Today In Literature

On this day in 1939, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep was published. Chandler was fifty-one, an ex-oil company executive who had taken up writing at the age of forty-five, after being fired for alcohol-inspired absenteeism. Over the previous five years he had published enough crime stories in the pulp magazines to survive, but this was his first novel, the first of seven featuring the ever-inimitable and much-copied Philip Marlowe. Marlowe's first words, to the first of so many women -- here Carmen Sternwood, with tawny hair, slate-gray eyes and "predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith" -- give notice:

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February 7th

On this day in 1601, Shakespeare's Richard II was presented at the Globe playhouse, a performance especially arranged by those hoping to overthrow Queen Elizabeth the following day. Followers of the Earl of Essex had approached Shakespeare's Company the previous week with a promise of forty shillings to supplement ticket sales, so overcoming the Company's objections that the lines for Richard II were rusty and that a revival was unlikely to be popular. If the Saturday afternoon performance was poorly-attended, the Sunday morning rebellion was worse.

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February 8th

On this day in 1750, in the very minute of the earthquake, died Aaron Hill, poet, born February 10th 1685. Author of "Camillus" and "Elfrida," perhaps the only thing remembered of his is the libretto for "Rinaldo," the first opera that Handel composed in England.

"Tender handed stroke a nettle
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.

'Tis the same with common natures,
Use them kindly, they rebel;
But be rough as nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well."
Aaron Hill

On this day in 1926 Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with his first publisher, Boni & Liveright; this enabled him to sign with Scribners a week later, and so complete the double-deal he had orchestrated by means of his satiric novella, The Torrents of Spring. While the novella is little-read now, scholars regard it and the double-dealing as an early peek into the puzzle of Hemingway's personality.
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Jay! We've been missing you around the forum, where have you been?

On this day in 1837 Aleksandr Pushkin died at the age of thirty-seven, from a stomach wound suffered in a duel two days earlier. Though the duel is still something of a mystery, full of drama and social overtones, its specific cause was straightforward enough: a handsome officer in the Tsar's Horse Guards, a beautiful wife who liked to flirt, and salon gossip that had become nasty and public in St. Petersburg.
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I've been around ;), should be scarce for a week yet.

On this day in 1862 Elizabeth Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, almost certainly a suicide. Husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti was stirred by grief, guilt and his romantic temperament to the last-minute gesture of placing the only copies of many of his poems in his wife's coffin; seven years later, in one of the most notorious second-thoughts of love and literature, Rossetti retrieved and published the poems.
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On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln was born, and published on this day in 1926 was Carl Sandburg's two-volumed biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Sandburg researched, wrote and talked about Lincoln his entire life, and he clearly felt that he had not only an affinity but a mission. They shared Midwestern roots and frontier poverty, an up-by-my-bootstraps attitude, a love of the common man and a zeal for social reform. His Lincoln would be a story of the best of the American Dream: the railsplitter and country lawyer risen to the "elemental and mystical," the embodiment of men "who breathe with the earth and take into their lungs and blood some of the hard and dark strength of its mystery," who spoke with "stubby, homely words that reached out and made plain, quiet people feel that perhaps behind them was a heart that could understand them." If researching and writing Lincoln took a lifetime, best it was that of "some cornhusker" like Sandburg; and as for the struggle, ". . . don't he know all us strugglers and wasn't he a kind of a tough struggler all his life right up to the finish?"

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On the evening of this day in 1945, British and U.S. planes began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous fictional record of what resulted -- a firestorm that destroyed 85% of the city and killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut "got about five dollars for each corpse," he said, and a life-long desire to prevent such things from ever happening again.
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On this day in 1751, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published. Gray was a reclusive gentleman-poet and he did not write many poems, but this tribute to the humble life brought him immediate fame and the offer of the poet laureateship; it also became the most reprinted poem of the 18th century, one which Thomas Hardy would love and borrow from for his title, "Far From the Madding Crowd."
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On this day in 1883, Nikos Kazantzakis was born, in Heraklion, Crete. Kazantzakis was a philosopher, a doctor of laws, a politician, and a prolific writer in almost all genres. He studied under Henri Bergson, won the Lenin Peace Prize, missed the 1957 Nobel by one vote, translated Goethe and Dante, wrote a 33,333 line sequel to the Odyssey, and traveled the world for much of his expatriate life. Notwithstanding, his most famous novel, Zorba the Greek is a rejection of intellectualism and a return to his birthplace -- though Zorba may be a Cretan like no other. By precept and example Zorba educates a British academic to folly, passion, and the Arcadian basics: "How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea."

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On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him "the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language." Much of the attention that Callaghan did receive was not for his twenty novels and story collections but for That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his Lost Generation days among "a very small, backbiting, gossipy neighborhood" of Latin Quarter expatriates -- Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Callaghan's account of his boxing matches with Hemingway especially raised eyebrows --including those of Norman Mailer in a 1963 review entitled, "Punching Papa": "For the first time one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality." Callaghan and Hemingway had been friends since their newspaper days in Toronto, and both liked to box. Callaghan was considerably shorter and lighter, but more experienced, and in an early sparring session he had "worked out a routine, darting in and out with fast lefts to the head," while Hemingway "waited for a chance to nail me solidly":

It must have been exasperating to him that my left was always beating him to the punch. His mouth began to bleed.... His tongue kept curling along his lip, wiping off blood.... Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face.

When Callaghan stepped back in shock, Hemingway explained, "That's what the bullfighters do when they're wounded.... It's a way of showing contempt." At a later session, F. Scott Fitzgerald was volunteered as timekeeper, charged with regulating one-minute rounds with two-minute rests between. Fitzgerald became so enthralled with the boxing that he forgot the clock -- until the out-of-gas Hemingway made a desperate lunge at Callaghan, and got knocked on his back by a hard cross to the jaw. When Fitzgerald cried out, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes!" Hemingway spat his bullfighter's contempt in a new direction: "All right, Scott...if you want to see me getting the **** kicked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake."

http://www.todayinliterature.com/tod...Date=2/22/2006

On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Scheherazade

On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .

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...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.

It's funny, except that it's not.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TodHackett

...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.

It's funny, except that it's not.

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Tod - No one ever really drives anyone to suicide. Mental illness is a disease, and perhaps Plath could have been helped today where we have some notion of how to mitigate the symptoms.

On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson's "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers" was published. This was the second of only a handful of poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, all of them anonymously and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
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