A day for weirdness and horror:

Patricia Highsmith, b. 1921. We used to rent DVDs from Clean Films, movies that had been edited to remove profanity and nudity. One of the films we rented has become something of a family joke, The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. I think something was definitely lost in the editing; it was a very confusing movie experience for us, and by the time we realized what the movie was all about and that we really didn’t want to watch it at all, it was too late. I still can’t watch a movie with Matt Damon and feel comfortable with whatever character he’s playing; I’m always afraid he might turn into Mr. Ripley before the end of the movie. Anyway I read Strangers on a Train also by Patricia Highsmith last year. The characters in that book are rather disturbed, too.

January 19th is also the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe. I posted in 2005 on Poe’s birthday about Tintinabulation and in 2004 about my favorite poem, Annabel Lee.
I also wrote about the Poe forgery, Leonainie. Does anyone know without looking who the forger was?
Finally, have you heard about the Poe Toaster? He comes in the night every January 19th and leaves a half-filled bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave. Some unknown person has performed this ritual every year since 1949.

Alan Alexander Milne, b. 1882
The Most Important Book I Read in College and other Milne links.
Favorite Pooh quotes.
In 2006, I read Milne’s autobiography, entitled It’s Too Late Now. It gave the impression of a man rather surprised by his own success, but also grateful for it.

Did you know that Milne wrote a parody of Conan Doyle and of Pope called “The Rape of the Sherlock”?

His first book was called Lovers in London, a collection of sketches about a young Englishman and his American sweetheart. Doesn’t that sound sweet? Milne was ashamed of the book and said that he hoped it never came back into print.

He wrote plays and was a good friend of J.M. Barrie, also a playwright.

Dorothy Parker wrote a very critical review of The House at Pooh Corner to which Milne responded that he didn’t write it for Dorothy Parker but rather for the children who loved Pooh. ” . . . no writer of children’s books says gaily to his publisher, ‘Don’t bother about the children, Mrs Parker will love it.'”

Quotes:

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere. (Autobiography, 225)

“For myself I have now no faith in miraculous conception. I have given it every chance. I have spent many mornings at Lord’s hoping that inspiration would come, many days on golf courses; I have even gone to sleep in the afternoon, in case inspiration cared to take me completely by surprise. In vain. The only way I can get an ‘idea’ is to sit at my desk and dredge for it.” (Autobiography)

When I am gone
Let Shepard decorate my tomb
And put (if there is room)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet, from page a hundred and eleven
And Pooh and Piglet walking (157)…
And Peter, thinking that they are my own,
Will welcome me to heaven.

I got busy today and almost forgot to recognize Tolkien’s birthday! We’ve been enjoying the products of Tolkien’s inventive mind around here for many years, and lately has been no exception. Dancer Daughter is in the midst of her yearly re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. We watched Peter Jackson’s interpretation of The Fellowship of the Ring a few nights ago. Yesterday I read Eldest Daughter’s essay on Samwise Gamgee as a Kierkegaardian White Knight of Faith, an essay she wrote for one of her classes at Baylor. And Engineer Husband is reading Fellowship of the Ring out loud at night to some of the younger urchins who haven’t read it yet.

So Tolkien is daily indulgence here, and it’s easy to forget his birthday since we celebrate him and his works every day.

Happy BIrthday, Professor Tolkien!
Thoughts on The Silmarillion
Yesterday Was Tolkien’s Birthday
On Seeing the Movie Version of Return of the King

Philip Freneau, b. 1752. Known as the Poet of the American Revolution, he was a close friend of Madison and of Jefferson. His poetry leaned toward propaganda, first anti-British and then anti- Federalist and supporting the party of his friends Madison and Jefferson. Here’s a few lines from a more personal poetic ode:

If I should quit your arms to-night
And chance to die before ‘t was light,
I would advise you — and you might —
Love again to-morrow. From Song of Thyrsis

William Lyon Phelps, b. 1865, American educator, critic, author and preacher, professor of literature at Yale. “Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation – what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.”
“You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.”

Robert Nathan, American novelist and author of The Bishop’s Wife and Portrait of Jenny, both of which were made into movies in the late 1940’s.

Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767, Irish novelist and children’s author. She met and corresponded with Sir Walter Scott. She also met Byron, and George III read one of her novels and said that he now had a better knowledge of his Irish subjects. Her father, who had four successive wives and twenty-two children (Maria was his second oldest child), insisted on editing and approving many of her books before he would allow them to be published.

Arthur Hugh Clough, b.1819, poet and friend of poet Matthew Arnold. Clough died at the age of thirty-one of malaria, and Arnold wrote the elegy Thyrsis in remembrance of his friend.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night
In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.
I see her veil draw soft across the day,
I feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;
I feel her finger light
Laid pausefully upon life’s headlong train; —
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,
And hope, once crush’d, less quick to spring again.

Sir James George Frazer, b. 1854. Scottish student of mythology and comparative religion, author of The Golden Bough. He saw the history of religion in Darwinian terms as “three rising stages of human progress — magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science.” So now you know one source for that bit of nonsense.

E.M. Forster, b. 1879, English novelist and essayist. His most famous novels are Howard’s End, A Room With A View, and A Passage to India. I started reading A Passage to India but didn’t get very far into before giving up. I don’t remember what I disliked about it, but I did dislike it. Can anyone give me a good reason to try again?

J.D. Salinger, b. 1919, American author best known for his book The Catcher in the Rye. No, I’ve never read it.

Alan Paton is a South African author, famous for his book Cry, the Beloved Country about the system of racial apartheid that kept South Africa in turmoil for so many years. I see that I’ve never written about Paton’s other novels, Too Late the Phalarope and Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful.

If you read and enjoyed Cry, the Beloved Country, then Too Late the Phalarope should be next on your list. It’s the story of an Afrikaans (Dutch descent) policeman who finds himself involved in an affair with a black African girl. He is ashamed of his own inability to control himself sexually, but he also carries the false guilt of having broken the racial barriers that were ingrained in South African society (probably still are to some extent). Like Cry, the Beloved Country, the story is a tragedy, but retains some hope. And it’s beautifully written.

In Paton’s third novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, he continued to explore the theme of racial injustice and the prison that apartheid had become for both black and white South Africans. Here’s a passage that captures a little of the tone of Paton’s writing, a sort of poetic tragic novel:

“Black man, we are going to shut you off
We are going to set you apart, now and forever.
We mean nothing evil toward you.

You shall have your own place, your own institutions.
Your tribal customs shall flourish unhindered.
You shall lie all day long in the sun if you wish it.
All the things that civilization has stolen
Shall be restored. You shall take wives
Unhindered by our alien prohibitions
Fat-bellied children shall play innocently
Under the wide branching trees of the lush country
Where you yourselves were born.
Boys shall go playing in the reed lagoons
Of far Ingwavuma, the old names
Shall recover old magic, milk and honey
Shall flow in the long-forsaken places.

We mean nothing evil toward you.”

So well-meaning, so patronizing, so ignorant of what can and what cannot be done, and ultimately so very wrong.

Alan Paton is a writer you should read. There are passages in Cry, the Beloved Country that bring tears to my eyes whenever I read them. A writer who can evoke emotion that well and who writes hope in the midst of tragedy is not to be missed.

Information on teaching Cry, the Beloved Country.