Life In Letters Research Articles

A Choice Soul: An Excerpt from Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers

A Choice Soul: An Excerpt from Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers

From the Editor’s Gable

From the Editor’s Gable

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene

Reviewed by: The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene Jake Grefenstette The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene BY RICHARD GREENE New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. Paperback: $20.00. xvi + 591 pages. ISBN: 9781324020264. Richard Greene’s The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene is a welcome addition to a recent surge in Greene scholarship—a surge made possible in large part by the biographer’s own prior research into his subject’s life and letters. I first read and enjoyed Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Abacus, 2008) in 2015 for an undergraduate tutorial, which was set (appropriately enough) in the chaplain’s rooms at Oriel College, Oxford. After the tutorial, I recommended Richard Greene’s scholarship to friends both inside and outside the academy. I would do so (and indeed have done) again with this follow-up text, which offers a more narrative-driven and comprehensive account of Greene’s varied literary, romantic, and spiritual life. Two passages in The Unquiet Englishman will be of special interest to Newman scholars. The first comprises a nuanced interpretation of Graham Greene’s recurrent and challenging self-description as “not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be Catholic” (105). This formulation, which has just as often been understood as an ironic affirmation as it has a dismissal of (or even abdication from) his Catholic faith, is read by the biographer in light of Greene’s (equally recurrent, and equally challenging) appeals to The Idea of a University. Richard Greene points us to this seminal passage, which Graham would “trot out” ostensibly in order “to shut down discussion of the Catholic content of his work”: I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man. You may gather something very great and very high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all (105).1 [End Page 83] The biographer here raises a classic problem: by framing himself in negative terms as “not a Catholic writer,” and by invoking Newman’s line (perilously out of context) that one “cannot have a Christian Literature,” has Graham Greene—wittingly or unwittingly—subordinated his Christianity to his craft? Richard Greene’s initial response to this problem is to endorse Ian Ker’s thesis: Graham Greene “has badly misread Newman”—for, properly understood, “Newman was merely arguing against the notion that one could study Catholic writers and exclude pagans” (105–106).2 But in the discussion that follows, Richard Greene admits a deeper sense of irony (and, by extension, understanding of Newman) than is usually allowed.3 Drawing on his (probably unparalleled) knowledge of the development of Greene’s thought and faith, the biographer locates this claim in a period of his life in which “Greene himself was explicitly struggling with the problem of how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction” (106). “Providence” is the key word here. Catholicism, for Graham Greene, is not merely a jersey that one sports; it is a totalizing description of the universe. To claim that he is “not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be Catholic” is only to ironize, since the nature of providence (as Graham understands it) is such that it extends to every corner of facticity and fiction.4 Such a view is intended to dismantle any clean distinction between “Christian” and “secular” writing. And indeed, this is the very theological drive underpinning Greene’s famous themes of grace and mercy, themes afforded often to his most helpless and hapless protagonists. Richard Greene’s key insight, I take it, is this: that “Greene’s sense of craft” is something finally “shaped by his faith—the faith and the craft are not separate” (106). The second passage for our consideration represents a remarkable development of Richard Greene’s own understanding of the Newman-Greene relationship. In his earlier Life in...

Shaw’s Criticism and Philosophy Dramatized

Shaw’s Criticism and Philosophy Dramatized

Chasing Excellence: A Cardiac Surgeon's Life in Letters.

Chasing Excellence: A Cardiac Surgeon's Life in Letters.

A Life in Letters

Abstract Anna Frajlich's poetry was shaped by the shock of her forced emigration from Poland in 1969. This wound, which in time would become a creative nucleus, is amply documented in her correspondence to various recipients over the entire span of her life. Exile made Frajlich into a lifelong epistolarian, thus allowing the reader a rare glimpse into her everyday life, her professional relationships, her friendships, and the parallel progress of her scholarship and her poetry. Two sets of her correspondence stand out: her parents, because of the intensity and closeness of the letters between 1969 and 1971, and Stefania Kossowska, the editor of the London-based Wiadomości Literackie, because of the close friendship between the two women from 1973 until Kossowska's death in 2003. Both her parents and Kossowska gave Frajlich indispensable nurturing as a person and writer until she in turn became the nurturing one. The article is organized chronologically; a third section is devoted to Frajlich's use of her correspondence with several émigré Polish authors in order to write tributes that represent an important contribution to the history of émigré literature as well as to Frajlich's life. Her correspondence shows her attention to detail and her sensitivity to beauty, and her love for her correspondents. The letters narrate the building of her career, from her first publications in Poland to her doctoral studies and to the growing recognition of her work in the United States and in Poland.

Female everyday life in letters by a Karelian peasant woman of the early XX century

Introduction. The article reports the results of an analysis of the letters written by a peasant early in the XX century, found in the National Archives of Finland, which are a rare-type of historical source. Their author is a twenty-year-old peasant Anna Eremeeva-Räikha, who wrote them to her husband exiled to North Kazakhstan. The relevance of the study is defined by high interest to epistolary cultural heritage, where a special place is given to the letters of Russian’s different ethnic groups, and also by attention paid to the history of everyday life. Materials and Methods. The principal method was analysis of the structure of the letters, including identification of thematic block sequences and their subsequent clustering for the analysis of specific issues. Results and Discussion. The article explicates the substantive dimension of the letters, which reflects the sphere of interests of their author, and looks into the descriptions of women’s daily routines and the life of the Karelian family. It highlights the range of covered subjects and outlines the topics showing the routines and the behavioral practices of a peasant woman, her ways of adapting to the new circumstances after the husband’s arrest. The specific jobs and occupations are aligned with the farming calendar of northern Karelia. Features of the author’s self-presentation, ways of structuring and drawing up the texts are demonstrated. The study illustrates the range of topics and emotions rooted in the gender factor, and the diversity of their expression. Conclusion. The letters disclose the system of moral values of a Karelian woman, the Christian ideal of family relationships, special features of professional motivations. The “voice” of a Karelian peasant woman retained in these letters is a relevant source for studying the alteration of women’s everyday life early in the XX century and it allows talking about the maturing demand for emancipation in everyday life and gradual loosening of the traditional gender order in the Karelian village.

Nikolay Antsiferov. ‘That’s our life in letters’: Letters to family and friends (1900s — 1950s)

The collection prepared by IMLI RAN contains letters of the eminent specialist in local history N. Antsiferov and focuses on the biography of this St. Petersburg Imperial University alumnus, who, despite many arrests by the Soviet regime on trumped-up charges, incarceration in prisons and guarded camps and exile, preserved his inner freedom and, therefore, his scholarly potential. The book details the political context that brought about the outrageous persecution of this highly skilled and staunchly apolitical scholar aswell as the abrupt clearance of charges. Also included is a summary of his scholarly output in literary history, local history and cultural studies. The book lists the scholar’s acquaintances and correspondents, e. g., M. Bakhtin, V. Vernadsky, M. Lozinsky, A. Meyer, K. Chukovsky, B. Eichenbaum, and many other members of the intellectual elite. The book is celebrated as a landmark scholarly publication; highly praised are the text preparation efforts and explanatory notes.

The public and private life of Sol Plaatje

There has been an upswing in attention to South African biography in the past few decades, with a welcome trend towards remaking or revising the canon of important figures from the South African past. This has included edited collections of the works of prominent individuals, and notable among these have been early-twentieth century black African politicians and writers. Historical Publications Southern Africa (renamed from its previous moniker, the Van Riebeeck Society) has published four edited collections of the writings of such individuals since 2008, including Isaac Williams Wauchope, Richard Victor Solope Thema, and A.B. Xuma. A Life in Letters, a collection of Solomon T. Plaatje's correspondence, is the fourth such volume in just over a decade. There are 260 letters, written from 1896 to 1932, included in the book. Most are in English, but some are in Setswana, Dutch/Afrikaans, and a few are in German. Although a number of the letters are from the collections of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, the reviewer counted twenty-seven different collections across three continents. The book is thus an excellent resource not only for historians, but also for students and the general public who now have access to a wide range of Plaatje's thoughts, opinions, and emotions that are evident in his letters.

The Nazi Occupation of Theaterwissenschaft

Theaterwissenschaft was first developed as an academic field in Germany. In Berlin, Max Herrmann pursued a sociological and iconological approach; in Cologne and in Munich, Carl Niessen and Artur Kutscher followed an ethnographic and mythological direction, respectively. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, Herrmann was dismissed and replaced by a non-scholar, Hans Knudsen. Niessen’s open-air Thingspiel was co-opted to support Nazi ideas of Volkstum. Kutscher renounced his liberal background and joined the Party. In Vienna, Josef Gregor got the local Gauleiter to found a Central Institute for Theatre Studies that disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda. The most egregious case is that of Heinz Kindermann, who rose to be the most influential aesthetician of National Socialism, proposing a biological foundation to theatre studies and offering a racial-eugenic approach to theatre history. As this article demonstrates, in the post-war period, theatre studies sedulously avoided dealing with the Nazi interlude, where official denazification permitted these men and others to carry on teaching and publishing, winning honours and titles. It was not until the 1980s that attempts were made to confront this past. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Conference on Transglobal Theatre. His most recent books include Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters (Routledge, 2013); and (with Sergei Ostrovsky) The Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History (Yale University Press, 2014).

