tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41315652325462238572024-03-17T23:04:40.771-04:00Story of the WeekThe Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comBlogger666125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-63605982459477347682024-03-17T14:13:00.011-04:002024-03-17T17:28:25.871-04:00Mrs. Fiske on Ibsen the Popular<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=317"><i>The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
<a href="https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/mrs-fiske-7827">A list of Mrs. Fiske’s roles </a>(Internet Broadway Database)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a37023191/alexander-woolcott-dorothy-parker-original-influencer/">Was This Algonquin Round Table Writer the Original Influencer?</a>” (Mark Peikert, <i>Town & Country</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/10/the-man-who-came-to-dinner-with-george.html"><i>The Man Who Came to Dinner</i>, With George Kaufman Directing</a>,” Morton Eustis<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/06/alla-nazimova.html">Alla Nazimova</a>” Djuna Barnes<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/12/ira-aldridge.html">Ira Aldridge</a>” William Wells Brown<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/11/melodrama.html">Melodrama</a>” Rollin Lynde Hartt<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=317"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixGJrus80XGMG-xwhtKd5GZzzOFDi61hyKjfPYWGVwUoJ0WoWnnejIGqn20qigTgO3t2bpwz_cl2_r9E1kvkD7Xtqh1pRcfLmdJXipsMIeEEuxfBYhhUSbQL1SSGAMGGEppUEI0mf_bl0/s200/StageBookFlat.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=317"><b>The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner</b></a></i> <br />
Over 850 pages of history, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, and parody<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWJxX9SPi25COONBAQdwz5DfbcX8Jt8CgynFLedcohx8CsHxIGHJxNavvCZR1Qn7dubdMGbS7jq-caTVE9sR0wGQXSmcH1R4Wu5tDg55gWu45UGOCv10DiTa77VbXQz_7jjEN4piRifiqTaORQFBuG8A4j6fZRoMbJZb_hz7XBMAPqDZO5QqaXcitu378/s1600/Hedda-Gabler.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWJxX9SPi25COONBAQdwz5DfbcX8Jt8CgynFLedcohx8CsHxIGHJxNavvCZR1Qn7dubdMGbS7jq-caTVE9sR0wGQXSmcH1R4Wu5tDg55gWu45UGOCv10DiTa77VbXQz_7jjEN4piRifiqTaORQFBuG8A4j6fZRoMbJZb_hz7XBMAPqDZO5QqaXcitu378/s1600/Hedda-Gabler.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Minnie Maddern Fiske (Mrs. Fiske) in the title role and George Arliss as Judge Brack in the November 1904 revival of <i>Hedda Gabler</i> at the Manhattan Theatre. Gelatin silver printing-out paper print by American theatrical photographer Joseph Byron (1847–1923). Courtesy Library of Congress.<hr></td></tr>
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The first American performance of a play by Henrik Ibsen was an amateur production of <i>A Doll’s House</i> in Milwaukee, featuring in the role of Nora an actress who was apparently unable to remember most of her lines. The following year Helena Modjeska starred in the same role in a professionally staged performance in Louisville; the reactions from both the audience and reviewers convinced her to limit the show to a single night. It was hardly an auspicious start for the playwright who would eventually be regarded by many Americans as the greatest since Shakespeare.<br />
<br />
For the remainder of the nineteenth century, attempts to stage Ibsen’s plays in American theaters were often met with hostility, skepticism, or just plain bafflement. Amy Leslie, a drama critic for <i>The Chicago Daily News</i>, launched her decades-long campaign of trashing the playwright in her very first review of an Ibsen play: “The world abounds with festers of many kinds, but the way to remedy them is not to smear their horrible oozings over everything else.” Even more influential were the tirades of the longtime <i>New York Tribune</i> journalist William Winter, perhaps the best-known dramatic critic of his day, who railed against the new modernism: “Mr. Ibsen, as the writer of a number of insipid and sometimes tainted compositions purporting to be plays, could be borne, although even in that aspect he is an offense to taste and a burden upon patience. But Mr. Ibsen obtruded as a sound leader of thought or an artist in drama is a grotesque absurdity.” The reception of each new production, more often than not, was further doomed by abysmal casting; the stars hamming it up in the 1894 premiere of <i>Ghosts</i> were more familiar to audiences for their past roles in comic plays and melodramas.<br />
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In the early decades of the new century, however, both critics and audiences warmed to “new” works by the Norwegian playwright. Ibsen’s star kept rising in the years after his death in 1906 and reached a milestone when six productions of his plays ran on Broadway in 1926. Leading the vanguard was the actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, who first tackled an Ibsen play in 1894 when she emerged from her “retirement” (she was all of 28) to stage a one-night-only performance of <i>A Doll’s House</i> to benefit a New York City children’s hospital. Robert A. Schanke explains in <i>Ibsen in America</i> that, to win over the audience, Fiske played the first act with a light touch, “eliminated Nora's references to her stockings, cut Dr. Rank's discussion of his disease to one sentence, and played down the emotional fervor of the tarantella.” One critic marveled, “Ibsen has been cold-shouldered in America for twenty years—yet all his plays needed to make them popular was an actress like Mrs. Fiske.” The performance marked both the reentry of Fiske into the limelight and the beginning of a new career that would permanently associate her with Ibsen in the minds of theatergoers.<br />
<br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div>
This week’s selection is an interview between Alexander Woollcott and Minnie Fiske, reprinted in <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=317"><i>The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner</i></a> with the following headnote by Laurence Senelick:<br />
<br />
With her red hair and blue eyes, Minnie Maddern was from childhood one of the most popular ingénues on the postbellum American stage, but she retired in 1890 when she married Harrison Grey Fiske, influential editor of the <i>New York Dramatic Mirror</i>. Three years later she returned as Mrs. Fiske, but in a loftier repertoire, playing Nora in <i>A Doll’s House</i> and Tess in <i>Tess of the D’Urbervilles</i>. Her comic talent gave relief to tragic situations, and her personal magnetism, combined with her husband’s managerial skills, help naturalize Ibsen on the American stage. She played Hedda, Rebecca West, and Mrs. Alving; even William Winter, who otherwise had little use for Ibsen, had to grant that her Hedda was “remarkably effective—being mordant with sarcasm, keen with irony, dreadful with suggestion of watchful wickedness, and bright with vicious eccentricity.” Settled in her own playhouse in Manhattan, she successfully battled the theatrical trust and was the first to stage a product of the Harvard playwriting workshop, Edward Sheldon’s <i>Salvation Nell</i>. The last phase of her career saw her in regular revivals of her star vehicle Becky Sharp (an adaptation of Thackeray's <i>Vanity Fair</i>).<br />
<br />
Mrs. Fiske was a favorite of Woollcott, whose other pets included Harpo Marx, Katharine Cornell, and Charlie Chaplin; the bouquets he threw to them were matched by the brickbats he hurled at Eugene O’Neill and Marcel Proust. Obese, bespectacled, gossipy, Woollcott was one of New York’s most widely read dramatic critics from 1914 to 1928, writing successively for the <i>Times</i>, the <i>Herald</i>, and the <i>World</i>, and warring with the Shuberts, who tried to bar him from their productions.<br />
<br />
He then achieved nationwide notoriety as a columnist at <i>The New Yorker</i> and as a radio personality in <i>The Town Crier</i> at $3,500 a program. Woollcott the critic was shamelessly subjective, with a sentimental streak at odds with his waspish invective (he was one of the habitués of the Algonquin Hotel’s “vicious circle”). His occasional collaborator, George S. Kaufman, immortalized him as <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/10/the-man-who-came-to-dinner-with-george.html">the insufferable Sheridan Whiteside in <i>The Man Who Came to Dinner</i></a> (1939). The part was created on Broadway by Monty Woolley; when Woollcott undertook it on the road, critics found him to be unconvincing.<br />
<br /><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div>
The interview that follows—one of a series of conversations with Mrs. Fiske that Woollcott sculpted into an entire book—took place in 1916, when he was a drama critic for <i>The New York Times</i>. Fiske reveals the arc of her post-retirement career, from the early yet ultimately unprofitable attempt to re-stage <i>A Doll’s House</i> in 1902 to her commercially lucrative productions of <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, <i>Rosmersholm</i>, and <i>The Pillars of Society</i>. She also describes in detail how her study of Ibsen led to a pioneering approach to acting: for each role, she imagined and re-created for herself everything that had happened in the character’s life up to the moment the play begins.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><i><b>Notes:</b></i> In Dickens’s <i>Great Expectations</i>, Mr. <b>Wopsle</b>, a village church clerk who aspires to the stage, stars in a ludicrously bad production of <i>Hamlet</i> with a cast of actors playing Danish nobles “who seemed to have risen from the people late in life”; <b>Elsinore</b> is Hamlet’s castle in Denmark. The Italian stage actress Eleanora <b>Duse</b>, like Fiske, is remembered in part for her starring roles in Ibsen’s plays. Evangeline <b>(Eva) Booth</b> was the head of the Salvation Army from 1904 to 1934. A <i><b>succès d'estime</b></i> is a critical success but a commercial disappointment.<br />
<br />
Fiske refers to an unnamed critic who wanted her to have “nothing to do” with Ibsen and instead suggested a trio of traditional and sentimental female leads: the title role of Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé’s <b><i>Adrienne Lecouvreur</i></b> (1849), revived in an 1896 production by Sarah Bernhardt and based loosely on the life and mysterious death of the eighteenth-century French actress; <b>Mrs. Haller</b>, a role made famous by Sarah Siddons in August von Kotzebue’s <i>The Stranger</i> (1790); and <b>Pauline</b>, a star turn for Helena Faucit in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s melodrama <b><i>The Lady of Lyons</i></b> (1838).<br />
<br />
George <b>Arliss</b> was a prominent British actor who successfully made the transition from stage to silent films to talkies. Johnston <b>Forbes-Robertson</b> was a British Shakespearean actor, mostly remembered for his many performances as <i>Hamlet</i>. James Gibbons <b>Huneker</b> was a cultural critic and an early admirer and defender of Ibsen’s plays. <b>Lawrence Barrett</b> was a veteran American actor who first recommended <i>A Doll’s House</i> to Fiske when she was a teenager. English actor and stage manager Henry <b>Irving</b>’s comments on the art of acting can be found in his book <i>The Drama</i> (1881). In a speech delivered in 1885 at Harvard, Irving related the anecdote about the British actor William Charles <b>Macready</b>’s final performance of <i>Hamlet</i>. Broadway actress <b>Emily Stevens</b> was Fiske’s younger cousin, friend, and doppelganger.<br />
<br />
At the time of the interview, Fiske was in the middle of a six-month run of <b><i>Erstwhile Susan</i></b>, Marian de Forest’s stage adaptation of Helen R. Martin’s 1914 novel <i>Barnabetta</i>.</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">W</span>e talked of many things, Mrs. Fiske and I, as we sat at tea on a wide veranda one afternoon last Summer. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Woollcott-Fiske-Ibsen.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Woollcott-Fiske-Ibsen.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Woollcott-Fiske-Ibsen.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-54847311305303438942024-03-10T15:25:00.004-04:002024-03-10T19:25:42.303-04:00It’s an Honor<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/essential-writings/"><i>Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
<b>Video:</b> “<a href="https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/deadline-artist-the-genius-of-jimmy-breslin/">Deadline Artist: The Genius of Jimmy Breslin, with Dan Barry, Mike Barnicle, and Mike Lupica</a>” (<i>LOA Live</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Blog/Post/13359/Remembering-Clifton-Pollard-JFK-s-Grave-Digger">Remembering Clifton Pollard, JFK’s Grave Digger</a>” (Kevin M. Hamel, Arlington National Cemetery)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/12/horsefeathers-swathed-in-mink.html">Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink</a>,” A. J. Liebling<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/03/up-stairs-with-cus-d.html">Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato</a>,” Pete Hamill<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/05/inside-cages-of-zoo.html">Inside the Cages of the Zoo</a>,” Ellen Sander<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/03/the-man-baseball-forgot-plays-hand-hes.html">The Man Baseball Forgot Plays the Hand He’s Dealt</a>,” Jane Leavy<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/essential-writings/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537680.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/essential-writings/"><i><b>Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings</b></i></a><br />
Columns & Other Journalism 1960–2004 | <i>How the Good Guys Finally Won</i> | <i>The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez | 734 pages</i><br />
List price: $40.00<br />
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<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/essential-writings/">Web store price: $32.00</a><br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitECvOr2bKjC1oC9-Bm5bB4wytpIiLSbzuOpEhCalUhlqooYul5sVRKGKLyNUXPJXDAHsJgGUfEOSEknlKDLXBc4axjE7-7-jT09AGp6ZLKikcgQAk7o-NNuuAR3GVBWbx0Go8yYXA-llRiFeiYWEkIQ9vjWwF3V2naAGRmDxFN5sVKe3ErgzUwdNlgI/s1600/Kennedy%20grave%20site.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhitECvOr2bKjC1oC9-Bm5bB4wytpIiLSbzuOpEhCalUhlqooYul5sVRKGKLyNUXPJXDAHsJgGUfEOSEknlKDLXBc4axjE7-7-jT09AGp6ZLKikcgQAk7o-NNuuAR3GVBWbx0Go8yYXA-llRiFeiYWEkIQ9vjWwF3V2naAGRmDxFN5sVKe3ErgzUwdNlgI/s1600/Kennedy%20grave%20site.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Graveside view during the state funeral of President John F. Kennedy with members of the Kennedy family, officials, and dignitaries. Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, November 25, 1963. Photograph by White House photographer Cecil W. Stoughton (1920–2008). Courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.<hr></td></tr>
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During the recent <i>LOA Live</i> program “<a href="https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/deadline-artist-the-genius-of-jimmy-breslin/">Deadline Artist: The Genius of Jimmy Breslin</a>,” <i>New York Times</i> columnist Dan Barry described what made Breslin’s columns so memorable. “Breslin is writing on deadline, and he’s figuring out how to use language differently and economically in such a way that, to my mind, it rises to literature. Even though he was known as the guy from Queens Boulevard who was hanging out at Pep Maguire’s and all this kind of stuff, he was a deep, deep reader—a deep reader of Dostoevsky and all the classics. He wouldn't wear it on his sleeve, but I think it informed how he wrote as well.”<br />
<br />
“He’s writing short stories, magnificent short stories,” agreed fellow journalist Mike Barnicle, “three, four, sometimes five days a week but at least three days a week on deadline. . . . There are a lot of other newspaper columnists in the world—and we are not running any of them down by saying this—but there was Jimmy Breslin and then there was literally everyone else.”<br />
<br />
One could say that Breslin got his start in journalism when he was around ten years old and began publishing <i>The Flash</i>, his own neighborhood newspaper. His father had abandoned the family years earlier and left behind a wife holding down a job in the city’s Department of Welfare and raising two children; “she used to drink too much,” recalled Breslin, a heavy drinker himself. One evening he found his mother holding a pistol to her head. Screaming for his grandmother, he wrestled the gun away. The following day no mention was made at home of the struggle, but he reported the incident in his paper with the headline, “Mother Tried Suicide.” (He later noted that the headline should have been in the present tense.)<br />
<br />
By the time he turned 17, in 1945, he was a copyboy at the <i>Long Island Press</i>, where he fantasized that the copy he urgently ran across the newsroom concerned events of historic import; instead, it was often “four paragraphs about the Eastern Queens Civic Association.” He later told Pete Hamill, “I didn’t learn anything there. They taught you nothing. But it was a lot of friggin’ fun.” He took courses at Long Island University, where he “majored in excuses” before dropping out. Beginning in 1950, he worked inauspiciously as a sportswriter for the <i>New York Journal American</i> and other metropolitan area papers, and it wasn’t until 1962 that he received widespread attention for his humorous and lacerating columns about the bumbling New York Mets’ first season, including the <i>Sports Illustrated</i> essay “Worst Baseball Team Ever” and the book <i>Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?</i><br />
<br />
John Hay Whitney, publisher of the <i>New York Herald Tribune</i>, bought the serial rights for Breslin’s book about the Mets and then hired him to write a five-days-a-week column. “So with absolutely no direction I invented a new form for news pages, a column based on something happening right now in this city,” Breslin later wrote. He had been working at the <i>Herald Tribune</i> for only a few months when, late in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Breslin wrote the stories that altered the trajectory of his career.<br />
<br />
“People remember the gravedigger story,” recounted Barry in <a href="https://tv.cuny.edu/show/nytcloseup/PR2012572">a recent television program</a> with fellow <i>Times</i> correspondent Sam Roberts.
<blockquote>
He writes the story about Mr. Pollard, who dug the grave for John F. Kennedy at Arlington. But before that, he had done this brilliant story about the doctor who received Kennedy’s body and spent several panicked minutes trying to massage the President’s heart, even though the president was dead, while the president's wife was standing there watching. . . .<br />
<br />
And then it’s Thanksgiving time—he’s back in New York. And what does he do on Thanksgiving morning? He goes to the Automat, and he writes—really what he’s writing about is a city in mourning, or a country in mourning—but he never says that. He just describes these lonely hearts sitting in an Automat on Thanksgiving Day.
</blockquote>
“Otherwise it was a vacant day in the Automat,” Breslin wrote. “Which was right. Yesterday was a day meant to be vacant.”<br />
<br />
The stories Breslin wrote that month “led to this idea of the Gravedigger Theory of journalism,” explained Library of America editor James Gibbon at the LOA forum. “The idea is that you want to look in a story for an unlikely person that somehow expresses something about the story that everyone else is missing. It's a little bit of a corollary to the dictum of sportswriters that says if you want the real story don't go to the winners’ locker room, go to the losers’ locker room.” Former <i>Daily News</i> sports columnist Mike Lupica added, “Jimmy gave a lot of credit to Murray Kempton, because the day Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in the [1956] World Series, Kempton went and wrote about Sal Maglie, who had pitched the game of his life and lost two-nothing.” Breslin’s story about Clifton Pollard stood in marked contrast to the rest of the international media’s coverage of Kennedy’s funeral, which focused on its somber choreography. The so-called Gravedigger Theory and the column that spawned it are now ubiquitous in courses on journalism.<br />
<br />
A half century after Breslin wrote that column (which we present below), Pat Fenton, a reporter for <i>The Irish Echo</i>, a New York City paper, <a href="https://www.irishecho.com/2017/3/an-afternoon-with-breslin">interviewed him</a> and asked about his “most famous article”:
<blockquote>
“What were your thoughts about that when you got back to New York after you wrote it?”<br />
<br />
“I went back to the <i>Tribune</i> office and wrote the column. And then I went out and got on the train to New York. Got off at Penn Station. And I took the train out to Queens on the Long Island Railroad, and I went to Pep McGuire’s Bar on Queens Boulevard. And that was it. Pepi was there and he asked me where I had been. And I said give me a drink. And I was there until midnight.<br />
<br />
“I got murdered with whisky,” he said as he remembered a day when his whole writing life was about to take a different course. “My wife had to come down and get me out of the place. And that was it.”</blockquote>
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *<br /><br /></div>
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">Comments from the LOA Live event have been edited for clarity. Some of the biographical details above are from the Chronology in <i>Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings</i>, edited by Dan Barry
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *<br /><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Breslin-Its-an-Honor.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">download it as a PDF</span></u></a> <span style="color: black;">or </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Breslin-Its-an-Honor" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">view it in Google Docs</span></u></a></span><br /><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 140%;"><b>It’s an Honor</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 160%;">W</span><span style="font-size: 75%;">ASHINGTON</span>—Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m. in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Nettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting.<br />
<br />
It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.”<br />
<br />
Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.<br />
<br />
When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him.<br />
<br />
“Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.”<br />
<br />
Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket which scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging.<br />
<br />
Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.<br />
<br />
“That’s nice soil,” Metzler said.<br />
<br />
“I’d like to save a little of it,” Pollard said. “The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.”<br />
<br />
James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it.<br />
<br />
“He was a good man,” Pollard said.<br />
<br />
“Yes, he was,” Metzler said.<br />
<br />
“Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,” Pollard said. “You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this.”<br />
<br />
Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352d Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.<br />
<br />
Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started walking toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.<br />
<br />
Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.<br />
<br />
There was mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground. This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take.<br />
<br />
The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking. In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is President and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often.<br />
<br />
Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House.<br />
<br />
“What time is it?” a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch.<br />
<br />
“Twenty minutes past three,” he said.<br />
<br />
Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards.<br />
<br />
“They’ll be used,” he said. “We just don’t know when.”<br />
<br />
“I tried to go over to see the grave,” he said. “But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn’t get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I’ll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it’s an honor.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">First published in the <i>New York Herald Tribune</i>, November 26, 1963, and collected in <i>The World of Jimmy Breslin</i> (1967). © 1963 by Jimmy Breslin. Published by arrangement with the Jimmy Breslin Literary Trust.</div>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-90380561365699174952024-03-03T12:41:00.006-05:002024-03-10T14:45:54.016-04:00My Future As I See It<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Helen Keller (1880–1968)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/autobiographies-other-writings/"><i>Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
<a href="https://www.perkins.org/resource/helen-keller-timeline/">Helen Keller timeline</a> (Perkins School for the Blind)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/helen-keller-bookshelf/">Helen Keller’s Bookshelf</a>” (Dorothy Herrmann, <i>American Experience</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2015/06/i-go-adventuring.html">I Go Adventuring</a>,” Helen Keller<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/09/my-country.html">My Country</a>,” Mary Antin<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/03/carlotta-lady-aeronaut.html">Carlotta, the Lady Aeronaut</a>,” Mary H. Myers<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/02/mon-amie.html">Mon Amie</a>,” Randolph Bourne<br />
<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkDh9Izs1tNW4kamatoE4G1uOr4aaqlCV11bFK1jUPPN8KCKqhj7WC_XTxsuoM1GPiz3L_ZsMuBWhZjrp_zuag526uNPMj_A0OYOefmrqEF56i_JXr3wnBI6R1yagBdENlO_xjbYUwVVueIRJmc_ELz6Yw_35xHs7oIHaUdll2bZ8IesZQbM36zaqAN3w/s1600/Keller-Sullivan-Tree.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkDh9Izs1tNW4kamatoE4G1uOr4aaqlCV11bFK1jUPPN8KCKqhj7WC_XTxsuoM1GPiz3L_ZsMuBWhZjrp_zuag526uNPMj_A0OYOefmrqEF56i_JXr3wnBI6R1yagBdENlO_xjbYUwVVueIRJmc_ELz6Yw_35xHs7oIHaUdll2bZ8IesZQbM36zaqAN3w/s1600/Keller-Sullivan-Tree.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, and Keller’s dog Sir Thomas (“Phiz”)—a black-and-white Boston bull terrier—sitting in the branches of a tree, probably in their backyard in Wrentham, Massachusetts, around 1904. With one hand Keller reads Sullivan’s lips; with the other she touches a book Sullivan holds open. Both women are in white dresses, Sullivan’s embroidered with flowers. A lawn stretches far into the distance behind them. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind Archives, Watertown, MA.<hr></td></tr>
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“It is heresy in our time to intimate that a young woman may do better than go to college,” twenty-four-year-old Helen Keller <a href="https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/apology-going-college/">wrote</a> the year after she graduated from Radcliffe College. “Five years ago I had to decide whether I should be a heretic, or adhere to the ancient faith that it is the woman’s part to lay her hands to the spindle and to hold the distaff. Some of my friends were enthusiastic about the advantages of a college education, and the special honor it would be for me to compete with my fellows who see and hear.”<br />
<br />
She had entered Radcliffe in the fall of 1900; Anne Sullivan, her governess and teacher since Keller was six years old, accompanied her to classes and spelled out the lectures into her hand. For both the entrance exams and for subsequent tests, Sullivan was not present; the dean arranged for two proctors for each exam: “one to proctor Helen, and another to proctor Helen’s proctor,” one of the former recounted years later. “She had her typewriter for work in answering the exam questions. I had my Braille typewriter to translate the questions.”<br />
<br />
For her studies at Radcliffe, Keller relied on two assistive devices: a braille machine and a typewriter. Using the former, she was able to read and revise her writing without help; but she found the machine “somewhat cumbersome.” She was much faster and quite accurate at the typewriter, but then necessarily depended on Sullivan and others to notice typographical errors and, if she wanted to revise, to spell out her work back to her. On top of the challenges presented by her studies and her exams, Keller signed a $3,000 contract to write her life story for <i>The Ladies’ Home Journal</i>. Her English literature professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged the proposal and allowed her to submit her work-in-progress in lieu of regular assignments. For the most part, she composed the essays of the magazine version of “The Story of My Life” on her typewriter. “Under great pressure” to meet her publisher’s deadlines, in July 1902 Keller finished the last chapter of her story, which had already begun to appear in print as a serial in the magazine.<br />
<br />
She also enlisted the assistance of John Macy, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard instructor who lived in their boardinghouse; he learned to finger-spell and with Sullivan helped to arrange and submit Keller’s manuscripts. Macy negotiated a contract with Doubleday, Page to gather the installments into a book. William Wade, a friend who had previously arranged to make braille editions of some of Keller’s college textbooks, had a braille copy of each article prepared from the magazine proofs. When she read through the entire series, Keller decided to rewrite it substantially; Sullivan and Macy played an essential role in this process, not only offering practical help in assembling a finished typescript but also making “suggestions at many points” about Keller’s prose.<br />
<br />
<i>The Story of My Life</i> was published in March 1903 and was widely and favorably reviewed, although its initial sales were modest. There were a handful of naysayers who questioned the authenticity of the book, but one review apparently caused the most consternation to Keller, as well as to Sullivan and Macy. “All her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,” wrote an unnamed critic in <i>The Nation</i>, “her very sensations are for the most part vicarious, and yet she writes of things beyond her power of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.” The writer chided her for describing things she “saw” or “heard” when she could have done neither and seemed less interested in Keller’s experiences or accomplishments and more interested in her as an object for scientific study: “We lose what she could teach us by showing wherein she varies from the normal. It almost seems as it every fact of real psychological value has been perversely withheld. . . . Some accurate observations of the manner in which the senses of touch and smell can play substitute to the missing ones would be of real scientific value.”<br />
<br />
In response, Keller tackled the issue of language and experience in her next book, <i>The World I Live In</i>:
<blockquote>
It is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the reality, that at times makes me start when I say, “Oh, I see my mistake!” or “How dark, cheerless is his life!” I know these are metaphors. Still, I must prove with them, since there is nothing in our language to replace them. Deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not exist and are not necessary. Because I can understand the word “reflect” figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me.
</blockquote>
As an example, she flags the following sentence in her book: “When I was a little girl I was taken to see a woman who was blind and paralyzed.” In a footnote, she adds, “The excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use of the word ‘see.’ If I had said visit,” he would have asked no questions, yet what does ‘visit’ mean but ‘see’ (<i>visitare</i>)?” Georgina Kleege, author of <i>Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller</i>, comments, “Keller uses her knowledge of Latin to demonstrate that the more one knows about language the harder it is to find vocabulary that does not have some etymological link to sight and hearing. To deny her the use of such language, she argues, would be to deprive her of the ability to communicate at all.”<br />
<br />
Keller hoped <i>The World I Live In</i> would sate the public appetite for her life story (it did not) and allow her to write on other subjects. “It is startling to observe how five years after publishing what is still probably the best-known disability autobiography,” Keege concludes, “Keller writes a book that chafes at the shortcomings of the genre she helped to invent, exposes the limitations of the language that is her chosen medium, and experiments with a new approach to self-representation that was well in advance of her time.”<br />
<br />
Before Keller went to Radcliffe, Anne Sullivan had pondered publishing her own biographical account of their experiences. “<i>The Story of My Life</i> is a radically different book from what Sullivan originally had in mind, even based on just the little bit known about her unrealized plans,” writes Kim E. Nielsen, who edited <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/autobiographies-other-writings/">the just-published Library of America edition</a>. “In her imagined book she would have been the primary actor, the focal point from which the story was told. <i>The Story of My Life</i> tells the story from Keller's vantage point as Keller's story with Keller as the authorial voice.” Moreover, for the last century most readers, especially students, have read not the full, collaborative book but only the autobiographical narrative written by Keller herself. The original “unabridged” edition was more than three times the length; two additional sections included a selection of Keller’s letters from 1887 to 1901 and a “Supplementary Account of Her Education,” written by Macy, that draws liberally on Sullivan’s letters and reports. Although Doubleday, Page reprinted the original edition on at least seventeen occasions through 1949, most of the dozens of editions produced by other publishers, from the 1928 “school edition” issued by Houghton Mifflin to the 1967 Scholastic edition to the 1996 Dover edition, present only the first third of the book (often abridged or even rewritten) and omit the other two sections.<br />
<br />
In 1905, Doubleday, Page published a “special edition” of the full book, with two additional chapters appended as Part IV. The first of these new entries would become, in 1908, the opening chapter of <i>The World I Live In</i>. The second, “My Future As I See It,” appeared in the November 1903 issue of <i>The Ladies’ Home Journal</i> as a postscript to “The Story of My Life.” Written when Keller was a senior at Radcliffe, the essay was removed from all future printings and editions of the book, but it has been reprinted in the LOA edition, and we present it below. In a headnote for the magazine version, the editor wrote, “Exactly what Miss Keller intends to take up as her life-work after she has graduated is practically the only point about herself which she has not fully explained in her book. Hence it was suggested to Miss Keller that she elucidate this oft-asked question.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">The descriptions above of Helen Keller’s methods of compositions and the textual history of <i>The Story of My Life</i> are adapted from the Note on the Texts in <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/autobiographies-other-writings/"><i>Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings</i></a>, edited by Kim E. Nielsen. The account by one of Keller’s proctors appeared in the August 1968 issue of <i>The Radcliffe Quarterly</i> and was quoted in Dorothy Herrmann’s biography of Keller.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Notes:</i></b> The <b>peasant girl who spilled her milk</b> is a reference to La Fontaine’s “<i>La laitière et le pot au lait</i>” (“The Milkmaid and Her Pail”), from his <i>Fables</i> (1668–94). Andrew <b>Carnegie</b> was a steel industry magnate who gave away most of his wealth during the last two decades of his life, funding about three thousand public libraries, as well as dozens of colleges, museums, and foundations. In 1910 he offered Keller a pension to support herself and her work; she at first declined but “anxious about those who are nearest to me” she accepted his offer three years later.
