Revisiting Roosevelt’s naval history masterpiece: While The Naval War of 1812 “was well received in its time (every ship in the Navy was required to keep at least one copy on board), it is far more valuable today as a manifesto for American naval power and a clarion call for the modernization of what Roosevelt saw as a woefully ill-equipped fleet.”
How the Brooklyn Bridge was built: “The Brooklyn Bridge was never a foregone conclusion. In the mid-19th century, a bridge high enough and long enough to jump clear over the water seemed to many an impossibility, but not to John Roebling, a German-born engineer who was a pioneer in suspension-bridge construction and wire manufacture. He was given the go-ahead in 1867 – but by 1869 he was dead, felled by lockjaw, and it was left to his son, Washington Augustus Roebling, to construct the bridge his father had envisioned.”
Gregory Orr’s A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry has much to teach both the practiced and aspiring poet, but it could have done more for the latter had Orr looked beyond the lyric and considered other motivations for writing besides self-expression. Christopher Scalia: “This is the first poetry guide I’ve read that uses Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments to introduce the concept of empathy. Strangely, though, rather than using Smith’s notion of ‘sympathetic identification’ to encourage poets to expand their sympathies, Orr applies it to the reader’s empathy for a poetic speaker. At one point, Orr recommends that poets ‘focus attention . . . on some thing other than ourselves—another person, a creature, even a tree’—but the goal of even that exercise is to help writers ‘become more conscious of our own feelings and attitudes.’”
Travel Mississippi’s literary trail: “This month, the Mississippi Arts Commission received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to set up a series of markers across the state to honor the contributions of its most prominent writers. The first place to be acknowledged will be the home of Ms. Welty, located in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson.”
David Stromberg, an editor for the Isaac Bashevis Singer estate, explains how he discovered a previously unpublished Singer story. Read the interview here and the story here.
The daring exploits—and idealism—of Romain Gary: “When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen Mother shortly after the second world war and asked about his background he apparently chose to remain silent. ‘Pour ne pas compliquer les choses,’ was his own version of the one-sided exchange. Gary, born Roman Kacew to Jewish parents probably in Vilna in 1914 and educated in Nice where he was taken as a teenager by his ambitious actress mother, was constantly re-inventing himself.”
Essay of the Day:
Why did Plath write so many letters? Perhaps her “experiences were never quite real until she put them into words.” Meg Schoerke in The Hudson Review:
“But while the letters lay bare the serious challenges Plath overcame in becoming a writer, their power to hook readers also depends on her increasing resourcefulness in telling her story. Although her narrative style changes as the volume progresses, she consistently portrays herself throughout as an archetypal heroine struggling to succeed against great odds. Her letters to Aurelia sometimes evoke the brisk pacing, adjectival ebullience, and fashion forwardness of women’s magazines, a fiction market Plath aimed to crack: ‘Picture me then, in my navy-blue bolero suit and versatile brown coat, snuggled in the back seat of an open car, whizzing for two sun-colored hours through the hilly Connecticut valley!’ (8 October 1951). Plath styles herself in this long letter as Cinderella attending a ball, swept off her feet by a handsome Princetonian (‘‘Milord . . .’ I replied, fancying myself a woman from a period novel, entering my castle’). Plath often used her journal as a writerly testing ground, and correlation with the letters shows her taking different approaches to narrating the same experience. Thus, a G-rated anecdote in an August 1952 letter to Aurelia about a joyride with a boy in an MG is retold in the journals from the third person perspective of a girl, jaded at age twenty, who endures her date’s immature behavior with a combination of maternal smugness and sexual ennui. After her suicide attempt, Plath took a break from journal writing until October 1955, and letters she wrote during this period became her main venue for stylistic exercises. She sometimes repeats descriptions or similes in letters to different correspondents, and, consciously or unconsciously, adds to the word hoard that she would later mine for poems; ‘I am squatting on my bed like a sleepy Buddha,’ recycled in several letters, looks forward to a line from ‘The Manor Garden,’ ‘The pears fatten like little buddhas.’ Writing to intellectual friends, she laces her letters with allusions. In an existential argument she conducts with Melvin Woody, for example, her description of her suicide attempt takes convoluted Yeatsian turns: ‘I get so tempted to take you verbally by the scruff of the neck and shake you when I hear you talk about solitude, or exile, . . . because the cataclysmic downward gyre I plummeted to symbolic death in last summer, when the center did not hold because there was none, or rather (as you wrote), too many, has given me an understanding of the black and sustained hells a mind can go through . . . and the enormous insulated loneliness when you feel that no human hand or love could reach or move you’ (5 July 1954). Whereas her literary allusions tend to accompany serious discussions, her stylistic experiments are often lighthearted: tongue-in-cheek imitations of authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Her letters to Gordon Lameyer brim with stylistic bravado. In one, after regaling him with multilingual puns (‘dear ponce de lameyer (en route) je pense de la mer’), she portrays her life as a radio drama: ‘Narrator (in highly suggestive tones): Yesterday we left our heroine Absinthe Lutely Plathtered struggling valiantly through the yuccas and the thith (shuchks, fluffed again!) thistles to get to her destination hundreds of ohms away in Newport, the Celestial City. Armed only with stale toll house cookies (to annihilate venomous nematodes) and Rinso Flakes (to keep her Nylons lovely longer), Absinthe ponders to herself the happenings of the past ninety-eight hours’ (3 July 1954). Whether she attends a swank ball, goes to hell and back, or makes a foray into Newport, Plath always imagines herself as the valiant heroine. Overall, the sheer number of extant letters, and the effort Plath devotes to shaping her life as an ongoing narrative, suggests that, for her, experiences were never quite real until she put them into words, a conclusion she hints at when confessing to a friend, ‘I’d really love to have you call me: it’s always so exciting, even though I am more myself in letters’ (13 May 1954).”
Photo: Ta Pa rice fields
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Strength to Change”
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