivered the lectures, and what he probably did not know himself then, was that the book would be the trial run, the off-Broadway tryouts, for what would become his most famous book of the more than fifty books he wrote: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).

When he accepted the commission to deliver the six Norton Lectures, Harold told Derek Bok that he would not take up the residency at Harvard normally required of the Norton lecturer. “I told them I’d come up for one day only for each lecture over the course of six weeks.” But, having bargained Bok into an arrangement that would see him at Harvard for only six days, Harold in effect moved up to Cambridge for the entire academic year! He was everywhere. We could not get rid of Harold. If the mountain would not move to Bloom, Bloom moved his mountainous self and enterprises with him for a year.

Why is The Western Canon so like Ruin the Sacred Truths? “I write only one book,” before lapsing into deli talk from the Lower East Side: “It is like a very long sausage. I cut off so much here and so much there.” This was, as I said, the trial run for the Broadway show. Harold delivered his pre-Broadway performance at Harvard’s great Memorial Hall, the building constructed to honor the Harvard grads who had died in the Civil War. Think of The Western Canon as Paradise Lost and Ruin the Sacred Truths as the “brief epic” Paradise Regained.

Keep in mind that picture of the Yale Critics crammed into a car—making room for one another to fit—because, although Harold Bloom might seem like the ultimate lone literary superstar, he was, I’d contend, and that is the point of this remembrance of him, always a team player, someone who thrived best when he struck up alliances with others, and those others did not need to be like-minded to become enlisted in his work. Michael Dirda wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Bloom has always been, to echo Kipling, a cat that walks by himself” (Oct. 11, 2019), but I beg to differ. In fact, he ground out much more sausage, if you will, when he had others around him to spice it up.

For all his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—all his kvetching about the ruination of the American academy—he kept at his lectern until the end, until just before he died, in fact. Inside the university he had lifelong relations with many, and especially with some. I bring as evidence for what I am contending information about two special people in particular, Paul de Man and Angus Fletcher. He loved John Hollander and Richard Rorty, and he admired Mark Edmundson and David Bromwich. He did not have much use for some famous colleagues. Some had no use for him. I have somewhere a list of the people in the department who voted to deny him tenure. He was unusual, and he had a taste for the unusual. For example, he was inspired by Victoria Nelson, someone whose work I introduced him to, and he was devoted to her books and supported my publishing two of them, one of which, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002), won the MLA prize for best book in comp lit despite the author’s lack of professional credentials.

He would have been categorized by many as a literary theorist, especially since helping to develop the books Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) and Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). But he was not, I’d contend, a theorist like his great friends de Man and Fletcher, and he acknowledged this repeatedly. He was a lover of poetry with a photographic memory. He was also a critic, one who could say what he loved and why, like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. He was what Nelson George calls “a hanging critic,” someone who would condemn what he did not like, as he did Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Jorie Graham, and J. K. Rowling, to name some of those he strongly criticized.

But his connections with Paul and Angus were deeper, abiding, and loving. Harold writes in The Western Canon about how the “long, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book” (131). This captures the relationships between Bloom and de Man and Bloom and Fletcher. Bloom was hardly a solitary. He was not Hamlet, standing alone on the battlement. As he said, he was Falstaff at loving war with Hal.

Harold always maintained that there was one person superior to him in his generation, and that was Angus. They’d met when they were each starting graduate school in English at Yale in September 1951. As he tells the story, Harold wandered disconsolately into the lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale, where he heard a “vigorous performance of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Piano. Sitting down, I listened to its percussive splendor being played by a yellow cowlick bobbing up and down behind the piano.” Beneath that cowlick was “a splendid Scottish youth,” as he wrote in a foreword to the Princeton edition of Fletcher’s Allegory (2012). In one of the two books Bloom published in 2019, he gave repeated testimonials to Angus’s friendship and mind. He wrote, “Of all the literary critics of my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone” (Possessed by Memory, 343). In this book he praised Angus for being in tune with the natural world. There is truth to this. But I believe the deeper reason for their ongoing friendship was that Angus was much more of a thinker than Harold ever was, and that in their nearly daily phone calls to discuss each other’s writing, Angus pushed and probed and forced the fanciful Bloom to make his writing walk on the earth and engage in argument. Harold wrote a stunning blurb to describe Angus for the cover of his HUP book Colors of the Mind: “He is an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers.” This tribute sounds great and stirring, but it misses the way Angus continually sliced through Harold’s verbiage. No wonder Angus loved Harry Frankfurt’s book on bullshit! I, too, had the experience of Angus’s continually and sharply cutting through my waffling. I am sure he tried to cut through Harold’s, too. And if those books of Harold’s speak to general readers, as it is clear many of them do, it is, I’d contend, because of how Angus in effect edited them working over the phone with Harold.

