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How are you celebrating National Poetry Month?

Since 1996 the Academy of American Poets has been encouraging people everywhere to embrace and celebrate the history, passion, and art of poetry.  Around the country people are planning readings, write-ins, talks, and events that could inspire a haiku out of anyone.

Whether you’re a seasoned poet or just interested in seeing what poetry has to offer, Columbus offers a few great ways to take part in the celebration.  

Meet the Authors: Celebrating National Poetry Month
Tuesday, April 17, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Westerville Library, Meeting Room B.
Three published poets from the Westerville Poetry Group share their work. An open mic gathering and discussion will follow the readings.

Pen and Pallete Poetry Open Mic
Thursday, April 18, 8:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Travonna Coffee House.
Free poetry open mic, hosted by local poet Hanif Abdurraqib. All work is welcome to be shared!

Borderlands: Poetry On the Edge
Saturday, April 20, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Main Street Books (Mansfield, OH).
These poetry readings feature writers we have invited from all over the state; the readings by our hand-picked poets will be followed by a brief open mic.

National Poetry Month Publishing Workshop with M. Scott Douglass, Publisher of Main Street Rag
Thursday, April 26, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Bexley Public Library.
To celebrate National Poetry Month this year, OPA members are invited to attend a publishing workshop where they can get great ideas and advice to help them compile a manuscript for a book or chapbook.

Poetry Slam and Open Mic
Every Wednesday, 8:00 p.m.
Kafe Kerouac.
Every Wednesday Writers’ Block Poetry has their weekly slam followed by an open mic for anyone in the audience.  

Even if you can’t make it to one of these events, celebrate poetry on your own terms! Whether you’re doing a little extra writing or reading, take the opportunity to further explore this fantastic multi-faceted art form. So indulge in your favorite poet, find your favorite line, and spread your love of poetry!

Are you doing something to celebrate National Poetry Month? If so, let us know in the comments below!

Balloon Trees, the new title from Sylvan Dell, written by Danna Smith and illustrated by Laurie Allen Klein, reveals that the rubber that makes up balloons, balls, tires, shoes and many more things actually comes from trees! What other surprising things do you think trees give us?

The house you live in may be made from wood from trees; that’s obvious, but did you know that that house is filled with gifts from trees also? Do you like that your parents are less grumpy in the morning when they have their coffee? You can thank the coffee arabica tree for that, a 20 foot evergreen that grows in warm climates of the world. A cup of hot cocoa has made a long journey from cocoa trees along the equator to reach your kitchen. Maple syrup, cinnamon, fruits, nuts, and many more delicious items also come from trees.

Ever wonder how jelly candies get so goopy and great? Check the ingredients and you’ll find “gum arabic” in the list. Gum arabic is hardened sap from an acacia tree, and it’s used in foods like desserts to lend its goopy texture to them. It is also a key ingredient in glues, paints, and many other products that manufacturers want to make ‘slimy,’ ‘goopy,’ or ‘jelly.’

“Cellulose” is part of the ‘skin’ of trees, and when manufactured it can become “Rayon” clothing to make our own skin warmer. Cellulose is even an ingredient in foods and beauty products, lending its texture to them to make them ‘thicker’ or ‘heavier.’ When fat is removed from some “diet” or “fat-free” products, cellulose is often added to try and make the food ‘feel’ the same in a person’s mouth as before. 

Trees also give us many kinds of medicine, such as aspirin, and even the first medicine for fighting malaria, “quinine.” If you’ve read our book, The Most Dangerous, you know how harmful the mosquito-spread disease malaria can be. Without the discovery of quinine from Peruvian trees, malaria would have harmed that many more people, and maybe even changed world history! Soldiers in WWII that fought in the Pacific jungles took quinine everyday, and it helped the building of the Panama Canal, and the Dutch and English to build their historical empires!

Of course, this is only the beginning of the gifts that trees give us. Say “thank you” back, by planting a tree, or at least reading a Sylvan Dell book under the shade of one!

Describe your latest book. News from Heaven is a collection of 10 short stories set in and around Bakerton, the western Pennsylvania coal town that was the setting for my second novel, Baker Towers. What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had? Cleaning office buildings at night. Offer a favorite sentence or passage [...]

What do you write? I used to say book-length essays, but the inevitable follow-up question — essays about what? — would take me to another dodge, first-person narrative nonfiction... and seconds later I'd admit, I write about myself. Now I just say the word: memoir. I'm 38 years old and I'm working on my third [...]

Harry Silver commits a sin that will forever change his life, and no amount of foresight could have prepared him for what follows. Harry's brother, George, is suddenly out of the picture, and Harry is left with George's house, his two children, his pets, and all of George's many problems. Harry soon find himself sucked into Internet "dating," trouble at work, [...]

By Max Saunders

One definition of a classic book is a work which inspires repeated metamorphoses. Romeo and Juliet, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby don’t just wait in their original forms to be watched or read, but continually migrate from one medium to another: painting, opera, melodrama, dramatization, film, comic-strip. New technologies inspire further reincarnations. Sometimes it’s a matter of transferring a version from one medium to another — audio recordings to digital files, say. More often, different technologies and different markets encourage new realisations: Hitchcock’s Psycho re-shot in colour; French or German films remade for American audiences; widescreen or 3D remakes of classic movies or stories.

Cinema is notoriously hungry for adaptations of literary works. The adaptation that’s been preoccupying me lately is the BBC/HBO version of Parade’s End, the series of four novels about the Edwardian era and the First World War, written by Ford Madox Ford. Ford was British, but an unusually cosmopolitan and bohemian kind of Brit. His father was a German émigré, a musicologist who ended up as music critic for the London Times. His mother was an artist, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford was educated trilingually, in French and German as well as English. When he was introduced to Joseph Conrad at the turn of the century, they decided to collaborate on a novel, and went on over a decade to produce three collaborative books. He also got to know Henry James and Stephen Crane at this time — the two Americans were also living nearby, on the Southeast coast of England. Americans were to prove increasingly important in Ford’s life. He moved to London in 1907, and soon set up the literary magazine that helped define pre-war modernism: the English Review. He had a gift for discovering new talent, and was soon publishing D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside James and Conrad. But it was Ezra Pound, who he also met and published at this time, who was to become his most important literary friend after Conrad.

Ford served in the First World War, getting injured and suffering from shell shock in the Battle of the Somme. He moved to France after the war, where he soon joined forces with Pound again, to form another influential modernist magazine, the transatlantic review, which published Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Ford took on another young American, Ernest Hemingway, as his sub-editor. Ford held regular soirees, either in a working class dance-hall with a bar that he’d commandeered, or in the studio he lived in with his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen. He found himself at the centre of the (largely American) expatriate artist community in the Paris of the 20s. And it was there, and in Provence in the winters, and partly in New York, that he wrote the four novels of Parade’s End, that made him a celebrity in the US. He spent an increasing amount of time in the US through the 20s and 30s, based on Fifth Avenue in New York, becoming a writer in residence in the small liberal arts Olivet College in Michigan, spending time with writer-friends like Theodore Dreiser and William Carlos Williams, and among the younger generation, Robert Lowell and e. e. cummings.

Parade’s End (1924-28) has been dramatized for TV by Sir Tom Stoppard. It has to be one of the most challenging books to film; but Stoppard has the theatrical ingenuity, and experience, to bring it off. It’s a classic work of Modernism: with a non-linear time-scheme that can jump around in disconcerting ways; dense experimental writing that plays with styles and techniques. Though it includes some of the most brilliant conversations in the British novel, and its characters have a strong dramatic presence, much of it is inherently un-dramatic and, you might have thought, unfilmable: long interior monologues, descriptions of what characters see and feel; and — perhaps hardest of all to convey in drama — moments when they don’t say what they feel, or do what we might expect of them. Imagine T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, populated by Chekhovian characters, but set on the Western Front.

I’ve worked on Ford for some years, yet still find him engaging, tantalising, often incomprehensibly rewarding, so I was watching Parade’s End with fascination. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stoppard and the director, Susanna White, have done an extraordinary job in transforming this rich and complex text into a dramatic line that is at once lucid and moving. Sometimes where Ford just mentions an event in passing, the adaptation dramatizes the scene for us. The protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, a man of high-Tory principle — a paradoxical mix of extreme formality and unconventional intelligence – is played outstandingly by Benedict Cumberbatch, with a rare gift to convey thought behind Tietjens’ taciturn exterior. In the novel’s backstory, Christopher has been seduced in a railway carriage by Sylvia, who thinks she’s pregnant by another man. The TV version adds a conversation as they meet in the train; then cuts rapidly to a sex scene. It’s more than just a hook for viewers unconcerned about textual fidelity, though. What it establishes is what Ford only hints at through the novel, and what would be missed without Tietjen’s brooding thoughts about Sylvia: that her outrageousness turns him on as much as it torments him. In another example, where the novelist can describe the gossip circulating like wildfire in this select upper-class social world, the dramatist needs to give it a location; so Stoppard invents a scene at an Eton cricket match for several of the characters to meet, and insult Valentine Wannop, while she and Tietjens are trying not to have the affair that everyone assumes they are already having. Valentine is an ardent suffragette. In the novel, she and Tietjens argue about women and politics and education. Stoppard introduces a real historical event from the period — a Suffragette slashing Velasquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery — as a way of saying it visually; and then complicating it beautifully with another intensely visual interpolated moment. In the book Ford has Valentine unconcsciously rearranging the cushions on her sofa as she waits to see Tietjens the evening before he’s posted back to the war. When she becomes aware that she’s fiddling with the cushions because she’s anticipating a love-scene with him, the adaptation disconcertingly places Valentine nude on her sofa in the same position as the ‘Rokeby Venus’ — in a flash both sexualizing her politics and politicizing her sexuality.

Such changes cause a double-take in viewers who know the novels. But they’re never gratuitous, and always respond to something genuine in the writing.

Perhaps the most striking transformation comes during one of the most amazing moments in the second volume, No More Parades. Tietjens is back in France, stationed at a Base Camp in Rouen, struggling against the military bureaucracy to get drafts of troops ready to be sent to the Front Line. Sylvia, who can’t help loving Tietjens though he drives her mad, has somehow managed to get across the Channel and pursue him to his Regiment. She has been unfaithful, and he is determined not to sleep with her; but because his principles won’t let a man divorce a woman, he feels obliged to share her hotel room so as not to humiliate her publicly. She is determined to seduce him once more; but has been flirting with other officers in the hotel, two of whom also end up in their bedroom in a drunken brawl. It’s an extraordinary moment of frustration, hysteria, terror (there has been a bombardment that evening), confusion, and farce. In the book we sense Sylvia’s seductive power, and that Tietjens isn’t immune to it, even though by then in love with Valentine. He resists. But in the film version, they kiss passionately before being interrupted.

Valentine and Christopher. Adelaide Clemens and Benedict Cumberbatch in Parade’s End. (c) BBC/HBO.

The scene may have been changed to emphasize the power she still has over Tietjens: as if, paradoxically, he needs to be seen to succumb for a moment to make his resistance to her the more heroic. The change that’s going to exercise enthusiasts of the novels, though, is the way three of the five episodes were devoted to the first novel, Some Do Not…; and roughly one each to the second and third; with very little of the fourth volume, Last Post, being included at all. The third volume, A Man Could Stand Up — ends where the adaptation does, with Christopher and Valentine finally being united on Armistice night, a suitably dramatic and symbolic as well as romantic climax. Last Post is set in the 1920s and deals with post-war reconstruction. One can see why it would have been the hardest to film: much of it is interior monologue, and though Tietjens is often the subject of it he is absent for most of the book. Some crucial scenes from the action of the earlier books is only supplied as characters remember them in Last Post, such as when Syliva turns up after the Armistice night party lying to Christopher and Valentine that  she has cancer in an attempt to frustrate their union. Stoppard incorporates this into the last episode, but he writes new dialogue for it to give it a kind of closure the novels studiedly resist. Valentine challenges her as a liar, and from Tietjens’ reaction, Sylvia appears to recognize the reality of his love for her and gives her their blessing.

