Roy Miller's Blog, page 240
March 21, 2017
Where Fiction and Reality Collide: Books and Black Lives Matter
Below are six books for young readers that address police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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‘All American Boys,’ by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
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Jason Reynolds, left, and Brendan Kiely.
Credit
Tina Fineberg
Jason Reynolds still vividly recalls when his mother gave him “the talk” about how to behave around police officers. “That talk has saved my life many a time,” Mr. Reynolds said.
In 2014, after an officer shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Mr. Reynolds and the author Brendan Kiely decided to team up to write “All American Boys,” a young adult novel. In it, a quiet and artistic teenager is shopping for chips at a bodega when a police officer mistakes him for a shoplifter and assaults him.
Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Kiely assumed no one would publish the book, and planned to put it online for free if they couldn’t sell it.
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“When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing,” Mr. Reynolds said. “Does any publishing company want to bring forth static around something so fresh?”
In fact, “All American Boys,” which came out in 2015, became a commercial hit, selling more than 120,000 copies.
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‘Tyler Johnson Was Here,’ by Jay Coles
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Jay ColesJay Coles was 18 when he started writing his debut novel, “Tyler Johnson Was Here,” about a boy whose twin brother is a victim of police brutality. While the characters were fictional, Mr. Coles said he had been motivated to write the novel after Trayvon Martin, 17, was killed in Florida. “I put myself in a deep depression while writing it,” he said.
A few months ago, Mr. Coles, who grew up in Indianapolis and is now a senior in college, sold the book to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which will publish it next spring.
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“I want people to leave with the understanding that it’s O.K. to be angry and loud when it comes to seeking justice,” he said.
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‘Dear Martin,’ by Nic Stone
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Nic StoneIn Nic Stone’s debut novel, “Dear Martin,” Justyce, a smart, ambitious black high school scholarship student at an elite prep school, gets caught up in a heated exchange between his best friend and an off-duty police officer, who shoots at them. In the frenzied media coverage that follows, Justyce is stunned to find himself described as a gang member.
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His story is interspersed with letters he writes to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lamenting how little race relations have improved since the civil rights movement. Crown Books for Young Readers will publish the novel this fall.
Ms. Stone, 31, who lives in Atlanta and has two young sons, said she had written the book after a string of high-profile shootings of unarmed African-American teenagers left her feeling gutted.
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“When it comes to the heavier issues, fiction gives you this bubble, where you can grapple with things without somebody in your face,” she said.
‘I Am Alfonso Jones,’ Written by Tony Medina and Illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson
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Tony MedinaIn this forthcoming young adult graphic novel written by Tony Medina, a poet and prolific children’s books author, a teenager named Alfonso Jones is killed by an off-duty police officer, then watches from the afterlife as his family struggles to bring the shooter to justice.
The story will be illustrated by John Jennings, who illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” and Stacey Robinson, who works with Mr. Jennings as part of the collaborative team “Black Kirby.” It will be published this fall by Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books.
‘Ghost Boys,’ by Jewell Parker Rhodes
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Jewell Parker RhodesCredit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Jewell Parker Rhodes, an award-winning children’s book author, has never shied away from emotionally challenging subjects. Her previous novels have addressed national tragedies like Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Her next novel, “Ghost Boys,” which Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will publish next spring, is a surreal tale that tackles recent police shootings and the country’s long history of racially motivated crimes.
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The narrative unfolds from the point of view of a ghost — a young black boy who is shot by a white police officer and observes what happens after his death. In the afterlife, the boy meets the ghosts of other black boys, including the spirit of Emmett Till. Because of the book’s violent premise and its proximity to real events, the novel is being recommended for slightly older middle-grade readers, ages 10 and up.
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“Children and teens are reading and hearing about this in the news all the time, and fiction gives them an entry point to understanding it better and helping them to empathize with all sides,” said Alvina Ling, the vice president and editor in chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
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‘How It Went Down,’ by Kekla Magoon
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Kekla MagoonCredit
Kerry J. Land
The young adult novel “How It Went Down,” which was written by Kekla Magoon and came out in 2014, explores the aftermath of a shooting from multiple perspectives. After a white man shoots Tariq Johnson, a 16-year-old African-American boy, witnesses offer conflicting accounts of what happened — whether Tariq was armed, and what precipitated the violence.
In a review, School Library Journal said the book “raises such difficult, thorny issues and doesn’t try to offer any easy answers.”
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March 20, 2017
Descort: Poetic Form | WritersDigest.com
Recently, I shared 11 French poetic forms on the blog, but there are still many more to share, including today’s form: descort!
Descort Poems
The descort differentiates itself from other forms by differentiating its lines from other lines within the poem. That is, the main rule of descort poems is that each line needs to be different from every other line in the poem.
A descort poem has different line lengths, meters, avoids rhyming with other lines, no refrains, and that goes for stanzas as well. In other words, no two lines in a descort should look like each other, and the same could be said for each descort.
Note: This is different than free verse, because even free verse may occasionally have similar line lengths and meter. However, descort is very intentional in its variability.
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Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
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Here’s my attempt at a Descort Poem:
Daffodils, by Robert Lee Brewer
Daffodils don’t sway in the breeze or dance along the lane.
Frogs jump; dogs bark; logs sit.
Never ask a question of liars.
Always do whatever someone tells you to never ever do.
Cauliflower crowns.
And dandelion seeds spread in the wind because…
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Robert Silvers, a Founding Editor of New York Review of Books, Dies at 87
He arrived at the office early and left late, if at all, to the kind of heavyweight cocktail party that was, for him, a happy hunting ground for writers and ideas. For many years, his companion was Grace, the Countess of Dudley, with whom he shared a passion for opera and a vacation home in Lausanne, Switzerland. She died in December. Mr. Silvers is survived by nieces and nephews.
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His myriad enthusiasms found their way into a publication that was edited for an audience of one. When asked to describe readers, he once said, “I really don’t know too much about them.”
He was happiest surrounded by stacks of manuscripts by the writers he pursued with flattery and guile; in one typical instance, he drafted Jonathan Miller to write about John Updike’s novel “The Centaur” for the first issue of The Review by waylaying him after a performance of “Beyond the Fringe” on Broadway. He would inundate them with newspaper clippings, afterthoughts, helpful notes and suggestions for further reading as they toiled over their assignments.
It was routine for him to hunt down contributors on their vacations. The Christmas-morning phone call was not unknown.
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Most writers regarded him with admiration verging on awe.
“He was one of those rare editors who is also one’s ideal reader,” Ian Buruma, a marquee writer for The Review since 1985, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2011. “He was not only sympathetic, but you knew that he would get it, and not try to rewrite because he really wanted to be a writer. He was unusual in being interested in so many things, in a profound way — a polymath who knew a tremendous amount about many subjects.”
