Harvard University Press Blog

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.

“A Masterpiece of Scholarly Production”

In the spring of 2016 we published a major new edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse, the only extant volume of Dickinson’s complete poems that distinguishes between those she delicately preserved in her storied fascicles and those she treated with somewhat less care. Painstakingly edited by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller, the book is also the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poems, as well as the first edition to include the alternative words and phrases Dickinson wrote on the pages of many of the poems she retained.

To have produced such a lovely and invaluable resource is its own reward, but we’re nonetheless extremely pleased to share that the Modern Language Association of America has named Miller’s volume co-winner of its biennial MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The prize committee’s citation for the book reads:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is a masterpiece of scholarly production, from layout and design to content. Cristanne Miller demonstrates how engaging with the materiality of the poems leads to new knowledge about the poet and her work. The care and attention given to the intricacies involved in Dickinson’s textual productions are striking. The clean presentation of the poems on the page allows readers to see the alternative phrasings with ease, and the introduction presents a welcome overview of Dickinson’s writing practices and the ways in which her work has been edited in the past. This outstanding edition helps make clear the complexity of Dickinson’s habits and how they have affected our understanding of her poetry.

From the beginning, we recognized the value of placing this edition alongside the open access Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), on which we’d partnered with Amherst College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and a host of other institutions. On our website, we produced an index to Miller’s volume from which one can jump directly to the high-resolution images of the fascicles presented at EDA, allowing readers not only to read Dickinson’s poems “as she preserved them,” but actually to see those preservations themselves.

Our congratulations to Cristanne Miller on this well-deserved recognition for her wonderful work.

Loebs New and New Again

June saw the publication of four new Loeb Classical Library volumes, a batch consisting of two revisions to earlier works and two new additions to the corpus. Below, General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the offerings.

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Following the release in fall 2016 of the extraordinary Early Greek Philosophy in nine volumes (LCL 524–532), the Loeb Classical Library catalog for spring 2017 resumes a more typical pattern: two volumes of works new to the Library and two replacement volumes, one each of Latin and Greek. Yet this catalog is not so typical in longer historical perspective: each volume in its own way exemplifies significant adjustments to James Loeb’s original plan for the Library that have been developed over the past half-century in order to preserve the viability and maintain the vitality of his vision for new generations of readers.

Loeb aimed “to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature” and so imagined a moment when the Library would be complete, which almost came to pass in the 1970s as a solution (however unwelcome) to the financial challenges of that era. Instead, there were prospects for a new dawn: the roster of works that count as valuable and interesting is not an immutable or finite canon, but one that changes and expands in each successive generation. Nor are existing volumes immortal, as even the most solid ones inevitably grow outdated in one way or another. And so, the LCL embarked on a massive revaluation project to grade each existing edition for retention, revision, or replacement, and to add such new editions as would likely be received as valuable and interesting. Accordingly, new authors and works continue to be added, but revisions and replacements appear at an equal pace: over 25% of the Library’s editions have already been revised or replaced, and in many cases expanded by adding lesser-known or fragmentary works.

The idea of systematic revision was already in the air when General Editor Eric Warmington decided to revise Heseltine’s edition of Petronius in 1969 (LCL 15), as soon as the relaxation of obscenity laws in the US allowed (the UK had acted a decade earlier), and the de-bowdlerization of the Library has continued apace. Similarly for archaic or otherwise dated styles: Edmonds’ 1912 edition of the Greek Bucolic Poets, among other outdated features, claimed allegiance to the “fain/twain school” and used regional dialect or “colloquial suburban” to represent characters in the mimes, is virtually unreadable today and was finally replaced in 2015 by Neil Hopkinson’s fine and pellucid Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (LCL 28). By contrast, Way’s 1913 edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus (LCL 19), though it features a very stilted iambic pentameter translation, was deemed in the Loeb assessment of 1991 not to warrant replacement on the grounds that such a translation is “what this poetaster deserves” and that the existence of Vian’s sound text was “hardly sufficient to justify a new edition of this boring writer.” But here, as often, times and tastes have changed, so that Hopkinson’s replacement of the Way edition is scheduled to appear next year.

