Today In Literature

Novermber 21

On this day in 1694 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) was born. Few could have predicted his Age-defining stature, but apparently the young Voltaire showed every sign of becoming, as biographer Theodore Besterman puts it, "one of those over-life-size personages who seem perpetually to attract equally extraordinary events." He would be applauded and attacked for most of his life, and it is hard to find a portrait of him in which he is not smiling.
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November 22

On this day in 1962 George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published in a new "fonetic alfabet," as commissioned by his will. Those who wished to attempt Shaw's cheaper, more rational system were instructed to "Keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance toward the mirror until you are able to see the individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them...."
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On this day in 1678, "Ephelia" had her first public writing licensed by the King's censor, thereby marking her official entry into the world of Restoration literature. The writing in question is Ephelia's poem on the Popish Plot that was rocking the Court and all of England, but more interesting than poem or Plot is Ephelia herself -- especially now that we know who she was.
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On this day in 1947, John Steinbeck's The Pearl was published. Although he could have taken the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold theme from his own troubles with fame and fortune, Steinbeck's source was a Mexican folk tale. It could as easily have been the Bible, or Shakespeare's Othello, who "loved not wisely but too well," and "Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe."

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On this day in 1909 James Agee was born
in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a poet,
a film critic, a social documetarist, a screenwriter.
But he is best known for his autobiographical novel
" A death in the family"

On this day in 1919, twenty-two-year-old William Faulkner published his first prose, a short story entitled "Landing in Luck." It is a lighthearted tale about an air force cadet's first solo flight, and it gives little sign of the style or fame to come, but the autobiographical details behind its telling are pure, playful Faulkner.

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On this day in 1960 Richard Wright, the expatriate Amarican writer
of Black Roy and Native Son, died in Paris. "He came like a sledgehammer,
like a giant out of the with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer",
said historian John Henrik Clarcke. Of all the things Wright wanted to smash
in racist America,the last may have been the Hollywood producer who asked
to film "Native Son" with a white hero.

On this day in 1811, a notice appeared in the Richmond, Virginia Inquirer asking for donations in aid of Eliza Poe, a young actress now "lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children." Though two-year-old Edgar would be rescued by the Allan family, the life of poverty, abandonment and hand-outs so familiar to his mother would eventually return to stay.
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November 30
On this day in 1667 Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, the exact location seemingly pregnant with significance: a few blocks from St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Swift would be Dean; almost in the backyard of Dublin Castle, representing the Englishness he would both covet and skewer; the specific address, 7 Hoey's Court, almost perfect for perhaps the most famous scoffer in literature.
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December 1
On this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's "Adonais," his elegy to John Keats, was published in England. A cornerstone of both Romantic poetry and the myth of the Romantic, the poem paints Keats as Adonis in pursuit of Beauty and Truth, brought down by those less noble and talented. This was a fate Shelley predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected.
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On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour. Like all but a few over the five months, the evening was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.

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On this day in 1830 Christina Rossetti was born. Although she was only peripherally involved with her brother's Pre-Raphaelites, and claimed to be "content in my shady crevice," Rossetti was not quite the "recluse, saint and renunciatory spinster" commonly portrayed. To those familiar only with her devotional or children's verse, her classic "Goblin Market" will raise eyebrows.
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On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. In 1993 a commemorative plaque to Trollope was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, upon which is inscribed the last sentence from his Autobiography, published the year after his death: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." The "many words" amount to forty-seven novels; this is ten more than the other literary giants of his time -- Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës -- combined. And many hands continue to reach out to them: virtually all of Trollope's books are currently in print, bought in unrivalled quantities, says biographer N. John Hall, "not by students, forced to do so, but by people who read them because they enjoy them."

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On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with "This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's previous days had also been made to parallel Holden's -- a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow point bullets.
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On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. He is the author of some forty novels and story collections, and estimated to be the most read Arabic novelist both outside of and within the Arab world -- though some of his books were ominously banned, and remain so. His epic social chronicles -- most notably the Cairo Trilogy, which covers much of the first half of the 20th century -- are compared to, and were in fact written in emulation of, those by Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac. At the other end of the range, his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed provides a cultural snapshot for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. One of its central characters, the alienated, café-drifting Elwan, has the options and opinions of those who might have done it -- or of those born a little afterwards but to a similar Egypt, such as Mohammad Atta, who would grow up to do worse:

We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us -- no more, no less. Where are the good old days?... My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this café as a refuge from the pain of loneliness.... How many nations live side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis? --stories far better than A Thousand and One Nights. What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet, as the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs on Pyramid Road are showered with banknotes and gratuities. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Security Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood.... [Sadat is] a failure -- "my friend Begin, my friend Kissinger," is all he can say; his uniform is Hitler's; his act, the act of Charlie Chaplin. He's rented our entire country -- furnished -- to the United States....
Mahfouz would be the last person to recommend terrorism. Muslim fundamentalists attacked him verbally for backing the Camp David Accord in 1978, and then his Children of Gebelawi was considered so blasphemous that it was banned in Egypt, and Omar Abdul-Rahman pronounced a fatwa against him. This was very nearly carried out in 1994, the 83-year-old Mahfouz stabbed in the neck and severely wounded just outside his apartment. "This incident," he said later, "is an opportunity to ask God to make the police defeat terrorists and to plead for the country to be purified of this evil in defense of people, liberty and Islam."

On this day in 1991 Salman Rushdie made his first appearance after three years in hiding from the fatwa against him -- the issuing of which would not have been necessary, according to Omar Abdul-Rahman, had Mahfouz been made an example of earlier, when he first started to offend terrorist sensibilities.

On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize. At this point, Bellow had written only fifteen of his twenty-nine (and still counting) books, but among these are his major prize-winners -- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). These were proof enough, said the Academy, of Bellow's "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion." His characters are anti-heroes more or less lost in a ram-shackle world, but they keep their chin up even as they stick their neck out, and are funny. In his acceptance speech, Bellow seemed to make an appeal on their behalf, urging modern writers to stick to the human comedy, and build their novels as if "a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter" from the dehumanizing storm.

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Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend?