8. Lives on Paper.
The image shows James Boswell, one of the earliest and greatest of British biographers, sitting in a tavern with
Dr. Samuel Johnson. Boswell wrote at length, but we'll start with shorter forms such as the four-line Clerihews of
EC Bentley, the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, and one of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. The
second half-hour features women: two poets writing verse biographies involving Beethoven, and an artist-polymath
creating a new form to illustrate Marie Curie and her legacy.
The second hour considers the special case of Emily Dickinson. Her poems may be confessional, but she lived as a
recluse, was photographed only once, and left very little for the biographer. Even the primary materials—her poetry
and letters—were censored by her first editors. But we have other ways of coming to know her: a memoir from her niece;
a composite study built up from her love of gardening; and two films with rather different takes on the passion that
smolders in her verse but seldom appeared in her outer life. rb.
VIDEO LINKS
A mixed bag this week! The playlist below contains a lot of interesting stuff, but comparatively little of it
repeats what we watched in class. The only things exactly the same are my own sampler of Clerihews, the three
readings of "Wild Nights," and one scene from the Wild Nights with Emily film. With this one exception, the
three films (Radioactive, A Quiet Passion, and Wild Nights with Emily) have to be represented by
trailers and scenes other than the ones I showed.
On the other hand, there are bonuses. Both the plays, Brief Lives and The Belle of Amherst, are
available complete. I put back the Beethoven Trio that Ruth Padel writes about in this poem, but which I did not have time for in class. And I include interesting videos on
Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica and Lauren Redniss' Radioactive plus a breathless male reading of "Wild
Nights" that has to be heard to be believed!
All new items are *asterisked below. rb.
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| IMAGES |
The thumbnails below cover the slides shown in class. Click the
thumbnail to see a larger image.
Click on the right or left of the larger picture to go forward or back,
or outside it to close. |
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Here are brief bios of the artists, composers, and writers considered in the class, listed in order of birth.
A not-necessarily-up-to-date alphabetical listing of artists for the whole course can be found at
BIOS.
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John Aubrey, 1626–97. English antiquarian.
Aubrey took on numerous antiquarian projects, but left most of them unfinished. However, he did pioneering work as an archaeologist, and has secured a place in history for his debunking and often hilarious biographies of luminaries and hangers-on of the Elizabethan, Stuart, and Restoration periods collected as Brief Lives (1693).
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James Boswell, 1749–95. Scottish biographer.
Boswell was born into a Scottish landowning family (he was Laird of Auchinleck), and trained as a lawyer in Edinburgh. But a restless nature (which may have been a bipolar affliction) caused him to travel, which in turn brought him into contact with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who in his hands became the subject of one of the earliest and finest of British biographies.
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Thomas Rowlandson, 1756–1827. English caricaturist.
Although also a painter, Rowlandson is best known as the leading caricaturist of the Georgian era. His subjects include literary illustration, social observation, and political polemic. Most of his works were distributed in the form of hand-tinted engravings. The image is a self-portrait titles Discomforts of an Epicure.
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Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770–1827. German composer, working primarily in Vienna.
The dominant composer of his time, Beethoven wrote 9 symphonies, 16 string quartets, 32 piano sonatas, and one opera, Fidelio, which he labored on in several versions between 1805 and 1814. From about 1800 onwards, increasing deafness gradually put an end to his performing career, although he wrote some of his finest works when totally deaf. He is one of the first composers to exhibit a distinct late style.
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Emily Dickinson, 1830–86. American poet.
As she lived in Amherst for her entire life, latterly refusing to leave her family home, Dickinson's prolific output was virtually unpublished in her lifetime, and was subject to editing after her death to bring it more in tune with contemporary aesthetics. But it is precisely the unconventional nature of her verse, with its short lines and slant rhymes, that has led to her recognition as one of the leading Americal poets of her time.
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Martha Dickinson Bianchi, 1866–1943. American writer.
A published poet and novlish. and also an accomplished musician, Mattie (as she was called) is best known as the editor of several later collections of poems by her aunt, Emily Dickinson, and author of the memoir Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932).
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Edmund Clerihew Bentley, 1875–1956. English writer.
Bentley secured a small place in literary history with his pioneering detective novel Trent's Last Case (1913), and his middle name is enduringly attached to a particular form of 4-line biographical doggerel (the awkwardness in intentional) beginning with the subject's name.
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Lytton Strachey, 1880–1932. English writer.
Strachey "was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit." [Wikipedia]
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Patrick Garland, 1935–2013. English writer and director.
Garland is listed by Wikipedia as the only director to have had four productions running simultaneously in London's West End. In addition to that, he has worked as an actor, and as a presenter for BBC-tv. With Ted Hughes, he founded Poetry International shortly after leaving Oxford. And his one-man-show compilation of John Aubrey's Brief Lives holds the record for the most performances in a role by the same actor (Roy Dotrice).
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Ruth Padel, 1946– . English poet.
Padel became widely known after she was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford (arguably Britain's highest literary accolade), but resigned almost immediately to bypass a scandal. She is a remarkable woman nonetheless, writing a PhD on classical Greek poetry, working as a professional musician, publishing novels and books on environmental issues, and writing several prizewinning collections of poetry, including verse biographies of Beethoven and Charles Darwin, her great-great-grandfather.
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Rita Dove, 1952– . American poet.
Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1987) and a former Poet Laureate (1993–95). She teaches at the University of Virginia. Her work is wide-ranging and addresses a variety of themes, including the life of the Black violin prodigy George Bridgetower, the original dedicatee of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, whose tragedy she explored in her 2009 book Sonata Mulattica,
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Marta McDowell, American writer and horticulturalist.
After working originally as a horticulturalist, McDowell turned to writing, producing beautifully designed books that view the life of authors (Frances Hodgson Burnett, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Emily Dickinson) through the gardens they kept.
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Lauren Redniss, 1974– . American artist and writer.
2016 MacArthur Fellow Lauren Redniss has published six books combining her words, her art, and a remarkable use of non-linear thinking, beginning in 2010 with Radioactive: a Tale of Love and Fallout about the Curies and the impact, for good or ill, of the discovery of Radium. Not all her later books are biographical, but all address serious socio-political concerns.
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