This Day In Literary History
On February 3rd, 1907, the famous American writer James Michener was born. His birth date is a guesstimate; he knew neither who his parents were nor exactly when and where he was born. He was raised by his adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Micheners were Quakers.
In 1929, James Michener graduated summa cum laude from Swarthmore College, earning a Master's degree in English and psychology. He spent the next two years traveling through and studying in Europe, then took a job as an English teacher at Hill High School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
From there, he taught English at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, then attended Colorado State Teachers College, (now known as the University of Northern Colorado) earned a Master's degree, and taught there for several years.
After a one-year teaching stint at Harvard from 1939-40, Michener left his teaching career to become a social studies education editor for Macmillan Publishers. When World War II broke out, he enlisted and became a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.
Stationed in the South Pacific and assigned as a naval historian, he would use the experience to begin a writing career after the war ended. His first book was published in 1947. He was 40 years old at the time.
Tales of the South Pacific was a collection of related short stories set on the Solomon Islands in the Coral Sea during World War II. Though the stories deal with the Navy, most of the action takes place on shore.
The book was a huge success and made James Michener's name as a writer. It won him a Pulitzer Prize and was later adapted as the hit Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical, South Pacific. A classic feature film adaptation of the musical was later released.
The extremely prolific Michener wrote numerous epic novels. His detail rich prose reflected his meticulous research. Some of his most memorable works include The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), a tale of American fighter pilots in action during the Korean War.
The novel was adapted as a feature film in 1954 - just one year after it was published. Hawaii (1959) traced the history of the Hawaiian Islands from prehistoric times through the 1950s. It was adapted for the screen in 1966.
Centennial (1974) explored the history of the northeast Colorado plains from prehistoric times through the 1970s. It would be adapted as a TV miniseries in 1978.
Space (1982) was an epic, fictionalized history of the American space program that began with the work of Nazi rocket scientists during the war. It was adapted as an Emmy Award winning TV miniseries in 1985.
Texas (1985) traced the history of the Lone Star State, featuring both fictional and real historical characters, including explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. It was adapted as a TV movie in 1994.
In 1960, James Michener got involved with politics, becoming chairman of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania committee to elect John F. Kennedy. Two years later, he ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress.
He would consider his foray into politics a mistake, saying "My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democrat candidate for Congress. [My wife] kept saying, 'Don't do it, don't do it.' I lost and went back to writing books."
During Michener's lifetime, his novels sold an estimated 75,000,000 copies. He made a great deal of money, which he used for philanthropic endeavors, giving away more than one hundred million dollars to universities, museums, libraries, and other charitable causes.
In 1989, he donated all of his royalties from the Canadian edition of his novel Journey (which is set in the Canadian Yukon during the Gold Rush) and created the Journey Prize, which is awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an up-and-coming Canadian writer. The prize is worth $10,000 Canadian.
In his later years, James Michener suffered from kidney failure and required daily dialysis. In October of 1997, after suffering through four years of treatments, he decided to end them. He died soon afterward of kidney failure at the age of 91.
Quote Of The Day
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions." - James Michener
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a nearly two hour interview with James Michener. Enjoy!
My essay, The Ice Medusa: Writing From Your Fear, was released as a pamphlet in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters' Pamphlet Series. The essay was originally published in Web Del Sol's Perihelion (still available in their archives). It's beautiful in pamphlet form - do pick up a copy. It's free. Download it here.
This Day In Literary History
On January 30th, 1935, the legendary American writer Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington. His father, Bernard Brautigan Jr., was a factory worker, his mother Lulu a waitress.
They separated when Lulu was pregnant, and Richard Brautigan only met his biological father twice because his mother had told him that her second husband, Robert Porterfield, was his biological father. She had never told Bernard Brautigan Jr. she was pregnant.
Richard Brautigan spent his childhood in grinding poverty thanks to his mother's history of broken relationships. She would have two more children with two other men. When Richard was six years old, he and his two-year-old sister Barbara Ann were left alone in a motel room for two days.
The family drifted around the Pacific Northwest, ultimately settling in Eugene, Oregon. They still faced grinding poverty and hunger, sometimes not eating for a few days at a time. Nevertheless, Richard Brautigan proved to be an intellectually gifted child. He began writing poetry and short stories when he was twelve.
