Eric The Blue

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was christened on April 26, 1564--the year of Michelangelo's death, and Calvin's--at the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford-on-Avon, a small market town in Warwickshire, about 100 miles northwest of London.  He was the eldest child of six (to survive infancy)--four boys, two girls--born to John Shakespeare, a leatherworker, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a prosperous landowner.

John Shakespeare was active in town politics and in 1568 was elected bailiff, what we now call mayor, which would have permitted William to attend the local grammar school free of charge.  The curriculum stressed rhetoric, Christian ethics, and classical literature; it seems a virtual certainty that Shakespeare, who did not attend university, acquired the formal part of his education at this school.  The documentary record loses track of him, however, between his birth and the marriage license that was obtained on November 27, 1582.  His wife, the former Anne Hathaway, was 26, eight years his senior. Their first child, Susanna, was born six months later.  There has been much speculation about Anne, to whom 34 years later Shakespeare bequeathed his "second best bed," and the details of their marriage in general--whether, for example, it was a "shotgun wedding."  It's evident that during the twenty years or so that Shakespeare spent mainly in London, acting and pursuing business interests related to the theatre and composing 38 dramas, a dozen or so being widely regarded as among the very greatest works of the world's literature, they lived apart, she remaining at Stratford-on-Avon, where twins Hamnet and Judith were born in 1585.  The biographical record being too scanty to satisfy curiosity on this point and others, his literary output has naturally been mined for clues, and some have found significance in the passage in The Winter's Tale wherein a shepherd laments that from the ages of 16 to 23 young men do nothing "but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting." 

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare again drops from sight until, in 1592, he is attacked in a pamphlet by the writer Robert Greene, a university-educated playwright who appears to have taken offense at the way in which a lowly actor was now establishing himself as a dramatist.  So between 1585 and 1592 Shakespeare had moved to London and acquired enough of a reputation in the theatre to have aroused a fellow practitioner's envy.  He also seems to have had defenders, for the publisher of the pamphlet soon issued a written apology in which some personal traits of the young dramatist are mentioned:

I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he excelent in the qualitie he  professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his  honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that approoues his Art.

From now on the broad outlines, if not the details of daily living, are chronicled in theatre records, property deeds, business documents, court records, and the like.  The picture that  emerges is of a practical man of affairs, extremely busy in his work life, where he excelled and prospered.  It has not escaped notice that on a couple of occasions he used the courts to enforce the payment of relatively small debts.  In 1597, he purchased, for sixty pounds, the second most valuable residence in Stratford-on-Avon.  Had he died  in the same year, he would have lived three years longer than did Marlowe, the second greatest dramatist of the period, and it is possible the two would be regarded similarly.  But starting right around 1600, the year in which Hamlet was likely composed, Shakespeare's work turned.  To the next six or seven years belong the tragedies of Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.  For those inclined to read Shakespeare's autobiography in his plays, Hamlet seems a break through.  It is longer by half than anything before it, a linguistic analysis reveals more than 600 words that had not been deployed in more than twenty earlier plays (and two long poems), and plausibility is sacrificed in order to achieve disturbing effects--for example, the "antic disposition" adopted by the hero makes perfect sense in Shakespeare's source but not in the play that he wrote, where it is nevertheless preserved.  The audience, wondering whether Hamlet will indeed take revenge for the murder of his father, is confronted with unexpected soliloquoys in which the topic of suicide is at the fore.  One critic has remarked that, of all Shakespeare's characters, only Hamlet could have written his plays.  Many have sensed or supposed that Hamlet is the character closest to Shakespeare the man.

One approach to all such speculation is to dismiss it as overwrought and purely conjectural.  Those otherwise inclined will note that Shakespeare's son Hamnet was buried in 1596, his father in 1601.  The critic Edward Dowden identified four periods to Shakespeare's career and labeled them "In the workshop," "In the world," "Out of the depths," and "On the heights."  This seemed to indicate that autobiography was the principal force exerting itself on this "practical man of affairs" and has been dismissed as too pat.  Yet it is true that there is much gaiety in the plays composed before 1600, that his work for most of the next decade was characterized by savagery and nihilism, which then modulated into something like serene acceptance in such late works as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. He retired and returned to Stratford-on-Avon in about 1612.  He made a will in March of 1616 and died on the 23rd of the following month, almost exactly 52 years after his birth.  The recurring word in the testimony of contemporary acquaintances is "gentle," which then was more closely related to gentilesse than it is today.  "The best verbal vignette," according to Alfred Harbage, "was written by his rival Ben Jonson, the more impressive for being imbedded in a context mainly critical":

. . . . I loved the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. Hee was indeed  honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions. . . .

Chaucer

 Geoffrey Chaucer was born into the growing English middle class, in London, most likely in 1343.  His father was a prosperous wine merchant, and in the normal course of things Chaucer might have been expected to follow a similar life.  But while still a young teenager he was sent to work as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, son of the current king, Edward III, and brother of John of Gaunt.  Thus began his distinguished service, which would last for the rest of his life, to the ruling English nobility.  Much of what we know of his life comes from the governmental record.  He served in positions of increasing responsibility until, as a young man, he was a trusted diplomat carrying out foreign missions of considerable importance and sensitivity.  He married a woman, Philippa, who belonged to the household of Edward's queen.  Everything in the record suggests that he was highly esteemed by his royal employers.  He was the recipient of a succession of grants and annuities, which, upon the succession of a new king, were always confirmed. 

When I think of what is known of his life, and put it next to what I know of his poetry, I think of Chekhov, the son of a serf who went to medical school and worked as a doctor while writing some of the best stories and plays of the 19th century.  Chaucer started higher, and crossed a boundary higher up the stratum, but the circumstances of their lives made both men intimate with a wide range of humanity.  One may detect in Chekhov's fictions the bedside manner of a good physician--intelligent, sympathetic, but sufficiently detached to guard against false judgments; and in Chaucer very similar qualities of mind and character might be associated with the sensibility of an accomplished diplomat. 

His two greatest works are Troilus and Criseide, a narrative poem of some 8000 lines that he completed in about 1385, and the Canterbury Tales, the composition of which seems to have consumed his leisure time beginning in about 1386 until 1400, when he died.  The completed portion reveals a plan to compose well over a hundred tales--two for each of the 29 pilgrims on the way to Canterbury and two more for each of them on the return trip to London.  We have 22 completed tales and two unfinished fragments.  If we work out the ratio of finished to projected, it comes to only about one-fifth, but the universal judgment has been that in the Canterbury Tales "there is God's plenty." 

Some day I will read the Troilus, which is often regarded as a forerunner of the modern psychological novel.  Now, Chaucer obviously did not think of himself as a medieval writer endeavoring to give us a foretaste of modern masterpieces.  Nevertheless one recognizes why it's tempting to say such arguably silly stuff.  For example, in the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner, a lost soul who is aware of his own depravity, will put some readers in mind of Dostoevski's anti-heroes.  But there is in Chaucer no hand-waving; the almost unbearably affecting portrait of a villain is achieved by means of a detached restraint that I tried to suggest by invoking Chekhov.  Here is E. Talbot Donaldson doing a better job of it in a single sentence:

He understands both the high and the low, but he remains curiously detached from both, and it is detachment, perfectly balanced in his poetry by sympathy, which distinguishes Chaucer's art.

