Biography Corner

Did Jack London set fire to Wolf House?

/ Donna Campbell / 1 Comment

Jack London Ranch 2010 033In this month’s Valley of the Moon Magazine, Jonah Raskin says, well, maybe he did.

http://www.vommag.com/january-2016/

Background for this excerpt: Wolf House, the ruins of which still stand in Jack London State Park, was London’s dream home, designed with his input and built from California materials. After citing a 1995 forensic investigation that found oily rags and spontaneous combustion to be the cause, Raskin continues:

Still, not everyone was convinced, including Greg Hayes [Jack London State Park Ranger and London expert]. Even Robert Anderson [forensic investigator] wasn’t entirely convinced of his own argument, especially when I pointed out to him that Jack had written in an essay published before the fire, “It will be a happy house–or else I’ll burn it down.” Just what did Jack mean when he made that provocative remark? Just how unhappy was he in 1913 when his doctors told him that if he didn’t stop drinking, alcohol would kill him.

There was no investigation of the fire that year, not by London’s insurance company, not by law enforcement and not by the fire department, since there was no fire department in Sonoma County in 1913. . . .

Whatever the cause, one thing seems clear. It wasn’t one big happy family on Beauty Ranch. Jack’s second wife, Charmian Kittridge, whom he had married in 1905, typed his manuscripts, followed him most everywhere he went and put up with his philandering. Often depressed, he drove her crazy, and she continued to love him.
According to a witness who overheard an argument in Wolf House shortly before it burned, Charmian told Jack, “You’ll never live here.”

Raskin goes on to discuss other suspects, including jealous neighbors.

What to make of this evidence? A few thoughts:

  1. London’s “or else I’ll burn it down” sounds a lot like London being London to me. London liked to grandstand, and he could be a bit of a drama king; it was good publicity, and he’d nudge the public to make sure they paid attention. That melodramatic note is a fairly characteristic pattern in some of his writing, and holding him to it as a threat, which may work in a police procedural drama, probably means less than you’d think.
  2. “How unhappy was he in 1913”–London’s legion of biographers can sort that one out. He was devastated when Wolf House burned down, as numerous witnesses attest. A brutal letter to his daughter Joan upbraids her for not writing to him to sympathize with its loss.
  3. “You’ll never live here”–Again, in the heat of an argument, the participants say things for effect rather than as actual threats. 1913 was a fraught year for the Londons (see The Little Lady of the Big House), but the two months spent in New York City in 1912 rather than the events of 1913 were a low point in their relationship. If Charmian had to “put up with” a lot from London and his depressions, would she be inclined to burn down a house, knowing that it would send him into a further depth of despair and that, since she’d be there, she’d have to bear the brunt of it?

You can read the article on pp. 46-47 of the issue, which is online at the link above.

Biography Corner: Unsensationalizing Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate

/ Donna Campbell / 1 Comment

Biography Corner: Unsensationalizing Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate
hughes
As a counterpoint to reading for work, my reading for pleasure tends to be nonfiction on either subjects (British literature), disciplines (history), or time periods close enough to be interesting but with enough distance to provide an escape. In practical terms, these tend to be biographies (John Hay, Jack Kerouac) or popular nonfiction (The Bully Pulpit, Stephen Crane Remembered).

Since these are reading for pleasure, I don’t pretend to have any special insight into the subjects they cover but thought that this blog might be a good place for thoughts about them.

The most recent book is Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life by Jonathan Bate. The press surrounding this book has tended to sensationalize its revelations (go read them if you want to) and has earned the condemnation of Janet Malcolm, whose The Silent Woman on Sylvia Plath and the perils of biography I’ve read several times and who condemns this work and what she calls its superficial readings. Bate has gone on record saying that the Hughes estate’s withdrawal of permission to quote from Hughes’s poetry forced him to cut out huge portions of the manuscript.

baskinWhat struck me about the book, even in this truncated form, isn’t the gossip but its its account of Hughes’s process of poetic creation. I knew something about this (Graves’s The White Goddess, etc.) from a grad class in which we read “The Jaguar” and Crow, but it’s not until the later chapters that Bate speaks powerfully to this. Bate clearly sees Lupercal and to a lesser extent Crow as the highlight of Hughes’s career, with occasional descents after that into vatic self-importance amid some genuinely good poems and a host of public performances (as Poet Laureate and public intellectual) that diluted his gifts.

Despite praise for Hughes’s translations, which were (I looked this up) his poetic reconstructions or renderings from a word-for-word translation created by a fluent speaker of the language (Hughes could speak French but not other languages), Bate sees these as an evasion, too.

Bate sees Hughes as roaring back to life with The Birthday Letters (1998), however. What the chapter on The Birthday Letters reveals is that they were written over the course of years but unpublished due to fears of feminist and other critical backlash. (Feminists and critics in this book are represented pretty much as shrieking harpies and vultures, respectively.)

birthdaylettersBate shows Hughes as constantly on the edge of a more confessional mode–in the early 1970s, for example–but held back by these fears. It’s as though Hughes teeters on the confessional versus vatic/safe imagistic poems precipice and goes with safety but then unleashes his powers in The Birthday Letters. The Birthday Letters frees him, but Hughes expresses the thought that it may be 30 years too late for the electric voltage of the early poet of “The Thought Fox” and “The Jaguar.”

Bate spends chapter 30, “The Sorrows of the Deer,” in explicating both a later volume, Howls and Whispers (509) and a Silvine notebook, likely composed before 1969 (511), called The Sorrows of the Deer. Containing 22 poems, the notebook could, claims Bate, have “expiated both [Hughes’s] grief and his guilt” if published in the 1970s. It’s a chapter about Hughes in elegaic mood, but the meta version is that Bate expresses some sorrow, too, for the poet that he thinks Hughes could have been.

Bate repeatedly compares Hughes to Wordsworth, right down to his use of his vivid journals being similar to the use that William made of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals. Another notebook, a “Challenge Triplicate Book,” contains a 5,000 word draft of what could have become Hughes’s version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Bate reads in detail a poem called “Black Coat: Opus 31,” linking it to Hughes’s life but also demonstrating how its Wordsworthian “spots of time” of grief, memory, and loss recall Wordsworth. Bate says that there are thousands of unpublished pages in the archives and that a whole book could be written on the composition of The Birthday Letters.  Knowing academics, I’m pretty sure there’s probably one in production right now.

I haven’t finished the book yet–two chapters left to go– and can’t say whether Bate has a grand summing-up on Hughes’s career. I’m also not up on the status of Hughes’s literary reputation.

What interests me primarily is this book’s achievement as a literary biography, even in its current form, and a question. Does Bate believe that Hughes has somehow failed the poet that he might have been by refusing to take (in a Frost quotation he uses often) the road less traveled? Is it the biographer’s place to judge the achievement of his or her subject, and, if so, to what extent?

Stephen Crane in the News: THE RED AND THE SCARLET: The hectic career of Stephen Crane. BY CALEB CRAIN

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Caleb Crain’s sketch of Stephen Crane’s life at The New Yorker.

Donna Campbell's avatarThe Stephen Crane Society

From The New Yorker:
THE RED AND THE SCARLET
The hectic career of Stephen Crane.
BY CALEB CRAIN
JUNE 30, 2014

Early readers of “The Red Badge of Courage” assumed that its author was a war veteran.

Early readers of “The Red Badge of Courage” assumed that its author was a war veteran.

In Stephen Crane’s novel “Maggie” (1893), it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when the title character is first set on the path to prostitution. Maybe it happens when her brother’s friend Pete tells her that her figure is “outa sight.” Maybe it happens a little later, when her job making shirt collars on an assembly line begins to seem dreary. Is it a mistake when she lets Pete take her to a music hall? What about when she lets him spirit her away from her rage-filled mother, who has collapsed on the kitchen floor after a bender? Women in the neighborhood gossip, and a practiced flirt steals Pete away—perhaps they are instrumental. Or…

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Biography Corner: Review of Stephen Crane Remembered

/ Donna Campbell / 3 Comments

SORRENTINO, PAUL, ED. Stephen Crane Remembered. University of Alabama Press, 2006. 400 pp. $57.50.

In 1895, Willa Cather, then a college student, was working for the Nebraska State Journal when she met a thin, shabbily dressed young man who introduced himself as Stephen Crane. At that time Crane was one of her literary heroes, so she cut classes to stay in the State Journal office and “trap him in serious conversation.” Cather was rewarded one evening when Crane let his guard down and described his writing process, in which “the detail of a thing has to filter through my blood” before he could write about it.  When she “suggested to Crane that in ten years he would probably laugh” at his discomfort in writing, he responded, “I can’t wait ten years. I haven’t time” (177). But is Cather’s account true, or did she fictionalize it later to present her own version of Crane as a romantic artist with a tragic premonition of his own early death? Incidents such as these, and the questions they raise, are at the heart of Paul Sorrentino’s excellent Stephen Crane Remembered, a collection of reminiscences by Crane’s contemporaries. Divided geographically and chronologically into seven sections, from Crane’s childhood in Port Jervis through his college years, his time in New York, his travels in the West, Florida, and Cuba, and his final years in England, Stephen Crane Remembered creates a composite portrait of this enigmatic author.

Stephen Crane Remembered presents Cather’s account along with those of sixty-one others who knew Crane, including Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Harding Davis, and Hamlin Garland, as well as reminiscences by those known primarily through their relationship to Crane, accounts previously available only in archives or out-of-print publications.  Among these are recollections from his nieces, his classmates, the artists with whom he shared a creatively rich but materially impoverished life in New York, his fellow correspondents in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and some of the many visitors that crowded Brede Place as Crane desperately tried to write enough fiction to support his household there.  As Sorrentino states in his introduction, several of the writers were influenced by Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane (1924), a fictionalized biography accepted as fact by most Crane biographers  before Sorrentino and Stanley Wertheim exposed Beer’s fabrications in The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988).

Although all the selections are presented with few in-text emendations so as not to disrupt the authors’ narratives, Sorrentino provides an informative biographical introduction for each and supplements these with extensive and well-researched footnotes, thus ensuring that neither Beer’s falsehoods nor other misstatements by the authors stand uncorrected. For example, citing Bernice Slote, Sorrentino notes that Cather’s account is incorrect in some details and that Cather echoes later assessments of Crane, suggesting that she had dramatized her encounter with him. Comprising one-sixth of the book, the footnotes are also an unusually rich source of details about Crane’s life, for in them Sorrentino provides not only publication details but other information, such as one fraternity brother’s recollection that the manuscript of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was “saturated with obscenity and profanity” (316 n.32) or another’s story that a lost manuscript by Crane is hidden in the walls of the fraternity house. The notes also resolve conflicts over the composition and publication history of works such as Maggie:  Crane’s niece Helen R. Crane believes that it was written in “two or three nights” at the home of her father, Crane’s brother Wilbur Crane (47); a classmate, Abram Lincoln Travis, thought Crane had written it in boarding school (62); Frank W. Noxon, a fraternity brother, believed that it was written while Crane was at Syracuse in 1891 (73); and two others place its composition in New York in 1892. In assessing these accounts, confirming some and dismissing others, Sorrentino concludes that Crane was “working on his first novel while at Syracuse” (317 n. 32).

The portrait of Crane that emerges from these overlapping slices of biography includes fresh retellings of familiar incidents from Crane’s life. For example, accounts of Crane’s courage under fire during the Spanish-American War appear in two different versions of the battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba on July 1, 1898. In Cecil Carnes’s account, Crane, wearing a white raincoat that makes him an excellent target, stands gazing at the Spanish lines despite a direct order from the newly promoted General Leonard Wood to get down and stop exposing himself to fire. James H. Hare, a photographer, forces him to lie down by saying, “What’s the idea, Steve? Did you get a wire from Pulitzer this morning reading: ‘Why the hell don’t you get wounded so we can get some notices, too?” (224). Reporting on the same incident, Richard Harding Davis recalled, “I knew that to Crane, anything that savored of a pose was hateful, so, as I did not want to see him killed, I called, ‘You’re not impressing any one by doing that, Crane.’ As I hoped he would, he instantly dropped to his knees” (347 n. 37). Despite their differences, both accounts emphasize not just Crane’s indifference to danger and his determination to get the story but also his dislike of ostentatious displays of courage. Another memorable image that confirms Crane’s hatred of display is Charles Michelson’s description of  Davis, resplendent in a tailored uniform “striated with service ribbons,” singing “Mandalay” and accompanying himself on the banjo before an admiring crowd as the “tongue-tied” Crane sat in the shadows “in his old campaign clothes” and refused to discuss his work in such a company (219).

Equally interesting are the accounts of influences on Crane’s writing: Sorrentino notes that those who claim that Crane read the French or Russian realists rely largely on Beer’s biography, but Crane’s sense of gratitude toward William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, who despite their limitations had promoted his career and “blazed the way” (279) for contemporary literature, occurs in at least one authentic reminiscence. A common thread in the reminiscences is that of the author at work on his writing: Crane assuring Hamlin Garland that “little rows” (94) of the poems that would become The Black Riders were complete in his mind before he wrote them down, or shutting himself up in the “red study” (277) at Brede Place each morning to write before greeting his guests, pausing only to let in his beloved dogs, or, as several writers recall, Crane bent over a sheet of paper, spending a long time carefully searching for the right word before slowly writing down the sentences he had formed in his head.

Stephen Crane Remembered is selective rather than comprehensive; reminiscences readily available elsewhere, such as Corwin Knapp Linson’s My Stephen Crane, reviews by William Dean Howells, and Elbert Hubbard’s obituary of Crane, are omitted, as are pieces already included in Wertheim and Sorrentino’s The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900 (1994) and The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, which Stephen Crane Remembered complements rather than supersedes. The Correspondence presents Crane in his own words, but Stephen Crane Remembered fills in the other side of the story, providing not only fresh and interesting glimpses of Crane as a writer and a human being but a superb biographical context, in the form of the introductions and notes, for assessing and understanding the stories told by Crane’s contemporaries.

Earle Labor’s new Jack London biography

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Cross-posted from the Jack London Society site at http://jacklondonsociety.org

Edited to add: This clip also has a 10-second excerpt (at 2:00)  from the only known recording of Jack London’s voice, which isn’t otherwise available online.

I’ve been hearing portions of this biography for years at Jack London symposia, and it should be a terrific book.  Labor began working on Jack London in the 1960s; a prominent scholar, he knows as much about London’s life as it’s possible to know after a lifetime of study.

From http://www.npr.org/2013/10/17/230497660/jack-london-believed-function-of-man-is-to-live-not-to-exist

A literary critic once remarked, “The greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived.” In his brief life, London sought adventure in the far corners of the world, from the frozen Yukon to the South Pacific, writing gripping tales of survival based on his experiences — including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf.

His story is the subject of a new biography,Jack London: An American Life, by Earle Labor, curator of the Jack London Museum in Shreveport, La. Labor wrote his first book about London in 1974, but the 85-year-old scholar says with London, there’s always more to write.

Image[read or listen to the rest at the link]

Identity of Hannah Crafts (The Bondswoman’s Narrative) Revealed

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From this morning’s New York Times : 

In 2002, a novel thought to be the first written by an African-American woman became a best seller, praised for its dramatic depiction of Southern life in the mid-1850s through the observant eyes of a refined and literate house servant.

Gregg Hecimovich and Reverend Joseph Cooper

John Wheeler lived on the plantation where Hannah Bond escaped slavery.

But one part of the story remained a tantalizing secret: the author’s identity.

That literary mystery may have been solved by a professor of English in South Carolina, who said this week that after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.

Beyond simply identifying the author, the professor’s research offers insight into one of the central mysteries of the novel, believed to be semi-autobiographical: how a house slave with limited access to education and books was heavily influenced by the great literature of her time, like “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre,” and how she managed to pull off a daring escape from servitude, disguised as a man.

The professor, Gregg Hecimovich, the chairman of the English department at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., has uncovered previously unknown details about Bond’s life that have shed light on how the novel was possibly written. The heavy influences of Dickens, for instance, particularly from “Bleak House,” can be explained by Bond’s onetime servitude on a plantation that routinely kept boarders from a nearby girls’ school; the curriculum there required the girls to recite passages of “Bleak House” from memory. Bond, secretly forming her own novel, could have listened while they studied, or spirited away a copy to read.

Biography Corner: John Hay’s Literary Network

/ Donna Campbell / 2 Comments

John_Hay,_bw_photo_portrait,_1897I’m only up to the year 1895 in listening to John Taliaferro’s All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, but it’s clear that what others are seeing as a bug in the biography is something I’d call a feature: its focus on the literary rather than the political side of Hay’s life.  Historians like Louis L. Gould in the Wall Street Journal and Heather Cox Richardson in the Washington Post have faulted Taliaferro’s lack of emphasis on politics, but for the literary historian, it offers a passing parade of nineteenth-century characters:

