ALFRED

ALFRED (848-901)

"Every craft and every power soon grows

old and is passed over and forgotten, if it

be without wisdom.... This is now to be

said, that whilst I live I wish to live nobly,

and after life to leave to the men who come

after me a memory of good works."[36]

So wrote the great Alfred, looking back over his heroic life. That he lived nobly none can doubt who reads the history of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon kings; and his good works include, among others, the education of half a country, the salvage of a noble native literature, and the creation of the first English prose.

Cynewulf

CYNEWULF (Eighth Century)

Of Cynewulf, greatest of the Anglo-Saxon poets, excepting only the unknown author of _Beowulf_, we know very little. Indeed, it was not till 1840, more than a thousand years after his death, that even his name became known. Though he is the only one of our early poets who signed his works, the name was never plainly written, but woven into the verses in the form of secret runes,[32] suggesting a modern charade, but more difficult of interpretation until one has found the key to the poet's signature.

CAEDMON

CAEDMON (Seventh Century)

Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,
The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,
The thought of His heart. He, Lord everlasting,
Established of old the source of all wonders:
Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men;
The King of mankind then created for mortals
The world in its beauty, the earth spread beneath them,
He, Lord everlasting, omnipotent God.[28]

Bede: Anglo Saxon Witer

BEDE (673-735)

The Venerable Bede, as he is generally called, our first great scholar and "the father of our English learning," wrote almost exclusively in Latin, his last work, the translation of the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon, having been unfortunately lost. Much to our regret, therefore, his books and the story of his gentle, heroic life must be excluded from this history of our literature. His works, over forty in number, covered the whole field of human knowledge in his day, and were so admirably written that they were widely copied as text-books, or rather manuscripts, in nearly all the monastery schools of Europe.

Aurobindo Ghosh

Sri Aurobindo Ghosh ranks among the greatest personalities of modern India. He is a multi-faceted genius – a political revolutionary, social reformer, historian, educationist, philosopher, yogi and above all men of letters. He is a journalist, editor, literary critic, linguist, translator, essayist, short story writer, dramatist and more than all of these,a  great poet.

            

Esther David

Esther David (March 17, 1945— ) is a Jewish-Indian author, an artist and a sculptor.^[1] She was born into a Bene Israel Jewish family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. ^[2]

Her father, Reuben David was a hunter-turned-veterinarian, who founded the Kamala Nehru Zoological Garden and Balvatika in the city of Ahmedabad. Her mother Sarah, was a school teacher. ^[3] As a child she spent a lot of time in the zoo, watching and communicating with the animals her father nurtured there.

John Updike

Many stirring and provocative reactions to John Updike’s death yesterday at seventy-six. The best, of course, belongs to Patrick Kurp, who adopts a wise autobiographical strategy, laying out the course of his Updike reading. Kurp finally prefers Updike as a critic, describing him as an “indefatigable teacher.” He quotes from essays on Nabokov, Henry Green, Daniel Fuchs, and William Maxwell. One of my favorite passages is when Updike opens an essay on two avant-garde satirists by commenting on the way their books are printed:

Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: And Other Stories of  Literary Friendship
By Edward Alexander
Transaction, 124 pages, $34.95

The Conservative Turn:
Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism
By Michael Kimmage
Harvard, 419-pages, $45

Why the persistent fascination with Lionel Trilling? An English professor, literary critic, and one-book novelist, Trilling continues to generate interest three decades after his death, while his contemporaries—Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Philip Rahv, Yvor Winters—go quietly into obscurity. Two new books by academics of distinction—one with a long career and the other at the outset—wrestle with Trilling’s legacy only three years after Gertrude Himmelfarb named Trilling as the summit of The Moral Imagination in her book of that title three years ago. Just last year, an unfinished novel called The Journey Abandoned appeared in print for the first time and was the occasion of essays everywhere, including in these pages,¹ just as the New York Review of Books reissued The Liberal Imagination, his best-known -volume, in a “classic” edition.

JD Salinger

For the past fifty-eight years, Holden Caulfield has been “stuck in time and place on the 256 pages J. D. Salinger allotted him in 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye,” Julie Steinberg writes in the Wall Street Journal today. And if Salinger has his way, that’s where Holden Caulfield will remain.

Last month Salinger sued to enjoin the publication of an unauthorized sequel, and just last week the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in his favor, holding that the sequel—60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by the Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting—does not constitute fair use of Salinger’s original material. “Mr. Salinger is notorious for his protection of his creations,” Steinberg observes. “He has denied movie directors the rights to option Catcher and turned down licensing deals that could have turned Holden Caulfield into a mass-marketing bonanza.” But I wonder if she hasn’t missed the point.

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, Literary Life: A Second Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 175 pp. $24.00.

The present volume, the middle layer of a triple-decker memoir, “is mainly about how the books came to me,” Larry McMurtry says. A self-described “midlist author,” McMurtry is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning cattle-drive saga Lonesome Dove (1985), although he has written better novels and worse—thirty in all. “Little of my work in fiction is pedestrian,” he ventures, trying to account for “the literary establishment’s long disinterest” in his work, “but, on the other hand, none of it is really great.” A contemporary of Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, and Joyce Carol Oates, he is neither a literary celebrity nor an advanced novelist with a cult following. Why then does he suppose that very many readers, most of whom have read only a few of his books—I myself have read only ten—will be particularly interested in how the books came to him?

He himself does not really care about his novels once they are written:

I had expected to be thrilled when I received my first copy of my first book [Horseman, Pass By, 1961], but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat. . . . I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer’s life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences,

Anthony Powell

This month the University of Chicago Press is republishing, in ebook format, a landmark of twentieth-century English fiction—Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time. As a teaser, Chicago is offering the first book in the series, A Question of Upbringing, for free. (The remaining volumes sell for eight bucks a throw.) One of the great custodians of neglected fiction, Chicago has kept Powell’s large canvas of English society, inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s 1640 painting (see right), in print for several years in the four large volumes originally published in this country by Little, Brown. However, Powell patiently released his novel in twelve separate books about every other year, and that is how Chicago is marketing the ebooks.

Kurt Vonnegut

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume covers ten years of writing from 1963 to 1973, the period during which the novels Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions and the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House were published. Although I have been unable to confirm the exact contents, Vonnegut’s books are short enough that the Library of America volume is likely to include all five.

Mario Vargas Llosa

For 2010 is the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who was laureled “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” A superb writer was recognized for his “idealistic tendency,” after all. I take back everything I’ve ever said against the Prize. All sins, except maybe Harold Pinter, are forgiven! (But I am also through with trying to predict the winners, even though I’ve managed to describe one leg of the elephant in each of the past two years.) This year’s is an entirely unexpected and richly deserved award for one of the world’s most distinguished writers, who has earned the international audience the Prize should attract to him.

Thomas Gunn

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, on the southern bank of the Thames estuary, in 1929. His childhood was spent mostly in that county, Kent, and in the affluent suburb of Hampstead in northwest London. A relatively happy boyhood was overshadowed first by his parents’ divorce when he was ten and then by his mother’s suicide when he was fifteen. In 1950, after two years’ national service in the army, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study English. This was during the heyday of F. R. Leavis, whose lectures had a profound effect on Gunn’s early poetry.

Conard

OUT OF THE FOG
JOSEPH CONRAD: A LIFE

By Zdzislaw Najder
(Translated by Halina Najder)
(Boydell & Brewer 745pp)
THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
(William Heinemann 378pp)

IF EXILE AND alienation are the defining characteristics of twentieth-century literature, Joseph Conrad is the quintessential twentieth-century writer. From Roman poets to modern playwrights, many have written well in places and languages other than their own, but Conrad was more deracinated than most. The man who has been called the best French novelist in English (a  compliment also paid to Henry James and Ford Madox Ford) was a Pole from what is now the Ukraine, stripped by circumstance of his culture, his class, his family, his language, his country, and even his name. But against these blows of fate Conrad  fought back in original ways. Born in the landlocked backlands of Central Europe, he made a living for nearly twenty years working tramp steamers for the British merchant navy. Schooled in a rough and ready way of life, he changed tack at thirty-seven, started writing in English and published his first novel at thirty-eight. Remaining single until he was thirty-nine, he married a workingclass girl from London and became a family man, ending his life as a rich and respected member of the Establishment with a mansion in Kent which looks not unlike a Polish manor-house. Quite a journey.

Indian Women in Literature

Romila Thapar is an Indian historian whose principal area of study is ancient India. Thapar's major works are Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, Recent Perspectives of Early Indian History (editor), A History of India Volume One, and Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. In January 2005, she declined the Padma Bhushan awarded by the Indian Government. In a letter to President A P J Abdul Kalam, she said she was "astonished to see her name in the list of awardees because three months ago when I was contacted by the HRD ministry and asked if I would accept an award, I made my position very clear and explained my reason for declining it". Thapar had declined the Padma Bhushan on an earlier occasion, in 1992. To the President, she explained the reason for turning down the award thus: "I only accept awards from academic institutions or those associated with my professional work, and not state awards". She is co-winner with Peter Brown of the prestigious Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity for 2008 which comes with a $1 million prize.

Paul Heyse.

Many famous writers from several countries have been proposed for this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy has awarded it to a writer whose nomination has been supported by more than sixty German experts on art, literature, and philosophy. His name is Paul Heyse. The name revives the memory of our youth and manhood; we still remember the literary pleasure that his novellas, in particular, gave to us. Now an old but still active man, he is a figure that the jury could not pass over if it was to express its admiration by awarding the high distinction to the most significant literary work. Nor was the jury to be swayed by considerations of age or, indeed, anything other than true merit.

Rushdie

From a novel by Salman Rushdie published in 1989 to an American civil protest called "Everyone Draw Muhammad Day" in 2010, a familiar pattern has evolved. It begins when Westerners say or do something critical of Islam. Islamists respond with name-calling and outrage, demands for retraction, threats of lawsuits and violence, and actual violence. In turn, Westerners hem and haw, prevaricate, and finally fold. Along the way, each controversy prompts a debate focusing on the issue of free speech.

Mark Twain

A man named Samuel L. Clemens traveled west with his brother, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and stopping in the territory of Nevada, where he got a job as a miner. That role didn't work out for him and, instead, he turned to the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.  He achieved some notoriety there, later writing to his mother somewhat tongue-in-cheek as having "the widest reputation" possible on the frontier. He noted, "If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond," he might even make money off it. "And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory." Such was Clemens's humor.

O Henry

He was born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina on September 11, 1862. Years later, he was coy about the year of his birth, saying nothing more specific than "about the close of the war." He was equally coy about his name; literary history would remember him as "O. Henry."

Porter kept his true identity a secret on purpose and asked that photos of himself never be circulated and provided little information about himself. "Nobody but a concentrated idiot would write over a pen-name and then tack on a lot of twaddle about himself," he wrote. As such, the true "O. Henry" was a bit mystifying. He once refused to tell an admirer whether he was male or female.