This Day in Literary History (Alison Lurie, Smart, Tart Pulitzer Winner, Born)

Sept. 3, 1926—Alison Lurie, who used her longtime career in academe as material for critically acclaimed fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, was born in Chicago.

I first encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.

For anyone wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.

Many neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie followed that.

Several of her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades, Cornell University.

Her female protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as in this passage from Foreign Affairs:

“For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department –indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards.”

With all of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.

For instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair, Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious skeptics, she had little or no use for.

Over the years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called “literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”

But I suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”

Readers who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary influences to use in contemporary contexts:

*Her consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.

*With his “international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.

*And her intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex personalities and frequent fears of the very young.

Above all, Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book Review:

“I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.”

The precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”

It made the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca, NY.

Lurie would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York City, the 92^nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy, Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.

And in London, the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie” on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame Margaret Drabble.

Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on a Boat Ride in July)

“A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —
 
“Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear.”— English children’s book author, clergyman, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” from Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)

The first couple of stanzas from this poem that I’ve quoted here refer to one of the most consequential boat rides in history: the one in July 1862 when Lewis Carroll, going up the Thames with Alice Liddell and her two sisters, came up with the tale that eventually saw print as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on a ‘Few of the Things I Like’)

“I may as well just tell you a few of the things I like, and then, whenever you want to give me a birthday present (my birthday comes once every seven years, on the fifth Tuesday in April) you will know what to give me. Well, I like, very much indeed, a little mustard with a bit of beef spread thinly under it; and I like brown sugar — only it should have some apple pudding mixed with it to keep it from being too sweet; but perhaps what I like best of all is salt, with some soup poured over it. The use of the soup is to hinder the salt from being too dry; and it helps to melt it. Then there are other things I like; for instance, pins — only they should always have a cushion put round them to keep them warm. And I like two or three handfuls of hair; only they should always have a little girl’s head beneath them to grow on, or else whenever you open the door they get blown all over the room, and then they get lost, you know.”— English children’s book author, clergyman, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), letter to Jessie Sinclair, Jan. 22, 1878, in The Best of Lewis Carroll (2011)

Lewis Carroll died 125 years ago today in Guildford, England. His “child-friends,” who included Alice Liddell (the inspiration for the children’s-lit masterpiece, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), have in recent years come in for considerable speculation as to the exact nature of their relationships with the author.

Jessie Sinclair was reputed to be another of these “child-friends,” as one might guess from the whimsical tone that the middle-aged author adopted in this letter.

Quote of the Day (Roald Dahl, on Disbelievers in Magic)

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” —British children’s book author Roald Dahl (1916-1990), The Minpins (1991)

Quote of the Day (L. Frank Baum of ‘Oz’ Fame, on College Life)

“You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.”— L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (1907)

(The illustration accompanying this post was done for the original edition of Ozma of Oz—the first in which the author was consciously creating as part of a series—by John R. Neill.)

This Day in Literary History (Birth of Roald Dahl, Children’s Book Legend)

Sept.13, 1916—Roald Dahl, who used his wartime experience as a springboard to a career as a creator of TV and movie scripts, short stories and children’s novels, was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents.

Three generations of children have been exposed to such Dahl works as Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches and The BFG. Hollywood has adapted these novels into big-screen projects, and Broadway did the same with the long-running, award-winning musical Matilda.

Dahl did not publish the first of his 19 children’s books, James and the Giant Peach, until he was 45. I was never required to read any of these novels as a youngster, did not read them as an adult, and have never watched any films made from his books that were targeted to children.

But so varied were his interests that I did know many of his works for adults. First, I saw You Only Live Twice (1967), for which he wrote the screenplay. It must have amused him to adapt the James Bond novel by Ian Fleming.

But I also knew and loved his other work for adults. Much of this, now compiled for the “Everyman Library” as his Collected Stories, include such story collections as Kiss Kiss (1959) and Switch Bitch (1974).

With his 6 ft.-6-in. frame, red hair, wounded incurred during a crash as a British pilot in the Royal Air Force campaign in Libya, and considerable charm, Dahl cut a dashing figure at cocktail parties when he was posted to Washington in WWII--ostensibly as an English assistant air attache, though
actually as part of a spy ring to nullify isolationist interests and switch American focus on the war from the Pacific to European theaters. He became friendly with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and very friendly indeed with Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. (Possibly in preparation for his future career as a storyteller, Dahl once said that he’d had his way with the playwright-turned-politico on every piece of furniture in her house.).

As he recounted later in his essay “Lucky Break – How I Became a Writer,” once hostilities ceased, Dahl was unsure about what to do with his life when he met author C.S. Forester for lunch. The creator of the popular “Horatio Hornblower” seafaring books was casting about for different material, and agreed to pay Dahl for notes on his plane crash.

When Forester received the material, he was astonished to find a finished story rather than the fragmentary notes he expected, and was supposedly so “bowled over” by the piece that he urged the younger man to submit it under his own name. (More recently, Jeff Meaney has cast doubt on this chronology, noting that the piece was submitted anonymously to Reader’s Digest four years earlier than Dahl had let on. In fact, a June 1942 account, in which Dahl writes that he's "just done another story," called "Gremlins," appears in the new book Love From Boy: Roald Dahl's Letters to His Mother.)

Several of Dahl’s subsequent stories—macabre and slyly mocking—became the basis of classic episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Having tried his hand at TV writing earlier (for the series Suspense, in the aptly named episode “Poison”), he went on to write the teleplay for one of the most memorable Hitchcock episodes, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

Dahl possessed a restless intelligence, not only writing in a wide range of forms but even, because of family crises, contributing to the advancement of modern medicine. (After his young son contracted hydrocephalus, he collaborated with friends on the Wade-Dahl-Till valve to alleviate cranial pressure—and, after first wife Patricia Neal suffered devastating strokes, he designed techniques that restored her to full functionality--procedures now standard in treating stroke victims.)