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Poem for Langston

At nineteen what did you know of rivers?Of life's ups and downs, of green currents that led to the open sea.To brilliantly bide time among people not your kind,yet using your gifts of charm and friendship to distractthose who could make your life much harsher.You were always the bright face, handsome, young manwho knew how to talk to people; to make a poem out of themost common of elements; going past limits of race.What did you know of rivers? How to navigate wildrush of circumstances that would change your path in life.What to do with the anguish of the generation before you?To take whatever life threw at you and put it to use.You were always meandering from shore to shore; sometimeswildly thrashing about in currents not of your own making.You moved countless times from your mother to grandmother, fromMissouri to Kansas, to Ohio across so many state lines andeven to Mexico, twice to visit your father. Carrie and Jamespulled you between them hoping to make their dreams yours.Why not go to Europe, study to be an engineer and take over the land?Why not get work, any job to support your mother?Penning poems in your free time; lollygagging, staring out a window.Keen on writing, your dreams were beyond their imagination.What could you know of rivers? Growing up a few milesfrom the Kansas river, its muddy banks a daily view.You lived constantly moving and flowing overrocks and turns in the river as you learned to becomeeverything; student, bus boy, sailor, fellow traveler, reporter,going from screenwriter, poet, translator to Harlem royalty.You went everywhere Russia, Spain, Cuba, Ghana,Nigeria and Asia to become yourself. What did youknow of the Lawrence or the Missouri rivers?Of making your own life of letters and adventure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams”

Abstract “A sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea” (Life in Letters 121), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story “Winter Dreams” is an assessment of his romance with Ginevra King, his first love. This article explores the wealth of direct and indirect, as well as outright arcane, references to facts and incidents in the lives of Fitzgerald and King and their relationship. It argues that in their complexity these references make sense only if the story is read as the author’s deliberate message to Ginevra, devised in continuation of their erstwhile exchange of bits of fiction written for and about each other to discuss aspects of their relationship. An extraneous reference to the autobiographical hero’s Bohemian immigrant mother—wholly incompatible with the author’s biography—likewise points beyond the fictive world of the story and acknowledges the example of Willa Cather, whose novel My Ántonia (1918) had helped Fitzgerald to conceive and shape his own story of Midwestern experience.

In Memoriam: Constance M. Fulmer (21 November 1938–17 March 2020)

Celebrating the life of Constance Fulmer calls for celebration of her two favorite authors: George Eliot and Edith Simcox. Constance has received many tributes from grateful students and colleagues for her contributions as teacher and dean at Pepperdine University. But for those of us still working on Eliot and Simcox, two of her many, many publications will never go out of date: George Eliot: A Reference Guide (1977) and A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998).The early 1980s saw a peak in the number of George Eliot doctoral dissertations. In 1948, when F. R. Leavis installed her in his Great Tradition, he almost singlehandedly ended a fifty-year period during which her novels gained little interest. Afterward, with women's studies flourishing in the 1970s and 1980s, Eliot made an appealing subject: canonical enough to satisfy any dissertation director, yet with miles more to write no matter what literary theory came into fashion. Hence Constance's reference guide showed perfect timing. Not just a list, the guide inserts paragraphs summarizing books and articles of particular interest. By the early 1980s, she had done at least half the research chores needed no matter what approach an ABD working on Eliot was taking in a dissertation.Nor has the Guide lost its usefulness. As research on Eliot goes on, it guards against the real risk of writing things twice over. Hence it remains indispensable for younger scholars. Moreover, certain names recurring therein merit repeated reading: Barbara Hardy, U. C. Knoepflmacher, J. Hillis Miller, Reva Stump, and so many others. No teacher should overlook Jerome Beaty's Middlemarch: From Notebook to Novel (1960), which proves that even Eliot could tell a lie about her creativity—so useful in diverting students who believe in inspiration rather than revision. Beaty's study of the notes for chapter 82 in Middemarch proves that the climactic meeting between Dorothea and Rosamond came not from a fit of inspiration as Eliot claimed but through the less glamorous labor of revising.Meanwhile, Constance found the figure who probably engaged her heart as much as her mind: Edith Jemima Simcox. She and her coeditor Margaret Barfield traveled first to the Bodleian, which held the manuscript of what Simcox called The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, not only a narrative of love for Eliot but an account of Simcox's incredibly various other interests: economics, journalism, fair labor, women's education and jobs, and, yes, manufacturing shirts. (Its misnaming as A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot, Constance confided, was down to the publisher, not herself and Barfield.) In the ninth volume of Gordon Haight's collection of letters (as supplemented by William Baker's ongoing ferreting out of still more letters), more than a hundred of the pages concerning Eliot's later life come from Simcox's Autobiography, of great value at the time (1978) but selected entirely for their references to Eliot rather than for such significant parts of Simcox's life as her service on the London School Board or her attendance as a delegate to trade unions meetings. Just as Haight's biography superseded John Cross's choice of excerpts for his Life in Letters, Fulmer and Barfield have superseded Haight's selections in the ninth volume of his Letters.Constance and Margaret well understood that online research, though wonderfully convenient, can never entirely replace on-site scholarship, including conferences. In Britain, they visited as many locations associated with Eliot and Simcox as possible and generously shared what they saw at countless meetings in photographs and paper readings. They participated enthusiastically in the George Eliot Fellowship, making friends, in particular, with Kathleen Adams. While her generosity of time and spirit reached Constance's students and colleagues at Pepperdine, for readers of this periodical I recommend the Reference Guide and the Simcox Autobiography as the greatest monuments to the scholarship of Constance Fulmer.

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Zora's Legacy: Black Love as Critical and Creative Inquiry

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Marullo, Thomas Gaiton Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky's ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency Marullo, Thomas Gaiton Fyodor Dostoevsky — In the Beginning, 1821–1845: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism (review)

REVIEWS 337 Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky’s ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2015. xv + 204 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. Marullo, Thomas Gaiton. Fyodor Dostoevsky — In the Beginning, 1821–1845: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2016. xi + 293 pp. Directory of Prominent Names. Notes. Source Notes. Index. $59.00. Dostoevskii’s first attempt at a full-scale novel, Netochka Nezvanova, abandoned unfinished at the time of the author’s arrest in 1849, has never received the same level of critical attention as Poor Folk or The Double. It seldom merits more than passing mention in studies of Dostoevskii’s oeuvre as a whole, and has only infrequently been the subject of essays and articles in its own right. This is surprising, given the novella’s importance both as a Russian Bildungsroman, and for its development of the themes we associate with the mature Dostoevskii, not least that of the suffering and innocent child. Thomas Gaiton Marullo has long bucked this trend, with occasional articles on the novella dating as far back as the mid-1980s. The ideas he initially set out therein — in which Netochka herself was generally not the primary focus — have now received significant further development and recasting to centralize the heroine, in a short but very welcome first monograph on the text, Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky’s ‘Netochka Nezvanova’ and the Poetics of Codependency. The book’s corny title notwithstanding, co-dependency proves a very useful concept for analysing Dostoevskii’s only female narrator and precursor to many of the female characters we see in in his post-Siberian works. Marullo is not the first critic to use co-dependency as an interpretative tool; Catherine MacGregor has previously analysed co-dependency in Crime and Punishment (in a doctoral thesis from the University of Ottawa and two articles that are not cited in the present work). However, her focus remains firmly on the question of alcoholism, rather than the range of addictive behaviours and damaging relationships Marullo addresses here. Co-dependency, as Marullo outlines it, takes the form of passive-aggressive relationship addiction, leading to the erasure of boundaries between self and other, ‘in individuals who seek skewed or inordinate fulfilment in people, place, and things apart from themselves’ (p. 1). Indeed, Marullo’s identification of five symptoms of co-dependency (pp. 1–3) resembles a check-list of Dostoevskian character traits: a confused or lost sense of selfhood; problems in discerning and expressing experiences of the world, including an inability to distinguish dreams from reality; exaggerated reactions to events and a tendency to live life at the extremes; a reluctance to acknowledge needs or desires, leading to a refusal to accept anything but their absolute fulfilment; and a tendency to repress a sense of inner inadequacy by demanding perfection from the self. SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 338 Marullo constructs his interpretation through a straightforwardly chronological analysis of the three family relationships Netochka Nezvanova depicts, showing how the same pattern of morbid co-dependency is translated from one situation and set of characters to another. As her step-father Efimov’s appalling treatment of his family distorts the young girl’s worldview, he sets in train a series of events that replicate the original abusive relationship. The interpretation establishes the link between alcohol abuse and the physical and emotional abuse of children in a way that enables a fuller understanding of the significance of the ‘accidental family’ in Dostoevskii’s fictional universe. But occasionally the analysis goes too far. There is a good deal of merit, for example, in the idea that the landowner in whose serf orchestra Efimov played exhibits co-dependent traits, and that like the musician B., and Netochka’s mother, he adds fuel to the fire of Efimov’s addictive personality. But when Princess Katia’s father, Prince X., and even her bulldog Falstaff, received the co-dependency diagnosis, the present reader at least was more sceptical. The Prince’s unmasking as a much less benign character than we may be inclined to think is undoubtedly thought-provoking, but ultimately he appears too briefly, and...

