Author Archives: Speer Morgan

Prospecting for Literary Gold

Recently my wife Kris and I went to London to research “Found Text” possibilities for TMR. We intended to go to several plays and wander around happily between the British Library, the Tate, theaters, and so on. But it was cold and rainy for all but a couple of days. I got a cold (haven’t had one in three years) or possibly something worse, since it did require my going to a doctor, who after glancing at my throat and writing a prescription charged me 135 pounds ($270). I told her that she was being hard on an impecunious scholar. She smiled sweetly and said, “You can pay the secretary.”

Instead of wandering around freely, we trudged through the wet streets, back and forth to the library, where my only solace was the manuscripts we studied as potential found texts. It’s always difficult to explain to a manuscript librarian that you’re looking for an interesting, previously unpublished piece by a well-known author. Manuscript librarians are used to scholars and biographers studying one group of manuscripts or one subject. They’re aren’t used to gold prospectors who are looking among all sorts of documents—some of which are so valuable that one has to wear white gloves, sit at certain desks and keep all elements of the manuscript within a certain box and on a certain stand that they give you. Kris in a moment of excitement brought over a letter from Laurence Olivier to tell me how exciting the Olivier collection was. I looked at the letter, nodded my head and whispered, “That’s great,” at which point a librarian came storming across the room and so severely chastised Kristine for taking the letter out of the box that I was afraid the next step was incarceration. My poor wife sulked for a couple of hours.

Not that I blame him. Rare book librarians are looking out on a roomful of readers, many of whom are working with items that would be hard to put a price on—illuminated manuscripts from the 12th century and irreplaceable documents by the greats in history and literature.

I spent a lot of time reading the proceedings of London’s Ghost Club—a group of spiritualists who met from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was hardly eccentric to believe in “spirits.” One of the accounts among their proceedings was a talk given by William Butler Yeats on his theory of history (among other things)—complete with a sketched model of the “widening gyres” that he wrote about in “The Second Coming.” There were also some interesting accounts of the appearances of the ghosts of dead wives and of spirits who presumably resided in certain houses; but, alas, after three days of sneezing over the Ghost Club I gave them up as the source of a possible found text.

Among the other things I read was an unpublished story by Charles Algernon Swinburne, unpublished probably because it was only fairly recently discovered. Alas, again, it was juvenilia—promising and even in places good but too convoluted.

Then it was on to Graham Greene’s recently acquired “lost” diary—written during his later years, when he was flying around South and Central America touting leftist causes. The problem with the diary is that it was written by an old man with a wobbly hold on both his pen and at times his mind. I also got an uncomfortable feeling from it that Greene’s “Leftist Christian” self-identity came from a peculiar kind of personal vanity rather than from a real understanding of what he was doing. So no-go, interesting though it should have been.

As for the three or four that we read and hope to publish, I have to save the details until we receive permission from their estates. Hints: Two are unpublished poems by two of the greatest contemporary English poets. Another is a beautifully written scene from a (somewhat famous) “lost novel” by one of the most important American poets of the same period. Finally, we uncovered an unpublished portrait of her father by one of the most influential Modern British novelists, who is claimed by some of her biographers to have been sexually abused by her brothers. Another hint: she didn’t like her father, either, according to this portrait.

We begin contacting estates today. Wish us luck.

Is Literary Love Real?

Recently, on a lazy evening, I saw the movie “The English Patient” a second time, and it reminded me of the weirdness of the “romance.”  To what degree is such a storytelling genre true to the subject as lived in life and how much is pure artifact?  Is there a true connection between love in life and love in stories?  

Certainly there are classic elements in literary romance that didn’t appear until some point fairly recent in human history.  As in Shakespeare’s tragic romances, love is potent, often destructive, and people in love are temporarily insane or at any moment might become so.  They may be blissful or miserable, capable of the highest reaches of poetry, yet they’re never far from prostration or suicide.  Deprived of judgment, they can be manipulated by others.  Socially, their passion is a great welding force that may bridge gaps between classes and races, or between families, as it promises to do at the end of Romeo and Juliet.  But more immediately it endangers them and everybody in their vicinity.

In many ways, the love in Shakespeare’s tragedies is like the love in epic poetry — black-and-white possession or loss characterized by madness and danger.

Shakespeare’s ideal of love is expressed in his sonnets in more realistic form, without the shoot-em-up of the theater or the epic conventions of theatrical tragedy.  The model of this kind of love had been floating around Western Europe since the eleventh century, when it apparently made its first appearance among scholar-poets in Provence. One of the fascinating things about the Provencal depiction of ideal love is that it cannot be traced with any certainty before that time and place.  There are theories about previous sources, but none is convincing.        

In his monumental book Feudal Society, historian Mark Bloch says that the new forms of chivalry, born in the eleventh century, were at first confined to southern France, where the church was relatively weak.  Courtois, the courteous, was soon being imitated in Italy and in Germany; the codes of chivalry had much to do with a new role and influence of women.  Prior to that time, a noblewoman might have ruled her household or been politically powerful, but it was only with the birth of chivalry that she could rule a salon.

