Posts Tagged ‘John Keats’

Last year, we interviewed Denise Gigante about her acclaimed new book, The Keats Brothers – the Q&A is here. The formidable author is now tackling a new subject, with the help of a Guggenheim fellowship. Read more:

What is a book? A source of wisdom, a cultural artifact, a sacred relic, a text that can be rearranged into pdf, ebooks and pasted into a cloud. But in an earlier era, books were more than that: they were bosom friends.

Denise Gigante, a Stanford English professor, traces the power of the book in the 19th century and then looks forward to the future of the written word. Her research for her forthcoming book with Harvard University Press, The Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America, which earned her a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, also recalls the half-forgotten English essayist and “tastemaker” Charles Lamb, a cultural icon as popular in the 19^th century as Charles Dickens.

Gigante tells a tale of how movements can flip into their own opposite: how transatlantic book-collecting and literary idolatry morphed into a fuzzy, off-the-page future. Passionate devotion to particular books has yielded to a universally available, disembodied text.

If the past is anything to go by, her new book is likely to make literary waves. Last year’s The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and an Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review.

Gavin Jones, the chair of the Stanford English Department, said, “Denise is the rare scholar with the power to tell a story that’s also the biography of an age and an intellectual culture.”

Gigante’s research recalls an era when “bibliomaniacs had a relationship with books – they saw them as companions, friends, mentors, real presences in the world. A character from Tom Jones could be as real to them as anyone they might meet.”

Gigante’s newest intellectual adventure began with the Jay Fliegelman Collection of “association copies” now in the Stanford Libraries. The collection is important not just for the books that it holds, but for the signatures, notes and dedications to and from the era’s leading cultural figures contained in them. English Professor Emeritus Albert Gelpi, describing the Fliegelman Collection, noted how “the books speak to each other.”

Gigante found inspiration in the collection. The idea of “association copies” was central to the 19th-century world of letters. When a book had the pencil marks of an admired literary friend or had been owned by a long-dead colleague, it deepened the conversation between book and reader.

American collections put together by private collectors abounded in such souvenirs of the literary life – anything associated with authors was hoarded and venerated. It was the age, Gigante said, of “bibliomania.”

In a residual way, the idea of association continues to this day. Think of all the people who line up at the local bookstore for an author signing. “This is a legacy of the association copy, a commoditized version,” said Gigante. “One can now purchase an autograph connecting the reader to the writer in a sentimental economy.”

Amateur book collecting – “amateur” is based on the French word for “lover” – was a very self-conscious way of styling oneself as a person of culture. For bibliomaniacs, taste was “a lived experience,” said Gigante, “an art of living.”

In the 19^th century, such tastemakers were “usually people who had to work a day job, or fit their literary life into a workaday world.”

From the beginning, the movement was not about wealthy collectors. Charles Lamb, the son of domestic servants who wrote so lovingly about books, left school to work as a clerk. His fellow essayists and bibliomaniacs, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt, spent their lives fleeing from creditors. Even John Keats, Gigante’s former subject, was the son of a hostler who took care of horses at an inn.

“There was a big difference between collectors with money who could buy anything that caught their eye, and people who had to make choices, to exercise judgment, in choosing one book over another.”

Book-loving morphed into a kind of bourgeois consumerism, where people stacked shelves with books for display (though old books retained their status as idols). Book buying, selling and collecting became hallmarks of the age. Bookstores became the center of social and cultural life. Libraries became shrines where cultural heritage was preserved.

Like just about everything else in America, the great libraries born in this era were not created top-down, as were their European counterparts, but rather bottom-up. While the French royalty housed great collections in palatial structures and the British university libraries descended from the 16th century dissolution of the monasteries, American libraries were formed as “expressions of personality, character and individual genius rather than wealth,” said Gigante.

Compare these libraries to, say, Mr. Darcy’s library in Pride and Prejudice. The books Elizabeth Bennet admired at Pemberley were collected over generations as a mark of a family’s cultural prestige – a collection of literary “Golden Oldies.”

