Southern Bookman

Remembering the anniversary of Keats' writing "To Autumn"

John Keats wrote "To Autumn" on this date in 1819, ending his poetic career with a last flowering of genius.

Keats in the spring of the year wrote his famous odes in a remarkable burst of creativity. In late summer, he left London to stay in the old cathedral city of Winchester, 60 miles away, hoping to finish several projects he hoped would prove lucrative.

On a walk along the River Itchen on Sept. 19, he basked in the late summer weather, finding a strange beauty in the stubble fields after the harvest. In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, he commented "how beautiful the season is now - How fine the air," and noted that he'd composed the poem.

Sadly, he abandoned the epic "Hyperion" and other work he'd wanted to finish in Westminster. Outside of the fragmentary "The Living Hand," Keats had written his final poem with "To Autumn." Suffering from tuberculosis, he died in Rome two years later. 

Keats in "To Autumn" asks "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?"

The young poet didn't know that he'd written his last songs of spring.

 

To Autumn

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

 

 

 

 

Emily Wilson's translations of Homer's epics recalls Keats' excitement at George Chapman's pioneering versions

Reading Elizabethan playwright George Chapman's translations of Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" inflamed John Keats' poetic imagination on an autumn evening in 1816.

Chapman's vernacular language so exhilarated Keats and his friend George Cowden Clarke that they stayed up all night feverishly reading the flowing iambic poetry of Shakespeare's contemporary.

Later translations by Alexander Pope and John Dryden sought to elevate Homer into refined English, but Chapman's earthier version awakened Keats' ambition to write great poetry.

Penn classics professor Emily Wilson said after the publication of her translation of Homer's "The Odyssey" in 2017 that she sought to attract readers like the young Keats. Her rendition reached a broad audience, including many who had never before discovered Homer’s ancient epic.

Wilson's translation of Homer's "The Iliad" comes out next week. As with her "The Odyssey," Wilson's new translation will excite new readers of Homer, as Chapman's language electrified the 20-year-old Keats.

Keats' sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," one of his first great poems, expresses his joy at the Elizabethan writer's language.

Anticipating his great odes of the spring of 1819, Keats wrote the poem the morning after reading Chapman for the first time. The poem was published in the Examiner on Dec. 1, 1816, 200 years after the publication of Chapman's Homer.

On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer

By John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

Emily Wilson's translation of "The Iliad" a major literary event

Emily Wilson's anticipated translation of Homer's"The Iliad" arrives Sept. 26, accelerating an already exciting season of new books.

Wilson's "The Odyssey" in 2017 attracted a multitude of new readers to the ancient epic, freshening Homer's language with traditional iambic pentameter lines, an effective English parallel to Homer's dactylic hexameters.

Homer traditionalists griped that Wilson took too many liberties with choices such as calling Odysseus a "complicated man" in the poem's first line, yet Wilson's words were actually closer to Homer's original language than earlier, more grandiose translations.

Wilson told the New Yorker's Judith Thurman and the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins that she struggled with Homer's descriptions of war, death and conquest, which make "The Iliad" darker and more concentrated on violence than "The Odyssey." 

In a profile in the New Yorker's current issue, Thurman describes traveling with Wilson to purported site of Odysseus' palace in Greece. Wilson visits several places from the end of "The Odyssey," in which Odysseus returns home after years wandering from the war with Troy described in "The Iliad." Thurman also witnesses Wilson giving a reading at the University of Pennsylvania, where she's a classics professor.

Higgins in an interview with Wilson also reports on her struggles with translating "The Iliad" and its more difficult poetic conventions. Higgins sees parallels with the current war between Ukraine and Russia.

Working on the difficult translation during the Covid shutdown, Wilson at last decided to return to the five-beat line used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, although the meter didn't match as well with Homer's tropes in "The Iliad."

