Cultural history Archives - Page 17 of 23

The Life of Jimmy Scott

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

I have to confess that I only heard of Jimmy Scott quite recently. Understandably so, it turns out. He’s one of the best kept secrets in the world of jazz and ballad singing. I heard his voice on a radio broadcast, was intrigued, bought a couple of CDs from Amazon – and was completely blown away. He’s completely unlike any other male singer you’ve ever heard of – mainly because he sounds like a woman. This is the result of a congenital disease which denied him puberty.

But that isn’t all: he has a style which is stripped bare to a minimum and yet very mannered at the same time. Like all good jazz musicians, he pays attention to song lyrics and sings them as if he means them. The most interesting things about him are his voice quality – high falsetto, big vibrato – and his delivery, which is laid back to a point where you think he might fall over. But he never does. The nearest style I can think of is Billie Holliday – one of his early fans and an influence. As David Ritz puts it in this very readable biography:

The rhythms he creates are wholly original. He does more than take his time. He doesn’t worry about time. Time disappears as a restraint or a measure. As a singer, his signatures are idiosyncratic phrasing and radical, behind-the beat syncopation. His career, like his singing, has lagged far behind the beat.

Scott’s life was full of personal heartbreak: from a dysfunctional family; orphaned as a teenager; married four times; duped by record producers; constantly on the move; scorned as an outsider; drink, (soft) drugs. He lived, as David Ritz accurately puts it, the jazz life.

Oddly enough, he claims that his early influences were Paul Robeson and Judy Garland two singers who you would think were at opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

The amazing thing, for someone who is still alive and singing now (I heard him with a German tenor player only a few weeks ago) is that he cut his musical teeth with people such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Tadd Dameron. His working life spans the last half-century.

Much of the racy vivacity of Ritz’s narrative comes from the fact that he transcribes the accounts of people he interviewed in his research. There are also some very entertaining vignettes along the way – such as life on the road in the high-octane Lionel Hampton band in the late 1940s.

His biggest fans were the people who matter musically – Bird, B.B.King, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horn. Later on he was championed by Lou Reed and Madonna.

And his own musical taste is impeccable – as in his perceptive observation that Stan Getz got better as he got older “Whatever he learned from Lester—and he learned a lot—he expanded on the lessons until he became a master himself”

He started out promisingly enough, but every time he tried to make his breakthrough record albumn, an old producer would surface to block his ambition with a ‘cease and desist’ order straight out of a nineteenth century melodrama. Scott remained unembittered – though it has to be said he took out a lot of his anger on the people closest to him.

The 1970s and 1980s are like waste years, with Scott working as a hotel lift attendant and a shipping clerk to make ends meet. Then there are a succession of failed enterprises which left him living off social security. But then he finally got some recognition and success in the 1990s when largely white audiences began to catch on to him. By then he was sixty-eight years old.

So the story has a reasonably happy ending – but he had to wait almost half a lifetime for it. This is an enthralling account of a real survivor, recounted with genuine but not uncritical admiration, and supported by a scholarly apparatus of bibliography and discography which left me yearning to read and listen to more of this truly remarkable artist.

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David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002, pp.270, ISBN: 0306812290

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The Mausoleum Book

April 13, 2016 by Roy Johnson

the intellectual life and two marriages of Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen has every right to be considered the ‘father’ of the Bloomsbury Group. His two sons Thoby and Adrian attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge.where their father had been a tutor and fellow. The sons invited their talented friends home to meet Stephen’s equally gifted daughters Vanessa and Virginia; and Sir Leslie helped to introduce the twentieth century and the first shoots of its modernism by publishing writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. The intellectual and social connections that underlay the Bloomsbury Group actually went back into the middle of the nineteenth century.

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832—1904)

The Mausoleum Book is a very personal account of Stephen’s two marriages was written in 1895 following the death of Stephen’s second wife Julia, and it was intended to be an entirely private document, addressed as a record to the family. Indeed it remained unseen outside this circle until its first publication in 1977. His children were slightly embarrassed by the tone of the memoir, which in his introduction Alan Bell calls one of ‘unrestrained lamentation’. But it has to be said that Leslie Stephen was doing something fairly unusual for the period – facing up to bereavement and the facts of death without the consolation of any religious belief. He had rejected what he called the ‘Noah’s ark myth’ and the trappings of religious ideology once and for all whilst at Cambridge – an act of intellectual honesty which led him to resign from his position of tutor at Trinity.

Having announced to his children at the outset of the memoir that it was to be about their mother, he launches immediately into an account of his own life – Cambridge, loss of religious belief, early days as a journalist, friendships with Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Carlyle, and George Eliot. His family was also friendly with William Makepeace Thackeray, through whom he met their daughter Harriet Marion (‘Minny’) who was to become his first wife.

But no sooner is Minny introduced than he immediately goes on to reflect on her sister Anny, who was a. popular novelist at the time. He describes her intellectual superiority, and her temperamental shortcomings. At this point the shadow of hereditary insanity in the Thackeray family is raised, and Stephen’s wife Minny dies very suddenly. His account then prepares the ground for his second marriage to the beautiful Julia Princep Jackson.

He backtracks very gallantly to give a history of her first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, painfully scanning their love letters and admitting she had been very happy in her choice of husband. Alas, this happiness was to last only three years, for Duckworth died very suddenly in 1870.

The shock and sadness of this sudden bereavement turned her into ‘a kind of sister of mercy’. She became engrossed in nursing skills which were reflected in her publication Notes from a Sickroom (1883) which forms an interesting bookend to her daughter Virginia Woolf’s later On Being Ill (1926).

Following their double loss, Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth became neighbours in Hyde Park Gate. They were close friends, united in widowhood, and had five children between them – one of whom (Laura, from his marriage to Minny) eventually became permanently incarcerated in a mental institution for the rest of her life.

They had domestic situations and social connections in common; they were old friends; and they lived in the same road – yet when he proposed marriage she turned him down, whilst protesting that she admired and even ‘loved’ him. They continued in this paradoxical impasse for a number of years until 1878 when she finally accepted his offer.

He claims that they were blissfully happy ever after – though his account should be taken along with the often more critical memoirs of his children (particularly Virginia’s) who all saw him as something of a domestic tyrant.

He paints a warm picture of summer holidays at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall which will be familiar to those who have read To the Lighthouse – though the setting of the novel is supposed to be the Hebrides, a part of the narrative which is wholly unconvincing.

The memoir becomes slightly bizarre when he includes character sketches of people known to Julia but who had died at the time of its composition. These include the grotesquely entertaining figure of Halford Vaughan, who took a lofty and disdainful attitude to his adoring wife and devoted a lifetime to the composition of a magnum opus of which he only ever completed the introductory chapter, which completely fails to identify even the subject under consideration.

From this point on, the narrative becomes truly maudlin. There is amazingly little mention of his ‘new’ children with Julia (Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian) but endless accounts of other people’s illnesses and deaths.

For a while he protests in what seems to be a self-effacing manner about his own lack of literary achievement – only to then reveal his wife’s refutation of this view, something that he offers as an example of her superior judgement. He also lists compliments he has received from distinguished figures on his literary powers — ‘one of the greatest philosophic writers’ — but mentions them as something to confirm the wisdom of Julia’s views. This is a fairly devious way of patting yourself on the back. And it gets worse:

I can not doubt, without impugning her [Julia’s] judgement, that there must be something loveable in me.

This may even be true – but it’s no wonder that his children found their father’s memoir something of an embarrassment. But this slim volume is a rich vein of information for devotees of Bloomsbury, and a valuable insight into aspects of sentimental life of the late nineteenth century.

The Mausoleum Book – Amazon UK
The Mausoleum Book – Amazon US

NB! – On Amazon this book is classed as a rare item, and is priced accordingly. But don’t be put off: I bought my copy for one penny.

Leslie Stephen, The Mausoleum Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp.118, ISBN: 0198120842

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The Modern Movement

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

themes and developments in English Literature 1910-1940

Although writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster produced their work almost a hundred years ago, we still class their work as ‘modernism’. That’s because they made such a radical break with the preceding century, and the fact is that some of their experiments have not been surpassed in the literature produced since.

Chris Baldick’s comprehensive study sketches in the social, linguistic, and aesthetic background of the period, then groups his discussion of examples according to literary forms – short stories, drama, poetry, and the novel. He naturally highlights the major figures – Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot – but his other concern is to show the traditional literary culture out of which the modernist experiment emerged at the beginning of the last century.

This involves consideration of writers such as Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, and now almost-forgotten figures such as Dornford Yates, Aldous Huxley, and Elizabeth Bowen who were very successful in their own time.

The Modern Movement ranges broadly, covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, ‘light reading’, essays, biography, satire (Waugh, Huxley, Lewis, Isherwood) children’s books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life. He also introduces chapters which focus on themes such as Childhood, the Great War, and Sexuality.

He’s particularly well informed on what’s often called ‘the writer and the marketplace’ – that is, the financial realities which lie beneath the occupation of authorship. He knows who earned most (Arnold Bennett) he reveals which writers were subsidised by rich patrons (Joyce of course, as well as others who were subsidised by wealthy spouses). I was amazed to learn that D.H. Lawrence not only made a lot of money out of the privately published Lady Chatterley’s Lover but that he went on to make even more by investing it in stocks and shares on Wall Street.

One small feature comes off nicely. Each chapter is preceded by a list of new words which came into currency at the time, and they always seem to emerge earlier than you would guess – blurb, umpteen, back-pack, and tear-jerker for instance.

He even includes an interesting presentation of theories of the novel – which involves consideration of first and third person narration. This ties in the connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and lays out the groundwork for the central chapters on Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster.

Baldick interprets all the major works of these writers – Howards End, Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses, Women in Love – in a way that makes you feel like immediately reading them again. But en route he takes time to look at the lesser-known works of the period, such as Love on the Dole, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, and novels by Naomi Mitchison, Robert Graves, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

I remember reading Walter Allen’s The English Novel and Tradition and Dream many years ago, and this is a similar experience. Authors, novels, books, and ideas jump off every page, and anybody with an appetite for literature will feel a terrific urge to follow up on the suggestions he holds out.

There’s a very good collection of further reading at the back of the book. These entries combine biographical notes on the author, together with available editions of their major works, plus secondary studies and criticism.

This is the fifth volume to be published in the Oxford English Literary History series. It can be read continuously as an in-depth study of the period, or used as a rich source of reference.

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Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.477, ISBN: 0198183100

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The Moment

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment (1947) is the second collection of essays and reviews by Virginia Woolf that were gathered and edited by her husband Leonard after her death in 1941. She herself had supervised the earlier collections The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932) which were published during her lifetime

The Moment and Other Essays includes writing on literary criticism, biographical sketches, political polemics, and book reviews. Some of the essays were being published for the first time; others had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, and John Lehmann’s New Writing. The collection includes two essays with the same title, Royalty; the first was commissioned, but not published by Picture Post; the second was published in Time and Tide.

The Moment – critical commentary

There are some essays in this collection that have become quite well known in their own right. On Being Ill for instance takes as a starting point the subject of illness in literature, a topic which she spins out into an extraordinary display of reflections on subjects including solitude, the psychology of reading, and the nature of language.

‘The Art of Fiction’ is one novelist’s response to the theorising of another – her critique and appreciation of E.M. Forster’s now classic study of fiction, Aspects of the Novel (1927). She agrees with his analysis of plot and structure, but playfully rebukes him for not paying more attention to the very medium of literature, which is words.

She is a writer (and a reader) who is inclined to look at the most fundamental aspects of her subject – which is the production and consumption of literature. In ‘Re-Reading Novels’ for instance she tackles head-on the problem of reading long Victorian novels such as Vanity Fair (1847) and (Meredith’s) Harry Richmond (1870).

First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting.

She argues with Percy Lubbock’s notion of the novel’s ‘form’ — in The Craft of Fiction(1921) — that it is not something analogous to visual ‘shape’ in painting, but an arrangement of feelings with which we are left after the first reading of a text, and which might be re-arranged on a second or subsequent reading.

It’s a popular myth about Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury artists and writers that they were elitist and not interested in politics. An essay such as ‘The Leaning Tower’ shows how the exact opposite was true. She analyses the tradition of English literature from an ideological, almost Marxist point of view, showing how the education of its writers was based on class privilege. It is no accident that the majority came from families who had the wealth to afford a public school and university education. She ends her survey with a rallying cry for an end to class divisions altogether, and the hope that ordinary men and women will borrow more books from public libraries. But then this essay was delivered as a paper to an audience of the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association in 1940 – so maybe we should not be surprised at its radical message.

This is not to say that all the essays and sketches are deadly serious. The attitudes she struck were obviously determined by the publications for which she was writing. There are shorter and more lightweight pieces such as her satirical account of the life of Benjamin Haydon, monumental painter and diarist, her reflections on the relationship between painting and literature, and even some thoughts on the poetry of fishing.

But whether the essays are short and witty or long and serious, she always has something thought-provoking to say. For instance, on individual writers, she admits her reservations regarding D.H.Lawrence, but produces a deeply felt appreciation of Sons and Lovers. She recognises that people have stopped reading the novels of Walter Scott altogether – but still manages to find something admirable in his ambition. And although she believes that David Copperfield is part of the national consciousness, she confesses that considered as a human being she ‘would not cross the road to dine with … Dickens.’

The Moment – study resources

The Moment – Amazon UK
The Moment – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Moment – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Moment – complete contents

The Moment: Summer’s Night
On Being Ill
The Faery Queen
Congreve’s Comedies
Sterne’s Ghost
Mrs. Thrale
Sir Walter Scott. Gas at Abbotsford
Sir Walter Scott. The Antiquary
Lockhart’s Criticism
David Copperfield
Lewis Carroll
Edmund Gosse
Notes on D. H. Lawrence
Roger Fry
The Art Of Fiction
American Fiction
The Leaning Tower
On Rereading Novels
Personalities
Pictures
Harriette Wilson
Genius: R. B. Haydon
The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray
Two Women: Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley
Ellen Terry
To Spain
Fishing
The Artist and Politics
Royalty
Royalty

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

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The Myths of Innovation

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new developments in technology, science, and business

This is a book which seeks to de-bunk the myths of invention. Most of us are brought up to believe that Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, and that Archimedes had a ‘Eureka!’ moment in his bath. Scott Berkun points out that neither of these two myths is true, and that almost all technical innovations come about as a result of years and years of research, failed attempts, and lots of hard work. He also points out that history is not only written by the victors, but that it commonly misses out the failures, wastes, and losses that go to make up a success. His telling example here is Rome, whose architectural glories are actually built on the ruins of a city that was previously burned to the ground.

Once these myths are out of the way, he looks at how innovations do come about, and wonders if there is any way of planning for them or creating systems that will encourage them. No matter how much we might wish there were, his answer is ‘It can’t be done’ in both cases.

In fact the more he looks at real-life examples, the more it becomes apparent that perfectly good innovations can fail for lack of appreciation, audience, funding, and a host of other reasons. When he looks closely at the provenance of success stories it’s obvious that they must

not be too far ahead of their time
fit within existing sets of beliefs
be simple to adopt
meet an existing need

As he puts it in one of his many amusing examples, if free mobile phones had mysteriously appeared in 9th century England, they would have been burned as witches’ eggs.

The World Wide Web, the medium through which we all live and breathe, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he couldn’t remember where his colleagues’ research papers were located. So he devised a simple coding system (HTML) which allowed documents to be tagged. A Eureka moment? No – because look what was already in place, on which this system ran.

First there had been the invention of the computer roughly fifty years before – at Manchester University, where Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both members of staff. There had already been established a world-wide network of computer connections (ARPANET). Packet-switching (the unsung gem of communication technology) had recently been invented. And the personal computer with its attendant gizmos of mouse, screen, and keyboard had been developed. You get the point: the Web and HTML was an amazing development which has changed all our lives – (and I still don’t know why Berners-Lee hasn’t been given a Nobel Prize, if Winston Churchill can have one for literature). But the Web was built on lots of other inventions, and it came at the right time.

The book dips slightly in the middle when he looks at the (largely negative) effect managers have on innovations and efficiency, but true to the theories he is propounding, he pulls some positive lessons out of the exploration.

Then towards the end of the book he looks at the social and political results of major innovations. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be wholly ambiguous. Motor cars liberate people to travel wherever they wish, but they also pollute the atmosphere and kill people in their hundreds of thousands every year. DDT helped to control typhus and malaria, but it got into the lower species’ food chain and caused havoc. Einstein’s theories revolutionised cosmology, but also led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This summary makes it all sound rather negative. But his overall message is not so. He merely wants us to realise that the world is a messier place than we often realise; that we shouldn’t accept the over-simplified stories we are fed – even about successful inventions; and that what we regard as somebody’s ‘breakthrough moment’ might to them be the end of a lifetime’s slog.

It’s also a very readable book – the first I have ever come across in which the technical colophon was the funniest part.

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Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.178, ISBN: 0596527055

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The New Spaniards

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

culture and society in post-Franco Spain

It’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago Spain was an under-developed country with a fascist dictator. Tourists were arrested for wearing shorts, and outside major cities many villages didn’t have electricity or street lighting. Today, Spain is one of the biggest, the most democratic, and technologically advanced countries in Europe. John Hooper’s book The New Spaniards is all about the social, political, and cultural consequences of this very rapid development during the last four decades.

As he observes, it’s possible to see this reflected in a typical family gathering of three generations. The grandparents, reflecting a poorer agricultural past, will be short and dark; their children, beneficiaries of the post-Franco boom, and raised on a Mediterranean diet, will be tall and slim; but the grandchildren, victims of current prosperity, might well be overweight.

The first part of the book is a detailed political history of Spain following the death of Franco. His rule had held Spain in a fossilized state since the end of the Civil War in 1940. The aftermath was, unsurprisingly, a sweeping away of the old, corrupt, and backward-looking practices – to be replaced by an essentially socialist government dominated by one party.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that people who had been excluded from public life for a generation, when they came back in contact with it, feathered their own nests. Post 1980 Spain has a long history of local graft, corruption, kick-backs, and ‘influence’ which make it seem closer to the world of Italian Mafiosi than the rest of Europe. And I have to say that this sort of thing still continues in the part of Andalucia where I live part of the time.

He deals with all the features of Spanish society which outsiders find surprising and puzzling – such as the church, for instance. It’s been disestablished since 1986, yet the state supports it with public funding. Its membership has decreased since the advent of democracy, yet many Spaniards consider themselves Christians, and the slightly dubious Opus Dei organisation has its greatest numbers and influence there.

On sexual mores, the country has passed from being against topless sunbathing in the 1970s to accepting gay marriages thirty years later. The birth rate is declining, more women are working, and adult children are living at home as the family unit, which is seen as the bulwark against unemployment and the harsh economic climate of the 2000s.

John Hooper explains the astonishingly murky finances of the National lottery, and throws in the amazing fact that the Spaniards spend/lose more on gambling each week than they do on fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables.

That’s one of his strengths – bringing sociological data to life with striking examples. Against this, he has a slightly annoying habit of looping back historically into the nineteenth century. The idea is to show how certain political conditions have originated, which is understandable, but it produces the unfortunate effect of a book in which the narrative is going backwards.

He’s much more lively and interesting when he deals with contemporary life, such as why Basques, Catalan, and Galicians feel so keen on independence, why bullfighting is still tolerated in a country with strong support for animal rights (not dissimilar from fox-hunting in the UK) and how the Spaniards feel about the influx of second home owners who bring mixed blessings to the country.

There’s plenty of detail on the Spanish royal family which I could have done without, but his chapters on the press and the extraordinary explosion of modern art and architecture really bring alive the sense of renewal and positive exploration of new ideas which anyone who visits the country regularly cannot fail to register.

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John Hooper, The New Spaniards, London: Penguin, second revised edition, 2006, pp.480, ISBN 0141016094

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The Nobel Prize for Literature

March 21, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Nobel Prize for Literature was first established in 1901. It is awarded annually to a writer who has produced ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. This might appear to be a simple formula, but it has led to a number of controversies.

The term ‘ideal’ has often been interpreted politically as meaning work of a naive and idealistic tendency. This has sometimes led to accusations that only works promoting virtuous behaviour were being recognised. It has sometimes been accused of being ‘a Nobel Peace Prize in disguise’.

The prize is awarded in October each year, along with the prizes for Chemistry, Physics, Peace, Economics, and Medicine. It is funded from the legacy of Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune from the invention of dynamite. He also owned the Bofors company which manufactured armaments. The idealism of the award and the source of its financing is an irony which has not been lost on commentators ever since.

The award procedure starts with nominations that are canvassed in the early part of each year. These nominations are scrutinised by a committee, and a short list of five names is drawn up and submitted to the Swedish Academy. There is a vote, and anyone receiving more than half the votes is declared winner. The nominations are then kept secret for fifty years before being made public. The prize is awarded for a body of work, rather than for a single publication.

The prize itself consists of a gold medal, a diploma, a cash award, and an invitation to deliver a lecture at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The value of the award is determined by percentage returns on the investment made in Nobel’s original will, but is usually in excess of one million US dollars.

The winners

A glance through the historical list of prizewinners will quickly reveal three curious features, which have been the subject of much comment. The list reveals:

famous writers who were not awarded the prize
prize winners who are now completely unknown
winners who were once famous but are now in decline

Samuel Beckett – winner 1969

The overlooked

The prize must be awarded to a living writer, but the early years of the prize in particular are rich in what can now be seen as missed opportunities. Anton Chekhov was still alive in the first phase of the award, but was not given the prize. The same is true of Henrik Ibsen, who was a powerful influence on other writers and is still widely performed today. Leo Tolstoy did not die until 1910, and had a world wide reputation – but he was never a winner. Henry James was nominated for the prize three times but never given the award.

Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy both had reputations which stretched across Europe and American and were both alive until the 1920s – but neither was given the award. Virginia Woolf was publishing mature works now regarded as modern classics for the last two decades of her life until her death in 1941. The same is true of James Joyce, who is now seen as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Neither Woolf nor Joyce was awarded the Prize.

There are some borderline cases. Marcel Proust was still working on his masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdues when he died in 1922. Franz Kafka did not die until 1924, but he published very little in his own lifetime. Almost nothing was known of the work of the Russian writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Osip Mandelstam because of their persecution during the Stalinist period. Other notable absentees include Mark Twain, Emile Zola, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Saul Bellow – winner 1976

The unknown

This is a slightly embarrassing category, because somebody, somewhere, might well have heard of and maybe even have read some of these totally forgotten and unknown writers. But measured against writers of the stature of Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, and Saul Bellow, it is extremely difficult to believe that anybody in the twenty-first century is seriously immersed in the works of Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Jose Echegary, Giosue Carducci, and Rudolf Christoph Eucken. Those are the older prizewinners: more recent names include Imre Kertesz, Elfride Jelinek, Herta Muller, and Thomas Transtromer. Hand on heart, have you ever even heard of these writers, let alone read their works?

The fading flowers

Literary reputations of even the highest order are subject to the ravages of time, and not even the imprimatur of the Swedish Academy is a guarantee against the decay of public esteem. Writers who were once regarded as unassailably great may now be deemed passe or outmoded. Does anyone really read the work of Andre Gide any more? He was celebrated in his day – and supported many worthy causes. But now, probably few, with the exception of students of the history of modern French literaturewill bother to read him.