  • The Five of Hearts, including Henry Adams, the tragic Clover Adams, subject of a fine recent biography by Natalie Dykstra; and the mercurial Clarence King, whose amazing double life is told in Martha Sandweiss’s fascinating social history and biography of King, Passing Strange. 
  • The usual suspects: Lincoln, for whom (as anyone knows after seeing Lincoln), Hay served as a private secretary with John Nicolay; Garfield, Grant, James G. Blaine, McKinley, Mark Hanna.
  • Our old friend W. D. Howells, with whom Hay shared a lively correspondence as both men seem to have done with everyone else in the nineteenth century.
  • The beautiful and elusive Lizzie Cameron, for whom Hay, Adams, and a good portion of nineteenth-century masculine Washington seem to have carried a considerable torch (was she the “It Girl” of the Gilded Age?). She deserves a biography of her own.
  • Directly or indirectly: Mark Twain,  Henry James, and Bret Harte.  The latter’s success inspired Hay to write two popular dialect poems, “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle.” 
  • And Constance Fenimore Woolson, the subject of Anne Boyd Rioux’s new biography project.  Hay was related to Woolson through Samuel Mather, and it was Hay who helped arrange and pay for her burial in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. To Henry Adams, he wrote (I’m paraphrasing): “We buried poor Constance Woolson today. She did much good in her life, and no harm, and she had no more happiness than a convict.”

Hay’s The Breadwinners, which I read many years ago, is discussed at some length, as is the LIncoln biography and Hay’s poetry.

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900): Brief biographical sketch

/ Donna Campbell / 3 Comments

warner_cd_mtbThe following is a short biographical sketch of Charles Dudley Warner written a few years ago for a collection that was never published, and the sketch is now on the Charles Dudley Warner page at the American Authors site.

Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), author, critic, an editor, is best known today for his collaboration with Mark Twain on The Gilded Age (1873). Born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1829, Warner worked on his guardian’s farm from ages eight to twelve, an experience that informs the memoir Being a Boy (1877).  After graduating from Hamilton College in 1851, Warner, hoping to restore both his health and his fortune, joined an engineering corps surveying lands in Missouri.  After returning east, he married Susan Lee (1838-1921) (http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/hbs/nook/warner.shtml) in 1856 and received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania two years later.  He practiced law in Chicago before moving to Hartford and beginning his journalistic career in 1860. He was a founding member of the literary colony at Nook Farm, whose members included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain.

Warner’s principal contributions to journalism are his editorship of the influential newspaper The Hartford Courant and his exploration of the essay as a genre.  In 1861, he assumed the editorship first of The Evening Press and then of The Hartford Courant, later consolidating the two papers.  During the Civil War, Warner contributed essays and sketches to the Courant, consciously choosing, according to Annie Adams Fields, to focus on lighter domestic fare that would distract readers from the conflict (http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/fields/warner.html). This series of popular editorials, later collected as My Summer in a Garden (1870), established Warner as an essayist as well as an editor, one whose genial manner and mildly humorous style recalled the work of Washington Irving.  Backlog Studies (1873) continued this tradition, being ” a kind of apotheosis of home” that nonetheless prefigured some of Warner’s critical preoccupations.

Beginning with Saunterings in 1872, Warner also published nine travel books, some of which focused on Europe and the Middle East, such as In the Levant (1875) and My Winter on the Nile: Among the Mummies and Moslems (1876; rev. ed., 1881). Others provided an in-depth look at lesser-known areas of the United States: Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada (1889), On Horseback: A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California (1888), and Our Italy, Southern California (1892).  Many of his books were first published as essays in the major literary journals of the day, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. His editorship of the American Men of Letters biography series, for which he wrote the initial volume, a biography of Washington Irving, cemented his reputation as a biographer as well as an editor.

In addition to the genre of the familiar essay, Warner was successful as a critic and novelist.  His essays in social and literary criticism generally favored social and literary reform, albeit of a limited kind.  Although in “A Study in Prison Management” (1885) he supported flexible, open-ended sentences, and in “The Education of the Negro” encouraged African American suffrage and education, he nonetheless argued that manual training and a designedly slow pace of racial assimilation was necessary.  As a literary critic, he succeeded William Dean Howells as the writer of the influential “Editor’s Study” column for Harper’s from 1894-1898, and his judgments in the column, as in his books The Relation of Literature to Life (1896) and Fashions in Literature (1902), sought to elevate Americans’ taste in literature.  After writing the satirical novel The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, Warner examined the rise and fall of a great family fortune through a trilogy of serious novels: A Little Journey in the World (1889), The Golden House (1894), and That Fortune (1899).  Achieving popularity during his lifetime but not the enduring critical respect given to figures like Twain and Henry James, Warner died in Hartford on October 20, 1900.