Rebecca Hall, playing Sylvia, has been so brilliantly and scathingly sarcastic all the way through that this change of heart — moving though it is — might seem out of character: even the character the film gives her, which is arguably more sympathetic than the one most readers find in the novel. Yet her reversal is in Last Post. But what triggers it there, much later on, is when she confronts Valentine but finds her pregnant. Even the genius of Tom Stoppard couldn’t make that happen before Valentine and Christopher have been able to make love. But there are two other factors, which he was able to shift from the post-war time of Last Post into the war’s endgame of the last episode. One is that Sylvia has focused her plotting on a new object. Refusing the role of the abandoned wife of Tietjens, she has now set her sights on General Campion, and begun scheming to get him made Viceroy of India. The other is that she feels she has already dealt Tietjens a devastating blow, in getting the ‘Great Tree’ at his ancestral stately home of Groby cut down. In the book she does this after the war by encouraging the American who’s leasing it to get it felled. In the film she’s done it before the Armistice; she’s at Groby; Tietjens visits there; has a Stoppard scene with Sylvia arranged in her bed like a Pre-Raphaelite vision in a last attempt to re-seduce him, which fails partly because of his anger over the tree. In the books the Great Tree represents the Tietjens family, continuity, even history itself. Ford writes a sentence about how the villagers “would ask permission to hang rags and things from the boughs,” but Stoppard and White make that image of the tree, all decorated with trinkets and charms, a much more prominent motif, returning to it throughout the series, and turning it into a symbol of superstition and magic. But then Stoppard characteristically plays on the motif, and has Christopher take a couple of blocks of wood from the felled tree back to London. One he gives to his brother, in a wonderfully tangible and taciturn gesture of renouncing the whole estate and the history it stands for. The other he uses in his flat, throwing whisky over it in the fireplace to light a fire to keep himself and Valentine warm. That gesture shows how it isn’t just Sylvia who is saying ‘Goodbye to All That’, but all the major characters are anticipating the life that, though the series doesn’t show it, Ford presents in the beautifully elegiac Last Post.

Max Saunders is author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP, 1996/2012), and editor of Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford’s Parade’s End (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010) and Ford’s The Good Soldier (Oxford: OUP, 2012). He was interviewed by Alan Yentob for the Culture Show’s ‘Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford’ (BBC 2; 1 September 2012), and his blog on Ford’s life and work can be read on the OUPblog and New Statesman.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credits: (1) Portrait of Ford Madox Ford (Source: Wikimedia Commons); (2) Still from BBC2 adaption of Parade’s End. (Source: bbc.co.uk).

The post Ford Madox Ford and unfilmable Modernism appeared first on OUPblog.

True love in opposition: Levin and Kitty’s match set against the triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky. How can Tolstoy’s crushing rejection scene (drawn from his own life) be portrayed on screen? The film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, is contending for four Oscars tonight (Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score). Let’s see how they do compared to the Oxford World Classic edition before the cinematic contest this evening.

DURING the interval between dinner and the beginning of the evening party, Kitty experienced something resembling a young man’s feelings before a battle. Her heart was beating violently and she could not fix her thoughts on anything.

She felt that this evening, when those two men were to meet for the first time, would decide her fate; and she kept picturing them to herself, now individually and now together. When she thought of the past, she dwelt with pleasure and tenderness on her former relations with Levin. Memories of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother lent a peculiar poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt sure, flattered and rejoiced her, and she could think of him with a light heart. With her thought of Vronsky was mingled some uneasiness, though he was an extremely well-bred and quiet-mannered man; a sense of something false, not in him, for he was very simple and kindly, but in herself; whereas in relation to Levin she felt herself quite simple and clear. On the other hand when she pictured to herself a future with Vronsky a brilliant vision of happiness rose up before her, while a future with Levin appeared wrapped in mist.

On going upstairs to dress for the evening and looking in the glass, she noticed with pleasure that this was one of her best days, and that she was in full possession of all her forces, which would be so much wanted for what lay before her. She was conscious of external calmness and of freedom and grace in her movements.

At half-past seven, as soon as she had come down into the drawing-room, the footman announced ‘Constantine Dmitrich Levin!’ The Princess was still in her bedroom, nor had the Prince yet come down.

‘So it’s to be!’ thought Kitty and the blood rushed to her heart. Glancing at the mirror she was horrified at her pallor.

She felt sure that he had come so early on purpose to see her alone and to propose to her. And now for the first time the matter presented itself to her in a different and entirely new light. Only now did she realize that this matter (with whom she would be happy, who was the man she loved) did not concern herself alone, but that in a moment she would have to wound a man she cared for, and to wound him cruelly…. Why? Because the dear fellow was in love with her. But it could not be helped, it was necessary and had to be done.

‘Oh God, must I tell him so myself?’ she thought. ‘Must I really tell him that I don’t care for him? That would not be true. What then shall I say? Shall I say that I love another? No, that’s impossible! I’ll go away. Yes, I will.’

She was already approaching the door when she heard his step. ‘No, it would be dishonest! What have I to fear? I have done nothing wrong. I’ll tell the truth, come what may! Besides, it’s impossible to feel awkward with him. Here he is!’ she thought, as she saw his powerful diffident figure before her and his shining eyes gazing at her. She looked straight into his face as if entreating him to spare her, and gave him her hand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I don’t think I’ve come at the right time, I’m too early,’ he said gazing round the empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectation was fulfilled and that nothing prevented his speaking to her, his face clouded over.

‘Not at all,’ said Kitty and sat down at the table.

‘But all I wanted was to find you alone,’ he began, still standing and avoiding her face so as not to lose courage.

‘Mama will be down in a minute. She was so tired yesterday …’ She spoke without knowing what she was saying, her eyes fixed on him with a caressing look full of entreaty.

He glanced at her; she blushed and was silent.

‘I told you that I did not know how long I should stay … that it depends on you.’

Her head dropped lower and lower, knowing the answer she would give to what was coming.

‘That it would depend on you,’ he repeated. ‘I want to say … I want to say … I came on purpose … that … to be my wife !’ he uttered hardly knowing what he said; but feeling that the worst was out he stopped and looked at her.

She was breathing heavily and not looking at him. She was filled with rapture. Her soul was overflowing with happiness. She had not at all expected that his declaration of love would make so strong an impression on her. But that lasted only for an instant. She remembered Vronsky, lifted her clear, truthful eyes to Levin’s face, and noticing his despair she replied quickly:

‘It cannot be … forgive me.’

How near to him she had been a minute ago, how important in his life! And how estranged and distant she seemed now!

‘Nothing else was possible,’ he said, without looking at her, and bowing he turned to go …

One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina illuminates the questions that face humanity. A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The post Levin’s proposal appeared first on OUPblog.

I love books where the protagonists' stories are told in alternating chapters. That's one reason I'm enjoying Jennifer duBois's intelligent first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes; it's also richly layered and poignant. Books mentioned in this post A Partial History of Lost Causes Jennifer Dubois Used Trade Paper $10.95 A Partial History of [...]

Recently I was invited to give a reading at Colgate University, where I wrote my first novel, Y, while on a one-year teaching fellowship. A handful of my former students accompanied me to lunch the next day, and at some point we fell into a discussion about why the protagonist of my novel, Shannon, was [...]

By Robert Morrison

In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Immanuel Kant gives the standard eighteenth-century line on opium. Its “dreamy euphoria,” he declares, makes one “taciturn, withdrawn, and uncommunicative,” and it is “therefore… permitted only as a medicine.” Eighty-five years later, in The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche too discusses drugs, but he has a very different story to tell. “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?” he asks pointedly. “It is almost the history of ‘culture’, of so-called high culture.” What caused this seismic shift in attitude? How did opium, in less than a century, pass from a drug understood primarily as a medicine to a drug used and abused recreationally, not just in “high culture”, but across the social strata?

The short answer is Thomas De Quincey. In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, first published in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, he transformed our perception of drugs. De Quincey invented recreational drug-taking, not because he was the first to swallow opiates for non-medical reasons (he was hardly that), but because he was the first to commemorate his drug experience in a compelling narrative that was consciously aimed at — and consumed by — a broad commercial audience. Further, in knitting together intellectualism, unconventionality, drugs, and the city, De Quincey mapped in the counter-cultural figure of the bohemian. He was also the first flâneur, high and anonymous, graceful and detached, strolling through crowded urban sprawls trying to decipher the spectacles, faces, and memories that reside there. Most strikingly, as the self-proclaimed “Pope” of “the true church on the subject of opium,” he initiated the tradition of the literature of intoxication with his portrait of the addict as a young man. De Quincey is the first modern artist, at once prophet and exile, riven by a drug that both inspired and eviscerated him.

The Confessions warned some early readers off opium, as De Quincey claimed he intended. “Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!” Thomas Carlyle commented after reading the work, while De Quincey’s erstwhile friend and fellow opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisted that he read the Confessions with “unutterable sorrow…The writer with morbid vanity, makes a boast of what was my misfortune.” But for many other readers, De Quincey’s account of opium was an invitation to experimentation — his drugged highs almost irresistible, and the gothic gloom of his lows even more so. Within months of publication, John Wilson, De Quincey’s closest friend and the lead writer for the powerful Blackwood’s Magazine, heard alarming reports of people recklessly attempting to emulate De Quincey’s drug experiences. “Pray, is it true…that your Confessions have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?” he inquires in a flamboyant Blackwood’s sketch. “I should think not,” the Opium Eater replies indignantly. “I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.”

Others, however, did not find the situation funny. One doctor recorded a sharp increase in the number of people overdosing on opium “in consequence of a little book that has been published by a man of literature.” The authors of The Family Oracle of Health (1824) were even angrier. “The use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd, and romancing production, called the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” they declared. “We observe, that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.”

De Quincey was characteristically divided on the influence of his Confessions. In the work itself he states that his primary objective is to reveal the powers of the drug: opium is “the true hero of the tale,” and “the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves.” Yet in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), the sequel to the Confessions, he maintains that its “true hero” is, not opium, but the powers of his imaginative — and especially of his dreaming — mind. Elsewhere, De Quincey denied the charges that his writings had encouraged drug abuse: “Teach opium-eating! – Did I teach wine drinking? Did I reveal the mystery of sleeping? Did I inaugurate the infirmity of laughter? . . . My faith is – that no man is likely to adopt opium or to lay it aside in consequence of anything he may read in a book.” In still other instances De Quincey regarded his drug habit as a source of amusement. “Since leaving off opium,” he noted wryly, “I take a great deal too much of it for my health.” More commonly, though, he was horrified by the damage it was inflicting. “It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins and the wrecks of some forgotten life,” he wrote in the midst of one of his many attempts to abjure the drug.

De Quincey’s account of his opiated experiences has left on indelible print on the literature of addiction, and modern commentators continue to grapple with his legacy, though there is no agreement on whether he should be blamed, or absolved, or lauded. In Romancing Opiates (2006), Theodore Dalrymple lambasts him. “In modern society the main cause of drug addiction…is a literary tradition of romantic claptrap, started by Coleridge and De Quincey, and continued without serious interruption ever since,” he asserts. “This claptrap is the main source of popular and medical misconceptions on the subject.” Will Self, however, argues vigorously against such a view. “The truth is that books like…De Quincey’s Confessions no more create drug addicts than video nasties engender prepubescent murderers,” he declares in Junk Mail (1995). “Rather, culture, in this wider sense, is a hall of mirrors in which cause and effect endlessly reciprocate one another in a diminuendo that tends ineluctably towards the trivial.”

Ann Marlowe takes yet another position on the “brilliant, unsurpassed Confessions.” “Ever since I read De Quincey in my early teens,” she writes in How to Stop Time (1999), “I’d planned to try opium,” a far more direct account of “cause and effect” than Self’s halls of opium smoke and mirrors. Yet Marlowe and Self agree that they were both drawn to the drug because of its close association with intellectualism and insight, for both “hoped to pass through the portals of dope” into the “honoured company” of Coleridge and De Quincey. Such reasoning, Marlowe recognizes later, is “the sorriest cliche,” or what Dalrymple would call “claptrap”. But these accounts make plain that De Quincey’s potent memorialization of his drug experience has proven at least as seductive as the drug itself. His Confessions loosed the recreational genies from the medicine bottle and made opiates for the masses. De Quincey was lucky. The drug battered him, but it never finally defeated his creativity or his resolve. Many have not been that fortunate. Diagnosed at aged twenty with an opiate addiction, Self was “appalled to discover that I was not a famous underground writer. Indeed, far from being a writer at all, I was simply underground.”

Robert Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he maintains the Thomas De Quincey homepage. For Oxford World’s Classics, he has edited (with Chris Baldick) The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, as well as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, and three essays On Murder. Morrison is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Black Memorial Prize. His annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published by Harvard University Press. For Palgrave, he edited (with Daniel Sanjiv Roberts) a collection of essays entitled Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’. Read his previous blog posts: “De Quincey’s fine art” and “Vampyre Rising.”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image Credits: (1) Thomas de Quincey – Project Gutenberg eText 19222 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) “A New Vice: Opium Dens in France”, cover of Le Petit Journal, 5 July 1903. via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Cropped screenshot from the film trailer Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) via Wikimedia Commons

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By Bart van Es

Richard Burbage © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:

Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.

A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.

Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.

Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.

Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.

This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.

Edward Alleyn © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…

In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:

The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.

The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before.  His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved. 

The post Richard Burbage: Shakespeare’s first Hamlet appeared first on OUPblog.

This tiny little novella tells the very big story of Cat, a former military medic who lost his foot when he stepped on a landmine during combat. Cat's military service is long over, but he begins to realize that "it was a good foot and we parted so hurriedly..." Leaving his wife and sons, Cat returns to [...]

By Maya Slater

The farce is at its height: the old clown in the armchair is surrounded by whirling figures in outlandish doctors’ costumes, welcoming him into their brotherhood with a mock initiation ceremony. He takes the Latin oath: ‘Juro’, falters. His face crumples. The audience gasps – is something wrong? But the clown is grinning now, all is well, the dancing grows frenzied, the play rushes on to its end.

Not till the next day will the audience find out what happened afterwards. They carried the clown off the stage in his chair, and rushed him home. He was coughing blood, dying. He asked for his wife, and for a priest to confess him. They failed to arrive before he died.

It happened 340 years ago, on 17 February 1673, but his magnificently ironic death is still central to the French understanding of Molière. He is their greatest comic playwright, unique in that he also directed his own plays and wrote his greatest parts for himself. Centuries later, this still gives the modern audience a frisson. In The Hypochondriac, sick with TB (he had his fatal seizure during the fourth performance), Molière himself spoke the following words:

‘Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: “Go on, drop dead!”

Writing those words anticipating his own death was surely tempting fate, but long before his last play, audiences had got used to seeing Molière on stage speaking lines which seemed to cast an ironic light on his own life. Nine years earlier, in The School for Wives (1662), the first of his great verse comedies, he played the part of a ridiculous old bachelor determined to marry an innocent young girl decades younger than him. Instead, the girl escapes with a young man her own age. The audience knew that Molière himself had recently married Armande – he was 40, she was 22. What must they have thought when he portrayed a thwarted older lover, gnashing his teeth in rage and frustration as his young bride escaped from his clutches?

A year later, Molière’s self-mockery has grown more explicit. The new play is The School for Wives Criticised, a short, informal sketch, ridiculing Molière’s critics in an argument about The School for Wives. Significantly, Molière didn’t defend his own play onstage.  Instead, he himself played an absurd Marquis, who attacks Molière and his work: ‘I’ve just been to see it… It’s detestable.’ ‘Talk to us about its faults,’ says someone. ‘How should I know? I didn’t even bother to listen,’ replies the Marquis.

Molière’s second riposte to his critics, which again took the form of a short polemic play, The Impromptu at Versailles, was strikingly new, and still feels fresh and exciting today. We see Molière (who just this once played himself) and his troupe in rehearsal, trying desperately to get a performance together for the King and Court to see. The actors are uncooperative and annoying, which enables Molière to show himself trying to cope with them. He presents himself as unable to keep control of his unruly cast, breaking out in frustration: ‘Don’t you realise, I’m the one who carries the can…?’ When they finally start their rehearsal, Molière interrupts it to comment on The School for Wives, and to make some interesting general observations on acting. The play they are rehearsing  is a conversation between two stupid courtiers. Molière again takes the part of the silly Marquis, and once more launches a comic attack on himself: ‘You’re desperate to justify Molière… don’t you think your Molière is played out [?]’ And then comes a moment unique in his work, where he takes over another actor’s part, and speaks as himself, in defence of his own art: ‘Wait a minute, You want to say all that a bit more emphatically. Listen, this is how I want it spoken…’

Of course the burning question must be: what was Molière like as an actor, and how did he perform his roles? We know he wore a heavy black moustache. We can assume that he excelled at portraying comic rage and frustration, from the number of furious outbursts he wrote for himself to perform. He put himself in ridiculous situations, hiding under the table in Tartuffe, performing a clumsy dance in The Bourgeois Gentleman, fleeing in terror dressed as a woman in M. de Pourceaugnac. But perhaps the most vivid account of his acting is found in a malicious satirical portrait written by the son of a rival actor:

‘He enters, nose to the wind, on bow legs, one shoulder thrust forward. His wig trails behind, stuffed full of bayleaves like a ham. He dangles his hands rather carelessly by his sides. His head sits on his back like a pack on a mule. He rolls his eyes. When he speaks his lines, the words are punctuated by endless hiccoughs.’

By the end, racked with TB, his performances had become less physically demanding. And performing the role which killed him that February night 350 years ago, that of the ludicrous hypochondriac, he was having to insert lines to excuse his own coughing, and played the part sitting in the red velvet chair which is still preserved as their most precious relic by the Comédie française theatre.

Maya Slater is Senior Reseach Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She also writes fiction and reviews theatre and books. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays by Molière.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Molière as Julius Cesar by Nicolas Mignard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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George Saunders fans have long been stalwart champions of his work, recommending CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia to anyone who would listen, pushing copies of In Persuasion Nation and The Braindead Megaphone into the hands of the unconverted. He's always had critical praise, from no less than Thomas Pynchon ("An astoundingly tuned voice — [...]

It’s Valentine’s Day on Thursday, so let us celebrate the happiness of brief, all-encompassing love. We’ve paired a scene from the recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina, currently nominated for fours Oscars, with an excerpt of the novel below. In it, Anna and Vronsky discuss the happiness of their newfound love.

IT was already past five, and in order not to be late and not to use his own horses, which were known to everybody, Vronsky took Yashvin’s hired carriage and told the coachman to drive as fast as possible. The old four-seated hired vehicle was very roomy; he sat down in a corner, put his legs on the opposite seat, and began to think. A vague sense of the accomplished cleaning up of his affairs, a vague memory of Serpukhovskoy’s friendship for him, and the flattering thought that the latter considered him a necessary man, and above all the anticipation of the coming meeting, merged into one general feeling of joyful vitality. This feeling was so strong that he could not help smiling. He put down his legs, threw one of them over the other, and placing his arm across it felt its firm calf, where he had hurt it in the fall the day before, and then, throwing himself back, sighed deeply several times.

‘Delightful! O delightful!’ he thought. He had often before been joyfully conscious of his body, but had never loved himself, his own body, as he did now. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, to be conscious of the muscles of his chest moving as he breathed. That clear, cool August day which made Anna feel so hopeless seemed exhilarating and invigorating to him and refreshed his face and neck, which were glowing after their washing and rubbing. The scent of brilliantine given off by his moustache seemed peculiarly pleasant in the fresh air. All that he saw from the carriage window through the cold pure air in the pale light of the evening sky seemed as fresh, bright and vigorous as he was himself. The roofs of the houses glittered in the evening sun; the sharp outlines of the fences and the corners of buildings, the figures of people and vehicles they occasionally met, the motionless verdure of the grass and trees, the fields of potatoes with their clear-cut ridges, the slanting shadows of the houses and trees, the bushes and even the potato ridges—it was all pleasant and like a landscape newly painted and varnished.

‘Get on, get on!’ he shouted to the coachman, thrusting himself out of the window; and taking a three-rouble note from his pocket he put it into the man’s hand as the latter turned round. The coachman felt something in his hand, the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled quickly along the smooth macadamized high road.

‘I want nothing, nothing but that happiness,’ he thought, staring at the ivory knob of the bell between the front windows of the carriage, his mind full of Anna as he had last seen her.

‘And the longer it continues the more I love her! And here is the garden of Vrede’s country house. Where is she? Where? Why? Why has she given me an appointment here, in a letter from Betsy?’ he thought; but there was no longer any time for thinking. Before reaching the avenue he ordered the coachman to stop, opened the carriage door, jumped out while the carriage was still moving, and went up the avenue leading to the house. There was no one in the avenue, but turning to the right he saw her. Her face was veiled, but his joyous glance took in that special manner of walking peculiar to her alone: the droop of her shoulders, the poise of her head; and immediately a thrill passed like an electric current through his body, and with renewed force he became conscious of himself from the elastic movement of his firm legs to the motion of his lungs as he breathed, and of something tickling his lips. On reaching him she clasped his hand firmly.

‘You are not angry that I told you to come? It was absolutely necessary for me to see you,’ she said; and at sight of the serious and severe expression of her mouth under her veil his mood changed at once.

‘I angry? But how did you get here?’

‘Never mind!’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. ‘Come, I must speak to you.’

He felt that something had happened, and that this interview would not be a happy one. In her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the cause of her agitation he became infected by it.

‘What is it? What?’ he asked, pressing her hand against his side with his elbow and trying to read her face.

She took a few steps in silence to gather courage, and then suddenly stopped.

‘I did not tell you last night,’ she began, breathing quickly and heavily, ‘that on my way back with Alexis Alexandrovich I told him everything … said I could not be his wife, and … I told him all.’

He listened, involuntarily leaning forward with his whole body as if trying to ease her burden. But as soon as she had spoken he straightened himself and his face assumed a proud and stern expression.

‘Yes, yes, that is better! A thousand times better! I understand how hard it must have been for you’ he said, but she was not listening to his words—only trying to read his thoughts from his face. She could not guess that it expressed the first idea that had entered Vronsky’s mind: the thought of an inevitable duel; therefore she explained that momentary look of severity in another way. After reading her husband’s letter she knew in the depths of her heart that all would remain as it was, that she would not have the courage to disregard her position and give up her son in order to be united with her lover. The afternoon spent at the Princess Tverskaya’s house had confirmed that thought. Yet this interview was still of extreme importance to her. She hoped that the meeting might bring about a change in her position and save her. If at this news he would firmly, passionately, and without a moment’s hesitation say to her: ‘Give up everything and fly with me!’ she would abandon her son and go with him. But the news had not the effect on him that she had desired: he only looked as if he had been offended by something. ‘It was not at all hard for me — it all came about of itself,’ she said, irritably. ‘And here …’ she pulled her husband’s note from under her glove.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I understand, I understand,’ he interrupted, taking the note but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. ‘I only want one thing, I only ask for one thing: to destroy this situation in order to devote my life to your happiness.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ she said. ‘Do you think I could doubt it? If I doubted it …’

‘Who’s that coming?’ said Vronsky, pointing to two ladies who were coming toward them. ‘They may know us!’ and he moved quickly in the direction of a sidewalk, drawing her along with him.

‘Oh, I don’t care!’ she said. Her lips trembled and her eyes seemed to him to be looking at him with strange malevolence from under the veil. ‘As I was saying, that’s not the point! I cannot doubt that, but see what he writes to me. Read—’ she stopped again.

Again, as at the first moment when he heard the news of her having spoken to her husband, Vronsky yielded to the natural feeling produced by the thoughts of his relation to the injured husband. Now that he held his letter he could not help imagining to himself the challenge that he would no doubt find waiting for him that evening or next day, and the duel, when he would be standing with the same cold proud look as his face bore that moment, and having fired into the air would be awaiting the shot from the injured husband. And at that instant the thought of what Serpukhovskoy had just been saying to him and of what had occurred to him that morning (that it was better not to bind himself) flashed through his mind, and he knew that he could not pass on the thought to her.

After he had read the letter he looked up at her, but his look was not firm. She understood at once that he had already considered this by himself, knew that whatever he might say he would not tell her all that he was thinking, and knew that her last hopes had been deceived. This was not what she had expected.