Robert Benjamin Silvers was born on Dec. 31, 1929, in Mineola, N.Y., a village on Long Island. His father, James, was a businessman who left Manhattan to live the rural life. His mother, the former Rose Roden, was the music critic for the The New York Globe, long since disappeared. A precocious student, he left high school in Rockville Centre at 15 and enrolled in the University of Chicago. He pursued an accelerated two-year program, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
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Mr. Silvers spent three semesters studying law, without enthusiasm, at Yale. In 1950, he entered the Army and was assigned to the intelligence library of NATO military headquarters in Paris. He studied at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po.
After completing his military service, he remained in Paris, living on a houseboat on the Seine with the future bandleader Peter Duchin. He patched together a living as a representative of the publisher Noonday Press and an editor of a quarterly magazine published by the World Assembly of Youth; the magazine, probably unknown to him, was financed by the C.I.A.
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An introduction to George Plimpton led to a post as managing editor of the newly created Paris Review, a journal in some disarray and badly in need of an editorial guiding hand. “It seemed to me quite a natural thing,” Mr. Silvers told The Guardian of his decision to take up editing as a vocation. “It was something I could do without even making a choice.”
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Interviewed by Mr. Nobile for his book, Mr. Plimpton said of Mr. Silvers: “He was rather shy but formidable, and a strong voice amidst all this sturm und drang. He made The Paris Review what it was.”
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John Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, hired Mr. Silvers at the recommendation of Mr. Plimpton’s father, Francis, a corporate lawyer, to oversee literary articles and book reviews at the magazine in 1958.
In that job, Mr. Silvers became known for bringing in new writers like Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis and Alfred Kazin, and for orchestrating theme issues. Most notable was one titled “Writing in America,” published in October 1959 and later issued as a book, with an essay by Mr. Silvers from which he removed his byline.
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For that issue, he commissioned Ms. Hardwick, a literary critic, to write an extended essay on the state of book reviewing in the United States. She dismissed the reviewing in American newspapers and magazines as tepid, perfunctory, shallow and, in a word, noncritical. Her main target was The New York Times Book Review.
Three years later, a typographers’ strike shut down nine major newspapers in New York.
The timing was perfect.
Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, and his wife, Ms. Epstein, a freelance editor, had proposed the idea of a new publication in discussions with Ms. Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell. They had in mind a literary review on the model of The Times Literary Supplement in London, or the literary section of the British magazine The New Statesman under V. S. Pritchett: a forum for writers to discuss ideas, books, ideas and politics at length, provocatively.
When the newspaper strike deprived book publishers of their main advertising outlets, the pipe dream took on solid form, and Mr. Epstein immediately called Mr. Silvers, who had been thinking along similar lines, to engage him as an editor.
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Gathering in the offices of Harper’s at night, Mr. Silvers and his co-conspirators worked their way through stacks of review books and compiled a list of ideal reviewers.
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When a trial issue of The Review was published in Feb. 1, 1963, many of those names were in its pages, writing free of charge: Mr. Kazin, Ms. McCarthy, Mr. Miller, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, William Styron. The print run of 100,000 sold out.
In an astonishingly short time, The Review had not only turned a profit, but also established itself as a rival to two other magazines, Partisan Review and Commentary, an American counterpart founded in 1945. But unlike them, it made its starting point the world of books and publishing.
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Mr. Silvers liked essays that both made an argument and settled it. “We like important questions to be dealt with by experts with strong views,” he told Time magazine in 1967.
He also liked to let writers roam, figuratively and literally, freed from the constraints imposed by most American publications.
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“What we saw was that the book review is a form that is capable of being used to address nearly any kind of issue, and any kind of question, because there’s always a book,” Mr. Silvers said in an interview at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism in 1999. “Book reviewing can be a way of bringing critical perspectives to bear on the most intense political issues.”
Over the years, The Review became famous for wide-ranging essays that often dealt only glancingly with the multiple book titles, sometimes as many as a dozen, nominally under consideration.
Mr. Silvers liked to match writers with unexpected subjects. After noticing that Mr. Mailer had left Ms. McCarthy out of the discussion when he assessed “the talent in the room” in “Advertisements for Myself,” he assigned Mr. Mailer to review Ms. McCarthy’s novel “The Group.” Applying the same logic to political writing, he sent Ms. McCarthy to Hanoi, Vietnam, and a reluctant V. S. Naipaul to the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.
When Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, traveled to El Salvador in 1982, Mr. Silvers coaxed a series of long dispatches from her on the difficult situation of a country in the grip of a right-wing dictatorship. It later became a best-selling book, “Salvador.”
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The editing process was a characteristic performance by Mr. Silvers.
“How Bob edited ‘Salvador’ was by constantly nudging me toward updates on the situation and by pointing out weaker material,” Ms. Didion told The Paris Review in 2006. “When I gave him the text, for example, it had a very weak ending, which was about meeting an American evangelical student on the flight home. In other words, it was the travel piece carried to its logical and not very interesting conclusion.
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“The way Bob led me away from this was to suggest not that I cut it (it’s still there), but that I follow it — and so ground it — with a return to the political situation.”
With Ms. Epstein as his co-editor, and A. Whitney Ellsworth as publisher, Mr. Silvers kept The Review in the thick of literary and political debate in the 1960s. He published searching critiques of American policy in Southeast Asia throughout the 1960s, featuring the work of I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky prominently.
The journal flirted with the New Left and became a byword for radical chic. The issue of Aug. 24, 1967, epitomized its political stance. The left-wing journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote a scathing review of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book “Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?,” dismissing its author as hopelessly out of touch and accommodationist, while Tom Hayden contributed an analysis of the race riots in Newark that was accompanied by a diagram on how to make a Molotov cocktail.
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With the windup of the Vietnam War, Mr. Silvers opened up the pages of The Review to a host of British writers like Frank Kermode, A. Alvarez, Isaiah Berlin, A.J.P. Taylor and Christopher Ricks, who lent the magazine a more sedate literary tone, which made it seem less a successor to the brawling political journals that dominated New York intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s than to majestic Victorian flagships like The Edinburgh Review.
Politics never faded entirely from the picture. From the outset, Mr. Silvers made human rights and the need to check excessive state power his preoccupations, rising at times to the level of a crusade. Petitions and essays on behalf of political prisoners and victims of human rights violations were a constant feature.
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“I don’t like accepting anything as having its own necessary authority,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “That includes skepticism about government, which is a crucial point of view we have had from the first.”
Mr. Silvers, despite the magician’s aura and the seemingly sacred status of The Review, came in for his share of criticism. He seemed to have little interest in younger writers and, particularly in the 1970s, The Review seemed to suffer from an advanced case of Anglophilia.
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Despite its self-image as an arena of intellectual combat, it could be staid, even boring. The same writers showed up in issue after issue, and for a time, The Review was jokingly called The New York Review of Each Other’s Books. Mr. Silvers could blow hot and cold on his writers, courting them assiduously, then dropping them without explanation or apology.
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After the election of President George W. Bush and the advent of a more interventionist American foreign policy culminating in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Silvers recast The Review as a leading critical voice. Recapturing its militant spirit of the 1960s, he filled its pages with long, scathing critiques of the government’s diplomacy, its conduct of the wars and its record on civil liberties.
In a slightly astonished appreciation of the publication’s re-engagement, Scott Sherman, in The Nation, praised “the re-emergence of The New York Review of Books as a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.”
For Mr. Silvers, The Review had never changed, only the circumstances of the world around it. Its personality and its mission had remained constant since the days of the newspaper strike.
“I feel it is a fantastic opportunity — because of the freedom of it, because of the sense that there are marvelous, intensely interesting, important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an interesting way,” he told The New York Observer in 2005. “That’s an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you’d be crazy not to try and make the most of it.”
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Margaret Atwood On the Important Work Book Critics Do
The following is Margaret Atwood’s acceptance speech for the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle.
I am deeply honored to have been given the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. You have placed me among some very august names indeed, and I am somewhat in awe.
I would also like to say how important it is that you–as book critics–are doing what you do. I’m an author of fiction and poetry, true, but I have also put in some time as a book critic, and I have to say it’s about the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a writer. A review of another author’s work carries a heavy responsibility, because you can’t–unfortunately–just make stuff up. Fiction’s task is to be plausible, but criticism’s task is to be accurate in fact, generous in appraisal, and considered in judgment. A real book is at stake, with a real person attached at the other end–most of the time–and every author knows how much work and anxiety have gone into a book–any book.
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Being Canadian–and therefore much given to the puncturing of balloons–I have sometimes had to tie my hands to the chair to avoid silly puns and bad-taste jokes at the author’s expense. It can be a struggle for me, and I haven’t always won it. Added to which, book criticism is a thankless task. Authors are sensitive beings; therefore, all positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time. “Accomplished?” one writer raged at me. “Don’t you know that “accomplished” is an insult?” (I didn’t know.)
Then there was that period in the early seventies–thus, early second-wave feminism–when I was given nothing but books by women to review. Why was this? Fear on the part of men that they would be reprimanded for not getting it right? Or the shoving-off upon one of the second sex works by others of this group that were considered not weighty enough? Who can tell?
But time passed, and I was allowed to review men once more. It helps if they’re dead–they can’t get back at you–but I’ve reviewed some living ones, too. Why do I attempt such a painful task? For the same reason I give blood: we must all do our part, because if nobody contributes to this worthy enterprise, then there won’t be any just when it is most needed. Blood, or book reviews. Or both, in the same package.
And right now, what you do as critics is sorely needed. Never has American democracy felt so challenged. Never have there been so many attempts—from so many sides of the political spectrum–to shout down the voices of others, to obfuscate and confuse, to twist and manipulate, and to vilify reliable and trusted publications. A dictatorship aims for three things in order to consolidate its power: first, to erase the independent judiciary and its law enforcement agencies; second, to control the army, which ought to be defending the people, and make it instead an arm of the dictatorship; and third, to shut down independent media outlets and thus mute all opinions but its own.
As independent critics, you are part of the barrier standing between and a pluralistic and open democracy. That barrier is always fragile, but at some times more than at others. Keep at your craft and sometimes sullen art, to misquote Dylan Thomas, Persist, despite the hazards. Readers everywhere will be grateful to you. Well, not everywhere–because there are still places on this planet where to be caught reading you–or even me–would incur a severe penalty. I hope there will soon be fewer such places. (Though don’t hold your breath.)
But I will cherish this Lifetime Achievement award from you–though, like all sublunar blessings, it is a mixed one. Why do I only get one lifetime? Where did the lifetime go?
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Robert Silvers, ‘NYRB’ Co-Founder and Editor, Dies at 87
Robert B. Silvers, the co-founder of the New York Review of Books and its editor since 1963, died on the morning of March 20. He was 87. The NYRB announced the news via its Twitter account on Monday afternoon.
With great sadness we must announce that Robert B. Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review, died this morning after a short illness.
— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) March 20, 2017
Silvers founded the NYRB with fellow editor Barbara Epstein, who died in 2006, together with publisher A. Whitney Ellsworth and writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He has since been a mainstay in New York literary and intellectual circles.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1947, the Long Island–born Silvers attended Yale Law School before dropping out to work as press secretary for then-Governor of Connecticut Chester Bowles in 1950. In 1952, he moved to Paris, where he served with the U.S. Army at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
While in Paris, Silvers attended the Sorbonne and École des Sciences Politiques, joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 under George Plimpton, and became Paris editor at the Review in 1956. He served a stint as associate editor of Harper's from 1959 to 1963 before joining the NYRB, where he would remain for the rest of his career.
Silvers was also the editor of the book Writing in America and the translator of La Gangrène, which describes the torture of seven Algerian men by the Paris Security Police in 1958 under Charles de Gaulle.
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Richard Wagamese, Whose Writing Explored His Ojibwe Heritage, Dies at 61
He died at 61 on March 10 at his home in Kamloops, British Columbia. Yvette Lehman, his fiancée, said that he had recently had pneumonia but that she was not sure of the cause of death.
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Though not widely known outside Canada, Mr. Wagamese was admired by his peers. Louise Erdrich, who is part Ojibwe (and whose novel “LaRose” won the National Book Critics Circle Award this month), described him as “a very funny writer with an eye for the absurd ironic detail.”
“Richard Wagamese divined the secrets of human scars and knew that broken people are the strangest and most extraordinary people of all,” Ms. Erdrich wrote in an email.
His fiction drew on his life, and his return to Ojibwe culture became grist for his first novel, “Keeper ’n Me” (1994). As a freelance columnist and reporter for newspapers including The Ottawa Citizen, he wrote about the Native Canadian community as well as his alcoholism and his times in jail. In 1990 he won a National Newspaper Award, a major award in Canada, for column writing, honoring his work at The Calgary Herald.
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His other novels include “Ragged Company” (2008), about four homeless people who win millions of dollars in the lottery, and “Medicine Walk” (2014), about a teenager named Franklin Starlight who accompanies his chronically ill estranged father on a journey into the woods.
“Out here where he spent the bulk of his free time there was no need for elevated ideas or theories or talk,” Mr. Wagamese wrote of Franklin, “and if he was taciturn he was content in it, hearing symphonies in wind across a ridge and arias in the screech of hawks and eagles, the huff of grizzlies and the pierce of a wolf call against the unblinking eye of the moon. He was Indian.”
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Milkweed Editions
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The novel “feels less written than painstakingly etched into something more permanent than paper,” the novelist Liam Callanan wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2015.
