The Poet Buried Standing Upright

Memorials in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, Poets' Corner
 CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

In 1065, Westminster Abbey was consecrated. It was the project of King Edward the Confessor, but Edward himself was sick on this day and couldn't come to the ceremony and died a few days later. The next year William the Conqueror was crowned in the Abbey, a tradition that has continued to this day with a few exceptions. 

There is one section of the Abbey known as the Poets' Corner. The first poet buried there was Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400. It wasn't because he was a poet. It was because he had an administrative position with Westminster and lived near the Abbey. 

Then in 1599 poet Edmund Spenser was buried near Chaucer and, after that, it was considered a place for writers. Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling, and many more are buried there.

Ben Jonson      Public Domain, Link

Ben Jonson was William Shakespeare's contemporary. He has what might be the most famous epitaph in the Abbey: "Oh rare Ben Jonson." It has been claimed that the inscription could also be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), though there is a distinct space between "O" and "rare."

Though he is buried in Westminster, it's not in Poets' Corner. Another oddity is that he is the only person buried there standing upright. 

The popular story goes of that burial oddity is that when the Dean of Westminster talked to Jonson about being buried in Poets' Corner, Ben replied, "I am too poor for that, and no one will lay out funeral charges upon me. No, sir, six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me; two feet by two will do for all I want." The Dean promised he could have it. 

When Jonson died in poverty in 1637, he was definitely buried upright, as some workers found out in 1849 when they accidentally dislodged his burial spot and his skull, with some red hair attached, rolled down from a spot above his leg bones.

A monument to Jonson was erected in about 1723 by the Earl of Oxford in Poets' Corner which has a portrait medallion and the same inscription as on the gravestone. It seems Jonson was to have had a monument erected by subscription soon after his death but the English Civil War intervened.

Uncle Wiggily and J.D. Salinger

Uncle Wiggily is not an Easter bunny. He is a gentlemanly old rabbit who always wears a suit and a silk top hat. 

The character was created by Howard R. Garis. I just discovered this year that Uncle Wiggily has some roots in my home state of New Jersey and even in my birthplace of Newark.

Garis was a reporter for the Newark Evening News and he wrote hundreds of children’s books, many of them as a ghostwriter. He published his first Uncle Wiggily story in a newspaper in 1910, and it was so popular that he ended up publishing an Uncle Wiggily story six days a week for more than 30 years. By the time he retired, he had written more than 10,000 stories about the rabbit. 

According to Garis' obituary in the Chicago Tribune, it was a walk in the woods in Verona, New Jersey that inspired him to write about the rabbit. I now live in the town next to Verona. The Uncle Wiggily connection is very strong with me.

I don't really remember the stories, though in my childhood the Newark Evening News was dropped on our front porch every night and I did read the comics, so it's likely I read some of those stories. I was a big fan of rabbits and we had them as pets.

I do remember playing an Uncle Wiggily game. I found the original game selling online for $100. I guess I should have kept my childhood game - and kept it in good shape.  They do sell today a much more reasonable version of the game.

Uncle Wiggily Longears - his full name - appeared in the paper every day (except Sundays) from 1910 to 1962 and Garis published 79 books in his lifetime illustrated by a variety of artists. 

I left Uncle Wiggily behind when I got a bit older, but he popped up again in my early teen years. Eloise and Walt appear in the short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" which is one of the stories in J.D. Salinger's collection Nine Stories which I read many times. In that story, Eloise recalls a time when she and Walt were running to catch a bus and she sprained her ankle. Walt says, referring to her ankle, "Poor Uncle Wiggily."

I guess Jerry Salinger read some of those stories. Uncle Wiggily is lame from rheumatism and uses a candy-striped walking stick.

The 1949 film My Foolish Heart was based on this story and is still the only authorized adaptation of Salinger's writings into a film. The film's plot bears little resemblance to the original story - which might be why Salinger never allowed his fiction to be used again.

The story is about how Eloise is trying to come to terms with her life with her husband Lew when her true love was Walt (a member of Salinger's favorite family, the Glass family) who died during his service in the army.

Poor Uncle Wiggily. 

Crossposted at Weekends in Paradelle

Happy Franz Kafka

Franz in 1917

Today is the birthday of Franz Kafka. He was born in Prague in 1883. I was able to visit the museum for him there last year. He is an author I have admired since I read that entry story -"Metamorphosis" - of his.  I then went on to read his novels.

The general view of Kafka by most people is he was this sad, lonely, disturbed man. He gets a bad public bio, much like Edgar Allen Poe. Yes, he was unhappy for much of his life, but not for all of it. He had a tyrannical father. He suffered from psychosomatic illnesses. He seems to have anxiety issues. And his stories and novels like "In the Penal Colony” and The Trial encouraged that view of him.

Of course, we should always be careful about seeing a writer's words as autobiographical, though almost every writer does use his life in his work to some degree.

So, I was pleased to hear today's episode of The Writer's Almanac because it included this much more optimistic bio section:

But he was also a productive and well-liked employee at an insurance company and worked tirelessly to prevent workplace accidents in the lumber industry. 

He kept up a rigorous fitness regimen and loved fresh air: “I row, ride, swim, lie in the sun. Therefore my calves are good, my thighs not bad, my belly will pass muster, but my chest is very shabby.” 

And he found love and happiness in the last year of his life, with a woman named Dora Diamant. Even though Kafka was suffering excruciating pain from tuberculosis, Diamant later said, “Everything was done with laughter,” and “Kafka was always cheerful. He liked to play; he was a born playmate, always ready for some fun.”

Here's a toast to Franz in that last year. I wish you were not in physical pain and that love and happiness had started much earlier in your life. Your words live on.

Sculpture of Kafka in Prague

Robert Louis Stevenson

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

Robert Louis Stevenson is an author I read as a kid. He was one of those early "classic" authors that was pushed on you in school, but I really liked his books.

He was born in 1850 and died in 1894. He was a novelist, poet, short-story writer, and essayist. In 1883, while bedridden with tuberculosis, he wrote what would become one of the best known and most beloved collections of children's poetry in the English language, A Child's Garden of Verses.

But his bigger claim to fame (and fortune) comes from the novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

After some time in America and a marriage, he moved with his wife back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage. On a rainy afternoon the following summer, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him an idea for a story.

He wrote Treasure Island (1883) in a month. I was intrigued with the story of young Jim Hawkins who found a treasure map. I wanted my own treasure map and wanted to go on a a journey to find the treasure. I didn't really want to run into pirates, a mutiny, or the one-legged cook named Long John Silver. I drew my own treasure maps as a kid and went on my own adventures. I still love maps - and books with maps in them.

His second novel came to him in a dream and he wrote the first draft in three days. His wife thought it was good but not great. He spent the week rewriting and ended up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885). This tale of a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal has stayed on reading lists for more than a century. Besides being another kind of adventure, the novel has psychological elements that I think raise it above Treasure Island on the literary bookshelf.

Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous, and he spent the rest of his life traveling and writing about 400 pages of published work a year.

For his health, he finally settled on the island of Samoa. In the last five years of his life he wrote 10 books. He died young - age of 44 - but not from his lingering respiratory illness, but from a stroke.

His reputation during his life was that of a great writer, but today he is somewhat dismissed as an "adventure" writer. 

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

===

Man Pursuing the Horizon: Stephen Crane

I have been a longtime reader and fan of novelist and short-story writer Stephen Crane. I first read him when I was an impressionable 13 years old and diving into serious literature.

He was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. I was also born in Newark.

On the 100th anniversary of his birth year, I visited his New Jersey grave on the day of his death - June 5.

My first encounter with Crane was via some of his short stories. I knew that "the book" to read by him was The Red Badge of Courage. I read that the summer before my senior year in high school. It was fast read, but I didn't really enjoy it.

That summer I also started to read more about Crane's life. He never went to war. The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by someone who never went to war.

As a young man, Crane wanted to be a professional baseball player. He played catcher on his prep school team in a time when a catcher wore no protective gear and the mitt was basically a gardening glove with some extra padding. Stephen was known for being somewhat reckless, but able to catch anything, even barehanded.

Crane at 17 in a school military uniform

He bounced from school to school. He was at the Pennington School in NJ (his father had been principal there), but after 2 years he transferred to Claverack College, a quasi-military school.

He did one semester at Lafayette College and then transferred to Syracuse University. He played baseball at all these schools.

Crane (front center) with his Syracuse teammates 

Stephen Crane (front row, center) sits with baseball teammates on the steps of the Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, 1891. (Photo courtesy of the SU Special Collections Research Center)

During summer vacations until 1892, he was his brother Townley's assistant at a New Jersey shore news bureau.

I had read Catch 22 and seen the movie M*A*S*H  the year before and my mind was filled with anti-war and anti-Vietnam news. I was thinking about how I had to register for the Selective Service and how I would be in the draft lottery when I got to college.

I went back and reread The Red Badge of Courage that fall through the lens of it being an anti-war novel written by someone who probably equated war with his own sports experiences.

That sounds naive, but it worked for me that year.

Crane cut classes and was spending a lot of time in New York City, especially the poor tenement streets of the Bowery.

He began writing for New York City tabloids while he was still a teenager.

His first novel was Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). It was considered scandalous and unseemly, and booksellers wouldn't stock it. He gave away about a hundred copies and burned the rest.

He had read a series of reminiscences of Civil War veterans published in newspapers and had met some veterans as teachers in his schools that became the research for his own Civil War story.

In The Red Badge of Courage (1895), we follow Henry Fleming, who signs up for the 304th New York regiment. Henry wants to experience a war that matches the glory of battle that he had read about in school.

The novel made him famous. It was considered to be the most realistic war novel ever written, despite the facts that the author was only 24 and had never been in battle himself.

I have read more recently that some Civil War veterans wrote in to newspapers claiming that they knew Stephen Crane and had fought beside him in various Civil War battles.

Crane admitted to fellow writer Hamlin Garland that he had used his own experience as an athlete as inspiration for the battle scenes.

The novel's success led to Crane spending the rest of his life working as a war correspondent.

On New Year's Eve in 1896, the boat he was on traveling to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War hit a sandbar and sank.

He barely survived in a small dinghy with three other men. They spent 30 hours at sea, then finally in desperation, dove in and made for shore.

From that experience, Crane wrote his short story "The Open Boat" which was the first piece of fiction I had ever read by him.

Sadly, that time spent adrift at sea and swimming severely damaged his health and contributed to his death from tuberculosis (TB ) just 4 years later at the age of twenty-eight.

Stephen Crane, 1897

It wasn't until college that I read Stephen Crane's poetry. He is considered a minor poet and his Complete Poems includes all 135 poems, published and unpublished during his lifetime. I like Crane's short poems and his use of irony and paradox which were influenced by his reading of Emily Dickinson's verse. They are generally very accessible poems.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this; 
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried, 
And ran on.


His life was short, but his output was impressive for that short time that he wrote professionally. I think we could have been friends in another timeline. We would have at least played some pickup baseball together.

Cross Posted on Weekends in Paradelle

That's Harsh

Reading "The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History" - here are a few samples...

Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”


Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”


Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)
“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”


Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)
“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”


Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898) 
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

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


Ouch.