Literary biography and poetry on command

The strain of criticism that dismisses literary biography tends to do so on the grounds that to plumb an author's life for keys to his work is pointless, likely to lead to overly simplified and pointlessly reductive interpretations. While I do believe that a life can frequently have interpretive value, and I'm therefore willing to fight on that front on occasion, that's not really where my love of literary biography lies. What I really enjoy in a well-written biography is its placing of a writer in a fully realized world, surrounded by contemporaries--allies and enemies alike--and subject to all the day-to-day fluctuations and demands of friendship, family, and love that we all endure, while at the same time trying to render their accumulated experiences as art.

In that regard, Richard Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) is no disappointment. Shelley emerges whole, a figure far more maddening than admirable, yet impossible to dismiss or disregard, while around him, his friends and family--Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, William Godwin, and others--sparkle with all the life of an age of great change and fervor. What literature fan could fail to thrill at the thought of the rainy summer of 1816, when the Shelleys and Lord Byron wrote ghost stories to assuage their cabin fever, and Mary Shelley produced Frankenstein?

Holmes is particularly good at exploring the process by which Shelley wrote, comparing casual notebook entries, early drafts, and finished poems to trace a work from inspiration to completion. But one of my favorite moments in the book so far is an account of a couple of more compressed processes of creation, one that brings in that sense of a living artistic community that I enjoy so much. It starts with a contest that, in the quality of its entrants, is reminiscent of the ghost story competition:

[I]n Hunt circles poetry was a social art, and on 14 February [1817] three competitive sonnets on the subject of the Nile were written during an evening party at Lisson Grove. The competitors were Hunt, Keats, and Shelley. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Hunt's is far the most competent while both Keats's and Shelley's betray embarrassment.

One could easily imagine Keats and Shelley reacting differently, being goaded by the quality of the competition--thought at that point Shelley didn't think all that much of Keats's abilities, and Shelley himself had only a handful of notable poems under his belt.

Holmes goes on, however, to tell of a subsequent contest with a more lasting outcome:

Egyptian subjects were very much in vogue, for in the autumn of 1817 the British Museum had taken receipt of fragments and sculptures from the empire of the Ramases. . . . Among these were the celebrated Rosetta Stone, and the massive figure of Ramases II taken from the King's Funerary Temple at Thebes. . . . Visits to the British Museum with Horace Smith prompted Shelley to suggest that they might both produce a sonnet on the subject. Smith, the stockbroker poet who had agreed to be Shelley's financial agent in London, faithfully produced a workmanlike poem.

The Wikipedia is kind enough to offer us the text of Smith's sonnet:

On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

As you've already figured out, Shelley's poem was the everlasting "Ozymandias," a poem that manages to retain its power even when it's first encountered in the deadening confines of a high school English lit textbook, retains its power:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Smith's poem is far from terrible--I particularly like the sibilance of "Egypt's sandy silence," and the insight that the stone leg would, in that flat land, throw "the only shadow that the Desert knows." But Shelley's imagery is so much stronger, from the "frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command," which sounds like the harsh features it depicts, to the rythmic and sonic perfection of "The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed."

In the preface to his Revolt of Islam, Shelley wrote,

How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not.

"Ozymandias," written quickly, on command, and about a subject to which many poets and writers had recently turned their hands with less success, does just that: Shelley's skepticism and distrust of power come through clearly and convincingly, even two centuries later.

"I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley & Capt. Williams were lost on the 7th Ulto."

{Photos by rocketlass.}

If you don't have Bill Peschel's Reader's Almanac in your RSS reader, you should: it offers an interesting and well-told story from literary history every day. The lead item for this past Monday, August 18th, an account of the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley on a beach in Italy in 1822, was gruesome enough to send me back to my bookshelves to learn a bit more. I recommend you go read Peschel's account now, then come back here.

Shelley had drowned a week earlier, along with his friend Edward Williams, and worries about disease led Italian officials to order the pair temporarily buried where they washed up until a proper funeral could be arranged. Shelley's opportunistic and somewhat irritating--but, one has to admit in this case, loyal--friend Edward John Trelawny took charge, and Williams was burned first. In her biography of Lord Byron, Fiona MacCarthy relates Byron's description of Williams's pyre:

"You can have no idea," he told Tom Moore, "what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back-groudn and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame."

The next day, the men set out in search of Shelley's grave, which, according to MacCarthy, was poorly marked:

It took about an hour to locate it, by which time Byron and Leigh Hunt had arrived from Pisa, accompanied by two mounted dragoons and four foot soldiers to keep prospective sightseers at bay.

