Awe-Inspired Paralysis

Clockwise from top left: Henry James, Joan Didion, Proust, Virginia Woolf, and a photo by Zan McQuade of Maud Newton interviewing Rupert Thomson

From Maud Newton:

Joan Didion suffered from an extreme case of awe-inspired paralysis. She told The Paris Review that, while Henry James was as formative as influence on her writing as Hemingway, she could no longer read him at all.

He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.

Read More

The photo of Maud and Rupert is by Zan McQuade, whose blog is called a cup of tea & a wheat penny

Afoot in Connecticut

I’ve been enjoying these video clips from Eric Lehman’s blog, The Myth of Home.  I’ll be back soon with another Wadsworth Camp update.

Starry Ocean Night

“If I frequently use the analogy of the underwater area of our minds, it may be because the ocean is so strong a part of my childhood memories, and of my own personal mythology. If I am away from the ocean for long, I get a visceral longing for it. It was at the ocean that I first went outdoors at night and saw the stars. I must have been very little, but I will never forget being held in someone’s arms – Mother’s, Father’s, Dearma’s, someone I loved and trusted enough so that all I remember is being held, and seeing the glory of the night sky over the ocean.”

Excerpt from The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Chapter 8, by Madeleine L’Engle

Wadsworth Camp Update: The Multi-Dimensional Madeleine L’Engle

The four books of The Crosswicks Journals, embedded in a tesseract

I’ve considered myself a Madeleine L’Engle fan since I first read A Wrinkle In Time as a 10 year old in the 1960s, but only within the past two days have I come to appreciate L’Engle’s formidable abiltity to address serious issues like life and death in prose that is both simple and profound. 

Thanks to a comment by W. Orth on my last Wadsworth Camp installment, I have discovered the wonderful world of  The Crosswicks Journals, which consists of the following four autobiographical books by Madeleine L’Engle: 

• A Circle of Quiet (1972)
• The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974)
• The Irrational Season (1977)
• Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988)

I’m reading the 2^nd book in the list. The “great-grandmother” in the title is Madeleine L’Engle’s 90 year old mother, the great-grandmother of L’Engle’s grandchildren. The “summer” refers to a time when all four generations were gatherd together in the large Connecticut farmhouse known as Crosswicks, the home of Madeleine and her actor husband, Hugh Franklin. It’s a moving and honestly human account by L’Engle about caring for her mother, a once-brilliant and adventerous woman in the throes of advancing senility. 

One thing I have always admired about L’Engle is that she rocked the boat of conservative Christians. According to Donald Hettinga in Christianity Today, “(L’Engle) has been perceived as too worldly by some conservative Christian audiences and too dogmatically Christian by some secular audiences . . . Ministers preach sermons against her; books and articles denounce her and any Christians who evaluate her work favorably or even evenly; librarians in Christian schools and churches handle her books as though they carried dangerous heresies, sometimes relegating them to back shelves where patrons must ask specifically for them, and sometimes banning them altogether.” 

I can’t recall reading anything by L’Engle that seemed remotely dogmatic. In the book I’m reading, for example, she says, “The artist’s response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, not to impose restrictive rules but to rejoice in pattern and meaning, for there is something in all artists which rejects coincidence and accident.” That almost sounds like a William S. Burroughs sentiment.

 L’Engle is not afraid to express doubt, nor does she downplay the importance of common sense and and mental health science to get through a hard time. She was apparently the way I imagine Maud Newton to be, although I don’t know if Maud would approve of that statement. 

But this blog entry is supposed to be about Wadsworth Camp, so let me move on to Mister C. 

In The Summer of the Great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle tells us that her mother, Madeleine Hall Barnett and her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, were married in Jacksonville, Florida and went to nearby Saint Augustine for a brief honeymoon, where they stayed at the Ponce de Leon hotel. They then moved to New York, where Camp worked as a newspaper reporter, writing reviews of plays, operas, and concerts. Camp dressed elegantly every evening, whether he was eating dinner at home or taking the horse-drawn trolley a theater or concert hall. Many of their friends were msuicians. 