</div>
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<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *<br /><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Keller-Future-I-See.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">download it as a PDF</span></u></a> <span style="color: black;">or </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Keller-Future-I-See.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">view it in Google Docs</span></u></a></span><br /><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 140%;"><b>My Future As I See It</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 160%;">W</span>hen I wrote “The Story of My Life” I thought I had told my readers all I knew about myself. But since the publication of my book I have been asked what I am going to do after I graduate from Radcliffe this year. People often ask me what my future is as I see it. I do not intend to follow the example of the peasant girl in La Fontaine, who pictured such a bright future that in her enthusiasm she spilled her milk. Nor am I like the small boys who vie with each other in predicting what they will do when they grow up, and promise to be policemen, doctors, firemen, and soldiers.<br />
<br />
I used to have all sorts of unrealizable ambitions. Indeed, the only one that has never troubled me is the ambition to be President of the United States. I suppose in youth we are all, as a matter of course, song-birds. The only question of importance which we have to decide is what kind of song-bird we shall be. As we grow older we smile at the eager soarings of our childhood. But I hope we shall never cease to dream out our world, to people it with gods strong of hand and great of soul. I certainly hope I shall never think of the world as the pessimist thinks of it—a commonplace thing shaped like an orange, slightly flattened at the ends!<br />
<br />
The only real ambitions spring from the circumstances in which our lives are set. I used to believe that my limitations would prevent me from doing anything beyond improving my mind and accepting the cup of pleasure or sorrow in whatever measure it might be dealt to me. There is no grief deeper than the consciousness that we are isolated, no ache of heart harder to bear than the thought that our fellows are crying in the darkness, and we are so fettered that we may not go to them. This is separation from the social order into which we are born, the agony of thwarted forces, a death in the midst of life. But I have discovered that the material with which we work is everywhere and in abundance. I have felt the joy of the strong man who grasps the reins in his hands and drives the forces that would master him. Our worst foes are not belligerent circumstances, but wavering spirits. As a man thinketh, so is he. The field in which I may work is narrow, but it stretches before me limitless. I am like the philosopher whose garden was small but reached up to the stars.<br />
<br />
The occupations I can engage in are few, but into each one I can throw my whole strength. Opportunities to be of service to others offer themselves constantly, and every day, every hour, calls even on me for a timely word or action. It bewilders me to think of the countless tasks that may be mine. I am near the end of my last year at college. I am already looking forward to Commencement Day. In imagination I have passed my last examinations, I have written my last thesis, I have said good-by to my school-days, and taken my little canoe and ventured out on unknown seas. I have received the best education my country can give me. Generous friends have assisted me and strewn my path with opportunities. The question now is, What shall I do with this education and these opportunities?<br />
<br />
I shall not forget the continuous task which my friends keep before me of improving my mind. I shall try to keep my flower-beds well trimmed and perhaps I may add to my estate. I shall read as extensively as possible and, perhaps, increase my knowledge of the classics. I shall never lose my interest in history and social questions, and I shall continue the studies that please me most as long as I live.<br />
<br />
I am much interested in work that woman may do in the world. It is a fine thing to be an American, it is a splendid thing to be an American woman. Never in the history of the world has woman held a position of such dignity, honor, and usefulness as here and now. We read how nation after nation has reached a certain height of civilization and failed because the women of the nation remained uncivilized. I think the degree of a nation’s civilization may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women. So I shall study the economic questions relating to woman and do my best to further her advancement; for God and His world are for everybody.<br />
<br />
Above all must I interest myself in affairs which concern the deaf and the blind. Their needs have given me another motive for traveling. I used to idle away hours in dreams of sailing on the Rhine, climbing the Alps, and wandering amid the monuments of Greece and Rome. Every tale I read about travelers, every description that friends gave me of their experiences abroad, and especially my visit to the World’s Fair at Chicago, added fire to my longing. But now I have another ambition which transcends those imagined pleasures. Travel would, it seems to me, afford valuable opportunities to act as a sort of emissary from the teachers in this country to those of Europe, and to carry a message of encouragement to those who, in face of popular prejudice and indifference, as in Italy and Sweden, are struggling to teach the blind and give them means of self-support.<br />
<br />
There are two ways in which we may work: with our own hands and through our fellow men. Both ways are open to me. With my own hands and voice I can teach; perhaps I can write. Through others I can do good by speaking in favor of beneficent work and by speaking against what seems to me wrong.<br />
<br />
I often think I shall live in the country and take into my home a deaf child and teach him as Miss Sullivan has taught me. For years I have observed the details of her method, and her example in word and deed has inspired me so that I feel that I could impart to a child afflicted like myself the power to see with the soul and understand with the heart. All his needs and difficulties would be intelligible to me, since I know the darkness he sees and the stillness he hears. The road he must travel I have traveled; I know where the rough places are and how to help him over them. This would be the directest and most joyous way of doing for another what has been done for me.<br />
<br />
Whether I teach or not, I shall write. My subject-matter is limited. I have very little that is novel or entertaining to tell those who see and hear, who have a vision that embraces earth and sky and water, whereas I grasp only so much of the world as I can hold in my hand. But I may perhaps translate from the classics and from the modern languages. If opportunity offers, I shall certainly write on topics connected with the deaf and the blind. If I see a plan on foot to place the blind in positions of self-support, I will advocate it. If there is a good cause that needs a word, I will speak it if I can. If an institution is projected for the relief of suffering, and money is needed, I will write a timely appeal. Editors and publishers have already suggested subjects on which I might write, and I find their proposals helpful because they afford a clue to what others expect of me, and indicate the various ways in which I may increase and apply what literary skill I may have. I cannot say, however, to what extent I shall follow those suggestions.<br />
<br />
Another way in which I may render service to others with my own hands is to take up settlement work. I suppose, as a friend said, I was fighting with windmills when I said in my story that it seemed wicked that the poor could not live in comfortable homes and grow strong and beautiful. But I hear every day of young girls who leave their homes and pleasures to dwell among the poor and brighten and dignify their lives, and the impulse within me to follow their example seems at times too strong for me to restrain. The world is full of suffering, it is true, but full, also, of the overcoming of it. As I reflect on the enormous amount of good work that is left undone, I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions upon millions of dollars for war and war engines—more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public-school system of the United States costs us.<br />
<br />
I could help take care of the sick. I have several times had occasion to use my hands to lessen pain, as they do in massage. I may study this art by-and-by, and even if I do not become a masseuse I shall be interested in it as an employment for the blind. Our hands are instruments with which to gain a livelihood, and if they are trained to the best advantage they prove more precious than the eye or the ear. Massage is an occupation in which I or any blind person may use the hands with profit and pleasure and bring comfort to many.<br />
<br />
No work, however, can mean so much to me as what I can do for the deaf and the blind. I am not competent now to discuss their problems, but I shall find out what those problems are and study the methods of solving them. Whatever I do I shall keep track of all the measures proposed in behalf of the deaf and the blind, and to the best of my ability support the most efficient. I realize how much has already been done toward improving the condition of the blind and the deaf, and I am grateful; but there still remains much to be done; do what we may, we fall short and leave the work incomplete. I have twice had my share in the promotion of enterprises for the relief of the defective classes.<br />
<br />
Last winter there was a bill before the Legislature of Massachusetts to provide the blind with manual training which would enable them to earn their bread, and I was asked to speak for the bill. Again, last May I attended the dedication of the new building of the Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York, and at the request of the physicians I spoke in behalf of the hospital. If these workers and philanthropists in Massachusetts and New York thought that I, a student in college, could help hundreds of unfortunate men and women, how much greater must my chances of usefulness be when I comprehend more fully the needs of the deaf and the blind! These experiences promise others, and I must follow where the good cause leads, just as the lamp goes with the hand.<br />
<br />
Among the problems of the blind are two to which I shall direct my attention—more books for the blind and a universal system of raised print. My views may be erroneous, and I suggest them here merely to illustrate the kind of work which lies before me.<br />
<br />
I should like the blind in America to have a magazine of high quality and varied interest like the best periodicals published for those who see. To establish one would require much money, and the blind are poor. If they are to have a periodical, some generous friend must establish it for them. In a country where so much is done to build great libraries and provide books for those who see, I should think a Mr. Carnegie might be found who would give a magazine to us who cannot see.<br />
<br />
I am still a college girl, and I can look forward to a golden age when all my plans shall have been realized. I can dream of that happy country of the future where no man will live at his ease while another suffers; then, indeed, shall the blind see and the deaf hear.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">First published in the November 1903 issue of <i>The Ladies’ Home Journal</i> and reprinted with minor updates and additions in the 1905 “special edition” of <i>The Story of My Life</i>, which is the text presented here.</div>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-63083782140800096982024-02-25T14:53:00.012-05:002024-02-25T19:44:54.978-05:00Quoits<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/five-novels/"><i>Ursula K. Le Guin: Five Novels</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
<b>Interview:</b> “<a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/breaking_into_the_spell_1/">Breaking into the Spell</a>” (Alexander Chee, <i>Guernica Magazine</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/through-a-hernes-eye-on-ursula-k-le-guins-five-novels/">Through a Herne’s Eye: On Ursula K. Le Guin’s <i>Five Novels</i></a>” (Brian Attebery, <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2016/09/imaginary-countries.html">Imaginary Countries</a>,” Ursula K. Le Guin<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/10/mother.html">Mother</a>,” Sherwood Anderson<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/05/the-town-poor.html">The Town Poor</a>,” Sarah Orne Jewett<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/07/the-white-azalea.html">The White Azalea</a>,” Elizabeth Spencer<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/five-novels/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537734.jpg" style="float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/five-novels/"><b><i>Ursula K. Le Guin:<br />
Five Novels</i></b></a></i><br />
<i>The Lathe of Heaven</i> | <i>The Eye of the Heron</i> | <i>The Beginning Place</i> | <i>Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand</i> | <i>Lavinia</i> | 971 pages<br />
List price: $45.00<br />
<b style="color: #990000;">Save 29%, free shipping</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/five-novels/">Web store price: $32.00</a><br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDWKT5Z_SXyfANyaF5yVuDqVRb9uwDeJIFE3_kSMLvKoW4dwq9Y1FH0v1M-gRoH1tep4Fs5mm7EOq90acJNb0FCTvu4N1sUjYzsyhnW-NFcc5DrjWRZg2gNpZdXdAjUoPG5bkIaC96J-EbCehsIfjn8H26N5zqeyy2JOVM2g1Yt9mGEX3aQ-rsbuQqmGQ/s1600/Chun_Quoit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDWKT5Z_SXyfANyaF5yVuDqVRb9uwDeJIFE3_kSMLvKoW4dwq9Y1FH0v1M-gRoH1tep4Fs5mm7EOq90acJNb0FCTvu4N1sUjYzsyhnW-NFcc5DrjWRZg2gNpZdXdAjUoPG5bkIaC96J-EbCehsIfjn8H26N5zqeyy2JOVM2g1Yt9mGEX3aQ-rsbuQqmGQ/s1600/Chun_Quoit.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chûn Quoit, in western Cornwall, England. Originally covered by a barrow of dirt and rocks measuring about 35 feet across, this burial site was built around 2400 BC. The capstone measures 10 feet in diameter. Photograph by Jim Champion (treehouse1977, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2857395">Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0</a>).<hr></td></tr>
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Ursula K. Le Guin finished the manuscript for <i>Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand</i> in 1991 and sent it off to Marion S. (Buz) Wyeth, Jr. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate in having Buz Wyeth as my editor,” she said during an interview at the time. “What I do, Buz will take. And he’s never said, ‘Do another this or that.’” Yet Wyeth, his colleagues at HarperCollins, and many American critics apparently did not know what to make of this new book by one of world’s most famous writers of science fiction and fantasy. A collection of interconnected stories, <i>Searoad</i> focused on moments in the lives of various women (and a few men) living in a small town in northwest Oregon, without so much as a hint of dragon-taming wizards, otherworldly dystopias, or space travel. “People didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “It didn’t fit any particular category.”<br />
<br />
During an interview with <a href="https://kenyonreview.org/contributor/william-walsh/">William Walsh</a> published in the <i>Kenyon Review</i> in 1995, she recalled the challenges that confronted her:
<blockquote>
If men are at the center of the book it’s considered to be of general interest to the reader. If women are at the center of the book, it is considered to be of interest to women. <i>Searoad</i>—the book you have with you—I had to fight my own publisher from saying it was a book about women for women, and only women could possibly be interested in it. I said, “My God, my sales are generally pretty good. Shall we not try to cut them in half by saying stay away from this book, boys, you’ll hate it?” In <i>Searoad</i> there are women who don’t seem able to keep men in their lives or don’t have very good luck with men, women who live alone. I think that’s what some of the reviewers and my editor homed in on, and why they said this is all about women. So what?
</blockquote>
In the three decades since its publication, <i>Searoad</i> has attracted a coterie of discerning readers who laud it as an overlooked gem. Among them is science fiction critic Carl Freedman, who interviewed Le Guin in 2008 and remarked on how her imagined Oregon town was “not a utopia, but perhaps it could be called a ‘topia,’ because the sense of place is very strong and very important for the overall effect of the book.” Comparing it to previous American story cycles, including Sherwood Anderson’s <i>Winesburg, Ohio</i>, Ernest Hemingway’s <i>In Our Time</i>, and William Faulkner’s <i>Go Down, Moses</i>, he asked what opportunities the format presented to the writer. Le Guin responded with a description of how the book (a “story suite, as I have come to call it”) evolved:
<blockquote>
[A] perfect example of a topia is the (very British) Victorian story cycle <i>Cranford</i> by Elizabeth Gaskell, which probably helped Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine write her <i>Country of the Pointed Firs</i>. Because these books are important to me, I had in fact thought of the story cycle as probably being predominantly a feminine form. (I know the Anderson and admire it, but am ignorant of the Hemingway and Faulkner.) . . .<br />
<br />
My experience is this: As I began to write them, the stories were connected only by place, or by certain characters. But as I went on writing them the stories began consciously to interconnect and inter-implicate, forming by the end something that is unmistakably a whole thing: not exactly a novel, yet achieving very much what the novel achieves, by a slightly different method. (I should guess that this is how <i>Cranford</i> and <i>Country of the Pointed Firs</i> were written, too.)<br />
<br />
This is how <i>Searoad</i> came to be, and by the third story at latest I was fully conscious that I was writing not just a story but part of a book. . . .
</blockquote>
Brian Attebery, the editor of the Library of America’s multivolume edition of Le Guin’s fiction, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/through-a-hernes-eye-on-ursula-k-le-guins-five-novels/">recently remarked</a>, “In Le Guin’s hands, characterization is a form of world-building, even in a more-or-less realistic work like <i>Searoad</i>. The coastal village of that novel turns out to be a kind of multiverse. Characters interact across gulfs of difference. Conversations between neighbors might as well be conducted via Le Guin’s invented interstellar communication device, the ansible.” Or, as Le Guin told Freedman, “I don’t feel that writing sf is in any important way different from writing fantasy, nor from writing realistic fiction, for that matter. You have to construct, sort out, select your fictional world, whether it is a made-up planet, a fantasy kingdom, a utopia, Russia in 1812, or a contemporary town on the Oregon coast. The process is much the same. The degree of invention may vary somewhat, but after all we do not literally invent; we can only recombine.”<br />
<br />
<i>Searoad</i> is included in <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/five-novels"><i>Five Novels</i></a>, the latest volume in the LOA Le Guin edition. One of the stories in the suite that (judging from comments in online forums) seems to have resonated most strongly with readers is “Quoits,” which we present below.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> <b><i>MacNeill and Lacey</i></b> is Le Guin’s wry conflation of the detective series <i>Cagney and Lacey</i> with the PBS news show <i>The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour</i>. The final scene of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> takes place in the <b>Capulet</b> family tomb; by the end, Romeo, Juliet, and Juliet’s vengeful cousin, <b>Tybalt</b>, all lie dead. <b><i>Black Elk Speaks</i></b> is a book published in 1932 by American poet and amateur ethnographer John G. Neihardt and is loosely based on his conversations with Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk; it became widely read by New Age groups. The two italicized lines of poetry (<b><i>Out of her grave</i></b> . . . and <b><i>They twined into a true lovers’ knot</i></b> . . .) are from a stanza found in some versions of the traditional folk song “Barbara Allen.” In 1989, the Conservative government of England, led by Margaret <b>Thatcher</b>, sold off public water systems to corporations. In Ebenezer <b>Scrooge</b>’s vision of his own funeral in Dickens’s <i>A Christmas Carol</i> (1843), two women sell his <b>bed sheets</b> in a rag-and-bone shop. <b><i>Off Our Backs</i></b> was an American feminist periodical that ran from 1970 to 2008. The American poet <b>Adrienne Rich</b> was a classmate of Le Guin’s at Radcliffe College.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">T</span>he days after Barbara ’s death had not been a period of time but a place of a certain shape, a place where Shirley had to crouch down and hold still because it was the only thing to do . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Le-Guin-Quoits.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Le-Guin-Quoits.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection is used by permission.<br />
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the <a href="http://www.copyright.com/">Copyright Clearance Center</a>.</span></div>
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Le-Guin-Quoits.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe><br />
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-4987160778770641212024-02-11T15:34:00.010-05:002024-02-11T19:36:08.109-05:00The Final Struggle<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://loa.org/books/720-speeches-writings"><i>Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/abolitionists-douglass-published-north-star/"><b>Video clip:</b> The North Star</a> (<i>American Experience</i>, PBS)<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.nationalabolitionhalloffameandmuseum.org/gerrit-smith.html">Gerrit Smith: capsule biography</a> (Norman K. Dann, National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selection</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2015/06/letter-to-his-old-master.html">Letter to His Old Master</a>,” Frederick Douglass<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/06/the-two-altars-or-two-pictures-in-one.html">The Two Altars; or, Two Pictures in One</a>,” Harriet Beecher Stowe <br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/11/no-greater-joy-than-to-see-these.html">No Greater Joy Than to See These Children Walking in the Anti-Slavery Path</a>,” Lucretia Mott<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/720"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/loa-production-23ffs35gui41a/volumes/images/000/000/720/ecommerce/9781598537222.jpg?1660169379" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><a href="https://loa.org/books/720"><i><b>Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings</b></i></a><br />
List price: $40.00<br />
Save 20%, free shipping<br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/720">Web store price: $32.00</a><br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWVaXxuBOdBehomDwywvP-f4sq1TQGVFzjNYjiKdAjkaDmfriWNauCZpAE-9nx1J-2T2MDG0lrjKUcXe4KIYQ2BDoWqruDmYbr7u2AtiAJCtdaim808fFzhMMlTScP8ZHsdW-756OVzmJdJND4kbtPr74oZTDQv6LLwg5HG6eGKx81equCuA2jSW1_eE/s1600/Anti-Fugitive-Slave-Law-Convention.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWVaXxuBOdBehomDwywvP-f4sq1TQGVFzjNYjiKdAjkaDmfriWNauCZpAE-9nx1J-2T2MDG0lrjKUcXe4KIYQ2BDoWqruDmYbr7u2AtiAJCtdaim808fFzhMMlTScP8ZHsdW-756OVzmJdJND4kbtPr74oZTDQv6LLwg5HG6eGKx81equCuA2jSW1_eE/s1600/Anti-Fugitive-Slave-Law-Convention.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Attendees at the Fugitive Slave Convention, Cazenovia, New York, August 20–21, 1850, daguerreotype by American photographer Ezra Greenleaf Weld (1801–1874). Frederick Douglass is seated with his elbow on the table; behind him is Gerrit Smith, standing at center; Mary Edmonson is at Smith's fingertips, wearing a shawl; her sister Emily Edmonson, also in a shawl, stands to the left of Smith. (National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum)<br />
Born into slavery in Maryland (as was Douglass), the Edmonson sisters became nationally known when the teenagers were among 76 fugitives captured during an escape attempt arranged and financed by Smith and others. The two sisters were sold to traders in New Orleans, sent back to Alexandria for hire, and then emancipated with funds raised by Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation.<hr></td></tr>
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Philip S. Foner, in his 1969 biography of Frederick Douglass, reminded his readers of the importance of the Liberty Party, not only to Douglass’s pre–Civil War career but also to American political history.
<blockquote>
The vast majority of American historians have underestimated the Liberty Party since it never carried a state, or even came close to carrying it, in any election. Yet the significance of this party cannot be estimated from the number of votes cast for its candidates at any given time. Its newspapers and propaganda went into the homes of Whigs and Democrats alike; its lecturers spoke to hundreds of people whose sense of party loyalty prevented them from voting the Liberty Party ticket. The Liberty Party men helped to shape the principles, forge the arguments, and train the leaders who in 1854 formed the Republican Party.
</blockquote>
Among those leaders were future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (who would also serve as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury), the social reformer <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/11/no-greater-joy-than-to-see-these.html">Lucretia Mott</a>, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The organization was also the first political party that numbered African Americans among its ranks, including the educator and minister <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2023/06/let-slavery-die.html">Henry Highland Garnet</a> and the prominent Presbyterian minister Theodore S. Wright.<br />
<br />
Founded in New York State in 1840, the Liberty Party aimed to divorce the institutions of the federal government from slavery. The party’s members believed that the Constitution was inherently antislavery in spirit and that it already granted the federal government the power to limit slavery to only those states where it had already existed at the time it was adopted. Therefore, abolitionists had a moral obligation to enter the political fray and challenge and reform the government. They were opposed by other abolitionists, especially the members of the American Anti-Slavery Society led by William Lloyd Garrison, who maintained that the Constitution was fundamentally corrupted by slavery, that any political action under its system was morally compromised, and that Americans could be persuaded of the wrongness of slavery though peaceful, nonpolitical resistance, or “moral suasion.”<br />
<br />
Douglass, however, came late to the Liberty Party. By the time he publicly announced his support, in 1851, many of its adherents had switched to the new antislavery (but not abolitionist) Free Soil Party, and the remaining Liberty leaders had split into two factions. “From the hour that the old Liberty Party was swallowed up by the Van Buren Free Soil party in ’48,” he acknowledged a few years later, “the work of deterioration began, and has been continued until now. Instead of going upward, the political Anti-Slavery sentiment has been going downward.”<br />
<br />
Initially, as a loyal follower of Garrison, Douglass was opposed to the principles of the Liberty Party. In June 1848, however, the remnants of one faction hosted a convention in Buffalo, close enough to his new home in Rochester, and he attended. He ended up debating with several attendees and strongly defended the Garrisonian directive for moral suasion over political action. While somewhat impressed with the proceedings, he remained convinced “that the only true ground for an American Abolitionist is, <i>No Union with Slaveholders</i>,” as he told the readers of his newspaper <i>The North Star</i>. Many of his allies in the Garrison camp, however, protested that he had bestowed legitimacy on the Liberty Party by appearing in Buffalo at all.<br />
<br />
Over the next three years, frustrated in part by the lack of progress (much less action) in the abolitionist movement, Douglass inched toward accommodation with the Liberty Party’s position. He became friends with one of the party’s founders, the wealthy New York businessman Gerrit Smith, whose estate in the small town of Peterboro was a significant stop for the underground railroad. “I am sick and tired of argueing on the slaveholder side of this question although they are doubtless right so far as the intentions of the framers of the constitution are concerned,” <a href="https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/5389">Douglass admitted to Smith in January 1851</a>. “But these <i>intentions</i> you fling to the winds—your legal rules of interpretation override all speculations as to the opinions of the constitution makers and these <i>rules</i> may be sound and I confess I know not how to meet or refute them on <i>legal</i> grounds.”<br />
<br />
That spring, Smith arranged with Douglass to merge <i>The North Star</i>, which had more than 4,000 subscribers, with the <i>Liberty Party Paper</i>, struggling for survival with a circulation of 700. Smith provided the funding for the new publication, retitled <i>Frederick Douglass’ Paper</i>. In <a href="https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/item/5407">a letter to Smith</a>, Douglass worried, correctly, that he would be accused of selling out: “The war will be waged not against opinions, but <i>motives</i>.” He publicly announced the merger in May at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and his statement in Garrison’s newspaper <i>The Liberator</i> argued that because slavery is incompatible with “the noble purposes avowed” in the preamble to the Constitution, the document should be interpreted as an antislavery instrument and “wielded in behalf of Emancipation.” His call to use political as well as moral power in their efforts to overthrow slavery alienated him from Garrison, and the subsequent exchange became so vitriolic and personal that—despite an attempt by Harriet Beecher Stowe to broker a peace—Douglass left the Society at the end of 1853.<br />
<br />
By April 1856, the Liberty Party was a shell of its former self and a new group—the Republican Party—was on the rise. Douglass was skeptical: “That the National Republican party, around whose standard Abolitionists are now called upon to rally, does not occupy this high Anti-Slavery ground, (and what is worse, does <i>not</i> mean to occupy it,) is most painfully evident.” Rather than supporting the Republicans, Douglass stumped for the Radical Abolition Party—a small group of old Liberty Party men, led in part by Gerrit Smith. After the Republican Party held its convention in June, he dismissively summarized the party’s position, which was limited to its opposition to the expansion of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska:
<blockquote>
Nothing said of the Fugitive Slave Bill—nothing said of Slavery in the District of Columbia—nothing said of the slave trade between States—nothing said of giving the dignity of the nation to Liberty—nothing said of securing the rights of citizens, from the Northern States, in the constitutional right to enter and transact business in the slave States. There is not a single warm and living position, taken by the Republican party, except freedom for Kansas.
</blockquote>
Yet Douglass bowed to the reality of the political situation, and in August he endorsed the Republican ticket of John C. Frémont and William L. Dayton “because there is no chance whatever in the present context of electing better men than they.” As David W. Blight concluded in his recent Pulitzer Prize–winning biography: “More than from any other single issue before the war, Douglass derived his sense of political pragmatism from coming to grips with the Republican Party, the odd assemblage of former Whigs, antislavery Democrats, Liberty Party men, and even nativists who all coalesced around stopping the expansion of slavery. His reactions ranged from vehement opposition to cautious support.”<br />
<br />
In the middle of this maelstrom of oppositional forces within the antislavery movement, Douglass found hope and strength in his continuing belief that the conflict over slavery “will not, cannot, last for ever” and that even the “disintegration of the once powerful political Parties, is a cheering and significant sign of the times.” In August 1855 he published the following editorial, presciently expressing his confidence that the “final struggle” was at hand.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">Portions of the above introduction have been drawn from the Chronology and Notes in <i><a href="https://loa.org/books/720-speeches-writings">Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings</a></i>, edited by David W. Blight.</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *<br /><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Douglas-Final-Struggle.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">download it as a PDF</span></u></a> <span style="color: black;">or </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Douglas-Final-Struggle.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">view it in Google Docs</span></u></a></span><br /><br /></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: 140%;"><b>The Final Struggle</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 160%;">A</span>mong the varied and multitudinous array of opposition to the anti-slavery movement, no Abolitionist should abate his zeal, or relax his energy, but rather redouble his diligence, and resolve, if need be, to die upon the battle field, struggling for the victory. There is some consolation in the reflection, that the conflict will not, cannot, last for ever. The hour which shall witness <i>the final struggle</i>, is on the wing. Already we hear the <i>booming</i> of the bell which shall yet toll the death knell of human slavery.<br />
<br />
Liberty and Slavery cannot dwell together forever in the same country. There is not one iota of affinity existing between them. They hate each other, with a hatred which is unto Death. They ever have been, and they ever must remain, in a state of irreconcilable hostility. Before a union can be effected between them, the laws which govern the moral universe must be repealed. It is absurd in any one to expect to witness the spirit of Liberty being led, by the demon of Slavery, to the hymeneal altar.—As well expect the pains and sorrows of hell, to mingle, in happy unison, with the pleasures and the joys of heaven; the spirits of just men made perfect, with the spirits of the lost.<br />
<br />
It is useless, then, to attempt to effect a union between them. No compromise can effect it. No legislation can change the inflexible law of adaptation, the eternal fitness of things. No compact can make that Right, which is wrong from its first principles to its crowning assumptions.<br />
<br />
It is, then, perfectly apparent to every reflecting mind, that a crisis more critical than any which has preceded it, is pending. This crisis cannot much longer be delayed. It must come to pass as the legitimate result of the past and the present struggle for the mastery in which we behold these deadly enemies engaged. We may attempt to bind up the wounds of the respective hostile parties, with mollifying ointment, but this will not avert the impending hour. It must come, as sure as the laws of God cannot be trampled upon with impunity.<br />
<br />
Then, as a nation, if we are wise, we will prepare for the last conflict, for that final struggle in which the enemy of Freedom must capitulate. Instead of indulging in delusive dreams of safety, the Slave Power should prepare for the era of its disastrous doom; it will be wise and consider its latter end.<br />
<br />
The motto to be inscribed upon the banner of Freedom, in the last conflict is not, “No <i>more</i> Slave States,” nor “No Slavery outside of the Slave States”; but no Slavery where it does exist; no Slavery in the Republic. We shall not be burdened or annoyed by unhallowed compromises, we shall make no contracts with the perfidious enemy. Not one word of concession or compromise, shall escape our lips, not one syllable of apology. Truth and Error, Liberty and Slavery, in a hand-to-hand conflict. This is what we want; this is what we will have. The utter extinction of Slavery, everywhere in our national domain; the subversion of the Black Power, wherever, in all our widespread territory, it dare lift its defiant head toward Heaven.<br />
<br />
Again; in the final struggle, in order to be successful, there must exist a thorough organization of freemen, with the single issue presented, Liberty everywhere, Slavery nowhere; there must be unity of effort; every man who loves freedom, must array himself in her defence, whatever may have been his past political predilections. The magnet of Human Freedom, must be held high above the din of party tumult, and every man who is willing to peril his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor, in its defence, will ultimately be attracted to the magnet, whether Whig, or Democrat, or Freesoiler, or Abolitionist. This will form the great Abolition Party of the land. In fact, there must be, and there will be, but two Parties in the country; these will be known not as Whigs, nor as Democrats, nor as Republicans, so far as party names are concerned, but simply as the Anti-Slavery, and Pro-Slavery parties of the country. All who are desirous of maintaining a sort of assumed neutrality on the question, as well as the most inveterate haters of the Abolition movement, will constitute the Pro-Slavery Party. Neither of these parties, in the last conflict, will be <i>wheedled</i> from the arena, by the presentation of incidental issues. Each party, forming a unit, and rallying under its own banner, will fight for the triumph of its respective Principles.<br />
<br />
We do not fear the result of such a struggle. The sooner the last battle shall be fought, the sooner victory will perch upon the standard of the free. The Principles which form the basis of the Abolition movement, are as unchanging and as undying as their Eternal Author. They must triumph, <i>for Heaven has nowhere promised to delegate his power to another</i>. Let us then prepare for the battle, and for victory. Already are the masses moving. The disintegration of the once powerful political Parties, is a cheering and significant sign of the times. The throne of the despot is trembling to its deep foundations. There is a good time coming. We yet shall make the welkin ring with the mighty hallelujahs of the free.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">From <i>Frederick Douglass’ Paper</i>, November 16, 1855<br />
<br />
<b><i>Note:</i></b> The phrase “<b>his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor</b>” evokes the closing line of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”</div>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-51247986363211141562024-02-04T14:55:00.013-05:002024-02-04T19:21:15.456-05:00A Point at Issue!<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Kate Chopin (1850–1904)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=184"><i>Kate Chopin: Complete Novels & Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
“<a href="https://www.katechopin.org/faq/">Frequently Asked Questions about Kate Chopin</a>” (The Kate Chopin International Society)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://iris.virginia.edu/my-awakening-awakening">My Awakening with <i>The Awakening</i></a>” (Cheyenne Butler, <i>Iris Magazine</i>, University of Virginia)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/08/wiser-than-god.html">Wiser Than a God</a>,” Kate Chopin<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/02/spunk.html">Spunk</a>,” Zora Neale Hurston<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/08/a-traveler-at-forty-paris.html">A Traveler at Forty: Paris!</a>” Theodore Dreiser<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=184"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnvb8C3eOfWKowYca7mLTzXrgJp-vigYcd4dpEiFubBtHweM4mTWa3IpAiDCkwGiXWBEsCoeab1IMETSywqw-mrSnIuz-XC0xp0-fXRKE1PRadk0jnopXWhRHzftqQHxPABZfAdpk1vIQ/s200/chopin_jacket.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 5px 0px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=184"><i>Kate Chopin: Complete Novels & Stories</i></a></b><br />
<i>At Fault</i> | <i>Bayou Folk</i> | <i>A Night in Acadie</i> | <i>The Awakening</i> | uncollected stories<br />
List price: $40.00<br />
<b>38% off, free shipping</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=184">Web store price: $25.00</a></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a 1="" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9PjQHbQOeNnJcdGmE_Ea1g0IBCHh6RvI88o8qKXWYA0XWUMRBuJR9prij9xJ-g62ZjwYg_TL8EhNRbTCnJ9mNl5gcXGh6zg-XCyT6dtWZedgKfb6oO4r9nfJI2dUvnqxRbhO9GoiLBJYccEWM4bbK0Tt5AQTKMdScep0t8jUulzzHk5Vk-m7sK5rCt5A/s1600/Beraud-Cafe-Americain.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9PjQHbQOeNnJcdGmE_Ea1g0IBCHh6RvI88o8qKXWYA0XWUMRBuJR9prij9xJ-g62ZjwYg_TL8EhNRbTCnJ9mNl5gcXGh6zg-XCyT6dtWZedgKfb6oO4r9nfJI2dUvnqxRbhO9GoiLBJYccEWM4bbK0Tt5AQTKMdScep0t8jUulzzHk5Vk-m7sK5rCt5A/s1600/Beraud-Cafe-Americain.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Les Grands Boulevard (Café Américain)</i>, c. 1884–95, oil on canvas by French artist Jean Béraud (1849–1935). Image: Sotheby’s.<br />
From Chopin’s story: “He took refuge at one of the small tables of a café, called for a ‘Mazarin,’ and, so seated for an unheeded time, let the panorama of Paris pass before his indifferent eyes.”
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In May 1889, Kate Chopin finished the first short story she considered good enough to send out for publication. All we know about the tale, which was titled “A Poor Girl,” is the following entry in her manuscript book that records the trajectory of each one of her works:
<blockquote>
Returned from Home Mag . Dec. 1 — objection to incident not desirable to be handled <br />
remarks “well written , full of interest” if changed, would consider<br />
Gave to John Dillon to read Dec. 11<br />
Sent to New York Ledger May 1890.<br />
Returned from New York Ledger June 5<br />
destroyed<br />
</blockquote>
We don’t know the nature of the “incident” the editors at <i>Home</i> (probably <i>Arthur’s Home Magazine</i>, a popular monthly journal for women) found objectionable, although the criticism that something in a story was “not desirable to be handled” was one Chopin would receive frequently during her career. After the first rejection, she showed the story to John Dillon, the editor of the <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i>, before sending it out again for another dismissal. She often sought his advice and feedback during the next few years, and the newspaper generally championed Chopin and her writing in the years ahead.<br />
<br />
During the remainder of 1889, Chopin wrote four other pieces and had much better luck placing them. In June she finished “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/08/wiser-than-god.html">Wiser Than a God</a>.” A story about a concert pianist, it was accepted by the <i>Philadelphia Musical Journal</i>, the first publication she sent it to, and it appeared in the December number. In August she wrote “A Point at Issue!” and it seems she likely shared it with Dillon for comment because in late October the <i>Post-Dispatch</i> published it with the subtitle “A Story of Love and Reason in Which Love Triumphs”—her first story to appear in print. She received $15 for it—three times the amount the <i>Musical Journal</i> paid her. Two stories she completed toward the end of the year underwent a rockier reception; between them they accumulated nine rejections before finding homes. Throughout the year, she also worked steadily on her first novel, <i>At Fault</i>, which she published in 1890.<br />
<br />
During the next decade, Chopin wrote nearly one hundred stories and two more novels, including her controversial masterpiece <i>The Awakening</i>. (She couldn’t find a publisher for her second novel, “Young Dr. Gosse,” and after numerous rejections, she destroyed the manuscript.) When she began her writing career, she was a 39-year-old widow busy raising a 9-year-old daughter and five sons ranging in age from 11 to 18. In 1907, three years after Chopin’s death, her daughter, Lelia, recalled how her mother managed to get any writing done:
<blockquote>
She always wrote best in the morning, “when the house was quiet,” as she said. She always wrote rapidly with a lead pencil on block paper. When finished, she copied her manuscript in ink, seldom changing a word, never “working over” a story or changing it materially. She did not have a study or any place where she ever really shut herself off from the household. I know now that she often desired to do this when writing, but on the other hand, she never wished to shut us children out of her presence, and with the natural selfishness of children, we never tried to keep her undisturbed as she should have been.
</blockquote>
Lelia might have romanticized her childhood recollections; the household’s circumstances certainly changed over the course of the following decade. As Chopin’s sons grew older and moved out, the space and time available for her writing improved. An article published in November 1899 in the <i>Post-Dispatch</i>, titled “A St. Louis Woman Who Has Won Fame in Literature,” shows her spacious study in a watercolor by Chopin’s son Oscar, an art student at the time and a future cartoonist. Chopin biographer Emily Toth describes the sketch as depicting “a well-appointed room, with well-stocked bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, an intricate musical clock on the mantel, framed pictures on the walls above a nude Venus and interesting bric-a-brac on the shelves. In the armchair, leaning back and looking almost ghostly, is Kate Chopin (who liked to write in her favorite chair, beside the grate fire).”<br />
<br />
Both of Chopin’s first two published stories were about the struggle between marital obligations and, as she put it, “a woman’s intellectual existence.” The pianist in “Wiser Than a God” is confronted with a choice: accepting a marriage proposal or continuing her career. “A Point at Issue!” tackles the same dilemma from a different, satirical angle: Charles Faraday, a professor of mathematics, marries Eleanor Gail, who wishes to continue her education and maintain a modicum of independence: “Marriage was to be a form, that while fixing legally their relation to each other, was in no wise to touch the individuality of either.” Oblivious and uncaring of what their social circle thinks of the arrangement, the couple agrees that Eleanor should spend the academic year living alone in Paris so that she can learn how to speak French more fluently. The separation, built on the “trust in each other’s love,” does not go as smoothly as either of them hoped.
<br /><br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><i><b>Note:</b></i> A <b>Mazarin</b> is a cake with almond paste filling.
</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">M</span>arried—On Tuesday, May 11, Eleanor Gail to Charles Faraday.<br />
<br />
Nothing bearing the shape of a wedding announcement could have been less obtrusive than the foregoing. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Chopin-Point-Issue.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Chopin-Point-Issue.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span> <br />
<br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Chopin-Point-Issue.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-90297267525643082922024-01-28T16:45:00.026-05:002024-02-02T10:44:53.624-05:00Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>S. J. Perelman (1904–1979)</b></span><br />
From <i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/crazy-like-a-fox-paperback/">Crazy Like a Fox: The Classic Comedy Collection</a></i><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Interesting Links</b><br /><br />
“<a href="https://forward.com/culture/473889/the-glorious-irrelevance-of-s-j-perelman-the-original-remix-artist/">The Glorious Irrelevance of S. J. Perelman, the Original Remix Artist</a>” (Jackson Arn, <i>Forward</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.villagepreservation.org/2018/06/29/they-dwelt-0n-west-9th-street-s-j-perelman/">They Dwelt on West 9th Street: S. J. Perelman</a>” (Lannyl Stephens, <i>Off the Grid</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/05/cloudland-revisited-rock-bye-viscount.html">Cloudland Revisited: Rock-a-Bye, Viscount, in the Treetop</a>,” S. J. Perelman<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/04/the-night-bed-fell.html">The Night the Bed Fell</a>,” James Thurber<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/04/the-school.html">The School</a>,” Donald Barthelme<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/crazy-like-a-fox-paperback/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537789.jpg" style="float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/crazy-like-a-fox-paperback/"><i><b>Crazy Like a Fox</b></i></a><br />
<b>The Classic Comedy Collection</b><br />
Introduction by Joshua Cohen | Includes all 50 selections from the 1947 expanded edition<br />
Paperback | 308 pages<br />
List price: $15.95<br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/crazy-like-a-fox-paperback/">Web store price: $11.95</a><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmyEy69evgQ6QajHhF2amdTyDYrQTF1R2HAbVb_kWCh8CrskLmIHZICRZpPpHphYT4Ky1047JD3x5J0j675rHttlATSTpo1Nq9NIOzRsfLD7dc8N1DVd66UA7cDSKy3SVKduu1NzVgF9oxBvIUOZyHfjTvYqEkd_kp4HidaAdJMK-SWbPeVSDW7-sMMLE/s1600/EZ-DO.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmyEy69evgQ6QajHhF2amdTyDYrQTF1R2HAbVb_kWCh8CrskLmIHZICRZpPpHphYT4Ky1047JD3x5J0j675rHttlATSTpo1Nq9NIOzRsfLD7dc8N1DVd66UA7cDSKy3SVKduu1NzVgF9oxBvIUOZyHfjTvYqEkd_kp4HidaAdJMK-SWbPeVSDW7-sMMLE/s1600/EZ-DO.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">
“Put new life in your closets with the E-Z-DO Closet Ensemble in the gay Hollywood pattern. . . . New, two-piece Set-0-Matic construction with Invisa-grippers assures quick, easy assembly.” 1947 advertisement for wardrobes and accessories of the type mocked by Perelman in his essay. (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmalon/8099847821/">Flickr</a>).</td></tr>
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Whenever S. J. Perelman met with journalists—and he was interviewed hundreds of times over the course of his career—his work with the Marx Brothers inevitably came up. Many of his interviewers noted how little patience he had with the topic, and he would often change the subject or request that they talk about something else, but in 1978 British cartoonist Mel Calman convinced Perelman to trot out the story of how he got into show business:
<blockquote>
I first went out to Hollywood in December 1930, as I recall, soon after Groucho had hired Will Johnstone and me to work on <i>Monkey Business</i>. It began when I went to a performance of <i>Animal Crackers</i> on Broadway, and I was so entranced that I went to see them after the show. Groucho explained to me that the group was interested in doing some radio. . . .<br />
<br />
Johnstone and I got into a huddle in a room for three days and the only idea we came up with was the notion of the four Marxists as stowaways on a transatlantic liner—each one in his own barrel. Having thought of this, our inspiration completely gave out. On the third day the Marx Brothers rang up and asked us to lunch. We put forward this idea and to our complete stupefaction Groucho turned to Chico and said, ‘This isn’t a radio sketch, boys—this is our next picture.’ And before we had recovered our breath they took us by the hand and led us to the Paramount Building and introduced us to Jesse Lasky. We were both signed to six-week contracts at 500 dollars a week. For us this was big money. . . .<br />
<br />
I went back to Hollywood whenever we were broke. Hollywood could absorb writers. . . . After the first novelty, working there quickly became very boring. </blockquote>
A read-through of the initial draft of <i>Monkey Business</i> was met with blank stares by the team (“Stinks,” was Groucho’s single-word verdict), but the heavily revised script nevertheless retained many of Perelman’s lines from the original. Perelman and Johnstone stayed to work on the next Marx Brothers movie, <i>Horse Feathers</i>, and for the rest of his life Perelman would frequently boast about how he had accomplished the impossible: surviving two movies with the Marx Brothers.<br />
<br />
Over the next decade, he and his wife, Laura, returned to Hollywood many times and worked together as screenwriters, jointly earning for each assignment as much as $1,000 a week—a handsome sum during the Depression. Most of the movies were never filmed, and they received little credit for several that did make it to the big screen. During the Second World War, however, two windfalls allowed the Perelmans to escape the drudgery of the studios.<br />
<br />
The first triumph miraculously came together when Kurt Weill began shopping around for a new project after he had worked with Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart on the 1941 hit musical <i>Lady in the Dark</i>. Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford approached Weill with the idea of an adaptation of the 1885 novella <i>The Tinted Venus</i> by F. T. Anstey. Bella and Samuel Spewack were hired to write the book for the musical, titled <i>One Touch of Venus</i>, but nobody involved with the production liked the script they turned in. Ogden Nash suggested to Crawford that Perelman might be a good replacement; the two writers had worked together in 1936 to salvage an unfilmable screenplay based on, of all things, Dale Carnegie’s <i>How to Win Friends and Influence People</i>. Nothing came of that project, but the two became friends. Perelman accepted the opportunity to work with Nash again, and the Spewacks were fired. (Five years later, the Spewacks would receive the Tony Award for writing <i>Kiss Me, Kate</i>, which also won Best Musical.)<br />
<br />
Perelman wrote to Groucho Marx in April 1943 with an update:
<blockquote>
I have been tied up since mid-January on a musical with Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill, which we finished the end of this past week. Nash and I did the book (based on a short story by F. Anstey, who was the editor of <i>Punch</i> back in the Eighties), and Ogden’s now finishing up his lyrics for Weill’s music. It’s the story of a small schnuckel of a barber who accidentally brings a statue of Venus to life, and it has turned up a lot of pretty funny and dirty complications. The music and lyrics thus far (about ⅔ finished) are grand, and we’re dickering with several leading women currently.
</blockquote>
Although <i>One Touch of Venus</i> had originally been created with Marlene Dietrich in mind, she decided Perelman and Nash’s script was too risqué, and she backed out. Mary Martin eventually stepped into the lead role, and the production was directed by Elia Kazan with choreography by Agnes de Mille. After a rocky trial run in Boston, the play opened on Broadway in October 1943 and ran for 567 performances before going successfully on the road.<br />
<br />
The second stroke of fortune came unexpectedly from Perelman’s magazine work. He had been writing humor pieces for more than ten years, primarily for <i>The New Yorker</i>. Several dozen selections had been collected in three slow-selling books that barely earned out their advances. In 1944 he worked with Bennett Cerf, the publisher at Random House, to assemble <i>Crazy Like a Fox</i>, a greatest-hits assortment of forty-six pieces, most of them culled from the previous collections. The book became a best seller and sold 25,000 copies in a matter of months. Several hundred thousand were issued in a wildly popular Armed Services Edition and distributed free to American soldiers. (In the introduction to <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/crazy-like-a-fox-paperback/">the new Library of America paperback reprint</a>, the novelist Joshua Cohen imagines “some private first-class rereading the screenplay-pitch-meeting montage of ‘Scenario’ or the hard-boiled ‘Somewhere a Roscoe’ after digging some latrines in the Philippines or liberating Buchenwald.”) In 1947 the book was reprinted as a Modern Library edition under the title <i>The Best of S. J. Perelman</i>, with four new essays, including “Farewell My Lovely Appetizer,” his famous parody of Raymond Chandler’s prose style, and “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away,” which Joyce Carol Oates selected for <i>The Best American Essays of the Century</i> (2000). In 1973 Vintage, the paperback division of Random House, restored the original title when it reissued the expanded edition.<br />
<br />
“Insert Flap ‘A’” employs one of Perelman’s signature techniques. A Perelman essay often opens with “a straight-man setup,” as Adam Gopnik describes it, of “eyebrow-raising citations from advertising copy or fashion magazines—or even an instruction manual for an electric blanket—whose inanities or fatuities Perelman would then satirize in a comic sketch.” In the blanket story, “To Sleep, Perchance to Steam,” the manual printed by General Electric intends to reassure a new owner about the product’s safety. Perelman is having none of it:
<blockquote>
“The heart of the Comforter,” states the booklet, “is a web of 370 feet of fine flexible copper wire of low resistance arranged in a zigzag pattern.” Set me down as a dusty old eccentric, but frankly, there would seem to be some more ideal haven nowadays than a skein of copper wire, no matter how fine or flexible. Nor is it any more reassuring to learn that “six rubber molded safety thermostats are placed at intervals in this web of insulated wire (you can feel these thermostats with your fingers beneath the cover of the Comforter).” It needs no vivid imagination to imagine oneself lying in the dark with eyes protruding, endlessly tallying the thermostats and expecting at any moment to be converted into roast Long Island duckling.
</blockquote>
Similarly, in “Counter-Revolution” (also included in <i>Crazy Like a Fox</i>), Perelman is alarmed by the tone of the sheet accompanying a bottle of Major’s Cement for china and glassware repair. Rather than merely instruct the consumer on its use, the writer has attempted to preempt any imagined disappointment with the product and ends with: “If, before doing as suggested, you tell others that the Cement is no good, you are saying an untruth and injuring the reputation of Major’s Cement.” Perelman then imagines a department store salesclerk applying the same attitude toward shoppers. In “Insert ‘Flap A,’” which we present below as this week’s selection, the instruction sheets for assembling household furniture and children’s toys prove to be Perelman’s undoing.<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<div style="font-size: 75%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> <b>Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi</b>, was the daughter of Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus; she is remembered for devotedly guiding the careers of her sons and for her interest in literature and writing. <b>Zim’s School of Cartooning</b> was a correspondence program operated in the 1910s by former <i>Puck</i> and <i>Judge</i> cartoonist Eugene Zimmerman, who had been dead for a decade when Perelman published this piece. A noted inventor, Charles F. <b>Kettering</b> was the head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947 and the founder of the Kettering Foundation. Robert Andrews <b>Millikan</b> was an American experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 and served for 26 years as the founding president of the California Institute of Technology. <b>Chili Williams</b> was a pin-up girl famous for wearing a polka-dotted bikini for a <a href="https://24femmespersecond.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/chili-williams.jpg"><i>Life</i> magazine photo</a> published in 1943.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<span style="font-size: 200%;">O</span>ne stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Perelman-Insert-Flap-A.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Perelman-Insert-Flap-A.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75;; font-size: 70%;">This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the <a href="http://www.copyright.com/">Copyright Clearance Center</a>.</span></div>
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Perelman-Insert-Flap-A.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-69729771337228492882024-01-21T15:31:00.015-05:002024-01-21T19:24:40.276-05:00Atrophy<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Edith Wharton (1862–1937)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=150"><i>Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
“<a href="https://lithub.com/the-secret-love-of-edith-whartons-life/">The Secret Love of Edith Wharton’s Life: On the Mystery of Walter Van Rensselaer Berry</a>” (Yvonne Georgina Puig, <i>Lit Hub</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/08/10/158237287/age-of-desire-how-wharton-lost-her-innocence">‘Age Of Desire’: How Wharton Lost Her ‘Innocence’</a>” (Lynn Neary, <i>All Things Considered</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/03/autres-temps.html">Autres Temps . . .</a>,” Edith Wharton<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2015/07/the-special-type.html">The Special Type</a>,” Henry James<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/07/white-weeds.html">White Weeds</a>,” Charles W. Chesnutt<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/09/the-shell-of-sense.html">The Shell of Sense</a>,” Olivia Howard Dunbar<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book:</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=150"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNY4HSyfKzltnQjgpe-S-OGMbW-GVKDqK-r-nNdD5k7nW18k5ZpK5ii6oOzTolYjtLOUZ1LfEt3VjOcM6MvKcBmOuf58Kj_FUCzUJa2LKJbVNgceFFCrIpPYUB1gurUABRztljeY5MUDc/s200/wharton_stories.jpg" style="float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=150"><i><b>Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937</b></i></a><br />
Xingu | Roman Fever | A Bottle of Perrier | All Souls | 25 other stories | 848 pages<br />
List price: $40.00<br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=150">Web store price: $31.50</a><br /><br />
<b><a href="https://loa.org/books/578-the-collected-stories-of-edith-wharton-two-volumes">Save $25 when you buy both volumes of Edith Wharton’s stories</a></b>.<br /></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN86s9H09pzxAeDEx54kOMr9Nrn2ejQatJ2LBjVbu_46PE6ahx5_pZE4hNeJg0EDfcLxvcwbLabow63O7NkjuZCQGFOEqynjQVZfIJL4ju_gjYTFpVyYjJW6xgtOzClY7yzHBcNfRLvbE-UX9EBMv6BwECLatDnuJco6E3TzNOl3WSpSCPf_v27NBGM5g/s1600/Wharton-Berry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN86s9H09pzxAeDEx54kOMr9Nrn2ejQatJ2LBjVbu_46PE6ahx5_pZE4hNeJg0EDfcLxvcwbLabow63O7NkjuZCQGFOEqynjQVZfIJL4ju_gjYTFpVyYjJW6xgtOzClY7yzHBcNfRLvbE-UX9EBMv6BwECLatDnuJco6E3TzNOl3WSpSCPf_v27NBGM5g/s1600/Wharton-Berry.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walter Berry and Edith Wharton, undated photograph. The man in the background is unidentified. (The Mount)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the Maine seaside town of Bar Harbor during the summer of 1883, Edith Jones met twenty-four-year-old Walter Berry, a scion of the Van Rensselaer family who stood to inherit a small fortune from his mother and who was studying to be a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Three years his junior, Edith spent the early weeks of the summer with him, canoeing and cycling and sharing their similar intellectual preoccupations. As she recalled in <i>A Backward Glance</i>, “the encounter had given me a fleeting hint of what the communion of kindred intelligences might be.” Soon after Berry left, she met up with thirty-three-year-old Edward (“Teddy”) Wharton, a friend of her older brothers who was a Harvard graduate living off his trust fund and interested mainly in camping and hunting—and not at all in books. Teddy and Wharton were married two years later.<br />
<br />
Wharton resumed her friendship with Berry in 1897. She was at work on her first book, <i>The Decoration of Houses</i>, with coauthor Ogden Codman Jr., the architect who had renovated her mansion in Newport. As she wrote in her memoir:
<blockquote>
He happened to come and stay with us at Land’s End the very summer that Codman and I were struggling with our book. Walter Berry was born with an exceptionally sensitive literary instinct, but also with a critical sense so far outweighing his creative gift that he had early renounced the idea of writing. . . . I remember shyly asking him to look at my lumpy pages; and I remember his first shout of laughter (for he never flattered or pretended), and then his saying good-naturedly: “Come, let’s see what can be done,” and settling down beside me to try to model the lump into a book.
</blockquote>
Two years later, Berry helped the Whartons find a place to stay for four months in Washington and, a lifelong bachelor, he remained one of Edith’s closest friends until his death in 1927.<br />
<br />
By the early 1900s, Edith’s marriage was falling apart under the strain of Edward’s debilitating depression and erratic behavior; they would finally divorce in 1913. “One cannot help feeling that her punishment has been awful—tied to a crazy person, who is only just sane enough not to be locked up,” Codman wrote to his mother. Many of their friends assumed Edith and Walter had become lovers and until late in the twentieth century, that belief resulted in several erroneous biographies and fanciful legends about their relationship. A secret journal Wharton kept in 1908, addressed to an unnamed lover, was for years assumed to have been about Berry. In the 1970s, however, biographer R.W.B. Lewis confirmed that Wharton’s affair, which lasted for more than two years (while she and her husband were separated), had been with the journalist Morton Fullerton. The subsequent discovery in the 1980s of her letters to Fullerton ended any doubts about the matter.<br />
<br />
Similarly, Lewis dispensed with another myth, <a href="https://www.americanheritage.com/edith-wharton-beckoning-quarry">as he recounted in 1975</a>:
<blockquote>
One of the silliest and most characteristic of the stories—and one finds it solemnly stated in print—was that a secret stairway connected Edith Wharton’s apartment on the Rue de Varenne in Paris with that of Walter Berry. It was used, presumably, to creep up and down for assignations. The picture conjured up is not without attraction; but in fact Edith and Berry never had apartments in the same building. Berry succeeded to the lease of Edith’s apartment in 1920. I had a guided tour of the rooms . . . and suspect that a back-stairway entrance combined with the all-powerful Berry legend to generate this canard.
</blockquote>
In the fall of 1926, Berry underwent surgery for appendicitis; the following January he suffered a stroke that rendered him unable to speak. Wharton cared for him in the weeks following both episodes; against his express wishes, his interfering sister showed up during the second convalescence and complicated the matter of who oversaw his care. In October, he died after a second stroke. Wharton wrote in her diary, “The Love of all my life died today, & I with him.” To one of her closest correspondents, the Cambridge historian Galliard Lapsley, she wrote, “No words can tell of my desolation. He had been to me in turn all that one being can be to another, in love, in friendship, in understanding.”<br />
<br />
Wharton enlisted the help of Berry’s sister to locate her letters in his apartment and burned them all. She also destroyed his letters to her, and all we have left to us are a few surviving pieces of correspondence, including one from Berry sent in 1923 to commemorate forty years of friendship. He recalls when they spent a day canoeing in Bar Harbor and how he later “wondered” why nothing came of it. “Well, my dear, I’ve never ‘wondered’ about anyone else, and there wouldn’t be much of me if you were out of it.” There’s no doubt they had an intense and close relationship, but we will probably never know if they spent those forty years—or any part of it—as lovers. In a recent biography, Hermione Lee weighs the evidence and decides that is “more likely . . . they were not. But that does not mean she did not love him.”<br />
<br />
In the months following Berry’s surgery and first stroke, Wharton wrote “Atrophy,” one of her shortest tales and the only story she published that year. It is a curious yet masterful story and, given the above biographical details, one is perhaps tempted to read too much into it—although the piece was submitted for publication before Berry’s death. The protagonist, Nora Frenway, is a married woman who finds out that her former lover appears to be dying and decides to visit him at his home, where he is under the protective care of his sister. The affair had been a source of great happiness and intimacy, but she has kept it a secret (she thinks) from everyone. The story was reprinted in the 1930 collection <i>Certain People</i>, which was reviewed in <i>The New York Times Book Review</i> by Percy Hutchison. The first half of his article focused on “Atrophy” and concluded:<br />
<blockquote>
It was another Nora who blustered out through the door of a Doll’s House. Well, it can’t be done, says Mrs. Wharton, rather savagely. And who is right? Crestfallen, spiritually bedraggled Nora Frenway’s clattering back to the Connecticut railway station in the antiquated taxicab may become quite as important a literary figure as Ibsen’s Nora, from whose eruption cataclysmic social changes were predicted. If Mrs. Wharton is right, then those changes were not so cataclysmic after all, and it is pretty much the same old world. “Atrophy” is a story to be read and pondered.
</blockquote>
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">The source for the quote from Ogden Codman’s letter to his mother is Shari Benstock’s <i>No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton</i> (1994).</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">N</span>ora Frenway settled down furtively in her corner of the Pullman and, as the express plunged out of the Grand Central Station, wondered at herself for being where she was. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Wharton-Atrophy.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Wharton-Atrophy.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span> <br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Wharton-Atrophy.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-67597152900004266362024-01-14T13:44:00.010-05:002024-01-14T16:54:04.941-05:00Letter to Thomas Jefferson<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806)</b></span
><br />
From
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"
><i>Black Writers of the Founding Era</i></a
><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox">
<b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"
><br />
<a href="https://friendsofbenjaminbanneker.com/history/benjamin-banneker-2/"
>Benjamin Banneker: Biography and Timeline</a
>
(Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-14-02-0267"
>Jefferson’s Notes from Condorcet on Slavery</a
>” (National Archive)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a
href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/07/the-natural-right-of-all-men-their.html"
>The natural right of all Men—& their Children</a
>,” Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess, Brister Slenser, Prince Hall, et al.<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/02/madison-washington.html"
>Madison Washington</a
>,” William Wells Brown<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/01/a-dream.html">A Dream</a
>,” Anonymous<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"
><img
alt=""
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><i
><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"
><b>Black Writers of the Founding Era</b></a
></i
><br />
767 pages<br />
List price: $40.00<br />
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<a
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><br /><br
/></span>
</div>
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align="center"
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style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">
Manuscript page depicting a 1791 solar eclipse, from Benjamin
Banneker’s Astronomical Journal, drawn while he was working on the
survey team to establish the boundaries of Washington, D.C. Banneker’s
notes read: “This projection I laid down for April the third 1791 when
the Sun arose centrally eclipsed at the City of Washington. This is a
back tryal to see how my present method would agree with the former.