Mr. Wagamese’s other books include “For Joshua” (2002), a memoir dedicated to his son, and “One Story, One Song” (2011), a collection of essays.
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He was born in Minaki, Ontario, on Oct. 14, 1955, to Marjorie Wagamese and Stanley Raven. His adoptive parents legally named him Richard Allen Gilkinson, a name he disowned.
His biological parents had been among the roughly 150,000 native children whom the Canadian government removed from their families and placed in residential schools to “civilize” them. Many were physically and sexually abused in the schools. This aggressive assimilation program, as it was known, essentially destroyed the traditional structure of many native communities. Mr. Wagamese later wrote that he blamed his parents’ experience for their negligence with him and his siblings.
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Mr. Wagamese lived in foster homes, then was adopted by a family that, he wrote, subjected him to “beatings, mental and emotional abuse, and a complete dislocation and disassociation from anything Indian or Ojibwe.”
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He ran away from the family at 16 and spent years on the street or in prison, struggling with alcoholism, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and an intractable sense of alienation.
When he was in his mid-20s, his brother Charles, who had huddled next to him on the sled decades before, tracked him down and reunited him with his Ojibwe family and his lost heritage. For the first time he began to feel a sense of belonging, he said, though he never entirely escaped the emotional toll of his youth.
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Mr. Wagamese had little formal education but spent much of his time at the library, devouring all the books he could, Ms. Lehman said. After his reunion with his family, he began reporting for indigenous publications and later Canadian newspapers as well as for television and radio, where he was a producer and host.
In addition to Ms. Lehman, he is survived by two sons, Jason and Joshua; his brother Charles; and 10 grandchildren.
In a 2007 column for The Calgary Herald, Mr. Wagamese recalled the first time he had spoken a word of Ojibwe, after he had returned to his family in his 20s.
“It felt all round and rolling,” he wrote, “not like the spiky sound of English with all those hard-edged consonants. When I said it aloud, I felt like I’d really, truly spoken for the first time in my life.”
That word, the first in a lifelong conversation about identity, was “peendigaen,” Ojibwe for “come in.”
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Take Heart: Shakespeare’s Drafts Were Pretty Damn Rough
After learning of his father’s early death, Prince Hamlet of Denmark wallows in despair. He contemplates ending his own life, and from those pain-racked lips falls one of the most quoted monologues ever uttered:
To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—No more.
From the mind of Shakespeare, to his pen, to the words before you, Hamlet’s soliloquy is among the finest ever crafted by the great Bard. Or was it? There is another version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the earliest printed version, that is somewhat less refined in the philosophizing of the crown prince. “To be, or not to be, Aye there’s the point, / To Die, to sleepe, is that all? Aye all.” These yokelish lines belong to a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that, for a hundred years, scholars called the “bad” quarto.
Single plays were most often printed in quarto format, meaning four pages to each side of a sheet of paper. In Elizabethan England, these quartos were roughly the dimensions of a cheap square paperback book. What made some of these particular quartos “bad” was how rough they were in comparison to later versions of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s like when someone says this is a “bad casserole.” You do not eat that casserole. It will make you puke your guts out. For almost two centuries, scholars felt the same way about “bad” Hamlet.
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But what if the “bad quarto” isn’t really that bad? What if that quarto is just an earlier version of Hamlet? Or what if Shakespeare, arguably the most important writer in English literature, wasn’t really as good as we remember him today? And what if the Bard’s reputation was shaped, in part, by the people who memorialized him in print?
For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, scholars had no idea that an earlier version of Hamlet even existed. Then, in 1823, a man with the very English-sounding name of Sir Henry Bunbury stumbled across a copy at his Barton Hall estate, in Suffolk. He would later document this amazing find as a footnote to a memoir he was writing about someone else: “the edition of 1603, the only copy of which, known to be in existence, was found by me in a closet, 1823.” Bunbury writes this so nonchalantly that it would appear as if English closets were routinely the sites of astonishing discoveries. (Behind this closet door, a land of mythical creatures led by a talking lion. Behind this one, we keep a boy wizard. Behind that door, a previously unknown work of Shakespeare that will turn the literary world on its head.) Sir Henry Bunbury sold the collection to the booksellers Payne and Foss for £180; they quickly turned around and sold it “at a tidy profit” to a friend of Charles Dickens.
Thirty years later, a second “bad quarto” was discovered—likely hidden for so long because it was missing its title page—and sold to a bookstore in Dublin. Shockingly, the bookseller, M. W. Rooney, had a hard time selling this book at first. Since it was an incomplete copy, he was ignored by the British Museum, which considered his asking price too high. Yet this was literally one of the only known copies of the earliest Hamlet! Some of us would saw off our own pinky fingers just for a chance to hold the thing. Sure enough, a presumably repentant British Museum did end up purchasing the quarto through a private collector (for more than Rooney had initially offered it).
These two copies are all that have survived of the earliest-known printing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The discovery of the 1603 Hamlet and several other “bad quartos” (including such well-known plays as Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and yes, even Romeo and Juliet) forced the world to face the very real possibility that Shakespeare may not have been as great as we remember him. Some scholars have spent their entire lives debating these points, fighting among themselves to explain how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
To descend into the world of Shakespearean scholarship is to descend into a particular species of madness. Factions with names such as the Disintegrationists, the New Bibliographers, and the Revisionists rise like Elizabethan houses to duel one another with collating machines and proof sheets and watermark catalogues. They lob insults at one another: “Bardolator” (bard + idolatry) and “Bardoclast” (bard + iconoclasm). Diving into the nerdy carnage in their wake tests the mettle of any researcher, and at a certain point, you’d rather take a poisoned rapier to the heart than read one more goddamn textual criticism. But if you take anything away from the labyrinth of that scholarship, it should be this: what you think you know about Shakespeare may not be so.
Was Shakespeare the best-selling playwright of his time? Yes. Could just putting his name on a title page sell books, even if they weren’t his? Absolutely. Was Shakespeare an insightful storyteller whose writing ranged from the sublime (“Duke Orsino: If music be the food of love, play on . . .”) to your garden-variety smut jokes (“Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother. / Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother”)? No doubt. But when we look at Shakespeare’s plays today, we simply cannot ignore that, on some level, centuries of editing have fine-tuned and honed what we know as the Works of William Shakespeare. The man who wrote these works was a real person whose fallibility and roughness has been smoothed out over time. Yet, stripping away that polished veneer is a worthwhile endeavor. Only by discarding the dust of our reverence do we get a clearer picture of the brilliant writer remembered by the world as William Shakespeare.
Now, not all scholars have agreed on this point. The struggle to keep Shakespeare on his pedestal has influenced how editors have presented his plays to generations of readers who were happily ignorant of the warfare raging behind the scenes. As scholar R. B. McKerrow summarized in 1933, “if an editor likes a reading, that reading is (a) good, and (b) attributable to Shakespeare.”