The same is true of other winners such as Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. An even more dramatic example is the case of the German novelist Gunter Grass, winner in 1999, whose reputation has gradually declined since the success of his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959). This fading reputation was further diminished when he revealed (after a silence of sixty years) that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during the Second World War.

Nadine Gordimer – winner 1991

Controversies

The award sometimes causes controversy. Some cases arise because of the political background to the award, as well as the perceived wisdom of the choice of winner. For instance in 1958 the award went to Boris Pasternak, largely on the strength of his international best-selling novel Dr Zhivago. The Soviet government forced him to publicly reject the honour and he was forbidden to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize. However, the Prize committee does not accept rejections, and the honour still stands.

The same thing happened (under more amicable circumstances) when the Prize was awarded to Jean Paul Sartre in 1964. He made it known that he could not accept the award because he had consistently argued against official honours in the past. However, his name remains on the list of winners.

Other controversial issues arise from what might be called false categorisation. For a prize which is normally awarded to novelists, poets, and dramatists, it is difficult to see why it would be given to a historian (Theodo Mommsen, 1902) a philosopher (Bertrand Russell, 1950) a politician (Winston Churchill, 1953) or a pop singer (Bob Dylan, 2016) . It was claimed that Dylan’s award was for the poetry of his song lyrics – which illustrates the element of controversy still at work. To underscore the point, he did not turn up in Stockholm to deliver the acceptance lecture, but had someone else read it out for him.

The Nobel Prize for Literature

complete list of winners

1901	Sully Prudhomme	France
1902	Theodor Mommsen	Germany
1903	Bjornstjerne Bjarnsten	Norway
1904	Frederick Mistral	France
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Poland
1906	Giosuè Carducci	Italy
1907	Rudyard Kipling	United Kingdom
1908	Rudolf Christoph Eucken	Germany
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	Sweden
1910	Paul von Heyse	Germany
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	France
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	Germany
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	India
1914	No prize awarded	—
1915	Romain Rolland	France
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sweden
1917	Karl Adolph Gjellerup	Denmark
1918	No prize awarded	—
1919	Carl Spitteler	Switzerland
1920	Knut Hamsun	Norway
1921	Anatole France	France
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Spain
1923	William Butler Yeats	Ireland
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Poland
1925	George Bernard Shaw	Ireland
1926	Grazia Deledda	Italy
1927	Henri Bergson	France
1928	Sigrid Undset	Norway
1929	Thomas Mann	Germany
1930	Sinclair Lewis	United States
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	Sweden
1932	John Galsworthy	United Kingdom
1933	Ivan Bunin	Russia/France
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Italy
1935	No prize awarded	—
1936	Eugene O’Neill	United States
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	France
1938	Pearl S. Buck	United States
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpää	Finland
1940-43	No prizes awarded	—
1944	Johannes Vilhelm Jensen	Denmark
1945	Gabriela Mistral	Chile
1946	Hermann Hesse	Switzerland
1947	André Gide	France
1948	T.S. Eliot	United Kingdom
1949	William Faulkner	United States
1950	Bertrand Russell	United Kingdom
1951	Per Largerkvist	Sweden
1952	François Mauriac	France
1953	Sir Winston Churchill	United Kingdom
1954	Ernest Hemingway	United States
1955	Halldór Laxness	Iceland
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Spain
1957	Albert Camus	France
1958	Boris Pasternak	Soviet Union
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Italy
1960	Saint-John Perse	France
1961	Ivo Andric	Yugoslavia
1962	John Steinbeck	United States
1963	Giorgos Seferis	Greece
1964	Jean-Paul Sartre	France
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Soviet Union
1966	Shmuel Yosef Agnon	Israel
1967	Miguel Ángel Asturias	Guatemala
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Japan
1969	Samuel Beckett	Ireland
1970	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Soviet Union
1971	Pablo Neruda	Chile
1972	Heinrich Böll	Germany
1973	Patrick White	Australia
1974	Eyvind Johnson	Sweden
1975	Eugenio Montale	Italy
1976	Saul Bellow	United States
1977	Vicente Alexandre	Spain
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	United States
1979	Odysseas Elytis	Greece
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Poland
1981	Elias Canetti	United Kindom
1982	Gabriel García Márquez	Colombia
1983	William Golding	United Kingdom
1984	Jaroslav Seifert	Czechoslovakia
1985	Claude Simon	France
1986	Wole Soyinka	Nigeria
1987	Joseph Brodsky	United States
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Egypt
1989	Camilo José Cela	Spain
1990	Octavio Paz	Mexico
1991	Nadine Gordimer	South Africa
1992	Derek Walcott	Saint Lucia
1993	Toni Morrison	United States
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Japan
1995	Seamus Heaney	Ireland
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Poland
1997	Dario Fo	Italy
1998	José Saramago	Portugal
1999	Günter Grass	Germany
2000	Gao Xingjian	China
2001	Sir V. S. Naipaul	United Kingdom
2002	Imre Kertész	Hungary
2003	J.M.Coetzee	South Africa
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	Austria
2005	Harold Pinter	United Kingdom
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Turkey
2007	Doris Lessing	United Kingdom
2008	J.M.G Le Clezio	France
2009	Herta Mueller	Germany
2010	Mario Vargas Llosa	Peru
2011	Thomas Transtroemer	Sweden
2012	Mo Yan	China
2013	Alice Munro	Canada
2014	Patrick Modiano	France
2015	Svetlana Alexievich	Belarus
2016	Bob Dylan	United States
2017	Kasuo Ishiguro	United Kingdom
2018	No prize awarded	—

The Platform of Time

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

This is a new collection of largely unfamiliar memoirs, edited by the Bloomsbury scholar S.R.Rosenbaum (who also edited The Bloomsbury Group). It includes the first ever publication of Woolf’s long sought-after and newly recovered talk on her role in the famous (and infamously silly) Dreadnought Hoax which she delivered to Rodmell Women’s Institute in 19940. The Platform of Time collection also includes the complete version of her memoir of her nephew Julian Bell, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

The Bloomsbury Group were very fond of writing memoirs. They even had a Memoir Club where members read out their compositions for each others’ amusement. And Virginia Woolf’s family was also much given to written records of their relationships. Her own father Sir Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph albumn and wrote an epistolary memoir to commemorate the death of his wife Julia in 1895. It’s now available as The Mausoleum Book.

The Bloomsberries also wrote sketches of their relatives and friends, on some occasions to reinforce the friendship network, and on others to provide an obituary for the Times. There are examples of both in this collection: two very warm sketches Woolf wrote in memory of her father, recounting the cheerful way he read to his children, taught them each morning, and played with them sailing toy boats in Kensington Gardens. These recollections counteract the rather severe portraits of Leslie Stephen given elsewhere

Many of Woolf’s memoirs ooze with the sort of confident generalisations of the post-Victorian era celebrating itself in the coterie of what they would call the national press, but which was in fact a tiny minority, talking to itself. Speaking of her aunt, the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf writes:

Mrs Cameron had a gift for ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself on the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society.

There is quite a sympathetic portrait of Ottoline Morell, who during her own lifetime had to endure the affront of writers who accepted her generous hospitality at Garsington and Bedford Square, then went home to write spitefully satirical accounts of her.

The collection also includes what are called ‘fantasy memoirs’ – fanciful inventions based loosely on the lives of Saxon Sydney Turner and John Maynard Keynes. These are witty, allusive sketches which explore the outer limits of biography – something she was to bring to a stunning climax in Orlando, her meditation the life of her then lover Vita Sackville West.

In fact many of the sketches reveal more about the author than they do about their ostensible subject. For instance, you would never guess from her encomium to the celebrated war poet and ‘hero’ Rupert Brooke that he in fact never saw military action, and died of a mosquito bite.

One of the longest pieces is her account of attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, along with her husband Leonard Woolf. Life as We Have Known It is a thoughtful and reflective meditation on the women of the co-operative movement in the 1930’s, a very practical piece of feminist sympathising, and a paean for social-democratic values which foreshadows the arguments she was to develop in Three Guineas a few years later.

This is a useful collection from the Hesperus Press, which produces reprints and updated compilations which are given a scholarly editing and are elegantly designed and printed. If you don’t have these pieces in other forms, this is an excellent edition.

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Virginia Woolf, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, London: Hesperus, 2008, pp.262, ISBN: 1843917114

More on Virginia Woolf
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The Play of the Eyes

July 5, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

The Play of the Eyes is the third volume of the memoirs of Elias Canetti, a trilogy which I have read with a growing sense of frustration. He was an amazingly clever, talented, and well-connected writer who at only twenty-six produced what has become a European modernist classic novel (Auto-da-Fé) he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, and he was personally acquainted with some of the most prestigious artists of the modernist period of the early twentieth century – Karl Kraus, Bethold Brecht, Georg Groz, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Alban Berg – and yet he tells you almost nothing about them. Every attempt at a character sketch or an artistic evaluation is shrouded by either abstract generalizations, his own egoism – or both.

When Hermann Broch is given a chapter of his own we are presented with nothing except Canetti’s own reactions to him, including the quite ridiculous notion that Canetti was able to detect Broch’s secret method for penetrating insights into other people through his manner of breathing. When introducing the conductor Hermann Scherchen he ends up talking about his own play The Wedding, how powerfully moving it is, and how talented must be the writer who can create such moving effects. It is not surprising that he is somewhat unloved by most commentators.

He moves on to describe Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and falls in love with her daughter Anna, a sculptor, through whom he meets her tutor Fritz Wotruba, who was considered one of the more avant-gard artists of the Vienna Sezession movement. He doesn’t bother explaining what his wife Veza thought about his affairs with other women.

In fact there is very little by way of personal revelation of the kind you might normally expect in someone’s memoirs. He makes no mention of his emotional life, which was very complex; there’s nothing about his family, which was very important in the first volume, The Tongue Set Free; and it’s not at all clear how he earned his living – or even if he earned it at all.

The most moving chapter is a description of the funeral of Manon, Alma Mahler’s daughter from her second marriage to the architect Walter Gropius. Manon died of polio at the age of only eighteen, and the occasion was immortalized in the violin concerto Alban Berg wrote and dedicated ‘To the memory of an angel’. Canetti manages to combine a heartfelt tribute to the girl with a fulsome picture of her grieving mother which is tinged with satire (Alma Mahler was well known for very theatrical public displays).

Even after his marriage and the publication of Auto-da-Fé in 1935, the long-running conflict with his mother continues just as intensely as it is described in the first two volumes. On a visit to her in Paris she predicts what will happen to him with amazing critical zeal and foresight:

She saw me surrounded by women, who would worship me for the ‘misogyny’ of Auto-da-Fé and long to let me chastise them for being women. She saw a fast-moving procession of bewitching beauties at my home in Grinzing, and in the end she saw Veza [his wife] banished and forgotten in a tiny apartment just like her own in Paris.

And sure enough, the very next chapter is a self-indulgent description of a nineteen year old girl fan throwing herself at him in a night club.

The general picture he creates of Viennese artistic circles is one of snobbery, one-upmanship, rivalries, and undisguised private enmities. This is mixed in his own case with a marked degree of self-loathing that seems to be endemic in Austrian culture (one thinks of the extreme case of Thomas Benhard).

He makes a laughing stock out of the biographer Emil Ludwig. Robert Musil cuts him dead for daring to mention the very name of Thomas Mann. Heimito von Doderer is reduced to a vain fool. No doubt all these people had character flaws: writers are not renowned for being models of virtue – but Canetti seems to relish negativity, just as he elevates his personal heroes into saints.

The book ends with his mother’s death in 1937 – which is another quite moving chapter. Two years later he moved to live in Hampstead, London, a story which is taken up in the continuation to this grizzly but fascinating memoir, Party in the Blitz

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Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.329, ISBN: 1847083552

Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

Twentieth century literature
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The Renaissance Computer

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

information architecture in early print technology

The Renaissance Computer is a collection of essays which seek to explore the similarities, connections, and lessons to be drawn from a comparison of the advent of digital technology with the age of print in the immediate post-Gutenberg period. In the 15th century the printing press was the ‘new technology’. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

The basic argument is that the proliferation of printed texts was as revolutionary and presented similar problems of information architecture, storage, and retrieval as we feel we have now in our digital age. The earliest attempts at memory and storage systems were remarkably similar to the Windows operating system, though the fact that they were made physically manifest made them cumbersome and non-portable. Nevertheless, it would have been wonderful to visit Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre, where a visitor occupied the stage, and all the knowledge of mankind was stored on the tiered rows of what would normally be seats.

Editor Jonathan Sawday looks at precursors of the modern computer in the work of Milton, Hobbes, Pascal, Liebnitz, and Descartes. There’s a chapter on the role of illustrations in early modern books, another looks at the role of the index, title page, marginalia, and contents page as early examples of hypertext and navigation.

The authors also point to the amazing persistence of some outmoded technological forms:

Recent work on the circulation of manuscript collections of poetry in the seventeenth century…has demonstrated that this form of publication survived for two centuries after the invention of the printing press. The modern researcher who, seated in the rare book rooms of the Huntington Library or the British Library, laboriously copies out passages from an early printed book is participating in an ancient tradition.

There is a very interesting (and more readable) chapter on Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion (1624), an encyclopedia on women. The link with computers is no more than the suggestion that it’s a cut and paste composition, but the content sounds so interesting it made me feel I wanted to read a copy.

These chapters are scholarly academic conference papers – and the have both their strengths and weaknesses. Wide ranging and well informed, but often looking for connections where none exist or finding them to little purpose.

The idea of a Renaissance computer is only a catchy idea. These studies are of how information was organised in text form, how it was understood and retrieved, and how the Renaissance book tackled issues of information architecture which many people now think of as something new.

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Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds), The Renaissance Computer: knowledge technology in the first age of print, London: Routledge, 2000, pp.212, ISBN: 0415220645

More on information design
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critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

the intellectual life and two marriages of Leslie Stephen

themes and developments in English Literature 1910-1940

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The Moment – critical commentary

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The Moment – complete contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

new developments in technology, science, and business

culture and society in post-Franco Spain

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Nobel Prize for Literature

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

information architecture in early print technology

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