N.B. Ferguson’s Tables make the new Moon about 30 minutes to[o] soon |
April 3, 10:30 | I say [April] 3, 11:32 AM." (Courtesy of the Maryland
Center for History and Culture)
</td>
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<br />In 1791 Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State under President George
Washington, sent a manuscript to the French mathematician Nicolas Caritat,
Marquis de Condorcet, who was the Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of
Sciences. The cover letter explained:
<blockquote>
I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a
negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the
United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. I procured him to be
employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city
on the Patowmac [Potomac], and in the intervals of his leisure, while on that
work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own
handwriting, and which I inclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of
Geometrical problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy and
respectable member of society. He is a free man. I shall be delighted to see
these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of
talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and
not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which
intellect depends.
</blockquote>
A decade earlier, Condorcet published
<i>Réflexions Sur L'Esclavage des Négres</i> (<i
>Reflections on the Slavery of Negroes</i
>), a strident condemnation of slavery, and Jefferson purchased two copies of
the work. Its opening preface, “Epistle dedicatory to the Negro slaves,”
which <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-14-02-0267">Jefferson translated for himself in his personal notes</a>, began, “Tho’ not of your
colour, my friends, I have ever considered you as my brethren. Nature has
endowed you with the same genius, the same judgment, the same virtues as the
Whites.” When Jefferson lived in Paris between 1784 and 1789, he had known
Condorcet; as biographer Fred Kaplan points out in
<i
><a
href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/his-masterly-pen-fred-kaplan?variant=40153665830946"
>His Masterly Pen</a
></i
>, it’s not clear whether Condorcet and his associates knew that Jefferson was a
slaveowner—or that James and Sally Hemings, the two servants staying in his
hotel, were in fact enslaved by him, contrary to French law.<br />
<br />
It is also not known if Condorcet ever received the manuscript sent to him by
Jefferson. The French revolution had turned the city of Paris into a center of
chaos, and Condorcet died in a prison three years later, probably from
poisoning. The author of the manuscript in question, which featured among its
calculations astronomical data and tide tables for 1792, was Benjamin Banneker,
the most accomplished African American mathematician and scientist in the early
history of the United States. The child of a free Black mother and a formerly
enslaved father from Africa, Banneker was an autodidact with limited schooling
but a lifelong intellectual curiosity. In his forties he took on astronomy and,
with the support of members of the prominent Ellicott family who lived near him
in rural Maryland, he was appointed to the surveying team that laid out the
District of Columbia in 1791—an assignment mentioned by Jefferson in his letter
to Condorcet. Banneker produced annual almanacs from 1792 to 1797 in seven
cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond.<br />
<br />
When Banneker sent Jefferson the handwritten copy of his first almanac, he
included a cover letter that, as he put it, took “a liberty which seemed to me
scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished and dignified station
in which you stand.” He chided the Secretary of State for his views on Africans
and their descendants, such as those expressed in
<i>Notes on the State of Virginia</i> (“in reason [they are] much inferior, as I
think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the
investigations of Euclid”), and for the hypocrisy between the professed ideas of
the Declaration of Independence and the realities of slavery. Jefferson’s
brief response acknowledged receipt of the manuscript and indicated he would
send it to Condorcet—but he left unanswered most of the points raised in
Banneker’s letter, which we reprint below. Both Banneker’s letter and
Jefferson’s reply were reprinted several times, including in the Baltimore
edition of his 1793 almanac and in a standalone pamphlet printed in
Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">
Much of the above paragraph detailing Banneker’s biography is adapted from
<i>Black Writers of the Founding Era</i> (edited by James G. Basker, with
Nicole Seary).
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<blockquote>
<i
>For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce
the selection, in its entirety, below.<br />
You may also
<span style="color: #990000;"
><a
href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Banneker-Letter-Jefferson.pdf"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"
><u><span style="color: #990000;">download it as a PDF</span></u></a
>
<span style="color: black;">or </span
><a
href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Banneker-Letter-Jefferson.pdf"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"
><u><span style="color: #990000;">view it in Google Docs</span></u></a
>.</span
></i
>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: 140%;"><b>Letter to Thomas Jefferson</b></span
><br /><br />
Maryland, Baltimore County, Near Ellicotts Lower Mill, Augt 19th 1791<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">Thomas Jefferson Secretary of State</div>
Sir,<br />
<br />
I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom which I take with you on
the present occasion; a liberty which seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I
reflected on that distinguished and dignified station in which you stand, and
the almost general prejudice and prepossession, which is so prevalent in the
world against those of my complexion.<br />
<br />
I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we
are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the
world, that we have long been seen rather as brutish than human, and scarcely
capable of mental endowments.<br />
<br />
Sir I hope I may safely admit, in consequence of that report which hath reached
me, that you are a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature, than
many others; that you are measurably friendly, and well disposed towards us, and
that you are willing and ready to lend your aid and assistance to our relief
from those many distresses and numerous calamities to which we are reduced.<br />
<br />
Now, Sir, if this is founded in truth, I apprehend you will readyly embrace
every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and
oppinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us, and that your
sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath
given Being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but
that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the same sensations and
endued us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in
society or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of
the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.<br />
<br />
Sir, if these are sentiments of which you are fully persuaded, I hope you cannot
but acknowledge, that it is the indispensible duty of those who maintain for
themselves the rights of human nature and who profess the obligations of
christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of
the human race, from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor
under, and this I apprehend a full conviction of the truth and obligation of
these principles should lead all to.<br />
<br />
Sir, I have long been convinced, that if your love for yourselves, and for those
inestimable laws which preserve to you the rights of human nature, was founded
on sincerity, you could not but be solicitous that every individual, of whatever
rank or distinction, might with you equally enjoy the blessings thereof; neither
could you rest satisfied, short of the most active diffusion of your exertions,
in order to their promotions from any state of degradation, to which the
unjustifiable cruelty and barbarism of men may have reduced them.<br />
<br />
Sir, I freely and chearfully acknowledge, that I am of the African race, and in
that colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye, and it is under a sense
of the most profound gratitude to the supreme Ruler of the universe, that I now
confess to you, that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom, and
inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed; but that I have
abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings, which proceed from that
free and unequalled liberty with which you are favoured, and which I hope you
will willingly allow you have mercifully receiv’d, from the immediate hand of
that Being, from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift.<br />
<br />
Sir, suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the Arms and tyranny
of the British Crown were exerted with every powerful effort in order to reduce
you to a state of servitude: look back I entreat you on the variety of dangers
to which you were exposed, reflect on that time, in which every human aid
appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect of
inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and grateful
sense of your miraculous and providential preservation; you cannot but
acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquility which you enjoy you have
mercifully received, and that it is the peculiar blessing of Heaven.<br />
<br />
This Sir, was a time in which you clearly saw into the injustice of a state of
slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its
condition, it was now Sir, that your abhorrence thereof was so excited; that you
publickly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be
recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages. “We hold these truths to be self
evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are, life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.”<br />
<br />
Here Sir, was a time in which your tender feelings for yourselves had engaged
you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper Ideas of the great
violation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you
were intitled by nature; but Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect that altho you
were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his
equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges which he had
conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in
detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning
captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty
of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others, with respect
to yourselves.<br />
<br />
Sir, I suppose that your knowledge of the situation of my brethren is too
extensive to need a recital here; neither shall I presume to prescribe methods
by which they may be relieved, otherwise than by recommending to you and all
others, to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have imbibed
with respect to them, and as Job proposed to his friends “Put your Souls in
their Souls Stead,” thus shall your hearts be enlarged with kindness and
benevolence toward them, and thus shall you need neither the direction of myself
or others in what manner to proceed herein.<br />
<br />
And now Sir, altho my sympathy and affection for my brethren hath caused my
enlargement thus far, I ardently hope that your candour and generosity will
plead with you in my behalf, when I make known to you, that it was not
originally my design; but having taken up my pen in order to direct to you as a
present, a copy of an Almanac which I have calculated for the succeeding year, I
was unexpectedly and unavoidably led thereto.<br />
<br />
This calculation Sir, is the production of my arduous study in this my advanced
stage of life; for having long had unbounded desires to become acquainted with
the secrets of nature, I have had to gratify my curiosity herein through my own
assiduous application to Astronomical Study, in which I need not recount to you
the many difficulties and disadvantages which I have had to encounter. And altho
I had almost declined to make my calculation for the ensuing year, in
consequence of that time which I had allotted therefor being taken up at the
Federal Territory, by the request of Mr. Andrew Ellicott, yet finding myself
under several engagements to Printers of this state to whom I had communicated
my design, on my return to my place of residence, I industriously applyed myself
thereto, which I hope I have accomplished with correctness and accuracy, a copy
of which I have taken the liberty to direct to you, and which I humbly request
you will favorably receive; and altho you may have the opportunity of perusing
it after its publication, yet I choose to send it to you in manuscript previous
thereto, that thereby you might not only have an earlier inspection, but that
you might also view it in my own hand writing.<br />
<br />
and now Sir, I shall conclude<br />
and subscribe myself with the most
profound respect<br />
your
most obedient humble servant<br />
B Banneker<br />
<br />
NB any communication to me may be had by direction to Mr Elias Ellicott merchant
in Baltimore Town.<br />
<blockquote>
On August 30, 1791, writing from Philadelphia, Jefferson responded to Banneker
as follows: “Sir, I thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19th instant
and for the Almanac it contained. No body wishes more than I do to see such
proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents
equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of
them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in
Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to
see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body &
mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present
existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I
have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet,
Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic
society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a
right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained
of them. I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedt. humble servt. Th.
Jefferson.”
</blockquote>
<div style="line-height: 110%;">
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;"
>“Letter to Thomas Jefferson” was transcribed from the manuscript,
Banneker Astronomical Journal, MS2700, Maryland Historical Society. Courtesy
of the Maryland Historical Society.</span
>
</div>
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-90801713737808053712024-01-07T16:21:00.017-05:002024-01-07T19:24:01.106-05:00The Martyr<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=290"><i>Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings</i></a><br />
<br /><div class="linksbox">
<b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><br />
“<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/katherine-anne-porters-pandemic/">Katherine Anne Porter’s Pandemic</a>” (Melanie Benson Taylor, <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/katherine-the-great/">Katherine the Great</a>” (Don Graham, <i>Texas Monthly</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/06/charmed-life.html">The Charmed Life</a>,” Katherine Anne Porter<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/12/w-l-s.html">W. L. S</a>.,” Theodore Dreiser<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/10/stories-told-by-artist.html">Stories Told by an Artist</a>,” Stephen Crane<br />
<br />
<b>Buy this book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/477-flowering-judas-and-other-stories-loa-ebook-classic/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/9781598533309.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/stories/"><i><b>Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas and Other Stories</b></i></a><br />
LOA eBook Classic<br />
List price: $6.99<br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi26yTgQLrBcXPUNFP8bAFydpsFs2_4EZzbnUP6SJq0Qp_OkUsbvBClM9PD0GkZ63yXM4W2AJBm2T5umM6m5cb_JytWBR2FGi9v6pAFEp3wEoUAnkQ0-ZXRjQSoJ-_nEGQlXIGVIi6YBSR0a8siEu29zPLh5KSs31fMHuFDZSZnUedpCW83vZ2wvW-1-G4/s1600/Rivera-Creation.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi26yTgQLrBcXPUNFP8bAFydpsFs2_4EZzbnUP6SJq0Qp_OkUsbvBClM9PD0GkZ63yXM4W2AJBm2T5umM6m5cb_JytWBR2FGi9v6pAFEp3wEoUAnkQ0-ZXRjQSoJ-_nEGQlXIGVIi6YBSR0a8siEu29zPLh5KSs31fMHuFDZSZnUedpCW83vZ2wvW-1-G4/s1600/Rivera-Creation.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Creation</i>, 1922–23, encaustic and goldleaf mural by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957), in the auditorium of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Mexico City. The figure of Wisdom, an element of Porter’s story, is in the sky on the left, opposite the figure of Science. (www.diegorivera.org)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In 1965, Hank Lopez, editor of <i>Dialogos</i>, a prominent cultural magazine in Mexico City, interviewed Katherine Anne Porter about her life in Mexico during the early 1920s and early 1930s. When he asked what prompted her to move there, she replied:
<blockquote>
I was brought up in San Antonio, which was always full of Mexicans really in exile. . . . It was a revolutionary city, so, we kind of kept up with things in Mexico. But in New York almost the first people I ran into were all these charming young Mexican artists, and Adolfo Best-Maugard was among them. He died a few days ago; was a lifelong friend of mine from that day to this. And there was a wonderful lad—he called himself Tata Nacho [Ignacio Fernández Esperón]. He’s still living—he was at Adolfo’s funeral the other day. He was playing the piano in a Greenwich Village cabaret to make his living, and he was a great revolutionary. I was living in Greenwich Village, too, and we got to be friends: I was thinking of going to Spain. But they told me, “Don’t go to Spain. Nothing has happened there for four hundred years. In Mexico something wonderful is going to happen. Why don’t you go to Mexico?”
</blockquote>
Porter took a train to Mexico City in October 1920 with reporting assignments from <i>The Christian Science Monitor</i> and the promise of a job as the managing editor of the new English-language <i>Magazine of Mexico</i>—which, alas, would lose its funding after only two issues. Soon after her arrival, she met American journalist Thorberg Haberman, editor of the English-language section of the daily <i>Heraldo de México</i>, and her husband, Robert, a labor organizer and speechwriter for Mexican president Alvaro Obregón. Porter soon became acquainted with Obregón, as well as many other prominent figures in the new government, the labor movement, and the press.<br />
<br />
Like most of the members of her new social circle, Porter favored Obregón, who was elected in 1920—the twelfth president in the chaotic and violent years since Porfirio Díaz’s 31-year regime came to an end in 1911. “After the scintillating procession of remote and inaccessible rulers,” Porter extolled to readers of the <i>Magazine of Mexico</i>, “there came up from the land a farmer, Alvaro Obregón, prosperous and well acquainted with his country in its working dress; a man of straight literal mind, with a detached legal passion for setting disorder to rights.” The following year, Obregón appointed Porter as the American curator of a state-sponsored exhibit designed to tour the U.S. While writing and researching the exhibition catalog, she became an ardent admirer of artists Diego Rivera and Xavier Guerrero and caricaturists José Clemente Orozco and Miguel Covarrubias.<br />
<br />
“Mexico was wonderful—a crowd of us were there, perfectly free of each other, yet happily knit together by our interest in Mexican art,” she recalled in one interview four decades later. Rivera had recently returned from fourteen years in Europe, and Porter would meet up with him, his soon-to-be second wife, Lupe Marín, and several of their friends in various spots, including the Café de los Monotes<a href="#note">*</a>, which was owned by Orozco’s brother and which featured Orozco’s and Covarrubias’s caricatures on its walls. She also visited Rivera while he worked on <i>Creation</i>, the famous mural commissioned by the Obregón government for the auditorium of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School). After she finished the exhibition catalog, Porter and Rivera collaborated on two publications; in 1924 “The Guild Spirit in American Art, as told to Katherine Anne Porter by Diego Rivera,” appeared in a special issue on Mexico of <i>Survey Graphic</i> magazine, and the following year Porter translated excerpts from Rivera’s notebooks for <i>Arts</i> magazine.<br />
<br />
In various essays and reviews, Porter commented on how “there is no conscience crying through the literature of the country. A small group of intellectuals still writes about romance and the stars, and roses and the shadowy eyes of ladies, touching no sorrow of the human heart other than the pain of unrequited love.” Yet she acknowledged that “a literature of revolt” would not reach the masses in a country with such a low literacy rate; she had high hopes instead for the influence of the visual arts on Mexican life. The murals of Rivera (and his compatriots) could be “as immediate, disturbing and almost as dangerous as a Presidential election.”<br />
<br />
Privately, however, Porter became disillusioned by Rivera and by the revolutionary spirit in general—or more accurately, by the failure of the national culture to aspire to her own idealistic notions of what a people’s revolution should entail. She complained that Rivera’s artistic circle, with rare exception, had diluted their talents with foreign influences and had abandoned the purity of “the art of the Indian in Mexico”; that his peers “had fled out of Europe with years of training and experience, saturated with theories and methods, bent on fresh discoveries”; that the “pure-blooded Indian artist” did not exist. Forty years later, during her interview with Lopez, she recalled, “I never (after sort of being hoodwinked by that particular school of art) appraised Diego quite the same way. Before I was finished I didn’t like his character—he was a treacherous man and a dishonest artist.”<br />
<br />
A story from 1923—the second piece of fiction she published—shows her early disenchantment. Written while she was still working with Rivera, “The Martyr” is (as she put it in 1965) a “little tirade against Diego Rivera and his wild woman Lupe Marín.” In this work of satire, the artist is nearing completion of a mural featuring twenty female figures when his fickle wife, who is his model, abandons him, and he becomes unable to finish the nineteenth figure. As Darlene Harbour Unrue has pointed out, <i>Creation</i> has twenty figures (which conservative critics mocked as “Rivera’s monkeys”). The nineteenth represents “Wisdom,” which according to Rivera’s notes for the mural “is a vigorous figure of a southern Indian” that “unites the group to the central focus.” By turning the painter’s theme from revolutionary idealism to “the pain of unrequited love,” Porter is effectively comparing Rivera to the writers of popular Mexican novels; his work has lost its central focus, its Wisdom.<br />
<br />
“The Martyr” was one of Porter’s several attempts to satirize Rivera—but it was the only one she finished. She published it in <i>Century</i> magazine in 1923 but a decade later chose not to include it in the collection <i>The Flowering Judas and Other Stories</i>. In 1965, she added the story in “The Flowering Judas” section of her <i>Collected Stories</i>, claiming she had forgotten why it had been omitted from the earlier edition.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><a id="note">*</a> <i>Monotes</i> can refer to large monkeys or giant puppets, especially of the type used in parades; it was the Orozco brothers’ sly reference to the oversized caricatures on the walls of their café.<br />
<br />
Many of the above details about the connections between Katherine Anne Porter and Diego Rivera are discussed in <i>Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction</i> and <i>Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist</i>, both by Darlene Harbour Unrue.<br />
</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">R</span>ubén, the most illustrious painter in Mexico, was deeply in love with his model Isabel, who was in turn romantically attached to a rival artist whose name is of no importance. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Porter-Martyr.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Porter-Martyr.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Porter-Martyr.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-10940954324267197652023-12-17T17:04:00.011-05:002023-12-17T17:42:12.351-05:00The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Joan Didion (1934–2021)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><i>American Christmas Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><br />
“<a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/intimate-images-joan-didion-years">Intimate Images of Joan Didion Through the Years</a>” (Matt Mullen and Griffin Dunne, <i>Interview</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://la.curbed.com/maps/joan-didion-white-album-los-angeles-house">Mapping Joan Didion’s Los Angeles</a>” (Pauline O’Connor, <i>Curbed</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/11/quiet-days-in-malibu.html">Quiet Days in Malibu</a>,” Joan Didion<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/12/the-loudest-voice.html">The Loudest Voice</a>,” Grace Paley<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/12/according-to-solomon.html">According to Solomon</a>,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/05/night-we-all-had-grippe.html">The Night We All Had Grippe</a>,” Shirley Jackson<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkJqoZy6NBejw3QUPt-PirjmSu_ua6snoW3uZjB7WEMi8DYFJH7aaOJS_DBgharnAaFWCMTVQQvz8Q8F7rmnEgqKTZO_zLl09galrgmMpqPw2tYwPaaFsRGFh2yXfqzLY1TDzIc57_hMg/s0/Christmas.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><i><a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><b>American Christmas Stories</b></a></i> <br />
From the Civil War era to today: 59 stories in all<br />
List price: $29.95<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Save 25%!</b></span><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><b>Web Store price: $22.50</b></a></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS2-kMLDOsrIrzMFGpT-MW7HmLXYAHXwmrydSCDTXtuoZjOjT3WB3jBraChWH7LBlzVrrc7XWH1MzPboebZU9UBzvYmdvXQJpbm65hextjApdIG8iWIw3SYj3UzXoC-BBfK5QM1kV4xGqjUcwV3f2hQWcfnpgkvx6WH5_a0wtznts-MCnSj5eoIPUHHRA/s1600/christmasdecormags.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS2-kMLDOsrIrzMFGpT-MW7HmLXYAHXwmrydSCDTXtuoZjOjT3WB3jBraChWH7LBlzVrrc7XWH1MzPboebZU9UBzvYmdvXQJpbm65hextjApdIG8iWIw3SYj3UzXoC-BBfK5QM1kV4xGqjUcwV3f2hQWcfnpgkvx6WH5_a0wtznts-MCnSj5eoIPUHHRA/s1600/christmasdecormags.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“It was late in September, about the time certain canny elves began strategically spotting their <i>Make It Yourself for Christmas</i> books near supermarket check-out counters.” Three of the many 1966 Christmas decor publications that inspired Joan Didion to write her humorous Christmas story. (eBay).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Joan Didion had been working at <i>Vogue</i> for eight years when she was dismissed in late 1964, shortly after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved to Los Angeles. She began at the magazine as a writer of promotional copy and eventually worked her way up to the position of features associate before becoming one of <i>Vogue</i>’s two film critics. Years later, both Didion and Pauline Kael, who was the film critic at <i>McCall’s</i>, would tell people they had been fired for trashing <i>The Sound of Music</i>; Didion’s review of that movie includes the often-quoted zinger, “Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.” While Kael’s recollection concerning her dismissal has been questioned by those who worked with her at the time, “Didion has a bit more leverage in her legend, if only because there is no loud opponent to her version of events,” <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/michelledean/how-joan-didion-became-joan-didion">writes film critic Justine Smith</a>.<br />
<br />
Working as a freelancer, Didion began publishing articles and stories for <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i>, and she and Dunne struggled to make ends meet. In early 1966, they adopted a baby girl, who had been born at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica on March 3, and named her Quintana Roo. “Once she was born I was never not afraid,” she recalls in her 2011 memoir <i>Blue Nights</i>. “<i>What if I fail to take care of this baby?</i>” The struggle to balance domestic concerns and a career, along with doubts of her own abilities, haunted and inspired Didion’s work for the next five decades.<br />
<br />
“Our daybook for those months shows no income at all for April, $305.06 for May, none for June, and, for July, $5.29, a dividend on our single capital asset, fifty shares of Transamerica stock left to me by my grandmother,” <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/01/after-henry.html">she wrote years later</a>. Amidst this hardship, she published “The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall,” a humor piece for the holidays that pokes fun of her desire to be a “‘can do’ kind of woman.” Reprinted below, the piece is somewhat atypical for her, resembling Shirley Jackson’s or Erma Bombeck’s stories about home life far more than anything Didion would write in the coming years.<br />
<br />
During the remainder of the decade, she and Dunne enjoyed a complete turnaround in fortunes. They struck a relatively lucrative deal with <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> for a monthly column which would alternate between the two of them, and her first book, <i>Slouching Towards Bethlehem</i>, became a critical success. At the end of 1969, she and Dunne worked together on the screenplay for <i>The Panic in Needle Park</i>, adapted from the novel about heroin addicts by James Mills and starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn. After <i>The Post</i> folded that year, she was offered a column in <i>Life</i>, and the opening of one piece seems almost a sequel of sorts—a far more Didion-like revision of the “Figgy Pudding” story.
<blockquote>
I had wanted to make this Christmas a “nice” Christmas, for my husband and for our baby and for everyone who came to our house in Los Angeles, and, because such plans lend always to involve an element of self-congratulation, a way of perceiving oneself in a new and flattering light, I suppose most of all for myself. I saw a house full of candles and star jasmine. . . . We would make pomegranate jelly and wrap the jars in red Cellophane. We would sit at the piano and pick out carols together. . . .</blockquote>
The remainder of this newest holiday essay, however, does not echo the obsessive home decor mania of her previous story. Didion and Dunne were in New York to work on the film, and the day after she wrote the piece they had “an appointment with a dealer in a Blimpy Burger on a desolate side street” and would “spend the next week with two junkies.” She felt remorseful because she wouldn’t be spending Christmas Day with her three-year-old daughter doing “so many small things as to imprint indelibly upon her memory some trace of the rituals of family love.” Yet in the end she concluded, “The baby will know something about family love on Christmas because she knows something about it today, and she will also know something about its complexities.”
<br /><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<blockquote><i>For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.<br />
You may also <span style="color: #990000;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Didion-Figgy-Pudding.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">download it as a PDF</span></u></a> <span style="color: black;">or </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Didion-Figgy-Pudding.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">view it in Google Docs</span></u></a>.</span></i></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: 140%;"><b>The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall</b></span><br /><br />
<span style="font-size: 160%;">Y</span>ou will perhaps have difficulty understanding why I conceived the idea of making 20 hard-candy topiary trees and 20 figgy puddings in the first place. The heart of it is that although I am frail, lazy and unsuited to doing anything except what I am paid to do, which is sit by myself and type with one finger, I like to imagine myself a “can-do” kind of woman, capable of patching the corral fence, pickling enough peaches to feed the hands all winter, and then winning a trip to Minneapolis in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. In fact, the day I stop believing that if put to it I could win the Pillsbury Bake-Off will signal the death of something.<br />
<br />
It was late in September, about the time certain canny elves began strategically spotting their <i>Make it Yourself for Christmas</i> books near supermarket check-out counters, when I sensed the old familiar discontent. I would stand there in the Westward Ho market, waiting to check out my frozen chicken Tetrazzini and leafing through the books, and I would see how far I had drifted from the real pleasures. I did not “do” things. I did not sew spangles on potholders for my friends. I did not make branches of marzipan mistletoe for my hostesses. I did not give Corn Dog and Caroling Parties for neighborhood children (Did I know any neighborhood children? Were there any neighborhood children? What exactly was my neighborhood?), the Corn Dogs to be accompanied by Hot Santa’s Grog.<br />
<br />
Nor had it ever occurred to me to buy Styrofoam balls, cover them with hard candies, plant them on wooden stalks in small flowerpots, and end up with amusingly decorative hard-candy topiary trees, perfect for centerpieces or last-minute gifts. At the check-out counter, I recognized clearly that my plans for the Christmas season—making a few deadlines—were stale and unprofitable. Had my great-great-grandmother come west in a covered wagon and strung cranberries on scrub oaks so that I might sit by myself in a room typing with one finger and ordering Italian twinkle lights by mail from Hammacher Schlemmer?<br />
<br />
I wanted to be the kind of woman who made hard-candy topiary trees and figgy puddings. The figgy puddings were not in the <i>Make it Yourself for Christmas</i> books but something I remembered from a carol. “Oh bring us a figgy pudding and a happy new year,” the line went. I was unsure what a figgy pudding was, but it had the ring of the real thing.<br />
<br />
“Exactly what kind of therapy are we up to this week?” my husband asked when I arrived home with 20 Styrofoam balls, 20 flowerpots and 60 pounds of, or roughly 6,000, hard candies, each wrapped in cellophane.<br />
<br />
“Hard-candy topiary trees, if you don’t mind,” I said briskly, to gain the offensive before he could mention my last project, a hand-knitted sweater which would have cost $60 at Jax, the distinction being that, had I bought it at Jax, it would very probably be finished. “Twenty of them. Decorative. Amusing.”<br />
<br />
He said nothing.<br />
<br />
“<i>Christmas</i> presents,” I said.<br />
<br />
There was a moment of silence as we contemplated the dining-room table, covered now with shifting dunes of lemon drops.<br />
<br />
“Presents for whom?” he said.<br />
<br />
“Your mother might like one.”<br />
<br />
“That leaves nineteen.”<br />
<br />
“All right. Let’s just say they’re centerpieces.”<br />
<br />
“Let’s just say that if you’re making twenty centerpieces, I hope you’re under contract to Chasen’s. Or maybe to Hilton.”<br />
<br />
“That’s all you know,” I countered, wittily.<br />
<br />
Provisions for the figgy puddings were rather more a problem. <i>The Vogue Book of Menus and Recipes</i> made no mention of figgy pudding, nor did my cookbook, although the latter offered a recipe for “Steamed Date or Fig Pudding.” This had a tentative sound, and so I merely laid in 20 pounds of dried figs and planned, when the time came, to improvise from there. I thought it unnecessary to mention the puddings to my husband just yet.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, work on the topiary trees proceeded. Pebbles were gathered from the driveway to line the flowerpots. (“Next time it rains and that driveway washes out,” I was informed, “there’s going to be one unhappy Santa’s Helper around here.”) Lengths of doweling to be used as stalks were wrapped with satin ribbons. The 20 Styrofoam balls glistened with candies, each affixed with an artfully concealed silk pin. (As it happened I had several thousand silk pins left from the time I planned to improvise a copy of a Grès evening dress.) There was to be a lemon-drop tree and an ice-mint tree and a cinnamon-lump tree. There was to be a delicate crystallized-violet tree. There was to be a witty-licorice tree.<br />
<br />
All in all, the operation went more smoothly than any I had undertaken since I was 16 and won third prize in the Sacramento Valley Elimination Make-It-Yourself-With-Wool Contest. I framed graceful rejoinders to compliments. I considered the probability that I. Magnin or Neiman-Marcus would press me to make trees for them on an exclusive basis. All that remained was to set the candy balls upon their stalks—that and the disposition of the figs—and I had set an evening aside for this crowning of the season’s achievement.<br />
<br />
I suppose that it was about seven o’clock when I placed the first candy-covered ball on the first stalk. Because it did not seem overly secure, I drilled a deeper hole in the second ball. That one, too, once on its stalk, exhibited a certain tendency to sway, but then so does the Golden Gate Bridge. I was flushed with imminent success, visions of candy trees come true all around me. I suppose it was about eight o’clock when I placed the last ball on the last stalk, and I suppose it was about one minute after eight when I heard the first crack, and I suppose it was about 8:15 (there were several minutes of frantic shoring maneuvers) when my husband found me sitting on the dining-room floor, crying, surrounded by 60 pounds of scattered lemon drops and ice-mints and cinnamon lumps and witty licorice.<br />
<br />
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we get the grout left over from when you were going to retile the bathroom, and make a ceramic candy floor.”<br />
<br />
“If you think you’re going to get any figgy puddings,” I said, “you’d better think again.”<br />
<br />
But I had stopped crying, and we went out for an expensive dinner. The next morning I gathered up the candies and took them to Girl Scout headquarters, presumably to be parceled into convalescents’ nut cups by some gnome Brownie. The Styrofoam balls I saved. A clever woman should be able to do something very attractive for Easter with Styrofoam balls and 20 pounds of figs.<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">Originally published in <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> (December 3, 1966).