If Harold argued with Angus, he argued just as much with Paul de Man. De Man loved Walter Benjamin; Harold did not—he loved Walter Pater. In a story Harold told me in 1996, he recounted how once upon a time he ran into Paul at the Yale Coop. Harold was teaching Freud that day and was carrying five or six books by Freud to his class. Paul laughed at him when he saw him juggling the stack of books, and asked: “Why are you carrying the contents of the Sterling Library to your class?” Paul was carrying one slim book of Walter Benjamin’s essays! Paul laughed at Harold for being so devoted to Freud, not that he disbelieved Freud, but he thought all Freud said was common sense. What really upset Harold about Paul was the way he taught and how he created magic circles of acolytes around himself. There was something mystical and mystifying about his teaching style that caused students to grant him some inexplicable control over them. He complained to me that he loved Paul but did not love his effect upon me: for too long I did not understand that I was too devoted to him.

When people rose against de Man after the discovery that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper in 1942, and then others kept coming forward to attack him with more sensational charges, Harold never disowned him. He remembered Derrida calling him to tell him dramatically that “we must fight” to save our friend’s reputation. What Bloom said to me was that he’d have nothing to do with such fights. “What happened is between the soul of our late friend and God, if there is a God. I consider the attacks on him to be an offense and obnoxious. My thought is that nothing in the attacks is untrue and none of it matters. The wild publications reveal a certain astonishing lack of responsibility.”

I remember that when Adam Begley wrote a profile of Harold for the New York Times Magazine and I was quoted as having a favorable opinion of Harold, a Harvard colleague wrote to tell me he was surprised to read that. I knew that many people were suspicious of Harold. I had my own questions about some of his work, but in the battle about literature and politics that emerged in the 1980s and has continued unabated, I was always on his side. He remained a true friend to my best friends de Man and Fletcher, and he revered and supported other friends and authors Miriam Hansen and Victoria Nelson. He was a champion of literature. I will miss him.

Who Needs an Author?

In his new book Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome, classicist Tom Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time. Here, he discusses the history—and strength—of anonymous works of literature.

Back in the roaring ’20s, I. A. Richards, the plucky young father-to-be of modern literary criticism, did an experiment with his students at the University of Cambridge. He started circulating poems neat—shorn, that is, of any complementary information about who they were by, when they were written, etc.—and got his students to write responses to them. He then collated, synthesized, and analyzed everything to produce the classic book Practical Criticism (1929): an incredible snapshot of how a particular set of educated young things in 1920s Britain tended to talk about poetry.

Richards found that his flock were more or less beholden to pallid and predictable stock responses, fumbling to find any meaningful aesthetic language to formulate their experience of the “words on the page” in all their particularity. This empirical horror prompted Richards to start an educational crusade to transform students’ aesthetic sensibility. And thus—so they say—the discipline of modern English was born.

Something about this Cambridge don’s innocent little sport with anonymizing poems and probing reader response always fascinated me. I fantasized myself back into one of those classes, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed guinea pig scurrying to impress the prof: how intimidating it would have been to make something of all those high-flown yet completely unprovenanced words; how hard it would have been to face them down and pick them apart without the idea of an author or a date guiding my gut. But I also found it strange, because the poor students’ colorless responses to these poems under conditions of laboratory duress didn’t seem to do any justice to my own enthused experience of the authorless.

As a teenager, then a twenty-something wannabe intellectual with literary pretensions, I read and loved a lot of “classic” literature, and “classics” usually came with famous authors included. But some of the most moving poetry I found during these formative years, the words that really filled me up, were actually by no one. Bella Ciao, the haunting monologue of a nameless Italian partisan facing death, a poetic emblem of the anti-fascist international left, had no author; nor did the rough-and-ready rum songs of early colonial Australia cited by Robert Hughes in his gripping story of the genesis of convict colonialism, The Fatal Shore; nor, I found in the course of my university studies, did the early masterpieces called the Iliad or Odyssey, which everyone only pretended had an author called “Homer” so they could write essays on “him.”