They finally found Shelley's body, which had been rendered grotesque by the water, and set about their work. Peschel points out that Trelawny forbade Byron to take Shelley's skull, which ultimately disintegrated; yet, when Shelley's heart, in Byron's words, "would not take the flame," Trelawny himself eventually grabbed it. MacCarthy goes into detail, drawing on Trelawny's later Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author:

Trelawny's recollections of the scene provide more details: the heart "although bedded in fire--would not burn." They waited an hour, continually adding fuel, until "it becoming late we gave over by mutual conviction of its being unavailing--all exclaiming it will not burn--there was a bright flame round it occasioned by the moisture still flowing from it--and on removing the furnace nearer to the sea to immerse the iron I took the heart in my hand to examine it--after sprinkling it with water: yet it was still so hot as to burn my hand badly and a quantity of this oily fluid still flowed from it."

Mary Shelley ultimately ended up with the heart, but not before Leigh Hunt tried to put in a claim that is astonishing in its presumption and lack of feeling:

[T]he next day [he wrote] indignantly to her, "With reagrd to Ld B. he has no right to bestow the heart, & I am sure pretends to none. If he told you that you should have it, it could only have been from his thinking I could more easily part with it than I can."

An interesting final note to all of this is that, though Byron earlier that month, in writing to his publisher, John Murray, had praised Shelley extravagantly--

You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley who was without exception--the best and least selfish man I ever knew.--I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.

--he later that year wrote to Mary Shelley an unexpectedly distant account of their relationship:

As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel any thing that deserves the name. All my others are men-of-the-world friendships. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed him; so that you see not even vanity could bribe me into it, for, of all men, Shelley thought highest of my talents,--and, perhaps of my disposition.

That Dog Won't Hunt, or, Cigarette Shenanigans

{All photos by Maura.}

Paul Collins at Weekend Stubble has a fascinating post up today about a forthcoming article he's written for the New York Times Book Review [It's now up at the Times site.]
about the cigarette ads that were bound into the middle of a lot of American paperbacks in the 1970s. Though I've come across these when buying used books before, I'd forgotten all about them--and I certainly never knew how commmon they were. (Collins reveals that Lorillard alone ran ads in 540 million paperbacks in one three-year period.)



He links to a creepily nefarious 1986 memo from a Phillip Morris executive noting that he had commissioned a positive review of a book, Robert D. Tollison's Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and had been trying, unsuccessfully, to plant it in the San Francisco Chronicle.



I found a real treat buried in the memo: the reviewer, David Hunter (described by the exec as "a freelancer who wants to work for me") submitted the review under the pen name Leigh Hunt.



The English lit fans among you will recognize that name. (And don't you love his louche pose in that portrait?) Friend of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Hazlitt, among many others, Hunt was in his lifetime well known for his poetry, his political journalism (which he put in the service of liberal political reform), and his integrity. He spent time in jail for attacking the Prince Regent in print, and he remained within at least arm's length of financial ruin his whole life. As his Wikipedia entry puts it, Hunt should be remembered for

his unremitting literary industry under the most discouraging circumstances, and for his uncompromising independence as a journalist and an author.

Dickens called him

The very soul of truth and honour,

while Byron, in his journal, wrote that

Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times--much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. If he goes on qualis ab incepto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. . . . [H]e is a man worth knowing. . . . [W]ithal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring "the right to the expedient" might excuse.

So why did David Hunter use Hunt's name? I think there's no question that he was thumbing his nose at his boss at Philip Morris, whom he could be confident wouldn't know Hunt. Was he also just indicating his utter cynicism, as the taking of the assignment in the first place might suggest? Or could he possibly have secretly been attempting to sabotage the company's efforts--was he trying to set off alarm bells among the review editors to whom the piece would be submitted?

That last does, I grant you, seem unlikely. But people's relationships to cigarettes--and thus to cigarette companies--are often complicated. Take as an example this passage from Luc Sante's spectacular, nigh-erotic paean to cigarettes, "Our Friend the Cigarette," available in his recent collection, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007):

Nowadays no one will really defend smoking, even the most unregenerate addicts being inclined now and then to sermonize against their filthy habit. Hardly anyone wishes to dignify the appalling cynicism of the tobacco cartels and their decades of suppressing facts and falsifying statistics. When you see a tract issued by a smokers' rights group, you can be sure that it originated either in the public-relations department of a cigarette manufacturer or else somewhere on the coldly literal-minded fringe of the libertarian movement.

And yet . . .

Maybe there are ex-smokers out there who feel uncomplicated relief at having quit. I doubt there are very many, though. Your cigarette was a friend--the sort of friend parents and teachers warned you against, who would lead you down dark alleys and leave you holding the bag when things went wrong--but a friend nevertheless. It's terribly sad that you can't enjoy a smoke now and again without tumbling into the whirlpool of perdition, the way you can take a glass of spirits on the weekend with no danger that by Monday you will end up filtering the shoe polish after exhausting the cooking sherry.

I wonder whether David Hunter was a smoker . . . in 1986, a man following the sometimes lonely, hand-to-mouth existence that is the life of a freelance writer, taking a distasteful job from a cigarette company to pay the bills? My bet's on the butts.