But the marketplace eventually came to the fore. Thus, the 1848 sale of Charles Lamb’s old books, 14 years after his death, was a high-profile event. Sixty of Lamb’s dog-eared association copies, his “midnight darlings,” were displayed by a bookseller in the Astor House in Manhattan as a “seven-day wonder.” The English world of letters lamented the national loss of the iconic collection.

After the books were scattered at auction, a few were swallowed into John Jacob Astor’s collection, which formed the basis for the New York Public Library, and a few went to Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard. The private libraries of other collectors started the great collections at Yale, Princeton, Brown and other universities.

Something essential had fallen by the wayside in the rush for big collections. The death of “gentle-hearted Charles” marked the end of the romantic quality of book collecting. “The gentility of the belletristic tradition amid the prosaic reality of middle-class life had been a model for many Americans,” according to Gigante.

We’ve turned the page onto a future without pages. The medium is a computer screen. “The center of association shifts from the self to the commodity that is the computer,” Gigante said. “The agency of connection is likewise transferred from the internal space of reflection to larger corporations.”

What’s missing is a tastemaker’s wise words in real time and the presence of a bosom buddy on your bookshelf. Does it matter? Gigante thinks so: “In the end, we will always be tactile creatures,” she said.

A brilliant article in today’s Quarterly Conversation offers a fresh take on Lev Loseff‘s much-discussed Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Marbled with impressive insights, it represents the finest standards of literary journalism, and should establish a new highpoint for the rapidly disappearing genre … let me dissemble no further, dear reader, I myself wrote the review.

A hackneyed opening gambit, I know … So let’s cut to the chase with a little shameless plugging via an excerpt:

“For Brodsky, poetry was a ticket out of this world. And in Russia, the poet is godlike. To know both is to understand the context for this erudite and often wise book—a work more likely to find readers among current fans, rather than find new ones. Yet Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life is simultaneously enlightening, perplexing, and exasperating. The knowledgeable reader is left feeling rewarded and cheated at once, as if invited to a sumptuous banquet and offered only canapés. The protean figure remains beyond the range of these pages. The door remains at once half open and half closed to us.

You’ll read no secrets in Loseff’s volume. But neither will you get Brodsky’s bewildering, mesmerizing blend of hubris and humility, charm, and abrasiveness. Brodsky was a Catherine Wheel of metaphysical brilliance, scathing insults, and intellectual splendor.

Russia’s longing for pure poet-heroes held an incandescent grip on the Russian psyche, and the nation bleaches its bards to an unearned whiteness. Writers have always claimed special moral exemptions for themselves—wishing to be something grander than simply a guy who wields a ballpoint or stares at an empty computer screen. Brodsky upped the ante.

He told Loseff that the lesser cannot comment on the greater, the mice cannot review the cat. Was he exempting himself from criticism? Certainly. But Brodsky was also the first to bend his knee to those he saw above him on the ladder—from Ovid to Auden. The sense of hierarchy may rub against the egalitarian Brodsky who once wrote, ‘Evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another,’ but the contradiction can be chalked up to his complex humanity as easily as his self-blindness.”

Read the rest here.

Quarterly Conversation is run by Scott Esposito. It’s another valiant online effort to sustain serious literary criticism – and that’s no hyperbole.

It’s gotten some rave reviews, from The Nation, among others. From Columbia University Press: “It would not be a stretch to say that The Quarterly Conversation has come to be one of the better places—online or in print—to turn to for literary and cultural criticism.” According to Canongate Books’s “Meet at the Gate”: “If a website was able to drool, Meet At The Gate would be drooling over The Quarterly Conversation. It’s what online literary magazines are meant to be.”