And the Pardoner is just one of 29 pilgrims. Even in its one-fifth finished form, the Canterbury Tales stand as a sprawling human comedy wherein all stations and aspects of life receive vivid, entertaining treatment. Donaldson, again, on the characterization of one of the Pardoner's 28 fellows, the Prioress:

Chaucer shows us clearly her inability to be what she professes to be, a nun; shows also the inadequacy of what she thinks a nun ought to be, a lady; and shows the great human charm of what she is, a woman.

So we have the Pardoner and the Prioress.  I've written recently about Chaucer and the fabliau, here.  Kittredge, one of the great Chaucerians, was the first to point out that a series of tales--most memorably those of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, and the Franklin--form a "marriage group" in which pilgrims advance, criticize, and rebut, by the stories they tell, each others' views on proper matrimonial relations.  As free-standing fictions, the individual tales are brilliant, but in their relation to teller and auditor they also build up the gallery of complex psychological characters.  In his artistic powers and many-minded mastery of the whole human scene, Chaucer reminds us of the only English poet greater than he.  Kittredge, at one point pausing in his explication, says that here is an instance of Chaucer "touching the garment of Shakespeare": it's hard to remember the particular occasion.

John Keats

John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, the oldest of five children born to the chief ostler at a horse-lending firm and his wife, who was the daughter of the livery's owner.  Three boys and a girl survived infancy.  The parents had been 20 and 19 at their marriage, which occurred about a year before John was born.  The father died after falling from a horse when Keats was 8, and the mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14.  The livery business had prospered, and the Keats children were provided for in the estate of their maternal grandparents, but their guardian, a tea merchant to whom the adjective "unimaginative" is applied by diverse writers, held virtually all of it while Keats lived.  The children, when they were older, were told that they were not to receive their inheritance till the youngest, the girl Fanny, attained her majority, and also that the estate was the subject of a lawsuit that made distribution impossible.  The will was poorly drafted, but neither claim was true, and it seems likely that the tea merchant invested the funds for his own profit.  Keats was not the type to pursue him on the question.  Chronically short of funds, partly because he loaned what he had to other impoverished artists, his letters asking for loans were so hesitant and indirect that the recipients sometimes did not realize they were being solicited.

Thus the first sentence in the editor's headnote to the section on Keats in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: "No major poet had a less propitious origin."  His personality first comes into view in the reminiscence of his schoolteacher and friend, Charles Cowden Clarke:

He was not merely the "favourite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from anyone, superior or equal, who had known him.

When Keats was 15, his guardian took him out of school and apprenticed him to an apothecary and surgeon at Edmonton, just to the north of London.  By this time, however, he  had discovered books and poetry.  He read widely and set upon an ambitious course of self-education in the art of poetry.  In 1815, he  continued his medical studies at a London hospital, but it was the next year that his first famous poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," was written.  He had four more years to write, and five to live.

There is nothing in literary history to compare with the rapidity of Keats's development.  His first great project was Endymion, a long poem that he  regarded as a kind of "exercise in invention."  I find it almost unreadable; M.H. Abrams, the editor of the section on the Romantics in The Norton Anthology, writes in a footnote that "[t]he poem's constitution is so cloudy, however, that its purport is disputed." It was published in 1818.  The next year, 1819, is frequently called Keats's annus mirabilis, the "year of wonders" in which he composed several of the finest lyric poems in the English language--the "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on Melancholy" were all written within about a three week period in April and May, between the composition of the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and the ode "To Autumn."  To the summer months belong the great longer poem, Lamia, which retells a story from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.  He also was carrying on with an even more ambitious effort, The Fall of Hyperion, which however he left unfinished: he completed the first canto (468 lines) and 61 lines of Canto II. In a letter, he revealed his dissatisfaction with the work: it has too much of "the false beauty proceeding from art," not enough "true voice of feeling."  (Keats's poems are available online.)

Meanwhile, private misfortune dogged him.  Money was a constant problem.  The Keats orphans were close, but one boy, George, emigrated to America; another, Tom, died of tuberculosis in 1818, when he was 19, after being nursed by John for several months; and the girl, Fanny, was practically quarantined at a school at Walthamstow, perhaps because the guardian did not want her and John putting their heads together on financial matters.  While Tom was dying, Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but his poverty and devotion to poetry, then his illness, kept them from marrying. 

What Keats called his "posthumous existence" may be dated to February 3, 1820, when he coughed up blood, thereby signalling the onset of the disease that had killed both his mother and brother.  He was 24.  The story of his last year is lacerating.  The "treatment" included a starvation diet, the letting of blood (in equal measure to what he coughed up), rest, and, before his last winter could begin, a journey to mild Italy, where he finally died, at Rome, on February 23, 1821.  He seems to have been conscious mainly of unfinished work, waste, and pain.  He asked that his epitaph be, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

A word about his letters.  They proceed in headlong rushes, spelling and grammar be damned, as his hand struggled to keep pace with his racing brain.  In a way they are the opposite of the calm, stately progression of thought and observation one beholds in his poetry.  They were cherished by their first recipients, partly for their own qualities and partly because Keats himself was cherished by his friends.  In time individual specimens have come to be indentified by ideas Keats introduced and the phrases he used to describe them--the letters on "negative capability," "the chamber of maiden thought," "the vale of soul-making," and so on.  Individual passages make one love Keats.  Distraught by the falling out of friends, he writes, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey:

Things have happen'd lately of great Perplexity--You must have heard of them--Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating--and parting for ever--the same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt--It is unfortunate--Men should bear with each other--there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side. . . .

His last letter, written to Charles Brown from Rome on November 30, 1820, begins:

'Tis the most difficult thing in the world to [sic] me to write a letter. . . . I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.  God knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject.

And concludes:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom.  I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter.  I always made an awkward bow.

God bless you!
John Keats

 

A review of my review of Johnson; or, Johnson & Quoheleth

Having come to the end of Bate's first-rate biography of Dr Johnson, it is natural to scan again my own brief review of Johnson's life, in my Authors category, and to contemplate possible corrective measures.  I think my nod at the end in the direction of his orthodox Christian faith was too easy.  He indeed was the author of the Prayers and Meditations I mentioned.  Bate however points out that theological subjects are hardly ever the immediate subject of his diverse work product; also, that he confessed to being, as a young man, "a lax talker against religion"; and that in the last days of his life he destroyed large portions of a journal in which he may have confided some measure of skepticism.  Whatever his faith was, it wasn't serene.  Bate I think would say that Johnson, perhaps because he knew his own mind, and put a premium on honesty, deliberately chose not to address himself to religious themes.  Philosophical themes, yes.  And the recurring motif here puts one in mind of the Book of Ecclesiastes rather more than anything written by Paul or one of the evangelists.  Quoheleth, the preacher of Ecclesiastes:

Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.  The wise man has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness; and yet I perceived that one fate comes to all of them. . . .  So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a man who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by a man who did not toil for it.  What has a man from all the toil and strain with which he toils beneath the sun?  For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation; even in the night his mind does not rest.  This also is a vanity. 

Johnson:

Enlarge my Life with Multitude of Days,
In Health, in Sickness, thus the Suppliant prays;
Hides from Himself his State, and shuns to know,
That Life protracted is protracted Woe.

Quoheleth:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.  For man does not know his time.  Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.

Johnson:

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promise of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia. . . .  Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

I first found out about Ecclesiastes in a college course on the Old Testament.  We had made our way through the Pentateuch, and the historical books, and the prophets, and coming now to Ecclesiastes, the instructor related an anecdote concerning how, in a previous year, a student had at this point in the term visited him in his office and said: "Finally, something I can believe in!"  It's hard to know how this slim masterpiece was admitted into the canon, and in a similar way the works of Johnson are bracing in comparison to the conversation of the confident Tory and Church of England stalwart immortalized by Boswell.

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was born in 1895 at Red Bank, New Jersey.  His father, a prominent lawyer, served New Jersey as its attorney general and was credited with cleaning up the rackets in Atlantic City; later, he was disabled by what was then called neurasthenia.  Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and then Princeton University, from which he was graduated in 1916.  His later tributes to Mr. Rolfe, his Greek instructor at Hill, and Christian Gauss, with whom he studied literature at Princeton, indicate that he valued his education more than most.  Upon graduating, he told his father that he meant to read up and "learn something about all the main departments of human thought"--an intention that probably seems quaint to the modern Ivy grad, who wants either to attend law school or get a job on Wall Street.  In any event, World War I intervened.  Feeling he could not participate in the killing, Wilson volunteered for a medical unit, and spent much of 1918 near the front dressing wounds, assisting in the treatment of mustard gas and flu victims, patrolling halls to prevent crazed and wounded soldiers from jumping out of windows or otherwise harming themselves.  He later said the experience knocked out whatever sense of privilege or entitlement he might once have felt.

After the war, he got work reviewing books for such literary magazines as Vanity Fair, The Dial, and The New Republic.  I suppose you might say he was therefore a journalist but in retrospect it appears that he was really improvising a career based on the intention he had announced to his father.  He was among the first to review Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, but he did not drop these subjects when the reviews were in print.  As Louis Menand has noted, once Wilson had started in on a writer, he tended to read the whole shelf.  His first major book, Axel's Castle, was published in 1931; its chapters on Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Stein are probably still the best companion for students of these writers. 

For most of the 41 years remaining to him, Wilson worked steadily as a book reviewer.  These mainly short essays were collected in such volumes as The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (793 pages in my Vintage paperback edition), Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (406 pages in the Library of America), and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-65 (668 pages in my Noonday Press paperback).  Wilson, who hated academic criticism, sought in this work to inform interested subscribers about the author or work under consideration and to come to a conclusion about relative merit--whether or not the work is "first-rate," to use one of his favorite expressions.  He brought to the task his own formidable intelligence and a prose style that is a model of lucidity and unshowy elegance.  He spoke his own mind. One of the pieces in Classics and Commercials is "A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka." 

Meanwhile, he was engaged in other activities.  He married four times, carried on numerous affairs, travelled the country as an investigative journalist during the Depression (product: The American Jitters and The American Earthquake), developed some of his ideas on favorite writers (Dickens, Joyce, Flaubert, Shaw, Pushkin) into long essays that were collected in The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow, taught himself foreign languages (example: Russian, to pursue his interest in Pushkin, and ultimately the source of a famous feud with Nabokov over questions of translation), and wrote what are often considered his masterpieces, To the Finland Station (1940), on the literature of socialism, with long sections devoted to Marx and Engels, and Patriotic Gore (1962), on the literature of the American Civil War, an idiosyncratic work that largely skips authors you would expect to be represented (Whitman, Melville) and provides instead long and interesting chapters on Ulysses Grant and his memoirs, Alexander Stephens (Jefferson Davis's vice president), and a contrarion view of Lincoln that is indebted to the biography of his Springfield law partner, William Herndon.  Wilson was also an indefatigable diarist whose journals, published posthumously, are named for the decades they cover: The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, The Fifties and The Sixties, which extends two years to his death, in 1972.  These provide a vivid portrait of a man at work and play, his sexual conquests (and failures), his mostly chaotic marriages, his drinking (Menand calls him a functioning alcoholic), a thousand small portraits of his many friends and acquaintances, his likes (magic tricks) and dislikes, which include the movies, one of the very last entries reading, in its entirety: "Two movies: Godfather and French Connection, bang bang."

If all septuagenarians were as interesting as Wilson in his "golden years," gerontology would not be begging for practitioners.  A trip to Florida elicits the judgment that the town of Naples, far down the Gulf side, is "a sunlit hell."  He split his time between Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and upstate New York, specifically Talcottville, where, wielding a Civil War weapon, he faced down some drunk juvenile delinquents on his porch.  The young wife of his dentist paid visits and was persuaded to disrobe, whereupon she and Wilson lounged together in bed, drinking Johnnie Walker and discussing the evolutionary significance of pubic hair.  The prevailing theme, however, is that of the Book of Ecclesiastes; for example:

Surrounded by the void of the universe, we agitate ourselves, one sometimes feels, to very dubious purpose.  Our little lives soon go out, and is it really at all surprising that in order to fulfill our immediate desires, we should put out other lives, send them off into the void?  Eventually, we shall go blank--what difference does it make if they do?

His youthful horror at the organized butchery of war now seems resigned, and his allusion to The Tempest seems perfectly apt.  He died, age 77, at Talcottville, on June 12, 1972. 

 

 

 

 

Authors: Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser was born in August of 1871 at Terre Haute, Indiana, the twelfth of thirteen children.  The parents of the protagonists in his novels Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy are representations of his own: the father, a fanatical religionist, authoritarian, unimaginative, ineffectual; the mother, submissive, kind, distracted by domestic problems; the family as a whole impoverished and frequently moving, usually to cheaper lodgings.  As a schoolboy, Dreiser was physically awkward and a social failure, but he did well in school and became a voracious reader of American and British fiction.  He won his father’s rare approval when, as a teen-ager, he purchased sets of works by Irving, Dickens, and Scott. 

The oldest boy, Johann Paul, became a successful songwriter and entertainer under the name Paul Dresser, but it was his sisters’ activities that seem to have made the strongest impression on Dreiser.  Sylvia had an out-of-wedlock baby at age 20 by the son of a wealthy family in Warsaw, Indiana.  Theresa hooked up with, and then was deserted by, a Chicago manufacturer.  Emma took an architect for a lover and, when he left her, ran off with a married saloon clerk who bankrolled their flight with $3500 stolen from his employer. 

Dreiser wrote two memoirs, Dawn and Newspaper Days, chronicling his youth and young manhood.  It will suffice for me to say here that, after a sympathetic and devoted public school teacher supported him through one year at Indiana University, he knocked about a series of menial jobs, continued his self-education, made friends of Bohemian-types, and finally landed in the newspaper business, where reporting jobs at different Midwestern dailies saw him covering the crime beat, a lynching, labor strikes, machine politics—nothing that would have mitigated a view of life, imprinted by his own experience, inimical to the genteel tradition that reigned among a largely female novel-reading public.

Sister Carrie, his first novel, was published, on the recommendation of Frank Norris, by the firm of Doubleday, Page in 1900.  The publisher, owing largely to the distaste with which it was read by Mrs Doubleday, cooled on the book after having accepted it and did nothing in the way of promotion.  Mrs Doubleday’s objections were on moral grounds.  Caroline Meeber, the title character, comes to Chicago, age 18, from a small town in Wisconsin.  She meets on the train an affluent young salesman, the thirtyish Charles Drouet, with whom she takes up after finding that the work she is able to get in Chicago is dreary and exhausting, the pay insufficient to acquire things she desires.  He sets her up in an apartment and enjoys her sexual favors while pursuing his career as a traveling salesman.  Drouet has an older acquaintance, Hurstwood, the manager of an upscale saloon, who, trapped in a poor marriage, conceives an intense infatuation for Carrie, whose good looks are now augmented by stylish clothes purchased with Drouet's money.  She however prefers Hurstwood, who is richer and more sophisticated, less of a bounder than Drouet, and eventually she runs off with him to New York after he steals a large sum from the safe in his office at the saloon. In New York, Hurstwood’s fortunes decline, until finally he has run through his money and the two are forced to live on Carrie’s small income as a Broadway chorus girl.  Owing to luck abetted by her good looks, Carrie’s acting career lifts off and she separates from Hurstwood, who sinks into homelessness and, finally, suicide.  The end.

In 1900 the subject matter, including preeminently the frank presentation of sexual relationships between unmarried adults, with the woman advancing materially instead of suffering retribution for her transgressions, was shocking.  But Sister Carrie broke ground in other ways, too.  The great cities of Chicago and New York are realistically depicted, the crowds of all types, the saloons and stores and theatres and neighborhoods of the easy rich and grasping poor, the way that people dressed and the houses they lived in and how married people sometimes treated each other behind the walls of those houses.  It may be the first American work of fiction in which the necessity of earning a living looms large.  Its length, together with the relentlessly accumulating details, gives the book a quality often indicated by the word “textured.”  It was a commercial failure and the first masterpiece of American realism.

Dreiser, however, failed to develop as an artist.  Discouraged by the virtual suppression of Sister Carrie, he spent the next decade making lots of money, mainly as an editor of women’s magazines whose subscribers had sensibilities like Mrs Doubleday’s, and it wasn’t until 1911 that his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was published.  It’s almost as good as Sister Carrie, and its virtues are similar.  He was a writer for the rest of his life, but of the books yet to be written only An American Tragedy, an immense novel based on an actual murder case from 1906 in the Adirondacks, comes up to the level of his first two.  An editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, describing this ambitious work published in 1925, speaks of its “thick texture of biographical circumstance, social fact, and industrial detail.” The strengths are still the same.

Of the remainder of Dreiser’s fictional output, the most interesting is the so-called “trilogy of desire,” a series of novels—The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (posthumously, in 1947)—treating the career of one Frank Cowperwood, who is based on the American businessman Charles Yerkes.  Dreiser was interested in money and power, and these novels make explicit the connection, suggested in more successful works, between financial and sexual prosperity.  He promulgated a law of life that subsumed areas traditionally explained by the finest feelings and the highest human aspirations.  

Dreiser’s novels are to a considerable extent transcriptions of his own experiences, his longings, and those of his family: the similarity between the history of his sister Emma, who ran away with the married saloon clerk after he had stolen $3500, and the story of Sister Carrie and Hurstwood being just one instance of biography serving as source.  An American Tragedy achieves the alchemy of arousing our sympathy for a stock villain by endowing that villain with goals, yearnings, impulses that are recognizably, undeniably human.  The characterization is so persuasive because Dreiser comprehended it completely.  Clyde Griffiths is not the murderer in the case the novel is based on so much as he is Dreiser himself, less the intelligence and dogged will.  Clyde wanted the wrong things but they are the things almost everyone wants, especially perhaps if your background is one of deprivation.  In a way, the novel is On Walden Pond brought up to date for the new urban America.

Dreiser married in 1898, and he wrote, in Newspaper Days, that by then he had known his wife, Sara, long enough so that “the first flare of love had thinned down to the pale flame of duty.”  Duty!  In 1907 Dreiser precipitated a scandal by pursuing a romance with an 18-year-old he met in a dance class.  Mrs Dreiser was to endure a long succession of such indiscretions.  It’s another way, perhaps, in which his biography informs his fiction.  The poor awkward boy now cut a figure in the world and he found that, like the rich buccaneer Yerkes, he was attractive to women.  He quit the magazine publishing job rather than give up on seducing the 18-year-old.  American literature, if not Sara Dreiser, was the beneficiary.

Ever the restless searcher, Dreiser in his later years was attracted to radical politics and religious philosophy.  I don’t think many people today think much of Dreiser Looks At Russia (1928) or of his opposition, on account of his hatred of the English, to making war on Hitler.  On the other hand, his social activism was often distinguished by purity and bravery, as in his defense of the Scottsboro boys.  He died in 1945.

Updike: an afterword

I've just read over my recent post on John Updike and got a chuckle over the way in which my attempt at achieving a critical "balance," by giving voice in the last paragraph to the less enthusiastic responses of other readers, shifted so quickly into more praise.  I am almost incapable of saying a bad word about Updike.  So let me try again--at first, by quoting someone else.  Of Updike, the critic Harold Bloom wrote that he is "a minor novelist with a major style."  You see here, perhaps, that Updike's achievement is sufficiently variegated as to recommend the back-handed compliment as an available weapon.  What of the claim that he is a "minor novelist"?  Updike's characters, unlike Dostoevski's, go to the dentist, which may be part of what lies behind the insult: in the work of major novelists, characters commit murder and shake their fists at God but never undergo a root canal.  I'd rather reread all four Rabbit novels than figure out whether there is more to Bloom's case than that.

But let us postulate that the ordinary events of daily life are an apt subject for the novelist.  It seems to me that one considerable aspect of the quotidian slog is largely absent in Updike: the world of work, making a living.  Rabbit is a Linotyper, then inherits a Toyota dealership--an unusual career arc, and we do not often see him on the job.  Bech, the author, and winner of the Nobel prize, has a yet more exotic means of earning a living.  In the first of the Maples stories, we are told that Richard Maple works in advertising, but it doesn't carry through; later, when he's divorced,  we follow him as he prosecutes a new daily routine that still does not, however, involve going to the office.  It's hard to say for sure what he does for money.  He gets scientific monographs in the mail.  Maybe he's graduated from advertising to authorship or a professorship.  In Roger's Version, there is a professor, but I don't remember him teaching or voting on anyone's tenure.  Here is how that novel begins:

I have been happy at the Divinity School.  The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile--there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living.

There are 325 pages to go but that is pretty much all there is about what he does to get paychecks.  If there is a stunning counterexample to this general trend, I have in my feedings at Updike's ample table not yet come to it.  Therefore, I nominate the workaday world as Updike's one blind spot.  Being one of Augustine's fit and fair, he probably never had a chance to study at close range the eight-to-five that takes up so much of so many lives, and it's not really a subject you can read up on and then make fiction out of your researches. 