L’Engle tells this story: 

“One hot summer evening, long before I was born, (my mother) walked through the hall and glanced at the etching of Castle Conway and said, ‘Oh, Charles (Camp), it’s so hot. I wish we could go to Castle Conway,’ ‘Come on!’ he cried, and swept her out of the house without toothbrush or change of clothes, and into a taxi, and by midnight they were on a ship sailing across the Atlantic. In those days a trip could be as spontaneous as that. My parents were not poor, but neither were they, by today’s standards, affluent. Father was a playwright and journalist, and their pocketbook waned and swelled like the moon; this must have been one of the full-moon cycles.” 

To be continued…

Words are Flowing Across Paper Shores of a Wine Dark Sea

Above: The book cover of Scarabocchio and a picture of Grace Andreacchi outside the Church of San Zacccaria in Venezia in winter 2008, merged into a painting by Theobald von Oer called Der Weimarer Musenhof (The Weimer Court of the Muses). Painted in 1860, it depicts Johann Schiller speaking to a group of people, including Goethe, to the right. Wikipedia says this picture is in the public domain. We’ll see.

Listen to the first line of Scarabocchio, by Grace Andreacchi:

I came here first of all to work.  By which I mean not only, nor even in the first place, to make black marks on paper, but also to look about me, to observe the passing scene, to tread in the iron-clad footsteps of dead Crusaders along the black shores of a wine dark sea, to pose for my official portrait with the ancient temple of Segeste serving as the highly appropriate backdrop or stage set if you will. 

And later in the same chapter:

We sailed directly into the heart of a storm, sea and sky were one black and sickening whirlpool.  I lay in the bunk shivering with nausea and fear, watching the rats run back and forth across the tilting walls.  The water came in and I tasted the dark salt wine of the mythopoëic sea.  I shut my eyes tight and was once again an Unborn, rocked in swirling waters, dreaming the pure nameless passions of infancy.  When the sky cleared and the dripping sails were unfurled like the white wings of waterbirds shaking off sleep and I staggered on deck to see the sky blue once again in all its cloudless innocence I was almost sorry to be alive, my head stuffed with thousands and millions of names, names for all things as well as their Latin equivalents.  I would have liked to linger in that salty twilight a little longer, perhaps passing imperceptibly over into death. 

I don’t know if the above collage makes any sense, but I’m rather please with the way it turned out. I got the idea from reading V. Ulea’s review of Grace Andreacchi’s novel, Scarabocchio, at Sein Und Werden. 

Ulea describes the book as, “A whimsical interlacing of the ideas introduced by Weimar Classicism (including its central concept of harmony and synthesis of Ancient Greek literature and romanticism) and those expressed by Glenn Gould (whose own path can be described as “reconciliation” with Romanticism through Wagner and Strauss) creates a contrapuntal discourse between artists and thinkers of all times.”

So first, I read up on Weimar Classicism. It felt refreshing to swim in a different lake for a change, after playing Marco Polo with Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Wadsworth Camp. This is good stuff.

The Dickens Dichotomy

Mitsu Matsuoka, Charles Dickens, Alan Shelston, Cover art for The Mystery of Edwin Drood Broadway play

On the Charles Dickens page of Mitsu Matsuoka’s site, I found this interesting article by  Alan Shelston:

Dickens has always presented problems for literary criticism. For theorists whose critical presuppositions emphasise intelligence, sensitivity and an author in complete control of his work the cruder aspects of his popular art have often proved an unsurmountable obstacle, while for the formulators of traditions his gigantic idiosyncrasies can never be made to conform.

Read entire article

A Shout-Out to Warner Robins, GA!

Happy New Year to David Broussard, seen here with my book, Tamper, shortly after it arrived by mail at his home in Warner Robins, Georgia.

Fake Book

Jean Shepherd, Ian Ballantine, a sturgeon

Jean Shepherd was called “the first radio novelist” by media scholar Marshall McLuhan. He is probably most famous for narrating the 1983 movie A Christmas Story, which was based on his book In God We Trust (All Others Pay Cash), a collection of stories he first told on the radio about his childhood in Hammond, Indiana. Parts of my novel, Tamper, like Danger Hill (Chapter Four), Treasure Hunt Chapter Five), and The Boy Who Hid In Leaves (Chapter Six), were inspired by events in my own childhood, growing up in a small town in Virginia, and my manner of telling these stories is influenced, in part, by Jean Shepherd. Not to mention the Nabokov-like introduction of fictional books. Here’s the story of a fake book that became real. Jazz musician Bob Kaye tells the story on his web site:

 

When Shepherd came to New York in the early 50’s he had a totally different concept of what he wanted to do on radio. Basically, he wanted to do what other close friends of his (Jack Kerouac, Herb Gardner, Jules Feiffer) were doing, but in a different medium. To Shep, the airwaves were his blank page, to fill with his satiric and usually right-to-the-point observations about Mankind.