Wilson, the daughter of British biographer and critic A.N. Wilson and the late Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan Jones, who died in October of Alzheimer's disease, came to the United States to receive a doctorate at Yale after completing undergraduate and master's degrees at Oxford. She's the sister of noted food writer Bee Wilson.

As with her translation of "The Odyssey," Wilson said she sought in "The Iliad" to recover Homer's democratic language that first made his poems popular centuries ago when traveling bards read them orally to audiences.

Wilson in her translations seeks to give Homer's language the same immediacy for today's readers.

 

 

Mal Waldron's "Searching in Grenoble" a mesmerizing musical journey

Jazz pianist and composer Mal Waldron appears in Frank O'Hara's  famous poem "The Day Lady Dies."

When the poet on his lunch hour buys a New York Post that announces Billie Holiday's death, he recalls seeing the tragic singer perform at New York City's legendary Five Spot nightclub.

"...she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing."

Waldron, Holiday's pianist in her final years, achieves the same emotional connection on "Searching in Grenoble," a recording of Waldron's 1978 solo

concert in Grenoble, France. The impressionistic album had never been released until last year.

 

After suffering a major mental breakdown in 1965 caused by a heroin overdose, Waldron had to relearn how to play piano. Seeking a new beginning,

he moved to Europe, where he slowly revived his musical career. He died in 2002 in Brussels at age 77, a renowned jazz pianist and composer.

 

The album begins with Waldron's 23-minute composition "Mistral Breeze/Seig Haile," a meditation on the intersection of European and African

history across the Mediterranean. Abstract chord progressions shift to melodic reveries, affirming a common humanity prevailing over tragedy.

 

Waldron compositions "Russian Melody," "Petite Gemeaux," "Fire Waltz," "Soul Eyes," "Snake Out" and "All Alone" range from interpretations

of diffeent European musical traditions to dance motifs and reflections on love.

 

Interpreting Jimmy Van Heusen's "It Could Happen to You" and "I Thought About You," Waldron explores the musical depths of Frank Sinatra's

favorite composer.

As with recent releases of rediscovered recordings by Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald and others, "Searching in Grenoble" brings joy like

a fresh mistral breeze arriving from a distant shore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rose Styron's memoir "Beyond the Harbor" recalls global adventures, marriage to novelist William Styron

Rose Styron achieved an exciting, fulfilling life independent of her long marriage to the acclaimed novelist William Styron.

In her memoir "Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart," Rose Styron presents her contentious relationship with her husband as her most trying experience.

While Rose deeply loved and admired her husband, she at age 95 reveals deeper joy from her career as a human rights activist and her many friendships with famous people. 

The marriage produced four children, and after early years of sexual fulfillment and domestic satisfaction, "Bill's" mood swings, anger at her and their children and self-absorption erode her confidence.

As Styron's writing career takes flight, he discourages her poetry, even disrupting their Roxbury, Conn., neighbor Robert Penn Warren's affirmation of her work. The brooding novelist storms off from the social visit, dismaying Rose and Warren and Warren's family.

Giving up her poetry career, she launches her adventuresome life as an Amnesty International envoy, traveling around the world seeking to free political prisoners. During the last years of the cold war, she makes clandestine trips to Chile and Eastern European countries still ruled by the declining Soviet Union.

While he undermined her writing, Styron apparently didn't mind her hazardous trips, perhaps because it allowed him space to pursue extramarital affairs. In turn, Rose coyly admits to a few "one or two-night stands."

Rose expresses regret at slighting her children, especially her youngest, Alexandra, whose memoir "Reading My Father" delivers a devastating portrait of her father, confirmed by Rose's softer account.

She begins the book with a thrilling anecdote about a visit she made to Chile in 1974 during the Pinochet regime, which overthrew the Allende presidency with CIA assistance and killed thousands of Allende's supporters. Her then 16-year-old daughter Susanna made the trip with her, a risk that she now finds unsupportable.

With the suspense of a spy novel, with comic undertones, Styron looks back at she and Susanna playing with a red beach ball at a Santiago hotel swimming pool. Chilean women also in the pool whisper to them details about their husbands being detained by Pinochet's police. Looking back, Styron realizes that she and her daughter were in great danger of also being imprisoned or killed.

During her marriage, she also enjoyed a cascade of social events, tennis games and friendships with a dizzying array of well-known artists, actors, writers and progressive political leaders. Social events centered around the couple's homes in Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard was one satisfying element of her marriage.

After William Styron's death in 2006 after his well-known battles with depression documented in his best-selling book "Darkness Visible," she's taught at Harvard, revived her poetic career and continued her human rights activism for Amnesty International and Pen America.

Her recollections of her trips, friendships and social occasions flash by at breakneck speed, at times crashing. Her last chapters, when she slows down to describe her loyal support of Styron during his last years, display her best writing. Her sympathetic portrayal of the dying Styron is a heart-rending story of love and redemption.

After years of living in a pastoral Connecticut hideaway of writers, the Styrons made their permanent home in Martha's Vineyard, another enclave of the creative elite.

Styron's view from the harbor is a long one, encompassing much of the 20th century's literary and political history.

 

Discovery of old books recalls vanished era of multiple Atlanta bookstores

In a sudden urge to "declutter," I cleaned out a box full of papers and found some long-forgotten books.

A few were once heralded: Frank Kermode's "The Uses of Error," Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism," Cynthia Ozick's "Metaphor & Memory," Amy Clampitt's "What the Light Was Like" and a one-volume version of Douglas Southall Freeman's "Washington," abridged by Richard Harwell.

 Kermode's collection of essays and Clampitt's poems I vaguely remembered reading. I think I had made a start on the others.

Rereading Kermode's collection, I was intrigued to find the late critic's review of Princeton professor Peter Brown's lauded biography of St. Augustine, which began a re-evaluation of "late antiquity" after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

Brown in his St. Augustine biography and subsequent books revealed that the period long derided as "the dark ages" was  in reality a time of creativity and dynamic cultural change, especially in the eastern Roman empire, which lasted for centuries. Brown also made ground-breaking discoveries about Mideastern empires and the rise of Islam.

As the result of a laudatory review by the Washington Post's Michael Dirda, I'm reading Brown's autobiography, "Journeys of the Mind," which tells of his rise from a modest Irish childhood to a career as a world-renowned scholar.

In engaging un-academic language, Brown recalls his Oxford education, his joy at intellectual discovery, his travels to Iran and other parts of the Mideast, and his collaboration with other scholars.

Rediscovering the old books, I tried to remember where I might have acquired them, raising memories of long-gone Atlanta bookstores where I spent many hours through the years.

I remembered the first Borders Bookstore in a Roswell Road strip shopping center, before the business moved to a bigger space on Peachtree Road. Oxford Books was another shrine for booklovers that vanished, the victim of over-expansion. Phipps Plaza had a bookstore whose name I can no longer remember. In my years working at the AJC, I often visited a long-gone bookstore on the corner of Peacthree and Marietta streets.

Barnes & Noble and a few independent stores have survived the competition with Amazon and the decline in reading. For a brief moment, Atlanta was a paradise for book-lovers.

 

Darryl Pinckney gives warm portrait of Elizabeth Hardwick in memoir "Come Back in September"

Elizabeth Hardwick is the moral and cultural center of Darryl Pinckney's memoir "Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan."

Pinckney, who came to Columbia University in the 1970s from an upper middle-class upbringing in Indianapolis, signed up for Hardwick's creative writing course, which she taught at Columbia and Barnard.

The Southern-born Hardwick grows fond of the young gay black student, inviting him to her Upper West Side apartment and introducing him to many of the great books of Western literature.

The long-suffering wife of the mentally unstable poet Robert Lowell, Hardwick gained an independent reputation as a critic, journalist, short story writer and novelist, especially after Lowell's death in 1977. 