While in high school, Richard wrote for the school newspaper, where his first published poem, The Light, appeared. After graduating with honors, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, whose mother became Richard's surrogate mother. He would live with the Websters on and off for a few years.
By December of 1955, unable to find steady work, the then 20-year-old Richard Brautigan faced poverty and hunger yet again. So, he came up with an unusual solution. He threw a rock through the police station window, hoping to be jailed for the offense. There, he would at least be fed.
Instead of being sent to jail, Brautigan was fined $25 and released. He kept trying to get himself sent to jail. He was arrested ten days later and committed to the Oregon State Hospital, where he was diagnosed with both schizophrenia and depression and subjected to electroshock treatments.
Released in February of 1956, he lived briefly with his family, then took off for San Francisco, where he established himself as a writer. He handed out copies of his poems on street corners and read at poetry clubs and coffeehouses.
Brautigan's first published poetry book, The Return of the Rivers, appeared in 1957. It contained just one poem. He followed it with classic poetry collections like The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959).
He married his girlfriend Virginia Alder, and she bore him his only child, a daughter named Ianthe. Their marriage would end in 1962, as he had been suffering from depression and alcoholism.
A year before the breakup, Richard, Virginia, and baby Ianthe went on a camping and hiking trip in Idaho's Stanley Basin. He had his typewriter with him, and as he sat near a trout stream, he began writing some sketches that would become his celebrated second novel.
Trout Fishing in America (1967) made Richard Brautigan's name as a writer. Its chapters were basically short stories with recurring characters and non-linear narratives. The title of the novel is also the name of a main character, the name of a hotel, and a reference to fishing itself.
Like all of Brautigan's novels, Trout Fishing in America is a comedy seasoned with pathos. To get an idea of his humor, a character called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, described as "a legless, screaming middle-aged wino," gets shipped by mail to writer Nelson Algren.
In another chapter, a gang of sixth-grade boys in elementary school become "Trout Fishing in America terrorists" when they write "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk on the backs of all the first-graders.
Trout Fishing in America became an overnight sensation, a classic of the 1960s American counterculture that sold over four million copies. Many copies were sold to people who mistook the novel for a nonfiction book on trout fishing; some chapters read like nonfiction on the subject.
Poet Billy Collins, in his introduction to the 2010 edition of Trout Fishing in America, accurately described Richard Brautigan as "an American Apollinaire with a fishing pole in one hand and a joint in the other."
Although Brautigan was said to have disliked hippies, they loved his avant garde yet folksy poetic style of writing. Soon he was reading his works at psychedelic rock concerts and serving as Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology.
He also wrote for underground newspapers and recorded a spoken word album for the Beatles' short lived Zapple Records label, which had been dedicated to spoken word and experimental recordings. The album would later be released by Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan (1970).
Brautigan followed Trout Fishing in America with another classic novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which opens with this memorable, poetic passage:
In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.
I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.
There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us.
The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.
Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.
In Watermelon Sugar is an avant garde, post-apocalyptic comedy set in iDEATH, a new Eden located amidst the ruins of the old world. iDEATH is reminiscent of the American hippie communes of the 1960s. The people of iDEATH make things out of watermelon sugar at the Watermelon Works.
One member of iDEATH, a man called inBOIL, rebels and leaves the commune to live near the Forgotten Works, a huge trash heap containing the ruins of the old world. Another member of iDEATH, a woman named Margaret, likes to collect "forgotten things."
In the 1970s, as the American counterculture began to wane, Richard Brautigan found his popularity waning as well. Still, he continued to produce great novels such as The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971).
The novel's narrator is an unnamed man in his 30s who works and lives in a library of unpublished manuscripts. Anyone can come in and donate a book they've written to the library, which is open 24 hours. One of the donors turns out to be a girl named Vida.
The 21-year-old Vida has written a book of poems about her body, which she hates because it's too beautiful - too perfect to be real. Nobody cares about her, only her body. Everybody lusts for her, but nobody loves her.
She moves in with the librarian, a kind, gentle man who sees her as a person, not a sex object. They fall in love, but when Vida becomes pregnant, they don't want kids, so the librarian turns to his friend Foster, the library's eccentric, hard drinking archivist, for help in arranging an abortion in Tijuana, Mexico.
