This Day in Literary History (Death of Christopher Isherwood, ‘Cabaret’ Chronicler)

Jan. 4, 1986—Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer at age 81 in Santa Monica, CA.

Thousands of Broadway playgoers and even more movie and TV fans may have seen the Cabaret without associating it with Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories (1930) inspired the musical about decadent Weimar Germany. 

The latter came from the first decade of his writing career, when as part of the “Auden Circle” of modernist British and Irish writers, he became associated with left-wing politics and was hailed as “the hope of English fiction” by critic Cyril Connolly.

After emigrating to America with W.H. Auden as Britain was on the brink of war in 1939—a move denounced as cowardice in the face of the Nazi threat by the pair’s critics—Isherwood moved his career and lifestyle in entirely new directions—including, for that atheist, a conversion to Hinduism (and even a brief time as a monk in the 1940s) and three decades of what he cheerfully admitted was hackwork as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Most significantly, following his decision to publicly acknowledge his own sexual orientation in 1971, he emerged as a godfather figure to gay authors, including the likes of Truman Capote, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Patricia Highsmith, and Gore Vidal.

Did Isherwood deserve Vidal’s praise in a December 1976 New York Review of Books assessment as “the best prose writer in English”? I’m inclined to see that as exaggeration—or, more charitably, an expression of Vidal’s gratitude for championing his work early in his career. Even so, Isherwood is an important writer and his work contains considerable merit.

The clarity, even transparency, of his prose masked how complex his artistic vision could be, just as his much-discussed wit and charm often obscured his complicated personality.

Perhaps the most famous line in all of his work, from Berlin Stories—“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”—encourages a sense of his objectivity. That is crucial because, as an early practitioner of metafiction, Isherwood frequently created a persona explicitly named “Christopher Isherwood.”

Conversely, his memoirs, which readers would normally view as more reality-based than his fiction, employed composite characters, chronicled events out of sequence, or reshaped them differently from the actual occurrences as recorded in his diaries.

Isherwood’s style is uncluttered, concise and graceful, adding to the believability of both his fiction and nonfiction. Whether in bohemian Berlin of the interwar period or the European emigres and New Age devotees of Southern California’s postwar era, his nonjudgmental “eye” takes in all it sees.

Though influential and helpful to many people, Isherwood was not always admirable. Interviews and documentary evidence from his extensive diaries led biographers Peter Parker and Katherine Bucknell to conclude that he could also be drunken, neurotic, promiscuous (an estimated 400 lovers by age 44), and even antisemitic. 

(He told a listener that "Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals." When this young Jewish producer responded that "Hitler killed 6 million Jews," Isherwood said acidly, "What are you? In real estate?")

I find Isherwood’s relationship to Hollywood particularly fascinating. His movie and TV assignments often involved subjects he surely did not find congenial (for example, as I mentioned in this post from 17 years ago about “Silent Night” composer Franz Gruber).

But what Hollywood chronicler Tom Dardis called “Some Time in the Sun” for famous novelists-turned-screenwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald not only gave Isherwood a lifestyle far more comfortable than he had enjoyed in Britain but also fueled his creativity. 

Prater Violet (1945), for example, is still considered one of the best fictional representations of the Hollywood “dream factory.”

When it came time to adapt Cabaret from stage to screen, director Bob Fosse made an unexpectedly felicitous decision, by casting Michael York—practically a dead ringer for the young Isherwood—in the role of the author’s alter ego “Brian.”

This Day in Literary History (V.S. Pritchett, Wildly Versatile British Man of Letters, Born)

Dec. 16, 1900--Victor Sawdon Pritchett—or, as readers came to know him across multiple genres across the 20th century, V.S. Pritchett—was born in a lower-middle-class household in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

Though Great Britain has had at least several examples of the term applied to Pritchett, “man of letters” (see: Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold) I’m not sure there are (outside of, say, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling) many Americans who fit the bill.

Perhaps, reflected Ronald Gottesman in a June 1987 review of Pritchett’s essays in The Los Angeles Times, “These men of letters--all of them fictionists or poets as well as critics—were independent, flexible, liberal, morally serious in the practice of discrimination and judgment—the chief marks of criticism before Literary Theory banished authors, vaporized texts, and called readership into doubt.

Over 75 of his 97 years, Pritchett’s output was enormous: five novels, two memoirs; approximately 100 short stories; travel books; major studies on several European writers; and thousands book reviews. Writing as much as he did in any one of these genres would have challenged other authors; producing all of it combined was mind-boggling.

And that’s just what he published: there were also thousands of letters sent to lucky recipients.

Though the author attributed the impetus for all this activity to a spendthrift father who endangered the family’s financial security, his anxiety about not having enough funds lasted well into adulthood, according to biographer Jeremy Treglown. “Even in his most celebrated years,” observed British literary critic Frank Kermode in a February 2005 article for The New Republic, “he could not live by his books alone, and remained dependent on journalism.”

In Brian John Spencer’s “The New Irishman” blog, I was especially interested to discover one of Pritchett’s formative journalistic experiences: covering the Irish War of Independence for the Christian Science Monitor and how the writers in Dublin’s literary circle at the time influenced his own short-story writing.

This Day in Literary History (William Styron, Chronicler of Slavery, Holocaust, and Despair, Born)

June 11, 1925— Novelist and essayist William Styron, who wrote powerful fiction about slavery, the military, and the Holocaust—as well as a searing memoir of his own struggle with suicidal depression—was born in Newport News, Va.

Lie Down in Darkness brought the 26-year-old Styron notice as a novelist of abundant narrative gifts and deep moral seriousness, working in Faulkner’s tradition of Southern storytelling. He did not realize until his first bout of mental illness in the mid-1980s that even the heroine of this early effort suffered from this affliction.

As part of a cohort of writers who served in World War II and briefly spent time abroad after its conclusion, he—as well as friends James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer, and Peter Matthiessen—took cues from the “Lost Generation.”

They were, Styron’s youngest daughter Alexandra wrote in her memoir Reading My Father, “Big Male Writers…[who] perpetuated, without apology, the cliché of the gifted, hard drinking, bellicose writer that gave so much of twentieth-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura."

Even as Styron played the bon vivant during summer parties at Martha’s Vineyard, his poet-activist wife Rose and their four children endured his moodiness, angry outbursts, and frequent frustration over his inability to bring his work to as quick and successful conclusion.

In middle age, that age of homage, masking their own attempts to obliterate the shock of their war, proved increasingly unsuccessful and counterproductive. Though Styron’s career lasted four decades, his output was not that extensive—four full-length novels, a book of short stories, a memoir, a play, and an essay collection—finding, at the age of 65, that the “senior partner” to his writing, his drinking, no longer satisfied or spurred his writing.

A childhood in Tidewater region of Virginia was overshadowed by his mother’s decline and death from breast cancer, a struggle that only worsened his father’s melancholy. W.C. Styron’s second marriage left his son with a stepmother he found chilly and unsympathetic.

I briefly described in this post from 14 years ago the controversy surrounding Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the bloodiest slave uprising in antebellum America, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Many admirers like myself of his forays into the darkest chapters of American life attributed the long gaps between books to perfectionism, a tendency common among authors.

But with Darkness Visible, he described, in shattering detail, how his writer’s block was bound up with a psychic condition that he likened to a storm in his brain.

This memoir provided knowledge and help to others similarly afflicted. But, aside from the trio of novellas collected in Tidewater Morning (1993), Styron was never able to complete his World War II novel, The Way of the Warrior, after Sophie’s Choice in 1979, because his depression returned with a vengeance in the spring of 2000, troubling him till his death six years later.

This Day in Literary History (Death of Psychological Thriller Author Patricia Highsmith)

 

Feb. 4, 1995— Patricia Highsmith, whose psychological thrillers achieved greater sales, critical acclaim, and understanding in Europe than in her native United States, died at age 74 of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland.

Since her death 30 years ago, however, a virtual cottage industry about her work has sprung up in the U.S., with at least three biographies, and numerous reprints of her books, appearing.

Whatever fame Highsmith gained at home derived from two novels adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Her pigeonholing as a “crime writer” annoyed her because it said nothing about her profound probing of the human heart.

Beneath the placid surface of American life, discontents, even demons, lurked in her fiction. Many of her intimates agree that Highsmith shared many of these—indeed, if she didn’t have writing as an outlet where she could vent these, she feared that she might go insane.

Outsiders, misfits, manipulators, sociopaths—an entire psychological spectrum can be described in Highsmith’s work. On a podcast I listened to today, one of her later friends said she didn’t doubt that Highsmith herself existed on the autistic spectrum.

More specifically, some see the writer as being a high-functioning case of Asperger’s Syndrome. She possessed many unusual traits, including a terrible sense of direction, hypersensitivity to sound and touching, clumsiness, and depression.

Even before she struggled with alcoholism for much of her adult life, Highsmith had to cope with the revelation that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her when she was only four years old.

Even though her collected fiction is considerable—22 novels and eight short-story collections—it’s remarkable how certain themes and motifs reappear obsessively:

*fractured or swapped entities;

*murder;

*madness;

*pairs who bring out depths of evil in each other;

*malignant mothers; and

*guilt.

Just as her characters traffic in aliases, Highsmith resorted to pseudonyms. The most famous, “Claire Morgan,” was adopted for the initial publication of her 1952 celebration of lesbian love, The Price of Salt.  

She used others in letters to the editor that were printed in the Herald-Tribune, where she fulminated against Catholics, neighbors, Frenchmen in general and their bureaucrats in particular—and, most problematically, Jews.

Her characters are frequently doubles and alter egos. More chillingly, her narratives feature complicit characters and readers.

This Day in Literary History (Christina Rossetti, Victorian Poet and Devotional Writer, Dies)

Dec. 29, 1894—Weakened by a recurrence of breast cancer on top of the ailments that plagued her for most of her life, poet and devotional writer Christina Rossetti died at age 64 in London.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have frequently quoted from this Victorian frequently over the years—even though, unlike most other writers featured here, I discovered her on my own, well after my formal education ended.

When I did, I was astonished to discover that her Complete Poems—over 1,100, with approximately 900 published in her lifetime—ran to a hefty 1,300 pages.

As I considered her work and her life, I was struck by several similarities with Emily Dickinson. 

Even the most seemingly significant difference between the two might not be as substantial as it seems at first: Although Rossetti’s religious orientation was Anglo-Catholic while Dickinson rejected the Calvinism of her New England ancestors, both pondered in their work, for want of a better term, the ultimate—i.e., the presence (or lack of it) of God, the possibility of a hereafter.

It turns out that I am hardly the only reader who has drawn parallels between the two poets. Others have pointed out these similarities:

*Each was born in December 1830;

*Each developed a reputation as a spinster/recluse;

*Each, when meeting others, did so within their homes, usually facilitated by their charismatic older brother;

*Each devoted much of their work in their home to looking after their fathers;

*Each’s sexuality—or suppression of it—has fanned intense scholarly interest, despite the lack of much documentation to justify many conclusions;

*Each seems to have suffered from a mysterious ailment or set of them, which has also produced a small cottage industry of studies;

*Each wrote poetry in a deceptively simple style that cloaks complicated reflections on resignation, loss, and mortality.

The youngest child of Italian immigrants to Great Britain, Christina came from one of the most artistically accomplished families of her era. Her father was a poet and Dante scholar; sister Maria, books on Dante, religious instruction, and Italian grammar and translation; brother William, art and literary criticism; and brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the foremost poets and painters of his time, as a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In her youth, Christina could beat her siblings in rapidly dashing off exquisite poems, and her striking looks—particularly the pale complexion, large eyes, and long uncurled hair (as seen in the attached image, created by her brother Dante)—made her one of the initial go-to models of the Pre-Raphaelites.

But in her mid-teens, she suffered a collapse in health. Over time, as she became more intensely devotional, she spurned at least two suitors who did not meet the spiritual standard she desired for a husband.

Much of her poetry inextricably intertwines Biblical imagery with her own spontaneous melodic voice—a style that reached a peak of sorts with the famous hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” In art as in life, she was confessional and self-abasing to a fault.

But she was valued so much by contemporaries that she was a serious contender for the post of British poet laureate after the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (Her rapidly declining health at this point closed off any chance of achieving that distinction.)

This Day in Literary History (Death of Anne Bronte, The Forgotten, Underrated Sister)

May 28, 1849— Anne Bronte, the youngest, quietest, and most religious of a trio of sisters who mined extraordinary fiction from the wild Yorkshire moors where they grew up, passed away from tuberculosis at age 29 in the seaside town of Scarborough, where she had begged to be taken for a last visit before she died.

The adjectives I used in the last sentence might conjure up a weepy, weak, wren-like woman accustomed to taking a back seat to sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights). 

That image is reinforced by Anne’s physical appearance: a “long neck, thin features and pronounced mouth,” writes Bronte family biographer Juliet Barker.

But Anne was also the most bitingly satirical of the three sisters, and the one most unafraid to challenge Victorian mores about what constituted suitable fiction for women and children—so much so that after her death, Charlotte and early biographers did her an inadvertent disservice by softening her sharp edges.

Partly as a result, family biographers and critics didn’t plumb Anne’s life for clues to themes and characters in her poetry and two surviving novels. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has only had one TV adaptation, the 1996 BBC miniseries with Tara Fitzgerald in the title role, and Agnes Grey has had no TV or film versions at all—unlike for Jane Eyre (9) and Wuthering Heights (12, counting modern and Spanish-language versions).

Like Charlotte, Barker wrote in her epic 1994 biography, The Brontes, Anne had “a core of steel, a sense of duty and obligation,” which manifested itself in making the best of her time away in school, despite rampant homesickness; in how she looked after her parson father; in how she worked as a governess for five years, despite her growing dissatisfaction with the profession; and in an ironclad commitment to writing that was so intense, Charlotte worried, that she dreaded for her sister’s health.

Biographers face an unusual problem with the Brontes, for none more so than Anne. It is impossible to understand how they came to write at all without understanding their interactions.

But too much stress on that environment can also lead to a failure to understand the sisters’ differences from each other, as well as from their equally talented but troubled artist brother Branwell.

It was Branwell, for instance, who created one of the few likenesses of the three sisters together. (Emily—and Branwell--preceded Anne in death only months before.) But it was Branwell who seems to have brought Anne’s second job as a governess to an end when, as tutor to a son in the Robinson family, he engaged in a scandalous affair that led to his dismissal.

Branwell’s alcohol- and opium-spurred downward spiral when he went home, in turn, likely inspired Anne’s characterization of Arthur Huntingdon of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whose alcoholic rages lead his wife to flee under an assumed name with her child to a remote village.

The novel’s description of the suffering caused by alcoholism (“I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other”) has the special insight of one who has watched a loved one undone by the disease.

Anne’s relationship with Charlotte, though not as troubled, was equally complicated.

Though it was Charlotte’s idea, for instance, to publish her and her sisters’ poems together, Emily and Anne compelled her to adopt pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Eventually, Charlotte saw the wisdom of the sisters’ not using female names, because “authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery which is not true praise.”

These pseudonyms—Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell—feature gender-neutral first names, with the initials of the three authors corresponding to their actual names.

But it was other circumstances surrounding the publication of their books involving Charlotte that led the oldest sister to leave Anne as something of a cipher in the brooding family saga.

As Samantha Ellis’ January 2017 essay in the British paper The Guardian outlined, Anne had written a novel about her experiences as a governess, Agnes Grey, first. But it was Jane Eyre that was seen by British readers first, because, separate from Emily and Anne, Charlotte found a publisher more enthusiastic about issuing her book.

In addition, Anne’s challenge to conventional mores in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall led Charlotte to be overprotective of her sister’s image after her death.

It would have been bad enough that Anne, in defiance of the Anglican Church, opposed the idea of eternal damnation in favor of universal salvation.

But she also raised hackles with her depictions of a single woman (Huntingdon’s wife, adopting the name “Mrs. Helen Graham” in her new community) earning a living through her paintings, of domestic violence, and of the precarious legal position of women in Victorian England.

While Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ultimately belong to romantic fiction with their raging but suffering chief male characters, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is unsparing in its realism. 

When contemporary critics took issue with this treatment, Anne responded, in a preface to the second edition of the book, with a ringing defense of gritty, unillusioned fiction that doesn’t cater to readers’ expectations:

“To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of like to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”

Anne also echoed John Milton’s denunciation of “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” in having her heroine directly challenge society’s encouragement of domineering boys while girls are supposed to be meek and mild:

“I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.”

Anne’s death following months of depression over the death of Emily and her own ineffective medical treatment for tuberculosis left her posthumous reputation in the hands of Charlotte, who did not authorize a reissue of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the remaining six years or her life—and who described her as a “gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer.”

That overprotectiveness led critics and English professors to overlook a writer with a contribution to literature every bit as distinct as her older sisters.

This Day in Literary History (Somerset Maugham, Cosmopolitan and Popular Man of Letters, Born)

January 25, 1874—W. Somerset Maugham, who went from the world’s most popular author in his lifetime to critical neglect afterward, only to experience a more recent partial reputational rebound, was born in the British Embassy in Paris—a foreshadowing of the globe trotting that would take him outside the British Isles for much of his life.

Maugham’s birth occurred in France because his lawyer father worked in the embassy at the time. Later in life, he traveled far from his homeland to see the world, to distance himself from obligations and ties he preferred not to deal with, and to accommodate the legal situation of his longtime lover.

The cosmopolitanism that the author came to first virtually by inheritance, then by preference, turned out to be a boon to his career as well as a personal joy.

The exotic places and unusual people he encountered along the way often showed up, in comparatively disguised form, in the 32 plays, 19 novels, nine volumes of short stories, and assorted essays, travel pieces, and memoirs he turned out in his prolific, 65-year writing career.

In a post from five years ago, I discussed one such novel that reflected his wanderlust and misogyny: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), about an artist who sought in the South Seas creative and sexual freedom away from conventional middle-class mores.

Though Maugham modeled his main character on French painter Paul Gaugain, his protagonist’s dramatic change in life represented a form of wish fulfillment for the novelist, who, after only two years of marriage, wanted no more of his wife Syrie, whom he blamed for trapping him in a loveless marriage.

Brisk sales, a steady stream of residual income from Hollywood adaptations of his works, and personal industry and thrift enabled Maugham to travel frequently to the Far East. They also provided the means for him to live on the French Riviera with personal secretary and lover Gerald Haxton, who had been deported from England on a morals charge.

In addition to cosmopolitanism, two other aspects of Maugham’s background aided him in his writing career: speech and secrets.

Growing up, Maugham would have regarded speaking as a handicap to career advancement or happiness. A severe stutter left him unable to follow his father into the practice of law and increased his social anxiety.

But the resulting preference for listening rather than talking heightened an ear for dialogue that he capitalized on in writing the plays that made his reputation, and his knowledge of three languages—English, French, and German—widened the circle of people to whom he conversed.

Those people held secrets and, by early professional training as a doctor, none of this escaped Maugham’s close observations.

Indeed, because of his same-sex attraction, the writer understood how people sought to conceal these personal blemishes at all costs, through all manner of disguises and identities.

It was great training for his intelligence activities on behalf of Britain in WWI, as well as the spy story collection he wrote inspired by his service, Ashenden (1928), which pioneered the realistic treatment of espionage work that would later be perfected by Graham Greene and John le Carre.

Unable to eye others without illusions, Maugham was similarly unsparing towards himself. Though fascinated by different forms of spirituality (an interest that came to fruition in his 1944 novel The Razor's Edge), he found no ultimate purpose or meaning in life.

Moreover, in his 1938 quasi-memoir, The Summing Up, he seems to have absorbed the increased critical complaint that he was at heart a middlebrow writer who required little intellectual effort from readers, perhaps because of his own limited skills:

“I have had small power of imagination. I have taken living people and put them into the situations, tragic or comic, that their characters suggested. I might well say that they invented their own stories. I have been incapable of those great, sustained flights that carry the author on broad pinions into a celestial sphere. My fancy, never very strong, has been hampered by my sense of probability. I have painted easel pictures, not frescoes.”

Nevertheless, if Maugham rarely indulged in the metaphors and literary allusions so often prized by academics, he influenced writers as diverse as George Orwell, Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul in what Orwell called “his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.”

Moreover, especially in short stories such as “The Outstation,” “In a Strange Land,” “The Letter,” and “Mackintosh,” he depicted an environment that has increasingly intrigued readers since the success of TV’s “The Jewel in the Crown”: Britons at the far edges of their country’s empire, yielding, despite the exotic environment around them, to boredom, drink, lust, and the temptations of power.

This Day in Literary History (Edmund Blunden, Acclaimed WWI Memoirist and Poet, Dies)

Jan. 20, 1974— The poet, biographer, critic, and travel writer Edmund Blunden, died at age 77 at his longtime home in Long Melford, England, mourned by intimates in academe and beyond for his sensitivity, wry sense of humor and fanatical love of cricket.

But the experience that colored his entire adult life was indicated by what lay atop his coffin: poppies from Flanders, Belgium, the WWI battleground where he fought nearly 60 years before and wrote about, in a searing memoir and poetry that sought to evoke the pastoral landscapes marred by the carnage.

Six nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature testify to high esteem from the literary community during Blunden’s lifetime.

Nowadays, he belongs to the type of understudied figures whose reputations he tried to elevate as a critic, such as William Collins, William Cobbett, Robert Southey, Thomas Hood, and Michael Drayton.

A stone inscription in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner, installed in 1985, points to the greatest claim for his importance: his listing among 16 “Great War Poets.”

I have blogged before about this group, either focusing on individuals (Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves) or the larger group of creative artists struggling with the violence, carnage and shock to civilization created by the conflict.

But Blunden—who enlisted and became an intelligence officer at only age 19, and won the Military Cross for “his conspicuous gallantry” during the Battle of the Somme—deserves his own extensive discussion.

While in the service the longest of these poets, he was also, according to one of his friends from this group, Siegfried Sassoon, his friend, the one most enduringly obsessed by it.

Not only did he witness the deaths of countless comrades and the dissolution of his unit, the 11th Battalion of the Royal Sussex regiment, because of all these casualties, but in the 1917 Passchendaele offensive, he was gassed.

This new form of chemical warfare left victims like Blunden with temporarily impaired eyesight and irritated skin. Worst, it blistered his throat and lungs, considerably aggravating his asthma.

For the rest of his life, Blunden would be plagued by nightmares from his wartime service. His daughter Margi, trained in counseling, said in a March 2014 Oxford Mail interview that she believed her father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder:

“The dreams never stopped and he continued to feel guilt about having survived. But he had no treatment for it at all.”

At first, Blinden set aside his attempt at chronicling these wartime horrors, De Bello Germanico. It was only several years later, in the mid-1920s, in Japan (where he was teaching English at the Tokyo Imperial Museum), that he had sufficient physical distance and psychic space to write Undertones of War in 1928.

Privately, Blunden had been dismayed to find that Graves had exaggerated elements of his own wartime experience in Goodbye to All That. It was all the more imperative, then, that after Undertones of War was published, Blunden felt compelled to correct any mistakes for its second edition.

It was miraculous that he was able to record and remember as much as he did. Blunden’s creative work had been hampered from the start by the extreme difficulties of writing while the war raged. Blunden lost a number of his poems, for instance, amid the chaos of troop movements and trench warfare. In addition, his PTSD disrupted recollections of painful deaths.

Emily Dickinson defined the mission of the poet to “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” Blunden managed to “tell it slant” by evoking elements of pastoral poetry.

The style of Undertones of War evokes the kind of landscapes that Blunden had cherished since childhood, with archaic phrases (often switching word order) reminiscent some of his favorite poets like Thomas Hardy and John Clare:

“Acres of self-sown wheat glistened and sighed as we wound our way between, where rough scattered pits recorded a hurried firing-line of long ago. Life, life abundant sang here and smiled; the lizard ran warless in the warm dust; and the ditches were trembling with odd tiny fìsh, in worlds as remote as Saturn.

Though modern readers may be startled by this very unusual language, it enabled Blunden to underscore the damage to the natural landscape and ancient traditions that this brutally modern war represented—a contrast equally apparent in his poem “The Zonnebeke Road”:

“Look, how the snow-dust whisks along the road
Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch
In this east wind; the low sky like a load
Hangs over, a dead-weight. But what a pain
Must gnaw where its clay cheek
Crushes the shell-chopped trees that fang the plain –
The ice-bound throat gulps out a gargoyle shriek.”

Throughout Undertones of War and his war poetry, Blunden paid continual tribute to the comrades he likened to a family. His subsequent memories are filled with a survivor’s guilt.

“Why slept I not in Flanders clay/With all the murdered men?” he wrote. He could not be buried with “Flanders clay,” but his coffin contained what may have meant more to him: poppies symbolizing the renewal of life in the face of the horrors.

(For an interesting discussion of how closely Blunden engaged with books—including war correspondent Mary Augusta Ward’s 1919 account, Fields of Victory—see Alexis Voisard’s blog post on the Edmund Blunden Collection in the Ohio Universities Library.)

This Day in Literary History (‘Wuthering Heights’ Author Emily Bronte Dies of TB)

Dec. 19, 1848— Only a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, the single novel that assured her literary immortality, Emily Bronte died at age 30 in her family’s Yorkshire parsonage of tuberculosis, the same disease that had taken her older and troubled brother Branwell only three months before.

To my knowledge, there has never been a set of talented creative siblings quite like the Brontes. The closest might be the Jameses—philosopher William, novelist Henry, and diarist Alice. But the three Jameses managed to survive well into middle age, enabling them to achieve a prolific output even individually.