 

In addition to being a popular radio personality on WOR Radio in New York City, Shepherd appeared at The Limelight Café in Greenwich Village, emceed jazz concerts, improvised spoken word for the title track on the 1957 Charles Mingus album The Clown, and wrote for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Mad Magazine, Playboy, Omni, Car & Driver, and many more.

Another indirect connection to Tamper is Shepherd’s book hoax.  As jazz musician Bob Kaye tells it, Shepherd complained that:

 

“New York was a city that was entirely run by lists. Nobody dared go to the theater without reading ten reviews first! If Clive Barnes said the show was good, it was good. Even if you fell asleep in the first act,
you somehow felt that it was your fault! Did it ever occur to you that lists are compiled by mortals?”

 

 

It was around this time Shepherd formed his concept of “Night People and Day People.” Kaye quotes him as saying:

 

“At 3:00 am the people who believe in lists are asleep. These are the people who get all the latest hit show tickets. Anyone still up at 3 am secretly has some doubts. There are only two kinds of people. Us and Them. And they don’t know that we exist!”

 

At about 2 am one night, Shep said to his listeners, “let’s all go to the local book stores tomorrow and ask for a book, that we, the Night People, know doesn’t exist.” Since it was a communal thing, he asked the listeners for suggestions for a title.

 

Finally, at about 4:30 am someone came up with “I, Libertine”. Shep then created an author, Frederick R. Ewing, formerly a British Commander in World War II, now a civil servant in Rhodesia, married to Marjorie, a horsewoman from the North Country.

 

So what’s next? The first guy walks into the store and asks for ‘I, Libertine.’ The owner says he never heard of it. Man number two walks in asking for it. Now (the owner) says ‘it’s on order.’ The next guy
comes in. Now (the owner is) on the phone to the distributor. Well, after 350 more people ask for it, Publisher’s Weekly is in shambles!

 

You must remember that the listeners KNEW that this was a nonexistent book!

 

After finally revealing to the public that the book did not exist, Shepherd had lunch with Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books and the famous science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon. They decide to take it to the next level. Shepherd and Sturgeon quickly wrote a novel called I, Libertine. Ballentine published it and the book and it actually became a best-seller! By then, most people knew it was a prank and many of them probably bought the book for just that reason. Profits from the sale of the book were donated to charity.

Conan Doyle as Metafictionist?

Arthur Conan Doyle, Bessie Love in The Lost World 1925 movie, movie poster, Frances Griffiths in one of the Cottingly Fairy photos, Professor Challenger

With his big mustachioed laugh and a twinkle in his eye, maybe Conan Doyle was only pulling our leg about his absolute and seemingly naïve belief that the Cottingley Fairy photographs were real. I’m not saying he didn’t believe in the spirit world at all. For that matter, I don’t know why people make such a big deal that a medical school graduate and creator of the logical-minded Sherlock Holmes might also believe in life after death. Even so, we should remember that Doyle was a very playful character. While his friends and colleagues may have been embarrassed by his apparently gullibility, Doyle seems to have remained nonplussed.

Researcher  Cory Gross, on his magnificent site dedicated to The Lost World,  tells us about a practical joke Conan Doyle played on a group of magicians, including Houdini, in 1922:

Conan Doyle’s good friend Harry Houdini invited him to the annual meeting of the Society of American Magicians. But despite being close, their friendship was frequently tested by Houndini’s deep-seated skepticism of Spiritualist claims. Anticipating more of the same at the Society’s meeting, Conan Doyle prepared a little trick of his own.

Doyle brought a movie projector to the meeting and, without explanation, gave the attendees a screening of what appeared to be living, breathing, walking dinosaurs. This was, of course, footage created by Willis O’Brien, the great stop-motion film pioneer responsible for the special effects in The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933).