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) is a surreal Western parody set in Oregon, circa 1902. It opens with two morally ambiguous gunmen, Cameron and Greer, being seduced by a Native American girl called Magic Child.
Magic Child then hires them to kill a monster that lives in the ice caves beneath the home of Miss Hawkline, who turns out to be Magic Child's twin sister. They take the job, and the novel climaxes in a memorable mix of comedy, science fiction, and psychedelia.
Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977) told the story of C. Card, a very inept private detective. His name sounds like "seek hard," but his investigations are complicated by an unusual medical condition.
The condition is a form of narcolepsy where C. Card suddenly falls asleep at random times and dreams of ancient Babylon. The novel alternates between C. Card's adventures in the present (San Francisco, circa 1942) and in ancient Babylon.
Though Richard Brautigan would publish five quality novels and three poetry collections during the 1970s, by the end of the decade, he had been largely forgotten as a writer. Like his mother before him, his personal life would become a series of shattered relationships.
In 1982, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, his last novel published during his lifetime, was released - a poetic, melancholic autobiographical novel based on Brautigan's coming of age in 1948 Oregon.
Two years after the novel was published, Brautigan lost his long battle with alcoholism and depression, committing suicide at the age of 49. He had been living alone in a huge old house in Bolinas, California, that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. His body wouldn't be discovered for over a month.
Richard Brautigan's classic 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America continues to inspire new generations of readers and writers, earning the author new fans. In 1979, a folk-rock duo who performed for children named themselves Trout Fishing in America.
In 1994, a California teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. That same year, a young couple named their newborn baby Trout Fishing in America.
Quote Of The Day
"Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords."
- Richard Brautigan
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Richard Brautigan's 1970 spoken word album, Listening To Richard Brautigan. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 29th, 1860, the legendary Russian writer Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia. His father, Pavel, was a devout Orthodox Christian and choir director. Physically abusive to his wife and children, he made their lives hell and served as a model of hypocrisy and tyranny for his son's writings.
As a boy, Anton Chekhov attended a school for Greek boys and the Taganrog Gymnasium, which is now known as the Chekhov Gymnasium. In 1876, Chekhov's father mismanaged his finances while building a new house and bankrupted himself.
To avoid debtor's prison, the family fled to Moscow, where oldest sons Alexander and Nikolai were attending university. Anton was left behind in Taganrog to finish his schooling and work to support the family. His mother was devastated, both emotionally and physically drained.
To earn money, Anton did various odd jobs; he worked as a tutor, caught birds and sold them as pets, and took up writing, selling short stories to newspapers. He sent all the money he could spare to his family, along with humorous letters to cheer them up.
He became a voracious reader, delving into the works of Cervantes, Turgenev, Goncharov, Schopenhauer, and others. He also wrote his first play, a comic drama called Fatherless. He had many love affairs, including one with his teacher's wife.
In 1879, Chekhov completed his primary education, rejoined his family, and enrolled in medical school at Moscow University. He obtained his medical degree and became a doctor, but made little money as a physician, treating mostly poor people for free.
Not long after he began his practice, he started coughing up blood. By 1886, the attacks worsened, but he wouldn't admit to his family and friends that he had tuberculosis.
Chekhov returned to writing, and wrote prolifically, publishing many short stories in weekly newspapers and magazines, which earned him enough money to move his impoverished family into better housing.
He made a name for himself as a writer and was invited to write exclusively for the Novoye Vremya (New Times), one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg.
It was owned and edited by millionaire newspaper magnate Alexey Suvorin, who was known to pay his writers generously. Suvorin and Chekhov would become lifelong friends.
After reading Chekhov's short story The Huntsman, 64-year-old Dmitry Grigorovich, a celebrated writer of the time, wrote to Chekhov, telling him "You have real talent - a talent which places you in the front rank among writers in the new generation." He advised Chekhov to slow down and concentrate on the quality of his writing instead of the quantity.
Chekhov wrote back that the letter had struck him "like a thunderbolt," saying "I have written my stories the way reporters write up their notes about fires—mechanically, half-consciously, caring nothing about either the reader or myself." Actually, he often wrote with extreme care, and continually revised his work.
In 1887, with a little help from Grigorovich, Chekhov's short story collection At Dusk won him the Pushkin Prize. That same year, a theater owner named Korsh commissioned him to write a play. The play, Ivanov, was written in two weeks and premiered in November.
Chekhov found the whole experience "sickening," and in a letter to his brother Alexander, he humorously described the chaotic production. To Chekhov's amazement, the play was a hit with both critics and theatergoers. Two years later, in 1889, Chekhov's brother Nikolai died of tuberculosis, plunging him into a depression and influencing the writing of his short story, A Dreary Story.
Searching for a purpose in his own life, Chekhov took up the issue of prison reform. In 1890, he made an arduous journey by train, carriage, and river steamer to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island in the far east of Russia. The letters he wrote during the two and a half month journey are among his best.
What Chekhov saw on Sakhalin shocked and disgusted him; prisoners were being flogged, supplies embezzled, and women forced into prostitution. "There were times," he wrote, when "I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation." He was especially moved by the plight of the children who lived with their parents in the penal colony:
On the Amur steamer going to Sakhalin, there was a convict with fetters on his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.
Chekhov concluded that charity wasn't the answer - the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of prisoners. He published his findings in a nonfiction work of social science called Ostrov Sakhalin (Island of Sakhalin) (1893-1894).
In 1892, Chekhov bought Melikhovo, a small country estate 40 miles south of Moscow, and settled there with his family. He joked that "it's nice to be a lord," but took his responsibilities as a landlord seriously and helped the local peasants.
He organized relief for the victims of the famine and cholera outbreaks, built three schools, a fire station, and a free clinic where he treated peasants from miles around - even though his tuberculosis attacks increased.
Chekhov began writing his play The Seagull in 1894. It premiered two years later at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The production was a disaster and Chehkov was so incensed that he renounced the theater and vowed never to write another play.
Theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was impressed by The Seagull and convinced a colleague, Constantin Stanislavski, to direct a production for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. Stanislavski's brilliant, innovative production was a hit.
His faith in the theater restored, Chekhov returned to play writing when the Art Theatre commissioned him to write more plays. The great Uncle Vanya, which Chekhov wrote in 1896, premiered at the Art Theatre in 1899.
In 1897, Chekhov had suffered a major hemorrhage of the lungs, so he finally went to a clinic, where his tuberculosis, located in the tops of his lungs, was diagnosed. The doctors advised him to make a major change in his lifestyle, so the following year, he bought land in Yalta and built a home there.
When it was completed, he moved in along with his mother and sister. In Yalta, Chekhov planted trees and flowers, kept dogs and tamed cranes as pets, and entertained his friends and fellow writers, including Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. He also wrote more plays for the Art Theatre.
Chekov hated living in Yalta, which he described as a "hot Siberia," so he often visited Moscow or traveled abroad to get away from it. In May of 1901, at the age of 41, Chekhov married his girlfriend, Olga Knipper.
His marriage came as a surprise to many, because he had been called "Russia's most elusive literary bachelor," preferring casual relationships and brothels to marriage.
His attitude is reflected in his classic short story, The Lady With The Dog, which told the tale of Dmitry, an unhappily married Moscow banker who believes that women are only good for one thing. So he engages in many meaningless affairs.
Then one day, while vacationing in Yalta, he meets Anna, a young woman who is walking her dog along the seafront. Smitten, he introduces himself. Soon, Dmitry and Anna begin a passionate affair which lasts until he returns to Moscow.
Back home and back in his daily routine, Dmitry finds himself haunted by his memories of Anna and determines to find her. Using business as a ruse, he goes to St. Petersburg and finds out where she lives. Afraid that she's found someone else, he returns to his hotel.
Later, he goes to see a production of the musical play The Geisha, thinking that Anna might be in attendance. He sees her with her husband. When the man steps out for a smoke, Dmitry greets Anna. Startled, she runs off, and he follows her.
When Dmitry finally confronts Anna, she tells him that she never stopped thinking about him, but begs him to leave, promising to visit him in Moscow. She keeps her promise, and Dmitry realizes that he has fallen in love for the first time in his life. The story ends with Dmitry and Anna trying to plan for a life together.
