“The Boundless Deep”: Richard Holmes on the Young Tennyson

It’s not exactly a confession, but I have the textbook I used for English in my senior year of high school, England in Literature. It’s not the one I actually used, but a copy I found at a used book fair. And I’ve also held on to the texts from my two courses in English Literature in college – the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1962 and revised in 1968. I’d prefer not to think about how many editions have occurred since then (those recent is 2024). 

I pulled both texts from the shelf recently to see what poems were included from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). I’ve been reading The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes. Holmes cites Tennyson poems I’d never heard of, and I wondered how many of them had been included in those textbooks.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Foxy noses – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“The Frog,” poem by Hillaire Belloc – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Close and Slow: ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Fifty – poem by David Whyte.

 

“To Rosamounde,” poem by Geoffrey Chaucer – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“The Atlas of Independence” by Chris Mackowski

If I had a mental image of John Adams, it was of a rather dour individual who bridged the presidencies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whom my history teachers in high school and college seemed to find much more interesting. 

Then came the 2008 miniseries John Adams, with Paul Giamatti in the title role and Laura Linney as his wife Abigail. I almost skipped it, but we decided to watch it. And I began to understand that my teachers and I had all missed the boat on this major figure of the American Revolution.  I sought out some biographies and histories, and I discovered my understanding of the second U.S. president was seriously misguided.

 

It was with that improving understanding that I began reading Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution by Chris Mackowski. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Bob Dylan: ‘I’m a Religious Person’ Who Reads Scripture Daily – Stephanie Martin at Church Leaders.

 

Britain’s Great Self-Loathing Crusade – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

Ghosts in the Field – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

Alan Jacobs Writes a Biography of “Paradise Lost”

We were in London in 2024, and I signed up for a London Open House tour that was right by our hotel. London Open House was a two-weekend event in which buildings not normally available to the public (or tourists) were open. Most, like this walking tour, required pre-registration.

 

The tour was fascinating. I had walked around these streets scores of times and never knew what had happened here. That rather ornate building around the corner – where Winston Churchill recorded all of his wartime addresses. That townhouse on a side street – the original building for the British Museum. That large stone mansion that backed to St. James’s Park – built by John D. Rockefeller as his London home. The rather nondescript office building across from the tube station – where Ian Fleming worked for MI-6 before he wrote the James Bond stories.

 

And right there, on a street named Petty France, was a Brutalist building housing the Ministry of Justice (it’s an ugly edifice; we call it the “Darth Vader Building”). At one corner is a small courtyard-like area. And right here, on this site, stood the house where then-blind poet John Milton (1608-1674) lived with his daughters and dictated the entirety of Paradise Lost. The only hint of this is the pub across the street, the one named the Adam and Eve. 

 

Paradise Lost is one of the works that everyone wants to say they’ve read but hope no one asks for details. The fact is that it is one of the great works of English literature, cited by many as equal to or greater than Shakespeare and Chaucer. It’s also one of the greatest poems written in any language.

 

But as Alan Jacobs points out in Paradise Lost: A Biography, the work is also something else, a kind of cultural bellwether. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Sugaring,” poem by Raymond Holden and “Lay of the Trilobite,” poem by May Kendall – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Henry Hart’s Seamus Heaney’s Gifts – Matthew Ryan at Literary Matters.

 

Missing You – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

Flannery’s Music – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Rabbit Room Poetry.

"Winston and the Windsors" by Andrew Morton

In late October, we were back at the St. Louis County Library. We had previously attended the talk by mystery writer Elizabeth George; this time it was the British writer, Andrew Morton. 

Morton became an almost-household name in Britain in the 1990s when he wrote not just “a” book but “the” book about Princess Diana – the one she agreed to do. Diana: Her True Story nearly toppled the British monarchy – or at least Diana’s revelations seriously damaged the institution. 

 

Morton has since written books about Monica Lewinsky, Madonna, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and William and Catherine when they were still the duke and duchess of Cambridge. You might say he’s an A-List celebrity biographer.