It was more than just editors, though. Books are not a direct line from the minds of authors to their readers. Many people along the way have their hands in that cookie jar, and Shakespeare was no exception. Publishers, printers, typesetters, and even the actors and playhouses before them—all had an effect on Shakespeare’s plays. Almost all the changes they made to his work occurred without Shakespeare’s participation or after he was already dead. So how do we determine what an “authentic” Shakespeare play would have looked like?
Let’s take a minute and consider the famous 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. In the 1720s, Pope edited an edition of Shakespeare’s plays that paid special attention to the earliest printed texts, following a “historically based editorial practice.” For instance, he took pains to compare different editions of the same play. This seems obvious today, but in that period it was a notable change in editorial philosophy. As an example, one of the reasons the fourth collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays (the Fourth Folio) survives more than any other is due to 17th-century buyers assuming it was the most up-to-date and therefore the most accurate. This mind-set prompted folks who owned earlier editions to start tossing them out after they had purchased the new one . . . a physically painful realization for any historian or collector. To twist the knife even further, the first collected edition of Shakespeare, the First Folio, today sells for between $4 million and $6 million; copies of the Fourth Folio sell for around $200,000 to $250,000.
Pope may have been the first to look back to the earliest printed Shakespeare texts, but even he wasn’t above tweaking the Bard. He would revise Shakespeare’s verse when it seemed to show metrical errors, and occasionally “update” the text for contemporary readers, removing verses or wording he didn’t like. He moved about 1,500 “degraded” Shakespeare lines to the footnotes, when he kept them at all.
Pope’s edition was viciously attacked by the scholar and translator Lewis Theobald in a 1726 work called Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the many Errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late Edition of this Poet. Designed not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet publish’d. The criticisms in this snappy little title range from petty interpretations to major misunderstandings of Shakespeare’s work. Mostly, Theobald took issue with Pope “refining” Shakespeare’s style into what was trendy in the 18th century. In response, Pope made Theobald the dull, maligned chief of the dunces in his new poem, “The Dunciad.” This attack in verse is one of the crowning achievements of an era celebrated for its satirical bitterness. One scholar calls “The Dunciad” “the greatest work in English literature to which Shakespearean controversy has given birth.”
Writing one of the great works of verse of your era, however, doesn’t save you from legitimate criticism. After the dismal sales of Pope’s Shakespeare, his publisher turned traitor and chose Theobald, of all people, to edit their next edition of the Bard. Ouch. Of course Theobald had his own issues with Shakespeare. “There are very few pages in Shakespeare,” he wrote, “upon which some suspicions of depravity do not reasonably arise.” This cycle of suspicion is probably the single unifying link between the major editors of Shakespeare across hundreds of years. They all agree that the play texts are suspect, even if they can’t agree on anything else.
Surprisingly, the one person who appears to have been the most blasé about the interpretations of his plays is the man himself. Outside of possible rewrites (one of the many proffered explanations for the existence of earlier “bad quartos”), there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare was concerned with how his plays would be remembered.
This wouldn’t have been out of place for the time. Plays were usually sold to a theater team at a price of around six to eight pounds. Shakespeare worked with the Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men in 1603. He could sometimes offer revisions to his plays, but the troupe itself was free to make changes to the text as they saw fit. It’s a bit like authors selling their book rights to a film production company. Once sold off, the adaptation belongs to the company. It can do whatever it wants with it. It can make it way better than the original (as in the case of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather), or it can murder it and bury it quietly in the backyard (like James Franco’s 2013 As I Lay Dying).
Shakespeare wrote plays for the same company in which he was acting, so he likely retained some influence on the texts. Yet other people, including very powerful Elizabethan figures, made their influence known as well. After leaving Shakespeare’s pen, his work would have been perused by the Master of the Revels. If the title isn’t obvious enough, this actual member of the royal household was in charge of all royal festivities. He was also in charge of censoring plays to make sure “nothing too seditious or blasphemous was played on the stage.” Luckily, both for English audiences and for every eighth-grade literature class, thinly veiled references to lady parts were considered neither seditious nor blasphemous. (Reading a letter from his employer in The Twelfth Night, Malvolio says, “By my life, this is my lady’s / hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and [’n’] her t’s.”) At a time when the word nothing was a euphemism for vagina (no-thing), Much Ado About Nothing isn’t even trying anymore.
After the Master of the Revels granted his approval, a play could be altered to fit the needs of a particular theatrical troupe or performance. With its focus on action and plain language, one past theory of the Hamlet “bad quarto” suggests the play is an abridged traveling version used by the King’s Men.
As the play texts passed from actors to private investors to publishers and printers, changes were unavoidably made along the way. One particularly grievous theory of the “bad quartos” involves memorial reconstruction. Rather than making changes to a play text in front of him, memorial reconstruction involves an actor from a troupe, one with a bit part, reconstructing the play from memory, writing it all down, and selling it to a publisher. Thomas Heywood, a poet and playwright contemporary to Shakespeare, observed, “some of my plays have (unknown to me, and without any of my direction) accidentally come into the printer’s hands, and, [have become] therefore, so corrupt and mangled (copied only by ear).” However, it is questionable just how widespread memorial reconstruction was in Elizabethan England for drama.
The only instance of Shakespeare seemingly exhibiting displeasure comes to us secondhand, from the previously mentioned Thomas Heywood, but it wasn’t even about his plays. In 1599 a printer named William Jaggard published a collection of poems entitled The Passionate Pilgrim, attributing the entire thing to “W. Shakespeare.” As it turns out, only five short poems in the 120-page octavo had actually been penned by Shakespeare, and the Bard wasn’t too happy about this little advertising scheme. “The author [Shakespeare] I know [was] much offended with [W.] Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t just Jaggard. Shakespeare’s name was big business, even while he was alive and kicking. No other playwright with the initials W.S. “was deemed worthy of publication” between 1590 and 1616, yet a number of play texts found their way to market with just those initials. Shakespeare scholar Lukas Erne borrows from Romeo and Juliet to make the point “What’s in a name? . . . money. [And] a name to make money with was ‘Shakespeare.’”
Scholars have been inclined to believe that disapproval from Shakespeare worked when it came to The Passionate Pilgrim because in the 1612 edition, Jaggard removed Shakespeare’s name from the title page. This dispute with Jaggard concerned Shakespeare’s poems, however, a much more respected literary medium at the time. When it came to his plays, we have no documentation for how Shakespeare felt.