These works were not temporarily deprived of their authors in the name of a pedagogical game, then restored to them swiftly after—as if literature without source were incomplete, licensed only for the carnival of the criticism lab. No, they never needed authors in the first place. Not only that: they were partly beautiful because they were name free, not in spite of it. The Iliad and Odyssey seemed so much bigger the moment I found out they were probably a collective product built over time, by everyone, anyone, and no one; just as Bella Ciao’s dying partisan directing their own burial under a beautiful flower floored me all the more because the song was without a single origin, indeed came already imbued with the shared mourning of a whole people, unhinged from the conditioning of the individual. Anonymity could serve the art.

And so, over time, I wanted to work out if and how the lack of name and uncertainty of date could actually help (rather than hold back) the literature of ancient Rome coming down to us under its own mysterious circumstances. Hence Author Unknown. The book treats a host of primarily anonymous literary texts from the first few hundred years of the Roman principate. For most of their history, these texts have fallen victim to a form of classical scholarship which is scared of the dark: a scholarship obsessed with resolving, or at least approximating answers to, the questions of authorship and date, as a prerequisite to handling the texts in meaningful ways. What’s more, in the kind of big-name culture of authorship we have inherited from the ancients, this anonymous literature has often been a target of simple benign neglect born of quasi-patrician snobbery: why read that two-bit unknown imitator of Virgil, when you can read VIRGIL?!

My project in Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome is an attempt at resisting this deep-set cultural habit of looking for the author and disparaging the work when one can’t be turned up. I try to redeem some of Latin literature’s minors to show that they are actually majors, many of them wonderful artifacts that depend on their anonymity to achieve certain stunning special effects. These works pack a punch because their authors will always be unknown. I. A. Richards wouldn’t have known what to do with them.

 

 

A Very Hippo Holiday with Edward Lear

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and has captivated the imagination of readers, young and old, for generations. As a holiday treat, we asked Sara Lodge, author of Inventing Edward Lear to reflect on Edward Lear as a Christmas poet.  

Edward Lear is an apt character to think about at Christmas-time. His nonsense books, most famously Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, were published in December to catch the Christmas gift market. And Lear associated himself with the spirit of the season. Lear’s first, anonymous book of illustrated limericks for children, A Book of Nonsense (1846) announces on its title page that:

There was an old Derry down Derry, who liked to make little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

As Vivien Noakes points out, Derry down Derry was ‘one of the fools of the traditional English mummers’ plays’. Mummers’ plays were a practice dating from at least the eighteenth century and probably linked to much older festivals and masques – they were traditionally staged at Christmas time by itinerant groups of actors who were not professional players but were drawn from the local community and were often raising funds for food and drink to celebrate the season. In the Buckinghamshire mummers’ plays, ‘Hey Down Derry’ or ‘Don Derry’ has a particular function. He is the announcer of the performance whose arrival signals its beginning. He calls on the assembly to make room for the entertainment, sometimes also pretending to sweep bystanders back with a broom that he carries for this purpose. In some versions he is the Fool, but in others he is Father Christmas.

It is telling that Lear invokes this figure on the title page of his Book of Nonsense, dancing with an audience of children who are jumping in the air or turning handstands. He is announcing his own entertainment at its commencement, like the Christmas mummer of old. In fact Lear in 1846, when he published A Book of Nonsense, was only thirty-four. He was not an old Derry down Derry at all. But as a figure who promised mirth to children, like Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard or Old Mother Goose, Lear was placing himself within a tradition that was extremely old. It is noteworthy that Lear refers to his authorial alter ego as ‘making’ children a book. This book is a hand-crafted object. Lear has ‘made’ it in a sense that only an artist-author can claim to do who has both written the text and drawn the illustrations. It has the hallmarks of a personal gift, even when sold in a commercial bookshop. Lear’s persona as the dancing Derry down Derry is part of that gift. Lear places his alter ego in the midst of his nonsense not as an author in the commercial sense but as a figure for the emotional transaction, beyond words, that the season invites.

James T Fields of Boston in his collection of sketches of eminent contemporaries Underbrush (1877) described Edward Lear, ‘Nonsense-Poet’ thus:

if you chanced, a few years back, to go to Farringford about Christmas time you would have been likely to find a tall elderly man, in enormous googles, down on all fours on the carpet, and reciting in the character of a lively and classical Hippopotamus new nonsense verses to a dozen children, amid a roar of laughter…

It is easy to picture the sixty-something Edward Lear, with his super-strength glasses to combat myopia, larking about at Christmas on all fours in Alfred Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. One imagines that this ‘classical’ Hippo, inspired by its Greek name, may wallow in the Hippocrene, spring of the Muses. Most of Lear’s poetical works, from his nonsense verses to his illustrated alphabets, started their life as gifts: sung or recited at friends’ houses, enclosed with letters, or laid on a hotel table at lunchtime to delight bored holidaymakers. They have never lost the quality of gifts: and Lear’s comic persona ­– needy, funny, anxious, boisterous ­– is an integral part of the offering he presents.

