In 1926 a recently opened letterpress shop in New York City named Spiral Press printed a book of poems for Frost. One of the owners of the press, Joseph Blumenthal, printed one of the poems as a Christmas card for his wife. Robert Frost loved the card and thus began a working relationship between Blumenthal and Frost and several woodcut artists and engravers.
Frost sent the cards out annually from 1934 to 1962. The last year they were mailed, the print run was over 17,000. Some of the cards ran up to 20 pages and included such well-known Frost poems as “The Gift Outright” and “The Wood-Pile.”
Examples of the cards from the Rauner Special Collections can be viewed here.
Dartmouth College’s Officce of Alumni Relations recently posted the following notice about the cards on their blog:
Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library has an extensive collection of the cards, including copies of the first-ever example—“Christmas Trees”—which was produced without Frost’s knowledge in 1929. Later, Frost expressed admiration for the card and he agreed to help produce them on an annual basis in 1934.
Rauner’s collection also includes cards with handwritten notes from Frost to librarians at Baker Library and other friends in Hanover. In 1951, Frost accompanied the “A Cabin in the Clearing” card with this note to Dartmouth bookstore employee Ruby Dagget: “in hopes that you will carry it like a lesson to your schoolhouse in the wilds of Vershire.” Vershire is a nearby town in Vermont.
In late 2000 I wrote a letter to Don DeLillo asking him what kind of typewriter he used. I’d read in the Paris Review interview that he used a manual typewriter. A page from said typewriter (from his novel Libra) was also reproduced in the article, and I found it fascinating because it showed evidence of hard labor — typing and lots of inked-in corrections. Plus, the type style was beautiful and I wanted that typewriter. So I wrote the letter. A few months later I received a letter (unfortunately damaged) in reply from this most reclusive literary genius, who identified his typewriter as an Olympia “SM-something.” The above photo clearly shows an Olympia SM9, manufactured in the early 1970s. A great and reliable machine, one of which I now own. Here’s a link to the manual.
Portrait of Anne Bronte (Thornton, 1820 – Scarborough, 1849), Emily Bronte (Thornton, 1818 – Haworth, 1848) and Charlotte Bronte (Thornton, 1816 – Haworth, 1855), English writers. Oil on canvas by Patrick Branwell Bronte (1817-1848), caa 1834, 90.2 x74.6 cm.
Juliet Barker has published a revised edition of her landmark biography, The Brontës with new material, including letters and juvenilia not available when the original edition was published eighteen years ago.
What sets Barker’s biography about the Brontës apart is that hers is not the typical account of a mad, freakish clan of sequestered geniuses, but rather a depiction of a flawed and human family. Barker redeems the much maligned Patrick Brontë, the girls’ father, who is portrayed as loving and sympathetic. She depicts Charlotte not as a saint and martyr but instead as a controlling and self-absorbed young woman with a dash of wicked humor and a taste for sarcasm.
Concerning Emily, Barker also dispells a long-held belief about her literary output. She never wrote another novel after Wuthering Heights, but Barker insists she would have penned another had she lived long enough — and that, contrary to received opinion, she was not exhausted creatively or crippled by savage reviews.
At more than a thousand pages, Barker has enough canvas on which to flesh out her major theme: the family’s unique intimacy fostered their extraordinary literary output; the family’s closeness and affection helped them through illness and loss; and each family member sustained the others, despite jealousies and temperamental differences.
H. L. Mencken with a Remington understrike typewriter
H.L. Mencken as a uniquely American voice was The American Language, a book he believed would be “my swan song.” Through the humid months of 1918, a shirtless Mencken could often be found on the sleeping porch of his home in Baltimore amongst piles of reference works and dictionaries. He sweated through each tome, taking notes and dog-earing pages. He also dug out articles he’d previously published in the Evening Sun, the Smart Set, and the New York Evening Mail. From this chaos of material came a certain order.
In 1918 linguistics was hardly recognized as a science. One of the aims of education was to preserve the sanctity of the King’s English, a pedagogical aim based on the notion that American English was inferior to that spoken in England. Mencken could find but a few scant articles on American pronunciation and even less on grammar. He found this surprising since the difference between the American and English languages was a subject that had preoccupied America since the colonial days. In 1789, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster foresaw that this new country, with its relations with Indian tribes, would forge a new vocabulary. But not just in words alone did the two languages differ — something remarked upon by Mark Twain in 1882 when he wrote that in England his American tongue was unintelligible to most Englishmen. Yet the bulk of the material Mencken uncovered, as he writes in the Preface to the First Edition, was dedicated “to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing as an American variety of English existed — that the differences I constantly encountered in English and that my English friends encountered in American were chiefly imaginary.”
In “Mencken Revisited,” the noted linguist Raven McDavid Jr. wrote: “No professional scholar of the time would have dreamed of presenting a discussion of the totality of American English.” This was a role for which Mencken was well cast. As an experienced journalist, a social historian, and a critic of modern culture (the booboisie), Mencken was skilled at summarizing information in a clear style. The writing of linguists was dull in comparison.
Even for a writer of Mencken’s talent, however, the book wasn’t easy to write. “This tome is infinitely laborious and vexatious — a matter of writing and rewriting,” Mencken told his future biographer, Ernest Boyd. Yet by the end of six months, Mencken had typed the last sentence of The American Language. He wrote in the Preface: “It is anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject . . . . All it pretends to do is to articulate some of those materials — to get some approach to order and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some more competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate philologist, which I am surely not.” He described “that damned American language book” to friends as “a heavy, indigestible piece of cottage cheese.” As for continuing with the subject, he wrote to Ernest Boy, “Never again! Such professorial jobs are not for me.”
The indexes remained, and throughout the autumn of 1918 Mencken struggled to complete them while an outbreak of influenza struck the nation. As many as 1,500 obituaries filled newspaper columns each week. More civilians were dying at home from influenza than troops abroad. In August Mencken wrote, “All that could be seen from our house were funerals.”
Alfred A. Knopf published The American Language in 1919, and the first edition was a runaway success. With one powerful stroke Mencken had severed the umbilical cord which linguistically bound America to England. In addition it was clear that the center of American cultural gravity had shifted and had swung toward Mencken though not all were pleased about this. As his most virulent critic, Stuart Sherman, put it in his book Americans, Mencken had leapt into the center stage off American culture “at a hard gallop, spattered with mud . . . high in oath.”
In 1920 when Knopf published Mencken’s Prejudices: Second Series, they wanted a revision of The American Language. The orders were rolling in and the royalties on the small first edition were more than on any of his previous books, leading Mencken to joke, “the moral is plain: fraud pays.” Despite his sarcasm, Mencken would see that his was the first work of its kind to transcend traditional barriers between scholarly and popular books. What at first had been drudgery now enthralled him as he saw how each new edition recaptivated an old audience and captured a new one.
But revising the manuscript filled him with dread. He wrote in “Preface to the Revised Edition” that the corrections and suggestions from the first edition that needed to be incorporated into the second “were of such bulk that they almost alarmed me into abandoning the work altogether.” Mencken’s revision, which included the addition of four new chapters, an appendix, and an extended bibliography, was demanding physically and mentally. Three new sections dealt with American slang. The first, “Specimens of the American Vulgate,” included a facetious translation of “The Declaration of Independence” into common speech. Two pieces by Ring Lardner that showcased the common argot of professional baseball players were also included. A second addition, “Non-English Dialects in America,” acknowledged the influence of Yiddish and Spanish on the American language. The third addition included a section entitled “Proverb and Platitude,” in which Mencken included examples of “the national talent for extravagant and pungent humor.”
The American Language was nothing less than a declaration of linguistic independence. No more would America suffer the oppression of literary colonialism. A new day had dawned on American literature. “American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect,” Edmund Wilson observed. “Mencken showed the positive value of our own vulgate heritage.”
Despite his belief that the book was filled with errors, he was able to explain to linguist Raven McDavid that he had achieved his “central objective” of “convincing[ing] 100% of Americans that language is really interesting, and not only interesting but important.”
The Museum of London said Wednesday that an archaeological dig had uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The site is situated behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment just east of London’s business district.
The remains are of a polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theaters. It is believed to be the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.” The Curtain opened in 1577 and was home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597-1599, until the players moved to the Globe Theatre across the Thames.
Among the plays premiered at the Curtain were the Bard’s “Henry V” and possibly “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour.” Shakespeare and his troupe moved to the Curtain after a dust-up with the landlord of their previous venue, known simply as The Theater.
The troupe’s experience at the Curtain was not a happy one, according to Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe. The venue staged sword fights, acrobatics, and bear-baiting — in addition to plays — and attracted a rough, demanding audience. “It was a different kind of house and they were probably desperate to leave,” Spottiswoode said. “Crowds would flock to The Curtain to see all sorts of activities — they didn’t go there to see thesps.”
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men abandoned the site in 1599 for the Globe, the theater they’d built using timbers smuggled from the original Theatre and pushed across the frozen Thames on large sleds. The Curtain survived at least until the 1620s, which makes it the longest-lived of London’s Elizabethan playhouses.
The real estate company redeveloping the site said it plans to preserve the site.
The Theater and the Curtain were London’s first successful playhouses — before then, plays were staged in inn yards and various makeshift spaces. Elizabethan playhouses were built outside the city walls, making them free from regulation by civic leaders, who were hostile to theaters and other disreputable forms of entertainment.
Despite recent discoveries, there is still much to learn about the Elizabethan theater. According to Heather Knight, a senior Museum of London archaeologist, “The late 16th century was a time of a theatrical arms race in London. The proprietors of these building were making improvements to attract customers. So to have the chance to look at the earliest of these buildings (The Theater), and the one that had the longest life is a real opportunity.”
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