By 1904, Anton Chekhov was dying of tuberculosis. In June, he and Olga went to the German spa town of Badenweiler, where he wrote cheerful letters to his mother and sister telling them that he was getting better. He was really getting worse. He died on July 15th at the age of 44 - just six months after the premiere of his classic final play, The Cherry Orchard.
This is how Olga described his death:
Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ('I'm dying'). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: 'It's a long time since I drank champagne.' He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child...
Quote Of The Day
"The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly."
- Anton Chekhov
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a full cast reading of Anton Chekhov's classic play, Uncle Vanya. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 28th, 1873, the legendary French writer and actress Colette was born. She was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Yonne, France. In 1893, at the age of twenty, Colette married writer and music critic Henri "Willy" Gauthier-Villars.
Willy, fifteen years her senior, was known for having a staff of ghostwriters that he would direct in producing his works and for his notorious sexual exploits, which didn't end with his marriage.
A few years after they were married, Colette decided to try her own hand at writing. In 1900, her first novel, Claudine a L'ecole (Claudine At School) was published - under her husband's name.
It would be the first in a series of semi-autobiographical novels featuring Claudine, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The novel takes the form of Claudine's journal as she records her home and school life. She lives in Montigny with her father, who ignores her.
At school, Claudine falls in love with Miss Lanthenay, the assistant headmistress, and they have an affair. Miss Sergent, the headmistress, finds out about the affair and gets Miss Lanthenay to break it off. She eventually takes Miss Lanthenay as her own lover.
Heartbroken and feeling betrayed, Claudine turns to her friends - tough, cynical Anais and sweet-natured Marie - to help her cause trouble for the headmistresses. In addition to chronicling her love affairs with both female and male paramours, Claudine records other events in her journal.
Chronicling her school year, she records events both mundane and important, such as the opening of a new school, a ball given in the honor of a visiting politician, and preparations for final exams.
Claudine a L'ecole caused an outrage with its frank and honest depiction of female bisexuality and a sensation with the quality of its prose. Colette's husband Willy, who served as her editor, later tried to claim that he was the real author of the Claudine books.
This, along with his constant philandering, put an end to their marriage. When she first discovered that he was cheating, she had an affair of her own with another woman, then learned that the girl was one of her husband's mistresses! When she revealed this to Willy, he suggested that they make it a menage a trois.
Colette agreed, but the relationship didn't last. She left Willy in 1906 and moved in with her friend, American writer Natalie Barney. The two women had a brief affair, but remained lifelong friends. Colette took up acting and became a music hall actress in Paris.
Her mentor in acting was Mathilde "Missy" de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf. They became lovers, and in 1907, while doing a pantomime called Reve d'Egypte at the Moulin Rouge, the performance included an onstage kiss between the two women. It caused a riot.
The ensuing scandal resulted in the banning of future performances of Reve d'Egypte. Though Colette and Missy were no longer able to live openly together, their relationship lasted for five years. After it ended, Colette had relationships with male lovers.
Her male paramours included Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio and French car magnate Auguste Herriot. In 1912, Colette married her second husband, Henri de Jouvenel, editor of the newspaper Le Matin. She bore him a daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, called Bel-Gazou.
In 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, Colette was approached by the Opera de Paris and asked to write a ballet. She accepted the offer and chose her friend, legendary composer Maurice Ravel, to write the music. He turned it into an opera, and by 1918, Colette gave him her finished libretto.
L'Enfant et les Sortileges, aka The Child and the Spells: a Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts, premiered seven years later. During the war, Colette had converted her husband's estate in St. Malo into a hospital for the wounded. For this, she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1920 - the French government's highest award.
That same year, she resurrected her literary career, publishing her classic novel Cheri. Cheri is a young man of 25 involved in a passionate, albeit casual relationship with Lea, a retired courtesan nearly twice his age.
When Cheri enters an arranged marriage to a young woman from a wealthy family, he and Lea realize that they are in love with each other. After nine months of misery in a loveless marriage, Cheri returns to Lea, who rescues him from the depths of depression.
She gives him the courage to return to his wife, realizing that she has to let him go for his own good. Colette would follow Cheri with a sequel, La Fin de Cheri, which was published in 1926.