It might best suit our purposes to avoid the black hole of time and hope that is Shakespearean textual criticism and focus instead on how the history of print influenced what we know of the famed playwright. That Shakespeare is one of the most important writers who ever lived is not exaggeration. That his plays have had a profound impact on four hundred years of Western civilization is beyond question. All this notwithstanding, it’s just a fact of history that we still don’t “know Shakespeare” (a little tip of the hat to the master of the double entendre). “Any tale that scholars tell about these plays must on some level be a story about how little we know, or our story will not be true,” observes Shakespeare scholar James J. Marino.
We might start with Shakespeare’s name. There are 83 variants. Not too surprising in a time before “the dictionary” or “standard spelling.” More important, we have six autographs that have been directly attributed to the Bard. The spellings range from “Shakspeare,” to “Shakspere” to even “Shakspe” and “Shak sp.” The common thread here is the notable absence of the letter e after the k in any of his signatures. So how did “Shakspeare,” which our spellcheck is highlighting angrily, become “Shakespeare,” which irritates exactly no spellchecks? The answer is the printing press.
When typesetting Shakespeare’s name, specifically in italics, the k and the antiquated long s (ſ ) overlapped. Under the mechanical pressures of the printing press, the two letters tended to chip or break. In order to resolve this issue, compositors slapped an e between the letters, a typesetting practice called kerning. “Shak-” became “Shake-,” the k’s and ſ ’s were saved, and the great Bard was condemned to have his name misspelled by everyone everywhere for the rest of time.
Both the inevitable processes of printing and the equally inevitable mistakes of compositors have had an impact on how we read Shakespeare, and we don’t even realize it. As book historian Roger Stoddard famously put it, “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured.” This process of manufacturing leaves its own marks.
When planning the printing of a particular volume, printers had to estimate just how much text would fit on each page, a practice called casting off. If these calculations weren’t accurate, the compositor was faced with a real problem, since he couldn’t just hit Backspace and magically reformat the document. In these cases compositors might cram more text onto the page, or simply cut lines.
There’s even the (remote) possibility that some lines were added to plays to pad out a block of text that was too short. As one scholar put it, “The worst-case scenario is that the compositor might feel compelled to add the odd word, phrase, or clause to fill out a speech and get it into a new line. The prospect of Shakespeare’s quartos containing material ‘written’ by a compositor trying to fill out a page fills bibliographers with horror.”
While the practicalities of casting off wouldn’t have had a huge impact on our interpretation of Shakespeare, typesetting mistakes certainly have. In Richard II, Sir Stephen Scroop approaches King Richard to inform him of how deep the rebellion against him runs. “White beares have armed their thin and hairless scalps against thy majestie.” Apparently King Richard was so despised that even the follically challenged wild animals of England were reaching for their swords—or the typesetter’s hand slipped into the e box of type, which sat next to the box of d’s. After all, “White beards [old men] have armed their thin and hairless scalps against you” makes a whole lot more sense.
For years, people were confused about a seemingly nonsensical list of questions found in a speech in The Merchant of Venice—until it was realized that the compositor had just run out of periods and substituted question marks in their place. That doesn’t change the meaning at all, does it./?
In the middle of King Lear, “Edmond,” an illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, gets a name change to “Bastard” in the stage directions and speech prefixes. Entire studies have been written on the significance of this appellation, as if the change showed that “his ‘bastard’ birth shaped and defined Edmond’s true self.” Or it’s entirely possible that the capital E, which was in heavy demand in a play text with frequent Enters and Exits, was sidestepped by calling [E]dmond “the Bastard,” a move that had no significance whatsoever outside the printing shop.
So the history of print mangled Shakespeare a bit here and there, but it made up for it by immortalizing him to the ages. Single quartos were printed sporadically throughout his career as a playwright, but the first attempt to gather his plays into a printed “collection” of great Elizabethan dramas took place in 1619, three years after his death. And who better to print those plays than the object of Shakespeare’s one recorded resentment: William Jaggard.
From Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History, by Rebecca Romney and J. P. Romney. Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Romney and J. P. Romney. Reproduced with the permission of Harper.
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George Braziller Dies at 101
George Braziller, who began his career in books in the 1930s and published such international literary stars as Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Malraux, died in New York City on March 16. He was 101.
Born in Brooklyn in 1916, Braziller got his first job in publishing at the age of 20; he was a clerk for a remainder book company. It was there that he learned the basics of the book industry. In 1941 he quit, after the company refused to give him a $1 raise, and founded The Book Find Company, which bought and resold remaindered books under a subscription model.
In a 2015 interview with PW, Braziller said the Book Find Company offered “low prices for low-income readers.” Braziller explained the business this way: “I’d buy a remainder for 25¢ and sell it for 50¢.”
Braziller was drafted into the army in 1943 and published his first book, about his artillery unit, while serving in Europe. After the war he returned to New York and to the Book Find Co., which had continued to grow under the management of his wife, Marsha.
Although the Book Find Co., and the Seven Arts Book Club, a similiar company he founded after war, were both flourishing, Braziller said he grew bored with the remainder/book club business and wanted to expand his original publishing. He sold the two companies to Time Life in 1969 for $1 million.
He had founded George Braziller, Inc., earlier, in 1955 and began to publish a long list of critically acclaimed postwar international literary authors. Three of his authors--Claude Simone, Orhan Pamuk and Jean-Paul Sartre--would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In order to compete against the bigger U.S. houses, Braziller went to Europe to acquire literary titles. He later added art books to his list, publishing acclaimed titles on art history and modern art.
The George Braziller list featured such distinguished authors as Nathalie Sarraute, Janet Frame, Buchi Emecheta, Beryl Bainbridge, Langston Hughes, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Ned Rorem, and Charles Simic.
In 2011, at the age of 95, Braziller retired and turned his publishing house over to his two sons: Michael Braziller (the current publisher) and Joel Braziller. At the age of 99, Braziller published Encounters: My Life in Publishing, a memoir on his life in book publishing. The book was published by the house he founded.
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Derek Walcott: Poet of Twilight, Poet of the Caribbean
“The English language is nobody’s special property,” Derek Walcott said in an interview with The Paris Review in 1985. “It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.” In an earlier famous essay on the theater and the Caribbean, “What the Twilight Says,” Walcott had expanded upon this idea of inhibition, an idea those of us who grew up amidst the chiaroscuro contradictions of colonialism know well, even when we do not have the language for it.
“Colonials,” he wrote after contrasting the immense artificial lights of big cities to the dimness and rust and rot of our own towns, “we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; that being poor, we already had the theater of our lives. In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, and the outward life of action and dialect.” The twilight says much about our islands: it is beautiful yet forgettable, a transition between day and night, a space not quite one thing or the other, like the sea’s phosphorescence. The twilight is a sublime contradiction, which means it is closest to describing reality—for Caribbean and cosmos alike, to be sure, but certainly for Caribbean.
I knew the twilight’s language well. It was much the same in Dominica, where I grew up. We had technology, yet the idea that we would be known for it across the world seemed ludicrous; we had gained our independence from the British, yet we retained their political systems and language and even, albeit more for certain older family members, a romanticized notion of the “Mother Country” (replaced, for my generation, more with America); we created art, indeed the Caribbean as a whole had some of the world’s best poets and novelists, yet few who were not artists believed we could actually create art; we were beautiful, yet almost no one in the world even seemed to know we were not the Dominican Republic, could not, indeed, differentiate Jamaica from the rest of the archipelago; if someone said he would do what Icarus did, we would gather around in a big crowd and joke and amidst the people saying he was crazy some would tell him to fly, even as many of us would not know who Icarus was or would not believe he could even get his wings off the ground, much less reach a star. We would dream, then fail, then dream, then, then, in the silly-sad way our government makes big claims, yet can rarely fix the road’s potholes for more than a month.
My mother had a book of Walcott’s on a shelf, which she had told me Walcott gave her many years ago when she used to work in St. Lucia. It was his Collected Poems. In some ways, it saved me, or, better, saved me from needing saving. As a child in the 1990s, all the books I read seemed to take place in America, Europe, or in worlds that did not exist; I remember sitting on my bed one day, a tattered novel from my father’s collection before me, and thinking I would need to learn the names of streets in New York or London to write a story. A book, I had been taught without anyone teaching it to me, could take place anywhere but my own island, even somewhere unreal. It was farcically naïve, yet it is hardly an uncommon story for those of us, around the world, who have grown up in countries once belonging to a European empire; we often begin growing up reading more about the art of the countries that colonized us than about our own artistic achievements, and we might even begin to think that our own nations are somehow less worthy of being written about. And if we are less worthy of a page, we seem less worthy of life.
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Walcott, the first Caribbean writer I seriously read, was a revelation, as Earl Lovelace, Jean Rhys, C.L.R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Kwame Dawes, early V.S. Naipaul, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez would be later. I devoured Walcott’s Collected Poems as a tween, long before I understood the sinuous curves of his words, long before I understood the sea as language, as book, as history. Here was someone, suddenly, who seemed the greatest unacknowledged legislator I had ever read, only two islands down from me, fusing references to the colonial classics with the language of the sea, the mountains, the villages, the winds, the phantoms. He captured the day-to-day and the epic alike. I took the book with me to Florida for graduate school, turning to it at random, the poems growing as I did. The best art has many doors and floors, attics and cellars and verandas, but you may not find them for years—not because they are not there, but because you are not.
Walcott’s language was protean. It could be lazy and lacertilian, rhythmic as the tide, dense as our mountains and fleeting as their ghosts. You can hear T.S. Eliot through Walcott; more intriguingly still, you can read Eliot anew after Walcott. Frequently, he connected the Caribbean to the mythos of ancient Greece—most clearly in his own epic, Omeros, but ever-present elsewhere. In “Homecoming: Anse La Raye,” the students in school are “solemn Afro-Greeks, eager for grades,” learning “of Helen and the shades / of borrowed ancestors.” The theme becomes even more explicit in another poem, “Sea Grapes.” “That sail which leans on light,” Walcott writes,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaä’s name
in every gull’s outcry.
The references at once braided Walcott to the broad tradition of Western literature and reified the everyday reality of the Caribbean. We were living in our own epics, even if many of us, subconsciously, might have believed we could not ever be in something epic.
“Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination,” Garcia Marquez, who always considered himself Caribbean (and, of course, was), said to The Paris Review in 1981. I am an atheist, yet growing up in Dominica the marvelous always seemed the same as the real; it was simply a part of life, even in the digital age, for someone to go in secret to an obeah woman for magical cures or to believe that soucouyants might fly through the night. But the marvelous need not be magical. You can evoke it by what Viktor Shklovsky called defamiliarization: making mundane reality seem magical.
Walcott’s language is often rich, yet some of this richness comes from his source material itself: the ever-present, if subtle, potential for the marvelous that blooms almost everywhere in our islands: I would feel it as the evening shut her orange drapes and the night let loose her thick black Rapunzel’s hair across a world, fireflies twinkling in her curls, the dim orange streetlamp down the dirt road orbited by a chaos of shadowy bats and moths, would feel it seeing the horizon dotted with the flash of old lighthouses and the glow of divers’ flashlights, would see it in the crumbling forts and weathered cannons that had shot at French ships two centuries ago, would hear it in the reggae and dancehall carried on the winds up entire mountainsides so we could hear what was happening a mile away in the capital, the dark echoing with the witch cackles of the giant geckoes we called mabouyas, would see it again in Carnival and in the rust of zinc roofs and in the suicidally relaxed dogs that slept in the middle of winding roads where buses rushed along, tires brushing precipice edges, these roads that were too small and absurd for two cars to pass yet somehow they always did. It was everywhere, this vibrancy, this mundane crazy magicality.
But more importantly, the poem above evokes the sea and history together. Walcott would often do this. “The sea is history,” he titled one poem; Kamau Brathwaite similarly wrote that “the unity is submarine.” The sea and ocean are the roads the colonists took, as well as the Arawaks and Caribs who were there long before Columbus. In the mountain where I had lived in Dominica, the wind on a blue night always sounded like the sea, as everything ultimately somehow does. We can never escape the water.
I almost didn’t believe he was dead when I saw the news. It just quietly hit me, like age. I knew he had been very ill, yet somehow I had pushed aside the idea that he would ever not be there, as I had done with the other writer who perhaps meant the most to me formatively, Garcia Marquez. Near the end of his life, Walcott, with great humility, said true literary history in the Caribbean was only just beginning, yet those of us who write will never be able to ignore his poems, paintings, plays, prose. But, of course, Walcott and Marquez are both still there. Writers like this can never leave; they have changed the world. They can take Lady Death’s hand as she leads them to the starless place, but their footprints in this life will always be there.
Of course, I’m being silly, romanticizing. Marquez worried he would be forgotten, given his great popularity; in the Caribbean, the most incredible things can be forgotten, rotted and rusted away, so quickly, until they take on the translucence of an old dream. Writers endure for many reasons, some good, some bad, some for greatness, some by little more than the bigoted erasure of another. Perhaps the unnerving truth is knowing we can never know whose words will last, even when forgetting seems absurd, impossible, hateful in the moment.