In Pinckney's remembrances, Hardwick regally conducts her tutorials from her red couch in the apartment's living room, taking books from her shelves for Pinckney to borrow. The reader pictures her elegantly dressed, as in the winsome photo on the book's cover.

She wittily regales Pinckney with literary gossip from the past and present, and stories about her own youth in New York City and upbringing in Kentucky. Her voice rises from Pinckney's pages.

Pinckney's elliptical, lyrical style gives the impression of overheard conversations from a dangerous, thrilling era of New York City, when art, music, theater and literature swirled in ferment. Hardwick both upholds cultural traditions and welcomes new creative energy.

While often visiting Hardwick, Pinckney was receiving another education as a member of New York City's avant garde gay scene, frequenting all-night clubs and engaging in drugs and wild sex.

He recounts adventures with fellow young aesthetes Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmuch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Luc (now Lucy) Sante, Howard Brookner and Nan Goldin. Athens' own B-52s appear several times as a favorite band.

The revels end with AIDS decimating an entire generation. Pinckney escaped succumbing to the disease but did require a stint in rehab. Whether for alcohol or a harsher addiction to heroin or cocaine is left unclear. In recovery, Pinckney heads to Europe, living in still divided Berlin and writing his first novel, "High Cotton."

A driving conflict of the book is Pinckney's efforts to keep his Bohemian lifestyle secret from his proper family. His father is a high-ranking NAACP official, and the family has ties with black leaders of the civil rights movement.

Pinckney treasures his family's prominence while seeking to escape their strictures. The serious health problems suffered by one of his two sisters gives a sad undercurrent.

Thanks to Hardwick, Pinckney falls into the New York Review of Books circle, working for editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick's neighbor and best friend. Epstein emerges as almost as important a mentor to Pinckney as Hardwick and the book is dedicated to Epstein's memory. Silvers is pictured as an unstable, bullying tyrant, whom Epstein endures.

Under Epstein's exacting editing, Pinckney gains his first publications in The New York Review, co-founded by Hardwick, Lowell, Barbara Epstein and her then husband Jason Epstein during the New York newspaper strike of 1963.

Now 70, long involved in a stable relationship with the English poet and political journalist James Fenton, Pinckney is known for his novels and the nonfiction works "Busted in New York and Other Essays," "The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy" and "Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature."

Fenton, a close friend of the late Christopher Hitehens and Martin Amiss from their days at Oxford, acts as sort of a Greek chorus, commenting on Pinckney's reminsceces and reading.

The powerful women writers Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy also play significant roles in the book. Pinckney especially grows close to Sontag., who  over the years rises as the third feminine grace in Pinckney's life. 

McCarthy makes more of a subsidiary appearance, mainly as an old friend of Hardwick. Along with literary events in Manhattan, McCarthy and Hardwidk were neighbors in Castine, Maine, where they both had summer homes. Like Hardwick, McCarthy overcame a doomed marriage to a prominent male writer, in her case the critic Edmund Wilson.

Pinckney gives a Proustian view of a vanished era. The book ends in 1989 with the death of McCarthy, and an image of Hardwick taking the cross-town bus to see her old friend in the hospital as McCarthy was dying.

Hardwick lived on until 2007, her reputation eventually surpassing that of Lowell. Pinckney launched a recent revival of interest in Hardwick's work, editing her Collected Essays in 2017 and a collection of her New York City short stories. Hardwick's autobiographi9cal novel "Sleepless Nights," recently republished by the New York Review of Books, is considered a classic.

In summing up Hardwick's work, Pinckney says "Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to honor the literature she cared for."

Pinckney's beautiful work does the same.

 

 

 

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 reveals summer's essence

While temperatures soar to record heights across the world, summer has been pleasant in Atlanta.

Days of 90 degrees have kept the air conditioner running. But it's not too hot for evening walks, cooled by a soft breeze.

Summer seems more extreme than when I was young. I miss the fireflies and the bees. The almost daily thunderstorms rise with frightening volatility. Yet, they lower the heat. 