 

John Updike

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, at Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the small town of Shillington, which is around 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia. He was the only child of a schoolteacher father and a mother who worked steadily at writing but hardly ever got published.  He was a top-flight student.  Upon finishing high school, he enrolled at Harvard College, from which in 1954 he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English.  He was interested in drawing and wanted to be a cartoonist, but after a year in England he returned to the United States and began contributing to The New Yorker, where for the next fifty-some years his short fiction, book reviews, and occasional poetry appeared regularly.

Updike, who died in 2009, is now regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American authors; in a hundred years, he will likely be regarded as one of the greatest American authors, ever.  The critic Elizabeth Hardwick begins her essay "Citizen Updike" by designating her subject "one of Augustine's 'fair and fit'"--and, later, on the topic of the novels concerning the life and times of Rabbit Angstrom, refers to "a long flow of attention and feeling."  The phrases are evocative of Updike's prodigious output as well as of a gift that was plainly nurtured by steady hard work.  It's as if Cal Ripken could run very fast, too.  Updike wrote more than twenty novels, a couple hundred stories, and a considerable amount of verse. His "occasional" prose, much of it reviews first published in The New Yorker, was collected, at least a half dozen times, in 850-page installments--Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, and Due Considerations are the ones I can see on our shelves from where I'm typing.

In a body of work this size a reader seeks guidance.  I haven't read even half of it--I'm only a little over 50 and have to work for a living--but my recommendation, like that of a lot of other people, would be to start with the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy.  Read them straight through, in the order they appeared: Rabbit in the 1950s (Rabbit, Run); in the 1960s (Rabbit Redux); in the 1970s (Rabbit is Rich); and in the 1980s (Rabbit at Rest).  It's a portrait of a man and of a country, the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.  The author's concerns range from swingin' sexuality to Barthean theology, the in-between and spill-over being American middle-class life in four decades, including thousands of small artifacts fully rendered, catalouged, and integrated into the sprawling narrative, all of it conveyed in that controlled, effortless, shimmering flow described by Hardwick.  Four great books, the latter two a little ahead, I think, of the first two, maybe only on account of being longer and,therefore, the better to luxuriate in.

If so inclined, the next step might be to become acquainted with some of Updike's other serial creations, like the Maples, Richard and Joan, whose problematic marriage is chronicled in a series of stories first collected in Too Far To Go and, later, with some additions, in an Everyman pocket edition, The Maples Stories.  If you like these, proceed to The Early Stories, 1953-1975, another volume of luxurious length, more than a hundred short stories, including the baker's dozen or so concerning the Maples, which however you will want to read again anyway. 

If you love all this as well as I you will by this point want to find your own way.  But, of the other novels, I should say that I am a particular fan of Roger's Version, wherein religion, a steady theme, clashes with reason, the former championed by a manifest nut and the latter by an over-urbane divinity scholar.  I also am a fan of the stories about the writer Henry Bech, who, while sharing Updike's vocation, seems in many respects his opposite--withdrawn, Jewish, cramped, and a winner of the Nobel prize.  These fictions, also, have been collected in an Everyman edition, The Complete Henry Bech.

I think the criticism, collected in those 850-page tomes, is too easy to overlook.  Rooting around in these volumes, first in the essays you think will interest you and then in the ones you at first thought maybe wouldn't, is like hanging out, for hours, with someone loquaicious, unpretentious, and really smart. It sometimes seems there is nothing he doesn't know about.

It's natural to be curious about the man who created this body of literature, but, to keep the length of this decently brief, I will mention only a couple of things that seem connected to his fiction. 

Updike married young, in 1953, and was divorced 21 years later.  According to his memoir, Self-Consciousness (I forgot to mention the autobiographical work, which includes another memoir, The Dogwood Tree), he took it hard: he felt like he "couldn't breathe" and "broke out" to such a degree that "my shoulders and neck [were] so encrusted I couldn't turn my head without pain."  Like the Maples, who also divorced, Updike and his first wife had four children.  He later remarried, and this one lasted till his death, of lung cancer, on January 27, 2009.

As a young man, Updike for a time felt he could not maintain the Christian faith in which he had been raised, and he took this hard, too.  His reading became heavily theological, in particular the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, both of whom he unfailingly named when asked about authors who had "changed his life."  In Odd Jobs, for example, he includes his response to a request, from a British newspaper, to contribute to a weekly section called "A Book that Changed Me."  From Kierkegaard, Updike wrote, he eagerly took

the idea that subjectivity too has its rightful claims, amid all the desolating objective evidence of our insignificance and futility and final nonexistence; faith is not a deduction but an act of will, a heroism.  So I took courage and thumbed my nose, in a sense, at the world, in imitation of Kierkegaard's proud, jeering, disorderly tone.

There is here perhaps more exhiliration than hard, good sense--and it is, I guess, his point that hard, good sense has its limits.  Close readers of Updike's work will detect an abiding interest in things theological and a distinct, if in these times unconventional, religious sensibility.  Perhaps one senses it most in the way things look--the manner, I mean, with which ordinary objects are charged with something resembling what the poet Hopkins called "God's grandeur." 

In the interests of balance, he is not for everyone.  Students, when asked to read a Rabbit novel, frequently express repugnance for the main character.  I won't defend him.  It's true that you will not feel about Rabbit Angstrom the way you are apt to feel about, say, Constantine Dimitrich Levin.  But while the Russian may be ahead of the American in the likable department, I don't think he is a more representative specimen of humanity.  Getting tired of Rabbit Angstrom reminds me of what Dr Johnson said about being tired of London: it's like being tired of life.

Authors: Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in January of 1860 at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia.  His father, the son of a serf who had bought his freedom twenty years before the emancipation, rose by hard work to the merchant class and operated a general store.  The children--five boys and a girl--were subjected to the father's harsh discipline and conservative views.  They worked long hours in the store, were forced to sing in the church choir, and were beaten.  The mother was dominated by her overbearing husband.

While Anton was a boy, residents of Taganrog declined to spend money on the bribe needed to extend to their town a branch of the new railroad from a terminal at Rostov-on-Don, a larger port about 45 miles to the east at the mouth of the River Don.  Commerce at Taganrog slowed and the elder Chekhov's store failed.  When a loan was foreclosed, he fled to Moscow.  Instead of pursuing legal remedies to the extent allowed by law, the creditor took possession of the house and store and let the family members join the father in Moscow--except for Anton, age 16, who stayed behind as a form of security and as a cheap tutor to the creditor's son. 

If this event seems in retrospect like less of a catastrophe than, say, Dickens's time in the blacking factory, that is probably to be attributed to the intelligence and maturity of young Anton.  He attended school, read widely, tutored additional students besides the son of his father's creditor, sent money to Moscow.  From this time forward, the family leaned on him.  His letters to his brothers offer advice that often sounds parental.  Considering what he would do with his life, the scraps of literary criticism are also interesting.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was popular in Russia and one of the brothers had written to Anton expressing admiration.  Still a schoolboy, he replied:

I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her--and . . . I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants.

Upon graduating, in 1879, from the high school in Taganrog, Chekhov joined his needy family in Moscow and enrolled in the medical department of the university.  To make money, he began furnishing comic papers with humorous sketches and stories.  These were crude publications, but Chekhov's work, though not out of place in them, was at least sometimes augmented by hints of social criticism and a sharp eye for human weakness.  He completed his studies and, while continuing with his writing, began practicing medicine in 1884.  Medicine, he was fond of saying, was his lawful wife, and literature his mistress.

By 1886, Chekhov had acquired a following and a publishing home in the pages of Novoe Vremya ("New Time"), a journal of reactionary political opinion edited by Aleksey Suvorin.  Chekhov's impulses were liberal, but he did not hesitate to publish in Novoe Vremya, and he formed a warm relationship with Suvorin that lasted till the Dreyfus affair.  On more solid financial ground, he began to take more care with his writing.  The long story "The Steppe" appeared in 1888.  His tuberculosis had by this time begun manifesting itself, and to his fifteen remaining years belong the many fictions on which his reputation as the world's finest author of short stories rests.  Are you looking for a reader's guide?  I would suggest reading through these: "Enemies" (1887), "A Boring Story" (1889), "Ward 6" (1892), "The Student" (1894), "Peasants" (1897), three linked stories from 1898 ("The Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love"), "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), and "The Bishop" (1902).  If these please you, there are many others.  Such collections as The Portable Chekhov and the Norton Critical Edition of Chekhov's Short Stories are useful but do not include most of the great longer stories.  In this regard, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, translated and introduced by David Magarshack, which includes both "Ward 6" and "A Boring Story," helps fill a gap.

I've referred to the youthful Chekhov's opinion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is in line with some advice he once gave a fellow writer: "When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder.  It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief."  Lionel Trilling, noting Chekhov's profession, said that his fiction might put you in mind of the bedside manner of a very good physician:  intelligent, objective, and, somehow, simultaneously detached and suffused with humane sympathy.  There are few fireworks, linguistic or otherwise.  The adjective, "restrained," is often deployed.  Read the stories if you want to find out what I'm trying to describe.

Chekhov was a man of progressive views and generous instincts.  Despite being financially responsible for his family, he gave away a lot of money, including, at his death, to the administration for public education in Taganrog.  He donated his time as a physician, worked indefatigably on various relief efforts, went door-to-door soliciting contributions to build schools and improve hospitals, and, most famously, made an arduous journey, notwithstanding his own poor health, to the penal colony at Sakhalin, where he interviewed convicts, saw patients, advised on public health, and documented conditions for The Island of Sakhalin; travel notes, a sober report that appeared in 1895, five years after the three-month excursion ended.  He worked on it alternately with his fiction during the first half of the 1890s.

In the second half of the 1890s, Chekhov turned his attention increasingly to the drama.  His play The Gull had been virtually hissed off the St. Petersburg stage in 1896, but, revived by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, it achieved a popular and critical success.  Uncle Vanya was performed for the first time the next year, and it was followed by Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard.  The plays are thematically continuous with the stories but exhibit great originality in construction and technique.  Had he never written a story, the four plays of his maturity would have secured for him a reputation, with Ibsen and Strindberg, as one of the fathers of the modern drama.  Cherry Orchard is included in The Portable Chekhov but I think the longer Three Sisters is his best play.

In 1898, Chekhov met the actress Olga Knipper during rehearsals of The Gull at the Moscow Art Theatre.  They were married in 1901.  Chekhov's failing health meant they were often apart, he in the Crimea while she pursued her acting career in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but it appears to have been a happy match.  Before meeting Knipper he had always turned away, usually with jokes, the attentions of female admirers.  V.S. Pritchett, author of Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, from which I am drawing many of the biographical details, speculates that Chekhov's "sexual temperature was low."  I think it is possible that he knew he would not live long and therefore jealously guarded his freedom.  With his end in sight, he consented to marry a professional woman with her own career who would not cramp him.  He attended the premier of Cherry Orchard in January of 1904.  On the advice of his doctor, he travelled with his wife in June to the spa at Badenweiler in Germany.  He died there a month later at the age of 44.
  

Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen was born in 1828, the same year as Tolstoy, at Skien, a small town a little over 100 kilometers southwest of Oslo.  His mother had artistic interests and his father was a prosperous merchant whose fortunes reversed dramatically before Ibsen was ten.  His youth and young manhood is a tale of poverty, hardship, and loneliness.  At fifteen, he was apprenticed to a pharmacist at Grimstad.  He worked long hours and stole from his sleep to study for the entrance exams at the University of Christiania (now Oslo), which, performing poorly in Greek and mathematics, he nevertheless failed.  He had an illegitimate son with a servant girl in 1846.  There is no evidence indicating Ibsen ever met the boy, though he helped to support him for fourteen years.

By 1850, when Ibsen moved to Christiania, he was writing satirical sketches, poems, and plays.  They are of interest now only because he wrote them.  He came to the attention of Ole Bull, who hired him to work at Den Nationale Scene, a small theatre in Bergen where, like Shakespeare before him, he acquired a practical education in the theatrical arts.  He remained in Bergen till 1856, when he returned to Christiania to become the artistic director of the new Norwegian Theatre, and when after a couple years that theatre went bankrupt he caught on at the Christiania Theatre.  The many plays he completed during these years found no audience and history has not reversed the judgment of his contemporaries.  A series of four dramas, for instance, treated Norwegian history and folklore.  Probably there was rough weather and trolls but you would have to read them to know for sure.

Meanwhile Ibsen had in 1858 married Suzannah Thoresen.  Their only child, Sigurd, was born the next year.  There is at the center of most of Ibsen's great plays a problematic or sham marriage, so it is natural to speculate about his own, the more so because after he was famous he formed apparently intimate associations with a series of much younger women.  But Suzannah, the stepchild of a novelist, appears to have been through the years a reliable support and source of stability.  She died in 1914, eight years after her husband.

Ibsen left Norway in 1864 and, excepting a couple brief visits, did not return until 1891.  His attitude toward Norway appears to have resembled Joyce's toward Ireland: he couldn't stand it, found it intolerably stuffy, and took his inspiration from it.  (Joyce, by the way, revered Ibsen, taught himself Norwegian in order to be able to correspond, and, in his first published work, glowingly reviewed When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last dramatic work, in the Fortnightly Review of April 1, 1900.)  In nomadic exile, mostly in Italy and Germany, and almost forty years old, Ibsen soon began producing the plays on which his reputation as the world's second greatest dramatist rest.  Here is the roster: Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), then, turning in a new direction, Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

The best critical study is probably still George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism.  The standard, accepted summary of Ibsen's life's work is that he invented the tightly plotted drama of social realism.  True, but it sounds like something in a half-forged college essay, and does not explain, for example, Joyce's adulation.  Ibsen's great overlooked theme, in my estimation, concerns self-delusion: the power of many of the plays derives largely from the way pretensions and "life's lie"--the story people tell themselves about themselves in order to live contentedly--is stripped away so that both audience and character finally contemplate their naked selves.  The American dramatist O'Neill said something that summarizes the desolating effect of the great Ibsen plays--"a life of illusion is unpardonable, but a life without illusion is unbearable."

Ibsen developed mental illness in his final years and died, in Christiania, in 1906.

Jonathan Swift

Third in a series.  No. 1.  No. 2.

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin.  On the day he was born, his father had been dead for around seven months, and his formal education, at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin, was sponsored by an uncle.  His family's connection to Sir William Temple, a relative and diplomat and friend of King William, turned out to be even more important: for the ten years beginning in 1689, he lived intermittently at the Temple household in England, read widely, took holy orders, and became a satirist, the most brilliant ever to write in English prose, of which he was the first great master.  It is well to keep in mind his deceptively simple definition of good writing: proper words in proper places.

It was in Temple's household that he met Esther Johnson, the daughter of Temple's steward, who became something like a lifelong partner. It is not clear whether they ever married.  She was a child when Swift first made her acquaintance, and he oversaw her education, communicated with her constantly when they were apart, and, when they were together, visited her daily, though always in the company of others.  If they married, it was a secret, we know not why; and, if they did not marry--we don't know why that would have been, either.  There is nothing to suggest that either one of them was anything less than completely satisfied with their relationship.  

While Swift's earliest days are somewhat obscure, we have, thanks to Esther, whom Swift called Stella, a vivid picture of his life in the period 1710-1713, when he was living in London, working for the Tories, and she was in Dublin, where it was cheaper to live.  He wrote to her each day, and the preserved letters were, years after his death, published as Journal to Stella.  The parts I have read are full of chatty and mundane detail--his walking exercise, his meals, where and what and with whom he dined, lots about the weather and his ailments (he suffered from what we now recognize to be Meniere's Disease), the time that he went to bed and how well he slept, and, occasionally, something like this to make you sit up: 

I am just told now that dear Lady Ashburnham, the Duke of Ormond's daughter, died yesterday at her country house. The poor creature was with child.  She was my greatest favourite, and I am in excessive concern for her loss.  I hardly knew a more valuable person on all accounts. . . .  I hate life when I think it exposed to such accidents; and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth, while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.  Farewell.

The church was his career but his writings do not seem particularly theological.  It is therefore interesting to me that, about the time he was taking holy orders, he collected some "notes on religion," which were not published till after his death.  One of them reads:

I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me; if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life.

His political journalism on behalf of the Tories won for him, in 1713, the Deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.  He might have expected a more desirable appointment, such as an English bishopric.  But he accepted the post, proved himself an effective church administrator, and starting in 1724, with his Drapier's Letters, written under the pseudonym M. P. Drapier, became a leader of Irish resistance to English oppression.  The government offered an award of 300 pounds for information regarding the identity of the Drapier, but although everyone in Dublin knew it was Swift, not a soul came forward.  Swift then became, and still is today, venerated in Ireland.  His "Modest Proposal" for alleviating the suffering of Ireland's poor is one of the most startling short documents in English literature, the single work that most richly illustrates one critic's observation that his style, which always "shuns ornaments and singularity of all kinds," "grows more tense and controlled the more fierce the indignation that it is called upon to express."

Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, the year Swift turned 59.  The details of his friendships with Addison, Steele, Gay, Pope, and other eminent though less famous personages, not to mention his relationship with Stella, all indicate that he was, notwithstanding the cold hatred exhibited in some of his most representative works, a gregarious, companionable, and loyal friend.  In a letter to Pope he wrote that he heartily loved John and Peter and Thomas but detested mankind.  His rejection of the view, which in his time was gaining currency, that human beings are essentially good was thoroughgoing.  He remained active and prolific through his sixties--Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1731), Complete Collection of Genteel Conversation (1738), Directions to Servants (1745)--and, in 1735, established an insane asylum, later named St. Patrick's Hospital, that he had already provided for in his will.  By 1740, however, it was apparent that his increasing deafness was isolating him, and he sank into senility, finally to the point that he was declared insane in August of 1742.  He died on October 19, 1745, about six weeks shy of his 78th birthday.

Authors: Dr. Johnson

This is the second in a series, the first being here.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in the English Midlands, on September 18, 1709. If one scans what is known of his parents, the resemblance to his father, Michael, a bookseller and stationer, seems stronger--both were large men with quick minds and saturnine dispositions.  He had a younger brother, Nathaniel, who died in his 20s. Young Samuel was afflicted with scrofula, near sightedness, and deafness in one ear, all of which tormented him through his life.  He later developed odd motor and vocal tics, like those now associated with Tourette's.

He was a lazy but excellent student and, upon completion of the public education offered at Lichfield, his father, making use of a small inheritance from a cousin, took him in the fall of 1728 to Oxford and enrolled him at Pembroke College.  Beset by poverty, hypochondria, and depression, he returned to Lichfield at the end of 1729.  His one-year college career was marked by wide but unsystematic reading,  a revived religious devotion, and intellectual self-assurance tending toward a bullying arrogance.  In one surviving anecdote, he told a professor: "Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny."

At Lichfield, he helped around his father's shop, wrote poetry in the manner of Pope, and continued to read widely.  His father died in 1731.  Johnson moved to Birmingham and in 1733, confined to bed by some malady, perhaps the recurring hypochondria, dictated to an old schoolfriend his first book, an abridged English version of a French translation of Voyage to Abyssinia, by Jerome Lobo, a 17th-century Portugese Jesuit.  Two years later, at age 25, he married Elizabeth Porter, a widow nearly twice his age who has been described as "flaring and fantastic," fat, large-busted, and rosy from the over use of paint and liqueurs. Her dowry temporarily relieved his poverty and he opened a school near LIchfield for the instruction of young men in Greek and Latin.  He may never have had more than three students, but one was David Garrick, who would become the famous actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London.  Garrick told about how the boys would peep through the keyhole of their master's bedchamber to observe his "tumultuous and awkward fondness" for his corpulent wife.

In 1737 Johnson gave up on the school and moved to London, where biography occasionally loses sight of him through the next roughly 15 years.  He found literary hack work but suffered extreme poverty, including it seems intermittent homelessness.  It is not clear how his wife fared.  Though a royalist and a Tory, he forever felt a kinship with the downtrodden.  When years later a pious second-rate philosopher urbanely explained that God in his mercy had compensated the poor by making them less concerned with small annoyances, Johnson retorted, in a review (I think it is almost his finest moment):

The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

His hack work included imitating debates, sometimes on no more evidence than the name of the speaker and his subject, in the Parliament.  These were published as the actual speeches of statesmen, and according to legend Johnson, once hearing the eloquence of a certain politician praised in a tavern, exclaimed: "Sir, that speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street!"

Despite many hardships his fortunes slowly rose.  By 1746 his reputation was such that he contracted with a group of London booksellers to turn out, for 1575 pounds, a Dictionary of the English Language.  For the next eight years, aided only by six amanuenses, he labored over his definitions, many of which he augmented with instances of proper use culled from the classics of English literature.  Since the 1575 pounds, a substantial sum, nevertheless was not sufficient to sustain him through these years, he worked simultaneously on other projects: he allowed Garrick to produce in 1749 an early tragedy, Irene (of which he famously remarked after seeing it performed, "I had thought it better"); he published his best poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the same year; and from 1750-52 he wrote and published, twice weekly, the series of essays known as The Rambler.  The Dictionary was finished in 1755.  Boswell, whom he did not meet until 1763, summed up the reaction:

The Dictionary, with a Grammar and History of the English Language, being now at length published, in two volumes folio, the world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work achieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies. 