‘You see what a man he is!’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘He …’

‘Forgive, me, but I am glad of it!’ Vronsky interrupted. ‘For God’s sake hear me out!’ he added, with an air of entreaty that she would let him explain his words. ‘I am glad because I know that it is impossible, quite impossible for things to remain as they are, as he imagines.’

‘Why impossible?’ said Anna, forcing back her tears and clearly no longer attaching any importance to what he would say. She felt that her fate was decided.

Vronsky wanted to say that after what he considered to be the inevitable duel it could not continue; but he said something else.

‘It cannot continue. I hope that you will now leave him. I hope …’ he became confused and blushed, ‘that you will allow me to arrange, and to think out a life for ourselves. To-morrow …’ he began, but she did not let him finish.

‘And my son?’ she exclaimed. ‘You see what he writes? I must leave him, and I cannot do that and do not want to.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, which is better? To leave your son, or to continue in this degrading situation?’

‘Degrading for whom?’

‘For everybody, and especially for you.’

‘You call it degrading! do not call it that; such words have no meaning for me,’ she replied tremulously. She did not wish him to tell untruths now. She had only his love left, and she wanted to love him. ‘Try to understand that since I loved you everything has changed for me. There is only one single thing in the world for me: your love ! If I have it, I feel so high and firm that nothing can be degrading for me. I am proud of my position because … proud of … proud …’ she could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her. She stopped and burst into sobs. He also felt something rising in his throat, and for the first time in his life he felt ready to cry. He could not explain what it was that had so moved him; he was sorry for her and felt that he could not help her, because he knew that he was the cause of her trouble, that he had done wrong.

‘Would divorce be impossible?’ he asked weakly. She silently shook her head. ‘Would it not be possible to take your son away with you and go away all the same?’

‘Yes, but all that depends on him. Now I go back to him,’ she said dryly. Her foreboding that everything would remain as it was had not deceived her.

‘On Tuesday I shall go back to Petersburg and everything will be decided. Yes,’ she said, ‘but don’t let us talk about it.’

Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to return to the gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna took leave of Vronsky and went home.

A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The post Anna Karenina’s happiness appeared first on OUPblog.

By Philip Carter

Today, 11 February 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). It is an event that has significantly shaped biographies and critical studies of her work — particularly following the publication of Ariel (1965), her posthumous collection edited and prepared by Ted Hughes. Then, as now, many reviewers regarded these poems as foretelling the circumstances of her death. Plath’s biography in the Oxford DNB offers an alternative perspective. As its authors Sally Brown and Clare Taylor write:

‘Such criticism helped to perpetuate the idea that [Plath’s] death was the most famous thing about her, and encouraged further critics to read the poems as solely charting her increasing mental agitation. But even a cursory reading of the poems reveals the many voices of her work—the amused, hopeful, triumphant, as well as the enraged and vitriolic—and Plath herself, when talking about her work, was amusing and charming, her voice controlled, guttural, and powerful. … A writer and a mother, Plath provided a model for a new generation of poets of the consciousness-raising movement, and she remains enormously popular especially with young female readers. Her lasting triumph will be the power and precision of her poetic voice, and her vision of new possibilities for women writers.’

In addition to Plath’s life in the Oxford DNB, an edited audio version of her biography is also available.

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download the podcast directly.

Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about Sylvia Plath on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news.

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My novel The House Girl tells the story of two women: Lina Sparrow, a lawyer in modern-day New York, and Josephine Bell, a slave in 1850s Virginia. People often ask me why I chose to write about Josephine and who inspired her character. (They assume, I suspect, that Lina is a stand-in for myself: I [...]

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By Finn Fordham

Joyce was obsessed with birthdays.  Today, February 2^nd, is his. An emerging secular saint’s day, it will be remembered and alluded to round the world – especially in Dublin — in the corners of newspapers and pubs, in blogs (like this one), tweets and the odd talk. Born in 1882, Joyce’s cake — if he could have one, let alone eat it — would have a hundred and thirty one candles; a hundred years ago, therefore, he would have been celebrating his 31^st birthday. The image of candles is suitable, since Joyce’s birthday fell on ‘Candlemas’, a holy day which commemorates Christ’s first appearance in a synagogue with his mother, forty days after his birth, in part by the lighting of candles. Mary was following the Mosaic law which says that, after giving birth, a mother is not clean for forty days, at which point she is to be purified through sacrifice. 

‘Celebrating’, however, might be too strong a word: in 1913, Joyce was, artistically, in something of a lull, and life might well have been frustrating. He was teaching English in Trieste, with two small children, aged 5 and 7. He was struggling to get Dubliners past timid publishers and printers; A Portrait…, begun some nine years before, was unfinished; Ulysses was not yet begun. He was writing the odd bit of journalism, but the high artistic ambitions he had cherished as a young man had taken a battering. He’d spent his twenty-first in Paris, receiving a letter written by his father John Joyce, which he would carefully keep wherever he went:

My dear Jim, May I be permitted to offer you my best wishes for your future which I, at one time, fancied may have been more rosey on your attaining your majority [i.e becoming 21]… I hope you will beleive [sic] me that I am only now, under I may tell you, very trying times, endeavouring to do my little best, but Jim you are my eldest Son I have always looked up to your being a fitting representative of our family one that my father would be proud of. I now only hope that you may carry out his ideas through your life and if you do, you may be sure you will not do anything unbecoming a gentleman.

John Joyce, here and in general, was, like Simon Dedalus in Ulysses, strong and open in his expression of emotion. He is not the stereotypical cold and detached Victorian father. On the other hand, the complexity of his warmth borders on ambiguity, and its intensity must have brought some pressure to the young and, by all accounts, lonely Joyce: the father feels responsible for failing his son, but implies that his son was failing, or in danger of doing so; he seeks forgiveness while sending his son on a guilt trip; he says he looks up to him, while also establishing a role model in his own father, thus reaffirming the patriarchal hierarchy of genealogy. Self-pityingly unable to help materially, he adopts the role of civic mentor — urging him to behave like a gentleman, as Polonius did to Laertes when the latter was about to go to Paris (and its fleshpots).  Larkin’s term for such ambivalence was ‘sloppy-stern’.