The highborn lady was the person for whom a knight might seek to outshine his rivals not only by his reputation for valor but also by good manners and literary talents.  This is quite an evolution from the love of the gods and heroes of epic poetry.

How imaginary the conventions of Courtly Love were will never be known.  In the real world, the marriages of nobles were usually business transactions.  Courtly Love had little to do with marriage, and in many ways it directly opposed it.  The female beloved was usually already married and of a higher rank than the man — off limits times two.  While Courtly Love was not opposed to physical satisfaction, obstacles to it enriched its melancholy pleasure, as the man, pledged to secrecy, remained frustrated and jealous. 

It was quite a step when knights of all degree began, in the l2th century, to devote themselves to lyric love poetry.  William IX of Aquitaine was the earliest troubadour whose work has survived.  The troubadour style was intricate, sometimes deliberately hermetic, and perfect for recital at aristocratic gatherings.

Whether modern love was invented by Provencal poets in the 11th Century or at some earlier time, it does strike me that its literary conventions do relate to love in real life:  The suffering, the “other person” (jealousy), the inspiration and opportunity for improvement, the conflict and magnetism involved in possible class distinctions between the two lovers, the connection between love and mortality — such issues are certainly not unrelated to love in real life.  And even as the epic poets described it, love is dangerous and it can get you into trouble.  So go for it.

Speer Morgan

Talking to Myself Thirty Years Later

The Don Imus thing brings up a lot of interesting issues, including that of the evolution of attitudes.  Public opinion and discourse is the theme with the Imus imbroglio, but I occasionally wonder about the changes in private attitudes with issues such as taste.  What would it be like to meet yourself at a much younger age?  What would you say to each other?

In order to test that, I pulled down a book that I read in 1977 or so (a guess) and read what I wrote on the inside cover.  The book is Play it As It Lays by Joan Didion.  At that time I was a serious young bibliohead desperately trying to finish a huge novel that was about to be rejected.  It would be another year or two before I published even a book of stories, then another couple more before I published a first novel.  So desperate is the relevant word.  But I was a bibliohead — definitely — so much that I called the novelists in my note by their first names (I barely knew one of them).  So here’s me 30 years ago, with a response:

1976:  There are too many people walking around being pretentious nihilists in Joan’s books.  This time it’s Hollywood.  They’re all too helpless to believe.  They take themselves or the narrator takes them too seriously.  Rita May’s Rubyfruiters take selves seriously but in broader parameters of emotion.  Rita May writes about people accepting themselves (lesbians), Joan writes about people loathing themselves.  Margaret [Atwood] writes about people finding their selfhood.  Toni [Morrison] does the same but on a more social scale.  Toni is the best writer among them, can turn the best phrase, create the best milieu.

2007: Pretty smart, kid.  You’re reading and paying attention.  But you sorta knew Ms. Brown, so you’re a little prejudiced, eh?  Admit it.  And Margaret Atwood had just really gotten her fiction career going. 

If you could only see what Margaret has done since then-way beyond The Edible Woman and Surfacing.  She has endured and become almost a Dickens of the contemporary novel — adventurous with genres, writing entertaining, readable but serious stuff.  And Joan may have had a little of that boring post-existential thing going in the mid-seventies, but she too has endured. 

You should see how she uses that flat, direct, tough mindedness on a memoir she just wrote-about the death of her husband and serious illness (and later death) of her daughter.  Imagine, kid, this is thirty-five years after she wrote Play It As It Lays, and she’s put out a great, hard book. I agree with what you say about Toni Morrison at that point, just after she’d just published The Song of Solomon.  And guess what, she’s gonna win the Nobel Prize in about 15 years.  But I wouldn’t say she’s hung in there as amazingly.

But enough of that.  I’ve been typing all morning and have back problems. . . .

1976:  Back problems?  I ride a bike in the snow and like it when I fall.  I don’t have any back problems.  You seem to be rambling a little bit.  And what do you mean “hung in there?”  One great book is worth 20 good ones.  

2007:  Okay, okay.  But one more thing.  That 500-page novel you’re writing right now.  Uh . . . well . . .

Groovy Literature

Terrible, title, eh?  But I speak not as a Seventies holdout but of something a bit more universal: Stubborn pursuit of the irrelevant, failing to see the obvious, getting stuck in grooves.  It happens to all of us.  It accompanies youth as well as ageing, and it comprises every personality type from those who seem to grind away at the same thing every day to those who seem to float from one thing to another.  It is a classic theme in literature and entertainment. (Half the cartoons in the New Yorker are dedicated to it.)  For me, it calls to mind the larger issue of why human beings are so contingent on their history; why we don’t just move brightly ahead, fully aware of what is before us, clear eyed, rational, open to the present; why even the most mindful, receptive people are continually tracking mud from the past across the floor.

The image of the human mind that was projected during the Enlightenment was of a logical machine with hierarchically arranged faculties.  In the era of classic psychology the mind was seen as being dominated by drives and primitive conflicts in the past, with conscious thinking being caught in the undertow of one’s psychosexual history.  The model of the mind that has been projected since the development of artificial intelligence research — partly as a result of failed efforts in the field — is of a pragmatic thinking organ, “automated” in the sense that it stays at work most of the time, limited not by stylized conflicts between different drives but by an infinitely variable, particular past.  We are all different.  We are as different as we can be.  Yet still we are a product of our past.

This picture of the mind goes as follows:  As we navigate the fluid present, we confront a world of limitless variety.  To deal with it, we depend of a storehouse of rules of thumb, abstractions, and procedures that we have been gathering for as long as we’ve been alive.  Much of our learning scarcely enters conscious thought.  Our minds naturally go about their business, making connections, associating things, coming up with “loose” hypotheses and assumptions.  To some extent the brain does its work indiscriminately and continuously, extracting code from the world as naturally as our lungs extract oxygen from the air. 

At the process of retaining information, the mind tends to be like a secretary with a sloppy desk, who “files” things all over the office but is nevertheless usually able to find whatever’s needed, often with astonishing speed. 

Out my window, I see a young woman striding across a hilly park toward an exercise path; inside the confident adult is the child who stumbled around for months learning to navigate the peculiarities and anomalies of topography.  Today, walking across that field, she has no idea how much estimating, comparing, remembering, and rule testing are going on in order for her to accomplish the simple act of walking.  Her mind does her the favor of keeping most of these cerebrations hidden.

By attempting to imitate human thinking with computers, scientists have learned how much people depend on the details of their mostly “forgotten” past, and how bewilderingly broad human experience apparently needs to be in order for us to understand an unpredictable world.  Researchers in artificial intelligence have discovered, to their frustration, that human learning is very hard to divide into separate, describable systems.  People learn a lot of little things that build on each other and cross from one area of thought to another.

To some extent, the complicated world dooms us to follow previous experience.  Without mental inertia we could not move forward, indeed we could not move at all.  We have to project patterns before ourselves in order to get through the jungle.  But when the automatic systems take control, when we get lazy, when we do for too long what we’ve always done, believe what we’ve always believed, we may go in one direction, all right.  We may be “consistent,” but eventually we become blind and deaf to the world, a powerless emissary of the past.  The question of when the mind’s habits become imprisoning, when tradition becomes barren, or the past becomes a trap, is not only one of the favorite themes of comedy but of all literature.

An Acre on the Riviera

A former student of mine who’s now trying to run a literary magazine asked me for advice last weekend.  He’s at a small state university with a literary magazine that’s been around briefly but only began to achieve serious purpose when he took over its management.  He’s ambitious, capable, and a lover of good writing.  My advice to him boiled down to the following:

You have to convince the powers that be at your university that a literary magazine is worth a lot more than straight PR.  A literary magazine that survives and is well run is like real estate bought cheap in an exotic locale that hasn’t yet quite been discovered.  It’s an acre on the Riviera a hundred years ago.  If the magazine is well-handled, it will gain in usefulness for its institution far beyond what it costs.  While standard PR dies soon after its first appearance, a literary magazine’s history and contents gain in value over time.  It is a capital investment, not just an “expense.”  You have to find an administrator at your university who can be made to understand that.

Second, a literary magazine usually cannot thrive over time within a standard academic department.  It needs to be under the control of a dean, a provost or a president.  The simple fact is that English and other academic departments have plenty of other things to deal with, and a magazine can become a burden to their standard activities. More importantly, a magazine can operate better when it is more independent.  That’s not to say it can’t begin in a department — or have ongoing positive relations with it-but as a representative of the larger university, it needs to have a position within the institution that matches its purpose.

Next, you need money and backing, but you can’t really expect it to just fall into your lap.  You have to raise some or most of it yourself through grants or a trust.  A trust is like an anchor: once it exceeds a few hundred thousand dollars it creates stability.

And alas, you can’t expect the university’s development staff to really care much about raising money for you.  You have to be ready to do it yourself.  They are raising money essentially for their own area and are focused on major potential gifts. They don’t want to be sidetracked down the bumpy roads of asking for $10,000 or even $25,000 (that’s not to say that if you dump a prospect into their lap, or they know that the money is coming already, they won’t cooperate).

Obviously your magazine needs to contribute to the educational purpose of its university or it will always live a little on the edge.  In the case of TMR, we created an active, involved internship that helps students get into graduate school or get a job, often in publishing.  Potential employers or graduate programs want to hear that an applicant is cooperative, creative, and productive.  Our best interns in almost all cases know things that I don’t know and teach me new programs, new Internet sites and all sorts of things that I would never find out on my own.  Recently, an intern brought in a scanning machine, lent by a bank, with which we are going to scan all thirty years of our magazine.  Yesterday, a senior adviser set the machine up, putting in circuit boards and getting it running; we were scanning pages within an hour.  A good literary magazine based at a university needs to be open to the talent and effectiveness of its younger workers and at the same time ready to train them in things they don’t know.

Most importantly, a good magazine must never forget its main business — finding and publishing great new writing.  All the fundraising and good organization in the world is insignificant beside this.  Even the poorly run and short-lived magazines of the past that discovered great writers are remembered in literary history.  The quality of the magazine, not its mere existence, is its defining feature.

Speer Morgan