Copyright © 1966 by Joan Didion. Reprinted by permission.</span></div>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-30960583189465583602023-12-10T17:51:00.021-05:002023-12-11T10:59:39.686-05:00Christmas Every Day<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>William Dean Howells (1837–1920)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><i>American Christmas Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br /><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/groundhog-day-russian-doll-secret-history-science-time-loops/">Live Like There’s No Tomorrow: The Secret History—and Science—of Time Loops</a>” (Jonathan Holmes, <i>The Telegraph</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://blog.oup.com/2017/09/william-dean-howells-gilded-age-excerpt/">William Dean Howells and the Gilded Age</a>” (Richard White, Oxford University Press)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/04/shakespeare.html">Shakespeare</a>,” William Dean Howells<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/12/thurlows-christmas-story.html">Thurlow’s Christmas Story</a>,” John Kendrick Bangs<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/12/a-christmas-party-that-prevented-split.html">A Christmas Party That Prevented a Split in the Church</a>,” Margaret Black<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/07/the-empresss-ring.html">The Empress’s Ring</a>,” Nancy Hale<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkJqoZy6NBejw3QUPt-PirjmSu_ua6snoW3uZjB7WEMi8DYFJH7aaOJS_DBgharnAaFWCMTVQQvz8Q8F7rmnEgqKTZO_zLl09galrgmMpqPw2tYwPaaFsRGFh2yXfqzLY1TDzIc57_hMg/s0/Christmas.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><i><a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><b>American Christmas Stories</b></a></i><br />
From the Civil War era to today: 59 stories in all<br />
List price: $29.95<br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/703-american-christmas-stories"><b>Web Store price: $22.50</b></a></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZEsjeGqGveWgP2H-h_OD7uPrznWuTU9-jH4Tz-dqs-RaF6WFrcziIrUklWE4SzYsJnM90LEnxjBIq5SD0oLbYOKU-Z0V3nrRql9zPQLqlfH74e6Fjs5hwpt6l-KQ_ZNZ2ABE4Om6QHavwUn62GQqe8lTDLU1BLq2h1qDk0exm48AILE4UKUMrSbRUdhw/s1600/MildredHowellsChristmas.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZEsjeGqGveWgP2H-h_OD7uPrznWuTU9-jH4Tz-dqs-RaF6WFrcziIrUklWE4SzYsJnM90LEnxjBIq5SD0oLbYOKU-Z0V3nrRql9zPQLqlfH74e6Fjs5hwpt6l-KQ_ZNZ2ABE4Om6QHavwUn62GQqe8lTDLU1BLq2h1qDk0exm48AILE4UKUMrSbRUdhw/s1600/MildredHowellsChristmas.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“The police told them to shovel their presents off from the sidewalk.” Illustration for “Christmas Every Day” by Mildred Howells (1873-1966) in <i>The Howells Story Book</i> (1900).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the year 1900, William Dean Howells agreed to take over the dormant “Easy Chair” column that the editors of <i>Harper's Monthly</i> hoped to resurrect “in its old place in the rear of the magazine.” From 1863 until his death in 1892, George William Curtis had been responsible for the feature. Although Howells was himself quite famous and highly respected by critics and readers, he knew the bar had been set high by his predecessor.<br />
<br />
In his first column, Howells imagined taking Curtis’s old easy chair out of storage. Awakened from its eight-year slumber, the chair begins to speak and remembers the last article Curtis had written, which was about the spirit of the holidays: “You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little. . . . Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance?”<br />
<br />
“That was Curtis!” the chair exclaims. “The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy, . . . the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience and the undying hopefulness! Do you think that you are fit to take his place?” The chair then challenges Howells, “What good can you find to say of Christmas?”<br />
<br />
At first, Howells is stymied, because “in his heart he was sick of Christmas” and its excesses: the sentimental stories, the gifts, the “heavy Christmas dinners and indigestion,” and all the rest. But he responds that “for the young to whom these things are new, and for the poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is yours forever.” After a while, Howells notices that the chair has nodded off, and he instructs the warehouse agent to return it to storage, quietly adding, “Don’t wake it.”<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnjFtuqrEnDyztTTyAOwo51pfqdhnoxTJ2_CV6N4Ozhf5zJJraLbjFLbqCjMm9-DyVTBtuLXu-1Khr-85pZQ5jiQrPw8iS-OLsDHTPsiclZEurw_lvS7oBq6PP7XKaWMk1GXIEiQthsBUhKqDGIUB-_UVbCf-N3y3BLgRkmpSyZV2DNv-BntP0Vn1oFfo/s1600/MildredHowellsSecondMorning.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 0px 1em 0px 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnjFtuqrEnDyztTTyAOwo51pfqdhnoxTJ2_CV6N4Ozhf5zJJraLbjFLbqCjMm9-DyVTBtuLXu-1Khr-85pZQ5jiQrPw8iS-OLsDHTPsiclZEurw_lvS7oBq6PP7XKaWMk1GXIEiQthsBUhKqDGIUB-_UVbCf-N3y3BLgRkmpSyZV2DNv-BntP0Vn1oFfo/s1600/MildredHowellsSecondMorning.jpg" width="300"></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“The Second Christmas Morning.” One of five<br />illustrations by 12-year-old Mildred Howells for<br />the first appearance of “Christmas Every Day”<br />in <i>St. Nicholas</i> magazine.</td></tr></tbody></table>Fourteen years earlier, in 1886, Howells had published “Christmas Every Day,” his first work written especially for children. The story combined his cynicism about the excesses of Christmas with his love for his three children and their innocent yet perceptive wonder. It appeared first in <i>St. Nicholas</i>, a magazine for children, with five hand-drawn illustrations by an unidentified “little girl.” The young artist was in fact his 12-year-old daughter, Mildred, who grew up to become a moderately successful watercolorist and book illustrator. In 1900, Mildred provided the illustrations for <i>The Howells Story Book</i>, a selection of the best pieces that her father had written for children, and she used the opportunity to include a far more polished drawing for his Christmas story (reproduced above).<br />
<br />
Howells continued to publish children’s stories after the appearance of “Christmas Every Day”; over the next six years he published four tales in the <i>Harper’s Young People</i> magazine and gathered them in the 1892 collection <i>Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children</i>, the most successful of his books for young readers. He also wrote many holiday items; during the 1880s and 1890s, he published a series of farcical one-act plays, many of which were set at Christmas and appeared in the annual Christmas number of various magazines. “They began to be acted everywhere within a week or two of their publication,” the novelist Booth Tarkington recalled, “and a college boy of the late ’eighties and golden ’nineties came home at Christmas to be either in the audience at a Howells farce or in the cast that gave it.” Howells also wrote half a dozen moderately absurd Christmas allegories for <i>Harper’s</i> over the same period.<br />
<br />
Ironically, Howells did not think much of most works of holiday fiction, which he regarded as pale, formulaic successors to Charles Dickens’s Christmas tales and which had become, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/My_Literary_Passions/APQ1AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">he wrote despairingly</a>, a “whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned.” On the other hand, he respected the “new” children’s literature by the likes of Mark Twain and J. M. Barrie, written to be enjoyed by adults. “The new school of briefer fictionists, who have done so much that is of fresh truth and novel impulse in other sorts, have got rather a new turn in the heart of childhood,” he wrote in the preface for <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Heart_of_Childhood/iTOBB344YtMC">an anthology of children’s stories</a>. “Children like to be taken seriously, and though grown-up people cannot take them quite so seriously as children would like, yet the loving irony of these writers is such as the children would not easily find them out in.”<br />
<br />
When Howells died in 1920, he was lauded for his career as an editor, critic, and novelist, and the titles most singled out from among his more than 100 books were <i>The Rise of Silas Lapham</i>, <i>A Hazard of New Fortunes</i>, <i>A Modern Instance</i>, and <i>A Foregone Conclusion</i>—often in that order. Few notices mentioned his works for children. In the century since, Howells’s star has diminished; he has become one of those authors occasionally and deservedly “rediscovered” in the pages of literary periodicals. Released into the public domain several decades ago, “Christmas Every Day” has inspired some two dozen film and television productions, from <i>Groundhog Day</i> to <i>Elmo Saves Christmas</i> to “Donald Duck: Stuck on Christmas.” The critics of Howells’s day—and almost certainly Howells himself—would have been dismayed if they been told that his little Christmas story first published in 1886 in a magazine for children would become, a century after his death, what is almost certainly the most widely read of all his works.<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">T</span>he little girl came into her papa’s study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a
story. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Howells-Christmas-Every-Day.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Howells-Christmas-Every-Day.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Howells-Christmas-Every-Day.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-34225691286763778782023-12-03T17:29:00.012-05:002023-12-03T19:43:51.074-05:00The Sentimentality of William Tavener<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Willa Cather (1873–1947)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=24"><i>Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/in-search-of-willa-cather-nebraska-hometown-180982338/">Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown</a>” (Jeff MacGregor, <i>Smithsonian Magazine</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://lithub.com/never-ending-nostalgia-who-and-what-inspired-willa-cather/">Never-Ending Nostalgia: Who and What Inspired Willa Cather</a>” (Benjamin Taylor, <i>LitHub</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/05/peter.html">Peter</a>,” Willa Cather<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/08/the-circus-at-denby.html">The Circus at Denby</a>,” Sarah Orne Jewett<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/08/bill-of-fare-on-plains.html">Bill of Fare on the Plains</a>,” Annie D. Tallent<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/24"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh61aqVGbxikO4ocCb8fZT2JBTQZILhYRvAQFPyWG6XVxYlFNaVn_iow9Fce6G5StpQ8dYv0gQqnZlpgNPo6vfuoyzlcAg9OXKTY-wHgkMUgL0FuHrwiPe6D3O8wwLrFBoXYKd6tUvrUsQ/s1600/9780940450714.jpg" style="float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><a href="https://loa.org/books/24"><b><i>Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings</i></b></a><br />
<i>Alexander’s Bridge</i> | <i>My Mortal Enemy</i> | 28 stories | essays and reviews | poems | 1,039 pages<br />
List price: $45.00<br />
<b style="color: #990000;">Save 30%, free shipping</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/24">Web store price: $31.50</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/494"><b>Buy all three Willa Cather volumes in a boxed set and save $55</b></a><br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaeBtzmW1mlGnFeTebuawvA0FFg5ZWyW0Qua8tTy-iH8ziacVmP11_UxMVFt4NXwHHzX5nyu8lC5EfRvMjUniAXANEDlPbqUC-3ubth0GX4ABkOtBZiZX7juFhE69Shz9_HAcisxeTrIWue-tJPKiiQwygZYKRBLjFpG5Df3rYC4yneS9zbPW9EwYfQPo/s1600/SellsBros.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaeBtzmW1mlGnFeTebuawvA0FFg5ZWyW0Qua8tTy-iH8ziacVmP11_UxMVFt4NXwHHzX5nyu8lC5EfRvMjUniAXANEDlPbqUC-3ubth0GX4ABkOtBZiZX7juFhE69Shz9_HAcisxeTrIWue-tJPKiiQwygZYKRBLjFpG5Df3rYC4yneS9zbPW9EwYfQPo/s1600/SellsBros.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #073763;">“The Big Show of the World: Sells Brothers / Enormous United Shows.” The type at the top right corner reads: “Correct interior view of the great five continent menagerie prominently displaying the three dominant features: the pair of hippopotami, the school of Arctic seals and sea lions, and the flock of African ostriches which cannot be duplicated by any other travelling exhibition.” Poster printed by Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati, 1895. (Library of Congress)<br />
Founded in Ohio in the 1870s, Sells Brothers quickly became one of the nation’s largest circuses; by the mid-1880s, the company travelled to most major railroad stops throughout a region that included Nebraska and Kansas.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
In 1899, Wisconsin-born Hamlin Garland, who had spent most of his early years living with his family on homesteads in South Dakota and Iowa, published <i>Boy Life on the Prairie</i>, a collection of semi-autobiographical sketches about rural life. In one chapter, he described the importance each summer of the traveling circus:
<blockquote>
No one but a country boy can rightly measure the majesty and allurement of a circus. To go from the lonely prairie or the dusty corn-field and come face to face with the “amazing aggregation of world-wide wonders” was like enduring the visions of the Apocalypse. From the moment the advance man flung a handful of gorgeous bills over the corn-field fence, to the golden morning of the glorious day, the boys speculated and argued and dreamed of the glorious “pageant of knights and ladies, glittering chariots, stately elephants, and savage tigers,” which wound its way down the long yellow posters, a glittering river of Elysian splendors, emptying itself into the tent, which housed the “World’s Congress of Wonders.”
</blockquote>
“The boy whose father refused to take him wept with no loss of dignity in the eyes of his fellows,” Garland recalled. “He could even swear in his disappointment and be excused for it.”<br />
<br />
The year after the book appeared, Willa Cather published “The Sentimentality of William Tavener” in <i>The Library</i>, a new Pittsburgh literary magazine that employed her as a staff writer and editor. Her short story opens with the distress exhibited by the sons of a farmer who has denied them permission to take a day off from their farm chores to go to the circus.<br />
<br />
The timing may well be a coincidence; circuses featured frequently in stories and novels of the era. Indeed, there is no way to confirm that Cather was inspired to write her story by Garland’s chapter on circuses or, for that matter, that she had even yet read it—although she clearly kept up with his work. Five years earlier, in 1895, she mockingly panned a “love story” by the editor of the <i>Lincoln Courier</i> and joked that she felt obliged to read it because any local tale might prove to be “the forerunner of many valuable additions to Mr. Hamlin Garland’s western school of literature.”<br />
<br />
Cather was referring to Garland’s series of influential essays, which were collected the previous year in book form as <i>Crumbling Idols</i>. Garland advocated for a ”new school” of literary realism “true to the scenes and the people we love” in “the interior of America,” but he antagonized many in the literary world by inveighing against the dominance of tradition-bound publishers, editors, and critics in New York and Boston: “By what right do you of the conservative East assume to be final judges of American literature?” Although Garland continued to write about farm life and the American West, in 1902 he surrendered to the realities of the marketplace and, in order to work more closely with his editors and publishers, began spending much of each year in New York City, where he stayed until 1930. Cather, too, moved to New York in 1906 and lived there for the rest of her life. (Garland and Cather apparently did not meet each other until 1919 or 1920.)<br />
<br />
Several scholars and critics have noted how some of Cather’s early stories resemble Garland’s tales and sketches; biographer James Woodress refers to her apprentice work about prairie life, including “The Sentimentality of William Tavener,” as written in “her Hamlin Garland manner.” Yet Mildred R. Bennett, author of <i>The World of Willa Cather</i>, contends that the Tavener story stands out: “its economical, low-keyed narrative style distinctly suggests the author’s later manner.” Marilyn Arnold, in her book about Cather’s short fiction, agrees: “Cather’s growing sense of how much to say and how much to leave unsaid, her increasing skill at delineating a character with one stroke, her almost uncanny ability to define a relationship with a single apt observation, and her marvelous feeling for low-keyed humor are evident.”<br />
<br />
Some scholars have also asserted that the story is autobiographical and have pointed to Woodress’s reference to its “rather skillful use of what must have been a family story.” Although the story certainly has autobiographical elements, Woodress didn’t provide any evidence to support his supposition. Like the Taveners, Cather’s parents migrated from the Shenandoah Valley, and perhaps they both went to a circus before they were married. Yet, just as certainly, the story does not depict Cather’s immediate family. Her father, Charles Cather, didn’t last long as a Plains farmer; he sold out after a mere eighteen months in Nebraska and moved his family to Red Cloud in 1884. Futhermore, only two of Willa’s four brothers had been born, and they turned four and seven years old that year—hardly old enough to be the farmhands described in the story. While there were plenty of farms in the region that were homes to children working long days without end, deprived of festivities, the Cathers could not count themselves among them. In August 1888, after Willa had been living in Red Cloud for four years, she wrote to a friend: “We children have a great many picnics, parties & circus’ this summer.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> “The Sentimentality of William Tavener” is the only work by Willa Cather that is set in both Virginia, where she was born, and Nebraska, where she lived after she was nine years old. The Taveners’ farm, however. is in <b>McPherson County</b>, which is 200 miles northwest of the Cather home in Red Cloud. Like the Cathers, William and Hester Tavener migrated from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. <b>Back Creek</b> runs ten miles to the west of the city of Winchester, and <b>Romney</b> is 30 miles further, West Virginia. Cather’s last novel, <i>Sapphira and the Slave Girl</i>, takes place in this same region in Virginia.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">I</span>t takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Cather-William-Tavener.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Cather-William-Tavener.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Cather-William-Tavener.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-25930284752246366872023-11-26T15:47:00.018-05:002023-11-29T17:47:56.127-05:00Cannibalism in the Cars<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Mark Twain (1835–1910)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=80"><i>Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/committee-office-staff/senator-and-his-secretary.htm">The Senator and His Secretary</a>” (U.S. Senate)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.tahoemagazine.com/mark-twain-at-lake-tahoe/">Mark Twain and His Adventures—and Tomfoolery—at Lake Tahoe</a>” (Mark McLaughlin, <i>Tahoe Magazine</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/11/how-i-escaped-being-killed-in-duel.html">How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel</a>,” Mark Twain<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/01/the-story-of-hour.html">The Story of an Hour</a>,” Kate Chopin<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2015/01/the-white-silence.html">The White Silence</a>,” Jack London<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/12/the-christmas-magazines.html">The Christmas Magazines and the Inevitable Story of the Snowbound Train</a>,” Dorothy Parker<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the books</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/538-the-collected-shorter-works-of-mark-twain-boxed-set"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD6CF3qJ4tM4O3hKgKvF_hRvkzZVZBQK5SUp9yRIxJynCLPVLttAWzMs70qgLWu5vTQDa6UqFz6QC2XdSyTrtENg9FNXDRza4DPAP1U0WptkIG6e5jYkghHKWXqy8dbivzuRsiveIBBA0/s1600/9781598535280.jpg" style="float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><a href="https://loa.org/books/538-the-collected-shorter-works-of-mark-twain-boxed-set"><i><b>The Collected Shorter Works of Mark Twain</b></i></a><br />
<b>Two-volume boxed set</b><br />
Clothbound | 2,126 pages<br />
List price: $85.00<br />
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<b><a href="https://loa.org/books/538-the-collected-shorter-works-of-mark-twain-boxed-set">Web store price: $60.00</a></b></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Dv6kqFI4XNmc6UoIJDq7ulggVVGXKvH1vqF94MAERhwBfvfrbPz1LswNrRE_-AABenjbX_CpVtG4aOduBbNW87qkVavZxdIFM3L3TbPi6nSitsEdMIfHIUDrLJKBpxfxjyPXFfD_oFE3mOZ0uNOB2SLeXRMQ1-WlqJCyLFyhJeplyTynX1M0S3lDS2o/s1600/TrainSnow.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Dv6kqFI4XNmc6UoIJDq7ulggVVGXKvH1vqF94MAERhwBfvfrbPz1LswNrRE_-AABenjbX_CpVtG4aOduBbNW87qkVavZxdIFM3L3TbPi6nSitsEdMIfHIUDrLJKBpxfxjyPXFfD_oFE3mOZ0uNOB2SLeXRMQ1-WlqJCyLFyhJeplyTynX1M0S3lDS2o/s1600/TrainSnow.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Title illustration for “Cannibalism in the Cars” by American artist Truman W. "True" Williams (1839–1897), in the 1875 edition of Mark Twain’s <i>Sketches, New and Old</i>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the spring of 1868, Samuel Clemens, who had begun writing stories and articles as “Mark Twain” five years earlier, went to the West Coast via steamship, taking the usual route across Panama and arriving in San Francisco. In late April he went to Nevada to visit his old haunts and to give a lecture in Carson City, and after he returned to San Francisco on May 5, he wrote to his mother:
<blockquote>
I have had the <i>hardest</i> trip over the Sierras. Steamboat to Sacramento (balmy summer weather & peaches all in bloom)—railway to the summit (snow thirty feet deep on level ground & 100 in the drifts)—6-horse sleighs to Donner Lake—mail coaches to Coburn’s—railway to Hunter’s—stage coaches to Virginia—<i>all</i> in the space of 24 hours. Distance 150 miles. Coming back last night in a snowstorm, the two & a half hours’ sleighing (part of the time clear weather & superb moonlight,) was something magnificent. . . .
</blockquote>
Although Clemens had made the trip on several previous occasions when he lived in Carson City and Virginia City, any passage across the summit would conjure in the minds of the travelers the tragic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party">Donner Party</a> two decades earlier. Weeks before Clemens arrived in California, 20-year-old Frances Boyd made that same trip from New York, across Panama, and to San Francisco before braving the summit in the middle of winter to join her husband in Nevada. Decades later, she wrote <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cavalry_Life_in_Tent_and_Field/elU0AQAAMAAJ">in her memoir</a>:
<blockquote>
We had supped at Donner Lake, a beautiful spot in the very heart of the mountains, made famous by the frightful sufferings of the Donner party. . . . It proved an unfortunate prelude to our eventful night; for in the midst of our own suffering we were compelled to think of what might befall us if we, like that ill-fated party, should be left to the mercy of those grand but cruel mountains, which already seemed so relentless in their embrace that although haste meant torture yet we long to see the last of them.
</blockquote>
Frances’s husband, Orsemus B. Boyd, was stationed at the Camp Halleck outpost, established to protect the workers constructing the Central Pacific railroad. In June of that year, soon after Frances Boyd and Samuel Clemens made their respective trips, the last section of railway track across Donner Summit was completed, enabling travel between Sacramento and Reno in only ten hours. Few would ever again have to pass over the summit in a stagecoach or sleigh.<br />
<br />
In July, Clemens returned to New York, and later that year his farcical story “Cannibalism in the Cars” appeared in the November number of a transatlantic magazine issued by London publisher George Routledge & Sons, which had an office in Manhattan. It’s unknown when that year Clemens began the story or when he finished it, so how his own trek across the summit that year might have inspired the tale is a matter of speculation. Another influence could have been an item that appeared in February 1855 in the <i>Muscatine Journal</i>, the newspaper managed by his brother, who published a number of Clemens’s early pieces from 1853 to 1855. The account, a diary excerpt, described the travails of three hundred people, including a group of state legislators, trapped on a snowbound train between Chicago and Springfield for an entire week. They managed to survive by sharing the scanty provisions found in the freight car and burning train seats to keep warm. One of the more sensational reports published in St. Louis claimed that the passengers “were compelled by the bitter necessities of their Condition to eat dogs to keep from starving”—an unfounded rumor ridiculed by other newspapers.<br />
<br />
At the time, Clemens did not think much of the transcontinental railroad. In <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/18670526.html">a dispatch from St. Louis that appeared in the <i>Alta California</i></a> in 1867, he bemoaned the destruction the railroad left in its wake, both to the towns it bypassed and the towns it went through:
<blockquote>
I went up to Hannibal, Quincy and Keokuk, on the Upper Mississippi. The first and the last named are enjoying a season of rest, but not refreshment—the railroads have stricken them dead for a year or two, and I cannot help fearing for Quincy also, now that she is going to build a bridge and let her trade cross the Mississippi, and go through without stopping. St. Louis is doing the same, and somebody has got to suffer for it some day, no doubt. . . . A railroad is like a lie—you have to keep building to it to make it stand. A railroad is a ravenous destroyer of towns, unless those towns are put at the end of it and a sea beyond, so that you can't go further and find another terminus.
</blockquote>
As it happens, Clemens was in Washington, D.C., when the act that created the transcontinental railroad was working its way through the Senate. In February 1854, when he was 18 years old, he visited the Capitol and observed the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill sponsored by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas that settled the question of where to build the railroad, allowing it to traverse northern states in exchange for permitting new territories to decide through “popular sovereignty” whether to ban slavery or not—thus repealing the Missouri Compromise. In effect, the act built the railroad but hastened the Civil War; or as Mark Twain scholar John H. Davis puts it, “The Transcontinental Railroad, meant to unite the country, geographically and figuratively split it North and South.”<br />
<br />
Fourteen years later, from the end of 1867 through the early months of 1868, Clemens served consecutively as a private secretary to each of Nevada’s senators, William M. Stewart and James Nye. As Samuel Clemens, he was an unreliable and mischievous aide who <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/committee-office-staff/senator-and-his-secretary.htm">caused some embarrassment</a> for his superiors, but as Mark Twain, he wrote a series of “Letters from Washington” for the Virginia City <i>Territorial Enterprise</i>, beginning with <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/18671222t.html">a dispatch in December</a> that recalled his earlier trip to Washington:
<blockquote>
I was here fourteen years ago, and remember what I saw then, perfectly well. I saw in the House Mr. Douglas and a few other great men. The mass of the remainder seemed to be a mob of empty headed whipper-snappers that had come to Congress to make incessant motions, propose eternal amendments, and rise to everlasting points of order. They glanced at the galleries oftener than they looked at the Speaker; they put their feet in their desks as if they were in a beer-mill; they made more racket than a rookery, and let on to know more than any body of men did know or ever could know by any possibility whatsoever.
</blockquote>
Another piece, <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/18680203nyh.html">published in <i>The New York Herald</i> in February</a>, decried the boys-club atmosphere that pervaded the Capitol and hinted at activities that would destroy reputations if known to the public:
<blockquote>
Congressmen are a somewhat eccentric class of moralists. A large proportion of them prefer to have their families remain at home, that they may better enjoy their freedom here; for in some respects Washington is a free and easy place and never more so than when Congress is in session. A favorite mode of life for the bachelors and temporarily emancipated benedicts is to take apartments, and trust to a first class hotel or restaurant for the sustenance that is essential to the proximity of soul and body. Nothing can exceed this for comfort and convenience, nor is there anything to interrupt the enjoyment save an occasional angry remonstrance from the proprietor of the apartments against some curious discoveries that are calculated to scandalize the establishment.
</blockquote>
In “Cannibalism in the Cars,” Mark Twain brings together his contempt for Congress and his misgivings about the railroad, and he sets his satirical story during a wintry trip that evokes the public’s fascination with the Donner Party and similar ill-fated journeys. Mirroring the timing of Clemens’s visits to Washington in 1854 and 1867–68, a stranger tells the narrator his story about a calamity that occurred fourteen years earlier—that is, before and after the Civil War, an event that might itself be described as an act of cannibalism. <br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> Astute readers at the time of the story’s publication might have realized something was amiss with the stranger’s tale because the town of <b>Weldon</b>, while between St. Louis and Chicago, is not on a railroad line connecting them. Similarly, although the stranger states at the outset that there are only <b>twenty-four passengers</b> on the trip, nearly forty are identified by name.<br />
<br />
Clemens’s primary purpose for making the trip to California in 1868 was to secure the rights to his own work from the <i>Alta California</i> newspaper, which controlled the copyright to his dispatches from an American tourist excursion through the Mediterranean on the steamship <i>Quaker City</i> in the fall of 1867. He planned to incorporate some of the pieces in his next book, <i>The Innocents Abroad</i>. Three close friends he made during that voyage appear as characters in “Cannibalism”: his cabin-mate, Daniel <b>Slote</b>; John A. <b>Van Nostrand</b>; and his future brother-in-law, <b>Charles J. Langford</b>. In fact, most of the train’s passengers are named after friends of the author.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">I</span> visited St. Louis lately, and on my way west, after changing cars at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty-five, or may be fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat down beside me. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Twain-Cannibalism-Cars.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Twain-Cannibalism-Cars.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Twain-Cannibalism-Cars.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-87768408069818079882023-11-19T14:26:00.012-05:002023-11-19T17:57:34.513-05:00The Purple Dress<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>O. Henry (1862–1910)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/657-101-stories"><i>O. Henry: 101 Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.americanheritage.com/man-who-invented-manhattan-0">The Man Who Invented Manhattan</a>” (Judith Dunford, <i>Smithsonian Magazine</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Interview with Ben Yagoda:</b> “<a href="https://loa.org/news-and-views/1878-ben-yagoda-presenting-an-o-henry-for-the-twenty-first-century">Presenting an O. Henry for the Twenty-First Century</a>”<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/09/an-unfinished-story.html">An Unfinished Story</a>,” O. Henry<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/07/tyrants-of-shop.html">Tyrants of the Shop</a>,” Fanny Fern<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2023/01/the-bookkeepers-wife.html">The Bookkeeper’s Wife</a>,” Willa Cather<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/10/miss-mcenders.html">Miss McEnders</a>,” Kate Chopin<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/657-101-stories"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2r-6v3kbZVmn-0-mFCRkFJmUva1mf3CLPcf56D8qPOP_JbiibXyEXMU2z3Hd1VmB3wODauZeav0qSG5_hcsdPtKEkyekt-0s14MrdeHJNjPmuJ-NnemevS_kxSTL7i0vl0omsWGTOBnc/s0/9781598536904.jpg" style="float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 62px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/657-101-stories"><b><i>O. Henry: 101 Stories</i></b></a><br />
840 pages<br />
List price: $35.00<br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/657-101-stories">Web Store price: $30.00</a><br /><br />
</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhG1OERTQU8KB1OikaH0nK1lJ_TsckifnOm_tS_cL0JGWI0ExVcnNDOjnBrUx8htVGlZB7AqFPLNb42gJkQCZyppbbfanhbnoOwypwIDzWS-Ju-6K0XW8bzYJXaaGT6vytcGIMUbjJrgYNpvN0mlBaydQM4eC8ZE8HgQN7xksolWMu_5GOLPkdCEP97X0/s1600/Glackens-Puple-Dress.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhG1OERTQU8KB1OikaH0nK1lJ_TsckifnOm_tS_cL0JGWI0ExVcnNDOjnBrUx8htVGlZB7AqFPLNb42gJkQCZyppbbfanhbnoOwypwIDzWS-Ju-6K0XW8bzYJXaaGT6vytcGIMUbjJrgYNpvN0mlBaydQM4eC8ZE8HgQN7xksolWMu_5GOLPkdCEP97X0/s1600/Glackens-Puple-Dress.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Purple Dress</i>, 1908–10, oil on canvas by American painter William Glackens (1870–1938). Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In 1912, four years after the end of his second term as President, Theodore Roosevelt ran unsuccessfully for a third term, this time as the nominee for the Progressive Party rather than as a Republican. He came out strongly in favor both of women’s suffrage and of better working conditions for female workers, including a federal minimum wage, eight-hour days, six-day weeks, and a form of enforced maternity leave: the suspension of “employment in manufacturing, commerce, or other trades where work compels standing constantly . . . for a period of at least eight weeks at time of childbirth.” In his stump speeches, Roosevelt revealed how the “dreadful suffering and misery” of working women had convinced him to support these new (for him) positions. “Any man who goes to the night session of such a court as the Jefferson Market Women’s Night Court in New York City,” he said in one speech, “and who follows up some of the cases brought before that court, will soon learn for himself just what misery and immorality are produced among women when they receive less than a living wage. . . . We intend to put a stop to the misery which now actually exists, and we believe that a minimum wage plank is a humane, practical, and effective method of attacking that misery.” The following year, in <i>An Autobiography</i>, he argued, “Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.”<br />
<br />
Roosevelt expressed concern not only for the women who toiled in factories and sweatshops but also for the young women flooding into cities to work as office employees and “shopgirls.” Perhaps a little hyperbolically, he credited a short story writer with his epiphany: “It was O. Henry who started me on my campaign for office girls!” he exclaimed in a letter to biographer C. Alphonso Smith—an endorsement that would be used as an advertising headline by O. Henry’s publishers well into the 1920s.<br />
<br />
O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter, had died two years before Roosevelt’s unsuccessful Presidential campaign. During the previous decade he had written dozens of stories describing the lives of working women, including such tales as “The Trimmed Lamp,” “The Third Ingredient,” and “Brickdust Row.” Our <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/09/an-unfinished-story.html">introduction to a previous <i>Story of the Week</i> selection</a>, “An Unfinished Story,” details how, before O. Henry became famous, a writer named Anne Partlan introduced him to actresses, secretaries, waitresses, and servants who barely scraped by in the tenements of the city he called “Bagdad of the Hudson.” His stories came from observations of their apartment furnishings, living conditions, financial struggles, and recreational activities.<br />
<br />
Shortly after O. Henry died, the editor George Jean Nathan gathered anecdotes about him in a piece titled “O. Henry in His Own Bagdad.” One friend had brought up the shopgirl stories and asked O. Henry, “Do you ever go into the department stores to study them?” “Indeed, not," he answered. “It is not the sales-girl <i>in</i> the department store who is worth studying, it is the sales-girl <i>out</i> of it.” Soon enough, editorial writers mentioned O. Henry’s stories when discussing the hardships of “shop-girls.” One columnist wrote, “Across every counter of the New York department store is the shadow of O. Henry.” What distinguished his stories from the usual sentimental pap was their lack of moralizing—at least in his depictions of the women. (Managers and store owners did not always escape his judgment, however.) The stories he wrote about the women were hardly about their occupations but instead about their lives and poverty, their hopes and disappointments.<br />
<br />
His reputation as a friend and advocate of the underpaid women endured. Five years after O. Henry died, the author Christopher Morley published in <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> <a href="https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth139288/">a sonnet that included the lines</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
But still the heart of his well-loved Bagdad<br />
Upon-the-Subway is to him renewed.<br />
He knew, beneath her harmless platitude,<br />
The gentler secrets that the shopgirl had.
</blockquote>
“The Purple Dress,” our current <i>Story of the Week</i> selection, reveals those gentler secrets; the tale is less about the clash between management and workers than about the community that develops among the women—both their rivalries and their friendships. And, as with many O. Henry tales, it features what the literary scholar Patricia Marks called one of his famous “twist endings that turn minor personal tragedies into comic triumphs.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> In the story, O. Henry puns on the name of G. Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright whose play, <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i>, had been published in 1898 “to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.” It was first performed in 1902.<br /></div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<span style="font-size: 200%;">W</span>e are to consider the shade known as purple. It is a color justly in repute among the sons and daughters of man. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/OHenry-Purple-Dress.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/OHenry-Purple-Dress.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br /><br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/OHenry-Purple-Dress.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-58214131059881948382023-11-12T16:09:00.002-05:002023-11-12T16:14:26.759-05:00The Petitions of Belinda an African<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Belinda Sutton (c. 1713–late 1790s)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"><i>Black Writers of the Founding Era</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://exhibits.law.harvard.edu/legacy-isaac-royall-jr">The Legacy of Isaac Royall, Jr.</a>” (Harvard Law School)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery#:~:text=In%201780%2C%20when%20the%20Massachusetts,judicial%20review%20to%20abolish%20slavery.">Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery</a>” (Commonwealth of Massachusetts)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/07/the-natural-right-of-all-men-their.html">“The natural right of all Men—& their Children,”</a> Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess, Brister Slenser, Prince Hall, et al.<br />
• <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2016/04/remember-ladies.html">“Remember the Ladies,”</a> Abigail Adams & John Adams<br />
• <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/03/on-absurdity-of-bill-of-rights.html">“On the Absurdity of a Bill of Rights,”</a> Noah Webster<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/9781598537352-e1694660038371-226x346.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 5px 0px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/"><b>Black Writers of the Founding Era</b></a></i><br />
767 pages<br />
List price: $40.00<br />
<b>Save 20%, free shipping</b><br />
<a href="http://https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/">Web store price: $32.00</a><br /><br /></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEW04_6QLt7OzHSvjm-rw-WzpleS0lzIYBovCOEg1wMkRZvfv15ZAjzHlxnN6UgfYoXBJJ4CpKQJF6tEyuD3oRvj5AutVn07n6f1G2PdLPrxsq-ShURHdqmNfFu_oG7mBAFvJMQ_gBE9Gq_r3gM5Rr39HWE8ybGTKp34ADJaHrROHdu_8yWCRftlvJ22w/s1600/Royall-House-postcard.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEW04_6QLt7OzHSvjm-rw-WzpleS0lzIYBovCOEg1wMkRZvfv15ZAjzHlxnN6UgfYoXBJJ4CpKQJF6tEyuD3oRvj5AutVn07n6f1G2PdLPrxsq-ShURHdqmNfFu_oG7mBAFvJMQ_gBE9Gq_r3gM5Rr39HWE8ybGTKp34ADJaHrROHdu_8yWCRftlvJ22w/s1600/Royall-House-postcard.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“Old Royall House, showing Slave Oumarters [Quarters], Medford, Mass,” c. 1906. Hand-colored photographic postcard printed by the Rotograph Company, New York. (Courtesy Royall House & Slave Quarters)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i>Between 1781 and 1783, several Massachusetts court decisions ruled that slavery was incompatible with the new state constitution, which declared in 1780 that all men “are born free and equal.” Although it undoubtedly took several years for the rulings to become widely known and fully implemented, no slaves were reported in Massachusetts in the 1790 census. For Belinda Sutton, however, freedom came from a will written up in 1778 by the slaveholder Isaac Royall, Jr., who died in exile in England in 1781, when she was in her late sixties: “I do also give unto my said daughter my negro Woman Belinda in case she does not choose her freedom; if she does choose her freedom to have it, provided that she get Security that she shall not be a charge to the town of Medford.” We know of Belinda Sutton, one of 64 people enslaved by Royall on his Medford estate, through a series of remarkable documents dating from the 1780s, as detailed in the following introduction from the just-published anthology </i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/black-writers-of-the-founding-era/">Black Writers of the Founding Era</a><i>, edited by James G. Basker and Nicole Seary</i>:<br />
<br />
Arguably the first slave narrative by a woman, a petition was presented to the Massachusetts legislature on February 14, 1783, by Belinda, who for fifty years had been enslaved by the landowner and businessman Isaac Royall. Born around 1713, probably in what is now Ghana or Nigeria, kidnapped at age twelve, and transported to the New World, Belinda began working for Royall and his family after they moved to Massachusetts from Antigua in 1732. Little is known of her life except that she had two children (both baptized in 1768), a son Joseph and an invalid daughter Prine, and that she was still caring for Prine when she wrote this appeal in 1783.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Royall, through various businesses, including trade in rum and slaves, became one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts and an overseer of Harvard College. A Loyalist, he fled at the outbreak of the war, eventually settling in England. In 1778, he was named in the Massachusetts banishment act, which put his property at the disposal of the state and gave Belinda hope for her petition.<br />
<br />
In her pioneering request for reparations, Belinda’s personal travails during fifty years of enslavement are visible beneath the embellishments of the amanuensis who transcribed her story. The government ordered Royall’s executors to pay her a pension of £15, 12s. But within a year the payments had stopped. Belinda would petition again in 1785, 1787, 1788, 1790, and 1793. The second text reprinted here, more businesslike and direct, is her petition from 1793, using what is presumably her married name of Sutton. The “Sir Wm Pepperell” who cut her off was Isaac Royall’s son-in-law. The name of the executor of Royall’s estate, Willis Hall, appears at the bottom of the petition, along with “Priscilla Sutton,” who may be Belinda’s invalid daughter Prine. A clerk’s note on the backside of the docket indicates that the state had to re-enforce the pension order yet again two years later, on February 25, 1795.<br />
<br />
Versions of her story circulated in the antislavery press of the 1780s, before disappearing. The quiet heroism of her life resurfaced in the twenty-first century, when the disgrace of her treatment led Harvard University to remove the symbols of Isaac Royall’s patronage from the insignia of its Law School, which had been partially founded with proceeds from his estate.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><i><b>Notes:</b></i> The Rio da Valta is the Volta River, in what is now Ghana. <b>Orisa</b> is a deity or spirit in the Yoruba language and religion.</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">T</span>he Petition of Belinda an Affrican, humbly shews that seventy years have rolled away, since she on the banks of the Rio da Valta, received her existence. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Sutton-Petition-Memorial.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Sutton-Petition-Memorial.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span> <br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Sutton-Petition-Memorial.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-20275714456252439552023-10-29T14:14:00.011-04:002023-10-29T17:26:31.388-04:00Stephen Crane’s Own Story<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Stephen Crane (1871–1900)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=31"><i>Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.staugustinelighthouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Explore-Learn-Research-Archaeology-Project-Archive-Commodore.pdf">The Shipwreck, Discovery, and Investigation of the <i>SS Commodore</i></a>” (The St. Augustine Lighthouse Museum)<br />
<br />
<b>Video:</b> “<a href="https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1887-burning-boy-paul-auster-on-the-extraordinary-life-and-work-of-stephen-crane/">Burning Boy: Paul Auster on the Extraordinary Life and Work of Stephen Crane</a>” (LOA Live)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/10/an-episode-of-war.html">An Episode of War</a>,” Stephen Crane<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/08/when-i-knew-stephen-crane.html">When I Knew Stephen Crane</a>,” Willa Cather<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/08/storm-and-shipwreck.html">Storm and Shipwreck</a>,” James Fenimore Cooper<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/10/the-long-voyage-home.html">The Long Voyage Home</a>,” Eugene O’Neill<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=31"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTobJA3KPfihzC3_5JRUID1gEGxwMqip5z4jcrbjphGAFHTZ6uE7zq4iERHBN1KefdZeqwBm6P9vivxlSX8Oi9p6hs1b3Ug-Ps95fgt1rf-b0LtHUEz7-_ewH9MOE3Z43C_uIiBUte3IQ/s200/Crane.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 5px 0px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=31"><b>Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry</b></a></i><br />
<i>The Red Badge of Courage</i> | <i>Maggie</i> | <i>George’s Mother</i> | <i>The Third Violet</i> | <i>“The Monster”</i> | stories & poems | 1,379 pages<br />
List price: $50.00<br />
<b>Save 37%, free shipping</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=31">Web store price: $30.00</a></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib7RgModSvD2GEH5qZ6CDiQJZ98PtOY0mSr6fs1yhFVH8Q7c9Z2nf8u6YIhmfaBj0oydaECXXmjbzKDEDn8RUcs_StxEsrQ2I1Qqjkttw9_RseP1-5w81MGD_Mp7Udh2m7j6yA7zgVyqRrMNFtrdlvoUwT5n_HkfL8swgkvjxrIkBqoie9s6w37bS2HLA/s1600/Jefferson-shipwreck.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib7RgModSvD2GEH5qZ6CDiQJZ98PtOY0mSr6fs1yhFVH8Q7c9Z2nf8u6YIhmfaBj0oydaECXXmjbzKDEDn8RUcs_StxEsrQ2I1Qqjkttw9_RseP1-5w81MGD_Mp7Udh2m7j6yA7zgVyqRrMNFtrdlvoUwT5n_HkfL8swgkvjxrIkBqoie9s6w37bS2HLA/s1600/Jefferson-shipwreck.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Shipwreck, Palm Beach, Florida</i>, c. 1890, oil on canvas by American artist Joseph Jefferson (1829–1905). (Artsy)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The initial reports were not promising. Early in the morning of January 2, 1897, the <i>SS Commodore</i> sank sixteen miles off the coast of Florida on its way to Cuba; by the end of the day, not even half of the crew of 28 men had been rescued. “I am very sorry that I have no encouraging word to send you,” the ship’s previous captain wrote to Cora Taylor later that evening. “The eleven men who were saved have arrived in town”; one of the survivors saw author and journalist Stephen Crane “get out of his berth and dress himself with that same nonplussed manner, characteristic of him.” Crane made it into one of the lifeboats, and there were “conflicting rumors as to the empty boat being washed ashore. . . . God save Crane if he is still alive.”<br />
<br />
Stephen Crane had met Cora Taylor just weeks earlier in Jacksonville, while he was on his way to Cuba. Not only was he reporting on the Cuban revolution for the newspaper syndicate run by Irving Bacheller, but he was also fleeing unflattering headlines and the wrath of the New York Police Department for his exculpatory testimony in favor of Dora Clark, a young woman he had met on the night she was arrested on suspicion of prostitution. In late November he arrived incognito at Jacksonville’s St. James Hotel and checked in as Samuel Carlton in the company of several other journalists.<br />
<br />
He soon made his way to the Hotel de Dreme, a local nightclub—a high-class bordello, really—owned by Taylor, who was estranged from her second husband, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_William_Stewart">Donald William Stewart</a>, a former British military officer employed at the time as a political official on the Gold Coast in west Africa. “Fact is, she was a cut above us in several ways, notably poise and surety of command of herself and others,” recalled Crane’s fellow journalist, Ernest W. McCready. “If she had any false notes I was then all too unskilled in recognizing authentic ‘class’ or lack of it, to detect any.” McCready had heard from another reporter that the first night Crane went there, Taylor was reading one of his lesser-known books and she was entirely unaware that the Samuel Carlton standing before her was one of her favorite authors. They were lovers by the end of the year, and they would be together for the remainder of Crane’s short life.<br />
<br />
After a month in Jacksonville, Crane found passage to Cuba by signing on as a crew member of the <i>Commodore</i>—one of dozens of ships attempting to sneak past the American and Spanish navies to transport weapons and ammunition to the Cuban rebels. The voyage seemed doomed from the start; after leaving Jacksonville the ship ran aground twice in heavy fog along the St. James River. “That man Crane is the spunkiest fellow out,” Edward Murphy, the ship’s captain, later told a reporter for <i>The New York Press</i>. “The sea was so rough that even old sailors got seasick when we struck the open sea after leaving the bar, but Crane behaved like a born sailor. He and I were about the only ones not affected by the big seas which tossed us about.” The journey had barely begun when water began swamping the engine room through a breach in the hull, and Crane “was the first man to volunteer aid,” Murphy reported.<br />
<br />
Late in the day on January 3, word came that three men—Crane, Murphy, and the ship’s steward, Charles Montgomery—had finally come ashore near Daytona Beach after more than thirty hours at sea. A fourth man with them had been killed, struck on the head when the dinghy that had brought them to shore capsized within sight of the beach. In all, eight of the <i>Commodore</i>’s crew had died; one of the ship’s three lifeboats proved to be unseaworthy and sank almost as soon as it hit the water.<br />
<br />
“That newspaper feller was a nervy man,” Montgomery told a reporter that day:
<blockquote>
He didn’t seem to know what fear was. He was down on the ship’s papers as an able seaman at $20 a month. When we started out he insisted upon doing a seaman’s work, and he did it well, too. When aroused Saturday morning he never quailed when he came on deck and saw the foaming and raging billows and knew that the vessel was sinking and that it was only a question of time when we would be at the mercy of the terrible sea in a small ten-foot dingy. . . .<br />
<br />
When the boats were launched he was the last one, except Captain Murphy, to get in, and his nerve greatly encouraged all hands. In the small dingy he rowed as well as the others, notwithstanding he was so worn out that he could hardly hold his oar straight in the terrific seas. At the last moment he rose on his seat, and, seeing the big wave coming that overthrew us, cried out, ‘Look out, boys, there’s trouble for us. Jump, captain!’<br />
<br />
. . . We all battled there in the water for hours, it seemed to us. Crane was a good swimmer, and he really saved one of the sailors, as the man could not swim a stroke, and Crane had to keep him up by the aid of an oar.
</blockquote>
The man whose life Crane saved was Montgomery himself.<br />
<br />
As soon as he was able, Crane responded by cable to the offices of <i>The World</i> in New York: “I am unable to write anything yet but will later.” On January 7, “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” appeared on the front page of <i>The New York Press</i> and in several other newspapers; he focused less on his own heroics and more on the actions and reactions, the bravery and the panic of the men around him as they faced the possibility of imminent death, and we reprint the article below as our <i>Story of the Week</i> selection. His account stops at the point when the ship sinks into the ocean; he saved the experience of the subsequent thirty hours for what is perhaps his most famous short story, “The Open Boat.” As Paul Auster writes in <i>Burning Boy</i>, a recent biography of Crane, “Not three months earlier, he had been portrayed as an archvillain of loose morals and scandalous habits for the newspaper readers of New York, and now he was being heralded as a shining figure of dauntless courage and exemplary inner strength.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">The contemporaneous excerpts and quotations above are culled from <i>Stephen Crane: An Omnibus</i> (1954), edited by Robert Wooster Stallman; <i>Cora Crane A Biography of Mrs. Stephen Crane</i> (1960), by Lilian Gilkes; and <i>The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane</i> (1993), edited by Paul Sorrentino and Stanley Wertheim.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Note:</b></i> A <b>filibuster</b> was someone engaged in unauthorized or illegal warfare against a foreign country. The term was commonly used in the nineteenth century to describe Americans supporting insurrections in Latin America.</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">I</span>t was the afternoon of New Year’s. The <i>Commodore</i> lay at her dock in Jacksonville and negro stevedores processioned steadily toward her with box after box of ammunition and bundle after bundle of rifles. Her hatch, like the mouth of a monster, engulfed them. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Crane-Own-Story.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Crane-Own-Story.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span> <br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Crane-Own-Story.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-85068284809422266752023-10-22T16:23:00.011-04:002023-10-22T19:46:43.547-04:00Shingles for the Lord<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>William Faulkner (1897–1962)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/stories/"><i>William Faulkner: Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">“<a href="https://lithub.com/about-all-those-unproduced-screenplays-william-faulkner-wrote/">About all those unproduced screenplays William Faulkner wrote . . .</a>” (Walter Caplan, <i>Literary Hub</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Official site:</b> <a href="https://www.rowanoak.com/">William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak</a><br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/05/a-southern-landscape.html">A Southern Landscape</a>,” Elizabeth Spencer<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/01/a-half-pint-of-old-darling.html">A Half-Pint of Old Darling</a>,” Wendell Berry<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/07/petrified-man.html">Petrified Man</a>,” Eudora Welty <br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/05/manifest-destiny-usa.html">Manifest Destiny U.S.A.</a>,” Albert Murray<br />
<br />
<b>Buy this book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/stories/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/9781598537529-e1694573110785.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/stories/"><i><b>William Faulkner: Stories</b></i></a><br />
<i>Knight’s Gambit</i> | <i>Collected Stories</i> | <i>Big Woods</i> | 54 stories in all<br />
List price: $45.00<br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/stories/">Web Store price: $32.00</a><br /><br /><br /></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnaPy8v3bUxjG5cMr6UJYt-O3tav1tTo_opoQ7t9_dp9p6PSUYq9YLdoQ79JQaNawnBE5GoHMrcDcQNWQgWhwZJZAC0-a0d0ohnUAO8ZGqTgZyAYve8HEGnqYhGuqMT-AXrqwgNuFE5Hypk1iGp1xvdTu8fWOKg2y8t3jndMCkM1ff9kb6ZxdgWjWfjeI/s1600/froe-and-maul.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnaPy8v3bUxjG5cMr6UJYt-O3tav1tTo_opoQ7t9_dp9p6PSUYq9YLdoQ79JQaNawnBE5GoHMrcDcQNWQgWhwZJZAC0-a0d0ohnUAO8ZGqTgZyAYve8HEGnqYhGuqMT-AXrqwgNuFE5Hypk1iGp1xvdTu8fWOKg2y8t3jndMCkM1ff9kb6ZxdgWjWfjeI/s1600/froe-and-maul.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A man prepares to strike a wooden froe, which is lodged into a log, with a maul, c. 1900–20. Photograph by Bruce Washburn, probably taken in Harrison County, West Virginia. <a href="https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/052305">Courtesy West Virginia and Regional History Center. West Virginia University</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
During the early years of the Second World War, William Faulkner was at his wits’ end. He was flat broke (“I have 60¢ in my pocket, and that is literally all”), he was dissatisfied with most of the stories he had been cranking out for magazines (“that’s what having to write not because you want to write but because you are harassed to hell for money does”), and even then he couldn’t find publishers for them (“I cant sell stories. Wrote 6 since Jan., sold one”). His frequent bouts of heavy drinking didn’t help. Frustrated and depressed, he lashed out in a letter to his agent, Harold Ober, in June 1942:
<blockquote>
I know where the trouble lies in what I write now. I have been buried here for three years now for lack of money and I am stale. Even a military job will dig me up and out for a while. If I fail at [getting a commission], and can get some money, I am going somewhere for a while, probably to California and try for something in pictures, even $100 a week until I get back on my mental feet. I have been trying for about ten years to carry a load that no artist has any business attempting: oldest son to widowed mothers and inept brothers and nephews and wives and other female connections and their children, most of whom I dont like and with none of whom I have anything in common, even to make conversation about. I am either not brave enough or not scoundrel enough to take my hat and walk out: I dont know which. But if it’s really beginning to hurt my work, I will choose pretty damn quick.
</blockquote>
The source of his financial woes, in large part, was his home in Oxford. In 1930, the year after he married Estelle, his childhood sweetheart, he purchased a crumbling antebellum house, named it Rowan Oak, and began renovating it. The couple had come close to marrying twelve years earlier, in 1918, but Estelle’s parents intervened and ensured that she went through with her engagement to Cornell Franklin, a friend of the family practicing law in Hawaii to whom she had been promised, rather than end up with a haughty would-be poet mocked as “Count No ’Count” by his fellow undergraduates. After living for several years in Hawaii and China, however, Estelle divorced Franklin and returned to Oxford with her two young children.<br />
<br />
During the following decade, the Faulkners enjoyed windfalls from several sources: the sales of his stories during the early 1930s to such magazines as <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> and <i>Scribner’s</i>, his intermittent $1,000-a-week screenwriting career in Hollywood, and the movie rights to his novels and stories (particularly <i>Sanctuary</i> and <i>The Unvanquished</i>). Faulkner expanded his holdings around Rowan Oak and acquired a 320-acre farm seventeen miles away that he called Greenfield Farm, where he installed his brother John as tenant manager. As the decade progressed, the Faulkner household strained to the breaking point; when he wrote in despair to Ober, the Rowan Oak residents and dependents included his and Estelle’s daughter, Jill; his widowed mother, Maud; his two stepchildren, Malcolm and Victoria; Victoria’s husband, William Fielden, and her daughter, Vicki; his widowed sister-in-law, Louise, and her daughter, Dean; Cornell’s son from his second marriage, Corney, visiting from China; the maid, Ludidelle “Boojack” Lester, and her daughter, Estelle; and any number of occasionally visiting friends and relatives.<br />
<br />
By 1940, taxes and debt on all his property, combined with the obligations of supporting his expanded family, had become an overwhelming burden. He wrote to Random House publisher Robert Haas that his imminent financial commitments totaled nearly $10,000:
<blockquote>
Obviously this is too high a rate of spending for my value as a writer, unless I hit moving pictures or can write at least six commercial stories a year. I am still convinced that I can do it, despite the fact that I have not so far. But as I said before, when I become convinced I cannot, I will liquidate what I am trying to hold on to. It’s probably vanity as much as anything else which makes me want to hold onto it. I own a larger parcel of it than anybody else in town and nobody gave me any of it or loaned me a nickel to buy any of it with and all my relations and fellow townsmen, including the borrowers and frank spongers, all prophesied I’d never be more than a bum.
</blockquote>
He managed to postpone the day of reckoning for another two years. Barely able to sell one story, much less his goal of six per year, he faced the choice of enlisting in the military or returning to Hollywood. He traveled to Washington in the spring of 1942 and tried to get a commission with the Air Force: “They turned me down on application, didn’t say why, may have been age.” So instead he accepted a five-month, $300-per-week contract from Warner Bros. in July 1942.<br />
<br />
During the weeks before he left for California, Faulkner finished one last magazine story and mailed it to Ober. “Of the seven stories Faulkner had done thus far in 1942,” contends biographer Joseph Blotner, “‘Shingles for the Lord’ was perhaps the best”; the editors at <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> must have thought so, since they accepted it almost immediately. Just two days after he arrived in California, Faulkner learned they were sending him $1,000 for the story, and he forwarded the check to Oxford to pay off his most urgent debts. It would be the last Faulkner story to appear in a major magazine for seven years.<br />
<br />
Featuring several characters who populate the Yoknapatawpha County of Faulkner’s other novels and stories, “Shingles” comically portrays a trio of men who have volunteered their labor to split shingles for the roof of their church but who spend much of their time bickering over the value of their labor and the ownership of a hunting dog—a squabble that at times reads like a vaudeville act. Res Grier, whose ten-year-old son narrates the tale, comes up with a plan to outwit one of the other two farmers. Faulkner scholar John T. Matthews has noted how the opening scene, in which the three men argue over the number of lost “work units” when Grier shows up two hours late, echoes some of Faulkner’s letters obsessing over how his own labor might be used to pay the bills, like one he sent in 1940 to Bennett Cerf, his editor at Random House:
<blockquote>
Harold Ober, agent, has been holding my short stories for best prices. I suggested to him that he sell them for whatever he can get. I wrote another last week, and will keep on at it. If I can get another $1,000.00 for one of them, it will carry me through Oct. 1. If I can sell two of them, I can raise mortgage I had to put on my mules, and sell some of the mules. If I can get through to Nov. 15, I will begin to collect on my cotton and tenant crops, etc, though because of excessive rain in June-July, this crop will be only 40%.
