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Gilbert Alter-Gilbert is a critic, translator, and literary historian whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. His book-length translations include:

 The Mirror of Lida Sal by Miguel Ángel Asturias  Streetcorners: Prose Poems of the Demi-Monde by Francis Carco  Manifestos Manifest by Vicente Huidobro  Scarecrow and Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo  Dead Man & Company by Marie Redonnet  Strange Forces: The Fantastic Tales of Leopoldo Lugones.

For Xenos Books, he's working on three short story collections in translation: On a Locomotive and Other Narratives by Massimo Bontempelli (Italian); Metaphysical Tales by Giovanni Papini (Italian); and Unsavory Tales by Léon Bloy (French). For Green Integer Press, he's doing additional book-length translations: The Fantastic Tales of Alberto Savinio [sample] and Jesus Christ, Flashy Adventurer (tentative title, which I think should be made permanent) by Francis Picabia.

Alter-Gilbert has acted as redactor, revisionist, ghost writer, and factotum for many periodicals. He's also an art and architecture critic. In this capacity he's done reviews, catalog essays, and book prefaces.

I first encountered Alter-Gilbert in his role of anthologist, through Life and Limb: Selected Tales of Peril, Predicament, and Dire Distress. He has several other anthologies in the offing, such as Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature for Leaping Dog Press. He discusses some of these forthcoming collections in his first response below, but I want to share his story about The Riddle of Existence: A Compendium of Short Philosophical Fiction: This work was under consideration for publication by OUP, whose editor asked Alter-Gilbert to cut the length of the manuscript from 2,000+ pages to just over 200.

Some of the many authors Gilbert Alter-Gilbert has translated: Cristina Peri Rossi, Max-Pol Fouchet, Francis Jammes, Mohamed Choukri, Kajii Motojiro, Rodrigo Rey Rosa,Enrique Anderson-Imbert, Felisberto Hernández, Ana María Shua, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Santiago Dabove, Marco Denevi, Fernando Sorrentino, Jean Richepin, Augusto Monterroso, Norberto Luis Romero, Charles Nodier, and Meliton Barba.

Above, Photograph: Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, oil portrait by Valentin Popov, 2002 Below, Photograph: Portion of Gilbert Alter-Gilbert collection of literary memorabilia

*****

This post will morph slightly over the next few weeks as I add additional links to the authors and movements Alter-Gilbert discusses. (I'll also attempt to add accent marks to names. I realize I'm incredibly inconsistent with accents throughout my entire blog.)

I'll soon post excerpts from Alter-Gilbert's translations of Asturias, Carco, Huidobro, Lugones, Redonnet, and Girondo. He has also given me permission to post his not-yet- published translation of "The Infusion" by Léon Bloy.

Alter-Gilbert provided me with some anecdotes from literary history. These appear in a gray, italic font throughout the interview.

*****

The Interview

JRMS. --Leaping Dog Press will publish two of your anthologies of international writing and you've edited anthologies in the past.* Can you talk about the genesis of the two new collections, how long it took you to compile them, and discuss your research methods? How do you make selections – out of often vast oeuvres – from previously untranslated authors?

A-G. --The anthologies slated for publication by Leaping Dog Press are Pulse of Doom: Selected Tales of Fate and Fatalism and Gnostic Clock: A Tenebrist Miscellany. Pulse of Doom is intended as a sort of sequel to my compilation Life and Limb: Selected Tales of Peril, Predicament and Dire Distress, an earlier collection of short fiction concerned with the operations of destiny (even if masquerading as chance or coincidence) in human affairs. In Life and Limb, the emphasis is on situations of immediate jeopardy: in one story, a teenager, on a dare, scales the crumbling ladder of a derelict gas tower, gets stuck when some of the rusted rungs collapse, and finds himself dangling precariously in mid-air, unable to go up, unable to come down; in another, a man walking home through a field overgrown with tall grass tumbles into an abandoned shaft and finds himself trapped in a pit from which he can't escape – the common denominator of these accounts is the existential predicament of immediate physical threat to life and limb. InPulse of Doom, the focus is on tales of predestination in which, no matter how drastic or devious the extremes the protagonist may adopt in an effort to outwit fate, everything slowly eventuates towards a foreordained conclusion. Detonation may be delayed, in other words, but is nonetheless inevitable. The second anthology scheduled by Leaping Dog is Gnostic Clock, a compilation of dark and pessimist writings down the ages. I've always been fascinated by this genre because it appeals to my Schopenhauerean tendencies. The pessimist attitude naturally strikes a responsive chord in anyone spiritually honest, since the fact of the matter is that the human condition, metaphysically speaking, is largely, if not ultimately, one of solitude and forlornity, despite all the warm and fuzzy expedients man has contrived to conceal it. As for why I am attracted to the anthology format, I suppose it's because I have a deep- seated taxonomic streak. Something in me wants to scientifically classify everything, analyze, dissect. (In literature, the Goncourt brothers notably exhibited that proclivity.) There are rich fields for discovery still waiting to be explored. What slays me is that there are major research departments, programs, facilities and staffs devoted to absurdly precious and insular endeavors such as examining glove styles or eating habits during the time of Ben Jonson instead of opening up entire bodies of literature neglected or never adequately appreciated or understood. Pulse of Doom was one of several anthologies I researched simultaneously at one period. The others were The Riddle of Existence: A Florilegium of Short Philosophical Fiction; Saturnian Harvest: Selected Tales of the Grotesque and the Malign; Worlds Within Worlds: An Omnibus of Imaginative Literature; and Anthology of Alogical Literature. With regard to investigative methods, I'm omnivorous, ruthless – I plow through everything indiscriminately, covering all the global troves. Where literary production is concerned, cultures are most definitely not created equal, but where ore is present, there are often vast depths and recesses which have not been adequately tapped, and where the skein of literary excellence is rich and abundant. In compiling the anthologies I consulted publishers' catalogs, drew upon resources of libraries around the country, made many pilgrimages to university reading rooms and catacombs containing special collections, used interlibrary loan services, the internet, scanned the latest publications in the bookstores, and followed up references hoarded over a lifetime of reading. Along the way, I encountered a certain amount of obstructionism but, occasionally, help from unexpected quarters. It's amazing how difficult it's become to obtain certain titles. Alas, ours is a post-literate era! At any rate, when I do hit the library, I tend to roll through the stacks like a threshing machine, just gobbling up everything in sight. When I find a prospective diamond in the rough, I make a quick mental translation, or seek a translation or compact exegesis in English, if it exists. But my decoding faculties are fallible, and I can't get to everything. There are always more treasures waiting to be unearthed – after all, that's what keeps things interesting… ***** "Balzac kept wax dolls in his desk drawer as writing aids to remind him of his characters."

*****

JRMS. --From reading your many introductions and prefaces, I know you think a lot about how to introduce the authors you translate to English-speaking audiences. Do you like writing these intros? Do you think of yourself as a literary historian? Who are your role models as literary historians?

A-G. --I regard the function of introducing authors as a sacred office, and approach it with the utmost solemnity. I enjoy the impresario factor – it's a quiet but genuine thrill to introduce a "new," important writer. I like writing prefaces and introductions because so many authors are intriguing personalities and their lives are every bit as dramatic and poignant (and, in some cases, mysterious) as their works. As I've written neither a full- length literary biography nor a full-length book of criticism, I think it unlikely anyone in authority would officially consecrate me a literary historian as such, unless it was to extend membership in the League of Soi-disants. Admittedly, however, if I may be permitted to indulge in a modest exercise in self-stylization, I suppose I can legitimately claim to practice a sort of esoteric literary archaeology which entails sustained and repeated forays into the adjunct disciplines of paraphilology and cryptohermeneutics. Literary historians I admire are too numerous to list. Off the top of my head, I would mention John Drinkwater, Joanna Richardson, Roger Shattuck, Angel Flores, H. P. Lovecraft, Louis Untermeyer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Vangelisti, Seymour Menton, Enid Starkie, Wallace Fowlie, Jorge Luis Borges, Douglas Messerli, Clifton Fadiman, Robert Peters, Michael Richardson, Babette Deutsch, John Fitzell, C. M. Bowra, Arthur Symons, Leon Vincent, Chris Baldick, Lafcadio Hearn, the Goncourts, de Quincey, Michael Holyroyd, Lewis Turco, William Hazlitt, André Breton, Max Brod, Edmund Wilson, Mario Praz, Gary Kern, and George Slusser. Historians and critics I don't admire would comprise at least as long a roster. As for theorists in the mold of René Wellek (and anyone who has seen his personal library will readily concede his breadth of learning), the attempt to systematize the span of all things (an impulse to which I myself am profoundly prey) is, by its very nature, doomed to failure, and inevitably backfires so that we wind up exiting through the same door as in we went. The highly entertaining, cerebral antics of the semiotics-structuralist-post-structuralist- deconstructivist-situationist crowd – Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al., makes for great intellectual diversion but ultimately leaves a bitter taste in the mouth when everything gets lost in a labyrinth of circular saws and cognitive cul-de-sacs. Except for the fun factor inherent in the sheer ludic dynamic which drives them, these new systems, attitudes and approaches ultimately prove synthetic and empty, and bear an uncomfortable resemblance to all the dry-as-dust scientific and mathematical methodologies that have shanghaied philosophy during the past century. If you could package it as a weapon and dispense it as an aerial spray, you could neutralize entire populations – leaving them limp and dizzy and screaming for analgesics…

***** "William Faulkner, on the occasion of being invited to speak at the University of Mississippi shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize (while all his books were out of print), declared, 'When I was here, you had nothing to say to me. Now I have nothing to say to you.'"

*****

JRMS. --You mentioned that you were going to publish a couple volumes with John Calder, though he retired before this could happen. What were the projects?

A-G. --The first project was to have been a volume of short stories by Alberto Savinio. The second was to have been any book I chose to do. A generous offer! Unfortunately, the dogs of indigence closed in on Calder and forced him to shut down what had become a literary institution – a backlist of 5,000 serious titles, all of the highest order – many classics, many, many works in translation – all the top guns of twentieth century letters – Calder was, for example, Robbe-Grillet's English publisher. He was a close personal friend of Samuel Beckett, and also his publisher. He published in English translation all the newest plays in European theater. Actually, my understanding with Calder immediately preceded his bankruptcy, not his retirement. Despite desperate business reverses, Calder valiantly soldiered on from that period of fifteen years ago or so, and persevered in what he considered a bitter-cold cultural climate in Britain, Europe and the rest of the world, making a stand until finally overwhelmed by the forces of philistinism and driven into retirement, still defiant, this past year. [Ed. One World Classics purchased Calder's backlist.] Calder is a fascinating figure. A gentleman of the old school, he will always hold a shining place in my memory as the perfect picture of a proper British publisher, in his double-breasted navy blue blazer, with one brass button missing, stoically holding forth about toeing the line against the predations of all-encroaching barbarism. Calder authored an indispensable apologia for literary endeavor entitled The Defence of Literature, in which he asserted that writers ought to be coddled and cherished and supported in every possible way as a priceless cultural resource. Now, here are the thoughts of an enlightened individual! I count myself fortunate to have met him and to have met in Paris, years earlier, when he was already of advanced age, another legendary publisher, José Corti – both inspiring, dedicated, visionary men. "Men of insight, men of granite, knights in armor bent on chivalry" as Van Morrison would say. As fate would have it, an edition of Savinio short stories appeared from Atlas Press about a year or two after Calder and I discussed ours. The translation, by James Brook, is excellent. [Ed.: see this post.] Meanwhile, a fresh collection of Savinio stories translated by little me, consisting of the original mix and a number of additional items, is tentatively scheduled for publication by Green Integer. A professional recording of character actor Paul Benedict reading many of the early translations was made in the late 1990s, and was to have been released by Audio Literature, Inc. of San Francisco. Whether or not that recording will ever reach the marketplace remains to be seen, but it must be noted that Benedict's renditions of the Savinio texts are sparkling and delightful; a voice better suited to the material can't be imagined. [Ed.: This is the same Paul Benedict

who played Harley Bentley, the tall, eccentric neighbor on The Jeffersons and the Mad Painter on Se same Street!]

***** "Paul Valéry considered himself a businessman and not an artist, and thus it was that he published his works in exquisite, highly limited editions, in order to command high prices."

*****

JRMS. --Tell us about one of the authors you've translated for Green Integer, Francis Carco.

A-G. --Francis Carco was the very prototype of the Left Bank bohemian of the early years of the twentieth century. He was the chronicler of the demi-monde – the "netherworld" inhabited by pimps, prostitutes, burglars, street toughs, petty criminals of all sorts. In treating this shadowy milieu – his chosen subject – he walked a tightrope slung between sympathy and dispassion. He was also a biographer and critic who hobnobbed with everyone who was anyone in the art scene of his day. There is a three or four hour documentary about Jean-Paul Sartre available at your local video rental store which contains, towards the end of the last reel, some footage of an awards banquet in Paris, where all the literary heavyweights – the Legion of Honor set – have turned out. Lo and behold, there, a couple of years before his death, stands Francis Carco with his large, leonine head and mane of dark hair, wearing a tailored suit, puffing on a Gauloises, cutting an ironic figure as the most distinguished and stately of the lot! *****

"Jack London hired a young Sinclair Lewis, among others, to furnish him with plot outlines and story ideas."

*****

JRMS. --Have you looked into the South-American / French literary cross-pollination that seemed to happen repeatedly in the early twentieth century?

A-G. --Of course, but, in this regard, I must defer to the observations and analyses of the leading authority on this phenomenon – Jason Weiss – whose masterful study The Lights of Home illuminates the matter admirably. So many of the Latins spent time in Paris, soaking up the latest trends during the formative years of Surrealism and so on … the most significant of them chummed around together while consorting with the rest of the international Parisian avant-garde. Uncannily (or, inexorably), several of the most famous of these epochal cultural cohorts were roommates!

JRMS. --You've translated numerous writers from Argentina. I know you're interested in writers such as Lugones (and even earlier authors never published in English) who influenced Borges. Can you discuss some of them?

A-G. --Lugones was a monster of intellect and, at the same time, something of a bête noire, a freak. He was an autodidact as well versed in science as in letters, and unquestionably one of the leading Latin American minds of his time. His immediate Argentine antecedents were Eduardo Holmberg, whose work (except for one short story) hasn't been translated into English, and Eduardo Wilde. Holmberg was heavily influenced by the German Romantics; Wilde by the English and French Naturalists. The prose of these illustrious pioneers is poetic and highly colored, if quite unalike in other respects. Borges can trace his patrimony as a proponent of "imaginative literature" through Lugones, Holmberg and Darío and beyond them to European and American (i.e., Hawthorne and Poe) models who influenced them. Borges worshiped Leopoldo Lugones, who was his idol although, when he was young, Borges made a remark Lugones considered insolent. Lugones challenged Borges (whom he hadn't met) to a duel and, when informed of Borges's blindness, reportedly said, "In that case, you had best advise that impudent whelp not to make opprobrious comments he is not prepared to defend with his person!" Stern, proud, courtly and ceremonious, Lugones held supreme sway over Argentine letters during his lifetime (1874 - 1938) until he fell desperately in love with a tender young flower of Argentine femininity by the name of Emilia Cadelago. He idealized her with all the glory and majesty a great poet at the height of his powers could bring to bear, but he was a married man thirty years her elder and when the beloved senorita, mortified and ostracized because of the situation, refused to prolong their liaison, Lugones committed suicide a la Werther. Borges was influenced by another important contemporary: the eccentric, if avuncular, philosopher manqué Macedonio Fernandez who, though a fully licensed attorney, preferred to spend his days (and most of all, his nights) strumming his guitar and indulging in fanciful metaphysical speculation. A sort of offbeat eminence grise of the Pampas, Fernandez was better known for his personality than for his writing, the best of which is marked by satire and sardonic paradox. Perhaps it was Fernandez who, with his twisted humor, fostered in Borges the acerbic wit and penchant for the felicitous phrase which led him to mint such gems as "the original is unfaithful to the translation" and, when someone clumsily attempted to slight his friend Santiago Dabove by remarking that he had written only one book, Borges quipped, "Yes, but how many people have written even one?" Borges must be credited with formulating his own literary modalities, original and distinct. Despite being thoroughly steeped in the grand cosmopolitan tradition of fantastic fiction, Borges managed to fashion a body of work that is not discernibly derivative and, for the most part, is cut from whole cloth. But he didn't spring from a vacuum…

*****

"Rilke, who cherished women and flowers with equal relish, contracted blood poisoning from a wound to his hand caused when he was pricked by a thorn from a bouquet of roses he offered up in an act of courtship; the wound became infected and killed him."

***** JRMS --I'm fascinated by fleeting literary schools of the nineteenth century. Can you discuss some of the French movements: the frantic school, bouzingos, Jeune France, salons of Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier?

A-G. --The Nodier and Hugo cenacles, as they came to be known, were more or less coeval and somewhat overlapped. Nodier's came first. It convened at the Arsenal Library, where Nodier, whom one scholar has dubbed "the pilot of French Romanticism," held court. Regulars included Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Alexandre Dumas and Alphonse de Lamartine. As chief librarian (in the Borges - Paz mold), Nodier presided over evenings which resembled gala fetes or small palace balls more than conventional salons. Soirees at the Arsenal were fashionable affairs at which dandified men of letters and other glitterati mingled with elegant ladies in gaily-bedecked rooms enveloped by exchanges of dazzling conversation in a cocktail party atmosphere. Nodier's daughter was apparently quite a dish, and it was chiefly her allure that was the magnet for many of the young poets in attendance. Hugo frequented the Arsenal gatherings and soaked up Romanticist doctrine while formulating plans to bring together artists of like mind intent on ushering in the new school and dethroning the classicism then prevailing over aesthetic endeavor. After collaborating with Emile Deschamp on the journal La Muse Francaise (the unofficial organ of French Romanticism), which drew still more young bloods such as the budding luminaryProsper Mérimée, to the cause, Hugo, in conjunction with Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, formed a second cenacle, which began to hold meetings of its own. These consisted largely of readings and recitations excitedly received by appropriately emotional devotees in the more-or-less reserved, if romantically-inflected setting of Hugo's medieval- décor-drenched home. Participants, in keeping with what was not so much a tenet as a tendency of Romanticism – that of hero-worship – gravitated to Hugo, as they had orbited around Nodier before him. Hugo resoundingly achieved his goal of displacing classicism with the success of his play at the notorious Battle of Hernani (where he had packed the playhouse with Romanticist sympathizers) and, having won the day, no longer felt the need for concerted activism. (Though, for the rest of his life, he continued to attract followers and hangers-on wherever he went.) At around this time, a group of relatively recent recruits to the Hugo circle – Theophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Gerard de Nerval, et al., splintered off to form the Petit Cenacle – a dedicated cell of extremists determined to carry Romanticism to even wilder heights. Hugo, Nodier, Deschamps and their confederates in the first wave cenacles were known as the Grand Romantics in contradistinction to the Petit Cenacle constituents, known as the Lesser Romantics. Later, the members of the Petit Cenacle changed their name to Les Jeunes France (Young France). All the while, a flurry of coetaneous cliques and coteries swirled around both Sainte-Beuve and Deschamps. The Frantic School was closely associated with Nodier and those writers who shared with him a predilection for supernatural themes, vampire lore, and other dark subject matter derived from the gothic novel which, it must be remembered was, in the 1820s and 1830s, still a relatively new phenomenon of which certain elements enjoyed a lingering fashion. The gothic novel created a huge sensation in its day, and stock features of crumbling, fog- enshrouded ruins, forsaken glades, haunted castles, chain-rattling ghosts and doom-laden protagonists filled readers with dread, frenzy and hysteria; hence the term "frantic." The Frantic School is also known as the Frenetic School. A good example in this vein is Nodier's collection of tales and anecdotes Infernaliana. I like to think of Aloysius Bertrand, too, as a writer of this brand. Among the public-at-large, Frenetic School came to be known as one of the synonyms for the Bouzingo. The Bouzingo (sometimes called Bousingo or Bousingots, and meaning noise, racket, uproar, ruckus) were a collective of flamboyant Bohemian writers and artists probably named after the roaring boys of seventeenth century England. Forerunners of Anthony Burgess's Droogs, the roaring boys were drunken rowdies who traveled in packs, blustering boisterously through the moonlit streets of London, roughing up passersby, ambushing maidens and generally wreaking havoc and raising Cain. Jaded, disaffected youth out on a tear, they were amoral pranksters intent on amusement at any cost. No matter how much mayhem they brought about, they were generally left alone because of their aristocratic affiliations. It was undoubtedly these same ruffians who gave rise to the expression rakehell. The Bouzingo drank from human skulls, played musical instruments at all hours, conducted orgies and dabbled in drugs. In fact, it was the Bouzingo outgrowth from the original Petit Cenacle crew – Gautier, Nerval, Bertrand and Borel who, along with newcomers Philothee O'Neddy [Ed.: great name], Augustus MacKeat, Joseph Bouchardy, Alphonse Brot and Xavier Forneret, instituted the celebrated Hashish- Eaters Club. The Bouzingo group, though posing as an antithesis to Nodier's official romanticism, was simply an offshoot of the broader trend and took its cue from the "black" romanticism of Nodier as represented by his vampire and ghost stories and the sort of dark subject matter, lurid scenes and settings, gloomy harbingers and brooding metaphysics usually associated with Edgar Allan Poe; "black" in this context harks back to the terms "black magic" and "black mass" and suggests overtones of forbidden knowledge, unspeakable secrets and dark doings. Much of this was conceived in emulation of the Byronic anti-hero, who was the bearer of hidden griefs, a scandalous past and foretokenings of doom; Nerval and Gautier favored ornate descriptive prose, and reveled in bringing to life far off places and times in a highly vivid fashion. They all brought psychology into their writings in a big way – but then, so did Nodier. Though not all of the second-generation Romantics had spent time at Nodier's cenacle, their concerns weren't much different than his; the difference was one of degree. They wanted to prove themselves more daring, more willing to go out on a limb, to delve into hitherto uncharted, proscribed territory, to flaunt taboo. They probably regarded the somewhat older Nodier as a bit formal and tame for their tastes, that's all. This being said, Bouzingo wasn't the only literary shock squad to surface in the wake of the Petit Cenacle. Soon a motley array of movements was flitting across the stage; following them all is like chasing a chameleon through a kaleidoscope. Binding their adherents was a passionate pledge to a credo of agitation, provocation and subversion and a tireless enforcement of their chosen directive to shock society, skewer the bourgeoisie, and banish any remaining arbiters of classicism whom they regarded as a bunch of ninnies. At one point, French writer Jules Levy organized a series of exhibitions featuring work by a group facetiously called the Incoherents (Incomprehensibles), which came to be a catch-term for all manner of artistic fauna of the period. There were the Hydropathes (Water Drinkers), which had boasted the participation of Henry Murger in its first incarnation; the Hirsutes (Hairies); the Fumistes (Humbugs); the Chat-noiristes (Black Cats) or Chat-nouristes (Cat Feeders), named in honor of their hang-out, the Chat Noir cabaret, where they purred their satires, songs and poetry; the Zutistes (Kiss-Offs), who claimed Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Germain Nouveau and Charles Cros among their number and who took particular delight in mercilessly deriding the Parnassians (famously, the Countess Nina de Villard hosted a vibrant Parisian salon which welcomed Zutistes and Parnassians both!); and the unforgettably denominated Jemenfoutistes (F***-Alls). Many of these subsets or cells of the Petit Cenacle or, at least, of its spirit were simply loose-knit aggregates of writers, painters, dramatists, actors, musicians, flaneurs, faineants, cut-ups and cognoscenti who banded together at cafes and studios for all-night gab sessions and general camaraderie. Then there were the Meditators, dilettanti who produced no art but considered themselves artists by dint of sensibility alone. [Ed.: "Baby that's me."] Striving to match or outdo their escapades was a crowd of still more revolutionary scribes: the vers- librists; the instrumentistes; and of theories: paroxysme; synthetisme; integralisme. In contrast, the Parnassians comprised a major movement of late nineteenth-century France. C. M. R. Leconte de Lisle, Theodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Francois Coppee, Catulle Mendes and Jose Maria de Heredia constituted the nucleus of their society. Originally designated by the labels Les Impassibles, Les Formistes or Les Stylistes, the Parnassians rejected Romanticism in favor of a detached, objective outlook and their program evolved into a formal, structured movement that rose to prominence and maintained itself on the stage for some time. Besides the Symbolists and Decadents, the other important late nineteenth-century movement was, of course, Naturalism, the conscious development of which was pursued by the Medan group, centered around Emile Zola. Assembling at Zola's country residence were perennial members Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexia, and Leon Hennique. Similar to Parnassianism in its dismissal of Romanticism, if not sharing Parnassianism's lofty dispassion and Olympian ideals, Naturalism laid the foundation for several species of modern fiction.

All in all, a very turbulent, very fertile epoch…

[Ed.: The above response will keep me busy for months.]

*****

"A one-of-a-kind, jewel-encrusted copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam fabricated over the course of a year by Tiffany's in New York, went down with the ill-starred Titanic."

***** (A-G's Genealogy of the Cruel Tale from Bakunin v.6, 1997)

JRMS. --You've translated and written about "the Cruel Tale." How does this fit into the larger movements of the time?

A-G. --It fits into them and stands apart from them, simultaneously. The cruel tale is not a movement, but a genre. The term conte cruel was coined in 1870 by the French writer Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam to characterize the stories in his eponymous collection published that year. In effect, the genre goes back many centuries, even to Roman times. Examples pop up here and there, in the Middle Ages, in the eighteenth century. But, after Villiers de L'Isle-Adam created the tag, the name stuck and the cruel tale came into its own, being implemented consciously and deliberately as a specific form ever since. The cruel tale is marked by bitter irony and by a mocking fate expressing the disdain of the cosmos for puny mortals and their best-lain plans. The so-called "dark" romantics – those who dwelt on unsavory aspects of existence and on matters of the occult and shadowy metaphysical questions, produced a number of cruel tales. Succeeding generations, represented by such figures as Alphonse Daudet and Jean Richepin in France, and by Ambrose Bierce in the United States, served up a rich banquet of cruel tales during the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the period contemporaneous with Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, or immediately following. In the twentieth century, with the explosion of modernism, the "cruel" tradition continued and expanded on many fronts around the globe, perhaps most notably in Latin America and in Asia. Some of its practitioners have been adherents to clearly-defined aesthetic schools and movements, some have not. At the present time can be found some superb variants on the cruel tale tradition in the works of Liliane Giraudon and Marie Redonnet in France, and Takashi Atoda in Japan.

*****

"Lovecraft spoke with an English accent, though no one in his family was British and, not only did he never visit England but, in his entire lifetime, never ventured farther than 500 miles (in order to visit Richmond, Virginia, the city of which his literary idol, E. A. Poe, always regarded himself a citizen) from his ancestral home on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. Through correspondence, Lovecraft entered into a marriage agreement with a lady before he had ever actually seen her; their original acquaintance was as pen pals."

*****

JRMS. --Tell us about Oliverio Girondo.

A-G. -–As the scion of a family of Argentine beef barons, Girondo had the means and the leisure to put himself at the service of public cultural enrichment, which he did, generously and unstintingly, throughout his life. Money from the family cattle empire afforded him, like other wealthy Latin literati such as the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, to engage, along with his wife the poet Norah Lange, in extravagant enterprises of personal indulgence such as champagne-and-cocaine-laced voyages beneath the stars on the decks of glamorous transatlantic ocean liners plying the distances between Buenos Aires and Cherbourg and to bring back from Europe the latest intellectual trends and aesthetic ideas. Because his literary output was slight, some have accused him of indolence of mythic proportions, but such an assessment is probably unjustly harsh, because Girondo's mental formation was such that he sought a chimerical and impossibly elusive aesthetic absolute. He wasn't interested in pursuing existing writing styles, no matter how avant-garde or experimental. In fact he was so perfectly and intrinsically an avant-gardist, spiritually speaking, that he was determined to attain absolute originality and absolute purity, or to create nothing. The most significant aspect of his trajectory as a literary artist was his quest after linguistic essences. In this he shared the concerns of poets such as Francis Ponge, Roberto Juarroz, Peter Handke, and Vicente Huidobro. In between hosting salons and soirees for the Argentine cultural set and boosting the careers of countless younger literary aspirants, Girondo spent a lifetime cloistered in his study, amidst looming wall-to-wall ledges of recondite and recherché tomes, searching out the polyperspectival meanings and music, oblique verities and poetic valences resident in the spaces in and around the semiotic prisms of words and their linkages. Like the alchemists of old, Girondo seemed convinced that if he could milk a single word for all it was worth, if he could bleed it dry, exhaust it, drain it completely, he would arrive at a result akin to the splitting of an atom, or the conversion of base metal into gold. He was also convinced, years before Harold Pinter came on the scene that, in any syntax, there is as much meat in lapses and lacunae, as in words themselves. He was gravely injured in a car accident, from which he suffered horribly the last few years of his life. When he was informed that the house of his birth was to be demolished and paved over with a new boulevard, he joked, with characteristic black wit, that he had been killed in the same place he'd been born: in the middle of the street…

JRMS. -- You've translated some writers with appalling political views (like Céline) -- do you know of any international writers of great quality who have been buried because their political views were trash?

A-G. --Yes – Léon Bloy! Strictly speaking, it was his religious, not political, views which got him in trouble. Like Céline, he was anti-Semitic – or, rather, he was Semitophobic, you might say. Nevertheless, he believed that the Jewish people would redeem mankind and rescue the planet and he wrote a book titled Salvation Through the Jews! Bloy is a titanic moralist. In his manner, his attitude, his writings, his whole relationship to the world, he resembles an Old Testament prophet! He is terrifying! Giovanni Papini is another who is underrated because of his religious beliefs. Marxist troglodytes who stalk the groves of academe have deemed that writers with religious foundations should not be taken seriously. It's inexcusably petty to dismiss such writers out of hand merely on account of their religious proclivities. Cotton Mather is arguably more interesting to read than the majority of recent Nobel laureates and Bloy and Papini endured personal hardships and spiritual struggles that put to shame those of Augustine and St. John of the Cross and make them look like namby-pambies. The precious, hand-wringing academic mafiosi who blackball such writers are a pack of pretentious, politically-correct poltroons. Countless brilliant writers have been suppressed or, worse, ignored, simply on account of unorthodoxy. The roster ranges from Johann Most, the German anarchist who, at the other end of the religious scale, penned the atheist classic The God Pestilence, to the children's writer Eugene Field, best known as the author of Wynken, Blynken and Nod, whose sub rosa texts contain hundreds of imaginative terms for the human pudenda.

JRMS: -- Do you think some things are untranslatable?

A-G: -- No. Translation is an interpretive art and, as such, infinitely plastic, infinitely flexible. Any given work is translatable in an infinite number of versions. The bigger question is: what is translation and what is mistranslation? Or, to put it another way: is there such a thing as false translation?

*****

And thus concludes the first interview on A Journey Round My Skull (which is somehow now one year old).

Hopefully there will be follow-up interviews with Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. (Notice that I optimistically numbered this interview.) I'd like to hear more of his thoughts on translation, mistranslation, and false translation.

Notes:

*I flubbed the math in my first interview question, which A-G works around in his response. Life and Limb is the only anthology currently in print (as of August 2008), though Pipe Dreams should be coming later this year. Leaping Dog's editor and publisher, Jordan Jones, confirms that he's behind schedule. I'll update the publication status as I get more details.

Tadanori Yokoo, Finger Cutting Ceremony, detail

Taedium Vitae Farewell Notes of Japanese Literary Suicides

By Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

mono no aware – Japanese phrase meaning "the pathos of things"

In Japan, longstanding tradition has perpetuated several honorable categories ofseppuku, or ritual suicide; a fact reflected by the Japanese language, which contains many terms for specific forms of shi, or death. Shinju is the word for suicide which fulfills a pact between lovers. Roshi refers to death from old age, while gokuraku-ojo is the death (of a woman) through prolonged sexual intercourse. Senshi is what death in war is called; junshi designates the suicide of a warrior who follows his lord to the grave. Perhaps the best-known exemplars of this code of martial martyrdom were the Samurai, adepts of the art of Bushido, who were emulated in spirit by the members of the ikosyu, the Japanese suicide squadrons of World War II: the kamikaze, kaiten, and aoka pilots who rammed airplanes, midget torpedo-submarines, and manned missiles into enemy craft.

Japanese culture is probably the only one in which, besides leaving a last will and testament, a concomitant tradition of writing a jisei—a death poem, or "farewell to life"— has arisen, and in which the suicide note is cultivated as a literary form.

Twentieth-century Japan (particularly during the Showa period, 1926 – 1989) has been rich in literary development. Writers such as Shiga Naoya, Arishima Takeo (who committed suicide in 1923), Junichiro Tanizaki, Sato Haruo, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa comprised the White Birch School; there were also the Neo-perceptionists Yokomitsu Riichi and Yasunari Kawabata, as well as proponents of the business novel, the pop novel, and postmodernism. As the Buraiha or anti-literary establishment writers, roughly comparable to the beats in the U.S. or the new novelists in France, challenged prevailing artistic standards, they were complimented by pure aestheticists such as Tanizaki, who wrote In Praise of Shadows; the cruel and abberantly fixated Mishima; the existentialist Dazai; and the hedonist-nihilist Ryu Murakami. Some followed the Romantic tradition, some Naturalism, while the emergence of the so-called "I-novel" — confessional, autobiographical, psychological— heralded a modern sensibility, colored by a deep strain of pessimism. Of these many significant authors, several were suicides, including three of the most prominent: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, and Yukio Mishima. Each of them left an embarkation missive, expressing defiance or resignation.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa, born March 1, 1892 in Tokyo, drank poison and died in the same city, July 24, 1927. His father named him Dragon-helper because he was born at the dragon hour on a dragon day in the dragon month of a dragon year. Both of his parents went insane. A pure artist, he has been called an "arbiter of elegance in the vicious society in which he lived." In Akutagawa, as in Edgar Allan Poe, a curious dichotomy of pessimism and dark thought combined with a quest for what he termed "supreme beauty." Akutagawa was a major proponent of the gothic / grotesque vein which runs through the work of other Japanese writers such as Sato Haruo, Junichiro Tanizaki, Kajii Motojiro, Edogawa Rampo, Kobo Abe, and Nakajima Ton.

Best known for his story Rashomon, Akutagawa had a penchant for the strange and disturbing, cultivating what one critic called a "disgusting realism" steeped in the macabre. Akutagawa stories often have a basis in old Japanese folk tales; many, such asThe Nose, are fraught with obsessive elements. Though he eschewed autobiographical revelation in his fiction, his character and world-view show themselves clearly throughout his oeuvre. Especially sensitive and physically frail, Akutagawa was, from childhood onward, a sickly runt, plagued by poor health and a host of other problems. His neurotically critical intelligence led him to adopt a jaundiced opinion of mankind, and this cynicism about human nature is reflected in the deviousness and treachery of his fictional characters. Cynicism aside, Akutagawa suffered from self-doubt and from a constitutional inability to cope with the practical demands of life; a condition offset only by his faith in his aesthetic convictions. Suicide suggested itself to him as the only fitting end for a writer and, at the age of thirty-five, Akutagawa killed himself by administering a lethal dose of veronal. He left a final epistle entitled To an Old Friend, in which he dryly discusses suicide and its motivations, justifications, and techniques of execution, replete with literary allusion, and a detailed consideration of the act's philosophical implications, and in which he repeatedly makes mention of "a vague sense of anxiety" and his loss of vital force or animal strength. He concludes with a reference to Empedocles, who wanted to make a god of himself by leaping into Aetna's cinder cone, but unlike whom Akutagawa professes to desire only peace and deliverance from disenchantment and world-weariness. After his death, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize was instituted in his honor. Three years later, a young acolyte, a minor writer, took his own life on Akutagawa's grave.

illustration from Akutagawa's Kappa*

Osamu Dazai (pen name of Tsushima Shuji) 1909 - 1948, Japan's "poet of despair," led a reckless existence marred by alcoholism, narcotics addiction, institutionalization, and extramarital affairs. Like Akutagawa and Tanizaki, the "dark romantics" of Japan, he was an obsessed artist who adopted the Byronic stance of tragic hero, a past master of the art of suffering, doomed to play his part in a continual round of trauma, failure, delinquency, and dereliction. His writings were a record of personal catastrophes, autobiographical chronicles capturing in "the prison of language" the romantic agony of his pitiful life. He attempted suicide four times, before his fifth try proved successful. His entire output was one long suicide note; "completing it," according to one critic, "meant long-overdue release from the pain of being." Shiga Naoya described Dazai's death as "self-euthanasia." From his precocious youth forward, Dazai was beset by problems of self-destruction and felt a sense of alienation, defeat, and defection from life; he complained of a lifelong "feeling of futility" and of the never-mitigated "perfidy of this world."

At the age of eighteen, Dazai published a magazine called Cell Literature, and caught the attention of the writer Masuji Ibuse, who became his patron and mentor and, by the mid- thirties, Dazai was well on his way to establishing his "unsavory reputation." During the next dozen years, Dazai struggled intermittently with lung hemorrhages stemming from tuberculosis, was hospitalized for peritonitis and respiratory complications, married a geisha and was disinherited by his wealthy family, succumbed to at least one accidental sleeping pill overdose, was confined to a sanitarium, became hooked on opiates, did his best to ignore the Pacific War through a self-prescribed program of "artistic resistance," suffered misery and penury, and managed to create such masterpieces as The Setting Sun and No Longer Human. Ironically, Dazai succeeded artistically because, as one commentator put it, "after the war, his own life mirrored Japan's state of prostration as it began once again to disintegrate; and his stories reflected the public and private despair of a society torn from its moorings, which had discarded old creeds and failed to find new." Dazai, nonetheless, unfailingly relapsed into a state of victimization, convinced there was no place for him on this earthly plane. The chronology of Dazai's suicide attempts runs as follows: December 10, 1929: first suicide attempt (with overdose of sleeping pills at age 19); he recovers and recuperates at Owani Hot Spring . . . November, 1930: attempts suicide (by drowning) with waitress Tanabe Shimeko at Enoshima; she dies, he survives and recuperates at Ikarigaseki Hot Spring . . . March 1935: attempts to hang himself in Kamakura . . . August 1936: goes to Tanigawa Hot Spring for rest . . . March 1937: goes with wife Hatsuyo to Minakami Hot Spring where they attempt suicide together (both survive); visits hot springs near Kofu in 1942 and 1943 . . . June 13, 1948: Dazai and girlfriend Tomie Yamazaki disappear, leaving behind farewell notes . . . June 19, 1948: their drowned bodies are found in the Tamagawa Canal . . . June 21, 1948: Dazai's cremated remains are entombed at the Zenrinji Temple in Mitaka. In his parting message to his wife, titled Goodbye, he wrote that he had come to hate writing. Thus, at the age of thirty-nine, passed the grand vizier of negative zen and crown prince of Nipponese nihilism.

If Dazai illustrates Freud's dictum that "the goal of all life is death," the still more pathological Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970) gives validation to Euripides' "count no man happy till he die." Like Akutagawa, Mishima was a prodigy, during a childhood checkered by bouts of jikachudoku, or autointoxication. Like Gabriele d'Annunzio, he was to bloom into both brilliant artist and arch-fascist. From the occasion of his graduation first in his class from the Peers School, when he was presented a silver watch by the Emperor at the palace, through his album of photographs Ordeal by Roses, to his formation of the Shield society, an impeccably uniformed private army devoted to militaristic ultranationalism and emperor-worship, Mishima was a dandy and a narcissist. He was also a genuine masochist who once aptly posed for a famous portrait as St. Sebastian. His ideal was a "beautiful death," and he rehearsed his own death endlessly. Like Gide and Genet, he was an invert who often dealt, in his more than dozen novels (including Confessions of a Mask, Forbidden Colors, The Thirst of Love, and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea), fifty volumes of stories and essays, and scores of Kabuki, Noh, and contemporary plays, with thinly-veiled themes of homoeroticism. Two stories of this anti-vitalist writer- warrior illustrate the Weltanschauung: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which a monk, obsessed with the beauty of his temple, destroys it by fire in an act of supreme liberation; and At the Cape, which concerns a young couple poised atop a cliff, who are so hypnotized by the dazzling blue of the ocean glittering beneath them, that they hurl themselves in. Motivated not only by dissatisfaction with the empty materialism and spiritual malaise of post-war Japan, but by recognition of his inability to freeze time, and preserve his own youth and physical beauty, Mishima's spectacular suicide was perhaps the inevitable outcome of his well-known exhibitionism, a theatrical act, a wild bid for heroism propelled by what one observer termed a "sense of phantom crisis." After an abortive attempt to stage a coup d'etat by seizing the Ichigaya headquarters of Japan's National Defense Force, Mishima enacted kappuku, or self-disembowelment, the first stage of hara- kiri. When the second stage, kaishaku, or decapitation, was carried out by his protege and probable lover, Morita, Mishima's head rolled off onto the commanding officer's carpet with hachimaki intact. The hachimaki, or headband, read: Serve the nation for seven lives. As early as 1955, Mishima published in the newspaper Mainichisomething called Last Letter. He is also reported to have left a suicide announcement of some sort with the American scholar Donald Keene. Immediately prior to taking his life, he addressed a gekibun, or exit manifesto, to an assembly of Jietai troops. This valedictory aside, a last note left on his desk read: "Human life is limited, but I would like to live for ever." Mishima's funeral was attended by more than ten thousand people.

Two years later, in 1972, Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata, who claimed to have been visited by the specter of Mishima after his death, himself committed suicide by gas inhalation. He left no farewell message. If he had, what would it have said?

* Borges: "In Kappa the novelist employs the familiar artifice of blasting the human race under the guise of a fantastic species; perhaps he was inspired by Swift's "yahoos," or the penguins of Anatole France, or the strange kingdoms crossed by the stone monkey in the Buddhist allegory. Halfway through the story, Akutagawa forgets the satiric conventions: it hardly matters to him that the Kappa, who are water imps, turn into humans who talk about Marx, Darwin or Nietzsche. According to the literary canons, this negligence is a flaw. In fact, the last pages of the story are infused with an indescribable melancholy; we sense that, in the author's imagination, everything has collapsed, even the dreams of his art." (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

Swinburne by William Bell Scott, 1860 Even if you've never read Swinburne (guilty) – or hope to never read him – you'll enjoy this Lions of Literature column from Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, which featuresHarry Clarke's fantastic but little-seen illustrations (courtesy of Golden Age Comic Book Stories). Visit the Swinburne Project to sample the poet's work.

2009 marks the centenary of Swinburne's death in (April) 1909. This fact allowed us to rationalize the extra length of a normally brief column.

Use these links to read the four-part column in order: Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837 – 1909) by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

If ever there was such a being as a "born poet," that being was Algernon Charles Swinburne.

He was the poet of natural energies and primal forces. He was a lyrical poet par excellence, whose ethereal melodies are unparalleled in his native tongue, and he was equally adept at majestic laments of fantastic despair, soaring hymns to Nature, existential anthems of uttermost metaphysical desolation, and love songs (albeit thwarted love songs) of unearthly beauty. He was, like his contemporary Baudelaire, whom he was first to appreciate outside of France, a sensory poet, an exultant master of mood, scent, and color, as well as a sorcerer of sound and cadence. He could vary his register at will, with unsurpassed dexterity, achieving effects as delicate as the muffled scream of a butterfly whose wing is snagged by a thorn, or as thunderous as a towering wave crashing on a rocky, storm-lashed shore. He was, moreover, of all the great poets, the Grand Initiate of the Mystery of All-Devouring Time.

According to one unimpeachable authority, "Swinburne was the last nineteenth century British poet to create a major body of work commanded by an idea, dominant in England since the generations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, that the poet was the maker of a new reality and the prophet of a universal truth unknown to common apprehension."

The birth of this messianic poet did indeed occur – in Chester Street, near Grosvenor Place, London, England, April 5, 1837, when a son came to grace the estimable escutcheon of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham.

CHILDHOOD

Algernon's was an idyllic childhood divided between ancestral estates at East Dene, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, Capheaton, Northumberland, and Ashburnham Place, Sussex. Always a sickly child – he was not expected to live more than an hour after birth – he thrived, nevertheless and, though frail, became an avid climber, a stalwart swimmer (in the tradition of Byron and Poe, both outstanding aquatic athletes), and a dashing, devil-may- care equestrian. With absolute abandon, he hurtled into the breakers along the beaches of Wight like a maddened sea-creature delirious to regain its native medium. He never tired of galloping his pony hell-for-leather over the furzy Northumbrian downs. Fearless on horseback, he would dare a prancing steed to any feat, and take bolts and spills in stride. Once, without alerting anyone, he made a dangerous solo climb of Culver Cliff, scaling the sheer, seaside precipice to prove his courage to himself. This reckless streak would manifest in wholly other forms later in life.

Arrangement in Grey and Black, 1871 (popularly known as Whistler's Mother): oil portrait of his maternal parent by American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler's mother revived Swinburne and nursed him to recovery after he fainted while reciting his poetry in the Whistlers' London home. Swinburne was accident-prone, partly because of an innate excitability, partly because of a probable neuromuscular disorder and, partly, because of a devil-may-care approach to physical recreation.

An exceptionally precocious child, young Algernon was educated by his highly refined mother, by an erudite grandfather in whose far-famed library the boy loved to roam and explore and, intermittently, by private tutors. Swinburne was a polyglot at a tender age and genuinely enjoyed linguistic scholarship. He thrived on the classics, translated Greek and Latin with ease, mastered French and Italian and, as was to continue throughout his life, his facility with language expressed itself in the creation of complex neologisms, such as "polypseudonymuncle," for which improbable vocable he readily supplied a friend the impromptu definition: "a horrible little sewer rat who had been convicted under a hundred aliases." Contemporaries variously described the redoubtable juvenile as "a fascinating, most loveable little fellow," "a very spoilt child," and as something of a holy terror – a "demoniac boy who would go skipping about the room declaiming poetry at the top of his voice." While still a child, Swinburne was presented to Wordsworth and to poet, art connoisseur, and cultural arbiter Samuel Rogers who gave the literary cadet his prophetic benediction, proclaiming "you will be a poet." Swinburne was a single-minded literary prodigy from the first and every inch of him looked the part. He wore his shock of red hair in the Struwwelpeter fashion and, relates historian John Drinkwater, "the boy was simply an astounding freak. Imagine a Lilliputian body, with very sloping shoulders, a neck as slender as a lily-stalk, a giant's head, with a crest of orange-fiery hair 'like some strange bird of paradise,' eyes and lips forever twitching in a kind of spasm, a tiny body that, at the least excitement, shivered like a leaf in a tempest, and a voice that shrilled upward like a piccolo." In one youthful incident, the impetuous and high-strung Swinburne burned one of his manuscripts, following its criticism, but then re-wrote it overnight from memory. "Such," says Drinkwater, "was the strange wild being from whom there was to come a strange wild poetry, that yet was charged with the intensest beauty."

ETON

Always "nervous and slight," Algernon wasn't allowed to read a novel until he attained the age of twelve and, after he was enrolled at Eton, he exhibited a voracious appetite for literature. It was there that he conceived his lifelong passion for Sappho, Shakespeare, and Victor Hugo, and composed the first of his gory tragedies about Mary Queen of Scots. He excelled in Greek and Latin, but left the school under a cloud, officially for "reasons still undisclosed" but ostensibly for "incapacity to respond to discipline." Apparently, having acquired a taste for the caning which was a customary method of corporal chastisement at the venerable boys' academy, Algernon not only failed to respond in the anticipated fashion to its application but, having developed a pleasurable sexual fixation for it, deliberately misbehaved as a means of gratifying his pathological craving for the lash. Thus began his much-publicized masochism which, because of his inability to separate pleasure from pain or, by extension, to disassociate other dualities, not only ultimately came to permeate his most powerful poetry, but came close to destroying him physically and morally. Much later in life, a relative cryptically referred in a memoir to "the persecutions at Eton, when he learned to hate all the boys about him."

portrait by Rossetti

OXFORD

After leaving Eton, he was intent on joining the Royal Dragoons, but his father, the admiral, mindful of the lad's physical delicacy, and less-than-robust health, refused his entreaties and would not relent. Instead Algernon was enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was befriended by the master Benjamin Jowett (noted translator of Plato) who is said to have "discreetly rescued" the poet "from his excesses." Swinburne was so skilled with classical Greek that he sometimes clarified some finer point for the distinguished scholar. At Oxford, Swinburne consciously modeled himself after Shelley. He joined the literary society, Old Mortality, and kicked around with the "revolutionary set" "of advanced taste and opinions" who read texts outside the formal curriculum, disdained religion, and embraced radical republican politics. It was also at Oxford that he first met his longtime friends and comrades "Gabriel" (Dante Gabriel Rossetti), "Topsy" (William Morris), and "Ned" (Edward Burne-Jones), as they were painting the Arthurian frescoes for the Union Debating Hall. (Swinburne's own nickname was "Carrots," no doubt on account of his violently red hair.) Rossetti, Morris, and William Holman Hunt, another painter, comprised the founding triumvirate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an alliance of poets and painters whose shared aesthetic, by sparking a fascination for medieval subjects and decorative imagery, inflected much of Swinburne's writing during this period.

At Oxford, Swinburne's gnawing religious skepticism culminated in a violent repudiation of authoritarian institutions and ruling hierarchies, including the church and its officers and he even went so far as to spurn God as yet another tyrannical force established to oppressively govern mankind. Swinburne entertained notions of himself as an honorary Gaul – his adored paternal grandfather had been educated in France, was a friend ofMirabeau and dressed himself in the attire of an ancien regime aristocrat. Swinburne loathed Napoleon and all his heirs and became enraged at the mention of the detested name of Bonaparte. He was threatened with expulsion from Oxford in consequence of his very vocal and undisguised support of an Italian patriot who made an assassination attempt against Napoleon III. When neglect of his studies and the disfavor in which his ideological extremism was held by authorities threatened Swinburne's expulsion, college master Jowett intervened on the fledgling poet's behalf, declaring that he couldn't stand by and watch "Oxford sin twice against poetry." (The expulsion of Shelley being the first occasion.) Complaining of his late hours and "general irregularities," Swinburne's landlady, too, was ready to give him the boot. In any case, a riding accident (on horseback, Swinburne had an insatiable craving for speed) prevented him from taking his final examinations and effectively put paid to his academic career and, in 1859, "erratic in studies and intemperate in habits," he left without taking a degree. "Liberty" became the motto emblazoning Swinburne's banner. As had been from his birth and as was to obtain for the rest of his life, it was his preeminent philosophical impetus and his rallying cry.

Sketch by Rossetti

PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD

For a year or so, Swinburne sporadically continued to study with tutors. During the Crimean War, he was a volunteer, along with Rossetti and the other PRBs, of The Artists Rifles, a rag-tag, comically unlikely company of Laurel-and-Hardy civilian soldiers forming a detachment of the Home Guard pledged to defend England in case of invasion by Russia. He traveled abroad with his family during this formative period, stayed periodically in Newcastle with his painter friend William Bell Scott, and mixed with intellectual circles, frequenting Lord Houghton's literary breakfasts and Lady Trevelyan's soirees at Wallington Hall. Then, in 1861, he set out for London to establish himself as a literary professional. "Poetry," he declared, "is quite work enough for any one man." At first, he resided in North Crescent, off Oxford Street, where rooms had been arranged for him, along with an allowance from his father. Swinburne, now in his early twenties, savored the attractions and distractions of London to the full. Pre-Raphaelitism was in its heyday, and he fell more fully under the sway of Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom, beginning in 1862, he came to move from his lodgings in Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square into a house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, also shared with Rossetti's sister Christina and, briefly, with the novelist George Meredith. In 1848, poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in concert with fellow painters William Holman Hunt andJohn Everett Millais, had organized the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a secret society revolving around a rejection of the materialism of an increasingly industrialized Britain, and as a reaction against what they considered the low standards of British art then prevailing. The Pre-Raphaelites, so named because they "found a happy innocence in the works of Italian painters prior to Raphael," sought refuge, through symbolism and imagery, in a fablelike vision of the Middle Ages. They fancied themselves devotees of "nature and truth," cleaving to the simplicity of a more innocent time, acolytes of a cult of beauty built around a melancholy nostalgia for the code of chivalry and the idyllic epoch of Arthurian romance. Some scholars have linked Swinburne artistically with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and classified him as a card-carrying practitioner. But Swinburne was always his own man and, though sharing an affinity for medieval lore, and a fondness for the period which framed it, he was drawn at least as much to still more archaic models – classical Greek and Latin literature – and was as apt to daydream about Sappho on her glittering Aegean Isle and centaur-and-nymph-filled Arcadian meadows pre-dating the Age of Pericles as about Lancelot and Guinevere. Strictly speaking, the majority of poetry that can be considered Pre-Raphaelite proper is that found in the pages of The Germ, a short-lived literary journal that served as the unofficial organ of the movement during the year of 1850, when Swinburne was still a schoolboy at Eton. Consequently, it is a mistake to lump him with Pre-Raphaelitism's principal players, as he was peripheral to the movement, at best. He and Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism's high priest, remained intimate friends and, in a general sense of artistic trail-blazing, comrades-in-arms throughout the 1860s. However, when Swinburne and his sidekick, the transvestite painter Simeon Solomon (who later, much to the discomfort and chagrin of all who knew him, ended up in Oscar-Wilde-like disgrace when he was convicted of homosexual soliciting) ran around Rossetti's Tudor House decked out as Greek pagans in nothing but laurel wreaths and sandals, then slid down the banister naked, Rossetti threw them out. Two years prior, Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddall, had died from an overdose of laudanum. During the period leading up to her death, Swinburne had been her closest companion and was required to testify at the inquest. As a formal unit, Pre-Raphaelitism would not outlive this shock to its chieftain. Haunted Rossetti grew morbidly involutional and became addicted to alcohol and chloral hydrate. Morris continued as something of a spokesman and apologist for Pre-Raphaelite principles and theories and went on to lay the groundwork for the Arts and Crafts movement in architecture and design. Burne-Jones and the other painters attained the heights of artistic acclaim.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, decoration

TRAUMA, CONTROVERSY, DISSIPATION

During the early 1860s, Swinburne suffered many shocks and losses – besides the death of Elizabeth Siddall, there were several significant deaths in his own family, and he was rejected in love – some say by his cousin Mary Gordon; others say by Jane Faulkner, daughter of Sir John Simon. In any case, this romantic rebuff was a blow from which, in one sense, he never quite completely recovered. He had already spurned the church. Now his pessimistic nihilism set in, and assumed a permanent cast. He had fallen in with a fast company – the scoundrel and all-around shady character Charles Augustus Howell, the exquisite and roué Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton, one of Tennyson's fellow Apostles), and the anti-Victorian Richard Burton, translator of the Arabian Nights and interpreter of the sexual mores of the Levant. This trio of rogues expertly led him astray and schooled him in the ways of haute dissipation. Milnes introduced him to the writings of de Sade; Burton introduced him to brandy, of which he soon began to assimilate inordinate amounts. Svengali-like Howell, who charmed both Algernon and Gabriel Rossetti (also whose affairs he managed) is described in contemporary accounts as a suave buccaneer who, in an earlier era, would have gone about in seven-league boots, with a sword and a flintlock pistol in his sash, and a plumed hat on his head. Milnes later arranged for Algernon to meet Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. Though he admired these poets as well as Tennyson and Dickens, none of them much reciprocated. Swinburne and Burton shared a hearty contempt for Oxford University, from which Burton, like Shelley, had been expelled; Swinburne avoiding the same fate only because he quit before expulsion could be effected. Throughout his twenties and thirties, Swinburne was caught in a vicious circle of drunken binges, recuperation, then more binges. More than once, he turned up at Rossetti's doorstep in the wee hours, dead drunk. Burton had often "after their sessions, to tuck the unconscious Swinburne under one arm and carry him out to a cab." Algernon went to Paris and the Pyrenees with his family in 1862, he went again to Paris with Whistler in 1863, and with Milnes in 1864 (during this last trip venturing as far as Italy to meetLandor). His drinking increased during this period and he developed epilepsy. He was known to pass out during the throes of furor poeticus, so carried away did he sometimes get during a recitation. In the summer of 1863, after a fall at the studio of James McNeill Whistler, he was nursed back to health by the artist's mother. Swinburne's refined aestheticism influenced Whistler who, in turn, became one of the two men most associated with the Aesthetic Movement; simultaneously, the Rossettis influenced Swinburne by deepening his interest in Blake and Shelley, about whom he wrote studies in 1868 and 1869 respectively.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Satia te Sanguine

In 1864 he joined the Art Club in London and, in 1865, the Cannibal Club.

Around this time, Swinburne enjoyed a brief dalliance with the flamboyant American poetess and circus bareback rider Adah Isaacs Menken, a sort of Lola Montez type notorious for her multiple marriages and steamy liaisons with famous literary men. Celebrated for both her pulchritude and her charm, Menken was internationally famed for the skimpy flesh-toned leotard which clingingly costumed her curvaceous figure during her performances. Once, when she began to converse about literary matters, Swinburne politely cut her short, saying "Darling, a woman who has such beautiful legs need not discuss poetry." In a photograph with her, William Gaunt describes him as "looking meek and dwarfed by her buxom contours." Swinburne idolized Adah and wrote a poem for her but, apparently, was unable to satisfactorily consummate this conventional heterosexual passion; in his finest sadomasochistic fashion he tried to excite her by biting her – alas, to no avail.

In 1868 Swinburne was invited by the Reform League to stand for Parliament.

Like a fugitive from a page of de Sade, Algernon had a weakness for the swish of the whip and was a regular visitor to houses of flagellation, such as the quaintly named Verbena Lodge, a bondage lounge in St. John's Wood, and his health was increasingly compromised both by his worsening algolagnia and the excessive consumption of alcohol. (As with Poe, a capful would send him over the edge.) For thirteen years, from 1866 on, his patronage of gin mills, paddling pits, and other sloughs of iniquity would make his life a putrefying sink. A climbing expedition to Auvergne to scale the Puy de Dome with Richard Burton, and salubrious outings to Cornwall and Scotland with Benjamin Jowett briefly fortified Swinburne's fragile constitution. He visited Paris and Florence and met Manet, Turner, Victor Hugo and Landor, then ninety years old and living in Fiesole in a house secured for him by the Brownings. All the while he was struck by blow after cruel blow: Simeon Solomon was prosecuted, a la Oscar Wilde, for homosexual enticement, death claimed Mazzini, and Rossetti suffered "permanent emotional collapse." He would never see them again.

In 1865, Swinburne's drama in verse Atalanta in Calydon made its sensational debut, and instantly put him on the literary map. In the wake of the publication of the first series of Poems and Ballads, which quickly followed in 1866, Swinburne became the subject of a famous denunciatory diatribe by Robert Buchanan called The Fleshly School of Poetry printed in The Contemporary Review. The Saturday Review joined the fray, proclaiming a state of siege against decency and accepted social standards. Summarizing not the effect, but the inner character of this novel, high-impact poetry, one scholar notes that "in Atalanta in Calydon, Swinburne used his thorough classical knowledge and sympathy with classical Greek literature to turn a Greek myth and tragic form into a fundamentally lyric enactment of a reality in which love, beauty, human consciousness, and the capacity for speech itself are painful ironies in a world governed by accident and doomed by time and death. In the first series of Poems and Ballads, he continued to explore this world and, like Baudelaire, registered a moral disgust at the exhaustions and perversions of mortal flesh pushed to its limits by wishes for a wholeness and health that material existence cannot satisfy. In these poems time itself is running down, the fabric of things is unraveling, and gods as well as men are dead or dying."

Swinburne's Olympian appetite for freedom, coupled with the elegant nastiness of his anti- theist nose-thumbing, incensed strait-laced Victorians. Oppositional elements aligned on every side to revile the concupiscent sympathies and degenerate sensibilities of Swinburne's intoxicating new poetry and, throughout his stormy career, from this ominous onset forward, his work was "vigorously attacked for its 'immorality' and 'feverish carnality,'" while the shrill objections to the "diseased state of mind" whence the poetry derived never entirely died away.

As Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads had time to take hold, the public became polarized in their defense or disapprobation. Even Swinburne's champion, John Ruskin, who called Atalanta in Calydon and its coruscating choruses "the grandest thing ever done by a youth," qualified his judgment by temperately adding "though he is a demoniac youth." Swinburne's work was "savagely attacked for its sensuality and anti-Christian sentiments, but almost as excessively praised in other quarters for technical facility and infusion of new energy into Victorian poetry." The poet took the public gaze, and began to enjoy at once a vogue that may almost be likened to the vogue of Byron. He exerted a "sudden and imperative attraction" and, "by the close of his thirtieth year, in spite of hostility and detraction, Swinburne had placed himself not only in the highest rank of contemporary poets, but had even established himself as leader of a choir of singers to whom he was at once master and prophet." Oxford undergraduates regarded him as little short of a demi- god and marched through the ancient halls and ivy-clad cloisters chanting Dolores as if it were a revolutionary oath. He reveled in his popular image as an "exultant dervish of the immoral." He was a bit of a show-off and didn't shrink from grand-standing when the opportunity presented itself. He bragged that when his projected Hymn of Man appeared, it would put Shelley's Queen Mab to shame. As Swinburne's lyrical masterpieces percolated into the bloodstream of Victorian consciousness, the poet began to swing away from pagan themes and erotic dreams to songs of the Risorgimento (Songs Before Sunrise), for he had befriended the revolutionary Mazzini and embraced the cause of Italian reunification. Even as he cranked out book after book, shifting in theme and approach (and including, besides important poetry, groundbreaking studies of William Blake, Percy Shelley, and Charlotte Bronte), he embarked on a decade and more of intermittent dissipation. Public perceptions of the poet, whether warped or accurate, couldn't be disentangled from the work and became conflated in the general mind. The fact that Swinburne enjoyed riling smug Victorian society and flaunted his taboo-exploding poetical provocations in its sanctimonious face caused the more conservative of his countrymen to conclude that this poet enamored of lesbians and dominatrices, necrophiliacs and lepers must be a deviate guilty of who-knows-what perverse pleasures and unspeakable indiscretions in his private life. Pungent and pugnacious critics prodded him with their pikestaffs as if he were an execrable monster, a depraved and degenerate dragon to be slain in the interests of the public moral good. Critical attacks were fierce and Swinburne girded himself for battle against a rising tide of animadversion, a literary pugilist publishing pamphlets such as Under the Microscope defending his position as a free-thinking artist.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Faustine

Public perceptions and critical estimations of Swinburne's persona and poetry have been vociferous and mixed. He has been called virginal, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual perverse, an atheist, a sublimated theist, a radical, a reactionary, a nihilist. Edmund Gosse called him "not quite a human being"; Maupassant called him "supernatural"; Turgenev said "positively anything could be expected from him – he was far from a normal person." Oxford don and all-around cultural cicerone John Ruskin leapt to his feet blurting encomia on first hearing Swinburne's verse. Ejaculating "What divine music!" and "Glorious!," the High Victorian poohbah gushed that Swinburne's lines were marked by a "frenzied rush of rhythm that sweeps the soul before it"; and of the author who created them, "he simply sweeps me away before him as a torrent does a pebble": according to Drinkwater, "these sayings perfectly express the double gift of Swinburne – the strange new tunes of his rhythms and the torrent-sweep of his verse." Alfred, Lord Tennyson called him "a reed through which all things blow into music." Oscar Wilderemarked, "He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal." John Drinkwater maintained that experiencing a Swinburne poem is, "as it were, to hang a splendid picture in the gallery of the mind or to fill the soul with the remembrance of a glorious symphony," and that Swinburne's poetry carries us away to "a land enchanted, a land of strange, unearthly blossoms," a "wonder- world" which is the dwelling place of "phantasmal women who are the daughters of sweet dreams." By and large, however, Swinburne's Victorian elders strongly disapproved. A dismissive Browning summarized Swinburne's verse as "a fuzz of words." Crotchety Carlyle referred to it as "the miaulings of a delirious cat." A carping Matthew Arnold, in a less than generous mood, referred to the upstart as a "sort of pseudo-Shelley." Swinburne was caricatured in Punch by novelist / cartoonist George du Maurier as poet Jellaby Postlethwaite while the role of Bunthorne in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, ultimately based on Oscar Wilde, was originally conceived as a satire of Swinburne. In Mortimer Collins's novel Two Plunges for a Pearl, Swinburne was burlesqued as the character Reginald Swynfen, "a little man built like a grasshopper." The press called him "Mr. Swineborn" and plastered him with pejoratives.

Swinburne courted this notoriety and took a devilish delight in being the cynosure of scandal. Because of what were perceived by the public as his heretical, anti-theist views and gross licentiousness, he was branded an apostate (shades of Percy Shelley) and dubbed the "libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." He thrived on the attention and on his ability to cause the British tea kettle to "seethe and rage," as he coyly put it.

"There were of course antecedents for Swinburne's idea of himself as a poet in society. Among the models – he called them 'masters' – of his early poetry were William Blake, Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Walt Whitman, poets who wrote in large literary forms and who wanted to effect philosophical, social, and political change by their words. Until the end of his life he wrote in the familiarly grand forms of Elizabethan as well as classical drama, long narratives, elegies, ceremonial odes, and a kind of long meditative lyric, in the tradition of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and Shelley's Mont Blanc, of which On the Cliffs is an exceptionally complex example. At the climax of his powers, he made the new mythologies of Hertha and Hymn of Man, in which he articulated the doctrine that the redemption of an exhausted time would come not from an incursion of the divine but from a fulfillment of the capacities of the human. He wanted to perform the entire office of the romantic poet as prophet. Swinburne's contemporaries often thought him not only extreme, but excessive." [Ed.: we lost the source for this quote.] Certainly Swinburne gave his fellow Victorians ample grounds for regarding him as an ogre. It is difficult to determine which of his transgressions offered greater offense: the lush sensuality, diseased with debauchery and dripping with decadence; the blasphemous paganism, which "attacked Christianity for its doctrine of death"; the advocacy of Shelley's idea of a religion-free society, borrowed from the French Revolution and its Goddess of Reason; or the depiction of a stern, implacable Nature which marched in concert with the gods Time and Inevitability towards the extinction of all things in a cycle of eternal recurrence. Is it any wonder that when Poems and Balladsappeared in 1866, it sent shock waves through Victorian England? "It was received with a scream of hysterics on the grounds of immorality" and, so startling was its effect, that the publisher canceled the book and it dropped from circulation before being re-issued by another. "God is the supreme sadist in Poems and Ballads," observes John D. Rosenberg. Swinburne, according to Rosenberg, rebelled against and committed "defiance and desecration" of a God who "grinds men in order to feed the mute, melancholy lust of heaven." Swinburne was not only the "poet as impudent sensualist insulting prevailing Victorian mores," he was the poet of Time, poet as prophet of a New Order; poet as harbinger of a philosophical message; poet as metaphysical initiate of life's deepest mysteries.

Swinburne was possessed by an indefinable quality poetically known as the divine afflatus or, as Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca called it, the duende – a spirit force that charged his every utterance with maniacal fervor. Max Beerbohm referred to the experience of listening to Swinburne speak as like listening (to borrow the refrain from one of Swinburne's own poems) to the "song of a secret bird." Beerbohm states that ever after Swinburne's days at Oxford, generations of students continued to ape his speech patterns and mannerisms. When Swinburne recited his poetry, so feverish was his delivery and so ardent his excitement that he would bounce to his feet from his seat on a sofa, and back again to a seated position, all the while gesticulating wildly like one possessed. He was chronically fidgety and twitchy, and couldn't keep his hands still. The slight frame of his small body shook convulsively and jerkily as a puppet's when he was animated by some passion. At different times, Swinburne was said to suffer from a nervous tic, fainting spells, trembling "fits," and uncontrolled speech which Beerbohm informs us an attending medical specialist attributed to "an excess of electric vitality." It has been theorized that Swinburne's condition consisted of anything from Tourette's Syndrome to epilepsy.

His masochism apparently found extended expression in hero-worship; he seems to have substituted a sense of abasement before human idols for the traditional equation of supplicant to deity. When he was introduced to the Italian nationalist Mazzini, he kneeled in prostration. He toted a footstool to a banquet in order to pay proper homage to Robert Browning. He was forever writing adulatory tributes to this one and that. He had a great capacity for fanaticism and adoration. He tried to seduce Adah Isaacs Menken by applying childlike love-bites. Unexcited by his clumsiness, she did not respond. Swinburne routinely indulged in a raft of additional gestures of self-humiliation that went well beyond the superior grooming, impeccable manners, and even the most rudimentary and conventional courtesies presupposed of a lordly English gentleman.

He had a perpetually juvenile, even infantile quality. Puckish, implike, he was Peter Pan personified, and had a dependent nature which, when not nourished, led him to quickly disintegrate.

Swinburne carried in the very fiber of his being the anti-industrial creed of the Pre- Raphaelites. Even though he lived well into the early years of the automobile, he studiously avoided machinery. He hated typewriters, read by candlelight and refused to adapt to gas jets let alone electric fixtures, and couldn't work the squirter of a seltzer bottle.

***

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, decoration

Use these links to read the four-part column in order: Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837 – 1909) by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (part 2)

THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT Swinburne, together with Oxford academician and "gospel of beauty" high priest Walter Pater, and American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler, adopted Théophile Gautier's dictum of "art for art's sake" and codified what came to be known as the Aesthetic Movement in England, which pre-dated but was embraced and championed by Oscar Wilde and remains most famously associated with his name. At the same time, the movement anticipated many concerns of the Symbolists and Decadents and was, along with the vogue for Poe and Baudelaire, a principal pater familias. Bracketed by Pre-Raphaelitism and the Symbolist phase and Art Nouveau, the Aesthetic Movement effectively bridged this period of artistic ferment, finding full flower between 1870 and 1875. Swinburne's "religion of beauty" was a creed shared wholeheartedly by former Pre-Raphaelites and by prominent Aesthetic Movement adherents such as Wilde and Whistler.

MAN ABOUT TOWN

Undeserved or not, Swinburne's reputation for vice and license followed him for a decade, from the late 1860s to the late 1870s. It was a reputation he cultivated and did nothing to counteract. His reckless lifestyle continued unabated. William Gaunt imagines the trio of Milnes, Swinburne, and Burton in the social swirl of London's velvet underground during a nocturnal tour: "…at Cremorne in the Hermit's Cave and Fairy Bower amid the polka- dancing mob. One hears the pop of champagne corks and the gurgle of the brandy bottle in some blazing resort near the Haymarket. One sees Swinburne subsiding in the midst of a wreck of glasses, repeatedly comparing himself with Shelley and Dante, asserting that two glasses of green Chartreuse were a perfect antidote to one of yellow or two of yellow to one of green. One sees him and his companions venturing into the slum quarters which were then infernal in their wildness and riot…" These years "furnish innumerable accounts of Swinburne's disgraceful behavior, snatching at bottles 'like a mongoose,' 'belching out blasphemy and bawdry and wasted by drink.'" He had fallen in with a bad crowd. He announced at a party that he wanted to "build seven towers, in each of which to enact one of the seven deadly sins." He and a chum raided the cloak room of a prominent gentlemen's club, gathered up the top hats of the members and crushed them by stomping on them until they were unceremoniously ejected from the premises. Careening around the night spots of the capitol, Swinburne might turn up at a function at Rossetti's in evening clothes or might just as unsurprisingly justify Ruskin's bemused wonder "whether the boy would ever be fully clothed." He had achieved Byronic status, which had been his goal from the outset.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, The Queen

Edmond de Goncourt wrote a novel involving a character based on a composite of Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. Goncourt asserted that Wilde's homosexuality was largely a pose plagiarized from Verlaine and Swinburne. Goncourt, who wrote the introduction to the 1891 French edition of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, and who was never averse to the raw and the raunchy, cited in his famous Journal a number of juicy and salacious entries concerning Swinburne, beginning with an incident related by Guy de Maupassantwhich supposedly took place in 1868 on the Normandy coast near Dieppe as Swinburne was visiting the seaside town of Étretat where he shared a cottage with his confrere, the folklorist and translator George Powell. It seems that one morning, while out for a swim, dainty and petite Algernon was swept out to sea by treacherous undercurrents and barely saved from drowning, as legend would have it, by none other than the teen-aged Maupassant who, coincidentally, happened to be vacationing in the area at the same time. After hearing shouts for help, the huskily-built Maupassant dove into the waves, and made his way through the rock arches near the palisaded beach and began to race towards Swinburne as he floundered some two miles offshore. Soon enough, the hapless poet was scooped from the brine by a passing boat, but all who participated in the rescue were feted by the grateful near-victim, most of all the handsome and brawny Maupassant, who was invited to dine with Swinburne and Powell chez eux. (Safely back on shore, Maupassant stated that Swinburne had been "dead drunk" at the time of his nautical misadventure.)

What happened next, according to Goncourt who, as a French naturalist, did not shy from the raw and the raunchy, was a juicy and salacious series of incidents that have been handed down to posterity as fact, however much they may have been embellished by both the gossip-loving popular imagination and by the sensation-hunger of Swinburne himself, who never refuted them.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Complaint of the Fair Armouress

At the cottage, ominously named in honor of the domicile of the protagonist of de Sade'sPhilosophy in the Bedroom, Maupassant found the occupants Powell to be short and fat, and Swinburne to be short and skinny, "with a pointed face, a hydrocephalic forehead, pigeon-chested, and agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St. Vitus' dance, and talking incessantly like a madman." The décor suggested the haunt of a pair of bohemian gothicists, with arrangements of bones and a preserved human hand. Besides being pestered by Powell's pet monkey, Maupassant was regaled with dirty pictures of German men engaged in a variety of pornographic activities." In these exotic and ghoulish surroundings, the conversation proceeded at the highest cultural level. Swinburne displayed 'an immense fund of learning.' He translated some of his poems for Maupassant's benefit and enthused about Victor Hugo (whose entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica he was subsequently to write). The two men struck Maupassant as 'singularly original, remarkable and bizarre,' a pair of hallucinatory visionaries in the tradition of Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. 'If genius,' he concluded, 'is, as people say, a kind of delirium of the higher intelligence, then Algernon Charles Swinburne is assuredly a genius.'" In Goncourt's journal, Maupassant goes on to say: "Yes, they lived there together, copulating with monkeys or with young boys imported periodically from England. The monkey that slept in Powell's bed and shat in it every night was hanged by the servant boy, partly out of jealousy but also out of annoyance at having to change the sheets all the time. The house was full of strange noises and the shadows of sadism; one night, Powell was seen and heard firing a revolver in the garden at a black man. Those two were real sadeian heroes, who wouldn't have held back even from crime." For the rest of his life, Swinburne kept the 'outsize garments' in which the rescuing fishermen had dressed him.

Home in London, it was clear that Swinburne's life of dissipation did not mean one of dessication. His authorial output was unattenuated though "in these years he sometimes became so ill as a result of the unregulated habits of his life that he had to be taken to his parents house to recuperate." It was evident from the appearance of the second series ofPoems and Ballads in 1878 that an "autumnal mood" had descended over Swinburne's verse. It was "a mood not of the residue of energies desperately spent or fearfully thwarted, but rather of the slow encroachment of time, the sea eroding the shore, the night darkening the sea." These poems fulfilled Swinburne's "ambition to be a great poet in the way of his masters. In them Swinburne leaves the desolate landscapes and the quiet tonalities characteristic of late century verse to penetrate again the deep, dense life of things and to find again words, rhythms and forms that will make or manifest realities whose power and meaning none will know until a poet speaks them." Swinburne's "energy was at fever height, the current of his poetry continued unchecked"; his poetry had transited from "the sensual sphere, through the political and ecclesiastical, with the virulent animosity of its detestation of kings and priests" and through the phase of "what has been called his 'pan- anthropism' – his universal worship of the holy spirit of man, the gospel of the 'body electric' and the glory of human nature" to a new plateau of "passages of power and intensity unsurpassed, in which the fecundity of his versification and the force of his melody were unbroken, and his magnificent torrent of words inexhaustible."

Although, by the time he was in his early forties, Swinburne's literary precocity remained unimpaired both in quantity and quality, he was physically fading fast. His boozing had worsened. When he was out on the town, he often had to be assisted to a cab and, when delivered home in the wee, wee hours, dumped on his doorstep, blind drunk. When left to himself, he drank until he blacked out. The squalid cycle of dissipation, collapse, recovery, and fresh dissipation was taking its toll, and his health began to fail. His masochistic indulgences continued undiminished and his deafness deepened. By 1879, periodic "recuperative intervals were too rare to save him" and his "phenomenal energies were at last subdued by alcoholism." Swinburne is a pathetic figure at this point. A plaintive tone informs his letters, a note of sadness, a wistful sorrow tinges his conversation. Pining for his "lost love" and pained by the slanders of others, he finds himself snared by mounting isolation and by the downward spiral of dissolution. Ruing his revels and carousals, and suffering in conscience, he is penitential over the debaucheries from whose consequences he may soon succumb. "Incapable of moderation," Swinburne had become a lush of epic proportions – a prototype of Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan and all titanic tipplers of British literature to follow. Both Swinburne and his quondam comrade Rossetti were broken men at this point but their mythic stature had been irrevocably cast.

An epileptic algolagniac prostrated by alcoholic dysentery and spiraling towards death, he helplessly awaited his fate…

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, endpapers

RESCUE AND RECLUSION

Enveloped by solitude, swallowed by squalor, eaten alive by sheer physiological deterioration, Swinburne's situation was one of the acutest peril. Realizing the emergency, Swinburne's mother importuned his friend, the poet-solicitor Theodore Watts-Dunton, to intervene before it was too late. A sordid scene ensued when Watts-Dunton entered Swinburne's rooms, and found before him a crippled wretch. The kindly lawyer bundled the wreckage of the greatest nether-poet then living in England, and helped him into the compartment of a waiting coach. The grimness of Swinburne's condition is not to be exaggerated and Watts-Dunton's simple act of gallantry unquestionably saved the bard from certain catastrophe. By 1879, Swinburne was living in an advanced state of misery and degradation to which Watts-Dunton's wife, in a memoir, macabrely refers as the days of "roses and raptures." He was a broken reed who had reached a point where family, friends, and physician had all but written him off. When Swinburne's attorney, business manager, and literary cohort broke in on him and scooped him up from his rooms in Great James Street, in the center of London, and spirited him off to the outlying district of Putney, first to No. 11 Putney Hill, then down the way to No. 2, The Pines, a house which Watts-Dunton, or "Walter," as he was familiarly known, shared with his sister and servants and, later, with his young, worshipful wife Clara, he removed a creature lost to the world, and installed him in the bosom of comfort and security. Swinburne had been altogether unable to take care of himself. Now he had residence in a country retreat, a salutary haven formed by congenial quarters and the quiet companionship of caring friends. The simple remedial measure of removing him from the pernicious influences which had undermined his health resulted in a miraculous cure, and Swinburne underwent a remarkable and complete restoration.

Shut up at The Pines but for an occasional trip to the coast (under supervision) to satisfy his infatuation with the sea, Swinburne effectively became a scholar-hermit, devoting the last thirty years of his life to assiduous literary activity, and growing into an increasingly respected grand old man of letters under the benign stewardship of Watts-Dunton, who became his de facto guardian. Many of his old friends thought him "imprisoned," but his prodigious productivity during these years proves incontrovertibly the salubrious effect of tranquil surroundings and steady routine on his equilibrium. By successive steps and stages, Watts-Dunton gradually weaned Algernon from an accustomed intake of brandy in ghastly amounts to a few glasses of milder wine and, eventually, to a single tankard of ale per diem. The unusual filial arrangement of this Damon and Pythias of Putney Hill ensured that, "after 1880, Swinburne's life remained without disturbing event, devoted entirely to the pursuit of literature in peace and leisure."

Prejudice and malice caused some observers to regard his shrinking sociability, owing to progressive deafness, as evidence of an insidious conspiracy to engineer his abduction and subject him to an incarceration which sapped his genius and reduced him to a parody of his former self. "The cry went round that the physical improvement of the poet synchronised with his mental decay." Some critics opined that the syndrome of"early flourish and later decline" afflicted Swinburne as it had so many another whose flame burned uncommonly bright during the bloom of youth only to flicker and fade with the passage of the years. And, indeed, The Pines did "serve Swinburne as a sort of suburban sanitorium." But he was far from the victim of a sinister plot. The fact is that Watts-Dunton acted as a stabilizing influence over him, and his extraction of the poet from "pitiable surroundings and mischievous companionship" at a time he was depleted and demoralized and all but left for dead not only enabled Swinburne to rebound from the breakdown and regain his health, but to revitalize his creative energies and enter a new, Herculean phase of serious scholarship and original production. "The Pines," in effect, "became the tomb of a great poet and the birthplace of a distinguished man of letters."

During this picturesque period of retirement at Putney, Swinburne's eccentricities multiplied and intensified. In the course of his daily wanderings through the woodlands surrounding Putney Heath, he would greet his favorite trees and do them obeisance by chivalrously bowing and doffing his hat on parting from each one. He spoke to them familiarly; running from one to the next, repeatedly ejaculating "ah-h-h!" An impish, elfin figure, he flitted through the woods like a nature-sprite, springing and leaping, cavorting and capering, skittering among his arboreal friends, rhapsodizing them with eloquent tributes. One could easily be persuaded that he honored them above mere creatures of flesh and blood. He composed poems during his sylvan rambles, and sang them as he strolled along.

Arthur Rackham, from The Springtide of Life: Poems for Children

An Edwardian era portrait of Swinburne as a hairy satyr delighting an audience of naked babes (above), which adorns a posthumous collection of his child-poetry reinforces a popular perception that, in his later years, the illustrious bard had become a "babyolater." His volume A Century of Roundels included twenty-four florid poems about infants and toddlers. From among them, Edward Elgar, the English composer, adopted as a libretto the odelet A Baby's Death. (Perhaps this is no stranger than the fixation on juvenile themes peculiar to Eugene Field, James Whitcomb Riley, or other august predecessors of the Hallmark School but, coming from an author once accused of promulgating "peccant" verse which was the product of "the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination" in which "the Bottomless Pit encompasses us on one side and stews and bagnios on the other," it carries more than a little resonance of somethingodd.) Now, in his upper years, Swinburne routinely spent part of his daily round rejoicing in "beautiful," fresh-faced infants randomly encountered in their nanny-propelled prams while taking the air in Wimbledon Common, and apostrophizing these beaming babies of the neighborhood in reverent paeans and jocund odes. With a touch of the dotard, he goofily fawned over these bubbling bundles of joy, gushing like a grandmother over every dimple, squint, hiccough, and burp. He also amused himself during these years by writing farces and hoaxes, pornography, bawdy limericks, naughty skits, and a lubricious treatise about flogging titled The Whippingham Papers. Some of his efforts remain "unpublished and unprintable." These essays in the racy and risqué were not a passing phase; Algernon the prankish schoolboy had been at them all along. It was an impulse he had never outgrown.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, decoration

In his library Swinburne kept a bronze statuette of Victor Hugo presented to him by his sculptor friend Lord Ronald Gower. "A lithe, energetic man with wonderful, twinkling eyes" surrounded by thousands of books in his study at The Pines, Swinburne radiated happiness. An impassioned bibliophile, he knew exacting details about, and could rattle off minutiae concerning every one of the thousands of books in his personal collection, and was puzzled and amazed whenever a visitor to his study didn't possess the same erudition in book lore as he. With mathematical precision, he could pinpoint the precise location of any volume on his groaning shelves and, after pulling it down for display from the tottering stacks, would go over it thoroughly with a red and black checkered duster, as he had a horror of handling a dusty book and couldn't bear to touch one unless immaculate. Puttering merrily about his library rapturously muttering oohs and ahs as he flitted from book to book, this was where Swinburne received the occasional visitor.

Contented as he was in his comfortable surroundings, he wasn't always docile as a kitten. As has been mentioned already, the poet felt a scathing hatred for Napoleon Bonaparte; the merest reference to that detested Gallic personage would provoke him to spew niagaras of abusive verbiage. Such outbursts were not confined to execrations of the emperor exiled to Elba; other peeves could trigger furious tirades just as easily. He was the gentlest of gentlemen except when fuming about some literary foe. It may be this was a belated release of steam for all the high-handed and vindictive pontifications hurled at him during the 1860s and 1870s, against which he had never publicly retaliated.

This epicure of books regularly could be found "inarticulately ecstasizing" over one of his favorites or indecisively flipping through another, assessing its virtues or demerits, pronouncing commendation or condemnation. Woe unto the author who did not meet with his approval; such an unfortunate would be flayed alive. Against those he disliked, his tongue lashed viciously. Courteous to a fault with visitors, he was nevertheless roused to petulance when confronted by the merest divergence from strictly regulated daily routine. Punctilious and pedantic, he would fly into "gusts of ill-temper" when his opinions were crossed. He was so expert and so exactingly knowledgeable in matters of literature that he bristled to the point of apoplexy when confronted by the slightest inaccuracy in connoisseurship or any lapse in taste.

In the evenings, he ritualistically read by candlelight. He dilated on this and expatiated on that in a shrill, metallic voice rendered still the more strange by certain peculiarities of elocution. For all this, visitors found him charming company and far from a garrulous old man. He was even known, on occasion, to give out with an expansive laugh.

In later years, Swinburne composed major studies of literary kingpins such as Byron, Blake, and Ben Jonson. Swinburne himself soon became the subject of studies, dedicatory poems, appreciations and commemorations of all sorts by fellow men of letters the august likes of Ezra Pound (who lionized him), fuddy-duddy T. S. Eliot (who, in some ways, denigrated him), Edmund Gosse, Edmund Wilson, Mario Praz, George Saintsbury, and C. M. Bowra. A. E. Housman wrote a précis on him. Thomas Hardy, who idolized Swinburne and never spoke of him "save in words of admiration and affection," penned a touching poem about him while sitting next to his grave, after placing a spray of ivy at the spot where he spends "the vast forever." Swinburne's literary criticism has prompted a good deal of comment. It has been called "a tangled thicket of prejudices and predilections marred by exaggerated vituperation and praise, digressiveness, and a flamboyant style." Then again, "he was, of course, a master of the phrase, and it never happened that he touched a subject without illuminating it with some lightning-flash of genius, some vivid, penetrating suggestion that outflames its shadowy and confused environment." But "even his best appreciations are disfigured by error in taste and proportion" and "when aroused to literary indignation the avalanche of his invective sweeps before it judgment, taste and dignity. His dislikes have all the superlative violence of his affections" and are apt to spawn a glib melee of epithets and imprecations. Nonetheless, any characterization of the lordly literateur as some sort of quibbling crank is doomed to fall short of the mark, since consensus confirms his unshakeable place in the firmament of critical exegetics.

Swinburne's twilight years were dazzlingly prolific. Among his late works were Songs of the Springtides; Tristram of Lyonesse; Locrine; Astrophel and Other Poems; A Century of Roundels, dedicated to Christina Rossetti, Swinburne's favorite poetess after Sappho; and a number of essays and studies, such as those devoted to Hugo and Shakespeare. His physical aspect changed and he gradually grew deaf while contributing over two hundred reviews and poems to periodicals, and publishing twenty volumes of prose, poetry, and verse drama on historical and classical subjects. "He rose to an eminence as a learned man of letters and a poet on the old, grand scale, a master of his craft and the creator of a distinctive voice and presence." Installed in a suitable environment, and insulated from perturbations and vexations, Swinburne had shed the skin of his disorderly, self-destructive existence and emerged from the chrysalis as a new creature – the venerable man of letters. He had produced copious quantities of poetry and prose during his years of dangerous illness. Now that he was ensconced in feather-down confinement, his productivity was undiminished and his glory unsubdued. Watts-Dunton's decisive, humane gesture had preserved for posterity a poet who would continue to create for thirty years after the crisis.

FINAL SUMMONS

In April, 1909, after traipsing in the woods without a brolley or a cloak, Swinburne contracted influenza which flared into pneumonia. After a handful of delirious days and fever-fuddled nights during which he muttered incomprehensibilities in scrambled Greek, he succumbed at the age of seventy-two. He was exactly five feet in height and his shoe-size was 8 ½. He was buried on the Isle of Wight, near the family home at Bonchurch which, after his demise, became a convent. Queen Victoria declared she had heard him held to be the "finest poet in my dominions." He had been considered to hold the post of Poet Laureate following Tennyson but was rejected because he had once made a diplomatically reprehensible statement about the Russian Tzar. (He advocated tyrannicide.)

RANK AND STATURE

If consensus fixes Swinburne's artistic zenith at the period of Atalanta in Calydon and the first series of Poems and Ballads, the flower of later periods found him still singing "in chaste magnificence" and, while his stature rests securely on a handful of supreme masterpieces which alone are sufficient to ensure his immortality, his position as a critic of high distinction and his eminence as a general man of letters remain unshakeable. Lauded and denigrated both during his life and since, his mythical status, like Byron's, like Wilde's, firmly endures. In 1911, Edmund Gosse, Swinburne's amanuensis, offered a fitting memorial tribute to the master with this stirring summation: Of his poetic technique, it may safely be said to have revolutionized the whole system of metrical expression. It found English poetry bound in the bondage of the iambic; it left it reveling in the freedom of the choriambus, the dactyl and the anapest, entirely new effects; a richness of orchestration resembling the harmony of a band of many instruments; the thunder of the waves, and the lisp of leaves in the wind; these, and a score of other astonishing poetic developments were allied in his poetry to a mastery of language and an overwhelming impulse towards beauty of form and exquisiteness of imagination. In Tristram of Lyonesse the heroic couplet underwent a complete metamorphosis. No longer wedded to antithesis and a sharp caesura, it grew into a rich melodious measure, capable of an infinite variety of notes and harmonies, palpitating, intense. The service which Swinburne rendered to the English language as a vehicle for lyrical effect is simply incalculable. He revolutionized the entire scheme of English prosody. Nor was his singular vogue due only to his extraordinary metrical ingenuity. The effect of his artistic personality was in itself intoxicating, even delirious. He was the poet of youth insurgent against all the constraints of conventionality and custom.

No one did more to free English literature from the shackles of formalism; no one, among his contemporaries, pursued the poetic calling with so sincere and resplendent an allegiance to the claims of absolute and unadulterated poetry. Some English poets have turned preachers; others have been seduced by the attractions of philosophy; but Swinburne always remained an artist absorbed in a lyrical ecstasy, a singer and not a seer. His personality was, in its due perspective, among the most potent of his time; and as an artistic influence it will be pronounced both inspiring and beneficent. The magnificent freedom and lyrical resource which he introduced into the language will enlarge its borders and extend its sway so long as English poetry survives.

ENVOI

Swinburne's funerary enclosure bears no inscription from his vast literary annals. If it did, such an inscription might consist of these lines from his poem Nephilidia:

"Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die."

***

Caricature of Swinburne from Vanity Fair, November 21, 1874

Use these links to read the four-part column in order: Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

SWINBURNE AND THE SPASMODISTS by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

The idea has been advanced, in certain circles, that A. C. Swinburne was a member of the so-called Spasmodic School or was, in some respects, a proponent of its principles and practices.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Swinburne was susceptible to influence from a number of quarters – he was a marvelous imitator who has been called the most gifted mimic in English letters for his uncanny ability to parody the style of other writers – most of his inspiration sprang from two distinctive and very different sources – classical literary models and contemporary visual aesthetics. From the Pre-Raphaelites and related contemporary visual artists who were his confederates, from his close friendJames Abbott McNeill Whistler and, most particularly, from another great proto-impressionist – J. M. W. Turner – who was a friend of his grandfather, and a set of six of whose watercolors was so treasured a family possession that Algernon’s mother carried it with her in a special traveling case wherever she went – Swinburne drew much of his formation.

With regard to the Spasmodists, however, Swinburne stood so far above and apart both in originality and in grandeur, as to be likened to an eagle atop Olympus gazing down upon pismires crawling on a stinkweed in meadows leagues below. Swinburne went his own way and had no association with the Spasmodists, either formally or otherwise. From no plausible perspective whatsoever does he share characteristics with those construed "spasmodic."

Caricature by Max Beerbohm, 1922

Spasmodic was a largely facetious and derogatory term directed at "mushy" poets of the early Victorian period in England. Originally coined by Thomas Carlyle in reference to Byron, it was appropriated by Charles Kingsley and W. E. Aytoun and applied to a group of popular sentimentalist poets whose attitudes and stylistics were prevalent in the 1840s and 1850s. John Stanyan Bigg, Owen Meredith, Gerald Massey, George Gilfillan, Sydney Dobell, Philip James Bailey, were charter members. Other names later linked with the movement include J. W. Marsten, William Bell Scott (a Swinburne crony), Ebenezer and Ernest Jones, R. H. Horne and, intermittently, in their more effusive phases, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett (Browning), and Arthur Hugh Clough. Although the names adorning the preceding roll call are predominantly, if not exclusively masculine, Kingsley pronounced the "spasmodic vogue" "dangerously effeminate." Mawkish, saccharine, and emotionally indulgent, the Spasmodists might be likened to the cloyingly sentimental Hallmark Poets – Rod McKuen, Maya Angelou, et al. – of our own day.

Spasmodic loosely designated "neoromantic yearners toward the cosmic, exploiters of intensity and formlessness," whose "main feature was said to be an undercurrent of discontent with the mystery of existence, characterized by vain efforts, unrewarded struggle, skeptical unrest, and an uneasy straining after the unattainable." Elsewhere, it is defined as "a willful delight in remote and involved thinking, abrupt and jerking mental movements, and 'pernickitieness' of expression."

Caricature by Max Beerbohm The Small Hours in the Sixties at 16, Cheyne Walk, Algernon Reading Anactoria to Gabriel and William

From the vantage of half a century after the evaporation of the Spasmodic movement,Lafcadio Hearn devoted a lecture to the subject. He had this to say: The sarcastic term "spasmodic" must not be taken literally. It was unjust and the school, although having no great sustained force, did some good work and must not be despised. Some of the best examples have found their way into the best Victorian anthologies, proof positive that the school has merit. If it could not live, that was because its keynote was strong emotion, and you cannot keep up such a tone indefinitely. The school exhausted itself at an early day.

The term Spasmodic refers to the faults of the school. The meaning of the word"spasmodic" is, as I told you, excess of emotion wrought up to the point of morbidness or sickness. But this does not mean that emotion is to be condemned because it is too strong. On the contrary such emotionalism, in real life, indicates weakness, sickness, disease of the nerves, loss of will power. An emotion cannot be too strong for artistic use. But such passions, when artistically expressed, come like sudden storms and as quickly pass; for they are the passions of powerful and healthy men and women. Not so in the case of sickly or mawkish feeling; that is long-drawn and wearisome like the crying of a fretful child, or like the complaining of a sick man whose nerves are out of order. In the case of a child crying for good reason, we are sorry, and try to comfort the child; if the crying goes on too long, if the child continues to cry long after the pain is over, we become tired, and think it ugly as it cries. And if the child persists in crying for another hour, we suspect a malicious intention, and we become angry with the child. Now the Spasmodic poets make us angry in the same way; they cry without reason. Fledgling poets are likely to be too pathetic. Emotion must be compressed like air to serve an artistic object. Emotion in literature is, in the same way, a motive force; but you must compress it to get power. This the poets of the Spasmodic School refuse to do.

Nevertheless, they obtained immediate, though brief, popularity – which encouraged them to cry still louder than before. But why? Simply because to persons of uncultured taste the higher zones of emotion are out of reach. Their nerves are somewhat dull; they are moved by very simple things, and would not be moved at all perhaps by great things. Everywhere there is a public of this kind, to whom lachrymose emotion and mawkish sentiment give the same kind of pleasure that black, red and blazing yellow give to the eyes of children and savages. When the English public learned the faults of what they were admiring, they dropped the Spasmodics and forgot their beauties as well as their faults.

There was a belief prevalent in certain circles at the time that Tennyson and his followers were too cold and that a more emotional school of poetry was needed. The Pre- Raphaelites had the same opinion. But while the Pre-Raphaelites went in the right direction to improve on the methods of the earlier Romantics, the Spasmodics went to work in the wrong direction. They exaggerated pathos without perceiving that the more room given to it, the weaker it becomes. Nevertheless, before they failed, they succeeded in giving a few beautiful things to the English anthologies, and several of these are by Dobell. He generally takes a death bed scene or a tragedy of some kind, and heaps up the sorrow at wearisome length. Arthur O’Shaughnessy but partly belongs to the group. He is not always a Spasmodic, but always a Rhapsodist. He was a clerk in the British Museum. Like all members of this school, he was nervous, sensitive, sickly and, to a great extent, unhappy. He sang of his own pains, mostly, and sang best when he was most unhappy. Besides poetry of regret, he wrote The Silences and The Fountain of Tears, this last a typical poem of the school: it pushes the emotion to the extreme of rhapsody. In the poem there is a spring in some retired place made of the tears of all mankind. In the poem the spring of tears at first appears to well up very gently and softly, with a music in its flowing that brings a strange kind of consolation to the hearer. But gradually the stream becomes strong, the ripples change to waves, the waves to billowings, and at last the flowing threatens to drown the world. So the imagination is carried almost to the edge of the grotesque.

It must be remembered that the Spasmodic poets, fighting for the expression of sincere emotion in literature, were themselves nearly all weak, sick, unhappy persons; and many of their mistakes must have been due to nervous conditions. All the more do they deserve credit for having been able to add something to the treasure-house of English poetry, especially something of a new kind. It must not be forgotten, at the same time, that their principal weakness constitutes a literary object lesson. To dwell upon an emotion at an unnecessary length is always dangerous and not necessarily likely to be powerful.

The Spasmodists were made a laughingstock by Aytoun’s burlesque Firmilian: A Spasmodic Tragedy which poked fun at the spasmodic fashion for whiny dramatic monologues in verse frequently structured so that the speaker was a maundering, self- indulgent, woe-is-me-spouting poet.

Thus we see that, though the term "spasmodic" was meant to deride and ridicule, the school has a legitimate claim to a place in history, despite its limited credo. But any affiliation of spasmodism with Swinburne or the ascription to him of its traits remains a shallow and grossly inaccurate assessment. ***

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF SWINBURNE

Lord Redesdale on Swinburne (childhood)

What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there between his father and mother, with his wondering eyes fixed upon me! Under his arm he hugged Bowdler's Shakespeare, a very precious treasure, bound in brown leather, with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon, blue I think, with a button of that most heathenish marqueterie called Tunbridge ware dangling from the end of it. He was strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate; and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero- worshippers talk of his hair as having been a 'golden aureole.' At that time there was nothing golden about it. Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakeable, unpoetical carrots.

His features were small and beautiful, chiselled as daintily as those of some Greek sculptor's masterpiece. His skin was very white — not unhealthy but a transparent tinted white, such as one sees in the petals of some roses. His face was the very replica of that of his dear mother, and she was one of the most refined and lovely of women. Another characteristic which Algernon inherited from his mother was the voice. All who knew him must remember that exquisitely soft voice with a rather sing-song intonation. His language, even at that age, was beautiful, fanciful and richly varied. Altogether my recollection of him in those school days is that of a fascinating, most loveable little fellow. Ecce Barditus

In the poet's maturity, a close friend remarked, "Even when I knew Swinburne only by fleeting glimpses, his personality struck me as something quite out of the ordinary. To begin with, he looked what we call "a celebrity." Having once seen him, much less met him, no one could fail to understand he had come into contact with a very extraordinary being, for certain characteristics removed Swinburne definitely outside the pale of ordinary mortals. Had I met him for the first time in the street or in a room, and not knowing he was Swinburne, had been asked to guess what manner of man he was by profession, I should unhesitatingly at the first glance have said " Poet."

Clara Watts-Dunton on Swinburne (old age)

Often when he sat opposite me at meals I would mentally frame Swinburne's head in the pianist's wealth of copper-coloured hair and the resemblance between them would then become positively surprising. But his hair had never been copper-coloured. When his cousin first showed me a lock of Algernon's hair, I could hardly believe such a colour could have grown on a human head. It was not a bit like the hair so often described as "the sort Titian would have loved to paint"; it was just a fiery red.

His eyes were what specially attracted me. They were wonderful, and by far the best feature of his face. If the eye is the window of the soul, truly the eyes of Swinburne spoke for him. I would look at him long and searchingly across the table to try to ascertain what colour they really were. Sometimes they would look soft and tender enough to suggest pansies, at other moments they seemed to be greyish green; and, again, I would think the speckles in them made them marvellously expressive. I have seen them dance and catch fire, according to his various moods. When he read aloud any passage requiring dramatic emphasis, these speckles would grow more radiant and quiver with every cadence of his rather high-pitched voice.

Taking it for granted that Swinburne possessed a superabundance of hair as a young man, I cannot agree with those who think that he possessed a head too big for his body. I would have been the first to have noticed any abnormality of this sort, had it existed. In figure he was slender and boyish, the top-heavy look with which he is credited was no doubt due to the thick hair standing out bush-like from both sides of his head.

Had Nature given Swinburne a body worthy of his mental gifts, he would have been better looking than the Apollo Belvedere. But it was other-wise decreed. His facial features were remarkably good, but his figure was against him. He would have been handsome if he had been a few inches taller and his figure good. But he was short, and his shoulders were far too sloping. His physical imperfections had become less noticeable when I knew him, for he had 'filled out' since the days of "Dolores" and "Chastelard," and his lim bs, unusually muscular, for a man of his size, had taken on a more solid look. His hands were not beautiful or well-shaped, and they were not particularly small. I would often look at his rather podgy digits and prosaic finger nails. [Ed. - I love this woman.]

In the days of his young manhood, Swinburne may or may not have evinced a partiality for fine clothes, but I am sure his good sense never allowed him to adopt any sort of eccentricity of attire. The poet of tradition and the stage has always something of the guy about his clothing. He wears a pair of rusty black trousers, baggy at the knees, a nondescript waistcoat, and a shabby velveteen coat surmounted by a very low turned-down collar with a huge bow under it. His hair is long, and his hat is an umbrageous sombrero.

Swinburne's attire, as I observed it, flatly contradicted this caricature. He took great pains to avoid advertising his metier. He did not wear his hair long; it only reached the nape of his neck, and the little he possessed was often cut by the barber.

He was always very plainly dressed, and I never saw him wearing any other sort of tie than a plain black silk one. At home, and sitting restfully in his chair with a book, he offered no mark for the caricaturist. But outside, when he had donned his wideawake, he somehow looked eccentric. For one thing he braced his trousers too high; in his absence of mind, he would pull them above the ankles, showing several inches of white sock. Furthermore, he had a curious prancing gait, and his deliberate way of flinging out his feet before him as he trod the ground reminded one of a dancing-master or a soldier doing the goose-step.

With his head thrown stiffly back and his body almost rigid from the waist upwards, Swinburne out-of-doors seemed to me an individual distinct from the Swinburne at home.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, binding decoration

Swinburne On Books "The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain."

Use these links to read the four-part column in order: Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4 SWINBURNE'S LEGACY by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

With its driving, headlong rhythms and repetitive, trancelike drone, the imperative surge of incantatory utterances given voice by Swinburne's verse had all the strangeness of glossolalia. It rattled the guardians of tradition and shook the benumbed British mind from its tedious slumber. The startling new poetry sent shock waves shuddering through the repressed realm of Victoria Regina, not just because of its erotic content, but because of the jarring unfamiliarity of the very sound of its speech. In addition to his sexual, political, and theological provocations, Swinburne had waged what amounted to nothing less than an aural assault upon an unsuspecting England. A definitive lyric poet, Swinburne performs feats which seem to defy the physics of prosody. Tour de force is too weak a term to describe the effects he achieves routinely, almost offhandedly. With the urgency of its anapestic beat, its intricate symphonies and antiphonies alternately aggressive and lulling, its gushing rushes of adjectives strung together in alliterative syndicates and its scintillating trains of monosyllabic nouns, Swinburne's technique had, on the ear of England, the impact of a verbal avalanche.

At its most opulent, the sensorial sumptuousness of Swinburne's verse cannot be overstated; stanza after stanza of perfumed notes and chords, overlush and decadent, cascade in dizzying, indefatigable torrents of eloquence. A spasticated frenzy of compounds and concatenations all but impossibly coordinated in splurging cataracts of rhetorical excess and complex scansion; all of it building, wave after wave, into a massive onslaught of music – this was Swinburne's artistry.

To the unprepared ears of the average Victorian, Swinburne's mesmeric monotone of manic diction and emotional intensity must have seemed staggering, unimaginable – an auditory circus, a congress of wonders. To the discerning, it was literary caviar.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Weary Wedding

Like Austin Dobson, Swinburne was well at ease with the conventions of French versification. He was adept with the virelay, the sestina, and the villanelle, and is credited with having adapted the rondeau into his own invention, the English roundel. Moreover, he was an adroit practitioner of rarefied meters such as hendecasyllabics and trochaic tetrameter. Swinburne, nevertheless, was sometimes rebuked by critics for emphasizing sound over sense – a foible with which critics were to fault Dylan Thomas nearly a century later. Swinburne was a lifelong Hellenist and Latinist of the highest order and a medievalist by temperament and taste, partly as a result of the principles and preferences that rubbed off on him during his affiliation with his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. He wrote verse dramas in the classical and medieval molds, featuring femmes fatales and sadomasochistic situations.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, St. Dorothy

Three series of Poems and Ballads and volume on important volume of other verse; scores of scholarly treatises about fellow writers; histories; essays; historical plays and plays based on myth poured from his pen. He was a mighty workhorse who trotted out novels, hoaxes, burlesques and parodies, erotica and juvenilia, much of it still unpublished, in a continual, undifferentiated splurge.

Swinburne is noted for his metaphorical depictions of desolate, inhuman landscape. Pre- Raphaelite pictorial productions tended to render nature as an enchanted fairyland of dream settings a la Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Spenser's Faerie Queene, or Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. Though this sensibility tinged some of Swinburne's work, and he was intimately familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and with the related creations of his contemporary Richard Dadd and of William Bell Scottand John William Inchbold, who were his friends, his own technique was generallyTurnerian, impressionistic, and his aesthetic was that of the Sublime.

Scholar J. D. Rosenberg notes that Swinburne was "obsessed by the moment when one thing shades off into its opposite, or when contraries fuse." He was especially fixated on transitional states in nature – dawn and dusk, sea and sky; what Rosenberg terms "hermaphrodisms." Striving to express this singular sense of the inseparability of contraries, Swinburne emulated in words what his great countryman Turner had done with paint. Swinburne's various technical signatures – assonance and alliteration, synesthesia, monotony – comprised a palette prepared with incomparable virtuosity and they set him apart from all others. The "covert pathology" of his algolagnia, coupled with an exuberant morbidity and a preoccupation with exotic themes like necrophilia, sapphism, and states of sexual humiliation, combine with a truculent "theological defiance" deliberately blasphemous to the point of pastiche, to force a heretical and systematic upheaval by substituting a perverse facsimile of conventional expectations. This impulse, which permeates the preponderance of Swinburne's loftiest verse, manifests colorfully in his poisonous pantheon of cruel goddesses such as malignant Faustine and toxic Dolores. Their dolorous and baleful beauty demanding absolute adoration repaid with abasement, abjection, shame, and disgrace, emblematizes a veritable ethos of the bittersweet.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine

For Swinburne, love is a cruel god, "doomed, bleak, sick and sterile." He is the "poet of love's impossibility" and, according to scholar J. D. Rosenberg, "the laureate of barrenness in all its forms." Love, for Swinburne, is traumatic, and its victims always bruised and scarred. Swinburne's linkage of the frigid with the torrid, of love with death has been attributed to the loss of an often-hinted mystery sweetheart – almost certainly his cousin Mary Gordon – when she married another during his youth. Swinburne's compulsive conflation of affliction and infliction, agony with ecstasy, latent and patent, make him seem a mass of ambiguity and contradiction. Living paradox that he was, he nonetheless not only successfully sublimated the exuberant perversity of his algedonic world view into a balance of opposites but harnessed it as fuel for exquisite literature.

Swinburne studied painters and learned coloration from the Pre-Raphaelites and mirrored "indistinctness" and other innovations he observed in the works of Turner and Whistler. He aped Turner's diffuseness to create total impressionistic wholes displaying an "exaltation of energy over form, and infinite nuance over discrete detail." Within these parameters, Swinburne was able to give scope to his larger view of the cosmos, and of "man's fate on a cooling star." For Swinburne, that fate, according to Anthony Harrison, is "the tragedy of mankind whose pitiable part it is to strive for fulfillment through filial, erotic, and fraternal love, but, in doing so, to generate only strife and be freed from frustration and suffering only in death."

Swinburne uniquely used monotony to convey desolation. To this day, he remains unique in the application of this technique and the achievement of the resultant effect. He was equally unique in his ability to sustain a spree of highly ornate phrasings and fluid inflections perfect to the last scintilla and iota. It has been seriously speculated that the unaccustomed vigor and vivacity of Swinburne's verse and the source of its vital spark is attributable to a brain disorder. Swinburne's was a "music of enervation" in which "a sense of disorientation combined with insistent, mesmeric meters," a blurring, slurring mutedness, as if the drowsy cadences of the poem were enunciated in a dream.

Swinburne the humanist who celebrated in Hertha a Whitmanesque ideal of homo sapiens and who, as a ten-year-old Anglican ("quasi-Catholic," as he put it) had a working knowledge of biblical hermeneutics came, as an adult, to posit the presence of a God-but- not-God governing principle of the universe in which an infinitude of stars views man with cold indifference and even the supernal overlord Time Himself is susceptible to erasure. Just as his countrymen Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and James Thomson and their American cousins Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson were grappling with similar proto- existentialist notions of tragedy and pessimism, Swinburne subscribed to a "relentlessly fatalistic world view" of a sumptuous desolation void of all but Implacable Nature, tyrannical and irreducible, subject only to the supremacy of all-vanquishing Time.

The final paradox of Swinburne is his insistence on the absence of eschatological purpose or teleological scheme in the cosmos other than the rhythm of primordial forces – of oceans and tides and seasons, of the phases of nature and the predations of time. For the most part, Swinburne dispenses with cataloging the contents of Pandora's Box, unlike Baudelaire; he cleaves to a higher perspective from which he views the evils that beset mankind as mere incidentals of mortality all of which will be expunged in the ultimate onslaught – the eventual extinction of mortality and of the process of extinction itself – when, in Swinburne's own oracular words, "as a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead."

Flannery O'Connor and her peacocks

Literary Pets by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

The animal figure is a universal ingredient in literature from Aesop to Orwell. Perennially and ubiquitously, from the humblest children's storybook to the most ambitious epic, beings with paws and claws, beaks and fangs, horns and hooves, fins and flippers, have been put at the service of metaphor or moral instruction. Fables and fairy tales abound with familiar and endearing creatures; the brute beast, although bereft of the faculty of speech, may be eloquent on the printed page. Whether presented realistically or symbolically, members of the animal clan have reflected and, in some cases, indicted the behavior of their human stewards in ways that make representatives of the two-legged species look at least as curious as any of their "lower" planetary co-inhabitants, and often more contemptible.

Leonard Woolf and Pinka in Monk's House garden, 1931

From sable cats to albino cetaceans, famous titular animals span the chromatic spectrum: White Fang; The Green Mare; The Bluebird; The Red Pony. Literary animals of ill omen include Poe's redoubtable raven and Coleridge's ineluctable albatross; other fine feathered friends have exerted a comparable fascination: the fixation of the classical Persian poets on the nightingale, Shelley's skylark, Hardy's thrush.

Even amoebae and their unicellular relatives have found focus in certain literary productions: the tubercular germ in Eduardo Wilde's consumption story "The Rain"; the viral infection, tentative, if implied, in Ezequiel Martinez Estrada's "The Cough"; the microbial organisms which prove the downfall of the extraterrestrial invaders in H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds; from primitive protozoa to prehistoric monsters, to the mythic creatures populating the bestiaries of old, animals have been a constant of literary culture. Petrus Borel

Transformation stories—the Kafka character who metamorphoses into a cockroach; the Cortazar protagonist who turns into an axolotl—carry forward a tradition delineated two millennia ago by Ovid; a tradition in connection with which must not be omitted Bram Stoker's dread vampire Dracula and his elective bat-guise, nor the equally bloodthirsty, half-human, half-lupine werewolves—a theme exploited by French author Charles Nodier and his countryman and fellow dark romantic Petrus Borel, whose nickname was "the lycanthrope." Then there is Arthur Machen's Great God Pan—a goat-human amalgam—the satyr-like deity who presides over nature.

Carl Sandburg, Photo by June Glenn Jr. 1946.

Many preterit writers had an intimate association with livestock from an early age, either by choice, or by accident of birth: Robert Burns had been a farmer—he probably knew how to throttle a hen and trap a fox, slaughter a hog and slop a sow, and could tell a ram from a ewe and a stag from a doe. Argentine beef baron and avant-garde poetOliverio Girondo grew up among droves of cattle which ranged over mile upon mile of unspoiled pampas, guarded by vigilant gauchos. Carl Sandburg raised dairy goats at Connemara, his North Carolina spread. No doubt many another author of yore could identify with Old MacDonald while enthusiastically chanting with a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there, here a quack, there a quack, everywhere a quack-quack; not all, however. Joaquin Miller once rolled a rock down a slope and gravely injured a neighbor's cow; he fenced his property to keep chickens out, not in; but he loved trees and vegetation, and launched the tradition of celebrating Arbor Day in his adopted state of California.

While a hamster, a goldfish, a parakeet are a part of so many lives, and it is to be assumed that many of the most famous of authors had more than a passing acquaintance with common household pets as well as local varmints and other wild critters, an empirical linkage with the animals depicted in their celebrated works does not necessarily follow. So far as is known, Jack London didn't keep a wolf; Kipling didn't keep a mongoose or an elephant or a tiger; Tennessee Williams didn't have an iguana; Mark Twain didn't have an athletic frog; Miguel Angel Asturias didn't have a kinkajou; Jacques Prevert didn't have a donkey; and Edgar Rice Burroughs passed the days at his Tarzana ranch with ne'ery an ape in sight.

Nerval enthusiast Evonne Kummer with lobster at NY World Fair [via nypl]

Zane Grey wrote animal tales and fishing stories galore but, at his rustic California estates, kept neither pelican nor pangolin. Eugene O'Neill went in for neither fish nor fowl as pets, but he had some llamas at the Tao House, his hilltop abode. Authors have often kept exotic pets: C. S. Lewis didn't keep a lion at Oxford but, at Cambridge, Byron kept a bear; D. G. Rossetti maintained, in a section of London which is today smack in the middle of the modern metropolis, a menagerie which would have been the envy of Noah. And eccentric French romantic Gerard de Nerval paraded his pet lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris before hanging himself with Marie Antoinette's garter.

* * *

Persian caricature of Hedayat with owl

* Lord Byron's spirit of friendship among mammals extended to the husbandry of monkeys. At one time or another, his pets included falcons, a fox, a badger, a goose, a heron, a peacock, a brood of guinea hens, a crane, a crocodile, and a crow.

* The pet name of lover Reynaldo Hahn for Marcel Proust was "pony."

* Persian novelist Sadegh Hedayat, author of The Blind Owl, wrote movingly about animals, believed in reincarnation and was a strict vegetarian.

* At the Rare Book Department of the Philadelphia Library, "perched on a log, preserved with arsenic, frozen inside his shadow box" and dead since 1841 (as a result of ingesting lead paint flakes), rest the mortal remains of "Grip the Clever," "Grip the Wicked," "Grip the Knowing"--a corvus corax or common raven, formerly the pet of English novelist Charles Dickens. After its demise, Grip was professionally embalmed and mounted. Eventually, the ebony bird's mortal coil wound up in the City of Brotherly Love—a city once inhabited by Edgar Allen Poe, who was familiar with the pet belonging to his English friend and colleague, and who is said to have been inspired by the raven to indite his eponymous poetic masterpiece—centering on the idea of the ominous avian's "prophetic croakings." In some societies, ravens are thought to embody the souls of murdered people.

* For hours on end, day after day, week after week and month after month, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke studied the panther at the Paris zoo. He undertook this curious research on the advice of his employer, sculptor Auguste Rodin, who counseled the young poet to look at the caged beast until he could truly see.

* Presumably for reasons similar to Rilke's, American author O. Henry regularly visited the alligators in the pond of a prominent Texas park.

* Novelist Flannery O'Connor gave an ornamental flock of peafowl the run of the grounds at her farm "Andalusia" outside Milledgeville, Georgia.

- PRIMATES -

* Spanish ladies used monkeys as foils to their beauty. At one time in France, the Salle des singes, or "monkey room," was an essential fixture of the best households: this was an elegant salon or fashionable lounge ornately decorated with murals, textiles or other wall coverings featuring lavish scenes of frolicking monkeys. Throughout the early decades of the eighteenth century, the cavorting simian was a major fad of Gallic décor. Despite the title of British American writer John Collier's celebrated 1930 novel His Monkey Wife, no evidence has surfaced which would indicate that any of his three spouses was a chimpanzee.

- CANINES -

* Byron was particularly fond of a Newfoundland hound named Boatswain, whom he nursed after the animal became infected with rabies. Byron buried this beloved pet on the grounds of his ancestral home at Newstead Abbey, where his grave monument eclipses that of his master. The poet inscribed Boatswain's memorial tablet with one of his best-known texts: Epitaph to a Dog. Reclusive spinster Emily Dickinson, though a homebody, kept a Newfoundland named Carlo—with whom she roved the family garden, and surrounding meadows and woods of Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson remarked that dogs are better than people because "they know—but do not tell." Writers named Emily seem to have preferred larger animals. Emily Bronte had an intimidating, massive-pawed brute named "keeper" who accompanied her on her prowls over the moors. Like Byron before him, American playwright Eugene O'Neill's wrote a moving eulogy to his pet Dalmatian "Blemie." Sword and sorcery fiction writer Robert E. Howard had a dog named "Patches," after the famous jester who, having disappointed the king, was sent without supper to sleep with the spaniels. Virginia Woolf had a spaniel, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose puppy "Flush" was twice dog-napped and ransomed.

Edith Wharton with a pair of petite pooches perched precariously atop her shoulders

* Lonely New England novelist Edith Wharton, married to an invalided and intellectually impaired spouse, found solace in the companionship of lapdogs, including Chihuahuas, Pekingese and poodles. Wharton confessed being secretly terrified of animals, explaining that she dreaded "the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it— so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us." Woof-woof, arf-arf, bow-wow-wow…

(c) Kate Simon, print, Burroughs and friend [via]

- FELINES -

* William S. Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot kept large clowders of cats. Other prominent literary figures with a fondness for felines have been Alexander Dumas, whose puss "Mysouff" each day greeted him in the street as he returned from work, and Raymond Chandler, whose purring Persian "Taki" routinely took up her station atop a mound of manuscript as he edited. Chandler jokingly referred to his mewling colleague as his "secretary." Hemingway and friend

Faulkner in his Farmington Hunt Club riding habit

- EQUINES -

* Southern novelist William Faulkner was an inveterate equestrian. He claimed to have written his self-proclaimed "potboiler" novel Sanctuary in order to raise money to buy a horse. When running errands in the vicinity of his home in Oxford, Mississippi, he liked to get about on horseback and, late in life, he joined a riding club in Virginia. If there wasn't a fox hunt in which he could ride, he would create his own steeplechase, jumping hedges and fences and repeatedly falling off his mount or being thrown. One day, he broke his collarbone and injured his back in a bad spill from which he never recovered.

- BOVINES -

* At her plantation in Kenya, Isak Dineson didn't have a pet hippo, rhino, gorilla, or giraffe, although she did care for an orphaned bushbuck, kept poultry and raised steers which competed with marauding zebra herds she was constantly at pains to shoo away.

- REPTILES and AMPHIBIANS -

* In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, historical novelist Lionel Feuchtwanger, being a Jew, had to flee Berlin, where his house was ransacked and his pet lizards were killed by the brown shirts, who also trampled his gardens and destroyed his library. Although Feuchtwanger's beloved reptile terrarium had been crushed by the jackboot, he managed to mitigate his loss at his eventual place of exile—the seaside overlook he called Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, California: there he kept a pair of tortoises, tattooed with his phone number, so that they could be returned to their owner if lost.

* A herpetologist by avocation, Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, after being abandoned by his second wife, fabricated a serpentarium out of the empty swimming pool he had built for her at his agricultural station on the edge of the Amazon jungle. There he kept such exotic pets as an anteater and a coatimundi, wrote a number of snake stories and even titled one ensemble of tales Anaconda.

- PORCINES -

* In 1939, American children's author E. B. White moved his family from New York City to North Brooklin, Maine, where he occupied a farmstead and raised cud-chewing sheep, pellet-pecking chickens, and slop-wallowing, corncob-gobbling swine destined for slaughter. On one occasion, he discovered that one of his prize porkers had fallen seriously ill and, instead of speeding its delivery to the butcher shop to be turned into bacon, decided to spare the sickling. He did his utmost to nurse the ailing oinker back to health, finding himself "cast suddenly in the role of pig's friend and physician." His experiences resulted in the celebrated essay Death of a Pig. One can't help but wonder if White would have shown the same compassion to a feral javelina or European boar.

- PSITTASCINES -

* In a tradition which continues to the present day, museums around the world loan specimens of stuffed animals for use as pedagogic aids, theatrical props, and decorative accessories. When French novelist Gustave Flaubert was composing his story A Simple Heart, he rented a taxidermied parrot from the Rouen Museum and placed the preserved featherling on his desk as an object of inspiration. The polychromatic avian proved an excellent muse for the literary master who patterned on it an imaginary counterpart which was to become the centerpiece of his immortal story. Within a few weeks, however, the novelist had tired of the brightly hued bird and returned it to the custody of museum curators.

- PISCINES -

* Considering the Japanese fascination with all things aquatic and the predilection of the national palate for fresh marine life, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Nipponese novelist Yasunari Kawabata kept a number of pedigreed Koi; nor that fellow pen pusher Kajii Motojiro was rumored to have kept an aquarium filled with multicolored jellyfish, on which he would brood for hours at a time.

Oberländer, Ice-Skating Camel, ca. 1898 [via nypl]

- UNGULATES -

* Isabelle Eberhardt and Paul Bowles trekked across the Sahara desert on camels.

- URSINES -

* English romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, when a resident student, defied Cambridge University's statutory prohibition against dogs by keeping a tame bear, instead. Byron took pains to provide the former dancing bear with the finest viands available and pampered his pet with long walks and every comfort his college quarters could afford. This attitude was perpetuated at later domiciles where he allowed contingents of horses, hounds, foxes, and fowls to freely roam indoors.

- PLANTIGRADES -

* Although they obviously had a soft spot for animals, famous nature writers such as E. Thomas Seaton and G. D. Roberts and children's writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Howard R. Garis were not known to nurture any creatures outside the ordinary domestic variety. The slightly more adventurous American memoirist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings kept a pet raccoon.

- INSECTS and SPIDERS -

* Beekeeping was the hobby of Belgian dramatist, poet, Nobel Prize winner, and winged thing fancier Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Bluebird and The Life of the Bee. He maintained an apiary for many years, so as to enjoy the soothing sound of the buzzing drones.

* Itchier and twitchier specimens were the insects of choice for certain writers: ants were just the ticket for H. G. Wells in The Empire of the Ants; a beetle was the focus of E. A. Poe's "The Gold Bug"; Norberto Luis Romero favored tamer fare in his moth story "Epiphytes." Although British novelist and author of The Collector John Fowles is not known to have gone in for any sort of butterfly hunting himself, his Russo-American counterpart Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist first class with a special interest in the fairylike creatures. Amateur lepidopterist Nabokov killed and impaled butterflies; he didn't raise them. He chased the flitting ephemerids through forest and meadow, swooping down on them with a net, before chloroforming them and pinning their bodies to mounting board so as to best display their painted wings. Because Nabokov never learned to drive a car, his wife chauffeured him on these expeditions. Nabokov discovered several unknown genera and had many others named for him. The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University maintains Nabokov's "genitalia cabinet" containing male butterfly reproductive organs. The genitalia are stored not because they afford a means of establishing gender but in order to distinguish among species. Nabokov spent so much time poring over his specimens that he permanently damaged his eyesight.

* While Swiss novelist and prudish Protestant pastor Jeremias Gotthelf authored the plague allegory The Black Spider, he wouldn't have dreamed of keeping a pet arachnid. Shabby genteel symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, on the other hand, reputedly kept a Brazilian tarantula in a glass-encased window box purely for the spooky effect it lent to his decadent, demi-dandified Ile Saint-Louis digs.

Rossetti's "Death of a Wombat," sketch "I never reared a young Wombat To glad me with his pin-hole eye, But when he most was sweet and fat And tail-less, he was sure to die!"

- MARSUPIALS and MONOTREMES -

* Not to be outdone by his pet-crazy predecessor Byron, English Pre-Raphaelite poet and animal fanatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti ran, at his Cheyne Walk "Tudor House" in Chelsea, a three-ring circus of exotic beasts. Not content with a Brahmin bull, a zebra, an armadillo, a wallaby, a Japanese salamander and an Irish deerhound, he soon added dormice, rabbits, marmots, woodchucks, laughing jackasses, a Pomeranian puppy, owls and parrots. Also in residence were the novelist George Meredith and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, a being every bit as exotic as any of the other specimens in Rossetti's suburban zoo. Neighbor Thomas Carlyle complained about the constant racket emitted by the denizens of Rossetti's large, lime-and-mulberry-tree-filled garden. The bohemian poet was a sucker for every creature from the clumsiest caterpillar to the most graceful gazelle. He wanted to add a young elephant to the population, but balked at the exorbitant price quoted by his pet broker. After spending endless hours during the 1860s at the Wombat's Lair in Regent's Park Zoo, he eventually determined to acquire one of these marsupials for his own. In September, 1869, he purchased a wombat, named it "Top," and installed it as the showpiece of his collection. Although "Top" was short-lived and survived by Rossetti's sturdier and hardier Canadian woodchuck, the little antipodean fur ball was the star prop of the London literary scene and single-handedly started a craze much like the mania for ferrets in our own day. The talented Rossetti family fawned over "Top": the poet's sister Cristina composed verses praising the pet as "nimble, cheerful, hairy and round"; she bought or built a "shrine" to serve as the wombat's headquarters; brother William noted that "Top" would follow people all over the house and described him as "lumpish and incapable, with an air of baby objectlessness" but affectionate, and apt to "nestle up against one, and nibble one's calves or trousers." Dante Gabriel himself gasped, "Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?" He devoted endless encomia to the pet and painted a self-portrait with the wombat crowned by a halo. "Top" is surrounded by legend. "Rossetti gleefully reported that the wombat had effectively interrupted a long and dreary monologue from John Ruskin by patiently burrowing between the eminent critic's jacket and waistcoat. Much later, James McNeill Whistler invented a silly story about how the wombat had perished after eating an entire box of cigars." It has been noted for a fact by Ford Madox Brown and other illustrious guests that Rossetti allowed the wombat to sleep in the large epergne which rested on the dining room table. This same table was also the site of a rodeo staged by a toucan sporting a cowboy hat and trained by Rossetti to ride rings on the back of a llama.

* Contrary to popular belief, Australian authors Judith Wright and Patrick White had neither a koala nor a duck-billed platypus between them.

Rackham, illus. for Comus, 1921, via nypl

- RODENTS -

Considered by many to constitute a lower order of animalia than even the slimiest insect, the rodent embodies mankind's collective guilt over its exploitation of beings with gills and pelts. Beavers, gophers, voles and weasels, with their beady eyes, luxuriant fur and ever- replenishing, ever re-sharpening incisors, represent the animal kingdom at its most accusatory, at its most menacing. The undeservedly unsavory reputation of the rodent and its popular classification as a breed of vermin stems from the perception that there is something subversive about its kind; this perception, in turn, derives from man's remorse and embarrassment over his lamentable, millennia-long history of subjecting beasts of burden to the yoke of oppression. To see the injustice of this situation, we have only to look at E. A. Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," in which rats are the heroes and act as the condemned protagonist's saving grace and ultimate deliverance. The rodent is a vehicle of contrition. Innovative editor and pioneer science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback dreamed up robot mice because he knew that, in the absence of this natural enemy who threatens to displace us, threatens to outperform us, we would have to fill the void with artificial surrogates. In point of fact, the members of the writerly tribe, along with all their fellow men, thrive on the furtive threat of infestation poised to catch them unwary and unwitting. A Freudian might asseverate that the creative personality, of a highly imaginative and sensitive nature, coupled with a pronounced susceptibility to suggestion and a propensity for hysteria, nurtures a secret dread—not unfounded—of succumbing to a runaway lemming effect…

* * *

It will be seen, then, that the personal pet has played a triple role in the service of literature: that of comfort, companion and, along with its undomesticated counterpart, that of inexhaustible source of inspiration—an inspiration which surely will endure until the most delinquent pigeon roosts and even the tardiest cow comes home…

Children placing wigs and headdresses on their pets [via nypl]

***

James Joyce and Edith Sitwell

A Succinct Survey of Authors' Accessories and Accoutrements by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

It is generally conceded that creativity can be engendered and enhanced by artificial agency. In the literary sphere, the evidence for this extra-dynamic phenomenon has taken many fascinating forms and found expression in a variety of media.

*

Perhaps the most familiar and obvious manifestations of this principle are the colorful flourishes of fashion affected by the literary class. Among the idiosyncrasies of dress setting authors apart from the crowd are any number of distinctive sartorial signatures sufficient to send the slap-happiest of haberdashers into a dither of aesthetic paroxysms. Episodic French novelist Marcel Proust, for example, had so pronounced a fondness for velveteen gloves, that he frequently wore them to bed.

Marianne Moore and George Sand

In the headgear department, American poet Marianne Moore is inseparable from the ubiquitous tricorn hat which made her look like a Minuteman hastening to Bunker Hill; Voltaire has been immortalized by his Phrygian cap, which made the Father of the Enlightenment resemble a superannuated sandman or a senile jester sprung from a broken jack-in-the-box, while Ernest Hemingway's constant cap-companion, on the other hand, was a long-billed model, designed to shade his brow while Marlin fishing. British belle- lettrist Edith Sitwell's cigarette holder made her look entirely like Edith Sitwell, which is to say, a post-Edwardian rendition of an exceptionally eccentric, decadence-dripping, slightly deranged tsarina.

Faulkner, Meyrink, Chesterton

Countryman G. K. Chesterton's opera cloak gave him the appearance of a caped crusader for the Republic of Letters and Romanian-Swiss Dada dandy Tristan Tzara was photographed so often in his youth with his Old World monocle cupped to his face that it gave the impression of being an epidermal appendage. He seems to have divested himself of this ocular appurtenance in later years, when he became a respectable burgher no longer sporting a striped gilet and a cane after the manner of a silent screen thespian circa 1922.

Tzara, his monocle, his ascot, and Rene Crevel, by Man Ray (1928)

Nipponese pen-pusher Yukio Mishima's tatenokai arm band, emblem of the Shield Society, his private army, adorned his sleeve at every opportunity. Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde preferred floral ornaments—the carnation and the sunflower—as a personal metaphor, while the distinctive badge of Mississippian prose-bender William Faulkner was a simple Dunhill pipe. In a perfect blend of necessity and taste, Dublin word-sorceror James Joyce brandished a black Abbott eye patch and an ashplant cane—byproducts of declining eyesight requiring a total of twenty-five surgical operations. Mid-nineteenth century cross- dressing French authoress George Sand's breeches and riding crop caused quite a commotion at the time. Austrian fantast Gustav Meyrink, on the contrary, was the picture of a strange propriety, never to be seen in public without his pearl stick-pin-studded silk cravat and immaculate mauve canvas spats. The larger-than-life figure cut by English poet William Ernest Henley with his pegleg and crutch inspired friend R. L. Stevenson to create the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Curiously, some of history's most reserved and straight-laced authors had a flair for the offbeat and the antic. Henry James couldn't resist hand buzzers and exploding cigars; George Eliot frequently resorted to an ether-soaked handkerchief; still others, in keeping with our theme of attire and its adjuncts, kept fetishistic collections of walking sticks or parasols. French diarist, dramatist and surrealist minister of propaganda Antonin Artaud devised and circulated the movement's official calling card, which read:You are looking for Surrealism — Surrealism is looking for You. The occupational costume of the Parisian existentialists was black, denoting a dutiful mourning for the sad state of the world…

*

Fox writing with a goose quill pen, via nypl

Writing implements: what could play a worthier or more essential role in the life of any author? Goethe favored a humble Faber pencil; Truman Capote, who always wrote while lying in bed or reclining on a sofa, used Blackwings. Tolstoy used dipping pens and, at one point, the silver-bearded sage of the steppes was presented with an Edison electric pen—an early mimeograph or document duplicating device, but it didn't work. Gustave Flaubert enjoyed the verve of the goose quill; Virginia Woolf composed correspondence in violet ink. With the debut of the self-filling fountain pen, authors, naturally, were among the first to put the device in service: Arthur Conan Doyle used a Parker Duofold, as did Colette; Edith Wharton's instrument of choice was the Conklin, as it was for her estimable confederate-in- letters Mark Twain. The white-maned humorist was so enamored of the Conklin crescent filler that he promoted it for the manufacturer. From 1903, Twain served as a company spokesman, extolling the Conklin in an ad campaign in which he averred "I prefer it because it is a profanity saver; it cannot roll off the desk."

via nypl

Twain, himself a failed inventor and gadgeteer first class, chum of Nikola Tesla, and incorrigible sucker for any sort of new-fangled contraption, took pride in being one of the very first to adopt the early typewriter. The fabled names ring with the heady romance of a bygone era: Remington, Underwood, Royal, Hermes, Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Olympia, Halda, Hammond, Sholes & Glidden. In the Remington camp were the likes of Stephen Vincent Benet, Allen Ginsberg, Hermann Hesse, Stanislaw Lem, George Orwell, H. L. Mencken, and Flannery O'Connor. The stalwart Underwood was the mainstay of many, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, Carson McCullers and Upton Sinclair.

Tennessee Williams at the typewriter (with cigarette in holder)

The refreshing modernity and streamlined simplicity of the Smith-Corona were just the ticket for e.e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, Nikki Giovanni, and T. S. Eliot. Opting for classicism were Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Ring Lardner, Richard Wright, and Clifford Odets, devotees of the Royal. Patrick White used an Optima; Sylvia Plath had an Olivetti; Jack London's workhorse was a Standard Folding; Ezra Pound's was an Everest. John Steinbeck and Eugene Ionesco were Hermes owners; J. B. Priestley was well contented with his Imperial. Mickey Spillane and Richard Wilbur found their inspiration in the L.C. Smith. The list is long and turgid, although softened by the wistful scent of nostalgia.

*

Kerouac's On the Road scroll

For other authors, the typewriter and its technological relatives were made moot by unconventional writing habits. Fernando Pessoa, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Wolfe and Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up; Nabokov used a lectern, presumably to keep lookout for errant butterflies—he was an amateur lepidopterologist. Still other noted ink slingers used index cards or pinned pages of manuscript to the wall with thumbtacks; beatnik scrivener Jack Kerouac famously indited one of his picaresque road sagas on a roll of adding machine paper systematically unfurled like a papyrus scroll. *

Robert Walser, out for a walk

Members of the literary set have long been noted for their enthusiasm for walking, not only for purposes of health, recreation and basic locomotion, but because this simple ambulatory activity promotes reverie and creative cogitation. Some of the world's masterpieces of the pen have had their conception in a meditative morning constitutional or a cerebral afternoon stroll. Writers have always been only too happy to quit the stuffy precincts of the garret for a breath of fresh air, and trade parchment for pavement in an outburst of joyous and unrestrained pedestrianism. And, while altogether content to be propelled strictly by the soles of the feet, writers are as likely as their forward-looking fellow citizens to avail themselves of the advantages of the latest advances in transportation. With the advent of modern vehicles such as the bicycle and the automobile, writers were as ready as anyone else to give their feet a rest, and embrace the fruits of progress.

Jarry and his "external skeleton"

Pataphysician-playwright and congenital bicycle fanatic Alfred Jarry blissfully tore around the French countryside on his beloved velocipede. So obsessive was his mania for the conveyance, that he called it his "external skeleton." He adopted the dress of the racing cyclist and refused to wear any other raiment, even once attending the funeral of a famous public figure in his road regalia. He may have been a hazard on the highway, as he was a raging alcoholic, but the precise extent of his recklessness on two wheels has not been documented. Experimental French poet Francis Picabia loved fast cars and had a collection of 150; American dramatist Eugene O'Neill had the same weakness; strangest of all was Uruguayan author of grim existential narratives Horacio Quiroga, who scrambled around the fringes of the Amazon jungle on a 1925 Harley Davidson with a sidecar. The natives in the remote Misiones region on the border of Paraguay called Quiroga "el loco del moto," or "motorcycle madman."

*

Thoor Ballylee

For all the convenience and prestige of a top-of-the-line bicycle or motorcar, the ultimate writer's accessory, the luxury par excellence, must surely be the personal ivory tower. "Poet's towers" have been famously occupied, in Ireland, by Rosicrucian rhymester and Golden Dawn acolyte William Butler Yeats and, in the western United States, by misanthropic poet-dramaturge Robinson Jeffers. Yeats first took up residence in Thoor Ballylee, an old stone structure in County Galway, in 1915. The ancient habitation was perfused with an ethereal fairyland energy irresistible to a Celtic Twilight twinkletoes such as himself, and he produced many significant works while cloistered within its walls. So famous has Thoor Ballylee become, as a result of its association with the redoubtable Mr. Yeats, that a miniature ceramic replica of it has been mass-manufactured by a world- renowned maker of porcelain goods, and made available as a commemorative collector's item. [The so-called "James Joyce Tower," also in Eire, is a Martello fort left over from the Napoleonic era, where the author once spent a week as a young man. Today the fort is a museum consecrated to the memory of Joyce and his writings.]

Tor House

Jeffers' Tor House, a narrow masonry cylinder of four levels he built with his own hands, over the course of several cold winters, with stones collected from the rocky shoreline of coastal Carmel, California, near Monterey Bay, still stands in all its pristine splendor. Jeffers spent much of his working life ensconced in the cramped, petrous turret, brooding about civilization and its discontents. The craving for privacy which undoubtedly underlies the urge to create such personal refuges was undoubtedly the same impetus which prodded Marcel Proust to set new precedents in environmental control with his famous cork-lined bed-chamber. A lust for Solitude and Silence, sainted twin sisters of blessed imps Sanctuary and Seclusion, spurred Connecticut Yankee Samuel Clemens to assemble a backyard gazebo behind his picturesque mansion in Hartford, where he rigidly adhered to a strict daily schedule, routinely writing and puffing his way through a a train of cigars hour after hour.

General Lew Wallace Study

In Crawfordsville, Indiana, General Lew Wallace, Civil War hero, Governor of New Mexico Territory, and author of the historical novel Ben Hur, created a habitat with just the right ambience for creative endeavor. Though he called it his "library," it is really a rather large studio, furnished with every amenity and comfort to mitigate the rigors of the writer's life. Here, Wallace could wallow in sybaritic splendor, turning his toils into something tinged with a splash of the hedonic, like a pasha taking an afternoon off from the demands of his duty to the harem.

The "James Joyce Tower"

*****

Industry has always done its dogged best to keep pace with the arts and their many- splendored vancouriers. Quick to address the needs, real or imagined, of the harried workaday writer, the titans of commerce, during decades past, have come up with mechanical paracletes, electrical aids, magnetic appliances—artificial auxiliaries and assistants of every description. Indeed, no shortage of personal afflatus aids has streamed from the restless imaginations of far-sighted inventors, designers and developmental engineers, manifest in a proud, unstinting parade of startlingly odd and offbeat contrivances. The fanciful appellations of these gadgets and apparatuses, couched in the quaint and faintly foreign-sounding nomenclature of the waning Industrial Age, are as amusing as they are colorful.

The Dictascrivener

The Patterson-Armitage Dictascrivener of 1898 was an early attempt to perfect a method of effecting transfer of thought to paper without program or mediation. The gentle voltage passing through the barrel of the Dictascrivener emitted a vibratory stimulus which would allegedly trigger a discharge of dazzling revelations.

The Dicta-pen

The Neverfail's platinum jacket, iridium tip Dicta-pen, a rival device which made its debut in 1899, was transparently derivative and unabashedly imitative of its predecessor. Accompanying literature promised to "coax veiled truths from secret places and, spontaneously dredging them to the surface from hidden depths, place them, fully formed, at the forefront of an author's faculties of awareness." Around 1904, Hammond, Hemmings, and Smith published a stunning series of Portable Literary Shrines which folded flat for easy placement in luggage and which a blockage-afflicted writer could, while traveling, unpack and set up for contemplation in a lonely hotel suite.

The Muse-o-Matic

The Castalia Corporation introduced, in 1931, the Muse-O-Matic, a frightful device with a housing like that of a massive console radio ill-concealing a tangled mass of insulated wiring and cathodes and diodes galore. A nightmare of exposed hinges, argon and neon beam projectors, tubes and resistors, it was crowned by a gigantic hypnotic disk with a spiral pattern mounted on its lid. The repetitive "emanations" of the swirling spiral purportedly enabled the Muse-O-Matic to fix the user in a "thrall" of "mental captivation" induced by the machine's "invisible aura" of subtle suggestion and subliminal insinuation.

Inspiratron (interior view)

In the same year, Parnassus Enterprises followed suit with the Inspiratron, which featured a saddle with massage action, designed to soothe a spasm-fraught sacroiliac, while the writer seated thereon placed his or her hands on a pole through which a mild electric current passed. The action of this mechanism was supposed to spark an upsurge of creative consciousness.

But perhaps the crowning glory of this era of rabid innovation and exploratory ferment was the invention of the personal writing booth. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, manufacturers could scarcely keep pace with demand, and cranked them out at a heady rate. Some were as colorful as carousels, others as tame as shipping crates. An extreme form of author's retreat, the writing booth was neither an elevated nor secluded edifice but a coffin-sized compartment positioned on the perpendicular and designed with the sole purpose of manifesting a perfervid inspirational influx or, to borrow from strict scientific terminology, "infrapoesis," in the subject enclosed in its confines. All writing booths had two things in common: buzzers, bells, switches and levers to pique the mind and tweak the senses; and a tight-fitting, hermetically sealed cockpit where a wishful writer squeezed into a seat which barely cleared an adjustable lap board serving as a desk. Here, the encapsulated author was expected to generate masterpieces in a condition of claustrophobic envelopment only a contortionist could find comfortable Nevertheless, many succeeded. "Immersion" could last for hours, even days. Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have penned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while confined for a week, without emerging to eat or relieve himself!

Leading brands and models of writing booths include:

The Jones-Underhill Patent Composition Cabinet

Equipped with a gleaming chromium sphere orbited by colored glass globes, the roof of the de luxe version of this cagelike structure resembled a trelliswork steeple topped by a windsock and a weather vane. This may have been because the Jones- UnderhillComposition Cabinet boasted a bank of remote-controlled vacuum-intakes designed to register the "climate of the soul." Feedback from these indicators was piped into the cabinet to offer encouragement to the poet toiling within, imparting a tonic effect to a fevered brow and softening the rigors of solitary endeavor.

The Jones-Underhill Patent Composition Cabinet, alternate views (above & below)

*

General Fabricators Lucubration Closet

Restricted by a complex of obtrusive internal partitions and fitted with a nexus of acoustic baffles and riffles, G. F.'s Lucubration Closet had all the coziness of a sardine can with spikes. This forbidding cubicle was a popular and widely sold item, despite an alarming, all- enveloping intimacy not every customer found genial.

Universal Dry Goods All-Weather Field Scriptorium

This booth had the advantage of portability, even if hampered by less-than-advertised immunity to meteorological vicissitudes. Essentially a tent, its airiness gave, less than other models, the sensation of taking up residence in a dark cocoon.

Severin & Spottiswoode Spectral Dictation Chamber

Curtained like a confessional or a carnival midway photo booth and engineered for the reception of messages from the Spirit World, this legendary model is reputed to have channeled many a communiqué from the Great Beyond. Not only have great authors of the past engendered immortal manuscripts through the operations of the S. D. C.(Goethe claimed to have "received" the text of Faust by this means), they have continued to capitalize on the uncanny powers of the S. D. C. to channel transmission of fresh manuscripts after death. And, although the allegation cannot be definitively credited, it is widely believed that the practice of automatic writing was born after Andre Breton encountered an S. D. C. in a mysterious castle in the Ardennes.

Fairchild Standard Scriptomat

Its tin epidermis marvelously embellished with Doric pillars, laurel wreaths and cameo portraits of classical authors, the Fairchild Scriptomat featured a stool redolent of a refugee barber's chair from a vintage tonsorial parlor and a complex control panel checkered with pushbuttons, toggles, sliding knobs and dials.

Control Panel of the Standard Scriptomat

Pedals below and a handgrip alongside could be manipulated to regulate the fluid levels in hydraulic dispensers and release anesthetic, mood-altering gases inside the enclosure. A holdover from the pioneering days of nitrous oxide experimentation, it proved irresistible to pragmatist philosopher William James, who ordered one in hopes of curing his neurasthenia.

*

The decerebrator

Dossiers from confidential archives have only recently come to light exposing evidence of warped applications of some of the devices outlined in the present survey. Abuses of a most glaring and infamous nature have been cited at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (popularly known as the Swiss National "Creativity Clinic") in Zurich, where clinicians are reported to have press-ganged squads of "volunteers" and subjected them to all manner of physical insults and moral indignities in the name of cultural advancement. In an outrage almost unthinkable in its implications, scores of noted European authors were, during one regrettable period, abducted by renegade elements inside the institute and strapped into electrode-studded body harnesses and counter-prevarication stirrups in an effort to force confessions of plagiarism, and other breaches of professional ethics. According to reliable sources, researchers watched expressionlessly as test subjects were infected with synthetic nerve parasites, coolly indifferent to their struggles. The extent of these horrific "studies" is not known, but the unspeakable practices in Switzerland may explain both the voluntary reclusion of several prominent fixtures in the literary firmament and the mysterious disappearance of others.

Long-buried files newly retrieved from top security vaults at the Peoples' Laboratory for Brain Research in the Central Facility for Cognitive Studies in Nulligrad, at last confirm persistent rumors that, during the early years of the Soviet regime, the notorious State Punition Bureau conducted a round of decerebrator or "brain scrambler" experiments, using controversial poets and playwrights as guinea pigs. Unfortunate participants were exposed to low frequency sound waves by means of electrodes attached to the temporal lobes. During winter nights the spastic screams of the victims could be heard piercing the arctic air as the decerebrator ratcheted into place, accompanied by the asthmatic laughter of an exultant technician leering and wheezing in a lymph-splattered smock. It quickly became apparent that the procedure had gone terribly awry when gaunt and emaciated survivors were seen bumbling about in broad daylight, addled beyond repair. Wandering aimlessly through the city streets, minds melted down to that of a mullet, they were no better than a bunch of drooling nyctophants...

The Nooklopia Helmet

Not to be outdone by the decerebrator was the nooklopia or thought theft helmet designed to cleanse the mind of "noxious effluvia." By sucking dry impertinent ideas and erasing extraneous thought patterns from the cerebral cortex, the nooklopia helmet would theoretically free the greater cerebellum of static congestion in order to facilitate spontaneous poetic transport or "logopoesis." Clinical trials revealed a dangerous deficiency in this dubious if well-intended appurtenance—a side effect forewarned in its instruction booklet—absolute and permanent speechlessness…

Then again, no serious-minded person expects poetic exaltation to come without cost. As Arthur Koestler astutely reminds us, true creativity often starts where language ends.

"Pyramid of Capitalist System"

Variorum of Classic Tracts and Pamphlets ~ Gilbert Alter-Gilbert ~

At one time or another, the ills of the world have been blamed on everything from tight- fitting shoes to television. The Diggers wanted to abolish money, the Luddites wanted to destroy the machines. The majority of such sectarians has traditionally adopted the medium of printed matter to broadcast theories, positions, opinions. Social theorists have published provocative polemics about eugenics and population engineering. Crusading utopians and meliorists have generated a wealth of redemptive and rehabilitative circulars such as the memorably-titled Kill Your Television (anti-cathode tube), The Menace of Psychiatry (anti-mind modification), and Absinthe – Sapper of Souls (anti-alcohol). Feuding factions have produced pamphlets both pro and con concerning such issues as abortion, the legitimacy of monarchy, gun control, the right to privacy, methods for disposal of the dead, vegetarianism, even aesthetics. The germ and genesis of most of these is the impulse to air grievances. Gripes, beefs, cavils and carpings envenom the prose of leaflets, pamphlets, flyers, tracts and broadsides published by a panoply of political extremists, religious fanatics, eccentrics, radicals and zealots of every stripe. It is a long tradition dating to the early days of the printing press, and which persists even in the era of e-mail, facebook, and twitter and, although the pages of many of these impassioned documents have become brittle with age, many are still dripping wet with vitriol or, at least, with the perspiration of fervid conviction.

Because of its raw attitude and subversive flavor, the collective family of tracts, pamphlets, and related texts has been characterized by some as "outsider" writing orliterature brut. There is, of course, a certain measure of validity to this assertion. Nevertheless, Victor Hugo and Leon Bloy were pamphleteers. Jonathan Swift's Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal were originally circulated in pamphlet form, as were Thomas Paine's American Crisis and Common Sense. Any number of other significant literary figures, including Octave Mirbeau, Max Nordau, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound, Benjamin Peret, and Philippe Soupault resorted to the printed tract at one time or another, and used it as a launch pad for public tirades. Indeed, the humble yet potent tract or pamphlet format has assumed a range of variations and exhibits a breadth of subject matter almost as diverse as that displayed by its big brother, the book.

Often authored anonymously, tracts and pamphlets have frequently taken the form of satire in order to convey derisive messages. Sometimes all semblance of civility is ripped away to reveal a naked and unabashed core of blatantly scurrilous invective.

Pamphlets of a pragmatic nature, such as training manuals or instruction booklets for household appliances and appurtenances, share a simple utilitarianism with their didactic cousins the etiquette, courtship, garden, recipe, and hygiene handbooks. Still other straightforward variants are commercial and business brochures, institutional bulletins and official communiqués, and labor union flyers and handbills calling for justice for janitors or boycotts of grapes.

A Demon's Nightmare, Chick Publications

By the late 1800s, submarine telegraph pamphlets and suffrage tracts were all the rage. Fifty years later, airborne leaflets were routinely disseminated from aircraft for propaganda purposes. Today, despite the inroads of rival media, pamphlets and tracts still make the rounds of shopping malls, parking lots, and other public concourses, because of the need to reach the "man in the street."

As a conveyance for exchanging animadversions, as a platform for socioeconomic argument, as a substitute for soapbox or pulpit, as a megaphone through which to decry the wreckage and carnage of civilization, as a conduit for sermon, sanction, gospel or grimoire, ad hoc credo or instant ideology, the tract or pamphlet has no rival.

Representative of every shade and nuance of opinion, admonition, alert, announcement, oracle, proclamation, decree, denunciation, revelation, epiphany, panegyric and condemnatory blast is a host of categories, including:

Manners and Mores • European Leaflets for Young Ladies (1861) • Jonathon Club Roster, Bylaws, and House Rules (clubhouse rule book)

Public Health • Diseases of Animals (Great Britain, 1922) • Soil Sterilization • Insect Pests • Fluke or Liver Rot in Sheep • Eelworm in Potatoes • Destruction of Mites and Insects in Sacks • Cannibalism and Feather Picking in Poultry • Beet Eelworm • World Status Map – delineates war zones and danger areas, traveler advisories and warnings, vaccination and Center for Disease Control reports, immunization mandates, quarantines for cholera, yellow fever, plague • Miscellaneous leaflets advertising or warning against medical nostrums

From Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack (Dept. of Defense, 1961)

Industrial • Formaldehyde: Its Safe Use in Foundries • Pig Fattening Houses • Wall Construction – a typical how-to booklet • A Brief History of the Clark Grave Vault Company charts the development of metal burial vaults. One might be surprised to learn that the use of burial vaults was begun in the U. S. only in the 1850s or 1860s. Use was initiated primarily to prevent grave robbing and theft of buried valuables. The founder of the company Hugh D. Clark, using air-seal diving bell technology, devised a metal vault to enclose a casket and prevent invasion by moisture or human invaders. Readers learn from this booklet that the "Custodian" is the company's flagship model.

From Clark Vault catalog

From back cover of A Brief History of The Clark Grave Vault Company

Imperial Casket Co., Model n.5, The Bel-Air Colonial Deluxe "All the Warmth that Wood Can Give"

Environmental • Mediterranean Fruit Fly, published by the U. S. Department of Food and Agriculture, is accompanied by illustrations of thriving maggots and infested fruit; instructions on "How to Recognize the Mediterranean Fruit Fly and Cooperate with Quarantine laws" • Gypsy Moth and Japanese Beetle – other insect pests • Questions and Answers About Cryptosporidium Eternal vigilance against pernicious contaminants and scathing contagions…

Political • Women's Suffrage (U.S., circa 1900) • Why Socialism Must Come (U.S., circa 1927) – a bullying, insistent polemic • Savak: Iranian Assassins – an anti-Pahlavi leaflet

Games and Toys • Collecting Meccano Dinky Toys: A Meccano Magazine Digest 1928 – 1940 compiled by Ronald Truin, printed and published by the Cranbourn Press, Ltd., London; Dinky Toys are manufactured by Meccano, Ltd., Liverpool, as are Hornby miniature railway sets; trains, boats, planes, automobiles, barnyard animals, station staff and passengers are among the scale models and accessories made by this firm; scaled-down replicas of the Queen Mary, of aircraft such as the De Havilland Leopard Moth, the Percival "Gull," a low wing monoplane, and a General "Monospar" being specific examples. Additional choices include a delightful little model of a Cierva "Autogiro" with revolving vanes, and Royal Tank Corps personnel along with battle tanks, motorcycles and delivery vans. As the richly illustrated catalog announces, "All boys are interested in warships, and Set No. 50 provides a set of ships of the British Navy ranging from battleships to submarines."

From Fun and Games of Long Ago

• Fun and Games of Long Ago, published by Chandler Press, Maynard, Massachusetts, 1988, is a facsimile reprint of the 1864 edition of The American Boy's Book of Sports and Games designed by White, Herrick, Wier, and Harvey, engraved by Orr, and published by Dick and Fitzgerald, New York. Hopscotch, shinny, ten pins and pole vaulting are among the juvenile recreations enumerated between its covers. Besides outdoor activities there are playroom games and arithmetical amusements and puzzles; recommended "evening amusements" include "How to Strike the Knuckles Without Hurting Them," "The Magnetized Cane" and "The Erratic Egg."

• Rules for Games on Carrom Game Boards, 37 pages, published by the Carrom Company, Ludington, Michigan, copyright 1898 and 1899, 1900 and 1901 details proper gamesmanship for such variations as Crokinole and Spinoza. The Carrom product was a game board so versatile that some two dozen different games could be played on it.

Daisy Air Guns credo

• American Youths' Bill of Rights, first printed in 1947 by the BB gun maker Daisy Manufacturing Company, Rogers, Arkansas. Millions of copies of this "poignant plea" for the right of minors to bear arms have been circulated.

Hobbies

• Bischoff's Expert Taxidermy of Burbank, California (established 1922); internal illustrations for this company catalog and price list feature game heads, fur rugs, elephant foot stools, zebra foot table lamps and ash trays made from hippo, rhino, and buffalo feet.

From Bischoff's Expert Taxidermists catalog

• DeJon's Taxidermy Studio promotional brochure, ca. 1984

• Gardening Under Artificial Light (1970), a 65 page Brooklyn Botanic Garden Plants & Gardens series publication which discusses such subjects as "the basement greenhouse," "plant propagation under fluorescent tubes," effective mulching and how to build a phytarium.

Aesthetic Theory

Rants of the Parisian surrealists packaged in pamphlet form include A Corpse, directed against author Anatole France on the occasion of his funeral in 1924 and containing an essay titled Gilded Mediocrity, which ran down the literary establishment; later, members of the surrealist inner circle published a pamphlet against Breton – also calledA Corpse. Antonin Artaud was chief propagandist for the group, and was responsible for such items as Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities; Address to the Pope; Address to the Dalai Lama; Letter to the Buddhist Schools; Letter to Doctors in Charge of Lunatic Asylums, and was probably the architect of an open letter against Paul Claudel and to the "notables of the municipal government" protesting the erection of a monument to Rimbaud in 1927.

Astrological and the Occult • Publications of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye

Conspiracy / Paranoia • Beware the Trilaterals • The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye by Robert Keith Spenser, published by Monte Cristo Press, 1964, USA, outlines the threat of a "universal theocratic state" engineered by persons indoctrinated in the "secret course of instruction at the Arcane School"; traces occult symbolism in the design of the United Nations meditation room, the Temple of Understanding in the U. S. capitol, and the nefarious influence of the "cult of the All-Seeing Eye"; much mumbo-jumbo about "Kunalini, the Sephiroth, or Emanations, the Tetragrammaton, etc…." • Adam Weishaupt: A Human Devil by Gerald B. Winrod; this booklet maintains that "the impact of Weishaupt's evil genius is still being felt the world around, even down to the present hour." According to Winrod, Weishaupt created the sect of the Illuminati, a subversive secret society whose "plot has been carried on with secrecy and diabolical cunning" while "the diseased brain of this wicked personage" took control of European masonry in a bid to "bend it to his will and use it as an instrument for carrying out his conspiracy against God, Christ, the Church and civilization." They also were given to the use of "strange poisons and weird medicines." "From documents which fell into the hands of the German government it has been discovered that his organization possessed dreadful poisons and had no hesitation about using them when to do so might serve to silence an enemy or advance their cause in other ways. They had a powder which produced blindness, a prescription of a poison which had an insidiously slow but deadly effect, the formula for another poison which 'devoured everything' when sprayed into the face, etc. They also possess a strange substance called Luisenwasser (Louise Water) because it was secretly given to Louise, the Crown Princess of Saxony to further the romance with Toselli and thereby detract from the reputation of the ruling dynasty." As we read on, we learn, to our horror, that Weishaupt's beliefs are the impetus behind fascism, communism, the Jacobins, Jesuits, and Jews…

Freemasonry, A Way of Life, brochure

• A History of Freemasonry: The Story of its Relations with Satan and the Popes by Joseph McCabe, 31 pages, published 1949 by Haldeman-Julius Publications, Girard, Kansas, concerning the "rebuke to convivial society" comprised by "…the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders, which professes to combine the wisdom of the world from the beginning of time with the most perfect blend of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man…" • Freemasonry: A Way of Life, published by The Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of California, San Francisco • 12 Questions on Freemasonry Q. "What are the principal teachings of Freemasonry?" A. "Brotherly love, relief and truth." • The Great Swine Flu Caper of 1976, published by the Lord's Covenant Church, Phoenix, Arizona • The New Fugitive Pope, published by the Music Square Church, Van Buren, Arkansas • Swine's Flesh as Food, reprinted from Mount Zion Reporter

From Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack (Dept. of Defense, 1961)

Civil Defense • Home Blast Shelter • Belowground Home Fallout Shelter • Aboveground Home Fallout Shelter • Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack, 46 pages, published by Department of Defense Office of Civil Defense, 1961.

FEMA (the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency) has published a variety of handy pamphlets to ensure preparedness of the populace in the event of nuclear attack: how-to handbooks for the construction of belowground and aboveground home fallout shelters, detailing such matters as excavation, waterproofing and hatch integrity. If a home blast shelter is more to a family's taste, FEMA obligingly offers a pamphlet for that, too; this informative publication cautions that "if the attack does not occur by the time the shelter has been occupied for about 2 hours, the ventilation system should be operated for about 15 minutes to provide fresh air in the shelter. The ventilation system should then be closed again and this cycle repeated until either the blast wave has passed over the shelter (detected by a shaking movement) or the danger of the attack has ended." Similarly, the Department of Defense Office of Civil Defense offered for a price of 10 cents, a pamphlet first published by the Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Printing Office in June, 1959, containing messages about the "enemy" along with technical blueprints and detailed construction plans; yet another pamphlet – Fallout Protection, published in 1961 – discusses such matters as Geiger counters and "emergency housekeeping" and defines terms such as "kiloton," "megaton," "roentgen," and "fireball," "blast wave," and "blast wind."

From Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack (Dept. of Defense, 1961) initial radiation helpfully illustrated by "wavy lines extending from the fireball"

Manifestos • The Cry for Justice (1921) by Upton Sinclair • Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 8 pages, "adopted and proclaimed" on December 10, 1948 and published by the United Nations Department of Public Information; reads like a pretentious rehash of two foundational documents of the United States: the U. S. constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Social Meliorism • What Every Woman Should Know - the classic of birth control by Margaret Higgins Sanger • Nudism - American Sunbathing Association's 9 page promotional pamphlet containing general information – a history of public nudism in America along with a map detailing two hundred regional chapters in North America and Hawaii (nudist camps). "Naturism," as it was formerly called, was started in America in 1929 by German immigrant Kurt Barthel who formed "The American League for Physical Culture" and whose outings early on were the target of raids by law officers; motto = "clothed when practical, unclothed when possible." • Bureaucrat, Kill Thyself! by Archibald Canby Higgins, published 1957 by Faith and Renewal Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan; here the servants or masters trope is given a new twist by insisting that the only honorable course for useless government employees who purport to serve the interests of the electorate is to immolate themselves on the pyre of self- extinction; by eliminating themselves and the burden of their parasitic existences as a function of an overbearing and unwieldy government, they will thereby relieve the body politic of a persistent burden of supporting individuals who would otherwise be unemployable, serving the highest public good in the process, and performing the highest duty to the citizenry whose interests their "entire parasitic tribe claims to serve"; lots of memorable verbiage such as "minor officials and petty authoritarians whose effects can be reduced to the equation: tiny brain + shiny badge = big, big trouble."

From Bob Black's The Abolition of Work

• The Abolition of Work by Bob Black, published by Feh! Press, New York, 1993; in which the author contends that there should not be industry or labor but that, as with play, all human activity should involve a "ludic" element making it "pleasurable, enjoyable, as is recreation"; originally published in pamphlet form in 1985 and subsequently translated into several languages, it is breathtaking in its scholarship. Advocating not more leisure but more fun, author Black offers such wisdom as: "Workers of the world…relax!"; "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working." "Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such moronizing mechanisms as television and education." "People are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias." Workers, Black asserts, are nothing but "stultified submissives."

From Bob Black's The Abolition of Work

Civics / Public Information • Juror's Handbook • The Death Penalty: Cruel and Inhuman Punishment, a brochure published by Amnesty International, New York, New York, 7 pages, ca. 1988. • How to Avoid Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes, 12 pages, a U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission "consumer education" pamphlet for investors published in Washington, D. C., ca. 1977. • Censorship Causes Blindness, published by Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Science and Pseudoscience • The Brain Scale of Dr. Brunler by Arthur M. Young, a 16 page pamphlet published by Robert Briggs Associates, San Francisco; its author was the designer and developer of the Bell helicopter and founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California; Brunler had an instrument with a radiesthesia pendulum and a long mahogany box five inches square and four feet long with a diamond-shaped insert at the end which he used to gauge the brain power of a subject who sat for the test wearing a headpiece from which "a silk cord led to a slider adapted for motion along the scale." • Perpetual Motion • There Will Never Be a Cure for Aids • Rogaine: The Only Product Ever Proven to Grow Hair

Vivisection is Scientific Fraud by Hans Ruesch, front cover

• Vivisection is Scientific Fraud, an expose authored and published by Swiss activist Hans Ruesch detailing his lurid investigations of animal experimentation in medical, scientific and cosmetics research; this pamphlet protests research on sentient subjects and contains brutally graphic illustrations; characterizes vivisection as "the modern barbarity palmed off as science through the venality of the mass media and industry-beholden politicians."

• Your Personality Revealed is a questionnaire circulated by the Church of Scientology, the pseudoreligion fabricated by d-grade science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard during the 1950s; teeming with rinky-dink pretensions to psychological insight. Hubbard chides the scientologist not to use "squirrel meters or home-built meters" (in reference to the Scientology "e-meter"), but to buy only his approved official model made to his exacting specifications. These "electropsychometric" clown tests are pure brain bilkers, close relatives to P. T. Barnum sideshow attractions; excerpts from these publications: "Dianetics: from the Greek dia (thought) and nous (soul), thus: "through the soul"; a system for the analysis, control and development of human thought which also provides techniques for increased ability, rationality, and freedom from the discovered single source of aberrations and psychosomatic ills"; Dianetics is then declensioned "in Latin = scio (=knowing) and the Greek logos (study), scientology means "knowing how to know."

• E-Meter Essentials: Clearing Series: Volume One, 1961 by L. Ron Hubbard, Bridge Publications, Los Angeles, California; an instruction booklet for use of the "Hubbard Electrometer or E-meter" which, according to the Scientology Applied Religious Philosophy organization, is "a device which is sometimes used in Scientology. In itself, the E-meter does nothing." Resembling a military surplus voltmeter with two tin cans attached by insulated wire cables, a panel with knobs and dials and a fluctuating needle, the e-meter is employed in sessions conducted by an "auditor" in order to sense the presence of "Thetans," disembodied spirits or partially incorporeal corporealized spirits; it is a "pre-conscious meter" because it registers a datum before the user becomes conscious of it. This booklet abounds with hilariously dopey jargon such as "Pre-Havingness stage," "engrams," "release," and "clear," and warns sternly against being inhibited by "suspected withholds." The instructions read like something written by precocious children aping scientific jargon they don't understand. "Theta bops" and "rock slams," for example, mean hidden evil intentions. The e-meter mocks the lie detector, and recalls vintage quack devices like the "biometer" with its modulated, colored lights. To quote the jacket blurb: "A startling and thorough coverage of the E-meter incorporating all modern developments and its use in Assessments, Security Checking and S. O. P. goals." • Scientology: A History of Man; billed as a "cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years" • Animal Magnetism • Mesmerism • Learn Hypnosis at Home • The Baxter School of Lie Detection Polygraph Examiner Course published in San Diego, California; deals with calibration, chart analysis and examiner ethics

Countless pamphlets deal with speculative topics such as U.F.O.s, methods of behavioral analysis such as phrenology, and vitalist theories such as Wilhelm Reich's notion of "orgone." For those who can't get enough of pseudo-scientific gadgets, there are the confiscated specimens documented in the promotional flyer (circa 1972) for the FDA's National Museum of Medical Quackery at the St. Louis Science Museum.

T. Lobsang Rampa flyer

Religious / Metaphysical • Compendio de Oraciones a quaint book of 40 prayers published in Mexico. • Life of Immanuel Swedenborg by Sig Synnestvedt, a publication of the Swedenborg Foundation, New York, New York; discusses the Swedish mystic's inventions, his contributions to biology, mineralogy, metallurgy, physics and cosmology, his clairvoyance and his dreams, revelations, visions as outlined in his Arcana Coelestia(Heavenly Secrets). • Basic Facts of the Baha'i Faith, 5 pages: "This Faith originated in Persia in 1844. In that year a young Man Who Called Himself the Bab (or "Gate") began to teach that God would soon "make manifest" a World Teacher to unite men and women and usher in an age of world peace. The Bab attracted so many followers that the Persian government and the Islamic clergy wanted to kill Him, and they massacred more than twenty thousand of His followers. In 1863 Bahaullah announced to the remaining followers of the Bab that he was the chosen Manifestation of God for this age. He then proclaimed His Message in letters (known as "Tablets") to the leading monarchs, religious leaders and people of the world." • The Lemurian Viewpoint, 13 pages, published by The Lemurian Fellowship, Ramona, California, 1984; described as "A School of Universal Philosophy established under the direction and guidance of the Lemurian Brotherhood, one of the original Mystery Schools of this human life wave," the purpose of the Fellowship espoused by this pamphlet is the dissemination of "The Great Work" conducted among humans by the "Great Ones," the greatest of whom was "The Great Being Melchizedek – ruler of Mu and the Mukulian Empire now submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean who brought his message 76,000 years ago to mankind"; adepts and initiates originated in 1936 in Chicago, then moved to Milwaukee and finally to California led by "the Ego best known as Dr. Robert D. Stelle, selected by the Great Ones of the Brotherhood as Direct Emissary to the human race." • My Visit to Venus, a promotional flyer by T. Lobsang Rampa, published by Fatemagazine, circa 1980 – "all royalty profits go to the Save a Cat League" • A Modest Proof of the Order and Government settled by Christ and His Apostles in the Church by John Checkley. • Puritan manifestoes • The Guru-Disciple Relationship by Mrinalini Mata

From The Guru-Disciple Relationship by Mrinalini Mata

Evangelical • One Way!; This Was Your Life!; Somebody Goofed; A Demon's Nightmare; by Chick Publications / Emmanuel Assembly of God / Robert Percival Ministries; cartoon strips in which the Grim Reaper comes for a self-satisfied Everyman: "But God said unto him, thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee."

Last page of Somebody Goofed, Chick Publications

• Did God Create a Devil? Published by the Worldwide Church of God. • Behind the Walls, published by Tony Alamo, World Pastor, Holy Alamo Christian Church, Alma, Arkansas: Behind the Walls boasts that "Alamo literature circulation is more than USA Today, the New York Times, L. A. Times and many other international publications combined." In bold headlines, Alamo tracts shout: "Cult Protection Racket"; "Government Subversion Against Alamo"; "Duped?"; and "Nailed!!!" • Do You Have a Drop-Off Point for God? Published by the Concordia Tract Mission, St. Louis, Missouri.

Gandhi Speaks pamphlet

Pacifism • Ghandi Speaks, published by Self-Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, California • From Military Service to Christian Nonresistance: The Testimony of a Former French Army Officer by Pierre Widmer, Nommay, France; published by the Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pennsylvania, October, 1949 • Christian Pacifism: A Personal Testimony by J. Stuart Innerst, sixth printing, revised 1965, La Jolla, California; 8 page leaflet • The Dream Shattered Over Sixty Years Ago by Leo Tolstoy

Quote from The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility

Etiquette • The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility by Emily Thornwell, New York, 1856; a "courtesy and conduct" book with chapters on The Art of Conversing with Fluency and Propriety and The Whole Art of Correct and Elegant Letter-Writing in which ladies learn that "much of the civility of fashionable life savors of deception"; "Beware of talking too much; if you do not talk to the purpose, the less you say the better; but even if you do, and if, withal, you are gifted with the best powers of conversation, it will be wise for you to guard against excessive loquacity"; and "avoid even the appearance of pedantry. If you are conversing with persons of very limited attainments, you will make yourself far more acceptable, as well as useful to them, by accommodating yourself to their capacities, than by compelling them to listen to what they cannot understand."

• How to Love and Be Loved (no publication data), anonymous, ca. 1900; contains advice to the lovelorn, and encouraging tips to all those bitten by the bug: How to Woo and How to Win; How to Begin a Courtship; Courting a Lively Girl; Courting a Domesticated Girl; Courting a Prudish Girl; Courting a Proud Girl; Courting a Shy Girl; Courting an Heiress; Courting a Blue Stocking; Courting an Old Maid; The Science of Kissing ("Don't grab and yank the lady as if she were a restive colt; don't muss her hair, scratch down her collar, bite her cheek, and leave her rumpled and mixed; Don't flavor your kiss with onions, tobacco, gin, cocktails, lager beer, or any other odorous delicacy"); then there are sections on "Love as a Disease" and " How to Kiss Sweetly": "The gentleman should be taller than the lady he intends to kiss. Take her right hand in yours, and draw her gently to you; pass your left hand over her right shoulder, diagonally down across her back, under her left arm; press her to your bosom. At the same time she will throw her head back, and you have nothing to do but to lean a little forward and press your lips to hers, and then the thing is done. Don't make a noise over it, as if you were shooting crackers, nor pounce down like a hungry hawk upon an innocent dove; but gently fold the damsel in your arms without smashing her standing collar, or spoiling her optics, and, by a sweet pressure upon the mouth, revel in the blissfulness of your situation, without smacking your lips, as you would after imbibing the Bacchanalian draught, but like sipping the honey from the lips of Aphrodite."

• The Art of Kissing by Hugh Morris, 1936; 45 pages; includes: "How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouth"; the "French 'Soul' Kiss"; the "'Vacuum' Kiss"; the "'Spiritual' Kiss"; and "Electric Kissing Parties." A veritable bible of osculation - "the exquisite, ineffable epitome of unalloyed bliss" - this indispensable primer offers explicit counseling: 'Then, with a series of little nips, bring your lips around from the nape of her neck to the curving swerve of her jaw, close to the ear. Gently kiss the lobe of her ear. But be sure to return to the tender softness of her jaw. From then on, the way should be clear to you. Nuzzle your lips along the soft, downy expanse until you reach the corner of her lips. You will know when this happens because, suddenly, you will feel a strange stiffening of her shoulders under your arm. Kiss her! Kiss her as though, at that moment, nothing else exists in the world. Kiss her as though your entire life is wrapped up into the period of the kiss. Kiss her!"

From The Art of Kissing

Souvenir Booklets and Travel Brochures • The Deathless Story of the Titanic; a commemorative booklet listing the passenger manifest of the ill-fated White Star liner, a list of survivors, a list of those who perished, and a narrative of the great maritime tragedy.

• A Complete Bullfight with Colored Pictures, published by Aboitz Press, Mexico City, 1953; a bilingual Spanish – English souvenir booklet explaining a toreador's moves and maneuvers, such as the "Veronica," the "Half Veronica" and "The Telephone," a maneuver in which the matador has so dominated the bull that he is able to rest his elbow on the bull's head while resting his own head in his hand; if the toreador stands with his feet spread while executing a veronica or other pass, it is called "with the open compass"; also contains interesting tidbits of information, such as the fact that the traditional hour for a bullfight is five in the afternoon and corridas (bull fight rings) are built so that, at that fateful hour, half the arena will be in the sun, the other half in the shade. • Boot Hill Graveyard, a souvenir booklet from Tombstone, Arizona • Folsom Prison • Thai tourism brochures • Iraq – Land of Contrasts

Illustration from Thumbscrew and Rack pamphlet by G.E.Macdonald

History • Thumbscrew and Rack by Geo. E. Macdonald; a history of torture during the Inquisition featuring instruments for the annihilation of heretics from the Nuremberg Collection; published by the American Atheist Press in Austin, Texas; with gory observations by Robert Ingersoll.

• Anchors - a nautical title (number 110) in the lavishly illustrated Shire Album series, whose companion volumes treat such topics as thimbles, lost trade routes, laundry bygones, dairying bygones, scales and balances, old garden tools, writing antiques, street furniture. • Fronde pamphlets – French Revolution • Labor pamphlets – trade unions

A circular issued in April 1847 by the headquarters of General Antonio Lopez de Santa- Anna offered bribes and rewards to any American soldier who would desert during the Mexican War: KNOW ALL MEN: That Antonio Lopez de Santa-Anna, President of the United States of Mexico and Commander in chief of the Mexican armies has been duly authorized to make the following concessions to all and every one of the persons now in the American army who will present themselves before me or any of the commanding officers of the Mexican forces, viz:, etc.

***

In a space of but twenty years, the religious tract, the polemical pamphlet, the broadside manifesto, and their humble cousins, the handbill, flyer, and circular, have been eclipsed by the brighter baubles of the Electronic Age. Ideal vehicles for the conspiratorial whisper and the barbaric yawp alike, these time-honored, ink-and-paper instruments of public communication have been relegated to the status of quaint and dusty relics…

Vivisection is Scientific Fraud by Hans Ruesch, back cover

Colette, Sartre & de Beauvoir (facsimiles), Mayakovsky

Nicotine Chic: Writers as Smokers by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils? —lifelong smoker Ian Fleming

Historians have long concurred in identifying professional authors as the occupational group most prone to habitual tobacco use. Writers are most closely associated with the practice of smoking in particular, as if, in the general consensus, the scribe could find inspiration in a tobacco pouch or pry the muse from her hiding-places with a few puffs of poisonous fumes. Other stimulants have found favor among the authorial class; a special example being coffee—Voltaire and Balzac were known to have downed prodigious quantities on a daily basis—but no substance, except for printer's ink, has been seen to play so important and intimate a role in the life of the workaday wordsmith.

Bowles, Wilde, Highsmith

History has preserved only the slimmest visual record of other fads and fashions of tobacco- taking, such as snuff-inhalation and wad-chewing, perhaps because of the unattractiveness and perceived vulgarity of the sniffing and spitting attending these methods of ingestion, although posterity has left many prized examples of sterling silver snuff boxes and gleaming brass cuspidors. Archives abound, on the other hand, with groaning files of photographs of this or that celebrated author taking a deep, satisfying drag from pipe, cigar, or cigarette.

Anderson, Crevel, Gorky Duras, Dinesen, Berryman Artaud, Buzzati, Rand

The number of ladies figuring in these smoke-tinged portraits is considerably smaller than that of their male counterparts; a phenomenon which merely echoes statistical findings that smoking is less prevalent among the distaff sex. From Cowper to Colette, renowned writers have championed the joys of nicotine addiction. In long-ago France, Moliere maintained that "whoever lives without tobacco doesn't deserve to live" while, across the pond, a few centuries later, Oscar Wilde would opine, with customary wit, that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?"

Dazai, Hurston, Onetti Cummings, Eliot, Thomas

But then there is the sad story of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973): definitive proof against the advisability of smoking in bed. Bachmann met her tragic demise when she fell asleep with a lit cigarette in hand. She may have had the same doctor as Erik Satie, whose advice to patients was: By all means smoke; for, if you do not smoke, someone else will smoke in your place!

Beckett, Bachmann, Cortázar, Abe

Perhaps it is no accident that smoking was introduced to European explorers by native American shamans who used "sacred smoke" as a conduit to visionary experience and spiritual guidance. Legend has it that the American Indian system of inter-tribal communication known as "smoke signals" had its origins in the aerial pictograms formed by figural swirls of tobacco vapor seen during communal pipe-smoking sessions. Certainly, anyone who has ever witnessed smoke balls curling into the air from the tip of a cigarette can attest that, at times, the ghostly patterns made by their fleeting, caliginous coils appear to form letters, even words.

"Time smoking a picture," William Hogarth

In the dead of night, in a becalmed room, in the solitude of the flickering lamplight, how many writers, while questing after the divine spark, have kept a futile vigil waiting for lightning to strike, vainly watching draught after draught of nicotine-fueled inspiration go up in smoke? Wafting skyward in so many wreathing, spiraling evanescences, who knows what immortal messages, what supernal songs, have strained to be spelled out, only to be lost forever to the remorseless tide of all-enveloping ether...receding wraithlike, into the genie-bottle of the absorbent atmosphere...growing ever dimmer, ever more brittle until, like skeletons on stilts, they steal down the faint and foggy corridors of fugitive Time…

Cocteau

Sexton, Steinbeck, Brecht

***

History of a Cigarette by Felisberto Hernández Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

1

Late one recent evening I pulled a pack of cigarettes from my pocket. I did this almost without wanting to. I never gave much thought to how many cigarettes I had on hand, or to when I was going to smoke them. It was a long time before I began to think about the spirit of such interactions: of the spirit of man in relation to his fellows; of the spirit of man in relation to things; and certainly I never thought about the spirit of things in relation to men. But without wanting to, I was staring fixedly at a thing: the pack of cigarettes. And now as I analyze it, I recall it vividly. I remember that I had fully intended to pull out one of the cigarettes, but only barely touched it with my finger. Then I began to pull out another, but couldn't get hold of it firmly, so I pulled out a third. I was distracted all the while—somehow they were able to dominate me a little—yes, it was plainly evident that, along with their scanty material substance, operated a corresponding spirit. And this infinitesimal, discretionary spirit enabled them to orchestrate the escape of some, while I reached for others, instead.

2

The other night I was walking with a friend. Then I became distracted, began to sense something odd, and started thinking about cigarettes. I had the urge to smoke and when I reached for one of them, suddenly I changed my mind and reached for one of the others. Without meaning to, I crimped the tip of the first one I touched, and it seemed as if it had caused me to do this so as to avoid being taken. If given a choice, my tendency has always been, as is only normal, to prefer my cigarettes unbent. Consequently, I pushed the broken cigarette to one side, away from the rest. I offered them to my friend. He reflexively chose the one snuggling in the corner by itself, because it was easiest to reach but, when he saw that it was crooked, he immediately reached for another. I was preoccupied by this series of events for quite awhile but, as we resumed our conversation, I gradually forgot about it. A few hours later, I again felt the craving for a smoke; I pulled out the pack of cigarettes and then it struck me. With much surprise I saw that the twisted cigarette wasn't there, and I thought I must have smoked it without noticing, and my obsession vanished in a puff.

3

Still later the same night, when I picked up the pack once again, I was confronted by the following: the broken cigarette hadn't been smoked after all; it had fallen sideways and was lying horizontally at the bottom of the pack. Certain now that it had deliberately eluded me several times, my obsession returned with redoubled tenacity. I was seized by an overwhelming curiosity to see what would happen if I smoked it. I stepped out to the patio, removed all the cigarettes from the pack except the wrinkled one, re-entered the living room, and offered it to my friend; since it was the only one left in the pack, he would have no choice but to take ‘it'. He started to take it, but then refrained. He regarded me with a smile. I asked him, "Is something wrong?" He answered, "Yes, but I'm not going to tell you what…" This really frosted me, but then he added, "There's only one left and I'm not going to be the one to smoke it." Then he pulled out his own cigarettes, and we smoked two of them in silence.

4

The following morning I remembered that, before going to bed, I had put the broken cigarette in the drawer of my nightstand. The nightstand bears a special distinction: it has a strange alliance and affiliation with cigarettes. But I was determined not to let this get the better of me. I approached the nightstand, intending to take out a cigarette and smoke it. I opened the drawer. I took out a cigarette as always, with complete naturalness and aplomb but, as I did so, I knocked over a glass of water, and it fell, along with the cigarette, onto the floor. My obsession flared. I quickly contained myself. But when I reached down to pick it up again, I saw that the cigarette had fallen onto a section of the floor which now was sopping wet. This time my obsession was beyond control; it steadily intensified as I observed what was taking place on the floor: the cigarette was blackening along its entire length as the tobacco absorbed the water…

Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964) brief biography by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

A Uruguayan writer of growing reputation, Felisberto Hernández was born in Montevideo, and spent most of his life in its environs. Early in his adult life he supported himself as an itinerant pianist, traveling throughout Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil playing in silent movie theaters and giving private recitals in wealthy homes where, it is presumed, he met an abundant supply of ample-bosomed, matronly women which gave rise to the rumor, whether baseless or deserved, that he had an amorous obsession with corpulent women, and enjoyed a succession of dalliances with them. Certainly there is evidence that, as Hernández advanced in years, each of his numerous wives and female companions seemed better nourished and more graciously endowed with adipose tissue than the last.

A composer as well as a pianist, Hernández gave concerts featuring both his own works and those of such contemporaries as Igor Stravinsky. Hernández's fast, agile fingers enabled him to ply two trades—that of musician and that of stenographer. He developed a stenographic system of his own which was highly innovative and efficient and he even wrote stories using it which were found, unpublished, at the time of his death—but no one has been able to decipher them!

Hernández's customary poverty and vagabondage were alleviated somewhat by his association with a circle of major Latin American intellectuals. After 1940, he gave up piano-playing to devote himself to literature full-time. He traveled to France in 1946 and spent two years there, forming a close and lasting relationship with distinguished authorJules Supervielle, who presented him at the Pen Club in Paris and at a Sorbonne lecture hall.

Hernández is often cited as a forerunner of magic realism both because of the fanciful transgressions of his imagination into quotidian existence and because his stories abound with static objects which seem to be invested with a restless, interior life of their own. His fabulistic fiction has been described as a "strange and fascinating blend of realty and dream, ironic observation and poetic fantasy."

[In English: Piano Stories (out-of-print) and Lands of Memory.]

***

Serling, Giono/Hamsun, Breton, Robinson

Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar, Alice, Hookah-Smoking Pierre Loti

The definitive smoker chic look anticipated by Rudyard Kipling two decades before Groucho Marx perfected it with a fine Cuban cigar.