Colette, now regarded as France's finest female writer, struck up a friendship with legendary writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and became part of his literary circle. She divorced her husband after engaging in a scandalous affair with her stepson, Bertrand.
In 1935, she married again, to Maurice Goudeket. During World War II, at the time of the Nazi occupation of France, Colette hid her husband and their Jewish friends in her attic, where they remained throughout the war.
In 1945, after the war ended, Colette published her most famous novel, Gigi. Set in turn of the 20th century Paris, it told the story of Gigi, a young girl who is well-educated at a girls' school and taught etiquette, dress, and style by her female relatives.
They're grooming Gigi to follow in their footsteps and become a courtesan - a mistress of wealthy, cultured married men - and support them. But Gigi doesn't want to be a courtesan - she wants true love.
That true love takes the form of family friend Gaston Lachaille, a wealthy thirtysomething year old man who is bored with high society and his current mistress. He falls in love with Gigi - and ultimately marries her.
Gigi would be adapted as a Broadway play by Anita Loos in 1951. In 1958, the book would be adapted as an acclaimed albeit sanitized movie musical starring Leslie Caron in the lead role and co-starring Louis Jordan and Maurice Chevalier.
Featuring a soundtrack of songs by Lerner and Loewe, including the endearing Thank Heaven For Little Girls, Gigi is rightfully considered a classic film. It won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Colette died in 1954 at the age of 81. She had written around 50 novels and become a feminist icon - a brilliant writer, intellectual, and free spirit who flaunted her bisexuality, determined to live her life on her own terms with apologies to no one.
Quote Of The Day
"On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah, what a dream, to live in that! The other stifles us at the first breath."
- Colette
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 48-minute reading from Colette's classic first novel, Claudine At School. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 27th, 1832, the legendary English writer Lewis Carroll was born. He was born Charles Dodgson IV in Daresbury, Cheshire, England.
His father was a fiercely conservative clergyman in the Anglican Church. Young Charles, however, did not share his father's conservatism or his extreme devotion to the Anglican Church.
A precocious, intellectually gifted child and voracious reader, Charles Dodgson received his early education at home. He was sickly; a fever left him deaf in one ear, and he suffered from a stammer which would result in the extreme shyness that plagued him all his life.
As a teenager, he would contract a severe case of whooping cough that left him with a weak respiratory system. He also suffered from a condition that matched the description of temporal lobe epilepsy.
In 1844, at the age of twelve, Charles Dodgson began his formal schooling at a small private school in Richmond, North Yorkshire. He loved that school, but when he moved on to Rugby School in Warwickshire two years later, he came to hate the place.
R.B. Mayor, his mathematics master, recognized Dodgson's genius for arithmetic. Though he disliked Rugby School, he maintained his academic prowess and was an excellent student as always.
Dodgson enrolled in his father's alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford, in January of 1851. He was at university for only two days when he was summoned to return home. His mother had died at the age of 47 from "inflammation of the brain," a common euphemism for conditions such as meningitis and stroke.
He later returned to university, where his talent as a mathematician won him a Mathematical Lectureship at Christ Church, and he would teach there for the next 26 years. Teaching bored him, but the pay was good.
Charles Dodgson had begun writing poetry and short stories as a young boy. He would publish them in Mischmasch, a magazine created by the Dodgson family for their own amusement. Later, between 1854 and 1856, his works would appear in both national magazines and smaller publications in the UK.
Most of these works were humorous and satirical in nature. Too shy to use his own name, Dodgson wrote under his soon-to-be-famous pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, which was a clever play on his own name; Carroll is an Irish surname similar to the Latin word Carolus, from which the name Charles comes.
In 1856, Dodgson published the first work to make him famous, a romantic poem titled Solitude. That same year, a new Dean arrived at Christ Church with his family. His name was Henry Liddell. He and his wife had four children: Harry, Lorina, Edith, and Alice.
Dodgson became a close friend of the Liddell family. He would take the children on rowing trips to Nuneham Courtenay and Godstow. Of the four Liddell children, Dodgson was closest to youngest daughter Alice and would spend a lot of time with her.