</blockquote>
“Within his own career,” Matthews notes, “frequently in the same moment, Faulkner suffers the great divide between autonomous modernist master and cultural laborer in Hollywood and magazine marketplace.” The story’s focus on “the arbitrary valuation of labor” mirrors how Faulkner had come to think of his own work.<br />
<br />
In 1957, Faulkner <a href="https://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio07_1.html">read the story</a> to an appreciative audience at the University of Virginia. Afterwards he was asked by a member of the audience what “lumber” he used to build the story—how did he “shape it to make it different” from real life? “Well, these people that I know, they are my people, and I love them,” he answered. “They might well have—have done this. I just got to it before they did.”<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><i><b>Notes:</b></i> The Works Progress Administration (<b>WPA</b>) was a New Deal agency that employed millions of Americans to work on infrastructure projects during the 1930s. A <b>fyce</b> (also, fice or feist) is a small dog. After Faulkner’s story was published a reader wrote to the editors to argue pedantically that anyone wielding a <b>froe</b> in the manner employed by Res Grier would splinter the shingle. Faulkner responded, “I just took what I thought was a minor liberty in order to tell the story. I didn’t consider the liberty important and still dont. But I regret sincerely having offended anyone’s sense of fitness, and I will be doubly careful from now on to be explicit in facts. . . . I hope you got some pleasure from the story to balance some of the irritation.”<br />
</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">P</span>ap got up a good hour before daylight and caught the mule and rid down to Killegrew’s to borrow the froe and maul. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Faulkner-Shingles-Lord.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Faulkner-Shingles-Lord.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection is used by permission. To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the <a href="http://www.copyright.com/">Copyright Clearance Center</a>.</span></div>
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Faulkner-Shingles-Lord.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-86179977181082955232023-10-15T15:35:00.005-04:002023-10-15T19:45:13.944-04:00War<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Jack London (1876–1916)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=99"><i>Jack London: Novels & Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
“<a href="https://www.utsa.edu/ovations/vol6/story/london.html">Hiding in Plain Sight: The photojournalism of Jack London</a>” (Cindy Tumiel, <i>Ovations</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://smallfarmersjournal.com/jack-londons-horsepower/">Jack London’s Horsepower</a>” (Connie Kale Johnson, <i>Small Farmer’s Journal</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/08/the-water-baby.html">The Water Baby</a>,” Jack London<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/05/the-price-of-harness.html">The Price of the Harness</a>,” Stephen Crane<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/09/in-north.html">In the North</a>,” Edith Wharton<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/07/a-veteran-visits-old-frontwishes-he-had.html">A Veteran Visits the Old Front—Wishes He Had Stayed Away</a>,” Ernest Hemingway<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=99"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5370985270252722946" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguPdvu9dyWTzkLbFM999sRtLr7wahF6Krm8nmGrvbBSIkCf0o8naAdxwJIjqtEgtnuhHF09X5rBa_Xi8b14Oddvhi-m35JkslZxln32rnymptVwVlOz3LyY9Xs4Mmh5qhe3SR5DZF71Ck/s1600/London-bookshot.jpg" style="float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 62px;" /></a><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=99"><b>Jack London: Novels & Stories</b></a><br />
<i>The Call of the Wild</i> | <i>White Fang</i> | <i>The Sea-Wolf</i> | 25 stories | 1,021 pages<br />
List price: $40.00<br />
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<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=99">Web store price: $27.00</a><br /><br /></span></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy0of5HnEUR_ew9T0zdn282IYdi0B8aGWre3Tq5qeyKpqy4fR6ktzDcuhaq-WUAmZP7rbp40ZS4g0YrnOIrRYftfOg7MC8SFgG2xlUku5mXz-J9apYwRm7zvBu6FPyC3jEqmiD94O8zs89AclQ_5O_wJYHBxQ9nBR2BxajiaSc3VnyszQYJO3sIUUo2ek/s1600/Jack-London-Japanese-army.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy0of5HnEUR_ew9T0zdn282IYdi0B8aGWre3Tq5qeyKpqy4fR6ktzDcuhaq-WUAmZP7rbp40ZS4g0YrnOIrRYftfOg7MC8SFgG2xlUku5mXz-J9apYwRm7zvBu6FPyC3jEqmiD94O8zs89AclQ_5O_wJYHBxQ9nBR2BxajiaSc3VnyszQYJO3sIUUo2ek/s1600/Jack-London-Japanese-army.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Japanese soldiers near the location of the Battle of the Yalu in 1904. Photograph by Jack London. (California State Parks Collection)</td></tr>
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“I entered upon this campaign with the most gorgeous conceptions of what a war correspondent's work in the world must be,” a frustrated Jack London concluded his final dispatch from the Manchurian city of Antung on June 2, 1904. “I remembered Stephen Crane's descriptions of being under fire in Cuba. I had heard—God wot, was there aught I had not heard?—of all sorts and conditions of correspondents in all sorts of battles and skirmishes, right in the thick of it, where life was keen and immortal moments were being lived. In brief, I came to war expecting to get thrills. My only thrills have been those of indignation and irritation.”<br />
<br />
The newly famous author of <i>The Call of the Wild</i> had been commissioned by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Russo-Japanese War for his flagship newspaper, <i>The San Francisco Examiner</i>. London left for Japan on January 7, but fell sick with influenza four days later on his 28th birthday and recovered only to sprain his ankle severely while horsing around on deck. “I hope war isn’t declared for at least a month after I arrive in Japan,” he wrote his future wife, Charmian Kittredge, as it “will give my ankle a chance to strengthen.”<br />
<br />
Instead, before that month was up, London had ensnared himself in trouble. Western journalists expected Japanese authorities to arrange for passage to the front in Korea, but their hosts were having none of it. The reporters booked themselves into comfortable Tokyo hotels and waited for permissions that never came. Frustrated, London took a train to the western shore, where he planned to catch a steamer across the Sea of Japan to Korea. While awaiting transport in the town of Moji, near a heavily fortified naval base, he began taking photographs of the local attractions and residents—and was quickly arrested for spying. London had a telegram sent to Richard Harding Davis, a veteran war correspondent who was in Tokyo with the rest of the reporters. A decade earlier Davis had had his hands full <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2014/05/the-price-of-harness.html">dealing with Stephen Crane’s recklessness</a> during the Spanish-American War, and once again he found himself coming to the rescue of the world’s newest literary celebrity. He requested the help of the American minister, who intervened, and London was released.<br />
<br />
Undeterred, London nevertheless made his way to the Korean peninsula. He met up with <i>Collier’s</i> magazine photographer Robert L. Dunn, and they traveled by horseback 180 miles from Seoul to Pyongyang, where the commanding general prohibited the two journalists from going any further. While ensconced in a hotel, London got his first scoop: a Japanese lieutenant told him that, outside the walls of Pyongyang a week earlier, twenty Cossack scouts had encountered five Japanese soldiers, who were soon backed up by reinforcements. Shots were fired and, although nobody was injured, the fight proved to be the first ground skirmish of the war and London reported it as such in the <i>Examiner</i>. Dunn returned to Seoul, but London bluffed his way out of town and made it as far as Sunan, 25 miles to the north. Once again, he was detained by Japanese troops; he spent a week in custody while, as he wrote Charmian, “the wires are working hot between here and Ping Yang and Seoul.” He was eventually returned to Seoul and released.<br />
<br />
By the end of April, London had filed nearly twenty stories: portraits of Japanese soldiers, accounts of military preparations in Korea, sympathetic depictions of refugees and peasants, descriptions of Japanese and Korean culture and customs, and comic reports of his encounters with the authorities and of the travails of other journalists. Yet, after three months in Japan and Korea, he had yet to achieve his goal of experiencing war in person. Finally, Japanese military leaders permitted a small contingent of reporters to witness what would be the Battle of Yalu River. Despite his frequent defiance of Japanese strictures (or perhaps because of it), London was allowed to be one of the reporters.<br />
<br />
It proved to be a complete charade. The reporters were allowed to view the battleground from a high point overlooking the valley—but more than two miles away. Under the headline “Japanese in Invisible War,” London reported:
<blockquote>
This was the battle—a river bed, a continuous and irregular sound of rifle firing over a front of miles, a few black moving specks. That was all. No Russians were to be seen. With all the hubbub of shooting no smoke arose. No shot was seen to be fired. The black specks disappeared in the willows. The hubbub of firing continued. Smoke filtered through the air, but the enemies who hurled death at each other were not visible.<br />
<br />
It might be a war of ghosts for all that eye or field-glass could discern. . . .
</blockquote>
London had had enough and decided to return to San Francisco. “I am . . . profoundly irritated by the futility of my position in this Army and sheer inability (caused by the position) to do decent work,” he wrote to Charmian. “What ever I have done I am ashamed of. The only compensation for these months of irritation is a better comprehension of Asiatic geography and Asiatic character. Only in another war, with a whiteman’s army, may I hope to redeem myself.” London was undervaluing his reporting; as Jeanne Campbell Reesman writes in <i>Jack London’s Racial Lives</i>, his two dozen dispatches and hundreds of photographs show “his keen eye for detail and moreover his ability to place the immediate human scene within historical and cultural frameworks.” Reesman adds, however, that “the false note is sounded when he tries to analyze ‘the Japanese character’ or ‘the Asiatic.’” His subsequent reputation has ever since been stained by the racist comments that pepper his dispatches, letters, and subsequent writings, often written in anger at the supposed inability of Japanese leaders to understand “the mental processes of a correspondent, which are a white man’s mental processes.” Later that year, when he was attacked for his views and arrogance at a political meeting in San Francisco, he angrily shouted, “I am first of all a white man and only then a socialist!”<br />
<br />
Before the month of May was over, he got in trouble with the Japanese military one last time. His Korean valet, Manyoungi, complained that a neighboring groom was stealing horsefeed. A confrontation ensued and London laid flat the accused thief with a punch. London was arrested and threatened with a court martial. Still stranded in Tokyo, Davis learned of the news, stepped in one more time, and cabled President Theodore Roosevelt. London was released, he booked passage on a ship home, and took with him both Belle, the horse he had purchased for his travels in Korea, and Manyoungi, who lived with the Londons as a servant for three years.<br />
<br />
London stopped in Tokyo on his way to California and took the chance to thank Davis. “I liked him very much,” Davis wrote to his mother at the time. “He is very bitter against the wonderful little people and says he carries away with him only a feeling of irritation. But I told him that probably would soon wear off and he would remember only the pleasant things. I did envy him so, going home after having seen a fight and I not yet started.” In fact, Davis would wait until the end of August until he was allowed to travel to Manchuria. When he was informed that the Russians had retreated fifty miles north from Liaoyang to Mukden (Shenyang) and he wouldn’t be allowed to join in the pursuit, he returned to Tokyo—only to discover that he had been deliberately misinformed and had missed the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Liaoyang">Battle of Liaoyang</a>.<br />
<br />
In 1911, when Jack London sat down to write what would be his only short story about war,* he lacked the background of the “keen and immortal moments” and firsthand “thrills” he had hoped to endure in Korea. Featuring unnamed combatants during an unspecified conflict in an unidentified land, “War” is a masterpiece of brevity, but—like some of the best stories about war—it is a tale based ultimately on imagination rather than experience.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;">* London’s early story, “An Old Soldier’s Story” (1899), is often categorized as a war story, although it’s more of a comic Civil War anecdote, apparently told to him by his stepfather, featuring a provost marshal who hunts down and arrests for desertion young soldiers overstaying their furloughs to help with farm chores.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">H</span>e was a young man, not more than twenty-four or five, and he might have sat his horse with the careless grace of his youth had he not been so catlike and tense. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Jack-London-War.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Jack-London-War.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Jack-London-War.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-38697840862062130172023-10-08T14:15:00.006-04:002023-10-08T17:21:34.245-04:00A Game of Vlet<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Joanna Russ (1937–2011)</b></span><br />
From <i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/780-novels-amp-stories/">Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories</a></i><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.tor.com/2011/06/28/reading-joanna-russ-the-adventures-of-alyx-1967-1970/">Reading Joanna Russ: <i>The Adventures of Alyx</i></a>” (Lee Mandelo, Tor.com)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.tor.com/2017/04/13/the-one-book-that-made-me-believe-in-female-heroes/">The One Book That Made Me Believe in Female Heroes</a>” (Gwyneth Jones, Tor.com)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/11/when-it-changed.html">When It Changed</a>,” Joanna Russ<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/12/knight-to-move.html">Knight to Move</a>,” Fritz Leiber<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/08/the-day-before-revolution.html">The Day Before the Revolution</a>,” Ursula K. Le Guin<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/10/moxons-master.html">Moxon’s Master</a>,” Ambrose Bierce<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/780-novels-amp-stories"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/203895.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 82px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 50px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/780-novels-amp-stories-by-women"><i><b>Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories</b></i></a><br />
<i>The Female Man</i> | <i>We Who Are About To . . .</i> | <i>On Strike Against God</i> | The Complete Alyx Stories | Other Stories<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqXi9vV1OUT4CvYLq-IrQS3xYgArHKc0LL1CZ3ml1o_EHwbh_sAwwSwlBui5I5mQXxc6U-Hq09HLSvT6skIzNyxj2NBAHJqUV496BJy12YfuXwOy5K5PIx3cQyW81fap-_IQlC2XrtfTXoylYu2Vd6ZkLu7fqE2gmi2gvZri5VsvBBm_Qwd7y_Th74M7M/s1600/Russ-covers.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqXi9vV1OUT4CvYLq-IrQS3xYgArHKc0LL1CZ3ml1o_EHwbh_sAwwSwlBui5I5mQXxc6U-Hq09HLSvT6skIzNyxj2NBAHJqUV496BJy12YfuXwOy5K5PIx3cQyW81fap-_IQlC2XrtfTXoylYu2Vd6ZkLu7fqE2gmi2gvZri5VsvBBm_Qwd7y_Th74M7M/s1600/Russ-covers.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Three Joanna Russ books: Her first novel, <i>Picnic on Paradise</i> (Ace Books, 1968), with cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon; the 1983 edition of <i>The Adventures of Alyx</i> (Timescape / Pocket Books), with cover illustration by Kevin Eugene Johnson; and the story collection <i>The Zanzibar Cat</i> (Arkham House, 1983), with cover illustration by James C. Christensen.</td></tr>
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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, inspiration is surely a close second. In 1974, when Joanna Russ published a new sword-and-sorcery tale in the pages of <i>The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction</i>, she could not have imagined that the 4,000-word story would play a significant role in the creation of a suite of books by Samuel R. Delany. Russ’s influence was obvious early in his 1976 science fiction novel, <i>Trouble on Triton</i>, in which several characters play vlet, a complex chess-like board game. As Delany later explained in <a href="https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm">an interview</a>:
<blockquote>
The name comes from a story by Joanna Russ, “A Game of Vlet.” It’s part—or almost a part—of her “Alyx” series. The game in her story is not quite so complicated as mine; but in Russ’s tale, at one point, you realize that the world of the story is actually controlled by the game: you can’t really tell where the game ends and the world takes up. The three books I’ve written since <i>Triton</i>, set in ancient Nevèrÿon, are basically the game of vlet writ large.
</blockquote>
Delany informed Russ of his appropriation “and she said it was all right.” He returned the favor the same year <i>Triton</i> was published. The first five Alyx episodes, including the novel <i>Picnic on Paradise</i>, were gathered under the title <i>Alyx</i> in a Gregg Press limited edition, and Delany wrote the introduction, in which he examined how Russ’s series transcends and subverts the traditions of the fantasy genre:
<blockquote>
The opening two tales are the swordiest of sword and sorcery; the third is only a few dials and traveling spotlights away from the most sorcerous; and, despite its dials, lights, and the world “machine,” it certainly doesn’t <i>feel</i> like science fiction. In the novel, when our pre-civilised heroine is transported into the future, we have a tale that does feel like science fiction; and the closing novella, while its surface demands to be taken as science fiction, keeps evoking feelings that tend to veer our reading of it toward a psychological fantasy. . . .
</blockquote>
He adds, “The largest break with the sword and sorcery tradition is, of course, that there are women in Russ’s tales. . . . Possibly an even larger break is that there is, at least, one—and this is what sword and sorcery banishes entirely from its landscape—husband in the series.”
<br /><br />
“Those stories were a breakthrough for me,” Russ told interviewer Larry McCaffery in 1986.
<blockquote>
. . . up until that point I had pretty much been following the usual cultural scenario by writing action stories with men as main characters and love stories with women protagonists; naturally, in the action stories the men usually won, while in the love stories the women lost. When I got to Alyx, for the first time I realized I had stumbled upon the chance to create a new story—really a whole series of stories—that could counter those gender stereotypes. One of the most exciting things about working in SF for me, a woman, is that SF is so open-ended—it’s perfectly possible to imagine a world where sexism doesn’t exist, or in which women can be presented in the context of new myths that women can admire or learn from.
</blockquote>
In the mid-1980s, the Alyx stories were reprinted (sans Delany’s introduction) as a mass-market paperback with the title <i>The Adventures of Alyx</i>, yet readers will find “A Game of Velt” in neither collection—which is why Delany refers to it as “almost a part” of the Alyx series. The story appeared instead in Russ’s 1983 story collection, <i>The Zanzibar Cat</i>. Just as Delany had borrowed an idea from her story, she too had adapted an element from an earlier work, as she acknowledged in a headnote:
<blockquote>
This story was inspired by the fine piece of medieval magic Vergil Magus performs in Avram Davidson’s wonderful <i>The Phoenix and the Mirror</i> [1969]. It’s also the last story I ever wrote about my character Alyx, the last, the last, the last. I’m sorry, readers who want more of her, but there just ain’t no more.
</blockquote>
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<span style="font-size: 200%;">I</span>n Ourdh, near the sea, on a summer’s night so hot and still that the marble blocks of the Governor’s mansion sweated as if the earth itself were respiring through the stone—which is exactly what certain wise men maintain to be the case—the Governor’s palace guard caught an assassin trying to enter the Governor’s palace through a secret passage too many unfortunates have thought they alone knew. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Russ-Game-Vlet.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Russ-Game-Vlet.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection is used by permission.<br />
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the <a href="http://www.copyright.com/">Copyright Clearance Center</a>.</span></div>
<iframe height="900" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Russ-Game-Vlet.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-23334602974049417942023-09-24T14:38:00.018-04:002023-09-24T19:07:02.567-04:00Secret Paragraphs about My Brother<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/778-collected-plays-amp-other-writings/"><i>Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">
<br />
<b>Interview:</b> “<a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/adrienne-kennedy/">Adrienne Kennedy by Suzan-Lori Parks</a>” (<i>Bomb</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/t-magazine/adrienne-kennedy-broadway.html">At 91, Adrienne Kennedy Is Finally on Broadway. What Took So Long?</a>” (Scott Brown, <i>The New York Times</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/09/portrait-of-author-as-working-writer.html">Portrait of the Author as a Working Writer</a>,” Virginia Hamilton<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/12/Tall-Tale-Blue-Over-Mobile-Bay-in-Harlem.html">Tall Tale Blue Over Mobile Bay in Harlem</a>,” Albert Murray<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/10/thesis-turned-broadway.html">Thesis Turned Broadway</a>,” Katherine Dunham<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/04/new-haven-1920.html">New Haven, 1920</a>,” Thornton Wilder<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/778-collected-plays-amp-other-writings/"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/9781598537512.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 82px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 50px;" /></a><b><i><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/778-collected-plays-amp-other-writings/">Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings</a></i></b><br />
<i>Funnyhouse of a Negro</i> | <i>The Owl Answers</i> | <i>A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White</i> | <i>Ohio State Murders</i> | 23 other plays | adaptations of Euripides | short stories, memoirs, essays, other works<br />
List price: $45.00<br />
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<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/778-collected-plays-amp-other-writings/">Web store price: $32.00</a><br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigm6yGA9o3NuIiiKoFWAw5r6QgU4Xmy4ria06NFRtbVIPH0TxRsrKIV3DkHvYLJl3x_yGNA0qBgbz9pO7dUmXEJKLrKn2IYtiz9tfS0n1o5RTp2XrytZDPmF5erZvbuerNAuO4YO3R3F0ACNDoQ4XIgQg_J5m180WaEYWf6XKptIjaoz_cbKgJIBJObDo/s1600/kennedy-wedding.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigm6yGA9o3NuIiiKoFWAw5r6QgU4Xmy4ria06NFRtbVIPH0TxRsrKIV3DkHvYLJl3x_yGNA0qBgbz9pO7dUmXEJKLrKn2IYtiz9tfS0n1o5RTp2XrytZDPmF5erZvbuerNAuO4YO3R3F0ACNDoQ4XIgQg_J5m180WaEYWf6XKptIjaoz_cbKgJIBJObDo/s1600/kennedy-wedding.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adrienne Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy on their wedding day, May 15, 1953, at her family’s home in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland. To the left are his parents, Leon and Cara Kennedy, and to the right are her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins; her brother, Cornell Jr.; and her mother, Etta. (Courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy via <i>The New York Times</i>)</td></tr>
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In the summer of 1946, Tennessee Williams’s <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> came to the Ring Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. The touring company featured film and stage star Julie Haydon, who originated the role of Laura Wingfield in the 1944 Broadway production. Fourteen-year-old Adrienne Kennedy went to a performance—and it changed her life.<br />
<br />
Kennedy has often referred to her lifelong fascination with Williams’s plays in her writings and interviews. “When I saw <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>, I decided I could write scenes of family turmoil, but not until I was about 22 did I want to be a playwright,” <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/5-questions-for-writer-ad_b_10335420">she told author and film producer Tanya Selvaratnam in 2016</a>. “I lived in New York then, and I was intoxicated by Tennessee Williams’s career, his plays, movies. People paid so much attention to him, and I was quite taken with that.” She recalled in an earlier essay, “In the spring of 1956 I registered for a course in playwriting at the New School. I hoped to write a play like <i>The Glass Menagerie</i>. In my mind at that time Laura and Amanda as well as Blanche in <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i> spoke the way people onstage were supposed to speak.” For several years she worked on a three-act family drama, “The Pale Blue Flowers,” which, she admits now, “was as much like <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> as I could make it,” and she even sent it to Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood, who responded with a friendly and encouraging letter of rejection.<br />
<br />
“It took ten years to stop imitating him, to stop using his form and to stop stealing his themes, which were not mine,” Kennedy wrote in her 1987 memoir, <i>People Who Led to My Plays</i>. By the end of the 1950s, she had found new inspiration in the works of Federico García Lorca; in particular, his play <i>Blood Wedding</i> and the poetry collection <i>The Poet in New York</i> showed her “that imagery is multilayered, that it comes from recovering connections long ago lost and buried.” In addition, Kennedy mined her own life for the “scenes of family turmoil” that she had so loved in Williams’s plays. As she explained in her essay “A Growth of Images”:
<blockquote>
Autobiographical work is the only thing that interests me, apparently because that is what I do best. I write about my family. . . . I feel overwhelmed by family problems and family realities. I see my writing as being an outlet for inner, psychological confusion and questions stemming from childhood. . . .
</blockquote>
Kennedy’s brother, Cornell Hawkins, Jr., younger by three years, was one source of inspiration. References to him, both fictionalized and factual, are scattered throughout her plays and prose. When they were children, the two were very close, traveling by train each summer “in the dirty Jim Crow car” to their paternal grandparents’ home in Montezuma, Georgia, and playing together for hours (“we sat side by side next to the Philco radio and listened to the shows and then played games acting out the characters”). As they grew older, her brother’s relationship with his family became strained, and past events took on new meaning, as she noted in <i>People Who Led to My Plays</i>: “As a child my brother Cornell was quiet, and he ran away for a few hours (when it was snowing) when he was ten. And I know there was an unseen sadness in him.” She added, “In his twenties my brother spoke bitterly of his life in a way I could not fathom. He often said he felt hopeless, and then he joined the army.”<br />
<br />
In Kennedy’s often-anthologized play <i>A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White</i>, one sees echoes of Cornell in Wally, the brother of the lead character, Clara:
<blockquote>
When my brother was in the army in Germany, he was involved in a crime and was court-martialled. He won’t talk about it. I went to visit him in the stockade. . . .<br />
<br />
His head was shaven and he didn’t have on any shoes. He has a vein that runs down his forehead and large brown eyes. When he was in high school he was in All City track in the two-twenty dash. We all thought he was going to be a great athlete. His dream was the Olympics. After high school he went to several colleges and left them; Morehouse (where my father went), Ohio State (where I went) and Western Reserve. I’m a failure he said. I can’t make it in those schools. I’m tired. He suddenly joined the army.
</blockquote>
When Cornell died in 1972, Kennedy realized how little she’d known about him, and she wrote about the mystery and loss in “Secret Paragraphs about My Brother.”<br />
<br />
In an interview with fellow playwright Suzan-Lori Parks <a href="https://bombmagazine.org/articles/adrienne-kennedy/">published in <i>Bomb</i></a>, Kennedy observed, “I’m genuinely fascinated and I will always be—by that pool of stories I heard when I was growing up,” to which Parks responded, “But supposedly black people don’t <i>tell</i> things. I’m fascinated by the tension: the pool of stories, and yet those things that <i>aren’t</i> told. All those things that aren’t talked about. . . .”<br />
<br />
“The secrets,” Kennedy replied.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> The 1988 Dutch movie <b><i>The Vanishing</i></b>, directed by George Sluizer, is about a woman who disappears at a highway rest stop. <i><b>Vertigo</b></i> is a 1958 film noir in which James Stewart, playing a private detective, grows obsessed with a pair of apparent doubles, both played by Kim Novak. <b><i>Guys and Dolls</i></b> is a 1955 film adaptation, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, of the 1950 musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">T</span>here have been killings in Cambridge.<br />
They want me to help them find the murderer, but I can’t concentrate. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Kennedy-Secret-Paragraphs.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Kennedy-Secret-Paragraphs.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 110%;"><span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection is used by permission.<br />
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the <a href="http://www.copyright.com/">Copyright Clearance Center</a>.</span></div>
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Kennedy-Secret-Paragraphs.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-64928023749264672382023-09-18T16:31:00.017-04:002023-09-24T12:52:53.570-04:00Absolution<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/779-the-great-gatsby-and-related-stories-paperback/"><i>The Great Gatsby and Related Stories</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Video:</b> “<a href="https://www.c-span.org/classroom/document/?21424">F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota</a>” (Dave Page, CSPAN)<br />
<br />
“<a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/f-scott-fitzgerald-novelist-who-was-catholic-not-catholic-novelist">F. Scott Fitzgerald: a novelist who was Catholic, but not a ‘Catholic novelist’</a>” (David Leigh, <i>America Magazine</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/09/benediction.html">Benediction</a>,” F. Scott Fitzgerald<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/01/the-egg.html">The Egg</a>,” Sherwood Anderson<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/07/the-doctor-and-doctors-wife.html">The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife</a>,” Ernest Hemingway<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/10/train.html">The Train</a>,” Flannery O'Connor<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/779-the-great-gatsby-and-related-stories-paperback"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/410500.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 82px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 50px;" /></a><a href="https://www.loa.org/books/779-the-great-gatsby-and-related-stories-paperback"><i><b>The Great Gatsby and Related Stories</b></i></a><br />
Paperback | 387 pages<br />
List price: $15.95<br />
<a href="https://www.loa.org/books/779-the-great-gatsby-and-related-stories-paperback">Web store price: $11.95</a></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioEmbBI1jkkeDvVZSkll7_4HvQrQQryaieJ4eo9a6kzn2RBZMdBnJCrwG458G-Z6JKNewdWKbqOuH0kVScTiLiPhiecT-zlO9u4qLyjC1oxlL3P-qMujyagSz6kKSZYhJ6Qc8Tq7Hd0nKe1dRqffsBkNxtF70zmygluPrTKnrYSsZnWVKFzkpUtJBamiQ/s1600/threshing.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioEmbBI1jkkeDvVZSkll7_4HvQrQQryaieJ4eo9a6kzn2RBZMdBnJCrwG458G-Z6JKNewdWKbqOuH0kVScTiLiPhiecT-zlO9u4qLyjC1oxlL3P-qMujyagSz6kKSZYhJ6Qc8Tq7Hd0nKe1dRqffsBkNxtF70zmygluPrTKnrYSsZnWVKFzkpUtJBamiQ/s1600/threshing.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon. . . .” <i>Above</i>: Wheat-threshing scene in the Red River Valley, c. 1900–1910. The hand-colored image for this postcard was also used in advertising for Washburn-Crosby Flour Mills in Minneapolis, which produced Gold Medal Flour. (eBay)</td></tr></tbody></table>
In 1919, after leaving the Army, F. Scott Fitzgerald began keeping a detailed business ledger, listing all his publications and the money he earned through his writing. The last section of this journal was a month-by-month chronicle of his life, told in the third person, looking back to his birth (“1896 Sept 24th at 3-30 P.M. a son Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald to Edward and Mary Fitzgerald”), and he kept it up to date through the summer of 1935. Fitzgerald’s childhood memories are often half-joking embellishments, such as the day he went with his family to Atlantic City, “where some Freudean complex refused to let him display his feet, so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason. They thought he feared the water. In reality he craved it.” More relevant to our current selection was part of the entry for September 1907: “He went to Confession about this time and lied by saying in a shocked voice to the priest ‘Oh <u>no</u>, I <u>never</u> tell a lie.’” From this memory sprang the story “Absolution,” written while he was struggling to work on the novel that would become <i>The Great Gatsby</i>.<br />
<br />
Fitzgerald came up with the idea for his third novel in the spring of 1922, when he and his wife, Zelda, were still living in Minnesota. “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think,” he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s. “It will concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually + will be centered on a smaller period of time. It will have a catholic element.” He worked on the novel in earnest the following year, but in April 1924 he updated Perkins: “Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged + in approaching it from a new angle I’ve had to discard a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the <i>Mercury</i> as a short story).” A novel originally set forty years earlier had become something altogether different, and Fitzgerald sent an episode from the discarded material to H. L. Mencken, who published it in <i>The American Mercury</i>. Two months later, Fitzgerald responded to a letter from Perkins, “I’m glad you liked ‘Absolution.’ As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan.”<br />
<br />
Ten years later, Fitzgerald received a copy of a letter sent to <i>Hound & Horn</i> by the librarian John Jamieson, who objected to an essay in the literary quarterly positing that Flaubert should be considered Fitzgerald’s “ultimate master.” Jamieson argued that the more obvious influence was Thackeray—which impressed Fitzgerald, who had read Thackeray’s novels “over and over by the time I was sixteen” and had even compared <i>Gatsby</i> to <i>Henry Esmond</i> and <i>Vanity Fair</i> in a letter to another critic. Fitzgerald sent a short letter to Jamieson and, in subsequent correspondence, wrote:
<blockquote>
I agree with you entirely, as goes without saying, in your analysis of Gatsby. He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance. It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called ‘Absolution,’ in my book <i>All the Sad Young Men</i> was intended to be a picture of his early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve a sense of mystery.