*
In 2008, thinking V.S. Naipaul had grown too embarrassing in his cultural self-loathing, Walcott decided to make fun of him in a poem. “I think you’ll recognise Mr. Naipaul,” Walcott told an audience at the Calabash festival in Jamaica with perhaps a kind of Mephistophelean glee. “I’m going to be nasty.” He then launched into the poem, which was entitled “The Mongoose.” “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection / Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction,” Walcott read to gasps and tittering laughter, the rhymes and brutality of the diss almost suggesting an image of Walcott as a rapper. “Read his novels, you’ll see just / what I mean,” he continued. “A lethargy, approaching the obscene… The plots are forced, the prose / sedate and silly.” Walcott then likens Naipaul—and Trinidad more broadly—to the image from his title, the mongoose, an animal imported into parts of the Caribbean from British India and thus a symbol of interpenetrating colonialisms. The “mongoose takes its orders from the Raj,” Walcott read, a nod to Naipaul’s love affair with Trinidad’s imperialists, as well as, perhaps, to Naipaul’s infamously calling Trinidadians monkeys. At the end, Walcott hits below belt and bra alike. “He doesn’t like black men,” Walcott said savagely, “but he loves black cunt.”
The feud between the two giants was telling, if unsurprising. Naipaul, perhaps taking a cue from the racism of Hegel or Hugh Trevor-Roper, notoriously wrote in 1962 that the Caribbean has no real history because it has not achieved anything of importance. “History,” he argued, “is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies.” Twenty-four years earlier, C.L.R. James had argued much the opposite in his landmark study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, but Naipaul was infected with the cultural self-loathing that is all too often what grows first from the detritus of colonialism. Walcott never denied the difficulty and frustration of trying to create art in his home. But where he departed from the Trinidadian novelist was in how, throughout his life, he saw the art in our islands themselves and brought it out; Naipaul did this only in his earlier work, like Miguel Street and the magisterial A House for Mr. Biswas, and the power, the Caribbeanness, whatever that abstraction might be, of these works is why Naipaul’s rejection stung all the more. (His later absurdities, perhaps most of all the head-shaking sexism of his claim to know whether or not a woman had written a book from its first paragraph and his rejection of any woman writer as his equal, only made Naipaul look more like a cartoonish villain.) Of course, rejecting the islands for a kind of imperial approval is also Caribbean. We are many things all at once, contradictions and complements, like the hybrid forms of Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, like twilights. Naipaul is certainly a mongoose; he is a product of a world, all the same. It is not Naipaul himself, but what he represents, that leaves a sad rot in the air.
“The classics can console,” Walcott wrote in another poem many decades prior. “But not enough.” He could have been talking about Naipaul, just as he could have been—and was—talking about all the world’s nights.
*
Walcott has passed. Our literatures are blooming, wonderful, protean, sci-fi and fantasy and queer novels and all in-between, genres at times quite distinct from the themes Walcott’s work evoked, though, as Junot Diaz asks, who more sci-fi than us? I’m excited by what is to come. But I can never forget Walcott. After all, he helped give me language, as he did for many others. And that is a special kind of love, the writer who helps others speak—and, with that, love more.
“Break a vase,” he said in his Nobel Lecture, “and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” So it is. So it is.
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March 19, 2017
A Dissident Book Smuggled From North Korea Finds a Global Audience
How “The Accusation” came to light is a story of its own. In 2012, Mr. Do received an urgent call from fellow human rights activists in China: A North Korean woman had been caught by the Chinese police and was about to be extradited to the North, where she would certainly face time in a prison camp. Mr. Do raised cash to help her bribe her way out and to bring her to South Korea.
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She told Mr. Do that before fleeing the North, she went to say goodbye to a relative, Bandi. He asked her to take a seditious manuscript he had been hiding, but she was too afraid to smuggle it across the border into China; if she was caught, she, the writer and their families would certainly have been banished into prison camps, if not executed.
She gave Bandi’s real name and his North Korean address to Mr. Do, who hired an ethnic Korean in China to travel to North Korea as a tourist and discreetly contact the writer. In 2013, the manuscript was smuggled out, hidden among works of propaganda glorifying Kim Il-sung, the country’s founding president and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un.
Mr. Do was a well-known advocate for human rights in North Korea and a member of the South Korean government’s National Unification Advisory Council. But when he offered the manuscript to publishing houses in South Korea, most declined, as Bandi’s existence in North Korea has never been independently verified. All they had to rely on was Mr. Do’s word.
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Mr. Do faced an agonizing predicament. He wanted to provide as much information as he could to establish that the book was not a hoax. But he also had to protect Bandi’s identity to keep him safe from retaliation by the North Korean regime. This is about all Dr. Do will say about Bandi’s identity: He was born in 1950. He has belonged to the Korean Writers’ Alliance, a government-controlled organ dedicated to producing censored literature for state-run periodicals of the North.
Photo
“The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea,” by Bandi.
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Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“The Accusation” was published in South Korea in 2014 by Chogabje.com, a conservative news website and publisher, but failed to gain much attention. Mr. Do persisted, pitching the manuscript to publishers abroad. A breakthrough came when a French translation was released last year. Other translations quickly followed.
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Mr. Do said that the last time middlemen checked on Bandi, nine months ago, he was safe and was aware of his book’s publication in the outside world. A regular guest on a South Korean radio program broadcast into the North, Mr. Do has been providing updates on the book, hoping that Bandi will hear him. “The Accusation” has earned $10,000 in royalties. Any profit will be used to support Bandi’s family and books by defector writers living in South Korea, Mr. Do said in an interview.
Only a handful of people have been allowed to examine the original manuscript. Mr. Do recently let a reporter for The New York Times check it, but did not allow it to be photographed, fearful that the North Korean regime might be able to identify Bandi by scrutinizing his handwriting.
As an additional protection, Mr. Do said that he altered the names of the characters and locations in the stories. “I assumed that they were fictional in the first place,” he said. “But I did not want to take chances. The more he is known, the more I am worried about his safety.”
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Kim Joeng-ae, a former North Korean propagandist now in Seoul, is a member of North Korean Writers in Exile PEN Center, a branch of PEN International, the literary and human rights organization. She said that she and other writer defectors had studied Bandi’s stories and concluded that they were indeed written by a North Korean.
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There are expressions in his book that only a North Korean would be able to write, she said. (The version published in South Korea has footnotes to guide readers though words only used in the North.) His stories also closely followed the “seed theory,” a guideline of all North Korean writers, which requires them to structure their writing tightly around a core ideology — though Bandi uses the same device to attack the party line.
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Bandi was the pen name the writer chose for himself, Mr. Do said. In one of 50 poems smuggled out with the manuscript of “The Accusation” and to be published separately, Bandi explained his alias. Bandi, he wrote in a poem, was “fated to shine only in a world of darkness.”
In the book, North Korea is a country where a woman is programmed to show grief over Kim Il-sung’s death with flowers, streaming tears and a heart-rending cry of “Great Leader, Father!” — even as her husband is languishing at a political prisoners’ camp.
In one story, “So Near, Yet So Far,” a son is unable to see his dying mother because he lacks the requisite travel permit. He compares himself to “a dragonfly stuck in a spider web.”
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“Ultimately, this is a textbook on the human rights condition in North Korea,” Mr. Do said. “What it does is to show that in North Korea, ordinary life itself is slavery.”
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