On July 4th, 1862, during a rowing trip with Alice, Dodgson told her a story he was thinking about turning into a children's book. It was about a little girl (named after Alice) who falls through a rabbit hole and finds herself in a strange and magical world. Alice loved the story and begged him to write the book. So he did.
A year later, he took his unfinished manuscript for Alice's Adventures Under Ground to a publisher named Macmillan for appraisal. He liked it immediately. In 1864, Dodgson presented Alice Liddell with a copy of his completed manuscript.
When the book was being prepared for publication, several other titles were considered, including Alice Among The Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour. The book was published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, later shortened to Alice In Wonderland.
It was a huge critical and commercial success, beloved by both children and adults. It made the name Lewis Carroll world famous. It also made the author a lot of money, but he still kept the teaching job he disliked.
Dodgson published a sequel, Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There in 1871. The title page erroneously states that the book was published in 1872.
Through The Looking Glass was a darker tale than the original, which no doubt reflected (no pun intended) the author's struggle with depression following the death of his father in 1868.
Dodgson would publish several other children's books, including Sylvie And Bruno and The Hunting Of The Snark, a dazzling, epic "nonsense poem." He also wrote over a dozen mathematics textbooks.
When he wasn't writing or teaching, Dodgson explored his interest in photography and became a renowned photographer. Ironically, it was his photography, not his writing, that gained him entrance into high society.
He would photograph many notable people, including legendary poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. When he retired as a photographer in 1880, Dodgson had taken over 3,000 photographs, but sadly, less than 1,000 of these images have survived.
In late 1897, Charles Dodgson contracted a bad case of the flu that turned into pneumonia. His weak lungs never recovered, and he died at his sister's home on January 14th, 1898 - two weeks before his 66th birthday.
Years later, several different biographers would speculate that Dodgson was a pedophile. He never married, he preferred the company of children to adults - especially little girls - and as a photographer, he had taken many nude photographs of young girls, including Alice Liddell.
A group of scholars, including French academic Hugues Lebailly and biographer Karoline Leach, sought to debunk what they called the "Carroll Myth." Leach wrote a biography called In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, where she explained how the Carroll Myth came to be.
In her book, Leach argues that the myth of Dodgson's pedophilia arose from a misunderstanding of Victorian morality and aesthetics. Images of nude children were common in Victorian England, considered artistic representations of beauty and innocence devoid of eroticism. They even appeared on Christmas cards.
Leach goes on to say that Dodgson's diaries showed that he was interested in adult women, his relationships with them considered scandalous by Victorian standards.
Some biographers had claimed that Dodgson's falling out with the Liddell family happened because he wanted to marry the then 11-year-old Alice; Leach claimed that the falling out happened because Henry Liddell discovered that Dodgson was sleeping with either oldest daughter Lorina or the family's nanny, both of them grown women.
Of the 13 diaries that Dodgson kept throughout his life, four are missing. Leach believes that they were destroyed by Dodgson's family to protect his name because they chronicled his sexual relationships with unmarried women - not little girls.
Charles Dodgson's love for children came from the extreme shyness brought on by his speech impediment. He was more comfortable around children because they weren't bothered by the stammer he was so self-conscious of.
Karoline Leach's biography of Dodgson is, like the writer's sexuality, still hotly debated. Some say that In the Shadow of the Dreamchild is a long overdue repudiation of the besmirching of Dodgson's name, while others accuse Leach and the academics who support her of historical revisionism.
Dodgson's classic novel, Alice In Wonderland, still beloved by readers of all ages and popular with literary scholars, has been adapted numerous times for the stage, screen, radio, and television.
The latest feature film adaptation was released in March of 2010. Directed by Tim Burton, the movie featured Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, and Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock.
A sequel, Alice Through The Looking Glass, was released in 2016. Unfortunately, having little to do with the book on which it was based, the film turned out to be a critical and commercial failure.
Quote Of The Day
"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."
- Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson IV)
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Lewis Carroll's epic "nonsense poem," The Hunting of the Snark. Enjoy!
My essay, The Land of the Ice Medusa, Writing from Your Fear, is going to be republished, but this time in pamphlet form. I've never been "pamphlet-ed" before! It's gorgeous (I've seen the mock-up) and will likely be released in February.
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