 

But his more recent attention has turned from contemporary celebrities to those who are more historical. And that’s what we were there to hear him talk about –Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

15 Things a Writer Should Never Do – Zachary Petit at Writer’s Digest.

 

Elitism is good – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

“Horace: Poet on a Volcano” by Peter Stothard

My introduction to the Roman poet Horace happened in Latin II class in high school. As a foreign language elective, Latin was down to two classes – introductory Latin I and Latin II. As I recall, the class did a group translation in class, which likely meant the Latin teacher did most of the heavy lifting. And then in college, in a class on Western civilization, we read a few of his odes.  

Other than that, I’ll confess to a general ignorance of the poet’s body of work.

 

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 B.C.), better known to us as Horace, lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of Western history. The son of an ex-slave, he came of age during the rapid decline of the Roman Republic, the assassination of Julius Caesar, the civil wars that followed as competing factions battled (literally) for power, and the final triumph by Octavian, soon called Augustus Caesar. 

 

When death from warfare, suicide, forced suicide, and murder was all too common, Horace was able to thread his way through the politics of power in Roman society. And he did something that few of peers accomplished – he died in his bed from natural causes. That by itself was an achievement, given the deadly nature of Roman politics, especially in the upper tier of society.

 

British journalist and author Peter Stothard tells Horace’s story in Horace: Poet on a Volcano. But he does do in an intriguing way – he uses Horace’s famed odes as the biographical reference. 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

A Video Reading of the Poem ‘The Loons of Colby Lake’ – Michael Pietrack at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Found in Translation: Gently May It Sing – L.L. Barkat at Twetspeak Poetry.

 

“Leda and the Swan,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Glorious Courage" by Sarah Kay Bierle

In my research for my novel Brookhaven, it was difficult not to run across references to one particular officer. 

John Pelham was an Alabama boy, the third of three sons and born in 1838 in a small wooden house in rural Benton County. His father was a doctor and farmer, enjoying both community respect and economic success. The family’s reputation was such that John’s father was able to get an appointment for his son to the U.S. Military Academy. The young man arrived at West Point in 1856, enrolling in a five-year degree program.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Language of the Master – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

How Warriors Prepare – H.R. McMaster at The Free Press.

 

Don’t Come Back In Until Dinner – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Humanity in Wartime – Nadya Williams at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Five Takes on Bombing Iran – Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

The Biography of a Civil War Regiment

In my historical novel Brookhaven, the elderly Sam McClure recalls his experience with the Iron Brigade in the Civil War. It was of short duration, only about three weeks, but he attached himself to the brigade’s soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg. He was following his orders; he was all of 13 years old, but he was working as a spy for a Confederate group called Colby’s Rangers. 

Sam admits he never really learned anything of importance; what he did was to run errands and keep the soldiers entertained with recitations of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The brigade suffered a high casualty rate during the war; it was known for its fearlessness. Sam meets up with a bare handful of survivors at the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, but he never reveals his identity. He listens as the veterans eventually discuss “the boy who recited Mr. Longfellow’s poems.” 

 

He tells his listeners that he’s always felt bad for misleading the men; the reporter Elizabeth Putnam gives him another insight, that he provided a respite to the men from the horrors of war. Her words move Sam to such an extent that he spends time alone in the woods.

 

Historian James Marten has written a somewhat unusual history of a key part of the Iron Brigade. The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment is not an history of all of the battles the regiment fought in. The battles are included, of course, because they played such an important role in the lives of regiment’s men. But Marten uses the word “biography” very deliberately; he’s not telling the story of the regiment’s history so much as he’s telling the story of men who comprised the regiment. As he writes, the book is a story of “how men made war and what the war made of those men.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

“Shiloh: A Requiem,” poem by Herman Melville – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Thoughts on the Army of Tennessee and Memory – Sean Michael Chick at Emerging Civil War. 

 

In Search of Shakespeare’s London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Lost Enchantment by Andrew Klavan, and Enchantment Regained? By Spencer Klavan – both at The New Jerusalem.

 

Detective Novels and the “Middlebrow” – Tom Spencer at CrimeReads.

“Van Gogh’s Ear” by Bernadette Murphy

Last fall, we attended the opening of the “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. It was the Gallery’s 200^th anniversary year, and the exhibition lived up to the pre-event publicity, and then some. The show included almost every painting Van Gogh (1853-1890) did while he was in the south of France from February 1888 to May 1890. The sheer size of the show was staggering, and it included many of Van Gogh’s most iconic works – the Sunflower series, The Yellow House, The Bedroom, The Starry Night, Irises, and so many more. 

On of the concierges at our hotel heard us waxing eloquent, and he suggested a book about Van Gogh’s ear, published in 2017. I wasn’t quite sold; a book devoted to the artist cutting off his ear? But my wife surprised me with it as a Christmas present.

 

It’s an incredible story that reads almost like a detective novel. 

 

Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story, written by Bernadette Murphy, covers the last two-and-a-half years of the artist’s life. It’s the period of his incredible productivity, the short but significant relationship with Paul Gauguin, his confinement at a nearby asylum, his return to his yellow house, his subsequent confinements amid his rapidly disintegrating mental state, and eventually his death in July of 1890. And it includes the story of his ear.

 

In fact, it was the ear that started Murphy on her Van Gogh quest. She was living not far from Arles, and she became interested in the story of Van Gogh reportedly cutting off his ear, or by the time she started her research, the story that had become cutting off just the lobe. 

 

Bernadette Murphy

The research she undertook was more than impressive; it was mind-blowing. She assembled a data base of people who were living in Van Gogh’s neighborhood in Arles at the time he lived there. She searched what medical records were available and census data. She traveled to Marseilles and Amsterdam. She followed every lead over the course of years. Eventually, she would find the answer to the question about the ear in library archives in California, of all places.

 

In the process, she discovered far more. She learned the identity of the “Rachel” with whom Van Gogh left the grisly remains wrapped in newspaper. She traced back the history of mental illness in his family. She learned what precisely happened “the night of the ear.” She discovered the errors and mistakes other biographers and art historians had made. Given that this was her first book, I can’t imagine the art critics establishment was particularly pleased. But she found answers to questions many had had in the past and had tried but failed to answer or answer incompletely. What’s clear is that her dogged determination and ability to research served her – and her readers – ultimately very well indeed.

 

Our concierge said the book might bring us to tears at points. Surprisingly, he was right. This artist, so misunderstood and often ridiculed during his life, became one of the greatest painters ever in his death. 

 

Related:

 

The National Gallery exhibition catalog, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

From Out-of-Print to Global Hit: The Surprising Resurgence of Michael McDowell’s Blackwater Novels – Julia Steiner at CrimeReads.

 

Tides – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Lost Boys: State of the Nation (Britain) – Centre for Social Justice.

 

3 Reasons Your Art Might Fail (and how to ensure it doesn’t) – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? – Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader.

"Augustine of Canterbury" by Robin Mackintosh

In 2013, we visited Canterbury, primarily to see the cathedral and the shrine of Thomas Beckett, the archbishop murdered by henchman of Henry II. There had been a mention in the our travel book of a nearby site, the Abbey of St. Augustine, and we walked a few blocks to see it. I’m glad we did. 

The abbey is a ruin, destroyed during the dissolution of the churches by Henry VIII (Thomas Cromwell, he of Wolf Hallfame, directed the destruction). But walking around the ruins, listening to the audio tour, you get a good idea of what the site would have been like in its prime. A question we had was, who was St. Augustine? It clearly wasn’t the saint and theologian who died in Hippo in North Africa in 430 A.D. As it turns out, not a whole lot is known about the missionary sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 596 to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom led by King Aethelbehrt and Queen Bertha (she was a Christian; the king was not). 

 

The mission was highly successful; Augustine eventually became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

Augustine of Canterbury by Robin Mackintosh aims to answer that question, at least as fully as it can be answered. The fact is that we don’t know much of the man’s early life, until he appears in the church records and accounts in Rome. Mackintosh also goes further. He discusses the context of Augustine’s mission, based on recent historical, archaeological, and sociological studies. He looks at Augustine’s leadership and what it might imply for the church in the 21^st century. And he challenges the negative interpretation of the mission, which started with the Venerable Bede himself.

 

Mackintosh was in a good position to write this story. He’s the director of Licensed Ministries and Warden of Readers in the Diocese of Canterbury and an honorary cathedral canon. He’s also spent considerable time in research; the book is only 192 pages (including notes, bibliography, and index) but it is packed with historical context of Rome, southern and northern France, and England in the late sixth century. When he describes, for example, what Augustine and his companions would have seen in Aix-en-Provence on their journey, the reader feels he’s right there in the moment, seeing what Augustine saw.

