Literary Miscellany

by Alex Palmer

  Dickens was not alone in his opinions, as evidenced by William Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855) and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), which focused first on fantastical descriptions and characters, and secondarily on offering a lesson. Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense (1846), abandoned meaning altogether, aiming to please young ears with the sound of words while letting children make up their own definitions. The pinnacle of these surrealistic kids’ books came with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a book offering deranged fantasy and word games, with hardly a moral lesson in sight. It was an immediate success with both adults and children.

  Name Games

  J. M. Barrie popularized, and some say actually invented, the name “Wendy.” Before his play Peter Pan and novel Peter and Wendy were published in the early twentieth century, the name was virtually unheard of. Barrie is thought to have gotten it from the daughter of his friend, who mispronounced her “R”s when she said, “fwiendy-wendy.”

  “Pinocchio” means “pine nut” in Italian.

  “Cinderella” is derived from the fact that the character sits in cinder and ashes before escaping her destitute surroundings. Earlier versions and translations of the tale called her, among other names, “Aschenputtel” and “The Hearth Cat.”

  Through the early twentieth century, children’s literature continued to diversify, with writers like A. A. Milne, J. M. Barrie and L. Frank Baum (initials were all the rage at this time) creating entire franchises around their memorable characters, including book series, stage plays, and merchandise. Beatrix Potter’s bestselling The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) spawned not only twentythree books but also Peter Rabbit games, wallpaper, stationary, stuffed toys, and figurines shortly after the book was published. Besides making these authors and their publishers rich, these brand extensions further established children’s literature as a true entertainment industry, setting the stage for the films and television spin-offs that would follow in later decades.

  Who Needs English?

  Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, and Enid Blyton (author of the hugely popular Noddy books and Famous Five series) top the children’s bestsellers in English, but their sales hardly compare to the 160 million Tintin books that Belgian Georges Remi (Hergé) has sold, or the quarter billion in sales of the French René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix books. Despite their major success in various translations throughout the globe (and their largely illustrated content), neither have done particularly well in Britain or the United States.

  As children’s literature has matured, so to speak, meeting the demands for a variety of tastes, the line between adult and young adult fiction has become increasingly thin. Writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Roald Dahl have remained relevant even as readers move on to more adult works.

  More recently, authors like Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer have commanded the bestseller lists, with adults as likely as children to pick up their latest books (or view the latest film based on them). In 2001, The New York Times created a “Children’s Books” bestseller list because the first three Harry Potter books had monopolized the top positions of the adult list for over a year. After centuries of kids having to read like grownups, it seems like adults are now choosing to read like kids.

  PART III

  WORKS

  Literary styles and their surprising histories

  WHO ELEVATED INSULTS TO AN ART FORM?

  When authors attack (with invective and satire)

  People have surely been hurling insults at one another since we were able to grunt, but some notable figures in the history of literature took denunciation to glorious levels. Whether criticizing individuals, institutions, or society at large, poets and writers from Juvenal to Jonathan Swift helped turn vicious takedowns into a laudable art form.

  The history of insults began in classical time with two men of very different dispositions—one cruel, one kind. The Roman poet Juvenal was one nasty dude. He penned ferocious attacks on the vices and many offenses of the Roman lifestyle, particularly those perpetrated by the rich and female. His masterworks are the Satires, a series of sixteen lengthy poems written in the late first century. The poems denounce Roman pretensions and greed and even the fashion choices of one judge Juvenal particularly disliked:

  However guilty, [criminals] would never wear such a gown as yours. “O but,” you say, “these July days are so sweltering!” Then why not plead without clothes? Such madness would be less disgraceful ... What would you not exclaim if you saw a judge dressed like that?

  Ouch. The other great ancient insulter was Horace, less strident than Juvenal and generally more playful in his satires (and likely more frequently invited to ancient Roman parties). His works examine the pursuit of a happy and satisfied life; he observes that superstition is for fools and that because human sexual urges are easily satisfied, running after married women is silly.

  Samuel Johnson defined satire as “a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.” Horace’s kinder, gentler satire has been an inspiration to many works that aim an amused smile at “folly,” from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (1942), in which a senior demon counsels a less experienced tempter in the failings of human beings. Those looking to make a harsher indictment of “wickedness,” channel Juvenal, and the influence of the poet’s acid tongue can be seen in works like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

  Satire flourished during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. Ben Jonson’s “humour” plays, in which characters are dominated by a specific emotion, gently mocked various types of foolish behavior and created something of a trend in the period.

  Did You Know?

  Juvenal’s Satire VI, which rails against female immorality and the difficulty of controlling women, contains the phrase, “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (“But who will guard the guards themselves?”). Translated as “But who watches the watchmen?,” this line became the epigraph to the landmark graphic novel Watchmen (1986) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

  Shakespeare could truly brandish an insult. In works such as Troilus and Cressida (1602), King Lear (1608), and The Tempest (1623), the Bard lets the invectives fly, like this one from Lear:

  A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundredpound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni’st the least syllable of thy addition.

  Shakespeare’s insults were downright kind when compared to some of the brutally satiric works released by contemporaries like Joseph Hall and Thomas Middleton during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign (a period of general national disillusionment). These works irked the powers that be, since they attacked England’s established institutions, eventually leading to a “Bishops’ Ban” in 1599, prohibiting the printing of satires.

  This silenced critical writings for a while, but the Age of Enlightenment, with its love of rationality, order, and the wisdom of the ancients, helped usher in the golden age of satire. Writers like John Dryden, Swift, and Alexander Pope used their poems and stories to poke fun at the excesses they saw in individuals and institutions around them.

  A Club of Jokers

  While they dedicated many couplets to criticizing their fellow men, the great neoclassical (early eighteenth century, also know as the Augustan Age because of its emulation of classical works and the era. of Caesar Augustan) satirists were quite chummy with each other. Pope, Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and several other writers went so far as to form the Scriblerus Club, which met regularly to chat and needle “all the false tastes in learn
ing.” They even collaborated on the work Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741).

  Satire would bring writers together in later periods as well, most notably the Algonquin Round Table of New York writers in the 1920s. The writers and wits in the group included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and New Yorker editor Harold Ross, although their daily lunches at the Algonquin Hotel were spent directing wisecracks and practical jokes at each other as much as at broader cultural targets.

  In “An Essay Upon Satire” (1679), Dryden provides a manifesto for mockery for his age, explaining that:

  Satire has always shone among the rest,

  And is the boldest way, if not the best,

  To tell men freely of their foulest faults;

  To laugh at their vain deeds, and vainer thoughts.

  But the poet acknowledges at the end of the work that “I, who so wise and humble seem to be, / Now my own vanity and pride can’t see.”

  Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717) humorously turns a petty argument into a mock epic in which the theft of the heroine’s lock of hair is treated on the scale of Helen’s abduction from Troy in The Iliad. In Dryden’s poem Mac Flecknoe (1682), he takes aim at fellow poet Thomas Shadwell by presenting him as the heir to the kingdom of poetic mediocrity.

  Unlike the Elizabethan satirists before them, the writers in the Augustan age viewed their work as a way to maintain the moral order by calling out the excesses of their fellow men, rather than using their pen to lob criticisms at the order itself. These works were meant to skewer their targets with Horatian meticulousness, rather than bludgeon them with the misanthropy of Juvenal, which was simply not their style.

  Satire continued to thrive throughout the nineteenth century, particularly with the publication of satiric magazines like Punch and Fun, and into the twentieth century in works as wide-ranging as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), poking fun at the vacuity of American culture, to Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), with its “ultra-violent” Juvenalian exaggeration of the dangers of totalitarian rule. Satire may not hold the honored place in the literary world that it did during the neoclassical era, but its popularity has endured, from The Onion newspaper to The Daily Show. As long as people and institutions continue to do foolish things, satire will likely remain an enduring art.

  Quick Quotes

  “Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.”

  —Voltaire

  “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  Poison Pens

  While writers of satire could lay out some cruel condemnations of social ills and human failure in their works, some of the best zingers in literature come from writers bashing fellow writers. Some choice words:

  William Faulkner on Mark Twain: “A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

  Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

  Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

  D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville: “Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick.... There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

  George Bernard Shaw on William Shakespeare: “The intensity of my imapatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.”

  Gore Vidal on Truman Capote: “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

  Elizebeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

  Samuel Johnson on John Milton: “Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

  WHAT MAKES SOMETHING ODE-WORTHY?

  The surprising range of the lyrical poem

  When a poet wants to say something of high emotion and praise, he or she is very likely to reach for the ode. This stately form of poetry, with its elaborate stanza structure and lofty language, has been used for centuries to honor historical victories and joyous events. It can also be used to praise peculiar inanimate objects or, perhaps, anything. The ode is one of the loftiest kinds of poems, but there is little limit to what it can be, and has been, dedicated to.

  For example, William Collins published an “Ode to Fear” in 1747 (“Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, / And look not madly wild like thee?”) and one of W. H. Auden’s great ones is “In Praise of Limestone” (“This land is not the sweet home that it looks, / Nor its peace the historical calm of a site / Where something was settled once and for all”), published in 1948.

  Odes are generally categorized into two main groups: public and private. The public odes have been used for ceremonial occasions like significant birthdays, funerals, and celebrations. Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852) is a good example of public odes. The godfather of this type of ode is considered to be Pindar, who honored victors of Greek games and other public celebration, usually accompanied by music and dancing (“ode” is actually Greek for “song”). For something to be a “Pindaric ode” usually requires stanzas in a pattern of three—the strophe, antistrophe, and epode.

  The Romans were a bit more introspective in their odes, and Horace remains the dominant ode-maker of the Romans (the same man who pioneered satire, as discussed in the previous chapter), developing a more meditative style, which celebrated intense, personal experiences, friendships, and the like. The Romantics loved the private odes for these reasons. Each stanza of a formal Horatian ode has the same stanza and metrical pattern.

  Edmund Spenser raised the ode to epic heights with “Epithalamion” (1595), a 433-line wedding poem written for his bride Elizabeth Boyle. The twenty-four stanzas can be seen as corresponding to the twenty-four hours of the wedding day (not a bad wedding gift). He doubled down the next year with “Prothalamion” (1596), a poem written for the twin marriages of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester, who are referred to as “two swans of goodly hue.”

  Many Other Celebrated Poets Wrote Epithalamions, Including:

  Theocritus ➛ Greek poet celebrated Menelaus and Helen’s marriage.

  Catullus ➛ Roman poet wrote an ode to the marriage of Thetis and Peleus.

  John Donne ➛ “Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn” ends every stanza with “Today put on perfection, and a woman’s name.”

  Sir John Suckling ➛ “A Ballad Upon a Wedding” demystifies marriage with a comic, plainspoken style.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins ➛ Ostensibly about the marriage of unnamed bride and bridegroom, but spends a lot of time discussing young boys bathing.

  e.e. cummings ➛ Heavy on the erotic language, from “quivering continual thighs” to “the warm long flower of unchastity.”

  Ben Jonson contributed his own epithalamion, but is perhaps more notable for being the first to bring the Pindaric style to English, with his “Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (1629).

  While Milton did not describe any of his poems as odes, a few, such as his formally complex “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1645), are widely seen as fulfilling all the requirements of an ode in the Pindaric style. He certainly spoke in a high-minded way, writing to his friend Charles Diodati, “I sing to the peace-bringing God descended from heaven, and the blessed generations covenanted in
the sacred books ... I sing the starry axis and the singing hosts in the sky, and of the gods suddenly destroyed in their own shrines.” One of his earliest poems, “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough” (1626), was essentially an ode written after his sister Anne Phillips miscarried.

  Andrew Marvell wrote his “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650), to celebrate Cromwell coming back to England after his subjugation of Ireland, and looks forward to his campaign against the Scots. Abraham Cowley followed the Pindaric public tone, but dropped the involved metrical structure and liberally altered the stanzas and lines. John Dryden had many of the big odes during the period, though, including “Threnodia Augustalis” (1685), “Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew” (1686), “Song for St Cecilia’s Day ” (1687), and “Alexander’s Feast” (1697).

  In the eighteenth century Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea wrote a Pindaric poem on “The Spleen,” and Alexander Pope composed the Horatian “Ode on Solitude” (written when he was twelve years old) and the Pindaric “Ode for Music on St Cecilia’s Day.”

  Some of the more interesting odes composed during this time include Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” “Ode to Simplicity,” “Ode to Fear,” “Ode to Mercy,” and “Ode on the Poetical Character.” Gray provided “Ode on Spring,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Ode on Adversity,” and “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” which details a curious tabby’s tragic slip as she tries to get lunch out of the goldfish bowl: