Private Persona Research Articles

BOOK REVIEW: Mildred Davis Harding.AIR-BIRD IN THE WATER: THE LIFE AND WORKS OF PEARL CRAIGIE (JOHN OLIVER HOBBES).Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996.

Reviewed by: Air-Bird in the Water: The Life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) Flavia Alaya (bio) Air-Bird in the Water: The Life and Works of Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), by Mildred Davis Harding; pp. 535. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996, $65.00, £45.00. About a third of the way into her biography of Pearl Richards Craigie (1867–1906), the singular turn-of-the-century woman who produced an astounding number of novels and plays within the brief span of her pseudonymous career as John Oliver Hobbes, Mildred Davis Harding introduces us to Zoë Procter, Hobbes’s career-long secretary, one of those curiously Jamesian lingerers in the shadows of interesting celebrities. A kind of “odd woman” in the George Gissing style, niece of the fabled poet Adelaide Procter and daughter of a general in the Indian army, Procter (who is familiarly “Zoë” to Harding, as Craigie in her private persona is always “Pearl”), was almost exactly Craigie’s contemporary. But Procter outlived her by half a century, and included revealing recollections of her in her 1960 autobiography, Life and Yesterday. One senses a certain jealousy in Harding’s feeling for this lucky precursor, who had the living Pearl to adore as well as the dead one, and whose taste for the gossip surrounding the lusciously enigmatic “Mrs. Craigie” was nearly as insatiable as her own. Giving Procter’s account of Craigie’s tabloid love-life, Harding reports Zoë’s belated realization “that none of Pearl’s relationships with men ‘contained the least trace of passion.’” She counters with a barbed parenthetical caution against assuming that even “this trusted spinster friend” would have “the whole truth,” but follows it shamelessly with Zoë’s account of a game Pearl had invented in which she shared a boat with all the men in her life, and pondered which of them she could see go overboard in heavy weather: “I would want to save Walter, because he is so weak, but I think it would be Curzon, because he would naturally expect it [. . .]. Of course if the boy (her son) were in the boat, there would be no doubt [. . .]” ; and then she ends the whole episode with the absolutely deadpan observation that the game grew “more complicated” in later years, “when Father Brown was in the boat” (168). It may be difficult to imagine a 480-page biography conducted end-to-end at this level of evenhanded detail, capable of collapsing the silly, the strenuous, the snobbish, and the sentimental into the same superficial plethora. But besides having an enchanting [End Page 360] woman for its subject (a skewering Craigie one-liner can rescue a whole chapter), Harding’s near-genius for superficiality may be what saves her story. There is something about the life and work of Pearl Craigie, however disquieting at its points of crisis, that craves weightlessness. It was she who called herself an “air-bird in the water,” a phrase that in all its ambiguity is purest Pearl on Pearl, a free-bird metaphor paradoxically buoyed in a metaphor for drowning, not only catching her sense of extremity but drawing us into inadvertent empathy with her scared, teasing courtship of the dangers of life. The impression Craigie leaves is less of a risk-taker than of an incurable skimmer of risk, who preferred speeding over the mirror surface of her world to sinking herself into it. She had had one near-suffocating total immersion, when, as the nineteen-year-old American-born Pearl Richards—brilliant daughter of the doting “Yankee pedlar” who successfully marketed American cigarettes and Carter’s Little Liver Pills to the British— she had blithely wed a rich Englishman named Reginald Craigie who promised the stars but turned out virtually on their honeymoon to be a brutal, syphilitic philanderer. They had one child, John—“the boy” in the boat—to whom Pearl was devoted, but she quickly broke with her husband, and in order to gain exclusive custody finally scandalized even the nineties with a lurid divorce suit in 1895. Harding’s account of the court case, though better than any in print (and...

