Literature – My Own RE:public

Stark reminder

Given that Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men has maintained its reputation as one of the most lauded of American 20th century works of political fiction, I abstain here from too much (unqualified) comment. But I feel like I have to write something for it is a work of such merit and is, in my opinion, incredibly relevant to the contemporary political landscape.

A couple of years ago I saw a 2006 movie adaptation of the novel on Netflix with Sean Penn as Willie Stark; presumably a box-office flop and only tepidly received by critics but liked immensely by this person (that is, ME). Watching it at the time, I recall only being able to think of Donald Trump; by then out of office if not out of mind (HIS or mine I am not sure!), and confined to the annals of history one could have thunk. Well, one could have…! Alas. After his reelection in November, I was reminded again of Warren’s book and so, over the holidays (and for the first time), turned to the original stuff. And I had not been deceived, he (TRUMP) ghosts his way through the entire narrative. But not only does HE, but also a particular brand of populism that once set alight, blazes, may diminish, but continues to smoulder, ever ready to flare up again.

Now I have no idea when Trump became TRUMP, but one can follow Willie Stark as he progresses from an ambitious wannabe to THE BOSS, and one can follow, too, those around him facilitating his ascendancy. For instance, I was particularly taken by this exchange between the still-fledgling candidate and his runaround Jack Burden (the novel’s narrative voice) who, in an attempt to salvage the floundering gubernatorial campaign, launches into a rare tirade in an effort to persuade Willie to change tack – to forsake his formulaic, heavy-on-detail speeches for an oratory style with more, shall we say, entertainment value:

[…Willie says:] “They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program.”

[Jack:] “Maybe you try to tell ’em too much. It breaks down their brain cells. […] Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”

[Willie:] “What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that -“

[Jack:] “… they don’t give a damn […] Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

-“All the King’s Men” (Penguin Modern Classics) [p.108]

Now if that ain’t the winning formula for a Trumpian scorched earth rally! A major difference of course is that nobody has needed to nudge Trump; what Willie had to learn, Trump seems to know instinctively.

Embedded below is a sample reading of the first chapter of this legendary novel from the U.S. publisher’s website. For the uninitiated: Think Faulkner just not as difficult, the Deep South almost palpable – the heat, the poverty, the religious (irreligious, and anything else) fervor, the politicking, the corruption. Then exchange Louisiana for Queens, rural poverty for urban wealth – inherited both, Willie Stark or Huey Long (an inspiration for Stark, though one which Warren sought to minimize) for Donald Trump, and you can imagine your way to the here and now. Mag(a)nificent (sic) – to imagine, that is. In reality anything but.

Virginia the poet

Said oft before
and to be said again:
just as one thinks
there can be no more
come upon perchance
a pair of unknowns
scribbled one day
as a playful jest
for the dearest
the two nearest
to those
she never had.
 
- Anne Dromache

On the discovery of two unknown poems by Virginia Woolf.

Discovered by chance at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas by the University of Liverpool academic Dr. Sophie Oliver, are two little poems by Virginia Woolf, written for her niece and nephew, Angelica and Quentin Bell, presumably sometime after March 1927. Says Dr. Oliver in the opening paragraph of her just published piece in the Times Literary Supplement:

Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention. […]The manuscripts join a handful of extant poems by this novelist, who as a young woman could not get on with poetry and as a mature author declared it “defunct”. […] like most of Woolf’s other known poems, it takes up poetry to do something; in this case to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacies with people.

–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.

Oliver goes on to mention some other known examples. That written as a child for the Hyde Park Gate News is known to me, the others not:

Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).

–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.

Without a subscription I can get no further! But an interesting find to be sure, that says something about the ‘Aunt’ Virginia and is supportive of Vanessa’s children’s later recollections of her; as being somewhat ‘other’, shall we say, but always lots of fun and a kindred spirit of sorts – creative and playful.

The style of the two poems and the tonality one hears is also indicative of what one could imagine Woolf would have heard in the nursery as a child herself – Lear, for example – and one is reminded of the power of such words, rhymes and rhythms to stay with one a life long.

Alice Munro obituary | Alice Munro | The Guardian

Canadian short-story writer who won the Nobel prize in 2013 and was often likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/14/alice-munro-obituary

The death has just been announced of the truly great Canadian writer, Alice Munro. Lots to read at The Guardian and, of course, at The New York Times, including from earlier this year an “Essential Alice Munro” (astutely subtitled with the prerequisite for reading Munro being simply to have lived!)

Sent
 a life as long
 as said stories short.
Said therein
 much more than most.
Surely to live long,
much longer than most
 mere mortal days
 here spent.

- Anne Dromache, May, 2024.

‘They’re teaching me’: Greg Doran on staging Shakespeare’s unloved Two Gents with students | Theatre | The Guardian

The theatre director, now teaching at Oxford after years running the RSC, thinks The Two Gentlemen of Verona is perfect for a young cast to argue over. We go into rehearsals
— Read on www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/may/10/student-production-two-gentlemen-of-verona-oxford-greg-doran

Listening to Greg Doran on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning alerted me to his visiting professorship at Oxford and the Playhouse production. The above Guardian piece by Michael Billington informs on this and other aspects of Doran’s life post-RSC, and takes us inside rehearsals of the diverse student production of one of Shakespeare’s least performed (and ‘problematic’ says Billington) works. A terrific read.

Annotating the Archives

With a new feature, The Yale Review has become an even more wonderful place to go. Here, the announcement by Meghan O’Rourke of a weekly column called Annotating the Archives; archives that really are a treasure trove of 20th century literature and ideas, and which deserve to be brought to the fore and presented with perhaps a differentiated slant or emphasis – and by fine contemporary writers.

An absolute gem as opener: Claire Messud on ‘the common reader’, as identified by Virginia Woolf and as represented through her essay contributions to The Yale Review, including ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ – fittingly the concluding essay of The Common Reader – Second Series.

The First Lady of American Classics: Remembering Edith Hamilton – Antigone

The First Lady of American Classics: Remembering Edith Hamilton – Antigone
— Read on antigonejournal.com/2024/03/remembering-edith-hamilton/

Possibly Edith Hamilton (here her Wiki entry) is one of those extraordinary American women renowned only on their home turf and amongst those steeped in Classics education. Whatever, I only came across Hamilton by chance a few years ago whilst reading Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones in which the feisty young protagonist is given a copy of Mythology to read by a teacher, and finds solace in those ancient myths – and refuge from the cruel realities of poverty and despair in the Mississippi Delta.

Emma B. & Elizabeth F.

Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.

To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.

Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also remember his essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!

Every day is Shakespeare Day…

*The title page of the 1623 First Folio of William Shakespeare‘s plays*

Earlier this year I wrote what I remember to have been a fairly extensive entry relating to the 400th anniversary of the printing of the so-called ‘First Folio’ of Shakespeare’s plays. Looking for it today, I am mortified – radically overly stated perhaps but nevertheless appropriately theatrical in tenor – to discover it has disappeared! I do know that it was written during a period of preoccupation with the Bard (a not uncommon thing) around about the time I read Hamnet and heard about (then later acquired) Greg Doran’s My Shakespeare – A Director’s Journey through the First Folio.

Of all days – today! There has been of course much ado during this whole year, now all but gone, but the book was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 8 November 1623 so this is a good book end, so to speak.

So it is, and belatedly, that I refer again to the magnificent site, Folio 400: Printing Shakespeare set-up to inform and help navigate through all the celebratory events. An invaluable resource; that it, too, may have a long life! Their mission is self-explanatory:

The First Folio is one of the great wonders of the literary world.

Published in 1623, seven years after the death of its author, it was the first printed edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Without this achievement, we would have lost half of his dramatic work.

This website is dedicated in gratitude to the 400th birthday of this foundational book on the 8th November 2023.
folio400.com

To end, as I began, on a theatrical note. On the BBC site, media editor Katy Razzall talks to David Tennant about what Shakespeare means to him and his upcoming role as Macbeth at the Donmar – sold out, but of course! And, as we lick our wounds, we are left with the special treat of Tennant’s recitation of a Macbeth soliquay (Act 1 Scene 7). (Embedded below.)

Every day is Shakespeare day, but today most especially.