The New York Times ran an article about the event, the next day (June 3, 1922), which said in part:

Whether these pictures were intended …as a joke on the magicians or as a genuine picture like his photographs of fairies was not revealed…His monsters …were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces. Hitherto, the famous visitor has not been inclined to play with his subject. Sir Arthur is the author of “The Lost World”, a novel in which a British scientist discovers in South America a plateau which has survived through geologic time and is still stocked with monsters which roamed the earth millions of years before man developed from the lower forms or was created.

A day later, the Times published a letter from Doyle in which he verified that he was simply having fun with footage from the planned movie adaptation on his novel, The Lost World. Whether intended or not, this was top-notch publicity for the film!   

Elsewhere on the same site, John Lavas tells how, in the first editions of The Lost World, “Conan Doyle included faked photographs (some of which he created himself) and maps purporting to represent the plateau (where the dinosaurs were discovered).” Lavas further tells us that the hero of  The Lost World, Professor Challenger, “was, after Holmes, Conan Doyle’s favourite character. Conan Doyle even used to walk about London streets in full Challenger disguise complete with fake beard and eyebrows! Challenger would later appear in four other Conan Doyle stories, but was never again as memorable as he proved to be in his debut.”

Reading the Lavas article, followed by a Cory Gross piece called The Land of Mist, got me thinking about Doyle as a “metafictionist.” (I thought about using the term “metafictionalist” but I like the Steampunk ring of metafictionist. It’s like saying “machinist” instead of “mechanic.”)

The Lost World introduced readers to Professor Challenger in 1912. Challenger returns a year later in The Poison Belt. Here’s what Cory Gross says about the third Professor Challenger novel, The Land of Mist:

After the publication of The Poison Belt in 1913, there was a 13 year gap in which nothing was heard from Professor George Edward Challenger. Then in 1926, perhaps in reaction to the success of the Lost World film in 1925, he surfaced again… one doesn’t get very far into the text before the strong impression is given that The Land of Mist is intended to take place in an alternate continuity. The book begins with the following paragraph:

The great Professor Challenger has been- very improperly and imperfectly- used in fiction. A daring author placed him in impossible and romantic situations in order to see how he would react to them. He reacted to the extent of a libel action, an abortive appeal for suppression, a riot in Sloane Street, two personal assaults, and the loss of his position as lecturer upon Physiology at the London School of Sub-Tropical Hygiene. Otherwise, the matter passed more peaceably than might have been expected.

So, here we have Conan Doyle writing about professor Challenger as if he were a real person about whom two fictional stories have been written, in the introduction to what purports to be a real account (but which we know is also fiction)!

Or do we? Some people, after all, even wondered if the dinosaurs were real!

Lavas also raises the possibility that Doyle himself may have perpetrated the Piltdown Man hoax. An orangutan jaw affixed to a human skull, the so-called Piltdown Man relic was discovered in the vicinity of Doyle’s home in 1908. Some evidence points to Martin Hinton, a curator at the British Museum, as the culprit, while other clues implicate Doyle. It is possible that they acted together, but it is also possible that neither man was involved.

We may conclude one sure thing: In matters of  science vs. mysticism, fiction vs. metaficition, or prank vs. publicity, when it comes to Arthur Conan Doyle, nobody knows for sure.

Just Because You’re Seeing Things Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t There

Lots of good study material on Nabokov’s shortest short story, Signs and Symbols.

I personally think Nabokov’s general idea was this: The young man is considered insane because he fears inanimate objects, but by the end of the story, we fear the telephone because of the potential message it might convey to the elderly couple. There is apparently much more to it, as can be seen in the following essays by Alexander Dolinin and Roy Johnson:

 “Contrary to the prevailing line of criticism, I take Nabokov at his word and argue in this article that “Signs and Symbols,” like “The Vane Sisters,” is constructed according to a specific “system” of concealment and does contain a neat soluble riddle whose function is similar to the acrostic puzzle in the later story.” – Alexander Dolinin, The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols”  from the Nabakov Studies section of  The Nabakov Society.

And from Roy Johnson’s tutorial on the story,

“We are given no further information, but it is impossible to escape the implication that the call is from the hospital with news of another and this time successful suicide attempt. For if it were another wrong number there would be no relation at all between these calls and the remainder of the story.

“It is not possible to ‘prove’ that this is the case, but it is quite obvious that Nabokov is inviting the reader to supply the missing explanation. Thus the old man and his wife do have a further blow waiting for them, and the second link between the two subjects is made – in the reader’s mind.”