Birthdays may be a universal convention, but they are not universally liked.  One pressure that birthdays bring is the inevitability, almost the duty, of self-reflection — a pressure which the Joyces, father and son, must have been aware of in 1903. The attention of others — fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, wishing us well, presenting a gift, raising a glass — may exacerbate processes of self-examination and even pernicious comparison. Relative to where we were, or where we hoped to be, relative to our peers, or where our role models once were — where have we got to, or to what have we sunk?  Birthdays are ciphers that multiply whatever condition we’re in. The potential trauma of birthdays repeats, perhaps compulsively, the trauma of the day of birth. The twitching nervous checking during labour of the condition of mother and child – how are they doing, what are their heart rates? — becomes a twitching nervous checking on birthdays of whether one has yet become oneself.

For an ambitious person, for someone intent on establishing a mythology of themselves, for someone superstitious, birthdays, especially their own, and other anniversaries are crucial. And so they were for Joyce, for these very reasons. He habitually made awkward deadlines for himself and his publishers, by wanting his books to appear on his birthday or, failing that, his father’s. The day on which Ulysses is set (itself the day of the troubled birth, though fictional, of Mortimer Edward Purefoy), is supposed to be the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, though their encounter is not in fact recorded in the fiction.

Through the cyclical repetition of dates, days become haunted, charged with the meaning of the events of the past, implicit in their dates: Armistice Day, Guy Fawkes, the Battle of the Boyne. The different calendars of the global village, now shared in multi-cultural societies, show the space of the year as an environment that is densely built up with official anniversaries which are the signs and the foundations of institutions, of nations, states, religions, organisations, movements.

Anniversaries seem inevitable because of the cycle of the year, but they are not guaranteed: different anniversaries can coincide on the same day, so that one feast day ousts another; secular festivals push out saints’ days. Joyce cheekily engineered such a coincidence in the birthday of Molly Bloom, which was September the 8^th, the same day as the Virgin Mary’s birthday. Joyce’s love of birthdays is in part a wish to appropriate this map, a symptom of an eternal struggle he identified between the individual and society: ‘the state is concentric; man is concentric. Thence arise an eternal struggle.’

We have a Bloomsday, on which the institution of Joyce studies (and Joycolatry) are built. But there is no Wake-day: Finnegans Wake does not seem to happen on a single day, though for one critic it is a dream dreamt on 28 March 1938. For others the events of the Wake happen everyday and anyday. Unlike Ulysses, it has not been so easily institutionalised. Either way, it is certainly worth celebrating and lighting candles for: and Joyce’s birthday is as good as any to do so.

Dr Finn Fordham is Reader in 20th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Along with Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a book that reinvents the novel and plays fantastic games with the language to tell the story of one man’s fall and resurrection; in the intimate drama of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, the character of Ireland itself takes form. Joyce called time and the river and the mountains the real heroes of his book, and its organic structure and extraordinary musicality embody his vision. It is both an outrageous epic and a wildly inventive comedy that rewards its readers with never-ending layers of meaning.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: By Paweł Cieśla Staszek_Szybki_Jest (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Having lost both her parents, and subsequently her beloved uncle, 10-year-old Gemma Hardy is left with her uncle's wife. Her aunt despises Gemma and wastes no time dispatching her off to boarding school, where room and board are exchanged for nonstop backbreaking work. Education is an afterthought, but Gemma is a bright and earnest girl. After [...]

Margaret Atwood's haunting companion to Oryx and Crake will leave you hungry for another book in this "speculative fiction" universe. Written in the alternating voices of young and initially naive Ren and nostalgic but wounded Toby, the novel explores themes of ecology, disaster, relationships, and religion in a world that feels eerily familiar. Unlike Oryx [...]

I have recently been living in Texas. You'd need to be like me, an apprehensive Englishman, to share or even understand the uneasy thrill I have felt when walking in its countryside (though countryside is not a fitting word; it's far too tame for Texas — its wilds, perhaps, or its terrain). A country hike [...]

Sinclair Lewis was the first US writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known for his insightful and critical depictions of American society, one of Lewis’ most famous works was Babbitt. Amusing and tragic by turn, this classic novel is a biting satire of middle-American values whose title has entered the language as a byword for smug complacency, conformity, and materialism, and whose suburban targets are still much in evidence. In honor of the anniversary of Lewis’ birth (7 February 1885), we’ve crept into the archives and dug up some pages from Babbitt for you to enjoy.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail —Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned, turned over, struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnaceman slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard.

As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of someone cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah — a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day. He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires. He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch’s till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fi ne, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.

From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife’s detestably cheerful “Time to get up, Georgie boy,” and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.

He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket—forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts. He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, “No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage. But by golly it’s the only thing on the place that isn’t up-to-date!” While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling.

His arms were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done. On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom. Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been at it again! ’Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I’ve re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she’s gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!” The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said “Damn!” Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, “Damn — oh — oh — damn it!” He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying

“Damn.” But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them — his own facetowel, his wife’s, Verona’s, Ted’s, Tinka’s, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansyembroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.

He was raging, “By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every doggone one of ’em, and they use ’em and get ’em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me —of course, I’m the goat! — and then I want one and — I’m the only person in the doggone house that’s got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and consider — ” He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn’t wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn’t go and use the guest-towel, did you?” It is not recorded that he was able to answer. For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.

A successful real estate agent, George F. Babbitt is a member of all the right clubs, and unquestioningly shares the same aspirations and ideas as his friends and fellow Boosters. Yet even Babbitt dreams of romance and escape, and when his best friend does something to throw his world upside down, he rebels, and tries to find fulfillment in romantic adventures and liberal thinking. Hilarious and poignant, Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes, Gordon Hutner explores the novel’s historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. The Oxford World’s Classics edition also features an up-to-date bibliography and explanatory notes that document and gloss the rich social history of the period. Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926 but refused it, claiming there were worthier contenders than himself, a self-deprecating disclaimer he repeated in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1930.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Describe your latest book. My latest book is a short story collection called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Many of the stories are about monstrous metamorphoses — teenaged bullies in New Jersey, captive Japanese women converted into factory machinery, vampires in recovery. Human subjects converted into objects by violence. What fictional character would you like [...]

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