When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, he was considered a tragic failure. The New York Times eulogized him by writing that “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” Though he masterfully captured all the mad flash of the Jazz era and the damaged young men of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald’s novels hadn’t been fully recognized for their greatness at the time of his death. Now, of course, one could make a plausible argument that The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of the 20th century. Nonetheless, there’s a lingering sense of what could have been that hangs over the author’s life. How many more great books could have been written if it weren’t for his alcoholism, his bouts with depression, or his famously tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda?
As the facts of his biography ossify into legend, it’s always bracing to see some reminder of the man himself. In the clips above and below you can listen to his actual voice. For reasons that still remain unclear, Fitzgerald recorded himself reading the works of William Shakespeare and John Keats in 1940, the last year of his life.
Above, you can see listen to him read Othello’s speech to the Venetian Senators from Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello. While his delivery doesn’t have the polish of a trained Shakespearean actor, it does have a sonorous, emotive authority to it even when he stumbles and slurs.
And here Fitzgerald recites John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” from memory, which wasn’t quite as good, one imagines, as he hoped. Fitzgerald flubs a bit here, skips a bit there, before grinding to a halt somewhere around line 25. Still, it’s much better than I could have done.
Check the videos out. It might just give you a new appreciation for the author.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Pity the man who has everything. Satisfaction is but fleeting.
One wonders if rock god Mick Jagger might know a thing or two about the condition. He doesn’t seem to know all that much about acting, as evidenced by his turn in The Nightingale episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series.
No matter. His artlessness is part of the charm. As the spoiled emperor of Cathay, he makes no effort to alter his Mockney accent. He also keeps his famous strut under wraps, weighted down by his royal robes (and top knot!).
The emperor demands an audience with a nightingale, after hearing tell of its song, but the toadies who comprise his court are too rarified to locate one in the forest.
A lowly kitchen maid (Barbara Hershey, on the brink of stardom) is the only one with the know how to deliver.
But the emperor is fickle — it isn’t long before his head is turned by a jewel encrusted, mechanics facsimile…a common enough rock n’ roll pitfall.
A large part of Faerie Tale Theater’s magic was the juxtaposition of high wattage stars and extremely low production budgets. There’s an element of student film to the proceedings. The videotape on which it was shot flattens rather than flatters. This is not a criticism. It makes me awfully fond of the big shots who agreed to participate.
In addition to Jagger and Hershey, look for Angelica Huston, Edward James Olmos, and Jagger’s then girlfriend, Jerry Hall, in smaller roles. There’s also Bud Cort of Harold and Maude, flapping around the sparsely decorated forest like a visitor from an entirely different story, nay, planet.
It’s less clear how the great observer of “the Modern Age” would’ve responded to the proliferation of Mommy bloggers.
Their sheer numbers suggest that perhaps female writers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though presumably all of them would be in favor of such a development.)
Ergo, it’s possible for the general public to know of her, without knowing much of anything about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).
The latest animated installment in The School of Life humanities series seeks to remedy that situation in ten minutes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the Western canon and the ever-glamorous Bloomsbury Group, and celebrates her as a keen observer of life’s daily routine. And that by-now-familiar cut-out animation style takes full advantage of the author’s best known head shots.
From the Future Of StoryTelling video series comes an animation featuring Margaret Atwood meditating on how technology shapes the way we tell stories. Just like the Gutenberg Press did almost 600 years ago, the recent advent of digital platforms (the internet, ebooks, etc.) has created new ways for us to tell, distribute and share stories. And Atwood hasn’t been afraid to explore it all, writing stories on Wattpad and Twitter. Atwood will appear at The Future of Storytelling Summit on October 7 and 8.
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When it comes to theories of artistic lineage, few have been as influential as Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, in which the august literary critic argues, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” This kind of misreading—what Bloom calls “misprision”—often takes place between two artists separated by vast gulfs of time and space: the influence of Dante on T.S. Eliot, for example, or of Shakespeare on Herman Melville.
When we come to a study of James Joyce (1882–1941), however, we find the groundbreaking modernist corresponding directly with one of his foremost literary heroes, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), whom Maria Popova calls Joyce’s “spiritual and mental ancestor.” As Bloom points out, Joyce described Ibsen’s work as being “of universal import.” He extolled and defended Ibsen’s then-controversial work in his student days, both in a 1900 lecture he delivered at University College, Dublin, and in an essay he published that same year in the London journal Fortnightly Review. (See the young Joyce above in 1902, at 20 years of age.)
Joyce’s article, “Ibsen’s New Drama,” focused on the playwright’s latest, When We Dead Awaken, and was warmly received by Ibsen himself, who—through his English translator William Archer—described the essay as “velvillig,” or “benevolent.” Archer conveyed Ibsen’s sentiments in a letter soon after the essay’s publication, and thereafter, Joyce’s essay—writes the James Joyce Centre—was “no longer just a review but a review that Ibsen had read and praised.”
Thus began a three-year correspondence between Joyce and Archer, and a friendly relationship—at some remove—between Joyce and Ibsen. In 1901, on the playwright’s 73rd birthday, Joyce wrote a letter to Ibsen directly. He mentions the circumstances of the review and expresses much youthful admiration, self-confidence, and gratitude for Ibsen’s response. The young Joyce laments that his “immature and hasty article” came to Ibsen’s attention first, “rather than something better,” and boasts, “I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of drama.”
Read the letter in full below, in all its exuberant egotism. According to James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, as he matured, the novelist “drew upon Ibsen less for creative encouragement than for psychological inspiration. In Joyce’s mind, Ibsen remained the model of the artist who defies conventional creative approaches and who remains true to the demands of an individual aesthetic.” Whether Joyce “misread” and “creatively corrected” Ibsen is a question I leave for others. You can read many more “fan letters” written by other famous authors to their literary heroes—including George R.R. Martin to Stan Lee, Charles Dickens to George Eliot, and Ray Bradbury to Robert Heinlein—at Flavorwire.
Honoured Sir,
I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any willful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.
What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence — your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims — your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debating-societies, and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead — how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now.
Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies — onward.
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally — but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.
William S. Burroughs, like Christopher Walken, has one of those voices that casts anything he reads in a new light. No matter who the author, if Burroughs reads it, the text sounds like one more missive from the Interzone. In 1995, Burroughs took on the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, reading “The Masque of the Red Death” and the poem Annabel Lee for a little known PC game called The Dark Eye.
Ignored during its release, the game has since gained cult status, and playthroughs can be found on YouTube (see below). Similar in style to Myst, players point and clicked their way through three narratives based on Poe stories, with little interaction. In the end it was more about mood and design, and the creep of Burroughs’ drawl. (He also voiced the old man character in the game.)
Accompanying Burroughs’ reading was a slideshow that popped up in the middle of the game, with art directed (and possibly drawn) by Bruce Heavin, best known these days as the co-founder of Lynda.com. Thomas Dolby composed the gloomy soundtrack. The Dark Eye was the second game from Inscape, which debuted with the equally ambitious Bad Day on the Midway, a game featuring weird music giants The Residents. Two years after The Dark Eye, the sort of CD-ROM games the company made fell behind due to advances in technology, and the fall of the house of Inscape came inevitably in 1997.
The Internet continues to excavate what’s left of these boundary pushing games, and for those who want an audio version of “Masque”, an mp3 can be enjoyed here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Some of the U.S.‘s greatest secular sages also happen to be some of its greatest cranks, contrarians, and critics. I refer to a category that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, and Hunter S. Thompson. The many differences between these characters don’t eclipse a fundamental similarity: not a one embraced any of the usual pieties about the inherent, infallible greatness of Western Civilization, though each one in his own way made a significant contribution to the Western canon. We would be greatly remiss if we did not include among them perhaps the greatest American satirist of all, Mark Twain.
Twain skewered all comers, usually with such wit and invention that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting ourselves. Such was his talent, to deflate puffery in Western literature, politics, religion, and… as we will see, in art. “Throughout his career”—writes UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reactions to Western painting and sculpture, particularly the Old Masters, both in his published works and in private.” He offered up some hilariously irreverent takes on some of the most revered works of art in history: “his opinions are often passionate, sometimes eccentric, and always lively.” Take for example Twain’s tepid assessment of that most recognizable of Renaissance masterpieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpublished draft called “The Innocents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone River, Twain “admitted to being puzzled by the adulation accorded” the painting.
To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “merely a good representation of a serene & subdued face… The complexion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no people of that color.” The painting’s greenish hue prompted one of Twain’s companions, possibly an invention of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked haddock!” “After some discussion,” write the UC Berkeley librarians, “the travelers concede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appreciate certain aspects of art.” Such training in art appreciation seemed to Twain as much genuine education as instruction in studied, insincere poses.
The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Levant on the cruise ship Quaker City in the company of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bourgeois travelling companions’ “conventional appreciation for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California—confessed himself underwhelmed. In particular, he described another Da Vinci, The Last Supper—“the most celebrated painting in the world”—as a “mournful wreck.” (The work was then unrestored; see it above as it looked 100 years later in the 1970s.) Twain later revised his observations for his first full-length book, 1869’s Innocents Abroad, a caricature of ugly American tourists filled with what William Dean Howells called “delicious impudence.” While the others marveled at Da Vinci’s crumbling fresco, Twain, in the current parlance, expressed a great big “meh.”
The world seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not possible for human genius to outdo this creation of Da Vinci’s.… The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
Twain and the professional critics did not always disagree. Take J.M.W. Turner’s famously riotous canvas Slave Ship (or Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever painted by man” and it has come down to us as a violent representation of the horrors of the slave trade, occasioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turner’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and England’s role in condoning and perpetuating slavery’s malevolent legacy.” The anti-slavery, anti-imperialist Twain would surely have appreciated the sentiment; the painting, however, not so much. Other critics felt similarly, one calling Slave Ship a “gross outrage on nature.” Twain’s summation in an 1878 notebook is much more colorful, a piece of vintage Samuel Clemens undercutting: “Slave Ship—Cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
For all his snide portraits of conventional middle-class attitudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cultural attitudes (or Facebook and Google’s attitudes) about nudity. The censored version of the painting above (see the original here) comes to us via Buzzfeed, who write “Remember kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have unironically agreed, railing in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad against the “indecent license” afforded artists and calling Titian’s suggestive reclining nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the internet’s foulest depths.)
Twain’s own meager contributions to the visual arts—consisting of a dozen sketches, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall somewhat short of the standards he set for other artists. Nevertheless, he recalled in The Innocents Abroad his dismay at the “acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions” in the museums and churches across Europe. What, we might wonder, could possibly move such a harsh, unsparing critic? In art, it seems, Twain valued “strict realism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on display in abundance in American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.
After viewing this idealized South American landscape in St. Louis, Twain called the enormous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) canvas a “most wonderfully beautiful painting.” “We took the opera glasses,” he wrote to his brother, “and examined its beauties minutely…. There is no slurring of perspective about it.” He recommended multiple viewings: “Your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in… and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.”
Twain, won over by this sublime spectacle, seems to have temporarily surrendered his critical faculties. In reading his response, I found myself wanting to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy lighting, those lumpy mountains, and the kitschy, overly-sentimental look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s critical arsenal for genuine awe as for amused contempt at what he saw as phony expressions of the same. And that breadth of character is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.
Evoking the playful grotesques of Shel Silverstein, the gothic gloom of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, the occult beauty of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, and the hidden horrors of H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Clarke’s illustrations for a 1926 edition of Goethe’s Faustare said to have inspired the psychedelic imagery of the 60s. And one can easily see why Clarke’s disturbing yet elegant images would appeal to people seeking altered states of consciousness. Clarke, born in Dublin in 1889, came to prominence as an illustrator of imaginative literature—by Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, and others—though he worked primarily as a designer, with his brother, of stained glass windows. Faust was the last book he illustrated, and the most fantastic.
Clarke (1889 — 1931) drew his inspiration from the Art Nouveau movement that began in the previous century with artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt. We see the influence of both in Clarke’s gaunt, elongated figures and his interest in unusual, organic patterns and ornamentation. We can also see—mentions an online Tulane University exhibit of his work—the influence of his own stained glass work, “through use of heavy lines in his black and white illustrations.” The blog Garden of Unearthly Delights notes that “initially Harraps, the publisher, did not like the drawings (Clarke recalled that they thought the work was ‘full of steaming horrors’), and many of the illustrations were finished under pressure.”
Despite the publisher’s reservations, reviews of the 2,000-copy limited edition were largely positive. Reviewers praised the drawings for their “distinctive charms” and “wealth of fantastic invention.” One critic for the Irish Statesman wrote, “Clarke’s fertility of invention is endless. It is shown in the multitude of designs less elaborate than the page plates, but no less intense.” The “page plates” referred to eight full-color, full-page illustrations like the painting of Faust and Mephistopheles above. Additionally, the book contains eight full-page ink wash illustrations, six full-page illustrations in black and white, and sixty-four smaller black and white vignettes.
You can read the Clarke-illustrated poem online here, with the illustrations reproduced, albeit badly. (Also download the text in various formats at Project Gutenberg.) To see many more higher-quality digital scans like the ones featured here, visit 50 Watts and The Garden of Unearthly Delights, which also brings us more quotations from reviewers, including “a negative review of the drawings” that sums up what we might—and what those 60s revivalists surely did—find most appealing about Clarke’s illustrations. They present, wrote a critic in the magazine Artwork,
A dream world of half-created fantasies; the powerless fancies of senile visions; misshapen bodies with wormlike heads; staring eyes of octopuses and reptiles gaze like ponderous saurian of the lost world, while half-finished homunculi change like “plasma” in forms unbound by reason.
That last phrase, “unbound by reason,” could also apply to the weird, nightmarish pilgrimage of Goethe’s hero, and to the shaking off of old strictures that artists like Clarke, his fin de siècle predecessors, and his psychedelic successors strove to achieve.
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