Many other factors come into play when deciding whether to revise or replace an edition, for example the existence of a better critical edition on which to base the text, the quality and currency of the scholarship, the level of annotation, or the adequacy of the front and back matter; the first volume of de Melo’s Plautus (LCL 60) has a 120-page Introduction versus the 8 pages offered by its predecessor, a decision prompted largely by the lack elsewhere of a similar overview for Anglophone readers.

Both new editions in the spring 2017 catalog contain works from the second century AD: the first volume of Michael Trapp’s edition of Aelius Aristides’ Orations (LCL 533), and Christopher P. Jones’ Apologia, Florida, and De Deo Socratis of Apuleius (LCL 534), which together with the Metamorphoses (LCL 44, 453) complete our coverage of that author’s genuine works. Although this era of the “Second Sophistic” was exceptionally prolific on both the Roman and the Greek sides, intellectually and artistically rich and varied, and crucially important in the transmission of classicism, it had been for the most part the preserve of specialists until a recent renewal of interest began to equip the rest of us to understand and appreciate its riches. These works by Aelius Aristides and Apuleius, two of the most distinctive and celebrated figures of their time, join other recent and forthcoming additions by Philostratus (LCL 521) and Galen (LCL 523, 535, 536) to help fill out our picture of an important era.

The other two volumes for spring 2017 replace existing volumes, which are thus retired from both the print and the digital Library: Emlyn Jones’ and Preddy’s new Plato, volume I (LCL 36) replaces Harold North Fowler’s edition of 1914, and J. C. Yardley’s new Livy, volume IX (LCL 295) replaces Evan T. Sage’s edition of 1935. The decision to revise or replace differs in each individual case and then depends on finding the right editor to (re-)do both text and translation. In both these cases, replacement was surely merited. Fowler’s Plato lacked a solid foundation for revision: its text had long been superseded, its translation was dated and often inaccurate, its 10-page introduction was minimal and unhelpful, there were no explanatory notes, and Phaedrus does not belong with Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. (Phaedrus is now slated to be included with two other dialogues on love and literature, Lysis and Symposium, in a forthcoming replacement of LCL 166.) Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, who had recently replaced our edition of Plato’s Republic (LCL 237, 276), were happily ready to repair these deficiencies, and continue to assist us in our long-term efforts to update our twelve volumes of Plato.

An even more massive replacement project is inaugurated by Yardley’s new volume of Livy, whose complete LCL edition is currently in fourteen volumes. Livy presents a special challenge insofar as his monumental History of Rome begins with the city’s foundation and continues down into his own era in the age of Augustus, thus requiring editorial expertise spanning multiple historical periods. Hence our original edition, begun in 1919 and completed in 1959, was divided among four editors: B. O. Foster for Books 1–22 (LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233), Frank Gardner Moore for Books 23–30 (LCL 355, 367, 381), the aforementioned Evan T. Sage for Books 31–42 (LCL 295, 301, 313, 332) and his collaborator on volume XII Alfred Cary Schlesinger for Books 43–45, etc. (LCL 396, 404). Each of these volumes is a product of its time, and needs updating for various reasons. Yardley’s LCL volumes of Livy’s third and fourth decades, based on Briscoe’s new critical edition, initiate our efforts to convey Livy’s meaning to the Anglophone reader more uniformly and accurately, with much fuller annotation in line with current scholarship. (We began with the fourth decade while we awaited the publication of the final books of Briscoe’s edition of the third.) Yardley, a veteran translator of Livy, is just the right scholar to set the overall tone for this undertaking, and even as his new LCL volumes will replace Sage’s, so too will replacements for the existing LCL volumes by Foster, Gardner Moore, and Schlesinger follow in due course.

Jazz and the Literary Imagination

The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is that the pollination has gone both ways, “an unending back-and-forth between a music that hovers at the edge of language, on the one hand, and a writing that strives for the rhythmic propulsion, emotional charge, and melodic contours of music, on the other.”

In Epistrophies, Edwards comes to terms with this foundational interface by considering the full variety of “jazz literature”—both writing informed by the music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. Here’s a bit from the book:

The term jazz literature tends to bring to mind writing influenced by music. But this other sort of jazz literature—that is, writing by musicians—includes an enormous range of work, including not only autobiography but also music criticism, history, interviews, philosophy, fiction, poetry, drama, technical and instruction manuals, liner notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. Aside from autobiographies this work has received little attention from scholars of either literary studies or jazz studies, but it seems to me that this corpus must not be dismissed as a curiosity. It should be understood, instead, as a persistent impulse. Whether in Sun Ra’s “cosmo-myth rituals” or in Ellington’s “social significance” suites, one encounters again and again an approach to aesthetics that resists any easy distinction between “writing” and “music,” instead viewing both as components in a broader sphere of art making and performance.

Edwards makes his way through studies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams, among others, to consider the uses and implications of jazz writing for artists we tend to think of primarily as composers and improvisers. Here’s Edwards again:

Although all the chapters shuttle between jazz and literature, it is not by coincidence that the first is devoted to Louis Armstrong, in an attempt to take account of the apparent parallels or shared predilections across his work as a singer, an instrumentalist, and a writer. To read and hear Armstrong this way—or Duke Ellington, or Sun Ra, or Mary Lou Williams, or Henry Threadgill—is to shift the fringe of contact between music and language by noting that black musicians so often insist on working in multiple media, not as autonomous areas of activity but in conjunction, insistently crossing circuits, rethinking and expanding the potential of each medium in the way it is like and unlike the other. It is also to insist that the provocation goes both ways: from music to literature, from literature to music.

The book’s title itself points to one of these flowing episodes of provocation. There’s a famous 1941 composition by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke called “Epistrophy”—the title refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses—that Amiri Baraka alluded to decades later with his poem “Epistrophe,” which, not for nothing, never once employs its namesake’s namesake literary device. From a bebop standard, to a Black Arts poem, to Edwards’s dazzling new work of criticism—“Epistrophy” to “Epistrophe” to Epistrophies—consider that architecture well-danced.

On Literary Chronology

This month brings the publication of A New Literary History of Modern China, a volume that amasses 161 essays by 143 authors under the editorship of David Der-wei Wang. Intended for readers interested in understanding modern China through its literary and cultural dynamics, the book follows the similarly conceived New History of French Literature, New History of German Literature, and New Literary History of America. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters considers the organizational principle linking all four.

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It might be worthwhile to talk about the Chinese literary history in terms of the series of literary histories that began with Denis Hollier’s New History of French Literature in 1989, because, although the volume devoted to the literatures of those who speak and write Chinese is the first book in the series to be devoted to a non-European tongue, the set-up and the goals of all the books in the series have some things in common. First, they are literary histories organized chronologically.

When we decided to organize the French literary history chronologically, I confess we were risking appearing to be too cute, looking like we were playing around. As the originator of the form we used for that book and for this one and the German and American volumes, Denis Hollier, wrote in the manifesto document to launch the French book, dates had “become the symbol of useless knowledge.” The time we began that book was the heyday of Deconstruction, literary theory, French and American feminisms, the birthing-time for Cultural Studies, ideologiekritik, so the recourse to dates offered us an organizing device that constituted “the least ideological way to reintroduce an historical dimension into the study of French literature. Dates [would be used] with some irony, a mostly rhetorical device which could encourage each contributor to focus on detail and give sharpness and specificity to each article. The devise [was] intended to work against pedestrian historicism.”

But, really, why dates? At this moment, so distant from the time of the original decision, I am tempted to say that our winking and smirking about dates concealed from us, all of us roughly from the class of 1968, that the date 1968 meant a great deal to this generation of researchers, just as September 11, 2011, means much to a later cohort. Dates, originally bits of useless knowledge, come to mean something. They can become what Walter Benjamin had called “focal points,” in his early essay “The Life of Students,” where he calls them “burning points” (Brennpunkt), something that concentrates events in a “kairos” or “monad,” thus shattering the historical continuum and the bare inventory of atomic facts, interpreting the past from out of the highest energy of the present, as Nietzsche puts it. In French literary history, just as in Chinese literary history, “assigning dates is far more problematic” the further back you go, as John Benton explains in “Entering the Date,” his contribution to A New History of French Literature. And as contributor Sandy Petry writes of the year 1789 in the same volume, “As the fall of the Bastille is a reality that became a representation,” so the falling of the Twin Towers has become a representation. The long-term impact of the name of the year “1968” was more decisive in our choice of dates as our organizing device than we could fathom. No one in China doubts the significance of dates, especially those of “May 4th,” or “1949,” or “June 4th.”

We use the dates not to assert continuity of French, German, American, or Chinese literary history, but to scramble it up. It is clear now, nearly thirty years after the appearance of the NHFL, that France is so unified a country that our deconstruction of it could not break it into pieces. It is the case that, on the contrary, the Chinese people, although they have lived for millennia held together and apart by the tribute system, have never had the sort of unity the French have had. Few peoples in the world have except primitive tribes. The effort to unify sinophone culture is a new thing, the very thing that is the subject of this book, that you can witness in the actions of the people who inhabit this book and engage in every sort of struggle to modernize China.

So, the dates that this book makes you aware of are important because, as Cognitive Science professor Edwin Hutchins writes in his book Cognition in the Wild, “the identification of a landmark is a highly interactive process.” That sounds abstract, but it is the opposite of abstract. Think of the effect of bases on ballplayers. And identifying landmarks is a process that the readers of the book are invited to participate in. Readers of previous books in this series have found that, because of the way the books are constructed, they become involved in them. Aiming to read one or two essays, they have gotten caught up in an ongoing flow from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves.

As Arthur J. Rosenthal, then the Director of HUP, said at the outset of this adventure, these books are not reference books. They’re not to be used like Google and Wikipedia, extracting free-floating facts, like stopping for a burger at the McDonald’s drive-by window. To put it differently, the readers of this book are not invited to be gravediggers exhuming a bit of knowledge, a bone here, a skull there, as in Hamlet. Rather they are invited to consume food to live in the present. Communion is the goal, not communication. This is the difference between the atomism Bertrand Russell celebrated and the holism that Henri Bergson promoted.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin sought to immerse his readers in the felt life of nineteenth-century Paris just at the time the Eiffel Tower was being raised, stunning many and horrifying many others. This way of writing cultural history is what Benjamin called “historical materialism.” How does that history work? It sidesteps the mere communication of information. He explained: “To put to work an experience with history—a history that is originary for every present—is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward a consciousness of the present—which explodes the continuum of history.” This is the operation of “kairos,” as opposed to chronos, history a la Nietzsche, Bataille, and Hollier. Such history writing is directed to people who live in the present, provoking in the readers an experience in the fullest sense, what he called “Erfahrung.” When this history works, the past explodes into the present. The alternative form of history writing delivers up a continuum in a neat inventory, history reified. What the new history hopes to precipitate is an experience in which the pulse of the past is felt in the present.

A Life of Miłosz

Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz is the first full biography of Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz was born in 1911, died in 2004, and was a witness to and participant in almost all of the crucial events of a century full of pain. Indeed, what comes across strongly in Franaszek’s account is how constantly Miłosz was confronted by upheavals within the political and social landscapes he inhabited, first in Lithuania, next in Poland and then in France and the United States, in each of which he experienced periods when he felt utterly alienated from his surroundings. The book puts Miłosz’s outsider status at the center of his life and work, and gives us a moving account of the writer’s difficult personal odyssey and the appalling history through which he lived.

In Aleksandra and Michael Parker’s English-language edition of Franaszek’s original Polish, the book is a feat of immersion, combining biographical narrative and critical insight with generous excerpting of Miłosz’s poetry and prose. Miłosz wrote prolifically but also thought without end about the role of the writer and the work of the intellectual, and his feelings on these things evolved over his long life. Franaszek interweaves it all, such that on nearly every page you’ll learn about an event in Miłosz’s life or in the world he watched so closely, then read a bit of a poem or letter he wrote about it at the time, followed by quotes from his reflections decades later.

Altogether, Franaszek gives us a remarkably intimate sense of Miłosz’s complicated life, wrapped in an emblematic portrait of the twentieth century. During the first eleven years of Miłosz’s life, his family was caught up in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian-Polish War. In his late twenties and early thirties he witnessed the catastrophe of the Second World War, lived through the hell of Nazi occupation, and witnessed the beginning of a new chapter in European history. Finally, he settled down in the California of the 1960s, and for a long time was safe and stable, but still largely unknown to readers of English. This sense of his own obscurity weighed on him tremendously, as Franaszek describes:

It is easy to dwell on the latter, happier years of his life, when he was constantly honoured. From 1951 until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, he had a small readership, and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles written about him. For almost three decades after his defection from Poland in 1951, Miłosz was a writer who had resigned himself to the fact that he had failed and would be forgotten.

He hadn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t be.

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago has spent this entire month celebrating Czesław Miłosz and highlighting the work University Presses do to help keep poetry in play. Day by day they’ve shared lines from Miłosz’s 1978 poem “Notes,” and this week they published a wonderful consideration of Milos’z “The World: A Naïve Poem” from Michael Parker, who describes how the poem explores concerns that Miłosz would address throughout his literary career. His treatment of the poem offers a way into one of the great lives of the twentieth century, which Franaszek’s landmark biography now presents in such vivid detail.

What Is a Good Talking Book?

As the first full history of recorded literature from Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph to today’s surging audiobook market, Matthew Rubery’s The Untold Story of the Talking Book documents a vibrant tradition of audiobooks extending back to the late 19th century, as well as the devices, formats, companies, and government entities that ushered them along. In doing so, the book addresses a number of longstanding questions: What difference does it make whether we read a book with our eyes or ears? Is listening to books really “reading,” or is it something else? What accounts for the curious sense of shame people sometimes feel for listening to books instead of reading them in print?

In the excerpt below, Rubery details early efforts by the American Foundation for the Blind, the Library of Congress, and others to define the purpose and parameters of the talking book. The embedded audio player presents the corresponding section of the audiobook edition of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, read by Jim Denison and available from Blackstone Audio.

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“What Is a Good Talking Book?” was the question posed in 1938 by Talking Book Topics, the AFB’s quarterly magazine. Once the talking book library had been established, its studios began to take an interest in quality as well as quantity. William Barbour, a former Broadway actor working for the AFB, singled out three characteristics: clarity, editorial accuracy, and artistic perfection. Above all, a good talking book faithfully reproduced the original book. “We demand that our readers preserve complete fidelity to the text which they are reading,” wrote Barbour. “We want those who listen to our books to feel that they are hearing exactly what the author wrote.” Exactly: the talking book was treated like the printed book in another medium.

For Barbour and many others, ink-print, talking, and embossed books differed only in conveying information via the eyes, ears, or fingers. The AFB’s policy of bibliographic equivalence assured audiences that they were reading the same books as every one else. This policy also sought to uphold the talking book’s legitimacy by aligning it with a familiar format rather than presenting it as something completely new. Listening to books might offer a pleasure all its own, but, if so, that pleasure was a secondary consideration. The goal was to allow blind people to participate in the same activities enjoyed by other people.

Talking books preserved the printed book’s features or at least a sense of “bookishness.” “Page” was often used instead of “side” to describe records, for example. The talking book was not only a spoken version of the book but also a bookish version of speech. The bibliographic emphasis ensured that talking books would be evaluated in terms of printed ones. Such fidelity rendered the experience of listening to a book as much as possible like that of reading one in print. The AFB embraced fidelity to the point that, in a few cases, narrators were asked to reproduce obvious errors (sometimes even spelling mistakes) in order to ensure that blind readers received the exact same treatment as other readers.

Talking books reproduced every word of the original book. The Library of Congress’s “Specifications for Talking Book Records” insisted that the wording be identical: “The Talking Book edition of any work should conform just as closely as possible to the text of the printed edition.” Scripts likely to be known by heart—the Bible, historical documents, favorite poems—had to be word perfect. Accuracy was stressed to ensure that talking books were treated as equivalent to ink-print ones. For instance, they recited verbatim the textual apparatus (front matter, acknowledgments, and so forth) skimmed or skipped altogether by the typical reader. The narrator of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy spent thirteen hours on the fifty-six-page index alone. Chapter headings, epigraphs, and other paratextual features likewise had to be read aloud; manuals instructed narrators to read footnotes at once since records had no page breaks. Educational recordings even cited page numbers in order to convey the source book’s layout.

Tradition and Innovation in the Loeb Classical Library

After years of growing step by step, the Loeb Classical Library takes a leap this month. As General Editor Jeffrey Henderson explains below, the publication of the nine-volume Early Greek Philosophy collection is a significant advance for both the Library and the field.

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For the 2016 fall season, and at the start of its third year online, the Loeb Classical Library welcomes an edition extraordinary in size, scope, and ambition. Early Greek Philosophy by Glenn Most and André Laks—at nine volumes our largest anthology, our first multi-volume series to be published all together, and our only edition consisting entirely of fragments and testimonia—is not merely a translation and a reference collection but a bold and innovative work of scholarship that greatly enhances our understanding of the earliest stages of the Western intellectual tradition. EGP represents a wholesale advance on Diels-Kranz (unrevised since 1952) and all other editions.

Finally retiring the conventional but misleading label “Presocratics,” EGP updates and significantly broadens the scope of an already vast corpus by including recent finds (notably the Strasburg papyrus of Empedocles and the Derveni Papyrus) as well as a selection of what can be called the pre-philosophical representations of the world and of human beings, not only from Homer and Hesiod but also from other archaic texts, classical drama both tragic and comic, notionally “sophistic” thinkers, and early medicine, especially the Hippocratic corpus, whose relations with the contemporary discipline of philosophy are particularly close. The whole freshened corpus is reorganized so as to clarify as never before its principal themes and trends, with authors grouped by P (personal information), D (doctrine), and R (reception), and corpora by the thematic organization that best showcases each. Finally, EGP presents an overview of the reception of these thinkers until the end of antiquity.

There are also noteworthy technical features. For the first time, translations from lost Greek writings are reproduced in the original Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian; boldface text clearly distinguishes what there is good reason to attribute directly to the original work, as distinct from paraphrases or reports; there is a descriptive index of the potentially unfamiliar “other persons” who cite the passages or are mentioned in the entries; and there is a glossary that explains those of the most significant Greek and Latin terms that seem to require a special explanation. These features, together with well-judged textual and explanatory annotation and cross-references, keep the interconnectedness of the whole constantly in view, so that all nine volumes are made to be used, and thus published, together.

The publication of EGP prompts reflection on the recent evolution of both the Library and its readership. James Loeb’s original promise in 1912 was to make generally available “all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature,” and for a long time that meant extant and more or less mainstream authors. George Goold, my predecessor as General Editor, once compared the Library to the public exhibition area of a great museum: in the storerooms are many more artifacts for specialists to study and enjoy, but in the public areas are placed only the most important and most meaningful pieces. But over time what counts as important and meaningful to scholars and general readers does change. In recent years, alongside revisions or replacements of works by familiar authors such as Caesar and Plato have been added works by the likes of Macrobius and Philostratus as well as many volumes of fragments, both to complete our editions of extant authors and to add authors whose work does not survive intact.

Loeb designed our volumes to be trim and portable, elegant, legible, easy to use, unconfusing, and unintimidating, so that it is easy to overlook just how much information can be packed into their small facing pages. The unfamiliarity of authors like Macrobius and the complexity of editions like EGP present unusual challenges of presentation and format, but the constraints of Loeb’s design continue to prove workable, and well worth the effort to accommodate when they inspire editions such as John Ramsey’s fragmentary Histories of Sallust, with its remarkably resourceful and efficient system for rendering a voluminous and hugely complex tradition both accessible and authoritative, and such as EGP, with its clear shaping and mapping of an otherwise intimidating terrain.

And so, five years after our centenary and two years after the launch of loebclassics.com, Loeb’s dual spirit of tradition and innovation—in material, in medium, in mode of presentation—continues to grow and thrive. Who knows what the next hundred years will bring?

From Wessex with Lunch

In which Mark Ford imagines discussing his new book, Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner, over lunch in a London pub.

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Q: Hardy is famous as a regional writer isn’t he, as the creator of Wessex?

A: Well, yes, but did you know that the first novel in which he uses the term consistently is The Hand of Ethelberta, which is set largely in London. It occurs 16 times there! It was only very gradually that Hardy came to realize the potential of the concept of Wessex – in fact a London-based friend called Kegan Paul realized it first: in 1881 (Hardy was at this time living in the London suburb of Tooting) Kegan Paul wrote a long article for a London paper on Hardy’s creation of Wessex, and even advised Londoners to visit Dorset and seek out the originals of Hardy’s mythical country. The whole Wessex-themed tourist industry, you might say, was dreamed up by a London publisher and journalist – rather as the ‘ploughman’s lunch’ we are eating in this faux-rustic pub in Shepherd’s Bush was dreamed up by a London-based ad firm in the 1950s.

Q: Hmm, pass that authentic rural pickle, will you? But doesn’t that make Hardy seem a bit of sham?

A: Here you go … No, not at all – he was a realist. He couldn’t get his first novel, which was largely set in London, published, and had to pay for his second to be issued by a pretty dodgy publisher, Tinsley – he lost about £15 on the deal in the end. He came to understand the London publishing industry and what it wanted. He turned himself into a London professional. You’ve got to understand he came from a pretty poor background – indeed his mother’s mother had received poor relief. His parents invested a lot in him becoming a successful architect, and his mother was not at all happy when he became a novelist. A very risky trade. Plus he had to support a middle-class wife on what he earned from his books. There’s a great scene in Tess when Angel and Tess load the Talbothays milk on to a train bound for London, and Angel says it will be ‘watered down’ by the time it reaches Londoners’ breakfast tables. Hardy’s probably surreptitiously talking about the accommodations he had to make with the London publishing industry here.

Q: So you are saying he wouldn’t have become the novelist – and the poet – that he did if he hadn’t gone to London? Do you want another pint of Harvester’s?

A: No more mead for me … Absolutely. No question. Those five years in London in his early twenties were crucial. In many ways they ended in failure, though he did write some wonderful poems, such as ‘Neutral Tones’, and he educated himself in this period, very strenuously indeed, which led to the breakdown of his health. The key thing, though, was – when he went back to Dorset he had been urbanized, or one might say modernized – he understood what Tess calls ‘the ache of modernism’. He was a native returning – and it was the distance between himself and the region where he’d grown up that allowed him to convert it into Wessex.

Q: If he liked London so much, why didn’t he write about it more?

A: Well, journeys to and from London, by train – the railway reached Dorchester when Hardy was eight – are crucial to lots of the novels, particularly Desperate Remedies, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta and The Well-Beloved. Not, I concede, his most famous novels, but all four are wonderful in their different ways. And he wrote over 50 poems set in London, including some of his very best, such as ‘Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening’ and ‘The Woman I Met’, which is about an encounter with the ghost of a London prostitute. And the Life, his autobiography, has dozens of anecdotes, observations, accounts of London life – in fact it’s really almost as much about his life in London as in Dorset. And of course, after Tess, he was practically the most famous writer on the planet – maybe Kipling was a bit more famous. He got invited everywhere, and beautiful hostesses courted him, and he’d fall in love with them, but none would go as far as he seems to have wanted them to go. He and Emma would spend the four months of ‘the Season’ in London almost every year. One year they even took their own servants up with them. And from the 1890s onwards Wessex pilgrims streamed down to Dorchester from the capital, following Kegan Paul’s advice – and many would ring the doorbell at Max Gate and ask if they could have tea with their favourite rural novelist – only to be told he was up in London – likely as not attending some exclusive soirée in Kensington!

Q: What an extraordinary life!

A: It really was. And this Dick Whittington aspect has been overlooked because it doesn’t fit in with the myth of Wessex. But that’s sort of what it was – coming to London led to the making of him … or so I argue … but he was always ill there, and nearly died when he and Emma were living in Tooting, and he realized that there was a ‘mechanical’ aspect to the novels he wrote when living there at the end of the 1870s. He couldn’t live there, but he depended on it for his livelihood. In this sense he really was, as he put it in a letter to Edmund Gosse after he grew too old and ill to make it up to the capital, ‘half a Londoner’! All this talking has made me thirsty again – I think I’ll have a pint of London Pride.