[I get something in my inbox called the Connell Review. It doesn't show up on google. I don't know how or when or why I subscribed to it, but it sends me light literary criticism, mostly classics, every week or two. Sometimes the parallels are neat.]
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In a visit to Princeton University Library, William Giraldi recently discovered Herman Melville’s copy of Paradise Lost. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations and Xs reveal something of an obsession with Milton’s greatest work, an obsession that came to define the writing – and rewriting – of Moby Dick.
In 1849 the manuscript for Moby Dick, which would be published less than two years later, was already longer than any of Melville's previous writings, but those familiar with the end product would have found themselves all at sea with this early draft. Captain Ahab, one of the great tragic heroes of American literature and Melville's best known creation, had yet to appear in the encyclopedic account of a whaler’s life, centered around the young sailor Ishmael. It wasn’t until Melville had immersed himself in Paradise Lost that his work began to deviate from detailed descriptions of whaling to incorporate the story of an obsessive, vengeful captain, driven to hunt down the whale that had sunk his ship and bitten off his leg. Melville’s story drew on several contemporary accounts of aggressive sperm whales – along with the alleged killing of a real whale known as Mocha Dick – but any reader of Paradise Lost will also recognise Milton’s Satan in the forceful character traits of Captain Ahab. Both Satan and Ahab, defined by their pride and their obsession, their manic grandiloquence and epic resentment, retain the reader’s sympathy in spite of their madness. Captain Ahab himself points out his parallels to the devil, telling his shipmates that that he is as “proud as Lucifer” and “damned in the midst of Paradise”. And in the pitches of his crazed speechmaking one can also detect the lyrical influence of Milton’s poetics: “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.” It was on the image of Satan that Melville modeled Ahab’s tragic heroism – his solipsism, resentment and crazed determination to succeed. Without Milton’s Satan, Ahab would have had no leg to stand on.
The rest of the email.
There’s a wooden leg in almost every Dickens novel. From the Greenwich pensioner at Bella’s wedding in Our Mutual Friend to Simon Tappertit in Barnaby Rudge, from the stump-legged stranger at Salem House in David Copperfield to Mr Gamp in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, wooden legs are one of Dickens’s favourite details. As an image they bear testament to the crudity of the medical methods in the Victorian period. Whether the injury was caused by a road accident or the savagery of the Napoleonic wars, a broken leg was routinely treated with amputation, even though 30% of amputations resulted in death. According to Adrienne E. Gavin, Dickens’s personal fascination with the wooden leg comes from the time he spent nursing his uncle Thomas Culliford Barrow as a youth. Dickens was on hand when his uncle recovered from an operation on his fractured leg. Barrow asked: “Where's my leg?” – and was told he could find it “under the table”.
Perhaps influenced by this episode, Dickens makes wooden legs a source of farce as well as poignancy. In The Pickwick Papers a man describes how expensive wooden legs can be – an expense exacerbated by a diet of gin and water which causes the legs to “split and rot very quickly”. At the end of Barnaby Rudge, Mrs. Tappertit removes her conceited husband’s two wooden legs, “leaving him exposed to the derision of those urchins who delight in mischief”. Mr. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewitt sends his son to “sell his wooden leg for any money it 'ud fetch as matches in the rough, and bring it home in liquor”.
In line with Dickens’s preoccupation with social stratification, the type of wood that a leg is made of is carefully gradated: cork legs, which could incorporate springs and joints, were far more expensive; peg-legs were cheap and readily available. Adrienne E. Gavin’s essay shows that Dickensian wooden legs are more than a simple props for their owners: like the recurring motifs of orphans, pickpockets and factories they are a subtly used symbol of disempowerment in Victorian London.
Adrienne E. Gavin’s essay, ‘Dickens, Wegg, and Wooden Legs,’ is featured in the British Library’s article, ‘Without a Leg to Stand On – Victorian Prosthetics’, published 1st October. Working lives… W.H.Auden
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition,” Auden wrote in 1958. If true, he was undoubtedly ambitious. He rose shortly after 6am, made coffee and settled down to work quickly, perhaps after taking a first pass at the crossword. He usually resumed after lunch and continued into the late afternoon. Cocktail hour began at 6.30pm sharp, featuring several strong vodka martinis. Then dinner was served, with copious amounts of wine. To maintain his energy and concentration, he relied on amphetamines, taking Benzedrine each morning. At night, he used Seconal or another sedative to get to sleep.
Sylvia Plath
Plath's journal, which she kept from the age of 11 until her suicide at 30, records a near-constant struggle to find and stick to a productive writing schedule. Only near the end of her life – separated from her husband, Ted Hughes, and taking care of their two small children alone – did she find a routine that worked for her. She was using sedatives to get to sleep, and when they wore off at about 5am, she would get up and write until the children awoke. Working like this for two months in 1962, she produced nearly all the poems of Ariel. From an edited extract of Mason Curry’s book, Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work, published in The Guardian.
...and modest beginnings Writer’s Digest magazine compiled a list of the odd jobs of ‘Literary Greats’, before they were great:
Kurt Vonnegut managed America’s first Saab dealership in Cape Cod during the late 1950s, a job he joked about in a 2004 essay: “I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature.”
Stephen King served as a janitor for a high school while struggling to get his fiction published. His time wheeling the cart through the halls inspired him to write the opening girls’s locker room scene in Carrie, which would become his breakout novel.
Harper Lee worked as a reservation clerk for Eastern Air Lines for more than eight years, writing stories in her spare time. This all changed when a friend offered her a Christmas gift of one year’s wages, with the note, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.” She wrote the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird within the year.
Before his writing career took off, William Faulkner worked for the Postal Service, as postmaster at the University of Mississippi. In his resignation note, he neatly summarised the struggle of art and commerce faced by many authors: “As long as I live under the capitalist system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”Dickens's obsession with wooden legs:
Gleanings: gems from the literary pages