</blockquote>
This later letter has fueled the belief that “Absolution” is the “deleted prologue” of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. Arthur Mizener, in the first full-length biography of Fitzgerald, claimed bluntly that it “was written, not as a short story, but as a prologue for <i>Gatsby</i>,” and the inference has reappeared frequently over the decades. During the 1970s, a professor suggested in the pages of <i>College Literature</i> that teachers could use the story to reignite students’ interest in the novel by presenting Rudolph Miller, the boy in the “prologue,” as “undoubtedly the pre-adolescent James Gatz.” And a decade ago, <i>Slate</i> resurrected the story, celebrating it as “<a href="https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/absolution-and-great-gatsby-f-scott-fitzgerald-story-gives-us-gatsby-as-a-boy-sort-of.html">The Forgotten Childhood of Jay Gatsby</a>.”<br />
<br />
Many scholars downplay both the importance of “Absolution” in the development of Gatsby’s character and Fitzgerald’s later claim that the story was “cut” in the final novel. “This surely cannot have been literally the case,” protested the novelist Thomas Flanagan in <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/12/21/fitzgeralds-radiant-world/"><i>The New York Review of Books</i></a>, “there seems little connection between Jimmy Gatz . . . and Rudolph Miller.” Similarly, the late Matthew J. Bruccoli, a foremost expert on all things Fitzgerald, wrote in his 1981 biography:
<blockquote>
It is not certain that Rudolph Miller, the boy whose dreams of metropolitan glamour are reinforced by his encounter with the deranged priest, is Jimmy Gatz. As Fitzgerald told Perkins, “Absolution” was salvaged from a discarded version before he approached the novel from “a new angle”—by which he meant a new plot. While Miller and Gatz share a romantic disposition, there is no clear evidence that they are the same characterization from the same novel. Fitzgerald’s 1922 plan was that his third novel would have a “catholic element”—which is entirely absent in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, though central to “Absolution.” Indeed, there is no clue to Gatsby’s religious background beyond the fact that his funeral is conducted by a Lutheran minister. The safest way to regard Rudolph Miller is as a preliminary treatment of the figure who developed into Jay Gatsby; they share the conviction that “There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.”
</blockquote>
It is perhaps more accurate, then, to think of “Absolution” not as the chapter that was omitted from the finished novel but as an episode from a novel that was never finished.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> The slang phrase <b>twenty-three Skidoo</b>, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, means “Beat it!” or “Scram!” <b>James J. Hill</b> was a Canadian American railroad executive and financier whose base of operations was in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald’s hometown. A self-made man, Hill was a hero to many midwestern boys. American author Horatio <b>Alger</b>, Jr., wrote <i>Ragged Dick</i> (1868) and numerous other rags-to-riches stories extolling honesty, hard work, and perseverance. One of Rudolph’s pennants is from <b>Hamline</b> University, a small Methodist institution in St. Paul.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Dómini, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanábitur ánima mea</b></i>. . . . is from the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass: “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul will be healed.” <b><i>Corpus Dómini nostri Jesu Christi custódiat ánimam meam in vitam ætérnam</i></b>: “May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve my soul unto life everlasting.” <b><i>Sagitta Volante in Die</i></b>: “The arrow flying in the day” (from Psalms 90:6, Douay–Rheims version).<br />
<br />
The <b>German cuirassiers at Sedan</b> were Prussian cavalry, who wore breastplates and plumed or spiked helmets, at the Battle of Sedan on September 1–2, 1870, which resulted in the capture of Napoleon III and the effective defeat of the French.</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<span style="font-size: 200%;">T</span>here was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Fitzgerald-Absolution.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Fitzgerald-Absolution.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Fitzgerald-Absolution.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-65318686698478035522023-08-06T14:34:00.022-04:002023-09-18T00:28:56.828-04:00Narrative and Testimony of Sarah M. Grimké<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/books/376"><i>American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://blog.phillyhistory.org/index.php/2013/05/the-wedding-that-ignited-philadelphia/">The Wedding that Ignited Philadelphia</a>” (Ken Finkel, <i>The Philly History Blog</i>)<br />
<br />
“<a href="http://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/slavery-and-anti-slavery/essays/angelina-and-sarah-grimke-abolitionist-sisters">Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters</a>” (Carol Berkin, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2018/06/the-two-altars-or-two-pictures-in-one.html">The Two Altars; or, Two Pictures in One</a>,” Harriet Beecher Stowe<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2017/06/the-whole-horrible-transaction.html">This Whole Horrible Transaction</a>,” John Quincy Adams<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/04/the-lover.html">The Lover</a>,” Harriet Ann Jacobs<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/01/a-dream.html">A Dream</a>,” Anonymous<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/books/376"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdXLLDfRJsvSehoXfXU83r5sdaOSA7nGxh8eHUpDHNRUbWAhlDD8jC1MTyhpa4kWHAn9ctwQseb0OqyOKwSTFFmXUP14iInXh6cjwgBMczvlz0HecCEViaH6mVQzge6qxqPDCvh6r-rj8/s1600/Antislavery-jacket.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 115px; margin: 0pt 5px 10px 0pt; width: 70px;" /></a><i><a href="http://www.loa.org/books/376"><b>American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation</b></a></i> <br />
Autobiography, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, oratory, & song<br />
<b>970 pages</b><br />
List price: $40.00<br />
<b>20% off, free shipping</b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFBsajr8HdTwN4ir915NM5hxvjL91S7bBI2tHVKmBeh1jhIiRY3mFQ-NMxlQoyrJ-e533N7U3_3FuRWZ6M-gq5bWegIF2Bd8OxNPGG3zNkbdHMRCiTdpy7zS6cG7WFmy5ngbLoC-EJMmmb9I3t5rqRLRY6TCei3S8SM6x5Ek-XXOXi6sUBJDl6KBZdLPY/s1600/Penn-Hall.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFBsajr8HdTwN4ir915NM5hxvjL91S7bBI2tHVKmBeh1jhIiRY3mFQ-NMxlQoyrJ-e533N7U3_3FuRWZ6M-gq5bWegIF2Bd8OxNPGG3zNkbdHMRCiTdpy7zS6cG7WFmy5ngbLoC-EJMmmb9I3t5rqRLRY6TCei3S8SM6x5Ek-XXOXi6sUBJDl6KBZdLPY/s1600/Penn-Hall.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania Hall. On the Night of the 17th May, 1838.” Illustration by Swiss-born American artist and lithographer John Caspar Wild (c. 1804–1846). The publisher John T. Bowen issued the print within a few days of the fire. Image and caption details courtesy Library of Congress.<br />
Constructed in 1837–38 at Sixth and Haines Streets in Philadelphia as a meeting place for local antislavery groups, Pennsylvania Hall opened with dedication ceremonies on May 14, a day that concluded with the wedding of Sarah Grimké's sister Angelina to the abolitionist Theodore Weld. On the night of May 17, an anti-abolitionist mob stormed the hall and set it on fire. In the illustration, a large crowd looks on as firefighters spray water on an adjoining building. </td></tr></tbody></table>
Decades after the publication in 1839 of <i>American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses</i>, Harriet Beecher Stowe told one of its contributors, Angelina Grimké, that “she kept that book in her work basket by day, and slept with it under her pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom.” Stowe acknowledged in a preface to the 1878 edition of <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i> that the book had “reinforced her repertoire of facts,” and she included excerpts in her supplementary work, <i>A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i>. Her use of the book was hardly a surprise to readers; <i>American Slavery As It Is</i> was the most widely distributed book on the subject of slavery before the publication of Stowe’s famous novel in 1852; Charles Dickens included lengthy passages from it, without attribution, in his 1842 book <i>American Notes for General Circulation</i>.<br />
<br />
With help from Angelina and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké, Angelina’s husband Theodore Dwight Weld published the densely packed, encyclopedic compendium of eyewitness accounts. To counter the argument by “slaveholders and their apologists” that “their slaves are kindly treated,” the three editors compiled a mountain of evidence that evinced “their condemnation out of their own mouths”:
<blockquote>[The] newspapers in the slaveholding states teem with advertisements for runaway slaves, in which the masters and <i>mistresses</i> describe their men and women, as having been ‘branded with a hot iron,’ on their ‘cheeks,’ ‘jaws,’ ‘breasts,’ ‘arms,’ ‘legs,’ and ‘thighs;’ also as ‘scarred,’ ‘very much scarred,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘marked,’ &c. ‘with the whip,’ also with ‘iron collars on,’ ‘chains,’ ‘bars of iron,’ ‘fetters,’ ‘bells,’ ‘horns,’ ‘shackles,’ &c. They, also, describe them as having been wounded by ‘buckshot,’ ‘rifle-balls,’ &c. fired at them by their ‘owners,’ and others when in pursuit; also, as having ‘notches,’ cut in their ears, the tops or bottoms of their ears ‘cut off,’ or ‘slit,’ or ‘one ear cut off,’ or ‘both ears cut off,’ &c. &c. The masters and mistresses who thus advertise their runaway slaves, coolly sign their names to their advertisements, giving the street and number of their residences, if in cities, their post office address, &c. if in the country; thus making public proclamation as widely as possible that <i>they</i> ‘brand,’ ‘scar,’ ‘gash,’ ‘cut up,’ &c. the flesh of their slaves; load them with irons, cut off their ears, &c.; they speak of these things with the utmost <i>sang froid</i>, not seeming to think it possible, that any one will esteem them at all the less because of these outrages upon their slaves; further, these advertisements swarm in many of the largest and most widely circulated political and commercial papers that are published in the slave states. The editors of those papers constitute the main body of the literati of the slave states; they move in the highest circle of society, are among the ‘popular’ men in the community, and <i>as a class</i>, are more influential than any other; yet these editors publish these advertisements with iron indifference.
</blockquote>
The volume reprinted hundreds of such notices, leaving the names intact. For example, one advertisement in the July 18, 1838, issue of <i>The North Carolina Standard</i>, a leading paper in Raleigh, reads: “TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD. Ranaway from the subscriber, a negro woman and two children; the woman is tall and black, and a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M, and she kept a cloth over her head and face, and a fly bonnet on her head so as to cover the burn. . . . [Signed] Micajah Ricks.” In July 1836, Mississippi sheriff J. L. Jolley placed a notice in the <i>Clinton Gazette</i> that he had captured and jailed a man, “says his name is Josiah, his back very much scarred by the whip, and branded on the thigh and hips, in three or four places, thus (J. M.), the rim of his right ear has been bit or cut off.” (Weld and the Grimkés devoted an entire section to the cropping of ears as a form of branding and punishment.) Considered an everyday part of life to most newspaper readers in the South, the notices were a shock to many in the North.<br />
<br />
The Grimké sisters themselves knew the ads well. They had been born in Charleston and raised among the city’s elite; the family’s home overlooked the wharves where, until 1808, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived. Their father was a wealthy slave-owner and served on the state’s top court for four decades—eventually as its chief justice. In 1819, Sarah accompanied him when he traveled to Philadelphia to obtain medical advice for a chronic and mysterious ailment. He died while seeking a rest cure on a New Jersey beach. During her stay in Philadelphia, Sarah, 26 years old at the time, had been impressed by members of the Society of Friends, and two years later she moved to the city with her recently widowed sister, Anna Grimké Frost, and became a Quaker.<br />
<br />
Angelina, the youngest of the fourteen Grimké children, joined Sarah and Anna in Philadelphia in 1829. She met Theodore at an abolitionist meeting in New York City in 1836, and the couple were married two years later in Anna’s home, on Monday, May 14, 1838, in a ceremony for which they had written their own vows. Later that week, Sarah described the occasion in a letter to a friend:
<blockquote>A colored Presbyterian minister then prayed, and was followed by a white one, and then I felt as if I could not restrain the language of praise and thanksgiving to Him who had condescended to be in the midst of this marriage feast, and to pour forth abundantly the oil and wine of consolation and rejoicing. The Lord Jesus was the first guest invited to be present, and He condescended to bless us with His presence, and to sanction and sanctify the union which was thus consummated. The certificate was then read by William Lloyd Garrison, and was signed by the company. The evening was spent in pleasant social intercourse. Several colored persons were present, among them two liberated slaves, who formerly belonged to our father, had come by inheritance to sister Anna, and had been freed by her. They were our invited guests, and we thus had an opportunity to bear our testimony against the horrible prejudice which prevails against colored persons, and the equally awful prejudice against the poor.</blockquote>
The wedding proved to be the concluding event of a day of festivities to celebrate the official opening of Pennsylvania Hall; many of the nearly one hundred wedding guests had been in town for the center’s dedication ceremonies. Built primarily as a meeting place for abolitionist and other reformist associations, the Hall was the site over the next three days for the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Angelina was scheduled to speak at the event on May 16 when a mob surrounded the building and eventually threw stones and other objects through the windows. She took the stage and extemporaneously began her speech, shouting over the sound of breaking glass, “What if the mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons—would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?” She then spoke for over an hour before leading the women, double file, out of the building and safely through the stunned mob. The following night, however, proslavery forces returned and burned the building to the ground, three days after its opening, while the city’s firefighters stood by and watched.<br />
<br />
The next year, the newlyweds, along with Sarah, moved to a small farm in New Jersey and published <i>American Slavery As It Is</i>. One of Sarah’s contributions to the volume was her own “Narrative and Testimony,” which recounted the horrors she had witnessed while living in Charleston and which we present below.<br />
<br />
<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Note</i></b>: Grimke’s essay refers to the <i><b>Narrative of James Williams</b></i>. Raised as a household servant to a man named George <b>Larrimore</b> in Virginia, Williams became a slavedriver on an Alabama plantation under the direction of a sadistic overseer. Elements of the book, ghost-written by John Greenleaf Whittier, had been doubted and disputed since its publication in 1838 because (as recent scholarship culminating in <a href="https://lsupress.org/books/detail/narrative-of-james-williams-an-american-slave/"><span style="color: red;">an annotated edition by Hank Trent</span></a> shows) Williams had altered or romanticized many of the names, dates, places, and events in his biography—including his own name—to avoid discovery by his pursuers; the misrepresentations made factual verification impossible. In the words of one recent reviewer, it should be read for “what it is—an honest account of a runaway’s sufferings and escape using misdirection as a form of self-preservation.”</div><br />
<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">A</span>s I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Grimke-Narrative-Testimony.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Grimke-Narrative-Testimony.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Grimke-Narrative-Testimony.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-90708810914741435462023-07-30T12:48:00.022-04:002023-09-18T00:29:56.558-04:00‘X-ing a Paragrab’<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)</b></span><br />
From <a href="http://www.loa.org/books/90"><i>Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales</i></a><br />
<br />
<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.eapoe.org/index.htm">Nathaniel Parker Willis: Death of Edgar Allan Poe</a>” (The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore}<br />
<br />
<b>Poem:</b> “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44887/for-annie">‘For Annie,’ by Edgar Allan Poe</a>” (Poetry Foundation)<br />
<br />
<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/01/william-wilson.html">William Wilson</a>,” Edgar Allan Poe<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2020/11/the-poor-devil-author.html">The Poor Devil Author</a>,” Washington Irving<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/12/miss-grief.html">‘Miss Grief,’</a>” Constance Fenimore Woolson<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/10/baxter-procrustes.html">Baxter’s Procrustes</a>” Charles W. Chesnutt<br />
<br />
<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/books/90"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA7GJ6QQNf3Ug5762OxsG9Y_rHUEZsL9gbg10vPqrAcTG3tAZIEiIgEnqw-lPU5HQYfppUV-LWW28l0SPS2VQq-msixWdbrGXS73aTEfMsqolLhheMobduXN8FilwQ921OIDNOitPIpqc/s1600/9780940450189.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 5px 0px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><i><a href="http://www.loa.org/books/90"><b><i>Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales</i></b></a></i><br />
Clothbound • 1408 pages<br />
List price: $45.00<br />
<a href="http://www.loa.org/books/90">Web store price: $30.00</a><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqRrleDe1wyKWm_hG4Fr51dsVPlppeGyho-yLU3EK5G8U4yEhtMu2zdR3KKRSQ1JVB1d5Ci_QEGuRdXuFrg-j78JutQATaVV3LLeGyn6H1WSSejsRzffN3ChuM_jWjcwVAerGveB-OuL9O3pJdWpl-vqiwPFRkv2jgpGM0P6pJneXSs9Vv7bOx0lax0k/s1600/Metal_movable_type.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidqRrleDe1wyKWm_hG4Fr51dsVPlppeGyho-yLU3EK5G8U4yEhtMu2zdR3KKRSQ1JVB1d5Ci_QEGuRdXuFrg-j78JutQATaVV3LLeGyn6H1WSSejsRzffN3ChuM_jWjcwVAerGveB-OuL9O3pJdWpl-vqiwPFRkv2jgpGM0P6pJneXSs9Vv7bOx0lax0k/s1600/Metal_movable_type.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;" >A case of cast metal type pieces and a composing stick. (Photo by Willi Heidelbach, Wikimedia Commons)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<br /><br />
The University of Virginia Library is home to <a href="https://www.eapoe.org/works/letters/p4903011.htm">a fragment of a letter</a> written by Edgar Allan Poe sometime around the beginning of March in 1849. He teases two pieces scheduled to be published in <i>Flag of Our Union</i>, a Boston weekly featuring new fiction and poetry: “The Flag has 2 of my tales now — Hop-Frog & another called ‘X-ing a Paragrab’: — guess what that is about if you can!”<br />
<br />
“Hop Frog” has become one of the better known of Poe’s tales (we previously presented it as <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/08/hop-frog.html">a <i>Story of the Week</i> selection</a>), but “X-ing a Paragrab” holds a curious, marginal place in his bibliography. A light-hearted bagatelle, it would be the second to last prose piece published in his lifetime (the final sketch, “Landor’s Cottage,” appeared a month later), and it is often glossed over in the biographies of Poe and in critical appraisals of his work.<br />
<br />
The anecdote at the center of the tale “is by no means original with Poe,” writes Thomas Ollive Mabbott, whose annotations for Poe’s story cite as examples two contemporary pieces in the <i>New-York Mirror</i>, both about the “printers’ custom of substituting X for a letter for which type is lacking.” Although Poe’s humorous take on the topic doesn’t evoke the dread or chills of his most famous works, it does speak to one of his own personal “terrors”: having his text mangled by a typesetter or printer. As Michael J. S. Williams notes in <i>A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe</i>, “On the most obvious thematic level, then, ‘X-ing a Paragrab’ dramatizes that element of risk, that ‘unknown quantity of X’ that intervenes between the act of writing a manuscript and its final printed version and threatens to deflate by X-ing an author’s sense of ‘conscious power’ in composition.”<br />
<br />
Poe’s affiliation with <i>Flag of Our Union</i> fueled his anxieties. The four poems and four stories published during his lifetime after February 1849 all appeared in the popular weekly, and he felt the pieces were cheapened by their very presence in its pages. The rushed pace of publication for the journal exasperated him. When he was unable to make a handful of last-minute changes and corrections to the poem “For Annie,” he convinced editor Nathaniel Parker Willis to print, only days after it appeared in the <i>Flag</i>, a clean copy in <i>The Home Journal</i>, a subterfuge that angered his editors. Poe felt his work was tainted by association with the down-market fare that crowded <a href="https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:rbc:rbc0001:2007:2007ser36056:0007/full/pct:50/0/default.jpg">the <i>Flag</i>’s newspaper format</a>, but he desperately needed the money. “In this emergency I sell articles to the vulgar and trashy ⸺ – — ⸺, for $5 a piece,” he wrote to one friend. “I enclose my last, cut out, lest you should see by my sending the paper in what company I am forced to appear.” Against the backdrop of these challenges and humiliations, Poe wrote his satire of dueling editors, commercial printers, and corrupted texts.
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<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Note:</i></b> The “<b>logic of a Brownson</b>” is a sarcastic reference to the writings of Orestes Augustus Brownson, especially the didactic novel <i>Charles Elwood, or The Infidel Converted</i> (1840). Brownson ended a decade’s association with the Transcendentalists when he converted to Catholicism in 1844. “<i><b>Oh, tempora! Oh, Moses!</b></i>” is Mr. Bullet-head’s malapropism (or his apprentice’s typo?) for Cicero’s “<i>O tempora, o mores</i>” (“Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”). Bullet-head hails from <b>Frogpondium</b>, Poe’s disparaging name for Boston, referring to the Frog Pond in the Boston Common. The line “Off with his head, <b>So much for Buckingham!</b>” is from Colley Cibber’s 1699 adaptation of <i>Richard III</i>, which was more commonly performed than Shakespeare’s original play. A printer’s <b>devil</b> was the term used for a young apprentice who performs small tasks, such as mixing ink, gathering type, and cleaning presses. XX and <b>XXX</b> were markings used by breweries to denote the quality and/or the strength of its ale.</div>
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<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div><span style="font-size: 200%;">A</span>s it is well known that the ‘wise men’ came ‘from the East,’ and as Mr. Touch-and-go Bullet-head came from the East, it follows that Mr. Bullet-head was a wise man; and if collateral proof of the matter be needed, here we have it—Mr. B. was an editor. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Poe-Xing-Paragrab.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Poe-Xing-Paragrab.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
<iframe height="1200" src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Poe-Xing-Paragrab.pdf&embedded=true" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;" width="600"></iframe>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4131565232546223857.post-75800006648874923062023-07-23T12:59:00.051-04:002023-09-18T00:32:02.340-04:00Out of Season<span style="font-size: 130%;"><b>Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)</b></span><br />
From <a href="https://loa.org/books/634"><i>Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926</i></a><br />
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<div class="linksbox"><b>Interesting Links</b><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">“<a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hemingway/hadley-richardson">Biography | Hadley Richardson</a>” (Ken Burns’s <i>Hemingway</i>, PBS)<br />
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“<a href="https://ehto.thestar.com/marks/how-hemingway-came-of-age-at-the-toronto-star">How Hemingway Came of Age at the Toronto Star</a>” (Bill Schiller, <i>Toronto Star</i>)<br />
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<b>Previous Story of the Week selections</b><br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/07/cat-in-rain.html">Cat in the Rain</a>,” Ernest Hemingway<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2021/09/the-lees-of-happiness.html">The Lees of Happiness</a>,” F. Scott Fitzgerald<br />
• “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/01/tom-husband.html">Tom’s Husband</a>,” Sarah Orne Jewett<br /><br />
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<b>Buy the book</b><br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/634"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsNjTkuDwDEqRLPia9ktFuKR8JJpwu6_uMYzKd5CX8-5zFQuau4U5Xg1tz9w1isJyCmwWL852q-7uA_0aEt3b7-eARCcrW7oQs4jHOkUowEjVGdycPmmnZmViKF8h2sU7vJu4gKgJ7JPM/s1600/9781598536676.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 90px; margin: 0pt 5px 0px 0pt; width: 55px;" /></a><b><a href="https://loa.org/books/634"><span style="color: #0b5394;">Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926</span></a></b><br />
<i>in our time</i> (1924) | <i>In Our Time</i> (1925) | <i>The Torrents of Spring</i> | <i>The Sun Also Rises</i> | journalism | letters | 863 pages<br />
List price: $35.00<br />
<a href="https://loa.org/books/634">Web Store price: $31.50</a><br /><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuPjq07SyZMkErKYcJBSxAboYGOA5XZnUwvbdKzHJmPHUlYzrxMC1WrRL50oV3adAmgJzehIADpVbNR4WFivrdY47OBWCsoyveHoMTXGXbPkqLpXcVT2TRj-H5JHWuRFFIm8zIPRFA_Tb8QGlxc36tIFIF1zBE87BofI_HjU4ADhbVENjFdq6Hn1JHc8/s1600/Cortina.jpg"><img border="0" height="variable" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuPjq07SyZMkErKYcJBSxAboYGOA5XZnUwvbdKzHJmPHUlYzrxMC1WrRL50oV3adAmgJzehIADpVbNR4WFivrdY47OBWCsoyveHoMTXGXbPkqLpXcVT2TRj-H5JHWuRFFIm8zIPRFA_Tb8QGlxc36tIFIF1zBE87BofI_HjU4ADhbVENjFdq6Hn1JHc8/s1600/Cortina.jpg" width="650" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hand-colored photographic postcard showing Cortina d’Ampezzo during the 1920s, with the cliffs of Pomagagnon in the background. (eBay)</td></tr></tbody></table>
It is, perhaps, every writer’s worst nightmare. When the journalist Ernest Hemingway arrived in Switzerland from Constantinople to cover the Lausanne Peace Conference in late 1922, he wrote to his wife, Hadley, then at their home in Paris, and urged her to join him for the upcoming holiday season. She packed in a valise all of his manuscripts, with their carbon copies, took a taxi to the Gare de Lyon, and hired a porter to carry the luggage to the train. Amidst the melee of the station, when her bags were momentarily out of sight, the valise was stolen. As Hemingway recalled decades later in <i>A Moveable Feast</i>:
<blockquote>I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. . . . It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told [editor Edward J. O’Brien] all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so bad, I knew that it was true.</blockquote>
Only two manuscripts (the stories “My Old Man” and “Up in Michigan,” each of which were elsewhere) survived the debacle.<br />
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During the following months, the couple attempted to put this incident behind them by skiing the slopes of the Alps and going on a walking tour from Milan to Cortina d’Ampezzo. In February or March, Hadley realized she was pregnant, and arguments over whether they were ready to become parents may have increased tensions between the couple. Their journey and the strains in their marriage inspired Hemingway to work on two stories during this period. First, in the seaside town of Rapallo, he scribbled four pages of notes for a story that, a year later, would become “<a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/07/cat-in-rain.html">Cat in the Rain</a>.” Then, in April, while he and Hadley were staying in the alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, he finished the story “Out of Season,” which would appear that summer alongside his two surviving stories in his first book, <i>Three Stories and Ten Poems</i>. He would also include the story in his 1925 collection, <i>In Our Time</i>.<br />
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On Christmas Eve 1925, Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he had met earlier in the year. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, both thought the woman in “Cat in the Rain” was Hadley, which Hemingway denied, claiming that the story brought together various characters and places encountered during their trip—a hotel in Rapallo, an innkeeper in Cortina d’Ampezzo, and a couple they met in Genoa. Instead, Hemingway insisted:
<blockquote>The only story in which Hadley figures is Out of Season which was an almost literal transcription of what happened. Your ear is always more acute when you have been upset by a row of any sort, mine I mean, and when I came in from the unproductive fishing trip I wrote that story right off on the typewriter without punctuation. I meant it to be tragic about the drunk of a guide because I reported him to the hotel owner — the one who appears in Cat In The Rain — and he fired him and as that was the last job he had in the town and he was quite drunk and very desperate he hanged himself in the stable. At that time I was writing the In Our Time chapters and I wanted to write a tragic story <u>without</u> violence. So I didnt put in the hanging. Maybe that sounds silly. I didnt think the story needed it.</blockquote>
Three decades later, in <i>A Moveable Feast</i>, Hemingway reiterated, “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself.”<br />
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As Hemingway scholar Paul Smith notes in his essay on the story, the surviving typescript seems to confirm Hemingway’s recollection that he wrote the story immediately after returning to the hotel: “With his memory for dialogue sharpened by an abrasive row with Hadley—or Tiny, as he nicknamed her then—he wrote in too much of a hurry to pause over punctuation, especially during the writing of the couple’s bitter dialogue in the Concordia, which he did not bother to paragraph.” He later made several additions and revisions to the story—but none to the dialogue between husband and wife. If the first part of his recollection is true, however, the subsequent suicide of the guide is not something he could have <i>omitted</i> when he wrote the first draft but, at most, a tragedy he chose not to <i>add</i> to the story during its revision.<br />
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In sum, the tale as originally written is ostensibly about a fishing trip led by a drunken and comically impertinent guide scorned by his fellow townspeople, but its underlying portrait is of a couple during the hours after a heated argument. In his biography of Hemingway, Carlos Baker writes that the story’s dual nature marks a turning point in Hemingway’s career:
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Ernest later spoke of it as a "very simple story." It was not. . . .<br />
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With this story, in fact, he discovered for the first time the infinite possibilities of a new narrative technique. This consisted in developing two intrinsically related truths simultaneously, as a good poet does with a metaphor that really works. The "out-of-season" theme applied with equal force to the young man's relations with his wife Tiny, and to the officious insistence by the guide Peduzzi that the young man fish for trout in defiance of the local fishing laws. . . . The metaphorical confluence of emotional atmospheres . . . was what gave the story its considerable distinction. This first successful use of it was the foremost esthetic discovery of Ernest's early career. It was in this, rather than in the flat and uninspired verse of which he seemed so proud, that his true gifts as a poet were to be repeatedly displayed.
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Whether “Cat in the Rain” and “Out of Season” portray “Hemingway’s own marriage seems of less moment than that the subject of marriage inspired his return to fiction in 1923,” writes Smith in <i>The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway</i>. The stories can be said to have relaunched Hemingway’s writing career; as Gioia Diliberto, in her biography of Hadley, remarks: “The successful completion of ‘Out of Season’ eased his anguish over the lost manuscripts, for he knew that it was much better than any of the material that had been lost.”<br />
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<div style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 130%;"><b><i>Notes:</i></b> A <b>musette</b> is a small knapsack. In 1922, while covering the International Economic Conference in Genoa, Hemingway visited the humorist and caricaturist <b>Max Beerbohm</b> at his home outside Rapallo; he was accompanied by the American writer Max Eastman and the British journalist George Slocombe, and Beerbohm greeted his guests with glasses of <b>marsala</b>. With the allusion to Beerbohm’s preference for marsala, “Hemingway was able to characterize the young gentleman as, perhaps, a bit of a dandy and maybe a bit self-absorbed,” suggests literary scholar Charles J. Nolan, Jr. The <b>Carleton Club</b> is a gentlemen’s club in London favored by Conservative leaders.<br />
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Foreign expressions: <i><b>Was Wollen sie?</b></i> (German: What do you want?); <i><b>vecchio</b></i> (Italian: an old man); <b><i>caro</i></b> (Italian: dear, dear one)</div>
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<div style="line-height: 110%; text-align: center;">* * *</div>
<span style="font-size: 200%;">O</span>n the four lire Peduzzi had earned by spading the hotel garden he got quite drunk. . . . <span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="color: #990000;">If you don't see the full selection below, <a href="http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Hemingway_Out_of_Season.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Download', 'PDF']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (PDF) or <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Hemingway_Out_of_Season.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Story Of The Week', 'Read As GDoc', 'Google Doc']);"><u><span style="color: #990000;">click here</span></u></a> (Google Docs) to read it—free!</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #351c75; font-size: 70%;">This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.</span><br />
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