The always insightful Patrick Kurp, by the way, reviews Denise Gigante‘s The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George in the same issue – it’s here (and the Book Haven Q&A with Denise is here). An excerpt from Patrick’s review:

… despite Gigante’s standing as an academic in a major university English department, she is a writer, not a slinger of theory or political poseur. Out of primary documents she reanimates a major poet and his world, and crafts a transatlantic adventure story with a novelist’s gift for moving narrative along. In brief, Gigante convincingly demonstrates that George Keats, the poet’s junior by sixteen months, served as John’s “muse.” In an 1818 letter to Ann Wylie, John says: “My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend.”

 

John Keats (1795-1821) is celebrated as one of the greatest poets of the English language, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 25. His brother? A ne’er-do-well who scarpered off to America, leaving both his brothers to die young of “the family disease.”

That is, until Denise Gigante’s The Keats Brothers, published by Harvard University Press (a podcast is here). Weaving the double stories of brothers John and George Keats with a sympathetic mind and heart, she tells how two men remained deeply committed to each other throughout their lives. In fact, the case could be made that George was the great love of John Keats’s short life.

“My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend,” John Keats wrote in 1818.

George wrote nearly a decade after his older brother’s death: “I claim being the affectionate Friend and Brother of John Keats. I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit.”

The book is making big waves on both sides of the Atlantic. Here’s a Book Haven Q&A with the author:

After long incubation, sudden acclaim. How does it feel to be suddenly in the news, everywhere?

I’m pleased that the book has been favorably reviewed and even made it to “Editor’s Choice” for The New York Times. But I have learned one lesson: you’re only as good as your reviewers.

Since there is so much reading material and so little time, the general reading public depends on book reviews for knowledge of new events in the cultural world. One assumes, naturally, that the reviewers, at least, read the books. That turns out not to be the case!

I’m afraid that the reviewer for The Independent in the U.K., for instance, did not get much past the prologue. Lesley McDowell’s last sentence of that review shows a painful ignorance of the circumstances of John Keats’s death.

On the other hand, Christopher Benfey’s review for The New York Times and Seamus Perry’s review for the British Literary Review both manage to distill the narrative and thematic ambitions of my dual biography of John and George Keats down to a few incisive—and lively—paragraphs for a general public.

How did George Keats get such a bad reputation? And how do scholars get the wrong end of the stick like that, for so many years?

George Keats left England in 1818 to make a new life for himself in America with his young bride, Georgiana Wylie. His intention was to earn enough money to return to England and support his family—which included his more famous brother—in the lifestyle to which they aspired to live.

George lost his inheritance in a steamboat speculation and returned to London, desperate with a pregnant wife back in Louisville, Kentucky, to scour up more funds. When he left England for America for the second time, in 1820, he had borrowed money from his brother John; he did not realize John was terminally ill.

A couple days after George’s departure, John had his first major pulmonary hemorrhage from tuberculosis, the family disease. John was sick and in dire straits financially—like George—and John’s roommate Charles Brown resented George for leaving the poet in his care. George failed to raise money to send John to Italy, where the doctors ordered the poet to go for the sake of his health. After John’s death, Brown proceeded to blame George for John’s sufferings.

Their mutual friend Charles Dilke later vindicated George, proving that he had not acted dishonestly, whatever one might say about his absence as a caregiver, but the rumors about George’s bad behavior have tarnished his reputation for posterity.

My effort has been situate these familiar events to us in a more historical, transatlantic context: the collapse of the American economy in the Panic of 1819; an unreliable mail system between England and the Western Country of America; sickness on both sides of the Atlantic; and so forth.

George, too, was a victim of circumstance. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life after John’s death trying to live up to his brother’s memory.

You have indeed situated these events in a bigger context. We talk a lot about the era of globalization. Your book shows us again that we aren’t the first to experience its traumas. The American and French revolutions toppled imperial powers and had international repercussions, and the Industrial Revolution affected everyone. Can you describe how these quakes affected the Keats family?

The ongoing Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, involving many nations and a global economy, both ended in 1815, the year before The Keats Brothers begins, leaving Britain reeling both in heady splendor—think of the Prince Regent and his retinue—and, for the working classes, in the tribulations of poverty.

Although John and George Keats were not part of either extreme, opportunities for both of them were curtailed in a sociopolitical system based on rank and hereditary privilege. John faced a snobbish conservative press determined to mock his poetic pretensions: he was a “Cockney Poet.”

George could not get a start in any business, and faced years of paying his dues as an anonymous clerk: he became a “Cockney Pioneer,” like the entrepreneurs he followed to the so-called “English Prairie” in the Illinois Territory. He was part of a flood of migration from the British Isles, across the Atlantic and down the Ohio River, to the new states and territories opening up west of the Allegheny Mountains. The New World represented a land of opportunity away from entrenched systems of power and privilege. The reality was often otherwise, as George Keats, like many other pioneers, found out.

John Keats’s love affair with Fanny Brawne has become the stuff of legend. Jane Campion’s recent movie Bright Star was devoted to the tragic affair between the poet and his neighbor, carried on as John was staring down the all-too-close antagonist, death.

But until George left England, John had always found his closest bonds to be with his brothers. “When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice spleen,” he confessed, “I cannot speak or be silent—I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing—I am in a hurry to be gone.” He was attracted to women, clearly, but his trust and intimacy resided in his brothers.

After George left for America, and their younger brother Tom had died, John’s enormous capacity for love shifted to Fanny Brawne. The Keats brothers did have a sister, but she was very young and isolated from them by their guardian, Richard Abbey. George was John’s anchor until 1819: the year after George’s departure when John wrote his most lasting verse in the void opened up by his brothers’ absence.

Can you tell us about some of that verse?

“But what without the social thought of thee, / Would be the wonders of the sky and sea,” John wrote to George in the concluding couplet of a sonnet titled “To My Brother George.”

His poetry, following the loss of his brothers, became darker, more introspective, deeper, and more philosophical. The poems known as the Great Odes—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “To Autumn,” and so on, written in the spring of 1819, after Tom’s death and George’s departure—describe the misery into which the poet had plunged after the loss of his brothers: “George is in America and I have no brother left,” John wrote to an acquaintance that May. “My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world—Now I find I must buffet it—I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight—I must choose between despair & Energy—I choose the latter.”

And choose he did, writing the majority of poems that appeared in his famous volume of 1820, the book that made his lasting reputation. His letters also reveal the profundity of his connection with George, to whom he spoke of life not as a vale of tears, but as a “Vale of Soul-making.” We come into the world, he speculated, as atoms of perception—“intelligences,” the poet called them—that have no distinct personality or identity but that, in the school of hard knocks called experience, a school whose lessons are felt on the pulses, those intelligences become souls. Such a system of spiritual redemption proved no affront to his reason.

You’ve taken on a double narrative in your book. As a writer, can you describe some of the perils of this kind of writing?

The story of John Keats is as famous as the story of George Keats is unknown. The sections of the book focused on John tend to be more concerned with his imaginative and intellectual life—his thoughts, his emotions, his poetry—while the sections of the book devoted to George are active: where he went, whom he met, what he did. John in fact had an imaginative relationship to the world around him, while George lived in a world that for us today is purely imaginary: a wild landscape inhabited by settlers and Native Americans, keelboats and whisky-drinking boatmen, transatlantic packet ships weighed down with iron to be shaped into plowshares, men gouging out each others eyes after a few drinks in the tavern. The main narrative challenge lay in reconciling the diverse worlds of Regency London and frontier America, keeping the right rhythm between the two brothers.

Are there any living descendents of John Keats’ family today?

George Keats had eight children and his descendants in America number in the hundreds. Among them is Lawrence M. Crutcher, of Louisville, who is descended from George’s daughter Emma and who has compiled a book, The Keats Family [Butler, 2009], which contains biographical portraits of George’s many descendants.

Fanny Keats, unlike her brothers John, George, and Tom, did not die of tuberculosis. She had six children and lived into old age; her family tree is alive. Crutcher’s cousin, Fernando Paradinas, provided information regarding the descendants of Fanny Keats, the brothers’ sister, which Crutcher has included in The Keats Family.

 

I wrote about the Polish poet Julia Hartwig some months ago on the Book Haven here – but now there is an special occasion for celebration. The poet turns 90 on August 14th.

It’s rare that a poet’s supreme moment of recognition should occur so late in life – rarer still that the poet’s productivity is unimpeded by age. However, the Grande Dame of Polish poetry is clearly an extraordinary woman.

I made sure to celebrate my own way, with an article in the July/August issue of World Literature Today. It’s not online, alas, but here are a few excerpts to familiarize the West with a poet who received as much applause as Nobel winner Wisława Szymborska when they shared the stage last May in Kraków’s medieval St. Catherine’s Church.

“My way of poetry is a long way,” Julia Hartwig told me on a hot August night in her Warsaw apartment.

Her comment is at once enigmatic and precise. Precise because the poet, who turns ninety this year, has been writing for eight decades, since she was ten. She has been publishing collections of her poems since the 1956 thaw over half a century ago. Yet her long career is still in glorious late flower.

Enigmatic, too: her range of vision roams through centuries, continuing a conversation with her recently dead colleagues, literary forebears, and friends throughout time. All great poetry does that, really—but in Hartwig’s case the search is direct and unambiguous. Titles of poems in her newest collection in English, It Will Return, reference Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, and Joseph Brodsky as well as Vincent Van Gogh, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Henri Rousseau.

Her life was largely a quiet and orderly one, after the national upheaval of war, when she worked as a runner for the Home Army, and studied in Warsaw’s underground university (the Gestapo’s attentions forced her into hiding for a time). After the war, she went to Paris on a scholarship and never lost her love for France. She wrote about Guillaume Apollinaire and Gérard de Nerval and translated Rimbaud:

“What is striking about French literature is the range of scale: the Hugo-style genius of the French spirit and the Rabelaisian bawdiness, de Musset’s charm and Apollinaire’s thrilling melody, Lautréamont’s madness, the inexhaustible passion of Rimbaud’s poetry, the latent sensitivity of Reverdy’s cubism, the inventiveness of the lyrical paradox in Jacob’s work,” she wrote. “Old and new, separate and shared, like the root, stem, leaf, and flower in one plant.”

In 1954 she married the eminent poet, writer, and translator Artur Miedzyrzecki (1922–96), who had served the Polish Army in Italy. She published her first book during communism’s brief 1956 thaw, when she was in her mid-thirties.

“I waited for good poems, it’s true,” she said. “But still the attention was . . . it was remarked.”

I find the frequent comparisons to Szymborska to be a bit offensive, as if there were only one slot were available to a female poet per generation. I aired my grievances … well, a little, anyway:

She is often compared to Wisława Szymborska. One wonders if the association would come less easily if Szymborska were not a woman of the same generation. But it’s not entirely the comparison of poetess with poetess—both have a light, deft touch and a taste for whimsy.

But Hartwig’s terroir extends into a different psychological landscape. She has called her way “reality mysticism,” extending her acceptance of the world to all its horrors, then moving beyond to transcendence. Of the world, she wisely told her translator Bogdana Carpenter, “One cannot set oneself apart from it and be alone like an underground man or a misanthrope.”

But it’s more than that. Reality mysticism doesn’t abstract or withdraw from the present, or use it for a jumping-off point for dreamy speculations, but holds us steadily there, using it to increase our attention, our presence, and our appreciation.

For example, “Return to My Childhood Home” begins with wonder and loss, moving to consolation and light:

Amid a dark silence of pines—the shouts of young birches calling each other.
Everything is as it was. Nothing is as it was. …

To understand nothing. Each time in a different way, from the first cry to the last breath.
Yet happy moments come to me from the past, like bridesmaids carrying oil lamps.

Many more happy moments in your beloved Warsaw, Julia – a thousand lamps to greet you on your way!