In contrast, Emily—along with older sister Charlotte, younger sister Anne, and even Bramwell—died while still young; and the melodramatic plots and Gothic settings of their works—what biographer Juliet Barker calls “Wild Genius on the Moors,” and what contemporaries often labeled “coarse”—could not be more removed from the refined intellectual, urban content of the Americans.

One aspect of Wuthering Heights that especially fascinates me is how, even with its complex, multi-generational plot, it still leaves space on important matters that has invited considerable speculation.

(For instance, who were the orphaned Heathcliff’s parents when Mr. Earnshaw discovers him on the streets of Liverpool? And what was Heathcliff doing in the years away from Wuthering Heights that enabled him to become rich and return to wreak vengeance?)

In the same way, Emily, perhaps the least documented of the three writing Bronte sisters (two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, also died of TB in 1825), also had gaping holes in her history that biographers sought to fill—with perhaps even more speculation than has revolved around Heathcliff.

Most of what we know about Emily came via Charlotte, either directly (in her "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell," two pseudonyms adopted by Emily and Anne to circumvent sexist publishers and book reviewers of the time) or indirectly (novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte relied heavily on her friend’s reminiscences about her sister).

At the time, Emily had endured fierce criticism from critics (e.g., “The reader is … disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”).

Charlotte, desiring to protect the posthumous memory of the younger sister she loved, depicted her, in a preface she wrote for Wuthering Heights after Emily’s death, as a homebody who preferred seclusion, and thus “had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.”

Recent scholars, like Juliet Barker in her epic biography of the family, have pushed back against such well-intentioned but one-dimensional portrayals. Some have theorized that Charlotte, not content with creating a genteel image for Emily, may have taken matters a step further and burned a manuscript that was intended to be Emily’s follow-up to Wuthering Heights.

(Emily’s publisher wrote her at one point to agree that she shouldn’t send her the manuscript for her second novel until she was satisfied with it. But the manuscript has never been found after Emily’s death.)

Charlotte might have been the driving force in the publication of the sisters’ work, and, as I wrote in a prior post, she certainly upended Victorians’ notions of what women could do with Jane Eyre.

But Emily’s genius is no less astonishing. As vivid and evocative as the film adaptations (1939, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; 1970, starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall) of Wuthering Heights are, they don’t prepare viewers when they encounter the novel for the first time.

Only full exposure to the source material enables one to see how dexterously Emily Bronte handled its plot, setting, and the flawed, selfish soulmates Heathcliff and Cathy who form its passionate center.

In addition, 175 years after the death of its author, contemporary readers are likely to be more aware of themes that have become even more relevant since the novel’s original publication, including inequality, domestic abuse, social constraints versus the freedom of nature, and the agony of displacement.

(The image accompanying this post comes, if you haven’t guessed it already, from William Wyler’s classic adaptation of the story, showing Laurence Olivier’s tormented Heathcliff visiting Merle Oberon’s Cathy at her deathbed.)

This Day in Literary History (‘Turn of the Screw’ Scares Up Much-Needed Sales for Henry James)

Oct. 13, 1898—As The Turn of the Screw came out in book form following its serialization in Colliers’ earlier in the year, Henry James didn’t bother to hide his disgust with this “abject, down-on-all-fours pot-boiler, pure & simple, that a proud man brought low ever perpetrated.”

Readers, however, differed sharply, making this “ghost story” the novelist’s most successful work of fiction since Daisy Miller over two decades before. In time, James—needing the money from this tale of terror to boost his finances, and its widespread acclaim to soothe his spirit from his recent disastrous foray into the theater—came to feel differently about it, too.

I’m sure he would feel surprised but delighted that even Ivy League English departments today put it on their reading lists for American Lit classes.

What has made the novella so enduringly popular, 125 years after publication? Successive generations have discovered something creepy in this study in ambiguity that has left readers guessing as much as frightened.

In the late Victorian Era when the tale came out, readers would have picked on the fact that the story is being told “on Christmas eve in an old house.” Ghost stories told by the fireside remained an English tradition during the holidays. Already, the atmosphere in the tale is threatening.

Well into the 20^th century, critics offered Freudian interpretations of what transpired. Did the ghosts of past servant Peter Quint and governess Miss Jessel really exist—or did they spring from the imagination of the neurotic new, unnamed governess, the sheltered daughter of a vicar who may have been projecting her own sexual fantasies onto others?

Or was James being prescient but careful in alerting readers to child molestation—a crime that, like many other sexual matters, could not be discussed openly in the repressive late-Victorian age?

Structurally, Turn of the Screw is an “envelope story”—a story within a story, with one narrator hearing the tale from another, who yields it in turn to another. This framing device—influencing, among other cases, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Willa Cather’s My Antonia—seemingly testifies to the credibility of the narrative.

But that very authority is undercut in the prologue by complications of time that are disclosed. Consider:

*It opens in our age (or, for Victorians, their) age;

*The narrator immediately says the events are in the past;

*Douglas’ narration of the tale happens two days after the fireside scene;

*A short time elapses when the narrator transcribes the governess’ manuscript;

*Still further back in time, when Douglas reads the governess’ manuscript, which had been willed to him;

*Earlier still, when the governess writes the manuscript;

*Yet earlier still, when the governess tells Douglas the events;

*Earlier yet, when the events took place.

In short, the events happened 50 years before the tale proper begins. The possibility can’t be ruled out that some of what happens has been misremembered, forgotten, suppressed—or made up.

A few words should also be said about the employer of the governess, “a bachelor in the prime of life…handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.” Left as guardian of little Flora and Miles through the death of their parents, he has no experience in dealing with children, and neither the time nor the wish to be bothered with them.

So he offers the governess the job, with the provisos that she will have absolute authority over them and he is not to be disturbed by news of them. She accepts, carried away by his looks and manner—and, Douglas relates, “She never saw him again.”

The governess comes to believe not only that Flora and Miles have seen Quint and Miss Jessel, but that they’re somehow in league with the apparitions. But James never reveals what, if anything, happened between the children and the dead house help, leaving the reader to infer the most horrifying possibilities.

As R.W.B. Lewis perceptively notes in his family biography, The Jameses, The Turn of the Screw was written when both Henry and his brother William, the pioneering psychologist- philosopher, had become increasingly concerned with the supernatural.

Though Henry wrote the first of his 10 ghost stories as far back as 1868, they grew in number, length, and psychological complexity in the 1890s, as more family members and friends passed away.

This genre also enabled the novelist to extend, in a realm he never imagined, the dramatic devices and themes he had learned in his brief attempt to conquer the London theater world (culminating in the disastrous play Guy Domville, a fiasco I discussed in this blog post from 15 years ago).

The dramatic possibilities of The Turn of the Screw have been exploited by others in several genres in the 20^th and 21^st centuries:

*As the play The Innocents, written by William Archibald;

*As a 1961 movie by the same name, written by Archibald and Truman Capote and starring Deborah Kerr (shown in the image accompanying this post);

*Several TV adaptations;

*Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw.

This Day in Literary History (Wordsworth Sparks Romantic Movement With ‘Tintern Abbey’)

 

July 13, 1798—Returning to a sylvan landscape he’d visited five years before, inspired by conversations and shared poems with a recently made poet friend, William Wordsworth wrote 159 lines of blank verse that served as the foundation of England’s Romantic movement.

The title of the poem “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798,” was mercifully shortened in conversation by its author and his circle to “Tintern Abbey.” But it’s important to keep the longer title in mind because Wordsworth wanted to summarize the change and reconnection to the natural world that the trip meant for him.

The 28-year-old poet was trying to make sense of the turbulence in his political beliefs and personal life wrought by the French Revolution in that decade. (While in France, he had fathered an illegitimate child by his mistress, then was prevented from returning to the country by the Reign of Terror and the wars that ensued on the Continent shortly thereafter. His growing disgust with Napoleon led him to shed his onetime radicalism.)

The French Revolution might be thought of as an experiment in a new kind of relation among men through government. Wordsworth used the word “experiments” to describe most of the poems in the collection he issued anonymously two months after his ecstatic pastoral experience by the Wye with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, which, he noted, were written chiefly to “ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”

More concisely, Wordsworth wrote in an 1800 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, he was hoping for “fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”

Rather than the public controversies in which the likes of John Dryden and Alexander Pope engaged, these works focused on the private and the subjective, the local and even rural. In giving voice to “the commonplace” in the speech of men and women, Wordsworth would indelibly influence later poets such as Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost.

Moreover, to an extent never before explored, Wordsworth’s poems did not directly address religious beliefs, but found in nature overwhelming elements of the divine. In this way, he inspired American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill referred, in his notes for the poet’s Major Works, to 1798 as the “annus mirabilis” (Latin for “miraculous year”) for him and Coleridge.

The two young men, along with Wordsworth’s devoted sister Dorothy, couldn’t get enough of each other’s company, on walks taking in the rural landscape”—or, as Coleridge observed in his Notebooks, “The flames of two Candles joined give a much stronger Light than both of them separate.

Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads several of the poems that established his enduring fame, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” and “Nightingale.” Wordsworth managed to make a last-minute addition to the volume with “Tintern Abbey.” Indeed, he composed the poem so rapidly, judging from his description below, that the verses could have written themselves:

“No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”

Several years later, when Wordsworth, strongly encouraged by Coleridge, attempted a more ambitious project, he was more self-critical, unable to summon the spirit of transport that enabled him to write “Tintern Abbey” so rapidly. Though he finished “The Prelude” (only one-third of this larger work), he refused to publish it during his lifetime. His wife Mary only did so after his death 45 years later.

The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge had its own bumps along the way. In the last quarter-century of their relationship, the two poets became estranged over misunderstandings, and even when the breach was healed their easy onetime intimacy was gone for good.

But in this first phase, when they were young and unburdened by ill health (Coleridge’s addictions to laudanum and opium) and family tragedies (deaths of Wordsworth’s young son and daughter a couple of years apart), they embarked on what Adam Sisman, in his dual biography The Friendship, called “their joint mission, to fulfill the hopes of a generation disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution: nothing less than a poem that would change the world.”

For the Romantic movement of which Wordsworth and Coleridge formed the leading edge—and for the hundreds of thousands of nature and poetry lovers sustained by “Tintern Abbey” in the 225 years since—it became a matter of faith that “Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her.”

This Day in Literary History (Edmund Wilson Sr., Disappointed Supreme Court Hopeful and Dad of Literary Critic, Dies)

May 15, 1923—Edmund Wilson Sr., a former Attorney General of New Jersey and father of his namesake, the preeminent “Lost Generation” public intellectual (pictured here), died at age 59 in Red Bank, N.J., in the home that had given him and his only son little psychic comfort.

The influence of fathers on their famous literary progeny could comprise a book in itself. The relationship of Wilson, father and son, was especially fraught. Though the father won great recognition and financial rewards in his life, his fame has been completely overshadowed by that of his only child (to such a point that, while there are few useful photos of the father, there are quite a few--including the one I have here--of the son.)

Through much of a career that in which he was universally recognized as America’s leading literary and social critic, Edmund Wilson Jr. (who dropped the suffix early on) rebelled repeatedly against his father. Easier said than done.

Edward Sr. (whom I will designate as “Senior” from here out to distinguish him from his son) and several brothers had attended Princeton University in the 1880s and 1890s—which, when combined with his high reputation in legal circles, virtually assured entrance to that Ivy League school for his son.

But, if Senior furnished “Bunny” (the nickname given the future literary titan in childhood by his mother) with a standard for culture set very high, he also bequeathed him with a genetic and environmental legacy that the young man tried but failed to shed: depression all enveloping. 

Though I had read works by and about the more famous Edmund Wilson for years, I had never come across anything about his background until I read Christopher Benfey’s 2007 New Republic review of a biography of the critic that highlighted the filial relationship.

As I read about Senior’s late-life decline into lassitude from his earlier peak, I was reminded of nothing so much as Richard Simon, who, having been sidelined at the firm he co-founded, Simon and Schuster, became increasingly sullen, remote and frail—an atmosphere of alienation and emotional unavailability that daughter Carly memorialized in her first hit song, “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” (I wrote about this psychodrama in this blog post from 13 years ago.)

Even at an early age, Senior’s achievements were substantive. He lost only one case in his entire career, and that was early on. Despite being appointed by a GOP governor (and being a Republican himself), his reputation for integrity was burnished when he secured guilty verdicts against 200 members of the Republican political machine in Atlantic City, including the boss himself, Louis “the Commodore” Kuehnle, Jr., in a case that Senior personally prosecuted.

The prestige accruing from this successful prosecution was so significant that the recently elected Democratic governor, Woodrow Wilson (no relation to the AG), seriously considered nominating him to the Supreme Court after his victorious 1912 campaign for the White House.

Instead, Wilson chose three other men: John Hessin Clarke, who only served on the court for six unhappy years; Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, and a leading liberal voice on the court for the next two decades; and James McReynolds, an argumentative, racist, anti-Semitic blight on the bench all the way into the FDR administration.

I was unable to discover why the President passed over Senior. But already since his mid-30s, Senior had, according to an essay his son wrote in the mid-1950s, “passed into the shadow.” Evidence of this “neurotic distemper,” exhibited most obviously early on in hypochondria, became more pronounced as time went on.

In his final years, as his bouts with mental illness became longer and more frequent, Senior shuttled back and forth from home to sanatoria that he would check himself into in the vain hope of relief.

At some point early on, “Bunny” became aware of his parents’ profoundly dysfunctional union. (His mother had become deaf after doctors told her that the mentally unbalanced senior would probably not return to his old routine.)

The knowledge profoundly discomfited him. In an early skit he wrote, “The Sane Tea Party,” his father is depicted as “hopeless hypochondriac” Elgrim Sexton, whose face is ‘lined with the worry and anxiety of dying many deaths.” His uneasiness grew until, in his mid-30s, he had “an unexpected breakdown”—the same age that his father began to exhibit profound unease.

Two decades later—and especially after “Bunny” inherited the old stone house in Talcottville, NY, that his father had regarded as a refuge—Wilson’s feelings towards his father softened.

For one thing, he may have begun to identify with his father’s sense that, like Hamlet, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” Senior was dismayed by the excesses of the Gilded Age following the Civil War, and loathed serving as an attorney for railroads, the epitome of corporate corruption in that era.

Bunny, who served as a nurse and as a translator at General Headquarters in WWI, felt acutely the postwar malaise that gripped other writers of his generation such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (a classmate of his at Princeton). The Roaring Twenties, much like the Gilded Age, profoundly disappointed those who had hoped for a better world.

Second, Bunny realized that, though he exhibited the same melancholy that had undone his father, he also possessed an openness to people with different points of view, and a similar searching, restless intelligence. Though a Republican, Senior would talk to anyone—including, unusually for someone in the business circles he frequented, Socialists.

Bunny’s biographer called his dad “a kind of instinctual Jeffersonian Democrat with a Tory coloring—a libertarian who had little faith in either big government or big business. His greatest desire was to be left alone.” In the same light, Wilson—who had briefly embraced Marxism during the Great Depression—arrived at a fundamental distrust of the uses of government, perhaps best expressed in the title of a cantankerous later piece, “The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest.”

Leon Edel, the editor of Bunny’s diaries, linked the habits of mind shared by father and son when he wrote of the “taproots of the son's imagination, his ability to live himself into the past as few historians have done, while maintaining a cool detachment (as his father had done); his supreme power of summary and utterance—qualities of both literature and the law.”