Introduction: "The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800)

Introduction"The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) Nicole Pohl (bio) There is a much higher character than that of a wit or a poet, or a savant, which is that of a rational and sociable being, willing to carry on the commerce of life with all the sweetness and condescension decency and virtue will permit.1 john doran's characterization of Elizabeth Montagu aptly reflects her multifaceted and versatile role in eighteenth-century society. Montagu was and still is known as a prominent author, critic, patron, businesswoman, and salonnière. Through birth, friendship, and marriage she was part of and, at times, the center of important political, literary, and social crosscutting networks that connected the public sphere and the court. She corresponded extensively with leaders of British Enlightenment coteries, such as Edmund Burke, Gilbert West, David Garrick, and Horace Walpole, as well as the Bluestocking inner circle—Elizabeth Carter, Sarah Scott, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Frances Burney, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen. Her vast correspondence (ca. 8,000 extant letters) is now collected in various archives and private collections across the U.K. and the United States; only a few of these have been printed, often in heavily edited versions.2 With such wealth of epistolary material, it is not surprising that her letters [End Page 443] have been described by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg as "among the most important surviving collections from the eighteenth century"3 and that Elizabeth Eger's forthcoming biography is entitled Elizabeth Montagu: A Life in Letters. Doran accentuated Montagu's participation in "the commerce of life" of eighteenth-century polite society with, indeed, "decency and virtue." The meaning of commerce is undeniably multilayered, ranging in the eighteenth century from conversation to "exchange of one thing for another; interchange of any thing" and, of course, to economic trade, according to Johnson's Dictionary (1755).4 In this sense, and as the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued, sociability and conversation, virtue and sympathy were not necessarily seen in contradiction to, but rather helped to embed (and in some ways, justify), commercial activities and pursuit of self-interest for the purpose of the public good. Thus, Montagu elegantly spanned all rubrics of eighteenth-century commerce that Johnson identified; to trade, to correspond and to exchange ideas as a literary critic and essayist, to be a businesswoman, a patron of the arts, and a literary hostess. These economic but, more importantly, social activities produced, according to eighteenth-century political philosophy, civility and refinement of manners, morals, and the arts: "doux commerce."5 It was predominantly the douceur of women that appointed them to exert civilizing influence through mixed-gender sociability in polite society. Montagu exceeded this gender-limited role. While her patriotic and public sociability, particularly in her Bluestocking assemblies, was admired by contemporaries and exemplary, she also sought to influence and correct through her active participation in business, politics, [End Page 444] and the arts.6 In a letter to her husband, Montagu enthusiastically praises the benefits to humankind of his coal business, which, after his death, she took over and expanded successfully: Riches drawn from the bowels of the earth, or gained by commerce, where exchange is still a mutual benefit, present agreeable views of the arts and policy of mankind. Though the coldness of our climate may set coals in a favourable light, I shall be glad to see as many of them turned to the precious metal as possible. I have not enough of the miser, to love treasures hidden and buried. Money is convertible to credit and pleasure; useful in the hands of the prudent; noble in the hands of the generous; pernicious with the bad; ridiculous with the prodigal, and contemptible with the miser.7 Montagu was aware that commerce in the business sense, the transaction of money and the management of industry, shaped civic virtue and moral responsibility as much as her conversations and assemblies civilized the nation. This special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly addresses Elizabeth Montagu's complex and innovative position in eighteenth-century polite society and complements "Reconsidering the Bluestockings" (2002), edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, also...

Catherine Spalding, SCN: A Life in Letters by Mary Ellen Doyle

Catherine Spalding, SCN: A Life in Letters by Mary Ellen Doyle