 

Lear sketched endless caricatures of himself in letters to friends. In them, his body is always risible. In his twenties, he depicts himself as a lanky, blundering string-bean, blown away with his umbrella in a high wind. In later life, his self-caricature is small (he is the same size as slugs, snails and frogs), bearded, myopic with a plum-pudding belly and thin legs that stick out like a bird’s. Often, he is off the ground. Like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, he gets into comic scrapes. One of the most important things I realised, in producing an account of Lear, was that – just as Charlie Chaplin is not identical with his most memorable character, The Little Tramp – Edward Lear is not identical with his self-caricature. The small, ‘minor’ figure who consorts with molluscs is a performance. The real Lear was tall, a well-read intellectual with serious ambitions and an extraordinarily large and varied social, cultural and political network. In tracing Lear’s intellectual life, I was constantly surprised by the strength and depth of his connections. He set Swinburne, Shelley, and his friend Tennyson’s verse to music; he was a self-elected member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with strong views on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown. He was influenced by American artists including Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt. And, as a naturalist and natural history painter, he moved in scientific circles that included Charles Babbage, Joseph Hooker, and the Darwins.

When living in San Remo, which he did from 1871 until his death, Lear preferred a quiet Christmas, often refusing invitations. Raised a dissenter in religion, he valued simplicity in expressions of faith and his sensitive ear and mind disliked the ‘bother’ of big parties. Lear’s ‘sudden reversions’ from gloom to cheer, his equal and opposite desires for lively company and silent solitude, are to me the essence of December and the contradictory moods it can inspire. In appreciating this complex man, who so ardently seeks the reader’s sympathy and was all his life committed to greater tolerance amongst ‘humanbeans’, I gained greater understanding of my own frequent switchbacks as a writer from delight to despair and back again. One of Lear’s early limericks features a lady ‘Whose folly/ induced her to sit in a holly’. She tears her dress and grows ‘melancholy’; but the limerick is designed to amuse, converting her tear or tears into a smile we can join in. Whether you are approaching the holiday season with a grin or a groan – or both at once – Edward Lear has his arm in yours.

Frankenstein, Born January 1, 1818, Still Alive

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, and arguably our greatest tale of horror. Below, Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao, whose widely celebrated annotated edition of the novel we published in 2012, reflect on Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein’s “Creature,” and the work’s lasting cultural legacy.

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Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published January 1, 1818, and since then has never been out of print, or out of range. The range is more than the book: it is a fable and a language. On December 21, 2017 (the darkest night of the year), Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the recently passed unilateral tax bill this way: “It’s a Frankenstein. Anybody who’s familiar with Frankenstein knows it was… a monster that was created… Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley’s story?” she exclaimed. “The monster comes back to destroy.” Her reference needs some nuance: Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation. And the creation was not “a monster,” but deemed so on the basis of a physical appearance outside or beyond the normative range. And the Creature (let’s call him) was abandoned and abused, and miserably lonely, before he became a vengeful destroyer. Such reservations aside, we can marvel at the readiness of the reference, needing no footnote 200 years on: who is not “familiar with Frankenstein”?

The novel main-titled Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The publication of 1818 was anonymous, from a down-market press. It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. She proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage confection at London’s Royal Opera House in August—running for nearly 40 nights in this debut. Scarcely a month goes by now without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events.

The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Victor Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-seller Reflections on the Revolution in France recoiled at the new France as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, raged against “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out that the system of monarchy was an “artificial monster,” a “luxurious monster,” and its despots a “race of monsters in human shape.”

The language of “monster” had another stage, with heightened interest in the era of the rights of man, when large populations of human beings were systematically brutalized. With much controversy, and against the lobbying of wealthy plantation owners, England outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807; but slavery in its colonies was legal until 1833. (Frankenstein reaches its third and most popular edition in 1831). Who was a “monster”? Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and slave-masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Defenders of slavery cast the Africans as monsters: subhuman, improvable perhaps by conversion to Christianity and disciplined work, but a threat, especially the men, if freed. “In dealing with the negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength…would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” The reference was transparently Frankenstein, not only the novel but also the recent stage-plays, which stripped the Creature of the eloquent and moving language Mary Shelley wrote for him, and rendered the familiar or cinematic tradition: a mute, lumbering, physical threat.