 

We travel with the mission from Rome to southern France, with a return when more letters from the pope are needed; then he returns through France and finally southeastern England. With Augustine, we navigate the sets of royal politics through numerous kingdoms. If we don’t know much about Augustine’s personality, we can see some of it reflected in the people along the way he had to deal with.

 

Robin Mackintosh

Eventually we land in England, wait for the official welcome by the king and queen to be organized, and then begin the mission. The king becomes a Christian (the critical conversion), and soon the mission is working its way through the people. Christianity had been introduced to Britain during Roman times, but the Romans had left a hundred years before and the church, had found itself (along with native Britons) pushed to margins of Wales and northern England by the Anglo-Saxon invasions. 

 

Augustine of Canterbury was published in 2013; I’d read a similar approach to a subject with Annie Whitehead’s 2018 Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, in which a small kingdom in north central England left almost no historical record of its own. Researching the context can tell us much even when we have little direct evidence from the subject of the study. 

 

Top photograph: Ruins of the Abbey of St. Augustine, Canterbury, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some Monday Readings

 

Pundits: “Ignorance” Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers to Economic Confidence Poll – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

I Once Thought British Jews Were Special. Not Anymore – Tanya Gold at The Free Press.

 

Fundamentally Religious and Catholic: A review of Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway – Adam Schwartz at Kirk Center.

 

Many People at Once: The Role of Literary Translators – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

November Poem a Day 2023, Week 2 – Kelly Belmomte at Al Nine.

"Man of Fire" by Derek Maxfield

“Well we have had a big battle where they Shot real bullets and I am safe. Except a buckshot wound in the hand and a bruised shoulder from a spent ball…” – Letter from William T. Sherman to his wife Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 11, 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh. 

Growing up, I had a grandmother who referred to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression” which had been won for the North by “that drunkard General Useless Grant.” Her father-in-law had been a young soldier in the war; relatives on both sides had fought and died. A century later, the Civil War was still being fought, at least when she was present, wrapped up in loss, memory, and an unshakeable belief in the “Lost Cause.”

 

But no Union officer received my grandmother’s opprobrium like William Tecumseh Sherman, whom I understood to be a personification of Lucifer. 

 

And that so-called Lucifer is the subject of Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, the highly readable, fact-filled, and wonderfully illustrated biography by Derek Maxfield. This is not a comprehensive, “be-all-and-end-all” study of the man; instead, it focuses on his Civil War years and military service.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

"Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction" by Jonathan Post

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) fits the oft-believed stereotype of the writer or artist who becomes mor famous after her death than during her life. She has a towering reputation today as one of the finest American poets of the 20^th century – and she had a total of 90 poems published during her lifetime. 

As professor and author Jonathan Post points out in Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction, her timing for fame – like the sense of timing in her poetry – was perfect. The end of her life occurred as feminism was going mainstream in American culture. It also helped that her poetry was approachable – you didn’t need a college degree to read and enjoy it, as Post says, calling her poetry “casually perfect.” 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Classic Biography: "Edgar Lee Masters" by Herbert Russell

The year 1915 was momentous in the history and development of American poetry and poetry in general. Poetry Magazine published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, launching the era of modernism in poetry. And a number of poems which had been published off and on by William Reedy of Reedy’s Mirror in St. Louis were collected and published under the title of Spoon River Anthology.  

The collection by Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950), a Chicago attorney, rocked the poetry world, the literary world, and even popular culture. The book went through seven printings in seven months. By 1916 (and 19 printings), an augmented edition was published. It was the top-selling poetry book for the next five or six years. 

 

The more than 200 poems written as tombstone epigraphs struck a deep, responsive chord in American culture and among the broad general public. People recognized the characters who emerged from the poems. They weren’t so much types as they were cleverly drawn and succinct summaries of your family members, friends, and neighbors. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950).

“Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’” by Robert Crawford

After T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) published The Waste Land in 1922, it seemed that there might be a creative dry spell. As far as poetry was concerned, there was. He was struggling with his marriage and the declining mental health of his wife, Vivien; he was editing his literary magazine Criterion; and he was maintaining a full-time job in banking. The next year, he transitioned from banker to editor at Faber & Gwyer (eventually to become Faber & Faber), where he stayed for the next four decades. 

It is the second half of Eliot’s life, from 1923 to his death in 1965, that is the focus of Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ by British poet and writer Robert Crawford. Crawford completed the first volume, The Young T.S. Eliot, in 2015. He’s completed the monumental biography seven years later, and, as he notes in the introduction, this biography has the benefit of the writer’s access to the extensive correspondence of Eliot and Emily Hale, his romantic interest for a considerable period of time. The letters were finally made available in 2020. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

"Dorothy and Jack" by Gina Dalfonzo

It may sound like a kind of heresy, but I read Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) before I read C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). In the 1970s, there was a revival of mysteries from the Golden Age (1920s-1940s, possibly including the 1950s). I was reading Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and many others. I connected to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories through Chesterton. In the late 1970s, I was reading Francis Schaeffer, and it was through Schaeffer that I began reading Lewis. 

While I came to know a lot about Lewis and the Inklings, and his friendship with Tolkien, what I didn’t know was the connection between Lewis and Sayers. One connecting point was Charles Williams, a sort of “add-on Inkling” who moved to Oxford with the University Press in 1940. He became great friends with Lewis, but not so much with Tolkien. It was Williams who inspired Sayers to undertake her translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante, although his death in 1945 happened before she began to publish.

 

The original connecting point was a fan letter written by Sayers to Lewis in 1942. For the next 15 years, until Sayers’ death in 1957, they developed and maintained a friendship nurtured in writing, faith, education, family background, interests, and philosophy. Gina Dalfonzo tells their story in Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and she notes that it would be difficult to find a man and a woman more alike in virtually all aspects of their lives. 

 

Gina Dalfonzo

The story of their friendship is the story of two towering intellects who connected initially through that fan letter. Dalfonzo notes that the letter itself has been lost; we don’t know which of Lewis’s works inspired her to write. Lewis said that this letter was the first fan letter he received from someone famous.

 

Their correspondence continued and grew. It was a friendship of equals – equals in intellect, faith, and fame. Their correspondence and occasional face-to-face meetings continued. Dalfonzo ably guides us through their friendship, the letters, and the context of their meetings and discussions. As the meetings of the Inklings became more sporadic, Sayers may have provided the intellectual sounding board that Lewis thrived on. And vice versa. 

 

It's a wonderful book, filled with insights about both authors.

 

Dalfonzo is the author of One by One: Welcoming the Singles in Your Church and the editor of The Gospel in Dickens: Selections from His Works. She serves as a columnist at Christ & Pop Culture and is the founder and editor of Dickensblog, a “blog for all things Dickens.” She’s written for The Atlantic, Christianity Today, First Things, Weekly Standard, and Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, among many others. She received a B.S. degree in English from Messiah College and an M.A. degree in English from George Mason University. She lives in Virginia.

 

Dorothy and Jack is an important contribution to our understanding of not only both authors individually but to that overall climate in England in the 1940s and 1950s that did much to fan the flames of Christian faith on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton by Joe Moshenska

John Milton (1608 – 1674) is one of those poets who seem to be largely ignored today. Shakespeare we still read and study; Milton, who was just as brilliant a writer as Shakespeare, comes with baggage, from a contemporary cultural perspective.  

For one thing, he was religious. For another thing, he was one of those Puritan-types, having even written a poem condoning the execution of Charles I. And a third thing was that he served in the British government under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. Cromwell was so hated by the royalists that, upon the Restoration in 1660, his body was removed from its tomb in Westminster Abbey, hung, beheaded, and thrown into the Thames. 

 

The young John Milton

Milton was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. (Why does this sound so vaguely like current American politics?) And yet he had written some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language that Charles II relented and freed the blind poet after a few months. Ours was the benefit: Milton’s epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, still lay ahead, published in 1667 and 1671, respectively.

 

Joe Moshenska, professor of English literature at University College, Oxford, loves the works of Milton. His study, research, and teaching center in the 1500 to 1700 period in English literature. He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. He’s published Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (2014), The Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby (2016), and Iconoclasm at Child’s Play (2019).

 

And now Moshenska turns his full attention to Milton. Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton is a biography, of sorts. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Philip Roth: The Biography" by Blake Bailey

The first thing you notice about Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey is the size of the book – more than 800 pages of biography. Add the acknowledgements, the footnotes, and the index, and you have almost 900 pages. If there was ever meant to be a definitive biography of the American author of 31 works, including Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, this is it.  

That it is the authorized biography by Roth himself, giving Bailey access to files, archives, letters, and friends’ interviews, also helps explain the breadth of the book. Bailey covers Roth’s life, and especially his publishing life, in detail. The fact that Bailey keeps the story interesting and engaging is due to both the biographer’s skill and Roth himself. 

 

Published earlier this year, Philip Roth received widespread and enormous critical praise – until accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and impropriety were leveled against Bailey (including via The New York Times). Eventually, the controversy led the publisher, W.W. Norton, to announce it was stopping the shipping of the book. Bailey had just run smack into cancel culture. At last report, no criminal charges had been filed against Bailey. The author has denied the accusations.

 

The biography tells Roth’s story – and it is indeed Roth’s story. That said, it is also a factual and objective story. The Philip Roth in these pages is the Philip Roth who was a major literary figure in American letters for more than half a century, winner of both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. And it is the Philip Roth, the flawed man who made bad marriages and was unfaithful to his wives. He moved in literary circles, and at times the biography reads almost like a who‘s who in American literature. People like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Styron, George Plimpton, Wallace Stegner, Bennett Cerf, John Updike, Francine du Plessix Gray, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, and many others move through the story. So do celebrities like Claire Bloom, Roth’s second wife, and Mia Farrow, Roth’s close friend.

 

Blake Bailey

To read the story of Philip Roth is to read the story of American literature in the second half of the 20^th century. And Roth’s importance can’t be underestimated. He broke literary taboos. He influenced countless writers. He helped shape the course of literary culture for two generations. And Bailey more than does justice to that story, describing each of Roth’s works and how they were received both critically and popularly. 

 

The biography also covers the influence of Roth’s Jewish-American roots and family. Many of his novels were about Jewish-American characters, and his work more than once offended Jewish readers and religious figures. Roth considered himself an atheist and was not observant in the Jewish faith. He also visited Israel several times and met with leading political and cultural figures in the country. He was also close to his family and especially his older brother.

 

Bailey has published biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He’s received numerous literary awards and recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American academy of Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and others. He lives in Virginia. 

 

In short, Philip Roth is a masterful biography, and Bailey has accomplished likely even more than Roth himself would have hoped for. The Roth who emerges here is a complex and complicated man, capable of both spite and extreme generosity and well aware of his failures and shortcomings. 

"Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction" by Jenny Hartley

Oxford University Press has been publishing a considerable number of “very short introductions,” numbering now in the hundreds, covering authors, movements, science, technology, history, and other subjects. Last year, OUP published one for C.S. Lewis, written by James Como. The slender volumes are about 100 pages, and the ones for authors include a biographical overview as well as a discussion of major works. 

And who was I to resist one for Charles Dickens?

 

Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction by literary scholar Jenny Hartley was originally published in 2016, without the “very short” in its title. Last year, it was republished including the “very short,” and packaged like the other OUP introductions. It’s concise, insightful, and covers the highlights of the author’s life and career.

 

Hartley discusses Dickens’s life through the prism of his works. Through Oliver Twist, we’re introduced to his early professional life and his meteoric rise in public acclaim. Sketches by Boz and other works help explain the public and private Dickens. Several works serve as the platform to explain his mastery of character and plot (and not everyone agrees on his mastery of plot). Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and other novels are used to discuss the author’s relationship with London. Hard Times serves as the platform for his radical politics and public crusades for social change. And A Christmas Carol becomes the window through which we see the man’s enormous impact on literature and culture.

 

Jenny Hartley

Hartley, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Roehampton, is the author of Charles Dickens: An Introduction (2016), The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (2012), Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women(2009), Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1997), Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War (1995), and other works. She was president of the International Dickens Fellowship from 2013 to 2015 and serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Charles Dickens Museum in London. 

 

Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction is not only brief; it’s also an excellent study of the author and his works. Hartley takes “very short” seriously and still manages to provide a broad overview with resorting to broad generalizations. It’s an excellent “very short” volume.

 

Related:

 

C.S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como.