Writing nearly 200 years later, the biographer and critic Walter Jackson Bate confirmed this opinion, adding that Johnson's Dictionary

easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time.

He was now "Dictionary Johnson," a formidable self-made man, but his difficulties continued.  When his mother died in 1759, he covered the cost of her funeral and paid a few of her outstanding debts by composing, in the evenings of a single week, Rasselas, an Oriental tale of novella length that inculcates from its first words his theme of themes:

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow--attend to the history of Rasselas, prince of Abyssinia.

These "phantoms of hope" and, from a later chapter, the "hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life"--what we usually call "wishful thinking"--must be banished in order that we may learn sensibly to rely on what can be expected of life, which isn't much: it is "everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed."

In 1762 Johnson's services to literature were recognized by the Crown with the offer of a 300 pound annual pension.  Of "pension," his Dictionary had noted, "In English it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country"--but he accepted and, at age 52, years of gnawing want were at an end.  His wife had died while he labored on the Dictionary, and the next year he met Boswell.  In my Modern Library Edition of The Life of Johnson, the narrative of his acceptance of the Crown's pension occurs on page 236 of 1243, so you can see that 80% of that very enjoyable book's bulk is given over to the period in which Johnson, to deploy his own phrases, would "fold his legs" and enjoy the "bread and tea of life."

He had been working for years on an edition of Shakespeare, and the long delay, the occasion of wry speculation among friends, was probably made longer still by the receipt of pension payments. He held that no man but a blockhead wrote except to make money.  It was finally ready, however, in 1765, and secured for him a place in the pantheon of Shakespearean critics.  The famous Preface falls naturally into two sections, praise and censure.  Regarding the former, Shakespeare's "drama is the mirror of life," a long procession of "scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions."  Having elaborated generously on these ideas, he proceeds to the faults, which are twelve in number.  The first is that Shakespeare "seems to write without any moral purpose"; several of the others might be grouped under a single heading of general sloppiness.  These points are elucidated by his copious notes to the plays.  Of course some are unwilling to allow that Shakespeare can ever be at fault but the sloppiness is there to behold: it might be explained, I think, by the simple fact that Shakespeare was every inch a man of the theatre and his work was necessarily affected by professional pressures--exigencies that Johnson, of all people, should have recognized.  The standard retort to charge #1 is that Johnson was a Christian moralist and Shakespeare was not.  But perhaps this dismisses too easily Johnson's case.  If nothing else, his commentary on King Lear should impress upon more casual readers the desolating force of the conclusion to that play.

An aspect of Shakespeare's sloppiness, according to Johnson, was that toward the end of many of his plays, when the final events were in his mind and sights, he remitted his efforts and raced to the end in order to "snatch the profit."  Thus the latter parts are comparatively weak.  I shall now provide an example of what he meant.  Of Johnson's later years, his conversation at club and picaresque adventures as a traveller, Boswell is an admirable source.  His remaining notable work, The Lives of the Poets, which appeared in two parts in 1779 and 1781, is a worthy companion to the Dictionary and the Shakespeare.  I have neglected to mention The Idler, a second series of essays in the manner of The Rambler that appeared in 1758-60.   I also have not said much about his Christian faith, the one thing he put up opposite his otherwise dim view of life.  His Prayers and Meditations seem to be written by someone other than the acerbic bully who "talked for victory."  On Good Friday, 1779, he wrote:

I am now to review the last year, and find little but dismal vacuity, neither business nor pleasure; much intended, and little done.  My health is much broken; my nights afford me little rest.  I have tried opium, but its help is counterbalanced with great disturbance; it prevents the spasms, but it hinders sleep.  O God, have mercy on me.

Last week I published the Lives of the Poets, written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety.

In this last year I have made little acquisition; I have scarcely read anything.  I maintain Mrs. [Desmoulins] and her daughter.  Other good of myself I know not where to find, except a little charity.

But I am now in my seventieth year; what can be done, ought not to be delayed.

He died on December 13, 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20. 

Hemingway

I am so much enjoying my perusal of selections from Johnson's Lives of the Poets that I thought I might write up, in blog posts, very brief biographies of some writers I like.  At the least, I will enjoy the exercise.  Hemingway is first.

He was born on July 21, 1899, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb abutting Chicago on the west.  His father was a medical doctor and his mother an enthusiastic member of the local Congregational church.  The family kept a house on Walloon Lake, between Boyne City and Petoskey, and the short fiction he would publish in the 1920s makes clear that his time spent in this area was the part of his childhood that mattered to him.  One of his first published stories is called "Up in Michigan."  The title alone suggests two worlds, the unmentioned artificial one and then the one that will be the object of his intense and enduring interest. 

The United States entered the war in the year he was graduated from high school.  He tried to enlist but was rejected for poor vision and then, lying about his age, which accounts for some books giving 1898 as the year of his birth, landed a newspaper job in Kansas City.  But he soon found that he could get in the war by volunteering for the Red Cross.  Serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, he saw heavy fighting and was himself seriously wounded in his legs by mortar fire on July 8, 1918.  He recuperated in Milan and, later, back in Oak Park.  In September of 1921 he married Hadley Richardson and soon moved with her to Paris, where he began writing the sketches and stories that would be published in 1925 as In Our Time.

His status as a major American author rests almost entirely on the fiction he wrote and published over the next ten or twelve years.  Besides In Our Time, there were two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and two collections of stories, Winner Take Nothing (1927) and Men Without Women (1933).  After this period, his work became less regular, and much of it would not be read if he hadn't written it.  He won the Nobel Prize for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), but by this time he was imitating himself.  During the last political season both Obama and McCain named For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, as a book that had influenced them.  I don't think much of it.  For one thing Hemingway, in order to achieve a desired effect of elevated solemnity, had this kind of trick of pretending to provide a literal English translation of dialog spoken in a different language.  Sometimes it could work, as in the conclusion to one of his best stories, "In Another Country," where the major, who has lost his wife, declares, "I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself."  But in For Whom the Bell Tolls it is frequently, though not intentionally, funny, especially all the thees and thous passing between the protagonist, Robert Jordan, and his pliant young lover. 

The dichotomy suggested by "Up in Michigan" carries through his work.  In another early story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," the wife asks her husband what has upset him and he explains that an Indian has tried picking a fight with him to avoid having to pay with labor for medical services rendered.  She says, "Dear, I don't think, I really don't think that anyone would really do a thing like that."  Oh, yes, they really would: the first part of the story shows it happening with understated precision.  This disgust with conventional attitudes and pieties receives its fullest expression in a celebrated passage from A Farewell to Arms.  An Italian soldier has just expressed the view that the war will not be lost because what has so far been gained in battle cannot have been "in vain."  Then the narrator:

I did not say anything.  I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.  We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.  There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.  Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything.  Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

He moved rather quickly through middle age, divorcing three wives and cultivating a celebrity status.  On July 2, 1961, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.  Some of his warmest admirers seem to think he founded a masculine cult but the heroes of his best fiction, wounded sufferers of night terrors and noontide nightmares, struggle to hold things together.  In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes, speaking of the bullfighter Romero's technique, observes that he "had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure."  This was meant to stand for something else, a versatile ideal to be sought in prose and life.