A Sweet Dedication

From George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885).

For those few who have not read . . .

Click on the image for a legible view.

Once upon a time, everyone under the sun — and a few in the shadows — knew a certain great novel so well, its characters’ names served as figures of speech. One still does, the very figure of servitude. Here’s a dictionary definition for another; it attests quite well to the novel’s ubiquity a century after publication. The definition was written by Eric Partridge and comes from his Name into Word: Proper Names That Have Become Common Property (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949):

Simon Legree tends, in American writing, to mean, literally and figuratively, ‘a cruel, sinister, relentless slave-driver’. …

For those few who have not read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which appeared in the early 1850s and did much to precipitate the emancipation of the Negroes in North America, it is necessary to mention that Simon Legree hounded Uncle Tom and his fellow-slaves and came to a somewhat gruesomely sticky end.

And for those few who have not read the novel, Legree’s comeuppance is precipitated by a certain Gothic tomfoolery, performed by two of the slaves, who prey on Legree’s mind by playing ghost. Here’s the sticky end as Stowe gives it:

… finally, there came over his sleep a shadow, a horror, an apprehension of something dreadful hanging over him. It was his mother’s shroud, he thought; but Cassy had it, holding it up, and showing it to him. He heard a confused noise of screams and groanings; and, with it all, he knew he was asleep, and has struggled to wake himself. He was half awake. He was sure something was coming into his room. He knew the door was opening, but he could not stir hand or foot. At last he turned, with a start; the door was open and, he saw a hand putting out his light.

It was a cloudy, misty moonlight, and there he saw it! — something white, gliding in! He heard the still rustle of its ghostly garments. It stood still by his bed; — a cold hand touched his; a voice said, three times, in a low, fearful whisper, “Come! come! come!” And, while he lay sweating with terror, he knew not when or how, the thing was gone. He sprang out of bed, and pulled at the door. It was shut and locked, and the man fell down in a swoon.

After this, Legree became a harder drinker than ever before. He no longer drank cautiously, prudently, but imprudently and recklessly.

There were reports around the country, soon after, that he was sick and dying. Excess had brought on that frightful disease that seems to throw the lurid shadows of a coming retribution back into the present life. None could bear the horrors of that sick-room, when he raved and screamed, and spoke of sights which almost stopped the blood of those who heard him; and, at his dying bed, stood a stern, white, inexorable figure, saying, “Come! come! come!”

I say “as Stowe gives it” because the dramatizations that flourished in the nineteenth century and after often altered the details. Legree is shot, for instance, in the most popular of the stage versions, that of George L. Aiken.

Oddly, Partridge has no entry at all for Tom or Uncle Tom, though this epithet has had much a longer shelf life than Legree. Go figure.

Books of Poetry: The 1860s

Joanne Dobson

One of the projects I’ve been working on for the past few years, in spare moments, is a counterfactual edition of Emily Dickinson’s war poetry: an attempt to imagine what a book of Dickinson’s war poems might have looked like, had she allowed one to be published at the end of the Civil War. I’m not the first to use this approach; I cribbed it from Joanne Dobson, who produced “a hypothetical Table of Contents for a volume of Verses by Emily Dickinson” as part of her own Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence. Dobson’s Verses was comprised of fifty poems run together in a continuous sequence; it had an imagined publication date of 1864, the year five of Dickinson’s poems poems did appear in print, on ten different occasions, her most public year as a writer. The point of the exercise: to make vivid the fact that many of Dickinson’s unpublished poems would not have been out of place in the literary market of the time, as previous critics had imagined. The point of my exercise is a little different: to make vivid the particularity of Dickinson’s war poems by putting them in a form that makes comparison easier with other war poets of the time (those, anyhow, who published whole volumes on the subject).

A Nineteenth-Century Errata Slip

From the Library of Congress copy of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), by way of the Internet Archive (link):

for “poles” read “polls”
for “bog-hut” read “log-hut”
for “smiles” read “smile”
for “Rhotruda” read “Rhotrude”
for “plaint” read “paint”
for “Let” read “Yet”
for “raftsmen” read “raftsman”
for “splashed” read “plashed”
for “give” read “gave”
for “earthly” read “earthy”

R.I.P. Frank Frazetta

Click for a readable image

I’ve been meaning to write about this surprising new edition of Longfellow’s Dante, brought out by Del Rey Books, the science fiction imprint of Random House. And yes, it’s a video game tie-in.

I’m not a player, so I can’t say anything about the game (this is not snobbery on my part, I’m inept — I haven’t tried a game since pinball made me its Charlie Brown) … but the treatment of the text is loving. If that’s any indication, the game must be terrific.

The cover copy is priceless: “The Literary Classic That Inspired the Epic Video Game from Electronic Arts.” And likewise the back: “The timeless classic of a journey through the horrors of hell … The action adventure blockbuster that’s rocking the video-game world.” Included: a 16-page full-color insert, with screen shots of the game and art by William Blake and Gustav Doré. The effect reminds me of Deadliest Warrior: there too a little research heightens the pleasure of make-believe — a geeky dress-up pleasure in that case, pop mythology in this one.

And there’s also an introduction, a good one, by Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer, and also — I love this — a note on the text. Unless I’m missing something, no individual is credited, but someone went to Harvard and looked at Longfellow’s papers: the annotations are as Longfellow wanted them, and for the first time. I’ve seen less credible texts on college syllabi. ^[1]

I wanted to spend some time with this edition and with the game’s website — and some of the online commentary — before writing this post, but I’ve been busy with end-of-semester stuff. Meanwhile, Frank Frazetta died today, at age 82. It seemed appropriate to mention the book in his memory. I’ve never played video games. But Conan? Bran Mak Morn? Yeah, I’ve spent some time in those worlds, which I associate as much with Frazetta as I do with their creator, Robert E. Howard. I wouldn’t have thought before now to link Howard with Dante, but Howard’s publisher, Del Rey, has done that for me, by way of Frazetta. Take a look at the image below, and then at the new Longfellow cover. Frazetta’s art is clearly an inspiration. If not directly, then through a chain of artists who influenced artists who influenced the artists at Electronic Arts.

Enjoy a long afterlife, Frazetta.

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Note

¹ [Back to text] Del Rey’s website lists Matthew Pearl and Lino Pertile as authors, and it would make sense if they had a role in the editing — Pearl wrote The Dante Club, a novel in which Longfellow is a character, and Pertile teaches Dante at Harvard — but I can’t confirm that.

Margaret Fuller’s Running Heads

Click on the image for a link to the book

I have a thing for running heads. They’re a compositional device that bridges the gap between text and paratext, or can, though it’s not always clear who’s responsible. A case in point: the first edition of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which was brought out by Horace Greeley in 1845. Though I know from some of the scholarship that Fuller was responsible for the frontispiece (shown at the left), I don’t know what sort of role she played in the other aspects of the book’s design. It’s hard to imagine that anyone but the author would write running heads such as

CAN WE TRUST AN EARTHLY FATHER?

or

BOND-MAIDS! BRUNHILDAS!

— but you never know.

One of the curious things about the running heads is that they change direction about an eighth of the way into the book. Up until page 25 (after the preface and first page of the text proper, that is), the headers spell out Fuller’s title, with

WOMAN IN THE

and

NINETEENTH CENTURY.

sitting atop the verso and recto pages, respectively. Starting at page 26, the versos read

WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

and the rectos begin to have descriptive headers. Here’s a complete list (with page numbers in parentheses, and a few illustrations interspersed):

Dedications

W. said he had never dedicated a book. “I do not know why — probably there was no why. Dedications have gone out of vogue — are no longer regarded as necessary.”
— With Walt Whitman in Camden

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For no particular reason I’ve been thinking about dedications this week. Has anyone ever compiled a book of the really good ones? Here’s an instance I’d include, from a book I was reading this week, Our Famous Women (1884):

"To / Men and Women / WHO HONOR MAN AND WOMAN, / AND SEE THE SPECIAL FITNESS OF / THIS BOOK, TO-DAY, / IT IS DEDICATED." (click for a larger view)

I’ll have more to say about that book in the coming weeks, if I can find time to scribble it out. There are a few really fascinating biographies of poets included in it, and a few other biographies that were written by poets. In the meantime, the book’s dedication brought another to mind, this one from Mary Berenson’s A Modern Pilgrimage (1933):

"To / THE INTELLIGENT (BUT NOT TOO INTELLIGENT) / THE LEARNED (BUT NOT TOO LEARNED) / AND THE CURIOUS (BUT NOT OVER- / CURIOUS) TRAVELLER / THIS BOOK IS ADDRESSED" (click for a larger view)

Index under “Genres — paratextual.”

Provenance

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Not poetry-related, but I thought I’d share anyway. The story of a book…

In the course of doing some prep work for next semester, I learned that the Bangor Public Library owns an original printing of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860), the classic slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs. I love to hold an original edition, and this one in particular called out to me, as the author herself arranged for publication. It’s entirely credible to me that Jacobs once held this very copy in her hands.

So today I stopped by the library to take a look.

Because the book is precious, it’s kept in what’s called the  “cage,” an unfortunate designation given what Jacobs writes at the christening of her daughter:

When we left the church, my father’s old mistress invited me to go home with her. She clasped a gold chain round my baby’s neck. I thanked her for this kindness; but I did not like the emblem. I wanted no chain to be fastened on my daughter, not even if its links were of gold. How earnestly I prayed that she might never feel the weight of slavery’s chain, whose iron entereth into the soul!

But then again, maybe Jacobs would have appreciated the irony. The sentences above come at the end of a chapter called “Another Link to Life” — the other link being that very daughter gifted with a gold chain.

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You can see from the photo above that the book was rebound at some point, with an art deco motif on the cover. I’m no expert on cover designs, but I’m guessing that this binding was added several years after donation, since art deco is associated with the later twenties and the book was given in 1918, as the book plate on the left indicates. The Bangor Public Library has a fair number of nineteenth-century items, many of them with original bindings, so there’s no reason to think the cover would have been changed as a matter of course. The point matters only because it gives some sense of how often the book was handled. I’d like to think it was handled often — often enough to require rebinding.

The book’s donor was Mary R. Spratt, principal of a now-defunct school on State Street, a fact I discovered with assistance from one of the reference librarians. I was curious about the book’s provenance, and thought there might be a story in it. The slave narrative was a neglected genre at the beginning of the twentieth century, little relied on even by historians of the period. This made me wonder about the person who cherished the book, who thought it important enough to give it to her city. I found the answer in an old newspaper file, an article on Spratt from the Bangor Daily Commercial, May 29, 1920:

Songs of the Diaspora (part two)

Back in August I was definitely fooling myself, thinking I could write about Yiddish poetry while trying to pack an apartment — and without sustained access to a library. Now I am probably fooling myself again, thinking I can pick up where I left off . It’s tempting, in fact, to say, “the hell with it”; “let it all hang.” This blog was meant to be a record of distraction. When distraction becomes obligation, it’s time to play hooky, right? Hooky from hooky, as it were … or maybe not, since that would mean going back to school.

Anyway, for good reason or bad — or just because — I’ve gone ahead with part two, half a conclusion to my reading of  Alice Stone Blackwell’s Songs of Russia (1906), focusing now on the first of the two Yiddish poets.

Part one is here. Part three to follow.

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Since abandoning these notes in August, I’ve acquired Marc Miller’s Representing the Immigrant Experience (2007), a study of Morris Rosenfeld (I’m still looking for good source material on David Edelstadt). Miller’s book doesn’t mention Blackstone’s anthology, so I don’t feel entirely superseded … but I do feel superseded a little. My one consolation: Miller answers a question dogging me while I wrote part one. “Did Rosenfeld write either of his two poems in Russia?” The answer, I now know, is nyet. His earliest poems date from after his arrival in the U.S. (heretofore, the best I’d been able to ascertain was that his first publications came after his arrival, not quite the same thing).

Rosenfeld was already in his twenties when he left the Russian empire for good, so it’s not surprising that both of his poems, though written in the U.S., retain a Russian perspective, which certainly invites a reader to see them as Old World creations (and nothing in Blackwell’s anthology suggests otherwise). The first, “The Jewish Soldier,” recalls the 1877 Siege of Plevna; the second, “On Ocean’s Bosom,” concerns the flight of Jews across the Atlantic … but with a twist. This twist — reverse emigration — is not revealed until the 20th and 21st stanzas.

The poem divides roughly into three sections. The first (stanzas 1-9) gives the setup: a ship at sea, in terrible danger from storm (1-4); awful noise from the passengers (5-6); inexplicable calm from two men in steerage (7-9). Next comes the speaker’s questioning of the two men (stanzas 10-14). Finally, after a pause in which the setting is again described (stanza 15), the men explain themselves tearfully (16-24): they are Jews, and though they have nothing to look forward to in Russia, save pogroms, they are leaving America; not of their own free will, as with the speaker, but from poverty.

There is, perhaps, an autobiographical element in this encounter: Rosenfeld came to America for six months in 1882, returning briefly to Russia before the draft forced him to flee for good. When he made his own reverse voyage, it may well be that he met men like those in the poem. Does it make a difference, then, that he only wrote the poem after reversing his reversal? Only if we take his speaker’s voluntary return to Russia as a sincere preference for the Old World on the part of the poet. A reading of that sort (especially in the context of Songs of Russia ) might well admit an inference of Russian patriotism — an inference turned ironic when we learn more about the poet.

Ironies notwithstanding, the poem is indeed a song of Russia, also of America. And also, emphatically, of the diaspora: a protest against dispersal, international in its address. A reader’s appreciation of all this requires, however, a little context. Blackwell’s sophisticated readers no doubt brought that context to their reading. But as the book and its historical moment receded into memory (and then out of memory, into the archive), this preparation for understanding became less likely. I take my own rough understanding as typical: I get the general idea, but the fine points escape me. I did not know, for example, that the two Jews are not returning to Russia (as I at first presumed) because they find poverty more threatening than the pogroms. Their departure is involuntary for a more concrete reason. As explained by Abraham J. Karp, “The two Jews were turned back by the March 3, 1891, immigration law which barred entry to ‘paupers or persons likely to become a public charge.’” The poem, then, has complexities, but they’re frangible. Our care for them is a direct function of how much we know.

Parker’s Kaleidoscope

Theodore Parker at Age 39

In 1859, no longer able to speak from a pulpit (he had TB), Theodore Parker wrote a long letter to his congregation, in effect an autobiography. It was published as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister, a book precious in its succinct eloquence, and surely one of the earliest retrospects on a revolutionary period.  A premature retrospect, one might say, except that Parker, 49 years old, knew he was dying.

But the letter is not just a retrospect. Parker is also concerned here to set forth theological and political principles. At one point, he slyly notes that these principles often went disguised in literary drag. Only in this disguise, he implies, could his ideas be shared freely in public. Why? Because literature is a sphere apart, valued for its independence from worldly strife. Or rather, it operates under the illusion of that independence.

For Parker, the illusion is intrinsic to literature’s social function, a function he describes in terms Stuart Hall might embrace. An early member of “the party of resentment” (Harold Bloom’s derisive name for those who would reform the world through culture), Parker believed that literature is not simply an expression of social forces, but one of the ways those forces gain legitimacy. He also believed that literature’s ability to do good — which is to say, its ability to question legitimacy and so reshape society — is kept in check by the powers and authorities that control its dissemination.