Love, Death and Creation: Boris Pasternak and Two Rilke Requiems

Boris Pasternak's lifelong admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is well known and has been documented in his published correspondence and the autobiographical memoirs Okhrannaia Gramota and Liudi i polozheniia. His translations of Rilke's Requiem fur Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth and Requiem fur eine Freundin may be seen as expressions of this admiration; however, Pasternak's translations of Rilke reflect far more complicated motives than simple homage to a beloved poet's craft.2 In the late 1920s and early thirties Rilke became for Pasternak a touchstone in the evolution of his own public and private persona. Through the Rilke translations Pasternak speaks of the pressures of life and especially byt on creative people, of the growing political pressures on literature, and of his gradual realization that in Soviet Russia the price of creativity may be death. Pasternak also understood that Rilke had consciously constructed his private life-his relationships with women, his insistence upon solitude-so as to serve his art. During these years Pasternak came to realize that he faced the same life dilemmas as the older poet and attempted to follow his example, or at least to justify his actions and needs by invoking the Rilkean model. This essay will discuss the nature and implications of the Rilkean presence in Pasternak's Okhrannaia Gramota, Rekviem, Po odnoi podruge Rekviem and Stikhi moi, begom, begom. Because life and art meet and intertwine in Pasternak's turning to Rilke, my analysis will draw alternately upon Pasternak's letters, memoirs, the relevant Rilke and Pasternak texts and their external referents. When the pianist Mariia Iudina asked Boris Pasternak to translate some Rilke poems for her students in December 1928, he refused: Peqb mia o nepeBoxe HeCKOJIbKHX cTHXOTBOpeHHH Hi3 'Studenbuch,' H X ei oTKa3aJI, noTOMy ITO 6biJI 3aHIT, a KpOMe Toro H aoJIr CBOH naMATHI Rilke HcnojHAio B pyroM coBceM nniaHe,

Seferis and Friends. Some of George Seferis' Friends of the English-Speaking World (review)

Reviews 371 George Thaniel, Seferis and Friends. Some of George Seferis' Friends of the EnglishSpeaking World. Edited by Edward Phinney. Stratford, Ontario: The Mercury Press. 1994. Pp. 143. $14.95. The decision to publish George Thaniel's postiiumous book was certainly a way of paying homage to a scholar who recognized the need for continued research into Seferian archival material. Originally intended as a monograph about Seferis and his "interactions" with prominent English and American scholars, intellectuals, and writers, the manuscript has been published virtually intact in its rough draft form. Included is already published material researched at the Gennadeios Library in Adiens from 1985 to 1986 and in Maro Seferis's personal archive, on Seferis's connections to figures such as T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. Using what might be described as a biographical approach, the book expands upon this base to illuminate our understanding of Seferis's public and private personas. Chapter 1 prints twenty letters written to Seferis during the period 19471970 , and includes a brief introduction. The correspondents include Romilly Jenkins, Stephen Spender, Steven Runciman, Rex Warner, A. R Bury, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, and Eugene McCardiy. Chapter 2, drawing on autobiographical material found in the poet's diaries, reconstructs Seferis's sojourns in England from the 1930s to the 1950s as a representative of the Greek government , and discusses his formative years as a poet and especially his apparent debt to Eliot. Chapters 3 and 4, integrating material from published travelogues and archival sources, focus separately on Durrell and Miller, adding substance to each audior's association with Seferis and dispelling the mythological nature of previous accounts. Providing an assessment of this "work in progress" places die present reviewer in an uneasy position owing to a number of stylistic flaws and omissions in the text, much of which may not have been intended for publication. The fragmentary condition of the first two chapters, for example, prevents a thorough evaluation. They present a mere catalogue of Seferis's contacts with prominent Englishmen and Americans, but offer no organizing principle upon which the material is based. Moreover, the archival sources are not consistendy cited; nor are die secondary sources adequately utilized, except for those that comprise the "pioneering" wave. More recent sources employing a theoretical approach are conspicuously absent. Beyond these problems, there are more serious ones deriving from Thaniel's treatment of Seferis as a public and private figure. He offers no new insight into the problem of Seferis's political versus literary self, a question that has preoccupied scholars for decades. Instead of reverting to a conventional psychoanalytic approach, he employs extraneous evidence to describe the poet's character. For example, to dispel the myth of Seferis's melancholic disposition, he notes how Steven Runciman "sets the record straight" about Seferis "the man": He "was not, in reality, the gloomy person that some people (inferring from his poems) imagine. Seferis had a lively mind and could share a good joke with a friend" (11). 372 Reviews Most problematic is Thaniel's criticism of Seferis's early poetry, especially his insistence that die young poet succumbed to the "influence" of Eliot. He suggests that diis poetry suggests "the ways in which Eliot's themes were skillfully woven into the fabric of Seferis's art. The series of poems Notes for a 'Week'... are in terms of articulation and imagery Eliotic, in contrast to the Stratis the Mariner poems where no Eliotic influence is apparent" (62). Thaniel's approach runs contrary to recent scholarship—for example that of Tziovas, Calotychos, and Leontis—which, rather than link Seferis to the poetics of the high modernists, places him in the context of autochthonous cultural politics. Indeed, Seferis himself refuted the question of influence as early as 1933. "Last year," he wrote in his diary, "I thought that [Eliot] was the first poet whom I have influenced! I could not explain this similarity in our inclinations and quests in any other way" (quoted by Thaniel, p. 60). Thaniel's major contribution is no doubt his research into the Seferis archive. The letters to Seferis dispersed throughout his book reveal gems included in this extensive correspondence, most...

Norman Mailer and Rank's Theory of the Creative Self

The present article investigates Mailer's fiction and non-fiction in relation to Rank's views on creativity. Both Rank and Mailer are interpreted as examples of artists who invent themselves, the former as an intuitive therapist, the latter as the creator of a public and private persona. In Mailer's case, projections of the persona are traced to his fictional alter egos. Special attention is given to analyzing the significance of Mailer's creation of fictional protagonists who act out antisocial, anarchic impulses in a seemingly conflict-free way. This tendency, which characterizes Mailer's work as a whole, is interpreted in non-oedipal terms. Instead, I suggest a theoretical formulation, applicable to many contemporary writers besides Mailer, based on the assumption that patriarchal authority is in the process of disintegration. The reasons for this assumption lie outside the scope of this article but are to be found in rapid social changes reflecting the decline of tradition, including traditional family structure, religion and other patriarchal institutions.

Two Types of Autonomy Accounts

Philosophers’ intuitions about what constitutes autonomy are largely driven by the exemplars or paradigms that we recognize. There are indefinitely many exemplars, inasmuch as there are relatively private personae that serve as autonomy exemplars such as our parents, third grade teacher, or, for the megalomaniac, oneself. But among Western philosophers there are doubtless some exemplars that are widely shared and broadly influential. Philosophical exemplars include Socrates, Aristotle’s magnanimous man, Kant’s noumenal self that is perfectly attuned to the moral law, Mill’s anti-authoritarian non-conformist, Marx’s manin-society (after the higher form of communism is achieved), Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Sartre’s authentic youth who must decide whether to join the French resistance or stay at home for the sake of his mother. Exemplars from outside of philosophy include Antigone, Christ, Faust, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Winston Churchill, and even figures from popular culture such as the baseball player Ted Williams, the free spirited flower children of the 1960s, and practically any character that John Wayne ever played.

“We are more open when we are naked*

Finnish people are noted for their shyness. Shyness and a sense of independence restrict the ease with which they are able to meet strangers. This public persona need not map on the private persona, which may be warm and open to interdependence. Certain cultural institutions articulate the public and private arenas. Paramount among such institutions is the sauna, where Finns realize their responsiveness to personal and communal needs. Even in the sauna, however, norms regulate social behavior.

Billy Bishop Goes to War and Maggie and Pierre: A Matched Set

This article has a double focus: a comparison of two highly theatrical one-actor plays, written and performed in the same period, which both address the same subject: the relationship of the public myth to the private personae of the protagonists; and how the adaptation of each to the medium of television intensifies, often ironically, the dramas' deconstruction of those myths.