Watercolor by Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse is one of the most widely read German-language writers ever. He is most renowned for his literary works such as Demian, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, yet he also made a name for himself as a painter. After the First World War, he learned to paint with watercolors. His paintings vividly depict Ticino’s landscape (Switzerland), where he lived from 1919 to 1962.
HIs art is a glimpse into the more intimate and hidden side of this great popular writer. On his psychoanalyst’s advice, a student of Carl Gustav Jung, Hesse at first reluctantly took up watercolors. Eventually, he came to enjoy painting so much that it became his favorite pastime. What attracted and fascinated him was the magic of nature and the expressive power of colors. He painted thousands of watercolors, mostly Ticino landscapes in vivid colors, and illustrated small books of poetry throughout his life.
This is a full-cast performance featuring Robert Foxworth, Pamela Payton-Wright, Stuart Pankin, and Jerome Dempsey and cast. I use this full audio recording of The Crucible in my classroom and intend no copyright infringement. It’s for educational purposes only. It was produced by The Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center (under the direction of Jules Irving and Robert Symonds) and directed by John Berry.
ACT I:
ACT II:
ACT III:
ACT IV:
Be sure to check out my Crucible Study Notes on YouTube:
The Wall Street Journal a few years ago ran an article about Swintec, one of the last surviving typewriter companies in the U.S. (Please see the WSJ article for more information.)
Edward Michael, who started the company in 1985, is quoted in the article as saying, “We’re typewriters. This is our specialty. This is what we know.”
Down to about 10 employees now from about 85 during the boom years, Swintec continues to sell typewriters at a click-clackety pace: between 3,000 to 5,000 units a year, mostly to universities, senior centers, and prisons. Yes, typewriters are quite popular behind bars — especially now that Swintec came upon the novel idea of a clear typewriter designed to prevent the smuggling of contraband.
From our point of view, typewriters aren’t going anywhere. After all, the vacuum cleaner, as Mr. Michael points out in the above video, failed to replace the broom. Nor did the typewriter replace pens and pencils.
Sometimes a silhouette is more significant than an ordinary drawing. A few traces of the pen, a few vibrant adjectives, are often sufficient to bring a character to life.
Take Owl Eyes, a partygoer at Gatsby’s mansion, a quickly drawn and excellent character who wanders into the library with intoxicated admiration. I’ve always seen this man as wise, someone groping through the booze-haze to understand the mirage before him. Readers have been lost in Gatsby’s house ever since, lost in his never-ending revival.
Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel.
What major work of fiction is so well established in the curriculum and canon yet is constantly and vigorously contested for its literary merit and ethical character? We’re not talking about books like Huckleberry Finn, which got sucked into a rage about racial slurs and censorship and the tireless battle over the N-word. With Gatsby, one must ask: Could Fitzgerald write well, or was he, as Gore Vidal said, just a novice?
Almost all the bitterness Nick feels about Gatsby has been directed back at Fitzgerald’s novel. Just as Nick questions Gatsby, readers question his book: Is this mere shallowness or astonishing depth? Like Daisy, Nick has been criticized for his passive attitude or worse, for taking part in the spectacle.
Even admirers disagree: is the book good, or is it great?
The answer lies not in the assurance of the perfect text but its unknowability. Despite the tight structure and well-crafted three-act framework, it’s full of wild ambivalence, stiff morality, and a love of money, as well as a lack of empathy from many of its players.
Fitzgerald was proud of his achievement, but his work baffled critics and didn’t sell well. “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson.
That question remains unresolved. Some reviewers have seen the novel as a slapdash piece of work. John Kenneth Galbraith sneered that Fitzgerald had no real interest in class. “It is the lives of the rich — their enjoyments, agonies and putative insanity — that attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social and political consequences escape him as he himself escaped such matters in his own life.”
True, Fitzgerald was bitter and envious of the rich. “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has colored my entire life and works,” he wrote to his agent, this coming from the same man who fell in love with Zelda because she looked expensive.
As we are borne back through this single text, we see that admiration might be one path to literary immortality. Still, we should be wary of endless interpretation and enjoy the traces of Fitzgerald’s knife-sharpened pencil.
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