The season brims with beauty along with nature's fluctuations. Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 reveals summer's dual personality.

To whom Shakespeare addressed the poem remains a mystery. Perhaps a young man, perhaps a young woman. The other sonnets give intriguing clues.

The poem speaks for all of us, remembering those with whom we've shared the summers of our lives.

Sonnet 18

 

By William Shakespeare

 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

 So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

Emily Wilson's "Iliad" translation draws heightened anticipation

Emily Wilson's translation of  Homer's "The Iliad" is stirring excitement over its Sept. 26 publication.

The Penn professor's "The Odyssey" received critical acclaim in  2017 for its fresh rendering of the ancient poet's epic. Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer's work, updated the poem's language while employing the traditional English iambic pentameter form. 

Along with the praise, some purists found fault with Wilson's work, saying she strayed too far from Homer's language.

Wilson's "Iliad" was frequently mentioned by Times Literary Supplement contributors who in the literary journal's current issue give their summer reading plans. Famed classics expert Mary Beard is one of the worthies who express enthusiasm about reading Wilson's new work a few months early.

The New York Times Book Review in Sunday's special section on literary translations also gave attention to Wilson's new translation.

Wilson presented her rendition of a passage from "The Iliad"  along with the same lines translated by the Elizabethan poet George Chapman and Victorian writer Samuel Butler's prose version. 

The translations give variations on the Trojan hero Hector's poignant farewell to his wife, Andromache, before his fatal confrontation with the Greek hero Achilles, the epic's climax.

In her introduction, Wilson notes the frequency of English translations of Homer and how they reflect changes in English literature. Chapman's Homer translation, praised by Keats in a famous poem, was the first in English.

Chapman's lines add words not found in Homer, while Butler's work offers the poignance of a Victorian novel. Wilson's less melodramatic version strikes me as  overly contrived.

Wilson's "The Iliad" likely will raise the same heated debate as her "The Odyssey." She once again makes the ancient poet a modern literary sensation.

 

 

 

Farewell Martin Amis, prominent British novelist

Martin Amis' death last week at the age of 73 brought a shock of recognition.

I saw the British writer expatriated to the United States as perpetually youthful. In my mind, he had never changed from the brash novelist who shocked the literary world in the late 1980s and early '90s with his novels "Money," "Time's Arrow" and "London Fields."

That Amis was a only year older than me when he died at his home in Lake Worth,  Fla., was a memento mori.

Like his close friend and literary combatant Christopher Hitchens, Amis was a victim of esophageal cancer. All of those cigarettes, alcoholic binges, sarcastic jokes and literary battles took their toll on England's former literary outlaws.

As with Monty Python's comedy, Amis' novels were too smugly British for me. But "Experience," his 2000 memoir, was one of the best books of his generation, and I consumed the literary essays collected in Amis's  "The War Against Cliche" like a plate of fine oysters.

"Experience" warmly praised Amis's father, the lauded novelist Kingsley Amis, and Kingsley's contemporaries Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow. The book also presented a lively account of literary London in the 1970s and 1980s, including Hitchens and other then young stars.

Martin Amis showed a compassionate side with his expression of grief for his murdered cousin, Lucy Partington. Reading his heartbreaking lament for the young woman, I also felt deep sorrow and sense of loss.

Over the years, I read accounts of Amis and his circle in memoirs by Hitchens and noted biographer Claire Tomalin, one of Amis's paramours when they were both young literary celebrities.

Like Hitchens, Amis moved to the United States and proved himself an acute observer of American politics and culture.

A longtime resident of Brooklyn with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and children, Amis was a leading figure in the borough's re-emergence.

While I didn't care for Amis' later books, including his last novel "Inside Story," I followed his career when he made news with comments perceived as anti-Islamic and through profiles in The New York Times and other publications.

Amis's death does mark the end of an era, to resort to one of his hated cliches. Amis was one of the few writers who still commanded attention on the international stage.